How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland

0:00 I keep hearing people saying you will say to your AI, Find me a skiing holiday and it will provide you with a perfect skiing holiday. And I keep saying people don't decide like that. When you allow tech bros too much power over decision making Along with their running dog lackeys in kind of management consultancy. You're optimizing for something which may be very, very distant from what your real world customers really care about.

0:25 What makes Tyson so effective at advertising? Actually it's it's not advertising, it's marketing and it's customer experience. What's the difference between marketing and advertising? Advertising is a subordinate part of marketing. And Do you think we're looking for efficiency in the wrong place? We usually do. And so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation. What are the rules of good copy? If I asked you to teach me how to write good copy How would you do that? I think a large part of it comes down to So we first we were talking about this in the elevator, it was nine years ago. Back when podcasting wasn't even

1:05 Thank you We must be able to dig out the original content, presumably. Yeah. What was it? It was your podcast number forty seven or something, was it? Oh no. I think it was like sixteen or six it was really low. We'll have to dig out the number, but Uh it's been a long time since then. Oh fabulous. And and podcasting is expensive. So I've been following Farnham Street. Devotedly.

1:26 Appreciate that. Um and uh it's always always interesting. Very, very interesting. And I mean the whole question of the decision science is uh is I think at the moment completely critical. And actually by the way, it'll be very, very interesting with AI. Because I keep hearing people saying

1:45 You will say to your uh AI, Find me a skiing holiday, and it will provide you with a perfect skiing holiday. And I keep saying people don't decide like that. At the very least you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose. Because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison. It's wh you see what I mean? It's a sort of freakish element of free market capitalism, which is we can only like something if we choose it in preference to something else.

2:13 That's interesting. How how does that relate to like a travel agency which would do that inherently? Like if you said I'm going to India to Chat GPT and you're like, plan it for me, versus you go to a travel agency and you're like, I'm going to India, plan it for me. But among real estate agents, th there's apparently a kind of little bit of a trick, which is You always in before you show someone the house you want to sell them. You show them a less appropriate house, ideally that's slightly more expensive, say. So that when they see the house that you want to sell them.

2:45 It's now clear cut because they can say, Oh, it's a bit cheaper than the other one and it's got a conservatory. There's contrast. So there's a kind of decoy effect. A bit like the famous economist experiment with the decoy effect. So you know, one you know, one of my interesting questions is You know, what interface will AI deploy to help us Make choices. And Will it make the mistake that you could very easily make. If you think about it, nobody clicked the I'm feeling lucky button on Google.

3:13 I think it's still there, isn't it? It's been there for years. And they've removed it and found that it slightly reduces the appeal. But the number of people who actually click it, i.e., I'm feeling lucky, take me straight to a single page. is vanishingly small. People want to choose between You know, effectively above the fold options. And um So you know, I I I'm just intrigued because it's very, very easy, I think, for people with an economic or tech background.

3:39 to make assumptions about what people are trying to do and how they choose and that we're, you know, utility maximizers and all this kind of thing. Only really to be completely wrong. Do you think we're looking for efficiency in the wrong place? We usually do. uh in the sense that when you pursue efficiency there are quite a few problems.

3:57 But when you pursue efficiency generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors. And of course In the process you disregard psychological factors. Where the greater gains may be.

4:11 Found. And so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation. I mean one of the greatest forms of efficiency, by the way, is employing a human being who's really, really nice. Now this is complete anathema to people in tech. who love to define business processes so as to make them susceptible to automation.

4:32 You know, person X does this. We will take that function, we will replace it with algorithm Y. And it's a very begiling message because it usually comes with cost savings attached. You might have heard of my thing The Dorman fallacy, did you? I'll remind the viewers and listeners. Uh which is simply that, you know

4:51 You you have a hotel. It's a five star hotel. It has a doorman, someone who welcomes incoming guests. You know. A combination of, say, McKinsey or Accenture and a tech firm will come in and say Your dorman currently costs you X thousand dollars a year.

5:08 We have defined his or her function as opening the door. We will replace Fed Dorman with automatic door opening mechanism and an infrared human detector and will save you thirty, forty thousand dollars a year. And then they walk away, they take

5:24 The credit for the cost saving. And then two years later You know, the hotel's a catastrophe. The rack rate's fallen off a cliff because the dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one, you know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognising regular guests. Providing status to the hotel.

5:46 There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman, which aren't captured in the open the door. Definition. Is that an example of where the costs are really visible, but the benefits are visible. Correct. Yeah. So you it's very, very easy. Management consulting firms Uh if you a if you're in a business and a and and some management consultants come in, go to the management and say, Are they on a gain share agreement?

6:11 A game share agreement is a management consulting Scam. Where you claim a a certain percentage of the cost savings you identify in year one. Now, as Roger L. Martin, your fellow Canadian and my own personal Fengali says, any idiot can cut costs.

6:30 Okay. What takes real skill is cutting cost in a way that doesn't destroy value. One of the things that I don't think is understood by tech nerds And if I'm being really cruel, yeah, males in general in man in many cases. is the extent to which in evaluating or experience.

6:49 the human component of it, the face to face component. does really, really heavy lifting. I've got a lovely story to illustrate this, which I think is fantastic. It's the absolute Perfect example. of misalignment of optimization through quantification bias. So wonderful man Alex Bachelor used to be the marketing director of Royal Mail.

7:10 But you know, similar to what you have with Canada Post. Right. USPS. Mm-hmm. Yeah, sorry, not USP. Yes, just USPS. And they couldn't make any sense of the fact that the Brand perception of Royal Mail.

7:22 bore no relation to service levels. So there would be districts and areas where, you know, every single first class letter arrived early the following day, extraordinarily reliable levels of service. and Royal Mail wasn't particularly held in affection or esteem. There are other areas where the service was frankly a bit ropey and people seemed to love it. Now this obviously upset because they thought that all the billions or certainly hundreds of millions they'd invested in service quality improvement should translate into customer satisfaction and therefore Yeah, some sort of

7:55 Brand voltage. And someone had a theory. And they said. I think something else is going on. And the theory, which was put to the test and proved absolutely right, was that

8:06 The major determinant of whether you liked Royal Mail or not was whether you liked your postman or posty, technically, to be used the gender neutral term. So people who had a rather unreliable service, but the postman did the odd favour for them, left things in the porch, had a chat with them. Okay. Those people thought it was a brilliant organization. regardless of the actual metrics that were being pursued. And I think that's very true in

8:32 Uh any service organization. You know, you may There's an electricity company, a gas company, a water company, a utility. You may interact with them online ninety five percent of the time, but the one or two occasions where you interact by telephone or face to face disproportionately affect your p your perception of the organization.

8:53 And I've argued for quite a time, if I were being completely honest, I've worked in advertising for thirty six years, and if I were a wholly honest person uh without, you know, fear of annoying my colleagues. Probably fifty percent of the time I would advise to a client, take ten to twenty percent of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center. Pay the people too much. Get the best practitioners. I think it's perfectly legitimate in some organizations there should be the very best call center for people should be on six figures.

9:24 Because it makes if you're good and nice. That's how much difference it makes. In other words, it more or less drowns out all your other stuff, all the other noise. If every time you have a personal experience you have a good experience. Then broadly speaking in the human brain. Uh That's a good organization which I can trust. And when you think about it

9:45 I suddenly realised why this probably is. We don't really have much e evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we? Okay. We have Experience in

9:58 Deciding who to like and trust. Because for most of our evolutionary, you know, existence, that was one of the most five m five most important questions to get right. You know, do I trust this person? You know, will they attack me? Are they an ally? Are they are they a foe? Uh If I pay them money, will they deliver? And so consequently I think what we do in our brains is we use our human judgment

10:24 As a proxy. Mm-hmm. A story to back up that. You probably remember this, okay? It's in my book, Alchemy, which is imagine you're turning up to buy a secondhand car and you turn up at the house. Nondescript house. And the car's parked outside the house and you have a looky lou at the car and you judge the you know

10:42 Whether the pedals are wall and the condition of the bodywork and you have a look round the car. And you decide you're interested in paying let's say five thousand dollars for this car. So you go and ring on the doorbell of the vendor. And the door is answered. In one situation. by, for example, a female vicar.

11:01 Again. be Catholic but they can't be Catholic, but you know, Episcopalian, doesn't really matter. Okay. Female vicar. And it's a tiny clear. At that point you probably upweight what you're prepared to pay.

11:14 By twenty percent or so. In in a parallel universe, the door is answered by a guy in his underpants. In other words, someone with no shame. In that instance you devalue the car, I suspect, by about a thousand dollars or more. In fact, you may not even buy it at all. And what we're doing here is we're effectively

11:35 Saying What I'm gonna do is a stand in for the question Do I buy the car, which I don't have the technical knowledge to answer. I'm going to ask a supplementary heuristic question, which is do I trust the person who's selling the car to me.

11:50 And it's an interesting question. My mother didn't know anything about cars, knew a lot about people. I think she would very reliably go around buying cars just through her assessment of the seller. And similarly I think she might do better. than someone with an engineering qualification who ignored who the seller was, and their personality and character. Now

12:13 As a bit of evidence of this, I discovered'cause I've been investigating this. Uh various real estate agents Have said to me That every estate agent Does their utmost

12:25 To make sure That until things are signed and sealed. The vendor never meets the buyer and vice versa. And the reason for that is if one of them doesn't like the other They won't buy or sell.

12:40 Now, when you think about it, that's completely unless the person's moving next door. Obviously if you're buying a a house from someone who's planning to move next door and they turn out to be a psycho, that's relevant information. But it seems to be the case. that if you meet the th the vendor and you basically don't trust them or think they're a bit shifty It doesn't matter what the price is, it doesn't matter the condition of the house, suddenly you revise your valuation of the house downwards if you don't like the person selling it to you. And so that's one of the reasons why apparently

13:13 uh real estate agents will leave any kind of contact between the two. Uh until after at least the survey's been done and enough commitments taken place. I once by the way, I once didn't buy a house. Uh basically because

13:27 The guy was being an asshole about the fridge. Now the fridge was only worth Uh you know, I think naught point Two percent. Uh

13:37 of the value of the house, or not point oh two percent of the value of the house, I can't quite remember. But because he was being a dick about the fridge, I no longer trusted him about the house. Yeah. Weirdly, it turned out my instinct was right,'cause then a friend of ours went to buy the same house. They got some separate land registry search done and found out that a chunk of the garden actually belonged to Network Rail. Not to the house. It effectively filched a large part of the garden.

14:05 So does that mean I just want to go back to the the real estate thing for a second, does that mean Pretty or attractive real estate agents would be more successful than It's a really interesting question. Wh which is I think we you know, I think we ought to study these things much more because the assumption of an economist is that you need to disintermediate. You don't need estate agents, we just go on Willow, Zillow, sorry. Or right move in the UK or whatever it is. What's the Canadian equivalent?

14:34 I don't even know. Habiness dot com or whatever. Okay, little third.com. Yeah, we go exactly. You go on one of those things. You choose the house you want, you look at it, you then look at the house, get a survey done by the house. We assume that there is, you know, this is a purely transactional exchange. maybe in a rational world, that's exactly what it would be. But For one thing, actually, I

14:58 Someone who's investeen years in doing up a house. probably cares about what the person buying it is going to do to the house. So my parents in law, for example, are fanatical gardeners. Uh don't get into this. Seriously, get into something like crack. I don't think it's we have no worry that I'm gonna be. Don't worry, I'm gonna become an enthusiastic. I can barely keep a plant alive. Good, good, good. Okay. Um but

15:22 I guarantee if you went and looked round their house and placed an offer while being an expert in botany and generally quoting people like Gertrude Jeekel and you know, prominent garden designers and s you Sittinghurst and daddy daddy daddy da. Uh You could you could buy their house for two hundred thousand less than if you turned up and said, Brilliant, we can knock down that tree and put in a helipad. Yeah. I think if you said we can knock down that tree and put in a carting track, right? I don't think they'd sell it to you at any price.

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17:47 Find the perfect distraction free paper tablet at remarkable. dot com. Is that because people want to feel good about the transaction and feeling good is more than maximizing Richard Thaler did I think his most interesting work of all is actually on the concept of transaction utility.

18:06 Which you may remember. Do you remember this? A little bit. Yeah. It's in I think it's in Nudge. And the famous thought experiment is this. Which I find fascinating. And I think it's a really insightful thought experiment. So the idea is you and your best friend are lying on a beach somewhere and it's hot and you're very thirsty. And about quarter of a mile down the beach, there's a place that sells ice cold beer.

18:29 And your friend says to you, and he asked people to imagine this. Your friend says to you I'm off to blank to buy a beer, tell me what the maximum amount you're happy to pay for a beer is. And if the price, they quote, falls below that threshold, okay, I will buy the beer, and if not, I won't. And he asked people to imagine what the threshold would be of what they'd pay for a beer On a hot day when they were parched on a beach.

18:54 For a cold bear. The beer is going to be consumed. Back where they're sitting. So the ambiance or you know the the the the clientele of the establishment selling the beer is irrelevant because you're not going to consume it there. And

19:09 The interesting thing is In one situation he says there is a boutique hotel selling chilled beer. And in the other situation he says there's a shack. Selling cold beer. And your price changes. And your your the your readiness to pay

19:23 changes partly in accordance to what you imagine to be the overheads of the establishment selling the good. Even though the n even though the the utility of the as distinct from the tr how good the transaction feels. The actual utility of the cold beer is identical in both cases. I think that's a r I think that's Richard Thalen. I think it's Extraordinarily interesting because I think

19:45 We can make Yeah, car deal car salesmen will know this. You know, make the transaction feel good. Make them feel good when they drive out of the Place.

19:56 That was uh CLG need, right? You uh you know, people are more likely to buy from you if they like you. They're more likely to uh like you if they trust you and you have something in common with them and and you can use all of these things to manipulate people, unfortunately. It's not manipulation. Uh be careful of that. Because no no no. We gotta be really care I think we've gotta be really careful here. One one thing might be that a genuine cold blooded psychopath

20:21 Would intentionally Mm. No might find it difficult. Yeah. This is a Jeffrey Miller theory.

20:28 That If you're on a first date There's an element where apparently It's a long time. I've been married for thirty something years. But women on a first date will turn up a bit late.

20:39 Or do something a little bit annoying. And Miller's theory is that it's a psychopath detection. Test. So that If you interest so

20:50 You know, one of the worst things that can happen to women is to get into a relationship with someone who's you know psychopath'cause you end up with an empty bank account and uh you know, and you know, your sister's pregnant by everybody everything go you know, everything goes hopelessly wrong. Someone who's written very interestingly about this, by the way, is a fabulous woman who writes about education. Uh obviously brilliant. I c I'll remember her name in a second. But she's written quite about this, having a psychopath in the family. Likewise Kevin Dutton. Um

21:20 has also written about this about his own father. There are certain things which you can do which make it very likely that psychopaths will out themselves. So The perfect test might be you bribe the waiter to tip soup on them. Oh interest. And they'll lose it. Or you turn up late.

21:36 And someone like assuming you're not a psycho because you're Canadian So you know that that's probably s yeah. By default were relatively low. We're too polite. You're too polite, exactly, yes. It'd be too tiring to be a psychopath in Canada, wouldn't it? Soup on me. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have been sitting here. My fault. I got in the way of your soup. Uh the psychopath will lose it lose his rag.

22:01 Right. Um and can't control this. And likewise if you turn up late, there's a chance they'll go, Look, I've been sitting on my own like an idiot for fifteen minutes. Whereas you and I would go, Oh, I know, I only just got here myself, the traffic's terrible. Yeah. We don't fully know if he The value of what is going on. In

22:20 Using a personal quality as a proxy for a decision which is simply too complicated to legalize. or to reduce the numbers. Also a d it is, I'll completely agree, in economic terms, it's suboptimal. But if it leads to downside variance reduction. Which is what we're really trying to do.

22:41 We're not trying to optimise, we're trying to reduce the risk of downsize downside variants. You know and that's true in all sorts of things, investment strategy, et cetera. No. The barbell approach. First of all, make sure you don't Don't do anything disastrous.

22:56 Then after that try and get lucky. You you say it like it's a conscious thing, but I think it's an unconscious thing. Oh no, no, because it because if it is conscious, it's probably a reverse signal that you're actually a bit Uh off kilter. If you're consciously doing that, it's not a fairness. If if you study social science matters, you've probably but I agree with you that the I mean my wife

23:17 occasionally gets a bit annoyed with me because I'll get you know, I will literally apply Calib logic to decision. Just to give an example. I always argue That Over thirty six years. Holidays where I've rented a car

23:31 Uh are better than holidays where I haven't. And my argument is you have more optionality. See. Oh interesting. So if you've rented a car and you find the hotel's a bit meh or the hotel's not in a great area, you can just get in the car and go and find a beach somewhere else and go there every day. You know. In other words, you know, so I deploy occasionally will deploy these kind of Talib lines and I you know I'll also say let's fly from so and so because you know, it's the saddest voices there. You you're the one who I remember this, you said you should always fly from the smallest airport

24:03 It's convenient for you, is that it? Oh I'm I'm a big small airport thing. Personally. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I'm actually it's it's kind of interesting because airports are schizophrenic in a way because the clientele of an airport is roughly speaking a fifty fifty mix between people who fly a hell of a lot and just want to get through the damn thing as quickly as they can.

24:25 And People who only fly once a year. who regard the trip to the airport as part of the holiday. And they love going through a shopping centre and looking at them as outlets or whatever. And so airports are effectively catering for two totally disparate groups of traveller. And you can separate these people in the security line, effectively. You can, absolutely you can separate them. And that's why, you know

24:48 Um In a weird kind of way, I think you notice sometimes that the cue for the priority lane in security is longer than the queue for the amateur lane. but frequent business travelers will still join the priority lane on the assumption that the people in front of them are more competent. I mean there's a George Clooney.

25:06 Up in the air. Gag about that. Right. And so it is very interesting because Is it Is it irrational?

25:14 If it's a very reliable mechanism. So all right, one example would be I don't think it I don't think it works very well nowadays. Because there are enough posh spivs around. But in the you know, in the nineteenth century, if you were a Porsche respected real estate agent. You had a lot of reputational skin in the game in the local community, both commercially

25:38 in people you know, so you are highly vulnerable to reputational damage, both commercially and also socially. Because you know, a small town or a you know would have been to a large extent a prestige economy. And therefore. You know. Dealing with the posh local estate agent rather than some guy who claims to be cheap. It's not irrational.

26:00 You know, then the you know, the commission may be higher, whatever it may be. But in terms of reputational skin in the game as insurance against being, you know, treated appallingly But and I you know, I I I think there's a kind of weird thing going on, which is that Uh you know, the the job of the real estate agent is to some extent to be the person who stays behind in the place where the house is sold, to suffer the r reputational consequences of You know.

26:26 of anything outrageous because the vendor of the house isn't really reputationally vulnerable if they're moving three hundred miles away. Mm-hmm. And so you know, some of the role of these intermediaries is just highly complicated. But when I say that you know We fundamentally

26:43 seem to attach Very very high. Waiting. to, for example, a call center experience versus website design. I'm not suggesting for a second website design isn't really important. It's it's almost like there's some experiences that are sort of additive or subtractive, and then there's some that are multiplicative. Like you can multiply by zero, or you can multiply by ten, like a difference in that one particular factor.

27:10 There there's a there's a really interesting organization, I can't remember what they're called online, they call this a brand quake. A brand quake is where you do something, it could be resolving a problem really well. That would be a very good opportunity for a brand quake. The person has a problem You put quite a lot of effort and intelligence into solving it very effectively for them. Um and then you ring them back to check that the problem has indeed been solved.

27:35 Now that would be an example of something I'll give you the per okay, I'll give you the perfect story of this. My father Uh who is You know, half Scottish and um without stereotyping anybody. And it was quite parsimonious with what he bought, generally. I mean I'm I'm not trying I'm not saying it's it's genetic, by the way, I'm just culturally, he was descended from long lines of Highland Scots who didn't get where they were today by, you know

27:59 Splashing out. And he had a I think three Um when he died, he had three or four Dyson devices, which he'd bought from New. in his time.

28:11 He had one on each floor to save him carrying them upstairs. Now these are by any objective measure pretty expensive vacuum cleaners. Mm-hmm. Was that Dyson.

28:23 Now interestingly, I'm gonna make a point here. Which is a privately owned company. Mm-hmm. And that and do not Do not underestimate the importance of this. PLCs.

28:32 Or um uh uh or or companies on the Nasdaq or the U Stock Exchange. are incentivized to behave like psychopaths. Because they're optimised around short term transactional value, not long term relationship building.

28:47 I think maybe the the generalization is that like If they're private companies led by a founder, then They're not run by the finance department. It's so interesting. I think about this a lot where you You have these

29:02 Short term optimization and long term effectiveness are two completely different things. Short term money off versus long term value on. Yeah. Yeah. And so you can there's always somebody making more money than you, but you th maybe they're cutting corners, maybe they're doing things that are unsustainable and like you said, you can always save money in the short term, but you damage your brand and like the way my theory is the primary reason for the success of these private companies It the secondary reason is they look after their consumers better because They're effectively. Uh unwittingly they're practitioners in the customer value movement, not the shareholder value movement.

29:38 Well, Buffett had this saying where his directive, his letter, I guess, to all of his CEOs after he acquired the company was The only expectation I have for you is to treat this company as if you and your family have a hundred percent of your money in it for a hundred years and you can't take it out. Exactly that. Yeah. And and I think that that approach enables, even in a public company, that enables people to take long term Do the thing that's optimal. And there is an interesting exception to this probably, which is, for example, Costco. Which um ent actually enterprise rental is family owned, isn't it? Enterprise is family owned. Yeah.

30:12 In the and I've tell everybody this In the IPA advertising effectiveness awards in the UK My argument is that with the exception of P and G, Diadio, Unilever marketing led companies, I don't think that PLC is what what do you call them in c you know, publicly traded corporations. Corporation. I don't think they can actually do marketing very well. Because the requirement for short term self justification.

30:38 And numbers. effectively overrides the real purpose of marketing, which is investment in long term customer value. I think this is why generalizing a little bit, but this is why founders outperform. even when they lead public corporations. They have the same pressures, the same analysts, the same

30:56 But they also are considering posterity, aren't they? What is my legacy? I mean it's interesting actually. The German car industry, although they're public companies are sort of family run. Aldi famously with Jones Trader Joe's is basically owned by actually two German families. They had a huge feud. But something's going on there. One of the things they do is they look after their staff better. And I think when you look after your staff better, the customer notices. Well this is part of the Costco thing. But that comes from the Saul Price line of thinking, which when he started Fedmart He sort of outlined the obligation of our business is we have a fiduciary relationship with the customers. Yeah.

31:38 And Jim Sinegal, who founded Costco, was a student of Sol Price. And later on they would merge the companies and co? Yes, you're absolutely right. Yeah. And I I think that's interesting, right? Where you treat your employees better. Uh a nice story from Dyson, which is family owned. In fact, I think family run companies this would include people like um S C Johnson. I think they should wear a badge.

32:03 Do you see what I mean? Just as you have a kite mark on British Laws is family owned isn't it? For example, in Canada. Family controls. Family control. Mc McCain. Family control. So what I was saying about the advertising effectiveness awards. Four out of the five gold winners. It's only every two years this award and it's very, very rigorously judged. Four out of the five winners, namely McCain, your Yeah. Canadian uh heroes.

32:28 Um McCain, Yorkshire T Spec savers. and Lathwaite, a wine company. Four out of the five winners. The fifth one was Guinness, which is sort of a family company in in a sense, although it's owned by Diageo. And so my point is that I you know, we should actually have a kite mark that allows consumers to prefer to buy from companies which aren't listed on some stock exchange somewhere and hence aren't controlled by the finance function because they're more trustworthy.

32:55 That's an interesting I don't know if I agree with that, but Um it's interesting to thinkers what's is Rogers still family controlled? I mean Canada's obviously packed full of Well Nanade entire what about that? Increasing you get family controlled, but not economically controlled. So you have like a dual class. The Western family would control lob laws To some extent, even though they're not majority shareholder. Well, I think if you if you have a corporation that's hundreds of billions and you control ten or fifteen percent of it, you effectively have control over the company. Ford Motor Company falls into that definition. I think the fa you know, the family or some there's a particular class of shares. Lot of dual class coming. But hold on, I wanna go back to Dyson for a second. What makes Dyson so effective at advertising? Actually it's it's not advertising, it's marketing and it's customer experience. What's the difference between marketing and advertising? Advertising is a subordinate part of marketing.

33:49 And uh in many cases even though I've worked in advertising for thirty six years. I I I want to think of myself probably unsuccessfully, but I still aspire to be a marketer, not an advertising person, because advertising is a useful toolkit available to the marketer, and by the way, generally is pretty effective. But Peter Drucker, the purpose of business is to find and keep a customer profitably. Uh that's the purpose of marketing. It's to you know to cr you know, to either create Or find

34:20 Uh customers. with whom over time you can engage in mutually advantageous relationships to mutual profit. That's it. So what makes Dyson so good at marketing? Well The story I heard from someone who worked at Dyson for twelve years Is that

34:37 He was sitting in a presentation. James Dyson presiding. And They were presenting the call center sort of efficiency statistics. I by the way, I'm absolutely fanatical of alcohol centers because I'm terrified that in an AI age people will try and

34:54 effectively automate them. Uh I think what you should do instead is make them slightly smaller, but a lot better. Mm. Because I don't think you can substitute for the human in cases of unusual problems, special circumstances, empathy, generally. Don't get me wrong, I think you can get AI empathy. I'm not suggesting that AI is going to be completely unempathic.

35:15 But at some point it's rather like the equivalent of I want to speak to the manager. There will be situations where you want to speak to a person who can understand your specific situation and has the power to intervene to override the normal Rules and regulations. Yeah. to solve your problem because it is commonsensical to do so, even if You know, uh Well service level agreements doesn't normally allow us to send out a replacement part. In this case, since your part is faulty.

35:45 Somebody who has the power to do the right thing. Got it exactly. And I think Uh you know, I d I I think that will ultimately you'll have to have the human as the last port of call on that. Also your call center

35:58 is the only way you can find out the problems that people can't solve anywhere else. Do you see what I mean? So there was a very smart person I met at Microsoft who when they Uh when they took over some fairly niche Microsoft product, they put the call center in the middle of the development team. I mean I would argue that the call centre of British Airways should be on the same floor as the boardroom.

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38:44 Start making progress, get somewhere with base camp. Sign up for free at Basecamp.com. It's the map territory problem, right? So often the businesses are run by the map, which is like the spreadsheets, the volumes, the wait times, the Whatever, but the territory is the customer calling in. And the problem is Kinsky, isn't it? The map is not the territory. Yeah, but they're experiencing. And so if you're not touching reality, you can get distorted by the map. But I want to go back to City by the way exactly the same thing Dan Davis did, which is one huge advantage of being a customer value company, not a

39:19 shareholder value company is that customers Live in the real world. And therefore you are actually rooted in reality. Whereas shareholders by the way Not share owners, but the shareholders are principally interested in justifying their own existence to their investors, and therefore they're dealing with a highly artificial construct.

39:40 In terms of defining the value of a customer. But I think what's best for the shareholders is what's best for the customer. It's just the timeline mismatch that people have. So if your timeline for it's incoherent, by the way, the shareholder value movement's totally incoherent because over what time frame, which shareholders what are you optimizing for? It's a completely incoherent nonsense. which is very, very friendly to stock market analysts who want a ready supply of quarterly data so they can bullshit their way out of things, how valuable it is to people with pensions. is a completely separate matter. Because one of the things it does is it prevents companies from innovating effectively and it prevents them from investing properly in customer relationships.

40:21 Okay, come back to Dyson. You were telling me this story. Somebody had worked there for twelve years. They were going blah, blah, blah, average call time, blah, blah, blah, average wait time. And it was the standard kind of call center metrics about effectively how quickly can we get these people off the phone. I mean it's a bit more sophisticated than that. You know, I'm sure there's some measure of satisfaction. But it was kind of evaluating the call centre on an operational efficiency standpoint. And Dyson basically said, Stop right now. You've got this all wrong. The way we should look at this is we should treat it as an honour

40:52 If one of our customers chooses to get in touch with us, and we should therefore respond to them accordingly. as if we're flattered by the contact, not as if we're bothered by the interruption. Or words to that effect. I'm I'm putting words in his mouth, but this is roughly speaking what the person said happened in the meeting. That makes a lot of sense. I mean by the way, that's why my father had four Dysons. Stingy man, though he was, I hope he won't by staying just my late father. But Every time he rang them up, which might have been only once every year.

41:20 They did something astonishing. And they were really, really helpful and they solved the problem and the part arrived the next day. Sometimes they didn't even charge for the replacement part. And therefore he completely trusted those people and therefore was willing to pay an enormous premium, really, over other vacuum cleaners which might have had the same notional you know effectiveness. Precisely because of that trust. There's so much opportunity here, right? Oh, if you think of You competing in a world where

41:49 We're moving to AI driven call centers. Uh, if I took the exact opposite approach, which is by the way, you should do both. A really, really good service organization allows for very streamlined efficient service for people who know exactly what they want. And extremely em empathetic service for people who are undecided, uncertain, or find themselves in an unusual situation. And so you need to do both.

42:14 And that's that's where I think the the tech bros have got it all wrong, because they see the opportunity of tech as being a one way street towards ever greater efficiency, streamlining. And let's face it, tech bros are not neurotyp. In terms of what they want from things. When you allow tech bros too much power over decision making Along with their running dog lackeys in kind of management consultancy. You're optimising for something which may be very, very distant from what your real world customers really care about.

42:43 You're using tech crowds as like a No no no, it's perfectly reasonable to say that the people who work in this field are not representative of the whole human population. No, that's a reasonable assertion. What is it you're representing when you say tech bro, though? Um anybody in a tech industry, just as anybody in advertising, myself included, is overweighted towards a belief in the ability of advertising to solve all problems. And I will freely admit that I am guilty as charged. Um however, and people don't get that much opportunity to convince other people.

43:17 of the rightness of their argument. What has happened is that in marketing, for example. The tech companies, the consulting firms that sell stacks. And I owe a lot of this to a guy called Adele Borke, very interesting self taught Libyan marketing writer, former boxer. An El Borke, and I coined the phrase technoplasmosis by analogy with toxoplasmosis. Which is

43:40 Tech people and consultants have taken over the finance department. Mm. So the the marketing metrics, the finance department has faith in and demands from marketing are not those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and customer value over time. They're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies. What are the metrics that are it's all about short term transactional, uh bottom of the funnel, um click through, you know, how can you shovel money to meta in a slightly more efficient way. It's not about long term value creation at all.

44:17 Right. N now, don't get me wrong, all that bottom of the funnel short term transactional stuff Is Very important to get right. And I I'm not I'm not disparaging it. But

44:27 It's only A third of the game. Right. And they're not interested in the other two thirds of the game because they don't make money if someone spends money on their call centre or you know upgrades their call centre staff or allows the call centre staff to call out. It's sort of like cybersecurity. It's seen as a cost. It's a cost. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean Bonnie Blue would do really well in this,'cause she's all about the numbers, not about the quality of the relationship. You know.

44:50 Funny enough, she did work in NHS Finance Procurement, ironically. Well no finance recruitment, actually. She recruited people for N for National Health Service finance. So her approach to sex is merely an extrapolation of what she learned, I think, recruiting finance people for the National Health Service. All about the quantity, not about the value creation. The the relationship. I like this quantification bias w thinking. I mean Buffett. Okay.

45:17 Quite rightly your hero. Um Is Uh he was obsessed with the quality of the management of companies. With whom he invested, wasn't he?

45:25 Well I mean I'm obsessed with personal factors. I've read a lot in I think I'm gonna give a nuanced answer here. I don't know the answer, so I'll preface that with that. I did read a lot about what he used to do in the sixties. And he used to hire like private investigators. And what he was trying to determine, I don't think it was anything about

45:46 The person other than Does what they say line up with who they are? And if the answer is yes. I can deal with that because I know what to expect. And if the answer's no, if they're They can't go to work and, you know, claim to be a penny pincher.

46:02 'Cause if they go to work and say they're gonna cut costs, but they're driving around with a Ferrari or whatever. Like this is a thing that it doesn't line up. And so I I feel like he was always just trying to assess the predictability of people. If that makes sense. In other words, by looking at their consistency. Consistency. Did the management team do what they said they were going to do? The balance sheet changes over, you know, like he wasn't very he had to different emphasis on things than people I think realize And I think with a lot of his investments, I mean my personal take is

46:35 He was looking for predictability. And it wasn't about massive disruption. It was never about things being turned around. He got out of that in this Late sixties. With diversified refilling was the last real turnaround situation they sort of got themselves into. They exited quickly. And I go boom, did they quite Well, they didn't really get burned, but I was talking to Munger about this over dinner one day and he's like

47:00 We just realized that We made a mistake. Uh we were never gonna make a lot of money in this business and it was highly competitive and we had no edge. And so they got out as quickly as they could. Uh and I think that the predictability of what he buys, at least his long term holdings, like if you Look at that. I think it's really interesting'cause it's like

47:22 You can kinda see it, the railroad. These are gonna be using the railroad in fifty years. That's a great example. It will be unbelievably difficult to build a competing web. But you can also you can lever it if it's predictable. And leverage is is this interesting thing where he says they don't do a lot and they don't when you look at the whole company, but on the railroad, for instance, they'll put A decent amount of debt in the railroad. Because they know what the earnings, it's very predictable. And that's the same as the energy, where they're putting a lot of capital. They put a lot of data in. And I talked to this guy in um Nova Scotia, John Bragg. And he sort of did the same thing. And so he create he created Oxford Frozen Foods. He's this incredible story. He's this billionaire from this small town of eleven hundred people. He started what's it called? Oxford.

48:09 Nova S for Nova Scotia. And he started not one, not two, but three multi-billion dollar companies from this small town of eleven hundred people. Is he still there? He's still there. Yeah. Such a great guy, too. And It was fascinating to talk to him because he basically was like, look, you know He owns North America's largest private telecommunications company. And he said I I wasn't afraid of that at all. No. And we levered up massively. We went all in multiple times.

48:38 Acquiring more assets, acquire but if there's something more volatile, he gets very nervous about the debt. So he wouldn't do it if there was volatility, but he also had this thing where so counterintuitive to what you hear on Wall Street, which is is like I I don't mind pay more. You know, I don't mind paying the most. Uh and I was like, Really? That surprises me. And he's like, Well, a lot of these things only come up once. I don't get another shot at it. And if I'm a private company and don't have public company shareholders Uh and it takes me, you know, five years versus three years to get my motion back out of the deal. Why do I care? I'm never going to be offered this again, and they're not gonna build another one. No, no. So when it comes to fiber optic in the ground, he's like

49:18 It's getting harder and harder to do. Which is this company the Canadian company in telecoms? Uh it's East Link Cable Communication. Yeah, yeah. And so but they o not only do they deliver cable to a large portion of Canada, but they own A lot of infrastructure that people aren't aware of. And he's like, Well, what difference does it make? And I've been chewing on that nugget ever since. And you know, you can apply this from a marketing perspective as well, right? If you if you have a client or go back to real estate for a sec, you have a client who's looking at a lake house or a cabin or a cottage or whatever you call them in in the UK or in And the United States.

49:56 And You get a property and you say my budget is, I don't know, say five hundred thousand, and you find a property that's seven. And is it worth splurging on the seven hundred thousand dollar property or whatever it is? And the answer is Is this like a once in a generation property that I'm never going to have the shot at again? And if you can frame things it's also much more likely to be scarce.

50:19 Yeah. The rarer you get, generally. And then overpaying, you make overpaying seem rational. And in a way, it kind of is rational. Where it's like, well, this is only gonna come up once. So like I I have a friend actually going through this now. They're looking at buying a family cottage. And I'm like, How do you think about these things? He's like, Oh, I saw this one, it was perfect, but It was a little more money than and I brought this up. Having a cottage on a lake on which yours is the only cottage is the kind of gold standard for Canadian property. That would be the dream. But it's sort of like w what do you want if you want a second property, you want proximity so it's easy to get to, you want privacy.

51:02 Uh, so there's not a lot of things around it. And these things just don't come up very often. As m many lakes as we have. I mean The the prime properties come up maybe once every five or six years per lake. And And as Cain said, in the long term we're all dead. And all day anyway, an interesting aside here, but

51:22 When we sat down, we were talking about High trust versus low trust societies and introducing friction. Yeah, I'm wondering. Spend a beat on that for a second. Well I met um someone you must interview, by the way, called Philip uh

51:35 K. Howard. Who's written various books called Life Without Lawyers. He's just written a book which is coming out right now called um Uh I think it's uh Can do. Which is restoring the spirit of American can do.

51:48 And he argues that a large part of economic decline and social malaise Has come from the over intrusion of law and regulation. into practices which should properly be left to subjective human judgment. that we've created a culture where people are so afraid of making a subjective decision.

52:09 That they fall back on often totally inappropriate rules and regulations. And there are a whole bunch of people who are employed not always by the government, just as much by the private sector. who are much more interested in adherents to uh approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.

52:26 'Cause you can't get fired for following the rules. You can't get me in trouble. You told me to follow this procedure and Common sense would be to opt out at some point in certain situations and use your brain and judgment and But if I do that if I have the if I do that, I'm gonna have the very little parapet, there's no upside. Uh and there's considerable uh reputational risk and and career risk.

52:48 Yeah. From doing something slightly perverse and different. But there are a whole bunch of arguments. First of all, an awful lot of quality human decision making. Of necessity Has to be

52:59 Test it. and instinctive, not regulatory. There are various people. I think it might be Michael Pelani who says Yeah, most of life is like a kaleidoscope. We never completely encounter the same situation twice. Mm-hmm. And therefore.

53:13 Regulating for the universal. When in fact The great evolutionary gift of the human brain. Is adapting to context.

53:24 is inherently lawyers love it, of course,'cause they make money out of this. You know, arguably Uh the legal system, particularly in the United States, has strayed into all kinds of areas which were once settled. By

53:39 Two humans amicably discussing something and possibly finding a creative resolution to to the trade off, that's replaced by effectively we will take this to a legal decision. And that starts to infect, um, particularly because there's no talk law reform in the US. And that's partly because I was told yesterday trial lawyers are among largest donors to the Democratic Party because they resist any kind of tort law reform.

54:07 Mm. This has led to Things that should be solved through our evolved human talent for conflict resolution. being sold through

54:17 Totally inappropriate. application of of uh legal structures to a situation which is uh in many cases not really adequately captured by Law.

54:29 Or where a legal decision is made, which makes perfect sense within One setting But Which sets a precedent which leads to ludicrous second order consequences. Yeah. So for example, if you accept the fact that a

54:44 I think has happened in one of uh Philip K. Howard's case is Someone demanded that trees were trop down in their streets because one of their grandchildren was allergic to the nut. That came off the tree. The argument would be that if you accept that, which may seem kind hearted and uh

55:02 you know, uh and and generous within that particular frame of reference. Ultimately you've opened up the path to widespread deforestation. Because nobody can grow a tree anywhere to which anybody could claim to be allergic. There's an interesting case.

55:18 Um, in England where someone broke into a theme park or Some park of some kind. And then while drunk, dove into a pond. Which wasn't really deep.

55:31 And hurt themselves. And then sued. And the original in the lower courts they said there should have been a notice warning of the shallow water. because you could reasonably anticipate this problem. And then it went up to the high c whatever it was, the lawlords at the time. And they said if you took if you took this ruling to its uh

55:52 uh you know, natural consequences, you would have no lakes. You know, you would have no swimming, you would have no swings, you'd have no playgrounds, because everything would have to be girt around with warnings about every possible anticipated negative consequence that could arise from this part of the environment. And so what what happens is that Uh you've created a kind of idea, I suppose, where the legal solution has become the default. Mm.

56:19 Uh when it should in fact be the last resort. What happened to common sense? Well this is the this is the argument. being that that uh your fellow countrymen, what's his name? Um Ralston Sall, John Ralston Sall. Have you come across him? You Canadians totally under rate yourselves, you know, you produce wonderful people.

56:37 And you're always trying to import people like me from the UK or people from the US. John Ralston Sall wrote this book, which I think is called Voltaire's Bastards. And he argues that Human brains have evolved with a variety of mental capabilities. Only one of which is the capacity for reason. Mm. There's also the capacity for imagination, creativity, common sense, you know, et cetera.

57:01 We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal. Gifted to us by you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality The gold standard.

57:15 This is what's weird about working in advertising, by the way, and I think it's probably similar to theoretical physics and it's probably similar to entrepreneurialism. Okay. Which is what's unusual about those fields is that rationality is the Bronze Standard. In advertising, if someone says, you know, uh this is the problem and you come up with a completely rational solution, Um people don't go, right, that's perfect, let's go and do it as they would do in a finance setting or a

57:40 compliance setting. Okay. In most of decision making in in institutions, rationality, i. e. quality of argumentation, is the gold standard. In advertising if you came up with a rational ad, people go, Yeah, it's all right, but can you do a bit better? You know, is there an ad that says the same thing but in a more emotionally engaging way? Is there an ad that says the same thing in a way that's funny? Is there an ad that says this in a way people will remember or will act on?

58:06 So What is funny about being an advertising creative, and you know, I spent twenty years of my life either in or managing those departments. Is You know, the rational solution is where you start. Mm.

58:18 You use it as a springboard to something better. Th there's a famous quote, you know, fascinatingly from I think Niels Bohr who said, You're not thinking you're merely being logical. Isn't it? I think y you'll know that. He was an interesting guy, wasn't he? In terms of his 'Cause he also was the person who said the opposite of a good idea. You know, in boring physics the opposite of a good idea is wrong. But in high level physics, the opposite of a good idea might be another good idea. Mm-hmm.

58:44 Yeah. What can we learn from Marketing from the Madman era. It's still true today. Uh I think There was an understanding then and the remuneration of agencies respected this because you were paid on commission.

58:59 So if you had a big idea and you came up with a campaign and the client spent millions running the campaign, you made money from that campaign for years after you'd conceived it. So it was rather like having royalties on a book. Oh, okay. We didn't realise that at the time. Then media independents came along and so we had to be paid by the hour, like lawyers and management consultants. And we've never recovered because it's a catastrophic way to be paid. And the reason it's a catastrophic way to be paid My argument is that marketing is actually fat tailed.

59:29 So is innovation. R and D. Pharmaceutical research. Science, okay. In other words, five to ten percent of what you do delivers perhaps a hundred and ten percent of the value.

59:40 And therefore paying people by the hour and demanding that every quantum of effort has to be matched to a quantum of value creation. In some Neat proportion. So the way market never mind advertising.

59:54 that. Okay, right. Let's look at the whole of marketing as a discipline within an organization of which advertising is not a not necessarily very important part. You know, for a lot of organizations it may be, you know, relatively trivial what they actually spend on bought communication. On the other hand uh you know, how you design your reception or you know, whatever. That's still affection to the application of psychology to value creation.

1:00:19 Let's say you have a brilliant idea. And The value of that idea lasts goes on for ten years. I've seen this happen all the time. The agency, let's say an agency had the idea. It may well have been the cloud you had that idea. They are held

1:00:34 responsible for every single unit of cost they incur. Mm-hmm. Yeah, by yeah, by yeah, by yeah. You cannot offset any of those costs against the value you created in twenty twenty three by having a huge idea. Let me give you an example. There's a an enormous idea. for a very large, enormous American

1:00:52 That's a false moving consumer goods company. There's an idea conceived by Ogilvy Australia. It has made that company In excess of a billion dollars in the last ten years. It's still running. It runs in something like a hundred markets.

1:01:07 Still useful today. For that idea. The agency in Australia got paid three hundred and fifty thousand Australian dollars. Or rather, that's what they made from it. So in other words, you have a billion dollar idea, you get to buy a small flat in a crap part of Sydney. Now What I'm saying is that

1:01:23 This is not me bleating about the advertising industry. It's saying that anything like R and D or marketing, which is fat tailed, in other words, a small percentage of what you do, it's Jeff Bezos' point about in business you know, in baseball you can only score four, in business you can score a thousand. In marketing. When you score a thousand, which and the purpose half the purpose of marketing is not operational, gradual incremental improvement. It's finding another way to hit the ball out of the park and score. A hundred. If you cannot claim the credit for that, except to the extent that it delivers value in the quarter in which you have the idea or the financial year in which you have the idea, you are underfunding your marketing effort.

1:02:05 So it's like saying to J imagine you went to JK Rowling and said, Yep, you can have the royalties on the Harry Potter books, but only on the first edition. And consequently long term marketing ideas when you're paid by the hour or when you're evaluated by the quarter, as marketers would be. Now, you wouldn't go into a pharmaceutical research company and said, Do you invent a blockbuster drug this week? No, or you're all fired.

1:02:30 You accept the fact that you spend a load of money Effectively. Okay, this is the vr brutal truth. Okay. You don't you don't find entrepreneurs in chess clubs, you find entrepreneurs in casinos. They're playing poker, they're playing backgammon. you know, they're playing games of chance with an occasional very high payoff.

1:02:49 And a lot of life is exactly like that. But you don't know where the huge payoff's gonna come in advance. The people who are running these organizations for the benefit of financial predictability are trying to make it chess. They're trying to turn it into a reductionist game where the most you can score is one. For a win.

1:03:05 Put it ceiling on. They're trying to effectively to to to pretend it's a high variance mechanism, a low variance mechanistic predictable process. Fifty fifty percent of your effort in life, once you ensure the fact that you're not gonna starve to death, die, et cetera, you know, you've looked after your children should be attempts to get lucky. In other words, wouldn't the scene would say I love this phrase, uh increasing your surface area exposure to posit to positive ups upside optionality. You know.

1:03:37 Finding opportunity. But hold on for one second. I wanna go back to this. I wanna think about this out loud here. Maybe I'm wrong. With a book, it's great. I write a book once, I can sell it for the next hundred years. Assuming I've heard of my road. If you have a great marketing idea which continues to add value for the next fifteen years, some of that credit should be offset against your current marketing costs. F the difference is marketing also can go the other way.

1:04:04 And and like Jaguar perhaps or Cracker Barrel. I don't know if you followed the So you can create negative value. It's not like the baseline is zero and there's only upside and the upside is like one to one million, you can actually destroy a company through marketing and advertising. Uh some of those I'm gonna defend the company as two. Yeah, yeah. Because in the case of Bud Light.

1:04:29 Are you defending Bight? I wanna hear the They could not have necessarily anticipated that because it was confected outrage. Look, I'm politically on the right, okay. I get just as angry. from confected outrage on the on the right.

1:04:44 Which is oh, they've gone woke, da when you know, y you're merely showing, you know, a mix of ethnic groups in your advertising or something. This is b Right? And and the right do it and the left do it. Uh, there's confected outrage on the left, I would argue, about um American Eagle.

1:05:02 And it's confected outrage on the right. It's done for signaling purposes by a very narrow group of people. Do those cases actually damage the business? I don't know the figures. Gillette did. There was an extremely Now this wasn't convected outrage because Gillette ran an advertisement. They realized they had to move on, perhaps, from the best a man can get.

1:05:24 Despite the fact obviously that their customer base is overwhelmingly male for fairly obvious reasons. And they produced an ad which I would argue and even my wife would argue was needless um insulting towards men. In that it conflated the Me Too movement with barbecuing. Okay. In other words, it seemed to take a definition of toxic masculinity which went which went the whole spectrum from things which all right thinking men would quite rightly condemn.

1:05:54 to things which for example two boys having a you know a small scrap. On that patch of grass. Which all primates play fights. It's not you know don't get me wrong, sorry, if there's you know if there's a kid wailing on another kid with a plank of wood Uh, you know, I'll be quick to condemn it, but I'm not totally you know, the on play fighting thing, barbecuing I don't think is particularly objectionable. And that was a case where it was almost a kind of Act of deliberate affrontery to your core target audience.

1:06:23 The Bud Light thing to put it in context was a influence marketing campaign. of which most people in the company were probably unaware. Where they sent personalized canvas and blood light to a variety of different uh influencers. One of whom was Dylan Malvaney. Um

1:06:38 Now I've got to confess about this, uh as a Brit, you're Canadian. The gender thing isn't quite the flash point in the UK or Canada as it is in the United States. Did you know, for example, Um that's When it came out. I find this quite interesting. In Britain we've had pantomime for two hundred years. Yeah, men dressing up as women, w you know, women dressing up as attractive women dressing up as young boys, Shakespeare, day, cross dressing.

1:07:04 Some Like It Hot was a highly controversial film with all the studios in the United States. when it came out, because it involved men dressing up as women. No. In the UK, my grandmother went to see it. She was a sort of conservative woman in a Welsh provincial town. It would not have occurred to her. literally that there was anything controversial about this at all. It was simply funny. I think what maybe has changed is the meaning we ascribe to it.

1:07:28 Mm-hmm. In this case. My argument was Okay. All it well and they haven't made Dylan Mulvaney the face of Bud Light. Right. In it. And I think creating these cultural flashpoints through confected outrage is something to be disparaged when the right do it and when the left do it. I don't I d I think it's equally I think it's equally absurd.

1:07:48 Because you have in any communication, you have to understand context and the intention. Of the person producing the communication. Now in the case of Jangu They wanted it to look unlike. I would argue. I mean

1:08:02 I I was talking to Rick Rubin, who was in Hawaii, and he'd heard about the Jaguar ad the day it wasn't an ad, by the way. Do you know that, didn't you? It never ran as an advertisement. It was a brand film they showed. at the launch of the car. And then I had a right wing podcast. uh in the UK going, you know, it utters the most out you know, um outrageous anti conservative sentiment which is

1:08:25 Copy nothing. Copy nothing was the exhortation of Sir William Lyons, who founded Jaguar, you know I I I think he said it in nineteen thirty two. He was the original founder of the car company. You've also got to understand their position. What are they trying to do? So I'm just explaining this just in wider in wider context, yeah, which is They fundamentally made a mistake. I can't blame them for doing it, because we all do this. We all benchmark against our most obvious competitor. Don't benchmark against your most obvious competitor. All you'll do is make y make yourself a copy of them.

1:08:58 And Jaguar was always trying to compete head to head with BMW Mercedes Maudi. And bluntly put, because of the scale of those entities, it was always going to lose. Because if you're the kind of person who's happy to buy a BMW And you're also happy to buy a Jaguar. you'll probably end up buying an Audi at Mercedes or a B MW.

1:09:19 Simply to you know Because of scale, winner takes all effects, all manner of other things. So if Jaguar needs to survive in the electric car age, making its cars in the UK, which does a Jaguar lover ideally want them to continue to do, they've got to find a different kind of target audience, rather than benchmarking themselves against uh you know, companies which have gains to scale and a whole load of advantages they can't replicate. And so going for

1:09:45 What you might call The car of choice of the wealthy younger creative class. Reasonable bat. It's a reasonable bat. Okay.

1:09:55 I work in advertising. Okay. I'm I'm a m massive car lover. I really, really like for example the Chris Bangalera Bm Ws I thought were magnificent. I really, really like those'cause can't buy one. And the reason is'cause part of my shtick Okay.

1:10:12 is being a bit left field. And if I drive around in an Audi, it kinda screams, I work in financial services. Right. Okay. You know. Yeah, I aspire to managerial roles. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. And so You know, I've always bought Slightly weird cars. Uh uh I I don't know. I'm I've been trying to know what you have. What what do you have back in Canada, I've got to ask. Uh I have a Tesla.

1:10:35 Yeah, fine. You see that you know. Did you d do you have a sticker on it that says I bought this before Elon went mad or anything like that? So that Canadians don't key a car? It's been keyed three times. It's been keyed by m and uh run into by uh somebody I I can only assume intentionally

1:10:53 Uh in the past. Oh yeah, in the past. Well Ottawa is this hot like hotbed of uh Elon haters, is it? It's interesting'cause my mom got me one of those stickers and I I was like, I don't have a problem with Elon. Like I don't I don't understand this. I'm not gonna put that on my car and y I wanna relate this to sort of evolution. I agree, it's it's a little like um biting the hand that feeds you, isn't it? Well it's also like Uh going back to the jaguar, but we can tie these two things together, right? And I think we need Variation.

1:11:22 In approaches. And The the point of this is like we need more people like Elon, not fewer in the world. Whether you agree with him or not, this is how society progresses. We need differences. We have an environment and people thrive or don't thrive in that environment. Ideally we have some sort of Social safety net.

1:11:42 uh to catch people um if they don't succeed. And and so Jaguar the same thing. They're they're taking a bat as a company, they're being different. Yeah. They occupy an environment and if you think about it, they survive as Land Rover Range Rover because they have effectively created the category they dominate. Right. So I want more varieties. This is this is where your wonderful compatriot Rodrell Martin Praise be upon him. Okay. makes this point that um economists have this fantasy of the world of companies in direct competition driving down price and increasing efficiency while supplying the same thing. Which is based on a false premise that people know what they want to begin with. Now I would argue when you don't create differentiation.

1:12:28 Everybody suffers. Now let me explain, because if you have a differentiated car market It makes the car market more valuable overall to investors because Uh you know, there is more variety within the market. It benefits the companies because they can achieve a reasonable profit on what they do, because it has some degree of scarcity or uniqueness. And it benefits the consumer because the consumer ends up with more choice. What often happens is you have something like a regulated telecoms market.

1:12:58 Or you have a regulated insurance market. And everybody is forced to compete along the same dimension. And what you end up with is just red red ocean competition and nobody wins. But where I was going with all of this is that going back to the Mad Men era and how you can create a billion dollar.

1:13:15 uh profit for the company and only get paid like three hundred K You need to watch that. Yeah. And I think I've never actually watched Madman, but I think the the point that I was getting at is you can also create negative value. And like how do you ascribe for the negative value? I can speak for Gillette.

1:13:32 where the evidence was that it was uh and by the way, the research showed it was deeply problematic with a large swave of people. Uh has American Eagle suffered? I doubt it. In some ways you could argue it's an ingenious marketing strategy. Which is that you press the hot buttons of one percent of the population. So they then repeat your message. Accompanied by their own

1:13:53 signaling outrage, meanwhile you get free media coverage practically everywhere. But maybe I'm naive. I mean the media budget for that Jaguar film you really was a zero. Maybe I'm naive. Like the Sidney Sweeney American Eagle thing. I think we're just Going back to normal, aren't we? And like we've we've sort of deviated in the last few years and and that seems more maybe it's akin to my time and my frame and like when I was brought up, but

1:14:19 Like nothing about that struck me as rage or Um on either side. Like when I looked at that, I was like oh great. It's just like An advertisement. It's a pub. Yeah, like it just I didn't even think more I didn't think there was more to it. I just saw oh this is great, right? Like there there's a kind of weird sensitivity signaling which generally has nothing to do with the groups you are trying to protect.

1:14:44 Which is just It's sometimes called a purity spiral. Where you effectively signal your moral or political purity by signalling extraordinary

1:14:57 heightened sensitivity to anything that might conceivably offend someone else. Even if the group On whose behalf you claim to be campaigning is completely unconcerned by it. But a like the opposite of her, whatever that would be, it would not cause rage in me either. It would just I wouldn't I wouldn't even think about the brand, you know, it would just be like another thing that flies by. I don't understand why

1:15:21 were so hair triggered. At the this moment in time, unlike Maybe never before. You have to really watch it in um and I've I've noticed this in certain people on the right. Which is I think it's fundamentally dangerous to invest

1:15:38 Too much of your own identity. in a political standpoint. To the point where I I've seen it in people

1:15:48 Both sides become effectively deranged. Now, you could say that's that's the effect of the people who attack them. And that uh the derangement wouldn't happen and wouldn't be necessary in a different kind of media environment. What's different about today? Why is everybody on such a hair trigger? Why do we identify so strongly with extremes? I'm gonna say actually that everybody always blames social media.

1:16:14 Uh I would argue that the mainstream media It is always in your interest and this is a problem in journalism, it's always in your interest to provoke a fight because then you have something to cover. Nobody's interested in reading about peace and the harmony. They're interested in reading about discord and argument and dispute. By the way, that's an evolutionary tendency if we're sitting here.

1:16:33 And we hear we heard a fight. break out across the street, we'd be there with our noses pressed up against the glass. Okay, if if we had, you know, people amicably discussing the weather, we wouldn't pay out the slightest attention. Yeah, where we're we've fundamentally evolved to pay attention to uh Conflict. And so the only difference is the tools available to us. And the extent to which social media provide the mainstream media.

1:16:57 with the tool I I mean in nineteen seventy five, if you wanted to find someone who was outraged by the Sydney Sweeney advertisement, you'd actually have to do some legwork, wouldn't you? No, no. It's one search on X or Uh you know. Blue sky, whatever it may be. Uh willful misunderstanding is another thing that, you know, i i is another technique which is deployed. It's perfectly obvious. I mean I you know, it's perfectly obvious that that ad is not intended to mean Sidney Sweeney is the flow of Aryan womanhood. Okay, it's not you know, it's not that.

1:17:32 Now In a perfect world had they had more budget, maybe they would have had three celebrities of different different ethnicities or genders or whatever it may be. Um But nonetheless, this business where you effectively affect to be outraged by things. Well I'll give you another story about this.

1:17:49 It's always forget. Which is I don't think phrases like uncomfortable. Or Offended. or inappropriate.

1:18:00 You know you know you know that you get these things where you know your your presence here, people would find it, you know, would feel unsafe, triggering. Okay. They don't really in the public sphere. You know, they're matters which for you know, a few hundred thousand years.

1:18:17 We simply sort it out amongst ourselves. We didn't ha we didn't make recourse to the university dean or the supreme court in cases where we were bothered by things because you accepted that's just part of life, and we were allowed then creatively to find ways to get along without recourse to some sort of spurious rule book. Consequently I you know, I don't I don't think those phrases like in a I mean, this is one of the worst things that happens. You say, you know. was accused someone is describing the newspaper as being accused of inappropriate behavior. Now I now have no idea I mean I've literally had to book people for speaking engagements. You go on their Wikipedia page and it says accused of inappropriate behavior. Now I have no idea Whether they're the next Epstein

1:18:59 Or whether they told a knock knock joke. The two people found unpleasant. Do you have them in Canada? Not nothing. I because otherwise I could have been misunderstood there, you see. But

1:19:12 Yeah I have no idea. Literally no idea whether the person's guilty of some utterly trivial infraction which would only have offended naught point oh one percent of the population. Or they're not guilty at all. Somebody just made up an accusation and y the accusation became the framing and the framing became the narrative. So it strikes me as highly problematic in the UK. I'm not one of those people who, by the way, I'm not, you know, I'm not JD Vebs. I don't believe that free speech is completely dead in the UK. But there are worrying signs where People who make a complaint On the basis that they found something disturbing.

1:19:45 can then call in the that's not a police matter. Unless it involves a direct threat of physical Actually. Yeah. I mean simply being disquieted by something Can't be.

1:19:58 But we we've gotten to this point and You know, to varying degrees and varying different countries where You know, the we don't tolerate people who have different ideas than us. And we saw this last week play out in the US with the assassination of Charlie Kerr. And so whether you agree or disagree with him and his views

1:20:17 I have to confess I was only dimly aware of his existence beforehand, perhaps because I'm a bred. Uh I mean I I I I I'd heard the name and I knew he was. We see the same thing in Canada with his sort of our our politics, right? Yeah, I imagine you see it in the US too, where media is definitely uh intolerable of one position and more favorable of the other. And You can analyze this, you can study it, you could do a PhD on this.

1:20:42 It exists, and it seems like we're just not capable of having to think for ourselves and we're not capable of having reasoned discussion on things and and being friends with people. It used to be back in the The thirties, the forties, the the Churchill era. Both sides of the the house or would talk to each other, they would have dinner together, they would find common ground.

1:21:04 How many of these people who are hypersensitized on one side or the other? How many of them really exist? By the way, don't include things like one of the things I find really disturbing is the practice of the media describing people who say oppose uncontrolled immigration. and describe them as a far right group.

1:21:22 Oh, and well but it's not even f that you know you normal people are described as far right now. So in other words, if if you literally take an opinion which may may be held By the way, from my own personal standpoint, I'm pretty benignly disposed to immigration. uh within reason. However I also believe in democracy, and if a significant proportion of the population disagrees with me, I owe it to them to hear them out because their circumstances are different to my own. You know, I might be beneficially You know

1:21:53 One of the slightly annoying things is people who are very rich people who are pro immigration because they say their Polish housekeeper is wonderful. Well that that is an experience of immigration which is not shared perhaps by any means by the other ninety eight percent of people. I'm conscious of the fact that depending on where you are, you see the world differently. That's inevitable. And the job of a democracy is to accept uh the majority opinion even when it goes against your own. And so Th describing and vilifying an opinion which is held by a fairly large threat of the population. Regardless, by the way, the rights and wrongs of the whole thing, I'm not even getting into this now. Um

1:22:30 It's deeply dangerous because people go, Well, if that makes me far right, it looks like I'm far right. I mean insulting calling people deplorables is a Terrible, terrible way of getting deplorables to gang up against you. And then people don't speak up. They sell their opinions and then you lose debate and you lose and then you lose perspective because you don't hear the other side of it, so you think there is no other side, and anybody who believes that might be an idiot. Like an example on this debate which changed my mind a bit. A very, very good Oxford economist called Paul Collier.

1:23:03 wrote this economically balanced assessment of general migration. And made some you know, m uh pointed out that on both sides of what you might call the balance sheet. It was immeasurably more complicated. For example If Nigeria trains doctors who then immediately hoof it to the United States.

1:23:26 Huh how is that? possibly a good thing overall in that a poor country trains doctors who move to a rich country which arguably has enough doctors. From a country which doesn't have enough. Let's not You know, y y you have to I guess that depends on how you frame it, right? Because I another way to look at that, and I'm not arguing for this by any stretch, is that they come here, they make a lot of money and they send that money home to their family. Or all Collier said is look, this is inordinately more complicated.

1:23:58 Yeah. Um it is one of the things he said is the right, for example, of recent immigrants to family reunification. is a bit dubious because you're giving someone a right which the native population do not have. So I can't pick five Canadians and get them British citizenship. You see, I I've yet to meet somebody who totally disagrees with all immigration. It's a matter of

1:24:21 What reasonable immigration Looks like. And also assimilation. Should be decided by someone other than human rights lawyers. Oh yeah, definitely. I would probably agree. Because You know, th fundamentally as a as as a branch of the law that is not a partial Uh and state. Because human rights lawyers

1:24:41 It isn't it. You you know that great phrase of Sinclair Lewis or someone, which is uh it is difficult to get someone to disbelieve something when their salary is dependent on believing it. And just as management consultants have a huge incentive to sell in digital transformation programs to their clients. And therefore we have a culture in business which more or less doesn't assume that any money spent on tech Is money well spent. They didn't look at the opportunity cost. Should we have a better call sector? Buffett and Munger had a good way to sum this up, which is never ask your barber if you need to catch. Yeah.

1:25:16 Uh the same human long rights lawyer, it is in their interests for human rights. to capture a greater and greater part of public discourse at the expense of democratic Bodies. And consequently It's you know, you're not really in the b you're not really in the dispensation of j justice, you're in the amplification of grievance business.

1:25:38 I want to switch gears a little bit. My kids had a question for you. Oh god. Okay, go on. A few years ago we're in Italy on vacation and we walked into a Louis Vuitton store. And They saw a purse.

1:25:53 And they were asking me what makes Somebody span I think it was I don't know, twenty or thirty thousand. Euros on her purse and I had given them an answer, but they wanted me to ask you Some of those things, by the way, weirdly, you can resell them for more than the purchase price.

1:26:10 Because in some cases the Kelly bag, for example they won't sell it to you until you've been a fairly reliable customer of theirs for some time. And therefore the price on eBay is higher than the price they charge in the store. Um so so by the way, it's not it's it's not in it's complicated. But the feminine goods effectively a large proportion of goods depend for their value on being perceived to be expensive. So what goes into that though?'Cause they were well guilty of it to a degree. No, but they were talking about the store and the service and the m my wife just came back from, you know, somewhere where there was quite a nice night dress in Harrods, I think was in London, which was

1:26:49 eighteen hundred pounds. Okay. Now you have to remember that There are quite a lot of goods where The purpose of the good emotionally. is to s well

1:27:02 Let's take the end line. I often think there's a lot of hidden truth in advertising end lines. The L'Oreal end line because I'm worth it. Some part of that is the person advertising to themselves. So, you know, when you drive around in your brand new blinged up Tesla, albeit slightly keyed Okay. You're not actually doing it to pick up chicks. I manag I mean, maybe you are I've no idea what you do in your private time. Okay. But if you let's say you bought a bright red sports car, yes, one purpose of it in a in a particular group would probably be I visibly have resources to spare.

1:27:35 But quite a large part of this stuff is actually signalling to ourselves. Which is, you know Uh because I'm worth it. I deserve this. Uh I'm the kind of person who drives this.

1:27:46 Uh it provides me with a kind of ego boost, a sense of reassurance, whatever it may be. And so consequently, if you think about part of the reason why bags became very expensive is that Very high end clothing. Can only be worn. And

1:28:02 quite specific situations. Mm-hmm. On the other hand, a bag like a man's watch can be worn every day. So one of the reasons why those things are expensive is to use a very interesting measure, cost per entertainment hour. I wear a Casio G shock, I think it was a hundred and thirty quin,'cause I've I actually decided as a gross rationalist that the best watch is one that's cheap enough to wear in the shower, so you don't have to take the f thing off every day. Yeah. But

1:28:29 Paul Dolan, Professor Paul Dolan, who's the uh behavioral scientist at London School of Economics, I met him when I first met him, I said, I'm intrigued because you've worked with Daniel H Carneman on happiness. And I noticed you wear a Rolex. Mm-hmm. And he said, No, he said it's extremely good value for money because it makes me feel good every single day when I put it on and in twenty years' time I'll give it to my son. twenty one years time, I don't know how old his son was. I'll pass it on to my son who can enjoy exactly the same thing. So there's a repository of meaning.

1:28:59 Now Cosper Entertainment Hour is quite interesting because it was used to explain the fact that relatively poor young people We'll spend ninety hundred dollars on a computer game. Which seems like a lot of money until you realise that they might play that game for Oh yeah. Eighteen, ninety, a hundred hours. Yeah. Or more. Super cheap. So it's super cheap. I mean, compared to going to the cinema where it's ten dollars per entertainment hour, more if you buy popcorn.

1:29:25 So it's quite an interesting metric. I mean one of the things that used to make me really annoyed in Britain was when people rich people got really snarky about poor people having large televisions. And I said, Look, you if you haven't got much money, T V is a source of long term entertainment. Is spectacularly cheap. Okay. So having a really good television on which to enjoy'cause you're not going to go force racing at the weekend, you know. You're not you're not going to be there, you know, effectively going to Gleinborn or popping up to the bloody you know, Metropolitan Opera. Therefore having a really large television is a perfectly rational decision. Go deeper on this truth in end lines signalling to ourselves when we purchase something. Jeffrey Miller is fundamentally right that a lot of what we're doing is to advertise ourselves to other people.

1:30:12 And the mating mind um and spent. Two books I think you really should read because they're extremely good. Uh a a third book by my compatriot Will Stor, The Status Game, which you must know. Have you ever read it? Fantastic. I've heard of it. I've been I'm gonna g the the only caveat I give to reading these books, a bit like reading Uh the selfish gene.

1:30:33 is when you read them you are at you know, if you're someone of any kind of sensitivity, you are at risk of experiencing depressive episodes after reading them because not because they're not true, but because they are. And you go, God um you know, am I really that shallow? You know, I do things because I f they feel good, I explain why I do them, but deep down the evolutionary and emotional reason I'm doing these things is really to show off. or to establish, you know, some sort of one upmanship or status. It's kinda complicated. Do I buy one piece of

1:31:08 conspicuous consumption. As is argued by various people like Lord Layard in the UK, do I make my neighbours less happy if I buy a newer, better car? Because what I've done is I've changed their comparative frame and therefore my pleasure comes at the expense of theirs. Hm now that's not I don't think that's totally simple.

1:31:30 I think if you were a real car obsessive and your next door neighbor bought a Ferrari, you'd actually be delighted because you could go out and talk about talk vectoring and An adaptive air suspension or whatever it may be, okay, or the you know the normally aspirated V twelve. And you'd probably be made happier by that purchase. So I don't think it I don't think it's absolutely simple. I think Jay Leno and Jay Leno's garage makes him one of the world's great philanthropists because he goes and spend a fortune on extremely rare cars and then shares his passion with an audience of millions. If you are a car enthusiast. Th you know, it i it's an extraordinary case, by the way, of translating money into something which is both a selfish pleasure and a generous pleasure.

1:32:14 It's complicated. But when you read these books and you you realise that status is effectively a kind of thing within us which we can't turn off. Mm. The currencies will change. The status currencies change with fashion and time and everything else.

1:32:30 Um, you know, there was a time where having a digital watch was the You know, the the highest status thing in my school, if you were the first kid with an L E Dig, people were in awe of you. So these things change. But None the less,

1:32:45 It's Probably innate. Would it be nice if we had the power to completely disregard The opinions of others. Well, yes and no. I mean, I think such a society might be better in some respects. I also think it'll be kind of atrocious because people would kind of go shopping naked.

1:33:02 You know, Is Shame Necessary. It was booked by Jennifer Jackwood, actually. You know, I mean as a social species Patently at some level We're massively calibrated to care about the you know, the repute of others. And that's why some things need to be expensive because then it's a costly signal. It's peacock's tail. It's a so Th the guy who rescued the British sparkling wine industry effectively did so by improving quality by ten percent, twenty percent, and then putting up price by about one hundred and fifty percent. Because price is the same.

1:33:33 In the sparkling in the champagne business. It doesn't matter how good the drink is, if people think you've bought it for eight ninety five, it's not doing the job it's supposed to do, which is to signal generosity, to signal hospitality, or to mark a special occasion. You know, Oh, I see you've taken out the good stuff because it's my birthday. And that's pot I mean you're Canadian, right? Potlatch was I think Where they destroyed possessions. You know more about any history than I do. But I th I think I think it was tribes in the North West who practiced this potlatch thing where you destroyed things of value as kind of

1:34:13 Uh you know, a signaling. Mechanism. That that is like ultimate signal. It's like the rappers burning money on videos or something. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Signaling things that they're probably not intending to signal. There is a serious question here, which is can we take a an innate and immutable human instinct and harness it for good rather than for ill. And Geoffrey Miller's example here is let's imagine two parallel tribes.

1:34:38 Bluntly put. In one tribe the men Folk. Signal their desirability as mates. Uh by

1:34:47 Uh fighting each other with axes. Mm-hmm. That's a negative thumb game. In the neighbouring tribe they signal their desirability of mates by going hunting and trying to bring home meat which they then share with the rest of the tribe. That's a positive sum game. So there is this really complicated question, which is undoubtedly s human pursuit of status has both positive and negative externalities depending on the currency you choose to signal.

1:35:12 And also it's not Totally. It's not totally easy. to say whether it's negative or positive. I mean probably drives a lot of human behavior, which drives ambition, which drives progress, which drives I mean if we genuinely didn't care. Okay, if we had no shame

1:35:30 Uh, you're absolutely right. I mean no one you know, I'm sure by the way, I think also a lot of valuable goods are affordable now by everybody because they started as luxury goods. Yes. So I always mention this'cause it's such a silly boast. My grandparents were the fourth family in Wales to own a dishwasher. And it cost about a hundred and something pounds.

1:35:50 At a time when their house, which was a very nice house, cost them four thousand pounds. That dishwasher probably works better than a modern one, too, by the way. It's still working. They bought it in nineteen fifty nine, sixty one, something something like that. Wha why are they four hour cycles now? And it's like, yeah, I'll be ready Tuesday week. Come on. Yeah, you know. I have one of these it's interesting, just as a funny aside, I have one of these dryers from the eighties in my house. Came with the house. And the remaining about the repairman is like it's gonna be just as expensive to fix this as it would be to buy a new one. I'll just assume I was like no no things are these one and he's like why? I was like trying to close in thirty minutes. I'm gonna make an unusual foreign to environmental responsibility here.

1:36:34 Uh folks, everybody listening. Do if if there's a do, simple thing you can do. Two things. Put on your appliances at times when there is an abundance of clean electricity. You don't have to change what you do, you just have to change when you do it. Secondly If you've got a dryer that doesn't have a heat pump. Get a dry with a heat pump. Yeah.

1:36:54 Because Yep, it's slow. I'm gonna acknowledge that. It's not as fast as an old fashioned dryer. However. the energy efficiency of a dryer with a heat pump. Or better still, Americans, if you live in Arizona, dry your clothes outside. Because this is something that's slightly bemusing,'cause in Britain we didn't have the social stigma of hanging clothes up to dry.

1:37:16 to the same extent. Now we do now. Nobody would hold hang clothes up. But that's just a social stigma. Now in Britain, fairness, we've got a fair climate. You're Canadian, okay. There are plenty of times of the year where Your underpants can be hanging there for three months so they wouldn't notice they might freeze, but they wouldn't notice it'll be dry. But I do find it slightly weird in the US where if you're somewhere like Arizona, you could literally hang them up for f I I was in Fuerteventura in an island in the Can areas. And and well, the amusing thing was you literally they had a washing machine but no dryer, you put it up on the line about forty minutes later, it was ready to wear. So how would you market that to people? How would you change the behavior? Change the behavior so that it's not necessary. Now, I understand that people don't want to put their underpants. You know, private things.

1:38:01 I suspect that a lot of it is those weird housing associations already have rules that say you can't do it. And then bit by bit the social norm spreads. Th those American housing associations basically like living in a Nazi regime, isn't it? As far as I can see. You know, it it's like those co op apartments. In New York, which are

1:38:21 You I mean in London we never tolerate that degree of kind of uh intrusion. before we're allowed to move into a property. The interesting thing about the co op apartments in particular, from what I understand, I don't understand everything, so maybe speaking a bit about something I don't know is The degree to which all people Play it. Yes. Whether you're uh sort of like a student just graduating or you're a billionaire, you're all sort of like playing this.

1:38:47 This game. uh in the co op housing. No no it is completely a game. And apparently they can demand information which the IRS can't demand. I mean it is It is absolutely bizarre. You have a co op board which will uh you know, in occasion kick people out as well. But what probably happens is that once the this is very similar, by the way, with the necessity of children playing outside.

1:39:11 Which is once the behavior drops below a certain threshold. You have an inflection point. So My my my parents couldn't believe this. When I when I was twenty, twenty five and I told them that when I was eleven I used to cycle eleven miles to the nearest town to see my grandmother on my own at the age of eleven. And then when I told them that which they didn't know, I used to at the age of sort of eleven climb up onto the apex of the roof. And just wander around on the roof thirty feet up. Yeah.

1:39:38 My parents were aghast that they'd ever allowed it to happen. But if most people did that at the time it was normal. It was completely normal. Yeah. They'd be locked up today. Um, my parents would have been locked up for so you know, several of the things which I was allowed to do. Uh when I was young. Now what happens I think is that you reach a th a threshold or tipping point where In my childhood, let's say

1:40:03 Someone had abducted me. Or I'd been hit by a car. Okay. N then I'll I'll give the exact yeah, nineteen seventy four, seventy five, seventy six, that kind of era. If I'd been hit by a car cycling to Monmouth or I've been abducted by a paedophile Uh okay.

1:40:19 My parents would have been described as unlucky. You get past a threshold where that behavior becomes weird and now my parents will be held as irresponsible and would be blamed. Yeah. I don't think it occurred to them I was funnel enough hit by a car. My fault, honest. I failed to signal before maneuvering. I was hit by a car. Nobody suggested it was my parents' fault for allowing me to cycle around the place. That was just a normal thing you did.

1:40:44 And then you get these weird I've got a few theories. Um for example. What are the things that are products of social norms where you can suddenly hit a threshold To choose among the middle class would have been an interesting thing in Britain. Is this true in Canada as well? So perfectly middle class people now have body art. And it's normalized.

1:41:05 It would have been deeply weird in any middle class milieu. To see someone with a tattoo. Uh in the nineteen seventies or n nineteen sixties. It's just normal. I mean, like everybody you gotta be fifty nine to notice this stuff. A lot of it happens over quite a long time, friend. It's been a third. I've got a theory that all British men would wear shorts all the time if it weren't for social pressure. I also think for example

1:41:33 Yeah, here's an interesting one. I don't know if you're into perineal sunning, are you? What is this? It's a Buddhist practice where you basically expose your perineum to direct sunlight. Um I think That

1:41:46 A fairly large proportion of the population Uh Naturists. To an extent. By which I don't mean wandering around the streets with their schlong out. But I mean that on a beach, in a field, in sunny weather, in you know, in some sort of privacy, they would like to wander around with no clothes on because it's good for you. It exposes your whole body to sunlight. You get a lot of vitamin D. You know, it's generally healthful. And my argument about sunbathing is

1:42:13 You know, evolution made it pretty enjoyable. Maybe it's not all bad. And there are some schools of thought in dermatology which mayor case that actually weirdly although it in enhances the risk of skin cancer, it improves cardiovascular health. So there was a study actually among Swedes where there was a higher instance of skin cancer among Swedish sunbed addicts.

1:42:35 But they actually had a higher life expectancy, which they didn't expect. Mm. So quite often you see what we do is we measure the narrow effect of a behavior, but not the broader effect. But interesting in terms of you know how we might get things wrong. By the way, I wouldn't do it on a beach if there were children present. And then you know but if you go to if you go to parts of the of Europe

1:42:55 Particularly Germans will just wander around naked. I think at some level if there are no children now, in the United States that would be comp perceived in a completely different way. Meditieren, Yoga, joggen, nichts entspannt mich. Echt? Mich entspannt meine Steuer total. Steuer? Wie Finanzamt? Die Steuererklärung? Ja, ich habe ganz locker über 1000 Euro zurückbekommen. Hast du geheime Connections oder Excel-Superkräfte? Nö, nur die Wiso Steuer App. Wow, und das ist einfach? Klar, die macht fast alles automatisch. Ich fühle mich plötzlich so.

1:43:28 Entspannt. Hol dir dein Geld zurück. Abgabefrist 31. Juli. Was? Schaffst du ganz entspannt mit Wieso Steuer? Ach ja. So quite a lot of these things are arbitrary. They're just in other words You know, if doing something makes you weird, there is a point at which you reach a threshold vegetarianism, veganism, et cetera, where it where it goes from being weird to mainstream. So it's n what I'm saying is it's not an even process. Right. And sometimes you never get to the threshold.

1:43:57 I I see what you're saying. I never coming up to time here, I wanna get to a couple of questions. What are the rules of good copy? If I asked you to teach me how to write good copy How would you do that? I think a large part of it comes down to You know, Michael Polanyi.

1:44:13 And his idea of a tacit skill, which is we know more than we can tell. There are some generally good rules, which is write conversationally, much more conversationally than people think they should write, because everybody thinks they have to write a Um actually I'll give you two examples of this. David Ogilvy, all his books are incredibly readable because I think he was a copywriter first and an author second. His pro style is very good. And he also adopts a clever trick.

1:44:40 Which I've stolen. And which Uh a few other people. is that he writes extremely plainly for the most part, but will throw in the odd sescopedelian long word just to remind the reader that he you know, you're not an idiot.

1:44:54 You know, it's almost there to flatter the reader as much as it is to flatter the writer. Conan Doyle, uh I was talking to Rick Rubin about this. He and I both grew up on those Sherlock Holmes short stories, which are not only models of thinking and deduction and uh uh a you know, and and a fantastic lesson for uh mental gymnastics, I think. They're also the um Kingsley Amis believe this, that he's one of the greatest prose writers in the English language Because bear in mind a lot of that stuff's written in eighteen eighty. You read a lot of stuff that's written in eighteen eighty fuck does that fucking what's that mean? Yeah. Oh God, hold on, I'll I'll have to go back to page twenty seven to work out how who on earth Mr Homer Angel is or

1:45:31 Uh there's Miss Miss Mary miss something suddenly, isn't there, Martin? At no point in reading a Sherlock Holmes short story have I ever had to go back a page to work out how who somebody is. Yeah. In terms of just absolutely brilliant clarity. Uh those are astonishing. But in terms of persuasion. Uh there are various things so you use generally verbs of movement. You you use verb in preference to adjectives and adjectives in preference to adverbs, I think. You tend to use Anglo Saxon words rather than the romance words for the most part, without being silly about it.

1:46:06 You convert a feature into a benefit. There's also an element where sometimes all you need to do is tell people a fact. Yeah. I don't know any evidence about this and I'd like to know it. And I asked this question, which is Of the people who are anti vaxxers during Covid. Was there a difference between the people who are basically happy with the idea of a vaccine and the people who weren't?

1:46:27 partly driven by whether you knew that vaccination dated back to the eighteenth century than smallpox. In other words, it was a two hundred and fifty year old medical practice. Or whether you thought it was some weird newfangle thing that you couldn't possibly trust. I don't know. But sometimes. Do you ever watch Prest Talwalker on YouTube? You know those mathematical puzzles, j geometry puzzles?

1:46:50 I I really recommend them because weirdly I find myself on YouTube watching people solve mathematical equations for fun, which I never thought I'd do. But Tresh Telewalker and I can't remember what it's called something like Something decisionless, something anyway. Um it's great great little YouTube channel. It's not that little. He's got a huge following.

1:47:09 And sometimes there's a geometry puzzle which looks completely impossible to solve until you just draw one extra line, at which point the solution becomes obvious. And So sometimes in marketing all you've got to do is tell people a fact. It's not always about persuasion. It's not always about getting people it's simply putting people in a you know, a state of knowledge or belief. Or conviction. Th this thing can make a difference to their lives.

1:47:34 And by the way, you're not you're almost always up against a problem, which is that the two human default modes are do what everybody else does and do what I've done before. Uh obvious. Reasons. Yeah. What you've done before and what everybody else always does is not necessarily optimal, but it's much less likely to be catastrophic than trying something new that nobody else ever does.

1:47:55 Yeah. So we're kinda herd species and we're kinda habitual species. So in the marketing of something which is genuinely new. Yeah, you're The Tesla, the the electric car.

1:48:07 There is a degree of extreme anxiety. Which you don't encounter when you repeat by or when you buy the brand leader. There's like a resistance you have to overcome. The human default mode is do what I did before, do what everybody else does. I feel comfortable doing that. Very, very rational default mode. There's nothing silly about that in terms of If you think about it, our evolutionary um brain architecture. Those two things make a lot of sense. But

1:48:38 Um it does mean and something I only realized about a year ago, thirty five years after I've started working in the business, is that As a consequence of that, big innovative new ideas don't require less marketing. They require more. Because you're asking people to at the initial stages, you're asking someone to do something that nobody else has done and you're asking them to do something they haven't done before. Both of which create a kind of disquiet. And so providing people with conviction and reassurance

1:49:06 quite often, I suspect, by the way, in the early stages of a technology, that happens one to one. that you know, it was my brother, who's he's an astrophysicist, so he knows all the bloody m maths about kilowatt hours and stuff. So my brother provided me with the reassurance to buy my first electric car. F I don't think if he hadn't bought an electric car I've now had three would I bought an electric car.

1:49:30 Yeah. Probably not. Yeah. Uh it will be my brother who persuades me to get solar panels or a heat pump or something of that kind. But Big ideas don't require the the the classic geek idea is our idea is so good it will sell itself.

1:49:46 A rice Your fellow Canadian, Stuart Butterfield, isn't it, who founded um Slack? Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. Uh he says the only real measure of innovation is behavioral change. That the only real measure of whether an innovation is significant is whether it ha it both in first order and second order ways changes the way people behave.

1:50:06 Now an interesting question is Is AI at that point yet? My second question is The lesson of all tech was is that loads and loads of geeks compete

1:50:19 Through for technological numerical superiority by some measure or other. And then someone else comes along with a cute user interface that makes all the money. Basically Steve Jobs. Yeah.

1:50:30 Nobody's done that yet for AI. Now, maybe this weird thing that Johnny Ive is concocting. Which is some sort of weird pendant. Which talks to your mobile phone. Maybe that's what it is. There is the this thing that sort of relates to that, which was Bill Gates had this saying, he's like the best and you know, I have friends living this now, the best technology doesn't win. That's a very engineering point of view, because You're judging technology by its um engineering qualities rather than its uh human appeal.

1:51:00 Oh that's an interesting reference. Uh there are there are people in every field. Like in the camera world, there are people called measure beters. They're den d d they're denigrated as measure beters because they're obsessed with the numerical qualities of the camera. Yeah. You know, uh yeah, focal length and all that stuff. And they don't take very good photographs. Yes. And um saying that the best I mean, undoubtedly the be by the way, I mean you know

1:51:24 Beta Max is the famous example. Where they fail to capture network effects. And in a world where there are network effects Yeah, by the way, the best technology probably often doesn't win. I think that's probably fair. Everybody was competing to make a slightly faster IBM compatible B C. But they were all grey and beige. Now, nobody in the tech world would go, the slight problem with this PC isn't the fact that the clock speed or the processing power or the RAM is insufficient. The problem is if I put this device in any room of my house, it turns that room into an office. Yeah. If you put an IBM PC, a gray IBM PC in any room in your house.

1:52:01 Including the you might as well put a fucking photocopier in a bloody filing cabinet in the room. Right whereas when Johnny Ive comes along and has that lickable the iMac. The i Mac you can actually put that in any room of the house and it it it actually enhances the fashion, David. It's fantastic. It's a you know, it's an adornment. And so their failure to understand the wider context within which they were operating, which is the job of marketing. is exactly the reason nerds hate marketing because they think in a perfect world nerd metrics win out. But the consumer is much more bothered by the fact that when you get to the bottom of the iPhone scroll, it gives the little bounce.

1:52:41 And well yeah, you could. If we're to be absolutely honest, you could ridicule Um uh you know, Ives and jobs over their obsession with uh you know, bezels and champhers and things like that.

1:52:55 But of course, multiply that by a billion owners using the thing a hundred times a day. Okay, that's a hundred billion Encounters. And that probably matters a lot more, in fact, than, you know, by the way, I mean I I lost faith in Apple when they cancelled the car. How interesting. Because I thought Yeah.

1:53:18 To create for places like New York and London. A form of microtransphely really cool, really, really efficient. Yeah, the the brand power you have, you see You know, if you're Apple or Ford or whatever, people will buy a weird product from you much more readily than they will from Alpha Romeo. Right. Because they go, Well if Ford's doing it I you know, it must be okay. So one of the gifts of having a strong brand is your power to really disrupt and create new categories.

1:53:46 Yeah. New categories of transit. for example, which we need, you know. Uh take me wrong, I'm gonna You know, I gotta fuck off six hundred horsepower electric car. But when I go into London I want a Michelino or an itty biddy little thing'cause that's appropriate to the task. And My argument is that they could have done something there. They could have used their power to do something and

1:54:06 And you know, the finance people killed it, really. It was what was it called? Project something or other. Never remember. But no, no, they're just changing the shape of things and making the camera a bit better. Come on, guys. By the way. Johnny Gunt. Okay. I tend to buy and th this maybe applied to electric cars as well. Always a good reason to buy Korean stuff. Do you know why?

1:54:26 Well. They're gonna do that anyway. The Koreans are gonna make fantastic tech of fantastic cars, regardless of the profit motive. You know why? Lind up the Japanese.

1:54:36 Mm-hmm. So they've got two motivations. Okay. Other people are just trying to make money. Deep down do you know do you know why the largest Episcopalian church in the world is in Seoul? No. Right? This is really fascinating. I'm going to sell for the first time. I've never been. But the last four presidents of Korea have been variously like Catholic, Presbyterian

1:54:58 Now before Um before the Japanese invasion. Christianity was a tiny niche missionary religion in Korea. When the Japanese invaded, um Uh

1:55:10 The a tiny Christian population refused to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. And some of them were martyred. for refusing to effectively that pay due respect to the divinity of the Japanese emperor.

1:55:23 And therefore it became the patriotic religion. Because it was seen as a deeply patriotic um entity. So I've got a hunch that you you know, deep down, you know, if you go by a Hyundai or a Genesis or something like that, there's a dual motivation here. Let's make a bit of money. And uh that's that's purely so Similarly, if you want to look for anthropological reasons to buy. Um

1:55:47 An awful lot of German businesses are driven by sibling rivalry. Mm-hmm. So Puma versus Adidas. Yeah, yeah. Uh Aldi North versus Aldi South. There's a whole weird family rift in the German car industry, which is too complicated for me to understand about Porsche and the family who own Pinchitrieder. There are a whole load of families which are kind of weird warring families. And sometimes the family business has a motivation which actually the consumer is the winner. Well the consumer is the i is exactly the winner in in all this. Um but but going back to that family business thing, that you know, undoubtedly if you can harness Oh the

1:56:24 motivations alongside the profit motives. Most people working for a company, unless you've bought them off with massive stock options because they're in the senior management, most people don't get up in the morning to enrich the share owners. No. You know, I don't get up I don't get home every morning. I I don't know what a big shareholder is of my company. It's probably like the State of Wisconsin DMV Pension Fund. Well for the best wish in the will, I don't wish them any ill will be. I don't get up in the morning and I go, Oh, I really worry about those DMV people's pensions in Wisconsin. I can worry about customers, I can worry about colleagues. That's a natural human motivation. To serve those people. We always end with the same question.

1:57:02 Which is what is success for you? Just expanding the adjacent possible. That's a very pretentious article, but push the pebble a bit further. Th that that's it. I mean, you know, one of the reasons I do a lot of this sh sh shtick stuff Is because the feedback I got was every now and then someone comes up to me and says

1:57:22 I made a different decision because of something you said. Someone said to me, I bought my house because of you. I thought they might be about to hit me. We still hear from people about our first podcast every two or three months. Somebody emails me and says uh you know, because of that oh I love this. I never heard of this person. I went and looked him up and one thing I'm really clear on, and I we made this mistake. All creative people have made this mistake. Which is to go, Oh no, that rationality's silly. What you need is creativity. No. All you need is two strings to your bow. Okay. This is a complementary mode of problem solving.

1:57:58 It works best in parallel with some rational quantitative or data driven measures, but the quantitative and data driven measures should not be allowed to crowd it out. And so when I say w the the the reason someone bought a house because of me is I said, when you're looking for a house, don't optimise. Because everybody will want that house. Instead, find something the house has which most people won't like, but you don't care about. Next to a pub. Now, I'm I'm not saying next to a rough pub, I don't want to have fights outside my house, but most people, particularly older people, would hate the idea of being next to a pub because they crap all about noise and the beer garden and all that stuff.

1:58:38 I personally the noise of a pub, a good happy pub. is music to me. I don't get a sleep before midnight anyway, so it's not gonna keep me awake. Railway line. personally it to me it's a bonus, to most people it's negative. Go and look for those things where you can arbitrage Yeah. Uh what's possible. That would be my attitude. Now, similarly, if you've got a problem to solve

1:59:01 Don't purely define the problem in psychology free terminology. Just as in America you have a temperature and you have a fields like temperature. Which is by the way very, very intelligent thing because W what makes us feel hot is not just the ambient temperature. It's a combination of temperature, humidity, breeze, and I think there's one other factor. When they do the feels like temperature, there's something like temperature so many feet above the ground that they factor in. Um now when I'm going outside, I'm not gonna do chemical experiments. I don't need to know what the ambient temperature is, I need to know will I feel hot? And in the same way

1:59:37 I think there's something really important here, which is That Do not define an objective which is designed to h serve human beings without considering psychological factors. Because you might be able to solve your problem very, very cheaply and efficiently by changing the psychology, not by changing the technology. And provided people are looking at both with a reasonable amount of imagination. I'm not I'm not angry with a well I'm bit.

2:00:03 I'm I'm only angry with accountants and lawyers and economists. Not because they do what they do, but because they have too much power doing. And they've achieved a kind of monopoly over decision making, which I don't think they have a reasonable claim to. That's a brilliant place to end, though. It is not a bad place to end. Yeah. Thank you very much. We're not going to wait nine years before we get together. Nine years before we get back together. How often are you in London? Uh once or twice a year. Yeah. Oh we must meet up then, that'd be fantastic. Definitely.

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