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 news, and people on 24-hour TV news read the newspapers to decide what's actually worth talking about. And I think it leads to this complete imbalance where certain things get discussed far too much or ignored for far too long, and other things get ludicrously over-publicized. And this leads to the problem, because I was just writing about this actually — Daniel Kahneman's observation, he died last month, great man, and his, one of his most famous sort of dictums was: “Nothing is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” In other words, what determines our sense of priority and our sense of importance is often our attention. And our attention, although not beyond our control, is often quite arbitrary. And as a consequence, I think, what happens is because things garner people's attention, they then deem those things to be important. They talk about them more, which then spreads the degree of attention they get elsewhere. And, you know, I'm not necessarily, well, I am actually supporting those people who, you know, there are various scientists who said, look, we give far too little attention to the risk of a meteorite strike or a really major earthquake. There are certain potential catastrophes against which possibility we spend almost nothing, not because they're unimportant, they're monumentally important, indeed they could be cataclysmic sort of extinction events, but because they're unlikely. And I think those people had a point, which is that, look, at the very least, you know, the odds of a meteorite strike are relatively low, we don't seem to have had a real, really biggie since the dinosaurs got eliminated, unless you include, what is it, the Tunguska event in northern Siberia. But nonetheless, the consequences of such an event would be so immense that we should at least give it, you know, what you might call a few million dollars a year of scientific attention. And the same thing, by the way, happens in business where certain trends become absurdly over-dominant. I would argue that offshoring and globalization and actually, also, the replacement of human beings with technology have become almost just self-replicating activities where you know, you don't even have to — nobody even makes the contrary case — they've just been assumed to be true. You manufacture something in a low cost economy. You optimize around a single supply chain with whichever suppliers cheapest, regardless of the risk that might pose to resilience. And there were certain business behaviors, which achieve that kind of weird escape velocity, where if you suggest doing them, no one — investing enormously in AI — no one even makes the contrary case. It's become so fashionable that effectively everybody just nods along with you for fear of looking stupid, and it's it — I don't know if you know Chris Williamson well, you might have met him in Austin for all I know, but he talks a lot about the Abilene paradox or the Abilene Effect where people don't really believe things they just pretend to believe them in order to fit in and go along with what they think is prevailing opinion and at moments of sublime absurdity. With the Abilene Paradox, you literally get a group of people agreeing to do something, which no one individual in the group wants to do at all, simply because they've misread the room and they assume that everybody else is in favor of what's being proposed and that to raise a doubt would make them look awkward and, you know, feel silly and therefore people stay quiet. One of the things I think we don't talk about nearly enough is the importance of — particularly post-COVI — the importance of the widespread adoption of video conferencing, indeed of technologies such that we are using now, because I think it's actually very, very important and should have major economic effects. And I also think many, many businesses and many organizations have the opportunity to reinvent themselves around this technology. Everything from remote medicine to remote psychology to remote financial advice. And I think the technology is much, much more important than people give it credit for. The reason it doesn't get much attention is because the technology itself is old. I mean, you know, you had video conferencing on Star Trek. Okay. You had technology like that on Star Trek. You then had Skype in the late nineties. There's nothing remotely new about it as a technological possibility. What is new about it is the widespread adoption and normalization of it. And many, many technologies only really deliver the goods 20 to 30 years after they're invented. That was true of electrification of manufacturing. True of, actually, the internal combustion engine. You might argue the electric car — the electric car, as distinct from the electric motor, which was being pioneered in the Edwardian era, you know, has only finally come into its own with the invention of better batteries more than a hundred years later. The fact that a technology is not new does not make it unimportant, but it does make it much less talk-able, simply because you feel stupid talking about something that's been kicking around for 50 years. And there used to be a comedy sketch in the U.K. called The Fast Show. And there was a character there who was — it was a kind of character sketch of, “Isn't X brilliant?” And he'd go around going, “Electricity, brilliant!” Right? And he'd get excited about things that it was, somehow socially ridiculous to be excited about. And you know, if I go, “Isn't video conferencing fantastic?” I look like a bit of a t**t. By the way, that's the British use of the word, which is not very offensive. I will make that point to American listeners — in Britain the T-word is a slightly strengthened word of the word ‘Twit.' It's not particularly rude. But you feel a bit of an idiot if you get excited about a 20 year old technology. It's rather like getting excited about running water. Now, the fact that running water is new doesn't mean it's not important. I had a kind of early epiphany, bizarrely, with video conferencing before the pandemic. Actually, in the summer, in the
