Interview with Rory Sutherland: Emotional Efficiency & Reframes

Interview Transcript —

MK: You’re listening to an audio edition of ZINE, the Webby-Awarding Winning publication making sense of our current cultural moment, relationship with tech and one another, and what may come next.

My name is Matt Klein and I am a digital anthropologist, cultural theorist, strategist and writer, researching overlooked social shifts. I’m also currently the Head of Global Foresight at Reddit.

If we’re to author our preferred futures, we first have to be proficient in our zeitgeist. In other words, we can’t write culture if we first don’t know how to read it.

And today’s chat is an attempt at exactly that.

Celebrated as “one of the leading minds in the world of branding” by NPR and "the don of modern advertising" by The Times, Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy U.K. He’s also the founder of their behavioral science practice. Rory writes the Spectator's 'Wiki Man' column and presents series for BBC Radio 4.

His TED talks about reframing perspective, and re-prioritizing details have racked up millions and millions and millions of views. He’s also the author of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, which was published in 2019, and is an absolute must read.

Rory decodes human behavior and blends scientific research, absurdly entertaining storytelling, and deep psychological insight, which makes him, in my eyes, one of the most important and influential thinkers of our time.

In college, I first came across Rory’s talk, “Life lessons from an ad man” where he makes it clear that advertising simply adds value to a product by changing our perception, not the product itself. Yet such reframes can be applied to all elements of our life. He let me see that marketing isn’t simply about slinging crap that people don’t need, but rather is a practice in helping solutions be adopted by those who need them most.

Rory discusses how the Eurostar could have spent its budget not trying to increase the speed and decrease the time of its trains, but instead could have spent only a fraction of its budget on models and alcohol, and passengers would request the train ride to be longer, not shorter.

These are examples of simply reframing existing problems and solutions, recognizing innate value. In my eyes, strategies to dial up humanity and empathy, and resist the urge to reinvent wheels and spend unnecessarily.

And it’s these stories that wanted me to start working in communications and strategy.

I’ve been following Rory ever since, and find that his best, most insight interviews are the ones where he just goes off. I’m excited that this, was one of those experiences.

As a significant personal influence, here is my chat with Rory Sutherland.

MK: I am endlessly fascinated in making sense of culture. More specifically, what's overlooked? What are people not paying enough attention to? And I cannot think of a better person to help answer those questions than yourself. I have a laundry list of questions, but maybe we'll, we'll start simple. What's on your mind?

What are you thinking about? What's exciting you? What's worrying you? What are you thinking about in culture right now?

RS: I think that question, by the way, is the right question to ask, which is — what we're talking about quite often is the product of a kind of media feedback loop where effectively every news publication and to some extent social media, but actually I think social media is less guilty in some ways than the mainstream media is — effectively decides what's important based on what other people are reporting.

And it's been a facet of mainstream media for ages where there's this kind of effective echo chamber where people in the newspapers watch 24-hour TV n