TRIGGERnometry - Rory Sutherland on the Logic Trap, Humour & Free Speech

Episode Date: June 5, 2018

Rory Sutherland, Executive Creative Director of OgilvyOne advertising agency and renowned public speaker, discusses empirical thinking vs. logic, the importance of humour, the role of comedy, free speech and much, much more with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Find us on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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SelectQuote.com. That's selectquote.com. SelectQuote. We shop. You save. Full details on example policies at selectquote.com slash commercials. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisten. And this is the show for you. If you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about.

At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the expert. We ask the experts. We're here at the world famous angel comedy club and our amazing expert guest this week is the columnist for the spectator, vice chairman of the Ogilvy advertising group and one of the most amazing, creative, counterintuitive thinkers in the world today.

Rory Sutherland, welcome to Trigonometry. It's a joy to be here. Right, okay, so we always start with the question, regardless of the guest. How did you come to be sitting at this particular seat? If I look for the sort of proximate reason, I met Constantine at Kilconomics, which I'm very, very happy to plug. I have no financial interest in it. It's a festival in Ireland every November, and it's a festival of economics and comedy.

And it's an absolutely brilliant and inspired idea, not only is it in Kilkenny, which is worth visiting at any time of year. But it's this idea of combining kind of economic commentary with. comedic cynicism, which creates actually a kind of rare, useful magic. It's hugely useful if you're interested in kind of dissident economics or perverse economics, counterintuitive economics. It's inherently funny and rewarding in its own right. And we met there, and Constantine invited me on, if you want to go back to kind of deeper reasons.

Oh, we do. You do, I see. Then, one, of course, I'm a huge fan of the podcast as a format because I'm a I'm very fat. And so anything which is audio only, the great phrase goes, he's got a great face for radio. I can. I sympathise with that one. Anything that's audio only and doesn't require me to put on makeup.

Always appeals to me hugely. I basically say yes to any podcast invitation. It's a tragedy actually that everybody in radio secretly wants to work in TV. And I think it's a terrible mistake. I think radio is a magical, audio in general, is a magical medium. because with a few hundred pounds worth of equipment, you can produce content that's absolutely world-class. Problem with television,

the addition of pictures comes at a very high price, which is that the ratio of dicking around to actually producing content. I've got a friend who's a radio producer. He went out with a set of recording equipment and produced a documentary for Radio 4 on Mongolian opera singers. Wow, that's pretty neat.

Now, you can do that with basically a return air ticket and a large pocket to put your Zoom recording equipment in. If that had been a TV thing, it would have involved endless crap for actually not very much added value. So that's another reason. Why I'm here running Ogleby change, all those questions, I ended up in advertising. I think advertising appealed to me really as a greedy comedian Monkeh,

which is I wanted to work in a business which studied the value of things that don't make conventional sense. and it strikes me that if you look at humour in particular, the evolutionary origins of humour, by the way, are really, really interesting, and they're widely debated. Patently, this thing has some sort of value. It creates a context where you can say things that are unsayable in another context. And if you look at the court jester, which is a role which is hundreds of years old,

appears in Shakespeare, goes back to the early Middle Ages, that's a case where someone was allowed to speak to power in a way that if anybody else had said it, would have resulted in beheading or social horror or catastrophe. So creating a space where you can say unsayable things strikes me as really important. The reason there's a connection between advertising and comedy and it should be closer than it really is.

One of the greatest ads that Ogilvy ever produced, which is the Diamond Shreddies case, where they advertise new Diamond Shreddies by simply presenting existing square shreddies turned round through 45 degrees. That was actually the work of a comedian who was freelancing in Ogilvian, Toronto. Oh, wow, okay.

Now, the real freedom, quite a lot of interesting creative ideas are helped along if you have a kind of python-esque sense of humor. that if you have a kind of idea of a ridiculous way to solve a problem, nine times out of ten, maybe that solution remains ridiculous. You know, I mean, undoubtedly, humor is hugely generative of creative possibilities simply because it isn't constrained by the usual rules of reason. But on the 10th occasion, your ridiculous python-esque suggestion

maybe contains a germ of truth and you can, or actually, maybe it contains the germ of a solution. And so it strikes me as fascinating. Someone who just generally loves comedy for the fact that things that don't make sense can be so brilliant. I'm also fascinated by the advertising world in that repeatedly for all the efforts of kind of reductionist economists to reduce human motivation to something very, very simple, narrow and self-interested, there is patently a whole lot of stuff going on here, which we have yet to understand. And I think only evolutionary psychology really will ever uncover the true reasons. I'll give you just a perfect example of something that happened the other day. So we have a mail pack that goes out to customers of a very large telecoms company.

And it's gone out pretty much every year advertising what they call a spring sale where you can sign up to various products at a discount. And this year, the response to this mailing was about three times higher than it had been in the previous year. and people were totally maffled by this and they were basically scratching their heads and they were obsessed with looking for a rational explanation for the outcome

and they'd gone around and they'd looked and they said look you know the targeting was basically the same it was the same group of people it was essentially very similar load of offers the pricing was pretty much the same the creative you know the content of the letter hadn't really changed

And yet it was three times more successful. And they go around the agency and they ask various people and they come up with what you might call post-rationalized rational-sounding ideas. Finally, they came to me. I said, look, I'm 53 years old. I worked in advertising for 30 years. You're not going to hear this explanation from anybody else.

But I fundamentally believe it's true. The reason it's three times more successful is the envelope has lots of pictures of fluffy rabbits on it. They'd chosen an Easter theme. They'd covered it with kind of illustrated cute rabbits. one of very few absolutely solid findings from the advertising industry is that

ads with a nice animal in do better than ads which don't have a nice animal in. It's interestingly the same with humour. What I find is a joke that illustrates the point by using an animal tends to be much funnier for the audience. There was an analysis, wasn't there? Which I think someone in Scotland did,

which is jokes which involve a duck are somehow slightly funnier than other jokes. And they had a debate about this, whether it's actually the word duck which has comedic potential in the way that the word goose doesn't. Okay? Or whether it's just that the animal is inherently slightly ridiculous.

But, no, I mean, undoubtedly, anything animal related just has, and that's just an evolved instinct that probably it was just as simple as the fact that if things got cute rabbits on, you don't chuck in the bin. That's very interesting because when I was a teacher, we used to have

a duck pond at school and ducks are raky little bastards. They're balanced. I think They were evil. They are evil. If fairness, mallards are the psychopaths of the waterfowl world. They are, they're horrendous. They're absolutely terrible, yeah. I mean, they're breeding. I mean, don't stigmatize all waterfowls. Okay, we've got to be really careful here that we're not being, you know, we're not being mallardist. But, I mean, actually, you know, some... I am maladist. No, no, no, they are bastards. Yeah. They are. Evil. I mean, you know, quite a lot of waterfowler monogamous. Quite a few geese are, quite a few ducks are.

we had various waterfowl when I was a child who were actually intensely devoted to each other but the mallards were bastards absolutely evil yeah evil I once had to explain to a special needs child whilst trying to stop what looked like a gang rape by a group of mallards what was going on there's essentially gang rape I mean it is essentially

25 Cromwell Street yes yeah because there's also there's also infanticide and I think incest as well. So they're pretty much the whole gamut. I have to be honest,

of all the subjects I expected to come up in this podcast, this was certainly not one of them. Let me just talk about the value of comedy. Absolutely. There is a fundamental problem

in politics and in business, which is you can only propose a solution to anything if it makes sense. Now, the problem with that is it's context independent, that idea, in other words, rationality is the only tool you need to use to solve a problem.

The truth the matter is, is it looks like an absolutely godlike economist John Kay, who I think was at Kilconomics last year, he's made this point that the Faculty of Reason, Dan Sperburn, Hugo Mercier, a very good book called The Enigma of Reason, didn't evolve in humans to help us make decisions. If you think about it, all other animals, mallards, dogs, etc.,

managed to survive and function and reproduce perfectly well without having to justify their actions. Something about our nature as a social species required us to have a faculty of reason, either to stress test collective decision-making or to justify behaviour to others, but it didn't evolve to actually help us decide. And so nearly everything,

this is where advertising and comedy, I think, have an overlap, and where behavioural science naturally lends itself to comedic value, which is all of us essentially, have a view of ourselves which we project as to why we do things and what we do, and we have a real deep down reason which is buried and hidden not only from everybody else, but also from ourselves. One of the most important, I think, theories in psychology, Robert Triver's idea that we actually deceive ourselves in order the better to deceive others.

That if we actually had essentially full introspective access to our motivation, then essentially we'd blow it by giving you a game. away. And so we need to practice self-deception in order to actually maintain an acceptable facade for everybody else. Now, once you realize that, of course, what you realize is that one of the things comedy does is it points out the very obvious discord between the reasons we give and the real reasons for various actions. And I always find it really, really interesting. But the idea that things have to make sense is a very dangerous one. So one of the interesting things about capitalism is for all its faults, it can stumble on things and fund them

even when they make no sense. So when I give a talk, I usually give this great example of a fantastic product which is ostensibly a complete nonsense. Now, if you've been asked, let's say, 30 years ago to compete with Coca-Cola, you would have sat down, you would have sat around a table, and would have said, we need a drink that tastes nicer than Coke, cost less than Coke, and comes in a really big can, so we all get great value for money. Everybody would have nodded. and you would have gone off and you would have done it, and you probably would have failed. Meanwhile, the most successful attempt to compete with Coke in 150 years, Red Bull, okay, comes in a tiny can, cost of fortune, tastes disgusting. Absolutely does.

Now, there's a second order logic to that, I think, which is the disgusting taste is actually essential to the overall experience. Which is if you want, if you think about it, it would be deeply weird to you if you were given really nice tasting medicine. wouldn't it? Yes. Something about the placebo effect, if you want us to believe instinctively that something has psychoactive or medicinal powers,

it has to taste weird. It's why health food has to taste shit, basically. I mean, it's a very, you know, I mean... Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it,

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Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Otherwise, wheatgrass. I mean, lick the underside of your flymo. You get the same effect, right? But because it tastes kind of weird, we automatically infer from that that it's probably doing us some good. Or having some interesting effect. High price also adds to that effect. small can makes it look as if this drink is so dampotent.

If I had a full 375 millilitres, I'd kind of go postal. Okay? And so what's interesting about this is that it is impossible to get any idea through what you might call the reason police unless it first meets the criterion of being explicable. Now, this is wrong. In a search for problem solving, you should ask the third question, even if it doesn't make sense, empirically does it work? That's about what I was about to say, because isn't a big part of what you might expect reason to be is empiricism. In other words, using data from testing to see whether something works or not, rather than just going, ooh, in my head, logically, this doesn't make sense.

I'll give you an interesting example. I'm an empirical monarchist, okay, in that no one would create a hereditary monarchy in a constitutional democracy from scratch. you wouldn't just go, here's Barry, we'll take his family, and we'll essentially, you know, hereditary heads of state. It made for a great documentary. It would. And actually, I mean, choosing people by lot actually is another interesting area which we need to explore.

And that's how Greek democracy worked. But the interesting thing is, if you look at it empirically, the collections of countries in the world, which are basically constitutional monarchies, okay, so you've got Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, You've got Holland, Belgium, Spain, the Scandies. So you've got other than Finland, you've got Sweden, Norway, Denmark, you've got Japan. Pretty much about 90% of the countries in which you'd actually want to live have that system of government.

Now, all I'm saying is just because it doesn't make sense doesn't mean it may not have some virtue that's simply difficult to explain or difficult to quantify. Absolutely. And so one of the things I'd see with creativity is it's a way of actually. breaking out of a very, very narrow straight jacket of decision finding. I mean, the thing that started as a joke with me, if you asked the question at the very beginning, why am I here?

And I suppose one of the reasons I'm here is I gave a TED talk back in about 2009, I think, was something like that. That's nine years ago now. And I simply made the Eurostar gag. Oh, it's fantastic little story. Okay. Now, I'd only thought about it a couple of days beforehand.

The point was that they were spending six billion pounds building high-speed rail tracks between St. Pancras and the Ken Coast to reduce the overall journey time between London and Paris, London and Brussels as well, by about 25 minutes. Okay? Now, my snarky little suggestion was, look, what is a bit weird is we're spending six billion on these rail tracks and the trains. This was true until two years ago, okay? So the trains don't have Wi-Fi. I don't know. Our South Eastern trains, which you share with me from Tumbridge Wells, they're now installing Wi-Fi on them.

They are. I actually get half the time, I'm actually annoyed my train arrives so early. I should have got off London Bridge to get here today. I stayed on until Charing Cross because I was in the middle of something. If you put Wi-Fi on something, essentially time loses its meaning. Yes.

But also, you're perfectly productive or entertained. so actually, you know, the time doesn't matter nearly as much. So you can reduce what you might call perceptual journey time, not at a cost of $6 billion, which is what it costs to reduce actual journey time. You can reduce it at a cost of what's probably $5 million, $6 million, which is literally 0.1% of the cost. I said, look, if you want to be more perverse,

and I just got silly there, I said, you know, if you really wanted to improve the Eurostar and you had a budget of $6 billion, you'd hire all of the world's top male and female supermodels, get them to walk up and down the train handing out free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers. You'd have saved five billion pounds because it would cost you about a billion pounds to do that

and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down. Now my point about that is it's a totally... That is what you might call the advertising cousin to a comedic technique, which is the reframing joke. Which is you tell something, you know, the most boring thing is, you know, you know, that joke which seems completely innocent until you flip the context by saying that, you know,

I was masturbating the other day, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then suddenly you introduced the fact that it was in Sainsbury's. And the same thing takes on basically what is, goes for a self, what you might call a little bit of reveal. That wasn't me literally saying that, by the example. Just to make that clear of all that is. Right? You would never shop at science.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, true, man. But the interesting thing there is that it's exactly the same thing, which is that human decision-making is quite often, and human perception is badly constrained by a conceptual frame or what you might call a mind-trap. And comedy is one of the ways in which you can liberate yourself from this. So I'll give you a little real-world story, which is, you may remember, it's one of my favorite sketches,

even though, as I said, it makes no sense. It's a Rowan-Ackinson sketch from Not the 9 o'clock news where he goes into a bathroom showroom and they have various little bottle, showers, baths, etc., in which he can actually design his own bathroom. And he just decides he's going to have a bathroom with seven toilets. And he's going to go, if I get rid of the bath, I can have another couple of toilets against the wall, you see?

Now, okay, totally bonkers, gorgeous, right? Anybody who's seen it will still remember it 35 years later. Someone comes to me with a problem, which is the firemen in certain American cities when they're not fighting fires, which actually is most of the time, because smoke detection equipment and so on, and vastly less flammable fabrics have reduced the incidence of domestic fires quite significantly. So they go around typically to poorer areas in the US to housing projects,

and they try and install smoke detectors for free, perfectly. noble, worthwhile things do. Now, one of the things they can never get their head around, and I can't understand it either entirely, is that they can get nearly everybody, and they ring on the door and say, firemen here, we're just here to install a smoke detector. You basically, you can get them to install one, but they really balk at two or three, and the typical apartment really needs three. The strange thing is, that's like saying, no, I don't want one in my child's bedroom.

It's a really weird thing to say. But for some reason, people just draw the line at one, maybe two, when three is necessary. Okay. Now, I used that same kind of Python-esque, you know, bizarre approach to suggest a solution, which is a very simple thing in behavioral science, it's just re-anchoring. I said, and it partly was, okay, I partly suggested absolutely outrageous things, which would never be legal or acceptable, which is to actually outrage people by saying,

well, actually, if you're Korean, you'd be entitled to three, but since you're African-American, you only get two, okay? I can see why that might be any similar. But you do it the other way around, you do it the other way around, okay? So you'd absolutely cause some sort of outrage. And competitiveness. And competitiveness in comparison. That came from a friend of mine who's,

wife was Chinese, she was invited to visit South Africa, and they didn't go in the end. But she wasn't allowed to share the same hotel with him. And they rang up and said, is your wife Chinese or Japanese? He said she's Singapore and Chinese. Oh, unfortunately, she'll need to say in a different job. She wasn't so much about staying in a different hotel from her husband. The idea that had she been Japanese, it would have been okay,

drove her practically insane. Yes. We forget this fact, actually. One of the problems of the British left, they assume complete harmony among all external. ethnic groups. Well, the Chinese-Japanese rivalries, with some reason in some cases, is still pretty intense.

But, okay, so one of the reasons, and this is why free speech and advertising, by the way, and free speech and comedy are both really, really important things to fight for. Now, no one is suggesting for a second I'm ever going to do that, okay, but it just struck me as a really interesting idea of how to get people to accept free, is to suggest that they weren't actually... One of the ideas about how you get younger children to eat insects is to have a pile of locusts.

You say, well, unfortunately, because you're under 16, you won't be allowed to eat things. Basically, you know, the magazine, the magazine just 17 had an average readership age of about 13. You know, you know, so actually telling people that you're not eligible for something drives them practically insane. But then the reason the free speech thing is important

is because there is a whole area of iron. ideas which belong in an ad agency, which I would describe as you'd get promoted for making the suggestion and fired for enacting it. And that one that I suggested is an example of that. If you actually had the idea, I'd be impressed by your ingenuity. If you actually executed it, I'd be horrified by your lack of judgment. But the ability to say that thing is really, really important because one speech is experimental action. So applying the same criteria

to speech as you do to physical actions is ridiculous because one of the reasons we've evolved humour and speech is it's nature's flight simulator. It's where we try things out without actually doing them. Probably the road of stories, a whole bunch of things exist as a kind of simulation.

But the second thing is sometimes in advertising in problem solving of any kind, you kind of have to climb Mount Silley. to get to the bright sunlit uplands beyond. And what I eventually suggested, borrowing from that Rowan-Ackinson sketch, for the smoke-detecting thing,

is I said, turn up with six. Now, six is a ridiculous number. And if you say to the people, well, you know, we normally bring six smoke detectors to her home, but I think here you can make do with three or four. You'll probably get them to install three or four, three, in fact. because one now seems weirdly on the low side.

Once you've anchored them at six, one seems like, well, no one will have one. It's insanity, right? And so having the ability to say and think, and I would argue the principal value of an ad agency isn't actually the production of advertising or communication. It's the existence of a culture with a client company's interests at heart, but with a culture in which it is possible to say ridiculous things and still get promoted.

That's one of the most important things that that agency can have is the ability to say something totally ridiculous which in say the civil service would be career suicide or in politics would probably be career suicide unless you know unless you're a Boris Johnson

and you manage to kind of... Or Donald Trump. Or Donald Trump, yeah. I mean there's a bit of me which goes Jesus, you know, I mean I don't like what he says, but at least I believe him when he says it. I think a lot of people feel that way, actually. It's one of the

reasons he probably got to like it. It's a bit like the Nixon argument, isn't it? You know where you are with a good playing crumb. But I mean, there is something about that which is that the elite priestly caste has become basically weird. It's become fixated with a very, very narrow worldview, which is instilled in all those

kind of religious ceremonies that take place in Davos or business schools or whatever, which are all inculcated. exactly the same creed. By the way, I'm a conservative. I'm not making this as a kind of weird left-wing point. But I don't think anybody can reasonably say that there's a complete lack of imagination and weirdness

in politics and business, which is that it's become obsessed with an incredibly narrow way of defining worldly progress and success, mostly around efficiency and cost reduction, which is not really very well aligned with, what people really care about. That's one of the reasons we want to chat to.

And by the way, I love speaking with you, and one of the reasons is we've asked you how you got here. And I think that was, you win the word for the most articulate and elaborate answer to that question, probably in the history of any podcast. There's another secret I'll let you into, which I was born in Lundbadik, which is just outside ask. The most famous son by a factor of 200 of Lundbatic

was Alfred Russell Wallace. and so my little ambition is to be the second best evolutionary thinker born in Ladd Baddick and one of the actually one comedian is it Bill Bailey is it keyboard yes he's I think of the president of the Wallace Society there is I think and this is also true of certainly speaking to Jimmy Carr there is a very very close tie between comedians and an interest in evolutionary psychology. Absolutely.

I mean, if you wanted to know what comedy's pet academic discipline is, I think evolutionary psychology wins every time. And I think evolutionary psychology, by the way, gets into trouble for similar reasons to comedy. So in academia, one of the reasons why behavioral economists are very reluctant to investigate evolutionary psychology is an explanation for human behavior, is that if you are in that kind of Darwinist camp,

it's incredibly easy to get, you know, no platformed and generally abused. And, of course, I suppose that's the other reason why evolutionary psychologists are close to comedians, which is they both have that slight urge to go slightly closer to the edge that is politic, to we say. Well, Rory, it's fascinating. I mean, speaking with you always is.

one of the things that I know that you Well actually we'll talk about that stuff later Because you keep bringing up the issue of free speech And I think that's something that we've been talking about recently We had Today as we're recording this We're releasing an episode with a guy who co-writes for Jonathan Pye I don't know if you've seen this

But he's a guy who's a reporter Who keeps getting caught After he's delivered his professional report Ranting about whatever subject he's just reported on I don't know if you've seen that But anyway we were talking to him about free speech And it seems to me like you keep bringing that up because do you feel that it's under threat in this country?

Do you feel that the way we are conducting our conversations isn't the way that we should? Well, first of all, there's something slightly weird about it, okay, which is no one, one of the things about the social justice movement is no one asks, I mean, generally it's quite benign. I mean, they think they're clever. If you look at most social justice campaigns, what you find is they're basically Quakers who are late to the point.

party. The Quakers are, you know, I've never heard that theory. And Corbyn, I mean, Corbyn, I mean, Corbyn, 100 years ago would have been a Quaker. He's just a Quaker Monke. And it's actually, it's really, I've got no hostility. I've got no hostility to the diagnosis. You know, I would generally argue that the direction of travel is right. But by obsessing over little shibboleths, like whether what a comedian said might be offensive to some imaginary listener who frankly shouldn't be in a bloody comedy club in the first place if they're that sensitive. When you enter a comedy club, you are at some level deciding to be shocked. Okay? I would argue there is huge progress to be made in quite a few areas of justice where

the focus on those tiny little, what you might call those relatively trivial little, It's rather like the vegan debate about whether or not you eat honey. The focus on those tiny little things that set people apart is ultimately a distraction from what could be far greater gains. So, you know, I mean, one problem would be that the weirdness of the most vociferous members of the social justice movement actually set back its causes. Now, you know, I've got a daughter who's vegetarian.

and I occasionally argue, look, if you get really, really purest about this, so one vegetarian, a friend of mine, basically after about 20 years of pure vegetarianism, started eating prawns because his argument was they don't have a central nervous system, and the inconvenience you suffer going to restaurants, if you're simply prepared to eat prawns, basically vanishes. I mean, I suggested actually that you should make insects acceptable from vegetarians to eat because actually it's a very environmentally friendly way of producing high protein foods. Now, there is huge progress to be made in, I think, animal welfare, okay, which I would really, really support.

And yet, if you make the whole thing about some completely bizarre, tiny, tiny trivial point about the fact that, I personally got grumpy, I understand their reasons for it, which is all about disgust. which is vegetarians who get very upset if the pitter bread that their vegetarian kebab was being made in happened to touch a bit of the donor. Because I said, hold on thing. That's not about any kind of rational reason for vegetarian. That's basically religious purity.

Okay, that's the religious purity instinct. That isn't the utilitarian instinct at play. Okay? Patently resting against the donor is not irrelevant in terms of animal welfare. And what you're doing there is you're making people like me who would actually become very largely vegetarian, less likely to become vegetarian because I don't want to become that kind of weird crank. Okay? So it is just as there's a phrase that, you know, the great is the enemy of the good.

In some cases, the perfect is the enemy of the better. I mean, that's a very interesting argument, by the way, in Wired today about driverless cars saying the whole thing's being screwed up because they're aiming too high. they're aiming for a perfectly driverless car which can whizz around and do everything that a human driver can do. Well, ultimately we'll get there, but the way to actually succeed is to aim first for the middle.

And they said, look, if you had, for example, a network of roads to take teenagers home where the cars could just drive along a painted line on the road between 10 and 10 p.m. and 2am, and they could only drive at 20 miles an hour and they drove themselves.

Or you had pod transportation, which was just a network of little cars or pods that just circulated around London on totally preordained routes. I'd make it cycle lanes personally. Cycling is... The cycle lane is basically racist. You know that, isn't you?

No. Cycling is the whitest thing. Seriously, I'm three-eighths Welsh, okay, and I'm not white enough to cycle. I'm seriously, okay? But you can create designated lanes around London, on a very simple network, have little pods going around, driving themselves, not hitting people.

You would demonstrate a huge proportion of the benefits of something without necessarily trying to reach perfection. When you try and reach perfection, you end up people getting killed, people getting frightened, etc. Plus, we get rid of cyclists. And at the same way, I mean, for example, if you take the social justice movement, this shit about cultural appropriation.

Oh, yes. I mean, it's patently, okay, intellectually. Okay, what the hell happens to Katsu curry, right? Katsu Kari is a Japanese dish introduced from India by the British, okay? I mean, who's entire? Are the Japanese basically appropriating it for the Indians, for the British? Can I eat it? What the hell's going on?

I mean, you know, attaching that to kind of dress, for example, is patently insanity because the asymmetry of the whole thing becomes absolutely obvious. You know, I mean, no one would dream for a second of suggesting that, you know, Indians playing cricket was cultural appropriation. And yet you do the same thing the other way around, if I would turn up here in one of those narrow jackets. You know, I'd get a lot of shit. I'm quite like it in there. And the hat. But, I mean, there's something so bonkers about it.

The other thing is, it doesn't matter that much, right? I mean, you know, there's a huge instance of modern slavery. There's enormous animal suffering. There are also campaigns we can engage in collectively, if we could only get them started, which wouldn't benefit one tightly defined ethnic or gender group, but they could benefit everybody. So let's take this example of, it is, I think, whatever the arguments for why women end up earning less than men, which bear in mind, of course, high earners reflect the gender balance of a business 30 years ago.

Yeah. Okay. So, you know, if you look at Ogilvy, my graduate recruitment group in Oglevy was three males to one female, which was probably pretty normal at the time, whatever reason. Okay. If places that recruited from Oxbridge, it's worth remembering that four years before me at Oxbridge, there were most of the colleges were all male. So, you know, what you see now is actually a reflection of what happened 40 years ago. And, you know, the question is, you just have to accept a degree of path dependency on this stuff. But if you look at that, okay, there's a campaign which you could make for women to be given greater maternity rights, but also greater freedom for flexible working. Now, why make that a gender-based campaign?

If you look at the United States, okay, something like 68% of Americans, if you ask them, would rather have 4% less money and two weeks more vacation. I don't know if you know this, in the US, okay? Because it's standard to only get two weeks. which is shit. I mean I've never interesting fact interesting thought experiment here about how this is what I call a mind trap in other words if you think something is normal it's very difficult to be the first person to make a change so a lot of change happens you know it was very very and I'm not suggesting it's easy now okay but the difference between coming out in you know in 2018 and coming out in 1968 okay is you know an order of magnitude or something no one's suggesting

it's easy at any time, but nonetheless, you know, the first person to do something pays a disproportionately high price. And then as more and more people start to do it and the social norm becomes established, okay, the price becomes lower. And there are loads of things, by the way, there are loads of things which follow this very unequal path if you look at behaviour change. So I'll give you two very interesting examples of this. If you look at how social change happens, the standard kind of economic idea

is we're all individual actors. It's called methodological individualism. And we just go, actually, I think that's wrong. By the way, Quakers way, way in advance on that one as well, by the way. I just thought I'd make the point that the Social Justice Warriors are just crap Quakers. That is going to be the crime that we need to promote this episode, guaranteed. You know, if you look at Quakers on things like slavery, they're people extraordinary. My wife's an Anglican vicar, and there are really, really interesting people like John Wallman in the United States,

who, you know, if you stayed in a household where there were slaves, you left the money that the slave would be paid as a servant behind because that was the only acceptable way he could resolve it. And this was, by the way, I mean, this was, you know, 18th century stuff. This was really, really quite early. And bear of mind, I mean, slavery was a mind trap. I mean, everybody thought, for a long, long time, everybody thought it was perfectly normal.

It was in the Bible. It happened for thousands of years. You know, we've got to remember this, that, you know, having a go at people in the 18th century for, not being abolitionists, okay, is, you know, is a little like having a go at, you know, people for not being gay rights campaigners in 1926 or something, okay? It's a different order of difficulty.

And so a lot of things happen like this. So an interesting example of this where everybody gets the costs first and the benefits only come when something becomes more widely adopted. That applies to London taxis accepting credit cards. Now, I've spoken to loads of London taxi cab drivers. and it was a threat from Uber that made them do it to a great extent. But they do grudgingly admit that since they accepted credit cards and particularly contentless credit cards,

usage of black cabs has gone up dramatically. Because it was a complete anomaly that London had this cab system where you couldn't confidently get in a cab knowing that if the journey overran a bit and you ran out of cash, you could just use a credit card to pay. It created a whole load of uncertainty and anxiety and reluctance to use cabs, partly because if you think about it,

contactless payment has meant that we carry less and less cash and using a cab became the single biggest drain on your cash reserves in your wallet well i wouldn't know about that because i live in south london and they won't go south of the i'll have to take it on your experience rory but but the the interesting thing there was okay so it pays them all to accept credit card they're all better off okay but until you hit about 90 in the end they made it compulsory because they just decided until you hit about 90, 95% it doesn't benefit anybody. The person who is an

earlier doctor of credit cards, suffers all of the costs, transaction costs, general hassle, you know, people's cards not working, waiting for a receipt. Paying tax. Exactly, yeah. This is where comedians go right to the real why. You know, I was

delicately kind of tiptoeing around that issue and you go straight for the jugular. Well, Bob. No, but the First people to accept it, therefore, have disproportionate cost, no benefit. It's only when it hits 95% where the punter can confidently hail a cab. Now, you could have had an intermediate solution to the problem, which is cabs that accepted credit cards could have displayed a different color light, say. So consumer choice could have driven the adoption of the credit card.

But because of the problem where by the time you'd hail the cab, it was too late to go, you couldn't really say, you don't take credit cards, piss off, okay? because of that social awkwardness, the order effect, essentially what you had was no incentive to accept something because the early adopters paid the highest price. And there are loads and loads of things which I think follow that curve. Now, if you think about it, 68% of people in America would rather have more vacation a bit less money. I'm not sure, by the way, the economy wouldn't be better off

if they had more holiday because leisure expenditure is much more labor generative than just buying shit from Walmart, which is what they tend to do. Americans also tend to do a bullshit thing, really, which is they have loads and loads of conferences in sort of sunny or exotic places, which are like a zats vacation for Yankeks. You sit in a windowless room talking about marketing

and you kind of treat that as if it's a holiday. Total crap. If you want a holiday, have a fucking holiday. Okay, now that's an interesting case where if you think about it, 68% of the people in every firm would rather make that trade-off between leisure and money. But the first person to try and make that call is going to pay a disproportionate price because they become known as the lazy guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's happened in Sweden, actually, getting men to take paternity leave. Men out of various, you know, machismo things, about wishing to signal commitment to their employer will kind of take two days paternity leave when they're entitled to more. And so in the end, they made it compulsory to create a social norm. was just accepted that the guy is going to be off work. Yeah. And that's the end of it.

And so there's certain things where you need to reach a critical mass before you can get anywhere. And where I think social justice stuff goes a bit weird is that it's often focusing on stuff that's already tipped, trying to reach a kind of level of perfection. You know, I mean, generally, really nasty racist people, they're still around, but they're going to kind of die. Right. Okay, don't spend your whole time going insane because some guy said something nasty, you know, or whatever.

Why don't you focus on the things, you know, instantly, as I said, don't make bloody greater leisure time a feminist campaign, make it a universal one. There are loads and loads of guys and people out there who would want to make the trade-off between slightly less money, slightly more spare time. And actually the argument then is... So don't confine it to some blasted identity group.

Well, it started to jump in a row, But actually then the argument is as well is if men can take more paternity time, that will allow women to get back to work quicker potentially affecting their pay in a positive way. There are some kind of analyses which suggest that the disparity of earnings, it can be entirely attributable to time spent in maternity and that if you look at the career progression of people who haven't had children for any reason, it doesn't show the same debt. I don't think it's just that.

I don't think it's just prejudice, by the way. Yeah. No, no. I think that the slight thing that annoys me with the social justice movement is they can only see the world in terms of prejudice, discrimination, race, gender. And a press. And general, you know, oppressed group, et cetera. And, you know, I mean, one interesting thing which always interests me is, you know, it's perfectly possible, of course, that women oppress other women. It doesn't have to be. So I've always asked this question.

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Shop Ultima on Amazon or in store at Target and Whole Foods Market. I can't let you leave it there because if it stays there it's going to be very unexplained and trigger What do you mean by women oppressed other women? The pressure to dress well which undoubtedly imposes a burden on my daughters but not me. It's a fucking out of leave the house.

I've got one daughter who's a militant feminist. That's great because at least you'll be quick leaving the house you know a few paintstained dungarees and some Dr. Martin somewhere in the car, right? Unfortunately, no, she's one of these. new feminists who worries about foundation cream and eyelashes and shit,

which strikes me as a bit weird. But that's not... I don't know where that comes from. Some Darwinists would say it's innate. Other people would say it's peer pressure. It's not guys, right? If you look at the women's fashion industry, it is not driven by male desire.

I've never looked at a fashion magazine in my life. No, I mean, it's not interesting to us. I mean, and generally, guys don't read them. equally you can say that I don't think anybody's ever been apparently okay has been watching porn hub and saying oh my god that's last year's journey versus

I mean bluntly okay I don't want I don't want to take first actually for women to dress in a way that's attractive to men it's quite easy okay it doesn't require Anna Winter to tell you how to do that right okay you know you know

and so so there's something going on there Now, you know, I ask about this, and I ask the question, are there cases where social norms essentially impose collective costs which all of us would rather not bear individually, okay, but which are inescapable simply because of this sigmoid curve that anybody who deviates pays a disproportionately high cost? I mean, I've often... So like in this case, a woman that doesn't wear makeup, for example, makes yourself stand out. It makes yourself stand up. Now, I propose, which actually has some females of thought. I said that for Ogilvy, we should have a Monday, Thursday dress code

where we just wear red boiler suits. Because, A, we don't have to think about what we wear. B, it makes the office look like the headquarters of a James Bond villain, which would be really cool, okay? We could get a mono rail. But also, it would mean that, you know, maybe Friday, maybe Friday people enjoy this shit. But I'll give you, I'm the only person in the world

who also wants these bloody cookery shows ban, okay? because they set the bar too high, all right? So it used to be that basically, if you invited some people around your house, you provided a tolerant amount of free booze and something to eat, which could have been a pizza, right? You were a host. That was doing your job,

and you had a fantastic time because 90% of the pleasure in such evenings isn't created by the food, it's created by the company combined by the drunkenness. Right? It's not really about, you know, I mean, I can't remember what I ate at my wedding. I can't remember what I ate at loads and loads of things. You know, it's not about that.

But these cookery shows essentially set the bar so ridiculously high for what counts as baking, what counts as cooking, that we'll end up having far fewer sociable evenings because people simply can't face it. And I think there are loads of things there. There's a great book which I advise everybody to read called The Darwin Economy by my friend Robert H. Frank. And he talks about what you might call Peacock's Tale Effects in Human Behaviour,

where the competitive urge, and emphatically, if you think about it, it's all very well for economists to say that, no, no, no, all that matters is individual utility, you know, relative wealth doesn't matter. Patently we didn't evolve that way. There are lots and lots of things in life which depend, actually, access to high-quality partners to an extent. Okay, that's a relative question. It's not an absolute one.

You know, I guess you live in Denmark where you automatically get a Danish wife, which is probably going to be okay. Okay, I don't know. I don't know, maybe they reach some of them. It's not IKEA, you know, they've solved it. They've solved it in a wonderfully democratic Scandinavian way, you know. Actually, that reminds me of a story. I remember once when I was in my early 20s, my dad got a pleasant.

He was very drunk one night. And he said, he went to, he asked me, he went to me, Francis, are you single? I went, yes. And this was about 11 o'clock. And he went, but I've got one piece of advice for you. I'd go, what is it, Daddy? He went, go to Copenhagen in the summer. And then he walked out the room.

Very good advice. No, I haven't been. Although apparently I'm going to Copenhagen with my girlfriend in summer. Oh, that's probably a mistake. I think you know, I think you've done a bit late. Yeah, I think so. But I mean, certain things, certain things where I think the urge to, we have an innate urge to outdo other people, okay. And, you know, I mean, that's what drives comedy. That's what makes London comedy amazing is precisely that the bar set very high. No one wants to completely dis this competitive urge because it leads to the most spectacular thing. but it also leads to a kind of collective stupidity.

And misery for some people. And also we tend possibly to, if you look at universities, for example, we look at the, we do a benefit analysis. We don't really do a cast analysis. Are the worst 30% or 40% of people coming out of universities actually worse off because of the existence and preponderance of higher education? We never measure this. We just go, gosh, look at these very successful people.

they all went to university, so university is brilliant, it's basically a factory for producing really successful people. And we failed to ask the question, well, actually, what about the people who don't quite hack it? Are they actually screwed? You have this bonkers system now where companies won't interview people who haven't got a two one. So I met someone who had a two-two in maths from Cambridge and they couldn't get a job interview. I said, trust me, okay, I've never met any mathematical problem that couldn't be solved in business by someone with a two-two and a two. in maths from Cambridge. I said, if we do meet one,

you'll know loads of people who've got a first and you can ring them up and ask, right? It's not a big deal, right? So, you know, you've got into Cambridge to do maths, I think it's fair to say, you're not kind of enumerate, right? You kind of cross my bar there, you know. And so there is this thing which is that

you've got to, you know, you've got to ask the question about the, first of all, the obsession with, and I think the obsession with tiny minutiae of social justice movement is actually a product in this competitive urge that in order to show affiliation to a group

the way you've proved, it's exactly like football. I don't like football. I think it's irrational. Sorry, I think it's ridiculous. I'm sorry, it's crazy, right? Roy, this is rapidly becoming the most triggering podcast in this series ever.

No, no, but it's just stupid. It's just not relevant, okay? Now, bear in mind, there's a reason for that, which is not that I don't like football. It's that I grew up in the Seven Valley region. in the 1960s and 70s, where essentially we were in the HTV West TV area. Okay. Now, the local football teams, the nearest premiership team then was probably Aston Villa,

in fact, which was about 80 or 90 miles away or more. The typical local news thing would say, and another bad night for West Country football fans, City and Rovers both lost, and Swindon could only manage a draw. So if you grew up listening to that, it didn't really incentivise you to turn it. up on the terraces and get involved. But I've never understood it.

But just as people prove their loyalty to a football team by engaging in ever more bizarre and ridiculous antics, people will, you know, essentially signal their adherence to a cause by doing the same thing. And I think it's a dangerous thing because actually it's self-defeating. Just as actually the first people to adopt a technology can be a disaster for the technology. You know, you see what I mean? If the people who adopt something are generally weird and obsessive and keep ranting on about it,

it's not actually encouraging to other people. They just go, clearly, that's something for weirdos. I'm going to leave it alone. And so, you know, perfectly good intentions can get distorted into something that's actually self-defeating in that way. But it's very interesting. It's when you say that because you have people who advocate free speech

and then they get retweeted by Katie Hopkins or Tommy Robinson. and then people go, see, I told you this was nonsense. Look who's supporting you. Yeah, I mean, this is a bizarre one because it should be perfectly possible for people across the spectrum. And I think it's a bit awkward for comedy. I'm going to be honest about it.

Comedy actually pretends to be left way, but it isn't really. Okay. Oh, we know. Yeah, right? Okay. Because at some level, there is always a degree of mild nastiness. Of course.

There always has to be a victim in the joke. There has to be, I mean, victim is extreme, but, I mean, it's like tickling, according to the evolutionary psychologist, which is a form of physical contact where it's very clear from the context that no harm is intended, okay?

So this theory by the, I think it's a Colorado academic that actually humours essentially verbal tickling. So there's always something, if you know, if you think about it, very few comedians will stand up and go, you know, I voted Tory, my tax is outrageous. Who would be the...

But equally, they very frequently adopt personas, which are, you know, slightly, you know, patently you have to adopt a persona, the pub landlord. Yeah. Or Ricky Jervais, actually, as Brent, okay? Which are kind of everyman personas, which are a bit right wing. And it's complicated.

but the free speech thing has caught people slightly an awkward position because I think comedy patently it's an existential threat to comedy. If you have this problem where Chris Rock refuses to play the American College Circuit because it's just not worth the shit. I heard this, I'm thinking, lucky bastards, you're a university and you get a visit from Chris Rock, okay? I was thinking, shit, you know, okay? Now, once you get to that point, it's basically impossible, okay?

Because it can't, I mean, it can't, because it's there to point out to some extent. Okay, so comedy is essentially hostile to what you might call the New Jerusalem Project of the Left, which is the idea that it's much, much easier to live in an imaginary future than it is to live in a messy present. And comedy points out the fact that this, you know, life is messy, okay, there is a, conflict between what we would like to think of ourselves and how we really are. There are, you know, widespread absurdities in kind of human behavior and human emotion and so on. And comedy is there to actually point out the imperfectability of things, whereas to some extent, the worst of the left are actually essentially, you know, start with weird New Jerusalem dream world, basically go bonkers wherever current world's differs from that world, have no discussion about the paths necessary to get from A to B, but

simply get very, very angry and upset. Now, that's kind of problematic because it's also hugely problematic because context is really, really important. So I would imagine, okay, within a military platoon, there is unbelievable abuse of every kind heaped on each other, okay? Now, would you want to pull up? within a group of 20 or 30 crack soldiers, would you actually want to police their language in that way? Well, the truth of the matter is what you say to the other person is, A, it's actually weirdly a perverse sign of affection. Because it's exactly like aposomatic signaling in animals. You know this thing where poisonous animals tend to be brightly colored, right?

So ladybirds, they spend all their life on a fucking leaf, right? So you'd think that green might be a good kind of fashion choice. Right? No. Red and black. Why? Mimicry. It's actually the opposite of it. It's actually essentially saying, I must be inedible, because if I weren't inedible for some reason, there's nowhere I could get away with this badass coloration. It's probably why you wear jewelry in South Central Los Angeles, okay?

Now, it's not just to prove what you can afford, it's to prove what you can get away with, okay? Now, I as, you know, Vice Chairman of Advertising Agency, could probably afford quite a large gold necklace. There are large parts of American cities where I don't think I'd safely wear it because I get about 50 feet. The fact that you can wear that stuff in public basically proves that you're a badass. I think you should.

Lady birds, by the way, if you eat them or if birds eat them, they secrete a disgusting chemical from their knees. Now, aposomatic signaling is basically, I show that I'm something because if I weren't that thing, I couldn't get away with this. And actually, we prove we're friends, particularly Brits. Americans sometimes get this wrong by being rude to our friends. Oh, yes, absolutely.

The person you abuse is patent your mate, because if you weren't my mate, we couldn't get away with this level of banter and badinage. So there's an aposomatic quality to rudeness. Now, in a military group, all they really care about is I don't give a shit whether you're rude about my face, my origins, whatever. Would you die for me? That's the central question. And if you want to foster that kind of, you know, I mean, it will probably be progress, okay, if in 20 or 30 years, mild homophobic banter takes place between you and gay mates in Britain.

That would actually probably be a mark of progress. I'm not sure that's going to happen. I'm not sure it's desirable because you can make all sorts of arguments about it. But nonetheless, the fact that you can do that, it's much, much more complicated than taking everything that people say completely literally, because the whole, I mean, that speech is completely weird

in this respect anyway, okay? The way we interpret words entirely depends on the words either side of them. No word has a set meaning. Depends on tone of voice in many cases, which is why, I'm always very worried when I see a case in the paper where someone's words are written down. Okay. Someone is aggrieved because they claim their boss was da-da-da-da-da-da. Now, I'll give you a classic case of this, which is that I think there was a case where someone at a bank, they were travelling on a private plane

and the males suggested that she served them drinks on the thing. Okay, now, bear in mind this was like 1992. It's pretty iffy when you read it on paper. It was probably pretty iffy in reality. There's a 10% chance if well-intentioned and the two people were actually friends, that's exactly what would happen

amongst a bunch of mixed gender friends. Okay? You know, so it's very, very difficult to judge speech in print because the twinkle in the eye can completely change the meaning of what's said? Well, interestingly enough, nowadays, quite often when you see a story like that where somebody said something offensive, even the content of what they said is not reported. So you will often see an article where you are told that somebody made an offensive comment and you're not even given the opportunity to see the comment.

No, which really bothers me, the hell out of me, because what the hell... The real word there, which you've got to watch out for is inappropriate, okay? I mean, inappropriate is a subjective comment, and it's also a contextual comment, okay? And so you're absolutely right about that. Or also, I mean, I've noticed increasing things saying, you know, performed a sexual act, okay? Now, I mean, you know, that can, you know,

and in a more puritanical, I mean, I noticed Stephen Fry, who's basically a bit of a lefty-lovy. But he's sane. He's, well, what are you spotting about this, which I think is fair, is that there's a degree of this which is Puritanism in disguise. It's a kind of, it's a really unpleasant, weird puritanism that's actually taken on a political rather than the religious mantle. But the, you know, I think that the, what you might call the general fun brigade, the Bon vivor brigade, have got a this cause because at some level it's going to lead human relations to become deeply miserable and constrained and nervous.

I mean, to that extent. I mean, it's worrying. But the other point is that, you know, I mean, what you say, jokes are context dependent. I don't think free speech is context dependent. I think you've just got to accept the whole lot. I mean, Nazi pug was an interesting case in point, wasn't it? Yes, absolutely. The fact that he was, well, they said that context wasn't important.

No, and the point is that that was taken off YouTube, okay? I mean, I can find examples of it. Now, I first read about it, and I thought this guy's a total shit. You know, I'm not totally sorry that he is being prosecuted. When you actually see it, okay, he explains the context to which it's done, which is his girlfriend basically thinks his pug can do no wrong. So it's a brilliant exercise in testing her, herself, her, delusions, her pug delusions.

He trains the pug to act Nazi, okay? Well, that's kind of funny, right? Yeah, definitely funny. You know, I mean, and and, you know, it's patently, it's patently clear that, I mean, you can always get things out of context, okay,

which is, you know, I mean, you know, Twitter's dangerous for that reason, which is that, I mean, the, the humorous writer, I'm just forgot his name, but it's the sage of Baltimore, he was called. And someone will remember. I'll remember it in a second.

But he always said that there should be, as well as italics in writing, there should be another typeset which slopes the opposite way, which is called ironics, which is to convey what you're saying. And Twitter really needs a kind of, you know, an ironics type set. Oh, absolutely. It needs italics and ironics because I've occasionally made gags, which I quite understand if you completely misunderstood them. Okay.

Yes. you know they you know it would seem offensive and I'm occasionally making the joke in front of a basically to an imagined audience

of a few friends who will get to the fact that it's absurd and tongue in cheek and tongue in cheek the other 50,000 people have nowhere of knowing this so that I mean that's a kind of weird one

but yeah I mean I think ultimately you have to you have to treat free speech as a line in the sand unless there is some incitement to physical unpleasantness. I accept that. There are cases where speech can be used.

But the other problem is, of course, that in economics, interestingly, they've never, possibly wrongly, but they've never accepted what you might call psychic costs in economic models. The reason being that it's too easy to exaggerate them, So, you know, if I'm to be harmed, okay, physically, then patently there will be some evidence of my being harm.

But secondly, it's unlikely that I fake that harm by bashing myself in the face repeatedly. That does happen, okay? On the other hand, it's in our interests, if you look at game theory, to exaggerate the extent to which things upset us. Now, this is a really interesting case, okay, so here's an interesting case, pictures of parallel. my suspicion is, okay, that actually a third of the people in the Heathrow flight path, okay, actually like the planes, okay? Right, okay? Now, however, if you're seeking to gain for the group from Heathrow expansion,

if you're seeking to get from that group a general as much, if you want that group to get as much compensation as possible for the disturbance caused, okay, Me going in and saying, bloody marvellous, you know, 787, full flaps down, coming in low, gorgeous. The other thing, by the way, I don't know if you noticed this, which is that people who live in West London very quickly just black out the planes completely. Yeah, they do. They just become, I used to teach near Gatwick and you just... You just don't notice you. Yeah.

I went to a garden party once somewhere like, I think it was someone like Acton, okay. And we're standing there going, you know, blah, blah, blah, glass of red. We went to Tuscany last year. We thought we'd triumph this year. And there's something there, fucking hell. That's that, you see? Because the 7-4-7 comes in low. The people who are local basically didn't notice, okay? You know, and now anyway, but no one's going to tell the truth under those conditions about how much they care about the planes, because they're going to exaggerate the degree to which the planes upset them. And I always wondered, I thought there's a really interesting experiment, which is, if you made the deal slightly different.

So you said to West London, okay, if you're on the flight path for New Heathrow, right, we're going to give people living in acting. and the people who are infected by the runways. Really fantastic treatment of Heathrow. You're going to get a car park and you can part there for up to three weeks for a pound a day. You're going to get your own lounge, right? You know, where basically the West London people who suffer from this airport,

when they get to use this airport, will get treated like bloody royalty, right? My hunch is that about half the people would go, actually, I don't really mind the plane. Yeah. But if you have a case where, if you think about it, there's no upside to them except compensation. No upside to Heathrow expansion, really.

The upside is collective, the pain is individual. Then you have a very clear case where it's hugely in the interest of those people to exaggerate things, which planes annoy them, because that's how they get the best payout. So I think there's a danger here, which is that one of the problems about people claiming offence is that, you know, there's some people who have no sense of human, by the way. Are we going to, just as, okay, you can't serve a restaurant, you can't operate a restaurant which serves only food to which nobody is allergic, okay? And this is Nassim Talib's minority rule point, which is that a small group of extreme people

can exert a very large amount of market power. Because if the vast majority of people are happy with A and B, okay, but there's a small group that are only happy with B, okay, you end up only serving up B, because it's the one thing that everybody's happy with, lowest common denominator. It's like the blood group thing, isn't it? I can't remember, is it O or A, B, blood, the universal donor, which you can give to everybody, okay? So an example I always give of this, which I gave to Nassim Taleb, is actually blokes, I think, prefer spirits and beer to wine. I think wine is bloody overrated to drink, okay?

totally overrated nonsense, okay? But if you have a mixed gender party, there's a very simple fact, which is about 30% of women won't drink beer. And they won't drink cider. And a lot of them won't drink spirits.

Gin and tonic pimms maybe break the, they actually break the gender bar a bit. But, you know... Or a bailies. That's a male. That's a possible male. I agree, actually. We all love it, don't we? Yeah, everyone loves a baillis.

Is it right? Okay. Okay. A bit of candor there. But when you, there's always the potential that a small group of people through their own intolerance can essentially destroy the ecosystem for everybody else. So just as you end up serving wine because basically women won't drink, a certain number of women won't drink beer. Now, there are only about 15% of the overall group of the party, but it means that you can't have a party where you just serve beer. men basically will drink anything and broadly speaking I mean okay I draw the line at Sangria and that bloody Greek stuff Retsina but basically I'll drink anything

okay so as a result you have a mixed gender party red white okay and therefore the majority end up drinking not their drink of choice they don't really want to drink simply because a small group of people won't drink what they really want to drink

and you'll drink what the other people so you know and this is what you're saying is happening in comedy which is if you have imagine you had a restaurant where if any ingredient to which one person in the world was allergic was taken off the menu of the restaurant. Now obviously you can serve special dishes to people. I'm gluten intolerant. I've got a nut allergy. Okay? Right. Okay. You can serve special dishes. What you can't do, and basically a comedy club is where you serve the same food to everybody,

you can't only serve food to which nobody's allergic for the simple reason that the number of food stuff you can probably serve becomes limited to about four. And so your urge to offend nobody ends up essentially creating something so anodyne that the other 95% of people basically end up cheated. And getting angry.

And getting angry. We've got to fight that because you can't have... I mean, it's very interesting if you look at it in some interesting cases. I mean, there seems one that seems arguments is all carbonated drinks in the US are kosher. Now this makes perfect sense, by the way. Only about 0.5, maybe 1% of the American population really follow kosher dietary laws.

But it's not worth the Coca-Cola company producing separate kosher Coke for a tiny share of the market who wouldn't bring ordinary coke. So it's much easier just to make, you know, similarly, you know, if you have 5% of schoolchildren in a London school who will only eat halal, the whole kitchen goes halal. Now, in that case, by the way, it's a bit tough on the sea. I don't know if you knew that, because Sikhs technically aren't supposed to eat halal food for some reason. But Sikhs seem pretty chill and they basically go, yeah, whatever.

But nonetheless, what you might have is an intransigence of a minority can end up driving the majority behavior. And I think if we're not careful, you know, things like the BBC, which are hugely sensitive and oversensitive to, you know, to causing offence. I mean, I watch most comedy from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and about half the time I'm thinking they could never have done this. Now, in some cases, actually, I wish they hadn't. An interesting example of that would be about a third, maybe a quarter of the content of Little Britain. Oh, that's interesting.

There are some of them, some of the pieces on Little Britain strike me now as being actually cruel crueller than they're funny. Okay. Or, you know, there are particularly sort of extreme stereotype in some shape.

Most of it's very, very good still, okay? But there's a hell of a lot of stuff which I still enjoy, still think he's brilliant and would still defend to the Hilt. Which, funnily enough, I think the makers of Little Britain said the same thing themselves.

Now, what happens, though, if just like we can never see bands which happen to appear on TV with Jimmy Saville, okay? So all those past examples of Top of the Pops with Jimmy on them can never be seen. Now that's going to include a few band performances. If we get to the point where, in other words, any comedic sketch from the 1970s, 80s or whatever,

which would be deemed offensive to a small group of people, can no longer be shown. I mean, it's half-hot mum, for example, involved a character in Blackface. Okay. Interestingly, he actually spoke fluent Urdu because he'd grown up in India, but he played the Indian punker waller, I think, if my memory is right. Now that's clearly an absolute no-no

rebroadcasting that program. You can't re-broadcast the Dukes of Hazard? That's myth, not fast, but it's comedy in a sense. But because there's a Confederate flag on the car, is this, I mean, you know, this is kind of weird. And equally, I mean, I think that Kevin Spacey should be punished by proper legal process and then be allowed to rehabilitate his film career.

I'm not happy with a, you know, first of all, I'm not happy with a talent being completely destroyed without some sort of legal recourse to be prosecuted and punished. And he should face, he should face prosecuting an accord of law. But I mean, one of the points of prison, I mean, you've got to remember, if you look at prison or very large fines, or whatever it may be, or community service, okay, is that actually, okay, the general view is, one, you do it to protect the public. You lock people up to protect the public.

Secondly, you do it as a deterrent. Thirdly, you might do it as a, literally as a punishment. You might argue there's a kind of, you know, kind of eugenic component to it, although I don't think anybody would say that. No, I don't think that would worry. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, but I mean, you know, I mean, nobody would dream of saying that for a second.

But another reason, another reason for the justice system is it, you know, it basically says, once you've done the punishment, that's it over. You know, there is no necessary reason why you should not be able to actually reenter society in some way. Now, if you end up with this kind of innuendo war, probably the most extreme case was that happening with, for example, what was it, Lake Obegon guy, Garrison Keeler, where, you know, essentially some, you know, some weird allegation surfaces, which, I mean,

he barely remembers and is very unclear, then, you know, there is something slightly dangerous here because apart from the other, you are giving people extraordinary power that, simply to throw mud so that it, and the hope of some of it's sticking. And I'm not comfortable. I mean, I'm not, you know, I think that this business where you essentially, you signal your dedication to the cause, quite rightly, and I can understand why people want to do it. And I think most of the social justice movement is entirely well intentioned.

I think the questions about gender inequality are really intelligent questions that should be asked, accompanied by the question why, not accompanied by the assumption, it's, you know, it's the patriarchy. Yeah. Maybe it is partly the patriarchy. maybe it's exclusively a patriarchy, but we ought to find out what it is because otherwise we'll end up with a cure that's worse than the disease. If you basically, you know,

if your diagnosis of a problem is badly wrong, you end up, you know, with poisoning people with medicine, essentially. And so, but the urge to signal it basically leads to a kind of insanity, which I don't think is helpful. I mean, I'd like to see wider campaigning for vegetarian,

terrorism, as I was saying earlier, in that one of the things we ought to think about is that technology, I mean, just as I'd argue for different patterns of work, you know, at some level we've got to aim for a four-day week. We've got to stop aiming for annualised GDP growth, which is easy to aim for because it's a gradual measure. And we've got to take the big leap and go, okay, our aim for Britain in 10 years time is to have some form of four-day week where many people either only work four days a week, maybe for longer days, possible, okay, or can work from home with some degree of flexibility for one day a week. And part of the purpose of that is to make it easier. If you think about it, when women entered the workforce, the amount of leisure in a married household dropped by about 40 hours, when I say

leisure, discretionary time, not leisure, partly enabled by technology, partly enabled by the washing machine, etc. But the amount of discretionary time for a married couple fell by about 40 hours. I think we should try and get some of that time back, actually.

By reducing the working hours for everybody. Yeah, I think we have to look at either changing working patterns or reducing working hours or simply giving people the option to do so. Because what I said about this, you know, this taxi driver problem with credit cards is it's lots and lots of people, I think. I wanted to instill a thing in Ogilvy where everybody offered a pay rise whenever they received a pay rise. That's that awful. But they would be given the automatic option of taking half of it as money, half of it is holiday. So a 4% pay rise you could take basically as 2% cash pay rise and an extra week's holiday.

Okay? There'll be a limit to that. Otherwise, I don't know people who didn't turn up at all. But the point about that would be that at the moment there's no mechanism available except by one being incredibly valuable so they can't do without you, which happens with some software guys. really, really talented software guys usually will negotiate some sort of flexible hour thing. But there isn't a mechanism for normal people to actually even state their preference for the ratio of work to leisure.

And it's worth remembering that it'd be very easy to make that purely a feminist campaign. But there are tons and tons of men who'd probably be asking the same question. Absolutely. It's very, very interesting because actually, you know, you think, how much of work that we get done in the workplace is productive? I mean, my theory is the internet has actually made useful work 20% more productive, but at the cost of growing bureaucracy by about 100%. So ask covering activities, fatuous presenteism,

pointless emails copied to people unnecessarily, unwillingness to take decisions oneself without engaging five other people. it's actually created more bad behaviors than it's solved actually. We are probably running out of time. So the one question we always like to ask, I guess, before we let them go. And by the way, this has been absolutely fascinating.

I think we've covered about half a percent of the things. We wanted to talk to you about it. We haven't even got into the Golden State Killer yet. That's an interesting one. I mean, the whole familial DNA thing, which is... I'm not sure, by the way. I'm not familiar with the story. Right, right, right, right. Extraordinary cold case in the US of a guy who is, it seems, was variously the Vysalia Ransacker in the, I think the early 70s, then became the East Area rapist in Sacramento, and then went on to become essentially the original night stalker in other parts of California.

Who says men can't multitask? Well, he wasn't, he didn't actually, he had a separate periods. He did combine them a bit, but no, he was actually slightly monot. He seemed to sort of slightly focus on one or the other. But this is a case where, very, very interestingly, first of all, it was DNA which revealed it was the same person responsible for all three, which freak people out. Secondly, unbelievably lucky in or skilled in getting away for it as long as he did, partly because he seems to have stopped in the 80s, or we assume that. But the other interesting thing is that weird thing of familial DNA,

which is you could go and post to an ancestry site, just in the hope of finding out who your great-great-grandfather was. And the next thing, you know, as your second cousins doing a seven stretch in the nonces wing of Wakefield prison. It's a bit of a weird thought in terms of the modern world and the strangeness of its consequences,

I suppose. And we're not, of course, we're very bad at predicting. We can predict first order consequences sort of quite well sometimes. Actually, no, I'm not even sure we're good at that. I think our, we would have predicted from the internet now that people would have moved out of cities.

I mean, certainly in the early, you know, mid-90s, the prediction was people will move out of cities gradually and they will go and work in tele cottages and they will, you know, essentially there was going to be this huge dispersal of people. It's created completely the opposite. Because, of course, the more people you're connected to, the more you need to be able to visit a megalopolis in order to meet them face by face to face.

Yeah. So, you know, the world's airlines have weirdly done very well out of the internet because to some extent an email is what you might call a, is the first stage sample of an air truck. trip. Yes. So our ability to predict what something will bring is really, really terrible. So on that very note, what do you think we're not talking about now that we ought to be

talking about? What do you see coming in the future that we ought to be interested in, excited about, concerned about, and how do we solve some of these problems that we've been discussing today? I think we need a greater level of reflection, self-reflection, in terms of our our motivations. And one of the things I would be interested in is, you know, a discussion of, you know, of why people really do the things we do. Because this discovery that essentially we do things following certain instincts and then we post-rationalize or confabulate bullshit explanations for them. That strikes me as just such an interesting and important insight into

humanity in that one of the questions it raises, okay, is that I'm not sure if you want people to adopt more pro-social or green behavior, I'm not sure the right mechanism is actual conspicuous altruism. So if you look at the progress in hygiene, then life expectancy was hugely improved because people's bodily cleanliness and people's level of home sanitation programatically. If you look at the ads from that period, the ads generally, the ads generally don't say use pears soap and help prevent a cholera outbreak. They actually talk about Darwinian things like, I mean, always the bridesmaid, never the bride is actually a line from a listerine commercial.

They use huge sort of fear of singleness, fear of desertion, status and sexual attractiveness, were used in huge quantities to get people to clean their homes. In the same way, I don't think you'll get people to adopt, say, more environmental behaviour by appeals to polar bears and appeals to altruism because I think that kind of signaling doesn't scale. I think it's a peculiar kind of signaling. It's worth remembering you see that there are large numbers of status games

which only the rich can play. So if you turn up to the Oscars in a Prius, right, well, you're a Hollywood megastar, patently obvious you could have afforded to turn up in any car you like. So your decision to turn up in a Prius is a choice, not a compromise. And you can therefore signal

your care for the environment by choosing to turn up in a modest car. Just as likewise, if you're the lead singer in a rock band, you don't have to practice fantastic hygiene or wear very fashionable clothes. The reason is you signal exactly like that apposomatic signaling, you signal what you can get away with. I'm in other words so sexy by dint of being a lead singer or guitarist that I can actually still be attractive without making even the most basic effort around bodily hygiene. So that kind of signaling drives a lot of behavior, but it doesn't always scale.

Because if you're the mayor of London, you turn up to work on a bicycle, it's a choice and it's a signal and it's a status marker. If you work at Pizza Express and you turn up at a bicycle, it means you couldn't afford a car. And so understanding those things in terms of how we may need to solve the world's problems by very oblique means, ultimately people will end up buying electric cars because they're fucking cool. Yeah. Being actually honest, and this is where I think we can wrap the thing up, comedy, behavioral science, evolutionary psychology, the capacity to be cynically honest about our own true nature,

okay, is probably necessary to the solution of quite a lot of things. And one thing that bothers me, I mentioned the fashion question, okay? Now imagine how weird it would be right If men Had something which bear in mind Okay fashion and beauty products Three trillion dollars plus a year Spent in the world

More than the world spends on education Right That's a depressing statistic Imagine if they were a male equivalent to this I've asked this question okay So okay Where there's a women's clothes shop now Every single place is a women's clothes shop

There was a shop selling drones And I said things to my wife like I've got Andreas's wedding on Saturday so I'll need to buy a new drone. Pretty quickly someone would go, well, that's ridiculous. This has got out of hand. We're spending three trillion a year on these drones. And it's just basically for male, you know, weird,

masturbatory obsession with being able to fly things around and gadgetry, okay? Or, you know, if Hornby was, you know, like, you know, the Louis Vuitton for guys, right? This would be really weird. But there are certain things which, because we're trapped by them, we're completely blind to the weirdness. I think the travel industry has gone whack, okay? I don't think there's any correlation.

Now maybe I can only say this because I'm kind of rich and because I've been on some exotic holidays. I don't think looking at there's much of a correlation between how far I travel, how much it costs and how good a time I have.

I think if you go off with a few mates to Margate, right? You can have a fantastic weekend and you can actually have a fairly shit time and go to Machu Picchu. Oh absolutely. The best stag do I ever went on, we went to Buttland's.

It was great. It was genuinely the most fun I've ever had on a stag day. No, and actually the best wedding I went to was in a village hall. Similarly, I'd be careful about to say that because seven of the eight people who invited me to a wedding and I'm going to be going, fucking bastard, but actually the correlation between how much you spend

and how good a time it is is not good. So the question is, I mean, I had an audience in the Ogilvy theatre, about 150 people, and they're typical bloody millennials. How many people have been to Machu Picchu I've never been, I can say that. How many people have been to Machu Picchu versus how many people have been to Lincoln Cathedral? And the ratio was like

five or six to one. Yeah. Now, I'm not dissing Manchu Picci, it's a pile of fucking old stones on the top of a hill. You're not dissing at all right now. Lincoln Cathedral is, you know, a spectacular location

with a spectacular building. It's an absolutely triumphal achievement. And you can get there on the train in a day, right? Okay. Now, no, no, I'm not saying you're wrong to go to Machu Picchu. Okay. I'm saying that having been to Matthew Pitchu when you haven't been to Link Cathedral is fucking weird. And the only way to explain it is basically, let's be honest, my hunch would be that it's easier to pull if you've done a year off, isn't it? I always remember John O'Farrell. Have you ever read things can only get bitter, which is like 11 miserable years in the life of a Labour supporter.

He was the guy at university who hadn't done a year off. I hadn't done a year off. I hadn't done a year off. No, I didn't. I didn't, okay. And you had all these twaps going, yeah, of course, you've never really tasted bay leaves until you've had them in Thailand, right? You had all these twats doing this. And Jono Farrell said,

all I could say if I was trying to chat up girls was, do you realize that if you only fire 21 times in space invaders, when the spaceship comes across, you get a higher bonus? To a certain type of woman. We're traveling. We're kind of traveling, basically, to show off.

It's a status care. This is kind of shit, okay? So I've got a theory which is that the way we should do this, and this is my point that I don't think I'm right, but I think we need absurd solutions, is that when people are about 25, okay, the government should give them an American Express platinum card preloaded with 10 grand, okay,

and they've got to spend it in a week. Right? Or you could create a financial product like that, where you put in a certain amount of money, okay, and then once in your life, you get a text and it goes, okay, you've got to go week on Thursday. And you basically got a week in which you've got to spend 10 grand. And that way, you get your five-star hotel, you get your front of the plane,

you get your bit of exotic shit, okay, and you've basically done it. Okay? So the point about it is that it's not nearly as magical as you think it is when you haven't done it. Yeah. So I think you can create fantastic egalitarianism by effectively the equivalent of Rumsprigger among the Amish. I think financial Rumspringer is the answer.

There you go. Free holidays for everyone. Perfect. All right. That's a great note. Rory Sutherland. Thank you so much for coming on. You're on Twitter at Rory Sutherland. At Rory Sutherland, all one word. You must have a book coming out at some point, surely. Yep, there's another one coming up.

I haven't decided on the title yet, but it's basically about the danger of trying to make everything makes sense. That plenty of things in an evolved system don't make obvious sense because their role is complicated and embedded and you get rid of those things at your peril. So that's the book coming out any year now.

Perfect. Well, if you're kind enough to come back and chat to us when the book comes out, we would love to have you. Thank you very much indeed. So you're at Rory Sutherland. I'm at Failing Human. Give me a follow.

Give me a shout out. Oh, you're failing human. Yes, I am I dear. Oh, fantastic. I get this out. Lovely. Excellent. I have fans everywhere.

Yes, you do. And I'm actually going to change my Twitter username. So it's going to be something else. at the bottom by the time this episode comes out. Thank you very much for watching Trigonometry. Subscribe to us on YouTube. Give us a rating on iTunes. Follow us everywhere that you can.

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