Rory Sutherland is a columnist for The Spectator, vice chairman of the Ogilvy Advertising Group, and one of the most amazing creative counterintuitive thinkers in the world today. In this episode, he tells us how he got into advertising.
00:04:53.860The reason there's a connection between advertising and comedy,
00:04:56.500and it should be closer than it really is,
00:04:58.420You 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.
00:05:14.160That was actually the work of a comedian who was freelancing in Ogilvy in Toronto.
00:10:02.560Let me just talk about the value of comedy.
00:10:06.260Absolutely, there is a fundamental problem in politics and in business,
00:10:12.200which is you can only propose a solution to anything if it makes sense.
00:10:19.920Now, the problem with that is it's context-independent, that idea.
00:10:25.480In other words, rationality is the only tool you need to use to solve a problem.
00:10:29.580The 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.
00:10:49.940If 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.
00:11:00.420Something 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.
00:11:10.140But it didn't evolve to actually help us decide.
00:11:13.580And 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.
00:11:30.420And we have a real deep down reason, which is buried and hidden not only from everybody else, but also from ourselves.
00:11:37.100One of the most important, I think, theories in psychology, Robert Trivers' idea that we actually deceive ourselves in order the better to deceive others.
00:11:45.920That if we actually had essentially full introspective access to our motivation, then essentially we'd blow it by giving the game away.
00:11:54.380and so we need to practice self-deception in order to actually uh maintain a an acceptable
00:12:00.760facade for everybody else now once you realize that of course what you realize is that one of
00:12:04.680the things comedy does is it points out the very obvious discord between uh the reasons we we give
00:12:13.700and the real reasons for various actions and it's i i always find it really really interesting
00:12:20.400but the idea that things have to make sense is a very dangerous one so one of the interesting
00:12:24.200things about capitalism is, for all its faults, it can stumble on things and fund them, even when
00:12:31.220they make no sense. So when I give a talk, I usually give this great example of a fantastic
00:12:35.920product, which is ostensibly a complete nonsense. Now, if you've been asked, let's say, 30 years ago
00:12:42.860to compete with Coca-Cola, you would have sat down, you would have sat around a table, you would have
00:12:46.240said, we need a drink that tastes nicer than Coke, costs less than Coke, and comes in a really big
00:12:51.100cans we all get great value for money everybody would have nodded and you would have gone off
00:12:54.960you would have done it and you probably would have failed meanwhile the most successful attempt to
00:13:00.460compete with coke in 150 years red bull okay comes in a tiny can cost a fortune tastes disgusting
00:13:08.100absolutely does now there's a second order logic to that i think which is the disgusting taste is
00:13:14.600actually essential to the overall experience which is if you want if you think about it it
00:13:20.600would be deeply weird to you if you were given really nice tasting medicine wouldn't it yes
00:13:24.920something about the placebo effect if if you want us to believe instinctively that something has
00:13:30.020psychoactive or medicinal powers it has to taste weird so our health food has to taste shit yeah
00:13:36.360basically i mean it's a very you know i mean otherwise it's not healthy otherwise wheat
00:13:41.480grass i mean lick the underside of your flymo you get the same effect but because it tastes kind of
00:13:46.880weird we automatically infer from that that it's probably doing us some good or having some
00:13:52.020interesting effect high price also adds to that effect the small can makes it look as if this
00:13:57.640drink is so damn potent if i had a full 375 milliliters i'd kind of go postal okay and so
00:14:05.040So 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.
00:14:22.440Now, 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?
00:14:30.380That's what I was about to say, because isn't a big part of what you might expect reason to be is empiricism.
00:14:36.120In 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.
00:28:18.340One 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.
00:28:27.180We had – today as we're recording this, we're releasing an episode with a guy who co-writes for Jonathan Pye.
00:28:33.580I 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.
00:30:12.780relatively trivial little it's rather like the vegan debate about whether or not you eat honey
00:30:17.280you know the focus on those tiny little things that set people apart is ultimately a distraction
00:30:24.040from what could be far greater gains so you know i mean one problem would be that the weirdness of
00:30:33.520the most vociferous members of the social justice movement actually set back its causes okay now
00:30:40.140You know, I've got a daughter who's vegetarian and I occasionally argue, look, if you get really, really purist about this.
00:30:48.540So 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.
00:30:58.700And the inconvenience you suffer going to restaurants if you're simply prepared to eat prawns basically vanishes.
00:31:04.820And I suggested actually that you should make insects acceptable for vegetarians to eat.
00:31:10.140because actually it's a very environmentally friendly way
00:40:20.820But the first people to accept it, therefore, have disproportionate cost, no benefit.
00:40:28.300It's only when it hits 95% where the punter can confidently hail a cab.
00:40:32.780Now, you could have had an intermediate solution to the problem,
00:40:35.140which is cabs that accepted credit cards could have displayed a different colour light, say.
00:40:39.620So consumer choice could have driven the adoption of the credit card.
00:40:43.700But because of the problem where by the time you'd hailed a cab, it was too late to go,
00:40:47.660you couldn't really say, you don't take credit cards, piss off.
00:40:50.820OK, 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.
00:41:04.660And there are loads and loads of things which I think follow that curve.
00:41:07.720Now, if you think about it, 68 percent of people in America would rather have more vacation, a bit less money.
00:41:13.640I'm not sure, by the way, the economy wouldn't be better off
00:41:15.640if they had more holiday, because leisure expenditure
00:41:18.300is much more labour-generative than just buying shit from Walmart,
00:42:05.560Men out of various machismo things about wishing to signal
00:42:09.400commitment to their employer will kind of take two days when they're entitled more and so in the end
00:42:15.160they made it compulsory to create a social norm so it was just accepted that the guy is going to
00:42:19.680be off work yeah and that's the end of it and so there's certain things where you need to reach a
00:42:25.520critical mass before you can get anywhere and where i think social justice stuff goes a bit weird
00:42:30.800is that it's often focusing on stuff that's already tipped trying to reach a kind of level
00:42:35.920of perfection you know i mean generally really nasty racist people they're still around but
00:42:43.980they're going to kind of die okay okay don't spend your whole time going insane because some guy said
00:42:50.980something nasty you know or whatever why don't you focus on the things you know incidentally
00:42:55.980as i said don't make bloody um uh greater leisure time a feminist campaign make it a universal one
00:43:03.240There 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.
00:43:12.140So don't confine it to some blasted identity group.
00:43:14.320Well, 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.
00:49:12.300If 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?
00:49:30.520We never measure this. We just go, gosh, look at these very successful people and they all went to university.
00:49:35.980So university is brilliant. It's basically a factory for producing really successful people.
00:49:40.640And we fail to ask the question, well, actually, what about the people who don't quite hack it?
00:49:45.920Are they actually screwed? You have this bonkers system now where companies won't interview people who haven't got a 2-1.
00:49:53.000So I met someone who had a 2-2 in maths from Cambridge and they couldn't get a job interview.
00:49:57.940I said, trust me, okay, I've never met any mathematical problem
00:50:01.440that couldn't be solved in business by someone with a tutu
00:54:33.200Now, 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.
00:54:45.820OK, 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.
00:54:58.240And comedy points out the fact that this life is messy.
00:55:01.360okay there is a conflict between what we would like to think of ourselves and how we really are
00:55:06.940okay um there are you know widespread absurdities in kind of human behavior and human emotion
00:55:13.300and so on and comedy is there to actually point out the imperfect ability of things
00:55:19.180whereas to some extent the worst of the left are actually essentially you know start with uh
00:55:25.260You 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.
00:55:40.480Now, that's kind of problematic because it's also hugely problematic because context is really, really important.
00:55:49.360So I would imagine, OK, within a military platoon, there is unbelievable abuse of every kind heaped on each other.
00:56:00.580OK, you know. Now, would you want to police within, you know, a group of 20 or 30 crank soldiers?
00:56:07.060Would you actually want to police their language in that way?
00:56:10.660Well, the truth of the matter is what you say to the other person is, A, it's actually weirdly a perverse sign of affection.
00:56:16.200because it's exactly like aposomatic signalling in animals.
00:56:22.320You know this thing where poisonous animals
00:58:12.180I'm not sure it's desirable, because you can make all sorts of arguments about it.
00:58:16.280But nonetheless, the fact that you can do that, it's much, much more complicated than taking everything that people say completely literally.
00:58:24.820Because the whole, I mean, speech is completely weird in this respect anyway, okay?
00:58:29.160The way we interpret words entirely depends on the words either side of them.
01:05:57.900You're going to get your own lounge, right?
01:05:59.720You 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?
01:06:08.980My hunch is that about half the people will go, actually, I don't really mind the plane.
01:13:01.160I mean, you know, this is kind of weird.
01:13:04.620And equally, I mean, I think that Kevin Spacey should be punished by proper legal process and then be allowed to rehabilitate his film career.
01:13:14.640OK, 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.
01:13:25.820And he should face prosecuting in a court of law.
01:13:29.860But 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.
01:13:44.960You lock people up to protect the public.
01:15:40.160If your diagnosis of a problem is badly wrong,
01:15:45.080you end up you know with poisoning people with medicine essentially yeah and um so
01:15:51.500so but the the urge to signal it basically leads to a kind of insanity which i don't think is
01:15:57.600helpful i mean i'd like to see wider campaigning for vegetarianism as i was saying earlier
01:16:02.860in that one of the things we ought to think about is that technology i mean just as i i'd argue for
01:16:08.200different patterns of work you know at some level we've got to aim for a four-day week okay we've
01:16:13.060to stop aiming for annualized GDP growth, which is easy to aim for because it's a gradual
01:16:17.600measure. And we've got to take the big leap and go, okay, our aim for Britain in 10 years
01:16:22.280time is to have some form of four-day week where many people either only work four days
01:16:26.940a week, maybe four longer days, possible, okay, or can work from home with some degree
01:16:32.040of flexibility for one day a week. And part of the purpose of that is to make it easier.
01:16:37.340If you think about it, when women enter the workforce, the amount of leisure in a married
01:16:42.320household dropped by about 40 hours when i say leisure discretionary time they're not leisure
01:16:47.880okay partly enabled by technology partly enabled by the washing machine etc but the amount of
01:16:53.600discretionary time in a you know for a married couple fell by about 40 hours i think we should
01:16:58.480try and get some of that time back actually by reducing the working hours for everybody yeah i
01:17:03.680think we have to look at either changing working patterns or reducing working hours or simply
01:17:08.340giving people the option to do so because what i said about this you know this taxi driver problem
01:17:12.800with credit cards is it's lots and lots of people i think i wanted to instill a thing in ogilvy where
01:17:19.640everybody offered a pay rise whenever they received a pay rise that's very awesome um but they would
01:17:25.560be given the automatic option of taking half of it as half of it as money half of it as holiday
01:17:29.940so a four percent pay rise you could take basically as two percent cash pay rise and an
01:17:36.160extra week's holiday okay and there'd be a limit to that i don't know people who didn't turn up at
01:17:44.140all um but um but the point about that would be that at the moment there's no mechanism
01:17:50.680available except by one being incredibly valuable so they can't do without you which happens with
01:17:57.280some software guys really really talented software guys usually will negotiate some sort of flexible
01:18:02.960hour thing but there isn't a mechanism for for normal people to actually even state their
01:18:08.920preference for the ratio of work to leisure and um you know it's worth it's worth remembering that
01:18:14.600um you know it'd be very easy to make that purely a a feminist campaign but there are tons and tons
01:18:21.860of men who'd probably be asking the same question absolutely it's very very interesting because
01:18:27.140actually you know you think well how much of work that we get done in the workplace is productive
01:18:31.760I mean, my theory is the Internet has actually made useful work 20% more productive, but at the cost of growing bureaucracy by about 100%.
01:18:43.100So ask covering activities, fatuous presenteeism, you know, pointless emails copied to people unnecessarily, unwillingness to take decisions oneself without engaging five other people.
01:18:55.680It's actually created more bad behaviors than it's that it's that it's solved.
01:19:00.260actually we we are probably running out of time so the one question we always like to ask our
01:19:06.260guests before we let them go and by the way this has been absolutely fascinating i think we've
01:19:09.940covered about half a percent of the things we wanted to talk to you about because we haven't
01:19:14.360even got into the golden skate state killer yet that's an interesting one i mean the whole familial
01:19:19.280dna thing which is i'm not sure by the way i'm not familiar with the story extraordinary cold
01:19:26.100case in the u.s of a guy who was it seems was variously the visalia ransacker in the i think
01:19:31.940the early 70s then became the east area rapist in sacramento and then went on to become essentially
01:19:38.420the original night stalker in other parts of california who says men can't multitask
01:19:43.020well he wasn't he did actually he had a separate period so he did do a bit of he did combine them
01:19:50.280a bit but no he was actually slightly modern he seemed to sort of slightly focus on one or the
01:19:54.040other but um uh this is a case where very very interestingly uh first of all it was dna which
01:20:00.420revealed it was the same person responsible for all three which freaked people out secondly
01:20:04.480unbelievably lucky in uh or or skilled in getting away for it as long as he did partly because he
01:20:10.520seems to have stopped in the 80s or we assume that but the other interesting thing is that weird
01:20:15.980thing of familial dna which is you could go and post to an ancestry site just in the hope of
01:20:21.100finding out who your great-great-grandfather was.
01:20:23.360And the next thing you know is your second cousin's doing a seven stretch
01:20:26.260in the nonce's wing at Wakefield Prison.
01:20:28.820It's a bit of a weird thought in terms of the modern world
01:20:32.060and the strangeness of its consequences, I suppose.
01:20:35.560And, of course, we're very bad at predicting.
01:20:37.560We can predict first-order consequences sort of quite well sometimes.
01:20:42.320Actually, no, I'm not even sure we're good at that.
01:20:43.900I think we would have predicted from the internet now
01:20:48.260that people would have moved out of cities.
01:20:51.100I 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.
01:21:03.140It'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.
01:21:11.400Yeah. 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.
01:21:24.300Yeah. So our ability to predict what something will bring is really, really terrible.
01:21:30.560So on that very note, what do you think we're not talking about now that we ought to be talking about?
01:21:36.140What do you see coming in the future that we ought to be interested in, excited about, concerned about?
01:21:41.740And how do we solve some of these problems that we've been discussing today?
01:21:44.840I think we need a greater level of reflection, self-reflection in terms of our motivations.
01:21:54.380And one of the things I would be interested in is a discussion of why people really do the things we do.
01:22:09.680Because this discovery that essentially we do things following certain instincts and then we post-rationalize or confabulate bullshit explanations for them.
01:22:20.120uh that strikes me as just such an interesting and important insight into humanity in that
01:22:26.600one of the questions it raises okay is that i'm not sure if you want people to adopt more pro-social
01:22:32.800or green behavior i'm not sure the right mechanism is actual conspicuous altruism so if you look at
01:22:39.620if you look at the progress in hygiene um then life expectancy was hugely improved because
01:22:46.460people's bodily cleanliness and people's level of home sanitation proved dramatically if you look
01:22:52.800at the ads from that period the ads generally don't say use pear soap and help prevent a cholera
01:22:57.280outbreak they actually talk about darwinian things like i mean uh always the bridesmaid never the
01:23:03.200bride is actually a line from a listerine commercial okay they use huge sort of fear of
01:23:08.140singleness fear of you know of desertion status and sexual attractiveness were used in huge
01:23:15.480quantities to get people to clean their homes in the same way i don't think you'll get people to
01:23:21.460adopt say more environmental behavior by appeals to polar bears and appeals to altruism because i
01:23:28.040think that kind of signaling doesn't scale yeah i think it's a peculiar kind of signaling it's
01:23:34.240worth remembering you see that there are large numbers of status games which only the rich can
01:23:38.180play so if you turn up to the oscars in a prius right well you're a hollywood megastar patently
01:23:45.400obvious you could have afforded to turn up in any car you like so your decision to turn up in a
01:23:49.660Prius is a choice not a compromise okay and you can therefore signal your care for the environment
01:23:54.460by choosing to turn up in a you know a modest car okay just as likewise if you're the lead singer
01:24:01.980in a rock band you don't have to practice fantastic hygiene or wear very fashionable clothes
01:24:07.420the reason is you signal exactly like that aposematic signaling you signal what you can
01:24:12.280get away with i'm in other words so sexy by dint of being a lead singer or guitarist that i can
01:24:17.340actually still be attractive without making even the most basic effort around bodily hygiene okay
01:24:22.820so that kind of signaling drives a lot of behavior but it doesn't always scale because
01:24:28.500you know if you're the mayor of london you turn up to work on a bicycle it's a choice and it's
01:24:32.820a signal and it's a status marker if you work at um pizza express and you turn up on a bicycle
01:24:38.840it means you couldn't afford a car and so understanding those things in terms of how
01:24:45.220we may need to solve the world's problems by very oblique means ultimately people will end up buying
01:24:50.820electric cars because they're fucking cool yeah yeah being actually honest and this is where it
01:24:56.900all i think we can wrap this thing up comedy behavioral science evolutionary psychology
01:25:01.980the capacity to be cynically honest about our own true nature okay is probably necessary
01:25:12.300to the solution of quite a lot of things and one thing that bothers me i mentioned the fashion
01:25:16.480question okay now imagine how weird it would be right if men had something which bear in mind okay
01:25:23.800fashion and beauty products three trillion dollars plus a year spent in the world more than the world
01:25:28.840spends on education right okay that's a depressing statistic now what i'm saying is imagine if there
01:25:34.520were a male equivalent to this i've asked this question okay so okay where where there's a
01:25:38.860women's clothes shop now every single place of the women's clothes shop there was a shop selling
01:25:42.580drones okay and i said things to my wife like i've got andreas's wedding on saturday so i'll need to
01:25:48.260buy a new drone yeah pretty quickly someone would go well that's ridiculous this has got out of hand
01:25:52.780you know we're spending three trillion a year on these drones and it's just basically for male you
01:25:57.760know weird masturbatory obsession with being able to fly things around and gadgetry okay or like you
01:26:04.000know if hornby was you know like you know the louis vuitton for guys right okay this would be
01:26:09.460really weird okay but there are certain things which because we're trapped by them we're completely
01:26:14.080blind to the weirdness i think the travel industry has gone whack okay i don't think there's any
01:26:19.420correlation now maybe i can only say this because i'm kind of rich and because i've been on some
01:26:23.780exotic holidays but i don't think looking back there's much of a correlation between how far i
01:26:28.420travel how much it costs and how good a time i have i think if you go off with a few mates to
01:26:33.260margate right you can have a fantastic weekend and you can actually have a fairly shit time
01:26:39.180go to machu picchu oh absolutely the best stag do i ever went on we went to butlins
01:26:43.940it was great it was genuinely the most fun i've ever had on a stag do no actually the best wedding