The Psychology Of Transport - Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland 0:00 In fact, there are so many railcards that they should just say, "Okay, we're gonna get rid of all railcards and we're gonna give middle-aged men a white bastard middle-aged man's railcard, which means you've got to pay 33% extra." Because, I mean, everybody except the middle-aged gets a bloody railcard nowadays. (wind blowing)

Chris Williamson 0:19 You've been looking at transport

Chris Williamson 0:21 a lot recently. What have you learned there?

Rory Sutherland 0:22 Yes. Sorry, sorry. Okay, so the book's coming out on Thursday, it's being launched on, on Thursday, and it's called, uh, Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? And it's co-authored, and I have to say he's probably authored rather more of it than I have, um, uh, by my colleague Pete Dyson, who was my colleague in the behavioral science practice in Ogilvy and now works for the beha- Department for Transport as the head of behavioral science there. And it's a very, very interesting, uh, area for exploration because transport, even more than most areas of kind of business and governmental behavior, tends to get dominated by reductionist metrics. And as a result, uh, it gets over-optimized around what you can easily measure, things like speed and time and capacity and duration and punctuality, and under-optimized a- around things that humans care deeply about, but which you can't actually measure because we don't have quantifiable SI-derived units for.

Chris Williamson 1:27 What, like?

Rory Sutherland 1:28 E- enjoyment, regret, fairness, okay? There's a very useful, actually, guy called, um... I was gonna say Chris Rock, but he's obviously not called Chris Rock. Um, there's a guy called David Rock who's a neuroscientist. He's a Kiwi but based in New York, and he has a model which he calls SCARF. And SCARF stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Now, I don't think it's a complete list, I think there are other things like regret, avoidance, although you could put that under certainty, I suppose. But his contention is these are five things that humans have evolved to care deeply about, but which economists, or for that matter, transport planners, don't really understand or factor into their equations at all. So I'll give you a very simple example, okay? Um, and Daniel Kahneman has actually done work around this. It's much more annoying to miss a train or a flight by five minutes than it is to miss a flight by 25 minutes or half an hour or an hour. Um, now, you know, to a, you know, reductionist metric, it shouldn't matter because you missed the plane. You didn't miss the plane. The degree of annoyance and upset you might experience should be pretty much exactly the same in either case. There's also much more regret, I think, if, uh, if the flight was delayed and left five minutes before you arrived at the airport. It pisses you off more than if the flight wasn't delayed. There are all sorts of interesting psychological things going on here. Now, the point about that kind of thing is that, for instance, barriers like queues at ticket machines and, you know, problems getting through ticket barriers or a delay at a gate prior to boarding a train are likely to create disproportionate annoyance because they cause a large number of people to miss a train by a very narrow amount of m- m- n- narrow amount of time. Um, (coughs) another thing would be, which is a particular rant of mine, uh, you know, they spent, you know, hundreds of millions on new rolling stock for Thameslink. Now, Thameslink, because it's a penetrating service, you know, it'll go from places like Brighton to Bedford, for instance. It is potentially, although it's mostly used probably for commuter rail, it is potentially quite a long-distance rail service. And the trains, by the way, are very, very good. I think they're extremely well-designed with one extraordinary failing. There aren't seat back tables. So if you're on a one and a half hour journey from, let's say, Brighton to, I don't know, you know, w- just north of London, Kentish Town or something, okay, you can't work on the train. Okay? Now, that kind of thing, everybody is basically stipulating their, um, and they're assessing transport proposals based on their objective characteristics of time and speed and capacity. And yet that's based on the assumption that time spent on a train is a disutility. And that's, in fact, the justifiable, th- that's the case used to justify High Speed 2, that everybody on a train is economically useless, so the less time they spend on a train, the more productive these people are. Now anybody-

Chris Williamson 4:40 As opposed to, can we make their experience on the train-

Rory Sutherland 4:42 Te- tell me, if you've got an example.

Chris Williamson 4:43 ... facilitate productivity? Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 4:45 So, I mean, interestingly, they spent six billion on High Speed 1 and on the, the high speed rail line between Folkestone and St Pancras. Not necessarily a dumb thing to do. I'm not totally disputing the value of that, by any means. But they spent six billion speeding the trains up between Paris and London, um, and it was only something like 12 years later they put Wi-Fi on the trains.

Chris Williamson 5:09 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 5:10 Now, the Wi-Fi on the trains, okay, I imagine... I, let me get this right. I, I, I've got a guess here, but I'm guessing it cost either single-digit millions or maybe low double-digit millions of pounds to install that. It might even, even have been less, okay? But in many ways, to any businessperson thinking, "How do I get from central Paris to central London?" that is probably more of a decider relative to air travel than the duration of the journey. Because one significant difference between the Eurostar and flying to Paris or Brussels or even Amsterdam, actually, is yes, it takes longer, but it's quality time. You know, you're sitting in the same place with some sort of table for an uninterrupted period of two or three hours. They slightly do interrupt it by making breakfast, to be honest, a little bit too much of a drawn-out, um, uh, procedure for my tastes. But nonetheless, it's three hours of time when you can work, read a book, watch a film, do exactly what you'd be doing if you were at home, to be absolutely honest, okay? With the additional facility of a pleasant view out of the window.... I mean, I find train journeys disproportionately productive.

Chris Williamson 6:18 Yep, I agree.

Rory Sutherland 6:19 And yet, you know, most people actually en- you know, I enjoy the trip to Manchester, two hours 10 is about the right length for a train ride. You know, it's not long enough to get bored, and it's long enough to actually get deeply into something and be a bit productive. So these, these reductionist metrics which effectively treat humans as though they were freight, in other words, they turn transport into a logistics problem, which is a psychology-free problem. Actually, logistics isn't quite psychology-free because you have the state of mind of the recipient or the sender to consider. And so, for example, online package tracking is actually a transformation for UPS or FedEx because, you know, many, many people might not be that bothered about a parcel arriving a day late provided they know what's happening. Whereas if your package doesn't arrive on Friday as promised, you're... and you don't have online package tracking, your natural assumption is it's got lost, not that it's got delayed.

Chris Williamson 7:16 Well, I guess-

Rory Sutherland 7:16 So actually, even in the case of freight, there's a degree of psychology, but at least the freight itself doesn't have a hissy fit because it's sent by FedEx, not UPS. It doesn't have a hissy fit because it's got to share the lorry with some unsavory characters, you know? (laughs) Okay, freight is beautifully inert and free of those psychological factors, whereas human passengers, status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness really, really matter.

Chris Williamson 7:41 Yeah, I guess as transport becomes faster, we have less headroom to improve the speed of it, so you need to look at these other things, convenience, enjoyability.

Rory Sutherland 7:50 Spot on, spot on. I think we're hitting the law of diminishing returns. That's one point. The second thing is, I think there are a lot of metrics where we continue to pursue things. Let me give you an example, okay? There is a correlation between punctuality and passenger happiness. I'm absolutely confident of that, okay? However, I think if you disaggregate the data, you'll find that that correlation mostly emerges because people who are on a transport journey that is significantly delayed are very, very upset. I don't think there's much difference in passenger satisfaction if your train arrives on time or if your train arrives four minutes late, okay? I regard it as a monstrosity that railway operators are fined for rolling into a London terminus more than three minutes after the scheduled time.

Chris Williamson 8:37 Is that right?

Rory Sutherland 8:39 Yeah, it's crazy. Now, don't get me wrong, there are cases where punctuality matters, where people have to make a connection, for example, and if you dick around too much with the timetable. It's also punctuality is important for the efficient running of the service, because obviously you... if you run to timetable, uh, you know, it's likely that, uh, there are knock-on effects on other trains. I'm not being totally ignorant of the importance of the logistical challenge here, but from a pure passenger point of view, no one traveling into London and arriving at a London terminus has failed to leave 10 or 15 minutes margin of error for their onward journey, okay? You know, I mean, if you're significantly pissed off because a train is four minutes late, either you're Swiss or you're borderline neurotic, and I would argue that's your problem, not the rail operator's problem. You really should have built in some sort of buffer, because let's be honest, if you'd chosen any other mode of transport, most of all, the car... You know, if you drive into Central London by car, you have to leave 50 minutes as a margin of error, you know? So the idea that a train is being disappointing if it's three minutes late is really getting a bit silly.

Chris Williamson 9:42 Did you have a look at the reliability and the punctuality of different modes of transport?

Rory Sutherland 9:46 Yeah, I mean, uh, i- it is interesting in that... Uh, first of all, what is punctuality? So a train that's late where the driver gives information and reassurance to the passengers probably creates a lot less disquiet than a train that just stops in the middle of the countryside for no readily discernible reason for 20 minutes. You know, a train that keeps moving slowly is less frustrating to passengers than a train that grinds to a halt. You know, I, I don't know if you drive a car, you're young, so you... Excellent. Yeah. Oh, you're in Manchester, aren't you, anyway?

Chris Williamson 10:15 Newcastle, but I'm in Texas right now.

Rory Sutherland 10:17 Newcastle, yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:18 Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 10:18 Oh, where in Texas?

Chris Williamson 10:19 Austin.

Rory Sutherland 10:20 Oh, what a glory-... You definitely drive a car then.

Chris Williamson 10:22 Yes.

Rory Sutherland 10:22 Um, but the point I'm making is that, you know, quite often as a car driver, you might choose a route home where you keep moving even if the journey's 10 minutes longer-

Chris Williamson 10:32 Oh, man, this is me.

Rory Sutherland 10:33 ... while, while-

Chris Williamson 10:33 This is me to a T.

Rory Sutherland 10:34 Exactly, yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:35 This is me. I know the routes home where I'm going to get snarled up, and I would prefer to continue to move even if it's longer and if it's further, but I would prefer to take that route because the psychological discomfort of sitting in traffic, of having to do nose-to-tail, I can't sit on cruise control, I can't just sort of zone out a little bit and continue to go. Yeah, all over it.

Rory Sutherland 10:56 I mean, I mean, if you've got slow-moving traffic, adaptive cruise control is an absolute joy, isn't it? Because you just outsource your driving to the bugger in front.

Chris Williamson 11:03 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 11:04 You know, you basically go, "Okay, I'll set my speed at five miles an hour faster than that guy, and I'll just let him make all the decisions." Glorious.

Chris Williamson 11:12 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 11:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:13 It's like a conga line, like a conga line-

Rory Sutherland 11:15 It is, yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:15 ... of people trying to get home from work.

Rory Sutherland 11:18 Oh, I'm very interested in the psychology of elec- I've just bought an electric car actually, and I find it very interesting how it changes the psychology of driving. One of which is that range anxiety probably might have beneficial effects on people's style of driving because they... it makes it more salient the extent to which their style of driving impacts on the number of miles that they get per kilowatt. Or kilo-

Chris Williamson 11:43 Uh-huh. So you're going to accelerate less, less harshly, you're going to brake less harshly?

Rory Sutherland 11:47 Yeah, yeah. And, but secondly, I think there's an interesting thing in that it makes you a nicer person, in that if the guy in front of you brakes unnecessarily, regenerative braking makes you less resentful of your loss of kinetic energy. Because instead of thinking, "That guy's just robbed me of my hard won kinetic energy."

Chris Williamson 12:06 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 12:06 ... you tend to think, "Oh, well, th- I've just squirted a bit of, bit of electricity back into the tank." As it were.

Chris Williamson 12:11 What are you driving?

Rory Sutherland 12:11 And so... So it's a Ford Mustang Mach-E.

Chris Williamson 12:14 Right.

Rory Sutherland 12:14 I'm a bit-... bit of a lover of American metal, I have to admit. And the Tesla, to me, is a w- fantastic car, but it's a bit too Silicon Valley. It's a bit... I want a bit of Detroit, you know, in there. Uh, admittedly, the Mustang is actually made in Mexico, but nonetheless, it has, it's a little bit of Americana, which I rather like actually.

Rory Sutherland 12:33 And it's a lovely, gorgeous car to drive. Really fantastic.

Chris Williamson 12:36 Hasn't it been fascinating watching what's happened to the entire world's interpretation of electric vehicles almost exclusively on the shoulders of Elon Musk? Like that-

Rory Sutherland 12:45 Uh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:45 ... that company to me seems to have... Think about Priuses five years ago. Think about what-

Rory Sutherland 12:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:50 ... it meant to drive a Prius, and now think about the entire category of electric vehicles.

Rory Sutherland 12:58 I, I think, yeah, I mean, I think there are those strange entrepreneurs, aren't there? Who com- where there are certain products which are, in a sense, they are their own advertising. I mean, the iPhone was a similar thing. And the reason why I st- refer to products as their own advertising is that not necessarily because people automatically want them, but there is this effect which is that there are certain technologies which once experienced, you never go back. And that always fascinates me, actually. That it's an interesting marketing challenge when you have a product which people don't necessarily want it to begin with, but once they've had it, they never revert. Uh, and the mobile phone is a classic case. Now, you're too young to remember a period where people were cynical about mobile phone ownership, but I experienced ten years of that where I'm n- on, in 1989, I used a, a brick-sized mobile phone on Oxford Street, not my fault, I wouldn't have done it to make a call, but someone rang me and people shouted abuse at pass- fr- at me from passing cars.

Chris Williamson 13:59 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 13:59 Someone actually wound down the window of a black cab and shouted, "Wanker" out of the window.

Chris Williamson 14:04 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 14:04 One second, I've just got a... Oh, shit.

Chris Williamson 14:08 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 14:08 Hello? I'm on the podcast, but where are you? See you shortly. No problem. Fantastic. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Um, and, um, so, I mean, there is this electric car thing that you drive in a slightly zen way. I, I had in my previous car, which was an internal combustion engine car, I had adaptive cruise control. Now apparently, and I don't understand this, by the way, but apparently, once a sufficient number of cars on a highway have adaptive cruise control, it has highly beneficial effects on the transit speed of all traffic. And I think, I think I know what the reason is, okay? Which is that when you have adaptive cruise control, if you're following a car, let's say, 100 yards behind, um, the adaptive cruise control is a much better judge of distance and of the car's deceleration than your human binocular vision is. And therefore, the ca- your car slows down gradually when the car in front slows down, which means that you don't get this weird breaking wave.

Chris Williamson 15:27 Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 15:28 Because you use your brake lights less effectively. What's fascinating apparently is a breaking wave travels backwards in, uh, uh, uh, along a motorway at something like, it's gr- it's only like 500 miles an hour, okay? So, so if you could actually get three cars just to break really dramatically on a highway, and you could cause, unwittingly, a kind of serious traffic jam and bottleneck basically four miles behind you something like ten seconds later. There are these extraordinary effects going on in the fluidics of, um, motorway driving. And for some reason, if you inject enough cars onto the highway with a- adaptive cruise control and you get the drivers to use them, use it, uh, then actually it improves, uh, traffic efficiency, traffic flow efficiency quite markedly, even though a large number of people either don't have it or don't use it. One other thing I've noticed, I'd be interested to know your opinion 'cause you're in Austin which would, which would give a good sample size, I've never been pissed off as far as I can remember by anybody driving an electric car. Now, I've never been cut up, they've never tailgated me, okay? You, you know there are certain brands of cars, and we won't name them because Ogilvy does the advertising for some of them, okay?

Chris Williamson 16:48 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 16:48 But there are certain brands of cars where the owners are disproportionately tailgaters-

Chris Williamson 16:53 Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 16:53 ... left lane undertakers. You know, the, the, the... I mean, it used to be BMW, and it isn't really anymore to the same extent, but BMW drivers used to have that characteristic.

Chris Williamson 17:03 Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 17:03 I think it's moved on to other brands now. And what interests me is there are now quite a few Teslas. I mean, it's a very, you know, it's selling in very large numbers. But I've never had an unpleasant act of behavior from a Tesla driver.

Chris Williamson 17:18 How much of that is the selection effect of the people-

Rory Sutherland 17:20 But, i-

Chris Williamson 17:20 ... who buy Teslas and how much-

Rory Sutherland 17:21 But, because I j- okay.

Chris Williamson 17:21 ... of that is the type of vehicle they're driving?

Rory Sutherland 17:23 So, okay, you got to remember demography, this is not a representative sample because people who buy cars from new, which is most people buying Teslas at the moment, are disproportionately older and richer. But equally, there was objectionable behavior from new, you know, certain German car brands which were also new. So, you, you may be right. The, the, the Tesla particularly appeals to a particular mindset of person who isn't an asshole to begin with, um, but I've never, I've never had an electric car piss me off.

Chris Williamson 17:54 I think-

Rory Sutherland 17:54 I'm, I'm... Now maybe, to be honest, this might be bullshit, but on the other hand, in my own behavior, I have noticed a kind of more zen style of driving emerging.

Chris Williamson 18:03 Have you found yourself more aligned and awakened as soon as you get into your Mustang Mach-E?

Rory Sutherland 18:07 Oh, whereas it's I'm practically tumescent, mate.

Chris Williamson 18:11 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 18:11 Um, I love it. Absolutely love it. Um, uh, no, I have to say, it's been an absolute joy. Um-

Chris Williamson 18:16 Can you see yourself ever going back to a internal-

Rory Sutherland 18:19 No.

Chris Williamson 18:19 ... combustion engine? No?

Rory Sutherland 18:20 No. In fact, more than that...Now admittedly, there are tax advantages. I ought to mention this. So it's not a, it's not a complete apples for apples comparison, but we need to replace my wife's car and we've basically gone with the electric Mini because the act of owning w- Now, logically you should say one electric car, one petrol car. But actually, the act of owning a, um, uh, an electric car, first of all has largely banished range anxiety, okay? So that, uh, actually, I don't yet have a charger at home. I'm still fiddling around getting a seven-kilowatt charger at home, uh, installed. And yeah, I, I just want to say to your listeners, if you do live somewhere... Now London might be a bit of an exception, but if you live Newcastle, Manchester, somewhere, you know, which is a sane-sized city, not a stupidly sized megalopolis, okay? Um, uh, you can get by perfectly well without, uh, particularly if you're a little bit nocturnal like me, um, you can get by perfectly well without a home charger, in fact, assuming your mileage isn't insane. Okay?

Chris Williamson 19:19 Presumably you could use the same charger for your Mustang as you could use for the new Mini as well. Do they have the same connector?

Rory Sutherland 19:25 Uh, yes. Exactly that, yeah. So it'll be, it'll be a type two charger, seven kilowatt. And we might even... We, funnily enough, we, at the house we're in, we've got three-phase power, so we could even get two 11-kilowatt chargers if we wanted to go a bit flash.

Chris Williamson 19:38 So here was an interesting thing.

Rory Sutherland 19:39 Um-

Chris Williamson 19:39 We're, we're both buddies with Rob Henderson, and I remember-

Rory Sutherland 19:42 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 19:42 ... uh, probably about three years ago, Rob's book-

Rory Sutherland 19:44 He's the, he's the dog. I'm in awe of that guy. He's fantastic.

Chris Williamson 19:46 Dude. He is-

Rory Sutherland 19:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:48 Anybody that's not following Rob Henderson on Twitter now, search Rob K. Henderson.

Rory Sutherland 19:51 Great find.

Chris Williamson 19:51 He is fantastic to follow. Um, he tweeted ages ago saying that one way you could encourage the adoption of electric vehicles would be to give a status signal that was visible by everybody. So for instance, the Mini's a good example of this. The fact that you look at an electric Mini and you can't actually tell unless you're a real car buff-

Rory Sutherland 20:10 Oh.

Chris Williamson 20:10 ... and you know that the yellow detailing-

Rory Sutherland 20:13 If you, if you get... They've got the green number plate now, don't they?

Chris Williamson 20:15 Yes. The green number plate. So the green nu-

Rory Sutherland 20:17 Really good idea. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 20:17 The green number plate thing is now, in the UK, it's a status symbol. I am driving an eco-friendly car. This is electric, so on and so forth. I wonder soon if that green number plate, if people are going to want to revert back to no longer having that, to have it as they don't want it to be this outward show of how much they care about the environment, that I'm so cool. So they'll counter-signal the new signal.

Rory Sutherland 20:40 Well, well, you're, not only are you right, but I can prove you're right, because there was research done on Teslas. Sorry, no, there was research done on Priuses versus... If I'm right, there was a h- Alongside the Toyota Prius, there was a Honda hybrid. And the Toyota Prius was sui generis. It was obviously a hybrid. Whereas the Honda something or other was effectively a stealth hybrid, okay? It was a little like, you know, a kind of, um... I mean, there are a few, there are quite a few models. I think there's a Range Rover or Land Rover, isn't there? Which is a plug-in hybrid. Um, and what they did find was that in, I think in Democrat areas, people, I mean, vastly more people bought the Prius than bought the, um, the stealth hybrid. But then in certain more right-wing areas, there was an urge for people to enjoy the cost savings of driving a hybrid vehicle without in fact telegraphing that fact to their neighbors or to fellow motorists.

Chris Williamson 21:39 That's funny.

Rory Sutherland 21:40 And I, I, I'll, I'll try and dig out the paper, but there was some research done on signaling and counter-signaling, if you like. And

Rory Sutherland 21:47 it, it is very interesting because, you know, one of the best things people could do, really, okay, to improve their environmental impact or to reduce their environmental impact, would be either replacing their home central heating or boiler, in the case of the UK, um, or indeed replace the boiler with a heat pump. But it's worth noting that unlike a car, a heat pump doesn't really carry the same bragging rights or status connotations, does it? I mean-

Chris Williamson 22:13 You can't drive a heat pump around the center of London. No.

Rory Sutherland 22:16 No. No. You can't drive... And I don't think anybody's pulled by having a heat pump. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 22:20 Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry about the fact-

Rory Sutherland 22:21 I'm out of-

Chris Williamson 22:22 ... that I'm still driving a diesel vehicle. Wait until we get home and you see my heat pump.

Rory Sutherland 22:25 Just wait, wait until you get home, love, and see my heat pump.

Chris Williamson 22:28 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 22:28 No, actually, I didn't... Even I'm... Okay, now I like, you know, I, I like to consider myself reasonably, you know, um, scanny in terms of physics and general science. But e- even I can't quite get my head around a heat pump because apparently a heat pump is 500% efficient. Okay. So the best boiler you can have converts energy, heat energy from gas into heat energy in your home, um, at around about the 90% efficiency level, maybe it's a little bit higher. So in other words, you know, they now recapture far more of the heat than it used to escape into the, into the environment. Um, and I think some of them might even... I think there was one boiler I heard about which had a kind of Stirling engine operating, so it generated a bit of electricity on the, on the exhaust gases. But you can get 95% efficiency. What I never realized is a heat pump... We all understand how a fridge works, right? Okay. It basically uses some energy to extract energy from one place and put it somewhere else, okay? Now of course, the problem there is that we tend to think when it's cold outside, generally heat pumps work well in countries like the UK and Ger- and where you don't get extremes of temperature, by the way. So, you know, Austin, Texas, the case may be slightly weaker than any other case.

Chris Williamson 23:44 Oh, it's disgusting over here. You need, you need a vest and shorts during the day and you need a hooded top and long trousers on a nighttime. The amount of heat swing in the middle of November is absolutely insane.

Rory Sutherland 23:54 Ah, but there's a great thing for that, which is true of Phoenix as well, which is you have a great nightlife-

Chris Williamson 23:59 Yes.

Rory Sutherland 23:59 ... because it's intolerable going out during the day. So everybody goes out in the cool of the evening-

Chris Williamson 24:03 Correct.

Rory Sutherland 24:03 ... and you get totally hot. You know, I always notice that about Phoenix. You know, you actually get a bit of late nightlife, you know, which is rather fun because people then go and do the kind of wander- Spanish style wandering around the street stuff-

Chris Williamson 24:15 Dude.

Rory Sutherland 24:15 ... at kind of eight or nine at night.

Chris Williamson 24:16 The thing as well is, especially at this time of year where it is, it's perfectly fine during the day. It's not disgusting during the day. You're talking-... 23 degrees, maybe, ish, uh, celsius during the day outside. So all of those places that have got beer gardens with food trucks that are pulled up outside, they've managed to pivot themselves. So I'm across the street from a place called Cosmic Coffee & Beer Garden. Now if that's not-

Rory Sutherland 24:38 Oh!

Chris Williamson 24:38 ... just a perfect display of the fact that you've got daytime and nighttime. They have this unit. They've got fairy lights that aren't used during the day. They've got a beautiful garden and a, a waterfall in there. And then in the nighttime, all the lights come on, everything dims, the music comes out, live stage goes on, and you think this is a single unit that's got every use under the sun, from 9:00 AM for breakfast, when I went this morning, until 1:00 in the morning. It's amazing.

Rory Sutherland 25:02 They, this is, this is, there is a guy in Australia who worked out that, that you could have a dual-purpose coffee shop and cocktail bar. And, I mean, I imagine using digital signage, you could, you could actually effectively-

Chris Williamson 25:15 Flip the branding even more, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rory Sutherland 25:17 You could, you could morph a retail outlet from one thing to the other.

Chris Williamson 25:21 Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 25:22 'Cause, you know, with- the kind of lighting and signage that's appropriate for a tea shop isn't really appropriate for a, you know, (laughs) you know-

Chris Williamson 25:30 Cocktail bar or whatever, yep, yep.

Rory Sutherland 25:31 ... uh, a cocktail bar. So you could, I'm sure, using clever LEDs and lighting and screens, uh, do something really clever there. But, I mean, I, I, I've always slightly fantasized about Austin, um, because I'm a little bit hipster and a little bit redneck.

Chris Williamson 25:46 Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 25:46 Um, and so I've always rather liked the idea that I can go to a farmer's market in the morning and buy organic sourdough bread that's handcrafted by people with really interesting body art. But then if I wanted to, I could drive a pickup truck out into the desert and fire machine guns at oil drums, you know? And the fact that you have that kind of yin

Rory Sutherland 26:05 and yang thing really kind of appeals to me.

Chris Williamson 26:07 You really feel it here. Here's another thing-

Rory Sutherland 26:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:09 ... that I was thinking about to do with transport. So I was talking... Where was I driving? I can't remember where I was driving, maybe up to Edinburgh. And Google Maps, you don't have the same number of preferences as I think humans want, and there's two preferences that I would want to have included in Google Maps. The first one would be ease. So that would be, "Can I sit at a m- more consistent speed throughout the entire journey?" I.e., can I sit on cruise control? My car doesn't have radar-guided cruise control or adaptive cruise control, so can I sit at just a single speed or close to a single speed for the most amount of time? And also, the fewest number of turns, the fewest number of junctions, the straightest road. I don't want to go on some B road for ages. And then another option that I would love to have in there would be beauty. So can I drive... Let's say that I don't actually care about the speed of my journey.

Rory Sutherland 26:55 A, a, a, a, actually I'll go a bit further than that, which is that Google Maps... And actually, I'm fairly sure that the great guy Jonathan Haidt, his sister is involved in a campaign to make Google Maps more public transit friendly.

Chris Williamson 27:09 All right.

Rory Sutherland 27:09 And one of the American aspects of, of Google Maps, it doesn't really understand multimodality. So, if I say to Google Maps, "I want to get to work," okay? It will either think that I'm only going to use public transport, which as an American means I don't own a car, and it will suggest I catch a bus to the station, which, you know, uh, whi- which takes bloody ages, okay? And then take a train into London, because that's public transport. Or it suggests I drive all the way into Central London, which you would only do if you were a lunatic. Now in an electric car I don't even pay the congestion charge, but to be absolutely honest you don't need the congestion charge anymore. They should pay me for the stress of driving into bloody London, because it's intolerable, you know. The speed limit changes from 20 to 30 more or less at random, bus lanes spring up all over the place, there are cycle lanes which take up half the available space. You know, if you don't basically kill someone or, or, or get a 50 pound fine, you count yourself lucky. And then, then we're going to add electric scooters into the mix and it's gonna be, you know, Goodnight Vienna, frankly, okay? But Google will either suggest I drive in, which is mad, or that I get a bus to the station. Now what we all do as Brits is we drive to the station, we park the car, we take a train. But Google Maps can't get its American head around that multimodality. And you're right, uh, I mean, interestingly when I do drive to the station I drive to, quite often just a station called Otford where it's slightly easier to park and it's a little bit cheaper to park, but the main reason I do this quite often, oddly, and it seems completely bonkers, okay, is that I cap- deliberately catch a slower train to London Blackfriars. The fast way to get to work is Sevenoaks, London Bridge, change to Thameslink, Thameslink, Blackfriars, okay? Or Waterl- sorry, this is really boring to your international audience. Waterloo East, go through Southwark tube station, walk to Blackfriars. Those are the two fast ways to do it. Now, what I do is I take a slow stopping train that takes an hour rather than 33 minutes from Otford all the way to Blackfriars because it's one hour... First of all it's not very crowded, the train, so I can work on the train. I get a table, 'cause I sit at the back, okay, and it's an hour of total quality time in which I can clear my email inbox for the day. Now, if I take the faster route I have to change trains, dick around, go down an escalator, and so you're absolutely right that transport apps are all optimized around speed, not scenicness. Sometimes they're optimized around price, okay, but they're principally optimized around one or two metrics which fail to capture things that really, really matter to the human passenger. I'll get... Do y- okay, how, how many of you listeners to the podcast live in the UK? Um-

Chris Williamson 29:52 About 50%.

Rory Sutherland 29:53 Fifty... Okay. So this is... Okay. If you ever want to go to Cornwall, well, particularly if you want to go to Devon or you want to go to Bristol from London, okay, there are trains nonstop from Waterloo to Bristol Temple Meads and from Waterloo to Exeter St. David's, okay? If you search, even if you search Waterloo to Exeter St. David's on the National Rail website, these trains do not show up because they're so speed obsessed they say, "Go to Paddington on the tube, take a fast train to Exeter from Paddington."Now, a consequence of this is that virtually nobody knows these Exeter trains exist because if you search for them, the only way you can find them is to go Exeter, is to go Waterloo to Exeter St. David's, and then traveling via Salisbury, okay? Now, unless you're a KGB officer, uh, you know, looking to kill somebody, nobody's actually searched for that journey, you know, in the last 10 years, okay? (coughs) No one's put in "via Salisbury." When you do put in "via Salisbury," it reveals these trains, which are slow, but it's extremely beautiful as a journey, and because nobody can find the trains, they are insanely cheap because yield management basically assumes there's no demand for that service. And the reason there's no demand isn't because nobody wants it, it's because nobody even knows that the choice exists because the, the algorithm has basically hidden it from view.

Chris Williamson 31:22 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Rory Sutherland 31:22 And I, uh, I think my daughter, my daughter and three friends had to go to some weird festival in Cornwall, because that's what young people do, and I think I got something bonkers. Like, all four of them, now admittedly they have their, you know, young person's bloody railcard. In fact, there are so many railcards that they should just say, "Okay, we're gonna get rid of all railcards and we're gonna give middle-aged men a, you know, white bastard middle-aged man's railcard, which means you've got to pay 33% extra." You know, because I mean, everybody except the middle-aged gets a bloody railcard nowadays. Anyway, sorry, the gr- old boomer grumble over. I'll leave that, I'll leave that for a second. Okay, but I think I got them with their railcards, it was like a first-class single, um, from Waterloo to Exeter for something like 20 quid each or 19 quid each in first class. And they said, "Look, I can send you in second class for 12 pounds 50, but I mean, for the sake of eight quid, what the hell?" You know?

Chris Williamson 32:21 I had... I was in Rome recently, I'm not sure if you've ever seen this before-

Rory Sutherland 32:25 God, Italian trains are whacko cheap sometimes, aren't they?

Chris Williamson 32:28 They... Yeah, they're crazy, but this is the maddest thing. So while you're driving along, uh, in the train, while you're riding along in- inside of the train, especially on an underground, all of the opportunity for you to see billboards or have advertisements sent to you, they're limited to those tiny little sort of landscape things that are above... There's... You're trying to find a map and instead you're looking at an advert for insurance or whatever.

Rory Sutherland 32:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 32:48 What they have in Rome, they've mounted projectors onto the outside of the train that project adverts onto the inside of the moving wall as you go along.

Rory Sutherland 33:00 Oh, nice.

Chris Williamson 33:01 So you look outside and you see this advert, and obviously the projector can move and it's not just a static thing, and then as you arrive at the next station, the projector turns off, people get on, you get back into darkness, you hit another wall, the projector turns back on, it's a different advert. So good.

Rory Sutherland 33:16 That is re- actually... Given that the alternative is looking at a wall, uh, you know, if, if you started projecting over... building walls and projecting over views of the Thames Valley, I'd get a bit pissed off about it. But actually, given that the alternative is looking at a dark wall, I think that's actually advertising

Rory Sutherland 33:31 performing a mild public service, to be honest.

Chris Williamson 33:33 I would a- I would agree. What do you think about Insulate Britain's campaign?

Rory Sutherland 33:38 Oh, crikey. Um, th- So, uh, yeah. I have to say that there is often a problem with perfectly well-intentioned movements, okay? (computer chimes) I- I have a very interesting take on environmentalism, by the way, which is, I think there's a 20% chance that Nigel Lawson was right and that actually, um, uh, you know, the, the a- anthropogenic climate change through carbon emissions may be a scientific mistake and a form of collective insanity. Okay, 20% chance I think he's right because we, you know, we do see that, you know, collective insanity manifested in institutional decision-making, okay?

Chris Williamson 34:15 All the time.

Rory Sutherland 34:16 All the time. Emperor's new clothes. On the other hand, my question is slightly different. Even if we're wrong, is it necessarily a bad thing to treat carbon reduction as a heuristic to improve the quality of life on the planet? So, in other words, you know, electric cars may actually benefit humanity as much through being quiet, okay? Think about people who live on a busy road, okay? They, they... I mean, actually the, the stress created through noise. So it might be... I'll, I'll give you an example of this, okay? I think most people who think they're gluten intolerant are actually full of shit, okay? Um, th- Uh, don't get me wrong, okay? There are people with celiac disease, it's a serious condition, but I think for every person who actually ha- is gluten intolerant, there are four people who think they are. And similarly with lactose intolerance, okay? Uh, among Westerners, not... I mean, it's more common in different genetic populations. On the other hand, people who give up lactose and gluten do feel better, or claim to. Now A, even if that's purely placebo effect, you know, what the hell? Who cares? If it makes you feel better, who cares? Secondly, it may be that following the heuristic of don't eat gluten causes them to feel better for some completely unrelated reason, which is actually nothing to do with gluten, but the fact that they don't digest wheat very well or they don't, you know, they don't digest something else very well. It may be just a useful dietary heuristic which improves your gut health (computer chimes) for reasons entirely tangential to the reason you state.

Chris Williamson 35:50 Well, this is like-

Rory Sutherland 35:51 So one argument about carbon reduction is even if Nigel Lawson's right, that doesn't necessarily mean that carbon reduction isn't a useful heuristic by which to act.

Chris Williamson 36:00 Yeah, it... The reasoning can perhaps be wrong, but you can still arrive at a conclusion-

Rory Sutherland 36:04 But, no-

Chris Williamson 36:04 ... which is correct.

Rory Sutherland 36:05 I, I, my a- A, an example, the... I had an argument with Steven Pinker about this. Miasma theory wasn't actually true, okay? You know, germ theory is a much better theory of disease, but miasma theory led to beneficial consequences like, you know, the funding of sewerage, waste management, airy, airy, well-ventilated hospitals with big windows, which it turns out were good things to do even if we were doing them for the wrong reasons.

Chris Williamson 36:29 Well, this is the same as the porcupines don't throw their quills myth, right? The fact that if you treat a-

Rory Sutherland 36:34 I don't know this.

Chris Williamson 36:34 So if you... Uh, porcupines, for a long time it was told that porcupines could throw their quills at you-

Rory Sutherland 36:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:39 That they were actually, uh, uh, some sort of archery, ar- archery animal that was actually able to do that. Now-

Rory Sutherland 36:45 That would be fucking cool, actually-

Chris Williamson 36:46 It would be awesome.

Rory Sutherland 36:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:47 Imagine that.

Rory Sutherland 36:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:49 Um, but they can't.So, porcupines cannot do that.

Rory Sutherland 36:52 It's funny because otherwise por- porcupine darts would have been a flaming killer sport, wouldn't they?

Chris Williamson 36:56 That would have been amazing. Yeah, you had to hold it-

Rory Sutherland 36:57 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:57 ... and then squeeze it, and then you can-

Rory Sutherland 36:59 Or three hockey. We've got the-

Chris Williamson 36:59 ... try and aim it. Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 37:01 We can have porcupine. Right, okay.

Chris Williamson 37:02 Um, but the type of behavior that the belief, the erroneous belief, the incorrect belief-

Rory Sutherland 37:08 Yes.

Chris Williamson 37:09 ... that porcupines throw their quills, the type of behavior that that engenders is optimal because you need probably more of a degree of freedom than you think from the porcupine.

Rory Sutherland 37:20 (coughs) Really?

Chris Williamson 37:20 And it's exactly the same as, um, why Jewish people don't eat pork.

Rory Sutherland 37:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:26 Now, there's a sacred animal and blah, blah, blah, but in olden days, pigs were very difficult to keep clean. They have a higher number of parasites, they have a higher number of, uh, germs within the meat.

Rory Sutherland 37:38 They're quite often instrumental in the transmission, cross-species transmission from birds to humans as well.

Chris Williamson 37:43 Okay. So I mean, so all of these are reasons-

Rory Sutherland 37:45 So I think if you have ducks in proximity with pigs, for example, there's a greater risk of kind of avian flu making the transfer.

Chris Williamson 37:51 (claps hands) Nightmare. Yeah. So both of those things are, um, one's, one's, I guess, like a cultural artifact and the other one is an outright myth. But it's encouraged a particular group of people to behave in a way which is optimal for them, despite the fact that the reasoning behind that was a little bit more kind of spooky.

Rory Sutherland 38:09 So I wrote a piece in The Spectator about this saying that the, telling your children that if you tread on the cracks in the pavement you might be eaten by bears, which AA Milne did, okay?

Chris Williamson 38:18 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 38:18 There's, there's a poem. I think it's a little thing, which is you have to watch out for the bears because they catch children who tread on the cracks in the pavement. Now, children are much more frightened of bears than they are of traffic because they've had a million years of evolution to, to ward them off wild animals. What this does... Now, there is no scientific evidence of any correlation between walking on pavement cracks and the risk of bear attack, okay? But what it does do is it encourages the children to keep an eye on where they're putting their feet, which stops them tripping over. I don't know if you've had very young children, but they are prone to getting distracted and falling flat, and they do a face palm, you know? They, they kind of fall flat on their faces. But secondly, it means they stay on the pavement and they don't wander off onto the road because by adhering strictly to stepping within the cracks, you will, as a byproduct of that belief, you will adopt a more transport safe behavior. And so-

Chris Williamson 39:14 It's, this is the sort of thing that's basically impossible to mandate.

Rory Sutherland 39:18 Yeah. So, so this is what you might call heuristic. It's actually heuristic behavior. And there are, there are lots of cases where heuristics are arguably, you know, social norms. I mean, because it's worth noting that the Greek for law is nomos, okay? I don't know, I don't think that's the origin of norm, but nomos means both custom and law. The word can mean those two things. And so the creation of socially beneficial customs, which eventually then get formalized as laws, doesn't necessarily require reasoning. It simply requires an empirical measurement of the benefit of following that belief. So, you know, a belief in an omniscient god is probably a pretty good way of keeping people well-behaved, okay? You know? Because, you know, I mean, you know, I mean, if you think about it, there are all kinds of behaviors, um, uh, which would be, you know, bad, you know, which from a purely utilitarian stance would be completely harmless, but it would be better if people didn't indulge in them, you know?

Chris Williamson 40:23 Yeah, it's strange. I, I wonder a lot about this, the fact that there's a level of virtue or honesty or integrity that kind of almost holds advertising back in this situation. Let's say that you need to tell children that there's a bear if they step on the cracks in the street. But also there's a degree to which you think, "Well, we're fucking lying to children here. We're making them fear bears because of where they put their feet on the pavement." And it's only culture that can deliver this. A top-down dictatorial campaign couldn't do this because it would just be an outright lie.

Rory Sutherland 40:54 Charlie Says, have a look at the COI campaign Charlie Says, which you won't, you'll be too young to remember, but it was a boy who had a friend who was a cat who delivered sensible advice about not talking to strangers, not, and telling your mummy, because bear in mind, this is the 1970s, so your dad was at work and your mum was at home.

Chris Williamson 41:12 Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 41:13 But always tell your mummy if you are going out with strangers or going out with your friends, you know? Uh, tell your mummy where you are going. And Charlie would go, "Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah." Okay, it was a cartoon character, just to be clear. And, and then the child would translate for the benefit of the ear, "Charlie says that you should always tell your mummy bah, bah, bah, bah, bum." Now, that was the use of an animal to impart good advice. Now, you know, if we get absolutely literal about this, you know, why on earth would you have the advice delivered by a cat rather than by an, you know, an ex-

Chris Williamson 41:45 Well, the Green Cross Code was a hedgehog for years, wasn't it?

Rory Sutherland 41:48 Uh, you had... Hold on. You, you had... No, there was a very bad weasel, wasn't there?

Chris Williamson 41:52 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 41:52 Hold on, let me get this right. There was a weasel, um, uh, that was bad and there was a squirrel that was good. So that was a different one. That wasn't Charlie Says. That was a thing with a squirrel. Sophie? Yes? What was that squirrel that used to give you advice about crossing the road? Tufty. Tufty. Now that wasn't, Tufty wasn't actually a COI campaign. It was found- funded by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, I think. Um, but it was a very, very useful campaign where again, you had a squirrel and then the weasel, which was a badly behaved criminal thing, uh, would always ignore the advice and end up getting run over by a truck or sent to hospital or whatever. Um, and, um, it was, it was quite weaselish. I mean, you know, it was probably a bit unfair to weasels, but, um, that kind of thing is interesting because the assumption is as adults, of course, we don't need any of that stuff. We just respond to facts. But as, to be honest, okay, the most boring finding in advertising, okay? Which is so banal that I can't stand there as kind of Oxbridge graduate in front of a bunch of clients and even utter this fact.... despite the fact that it is completely true, is that basically, advertising that features animals, particularly I suspect in the UK, advertising that features animals is more effective than advertising that doesn't feature animals. Now, you know, the, you know, um, BNP, under the glorious days of John Webster and the Hofmeister bear, and the Cresta bear, and the, uh, and the dog, uh, Tonto, I think it was, in John Smith's, okay? I mean, John, John Webster actually said, "My question is not does the ad have legs, does the campaign have legs? It's does it have four legs and a tail?" But it's almost such a banal finding, that if I had to stand up in front of a bunch of people from PNG and go, "Why don't we put an animal in

Rory Sutherland 43:43 this?" I'd feel like a complete idiot. But it works.

Chris Williamson 43:46 There's a Family Guy episode where Stewie, the baby, is going shopping with Lois, the mother, and he's being pushed along in the, uh, in the trolley. And he's sat there and she needs to get, uh, aluminum file, they call it.

Rory Sutherland 43:58 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:58 Also, why has, why have, why have Americans removed one of the Is from aluminium?

Rory Sutherland 44:03 Uh, there's something even weirder about that, which is the British used to pronounce or spell it differently in some way as well. So I'll try and find out, I'll go and do the research after this is over.

Chris Williamson 44:12 Aluminum foil, pushing along, and he starts mocking the fact that on the side of one of these aluminum foils there's a tiger. And he says, "What? Look at this tiger. What's the tiger doing on aluminum foil? It's pointless." And then his mother goes to pick up the one that doesn't have the tiger on, and he goes, "No, no, I want the one that's got the tiger on."

Rory Sutherland 44:28 "No, no, I want the one with the tiger."

Chris Williamson 44:29 Yeah. Precisely. So I wanna talk about-

Rory Sutherland 44:31 Stewie, Stewie is kind of a walking id, isn't he?

Chris Williamson 44:34 Correct, correct, yes.

Rory Sutherland 44:35 You know? Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:36 Yeah, yeah. He's just exposition throughout the entire thing.

Rory Sutherland 44:39 Absolutely brilliant, yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:41 I wanna talk about some of the things-

Rory Sutherland 44:42 Why, why has he got a British accent? Is that just because...

Chris Williamson 44:45 I'm not sure. I think it's because there's a low-key hint at the fact that he's gay, and-

Rory Sutherland 44:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:51 ... he, that effeminate nature, maybe Americans think that Brits are a bit effeminate. But there's also the limey Brit as well, isn't there? There's the sort of slimy, limey version, but then there's maybe the... I don't know.

Rory Sutherland 45:02 It's fascinating, isn't it? I, I mean, it may just be because the guy who does the voice loves doing it that way.

Chris Williamson 45:07 Nails it, yeah. And then you're locked in. That's, that's the mad thing about when you start a TV show, or anything. Like, like, uh, cartoon's a good example. You begin a cartoon, you do a pilot, you put it out there, and you think, "Right, well this is, this is the way that it's going to be, and we'll, we'll just have a go and hopefully we'll get signed." 13 seasons and 200 episodes later, and all of those creative decisions that you and your mates made when you had no idea what you were doing, you're locked into those, shy of killing some poor unfortunate bastard off.

Rory Sutherland 45:38 Yeah. Absolutely fascinating. I was talking to John Cleese about how they came up with Monty Python. And they literally went in to see some guy at the BBC, and, um, they, he'd say, so this, this sort of comedy series, you know, "Is it going to feature sketches?" And they'd kind of look at each other and go, "Is it gonna feature sketches? Yeah, yeah, I think we might have some sketches." And genuinely, of course, they hadn't, they haven't got a clue what they're doing. And of course, this being the BBC in 1970 or '60, whenever it was, they said, "Well, just go away and make 10 episodes. Here's the money, and let's go and see what happens." And in a weird way, because they didn't know what they were doing, they created something completely unique and distinctive. If they'd gone in with a clean format in mind, it wouldn't have had any of the delicious... Because it was unlike, and I remember this as a kid, it was unlike any other television you ever watched. You know, you know, the bizarre segues, the, you know, everything about it, the fast-pacedness, you know, uh, you know, extraordinary kind of animated sequences that would suddenly interpolate themselves in between sketches. And it was utterly transfixing. In the same way, I think that Curb Your Enthusiasm, the fact that it's plotted but not scripted, there's something about Curb Your Enthusiasm which means that even when it's not being funny, which is comparatively rare, it's still very watchable. Because there are elements to the whole thing which somehow seem completely fresh. There's a kind of verite to the dialogue and so forth.

Chris Williamson 47:10 Are you fam-

Rory Sutherland 47:10 Which I don't, I don't think you could write.

Chris Williamson 47:12 Are you familiar with The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci's thing?

Rory Sutherland 47:14 Yeah, huge, extraordinarily fan of that, yeah.

Chris Williamson 47:16 Glorious. One of the best British, in fact, I would say, I would go as far as to say it's got, it's worthy of the Blackadder title of the modern era. You know, it was the 2010s Blackadder. Um, I don't know whether you knew this, but I read that they filmed every scene a minimum of twice. So they filmed one perfectly on script, and they filmed another where the actors were permitted to ad lib as much as they wanted. And they ended up using a really high proportion of the number of ones where they actually went off script. And there's a really good... Do you remember when, um, one of the guys is being asked to make a coffee, and as he's walking away, he throws a ball at him and he turns round and says, "You're getting a coff-wee. It's coffee with wee in it." And that scene was shot 30 times, and he did a new version each time. 30 different takes of him turning round. And they just decided to go for coff-wee, coffee with wee in it.

Rory Sutherland 48:07 'Cause Stewart, Stewart Lee talks about this very interestingly. So, one of the reasons why sa- stand-up people kind of rehearse is they will dick around with... Uh, and, and the person who first spoke about this in comedy, that it's so execution-dependent, okay? And, uh, the first person I remember hearing this from, uh, was, let me get this right, um, oh yeah, it was Douglas Adams. And Douglas Adams used to read sentences and paragraphs of P.G. Woodhouse and try and disentangle what it was about the precise word order that made them funny. Okay? And then subsequently, reading about stand-up comics, what they will do, I think there was, you know, Gary, Gary Lineker, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like a velvet owl. It was a little analogy that Lee used. And he, he was tweaking different versions of velvet owl.... in every single performance, both to find out what amused the audience the most, but also actually to find out what amused him the most. 'Cause there's a kind of recursive, um, uh, stochastic part of comedy.

Chris Williamson 49:13 Like iterative thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rory Sutherland 49:14 Yeah. It's an iterative thing, where you don't quite know what's funny until you've s- found it. And you notice that, that, you know, you can end a... If you write a piece with, you know, which is supposed to be funny of, you know, 500 words, you'll particularly dick around with the last sentence about 47 different times. And you can't explain what it is that makes the last sentence right, but you know when you've got there. You couldn't, you can't get there in advance. You can't say, "Oh, the way to write a last sentence is this." And there's something about the cadence that we understand instinctively that makes it funny and a proper... The last line of body copy in advertising will be the same, the last sentence, you know, where you traditionally leap back to the first paragraph to create a kind of closed system. Although, you don't have to-

Chris Williamson 50:00 Are people peak-end ruling that as well? Is the peak-end rule contributing to that a little?

Rory Sutherland 50:03 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:03 Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 50:03 So, so instinctively, we kind of feel, uh, that how something ends, uh, has a disproportional effect on its potency, as we would do if we were making a speech, you know. So you wouldn't just, uh, come up with a banal thing. You've got to end your talk on a sentence that is kind of semi-quotable or-

Chris Williamson 50:21 Pithy and yeah.

Rory Sutherland 50:22 And by the way, that advertising thing of looping back to the beginning of the body copy was a bit of an overused trope, to be absolutely honest. I mean, quite a few very good copywriters said, "No, no, no, no. When it's the right place to end, just end it there. You don't always have to refer back to the beginning."

Rory Sutherland 50:37 So look-

Chris Williamson 50:37 What, what have you become an evangelist for recently? 'Cause we spoke a couple years ago, and we talked about an air fryer. But since then, I've heard you talk about a glass-sided toaster, a Japanese toilet-

Rory Sutherland 50:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:48 ... and having two dishwashers.

Rory Sutherland 50:51 Yeah, I, I think there is a certain category of technology which is, it's not self-explanatory, but it's self-revelatory, which is, you know, once driven, forever smitten, to borrow that line from Vauxhall. Um, and I think the electric car is one such thing, which is that it's difficult to persuade... Mobile phones

Narrator 51:10 (01:30)

Rory Sutherland 51:10 ...

Narrator 51:10 (01:30)

Rory Sutherland 51:10 ... were another. Multichannel television, the internet. Now, you know, I spent a large part of the late 1990s working in an advertising agency, basically writing to BT customers and saying, "It might be a good idea to pay to have internet access at home." Okay? Now, they're ridiculous now, okay? Right? Okay, I mean, you know, i- if you moved into a house and there was no Wi-Fi, you'd just go, "Okay, this is a fucking nonstarter," right? Okay, I mean, you know, near, nearly everybody under the age of actually 80 would, okay? But back then, you had to persuade people. Now, I don't think there are many of the people who change broadband provider. I don't think there are many people who actually revert, okay? I don't... You know, I had friends who were very, very late, rich friends by the way, who were very late to get a mobile phone, 'cause they just didn't like the idea. Now eventually, they get a mobile phone, and once they've had a mobile phone, you never go back. And actually, the car itself, fascinatingly, there's a very good article in Edge by a guy who's an expert in adaptive preference formation, who made the point that nobody wanted a car, but once you... And actually, if, if the car had never been invented, we'd all whizz around on trains and buses thinking this was perfectly acceptable, okay? Once you've experienced car ownership, your bar and expectation for personal autonomy ratchets up by about 70% to a point where nobody who has ever... It, I mean, there are a lot of young people in London, okay, who go, "Oh, no, you don't need to own a car. No, no, no, no, no." Now, one of the reasons they're so anti-car is that they've never owned one. In the same way that, you know, w- um, you know, surprisingly, you know, what often happens is anybody who's been vaccinated is not an anti-vaxxer, okay? So it's one of those strange things. And actually, as the proportion of the population who gets vaccinated goes up, the number of anti-vaxxers goes down. So there is a kind of collective herd mentality that seems to go on with these opinions.

Chris Williamson 53:10 Talk to me about this glass-sided toaster, and-

Rory Sutherland 53:13 So the glass-sided toaster, particularly good if you, if you toast a lot of different things, either different breads or crumpets, morning goods, muffins, whatever it is you toast. Because of course, uh, it's difficult to know what the right setting is in advance for every single toastable product you put into the toaster. And so the great thing with a glass-sided toaster is you can, if in doubt, you put it on eight, okay? You bang the toaster on, and then you look at it, and when it reaches a point where it looks kind of just at the right level of toastiness, just as what Thomas Hardy would have called embrownment. Once it's reached the, uh, the op- optimal level of embrownment, then you hit eject.

Chris Williamson 53:56 That's such a good idea. Why... The two dishwashers thing, I'm gonna need explaining to me as well.

Rory Sutherland 54:01 Ah. Okay, so I'll explain that, which is that if you do have two dishwashers, and this is a bit of a bone of contention with my wife 'cause we're having the kitchen redone, and she doesn't want two dishwashers 'cause he's a bloody Luddite, and she think, you know.

Chris Williamson 54:13 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 54:13 Okay, um, but you never have to unload your dishwasher. So you don't lose any storage space because what it is, is you have a dirty dishwasher, okay? And you have a clean dishwasher. You retrieve plates from the clean dishwasher, use them, put them in the dirty dishwasher. Eventually, the clean dishwasher is empty, the dirty dishwasher is full. You turn on the dirty dishwasher, and then you reverse the process. That becomes the clean dishwasher, and so you don't have to unload your dishwasher and put things... Because the problem with a dishwasher is you got to empty the dishwasher before you can put dirty things in. Okay? And that's a pain in the ass, because you have to put things in cupboards, okay, before you can start putting dirty plates back in the dishwasher. Now with two dishwashers, that process doesn't happen. And it takes quite a bit of... It takes a certain understanding of logistics and understanding of complexity theory to grasp that principle, because it's not intuitively obvious.

Chris Williamson 55:11 Do you think that they'll end up making purpose-built, uh, two-segment, kind of like bunk beds, dishwashers? You could get one that would come in, and then you could even have perhaps a wall between them that you could slide things backward and forward.

Rory Sutherland 55:23 Well, there, there, there is interestingly a Fisher & Paykel dishwasher made in New Zealand which has two drawers, and you can put them on separately.

Chris Williamson 55:32 Probably not enough size though, eh? 'Cause you want to be able to have a full dishwasher load.

Rory Sutherland 55:38 Uh, well, I, I kind of agree with you. Um, they, they, they're also, of course, popular... Um, someone thought I was absolutely bonkers when I said this. They had a Fisher & Paykel dishwasher, and I said, "Very popular with Orthodox Jews." And they thought I was making some sort of weird racist point and got really upset. No, no, no. It's because if you're actually a devout Jew, you have to keep your crockery separate. So it's stuff that, stuff that touches dairy and stuff that touches meat has to be entirely separate.

Chris Williamson 56:05 No way.

Rory Sutherland 56:05 So the Fisher & Paykel dishwasher, which allows you to wash them separately... And, uh, uh, and somebody not realizing this thing about Jewish dietary law looked at me as if I was kind of, like, some sort of-

Chris Williamson 56:15 Xenophobe, yeah.

Rory Sutherland 56:17 ...weir- weird xenophobe. But I said, "No, no, no, no, no, it's a religious

Rory Sutherland 56:20 prescription," and then they- they calmed down a bit.

Chris Williamson 56:21 I, I learned this about, um, about Ben Shapiro who's a, a Jew, and their sabbath, I think, is... Is it Friday sunset?

Rory Sutherland 56:28 Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:30 Yeah, precisely. And he's not allowed to use anything electric, so he can't touch anything electric during that time.

Rory Sutherland 56:37 Uh, it's slightly complicated. You can have things on timers.

Chris Williamson 56:40 Yes, so that's what he's got. He's got smart lights around his house that are pre-programmed, and that, to me... I- uh, don't get me wrong, I think that Ben should be allowed to light his house as he wishes, but I'm not sure that that's in the spirit of the doctrine.

Rory Sutherland 56:55 Well, you, th- I mean, the other thing you can have is, um, a Sabbath guy. And a Sabbath guy is someone who lives... who's not Jewish, um, who, uh...

Chris Williamson 57:03 Oh, God. They're a light turner honorer.

Rory Sutherland 57:05 So, so, yeah, yeah. Um, I mean, I remember when I was at university. It was late, and, uh, they closed the door to the college at about... I can't remember what it was, midnight or something, okay? And th- there, there was a little door, and then they locked the little door, at the... It's called a Judas door, actually. They locked the Judas door sometime like midnight. And we were there, it was Saturday night, and there was this huge banging on the door. And the Italian guy, who was the porter, said, "Jews." (laughs) Bloody hell.

Chris Williamson 57:35 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 57:36 Okay. And, of course, they couldn't ring the bell, but they could knock on the door.

Chris Williamson 57:40 Oh, that's so funny.

Rory Sutherland 57:41 'Cause, um... And the reason is, of course, electricity didn't exist, but it's deemed to be making fire. And so if you flick a switch, it... There's also a weird thing about keys, about locking your house, 'cause I spoke to a Manchester police officer who did quite a lot of police work with the Orthodox community in Manchester. And you can wear keys, but you can't carry them on the sabbath.

Chris Williamson 58:04 Okay.

Rory Sutherland 58:04 And so there's some sort of thing which is if you have a kind of key chain, um, that's considered okay, whereas put- putting them in your pocket loose is not accep-

Chris Williamson 58:13 So a lanyard or something might be acceptable?

Rory Sutherland 58:16 Yeah, some, there's some sort of... But they would quite often get people... You would quite... She'd often, quite often be patrolling the area, and people would come in and say, uh, you know, "Could you turn my cooker on for me?"

Chris Williamson 58:26 Wow. That's crazy. I didn't know that.

Rory Sutherland 58:29 Um, and I, I think, I think that question of the spirit of the thing is an interesting question, 'cause I've always thought that's a little... You know, having an elevator that goes up and down, i- i- if you go to an Israeli hotel, okay, quite often on the sabbath, the elevator is programmed just to stop at every floor, so no one needs to push a button. Now, uh, yeah, there's a bit of me that goes, "That's kinda cheating, mate." Um, but I, I, I think the point is that there is a certain doc-... There's a certain kind of Jewish restriction which you obey it, and there is no reason. The, the, the argument is, and I, I can't remember what the Hebrew phrase is, but it's a law for which there is no reason. You simply have to follow this. And the argument they made about this particular kind of law is that if you provide a reason, okay, people will always look for reasons to get rid of the law. They'll say, "Ah, but it doesn't apply because..." You know. Uh, it do-... You know. The, you know, the prescription on pork doesn't apply because, um, now we have high standards of hygiene in our factory, so if you've given a reason saying that this is unclean. So in order to have these successful heuristic rules, they need to be capable of being Chesterton's Fences.

Chris Williamson 59:47 Yup.

Rory Sutherland 59:47 In other words, something you obey without knowing why you obey it.

Chris Williamson 59:51 But I mean, that's every...

Rory Sutherland 59:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:53 That's every parent of a teenager. That's their rule decree. "Why can't I go out tonight? Because I said so."

Rory Sutherland 1:00:01 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:00:01 That's the... It's... Because it... There is no coming back to that. "Because I said so" is as bulletproof of a, an argument as you're going to find.

Rory Sutherland 1:00:08 And so actually having those, um... Uh, uh, I, I mean, there's a huge amount of Chesterton Fence stuff in, for example, Jewish and Muslim, uh, law, which is very Chestertonian in the sense that, uh, d- just because you don't know what it's for, doesn't mean you should dis- disregard it, because the person who instigated it may have had a good reason. There's a hell of a lot of good stuff in the Quran about what to do if there's a plague. Um, for example, Jewish and Muslim, um, uh, very, very rapid burying of bodies, okay? You know, has very positive hygiene effects. So during the Crimean War, interestingly, you had effectively Christians fighting Turks. And the Muslims were absolutely assiduous about burying the dead, and the Christians weren't. And as a result, from decomposition and decomposing bodies, the disease was a much, much greater, uh, cause of loss of life on the part of the, uh... I haven't, I haven't got this right. I'm probably talking historical bollocks here. But the, but, um, similarly...Um, the belief in revenants is why, um, cemeteries tended to be built outside towns. The belief that the souls of the dead would rise up and haunt you, totally irrational belief. On the other hand, building cemeteries outside towns is pretty good from a public health point of view.

Chris Williamson 1:01:33 Yep.

Rory Sutherland 1:01:33 Particularly

Rory Sutherland 1:01:34 if you have to deal with the water supply or s- you know, anything of that kind.

Chris Williamson 1:01:37 Do you know where the w- word quarantine comes from?

Rory Sutherland 1:01:40 40 days.

Chris Williamson 1:01:41 Yes, quaranta. Yes, I learned that while I was in Florence, uh, a couple of weeks ago.

Rory Sutherland 1:01:45 And that's probably a heuristic r- rule, which is that by and large anything that's going to manifest itself will manifest itself in that period.

Chris Williamson 1:01:53 Yep. It's either, you're either dead or you're okay in the space of 40 days.

Rory Sutherland 1:01:56 And, you know, we could've, we could argue, okay, it was kind of m- I guess in, in, in, in they eventually in COVID they brought it down to about, what was it, 10 days I think, wasn't it, eventually?

Chris Williamson 1:02:06 Yep.

Rory Sutherland 1:02:07 The, uh, I, and, and by the way, that was probabilistic. I think that there were a certain number of people who manifested symptoms 10 days, more than 10 days after they were inf- infected. But what you were doing was effectively making a trade-off then between, uh, you know, total inconvenience-

Chris Williamson 1:02:22 Yep.

Rory Sutherland 1:02:22 ... and, you know, so through the vast-

Chris Williamson 1:02:23 Couldn't have been 40 days because the compliance would have been so low that it might as well have been no days.

Rory Sutherland 1:02:28 Yeah, y- yeah. Well, that- that's a very interesting question, actually, which I often raise about this, which is that when you design a rule, you, it's very rare that you can design a rule on purely scientific grounds without factoring in behavioral factors. So 40 days in a hotel room would be so much to ask of people that, um (laughs) , the most fun fact happened in Melbourne, wasn't it, is the hotel security started having sex with the guests.

Chris Williamson 1:02:53 No way.

Rory Sutherland 1:02:54 Did you come across this?

Chris Williamson 1:02:54 No.

Rory Sutherland 1:02:55 There was a huge outbreak in Victoria and the reason was that the people in the quarantine hotels were so goddamn bored, they started having sex with the people who are there to provide security.

Chris Williamson 1:03:04 Amazing.

Rory Sutherland 1:03:04 And so there was whole, there was kind of an outbreak.

Chris Williamson 1:03:06 That's so funny. Oh my god.

Rory Sutherland 1:03:08 Um, and the, the joke was why, why is Australia like the Spice Girls? Because Victoria has to spoil it for everyone else.

Chris Williamson 1:03:16 Nice. (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 1:03:17 Um, but, um, uh, but, but the interesting thing is let's say, let's say you know, and I think they knew this, okay, six or eight months ago, okay? Outdoor, non-dense social encounters are highly unlikely to lead to transmission, okay? So I said outdoor and non-dense. I don't mean a football crowd, but I mean people... A garden, a Buckingham Palace garden party with reasonable social distancing is very unlikely to lead to transmission. So a completely rational person would say, "Okay, we'll allow outdoor social events." Now, the, the problem there is you've got to factor in the behavioral component, as well as the scientific component, which is this. Outdoor event, outdoor socializing tends to lead to indoor socializing, because you meet in the afternoon, it gets cold in the early evening. A few people move into the conservatory, they leave the door open, you know, the patio heaters run out of gas. The next thing you know is there are 10 people in the conservatory, then they close the door 'cause it's getting a bit nippy. Then four people use the loo, then they go into the kitchen, then they have a row about Brexit, and before you know it, you've had a super-spreading event.

Chris Williamson 1:04:22 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 1:04:22 Now, if that sounds fanciful, that's exactly what happened at the White House, right? They had a m- a, a bloody session in the Rose Garden. I think nobody who only attended the Rose Garden event got infected. They all went back into that orangery thing, whatever it's called. You know, that kind of, you know, i- you know, off the pa... You can't really refer to the White House as having a patio, but you know what I mean. And they went into that thing with the curvy windows, and that's when the transmission happened. And so you can't just say you have to be an empiricist. You can't just be a kind of reductionist when you design legislation.

Chris Williamson 1:04:57 What are your thoughts around the communications that we've seen to do with vaccines?

Rory Sutherland 1:05:02 Um, the, um... Oh, crikey. Um, bloody hell. Um, uh, ooh. Uh, one really interesting thing. Okay. There's been, to be honest, I mean, in the UK, I'm, I'm pretty impressed with my fellow Brits. They're pretty sane. But in fairness, as more and more people get vaccinated, the hesitancy decreases even in the unvaccinated. I'm not totally hostile to anti-vaxxers. Uh, by which I mean people who are opposed to vaccinating, um, the very young. Because there is a case to be made that actually, you know, the cost benefit analysis might not pay off. Uh, old people who refuse to be vaccinated are just being irresponsible. Um, middle-aged people, look, mate, you know, you kind of have a duty to re- you know, uh, to your fellow man here. Anti-maskers strike me, strike me as completely bonkers, 'cause it was, to me, even if the thing didn't work, it was a mild courtesy to my fellow man. You know, I, I saw the mask wearing as, you know, rather like the reason I tend to wear underpants and trousers when I go out, which is that even if it would be more convenient for me to walk around naked, I, I'm, I'm conscious of the fact that it might cause distress to other people. So, you know... And also, I love, I love the, the comment of the comedian, I can never remember his name, he's always on, um... Uh, Bill Bailey. And he said, people said, you know, wearing a mask, you know, they're making us wear masks, it's like the Nazis. He said, "'Cause that's right, isn't it?" Because he said, "That's what the Nazis are chiefly famous for, imposing mild inconveniences (laughs) on people." I think, "All right." Okay. And my view was the cost of wearing a mask was so trivial. (coughs) Are there... Wait, what? (coughs) One or two caveats there. Um, I'm not totally comfortable with mandating masks all the time out of doors for a very strange reason, which is I did find that wearing a mask slightly disoriented me when I was crossing a busy road. I have no idea why that is. Um, but there were certain aspects to it, but indoor mask wearing and mask wearing in any kind of densely populated area struck me as simply something which even if I didn't believe in it, I'd be happy to go along with out of just, you know, courtesy to my fellow man. Now, one very important point with anti-vaxxing...... which I was, I, I had, I had theorized about this, but had never written about it because I thought it was maybe too stupid a point to make. But somebody else also theorized it and went to the intelligent lengths of actually investigating it, and that's the fear of needles played a bigger part in anti-vaxxing than we let on. Because about a significant double-digit percentage of people are really frightened of needles. Okay? I'm not. Not bothered. I've got a friend who might faint if you injected him with a needle. You know, he's, he was actually head of policy for the Liberal Democrats. He's an Oxford history graduate, right? He's not some wacko. But phobias are very strange. They're very strange things. If I said to you, because of some peculiar medical reason, that the injection, the COVID vaccine injection had to be given into your eyeball, I think you'd rapidly go around, uh, you know, looking for reasons not to get vaccinated. I mean, you know, I, I, you know, I think it's fair... Now, for people who have a real phobia of needles, the idea of being injected in the arm is equivalently distressing as it would be to you or me. After all, I know you may be frightened of needles, but to you or me being injected in the eye, I think it's fair to say would give me the fucking heebie-jeebies.

Chris Williamson 1:08:34 Yeah, it's just differences in, uh, differences in degree, not differences in kind, right?

Rory Sutherland 1:08:39 And so-

Chris Williamson 1:08:39 Just risk tolerance here.

Rory Sutherland 1:08:40 So one interesting thing is quite some of those people may have been engaging in what you might call, um, motivated reasoning. So they were frightened of getting injected, but they didn't want to say this, so they contrived, they, they reverse engineered a whole lot of reasons not to get vaccinated which were enough. Now, I don't think that explains the whole anti-vaccine movement, but it's a relevant sector. And one of the things they said is if you told people, "You can get vaccinated in private, you can get vaccinated lying down, so if you do faint, you don't crash onto the floor." Um, and the other... Another thing you might want to do is you might want to offer those people a very, very rapid vax. So if you, if you went to someone who's frightened of needles, right, and you said, "Uh, do you wanna come in now and get vaccinated?" they might go, "Oh, fuck it. I'll get it over with."

Chris Williamson 1:09:26 Yes. Yes.

Rory Sutherland 1:09:27 If you book them a flight-

Chris Williamson 1:09:27 Because the anticipation for so long-

Rory Sutherland 1:09:29 The anticipation, right?

Chris Williamson 1:09:29 ... is where their dis- yeah, their discomfort's gonna come from.

Rory Sutherland 1:09:32 You know, I've got friends who basically, uh, you know... Uh, uh, well, I'll give you the classic example of where I understand this is public speaking, 'cause I do a lot of it, right? You've got to do a lot of it because if you only do a bit of it, it's too frightening. And I know people, totally intelligent people, who if they have to give a speech, like a best man speech or a business speech in front of 100 people four weeks away, they have to spend four weeks shitting themselves. Okay? Literally, four weeks. I noticed when I started flying on business, 'cause of course a lot of people who fly business don't really want to fly, but their bosses tell them they've got to go to Frankfurt, I noticed in the business class compartment of planes, a significant minority of people are clutching the armrest on takeoff. You know, it's white knuckle shit. So one of the interesting things you could do with people who are frightened of getting injected is just say, "Come in right now and get injected." You know, or there's a walk on by thing. Because if you actually had an appointment for them three weeks hence, they'd have to put up with three weeks of total anxiety.

Chris Williamson 1:10:29 Mmm.

Rory Sutherland 1:10:29 And that might have been a factor in, in emotional decision-making, which we didn't, we didn't actually think about.

Chris Williamson 1:10:36 Did you know, I don't know if this story is true and I'm gonna stress test it on you, the original-

Rory Sutherland 1:10:40 Oh, by the way, on the, on the fear of things like that, I had a friend who did medicine at Cambridge, and on about day 10, you go into the dissecting room. It's your first year, medical student, there are a load of corpses, right, li- laid out on tables, and you've got to get a scalpel and you've got to start pulling them to bits, right? Now bear in mind, these people have spent six years of their life getting into Cambridge to read medicine. Okay? Right? And apparently, on that first day, you know, you'll get, I don't know, 300 medical students or whatever in the first year. Medical students, I don't know how many there are, but it'll be something like 200, 300. And about two or three of them will just go, "Fuck this."

Chris Williamson 1:11:19 Not for me.

Rory Sutherland 1:11:20 "I'll just-"

Chris Williamson 1:11:20 Not for me.

Rory Sutherland 1:11:21 "Not for me." You know, and they'll go and read law or, you know, something like that, right?

Chris Williamson 1:11:24 So that's like a hazing ritual to select out the people that are never-

Rory Sutherland 1:11:28 Well, I wonder-

Chris Williamson 1:11:28 ... going to be able to do this.

Rory Sutherland 1:11:30 I wonder, uh, it's a really, really interesting question about that, because if you're too squeamish to do that, maybe you just can't be a doctor, you know?

Chris Williamson 1:11:36 Cut your fucking losses after 10 days, mate. It's fine.

Rory Sutherland 1:11:38 Yeah. Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 1:11:39 Cut your losses. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:11:40 Yeah.

Rory Sutherland 1:11:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:11:40 Um, did you know about this? Is the original reason that a head on top of a beer, a pint of beer, that that was there and it was seen as scum originally?

Rory Sutherland 1:11:52 No, that's coffee, not beer, isn't it?

Chris Williamson 1:11:53 Is it coffee? Oh, yes. It's...

Rory Sutherland 1:11:55 It's crema.

Chris Williamson 1:11:56 Crema, that's it. Yes.

Rory Sutherland 1:11:57 Now, I... So in other words, it was, it was considered scum and it was the Gaggia machine, post-war Gaggia machine produced this stuff. And instead of getting rid of it, because an espresso previously, pre-war Italian espresso was just pure and black, they, they effectively rebranded it as crema. And something else has occurred to me which has done that, okay? Are you familiar with the... How long, how long since you've been in the UK?

Chris Williamson 1:12:23 A week.

Rory Sutherland 1:12:24 Oh. So, uh, well, you'll have to tell me why you're in Austin anyway, but fantastic. Okay. Are you familiar with the M&S cheddar brand Cornish Cruncher?

Chris Williamson 1:12:32 (laughs) No.

Rory Sutherland 1:12:33 Right. It's a mature cheddar brand, and it's called Cornish Cruncher. Now what's very clever about that, right, is that when you make mature cheddar, particularly super mature cheddar, the process of maturation causes salt crystals to form within the cheese. And so, you know, someone who just called it Cornish Mature would run the risk that people go, "What are these weird lumps doing in my cheese?" But by calling it Cornish Cruncher, you turn a bug into a feature.

Chris Williamson 1:13:06 That's so good.

Rory Sutherland 1:13:07 And so it's really, really clever. Really, really clever thing to do. Well done, M&S.

Chris Williamson 1:13:10 I love that s- what, what, what, how, I don't know how you would... It's like advertising Brazilian jiu-jitsu. So you've taken something which was a byproduct that shouldn't have been there and turned it into something which is now an actual attribute of the product.

Rory Sutherland 1:13:24 The most glorious thing of all, and I might actually go there this evening, I'm almost tempted, is the German kebab.And I couldn't get my head around this at all. It's a huge thing in, in, in Britain, the, um, the j- the German kebab house, okay? And I was thinking, "What, what fucking hell have the Germans got contributed to the kebab?" You know, why would I go to a... Now, it's interesting because of course Germany has a Turkish population of about six million. The kebab world, it's like the Indian restaurant world in Britain, okay? The kebab world in Germany, 'cause their ethnic food is Turkish, whereas ours is largely, you know, Indian, as God intended, okay? And, um, I was, I was saying to someone the oth- the other day, which is that my own particular pantheon of food, all Indian restaurants have an automatic Michelin star. You know, it's like all, all buildings built before 1700 are automatically grade two, and all Indian restaurants have a grade, have a Michelin star in my, in my particular book, okay? 'Cause even if it's bad, it's still better than anything else, right? Okay. But, but anyway, in Germany, it's, it's the kebab... The, their kebab wars. It's hugely competitive, okay? And you literally have people putting fresh heads of lettuce in the window of their shop to show how fresh the salad is. And so this hyper-competition in the Ger- (laughs) in German... And since their auto industry might be stuffed by the electric car, it's good they've got another export industry waiting in the wings, really. (laughs) So, um, so, so yeah, the German keb- I, I might actually go this evening and tool into Bromley and try one of these things, because I've never had one.

Chris Williamson 1:14:58 I think I did. I think I got treated to one the last time I came to London. But it was just, uh, someone said, "Do you just want to get a kebab?" And I thought, "Well, it's 3:00 in the afternoon. This is a... We're 12 hours too early here."

Rory Sutherland 1:15:09 And I, and I haven't had six pints yet.

Chris Williamson 1:15:10 Yeah, precisely. I, I haven't, I haven't fought anyone this evening. I haven't had, I haven't lost my keys and had a, had an argument with the missus. So yeah, it's, um... That's so strange to think about, the fact that you associate a particular type of food with the time of the day, and not just because of the effect it has on you. So for instance, if you have a big pizza for lunch, you're going to be sleepy for the rest of the day. No one's, no one's serving a big pizza at lunch ahead of a long conference where everyone's in a warm room.

Rory Sutherland 1:15:36 You can game that system, by the way. Next time you're in Central London, go and find a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant. Now, as I said, all Indian restaurants have a Michelin star, but go and find one with a real Michelin star, okay? And first of all, you'll be able to get in, okay? At lunchtime. This is the, this is the big thing. Secondly, they will have a lunchtime set menu, which is like 24.95, okay? You spend that at Pizza Express. It's the biggest bargain in the world, and it's all because most people associate Indian food with the evening. And I also suspect it's because out of any group of four people, there'll always be one worse who goes, "Uh, I don't eat Indian food for lunch." I had a boss, I lost all respect for them, boss who said, "You don't eat Indian food at lunchtime." I said, "Well, 1.4 billion Indians seem to manage okay, mate," you know.

Chris Williamson 1:16:26 (laughs)

Rory Sutherland 1:16:27 Um, and, um, so I love eating Indian food at lunchtime, actually. I think it's fantastic. But you will get the best bar... I mean, you, you, you're getting world-class food there for kind of pizza money.

Chris Williamson 1:16:38 Pennies on the dollar, yeah. Um, I-

Rory Sutherland 1:16:40 Yeah, really, really

Rory Sutherland 1:16:41 fantastic.

Chris Williamson 1:16:41 I think this was one of your tweets from the other day. "One reason political polarization tends to be confined to the young and stupid is this. Anyone over 35 possessed of any observational nous has noticed that there is no correlation between political allegiance