Rory Sutherland: The Psychology of Selling

your job is to sing we've got these guys in a shed over there who are writing the songs uh we've got Studio 3 free we get a song from these guys we give it to you and now you perform it and record it okay but I want to write my own no no you can't do that today I'm having a guest with Rory Sutherland Vice chairman of oie and we're going to get into Sonic branding sludge content behavioral economics Rick Rubin heat pumps and a lot more than that I hope you like it rodick Rory Sutherland one of the most famous people in advertising you know our mutual friend Paul Burke of course and he said uh he's magnificent Paul B very fast and very honest and he said um Rory Stewart is actually called rodick and I was hoping he'd become Prime Minister because then we'd have a prime minister called Rod Stewart so ah no interestingly I didn't know this um I'm Christan Rodrick um and my brother who was 18 months older than me couldn't really say rodk so said something and my grandmother said oh you should call him Rory which I've been known by everybody apart from my part passport my driving license uh I've had I've been known as Rory ever since and I didn't know until I met Rod rodri stroke Rory Stewart I didn't know that this was actually a formal abbreviation yeah I thought it was just an alternative name but in Scotland Rory is an abbreviation for Roderick wow um weirdly um and so likewise yes you're right Rod Stewart would have been the uh prime minister so today uh Rory we do have on instruction of Anna for the audience Anna is the sort of the what what what which hemisphere is the organized one the right or the left uh the left is the the only retentive one yeah right so Anna is your left hemisphere you get walking right hemisphere so what that means is uh she going to come in and M Gilchrist will be uh turning turning red at the yeah not in his grave because he's still no no no absolutely not no the master in his Emissary that's the book isn't it yeah fantastic book and his most recent book is the matter with things which is a TW volume sort of 1200 page work which I have to confess I haven't read in its entire but actually I'm not sure I'm not sure you need to read it in it in order you need to read it in its entirety but actually you can dip into it it's extraordinary work reminds me something you once said you said there are no schedules only checklists yeah I I don't really believe in Pro creative processes I think there are checklists which are important yeah and I think you know have have you looked at this have you considered that what about this I think checklists are really useful I think the idea that there's necessarily a kind of procedure and order in which you proceed if you're trying to do something original that is if you're trying to do something which is the same as the time you did it before then you want a process or an algorithm yes but if you're trying to do something new uh the best you can hope for I think is a checklist well that's kind of the problem with trying to scale up creativity isn't it which is to scale up you kind of have to copy and paste quite a lot I think what we can do and which we' what we failed to do in advertising is I think we can kind of you can't replicate it but I think you can classify it right and I think you can find recurring patterns in successful marketing campaigns uh which you can uh effectively uh you could you can do variations on a theme if you like and I don't think I think we need a kind of linean classification of persuasive forms I mean all credit actually Bob chalini I don't know if you're a fan of his book influence but he was the first person to say he he was he effectively went out with sales forces and said and he found that just to be clear he said every Salesforce every successful salesman has a whole effectively a whole panoply of different techniques and some of them are totally specific to what you're selling you if you're selling you know aluminium cladding or whatever it may be you'll have a stick or a particular technique that's very effective but it's not necessarily applicable if you're selling bathroom supplies right but he said there are these six things I think he's now expended them to seven which recur from category to category in other words scarcity for example example social proof they're kind of common recurring themes which humans instinctively find reassuring you know well it's scarcity as in the less more valuable what's weird about them and I think you could probably make the case that they're kind of contradictory in other words not many people have this so it must be good yeah okay we can only produce 2,000 bottles a year therefore it must be good or Coca-Cola which is everybody drinks this so it must be good or like in the case you mentioned on Rick Ruben podcast just been listening to that this afternoon you said in some categories like fashion uh what was it if you're not selling enough try raising the price you know there are some items for which you have to pay a painful amount for it to actually matter and I mean the psychology of price is really interesting because it's something that economics gets really badly wrong because it assumes that X that cheaper is inherently better and it forgets the fact that price isn't just a cost it also conveys meaning yeah and I the way I would say is to economists price is a number but to Consumers it's a feeling and the example I always give is if if you were completely logical Economist and you had two products and one of them had greater functionality more features than the other and it also cost less now in economic terms that's a slam dunk it's a no-brainer it's a really easy decision greater utility lower price you buy the cheaper more functional product what actually happens in the human brain is we actually have second order intelligence which goes well if my product really was better I kind of charge more for it wouldn't I so therefore why is this product cheaper well maybe there's something wrong with it that I don't know about I now feel uneasy so I'm not going to buy either of them right yeah so like was it penicillin if you get you know it's 62 p is not enough I've got a 2 pound aspirin aspirin was the aspirin was the great thing yeah well I said you know it worries me that there isn't any premium Aspirin because the placebo effect is undoubtedly affected by the way but if you tell people a treatment is expensive it does in many cases make make it more more effective which presumably a pharmaceutical clients are rolling I mean that's an interesting debate in itself which is and actually I bizarrely had a conversation briefly with Sir Patrick Valance of all people I had to give a talk at a medical uh dinner and I must admit two weeks before the talk I was kind of thinking bunch of doctors after dinner speech maybe a few knob gags and then I had a look at the invitation list and realized it was got of Chris witty and Sir Patrick Valance and Sir Richard tops I thought okay I think I need to raise my game a bit here and one of the things I was delighted Patrick Valance also agreed with is that we've got the placebo effect wrong in that to prove the efficacy of a drug what we do is we take drug plus Placebo only Placebo subtract Placebo that is efficacy of drug because we're trying to prove the pharmacological value of the drug in isolation but what we should be trying to doing as doctors is increasing and maximizing the combinatorial effect of the psychology and the and the pharmacology so you mean instead of minus Placebo so so instead instead of so let's say let's say you do okay what what's something I can't get a hold of at the moment which is this um you know weight loss drug that you inject into your gut called um OIC okay wig GOI now what you might do is get a load of people to inject themselves with nothing and a load of people to inject themselves with ozen pck and you can reasonably say that the weight loss between the two is attributable to the pharmacology not to the psychology okay but what we should be doing with ozen pick is saying how do you maximize the combinatorial effect in weight loss of psychology and pharmacology in other words do you tell people to take ozen piic for a week and then stop and then try and not eat for three weeks and then have another dose you know is there a way you can make this drug in a sense more theatrically effective because part of weight loss undoubtedly is pure what you might call Pure Endocrinology or whatever okay part of weight loss is surely convincing people providing people with a narrative that things have changed and they can actually lose weight they can change their behavior yeah and um so you know I mean is is there a way in which you also combine it say with something like Sleep Therapy and so what worries me is that we're trying to prove the Standalone efficacy of different drugs when really we should be looking at the multiplicative the combinatorial maximum efficacy of three interventions behavioral psychological and pharmacological and saying how can we combine those three things to maximize effective weight loss and instead of course to justify a drug for approval what you have to do is subtract all the other things that are working when you should be trying to maximize them right so there's a this reminds me of a line that always comes back into my head which is at the end of the final Harry Potter book um now you got you got to you got to excuse me here weirdly okay I haven't read any Harry I had a daughter who was obsessed with it that makes sense I think you're the right age to have not read the books I'm probably that grumpy Stuart Lee age where you go you've seen the Stu Le I have read one you should read it Stuart it's about a wizard no I have read the entire works of William Blake [ __ ] ex okay right no I haven't read the entire works of William Blake I probably should have done but I by the way I make that mistake I'm weirdly a bit snobby I'm not very snobby about food I'm as happy into KFC as I am going to you know mishan stad restaurants I'm weirdly snobby about Cinema and you know my ideal film is like from French people getting upset about something over dinner okay but I think that's I mean I I actually ended up watching The Lion King which is the kind of thing which um the original uh this is the yeah the movie Caron yeah yeah the cartoon and I'm the kind of person you know children's thing what am I watching a bloody cartoon for I should be watching you know you know you know I I I could be watching last year Mar bad why would I watch and I watched It's [ __ ] amazing it's absolutely brilliant but it's drawing from the same Source material you've got Hamlet you've got Richard thei well you're absolutely right and so it's it's rather like Star Wars which draws enormously on mythology it's actually extra and actually one of the lessons is that the best of anything is great yes okay country music you know that thing that went down to look at the Titanic and it it imploded okay well you apparently got to take your iPod or your Bluetooth device down and they had a Bluetooth speaker and you could choose your playlist for the Journey Down to the Titanic but there was a rule no country music now that's a red flag that's a red flag right there okay I'm not going to entrust my life to a guy who doesn't like country music the best country music is it's fantastic yeah look I'll finish my Harry Potter sorry sorry sorry yeah Harry Potter sorry back to Harry Potter so don't don't start talking about things like hogw because I I there was this really annoying three-year period where every piece of Journalism included a Harry po Potter reference about the Sorting Hat or owls and know or platform seven and and i' be sitting there reading the times or what [ __ ] person talking about this God what are you talking about owls there's a dream sequence at the at the end where Harry sees a a Dumbledore in in a dream and he's gets a revelation but he says the problem is none of this matters because it's all in my head so he not real and dumbler says of course it's all in your head but who's to say that means it's not real of course of course this is to your point about assuming the physiological is the only real effect and the psychological is a kind of I mean you I mean we've got a huge TV at the end of the room you can't see it but that's a mind hack it only produces three colors it's species specific I was talking to the um uh uh Department of Business and trade today about precisely this that it's optimized for perception it's not optimized for objective reality you couldn't make a television that actually reproduced colors without that mind hack very manual C would be jumping for joy absolutely yeah I by the way if you want a good book tip folks for your your lovely readers and listeners as well as obviously in mcgilchrist there's a book by a guy called Andy Clark called The Experience machine yeah and what he does is he revives and builds on a theory that goes back to the 19th century about human perception okay and I think it was chap called Herman Fon helmholtz sort of German polymath and I think William James who made the point now before televisions by the way and before digitization this Theory must have seemed quite strange but it makes sense in the light of technology and the theory is that most of what we perceive is a prediction and that we use our limited bandwidth from our senses for error correction of prediction not for generation of actual reality right so yeah we're not seeing it firsthand no we're generating it effectively now if you if you look at um mpegs and jpegs okay the way they achieve their extraordinary data compression is that there is a there is an expect expected value for each pixel based on what pixel preceded it in time or what pixel is adjacent to it and you only use data to describe the extent to which the pixel deviates from the expected value which is a much more efficient use of data than describing each pixel in raw mode for those of you who are digital I mean presumably this isn't shooting in raw mode is it you're just shooting in mpegs or okay now if you do take a pi if right here I'm talking to the AV folks here if you do shoot shoot a picture in raw mode presumably it's great for editing because there's literally a value for each pixel but the files are insanely massive is that right because I had a photographer was my neighbor in Deal who had to come around because I had fiberoptic Broadband to the premises and he couldn't get it and he had to upload these Raw photos 120 like you know insane sort of exactly abely and um I think he used to park outside my house when I wasn't there now interestingly it's much more efficient use of data to use data to error correct versus expectation than it is to use data to generate the whole image denovo from a blank slate and what it seems to be the case is that the brain has come up with exactly the same data architecture that kind of Samsung and digital camera makers have come up with for data compression which is just use the data to Des because I I I don't know imagine if you wanted to have a TV in raw mode okay your Sky dish would have to be the size of jodal or something consumption power consumption would have been absolutely insane but they play this BR three hacks one you only need three colors cuz the brains basically the cones in the eye only detect those three colors color mixing is a psychological phenomenon it's not it doesn't exist in nature no no if you mix green and whatever it is you know um what is it green and and red green and red is yellow isn't it if you mix green and red photons you don't get yellow photons you get green and red photons but the brain the brain effectively extrapolates yellow from the relative strength of those two stimuli yeah so the frightening conclusion is there's no such thing as yellow Noti magenta particularly magenta is entirely because halfway between red and blue is green but you're not detecting any green with your green sensors so magenta is effectively a color the brain generates to explain away the inexplicable absence of green okay um this this is actually fascinating because if this I mean when you think about it if um Andy Clark and Von helmholtz and the book once again is called The Experience machine if they're right about this which I think they probably are because it makes complete sense from a kind of data processing mental data processing point of view and that most of what we actually see is prediction and expectation um and this may be true of movement as well so in robotics they've had some success by making robots move in a kind of way that's basian in other words it's constant it's intent combined with constant ongoing error correction rather than intention action Y and it's interesting because apparently if you design robots to move in this basian way it looks much more natural and animalistic or human than it does if you actually design them to kind of this is similar to the way the degrees of like light intensity is logarithmic so if you ask your Echo dot turn the lights down by 50% it'll feel like it's barely moved to feel like it's half as bright it needs to be something like 10% bright yeah that's interesting because that's psychophysics which is a lot of things we perceive logarithmically According to some scientists we perceive numbers logarithmically so if you take an innumerate tribe apparently and you go and put a grain of rice down and then you put nine grains of rice down and you ask them to make a pile that's halfway between the two people who've done maths who have an actual number system put five but people who actually don't put three 1 3 n because they see three is halfway between one and nine why would that be well it sort of makes sense itly makes sense to me in terms of our actual perception because there's a big difference between being attacked by one lion and two lions okay whereas the difference between being attacked by 98 lions and 99 Lions is kind of hair splitting and rather irrelevant so in terms of perceiving quantity logarithmically maybe that explains a lot of pricing okay you know that's slightly weird thing with price which is there are things that are expensive within the 20 to 30 40 range okay and then I can go and spend £200 on something and it doesn't feel that much more expensive yeah I've never quite understood this I never actually do that s of math where I think well I could buy you know 200 fries at McDonald's for the price of this jacket or you'd find like you know a stick of butter for £5.95 maybe not where you live but we would find that in Salford disgusting yes yeah a pint of beer well I'll have three for that price you know five 15 quid and so there's this whole weird thing about a our perception of price is is comparative our perception of lots of things are comparative and they're not linear yeah um emphatically not linear at all and so I you know it's always I always love American weather forecasts because they have this thing feels like temperature yes and it's you know well here in Scottsdale Arizona it's 110 but of course it's really humid so sorry it's really dry so it feels like about 90 something and it factors in Breeze humidity and something else I think there's a third factor maybe direct sunlight I'm not sure but I mean it it always struck me as really weird in that as you know as a fat Welsh Celtic guy okay I don't come into work if it hits 90 degrees Fahrenheit in London that's just okay forget that I can't cope with that but I wonderand around scotdale in Arizona when it's hund and something I'm as happy as Larry because everyone's kind of doing the same thing is really important point for climate change which is a lot of the climate change modeling is all about increased temperature but actually what you should be modeling for is increased wet bulb temperature which is uh temperature plus humidity because humans can survive quite well in low humidity at 100° Fahrenheit sorry I'm old okay I'm still using you're still on I'm the I will be the last person using I don't use Shillings and pens okay but I'm one of the last it I must be um in Europe the people the rental car companies must really hate me cuz I you know I get into a French rental car first thing I do is language English or Welsh if I'm really really perverse and then it says Fahrenheit miles okay I convert everything to Imperial and there's some poor German who has the car after me who has driven practically insane but um but you know but you you can survive in in really high temperatures if there's low humidity if you have 100% humidity a really fit human being uh even well um uh well provided with liquid liquids well well um not humidified what is it hydrated hydrated thank you even well hydrated will die yeah um by the way I had a rant this morning this is a complete um but I'd like to know your opinion on this actually which is as you probably know the government really wants people to get heat pumps and is a heat pump l so it's a way of hitting your house where effectively it's like a fridge in Reverse okay it stores heat and then so no it basically extracts heat from the outside air and actually pumps it so just as a fridge removes heat from the fridge and pumps it out into your kitchen a heat pump is a bigger version of a fridge which removes heat from the air outside your house makes the air outside your house a bit colder makes your house a lot hotter and you know one way of doing it is you replace your boiler with a heat pump and you put a great piping of water underneath your lawn because that makes it a bit more effective now Britain's a few things because of the magic of kind of you know thermodynamics okay you actually get five five times as much heat out as you put energy in there is it varies depending on what the temperature difference is between outside and and inside but whereas when you B burn gas in a boiler to heat your house it probably converts calorific value at about 50% into heat in the home you actually get a sort of 300 400% bonus when you use electricity to power a heat pump it's I know it sounds like magic but because it isn't generating heat like a boiler it's extracting it and moving it from the outdoors into into the indoors it's vastly more efficient even though you're using electricity not gas the catch so what well isn't a catch but here's where I was having a bit of a rant to these people at the this not their responsibility at all but one form of heat pump is just an air conditioning unit okay and if you've been in a hotel room what you may have noticed is the air conditioning unit is also the heater yep okay and all you do is it flips some little switch directional switch and an air conditioning unit stops removing heat and pump pumping it outside and starts extracting heat from the outside moving it inside so an air conditioning unit is also an airto a heat pump now this is what pisses me off okay quite a lot of people I think would keep their boiler and bit by bit like it's about 1500 2,000 quid to buy an air conditioning unit that'll that'll supply room okay and one year at a time they might get they might go okay I'll air condition the kitchen I I'll put a airto air heat pump in the kitchen and while they got three or four of these things hardly be using their boiler and their gas at all except in really really cold weather okay and you can't get a government grant for that why you can get a government grant for digging up your lawn putting huge numbers of pipes in throwing out your gas boiler um replacing your radiators you can get a government grant for doing something that's really stupid and complicated but the simple thing which exploits exactly that same benefit of heat transfer being very efficient and the reason is because they said well if we give people air conditioning they might might use it for air conditioning which will actually increase energy use and I'm get well look I'm a marketer right I can sell anybody air conditioning which also reduces their gas bill if I go to you and say how would you like air conditioning and it will also save you a couple of hundred quid a year on your heating bills people and and by the way you can keep your existing boiler you don't have to have someone digging up your lawn you just put this sort of thing with a fan outside your house and a bit of a vent thing coming in my dad's got it cuz my dad's 93 and we realized okay he needs air conditioning cuz you know when you're 80 when you're 93 a real Heat Wave could be quite dangerous okay I mean you you you know you you don't cool yourself as effectively as you as you get older and my dad now is at home with his air conditioning unit providing most of the heat downstairs it's a heat pump an air to air heat pump it's a really easy sale I got my dad my dad's you know he's quite stingy but I easily persuaded him to get this thing no problem no no no you can't get a grant for that but you can get a grant for digging up your lawn replacing your boiler throwing that out well okay I get it okay there's a risk that people use it for air conditioning well you could limit it so you can only use it for air conditioning when the temperature hits 24 degrees or something anyway okay I'm using Centigrade you notice um okay but I said mate you know this is effing Britain right I get it if I'm the Greek government okay if you know if I'm the government of Chad okay I don't want people installing air conditioning I can understand that point this is going to be like 3 four weeks of the year at most and you're going to cheer everyone up in that one week everyone's unbearable and also it's you're you're going to be able to sleep cuz you you know that week where you can't get to sleep cuz you're just lying there like some character in a gram green novel and the conversation just becomes that it just oh it's hot I can't get to sleep there no I can't either it's terrible you know and then you have the windows open and then it's noisy and all that sort of stuff so my viewers this is dumb because it's it's the great being the enemy of the good cuz I I always ask this question why do you actually recycle your bottles at a bottle Bank well 20% of it is save the world 80% of it is cuz smashing bottles inside a big metal container is a [ __ ] blast right okay we love it you know trip to the bottle bag is basically a treat okay now if you have this one positive which is oh and you get air conditioning as well okay I can see a load of people going yeah what the hell I can keep my existing gas I've got a bit of resilience here because I've still got a gas supply but most of my heat when it's economic and when there's an abundance of you know solar or other clean generated energy most of it can come to electricity whoopy Doo and I'm not going to freeze to death because I've still got my gas boiler and my radiators as a fallback I can see a million people doing that okay whereas digging up your lawn throwing out your existing equipment Dum and so it's a typical case where the thing has been optimized for objective Perfection not for realistic human reality so it's an absolutely classic case where instead of going to marketers and saying look never mind what's per perfect theoretically what can we reasonably persuade people to do can we persuade people who are quite rich with bigger houses to spend a bit of money which which means they'll save money quite a lot of the Year heating their home and they'll also get air conditioning if there's a horrible hot day in the summer and they don't have to do major building works yeah I can get people to do that can I get people to do the conventional heat pump solution forget about it okay so this is this is part of your um what's the world I'm looking for it's like a trunk that runs through your thinking is count exactly so don't optimize for reality and then impose it on people optimize for people and then get the reality to do you know to do what it can yes and that's my argument it's a classic case where you know if you're coming up with theoretically Perfect Solutions which are not marketable and you know if if you look at all the great inventors okay you look at Henry Ford you look at um well Edison you look at Steve Jobs okay they're huers they're salesman yes yeah they didn't you go I made a thing the reason they're so successful is probably not because they had a comparative advantage in inventing [ __ ] it's because they were just better at selling it yeah I mean if you look at the whole history of the sort of American 19th century invention people like Otis who invented the elevator were going around like state fairs and Fairgrounds demonstrating these you know elevator cars where and they'd cut the cable and it would drop Six Ines and just stop because it was the it was some super safety system but they didn't just talk about it they went and created a load of theater Y and I think I think that everybody is so Keen to pretend the world works well I think if I'm being a bit migil Christy I think it's not just that the left brain sees the world in this kind of reductionist some of the parts way I don't think it's just that I think the left brain really wants the world to be like that and wants to create a world which is like that because it feels more comfortable but you know I mean actually I'll give you two examples of this actually um one of them I worked on a bit and the other one I had nothing to do with but two of the I don't know i' be interested in your i' always like to bring in the other folks um two of the best ideas in the last 30 years in terms of tech products um The Meta portal TV which is basically video conferencing in HD on your television it was about 120 quid you plugged it into the back of your TV it had a camera which also tracked you around the room they went to Hollywood directors so that the camera would kind of track you and zoom into your face in a kind of brilliant you know artistic not like a kind of janky computer not a janky computery way it was a kind of Roger deakon kind of you know nice smooth little s it's like 500 quids worth of equipment for 100 quid and it sits on top of your Telly and you know if you've got relatives on the other side of the world or indeed the other side of the country you can basically kind of chat to them on your massive Telly as if they're there as if they're there it's extraordinary okay basically failed for marketing reasons because everybody was too frightened to let Facebook put a camera in their home okay total marketing failure brilliant product but the more extreme case which I I I I mourn every week Google Glass yes you said absolutely Sensational product badly marketed there are all kinds of reasons for the bad marketing they launched too soon there was some sort of weird Affair between one of the Google 2011 wasn't it was way before any of it's still necessary right okay the watch is stupid because I I've got to do something to see the time if I just had a little device which occasionally you said this email's come in you can ignore it but it might be important this is your next meeting this is the time you have 10 minutes turn left okay which just gave me small it didn't need to have a camera on the front that recorded that was dumb and also they gave it to a load of developers first who you know without dissing you know techies there a certain type they're a certain type so then you had the glass holes kind of or glass holes kind of you know appr probium but it was a I still think that product I mean someone because because people don't understand marketing they go oh that product didn't succeed I think that product was brilliant I think it was just badly marketed I mean you were saying this about video conferencing for years but but there's something else that I want to pull you on to here because it's it it dovetails nicely so Google Glass my fear for something like that would be so I so I'm I'm I'm talking to you here but I can also have emails come up in my heads up display so I'm a bit distracted over here and then maybe I can have there's an advert going on down there have you heard of sludge content no well I know about sludge I which which is the opposite of nudge generally what's that that's it's a bit similar to dark patterns in design of interfaces dark patter okay right dark patterns are kind of where you make it really easy to do the highly profitable thing and really difficult to say cancel your subscription oh yeah oh that's right we're going to get on that in a minute but so this I'm Chris is going to be annoyed at me now because I'm going to be showing Rory something on my phone okay sure we can have a nice inser appearing and this this is sludge content so let's see if I'll I'll just get your yo reaction it did you know every single odd number has an e in it James are you high again no wait a minute bro since you were born deaf what Lang what do you make of that well okay so you've got you're not controlling that character at the bottom it's just running around jumping absolutely that's just on that's a Tik Tok video so what's it designed okay tell me what it's designed to do what's the the way it was explained to me was two completely unrelated videos mean your means your visual brain can never get bored oh I see something else just to take your mind off things if you get a tiny bit bored for a second that explains a very interesting thing which is one of the things that really annoys me about the um back to the office movement okay is I sit at home I've got a 55 in um 4K TV which I use as a monitor a fix to the wall in front of the desk I've got a laptop screen I've got a professional webcam and I come into the office and they basically give it say here's your plug and here's a chair okay now one thing we know about productivity apparently is that multiple monitors are an absolute productivity booster okay and yet what we're doing is we're doing this hot desking thing where people sit I'm 58 okay one of the things that really drives me crazy is mobile pH I mean a lot of older people use a tablet basically as a mobile phone yeah because the mobile phone is too damn small and fiddly unless you have good fat finger design the mobile phone for people over a certain age is just too fiddly and difficult to read and you know you know I would find it weird that my kids would like book a flight on a mobile phone like if I tried to book a flight on a mobile phone I'd end up in Addis Ababa at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday feels a bit too small to be doing that and also also of course it makes the choice architecture more painful because on a good web page you can make choose from 12 options then another page on you've chosen from another 12 you've now got one out of 144 options in two clicks in a mobile phone it either involves a lot of scrolling or a hell of a lot of clicking before you actually get to what you want so there are all sorts of reasons why the big I I find kids weird like this I mean well you know I mean you know when I all through the 70s ' 80s you know '90s how big is your TV let's watch this on a bigger screen wow it's IMAX okay and I got my [ __ ] 22y old kids going oh I can watch this on a thing the size of a [ __ ] letter box what was all that about lovely story about that by the way which is totally irrelevant but um uh people always talked about how big their television was I me literally through the 50s and 60s and kth Williams mom and the carry-on films uh was clearly the person from whom Kenneth Williams got his sense of smart was he the I same absolutely and he um so Kenneth Williams mom is sitting backstage waiting for some filming of one of the carry on films to finish and so what television have you got uh she asked her friend we've just bought a 14in console and tell with Williams's mom said 14 in that's enough to console anyone so clearly clearly the sort of genetic theory of smut I think which is that it was kind of I I don't think I I think his mum was probably a major contributory factor to seems likely doesn't it it does doesn't it look can I pull you on to something completely different why do you think we're on exploit underere exploiting Sonic branding uh well Mark riton has some very good data which shows that I'm always interested okay in that the best of something which is underrated that's where to go right if you're buying property if you're buying drink go and find the a category that's underrated and then find the best thing within that category it's gaming the system country music would be a very good example Sherry in alcoholic drinks under find the best yeah exactly if if you try and buy great wine it you can buy great wine it costs an absolute Fortune okay if you want to buy great Cherry it's probably 50% more than the average Cherry yeah and so you get this over concentration I said this with Rick Rubin actually the various musical genres and it's considered high status to dismiss the two that were first to be dismissed are typically heavy metal and Country yeah and that's because of the user imagery it's nothing to do with the actual inherent quality of the music itself so because it's associated with Associated withs or cowboy hats and stuff like that but the country music is kind of musicing I mean my church by Marin Morris is a recommendation for for everyone so went to a mastering studio in New Jersey over the over the summer Chris garinger uh was the chap who showed me around and uh it's an amazing thing cuz he's got this million dooll room just for making records sound perfect kind of at the end of the factory process it's like shining it and yeah and he's like what do you want to listen to and I was like uh just show me what we got he goes listen to some of this and puts on Marin Morris amazing country music you can have it you know it's really really loud you're like it's probably one of the best days of my life of course it is a million dollar sound system for country music and so Sherry would be another point and so one of the things I think that advertising marketing people get wrong is go and find the things that nobody else does and do them well right and um friend of mine gremme fin brilliant brilliant great ba face absolutely right you should interview me he's a neighbor of mine in deal so I go out to dinner with him quite a bit I'll send him this but he said he started his whole career because he said nobody wanted to do the radio ads ah now the interesting thing same as Paul book Paul book exactly the same nobody wanted to do the particularly in the UK because we didn't have a long tradition of commercial radio as in us too much BBC to the US I mean interestingly the whole film Convoy uh the whole Convoy thing is was actually created by something is it BJ McCall who was actually an advertising copywriter who created the character who then created the song which actually then is we are on exactly yeah so that the entire origins of that are kind of because I think he used to if I'm right he used to um quite a lot of quite a lot of the copywriters would actually record their own stuff as well I some but gr spotted two things one of which is you got to work with Incredible Talent cuz you could get amazing actors to appear in a radio ad for a fraction of the cost of appearing in TV so you got to work with amazing talent if you just put a little bit of extra money and love in it made a really big difference and also a good radio ad was a lot more surprising to the consumer than a good TV ad yeah you know it had that kind of I wasn't expecting that that's actually a really great ad you know um and so finding that that that game theory approach which is find what's underrated and then do it well and two of the things I think which are completely underexploited certainly riton says this Sonic branding of any kind uh where you effectively associate the brand and you give it a certain distinctiveness of noise now it's interesting to note that Netflix and HBO and more recently ITV X have all created a really really distinctive one of them is called I think silent Angel the other one's probably called tum I'm not quite sure like that yeah yeah tum okay those things actually have an effectively a kind of you know I think a connection to the amydala that is much much stronger than we give credit to and there's an argument that you know some great ads you've actually started with them with the music and built the ad around it yeah in a sense I mean you know a lot of the great Levis stuff was track dependent if you it's always worth asking that question there was a guy called Neil French who was creative director of WP in ogl and first of all he asked everybody in the sort of creative community in ogal what is your favorite sort of one minute of film in the whole of the films you've seen your Zulu wasn't it might it might well have been actually the singing yeah you're absolutely right and he pointed out that actually in the vast majority of them there was music yes um he used to do a thing which got him into huge trouble which is he he'd show uh the seven dwarfs uh with high ho and then he'd show the same footage with the horse vessel song and of course you know if you have a Nazi marching song versus you know a Disney song it comes across completely differently okay the whole meaning of the thing is changed by the the music yep um one of the risks with Sonic branding I don't know if you've noticed a lot of them tend to devolve into the same kind of PlayStation startup sound with like a single piano note uh an impact and some nice pads yes so it's hard to get it some away from that and also whistling tends to be quite effective as well oh it's I mean I I think itv's done quite a good job with ITV X I think they've done they they've they've got into the Zone there the other thing that's hugely underrated we've got a company here uh in the building uh called Mando connect which is one of the very few companies to specialize in and riton says this brand Partnerships ason Martin James Bond exactly yeah and that's probably you know one of the most exalted ones but they generally are extraordinarily coste effective which is probably why they get um neglected right so there's always there's always this problem with the human brain which is we think that we pay attention to what's important but actually we think important what we're paying attention to Yes it kind of works in both directions and the Very fact that something gains our attention gives it importance and this is usually why a lot of the big problems in history come from Left Field where you're not looking exactly yeah everybody's focused on what what they think is important no one saw n no no no one sees 911 coming no one sees Co coming Etc and so so our attenion is in a sense you know it's it's um it can be a kind of feedback distorting feedback loop yeah one of the things I think that happens in marketing is that we pay a lot of attention to the things that are expensive yes okay and so that gets all our attention so we automatically assume the TV commercial must be massively important whereas you know brand um brand Partnerships you know they don't cost very much to do so your budgets tiny so you don't really worry about it very much and so you have this fundamental I think that happened to radio advertising it was partly considered unimportant because it was cheap really I mean I you know I'm not being paid by the radio advertising Bureau to say this but in all the time I've worked in this business I've never really seen a case where radio advertising doesn't work pretty well the business is kind of painful in an age of management consultants and Engineers because one of my favorite phrases is it's from you know the greatest expert in kind of productivity and out put uh of the 20th century a guy called W Edwards Deming who just said to optimize the whole you have to sub optimize the parts and what people try and do with ads is they try and make every component of it work as hard as possible oh that will make the overall ad the most effective but actually there's a role for Whit space in press ads there's a role for silence in TV ads you know um there's a role for just having a period of Music before someone starts talking my co-producer Aaron Bentley gas music went to Jazz college and he said they told him one of the most valuable pieces of advice there ever he said not every bar needs to be a work of Genius no interesting have you been in a voiceover session where they what would you say um put every single word under scrutiny can you say it you know lifts with a bit more yeah yeah but the Gestalt is what's important the hole is what's important so you're saying don't try and optimize all the little Parts there's a fantastic scene in the trip which has Steve kougan and Rob bden talking about basically about advertising voice over and also t What It TV continuity announcement that's they had that Wonder little thing was is it with um apparently it drives the actor Trevor Eve was it Desperate Measures with Trevor Eve coming soon to and and he said you know when if it's BBC 2 you need to give a sense of Homecoming coming soon to BBC 2 and there is ITV it's Desperate Measures with Trev coming right and the whole thing about the tality of the whole is what really and of course it's it's very difficult you you it it seems very easy to talk about the individual word and the Cadence on the individual word but actually it's the whole that conveys the meaning I mean the most extreme case of that of course which always fascinates the hell out of me is song lyrics treating song lyrics As Standalone pieces of writing okay so the the the first one is um uh I love it when you get a really anly retentive person who points out that if you take for example I shot a man in Reno just to see him die and at some point said well why then are you in is it s Quentin isn't it the jail yeah okay cuz surely if you shot a man in Reno you'd be dealt with by the um Nevada Penitentiary the Nevada Criminal Justice System would take your case unless there were some Interstate element to your crime okay and picking picking the details apart or the fact that um very funny thing one of my favorite songs of all time is the day before you came by Abba their last ever song which only got to number number 17 and it's kind of like this weird Masterpiece but you can change the entire meaning of the song If you suggest that it's someone giving evidence of their movements in response to a police inquiry okay you know um I must have left my work about you know my desk about a quarter after 5 or whatever it was and um uh but it has a complete inconsistency because she stops at about 6:00 to get a Chinese some Chinese food to go and then she only gets home at 8 right and there a load of sort of retened people going well either Swedish Chinese restaurants are unbelievably inefficient or she was up to no good for those two hours you two hours are unaccounted for an yet was it an Yeta fog I can't remember which one's singing okay these two hours Miss fdog are clearly unac counted for yeah but what's interesting about that is you then take songs literally you know like I mean you know um uh for example you know um sex bomb with Tom Jones where's a totally meaningless okay if you look look at them purely as words but if you put them in a song and you get Tom to sing them you know exactly what Tom means yeah okay spy on me baby you s what the you think it would be different with a different singer would have different meaning nothing would play come on well she be reasonable of course okay you know nothing could possibly replace Tom of course no um and um but it it is it's fascinating because there's the whole question of this is very Ian mcgilchrist you know the whole rather than the component part and it's probably a bit of a problem where in various uh art forms specialisms and silos have taken over to such an extent that you and it happens in business where people are not responsible very few people are responsible for the business and the value it creates instead they're optimizing this component part to which they've been charged with responsibility pop song production someone writes the lyrics then someone produces a demo and then someone has to change it someone has to obviously perform it someone has to mix it afterwards and then master so you got this long production line but when do you think about it it makes no sense at all right that 50% of the world's best songwriters or singer songwriters yeah okay that shouldn't happen they're performing it themselves they're performing it themselves think Dy The Beetles the stones okay you'd think now obviously okay if you take two absolutely brilliant songwriters Liber and Schaller okay I think it's fair to say that two balding middle-aged guys with hor RG effects probably would have had trouble getting hound dog into the top that's why they hated the Beatles at the time wasn't it's like these kids these [ __ ] kids are getting into the charts and writing apparently you had the problem because mtown adhered to this kind of production line Detroit system they were trying to stop Michael Jackson writing music basically they were saying no no no you sing okay you're you're I know this is probably not the most um but your job is to sing we've got these guys in a shed over there who are writing the songs uh we've got Studio 3 free we get a song from these guys we give it to you and now you perform it and record it okay but I want to write my own no yeah no you can't do that well this this is probably like in your in your world of thinking isn't it it's like when something when the what the apparatus isn't quite ready for uh the new arrival so Elvis Presley is what I'm thinking of was treated the way they knew how to treat singers then not like the Beatles where he's a rockstar who TS we need to put him in films and get his songs in the films interesting yeah they Tre him more like a movie star than like a rockar cuz the rockar was not an archetype that existed yet no I suppose actually one a few of the Beatles acknowledged that didn't they that without Elvis there would be no Beatles there would no Beatles yeah but yeah so he's the first rock star and as a result was kind of crucified on doing crw doing CR films yeah exactly that my brother-in-law is a script writer for variously sort of Silent Witness and waking the dead and so forth and he said of course the whole thing is based on a complete pretense which is that serenic scientists investigate crimes and get majorly involved in driving around the place you know breaking into people's homes yeah they're not they're not they're not what they what do they call they're not actually the um C is that what you call it no no no they're purely their support function just an analyst yeah yeah yeah but obviously that wouldn't make very good television in fedus if they weren't allowed to leave the was it the ly laboratory or whatever you know okay if they weren't allowed to leave they said oh we've just had something come in oh look here's an envelope you know that wouldn't make great television you should watch air crash investigation no can I tell you a very funny story about this my wife occasionally accuses me with some justification of not always but under certain circumstances of being totally insensitive like you know you pushed in front of that woman with a push chair yeah you know and um for about two years there was this thing which was an app on your laptop and at the time I had like a 17inch MacBook Pro enormous screen yeah and you could get the sky app and you could download anything that you entitled to watch on Sky you could download to your laptop and then watch it okay and with this 17inch screen for about 6 months until I suddenly had an epiphany I used to watch air Crush investigation on a plan no way okay and I was sitting there and of course what you don't actually particularly to in business class where the people aren't choosing to fly okay about one in three people one in one in four a [ __ ] scar flying there people who are just frightened on takeoff and landing and there are people who literally spend the entire flight in a state of Terror okay and I was sitting there there was like a picture of like the wreckage of a 747 strewn over a Japanese thing or effectively you know the the the uh reenactment of a of a plane going into stall before and then you know then there was the Black Box being retrieved from 300 ft below the water surface and I was watching all this stuff I I'm not remotely frightened to Flying I'm bit weirdly I'm a TI tiny bit more frightened than I was M but it happens fascinating I had a friend in the foreign office and there are people who spend their entire working lives basically flying all over the place not a CL in the world and at the age of something like 55 they basically feel their Lux run out and they suddenly become really really nervous Flyers but I was sitting there with a 17in screen with air crash investigation on didn't Ur to me and this is a fair point of my wife that there are occasions where I'm just totally insensitive I mean there are certain there are certain there's a bit of me where um Larry David um Cur Your Enthusiasm and I actually brought my wife in and said you've got to watch this cuz if you watch this you'll understand me yeah where funnily enough how long into the marriage was that um well what what what happens in the scene and I can imagine myself doing so Larry's wife is on a plane that's going through a really dangerous thunderstorm and is about to crash and she manages to get the flone to basically say Larry Larry I'm not sure we're going to make it Larry's got the cable guy there trying to repair the cable TV and he wants to know where the warranty card is okay for the cable box okay and he's yeah yeah yeah yeah and she comes back and then says I'm sorry Larry I'm leaving you're just totally insensitive I was there you know thinking I was going to die and you basically now i s my I'm I'm really sorry but I can completely imagine myself doing that you know I've finally got the cable guy to come out you know there's this problem where he can't watch the basketball cuz it keeps going fuzzy okay and I would become totally fixated on that problem to the extent of ignoring the context of any other kind of problem and that's what I was doing when I was watching air crash investigation I just love the reenactments where they basically you know they write on a whiteboard like fuselage question mark yes yes what a part of something yeah there usually what is it they flapper on aerons Etc yeah but YouTube premium you get better video quality it remembers what you've Last Watched I think it improves the recommendations it's it seems like aot lot of money cuz unlike Netflix you can watch it for free but at the same time it's kind of kind of the last thing I'd give up if I if I went bust it'd be the last subscription to go I think that's a that's a much better way of looking at it because like you say the is a weird psychological thing with the fact that it most it seems like it's always free so why would I ever pay for it absolutely absolutely and actually they trying to hammer it with adverts on the free version what what one I has to say is that um uh you know I said this today uh to somebody else and in sort of in the government said schools have to teach videography now it's a basic form of literacy being able to film yourself record yourself and just understanding the grammar of film making and In fairness with YouTube it doesn't have to be you know it doesn't have to be Roger dekins right you know but if you've got basic competence in narrative storytelling and film making that's really what you need and actually I'm gonna I'm going to say also um you one of the reasons one of the reasons I think and this is be interesting to know what I mcgilchrist thought of this I think one of the one of the reasons I'm a huge um Zoom fan and video conferencing fan is that before we had the pandemic and we had video conferencing too much exchange was textual right okay there's a huge if you think about it conversation is probably human face to-face conversation is you know I mean you could argue it's kind of millions of years old if you go back primates but it's definitely hundreds of thousands of years old reading is about 7,000 years old it's you know and everyone reading is about 100 years old it's a very similar thing to dogs the human domestication of dogs happened like 100,000 years ago and cats is like 4,000 years ago why you get greater variety there is an argument that dogs actually selected for humans because if a dog liked you we've been bred by dogs just as much as dogs have been bred by humans because if a dog liked you it conferred a huge advantage on you for survival purposes of course because human plus dog is kind of is that why in I Am Legend he has a dog well there's an argument there's a really extreme argument which I don't know where it comes from but somebody mentioned that their wife at the University of b was involved in this theory that humans at their worst their lowest e of human population it the population was down to about 8,000 breeding pairs sometime during the Ice Age and the theory was that the people who survived were the people who domesticated dogs wow and because you know if you think about the combinatorial advantage of human plus dog as a hunting machine plus warmth all those kind of things ability to make fire cook food Etc it's an unbelievable bit of symbiosis that's amazing um but in in a way I think going back to convers open-ended conversation and away from like PowerPoint and writing part of everything else we can speak much much faster than we can write okay so writing obviously makes sense if you're dealing with an audience of thousands because you can read faster than you can listen yeah okay so there is an advantage to the consumer in reading things but in writing things and then what was happening I think before Zoom came along this is again the whole question about the the the parts and the hole it seems really efficient sending an email you get something off your back you press send it's gone it doesn't cost you anything it's instantaneous okay but if you think of a a conversation where you're clearing up where you're going to meet in a pub one evening okay if you it over the phone or by Zoom okay you arrive at a conclusion within about four minutes I can't do Wednesday what about so and so I don't know the Crown's closed let's go there on email is Ex on email it will be it will literally stretch out over days yes you know they whole things which are a living nightmare like conveyancing and moving house in the UK because everything happens sequentially okay rather than simultaneously and by bringing back what you might call synchronous decision making and synchronous conversation now this is one thing that really fascinates me right okay so you get these businesses and you get articles in the Telegraph and the times which everybody must get back into the office this working from home thing is a [ __ ] disgrace you know I can't imagine it you know I mean someone was someone I won't name them but quite senior in this organization was driven practically insane because the chief executive of Sainsbury's told them that Friday is their new Saturday and of course this person is suddenly thinking all my staff where they're supposed to be working are going shopping well actually the truth is probably are but maybe they started work an hour and a half earlier in the day and they're going to work in the evening yeah so actually going off to shop in the middle of the day isn't a Dar use of your time if all you're going to do is email stuff anyway but here's the thing that strikes me there's unbelievable what you might call puritanism bias in this which is that businesses have introduced loads of things which are real productivity Killers like email for example really really you know the fact that people don't have multiple screens the fact that you have hot desking the fact that nobody has an office office open plan offices all these things have been introduced which are empirically really disastrous for productivity but no one cared because the employees didn't like them okay but then you come up with flexible working okay which employees actually enjoy and suddenly there's this oh no this can't be allowed to happen yeah that that literally is evidence of people going I don't know whether my people are productive or not but if they're happy I'm probably doing something wrong yeah that is literally the most extraord zero some thinking you can possibly imagine y you know cuz nobody cared about flat hot desking CU staff didn't like it nobody cared about getting rid of offices staff didn't like it nobody cared about email suddenly came on because everybody's really busy with their email the fact that they're being totally ineffectual doesn't really matter no staff don't really like emails so that's fine we'll just introduce this the second you then introduce a potential productivity booster which saves your fortune and the staff really enjoy it's treated with massive suspicion yeah that's absurd well I don't know I don't know I don't know how that's like saying these car things they're terrible because people prefer them to walking we must get rid of this car thing because look people won't walk anymore but there's that I remember well thinking about being at very early Primary School it's kind of insane that we start people at 56 years old and say sit down for 15 years no in Finland you don't start they have huge rates of literacy yeah uh unbelievably High rates of General readership in Finland and they start at seven I think don't they yeah yeah there's but there's I'm sorry phones going I will just have to hi can I call you back in about 20 minutes chief exac of Co call where are you now 15 cool okay I I'll be leaving in about 25 minutes 30 minutes I think excellent okie dokie byebye okay lots of bye-bye lots of love byebye Mrs souland yeah Mrs S yeah she's probably you know accusing me of being insensitive again I can't wait to retire cuz I I I um uh there are various really really mischievous things I want to introduce which I don't believe but they're worth it's rather like comedy they're worth saying just because there's a bit of Truth in them and um no I I I was saying about the the relative the relative work done by men and women in the household and you always get these statistics saying you know 70% of domestic chores form by women I do find out that that's because if we try doing them we're told we're doing it wrong okay this crap by the way did you do this business of separating whites and colors what the [ __ ] all that about right been day if okay my shirt it goes in the [ __ ] washing machine yeah if it's going to leak all over the bloody place I don't want it I'll Chuck it out you've said this about dishwasher safe stuff as well right it's like if it doesn't go in the dishwasher I don't want it I don't want it no it's it's by definition is dishwasher proof because my dishwasher will kill off everything that isn't dishwasher proof and it's dishwasher Darwinism okay everything I own will be dishwasher prooof if you put it all through the dishwasher right there wh some colors thing what the [ __ ] hell is that all about you know I'll finish my dubstep story cuz I forgot okay dubstep Yeah back to dubstep there was a YouTube documentary that was saying that the 2007 smoking van change the nature of DJ sets because before that you could find a spot in the room and smoke away if you were a smoker and the DJ could take you on this journey that starts off soft at about 11:00 p.m. Peaks at about 1:00 a.m. it's big energy and then starts take off after that like you can't do that anymore because everyone's dipping in and out for cigarettes all the time so it has to be constant climax all the time which has taken the sort of narrative shape out of it so so there's actually a theory about smoking because are there this this business okay where and this is what's really really interesting is the extent to which really trivial seemingly trivial apparently unrelated or tangential things have a massive bearing on what actually happens in something I there's a whole theory about um uh some performance of American music which is there to do with the rhythm of the Railway train interesting yeah yeah cu the idea was that people would be spending a lot of time going DP DP dump D dump and that actually you know the American Railways had an effect on American Music I have read that quite seriously and then I mean by the way um we have uh Hitler's extremely uh strongly held anti-smoking views to thank for the fact that the Germans Lost World War II because Hitler had two real peculiarities apparently when he was in this bunker in it's in what is now Poland um the the the what was it the wolf's Lair or whatever it was called um we have two cafes here one of them is on the ground floor and the other one's right on the top and I want of them call the wolf's slay and the Eagle's Nest but for some reason people thought that was politically un incorrect but but um the um but but when he was in this bunker the two things were he was obsessed with a really low temperature and so the place was literally it was sort of I'll try and do I want to do Centigrade I'll it was like 50° okay and secondly there was a complete smoking ban okay in in the kind of map room and so you had all these incredibly ail German generals who spent most of the time standing outside having a tab and trying to warm themselves up like it was a ra meanwhile he was indoors on his own basically going oh let's not bother with Moscow we'll get a staring grad okay so I mean Churchill would allow cigars no no no I I don't think there was any nonsmoking or indeed non-drinking I don't think there were many impositions on drink or smoking in the uh in the cabinet War rooms I imagine they was pretty happy tabbing away but no it is it is funny how these extraordinary things come along which are oblique and I kept and one of the reasons I think we're slow to pick up the importance is that we're not calibrated yet to see their overall effects so one of the one of the questions I keep asking I asked this of the great people at Proctor and Gamble two days ago in Switzerland I said you're having a debate about flexible working okay and the whole discussion revolves around do we want our staff to work flexibly because you know they might be 2% less productive or we might lose Serendipity I said there's actually a much bigger question here which is do you want your customers or your consumers to be able to work flexibly because if you allow over 5 10 15 years a degree of flexible working people can live where they want they can spend much less of their disposable income on transport and less of their disposable income on housing and accommodation so I mean one of the things you can do okay you're based in Manchester we've had what four Zoom calls for every physical meeting yes okay and you know we probably wouldn't have had the physical meeting without the zoom calls so you can you know the need for you to move to I know Chris Williamson's moved to Austin Texas but the need for you to move to London is Trivial now it's pointless right whereas let's be honest you know 10 years ago you know you probably had to move to London if you wanted to do what you did well someone was saying to me the other day they said they were still saying from BBC creative the saying you still have to be in London to have those moments where you're in 750 mph with Sam Ashwell who can turn around and say there's an industry party tonight and all the agencies are going and then they all climb in together and then that's where deals are sometimes done what we actually need is micro housing in London so people can spend a large part of their time somewhere else I would I would I would adore I'd buy a micro house in London like a shot I I've got I've got a small well not that small small flat in Deal slightly larger flat near 7even Oaks the only property I'd ever by in London would literally be like a micro hotel room you know microwave toilet shower bit of a Telly somewhere to stay some crash what also why do you want a big house in London because what's the point of being in London if you're going to be out indoors I mean you know and all these people digging down and building a cinema room in a pool as someone said in The Spectator look if you want a pool in a cinema room that's what s is for ex don't try to build it into some Chelsea bloody you know terrorist house it's what do you think is going to happen in this city with I mean generally in cities in the west you know the uh there was some stat that came out recently where it's like you can't there is no minimum wage job that can afford you like a one bed apartment in the US anymore or something like that well you have the situation okay this is one of my politically correct things I got to be really careful here okay um what we didn't realize was that the Dual income family went from being an option to an obligation yes yeah yeah okay now okay I've got to be really careful here because people getting what what Rory is saying is that you women should get back in the house in the kitchen saying that the two people who introduced me to this concept are both women and both of unimpeachable I think feminist credentials they're Elizabeth Warren the the Democratic I'm right of Center in the UK I could never understand I thought Elizabeth Warren was brilliant but for some reason Americans Pocahontas As Trump called her Americans didn't warmed her at all but I always thought she was absolutely fascinating she made this point she wrote a paper I think called the double income trap the other person who I do know who used to talk about it a lot was Fay Weldon right who said said it was a brilliant option when it first came along and it was fantastic for her but it went from being an option now where if you are single you cannot buy a house right I've got friends who are single there was someone in Canary Warf who rents who is a hospital consultant okay who cannot buy a flat right because now you even get further absurdity which is if you go to Newcastle I my daughter was at Newcastle University and the student area of Newcastle is jasmond which is like the nights Bridge of bloody Newcastle and you realize that four students can outbid a family yes you said about your old office didn't you yeah so we were out bid we were out bid we we couldn't move to the original office building because they decided they didn't wanted to be offices for the fourth largest Ad Agency in Britain they'd rather have students in there and I'm going so effectively your ability to share property and and combine income it's gone from being an option which which is hey that's great we can get a second income in and we can get we can save a bit of money and buy a better house to if you want a house forget about it unless you both work yeah and as a consequence okay now when I was a kid and you know I'm in the Welsh borders a workingclass guy could support a family on one salary you see this Ironically in fredman's documentary watch that on YouTube about you know uh work efficiency in New York in the 1970s well one of the things it destroyed interestingly was Labor Force Mobility cuz in America in the ' 50s guy in New York who got an offer of you know a better job in California off your wi right now both of you have to find a job in the new place the only place where both of you can maximize opportunity is in the middle of a mega City a New York a Los Angeles you know maybe a Chicago so it's much more difficult to live in a Suburban place or to say you know a single guy can move to Newcastle and actually have a much better life because even if he's paid less actually gets a house to live in and stuff right very very difficult for two people to move simultaneously you've really got to synchronize that in Elizabeth Warren's piece she makes the interesting point which never occurred to me but it's actually not bad financial advice okay now I shouldn't say this but she said don't go and buy the most expensive house you can afford okay buy a cheaper house and spend your money on well she doesn't say this literally like hot tubs and Versace hats and extravagances okay that's terrible Financial device isn't it and she said No Elizabeth she said because if you hit Financial Financial Rocky patch you can stop heating the hot tub and you can stop buying the Versace Underpants but you're stuck with your house right you're stuck with your mortgage and I thought it's it's just a really interesting take which is I'd never thought of that which is that extravagance does give you optionality okay whereas whereas property is a massive great commitment yes which is actually a kind of albatross around your neck I mean the family advice for us was always buying a small house in a good area yeah that's not bad that's not bad advice but I mean it's by the way I don't think it's even legal to build micro houses in London unless it's student accommodation okay well there are a load of people who actually what they'd like to do is move out of London to somewhere more sizable with a bit of space and then keep a foothold in London with what is effectively a tiny house yeah and yet I don't think you're allowed to I don't think you're allowed to build them that's all I'd buy I don't see you know if I'm going to be in London I'm going to do London things I'm not going to pace around my library or drawing room right I'm going to be out doing London things yes so all I need is basically a crash pad and yet you're not allowed to build them and frankly that's probably all people will be able to afford in cities like New York and it's worse still because the property Market uh the new build Market is optimized for two-bedroom apartments because they're great for buy toet investment okay um and they're also great for overseas buyers okay they're terrible for a family you can't actually once you're in a two-bedroom apartment if you have two children of two different genders you basically got to move out wow so when you think about it the whole what's being built is optimized not for the the inhabitants of London it's being optimized for rent seeking investors really and I suppose we'll have to pick up on the decline of sort of family building in people my age but that that seems like a symptom of it what there is a solution which is you create a re you create a suburb okay with Suburban housing but you don't let people over 35 move there and so you create a really okay I'll let you into I think a bit of a secret which is one of the reasons Brits love moving to Los Angeles right is you can live in Suburbia but it's still cool yeah okay CU new Los Angeles accommodation housing is Suburban right Richard Burton said it's endless suburb endless suburb yeah and actually no one thinks it's uncool to move to Los Angeles and go and you know move into sort of you know somewhere just off um you know whatever it might be I mean uh you know you move to Wonderland or that Valley thing or whatever okay totally cool to live in a Suburban House in Los Angeles with a pool okay if you do that in Su you know or you do that in Connecticut not very cool no and in Sur you get sort of eyes from the neighbors wouldn't you so um do you need us done Anna yep what do I need to do next is there I'm got to go home am I this is as we said didn't we this is Rory's do I have something this evening do I have a late thing this evening or is that cancelled there was something in the diary may be tomorrow that might be tomorrow I'll go and see but um this has been I mean it's been really but that question of the Dual income it's it's wonderful because it start it's a furline trap okay it starts off as an option and it's totally desirable because if you want to earn two incomes you can what's now happened this is why I'm very sympathetic with the four-day week and flexible work is every single family has lost 35 hours of discretionary time a week okay at the unit of the family without really gaining in wealth at all who's gained government loves it because they get two lots of taxes rather than one okay Property Owners love it CU now your property price has gone up y but effectively most of the increase in earnings through having two earning two earning people in a household rather than one has been mocked up by property and transport costs and the actual increase in the in your ability to make discretionary purchases has hardly improved at all so it's a massive loss of discretionary time well I suppose we'll have to end on a dark note then that is a don't shoot the messenger it's Fay Welden and Elizabeth Warren okay I'm not I'm not suggesting we should reverse this um at all um in fact I think I go further as a feminist as a really extreme feminist I think men should stay at home entirely you know doing lious H task and playing computer games while while while their wives go off to run Goldman Sachs internationally that would be my ideal solution so you can't accuse me of any kind of but you heard it here first Rory everyone will be leaving on the mail side M tomorrow Rory thanks actually there's one truth men are a lot better at doing nothing aren't we you want want someone to do nothing is that fair yeah if you want someone to do nothing you need a bloke

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Id: wqb0f4vmkis

Length: 73min 22sec (4402 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024