Rory Sutherland: The Psychology of Selling

Your job is to sing. We've got these guys in a shed over there who are writing the songs. Uh, we've got Studio 3 free. We get a song from these guys, we give it to you, and now you perform it and record it. Okay, but I want to write my own. No, no, you can't do that.

Today, I'm having a guest with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Oie, and we're going to get into sonic branding, sludge content, behavioral economics, Rick Rubin, heat pumps, and a lot more than that. I hope you like it.

Roderick, Rory Sutherland, one of the most famous people in advertising. You know our mutual friend, Paul Burke, of course. And he said, uh, he's magnificent. Paul B, very fast and very honest. And he said, um, Rory Stewart is actually called Roderick. And I was hoping he'd become Prime Minister because then we'd have a Prime Minister called Rod Stewart. So, ah, no.

Interestingly, I didn't know this. Um, I'm Christian Roderick. Um, and my brother, who was 18 months older than me, couldn't really say Roderick, so said something. And my grandmother said, "Oh, you should call him Rory," which I've been known by everybody apart from my passport, my driving license. Uh, I've had, I've been known as Rory ever since. And I didn't know until I met Rod, Roderick, stroke Rory Stewart, I didn't know that this was actually a formal abbreviation. Yeah, I thought it was just an alternative name. But in Scotland, Rory is an abbreviation for Roderick. Wow. Um, weirdly. Um, and so likewise, yes, you're right, Rod Stewart would have been the, uh, Prime Minister.

So today, uh, Rory, we do have on instruction of Anna for the audience. Anna is the sort of the, what, what, what hemisphere is the organized one? The right or the left? Uh, the left is the, the only retentive one. Yeah. Right. So Anna is your left hemisphere. You get walking, right hemisphere. So what that means is, uh, she's going to come in and McGilchrist will be, uh, turning, turning red at the, yeah, not in his grave because he's still, no, no, no, absolutely not. No, the master in his emissary. That's the book, isn't it? Yeah, fantastic book. And his most recent book is *The Matter with Things*, which is a two-volume, sort of 1200-page work. Which I have to confess, I haven't read in its entirety. But actually, I'm not sure, I'm not sure you need to read it in its order. You need to read it in its entirety, but actually, you can dip into it. It's extraordinary work.

Reminds me of something you once said. You said, "There are no schedules, only checklists." Yeah, I, I don't really believe in procreative processes. I think there are checklists which are important. Yeah. And I think, you know, have, have you looked at this? Have you considered that? What about this? I think checklists are really useful. I think the idea that there's necessarily a kind of procedure and order in which you proceed if you're trying to do something original. That is, if you're trying to do something which is the same as the time you did it before, then you want a process or an algorithm. Yes. But if you're trying to do something new, uh, the best you can hope for, I think, is a checklist.

Well, that's kind of the problem with trying to scale up creativity, isn't it? Which is, to scale up, you kind of have to copy and paste quite a lot. I think what we can do, and which we've, what we've failed to do in advertising, is I think we can kind of, you can't replicate it, but I think you can classify it. Right. And I think you can find recurring patterns in successful marketing campaigns, uh, which you can, uh, effectively, uh, you could, you can do variations on a theme, if you like. And I don't think, I think we need a kind of Linnaean classification of persuasive forms.

I mean, all credit, actually, Bob Cialdini. I don't know if you're a fan of his book *Influence*, but he was the first person to say, he, he effectively went out with sales forces and said, and he found that, just to be clear, he said, every sales force, every successful salesman has a whole, effectively, a whole panoply of different techniques. And some of them are totally specific to what you're selling. You, if you're selling, you know, aluminum cladding or whatever it may be, you'll have a stick or a particular technique that's very effective. But it's not necessarily applicable if you're selling bathroom supplies. Right. But he said there are these six things, I think he's now expanded them to seven, which recur from category to category. In other words, scarcity, for example, social proof. They're kind of common recurring themes which humans instinctively find reassuring. You know?

Well, it's scarcity, as in the less, the more valuable. What's weird about them, and I think you could probably make the case that they're kind of contradictory. In other words, "Not many people have this, so it must be good." Yeah. Okay. "We can only produce 2,000 bottles a year, therefore it must be good." Or Coca-Cola, which is, "Everybody drinks this, so it must be good." Or like in the case you mentioned on the Rick Rubin podcast, just been listening to that this afternoon, you said in some categories like fashion, uh, what was it? "If you're not selling enough, try raising the price." You know, there are some items for which you have to pay a painful amount for it to actually matter.

And I mean, the psychology of price is really interesting because it's something that economics gets really badly wrong. Because it assumes that X, that cheaper is inherently better, and it forgets the fact that price isn't just a cost, it also conveys meaning. Yeah. And I, the way I would say is, to economists, price is a number, but to consumers, it's a feeling. And the example I always give is, if, if you were a completely logical economist, and you had two products, and one of them had greater functionality, more features than the other, and it also cost less. Now, in economic terms, that's a slam dunk. It's a no-brainer. It's a really easy decision. Greater utility, lower price, you buy the cheaper, more functional product. What actually happens in the human brain is we actually have second-order intelligence, which goes, "Well, if my product really was better, I'd kind of charge more for it, wouldn't I? So therefore, why is this product cheaper? Well, maybe there's something wrong with it that I don't know about. I now feel uneasy. So I'm not going to buy either of them." Right. Yeah.

So like, was it penicillin? If you get, you know, it's 62p. Is not enough. I've got a two-pound aspirin. Aspirin was the, aspirin was the great thing. Yeah. Well, I said, you know, it worries me that there isn't any premium aspirin because the placebo effect is undoubtedly affected by the way. But if you tell people a treatment is expensive, it does in many cases make, make it more, more effective. Which presumably pharmaceutical clients are rolling. I mean, that's an interesting debate in itself, which is, and actually, I bizarrely had a conversation briefly with Sir Patrick Vallance, of all people. I had to give a talk at a medical, uh, dinner. And I must admit, two weeks before the talk, I was kind of thinking, a bunch of doctors after-dinner speech, maybe a few knob gags. And then I had a look at the invitation list and realized it was got Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance and Sir Richard Thompson. I thought, "Okay, I think I need to raise my game a bit here."

And one of the things I was delighted Patrick Vallance also agreed with is that we've got the placebo effect wrong. In that, to prove the efficacy of a drug, what we do is we take drug plus placebo, only placebo, subtract placebo. That is efficacy of drug because we're trying to prove the pharmacological value of the drug in isolation. But what we should be trying to doing as doctors is increasing and maximizing the combinatorial effect of the psychology and the pharmacology.

So you mean instead of minus placebo? So, so instead, instead of, so let's say, let's say you do, okay, what, what's something I can't get a hold of at the moment, which is this, um, you know, weight loss drug that you inject into your gut called, um, OIC? Okay. Wegovy. Now, what you might do is get a load of people to inject themselves with nothing, and a load of people to inject themselves with Ozempic, and you can reasonably say that the weight loss between the two is attributable to the pharmacology, not to the psychology. Okay. But what we should be doing with Ozempic is saying, "How do you maximize the combinatorial effect in weight loss of psychology and pharmacology?" In other words, do you tell people to take Ozempic for a week and then stop, and then try and not eat for three weeks, and then have another dose? You know, is there a way you can make this drug, in a sense, more theatrically effective? Because part of weight loss undoubtedly is pure, what you might call, pure endocrinology or whatever. Okay. Part of weight loss is surely convincing people, providing people with a narrative that things have changed, and they can actually lose weight, they can change their behavior. Yeah. And, um, so, you know, I mean, is there a way in which you also combine it, say, with something like sleep therapy? And so, what worries me is that we're trying to prove the standalone efficacy of different drugs when really we should be looking at the multiplicative, the combinatorial, maximum efficacy of three interventions: behavioral, psychological, and pharmacological. And saying, "How can we combine those three things to maximize effective weight loss?" And instead, of course, to justify a drug for approval, what you have to do is subtract all the other things that are working when you should be trying to maximize them. Right.

So there's this, reminds me of a line that always comes back into my head, which is at the end of the final Harry Potter book. Um, now, you got, you got to excuse me here, weirdly. Okay. I haven't read any Harry. I had a daughter who was obsessed with it. That makes sense. I think you're the right age to have not read the books. I'm probably that grumpy Stuart Lee age where you go, "You've seen the Stuart Lee?" I have read one. You should read it, Stuart. It's about a wizard. No, I have read the entire works of William Blake. [ __ ] ex. Okay. Right. No, I haven't read the entire works of William Blake. I probably should have done. But I, by the way, I make that mistake. I'm weirdly a bit snobby. I'm not very snobby about food. I'm as happy into KFC as I am going to, you know, Michelin-starred restaurants. I'm weirdly snobby about cinema. And, you know, my ideal film is like, from French people getting upset about something over dinner. Okay. But I think that's, I mean, I, I actually ended up watching *The Lion King*, which is the kind of thing which, uh, the original, this is the, yeah, the cartoon. And I'm the kind of person, you know, children's thing. What am I watching a bloody cartoon for? I should be watching, you know, you know, I, I could be watching *Last Year at Marienbad*. Why would I watch? And I watched it. It's [ __ ] amazing. It's absolutely brilliant. But it's drawing from the same source material. You've got *Hamlet*, you've got *Richard III*.

Well, you're absolutely right. And so it's, it's rather like *Star Wars*, which draws enormously on mythology. It's actually extra. And actually, one of the lessons is that the best of anything is great. Yes. Okay. Country music. You know that thing that went down to look at the Titanic and it, it imploded? Okay. Well, apparently you got to take your iPod or your Bluetooth device down. And they had a Bluetooth speaker and you could choose your playlist for the journey down to the Titanic. But there was a rule: no country music. Now, that's a red flag. That's a red flag right there. Okay. I'm not going to entrust my life to a guy who doesn't like country music. The best country music is, it's fantastic. Yeah.

Look, I'll finish my Harry Potter. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yeah, Harry Potter. Sorry. Back to Harry Potter. So don't, don't start talking about things like Hogwarts because I, I, there was this really annoying three-year period where every piece of journalism included a Harry Potter reference about the Sorting Hat or owls. And, you know, or Platform Seven. And I'd be sitting there reading *The Times* or what [ __ ] person talking about this. God, what are you talking about? Owls?

There's a dream sequence at the end where Harry sees a, a Dumbledore in, in a dream, and he gets a revelation. But he says, "The problem is, none of this matters because it's all in my head." So he's not real. And Dumbledore says, "Of course, it's all in your head, but who's to say that means it's not real?" Of course, of course. This is to your point about assuming the physiological is the only real effect and the psychological is a kind of. I mean, you, I mean, we've got a huge TV at the end of the room, you can't see it, but that's a mind hack. It only produces three colors. It's species-specific. I was talking to the, uh, uh, Department of Business and Trade today about precisely this, that it's optimized for perception. It's not optimized for objective reality. You couldn't make a television that actually reproduced colors without that mind hack. Very manual. C would be jumping for joy. Absolutely. Yeah.

I, by the way, if you want a good book tip, folks, for your, your lovely readers and listeners as well as obviously in McGilchrist, there's a book by a guy called Andy Clark called *The Experience Machine*. Yeah. And what he does is he revives and builds on a theory that goes back to the 19th century about human perception. Okay. And I think it was a chap called Herman von Helmholtz, sort of German polymath, and I think William James, who made the point. Now, before televisions, by the way, and before digitization, this theory must have seemed quite strange. But it makes sense in the light of technology. And the theory is that most of what we perceive is a prediction. And that we use our limited bandwidth from our senses for error correction of prediction, not for generation of actual reality. Right. So, yeah, we're not seeing it firsthand. No, we're generating it effectively.

Now, if you look at, um, MPEGs and JPEGs, okay, the way they achieve their extraordinary data compression is that there is an expected value for each pixel based on what pixel preceded it in time or what pixel is adjacent to it. And you only use data to describe the extent to which the pixel deviates from the expected value, which is a much more efficient use of data than describing each pixel in raw mode. For those of you who are digital, I mean, presumably this isn't shooting in raw mode, is it? You're just shooting in MPEGs or, okay. Now, if you do take a pi, if, right here, I'm talking to the AV folks here, if you do shoot, shoot a picture in raw mode, presumably it's great for editing because there's literally a value for each pixel. But the files are insanely massive, is that right? Because I had a photographer who was my neighbor in Deal who had to come around because I had fiber optic broadband to the premises and he couldn't get it and he had to upload these raw photos, 120, like, you know, insane sort of. Exactly. Absolutely. And, I think he used to park outside my house when I wasn't there.

Now, interestingly, it's much more efficient use of data to use data to error correct versus expectation than it is to use data to generate the whole image denovo from a blank slate. And what it seems to be the case is that the brain has come up with exactly the same data architecture that kind of Samsung and digital camera makers have come up with for data compression, which is just use the data to Des. Because I, I, I don't know, imagine if you wanted to have a TV in raw mode, okay? Your Sky dish would have to be the size of Jupiter or something. Consumption, power consumption would have been absolutely insane. But they play this, these three hacks. One, you only need three colors because the brain's basically, the cones in the eye only detect those three colors. Color mixing is a psychological phenomenon. It's not, it doesn't exist in nature. No, no. If you mix green and whatever it is, you know, um, what is it? Green and red? Green and red is yellow, isn't it? If you mix green and red photons, you don't get yellow photons, you get green and red photons. But the brain, the brain effectively extrapolates yellow from the relative strength of those two stimuli. Yeah. So the frightening conclusion is, there's no such thing as yellow. Not, not magenta. Particularly magenta is entirely because halfway between red and blue is green, but you're not detecting any green with your green sensors. So magenta is effectively a color the brain generates to explain away the inexplicable absence of green. Okay.

Um, this, this is actually fascinating because if this, I mean, when you think about it, if, um, Andy Clark and von Helmholtz, and the book once again is called *The Experience Machine*, if they're right about this, which I think they probably are, because it makes complete sense from a kind of data processing, mental data processing point of view, and that most of what we actually see is prediction and expectation. Um, and this may be true of movement as well. So in robotics, they've had some success by making robots move in a kind of way that's Bayesian, in other words, it's intent combined with constant ongoing error correction rather than intention, action. And it's interesting because apparently, if you design robots to move in this Bayesian way, it looks much more natural and animalistic or human than it does if you actually design them to kind of.

This is similar to the way the degrees of, like, light intensity is logarithmic. So if you ask your Echo Dot, "Turn the lights down by 50%," it'll feel like it's barely moved. To feel like it's half as bright, it needs to be something like 10% bright. Yeah. That's interesting because that's psychophysics, which is a lot of things we perceive logarithmically. According to some scientists, we perceive numbers logarithmically. So if you take an innumerate tribe, apparently, and you go and put a grain of rice down, and then you put nine grains of rice down, and you ask them to make a pile that's halfway between the two. People who've done maths, who have an actual number system, put five. But people who actually don't, put three. One, three, nine. Because they see three is halfway between one and nine. Why would that be? Well, it sort of makes sense. Intuitively makes sense to me in terms of our actual perception, because there's a big difference between being attacked by one lion and two lions. Okay. Whereas the difference between being attacked by 98 lions and 99 lions is kind of hair-splitting and rather irrelevant.

So in terms of perceiving quantity logarithmically, maybe that explains a lot of pricing. You know, that's slightly weird thing with price, which is, there are things that are expensive within the 20 to 30, 40 range, okay? And then I can go and spend £200 on something and it doesn't feel that much more expensive. Yeah. I've never quite understood this. I never actually do that sort of math where I think, "Well, I could buy, you know, 200 fries at McDonald's for the price of this jacket." Or you'd find, like, you know, a stick of butter for £5.95. Maybe not where you live, but we would find that in Salford. Disgusting. Yes. Yeah. A pint of beer. Well, I'll have three for that price. You know, five, 15 quid. And so there's this whole weird thing about our perception of price is comparative. Our perception of lots of things are comparative, and they're not linear. Yeah.

Um, emphatically not linear at all. And so I, you know, it's always, I always love American weather forecasts because they have this thing, "feels like" temperature. Yes. And it's, you know, "Well, here in Scottsdale, Arizona, it's 110, but of course, it's really humid, so sorry, it's really dry, so it feels like about 90 something." And it factors in breeze, humidity, and something else. I think there's a third factor, maybe direct sunlight. I'm not sure. But I mean, it always struck me as really weird in that, as you know, as a fat Welsh Celtic guy, okay, I don't come into work if it hits 90 degrees Fahrenheit in London. That's just, okay, forget that. I can't cope with that. But I wander around Scottsdale in Arizona when it's 100 and something, and I'm as happy as Larry because everyone's kind of doing the same thing.

It's a really important point for climate change, which is a lot of the climate change modeling is all about increased temperature. But actually, what you should be modeling for is increased wet-bulb temperature, which is temperature plus humidity. Because humans can survive quite well in low humidity at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Sorry, I'm old. Okay. I'm still using. You're still on. I'm the, I will be the last person using. I don't use shillings and pence, okay? But I'm one of the last. It must be. In Europe, the people, the rental car companies must really hate me because I, you know, I get into a French rental car, first thing I do is language, English or Welsh if I'm really, really perverse. And then it says Fahrenheit miles, okay? I convert everything to Imperial. And there's some poor German who has the car after me who has driven practically insane. But, but, you know, but you can survive in in really high temperatures if there's low humidity. If you have 100% humidity, a really fit human being, even well, um, uh, well provided with liquid liquids, well, well, not humidified, what is it? Hydrated. Hydrated. Thank you. Even well hydrated will die. Yeah.

By the way, I had a rant this morning. This is a complete, um, but I'd like to know your opinion on this, actually, which is, as you probably know, the government really wants people to get heat pumps. And a heat pump is, so it's a way of heating your house where effectively it's like a fridge in reverse. Okay? It stores heat and then, so no, it basically extracts heat from the outside air and actually pumps it. So just as a fridge removes heat from the fridge and pumps it out into your kitchen, a heat pump is a bigger version of a fridge which removes heat from the air outside your house, makes the air outside your house a bit colder, makes your house a lot hotter. And you know, one way of doing it is you replace your boiler with a heat pump and you put a great piping of water underneath your lawn because that makes it a bit more effective. Now, Britain's a few things because of the magic of kind of, you know, thermodynamics, okay? You actually get five, five times as much heat out as you put energy in. There is, it varies depending on what the temperature difference is between outside and and inside. But whereas when you burn gas in a boiler to heat your house, it probably converts calorific value at about 50% into heat in the home. You actually get a sort of 300, 400% bonus when you use electricity to power a heat pump. It's, I know it sounds like magic, but because it isn't generating heat like a boiler, it's extracting it and moving it from the outdoors into into the indoors, it's vastly more efficient. Even though you're using electricity, not gas. The catch. So what? Well, isn't a catch. But here's where I was having a bit of a rant to these people at the, this is not their responsibility at all, but one form of heat pump is just an air conditioning unit. Okay? And if you've been in a hotel room, what you may have noticed is the air conditioning unit is also the heater. Yep. Okay? And all you do is it flips some little switch, directional switch, and an air conditioning unit stops removing heat and pumping it outside and starts extracting heat from the outside, moving it inside. So an air conditioning unit is also an air-to-air heat pump. Now, this is what pisses me off, okay? Quite a lot of people, I think, would keep their boiler and bit by bit, like it's about 1500, 2000 quid to buy an air conditioning unit that'll, that'll supply a room. Okay? And one year at a time, they might get, they might go, "Okay, I'll air condition the kitchen. I'll put an air-to-air heat pump in the kitchen." And while they've got three or four of these things, hardly be using their boiler and their gas at all, except in really, really cold weather. And you can't get a government grant for that. Why? You can get a government grant for digging up your lawn, putting huge numbers of pipes in, throwing out your gas boiler, replacing your radiators. You can get a government grant for doing something that's really stupid and complicated. But the simple thing, which exploits exactly that same benefit of heat transfer being very efficient. And the reason is because they said, "Well, if we give people air conditioning, they might, might use it for air conditioning, which will actually increase energy use." And I'm get, well, look, I'm a marketer, right? I can sell anybody air conditioning which also reduces their gas bill. If I go to you and say, "How would you like air conditioning, and it will also save you a couple of hundred quid a year on your heating bills?" People, and by the way, you can keep your existing boiler, you don't have to have someone digging up your lawn, you just put this sort of thing with a fan outside your house and a bit of a vent thing coming in. My dad's got it because my dad's 93, and we realized, okay, he needs air conditioning because, you know, when you're 80, when you're 93, a real heatwave could be quite dangerous. Okay? I mean, you, you, you know, you don't cool yourself as effectively as you as you get older. And my dad now is at home with his air conditioning unit providing most of the heat downstairs. It's a heat pump, an air-to-air heat pump. It's a really easy sale. I got my dad, my dad's, you know, he's quite stingy, but I easily persuaded him to get this thing. No problem. No, no, no. You can't get a grant for that. But you can get a grant for digging up your lawn, replacing your boiler, throwing that out. Well, okay, I get it. Okay, there's a risk that people use it for air conditioning. Well, you could limit it so you can only use it for air conditioning when the temperature hits 24 degrees or something. Anyway. Okay, I'm using centigrade, you notice. Um, okay. But I said, mate, you know, this is effing Britain, right? I get it if I'm the Greek government, okay? If, you know, if I'm the government of Chad, okay? I don't want people installing air conditioning. I can understand that point. This is going to be like three, four weeks of the year at most. And you're going to cheer everyone up in that one week. Everyone's unbearable. And also, it's, you're going to be able to sleep because you, you know, that week where you can't get to sleep because you're just lying there like some character in a Graham Greene novel. And the conversation just becomes that, it just, "Oh, it's hot. I can't get to sleep." "No, I can't either. It's terrible." You know, and then you have the windows open, and then it's noisy, and all that sort of stuff.

So my viewers, this is dumb because it's the great being the enemy of the good. Because I, I always ask this question, why do you actually recycle your bottles at a bottle bank? Well, 20% of it is save the world. 80% of it is because smashing bottles inside a big metal container is a [ __ ] blast, right? Okay, we love it. You know, trip to the bottle bank is basically a treat. Okay? Now, if you have this one positive, which is, "Oh, and you get air conditioning as well." Okay? I can see a load of people going, "Yeah, what the hell? I can keep my existing gas. I've got a bit of resilience here because I've still got a gas supply. But most of my heat, when it's economic and when there's an abundance of, you know, solar or other clean generated energy, most of it can come to electricity. Whoopy doo. And I'm not going to freeze to death because I've still got my gas boiler and my radiators as a fallback." I can see a million people doing that. Okay? Whereas digging up your lawn, throwing out your existing equipment, dumb. And so it's a typical case where the thing has been optimized for objective perfection, not for realistic human reality. So it's an absolutely classic case where instead of going to marketers and saying, "Look, never mind what's perfect theoretically, what can we reasonably persuade people to do?" Can we persuade people who are quite rich with bigger houses to spend a bit of money, which means they'll save money quite a lot of the year heating their home, and they'll also get air conditioning if there's a horrible hot day in the summer, and they don't have to do major building works? Yeah, I can get people to do that. Can I get people to do the conventional heat pump solution? Forget about it. Okay.

So this is, this is part of your, what's the word I'm looking for? It's like a trunk that runs through your thinking. It's count. Exactly. So don't optimize for reality and then impose it on people. Optimize for people, and then get the reality to do, you know, to do what it can. Yes. And that's my argument. It's a classic case where, you know, if you're coming up with theoretically perfect solutions which are not marketable. And, you know, if you look at all the great inventors, okay? You look at Henry Ford. You look at, well, Edison. You look at Steve Jobs, okay? They're hucksters. They're salesmen. Yes. Yeah. They didn't go, "I made a thing." The reason they're so successful is probably not because they had a comparative advantage in inventing [ __ ] it's because they were just better at selling it. Yeah.

I mean, if you look at the whole history of the sort of American 19th-century invention, people like Otis, who invented the elevator, were going around like state fairs and fairgrounds demonstrating these, you know, elevator cars where, and they'd cut the cable and it would drop six inches and just stop because it was the, it was some super safety system. But they didn't just talk about it, they went and created a load of theater. Yes. And I think, I think that everybody is so keen to pretend the world works well. I think if I'm being a bit McGilchrist, I think it's not just that the left brain sees the world in this kind of reductionist, sum of the parts way. I don't think it's just that. I think the left brain really wants the world to be like that and wants to create a world which is like that because it feels more comfortable.

But, you know, I mean, actually, I'll give you two examples of this, actually. One of them I worked on a bit, and the other one I had nothing to do with. But two of the, I don't know, I'd be interested in your, I always like to bring in the other folks. Um, two of the best ideas in the last 30 years in terms of tech products. The Meta Portal TV, which is basically video conferencing in HD on your television. It was about 120 quid. You plugged it into the back of your TV. It had a camera which also tracked you around the room. They went to Hollywood directors so that the camera would kind of track you and zoom into your face in a kind of brilliant, you know, artistic, not like a kind of janky computer, not a janky computery way. It was a kind of Roger Deakins kind of, you know, nice smooth little. It's like 500 quid's worth of equipment for 100 quid. And it sits on top of your telly. And, you know, if you've got relatives on the other side of the world, or indeed the other side of the country, you can basically kind of chat to them on your massive telly as if they're there. As if they're there. It's extraordinary. Okay. Basically failed for marketing reasons because everybody was too frightened to let Facebook put a camera in their home. Okay. Total marketing failure. Brilliant product.

But the more extreme case, which I, I, I mourn every week, Google Glass. Yes. You said, absolutely sensational product, badly marketed. There are all kinds of reasons for the bad marketing. They launched too soon. There was some sort of weird affair between one of the Google. 2011? Wasn't it? Way before any of it's still necessary, right? Okay. The watch is stupid because I, I, I have to do something to see the time. If I just had a little device which occasionally, you said, "This email's come in. You can ignore it, but it might be important. This is your next meeting. This is the time. You have 10 minutes. Turn left." Okay? Which just gave me small. It didn't need to have a camera on the front that recorded. That was dumb. And also they gave it to a load of developers first who, you know, without dissing, you know, techies, they're a certain type. They're a certain type. So then you had the "Glassholes" kind of, or Glassholes kind of, you know, opprobrium. But it was a, I still think that product, I mean, someone, because because people don't understand marketing, they go, "Oh, that product didn't succeed." I think that product was brilliant. I think it was just badly marketed. I mean, you were saying this about video conferencing for years.

But there's something else that I want to pull you onto here because it dovetails nicely. So Google Glass, my fear for something like that would be, so I, so I'm, I'm talking to you here, but I can also have emails come up in my heads-up display. So I'm a bit distracted over here. And then maybe I can have, there's an advert going on down there. Have you heard of sludge content? No. Well, I know about sludge. Which is the opposite of nudge. Generally, what's that? That's it's a bit similar to dark patterns in design of interfaces. Dark pattern. Okay. Right. Dark patterns are kind of where you make it really easy to do the highly profitable thing and really difficult to say, "Cancel your subscription." Oh, yeah. Oh, that's right. We're going to get on that in a minute. But so this, I'm Chris is going to be annoyed at me now because I'm going to be showing Rory something on my phone. Okay. Sure. We can have a nice insert appearing. And this, this is sludge content. So let's see if I'll, I'll just get your, yo, reaction. Did you know every single odd number has an 'e' in it? James, are you high again? No, wait a minute, bro. Since you were born deaf, what language, what do you make of that? Well, okay. So you've got, you're not controlling that character at the bottom. It's just running around, jumping. Absolutely. That's just on. That's a TikTok video. So what's it designed? Okay, tell me, what's it designed to do? What's the, the way it was explained to me was two completely unrelated videos. Means your, means your visual brain can never get bored. Oh, I see. Something else just to take your mind off things. If you get a tiny bit bored for a second.

That explains a very interesting thing, which is one of the things that really annoys me about the, uh, back to the office movement. Okay? Is I sit at home, I've got a 55-inch, um, 4K TV, which I use as a monitor, affixed to the wall in front of the desk. I've got a laptop screen. I've got a professional webcam. And I come into the office and they basically give it, say, "Here's your plug and here's a chair." Okay? Now, one thing we know about productivity, apparently, is that multiple monitors are an absolute productivity booster. Okay? And yet, what we're doing is we're doing this hot-desking thing where people sit. I'm 58, okay? One of the things that really drives me crazy is mobile phones. I mean, a lot of older people use a tablet basically as a mobile phone, yeah, because the mobile phone is too damn small and fiddly unless you have good fat-finger design. The mobile phone for people over a certain age is just too fiddly and difficult to read. And, you know, you know, I would find it weird that my kids would like book a flight on a mobile phone. Like, if I tried to book a flight on a mobile phone, I'd end up in Addis Ababa at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday. Feels a bit too small to be doing that. And also, also, of course, it makes the choice architecture more painful because on a good web page, you can make, choose from 12 options, then another page on, you've chosen from another 12, you've now got one out of 144 options in two clicks. On a mobile phone, it either involves a lot of scrolling or a hell of a lot of clicking before you actually get to what you want. So there are all sorts of reasons why the big, I find kids weird like this. I mean, well, you know, I mean, you know, when I, all through the 70s, 80s, you know, 90s, how big is your TV? Let's watch this on a bigger screen. Wow, it's IMAX. Okay. And I got my [ __ ] 22-year-old kids going, "Oh, I can watch this on a thing the size of a [ __ ] letterbox." What was all that about?

Lovely story about that, by the way, which is totally irrelevant. But, uh, people always talked about how big their television was. I mean, literally through the 50s and 60s. And Kathie Williams' mom, and the *Carry On* films, was clearly the person from whom Kenneth Williams got his sense of smut. Was he the, I, same? Absolutely. And he, um, so Kenneth Williams' mom is sitting backstage waiting for some filming of one of the *Carry On* films to finish. And so, "What television have you got?" she asked her friend. "We've just bought a 14-inch console and tell." And Williams' mom said, "14 inches? That's enough to console anyone." So clearly, clearly the sort of genetic theory of smut, I think, which is that it was kind of, I don't think I, I think his mum was probably a major contributory factor.

Seems likely, doesn't it? It does, doesn't it? Look, can I pull you on to something completely different? Why do you think we're on exploit, under-exploiting sonic branding? Uh, well, Mark Ritson has some very good data which shows that I'm always interested, okay, in that the best of something which is underrated, that's where to go. Right. If you're buying property, if you're buying drink, go and find the, a category that's underrated and then find the best thing within that category. It's gaming the system. Country music would be a very good example. Sherry in alcoholic drinks. Under, find the best. Yeah, exactly. If, if you try and buy great wine, it, you can buy great wine, it costs an absolute fortune. Okay? If you want to buy great sherry, it's probably 50% more than the average sherry. Yeah. And so you get this over-concentration. I said this with Rick Rubin, actually, the various musical genres. And it's considered high status to dismiss the two that were first to be dismissed are typically heavy metal and country. Yeah. And that's because of the user imagery. It's nothing to do with the actual inherent quality of the music itself. So because it's associated with, associated with bikers or cowboy hats and stuff like that. But the country music is kind of musicing. I mean, "My Church" by Maren Morris is a recommendation for everyone.

So went to a mastering studio in New Jersey over the over the summer. Chris Gehringer was the chap who showed me around. And it's an amazing thing because he's got this million-dollar room just for making records sound perfect, kind of at the end of the factory process. It's like shining it. And, yeah, and he's like, "What do you want to listen to?" And I was like, "Uh, just show me what we got." He goes, "Listen to some of this." And puts on Maren Morris. Amazing country music. You can have it. You know, it's really, really loud. You're like, it's probably one of the best days of my life. Of course it is. A million-dollar sound system for country music. And so sherry would be another point. And so one of the things I think that advertising marketing people get wrong is, go and find the things that nobody else does and do them well. Right. And, uh, friend of mine, Graeme Fain, brilliant, brilliant. Great Ba face. Absolutely right. You should interview me. He's a neighbor of mine in Deal. So I go out to dinner with him quite a bit. I'll send him this. But he said he started his whole career because he said, "Nobody wanted to do the radio ads." Ah. Now, the interesting thing, same as Paul Book. Paul Book. Exactly the same. Nobody wanted to do the, particularly in the UK, because we didn't have a long tradition of commercial radio. As in, us, too much BBC. To the US, I mean, interestingly, the whole film *Convoy*, the whole *Convoy* thing is was actually created by something, is it B.J. McKay, who was actually an advertising copywriter who created the character who then created the song, which actually then is. We are on. Exactly. Yeah. So the entire origins of that are kind of because I think he used to, if I'm right, he used to, quite a lot of quite a lot of the copywriters would actually record their own stuff as well. I, some. But Graeme spotted two things. One of which is, you got to work with incredible talent because you could get amazing actors to appear in a radio ad for a fraction of the cost of appearing in TV. So you got to work with amazing talent. If you just put a little bit of extra money and love in it, made a really big difference. And also, a good radio ad was a lot more surprising to the consumer than a good TV ad. You know, it had that kind of, "I wasn't expecting that. That's actually a really great ad." You know. Um, and so finding that, that game theory approach, which is, find what's underrated and then do it well. And two of the things I think which are completely underexploited, certainly Ritson says this, sonic branding of any kind, where you effectively associate the brand and you give it a certain distinctiveness of noise. Now, it's interesting to note that Netflix and HBO, and more recently ITVX, have all created a really, really distinctive. One of them is called, I think, "Silent Angel." The other one's probably called "Tum." I'm not quite sure. Like that. Yeah, yeah. Tum. Okay. Those things actually have an effectively a kind of, you know, I think a connection to the amygdala that is much stronger than we give credit to. And there's an argument that, you know, some great ads, you've actually started with them with the music and built the ad around it. Yeah. In a sense, I mean, you know, a lot of the great Levi's stuff was track dependent. If you, it's always worth asking that question. There was a guy called Neil French, who was creative director of WPP in Ogilvy. And first of all, he asked everybody in the sort of creative community in Ogilvy, "What is your favorite sort of one minute of film in the whole of the films you've seen?" Zulu? Wasn't it? Might it well have been, actually. The singing. You're absolutely right. And he pointed out that actually, in the vast majority of them, there was music. Yes. Um, he used to do a thing which got him into huge trouble, which is he'd show, uh, the Seven Dwarfs with "Hi Ho," and then he'd show the same footage with the Horst Wessel song. And of course, you know, if you have a Nazi marching song versus, you know, a Disney song, it comes across completely differently. Okay? The whole meaning of the thing is changed by the, the music. Yep. Um, one of the risks with sonic branding, I don't know if you've noticed, a lot of them tend to devolve into the same kind of PlayStation startup sound with like a single piano note, an impact, and some nice pads. Yes. So it's hard to get it some away from that. And also whistling tends to be quite effective as well. Oh, it's, I mean, I think ITV's done quite a good job with ITVX. I think they've done, they, they've got into the zone.

There, the other thing that's hugely underrated. We've got a company here, uh, in the building, uh, called Mando Connect, which is one of the very few companies to specialize in, and Riton says this, brand partnerships. Aston Martin, James Bond. Exactly. Yeah. And that's probably, you know, one of the most exalted ones. But they generally are extraordinarily cost-effective, which is probably why they get, um, neglected. Right. So there's always, there's always this problem with the human brain, which is we think that we pay attention to what's important, but actually we think important what we're paying attention to. Yes. It kind of works in both directions. And the very fact that something gains our attention gives it importance. And this is usually why a lot of the big problems in history come from left field, where you're not looking. Exactly. Yeah. Everybody's focused on what, what they think is important. No one saw 9/11. No, no, no one sees 9/11 coming. No one sees COVID coming, etcetera. And so, so our attention is, in a sense, you know, it's, it's, um, it can be a kind of feedback, distorting feedback loop. Yeah.

One of the things I think that happens in marketing is that we pay a lot of attention to the things that are expensive. Yes. Okay. And so that gets all our attention. So we automatically assume the TV commercial must be massively important. Whereas, you know, brand, um, brand partnerships, you know, they don't cost very much to do. So your budget's tiny, so you don't really worry about it very much. And so you have this fundamental, I think that happened to radio advertising. It was partly considered unimportant because it was cheap. Really. I mean, I, you know, I'm not being paid by the radio advertising bureau to say this, but in all the time I've worked in this business, I've never really seen a case where radio advertising doesn't work pretty well.

The business is kind of painful in an age of management consultants and engineers because one of my favorite phrases is it's from, you know, the greatest expert in kind of productivity and output, uh, of the 20th century, a guy called W. Edwards Deming, who just said, to optimize the whole, you have to sub-optimize the parts. And what people try and do with ads is they try and make every component of it work as hard as possible. Oh, that will make the overall ad the most effective. But actually, there's a role for white space in press ads. There's a role for silence in TV ads. You know, um, there's a role for just having a period of music before someone starts talking. My co-producer, Aaron Bentley, gas music, went to jazz college, and he said they told him one of the most valuable pieces of advice there ever. He said, not every bar needs to be a work of genius. No. Interesting. Have you been in a voiceover session where they, what would you say, um, put every single word under scrutiny? Can you say it, you know, lifts with a bit more? Yeah, yeah. But the gestalt is what's important. The whole is what's important. So you're saying don't try and optimize all the little parts.

There's a fantastic scene in The Trip, which has Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon talking about, basically about advertising voiceover and also, what is it, TV continuity announcement. That's they had that wonder little thing. Was it with, um, apparently it drives the actor Trevor Eve. Was it Desperate Measures with Trevor Eve, coming soon to? And and he said, you know, when if it's BBC 2, you need to give a sense of homecoming. Coming soon to BBC 2. And there is ITV. It's Desperate Measures with Trevor coming. Right. And the whole thing about the totality of the whole is what really. And of course, it's, it's very difficult. You, you, it, it seems very easy to talk about the individual word and the cadence on the individual word, but actually, it's the whole that conveys the meaning. I mean, the most extreme case of that, of course, which always fascinates the hell out of me, is song lyrics. Treating song lyrics as standalone pieces of writing. Okay. So the, the first one is, um, uh, I love it when you get a really anal-retentive person who points out that if you take, for example, "I shot a man in Reno just to see him die." And at some point said, well, why then are you in? Is it San Quentin? Isn't it the jail? Yeah. Okay. Because surely if you shot a man in Reno, you'd be dealt with by the, um, Nevada Penitentiary. The Nevada criminal justice system would take your case, unless there were some interstate element to your crime. Okay. And picking, picking the details apart. Or the fact that, um, very funny thing, one of my favorite songs of all time is "The Day Before You Came" by Abba. Their last ever song, which only got to number, number 17. And it's kind of like this weird masterpiece. But you can change the entire meaning of the song if you suggest that it's someone giving evidence of their movements in response to a police inquiry. Okay. You know, um, "I must have left my work about, you know, my desk about a quarter after 5," or whatever it was. And, um, uh, but it has a complete inconsistency because she stops at about 6:00 to get a Chinese, some Chinese food to go, and then she only gets home at 8. Right. And there's a load of sort of retentive people going, well, either Swedish Chinese restaurants are unbelievably inefficient, or she was up to no good for those two hours. Those two hours are unaccounted for. And yet, was it an Agnetha Fältskog? I can't remember which one's singing. Okay. These two hours, Miss Fältskog, are clearly unaccounted for. Yeah.

But what's interesting about that is you then take songs literally. You know, like, I mean, you know, um, uh, for example, you know, um, "Sex Bomb" with Tom Jones, where it's totally meaningless. Okay. If you look at them purely as words, but if you put them in a song and you get Tom to sing them, you know exactly what Tom means. Yeah. Okay. Spy on me, baby. You say, what the, you think it would be different with a different singer? Would it have a different meaning? Nothing would play. Come on. Well, she'd be reasonable, of course. Okay. You know, nothing could possibly replace Tom, of course. No. Um, and, um, but it, it is, it's fascinating because there's the whole question of this is very Ian McGilchrist, you know, the whole rather than the component part. And it's probably a bit of a problem where in various, uh, art forms, specialisms and silos have taken over to such an extent that you, and it happens in business, where people are not responsible, very few people are responsible for the business and the value it creates. Instead, they're optimizing this component part to which they've been charged with responsibility. Pop song production. Someone writes the lyrics, then someone produces a demo, and then someone has to change it. Someone has to obviously perform it. Someone has to mix it afterwards, and then master. So you've got this long production line. But when do you think about it? It makes no sense at all. Right. That 50% of the world's best songwriters or singer-songwriters. Yeah. Okay. That shouldn't happen. They're performing it themselves. They're performing it themselves. Think of the Beatles, the Stones. Okay. You'd think, now obviously, okay, if you take two absolutely brilliant songwriters, Leiber and Stoller, okay, I think it's fair to say that two balding middle-aged guys with horn-rimmed glasses probably would have had trouble getting "Hound Dog" into the top. That's why they hated the Beatles at the time, wasn't it? It's like, these kids, these [ __ ] kids are getting into the charts and writing. Apparently, you had the problem because Motown adhered to this kind of production line, Detroit system. They were trying to stop Michael Jackson writing music, basically. They were saying, no, no, no, you sing. Okay, you're, you're, I know this is probably not the most, um, but your job is to sing. We've got these guys in a shed over there who are writing the songs. Uh, we've got Studio 3 free. We get a song from these guys, we give it to you, and now you perform it and record it. Okay. But I want to write my own. No. Yeah. No, you can't do that.

Well, this is probably like in your, in your world of thinking, isn't it? It's like when something, when the, what the apparatus isn't quite ready for, uh, the new arrival. So Elvis Presley is what I'm thinking of. Was treated the way they knew how to treat singers then, not like the Beatles, where he's a rock star who, they said, we need to put him in films and get his songs in the films. Interesting. Yeah. They treated him more like a movie star than like a rock star, because the rock star was not an archetype that existed yet. No, I suppose actually, one, a few of the Beatles acknowledged that, didn't they? That without Elvis, there would be no Beatles. There would be no Beatles. Yeah. But, yeah, so he's the first rock star, and as a result, was kind of crucified on doing crap, doing crap films. Yeah. Exactly.

My brother-in-law is a scriptwriter for variously sort of Silent Witness and Waking the Dead and so forth. And he said, of course, the whole thing is based on a complete pretense, which is that forensic scientists investigate crimes and get majorly involved in driving around the place, you know, breaking into people's homes. Yeah. They're not, they're not, they're not what do they call it? They're not actually the, um, CSI? Is that what you call it? No, no, no. They're purely their support function, just an analyst. Yeah. Yeah. But obviously, that wouldn't make very good television. In forensics, if they weren't allowed to leave the, was it the lab? The laboratory, or whatever? You know, okay, if they weren't allowed to leave, they said, "Oh, we've just had something come in. Oh, look, here's an envelope." You know, that wouldn't make great television.

You should watch Air Crash Investigation. No. Can I tell you a very funny story about this? My wife occasionally accuses me, with some justification, of not always, but under certain circumstances, of being totally insensitive. Like, you know, you pushed in front of that woman with a pushchair. Yeah. You know. And for about two years, there was this thing, which was an app on your laptop. And at the time, I had like a 17-inch MacBook Pro, enormous screen. Yeah. And you could get the Sky app, and you could download anything that you were entitled to watch on Sky, you could download to your laptop and then watch it. Okay. And with this 17-inch screen, for about six months, until I suddenly had an epiphany, I used to watch Air Crash Investigation on a plane. No way. Okay. And I was sitting there, and of course, what you don't actually particularly want in business class, where the people aren't choosing to fly, okay? About one in three people, one in four, a [ __ ] scared of flying. There are people who are just frightened on takeoff and landing, and there are people who literally spend the entire flight in a state of terror. Okay. And I was sitting there, there was like a picture of like the wreckage of a 747 strewn over a Japanese thing, or effectively, you know, the, uh, reenactment of a, of a plane going into stall before. And then, you know, then there was the black box being retrieved from 300 feet below the water surface. And I was watching all this stuff. I'm not remotely frightened of flying. I'm a bit, weirdly, I'm a tiny bit more frightened than I was. But it happens. Fascinating. I had a friend in the Foreign Office, and there are people who spend their entire working lives basically flying all over the place, not a clue in the world. And at the age of something like 55, they basically feel their luck run out, and they suddenly become really, really nervous flyers. But I was sitting there with a 17-inch screen with Air Crash Investigation on. Didn't occur to me. And this is a fair point of my wife, that there are occasions where I'm just totally insensitive. I mean, there are certain, there's a bit of me where, um, Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I actually brought my wife in and said, you've got to watch this, because if you watch this, you'll understand me. Yeah. Where, funnily enough, how long into the marriage was that? Um, well, what, what happens in the scene, and I can imagine myself doing so. Larry's wife is on a plane that's going through a really dangerous thunderstorm and is about to crash. And she manages to get the flight attendant to basically say, "Larry, Larry, I'm not sure we're going to make it." Larry's got the cable guy there trying to repair the cable TV, and he wants to know where the warranty card is, okay, for the cable box. Okay. And he's, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And she comes back and then says, "I'm sorry, Larry, I'm leaving. You're just totally insensitive. I was there, you know, thinking I was going to die, and you basically..." Now I said, "I'm really sorry, but I can completely imagine myself doing that." You know, I've finally got the cable guy to come out. You know, there's this problem where he can't watch the basketball because it keeps going fuzzy. Okay. And I would become totally fixated on that problem to the extent of ignoring the context of any other kind of problem. And that's what I was doing when I was watching Air Crash Investigation. I just love the reenactments where they basically, you know, they write on a whiteboard like, "Fuselage, question mark." Yes. Yes. What part of something? Yeah. They're usually, what is it? They flap on, ailerons, etcetera. Yeah.

But YouTube Premium, you get better video quality. It remembers what you've last watched. I think it improves the recommendations. It's, it seems like a lot of money, because unlike Netflix, you can watch it for free. But at the same time, it's kind of, kind of the last thing I'd give up. If I, if I went bust, it'd be the last subscription to go. I think that's a, that's a much better way of looking at it, because like you say, there is a weird psychological thing with the fact that it, most, it seems like it's always free. So why would I ever pay for it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And actually, they're trying to hammer it with adverts on the free version. What, what one I has to say is that, um, uh, you know, I said this today, uh, to somebody else, and in sort of in the government, said schools have to teach videography now. It's a basic form of literacy, being able to film yourself, record yourself, and just understanding the grammar of filmmaking. And in fairness, with YouTube, it doesn't have to be, you know, it doesn't have to be Roger Deakins, right? You know, but if you've got basic competence in narrative storytelling and filmmaking, that's really what you need. And actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say also, um, you, one of the reasons, one of the reasons I think, and this is, it'd be interesting to know what McGilchrist thought of this, I think one of the, one of the reasons I'm a huge, um, Zoom fan and video conferencing fan is that before we had the pandemic and we had video conferencing, too much exchange was textual, right? Okay. There's a huge, if you think about it, conversation is probably human face-to-face conversation is, you know, I mean, you could argue it's kind of millions of years old, if you go back to primates, but it's definitely hundreds of thousands of years old. Reading is about 7,000 years old. It's, you know, and everyone reading is about 100 years old. It's a very similar thing to dogs. The human domestication of dogs happened like 100,000 years ago, and cats is like 4,000 years ago. Why do you get greater variety? There is an argument that dogs actually selected for humans, because if a dog liked you, we've been bred by dogs just as much as dogs have been bred by humans, because if a dog liked you, it conferred a huge advantage on you for survival purposes. Of course, because human plus dog is kind of, is that why in I Am Legend he has a dog? Well, there's an argument. There's a really extreme argument, which I don't know where it comes from, but somebody mentioned that their wife at the University of B was involved in this theory that humans, at their worst, their lowest ebb of human population, it the population was down to about 8,000 breeding pairs sometime during the Ice Age. And the theory was that the people who survived were the people who domesticated dogs. Wow. And because, you know, if you think about the combinatorial advantage of human plus dog as a hunting machine, plus warmth, all those kind of things, ability to make fire, cook food, etcetera, it's an unbelievable bit of symbiosis. That's amazing.

Um, but in, in a way, I think going back to conversation, open-ended conversation, and away from like PowerPoint and writing. Part of everything else, we can speak much faster than we can write. Okay. So writing obviously makes sense if you're dealing with an audience of thousands, because you can read faster than you can listen. Yeah. Okay. So there is an advantage to the consumer in reading things. But in writing things, and then what was happening, I think before Zoom came along, this is again, the whole question about the, the parts and the whole. It seems really efficient sending an email. You get something off your back, you press send, it's gone. It doesn't cost you anything. It's instantaneous. Okay. But if you think of a, a conversation where you're clearing up where you're going to meet in a pub one evening, okay, if you do it over the phone or by Zoom, okay, you arrive at a conclusion within about four minutes. "I can't do Wednesday." "What about so-and-so?" "I don't know. The Crown's closed. Let's go there." On email, it's ex- on email, it will be, it will literally stretch out over days. Yes. You know, they're whole things which are a living nightmare, like conveyancing and moving house in the UK, because everything happens sequentially, okay, rather than simultaneously. And by bringing back what you might call synchronous decision-making and synchronous conversation.

Now, this is one thing that really fascinates me, right? Okay. So you get these businesses, and you get articles in the Telegraph and the Times, which everybody must get back into the office. This working from home thing is a [ __ ] disgrace. You know, I can't imagine it. You know, I mean, someone was, someone I won't name them, but quite senior in this organization was driven practically insane because the chief executive of Sainsbury's told them that Friday is their new Saturday. And of course, this person is suddenly thinking, "All my staff, where they're supposed to be working, are going shopping." Well, actually, the truth is, probably are. But maybe they started work an hour and a half earlier in the day, and they're going to work in the evening. Yeah. So actually going off to shop in the middle of the day isn't a waste of your time if all you're going to do is email stuff anyway. But here's the thing that strikes me. There's unbelievable, what you might call puritanism bias in this, which is that businesses have introduced loads of things which are real productivity killers, like email, for example. Really, really. You know, the fact that people don't have multiple screens, the fact that you have hot-desking, the fact that nobody has an office, open-plan offices. All these things have been introduced which are empirically really disastrous for productivity, but no one cared because the employees didn't like them. Okay. But then you come up with flexible working, okay, which employees actually enjoy, and suddenly there's this, "Oh no, this can't be allowed to happen." Yeah. That, that literally is evidence of people going, "I don't know whether my people are productive or not, but if they're happy, I'm probably doing something wrong." Yeah. That is literally the most extraordinary zero-sum thinking you can possibly imagine. Yeah. You know, because nobody cared about flat, hot-desking, because staff didn't like it. Nobody cared about getting rid of offices, staff didn't like it. Nobody cared about email. Suddenly came on because everybody's really busy with their email. The fact that they're being totally ineffectual doesn't really matter. No, staff don't really like emails, so that's fine. We'll just introduce this. The second you then introduce a potential productivity booster which saves your fortune and the staff really enjoy, it's treated with massive suspicion. Yeah. That's absurd.

Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how that's like saying these car things. They're terrible because people prefer them to walking. We must get rid of this car thing because look, people won't walk anymore. But there's that. I remember, well, thinking about being at very early primary school. It's kind of insane that we start people at 5, 6 years old and say, "Sit down for 15 years." No. In Finland, you don't start. They have huge rates of literacy. Yeah. Uh, unbelievably high rates of general readership in Finland. And they start at seven, I think, don't they? Yeah. Yeah. There's, but there's, I'm sorry, phone's going. I will just have to. Hi, can I call you back in about 20 minutes? Chief exec of Co? Call. Where are you now? 15. Cool. Okay. I, I'll be leaving in about 25 minutes, 30 minutes. I think. Excellent. Okie dokie. Bye-bye. Okay. Lots of bye-bye. Lots of love. Bye-bye. Mrs. Souland. Yeah. Mrs. S. Yeah. She's probably, you know, accusing me of being insensitive again. I can't wait to retire because I, I, um, uh, there are various really, really mischievous things I want to introduce which I don't believe, but they're worth. It's rather like comedy, they're worth saying just because there's a bit of truth in them. And, um, no, I, I, I was saying about the relative, the relative work done by men and women in the household. And you always get these statistics saying, you know, 70% of domestic chores performed by women. I do find out that that's because if we try doing them, we're told we're doing it wrong. Okay. This crap, by the way. Did you do this business of separating whites and colors? What the [ __ ] all that about? Right. Been a day. If, okay, my shirt, it goes in the [ __ ] washing machine. Yeah. If it's going to leak all over the bloody place, I don't want it. I'll chuck it out. You've said this about dishwasher-safe stuff as well, right? It's like, if it doesn't go in the dishwasher, I don't want it. I don't want it. No, it's, it's by definition is dishwasher-proof because my dishwasher will kill off everything that isn't dishwasher-proof. And it's dishwasher Darwinism. Okay. Everything I own will be dishwasher-proof if you put it all through the dishwasher. Right. There. Wh- some colors thing. What the [ __ ] hell is that all about? You know, I'll finish my dubstep story because I forgot. Okay. Dubstep. Yeah. Back to dubstep. There was a YouTube documentary that was saying that the 2007 smoking ban changed the nature of DJ sets because before that, you could find a spot in the room and smoke away if you were a smoker, and the DJ could take you on this journey that starts off soft at about 11:00 p.m., peaks at about 1:00 a.m., it's big energy, and then starts to take off after that. Like, you can't do that anymore because everyone's dipping in and out for cigarettes all the time, so it has to be constant climax all the time, which has taken the sort of narrative shape out of it. So, so there's actually a theory about smoking because are there this, this business, okay, where, and this is what's really, really interesting, is the extent to which really trivial, seemingly trivial, apparently unrelated or tangential things have a massive bearing on what actually happens in something. I, there's a whole theory about, um, uh, some performance of American music, which is there to do with the rhythm of the railway train. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Because the idea was that people would be spending a lot of time going, "Duh, duh, dump, duh, dump," and that actually, you know, the American railways had an effect on American music. I have read that quite seriously. And then, I mean, by the way, um, we have, uh, Hitler's extremely, uh, strongly held anti-smoking views to thank for the fact that the Germans lost World War II, because Hitler had two real peculiarities, apparently. When he was in this bunker, in it's in what is now Poland, um, the, the, what was it? The Wolf's Lair, or whatever it was called. Um, we have two cafes here, one of them is on the ground floor, and the other one's right on the top. And one of them is called the Wolf's Lair and the Eagle's Nest. But for some reason, people thought that was politically incorrect. But, but, um, the, um, but, but when he was in this bunker, the two things were, he was obsessed with a really low temperature. And so the place was literally, it was sort of, I'll try and do, I want to do Centigrade. I'll, it was like 50 degrees, okay? And secondly, there was a complete smoking ban, okay, in the kind of map room. And so you had all these incredibly ill German generals who spent most of the time standing outside having a tab and trying to warm themselves up. Like it was a rave. Meanwhile, he was indoors on his own, basically going, "Oh, let's not bother with Moscow. We'll get a Stalingrad." Okay. So, I mean, Churchill would allow cigars. No, no, no. I don't think there was any non-smoking or indeed non-drinking. I don't think there were many impositions on drink or smoking in the, uh, in the Cabinet War Rooms. I imagine they were pretty happy tabbing away. But no, it is, it is funny how these extraordinary things come along which are oblique. And I kept, and one of the reasons I think we're slow to pick up the importance is that we're not calibrated yet to see their overall effects. So one of the, one of the questions I keep asking, I asked this of the great people at Proctor & Gamble two days ago in Switzerland. I said, "You're having a debate about flexible working, okay? And the whole discussion revolves around, do we want our staff to work flexibly because, you know, they might be 2% less productive, or we might lose serendipity?" I said, "There's actually a much bigger question here, which is, do you want your customers or your consumers to be able to work flexibly?" Because if you allow, over 5, 10, 15 years, a degree of flexible working, people can live where they want. They can spend much less of their disposable income on transport and less of their disposable income on housing and accommodation. So, I mean, one of the things you can do, okay, you're based in Manchester. We've had what, four Zoom calls for every physical meeting? Yes. Okay. And, you know, we probably wouldn't have had the physical meeting without the Zoom calls. So you can, you know, the need for you to move to, I know Chris Williamson's moved to Austin, Texas, but the need for you to move to London is trivial now. It's pointless, right? Whereas, let's be honest, you know, 10 years ago, you know, you probably had to move to London if you wanted to do what you did. Well, someone was saying to me the other day, they said they were still saying from BBC Creative, the saying, "You still have to be in London to have those moments where you're in 750 mph with Sam Ashwell, who can turn around and say, 'There's an industry party tonight, and all the agencies are going,' and then they all climb in together, and then that's where deals are sometimes done." What we actually need is micro-housing in London, so people can spend a large part of their time somewhere else. I would, I would, I would adore, I'd buy a micro-house in London like a shot. I, I've got, I've got a small, well, not that small, small flat in Deal, slightly larger flat near Sevenoaks. The only property I'd ever buy in London would literally be like a micro hotel room, you know, microwave, toilet, shower, bit of a telly, somewhere to stay, somewhere to crash. What also, why do you want a big house in London? Because what's the point of being in London if you're going to be indoors? I mean, you know, and all these people digging down and building a cinema room and a pool. As someone said in The Spectator, look, if you want a pool and a cinema room, that's what Sardinia is for. Ex- don't try to build it into some Chelsea bloody, you know, terrorist house. It's what do you think is going to happen in this city with, I mean, generally in cities in the West, you know, the, there was some stat that came out recently where it's like, you can't, there is no minimum wage job that can afford you like a one-bed apartment in the US anymore, or something like that.

Well, you have the situation, okay, this is one of my politically correct things. I got to be really careful here, okay? Um, what we didn't realize was that the dual-income family went from being an option to an obligation. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, okay, I've got to be really careful here, because people getting, what, what Rory is saying is that you women should get back in the house in the kitchen. Saying that the two people who introduced me to this concept are both women and both of unimpeachable, I think, feminist credentials. They're Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic, I'm right of center in the UK. I could never understand. I thought Elizabeth Warren was brilliant, but for some reason, Americans, Pocahontas, as Trump called her, Americans didn't warm to her at all. But I always thought she was absolutely fascinating. She made this point, she wrote a paper, I think, called "The Double Income Trap." The other person who I do know who used to talk about it a lot was Fay Weldon, right? Who said it was a brilliant option when it first came along, and it was fantastic for her, but it went from being an option. Now, where if you are single, you cannot buy a house. Right. I've got friends who are single. There was someone in Canary Wharf who rents, who is a hospital consultant, who cannot buy a flat because now, even get further absurdity, which is if you go to Newcastle, I, my daughter was at Newcastle University, and the student area of Newcastle is Jesmond, which is like the Knightsbridge of bloody Newcastle. And you realize that four students can outbid a family. Yes. You said about your old office, didn't you? Yeah. So we were outbid. We were outbid. We couldn't move to the original office building because they decided they didn't want it to be offices for the fourth largest ad agency in Britain. They'd rather have students in there. And I'm going, "So effectively, your ability to share property and and combine income, it's gone from being an option, which is, hey, that's great, we can get a second income in, and we can get, we can save a bit of money and buy a better house, to if you want a house, forget about it, unless you both work." Yeah. And as a consequence, okay, now when I was a kid, and you know, I'm in the Welsh borders, a working-class guy could support a family on one salary. You see this ironically in Friedman's documentary, watch that on YouTube about, you know, work efficiency in New York in the 1970s. Well, one of the things it destroyed, interestingly, was labor force mobility. Because in America in the '50s, a guy in New York who got an offer of, you know, a better job in California, off you went, right? Now, both of you have to find a job in the new place. The only place where both of you can maximize opportunity is in the middle of a mega-city, a New York, a Los Angeles, you know, maybe a Chicago. So it's much more difficult to live in a suburban place, or to say, you know, a single guy can move to Newcastle and actually have a much better life, because even if he's paid less, actually gets a house to live in and stuff, right? Very, very difficult for two people to move simultaneously. You've really got to synchronize that. In Elizabeth Warren's piece, she makes the interesting point, which never occurred to me, but it's actually not bad financial advice. Okay. Now, I shouldn't say this, but she said, "Don't go and buy the most expensive house you can afford." Okay. Buy a cheaper house and spend your money on, well, she doesn't say this literally, like hot tubs and Versace hats and extravagances. Okay, that's terrible financial advice, isn't it? And she said, "No, Elizabeth," she said, "Because if you hit financial, financial rocky patch, you can stop heating the hot tub, and you can stop buying the Versace underwear. But you're stuck with your house, right? You're stuck with your mortgage." And I thought, it's just a really interesting take, which is, I'd never thought of that, which is that extravagance does give you optionality, okay, whereas, whereas property is a massive great commitment, yes, which is actually a kind of albatross around your neck. I mean, the family advice for us was always, "Buying a small house in a good area." That's not bad. That's not bad advice. But I mean, it's, by the way, I don't think it's even legal to build micro-houses in London unless it's student accommodation. Okay. Well, there are a load of people who actually, what they'd like to do is move out of London to somewhere more sizable with a bit of space, and then keep a foothold in London with what is effectively a tiny house. Yeah. And yet, I don't think you're allowed to. I don't think you're allowed to build them. That's all I'd buy. I don't see, you know, if I'm going to be in London, I'm going to do London things. I'm not going to pace around my library or drawing room, right? I'm going to be out doing London things. Yes. So all I need is basically a crash pad. And yet you're not allowed to build them. And frankly, that's probably all people will be able to afford in cities like New York. And it's worse still, because the property market, uh, the new build market is optimized for two-bedroom apartments because they're great for buy-to-let investment, okay? Um, and they're also great for overseas buyers, okay? They're terrible for a family. You can't actually, once you're in a two-bedroom apartment, if you have two children of two different genders, you basically got to move out. Wow. So when you think about it, the whole, what's being built is optimized not for the, the inhabitants of London, it's being optimized for rent-seeking investors, really. And I suppose we'll have to pick up on the decline of sort of family building in people my age, but that, that seems like a symptom of it. What there is a solution, which is, you create a re, you create a suburb, okay, with suburban housing, but you don't let people over 35 move there. And so you create a really, okay, I'll let you into, I think, a bit of a secret, which is one of the reasons Brits love moving to Los Angeles, right? Is you can live in suburbia, but it's still cool. Yeah. Okay. Because new Los Angeles accommodation, housing is suburban, right? Richard Burton said it's endless suburb, endless suburb. Yeah. And actually, no one thinks it's uncool to move to Los Angeles and go and, you know, move into sort of, you know, somewhere just off, um, you know, whatever it might be. I mean, uh, you know, you move to Wonderland or that Valley thing or whatever, okay? Totally cool to live in a suburban house in Los Angeles with a pool. Okay. If you do that in Surrey, you know, or you do that in Connecticut, not very cool. No. And in Surrey, you get sort of looks from the neighbors, wouldn't you?

So, do you need us done? Anna? Yep. What do I need to do next? Is there, I'm got to go home? Am I? This is, as we said, didn't we? This is Rory's. Do I have something this evening? Do I have a late thing this evening, or is that cancelled? There was something in the diary. Maybe tomorrow. That might be tomorrow. I'll go and see. But, um, this has been, I mean, it's been really, but that question of the dual income, it's, it's wonderful because it starts, it's a f- trap, okay? It starts off as an option, and it's totally desirable because if you want to earn two incomes, you can. What's now happened, this is why I'm very sympathetic with the four-day week and flexible work, is every single family has lost 35 hours of discretionary time a week, okay, at the unit of the family, without really gaining in wealth at all. Who's gained? Government loves it because they get two lots of taxes rather than one. Okay. Property owners love it because now your property price has gone up. Yeah. But effectively, most of the increase in earnings through having two earning, two earning people in a household rather than one, has been mopped up by property and transport costs. And the actual increase in the, in your ability to make discretionary purchases has hardly improved at all. So it's a massive loss of discretionary time. Well, I suppose we'll have to end on a dark note then. That is a, don't shoot the messenger. It's Fay Weldon and Elizabeth Warren, okay? I'm not, I'm not suggesting we should reverse this, um, at all. Um, in fact, I think I go further. As a feminist, as a really extreme feminist, I think men should stay at home entirely, you know, doing ludicrous tasks and playing computer games, while, while, while their wives go off to run Goldman Sachs internationally. That would be my ideal solution. So you can't accuse me of any kind of, but you heard it here first, Rory. Everyone will be leaving on the mail side. M. Tomorrow. Rory, thanks. Actually, there's one truth. Men are a lot better at doing nothing, aren't we? You want, want someone to do nothing. Is that fair? Yeah. If you want someone to do nothing, you need a bloke.