The Secret to Great Marketing Revealed

If we couldn't lose our tempers, anybody more powerful than us could repeatedly just dick us around. Today, we're joined by Rory Southernland, Vice Chairman of OAL V UK, an author of "Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense," and an accidental TikTok star with millions of views.

One of the advantages Donald Trump has is that his bonkers threats are credible because you genuinely believe that he might do anything. Is there a method to the madness? Capitalist is a little like horse racing betting. If you bet on the favorite, yes, you're more likely to win, but the winnings aren't particularly exciting. The cognitive behavior of the rich and the poor has more in common than the cognitive behavior of the middle class, which tends to be risk and reputation averse.

With millions of people having watched his TED Talks, Rory has become a master of blending behavioral science and creativity to help brands stand out. If you focus exclusively on efficiency, you can't grow because all you can do is take what you already have and exploit it even more. Rory is a master of reframing how we see the world and how brands connect with us. Opportunities require an act of observation. Absolutely not saying for a second that you could fundamentally disrupt the property market. So, what you're really proving is not ability or human capital, it's just commitment. The miraculous marketing mindset involves just...

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I want to start with a quote that you've made. In fact, you've written a whole book about this, which is really that it doesn't pay to be logical if everyone else is logical because it takes you to the same place, and that place is sameness. So, how would you apply that to Jaguar, to other companies, to other brands? About, "Hey, we could be, we could... what's the logical extension of Jaguar's relaunch, rebrand, reframing?" But if we're logical, are we just going to have more of the same?

The, the interesting thing here is that, um, I guess you undoubtedly what capitalism is at its best, and it's lots of things, is a series of competing bets on the future. But it pays out a little like horse racing betting does, which is if you bet on the favorite, yes, you're more likely to win, but the winnings aren't particularly exciting. You know, if you [inaudible] roulette, you bet on red or black, yes, you're much more likely to win, um, but, uh, the returns are less exciting. And I think that applies in that it capitalism occasionally, not necessarily a good career move, it's not necessarily right, but it does pay effectively to view the world through a completely different lens to everybody else. And what you notice from successful entrepreneurs, but I ought to be honest enough to say that what you also notice a very, very many failed entrepreneurs, okay, let's be honest about this, is that they have a different cognitive style. Jeff Bezos has a very, very different decision-making style, uh, to, you know, most, most conventional business people. In fact, I was talking to someone who'd, uh, worked very closely with, uh, one of his sort of, uh, high-ranking officers within Amazon. Nearly everybody in Amazon hated the idea of Amazon Prime. They hated the idea of Prime Video. They hated the idea of the Kindle. In some cases, um, Jeff was asked once, you know, to what extent do we bet on the Kindle? And he said, "We bet the whole company on the Kindle because if we don't do this, somebody else will do it, and suddenly our entire book-buying business is now threatened." Okay? You know, so the, there's the mindset of the game theorist, which needs to accompany the mindset of the rationalist.

I'm a trained economist, so what you, I think you mean by this is that it's, it's in the context of all the other players. If you were by yourself in the world and no one was there, you might make one decision decision, but in the context of all the other players that will make rational decisions from themselves, suddenly that might impact the decision you make. According to game theory.

There's a fantastic philosophy podcast on which Paul Bloom, the Yale, uh, and Toronto psychology professor, appears, um, which is effectively on the evolutionary advantages to being a bit bonkers. Okay? Okay. In, in other words, there are moments, okay, one of which would be desperation, at which it actually makes sense to kind of throw your toys out of the pram, to basically just do something utterly crazy and unexpected. There are all kinds of reasons in evolutionary terms, and Paul does a fantastic job of enumerating them. One of them would be what you might call the complexity theory, um, idea that sometimes in order to get to a higher peak, you first have to go downwards. In other words, there are diminishing returns in optimizing where you already are. So it pays you to do something random, even if the short-term consequences or the seemingly logical consequences seem negative. The idea is that you effectively roll a big dice somewhere strange on the grounds that it's the only way you'll, you'll get out of your local maximum. So there's a sort of complexity theory argument for it. Um, you might argue that if you're absolutely desperate, there's an argument for doing something completely random because it's the best odds you have. You know, rather like very sick people will try, you know, drugs that appear, try anything. Okay? Right. Yeah. Totally experimental, try anything. You have nothing to lose. You, you might also argue that if you're very rich or ready, and this is why, by the way, sometimes I think the cognitive behavior of the rich and the poor has more in common than the cognitive behavior of the middle class, which tends to be risk and reputation of, you know, averse. Okay? And so, you know, you'll notice careers where, you know, which might include boxing and acting, which kind of makes sense if you're already pretty rich, and kind of makes sense if you're kind of pretty poor and you don't have much chance of getting out of the ghetto. But they don't make much sense to someone who isn't that rich but has the fairly reliable option of becoming a, a dentist. Okay? It does, you know, if, if you're not that rich already, you know, dentistry is a pretty damn sure way that you're going to enter, you know, the reasonably prosperous middle class, barring malpractice or, you know, uh, you know, some complete catastrophe. Okay? It's predictable. Okay? Now, if you're very rich already, you may say, well, you know, I could go into dentistry, but I, it would only make me 20% richer. It would make much more sense for me to try and become a Hollywood actor, in which case I'm rich and also really, really sexy and attractive in a way that probably, in a way that probably dentistry doesn't quite confer to the same extent. Okay?

So you're saying, but just to recap what you were saying about the sort of models for when it pays to be bonkers, when it's in your best interest, ration... I, I suppose what you're gonna say is rationality is kind of context-dependent. Okay? Um, in human behavior.

Another one would be that if you are known for being irrational, and this is something I said, it drove some people absolutely crazy, by the way, in my book, that one of the advantages Donald Trump has is that, in a way, his bonkers threats are credible because you genuinely believe that he might do anything. Meaning that he has said that he's going to have tariffs across the board on everything, and that's one of the things he's going to do there. And that would actually give him a superior negotiating position to negotiate with countries because if he's going to do a 75% tariff on everything, then maybe if you can negotiate, you know, that and not have that, then maybe you'd be better off. So the fact that it's a credible threat gives him an advantage. So, so I mean, you know, I mean, if, if you're in the real estate, uh, negotiation business, one of the things you need as a negotiator, I would argue, is you need to instill in the other person the belief that you might do something to spite them, even if it hurt you. Okay? That, in other words, you would take a material loss in order to, uh, avenge yourself on someone who'd done you wrong. Okay? And the argument would be that, you know, with Hillary Clinton, it didn't really matter what she said because you knew you were going to get what you might call the, the Harvard Business School, Davos kind of managerial rational response. Um, and therefore, essentially, me at a very simple level, okay, if we couldn't lose our tempers, okay, anybody more powerful than us could repeatedly just dick us around. And one of the reasons why people don't dick you around just for the hell of it, you know, I'm a 5'8", fat, not very athletic kind of, you know, Welsh advertising executive, but 6' 25-year-olds. One of the reasons, okay, they don't dick me around is that I might just flip. Now, they would still win, but I could still occasion significant damage, and it's not worth taking that risk. Okay?

So Donald Trump, do you think, is there, Rory, here we go, Rory Sutherland on Donald Trump. Is there a method to the, the madness at times? Is it part of a strategy? Is it just intuition? What is your, what is your feeling on Donald Trump?

Um, I, I, I got to be careful what I say here, particularly being based in Europe. But, um, I am repeatedly in awe of his salesmanship, his persuasive skills. Um, the way he speaks drives people crazy in some cases, but I regard him as a very, very good communicator in a peculiar way. By the way, but what he communicates is, "I'm not like the other guys." Okay? So, you know, uh, one of the things he does is is concretization. So, "I'm going to build a wall." Okay? That's highly concrete language, literally concrete and metaphorically concrete. Yes. Kamala Harris would say something like, "We're going to engage in trilateral talks with our Mexican and Canadian friends." Okay? Which is, you know, to most listeners, basically meaningless. Um, and so it's, it's only, it's only right that we should actually, you know, admire people for being good at something, even whether or not we actually support the ends or whether we actually support the person, uh, himself. Uh, it, it's, it's absolutely ridiculous, I think, to, um... I'll give you a lovely example of this, actually, which I thought was hysterical from a psychological point of view, okay, which is how the Democrats have kind of lost touch, uh, in a way that Donald probably hasn't, in a peculiar kind of earthy way. And it's hard to explain, but the wonderful thing where there was a joke, pretty offensive joke, told at a Trump rally at Madison Square Gardens, where the comedian was really rude about Puerto Rico. Sure. Made, made national headlines. He... We don't have to repeat. Hey, international headlines, because he sort of... We won't say it, but we... Yes. What, what was peculiar about the demographic responses? They immediately, confidently predicted he was going to lose the entire Latin vote. Okay? Now, that is like saying that if the comedian had made a joke about the French, okay, the British people would be offended. Okay? All right. Because we're fellow Europeans. No, if you told a joke about the French, British people would have loved it. Okay? All right. You know, Germans probably would have found it pretty funny as well. The idea that there's this weird Latin solidarity, which completely independent of your national origins, which is that, you know, all Mexicans feel instant solidarity with Guatemalans, Puerto Ricans, etc., is very, very strange. Ethnically, um, defined view of how people are offended. There would be a certain proportion of Puerto Ricans who might find it funny. Okay? Cubans might find it hysterical. I don't know. But I was thought that was very strange that you have this thing, Latin X, which is a term which Latin people don't like. Okay? But you impose, you impose from the outside this kind of imaginary homogeneity of them as a voter block, which, which to me just strikes me as just completely bizarre. I realized fairly quickly that yes, you know, that would rightly cause offense in some quarters, but the idea that there's so much kind of Latin solidarity that jokes about other Latin nationalities would cause offense universally. I mean, these people actually met a Latin American?

Okay, let me give you another person. So we've talked about Donald Trump a bit. Let me give you another sort of different sort of thinker, communicator. Um, obviously in the news a lot, actually, with with Donald Trump now, Elon Musk. What is your thinking on Elon Musk and his ability as a communicator, a marketer, a pitchman, really, um, in addition to being a, a technologist, effective?

Well, it's very interesting because again, you know, you have to say true of Musk, true of Jobs, you know, true of Henry Ford, you can go all the way back, okay? They fundamentally had an unusual way of seeing the world. Um, Musk undoubtedly has a very strange, uh, way of seeing the world, which is, you know, he's patently non-neurotypical. You know, you, I, I don't believe in diagnosing people remotely, that that kind of thing, but I mean, you know, I think to say not neurotypical is not, not an outrageous thing to, to make of him. And actually, there's an academic at King's College London who is herself not neurotypical, she freely admits that, who has made this case that actually, um, various conditions which we tend to kind of medicalize or treat as abnormal, which would include, for example, Asperger's or ADHD, have actually evolved because they are particularly valuable in groups. And therefore, in any given group of people, it is, in, in evolutionary terms, you know, on the Savannah, whatever it is, it is pretty valuable to have a few people kicking around who don't see the same, the world the same way as everybody else. And, um, I, I buy that thesis pretty, pretty readily, actually. There's some wonderful work by a guy called Matthew Syed in the, uh, in the UK, who's written a book called "Rebel Minds." But he also makes the point that, um, one of the worst things that I think besets, uh, you know, an awful lot of political groups is groupthink. And one, you know, a great Times journalist in the UK calls this "album politics," where you have to like every single track, track on the album. You decide your political inclination, and you effectively buy into every single manifestation of left-wing or right-wing thinking, and you kind of buy it like a package deal, wholesale. And that's one of the, one of the greatest problems, I think, of contemporary politics, which is an insight of, of Dominic Cummings, who is the kind of Brexit engineer, uh, in here, here in the UK, was that most real people outside the professional political and academic class, uh, actually are both much more left-wing and much more right-wing. Uh, in other words, they're much more variegated than the standard political narrative holds. And I think, by the way, I think Trump spots that. I mean, you would traditionally see, um, you, you typically see, I think, um, you know, tariffs. Very interesting one that. Tariffs, are they a left-wing or a right-wing thing? Protectionism historically was economically, uh, left-wing, um, although it's kind of complicated in the US because of course, if you go back to the Democrats in the, uh, 1920s, they, they were quite the opposite. So, so I mean, this is interesting, actually, because if you go back to the US in the '20s, the Republicans were arguably keen on tariffs to protect big business, whereas the Democrats wanted them to benefit the consumer.

Well, who, who else do you admire? Who are just like different thinkers? Who are different? I mean, we've said Donald Trump, we've said Elon Musk. I mean, you've mentioned Steve Jobs. It doesn't have to be all from, from, from those worlds. Who else do you admire?

Class comedians. And they're much, much more valuable, I think. Again, I think that the role of comedy in group setting, in group decision-making, uh, it's one of the most interesting questions in the world. Okay? What's the evolutionary role of comedy? Why is it more or less universal? Why is a sense of humor not, not quite universal? But it fascinated me when I had children. That my daughters both had a sense of humor before they could speak. By which I mean that, you know, you couldn't tell sophisticated jokes to them, but you could, you could do visual humor to them, but they could, they, there's a sense of... I have a two-year-old, a four-year-old. They, they, how they regard something. There's a way, there's an expression, there's a way of, of doing it. Yes, of course, they have a sense of humor. You can do some, you can do something, it's a bit slapstick, you know, you know, it's not, it's not Monty. Although, funnily enough, they probably would love Monty Python because of the absurdity. You see, even as small children, they sometimes love comedy just because of the sheer absurdity, even if they didn't get the subtlety of the joke. So comedians, I think the comedic instinct is much, much more valuable creatively than we, we tend to think. Think of them as entertaining. And in fact, in a lot of cultures, British culture, Jewish culture, are outliers here. Being funny is seen as being silly. It's not seen as something that's a mark of intelligence. British culture, Jewish culture, slightly different there. I've spoken to various people about this, that actually being funny is also clever in those cultures, and it's a, it's a valuable thing to cultivate.

And you're saying it's a valuable skill. We sort of talked about comedy in the context of just different thinkers because you have to, to find the joke in it. In the thing, like to have everyone in the room nodding and like, "That's exactly right, that's how I feel." You have to see it a different way, and that's a, a rare skill and a sign of intelligence, you're saying.

And I'm fascinated, I'm fascinated just from the psychological point of view by Andrew Schulz, who effectively, if you, if you took most of his content textually and you showed it to some humor academic, they basically demand that he was canceled for outrageous political incorrectness, which, you know, even to me, you know, it's pretty close. Okay? But I've got a, I've got a fairly high tolerance for, you know, shocking comedy. It's, it's a taste thing. And by the way, I'm sympathetic to people who don't. You know, I like serial killer jokes. I get it if you don't. Okay? I'm not, I'm not being, uh, you know, I'm not wishing to impose all forms of comedy on everybody. But what's fascinating is his audiences are completely, uh, uh, mixed in terms of ethnic, gender, every other identity, and they see, and it seems to create this extraordinary kind of bonding, actually, where the actual content has the opposite effect to that which a humorless person would predict. Okay? Now, you know, I mean, people presumably get drunk at comedy clubs, you occasionally get a fight, but generally, my impression of going to comedy is people leave in a universally good mood with a feeling of, you know, strong fellow feeling with their audience. You know, it's not like a sporting event, you don't generally get comedic violence. And something about that is just fascinating. I mean, one thing to understand, for example, is rudeness is highly complicated. And humorless people would always see, for example, ethnically or other forms of, of, of mutual abuse as, as naturally a sign of hostility. But you also find it in the military, where people would die for each other. So it can sometimes be a counter-signal, which is, if you and I weren't really, really mates, you wouldn't let me get away with saying this. So that you test the bonds of friendship, if you like, to prove them with kind of comedic insults. And that's, that's pretty common. And I always find it very strange when people take that kind of thing literally, because you, there's affectionate abuse. You, you'll know this with your children, right? You tease them, okay? It's not, you know, this is, you know, it's mock play. I mean, you know, all mammals engage in it. And there's sort of a strategic context for everything, right? What is the context around it? It's not the words themselves.

What, what do you think about, um, you know, brands using humor more? If humor is an unusual way of looking at the world, if brands are trying to separate themselves, should we see more, uh, I don't know, humor in marketing outside of Super Bowl ads?

I think partly people have got frightened. I mean, it was, uh, you know, the Golden Age of American advertising, David Ogilvy, funnily enough, originally made the claim that people don't buy from clowns. And effectively, um, uh, kind of vetoed in the early days of Ogilvy, he vetoed humor in advertising because, because of this claim that, in other words, that selling is a serious business, and people's money, how they spend it, is a serious, you know, is an answer to a serious question. Which, in some categories, by the way, it is undoubtedly. You know, however, um, he recanted, actually. Wasn't often that he changed his mind, but he did change his mind on that, because he thought that he saw evidence that actually, in some categories, particularly, it's highly effective. That entertainment and salesmanship go hand in hand. Ian, the beer category would be an obvious, uh, obvious case. But we, there's probably a distinction between what you might call things which are born bought of necessity, and things which are bought from discretionary income. You know, there are things which are serious purchases, which we can't afford to get wrong. And there are things which we effectively buy. I, I think the brain, the brain has two wallets, to some extent. Okay? There's stuff we need to buy to get by, and, you know, serious questions that where we just want to get it right. And there are other things where, you know, uh, it, it effectively comes from a different mental pot. And you think comedy lends itself to one of those more than another? It allows you to say things that you say things laterally that you can't say literally. So if you take a very simple ad, which is the, it was a famous British ad, and it was for The Economist. It simply had a big poster that said, "I never read The Economist," and underneath the quote was attributed to "management trainee, aged 42." Okay? Okay. Right. Okay. Now, if you'd said, "Reading The Economist will make you more successful at your job," it's a kind of naked appeal to self-interest, and people don't really, don't really resonate, and it may create reactance. You see, so you can often say something, if you say something, or you boss someone around. There was that great article in The Atlantic, which was "The HR-ification of the Democratic Party." That, if, if Donald Trump represents the sales function, okay, uh, then Kamala Harris effectively is the HR function. The Democrats have become kind of Human Resources, not evil, not necessarily well-intentioned, perhaps not really on your side, although they pretend to be. That's another, another thing they share with HR. Okay? They're not really on the side of the employee, to be ever. But also kind of bossy, and just a bit of a bummer. Um, so the ability to say things in a way that changes someone's behavior without, without creating reactance or resistance or loss of status, for example, is a magical property of comedy.

Let me tell you a story because I love it because it's a fantastic story. Um, and I, I got this from a wonderful guy called Kevin Dutton, who's another psychologist. And it's a, it's a formal dinner, um, at Buckingham Palace in, I think, the 1954. Queen is new, newly on the throne. Churchill is once again Prime Minister. They're hosting at Buckingham Palace, kind of heads of government, the major colonies, uh, you know, major world leaders at this dinner. And it's a pretty grand affair. And someone tips the wink to the people at the top table that one of the guests, a head of state, we don't know who, although it was someone female, apparently, had stolen one of the pepper pots. So, about been the salt shaker. Okay? Now, doesn't seem that significant, but they're solid gold, date back to George III, who's a marvelous king, by the way. You get a totally bad, um, he gets completely bad rap across the Atlantic. But, but they're worth, you know, £5,000 each, and they're irreplaceable. Okay? And they go, "What the hell do we do? Do we take the hit and lose the pepper pot, or do we accuse them of theft and face a diplomatic incident, extraordinary bad feeling, etc., etc.?" And Churchill goes, "Let me, um, let me solve this for you." He goes, "What's he going to do?" And he takes the matching salt shaker from the table and he puts it in his top pocket. And he waits for the woman, the head of state, to be standing somewhere on her own. And he sidles up to her after the, after the meal, and he pulls out the salt shaker from his top pocket where he'd hidden it. And he says to her conspiratorially, "I think we've both been spotted. We probably better put these back." Okay? Now, the genius, the genius of that is, okay, I don't think she believed for a moment, okay, in reality, or at least later that evening, she didn't believe for a moment that that that Churchill had heisted the, the salt shaker. But by presenting yourself as a fellow conspirator, rather than as an accuser, the whole emotional nature of the exchange, which would otherwise be emotionally fraught, is completely diffused. And, and maybe comedy can make us more part of on the same team, where we're, it's a wink, it's a joke, it's a nod. If you get it, then you're, we're, we're on the same team.

So there's a brilliant phrase I didn't know this until I told that Churchill story last night, actually. In Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," the advice is that you must build for your vanquished foe a golden bridge. And what it is, is that in other words, if you're winning in a negotiation or in a conflict, um, this is really the lesson of the, um, uh, Paris Peace Treaty, the end of World War I. You must build for the person you vanquished a way in which they can retreat without humiliation. Lao Tzu calls this a golden bridge. Help them save face so they can save face, as a, save their reputation. My cousin Woodrow kind of screwed it up because he caught the Spanish Flu at the Paris Peace Talks. And so consequently, half screwed up the 20th century. But he, in his defense, and there are lots and lots of criticisms, I'm not defending. I mean, he's not a close enough relative for me to get. And he was a massive racist, I think, by the way. I'm not, I'm not defending him. But he was, in his defense, he was much more in favor of what you might call a magnanimous, uh, treatment of the Germans than say the French were after World War I. In other words, he believed in a kind of golden bridge. And, um, uh, the, the other Allied forces were particularly, I think the French were less keen. But, uh, th this kind of thing, this kind of psychology of how you can get someone to change their mind and not mind about it. Comedy seems to form that act. It seems to promote observation. It's, it's an incentive to see things differently. So you might argue, okay, that it's a good idea that we enjoy sex because if orgasms were really tedious, okay, we probably would have gone extinct as a species. You know, if, in mid-orgasm, "When's this tedious pumping going to come to an end?" If we didn't enjoy an orgasm, you know, we probably wouldn't be a wrapped, okay, to be having this poll. Okay? Now, in the same way, humor is probably a kind of orgasm in the mind, in that it's a reward for noticing something, thinking about something differently, expressing something in an interesting way. Um, uh, you know, uh, it also breaks down standard status cues. Brits, by the way, are quite often misunderstood in this way. I will defend us in that we're often seen as an absolutely class-ridden society, which is sort of true, but it's not a high deference society. So people are incredibly rude about the Royal Family, they're incredibly rude about their bosses. It's actually a lower deference culture. It's not as low as Australia or New Zealand, and it's, you know, and, you know, but it's probably in many respects a lower deference society than the United States is, in that partly because of humor, people are non-maliciously rude, quite indiscriminately.

Well, and, and what is your take? My take on on humor, and see, see if you agree or not, is that humor to get an idea that will like spread, it has to have three qualities in my mind. It's, it's got to be simple. You've got to get it quickly. It's got to be surprising. In your lexicon, it's got to kind of be, be, be different than what you expect. And it's got to be significant to actually say something. So, in my mind, humor is something that kind of gives you all three. If you're going to tell it in a joke, if you're Dad, it's got to be simple. You can't, you know, tell it for 30 minutes, and people are going to lose interest in your joke. It's got to be surprising. It's not funny if it doesn't surprise you. And humor, when it's well, if it's not just slapstick, it says something. So it's like a structure that gives you the simple, surprising, significant approach to an idea, kind of for free. And it's funny, too, isn't it? Because obviously it requires mutual comprehension. I mean, some jokes are just, you know, universally and immediately funny. Um, you know, there are, there are niche intellectual jokes, of which my favorite is, um, what does the B stand for in Benoît B. Mandelbrot? B. Mandelbrot. It stands for Benoît B. Mandelbrot, which is an incredibly abstruse joke about Mandelbrot sets, which is basically incomprehensible to non-mathematicians. But once you understand it, it's still pretty funny. Okay? And then, you know, um, yeah, then they're absolutely stupid ones, you know, like, "What is Winnie the Pooh's middle name?" The... Okay, okay, okay. Um, but, but there's something there, which I think, um, there's a great book. Get him on your podcast because he's a brilliant guy called Dan Davis, has written a book called "The Unaccountability Machine." And one of the things I think, uh, which he, he effectively suggests is that in problem-solving, particularly in problems involving human beings, rather like that Churchill incident, okay, humor and a, and a sense of mischief is much more valuable than we give it credit for. In fact, that it, in, in the workplace, it is not a distraction from the serious business of work. Well, sometimes it is, and sometimes it's a necessary distraction. But some of the time, it's also actually really, really necessary.

I'll tell you the most bizarre story, okay, which this is genuinely extraordinary. Um, uh, but my, my grandfather was a doctor and employed as a, and kind of handyman, and, in fact, a sort of a man who'd been right in the trenches of World War I in the Somme, absolutely in the worst of the fighting. And they had a young, pretty enthusiastic officer. They didn't hate him, it wasn't one of those kind of Vietnam cases. Okay? They didn't hate this guy, but they just found him, as old hands who'd been there for some months or whatever, they just found him slightly irritatingly keen and enthusiastic. Okay? And one stage, he climbs up, he climbs up the ladder, uh, to lead a charge into No Man's Land, gestures forward with his arm, holding a Webley .45 revolver. He goes, "Come on, men, forwards!" And as he gestures forwards, holding the revolver, his shoulder is hit, either by machine gun fire or shrapnel, by something pretty big, to a point where it's completely disconnected from his body. His arm flies forward about six feet, still holding the revolver, and lands in the mud. Okay? They all burst out laughing. So, I mean, I always regard that as absolutely extraordinary because in certain absolutely miserable situations, you know, there's also a role of humor, which is it somehow can make things that would be seemingly absolutely intolerable, um, somehow bearable. And that's probably, you know, it was, to some extent, what was keeping them sane. Now, it's, by the way, it's not quite as mean-spirited as it sounds because he's going to survive the war. He's got a "blighty" wound, as it was called. He'd effectively get returned to the UK, admittedly minus one arm, but he'd almost certainly survive the war, whereas there are people around him being killed all the time. So it wasn't a total misfortune for this guy, to be honest. But nonetheless, it's a, it's a fascinating story in terms of, uh, uh, you know, how, how differently people can react depending on the context to certain situations.

What do, what is your recommendation then to, to people listening to this now who may be in charge of marketing for companies and budgets and everything else like, what if there was one thing that they could do to be more effective, more distinctive, um, you know, have more resonance and, and, and, and you, and you were given a red pen to all of their creative, their ads, everything else, what would you do? What would you change? Just generally speaking in marketing.

So we occasionally call this as a kind of, as a kind of mantra, reframe, re-wire. Now, reframing and comedy is very, very frequently about reframing. It's in other words, you take the same information and you, uh, you, you effectively suddenly recontextualize it so that it's surprising. And there seems to me in that act of recontextualization in comedy, okay, you know, um, uh, you know, the classic one is, you know, someone said, you know, "You know, I made love to my wife over the freezer yesterday." And then everybody goes, "And didn't go down very well. It seems like they frown on it at Walmart." Okay? So you suddenly, okay, okay, you suddenly repositioned the joke from what you imagine to be the home to being Walmart, and of course, the same behavior goes from being, one hopes, romantic to being obviously, you know, something of a social faux pas. Um, and that, that act of reframing seems to me really, really important if we're to actually grow businesses because we, we've created a business culture which is focused on, what is it focused on? Cost. And the problem is, is that we're much, much more focused on cost than on opportunity cost. And to spot opportunities, unlike costs, which are visible, okay, and quantifiable, opportunities require an act of observation. In other words, they would, if they, if they didn't require an act of observation, they wouldn't, there wouldn't be opportunities because someone would have already noticed them. Okay? And consequently, this reframing question of noticing something that nobody else notices by looking in a slightly different way. I think creativity, by the way, starts almost always with observation. I think we talk about creativity as if it's this mysterious thing that people, uh, produce in their heads. David Ogilvy made the point about good creative people that, uh, they're extensive browsers. This is before the internet existed. Extensive browsers in all kinds of fields. In other words, they're highly curious. And if you look at most scientific discoveries, from Newton to Viagra, to, um, penicillin, to smallpox vaccinations, nearly every really significant, uh, Darwin, okay, nearly every really significant act of scientific progress happened with an observation, seemingly trivial observation, where someone noticed the significance that had escaped everybody else. True, true detective work. You know, Son of Sam was caught because he got a parking ticket. I always love that one. You know, there's just this trivial little observation, and then someone spots the significance. And that's what you might call reframe. That's notice something by looking at things in a different way. Then effectively reimagine, what, what's the actual implication of this? If this is true, what does it mean? And then rewire, is if, you know, if we have evidence that this is true, then we need to actually reorient our business to take advantage of it. Now, we have this business culture which is dominated by kind of CFO, procurement, C-suite culture, which is all about cost reduction, which in many cases consumers don't really care about, by the way. You know, I, you know, I, I think that it's an extraordinarily, I mean, I'm not, I'm not suggesting that they're insensitive to price, but that what we've, what we've actually lost, what, what marks out entrepreneurs is they are highly curious and willing to, uh, willing to entertain an extraordinarily broad range of different ways of looking at the world.

And is it, is it, do we sort of take a different path because it's easier to defend the other path? Like, if we're going to base it on cost reduction, it's easier to say, like, "Look, I reduced cost. Like, look, I saved this," and you can defend it. And it's harder to defend a creative approach. It's rational. It's so, if you've got a reductionist mindset, cost reduction is rational, it's quantifiable, and it's fast. The only problem is, if you focus exclusively on efficiency, you can't grow. And one of the reasons you can't grow is that you can't even get, it's not even the fact that you can't be clever and imaginative, you can't even be lucky. Because all you can do is take what you already have and exploit it even more. You never discover what you might call a new source of pollen or nectar. You only focus on following the waggle dance and exploiting what pollen and nectar you're already aware of. So it's, so it's not even the case that you can't be creative and wonderful and imaginative, you can't even get lucky. Okay? You don't even, you're not even exposing yourself to positive upside, good fortune. And so, um, I, I was taken by this. This is a kind of interesting story. So I've just written about this. I'm driving along the road with my wife. It's dark, and there's a kind of motorway service station, but all the lights are off. And my wife goes, "Oh, [expletive], it's closed." Because we needed to buy something, lacto-free milk. My wife is one of those people who's convinced she's lactose intolerant anyway. But I said, "Well, hold on a second. How, it looks closed. All the lights are off. There isn't even the petrol sign illuminated or the petrol price. But I'm sure I bought something here year ago on Christmas Day. So if they're open on Christmas Day, it seems pretty odd that they close at 7:30 in the evening." Let's just pull off and see what happens. We pulled off. Sure enough, out of sight from the road, fully open service station, all the petrol pumps illuminated, massive 24-hour shop. Okay? Now, unsurprisingly, the shop is empty because everybody driving down the road would have assumed they were closed because it looked like the Bates Motel, basically. Okay? And I said to the guy behind the counter, I said, "Um, what, what's going on? All the lights are off on the road." "I'm a marketing person, right? Okay, you're pissing away, [expletive] thousand dollars of revenue tonight. You know, I don't think they sold a single liter of petrol since nightfall. Okay? Why are the lights off?" He goes, "Oh, yeah, I think the guy on the last shift, I think he like forgot to turn the lights on." Go and turn them on now, you [expletive] idiot. You know, I mean, this is awful. And when we left, he still hadn't bothered to turn the lights back on. And it occurred to me, that's an opportunity cost. Okay? If the same guy had like stolen a Mars bar, do you have those? Or, you know, stolen a bar of Hershey's, whatever, okay, at 2 o'clock in the morning, that's a cost. They'd be held to pay. They, you know, he might be fired, he might be heavily disciplined. You know, that would be considered a really serious incident. But failing to market yourself, failing to make yourself visible to potential customers, that's actually an opportunity cost. It's not a cost. And consequently, we are much more laser-focused on, on, you know, reduction of spurious costs than we are on ignoring possible opportunities. It's much, much easier to get fired for being irrational or extravagant than it is to get fired for being unimaginative. And that strikes me as a fundamental, fundamental asymmetry, not in startups, and not among entrepreneurs, but in all other businesses. That seems to be a fundamental asymmetry.

And, and you heard it here from Rory Sutherland. Seek to be an opportunity cost reducer instead of a cost reducer. Well, what's the... We should have two things. Okay? One, companies, as well as having a board which is obsessed with the tedious, joint interests, they should have a customer consumer board which is obsessed with, in other words, okay, not how do we add value to consumers? Is every bit as important a question as how we add value to shareholders? For some reason, post-Milton Friedman, people have got this completely out of balance. It's actually a much deeper mystery with much more opportunity for, uh, discovery and invention, and it will lead you in a to a much more interesting place. Second thing is, what's the opposite of the procurement department? Because the procurement department is a bunch of people who are very heavily bonused for asking the question, "What's overpriced?" But what's the corresponding department that spends its time going, "What's undervalued? What have we got here which actually people value much more than we realize they do?" Which might be an opportunity to create a much more, you know, a much better value exchange in the future. You, you know, a lot of these departments, they should have a mirror. They should have a kind of shadow self, a union shadow self, that's doing the opposite of what they're trying to do.

Oh, I want to end on, um, just some questions about you yourself, your newfound fame. Take me through, like, you are an unexpected TikTok star. I would say you've got millions of followers. How does that, and I, and I know the story of someone else was sort of posting your clips and putting them online and people seem to like them. What, what has that changed for you now? What is it now that you're recognized? And usually the, the vice chairman of an advertising agency, their commentary on the world is not usually, um, shared among, uh, folks on TikTok. Partly, I think, to quote Austin, it's, you know, "C'est la vie, absurdist." I believe it because it's ridiculous that actually, had you chosen someone to be a TikTok star, you would not have chosen the fat 58-year-old. Okay? So I think a degree of it is the sheer unexpectedness of it. In other words, the, the marketer I admire most is the wonderful actor who plays, um, Ron Swanson in Parks and Rec. Uh, he's, it's called, uh, Helman, is it right? Right. Nick, anyway. He, he, he was in Hollywood and he simply said, Offerman, that's his name, Offerman, isn't it? Nick Offerman, yeah, yeah. Nick Offerman. There you go. Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant. Okay. And he, he's basically going to all these castings in Hollywood and he's surrounded by these buff, kind of gym-go, you know, 26-year-old guys. And he goes, "Look, I can't really compete with those." So I'm going to portray myself as kind of a farmer guy, a woodworking enthusiast. Genuinely him, by the way. That's, that's not for the part. He is genuinely a huge woodworking enthusiast. Okay? And he just goes, "I'm just going to position myself as kind of a farmer guy." And every time a part arises which needs a guy who looks a bit like a farmer, they'll call me. So he understood, uh, he understood differentiation. So part of it, I think, is just exactly that. Um, what I've also discovered is there is a much, much greater appetite for marketing insight. Um, and of course, if you work in advertising and marketing, particularly work for Nestlé or P&G, or whatever, these conversations are commonplace, and you have access to a lot of information and consumer psychology, and you're familiar with some of these concepts. And I suddenly realized that ad agencies kind of sell insights a bit like fish and eggs. And I want to sell insights like Coke. You know, I want to give them away to everybody. And ad agencies, you can have one insight every next six months, we'll craft it for you individually. And I'm, okay, no, no, there are loads of insights out there. They can all be of huge use to small businesses. And the gratifying thing is, I do get people emailing me quite a lot to go, "I read something you or saw something you said, I tried something different, and it made me a million dollars." You know, or it solved a problem I couldn't solve for ages. Um, so in some ways, I mean, I'm not doing this, I don't make, I don't know who the hell makes money out of this stuff because it's certainly not me. But a, a little bit of it is that I genuinely believe as a passionate and committed marketer.

That the insights from Marketing in particular, what, uh, what, what's called, you know, the, the miraculous marketing mindset, which, as Mark Ritson says, involves just doing that 180-degree flip where you see your business as the consumer sees it, or the customer sees it, not as you see it as a business owner or business manager. And the, the value of that simple mental reframing that marketers do, which is, "Yeah, okay, okay, that makes sense from the business point of view, but how does that feel if you're a consumer?"

Okay, I'll give you a lovely example of this. Okay, so a hotel chain, very premium hotel chain, goes, "Here's how we can make, you know, a few million dollars a year. We'll charge people for early checking." And so people turn up early and they go, "Well, you can either wait until 3:00 when your room is available, or if you pay us $100, um, you can check in early." Disaster. Not many people took it up. Not because they couldn't afford to, not because they weren't willing to pay, but they were pissed off. Okay? Psychologically, because the very fact that they're offering you that room for early check-in means it's already, they have it. They have it right there. We've got it, but you can't have it. Okay? We're actually keeping the door at an empty room locked just to try and extract. Now, these people are rich. It's a super premium hotel. Okay? This just simply violated their sense of fairness.

Now, the point I'm making there is, if you'd said, "When at the time of booking, can check in at 3:00, or if you pay $70 now, you can check in from 11:00 a.m.," a lot of people go, "Yeah, that's fair enough because obviously you need to make the room ready and, you know, you need to prioritize some rooms for earlier cleaning, so yeah, yeah, the $70 is fair." Doing it when you turn up at the actual check-in desk, absolute, uh, uh, total failing. So these kind of psychological things are hugely important. You know, effectively, what emotions you trigger through seemingly economically rational behavior. And how, how actually acting as an economist would wish you to act could occasionally make your customers absolutely hate you to the point of just, you know, in a sense, you know, rich people sitting around in a lobby for two hours just to spite you, right? This, this stuff's really, really important.

And, and you found that there is a market for this on social media from people who will never be in an Ogilvy pitch meeting ever, or will never be in an Ogilvy client. Have you discovered what is the secret to that? Like, what, what are your kind of musings or insights that that do the best? People just as people enjoy humor because of the reframing. People enjoy seeing things from a different angle. And it's a, it's a great value exchange because, you know, insights don't cost very much. And my argument is, there are a lot of insights out there, particularly around things like customer service, customer experience, uh, pricing, okay, which just need to be, you know, we could get another 2% on GDP if just more businesses were just a bit more marketing savvy and spend a bit more time looking for the opportunity rather than looking to cut the cost. And, um, and also, you know, we'd have happier consumers, happier citizens if government and business were just a bit better at psychology.

To be absolutely honest, I genuinely believe that because I think that, um, the two, the two disciplines. One great thing about Donald Trump, okay, he's not a lawyer. Okay? He's not an economist, and he's not a lawyer. Okay? I know that. I know that sounds like fairly faint praise, but actually, the extent to which the legalistic mind or the economic mind have dominated kind of political decision-making and government policy is completely disproportionate. It's created, as I said, you know, this kind of "HR-ification" of the Democratic Party, where it's all about codification and internal consistency. Now, yeah, this value of kind of consistent theory, that that's actually a middle-class educated, you know, shibboleth. The idea that you have to be absolutely consistent. You can't be. This is going back to the beginning of the conversation. You can't be completely consistent because what is actually rational is very, very context-dependent. Sometimes you should actually back down. Sometimes you should be highly conciliatory. Sometimes you should get angry.

And one of the most interesting things, I think they found this in the military, is what distinguishes intelligent, sorry, what distinguishes inexperienced actors from experienced, less valuable actors in any kind of scenario is not actually what you might call intelligence or reason or rationality. It's situational awareness. It's the ability. What experienced people do, that might be an experienced doctor doing a diagnosis, or an experienced military officer, um, uh, you know, trying to take some piece of land. It's the ability to go, "This time it's different. This isn't the same as the other time." Okay? And so we've created this kind of weird cast of sort of pseudo-intellectual, um, managerialists who believe that kind of consistent, what you might call formulaic decision-making is the hallmark of rationality. But the real hallmark of human intelligence is situational awareness. It's, uh, actually, normally I do this, but this time something feels a bit different. You know? And that might be you. That might be the product of intuition. It might be the product of instinct. It might be the product of literally, I, I've had, you know, cases where I was forced to make a rational decision, but something felt wrong, and I've, you know, I've subsequently realized that actually maybe you should have acted on your intuition. Uh, and so I, you know, I think there's something very, very interesting there.

And of course, one great thing about comedy is that it's, what you might call, it's a gym for practicing situational awareness. You know, normally, yes, that would be right. Okay? You know, but actually, this time it's different. And, and, and the comedian who tells that off-color joke, that off-putting joke, that slightly on the edge, that makes you uncomfortable, but then gets away with it, that is great situational awareness to be able to pull that off. That is, as a master of understanding the situation.

By the way, judging spoken sentences in print, okay? In other words, that in itself. One thing that happened, which I've noticed a lot, is a lot of people got into trouble, including comedians, but also ordinary members of the public, for very, very early posts on Twitter, which would be deemed to be basically unacceptable or inappropriate. And one of the points I've made is that what they're slightly missing there is that in the very, I, I joined Twitter, I think, in 2007, which is either the f... I think it launched into...

You're, you're, you're, you're pretty early there. There, there you go. Yeah. And one of the things you noticed is that in the very early days of Twitter, it wasn't making a public pronouncement, as far as you're concerned. You were just chatting to your friends because you were followed by 30 friends on Twitter. And, and you had, basically, it was like a pub. Okay? So you might tell jokes on Twitter, basically, your friends. You would never, you would never... the world. No. Now, nobody, nobody who's posting similarly, when you become famous, what you post on Twitter, you have to be more cautious because it has a greater import and a greater, and a greater incentive to be misunderstood than it would have done when you were, when you were nobody. You know, I don't mean nobody, but when you're anonymous, okay? And so understanding the fact that in these very early days of Twitter, going back and saying, "Can you believe this person posted this on Twitter?" is meaningless because they weren't posting it. They were sharing a joke with 20 mates because in the very early days of the medium, the platform, that's exactly what it was. It was pub talk. Okay? And consequently, nobody thought that journalists would ever read you. You know, very early days, uh, yeah, journalists were quite quick onto the platform, but no one really thought that you're making a public pronouncement when you go out there, even though it was kind of public and searchable.

And so the very business of taking a joke and putting it, taking it out of its spoken place and putting it in print is very, very liable to misrepresent what was originally said because so much of the communication is non-verbal and contextual and involves things like tone of voice and who the audience is and when it was said. If you're in a comedy club, what is patently acceptable, uh, you know, versus say, the workplace or a funeral, okay? They're, they're pretty different.

Well, final question for you, because I could talk to you all day and I, I know we have to end at some point. But final question is, you know, a lot of people depend on you for your insights, your advice. I'm curious, Rory Sutherland, what is the best advice and what is the worst advice you've received in your professional career or otherwise? What, what has been the best and the worst of the advice?

In a way, I suppose I copy people rather than taking specific advice. But I've, okay, I'll give you the best bit of advice. And I'm delighted to say that on Amazon in the UK, this book, which was published by an, written by an American in something like 1917 or something, maybe 1920. Guy called Robert G. Ingersoll, called "Obvious Adams." And it was one of David Ogilvy's favorite books. It's only about 40 pages. You'll read it in a single sit. And I've been plugging this book because someone, guy called Mike Walsh, gave me a copy when I was promoted to be Creative Director at Ogilvy. And I was slightly off, you know, just been PR'd to this. But I want a subscription of the Harvard Business Review. I don't, I don't want this weird. By the way, you'll read the first two or four pages and you'll think, "What is this hokey [ __ ]?" Brilliant book. One of David Ogilvy's favorite books. So that gift of a book called "Obvious Adams" was probably, and I'm delighted to say that under "Sales and Marketing" in amazon.co.uk, it's the fourth bestselling marketing and sales book on Amazon, despite the fact that it's over a hundred years old. And I'm proud of that. Okay? So, so Mike Walsh, thank you for giving me a copy of "Obvious Adams" because at the time I was kind of like, "Okay, right." But it's David Ogilvy was right to admire it. It's a fantastic little book and everybody should just read it, which is just, "Don't be afraid to notice little obvious, seemingly trivial things which almost pass people by because they're beneath their dignity to notice them," or something like that.

That would be the worst advice. GL Hail, um, oh yes, yeah. Now, I, I do tease him about this, which is in the very, very early days, this is in the, uh, early '90s. We were working on Microsoft, and I thought, "This company is really going somewhere. Maybe I ought to buy some stock." And I went to a friend who worked at the time for Goldman Sachs. He said, "No, no, you don't want to buy American stocks. You're basically taking a bet on the exchange rates." I didn't buy me. So, but to be honest, okay, even if he'd said, "Great idea," I'm totally bloody incompetent at that kind of thing. I probably would have got around to buying them anyway. So I don't hold any kind of bitterness or resentment. But occasionally, when I meet him in the pub, I do remind him of his fantastic advice that, "No, no, no, you shouldn't buy Microsoft stock in 1990 because, you know, you never know that the pound might rise." Back there you go. So, so I would say, uh, be careful who you take advice from, but be, uh, be patient with those who give it.

Rory Sutherland, you've been an inspiration to a lot of people, um, with all of your insights on TikTok. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, and we look forward to your next insight. And I can see why, um, people enjoy talking with you so much. Podcasting, the success of podcasting, is one of the, you know, one of the delights of my life, which is it suddenly shows that effectively it was a market failure by media owners because they completely turned their back on the value of conversation as a, as a form of entertainment. Long-form conversation is one of the oldest forms of human entertainment, okay? And people in, people in radio and television lost interest in it far, far too soon. We've become a soundbite world, but there's still value. And I guess Joe Rogan proves it in having a three-hour conversation. You can still find value in that. We ought to have more of those conversations. Thank you so much. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you ever about.