RORY SUTHERLAND: INSIDE THE MIND OF A MARKETING GENIUS

And to not make you blush, but you are sort of one of my heroes. Say I work in advertising because it's the best way to monetize ADHD. A lot of people say it's a mystery how Ryan A has survived so long. That the genius of Ryan A is, if you take away social embarrassment, yeah, all English men would wear shorts all the time, is my theory. Okay, no ways? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if it weren't for social sanction, wow.

Guys, about to go into the episode. I'm really excited because it's with Rory Sutherland; he's one of my heroes. Um, and get your notebooks out, take some notes because this episode is going to blow your minds in so many different ways, especially if you're focusing on business, brand, and marketing in particular. This one is going to be for you. Um, now before we start the episode, um, so many of you who are watching this right now haven't subscribed to our channel, so if you can click that button, it would do us absolute wonders. Also, leave us a comment and let us know which guest you'd like next; any guest at all, leave it in the comment, and we'll check it out. Okay, here we go. Enjoy this episode of Great Company with Rory Sutherland.

Hello, I'm Rory Sutherland, and I'm in great company.

Rory, welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure, as ever.

No, this is more—I cannot—I've been raving to the team, um, and to not make you blush, but you are sort of one of my heroes.

Got it. You are. I'm afraid. Um, I find this utterly bizarre, by the way. I mean, why I—well, I don't know, 'cause I've just always done this stuff. And to be honest, you know, people close to me are as likely to find me annoying and perverse as they are to find me particularly rewarding. So the fact that, you know, uh, weird stuff that I might say or think, which I've been saying or thinking for some time, has suddenly gone mainstream is probably too generous a word for it, but has actually sort of—I suppose it's got what you call a crossover hit or a breakout hit in musical terms—it's come as a complete surprise to me, and it's very, very bizarre. Um, it—by the way, it happened; there was a young guy who effectively started taking my content and putting it up on TikTok. So that's a shout-out to Hugo there. And the first I knew about it was when I started getting kind of mobbed by school kids and just didn't know what was going on.

Yeah. Do you know what's funny? Okay, so I've just recently been in LA, and I was talking to a single person there who is a woman, and she was saying that everyone—what has now changed when you talk to single people, typically men—is that every—as an entrepreneur, that's what everyone is, where, you know, 15, 20 years ago, that was not the case. It's a great way to brand, rebrand an employment, but but nonetheless, you're absolutely right that when I left University, for example, uh, going into business for yourself or even joining a very small company—I left University in 1988—that would have been considered a deeply weird, risky thing to do and was probably evidence that you couldn't get a job with Price Waterhouse or something. Okay, whereas now it's actually pretty much again a mainstream thing to do.

Good. It is a good thing. And I think that's why people are so obsessed with you, because I think this idea of being an entrepreneur and being is sexy, cool, exciting, and fun. And the most sexy thing about being an entrepreneur is it's not—you're not that sexy if you work in the numbers, really. What kind of is sexy is being a marketeer. Oh, I've got this idea, this brilliant thing, and you sort of personify that in your work, so people, I think, um, take what you say and then regurgitate it on dates and sound like they're clever. I think that's what people are—do I truly think they are?

Oh, I see. I never thought of—I mean, I'm a very unlikely source of sort of chat-up lines, I would have thought.

I think you're a source of chat-up lines. I really do. This is fascinating. And I suspect that actually there's a there's a degree to which all podcasts are a little bit like that, which is their conversational fodder.

Mhm.

In other words, uh, you know, if I watch quite a few podcasts, uh, if anybody mentions something, I might have something interesting to say about it. And that that that is an interesting approach. I mean, the popularity of podcasts is to some extent surprising, um, in that what it suggests is—I mean, interestingly, that maybe mainstream news media and entertainment media neglected human conversation for a long time. Ah, because it's a very—in evolutionary terms—it's very old, isn't it? Storytelling, along with dance and music and possibly sport, we don't know, uh, are obviously very, very old forms of entertainment going back hundreds of thousands of years. And actually our enjoyment of them might be kind of, you know, an evolutionary adaptation. Yeah. And you might argue that just long-form conversation was always much more popular and better than the people who made entertainment media realized. And it always fascinates me if you think about it: you leave a home which has Netflix and Amazon Prime and Disney and, you know, uh, all the entertainment known to man, and you leave that home voluntarily to go to a pub to chat with your friends. Okay, now you—lots of people do that several times a week. Now, when you think about it, you've got the best that Hollywood has to offer at home, okay, with car chases, you know, uh, absolutely fantastic actors. You go, "No, no, I don't want any of that. I want to go and meet six people and have a chat." Yeah, but is that—that's because I hope that there's nothing better than real-life connection.

Yeah, I think that's true. But it's also, I think, true that, um, just good conversation is its own reward in a way.

Wow. So are you saying that—well, I think we've probably evolved to enjoy it because it's useful to do so. I mean, that's probably the reason.

Wait, hang on a second. So that's really interesting. So we—just by the way, with this podcast, if I go all over the place, it's because I have so many questions for you, so I apologize. And poor producer, Jamie, is going—I work in advertising because it's the best way to monetize ADHD.

Okay, great. No problems. No problems with going off-topic at all.

Okay, great. But that is so interesting because so that conversation, right, an authentic conversation is what we are after.

I agree with you. And what happened was is that Hollywood came along, in a sense, and basically said, "Here we go, here's conversation, storytelling; let's jazz it up." And now TikTok has done really well because it's short-form authentic conversation with no jazzing, and people just like to see the realness. This was the best thing. There are a lot of people in marketing called futurologists; an awful lot of what they say is utter bollocks, you know. In other words, they'll go and say, "Look, there's this shop in Copenhagen which makes furniture out of recycled rhino dong. We think it's a massive trend." And you go, "How very interesting." And then six months later, you Google it and realize that the shop went bust because, unsurprisingly, nobody wants their furniture made out of rhino dong. But one futurologist told me something really brilliant, which is: there aren't really trends; there are vectors, which is that what people often talk of as a trend, you also find there's an opposite trend going on at the same time. So what's interesting about the podcast stroke TikTok world is it's both very, very long and very, very short. Everything in the conventional entertainment world was at the kind of, you know, uh, it was at the kind of, you know, 1 hour 20 minutes. Yeah, length. That was the kind of thing about a film, and music tracks lasted so long. And what's interesting is that we've discovered, in a sense, through just media experimentation, everything from the box set binge, where I actually find watching one episode of something at a time really painful now.

So do I. I either want to watch nothing or I want to watch three episodes.

Um, and similarly, uh, actually, I have to confess my—the only reason I wasn't a heavy TikTok user is that whenever I used it, my kids used to shout at me. They're 23, and they thought it was deeply inappropriate for a 51-year-old man to be watching TikTok. Okay, it was kind of their thing. But I've always enjoyed it. I've always found it—by the way, I also found it quite benign. And me—we talk quite a lot about the malign effects of social media, and there's undoubtedly this component of social media which is driving FOMO; in other words, people share the curated parts—well, you were on Made in Chelsea—okay, but people share the most glamorous, most curated parts of their lives, okay, whereas actually when you're off-camera, you're eating in a KFC on the Old Kent Road, right? You know, your car's broken down, you know, you know what I mean? Is the parts of your life you share are vastly more exotic than the parts of the lives you live. Yes. And that can have a malign effect, I think, on people's expectations. But I would find TikTok—you know, quite often people's backdrop is a pretty shabby house, or the house isn't very tidy, or everything's a bit scruffy, and it's mostly just the wholesome business of people using their talents to entertain other people without any particular kind of status component to it. It's just, you know, that healthy business of sharing, uh, you know, jokes, amusements, observations.

What makes something a trend sometimes? I think—I think the only way you can look at it is say it's completely arbitrary in some cases. Things become fashionable—sometimes marketing drives it, yeah, uh, sometimes marketing accelerates it, sometimes marketing creates it, sometimes I think it's just genuinely the product of kind of accidental circumstances, uh, and time. I mean, give me an example: female fashion. I mean, there is some degree of planning by the fashion houses, but you will get these weird trends which just come from nowhere. One that particularly irritates me, okay, is when a trend is a perfectly healthy trend, and then it becomes all-encompassing. So sourdough bread, okay, it's great. I think it's a handy addition to my bread repertoire. I'm glad it exists, okay, but what's happened is that sourdough has just become effectively a phrase that means posh bread, okay? So you go into Gail's now—I'm partly Welsh, partly Scottish, and any Irish listeners will also agree with me—there's soda bread, which is magnificent, right? Fantastic cornbread if you go to the southwestern United States—cornbread, brilliant form. You can't get that stuff anywhere. Very occasionally, M&S sell this actually black treacle soda bread, which is the greatest bread ever made, but it's like—it's in store like on alternate Wednesdays, depending on the lunar cycle. M&S, anybody listening from M&S, [__] pull your finger out and make that a daily staple. Okay, so sometimes these trends—if you look at sourdough as a trend, it's fine. I'm glad it exists; it's a useful addition to my kind of bread choices, okay, um, but there's a bit of me which goes, "Okay, it doesn't deserve to predominate at Gail's to—" You know, it's like the gray squirrel of the bread world. It's one of these things that starts off as a useful little addition to the gene pool and then becomes basically a pest—you know, Japanese knotweed. And a lot of trends—the best way to understand a lot of trends are actually through understanding evolutionary biology. Wow. That you get these kind of runaway effects where certain things just become massively amplified through feedback loops. Women's fashion is—is weird because it has to keep changing effectively—U—but someone once very cynically described women's fashion as innovation without improvement. In other words, everything has to keep changing; it's not as if women's clothes have actually got better—no—okay, they haven't got better at protecting you from the elements or better at being hard-wearing; it's just needless, gratuitous kind of changes. And so, um, the whole fashion question is—is really, really interesting, and and it's—it's also interesting to study evolutionary biology because the pace of these things is actually very variable. Now, there's one interesting finding—often you can't predict them—but there is an interesting finding, which is that the faster a trend explodes, the faster it dies. And they've done a load of research into this; there's a kind of symmetry that if you take fashions in, for example, first names in the United States or the UK—names that suddenly go from nowhere to big in the space of a year—also tend to die off very quickly. Whereas if you looked at the trend for Emma, Emily, you know, Arthur, you know, this—this is in the UK, not what Americans are calling themselves—um, but you know, if you look at those trends for sort of slightly Victorian names, yeah, you'll see that actually, you know, it's been a long period of gradual growth over 15 years, and you can consequently predict that they'll—the fashion will die off more slowly as well. And so there's a kind of interesting idea that, um, uh, you know, I—I imagine there was a year where there were loads of girls called Daenerys or something, okay, um, because Game of Thrones was big, okay, and I can confidently predict that there aren't going to be many Daenerys's in your primary school in in seven or eight years' time. So there are a few things you can know about this, but I mean, acknowledging that some of it is beyond our control, um, that it is a kind of—it's just kind of a version of collective insanity sometimes—is just useful, um, because I mean, one of the most important things if you—if you talk about on entrepreneurialism, yeah, one of the things they basically found that distinguishes really successful businesses over which the founder doesn't really have full control is purely timing.

What do you mean? Explain that.

So there are ideas which effectively—if you had adopted the thing a year too early or a year too late, you would have got nowhere. So there are ideas that just somehow just impinge on our consciousness at a moment, and it—sometimes it—it—it's because the development of other technologies is necessary before your technology becomes—so I mean, just an example: if you'd invented Uber before there was 3G mobile, okay, basically your—the mapping wouldn't have worked or would have been massively frustrating. Okay, so quite often you have to wait for two or three other things to be developed before your idea or—or you have to wait for them to be adopted. So what you're saying—so you—sometimes—sometimes you—people will only do thing X if they're already doing thing Y, and therefore you have to wait for Y to become popular for you to then—I—I'll—I mean, okay, here's another one: go alongside sourdough—bubble tea.

Oh, God. I really didn't like it. I genu—I genuinely don't know whether it's a useful addition to my beverage options or a load of old BS. I mean, I do buy the stuff; I quite like it.

You like it? Yeah, I think—okay, my theory—bubble—my theory is there's a thing called variable reinforcement theory in psychology, which—which is—oh, G—on, I'll go on after digression. Um, oh, we were going to do that. Don't worry. So they were doing this experiment with incentives to pigeons, and effectively the pigeon would peck a switch, and you'd give it three food pellets, okay, and what would happen is the pet pigeons would fairly reliably peck the switch; they'd get the three pellets, and then after they eaten enough pellets, they go, "That's kind of enough," okay, "I think I'll kind of give that a break now," and they go off and do some other pigeon stuff—[__ ] on people or whatever. Okay. Okay. And then while they were doing the experiment, which is supposed to be a simple experiment on sort of Pavlovian incentives and rewards, they ran out of P—they ran low on pellets for some reason—I—it was just an accident. So they—they tweaked the dispenser so rather than dispensing three pellets, it would sometimes dispense one, sometimes three, sometimes two, sometimes zero. Okay, and the—I think it was pige—the pigeons went bonkers. What you effectively created was a pigeon fruit machine, okay, where now they didn't know what to expect when they pecked the switch, and so they just peck at it furiously, a bit like someone at Vegas endlessly feeding coins into a fruit machine. And that was called variable reinforcement theory, which is that if you do something which has a variable effect, it's somehow weirdly more addictive than something that's—that's a kind of constant reward and return. And my—my theory with bubble tea is because you don't quite know what you're going to get—W—right—okay, that actually there's an element of kind of, you know, what you might call a gustatory fruit machine at work there, where you go, "Oh, I wonder how many of those blobs are going to be coming up the straw this time round, or whether I'm going to get the gunky stuff at the bottom," or the—so it's a game within yourself, and that's why you enjoy the—possibly—the very fact that actually you don't quite know what's going to happen actually makes it appealing. Whereas if you—if you think of a completely conventionally blended drink, you know, there's a pretty clear expectation.

It's very interesting because I often ask this question, you know, uh, what are—what are things we'd all like to do if it—there's a wonderful quote from bizarrely Abraham Lincoln, um, where he says—so basically feeling socially awkward about something is an unbelievably strong emotional driver because whenever we're in public, we're always conscious of how we appear. And so there are things we won't do because we don't want to stand out. I mean, you know, cider, I think, as a drink is just as nice as beer, but what you'll see is that beer, which is the social norm, will outsell cider 7 to 1, so on. Okay, Guinness, I think, enjoys a lot of its advantages as the bestselling beer in Britain partly because it's very visible when someone's drinking Guinness, and they also came up with clever little things like splitting the G, exactly. Okay, um, but Guinness—it's—it's absolutely obvious when someone's drinking Guinness. The problem cider had, unless you put ice in it, is that people assume you're drinking lager, so it doesn't have the same social visible norm creation. Now, what are the—what—of the things—so Abraham Lincoln's quote was—it's a bit dated—but it said, "Imagine going to church wearing your wife's bonnet." He's writing to a male audience, and you just got to sit in church, and all you're doing is you're wearing your wife's floral hat, okay? The hat's not uncomfortable; it's probably less uncomfortable than a bloke's traditional top hat, okay, but you would feel—feel terrible the whole time you were there; you would feel absolutely awful unless you could explain you were doing it for a bet or something like that. If you were forced to do something in public that's just fundamentally embarrassing, uh, you'd experience a kind of physical pain, um, and by the way, it may well be a physical pain because strangely, um, if you're nervous before a party—obviously some people have a few drinks before a party—apparently paracetamol, just one paracetamol, works against social anxiety. So there may be some kind of connection between, you know, where we experience physical pain and where we experience social awkwardness.

Get out of here! That can't be—

No, no, no. But we were actually—I'll probably get absolutely slated by the medical authorities for sharing that bit of information, so uh, anyway, so that's our chance to work with Public Health England completely kiboshed. Um, but—but here—this is what we're talking about in the cab, and it's a theory of mine, okay? If you take away social embarrassment, yeah, all—all English men would wear shorts all the time, is my theory.

Okay, no ways?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if it weren't for social sanction, okay, how many people—yeah, yes, yeah. Every—every day you're on holiday, you're among strangers; it's normal to wear shorts. You wear shorts every goddamn day. Now, I think English blokes—I think it's true of Australians; it may be an Anglosphere thing—but we—basically, except for Arctic expeditions—we wear shorts 'cause they're just more comfortable; you get a bit more, you know, ventilation where you need it and so forth, but we just prefer wearing shorts. I think about 60 to 70% of people would be naturists.

No way.

No, no, no, no. Seriously. Okay, let's ask this question: you're living alone in a villa that's overlooked by absolutely nobody; it's pretty warm weather, and you've got a swimming pool. Okay, would you wear swimming trunks?

No, no, of course you wouldn't.

Way. And if you're with someone who is—now obviously if you're with a load of friends, you might want to preserve a bit of modesty, but actually if you're on your own or with a significant other, there's no way you get dressed to go in the pool. And so, you know, you look—you look at all these things, you realize when—when they argue about transgender bathrooms, I have the very perverse argument which is that the very concept of a bathroom and a toilet is an imposition upon men, because if you had a male planet, we just piss anywhere, wouldn't we, like dogs? Okay, right? Okay. The very fact that society demands that we go into a special r—true. But—but I mean, it is just interesting because you realize that—I mean, what are things—okay, I always—I once said that—what was it—that, um, that, for example, um, uh, environmental—a lot of environmentally friendly behaviors are—are actually what I call the opposite of a hot tub, okay, which is everybody pretends to want them, but they don't. Okay. And hot tubs are the opposite because everybody secretly wants a hot tub, but they're too embarrassed to buy one because it looks a bit pervy. Okay, is that fair? I mean, who wouldn't have—if you had the available money, who wouldn't have a thing in their garden where you can basically sit outside in really hot, bubbly water? Okay, I mean, you know—okay, I genuinely—I think there's a huge amount of human economic activity which is effectively constrained simply by how will it look. I had to fight with my wife for ages to get a Japanese toilet, which is the most obvious—

Have you got one?

No, but I'm getting one for the new house. They're brilliant.

Go absolutely—there is no turning back, okay? There is absolutely—you know, once you've done that, basically anything else seems medieval. But my wife was highly resistant—I don't think for any practical reason except that she didn't want other people to think she's English, you see. And so she cares what other people think. The rate advantage to being Welsh is you don't give a [__]. Okay, South Wales is like a superpower; you just don't really care that much. And so my—my wife, I think, didn't want us to be thought of as the people with the strange toilet.

We're going back to that idea then, which I totally agree with you, which is we see that trend as something that—which is hugely popular suddenly and then dying out. Everyone is after that viral content, the viral product, but actually you're—you're saying that's a negative—

No, no, no. I think there's a problem with things that spread in the sense that two very big, strong forces in humans—just—it's kind of, you know, the default mode in human behavior is both—there's habit—what I've done last time—and there's social copying, which is do what everybody else does. And in a globally interconnected world, you might argue there's a bit too much of a winner-takes-all effect in that—it's—it's not that I'm saying that Taylor Swift is [__]—just to be clear about that—I'm saying that maybe she doesn't deserve to be that much more famous than the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth best performers in the world. But because of this kind of herd effect where we're influenced—it's—it's technically called mimetics—where we effectively cannot help admiring things that other people admire.

Got it. So we—in other words, we automatically have this reflexive urge—there was a famous guy called René Girard who—who coined this whole idea of mimetics—that fundamentally we're a copying species. And so things that are fashionable acquire a kind of desirability not because we ourselves necessarily like or value them, but we can't help being impressed by the fact that everybody else does. We—you can go back to—actually, the reason it's slightly problematic is that it does create this winner-takes-all effect, which—whatever the brand leader is, whatever the category leader is, which has the biggest volume of support—that enjoys a kind of disproportionate advantage. It's why I have an Android phone, by the way, as a kind of—as a rebalancing act, you know. I think that the—the thing that's most popular is generally speaking a bit too popular.

Wow. Because you—the first time I ever saw you, Rory, was on stage at something called the TV Festival. It was hosted by Channel 4, ITV, those—CH—I love that. That was fantastic. You were fantastic. It was in the middle of a wood somewhere, wasn't it?

Correct.

And you were on stage, and you gave this talk, and I—and I have um, borrowed something that you said, and I said it to our team the whole time, which is where you talk about never following logic.

No—well, I wouldn't go quite that far, um, but I think you have to be free to suspend logic in order to explore the solution space for problem-solving, which is the number of solutions you'll arrive at if you insist that every stage of your journey is kind of reductionist and logical is a very limited part of the solution space, and you have to allow yourself freedom to speculate and to experiment, because—and well, first of all, an amazing number of uh, really important scientific discoveries happened with a chance observation.

Mhm.

And the creative—back there—wasn't coming up with the idea; it was spotting the significance. And the way I—the way I describe this—the analogy I always used is—I think that the police—if you think about it—the first question the police would probably ask if they find a dead body is they'd go door to door and they say, "Did anybody notice anything unusual?" Okay, totally open-ended question, okay? It has no particular end in mind, but simply the fact that if something weird happened, and we also have this weird finding, which is a dead body, the two weird things might be connected. And then someone might say, "I noticed this white van, for some reason, serial killers seem to be disproportionately fond of white vans, but I noticed this white van, and it drove past the house three times last night." Okay, now that's got no evidential value; it has no value in a court of law, but it does suggest, okay, maybe we need to spend a bit more time investigating white vans and have a look at the CCTV and see who it might be and whether they had a connection with a victim. And that's what I call an—an investigative, open-minded phase. And then eventually you've got to appear in a court of law, and you've got to prove the person driving the white—white van actually did it. And driving in a weird way is not enough, okay? That's not evidential; it's merely—but what we've—I think we've tried—we've tried to create in business and in government, and I blame economics for this because it pretends that things are physics when they're not, okay, uh, is we've created this world where unless it's evidential, you can't use it because it's not science. And I think it's a mistake because if you look at science—eventually science has to be scientific; you've got to—you've got to be proved to a reasonable level of confidence that what you're claiming is right—but the way you get there to the right answer is actually much more open-ended, much more speculative, and actually involves a lot more creativity.

That makes total sense. And the reason I ask you that, right, is because we're in this world where—which you've said—is that we—we can't bear but copy other people. But if we're in a world where we're copying other people all the time, we're never actually making anything new or discovering new places; we're actually ending up in the same place as everybody else—a place where we shouldn't be.

Well, this is an—this is a very interesting thing because I used to think you—working in advertising—advertising works really well if you're not asking people to do—

Very much in other words, if you want people to choose Corn Flakes rather than Grape-Nuts, okay, um, uh, then they're moving their hand three feet to the right on a supermarket shelf; not a very big behavioral ask. Advertising is going to work pretty well, and sure enough, it does.

And then I kind of took from that wrongly, I think, the idea that if you've got a really, really great product, you don't need to advertise it very much because its virtues, um, effectively justify itself. In other words, if your product's good enough, you don't need marketing. I used to sort of think that. Then I realized that if you've got a really, really revolutionary product, typically because it's revolutionary, it'll require a lot of behavioral change, and behavioral change requires a lot of marketing.

So why I suddenly discovered this is because if you look at some of the best ideas anybody's ever, ever had, like smallpox vaccination—yeah, okay—I always assumed naively, because I hadn't read the history, that basically Jenner notices that dairy maids don't get smallpox, surmises from his observation, okay, maybe that's because they all catch cowpox first, and cowpox immunizes them against smallpox. Hey, I'll take the gardener's son, and he did this totally unethical, uh, I'll infect my seven-year-old gardener's son with cowpox, and then I'll try infecting him with smallpox to see what happens, which he probably did, and the guy didn't get smallpox. Now, at that point, I thought you go, wow, this is a brilliant finding. Okay, um, okay, whoop-de-doo, have a nice night, goodnight Jenner, and um, uh, we're off to the races; let's get everybody vaccinated. It was actually 50 or 60 years fighting all manner of kinds of opposition from religious groups, from, uh, vested interests that made money out of variolation, which was the prior form. And so you suddenly realize that actually, I mean, mobile phones—you're too young, okay—you don't remember a world where you had to be persuaded to have a mobile phone, do you? No. I, I had to persuade my parents to give me a mobile phone. Oh, yes, yes. Yeah, that's another form of marketing. But actually, there was a whole period where the majority of adults would say, I don't want a mobile phone; why would I want to make phone calls in the street? What? Yeah, no, no, seriously, okay.

So I keep reminding people this: so in 1989, we had about five work phones at Ogleby that were shared. Okay, they were big Motorola brick phones, and they were kept in a box or charging, and if you had to go somewhere, you'd sign one out—not making this up—okay, you'd tell your colleagues what your mobile phone number was for the day and say, if you need me urgently, call me on this number. MH. And so I've picked up one of these phones, I'm going off somewhere, and I'm trying to, uh, I think, go to Tottenham Court Road Tube Station, and someone from the office—bloody B—calls me. And so the phone rings, I'm walking down Oxford Street, so I haven't got much choice but to answer the bloody phone while I'm speaking on a mobile phone in Oxford Street, 1989. Two people shout abuse at me from passing cars—literally, "wanker"—okay. Someone actually pulls down the window of a black cab and goes, "wanker." Now, okay, obviously you could try that now, okay, driving down Oxford Street and shouting "wanker" at everybody using a mobile phone, but you'd have your work cut out. Okay, but back then it was a socially objectionable thing because it wasn't the practice of most people because it hadn't been effectively normalized as a behavior. Using a mobile phone in public in 1989 was kind of a—I was going to say a subversive act—was it? It was seen as something people—but first of all, they were sort of obnoxiously, y'know, they were enormous, so that you know, you, you couldn't discreetly make a phone call, 'cause you were seen as a show-off. Yeah. No, I had—interestingly—I wouldn't have made a call in public back then because it would have been embarrassing. I didn't have any choice 'cause someone rang me.

But what I suddenly realized is that really, really big ideas—we love to think that they're adopted—but because a big idea requires you, one, to put your head above the parapet and do something that most people don't do, and people find that very uncomfortable, okay, and secondly, it requires you to break your habit. Okay, in other words, don't do something you used to do, do this other thing instead; that encounters an extraordinary—okay, it's impossible to—four people around us here who are like air fryer rejectors—is there anybody? Yeah, yeah. Okay, three of them. Three of them won't have the things. How do you know that? Well, I'm just guessing; it's always the case, okay, that, that, that there's no reason to reject an air fryer, but they, for some reason, there's a percentage of the population, and they just make them angry. Okay, just, just quickly, but explain that, just really quickly. Why does it make them angry? Because, because it's going against habit. I well, it, it's, I mean, in a sense, you get people who go, oh, it's just, it's just a very small convection oven, which is not true, you know; it's a ridiculous understatement of the benefits of air fryer ownership. But, but it always fascinated—so there was hostility to the vaccination, there's hostility to the mobile phone, there's this weird hostility to the electric car. Okay, right, um, uh, where I mean, okay, so you invent the electric car, and the, the first thing the Top Gear team do is they drive an electric car until it runs out of electricity. Right, you kind of go, how is that a useful experiment? I mean, you could have done that with every petrol car you've ever driven. D, okay, we're going to take this new Ferrari, you know, LaFerrari, and we're going just try to drive it up the M1 until it runs out of petrol. Well, yeah, you could do that, but people think that's ridiculous. But for some reason, an electric car—there's this innate kind of hostility to the driver of the electric car or to the early adopters. And so the early adopters of, of anything, you get, ah, effectively have to—you have to be a little bit thick-skinned. And so there is this fundamental thing that innovation requires an awful lot of marketing, um, precisely because if you want someone to do something that's different to what they did before, and you also, in the early stages, require to do something that most people don't do, the social burden, the kind of pain and, and discomfort we experience through doing that is just disproportionately high. Wow.

Now I'll give you an example. Anybody here got one of those taps that produces boiling water? Have you got a Quooker tap? Yeah. We cook on one upstairs. Yeah, you got—yeah. Now the interesting thing about that is that it's very difficult to buy the first one, isn't it? Okay, because you go, Jesus, I'm paying like 800 quid for a kettle. Here—once you've had one, you never go back. Okay, so the one thing technology does have—successful technology has—on its side is that it's like that old Vauxhall strapline, "Once driven, forever smitten." That once you've had a mobile phone, you can't go back because you discover uses for it; you've created a new normal. Eventually, then social norms reach a point where not having a mobile phone makes you a bit of a weirdo, okay, and the whole dynamic changes. And so you know, a lot of these things—effectively, the fact that there's this mimetic quality to the brain where we essentially take our opinions and value judgments from each other—that would affect massively. There are loads and loads of experiments in music where you show people 10 music tracks and you ask them to rate them, and they'll rate them fairly independently and differently. And then you show the music tracks and they're star-rated, okay, so it shows how many people have listened to this track; those people will automatically like the tracks more than—more people have liked—they'll rate them more highly because everyone else has—they, because everybody else does. Yeah. So that explains an awful lot of these kind of trends, which is—their kind of the best analogy is contagion. You know, the best mathematics to, to model many of these trends is to look at, you know, effectively, uh, to look at, you know, disease transmission, because it's—now we can use this to our benefit. There are great people like Nicholas Christakis and, um, others who've made the point, for example, that once one person on a street has solar panels in their house, everyone else—it's much more likely. Yeah. If you get, um, if you have someone stand at the entrance to a pub visibly drinking Guinness, the likelihood that people coming into the pub order Guinness goes up by double-digit percentages. That's why they put—Bloody Marys go on—well, when you go into a pub, right, what landlords do or people behind the bar do, they'll put—Bloody Mary—a jug of Bloody Mary at the till. So what you do, you go, I'm going to have a Bloody Mary. And I reckon—suggestible drink, the Bloody Mary, isn't it? It's highly suggestible, which is—any mention of a Bloody Mary will cause people to drink Bloody Mary. It does do that. So if you say, I want to have a Bloody Mary, and you see it, they go, I'm going to have a Bloody Mary. And the markup on Bloody Marys are probably quite high, so they're trying to sell it at the front of a pub.

Well, one of my funny ones is that, having written my books, you get these people who, you know, come up to you on the street and go, I made 4,000 quid because of you, and they don't explain how—annoyingly—but I remember someone—someone at a cafe—they could never sell watermelon juice, and they read "Alchemy," and they added a few herbs, they put the price up, and they called it "Water Melonade," which is a sort of anagram—not quite—of lemonade, okay, and they suddenly sell tons of the stuff. Effectively, it's the same thing, but presented differently, has a completely different appeal. And so everything, you know, that's another thing about human perception. I mentioned the fact of memetics, I mentioned the fact of habit; we're all also—we perceive the world contextually, you know, it partly—we judge things according to expectation. Now a lot of people say it's a mystery how Ryanair has survived so long because, you know, everybody affects to despise it, but I always make the point that the genius of Ryanair is that it's always—the real experience is always slightly better than you expect. Okay, the night before you fly on Ryanair, you're in a state of absolute terror because you're convinced that you'll be fined 70 because your, uh, you know, your clam luggage is 1 mm too large, and then you, you, you actually go there and it's kind of all right, and then you get off the plane at the other end, you go, well, I wasn't actually pistol-whipped by Serbian mercenaries, so I'll chalk that up as a win, you know. And also what's—what's so great, Rory, about, about Ryanair—I don't know if you've seen their sort of social media posts, which is so good on Twitter, where people sort of slate them; their replies are, "We'll see you again." Absolutely true, which they will. Yeah, know, absolutely true. It's so, it's so clever. If someone—someone's—I know there are going to be business owners and people who are starting brands right now, right, who are just trying to—they're writing down everything you're saying and trying to capture everything—how important is it for a brand to be able to say no? That's an interesting question, um, uh, in what sense—to customers—to—I mean, I'm intrigued, but I, you know, my theory about opening a chain of cafes called "Bacon Sandwich"—do you know—which is—I've looked at successful restaurant chains and various food places, and one of them is—if you only do one thing, people imagine you're going to be really good at it. Okay, if you only do one thing, people go, well, if they survive and they only do that one thing, that one thing must be good because they're entirely focused on it. It's why you wouldn't go to a place which was a tool shop and oyster bar. Okay, right. Come on, come on, come on. You got to focus, mate, you know, right, okay. Tool hire and oyster bar—although there is a mystery in capitalism, which is why the same places that do heel repair also do key cutting, uh, and I thought it was mechanical that you needed a thing that went round and round, but apparently it isn't. Uh, if you go on the TSO website somewhere, there is a place where they explain why it was that heel, heel repair and shoe repair places—effectively, when Portuguese shoes came in, which were not actually, uh, they were actually glued rather than, um, sewn—the sole was glued rather than sewn, and also shoes became cheaper, so people just chucked them away—affect—cobblers found themselves short of revenue, so they moved into key cutting as a diversification strategy. That is—because I know where you're headed with this—this is so interesting because it's what Levi's did. So Levi's made denim jeans, and so you knew what you were going for. So when it goes back to the idea of the Paris saying no, you just sort of focusing on one thing and doing one thing well is a really valuable thing to do. People fundamentally—people respect, I think, um, uh, what you might call specialization. Okay. But the interesting thing is my theory about "Bacon Sandwich" is that you have a couple of choices of bacon, you have a couple of choices of bread, okay, you do it incredibly well, you do a whole lot of research into what the perfect bacon sandwich is, you only serve two drinks, which is builder's tea and champagne, okay, those are the only two acceptable drinks to have at, at a bacon sandwich restaurant, and there's a rule which is totally perverse, which is you'll provide HP Sauce but no ketchup; you just refuse to offer ketchup. Now this defies all economic logic, except if you're really passionate about what you do, you have rules.

Okay, this is an extraordinary story, which is a friend of mine—quite a wealthy copywriter—went to the Bristol dealership in South Kensington, which is a very, very eccentric car specialist car company, and he said, I'm, I'm quite interested in buying one of your cars, actually, and, um, they said, oh, I'm very pleased to hear that, sir, um, do you have a garage? He said, no, actually, I don't. He said, I'm thinking of building one, but I haven't really got around to it. And he—well, I'm terribly sorry, if you don't have a garage, we wouldn't really be prepared to sell you a car, but at the point where you've built a garage, perhaps you'd like to come back. Okay, that is—now it's actually weirdly quite clever salesmanship as practiced. Okay, the most genius version of this idea is Bernie Madoff, okay, because Bernie Madoff, who had this effectively bogus investment fund, got billionaires coming to him saying, I really want to invest. Now, if you're a billionaire, there's one thing that drives you absolutely insane, which is someone saying no. Okay, so Bernie would go, I'd love to have you on, but I'm afraid, you know, I, I, I just can't take you on at the moment, I'm just can't take your money. And this would drive—so as a result, all their normal skepticism about whether Bernie was genuinely legit was completely drowned out by their desperation to be accepted by Bernie. Wow. And that's so interesting; that's why members' clubs, why golf clubs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, if, if you advertised, okay, if you advertised in Metro for the membership of the club at the Ivy, okay, it's game over. You have to pretend that membership is scarce. There are, of course, nightclubs which have the bogus queue, aren't there? They create a queue outside, and then my daughter got scammed by that somewhere where you queue for, bloody ages, you go in, and the place is totally empty. That is—so that's again social proof or, or memetics being used as a kind of—but my idea of brown sauce—no, no ketchup—I've stolen that from a, a tiny brand called Thrashers Fries, of Thrashers Fries in Ocean City, Maryland, I think it is. They've got three outlets, I think they close in the offseason; they only sell chips, or what your American listeners would call fries. Now this is the weirdest thing of all, um, uh, they're so good at making chips, and they're so cultish that when Five Guys launched, they went to these guys to ask them how to make chips because they're just absolutely extraordinary. Now the weirdest thing about this Thrashers Fries thing in, um, Ocean City is—now bear in mind this is America, right, not in, in the UK, this would be a bit perverse, but it wouldn't be that weird—this is America—you can't have mayonnaise and you can't have ketchup; you could only have salt and vinegar. Now all the Brits are going, yeah, absolutely spot on, okay, that's correct. Now how perverse that is for an American retailer of fries is almost unbelievable. There's another one which is, um, in Chicago, if you're a Chicagoan, okay, you will not put ketchup on a hot dog, and it's considered—basically, in Chicago—it's—now this is traced back to a, a hot dog seller outside—I think it still exists, the business—and it's called something like somebody's hot—it's got a Polish name, I think—but they had a stand outside, I think, the White Sox stadium, and the, the guy who ran the hot dog stand made very, very good hot dogs, but he refused to offer ketchup because he said it was just used to disguise poor-quality meat, and the quality of their hot dogs was such that you wouldn't need ketchup. And there's actually—if you look on Google Images for pictures of this place—there's this, there's this massive sign outside which says—has a big picture of ketchup—and it says, "Don't even ask." And this is a cultural thing spread to the whole of Chicago, where even now anybody who considers themselves either by adoption or birth an authentic Chicagoan won't do it; it's just, it's just too unpleasant to do; they just can't bring themselves to do it. That's—my theory is you just have this perverse kind of rule, Rory. I, um, I haven't told you about "Flat White or [ __ ] Off," my other business idea, which is that the Starbucks experience is great if you've got 45 minutes to spare, but at a rail station it's completely wrong, okay, because you want to get a coffee, pay, and get the hell out of there so you can catch your train. Yeah, right. So my idea is you only serve flat whites, you make them in advance, people pick one up, they tap with their card, they pay, they go off, and if you ask for anything other than the flat white, the answer is in the name. Okay. That is such a good idea because you don't want—you've got a train to catch—and then the person in front of you demands some ice-based drink that requires whipped cream and a whole load of—yeah, that's not—that's wrong. Airports, railways—"Flat White or [ __ ] Off"—it's fantastic. That's the answer.

So quick answer, if you were going to launch a product now, okay, and someone's listening now, they're saying, okay, what do we do? What, what would you say is the most important element? And the most important element when you're launching a product now, what do you need to look at? Um, what, what I think you need to do is—all I'm asking for now—a lot of people—I spend a lot of time attacking economics and attacking finance and procurement and all these kind of bone-reduction parts of the business world, and my argument is this: look, the point about the laws of conventional economics and the laws of physics is you can't rewrite them, okay, you're stuck with them. So the opportunity to be really creative if you're confined in your thinking to economic logic or the logic of physics, in the case of transportation, say, okay, your opportunity to break those laws—annoyingly, they've been written in stone, and you can't really do anything about gravity, you know, you're stuck with—okay, the laws of psychology are gloriously mutable, gameable, okay, and so if you look for a psychological edge or psychological arbitrage, you're much more likely to have a breakthrough than you are if you're, if you're just looking at, you know, what do we provide? How much does it cost? It's much, much easier to actually be creative and distinctive and therefore successful through psychological gameplay and marketing than it is through trying to be cheaper or trying to be faster. Wow. Okay, that's it basically. So have a great idea for electricity company, Greg, but make sure you've got a pink octopus, daddy. So can I ask you then a question? What is a product or a product that you've seen that's been launched that was a great product that you thought was good, but the marketing didn't work for it? That's really interesting because actually I've asked this question a lot, which is, um, one of them actually where I think they should have persevered was Google Glass. I think they had a brilliant—I fundamentally believe in augmented reality. I think that having a thing where I can walk around, um, I mean, partly having a, you know, and occasionally it says, you know, things like, "Turn right, your next meeting starts in 10 minutes, it's going to rain," okay, that basically effectively takes my—takes my environment and adds subtitles to it, um, without me needing to look at a watch or retrieve my phone or do anything like that. I fundamentally thought it was a good and necessary idea, and they messed up a couple of details. Part of it was because there was some sort of weird affair going on within Google between somebody and the person who was launching the product, um, but I won't go into that because, you know, family show and all that, um, uh, but also they, they, they only gave Google Glass to developers initially. You could buy them—it was about £1,200—and it was only on sale to the developer community who, with the best will in the world, probably aren't supermodels generally, okay, and so the user imagery was problematic. And that's, by the way, going to be a problem with the Apple Vision Pro because the only people who will use an Apple Vision Pro in public are going to be weirdos, and so the user imagery is going to be damaged by that very weird sector of the population who are happy walking around wearing a pair of steampunk goggles on their head. Okay, but, but I, I always thought—I always thought Google Glass was an interesting case. Well, I'll give, give you the best example of a brilliant idea which had terrible marketing—CU—I think that was a brilliant question, which is, okay, I always say, you know, of Octopus Energy, which I think is a brilliant and fascinating and innovative company. I always go, yeah, yeah, it's absolutely great what they're doing; it's absolutely mold-breaking; we as Britain should be proud of it. But if they decided to call themselves "Greeneot Tech.com," and they hadn't had a pink cuddly octopus as a logo, they'd still have 20,000 customers. Okay, marketing really matters, and people with an engineering mindset hate this because it means that contrary to the kind of deterministic world in which you want to live, you're actually living in the middle of insanity. Okay, it's so true, but it's, it's basically true. Okay. And so, okay, the worst-marketed good idea of all time, um, uh, nuclear power. Okay, right. If you think about it, you have this extraordinary green, efficient form of energy, and they had to name it after a kind of bomb. Okay, I mean, come on, guys, you know, if you just consulted the worst copywriter on the planet and said, do you think we should call this nuclear energy? He would have got—I'd probably—no, you know, can we, can we call it "Kitten Power" or something? Because, because then you'd be in with a chance. So actually, it's a really, really interesting question because I think a lot of ideas get killed because they go, we tried this idea, nobody bought it; therefore, we gave up. Yes. And actually what you need to say is maybe the reason you failed isn't because there was anything wrong with the product; it's two possibilities, okay: the timing was wrong, or you didn't market it right. And prime example which you talk about is San Pellegrino. Um, do you mean the foil on the top of the cans? I'm campaigning for them to bring it back because I think it was one of those things where the foil was notionally unnecessary. Can you explain this? My argument was that there will—there are lots of things that are extraordinarily potent in marketing which finance people hate because they're unnecessary. Okay, strictly speaking, they're unnecessary, but the reason we love them is because they're unnecessary. Mhm. Do you ever do a Deliveroo order? Yeah, yeah. You get that bizarre text that says your delivery will be made by Brian in a onion van, you know, EH21. Okay, because it's idiosyncratic and weird, we notice it. And if you talk to any other Deliveroo shopper, they're always familiar with those texts, and it's just one of those things; it's like a quirk of personality. Okay. Now what's really interesting is that the things you do that you don't have to do—that's what politeness consists of, okay? Politeness is not doing the bare minimum; it's doing something more than you are required to do, and we understand that as humans, which is why we wrap presents; we just don't just go, you—here's a can of beer—we actually wrap it up first in something decorative, okay? We go the extra mile. Now what happens with a business is the finance people go, our customers aren't buying wrapping paper, they're buying beer; let's get rid of all the extraneous stuff, and in the process you become more alike your competitors and you lose personality. So if you're a cafe, find something weird to do that nobody else does. Okay. Now, in particular, the example I always cite here is the DoubleTree Hotel chain, where if you check into a DoubleTree Hotel, they have an oven underneath the check-in desk which has warm cookies; they make cookies to their own recipe, and when you check in, they say, and welcome you to our, the DoubleTree, here are our warm DoubleTree cookies. Now the finance people hate that because they go, no one in our market research has said, um, they want warm cookies when they check in; why are we giving someone something that they didn't ask for? It's a cost; therefore, we need to cut it. But as far as human perception goes, it's incredibly impactful precisely because it was unasked for, unexpected, and it's surplus to requirements, and it adds a little bit—so we're going back—so the foil on the top, the foil on the top of the, of the San Pellegrino thing—someone described it beautifully, one of my colleagues, as an "access all areas pass" for the drink. In other words, you could have a wedding and have cans of San Pellegrino because it had the foil dressing, okay, whereas it would be a bit weird to have Tango, okay, right, at your wedding. It basically said, this is a posh drink. Because now it also makes—by the way, it's very difficult—great book on the subject, by the way—Will Garret's book, "Unreasonable Hospitality"—so good, isn't it? A great book. Yeah, I started reading it—my business told me to read it—it's amazing. And he—I'm actually very—I'm very—I was very flattered to be quoted in it, but because I kind of venerate the guy, and he, I think, gets to the absolute nub of this—that it's the unexpected. And this could go back to brain science, which is that most of what we perceive is a prediction; it's internally generated as a prediction, and we use our eyes, ears, noses, effectively for prediction error correction. In other words, we're only really using our optic nerve for things that we weren't expecting. So it's the unexpected thing that garners disproportionate attention. Okay, it's a thing we really, really notice, and it—by the way—it makes market research—it's very difficult, I think, as Will Garret would acknowledge—the kind of ideas you need aren't ideas that you can come up with by talking to customers. It's very important for a business just to be distinctive, just to have that little distinctive quality, like the pink octopus. Okay, animals—a bit of a gift in branding if you use an animal—because we've evolved to pay attention to—notice kind of animal things. That's what you said about Candy Kittens; you said, well—

Done. Well done. Well done, candy kittens. We're talking about product, and we're talking about market, like marketing a product, a famous product, which is because everyone says that, you know, with Candy Canin, it was all about making a great product, right? That's what we had to do. We had to make a great product, and then we had a great name; had a great name. And you had your Fame Honest.com. So immediately, you had a brand spokesman who is well known. So you did start with the benefit. Fame is actually extraordinarily valuable because it means that customers find you rather than you having to find them. It fundamentally reverses the polarity of business growth, which is so interesting. And, and there's a question about whether content creators are going to be the next business owners, right? But then, but then you look at something like this, right, which have a hell of a lot of energy drinks. If that's the case, okay. But going on energy drinks, right, with this is a prime example of a product which is terrible, but there is still a rise in the sales and energy drinks. And I know you've spoken about Red Bull before.

Yeah, the product is terrible; the marketing is genius.

So product is not terrible.

Okay, well, it tastes terrible. Yeah, objectively, if you ask if you ask people what it tastes like as a drink, they will say it tastes horrible. Okay, because if you're expecting Fanta, it's like, "Ryan, a…" Okay, if you're expecting Fanta and you get Red Bull, you go, "Yu," right? Fanta is a drink I think which is intrinsically enjoyable, okay. Right. Uh, Red Bull requires contextualization, and the, the contextualization is hugely important, by the way, in drinks, for some reason. In that one of the things that most fascinates me is that Pernod, which is quite an enjoyable drink in France, is absolutely repellent if you try and drink it in the UK, and I can't get my head around this at all. Okay. But, by the way, there are funny rosé wine tastes better, better if you drink it by the sea. Yes. Um, what are the other ones? There are some extraordinary findings about there was a somebody who, uh, um, was in the Caribbean drinking a banana lure, and they bought the import rights to the UK, ship back a case of this banana lure back to the UK, invited all their friends around and said, "I bought the rights to import this drink," and they all poured themselves glasses back in some basement in Fulham, and they were basically wretching all over the place because what tastes great on a Caribbean beach doesn't taste great in Fulham on a rainy October day.

Pims in the summer, delicious. Yeah, they have produced winter Pims; they have actually tried to make it a year-round thing. Doesn't work. No, it, it, it is fundamentally kind of, uh, it's contextually dependent. And Red Bull, if you think of it as a medicinal thing, the weird taste is actually a benefit, not a cost. But, but I truly, but isn't it right that that Red Bull were quite smart with that? They made it taste medicinal, so therefore you, as the consumer, would know that it is doing psychological things to your mind, to therefore you go, "I'm drinking this psychoactive 'cause it's weird," and it comes in a small can; it's really expensive, and 16-year-olds, or you need ID to—I still need ID to buy Red Bull. You believe a f***ing fat 59-year-old man. Come on, God's sake. You know, you know, I, I must be, you know, do you really think somebody who's 15 is gonna have this much plastic surgery just so they can buy a can of Red Bull? For God's sake. Desos. Um, but, but no, it's fascinating because Catagen, which you may not know of, but it was famously a tonic wine. Now, tonic wine was quite common, I think, because people who didn't drink, um, well, sometimes I think it was people who didn't, who pretended to be teetotal but then drank tonic wine as a way of getting alcohol by claiming that it was medicinal. But the last ingredient in the production of Catagen tonic wine, which was a very sweet wine and was therefore probably a bit like Port, was a weird chemical that didn't taste very nice because they realized if you didn't have that weird taste, people wouldn't, wouldn't believe it had medicinal effects. You can't make, you know, if Neurofen MTLs, I don't really trust them because they're a bit too tasty to be effective. You know what I mean? Wow. Okay. Whereas real Neurofen, when the bloody capsule bursts in your mouth, that must be doing a job because it's f***ing disgusting, right? Okay. And similarly, by the way, Diet Coke had to be made slightly more bitter than regular Coke so people would believe it was a diet drink. In other words, you had to have that little sacrifice of sweetness for people just to be convinced that it was actually a low-calorie drink. Wow. Rory, I've enjoyed—I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this—and Jama just gave a heart sign from behind; she loved it so much. Um, got these eight questions, and I'm, I'm, we, we can do rapid fire if you want. Do you want to do rapid fire?

Rapid? You sure?

As rapid as I can be. Okay, let's see. To be honest, it's more like small arms fire with me than machine gun fire, but we'll do our best. Yeah. Right. Just to caveat, I've absolutely loved this, so I, I can't tell anyway. Okay, first question: What's a saying or phrase that always makes you smile or cheers you up?

Play No Spicy, because it means I'm in an Indian restaurant.

Next: Best compliment anyone's ever given you?

Oh, uh, yeah, um, not the best, absolutely, but the best comparatively is, "Andy Circus has really let himself go," which appears underneath a lot of my YouTube appearances now. The reason that pleases me so much is it's a massive improvement on, "Miriam Margolyes has really let herself go," so comparatively, I consider that a massive bonus. Um, I, I, I'm sure, I'm sure we had—Andy Circus is now actually, uh, probably, probably swinging from a light fitting somewhere if he's listening to this, but nonetheless, that does cheer me up massively.

Yeah. When was the last time you cried?

Ah, interesting digression here. Um, weirdly, actually, two things: We're much more likely to cry on planes when watching a film, and it's a weird physiological effect which someone has finally explained, and I can't remember whether it's to do with oxygenation levels or whatever, but I've cried on planes watching utterly s*** films. Okay. But the other last time I cried—I'm actually weirdly quite patriotic—is, is rewatching various scenes from Dunkirk. Yes, when they fly over, and I, when they, when they fly over—my brother-in-law stood up and saluted the TV. Absolutely glorious; he was so emotional. R—you know what's interesting about your answer there is that we've had 43 people on the show, and every single person says, "I cry on planes," and I don't know why. And I've done it again, and you've done it again. There is an explanation; you can Google it. Only recently did they find out why it is, but I've, I've watched some pretty crap films on—I still—oh, this is so—you know—"Oh my God, this Peppa Pig thing," the p****s is just unbearable.

You know what scares you most about yourself?

Um, that I've only got two modes: being very, very busy or being completely lazy. Okay, so I don't know how I can face retirement because I'll either basically just sit around in my pants, okay, watching YouTube videos about traction engines or I'll be insanely busy. I don't know how to do the middle way.

Yeah. What's something you like, can't let go of?

Uh, um, uh, annoying thing, uh, uh, if I have a tech problem, my degree of tenacity in trying to solve it is ridiculous. It's a bit like the old joke that men never asked—in the days before satnav, there was a joke that men will never ask for directions. I have to explain it to all you young people, by the way, which is before there was satnav, you had to use things like Maps or you had to talk to passers-by and ask where something was, and the joke was that men will never do—I'll never ask for help with tech. I become absurdly determined, you know, if there's some weird problem attaching something to your television and it's playing up, I'll just reach a level of determination where 4:00 in the morning I'm still there trying to fix the thing.

What's your guilty pleasure?

There aren't any. Unguilty pleasures are there, really? Yeah, I mean, um, guilty pleasure—this is the first time Rory Sutherland doesn't have an answer. Well, I could talk about Frozen paraa… Um, there we go; there we are. The fantastic Frozen paraa. The greatest food innovation: sourdough. You are dead to me; your time has come. Yeah.

What turns you off?

I once ditched a girl; she wore training shoes with a skirt. Now, I can't publish that; that's terrible 'cause she might listen, but it was genuinely—there are certain things I, I find it really, really—I had a, I had a female colleague, I won't name—she's a brilliant, brilliant client of ours now, but she had a list of no-nos when dating men, like wearing a hat. Okay, I think it's very interesting to ask what are the most—just as you could ask what are the most sexy things, you can do things that are a massive turnoff. I remember talking to the comedian Sarah Pascoe about fashions that women love that men really, really hate. Okay. Okay, and those high-waisted Andy Pandy trousers, do you remember those?

Yeah.

Yeah, they were massive fashion with women; there wasn't a single guy who found them anything other than repellent, you know. Okay. Yeah. Well, next question is: What turns you on?

Curiosity in people, and actually, I love people who are not non-neurotypical, um, you know, uh, that actually, uh, weirdly, you know, it's often, it's often said that, you know, for example, people who are slightly Asic, uh, com—I find them conversationally absolutely brilliant because they're prepared to go absolutely deep into something.

What do you like most about yourself?

Oh, um, what I'm most pleased—I don't think it's necessarily about myself, but I'd have managed to find employment in marketing and advertising, which, for all its faults, has pretty much allowed me to remain me, in that brilliant—the fact that you can basically remain fairly true to yourself, with all the faults and f**kups, rather than having to bury it is one of the gifts of working where I, where I do.

Bonus: Favorite swear word?

Uh, there's a Bristolian one which I don't use, which is literally f***ing, okay, which, which I've, I've—I'm not, I'm only, I'm only like an eighth Bristolian, so I don't feel I qualify to use it, but it does strike me as a, as an absolutely ridiculous extension of—in other words, if f*** has a, has a, has a present, past, or whatever it is, we need to do the same, even though it's a goddamn noun. Okay, and I have to go—I kind of admire the person who came up with that one.

That's a great one.

Yeah. Rory Sutherland, thank you so much for coming on.

Great. That's a pleasure. Thank you very much indeed. Lot of pleasure.