How Your Brain Gets Tricked By Clever Marketing - Rory Sutherland (4K)

I heard a quote from you our mutual friend George Mack uh sent me a quote that said a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife's sister's husband yeah that actually isn't me I wish it were me because I would have retired on the basis of that quote happily I think uh it's what's the what's the chap called a brilliant American humorist called The Sage of Baltimore the Americans will know um no idea he a fantastic comic writer and I've briefly forgotten his name right but it is interesting how um interesting now I was having ation yesterday with someone at a an addiction clinic in Switzerland which I can't name I wasn't there as a patient just in case you I was there a very very interested Outsider and he said that you know comparison is the enemy of happiness that you know one of the things that seems to be a curse for all humankind and you've obviously read I you probably interviewed the author of the status game have you st yeah yeah which is a fascinating book because it's this kind of terrifying invisible force that drives us and we're in denial about it and in some ways the game only works because we pretend we're not playing the game you see what I mean and that comes down to other other phrases about status seeking which is I think the famous one of Aristotle and assis where he said that if there were no women all the money in the world would be worthless I think he's probably overstating that I mean you know they presumably Pleasures to be derived from sort of jet skiing and i' I'd like to have one of those Yachts not for the yacht but just for I know it's not called parking you know it's called moing okay but the actual business of sailing around on one of those Yachts wouldn't appeal to me at all but docking the [ __ ] thing that must be an absolute Joy do you ever watch that guy called super yacht captain on YouTube no now what they do when they dock those things is they actually send up a drone so they've got an aerial view of the ship right and then they use the bow thrusters and the stern thrusters to actually maneuver the thing in W I mean you get that now on um cars right you know the fanciest Range Rover gives you what appears to be an overhead sh it actually I I've got the electric car and they tend to come fantastic car absolutely delighted with it yeah right have you are you going to upgrade to something similar something Poss the macki GT next time because then I'll I'll be well into a midlife crisis and so I'll need a car with stripes on it uh interesting that you said earlier on I just attributed misattributed a quote to you there's something called churchillian Drift did I teach you about this before which is where quotes there's also a famous thing which is called somebody's law which is that the quote is never attributed to the original person who said it right it also applies to scientific laws so if you take baze theorem it wasn't actually Baye it was someone about 50 years earlier who's a blind mathematician at Cambridge in fact I can't remember his name appropriate enough we can all remember baz's name but we can't remember the person who actually came up with it and so quite often it's the second person uh the person who popularizes or makes famous who actually gets the law or the discovery credited to them not the person who is the original Discoverer well it's a stickiness game right it's all about who manages to capture the meme best me and George were talking about this yesterday allel M right the sage of Baltimore there you go there we go you know that Americans did you Tak it's only only taken five theic's kicking in he's one of those people who um probably is you know there are certain people who are you know much more famous in America than they are in brit undeservedly so because he was extraordinary yeah what have you learned about the choice AR ecture of online dating sites and how it relates to property websites well this is this is kind of interesting because one of the reasons one of the reasons I like working in advertising and marketing is I think the correct way to solve problems and to understand what's going on is really bottom up not top down by which I mean um actually open-minded inquiry and observation of all kinds of things okay tends then over time patterns start to emerge and I think the better way what we try and do in politics in particular is we start with a theory we then impose the theory on reality we trumpet the areas or the scale at which that theory succeeds and we sweep under the carpet those areas where the theory basically fails okay so if you take something like okay uh if you take something like the efficient market hypothesis it probably has an application in a few fields and those are well celebrated and measured by economists it's a complete nonsense to apply um the same rules of a market to say the property Market or the dating Market as you do to the market for a commodity like iron ore or something of that kind okay they're fundamentally different in particular if you look at the property Market there's a problem because when people go and buy most things you know uh if you went out to buy car I've got to ask about your car I'm a big macki Enthusiast have you gone electric or in Texas does that get you vilified it will it would get me killed not in Austin though uh yeah Austin suff Austin okay it's sufficiently Progressive I think I'll get Camaro a Camaro for my first car in America uh FYI there's no license equivalency between the US and the UK which means that I need to retake my theory test 18 years after I took it in American which is weirdly difficult it's going to be it's all the road signs are different what does this particular thing mean all of my knowledge about roundabouts is totally [ __ ] useless obviously my car which is obviously American has an interesting American feature which is you can set the cruise control to effectively go at the speed limit plus or minus X miles hour so it's using this satav it uses a mixture I think of satnav and actually Optical Character recogition reading the road sign which does raise the question that people in residential areas are going to put up fake 7 m hour signs along their Street so that electric cars all automatically slow to a crawl how hilarious but um so I imagine you you noticed that wonderful thing where people as I predicted were hacking autonomous taxis in San Francisco you put a cone on the on the hood as they'd call it and the thing was basically immobilized in a state of complete confusion and I predicted that I'm proud to say five years ago I said people will hack self-driving cars and they'll discover that all you got to do is put a pattern of weighted balloons on the road and the things will go absolutely Dali and sure enough someone discovered that okay dating sites so dating sites okay so let's look at something here which is so to go back to my original point the market for property is highly problematic because what most people do when they buy uh they look for property to buy is they work out how much Deposit they have they then work out how much they can borrow they add those two together and they start looking for houses around that price okay so the basic heris question they're asking is how much can I afford and then they start looking now if you notice we don't buy anything else like that we don't buy cars that way okay if you went and said okay how much money can I raise as a deposit how much can I borrow people be driving around in Bugattis and you know Bugatti Veyrons and Bentleys all over the place we don't do that with cars we kind of take a balance on how much property how much car do I actually need how much do I care about cars Etc but because we have this euristic that effectively property is the only tax free big bet you can make in your life okay with huge tax advantages in terms of the capital gains everybody maxes out now unsurprisingly people who sell property have noticed this fact and consequently property prices go up and up and up because everybody's effectively so as interest rates go down it doesn't make anybody richer it just means that they set their Target price for the property they're prepared to buy even higher than before sellers of property aren't complete idiots so they basically put their price up to get whatever they can get and so consequently you end up with an absurd spiral okay so the property Market is fundamentally unlike say the market for as I said whether it's iron ore or indeed whether it's you know uh high quality energy drink yeah there it is doing some implausible product placement um now it struck me also that there's a fundamental problem in three things which actually is the same in all three cases and it's the market for graduate recruits the market for first in other words employees for first jobs the market for property and the market for dating okay which is that two problems when you recruit someone straight out of University or you recruit anybody for a job in which they have no experience at all okay you don't know anything about them realistically but you need a proxy so the proxy seems to have become you know Russell group University 21 or above and everybody uses that as the first stage filter for their search and everything that doesn't meet those criteria or everybody who doesn't meet that those criteria effectively disappears out of the marketplace despite the fact that they may be possessed of unbelievable talents they just either had a good time at University or a part of that very large part of the population who are very very clever but don't feel motivated doing academic hyp pathetical things okay you know if you think about it I know people people who are good at chess are probably quite bright in some respect but you can't say someone who's bad at chess is thick right you know my brother's an astrophysicist he's [ __ ] at chess right okay um uh you know I mean they they do actually record games that sort of Einstein and Oppenheimer played in The Manhattan Project and they're kind of okay chess players but they're nothing amazing right so you know there are quite a lot of things that are one way proxy necessary but not sufficient in other words exactly necessary but not or sufficient you know but but actually not necessary so actually you know now what's happened here as a consequence is that we're automatically just discarding now let's take dating as a parallel there what's your first filter okay the HR person's first filter is two one and above you know and then they interview them but but the first filter is that two one and above they've got to have a degree in fact increasingly I noticed my daughter's generation are doing master's degrees because even if you got a first class degree from a Russell un Russell group University it's that positional good thing where you create hyper competition and it's really a kind of peacock's tale signaling effect okay so what you're really proving is not ability or human capital it's just commitment to the area in which you're invested okay now in dating sites it strikes me that what you have I I got married long before there were online websites and as a contemporary of Mind said who also got married before there was online dating he said I feel like I caught the last helicopter out of Saigon you know genuinely I wouldn't know where to get started an online dating but what's the first Criterion you use accept or reject now I'm assuming here you're a guy I don't quite know it works slightly differently I think for women because obviously the demand is completely asymmetric okay but it's a still picture of them and some words of text all right now how good just as 2 one or above is not actually a brilliant proxy for how valuable an employee this person will be it's all you've got okay I don't think a still photograph and a few words of text uh in any way proxy for who you might Forge a long-term relationship with okay because what you're doing is you're making a series of decisions you're going you're working your way down the decision tree to use the language of choice architecture and because every decision you make you're happy with you think therefore that a series of seemingly rational decisions will reach an optimal outcome but actually Ian for example there are people who are extremely attractive actresses who wouldn't make it as a model because their attractiveness is to do with motion humor wit pres you know all those things which matter more in a relationship than how you look in a static photograph you know I me I'm showing my age here but Cameron Diaz probably wouldn't have made it as a Vogue model okay but or Jennifer Anison I don't know okay but what I mean what I'm saying is what makes them attractive is a whole mix of things like humor deportment movement you know subtle things which cannot be captured at all in that initial filtration phase same goes for employment what makes a good employee cannot really be very well captured by that initial filtration phase same goes with property okay which is what do people do when they look for property they go okay uh first of all how much can I afford and they start looking at that point point then they ask the second question which is where is it and how many bedrooms now all I'm saying okay is that it seems rational while we're going through that process it seems perfectly sensible because each stage we're filtering what we don't see the dog that doesn't bark in the night is what we're rejecting that might be great okay now here's where the problem really gets acute okay everybody's going through this decision tree starting at the same place and working looking through in the same order that's what online Choice architecture does now if you look at how people chose houses or for that matter girlfriends or boyfriends back in the pre- internet age there was a lot of noise in the system you know I mean the conventional British way and the you know the New York way is you go out with people and first of all find out how much they earn as far as I can see okay I mean dating in New York always strikes me as like a weird Jane Austin kind of transactional field okay but in Britain basically you went to a rugby club and got pissed with your friend's sister okay and then you discovered you really liked each other now that's messy I'm not suggesting it's optimal there's a lot of choice you're missing out but everybody effectively found a house found a partner in a different way the choice architecture was different the starting point was different the initial filter in many cases people found a house because they walked past an estate agent window they drove down a lane and saw a for sale side M MH and in many cases they didn't start searching with 800,000 and down right and it was messy so people had houses had lots of opportunities to appeal to people and partners had lots of different strengths which they could deploy depending on the circumstances in which the meeting took place because I mean guys aren't that shallow men are a bit shallow but there are hell of a lot of Personality features okay now if everybody chooses according to the same criteria it's a much less efficient market clearing mechanism than if everybody's a bit messy so let's assume that you had you know I I mentioned this earlier because I was talking to a kind of recruitment firm I said let's imagine where you had a world where weirdly everybody's HR uh director was like oddly prejudiced okay but they're all prejudiced in completely different ways you know one person was obsessed with hiring Oxbridge graduates another person was obsessed with hiring Jamaicans uh a third person was obsessed with hiring scousers okay over time multiple differing prejudices or what you might call diversity of opportunity rather than equality of opportunity would provide a more efficient market for talent than the one we have now which is regimented and identical and it seems to me there's a conflict here which is in recruitment the needs to look fair means you have to apply the same criteria to everybody which means as that kind of consistency of selection spreads out across the whole of Industry okay it actually means that there's a ludicrous undersupply of certain people who meet those initial criteria while the 50% 80% of people who don't meet those initial sortation criteria effectively go to waste yeah it's like there must hell of a of girls who are single because they just don't look that great in the Still's photo right now there's this further thing which is now i' got to be really careful because my wife's going to watch this okay but actually you don't want a wife or a house which appeals to everybody right right if you you know if you marry a supermodel right basically they're going to run off with your tennis coach and take your house right what what you want is someone who's disproportionately attractive to you yeah all right that's the sort of game theoretic approach of house hunting so my my approach to house hunting I'll stay out of dating because my wife might be watching this okay is to some extent a form of and I've often said that estate agencies would be a lot better if they actually were forced to list the downsides of a property as well as the upsides because the shrewd way to choose a house is not to say what's my perfect house it's to say what do other people hate that I don't mind yes okay so an example in my case would be next to a railway line absolute bonus you know I Love Trains right they stop at midnight they don't keep you awake I'd never go to bed before midnight anyway I'd actually pay extra to have trains going past my house okay equally my children have left school so the school catchment area can be you know crackheads academy doesn't bother me right okay my kids are 22 right and the other the third one which would be a massive bonus to me I couldn't believe my parents-in-law once didn't buy a beautiful Georgian house wait for the reason because it was next to a pub right I think sorry I'm totally confused here that's a the best Garden in the world right it's not sissing Hurst it's a beer garden right because it's a garden and it's got beer now I actually knew some people who Liv next to a pub and they had such a good relationship with the landlord they could actually order over the fence so if they had a barbecue they could just go you know four points of the usual now to a lot of people being next to a pub is an absolute nightmare you know flight path okay if you're if you're completely deaf go and buy a place in the heathow flight path because it's not going to bother you but it's going to bother everybody else so the other thing about this very regimented mode of choice is that it prevents you from gaming the system yes now to be honest what makes someone initially attractive at first glance and what makes relationship enduring okay are not the same thing they're not the same criteria therefore using what you might call First Glimpse criteria in a house in an employee uh in a potential partner okay in if you're if you're seriously after a long-term relationship which after all you are with a house and you are with an employee you may or may not be when you're on an online dating site that varies okay the first Glimpse criteria are to toally unreliable as a guide to long-term enjoyment so this my wife's going to kill me for this okay the kind of person you want to marry right isn't something that everybody wants it's something the value of which you only discover on repeated familiar on on long-term familiarity so you want what you want is an air fryer girlfriend or a Japanese toilet girlfriend okay right not a Corvette girlfriend do you see what I mean right you want something which actually you know the value of fully because over long-term exposure they're actually technically called in economics they're called experienced goods and what's interesting about an experience good is that it's something the value of which only becomes apparent with use okay sorry this is terrible using that economic term to refer to relationships it's not the worst thing people have said about relationships on the internet this okay you're probably right yeah yeah yeah yeah but that is that is fundamentally interesting that what the internet has done that the two things are is that in many cases the it yields up as the first filtration point is not a very good proxy to begin with but secondly and this is I think the worst problem if everybody is using the same first stage filter because everybody's on Tinder or whatever it may be okay then effectively it's going to create a totally inefficient market clearing mechanism because demand disproportionately goes towards those people who happen to be those initial those initial proxy criteria yeah now that strikes me fundamentally as a problem in all three of those markets in other news this episode is brought to you by element element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't it's a healthy alternative to sugary electrolyte drinks and it is the best way that I have started my morning every single day for over three years now it contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium with no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients or any other junk your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't active for the first 90 minutes of the day but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system so if you want to be more awake want to regulate your appetite curb cravings and have better brain health this is the way to start your day head to drink LM nt.com slod wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box plus there is a no BS no questions asked refund policy so you can buy it 100% risk-free that's drink LM nt.com slash modern wisdom did you read Seth Stevens dz's book everybody lies so he was an ex data scientist at Google and then he did another book called don't trust your gut oh no I haven't read that so the second one don't trust your gut looks at this specific problem it looks at what is the issue by the way nicotine plus that is like just the supercharged yeah I know yeah beautiful what flavors that uh this one's I think Cherry I think oh very good with my cataract I can't bloody read this sorry sorry this is this is going to be the first ever guest Chris has had where half of our conversation is about medical problems sorry that's totally fine um yeah in his second book he looks at um people who basically haven't been priced into the market uh when it comes to dating uh and um by the way who single makes no sense does it if you actually go around the world and meet people who are single and meet people who are in relationship Highly Educated women Highly Educated women one of the most over represented single groups you got women who can contribute a ton of money to a household Etc I'm married to Highly Educated women they pain [ __ ] my God my God the arguments never mind okay but no no but also because historically effectively this may change okay so women are more reluctant to marry down in education level than men are correct interesting probably because men are shallower and they just go well you know 21y old barista that can't spell her own name yeah it's your atrophy wife as I call them you know very th second wife yes exactly my god um but you know you notice that the people you they have that very weird breed of people who are sort of very rich and very very thin you know right um but but you know so I mean Chris Rock did a whole routine on this didn't he which was what was it men can't go backwards sexually women can't go back in lifestyle was I think the Chris Rock routine one thing that I think deserves study um which is interesting is a huge generation of um the most successful comedians are also amateur or you amateur effectively evolutionary thinkers aren't they yeah so if you look at javes absolutely fascinated by kind of darwinian evolution and so on um absolutely true of say Andrew Schulz true of Jimmy Carr um Jimmy Carr actually wrote that co-wrote that book with Lucy Greaves the naked jape which is a absolutely fascinating kind of Investigation into the The evolutionary origins of comedy and actually there are few more than that I mean you know I think you can see it in Dave Chappelle you can see it in Chris Rock a lot of that stuff there's a huge influence and there seems to be a significant correlation between interest in kind of evolutionary psychology and um comedy well ultimately it tells us why we are the way we are right and that is one of the insights to say the thing that everybody knows but no one has named or no one dare say yeah is one of the greatest forms of that you can find there was something else I remember but also I suppose it's all about um I mean I suppose you know recontextualization so comedians are going to be very very open to different ways of looking at the world because it is to some extent The Source you know that contextual flip is at the root of quite a lot misdirection exactly um but it is fascinating because like music we have this debate what is the evolutionary function and one of the things that strikes me as odd is that we don't look at comedy uh as a source of inspiration for wider problem solving so I did an interview with Jimmy Carr at um adweek which was a kind of advertising Festival which by the way is as you must have found um I mean people like him for example the what you might call Brain to mouth speed is extraordinary isn't it terrifying there's that great phrase in television which is called brain to mouth and you know Jonathan Ross or whatever people like that are very very good as interviewers because they can basically form a thought and speak it more or less in parallel and I I found that really interesting in terms of you know talking to Jimmy Carr because it's rather like you know you fancy yourself a bit there was a wonderful thing I saw actually on I think it was the a299 in East Kent which was one you know you know they sort of hotted up citrons which are like the hot hatch with enormous kind of um unne necessarily large tail pipes and a ludicrously large woofer that takes over the whole of the um the boot and um one of those on the a299 decided to take on a McLaren F1 okay and I have to say it was comical to watch the guy actually you know acquitted himself in the first sort of five seconds reasonably well but I felt a bit like that you know talking to Jimmy Carr because you know you work in a business you were the Citron with the big I was the Citron with the unfeasibly large tail pipes okay and and similarly I've always been in awe of Andrew Schultz for the the crowd work just has just has a speed which is just terrifying yeah yeah m i so someone asked me the other day um who are the easiest people to speak to and who are the most difficult people to speak to on the show and I definitely find that comedians are the ones that I need to be the most switched on for Mark Mark Norman in particular Mark is so it's such a game of it's not a game of uh of tennis it's a game of ping pong dinging binging it's that it's that kind of pace and you're right he rides the crest of now it's oddly a Sam har Harian sort of type thing he's just living in the Perpetual present and just deploying thoughts as they come to him and the lack of filter and the Precision of his speech just allows him to just things just fall out of him and there's always this weird debate about creativity which is it kind of comes in two forms one of which is what you might call sheer inate Genius and the other one is hyper accelerated rationality which is just in the same time that the other person is getting from A to B you're already at F yeah but I mean what interests me also is if you look at political movements given the fact that psychology is often quite oblique the way to solve a problem this is this is what really really bothers me about politics at the moment which is in fact it's what my next book is about if I can give a taster which is the question is do you want to win arguments or do you want to solve problems because the most of thinking you adopt if you want to solve a problem is much more open-minded much less dogmatic okay it's much more oblique and creative than the mode you would adopt if you want to win an argument and what we've done is we've selected for our leadership for our politicians in some cases for our business people and we've educated for and we've promoted for the ability to win arguments okay and actually winning an argument and solving a problem are two completely different skill sets I'd argue so there's what always fascinates me about Andrew schulz's okay if Andrew Schulz said you know 5% of what he says on stage in a corporate environment or at Yale okay you know if if if you consider you know Rob Rob Henderson's experience at Yale okay you know they practically have the place shut down for def fumigation okay and contaminated Z deont and yet his audiences are completely mixed in every sense I mean if you want a really if you want a really really diverse group of people genuinely representative and diverse and Andrew Schulz audience is pretty much as good as it gets and he solves the problem which is interesting okay not by pretending say race or gender don't exist okay but by highlighting the distinctions and then taking the piss out of them yeah okay now from an oblique kind of creative point of view you have to ask the question is that actually a better way of solving the problem than for example the extreme dogmatism of say the politically correct movement I don't like using the word woke particularly okay now you know is part of the solution that you know in other words do you actually make people pretend not to notice ethnic differences and as a consequence become incredibly anxious in the presence of any of those differences okay or do you actually acknowledge them make light of them because but both of them are trying to tune down the seriousness both of them try to say okay the one of them Works yes precisely and here's a question I want I want to do some empirical testing on this okay you do occasionally at comedy clubs you do occasionally get a pissed guy who heckles and everybody gets really angry okay but do you get violence ever outside comedy clubs outside well inside or outside I once I've seen one video in the last few years where a Heckler has tried to start on a a comedian but unbelievably rare it's unbelievably rare especially given that you're pointing out people and saying stuff about them or their wife or their relationship or their Chastity or whatever I mean I recommended I couldn't make it to Andrew Schulz at the Royal Albert Hall but I recommended people went for the limited visibility seats not only because they were cheaper but because given his crowd work the blast radius the brilliant thing is I could hide behind a pillar and it's very unlikely I'd be singled out as like the whitest guy he'd ever seen or whatever it might have been yeah yeah yeah and so you know what's interesting is there comedy audiences are really fascinating just in terms of their demographic constituency it's teaching people a sort of a degree of uh intellectual humbleness uh being able to cast off the the tension that you have when watching something occur by laughing so I've noticed this I'm preparing for my first live tour which is happening around the UK and Island in a couple of weeks time and as a part of this I did a ton of work in progress shows and we could feel I could see in the room and feel in the room tension arising as I'm talking about whatever the thing is that I'm talking about this section about confidence or this section about regret or this section about whatever and there was bits where you needed a laugh almost kind of like how a dog shakes its coat when it's wet and one needs to cast it off yeah so here here's an interesting analogy okay in terms of being right versus solving the problem okay now if you want to win arguments or if you want to win the respect of a peer group who holds the particular set of political views what tends to happen is you get into a virtue spiral I think that's what it's called in the book Purity spiral Purity thank you Purity spiral you become absolutist and then because conflict is inherently interesting an argument is inherently interesting so if we hear outside some people having an amicable conversation we won't even bother to get up if we hear a fight starting to break up or two people shouting at each other we'll have our noses pressed to the window to see what's happening and journalists and news papers and media know this so they focus on those areas where there is the greatest polarization which means you're focusing on the part of the problem which is most difficult to solve so the example I give because I'm going to move away from politics because when you mention politics everything suddenly drives people to this polarization I I try I aspire to be the most left-wing person on the out right okay which is which is which is I find the conversation of the outright inherently interesting but I try not to become part of it and I occasionally you know I write for The Spectator but I I'm occasionally write about the virtues of Henry George or the insights of KL Marx just to shake the whole thing up bloody interesting guy marks by the way okay right I mean the I think I think the actual the um uh the the way I put it is the diagnosis is fascinating and the prescription is terrible correct okay correct um now okay the the perfect Exemplar of where this problem goes wrong and this is very difficult if you work in advertising and marketing because quite often you're not criticizing the intentionality or the aspiration of the person you're merely saying that the way you're going about this isn't working very well okay so yes uh you know nearly all the aspirations of say the diversity and inclusion movement are those which we should all generally support and I don't want to ever get into that kind of weird you know weird thing where you start getting angry about trigger warnings because if you give it about 10 minutes thought you realize that trigger warnings although they're a bit funny and it's a bit weird when Netflix says may contain nicotine use okay which you know never put anybody off going to the cinema in 1946 you know imagine if you had to do that Casablanca warning nicotine use it's a bit weird okay but it's a great idea okay some people may be deeply upset by certain forms of content and you should at least give them the opportunity to kind of opt out or to avoid it I don't you know yeah okay we we can debate what is triggering but nonetheless it's broadly speaking an intelligent principle I think now so the example I'll choose won't be from politics because politics automatically leads people to become tribal and therefore they have to take a side okay and the example I think is perfect is cycling Mikey do you cycling Mikey is a YouTuber okay and he goes around he stands at a place in London called Gandalf corner and if he sees a car ducking around the wrong side of a keep left Island he just stands in front of it and refuses to let them move takes a photo reports him to the police he's he's um uh he's got guy Richie um I think he got did he get guy Richie banned because he photographed him using a mobile phone while stationary waiting for a set of traffic lights and he sends his film footage to the police he puts it up on YouTube okay now I basically support what he's trying to do okay because I think cycling safety is incredibly important and these people are doing bad things okay we've all done it let's be honest okay we've all used the mobile phone uh when driving we've just been lucky enough to get away with it and I wish I'd never done it okay where cycl Mike is less effective however is his mode of delivery which is so combative and so effectively polarizing okay that it actually becomes counterproductive now where he you know he he he's he's well-intentioned which is he wishes to increase cyclist safety no no one's disagreeing with that okay where he's less effective is in disabusing people of The wellestablished Stereotype that all africanas are bastards um because he does things which are inherently first of all he's a little bit unfair because when he catches when cyclists misbehave one you can't report them to the police because they don't have a license plate secondly he claims that if you stand in front of a cyclist or a motorcycle they might fall off so he can't actually stop motorcyclists and cyclists performing egregious and illegal acts so he concentrates entirely on the motorist but then he basically goes stand in front of them on the road and then effectively does things which I mean we don't really have a massive culture of vigilantism in this country reporting other people to the police is something we're pretty reluctant to do you know it's not a hellmark of a nice culture when people are blagging you know basically you know lagging to the screws as it used to be called in prisoner of Cell Block H right okay it's something you just don't do but secondly I'm there as a marketing guy going look I support what you're trying to do but you've been driven into this extreme position where your Purity spiral is so extreme that actually it's counterproductive Y and so you you know you're very very good at at feeling confident in your own opinions but actually your ability to bring now if you notice in advertising it's very rare that you're nasty to users of your competing product okay you don't get Ford ads going if you drive a voxel you're a [ __ ] yes okay because genuinely people want to win over people who are either under ided or in a rival camp and it's not a good idea and you won't see much advertising that does that to patronize them or to effectively become incredibly sanctimonious as he does I mean extraordinarily sanctimonious and I think it's I think it's a kind of example of a pattern you see where people's desire to be entirely on the right drives them to practice counterproductive behaviors because I mean uh there's you know for example I think as a marketing guy I can't help watching this guy thing and say if you're actually very nice to those people and you handed them a leaflet which you produced yourself you know just warning them of cyclist safety I think it would probably quite effective yeah I mean I was actually I went on a speed awareness course I don't know if you ever had that I've had to do it once I had the pleasure I turned up thinking this is total ass but I'm doing it to avoid the points it was pretty worthwhile in the end at the end of it I went away going okay I have rethought quite a bit of my driving pattern as a consequence of what I learned reeducation now if you turn so there's this huge problem okay which is that everything now I think Douglas Murray says this which I thought was interesting it was actually had a dinner which he said his the real reason he gets angry about the culture wars which I think is the right reason to be angry about them is not because somebody's wrong and somebody's right and goodness says what it's the extraordinary opportunity cost that while we are arguing about these things that are very difficult to decide and which automatically polarize people there areund problems we could solve okay which would actually appeal to everybody yeah as he says while The Barbarians are at the gates we'll be debating about what gender they are well this is an interesting one because I'd also argue let's take cyclists and motorists okay every it's in everybody's interests to effectively Foster hostility between these two groups even though of course quite a lot of people straddle both groups outside London it's quite rare to be a cyclist who doesn't also own a car okay not not not totally rare but most people outside London most households have access to a car in some shape or form and my there is that imagine what you could have done if instead of fostering cyclist motorist hostility by focusing on the areas where uh there's the most Discord and the most disagreement imagine if you both said okay there two things that mo one thing that motorists hate and cyclists hate even more potholes right now bind them together over bind them together and say look potholes are really annoying to car owners cuz you got get your tires replaced which by the way is environmentally bad as well [ __ ] moral Terror to a total Terror to a cyclist particularly if you're one of those narrow tired you know titanium rich thingy Mobs with yikra and everything else and um so it's it's kind of interesting which is the point is that the opportunity cost of this focus on problems that divide you know problems where the solution acutely divides people is has a huge creative opportunity cost because the thing to do if you have two people who disagree about something is to change the question okay obviously we're not getting anywhere here so let's just solve something else there's a there's a quote from Scott Alexander which is really great it says if you're interested in being on the right side of disputes you will refute your opponent's arguments but if you're interested in producing truth you will fix your opponent's Arguments for them to win you must fight not only the creature you encounter you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse well well let me I'll I'll I'll come back to you with a quote which is Thomas Soul um as I said I'm the most left-wing person on the alt right I'm I'm I'm a very big admirer of of quite a lot of the people Soul included Thomas Soul's phenomenal absolutely phenomenal guy activism is a way for useless people to feel important even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole okay now one of the weirdest things about this movement okay and one of the most tiring things about being politically correct as a Brit is weirdly you have to pretend you're American because okay if you think about it okay there are loads of problems you can solve at the local level this place here okay sort out the [ __ ] signage right and first of all you come into a place to find it and it's like the St Valentine's Day Massacre you know you come into this weird news okay where the only thing you can imagine happening there you know it looks as if you know the interior Decor has been done by Pete docky right and then you got the signage and the numbering is completely batshit insane and you can only read the the actual number of each door if the Sun is at a particular angle okay so there all these things we can do to solve problems locally at a smaller level but if you want to feel self-important you concentrate on the problems at the top you know things like effectively politics I mean if you look at actually even things at the level of kind of um probably not London actually but if you look at I don't know why do we never get any coverage of say the mayor of Manchester or the mayor of the West Midlands we got a loot of coverage of Scottish politics right okay because why because there's a massive divisive issue there which gets people worked up which is Scottish independence where by the way we're asking the wrong question anyway the question should be what kind of Independence do we want not do we have Independence or don't we completely lacking in Nuance anyway okay you never get any coverage no coverage now bear in mind the population of Scotland is smaller than the population of Yorkshire okay most people don't realize that they think because it's kind of large geographic area there are about 15 or 20 million people living in Scot abandoned it's it's very small population because all the really talented ones move to Wales in the 19th century um sorry that's just my that's just my own ancestry sorry you know in in search of people who weren't permanently angry about nothing in particular and so my great-grandfather moved from kth s to the South Welsh valleys because it was kind to In fairness Cardiff was like the Dubai of the of late 19th century Cardiff was like the Dubai of the late 19th Cur first place in the world where a million pound contract was signed was in cardiv docs it was coal so it was effectively the largest coal exporting port in the world wow and by the way not your shitty German coal proper quality coal right here's a question here's a question for you why is it that when we look at the uh exports of national identities from the UK and Ireland to the rest of the world uh England English people we have a a position although we get referred to as being British y uh Northern Irish people kind of do Southern Irish people absolutely definitely do even Scottish people do oh Scottish marketing is brilliant I mean as as as a nation brand it's absolutely potent as hell yeah why does no one what what's happened to Wales why has Wales not managed to establish itself on the global geopolitical branding there's an interesting debate about this one one Welsh commentator I'm not don't shoot the messenger here suggest that Welsh people who move somewhere else very rapidly kind of lose their welness and assimilate anywhere that's his argument so if you look at the contribution of Welsh Americans okay now you've never heard you've never heard that hyphen before have you okay Irish American Scottish American yeah absolutely You' never heard of Welsh American includes like Thomas Jefferson okay it includes arguably Elvis about 50% of country singers Tammy winnette real surname Pew okay right if you actually Hillary Clinton funnily enough um is I think half Welsh okay so you have this but but there is app I mean if if you ask people who are American about their Welsh ancestry they may dimly know uh that they have some Welsh ancestry it barely extends to knowing where it is whereas if they got Scottish or Irish ancestry it informs every [ __ ] cell of their being even if they're like a 16th Irish they start wearing green things yeah and you know to the slight annoyance by the way of real Irish people I might add okay to be honest okay and quite a few people who are very proud of their Irish heritage are actually descended from northern Irish Protestants what's sometimes called in the United States Scots Irish but they don't even know that okay so you know I think Henry Ford there's a huge Irish American contingent of people who are effectively um uh from Northern Ireland um but again that distinction isn't really made uh there is an argument that it was at the time of the American Civil War where people tended to take sides on that basis I'm not quite sure um but generally that doesn't that hasn't pervaded until the you know 2023 but the Welsh have done a bad job there's actually a group called Global Welsh which I belong to which looks at this question of kind of I mean the greatest Welsh American by the way was a guy called Russell camel Humphries who was number two to Al Capone okay I'm not making this okay so this guy who was um by the way he was known by the by the various feds and people out for him as the nicest man in the mob okay and big Welsh from I think he was from Caro which is in kind of the middle you know kind of mid whales tiny little bit his parents were okay and he was entirely Welsh and uh read sorry M did I say Russell Murray Murray the camel humph and um or Murray the hump he was known as which is either to do with Humphries or to do with the fact that he wore camel coat but I think I think um he um effectively he he he would occasionally kill people but he'd only negot he'd always negotiate first and I think one of the senior feds who are supposed to arrest him uh actually refused to turn up to arrest him because he liked him personally okay and didn't want to be part of the arrest and he was also uh violently against cursing by the way okay soive organized crime killer but not a swear killer but not a swear no no he didn't didn't like any of that any of that but but research him because it's really really it's comically funny the idea of a Welsh guy in the mob I looked at a study recently that showed an inverse correlation between marriage length and cost of engagement ring and wedding combined that the more that is spent on the engagement ring and the more that is spent on almost in pure economic terms you'd expect it to be the other way around because the sunk cost of wedding should skin in the game should ensure the duration of the w equally what are you trying to prove yes yes okay yeah what what have you learned you must have some insights about engagement rings and their Heritage and their history I mean what is what is interesting is that um uh there is a degree where what you're practicing there is a form of commitment device in other words it's an unrecoverable sunk cost which is upfront expense being proof of long-term commitment and I've made that point that some advertising works that way okay in other words you wouldn't spend a fortune advertising this car if it were a waste of time for me to test drive it okay so once you spent the money on Advertising it's gone therefore the only possible value of the of advertising is that it leads to a sale therefore if you are advertising a new product heavily you are confident rightly or wrongly but it doesn't matter you yourself who know the product better than the buyer does is confident in terms of its long-term appeal and um desirability when test driven and so you know some part of advertising undoubtedly Works through sheer costly expenditure sheer costly signaling wasn't you you guys did a study where heavyweight paper was the most effective thing to increase Charity donations uh that's right yes now you will never ever get any what's so interesting about some of this research is it uncovers things which people feel but don't even think or say so there's this quote probably wrongly attributed to David ogelby that he said the trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say now no everybody would say that a charity donation uh should be sent out on the cheapest paper possible because you should minimize your marketing cost what we found is that when you put slightly more expensive paper in the donation envelope it was for Christian a week actually uh slightly more people give but people give much more large donations so the volume of donations over 50 or1 was significantly increased now that's unconscious it's probably you know if this thing's flimsy and there may be a certain degree of reciprocation in that which is they've sent me a bit of nice bit of paper I owe them 50 Quid I mean there you know we how it works by the way why it works you could come up with four or five different possible explanations but um those kind of things are really fascinating because they are they belong to that field of activity which you can only prove through testing market research won't tell you the answer pure Theory won't tell you the answer you have to test I'm a very prejudiced man but given my background as a nightlife club promoter uh living and breathing flyers and paper for a very long time did you do that nightclub game where you created artificially long cues of course I did course you of course I did let me let me let me give you this one first so one of the few prejudices that I have in my life is against single-sided Flyers single-sided Flyers are around about 90% as expensive to do double-sided Flyers because almost all Flyers are double-sided my second biggest Prejudice are against double-sided fliers with the same thing printed on both sides you have two sides of a piece of paper that basically says I can't even be bothered here what should we put on the back I just put the same thing command C command V send it I don't care then after that just tiny tiny little things that you can do we found that if you go there's something called um uh spot UV which is the kind of gloss that you put over the top of a piece of paper that gives it a smooth finish if you go uncoated which isn't that much more again and if you go a little bit heavier GSM you get this almost sort of organic furry feel to it it's like every um innocent smoothie label right you know it kind of feels a bit more kind of raw and organic and and and natural we see what we're talking about here is This brilliant thing okay which is it's very simple if you want to solve problems okay which is stop trying to think like Newton and come up with universal universally applicable context free laws okay that's been done okay it's called physics okay we've done that instead you got to think like Darwin okay now we mentioned earlier this this difference between effectively evolutionary thinking which I think um the evolution is a study of how things change not how things are okay that's a fundamental difference what do you mean well Evolution come the most Bale description of evolution but which is also incredibly insightful is things are the way they are because they got that way okay which sounds like AB absurdity but when you when you actually think a little bit more deeply then it forces you to ask the question well how do they get that way okay and where else could we go from here you know what are the tools at our disposable to to get from here to somewhere better okay now one of the things I think that is an obstacle to problem solving I think the reason that comedians are often evolutionary thinkers Ricky Javas being an obvious case but John C another one okay absolutely fascinated by um you know evolutionary thought is because it's a gate it's a gateway to complexity it's a gateway to thinking in terms of complex systems and complex systems changing over time and and it's an Escape From the idea that there must be universal laws I've got a friend called Jag Bala known on the web as hanging noodles who always argues that we monotheistic cultures like Christianity have a disadvantage in our thinking because unlike Hindus um we're prone to what he calls mono theism we need one Theory to explain everything okay and he points out that actually in Hinduism you you know don't have that problem because we're used to the fact that there's you know the elephant and the I mean I think I think he said his mother praised on an altar which has an elephant a monkey and Jesus on it right and there's no there's no inherent contradiction to that now actually that's what I'm quite hopeful about having a Hindu prime minister because I think if we unleashed his uh lack of monotheism and freed him from political Dogma uh he could be creatively really quite interesting but that complexity thing is really interesting because one of the things that you you need to lose in order to understand complex systems is an idea of what you might call discussing things that make you look important one person call it the higher twaddle and that's to that's you know I noticed this with a former Chief Executive you know if he was interviewed instead of talking about advertising and you know he'd always talk about like the fed and Janet Yellen you know and likely interest rate Rises okay right and that's kind of an that's a self-important thing to talk about weirdly people in Britain and instead of solving British problems somehow weirdly adopt American it's a signaling thing and it's a signaling thing which is I care about these things at and I'm I'm so important that I'm only going to debate them at the very highest level okay and so I mean there are all these people people going right tring to defund the police in the United States I going I'm a Brit right first of all my responsibility for what I think is a terrible criminal justice system of the United States my responsibility for that ended in 1776 okay I don't think it's great but it's not my problem okay secondly I wanted to start some Brits demonstrations going around going disarm the police because it's it's what's so interesting is if you're American this defund the police is debatable but the idea that the police shouldn't carry guns is probably to them so bizar that they think you're insane okay other things in the United States four weeks of paid vacation okay I've never met anybody in Britain so right-wing that they think we should have less holiday time nobody zero nobody's ever said we another two 2% on GDP growth if we just got rid of people's holiday doesn't happen never exists okay if we cut maternity leave down two and a half weeks no those things actually once you have them they're air fryers they're Japanese toilets once you have them there's no going back everyone's an evangelist grandfather once you once once once you've got there you never go back yeah okay and I'm kind of going well look you know first of all you you have to now if you look at what Darwin did to have what is probably one of the five biggest insights to to be honest I mean I'm going to stand up for Alfred Russell Wallace not least because I was born in lumad which is the same Village that he was born in tiny Welsh village um and my my ambition is to be I think I've probably already succeeded is the the second best evolutionary thinker born in L badok I think that's a kind of attainable sensible ambition okay um but uh I'm really worried that someone will crop up you know you know Imperial College London of fledgling evolutionary psychologist from Lum exactly yeah and um so was very sweet cuz I spoke at the Royal Institution and I made the prediction that I was probably only the second person from ladok ever to have spoken at the Royal Institution and sure enough I think Alfred Russell Wallace spoke there in sort of 1860 whatever it was he survived into the 20th century actually um but but if you look at what Darwin did and what Russell Wallace did okay they didn't get they didn't get involved in self-aggrandizing theory first they went around interesting funny little places and they looked at the beaks of of finishes okay now I think if you want to solve political problems actually this is why I love working and advertising okay because you can get down into the weeds of microscopic things like what's the effect of choice architecture on property selection or indeed dating websites you can actually we have a kind of Mantra in our Behavioral Science practice which is dare to be trivial because our argument is in a complex system quite often the things that make a difference may be surprisingly small they kind of butterfly effects and your job is to look for the point of intervention in the system where the smallest change has the biggest effect Buck Mr Fuller called it trim tab okay on his gravestone it says call me trim tab and the trim tab I don't I'm I'm not an engineer but it's the bit on the end of a Rudder I think on a ship or plane which only moves slightly but it's the greatest point of Leverage in terms of turning that ship it's like an extra Rudder on the end of a Rudder or something okay and my point is that we have and I had an argument with someone who was the I think he was the political correspondent of the ft and I said when John Major you a lot of your listeners be too young to remember this but um uh I'm always conscious of this I I I found myself doing things like now explaining what a fax machine was and things like that but when he invented the cones hotline he was widely ridiculed for that okay so he invented this thing which was a a phone number where you could report cones that were blocking off the road where no Road Works were being performed and you could also say you know you could also get advanced warning of where Cones were going to be now at the time he came up with that he was the Prime Minister okay and this was regarded as the most comical and absurd thing you could possibly imagine like every one was being tyrannized by roving bands of cones the other hand he was solving a problem which you like potholes which annoys a great number of people all the time okay and it was non-controversial but it was considered Absolut beneath his dignity well my only argument is that probably the way you solve big problems is by tinkering around with a lot of small things and then sometimes the big problems just weirdly go away okay I think that tackling problems head-on is usually counterproductive but the argumentation tendency that people want to win an argument rather than solving a problem first of all causes this tribal polarization which means that people very rapidly then start saying I won't actually argue for what good I'll argue for whatever path of action most annoys my opposing tribe correct yeah it's it's not what's most effective it's what signals that I am a acolyte yes I'm a devoted unquestioning acolyte of this particular let me give you this I've come up with this idea of the unreliable Ally so if I know one of your views and from it I can accurately predict everything else that you believe you're probably not a serious thinker because you've put your entire world ideology on as a onesie inally Dominick cummings's great Insight was he said that effectively the language of left or right is a is a tribal convenience for people who are into Political cosplay correct it's it's rather like you know okay most people are kind of interested in politics in the way that I'm interested in Star Wars which is I'll watch it if it happens to be on but I'm not going to go to a convention and dress as Darth Vader okay and politics is full of the kind of people who dress up as Darth Vader and you know get unbeliev involved in insane details of you know how the Federation is actually the governance of the Federation or something okay most people aren't like that the other Insight of dominant comings was he said most people in reality are both more left-wing and more right-wing than politicians fully understand so Ordinary People in a way are serer and more diverse politically than the people who've been forced to take sides yeah they get reduced down to a dashboard though right and that isn't able to fully capture you know one vote from somebody doesn't fully encapsulate just how far right and how far left you are because on balance you aggregated that you are a bit left so you voted labor or you are a bit right so you voted conservative this I do so avoiding that identitarian thing I mean you know I I write for The Spectator partly because the weird thing is it would have been complet actually no that's not fair okay actually that's not fair I was going to say that in the 1970s it would have been the opposite where the right-wing press got much more annoyed about you writing something left-wing than vice versa actually that's probably not fair of the British very interesting by the way way which is if you're American okay there's quite a simple narrative which you can reasonably believe which is that most progress socially not necessarily economically but most social progress happens under a democratic regime okay so you go back to say votes for women that was my cousin woodro who is De bizarrely he's like my fourth cousin twice Ro his mom was English from a Scottish family okay um just just to even things out my my other traced American relative is in prison in Washington state for kidnapping and attempted murder so swings the roundabouts right yeah um but um uh the the interesting thing there is that you know most of those kind of uh forward movements the Civil Rights Movement Etc happened under in a democratic regime okay and so it's very easy if you take the American narrative on board which is basically they're these well-intentioned Democrat people who do nice things and then Republicans tend to be nasty okay I don't think that Maps very neatly onto the UK okay so if you look at the UK uh votes for women was actually a conservative government uh the NHS was set up undoubtedly by labor government atly but actually on the recommendations of Beverage who is a liberal okay um I think um same-sex marriage was conservative government I think the legalization of by the way if you go back the Guardians supported the south in the American Civil War okay The Spectator a right-wing publication was about the only publication in the UK to support the uh Union against the Confederacy The Spectator in the 1960s okay was known as the buggers bugle for its campaigning for the legalization of homosexuality okay and another force that was absolutely decisive in that campaign was bizarrely the Church of England so there's well not that bizarrely I suppose if you consider that homosexuals in CIA Church positions perhaps okay no no no no no at the time no no there were quite a few trust me okay but but I mean actually there was an Archbishop of Canterbury at some point in the 60s who kind of needed protection because of his position on that matter if you want to if you want to see a really Advanced group in terms of being ahead of the curve on anything it's the Quakers I mean if you're an empiricist everybody would become a you know what we really need is a Quaker Revival okay but the thing is you can't have a demonstration can you as a Quaker what do we want sh okay it doesn't really work but but my point is that actually if you look at it if you look at the British social progress I mean you know the anti-slavery campaigners some of them were Tory okay Shaftsbury was it's actually British progress is much much less easy to uh kind of stereotype than in the United States and so you know you actually look at the you you look at the history of different Publications and their opinions on different things the idea actually which my kids seemed to absorb which was everything was horrible until leftwing people came along and made it better yeah this this force of History thing is kind of a bit borne out I have to say in the U you know it's complicated obviously it's a bit you know you could say well there is some empirical evidence for that in the United States although you had a Democratic party which was completely weird for you know while the South was overwhelmingly Democrat you had that kind of weird Unholy Alliance thing going on but it's not really safe and this business of taking American concerns because they're the most important because it's America okay and getting wildly excited about them in the UK even though our problems are different okay so I'll give you just a very simple example of this which is you know if you talk about white privilege okay and I I'm to some extent the beneficiary inarguably of exactly that but the only Point i' make is that when I was one of the reasons I'm white okay apart from the obvious ones one of the reasons I'm right is I was born in the UK in 1965 when I think someone will correct me on this the population of the UK was 97% white okay in 1965 so you know the odds that I'm going to be white it's not like it's not it's not a situation like the United States where you've had generations of people effectively unfairly disadvantaged okay the people who are disadvantaged hadn't arrived at the point when I was being born to the to the most part okay now as a consequence simply transplanting American history and American preoccupations and American narratives and imposing them on Australia the UK France okay doesn't really work and yet these people do it because they want to identify themselves with the highest profile um uh you know biggest debates do knowour so they can take sides and that's completely inimical to you know we got we got other things to be guilty of if we're Brits let's be honest okay it's very interesting actually I had a great aunt who's an anthrop olist called beatric Blackwood who spent her her life kind of connected to the pit Rivers Museum and her diary is survive and sometime in about 1923 she went to Memphis I think might have been I think it was Memphis okay I thought interesting to see you know how how does you know fairly you know obviously she an anthropologist fairly conventional English woman of 1923 upper middle class family how does she react to going to the American South in the 1920s and I thought her reaction gosh this is really you know tiny bit you know it's a bit dodgy you know it's a bit off you know she was AB horrified I mean there's there's just these pages of her raging against the fact that she wasn't even allowed to visit a black household because they wouldn't allow her in because if word got out that a white woman had been in their house there'd be trouble okay now yeah we got we got loads of flaws over here which we can solve and we can look at but I don't think there's a wonderful case from your part of the world isn't there which is a battle where the pubs refused to deny access to colored servicemen when when they were bed somewhere in the Northeast isn't it not sure are you a monkey hanger are you or technically a smoggy oh you're a smoggy as it's referred to the American audience at this point is completely Middle where ICI a huge big industrial plant that spews out all manner of smokers but I mean you know different countries you know the situation in Canada is fundamentally different from the situation elsewhere and the idea that you have to solve problems by basically looking to the United States and then just importing wholesale whatever happens to be the fashionable topic dour over there seems to be crazy and if I were in the US I'd be competing anyway for four weeks paid vacation which would benefit everybody yeah that seems to be the F the Vanguard of social change should be paid vacation and a bit more maternity leave the only person who suggested that was Bernie Saunders and everybody thought he was some sort of communist well I'm not sure if it was just because of that that they thought he was a communist but there may be other reasons as well one of my favorite stories that I've learned over the last couple of years about David Ogie that I've never got a chance to talk to you about was when Fortune published an article and titled it is David Ogie a genius question mark I asked my lawyer to sue the editor for the question mark um is there any truth in that gosh funny enough he's an interesting case in point because he's a university Dropout okay so he didn't have a degree he was when he started the agency he was former Chef failed tobacco farmer I think during the war he'd been in MI6 somewhere in Washington as well he was kind of Ian Fleming character in many way actually um you know he he and Ian Fleming by the way was also successful in a sense relatively late in life um and by the way we need more of these stories because you know you can re you know it's never too late Colonel Sanders you know sorry was 65 when he founded k enty Fried Chicken as then was okay um and David OG was a kind of Colonel Saunders of advertising he was relatively late and he had the advantage of surviving for a long time there are people within Ogie who think that his brother Francis who tragically died young and was based in the UK rather than the US was as much the brains behind the operation as David was but I I met him once fortunately and I knew his wife quite well his widow now um and yeah I think he had some advantages okay so he was doing advertising at first for Fairly aspirational products at a time of Great American angila so he was advertising Guinness Rolls-Royce um scheps um the English tourist board for example which allowed him to do a particular style of kind of Urbane aspirational advertising at a time when most American advertising was quite crash crash yeah it was to an educated audience that could work out the inference I mean famously that r R advertisement at 60 MPH appeared only twice and it was in the Wall Street Journal I think what was that at 60 MPH the loudest sound in this new Rolls-Royce is the ticking of the electric clock what is it that makes the Rolls-Royce the best car in the world there really is no magic about it it is simply patient attention to detail says an eminent Rolls-Royce engineer I even memorized the subhead but it's um he was very um the the one thing everybody can learn from him is uh writing and he is closest I think as a Pros writer if you read his books one of his books is terrible weirdly which I think it's called blood brains and beer it's his autobiography the rest of the books are excellent um I think everybody's allowed one bad book uh but um uh it's a wonderful Pro style very similar to con and do in that it's very very simple and easy to read with every sort of 57th word being a slightly more complicated or slightly more High futin word just to remind the reader that the writer isn't an idiot yeah and I think it's it's actually a great approach to communication which is that little signaling of in the Rolls-Royce advertisement if you are too diffident to drive a Rolls-Royce you could drive the Bentley yeah she says you have a Bentley with a less kind of grandiose radiator Grill effectively and you know and so he was it was actually it's a probably actually you know other people who are big fans of that kind of proel Kingsley Amis was a big admirer of Conan doy and it's a particular way of writing which is incredibly easy to read but at the same time really intelligent and quite Urbane what I really what I really loved about at least my research that I have managed to do a David Ogie is uh his approach to engendering which you guys have obviously continued now uh engendering this there are no wrong answers creativity kind of culture which I think is really great well it's a huge I mean I was saying to some clients the other day we actually we make it easy for ourselves in one way which is it's one of very few corporate this is why I'm very interested in the comedy world I'm very interested in other forms of anomalous economic activity if you like where you're actually paid to be weird and you you don't realize how rare and precious it is until you move into until you encounter management Consultants okay where the whole thing is kind of templated formulaic they recruit engineering graduates which by the way is a terrible waste of engineering talent I want Engineers going and making bloody things I want them bloody well producing PowerPoint decks at sort of200 an hour what a waste you know you know those people could be producing I don't know space Rockets or something but instead they're going and producing these effing PowerPoint decks for management consulting firms and the the value of actually having so most organizations first of all regard logic as a good proxy for um in other words the course of action that has the best argument attached must be the best course of action and what's unusual advertising and comedy and a few other things music obviously I guess um is that we don't buy that that we don't buy the idea that whatever has a good argument attached to it must be right because there's probably a better idea which comes from Left Field which you won't arrive at through pre- rationalization you can only post-rational eyesee it now that distinction by the way is quite interesting um I won't go into the whole thing about Charles Russell purse brilliant American philos of the 19th century and um I won't go into the stuff about um uh you know the whole thing of abductive inference being a different form of mental process but if you look at actually quite a lot of pharmaceutical progress okay it actually happens backwards okay it's not we have this disease we need to cure it oh look let's do these things here's a cure those processes generally lead to fairly well actually not that reliable you know tolerable incremental progress over a very long period now let's not discount that because over a period of 80 years we do get better at things the real breakthrough things happen backwards okay which is Viagra penicillin yeah in other words um it's almost a cure for which there is no known disease rather than a disease for which there's no what can we use this for it's giving people erections uh well what happened was it was intended as an angina remedy Viagra and there are two stories about it one of which is that the nurses noticed that when the guys came in for their kind of people on the trial when they came in for their kind of checkup they were sitting in a really weird way okay and the the other story I've heard is that at the end of the trial they were told well okay um we're we're obviously processing the trial results which were pretty inconclusive as far as angina went so could you hand back any unused pills you have to which the response in every previous trial have been yeah sure here they are and in this trial went no there's also a fascinating story which is that a German pharmaceutical company got there first noticed the side effect and immediately rejected the drug okay because they failed to see the opportunity to in other words as an an any angina cure that caused people to go around in a priapic state of tence was obviously no good as an angina medication and they failed to see beyond it which is that now I'll tell you two other stories of this I was talking to some other people one of the great things about being a vice chairman is you can just go and talk to to be honest okay most discussion and decision-making argumentation is top down most progress is bottom up or horizontal okay so we organize organizations in the absolute worst way for problem solving which is what you know what you need is people who know quite a bit about three different things to solve a problem because more and more Modern Problems aren't problems within a specialism they're problems that involve the combination of two specialisms so anyway here's an interesting one which is is a drugs company I was speaking to giving a talk to and to be honest I think I learn as when I give these talks companies often I learn as much from them as they do from me but they pay me so fine okay um this is a case where they were looking at drugs to treat um autoimmune diseases such as rheumatiod arthritis and what happened was that some of the drugs they tested were apping right because they actually had the opposite effect they boosted the immune system and of course if you've got disease where your immune system is attacking your own body it's the worst thing you want to do so they put these on the shelf and go okay you know rule that out and then someone a a little while later goes ding if you're trying to practice immunotherapy for cancer a drug that strengthens the immune system that's not a bug that's a feature okay and similarly that happened with Night Nurse which is one of my favorite marketing story is where they were looking when they created Night Nurse and this was long before there was something called day nurse okay they were looking to produce a a flu remedy and they produced a very successful to be honest it was treating actually treating the symptoms rather than the cause okay but they produced this flu treatment so not a remedy but a treatment uh which was brilliant but the downside was it sent you to sleep so you couldn't drive or operate heavy machinery um I'm don't regularly operate heavy machinery but it's a bit I love that warning yeah I love that warning too yeah oh [ __ ] I was about to do some heavy Excavating you ruined has been taken been completely it's rather like that video message which is you mustn't show this video on an oil rig do you remember that at the beginning of VHS videos it said this is not licensed for the display on oil rigs and you imagine those people 500 miles out of the North Sea going oh [ __ ] press the pause we about to watch speed to just about to watch Speed 2 and that's ruined it for us you know any moment now someone's going to turn up from the copyright licensing Authority and BP are going to be in trouble and um but anyway um the the fascinating thing is that what happened is they said okay so it's no good it sends people to sleep and then a little guy I've always heard the story as a little guy kind of from the marketing department said actually if you position it as a nighttime flu remedy okay the fact that it sends you to sleep is a bonus it's not a problem so night nurse was born by basically reframing and this is what I said about highspeed 2 I said High Speed 2 is a terrible answer really um in the sense that it goes at the wrong speed along the wrong route um lots of things are terrible about you know the whole thing was misconceived but it was the first thing that was wrong about high spe 2 was the question they asked and they asked an engineering question which is how do you transport X people over y miles uh you know at a time of Zed T okay right and so they set down those kind of mathematical parameters now a marketing person would have asked a different question which is a much more interesting open-ended question which has far more scope for expanding the solution space to allow for Creative Solutions and the question a marketer would have asked is how do you make the train service between Manchester and London so good and so enjoyable people feel stupid driving now speed obviously okay speed may be part of that convenience Comfort enjoyability connectivity catering okay um variation of seating so you know I mean you remember strangers on a train there Hitchcock films where they used to have the observation car at the back of the train [ __ ] me every time you watch this is a train in the 1950s you go oh God I wish they had trains like that now they even had a smoking thing at the back didn't they now I did have a crazy idea which is if you spent the money okay this is hypothetical but this is why comedy is so important it's much more easy to start silly and re it back than it is to start boring and re it forwards as it were and I said just a hypothetical exercise if you spent if you kept the tracks the same and you spent all the money on both buying and recreating the world's greatest steam locomotives right and you ran the trains from Manchester like your train at 9:15 will be pulled by the Union Pacific Big Boy okay or the malard right or a replica of the malard now it would be slower okay I'm assuming the Wi-Fi could be quite good you wouldn't go into full you know kind of you know 19th century or you know mid 20th century Nostalgia but every single tourist to London would go to Manchester just to ride on the effing train right if you had a replica of the bloody um Harry Potter train okay you'd actually get people coming to London so they could travel to Manchester yeah if you think that's by the way comical I've got a friend who's the warden of an Oxford College uh a former boss of mine um and the tourist visitors to Oxford colleges basically have completely bif there are colleges which nobody visits and there are colleges which are swarming with tourists the entire discriminator between those two is whether the college features in a Harry Potter film wow so new College Oxford has a tree apparently which is featured in one of the films and that has tourists swarming in next door you can have a fantastic College architecturally magnificent didn't feature in Harry Potter you know basically it's um pointless it's you know it's what you call those things that blow through the place tumble weed tumble weed yeah yeah what's your thoughts on the abandonment of this billion dollar train thing there's something recently that's been you can still solve it you go and hand the job to I've said this you go and hand1 million pounds to Johnny IES I and his mate Mark new Mark new Australian designer already has form here because he designed the Quantas business class seat which in my opinion is the best actually never mind business class it's the best airline seat ever conceived by the wit of man um and you say you give them the brief okay we've got this stupid Railway going along this stupid route how do you make it just absolutely amazing I mean joh Ives back in the UK right I'm sure 100 million are get him out of bed okay and you just go okay you're in charge of the design of the train Interiors you're in charge of the catering the connectivity your brief open brief make this journey so amazing that people want to go on the train for the sake of the train not for the sake of the journey that's the brief it's the brief that Cunard effectively had okay so when jet jet aircraft were invented okay um the blue ribboned which was that competition for how fast you could cross the Atlantic became to be honest a bit of an academic exercise because if you could get there in under a day by plane even if you had to refuel in Gander it didn't really matter whether the Q the Queen Mary was faster than the bloody United States or the Normandy anymore okay so card basically had to go okay we've got to stop thinking of these ships as a source of a form of transportation they got to be a destination in themselves and consequently they kind of invented the cruise ship industry sort of and I I don't give them 100% credit but that idea of so cruise ships when you think about it you border cruise ship you go around in a circle and you come back I mean you do visits and places for a journey yeah yeah you know but actually the cruise ship is as much of a destination as the destination is and you can do that with high speeded too yeah what would you do train twister is my suggestion solution to train overcrowding is to turn close proximity to other people from an annoyance to a source of entertainment okay a lot of intimacy concerns there yeah there probably I did think of the legalities but you know your next station is head corn left hand yellow come on you you probably have to have gender segregated T carries that's a concern it depends if you're going to Brighton or not that might be a bonus um you've also got the the issue I suppose I've seen a lot of the people that travel up and down this country is getting older yeah and I'm not sure whether you'd have to have at each different stop some sort of paramedic perhaps or or a physio that could give R down by the way that is part of the appeal of the cruise ship industry to the elderly in the United States which is you got a doctor on board right you've got three weeks where your medical care is basically taken care of if you tumble tumble down the the water slide not irrelevant and by the way if you're a cruise ship doctor you're a [ __ ] good doctor because you got to be able to cope with everything right you can't specialize if someone's on board and you're sort of you know 200 miles from Land you can't say I'm terribly sorry it's not my specialism I need perforated eardrum to a half exact exactly yeah I bet you got to be a [ __ ] hot generalist what would you do to improve business last flights interesting uh yeah I've got an idea for that for short Hall which is really mischievous you know how they always say that the the biggest car company in the world Uber doesn't own any cars and the biggest uh you know accommodation company in the world Airbnb doesn't own any houses I've got this idea to start an airline that doesn't own any planes okay and this is I did think of having a vaping Airline I did wonder about that or you can just Vape on board you just Vape on board not that you like a vaping tax a vaping search charge yeah and and you'd have two you know you'd have two classes you know 20 milligrams at the front 10 Mig at the back fantastic but I did wonder about that but actually my idea was you buy a country house near stanstead okay and every time you fly okay you park your car at this country house okay you're checking your luggage and the country house is it is like the party in The Wolf of Wall Street okay right it's like Eyes Wide Shut okay it's Absolute Total opulence okay and then when you're ready to fly you're driven in you know Dr Evil's car which of course is an S-Class Mercedes with the windows blacked out isn't it you know okay which is kind of like you know it's kind of like you know Dr Evil's natural conveyance of choice okay you're driven to the plane and you walk onto a ryion air flight okay and the ryion air flight cost you 37 quid and it cost 250 quid to use the lb you're a nightclub promoter right yeah yeah we could go into business doing this ready to go so the whole idea is okay the bid on the plane is only an hour it doesn't really matter if it's Ryan Air and all okay you know you could do a thing where you book the middle seat out okay so you got a bit of space but basically you use Ryan Air and the whole aim is you make the airport experience amazing where you're literally fered to the plane then the plane bit you don't try and compete because there's a limit what you can do at 30,000 ft to make it amazing yes or certainly a limit to what's illegal that would make it what's legal that would make it amazing it's quite there are lots of illegal things I'm sure you could do make moreing that would make it amazing but we'll we'll kind of you know we'll we we'll draw a veil over that should we say yeah what so we were talking earlier on about kind of this uh culture of creativity that you guys have managed to Foster and kind of perpetuate as well I know that you've spoken to Rick rubben yes yeah that was fantastic yeah you think a lot about creativity for yourself by the way Rick asked me a question which I'm going to ask you he said why haven't you moved to the United States and you have moved to the United States now you've moved to Austin which I think is very ever yeah because I think Austin is actually an interesting game which is Americans are choosing it because they want to live within a cool a cool culture rather than the cash culture okay in a sense the status game in Austin is slightly different you've read that Paul Graham essay each City Whispers something different to you lovely yeah I I haven't but I will yeah he's he's an interesting guy you know you go to Miami Miami Whispers to you you are as important as the watch on your wrist or the shoes that you wear or the car that you drive yeah right uh La Whispers to you you are as important as as your role in the entertainment industry people that you know and the people who know you know in La there's a club which is only for people who don't work in the entertainment industry right because any other club they join they're automatically at the bottom you can you can own some business you know literally a billion dollar business and you can own it but in La if you go to the same Club as the celebs you're basically treated night film second class so they they have a kind of separate club for people who aren't in the film industry fascinating and La you're right it Whispers London's very complicated because it's the bloody Center of everything from government to advertising to business to I can't remember what he says London London Whispers to you uh but yeah so the the Rick Austin also has the great advantage of being a democratic City and a Republican state I people say that blue dot red ocean thing I see no one that's liberal everybody that's there is in some degree based or conservative I sorry really I that's what I see man I mean I assume that you know I assumed it was my my idea of Heaven which is kind of it's short range left wing and long range right wi which is so I can go out and I can buy really good coffee made by people with interesting body art but then in the afternoon I can drive into the desert and fire machine guns at oil drums both they actually true yeah you can that's Austin in a nutsh tank that is that is a Austin in a nutshell but definitely one of the things that's interest absolutely adore Texas so I I've been I've been having the the old dig at you know I said I got nothing against the United States cousin Woodrow was president of the [ __ ] place but um uh I have to say that uh Texas I find absolutely love now I'm a Brit I'm a white guy Etc actually it seems to me I got a Texan colleague who says all Texans get on pretty well because they're all Texans okay they have an identity which transcends other things okay now Austin you say that actually you find oddly that you don't find that kind of blue dot well I don't know man it's just I don't know how much of it my visit there but I love I love Houston I love Dallas I don't know how much of it's a selection effect because the people that I'm around are going to be people who have maybe achieved a degree of Financial Freedom that's cause them to lean more right or whatever but there's definitely uh and low taxes correct there's definitely a freedom to and a freedom from culture so there is a freedom to do the things that I want there is a freedom from any of the [ __ ] interventions of the people from Washington etc etc but going back to the creativity thing for the people who want to try and get a uh they want to artificially inseminate their creativity muscle yes what are some of the things that you advise the guys that you work with in the companies you work with to do to engender a creative culture study biology not just sort of physics and maths in other words study complex things um I have a kind of weird Theory which might form a chapter in my next book which is in a weird kind of way cops are better scientists than scientists are okay now let me explain okay if so one of the things I recommend is read a lot of true life crime okay study that kind of stuff by the way there's a fantastic Andrew Schulz uh routine on this on his wife's propensity to watch um films about serial killers the female obsession with serial killers is never going to make sense to me but do you have because I have it as well so it's great because my wife and I both I think she likes it because there's a lot of psychology and I like it someone gets killed but I'm only joking Bond over your love True Crime there is a really interesting thing about reading about um uh true life crime which is it's one case where you get an extraordinary amount of detailed study into the life if you've read those you know books about say Peter Sutcliffe and his family you get an extraordinary amount of detail into a family which in many cases is completely ordinary except for the obviously the outlier that somebody kills somebody or a lot of people so that you know you do get that weird thing which is a very deep study not into a major historical figure except in the worst possible sense um but um no that it is interesting but what it is about detective work is you're kind of working okay there's a Conan dial P actually fun enough one of the I think one of the sources of my creativity was obsessively reading Sherlock Holmes short stories as a fairly young kid okay my Behavioral Science thing was probably weirdly reading ESOP who uh is really the first behavioral scientist even though he lived in the sixth Century BC you know Jesus was also a pretty good behavioral scientist if you look at it you know the parable of the lost is basically loss aversion okay you have really interesting things like you know the parable of the vineyard is you know perceived Equity you know actually there's a there's a hell of a lot of Behavioral Science in Jesus um seriously so that's that's my third book you know there's that book Jane Austin was a game theorist okay there's a fantastic book my my my book's gonna be my third book's gonna be Jesus was a behavioral Economist right I wonder how that one's going to go yeah yeah I don't know how that's going to go down but um but actually what what C do talks about through the mouthpiece of Sherlock Holmes is this business of reasoning backwards and he said that everybody knows how to reason forwards this has happened so this is going to happen next and it's the natural mode of thinking reasoning backwards is not actually that difficult to do but most people don't do it and that is if you think about a detective uh a work of detection it's this thing has happened now we have to find out what were the pre-existing conditions that led to this outcome and in advertising Forward Thinking creativity it's we want to get to the this place in the words of Roger L Martin a very brilliant business Guru what would have to be true for this to come about I think that's the question by the way a lot of political movements don't ask they they have a hypothesized ideal future okay and they don't subtly ask the question okay what needs to happen between now and in other words play the hand your dealt we happen to be here we want to get there let's not just ignore where we are and immediately effectively fantasize into existence a perfectly neat uh Society because change doesn't work like that you have to start where you are you have to play the hand your Del it's very very easy to say why did it take them so long to you know uh give votes for women etc etc but actually if you look at the reality of it these things take time and also persuasion is slower than legislation but it's persuasion that actually makes things work have you got the so I'll just make that distinction with in regard to drink driving okay the breathalyzer you know penalty points license banss for driving for American Americans we don't have a distinct between driving under the influence and driving while intoxicated if you're basically intoxicated you lose your license okay it the legislation sort of worked but a lot of people in my parents generation thought it was a bit naughty to get caught over the limit my parents didn't drive drunk I just want to absolve them of that but some of their contemporaries did and my parents wouldn't stop someone leaving the house if they had too much to drink they'd encourag them to stay but they wouldn't like grab their car keys now when something makes it way its way from being imposed to being adopted what you see in my children's generation is they would wrestle one of their friends to the ground before they got into a car over the limit so America is so different to this I know so different the attitude of Americans to people that drink Drive is like you'll be at some bar or something so oh we're going to go to such and such a place do you want to come I oh right okay brilliant presuming that there's an Uber waiting outside and someone gets into the four50 go I've just watched you sink Three Margaritas over the last hour and no one no one really bats an I I saw this amazing video I'll find it in LA is like that as well la la yeah yeah I mean Uber has probably reduced this to some degree but the extent to which people used to drive around La intox my brother-in-law who lived there for quite a few years just couldn't get his head rounded at all yeah there was a a great video of when they first introduced the uh you can't drink and drive drink and drive not drink then drive you can't drink and drive and they're talking to these guys and and girls from the deep south in America and they're all in you know beat up Chevy trucks or whatever and they're interviewing them through the window and this dude sat there and there's another one with a woman who sat there child on passenger seat without seat belt on beer between legs saying I don't know what this country is coming to that a guy can't finish his hard day at work and you know have beer when he's on his way home you know this country is being run by Communists these godamn commies trying to take our beers away from us and I'm like you're drinking and driving literally dring and driving extraordinary thing I think in New Orleans or certainly in Louisiana I think is it isn't it where you can actually have drive-thru margarita stands phenomenal so you literally put a margarita in your cup holder nothing in America is beyond being drive-thru the bank no CVS [ __ ] Margaritas everything is driveth through that that by the way um I never answered Rick rubin's question why I never moved to the United States and there are two reasons one of which is I'd probably make a million dollars but then I'd start shopping at Whole Foods and I'd be back to where I started right okay so the one thing I can't get my head [ __ ] individual malthusian trap that you've got yourself into we had this La guy who came over and he was La creative guy wonderful guy and he was in raptures about waitrose now this won't be funny to American audience apologies okay but he said the food is such good quality and such reasonable prices okay and you suddenly realize he grown up on Whole Foods or Bristol Farms all those LA and it's completely bipolar American Grocery retail you know German grocery retail is all about price really y okay American Grocery retail British grocery retail is really all about brand actually quite interesting and then you have American Grocery retail which is just like you have a choice between two absurd extremes you know it's like having first class and in room only you know it's kind of weird I think what happens with British supermarkets is that they are woven into the class structure as well yeah right you know little our system isn't all bad you know let me explain this okay one thing which I think is problematic about the British class system but is also quite nice okay is you do reach escape velocity relatively soon okay if you prove yourself reasonably successful materially okay so okay this is a total stereotype okay but if you're a brid you you're going to do this right okay you're going to come back to the Britain with some money which I hope you've made in the Colones okay right slowly and you're going to buy the old rectory in Minion Hampton a flat in London you'll have a Range Rover a labrador um a wife called Polly and two children at private school membership to Soho basically that point you could stop okay because anything more than that is actually evidence that makes you suspicious you're probably a drug dealer you know if you got a private jet or something like that will go he's probably up to no good yes okay he's probably a bit Shady he's not really respectable and so there is that kind of weird thing probably which is the the royal family sumptuary laws which is you know because we had a royal family who actually in many ways their Pleasures until recently were extraordin walking around muddy fields in Wellington okay yeah there's a c there's a culture of sort of elite modesty in some ways in the UK you know look at a Land Rover Defender yeah it's it's a a every single person I have a weird thought in the car market which is once you produce the Electric Land Rover Defender there can be no more prestigious vehicle than that in a weird way why because it's it's hard to explain but the landro defender is unbelievably beautiful by the way the latest iteration of it is fantastic if you made that electric and therefore you know you've got a big tough versatile vehicle big heavy thing with a huge battery quite a lot of range the performance is going to be fine right because it's electric okay and generally it doesn't matter what the electric cars the performance is going to be great okay why would if you had the money why would you have any other vehicle okay and the only other vehicle I can imagine by the way is um will a proportional so I'm as a georgist I believe that there should be a single land value tax and I believe that an awful lot of Technology exists so that people can escape from the rent seeking depredations of landlords and land owners and that's one of the Great bunch of places like Texas okay you've got it a super abundance because Austin like say Vegas or like say Phoenix okay they were basically built after the car was invented okay so living eight miles from the center of Phoenix doesn't matter because you can just drive in red to have the automobile in Phoenix what I love about do you ever do you ever go there Phoenix Scotsdale Santa Fe is a fantastic I'm going to Scotsdale in a couple of weeks time for the first time instead the hotel Valley Ho okay it's kind of hotel where the Rat Pack would have hung out it's really really cool and fun okay but I absolutely love the place now bear in mind okay as a Brit okay the two most pointless cities in the United States to visit in New York and San Francisco because they're a crap attempt to recreate a European city okay whereas Brits love places like Austin or Houston or LA or Chicago because they're really different they allow you to have a completely different life to the life you'd have in London and I'm going to make an accusation okay deep down everybody wants to live in Suburbia okay but in Britain living in Suburbia isn't cool but if you live in LA you can go and buy effectively a Suburban House you know up in the kind of you know just off what what's that place called um um uh Wonderland you know the the valley thing that goes up towards um uh uh the the mhall drive yeah yeah you can basically live in a glorious Suburban house and because it's La it's totally cool okay so that's one of those little games you see if you move to Beckley Heath your friends would start disowning you right but if you move to to LA and buy a nice Suburban House totally different yeah so I was thinking about uh the Rebrand of it's speaking about that sort of West Coast phenomenon this Rebrand of Twitter to X what's your assessment of it's a very weird thing to do because I would wait until he creates the everything app before you Rebrand it yeah um that's what seems strange to me bundle neuralink and SpaceX bundle payment vehicles I mean if he if he buil I'll forgive him everything thing if he builds in a Content payment mechanism to Twitter how do you mean uh there is a fundamental there are lots of holes in the ecosystem the digital ecosystem which haven't been plugged because they're natural monopolies and therefore um it's very difficult for them to reach critical mass as Network Goods unless they have Monopoly status now looking at the Royal Mail which is the first real Network good the penny post technically not the Royal Mail okay the penny post was extraordinary thing because there had been one penny postal services in London for about 150 years and this guy Roland Hill with the mathematical help of Charles Babbage IE the kind of inventor of the computer and one of the 10 greatest mathematicians of his time managed to do the maths to say actually you can scale this up to a national and subsequently an imperial level so there's an imperial Penny Post in 1910 whatever you know Ma some Australia when ra it didn't include Australia and New Zealand you had to pay extra for them but India but included India so when ramanujan wrote to GH Hardy in Cambridge he paid a penny for the L wow okay now the mathematics there is to say that in a network of of the postal kind of network the G the efficiencies in trunk routs in other words the cost per mile when you're transporting uh 50,000 letters at a time the cost per mile is so low that all the costs basically are in collection sortation and then last mile delivery so as a consequence the distance is actually more or less irrelevant to the cost of carriage and therefore we can have a flat rate for postage and it required babage to do the maths to prove it worked even then it lost money for the first few years because people weren't in the habit of writing to people 500 miles away because they didn't know anybody okay apart from else you know to Dev some time like if you own the world's first fax machine it's not really very useful yeah okay and I think there are lots of things and I think two of them are a locker system for e-commerce delivery and what the government should do is basically license a monopoly for 10 years and say okay if you offer an Open Access locker system will give you 10 to 15 years of schumpeterian rent from your your Monopoly okay and by the way it has to be open access so that local shops I can ring up a local shop in seven Oaks okay and say can you drop off a copy of this book in my locker or in this Locker you know sometime this evening after you shut right not just not just e-commerce but actually all forms of local Commerce and indeed peer-to-peer sending if I want to send something to my dad if there's a locker in his village he's 93 I can basically pop it in my locker and it be sent to his because then you remove the last mile cost of delivery which is causing environmental costs it's causing Transportation congestion and it's also it's not ultimately scalable because as I spoke to someone at PNG about the delivery the subscription model for things like razors they own Gillette right and they said the problem with this model is it works at a limited extent but if we bought everything that way our home our homes would turn into a delivery Hub you know it your house becomes the logistics Hub and every time you open the window it's beep beep beep beep okay it just doesn't make sense at at ultimate scale it doesn't make what this got to do with Twitter and X right okay so there's a similar problem which is with micro payments for now I've got a friend called Dominick young who's in a company called axate which is also looking at this problem which is most people don't want to subscribe to most content okay pay to subscribe okay now there isn't a single case there may be one case in like Finland okay but that's it there is there's barely a single case in the world of a tabloid newspaper making a success of the subscription model what Twitter could do is launch a micro payment system where I keep like 20 quid of my um Twitter balance and every time I want to read an article in well I do subscribe to the New York Times but I don't subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and i' Bugg it if I'm going to subscribe to the Ft right because the Ft there are lots of articles in the Ft I'd pay a pound to read but I'm not paying 35 quid a month or whatever I mean most people claim the Ft I guess or at least it's tax deductible okay but also the Ft there's a there's a psychological thing going on here which is that there are certain things in the Ft which I would love to read there's some Fant fantastic journalist there what's the guy called Gish something or other brilliant guy okay um but equally if I pay 40 quid a month for the whole of the Ft or whatever it cost that's 500 quid a year right okay well I feel that you know 70% 80% of that money is going to produce articles on the prospects for Central banking reform in Ecuador which are of no interest to me at all right not sure they that much interest to Ft readers but but nonetheless okay I I don't want to pay for the stuff I don't want and it's a psychological thing even if the net value to me of each of those articles added together might add up to20 I'm not paying for the whole thing because I feel I'm paying for a lot of value that I that other people are getting but I'm not so if you centralize the payment ability through Twitter I keep my Twitter balance at 20 quid or 20 US Dollars and I go that ft article looks a bit interesting I'll pay 50 cents to read that yeah now you can really monetize high quality and the same goes for video content by the way the same could go to musical content okay although spotify's made that work fairly well but I think for high quality journalism in particular but equally tabloid journalism PE the people who buy the sun buy it in the way you buy chocolate or crisps or a packet of cigarettes right an Impulse bar next to the tail and you go oh I feel like a bit of a treat I'll buy a copy of the super sore away sun and it's XP and then you take it with you those same people do not want to just just there are people who will only have pay as you go mobile phones even if they would be better off on a contract okay and I won't buy I won't buy a train season ticket because my argument is there are two days of the week where I don't take the standard Journey now I might actually save money overall on the three Journeys I do take but it pisses me off that I'm getting proportionately worse value than the people who travel in five days a week but I'm still paying the same so that feeling of pissed offness prevents me from subscribing to a season ticket prevents me from subscribing to a lot of Publications where I would give them 10 quid a month if it was pay as you go so would you if you had been El Al also by the way if you if I subscribe to every publication that you know I I think I subscribe to the Atlantic I think I subscribe to the New Yorker uh but let's add okay wired New York Magazine let's adders the new States okay I do subscribe to the spec I right for the spectators so that's obviously free exactly and I subscribed to the times and the telegraph I think okay and then I read you're probably accumulating what at least a grand a year well well this is the point that I I've basically reached Peak subscription okay subscription saturation so in other words there is a limit to the number of direct debits people are prepared to have yeah and therefore you cannot grow the market for paid high quality content or paid entertainment content tell you what's an interesting business that I found out about recently I think it's called Rocket reach and this company they go through maybe you link them to your bank or something I don't really know how it works uh but they go through and they look at all of the debits that you you that you've got that are kind of lapsed or pointless or [ __ ] something like that and they get rid of them yeah so if you've been by the way I'd also I would also add legislation here which is it is too difficult to cancel a recurring credit card payment I was paying for Club Penguin for my kids you know when I was picking them up pissed from all bar one you know at one o00 in the morning okay I was still paying for Club bloody penguin now I mean you know i' probably had little sneaky visit to I didn't don't worry um uh but um I did not go on clubbing the only time I went on Club Penguin as an adult is my children when they were younger would make me play the games to earn points to decorate their Igloo fantastic so they'd outsourc to me to get me to play the dad go to work please virtually yeah I wasn't doing anything else I don't want to end up in the nonsense wing of Wakefield prison okay um I wasn't going on for any other purpose okay right [ __ ] hell look let's get back to X for get back to X if you'd been Elon would you have waited until you were able to bundle everything underneath right yeah because there's too much equity in nobody everybody refers to it as Twitter brackets X there's a hell of a lot of equity in that it made perfect sense as a name you had a tweet it's a very very bizarre decision of elon's I mean he you know undoubtedly you know I mean the most bizarre feature of Elon okay if I may say so which is if you take comedic Viewpoint one of the great things you do you take this sort of Darwin mentality where you look at little things and suddenly you discover these absurdities everywhere and elon's greatest absurdity okay is he's in favor of driverless cars but mans space travel now I don't want to be rude okay what he means by man space travel is people who have no obvious aeronautic ability should be able to project themselves as humans into space but cars which obviously benefit from being driven by a human have to drive around autonomously now I don't want to be rude but isn't that the wrong way around okay shouldn't cars be driven by people and spacecraft be autonomous I don't want to be you know how much input do the humans in spacecraft have now none my brother is an astrophysicist if you want to get astronomers and astrophysicists absolutely um driven to a point of apoplexy just mention man space travel okay because they regard it as per per dollar spent an extraordinarily bad way of discuss discovering things about the universe you should just be robots it was described by one uh colleague of my brothers as spending $300 million to find out how mice wank in zero g okay you know the kind of experiments you performed on man space travel are kind of absurd compared to something like you know Space Telescope or or something of that kind you know whereas if you look at what those probes do that you know the nonhuman probes it's just that that's just joyous absolutely joyous however I do have a colleague in the advertising industry Trevor Bey whose lifetime dream has been to go into space and I think he's done this with Virgin I get it what is it now 250 Grand I think that that was it yeah and he at all credit him he's not some rich diletante guy who decided it' be cool I mean he's probably quite rich but he he's been an absolute lifetime space obsessive uh literally since being a child so it's a it's L good use of his I can see why he does that each time that we speak you have become an evangelist for a new category of products I think this is maybe your fifth or sixth time on the show each time that we've spoken I feel like the first time was the Japanese toilet the second time air FR was the air I I was the John the Baptist of bloody air fryers I can tell you that much right I mean seriously I went to Phillips who at the time had a monopoly of air on of air fryers now this is an really interesting point for anybody who's got a business the thing to look at at a business is not just the rate of growth okay you can have extraordinary rates of growth which consist of lots of people trying something and deciding it's [ __ ] I mean if you compare that thing what was that Facebook thing threads right now if you look at the actual data for the the adoption of threads it was absolutely you know exponential rates of insane adoption if you go there it's basically you know it's [ __ ] Wast absolute Wasteland okay now the reason for that is it may they very very easy to sign up people had a look didn't like it you can't actually leave threads because if you want to leave threads you got to delete your Instagram account which understandably people don't want to do so that's a kind of furline trap okay now it looks impressive means nothing by contrast there are things which grow very very slowly at first it's a sigmoid curve the data you need to look at to give yourself reassurance if that data is there is the repeat purchase rate or the subsequent conversion to evangelism yes now not many people had air frers now I I had this even the reason I went to Phillips and they didn't listen and I said look s trust me you're sitting on an effing gold mine here if you just promote your effec they were the only manufacturer of air fryers at the time okay if you promote your air fryer and you advertise it you can create kind of mov were they not promoting it at all no not at all didn't didn't advertise it at all I have no clue I don't know what it drove me nuts well it's now ninja right ninja ninja ninja wasn't ninja wasn't there t wasn't there now nin has become the um the Tesla they have I've got a I've got a 450 XL I've got a 450l double is that a double no single single yeah it's single but extra big and it goes to 450 so here's my I'm sure that you've got done this already look at me teaching the teaching the Messiah how to use his own [ __ ] air fryer um from frozen steak salt the [ __ ] out of it 12 minutes either side slap it on a plate done perfectly every time I asked I want I needed to eat more red meat in my diet according to my dietitian uh so I asked the only person I know who eats a very very high volume of meat Michaela Peterson who only eats meat yeah that's a bit weird isn't it I mean I I have to say Okay I I I my attitude to Jordan Peterson is a bit the same as my attitude to Frankie Bole which is in small doses I quite like him but I think he's overcommitted to a particular dogma and I think what what he says and there are very interesting sites to be derived from him but I wonder that there's a phrase that was used of Enoch Powell this equally applies to people on the left okay which is you're driven mad by the remorselessness of your own logic okay and I don't think I don't think anybody should see the world through exclusively a lens of black and white left or right okay I just don't think it's helpful conducive to problem solving an example on the left will be James O'Brien of someone who's you know I call it James O'Brien jesuitism which is that you you're so obsessed with the rightness of your cause that you effectively construct an argument from a fairly dubious assumption and arrive at a place and therefore you go QED my position on this is incontestable okay and what what's less visible about that is that the starting point or the driving assumption or axium of your argument isn't that great your argument seems wonderfully convincing it's a bit like dating sites okay every time I'm make I've never been on a date just in case my wife's M I don't want you you know I don't I don't know what dating side I go on in terms of you know fat Welshman there's probably a niche there isn't there I guess um but in any case by the way you mentioned that asymmetry that you said astoundingly that in your entire time as a nightclub promoter and as I assume because I can't tell as a bloke a pretty good-looking guy who was on love Island by the way which is partly a wppp creation so we can take a small amount of credit by the way for your incredibly deserved uh ele ation and fame but you you've only actually been spontaneously approached by a woman three time twice was it yeah yeah twice twice that overcoming of approach anxiety for women guys talk about how hard it is to go up to women and that's true that that is true but for a girl to do it to a guy they need to swallow something else which is that if they are rejected they've had to overcome a a social convention that is very very embarrassing to have done to be reject it's the same reason it's the reverse reason actually of why uh women are shamed for um not women ashamed of not for not performing in bed in a different way to man are but men get ashamed for not always being hot to trot when the wife is for some reason if you as a guy the guy is always supposed to be that's the Jimmy Carr joke isn't it that men and women desire sex to the same extent the difference is if a woman wants sex it actually happens I think that's a Jimmy I don't disagree go back to let's let's round out this Evangel thing so we had we had a Japanese toilet we had uh the a see I do I do take my Darwinism very literally which is don't don't have a sense of proportion don't get worried about being distracted okay I imagine on the Beagle the guy you know and the guy spent 10 years of his life [ __ ] around with earthworms for God's sake okay right Mustang Macky which may become Mustang Macky GT uh what was the other thing there was something you got for your dad a a telephone with massive buttons uh no that that was a very interesting thing which was that um the idea of Designing for the disabled is actually a good business policy even because you will actually find yourself with a target audience far larger than the one you originally anticip who's got shoing it's it's rather like actually you know glutenfree okay the number of people who are actually gluten intolerant to the extent of having celiac disease is pretty small but there are a hell of a lot of people who are trying to avoid gluten who will also buy a gluten-free product and in the same way what the example I always give is you know disability legislation mandates wheelchair ramps they're also handy if you've got wheelie luggage they mandate door handles rather than door knobs because people who have bad arthritis can't use a door knob but actually if you're carrying two bugs of tea you can open a door handle with your elbow because when you're carrying two bags of tea you effectively lost the use of your hands and you know putting the shampoo bottle that opens at the top and the conditioner that opens at the bottom You could argue that's just for people with severe visual impairment but actually no cuz I'm in the shower I've got severe visual impairment itless have had your fancy laser eye surgery which I can see everything so presumably you can see everything I can't see a [ __ ] thing I tell what if you be what are you evangelizing about at the moment um that's very interesting um actually electric cars interest me a lot because what I mean one of the things that interest me is that if you work in the advertising industry it practices what is makes it very very interesting is that it's as I said its problem solving methodology is slightly odd it's not the standard scientific you know we must have complete certainty P value less than 0.05 before we proceed it's closer to detective work which is you might act on a hunch because the hunch or the little bit of anecdotal information doesn't give you a decisive answer but it tells you uh what to investigate more okay it tells you where to direct your attention now if I had time I don't know how much time I've got there are two extraordinary stories here about how the capture of Levi bellfield uh effectively ghastly serial killer effectively happened because a former girlfriend of bellfields uh wrote to the police I think or contact to them and said I had this boyfriend once and there was a copy of a magazine and all the blond women had had their faces defaced with a brro okay now there's no evidential value to that you can't bang someone up for 20 years for defacing a copy of Vogue well that probably wasn't Vogue not sure the bellfield household kind of stretched to harism queen or anything I you know but whatever magazine it was right and you can't arrest someone for that but you should investigate okay similar thing happened with the Yorkshire Ripper which is uh effectively there was a very shrewd cop and I can't remember his name Yorkshire cop relatively Junior and the Yorkshire police were obsessed with the idea that he had a Newcastle accent do you remember this yes because you had that fake those fake tapes sent in which the police the police wrongly believed that there was information in the T sundland technically oh they narrowed it down to Shields yeah some [ __ ] pit that what was extraordinary there was an accent expert who placed him to within five streets that was the unbelievable thing about the accidents of the Northeast they have that degree of G but he wasn't the actual perpetrator and one day this couple they have to go and interview people who are suspects largely because their car is regularly cited in the red light district of Leeds or Bradford okay and or else they have some other reason to raise suspicion okay and they routinely have to go and interview these couples and it's an awful thing to do because first of all you've got to get the wife out of the room so you can ask the husband why he's always in the red light district okay so you have to go oh my throats like sandpaper make us a cup of tea love but they started this couple of cops just started with this kind of break the ice riff which was right Madam now's your chance to put your husband away for good to get rid of your husband for good and so they made light of the fact that they were making inquiries into the Yorkshire Ripper but by starting with a joke they kind of detoxified the whole exchange okay they were saying don't worry you know he's not you know you know you don't need to panic it was a wonderful little joke you know now has your chance to get rid of your husband okay and every single person they played that joke on about 10% of them got angry and 90% of them laughed as you might expect okay some people just don't have a sense of humor um which is what's slightly weird about woke comedy which is you allow comedians to be policed by people with absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever which doesn't seem to make much sense yes um but they just don't have they don't have a sense of humor when they interviewed Su Cliff that was the only occasion where they told that joke and they didn't either laugh or get angry they just took it as a dead B kind of statement of fact now then they noticed okay he had a gap in his teeth he was a lorry driver the pattern of wear on his Footwear because you're a long-distance Lorry driver match some footprints that have been found near the scene and they immediately went up to the head of the inquiry and said we should look at this guy and the guy said does he have a Jordy accent know he's a local man right forget it and they this guy really bollocked them for being suspicious I don't I don't want to see anybody I don't want to see anybody without a Jordy accent basically yeah Y and um uh so now what's interesting about that is it's as I said it's reverse reasoning it's kind of okay and also it involves to some extent a degree of nose I think there's something in this I'm not quite sure what but let's explore it a bit further now you might argue maybe that's how we should actually pursue some pharmaceutical research there's a company called helex in Cambridge which effectively is aiming to do pharmaceutical research backwards which is find interestes in compounds and see what they treat rather than Define a narrow disease and find a way to treat it now it's what you might call post-rational science rather than pre- rationalized science now a lot of advertising Works through that way it works backwards which is you come up with some weird idea through some mental process of inspiration that you're not quite sure about and then you reverse engineer the reasons why it might work now a lot of people see that as cheating just as the German you know German said well you know we designed a a drug to treat angina and it makes people penises wct okay this is clearly a failure okay well actually no it's the right answer to a different question and it worries me that we discount we discount it so often when we come up with an interesting answer to a different question now the advertising industry is probably relatively tolerant of that you know you know you know I always say look don't apologize for a post rationalization if it's an answer it's an answer okay how you got there this isn't like a high school maths exam where you have to show you're working out okay and sometimes the the place you get is by the way weird I always say look in psychological issues in physics the opposite of a good idea is wrong but in Psychology the opposite of a good idea might be another good idea okay it's a bit like the difference between you know if you like policing conversation on the one hand and Andrew Schultz on the other okay they're complete opposites but they may actually in a weird way be you know Solutions in some kind of strange well and we you know the psychology of humor is kind of fascinating because it is kind of harmless play I mean you know all primates all mammals kind of engage in kind of play fighting and we do it verbally as well as physically you know I'm not going to start wrestling with you now that'll be completely weird okay but we can engage in a bit of verbal that's what banter is Banter yes and you know and it's kind of like you know the tone is that there's also a form that abuse forms in friendship and Brit British English is slightly more High context than American English is in that not that Americans don't do it but British English is very much you say the opposite understatement that in other words tone of voice determines meaning or context determines meaning more than it does in American English uh that's not me speaking that's an American by the way it might be Jonathan height and so that kind of verbal play which is you know if we weren't friends I wouldn't be able to be rude to you like this you know which is kind of again it's kind of reverse reasoning but those kind of games exist all over the place which means that actually the opposite of something can can be just as valuable as the thing itself if you like and I you know I think it's important in problem solving because I think it's an additional string to your bow just as I think that that solving problems psychologically rather than technologically is is an extra string to your bow in terms of uh you know solving uh difficult problems make the railway enjoyable don't make the railway fast Etc okay I think that's an extra that expands the solution space and this business of allowing people to imagine and then work backwards which according to um uh interestingly the scientific method and and of course the method of scientific funding would be unless you've identified an absolutely clear problem you're not allowed to do anything okay right you experiment now you get some funding because you have demonstrated the absolute Clarity of your way ahead and the single point of your destination okay now if you look at someone like Andre gim who came up with graphine you know now okay first of all he discovered graphine with equipment that you could have bought from Staples on wh Smiths okay which is just taking taking bits of pencil graphite and endlessly pulling them apart with a bit of Cotate but he actually himself says I don't like that kind of research I like kind of what he calls hit and run research where you just find an interesting angle of inquiry and piss around for a bit and see where it gets you and then you discover the use subsequently I think that's a good strategy I think that's a strategy I just wonder I just wonder about our world where you have to win an argument before you can act in other words you need approval from complicated bodies of people before you can do anything you've got this thing about how all creatives have to justify their ideas to rationalist to do it the other way Rory let's bring this one home mate we've got lunch to get to with and George every single time you come on I absolutely love it thank you for joining me what can people expect the next couple of months well we'll catch up again but can I also say I mean nothing gives me more pleasure than to see how this entire series is just flourishing and absolutely brilliant I think it's it's and and there's a great quote from Jimmy Carr on your interview where he says YouTube became the biggest TV station in the world and nobody noticed and I think by the way you know we'd be wrong if we didn't kind of end with a bit of a pin and there's a wonderful article in the Ft saying that you know YouTube is the jewel in the crown of the internet uh one of the things I recommend to everybody by the way you said what am I evangelizing for I'll tell you YouTube premium oh okay subscribe to YouTube premium and secondly watch YouTube on your TV right yep I don't understand okay my kids right they they want to watch they want for [ __ ] sake right okay everybody in your whole childhood was how big is your Telly yeah okay there's by the way a lovely joke about that which is okay which is wonderful thing which is only of value to Brits so I really apologize so Kenneth Williams mom was obviously pretty similar to Kenneth Williams because they were sitting backstage waiting for some filming to finish on a carry-on film and um uh someone said to uh their neighbor which is one of the other relatives of Charles Horry or something you know what television have you got I've got a 14inch console to which Kenneth replied Kenneth Williams mom replied 14 in that would be enough to console anyone okay so clearly there was a kind of family tradition of absolute smut people are watching it on their phone but we all competed for how big your Telly was and then I have these kids who are staring at this sort of pathetic little letter box watch it on your big watch YouTube on your big Telly it's broadcast quality nearly all of it it's 4K there's 250,000 hours of content where I think the title starts with the words how to yeah okay if you want to repair now what I think has happened is first of all we've had we've had several YouTube Revolutions in that well several things okay there is a problem with certain Technologies which is when they're new they're not quite good enough so they hit the hype cycle at the wrong Point yeah uh that was true of video conferencing okay when it was when it was when it was hyped it was a bit [ __ ] and by the time it stopped being [ __ ] it was too late to Hype it CU you looked a bit like that guy in the fast show when isn't electricity brilliant you know premature problem premature problem okay and I think that happened a bit with YouTube you know it was a bit sort of flaky it was all filmed on crappy phone cameras you know it was all a bit pixelated wobbly and now actually it is the it is the only part of the internet which has no annoying if you have the YouTube premium it has no annoying qualities to it at all no and the algorithm is [ __ ] hot but if I if I keep on following you around the internet I'll consider that a a win yeah Rory I love you to bits thank you very much for likewise Mutual thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Rory you will love my fulllength conversation with Douglas Murray that you can watch right here go on give it a tap