Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Rory Sutherland

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Rory Sutherland is a British advertising executive, author, and marketing visionary. He’s the UK Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, one of the world's largest and most renowned ad firms. Mad Men is largely inspired by the company and one of the firm’s founders, David Ogilvy. Rory started Ogilvy’s behavioral science practice, pioneering the application of behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology to marketing and advertising. Some of his counterintuitive theories on marketing and human behavior are compiled in his book Alchemy: The Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense, where, primarily, he argues that great marketing ideas are often built around a core that is profoundly irrational. ------- Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with your order. ------- House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Get a free box of Dry Roasted Namibian Sea Salt Macadamias + 20% off Your Order With Code TETRA Use code TETRA for 20% off at checkout

Tetragrammerton. I think we're in danger of becoming trapped in a kind of communications media ghetto. I think there's a desperate problem not only in business actually but in institutional decision making where it's woefully in need of creativity and this is why I loved your book so much because actually of course your book explains something very interesting which is good advice in order to be creative okay when you think about it it's not necessarily good career advice because the very things and the very behaviors that make people reliably creative often are not rewarded indeed may be punished I, do you know why I went into creative advertising?

It's because when I was applying for various jobs, a creative director came in and said, I've got a very unusual job, because when I look down my department, if I see everybody staring out of the window, I'm basically happy, because that's what they're supposed to be doing. I thought, okay, I want that job.

In fact, that was the decisive moment. But one of the things I noticed about modern behavior, this is what I was mentioning about my second, my next book, it's basically all around, do you want to win arguments or do you want to solve problems because we've made the mistake of thinking they're the same thing, and that the person with the best arguments has the best solutions.

And my vastly inferior experience to yours, I would absolutely defer to you in this, but both of us, I think, have come to the same conclusion that, in fact, what you might call sequential logic, simply the use of kind of sequential logic in problem solving, doesn't really get you to the best place. It's fundamentally suboptimal in problem solving and that problem solving is much, much more Darwinian, much more iterative. It also I think relies on some conscious mental processes that we can't, and actually tacit skills that we can't really put down on paper or completely codify. To a point where it's an interesting question whether the creative process is in fact a process

and the fact that you sometimes told your book effectively a way of being. In other words, you actually have to be this thing. It's not something you actually do that can be easily replicated. You have to acquire that kind of third eye before you can do it. I thought your book was fantastic in that. I mean wonderful lessons like beginners mind, for example, that quite often the person who comes to something completely fresh will have, in fact, the benefit of ignorance. Yeah, they don't have the baggage of thinking they know the right way to do it. A wonderful little story about this, about the loss of assumptions.

So there's a very successful, and it's one of those things that's only really been admired in retrospect. Very successful, British train called the Intercity 1-2-5, which was introduced in the mid-70s and only left service about four years ago. And the reason it had such a long period of use was that it was just very, very good. It was two punchy diesels end to end. But what made it remarkable is that the person who designed it was told in the specification that obviously trains had to have buffers between the compartments. And no one in the rail industry had asked this question at all until he said,

why do we need the buffers? Is it for shunting? Is this train ever going to be shunted? No, well then we don't need buffers. And it's incredibly easy for people who are deeply versed in something to bring all the baggage and assumptions with them. And that business, and one of the things I think doesn't happen enough is areas of scientific expertise, or what you might call it, consider engineering expertise, would actually benefit enormously. And this is the thing that really worries me, I suppose. This is what I spend my time fighting, which is very, very simple asymmetry, okay? All creative people have to kind of present their ideas

to rational people for approval. They're someone in finance, someone in legal, someone in compliance. Well, you know, I'll accept that, but it never happens the other way around. You never get finance people with a spreadsheet game. Well, I've arrived at this figure, and my recommendation is 3.7,

but before I actually share that with the board, I'm gonna present it to some slightly wacky people to see if they've got an alternative idea, or to see if they can redefine the question. Never happens. And that's the real problem that you probably read about by Ian McGill-Trist called the Master in his Emissary. Not really.

It's about the divided brain. It's a very interesting theory that he effectively believes that we've created societies where the left brain has unhealthy dominance over the right hemisphere. But I think we've also done that organizationally. We've created this world where left-brain people are free to act on their fairly narrow, rational behaviors without being policed. Whereas, the burden of proof demanded of a creative act is literally 20 times greater. And I blame things like economics for this, you know, that makes people think that a totally crude mathematical model can somehow have predictive value over human behaviour. Because what they're trying to do is recreate physics and the certainties of physics in human form, but as your book points out,

we can't rewrite the rules of physics, someone else wrote them, okay. But actually in most creative problems, you actually can rewrite the rules of the game every time you start work Absolutely, and I think that actually disquiets people. I think creative people find the opportunity exciting But so often I think in life what we're actually unconsciously doing to make a decision is we're trying to narrow the solution space at the beginning to make the decision manageable. So we do something like, let's just treat this as a trade-off between A and B, and we'll find the optimal point between A and B, and that will declare that the optimum. Yes. Now, a creative person will say, actually, if you look at A and B from a different mental frame, they're not actually an opposition, it isn't a trade-off, we can actually resolve the contradiction creatively,

which is my point about making trains fun rather than fast. Yes. Actually, once you admit psychology into the mix, high-speed trains are to some extent up against two things, one, just the laws of physics, that it's very difficult to double the speed of a train that's already going 150 miles an hour, simple wind resistance, and so on.

And also safety, by the way, which is if a train that going 150 miles an hour crashes kind of everybody dies, we're not ready for that, it's never actually happened. A high-speed train has never crashed at maximum speed, but it's a problem. And the argument is, well, if you make the time spent on board pleasant, actually the train doesn't have to be that fast to attract passengers. So you're actually optimizing for the wrong thing, you're optimizing for a physical metric, not an emotional metric. It's one of the things about your book that I find so fascinating.

Your book seems to be about solving big problems when your job description is getting people to buy things. And there are two different things. That's one of the problems. I mean, one of the opportunity strike problems with advertising is that what something is worth is entirely dependent on how people perceive it. And so, animadverterating comes from to direct attention towards. And it is very simple, very, very simplest level, by the way. Nobody can buy something if they don't know of its existence. So, you know, there's a very, you know, no insect can visit a flower if it doesn't know it's there.

So, you know, a very simple level, there's kind of educational awareness function. And then you can take that further to add further value by, for example, framing the price of something in a way that makes it attractive. I'm telling you a lovely little story about, occasionally, I could get my father, who's now 93. I couldn't get him to get multi-channel television. He'd grown up in the UK, you'd had three channels, latter you had four. And I said, look, you know, and actually his fourth channel was in Welsh because he lives in Wales. So I said, look dad, you really need this. I mean, you're retired, you're at home a lot, television is great. And he said, yeah, but it's sort of 18 pounds a month, which it was at the time there,

on top of the license fee. And I offered to pay for it, I'm not that stingy, I said, yeah, but it's sort of 18 pounds a month, which it wasn't the time there on top of the license fee. And I offered to pay for it, I'm not that stingy, I said, well I'll pay for it for you, no, no, it's too expensive. And then I said, very simply, I said, it's not 18 pounds a month, it's 60 pounds a day. I said, well, why don't you take that big of a difference? I said, you spend two pounds a day on newspapers. If you spend two pounds a day on newspapers, spending 60 pounds a day on seven news channels, and you'll get, you know, 96 history, Smith's Sonan channels like that.

Oh, I see what you mean. I didn't even have to pay for it. He went and bought it himself. And it's probably contributed, you know, over the last 15 years to his happiness, pretty significantly, absolutely loves it. And so sometimes, you know, it's simply a question of, we will naturally attach a value to something based on a fairly split

second knee jerk heuristic, you know, 17 pounds a month is a lot, okay, compared to the license fee. If you simply change the frame of reference, And so in that sense, it's actually in a funny kind of way helping other people be creative, in that it's actually encouraging other people to look at things in more than one way. And so, you know, I also make the point that this goes much deeper because I think innovation is only any good if you can actually persuade people to buy it at some level. And if you look at Steve Jobs, if you look at Edison, if you look at whether you like him or not, you know, Marx, okay, they're actually kind of Hucksters, as well as their technologists, actually Edison to an extraordinary, Henry Ford, to an extraordinary degree.

You know, their marketers, in a sense, as much as they are inventors. But otherwise we might not have ever heard of them. My wife is a vicar in the Church of England, and if she ever gives me a hard time about working a marketing, I would say, no one would have heard of Jesus if it wasn't for St. Paul. Actually, there is a fundamental role in terms of simply garnering attention.

And quite often, I think, I mean, the thing that annoys me at the moment is solar panels are very, very good. And far cleverer people than me have worked out how to make them to a high degree of efficiency. But no one's worked out how to sell them. Now, most people don't like writing a check for $40,000 for a one-off installation on a home They may be planning to sell which has a two percent chance of going really badly wrong either structurally or your local electricity provider Won't pay you for the surplus for example Now the way to sell something like that is modular Okay, try to smoke solar panels and know, it will contribute towards charging your car

Then if you like that buy two more now I can see people doing that much much more readily than making a massive kind of you know one-off commitment Also, you know just by the law of numbers people have a spare two thousand dollars much more frequently than they have a spare $30,000 the first is as much more frequently than they have a spare $30,000. The first is comparatively much more common than the second. So, the wonderful quote, Kumail Galhotro, who's the head of Ford North America, who says car making is 100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional decision. And ultimately, the most inefficient thing in an economy is to produce something utterly brilliant and then fail to sell it.

That's about, you know, that's the greatest tragedy. So I do defend what I do to a degree. Are you ever in a situation where you can have impact on the product being better? Yes, well, marketing properly defined would include R&D, new product development. And I'll give you a little example of this. He won't mind the publicity. So I think I can tell you something which is sort of, with otherwise, be so much confidential.

There's a wonderful friend of mine who runs a company called ashore.io. And it's what I jokingly call Airbnb to be. And he finds rental homes, which you can rent for anything from a night to a fortnight to a month, which optimise for people who want to work while they're staying there, rather than people who just want to hang out and watch television. And that's why I call it air B to B.

And I said, look, I don't know how to solve your problem. But if I come up with an idea, I'll let you know. Okay, and there are some problems I've been exposed to, where literally inspiration has come years later. And the inspiration came because in one of these homes, when you rent one, you'll get two retina displays, you'll get a fantastic desk, you'll get two kind of absolutely ergonomic office chairs. I

think he might add an espresso machine and I'm adding an electric car charging next. And I was trying to think of a way to sell it and then my wife sold the problem for me. We were staying in a hotel room together and she said, why is there this residual sexism in hotel room design where they assume that only one partner and a couple is working as if it's 1950, you know, either chap sit at the desk firing off edicts, okay? Well, my wife is in the bathroom putting on makeup, okay? She's like, you know, this hasn't been the case for 30 years yet hotel rooms haven't clot the fact that you need more than one desk and

I said hold on a second, that's the answer. So a sure message, a sure.io's message is simply how come your hotel room has two washbasins, but only one desk. And now you found an enemy, you found an absurdity to which your product is the problem. And in your book, what I loved is that the creative act requires you to fall in love with something before it exists in order to bring it into existence. Okay. So there's, you you, you patently can't do that using sequential logic. So there's a sort of strange, I think that you phrase it much better than I would. By the way, I mean, the number of potent dafferisms in your book is absolutely glorious.

So I'm saying this to all the listeners, but that business of that you fall in love with something in advance of its own existence because it's by loving it that actually Nietzsche, I think, has a similar thing, I somewhere, doesn't it? Yeah, I think about that. It's a good company or bad company.

But, um, I'll take it. It's a take away, yeah. But, um, there'll take it. It's a taking win. Yeah. But um, there's this wonderful thing which is, I won't bore people who listen to me a lot by talking about Japanese toilets. But it's one of those cases where once it seems somewhat absurd. Like the total. Yeah, the total. But once you've actually had one, there's no going back. Yeah. You know, dry wiping is just absurd. And there's a great book by a guy called Russ Roberts who he makes the point about the problem of rationality is that there are many decisions

for example having children. Having children is from the point of view of someone without children an absurd decision. You know you ask them what you most enjoy, having a large amount of disposable income, staying out late, going on exotic holidays, you know, having complete loads and loads of free time. Now, against that, what you might call utility function, having children is a stupid idea, but once you have children, your preferences and your utility function completely changed so that picking them up from a party at one o'clock in the morning, I would say it's not really as rewarding as going to studio 54, but there's a reward to it which you never anticipated. And so there is that kind of role of advertising I think in getting people over the hump as far

as you possibly can, because everything new that comes into the world. Well, you know, that's better than anybody else with Of course with the run DMC, okay? It's anything you is met with a large amount of hostility Incrodunity rejection. Yes, not by everybody. I'm most but I most yes Whoever's in power at the time doesn't like when something new and popular comes up that they don't understand. There's an academic in London called Armond Le Rois. I don't know if you've met him, I might be Le Rois, I don't know. He's Dutch actually, he's got his kind of French name. And he did a kind of Darwinian analysis of music from the second half of the last century. And there

are effectively everything proceeds through what you might call slow step evolution, except for two periods, one of which is the British invasion, which he said was unusual because it was kind of welcome in a way. And then there was work this way, a single song, which was effectively, it looked like a Cambrian explosion in musical evolution. It's a bit like when I think it was possibly animals evolved sight or something, which completely changes the possibility

of the number of evolved forms that can suddenly be graded once you've cracked a particular thing. And he said, what was interesting about that was it was basically a, you know, more unwelcome than it was welcome. And I think that question where they will always be a strong vested interest in the status quo. You know, broadly speaking, people post-rationalise what they already have for all kinds of reasons. And therefore, the business problem, probably, the business equivalent of that is destroying entrenched metrics. So people become very, very comfortable about metrics. And in many cases, these metrics are further entrenched because people are incentivized on doing these three things.

And what tends to happen in any complex system is that if you over optimize the paths, you're actually damaging the whole. And that seems to happen here. And the healthy thing to do with metrics is make some of them subjective and change them every now and then. But once they take hold, they're very, very persistent and very difficult to dislodge.

We have an interesting thing in Britain with the National Health Service, which is they've become absolutely fixated and waiting times. They don't get me wrong, okay? There are a lot of medical conditions where speed is of the essence. But there are some other medical conditions, for example, anything orthopedic perhaps, where actually, to be honest, the speed of the American system is the eagerness to operate an intervene, may actually be a bug and not a feature. And actually, if you reframe that time as preparing for your operation or seeing if you

can avoid an operation, rather than immediately leaping to invasive surgery. A weight is not necessarily a bad thing. Now of course once people, politicians make promises based on those metrics, it filters all the way down the organization with separate incentive schemes and so on. And then essentially you get that terrible thing, which is that someone said, doing the wrong thing efficiently is actually worse than doing the right thing badly. And I think that happens very, very often. But I'm intrigued by this because I think the other problem we have is that, I mean, you patently, people who are independent

music producers, Brian E. No, I met a few times, being another case, you know, patently, it's one of those areas where the process helps you derive insights into how to be more creative. And the advertising industry is a pocket, a small pocket in the business world where you can learn similar lessons effectively. For example, do it backwards. You know, reverse the normal process. So, I mean, you're like this, you know, you know, we always add the music last to a commercial. Why not start with the music, okay?

See what happens. See what happens. And something will happen. That's the beauty of it. And it could be really good, it really bad. And either way, you'll advance your position. Whatever happens, actually, the very active generating something different, actually, probably is a contribution in itself, isn't it? It will lead to something different. Actually, probably is a contribution in itself, isn't it?

It will lead to something new. So my colleagues will ask me to ask this question of you, which is, what's the single thing? By the way, we all have this caveat here, which is, there are lots of cases in the world where you don't want people to be creative, where there is a best practice. I mean, the people who check the wheel nuts on your plane, you don't want them to be wildly experimental people. There is a kind of explore exploit trade-off, which is exploring what we don't yet know or what's changed versus exploiting what we do reliably know. You probably remember from my book The Bees, the question, some bees don't obey the waggle darts, and that baffled scientists until they realised that you get trapped

in a local maximum, over-optimised on the past, and the hive ends up starving to death. Because when the environment changes, it doesn't know how to adapt. So you have to allow for this kind of, what do you might call creative tax if you wish to be adaptive and resilient? And also, if you want to get lucky, by the way, you know, if you simply follow the wagaldons, you're never going to find a new patch of flowers. So there are, I think there are cases, you know, there are cases where, you know, large part of the economy, just as a large part of the economy, will have to be devoted just to repairing what we already have. But if you are trying to do something new, what's one of your suggestions was patience,

which I thought was very good. What's the single thing that's impossible to substitute for? First thing that comes up is the idea of curiosity, of like, what if it's a different way? Just that interest in wanting to see something new and not settling for what exists. To fear of the obvious, that kind of, yeah, this is really interesting. to see something new and not settling for what exists.

So fear of the obvious, yeah, that is really interesting. Because Dave Trotter, colleague of mine in advertising, says what makes it difficult being an advertising creative is that most people in business rather like the obvious because it's easy to sell the obvious because it comes with its own logic packaged baked in. Okay, whereas the non-obvious, the counter-intuitive, because it comes with its own logic packaged baked in. Whereas the non-obvious, the counter-intuitive requires an argument

and also exposes you to far worse consequences in the event of failure. If you do the obvious thing and fail, generally you don't get punished very much. But it also doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything. I completely agree. Absolutely right. It's a waste of time. It's a complete waste of time, in a sense. I think the curiosity thing, because I think you should, I think there's an analogy here in my question, interesting, which I'm really worried by online property websites, okay?

Now that's basically the thing, we've got AI to worry to worry about. So I'm really worried by, you know, on-line property searches. But what it is is, first of all, everybody wants to narrow down their search to make it manageable. And that means that effectively, the problem with online property websites, they're all doing it in the same order. Where? Radius of search. Okay. How many bedrooms or in the US, probably square feet? Well, I've noticed how many bedrooms. How many bedrooms or in the US probably square feet? Well, I know it's how many bedrooms. More than square feet is how many bedrooms? Square feet is a much better measure in many ways.

Absolutely. If you make number of bedrooms a metric, all the property developers will do. The best thing you can have in a house is one really big room. Yes. Because actually, how big your bedroom, I never understand that American thing, where the master bedroom is so big

that you practically need to set up a base camp halfway to the lavatory. I've never understood that thing. I mean, it's a bedroom, I'm asleep in it. I mean, I've never got that. But having one really big room is a wonderfully versatile thing. And then the other rooms are slightly secondary and important. All really big kitchen might be the thing, okay.

But then number of bedrooms, and then people will put in price, and they'll either search high low or low high. Now, what worries me about that is that when everybody searches in the same way, you start to get massive concentrations of demand in one place, and massive under demand in another place.

Now, when search is messy, there's a thing which I only discovered last week called mandavilion intelligence, which is when everybody's stupid in a different way, the collective effect can be surprisingly intelligent. Yes. So, if everybody bought cars on formula, which was, okay, acceleration, fuel economy, maximum speed, number of seats, I always tease Americans, number of cup holders, of course. But if everybody had the same mathematical formula for buying cars, cars would actually be terrible. And the fact that people value aesthetics, people value non-umerical things that you

can't put in a search, necessarily, the fact that people value design, people value non-umerical things that you can't put in a search, necessarily. The fact that people value design, they value interiors, all those other things. When you aggregate all those preferences, you actually end up with pretty good cars. When you don't aggregate those preferences, when everybody follows a formulaic search pattern, you lose all the mandavilion intelligence, the collective. And so what actually search pattern, you lose all the mandavilion intelligence, the collective. And so what actually happened,

interestingly, in the UK there are two websites. One is called the modern house.net. I'm not, I don't have a shit stake in any of these, I'm just, okay, and the other one's called in-a-go after in-a-go Jones. And they are both sites which can optimize around architectural quality, okay? In the case of the modern house, they tend to be, well, predictably enough, modern.

In the case of Enigo, they tend to be Georgian Victorian or older, but they're architecturally distinguished. Now, anybody who sets off searching to buy a house using one of those sites, in other words, what they've done is they've changed the, there's a thing in decision science and choice architecture, which is called elimination by attribute, where you take different attributes in order and you eliminate the worst 80%. Now, I'm sure there'll be a load of people who go, I want a five bedroom house and a sense of sense there, but if they see a really attractive Georgian three bedroom house, they'll go, subtle that, I'm going to revise my preferences in the light of new information. It's a very creative act, in a sense. You set out a tent intended to do one thing,

and then what you discover through the act of search, is that that's not what you want to do at all. It's very open-minded act. And it worries me that when you have, that you can have collectively a lot of people all thinking they're being rational and being completely content with their decision. But what they haven't built into that, which I think creative people would build into a search, is a I need to look for mechanisms that expand the possible solution set based on the fact that maybe I don't you quote Einstein, don't you, which is if I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend the first 55 minutes defining the question.

And I don't think people do that. I think once they think that the internal logic of their decision making process checks the box, I don't think they stop and think, well, what if we do this backwards? What if actually, you know, the first thing I searched for was architectural distinction or whatever it might be,

or garden size? But do you think that the people who use the current metrics are happy with what they choose? You see, I think this is where metrics are great if you want to win an argument, because it has the appearance of rationality, but the consequent effect is not optimal, I think. For you and I, if we were looking for a property, the metrics would not solve our issues.

No. They wouldn't. Is that the case for everybody? I don't know. No, I think it is the cable. The reason I investigated this, I'm conscious of the fact that you don't know. No, I think he is the capable, the reason I investigated this. And I'm conscious of the fact that you know, that worrying about property websites seems a bit silly. Because I've often written in defense of human real estate agents.

And the reason I defend them is that they possibly know what the buyer wants, better than the buyer herself or himself wants. And if you talk to a human real estate agent, they will say, everybody comes to them with a set of preset criteria. You know, these are nonnegotiable. I want X number of bedrooms. They said, the majority of people will end up buying a house which misses one of those criteria because they just like something else. In fact, a large minority of people end up buying something which means none of their initial criteria.

So that creative process of just mess with your own assumptions, if you like. I genuinely think that's probably the job of the right, if I'm being McGill-Christ about this. Maybe that's the job of the right hemisphere is to go, am I becoming overly fixated on X to the point of absurdity? Let's look at this in a wider context. And there's some evidence in McGilchrist's book.

To be honest, whether he's right or not from the point of view of neuroscience, I don't know, I'm painting, I'm not qualified to judge. Some people agree, some people don't. Whether the metaphor that arises from this is useful, that's a corrective. And his argument would be that effectively, if you look at birds, they seem,

quite often birds don't really have stereoscopic sight. And they use the left eye, hold on, no, they use the right eye because it crosses over for pecking. That's the specific job of pecking at bits of corn. The job of the other eye is to look out for predators, it's to look out for unspecified problems. So the brain is kind of, there's a kind of division of labor into the specific and the speculative, if you like. Does that apply to humans? I'll never be, you know, I've, for sure, I don't have enough life left to actually require the neuroscience to solve that problem. But it does strike me that we've,

we've politics in particular, we've come into world where we've chosen people for their ability and we've educated people and we've selected people in educational establishments for their ability to win arguments. And actually winning arguments is kind of bullshit because all you do is you set up a very dubious premise which seems reasonable. You then kind of geosuitically kind of extract a logical chain of consequences from that premise, arrive somewhere else with a big QED. And actually what you've done is actually has the appearance of intelligence. But it's, I mean, the philosopher guy, the American philosopher guy called, the business writer, Roger L. Martin, who's a big devotee of this American philosopher called Charles Sonders Perse, who said that

effectively creativity is part of intellectual rigor, that we can have the appearance of intellectual rigor without creatively exploring the solution space first, and it's kind of scientism or false. It has the appearance of being scientific. But actually he says that without abductive inference, which is basically hypothesis, it's what would have to be true if. It's what coden-doil-called reasoning backwards. In other words, not if this happens, what will happen next, but actually I've found a dead body, what must the initial conditions have been to lead to this corpse. And we're much more practiced at

reasoning forwards and we think that reasoning forwards is perfectly scientific and actually it's wrong. I mean, classically I think this illusion has been strengthened by the profusion of data because we think oh we've got so many gigabytes of data kicking around. We know everything we need to know and everything therefore every right answer is in the data. L-M-N-T Element Electrolikes Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun?

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LMNT. Can you use the same data to argue both sides of an order? Almost inevitably. I mean, Simpson's paradox. So for people who want to go on a big statistical rabbit hole, there's a thing in statistics called Simpson's paradox, where if you cut the data in two different ways, it tells you two completely different things. The other thing is that data A all comes from the past, okay? So all big data is biased because it

simply details what used to happen, not what could be, and so it has an inherent kind of conservative bias ironically in that respect. But also, it only captures the things typically which can be numerically expressed aggregated, averaged. So it's only looking backwards. It's only looking backwards. It's looking at trends which may or may not continue to the future. Okay. You know, if you plotted travel trends pre-COVID, you would have confidently suggested that this is going to be a kind of eternal development.

Suddenly everything changes. So it has that bias that it comes to the past, but it also has massive quantification bias, which is it doesn't capture anything emotional. It'll capture how long a train journey takes. It doesn't really capture how enjoyable it is or how inclined you are to make the same journey again. And also, I think creatively, we're not really interested.

I think if you want creative inspiration or insight, actually weirdly, what we're looking for is to be honest, it's anecdotes rather than averages. Because the really significant data points are the outliers or the anomalies. I think that's true in medicine as well. Look for people whose reaction to COVID is completely different to other peoples because that's more likely to tell you something than the

act of aggregation. And so this is an insect question, maybe you don't want artificial intelligence, we want artificial inquisitiveness, because if curiosity is the essential quality for creativity. What we really want is these gigaflops of graphics cards or plugged into some AI machine learning algorithm to go and say, don't tell us what you expect us to hear, which is what it's doing at the moment. Tell us something really weird. Tell us, you know, actually artificial anecdotes. In other words, would you believe that?

There's this person who's done this. And I think I've only got two tips for creative practice, which Americans don't have, by the way, so apologies, but Canadians, Israelis, Australians, Brits, or cryptic crosswords, and actually crime investigations. I think there's no coincidence that Sherlock Holmes writes about reasoning backwards, because I think effectively what you'll do in a criminal investigation is you'll place disproportionate weight on the unusual set, the dog that didn't bark in

the night. That always strikes me, by the way, as one of the most beautiful creative moments in English literature, which is, there's a country in Western Sogg is, and there, how come my dog doesn't bark when you're at my home, which is the assumption that he's having an affair with the guy's wife, which is the perfect country in Western Sogg, because it combines dogs and infidelity. But that's the country in Western version of the, of course, you did this fantastic thing, okay, so you go from one form of music to Johnny Cash. That was that almost deliberate, which is, in other words, beginner's mind.

Because that was the most glorious kind of, I don't call it a pizet, which would be the Silicon Valley term. It was much more than that. What drove that? The thought was, I've had success with mostly young artists, and I wonder if this would work with a grown-up artist. I'm the first person I thought of as Johnny Cash. That's absolutely fabulous.

So you almost just wanted to see, okay, how widely applicable is my methodology? You therefore chose the extreme, which an A.B. testing is, there's a very famous phrase in advertising A.B. testing. I have to say, the advertising which an A.B. testing is, there's a very famous phrase in advertising A.B. Testing. I have to say, the advertising industry invented A.B. Testing about 70 years before scientific medicine got them done for the ratized control trial. But you either test the worst, the best case scenario, because if it doesn't work there, it won't work anyway. Or you test the opposite, because if it works there, it'll work anywhere.

Oh, glorious. This is fantastic. And in the case of Walk This Way, there was a disconnect in people understanding that rap music was music. Interestingly too, among music snobs, apparently, the thing I'm really, really wary of is genre rejection. And the two genre that used to, I suppose, the three genres that suffered were rap, metal and country, with the three that were the most readily despised, and what was fashionable to despise them, which is absurd because the best of anything is, almost always, I don't know about electronic dance music, I've never got into that because I'm...

The best of it is great. The best of it is great. The best of it is great. I'll take your word for it. Yeah, absolutely. I'll take the best of it. The best of it is great. And it turns out that the best of it is usually not made by people who make exclusively electronic music.

Oh, music. And the other thing I loved about your work, the mention of the Ramones, which is that they didn't really know what they were doing. No. And they thought they were making kind of bubblegum pop as you're also at the same part of Long Island, is that right? Close by. So they're kind of local band for you. Yes. Yeah. I saw them growing up 70 times. And there was a young, I think, Sid Vicious, wasn't they? Well, they were all credit to my home country. They were actually more regarded and respected in the UK

than they were in the US, I think. Both sex pursuits in the clash were outcropping so people who saw the remounts. Because that business were just as in scientific discovery, Viagra, Pedicillin, et cetera. An awful lot of brilliant stuff is actually unintended. There was something that struck me, I don't know if you were watching a succession.

I'm not. I recommend it. By the way, partly for the music, because the interesting thing about succession is without the music, it would merely have been good. It was the music that undoubtedly took it to great. But the older of the two sons, not Roman, but a written interview with the actor where it appeared from the interview

he was completely, one of these people absolutely sort of method-dedicated guy. He was completely unaware that the thing was basically a comedy. So he was actually thinking of it as kind of kinglier? Which to a degree it was, okay? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, have everything but have nothing. But the actor in some ways prayed his part so brilliantly because he wasn't aware of it.

And there's an interesting one about people who don't realize why they're great, okay? Which is PG Woodhouse, I don't know if you're a fan. Apparently, he thought his real strength wasn't pros writing, it was plotting, okay? He genuinely thought that where his real genius lay was in constructing the plots, okay? Now, don't give me wrong, okay? He genuinely thought that where his real genius lay was instructing the plots, okay? Now, don't get me wrong, okay? Now, I mean, first of all, nobody can remember the plot of any novel after they've read it anyway. It's weird thing. I mean, how little

you remember of books is kind of strange. But the idea that one ice would be immortalized because of his blots is kind of totally bizarre. But genuinely, that seemed to be where he thought his strengths lay, which is kind of bizarre. Whereas the actual genius of the prize writing, he was always sort of doing without thinking about it. Yeah, it's often the case where people who are really good at things don't even... It's so second nature that they don't see the special quality in it because to them it's completely ordinary. I'll tell you a quick story. Do you know what Seth Goden is?

Seth Goden is. Yeah. So I got to speak Seth Goden. I'm a fan of Seth Goden. He's from my marketing space, you see. Yeah. He's brilliant. He started podcasts, I don't know, seven years ago or so. He started podcasts, I don't know, seven years ago or so, and it's a really well-written, well-explained, well-researched podcast. And I was so blown away by the content and the delivery of the content that when I saw him, I said, tell me about how you do the podcast. And he said, well, I have this, it's the company is called Blue, it's a blue microphone. I recorded into the blue microphone. I say, no, no, no, I don't mean how do you technically record it.

I mean, do you have script writers and do you have researchers and how do you get the information? And he looked at me and he's like, well, what happens is, I think about an idea and then when I have the idea, I think about it for about a half hour and then I go over to the blue mic and I say what I thought about for the last half hour and that's the podcast. So he didn't even understand the question he was so inside of, I was just saying what I think, but when you listen to it, it sounds like,

and then, do you know Michael Lewis? I don't know. I mean, I kind of accidentally ended up as a crap. The crap version of Michael Lewis for the advertising and marketing industry, that's how I always position myself as a shitty version of Michael Lewis. So Michael Lewis does a podcast.

Yeah, that's heavily scripted and well researched by a group of really smart people. And then he performs this thing. And it's a great podcast. And I told him the Seth Godin story and I sent him an episode and he was doing like, it's not possible. It is not possible that he does what he said. Because it's, again, their experiences are so different because... And it's possible that Woodhouse just found writing in a funny way so easy that it didn't

really attract his attention. And in the same way, the difficult thing for, I suppose, for Seth is, I'm guessing him, but maybe Seth finds the technology a bit fiddly and a bit awkward. So he's talking about his mic about it. I'm not going to remember to plug it into the US piece. Maybe. Maybe. This is wonderful. And actually, the fact that no two experiences can be the same in that world is tremendous.

I mean, I'm very interested in your book where you said there's no need for the creative act as a way of being, there's no needs to be a torture genius. It's one way of doing it. And I suppose we've always had the Mozart vs Beethoven, you know, the claim is that Mozart, I mean, as with Shakespeare, the claim is never blotted a line, you know, he just sat down and wrote this stuff. The evidence is pretty shaky. I don't know where that comes from actually. The claim is always that moats are basically, it could just bash it off, whereas with Beethoven, it was going to torture the process of creation. I'm intrigued by that because I think, I've amazed how kind of Zen and calm, because there are elements of me where I have a creative

problem, where I'm undoubtedly neurotic to the intense alignment of my own family, and I'd become absurdly cranky about tiny things. And I've probably made the mistake of just thinking this is the price you pay for doing what you do. Strangely, I'm quite calm when really bad things happen, but if my children don't put the bloody phone's back on their charging stations, I go nuts. And I was intrigued by that because there's a general tendency among creative people. And I think the fact that you call the book a way of being, in other words, this is just an approach to the world which you can learn to adopt. I mean, perhaps there's a mistake in the creative world in that in order to sell what we do,

we exaggerate the difficulty of it. Now, the reason I think that's a potential problem is that if you suggest that not many people can do this and there's a high price to pay, okay, it's kind of good for business, it's a barrier to entry, it creates guesty. What makes me agonize all the time is working in an advertising industry where to some extent you pretend it's very difficult. Only certain people can do it. It requires none of them. Actually, in economic terms and in general well-being terms, the single best thing you can do with creativity is not practices actually to teach it. Because if you have, let's say, I don't know, what is your podcast audience

typically? You don't know anything. You don't care, which is brilliant. You mentioned the book, a band shouldn't care about its existing audience necessarily. It shouldn't worry about alienating an existing audience by doing something different. That's a fundamental obstacle to creativity because you get trapped in our... Well, I can argue both sides of that, because there are certain certain cases and I can't always tell you why, but there have been times where I'm called to work with an artist who's done a lot of work. Yeah.

Where my first thought is, okay, we have to do something very new, different than what you've done before. And there are other times like, we have to get kind of back to the basics of what you do. And it's case by case and it really depends on the artist. Well, this is my great thing, which is why people who want to look scientific find creativity so painful is because they're in a world where the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. Absolutely.

And that seems to drive certain people insane, because if you want to win an argument, the one thing you can't afford is ambiguity. And that business where the opposite of a good idea is another good idea seems to drive certain people nuts. Give me an example of an idea that when you first either came up with it or heard it, you thought was a terrible idea, yet in practice it turned out to be a great idea. There's one little suggestion I made, I don't know how well it worked, but I still think it was a good idea, because I never followed it through.

But I think there's a strong link between creativity and humour. Well, it's very interesting, okay, there are certain parts of humans which are long before their quiet language, long before they acquired any sense of rationality, my children are 21, so I'm not even sure they acquired rationality even yet, there's a 57-year-old. They appreciated music and they appreciated funny, so I could make them laugh, okay, and I could make them dance, long, long before other mental capacities came into operation. Now, I don't know. That suggests to me that music and humour are pretty fundamental,

necessary, adaptive parts of the brain which in some way have been hugely important to survival and reproduction, more so than a reason, actually. And there's a really interesting book by two people called Spurber, Dan Spurber, and Hugo, is it Fugumersie called, it's basically the argumentation hypothesis that we evolved reason just to argue with other people. It's not there to happen. We shouldn't use it to make decisions. That's an accidental byproduct, you know. The fact that we can produce spaceships is an accidental byproduct. But we've got the brain of a kind of lawyer, not the brain of a scientist. And it's a necessary function of a social species to evaluate arguments and to make them,

but it's not nearly as deep in the brain as a musical sense of musical appreciation. By the way, this is what, this is something to research. Just as there are humorous people, I think there are genuinely people who have zero sense of humor. There is a tiny group of people which bizarrely includes, if I'm wrong, because I love, basically, to me, anecdotes are data, because they're outliers.

The fact that we find them interesting suggests that in evolutionary terms, they're important. And therefore, you shouldn't discount anything as being anecdotal. Two of the people, I think it's Che Guevara and Milton Friedman, were two people who were completely A musical. They couldn't tell the difference between basically random noise and music. Wow.

Wow. Isn't how rare that is. That's amazing. But it is fantastic to find those people and research and see what you can do. Welcome to the house of Macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood, sustainably sourced directly from farmers.

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No preservatives, no Palm Oil, no added sugar House of Macadamia's I Roasted with Namibian sea salt, crack black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate. Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacadamias.com slash tetra. One of the things that I talk about in the book is when working with other people, and again, it's just something I've noticed from working with bands, is there tend to be arguments about the theoretical that create conflict over nothing, nothing.

And one of the rules that I have in the studio and I talk about it in the book is we demonstrate everything. So instead of me telling you my musical idea, I play you my musical idea. And when you part the theory, the irrelevance of the theoretical discussion. And there's no more room for argument because you hear the thing, I can play you this thing. And now you can say, oh, I see what that is, I like it, I don't like it, or I like this about it, and I don't like this about it. Whereas if I tell you the musical idea, it doesn't mean anything because what you imagine. But also, you're forced to take sides by some strange part of the human brain which wants to bifurcate because, finally, the same thing applies to politics.

If you look at political division,, in every sort of descriptive way, we're more politically divided than, certainly in the United States, is more politically divided than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Actually, they're divided by theoretical arguments. Okay. If you ask people, this always intrigues me. If you ask people on the left and the right,

what country in the world do you think gets it right? What place in the world basically you think gets it right? What place in the world basically has the kind of culture? Nobody says Somalia, right? Now, don't remind both. In the 1950s, people would say the Soviet Union, East Germany, you know, I don't know if anybody has ever said North Korea, but you know, there were people on the left who would literally have taken those places and regarded them as well. Nobody does that anymore, right? And equally, nobody really goes, you know, mostly and he made the trains run on time. So in that sense, we're actually, we're closer to consensus. Now, people on the left might

say, Denmark, people on the right would probably say Texas, say, okay, I'll be able to see candid with you, okay, I can live in Denmark and I can live in Texas, right? Actually, fundamentally, you know, what we're arguing about, maybe not all that big a deal. And so it's very strange, because at the theoretical level, things are often far more divisive. And indeed, our opinions on theories are notoriously unreliable, I think.

Absolutely. And none of the people who believed Denmark is the place to be are moving to Denmark. No. And very few of the people who think Texas is the place to be are moving to Texas. Now, there were a few people who moved to be, are moving to Denmark, and very few of the people who think Texas is the place to be are moving to Texas. Now, there were a few people who moved to Canada under Trump, weren't they? I met an academic who did.

There were people who threatened to do it. I don't know. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I knew one, I think Jennifer Jackwet who wrote a book on his shame necessary. I seem to remember she moved to the University of... That might have been under Bush actually, she might have moved to the University of BC, but she was one of vanishingly few people who actually take the move. And so it's quite interesting, it's quite revealing in that sense.

I can certainly live in both that have absolutely no problem at all. Actually, Austin, Texas is the best of both, isn't it? Because you've got a left wing town surrounded by right wing countryside. So you can go and buy like Artisan sourdough in the morning, and then the afternoon you can go into the desert and find machine guns and oil drums. So when win really, isn't it? I mean, that's perfect.

Chris Rock had a great joke about that, about whether he's right wing or a left wing. You can't answer the question without knowing the specifics of the case. And the case was robbery. I'm conservative when it comes to robbery. Yes. prostitution.

I'm liberal. I'm liberal. That was not so. Because he's a rich male. I'm liberal. I'm liberal conservative. Of course. Like you can't be liberal or conservative.

It's always case-specific. In fact, the judge not. Of course, you can't be liberal are conservative. It's always case-specific. In fact, the G-Shan, I'm very funny, Jell. That's beautiful. This is actually why comedy is a problem-solving mechanism. What's so fascinating is we don't have a good theory of music and we don't have a good theory. There's a very interesting guy, actually, at the University of Colorado, McGraw, he's called Peter McGraw,

I think, who's written an interesting book about a kind of Darwinian theory of the value of humour, and it's related to play within primates in the sense that you set an environment where you can mock fight, okay? Are you a cat, person or dog person? I would say more of a dog person. Interesting. I mean, the cats have that play thing where part of the reason they seem to per is it says we're now in a mode where we play fight.

Okay, so we practice fighting and practice catching mice and practice all these bodily movements, but at no point is this gonna escalate into actual violence. And humor is probably an extension of that, where you set an environment, it's the verbal extension of play fighting, where you set an environment where we can all

say things that we wouldn't say seriously, because they would take a fence or they'd be perceived as insulting, patronizing, demeaning, whatever. But within the environment of humor, it's like the flight simulator, okay? You get to learn the skills without actually dying. And, I mean, the role of music is utterly fascinating because, you know, the fact that when Walk This Way

came out, a significant number of people said, this isn't even music. I don't even count this as being music, because it's... Well, that was what people thought of rap music up until walk this way. It's written as the original Aerosmith rock song, but Rendy M. C. are delivering it as rappers. So the audience hears it's like, well, I know this. This isn't so different than what I know.

So this is music and it's not so foreign. So it was the gateway drug to serious rap because it unlocked the idea that it's not as foreign as we thought it was. Now this is interesting because there's a concept in design, maximally advanced yet acceptable. And it came about because I think it was Raymond Lewey. He said there's a design concept. Okay, so if you have a digital camera, it goes click when you press the shutter.

It doesn't need to go click, but for people used to existing cameras, if you simply press the button and nothing happened. You wouldn't know that it was working. When that was working. And so it's called skewer morphic, I think. Those things on Greek temples, which are called mexics, I think, reproduce the shape of something that existed when temples were made of wood, which is like the end of a beam.

Now you don't need them in a stone temple, but they still put them in there as a kind of nod to wooden temples, so an architectural nod to what came before. And the click in a digital camera is skewer more thick, it's to make it a bit familiar. And I got a vague idea that lowly designed a fan that was completely silent. And basically nobody believed it was working because they so strongly believed that the cooling effect was kind of related to not the noise of the fan, that noisy fans were cooling and quiet fans weren't, that basically it failed. And he realized that there's this... It needed noise.

It needed the noise. The people to understand that it was doing its job. To understand it was doing its job. And so there's a... This is a glorious commonality between the design world and design thinking and music. So it's basically the sense that that was a glorious piece of design thinking.

How do we take people from here to there? That's the reason it happened. How has advertising changed over your lifetime? I think actually it's become more difficult because there are more things you can measure. And as a consequence, one of the problems you face is there are a lot of valuable things that advertising can do, which are very difficult to either measure or attribute to a specific communication, particularly long-term effects. And the upside of measurement is very big. You can experiment, as you mentioned, you know, I did this as an experiment.

I took the most difficult case scenario and thought if it works here it might work anywhere. So the experimentation is in one way glorious. The only problem is in a financial setting, you become limited to doing only those things that you can prove. And that's actually prove. And that's actually, I think, a bit of a problem that we've become. I would claim this is a wider problem of tech dominance, actually, which is that tech industries in order to define the world in ways that are highly susceptible to automation, effectively over quantify everything. So you may remember from my book that thing of the Dorman fallacy, which is consulting firm, an Accenture, a McKinsey come in, they look at a five-star hotel, they define the Dorman as the man who opens the door.

In other words, they define a human role in terms that are highly susceptible to being replaced with a technology. They then optimize for that solution. They get rid of the dormant, they replace him with a 25,000 pound automatic door mechanism. Because the door is over time cheaper than the dormant, they declare the success of the project, they lay claim to the cost saving, and then they walk away. And five years later, as I said, you know, the hotel's lost its most loyal customers, the rack rates falling off a cliff, you know, they're vagrants to sleep in the doorway, because a dormant isn't only about opening the door. He hails cabs, he recognizes regular guests,

probably means a lot to regular guests. They exchange gossip with other dormant about, you know, combat and whisks. They maintain the status of the hotel. There's a whole range of things. And what tech likes to do is to take a complex system, reduce it into its component parts, thereby stripping out the systemic complexities. It's enough for a tech.

It's everything. It's everything. I think man's greatest issue is the assumption that we know how anything works. Yes. As soon as we assume we know how it works, then we think we can control it. And by the way, that's not a recent delusion

because you go about 50, 150 years, science is basically done, you know. Yes, it's always been the case. It's always been the case that we've assumed that science actually understands more than the nature of Earth. I mean, Earth was the center of the universe. That was accepted. We've got that cracked, epicycles, explained the weird movement of the planets.

Yes. In other words, we'd rather pretend to understand something than acknowledge that there are elements. And as a consequence, both of our books mention the appendix. Of course, the human appendix. Yes. That's in both of our books. No, that's fascinating. So, because the whole question was, it was assumed to be just a redundant thing.

Yes. And of course, most of the time, this is the Chester's and his fence, I think I mentioned nearby. Most of the time it's pointless, okay? But there are, I mean, I would argue the same about monarchies. Now, I was an American. We're never going to agree on this. But monarchies probably are worth keeping, because there are moments when they can be decisive. The moments when they're valuable, by the way, partly because every subject is sort of equal,

and therefore you might argue that it's harder to play divide and rule with a monarchy than it is with an elected government. Okay, so, you know, the American War of Independence was fought by a special interest group. It was plantation-owning, actually slave-owning people who wanted to expand to the west, and the king was preventing them from doing that. If you read the Declaration of Independence as a bread, it's quite whiny. What they're complaining about isn't really, to be honest, all that material in the scheme of things.

And it was driven partly by the fact that the French and Spanish were no longer a threat, and therefore you didn't need British defense of the colonies, and therefore it was economically expedient to strike out on your own. I don't plan on having great success, don't not knocking it. But it's funny, it's funny, it's interesting that in a sense there's a kind of weird egalitarianism that comes about from a monarchy because the person in charge is arbitrary. And therefore, sort of views all subjects as equal because they're not divided into supporters. But I mean, okay, if you take the fall of Franco, the Spanish monarchy, was actually instrumental in the transition to democracy.

That was a king who, you know, highly controversial guy subsequently, but nonetheless probably made that possible in a way that might not have been possible otherwise. And the human appendix is that when you've had a very bad stomach infection or it repopulates your gut. So it's there most of the time, it isn't necessary, and therefore it's very easy to take a snapshot of the gut and say this appendix thing, you can chop it out, it doesn't serve any useful function. But in fact at decisive moments it has a really valuable kind of preventive role. And I think that's a very interesting question,

which is that if you're optimizing for the parts, not the whole, or you're optimizing for the moment, not the long term. And if B is optimized for the moment, they'd all follow the waggled arms, okay? You'd have a more productive hive in the short term if every B basically did what it was told and collected pollen and nectar from the nearest

possible known sources. But if you're optimizing for the long term, you need creative Bs, effectively. And that point about the opposite, you mentioned earlier that thing about the opposite of a good idea is another good idea. I've got a joke on that. I mean, I mentioned the human thing one way to solve problems I think is with a kind of pithenest absurdity. So someone rang me up from the States and they say we've got this weird problem which is that when firefighters aren't fighting fires, they form quite a useful function, they go into typically low cost housing or housing projects and they encourage

people to fit smoke alarms. And they're very successful. People don't deny access to a fireman, generally. The problem was that most people would only accept one smoke alarm when they really needed three. And that was a classic case where you take the opposite, where what I said is, and it was a slightly, it came from a sudden, it's like the Python F's thought that you turned up and you installed 47, you know, that every single wall had a smoke alarm on it. And I suddenly realized, if you turn up with three smoke alarms, the compromise is one or

two. If you turn up with six smoke alarms, three is an acceptable compromise to both parties. And actually, that was my proposed solution, which is you turn up and you say, well, normally, we recommend installing six. The person goes, oh, shit. But I think in your case, we can make do with three. There's a story in the book about 20 pills, and your suggestion was instead of them being 20 white pills, 16 white pills, and four blue ones.

And four blue ones. Because if you want people to finish the course, my hunch was, I think someone claims an intimate idea. It's a great idea. It's a great idea. So in other words, this is for antibiotics. Antibiotics, you want people to finish the dose. Don't give them 20 white pills and say take all 20.

You say take 15 white pills and when you've taken those, take five blue ones. Now I can't quite explain why that works, nor can I explain how I came up with the idea, except that, I mean, obviously, I suppose there are little lessons in contraceptive pills, you label them Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, good idea. But that idea, for whatever reason,

we'd be much more likely to stay the course. Absolutely. Yeah, it's a great idea It's the greatest idea and the beauty of it is I think The doctor could tell the patient. They're all the same and it doesn't change it. I think you're right I mean the same way weirdly placebo seem to work if you tell people their placebo. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No seem to work if you tell people that the seaboats. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

No. Fascinating. I mean, why that is. What it is about that that? I think it's something to do with, we like seeing things through. If we have a set of instructions, it's a very good feeling to complete the set of instructions.

When the instructions say, take another white pill, take another white pill, pick another white pill, pick another white pill. And you've got a target. There's no feeling of accomplishment. There's no intermediate accomplishment. You never get to the blue pills.

No, get to the blue pills. It's a new... Oh, I'm on the home straight. I've got to the blue pill. Exactly. This is fascinating. Yeah. Because one of those ideas,

which I always said, is that this is where creative winning arguments and solving problems There's so much of odds because I had that idea and behavioral science can be useful you know undoubtedly in this But I had absolutely no idea how to sell it to a rational listener I kind of instinctively knew, you know, tacit experience taught me that it would work. I'll give you another example of this strangely, which is a bit more commercial and less prosocial. But all the

British supermarkets, they have loyalty cards, so you collect points when you shop. And right now, rather like airlines have a loyalty program. And what was weird here was that all of the supermarkets have started doing this thing where the discounts on products are only available to the loyalty card members. And there is, I think, a bit of evidence for this, that exclusive discounts are perceived as being much more valuable, okay, than universal discounts. Contrary to what economists think, we actually are interested in relative advantage, not just, you know, advantage.

So give an example, if you had a mate who ran a post dealership who said, because I'm a friend of yours, I can get you 20% of a new Porsche. You'd be much more excited than that by that. And much more likely to buy a Porsche than if Porsche just dropped their prices across the board about 20%. It's a completely different perception, somehow we read it in a different way. Now, what was odd about this business that all British supermarkets have started doing this, which is saying, not just you save five quid, but you save five quid relative to people who don't belong to the program, was that I suggested this 20 years ago to a

supermarket, very large British supermarket, which was launching their loyalty program, make your discounts membership dependent, because they'll have a higher perceived value. And the problem back then 20 years ago is I couldn't argue it. I didn't know that, first of all, there wasn't behavioral economics to the same extent. There wasn't behavioral science, which at least investigates these things in a fairly rigorous manner sometimes. But it just effectively, the people, maybe the people agreed with me, but they thought, well, how do I explain that to the board?

It just sounds weird. And so many, I think, so many interesting ideas, and this is where I think you have the commonality in, you know, everything from music, humour, advertising. Those pockets of the world where it's accepted, I'll put it another way. The reason I've always worked on advertising agency is it's one of very few reasonably lucrative ways I can spend my time where I can make ridiculous suggestions without harming my career. Indeed, they might actually be a source of advancement.

But the freedom suggests the ridiculous, which I find it incredibly difficult to operate an environment where every time you suggested something that at first glance sounded a bit silly or was a bit pith and esk. You know, you are Dr. Mark. I find that almost impossible to exist within that format. And so you realize that of course the vast amount of, you know, would 100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional decision. So much of what is business life now is controlled by that reductionist tendency. You know, don't understand the whole, just concentrate on optimizing a part,

because the part is comprehensible and numerically quantifiable, whereas the whole is too complex. Tell me about you, Kru. How did you get involved from the beginning? I did classics at university. I grew up in the Welsh borders in Monmouth. I don't know if there's something in the water. I was born in the same tiny village where Alfred Russell Wallace was born, the co-discoverer of evolution. And I've always tried to basically think like Darwin, don't think like Newton.

That's as close as I can get to, you know, because one of those things is a science of what can't change, and the other one is a science of how things can change, okay, very simply. And my brother's an astrophysicist weirdly, so we obviously kind of bifurcated in some way. At university I did classics, which I loved. I think I did it because it's kind of the nerdy,

I did maths and Latin and Greek for my final school A levels, as they're called in the UK. And I think I couldn't really decide whether to go the side and side or the art side. And classics is what you might call the nerdy arm of the arts world. It's the dungeons and dragons playing arm of mod-like witches. You know, and do you have any dream of what you want to do with your life at that time? No, I never trained as a teacher and fell out with the people. And to be honest, I chose advertising on a very boring Venn diagram model, which is, I needed some money. I'm actually reasonably materialistic, not insanely so.

And I looked at the sort of potential graduate level jobs and the overlap between interesting and tolerably well-remoon rated. Advertising was, actually, the defense probably still is, one of the things that, I'll tell you what I love about it, okay. This is my plug to anybody as to why you should work there, but it's also a plug for your industry. It's a plug for quite a few other industries, but it's not a plug for becoming an actuary, but in this way, okay? Which is, it's one of those jobs where almost anything you do can make you better at your job. So if you are instinctively curious, okay? anything you do, going to the cinema, sitting

in a cafe, watching the world, buying something, selling something, going to a website, almost anything you can do has the chance of providing you with a useful insight. I mean, I don't know if you're the same. My worry is about my retirement, more or less been ended by the invention of YouTube. I pay for YouTube premium, the ad-free version. And if you are of the, I think 14% or so, maybe a little more of the population who are just, there is nothing, David Oglevey, to find a good copywriter as someone who is an extensive browser in all kinds

of unrelated fields. That, effectively, there's almost nothing, you know, a one-hour documentary on the Union Pacific Big Boy locomotive. Yep, that's me done, I'm happy, okay? And I think YouTube, by the way, I think has reached a kind of, what's that thing people talk about in AI? They call it the singularity, okay? I think there's a really interesting second generation

of the use of YouTube where it is now so extensive that it's become video Wikipedia. That previously you'd get caught trying to rabbit hole and you'd follow a particular thread. I think now it's, it is so rich and the broadcast quality of most of the content is so good that effectively it's searchable. Find anything you're interested in and someone's made a film about it. rich and the broadcast quality of most of the content is so good, then effectively it's searchable.

Find anything you're interested in and someone's made a film about it. So having had that extraordinary sort of curate streak, I think I always wanted a job where I could parlay my life's experiences into the job rather than basically having work life, private life. Now, your business is even better than mine. For that, I'm certainly not suggesting we've got a monopoly here, but there's something fascinating about that,

which is that why not turn my curiosity into a strength rather than frankly a weakness? So what was your first job in advertising? My first job was as a graduate trainee, it's assumed you become an account manager, which is Ulias with the client, and then go to the Creative Department and work with planners to brief the Creative Department on the work you like. Now, we don't have quite the same creative freedom

that you would have in the sense that you have to worry about your audience because at some level, you know, the people who can or might buy the product are finite. or the people who can or might buy the product are finite. Do you think of your audience as the person hiring you or the consumer? The consumer would be the correct answer to that. However, I would argue in any creative act, it has to somehow be pleasing to you. And reading your book actually was really quite

enlightening in that respect that actually you more or less recommend in saying you don't worry about the audience at all that actually if you're not careful worries about your past audience can get you stuck in a kind of rut effectively. And by the way actually I think there's an interesting thing which is that there's probably a mistake we all make which is in thinking of this might apply in the music industry and it might apply in the business world, conventional brand therefore produce conventional products. And actually, if you look at Ford, which is

I think is a magnificent car brand, I've got the electric Mustang back home, which I love. brand. I've got the electric Mustang back home, which I love. What's interesting is that Ford can get the conventional public to try far-weirder cars than Alfa Romeo can. So if Ford produces something like the car or the Mondais, or very cleverly, okay, let's take the F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck, okay. Now, the target audience for the F-150 pickup truck would not seem to be the natural buyers of electric vehicles. But they did two things. First of all, it still carries the F-150 brand, which is kind of iconic and, you know, vulnerable and so on. But secondly, of course, because they were thinking a bit about the F-150 pickup truck, they built in, you can run your power tools off the back of a truck of this massive battery.

Secondly, if you're a bit of a doomsday prepper and your power goes out, you can run your house off your truck. Now, once extraordinary about that in terms of brand power, is it's got an audience, you know, the pickup truck fan, who would be assumed to be absolutely laggidly in the adoption of electric vehicles. And it's got a massive great waiting list. And so I think there's a mistake we can make, which if we go forward, this is our target audience, don't frighten them, don't surprise them with anything. But actually, a great brand around the beach

boys, okay? If you take that example, those bands that have gone rogue. Actually, we've got to actually remember that those brands have an extraordinary power to introduce people confidently to new things. Alpharamau, if they put a gorgeous car brand, I'm absolutely adore the thing, but if they produce in vehicle that's a bit weird, it's also a bit scary. Are they just being self-indulgent? Do they really know what they're doing? Is this just a sort of gratuitous piece of differentiation? If Ford introduces a weird car, completely different effect.

So you're probably writing a sense in that we possibly make that mistake of thinking that our loyal customers, that their loyalty derives purely from wanting the same thing over and over again. In fact, a brand as a tool of for taking people on a journey of innovation is really, really interesting. You take the electric Mustang out, the purist again. I have to put up with not a proper Mustang. Yes. From absolute V8 purists. Yeah, okay, I buy it. But at the same time, of course, don't forget, the original Mustang was a product of marketing. It must. Okay. It seems like even the electric Rolls Royce seems even more foreign. Yes, absolutely. Funnily enough, you'll be interested by this because they looked at the perfect first brand

to go electric. And there were various requirements, relatively low mileage, this is quite early on, relatively low mileage, is not the only car on the household, and so on. Relatively high price. Okay, high premium on quietness. And actually, funnily enough, the recommendation was Rolls-Royce should be the first brand to go electric, because I think 90% of Rolls-Royce owners also own a Mercedes. So actually, and the mileage tends to be relatively low.

So in fact, and that's very interesting question actually. So there are going to be brands like Ferrari, which find electrification really painful, I suspect. Those kind of brands like Bentley and Aston Martin, which have always been in the kind of GT tradition. Are you a car guy? I'm a little... Ish, ish. Okay, I don't want to bore you to death, sorry. No, I'm sorry.

But it'll be very interesting to see those brands that make the transition. And also interesting, by the way, I mean, what is interesting is this is a case where technology allows you to rewrite the rule book a lot, in the sense that electric motors are so simple and capable of miniaturization. I mean, one of my more outlandish suggestions is, you know, by 2060, if you have the electric RV or the electric motorhome, okay, will a certain proportion of the American population just go nomadic? Because you've got Elon's internet access, okay, you've got GSM mobiles, you've got very high cost of property, the ability to work flexibly at some point,

okay? We're going to return to a kind of gengis card, no, with this, I'm kind of our V-drivers sweeping across the Midwest. I don't know. I hope that happens. I don't see that. I think people are very certain their ways. Many people don't move from the town they grow up in. No, no, no. I know. What are you, from a creative point of view, I've read a book, How Are You On Tweeting Your Surroundings As Nade To Creativity? Another aspect, I mean, of 20, I loved about the book. You very comfortably acknowledge contradictions, and that sometimes creativity is just the abandonment of an assumption, but sometimes you actually impose rules on yourself as an aid, as a creative aid. In other words,

how can I do, so you limit yourself to a certain thing, and there was a technique, I think, in it's sort of in prominent innovation, it's called the intermediate impossible. So if you're an airline, you say, we have five aircraft and we have to make money for them. And the rule is you can't leave the ground. Okay. And that then gets people thinking. Now, the obvious part is that you will subsequently remove that restriction. But the restriction is temporarily valuable in dogma, you mentioned, of course, in terms of getting you to a new place.

I'm not sure dogma was ever going to become mainstream. I don't even know if the intention was to become mainstream. No, no. But it's a series of rules to make something more interesting, more honest. And so then sometimes the whole point is find a rule that everybody takes as a gift and get rid of it. Sometimes you impose a rule. I mean, a very good example in advertising would be, let's imagine we have a budget of zero. What will we do? Yes. Okay. You're extremely healthy, think. Yes. So the book's brilliant at that,

which is that one of the strange things about creativity is that it requires you to believe the opposite of things quite frequently. Yeah, and it's helpful to be able to argue the opposite position of any that you hold. Otherwise, you don't really understand it. Absolutely. Yeah. Actually, that's an interesting political one because I'm quite friendly with a guy called John Hyde. He's on a huge fan. You're a huge fan, isn't he?

Huge fan. Have you met him? Never met him. That's fixed. Okay, I'll make sure that works then. But one thing he does say which I think is true, that the right understand the left better than vice versa. So he came into writing that book very much with the intention of basically saying they're

a liberal, informed and enlightened people and these other people are idiots. And then partly through I think in a Piffani in India, where I think he had some sort of Piffani in India around sort of certain traditions and so on. But he actually said, and it's a bit more complicated than that, because the right do understand the preoccupations of the left. They're not entirely ghastly.

It's just they have three or four additional moral taste buds which tend to be atrophied in left-wing peoples or difference to authority, which has its place. It's called the righteous mind. The righteous mind. Fantastic, beautiful. And I was thinking about that the other day where I went to Brighton, which is the port, the Norrigan of Britain. I remember thinking, you know, after a, sort of, variously, you know, have the bin men on strike.

So there's rubbish. And actually, you know, after about a three months in Brighton, I suspect I'd be wanting the military to take over, you know. That contrasting thing of, you know, can we just have a bit of order around here, please, just for a bit. And there's part of me, which really loves the loose culture. Yeah. There's a little, you know, a a bit of order around here please, just for a bit? There's part of me which really loves the loose culture. There's a little bit of acknowledgement that there are,

apart from anything else, in survival, in critical periods, having a tighter culture pays off. But no, if you don't understand the opposing point of view, or you spend your time demonizing it, and that will be very interesting advertising, because probably one of the first tricks of advertising is, or you spend your time demonizing it, you have that we've been advertising because you know probably one of the first tricks of advertising is we've been sitting here thinking for ages about how we persuade someone to do this kind of thing, okay. What are the positives?

And actually let's reverse the telescope, let's just say what are the negatives we could potentially remove? What's stopping them? And is it always that or is can you ever What's stopping them, dude? And is it always that, or is can you ever insult the product that you're selling? Is there a model where you're making fun of the thing that you're selling? Absolutely. There are two... Well, Lemon, which is one of the most famous advertisements of all time, the Volkswagen campaign in the high-doll-dane burn-back was, of course. Now, you're selling, not long after World War II, you're selling an absurd German car, to an American market which likes to replace its cars pretty much annually

and where Chrome is a major determinant of preference, you know. And so that was an extra, I mean, the Citroen 2CV did it in a European campaign, which was, it was, you know, completely taking the piss of the out of the two CV. And of course, there is a target order. It's claimed to be the lemon. So, lemon was, and think small. So, it was, I think it's probably in pot. I mean, it's in a...

Being small is such a great ad. It's such a beautiful ad. It's in me. Both lemon and think small are incredible. And so, what I think happens, I think this always happens, okay, is that some of the best thing I ever heard from a futureologist is there aren't trends, there are vectors. In other words, whenever you create a trend, you also create a countertrend, to a degree, or at least you create the conditions for a countertrend to emerge. In music, of course,

you see it gloriously, don't you? A disco created, you can just imagine, okay? You're probably familiar with that disco demolition thing that Chicago, which I have to say, there are kind of 10 places in history, which I think if I had time travel, I'd like to be the Kennedy assassination, et cetera. And I think, even though actually

there were highly unpleasant elements to it, that know, the Kennedy assassination, etc. And I think even though actually they were highly unpleasant elements to it, that was just one of those extraordinary cases, which was, you know, kind of rock and roll pushback. And so, first of all, there's always a weird battle in life between rich and cool, isn't there? In that as people get rich, it becomes harder for them to be cool. And there's always that kind of strange interplay.

But whenever you get what you might call an evolutionary kind of arms race, in cars become bigger and bigger, the fins become larger and larger, and people replace them, and new models introduce more and more frequently. There's a very politically incorrect phrase I've got to use here to describe the phenomenon. But the late Sir James Goldsmith, who is a kind of rogue British businessman, okay? Now, this is not an endorsement, but it's a

useful metaphor. He said that when a man marries his mistress, he creates an immediate job vacancy, okay? Right? Okay. Now, in the same way, when there's a very strong trend, it creates a vacuum in the opposite direction, which something else will come in and fill, I think. And so, you probably, I mean food, I mean, being a very dynamic, you know, area is interesting in that, you know, there was a missing quadrant of what you might call poached fast food, which has been filled. I try and look at the brand world a bit like an ecology, you know, from the point of view of sort of biodiversity and evolution. And the emergence of five guys is really interesting. By the way, I think they might be making the dangerous

mistake of overexpanding because I'm not sure it survives if it's ubiquitous. I think it has to be a bit of a special occasioned way. But that's the separate question. That's what always happens by the way. It's bought by private equity, private equity over expands them, they lose their magic, you know, they lose their specialness. Do you feel like that happened with Starbucks? Well, oddly, I think it's happened in Europe and the UK. I didn't realize, I drove from,

well, I actually went Chicago, which I think is the greatest city in the United States, by the way, but to a Brit, you see, it's a really American city. You go to San Francisco, you go to New York, not dissing them, but they're kind of European cities. You got a Chicago, and you go, and they're late for that matter. And it's the contrast, which is extraordinary. And when Chicago then drove to see some friends in Toronto, then drove down to the Western

Pennsylvania Sea, falling water, which has always been a name of mine, to DC. What I didn't realize is that middle America is still running on filter coffee. So actually, the... Middle America is huge. It's huge, it's huge. Now in Britain, I don't know why it happened so quickly

in Britain, but if you go to the cafe in a home depot in the UK, they would have a great big Italian espresso machine. It might be slightly more automated and touchscreen. It may not be the full Gadget, you know, shiny, metallic kind of thing, but you'll be able to get a cappuccini, you'll probably be able to get a flat white, which is by the way yet to permeate the United States

to be, in my view, the perfect coffee. Yes. But what amazed me is that in Britain, pretty much anywhere you go, offering only filter coffee after this Italy, just isn't done. I mean, Italian motorway service stations, you can get some of the best coffee you've ever had. Absolutely.

Anywhere, absolutely magnificent. And food as well. Have you ever had shit coffee in Italy? No, no, no. No, I can't. Probably have France where they make a big fuss of food. The coffee's awful. I mean, genuine, it's worse than Britain, you know, the coffee there.

But nearly I've never had a bad cup of coffee of any shape or form. So what struck me in America was interesting is that once you left a large city, the default was filtered coffee from a jug, drip coffee. And even quite large towns, there's one Starbucks. I'm thinking, okay, actually they've still got a lot of space to fill here, potentially. Maybe in Europe not so much, because effectively everybody has made the migration from drip. Now interestingly, you're like this, the reason an Americano is called an Americano is because American troops in Italy in World War II asked the Italians to dilute the espresso.

So, the Americano came about because you want your coffee in a Americano, which is... But now, if you ask for an Americano in Italy, they might give you drip coffee. But now it's accepted as, this is the American coffee, whereas the coffee I personally drink is the American Americano, which is a espresso. So, yeah, interesting.

Very, very interesting. But it is fascinating that, which is that, and I was just amazed, but, you know, because in Britain, you know, pretty much, I mean, Indian restaurants were relatively low to make the switch. You'd often have filter coffee in American restaurants. Peats are expressed held out for a while,

but pretty much everywhere has gone over to the espresso coffee thing. Of course, an espresso brought out that virtual machine. I mean, the story of an espresso. Oh, that's a very interesting case, because it's an absolutely glorious idea. I mean, okay, it's Presser. Oh, that's a very interesting case because it's an absolutely glorious idea. I mean, okay, it's based on a very reliable insight which is that deep down convenience always wins.

And I very much appreciate coffee connoisseurs. I watch a lot of their work on YouTube, but I always confess one thing. First thing in the morning, I'm not into tamping, okay? I'm not into dialing in the grinds and so forth. And so that was an interesting case because it only survived within Nestle apparently because they lied about their profitability

in the first two years, that like very many good ideas, the adoption rate is a sigmoid curve. But by the way, there are actually of all the things that probably needs to be more widely known, and which would aid the creative community greatly, is this understanding that many great ideas are not overnight successes. A few are.

But what's really interesting is that, you know, we are a kind of herd species, we kind of wear an imitative species, a large part of our mental default mode is driven by what have I done before, and what do other people do? And you can see an evolutionary terms, by the way, where the purpose, of course, an evolution is not to optimize, it's to avoid catastrophe.

Those are two pretty safe things. I've always eaten the blueberries, I've never got ill, I'm gonna eat more of the blueberries. I don't know which berries to eat, everybody here seems to be eating the blueberries, I'll eat the blueberries. Right? And you know, once you understand the evolutionary modality which is trying to avoid catastrophe rather than the tame perfection, then habit and social copying make a lot of sense. But the consequence of that is even really good ideas, sometimes take a hell of a long time

to actually make it to that critical mass. And I think the reason that's important is that I think many good ideas are rejected too soon. I thought Google gave up on Google Glass too soon. I thought actually, that was three years away from widespread adoption and they quit too soon. I've always wondered about that. But Jury's out on that one.

I tend to be wary of new technologies too soon. Yeah. It just seems like, I don't know. I don't know. Well, there's some technology in search of an application. Exactly. In many ways. Exactly.

And so it is a natural next step. I see that. But that's precisely why I'm suspicious of it, actually. In a way, is it too obvious? Is the thing we want something, you know, actually, actually an augmented reality earpiece is an interesting idea, isn't it? In other words, something that doesn't interfere with your hearing at all, but occasionally is a kind of helpful voice in your head. Now, why does that exist? I don't know. I mean, there are other things which fascinate me because I thought the slow adoption of videoconferencing was very interesting because this doesn't feature in my book because

the pandemic happened afterwards. Well, it doesn't bit because my great question was, did they make a mistake of making it too cheap too soon? In other words, it became the poor man's British Airways rather than the rich man's British telecom. Yes. And it had you had a period where video conferencing, you could do it, but it cost, you know, 40 pounds an hour and the webcam cost 300 quid. I've often wondered, would it have been successful far sooner? Whereas what happened is Skype came along, it was free and the webcam, if you didn't have one built into a really shitty webcam at the time, built into your laptop,

cost you 30 pounds from a logitech. Did that fail to give the thing the kind of impetus that it deserved? But it always fascinated me because that was a case where the failure to use it suggested there was something going on psychologically. It's interesting that you frame it as the possibility that it costs too little. Well, that's exactly, I mean, there's a glorious case here where I say the opposite of a good idea is another good idea. One of the things I quite frequently say to clients is, you know, if something isn't selling, try putting the price up. Yeah.

And there's a saying about a lot of goods that they, you know, fashion goods clothing, they have to cost enough to hurt in order to mean something. And there's a lovely case of this, which is British sparkling wine, the soil in the champagne district of France, the actual earth, more or less resurfaces in the southeast of England. So British soils very, very good for growing what is effectively but you can't legally call champagne. And there were quite a few vineyards producing wine which was getting better and better and better. But it never really cut through into the mainstream, until a guy who I think was a former marketer of a Heineken

bought a vineyard in Kent called Chapel Down, continued to improve the quality, but ramped the price up to almost champagne plus pricing. Okay. Now the interesting question there, which I think is probably true, is that champagne is to some extent a veblin good in that you buy it not just for the price quality exchange, the added utility of super-equality, you buy it to market occasion to show generosity, to show you your sincere. If that costy signalling I mentioned at the beginning, okay? And the great thing about champagne is because you can't make it for less than about $20 a bottle. If you buy someone a bottle of champagne, it automatically means something. And it says, I'm sorry, I love

you, I'm really glad to see you, congratulations, It can say lots of things because they know you've spent $20 on saying it, probably 25 now. And so interestingly, it didn't matter how good English sparkling wine was as wine. Until it cost 25 pounds of bottle, it was no good as a product because it wasn't doing the ultimate job. It was supposed to achieve. So I think there are cases where, I mean, it's well known in the art world. If you've got a painting in the window and it's not selling, double the price. Because it's just as likely to actually sell at double the price as it is at half the price. And it's a hell of a lot more lucrative. And if you think about psychology,

someone wondering around London looking to buy a £30,000 painting, doesn't want to buy a £30,000 painting doesn't want to buy a £15,000 painting. If you think about this only really works with female dress, but you could go and you could go to Zara, you could go to ASOS, okay, and you could buy perfect acceptable dress for your best friend's wedding that cost £45 and no one would know. But you don't. You spend a certain amount of money, commensurate with the significance of the occasion. And my friend Justin Fatterini, who's a wonderful guy, she's a brilliant guest, other podcast, who's both a fantastic wine expert and an expert on behavioral science and behavioral economics. So he's one of those glorious kind of U-shaped or talents. He says that what drives

expenditure on wine is now obviously rich people do it to a greater extent than poorer people do and it's obviously more magnified but it's effectively you ramp up the budget to mark the significance of an event or the significance of a message you wish to convey, rather than simply for better wine. And so it's anniversary and birthdays and graduations that drive the doubling of your wine price much more than this is the perfect moment for a really good bottle of wine. And actually, I suppose what's so interesting about that is that it's probably true that when marketers say, you know, this isn't really, why isn't really about why?

It's about something else. And it always irritates people, you know. Oh, it's not a car, it's a form of self-expression, you know, the kind of stuff. And people are, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but actually it's a car. Actually, the marketers are probably always more right than they realised. That actually we do things to signal things to much greater extent than we like to believe or even consciously realize. There's a book called the Darwin economy called Robert by Robert H. Frank, who calls himself Econ Naturalist on Twitter and he's going to Darwinian economist as the way

he described it. And what Robert Frank, people like Jeffrey Miller, the mating mind, I don't know if you've read that, we're either advertising our qualities to other people, perspective allies, perspective mates, perspective enemies, scaring them off, okay? And in other cases, we're probably self-advertisement as even more self-referential in we're actually advertising to ourselves. In other words, by wearing a particular piece of clothing makes us feel a certain way. And L'Oreal cracked that with the advertising line because I'm worth it. You know, that often seemed to people I think if slightly fatuous advertising line, I think actually because I'm worth it is an

extraordinary insight into the motivation behind cosmetics. And the world spends more on fashion and beauty than it does on education. It spends an album on an education. It's an enormous, enormous economic category. And some part of it is driven by, obviously, what we wish to communicate to the guy who's interviewing us for a job, or whatever. But a pretty large part of it is actually drummed by us advertising to ourselves. Nothing teaches you that, like having teenage daughters, by the way.

I remember there's a part in the book where you talk about a reverse signal. College professors tend to drive crummy old cars, almost as a badge of honor. Yes, it almost is. I remember in Berkeley in California, there are parking spaces. And they actually have an NL permit at Berkeley University. And you stick NL in your cart, you can only, it's for Nobel laureates. I can't remember. And there are these three parking spaces at Berkeley, which are reserved for Nobel laureates. Yeah.

And I noticed when I was there that they were occupied, now I'd like to think that I'm actually slightly shallow and that even if I won a Nobel Prize, which is highly unlikely, I'd still go and buy some sort of, you know, extravagant car. But there's this wonderful counter-signal, which is if you've got a Nobel Prize, no one cares

at what car you drive. I remember Murray Gelman at the Santa Fe Institute. Now he did have a personalized number plate with I think quark solid, but his car was a fairly standard Japanese substational wagon, and similarly you can be if you've got tenure, you're scruffy, okay? And there again there's an advertisement for that. So if we look at, I was going to write a book, which was all about taking interesting advertising lines and actually exploring their wider significance. And there was a slogan for an aftershave, a denim in my childhood in the 1970s in Britain, which was for men who don't have to try too hard.

And so you'd find that in music, for example, if you're the bass player in a very cool band, you actually dress like a tramp because it's aware of saying, my other attributes are so strong in terms of driving my general attractiveness, coolness, and everything else. I don't have to try too hard in the other direction. And I think counter-singling interestingly direction. And I think counter-singling interestingly seems to be unique to humans. And I make a point about it because generally there are certain behaviors which you can adopt if you're high status in other ways, like turning up at the Oscars in a Prius. Now if you're a former Oscar winner or a nominee, nobody suspects that you're turning up in that Prius because you couldn't afford a stretch limo,

it's therefore visibly a choice that you've made and therefore it actually adds to your status, the fact that you don't bother to try and have some blinged up limousine. Yeah, cycling to work if you're the chief executive of a corporation paid me a choice, you know, there are certain status gains from that. But if you work at a pizza delivery firm cycling to work just means you can't afford a car.

And so one of the things I was always cautioning people against was this business of making environmental behaviors a kind of hair-shirted activity because I said it works but it doesn't scale. Yes. You know, that kind of counter-singling activity, yep, you can get certain high status people to adopt it, but fundamentally, the meaning of it depends on the person performing the action. And when it's clearly a choice, the mayor of London cycling to work, it means one thing.

When it's perceived to be likely a compromise, I have to cycle to my pizza delivery job because, you know, I can't afford a car, then actually it means something completely different. And therefore, how it feels to the person performing the action is completely. So Eron's approach, whether you like him or hate him and I'm completely mixed on the guy, except to the extent that I accept that remarkable people in human history have quite often been, you know, arseholes in other areas, okay, or very unusual in other areas. The business of selling electric cars through fundamental desirable attributes, rather

than as a, you know, a patent compromise for a gasoline, struck me as basically right. What would you say were the greatest ad campaigns of all time? What are the ones that come to mind? I get a quote too, one that was recognized and one that was completely unrecognized. And your point that actually unfamiliar greatness is often missed in the early stages simply because it's too unfamiliar. So, I mean, okay, parking in environmental responsibility, a diamond is forever, and how else can three months salary last a life? It was originally, how can one month salary? How else can a month salary last a lifetime?

Which is a beautiful reframing of the expense of what is after all a costly signalling device? All the better, because it was a someone called Francis Gerrit,, I think it was a female copyrighter back in the 50s. So I have to include that as an extraordinary long-running campaign. And then another one, which I always mentioned, which was done by a small but very brilliant agency in London, Campbell Doyle Dle Die I think they were called, which didn't win a single award which and I asked I actually asked I said why did this not win an award? They said now this is quite common okay, you have an awards jury and the very best work half the jury love it and half of them hated or don't understand it and actually

those things don't get awarded. And there's a fundamental problem in that kind of awards mechanism which is that Sir John Heggatine, British ad guy, he said that actually the very best work sometimes doesn't get awarded for that reason. And this was a piece of work for Mercedes and they actually got Benicio Del Toro, they got a fantastic director and they made a promotional film for a film that never got made in the end. I think the plan was eventually to make it. The film was called Lucky Star,

about a man for whom everything just went right. Okay, this extraordinary character film, traffic lights turned green as he approached. Now it showed the guy driving around in a Mercedes, the title of the film Lucky Star, was a nod to the Mercedes logo. At no point did it explicitly say it was an ad for Mercedes. It was a promotional ad for it in a world where, for a film, okay,

which was an advertisement for Mercedes entirely tangentially, okay. So it wasn't even ostensibly trying to do or admitting to trying to do. It was 100% product placement. And I thought, okay, that is, you know, that is an extraordinarily exciting new approach in advertising, where you advertise things with a list of students. Well, I'd like to ask.

Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask,

Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, Well, I'd like to ask, James Bond's car and that means something to the fans. And that part of the shit is just absolutely magic. Bobby, we've just seen that. So the John Haggerty story, by the way, is because you make your point about patience. And I think it's very, very interesting that actually, what John Clears makes exactly the same point, which is that as a creative person,

you can't really force it. You're waiting to get lucky. And the reason creative people play Fast and Loose with deadlines is because they're affect, you can create the conditions that maximize the chance that you get lucky. You cannot determine the moment in which that occurs. If I look back, there are sort of liminal spaces and activities which seem particularly rich, going from one mode to another mode, that's why I'm a big fan of working from home, because when you take a break, when you're working from home, you go and stack the dishwasher,

and that's when the inspiration happens, when you're moving from one thing to another thing. So you can cheat the odds, but you can't force it. Anyway, John Heggity, the great guy said John Heggity, tell this story. He once worked with Paul McCartney on some business venture. And Paul didn't quite like John's initial work, so he said, I think we need to come back with this.

And John said, well, you said next Tuesday, but can we actually have about two or three weeks because nothing good ever comes from a short time. And Paul McCartney replied, that's not true. I wrote yesterday in 15 minutes. Okay. Now two points to that. Well, do we get shoes that John Hagerty, 10 minutes later, to this day regrets not replying with, with, imagine how much better it would have been if you'd taken some time over it. But the second point, which I think often causes the misunderstanding is he didn't write it in 15 minutes, but he didn't choose which those 15 minutes were.

In a period of, you know, I mean, you might, I can't, you know, write yesterday, there may be, you know, if you are a capable of doing that, in any three month period, there may indeed be 15 minutes. Yeah, you could write it in 15 minutes if you have the dream the night before of the melody, which is what happens. And so much, of course, so much of waiting to get lucky, looks like laziness, actually, or looks like a complete lack of focus. Yeah.

So all the things that creative people have that annoy other people, like no sense of proportion, you obsess about small things, you ignore big things, tendency to play fast and loose with deadlines, tendency to sort of spend a load of time apparently doing nothing, okay? They're annoying, but they're there for a reason. Which is... It's interesting that small things

instead of big things is an interesting one. Well, I think they're right, because in psychology, which is a complex system, there are those butterfly effects. And so obsessing about the tiny thing. Yes. Well, I'll tell the story, which I always love, which is that the decision in Ring of Fire to use the trumpets was a kind of whimsical one, wasn't it? So Johnny Cash was basically, you know, that moment where he just goes, okay, what we need here is trumpets was a kind of whimsical one wasn't it? So Johnny Cash was basically, you know,

that moment where he just goes, okay, what we need here is trumpets. I think he and I'd be about the sound of like Mexican trumpets. So it's got a barri-art, cheers. Yeah, it just, it painted a picture in his mind. Now, we don't know the count of actual, without the trumpets, it's not the same.

It's not the same. And so not having a sense of proportion was actually appropriate, I think, to the job in hand, where it is actually the small thing that is utterly transformative. And so not having a sense of proportion is part of the job. Sometimes the thing that makes it great is a tiny difference, not a big James. Yeah. That's also out of our control.

Now, I'm going to, I shouldn't interview you. This is a complete breach of podcast, airy-cats. But so, you know, if you're interested in behavioral psychology or behavioral science, you become naturally a bit of what, what sometimes call the decision scientist, okay? And you look at decisions and say, it isn't fair to say that this is a good decision or a bad decision based on the outcome

because at the time there are good decisions that make sense but have bad outcomes and vice versa. There's a good book by the way recommended that the poker book by Annie Duke because poker players very quickly learn, okay, I lost that hand, but I still made the right decision. And the famous case where the Beatles were turned down by the record label, which was, EMI, wasn't it? He was turned down by everyone. Ever first.

And so they turn up, which was interestingly on New Year's Day, I think, where they get lost driving through London. And they go and play their demo tape to, whoever it was, who says, small bands with guitars are on the way out and all this sort of thing We don't like their sound, you know, etc and They signed up with Decker Brian pool and the tremoloes instead now one of the reasons for signing Brian pool and the tremoloes

Who if I if I were to write the got a number one before the Beatles did but I may be wrong in the UK I don't know rightly, got a number one before the Beatles did, but I made me wrong in the UK. One of the reasons for signing them was they were more of a local band, so when you recorded with them, you only had to pay for a travel card in on the tube, rather than paying for return train tickets from Liverpool, which probably wasn't the best procurement decision of all time, if I may say so, okay. But was it the right decision? Because if you look at the evidence then, love me do, isn't that greater song, right?

It's like, you know, I mean, if that was all they recorded, it wouldn't have been remembered, okay? On that demo tape, there was no evidence of greatness that anybody could reasonably be expected to notice. And indeed, you know, the Brian Poole whom they signed, you know, had some, it's like, the earlier success. So my question is, what was it? So it's, it's, it's love me

do, and then it goes to, what does I want to hold your hand as next? Or is it? I think so. I think so. Okay. What happened between those two songs? You can ask the same question between Radiohead's first album and their second album. Okay. If you listen to Radiohead's first album, it has creep on it, which is an amazing song. But if you listen to the album, it's not really a... You wouldn't know this is a special group. Got it. And then they made arguably the best album of the next 10 years. Interesting.

So it's hard to know what happens. I look at it in a spiritual way. To me, it's like proof of the existence of God. God, that's something. It's like something changes. I'm friends with Chris Rock, the comedian. And when we first became friends, he was my comedian friend who was not funny. And he was, when I knew him, he was, sorry.

Yes, he was not funny. Sorry. What? He was not funny. He was my comedian friend who wasn't funny. And our relationship was about music, because he loved music, yeah, great-dazed in music, but he was a not funny comedian.

And then after several years, he invited me to the comedy story, said, oh, come see my new set, and I went, and I went doubtfully because he's my not funny comedian friend, and I walked in, and he was the funniest person I had ever seen. Now, for the last four or five years of our friendship, he was not that funny. I don't know what happened. It shifted in a moment. It was like someone upstairs pointed like, now you. It's you. Yeah. The freaky schooly instance is, okay, I mean, if you're not getting

Sergeant Pepper, the George Harrison, okay, who is number three in that band, okay, wrote some of the best songs ever written. I think, if I'm right, I think the rest of them always felt a bit guilty afterwards that they'd failed to write. You know, you know, that actually, even the also round guy was a genius. I can remember Mick Jagger telling me being from London that they looked at the Beatles as a joke. Like, there's no way for guys from Liverpool could be any good. If you were from London, it's like the middle of the boondocks, the sticks.

No one could come from there. It had two advantages, I suspect, and this is being highly speculative, okay. One of which it was a port, so it got the music from the US. So in other words, they would have had access to, you know, dodgely bought albums, you know, which fell off the back of a ship somewhere. Actually, the other influence which may be less visible to Americans is things like music hall, you know, the George Form B comedy acts, which actually informs effectively, you know, British music or nor particularly northern, as in, you know, that sort of popular music,

music hall aspect. Probably was a huge part of that musical show. Yes, when I'm 64. Four. Exactly. I wouldn't have been coming from London. No, it couldn't have happened. It could never have happened. No, that's a Northern song.

Yeah. So the kinks were not from London. Where were they from? Around and they were Ray Davis-Cryhill. I mean, I always think of it as Welsh, because I'm part Welsh, so I naturally But Ray Davis Crihill, I mean, I always think of it as Welsh because I'm part Welsh, so I naturally claim to anybody with even spurious Welsh connections. You have Tom Jones. Yeah.

Tantar, yeah. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. To this day, unbelievable. It's astounding, isn't it? Astounding. Yeah, the pipes have held up unbelievably well, haven't they? Yeah.

And I mean, it's always worth remembering that Elvis called him the voice, which is fairly high-price. That's pretty good, isn't they? Yeah. And I mean, it was worth remembering that Elvis called him the voice, which is fairly high praise. That's pretty good, isn't it? I think proof of the existence of God is an interesting thing that you just hit because yeah, I suppose of course the stones meeting on a train. They're back gardens, I think, kind of sort of they weren't quite contiguous, but there was some sort of diagonal link, but they didn't know each other, and then they met on a train, and I think Mick had a lot of blues records, and you know, those kind of coincidences. Now, mathematicians and statisticians would say, no, no, what you're talking about there is survivorship bias or something else, but I kind of agree with you that the fact that

actually they're not all that remarkable to begin with, and then something happens is just astounding to look at. My brother annoying sister asked you by the way what is your favorite stone's album? I tend not to listen to stones by album. I tend to listen by song. Thank you. That's what I that is because my brother my brother loves one of these album snobbs who's obsessed with the otare and the construction of the thing and I was who's obsessed with the otter and the construction of the thing. And I was... No, there are Beatles albums I love, but Stones are not. They're very, very good albums, thank you.

Because on the car driving here, I said, there's a British comedian called Alan Partridge, whose favorite Beatles album is The Best of The Beatles. I can't. I love Alan. So it's a kind of... But the comedy music link is kind of interesting because they're both in that kind of gift of God's space, aren't they?

The fantastic New York comedian, I was watching called Andrew, he's half Scottish, which is mum's Scottish. Oh, bloody forgot on his name, he's shorts. Yeah, shorts, is there... Andrew Schultz. Are you a fan? Yeah, he's very funny. He's extraordinarily good. And what's brilliant is he goes to places you shouldn't go, but has the fortune to have a completely diverse audience

and fan base. And so he's allowed to go there, you know. Yes. That's a wonderful thing about comedy and being able to say things comedically that you can't say seriously. Have you seen Tim Dylan? No, I need to know what the, okay.

Markably fine. Have you seen Gerard Carmichael? Again, no the name, but off the two names I need to know more. Okay. Markably fine. You've seen Gerard Carmichael. Again, no the name, but off the two names I need to follow. Absolutely. Really funny. Really, really funny. What is interesting is that there seem to be these fields and independent music producers, undoubtedly one of them, where there needs to be so much and comedy as another, where actually they're

the real Galapagos Islands if you want to understand the Creative Act. Because first of all, you have a problem to solve which of its nature cannot be solved through any conventional means. So therefore, what do you do? There is no formula for being funny. There are people who can never be funny, et cetera, et cetera. The whole thing is incredibly execution dependent. How do you solve that problem?

And it is kind of, I guess there's a kind of Darwinism to the whole thing, isn't there, which is a lot of it is probably just experimentation in your own mind. And experimentation on stage, and sometimes it's 10 years of bombing, till you finally understand how to do it. By the way, on the business of the benefits to ignorance, I think it's Louis C. K, who when he was first on the stand-up scene,

was so naive that he didn't realize you had a set and thought you had to come up with completely new material. Each time, you know, I mean. And then Steve was like, you know, he was new material every time. Each time, every time. And then Steve was like, you know, he's confessing, I find this really, really difficult. And I'm like, I mean, he said, well, are you kidding me? Right? And the new rule I think, and the ecological community in this is that if you go and see them a year apart, it's got to be all new.

Well, I think the rule is once it's on film. But that's the killer, you see? Once you've filmed it, once you have a special of the material, you don't repeat the material. Because musicians don't have that dilemma. I mean, funnily enough, to a surprising extent, we are actually happy hearing the same joke told by the same comedian. But when it's on film, you can't do it on stage. I think people go and see a comedian and they don't mind if they see a comedian on stage and they see that same comedian six months later.

And the third of the material is actually old. They don't like that. You see, I'm not sure. Because I used to have this sort of little, it's not a comedian, but my argument is, if you're going to talk to someone, funny is better than not funny. And therefore you should try and make what you say as funny as possible And I have a kind of heuristic if I do business talks, which is very simple, okay? If the AV guys are paying attention to what you're saying you're doing, okay?

Because they don't have to everybody else in the audience is sort of there to pay attention The best ever praise I got was when one of the guys on security Okay, at a business event he was going to like the dormant, came up to me afterwards and said, I thought that was great. Okay, that's all I need to know. I don't need to know the ships and the people who have them sort of vested interest

in writing their job is to be there. But if the security guy likes it, I'm doing, okay. So, okay, I'll make a note of these comedians to take away, this sounds fantastic. But these are the kind of Galapagos Islands for understanding how you solve wicked problems because every day you have to go and solve a wicked problem where you can rewrite their advantages, you can rewrite the rules, you can get rid of assumptions, but fundamentally coming to a conclusion is difficult because you don't know what success looks like before

you, I mean, if you're solving a what success looks like before you, I mean, if you're solving a physics problem or an engineering problem, you know when you've succeeded. Yes. And in this case, genuinely, you know, it's much closer to a penicillin or a viagra than it is, you know, you know, being able to actually spot moments fortunate accidents or whatever. So many of the discoveries that have changed the world happen by accident and there seems

to be a blindness to this. I don't know why. No, so it's still not only Vigrant Pelletine, I was talking to someone at Merck who said their most successful immunotherapy drug arose from an attempt to build an immunosuppressant drug. So their conditions like immunop� arthritis, okay, where you're trying to dampen down the immune system. And they confused this drug which isn't just, which is far worse than being ineffectual, it actually boosts the immune system, which is catastrophic if you've got rheumatinal arthritis. And funnily enough, there was a whole period before someone said, but hold on, a really shit immunosuppressant

might be a really brilliant immunotherapy drug in fighting cancer, for example. And so, now, a better scientific establishment would have spotted that immediately. Yes. And actually, there was a period, I mean there's a famous marketing case study, okay, you'll like this, it's a thing called night nurse and they were trying to build a flu treatment, a cold and flu treatment that ameliorated the symptoms of cold and flu. And the crazy one, and the only problem was it created unbelievable levels of

driving us, so you can drive, operate heavy machinery or whatever. And so they were going to abandon the whole thing instead of of a very clever and proud-stay marketing guy at the back of the room said, if we sell this as a night time cold and flu remedy, the fact that it sends you to sleep isn't a bug. It's a feature. And so they called it nightness. And then later on they actually cracked that problem and created dayness. Yes. In the US it's called nightquil. Night Night-quill, and I think there's a day-quill. There's a day-quill, yeah. And actually, you know, that's a beautiful marketing case.

There was before I think Pfizer discovered Vagra, which apparently a German pharmaceutical company discovered exactly the same effect. We're trying to do exactly the same thing, something to do with the heart medication. And they completely failed to spot the opportunity. They were, this is completely inappropriate. I'm sad to have people going around in a high state of two messians.

Okay? I've heard two different stories, but the better of the two stories is that they asked people on the trial to hand back the drugs they had left over, you see, because the trial is finished. About two, three people said, no! No, I'm keeping them. And the chat was shrewd enough to go, okay, this is why I'm big fan of anecdotes, okay, because anecdotes are single data points, but they carry a lot of freight. Yes.

And this guy went, well, that's never happened before. We better find out why. Yes. Okay, so referring to something as anecdotal is absurd. Yes. Because this is where science goes wrong, because it has this absurd p-value, which is just measuring the confidence with which you can assert something, not the importance of something. Okay?

And so it's completely context-free way of doing science or innovation in a way. Because you might say we know something, but if the thing is either useless, okay, well, it's not valuable information. On the other hand, something weird where you go, I don't know what's happening here, I'm not even sure this is true, but if it is true, we better well find out about it. Yes. That's what you should be. It's the dog that didn't bark in the night. We are talking about that lack of a sense of proportion in creative people because it's the small thing that matters. I'm talking to a colleague of mine last week who is massively excited I was going to see you because he's also a huge fan and he said what went wrong in advertising is that we stop the creative

people, stop doing the factory tour. So it would have been a sort of, you know, in a time when there was just more money swelling around. If you were have been a sort of, you know, in a time when there was just more money swimming around, if you were working on Jack Daniels, you flew out to Lynchburg, Tennessee and you spent three days going around the whole thing. Okay. And that was the first thing to kind of get cut when there was a bit of a budget cut.

But actually, the factory tour is precisely valuable because it's there you discover something which the people who work in the business haven't noticed. Yes. Okay. So there's a lovely one where again this John Hengetian I mentioned was I think he was on a factory tour of Audi and the other people with the tour were getting impatient because he was wondering off looking at obscure corners of the factory. Now, this is, this alone, he seemed funny to British audiences, but they were sort of saying,

come on, John, we're supposed to be at this next meeting. What are you doing? And he's staring at sort of sign leaning against the wall that just says, at Forsbrung Dirk Technik, okay, which became the strap line for Audi in the UK in one of the most successful automotive advertising campaigns of all time because they wanted a position Audi as being German. And so they took a German line and it's got unusual in British advertising, you have a German strapline. Absolutely. And took it made it explicit. But that came from a curious guy nosing into a part of the factory where, you know, not even the people who work there have noticed this significant of this thing. But it's just wanting to know why, what does it mean, what's

it doing there. And those kind of things which are, and I think creative people know the reason for them, which is that they, the same talent would say, they increase your surface exposure to possible upside optionality. Yes. Or when I read something, it doesn't make sense to me, I want to know more. When I read about a case that it doesn't add up, how could this be? I'll always research further. If it goes against my understanding of the world, I want to know more. The counter-intuitive thing. The thing which goes, hold on a second, how can that be? And so what you're looking for is something which is kind of highly elusive, but the willingness to pursue the quest is everything.

Yeah, I'm curious. That was Jules who said his question was, Jules Chalkley's question was, what is the one prerequisite without which? And the curiosity thing, and one of the things I would notice increasingly, I think, in business and politics with the adherence to dogma is that the ghastly thing about dogma is it provides you with the illusion of understanding. And the even worse effect, the invisible kind of externality is that it stops you looking further. And this awful thing in the human brain, which is, once I've made sense of something to my own satisfaction, I will now ask no further questions of it. I will apply it in all situations, regardless of context. So in politics, as you were saying, the adherence to things in theory, it's an argument really

about a worldview or a... And also, of course, the likelihood is when you get two people who are strongly conflicted is that both of them are right, but in different contexts. And a good number of the things that we believe are not correct. All of us, you know, we just were misinformed, we misunderstand. Most events that happen are complicated and we see something happen, we don't understand

it. And one of two things can happen. We can either stew on this problem or what happens normally. In an instant, it'll be, oh, maybe it was this. And we come up with a first guess of what happened. And once we have that first guess, like, okay, I don't have to think about it anymore because it could have been mad.

And then what happened is- For ever more, you believe that's what happened. In detective work, it's called privileging the hypothesis where you basically spend your entire time then looking for the property. Trying to prove. Trying to prove, and so you know- The first punch.

You notice everything that actually corroborates and you ignore everything that conflicts. Now, interestingly, of course, if lots of people have lots of diverse biases, the sum total might actually be reasonably intelligent. Yes. But if you have polarization, it's going to be pretty stupid, actually. It's a very different thing, isn't it? Five people looking at something in five different ways will actually maybe amounts to something vastly more interesting.

But if people are forced to take two sides, it's kind of game over for what you might call invention creativity or interesting problem solving because then maybe if you had you see this is the great difference I think the creative act is to resolve the contradiction. Okay. Now there's a friend of mine who's an economist called Nicholas Gruen who Martin Wolfen that he's an Australian based in Melbourne, brilliant man, Martin Wolfen the FT describes him as the best economist you've never heard of. And he thinks that one of the worst things

that economics foisted on the world was the idea of the trade-off. That most problems are a trade-off between one thing and an opposing thing, and the optimal thing is somehow somewhere in between these two opposing variables. So his example would become making, it was assumed there was a trade-off between the quality of a vehicle

and the cost, the money you spent on quality control and checking manufactured vehicles at the end of the production line. Okay. Now, what Toyota did, people like Edward's Deming did, was they said, no, no, if you change the way you make cars, that contradiction no longer applies. So apparently for a time the two most reliable cars in the world was a Mercedes sports roadster which had more money spent on quality checking at the end of the production line than any other vehicle. And the Toyota Corolla which had no money spent on quality control checking because it was built into the business of making the car. Now the creative person what they want to do is take a contradiction, view it from 90 degrees and realise that actually there is no contradiction, or that these things might actually be complementary, they're kind

of yin and yang, got away. Now he argues that by economics, basically encouraging people to look for a trade-off treated as though it's effectively inexorable, and simply look for the optimal point between these two things. He would argue that it's basically created a massive, creative deficit, because people don't look for magic, and they don't believe it when it's presented to them. And if all creative things are to some extent, if not magic, you practice magic, is that right? I did as a child. You see, this is fantastic, because I mean, the understanding

that actually about changing our perception of something, you can make absolutely remarkable things happen, and the usual trade-offs that are assumed need no longer apply. And by enshrining trade-offs in the mode of thinking of policymakers and business people and problem solvers, what you've actually done is create an incredibly infertile ground for creative ideas. Yes. Because you basically treat the trade-off as if it's kind of, you know, just part of the system.

Yes. I mean, you have to look at the extraordinary success of American business in a way, when it was massively self-indulgent. You know, well, I have to ask the question of this kind of obsession with efficiency. So the way I describe it in the book, I think I mentioned this in the book, is that what worries me about free market capitalism is that economists and most people manage them consultants like it for entirely the wrong reason. And it's been like liking Bob Dylan for his Militra singing voice, okay.

It's very healthy opinion to like Bob Dylan, but probably his singing voice isn't, you know, it's not Jim Reeves, you know, that's be clear, okay. It's a bad reason to hold a good opinion. And I would argue that most of the appreciation of capitalism, which is driven by the idea of its efficiency, not its inventiveness, is exactly the same problem. That we try to optimize free market capitalism for what you might call narrow efficiency at doing preordained tasks under the natural constraints

of these trade-offs. What we should have been doing is optimizing capitalism at doing preordained tasks under the natural constraints of these trade-offs, what we should have been doing is optimizing capitalism for inventiveness. So capitalism is not bad the way that we view it is maybe not necessarily the best way. I think we're not using it to its fullest capacity. We're not using it to its fullest extent because our appreciation of what its value is. Now, I'm in fact, not saying that consumers don't care about efficiency entirely. If you can find a way to do something 10 times cheaper, that's a breakthrough.

That's completely transformative. But given that most purchases nowadays in the developed world are from discretionary income to a large part, okay, the extent to which efficiency is prized by consumers, as opposed to, for example, meaning, you know, the idea that actually producing the same thing at a lower price is a strategy. The problem is that in the early days of doing that, it nearly always pays off. Just as I said, if you've got the bees all obeying the waggle dance, in the first stages that would look like a great approach. But the extent to which this has been pursued to a point where kind of accountant's procurement people, you know, the bureaucracy has taken

over organizations to the detriment of the inventive part of the hive, strikes me a slightly worrying. Come meet the stream of the penguin light. That was for British gas, I think. There's not a perfect AB test, but in two consecutive months, they held a competition. One of them was you could win a free energy for a year, which is probably worth about 1,500, 2,000, 2,500 dollars, they're about, that was the prize. And they got a smattering of entries, okay?

Next month, they decided not to rerun it. Not, not I think because it wasn't, they didn't consider it successful, but they just thought you could win this penguin brand in night light, which sat on your child's bedside table and featured the creature from the advertising campaign. I think Percy the Penguin, or was it personal? Okay, which would light up? It was worth about $20. They are hundreds of

thousands of entries. Okay? I mean, it's a really interesting thing, which is the great thing about, you know, sometimes testing advertising, is it precisely reveals these complete anomalies, which is that people's motivation to enter a competition where you can win a penguin. Now, in being absolutely honest, your chance of winning the penguin was slightly greater than the chance of winning the free energy. But generally in prize draws, it's the biggest prize that motivates.

Yes. And then they had people who were literally on the phone and there'd been a billing mistake, you know, or something of that kind. And they'd say, no, I don't, to be honest with you, say, I don't really want to refund. However, if you could send me one of those penguin nightlights. I'm a man.

There are people willing to kind of sacrifice a 50-pound rebate for this kind of eight-dollar nightlight. And so the fact that we're trying to minimize cost far more than we're trying to maximize meaning, I think. You know, it seems rational. Once you've trained in a countenance, it seems like to maximize meaning, I think. You know, it's even rational. Once you've trained in a countancy, it seems like the only job. You know? Are there other ways that economists get it wrong?

So the trade-off is dangerous. The quantification problem is dangerous undoubtedly. I mean, economists, I think the interesting thing about economics is a bit like Formula One, where the pit crew is almost more interesting than the driver. In other words, attempts to repair mainstream economics, whether it's behavioral economics or evolutionary economics or whatever, that most of the interesting activity in economics is really repair, not construction. Fundamentally, of course, it doesn't really understand signaling. It has since the 1970s, it's been very late in understanding that. The other thing is, it positions everything as an optimization problem, whereas in evolutionary

terms, quite a lot of what we do, I think, is driven by satisfying this business of, in other words, we will typically choose the course of action. Now, the same tale quotes me on this by saying very timely quote, because my children just stopped at McDonald's on the way here. Now, why in God's name would you stop? Now McDonald's is pretty good. Let's be honest. Okay, but why would you stop at McDonald's?

Well, the reason is, it's definitely not going to be bad. Yes. You know what you're getting. You know what you're getting? You won't be ripped off, you won't get ill. Everything will taste pretty good. The toilets will be clean. You won't get diarrhea. So we were time constrained.

We had obviously limited time in search costs. And the logical thing to do is to choose the thing which is least bad, where the worst case scenario is least catastrophic. But an awful lot of the time, perfectly rationally, evolution has taught us to avoid what is bad. And to do that, we tend to use, it's not an optimization problem. We'll often use, say, a heuristic, like Samsung make a lot of televisions, they've got a very, very well brand reputation,

Samsung probably aren't going to make a terrible television, so our pair premium for a Samsung television. Take us back right to the beginning of our conversation. So in trying to understand human behavior as a permanent series of optimization problems, it's fundamentally lost a lot of predictive value because to determine someone's behavior is irrational, you have to absolutely know what they're trying to do. Yes. Okay. It's absurd to describe someone's behaviour as irrational unless you understand fully their motivation, which is, by the way, even they themselves don't always fully understand.

Yes. I would say often don't fully understand. Or never fully understand, actually. Good. Yeah, thank you. Good. I mean, sometimes we have a glimpse and you do know people do have second order kind of insights occasionally.

But since even we ourselves don't understand what we're trying to do, talk of irrationality, in other words, where people deviate from economic behavior. And this is where there's been healthily a lot of criticism of sort of nudge behavior, which is that if you're always nudging people to behave more like the people economists think we should be, but that's misaligned with their general human deeper emotional interests than actually what you're doing is unhealthy. I think one of the best things you can do is probably present people with more different choices.

You know, it's that business where to go back to my concern about property websites, real estate websites, at the very least, they should allow people to say, what do you want to privilege first? Are you more interested in what the house is like or where it is? Yeah.

Okay? Because otherwise, to make choice manageable, you're forced to effectively two yards beyond your search radius, maybe your perfect home. Yeah. And then there's another one which interests me, which is, you mentioned that fact about the opposite of a good idea as another good idea. And there was a great man in the British advertising industry called Jeremy Bulmore, who died

last year, who was a brilliant writer on advertising. And his favorite advertising campaign of all time was a guy called Roy Brooks, who was an estate agent as we call them, a real estate agent, who advertised in the Sunday Times on the Observer in a small space, they're both Sunday newspapers, for about 15 years. He made a fortune, by the way, in every single case he was being unbelievably rude about the homes he was selling. So one of them was like, you know, redundant brothel in Pimlico, you know. The whole thing has room to swing a very small cat. But what was interesting is, first of all, many people got these Sunday newspapers and turned first

to the Roy Brooks advertisement. In other words, he was such an entertaining writer that they knew that he was the one unfailingly enjoyable part of the publication. He made a fortune, but the second thing that interested me about this was that it is exactly what you talked about in counter, when we mentioned counter signalling. Every single estate agent we know is exaggerating the positives, and here he did complete the opposite. He effectively said, this is your chance

to make a fortune doing up a house because it's in such a dismal condition now, or this house is in an unfashionable area, but soon this area will become fashionable, whatever it may be. Yes. But what strikes me about that is that really in a property website, you should have the ability to search by negatives that you don't care about.

So I'll give you an example, this probably times with you as well, I would remotely mind being next to a good pub. Now a lot of people will completely rule out a place because it's next to a pub. To me that's a benefit. I don't want a place where there's a massive fight every Saturday, but actually a pub with a nice beer garden where you can pop in next door and have a drink or in one case a friend of mine who lived next to a pub you can actually get people to pass pints over the garden fence. That strikes me as a plus, it doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me being next to a railway line. My children have left home, so the school district is immaterial, okay? So a truly intelligent way to search for property would be to search for property that had negatives that you personally didn't care about, okay? Because you can get a better

property. Because I can get a much better property because the fact that most people regard this as a deal breaker, whereas to me it's irrelevant. Now interestingly, the best way to buy art is to buy property because unless you go to Inigo or you go to the modern house.net in the UK or if you're American by the way, I'm going to cost you a few million here. There's a website called Right on the Market, which lists all the current frankline-right properties, and the sales at any given moment. And if you actually put architectural merit first,

now, okay, a Picasso, okay, is going to cost you, literally, a few million times more than a painting by a different artist of the same size. A Robert Adam House, or nearby me in Tumberidge, a groupious house, will cost you about 2% more than an equivalent size property by an indifferent architect. Yes. Now, if you think about it, maybe if we bought property the way we bought art,

which was, I'd like a painting that's four feet, a portrait not landscape, actually four feet by three mostly greens, but with some red in it and featuring a cow. And then the art dealer brought you out paintings that met those criteria. Picasso's will be really cheap, okay? Because it'd be quite rare for somebody to come in and say, you know, I like a picture of a load of prostitutes. Well, what's the one demo sale, don't you, I know, I like a picture of a load of prostitutes. What's the one demo sale down in yours? I like a picture of a load of prostitutes

with their features highly distorted. I mean, the number of people asking for that is going to be vanishing these small. I like it to be enormous. No one's ever going to ask for that. And so the extraordinary thing that seems to be happening with the property market is that the creative part has been completely subordinated to the quantifiable part, to a point where why would you build a beautiful house? That kind of worries me. Yeah. And actually, if I got a bit of backup, because a nice guy called Shlomo Binancey, who's at UCLA, who's a behavioral scientist. And he generally agrees with me that the quality of design and aesthetics of a house contribute a lot to your enjoyment. Okay? Absolutely. The other thing is, by the way, they enable you to reframe your property choices so you never suffer from property envy. So I live in the roof of a Robert Adam house, sort of, and I bought it for 395,000 pounds in 2001.

And it's worth double that now, but I haven't made a fortune on it, because it's an apartment in a house, and they just haven't gone up that much. But I go around and visit people in there, sort of, you know, five million pound Riverside apartments. My wife said, what do you think of their apartment? Thought the architecture was a bit shit.

And you can more or less do that. Just to give an idea of what I don't understand about this. So, the house I live in the roof of is grade one listed, okay. In the UK there are 6,000 grade one listed buildings. That's it, only 6,000, okay. So we're talking kind of shadowed of feet. But even more than that, 3,000 of the grade one listed buildings are churches. Another thousand of them are basically places you can't live in for other reasons because they're Nelson's column. So you obviously can't, well, I guess you can carve out a little house at the bottom, but you can't live in that.

All they're bucking on palace, all they're the Royal Opera House, okay. Which leaves 2,000 grey one listed houses in the UK, you know, either pinnacle of architectural excellence in which you can live. thousand grade one list it has is in the UK, you know, I, the pinnacle of architectural excellence in which you can live. And I live in the roof of one of them and my next door neighbor was an economist. And I said, I don't really understand this because I said, what premium do we pay for the architectural quality of this place relative to equally sized places that are 500 yards away? And he actually said, it's funny you say, because I wondered the. And he had said, it's funny, you say. I wondered the same thing.

And he said, it's somewhere between 0 and 3%. It's unbelievable. So it's a bit of a business, Hunch. I'm not sure if you're Warren Buffett, going around mopping up the, because I mean, absolutely obsessive, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marvel's World Charcuttex, it's part half-well.

But that's about Frank Lloyd Wright, if I had a few billion, going around and just mopping up all the Frank Lloyd Wright properties that came up on the assumption that maybe with more flexible working, I mean, one of the things, I don't know, it'd be interesting if you noticed this, one of the things I noticed is that

the gains to being in a city are not nearly as pronounced as they were. Yes, I can never imagine living in a city again. New York or where do you live? No, no, no, no, I don't live in any cities. No, interestingly. Growing up, I came from around and then assumed I would live in Manhattan my entire life. Then I moved to California, and since then it's only been more remote, more remote, more remote.

It's not interesting, because one of the biggest things I absolutely try and counter is this idea among all, well, everybody that the future requires more urbanization. Now, we've got Elon's, I don't know if you use SkyLink or whatever it is, do you use that internet connection? Yeah, okay. Now, I mentioned that that earlier that we might actually

become nomadic because the RV with four days power supply in a runny-great battery is gonna be one hell of a thing, okay? But the thing I've most argued against is this assumption because, first of all, the internet removed the retail impetus to be in cities because the best bookshop in the world was no longer in a place. Secondly, foodstuffs are all pre-if you're in a reasonably developed economy, you can get anything anywhere. So I think you have to be about 45 or over to notice this, but there was an extraordinary deficit to living somewhere more remote in

– okay, in 1989, 1990, if you move from London to Manchester, you thought, oh, this is a bit of a dump, okay? And now I go and I have provincial town envy, you know, I get a new castle, I get a Manchester, and go, actually, this has everything that London has as far as I'm concerned. And it was harder, it would have been harder to do your job from Manchester as well. Of course, it would have been

a normally harder to do your job, whereas even if you have to be in London twice a week, it's still feasible to do your job from Manchester. I do do, if you're familiar, I grew up in Monmouth, and one of the strangest things if you have ever heard about Monmouth, it's because of Rockfield Studios, which is where, for example, Queen recorded

Bohemian Rhapsody, and it was the product of two Welsh farmers who were fascinated by the recording industry, with that, to be honest, any knowledge of the music industry went and invested in a lot of equipment and did the apparently deranged thing of basically having a recording studio on a Welsh farm. Okay, there's a BBC 4 documentary about it.

That's great. And the sound insulation was fertiliser sacks, the head. It was surrounded by sheep. Now, no one would have approved their business plan. I think they just had enough money to do it. And they bought pretty good equipment. But what was fairly sure that yellow was written there as well. But what the music industry discovered was that actually sending a band away to the middle

of nowhere, if they were otherwise stuck, and removing them from excessive distraction. It's a really good thing. It's a really, really good thing. Absolutely. And it's interesting to look at a kind of evaluation of the effectiveness of Rockfield's TDAs in terms of just, and the farmer's wives

cooked the band breakfast. It was a complete, you must visit, if you ever come over to the UK, you must visit the place. Because I was when Bohemian Rhapsody, I was in a geography class in the afternoon at Montenegro being fairly bored. When two miles away, they still have the piano, by the way. Bohemian Rhapsody was being recorded.

And it was slightly on living in Montenegro because occasionally you'd be walking down the high street and white snake or something. You just imagine we would walk down this kind of Welsh market town. It was first of all the novelty I think of the setting was magical. Yes. But this was a classic example of just inject an utterly crazy idea. And I think the business succeeded for a long time. I'm not sure if they're still both in operation precisely because it was just due the opposite. And so it was rather strange growing up in this town, which also, by the way, was for about 15 years when I was young, was Robert Plants home as well. So I think what he liked about it was

nobody made any particular, we're all known of Welsh sort of far. He could wander around there without anybody, I mean he would have been mobbed if he'd been in Boise either home. But it was this very strange town which had this strange connection with the music industry for two or three Jake Thackeray, by the way, if anybody's obsessed, a third connection. But it ended up with this very, this provincial Welsh market town having this bizarre connection with the music industry. Precisely because the idea was so mad. Yes, fantastic. Those are the most interesting things, the anomaly, you know, the thing that doesn't make sense. And then when you experience it, you realize, it makes sense in a whole different way. It doesn't make sense in the way that we're used to weighing things. So, no one would want to do this for the reason we think we would want to do something.

But when you suddenly realize that actually the problem is, can I imagine that all bands in the cities, you know, there's a fundamental problem that bands get rich. Yes. Okay. And wealth brings within a whole load of distractions. And it is actually a real effort, as you get more and more rich, not to make your life more complicated.

Brianino, I remember, there was a lovely story about him. I won't name the musicians, it may be sort of confidential. But the guy didn't really have his mind on the composition because he was always going into the rub to look at faxes, which is his brownstone in New York was being redecorated and he was being ever since sort of swatches and design plans or whatever.

And Brian Eeney said, I've only got one house. Don't ever buy a second house. Now, I'm not sure. But the whole point is you haven't bought yourself a house, you've just bought yourself a distraction. I know in a sense, a really pathetic argument to talk about, you know, the problem is of the rich. But there is that fundamental problem, which is that you start off poor, and then you start

buying things which do appreciably make your life better, because being reasonably prosperous is a hell of a lot better than being poor. But then what happens is it's a bit like heroin. You're trying to recreate that same hit, and you require more and more to make the same appreciable difference. To a point where actually you've actually created a problem, not a solution. Absolutely. Same is true, even beyond success, going from a college student to becoming an adult and having a family, having a normal life takes a whole lot of energy that when you were a student in school and all you cared about was writing songs,

life takes over. There was an extraordinary guy who's a sort of, I can't quite work out his politics, but the Thatcher government introduced something called the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which meant that if you are unemployed, but you started a business of any kind, okay? And you presented accounts and so forth. You got more money, basically. Now, one of the things the enterprise allowance came did, which I don't think was ever part of that as original intention,

was it was unbelievably banned generative. Because a load of people thought they were gaming the system, they thought, well, if we call our band a business, we'll actually get more unemployed money, okay? But the business of just thinking of themselves that way and going, okay, we need a gig, we've got a balance sheet, we've got...

Bizarrely seem to have lead to the creation of an absurd. So this guy, I can never remember his politics, one of his great obsessions is to bring the enterprise allowance scheme back for creative people, not really just for it's, I mean, obviously it has good effects if someone comes to window cleaner or whatever. It had all sorts of other effects, but actually it was never part of that as intention to create a kind of 1980s musical revival. Amazing.

But that along with often said the invention of the transit van, you know, people often look for the real reason behind things. And a few people have said that the British music scene was kind of empowered by this invention of this transit van, which meant that a band and their instruments could fit in one vehicle. And there's this lovely story because on the M1 there's a place called Watford Gap, which has a motorway service station. And it was unusual in Britain in the 70s and 70s, I guess, because it was open 24 hours a day, and then Britain, that was really weird. And so the bands going from the north to the south, and the bands going from the south to the north would often meet there kind of one and two in the morning,

and it was called the Blue Boar. There was a brand of motorway service station, it's called the Blue Boar. And this was a kind of bizarre place, where if you were there two or three in the morning, you'd think, basically, if you'd worked as a waiter or waitress at the blue board on the night shift in kind of the late 60s, early 70s, you would have encountered every single up and coming band. To such an extent that Jimmy Hendrix had heard people talk about the blue board so

much, he said, this place the blue board, what kind of music do they play there? Because he assumed it had to be a venue. I don't was is we met you last time at the Blue Ball. So that I think is the no-sense of a proportion thing. That everybody, when they look for a reason for something serious, is looking for a serious reason. Yes. That the cause has to be commensurate in importance with the outcome. But actually, great things happen for stupid reasons. Yes. And stupid things, you know, people trying to be commensurate in importance with the outcome. But actually, great things happen for

stupid reasons. And stupid things, you know, people trying to be important, create stupid effects, whereas people sometimes try to be stupid, can create great effects. And actually, this idea of sort of proportionality that the world's kind of newtonian and that equal and opposite reactions and so forth, it's a great model if you're a physicist, it's a disastrous model if you're an economist, I think. I read that you hire psychology students as opposed to business students. Yeah, tell me about that. I mean, one of the reasons is they're quite grateful,

because of course you study psychology at university, you never expect it to lead into anything well-paid employment. I know, I also equally hire philosophy students. I mean, we don't confine ourselves to anybody, to lead into well-paid employment. And I also equally have philosophy students. I mean, we don't confine ourselves to anybody. But it strikes us that they're particularly enthusiastic because they can take something they've learnt and genuinely apply it to problem solving.

And there's a kind of three-way nexus in something which is, you've got to make the economics work, you've got to make the psychology work, you've got to make the psychology work, and you make the creativity work. If you can put those three things together and kind of resolve them, then there is a kind of corresponding magic that emerges. And it pays off twice, by the way, because A, it ends up asking more interesting questions. One good thing, anybody who studies psychology will fairly quickly have grasped, as as you said, we don't know why we do the things we do.

And actually our reasons for them are post-rationalized confabulations, they're not really to be taken at face value. And so that's useful because you end up asking much more interesting questions about motivation, causality and everything else. Maybe we're not always right, by the way, I'm pretty happy being wrong. If we're interestingly wrong, it's still progress. And the second thing is, if you've got to sell in a counterintuitive solution

to a rational audience of decision makers, which the world being as it is is often the case. which the world being as it is is often the case. The psychologists help make the case in scientific terms or in terms that at least pass muster with a finance person, whereas if you just use kind of brand language or marketing language, it doesn't really cut any mustard. I think they do double duty. They start with a more interesting question,

get you to a more interesting answer, and then increase the odds of that interesting answer actually surviving, at least to the point of a test. And by the way, I mean an awful lot of me, which is by my time going, actually it's a nice thing about growing slightly old too, which is that oddly, when you're young, you feel you have to pretend you know everything, and actually when you're older, you're more content going, I don't know which is the right answer. Well, I'll give you a lovely example of this.

No one knows, I mean literally no one knows whether you should price anything at $3.99, that $3.99 is round-time pricing. $2.99, $2.95, which is kind of the power of nine, okay? The power of the first digit. Or $2, 77. Or three pounds, 17. Cause three pounds, 17 looks as if you're really keenly priced,

cause you're shaving off every penny. Two pounds, 99 often looks cheaper than three pounds, but in some things, three pounds weirdly seems better than 2.99. And genuinely, they're pricing experts who say, we have never found an answer to this question. However, we do know one thing, it really pays to test it. Because even though we can't tell you what the right answer is, the difference in testing and getting to the right place

is really, really significant. How do you do testing? I'll tell you a old story here, which is, it was a test that got me interested in this whole thing in the first place So I started in Ogle V in the direct marketing, which is at the time was like the direct mail division because there was no internet in 88 So I started in the sort of direct marketing division of Ogle V and we had as a client the BT then called British Telecom, which was the kind of legacy national 80 and T,

I think for American audiences, probably be the fair comparison. And they just digitized a lot of exchanges. It was happening at a local level. So you couldn't advertise, because not everybody's exchange was upgraded to the new technology. But certain exchanges have been upgraded to digital exchanges,

which meant you could use the star and pound buttons on your phone to do clever things, like call diversion, call waiting that kind of thing. And if you wanted your phone to do those clever things, you had to pay them an extra £2.95 a month. And so we wrote them a load of letters and said, if you'd like to add this functionality of your phone, it'll cost you £2. 95 a month, to do that, either ring this free number or tick the box on the bottom of the letter and post it back in a free envelope. And we had a client who was basically bonkers.

The client said, we're the phone company. Why are we giving all this money to the post office when we allow people to respond by post? Why don't we just people to respond by post. Why don't we just make everybody respond by phone? And we said, we better test that. And he said, as most economists would say, why do you need to test it? Either you want this thing or you don't.

Whether you reply by phone or whether you reply by post shouldn't make a big difference. So we took three cells, 50,000 each, randomised, okay? They were identical in every way except one of them allowed you to respond by post, one of them allowed you to respond only by phone, and one of you gave you the choice. And the response rates were phone only 2% of people bought the product, post only 6% of people bought the product. If you gave people the choice, it was 7.9%. Now, bear in mind, I just left university, I was 23 years old, and all I can say was, do you not realise how weird this is? Because this test teaches you something about human psychology which shouldn't make sense. I mean, economists economist on Indians, they know about transaction costs.

But here, I said, the biggest determinant as to whether someone buys the product, isn't it's price on what it does, is how they can order it. Now, that's a really weird finding. Now, the reason that finding became so important later, A, well, two reasons, one, it got me really interested when I subsequently discovered behavioral economics. I used to talk about this science for which we have no name. I used to joke about in work, because I said, there's a whole science of the quirks of human behavior which no one seems to be studying, which seems to be a mistake. And then I eventually discovered Nudge and Carneman and Tversky and Thaler and so on. And a whole bunch of thanks to the internet,

I just got that there was actually a science around this. It's just that it wasn't related to advertisement at that time. So first of all, it got me really, really interesting that. And secondly, in fairness, it allowed me to spot very early on that the internet was going to be a big deal. Not necessarily because you could buy new things, but because if you had a new channel of purchase, it would have a much more significant effect on people's.

Because I think a lot of people have the model that people want something, and then they set about trying to buy that thing at as low a price as possible. And actually most human behaviour is weirdly path dependent, it's weirdly affected by strange heuristics. By the way, if you sent that phone only response out to my children's generation, you get a 0% response rate because they really, really hate talking on the phone. What you do now is anybody under the age of 30, 40, you put a text response, because that's the only thing, or a WhatsApp response or something like that. The idea of talking to a human being on a phone fills them with absolute paranoia. But the fact that actually the short term nature of the interface has such a massive effect. The other benefit I had through that test was that it actually got me really interested

in the internet because I thought when you present a choice on a screen, people will make a totally different choice to the choices they make in a choice on a screen, people will make a totally different choice to the choices they make in a shop and a totally different choice to the choices people make, for example, in a male order catalog. And, by the way, there's a lovely finding, which I think there's a great quote by Abraham Lincoln, where he talks about social embarrassment being a major factor in human behavior. We don't like looking weird. He said, if you're asked to walk around your hometown for a day wearing your wife's bonnet and you weren't allowed to explain why you were doing it, you'd experience extreme pain

the whole time you're doing something really, really embarrassing. And the really interesting thing is in McDonald's, now you order on a screen rather than face to face. Now, bear in mind, particularly men when they order their McDonald's from a screen not face to face, they are vastly more likely to include two burgers in a single order. Which is really interesting because the screen is revealing a preference because it's not money, it's not the cost. It's just that it's the guy might go in Paris, but you want two burgers. Well, you know, and do you want fries with both burgers,

and it's going to be a bit of an awkward conversation. Whereas the second you do it on a screen, apparently, the whole thing changes. And now, if you think about it, all I can say is that the speed with which McDonald's rolled out those screens. I'm not privy to any inside information, but the speed with which fast food outlets rolled out those screens, which was almost unprecedented, okay, suggests that they are unbelievably lucrative in terms of changing what people order. Wow. Now there are other factors which are fascinating, which is that there's another interesting psychological thing about those screens, which is that there's another interesting psychological

thing about those screens, which is that it's annoying waiting to place your order, much more annoying than waiting for your food to arrive, because you can reframe the food coming to arrive, as well as preparing the food, it's adding to the quality of my meal, whereas waiting to tell people what you want is like doubly frustrating. And so there is a kind of mental mind hack in that, in that it may not reduce the end-to-end weight, but it reduces the more irritating part of the waiting, which is waiting to tell them what you want. So there are other mind hacks in that, but I find it's so interesting the extent to which the interface determines the behaviour.

And of course in music, there have been some wonderful experiments with music where you have cases where you give people a clue to the popularity of a track. And it affects enormously what people listen to. So people use social proof, for example, to a very high degree. But I mean, the interesting data that must emerge from Spotify that never emerged in the early days of the record industry when they were just recording kind of limited sales. Tell me, oh, what's heedness to the opportunity cost? Oh, just the, when people are rational, fun, there isn't really a metric for fun. The idonic opportunity cost was that by being boringly rational, what nobody accounts for

is how much more fun you might have had, just in terms of sharing enjoyment, doing something differently. So, the example I would give is that I spend a lot of time ranting at train companies that they're obsessed with speed and punctuality when the real virtue of a train is it's a mode of transport where you can have a table. And my point is that, okay, unless you have a chauffeur driven stretch rolls, rice or something, okay. Other than first class air travel, train travel for all its faults is the only area where you can sit

down with a laptop at a cup of coffee and a power supply and you can either entertain yourself by watching Netflix or you can usefully work, okay? And therefore we should worry less about the time of a train journey and give it a particularly privileged role and the extent to which you can in productivity terms, it's wonderful. It's a rolling we work. It's a rolling we work. Absolutely right. In fact, it's some cases, it's better value than we work. Go and find yourself a really attractive railroad by an off-peak, direct turn in first class. And actually, you've bought yourself off his space, rolling off his space with a moving view,

for actually a pretty reasonable price. And so it's exactly that point about how I make about capitalism, which is that we've been encouraged to view it as an efficiency mechanism where it's really an exploration mechanism. It's a discovery mechanism. I think the Austrian School of Economists spotted that, actually, that the miraculous strength is not its beautiful singing voice, it's its fantastic lyrics. The beautiful strength is not efficiency. Actually, control economies can be very efficient within

narrowly defined parameters, okay. The real joy is the discovery mechanism. That we discover things we didn't know we wanted, we discover we value things that we never would have asked for. The fact that we discover that there are businesses in places that no sensible person would think there was a business opportunity, you know, Rockfield studios. That's the real magic. Doesn't take into account wonder to wonder. Absolutely right. And actually if we approach capitalism like naturalists, rather than like physicists or economists, we'd actually get a better kind of capitalism.

Because actually you know, the thing that interests me about flexible work is people are saying, is it more efficient working from home, not working from home? Does productivity fall by 3%? I guess I'll say the point of capitalism is it takes things that you think are in opposition. The point of creativity is you take things you think are in opposition and you resolve them so they're not. You find new and exciting new forms of value exchange which take something which is assumed to be in opposition and isn't. Now, one really interesting question is if you can reward people, traditionally assumed, okay, people give up their spare time for work. That's what a salary

is. That's what it's called remuneration, because it's technically recompense for your loss of leisure, okay? And you pay people for how much they work, how much they work, determines your output, which it doesn't actually obviously, it's not a linear relationship. And you effectively see these two things in opposition. We can either pay people more on their work harder or we pay them less and they work less. That's the sort of boring trade-off equation,

what my friend Nicholas Grewen would say. Now, if you introduced a degree of autonomy into the mix, and you realized that as long-side money, working in a garden provided the weather is good enough, is much more pleasant than working in an office. Now, if people will work a bit harder, or will take a slightly lower salary, for not just free time, but free when and free where. In other words, I've got kids, my age, this is relevant, but I had a PA who was a single parent and I just said, okay, let's make this work for both of us, right? I don't care if you take your son to school because I don't need you in the office at nine o'clock in the morning. I don't care if you leave a bit early to pick

up your son. But tell you what, what I'll do is you must find doing expenses really boring. That must be the most boring part of your job. Well, tell you what, I'll post my expenses to your home, you can do them at home while you're watching TV after your son's gone to bed. And all I was doing was not actually changing the nature of the work, I was giving her free when and free where. Now, what you're doing then is you're making the value exchange between employer and employee more nuanced. Okay, you're adding extra dimensions to it and you will find a new equilibrium where people are both happiest, best rewarded and where you get them at more productivity.

And so I don't think the win-win is impossible by any means. I think this can benefit both parties and it's the notion of the trade-off, people like it, so it must be worse for the business. I think as a rule, the idea of win-win is often easily reachable if you stop and look at these specifics of the situation. If you look at the specifics, or you just look at it, and there's another win-win here, by the way, which I say to our clients, which is part for a second, whether you want your colleagues to work flexibly or be in the office five days a week or whatever, okay? There's a bigger question here. Let's say you're unilever, or let's say you're Nestlay, or whatever, okay? Do you want your customers

to be able to work flexibly? Because I would venture that the answer to that question is yes, because if they can reduce the money they spend on commuting and they can actually perhaps spend less on property costs and let's face it, commuting is expensive in other ways because once you leave the house you then go and buy a bloody coffee which you wouldn't have made yourself at home. That's actually a 10% free tax free pay rise, right? Now if you're increasing people's disposable income by 25%, if you're increasing their discretion disposable income by, you know, 25 percent. If you're increasing their discretionary income by allowing them to spend less on things they'd rather not be spending money on, assuming you're not transport for London, you know, assuming you're not the person who makes the suits or sells the sandwiches on Fridays,

it's bloody good news for you because you've now got customers who are richer. And yet no one's looking at that dimension, which is at the systems level, this might be a hell of a lot better, even if at a narrow level of individual staff productivity, it's a bit worse. So just by looking at a different thing, you can trade a win-win. Actually, that's probably the whole conversation in a sentence, isn't it? You know, yeah. How did you learn what you know? Obsessive reading, I have to confess, and subsequently obsessive podcasting and YouTubeing. Second thing is you learn by teaching. So actually teaching pays double. It's a bit like that French guy who said, I write to discover what I think, you know, actually

having to teach something is a brilliant way to learn in your firm. Both internally and externally, I do speaking engagements. If you speak to an audience of 100 people and 10% of those people over the next year try one mischievous thing, okay? As far as I'm concerned, that's a result. Absolutely. You know, if you can just, you know, we don't need everybody to try and become Van Gogh, move to a, you know, France, and then chop their air off. Okay? But if we can get everybody just to go, what if this assumption isn't true? Yes. Okay? What if we need to innovate, but the only way we've innovated so far is by extrapolating from past successes and what we need to do is actually do a bit of, well, I think, child son is a person called, is an abductive inference. What we need to do is we need to actually

imagine something here. We need to imagine a different reality. Okay. If you can get just a proportion of people to do that sometimes, where it makes sense to do so. Now, I'll give you a great thing which everybody can steal, which I only heard about recently. But within Amazon, there's a phrase which is called the two-way door. I don't know where it comes from, whether it's Bees or so, whether he found it somewhere else. But a two-way door is something where if you try it and it doesn't work, it doesn't really impose significant costs. So you can reverse, okay? Now, to give an example, Amazon Prime isn't really a two-way door because once you've offered it to people, they'll feel very bad if you take

it away. Now, you could introduce it to a small group of select people and see how it works, but that's not entirely a two-way door. that's a bit of a one-way door. But in Amazon, when they're arguing something, they'll go, why are we arguing this? It's a two-way door. Don't argue it, test it. Because we can test it, we'll very quickly find out at low expense, and if it doesn't work or it has deleterious effects, we'll just cancel it and revert to the status quo, right?

So it's a two-way door, okay? And so they're very conscious of the fact that you spend a load of time arguing about one-way doors, but arguing about two-way doors is stupid. It's exactly to your point that if you argue about it in theory, it's a much more hotly debated thing that if you just show it in practice. You know right away when you do it in practice. So why argue about the theory? We call it the burden of proof because proving things in advance is a massive pain in the ass.

And it wasted a lot of time and it wasted a lot of effort. Now the most interesting thing is apparently Amazon Web Services came up as an idea where someone said, we've got all this server capacity, why don't we sell it to other people? And apparently this may be anecdotal. They put together a paper that wasn't very good. You know, it didn't make a great business case.

It was just this vague paper. And several of them are saying, okay, so that doesn't work in theory. And then somebody said, yeah, but this is a two-way door, right? We've got the server capacity anyway. If we can sell it and make more money, it's good. If we don't, what have we lost? Okay? And of course, that's now the most profitable bit of Amazon.

The business of actually selling their server capacity to third parties. And basically selling the robustness they need as a retailer. Yeah. To other people who want that level of robustness, that's what makes them the most money. Amazing. And of course, 99% of companies would have gone, now you haven't really made the case there, right? Without asking the question, why do we need to make that greater case?

Because if it fails, it's cost us peanuts. If it succeeds, the same talent is great on this, you know. In other words, the whole question of the asymmetric bet. Okay, it's got a finite downside and a manageable downside both in terms of time and money. The upside is potentially huge. Go for those bets. Absolutely. Yeah. Did you ever consider moving to the US being as it's a bigger market? Yeah, I probably should have done. Crikey. Advertising is very centred in New York and I probably had children at the wrong age. Advertising centred in New York and I probably had children at the wrong age. Advertising

is centred in New York and if I move to the US I've probably moved to New Mexico. Are you a new Mexico fan? It's... I've never been. Never been. No. It's magical. It's astounding. There are so many magical places. Fair enough, I buy that actually. Where do you go in New Mexico? Various Santa Fe Los Alamos, a bit of Taurus. What I love about it actually is it's hot during the day but it cools off in the evening which is the perfect climate because it's at high altitude. I absolutely love places like Arizona. Scottsdale Phoenix, okay. You're going, what's so cool about those places? What you got to remember is, okay, if you grow up in the UK, where green shit grows everywhere, it rains all the time, and if you put something out,

something green will grow on it, okay? The desert is gonna magical, you know? And you see this in a load of Brits, like DH Lawrence, who ended up in, I think actually he's buried in near Taurus, New Mexico, I think, was's buried in near Tarros, New Mexico. I think it was at George Rowe-Keef's. I think so. There was a woman called Mabel Dodge-Lewen, wasn't there, who lived up in Northern New

Mexico and was kind of a hostess salon kind of mad under Pompedor character for really, really interesting people. But you've got to remember to Brit the desert. So you open your hotel room window and there's's sand, and there's a fucking great rock, and there's a cactus, okay? Now to me, that's just absolutely joyous, it's just fantastic. Another place to go to, by the way,

if you've never been in Iceland. I've not been. No, one transatlantic journey, just stop over, because it's sort of three and a half hours flight from London, and you've get on a plane, it's not any British and a half hours flight from London and you've get on a plane, it's not any British Airways flight you've been on before, and then you land on the moon. That's another one. But I'm this kind of person who ended up, as I said, as a kind of crap Michael Lewis for marketing and advertising. I'm pretty happy there, but I'm also still 20% farmer.

And there's a bit of me which if I move to the States, maybe I get a, I don't know, West Texas or somewhere. Actually, but I love the United States. But yeah, the US is a bigger market. And actually, while I should have done this, basically capitalized on British accent, shouldn't I? Which is absurd. I mean, it's completely weird. I mean, you get a degree of everything from job offers to sexual attention, which are completely unwarranted by the content.

The world's go. So, it's so fast, it's so fast, it's so fast, it's so fast, it's completely odd. I mean, I always tease my wife, because when I go over there, you know, I tease my wife, that my retirement plan there, you know, I tease my wife that my retirement plan is to become a jiggle-o on the cruise ships out of Miami, you know, at the age of 17 because just British accent guy, it is absolutely absurd. I mean, seriously not deserved, okay? It's the most unbelievable, ridiculous kind of unfair request or legacy. How close was the Mad Men TV show to the advertising world?

Great question. There was a guy called Joel Rathelson. Joel Rathelson was a copyrighted god. And by the way, back in the 1960s, he had a conversation with David Ogleby, where he said something which was practically on a par with Herbert Simon, who was winning a Nobel Prize at the time, you know, or later on for his work on things like Satisficing. Okay. And what he said to David Ogleby, which was, you know, one of the biggest insights I've ever been bequeathed, is I don't think people buy brands because they think they're better, they pair premium for brands because they're more certain that

they are good. And he spotted that in the 1960s and David Ogleby kind of agreed with him that actually we buy brands as a form of they're going to deliver on their promise, it's variance reduction, it's not optimization. And so I think this guy, Joel Raffles, was one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. And he was married to, as you might guess, he was Jewish, his wife was Irish Catholic. He was one of those fantastic Adeline marriages. And I met them at a place, I'd just come off a flight

in Chicago, and he died tragically, Joel, about a year and a half ago. I think his wife must have married Beth, I think it is, is still alive, but needed to say you wouldn't expect to find a great place to eat near an airport, typically. But he took me to the space, which was a Chicago State house, which has an outlet quite close to O'Hare.

And I said exactly the same question to him, bearing in mind that he and his wife had lived through that period. How accurate was Mad Men as the depiction of the era? And Joel said it was nothing like that. And his wife who'd worked in advertising through the same period and said, one earth-duming Joel, it was exactly like that. And so I imagined, first of all, he had the kind of male defensive perspective where his wife had actually lived through,

you know, and been much more conscious of and attuned to. In its defense, by the way, I mean, advertising was pretty good at, I mean, it's far from perfect in terms of gender representation, but it was a hell of a lot better than a lot of places, occasionally, at least, not regarding the idea of a very senior female person as unthinkable. David Ogilby was a very early convert to women in the workplace. And the whole advertising industry was quite good at finding, so basically finding a home for talented misfits.

And sometimes that applied to gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation, it was by no means reliable in doing that or proportionate, but it did it a bit, okay? So, you know, it was an extraordinary home for sort of Jewish and Italian talent, you know, in a kind of wasp area in New York, for example. For getting the dramatic part under show,

was the way the creative was done, was that in line with you? for example, forgetting the dramatic part under show, was the way the creative was done, was that in line with you? Yeah, the extent to which the creative people were, to some extent, the marketing department for the client. So if you look at that, what wouldn't happen so often now, is Don Draper has to launch Heineken, and he says, I've seen some research, psychological research, that women don't regard alcoholic

drinks as being strong in proportion to the darkness of the colour. That's why Gen B. Whiskey and things were popular, you see. Because they were paler, vodka and gin, they arose less of a female objection that you're drinking hard liquor. Because they were still a kind of provisional hangover I suppose in the US at that time. I mean there still is actually a bit of a stigma around drinking in the US in certain respects which doesn't really pertain in Europe you know lunchtime drinking for example. But then Don says right we won't sell these in the booze part of the supermarket

we'll sell them with a picnic display kind of at the end of the row. So this is although it's an alcoholic beer, it's sold as a kind of picnic drink, not as kind of there's no implication of intoxication. And that kind of thing where you went much broader, much beyond the advertising, you are actually the client's marketing function and you told them for example, where to sell. The five P's of marketing, which don't ask me to repeat them because I'll always forget one of them. The advertising agency actually kind of covered the waterfront back then, much more than it does now, when clients tend to have larger marketing functions, which take responsibility for a lot of those decisions and then leave the advertising agency to do the comms part.

And in a way, I think it was, in a sense, better when it worked like that. To some extent, with behavioral science and by hiring psychology graduates, I'm trying to bring some of that back. Because, you know, back in the 50s, and I suppose the madmen starts in the 50s and ends in what?

70, 69. Think so. Something like that, okay? It ends with the co-c- Okay, okay. The Chess Campaign. Something like that. Okay. It ends with the coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke.

The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke.

The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and coke.

The coke and coke. The coke and coke. The coke and they probably would have worn a bow tie, and some of the things they said, they might actually have known kind of bit about psychology, but it was at least asking the question in the right place. In other words, the reason people are not buying our product may not be price or anything to do with the nature of the product itself.

It may be how the products perceive, position, promoted, you know, how it's framed, and the fact that you can change something completely by changing the context in which you presented is a kind of form of magic in a way. Absolutely. And sometimes it's a surprisingly small thing, you know, a very small tweak to something. I mean, there's a really interesting theory, which it's been kicking around for a hundred or so years and There's a psychologist at the University of Sussex called Andy Clark who's just written about this Which is basically the predictive mind hypothesis That what our brains doing all the time is predicting and it uses our senses

Only to the extent that we perceive reality differing from the prediction. And if you want sound experiments, there are these things called sine wave voices, where you reduce a spoken sentence to a kind of sine wave thing. It sounds just like mode M noise, but then you read out the sentence and you play the sine wave again, and it's impossible not to hear the sentence in the sine wave. And there's a view that those experiments,

things like the McGurk effect there's a view that those experiments, things like the McGurk effect, where you've seen those films where someone's saying, bar, bar, bar, you change the lip movements but leave the sound the same. If you record me saying, bar, bar, bar repeatedly, and then you record the video of me saying, par, or far, particularly far with the teeth, you play the video over me saying, bar, and you hear, far, because your brain effectively overrides the audio component with the unconscious lip reading component. And so there are a lot of really interesting kind of illusions and experiments

which illustrate that this, and of course the architecture, data architecture, makes sense because it's a bit like, if you take those photograph algorithms, which condense photographs, you know, the compression. The way they reduce the amount of data you need to describe a photograph is we don't describe the color of every pixel. We predict what the next pixel is going to be and we only use data to describe how the reality differs from the prediction. And that is a much more data-intensive way of actually constructing a photograph than raw where you have, you know, massive megabyte files, because you want to be able to edit every single pixel, which you can only do in a raw format, I think that's the reason. So in a sense, this would make sense in terms of making the most efficient use of available bandwidth in the human brain is prediction combined with Bayesian updating, makes more sense as a data architecture than we perceive everything everything and then we basically forge it into a hole. Now,

if that's true, I mean, it explains a hell of a lot of weird things like the fact that your advertising changes the taste of the product. Yeah. I've been told AI works that same way. It's only looking for the next sentence. That's it. Doesn't come up with a story. It starts with something and then it comes up with the next sentence. And then based on that, it comes up with the next sentence. Would you know an interesting thing, which is really weird? It hallucinates, of course, because there are things it assumes are likely,

which it then goes on to imagine a true. And this is actually quite worrying because when I looked at myself, okay, one of the AI things came back and said that I studied PPE at Oxford, which I didn't get orcs when I studied classics, right? And I'd work from a Kinseyham company. Well, I'm not a hell. I've worked at Oglumau's whole life, right? And it's something that occurred to me, this is actually quite disturbing because what it's revealing is that the AI is basically going, here is someone who is in the world of business. They are vaguely prominent, therefore they probably work for McKinsey and Company. Well, if I may say so, if you're a conspiracy there, that's a bit worrying because

is it really reasonable to assume that anybody who's quite influential in some field necessarily worked for McKinsey and Company, I went to Oxford to study PPE? The problem is also that people are taking the results as fact. Yeah. And actually we had a case where we asked it to describe a behavioral phenomenon. And from it, it did a pretty good job, which maybe you'd expect it. And then we said, what are the papers you can cite as citations for this effect? It invented

three academic papers that didn't exist, but they sounded like academic. That's scary. Two of the authors were actually weirdly not even psychologists. They were physicists, okay scary. Two of the authors were actually weirdly not even psychologists, they were physicists. The titles of the papers look completely believable, but when you actually search for these papers in the round of the day, they did not exist. They were just constructed from the idea of just as the McKinsey Company was ordered a CB for services to advertising in 2019, which I wasn't, okay? As far as I know, who am I saying doing these things by stealth?

And do we, do we, do we, do you study PPP? No, it's just going, what will this person regard as plausible? Now if genuinely it's a plausibility engine, that's really, really worrying. Because we will actually take what it says at fact. And it was only because my colleague was energetic enough to go, do these papers actually exist, rather than cut and paste, bang, that we didn't end up committing a huge kind of gaff. Now, what I want is artificial inquisitiveness. I want the things to say, here are 10 really surprising things which you never would have expected. I don't know if it can do that, can it?

I wonder. Now, I'm saying this just on the hope that one person will come to me and say, you're right, and I know how to do it, because I certainly don't. But there may be a way to look for statistical things like Simpson's paradoxes or to play around with possible causations or something. I don't know where you could actually set an AI to look for disruptive patterns in the data rather than common patterns in the data.

So you know, just as it's the blob on the radio gram, or the blob on the scan is the thing that's significant, not the background. I would argue that marketers, actually creative people in general, are looking for anomalies, nanodotes and outliers. They're not really looking for, you know,

the mainstream thing, because the mainstream area is already overpopulated. Yes. I mean, it read two statements, both seem true to me, and there's tension between them. The customer is always right. Yep.

And the audience doesn't know what they want. Yeah, that's... How do those both be? Actually, they are sort of both true in that if you offend a customer or upset them, you're doing something wrong. But what that doesn't mean is that you should ask a customer to design your customer service program. So there is actually a kind of way to resolve that contradiction, which is that every time

you upset a customer, you should learn from the experience and try not to repeat it. But do not assume that the customer, any more than the real estate agent, would assume it, that actually their definition of what they want is really what they want. And that's really interesting thing, finding is there, which is where research goes deeper. I'm not a total, I don't totally reject market research, I think it's just got to be handled very, very cautiously. So for example, you know, the assumption being, and probably what people would say, is that actually, that actually, first class air travelers want is, they want to be left alone. So one of the interesting things is the assumption that at the very top end you provide very attentive service and those people may even say they want very attentive service, but

actually where the customer is always right is that the customer may always be right but they don't know. And so the trick is then to be, is actually then to stand at a distance where you can always be hailed, but not to continue to go up to them and say, would you like another glass of shadow to, you know, pomeroll, whatever it is? Because actually, although they think they like that, actually it's a nuisance. And so they're, you know, that's an interesting way to kind of resolve that tension, but it's a great, it's a nuisance. And so that's an interesting way to kind of resolve that tension, but it's a great point, yeah.

I'll ask you one last question because I don't wanna keep you forever, even though I haven't even scratched the surface of what I wanted to know. What do you believe today that you didn't believe when you were younger? Oh, brilliant question. Actually, one of the best questions to ask people

is what have you changed your mind about? Because if the answer's nothing, it gets you. Something's wrong. Something's wrong. Lots of things politically, where I've weirdly, probably under the influence of people like John the Height, I've moved both to the left and the right. At the same time. At the same time.

Things like the minimum wage, I've definitely changed my mind about through behavioral science. In the sense that there is always a danger that organizations default to paying people the minimum they can afford. It is actually good business, by the way, but it's just a very easy thing with which to win an argument. Why should I pay my staff more than I need to recruit them? Actually, there are lots of reasons, but they're hard to argue. And that's the problem with economics. It's a ship science, but it's hard to argue with. Because it's got this artificial internal consistency that even though it's not actually rooted in reality,

it's an impressive kind of edifice in terms of its own internal lack of contradictions. So that, you know, there be lots and lots of things where I would have changed my mind equally. There are other areas where I, you know, become, I suppose it's a bit like Chris Rock, you know, if it's prostitution, I have a liberal, if it's robbery, I have a conservative. There's another great phrase which is a conservative is a liberal who's been mug I'm a conservative. There's another great phrase which is a conservative, is a liberal who's been mugged, and a liberal as a conservative who's been arrested. One of the things biggest things I've changed my mind about

is really interesting because it's almost a kind of recursive thing. I'm really impressed by people changing their mind. And I think we've adopted this weird thing where your endurance to a dogma in politics is proof of the rightness of your dogma. There's a great quote from John Maynard Keynes, which is someone accused him of contradicting something he'd written earlier. He said, well, when the facts change, I changed my mind. What do you do?

Yeah, exactly. So I'll give you an example of this. I used to smoke a lot. Okay, now I'm a vapor Unrependent vapor Now interestingly you've been in the music industry all your life, but you're pretty much straight edge. Is that right? Pretty much. Pretty much. Yeah I mean nowhere in your book on creativity do you recommend artificial substances or anything of that kind? Not necessarily. I've never really used any. No, no me, no me. I've spoke part of you times, obviously, to everybody who hasn't, but I didn't like it that much.

And also, nicotine was valuable to me in being what I'd call a gateway drug, by which I mean it was a closed gate, which is I saw how readily I could become addicted to nicotine, which scared me off a hell of a lot of other things, okay? But I was passionate at smoker, and my father was as well, which didn't help, because he never discouraged us from smoking very much.

He was pipe smoking, encouraged us to smoke pipes and cigars, not cigarettes, which, when you're 19, it's a bit weird, you know, going around smoking cigars. But nonetheless, eccentric, man, he's still alive at 93, so he's not totally on. Worked out okay. So, the interesting thing there is that there's an organisation called Action on Smoking and Health, which was absolutely passionately, I mean, insanely extreme in its anti-smoking

position, so that when you could smoke in pubs, bars and so forth, it was always calling for these bands, okay? To a point where it was almost on the point of being a bit annoying. And the vaping came along and I thought, you know, oh my god, they're gonna be absolutely leading the vanguard for batting vaping because most organizations tend to have this kind of mentality. And I went from slightly despising them to genuinely admiring them because they said, no, no, no, we were opposed to smoking, not because people were ingesting nicotine. We were opposed to smoking because people were dying. If you can genuinely show, which seems likely that vaping is 95% safer, helps people quit smoking, whether people enjoy it or not, is actually a material, and

they became massive vaping advocates. Interesting. Now, I mean, there's a similar write-up about what happened with British politics, where we had a Prime Minister who lasted literally a few weeks, which doesn't normally happen. She went in, she went into the series of mistakes, she went, okay? And if it was going on, you know, we're a laughing stock. And there are a few writers, you said, but no, this is how it's supposed to work. Yeah, exactly. It's a two-way door.

You make a mistake, you apologize, you reverse, you do something else. That's how the system should work, rather than pretending that I have all the answers from day one, and all I need to do is enact, I mean, someone wants to strive socialism, which is a good criticism of it, but it's true of all political dogmas, which is it's the mistake and belief you can get things right first time. In other words, that your theory is so damn good that you can actually impose it without consideration for its wider effects. And I mean, there are some wonderful quotes about politics. The other one I like is E.O. Wilson, who is the world's, he died recently, who is the

world's among other things, and brilliant evolutioning biologists. He was the world's leading expert on ants, and supposedly someone once described Marxism or communism to E.O. Wilson, and he said, a beautiful theory, wrong species, which is kind of cute. But it is that question which I, my suspicion of overarching theories and my belief in the value of experimentation and actually that's the green thing about being old. Okay, two things about being older, okay? And I, this is what you learn because you're, I mean, the same industry for 35 years. There are two things you can do when you're old, which you can't do when you're young. One, say, I'd like to experiment with that because I genuinely don't know the answer.

And that's okay if you're old because it's treated as genuine. And the other thing is to say really banal things. I know that's sensual Nicholas, but sometimes what we forget, there are things that are so simple that people forget to say them. And then what happens is that saying them become the sort of banal and silly. And actually one of the things you're allowed to do beyond a certain age, if you're older than the average in a particular industry, is you can say, in an advertising industry, you know, if someone says,

why should you advertise? You can simply say, because being famous is better than not being famous, you know, or people can't buy something or want something if they don't know it exists. You can say really simple things which need reinforcing because we're often moving onto one thing I'm worried about technology is we're obsessed with the next thing. Now, really important technologies take about 20 or 30 years for human behavior to change sufficiently to actually take advantage of them. And so one of the things I like to do, which I can do because I'm 57, is say, I think videoconferencing is really important.

Now, I know it's been around since 1997. What's important about it is that COVID normalized it so that it's no longer a weird thing to do. And my contention is that as a consequence of COVID and Zoom and Microsoft Teams, over the last four years, literally billions of conversations must have happened across continents and across borders, which would not have happened previously,

and that over the next five to ten years, we should start to see the economic effects of this in ways that we can't necessarily connect to those conversations, but nonetheless, those conversations are really valuable. So I'll give you, I don't like telling this story because it makes me sound like, hey, I'm Mr. Humanitarian, okay. But it's COVID, okay. And someone gets in touch with me by email and says, I live in Botswana, and I wanna work in advertising.

Okay, now, you know, well, I probably would have done, had it been pre-COVID, as I would have said, well, let me forward you, you know, I would have forwarded to someone in HR, yeah. I'm here at home, I'm not doing anything. Well, you have a Zoom chat for 25 minutes, which I wouldn't have done previously. Yeah.

And we had a really nice chat, and actually he was got an interesting guy who was obsessed with Nike, which was quite interesting. We had a kind of obsession, which I thought was okay. Well, you know, play with this. And by the way, the quality of the, both the video and the audio from Botswana is absolutely no different.

In fact, funnily enough, when you have problems on Zoom, it's usually with someone in Silicon Valley or something. And anyway, I just ended up in the conversation, and then halfway through the conversation, something occurred to me that there's a school in South Africa, which basically teaches advertising. So I put him in touch with that, and I said to a bit of a recommendation, they meet him,

and then he ended up getting a scholarship there, and he's now working in an agency in South Africa. Very beautiful. Now, what I'm saying is that nobody would ever say thanks to a Zoom call, I'm doing that, okay? But there is this extraordinary gap between what you might call an email and a face-to-face meeting. Now, okay, the likelihood I ever would have met him,

okay, is absolutely miniscule, okay? However, we sort of met through the virtue of the screen and the consequences were no different from how do we met in person. I don't think anyway, okay? And I flown out to Botswana, which I might have done, but I'd be unlikely to get permission from a Google V to book the tickets.

And so the interesting thing there is now, okay, no one's ever gonna to attribute that to video conferencing. But if you multiply that kind of thing by a billion, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, by the way, given there six billion people on the planet, okay. It's going to show up somewhere. You know, one of the things that most excites me is if this enables what you might call

Indian creativity, 1.6 billion, unbelievably inventive people, to plug into the rest of the world's economy, in a way they may not have been able to do before. Then all I can say is, stuff's gonna happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened. Now, okay, maybe some of it's undesirable. We've created weird conspiracies or terrorist organizations

through this technology. But it's undoubted. My view is that this technology has to be considered as impactful and significant and worthy of economic study and attention. And yet it's not getting it because everybody's talking about AI and the metaverse. And I think that's just a mistake because we're making the mistake between what is significant and what is attributable. You know, I think that's just a mistake because we're making the mistake between what is significant and what is attributable. You know, I think that's one of the reasons why creative people in a sense love complexity because they love the disproportionality and people who want the world to be neat are actually offended by it.

One of the great things about the last five or ten years is that body of people, sort of this conversation now, right? How did you learn about my book, by the way? I've got to ask that. I don't really know. I don't know. I think I was looking up something on Amazon and it was somewhere in the list of other things you might like maybe. Exactly that, you see. And actually, meant to be, clearly meant to be. It meant to be. Actually, of course, you could argue that a belief in God or God's is whether true or not, not going to be careful here because my wife's a vicar,

but whether true or not, it's a better way to understand the world in a way than pretending them away. And it occurs to me that maybe that living life with the belief, whether fictive or not, that there are invisible agencies that are interfering with the course of events or shaping the course of events is simply a happier state of affairs and will cause you to make better decisions than the alternative. Yes, that's fine. Which is fine.

That's the weird question. I mean, there's a weird question which is, if believing something that is untrue leads to good consequences, is it therefore rational to believe things that aren't true? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, there's a consequence of that, which is things like victim culture, where you have the complicated thing,

where you may have to say, yes, it is undoubtedly true that you are victims, but it is not good to dwell on it. Because there's some evidence that in individuals, I'm not talking necessarily about collective groups, okay? But individuals who are always looking to blame external forces for their misfortunes, okay, are probably right, in some cases, but the consequences of that state of belief are not healthy, okay, so it's a good idea to kind of move on. And in the same way, there's an opposite thing

to that, which is believing positive things that aren't true, if it actually leads you to make better decisions and therefore enjoy better consequences, go with that. It seems like whatever leads to the good consequences, why would we be bogged down in anything other than what works? What works? It works. It's fine. other than what works. What works? It works, it's fine. And now I think he's really, really interesting, because I think, I mean, one of the areas

where I'm probably quite conservative is, I've got very good friends who are polyamorous. I always think that's something that works in theory. The reason to avoid it in my argument, and it brings me no pleasure to say this, okay, but I had another friend who was polyamorous and I said the reason not to do it isn't because it isn't great when it works, it's because it's unbelievably catastrophic when it goes wrong, okay? So a single relationship is bad enough when it breaks up. When the equilibrium and a polyamorous,

a friend I had who was a validly polyamorous, I won't name them, or from his reasons, when their relationship finally broke up, it wasn't just a break up as you might see in a married couple. It was literally children not speaking to parents, you know, it created basically a complete family explosion rather than what might have been expected. If you've ever read any of the books by a guy called Jesse Barons, one of them is called Why is the penis shaped like that? And the other one is called Perv. Okay. So they're both books that are best read on Kindle, if you use public transport because you don't generally want to be sitting on the London tube with a book called Perv. But they're

both very interesting. I was always taking my something he said, which is that he's an evolutionary psychologist, a very brilliant one. He was in Northern Ireland for quite a long time, and he said, he's gay, and he's in a relationship. And he says, I'm an evolutionary psychologist. I'm completely aware of the fact that worries about infidelity in a gay relationship are nonsensical from an evolutionary point of view because there's no risk of either bringing up somebody else's children or any of the other consequences that happen in a heterosexual relationship. He said, I know that's to be true completely rationally. I do nothing else. However, okay, I'm wired that way. There's nothing I can do about it. So any attempt to intellectualize something of that kind is just, it doesn't matter. You can intellectualize it all you like, but it ain't going to work. Yeah. I think in general, the idea of intellectualizing things, it's always second order. Yes.

Whatever happens first is what actually happens, and we may not know why. And then we'll try to explain it, and that'll be an intellectual guess essentially of why it happened, but we don't know and we don't know anything. Well, so so my great we don't know anything and my great concern which I suppose is you know it's in the first book Ultimately, there are far more good ideas. We can post rationalize. There are good ideas. We can pre rationalize Absolutely. So why make the ability to rationalize something a pre-requisite for trying something? There's no reason not to try things to find out where they lead. Fantastic. There's no way.

We don't know. We don't know. And we met apparently because of an Amazon algorithm, which is really, really interesting in itself. Fantastic. And reading your book, it gave me the feeling I had already finished my book. And I'm reading your book, it's like, wow, so many of these ideas feel like they're related to the ideas in my book. It felt so kindered spirit. Well, is there a problem because

the rationalist community is monolithic. It's finance, it's economics, it's the treasury, it's the fed. You know what I mean? It's all monolithic. The creative community is all fragmented. It's advertising, music, architecture, it's art. It's sculptures, contemporary dance. And the creative community is kind of treated with a kind of divide and rule.

As a Brit, I'm very familiar with the divide and rule. It was how we controlled quarter of the world's surface, okay. But actually, we allow this to happen because creative people are considered to be creative within a particular domain, but actually as your bookshirts. A lot of this is really generalizable.

And actually, it should be taught in schools. I mean, this is effectively alongside what people are taught in school, which is, this is, you know, effectively, alongside what people are taught in school, which is that here's all the data you need to solve the problem, come up with a single right answer, and if you don't come up with that, you're wrong. We need to have an equal number of questions, which we don't know the answers to this. We don't even know what you need to know to answer this question. And is this even the right question to begin with, you know, what

disgust, you know, and then you reward answers on the basis of their interest and interestingness or originality, none of the basis of their kind of Absolutely, Joy, thank you so much. Thank you.