Transcription
[Music] Aori Sutherland, welcome to San Antonio. Welcome to the Geekdom Event Center and welcome to Big City, Small Town. Fantastic. What a pleasure. Thank you very much. I've absolutely loved it here. And I've already been sent back to London with a plea to get British Airways to operate direct flights to San Antonio. Oh, we'll take it. So, okay. So, so, so I I I can't I cannot promise anything, but I'll do what I can. Well, I thought that when you talked, people listen. So, is that going to happen? We'd love to have it. I'll try. We'd all come visit you more often if we could go non-stop.
Let me ask my first question. What the heck are you doing in San Antonio? And you know, let let me preface that by saying it's weird. There's a small town right outside of uh San Antonio called Southerntherland Springs. I've been there. I was there yesterday. Same name spelling as you. Yeah. I I can't claim any direct kind of disscent or relationship because I did actually have a look at them because one of them uh one of the family died at the Alamo chap called William Driest Southerntherland. Um, and I just noticed this so I'd always been intrigued in coming here anyway. I basically will come to Texas at the drop of a hat because I love it here. Um, and I I I once wrote in the spectator actually that what I liked about Texas was that I I my mother's side of the family, not the Scottish side, were Welsh sheep farmers. And I said that everybody in Texas reminds me of what my mother's family would have been if they'd had oil rather than sheep effectively, which which which does actually, you know, there still is this kind of agricultural, you know, vibe to the place. and it's incredibly friendly, incredibly collaborative, um really really charming. And so every time I've been to Texas, I've always loved it.
So um the Leapers reached out actually, I think it's fair to say. Where are the There we are in the front row. And um they they said possibly accurately that I had a kind of fan base in San Antonio and I should come and visit. And I'm now engaged in making a kind of documentary um uh about I suppose my approach to problem solving and just my approach to uh uh yeah I suppose my approach to creativity um which partly involves a whole series of filming here in and around uh San Antonio and indeed Southerntherland Springs.
Well, you're you know you're kind of an international brand yourself now, a oneman walking brand. Are we going to uh I don't know see season one of Rory Sutherland on Netflix? Is that will we all be binge watching? Uh well, we don't know who the streaming platform is going to be. Um, uh yet, do we? Um but you know, I was joking. He's not. No, no, no, no, no, no. There was the great Ricky Jves joke, wasn't there, about when it I think it was at the Golden Globes where he said, you know, you're you're all preaching, you know, you're Hollywood woke, but let's be honest, you know, if ISIS launched a streaming service, you'd call your agents. You know, I always remember that as one of the great kind of barbs. But um uh I mean, funny enough, I've I've my original love affair with the American Southwest was uh almost by accident. My wife and I ended up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Actually, the whole of New Mexico was how we discovered it first and we absolutely fell in love with New Mexico. And from there, I've just expanded uh the whole love affair with the whole of the American Southwest.
Really? Well, you uh you know, you can be an honorary San Antonio. We'd love to have you back and you could actually go to work on a few of our problems in this town and we love to listen. I think I have one tomorrow, don't I? There's a brief on garbage collection and uh illegal dumping. So, that's that's my first challenge, but it's very it's partly the thing as a also as a Brit, which is I never really see the point of places like San Francisco, Boston, and New York because they're kind of like trying to be European cities. Okay. What I like is the American cities that are entirely their own thing. So you often get that. I mean, Brits like LA. I mean, you could argue that you could argue that LA is a fantastic city or that it's terrible, but what it certainly is is completely different to what we're used to at home. But there's also the fantastic thing uh which you know partly why I fell in love with the Southwest is if you grow up in a country where everything has things growing on it and you wake up somewhere and you open your hotel room curtains and there's just a cactus. Okay. Okay. Now, I know for you it's completely mundane and boring, okay? But for us, it's really magical.
Rory, I was going to bring up some of the city's stronger points before getting into our challenges and problems, go, but you've gone right into garbage and litter and uh I know you were impressed with the don't mess with Texas campaign and it and uh you pointed out that maybe San Antonio could use a version of that. I don't disagree. Um, there's a colleague of mine in London who's actually an anthropologist. He's American, but he's made a study of the whole campaign and it's just a remarkable case of taking effectively by uh very very cunning use of language. Okay. Uh you suddenly make what you might call a form of protoenvironmentalism effectively or just cleaning up the place. It was actually sponsored by the highways department originally, wasn't it? Um, and you turn it into a badge of identity. And there was somebody, this is wonderful for anybody who's ever worked in an advertising agency. He told the story that when they first presented it, the people on the board of transportation who had to approve the line, three of them thought it was far too rude and direct. And one of them said, "Could we not just change it to please don't mess with Texas, which kind of destroys the whole Texan nature of the thing, you know? You know, you know, excuse me, ever so humble, but I was just wondering if you could perhaps mess a little bit less with Texas." No, that's that's not the same message by any means.
Well, the um you know, the power of how you manipulate words is something you really cover well in Alchemy. And if you haven't read uh Rory's book, which was my introduction to him and his way of thinking, it's uh Alchemy: The Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense. It's a wonderful uh book. I have become a fan of your column Wiki Man, which is in the Spectator. And um uh we're going to talk about a few of those columns before we get off stage today. But I I uh I saw one there was one anecdote about a I think a restaurant in London that put up a a sign for its patrons saying don't forget to turn your cell phone back on after you leave the restaurant as they came back as they came in. Yeah. No.
So what was genius about that because we were having exactly this debate yesterday about whether the adoption of electric vehicles in places like Texas would have been faster if the government hadn't encouraged their adoption because if you have those cultures and I you know I come from one myself if you like which is quite an independent-minded culture where if somebody tells you to do I mean so Martin Sorl famously said about managing advertising agencies it's actually extremely easy you decide what you want to do and tell them to do the opposite and creative people will reliably out of an innate sense of perversity you know if you tell them that you want them to do this they will look for brilliant you know reasons why they shouldn't or they will naturally try and do the opposite in some way and so I mean what's so ingenious about that is it's it basically is a way of persuasion not in other words you change a command to what you might call the implication of a social norm so what it does it's a French restaurant supposedly in Santon. And people look at that and go, I see. So, it would be a bit of a social gaff to actually take a phone call while I'm dining in this fancy establishment. And what a helpful notice to remind us all to turn our phones back on when we're leaving the restaurant. The net effect behaviorally, of course, is people turn their phones off when going into the restaurant. If anybody's been to a restaurant where or place where it tells you to turn off your mobile phone, your first reaction is to try and come up with a good reason why you shouldn't because you sitting there with your mo I mean, I've always noticed this. We we I went into a meeting once where they said now I want you all to turn off your mobile phones. Immediately seven people said actually my father's in hospital at the moment. Okay. Now I think two of them probably did have parents in hospital. Okay. I think the other five would just you know suffering separation anxiety and but that was a very interesting debate yesterday.
We we drove to Southernland Springs in an F-150 Lightning um electric pickup truck which we all have to say is magnificent. Even more so after we discovered sport mode. Um, which is totally insane because you have a three-tonon vehicle that behaves like a go-kart. Okay. And and part of the things we were saying is that actually, you know, a whole load of survivalists and doomsday preppers if you told them they could have a vehicle that could run off their own solar panels would have bought one without the need for government encouragement. In fact, the government encouragement may be counterproductive. So I think it is very very interesting in understanding how people effectively respond to different stim I suppose the perfect way of putting this is that there aren't any in human behavior there aren't any contextfree decisions or behaviors that what we do how we respond to information is always contextsensitive you know in other words h how it's phrased Now I had a I'll tell you a lovely story about this so I had a friend who worked for Goldman Sachs for many years and um very very good behavioral scientist he was obsessed with he's also a guy called Paul Craraven very very good amateur magician so he understands all these techniques of sort of you know misdirection and so forth um and he gave one bit of advice which said if you ever want anybody to do something for you if you need someone to do you a favor okay there's a magic formulation of the phrase which will work much better than nearly all alternatives and the phrase he used is this said I wonder if you can help me. He said, "Not I'm so so sorry to dump this crap on you or I know you were expecting to have the weekend off, but or I need to do you a favor." The the fantastic thing is you leave it open. I wonder if you can help me suggesting that the person's status would be considerably enhanced by the answer. Yes. And I've actually used it myself and I have to say it was a brilliant bit of advice. Unfortunately, this fantastic bit of advice was slightly poisoned by the discovery about a year later that it was exactly the phrase that Ted Bundy used to pick up his victims. Okay. So, he would Has anybody come across the comedian um uh Andrew Schultz? Right. Yeah. So, he does an extraordinary routine on how on earth did Ted Bundy how much have so much success with the opposite sex while driving a tan Volkswagen Beetle. Okay. Uh, I mean, it's not suitable for family viewing, but it is it is an extraordinary few moments of comedy. And apparently he'd pretend to have broken down and asked people for help. But it's very interesting because what's so interesting is your emotional response to that sentence, I wonder if you can help me, which is still implicitly leaving me with the option to say no. Okay. Is somehow much more powerful than so many other alternatives. And yet when we're saying these phrases, we're not really that conscious of the different emotional effect we're engendering.
Really fascinating. Well, if there's one thing I took out of the book, it's to not assume that people think logically. So, if it was up to me, Rory, I would say to this audience, I notice most of you don't subscribe to my Monday Musings newsletter. And I really think you should because I work hard on that. Yeah. But I'm looking out at people that I think would benefit from my newsletter. You're looking out and saying, "Bob, these are all irrational people. I haven't even met them, but pro I promise you they're irrational and you're not approaching it right." So I think you're the behavioral scientist and I'm the journalist. What am I doing wrong? It's very interesting in the sense that um this is quite important because actually you know ultimately what I think I think there I think there are a lot of problems here. One of which is I've got a vague theory that if you look at 90% of really successful business startups okay either through instinct or or possibly just through good fortune or good timing they stumbled on something psychologically important. sometimes intentionally, as I said, sometimes without even realizing it. Um, and you know, the example I always give is I'm sorry to people who've heard it before. The Uber map I think is a piece of psychological genius because it doesn't a logical engineer would say, how can we reduce the length of time people have to wait before their cab arrives. The psychological solution is to say, how can we make the experience of waiting less painful? And once you've got a silly little picture of a car, which does admittedly rotate occasionally in a rather off-putting way, but once you got a picture of a car and you can tell yourself a story about where it is and when it's going to arrive, the quality of your waiting time is much much better than if you're in a state of uncertainty. Um, even if the car is not really where you think it is.
Well, there is there is a school of thought certainly with Domino's Pizza that believes that actually a large part of that delivery sort of update is kind of effectively confetted. Now, if you're totally amoral, you'd say, "Who cares?" Because the people are chilled because what you're actually saying to them is, "Don't worry, we haven't forgotten you." So, you know, I I wouldn't I wouldn't support that level of dishonesty. By the way, I think as far as possible, you should tell people the truth. But there is a point that when you give people regular updates, what you're saying is, you know, don't worry, we've got this. Um, and you know, also I suppose, you know, I mean, I said this to an airline, British Airways. I said, um, look, there's a huge psychological difference between having a departure board where your flight just says delayed and delayed 47 minutes. Okay? You know, delayed first of all means you cannot relax because you've got to continually look at the screen. you can't go off and get your haircut or go, you know, go and get an elaborate meal, okay? Because you you have no idea whether the delay is 10 minutes or 2 hours. So, part of that's practical, but it's also just your brain, I think, has evolved to always imagine the worst case scenario, and you start then to imagine that the flight might be cancelled, whereas delayed 47 minutes, you basically go fine. And what I notice is that most, you know, airlines obsessively optimize objective measures like punctuality, but actually what they should be optimizing for to a degree. I mean, you can't be totally chaotic if you're running an airline, but what they should optimize for is effectively mental well-being. And so I I take this into a wider discussion in areas like transport where an awful lot of investment is spent investing in things like speed whereas actually improving the experience uh in some shape or form improving the now the problem you have is that most decisions are taken by people like economists and engineers who always leap to quantification you know in with economists it's the quantification of money okay with engineers it's the quantification of some SI unit like speed or acceleration or time and the human perception of things doesn't correlate exactly or indeed sometimes not at all uh with the things that those people like to measure. Um and so you know I mean you can for example hugely I mean an example would be we were talking about this this morning um you know if you built highspeed rail between San Antonio and Austin which probably sensible thing to do please. Okay. Okay. But I mean there's an interesting we were having this discussion which is how fast does it need to be now engineers might say okay we've got to compete with the car. Okay. And I would say, well, actually, if you put big tables on the train and there's really good Wi-Fi, effectively, anybody who you you've added a two useful hours to their day because they're now sitting and working rather than sitting in a car actually within I'm not saying you can go at 10 miles an hour. I did try and do that journey once, by the way. I discovered there's an Amtrak service, is that right? Is that right? In each direction and it takes something like six hours on a good day and it leaves at like 10:00. I mean, it's a completely bizarre journey, but I don't suppose many people take it. I think it's fair to say because you could probably get there on one of those electric scooters in about the same in about the same time. But um but but the interesting question would be the engineers would obsess about the speed of the train and you actually go look okay you know you don't want the train to be ludicrously slow and it'd be pretty good if it's not that expensive to make it go at let's say 80 or 90 mph but actually above that you're engaging in a whole load of cost for not much human benefit because I mean actually it gets more interesting than that because I don't know if anybody's ever been a regular rail commuter but some people actually complain that their commute is too And there's a weird bit of evidence. I've got a friend who's a transport economist and he tends to find that for various reasons people tend to live slightly further away from work than strictly speaking makes sense. And the two theories around that is one you just like to create mental distance between where you live and where you work. And the other theory is that actually um that journeys of about 40 minutes can be quite enjoyable where you know you can get into a book or you can watch a film on Netflix or whatever whereas 20 minute journeys are actually slightly irritating because the ratio of what you might argue about a very short journey is the ratio of [ __ ] around to actually sitting down and moving becomes less and less attractive. You know, you know what I mean? I that's the problem with very short flights. A very short flight from a very big airport is the most annoying experience because you basically spend sort of an hour and a half on the ground [ __ ] around and then there sort of 20 minutes of travel. And so so you know these things once you actually look at what we're trying to do which presumably is either to affect humans behavior or their emotional state in some way. If you optimize for that the rules are very different from if you optimize for engineering measures.
But the thing is we don't have numbers for human emotions. You know, if we if we actually, you know, I've often wondered what that would look like. You know, in America, you do something which I love, which I think is brilliant. Um, which is you have the temperature and you have the feels like temperature. Now, that's actually a brilliant distinction when you think about it, okay? Because it doesn't really matter to me how actually hot it is, okay? You know, I'm not planning to like cook on the sidewalk or something, right? The actual temperature doesn't matter. The question is what do I need to wear? How hot's it going to feel? And I think it takes account of humidity and breeze, doesn't it? So, if you have a reasonable breeze and it's not very humid, the feels like temperature will be a lot lower than the actual ambient temperature.
Well, while you're here, Rory, I'm determined to get you to help us fix our city. So, go on. We were talking off camera about There's not much you need to do. you've already got great food and um you know I mean by by the way I mean actually I always noticed this that cities that have this big inferiority complex actually are really nice places Chicago have you ever been to Chicago the inferiority complex there versus Chicago okay is just absolutely pathological you know everything versus Chicago versus New York is absolutely pathological and you go but architecturally you crap on New York what are you worried about you know well Here in San Antonio, yeah, we have a thing particularly about Austin up the road, which is why we're a big city, small town. If you listen to the mayors and other political figures, they'll refer to San Antonio as the seventh largest city in the United States, which fools nobody because of a census track, that's true, but we're really about the 24th or 25th city size city. But instead of metropolitan area versus the Exactly. Because there's a weird thing you can win a lot of pub bets on which is the largest city in Florida is St. Petersburg or something. Is that right? It could be because their city limits are defined like I don't know you know astronomically or something. I can't remember. Yeah. So so in other words the whole measures are a bit wonky. So Dallas is actually smaller than San Antonio technically inside the city limits but it has four or five million people and we're half that size at best. Got it. So, how do we tell people to stop calling us the seventh largest city and to find out what our true attributes are and assign those to people's identity outside of the city to what San Antonio really is?
I mean, one of the things about cities is that the success of play I mean where this is really magnified as a problem is what you might call in a globalized interconnected world you get more of these winner takes all effects. Okay? And actually air travel is in some respect. So I wrote a piece on the spectator because I know because you read it saying how great the car was as an invention. And my argument is slightly that there is a problem with trains and aircraft which is they all operate through a hub and spoke model. So what you're doing is you're concentrating people into hubs. So effectively it's sort of centra petal. The glorious thing about the car is effectively it it it disperses people and wealth rather than concentrating them because the network is it fundamentally the road network is fundamentally less like a spid's web than you know the the air the air network is terrible. uh the so what we've done when we invented air travel was we created this sort of disproportionate winner takes all effect for places that have happened to be hubs and concentrated more and more activity into into fewer and fewer spaces and so you always get this phenomen I mean I grew up in Wales and what you get is what you might call the Cardiff Newport I know this meaningless to the audience I apologize for this but you tend to have a big city and a slightly smaller city and the first always seems to grow at the expense of the And this now in tourism it's a catastrophic problem because what you're getting is the hideous overconentration of tourist visitors in fewer and fewer places and and and the extreme case you if you go to the louver in Paris 90% of the visitors are trying to see the Mona Lisa right and yet if you go back historically the Mona is actually famous because of you guys do you know this so it it was considered a very significant painting cuz hell it's by Leonardo. Okay. But sometime in the beginning of the last century, I thinking about 1910, it was stolen and journalists wanted to make a big story because they it was a quiet news day about the theft of the Mona. So they I know we I don't know what he's talking about. Okay. So I'm going to blame. Okay. So they thought bit of a quiet news day. They they you know citizen Kadan's phrase make the headline big enough. I'll make the story big enough. So they basically decided for the purpose of newsworthiness that this was the greatest painting in the world because it made a much bigger story to say you know you know rather than Italian table mat stolen which wouldn't have been very interesting world's greatest painting stolen and they eventually of course that that story would have gone nowhere had they not recovered the painting because everybody would have forgotten about it but when they recovered the painting it was now declared really by journalists as the world's greatest painting. So, so the same thing happens in tourism which is sometimes quite arbitrary things will just create a kind of tipping point and then this winner takes all disproportion takes over and I was going to write a tourist book funn Antonio would definitely feature which is basically how to visit the third most obvious destination in every place because I'm I think they're coming to a point where the third most obvious place to go is often more interesting than the most obvious place because the sheer number of tourists has made the most obvious place no longer resemble what it was when it was first appealing to go to. So, by the way, anybody who goes to France, um, particularly if you're Texan, go to Bordeaux for a few days. Okay? You know, it isn't it it's like a miniature Paris with the additional advantage that they get drunk in the evenings for some weird reason. Okay. So, as a Texan, you might feel much more at home to be absolutely honest. Okay. Um, so you do know a little bit about us. Exactly. Yeah.
But there but there is I mean there is this I mean I see this all the time and actually you know one of the interesting things about the car is nobody ever talks about it because it's fashionable to demonize the car and every single discussion of transport has to say um you know of course with the need for people to trans uh to to transfer to more sustainable forms of mass transit. Okay. But you are concentrating people with mass transit whereas with the car you're actually fundamentally so what you know what you can do if you think about I'm a bit of any georgists here there's always one they're always sitting nobody so this is the greatest you okay this is one of the greatest Americans that most people haven't heard of the guy called Henry George in the 19th century who believed effectively he had a school of economics which was um cap free market capitalism with respect to everything except land and his view that you should fund all public services through a land value tax. If you improved your land, the the gains to value were yours to keep, but the the in the innate value of the land you owned was what you were taxed on. And the argument is that when you use land, you're depriving someone else of it. Now, if you concentrate everybody into one station in San Antonio, if you build your rail thing, um what will happen is people will start businesses there because there'll be a lot of people coming off the train. The gains won't go to the people running the cafe. they'll go to the whoever happened to own the land around the station and that's called rent seeking in economics and it's really a form of enrichment without actually uh effort or benefit to anybody else. And the weird thing about renting is all economists agree that it's a really bad thing but no economist ever proposes that something be done about it. And so there is what was magical about the car was it meant that a huge number of people who wanted to start businesses could escape what you might call expensive real estate and if you were good enough you could start a cafe in the middle of nowhere and people would drive to you and I think that was hugely economically important and yet nobody ever talks about this the fact that when you concentrate people in places and when you have a hub and spoke transport so one thing I would propose if you do do rail between here and say Austin is one good thing you could do is actually make the trains train line penetrate both towns. So rather than going from the middle of one to the middle of the other, actually start the opposite side, create a bit of extra station uh you know the far side of one city and then travel on to the far side of the other. So you're creating not only concentration in the the terminus, but you're creating extra land value somewhere where which creates opportunity for people fundamentally.
Your genius, Rory, is seeing things differently than the rest of us. So, there's a lot of people in this audience that aspire to start their own businesses. A lot of people are skilled in uh you know, the use of technology to solve problems. I wonder if you would talk a little bit about the role of human nature in marketing that maybe people in that field aren't thinking very much about. And I'm I'm thinking of the example in your um in your book about why would anybody try to compete with Coca-Cola? Yep. Will you tell that story about the product that's out there? And I'm going to go back with a principle which I think everybody can steal from. Now, I won't guarantee complete success in every single instance, but it strikes me as a Now I've sort of stolen this idea. Has anybody read Will Gara's book, Unreasonable Hospitality? Gentleman at the back. Yeah. There was a story in that that fascinated me because it's the kind of thing that I would probably do. Okay. So he's running 11 Madison Park which is the 50th best restaurant in the world according to the San Pelgro guide and he and between 2011 and 2017 or 18 he gets into number one and what he did early on sometime back in 2011 is he takes a bunch of his team to the best restaurant in the world which happened to be a three star Michelang restaurant also in New York I think. Okay. And of course, as you might expect, everything's brilliant. And he asks everybody, okay, they're all writing down, "Oh, good. We could copy that." And, you know, they fold the napkins into a swan. We need to do I'm making this [ __ ] up, okay? But, you know, what whatever it is they do, you know, they go, "Oh, let's copy that. Oh, isn't that good?" And at the end of it, they've all got a whole list of things they really like. And he's not interested. Yes. What I want to know is what about this experience, amazing as it may have been, was slightly disappointing. Okay. And they came up with two things. One of which was the coffee was just kind of okay. You know, nothing wrong with it, but there was nothing special. And of course, because he'd taken, I think, some of the kitchen staff along, quite a lot of them are beer drinkers, not wine drinkers. I I think that's only right and proper, by the way. Um uh but anyway, I'll I'll part that. And they said the beer experience, if you're a beer drinker, you're treated like a secondass citizen compared to the people who are drinking wine. So he immediately goes back to his restaurant. He points one guy as the beer sumelier. Okay. There's a guy who's obsessed with craft brewing. He says, "You're now the beer smellier." And there's another guy who's obsessed with like single origin, you know, dark roast, whatever it is. And he appoints him the coffee sleier. He said, "Okay, your job is to make the those two experiences just freakishly good." Now, if you think about it, most people, we were talking, what's the chain of gas stations where the toilets are amazing? Bies. Okay. Now, I call it I call this exercise reverse benchmarking. What most people do and what McKenzie do is they go, "Let's look at your competitors and make you a bit more like them." And what reverse benchmarking does is say okay let's take our competitor's weak spot do that brilliantly and really really now it what you're doing there I think is optimizing for attention you you're a journalist right the famous thing is there's dog bites man not a story man bites dog that's a story okay right that's I think you're all taught that day one aren't you yeah I'm taking a beating up here no it's a brilliant point man bites dog Okay, we all we're all going to read that, right? And I call it optimizing for tension. Now, okay, a lot of people won't drink beer when they go to 11 Madison Park. You know, there are people who don't drink coffee, but if you're a beer drinker and you're expecting them to go, "Yeah, yeah, we got Sam Adams in bottles and we got this on draft." And the guy comes along and says, "Well, actually, we've got these 15 craft beers. Uh, this Citric IPA goes really well with fish." And the beer guy starts talking to you about food pairings. you're going to go, "This is the best restaurant I've ever been to in my life." Okay, it's just fantastic. And I think, you know, um I think there's something brilliant there, which is if you now look at a lot of successful businesses, I think intentionally or accidentally they've emerged from reverse benchmark. And the classic case is what there are a lot of things that stop people reverse benchmarking. One, they want to impress their peer group. So if you look at the whole tech world, it's all about So the whole tech world was all about geeky people trying to impress other people with things like, you know, if you're old enough to remember, right, RAM, processing power, clock speed, okay, they had all these geeky engineering metrics. What they'd failed to notice in the PC world until Steve Jobs came along was that a computer looked like a particularly ugly bit of office equipment. So that if you put it anywhere in your house, whatever room you put a PC in, might as well be an office. I mean, you could just put a go the whole hog and put a filing cabinet and a photocopier, right? Because you destroyed any room by putting a computer in it aesthetically. And so Steve Jobs comes along and comes out with mildly inferior um technology, but hits it out of the park in the thing that the competition were completely ignoring. By's the the gas station. Okay. What's the one thing that's famously bad about gas stations? The toilets. So, what you do is you don't just say, "We'll make sure our toilets are clean." You go basically insane. I've got some friends who run a chain of men's hairdressers in the UK, and when they open up a new hairdressing salon, they spend about $50,000 on the toilets, okay? And everybody goes, "Well, look, most people don't even use the toilets." And they go, "I know. That's the problem." And I suppose you could serve them loads of diuretic drinks to encourage the chance. you know, here's your second free grande coffee. Okay. Um, but what they said is the people who go in, you've all had this experience. You're in quite a nicel looking hairdressing place or a barbers and then you ask to use the restrooms and it's kind of like, you know, you has anybody been to a five-star hotel and you accidentally go through a door that says staff only and everything's total [ __ ] Okay. It's like the magic toll booth in reverse, isn't it? You're in this hotel and everything's fivestar. Oh, missure, please step this way. And you accidentally go through a room that says staff only. And it looks like some sort of dystopian hellhole. And so what often happens is you go to the headdress, you go to the L, and they have to move like a mop and bucket out of your way. And in this thing, you go in and it's kind of marble and glass and fresh flowers. And I think that's optimizing for attention. And I think I think it as a business strategy what I call reverse benchmarking which is spend a load of time looking for what nobody else cares about and then do it amazingly well. What I think is quite weird is it's often quite cheap to do. I think genuinely well how did somebody do that with Coca-Cola? Well, Red Bull was literally a case where uh this is the fascinating and you've probably read this if you read my book, but it always fascinated me because objectively anybody who wanted to compete with Coke would say, "Okay, the drink's got to taste nicer than Coke. It's got to cost less than Coke and it's got to come in a really big can because people want value for money these days. What with the, you know, you know, the the economic crisis or whatever." And Red Bull comes along, it costs a fortune, comes in a tiny can, and it tastes disgusting. Okay. And when I say that, I mean they objectively researched it and some of the research respondents, this is a company that only researches carbonated drinks and they said it's the worst drink we've ever researched. Some of the respondents are saying things like, "I wouldn't drink this piss if you paid me to." And yet they can run, is it two Formula One teams they run on the on the profits from this drink. Okay. And this comes back to my thing about there's no contextfree perception. Okay. Um, if you cut your knee, okay, and you spray it with one of those sort of antiseptic things, I know it sounds, you want it to hurt, don't you? Because the hurt is actually reassuring. Okay, you go, okay, I know it's working now because this is stinging like a bastard. Okay, phew. Okay, that's great. You know, okay, this stings like a bastard. It must, you know, this is great. I'm feeling so much better now. And actually, if you made it not hurt, you go sh. Now I think there's something there which is if you sell something as medicinal or psychoactive or psych psychotropic the fact that it tastes horrible actually convinces you of its efficacy. And so this is this also leads into my other great point which I think is significant which is the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. It obviously in you know in in maths the opposite of a good idea is usually wrong. Okay. But actually in psychology the opposite of a good idea often is a weirdly underexplored other good idea. And what tends to happen is businesses benchmark against each other and they all end up in a cluster effectively optimized around the same thing. And what I love if you run a hotel I mean I'm big fan of the um you know the double tree cookie. You all you all presumably had a double tree cookie at some point. Now, what's brilliant about that is precisely that no other hotel does it. I mean, it is just that simple. Now, it's quite common. You go and stay in a hotel and they said, "We've just been renovated at a cost of $75 million." And you go, "Ren, you spent $75 million to make my room look like every other hotel room I've ever stayed in." Okay? And so, you know, there's no, you're not optimizing for attention. You're not optimizing for surprise there. Whereas if you go I when I first came across this double tree cookie. Okay, you know I was kind of like all I can remember was in Chicago and what the hell is this? I actually thought you know well first one's a brick. They're called biscuits you I didn't lecture on ethmology. Yeah. So we call cookies biscuits and I had biscuits for breakfast here. It's different thing. Um, but um fantastic thing about biscuits and gravy. It is. Um, you've got breakfast shown up in this place, by the way. Rancheras, biscuits and gravy. I mean, it's like I'm, you know, I'm a bit um, sorry, we're the seventh largest city, right? Yeah, of course. It's the seventh largest city. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely right. Yeah. Uh, but um, but what's so interesting about that is that then I took them upstairs and I was surprised they were warm. Okay. Because they keep an oven under the check-in desk at the uh, double tree. And I took them up to my room. I sort of turned on the TV and well, these cookies are warm. I wasn't really planning to eat them, but since they're warm, I better eat them. Oh, they're absolutely fantastic. I don't know if you remember. They're just extraordinarily good. During COVID, they actually gave away the recipe, intriguingly. Um, but what I'm saying is that actually it's benchmarking in marketing terms is a really dumb exercise because what you effectively do is you make yourself you commoditize yourself because everybody goes well, there's no real difference between X Y and Zed so why shall I pay a penny extra I'll just buy on price whereas if you if you differentiate yourself and weirdly I think it can be surprisingly irrelevant you know the way in which you're surprising or different can be almost you know slightly trivial in some respects and you know the biscuit you know now the point is that the finance department of double tree apparently been trying to kill this off for years now actually how many people thought Southwest made a terrible mistake getting rid of the free checked in baggage okay right the whole point of that wasn't really what it was it was the fact that they did something that nobody else did and also there's a kind of sincerity to having a principle like that which you stick to. Yeah, I would have by the way I understand their need to make money in fairness, but I'm I'm absolutely convinced there was a better way to do that, you know, which is not to say that you you know, you know, maybe there are other things. By the way, I might make a little point which is that by giving allowing people to check in their luggage for free, my hunch would be that turnaround times are a lot faster. What you're now going to find when you make people check in their luggage is everybody now has one of those clamshell cases that are maximum allowable size, which means that boarding a plane is now like a game of Tetris in the overhead lockers. So, I'm not even sure that's a great move because if you factor in the cost of turnaround, you know, and so boarding once you charge, we have an airline called Ryan Air in the UK and people actually board wearing four sets of goddamn clothes, okay? you know, they look like the Mishla man basically getting on the plane because they're extremely restrictive in terms of baggage and actually it's one fair point is, you know, actually look at, you know, look at the second order implications. Ryionaire, they go to they go to the guy um uh famously stingy CEO and they offer him free newspapers to give to all the passengers. No, no, no. He said, "I'll um" he said, "I'll sell newspapers if you want." But he said, "I'm not giving them away." And they said, "Well, why not?" He said, "Because uh if people buy a newspaper, they take it off the plane with them. If we give them a free newspaper, they leave it on the plane and someone's got to clear it up." You know, it's very very, you know, very good business people are very good at that second order thing.
Rory, you mentioned the toilets at Bies, not once, but twice. I haven't been yet. It's worth it, is it? I mean, you know. Yeah. I mean, seriously, I'm going to veer off my notes here a little bit. Um, I read a really fascinating column uh that you wrote about how people tend to be marketed to by nationality. Every kitchen in the UK has an electric tea kettle, which is a much more efficient way to heat water. You can't find one in the States. I was reading that with interest. Anybody got a kettle? Okay, this is this is impressive. But not electric. Oh, electric. Eric's got one. I'm wrong. You should secede and come and join us. Well, my point I really should. My point there was I have made the point by the way that 250 years ago you started a war of independence over tariffs on tea. And I think I think the irony of that does need to be rubbed in a bit. Okay. It's not even as if you drank much tea, is it? You know, let's be honest. Because you hadn't got the kettles, you see. Anyway, sorry. Sorry. Yeah, I was going to say you definitely turned that column into a treatise on the Japanese toilet, which uh flushes not only after you've
used it, but it flushes before. Uh, which seems a little overkill to me, but you really enjoyed it. I went for the basic one. I, I, I didn't go for the one with a remote control because I think that's silly. Okay.
Um, and um, but it's one of those interesting things. We were talking about electric cars. There are certain. How many people have air fryers? That'll be an interesting one. Okay. Because I was a very, very early predictor of the success of the air fryer for a very simple observation, which I recommend to everybody who starts a business, which is the only really robust measure of a business is repeat purchase or or loyalty, fundamentally. That's that's the measure of whether you're doing something right. It's because someone who has experience of not only, uh, what you promise, but also what you deliver, chooses to keep coming back. That's a real, real badge of recommendation, I think.
And so what always interests me is technologies. I mean, who, who are the electric car drivers? Anybody? Uh, okay, we got three. Would you go back to a gasoline car? No. This is the interesting thing. So there's huge resistance. I mean, air fryers actually, you know, people got slightly abused because they were air fryer evangelists. Okay. And the people who bought air fryers did, including me, become a bit weird. Okay. Um, basically, you know, have you got an air fryer? I can't believe it. How come you don't, you know? But, but what was interesting to me was that everybody who got one basically became a convert instantaneously. Also true of electric cars.
So, and what's interesting is everybody will resist these things because, as humans, we're, I think we've got three really strong habits as humans. Social copying, do what everybody else does. Habit, do what I've done before. And self-justification is our third one. So, if we currently drive a petrol car and people tell us electric cars are better, obviously, you know, it's a bit like someone insulting your dog, right? Okay. Obviously, people will immediately assemble, they'll reverse engineer reasons why electric cars aren't better because they have a petrol car. In the UK, not relevant here, in the UK, for 15 years, everybody came up with totally stupid reasons about why they didn't like automatic transmission. I mean, you know, oh dear, the fuel economy is not as good, which was true a bit at the time, but oh, I like the sense of control, da da da, stick shift, blah blah blah. Everybody who bought an automatic never went back. Okay? You know, you just don't.
And so it is, it fascinates me because it's so important this to, if you're an innovative business, finding what you might call the gentle on-ramp for people to change an old behavior and move to a new one because fundamentally people are creatures of habit. We're also a kind of herd species. And so in the early days of any innovative new technology, you're asking someone to do, in a sense, you know, uh, well, three difficult things. Okay? You've got to do something you didn't do before. You got to do something that other people don't do. And you've got to explain yourself. And I often think they're winner-takes-all effects in terms of things you don't have to explain.
So, um, actually, does anybody here make hard cider or have come across it? Alcohol at our house. Okay. Because I'm convinced that would be an absolutely massive growth industry in the US if you introduced it. But it is difficult because if you're in a beer-drinking culture and you order something that isn't beer, you have to explain yourself. I know that sounds really weird, you know, but Coca-Cola is magical. And one of the magical properties of Coke, which is when you think about it, extraordinary, is you can walk in anywhere that serves beverages and say, "I'd like a Coke or a Diet Coke." And if they haven't got it, it's their fault, not yours. Okay.
Now, actually here, they're probably Dr. Pepper loyalists among you, are there? Yeah. That always fascinates me. There is no Pepsi here, is there at all? Basically, it's a bit, but it's basically a Coke Dr. Pepper state, is it? That's the, the divine. But what always fascinates me is that, okay, in the UK, if you could not go into a restaurant, ask for a Dr. Pepper, they'd look at you as if you were mad for asking. Okay, genuinely. Whereas you asked for a Coke, uh, they would have to explain why they don't stock it. And so there's something really interesting there about what you might call sort of psychological lubrication. In other words, we often seek the path of least resistance. And so it's much, much easier to say to your friend, "I'll have a beer." Versus in the UK, cider's probably 10, 15. It goes up in the summer when it's cooler. But, uh, you actually, you'll have a beer as well versus, "Oh, actually, I'll have a cider because it's a hot day." Okay. You literally feel you have to explain yourselves.
And so it always fascinates me that, of course, any new idea requires people. And I used to think, and it's, it seems logical. Okay. The bigger your idea, the less marketing it needs because the more significant the benefits it brings. That seems a sensible thing to say. What I suddenly realized years later is the bigger the idea, the more marketing it needs because it's requiring people to change their behavior a lot, and they find that really painful.
But there is a kind of cheat, I think, which is, how would I describe this? If you want to, if you, if you want to change behavior, you can either ask a hundred people to change their mind, or you can change one context. So, if you come up with a new phrase, or you come up with a new norm, or you somehow change the context, or even the place. I'll give you an example of this. I mean, the biggest behavioral change from McDonald's is on-screen ordering. Okay? Because if you order on a screen, you'll order in a fundamentally different way to the way you order when you're face to face. And do you know that one of the biggest things McDonald's have noticed? Loads and loads of guys now order a meal with two burgers in it because you never do that face to face because the guy would go, "What, what, what do you, what do you, you know?" In other words, the guy would sort of raise his eyebrows. You, well, hang on, you've got one lot of fries and two burgers. What's going on here? And you'd feel you have to explain yourself, whereas the screen is anonymous. You know, you could, um, so you, you discover all these things where just tweaking the context changes loads and loads of behaviors painlessly, whereas actually asking people to change their behavior is, is one person at a time, and it's painful. If you can.
So, I mean, you know, one thing that actually must terrify people like Google, okay, is if AI just creates for most of us a different interface we go to when we want to make a decision. I don't know. I, I don't know. It could be Perplexity, but my my question is actually, it's all too textual at the moment. Does anybody agree? Because I feel like, you know, never, you know, you know, I study classics, but I've never felt like the Emperor Augustus. I've never thought, "What I really need is a scribe." Okay. And so my, okay, my this is where the billions to be made, which is everything we've learned in tech suggests that loads and loads of really clever tech people compete for years and years and years to improve microscopically the capabilities of the actual technology, and then someone else comes along with a cute user interface and makes all the money. Okay. I mean, that's kind of a bit true. And I, what strikes me as weird with AI is, you know, is it, I mean, is do I talk to a human who can also show slides on a screen? I, you know, or pictures? What would be the absolute fantasy way of choosing a holiday? And we were talking about this fascinatingly, saying a lot of people think about human decision-making, that what you want the AI to do is to go, "Hello, I'd like to buy a toaster or a kettle." For those of you who are still, you know, lagging around in the 19th century of tea making, you know, deserts. Okay. Um, but, um, if I'd like to buy, I'd like to buy a toaster. Okay. And a lot of people assume that what we were just debating this, that what we want the AI to do is go, "Here is the perfect toaster for you." Okay. And my theory, and your theory, is actually we don't like making decisions like that. What we want is, "Here are five good toasters. These are the relative strengths and weaknesses of these. We think these are probably the best. There is one wildcard thing out here, which is a glass-sided toaster. Anybody come across these? So, you can actually just look at how brown it is and pop it up at just the right moment. Here's this glass-sided toaster, which you might be interested in. Here are five really good toasters of varying price levels. Uh, now choose between them because my hunch is we can't actually want something unless we have comparisons. Do you see what I mean? That it's like, no, if somebody showed you a house, you need to see three other houses before you could buy that house. Even if when you first saw the house, you thought it was a brilliant house.
And I think, I think we may also want AI to be kind of iterative where it goes, you know, "I'd like to go, you know, I'd like to go to Greece, you know, in 2026. Over the next few weeks, can you just show me some interesting places I could go or some hotels where I could stay?" And then that, you know, three days later, the AI goes, "Oh, by the way, I found you this new hotel in Greece. Ooh, that's quite nice. Uh, what else is around that area?" And actually, we need we to understand how to make AI really work for us, we need to understand how humans make decisions because I think a lot of people genuinely think what people want is an absolute, you know, straight-line route from problem to solution. And I think that the, the journey we go on to to solve a problem is sometimes more important than the destination.
Well, speaking of people that need some help solving a problem, you brought up tariffs, not me. So, oh, let's put you in the Oval Office with Trump. Telling him telling him he was wrong isn't going to work. So, what kind of advice would you give him on finding a way to maybe, uh, change the status quo that he's created?
Well, I have to admit complete bafflement because by by European standards, I'm, you know, relatively right-wing, certainly a free marketer to an extreme degree. And I don't quite understand why he's chosen to make that his kind of the hill on which you die, as it were, because, you know, some of the other stuff he's actually doing is not unintelligent, and some of it's, some of it certainly has a popular mandate. But actually, the extreme, there is an argument for it in some cases, which is effectively resilience, which is if you have a completely globalized world, you gain efficiency at the price of redundancy, and so you create a single point of failure, can cause catastrophe. So, some degree of like diversifying where manufacturing lies, diversifying some of that is quite, is, is not totally insane, by the way, from a kind of complexity perspective. But some of this just seems to be an exercise of power. Um, it's worth noting also that manufacturing is only 10% of employment anywhere in the US, isn't it? I think if I'm right. So most people are employed in a service economy. So it seems a bit weird. Even if you could double the size of the manufacturing economy, it wouldn't have, you know, it is, it does create disproportionately more wealth, manufacturing. It's fair to say, uh, because you have the real gains to sort of scale and, you know, all the Fordist magic, but it does, it does strike me as a very strange first thing to do. I, I don't quite get it.
I knew he wouldn't want to hear from you. No, but, but how you changed his mind is interesting, which is what you would do is you would point to the fact that in some senses, a shot across the bows isn't totally insane. Okay. I also think, by the way, he's right in terms of bullying Europeans to step up to the plate in terms of defense expenditure and things of that kind, because, you know, there are basically, you know, there are 40 countries which effectively had a free ride, and that's working. That's working, and that's that's necessary and important, by the way. So, some of that bravado stuff strikes me as actually pretty worthwhile and not a bad idea.
Rory, it's been absolutely delightful to have you on. We're a little over time, but I'm probably going to look at the world a little bit differently going forward than I did before we met. So, thanks for coming on to Big City Small Town and come back someday. Great, great name. What a pleasure. Please share this episode with friends and colleagues and do sign up for our new newsletter, Monday Musings. Big City Small Town is brought to you by Western Urban, building the city our children want to call home, and Geekdom, where startups are born and smart ideas become businesses. Our producer is Corey Ames. Video by Erica Rempel, sound engineering by Alfie Deagar of Sound Crane Audio. We will see you next week.