TRIGGERnometry - Rory Sutherland on the Logic Trap, Humour & Free Speech

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00:00:54.860 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:01.060 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:01:02.020 And this is the show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about.

00:01:07.940 At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:01:12.380 We're here at the world-famous Angel Comedy Club, and our amazing expert guest this week is the columnist for The Spectator,

00:01:18.680 vice chairman of the Ogilvy Advertising Group

00:01:21.580 and one of the most amazing creative

00:01:24.140 counterintuitive thinkers in the world today

00:01:27.000 Rory Sutherland, welcome to Trigonometry

00:01:29.000 It's a joy to be here

00:01:30.200 Right, okay, so we always start with the question

00:01:34.620 regardless of the guest

00:01:35.500 how did you come to be sitting at this particular seat?

00:01:39.440 Rory

00:01:39.540 If I look for the sort of proximate reason

00:01:42.560 I met Constantine at Kilconomics

00:01:44.600 which I'm very, very happy to plug

00:01:46.200 I have no financial interest in it

00:01:47.920 It's a festival in Ireland every November, and it's a festival of economics and comedy.

00:01:55.120 And it's an absolutely brilliant and inspired idea.

00:01:58.720 Not only is it in Kilkenny, which is worth visiting at any time of year,

00:02:03.220 but it's this idea of combining kind of economic commentary with comedic cynicism,

00:02:09.860 which creates actually a kind of rare, useful magic.

00:02:13.120 it's hugely useful if you're interested in kind of dissident economics or perverse economics

00:02:18.920 counterintuitive economics uh it's inherently funny and rewarding in its own right and we met

00:02:24.880 there and constantine invited me on if you want to go back to kind of deeper reasons oh we do

00:02:30.920 then um one of course i'm a huge fan of the podcast as a format because i'm very fat

00:02:39.960 And so anything which is audio only,

00:02:43.080 the great phrase goes, he's got a great face for radio.

00:02:45.820 I can sympathise with that one, Rory.

00:02:47.540 Anything that's audio only and doesn't require me to put on make-up

00:02:50.580 always appeals to me hugely.

00:02:52.400 I basically say yes to any podcast invitation.

00:02:56.500 It's a tragedy, actually, that everybody in radio

00:02:59.420 secretly wants to work in TV, and I think it's a terrible mistake.

00:03:03.960 I think radio is a magical, and audio in general is a magical medium,

00:03:07.580 because with a few hundred pounds worth of equipment,

00:03:10.460 you can produce content that's absolutely world-class.

00:03:13.700 The problem with television,

00:03:15.540 the addition of pictures comes at a very high price,

00:03:19.080 which is the ratio of dicking around to actually producing content.

00:03:24.340 I've got a friend who's a radio producer.

00:03:25.860 He went out with a set of recording equipment

00:03:27.820 and produced a documentary for Radio 4 on Mongolian opera singers.

00:03:33.400 Wow, that's pretty neat.

00:03:34.180 Now, you can do that with basically a return air ticket

00:03:36.540 and, you know, a large pocket to put your Zoom recording equipment in. 0.93

00:03:41.840 If that had been a TV thing, it would have involved endless crap

00:03:45.220 for actually not very much added value.

00:03:48.100 So that's another reason.

00:03:49.380 Why I'm here running Ogilvy Change, all those questions,

00:03:53.180 I ended up in advertising.

00:03:55.460 I think advertising appealed to me really as a greedy comedian monke, 0.99

00:04:00.040 which is I wanted to work in a business

00:04:02.360 which studied the value of things that don't make conventional sense.

00:04:08.260 And it strikes me that if you look at humour in particular,

00:04:13.420 the evolutionary origins of humour, by the way,

00:04:15.260 are really, really interesting, and they're widely debated.

00:04:19.220 Patently, this thing has some sort of value.

00:04:22.020 It allows you, or it creates a context where you can say things

00:04:25.040 that are unsayable in another context.

00:04:27.940 And if you look at the court jester, which is a role

00:04:30.040 which is hundreds of years old, appears in Shakespeare,

00:04:32.700 goes back to the early Middle Ages,

00:04:34.580 that's a case where someone was allowed to speak to power

00:04:39.160 in a way that if anybody else had said it

00:04:41.580 would have resulted in beheading or social horror or catastrophe.

00:04:47.780 So creating a space where you can say unsayable things

00:04:51.120 strikes me as really important.

00:04:53.860 The reason there's a connection between advertising and comedy,

00:04:56.500 and it should be closer than it really is,

00:04:58.420 You know, one of the greatest ads that Ogilvy ever produced, which is the Diamond Shreddies case, where they advertise new Diamond Shreddies by simply presenting existing square shreddies turned round through 45 degrees.

00:05:14.160 That was actually the work of a comedian who was freelancing in Ogilvy in Toronto.

00:05:19.160 Oh, wow. OK.

00:05:19.880 Now, the real freedom, quite a lot of interesting creative ideas

00:05:26.160 are helped along if you have a kind of Python-esque sense of humour.

00:05:31.200 That if you have a kind of idea of a ridiculous way to solve a problem, 0.83

00:05:36.600 nine times out of ten, maybe that solution remains ridiculous. 0.67

00:05:41.500 You know, I mean, undoubtedly humour is hugely generative

00:05:44.640 of creative possibilities simply because it isn't constrained

00:05:47.840 by the usual rules of reason.

00:05:49.880 But on the tenth occasion, your ridiculous Python-esque suggestion maybe contains a germ 0.70

00:05:55.960 of truth, or actually maybe contains the germ of a solution.

00:06:00.200 And so it strikes me as fascinating, as someone who just generally loves comedy for the fact

00:06:05.860 that things that don't make sense can be so brilliant, I'm also fascinated by the advertising

00:06:11.800 world in that repeatedly, for all the efforts of kind of reductionist economists to reduce

00:06:18.820 human motivation to something very, very simple, narrow and self-interested. There is patently a

00:06:25.920 whole lot of stuff going on here, which we have yet to understand. I think only evolutionary

00:06:30.020 psychology really will ever uncover the true reasons. I'll give you just a perfect example

00:06:35.700 of something that happened the other day. So we have a mail pack that goes out to customers of

00:06:41.780 very large telecoms company. And it's gone out pretty much every year advertising what they call

00:06:47.200 a spring sale where you can sign up to various products at a discount and this year the response

00:06:53.920 to this mailing was about three times higher than it had been in the previous year and people were

00:06:59.200 totally maffled by this and they were basically scratching their heads and they were obsessed

00:07:04.840 with looking for a rational explanation uh for the um outcome and they'd gone around they looked

00:07:12.940 they said look you know the targeting was basically the same it was the same group of people

00:07:16.780 uh it was essentially very similar load of offers the pricing was pretty much the same

00:07:22.060 the creative um you know the content of the letter uh hadn't really changed and yet it was three times

00:07:28.280 more successful and they go around the agency and they ask various people and they come up with

00:07:32.020 what you might call post-rationalized rational sounding ideas finally they came to me and i said

00:07:37.080 look i'm 53 years old i worked in advertising for 30 years you're not going to hear this explanation

00:07:41.880 from anybody else but i fundamentally believe it's true the reason it's three times more

00:07:46.780 successful is the envelope has lots of pictures of fluffy rabbits on it they'd chosen an easter

00:07:52.720 theme they'd covered it with kind of illustrated cute rabbits one of very few absolutely

00:07:58.040 solid findings from the advertising industry is that ads with a nice animal in do better than

00:08:06.100 ads which don't have a nice animal in really it's interestingly the same with humor what i find is a

00:08:10.720 joke that illustrates the point by using an animal tends to be much funnier for the audience there

00:08:14.960 was an analysis wasn't there which i think someone in scotland did which is jokes which involve a

00:08:20.240 duck are somehow slightly funnier than other jokes and they they had a debate about this whether it's

00:08:26.160 actually the word duck which has comedic potential in the way that the word goose doesn't okay or

00:08:32.380 whether it's just that the animal is inherently slightly ridiculous but um no i mean undoubtedly

00:08:37.480 anything animal related

00:08:39.180 just has

00:08:39.840 and that's just

00:08:40.680 an evolved instinct

00:08:42.660 that probably

00:08:43.660 it was just as simple

00:08:44.440 as the fact that

00:08:44.940 if a thing's got

00:08:45.780 cute rabbits on

00:08:46.580 you don't chuck it

00:08:47.560 in the bin

00:08:47.900 that's very interesting

00:08:49.140 because when I was a teacher

00:08:50.800 we used to have

00:08:51.260 a duck pond at school

00:08:52.280 and ducks are rapey 1.00

00:08:53.300 little bastards 1.00

00:08:54.060 they are mallards 1.00

00:08:54.900 I think 0.99

00:08:55.200 they are evil 0.71

00:08:57.460 they are evil 1.00

00:08:58.280 mallards are the psychopaths 1.00

00:09:00.460 of the waterfowl world 0.99

00:09:01.520 there's no doubt

00:09:02.160 about that at all

00:09:02.640 they're horrendous

00:09:03.260 absolutely terrible 0.94

00:09:03.960 I mean they're breeding

00:09:05.740 Don't stigmatise all waterfowl

00:09:08.700 We've got to be really careful here

00:09:11.600 That we're not being

00:09:12.240 We're not being mallardist

00:09:14.200 I am mallardist 1.00

00:09:16.760 They are bastards 1.00

00:09:18.380 They are, evil 1.00

00:09:19.420 Quite a lot of waterfowl are monogamous

00:09:22.040 Quite a few geese are, quite a few ducks are

00:09:24.320 We had various

00:09:26.520 Waterfowl when I was a child

00:09:27.740 Who were actually intensely devoted to each other 1.00

00:09:30.940 But the mallards were bastards 1.00

00:09:32.720 Yeah, evil 1.00

00:09:33.720 Evil, I once had to explain to a special needs child 1.00

00:09:37.220 whilst trying to stop what looked like a gang rape 0.90

00:09:40.580 by a group of mallards.

00:09:42.060 What was going on?

00:09:43.180 There's essentially gang rape.

00:09:44.340 I mean, it is essentially 25 Cromwell Street, that pond.

00:09:48.280 Yes, yeah.

00:09:48.600 Because there's also infanticide and I think incest as well.

00:09:55.040 Oh, yes.

00:09:55.360 So they're pretty much the whole gamut.

00:09:57.540 Rory, I have to be honest,

00:09:58.500 of all the subjects I expected to come up in this podcast,

00:10:01.360 this was certainly not one of them.

00:10:02.560 Let me just talk about the value of comedy.

00:10:06.260 Absolutely, there is a fundamental problem in politics and in business,

00:10:12.200 which is you can only propose a solution to anything if it makes sense.

00:10:19.920 Now, the problem with that is it's context-independent, that idea.

00:10:25.480 In other words, rationality is the only tool you need to use to solve a problem.

00:10:29.580 The truth of the matter is, is it looks like an absolutely godlike economist, John Kay, who I think was at Kilconomics last year, he's made this point that the faculty of reason, Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, a very good book called The Enigma of Reason, didn't evolve in humans to help us make decisions.

00:10:49.940 If you think about it, all other animals, ballards, dogs, etc., managed to survive and function and reproduce perfectly well without having to justify their actions.

00:11:00.420 Something about our nature as a social species required us to have a faculty of reason, either to stress test collective decision making or to justify behaviour to others.

00:11:10.140 But it didn't evolve to actually help us decide.

00:11:13.580 And so nearly everything, this is where advertising and comedy, I think, have an overlap and where behavioral science naturally lends itself to comedic value, which is all of us essentially have a view of ourselves, which we project as to why we do things and what we do.

00:11:30.420 And we have a real deep down reason, which is buried and hidden not only from everybody else, but also from ourselves.

00:11:37.100 One of the most important, I think, theories in psychology, Robert Trivers' idea that we actually deceive ourselves in order the better to deceive others.

00:11:45.920 That if we actually had essentially full introspective access to our motivation, then essentially we'd blow it by giving the game away.

00:11:54.380 and so we need to practice self-deception in order to actually uh maintain a an acceptable

00:12:00.760 facade for everybody else now once you realize that of course what you realize is that one of

00:12:04.680 the things comedy does is it points out the very obvious discord between uh the reasons we we give

00:12:13.700 and the real reasons for various actions and it's i i always find it really really interesting

00:12:20.400 but the idea that things have to make sense is a very dangerous one so one of the interesting

00:12:24.200 things about capitalism is, for all its faults, it can stumble on things and fund them, even when

00:12:31.220 they make no sense. So when I give a talk, I usually give this great example of a fantastic

00:12:35.920 product, which is ostensibly a complete nonsense. Now, if you've been asked, let's say, 30 years ago

00:12:42.860 to compete with Coca-Cola, you would have sat down, you would have sat around a table, you would have

00:12:46.240 said, we need a drink that tastes nicer than Coke, costs less than Coke, and comes in a really big

00:12:51.100 cans we all get great value for money everybody would have nodded and you would have gone off

00:12:54.960 you would have done it and you probably would have failed meanwhile the most successful attempt to

00:13:00.460 compete with coke in 150 years red bull okay comes in a tiny can cost a fortune tastes disgusting

00:13:08.100 absolutely does now there's a second order logic to that i think which is the disgusting taste is

00:13:14.600 actually essential to the overall experience which is if you want if you think about it it

00:13:20.600 would be deeply weird to you if you were given really nice tasting medicine wouldn't it yes

00:13:24.920 something about the placebo effect if if you want us to believe instinctively that something has 0.99

00:13:30.020 psychoactive or medicinal powers it has to taste weird so our health food has to taste shit yeah 0.86

00:13:36.360 basically i mean it's a very you know i mean otherwise it's not healthy otherwise wheat 0.94

00:13:41.480 grass i mean lick the underside of your flymo you get the same effect but because it tastes kind of

00:13:46.880 weird we automatically infer from that that it's probably doing us some good or having some

00:13:52.020 interesting effect high price also adds to that effect the small can makes it look as if this

00:13:57.640 drink is so damn potent if i had a full 375 milliliters i'd kind of go postal okay and so

00:14:05.040 So what's interesting about this is that it is impossible to get any idea through what you might call the reason police unless it first meets the criterion of being explicable.

00:14:22.440 Now, this is wrong. In a search for problem solving, you should ask yourself the question, even if it doesn't make sense, empirically, does it work?

00:14:30.380 That's what I was about to say, because isn't a big part of what you might expect reason to be is empiricism.

00:14:36.120 In other words, using data from testing to see whether something works or not, rather than just going, oh, in my head, logically, this doesn't make sense.

00:14:43.860 I'll give you an interesting example.

00:14:45.020 I'm an empirical monarchist, OK, in that no one would create a hereditary monarchy in a constitutional democracy from scratch.

00:14:52.760 You wouldn't just go, here's Barry, we'll take his family and we'll essentially, you know, hereditary heads of state.

00:15:00.140 It made for a great documentary.

00:15:01.880 It would be interesting.

00:15:03.000 And actually, I mean, choosing people by lot actually

00:15:05.180 is another interesting area which we need to explore.

00:15:08.540 And that's how Greek democracy worked.

00:15:10.460 But the interesting thing is, if you look at it empirically,

00:15:13.840 the collections of countries in the world

00:15:15.780 which are basically constitutional monarchies is,

00:15:20.220 OK, so you've got Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK.

00:15:22.800 You've got Holland, Belgium, Spain, the Scandies. 0.61

00:15:27.800 So you've got other than Finland,

00:15:29.080 You've got Sweden, Norway, Denmark.

00:15:31.560 You've got Japan. 0.70

00:15:34.140 Pretty much about 90% of the countries in which you'd actually want to live

00:15:37.900 have that system of government.

00:15:39.600 Now, all I'm saying is just because it doesn't make sense

00:15:42.240 doesn't mean it may not have some virtue

00:15:45.000 that's simply difficult to explain or difficult to quantify.

00:15:48.300 Absolutely.

00:15:49.000 And so one of the things I'd see with creativity

00:15:50.900 is it's a way of actually breaking out of a very, very narrow

00:15:55.900 straight jacket of decision finding.

00:15:59.320 I mean, the thing that started as a joke with me,

00:16:01.400 if you ask the question at the very beginning, why am I here?

00:16:03.960 And I suppose one of the reasons I'm here is I gave a TED Talk

00:16:08.480 back in about 2009, I think it was, yeah, something like that.

00:16:12.200 Yeah.

00:16:13.160 That's nine years ago now.

00:16:14.660 And I simply made the Eurostar gag.

00:16:17.160 Oh, it's a fantastic little story.

00:16:19.140 Okay.

00:16:19.360 Now, I'd only thought about it a couple of days beforehand.

00:16:22.260 The point was that they were spending £6 billion building high-speed rail tracks between St Pancras and the Kent Coast

00:16:30.660 to reduce the overall journey time between London and Paris, London and Brussels as well, by about 25 minutes.

00:16:39.640 OK?

00:16:41.100 Now, my snarky little suggestion was, look, what is a bit weird is we're spending £6 billion on these rail tracks

00:16:48.980 and the trains, this was true until two years ago, okay?

00:16:53.680 So the trains don't have Wi-Fi.

00:16:56.500 I don't know, our Southeastern trains,

00:16:58.500 which you share with me from Tunbridge Wells,

00:17:00.260 they're now installing Wi-Fi on them.

00:17:01.760 They are.

00:17:02.500 I actually get, half the time,

00:17:04.160 I'm actually annoyed my train arrives so early.

00:17:06.860 I should have got off London Bridge to get here today.

00:17:09.640 I stayed on until Charing Cross

00:17:11.260 because I was in the middle of something.

00:17:13.360 If you put Wi-Fi on something,

00:17:15.300 essentially time loses its meaning.

00:17:17.680 Yes.

00:17:17.960 but also you're perfectly productive or entertained so actually you know the time doesn't matter

00:17:23.680 nearly as much so you can reduce what you might call perceptual journey time not at a cost of

00:17:28.940 six billion which is what it costs to reduce actual journey time you can reduce it at a cost

00:17:33.440 of what's probably five million six million which is literally 0.1 percent of the cost i said look

00:17:39.480 if you want to be more perverse and i just got silly there i said you know if you really wanted

00:17:43.580 to improve the Eurostar and you had a budget of $6 billion.

00:17:46.740 You'd hire all of the world's top male and female supermodels, 1.00

00:17:49.860 get them to walk up and down the train,

00:17:51.740 handing out free Chateau Petrusse to all the passengers.

00:17:55.680 You'd have saved £5 billion because it would cost you

00:17:58.280 about a billion pounds to do that,

00:17:59.760 and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.

00:18:02.600 Now, my point about that is it's a totally...

00:18:05.520 That is what you might call the advertising cousin

00:18:08.480 to a comedic technique, which is the reframing joke,

00:18:12.240 which is you tell something you know that you know the most the most boring thing is you know

00:18:17.960 you know um that joke which seems completely innocent until you flip the context by saying 0.95

00:18:24.900 that uh you know i you know i was masturbating the other day blah blah blah blah and then 0.85

00:18:29.660 suddenly you introduce the fact that it was in sainsbury's yes and the same thing takes on

00:18:34.040 basically what is goes for a self what you might call a little bit of a reveal that wasn't me

00:18:41.040 literally saying that, by the way.

00:18:42.520 Just to make that clear, by the way.

00:18:44.920 Right?

00:18:45.860 You would never shop in saying that.

00:18:47.020 No, no, no, no, waitress, man. 1.00

00:18:49.280 But the interesting thing there is that it's exactly the same thing,

00:18:54.320 which is that human decision-making is quite often,

00:18:57.600 and human perception is badly constrained by a conceptual frame

00:19:02.360 or what you might call a mind trap.

00:19:05.600 And comedy is one of the ways in which you can liberate yourself from this.

00:19:10.140 So I'll give you a little real-world story, which is...

00:19:13.540 You may remember, it's one of my favourite sketches,

00:19:16.000 even though, as I said, it makes no sense.

00:19:17.580 It's a Rowan Atkinson sketch from Not the Lanicott News

00:19:19.880 where he goes into a bathroom showroom

00:19:21.900 and they have various little bottle showers, baths, etc.,

00:19:25.540 in which he can actually design his own bathroom.

00:19:28.320 And he just decides he's going to have a bathroom with seven toilets.

00:19:31.320 And he's going to go, if I get rid of the bath,

00:19:33.700 I can have another couple of toilets against the wall, you see.

00:19:36.600 Now, OK, totally bonkers gorgeous, right?

00:19:40.280 Anybody who's seen it will still remember it 35 years later.

00:19:44.960 Someone comes to me with a problem,

00:19:46.200 which is the firemen in certain American cities,

00:19:50.280 when they're not fighting fires,

00:19:51.660 which actually is most of the time,

00:19:53.280 because smoke detection equipment and so on

00:19:56.440 and vastly less flammable fabrics

00:19:58.920 have reduced the incidence of domestic fires quite significantly.

00:20:04.160 So they go around typically to poorer areas in the US,

00:20:06.920 to housing projects,

00:20:07.840 and they try and install smoke detectors for free perfectly noble worthwhile thing to do

00:20:14.160 now one of the things they can never get their head around and i can't understand it either

00:20:18.560 entirely is that they can get nearly everybody they ring on the door and say firemen here

00:20:22.700 we're just here to install a smoke detector you basically you can get them to install one

00:20:30.040 but they really balk at two or three and the typical apartment really needs three the strange

00:20:35.020 is that's like saying no i don't want one in my child's bedroom it's a really weird thing to say

00:20:39.680 but for some reason people just draw the line at one maybe two when three is necessary

00:20:46.520 okay now i use that same kind of python-esque uh you know bizarre approach to suggest a solution

00:20:55.280 which is very simple thing in behavioral science it's just re-anchoring i said it partly was okay

00:21:02.620 I partly suggested absolutely outrageous things

00:21:06.520 which would never be legal or acceptable,

00:21:11.180 which is to actually outrage people by saying,

00:21:15.140 you know, well, actually, if you're Korean,

00:21:17.320 you'd be entitled to three,

00:21:18.300 but since you're African-American, you only get two.

00:21:21.180 I can see why that might be an issue.

00:21:23.600 But you do it the other way around.

00:21:25.180 You do it the other way around, okay?

00:21:26.580 So you absolutely cause some sort of outrage.

00:21:30.640 And competitiveness would be.

00:21:31.880 And competitiveness and comparison.

00:21:33.720 That came from a friend of mine whose wife was Chinese.

00:21:37.420 She was invited to visit South Africa.

00:21:39.300 And they didn't go in the end.

00:21:40.860 But she wasn't allowed to share the same hotel with him.

00:21:43.700 And they rang up and said, is your wife Chinese or Japanese?

00:21:46.440 He said, she's Singaporean Chinese. 0.93

00:21:47.920 Ah, unfortunately, she'll need to stay in a different hotel. 0.94

00:21:50.420 She wasn't so bothered about staying in a different hotel from her husband.

00:21:52.740 The idea that had she been Japanese, it would have been OK, 1.00

00:21:55.760 drove her practically insane.

00:21:58.460 We forget this fact, actually.

00:22:00.380 It's one of the problems of the British left.

00:22:01.580 They assume complete harmony among all external ethnic groups.

00:22:07.100 Well, the Chinese-Japanese rivalry, with some reason in some cases, is still pretty intense.

00:22:14.320 But, okay, so one of the reasons, and this is why free speech and advertising, by the way,

00:22:19.020 and free speech and comedy are both really, really important things to fight for.

00:22:24.300 Now, no one is suggesting for a second I'm ever going to do that, okay?

00:22:27.880 but it just struck me as a really interesting idea

00:22:30.320 of how to get people to accept free

00:22:31.820 is to suggest that they weren't actually

00:22:33.700 one of the ideas about how you get younger children

00:22:36.200 to eat insects is to have a pile of locusts

00:22:38.680 and you say well unfortunately because you're under 16

00:22:40.820 you won't be allowed to eat things

00:22:42.240 basically the magazine

00:22:44.360 just 17

00:22:46.060 had an average readership age of about 13

00:22:48.500 so actually telling people

00:22:51.940 that you're not eligible for something

00:22:53.880 drives them practically insane

00:22:55.320 but then

00:22:57.500 the reason the free speech thing is important is because there is a whole area of ideas which

00:23:05.920 belong in an ad agency which i would describe as you'd get promoted for making the suggestion

00:23:11.020 and fired for enacting it and that one that i suggested is an example of that okay if you

00:23:16.960 actually had the idea i'd be impressed by your ingenuity if you actually executed it i'd be

00:23:22.040 horrified by your lack of judgment but the ability the ability to say that thing is really really

00:23:28.300 important because one speech is experimental action so applying the same criteria to speech

00:23:34.820 as you do to physical actions is ridiculous because one of the reasons we've evolved humor

00:23:39.260 and speech is it's nature's flight simulator it's where we try things out without actually doing

00:23:44.840 them and probably the role of stories a whole bunch of things exist as a kind of simulation

00:23:49.820 but the second thing is sometimes in advertising in in problem solving of any kind you kind of

00:23:56.600 have to climb mount silly to get to the bright sunlit uplands belong beyond and what i eventually

00:24:02.840 suggested borrowing from that rowan atkinson sketch for the the smoke detect thing is i said

00:24:07.220 turn up with six that six is a ridiculous number and if you say to the people well um you know we

00:24:15.140 normally bring six smoke detectors to our home but I think here you can make do with three or four

00:24:22.540 you'll probably get them to install four three or four three in fact because one now seems weirdly

00:24:28.180 on the low side once you've anchored them at six one seems like well no one will have one it's

00:24:33.440 insanity right and so having the ability to say and think and I would argue the principal value

00:24:41.720 of an ad agency isn't actually the production of advertising or communication it's the existence

00:24:48.060 of a culture with a client company's interests at heart but with a culture in which it is possible

00:24:57.480 to say ridiculous things and still get promoted now that's one of the most important things that

00:25:01.860 an ad agency can have is the ability to say something totally ridiculous um which in say 0.92

00:25:08.080 the civil service would be career suicide 0.84

00:25:10.000 or in politics would probably be career suicide

00:25:12.840 unless you're a Boris Johnson

00:25:16.120 and you manage to kind of...

00:25:17.700 Or Donald Trump.

00:25:18.700 Or Donald Trump, yeah.

00:25:20.300 I mean, there's a bit of me which goes,

00:25:22.920 Jesus, you know, I mean, I don't like what he says,

00:25:25.320 but at least I believe him when he says it.

00:25:28.040 I think a lot of people feel that way.

00:25:29.720 That's one of the reasons he probably...

00:25:31.040 It's a bit like the Nixon argument, isn't it?

00:25:32.480 You know where you are with a good plain crumb.

00:25:35.300 But, I mean, there is something about that

00:25:36.820 which is that the elite priestly caste has become basically weird.

00:25:42.300 It's become fixated with a very, very narrow worldview,

00:25:45.960 which is instilled in all those kind of religious ceremonies

00:25:49.400 that take place in Davos or business schools or whatever,

00:25:52.840 which are all inculcating exactly the same creed.

00:25:56.520 Now, by the way, I'm a conservative.

00:25:58.100 I'm not making this as a kind of weird left-wing point.

00:26:01.740 But I don't think anybody can reasonably say

00:26:04.160 that there's a complete lack of imagination and weirdness in politics and business, which is that

00:26:12.240 it's become obsessed with an incredibly narrow way of defining worldly progress and success,

00:26:18.940 mostly around efficiency and cost reduction, which is not really very well aligned with what

00:26:24.460 people really care about. Absolutely. That's one of the reasons we want to chat to you. And by the

00:26:28.720 way i love speaking with you and one of the reasons is we've asked you how you got here and

00:26:33.940 i think that was you win the award for the most articulate and elaborate answer to that question

00:26:38.380 probably in the history there's another secret i'll let you into which i was born in lumbadoc

00:26:43.520 which is just outside ask i think the uh the most famous son by a factor of 200 lumbadoc

00:26:50.040 was alfred russell wallace and um uh so my my little ambition is to be the second best

00:26:58.200 evolutionary thinker born in land baddock um and um one of the actually one comedian is it

00:27:05.680 bill bailey is it keyboard yes he's i think of the president of the wallace society there is i

00:27:13.360 think and this is also true of uh certainly uh speaking to jimmy carr um there is a very very

00:27:20.680 close tie between um uh comedians and an interest in evolutionary psychology absolutely uh i mean

00:27:29.220 if if you wanted to know what comedy's pet academic discipline is i think evolutionary

00:27:34.620 psychology uh wins every time and i think um evolutionary psychology by the way gets into

00:27:40.640 trouble for similar reasons to comedy so in academia one of the reasons why behavioral

00:27:46.140 economists are very reluctant to investigate evolutionary psychology as an explanation for

00:27:50.740 human behavior is that if you are in that kind of darwinist camp it's incredibly easy to get

00:27:58.280 uh you know no platformed and generally abused and um uh of course i suppose that's the other

00:28:05.080 reason why evolutionary psychologists are close to comedians which is they both have that slight

00:28:09.660 urge to go slightly closer to the edge that is politic shall we say yeah well rory it's fascinating

00:28:15.720 I mean, speaking with you always is.

00:28:18.340 One of the things that I know that you – well, actually, we'll talk about that stuff later because you keep bringing up the issue of free speech, and I think that's something that we've been talking about recently.

00:28:27.180 We had – today as we're recording this, we're releasing an episode with a guy who co-writes for Jonathan Pye.

00:28:33.580 I don't know if you've seen this, but he's a guy who's a reporter who keeps getting caught after he's delivered his professional report ranting about whatever subject he just reported on.

00:28:44.720 I don't know if you've seen that.

00:28:45.720 But anyway, we were talking to him about free speech,

00:28:47.600 and it seems to me like you keep bringing that up

00:28:49.760 because do you feel that it's under threat in this country?

00:28:52.080 Do you feel that the way we are conducting our conversations

00:28:54.800 isn't the way that we should?

00:28:56.760 Well, first of all, there's something slightly weird about it, okay,

00:29:00.320 which is one of the things about the social justice movement

00:29:04.240 is no one asks...

00:29:07.940 I mean, generally it's quite benign.

00:29:09.880 I mean, they think they're clever.

00:29:11.460 If you look at most social justice campaigns,

00:29:13.660 what you find is they're basically Quakers 1.00

00:29:16.720 who are late to the party.

00:29:18.460 The Quakers are... 0.83

00:29:20.460 I've never heard that theory.

00:29:22.280 And Corbyn, I mean, Corbyn 50, 100 years ago

00:29:25.160 would have been a Quaker.

00:29:26.240 He's just a Quaker monke. 1.00

00:29:27.660 And it's actually, it's really...

00:29:29.200 I've got no hostility.

00:29:30.900 I've got no hostility to the diagnosis.

00:29:33.460 You know, I would generally argue

00:29:34.940 that the direction of travel is right.

00:29:38.580 But by obsessing over little shibboleths,

00:29:41.320 like whether what a comedian said

00:29:43.520 might be offensive to some imaginary listener

00:29:46.620 who, frankly, shouldn't be in a bloody comedy club

00:29:48.780 in the first place if they're that sensitive, OK?

00:29:51.580 When you enter a comedy club,

00:29:53.400 you are at some level deciding to be shocked, OK?

00:30:00.080 I would argue there is huge progress to be made

00:30:03.020 in quite a few areas of justice

00:30:05.940 where the focus on those tiny little,

00:30:11.100 what you might call those, you know,

00:30:12.780 relatively trivial little it's rather like the vegan debate about whether or not you eat honey

00:30:17.280 you know the focus on those tiny little things that set people apart is ultimately a distraction

00:30:24.040 from what could be far greater gains so you know i mean one problem would be that the weirdness of

00:30:33.520 the most vociferous members of the social justice movement actually set back its causes okay now

00:30:40.140 You know, I've got a daughter who's vegetarian and I occasionally argue, look, if you get really, really purist about this.

00:30:48.540 So one vegetarian friend of mine, basically after about 20 years of pure vegetarianism, started eating prawns because his argument was they don't have a central nervous system.

00:30:58.700 And the inconvenience you suffer going to restaurants if you're simply prepared to eat prawns basically vanishes.

00:31:04.820 And I suggested actually that you should make insects acceptable for vegetarians to eat.

00:31:10.140 because actually it's a very environmentally friendly way

00:31:13.440 of producing high-protein foods.

00:31:17.520 Now, there is huge progress to be made in, I think, animal welfare,

00:31:23.600 which I would really, really support.

00:31:25.980 And yet, if you make the whole thing about some completely bizarre,

00:31:32.100 tiny, tiny trivial point about the fact that...

00:31:35.220 I personally got grumpy.

00:31:36.800 I understand their reasons for it, which is all about disgust.

00:31:40.140 which is vegetarians who get very upset if the pita bread that their vegetarian kebab was being

00:31:46.180 made in happened to touch a bit of the donor. Because I said, hold on a second, that's not

00:31:50.900 about any kind of rational reason for vegetarian. That's basically religious purity. That's the

00:31:56.160 religious purity instinct. That isn't the utilitarian instinct at play. Patently resting

00:32:04.420 against the donor is not irrelevant in terms of animal welfare okay and what you're doing there

00:32:10.520 is you're making people like me who would actually become very largely vegetarian less likely to

00:32:16.420 become vegetarian because i don't want to become that kind of weird crank okay so it is just as

00:32:23.380 there's a phrase that you know the great is the enemy of the good in some cases the perfect is

00:32:28.540 the enemy of the better and i mean that's a very interesting argument by the way in um in wired

00:32:33.240 today about driverless cars saying the whole thing's being screwed up because they're aiming

00:32:37.340 too high okay they're aiming for a perfectly driverless car which can whiz around and do

00:32:41.800 everything that a human driver can do well ultimately we'll get there but the way to

00:32:46.100 actually succeed is to aim first for the middle and they said look if you had for example a network

00:32:53.160 of roads to take teenagers home where the cars could just drive along a painted line on the road

00:32:58.580 between 10pm and 2am

00:33:02.340 and they could only drive at 20 miles an hour

00:33:04.700 and they drove themselves.

00:33:06.060 Or you had pod transportation,

00:33:08.260 which was just a network of little cars or pods

00:33:10.400 that just circulated around London

00:33:12.620 on totally preordained routes.

00:33:15.140 I'd make it cycle lanes, personally.

00:33:16.980 I mean, cycling is...

00:33:20.220 Cycle lanes are basically racist, you know that, don't you?

00:33:25.200 Cycling is the whitest thing.

00:33:28.100 Seriously, I'm three-eighths Welsh, okay,

00:33:31.300 and I'm not white enough to cycle.

00:33:33.080 I mean, seriously, okay?

00:33:35.000 But you can create designated lanes around London

00:33:40.800 on a very simple network, have little pods going around

00:33:43.400 driving themselves, not hitting people.

00:33:45.440 You would demonstrate a huge proportion of the benefits of something

00:33:48.360 without necessarily trying to reach perfection.

00:33:50.740 When you try and reach perfection, you end up with people getting killed,

00:33:53.400 people getting frightened, et cetera.

00:33:55.060 Plus we get rid of cyclists.

00:33:57.100 And in the same way, I mean, for example,

00:33:58.720 if you take the social justice movement, 0.99

00:34:00.440 this shit about cultural appropriation... 1.00

00:34:03.140 Oh, yes. 1.00

00:34:03.640 I mean, it's patently, OK, intellectually.

00:34:06.220 OK, what the hell happens to katsu curry, right?

00:34:09.740 Katsu curry is a Japanese dish

00:34:12.140 introduced from India by the British, OK?

00:34:15.440 I mean, who's entirely...

00:34:17.080 Are the Japanese basically appropriating it 0.77

00:34:19.600 for the Indians, for the British?

00:34:21.060 Can I eat it? What the hell's going on?

00:34:22.840 I mean, you know, attaching that to kind of dress,

00:34:25.960 for example is patently insanity because the asymmetry of the whole thing becomes absolutely

00:34:31.980 obvious you know i mean i mean no one would dream for a second of suggesting that you know um indians

00:34:38.620 playing cricket was cultural appropriation and yet you do the same thing the other way around if i 0.98

00:34:43.280 would turn up here in one of those neru jackets you know i'd get a lot of shit i'd quite like a 0.98

00:34:48.580 and the hat. 0.98

00:34:51.180 But, I mean, there's something so bonkers about it.

00:34:54.820 The other thing is it doesn't matter that much, right?

00:34:58.000 I mean, you know, there's a huge instance of modern slavery.

00:35:00.580 There's enormous animal suffering.

00:35:02.600 There are also campaigns we can engage in collectively

00:35:05.800 if we could only get them started,

00:35:07.780 which wouldn't benefit one tightly defined ethnic or gender group,

00:35:11.700 but they could benefit everybody.

00:35:13.100 So let's take this example of it is, I think,

00:35:16.260 whatever the arguments for why women end up earning less than men which bear in mind of

00:35:22.160 course high earners reflect the gender balance of a business 30 years ago yeah okay so you know if

00:35:28.300 you look at ogilvy my graduate recruitment group in ogilvy was three males to one female which was

00:35:34.800 probably pretty normal at the time whatever reason okay if places that recruited from oxbridge it's

00:35:41.240 worth remembering that four years before me at oxbridge there were most of the colleges were

00:35:46.120 all male so you know what you see now is actually a reflection of what happened 40 years ago and

00:35:52.180 uh you know the question is you just have to accept a degree of path dependency in this stuff

00:35:56.520 but if you look at that okay there's a campaign which you could make for women to be given um

00:36:04.060 greater maternity rights but also greater freedom for flexible working

00:36:07.960 now why make that a gender-based campaign if you look at the united states okay something like 68 0.96

00:36:16.860 percent of americans if you ask them would rather have four four percent less money and two weeks

00:36:22.860 more vacation i don't know if you know this in the u.s okay because it's standards only gets two

00:36:26.800 weeks which is shit i mean i've never interesting fact interesting thought experiment here about how 0.68

00:36:31.620 this is what i call a mind trap in other words if you think something's normal it's very difficult 0.97

00:36:37.660 to be the first person to make a change okay so a lot of change happens you know it was very very

00:36:43.680 and i'm not suggesting it's easy now okay but the difference between coming out in you know

00:36:48.640 in 2018 and coming out in 1968 okay is you know an order of magnitude or something no one's

00:36:56.700 suggesting it's easy at any time but nonetheless you know the first person to do something

00:37:01.800 pays a disproportionately high price yeah and then as more and more people start to do it and the

00:37:07.320 social norm becomes established okay the price becomes lower and there are loads of things by

00:37:12.180 the way there are loads of things which follow this very unequal path if you look at behavior

00:37:16.220 change so i'll give you i'll give you two very interesting examples of this if you look at

00:37:20.500 how social change happens um the the standard kind of economic idea is we're all individual

00:37:28.000 actors it's called methodological individualism and we just go actually i think that's wrong

00:37:33.240 By the way, Quakers, way in advance on that one as well, by the way.

00:37:36.780 I just thought I'd make the point that the social justice warriors 0.99

00:37:39.620 are just crap Quakers. 1.00

00:37:42.240 That is going to be the crap that we use to promote this episode, guaranteed. 1.00

00:37:47.240 If you look at Quakers on things like slavery, 1.00

00:37:49.920 they're people extraordinary.

00:37:50.920 My wife's an Anglican vicar,

00:37:52.880 and they're really, really interesting people like John Wallman

00:37:54.740 in the United States who, if you stayed in a household

00:37:57.700 where there were slaves, you left the money that the slave

00:38:01.020 would be paid as a servant behind,

00:38:02.660 because that was the only acceptable way he could resolve it.

00:38:05.140 And this was, by the way, I mean, this was, you know,

00:38:06.920 18th century stuff.

00:38:08.360 This was really, really quite early.

00:38:10.160 And bear in mind, I mean, slavery was a mind trap.

00:38:11.940 I mean, everybody thought for a long, long time,

00:38:13.960 everybody thought it was perfectly normal.

00:38:15.180 It was in the Bible.

00:38:16.080 It happened for thousands of years.

00:38:17.860 You know, we've got to remember this, that, you know,

00:38:19.440 having a go at people in the 18th century

00:38:24.820 for not being abolitionists, okay,

00:38:28.340 is, you know, is a little like having a go at, you know,

00:38:31.560 people for not being gay rights campaigners in 1926 or something, okay?

00:38:35.040 It's a different order of difficulty.

00:38:38.060 And so a lot of things happen like this.

00:38:39.100 So an interesting example of this where everybody gets the costs first

00:38:44.000 and the benefits only come when something becomes more widely adopted,

00:38:47.860 that applies to London taxis accepting credit cards, okay?

00:38:52.500 Now, I've spoken to loads of London taxi cab drivers

00:38:55.460 and it was a threat from uber that made them do it to a great extent but they do grudgingly admit

00:39:00.560 that since they accepted credit cards and particularly contentless credit cards usage

00:39:04.480 of black cabs has gone up dramatically because it was a complete anomaly that london had this cab

00:39:09.700 system where you couldn't confidently get in a cab knowing that you know if the journey overran a bit

00:39:16.240 and you ran out of cash you could just use a credit card to pay it created a whole lot of

00:39:19.560 uncertainty and anxiety uh and reluctance to use cabs partly because if you think about it

00:39:24.940 Contactless payment has meant that we carry less and less cash.

00:39:28.900 And using a cab became the single biggest drain

00:39:32.160 on your cash reserves in your wallet.

00:39:34.060 Well, I wouldn't know about that because I live in South London.

00:39:36.600 And they won't go south of the river.

00:39:37.600 And the fastest ever go there,

00:39:38.520 so I'll have to take it on your experience, Rory.

00:39:42.020 But the interesting thing there was, OK,

00:39:44.400 so it pays them all to accept credit cards.

00:39:46.600 They're all better off, OK?

00:39:48.940 But until you hit about 90...

00:39:50.400 In the end, they made it compulsory because they just decided.

00:39:53.400 Until you hit about 90%, 95%, it doesn't benefit anybody.

00:39:57.180 The person who is an early adopter of credit cards

00:39:59.620 suffers all of the costs, transaction costs, general hassle,

00:40:03.600 you know, people's cards not working, waiting for a receipt,

00:40:06.580 and gains none of the benefits.

00:40:07.700 Paying tax, exactly, yeah.

00:40:10.200 This is where comedians go right to the real why.

00:40:15.140 I was delicately kind of tiptoeing around that issue,

00:40:19.260 and you go straight for the jugular. 0.89

00:40:20.820 But the first people to accept it, therefore, have disproportionate cost, no benefit.

00:40:28.300 It's only when it hits 95% where the punter can confidently hail a cab.

00:40:32.780 Now, you could have had an intermediate solution to the problem,

00:40:35.140 which is cabs that accepted credit cards could have displayed a different colour light, say.

00:40:39.620 So consumer choice could have driven the adoption of the credit card.

00:40:43.700 But because of the problem where by the time you'd hailed a cab, it was too late to go, 0.96

00:40:47.660 you couldn't really say, you don't take credit cards, piss off. 0.91

00:40:50.820 OK, because of that social awkwardness, the order effect, essentially what you had was no incentive to accept something because the early adopters paid the highest price.

00:41:04.660 And there are loads and loads of things which I think follow that curve.

00:41:07.720 Now, if you think about it, 68 percent of people in America would rather have more vacation, a bit less money.

00:41:13.640 I'm not sure, by the way, the economy wouldn't be better off

00:41:15.640 if they had more holiday, because leisure expenditure 0.95

00:41:18.300 is much more labour-generative than just buying shit from Walmart, 0.99

00:41:22.800 which is what they tend to do. 1.00

00:41:25.100 Americans also tend to do a bullshit thing, really, 1.00

00:41:27.480 which is they have loads and loads of conferences 0.99

00:41:29.700 in sort of sunny or exotic places,

00:41:32.080 which are like a zatz-vocation for yanks.

00:41:35.060 You sit in a windowless room talking about marketing,

00:41:38.060 and you kind of treat that as if it's a holiday. 1.00

00:41:41.060 Total crap. 1.00

00:41:42.460 If you want a holiday, have a fucking holiday. 1.00

00:41:44.160 Now, that's an interesting case where, if you think about it, 1.00

00:41:48.380 68% of the people in every firm would rather make that trade-off

00:41:51.540 between leisure and money, but the first person to try

00:41:54.460 and make that call is going to pay a disproportionate price

00:41:58.100 because they become known as the lazy guy.

00:42:01.560 And that's happened in Sweden, actually,

00:42:03.200 getting men to take paternity leave.

00:42:05.560 Men out of various machismo things about wishing to signal

00:42:09.400 commitment to their employer will kind of take two days when they're entitled more and so in the end

00:42:15.160 they made it compulsory to create a social norm so it was just accepted that the guy is going to

00:42:19.680 be off work yeah and that's the end of it and so there's certain things where you need to reach a

00:42:25.520 critical mass before you can get anywhere and where i think social justice stuff goes a bit weird

00:42:30.800 is that it's often focusing on stuff that's already tipped trying to reach a kind of level

00:42:35.920 of perfection you know i mean generally really nasty racist people they're still around but

00:42:43.980 they're going to kind of die okay okay don't spend your whole time going insane because some guy said 0.91

00:42:50.980 something nasty you know or whatever why don't you focus on the things you know incidentally 0.79

00:42:55.980 as i said don't make bloody um uh greater leisure time a feminist campaign make it a universal one 1.00

00:43:03.240 There are loads and loads of guys and people out there who would want to make the trade-off between slightly less money, slightly more spare time.

00:43:11.000 And actually the argument then is…

00:43:12.140 So don't confine it to some blasted identity group.

00:43:14.320 Well, sorry to jump in right, but actually then the argument is as well is if men can take more paternity time, that will allow women to get back to work quicker potentially.

00:43:21.940 Yeah, I mean there's some…

00:43:23.080 Affecting their pay in a positive way.

00:43:23.640 I mean, there are some kind of analyses which suggest that the disparity of earnings,

00:43:29.280 it can be entirely attributable to time spent in maternity

00:43:34.220 and that if you look at the career progression of people who haven't had children for any reason,

00:43:38.200 it doesn't show the same dent.

00:43:40.660 I don't think it's just that.

00:43:41.800 I don't think it's just that.

00:43:42.560 I don't think it's just prejudice, by the way.

00:43:44.840 No, yeah. No, no, no.

00:43:46.160 I think that the slight thing that annoys me with the social justice movement

00:43:50.780 is they can only see the world in terms of prejudice, discrimination, race, gender

00:43:55.820 and oppression and general oppressed group, etc.

00:44:00.000 And, you know, I mean, you know, one interesting thing which always interests me is,

00:44:04.400 you know, it's perfectly possible, of course, that women oppress other women. 1.00

00:44:09.320 It doesn't have to be. So I've always asked this question.

00:44:13.180 All right. I can't let you leave it there.

00:44:15.680 Because if it stays there, it's going to be very unexplained and triggering.

00:44:19.680 What do you mean by women oppress other women? 1.00

00:44:21.500 The pressure to dress well, which undoubtedly imposes a burden on my daughters. 0.99

00:44:25.100 A burden on me takes a fucking hour to leave the house. 0.99

00:44:28.520 I've got one daughter who's a militant feminist. 0.99

00:44:30.580 I thought, that's great, because at least she'll be quick leaving the house. 1.00

00:44:35.380 A few paint-stained dungarees and some Dr Martins and we're in the car. 0.99

00:44:40.600 Unfortunately, she's one of these new feminists who worries about foundation cream and eyelashes and shit, 1.00

00:44:45.840 which strikes me as a bit weird. 0.99

00:44:47.900 but that's not

00:44:49.180 I don't know where that comes from

00:44:51.460 some Darwinists would say it's innate

00:44:54.160 other people would say it's peer pressure

00:44:56.060 it's not guys

00:44:57.420 if you look at the women's fashion industry

00:44:59.740 it is not driven by

00:45:01.780 male desire 0.77

00:45:03.020 I've never looked at a 0.99

00:45:05.400 fashion magazine in my life

00:45:07.340 no I mean it's not interesting to us

00:45:09.220 and generally guys don't read them

00:45:11.780 equally you can say that

00:45:13.940 I don't think anybody's ever been

00:45:15.920 apparently okay has been watching

00:45:17.740 porn hub and going oh my god that's last year's journey versus i don't i mean bluntly okay i don't

00:45:25.580 want to i don't want to tell you first um actually for women to dress in a way that's attractive to 1.00

00:45:29.560 men it's quite easy okay it doesn't it doesn't require anna winter to tell you how to do that

00:45:35.020 right okay you know you know um and so so there's something going on there now you know i ask about

00:45:42.700 this and i asked the question are there cases where where social norms essentially impose

00:45:48.580 collective costs which all of us would rather not bear individually okay but which are inescapable

00:45:56.420 simply because of this sigmoid curve that anybody who deviates pays a disproportionately high cost

00:46:02.180 i mean i've often so like in this case a woman that doesn't wear makeup for example

00:46:06.340 it makes yourself stand out

00:46:08.580 now I propose 0.99

00:46:09.360 which actually has some females of porn 1.00

00:46:12.000 I said that for Ogilvy we should have a Monday

00:46:14.340 Thursday dress code where we

00:46:16.500 just wear red boiler suits

00:46:18.340 because A we don't have to think about what we wear

00:46:20.520 B it makes the office look like the headquarters

00:46:22.740 of a James Bond villa which would be really

00:46:24.680 cool okay we could get a monorail

00:46:26.720 but also it would

00:46:28.620 mean that you know maybe Friday 0.99

00:46:29.880 people enjoy this shit but 0.99

00:46:32.180 I'll give you an I'm the only person 1.00

00:46:34.640 in the world who also wants these bloody cookery shows banned okay because they set the bar too 1.00

00:46:39.580 high all right so it used to be that basically if you invited some people around your house you

00:46:45.580 provided a tolerant amount of free booze and something to eat which could have been a pizza

00:46:49.940 right you were a host that was doing your job and you had a fantastic time because 90 of the

00:46:54.680 pleasure in such evenings isn't created by the food it's created by the company combined by the

00:46:59.760 drunkenness okay yeah right it's not really about you know i mean i can't remember what i ate at my

00:47:05.120 wedding i can't remember what i ate at loads and loads of things you know it's not about that

00:47:09.400 but these cookery shows essentially set the bar so ridiculously high for what counts as baking

00:47:16.520 what counts as cooking that we'll end up having far fewer sociable evenings because people simply

00:47:22.060 can't face it and i think there are loads of things there there's a great book which i advise

00:47:26.460 everybody read called the darwin economy by my friend robert h frank and he talks about what

00:47:31.780 you might call peacock's tail effects in human behavior where the competitive urge and emphatically

00:47:38.080 if you think about it it's all very well for economists to say that no no all that matters

00:47:41.980 is individual utility you know relative wealth doesn't matter patently we didn't evolve that way

00:47:47.440 there are lots and lots of things in life which depend actually of access to high quality partners

00:47:52.940 to an extent okay that's a relative question it's not an absolute one let's say i guess you live in

00:47:59.280 denmark where you automatically get a danish wife which is probably going to be okay okay i don't

00:48:04.080 know i don't know maybe maybe they reach something it's like ikea you know they've solved it you know

00:48:08.420 they've solved it they've solved the whole thing in a wonderfully democratic scandinavian way you

00:48:12.680 know actually that reminds me of a story i remember once when i was in my early 20s my dad got very

00:48:17.620 drunk one night and he said he went he asked me he went to me in frances are you single i went yes

00:48:23.260 and this was about 11 o'clock and he went but i've got one piece of advice for you and i'd go what

00:48:28.140 is it daddy went go to copenhagen in the summer and then he walked out the room very good advice

00:48:34.280 no i haven't been although apparently we're going i'm going to copenhagen with my girlfriend in

00:48:38.980 summer oh that's probably a mistake i think you left that a bit late yeah i think so but i mean

00:48:44.340 There are certain things where I think the urge to...

00:48:48.240 We have an innate urge to outdo other people, okay?

00:48:51.980 And, you know, I mean, that's what drives comedy.

00:48:54.260 That's what makes London comedy amazing

00:48:55.900 is precisely that the bar's set very high.

00:48:59.200 No one wants to completely diss this competitive urge

00:49:02.000 because it leads to the most spectacular thing. 1.00

00:49:04.980 But it also leads to a kind of collective stupidity. 1.00

00:49:07.780 And misery for some people. 1.00

00:49:08.920 And misery.

00:49:09.300 And also we tend possibly to...

00:49:12.300 If you look at universities, for example, we look at the, we do a benefit analysis, we don't really do a cost analysis. Are the worst 30% or 40% of people coming out of universities actually worse off because of the existence and preponderance of higher education?

00:49:30.520 We never measure this. We just go, gosh, look at these very successful people and they all went to university.

00:49:35.980 So university is brilliant. It's basically a factory for producing really successful people.

00:49:40.640 And we fail to ask the question, well, actually, what about the people who don't quite hack it?

00:49:45.920 Are they actually screwed? You have this bonkers system now where companies won't interview people who haven't got a 2-1.

00:49:53.000 So I met someone who had a 2-2 in maths from Cambridge and they couldn't get a job interview.

00:49:57.940 I said, trust me, okay, I've never met any mathematical problem

00:50:01.440 that couldn't be solved in business by someone with a tutu

00:50:04.480 in maths from Cambridge.

00:50:05.660 I said, if we do meet one, you'll know loads of people

00:50:07.580 who got a first, and you can ring them up and ask, right?

00:50:09.940 It's not a big deal, right?

00:50:12.280 So, you know, you got into Cambridge to do maths.

00:50:14.480 I think it's fair to say you're not kind of enumerated, right?

00:50:17.480 You kind of crossed my bar there, you know.

00:50:20.020 And so there is this thing which is that you've got to ask

00:50:25.260 the question about the first of all the the obsession with and i think the obsession with

00:50:31.180 tiny minutiae of social justice movement is actually a product of this competitive urge

00:50:36.280 that in order to show affiliation to a group the way you prove it's exactly like football i don't

00:50:42.440 i don't like football i think it's irrational okay sorry i think it's ridiculous i'm sorry

00:50:48.560 it's crazy right right this is rapidly becoming the most triggering podcast in this series ever 0.99

00:50:53.420 It's just stupid. 1.00

00:50:54.480 It's stupid. 1.00

00:50:55.640 I mean, it's just not, you know, it's not relevant, OK? 1.00

00:50:58.060 Now, bear in mind, there's a reason for that,

00:50:59.440 which is not that I don't like football.

00:51:01.020 It's that I grew up in the Severn Valley region

00:51:04.080 in the 1960s and 70s,

00:51:06.460 where essentially we were in the HTV West TV area, OK?

00:51:11.620 Now, the local football teams,

00:51:13.420 the nearest premiership team then was probably Aston Villa,

00:51:16.880 in fact, which was about 80 or 90 miles away or more.

00:51:20.240 The typical local news thing would say,

00:51:22.240 and another bad night for west country football fans city and rovers both lost and swindon could

00:51:28.940 only manage a draw okay so if you grew up listening to that it didn't really incentivize you to turn

00:51:34.060 up on the terraces and get involved but i've never understood it but just as people prove their

00:51:39.860 loyalty to a football team by engaging in ever more bizarre and ridiculous antics people will

00:51:45.540 you know essentially signal their adherence to a cause by doing the same thing and i think

00:51:52.620 i think it's a dangerous thing because actually it's self-defeating just as actually the first

00:51:58.340 people to adopt a technology can be a disaster for the technology you know if you see what i mean

00:52:03.840 if the people who adopt something are generally weird yeah and obsessive and keep ranting on

00:52:08.960 about it it's not actually encouraging to other people they just go clearly that's something for

00:52:13.380 weirdos i'm going to leave it leave it alone and so you know perfectly good intentions can get

00:52:18.380 distorted into something that's actually self-defeating in that way but it's very

00:52:22.540 interesting it's when you say that because you have people who advocate free speech and then

00:52:27.560 they get retweeted by katie hopkins yeah or tommy robinson and then people go see i told you this

00:52:33.640 was nonsense look who's supporting you yeah i mean i mean this is a bizarre one because it should be

00:52:40.780 perfectly possible for people

00:52:42.240 across the spectrum. And I think it's a bit

00:52:44.680 awkward for comedy, I've got to be honest about it.

00:52:47.020 Just comedy actually pretends

00:52:49.060 to be left wing.

00:52:51.260 But it isn't really.

00:52:53.000 Oh, we know.

00:52:55.120 Because at

00:52:56.660 some level, there is

00:52:58.440 always a degree

00:53:01.180 of mild

00:53:02.460 nastiness. 0.88

00:53:04.060 Of course, there always has to be a victim in the joke.

00:53:06.440 There has to be. I mean, victim is

00:53:08.700 extreme, but it's like

00:53:10.540 tickling according to the evolutionary psychologist which is a form of physical contact where it's

00:53:16.820 very clear from the contact from the context that no harm is intended okay so this theory um by the

00:53:23.960 i think it's a colorado academic that actually humors essentially verbal tickling okay so there's

00:53:30.120 always something if you know if you think about it very few comedians will stand up and go you know

00:53:34.760 I voted Tory, my tax is outrageous.

00:53:37.720 Who would be the...

00:53:39.120 But equally, they very frequently adopt personas,

00:53:44.400 which are, you know, slightly, you know,

00:53:46.800 patently you have to adopt a persona, the pub landlord.

00:53:50.960 Or Ricky Gervais, actually, as Brent, okay,

00:53:55.600 which are kind of everyman personas,

00:53:58.380 which are a bit right-wing.

00:54:01.520 And it's complicated,

00:54:03.200 But the free speech thing has caught people slightly in an awkward position.

00:54:11.000 Because I think comedy, patently, it's an existential threat to comedy.

00:54:14.940 If you have this problem where Chris Rock refuses to play the American college circuit 0.98

00:54:20.540 because it's just not worth the shit, I heard this and I'm thinking, 0.99

00:54:25.940 lucky bastards, you're at university and you get a visit from Chris Rock, okay? 1.00

00:54:30.640 I was thinking, shit, you know, okay? 1.00

00:54:33.200 Now, once you get to that point, it's basically impossible, OK, because it can't, I mean, it can't because it's there to point out to some extent. 0.98

00:54:45.820 OK, so comedy is essentially hostile to what you might call the New Jerusalem project of the left, which is the idea that it's much, much easier to live in an imaginary future than it is to live in a messy present.

00:54:58.240 And comedy points out the fact that this life is messy.

00:55:01.360 okay there is a conflict between what we would like to think of ourselves and how we really are

00:55:06.940 okay um there are you know widespread absurdities in kind of human behavior and human emotion

00:55:13.300 and so on and comedy is there to actually point out the imperfect ability of things

00:55:19.180 whereas to some extent the worst of the left are actually essentially you know start with uh

00:55:25.260 You know, start with weird New Jerusalem dream world, basically go bonkers wherever current world differs from that world, have no discussion about the paths necessary to get from A to B, but simply get very, very angry and upset.

00:55:40.480 Now, that's kind of problematic because it's also hugely problematic because context is really, really important.

00:55:49.360 So I would imagine, OK, within a military platoon, there is unbelievable abuse of every kind heaped on each other.

00:56:00.580 OK, you know. Now, would you want to police within, you know, a group of 20 or 30 crank soldiers?

00:56:07.060 Would you actually want to police their language in that way?

00:56:10.660 Well, the truth of the matter is what you say to the other person is, A, it's actually weirdly a perverse sign of affection.

00:56:16.200 because it's exactly like aposomatic signalling in animals.

00:56:22.320 You know this thing where poisonous animals

00:56:24.280 tend to be brightly coloured, right? 0.99

00:56:25.740 So ladybirds, they spend all their life on a fucking leaf, right? 1.00

00:56:29.500 So you'd think that green might be a good kind of fashion choice, right? 0.99

00:56:33.740 No. Red and black. Why?

00:56:36.120 Mimicrate.

00:56:37.140 It's actually the opposite of it.

00:56:38.520 It's actually essentially saying I must be inedible

00:56:42.740 because if I weren't inedible for some reason,

00:56:45.280 there's no way I could get away with this badass coloration.

00:56:48.280 It's probably why you wear jewelry in South Central Los Angeles.

00:56:52.100 Now, it's not just to prove what you can afford,

00:56:54.380 it's to prove what you can get away with.

00:56:55.900 Now, I, as vice chairman of an advertising agency,

00:56:58.360 could probably afford quite a large gold necklace.

00:57:02.640 There are large parts of America where I don't think I'd safely wear it

00:57:05.920 because I get about 50 feet.

00:57:06.940 The fact that you can wear that stuff in public

00:57:09.020 basically proves that you're a badass.

00:57:12.680 I think you should.

00:57:13.980 In fact, ladybirds, by the way, if you eat them or if birds eat them,

00:57:16.940 they secrete a disgusting chemical from their knees. 0.94

00:57:20.340 Now, aposomatic signaling is basically I show that I'm something

00:57:23.640 because if I weren't that thing, I couldn't get away with this.

00:57:27.240 And actually, we prove we're friends, particularly Brits.

00:57:30.460 Americans sometimes get this wrong by being rude to our friends. 0.97

00:57:33.540 Oh, yes, absolutely.

00:57:34.080 The person you abuse is patently your mate because if you weren't my mate,

00:57:37.280 we couldn't get away with this level of banter and badinage.

00:57:40.340 So there's an aposomatic quality to rudeness.

00:57:42.520 Now, in a military group, all they really care about is, 0.99

00:57:45.020 I don't give a shit whether you're rude about my face, 0.98

00:57:47.400 my origins, whatever. 1.00

00:57:48.840 Would you die for me?

00:57:50.660 That's the central question.

00:57:52.600 And if you want to foster that kind of, you know,

00:57:56.500 I mean, it will probably be progress, okay,

00:57:59.960 if in 20 or 30 years mild homophobic banter takes place 0.58

00:58:05.080 between you and gay mates, okay, in Britain. 0.80

00:58:09.440 That would actually probably be a mark of progress.

00:58:11.260 I'm not sure that's going to happen.

00:58:12.180 I'm not sure it's desirable, because you can make all sorts of arguments about it.

00:58:16.280 But nonetheless, the fact that you can do that, it's much, much more complicated than taking everything that people say completely literally.

00:58:24.820 Because the whole, I mean, speech is completely weird in this respect anyway, okay?

00:58:29.160 The way we interpret words entirely depends on the words either side of them.

00:58:33.360 No word has a set meaning.

00:58:35.340 Depends on tone of voice in many cases, which is why, I mean, I'm always very worried when I see a case in the paper

00:58:40.420 where someone's words are written down, okay?

00:58:46.040 Someone is aggrieved because they claim their boss was da-da-da-da-da-da, okay?

00:58:50.700 Now, I'll give you a classic case of this,

00:58:54.820 which is that I think there was a case where someone had a bank,

00:58:58.340 they were travelling on a private plane,

00:59:00.080 and the mails suggested that she serve them drinks on the thing, okay?

00:59:04.520 Now, bear in mind this was like 1992, okay?

00:59:08.200 it's pretty iffy when you read it on paper it was probably pretty iffy in reality there's a 10%

00:59:15.020 chance if well-intentioned and the two people were actually friends that's exactly what would

00:59:21.480 happen amongst a bunch of mixed-gender friends okay you know so it's very very difficult to 1.00

00:59:29.220 judge speech in print because the twinkle in the eye can completely change the meaning of what's

00:59:34.840 said. Well, interestingly enough, nowadays, quite often when you see a story like that

00:59:38.960 where somebody said something offensive, even the content of what they said is not

00:59:42.660 reported. So you will often see an article where you are told that somebody

00:59:46.680 made an offensive comment, and you're not even given the opportunity to

00:59:50.380 see the comment. No, which really bothers me, the hell out of me, because what the

00:59:54.640 hell? The real word there, which you've got to watch out for, is

00:59:58.520 inappropriate, okay? I mean,

01:00:01.660 inappropriate is a subjective comment and it's also a contextual comment okay and so you're

01:00:09.720 absolutely right about that or also i've noticed increasing things saying you know performed a

01:00:14.020 sexual act okay now yeah yeah i mean you know that that can you know and in a more puritanical

01:00:22.160 i mean i noticed stephen fry who's basically a bit of a lefty lovey um but he's saying he's he's

01:00:28.500 Well, what are you spotting about this, which I think is fair, is that there's a degree of this which is Puritanism in disguise.

01:00:35.680 It's a kind of it's a really unpleasant, weird Puritanism that's actually taken on a political rather than a religious mantle.

01:00:46.820 But. The you know, I think that the what you might call the general fun brigade, the bon viveur brigade have got to fight this cause,

01:00:56.300 because at some level it's going to lead human relations

01:00:59.820 to become deeply miserable and constrained and nervous.

01:01:05.500 I mean, to that extent.

01:01:06.900 I mean, it's worrying.

01:01:08.780 But the other point is that, you know, I mean,

01:01:10.920 what you say, jokes are context dependent.

01:01:13.460 I don't think free speech is context dependent.

01:01:15.340 I think you've just got to accept the whole lot.

01:01:17.480 I mean, Nazi Pug was an interesting case in point, wasn't it? 0.93

01:01:20.360 Yes, absolutely.

01:01:21.540 The fact that he was, well, they said that context wasn't important.

01:01:24.260 No, and the point is that that was taken off YouTube, okay?

01:01:29.580 I mean, I can find examples of it.

01:01:32.220 Now, I first read about it, and I thought, 1.00

01:01:35.700 this guy's a total shit. 0.99

01:01:37.120 You know, I'm not totally sorry that he is being prosecuted. 1.00

01:01:40.880 When you actually see it, okay,

01:01:43.200 he explains the context in which it's done,

01:01:45.520 which is his girlfriend basically thinks his pug can do no wrong. 1.00

01:01:50.520 Yeah.

01:01:50.880 So it's a brilliant exercise in testing herself,

01:01:53.980 her delusions, her punk delusions.

01:01:56.500 He trains the punk to act Nazi, okay?

01:01:59.480 Well, that's kind of funny, right?

01:02:02.000 Yeah, it's definitely funny.

01:02:03.100 You know, I mean, and, you know, it's patently clear that,

01:02:09.540 I mean, you can always get things out of context, okay,

01:02:12.360 which is, you know, I mean, you know,

01:02:14.440 Twitter's dangerous for that reason, which is that,

01:02:16.620 I mean the humorous writer

01:02:19.740 I've just forgotten his name

01:02:21.780 it's the Sage of Baltimore he was called

01:02:23.980 and someone will remember

01:02:25.300 I'll remember in a second

01:02:26.800 but he always said that there should be

01:02:28.660 as well as italics in writing

01:02:30.580 there should be another typeset

01:02:32.820 which slopes the opposite way

01:02:34.180 which is called ironics

01:02:35.620 which is to convey what you're saying

01:02:38.880 and Twitter really needs a kind of

01:02:41.420 you know an ironics typeset

01:02:43.900 it needs italics and ironics

01:02:45.960 because I've occasionally made gags,

01:02:48.160 which I can quite understand if you completely misunderstood them.

01:02:51.780 Yes.

01:02:53.360 You know, it would seem offensive.

01:02:58.660 And, you know, I'm occasionally making the joke in front of a,

01:03:01.240 basically to an imagined audience of a few friends

01:03:04.060 who will get to the fact that it's absurd.

01:03:07.120 And tongue in cheek.

01:03:07.980 And tongue in cheek.

01:03:09.120 The other 50,000 people have no way of knowing this.

01:03:12.700 um so that i mean that's a that's a kind of weird one um and but um yeah i mean i i think

01:03:20.860 ultimately you have to you have to treat free speech as a line in the sand unless there is

01:03:25.960 some incitement to physical unpleasantness okay i i accept that there are cases where speech can

01:03:33.280 be used but the other the other problem is of course that the i mean in economics interestingly

01:03:39.480 they've never possibly wrongly but they've never accepted what you might call psychic costs

01:03:45.980 in economic models the reason being that it's too easy to exaggerate them

01:03:51.700 so you know if i'm to be harmed okay physically then patently there'll be some evidence of my

01:03:58.800 being harmed but secondly um it's unlikely that i fake that harm by bashing myself in the face

01:04:05.000 repeatedly that does happen okay um on the other hand it's in our interests as if you look at game

01:04:12.040 theory to exaggerate the extent to which things upset us but this is a really interesting case

01:04:16.500 okay so here's an interesting case which is a parallel my suspicion is okay that actually

01:04:22.980 a third of the people in the heathrow flight path okay actually like the planes okay right okay now

01:04:31.740 However, if you're seeking to gain for the group from Heathrow expansion,

01:04:37.920 if you're seeking to get from that group a general as much –

01:04:43.180 if you want that group to get as much compensation as possible

01:04:46.280 for the disturbance caused, okay, me going in and saying,

01:04:49.580 bloody marvellous, you know, 787, full flaps down, coming in low, gorgeous.

01:04:54.720 The other thing, by the way, I don't know if you noticed this,

01:04:56.520 which is that people who live in West London

01:04:58.120 very quickly just black out the planes completely.

01:05:01.260 Yeah, they do.

01:05:01.900 They just become, I used to teach near Gatwick, and you just...

01:05:04.700 You just don't notice.

01:05:05.860 Yeah.

01:05:06.120 I went to a garden party once, somewhere like,

01:05:08.620 I think it was somewhere like Acton, okay?

01:05:10.620 And we're standing there going, you know, blah, blah, blah,

01:05:12.540 glass of red, we went to Tuscany last year,

01:05:14.560 we thought we'd try Umbria this year. 0.98

01:05:16.360 And there's something there, fucking hell, what's that? 0.96

01:05:18.980 Because there's 747 Cameras alone. 0.97

01:05:20.820 The people who are local basically didn't notice, okay?

01:05:24.280 You know, and now anyway, but no one's going to tell the truth

01:05:28.280 under those conditions about how much they care about the planes.

01:05:30.900 because they're going to exaggerate the degree

01:05:32.920 to which the planes upset them.

01:05:35.080 And I always wondered,

01:05:35.860 I thought there's a really interesting experiment,

01:05:37.380 which is if you made the deal slightly different.

01:05:42.000 So you said to West London,

01:05:42.880 okay, if you're on the flight path for New Heathrow, right,

01:05:46.260 we're going to give people living in Acton,

01:05:48.560 people who are infected by the runways,

01:05:51.160 really fantastic treatment at Heathrow.

01:05:52.980 You're going to get a car park

01:05:53.960 and you can park there for up to, you know,

01:05:56.080 three weeks for a pound a day.

01:05:57.900 You're going to get your own lounge, right?

01:05:59.720 You know, we're basically the West London people who suffer from this airport, when they get to use this airport, will get treated like bloody royalty, right?

01:06:08.980 My hunch is that about half the people will go, actually, I don't really mind the plane.

01:06:14.300 Yeah.

01:06:15.160 But if you have a case where, if you think about it, there's no upside to them except compensation.

01:06:20.300 No upside to Heathrow expansion, really, OK?

01:06:23.460 The upside is collective.

01:06:25.200 The pain is individual.

01:06:26.480 then you have a very clear case

01:06:28.660 where it's hugely in the interest of those people

01:06:31.340 to exaggerate the extent to which planes annoy them

01:06:34.060 because that's how they get the best payout.

01:06:36.640 Yeah.

01:06:38.420 So I think, you know, I think that there's a danger here

01:06:42.540 which is that, you know, one of the problems

01:06:44.120 about people claiming offence is that, you know,

01:06:46.360 there are some people who have no sense of humour, by the way.

01:06:49.260 Are we going...

01:06:50.060 Just as, OK, you can't serve a restaurant,

01:06:52.300 you can't operate a restaurant

01:06:53.420 which serves only food to which nobody is allergic.

01:06:58.320 And this is Nassim Taleb's minority rule point,

01:07:02.080 which is that a small group of extreme people

01:07:05.980 can exert a very large amount of market power.

01:07:08.780 Because if the vast majority of people are happy with A and B,

01:07:13.100 but there's a small group that are only happy with B,

01:07:16.880 you end up only serving up B,

01:07:19.440 because it's the one thing that everybody is happy with,

01:07:22.200 lowest common denominator.

01:07:23.420 It's like the blood group thing, isn't it?

01:07:25.180 Is it O or AB blood, the universal donor,

01:07:29.140 which you can give to everybody, okay?

01:07:31.500 So an example I always give of this,

01:07:32.920 which I gave to Nassim Taleb,

01:07:34.460 is actually blokes, I think,

01:07:37.280 prefer spirits and beer to wine.

01:07:39.380 I think wine's bloody overrated to drink.

01:07:42.280 Okay, totally overrated nonsense, okay?

01:07:45.220 But if you have a mixed-gender party,

01:07:47.740 there's a very simple fact,

01:07:48.640 which is about 30% of women won't drink beer. 1.00

01:07:51.800 And they won't drink cider.

01:07:53.420 and a lot of them won't drink spirits.

01:07:57.860 Gin and tonic Pimms maybe break the...

01:08:00.200 They actually break the gender bar a bit, but, you know...

01:08:04.600 Or a Baileys.

01:08:06.060 Well, that's a male. That's a possible male.

01:08:08.680 I agree, actually. We all love it, don't we, actually?

01:08:11.040 Yeah, everyone loves a Baileys.

01:08:11.880 Everyone loves it. Right, OK.

01:08:14.680 Bit of candour there.

01:08:18.000 But when you...

01:08:19.360 There's always the potential that a small group of people,

01:08:22.080 through their own intolerance

01:08:23.960 can essentially destroy the ecosystem for everybody else.

01:08:29.760 So you end up serving wine

01:08:31.540 because a certain number of women won't drink beer. 1.00

01:08:34.360 Now, there are only about 15% of the overall group of the party,

01:08:38.340 but it means that you can't have a party where you just serve beer.

01:08:41.460 Men basically will drink anything. 0.81

01:08:45.060 Broadly speaking, I draw the line at Sangria 0.75

01:08:47.940 and that bloody Greek stuff, Retzina. 1.00

01:08:50.640 Basically, I'll drink anything. 0.68

01:08:52.080 okay so as a result you have a mixed gender party red white okay and therefore the majority end up

01:08:59.080 drinking something they don't really want to drink simply because a small group of people

01:09:03.580 won't drink what they really want to drink and you'll drink what the other people so you know

01:09:07.480 this is what you're saying is happening in comedy which is if you had imagine you had a restaurant

01:09:11.980 where if any ingredient to which one person in the world was allergic was taken off the menu of the

01:09:18.120 restaurant now obviously you can have you can serve special dishes to people i'm you know

01:09:21.760 gluten intolerant i've got a nut allergy okay right okay you can serve special dishes what

01:09:30.720 you can't do and basically a comedy club is where you serve the same food to everybody

01:09:35.360 you can't only serve food to which nobody's allergic for the simple reason that the amount

01:09:41.300 number of foodstuffs you can probably serve becomes limited to about four and so your urge

01:09:46.540 to offend nobody ends up essentially creating something so anodyne that the the other 95 percent

01:09:52.160 of people basically end up cheated and getting angry and getting angry and you know we've got

01:09:58.400 to fight that because you can't you can't have i mean it's very interesting if you look at it in

01:10:04.060 some interesting cases i mean the seems one the seems arguments is uh all carbonated drinks in

01:10:09.400 the u.s are kosher okay now this makes perfect sense by the way but only about 0.5 maybe one

01:10:14.300 percent of the american population really follow kosher dietary laws but it's not worth the coca

01:10:19.240 cola company producing separate kosher coke for a tiny share of the market who wouldn't drink

01:10:24.500 ordinary coke so it's much easier just to make you know similarly you know if you have five percent

01:10:30.060 of school children in a london school who will only eat halal the whole kitchen goes halal

01:10:37.320 now in that case by the way it's a bit tough on Sikhs i don't know if you knew that because Sikhs

01:10:42.260 technically aren't supposed to eat halal food

01:10:44.240 for some reason. But Sikhs seem pretty 1.00

01:10:46.220 chill and they basically go, yeah, whatever.

01:10:50.880 But nonetheless,

01:10:52.460 what you might have is

01:10:53.920 an intransigence of a minority 0.95

01:10:56.500 can end up driving

01:10:58.140 the majority behaviour. And I think if we're

01:11:00.200 not careful, things like the BBC,

01:11:03.020 which are hugely sensitive

01:11:04.560 and oversensitive

01:11:05.660 to causing offence.

01:11:11.000 I mean, I watch most comedy from the 70s, 80s, 90s,

01:11:16.180 and about half the time I'm thinking they could never have done this.

01:11:19.680 Now, in some cases, actually, I wish they hadn't.

01:11:22.520 An interesting example of that would be about a third,

01:11:25.860 maybe a quarter, of the content of Little Britain.

01:11:29.640 Oh, that's interesting.

01:11:30.740 There are some of them...

01:11:33.740 Some of the pieces on Little Britain strike me now

01:11:38.080 as being actually crueler than they're funny, OK?

01:11:42.620 Or, you know, they're a particularly sort of extreme stereotype

01:11:45.920 in some shape.

01:11:47.420 Most of it's very, very good still, OK?

01:11:49.640 But there's a hell of a lot of stuff which I still enjoy,

01:11:52.180 still think is brilliant and would still defend to the hilt,

01:11:55.560 which, funnily enough, I think the makers of Little Britain

01:11:58.500 said the same thing themselves.

01:12:00.640 Now, what happens, though, if just like we can never see bands

01:12:03.960 which happen to appear on TV with Jimmy Savile, OK?

01:12:07.420 So all those past examples of Top of the Pops with Jimmy on them can never be seen.

01:12:15.520 Now, that's going to include a few band performances.

01:12:19.680 If we get to the point where, in other words, any comedic sketch from the 1970s, 80s or whatever,

01:12:25.640 which would be deemed offensive to a small group of people, can no longer be shown.

01:12:30.180 I mean, if it's half hot mum, for example, involved a character in blackface. 0.75

01:12:36.000 Yes.

01:12:37.420 Oh, interestingly, he actually spoke fluent Urdu

01:12:40.120 because he'd grown up in India,

01:12:41.220 but he played the Indian punk of Wallah,

01:12:44.360 I think, if my memory's right.

01:12:46.140 Now, that's clearly an absolute no-no,

01:12:47.820 rebroadcasting that programme.

01:12:49.600 You can't rebroadcast the Dukes of Hazzard.

01:12:52.320 Now, it's mystery, it's comedy in a sense.

01:12:55.840 But because there's a Confederate flag on the car?

01:13:00.180 Yeah.

01:13:01.160 I mean, you know, this is kind of weird.

01:13:04.620 And equally, I mean, I think that Kevin Spacey should be punished by proper legal process and then be allowed to rehabilitate his film career.

01:13:14.640 OK, I'm not happy with a, you know, first of all, I'm not happy with a talent being completely destroyed without some sort of legal recourse.

01:13:23.680 He should be prosecuted and punished.

01:13:25.820 And he should face prosecuting in a court of law.

01:13:29.860 But one of the points of prison, I mean, you've got to remember, if you look at prison or very large fines or whatever it may be, or community service, okay, is that actually, okay, the general view is, one, you do it to protect the public.

01:13:44.960 You lock people up to protect the public.

01:13:46.580 Secondly, you do it as a deterrent.

01:13:49.220 Thirdly, you might do it literally as a punishment.

01:13:51.980 you might argue there's a kind of you know kind of eugenic component to it although i don't think

01:13:58.940 anybody would say that no i don't think no but i mean you know you i mean nobody nobody would

01:14:06.380 dream of saying that for a second but another reason another reason for the justice system is

01:14:10.240 it you know it basically says once you've done the punishment that's it over you know there is

01:14:16.520 no necessary reason why you should not be able to actually re-enter society in some way.

01:14:23.720 Now, if you end up with this kind of innuendo war, probably the most extreme case was that

01:14:29.580 happening with, for example, what was it, Lake Wobegon guy, Garrison Keillor, where

01:14:39.060 essentially some weird allegation surfaces, which he barely remembers and is very unclear,

01:14:46.520 then, you know, there is something slightly dangerous here

01:14:50.400 because apart from anything else,

01:14:51.560 you are giving people extraordinary power

01:14:53.880 simply to throw mud in the hope of some of it sticking.

01:15:01.220 And I'm not comfortable.

01:15:02.760 I mean, I'm not, you know,

01:15:05.000 I think that this business where you essentially,

01:15:09.120 you signal your dedication to the cause quite rightly,

01:15:12.760 and I understand why people want to do it,

01:15:14.260 and I think most of the social justice movements

01:15:16.420 It's entirely well-intentioned.

01:15:18.140 I think the questions about gender inequality

01:15:20.700 are really intelligent questions that should be asked,

01:15:24.200 accompanied by the question, why?

01:15:26.020 Not accompanied by the assumption, it's the patriarchy.

01:15:29.860 Maybe it is partly the patriarchy.

01:15:31.720 Maybe it's exclusively the patriarchy.

01:15:33.460 But we ought to find out what it is,

01:15:35.420 because otherwise we'll end up with a cure

01:15:39.020 that's worse than the disease.

01:15:40.160 If your diagnosis of a problem is badly wrong,

01:15:45.080 you end up you know with poisoning people with medicine essentially yeah and um so

01:15:51.500 so but the the urge to signal it basically leads to a kind of insanity which i don't think is

01:15:57.600 helpful i mean i'd like to see wider campaigning for vegetarianism as i was saying earlier

01:16:02.860 in that one of the things we ought to think about is that technology i mean just as i i'd argue for

01:16:08.200 different patterns of work you know at some level we've got to aim for a four-day week okay we've

01:16:13.060 to stop aiming for annualized GDP growth, which is easy to aim for because it's a gradual

01:16:17.600 measure. And we've got to take the big leap and go, okay, our aim for Britain in 10 years

01:16:22.280 time is to have some form of four-day week where many people either only work four days

01:16:26.940 a week, maybe four longer days, possible, okay, or can work from home with some degree

01:16:32.040 of flexibility for one day a week. And part of the purpose of that is to make it easier.

01:16:37.340 If you think about it, when women enter the workforce, the amount of leisure in a married 1.00

01:16:42.320 household dropped by about 40 hours when i say leisure discretionary time they're not leisure

01:16:47.880 okay partly enabled by technology partly enabled by the washing machine etc but the amount of

01:16:53.600 discretionary time in a you know for a married couple fell by about 40 hours i think we should

01:16:58.480 try and get some of that time back actually by reducing the working hours for everybody yeah i

01:17:03.680 think we have to look at either changing working patterns or reducing working hours or simply

01:17:08.340 giving people the option to do so because what i said about this you know this taxi driver problem

01:17:12.800 with credit cards is it's lots and lots of people i think i wanted to instill a thing in ogilvy where

01:17:19.640 everybody offered a pay rise whenever they received a pay rise that's very awesome um but they would

01:17:25.560 be given the automatic option of taking half of it as half of it as money half of it as holiday

01:17:29.940 so a four percent pay rise you could take basically as two percent cash pay rise and an

01:17:36.160 extra week's holiday okay and there'd be a limit to that i don't know people who didn't turn up at

01:17:44.140 all um but um but the point about that would be that at the moment there's no mechanism

01:17:50.680 available except by one being incredibly valuable so they can't do without you which happens with

01:17:57.280 some software guys really really talented software guys usually will negotiate some sort of flexible

01:18:02.960 hour thing but there isn't a mechanism for for normal people to actually even state their

01:18:08.920 preference for the ratio of work to leisure and um you know it's worth it's worth remembering that

01:18:14.600 um you know it'd be very easy to make that purely a a feminist campaign but there are tons and tons 1.00

01:18:21.860 of men who'd probably be asking the same question absolutely it's very very interesting because

01:18:27.140 actually you know you think well how much of work that we get done in the workplace is productive

01:18:31.760 I mean, my theory is the Internet has actually made useful work 20% more productive, but at the cost of growing bureaucracy by about 100%.

01:18:43.100 So ask covering activities, fatuous presenteeism, you know, pointless emails copied to people unnecessarily, unwillingness to take decisions oneself without engaging five other people.

01:18:55.680 It's actually created more bad behaviors than it's that it's that it's solved.

01:19:00.260 actually we we are probably running out of time so the one question we always like to ask our

01:19:06.260 guests before we let them go and by the way this has been absolutely fascinating i think we've

01:19:09.940 covered about half a percent of the things we wanted to talk to you about because we haven't

01:19:14.360 even got into the golden skate state killer yet that's an interesting one i mean the whole familial

01:19:19.280 dna thing which is i'm not sure by the way i'm not familiar with the story extraordinary cold

01:19:26.100 case in the u.s of a guy who was it seems was variously the visalia ransacker in the i think

01:19:31.940 the early 70s then became the east area rapist in sacramento and then went on to become essentially

01:19:38.420 the original night stalker in other parts of california who says men can't multitask

01:19:43.020 well he wasn't he did actually he had a separate period so he did do a bit of he did combine them

01:19:50.280 a bit but no he was actually slightly modern he seemed to sort of slightly focus on one or the

01:19:54.040 other but um uh this is a case where very very interestingly uh first of all it was dna which

01:20:00.420 revealed it was the same person responsible for all three which freaked people out secondly

01:20:04.480 unbelievably lucky in uh or or skilled in getting away for it as long as he did partly because he

01:20:10.520 seems to have stopped in the 80s or we assume that but the other interesting thing is that weird

01:20:15.980 thing of familial dna which is you could go and post to an ancestry site just in the hope of

01:20:21.100 finding out who your great-great-grandfather was.

01:20:23.360 And the next thing you know is your second cousin's doing a seven stretch

01:20:26.260 in the nonce's wing at Wakefield Prison.

01:20:28.820 It's a bit of a weird thought in terms of the modern world

01:20:32.060 and the strangeness of its consequences, I suppose.

01:20:35.560 And, of course, we're very bad at predicting.

01:20:37.560 We can predict first-order consequences sort of quite well sometimes.

01:20:42.320 Actually, no, I'm not even sure we're good at that.

01:20:43.900 I think we would have predicted from the internet now

01:20:48.260 that people would have moved out of cities.

01:20:51.100 I mean, certainly in the early, you know, mid 90s, the prediction was people will move out of cities gradually and they will go and work in tele cottages and they will, you know, you know, essentially there was going to be this huge dispersal of people.

01:21:03.140 It's created completely the opposite, because, of course, the more people you're connected to, the more you need to be able to visit a megalopolis in order to meet them face by face to face.

01:21:11.400 Yeah. So the world's airlines have weirdly done very well out of the Internet because to some extent an email is what you might call a is the first stage sample of an air trip.

01:21:24.300 Yeah. So our ability to predict what something will bring is really, really terrible.

01:21:30.560 So on that very note, what do you think we're not talking about now that we ought to be talking about?

01:21:36.140 What do you see coming in the future that we ought to be interested in, excited about, concerned about?

01:21:41.740 And how do we solve some of these problems that we've been discussing today?

01:21:44.840 I think we need a greater level of reflection, self-reflection in terms of our motivations.

01:21:54.380 And one of the things I would be interested in is a discussion of why people really do the things we do.

01:22:09.680 Because this discovery that essentially we do things following certain instincts and then we post-rationalize or confabulate bullshit explanations for them.

01:22:20.120 uh that strikes me as just such an interesting and important insight into humanity in that

01:22:26.600 one of the questions it raises okay is that i'm not sure if you want people to adopt more pro-social

01:22:32.800 or green behavior i'm not sure the right mechanism is actual conspicuous altruism so if you look at

01:22:39.620 if you look at the progress in hygiene um then life expectancy was hugely improved because

01:22:46.460 people's bodily cleanliness and people's level of home sanitation proved dramatically if you look

01:22:52.800 at the ads from that period the ads generally don't say use pear soap and help prevent a cholera

01:22:57.280 outbreak they actually talk about darwinian things like i mean uh always the bridesmaid never the

01:23:03.200 bride is actually a line from a listerine commercial okay they use huge sort of fear of

01:23:08.140 singleness fear of you know of desertion status and sexual attractiveness were used in huge

01:23:15.480 quantities to get people to clean their homes in the same way i don't think you'll get people to

01:23:21.460 adopt say more environmental behavior by appeals to polar bears and appeals to altruism because i

01:23:28.040 think that kind of signaling doesn't scale yeah i think it's a peculiar kind of signaling it's

01:23:34.240 worth remembering you see that there are large numbers of status games which only the rich can

01:23:38.180 play so if you turn up to the oscars in a prius right well you're a hollywood megastar patently

01:23:45.400 obvious you could have afforded to turn up in any car you like so your decision to turn up in a

01:23:49.660 Prius is a choice not a compromise okay and you can therefore signal your care for the environment

01:23:54.460 by choosing to turn up in a you know a modest car okay just as likewise if you're the lead singer

01:24:01.980 in a rock band you don't have to practice fantastic hygiene or wear very fashionable clothes

01:24:07.420 the reason is you signal exactly like that aposematic signaling you signal what you can

01:24:12.280 get away with i'm in other words so sexy by dint of being a lead singer or guitarist that i can

01:24:17.340 actually still be attractive without making even the most basic effort around bodily hygiene okay 0.94

01:24:22.820 so that kind of signaling drives a lot of behavior but it doesn't always scale because

01:24:28.500 you know if you're the mayor of london you turn up to work on a bicycle it's a choice and it's

01:24:32.820 a signal and it's a status marker if you work at um pizza express and you turn up on a bicycle

01:24:38.840 it means you couldn't afford a car and so understanding those things in terms of how

01:24:45.220 we may need to solve the world's problems by very oblique means ultimately people will end up buying

01:24:50.820 electric cars because they're fucking cool yeah yeah being actually honest and this is where it

01:24:56.900 all i think we can wrap this thing up comedy behavioral science evolutionary psychology

01:25:01.980 the capacity to be cynically honest about our own true nature okay is probably necessary

01:25:12.300 to the solution of quite a lot of things and one thing that bothers me i mentioned the fashion

01:25:16.480 question okay now imagine how weird it would be right if men had something which bear in mind okay

01:25:23.800 fashion and beauty products three trillion dollars plus a year spent in the world more than the world

01:25:28.840 spends on education right okay that's a depressing statistic now what i'm saying is imagine if there

01:25:34.520 were a male equivalent to this i've asked this question okay so okay where where there's a

01:25:38.860 women's clothes shop now every single place of the women's clothes shop there was a shop selling

01:25:42.580 drones okay and i said things to my wife like i've got andreas's wedding on saturday so i'll need to

01:25:48.260 buy a new drone yeah pretty quickly someone would go well that's ridiculous this has got out of hand

01:25:52.780 you know we're spending three trillion a year on these drones and it's just basically for male you 0.94

01:25:57.760 know weird masturbatory obsession with being able to fly things around and gadgetry okay or like you 0.74

01:26:04.000 know if hornby was you know like you know the louis vuitton for guys right okay this would be

01:26:09.460 really weird okay but there are certain things which because we're trapped by them we're completely

01:26:14.080 blind to the weirdness i think the travel industry has gone whack okay i don't think there's any

01:26:19.420 correlation now maybe i can only say this because i'm kind of rich and because i've been on some

01:26:23.780 exotic holidays but i don't think looking back there's much of a correlation between how far i

01:26:28.420 travel how much it costs and how good a time i have i think if you go off with a few mates to

01:26:33.260 margate right you can have a fantastic weekend and you can actually have a fairly shit time

01:26:39.180 go to machu picchu oh absolutely the best stag do i ever went on we went to butlins

01:26:43.940 it was great it was genuinely the most fun i've ever had on a stag do no actually the best wedding

01:26:49.820 I went to was in a village hall.

01:26:51.220 Similarly, I was being careful about saying that

01:26:53.020 because seven of the eight people

01:26:54.960 who invited me to a wedding

01:26:55.900 and I got to be going, 1.00

01:26:56.720 fucking bastard, he drank our champagne. 1.00

01:26:58.920 But actually the correlation between 1.00

01:27:00.180 how much you spend and how good a time it is

01:27:01.960 is not good.

01:27:03.100 So the question is,

01:27:03.880 I mean, I had an audience in the Ogilvy Theatre,

01:27:07.940 about 150 people, 0.99

01:27:09.820 and they're typical bloody millennials.

01:27:14.240 How many people have been to Machu Picchu? 0.96

01:27:17.880 I've never been, I'm concerned.

01:27:18.900 how many people have been to Machu Picchu

01:27:20.840 versus how many people have been to Lincoln Cathedral, right?

01:27:24.160 And the ratio was like five or six to one.

01:27:27.400 Now, I'm not dissing Machu Picchu, 0.99

01:27:30.520 it's a pile of fucking old stones on the top of a hill. 0.98

01:27:32.900 Yeah, you're not dissing it at all, right, no. 0.98

01:27:35.680 Lincoln Cathedral is a spectacular location

01:27:39.440 with a spectacular building.

01:27:41.080 It's an absolutely triumphal achievement.

01:27:43.300 And you can get there on the train in a day, right?

01:27:47.300 Now, I'm not saying you're wrong to go to Machu Picchu, OK?

01:27:51.260 I am saying that having been to Machu Picchu 0.98

01:27:53.140 when you haven't been to Lincoln Cathedral is fucking weird. 0.96

01:27:56.240 And the only way to explain it is basically, let's be honest, 0.98

01:27:59.680 my hunch would be that it's easier to pull

01:28:02.780 if you've done a year off, isn't it?

01:28:04.760 I always remember John O'Farrell.

01:28:06.260 Have you ever read Things Can Only Get Bitter,

01:28:08.060 which is like 11 miserable years in the life of a Labour supporter?

01:28:11.980 He was the guy at university who hadn't done a year off.

01:28:15.600 I hadn't done a year on, right?

01:28:17.020 No, I didn't either.

01:28:17.680 I didn't, OK.

01:28:18.480 And you had all these twats going, 1.00

01:28:20.260 yeah, of course, you've never really tasted bay leaves

01:28:22.820 until you've had them in Thailand, right?

01:28:24.640 You had all these twats doing this. 1.00

01:28:26.400 And John O'Farrell said, all I could say

01:28:28.060 if I was trying to chat up girls was,

01:28:29.620 do you realise that if you only fire 21 times

01:28:32.080 in Space Invaders, when the spaceship comes across,

01:28:34.840 you get a higher bonus, right?

01:28:37.860 To a certain type of woman, that would be... 1.00

01:28:39.280 Largely, we're travelling, we're kind of travelling,

01:28:41.340 basically, to show off.

01:28:42.720 It's a status quo.

01:28:43.560 Yeah, it is. 1.00

01:28:44.000 This is kind of shit. 0.99

01:28:45.600 okay so i've got i've got a theory which is that the way we should do this and this is my this is 0.99

01:28:52.020 my point that i don't think i'm right but i think we need absurd solutions is that when people are

01:28:57.140 about 25 okay the government should give them an american express platinum card preloaded with 10

01:29:03.500 grand okay and they've got to spend it in a week right or you could create a financial product

01:29:10.200 like that where you put you put in a certain amount of money okay and then once in your life

01:29:15.440 you get a text and it goes okay you've got to go week on thursday and you basically got a week in

01:29:19.580 which you got to spend 10 grand okay and that way you get your five-star hotel you get your front of

01:29:24.300 the plane you get your bit of exotic shit okay and you've basically done it okay so the point

01:29:32.540 about it is that it's only it's not nearly as magical as you think it is when you haven't done 0.71

01:29:38.940 Yeah.

01:29:39.440 So I think you can create fantastic egalitarianism

01:29:41.820 by effectively the equivalent of rumsprigger among the Amish.

01:29:46.300 I think a financial rumsprigger is the answer.

01:29:48.840 There you go.

01:29:50.260 Free holidays for everyone.

01:29:51.360 Perfect.

01:29:52.060 All right, that's a great note.

01:29:53.100 Rory Sutherland, thank you so much for coming on.

01:29:55.180 You're on Twitter, at Rory Sutherland.

01:29:56.680 At Rory Sutherland, all one word.

01:29:57.860 And you must have a book coming out at some point, surely.

01:30:00.680 Yep, there's another one coming up.

01:30:01.780 I haven't decided on the title yet,

01:30:03.260 but it's basically about the

01:30:05.200 danger of trying to make everything

01:30:07.500 make sense, that plenty of things

01:30:09.480 in an evolved system don't make

01:30:11.480 obvious sense because their role is

01:30:13.340 complicated and embedded and

01:30:15.340 you get rid of those things at your peril

01:30:17.040 so that's the book coming out

01:30:18.720 in a year now. Perfect, well if you

01:30:21.400 are kind enough to come back and chat to us when the book

01:30:23.480 comes out, we would love to have you

01:30:25.360 Thank you very much indeed. So you're at Rory Sutherland

01:30:27.560 Francis? I'm at Failing Human

01:30:29.620 give me a follow, give me a shout out

01:30:31.480 Oh you're Failing Human? Yes

01:30:33.140 I have fans everywhere.

01:30:39.620 Yes, you do.

01:30:40.420 And I'm actually going to change my Twitter username.

01:30:43.460 So it's going to be something else at the bottom by the time this episode comes out.

01:30:46.560 Thank you very much for watching Trigonometry.

01:30:48.140 Subscribe to us on YouTube.

01:30:49.320 Give us a rating on iTunes.

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01:30:54.580 And we'll see you next week.

01:30:55.740 Thank you very much.

01:30:56.400 Goodbye.

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TRIGGERnometry - June 05, 2018

Rory Sutherland on the Logic Trap, Humour & Free Speech

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