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RORY SUTHERLAND | Psychology In The World Of Advertising

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising, an author & writer for The Spectator. Causing some form of behavioural change is the goal of all advertising and whoever holds the keys to understanding consumer psychology has an incredibly powerful tool at their disposal. Rory is one of the world's most influential advertising professionals and this episode is nothing short of gold for anyone who is a consumer, or advertises to them. More Stuff: Follow Rory on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rorysutherland Buy Rory's New Book Alchemy - https://amzn.to/2HdiUPL - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: modernwisdompodcast@gmail.com

Chris WilliamsonhostRory Sutherlandguest
Jan 28, 20191h 34mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 15:00

    (wind blowing) Hi, friends. My…

    1. CW

      (wind blowing) Hi, friends. My guest this week is Rory Sutherland, the vice-chairman of Ogilvy Advertising. Now before most podcasts start, there's a little bit of foreplay, backwards and forwards between myself and the guest, catching up and talking about what we're gonna talk about and stuff like that. With Rory, it was more analogous to me trying to step onto a train going at high speed, and he just, (laughs) he just began. So I started recording straightaway. Also, Rory had a British Gas technician come round to sort out his boiler partway through. So you will go through the adventure that is Rory's boiler, plus all of the amazing things that we spoke about today. He is an absolute master of behavioral e- economics and the psychology of advertising. Anyone who has ever bought anything in a shop should listen to this podcast. I, I'm not going to pontificate anymore because it's, it's just fantastic. Enjoy. (electronic music plays)

    2. RS

      I was, I always regarded consumer capitalism as kind of the Galapagos Islands of understanding human motivation. Because, um, just as evolution throws up things, the duck-billed platypus, the kangaroo, et cetera, that don't really make much sense, um, uh, in the same way, consumer capitalism is interesting, both the things which shouldn't be successful but are, and the classic example of that is Red Bull, but I mean, you could actually ... If you think about some of the greatest business successes of the last t- ten, 20, 30 years, I mean, w- going back further, denim, for example, doesn't really make sense as a fabric.

    3. CW

      (laughs)

    4. RS

      The popularity of denim doesn't make any sense. It kind of fades. It looks a bit shit. It was manufactured as a wagon cover and then worn as overalls by indigent laborers. You know, you would've expected silk to have become big-

    5. CW

      Yeah.

    6. RS

      ... and the trouser front, but nope, it's not silk, it's jeans. Uh, then you've got things, again, you know, if you'd made a business case for Wikipedia on your last slide and said, "And the best thing is that everybody's gonna write this for free," okay?

    7. CW

      Yeah.

    8. RS

      Basically you would've been shown out of the room. It's completely insane. Red Bull, again, doesn't taste very nice, costs a fortune, um, comes in a tiny can, you know. No one making a case for that really would get anywhere. You know, no one knew ... In a Soviet-controlled economy, no one would have sat down with a, a, you know, the Supreme Soviet and said, "Well, for our next seven-year plan, what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics really needs is an overpriced, disgusting-tasting drink."

    9. CW

      (laughs)

    10. RS

      But at the same time, I think it's interesting because I think what capitalism and evolution, uh, does is it throws up, um, you know, bonkers successes, but there are also things that fail that logically shouldn't. I mean, in the case of, in the case of, say, um, evolution, why is, um, parthenogenesis, or why is, in other words, um, asexual reproduction so very rare?

    11. CW

      Yep.

    12. RS

      Because if you want to replicate 100% of your genes, simply splitting into two, uh, is a, you would think, is a pretty cool, uh, system, what this sex stuff is-

    13. CW

      But you only need one of you, right?

    14. RS

      Yeah, exactly. And off you go. Uh, what seems to happen is that you, uh, when a disease hits, you all die. So sex is the-

    15. CW

      None of, none of the genetic variation.

    16. RS

      Sex is the diversity trade-off that means that some of your genes will survive. It's hedging your bets, essentially. It's, um, it's, you know, covering your bases, uh, because you'd rather have your genes survive, uh, split between a variety of different carriers-

    17. CW

      Yeah.

    18. RS

      ... than put all your eggs in one basket. Um, and I think what tends to happen is you do get these asexual reproduction things happening, and they're very, very successful right up to the point where they aren't.

    19. CW

      (laughs)

    20. RS

      And then when they fail, they fail spectacularly. Now is this my ... This might be unfortunately-

    21. CW

      (phone rings) Whoops. Is this your man from British Gas?

    22. RS

      Uh, hang on, I'm so sorry. Uh, this is-

    23. CW

      (laughs)

    24. RS

      ... this is gonna make this ... I suppose it's a very authentic podcast.

    25. CW

      Absolutely authentic podcast.

    26. RS

      Oh, I'm so sorry. I'd better go down, won't be a second.

    27. CW

      No worries.

    28. RS

      We can pause if you like.

    29. CW

      Yeah, we've paused.

    30. RS

      Right.

  2. 15:00 – 30:00

    I agree with him.…

    1. CW

      his-

    2. RS

      I agree with him.

    3. CW

      ... in, in his bathroom. But the problem is that it's right next to the boiler, so the water pressure that comes out-

    4. RS

      (laughs)

    5. CW

      ... if you don't have... if you're not able to hold sufficient anal tone and ring tension, you end up accidentally giving yourself an enema with your own-

    6. RS

      (laughs)

    7. CW

      (laughs) With your own shit.

    8. RS

      Oh my God. So sort of colonic irrigation through, uh-

    9. CW

      But reverse, yeah.

    10. RS

      ... reverse, of course.

    11. CW

      You're putting it back in.

    12. RS

      Oh my God. Of course. Oh my God.

    13. CW

      (laughs)

    14. RS

      Um, okay. Um, because I'm having my bathroom done at home, uh, later on this, uh, year, so I-

    15. CW

      Consider it.

    16. RS

      I think I will consider one of those, because I, I, I agree with you. I think it's barbaric that we don't have them. And actually, very strange actually, two things. One of the things... I often talk to my dad about this. My dad's 88, so you have this very interesting contrast. I also buy gadgets for my dad to see whether he uses them or not as a kind of experiment, because I'm the kind of idiot, okay, who'll buy any old shit.

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    18. RS

      You know, I bought yogurt makers, bread makers, I bought any bloody gadget that I can simply because I enjoy its intrinsic gadgetiness.

    19. CW

      Yeah.

    20. RS

      And so I always find it interesting buying my dad things, because, um, what he likes and what he doesn't is revealing as to what's genuinely useful. Because I think, I think at the age of 88, you, you've got a fairly sensible take on what's life improving and what isn't. I bought one of the Google, uh, HomePod Minis, which is like Alexa, it's like the Echo Dot-

    21. CW

      Yep. Yep.

    22. RS

      ... but the Google equivalent. And, uh, I wrote about this in The Spectator, and a few people said, "Oh, what, what the hell are you doing plugging, you know, Amazon and Google's products?" As though as if they need any help. My argument for this was that mostly those products were being sold as ways to turn on your lights remotely, control your thermostat. Now, I do all that shit, because I'm weird, okay? My argument was that for your Spectator reader or your Spectator reader's mom and dad in their 70s or 80s, it's a technology none of those people will buy off their own back. There's not a chance in hell that anybody aged 80 is gonna wander into Curry's PC World and go, "Get me an Amazon Echo Dot or a HomePod Mini."

    23. CW

      Yeah.

    24. RS

      Actually, it's... if you think about it in pensioner terms, it's the world's best radio for 30 quid.

    25. CW

      Yeah.

    26. RS

      Okay? It'll play any music you want, you just ask for it. It'll play any radio station you want. It'll tell you the time, it'll tell you the weather, it'll tell you how to cook a turkey. So 30 quid for the ability to speak to a supercomputer. And interestingly, my dad only installed it on, uh, about the 27th of December, but he uses it about, you know, six or seven times a day.

    27. CW

      Really?

    28. RS

      Brilliantly, after I wrote that article, a friend of mine told me that his mom is in a nursing home where they bought, um, an Echo Dot, and they put it in the lounge of the nursing home. Now, I think this is a brilliant idea. Now, no one's ever thinking and no one's gonna position a, a tech product as it's perfect for oldies, okay?

    29. CW

      Yeah.

    30. RS

      Because it's kind of the kiss of death in marketing terms, you know. It's rather like, "I bought from a, a company which only sells products to the elderly and disabled."

  3. 30:00 – 45:00

    Yeah. …

    1. RS

      on in terms of innovation, uh, can be extraordinarily counterproductive. And as I said, I mean, you know, I would say what we should have done is we should have announced the Alexa as, you know, for all elderly people living alone, this is one of the best things to happen in 10 years.

    2. CW

      Yeah.

    3. RS

      And yet nobody's mentioned that. Okay? They're all going, "Ooh, you can turn your lights on." Well, yeah, but you can do that with a switch. By the way, great story about light switches. And this is ano- another fascinating thing about how technology works. The first electric lights mimic the first gas lights in that the switch was beside the light. You may remember, American standard lamps often have that thing you turn-... at the top and it seems a bit weird to us, but that's actually a skeuomorphic mimic of how you'd turn a gas light on or off, by twisting a little flange.

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. RS

      Diana said -

    6. CW

      Fantastic term.

    7. RS

      Flange, right. (laughs)

    8. CW

      (laughs)

    9. RS

      And, um, so the first electric lights in America, you'd wander into the center of the room, reach up towards the bulb, turn a knob, and the light would come on. People went, "Oh, brilliant, it's electric." And then someone said, "Well, you can actually put the switch right next to the door, so when you come into the room, you just turn the light on." Now, you'd think people would go, "Fuck, why didn't we think of that?" Okay. But they didn't, they went on a completely unnecessary luxury. So they went on for 10 or 20 years, basically bumping into furniture in the dark-

    10. CW

      (laughs)

    11. RS

      ... trying to find the light. Because this seemed to them, at the time, a completely unnecessary indulgence.

    12. CW

      It's this odd artifact of what's already existed, sort of thing.

    13. RS

      What's already exists, so I've already solved that problem, so therefore, uh, in my mind, it isn't a problem because, you know. And it's really fascinating, you can actually find... And I was looking at this the other day. I looked on Google Images for ads for electricity. Now you're gonna say, "What the..." You know, if you ever moved to a house, okay, which wasn't on the electrical grid, right, basically day one you go, "Okay, the first thing we've got to do is we've got to get this wired for electricity." I'm not even... You know, the idea that you'd have a salesman come out and explain to you why it was a good idea, okay? (laughs) The idea that this guy would have to come round and go, "Well, the great advantage of having electricity is..." You go, "What the fuck are you talking about?" Right?

    14. CW

      Yeah, exactly. "Mate, just, can you just please put the wires in -

    15. RS

      "Can you just please put the wires in?" Right?

    16. CW

      ... for the love of God." Yeah.

    17. RS

      But, of course, in the early days, you actually needed to do this. And it's fascinating because you can see these ads, and as a copywriter myself, I can imagine myself writing exactly the same shit, okay?

    18. CW

      (laughs)

    19. RS

      So it's an ad, I think, by the Dublin Corporation encouraging people to get electricity in their homes. And one of the great things it does, it says, "Well, Maureen, with my new electric kettle," okay, now, you know, "I can simply flick it on, I don't need to light the stove, and it produces hot water." Now, and, the copywriter then goes on to imagine two possible consumer benefits from this that none of us have ever adopted. He says, "So first of all, when I'm having tea with you, I don't leave the kettle on the stove. I have it on the table between us, so if we need to top up the pot, I don't even need to get up from the table." Okay?

    20. CW

      Yeah.

    21. RS

      "And every night, I take my kettle upstairs to bed so I can have a cup of tea in the bedroom."

    22. CW

      Okay.

    23. RS

      Now, the fascinating thing there is they make both of them are true. Two benefits of having an electric kettle is, one, you can make tea in any room of the house, okay? Two, you can actually have the kettle anywhere you want it to be, not necessarily on the stove. The strange thing is that nobody, as far as I know, ever does any, either of those two things. We have the kettle-

    24. CW

      It's a stationary object. It stays in the same place.

    25. RS

      It's a stationary object. I've never moved it anywhere else. The, okay, some people had teas made, but it's never occurred to me, you know, to take a kettle into my bedroom.

    26. CW

      Yep, thankfully.

    27. RS

      But I mean, oh, for a lip sip have I ever done it? No, don't think so. I go into the kitchen-

    28. CW

      Well, you, you'd put it in the cup downstairs. And the other thing as well is if, if you did do that...

    29. RS

      Oh, one second, I've got, I've got, I've got, um, here we are from the, uh...

    30. CW

      If that's okay?

  4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

    Yes. (laughs) …

    1. CW

      and stuff like that-

    2. RS

      Yes. (laughs)

    3. CW

      ... I just thought like, "What am I doing?" Like, this does not reflect the business world that I'm being exposed to. And then sure enough, I, I, I, I, I came out and I thought, well, it, the piece of paper for me, I'm the absolute avatar for got a piece of paper that I didn't need, spent... And I spent... This was before the 9,000 pounds a year thing. I was like three grand a year, and I've still come out with like 27 grand, (laughs) 27 grand of debt for a degree that essentially facilitated me running a business.

    4. RS

      If you offered people that 27,000 pound loan and said, "You can spend a third of it... You, you have to spend a third of it on education. But the other 18 grand you can spend on anything you like. Starting a business, moving house, getting, you know-"

    5. CW

      Yeah.

    6. RS

      "... whatever." Okay. Everybody would do a one-year degree, wouldn't they?

    7. CW

      Absolutely.

    8. RS

      Or maybe two. I s- nobody would do three. You'd want nine or, nine or 18 grand t- for the other shit. So look-

    9. CW

      18 grand in 2006 was a deposit on a house.

    10. RS

      That was a deposit. You're absolutely right. Yeah. And so, so that's not a market in education saying, "Here's money which we'll lend for you," just as the housing market isn't a market, because a mortgage is money they'll lend to you on the sole condition that you spend it on property. So unsurprisingly, houses are really fucking expensive.

    11. CW

      (laughs)

    12. RS

      And a student loan is 27 grand they'll lend you on the sole proviso that you spend it all on education. Now, you know, I mean, to be absolutely honest, I would've spent two years at Cambridge and bought a fucking Mustang or something.

    13. CW

      (laughs)

    14. RS

      Um, (laughs) but, um, but uh, but I mean, actually, I mean, one of... I mean, this is one of the most interesting questions, which is I, I would argue that it's one of the interesting ideas which in a way interests people on the right and left, and as a result makes no progress because nobody gets angry about it. But actually giving people money in lumps, and there's a whole load of experiments in the effective altruism movement, but the problem with welfare is partly, and, you know, um, it's partly right-wing people are too reluctant to give it, which is one interesting question. But left-wing people tend to have this view that if you give people a large sum of money, they'll immediately get pissed. Now, what's interesting in all the experiments where you give people not regular small... Now if you give me 100 quid a month, what really improves my life wh- when I've got 100 quid a month to, uh, let's say I've got 40 pounds of discretionary income a month. What improves my life the most? Answer, beer and cigarettes. Right? Because if I've only got 40 pounds a month for discretionary income, the best way of improving my life is to get pissed with my friends and to have a tap, okay?

    15. CW

      Want the highest, highest immediate return.

    16. RS

      Yeah. Immediate return is fantastic. Now, if you give people three grand, they start asking different questions. You know, "Five grand, should I move house? Should, do I really need to buy a car? Do I really need to get educated?" And if you look at these experiments in Africa where you go around and they, they find genuinely deserving people, typically if you've got a house which is entirely made of natural materials, um, it, it doesn't mean you're a hipster in Africa, it means you're genuinely poor, okay?

    17. CW

      Yeah.

    18. RS

      If you haven't got any concrete, you haven't got any corrugated iron, you're really poor. So they identify those people and basically send them through their mobile phone like a year's salary. Boomf, like that. And the number of people who actually spend it on booze and cigarettes is unbelievably tiny. But what's fascinating is they don't spend it in the way the charity assumes is important.... they all spend it on totally different things. Educating their kids might be the priority. Actually getting a proper roof on the house might be the priority. One person actually did buy recording equipment, which looked a bit of an indulgence, but he then started a band and made quite a lot of money out of it. And so there's a real, there are some really interesting questions about welfare, which is the right tend to disapprove of it, the left tend to do it in a really patronizing way. And actually if you say, "Look, do-" And to some extent right-wing people are in favor of this because they go, "Well, if the bastards want to get pissed-

    19. CW

      (laughs)

    20. RS

      ... it's their own fucking problem, right?" So right-wing people may be a bit, actually ... although for the worst of reasons, they may actually be right here. (laughs) But you're saying, you know, actually if everybody at the beginning of their life, I had an inheritance from an aunt of £1,000 when I was, bloody hell, I was 20-something, okay? That sounds a bit ridiculous now. It was, at the time it was life-changing knowing you had £1,000 in the bank, which if you needed it, you could spend it. And then later on another aunt died and I had about 20, okay? And that basically enabled me to get a deposit on a flat, it enabled me to furnish the flat, it enabled me to, you know, da-da-dum. Now, you know, a huge amount of my present property wealth is probably predicated on that £20,000-

    21. CW

      (laughs)

    22. RS

      ... which enabled me to get started a bit earlier.

    23. CW

      Yeah. (laughs)

    24. RS

      And so I'm starting to wonder, should the student loan be available for anything? And you say, okay, you've got to spend one year of it in further education. If you spend £18,000 and you want to start a café or you want to start a business... And by the way, one thing about small businesses I think we ought, we ought to mention more is that, okay, there are areas where the business needs to be big. I don't want my broadband to be provided by a bloke down the pub, okay? I get that. But small business activity adds an enormous amount to the well-being of communities.

    25. CW

      Why do you think that is?

    26. RS

      You know, every time a shop opens, a café opens, you know, uh, you know, it, it more or less defines what's a successful, thriving community. Actually, one of the things... Are you in Newcastle now or are you in Manchester?

    27. CW

      Newcastle.

    28. RS

      Newcastle still. Now, interestingly, what I find interesting when you travel to other British cities is there are the, the cities that did really well in the kind of early part of the century, and Newcastle's probably one of them, isn't it, actually? I mean, you know, you go, there's Sheffield's another one. You come out of the station. I went to Sheffield in 1987 and we missed the last train and we said to our host, "Where's the best place to stay overnight in Sheffield?" and he replied, "Leeds."

    29. CW

      (laughs)

    30. RS

      It's... And, you know, the fact that people open, you know, whether it's hotels, plumbing firms, cafés, all that sort of activity actually has an importance in human, day-to-day human life which we can't really, you know, we shouldn't really understate. And so I, I would argue that you should change the student loan and just say it's a young person's loan, everybody gets it, um-

  5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

    But you, i- it's,…

    1. RS

      th- the assumption is not, "This guy is trying to help by suggesting there may be other explanations." Instead, you're treated as basically one of the enemy.

    2. CW

      But you, i- it's, th- the im- implication is that you're trying to deny, not trying to assist.

    3. RS

      You're trying to di- yeah, yeah. Now to some extent, you know, when I was recruited by Ogilvy we were about 12 of us, maybe 14 graduate trainees, and I think the ratio was something like two to one male to female.... don't know why that was. It's worth remembering, by the way, that HR, which is responsible for recruiting, is, in most companies, a bit of a matriarchy. So you could raise a little bit of a question, which is, well, obviously if HR has been a fairly well, uh, um, gender balanced, if anything-

    4. CW

      Or female-dominated.

    5. RS

      ... or f- female-dominated discipline for quite a long time, what were you fucking doing for the first, (laughs) you know, 10 years of this?

    6. CW

      Well, yeah. Is it-

    7. RS

      Okay.

    8. CW

      ... is it that women are oppressing women here or... Uh, I, I don't really get it.

    9. RS

      It's not impossible. I mean, if you look at it from a very Darwinian point of view, of course, there was a slight bias for s- among certain men to recruit women.

    10. CW

      Yep.

    11. RS

      Um, okay. Now, uh, the, the, that-

    12. CW

      Which is also looked down upon. That's also not allowed. (laughs)

    13. RS

      No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But I mean, th- you know, historically, um, you had advantages in certain forms of employment. Um, d- but I mean, no, I mean, th- the, by the way, that women, bias against women is not an impossible p- uh, uh, the point to make is that there are multiple variations here. There's, okay, the senior people are a product of who was hired in 1988. It's also a product of maternity leave. I accept the fact that actually my career wouldn't have, I wouldn't be Vice Chairman of Ogilvy if I had been at home looking after kids between, uh, I don't know, 1999 and 2008, okay? Right, if I'd gone home and looked after kids, effectively, I would've had to reboot my career. I totally accept that, by the way, as a, as a partial explanation. What I d- what I d- what I'm not keen on is, is just this thing which is anywhere where it's not 50/50, there is therefore evidence of prejudice. That's too simplistic. Uh, it's not to say that prejudice doesn't exist. Of course it exists, and that i- it exists in both directions and from both genders, by the way. Um, uh, patently though, is prejudice. But, this is the big but, it's not fair to say there is prejudice, there is in- inequality or imbalance, ergo, the only source of the, of the imbalance is the prejudice.

    14. CW

      Yeah.

    15. RS

      'Cause there are loads of... One of them is preference, okay? Simply speaking, if you look at countries, very liberal countries, uh, like Sweden or Norway, uh, you will find that accountancy and perhaps being an actuary is disproportionately male, and nursing is disproportionately female.

    16. CW

      But you can't scale a lot of the jobs that females tend towards in these more egalitarian countries like Sweden and suchlike. They scale more diff- m- m- like, a lot more poorly than STEM fields. Like, if you're a nurse, uh, how many patients can you look after at once? Like, maybe 10, 20, I guess? Uh, don't know. But if you are someone who's creating a-

    17. RS

      A software guy, of course.

    18. CW

      ... an app-

    19. RS

      Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

    20. CW

      Yeah, there you go. You've got seven billion people at your behest. So yeah, I, I, I totally agree. I, I think-

    21. RS

      And by the, by the, by the way, none of these, none of these findings has any bearing on the, uh, judgment of an individual. Because what often isn't understood in this debate is the difference between aggregate and individual. So, you know, where you get considerable overlap, okay, the, th- what you will see is the very extreme tails, the kind of person who wants to become an actuary, okay, is... Well, I mean, okay, if you wanna get... No, I mean, they're gonna be slightly teensy bit on the spectrum maybe, which is, by the way, trends male as well.

    22. CW

      Yep.

    23. RS

      Um, uh, you know, it's a very extreme take. Now, it's imp- now I mean, nobody's saying for a second that there can't be female actuaries. I'm simply saying that if you expect actuaries and scaffolders and nurses to be 50/50 male/female, you're gonna have a long wait.

    24. CW

      Yep.

    25. RS

      Unless you impose social engineering of a level that most of us wouldn't find acceptable.

    26. CW

      Yeah, and that's gonna lead to more dissatisfaction longer term, right, as well?

    27. RS

      Uh, I mean, there's an interesting theory, by the way, which is borne out by my own anecdotal experience, which is the main reason women... There are two problems with STEM and getting women... Well, there are loads of problems about getting, uh, about women in STEM. One of them is if you do STEM, you're more or less encouraged for A levels to do maths, physics, chemistry. What that means is you haven't got room to do a nice humanities subject. Now, I think someone's gotta change that. I did maths, Latin, and Greek, which was... I'm really glad I did that in, now as an adult. It was a total pain in the ass at the time, because I remember doing maths and physics. Effectively, it was the same shit with different diagrams, right?

    28. CW

      Yep.

    29. RS

      Whereas I had to go from, you know, reading Homer to then, you know, I don't know, yeah, I don't know, student's t-distribution or whatever it was, okay? Um, my memory's hazy on that one. And it was a bit of a mind fuck. So there's that problem, which is, and all, more women than men are going to be reluctant to say, "Those subjects I really enjoy, I don't want to do them." One of the theories is that, by the way, what tends to happen is that there, the reason more men go into STEM is simply that there are more men who are shit at history, English, and languages. Now, modern languages was always a female-dominated field at university. I don't know if you noticed that. Um, but, uh, it tended to be the modern languages faculty, uh, was the Playboy Mansion of the, (laughs) -

    30. CW

      (laughs)

  6. 1:15:00 – 1:16:13

    Yep. …

    1. RS

      the right information to the right person at the right time, and that's purely a data game. Now, of course, that suits Google and Facebook and everybody else to pretend it's a data game because that's where they have a monopoly. They have a monopoly on that kind of data. They can't claim a monopoly on creative talent, they can't claim a monopoly over celebrity, they can't claim a monopoly over persuasive ab- ability or psychology. But they can claim a monopoly over what they know. So they pretend advertising is the kind of game in which they are u- they are unavoidable. Now you can't blame them for doing it. We all do the same kind of thing. We all pretend that the areas where we're strong are more important than they really are.

    2. CW

      Yep.

    3. RS

      You know. Um, uh, and, um, so but- but at the same time, um, the- the data question is unbelievably flaming complicated because w- we've been naive in the West because we've always had relatively nice governments. You look at what's happening in China with the business where everybody has a kind of citizen's eBay rating.

    4. CW

      Yes.

    5. RS

      And this is being developed in China. Now it may be a terrible mistake because suddenly everybody below a three is identified as a group and they may rebel or revolt.

Episode duration: 1:34:48

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