Rory Sutherland | Hidden Psychology of Comedy and Cancel Culture

1. 0:00 – 2:07

   Glasgow catch-up, local trivia, and a quick detour into suspicious fires

   1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr0:00

      We did this one a couple years ago, Rory. Um-

   2. RSRory Sutherland0:03

      I remember. I remember it well. Yeah.

   3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr0:05

      Yeah. I did it from Prestwick, where you told me some interesting facts about Elvis Presley-

   4. RSRory Sutherland0:09

      About Elvis. Yeah, the only place where Elvis touched down on British soil. Yeah, absolutely.

   5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr0:14

      I've now vacated there, mate. I'm now in, uh, Glasgow in the West End. Do you have any trivial facts-

   6. RSRory Sutherland0:19

      Ah, fantastic

   7. DJDavid McIntosh Jr0:20

      ... around Glasgow?

   8. RSRory Sutherland0:21

      Uh, uh, I, I, I remember going on a bit of a Charles Rennie Mackintosh tour there once. There's a tearooms, isn't there? Is it Sauchiehall Street?

   9. DJDavid McIntosh Jr0:29

      Yeah.

   10. RSRory Sutherland0:29

       Uh, there's a lot of fantastic architecture around. I remember having a bit of a tour there. Yeah.

   11. DJDavid McIntosh Jr0:34

       His art school burnt down recently, unfortunately. It was one of the most-

   12. RSRory Sutherland0:37

       I know. That was absolutely a, a awful thing, and presumably some of it is reparable, but I don't know how... How badly burned down was it?

   13. DJDavid McIntosh Jr0:44

       Uh, I think incredibly, mate. I think disastrously almost. It was one of-

   14. RSRory Sutherland0:48

       Oh, God

   15. DJDavid McIntosh Jr0:49

       ... many of the actually, you know, institutional event spaces either, 'cause, uh, we had our O2 as well, which was our, um, venue space. I think that burned down months apart, maybe in the same year. It was disastrous.

   16. RSRory Sutherland1:01

       Oh, God. Oh, God. So the O2 in Glasgow actually burned down? Good God.

   17. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:06

       Yeah, yeah. We had two here-

   18. RSRory Sutherland1:07

       Yeah

   19. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:07

       ... but one of them burned down, yeah.

   20. RSRory Sutherland1:09

       Good Lord.

   21. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:09

       Not sure if it was an insane job or whatever else, but yeah.

   22. RSRory Sutherland1:14

       It's a bit suspicious when things burn down now, isn't it? Because generally, smoke detection is quite a bit better. Um-

   23. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:21

       Yeah

   24. RSRory Sutherland1:22

       ... so you do have to think-

   25. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:22

       I didn't think arson was on the rise of all crimes

   26. RSRory Sutherland1:25

       No, no, no, you wouldn't think, would you? No. I mean, there can be all kinds of reasons. Uh, you used to get it quite a lot, uh, in New York firms where they're, they were about to be investigated by the IRS, and there'd be a mysterious fire in their f- in their kind of records department. That used to be quite a common thing. Mm.

   27. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:44

       So you're telling me the integration or migration to Excel and spreadsheets is the reason we have less arson in financial services institutions? [chuckles]

   28. RSRory Sutherland1:52

       Well, yeah, possibly. Possibly someone's just digitized. There, there's probably a form of digital arson which can always take place.

   29. DJDavid McIntosh Jr2:00

       [laughs]

   30. RSRory Sutherland2:00

       You know, conveniently organized hacker attack or something of that kind. Yeah. You never know.

2. 2:07 – 3:41

   Who Rory Sutherland is in 2024: behavioral science and why we resist it

   1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr2:07

      I wanted to ask you, given that my podcast has grown over the last few years, and since you've been on, people might not be familiar with you through the podcast, have maybe not revisited that episode. I just find it really intriguing when I ask guests, like, who they are because it gives them, gives me an insight into how they perceive themselves but also how they think others should perceive them. So if I were to ask you who Rory Sutherland is today in 2024, how would the behavioral scientist or the behavioral guru bring that to life?

   2. RSRory Sutherland2:36

      Well, without getting into the whole husband, father, et cetera, um, professionally speaking, I've worked at Ogilvy for about 33 years now. Um, and, um, uh, I, um, uh, I, I've been a copywriter variously, a creative director. Uh, I've been, um, vice chairman for quite a few years, and I founded a behavioral science practice. And I'm simply very interested in two things really, uh, which are closely related. One of which is the use of psychology to, uh, solve sometimes intractable or persistent, uh, problems in anything from society to business to commerce. And the other thing I'm interested in, which as I said is related, is why we're so reluctant to do so. In other words, what is it about people that they'd rather spend money on, for example, policing something tangible and concrete rather than redesigning the environment so that there's less crime to begin with.

   3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr3:39

      Well, yeah-

   4. RSRory Sutherland3:39

      And, yeah, those-

   5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr3:41

      ... obviously in your book I don't know

3. 3:41 – 6:46

   Reductionist models vs messy reality: McGilchrist, proxies, and optimization traps

   1. RSRory Sutherland3:41

      ... those kind of questions... Yeah. Those questions always fascinate me because there seems to be a kind of... I think, I think what it comes down to, I don't know if you've ever interviewed a guy called Ian McGilchrist, uh, who's written a few extraordinary books. The latest sort of magnum opus is, uh, The Matter With Things, and the previous one was The Master and His Emissary. But he kind of proposes that there are two parts to the human brain. There's a kind of reductionist, uh, rationalist, very linear part of our brain, and then there's a much, much, much, much more contextually sensitive, um, holistic part of the brain, and that the former left hemisphere tends to gain dominance over the other to a point where, for example, it isn't just that people are very keen to have a model of the world that makes sense. They will go to almost unbelievable lengths to make reality fit their model. And so you get a group of people, whether it be economists, for example. Now, in the case of physicists, that isn't necessarily a problem because you can have a kind of model of the universe where the facts fit the theory actually fairly well. There's no context sensitivity. You know, atoms don't have feelings. Uh, you know, everything is fairly straightforward, and you're dealing with the law of very large numbers. But there are very, very large parts of society which simply don't submit to that same sort of simplistic modeling, and yet we're almost determined that they should. And I think that's the problem, that in many cases I think businesses, really a large part of success in business is down to opportunism, serendipitous fortune, uh, luck, um, random discoveries that no one was intending, okay? An awful lot of the success of a business is down to its exposure to kind of random upside, if you like. And yet everything about the way a business is run is designed to pretend the opposite. That, you know, in other words, every single good idea starts with an intention and moves through to execution and then reality, and the more efficiently and more quickly you do this, the better the business you are. And of course, that's true of part of business some of the time. You know, efficiency optimization in business isn't a complete waste of time by any means. If you can cut out genuine wastage, then obviously it pays you very well, quite rightly to do so. But there's an awful lot of the time, I think, where a business objective is reduced to a very simple proxy metric, not because it's true or accurate or a realistic kind of depiction of reality at all, it's anything but, but simply because it makes the modeling neater and easier, and it means that decreeing a course of action is therefore less ambiguous and more straightforward. But the ultimate loser here is both the business and its customers, in fact, because you're optimizing in many cases for things which the customers may not care about very much, which makes surprisingly little difference.

4. 6:46 – 15:20

   The Abilene paradox: collective misreadings that drive bad decisions

   1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr6:46

      I heard of a term, it's escaped me now, whereby individuals who are part of the group act in accordance to the, what they think the motivation of the entire group is. Therefore... And then the entire group acts out of accordance with the motivations of the individual, therefore you have a tension of people both doing what they don't want to do. An example is like someone, everyone within a group wants to leave a dinner party, but everyone's too scared to do so.

   2. RSRory Sutherland7:13

      Yes. Ah, yes.

   3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr7:14

      And then one person-

   4. RSRory Sutherland7:14

      Someone mentions that brilliantly, I think it was on Chris, uh, Williamson's podcast where they mentioned this is to do with a thing called the Abilene effect-

   5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr7:22

      Yes

   6. RSRory Sutherland7:22

      ... or the Abilene paradox. And you can look it up, and it's a bit strange that it refers to a small town in Texas, but the whole paradox or theory, however you want to depict it, emerges from the idea that there was a guy hanging around with his family, and everybody conceived the idea that everybody else wanted to go to Abilene, so they all pile in the car and go to Abilene. And for whatever reason, I mean, Abilene, according to George Hamilton IV, is the prettiest town that you've ever seen. Women there don't treat you mean, which sounds like quite a recommendation. But it so happened that this group of people went to Abilene and had an absolutely terrible time, and basically all came back and said, "Well, I didn't even want to go in the first place." And then everybody else basically said the same thing. Well, nor did I. I just thought you wanted to go along, and I was going along with what I perceived to be the group majority, even though it wasn't the case. Now, I think there's, I think there's quite a bit of importance here, and two questions actually. There's a potential case in Brexit, which is one argument for Brexit, is that the European Union was always at risk from the Abilene effect, which is that everybody felt that everybody else was keener on closer integration than they were, and so effectively went along with it, and there was always a danger of a kind of collective insanity emerging from that. I can see that as being very, very likely in those kind of intragovernmental bodies where people are second-guessing each other. It actually happened, funnily enough, in the development of the Concorde. Now, the Concorde was a brilliant, brilliant airplane, but it wasn't a great idea. And I won't go into the details of that because they involve all kinds of complicated things. It would've been a great idea if every plane had become a Concorde, uh, which would've shrunk the world appreciably. But since they could only make it work on about two routes, and the number of people who flew those routes all that frequently was remarkably few, uh, it was... And, and, and that flying it on the eastbound leg doesn't really work anyway, 'cause you've got to spend an extra night in New York and then get to JFK really early to take an all-day flight back, when, to be honest, it's better leaving the night before on an overnight flight. All kinds of objections, okay? But apparently there was a moment in the development of the Concorde where the British wanted to can the project but didn't want to let the French down, and the French wanted to can the project but didn't want to let the British down. So those kind of collective effects, the Abilene paradox in action, I think can emerge quite a lot. And it-- Another case where it happened apparently was in the collapse of communism. There was this moment when communism in places like Yugoslavia was collapsing, and they finally reached this moment where everybody, including members of the kind of nomenklatura and the members of the kind of politburo, had all finally admitted that they hadn't believed in this system for bloody years, but they were keeping the pretense going 'cause they believed that everybody else believed in it. And I think actually it's strange that it was named both so strangely and so late because I think the Abilene effect, the Abilene paradox, whatever you want to call it, is actually rather an important thing to understand. I mean, one of the funniest... I had a case of an Abilene paradox, which was where I felt unbelievably guilty about postponing this meeting, 'cause it was the only physical meeting in London and I would rather have worked from home for the day. And eventually I postponed this meeting and the guy said, "Um, I'm so grateful Rory postponed 'cause I'd actually broken my ankle and I was having to make it into London on crutches, which I really didn't want to do, um, but I didn't want to let Rory down." And all the time I was thinking, "Oh shit, I've got that stupid meeting in London." And so it is an interesting case where it's a kind of emperor's new clothes in, um, on steroids, if you like. You know, it's a collective belief. A-and, and I think in Chris Williamson's podcast they talk about a related thing, which is the Keynesian beauty contest or the Keynesian beauty contest, depending on how you want to pronounce the guy, where it's a beauty contest where you win if you select the baby that everybody else thinks is most beautiful. And so when you get into that second order realm where you're not really thinking about your own preferences, you're trying to second guess other people's, then what can happen is that errors of as-assumptions kind of magnify themselves and amplify themselves. So instead of, uh, you know, a distortion in your belief becoming confined simply to your own behavior, it becomes collective. So that I think-- No, to, to actually just to bring back the original point, that's why it happens that at the end of the evening, suddenly one person leaves the dinner party and everybody goes. A little bit of it is, you know, a little bit of it, it is that, okay, I don't want to be the last person here. I don't want to be lingering on, I don't want to be an unwelcome guest, okay? And you may, you may be enjoying the dinner party a hell of a lot, but you're frightened of being an unwelcome guest, and that feeling of awkwardness is nil when everybody's still there. But when two or three people have left, your feeling of awkwardness, even though you're enjoying the dinner party, uh, undoubtedly suddenly, um, ramps up quite a bit. The alternative is that you've been wanting to go for the last half hour, but you haven't been able to actually... No one's put the bell on the cat, and you're kind of stuck there being polite because no one wants to make the first move. I mean, that's a, an, an interesting case of this, an interesting case of this would be if we look at the Ivy League in the United States, or you look at Oxbridge or the Russell Group in the UK, very, very successful, absolutely revered, uh, world-class institutions educationally for the most part, okay? Now, all of them know that they could educate 10 times as many people if they went into a kind of hybrid model, which was part residential, part remote. They all know they can do that. Um, and they all know, uh, that in 10, 15 years' time, such a move within that period will be inevitable, okay? But no one wants the pain of making the first move. 'Cause, you know, when you think about it, I mean, we have this agony about diversity and inclusion in Oxbridge in the UK, which by the way, very unattractively and for whatever reason I don't understand, always focuses on diversity in Oxbridge, not diversity at Exeter or Newcastle or Manchester or whatever. It's obsessed with the state versus, um, uh, private, uh, component of the student body at Oxbridge, which is about 3% of all students, which doesn't seem to be particularly right measure unless you're an Oxbridge-educated PPE graduate, you know, who doesn't really realize there are other universities kicking around. But, but, um, uh, you know, we talk about all this. Well, one way you could actually solve your diversity and inclusion targets is by not having the exclusive demand that everybody spends three years in residence. I would argue you do need one year in residence. You probably need also three months at the end where you come back into residence, okay? Where you are in between, given the workload at a university, now this doesn't apply to courses like medicine, okay? But it does apply to quite a lot of courses. Is it absolutely necessary to limit your numbers, um, and indeed to some extent, you know, uh, massively ramp up the costs to people, um, attending that university when you could probably achieve a kind of Pareto result of 80% of the value could be achieved at maybe 30% of the cost? Um, but again, it's the fir-first, first move... F-there's first mover advantage, but there's also first mover paranoia. Um, and, and there's a great quote from this, which I think comes from Warren Buffett, but it might come from Charlie Munger. They're kind of the same person in a way, although Charlie's trag-tragically died recently, where he says that, um, uh, you know, to some extent, collective mediocrity is the best policy for many people in a business because he says, "Although lemmings are collectively foolish, there's never been a case of an individual lemming receiving a bad press."

5. 15:20 – 18:48

   Comedy as social permission: laughter contagion, banter, and audience dynamics

   1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr15:20

      I see this unfold almost... So o-one thing since we last met, Rory, is I've been performing stand-up comedy on a monthly basis.

   2. RSRory Sutherland15:28

      Ah, brilliant.

   3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr15:29

      Performed 50 gigs, and when I... I'm, I'm quite edgy with my comedy. It's quite dark. It's quite boyish humor at the same time.

   4. RSRory Sutherland15:36

      Good. Good, good, good.

   5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr15:37

      And, and what, what I see when I perform is I, I wait to see one person laugh, and that determines whether everyone else in the room will laugh. There's almost like a gateway drug to laughter, which is just one candidate in the room.

   6. RSRory Sutherland15:48

      Yeah. That's per- that's permission to laugh. Absolutely right. Yeah. And it's, it's, it, it... I think that's very, very interesting. And by the way, the heuristics you use are also interesting because that may mean that, you know, you don't... To be honest, very interesting my take on comedy. I mean, you, you must know from your part of the world, Frankie Boyle, and I'm very mixed on, on Frankie Boyle because someone put it very nicely. They said that he's one of their favorite comics, but only for 10 minutes at a time. That it's a bit too relentlessly dark to have a whole evening of it. Um, and I'm s- probably similar. I also, I also have to admit, um, in those very, very extreme comedic routines, there are certain areas where I'm totally happy for people to go, and there are certain areas which I don't like. I don't like anything, I mean, in the latest Ricky Gervais piece. It's all incredibly good except the bit where he's kind of taking the piss out of the disabled, which violates my, um, uh, violates my p- you, you, you know, it violates my can't punch back rule, if you like. And, you know, I found, I found that, you know, I, I always find him funny. I li- I like it. I think, I find it, it's absolutely right that comedy should be challenging, otherwise what's the point? Someone made the point about woke comedy, which is they said the difference with woke comedy versus real comedy is the audience when they, when they like something, they don't laugh, they clap.

   7. DJDavid McIntosh Jr17:14

      Mm.

   8. RSRory Sutherland17:15

      But I don't go to a comedy club to clap. I go to a comedy club to laugh, and I think that's, I think that's quite a revealing point. You know, if you have this very right on comedy and everybody goes, "Isn't Trump stupid?" And everybody goes like that, that's not a comedian at this point. You know, they may be something else, but it's not really a comedian. Now, a comedian is someone like Andy, you know, I don't know if you ever saw the, you know, uh, w-wonderful guy called Andrew Schulz, um, American guy.

   9. DJDavid McIntosh Jr17:44

      I love Andrew Schulz. I saw him in Glasgow when he came here.

   10. RSRory Sutherland17:46

       Yeah. Well, he's... I wanted, I wanted most of all to go and see him in Glasgow 'cause his mum's Scottish, and he always personalizes his abuse to the audience rather brilliantly. He tailors his kind of abuse. You know, in Abu Dhabi, he was playing a stadium in Abu Dhabi and was taking the piss out of the people from Sharjah and so forth. I wanted to know what he made of Scottishness. I had a sort of half Scottish dad and a Scottish grandfather, and I wanted to know Andrew's take on his Scottish mum. Did he do much of that stuff?

   11. DJDavid McIntosh Jr18:13

       Not about his mum, but he did this genius thing about exposing the audience as racists. So he asked what we call a Chinese, uh, takeaway-

   12. RSRory Sutherland18:24

       Yeah, I saw that actually on YouTube.

   13. DJDavid McIntosh Jr18:26

       Yeah. And he-

   14. RSRory Sutherland18:27

       Yeah

   15. DJDavid McIntosh Jr18:28

       ... got the, the crowd to basically profess their racism, which was-

   16. RSRory Sutherland18:32

       Yeah

   17. DJDavid McIntosh Jr18:32

       ... hilarious because it shone a light on the, the dumb people in the room. But he maneuvered it in such a incredible way that he wasn't perceived as the, the, the racist. Um, and it sh- like I said, it shed light on people that would use this term-

   18. RSRory Sutherland18:46

       Yeah

   19. DJDavid McIntosh Jr18:46

       ... in everyday life. It was beautiful.

6. 18:48 – 23:00

   Cancel culture, taboo words, and the uneven logic of offense

   1. RSRory Sutherland18:48

      Uh, in fairness to the term, in my childhood we used it, okay? We wouldn't, we wouldn't use it now, but in my childhood we used it, and there was wasn't really any animus to it. I mean, it was an abbreviation more than it was an, you know... Um, and so, you know, I, I will slightly def- you know, I, you know, I think you're being a bit antediluvian if you're still using that phrase for a Chinese meal, um, in the same way that it's absolutely ridiculous to use the phrase for a corner shop, which was used fairly routinely in the, um, uh, uh, in the '80s. But then the word didn't quite mean the same thing in the '80s, and it, you know, and, and context kind of, you know, context does kind of matter, but it is, it is a bit ridiculous. I, I wouldn't dream of using that. But then a- again, some of these rules are kind of arbitrary. Um, there was a person, again, on I think it's Rob Henderson's podcast, might have been on Chris Williamson's, uh, talking about how certain words like retard or retarded became an absolute no-no, whereas other words like idiot, cretin, moron, which had exactly the same origins, they were once scientific definitions of people, uh, with learning disabilities, okay? Um, you know, you know, saying something's moronic or cretinous or calling someone, "You, don't, don't say that, you cretin," okay? Uh, remains uncontroversial, whereas retard... Uh, and, and it was, it's kind of arbitrary, you know? Um, uh, you know what? So-

   2. DJDavid McIntosh Jr20:16

      What derives or changes the narrative of that term? Is it based on the type of group that would use it and then the way they would use that term?

   3. RSRory Sutherland20:24

      I mean, similar debate could be made about colored versus of color. I mean, it's, [chuckles] you know, it's a pretty small semantic distinction, and I think this guy's suggestion is that it's, um, th- there are certain cases where, uh, the, the... in other words, the opprobrium is not really evenly applied. Um, and then you get, you know, certain things, Brit is never really deemed to be offensive, for example. Um, uh, you know, uh, I mean, you could argue it was, but I mean, you'd be really struggling. Um, but, but there, there are cer- I can't remember the exact theory the guy had as to what actually drove it, but sometimes it's quite an arbitrary pronouncement which just spreads. And, um, uh, uh, okay. I, you know, I mean, I mean, if you think about it, retarded probably started as a euphemism, okay? 'Cause it said, it didn't say the person was stupid, it said they were a slow learner. And by the way, there are people who are highly intelligent who are slow learners [chuckles] in the sense that Einstein, I think, couldn't speak till he was four or something. As you know, so, so, you know, you've gotta be very careful, you know. But I think it probably started, literally retarded, was probably started as a kindness, and then the association changes and so on. Um, but, um, uh, these, these rules are kind of interesting because y- you, you, if someone d- you know, it's a worthwhile area of inquiry because there are certain things where, uh, it's accepted nobody goes, quite rightly, I think. Um, but then you get absurd cases where, um, the use of a f- word, for example, isn't used in, there was a legal case recently about a guy working for, um, I think it was Lloyds Bank, um, who was basically, you know, made redundant for using the N-word in a debate about racialized language, okay? Um, now that gets a bit more complicated because, yeah, we all know there's a euphemism for that, but I mean, there's a limit to the number of euphemisms we can actually have. And his claim, which was successful legally, was that he's dyslexic in some way, and, uh, that, uh, you know, effectively, you know, we don't entirely control our speech, all right? And not everybody is... So you're in a danger really where you're creating a kind of uber class of people who know the correct vocabulary, and you're effectively making other people who aren't up to date with approved vocabulary, you're effectively freezing them from the discussion. And so you could argue it's, you could argue it's an attempt to, it's an attempt to control who can speak, you know?

7. 23:00 – 32:10

   The comedian’s 'gold card' and why context matters (Schulz, Carr, persona)

   1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr23:00

      I listened to Andrew Schulz on a podcast speak about the mechanistics of comedy, and I think it was in light of someone getting canceled who wasn't a comedian for saying something, um, like Islamophobic joke, I think. And I think it may have been Chris Williamson that was asking him, and I think he was asking around how comedians get away with the jokes that they do without getting canceled. And Andrew Schulz-

   2. RSRory Sutherland23:22

      You've gotta be good.

   3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr23:23

      Yeah. And Andrew Schulz's advice to everyday people was just do one stand-up comedy gig, because once you have the stand-up comedy gold card or hall pass, you can essentially say what you like without majority of the time getting canceled.

   4. RSRory Sutherland23:36

      Yeah. This is why it's a bit unfair, this is why it's a bit unfair for people for, like Stuart Lee, to have a go at comedians going, "You can't say this, can you?" But they're just saying it, okay? Well, they're saying it because if you're Ricky Gervais, for example, you've reached a kind of comedic escape velocity. Jimmy Carr similarly. You've reached that kind of escape velocity where the rules don't apply to you, okay? And it's also a bit weird because it's a bit middle class. There's not a single case of a Roy Chubby Brown, [chuckles] okay, reaching escape velocity on television. But if you're a kind of middle-class comedian and you sprinkle it with a few Schopenhauer references, then you, you might be okay All right. So yeah, the, it's a bit unfair for, you know, a one comedian to pronounce saying, "Well, because this person can get away with it, then what are they complaining about?" Because you could argue that, um, the rules are not applied evenly or equally or fairly. Uh, and, and part of what comedian- comedy is, is that being a great comedian is a person who can rewrite the rules to some extent. But not everybody's there immediately from day one, you know. Some people have long struggling careers. Uh, that's, that's one point about it. I also, I mean [sighs] I also think to some extent the rules at a comedy club have to be different. I always thought they shouldn't have banned smoking in jazz clubs, 'cause a non-smoking jazz club's kind of ridiculous, and the rules for what you can say in the office and, and the rules for what you can say on broadcast TV where people may not have a choice, okay, are slightly different from the rules where you have paid to go and see a particular comedian. Um, but, um, he, he argues there's a, he argues there's a comedy gold card effectively that once you have it, you're, you're kind of allowed. Yeah.

   5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr25:19

      There's a great American comedian called Mark Normand. Have you come across him?

   6. RSRory Sutherland25:23

      I've come across him and I'm, and p- I keep hearing him recommended.

   7. DJDavid McIntosh Jr25:26

      He, he's fantastic.

   8. RSRory Sutherland25:27

      And-

   9. DJDavid McIntosh Jr25:28

      He, he said some outlandish joke that offended one member of the audience, and when he stepped outside, the audience member was waiting to see him, and she asked him to apologize for the joke. To what he said, "I'm sorry," kind of lackadaisically. She said, "You didn't mean that." And then Mark replied funnily, "I didn't mean the joke either." [laughs]

   10. RSRory Sutherland25:53

       No.

   11. DJDavid McIntosh Jr25:54

       Well, she didn't obviously-

   12. RSRory Sutherland25:54

       'Cause she get... It gets more, then it gets more and more complicated because you're, you're, everybody knows that comedians have a persona, okay? And you know, I mean, n- no more so than, you know, whether it's Alan Partridge or indeed any comedian on stage is a kind of persona. Although it seems that Andrew Schulz is pretty much himself all the time, fascinatingly. Um, but you know, the, uh, once you start policing the ability to play a persona, then actors aren't safe, are they? You know, I mean, you know, then, then, well, you know, where does it all end? And, and, and there is also a kind of, there is the... It, it does boil down to an attempt, if you like, should you really allow entirely humorless people to police public discourse? 'Cause that's like handing the, you know, handing controls to, um, uh, that's, you know, that's like handing the controls of, you know, a restaurant to someone who has, uh, a whole series of food allergies, right?

   13. DJDavid McIntosh Jr26:51

       [laughs]

   14. RSRory Sutherland26:51

       And you know, that, that question of individual veto. I, I went out for a meal last night. There was one person who didn't eat mushrooms, two people were gluten intolerant, two people were vegetarian, and one person couldn't eat, was lactose intolerant, okay? Now, you can't effectively produce food for which no one in the world has a dislike or an intolerance, okay? It's impossible to have a restaurant if you actually effectively have to produce only food that no one is intolerant of or allergic to, because then you're calibrating the restaurant to the most sensitive person in the world or the most humorless person in the world. And in the same way, you, you, you can't really calibrate comedy. I just accept the fact, um, uh, with, say, Frankie Boyle or similar, that I'm gonna watch this and I'm gonna love some of it, and some of it I'm not gonna like. But then that's pretty much like any meal I've had out as well. You know, some of the courses are great and some of them, frankly, I could have made at home. You know, and some of them disappoint me. Well, you know, true of virtually everything. Um, and this idea that you can kind of regulate and, and, and calibrate, uh, levels of offensiveness effectively calibrated to the most sensitive person in the world has started to become ridiculous. I mean, large numbers of people like having the, large numbers of people like having the piss taken out of them in many respects, okay? You know, if you take Anglo-French, um, uh, animus, it's generally, uh, i- it's generally, you know, it's actually less vicious than many kinds of footballing animus after all, okay? It's generally good-hearted and it's actually kind of affectionate. And that, that's another issue which I think is a cultural variant. So Paul Dolan, who's a professor at the LSE, is unusual as a professor 'cause he's genuinely working class background. He makes no apology for it, nor should he. Quite the opposite. And he said one of the things he misses in academia is banter. He just said, you know, "There's no banter in academia 'cause everybody's so reputationally fragile that they can't afford to have piss takes." Now, if you go, you know, if you go to, well, the US Army, okay? If you go to groups of people who are genuinely cohesive, okay? The banter and abuse in a US Army brigade or something will be relentless. So, you know, we can't allow academia legislating about comedy is about as absurd, you know... We, we need to improve comedy. What can we do? Let's put a bunch of academics on this. This is the most absurd case of, you know, uh, uh, of, of policing. It's r- it's ridiculous. It's, you know, uh, I mean, you, you couldn't think of a p- worse, worse kind of state of affairs. Um-

   15. DJDavid McIntosh Jr29:33

       Have you come across the comedian Matt Rife?

   16. RSRory Sutherland29:38

       Now, that's a name I know, and I almost certainly have on YouTube quite a bit. Is that right?

   17. DJDavid McIntosh Jr29:42

       On YouTube. He's a, he's a really young, handsome, chiseled American, maybe early 20s. Did you see that his-

   18. RSRory Sutherland29:48

       I don't

   19. DJDavid McIntosh Jr29:48

       ... Netflix special was canceled recently? So some, for some context behind that, his audience were typically, um, females because, or women, because he was so attractive and he would do a lot of crowd work so that the women in the crowd and those would go viral, and about 80 to 90% of his entire audience was girls. And when he got approached through his Netflix special, or he approached Netflix through his special, he wanted to change his tone of comedy to have more mass appeal or to have more guy power, more guys, uh, subscribing to his content So what you did in that special was made, you made a really kind of outlandish domestic abuse joke that was not that funny either. Um, it was okay, um, but you tried to change all of his content to suit kind of match your typical working class guy humor. But as a result-

   20. RSRory Sutherland30:39

       Right

   21. DJDavid McIntosh Jr30:39

       ... you got canceled, uh, for that one joke. And I'm thinking to myself, is the reason he got canceled because the joke was in- offensive or offended someone or it was over the line or-

   22. RSRory Sutherland30:49

       Uh, it's also that it's not su- it's not, not sufficiently funny.

   23. DJDavid McIntosh Jr30:53

       Or, or-

   24. RSRory Sutherland30:53

       There are various cases, or, or it can be taken out of context. So Jimmy Carr does a very clever thing where he just starts ramping up degrees of offensiveness in the joke, okay? And, you know, how far can I push this? And framed as such, it's very different to if you take the most offensive or second most offensive joke out of context and just show it as if it's a joke told in isolation. So you can always, you can always create that business of making something scandalous. Apart from anything else, you can often make something scandalous by putting it in print when it's actually spoken. Because spoken, well, any language that's spoken, but spoken English in particular, has an awful lot of the actual meaning, intent, and, um, the, the freight of the message is conveyed by things like tonality and, um, in posture indeed, okay? If you're on stage as a stand-up, you don't just stand up, you know, there's a whole body language thing going on. And if you take, if, if you take the joke, you simply put it in print. In many cases, it's, it's, it's first of all not funny, um, you know, because the timing's gone, the expression's gone, the build-up's gone. But also something that's actually funny in context can seem, uh, really, really grotesque, okay?

8. 32:10 – 40:41

   A near-cancel moment: the Freedom From Torture gig and the perils of the wrong room

   1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr32:10

      I, I, I was on the verge of getting canceled a couple weeks ago. I was visiting London and I got a text message asking to perform, uh, for a charity called Freedom From Torture. Have you-

   2. RSRory Sutherland32:19

      Uh-huh

   3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr32:19

      ... come across that charity before? So I, [chuckles] I got invited, uh, to go there and they-

   4. RSRory Sutherland32:24

      I generally support it. I, I hadn't come across it, but I do generally support its aim. So I think it's, I'm confident enough to say. Yeah, there are not many dissenters there. Yeah.

   5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr32:32

      Likewise. And I, I googled the, the charity event. I saw there was one in Glasgow the year before at the Stand Comedy Club. It was a fundraiser. There was professional comedians, and there was normal punters as well as people affected by the charity. I thought, "Great, I'm gonna do the exact same in London." They sent me an address in Islington, and I turn up, and it turns out to be an office block. And what it appeared to be was a precursor for their Christmas-

   6. RSRory Sutherland32:55

      Ah

   7. DJDavid McIntosh Jr32:55

      ... staff night out, and-

   8. RSRory Sutherland32:56

      Action

   9. DJDavid McIntosh Jr32:57

      ... with a bunch of service users too. And of course, th- they didn't want me there. They were just waiting, uh, for their, their Christmas night out. And I thought I'd stay true, true to tone and the first joke... So what happened was, Rory, actually, I, I stepped, before I stepped on stage, the, the manager, the foundation manager, the charity manager, uh, opened up with some really grave, grave statistics around s- um, sufferers-

   10. RSRory Sutherland33:21

       Oh, dear. Yeah

   11. DJDavid McIntosh Jr33:21

       ... of torture in the UK and wider. Um, and then she said, "Welcome to the stage, David McIntosh." Um, and the first joke that I said was, um, "Freedom from torture. It will be freedom from torture when she shuts the [laughs] fuck up." [laughs] I thought they would laugh at that because-

   12. RSRory Sutherland33:37

       You've also... I think that's pretty good. What you gotta remember, and I, um, it, and I, I'm surprised they didn't get this. Okay. Let's be honest here, okay? In a good way, Scots have a mean streak, which some people in England don't. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm quarter Scottish. I grew up in Wales, uh, and now I live in the southeast of England, and one of the things I notice is that there's a kind of mean, slightly mean humor, which is... My father had it, you know, um, undoubtedly inherited, I think from, you know, all the way back. And when I went back to visit my relatives in Caithness, they all had that, that slightly cynical kind of, you know, [laughs] No. No, I, I think that's a great joke, by the way. Um, uh, but I, I'm also conscious of the fact that my taste in humor is a notch or two meaner than maybe the mode or the median or something. I think that's a great joke, okay? That, but, but again, people-- Also, you had the problem of coming in very suddenly to an audience that wasn't necessarily waiting for a comedian at all. So there are all kinds of problems there. I mean, having a... I mean, being a comedian at an event where, which is not as pr- billed as a comedy event. So, you know, there's a whole board meeting where people are talking about their corporate restructuring and loads of jobs being lost, and you're brought in for, for a few gags at the end. It's an impossible gig, I think. I mean, I hate, I absolutely hate, uh, after-dinner speaking. And the reason, the reason I really hate it, I mean, I will do it, but I really, really hate it, is because to an extent, all these people have got chatting. They haven't come for comedy or amusement or edification. And to be honest, they'd rather be... They, they, they're with a load of people they haven't met for six months, and they'd rather be chatting to each other, okay? Now, you know, if you imagine a comedy club where everybody is a group of friends who hasn't met for the previous year, and you have to come on and interrupt their conversation about, "Did you know that Dave's got divorced?" Or whatever, right? It's, it, I mean, it's pretty flaming difficult. [chuckles] I had a very funny one where I had to give a after-dinner talk. I had to give an after-dinner talk at the, um, uh, Royal College of Physicians. And I must admit, sort of two weeks beforehand, I was thinking, "Audience of doctors, after dinner, you know, maybe a few knob gags." I mean, not quite as crude as that, but, you know, that was what I was thinking. And then I had, I had a look about a week before I had at the seating plan, and it, like, included [sniffs] Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance and, you know, the Queen's doctor and so forth. I, I think I better raise my game intellectually here a little bit. But that... And then you also get those wonderful situations, which is why the poor old best man speech is so difficult at a wedding, 'cause you have two target audiences, okay? Anything that amuses your friends will shock their parents' generation You know what I mean? So, you know, you, you... There's some wonderful, wonderful comedy routines of someone, I think it's done by what's his name? Uh, you know, the, um, oh God, the guy who was in "The Office," um, incredibly tall, rather brilliant guy. We all know his name, uh, Bristolian, where he does, you know, the disastrous best man speech, where it's, it's a bit too risque for his contemporaries, but it's absolutely outrageous for like, you know, the fam- the, the, the mother of the bride kind of thing. And it's just, it, it, it, it's just really, really goddamn difficult to do. You know, if you've got a, if you've got a completely bifurcated... And in that audience, by the way, would've been a load of people in Freedom From Torture, good aim, by the way, uh, which, um, uh, who would be absolutely on for a bit of comedy because hell's bells, it's their Christmas party, and let's lighten up a bit. But there is a brigade of people who don't go to comedy clubs very often, who are basically serious all the time. And I, I find people who are genuinely, in all cases of neurodiversity, I find people without, you know, and there are people with absolutely zero sense of humor. In many ways, I find them the most alarming people I've ever met, you know, because you can't understand them, really. But also, imagine these people in positions of power where they have absolutely zero sense of the absurd, absolutely zero sense of kind of paradox or, you know, internal contradiction or ambiguity. Th- they're kind of terrifying, I think. I mean, you know, it, it... And, and there are such people. Now, great, you know, greatly, if you say, "We're having a comedy evening," tends to out- filter those people out. If you just turn up at a business meeting where you're talking about, you know, corporate restructuring and... [chuckles] But I have to say, I think your intro joke, which is also tailored to the audience, I think it's a bloody good joke. But, um, uh, you gotta, you also gotta remember that weird thing, which is that the Scottish audience is meaner than the English one. Uh, and, uh, yeah, uh, which... And by the way, I'm pro-mean. I like, you know, I, I, I like Scottish comedy for exactly that reason. I mean, I, I'll give you a classic case of someone being com- in Scotland, funnily enough, being completely wrongly vilified, was the guy who t- taught his girlfriend's dog to do the kind of Nazi salute, okay? And the whole point was, which everybody chose to willfully miss, was that he was doing it because his girlfriend loved the dog so much. The dog could do absolutely no wrong in his, her eyes. So as a wind-up, he was training the dog to do something socially atrocious, okay? That was the whole point. That's what made it brilliant and funny. And a lot of people were saying, "Well, you know, I think the man was absolutely stupid." No, no, no. It was genuinely funny if you knew the context about his girlfriend and the relationship with this dog, which she absolutely worshiped, you know, and which was, you know, she absolutely venerated this dog, and he was training it to do something repellent as a kind of wind-up on his girlfriend, okay? And, and the, the very fact, the very fact the police got involved in that, it's obviously, it's obvious what is going on there. This is absolutely absurd. But also, you have the barometer of offense, which is I made the point, when you had Monty Python doing the Minehead by-election and Mr. Bimmler and, uh, you know, you had Hitler and the whole of the German High Command standing for the National Boastalist Party in Minehead, okay, and dressed up in Nazi costumes. Now, remember, when that went out, there would've been a significant portion of the audience who were concentration camp survivors, okay? [chuckles] Right? I mean, not huge, but appreciable, okay? But I don't remember anybody complaining about that at all, okay? [chuckles] Right? And so you do have to argue, well, uh, well, well, this is, this is a bit weird now that, um, uh, you know, the, the, the levels of what you might call... It's almost sensitivity by proxy. It's like, like Munchausen's by proxy, where I'm being sensitive on behalf of other people. And the problem about that is it's a kind of game where

9. 40:41 – 42:36

   Wokeness: useful tools vs context-free rulemaking

   1. RSRory Sutherland40:41

      nobody can... I mean, I mean, there are no rules to that game, okay? Uh, you know, another person whom I've just imagined in my head might have been upset by this. Well, you can use that to veto more or less anything if you like. Now, I'm gonna... Now, just, just to be clear, just to be clear, there are lots of things about the woke movement I think are really good. So trigger warnings are a good idea, okay? If, you know, if I turn on a Netflix documentary and I, you know, or Netflix drama, and it says there is, you know, um, s- sexual violence or whatever, and I'm deeply upset by the concept, okay, as anybody should be, but I mean, I've been particularly traumatized by that. The fact that you can avoid that stuff, trigger warnings, weird people on the right complain about that. I, I, I, uh, they strike me an entirely sensible idea. Ideas like intersectionality are actually really, really intelligent. There's some really thoughtful people who are doing this. But then what seems to happen is someone seems to take what's interesting and intelligent and just extrapolate it to some, um, you know, absurd level of context-free... It's, it's almost an urge to just create generalizable legislation about what's acceptable regardless of context, and tha- that's never gonna work because when most... I mean, all sorts of social behavior are contextually mediated, right? Being, you know, partially naked in the swimming pool is pretty much okay. In a boardroom, it's considered a bit weird, okay? Um, and, and so, you know, it did, it does bother me a bit. I mean, to be honest, to be honest, I don't think it's gonna be a problem for that long, um, because actually I've seen this before. It happened in the early '90s, and people actually get bored with it. In a, in a weird way, it's almost t- it, it, it collapses under the weight of its own lack of contradictions. In other words, that the attempt to make these rules becomes so unnuanced and so generalized that it becomes ridiculous

10. 42:36 – 47:02

    Creativity lessons from Rick Rubin (and John Cleese): why creative behavior irritates managers

    1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr42:36

       I wanted to ask you about your time in Italy. Uh, I think I invited you to f- to a dinner in London in July, and you told me that you were shooting off and not... You didn't tell me where you were going, you t- no, where you were going to, what you were going to do, but you told me you were going to Italy. And then I saw a couple months later that you were spending time with Rick Rubin, um, your hero-

    2. RSRory Sutherland42:53

       Yeah

    3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr42:53

       ... who's a creative-

    4. RSRory Sutherland42:54

       Fantastic

    5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr42:54

       ... absolute creative genius. I'm just wondering what you learned from creativity and permissionless landscape through him.

    6. RSRory Sutherland43:01

       Well, h- h- his, his book, which is called, um, uh, uh, Creativity... What, what is it? It, it basically, Creativity is an Act. Uh, um, uh, it's about the creative act, which I think is really, really interesting. And it essentially... Funnily enough, there's much, there's a very short book as well by John Cleese which actually complements the... They, the two complement each other quite well. Uh, that's called Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide. And this is not just about humor, although humor is, I think, um, an integral part of the creative toolkit, um, uh, to a great extent. Um, you know, it's a way of getting somewhere else. It's a sort of, it's me- it's a form of mental teleportation, if you like, which frees you from, you know, just the rigidities of sequential logic. But th- one of the things I s- I suddenly learned is that there is a really interesting observation there, which is generally the behaviors of creative people or people who are trying to be creative, because I don't think people are necessarily inherently creative or not, but the behaviors of people who are trying to do something creative and new are peculiarly irritating, uh, to people who aren't trying to do something creative and new. So, you know, John Cleese writes quite a bit about procrastination. It, uh, uh, he writes, for example, Rick Rubin, "It's ready when it's ready." You know, there's a disregard for deadlines. There's a kind of weird lack of proportion or, you know, weird loss of a s- of what seems to be a sense of proportion. John Cleese also talks very intelligently about the fact that there's a difference between serious and solemn, and if you make a joke about something that's serious, okay, that doesn't mean you're not taking it seriously. And, um, so an, an awful lot of the behaviors which creative people will instinctively or th- habitually engage in in order to come up with something new will be almost maddeningly frustrating. I'll give you the loveliest example of this, which someone told me on a, on another, uh, podcast, or it might have been a, uh, a Zoom call, where once a week, what part of their job at work was to write a newsletter. It was like to a bank's customers or something like that, okay? Now, if you've ever written a newsletter or written anything, okay, lots of people write in lots of different ways. You know, some people will be more methodical. Some people will leave it up until the last minute. Some people are basically waiting to get lucky for an interesting idea to strike so that the whole of the newsletter will be much better because it's based on an interesting idea or news story or insight rather than just coming out of nowhere. Okay? There are lots, lots of ways in which you might do it. But this guy's boss demanded because the newsletter had to be ready on Friday that he writes 20% of the newsletter on Monday, 20% of it on Tuesday, 20% of it on Wednesday. [chuckles] Now, that is a failure to understand that the whole has to be greater than the sum of its parts, [chuckles] okay?

    7. DJDavid McIntosh Jr46:00

       [chuckles]

    8. RSRory Sutherland46:01

       You need some overarching idea or leap or, you know, segue or intro or whatever it may be in order to make a newsletter work, [chuckles] okay? No, no, no. This guy wasn't having any of this. If he hadn't written 20% of the newsletter by Monday, he was behind. Now, that's ex- that is exactly what I mean by that kind of weird disparity between people who are kind of reductionist, logical people who believe that everything can be reduced to its constituent parts, and people who I think are right, who realize that very few things in a complex world can be at, sim- simply reduced to their constituent parts. Which brings us back to Iain McGilchrist again, and his insight that part of the brain wants to actually pull things apart, and the lumper and the splitter, and part of the brain wants to put things together and understand the wider whole. Now, again, I'll give you a lovely example of this. Now, I can say this because the two people who talked to me about it, I can't say this as a white middle-aged man without this preamble. The two people who've written about it and talk, and the person who

11. 47:02 – 53:46

    The double-income trap, housing, commuting, and the economics behind modern stress

    1. RSRory Sutherland47:02

       talked to me about it are, uh, variously Elizabeth Warren, the admirably, uh, liberal, uh, potential candidate for president of the United States, who I thought was absolutely brilliant, by the way, but Americans seem to find her absolutely Marmite. Uh, I, I thought she was a fantastically interesting person, uh, named by Trump because she'd got some university position by claiming a smattering of, uh, Native American ancestry. Trump always referred to her as Pocahontas. [chuckles] Okay. Um, uh, Trump was actually... You've gotta hand it to Trump. His nicknames weren't bad. I mean, he's got a lot of experience in the wrestling game, okay? In WWE. But his nicknames were pretty good. Sleepy Joe. Yeah, it's not bad. Okay. Um, you gotta, you gotta credit the guy with that. And, um, her argument and the argument which also was brought to me by Fay Weldon, who I knew quite well, she used to work at Ogilvy, that actually the double income household is kind of a disaster. Now, you go, you, this is, you know, obviously... Now, this is not to say that the freedom of women to go and pursue careers, not necessarily have children at all, not necessarily pursue motherhood, not be housewives. That is not to say for a second that that's a bad thing. Okay? Just to be clear. Okay? But a consequence of it is effectively rising property prices and increased urbanization, which means that it's no longer possible to support a family on one salary. Now, when I was a kid, a working class household could just bring up kids on a single working class wage, okay? You can probably do that now with social housing. If you're in the private housing market, forget about it. I came across a case the other day where someone who is single... So people who are single are, by the way, driven crazy by this because I've got two friends who are... One of them is a hospital consultant who cannot afford to buy a house because they're single. Female, single, can't buy a house as a single female, okay? You've got to get into a flat share. You have the absurdity, by the way, that places like Newcastle, the student quarter of Newcastle is the most desirable residential area in Newcastle, is Jesmond. And the reason it's packed full of students is that five people sharing a house have more buying power than two people earning a salary, uh, bringing up a family. Okay? And that the... Although it started a- and although that is micro rational and micro desirable, and it started as an option, if you want to do this, you can, it then transmogrified into an obligation, which is if you haven't got two salaries coming in, forget about bringing up kids. Forget about owning a house, you know. Now, what I'm saying there is that that comes from the urge to understand, to hold two conflicting thoughts in your brain at the same time, which Elizabeth Warren and Fay Weldon, I think we can confidently say, even if I can't, I can confidently say those two people definitely could. And it's-- So Elizabeth Warren wrote a book called "The Double Income Trap," and she makes the point that, you know, the need to get into school districts to buy property to bring up your children. Effectively, without two salaries, you can't actually move. You can't do anything. You're bidded out of everything, which wasn't the case before. And so, you know, a degree of liberation has been lost. The extent to which the economic gains have gone to the treasury or to landowners or to property owners or to buy-to-let landlords from two people working in a relationship rather than going to those two people themselves in the, in the form of greater spending power. I think we've got to be actually cynical about that and say it hasn't been a great triumph from a consumer point of view. It's been, it's been brilliant if you're a buy-to-let landlord, fantastic if you owned property in 1975, okay? Brilliant if you're the government because you've got more tax revenue coming in. Fantastic if you want to grow GDP. But from the point of view of the, of the family as a unit, it's problematic.

    2. DJDavid McIntosh Jr50:58

       I heard on Chris Williamson's podcast around if you want to optimize for happiness, minimize your, um, commute time.

    3. RSRory Sutherland51:06

       Mm.

    4. DJDavid McIntosh Jr51:07

       Or instead of earning more money-

    5. RSRory Sutherland51:09

       Well, you see, you see-

    6. DJDavid McIntosh Jr51:10

       ... and things such as that

    7. RSRory Sutherland51:10

       ... you see, that's another thing. Another, another thing that's been killed by the dual income household is labor mobility.

    8. DJDavid McIntosh Jr51:15

       Mm.

    9. RSRory Sutherland51:15

       In the United States, one of the remarkable features of the United States and economy up to the kind of Reagan era was people who were basically up sticks moved 2,000 miles away across the country if there was a slightly better job there. You can't do that. Now, and maybe the better job, maybe the better job was in Bentonville, Arkansas, right, which is where Walmart's headquartered. Now, I bet if you're a senior executive in Bentonville, Arkansas at Walmart, you've got one serious fuck off house, right? Okay. All right. You know. Now, you can't do that unless both of you... Now, the chance of both you and your partner finding a job in Bentonville, Arkansas at the same time is infinitesimally small compared to the chance of one person finding a job there or one person finding a job in California or Los Angeles or wherever. Now, it, it's easier if you move to another mega city. It means that moving jobs out of mega cities, which are effectively just extractive mechanisms for turning a salary into rent, okay? I think London's a shithole. I'm in East Kent at the moment. I think the whole thing's a racket. You're working for the Duke of Westminster half the time.

    10. DJDavid McIntosh Jr52:22

        Exactly.

    11. RSRory Sutherland52:22

        Um-

    12. DJDavid McIntosh Jr52:23

        As a consultant, I'm asked to move to London all the time, and I'm thinking, "Well, I don't want to single-handedly fund landlord-

    13. RSRory Sutherland52:30

        Yeah

    14. DJDavid McIntosh Jr52:30

        ... lifestyles and TFL." Uh, I would be left... I'd be squeezed with nothing.

    15. RSRory Sutherland52:33

        There's some landlord living in Spain who's living off your work, and yet people don't seem to mind. I find this extraordinary. I mean, my, one of my predictions is that once we develop the electric motor home, okay, think of a big American RV with a 200 kilowatt hour battery underneath. A significant proportion of the population will go nomadic, all right? Because you can afford a, a luxury motor home, let's say 200,000 pounds. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than a flat. It's not gonna depreciate that much, okay? And you go and buy 20,000 acres of woodland somewhere. No, that's exaggerating. But with the remaining money, you go and buy, you know, a few hundred acres of woodland where you park the thing at the weekend. Why wouldn't you, you know, why... Ultimately, why... You got an electric motor home, you got a stonking great battery underneath, which is feeding your microwave and your Nespresso machine and your flat screen telly. You got Elon's thing on the side giving you your internet access, okay? [chuckles] Why would you, why would you fucking bother buying a house? The only thing they haven't cracked is the toilet. Once they get, like, a microwave toilet, which just, like, dries your excretions and makes it easily disposable, uh, you've cracked the whole thing.

12. 53:46 – 1:03:21

    Employer value exchange reimagined: autonomy, 'free when/where,' and smarter benefits

    1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr53:46

       I think we spoke last time around employers solving for employees' everyday lives, like car valeting and running prescriptions, things like that, um, through the kind of office concierge. And what we didn't speak about-

    2. RSRory Sutherland54:00

       I think Pepsi... I think famously Pepsi does that.

    3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr54:03

       Yeah, that's what we spoke about. And I, I told you about the-

    4. RSRory Sutherland54:05

       Yeah

    5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr54:05

       ... the gent, um, Andy King from the Fyre Festival, who used to be their concierge. But what I'm thinking is there's no or very few in the UK [coughs] large employers that have campuses where graduates, apprentices, young professionals can live and offload-

    6. RSRory Sutherland54:21

       Yeah. If you-

    7. DJDavid McIntosh Jr54:21

       ... a lot of the living costs.

    8. RSRory Sutherland54:22

       If you've ever seen a Silicon Valley campus that's almost unbelievable, um, like Meta, in that there is either cheap or unbelievably subsidized street f- street food of incredible abundance, basically designed to make you come into work. Uh, I have to say that the Brits, there are, there are some British companies which have very, very, um- ... uh, precious employees. Uh, there, there are some fields where they know that everybody who works for them could go to Google. That's probably not true anymore, but two years ago, everybody who works for them could go to Google for 30% more overnight, and I think they calculated once that their annual expenditure on avocados was like quarter of a million pounds. So it does exist. But largely speaking, what's happened in businesses is that the finance and HR functions try and reduce everything to an algorithm which makes employees by and large just fungible, and the effort placed into retention or other forms of staff reward other than, uh, direct finan- financial remuneration. Um, now interestingly, creative people may much prefer... And if you're creative, one of the reasons is you need a bit less money if you're creative, 'cause you can spend your money more imaginatively to achieve the same effect. I'm not suggesting it's okay to be poor. I'm not saying that. I'm suggesting that the impetus to be super rich, if you're imaginative, is reduced because a large part of the effort of the super rich is just doing what other super rich people do, and that's expensive, okay? Maintaining your status among a kind of homogeneous group, you know, you've got to move to one of seven places, you know, Dubai, Central London, New York, Connecticut, you know, Palm Springs, whatever, okay? You can only live in a certain number of places. If you're more imaginative and you're happy to game the system, it's less expensive to be rich, okay? 'Cause you're not actually, your preferences aren't actually determined by those of other people like you.

    9. DJDavid McIntosh Jr56:17

       Yep.

    10. RSRory Sutherland56:18

        You know? Um-

    11. DJDavid McIntosh Jr56:18

        I think I saw that.

    12. RSRory Sutherland56:19

        So that, that, so... Yeah. No, no, no. And, and, and I, I think, I think imaginative people, you know, there is an element where there's a kind of a creative dividend in terms of being able to spend money imaginatively, um, rather than in a conformist way.

    13. DJDavid McIntosh Jr56:33

        Well, when I hear you-

    14. RSRory Sutherland56:34

        Um

    15. DJDavid McIntosh Jr56:34

        ... you speak about optimizing for experience over efficiency, and I hear you use the, um, the kind of train analogy where they put Wi-Fi on the train instead of optimizing-

    16. RSRory Sutherland56:44

        Yeah

    17. DJDavid McIntosh Jr56:44

        ... for efficiency. How would an employer... What are some easy ways an employer could optimize for experience over-

    18. RSRory Sutherland56:50

        Well, it's, it's-

    19. DJDavid McIntosh Jr56:51

        ... rewards?

    20. RSRory Sutherland56:51

        Well, O- Ogilvy's done one very smart thing which I thought was absolutely admirable. I might have suggested it to them, but they certainly did it, uh, which is that, um, everybody now, alongside a kind of flexible work regime where you only have two core days in the office and then one flexi day, um, nobody's core day is a Friday, by the way. Alongside that, there's also a, um, a staff benefit, which is a month a year, not necessarily contiguous, a month a year of working from anywhere. So if you want to go and see your mum, you know, and stay with your mum, you can go and stay with your mum and do your work from your mum's house, assuming your mum has tolerable Wi-Fi. Um, okay. Um, uh, and you can go and work from anywhere for four weeks of the year. Now, some, to some people that might mean in Ibiza, to some people it might mean visiting friends, okay? But that's kind of sensible because it was kind of unfair, and particularly if you look in the United States where people only had two weeks' vacation, okay? So if you're an expat in the US and you had to go home for a week to go and visit your parents and your friends, what that meant was with your two weeks' vacation, you typically only had one week of every year where you could go and explore the US, which makes it pretty pointless going, living in the US really, doesn't it? If you can't explore the place. And so that's a, that's a really good idea. Now, what used to be the case is the only negotiation, the only negotiables in an employment con- contract were how much and how many hours. Where was non-negotiable, when was non-negotiable, okay? Um, and now you have really essentially four variables, and if people are willing to accept slightly less money in exchange for slightly more autonomy, or they're not so bothered about free time but they are quite bothered about free where or free when, and I coin these phrases free where and free when because free time is leisure, okay? Economists basically see the model of employment as you exchange leisure for money. You sacrifice some of your leisure time, and in return your employer gives you money. It's a ridiculously narrow and shallow definition of work, but let's just park that for n- for, for now, okay? And leisure is valuable, but then when you're at leisure also has a differential value. If you're a really keen golfer, the ability to play golf on Wednesday for a couple of hours and then work in the evening when it's dark, okay, is disproportionately valuable to you because you can't play golf in the dark. If you're a really enthusiastic dogger, I imagine it's the other way around, right? Okay. Now, now the point I'm making is that that's kind of free when. It's not about leisure. It's not about a quantity of leisure. It's about when I... I particularly like going into, you know, I live in Kent, I can go into my local town on a Wednesday when nothing's very crowded and have a bit of a mooch around for an hour in return for working when it's... I mean, after 5:00, it's dark and wet and horrible. I mean, there's nothing you can do that's meaningful as a leisure activity other than watch television in the British winter anyway. So the extent to which you spend your daylight hours in an office and then you go home to sit in the dark is absurd. So some degree of flexibility of when, and then there's flexibility of where, which might mean, you know, for example, I could actually afford a family home if I only have to commute into London twice a week because I can just move out to, pl- pluck a place out of a hat, Rochester. Whereas I can't do that if I've got to commute in five days a week. And so those things are all of value, and, um, it's, it's a healthy state of affairs where the value exchange between employer and employee becomes just more intelligent and more nuanced. The more variables there are, then there is more opportunity of actually gaining value from that exchange. Mutual value, I mean.

    21. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:00:39

        There is a very illogical phenomenon at my work. Uh, I work at KPMG as a consultant, and one of the most ... mentioned staff benefits externally or how well marketed this is, is incredible, is we get our, a day off on our birthday every single year. And, uh, that, just the framing of that is so much more beautiful than saying you get an extra day off because-

    22. RSRory Sutherland1:01:01

        Yeah

    23. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:01:02

        ... everybody wants their birthday off. It's their special day. The psychological effect of having that one day off guaranteed is such an easy way to market having one extra day. And it's spoken about at every recruitment event, online, on forums. It's such a clever staff benefit, in my opinion.

    24. RSRory Sutherland1:01:19

        No, no, no. A- and so this is another thing which is I don't think, I don't think the investiga- I think the investigation of the employer value exchange has become ridiculously kind of formulaic and reductionist. And what is valuable, you know, one thing it doesn't really understand the value of is just s- uh, um, what you might call confidence in your continued employment. And employers have continually eroded that feeling that this is a mutual arrangement where we intend y- for you to be a long-term part of our team. And they used to do it with training courses, expensive things, a little bit of staff entertainment, company cars. You actually felt you were, you and your employer were mutually invested in an enterprise. And the whole thing has become transactional because it's been modeled around this American kind of hire and fire at will thing, and any sense of kind of paternalism or indeed confidence in your continued employment, you know, reduction in uncertainty, which has a value, okay? No one's been really factoring that in because they've just been looking at this very narrow economic model of, you know, why would I work? Uh, oh, I'm sacrificing leisure as a one-off transactional decision in exchange for some useful work. And as a consequence, I think staff motivation has fallen through the floor. I think we're getting more and more people who are effectively... What's the phrase where people basically just slack off and... There's a Chinese phrase which is called, like, lying low, where you just do the bare minimum and keep the wolf from the door and, um, uh, don't try all that hard. And I, you know, there's also a huge, um, huge burst of early retirement, which is incredibly wasteful because a lot of people retire not because they want to stop work, they retire because they want to stop commuting. And, you know, the ability to keep people on for longer in a valued role where they have considerable experience, but maybe coming in twice a week and then doing the rest of the work remotely, that seems to me quite an important, um, uh, way of coping with what is, after all, a huge decline

13. 1:03:21 – 1:05:08

    Demography and keeping older workers: remote work as an economic necessity

    1. RSRory Sutherland1:03:21

       in the working population. I don't know if you're a Peter Zeihan fan or if you're a, um... There's a very good talk in it by the Hoover Institution. But we've kind of ignored demography, even though it's one thing you can confidently predict, okay? Because if you need more working adults now, you needed to start 31 years ago, okay? It's too late. If you look at China as a consequence of the one-child policy, uh, the population of China, by some predictions, in a certain length of time, will basically fall by more than half. They've even discovered they have far less people. They think they might have 200 less million fewer people than they thought they had in China, and this demographic collapse where you have very few working people supporting basically kids and retired people, all right? And the ratio of them, as you see in Japan, the ratio of retirees to actually working taxpayers then starts to become absolutely crippling for the system. The baby boomers had it good because they had remarkably few children to support and remarkably few a- and to educate, and remarkably few old people, uh, to actually pay pensions for. They... The boom was a boom for precisely that reason. Uh, very good book by David Willetts, actually, who wrote about this, called, I think, "The Pinch," which is about this demographic problem. And if you have this, you know, falling birth rate, birth rate in the UK, not as bad as some places, but it's kind of be- below replacement levels. It becomes very, very problematic, and you can predict it with a high degree of accuracy because you can't suddenly produce 20-year-olds, okay? And yet no one's talking about it. But actually, one way of actually solving the problem is for older people to continue working for longer in as far as they are able to, under more agreeable conditions.

14. 1:05:08 – 1:09:54

    The rise of the 'box ticker': bureaucratic dominance, metric fixation, and why HR/finance outlast AI

    1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:05:08

       I love that as a solution. And to take a kind of step back to what we're speaking about, I watched you on The Spectator TV this week, I think, and you were speaking about-

    2. RSRory Sutherland1:05:16

       Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah

    3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:05:17

       ... the archetype of the, the box ticker within an organization.

    4. RSRory Sutherland1:05:20

       Yeah.

    5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:05:21

       What is the box ticker?

    6. RSRory Sutherland1:05:23

       Well, what seems to have happened is a bunch of functions within business, which started really as support functions like finance and HR, have acquired a peculiar kind of dominance, both in numbers and in scale, but also in terms of influence, that they've gone from effectively d- describing reality to defining reality. And as a consequence, a lot of business people don't feel they're anymore working in a kind of enterprise with a shared vision, values, and purpose or whatever. They feel they're basically working to satisfy the urge for neatness and formula among these people. It, and it's a kind of Soviet-style capitalism in that the people who do the quantification end up with disproportionate power, and they busily optimize the productivity and billability and so forth and, uh, and, and value of the people doing the core work, while effectively marking their own homework when it comes to their own jobs. And I think it's a problem because the ratio of administrative people, and therefore the ratio of the bureaucratic burden to core work being done in any large organization has simply become ridiculous. There's a YouTube video you can go and see from a, uh, a corporate raider called Carl Icahn, and it's called "How I Got Rid of 12 Floors of People," where he took over a company fairly early in his career. And there were 12 floors of people doing incredibly important complicated things that he couldn't possibly understand even though he owned the bloody company. And it turned out that when he got rid of all those people and sold the building, okay, it made absolutely no difference to the functioning of the organization. And there is a kind of, there is a kind of, I think there is a kind of parasitic middle-class office job, bullshit jobs in David Graeber's phrase, which has become... It's a form of corporate oncology. It just seems to grow and grow without any constricting forces, um, preventing it from becoming larger. So the amount of money spent on salaries of people employed in HR since 2017 has gone from 15 billion pounds a year to 25 billion. 17 billion pounds a year, is it? Maybe. No, it's 15 to 25. It's absolutely a monumental increase in expense. Now, some of this, I'm not denying, some of this has probably improved corporate output, the efficiency of the organization. It's removed an administrative burden from people who previously had to deal with awkward things like firing, and it took up too much of their valuable time. I'm sure some of that money is valuable. I'm sure that some of it is absolutely the opposite. It's just adding to the burden and removing the autonomy, uh, from people elsewhere in the organization.

    7. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:08:14

       And in a similar vein, we worry about humans being replaced by AI, valuable jobs, human-centric jobs being, um, replaced by artificial intelligence.

    8. RSRory Sutherland1:08:26

       What will happen, what will happen is HR and, and finance, which should be the first jobs to go in an AI world, will actually be the last to go.

    9. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:08:37

       And is it because they have-

    10. RSRory Sutherland1:08:38

        Because the people who decide-

    11. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:08:39

        They have the bargaining power and the deci- they're the decision-makers. You, like you said with Rick Rubin, you-

    12. RSRory Sutherland1:08:42

        Because the people, the peop- yeah, the people with the numbers have all the bargaining power, and they have, they have enough facility to win arguments very easily with a symbol- simple bit of oversimplified hot, you know, kind of cod mathematics. Whereas anybody who wants to do something counterintuitive, unexpected, oblique or different has the absolute murder of a time trying to get it approved.

    13. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:09:08

        I remember you saying to Rick that you'll often have finance employees scrutinizing over the creative's work, but you'll never have a creative scrutinizing-

    14. RSRory Sutherland1:09:17

        Never happens the other way around.

    15. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:09:18

        Yeah.

    16. RSRory Sutherland1:09:20

        Never happens. You never get, you know, accountants going, "Well, I think it's 7.3, but I'm gonna show it to some wacky people to see if they've got alternative ideas." Once you're in that rational sphere, nobody ever looks outside, okay? In your creative sphere, not necessarily wrongly, okay? You have to subject your work to scrutiny from more rational people than you. Um, fault finding can be very, very valuable. You know, um, creative people are often naively optimistic. I think there are all kinds of reasons why that's not a heal- not an unhealthy thing in general. What is really unhealthy is it never happens the other way around.

    17. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:09:52

        [laughs]

15. 1:09:54 – 1:20:36

    Class, Saltburn, and social navigation: accents, belonging, and the decline of deference

    1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:09:54

       I wanted to ask you, have you seen that new film, "Saltburn"?

    2. RSRory Sutherland1:09:58

       Uh, yes, I have. Uh, described b- by one critic as "Brideshead" regurgitated. Um, I... It was a kind of cross between "Brideshead Revisited" and, um, uh, and "Kind Hearts and Coronets" in a way. Um, it... I, I, I was interested by it. It was also interesting, by the way, in the extent to which anybody with a Liverpudlian accent could portray themselves as being the victim of an absolutely disastrous broken home without anybody actually raising any possible doubts around that, which was an evidence of kind of, you know, weird stereotyping. Um, it was very, very strange as a film.

    3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:10:40

       I wanted to ask you around the methodology that, um-

    4. RSRory Sutherland1:10:43

       Uh, but it was a strange, it was a peculiarly amoral film, wasn't it? Which was kind of a... You know, it was a dark comedy, I get that. I'm not being totally crass about it. You know, it was undoubtedly a very, very good dark comedy, and I enjoyed it as far as it went. But, um, I don't know, they should have showed the guy getting arrested. [laughs] You know.

    5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:11:06

       The question I wanted to ask you was some of the methodologies around Barry integrating with this elitist class. Like, why did he have to portray himself as such an extreme working-class kid to integrate into-

    6. RSRory Sutherland1:11:19

       Yeah

    7. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:11:19

       ... the elitist? Why couldn't he just be averagely middle class in Oxford, which would have been somewhat lower class and integrate in the same way?

    8. RSRory Sutherland1:11:27

       There probably is a kind of interesting thing in which there's always been a historical thing, which is that sometimes the working class and the upper class have more in common than with the middle class because both of them, in a sense, have nothing to lose. Um, uh, and the, you know, there's less signaling involved in your activities as well if you're confidently posh, I guess. Um, so there might have been a bit of that, that, you know, it would have seemed weir- less weirdly, less weird for him to adopt a, uh, a friend from a working-class background and therefore possibly, uh, you know, the person had a kind of natural urge to take people under his wing. But it wa- that, there were various aspects to that which were kind of interesting because of course "Brideshead Revisited" was an upper middle-class person in the case of Ryder being kind of, um, wowed by, um, uh, you know, an aristocratic household. But, um, uh, it, it, it was... There, there were aspects to it which were quite odd. I mean, it was set in 2006, if I'm right. Is that right? It wasn't set in the present day. Um, it was set in 2006. Some bits of the kind of ruthless snobbery struck me as pretty implausible, though not impossible. Um, you know, the practice, you know. Um, s- uh, but, um, it was great fun. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, you know, it was rather like one of those other films. There was a film made kind of, uh, about... What was that group at Oxford who used to trash places, tr- trash kind of pubs and things? There was a similar one of those. And, um- But no, it was, I mean, it, it, it, it, I mean, let's face it, it was kind of, you know, pretty good sort of visual candy in all kinds of ways and quite interesting. Um, but, um, uh, but, uh-

    9. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:13:15

       I, I saw myself during it, Rory, because I, I come from a council estate, kind of very rough and tough upbringing in the west coast of Scotland, and I've seen myself through nature of my employment and moving to the west end-

    10. RSRory Sutherland1:13:26

        Yeah

    11. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:13:26

        ... of Glasgow, known as quite, as the affluent end of Glasgow. I've seen myself integrate with more sophisticated crowds. So when I was watching that film, I thought, "Oh, I've faced some of these barriers around my accent, around how I'm perceived, my, my, my family background." Finally, a kid like me has representation [chuckles] in a film for it then to be skewed at the end. [laughs]

    12. RSRory Sutherland1:13:46

        Uh, there, there is an element, there is an element where you actually have an advantage. Um, my, my, my, my grandfather went to Cambridge about 1919, and I think he was Scottish-Welsh effectively, okay? And I think he was a hell of a lot better off being a middle-class Welsh person in a way than in, in terms of his ability to... 'Cause I mean, he, he remembers being at dinner and saying, so someone, you know, "What are you doing on the summer vacation?" And he said, "Well, I'll go back to Bryn Mawr," or wherever it was, "and I'll, you know, look after this or do that." And the other person said, "I'm taking my polo ponies over to Belgium," or something, right? Okay. So, you know, uh, so he, you know. But there, there are elements where, you know, actually being probably Scottish or Welsh or, uh, um, is better than being lower middle-class English, [lip smack] by the way. Uh, in terms of, you know, there are all those sort of funny little things. I remember someone complaining, someone who's Belgian complaining about the class system in Britain, and I said, "I totally agree with you, but it doesn't affect you because you can be brought up to, you know, Royal Ascot, and you're their Belgian friend," and everybody goes, "Yeah, that's fine. They're Belgian," whatever, okay? They have no clue about what your origins are in Belgium, nor do they necessarily want to know. Whereas if, you know, if you, if you commit various sort of English shibboleths as a lower middle-class English person, I don't know what they'd be nowadays, like curling your finger when you drink tea. Um, my wife claims it's a shibboleth that I use fabric conditioner, which I think is ridiculous. But anyway. But since I market fabric conditioner, I think it'd be dishonest of me not to use it. Um, but, um, uh, but, but y- but I mean, there are those elements where in a sense you can be outside the thing that you're not expected to know the rules, and the worst gaffe you can commit is being just, just close enough, but not there. So th- there are all those sort of strange things. Um, but it, it's a str- it is a strange world. I mean, I agree, um, uh, you know, you have that strange world where you ha- you know, the, the, the David Beckham documentary where, you know, Victoria claimed she was working class even [chuckles] though she went to school in a Rolls-Royce, which seemed to be stretching the definition a bit, to be absolutely candid, you know. Um, and, and you know, this whole thing is quite strange. It's much less... You've gotta be 58 to know this, but it's also much less, um, uh, prevalent. The, the, the control, the aristocratic control or, or delineation of taste is much less potent than it was. So if you look at the collapse in antique furniture, a large part of the value of antique furniture was pretending you were old money, okay? And nobody's really interested in doing that anymore. Well, I mean, they have, you know, people who are genuinely old money will have a lot of old furniture, I guess. But genuinely nobody quite wants to do that in the way they did in 1970 or 1980. You know, basically buying antiques to pretend they were heirlooms. You didn't, you know... Um, there is a ve- you know, post-Thatcher maybe, post, you know, post-Blair, who knows, okay? There is undoubtedly a slight difference there in the extent to which, uh, people care about origins all that much. Um, uh, and but it was, I mean, you could see, you know, in my parents' generation or my grandparents' generation, you could see, um, uh, you know, s- there were str- Jeremy Bulmer, one of the greatest advertising people, said that one of the big changes that happened during his lifetime, and he worked in advertising between 1948 and about 2010, so it was one hell of a lifetime. Um, he, he said that the decline in deference was a marked change. And actually, in a way, there's some strange things in that the Brits are always seen as very snobby, but in some respects they're less deferential than Americans are, even though Americans believe themselves to be kind of very egalitarian, 'cause Americans do that kind of he- hero worshiping thing of celebrities and chief executives and things, which we don't really have here to the same extent. We've got a bit of tall poppy syndrome. Um, but it was, it was interesting. I mean, it was, it, it wasn't set in the present, but it, it was, I, I highly enjoyed it. I'm glad I watched it. But like you, I was kinda going, "I'm not entirely sure I can make sense of this," but it was, it was quite funny.

    13. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:18:04

        In a similar way, I, uh, in, in 2020 had a conversation with Her Majesty The Queen. And, uh, uh, being lower, lower class in Scotland served me so well, or being from Scotland served me so well in that conversation because she has obviously Balmoral Castle, Dumfries House, and she could relate on some of the places that I grew up because she either-

    14. RSRory Sutherland1:18:27

        Yeah

    15. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:18:27

        ... flown in there to visit one of her estates. Uh, but also my dad was a Scots Guard. He's a, he, he was like a private in the army, but he served at Buckingham Palace, and it was so strange that this kind of lower class, working class background of mine had more in common than some of the other speakers that were there to see her on the day.

    16. RSRory Sutherland1:18:44

        Uh, there is, it's also worth noting, and there's a book by a guy whose name I can't remember, which is about American social class. Uh, and it's quite a nuanced book. It's all about America, but it's quite interesting to read all the same, including his observation that, um, if you have a working class couple, two couples in a car, sharing a car from a house to a restaurant. In a working class household, the two men go in the front, the two women go in the back In a middle-class household, the couple whose car it is go in the front, and the couple whose car it isn't go in the back. And in an upper-class American household, the man drives the car with the other man's wife in the front, and the, again, the mismatched couple go in the back, which is... I, I have no idea how accurate that is, not having lived in the States. But he also made the point, which I think is fair of the United States, there's also a working-class aristocracy. There's a what he called the blue-collar aristocracy, which I think exists in, you know, you see it in people who are in the military, you see it in people who do certain jobs, uh, you know, obviously cops, firemen to some extent, form a blue-collar aristocracy, which is quite interesting if you watch things like "The Wire," for example. Um, it's much more complicated. I think it's much more complicated. And, and you're absolutely right that if you, you, you had a dad who's in Buckingham Palace, you've got a shared knowledge of Scotland and the various parts of Scotland which most English people haven't got a clue about incidentally, you know. Um, and that's, um, that holds you in perfectly good stead and, um, uh, the people the Queen almost certainly found most interesting were fawning middle-class people.

    17. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:20:16

        Mm.

    18. RSRory Sutherland1:20:17

        Uh, the, the people, the people the Queen would've found most boring and tedious, although she'd never say so, would be the very people who are kind of reduced to a kind of fawning, uh, nonsense, uh, in her presence. Uh, 'cause apart from anything else, you can't have a sensible conversation with those people [chuckles] you know? Right, right. I mean, okay.

16. 1:20:36 – 1:28:43

    Serendipity over prediction, then wrap: MAD Masters and a nod to comedy gigs

    1. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:20:36

       Th- this is a severe left step. A- another question I was really curious to ask you about a s- a phenomenon that I wanted to s- know if you've watched is the slap competitions. Have you came across those?

    2. RSRory Sutherland1:20:47

       Hmm.

    3. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:20:47

       I think Dana White-

    4. RSRory Sutherland1:20:47

       A bit

    5. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:20:48

       ... UFC own the slap competitions. They have rivaled the NBA in terms of numbers, uh, in such a short period of time, Dana White professed. I, I just can't understand why there's such a group interest in such a primal sport.

    6. RSRory Sutherland1:21:05

       Ah. Who knows? Yeah, I mean, ah, I'm predicting... I suppose we should have predicted social media better than we did. Uh, you know, that if you have a medium that's all about you and your friends, it is effectively the best soap opera anybody can make, isn't it? Um, and equally predicting, you know, maybe we should have predicted TikTok, I don't know. Um, but there's so many things which... This is my great point about creativity, which is there are more good ideas you can post-rationalize than are good pre-a- good i- ideas you can pre-rationalize, and that you have to have progress requires a very large component of kind of evolutionary experimentation in order to work. Because the idea that you can progress entirely through intentional decisions isn't really true. No one, no one was looking for penicillin. No one was looking for Viagra, okay? That act- y- what we need to accept is we need to not only optimize efficiency, we need to optimize kind of serendipity, we need to optimize for opportunity.

    7. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:22:07

       I love that-

    8. RSRory Sutherland1:22:07

       How are you doing for an audience? And what, what do you mostly specialize in in KPMG, by the way?

    9. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:22:12

       I'm in people consulting, in fact, or HR consulting. Uh, I've just moved there recently.

    10. RSRory Sutherland1:22:16

        Very, very interesting, okay?

    11. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:22:18

        Yeah.

    12. RSRory Sutherland1:22:18

        This is really, really interesting because the problem with staff motivation, I think, is quite acute. I think that it... And I think that one of the things that's happened is that the kind of autonomy and, uh, barter that you could engage in with a team of people 10, 20 years ago has been stripped out and turned into kind of algorithms and processes, and it's been to some extent subsumed by HR and finance to a point where even quite senior people feel they don't really control their own destiny anymore, and a large part of the pleasure of working in an organization was exercising discretionary context-sensitive judgment, and everybody's trying to eliminate that.

    13. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:23:05

        And cult- company culture seems to be so flagrant and so beige and so, so-

    14. RSRory Sutherland1:23:10

        It is beige and it's, it, it's entirely self-interested really, in that can you imagine, this is what I said in my Spectator piece, does anybody really imagine that if they find a way of doing their work more efficiently, that they'll be rewarded for it? No, they're more likely to be fired for it, to be honest. Okay? Uh, if you find a way of doing your job twice as fast as you could before, will you actually be paid 30% more to do more of it? No. Someone will just position it as a cost saving and the finance people will take the credit.

    15. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:23:39

        Mm-hmm.

    16. RSRory Sutherland1:23:39

        So as a consequence, you're not... The, the, the people who are doing what the company exists to do do not really feel themselves actors in that particular drama anymore. You know? I mean, I got really annoyed 'cause they sent me a, you know, a travel policy and I, you know, I travel very economically. I go and find, you know, advanced first class train tickets for 43 quid, you know. And then they go, "No, you cannot go first class." You know, "It's an advanced ticket, it's cheaper." "No, no." Well, I said, "That was one of the few things I actually had control over, how do I get there, and now even that's been taken away," you know, because someone has to have a fucking policy. And if you're a box ticker, you love this world because it's exactly what you crave, okay? Absolute certainty, lack of ambiguity, no contextual decision-making required, okay? It's a fundamentally dehumanized environment in which to operate. Um, I don't know. Because the problem is, is that the sort of accounting finance efficiency, um, mindset, mental frame has taken over so irrevocably. You know, the chief executive's probably just the former finance director who got promoted, okay? I find b- you know, I, I, I think I can make the case and I go in quite often and say, "Look, there are cases where it's perfectly reasonable to pay someone in a call center 60,000 or 70,000 pounds a year. It's perfectly possible that a really good call center operative could be that valuable." What do they do? They try and get everybody in on minimum wage, because the call center person is positioned as a cost Okay. They're not a cost. They may be actually absolutely central to the whole reason the person uses you or the reason the customer stays or the reason the customer recommends you. Okay? And yet, no, what, what will the person running the call center do? They'll almost certainly just try and optimize it for make the people work. So it's a sort of tailorism. It's actually worse than tailorism. It's a less nuanced form. It's just basically sweat your assets. And it's, that's not a way to, that's not a way to, you know... There is a limit to how far you can cut costs before the, the organization is no longer really doing what it's supposed to do.

    17. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:25:56

        I, I love that idea of positioning call center agents as almost like a marketing tool is integral to the brand because it's a-

    18. RSRory Sutherland1:26:04

        Of course they are

    19. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:26:04

        ... it's at the fingertips of a customer experience.

    20. RSRory Sutherland1:26:07

        No, no. I mean, I had two experiences, one on Zoom where I had a very obscure technological problem. Very obscure, okay? Where somebody obviously very knowledgeable had come across it before and told me how to solve it in three minutes. Okay. I had another one with Ford actually, where my Ford car app, um, had become detached from the car and I needed to kind of reconnect it. Now, in both cases, had I been free to tip those people, I would've happily given them 15 quid because they saved me from what I thought was gonna be an afternoon of pain. And, and yet, you know, those people are probably just onto the next call. They're not really being properly rewarded, but they're absolutely decisive in terms of the value the organization creates.

    21. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:26:47

        And their value's probably measured by duration of call, uh, and metrics.

    22. RSRory Sutherland1:26:52

        Oh, yeah. And by the way, by the way, duration of call, that's a great measure, isn't it? Because sometimes you want a call to be really short because the problem's really easy, and sometimes you want the call to be really long because the problem's really complicated. Okay. But let's measure it all by duration of call, shall we? No, that's stupid. Okay. But it's easy to measure, so that's what gets measured. And as the great phrase goes, "What gets mismeasured gets mismanaged." And there you have it.

    23. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:27:15

        I, I promised quickly that I would give a shout-

    24. RSRory Sutherland1:27:17

        Okay

    25. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:27:18

        ... to MAD Masters.

    26. RSRory Sutherland1:27:19

        Of course. So I do a course which is, um, flexible now. You can stream it in a kind of box set binge, or you can watch it live one week at a time, interspersed with two, um, uh, every two weeks there's an hourly kind of surgery on effectively the thinking in Alchemy. It's effectively MAD Masters, the MAD Masters course if you go and look for it. It's affiliated with MAD//Fest, the great advertising and marketing festival. And the way I describe it very simply is, I'm not telling you how to do your job, but I'm telling you how to do 10% of your job remarkably. In other words, a lot of your job will always be, a lot of my job will always be, you know, effectively pushing the pebble down the road, doing this, optimizing that, tweaking that. But about 10% of the time you need the opportunity to, uh, actually go, "Are you sure we're doing the right thing? Is this a waste of time? What if we did this differently? What if we actually rethought this? Is this the problem we're trying to solve? Have we really defined the problem adequately to begin with?" Okay. It's only when you do that that you can really enjoy a breakthrough moment, and that course is designed to actually enable you to do exactly that.

    27. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:28:26

        I love it, Rory. I'll be in the next cohort as well, and I'll be at MAD//Fest.

    28. RSRory Sutherland1:28:29

        Fantastic. Oh, welcome. Absolute joy. And let me know when you're next doing a comedy gig as well. I'd love to come and see it.

    29. DJDavid McIntosh Jr1:28:36

        List- listed that. Thanks, Rory.

    30. RSRory Sutherland1:28:38

        All the best. Pleasure.

Episode duration: 1:28:44