#973 - Rory Sutherland - Waymo, Texas Culture, Airline Lounges, OpenAI & Uber Eats

Summary

Podcast Summary: Modern Wisdom Episode #973 - Rory Sutherland

Title: Rory Sutherland - Waymo, Texas Culture, Airline Lounges, OpenAI & Uber Eats
Host: Chris Williamson
Release Date: July 28, 2025

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1. Exploring Bucky's: A Texas Icon [00:00 - 02:27]

Rory Sutherland and his guest kick off the conversation by delving into the unique experience of Bucky's, a renowned gas station chain in Austin, Texas. Unlike typical gas stations, Bucky's boasts an impressive number of pumps—potentially 100 to 200—and offers an expansive retail space akin to a Costco, selling everything from life rafts to barbecues and local specialties like beef jerky and jalapeño honey.

Notable Quote:
Rory: "Bucky's is one of the only fuel stations I've ever been to that has so many pumps that even if you're not filling up for gas, you just pull up outside of one of the pumps." [02:48]

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2. Autonomous Vehicles and Human Interaction [02:27 - 05:30]

The discussion shifts to Waymo, the autonomous vehicle service, highlighting the challenges and unique behaviors exhibited by drivers around driverless cars. Rory shares his observations on how Waymo's lack of visible occupants removes typical social cues like tailgating or honking, leading to more courteous behavior from other drivers.

Notable Quote:
Rory: "What's interesting is that Waymo takes out fear of retribution and guilt of inconveniencing another person because the back windows are so blacked out." [04:15]

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3. The Social Impact of Driving [05:30 - 09:23]

Rory and his guest discuss the broader social implications of driving, particularly how frequent driving fosters social skills and "social calculus." They lament the trend among Gen Z of delayed driving, suggesting it may contribute to reduced empathy and increased antisocial behavior on the roads.

Notable Quote:
Guest: "We're breeding a generation of young urban people who can't drive and therefore that sort of domesticating influence is lost." [09:22]

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4. American vs. European Automotive Preferences [09:23 - 12:51]

A comparison between American and European cars is made, with Rory praising his 6.2-liter V8 Camaro for its performance and features. The conversation touches on cultural differences in car design and driving enjoyment, highlighting the emphasis on maneuverability and speed in American vehicles.

Notable Quote:
Rory: "I've gone totally fucking feral. I think rather than assimilating, it's beautiful, it's really fun." [10:57]

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5. Innovating Airport Experiences through Reverse Benchmarking [12:51 - 22:39]

The guest introduces the concept of "reverse benchmarking," inspired by Roger L. Martin's ideas, to drive innovation in airport experiences. By identifying overlooked aspects of travel, such as improving lounge services or streamlining boarding processes, airports can differentiate themselves beyond conventional amenities.

Notable Quote:
Guest: "Reverse benchmarking is finding something your competitors have overlooked, doing it exceptionally well, and turning it into a feature." [14:42]

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6. Enhancing Takeaway Food and Ordering Systems [22:39 - 45:36]

Rory and his guest delve into the evolution of food delivery apps, discussing how screen-based ordering changes consumer behavior. They explore the potential of AI to personalize and streamline the ordering process, making it more intuitive and reducing decision fatigue for users in unfamiliar cities.

Notable Quote:
Guest: "If you change the context or the interface that people use to make a decision, everybody's behavior changes." [41:37]

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7. The Role of AI in Shaping Consumer Choices [45:36 - 70:07]

The conversation explores how AI can revolutionize consumer interactions by acting as personal agents that curate choices based on individual preferences. This shift from traditional advertising to AI-driven personalization could fundamentally alter market dynamics and consumer satisfaction.

Notable Quote:
Guest: "Consumers appoint agents to find them things to buy, rather than companies appointing advertising agencies to find them customers." [44:20]

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8. Property Market Inequality and Land Value Tax [70:07 - 90:44]

A critical analysis of the property market highlights the vast wealth inequality exacerbated by land ownership. The guest advocates for a land value tax, inspired by Henry George's principles, to curb speculative landholding and redistribute wealth more equitably. Texas is cited as an example, where high property taxes discourage land hoarding.

Notable Quote:
Guest: "Land is effectively an artificial bottleneck. It's a rent-seeking device." [81:10]

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9. Behavioral Economics in Product Design and Marketing [90:44 - 112:55]

Rory and his guest discuss the importance of aligning product design with human perception and behavior. They touch on concepts like the IKEA effect, where consumer effort increases perceived value, and the impact of marketing strategies on consumer trust and satisfaction. The conversation also includes humorous anecdotes about advertising missteps and innovative design hacks.

Notable Quotes:

• Guest: "The effort you put into the acquisition of something contributes to the perceived value of the thing." [51:28]
• Rory: "You made it beautiful." [18:08]

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Conclusion

In this engaging episode, Rory Sutherland and his guest traverse a wide array of topics, from the intricacies of Texas culture and autonomous vehicles to the nuances of airport experiences and the complexities of the property market. Through insightful discussions and illustrative anecdotes, they shed light on the intersection of behavioral economics, marketing, and everyday life, offering listeners a wealth of knowledge and perspectives to navigate the challenges of a rapidly evolving world.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• [01:12] Rory: "Don't mess with Texas" belongs to TX DOT.
• [04:15] Rory: "What's interesting is that Waymo takes out fear of retribution and guilt of inconveniencing another person because the back windows are so blacked out."
• [09:22] Guest: "We're breeding a generation of young urban people who can't drive and therefore that sort of domesticating influence is lost."
• [10:57] Rory: "I've gone totally fucking feral. I think rather than assimilating, it's beautiful, it's really fun."
• [14:42] Guest: "Reverse benchmarking is finding something your competitors have overlooked, doing it exceptionally well, and turning it into a feature."
• [41:37] Guest: "If you change the context or the interface that people use to make a decision, everybody's behavior changes."
• [44:20] Guest: "Consumers appoint agents to find them things to buy, rather than companies appointing advertising agencies to find them customers."
• [51:28] Guest: "The effort you put into the acquisition of something contributes to the perceived value of the thing."
• [18:08] Rory: "You made it beautiful."
• [81:10] Guest: "Land is effectively an artificial bottleneck. It's a rent-seeking device."

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Recommendations:

• For Further Reading: Explore Henry George's principles on land value tax and Gary Stevenson's Ascendancy for insights into wealth distribution.
• Relevant Podcasts: Check out episodes featuring Roger L. Martin and Robert Cialdini for deeper dives into marketing strategies and behavioral economics.

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the multifaceted discussions from Episode #973 of Modern Wisdom, offering valuable takeaways on innovation, consumer behavior, and socio-economic issues.

Transcript

[Rory Sutherland]

Welcome back. Good to see you.

[Unknown Guest]

It's a pleasure. What a joy. And here in Austin too.

[Rory Sutherland]

Here in Austin. Bucky's. You went to BUC EE's? Tell me.

[Unknown Guest]

Absolutely. I actually brought you a present.

[Rory Sutherland]

Oh.

[Unknown Guest]

I thought, you know, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't bring you local specialties. And of course, some beef jerky as well. Jalapeno honey.

[Rory Sutherland]

Thank you.

[Unknown Guest]

I thought it'd be good. But the Buc ee's thing is particularly good. Cause they have a brand partnership with the TX dot, the Texas Department of Transportation.

[Rory Sutherland]

Okay.

[Unknown Guest]

So they license the Don't Mess with Texas advertising slogan. Okay. Now this may surprise you. Don't mess with Texas. The rights to it actually belong to the Texas Department of Transportation because it was an anti littering campaign.

[Rory Sutherland]

You're kidding.

[Unknown Guest]

No, no, no.

[Rory Sutherland]

How old is this?

[Unknown Guest]

It dates back, crikey, to the, I think the 70s. Or at least the very early 80s. I think the 1970s. And it's a kind of famous advertising case study because how do you tell Texans not to litter? Okay. Now in other parts of the world, you know, simple kind of blandishments or appeals to their sort of, you know, their, you know, higher order concerns might work. But this is a uniquely text and.

[Rory Sutherland]

Message low key aggression, unspoken. There's a spread kinetic interaction. Yeah, exactly.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah, yeah. And actually, funnily enough, when they presented it, one of the people said, I find this a bit abrupt. Could we not make it? Please don't mess. But of course that doesn't work, does it? No, unfortunately, rather beautifully, BUC EE's, which, for the benefit of non Texan audiences is. It's one of those things which I think is proof that one of the great things Americans do is it proves that you can take something that at a small scale is atrocious. And if you make it big enough, it's a work of art. And Bucky's has done this with the gas station by making it so enormous, you take it from something, you know, comparatively. Yeah. Ghastly Marching bands would be another case. You know, if you go and watch the Texas A and M marching bands. Marching bands are appalling at a small scale, I think they're.

[Rory Sutherland]

Until there's a hundred people or more.

[Unknown Guest]

But if they're 500 people doing it, it suddenly becomes magnificent.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah, Well, I think the. The interesting thing about BUC EE's for the people that haven't been. Again, it's 100 pumps, maybe 200 pumps, something like that. And then the biggest Costco sized building behind that sells everything from life rafts to barbecues to jerky.

[Unknown Guest]

Deer corn particularly. I think they seem to go very big on deer corn, which is not something else, I think. I don't know whether it's a hunting thing. I mean, whether it's just that you want to attract deer. I suspect that's unlikely. I suspect it's a hunting thing.

[Rory Sutherland]

Right. Like a trap or whatever.

[Unknown Guest]

It's a kind of way in which you sort of create a trail of deer corn and then they wander into your sights or something.

[Rory Sutherland]

Bucky's one of the. In fact, the only fuel station, gas station that I've ever been to that has so many pumps that even if you're not filling up for gas, you just pull up outside of one of the pumps.

[Unknown Guest]

I had an ethical dilemma as a Brit because my wife said, look, all these other cars next to the pumps are actually empty. The people have just left their car by the pump and they've gone into.

[Rory Sutherland]

Shop because it's under the shade now.

[Unknown Guest]

You wouldn't do that in Ms. Simply Foods back home.

[Rory Sutherland]

Then you pull into one of the.

[Unknown Guest]

Parking spaces and get out of the way. But you're right, there's so many pumps that the pump doubles as a parking space.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. It's also the only way because that's covered over. Right. You're in the shade. And so it just means that you don't get to be too hot.

[Unknown Guest]

They also have about 50 electric car chargers as well. They've gone big.

[Rory Sutherland]

Speaking of which, have you been in a Waymo yet?

[Unknown Guest]

No, because I tried to register. Now it's an Uber partnership in Austin.

[Rory Sutherland]

It is if you get an Uber.

[Unknown Guest]

But when I asked for it, they said you're on a trial or something, that I'm on some sort of beta test.

[Rory Sutherland]

Maybe it's because you're British.

[Unknown Guest]

It could be. It could be some weird thing. But interestingly, I'm still trying to get away. I had a friend who took one in San Francisco, actually took about 10, because he became addicted to taking Waymos. And his judgment, I don't know whether you agree with this, he's pretty comfortable in a driverless car just being driven around town. He said out on the open highway, if we hit 60, I'd get a bit nervous. But he said at kind of town speeds, he was. He was pretty content.

[Rory Sutherland]

I think the fastest that I'll have been will have been 35 miles an hour. Yeah, it's just a little. But I do have a theory. I'm going to give you this One. So I noticed when I was ordering Waymo's on the app, it would say it's 10 minutes away or five minutes away. And it would almost always be between 50% and 100% more time than it said it was to get to me. And it wasn't getting lost, it wasn't. It wasn't accidentally going somewhere. And then when I got in, my journey was also taking way longer. What I've realized is there's only two reasons I think that humans behave on the road in regards to other drivers. One is fear of retribution, and the other is the guilt of inconveniencing another person. But with a Waymo, both of those are taken out of the picture because the back windows are so blacked out that you can barely see if there's anyone in. There's never anybody in the front seat. And what retributive. They're not gonna tailgate you and beep their horn. You know, in America, road rage is a mortal endeavor given that everybody's armed. So basically every time that a Waymo is at a junction, it gets. No one lets it out. No one behaves courteously to it. Everybody knows if they pull in front, pedestrians. I do all the time when I'm walking. If I see a Waymo in front, I'm like, it's a little close. It's gonna slow down.

[Unknown Guest]

I mean, there's an economist, Douglas McWilliams in the UK, and he and I occasionally talk about this. Cause we're both car enthusiasts about the extent to which motoring actually teaches social skills, social calculus. So one of the little bits of social calculus a good driver would probably perform is that your readiness to let someone in from a side junction would be dependent on how fast you are going already if you're stuck in traffic. Okay, the calculus is, well, no skin off my nose. If I let this person In, I lose 5ft of road or whatever by being generous. Consequently, we engage in those small acts of kind of altruism as motorists. We're also hugely sensitive to when you perform a favor, whether the person thanks you. So one of the great inventions which I think originated in Japan, is the idea of flashing your hazard lights to say thank you if someone lets you in.

[Rory Sutherland]

I've never had that in America.

[Unknown Guest]

I've seen it once or twice here. It's less common, but it's spreading. It's one of those strange things. Interesting. It's a kind of truck drivers kind of propagated it in the uk, But I mean, I just remember Talking to Robert Trivers, who's kind of like, you know, the kind of Diane of evolutionary science.

[Rory Sutherland]

Trivers is a fucking legend. Oh my God.

[Unknown Guest]

He was talking about in Jamaica where, you know, your entire emotional reaction if you perform an act of generosity is nothing to do with the cost of the act of generosity, it's whether it's acknowledged.

[Rory Sutherland]

Right.

[Unknown Guest]

So if you actually let someone through in East Kent, in London nobody does it. But in East Kent, I noticed that if you pull it in to allow someone to come through a, you know, a narrow, it's usually alongside a row of parked cars and you don't at least give them a little wave, it's.

[Rory Sutherland]

That's bad form.

[Unknown Guest]

Bad form. It's really, really not done. And, but also we learn this kind of calculus of okay, how much does it benefit them versus how much does it cost me? And there's a kind of non zero.

[Rory Sutherland]

Sum domesticating effect of being on the road.

[Unknown Guest]

So I, I think that's probably true.

[Rory Sutherland]

I wonder if that's contributing to some of the extended adolescence, delayed development thing we're seeing among Gen Z.

[Unknown Guest]

They don't drive.

[Rory Sutherland]

The fewer and fewer people, if you're.

[Unknown Guest]

Not careful, can be quite psychopathic.

[Rory Sutherland]

There's that guy in London, right, that catches people that do that illegal U turn.

[Unknown Guest]

What's his name?

[Rory Sutherland]

Isn't he Australian?

[Unknown Guest]

He's actually, I think he's Zimbabwean. White Zimbabwean, originally.

[Rory Sutherland]

Oh God, that's a terrifying combination.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Rory Sutherland]

I don't want to get on the wrong side of the white Zimbabwe. Interesting. On the, the road thing, cycling Mikey, that's he's called.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Rory Sutherland]

Uh, in the US so if you, in the uk, if you are in front of the car that is in the lane that you're trying to get into and the car that's in the lane you're trying to get into isn't moving quicker than you. You're either moving at the same pace or around about the same pace. It is almost, maybe 90% of the time the car that's in the lane you're trying to get into should pull back, give you a little flash and let you to go in. Right. If you're more than about half a car length in front of them, if they can see your indicator, you do that. You. In the US people treat their lanes like it's their territory. They're so fucking Texans.

[Unknown Guest]

Interestingly, despite their reputation for individualism, Texan drivers seem to be quite generous. I mean, apparently Massachusetts is the worst place. But you're right about the whole thing of Lane possessiveness, that it's more extreme here than it is over in the uk. But your point, by the way, is quite worrying. Cause it occurs to me that we're breeding a generation of young urban people who can't drive. And therefore that sort of domesticating influence is lost. If you just sit around in public transport, you lose that social calculus. And it occurred to me that when I say they can't drive, they may have passed their test and they may have a driving license, but there's a.

[Rory Sutherland]

Problem because it's very different to being.

[Unknown Guest]

Able to drive well, if you live in London. Two problems, okay? One, you don't drive very often. All right? Secondly, driving in London's horrible anyway, it's not really enjoyable. But the third problem is suddenly occurred to me, driving's only really enjoyable when you do it frequently. So you'll know this experience, okay? You pick up a hire car, you're in an unfamiliar country, the hire car's unfamiliar, you're not quite sure where. The indicator thing is the country may have sort of weird norms like four way stops that you're unfamiliar with for the first 24 hours of driving. You don't enjoy it. You know, you're fumbling around. It's system. What is it? It's system two, not system one, to use a carnival phrase. It's only with frequency that driving becomes system one. So now I've been in Texas for five days. I'll pretty much pick up the car outside the hotel and I'll drift off pretty contentedly. The first, you know, the first five hours of driving were a little bit fraught. And it suddenly occurred to me that a lot of people, if you live in a city and you don't drive frequently and you only rent cars, you don't know what it is to enjoy driving.

[Rory Sutherland]

You're always in that alien sort of.

[Unknown Guest]

Alien kind of initial zone where it's, you know, it's kind of. You haven't got over the hump.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah, no, I love driving. I've heard you say that.

[Unknown Guest]

What have you. Given that you lived in Texas for a few years, what have you gone for?

[Rory Sutherland]

I've got to ask about this 6.2 liter V8 Camaro.

[Unknown Guest]

Fantastic. Okay, that's brilliant. You've assimilated.

[Rory Sutherland]

Correct. I've gone totally fucking feral. I think rather than assimilating, it's beautiful, it's really fun. Dude, it was 40 grand. 45 grand USD.

[Unknown Guest]

Oh, don't I know. It's insane.

[Rory Sutherland]

Don't you know for a 22 model, it was beautiful. It was everything that I wanted. It's got wireless Apple Carplay, it's got cooled seats that you can press the remote start and it'll turn the engine on and begin air conditioning the car before you get in, including cooling the seats down, which in 105 degree weather is actually literally. It's life changing. Yeah, exactly. I was like, and this is 35 grand GBP 30 less than that maybe.

[Unknown Guest]

I mean they pay for cars in dollars less than we pay for them in sterling generally.

[Rory Sutherland]

It's crazy. So, yeah, I love it, I love it.

[Unknown Guest]

I hope. Actually this is one area where Trump's tariff negotiations. I'd quite like to volunteer for the Trump team negotiating with the UK trade people on the grounds. Compulsory and zero duty on Mack trucks.

[Rory Sutherland]

Well, exchange. You can have our Land Rovers, you can have our Rolls Royces, you can have our Mini Coopers and we'll.

[Unknown Guest]

You want a Corvette.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. Well, you would upgrade your Mustang Mach E. Yeah.

[Unknown Guest]

I don't know.

[Rory Sutherland]

Have you still got it?

[Unknown Guest]

I've still got it. Love it. Actually, and I'm debating. There's an interesting question about whether the new Cadillac Lyriq will be introduced, which is electric and is arguably perhaps. What would I say? Well, you know, it's an extraordinary. I like luxury cars. Okay. So this is, this is slightly embarrassing. I used to have a German boss and I used to really, really rile him by saying things like, Lincoln Town Car, best car in the world. Okay. Because when you got off an eight hour flight in New York, that's what you want to sit in, isn't it? To be driven into New York. And I think Europeans are absolutely unhealthily obsessed with cornering on the grounds that you don't do it right. Acceleration is really valuable. You don't throw your passengers round corners at extreme speed. I don't, you know, I don't drive as if I'm on the fucking Nuremberg ring. Okay. I Dr. In a way that maximizes sort of. I like a little bit of speed and maneuverability, but I don't want all.

[Rory Sutherland]

This yacht mostly in a straight line.

[Unknown Guest]

About hurling things around hairpins. So a really good American car. This is not a fashionable opinion, I might add, in Britain, but my love of American cars is unabated.

[Rory Sutherland]

Good. How would you improve airport experiences? I've spent a lot of time in airports recently, so, I mean, one of.

[Unknown Guest]

The interesting ones is they're too big. I mean, you know, the, the shopping centre component, which was novel when it first started, has now become obligatory and you Basically have to walk through the Houston Galleria before you can catch your plane. And London City Airport, you've probably used that, have you?

[Rory Sutherland]

No, I've never been.

[Unknown Guest]

Okay, It's. This is what's so funny. Okay, so there's an idea I'm playing with in marketing generally and in innovation, which I call reverse benchmarking. Okay? So the idea is, what most companies do is they benchmark themselves against their competition. Now, the great writer on this is a guy called Roger L. Martin, who's my own personal. He's Canadian, my own personal business guru, extensive writer. He was dean of the Rotman School in Toronto. And he wrote a piece called Benchmarking is for Losers. Okay? That all you do is you diminish your margins by making yourself in direct competition with your other competitors. So you don't benefit your profits or your shareholders. And also you don't benefit your customers. Okay? And the reason you don't benefit your customers is because they're then deprived of choice and differentiation. And you don't benefit the overall category because the category loses value because it's more homogeneous. Okay? And my argument is, and I got this inspiration from that great book you've probably had him on. Will Gadara, have you ever had him on?

[Rory Sutherland]

No.

[Unknown Guest]

Okay. Unreasonable Hospitality. Fantastic book about a guy who ran 11 Madison Park. He's a major sort of food innovator in all kinds of ways. I think he's married to the woman who invented cereal milk, which I think is one of the most brilliant inventions, which is, you know, the milk you get at the bottom of Cocoa Pops would be the British, which is tastier than anything else you've ever drunk. And she had the inspired idea of just flavoring milk with milk with breakfast cereal and selling it as a drink, which I have to say, I think is just genius. Okay? Now, his brilliant thing was he's number 50. I've told this story a lot, so apologies to people who had this before. He's number 50 restaurant in the world in the San Pellegrino Restaurant awards. It's a three star Michelin restaurant in New York. That's 2011. He wants to get to number one pretty, you know, remote ambition. It's not going to be easy. But one of the things he did was what I call reverse benchmarking. He took his team to the number one restaurant in the world and they started doing what we all do, which is how are we doing compared to them? They do this really well, let's copy it, et cetera. And at the End of the whole experience, Gidara just goes to see him. I'm not interested in any of that stuff. They're already doing that. Well, if we merely copy them, no one will notice. What I want to know, given that you've just been to the best restaurant in the world, according to San Pellegrino, is what was a bit disappointing because we're going to double down on that. All right? And the approach was they finally came up with two things that were a bit disappointing, which was one, the coffee was nothing special. I mean, I found American coffee quality unbelievably high variance. And they just said it was fine. The coffee wasn't disgusting, it was just. There was nothing particularly interesting about it. And of course, because he'd taken a few people to the kitchen along, a few of them wanted to drink beer. And the beer drinkers were treated a bit like second class citizens compared to the wine drinkers who are given all manner of bullshit with a, you know, sommelier and a letter conversation about the terroir, you know, and so he goes back to his own restaurant and he appoints one of his guys who's a coffee obsessive, the coffee sommelier. And another guy, I think from the kitchens who is obsessed with American craft beers or all craft beers, he makes him the beer Somalia. Now imagine you're in this restaurant. Now, most of the people in the restaurant aren't going to ask for beer, but 10 or 20% of them will, okay? And they're expecting, yeah, we got Sam Adams on draft, or we've got this in bottles. And instead they get a beer menu from the beer sommelier with suggested beer pairings. You know, the Citrus IPA goes really, really well with the COD or whatever it might be. Now those people, you've blown their minds, okay? It's not a question of, hey, that was a bit better than I expected. So this reverse benchmarking is find out something that your competitors have completely overlooked. Do it really, really well, and I would argue as a marketer, and then actually turn it into a feature, you know, spotlight it, and you could, you could almost take this and make it into a. I'm not going to say it's everything, but it's a generalized theory of innovation, which is, you know, what Steve Jobs did was take a field where everybody was focused on the tech and the capability of the machine to the complete exclusion of any aesthetic or usability consideration.

[Rory Sutherland]

You made it beautiful.

[Unknown Guest]

And what he does is go, okay. Now what I'm not saying is you can be shit at the technology, so long as you make it lovely. No, you merely have to be kind of, you know, what you might call top decile in what you do somewhere else. But then you go off and you find the area which everybody else has ignored. I look at things like, I'm a big fan of the Moxie hotel chain. I often talk about that. And what that is is double down on the ground floor. You know, make the ground.

[Rory Sutherland]

We work on the ground floor. Don't feel weird when you've checked out.

[Unknown Guest]

That's one of the marvelous benefits you discover through experience. You know that actually after I've checked out of a Moxie I, every other hotel makes me feel homeless. But the Moxie you, you know, okay, take your shopping trolley and your plastic bags and go and push them through the streets until your flight leaves. Whereas in the Moxie, you just hang out for another five hours and get on with some shit and order their coffee and you don't feel remotely unwelcome.

[Rory Sutherland]

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[Unknown Guest]

Right, that's a really interesting question. What interests me about London City Airport is the fact that there's a natural benchmarking tendency, which is that when I was a kid, the rich kids had been to, you know, they might have been to. Actually wouldn't have been Dubai back then, would have been Sharjah or something. But they'd been to Schiphol or they'd been to Changi and Singapore. They go, it's amazing. Their shops, you know, it's like. Cause back then we hadn't seen a shopping center before and it was really novel. I bought Walkman, you know, it was fantastic, right? And then suddenly all airports became like that, okay. And suddenly people went, if you've been to London City, it's incredible. You go in and six minutes later you're at the gate, there hardly any shops. It's brilliant. Okay. So there is a really, really interesting idea. I mean, there is scope, lots of scope for really interesting innovation. I think it's a lot easier. Also, it's worth noting, it's a lot easier if you want to premiumize an experience. It's a lot easier to innovate on the ground than it is in the air. Now, there is a fantastic thing which a friend of mine called Jeremy Stone tells me about, which is at Washington Dulles where they still have these vehicles which I think were designed by Eero Saarinen, the Finnish kind of inventor, where your lounge drives to the plane. Okay? So you get in something that looks like a room where you're all sitting down and you know, you've got a few little tables and you're comfortable and then the actual lounge is on wheels and drives to the plane.

[Rory Sutherland]

Wow.

[Unknown Guest]

Now it's a really, really interesting innovation because there's a Soviet era innovation thing called triz, which is. It's the Russian foray technique for creative innovation or something. And they have a whole list of kind of principles, one of which is make the thing that stays still move and make the thing that moves stay still. It's just something in kind of mechanical and engineering innovation, which is a different way of looking at things. And so what's interesting about that, of course, is the planes don't need then to go to a gate. So the constraint, first of all, you probably save a lot of fuel because the plane doesn't have to spend so much time taxiing. The plane can be parked pretty much next to the Runway.

[Rory Sutherland]

You can have a much smaller number of gates or whatever it is.

[Unknown Guest]

And it means that every time you expand your airport, you just buy a few more vehicles. You don't have to go into a $1 billion.

[Rory Sutherland]

Well, you treat your airport more like a car park than a building, Right? How can we slot these different maneuvering Lego pieces together so that they can fuck off in a straight line toward where the plane is?

[Unknown Guest]

Here's a weird one. So one thing would be nothing to do with airports themselves, but it occurred to me the other day I was thinking, I was trying to do a bit of reverse benchmarking. No, hotels offer you a monitor, okay.

[Rory Sutherland]

An external screen.

[Unknown Guest]

You might have a 4K, you might have a 4K, you know, 85 inch TV, but in order to plug your laptop into it, you'd have to rip the thing off the wall. Okay? It's weird to me that no hotels offer a dual screen experience. And it's weird to me that car hire companies, if you wanted to employ all of America's young people in the summer, see if you agree with me, if you could pay a car hire company, very simple thing, you pay a hundred bucks, okay? And it's big money. Okay? We will meet you at the arrivals gate and with your keys and we will walk you to your car.

[Rory Sutherland]

Oh, yeah, that's good. Like a concierge because.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah, because that's the word. A car hire is terrifying. If you, if you're familiar with the airport, it's fine. Okay.

[Rory Sutherland]

But if you're going, where's the Avis? Oh, no, that's.

[Unknown Guest]

We've moved off site, so there's a shuttle bus.

[Rory Sutherland]

There's a huge queue that I need to get through. Yeah, I haven't pre registered my driver's id. All of this stuff hasn't been submitted. Here's a QR code, here's a single piece of ID that says, I'm the person with the QR code. Here's a one time password that's texted to the phone. That two factor authenticates the fact I'm here. Hello, sir. Have you ever been through Dubai airport or the Middle east and been met by one of those concierge people?

[Unknown Guest]

I think it's. No, I haven't got that right. That's wrong. There's a word for it which is an Arabic word for hospitality or welcome.

[Rory Sutherland]

So you get off, you walk off the plane.

[Unknown Guest]

There might be a book by someone in the 12th century, so don't ignore that bit.

[Rory Sutherland]

Okay?

[Unknown Guest]

You walk off the plane and someone meets you.

[Rory Sutherland]

Well, it's the same as being picked up by a driver at the arrival's gate exit. But it happens as you get off the plane at the gate and then they say, oh, Mr. Williamson, here, let me take your Bags. Let me take you through a special bit of immigration. Here's a. A rivals lounge that you can get into. Please give me all of your documents. I'll go and speak to the people for you. This is. And it's air conditioned and lovely and there's water and a cool towel that smells of cucumber. And they look after your immigration experience. I've only ever done this once and it wasn't me that was paying.

[Unknown Guest]

It would be nice as well if, I mean. Cause actually the airport experience, if you do it, if you go through it frequently does get weirdly stressful and annoying. Precisely. In a weird way. Because it's repetitive and there's that paranoia that you're only one lost bit of paper away from complete. We were debating this. Why is it that airports are so stressful now there are a load of things. Why is it that the boarding pass is completely unlike the dimensions of your passport? Shouldn't it have kind of 3m sticky post it note glue on the back?

[Rory Sutherland]

Well, imagine if every passport around the world just had a small number of magnets on each corner and you could have a tiny bit of printed on the printed paper, a tiny bit of magnetite. It, it snaps onto the back the same way that your iPhone has the mag safe thing on the back. And all that you need to do is hand the person, hey, here's passport and boarding pass. Because that's the thing, you know, you don't ever know when you're going through TSA at the front. Sometimes they seem to want your passport, sometimes they seem to want your boarding pass. And I can never fucking tell. Before I get there, there's by the.

[Unknown Guest]

Way, a very interesting hack there. I mean, the various hacks, one of which is. And I can do a bit of product placement here for the Hotel Emma in Southern Day, which is absolutely fantastic, by the way, is I do actually carry an open bag. Cause the trouble with having everything zipped up, as I said in the Spectator, is that every time you want to retrieve something, it's like making love to a goth, you know, there's just too many zips. Okay, right. You know, you know, you know what I mean? It's kind of, you know, this teaser. Oh, God, I left that thing. Oh, which of these 17 compartments is it in? And I think a lot of baggage design has gone in the wrong direction, which is multiple sealed compartments. But you actually need one thing where you just go, I'll chuck it in there.

[Rory Sutherland]

I have a friend who uses a workman's bag like A carry that you would have drills in you unstopped. No, no, no, no. Imagine that. But cut the top half off and make the handles longer. So it's basically a tray.

[Unknown Guest]

Clever.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. And it would have, you know, this is where the hammer goes, this is where the drill goes. And you can see everything from above. And he just picks his bits out and puts them back in.

[Unknown Guest]

So London City Airport, which I recommend you because I think you can fly to Newcastle from there. I'm not quite sure. It has some pretty good strengths in that they have the new scanners, so you don't need to take your laptop out of the bag now. It's amazing how irritating that is. It shouldn't be okay, but you know the kind of rigmarole you've got to go through. Deciding what goes into your checked luggage, what goes into your hand luggage is really, really tedious. So there are technologies which are starting to improve things, undoubtedly. Because, I mean, it is kind of weird why that's so unpleasant, but I suppose what it is is there's something about going back to school, about an airport, which is you're at the mercy.

[Rory Sutherland]

Of various being dictated to. You gotta wait in queues, you can't do the thing. You want another element, slightly weird one.

[Unknown Guest]

I would think, which is, oh, you're great privileges in. You're in group one, which means you get to wait in an unair conditioned air Bridge for 11 minutes, standing there like a Pratt before we'll let you onto the plane. Whereas I imagine the people in the later groups can just breeze straight on.

[Rory Sutherland]

I don't know what's going on sometimes. So I think it's an interesting one, at least in America. Something I've noticed. I live 12 minutes, maybe 15 minutes from Austin Airport. The reason that it gets stressful to me is that there's an inverse curve of tolerance that you have because you start to take the piss more and more. You assume that with experience you're able to navigate the airport more quickly, but it's mostly out of your control. Yes. Maybe you've got all of your stuff in the right places, you've packed the night before, you've already pre ordered the Uber, you know when it's gonna come. You know that if you order Uber Black XL that it actually arrives a little bit quicker, or they can take a different road because of the HPV people or whatever the fuck. But then when you get there, if TSA is slammed or if you, you know, you forgot that it's the beginning of spring break or something, else that's going on, you're still going to be screwed. So for me, the problem is, as you get more experienced at it, you try to take the piss more, but your experience isn't able to impact how quickly you can really go through the airport experience.

[Unknown Guest]

So you know this, you know this weird thing that, you know, the biggest car company in the world doesn't own any cars. That's Uber. The biggest lodgings company in the world doesn't own any property. That's Airbnb. And I always wondered whether you piggyback on Ryanair, which for American listeners is a bit like Spirit Air, okay? In the US It's a very ultra low cost carrier, okay? And this is how you do it. You basically produce. You'd have a luxury airline, which was totally banal in the air, but then that's only an hour and a half anyway in Europe, okay? So you'd buy a country house near Stansted airport and it would cost you £600 return to go to, let's say, Madrid, okay? And you'd turn up at the country house, park your car, there'd be a party going on, like something out of Eyes Wide Shut or, you know, the beach party in the Wolf of Wall Street. You know, there'd be fine wines and Belgian chocolates and then you'd be driven to your Ryanair plane, okay, cost of flight, £17 95. Okay. And then you'd be kind of met at the other end. So in other words, in other words, you take a totally banal experience in the air, but you absolutely make the.

[Rory Sutherland]

Ground experience in parentheses of something that's won.

[Unknown Guest]

So there's, I mean, there's emphatically scope for creating a kind of parallel network of air routes which are small airports, small airport, simply because, you know, Austin probably is a, is a lot easier than say Houston or Dallas, although Dallas, Dallas gets very high scores from users.

[Rory Sutherland]

Austin's great.

[Unknown Guest]

It actually Dallas DFW employed its own behavioral scientists, someone called Courtney Moore. I don't know if she's still there, but she had some very, very interesting ideas. So how do you stop people feeling compelled to queue before the gate has opened? And one of her ideas was you made the gate ambiguous until you were.

[Rory Sutherland]

Ready to board, so you don't know where you're supposed to go.

[Unknown Guest]

So you basically say, you know, your flight to London from DFW is boarding from gate 47 or 48. So you go, well, there's no point in me standing in a queue cause I might choose the wrong gate. And I'll look like a prat. So I'll go and sit in the coffee shop instead.

[Rory Sutherland]

That's clever.

[Unknown Guest]

And then only when the gate opens does it become obvious which gate is.

[Rory Sutherland]

Actually your G. It's interesting with gates because you can be more and less lucky based on where the gate's located and what the close retail spots are around it. If you're in between the DKNY and the Louis Vuitton shop, you think, what the fuck? I wanted to be next to the Starbucks. Heathrow Terminal 5. Everybody thinks Pret a Manger. Good. If you're going through Heathrow Terminal 5, you need to go to Pret a Manger. It's a British staple. Even though I don't think it's British. It's not meant to be.

[Unknown Guest]

It is. I think it's.

[Rory Sutherland]

It's built in Britain. But Pret a Monger is hardly a fucking.

[Unknown Guest]

You might be right. It might be owned by McDonald's actually.

[Rory Sutherland]

I think it is. But if you. If you're looking at the main Pret. If you're looking at the big windows at the far side, you've come in from the back. If you take a left all the way down toward the lower numbers away from the business class lounge behind you really hacked this. Keep all, keep going all the way, all the way, all the way down to the end, take a left. Keep going, keep going, keep going. There is a much smaller pretty that's there that still has everything, but it's down and on the side. And there's never any queue. You've got a little walk in, you go past the WH Smiths, have a little look at any of the books. But it is a.

[Unknown Guest]

There used to be a brilliant EasyJet hack which was that there was a pillar at the end of the check in desk. I don't think it works anymore at Gatwick. And the pillar led people to believe that there was only one gate there, but there were actually two. But the queue was the same length. Okay, so it was actually because nobody could see the extra little check in desk. Effectively the queue moved twice as fast. I think they've changed it now. So everybody queues in one line. But they used to be a rather brilliant. I mean there are little hacks you can find. So an interesting. Okay, here's an interesting theory for airports, okay, which is that generally people who fly infrequently aren't that bothered by streamlining the whole process. Whereas George Clooney and Up in the Air, if you're a totally Frequent flyer. You get almost unhealthily obsessed with streamlining the process. And one clever thing you can do as an airport, it probably wouldn't work at the scale of something like Heathrow is you could build in secret shortcuts which were known to your. The Tube has them. I mean, the London Underground, so there are places where it signposts. The exit is over there. But the Conya centi know that if you turn right down a, you know, down a funny little tunnel, you cut 150 yards off your wall.

[Rory Sutherland]

But it wouldn't do to advertise it because it could handle the traffic.

[Unknown Guest]

Advertise it. You simply allow them to be Easter eggs.

[Rory Sutherland]

Okay, so let me give you. Let me give you an Easter egg, which is going to ruin this for everybody that's listening. Amsterdam, Schiphol Airport. If you go to the.

[Unknown Guest]

That's a really annoying airport, by the way, because they should have made it two terminals, really.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah.

[Unknown Guest]

Okay. So what they've done is they've endlessly expanded that airport, you know, and D.

[Rory Sutherland]

E, F, G. And if you're, if.

[Unknown Guest]

You'Re from gate whatever is C148, I mean, frankly, you could have walked home.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah.

[Unknown Guest]

You know.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah.

[Unknown Guest]

Right.

[Rory Sutherland]

So most of the. A lot of people have layovers in Amsterdam. It's a real hub. Well, well positioned. Problem is it's kind of a bit of a fuck on to find somewhere to relax. It's really difficult. And the way that they've done this, kind of the same way that those benches have been designed in New York City to mean that homeless people can't lie on them because they're precisely the inverse of the shape that a human spine is supposed to make. Some weird medieval torture device that's masquerading as a fucking piece of art next to the street. But gate D2 in Amsterdam Schiphol Airport is the only one that I've found that doesn't have armrests in between the seats. So it's a low bench that's padded and there's no armrests in between it.

[Unknown Guest]

D2 Schiphol. Is that right?

[Rory Sutherland]

D2 Schiphol. And you can lie down, put the thing on. You can lie FL flat on this. I've spent many a time.

[Unknown Guest]

There's a gate in London City which is. Most people stay in the main kind of holding pen, but if you walk towards gate three or something, there's a little cafe and a seating area next to it which most people don't know about. So that's that.

[Rory Sutherland]

That's whoever's, whoever's staffing the fucking. Yeah, whoever's staffing the Easter egg pretimange and is near gate D2 in Amsterdam. Schiphol is going to be fucked. A quick aside. If you're anything like me, packing for weekend trips somehow takes longer than than the trip itself. Which is why I've partnered with Nomatic. Because this backpack is the best, most beautiful, most life changing piece of luggage that I've ever found. It's got a compartment for everything. No more playing suitcase, Tetris or rolling your clothes like you're some sort of burrito chef. You planned a beautiful trip. Do not let a disorganized bag ruin the vibe. Look, if you're still on the fence about their product, they come with a lifetime guarantee. So this is literally the final backpack that you'll ever need to buy. And you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy a new bag, try it for a month, if you don't like it, give you your money back, and they ship internationally. Right now you can get a 20% discount. See everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com modernwisdom that's nomatic.com modernwisdom Talk to me about takeaway food. You linked me in with some guy that makes crazy Indian takeaway food.

[Unknown Guest]

Oh, yes, it's nostalgia foods. And Naresankara, who's a food scientist at Berkeley, who like most Indian emigres and indeed British emigres to the United States, definitely woefully disappointed. Well, not always. There are, there are very good Indian restaurants in the U.S. but they're few. Okay. I mean, certainly in proportion. I mean, of course there wasn't much of an Indian population. And of course your spicy food is partly taken care of with things like Tex, Mex, etc. Okay. But anybody who's either British or Indian or Pakistani, Bengali, et cetera, would feel a bit deprived. And so he's found this technology where you basically, you can ship chefs over from Hyderabad. They then prepare biryani, which you then preserve using NASA food preserving technology. And I've tried it and I've shared it with other people and it's astounding.

[Rory Sutherland]

Was it the parathas that you were talking about?

[Unknown Guest]

That's a different one. That's a thing called a frozen paratha, which you probably could get here. And that's, that's an extraordinary thing because you just weirdly, you don't Thaw them, take them straight out of the freezer, bang them with a bit of oil in a frying pan about one minute each side and it's fantastic.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah, I. I can't believe I. The email thread that I was put in was somebody, somebody at Berkeley Edu telling me that my industrial sized order of NASA freeze dried Indian food had been. I was like, what? How have these five different things contributed to result in me eating Indian food?

[Unknown Guest]

But rank, he also makes Haleem, which is one of my favorite things of all time, by the way.

[Rory Sutherland]

If you've never had it, what's Haleem?

[Unknown Guest]

It's usually I think lamb and I think wheat grass, which is kind of soaked overnight in some shape. So it's like. The only way you can describe it is like a very meaty porridge and then you can pimp it. If you ever go to Saloo in Kinnerton street in London, they then bring you a little tray which has little bits of chili, little bits of ginger, little bits of something else, maybe saffron and then you pimp the top of it by sprinkling these things like a.

[Rory Sutherland]

Make your own pizza.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah, yeah. And then it sits. He probably sits on top of rice or. Yeah, typically I think it would come with rice. Absolutely magnificent thing. It's wonderful. And he makes Haleem. He makes biryani and hyderabadi. Biryani is considered the kind of gold standard in India.

[Rory Sutherland]

Okay. What's happened with changes in people's ordering preferences given that, that so much of this is now done over screen? You look at McDonald's, you look at even. I would be very interested to know the difference between a touch.

[Unknown Guest]

This has a really interesting. I don't normally talk about AI cause everybody else does. But one thing that strikes me as interesting about AI is when you change the context and the choice architecture within which people choose. So it's a screen rather than face to face. Okay. They make different choices. If you want my frank opinion, I think the whole property market is broken because everybody searches for property in the same way. Okay? Now one way in which you can innovate very reliably is it's quite hard to change a million people's behavior, okay? Because people are driven by habit and they, you know, they've already got a. I mean, they've already got a solution to the problem a lot of the time. Yours may be better, but they're. I mean, literally when mobile phones were invented, we forget this because your generation think nobody had mobile phones. They invented the mobile phone, everybody bought a Mobile phone, it was about 20 something years before it reached kind of really mainstream adoption. Now, part of that was price, part of that was technology. A lot of it was people saying things like, why would I want to make a phone call on the street? I mean, literally, because they didn't really envisage the value that a mobile phone brought you until they earned one. Okay. And there's also the whole social proof thing that in the early days of owning a mobile phone, you were a bit of a wanker. Okay? So translation for Americans, jerk. Okay? Now what's quite interesting there is that behavior is slow to change, but if you change the context or the interface which people use to make a decision, everybody's behavior changes. And so in McDonald's, one of the things they found, I think people tend to order a bit more when they order on a screen. I think I've heard anecdotally that the number of particularly males who order a meal with two burgers in it has gone up a lot because you felt awkward doing that face to face. Even with a complete stranger who you are never gonna meet again in your life, you just felt a bit awkward, okay, doing it. Whereas when you're ordering on screen, they don't even know how many of you there are. Okay. Because it's a screen, obviously upselling may or cross selling may become easier. You know, there's a limit in a spoken conversation. So it does strike me as interesting with AI, which is if. Which is possible. You know, there's this new device I think Jony I've been involved in.

[Rory Sutherland]

I wanted to talk about that.

[Unknown Guest]

Which is a thing which you wear around your neck and it uses the processing power of your mobile phone, but it basically talks to you. Okay. I think you'll also need a matching eyepiece.

[Rory Sutherland]

I think that the glasses.

[Unknown Guest]

Monocle would be quite good, I think, wouldn't it?

[Rory Sutherland]

I could see you. Stinks of you. Absolutely stinks of you.

[Unknown Guest]

The digital Monocle.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yes.

[Unknown Guest]

The digital Pince. Ne for yeah. Or lorgnette. You know, those things on a handle which you. But they. If you change the way in which they're in. If suddenly instead of going to a screen, I'm going, I need to renew, I need to rent a car. I'd like you to show me details of this. I need to choose a toaster. And that changes from being screen based to say, conversational and iterative. Then everything changes. Okay? Now there's a possible way in which AI will make me completely redundant, which is not in the way that most people Anticipate, which is advertising generally is a business trying to reach consumers. Consumers, okay. The natural direction of travel of an AI empowered world would surely be the other way around where consumers appoint agents to find them things to buy. So actually once you have unlimited, what you might call search, there are no search costs, you know, okay, right. For the consumer effectively, in the sense that the searching is being done by an AI agent, then effectively what you're doing is the consumer is appointing an advertising agency to find them stuff rather than the company appointing an advertising agency to find them customers. And I can't see, you know, now I'm sure that, you know, I'm sure, you know, I don't think I'm going to starve to death, but it does strike me that that would seem a pretty natural direction of travel. And for example, things like the, you know, the real estate industry. Now, okay, now that sort of works with fairly crude search, but it's not, I think it's very, very simplistic, which is, where do you want to buy a house? How much do you want to spend? Do you want a flat? Do you want a house? Do you want to buy? Do you want to rent? Okay, that's actually, it seems perfectly satisfying to the person going through that process, but I don't think it's very. Any more than dating apps are a great way of finding a lifetime partner necessarily. Okay. You know, the process of dating probably should be highly iterative, which is that you use what you find in the marketplace to refine your preferences.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah, you train it over time. You do it with your YouTube algorithm. Even Spotify. Spotify suggests new bands and songs to me like this. Really? No, I wouldn't have even picked that. And it knows. And that going back to your air fryer girlfriend, not a Corvette girlfriend idea. Experience. Good. Look, just trust, trust that I know your preferences.

[Unknown Guest]

There are things where the experience is better than the promise. There are things where, I mean, the classic case where I always think the experience and the promise are absolutely at loggerheads in consumerism is camping equipment. So you buy a tent or a sleeping bag and the thing that really impresses you is how small it is when it's in the bag. And then you use that sleeping bag, you take it out of its bag and it turns into something, you know, basically the size of the Hindenburg. Right. Okay. You think that is magnificent. How do they manage to get that sleeping bag into that tiny bag? And then it's raining and it's 8 o' clock the next day and you've got to get the sleeping bag back in the bag wet, okay? Wet. And it's a living fucking nightmare. So you could say there are air flyer girlfriends and there are sleeping bag girlfriends. Wow, this is much better than I. You know, it's much more than it said on the tin. The sleeping man girlfriend is. God, it looks so great. But I mean that about.

[Rory Sutherland]

For the nightmare to live with kinds.

[Unknown Guest]

Of things, things like that, which is, you know, the conflict between the promise and, you know, and, you know, undoubtedly advertising. I think sometimes over promises and under delivers. And then there are experiences where you under promise and over deliver.

[Rory Sutherland]

Interesting with the way that dopamine works with that stuff, right? That over promising on the front end is good for getting people through the door. And I imagine that you can launch businesses very hard with that. But how do you get repeat purchase and how do you get good customer satisfaction with that?

[Unknown Guest]

Actually, I wish. Very interesting question. Actually. I wish there were. There are a few things. This is the whole question of how search works. And it really comes into the field of sort of decision science and choice architecture. Okay? So at the moment, you tend to get ratings for restaurants. And I've always wanted in hotels. And one thing I've always wanted TripAdvisor to offer is a list of. Of the most polarizing hotels, okay? Really interesting hotels are going to be slightly divisive, okay? The moxie would be divisive, actually. You know, if you turned up, if.

[Rory Sutherland]

You'Re a family of four, if you're.

[Unknown Guest]

A family of four, you go to school.

[Rory Sutherland]

Where's the fucking pool? There's no kids club.

[Unknown Guest]

But anything that's really good for some people is probably going to be deficient on some other measure, you know, I mean, the most extreme. I've always given this example. The hotel I stayed in in East Berlin, it was a former East German police stat. The rooms had been cells, okay? You actually slept on a large platform above your own shower. Cause there wasn't room in the cell to have a whole bed and separate shower. There was one television in the room. It was black and white. Wasn't even a flat screen, one channel. And it showed. Still does show to this day, the big Lebowski on continuous loop. Now, if you'd turned up expecting the Marriott, okay, It would have been literally traumatizing, okay? On the other hand, if you wanted something that was authentically Berlin experience. And I ought to make the point, okay, I ought to make the point that in the middle of the hotel, it was a bit like the moxie in that thing. And we invest in the communal areas, not in the rooms. Okay. There was a barista and a coffee shop.

[Rory Sutherland]

You sure it wasn't a panopticon in the middle of the hotel or everybody's room being looked at?

[Unknown Guest]

I'm pretty sure you're right. It should have been a panopticon that.

[Rory Sutherland]

Would have been real authentic.

[Unknown Guest]

In the middle, in a kind of courtyard was literally a coffee shop where I had probably the best flat white I've had in my life. Life.

[Rory Sutherland]

When are we going to get a Hindenburg? We spoke about this last night.

[Unknown Guest]

The dirigible.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. What Talk to me about everybody's desire to have a dirigible.

[Unknown Guest]

Well, I've always wondered, by the way, I didn't fully answer the first question about star ratings, but I've always wanted. You mentioned repeat purchase. Nearly all businesses over invest in acquisition and under invest in customer retention. And the reason is, I'll tell you, the companies I don't think do that. I think family owned companies tend not to because they've got kind of reputational skin in the game and they've got longer term time horizons and they're actually building a brand. Okay. I think companies that are owned by like private equity companies that have short term time horizons are obsessed with quantification. And it's always easier to quantify and measure acquisition of customers than it is to actually measure retention of customers because retention of customers is harder to measure. But it's also slower. Okay. If you do something. But I would argue, and this is when I this is where I was going to go. The only really obviously it doesn't work for one off purchases like marriage. Okay. Right. It wouldn't work for. Okay, but repeat purchase. You know, Amazon should have a kind of repeat purchase oh meter obviously again, not on things you'd only buy once in your life. But actually it's a pretty significant measure.

[Rory Sutherland]

It's not just how many people bought this thing, it's how many people that bought this thing before rebought it.

[Unknown Guest]

So to tediously go back to air fryers. Okay, very simple question. If your air fryer broke, would you go and buy another one the next day?

[Rory Sutherland]

Yes.

[Unknown Guest]

Okay, now that's not true of yogurt makers. Okay. And so consumers would benefit enormously. Now interestingly, there are some libertarian economists who believe in this, that it'd be perfectly acceptable for the government to collect information on certain things and to share it with consumers to make them better informed. So one interesting thing would be people who enter this category. So you Might have, you know, yogurt maker. I'm being a bit unfair to yogurt makers. I'm sure they're people who love them. Right. I can never be bothered to churn.

[Rory Sutherland]

Our own butter as well. Why don't we do that?

[Unknown Guest]

Exactly. Let's pretend we're 17th century peasants. Yeah, I don't really get that. But it would be useful for the government. Electric cars, interestingly, generally have a very high repeat rate within the category. Most people who actually go electric don't.

[Rory Sutherland]

Revert question on that. I wonder how many of those situations are due to the fact that when you've planted your flag in the ground and your next door neighbor's gone, oh, Rory, that's. Oh, that's an interesting. Is that. It's a Mach E. It's an electric one. Oh, well, you. It's the future, you know, it's the ba, ba, ba, ba ba. And then four years later, when the car needs to be renewed and you go, yeah, I got. I got the 6.2 liter V8 Camaro, but what about the oligarchy said about the. And it's. You have to eat your own fries.

[Unknown Guest]

Part of its consistency bias, by the way. Part of it's regret minimization. Part of it may be sunk cost, which is it took me three months of effort to become really good at owning an electric car such that I could turn up more or less anywhere, charge the thing, not look like an idiot. Having invested that cost, okay. I'm more likely to actually reap the rewards, which is, in a sense, you know, in the dating market, that's why women have to play hard to get. Okay. Which is the cost of acquisition probably translates into loyalty and consideration.

[Rory Sutherland]

Absolutely.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Rory Sutherland]

I mean, you don't want to give somebody the job as they're at the interview the first time that you see them. It's usually not a good indication.

[Unknown Guest]

Currently, places like Goldman Sachs not only will subject you to about six interviews, okay, probably three of which are entirely gratuitous, but they don't even offer you a job. They wait for you to rig it, ask no way. Somebody literally told me this test of agency. So literally, they said, it's really weird because I had six interviews and they all went really well and. And I haven't heard back. And somebody said, you won't hear back. They want you to ring up and actually pester them. Now, that may. It was certainly one New York investment bank that literally would do that. They go, I'm not going to actually offer the guy a job. You know, we've done six interviews, but.

[Rory Sutherland]

It'S on him now. We did six interviews, it's now on him.

[Unknown Guest]

There are products, by the way, which is almost certainly good to add a degree of friction, because if there's a degree of difficulty, I mean, I have this.

[Rory Sutherland]

The IKEA effect, I have.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah. The effort you put into the acquisition of something contributes to the perceived value of the thing.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. This is your bit about the difference between cheap strawberries and pick your own strawberries.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah. That fundamentally they mean something different. One of them is, I put effort into the creation of value here, and therefore the low price is destigmatized. Whereas if you made IKEA really, really easy furniture to buy, I think they had to offer delivery when they moved to the US Didn't Cause they were met with complete incomprehension or something, because Americans had a high expectation of service. But fundamentally, IKEA is pick your own strawberries. I've put some effort into the creation and accumulation of this item. Therefore, the low price is partly a reflection of my own effort rather than just low product quality to begin with.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. There's double effort as well. For the people that have never been to an ikea, first try and find the nearest IKEA to you. It is a real experience. Halfway around, there's great quality meatballs. But it's a.

[Unknown Guest]

There is a big one near Austin, isn't there?

[Rory Sutherland]

I seem to remember it's not far. It's just a round rock.

[Unknown Guest]

I remember driving past it.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah, it's just in round rocks.

[Unknown Guest]

It's not quite as big as the Gigafactory, but it's pretty vast.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. You walk around this big maze for ages. So not only did you have to build the thing yourself, look at the instructions, have an argument with your wife about how it was going to work. Even before that, when you were in the selection period, you had to go through. We are here to get kitchen stuff. Well, we've got to walk through the bedrooms and we need to walk through the lounge. We've got to go through the lighting department, the. Oh, we're at the kitchen. Okay. That piece of art over there is quite. No, we're on kitchen, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It's an ADHD sufferer's nightmare.

[Unknown Guest]

You could actually sort of sell IKEA blinkers, couldn't you? Which are sort of, you know, to.

[Rory Sutherland]

Focus you in effectively.

[Unknown Guest]

Yes, but.

[Rory Sutherland]

Well, you could get a. You could do the concierge service again. Sir, I'm going to take you directly to the kitchen. Area. Exactly.

[Unknown Guest]

Put a sack over your head.

[Rory Sutherland]

Being abducted. Exactly.

[Unknown Guest]

And I'll lead you straight to the kitchen square section.

[Rory Sutherland]

We'll get back to talking in just a minute. But first, some things are built for summer. Sunburns, hot girl walks, your ex posting their Euro road trip, and now lemonade and salt. Huh? Element just dropped their brand new lemonade salt flavor. And it's everything that you want on a hot day. Tart, salty and stupidly refreshing. It's like a grown up lemonade stand in a stick with actual function behind the flavor. Because let's be real, if you're sweating through workouts, sauna sessions, or just walking to your car in July, then you are losing more than just water. Element replaces the electrolytes that your body actually needs. Sodium, potassium and magnesium. With no sugar, no junk and no nonsense. I've been drinking it every single day for years. And in the Texas heat, this lemonade flavor in a cold glass of water is unbelievably good. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US Right now. You can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com ModernWisdom that's drinklmnt.com Modernwisdom when are we going to get a Hindenburg? When are we going to get one?

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah. Oh yeah, you're absolutely right. Blimps.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yep.

[Unknown Guest]

So we had this conversation that actually helicopters are not only dangerous, but actually they're a poor status marker because they suggest you're time poor. And so the theory was that the air yacht, which by the way did exist. You can see it on YouTube. After World War II, there was a company that turned something like Boeing Stratofortresses into flying luxury yachts, which I think could land on water. So actually it wouldn't have been the stratofortress. It must be in some sort of seaplane. Okay. And there's actually a tragic thing of a family who set out to fly around the world were actually killed by people somewhere in the Middle East. East. Because they landed somewhere in the middle of some tribal conflict. But the airship would be extraordinarily high status as a mode of transport because it suggested you had money, but you also had spare time. And of course, you could have a degree of luxury, which is difficult in all but the largest aircraft. I mean, I've always wondered about it, which is, why is it that yachts are high status but RVs are low status, relatively, because I think American RVs. Did you ever watch Matt's RV reviews on YouTube?

[Rory Sutherland]

I did, yeah.

[Unknown Guest]

Matt Foxworthy, absolute genius in my opinion. And actually, by the way, interesting detail about salesmanship. Three things we like about this motorhome. Three things we don't like, actually. That's it.

[Rory Sutherland]

That's your one star, five star reviews again. Right?

[Unknown Guest]

Actually, the admission of what you might call disarming candor is actually a good element of salesmanship. Cause it actually contributes towards trust. The too good to be true heuristic kicks in and people actually get a bit unnerved. And one way of doing it, of course, is just to say, it is expensive, but it's worth it. Okay. But some acknowledgement of a downside can be actually, particularly, I think Robert Cialdini says close to the point of sale can be very convincing. Jay Leno on Jay Leno's Garage talks about the fact that he won't buy a Ferrari because the whole thing is mired in all sorts of weirdness. Okay. But he was very impressed because when he was buying a McLaren, he said, I'm quite interested in the ceramic brake discs or whatever it is. And the guy said, are you planning to track the car? No, he said, I'll mostly be.

[Rory Sutherland]

Don't need it.

[Unknown Guest]

Let me save you $20,000 straight off the bat, you know, because if you're driving around la, they take ages to warm up. You'll end up hitting the car in front. Now that's a brilliant way of establishing trust, of downselling someone slightly. Who else? Alex Hormozy is very, very good at this. I mean, that guy is an absolute genius, in my opinion.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah, he's one of the best funnel hackers in the world.

[Unknown Guest]

Absolutely brilliant. Brilliant. I mean, it's fascinating to watch. You know, I feel like, you know, but, but, but the airship. Because I've always thought when you think about RVs, okay, 99% of the world's interesting things are actually found on land, aren't they, really? Okay. And so there are also problems with the very big yachts, which is you can't go into small harbors, so you end up next to an even bigger yacht, feeling that you Failed in life. Life. You know, at the Monaco Grand Prix, I've always thought that actually, you know, if I, if I was supremely rich, having a really, really luxury land yacht would be a great thing.

[Rory Sutherland]

Didn't we think about the fact that a hot air balloon is even more high status than a blimp? Because at least with the blimp you have a tiny little turbine at the back that can direct you roughly.

[Unknown Guest]

Hot air balloon says, I've got money. It'd have to be a luxury hot air balloon. I've got money, I've got lots of time to spare, and I don't really care where I've.

[Rory Sutherland]

When you go, yeah, I'm so rich that I'll make it good wherever I go.

[Unknown Guest]

I mean, that, that's very much the weird finding on airlines, which is that when you have a flight that's canceled and people have to travel the ne on the next day, the general finding of airlines is that the people in the middle of the plane are really angry about it. Okay? The people at the, you know, some of the economy travelers, they're like students, okay? You give them a free night in a four star hotel, they're going off to Asia for, for, you know, five weeks anyway, okay? This is a bonus. They're delighted, okay? They, you know, they get a night in the hotel. It's all a bit of a novelty. The people at the front of the plane just go, yeah, that's fine. I'll just go back into the Savoy and I'll book an extra night. And then they're not bothered either. The people in the middle are going, absolutely.

[Rory Sutherland]

Premium economy are fucked.

[Unknown Guest]

I mean, the whole question, by the way of, you know, one of the most interesting things, you know, we're both fans of evolutionary psychology, and one of the great predictions made in evolutionary psychology was made by Jeffrey Miller in his book Both Spent and the Mating Mind.

[Rory Sutherland]

Have you had him on Multiple times.

[Unknown Guest]

Multiple times. Okay. This is a case of someone actually getting it bang on the money. He predicted that social media would fundamentally change not the human urge to display status, but what the currencies were. So he predicted that travel would become much more valuable as a status marker because you can now photograph yourself in front of Machu Picchu. You, okay? And basically, you know, while all your friends are at work in the rain, okay. And that the nature of the things that would actually enable you to display status through digital means and cars would be probably diminished or, you know, household possessions, except to the extent that you can photograph them, would be kind of diminished. And that prediction has been pretty much borne out. And what you're. I mean, what's interesting there is that, you know, a very interesting question would be status of a job. Okay. There was no debate, okay. That it was better if you had to work in London. Okay. It was better to earn 100x than 50x. Okay. If the choice becomes to today's young, you can live in Lisbon or Fuerteventura or for that matter, you know, in the middle of the New Mexico desert, you can live there for 50 or you can live in London for 100. It's not altogether a slam dunk to decide who's got the better job. When you were both competing for identical resources and that the only variable in employment was how long you worked, how much you got paid. That was employment economics for hundreds of years. Basically, it was assumed that place was a given, that when you worked was a given. And so the only variables were effectively, you know, how long you worked, how much you got paid, maybe commute and. Yeah, I guess, I guess. I mean, there would be people who choose jobs because the commute was easier. Famously, there was one London bank that moved next to a railway station and they found they could never get rid of their older staff because it was. They'd all moved to the country, bought an F off house and they just rumbled it on the train and walked, walked 100 yards to the office. Those guys weren't going anywhere. But suddenly you have this technical employment market where as well as free time, there's free where and there's free when. So if you can work where you like, when you like. And a colleague of mine, Brian Featherstonehaugh, said also if you can work with whom you like, all of those things are now negotiable value counters alongside the money. And so, you know, it's a really interesting debate. If you're an employer and you want to. You want particularly talented people, but you haven't got the immense budget which enables you to compete with J.P. morgan or something. Well, offering lifestyle benefits or locations where near affordable housing strikes me as a pretty smart place to go.

[Rory Sutherland]

What would you do to improve food delivery apps? This in the US there's even more than there are in the uk. So many different.

[Unknown Guest]

We have Deliveroo, which you don't have. Do you? We have Just Eat, which you don't have.

[Rory Sutherland]

No. And just. Just Eats kind of feels a little bit sort of Internet in 2005. E to me up against something like an Uber Eats.

[Unknown Guest]

I mean, Deliveroo, interestingly, is I Mean, they'll probably move into delivery of not just food as well, which is interesting. I mean, what. What ultimately happens there. There is fascinating. What? What? So you use door dash, presumably.

[Rory Sutherland]

I use Uber Eats. I use Uber Eats. But one thing, they do this slightly.

[Unknown Guest]

Annoying thing that I always find, which is, oh, yeah, okay, your meal comes to $35. That's a bit expensive. But hell, they're delivering it. What the hell? And then they go, pay us another $5 and we won't urinate on your food. That's another $7. And by the time you got. I'm finished.

[Rory Sutherland]

Have you ever done this? So if you go into.

[Unknown Guest]

Hit me with it.

[Rory Sutherland]

If you go into the Uber app, just normal Uber app here. And then it's got this suggestions thing in the middle. Now, everybody below your two most recent places that you've been and whatever it is that you're gonna type in about where you need to go, everybody forgets that. If you go to suggestions, you look here, car hire, bikes, stuff for teens. And then if you go down, get anything delivered. Food, grocery, alcohol, convenience, health, personal care, baby gourmet, pet supplies, flowers, retail electronics, you can, oh, get anything done. A courier or a store pickup. So if you've left your watch in a gym, you can send the fucking Uber guy to go and get it for you, or you can get your pharmacy delivery. You can get them to get pretty much anything.

[Unknown Guest]

What they're interestingly suffering from is the interesting thing, which is kind of the Starbucks pret dilemma, okay? Which is pret is mentally known for food in the uk and they want to sell more coffee, and Starbucks is known for coffee, and they want to sell more food.

[Rory Sutherland]

Food.

[Unknown Guest]

And what they're doing there with Uber, which is quite clever, is they're obviously predominantly associated with one particular application, okay? And people have got into the habit of getting food delivered because they had food delivered before you just booked it by telephone. You know, it was a pizza in 1989 or whatever. That was Domino's whole stock in trade. And so actually getting people to broaden their repertoire within it's quite a common marketing dilemma, which is. It's almost the market equivalent of the innovator's dilemma. You get known for one very good thing now, Starbucks, I think possibly, you know, I think Howard Schultz was conscious of this. They were so desperate to sell food because they saw it as incremental value, you see? Okay? And so, you know, in other words, you know, the coffee stuff was one thing, but the food they more or less saw as incremental. Profit. Profit that you then start diluting your coffee credentials if you're not careful.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yep.

[Unknown Guest]

And, you know, it's. It's interesting with, you know, for example, Pret. I think, you know, has experimented with various subscription services and so on and so forth, you know, to get people to up the coffee consumption.

[Rory Sutherland]

Well, like a loyalty card.

[Unknown Guest]

What Uber's doing there is. It's quite. Because they do trains in the uk, Obviously you don't, you know, so you. You literally. You can book. You can book any train on Uber.

[Rory Sutherland]

No way.

[Unknown Guest]

And coaches and I think a few other things.

[Rory Sutherland]

Me, I haven't been back to the UK for long enough. Wow, that's cool.

[Unknown Guest]

And so. But. But I mean, the. Where's your. What's the problem you have with it? Because I. I find that I. I've used UberEats, and apart from that slightly weird thing of continually demanding extra money.

[Rory Sutherland]

I'm a fan of UberEats. I think the. The main issue I've got at the moment when it comes to the intersection of food and digital is I'm still often overwhelmed and confused when it comes to choosing, especially in a city that I'm not familiar with.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah.

[Rory Sutherland]

And I don't quite know what the metric is that I want. So distance from where I am, especially if I'm gonna go somewhere. You know, you land in Manhattan or you're on the Upper east side, you think, I want to go for some food this evening? And maybe you don't even have that specific. Your missus can't decide. Whatever you go. Fuck. Okay, so I need to kind of reverse engineer what I think it is that she wants. And she says she doesn't want anything, but I need to. If I get this wrong, I'll know. And if I get this right, it's acceptable.

[Unknown Guest]

Claims to be lactose and gluten intolerant, which makes things even more tedious.

[Rory Sutherland]

Right. Okay. So I'm looking on Google Maps and I go, okay, well, I'll. I'll order by. First off, I need to filter by open now. That seems pretty important given that I'm trying to go now, but after that it's just this. It's really difficult. Okay, well, this one's 4.5 stars, but it's only got 100 reviews. This one's a four star, but it's got 2,000 reviews. And it's.

[Unknown Guest]

You're probably a Brit, so you'd like to order the food by degrees of spiciness in some cases, would you?

[Rory Sutherland]

That. I mean, I do it's certainly a criteria I look at. But yeah, it's just I struggle and especially if I'm somewhere new and I'm on Uber. Okay. I can either order sweetgreen or Carver a flower child for the millionth time, or I can try and get something that's at least remotely like localized to wherever it is. It's going to be a unique experience. But also I've got such potential buyers regret here that I think, God, this is my only sustenance for the evening. I've had to wait 50 minutes for it to get to me and I'm gonna hate it.

[Unknown Guest]

I agree. Yeah. By the way, by the way, I think all these people will start, start to have. Have to start offering Mounjaro portions soon.

[Rory Sutherland]

Okay.

[Unknown Guest]

You know, because actually if you look at the effects of what are they GLP1s on people's calorific consumption, it seems to affect all sorts of impulsive behaviors. Actually seems to have an effect on sort of gambling addiction and weird. Which they never anticipated. But if you look at Walmart had a lot of good data on this because they obviously have pharmacists, but they also have their loyalty card data. So they can see the effect that it has on what people buy. What you might purchasing. I saw talk from the chief economist at Visa about two days ago and purchased. Now, some of this is people eating out more and shopping a bit less. But purchasing, which was on a constant upward trend, purchasing a food from the grocery aisle, which was on a constant upward trend, seems to have flatlined. Now what's interesting about that is that's with probably 8 to 10% of the US population on some sort of GLP1 treatment now, if it causes flat lining with 8% end, what the hell happens when it's 25? So now I don't think the prognosis is all bad. I think that people on those things will actually have small which maybe, maybe, maybe this is, you know, the direction of, of capitalism, I would argue, or the desirable direction of consumer capitalism, of which I'm something of a fan, is actually less but better.

[Rory Sutherland]

You know, equality is going to be better soldiers.

[Unknown Guest]

Rather than having a chocolate bar that's, you know, that's the size of a small field you have, you know, in other words, you treat yourself to smaller quantities of things that are of a higher quality and you become more mindful about your enjoyment of them. Did you see that speech at the end of the White Lotus where the.

[Rory Sutherland]

Lady from didn't watch it.

[Unknown Guest]

You haven't watched it. Okay. She gives a speech which is, you know, effectively, we're the most privileged 1% of people in the history of the world. We have a duty to enjoy ourselves.

[Rory Sutherland]

It's a wonderful argument. Wonderful argument.

[Unknown Guest]

And it was. It was interesting because she wasn't an altogether sympathetic character, it's probably fair to say. Although the whole family were actually more interesting in many ways than anybody else. I don't know why they were chosen as being from North Carolina. I think she. There's a whole load of American nuance in there that he went to Duke and she went to UNC or something, you know, or. Okay, a whole lot of weird sort of stuff in there, which, as a Brit, I couldn't entirely disentangle angle. But there is actually a degree of validity to that, which is that if you're in a privileged position, it's actually slightly rude to your ancestors. It's disrespectful to your ancestors, in a sense, and to other people less fortunate than you to go around not enjoying the things that you have some active form.

[Rory Sutherland]

There's a meme that's floating around on the Internet at the moment, and it's a guy stood in front of this sort of cosmic backdrop, and it's. It's millions and millions of small silhouettes of people, and it's my entire ancestral lineage watching me lift weights instead of talk to a girl for the 3,000th time.

[Unknown Guest]

Perfect.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start. Which is why I partnered with Function, because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard, and give you you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with function, it is only $500. And right now, the first thousand people can get an additional hundred dollars off, meaning it's only 400 bucks. To get the exact same blood panel that I use, just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com modernwisdom that's functionhealth.com modernwisdom I.

[Unknown Guest]

Mean, that's an interesting one as well, isn't it? Which is the. I mean, one of the other things the economist revealed is the amazing number of single person households. In other words, people not in a relationship.

[Rory Sutherland]

I think the most common living arrangement for a man under 35 is still at home with his parents. Over 18 and under 35, the most common living arrangement is still with parents.

[Unknown Guest]

And that you're gonna unfortunately bring me onto one of my other hobby horses, which is the need for land value tax to make property more affordable and basically to get these oldsters out of houses which are bigger than they need, because family formation has become impossible. Okay, now this is one of those cases which I often talk about, which I think we need to be permanently alert to, where something comes along as an option and becomes an obligation.

[Rory Sutherland]

Explain that for me.

[Unknown Guest]

Okay, so Nassim Taleb taught me all this stuff. The huge difference between an option and an obligation, which is, personally, I hate drinks parties, right? I like dinner parties. I hate drinks parties.

[Rory Sutherland]

Last night for me was what, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. That's close to my upper bound. I think when you get to seven, seven to eight, that's starting to get a little much for me.

[Unknown Guest]

But back at home at Monmouth, there was a man called Wilson Plant, who was an extraordinary man. I mean, you know, he sat in the pub, sort of presiding in the pub, and someone would have a discussion and, you know, it would get a bit intellectual and go, well, how do you know D.H. lawrence thought that? And he'd reply, because he told me. So he knew everyone except Nancy Mitford. I mean, he was just one of those people who, in his 20s and 30s, he'd just been in sort of London society and he had a rule for a pub conversation which is between the Graces and the Muses. Now, I think I've got this right. There are three Graces and there are nine Muses. And his argument is that once a pub table, you know, once a pub table gets below three, it's time to go home. Okay. Once it gets above 9, you should split off and form another table.

[Rory Sutherland]

I'm in agreement.

[Unknown Guest]

I think it's. By the way, I don't mind drinks parties in the garden. Garden. Because you can wander off.

[Rory Sutherland]

Well, that's Little Clusters.

[Unknown Guest]

But if, if, particularly when you're 59, inside, you can't hear a word. Anyway, he's saying.

[Rory Sutherland]

Anyway, okay, so back to your land.

[Unknown Guest]

Value, my options and obligations thing. Okay? So interestingly, the only good thing about a drinks party is you go, yeah, yeah, that's Fine, Saturday night. And if you don't feel like going, you don't have to go. Whereas a dinner party, if they've actually prepared food and they're going to be eight of you and they don't, you know, they want to match up the genders or whatever it is anybody does. I don't know if anybody does that anymore, okay? But you have to go, basically, you have to have a really good reason not to go. So that's an obligation. Whereas the drinks party is an option, okay? And, you know, the ultimate option is six of us are going to the pub this evening. If you feel like it, come along, that, that's an option, okay? Whereas Dave's stag party is a fucking obligation. Right? Okay. Now, Nassim taught me this distinction, which obviously understands perfectly from finance, you know, know, it's a massively important distinction whether you own an option on something or whether you have actually an obligation. Now, what happens quite a lot, I think, and we need to be really alert to it, is something comes along. Now, a classic example of this would be parking apps, okay? Now, the parking app comes along and you still have machines, you still have meters that take coins, you still have a pay and display machine, as we call it in the uk, okay? But if you want to, you can pay by Apple app and you go, oh, that's fantastic. I really like that. That's great, because I don't always carry a lot of coins with me. This makes it really convenient. Absolutely fantastic. And you go, isn't this good? The world's getting better. And then the people who operate car parks notice that they. That it's a lot cheaper if they just get rid of the pen display machines, okay? And also they probably lose a bit.

[Rory Sutherland]

Of money from fraud or theft, maintenance.

[Unknown Guest]

Maintenance and all that stuff. And then suddenly you're stuck with only the parking app. App if you're 70 or 80 years old. This sort of shit is starting to turn the world into a nightmare. The extent to which you're expected to have a smartphone and have the eyesight to use it and master a pace of change, which is actually something that imposed on us. It's not chosen by us. That's becoming. By the way, you're talking about airports, okay? There is nothing at an airport between disabled, request a wheelchair and walk, okay? There's no halfway house for someone who's a bit elderly but doesn't actually want to be wheeled through. And I think given the fact that wealth is more and more concentrated again among the old nowadays, the extent to Which a lot of modern built infrastructure is extremely disrespectful to people who are just a bit elderly. In other words, they're not fully registered disabled, but they are constrained I think is monstrous. Anyway. Another example of what starts as an obligation, as an option and becomes an obligation is actually the two income household. Okay? So there was a period obviously women entered the workplace, married women particularly entered the workplace a little bit during World War II. I think it was something 10 to 15% of women were actually working in war work. That changed things. But for a long time it was, do we want to actually both go out to work and have a pretty blinged up, you know, fancy ass lifestyle option or would we prefer that one? Or either, you know, it doesn't have to be man or woman or would we prefer if one person stays at home and one person goes out to work? Now for that blissful period, it was still possible to maintain a household with children on one salary. The two income household was great news for property owners. It was great news for the government because you had twice as many people you could tax what it meant for the typical family. Now I'm not making any value judgment about this, I'm just simply saying what's true is you lost 40 hours of discretionary time each week without necessarily enjoying a market improvement in your discretionary income. Because all that happened was that house prices basically went up to mop up the spare income that was made possible by two people in a relationship working. And therefore the gains went to landowners, landlords or indeed, you know, your, our parents generation to some extent rather than to the people actually doing the work.

[Rory Sutherland]

We were all exit liquidity for everybody else. What do you make of Gary Stevenson's ascendancy and that sort of messaging that's happening in the uk?

[Unknown Guest]

Well, first frivolous point, which is if you want to help with wealth redistribution, Gary, go out and spend some fucking money, right? I mean he was earning like 2 or 3 million pounds a year and only owning, earning one pair of shoes, okay? And his mates from school were working in JD Sports. And I did help. I couldn't help thinking, reading the book, Gary, Gary, just go down to G Day's JD Sports. Just buy a few pairs of shoes, help out your mates, okay? You know, get a hot tub, you know, you know. But his fundamental insight, unbelievably stingy. Do you not think you do that.

[Rory Sutherland]

Book, I haven't read it, I've seen him talk on.

[Unknown Guest]

But Jesus, Gary, just go out and you know, enjoy it for Crying out loud. Okay? I think you get that weird thing actually in banking, which is so much of your enjoyment stuff back then was covered by an entertainment budget, okay? That you got really, really resentful about spending your own money. You see? You see what I mean? Most of us, the money comes in, 80% of it walks straight out again because we piss it up the wall, you know? You know, you know, I haven't got an air fryer for the second bedroom, you know, but there are people who kind of, you know, if you're in that very corporate world where more or less all your fun is taken care of by some expense account, you actually find spending your money disproportionately painful. He's absolutely right in his insight that money is becoming unhealthily concentrated in the two things. I would say he's absolutely right that economics uses these single representative agent models which don't capture inequality, Okay? I would argue personally, Gary, that you need to read up a bit about georgism, which I think the great ideas of Henry George and the land value tax would actually take care of a lot of that, in my view. If you tax land ownership, because property ownership is effectively, you are buying the right to impose taxes on the younger generation. I mean, when people invested in gold, okay, it doesn't do anybody else any harm. Cause I can make do without any gold, okay? I'm not massively into bling, I'm not hugely into jewelry, okay? We can all get by without gold if there's a bloody. A Dutch tulip boom, okay? I'll just switch to gladioli, okay? But I can't substitute for property at some level, if your employer demands you work in a major city. City, okay? And commutable land is scarce, other than the blimp, of course, where you could just live tethered above Berkeley Square, 400ft up, okay? Other than your blimp solution, there's no escaping the depredations of rent seeking landowners. And what has happened is that we've, in a way, we've sanctified wealth and been pretty mean on income, okay? So we've taxed away income discrepancies pretty energetically, but they aren't that big, okay? I mean, what I mean by that is if you look at income inequality even before tax, never mind corrected after tax, you know, the number of people who earn like, you know, 20 times median income, okay, is they exist, but there are very few of them and they pay an enormous amount of income tax, I mean, huge amounts of income tax. In other Words, that's someone who's probably like a high end lawyer in a partnership in a London magic circle law firm. Now, there are a lot of people I'd rather the money went to than people in law firms, but nonetheless, those people pay a lot of tax. Whatever you think about it, okay? By contrast, wealth inequality is monumental. I mean, there are people who, if they walked into a football stadium, every single person on average in that stadium would now be a multimillionaire simply because Bill Gates wanted in. There aren't inequalities like that, of that kind of extreme form in actual earned income. And yet we have this incredibly aggressive system of redistributing earned wealth. And yet we treat wealth that's actually resident in asset values and things as completely sacrosanct. And the problem is, until you actually get to that point where you start actually taxing. Now, Texas does it amusingly because you have quite heavy land taxes. So ironically, what's often stereotyped, I think unfairly, as, you know, the most conservative state in the union, which in fact is not okay, but it's a highly conservative state, you actually pay quite a lot of tax on the value of the property you own. So the property taxes in Texas, I think around 2.5% if you own it. Now, the great effect that has is that it makes property less expensive because you have to pay tax on it and it prevents you using property as an extractive store of wealth. Okay? And the extent to which I think you have to argue that speculation in property has been absolutely deleted has led to enormous redistribution of wealth effectively to the not necessarily very deserving old at the expense of the hard working young. Young is I, I just find it impossible to dispute. Okay, I'm 59, by the way. I did okay. I surfed the wave. I didn't surf it very well. I now own, you know, a couple of flats. I don't own a house. Nothing blingy. Okay, I now own a couple of flats sort of outright. But there are people who bought a House in 1974 whose children. This is literally a case I know of. Okay, okay, so there's a woman living on her own in a five bedroom house not far from where I live, which is probably worth, with the garden, 4.5 million. Okay. Or 3.2 or something like that. She has no money to spend. She has all this money tied up in a totally illiquid form of wealth. So, you know, she's kind of going down, Lidl, and comparing the price of lemons, even though she Owns a Fuck off, you know, 3.5. Her children are kind of worried about how they replace the shock absorbers on their car. And they're. Then the argument would be, why should those children go out and work really hard? What I do, to be absolutely honest, is get into debt, go off to Barbados, wait for your bum to die.

[Rory Sutherland]

Fuck me.

[Unknown Guest]

No, no, that's. But nothing you do working, let's say, as a school teacher. So there's this great book you must get her on called the Inheritocracy.

[Rory Sutherland]

Okay.

[Unknown Guest]

By a woman called Eliza. Oh, God, I'll remember it in a second.

[Rory Sutherland]

You're becoming increasingly left wing here, Rory.

[Unknown Guest]

No, no, no, no, no, no, I'm left. I'm pretty right wing in terms of people's ear actually earned them. So Henry George, effectively, the way to understand Henry George is it was an approach to life which actually had a brief but extraordinary success, popular success in the United States. The game of Monopoly is based on. It's trying to interest people in George's principles of extractive rent seeking. Okay. And the basic principle of Henry George is that it's. It's. Now I'm going to qualify this. It's extremely free market and capitalistic with regard to the fruits of your labor. Labor, okay? Anything you do, anything you build on your land is yours to keep. But it's effectively highly socialistic in terms of land ownership and arguably ownership of limited resources. So a georgist would also tax oil, for example. Anything that. And the argument is you didn't make those things. That would have been in the 19th century. They would have said, this is God's creation and your own. Only, you know, you're actually. You don't own it because you didn't make it. You don't have the right to own this thing because you didn't make it. What you are is a custodian of it, and you pay commensurate tax on the land you own. Okay. Whereas you would in purest Georgia circles, you have no income tax at all. Okay, that probably a bit extreme, but it's sometimes called geoism. And it's. There's also a school of thought which is kind of environmental georgism, which is you tax the consumption or. Or you tax anything where you rivalrously consume something of which more can't be made.

[Rory Sutherland]

Right? Yep.

[Unknown Guest]

Okay. And what happens in Texas, quite interestingly, is all these Californians apparently move to Texas and they go, God, the land here is really cheap. Let's buy loads of it. And then six months later they get hit with a massive tax bill for their land ownership. And they go, what the hell's going on here? We bought this land because it's cheap. Cheap. And the Texans reply, that's why it's cheap. That's exactly why you pay 2.5% tax on it.

[Rory Sutherland]

Did you ever look at that issue with fighter pilot seats? That was designed for average.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah, that's a brilliant point. So that's similar. That's analogous to Gary Stevenson. Have you had Gary on, by the way?

[Rory Sutherland]

I haven't. He was supposed to come on in London a couple of months ago when we had last had you on.

[Unknown Guest]

I hope he's out shoe shopping instead. I'm in advertising. Meet me halfway, Gary.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah, well, there's an interesting.

[Unknown Guest]

If you want to redistribute wealth, it does help if rich people occasionally go out and buy something.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah, there's an interesting. There's an interesting debate going on about whether or not Gary Stevenson is basically thinly veiled performance art. That you've got this, the get up, the same pair of joggers, all the rest of this stuff. It is, I don't know, it must be difficult to have.

[Unknown Guest]

I think, I think he's okay. Apart from his consumption patterns, I think he's fundamental. So there are a few things where the problem with all these models is that the assumptions of the model that are necessary to simplify the model eventually come back to bite you. And looking at average wealth as if it's somehow representative of a successful mean and variance, something richer on average. The fact that for 30 fucking years in the US and the UK we presented rising property prices as a good news story. Story is monstrous. I mean, that was just the most monstrous misrepresentation of information. You don't say petrol's got, gasoline's gone up, but good news, you've got a full tank of petrol. So your car's not now more valuable. Right?

[Rory Sutherland]

Is it, is it a case of kind of a luxury belief that the sort of people who would be writing and consuming those and understanding those sorts of stories are likely to already be people who own property. So their lesson is not going to be, holy fuck, it's going to be hard to get onto the absolute true.

[Unknown Guest]

Even worse, of course, every single MP in London throughout the 70s, well, 80s, 90s, 2000s, was basically heavily invested in the property market because they got a massive perk. They got their mortgage paid on a London home. So there wasn't a single person there, with a possible exception of someone you know. Was Ken Livingston ever an mp I'm not sure he was, but apart from a few very, very principal leftists or possibly a couple of Georgists in the Conservative Party. It's a weird. By the way, it's a weird sort of philosophy because it, it's, it's both left wing and right wing. And so it has its. At the same time, Milton Friedman was a fan. So was God. I always remember, I always forget her name. I was married to Malcolm McLaren, you know, the fashion designer Vivian Westwood. She was also a Georgist. You get Richard Nixon, Winston Churchill.

[Rory Sutherland]

Wow. It has its adherence, really crosses the spectrum.

[Unknown Guest]

But what happened in the model was that Adam Smith thought there were three sources of wealth creation, which was land, capital and labor. Labor and future generations of economists thought it's too complicated having three things because it makes the maths difficult. So we'll pretend that capital and land are the same thing and they're not because capital is potentially limitless and you can create more of it. Land is effectively an artificial bottleneck. It's a rent seeking device.

[Rory Sutherland]

I'm interested whether or not you've got any insights around painkillers. Every single time that I think about a psychological effect of something that people assume has got some sort of a drop off rate, I, I know that there's some studies saying that more expensive painkillers are interpreted as being more effective. So even if.

[Unknown Guest]

Yes, no, no, no, that's under. I mean, I'm the only person who complains you can't buy expensive aspirin anymore. Because my argument is I haven't got a 30p headache, I've got a £2 50 headache. You know, I mean, by the way, I think there are a whole load of things where in the human brain the X has to be commensurate with the Y. Okay? So the reason, if you're buying a house, the reason you have to have a posho estate agent is because fundamentally if I'm spending this amount of money, I expect a certain amount of money to be spent on the act of persuasion. And it may be highly performative, but it's just a kind of idea of what's proportionate. You know, if you turned up to look at a sort of $5 million mansion outside Austin and the guy just turns up and goes, here are the keys, go and have a look yourself. If something we buy, it's a bit like the fact in women's fashion that if you spend $150 plus you've got to get a rope handle bag, right? There's a commensurate amount of bullshit necessary to accompany any activity in order for it to seem somehow natural and right. Lovely finding, by the way, from the VISA chief economist about the American south, including Texas. They look at what happens to consumption patterns when people suddenly get more disposable income. Income, okay. Typically gas prices fall. Suddenly disposable income goes up right across the board. Okay, what happens? Two things that are really different. Women's expenditure on clothing, massive spike. Men's expenditure on clothing, flatline. Okay? Because in the south, if you've got a pair of jeans and a shirt, you're fully dressed. That's it. I think that's fantastic. But I mean, Gary's point, by the way, about that thing, which is that the single representative agent model, the average model model is. Is flawed because actually one of the most interesting philosophically, okay, the perfect place to live is not somewhere where everybody's a lot poorer than you, right? Because their consumption patterns will then mean that there's nothing for you to buy. So.

[Rory Sutherland]

Standard of coffee.

[Unknown Guest]

I always had this slightly socialistic idea when I was watching Downton Abbey, okay? If I'd been the Marquess of Downton, A.B. right, those people were immensely. Well, they had been broke, but he married the Canadian, didn't he? So they were kind of rich again. There was a whole period where nearly all aristocrats had to marry Americans because it coincided with a massive fall in agricultural prices. And there was kind of. After World War I, there was kind of agriculture. Oh, do you know what it was? Partly it was refrigerated shipments of beef from Latin America and grain from Canada. Canada. So suddenly the value of agricultural goods in the UK fell off a cliff and so the aristocracy basically headed west to try and pick up an heiress. But what I always thought about those people is they obviously lived in a fuck off house, you know, Downton Abbey. But they ate food cooked by the same woman every single night. And my theory was that what I would have done had been the Marcus of Downton is I would have trebled the salaries of all my servants, okay? And I would have given them three days off a week because then an interesting Indian restaurant would have opened in the nearby village and you would have had somewhere else to eat. Okay?

[Rory Sutherland]

Oh, wow.

[Unknown Guest]

You see what I mean?

[Rory Sutherland]

Yes.

[Unknown Guest]

You know, there'd be a car dealership and there'd be a bit of other stuff to cater to these richer people then. Actually, redistribution of wealth in some ways is not altogether a bad thing because you want everybody around you to be a bit poorer than you have you look, you know, let's be honest about it, you want, you want your neighbors to be a tiny bit poorer than you. So you can show off a bit turn up.

[Rory Sutherland]

But there's also fuck off 6.2 litre Camaro. Is there not a rule supposedly about you never want to own the most expensive house in the neighborhood?

[Unknown Guest]

There is an argument that says you buy the cheapest house on the most expensive street, not the most expensive house on the cheapest street. I've also got various property rules for how to game it, which is like find out something that everybody else hates that you don't mind next to a pub. Okay. If you're thinking really long term, you might think that with car electrification being next to a busy road isn't the downside that it once would have been.

[Rory Sutherland]

It's going to get quieter, it's going.

[Unknown Guest]

To get a bit quieter and you'll worry about pollution, might diminish. But that's quite a long game. But you know, don't worry about the school district if you haven't got kids or you're not planning to have kids or there are there. And one of my complaints about the property market is there aren't mechanisms for you to look for negatives. Because actually a negative I don't care about is actually a positive positive. But no, in terms of drugs, by the way, you're getting back to the placebo effect on drugs and do they have to be expensive? Does the packaging matter? There's a serious issue here which is I don't think vaping would have taken off if you'd medicalized it. If you demanded. People went and got vaporizers on prescription and they came in sort of typical medicalized packaging. I think the fact that it was a bottom up trend with all the marketing, hullabaloo and pizzazz and packaging and flavors and you know, all the extraordinary kind of, you know, the distribution, you know, I think that contributed to the successful adoption of it. I think if you, if you'd made it medicalized, I think you would have got about a quarter of the rate of adoption. Similarly, low alcohol beer and low alcohol, no alcohol beer fascinates the fuck out of me partly because I think it's placebo beer. I think that when we drink and zero alcohol beer, we still enjoy some of the psychoactive effects of drinking alcoholic beer by the power of association.

[Rory Sutherland]

I would love to see a behavioral observational experiment go on to see what's the words per minute, how many swear words does somebody use, how much does their body language Loosen up having not ingested any alcohol, but drunk something which is supposed to masquerade as.

[Unknown Guest]

There's a bit of a theory that among regular drinkers that you drink alcohol to give you the license to behave like a drunk person. Not that it's kind of both. Do you see what I mean? It's partly that the alcohol loosens you up, but it's partly that the fact that you are drinking alcohol makes you feel you can loosen up. I've certainly experienced a weird effect which quite a lot of people I've spoken to have had the same effect, which is you go out for the evening. Typically, I take a train out of London back to Otford, as it happens, and then drive home from there. And once or twice I've been out and I've had two or three pints of zero alcohol beer, and I'm suddenly driving home from the station. I go, shit. Okay, I'm over the limit. No, no, no, no, no. I haven't had any alcohol at all. But I've had two or three of those kind of weird panic moments where I go. Because mentally, somehow I've been out for two or three beers, and yet, obviously, as far as the Breathalyzer's concerned, I'm sober as a judge.

[Rory Sutherland]

Edward Slingland wrote a about the history of alcohol. So two cool facts on it. One, drinking alcohol makes you a better lying detector, so your ability to detect deception improves.

[Unknown Guest]

That's where it comes from, because I.

[Rory Sutherland]

Heard that from somebody else, Edward Slingerland. And the second thing is that drinking reduces your ability to deceive. So you have this really wonderful effect.

[Unknown Guest]

Oh. So in vino veritas. Which is effectively that both you're a better lie detector and you're a worse liar. So this is. Now, if you think about it, the argument there might be that by suppressing certain, what you might call highly literalist parts of the brain, we actually gain powers of sort of intuition over things like lying. Because the part of the brain that processes language might. You know, this is going. Ian McGill. Have you had Ian McGilchrist? Yeah. So Ian McGilchrist would probably say. The left brain tends to have a very literary interpretation of language, but it processes much language. But metaphor or analogies are processed in the right part of the brain.

[Rory Sutherland]

A little bit broader, and it's a bit broader.

[Unknown Guest]

So one of the things that might be absolutely true of alcohol consumption is it makes you less literal, which may explain why it increases. I mean, there is that weird view of alcohol that it's, you know, that being a Human is kind of tiring. And this gives you two or three hours of knowing what it's like to be a bit of an alpha animal, right?

[Rory Sutherland]

I mean, regress back to a feral state.

[Unknown Guest]

You, you will, you know, no human is ever as happy as a cat that's found a warm place.

[Rory Sutherland]

4B is deep is about being like a cat.

[Unknown Guest]

It's you effectively start just, you know, people seem to react hugely differently in my experience. You know, some people become violent, some people, you know, but there is that element to alcohol that it probably enables you to enjoy the sheer physicality of being because it quietens down those parts.

[Rory Sutherland]

Of the brain without the awkwardness of thinking. Yeah, yeah, interesting one. Related to people being tired of being themselves. Parents are all in on all inclusive travel again. Demand for kid friendly, all inclusive resorts is up 70% luxury tailored to parental burnout.

[Unknown Guest]

So that's the all inclusive, which is basically, you have. Part of that of course is choice reduction, isn't it?

[Rory Sutherland]

I mean if you've got an Italian restaurant and an Indian restaurant and a Chinese restaurant and there's a buffet, you don't actually need to choose where you're going every single night. It's self contained.

[Unknown Guest]

The whole thing is. So I always wondered about this, which is one of the reasons I always recommend. I've got a few recommendations for holidays from my 30 years experience. One, the only generalization I'll make is that holidays where I rent a car are better than ones where I don't. Because you get serendipity, okay, now you can achieve that through walking in a city, but that business where, you know, I ended up stopping on the outskirts of Florence to recharge an electric car. And then because I had nothing to do for 20 minutes, I wandered around the corner and there was a kind of leisure center and public swimming pool. Not the kind of place you'd ever visit as a tourist in Florence. And then I walked a bit further and then my wife and I discovered this fantastic cafe which was just, just, you know, it was totally casual cafe, but it was just glorious. And it's one of those things you, you know, pleasant optimize for pleasant surprises. And the problem with having a really planned holiday is that you don't get any surprises. In fact, you tend to get negative surprises. So that's why I'm a big believer in car rental, you know, on, on holidays because you, you just stumble on things that nobody else knows or a beach that nobody else goes to and you just feel great about, about it. And also it means that if the hotel you happen to book is absolute, there's almost certainly something pretty good 10 miles away and you can just get up in the morning and go and escape. I mean, I've never booked a hotel that's absolutely shit, but I booked hotels you wouldn't want to stay in for too long. But on the other hand, there's that element, this is the contrary point, which is one of the reasons I quite often go on holiday to an island, is there's a limit to the number of things you feel obliged to do. You know, the curse of Tuscany, okay, is that within about 90 miles there are, you know, there's Siena, there's Luca, there's, there's Florence. You go, you've got to go over the mountains of the moon to see the Piero de la Francesca's and you go, hell, I just want to sit by the pool and get quietly pissed, you know. And so the great thing about islands, you know, is that, you know, they constrain the number of things you feel obliged to do do. And the second time you go back, you've already done the things you were obliged to do, so you don't get.

[Rory Sutherland]

To do the things you wanted to do.

[Unknown Guest]

So there is an element to things where, you know, actually choice, choice, limitation, presumably childcare is taken care of. One thing I've repeatedly said to the hotel industry, by the way, talking about when you said child friendly, all inclusive, and I said that, I actually said there's two Expedia in their headquarters. So I hope they listen to. Okay, you've got to get rid of that designation, adults only, okay? Because I know what it means. It means you don't allow kids, okay? But I see adults Only hotel. I go, look, perverts, perverts, okay? I don't know, I go, you know, swingers, you know, I'm quite keen on a quiet thing without too many noisy kids. But it doesn't make me think that. It makes me think I gotta spend my whole week in a gimp mask while a German dentist urinates on me. Now, I don't want to do that. That, you know, call me old fashioned, right? And so adults only is a terrible designation. I did a competition on Twitter and loads, literally 15 people came up with better alternatives to adults only.

[Rory Sutherland]

What was some of your favorite?

[Unknown Guest]

One of them was just Grown Ups. You know, hotel for Grown Ups was one brilliant suggestion. Just Grown ups and adults.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. Because if you were to call it a mature hotel.

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or you just, you know, you just go, you know, Quiet hotel. Or you just say, oh, you know, over 16s only would be fine, but adults only. I'm going, oh, no, adults only is 59. You know, I don't.

[Rory Sutherland]

Awful. Demarcation, you're right. Skims are now selling a bra with a nipple piercing in.

[Unknown Guest]

Oh, that's not really. So the bra is pierced but not the nipple.

[Rory Sutherland]

No. So it's. It's got sort of silhouette. It's got the silhouette of a piercing. So it looks. Looks like you've got a nipple piercing, but you don't.

[Unknown Guest]

I have to confess, the taps and piercing thing. I was born in 1965 on the Welsh borders. Okay, okay. I've never really got my head around that shit. No, no, I don't mind. I told my daughters they could get tattoos if they wanted to, so long as they said dad. Right. Okay.

[Rory Sutherland]

Okay.

[Unknown Guest]

That was the. That was the only thing. Yeah, the heart. A massive heart. That was allowed nothing else, of course, but that's. It's quite clever. It's a trump Ly nipple piercing. Now the only problem there is it is false promise, isn't it? Because people who are really into that.

[Rory Sutherland]

Piercing stuff are gonna be disappointed.

[Unknown Guest]

Are gonna be suddenly disappointed.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. And people who would be turned off by it are going to look at somebody who doesn't have. Doesn't have a nipple piercing.

[Unknown Guest]

So it's not gonna work. I mean, you did hear that wonderful story, did you? It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard about the problems of the rich, which is the great complaint of Caledon Klein's daughter. You never heard this?

[Rory Sutherland]

No.

[Unknown Guest]

That this is not a problem you ever anticipated about coming from a family where your parents is rich or famous, which is Calvin Klein's daughter. His great complaint was that just at the peak moment of getting romantic with a man, you were suddenly confronted with your own father's name in inch high letters. Now, I've never, you know, my wife, okay. Has never. Has never had to pull down my trousers to be confronted with Clive Whitmore written across the elastic band in huge letters. You can imagine that's a bit of a turnoff, isn't it? You know, it's slightly alarming.

[Rory Sutherland]

It doesn't set the mood. That's fucking brilliant. Ad campaigns that have cuddly animals that are anthropomorphic. Yep, here we go.

[Unknown Guest]

Buc ee's for everybody who hasn't been. It's the Texas Disneyland.

[Rory Sutherland]

But you say that ad campaigns that include a cuddly animal that talks to you are more Successful, fundamentally.

[Unknown Guest]

I've always wondered whether the theory is that the odd extreme, the extreme opposite of that was for many, many years in the uk, BMW advertising would never show people. The most you were allowed to show was the silhouette of someone driving the car.

[Rory Sutherland]

I remember thinking that, yeah, yeah, oily windscreen type thing, reflections.

[Unknown Guest]

And the argument is, what's your user imagery? Right. And the cuddly animal is a brilliant, brilliant cheat to that because user imagery is problematic. Okay. In that I'll give you an example. Okay. The average person who buys is a car from new. Let's say it's a. Yeah, Citroen. I'm probably out of date. Yeah. Okay, let's say a small car from new Volkswagen Golf. Okay. Average age of the person buying those from new is in, I think the late 50s. Quite a lot. You know, that means that might be median age actually, but certainly in the late 50s. By the way, do you know the car brand that has the lowest average age profile of any purchaser? And you're never gonna guess. Well, at one of the lowest. I need to qualify that. It's not the lowest. First, you know, Rolls Royce.

[Rory Sutherland]

Really?

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah, footballers, rich young people. Oh, of course, you see, so interestingly, interestingly, Rolls Royce has quite a young profile because if you make it rich young, you're more likely to buy a blinged up car as a rich young person than you are as a rich old person, aren't you? Well, for obvious reasons, I suspect some of them reproductive and. But the user imagery is always problematic because some of your users probably don't necessarily like your. So obviously ads for small cars do not show 59 year old men driving them or 65 year old men. They show 27 year old women, which is a tiny niche of purchases of new. Those cars. New, it's quite, it's quite a common purchase of those cars secondhand. But new, very, very few. Few. You know, you've got to be pretty, you know, you gotta be pretty rich at 20 something to buy a new car at all. And the. So, so you have this problem with user energy. Now the, you know, the typical BMW driver, what's aspirational to some people might be repellent to others. Okay, so showing people is problematic because you immediately get into questions of class and age and everything else. Now sometimes you can play that game brilliantly, as with John Smith's Beer, where you show, you know, an old bloke in the pub with his dog Tonto, you. Which is obviously not intended to be emblematic of the people who Bought the beer. But it's kind of emblematic of people who, you know, in a sense were beer connoisseurs, you know, that kind of thing. But actually, animals are a brilliant, brilliant escape from this because most people will like that. Bucky's beaver, okay. In a way that a person, even in some cases a celebrity spokesman, you know, may not be liked by everybody. It may be repellent to everybody. But animals, animals both attract attention for evolutionary reasons. We look at things that are, that have two eyes, the whole thing. In Pareidolia, we see faces and things, okay. We see faces in clouds and all that sort of stuff. And that's because we're evolved to be highly attuned to spotting not only other human faces, although that's obviously important, but actually spotting anything with a face. Okay. And you get extraordinary biomimicry, by the way. I mean, fantastic things where if, you know, if you have orchids that look like the genitalia of insects and things like that, because.

[Rory Sutherland]

Is this Sam Tatum stuff again?

[Unknown Guest]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's. It, it. That's the wonderful book, the Evolutionary Ideas.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. I mean, you, you looped me in with him four years ago, something like that, for the people he has. He came on for evolutionary ideas. People that need, that love this. Imagine an intersection between David Buss and Rory Sutherland and you've got Sam Tatum. Yeah, that was fascinating, but no, it's interesting to think about this.

[Unknown Guest]

Seems like what you're doing is you're hacking perception. It's what you might call. I never remember what it's called. There's a field of sort of philosophy which is called phenomenology, which is how humans actually perceive the world. In other words, the yawning gap between what is, is as is measured by engineers and physicists and what we feel now the simplest example of which they do in the United States. I think it's fantastic. Okay, Is the difference between the temperature and the fields like temperature. Okay. Because you can. Sometimes I wander around Phoenix, Arizona. I hate hot, humid weather, but I wander around Phoenix, Arizona. You know, at 100 degrees, I'm pretty happy. And so the fields, like temperature is much more important to my sense of well being and what I wear and where I go than the actual temperature.

[Rory Sutherland]

I mean, the place that's got the, the highest variance of within a day, intraday variance for that. It's New York. If you go to New York. Oh God, like March time.

[Unknown Guest]

You're rude about the London climate. This really pisses me off that New Yorkers are always dissing London, but actually it probably rains more in New York than it does in London. I wouldn't be surprised. But also, the city's uninhabitable for about three months of the year.

[Rory Sutherland]

Well, look, if you leave the house on the morning in March and you need a big coat, a large coat with a hoodie and underneath, and by midday you wish that you put shorts on, I know it's unacceptable. Rory Sutherland, ladies and gentlemen.

[Unknown Guest]

Absolute joy.

[Rory Sutherland]

Rory, I love you to bits. Thank you for being here.

[Unknown Guest]

What a pleasure. What have you got any of your. We hadn't had any product placement. We've done a Good job for BUC EE's.

[Rory Sutherland]

Yeah. Rory, come on, do us a little ad. Do a quick ad to camera for Newtonic.

[Unknown Guest]

Well, I was trying. I was trying to start the interesting precedent where guests on podcasts got to advertise their own stuff because. Because I thought they've done all the traveling, you know. Why is it the host.

[Rory Sutherland]

What do you want to advertise?

[Unknown Guest]

Well, why don't I say Bussies Bites in Westrum, which I think is Kent's finest Jamaican Italian cafe.

[Rory Sutherland]

There we go.

[Unknown Guest]

So there we go. I'll advertise them. I always think they're wonderful.

[Rory Sutherland]

Bussies Bites.

[Unknown Guest]

This actually is extraordinarily drinkable, and it may well be, you know, a component of it, I'm sure, is the placebo, but it does seem to be. To be actually efficacious.

[Rory Sutherland]

That's what we wanted to hear. Seems to be efficacious. Exactly what I needed.