#225 Rory Sutherland - The Psychology Behind Great Advertising

Rory Sutherland is an advertising guru and behavioral economist, currently serving as the vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK and co-founder of “Behavioural Science Practice.

We explore how marketing and advertising have shaped our lives, from the origins of the two-day weekend to the evolution of automobiles as luxury items

We dive into topics like the penny post's impact on the economy, the paradox of reduced friction in communication, and the long-term effects of low-cost email on productivity.

Rory also dissects the role of advertising in market dominance. Learn how subtle shifts in business strategy, from the introduction of washing machines to the rise of hybrid cars, have shaped our societal norms.

Don't forget to smash that like button and share your thoughts in the comments below!


Rory’s Socials:
Twitter: https://x.com/rorysutherland


My Socials:
Instagram - Darrenlee.ks
YouTube- Darren_ks
LinkedIn - Darren Lee
Twitter - Darren_ks


(00:00) Preview and Introduction 
(00:38) The Origin of the Two-Day Weekend
(03:21) Technology's Impact On Consumer Behaviour 
(09:56) The Network Effect and Historical Adoption Rates
(12:22)  Decoding the Air Fryers' Popularity
(16:08) Evolution of Email and Communication Mediums
(20:19) Rory Sutherland on AI and it’s Potential Pitfalls
(29:22) Bureaucracy in Modern Work
(31:13) Rory Sutherland on Changes in Modern Advertising Strategies
(37:04) The Secret to Effective Customer Interaction
(42:05) Major Flaws in Economic Models
(45:42) Real-Life Market Distributions Explained
(50:41) Understanding Consumer Loyalty
(57:49) Historical Social Movements And Their Impact
(01:03:26) Political Influence on Social Issues
(01:07:23) Media Attention in Protests: Good or Bad?

Transcript

Rory: 0:00

That is an assumption of neoliberal economics. It makes a lot of assumptions in order to achieve its mathematical neatness and all the assumptions perfect information, single representative agents, perfect trust, no information asymmetries, whatever it may be all of those assumptions are fundamentally extraordinarily stupid. If you had $12 million and you could pay $11 million of those $12 million to avoid coming face to face with the american legal system before we start this week's episode, I have one little favor to ask you.

Darren: 0:33

Can you please leave a five star rating below so we can help more people every single week. Thank you, because that's something that's very interesting, like the two-day weekend. So no one really recognized that that was came in from henry ford, right? People presumed especially my generation that I was always rolling. Yeah, but that was part of the system to get people into factory work.

Rory: 0:54

My correct yes, so I mean factories of course imposed a sort of a level of kind of conformity on time, um, and of course it spread to office work, because historically the office workers were there to oversee the factory and were often sort of co-located. Um. But no, ford actually wrote quite intelligently about the need to create not only more wealth he massively increased the salaries he paid his workers, really quite dramatically but also the importance of ensuring leisure, because he quite understood, I think that at the time, to most Americans who you've got to remember, of course that at the time most people had to live within, before there were cars, you kind of had to live within walking or bussable distance of your employer. Because there was cars, you kind of had to live within walking or busable distance of your employer because there was no other means of getting to work. So in the early stages of the car, of course, a car was much more of a leisure good for many people it was much more of a leisure purchase. It subsequently became essential because obviously the whole location of both residential and commercial property became predicated on the existence of the car.

Rory: 2:08

But in the early days of the car, I mean, there's a wonderful quote from Woodrow Wilson where he says when he's president of Princeton in about 1909 or something, nothing is doing more to further socialism in the United States than the existence of the automobile, because it's a kind of way in which the wealthy are flaunting their wealth in a trivial leisure pursuit. Woodrow Wilson in 1909 isn't really seeing the car as a mode of transport, he's seeing it as a luxury good for wealthy Americans. The car industry then fought back and said there are a load of farmers who depend on their cars to take goods to market and so forth, but this was 1909. To be honest, the riposte wasn't true. The car was a luxury good in 1909. I'm always fascinated by this because I actually read a kind of paper by some sociologist written in the 1960s, which almost despaired of improving the living standards of the British working class Because they were inclined to spend their money on pointless luxuries like dishwasher.

Rory: 3:21

No, no, no, sorry, washing machines. Pointless luxury is like washing machines. Now I'm thinking then hold on, hold on a second. Okay, this was a time, you know, where a household without washing machines might devote one day of typically the woman's life to the business of laundry and then processing it through a mangle. I can still remember I was born in 1965, I can still remember I was born in 1965. I can still remember british homes that had mangles a mangle, by the way, no, no, no, no, no, I mean wasn't. I mean, you know, my, my family were both richer, uh, than average and also very, very gadget friendly. So my, my, um, my grandparents were the fourth family in Wales to own a dishwasher Fantastically okay. But to go to a home, a poorer home, or just a more Luddite home, it wasn't just about wealth. There were people who just were reluctant to get washing machines, for whatever reason, and you would actually put the clothes and you would turn a handle and the rollers would effectively squeeze the water out of the clothes after you'd washed them.

Rory: 4:25

It's kind of unbelievable in a handle and the rollers would effectively squeeze the water out of the clothes after you'd wash them. It's kind of kind of unbelievable in a way. Well, but here was someone writing in 1960 about pointless.

Darren: 4:32

Luxury is like the television or the washing machine well, if you think about that resistance, that comes at different stages, right, so the resistance comes before the adoption, before the early stage, before the early adopters, before the early adopters.

Rory: 4:46

Basically, I still believe. By the way, I think Google Glass was a fantastic idea and they quit on it too soon. I would have bought Google Glass. Well, most adoption. First of all, they mismarketed it. The fundamental product was good, but you had the problem with glass holes. You also had the the privacy problem, which is you could use the device to film, which I think was a mistake. The device needs a camera in order to provide augmented reality. It needs location and a few things. It wasn't necessary for the device to be made capable of filming people. Um, in my view, I think the act of filming someone should be actually, you know, in some ways made visible. There you could say, oh, you can have a red light on the thing, okay, but I I actually think you know what you might call filming people without their knowledge. That crosses a line a little bit well so there are a few details right.

Darren: 5:40

That has been done continuously, continuously, all the time.

Rory: 5:43

No, no I just say, say I regard that as a breach of trust. Actually for someone to record someone without asking. It's a basic courtesy, I think. And so I think Google Glass was a great idea. They quit on it too soon. I mean there were a whole load of weird facets around what went wrong which involved a slightly weird relationship between the project lead and larry or sergeant, maybe larry, I can't remember but. But I mean it was fundamentally a great idea.

Rory: 6:13

Had they persevered with it, I would own a google glass by now. I would find it extremely useful to have a device which just gave me augmentary information, uh, without me having to look at anything, take anything out of my pocket, pull up my cuff. You know I was partly late for the podcast because I didn't have google glass. Okay, you know I I have to keep looking at this clock which is actually behind my microphone. I mean there are lots and lots of useful applications which. So, first of all, it's a network good in that you need the developer community to work for it and you need enough adopters to make it worth the developer community developing for it. So you have that network effect which makes innovation slow, and the fax machine is actually an extraordinarily slow pace of adoption because there were fax machines in the 19th century but they were so rare as to be effectively useless. I still find it impossible to believe there were fax machines in the 19th century but apparently they were obviously pretty crude. I had a friend who was the guy who organized the Isle of Wight festivals and he had a fax machine in the 1970s, but the only person he can remember faxing is his opposite number in the Los Angeles office and they would fax legal documents back and forth to each other. But he can't remember sending a fax to anybody else because he didn't know anybody else for the fax. And so you have this network effect problem.

Rory: 7:48

I mean at a very simple level, the penny post, ok, which is probably the first. Before there was Henry Ford, there was Roland Hill and the penny post was the first idea where someone said you can make more money by making something cheaper. Because actually scale of a networked postal service means that the cost per mile on aggregated trunk routes, the incremental cost of carrying an extra letter, is more or less negligible. Distance therefore doesn't matter because most of the costs are in the last mile delivery and in the collection and sorting. The actual distance that the letter. And this extended, by the way, to the Imperial penny post under the British Empire, where you could send a letter to anywhere in the British Empire apart from Australia and New Zealand I think for one penny. So if you're an Indian you wanted to write as Ramanujan did to GH Hardy at Cambridge. It cost you a penny and that was an extraordinary insight. Now Roland Hill had to go to Charles Babbage, ie the same Charles Babbage who invented, kind of invented the computer, inverted commas, probably you know one of the 20 greatest mathematicians on the planet at the time. He had to go to that guy to do the maths, to show that his idea fundamentally worked, that you could actually make posts very cheap, have a lot of letters.

Rory: 9:01

I mean, the contribution that made to the British economy is actually really interesting. I've never seen anybody try and calculate it, but it always occurred to me that you couldn't really have had the railways unless you had the penny the passenger railways, not the goods railways unless you have the penny post first, because you can't just turn up on someone's doorstep 200 miles away and say I'm here to stay for a week, okay, you had to have the postal and telegram system, that so, by which you could make arrangements to meet before it was actually worth boarding a train. So there's a kind of path dependency there which I've never seen anybody else remark on. But without the penny post there wasn't really a passenger railway system that could be feasible, correct, and so these network businesses always are slow to take off because they actually require two things to happen. In this case it's both users and developers.

Rory: 9:56

In the case of the post, it's only when it reaches a certain scale that the one penny post becomes economic, because obviously if only one person a day sends a letter, uh, it's an extraordinarily expensive, loss making proposition. When a million people send letters, it's a different matter. And of course it takes time because at the beginning of the penny post people weren't in the habit of writing to people 80 miles away, so they had to learn the habit. And so when you have this, this habit is obviously a, you know, force of friction to adoption. And then you have these network issues where you have to reach a certain scale before the thing becomes feasible. What I'm saying is that google gave up too soon on google glass. You have to find you have to wait at least five or six years, maybe even more, to really see the promise delivered in reality. The theoretical promise only becomes delivered in reality at a certain scale and reaching that scale takes time and it's a sigmoid curve. You know it's slow at first and then you have a kind of tipping point, which I mean.

Rory: 11:00

I was a very early evangelist for the air fryer and it was extraordinarily amusing to see the air fryer effectively follow the sigmoid curve. And I predicted it in fairness, and the reason I predicted it was I simply noticed that everybody who got an air fryer became slightly weirdly enthusiastic about their air fryer in a way that isn't common with, say, yogurt makers or other devices. And I thought, okay, the really valuable metric in Google Glass's case shouldn't have been how many Google Glasses are we selling? Because that will be slow to begin with, particularly at a cost of about $1,000. And they only sold them to developers who probably aren't the coolest models for a new fashion product.

Rory: 11:46

You know you wouldn't choose the developer community for their user imagery. You know supermodels might be a lot better, but in that case. In that case, okay, what they should have looked at, the metric they should have looked at, is when people buy google glass. Do they go on using it? And an even better one, I would say as a metric, which is if your Google Glass broke, would you buy another one? How many are selling in the early days of a product? What was significant about the air fryer is that everybody who bought an air fryer effectively became converted. You know it wasn't a case like you buy that.

Darren: 12:22

We've all done this.

Rory: 12:23

We bought a yogurt maker or an ice cream maker and it ends up in a cupboard and nobody's air fryer. That's not quite true. There was a percentage, I noticed, of people who bought them but just couldn't get them or, more likely, had been bought them as a present but were bemused by them. I just don't get the point myself, you know, for whatever reason that's one thing is the majority of people go ahead.

Darren: 12:43

Sorry, there's one. One aspect, too, that you might find interesting is the virality effect, them turning into raving fans. Right, so with the air fryer. How many times did your, like family, go over to a friend's house and say, oh, like you can cook that chicken in 10 minutes and you do nothing right and tick tock?

Rory: 13:00

tick, tock was the absolute apotheosis moment, because people started doing air fryer cooking on tiktok and that was that was. That was the moment of you know, the point of no return. If you like, that was the you know that crossed the rubicon for air fryer sales.

Darren: 13:17

Yeah, and what's beautiful, there is the fact that most people didn't say I'm going to buy an air fryer. They said what are you doing, what are you using? And that creates that basically like loop in their brain that they're like well, I've been cooking on this pan for the past 20 years and now I have a faster, more succinct way of doing it. And you talked about the scale, right, the implementation. This is going to be really interesting, right? Because we're kind of observing old products versus new products. The fax machine could have been fixed by a dropbox effect, by having the sent by Dropbox or stored by Dropbox to have people become Well, there was no way of sending a fax to anybody without a fax.

Rory: 13:55

Now, if you can imagine a system where it was possible to fax something to the Royal Mail and they'd put it into the post and it would say, sent from my fax machine and you've got it through your letterbox, I don't think at any stage Royal Mail invented that, although it wouldn't have been a daft idea actually, as a way of getting things to people very quickly In the Victorian age you would have had a system where you faxed it to the local post office and a young boy with a cleft stick would have run along and run along to the house, rather like. You know how you learned that your son had died in the first world war. You know, someone came to your door with a telegram from the war office and you know your. You know your life was then ruined. But but there wasn't a kind of, there wasn't a kind of inter interconnect way in which you could send a fax in, except to people with faxes. Um, I, I have an interesting working life. I started working 1988 and during my whole working life I sent one telex and I received one telex. And that was because in the early days, the office in mumbai, the ogilvy office in mumbai. The telephone system was a bit too wonky for fax machines, so if you're making arrangements like someone flying over to visit, that was done still by telex you communicate to the Mumbai office by telex, and so I had to send a telex and I received one. That was it sum total in my entire working life.

Rory: 15:16

The faxes, innumerable ones, and then of course, email killed that, not necessarily for the good, by way, because the friction this is another thing worth knowing. That friction is generally something we try and reduce, but a certain level of friction in certain activities, like communication, is actually beneficial. It is too easy to email people. It's too easy to copy people. It's totally inexpensive, there's no cost of copying 17 irrelevant people and as a consequence, the burden of email has been shifted, or the burden of communication has been shifted from the sender, which was preparation costs and transmission costs in the case of a letter, and the burden has now been shifted to the recipient, who has to spend an hour and a half sifting through emails every day, just in case there's something important. Yeah.

Darren: 16:08

Yeah.

Rory: 16:10

And that's been a catastrophe for productivity. Now, the thing that worries me about AI is we're all looking at things that are a pain in the ass, okay, and thinking, won't it be great if those things are less of a pain in the ass? Well, what about AI lawyers? Right? I mean the reason I don't ever get litigious with any of my neighbors or anybody else. I never get involved with the legal system at all if I can possibly avoid it, and the reason for that is simply that it's expensive and I'd rather not spend a lot of my time talking to lawyers.

Rory: 16:41

Okay, now what happens if, every time you know your neighbor's tree damages the fence, you can go to AI lawyercom and issue a kind of cease and desist order or demand compensation through an automatic mechanism? Our lives are going to be made absolutely miserable. You know there are certain things which need to be kept expensive and slow and cumbersome in order to keep them in check, and so you know the prospect of a world in which you can effectively have the benefits of carter ruck. Okay, this is a british, highly litigious british legal practice available on your desktop for £7.50, you know, okay, that terrifies the shit out of me. It absolutely terrifies me because I'm sure, for example, in the course of the odd YouTube video, I have shown in the background a slide which is probably copyright. All right, okay, just you know, I'm preparing a presentation. I'm not expecting the presentation to go on YouTube. I want a picture of a man in a hat. I get a picture of a man in a hat, you know, thank god for that, I've got a picture of a man in a hat. That's what I needed. And then what's going to happen is that in 2038, I'm going to have demands for, you know, and the demands will start for demand of $100,000 to compensate me for the use of my.

Rory: 18:12

You know, I think everybody in business has done it. I don't always expect the thing to go up on YouTube. I'm thinking of it as something entirely for internal purposes, entirely for internal purposes. If someone quotes me on a podcast, I'm not going to do this, because I hate, I generally hate litigation as a mode of solving problems. It strikes me, as you know, fundamentally adversarial and uncreative and that's probably very unfair to the legal profession. But nonetheless, I find those adversarial means of solving problems fundamentally, um, economically negative some. But I mean this, this world where you know, effectively someone you know, without crediting me, quote something I said on a podcast and I'm free if I want you to go and search. You know effectively prior art, I think is the just you know and claim that they were actually plagiarizing me or something you know.

Rory: 19:10

Now you have, you know, or you only need you know 50 people to be assholes, or a legal firm to decide they're going to do this and then demand a cut of the proceeds, I mean in defense of prince andrew. Okay, if you had I'm going to ask you this question if you had, without, without any intimation on whether the guy is guilty or innocent or whether he did anything, or which is perfectly possible, by the way, nothing at all all right, um, right, if you had 12 million dollars and you could pay $11 million of those $12 million to avoid coming face to face with the American legal system, all right. Now what that means is you have a jury trial in the United States where a runaway jury could suddenly demand that you went to jail or whatever. It may be okay, regardless of the actual evidential value of anything presented. Okay, would I pay $11 million to avoid being, you know, forced to plea bargain, for example, or similar. Okay, with the American legal system.

Rory: 20:19

And I only had $12 million in the world, would I spend $11 million to avoid that every fucking time? Because the worst case scenario maybe there's only a 10% chance of the worst case scenario, but the worst case scenario is 15 years in fucking Leavenworth or something like that, right, there's no sodding way. And as a Brit, or, you know, as a non-American, my expectation of a fair trial is further diminished. I would argue you know, if you're a prince, you know there's the old tall poppy thing that you know there's going to be a kind of hey, you know, you know, we've got. You know, empathy, da, da, da, da da. Regardless of any evidence, would I pay $11 million to avoid that every solid day of the week? Yeah, no hesitation. And that's the problem, right? What's your take on that? Would you? Would you do?

Darren: 21:08

the same 100 and it's also it's a, it's a friction right, the fact that same with the medical system. Um, I actually you'll find it's quite interesting I was quite young and had a very bad accident to my leg and it wasn't spotted. So I got a blood clot on my knee and it wasn't spotted and about four days later I had to get like a removal of a blood clot and rumor has it, if it was above my knee I would have had a, it would have went to my heart and I would have died. Okay.

Rory: 21:39

But I could have died, yeah, and.

Darren: 21:40

I almost lost my leg, but I didn't it. And I almost lost my leg, but I didn't. It was fine, whatever. But I remember specifically I was told to not pursue it because if I pursued it, nothing I'd never, ever be treated, ever again. And I didn't want to pursue it, right, I was just a kid, I was like whatever, but it made me they threatened you they threatened you.

Rory: 22:00

Which which medical system was this?

Darren: 22:03

was this in ireland or in in europe? Yeah, I was in europe and and basically what it was like? Uh, because basically what your knee when I dislocated my kneecap initially and it's very fragile, right, so, as in, it's not anymore, but it is when you're younger that you could have done it again and I remember specifically, um, this is why in the only malpractice is one of the biggest areas of debt in america. In america it's, it's rated number two. One of the reasons I think it is like the top actually, and one of the reasons why is just because, like, um, the cases around it, you know the investigation or it's so lengthy, right.

Darren: 22:34

So this is interesting because this is the pros and the cons for for, like technology and advancements and especially ai as well, and I thought it's interesting because that process is so long to drag you through that the counter side to that and I know you can talk about the counter trend sometimes is the fact that that process would have been drawn out forever until I would have been bankrupt. Does that make sense? So we have it on both sides of the spectrum. Do you want to launch a podcast for your business but you don't know where to start? Remove the stress, pressure and all the overwhelm that comes with it by working with Podcast University. If you're an ambitious individual who wants to build your influence online, grow your own podcast and also stand out from the crowd, podcast University is for you. We help you with the strategy, equipment, the content, your guests, everything you need to create a top tier podcast. If you want to learn more, check out Podcast University and start your podcast journey today.

Rory: 23:28

So I had a similar case with my grandmother, in an extreme case of dental malpractice. Several dentists failed to pick up on the fact that she had cancer of the jaw until it was quite late. Fortunately her son-in-law was a GP and he said let me just take a look. And he took a look and he said get to the hospital in Chepstow first thing Monday morning. He said you have to go straight to the hospital, no messing around with a GP, straight there. Now, this was undoubtedly malpractice.

Rory: 23:58

My grandmother, bear in mind, had been married to a general practitioner for 25 years. It was unthinkable for her to sue a doctor. It was just something, you know it. It was unthinkable for her to sue a doctor, it was just something you know. It would have been unthinkable. And you know a large number of people. I'm pretty much like that. Actually, I'd be incredibly. Unless there was actual deliberate malice involved, I wouldn't do it.

Rory: 24:19

Now what happens? You only need 5% of people because we already have a problem with people who are excessively litigious. I mean, you know, I had a great aunt actually who kind of she spent something like five years of her life involved in litigation with the West Glamorgan Ambulance Service because they'd been too slow to pick up her sister and she got kind of weirdly obsessed with this and eventually, I think, and she got kind of weirdly obsessed with this and um, eventually I think there's a kind of there is a kind of mechanism in in the uk for effectively preventing excessive pursuit of litigation. I can't remember the legal, the legal term for this is um, but um barrett. No, I'm not quite sure. I'll have to try and remember, but anyway, the problems that could be caused, because we all really know this, because in social media we have no real friction, okay, there's no friction of communication, and so these informational asymmetries become just ridiculously exaggerated. And I talked to Dan Ariely about this yesterday actually, which is he makes this point that we spend a lot of time trying to reduce friction because we believe in efficiency, but there are times when you should add friction into the system. Um, you know that actually, for example, you know, making something effortful, what happens?

Rory: 25:42

Okay, if you can ai, automate applications to universities, it just becomes absurd. Then you have, then you have, effectively, the universities have to instigate ai to deal with and sift applications, and so you're effectively playing, you're paying to some extent. This has happened with google algorithms right with advertising, which is, you're paying some of the brightest minds in the world to play chess with Google's algorithm. And here you'll be paying some of the brightest minds in the world effectively to pay computers, to design computers, to play chess with each other, you know. And then it will be utterly absurd because you will be told, as a prospective applicant to Yale, that it's absolutely essential that you get into beach volleyball or something you know. I mean the whole thing will become bonkers because at some level, cost and effort is emblematic of effort. And in advertising, of course, effort is emblematic of sincerity. The extent to which you pay to say something, or you go to some lengths to say it In bought media is used to infer the extent to which you're committed to what you're saying. That's interesting.

Rory: 26:59

We can already see this, okay, which is, no one has thrown away a FedEx envelope unopened. I'm sure it's happened by accident, but I can basically say that if you receive something by FedEx unless you're kind of George Soros or something, right, okay, you basically someone's paid eight quid, 15 quid, to send this to me. I better have a look, okay, because it is worthy of my attention, because they wouldn't spend 15 pounds talking to 10,000 people, but they might spend 15 pounds talking to the hundred people who matter. Therefore, this possibly matters to me. This is, in other words, it's relevant because it's expensive and you make that free.

Rory: 27:39

And now, has anybody deleted an email unopened? Uh, that would be perhaps 95 of my inbox, maybe even more. Yeah, uh, is actually unopened because the cost of sending it is so low that I make no inference of the importance of the contents whatsoever. And so we've already got this lesson with email, which is that actually low friction, low cost actually quite often shifts the burden from one place the sender to another the recipient who now has to devote, in my case, an hour and a half a day effectively to prioritization of the seven emails in my case, an hour and a half a day effectively to prioritization of the seven emails in my inbox that actually matter. Okay, and what will happen, I think, with AI is we'll simply see a massive shifted burden, you know, in many ways, which is you know you're making it easier for people who want a bit of pain in the ass and you're making it harder for people who want to do a decent job. You know we forget this about technology. That technology is a bit like fertilizer it accelerates things. Right now, when you fertilize a patch of ground, the question is do the weeds actually benefit more than the flowers do? Right now, I would argue that one of the things we've seen as a consequence of technology is a massive explosion of corporate bureaucracy. You know, the size of finance departments, it departments, hr departments, seems to consistently balloon because of the amount of information available that has to be processed. It means that people have delegated to hr functions which are really part of your own job as a manager, which is to decide who works for you and how you look after them.

Rory: 29:22

That was originally called your job back in the 1980s. Right Was looking after your team and continually pruning them. That was your job as a practitioner, and now, of course, all of this stuff has been hived off into kind of separate bureaucracies and it means actually that you no longer really have the relationship with your co-workers that you once would have had of sort of mentorship and guidance and support which you're in professionals like medicine. That was everything you know. If you were in the right team with the right person okay, you know an eminent surgeon and you were part of their team.

Rory: 30:08

You know that was how this, it was a mini monarchy. There were undoubtedly, by the way, it led to some abuses and you know, we all know what I'm talking about here. Okay, you know. But nonetheless, anthropologically, that was kind of how capitalism worked and we've replaced it now with kind of a formalist, bureaucratic, reductionist sort of structure. And I don't think, I think at the emotional level, I think it's deeply disheartening to people in the world of work, because you're box ticking, you're not really exercising judgment anymore, you're jumping through hoops.

Darren: 30:49

If you think about how that's come down from you said from the organization how things are showing up online with paid advertising. I was just speaking to a client before this about like writing an ad for LinkedIn and I just think about how all those advancements have made everything look so bland and so basic that how do you think about how advertising was versus how advertising is now, compared to that?

Rory: 31:13

Very occasionally, very occasionally, very occasionally and it really is occasionally you see a banner ad and you go, oh, and it's extraordinarily potent because you feel some human love and attention and care has gone into scripting that ad. You know it might be a piece of ai genius. I'm not scripting that ad. You know it might be a piece of AI genius. I'm not discounting that. It's possible, by the way, perfectly possible. Or it might be that the AI comes up with a piece of genius and a human spots it. I mean it could be any combination of those things Great, but it's absurdly rare. I mean it's.

Rory: 31:47

You know that it's a bit like exactly the problem that happened to car design when the wind tunnel became dominant. You have these particular metrics, which is the you know coefficient of air resistance, and the consequence was every car started to look the same. I mean, I was looking at a. I'm a huge fan of modern architecture, I'm not a luddite by any, okay, but there was a thing sent out by some art magazine which was the 25 best architectural practices in Denmark, and you look at number one, you look at number two and you look at number three and they're bloody good. But I said, by the time you get to about number 14, you're dying for a bit of mock Tudor. You know you'd like a bit of Gothic, you'd like just something else, please.

Rory: 32:32

But it's even worse with the advertising, because I think you know love and care has gone into that building. It's just all gone into the same things. Okay, in advertising actually, you feel that most of it has been. You know that it's kind of just add water, cuppa soup kind of advertising, where you know there's a very, very basic formula and it's highly transactional. There's no added emotional component to it, there's no surprise, there's no, actually not much in the way of promise either, and most of it's highly transactional save 20% on. You know, I always thought the point of advertising was to get people to pay more for things, not to get people to buy things they would have bought anyway, but at a discount, by buying them sooner. But I suspect that a large part of online advertising is doing the latter, not the first job. It's getting people to buy something they might have bought anyway at full price, but speeding up their purchase a bit by offering a discount their purchase a bit by offering a discount.

Darren: 33:36

It's more following the frameworks. Right, it's like this is the framework that x company have used or x entrepreneurs use. This is a model that you can bring from health to fitness, from fitness to relationships, from relationships to investing. It's like it worked over here. Let's reuse this model and it's almost like you know you talk about this a lot, too, about the creative versus the marketer, the logical versus creative brain, like it's almost like we've taken away the creative aspect because of fear of tanking an ad campaign or tanking a marketing campaign I'll be.

Rory: 34:05

I'll be candid. I worked in direct marketing. We used to get this about right. We used to say that a third of it's creative, a third of its media and targeting and a third of it's what we call the offer, which is sort of everything else. But it would be sort of free bird table with every. You know, whatever it might be, and I don't think it was a third. A third, a third, but actually that was roughly the right ratio of attention to pay.

Rory: 34:30

The mainstream advertising industry back in the 80s paid far too little attention to media and targeting. They thought, once you've got the message sorted, it didn't really matter that much where you put it. I think tom goodwin's been saying this on twitter recently um, that it was far too little attention to market, to targeting. Uh, you know, they paid far too little attention. Things like customer experience, far too little attention to things like, you know, uh, late contextual selling and things of that kind. It was just we have. We produced this one fantastic ad idea and everybody gets to see it which was sort of a bit true in the 1980s if you had a reasonably large media budget, but nonetheless, nonetheless, there was still a huge gain to be had there in more intelligent targeting. But now the tech industrial complex, which is effectively obsessed with what you can quantify, has caused 95% of the effort to go towards targeting and about 5% to anything else, and that's completely out of whack, completely out of whack, completely out of whack. But there's also a problem which is fundamentally if you want to grow a business, you sell effectively and profitably to as many people as you can. The job is not to maximize roi by selling to the very small number of people who will buy what you have to offer, basically without any sales effort or additional investment being required. Okay, that's an efficiency model and that's the model which you see in supermarkets, where they're trying to drive everybody to use self-checkout. Okay, because they see that as the lowest cost per sale mode of selling, so they want to impose it on all their customers. My marketing viewpoint would be you sell profitably to as many people as you can and if, in order to sell to them, it requires you to operate a checkout with a human being scanning the stuff and having a chat with them, that's the price you pay for having more customers and having more customers buy from you more frequently, okay, so there's a double whammy there. And now what's happened is what we're optimizing for is we're not optimizing for the long-term value of the relationship. We're optimizing for the profitability of the one-off transaction. But they're not the same thing. In fact, they're very badly misaligned. There's a big misalignment problem there.

Rory: 37:04

So let me give you a lovely example of this, which is I am a huge, passionate fan of my cooker tap, which is a tap which has a device under the sink which effectively boils water or heats water in a highly insulated container, and then you have boiling water on demand. Now, to sell that to me, my daughter wanted one. I'm a gadget lover, so I was, broadly speaking, enthusiastic and my wife was skeptical and I was conscious of the fact that this is obviously brilliant, but I am spending like 800 quid on doing what a kettle kind of does. There are okay. And they said well, we can give you a demonstration in our showroom. And I said okay, well, where's your showroom? This is in manchester.

Rory: 37:50

I said I'm not sure I'm going to travel to manchester just to see a demonstration of. You know how brilliant your device is. And they said it's in Manchester. I said I'm not sure I'm going to travel to Manchester just to see a demonstration of you know however brilliant your device is. And they said no, no, no, no, it's not a physical demonstration. We've got a studio set up in Manchester and we'll give you a live kind of Zoom call with six various cameras in different locations where we can demonstrate the different designs of TAP, what the TAP does, how it works. We can answer your questions. It was a 30-minute Zoom call.

Rory: 38:15

Let's be, honest, it probably cost them you know a difficult say, but you know 20, 30 pounds to do that call with us. And at the end of the call, after 30 minutes, we'd answered our questions. My daughter was sold. I was sold. At which point we had my wife was probably neutral, neutral, but we had a majority at that point and they said oh, by the way, because you've had our little demonstration, we can give you a discount on 70 percent. And we bought it.

Rory: 38:43

There are people and they would include, like the super rich people who've owned a cooker before okay, there are people who would just go online order the thing, pay, pay 800 quid, have it delivered. Okay. There are people and would just go online order the thing, pay, pay 800 quid, have it delivered. Okay, there are people, and those people are great, are hugely profitable because you don't have to talk to them for 20 minutes or 30 minutes in order to sell them. Tap, great, fantastic. If those people are willing to do that, provide them with a channel that allows them to do it. Great, fine, dandy. But if you demand that everybody buys the thing, that way you're losing two I would guess two-thirds well, you're losing two-thirds of potential new customers, and the same would apply to something like financial advice. Okay, if you want to sell someone a pension, there are people who just go online, research the whole thing by the pension, all right, but the majority of people require some sort of conversation with a human being before you undertake a momentous decision. Now, the good news is they'll do that over Zoom, so you don't have to send a bloke to their house in a car and, you know, spend half a day traveling to see your prospective customers. But you can't take that from Zoom. I would argue down to a simple email or a phone call. You need face-to-face contact. There is just a necessary level of mental persuasion that is required to get people to do certain things and, where possible, reduce it.

Rory: 40:07

Some people prefer I prefer buying railway tickets from a machine than from a person. If I know exactly what I want, but we're not absolutely sure what I want and I don't completely trust my own appreciation of which ticket I need. I want to go to the guy and the guy in deal, where I sometimes go it's kind of mates with everybody who lives in deal who says, well, actually, if you're going on 927, what I'll do is I'll get you an off-peak return to dover and then you can have sorry a peak peak time return to dover and then you can buy an off-peak return from dover into london, and this is hypothetical, okay, but it's actually cheaper and you go, oh brilliant. So now I know I'm getting the best value for money for my ticket, whereas if I bought it from the machine I wouldn't have a clue because the machine might not bother to tell me if there was a cheaper option. In fact it probably wouldn't. So what I'm saying is that the act of actually transacting quite often comes with an attendant cost. If you optimize to reduce that cost, what you're not noticing is the opportunity cost of all the new customers you no longer have because you're demanding they transact in one way rather than another, and I think I think this is becoming.

Rory: 41:20

I think this roi driven um kind of quantification bias in business is one of the reasons we're not growing anymore. It's because and I think a lot of it comes from assumptions of neoliberal economics, which is that there is pre-existing demand. The demand is simply for the product or service as defined most narrowly, and your job is to then satisfy that pre-existing demand, not to create demand, not to actually generate demand, not to grow your customer. It is simply to satisfy what level of previous pre-existing demand there is at the lowest possible cost, and I think that is an assumption of neoliberal economics. It makes a lot of assumptions in order to achieve its mathematical neatness.

Rory: 42:05

And all the assumptions perfect information, single representative agents, perfect trust, okay, no information asymmetries, whatever it may be all of those assumptions are fundamentally extraordinarily stupid. I mean, they're. They're necessary if you want to turn things into equations, but no good mathematician would assume something for the purposes of constructing a mathematical model if the assumption were blatantly untrue. Okay, you know, let's assume that water boils at 50 degrees. All right, a physicist would go this is bullshit because it doesn't, unless you're at high altitude, I guess.

Rory: 42:45

Okay, let's assume, for the purposes of this calculation, that you know the water is in a bad mood and so it doesn't want to boil. Okay, whatever, whatever. Maybe Anybody, anybody with any reputable scientific chops, would go you're full of shit, and yet economists get away with it all the time. That brings us back to the original point about things like income inequality, which is Gary Stevenson whether you like him or don't, I mostly like him actually which he makes the point, which is, if you have a single representative agent model in economics by definition, you're not noticing inequality because your single representative agent is a product of aggregates right, so it doesn't capture disparities by definition.

Darren: 43:33

Hmm, the last thing in there is the variance right. Economists will put any sort of outside variables down to variance and therefore account for like a small variance in it, which is like the reason why the accuracy doesn't work right, and that's the reason why. Are you an entrepreneur who wants to build your influence and authority online? May have tried some of the hacks and tricks, but none of it has worked, and it makes sense. 90% of podcasts don't make it to episode 3. Of the 10% that are left, 90% of them don't make it to episode 20. That's where vox comes in.

Darren: 44:08

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Rory: 44:45

It's also the variance, isn't? I mean? This is why I suppose nassim talib gets so angry about gaussian right, because most real-life things aren't actually like that. Height is, to an extent, okay, but wealth isn't. For example, yes, there are things like height which are, broadly speaking, distributed around a mean, and you know, even then, obviously, there are no people who are one inch. Even then, obviously, there are no people who are one inch tall, but there are no people who are nine feet tall. Um, and so you can. You know. There's a reason for that, by the way, which is they're probably dead in either case. Right, okay, they don't actually make it um, uh, to viability, and so nature is chopping off the top and chopping off the bottom. You know, to an extent, but most things in life are not distributed that way, you know.

Rory: 45:42

For example, if you look at very simply, okay, brand success there are very strong winner takes all effects. There tends to be a dominant brand which has disproportionate market share relative to the number two brand, which has disproportionate market share relative to the number three brand, and so on. You get that pattern recurring every time. But it's not. You know, you would expect commonly to have kind of, within a category, three or four equally potent players, but it tends not to work like that.

Rory: 46:13

That's actually one, one reason to advertise, which is that if you can get to a position of uh dominance in terms of uh, share of uh, what you might call, you know, share of voice. Okay, if you, if you have dominance over share of voice, you will tend to have dominance over market share, because market share tends to attract a share of voice. You will tend to have dominance over market share because market share tends to attract a share of voice over time. And if you actually have dominant share of voice, then you enjoy those extraordinary what Ehrenberg, I think, called the double jeopardy effect, which is, more people buy you and the people who do buy from you buy more often the people who do buy from you buy more often.

Rory: 46:54

So, in other words, you're in more people's repertoire and among those people in whose repertoire you sit you form a greater part of their purchases, and so that's a classic example of showing.

Rory: 47:12

Of course, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is dedicated effectively to two graphs. You know, it's kind of the Ehrenberg thing, which I think is a there's a name for it actually the distribution, and I think it's a. I've briefly forgotten what it's called. And then, of course, there's the Bass diffusion curve, which is the idea that the adoption of new products follows a sigmoid curve.

Rory: 47:37

But it's really important that people know this because, as I said, um, uh, you know, google gave up on google glass far too early and they didn't, they didn't stick around for long enough to answer the relevant question, which was not how many people are buying this compared to last quarter or the quarter before that, it's of the people who are buying it. Are they using it regularly and reliably, and are they perhaps advocating for it For sure? Right, I'm going to cardo. Talking to a cardo, they're very smart in that they look at products in two ways how much do they sell? That's kind of the aggregate, but they also upweight those products which are few people buy very regularly. So you probably I don't know so when you go back to ireland or the uk, you go back to europe and you, you know, for a week or so, what do you take back to bali? Not marmite, I don't know. Okay, what was it? You?

Darren: 48:31

can't get it, probably coffee. So you know, sumatra coffee is obviously very it's fantastic. Yeah, so it's too much. There's also bali coffee. There's coffee. There's probably writing books, different types of things that are made locally. You wouldn't get elsewhere.

Rory: 48:49

No, so you take the. I think I generally find I mean coffee's called Java for a reason. Ordinary speaking it's fantastic. There's fantastic Colombian coffee and Rwandan coffee and so forth, but I find Sumatran coffee and Javanese coffee disproportionately good. I have to say, um, but then if you come back from europe, there'll be things you bring back from europe that are difficult to get in bali. Okay, so you know, I don't know, they're probably can you get marmite in bali. I need to check before I go it's.

Darren: 49:20

It's probably only tea. I remember I had a. I had tea from ireland recently and I was like damn, I haven't had this in like four years.

Rory: 49:30

It's not Thompson's Punjana, is it? That's a very good Irish tea, which I've discovered recently.

Darren: 49:34

No, it's Barry's tea.

Rory: 49:38

I know of it. I know of it, yeah, and it's interesting. Because what's clever with Ocado is they basically say, look if this, but not many people buy Bird's Grape Nuts. Okay. It's say, look if this, but not many people buy birds great nuts Okay, it's my funny, it was David Ogilvie's favorite. Uh, what? David Ogilvie's favorite foods? Breakfast cereal, okay, but the people who buy it buy it a lot.

Rory: 49:57

And a card oh, a shrewd enough to know. And people with a loyalty card would also spot this. Say, tesco would look club card data and go. If the 5% of people who are buying this thing are repeat buyers, we shouldn't delist it, even if the sales are comparatively unexciting. Because if you take away three or four of those products and bear in mind with a cardo, you quite often go to a cardo to buy the things which are either difficult difficult to buy elsewhere or really difficult to find. Because one great thing about online shopping is you just type in Korean Gochung sauce or whatever. If you've got something obscure like that, you buy regularly. It's a bloody pain in the ass to find on the shelves of a supermarket. And so Ocado quite cleverly look at both dimensions.

Rory: 50:41

How much does it sell overall? You know, because if a lot of it's selling and, of course, with a new product, the thing to look at, let's say you have something. Okay, there are products which I call epiphany products and they would include japanese toilets, air fryers, etc. Um, quicker taps, um. You won't know about this, but there's a brand of black bomber snowdonia cheddar mature welsh cheddar which was in its early days. It's now become unbelievably huge as a brand. In its early days it was a niche product, but what you noticed was that people who bought it bought it again, and so that was what. That was what google should have been looking at with google glass not going union and net popularity sales. Crazy that a company that well capitalized should have such a short-termist approach to innovation.

Darren: 51:35

Well, if you think about it, the main indicator they weren't optimizing for and what you're looking at has separated a lot of the bigger brands. If a small retail place is putting out the same product so that people can come in and get access to the other products and bear in mind, google is a suite of products it gives you a foot in the door right. So if you looked at uh, influenced by Robert Cialdini, it's the foot in the door effect of commitment and once you make the small commitment and get them across the door, then you open them up through the value ladder and they will graduate absolutely right evolution right, and that's the entire goal of marketing is to get someone to evolve through the different transitions of what you have.

Darren: 52:16

They won't buy the five thousand dollar package right now, but they could start out with the thirty nine dollar little ebook now you, you get okay, products are a different phase of maturity.

Rory: 52:24

What apple is is facing now is one. They've probably, in many markets, reached maximum penetration in that there are people like me who are kind of android till I die, who will never be seduced here. Then you get a slower rate of replacement, okay, so people used to replace their phones and tablets maybe every two to three years and it's gone to sort of four, because one reason, by the by the way, very boring reason but the phones are waterproof. Okay, there used to be a lovely, lovely source of new phones, just caused by people dropping them in a puddle. Okay, or, you know, they're dustproof, waterproof generally. You know, phone case technology, I think, has improved, so the level of breakage has declined, and so you know they've, they probably have topped. They've reached the asymptotic bit of the bass diffusion curve where penetration in developed markets can't speak for anywhere else yet might have reached a kind of limit, um, a natural kind of ceiling. Um, you know, I don't know what the ceiling is for air fryers. You could, you could argue it's, ultimately it's a hundred percent, um, but, but it is but, but I mean. And also you have the whole thing with tablets. Okay, you know one of the reasons why it's difficult, for people don't replace tablets nearly so frequently.

Rory: 53:43

You might argue also that the tablet is a brilliant way into the android ecosystem and the reason is that most people use their tablets for media consumption. Yeah, all right, and they use their tablets for media consumption. And so the apple ecosystem, if you're mostly using netflix or youtube or whatever, uh, you know, or kindle and the kindle reader, you know, is less critical having the apple ecosystem. You know you don less critical having the Apple ecosystem. You know you don't need a parking app for your tablet. I mean, I do have parking apps on my tablet, but I mean you know you don't need it. And so you know you might argue that's actually the gateway drug to getting people. You know the vaping alternative to the Apple ecosystem, the gateway drug out, as it were. So you know, know, you're right. I mean it's, it's a and so.

Rory: 54:29

But if you have people who are looking at these things in linear ways or they're expecting, you know that you can project forwards a, a sigmoid curve from its very low level at the beginning. Um, you're, you're misreading the situation. I mean social change, by the way. I mean, if you look at, okay, sometimes it's very fast. I mean, you might say acceptance of same-sex marriage was kind of perhaps should be a textbook case, because it basically went from nobody to more or less everybody. Um, you know, they'll still be there, you know. I mean, you know there'll still be outliers. But, broadly speaking, um, uh, you know, I, I, I come across quite a lot of conservative people, uh, other than you know a few. You know, other than you know, practitioners in certain religions, for example. Um, uh, you know it'll be a while before you get the catholic church on board, but then it's not the job of the catholic church to jump on every bandwagon, is it because that's why it's?

Darren: 55:32

2000 years old.

Rory: 55:33

Right, if you had to predict, if you had to predict in 1970 that ireland would liberalize um same-sex marriage before germany did, which is actually what happened. Okay, you could you could have got astounding odds on that with any bookmaker you know the fact that Ireland would approve this before Germany did. But it's very interesting because it was achieved. I mean, I think people should study it much more because it was achieved actually relatively pretty amicably, you know, and by contrast, you have you know other other things which take years. I mean, drink driving is an interesting one because, you won't know this, there are drink drivers. Now there's, there will always be drink drivers, not least because pissed people are brilliant decision makers, right, okay, but among my parents' generation, the majority of their friends wouldn't have much compunction other than the fear of disqualification for driving home drunk. Now, my parents I'm just going to defend the memory of my late parents by saying they didn't. In fact, my father said once that he thinks he'd drunk over the limit once in his life. To be absolutely candid, I've probably done it once, actually Borderline, to be honest. It was borderline, I would say, but it was a highly rural route, you know, et cetera. But I'm not defending myself, but by my parents' generation it was normalized that you know if you could dodge the cops and get away with it. That was considered fine Among my children' generation. It was normalized that you know if you could dodge the cops and get away with it. That was considered fine Among my children's generation. It's considered morally reprehensible to do it, regardless of any threat of fine or disqualification. It's considered a morally reprehensible act that took, you know, 40 years. It's a generational thing. No-transcript.

Rory: 57:49

Now, it's worth noting that before there was same-sex marriage, there was, of course, decriminalisation. If you go back to it, it's very, very strange and very interesting, because we always assume it was the left who led the charge for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. It wasn't. Uh, weirdly, the anglican church in the uk was significantly in favor of the decriminalization of homosexuality. Before it was a political issue which when you tell people this, they go no, no, this is rubbish, okay, um, there have been various churches, like the quakers, I think, who had basically campaigned for this. Quakers are basically ahead of the curve on everything. Okay, I don't know why we don't listen to them all. It's a very, very thoughtful. That's the only way I can explain it.

Rory: 58:41

Well, there's certain aspects of quakerism which are highly egalitarian, very much concerned with decency to your fellow man. Pacifism is a large part, is is to some extent a large part of it. Um so, um, many quakers are vegetarian, for example. I mean not, no, no, by any means not all quakers are pacifist, let's go. But it's a very, very thoughtful um, uh. So I'll give you one example of this.

Rory: 59:05

Uh, quaker businesses were fantastically successful, partly because you didn't need any lawyers, because, in, in quakerism, your word is your bond and therefore anything you say has the force of an oath. So if you had two quakers and one of them wanted to buy the other's chocolate factory, they'd just go. How much would you like for your chocolate factory? Well, I would sell it for, you know, 20 000 guas. And the other Quaker would say yes, I will pay you 20,000 guineas. That's the end of it. No lawyers, no papers. The whole thing has the force, has legal force, because you said it.

Rory: 59:41

Now, I don't know what happens if the Quaker's pissed or something. I don't know how that works, but it was an extraordinary thing in that you effectively could do business between Quakers simply on the basis of of course, most Quakers don't drink. Again, it varies. I knew a Quaker who did drink. Some of them won't drink tea or coffee. It's all very strange, but nonetheless it's very, very thoughtful and it's also very, very benign, actually, towards your, because you believe that everybody is possessed of kind, of any kind of in a light. And so it's. It has some really quite interesting, um, quite interesting attributes. But it's very interesting because part of the reason they were very successful in business is because they were very, very honest.

Rory: 1:00:28

And so Cadbury I think it might have been Terry's, cadbury's, roundtree's, terry's all the chocolate firms were Quaker in Britain, the big brands, and that was because they wanted to sell chocolate specifically drinking chocolate as a treat, that was an alternative to alcohol. So they started these chocolate companies almost with a moral, um dimension, moral purpose. And then I think cadbury's, or possibly roundtree, I can't remember, which started printing the price on their packaging. And they print 1d chocolate bar, whatever. It was. Okay, that wasn't normal at the time. The shop normally charged what it thought it could get away with, but they printed the price in the chocolate bar what? And the reason for that was it was what they called square dealing. This is what the chocolate bar costs. We think the retailer deserves a margin for selling the chocolate, but the consumer should pay a fair price for the chocolate too.

Rory: 1:01:18

It turned out this, this, this thing they'd introduced, which was done for moral reasons, was actually very popular with consumers because they didn't have to haggle or they didn't havele or they felt that this was fundamentally honest and it was a great way of selling chocolate. But the original intention of putting the price on the chocolate was not to sell chocolate. It was an emblematic of kind of their philosophy of business, which involved being very, very straight and fair with a customer or a consumer in this case, and fair with a customer or a consumer in this case. But anyway, the Spectator right-wing publication was known in the 1960s as the bugger's bugle because it campaigned for the decriminalization of homosexuality early. It's very interesting because we have this stupid narrative of social progress but, for example, votes for women were introduced. Know that it was the left-wing people who are on the side of the good doesn't really stand up.

Rory: 1:02:33

If you go back far enough in time to understand various past movements, you know the anti-slavery movement was not a I mean, shaftesbury was a Tory, some of them were Whigs. It was a cross-party movement. It wasn't really politicized in that sense and I think actually the politicization of a lot of these movements has actually made them less effective, I think, because you're effectively trying to tie yourself up with a sense of identity. I mean, you know, the most extreme case of all, this was not quite true, by the way, the idea that Hitler was a vegetarian, I mean undoubtedly an animal lover, but I mean the idea that there's this absolutely strict I mean, actually movements should be movements and they should be to some extent.

Rory: 1:03:26

Uh, you know, uh, I mean how strange is this? Right that your attitude to nuclear weapons throughout the 80s, say, was, broadly speaking, determined by political allegiance? Well, I mean, unless you're happy for the soviets to invade, which I suppose would be an extreme left wingwing position, right, whether you think it's a good idea for the UK to have nuclear weapons or not, which is a highly complicated question. At the time I thought we should keep nuclear weapons. We lucked out. Was that a good decision? I still don't know, but the idea that that kind of broke down on purely political lines was kind of weird when you think about it.

Darren: 1:04:10

Well, if you go back to like the deterministic factor and deterministic mindset within, like political parties, how that goes back to marketing, splitting the audience, creating an enemy and showing stones at the enemy. So, when you could have made progress, when you could have made progress and like the left will have right uh behaviors, the right had left behaviors. Instead of looking at progress in isolation, they look at the opposition and throw stones at them. And that is twitter today. That's every social platform. It's twitter in absolute essence. Um and yeah I can't.

Rory: 1:04:49

I can't go on twitter and give my views about the israel palestine conflict, because my views are nuanced. I would argue they're extremely reasonable. Okay, but I would. I would arouse the ire. Now, this was an interesting thing that happened in eurovision, okay, which is that the public vote, the telephone vote in the UK and in Germany and in possibly France, I can't remember there were about five countries which gave Israel 12 points. Israel picked up about 300 points in the public vote. They were coming in the second half of the scoreboard after the public vote. They were coming in the second half of the scoreboard after the jury vote.

Rory: 1:05:30

Now, all I'm saying is that, without making any comments about the rights and wrongs of the thing, one of the things that we have to be alert to I'm going to raise a really interesting point here. I think that demonstrations and the media attention given to demonstrations is kind of bullshit. All right, one in the days when you got beaten up by the police, being on a demonstration was at least proof of sincerity. Okay, it doesn't really matter whether I agree with you or not. I can infer from that that you are devoted to your cause because you're risking physical violence or arrest, as is still the case in many, many countries. If the police are actually there to protect you, okay, right, I'm not sure it carries quite the same freight, but think about how extraordinarily asymmetrical this is. Because the people who are willing to demonstrate, or who, in some cases, enjoy demonstrating, okay, are not representative of the public at large, and yet they have a source of media attention which is denied to I?

Rory: 1:06:44

I. There are virtually no circumstances I can imagine. No, that's not true, but I'm just not that kind of person, right, you know, as I joked, you know, if you're to the right of centre and you're angry about something, you have two possible outputs you write a stiff letter to the Daily Telegraph or you buy an assault rifle. There's no middle ground, okay. If you're on the right, okay, we don. There's no middle ground, okay, you know. If you're on the right, okay, we don't have this middle ground of traipsing through the streets. And so my, my question there, I'll have to go into two minutes yes, but my question there is this is extraordinary asymmetry because it is.

Rory: 1:07:23

It's massively unfair to people who don't live in london. I mean, the people of liverpool, okay, would have to burn their city to the ground to get the same media attention about a grievance as people in London can get by just wandering aimlessly through the streets right carrying placards. It's massively unfair to introverts, to claustrophobics, to people who just don't like walking aimlessly through the street, which I think covers a very large body of people. And it's incredibly unfair to people like me who would not participate even when I sympathized, for the simple reason that the whole nuance that any form of demonstration tends people towards a sunk cost investment in an extreme position and therefore maybe. But there's the final question, which I genuinely mean, by the way. This is we don't even know that it works. Okay, now 100. Okay, we know that.

Rory: 1:08:22

The civil rights, we know that the civil rights thing is it actually counterproductive? We know the civil rights. If I see a load of people who I think of as doing I don't understand football, I just don't understand it. I don't understand why you get worked up about it and so people who are obsessed about football kind of fucking annoy me. Right, because, okay, don't get me wrong, you're the same.

Rory: 1:08:45

I just don't understand it. Right, okay, now, if you look at the civil rights movement, it worked. But then there was, first of all, there was undoubtedly, commitment. If you look at the way in which the protests were actually conducted, there was extraordinary intelligence behind the organizers of Selma or whatever. I mean real, you know, really, really clever stuff. And so the effective promulgation of people with the most of the opinions, of the people with the most extreme view, which is, broadly speaking, what happens, I think, is frequently counterproductive and no one ever considers this, that, actually, you know, you're actually effectively forcing people who would otherwise be pretty, I mean, okay, there's that weird thing, isn't there? Which is I'm pretty sympathetic to vegetarianism, I'm pretty sympathetic to, you know, quite a few On environmentalism, by the way.

Rory: 1:09:53

My argument is I want antagonism towards hybrid cars, right, by which I mean plug-in hybrids. Most people, most days, they drive 50 miles, 60 miles. If you're in London, you're lucky if you can get 10 miles and you're only driving at 20 miles an hour anyway. Right, if most of your motoring is done electrically through a plug-in hybrid and every now and then, oh my God, I've got an emergency. I have to go to Walesales and boom, the petrol engine kicks in. I get the fact that, from purest point of view, you've got to have two power trains and two sources of weight in the vehicle. I get all that stuff, I get. I buy all that, I get it. But but it doesn't seem to be that bad if you can reduce your if with a plug-in hybrid, you can reduce your carbon emissions by 90 percent. Ah, fuck fuck it, you know, in the interim, until we get, until that's you know.

Darren: 1:10:51

It's better than noting right.

Rory: 1:10:53

It's better than noting, so you know. Likewise, you could, instead of having heat pumps, you could encourage people to get air conditioning okay, and use this as a heat pump in Britain or Ireland. Okay, 90% of the time you're going to be using your air conditioning as a bloody heat source, as a heat pump. It's an air to air heat pump. That's what an air conditioning unit is. What you're just doing is you're running it backwards, and there are loads of air conditioning units available. They're reasonably affordable and they're all been manufactured by years and years, and there are loads of people who know how to repair them. Right, oh, no, no, no, no, because then people might increase their energy consumption by using it as an air conditioning unit, which they wouldn't have done. This is britain, for fuck's sake, right, it's gonna be two weeks of the goddamn year, an island, probably six, admittedly. Admittedly, you feel the heat when it true days, it's true it will be absolutely right.

Darren: 1:11:43

I don't, I don't want to keep you any longer. No, no, no, I know you can run.

Rory: 1:11:49

Find out what people might actually willingly do and get them to do it. As you said, and if it's in the right direction, pat yourself on the back and be happy and make sure you don't lose momentum. 100%. I could get a grant for air conditioning units I could install with my house. I would keep my boiler. I don't want to rip out my boiler, cause what if it gets really really fucking cold? I still want my boiler, okay, because you know, for three days of the year I might turn on my boiler cause it's really bastard cold, right, and for three days of the year it might be really bastard hot and I turn on my air rather than the heat.

Rory: 1:12:31

fine, okay, you know it's a separate direction, right, that's all that matters. Yeah, there's a great concept, I think, for evolutionary biology I'll end on this which is called the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is is what? What can take you? It's a bit like that game show you get on tv in the middle of the day where people have to open up squares. Okay, um, I'm sorry, there are people waiting for me, I better go. But basically, if you're moving in the middle of the day where people have to open up squares, okay, oh, sorry, there are people waiting for me, I better go. But basically, if you're moving in the right direction, you're moving. It's like blockbusters, right, if you're moving in the right direction, okay, that's good enough, we'll get you there eventually. Don't demand that people get anyway, I must go, but thank you ever so much.

Darren: 1:13:01

Thank you so much.