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Intro

19 Of Human Behaviour's Weirdest Quirks -

Rory Sutherland | Modern Wisdom Podcast
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the gap between using a Japanese toilet and using a conventional toilet is roughly equivalent to the
gap between using a conventional toilet and shooting in a bucket in prison okay right okay that's
roughly speaking with you know the uh the yawning sense of kind of reversion you feel when you
go from using a Japanese toilet to a conventional one it's barbaric it's ridiculous nearly just stop I'm
drinking liquid death are you familiar with this the can yes water brand tasty water is it sparkling
water
00:33
off or still I've never had it this is sparkling so the black can sparkling and the white can is still ah I
watched a very interesting advertisement uh come analysis uh that the founder put across where he
explained The Branding strategy behind liquid death calling something literally the opposite of
what it is having a very sort of unique brand position it's got this skull on it there yes um what's
your thoughts on liquid death uh what's interesting about it is that um uh funnel enough a uh
something
01:03
rather weird as I pretty much dislike drinking water um from a tap or any other shape or form
weirdly I quite like drinking water from a can and I have no idea why that is so I've started buying
drinking far more water than I did before now you can get it in canned form rather than bottle form
actually it's not quite true I'm pretty happy drinking it from glass but I don't like drinking water
from plastic bottles do you know what my favorite brand of sparkling water is if you had Topo
Chico before
01:35
no you'll have to okay you'll have to enlighten me on that so it's Mexican sparkling water and there
is a uh carbonation grade and I think uh a San pellegrinos maybe at a 90 ish on this particular
spectrum and Topo Chico's 140. so this thing just feel it's like a fizzy battery it just takes a face it's
the same new carbonated yeah something enough the Germans have various sort of often fairly
cheaps brutal glasses which are again insanely carbonated which I've always really liked
02:10
um and um uh it's uh it's generally quite interesting there's a very good water with strong enough uh
you only seem to get now at um Crown Plaza Hotels which is a Welsh water uh which I like very
much as well which I think is called it's called something like Cambrian but it isn't called that um
but I think the idea I mean effectively uh The Branding will have totally affect the experience
because um uh you know packaging affects taste is it true it's a conspicuous consumption do you
think for a for an
02:47
age where alcohol is less cool than it might be it might have used to be yeah I mean I I like the
sheer perversity of saying call something the opposite of of what it really is um there was obviously
a brand called Death cigarettes back in the day in the early 90s which was from the ethical tobacco
company and they said we're going to sell cigarettes we're just not going to lie about them and that
was similar uh that that had a kind of black packaging and a skull on it um and um uh no I mean
what what is
03:21
undoubtedly true is you can um I mean you know I mean all alcoholic drinks Brands know this you
know that you're drinking imagery as much as you're drinking a drink and um uh you know the
associations are as powerful as the reality essentially and I hadn't tried liquid death I'll be intrigued
to know what what effect it has on me good quality what's this this is a 500 mil as well which is a
nice sized can I'll tell you what else I've been obsessed with recently have you watched first class
airplane cabin
03:55
reviews on YouTube yeah I've watched quite a few of those why are they so compelling what is it
about them I don't know um it's um uh it's kind of interesting because in a way when you think
about it an experience in an airline's first class is other than the food it's not all that fantastic is it
because you're still confined to a very small space you have to share a toilet okay you know uh
you've got one seat to sit in you can't actually you know I mean some of the more elaborate cabins
now you have your
04:32
own desk in a swivel chair and you just knows what else admittedly um but it is surprisingly and
weirdly interesting I quite like the idea they have an Emirates which is if you have a cabin in the
middle you have these windows which appear to be the windows of a plane but are in fact a video
reproduction of what you would see if you're looking out of a window no way I haven't done that
yet that is interesting implications for um uh you know Airline design ultimately it's an interesting
question you know it
05:05
must be presumably cheaper and safer to build aircraft without windows but you have to have
Windows to stop passengers going nuts I did see once the most extraordinary thing which was a it
was obviously a design project rather than a serious proposal but it was effectively an airliner where
uh you know more or less half the inside of the fuselage was video screens uh with a you know
effectively showing a picture of the exterior so you almost felt you were traveling in a transparent
plane wow which would almost magically weird I
05:39
suspect that's cool that would make for so I I mean it does it does one of the interesting things
actually is that 4K for quite a lot of quite a lot of functions 4K TV isn't that much better than HD
um HD I think most people can tell the difference between HD and standard definition certainly if
you're in the United States where the standard definition picture which had fewer lines than the
European picture was particularly crap actually I mean American standard definition television um
was rubbish even compared to European
06:13
Standard definition TV and HD is you know markedly better and clearer particularly when he was
playing something like text or detail and that kind and 4K is quite interesting because it doesn't
really make much difference if you're watching let's say soccer or football because when you've got
a lot of movement going on a I think there's a lot of blurring anyway but actually your brain's doing
most of the work your brain's effectively assembling the um the image from what information it
06:44
has when things are moving very fast so if you notice whenever you go into a TV store and they
have 4K or in extreme cases 8K screens on display it'll always show like a static close-up picture of
an ant next to a blob of water or a flower it's a jellyfish slowly moving in slow very very slowly
moving or a night sky over um you know imaginary remember do you remember when Joe Rogan
first moved to Austin and he went into a studio that was this big red thing it kind of looked like the
inside of a flashlight and the first few episodes
07:18
that he released in this new studio everybody was unhappy about it they couldn't tell what was
wrong but they said this is awful it looks terrible and I can't work out why it's because he was
filming it in 60 frames per second they'd moved there and they'd put it in 60 FPS instead of I think
25 and this I learned this because this um YouTube channel did a great breakdown of what was
wrong with it and then they fixed it and switched it back to 25 or 30 perhaps and the issue is that
your eyes
07:43
naturally see blur so if you hold your hand up in front of your face and you wiggle it left and right
you actually do see this blur you don't see every single frame of where your hand is no and what
that means is that 60 FPS is displaying a type of video that your eyes are not used to seeing in the
real world which is what makes it feel so artificial are interesting interesting so um I wonder why I
said nearly all TV has broadcasted 25 is it 25 yeah 24.
08:15
ah interesting yeah that that's that's fascinating obviously you have you know things like the the
mag uh the Apple Retina screen where there's no point in making a screen that's uh any finer since
we wouldn't be able to tell the difference um what is interesting about 4K is that it does get close
enough if you if you've got a reasonably slow moving image and there is that interesting you know
hypothetical debate um uh which is you know ultimately either through virtual reality or just
through really good
08:48
streams is there a perfectly acceptable form of virtual tourism now I must admit I'm glad you're a
YouTube fanatic the thing I always recommend people do is subscribe to YouTube premium oh
Rory yeah you are among friends here I'm also we must be on a tiny matter of few people because
I've got a friend at YouTube and I keep asking how many people actually subscribe to premium and
it's a pretty vanishingly small number I did it I think more or less by accident and it was practically
the best thing
09:18
that ever happened to me in life and we're reaching a point I think where the volume of content on
YouTube has become so vast that it's only well maybe maybe it's already happened but it's only a
smidgen away from becoming effectively Wikipedia with video in other words it becomes so
comprehensive uh this extraordinary kind of um assemblage of virtually every conceivable um you
know uh subject treated to on video that you'll reach a point where effectively there'll be a film on
everything yep
09:59
um and and the two things I really recommend with YouTube is I said first of all um watch it on
your Telly you know because you know we all have this very early memory of YouTube where it
was all you know handheld slightly pixelated all a bit crap and you there was no party watching it
on TV because it would have you know effectively pixelated and actually you know the vast
majority of the content actually is uh if not professionally produced it's you know sort of broadcast
quality and I do spend occasionally one of the things I really
10:32
love is really really slow TV so you get these 4K walking tours of Cebu in the Philippines for
example you know that was one of them and it's just someone with a 4k camera wandering around
Cebu for an hour and a half and it's surprisingly worthwhile in fact um you know that obviously um
uh that's one of one of my favorite ones is virtual rail fan which is basically an American YouTube
channel often live webcams for train spotters and when I'm working at home I leave this on in the
background and effectively you just get
11:07
a tiny amount of battery if it's in a station yeah you'll get a tiny amount of background noise or cars
driving past and then you get on with your work and then about every half hour a train goes past
and you kind of take a break to to stare at it for the seven minutes it takes to pass the screen there's a
there's a guy that does City tours walking at night and uh the the a lot of the time in rain and there's
something about that which is oddly very very therapeutic I saw an article that I
11:38
wanted to bring up actually um 50 of Americans watch content with subtitles most of the time 55
say it is harder to hear dialogue in shows and movies than it used to be nearly three and four
respondents claimed muddled audio from their content and 61 use them when accents are difficult
to understand 29 prefer to watch their content at home quietly leaving subtitles on so as not to
disturb their roommates or family and 27 of Americans rely on subtitles to keep them focused on
what they are watching while juggling the distractions
12:09
of multiple screens children pets work the news and more so interestingly if you go back to the
1970s um uh not that they broadcast many of them but Americans would impose subtitles on
Australian content in particular which seems you know I think it's if I've got this right prisoners
prisoner cell blockage was the first Australian sort of soap if you can call it that uh to be broadcast
in the US without subtitles well there's a you'll always see this even in the UK especially for us
because we have such a panoply of different
12:47
accents that you could get stuck into what I always find hilarious is when they hard code Subs onto
certain people perhaps in a documentary or whatever the policeman there's no subtitles but the
criminal with a very strong scouse accent he's he's been forced to have this because they've just
made a decision like look no one is going to be able the cohort of people that can understand this
man is like five so we're just going to put them on the screen for everybody so funny enough it's
another of my friends who also has
13:14
YouTube premium who is one of the first to point out that actually subtitles um have uh uh are
generally preferable in all kinds of ways and is it and of course Brits got used to it probably with
scandi drama unless you're into French Art House or something it was probably scandi drama that
really got Brits into subtitle watching it's it does force you to pay attention it stops you dozing off
because you have to look at the screen to know what's going on um I find the diction and
enunciation of a lot of modern actors pretty poor you
13:50
know I mean you one thing you say with your life about Kerry Grant but he didn't exactly Mumble
you know what I mean I mean you know it was okay it was a bizarre hybrid of a bristolian English
and American accent you know we can probably all accept that by the way one thing that Brits are
very talented at is linguists and it's through necessity is being able to understand English spoken in a
very wide range of accidents so we're always said to be very bad at languages well yes and no I
mean one thing we're pretty good at is being
14:20
being able to understand more or less anybody speaking English and it's partly our own Regional
actions give us practice the one you'll love if you're from the Northeast is that the Elder Stevenson
inventor of the steam locomotive had such a strong Geordie accent that when he presented the
locomotive in London he was accompanied by an interpreter no no um there was James and there
was the Elder one the father I mean I think I think the father said you know the son to a lot of fancy
schools was presumably he'd
14:55
made enough money by then but the Elder Stevenson would apparently go to London for
demonstrated to go right yeah I agree but you know the bastard what Mr Stevens wants to say is
that the addition of a boiler to the locomotive will facilitate that right it's just absolutely fantastic
wow very interesting actually when you think about it that most I was making a joke suggestion for
the electric car the other day which is to say that the actual actually the internal combustion engine
is unnatural and evil because
15:29
it's the only form of Motive Power not invented in the UK uh uh yes so the diesel and the petrol
engine are basically Continental inventions pretty much everything else electric motor probably
Faraday Sterling engine steam engine watt Etc and what's quite interesting is actually that um and
so many of these things were kind of invented I mean what being one obvious case Faraday himself
to a degree although he was he became an assistant to Andrew David but they're actually
uneducated people which is kind of
16:01
interesting um you know they were tinkerers and Fiddlers in you know and they had access to the
right tinkering equipment have you read Winston Churchill's Ministry of ungentlemanly warfare
I've heard of it but tell me more this is if I could give you a single book that I think is the most Rory
book that I've read over the last 12 months this would be it so um in the build up to the beginning of
World War II a bunch of bigwigs in the UK government realized that war seems to be afoot and
they realize that we are woefully
16:37
unprepared to be able to fight a war with this level of brutality and the reason that he calls it
ungentlemanly Warfare is that there was a point where uh guerrilla warfare uh sabotage of key
Bridges and and stuff was seen as being such an uncouth military strategy that a British military
General was actually quoted as saying if this is what it takes to win the war I'm prepared to lose he
basically saw that he had this sort of stiff upper lip type of discipline with regards to the way it's
absolutely okay to fight combatants but
17:11
to crap people's General quality or it rather sort of crop burning and all that would be too much so
what they did the reason that the tinkerer thing got me onto this was that he they try and create this
web of miscreants basically so this um garage inventor who'd created a three stories high Caravan
that was only able to go across certain roads because of the bridge clearance he needed he made the
world's first Limpet mine so the Limpet mine that was deposited into a sea and would then attach
with a magnet and would then blow
17:46
up a U-boat and stuff and the way that they did it was so cottage industry this is why you love it so
for instance they needed to find a primer that would dissolve at the exact right rate and the solution
that they came up to having gone through everything was aniseed seed balls so the aniseed sweets
that you would have and the reason they needed that they needed something to separate out the two
electrical contacts so it wouldn't fire too quickly it wouldn't fire too slowly and they tried everything
they also tried the reality
18:14
ball was perfect was it because in salt water it would be what sort of a number of minutes yep 30 30
minutes exactly let's say for this particular type so and then they wrapped it they wrapped the entire
thing to make sure that this aniseed ball didn't start to dissolve too quickly in condoms and I can't
remember where it was that they were doing this it was maybe in let's say it was in like Sussex or
something like that uh some little village in Sussex and the guy that wrote the book says it's unclear
whether or not there was an
18:41
increase in the number of children born nine months later after this the town of Sussex noticed that
every single because they were trying to do it subversively they needed to go into Little Village
stores and buy but yeah that's that's fantastic and the the tinkering thing makes a lot of sense as well
but legitimate wolf setting is interesting because uh one of my sort of favorite characters I think I'm
fairly sure it was Admiral Coburn uh who almost started the war of 1812 in the United States and uh
he was uh part of the
19:13
group which um along with us you know a bunch of Canadians as well who burned the White
House Down which is why it's the White House to cover the smoke damage and so on oh it wasn't
the white house before I I I've got a very good idea that was painted white thereafter um because of
smoke damage but I have to double check on this but he was certainly the guy who burnt the Senate
how the Senate and the capital down um in in this war of 1812 and um he was a kind of libertarian
military man who was absolutely an assistant that you could
19:49
you could damage National Property because it was uh you know the property of the seditious
Yankee state but you must not damage private property and he only made one exception there was a
newspaper that was very rude about him and I think he just broke into the newspaper and destroyed
all their letter K's so they couldn't write about him but his troops were under strict instructions you
know Town Halls that's fine you can burn those down but if it's private property you don't touch it
which is kind of quite interesting why
20:20
do you think um you mentioned earlier on about VR why do you think that vr's not necessarily
taken off mainstream adoption the way that some people might have predicted well there's also a
strange one which is why we have why we don't use computers wearing goggles as well I mean just
regardless of any 3dness even in 2D you could presumably have a fantastic and enormous screen as
an interface you know an interface which possibly had you know but I mean okay we need to see
the keyboard I guess would
20:53
touch typists be better off but but it always strikes me a strange that just watching a film with using
goggles which of course you can do on Oculus device or meta devices now um uh isn't more
popular because it's a very cheap way of getting a huge screen in a way um and okay some of it
seems to be sort of slight feelings of vertigo or sickness and I'm not sure they've actually cracked
that there are certainly a large number of cases where I wouldn't use it so I'd probably feel pretty
comfortable using
21:27
VR goggles on a plane but not on a train it was on a train I'd be convinced that either someone was
going to Nick my briefcase or that I might be stabbed from the high you know that you'd actually
just you know if you think if you think about it I mean the whole thing is very interesting on the
headphones question because um I bought before Christmas as a pure experiment these bone
conducting headphones uh which you don't wear over your area I I can't wear in-ear headphones I I
genuinely whether it's the shape of my
22:00
ears just age habits it just straight to me is completely bizarre you know uh and I've I've struggled
with in-ear headphones and I've bought them and I've tried different sizes of the sort of Dutch plug
device and so on I you know but I can't make them work and also I'm a plane for example I'm
terrified they'll just fall out get trapped in the seat mechanism and you know the whole thing will be
a disaster and so I'm always a big fan of over-the-air headphones and noise canceling headphones
22:29
um which worked for me very well as you can see um but these bone conducting things are
interesting because they don't actually cover your ears at all and so your ability to hear things in the
outer world is well it's not completely unimpeded because obviously you have a lot of noise coming
from something else but they were they're intended for joggers but actually they're also brilliant for
old people with hearing loss because the sound goes straight to your effectively straight into your
cheekbones and so if your ears have
22:59
become generally damaged through gen you know what you might call the subtle I was at the Anvil
and the Stirrup and so forth if they've become a bit clogged up and less flexible it bypasses that part
of your ear which has been damaged and kind of goes straight into sensation now my experience
with burnt conducting headphones um and I think which magazines review kind of bears this out is
that for music it's a bit [ __ ] still I mean I have to say it's not brilliant Fidelity is just not there it's
missing something I mean you can
23:38
hear it hear all the lyrics you can enjoy it to an extent but it it doesn't really do it but for spoken
content particularly podcasts I'd say it's absolutely brilliant you know I find it um because one of the
things is a you can walk around wearing these things for ages because they just hook over your ears
okay and then there's a little thing which makes very mild pressure against your cheek so um and
for answering phone calls having a phone call you can forget you're wearing these things now that's
not true
24:10
of over-the-ear headphones where your ears will overheat and you also have that mild sense of
disorientation yeah I'm I'm I do see young people walking around with um noise canceling
headphones or as I call them to the fury my wife canceling headphones um but but I you know I see
people walking around I couldn't do it myself I think because I'd feel some sort of loss of almost a
lot of balance in other words they're too immersive in that sense so these bone conducting things are
definitely part of the solution you know
24:45
if you wanted to just wander around London listening to a podcast without getting hit by a van um I
have to say that pretty good idea and actually what's a bit tragic is of course because because of that
whole thing of traffic and awareness they're being marketed to Young joggers when I would say that
50 of the market is actually people over 50.
25:06
yeah yeah you know whose hearing just isn't quite so good am I making this up or about 20 years
ago was there a brand of Lollipop that was released for kids that came attached to something that
looked a lot like the base of a electric toothbrush and it would play a song while you sucked on the
Lollipop by going through the lollipop in terms of vibration I swear that I'm not making this up in
my mind if it's not the case though imagine this let's say that you need to get kids to brush their
teeth and they need to
25:36
use an electric toothbrush there must be a way that you could induct a song as opposed to just the
vibrations of the actual toothbrush through the mouth of the child so that they would actually enjoy
the one minute and 20 seconds or however long a infant needs to brush it I think in two two minutes
I think might be the optimal time for an electric toothbrush yes maybe they could you know dance
around while they're listening to it I don't know that seems like a potentially cool solution if you
could somehow blend both
26:06
of these Technologies together because then they must be very closely linked because when you
think about it when you are cleaning your teeth particularly with an electric toothbrush it is
impossible to hear anything on the radio anything that's being said to you yeah so in other words
you know the vibration must be effectively drowning out all use of your ears yes I mean I I love I
love the Japanese Road organ which you probably know of which is a series of kind of um
corrugated strips on the road oh and the idea is
26:38
exactly if you drive at the legal speed it plays a nice tune and if you drive too quickly presumably
it's absolutely awful so if you imagine lots of uh those of you who know the southwestern quadrant
of the M23 M25 which is this most appalling stretch of ribbed concrete still which which was never
tar backed and where you have to drive along suddenly enough that actually has a rather negative
rather negative effect because the vibration is less unpleasant the faster you go really Welly it's just
to make that just
27:11
to make that stretch of the M25 tolerable it's a bit around Cobham yeah but the Japanese one is quite
sensible because it's it's various little different vibrations which plays a cutie Little tune in terms of
your tire knives it provide at the tune only sounds only good if you're traveling at the legal speed
have you heard about this new jet that's going to come and basically replace what Concord would
have been so a transatlantic supersonic jet that's going to get people across from New York to
London in
27:40
no time at all it's an interesting one isn't it I mean it's still by the way there are still weird problems
they're always struck me with supersonic travel um one of which is that unless you can actually
make it work across land and on a wide variety of routes um it isn't that big a time saving to any one
given individual you know unless you you know unless you cross the Atlantic you know practically
weekly um so unless you can actually create a network of SuperSonic Jets rather than just one route
but the other thing that
28:21
always strikes me is fundamentally flawed with the idea is the eastbound leg because everybody
goes Concord absolutely marvelous used to wake up in New York before you taken off in London
which was true you could leave London in at 10 o'clock and you'd basically arrive in New York at
something like 8 45 in time for breakfast yeah Phil Collins has once played Live Aid in the UK and
then flew to the US and played the same time slot I think you're right I think I think that's right yeah
that would have been yeah
28:53
and the interesting thing there though is that eastbound it really doesn't work because the best way
to there are only I think there are only about three or four day flights between New York and
London the airlines don't like them because you have a plane sitting on the tarmac overnight not
making any money okay so the airlines really don't like day flights I think they just do it out of
necessity with what you might call the last flight of the day to land um and um the interesting
problem is that if you think about it I think
29:26
concord's return flights let me hear this ride I got a vague idea there was one which where you left
at about nine in the morning and and it landed at about five and I might have the idea there was
another that landed that went at 11 in the morning with the one that went at seven in the morning
there were two flights that used to come in I always remember there was one around about sort of
five five o'clock five thirty six it would land in Heathrow and you'd hear it coming over London but
that's a singularly useless return
29:59
Journey because hey you've got to have a totally pointless night in the hotel where you get up really
early and have to get to JFK by I don't have seven something or other right um and um and then
then effectively you you lose a complete day while you're awake flying back and uh most people I
would have thought for the return leg would have preferred to have left the evening before on a 10
o'clock flight and woken up the following morning in London yeah especially if you're not staying
in London once you arrive there if you're
30:32
going on somewhere from London you're going to have to probably get it exactly yeah yeah so so
the the your absolutely right so the um uh the uh the um what were you saying the onward flight
okay you know you might have missed the last flight to Milan or whatever it might have been but
into that so there are some it always strikes me that everybody always bigged up the glories of
Concord going east to west which seemed to me fairly I agree is there's something rather wonderful
about leaving London in
31:02
the morning and having a full day in New York um uh but at the same time I suppose you can still
do I suppose you can still you can still kind of leave London fairly early and get into New York at
what would it be noon didn't they need to uh reinforce runways wasn't there an issue with runways
that the tires were sinking into them because of the pace that or the the weight perhaps it was a it
was a very high landing speed if I'm right I'm fairly sure that it landed at a much faster speed than
most other planes did
31:37
yeah I was talking to a friend who was a uh he was doing civil engineering at Uni and he was telling
me about uh the project was remapping newcastle's International Airport and one of the things that
they needed to do is you need to your your um planes that are allowed to land are limited by width
length uh density of the tarmac and concrete underneath there's a whole bunch of things that
actually restrict the type of planes that are able to land so I imagine that somewhere at Heathrow
there must still
32:06
be a Concord compatible but slightly aged Runway perhaps I think I think the main Runway at
Heathrow would probably be reinforced to that level given the volume of traffic it takes yes um I
know that the the space shuttle had um obviously a number of emergency runways around the world
uh where it could land and you also get this slightly weird thing where you get freakishly long
runways where you don't expect them in places like I think Morgan which is new key airport has an
incredibly long Runway because it was originally a
32:42
military aircraft airport the runways so the rumble is incredibly long and so I know the space shuttle
had to have this various kind of there was this worldwide network of places it could land in an
emergency it never actually I don't think it ever took advantage of any of them um because with the
space shuttle when things went wrong they went really wrong yes the emergency landing is not the
biggest yeah this was never never an issue yes um but no I mean I mean the other thing the other
thing in a sense is that
33:19
um the time saving is not quite as pronounced with um supersonic flight as you might hope and it
doesn't work either if there's no reliable way of getting to the airport on time and if if JFK doesn't
build a train to the airport you basically have to leave to you know two and a half hours before your
flight to be confident of getting there okay that's one problem and then the amount of time now
obviously with the Concord they reduce the amount of time you had to spend [ __ ] around at the
airport
33:48
to some degree and the amount of time you had to spend [ __ ] around at arrivals I know I don't
think you went through the standard U.S immigration procedure because imagine how maddening
that would be to go on the Concorde for you know and pay a fortune to go and then three detained
in an immigration queue for two hours so they did these cut down other parts of the journey as well
as the parts in flight um but I mean you know that the the pain of getting to an airport really adds
three hours to the beginning of any
34:18
long-haul flight unless you live spectacularly close to Heathrow and you're happy really dosing it
tell you what um have you ever done the journey to America through Dublin where you immigrate
into America in Ireland well I've done I've done the equivalent which was the which still is actually
the British Airways right from London City where you land in Shannon to refuel you clear
immigration in Shannon and then you do an unborn slide uh it's west coast of Ireland it's actually
very beautiful I mean it's
34:48
unbelievably and it's you you come in right next to the River Shannon and it's unbelievably green
and lovely the reason is that the 757 couldn't take off from London city with a completely full fuel
load and so what they did is they combined if if you like they made a virtue out of necessity which
is they said okay well take off with a partial fuel load it was business class only seating um um uh
there's one slide today I think well they may have killed it under covid London city and then you
you landed in
35:24
Shannon while they're refueling the plane or rather topping the the plane up with fuel to the full
load in Shannon you then clear U.S immigration which you can do in Dublin Shannon and knock
and if you know where else and then then when when you arrive in New York you basically walk
straight out it's an internal flight yeah yeah um what do you think about chat GPT and how it's
going to impact advertising and the Behavioral Science World foreign at some level it's it is
unbelievably impressive okay
36:03
in that it kind of passes a sort of Turing test doesn't it in that you wouldn't know it wasn't written by
a human and you know in some of its things like you know mimicking other writers and so on it
you know it's not fabulous but it doesn't do an atrocious job by any means you know Bob Dylan
song lyrics or PG Woodhouse or whatever else you try and get it to um emulate but um uh no how
would I describe it I one alarming facet it had which is that um a colleague of mine in New York
called Chris Graves and he's made a big
36:43
scene about this and Linkedin he asked it to explain a couple of cognitive biases in the social
science literature uh around human behavior and chat GPT came up with an extremely good and
intelligent description of what these biases are and he said well that's handy you seem to know a lot
about this please can you cite academic sources this has really got really weird it made up academic
papers that don't exist it just took a few academics to some of whom had published in the field and
some of whom hadn't
37:20
and it's somehow instead of saying okay here are the reliable sources from which I derived my
knowledge of uh you know human psychological biases it just said okay what what do citations
look like what what do um academic references look like um I will create a plausible version of
these and in the process it effectively invented completely non-existent academic papers which
which is when you think about it is really weird what do you think it's doing so but cheating I think
I think it's you know it's essentially suggests that it
37:57
doesn't know what the truth is uh in a funny kind of way and it merely goes how can I say this in a
way that looks plausible I mean that I mean because I mean you know two or three of the academic
excited in these papers which they'd never written um were actually social science academics in one
case it was a bit weird because the person seemed to be an expert on magnetic resonance nothing to
do with social science at all but it's not safe it's interesting and to use it as a curiosity it seems
38:31
absolutely fair but equally it's not totally safe I read an article that was very interesting and said that
the prediction this particular author's prediction was that chat GPT will become the biggest search
engine in the world because what you're doing when you go to Google is you're looking for an
existing article to be discovered by Google that will give you an answer to the question that you're
posing whereas what you do when you go to chat GPT is to just get the answer directly so you say I
want to
38:59
make a Manhattan cocktail and Google would bring you up 400 million different results from blog
blogs explaining what a Manhattan cocktail is whereas you type in the actual query to chat GPT
now one of the problems here is that if there are biases if there are some sort of predisposition if it's
been trained on a particular type of language you're going to potentially impact because there's no
crowdsourcing right it just gives you a single answer uh so yeah that's a concern as well yeah I
mean that you know well you know
39:33
it's very heavily reliant on Wikipedia and I personally found Wikipedia pretty okay but a lot of
people accused of political bias um I mean it was interesting in a sense in that um I didn't write my
own Wikipedia page someone else did um but uh for various reasons I mean uh it was very very
difficult getting a Wikipedia page because once you work in advertising there are a load of people
who basically assume that anybody working in advertising is doing this for reasons of self-publicity
and so people who have no idea who I was they were I
40:11
think Chinese or Japanese uh or something of that kind well you know somebody wrote a page for
me and then it kept getting deleted and the person will go this just looks like advertising to me well
and that was partly because I work in advertising so very obviously um and it um it and you know
you can argue that we you know I don't know how impartial Wikipedia is politically it doesn't seem
atrocious to me I mean it doesn't seem nakedly biased but it would surprise me equally if the people
who are the most
40:49
active Wikipedia contributors or editors are a realistic cross-sectional Society right because it takes
a pretty damn weird it takes a pretty damn weird person to want to do that to be absolutely honest
okay very correct I saw a visualization of the difference between gpt3 and gpt4 and the answer
before is the one that's not yet released correct yeah yeah it's not it's not out yet um however
apparently gpt4 is going to be able to write a 60 000 word book from a single prompt in less than a
minute
41:24
because of the amount of data that it's been trained on it's some obscene amount of data and they're
too frightened to release it is that right not ready yet not ready I think it'll still be being trained um
I've had a contrarian view which it isn't actually uh set to replace the search engine the proper place
where this belongs is kind of inside Microsoft Office how so where you have people who I suppose
the idea is you have people who have work to do and you could say Okay um if you could actually
talk to because
41:59
what has to say actually for all its faults it's comprehension is very good isn't it its level of
comprehension of a question or of a request is you know remarkably good compared to Alexa for
example um I haven't yet tried it on banal things like train times which always strikes me as one of
the weirdest Alexa failings that you can't say can you tell me the the times of the next trains from
this station to somewhere else oh that's it or how long is it going to take me to get to that yeah I
mean the interesting question is
42:42
because that that too in a sense there are two components to it there's the output which is very
interesting in terms of being uh grammatically written with what has to be said is a remarkably
lower low level of total garbage okay um well except in that even when these academic papers were
fake the whole reply looked plausible okay but it's comprehension of the question does seem pretty
impressive to me a tool that since I was out for dinner with last night uses it for is if he he writes
quite Advanced nutritional advice
43:21
and he puts his entire blog post or whatever into it and says please rewrite this at the third grade
reading level so he used it to dumb down very complex technical talk and apparently that is very
very successful I haven't tried that but so I would if you asked it to we all know that thing
PowerPoint Shakespeare um but if you asked it to take something you'd written as an argument and
the condenses into PowerPoint simply somebody else sent me the thing where they'd asked me to
ask Chet gdbt to summarize uh you know my books or work
44:03
or something and it did a pretty damn good job I I have to say and then there's the second question
which is you know uh are we nearing a point where the speech interface or at least we actually
we're typing full sentences to some extent replaces what you might call the push button point-and-
click interface um everything would just be speech commands yeah so I mean it is interesting in
that okay um one of the things that's a sort of interesting finding and I'm not quite sure what the
explanation is I think
44:41
there are multiple reasons but in customer service for example um these are the live chat nordinately
slower than speech okay okay sorry are you back on can you hear me I can yep oh for some weird
reason it's it's but okay I don't know uh let me try this I need to get back onto the headphones well
let's drop the headphones I think you might have poked it with your hand ah [ __ ] okay well don't
worry um uh people people weirdly really really like um uh people really really like never mind
okay
45:29
um people really like live chat as a form of customer service yes the way you make it work
economically is the people who are doing the live chat both use sort of boilerplate answers which
they can just cut and paste in many cases they don't have to type the whole thing from scratch and
they're also handling three customers simultaneously which is how you make it work economically
but it's much much slower than the spoken phone call and yet the levels of customer satisfaction
even though it's slower are much much higher
45:59
is that because you can do something else whilst you're chatting to them yeah I think I think I think
probably multiple reasons a I suppose if they have to pass you under somebody else uh the you
know the transcript can get passed on to the next person so you don't have that infuriating thing of
having to repeat yourself that must be part of it there is an interesting question which is are people
actually happier with you know we obviously defaulted to this point-and-click interface uh for a
time when it was much much faster and
46:31
pleasant and gave us an illusion of control whereas one of the things that makes voice interfaces
absolutely hopeless is when you know I mean Alexa is by no means you know I mean for example
local train times um uh invoice at my local station from which I nearly was traveling to London is
called Oxford which is spelled o-t-f-o-r-d well I mean forget about asking about trains from Oxford
because nine times out of ten you'll get a list of trains going to digits from Oxford um uh but there is
there is there is an
47:04
element where if the voice or text perception was good enough and didn't generate absolutely
nonsensical responses you know or responses that were totally blind to context like the time when I
used might have been Google in this case uh I was driving home from work and I wanted
pharmacies that were currently open and it gave me a list of pharmacies in Atlanta Georgia which
were indeed currently open of relativity okay and um so it may be I'm not I suppose um you know
that there may be a kind of component where um
47:44
where strangely we go back to command prompts with our interaction with with computers we're
actually just using spoken language or typed language is so much easier than going through some
weird routine of button pressing and menu pointing I wonder whether there's a concern about the
amount of control that people have so we've spoken about this on the show before where someone
would much rather be killed by a person driving than injured by an automatic driving vehicle
because there's just something if you were to put a vocal
48:19
prompt into uh some sort of word processor or some sort of computer and it got it wrong you would
feel so aggrieved you would feel completely hard done by if you meant it to order from this
particular restaurant and it ordered from somewhere else whereas if you press the button at least you
feel culpable for it and I wonder whether it might just be a case of acclimatizing to your level of uh
towards other words you know the thing would have to repeat you repeat the booking word for
word do you mean it's the last days of the Raj India
48:51
in a restaurant yes exactly yeah what have you been yeah what have you been obsessing it's worth
noting that when you go back to my childhood you know the most of you know orac you may
remember from Blake seven no you don't you don't remember Blake seven at all okay but the one
one of the common interviews well how for that matter okay the interface with the computer was
assumed to be speech you know howl did not have a graphical user interface right and so there is
something really really interesting there which is that you can
49:25
um uh and I mean the great problem you have with Amazon Alexa is they've spent billions on the
thing and 90 of the requests are basically for the time the weather or something you know there is
one huge benefit by the way of Alexa which I discovered which is that when you're half awake
early in the morning that uncomfortable as I am about having a lecture in the bedroom for obvious
reasons okay um uh when you're half awake you can find out what the time is without opening your
eyes now once you've opened your eyes to look
49:59
at a digital clock there's a danger that you then wake up but if Alexa replies while your eyes are still
shut then it's actually you know 457 then you can basically doze off straight back to sleep again
without that problem of of searing off your retinas by looking at a digital clock in the middle of the
guitar it is a game of chicken when you wake up on the morning to know when you wake up it is
absolutely a game of chicken yeah how much light do I want to let it what have you been obsessed
by recently have
50:28
you had any new purchases we've spoken I think in the past I want to say you tried to get me to buy
a glass-sided toaster I didn't yeah I didn't become part of your movement there although I did get
my parents to buy a airfryer and then they upgraded to an air fryer with pressure cooker in one wow
went to the whole Ninja thing right oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah they're happy with it oh they they
are I don't think that they use anything else I don't think that they did it sits on top of the cooker
51:03
and now is is the cooker in itself so what else has there been anything else you afford Mustang
Mackie glass-sided toaster and okay that's very very interesting so the um I have to say um the the
airfryer continues its magic the Japanese toilet uh never loses its magic I'm down here in deal where
I don't have a Japanese toilet and the gap between using a Japanese toilet and using a conventional
toilet is roughly equivalent to the gap between um using a conventional toilet and [ __ ] in a bucket
in prison okay
51:36
right okay that's roughly speaking with you know the uh the yawning sense of kind of reversion you
feel when you go from using a Japanese toilet to a conventional one it's barbaric it's ridiculous and
it will just stop um the airfryer maintains its magic I mentioned these bone conducting headphones
which I think for a joggers be the elderly and see people who don't want to become disoriented by
you know walking around with no knowledge of what what what's going on around them okay um
which tends to happen with noise
52:11
canceling headphones I like the fact that they cancel noise but it's also kind of disquieting in a way
you can turn it on and off and around that um so those are interesting in that they have an
application and for certain people I think can be very very useful um my father's stair lift I strongly
suspect to anybody elderly uh listening to this or anybody with a long memory listening to this that
almost everybody leaves getting a stair lift too long too late because they want to resist they have all
this whole thing about the exercise
52:44
of going up and down stairs is good for you they want to retain Independence as long as they can
well there's no compulsion to use a stair lift simply because you have one but to my father that's
been absolutely transformative what I also didn't realize is you don't need to put any you don't need
to drill into the wall at all the whole track for the stair lift is a fairly discreet strip of metal that just
goes up the flight of stairs and is basically uh screwed into the wood of the stairs not
53:10
into the masonry of the wall um so as an employer I I think what you might call guaranto Tech uh of
how you manage aging and caring through technology will be an enormous source of progress um
uh in the next 10 years and a very worthwhile area for investment I think gerund Texas yeah uh
other other things which um uh because the things that where the magic never really goes um have
gone back to using a tablet again after about a four-year hiatus um I got my Samsung Galaxy S8 the
eight inch um thing which I have to say is is
53:58
absolutely excellent um and that's mainly for reading and um uh uh reading newspapers and uh
reading books Etc and watching films occasionally um I'm happy to have gone back to a tablet after
as I said after a long period making do without one um no the other the other point I would make
about the electric car is that the well I've I've had one now for I guess it must be a year and four
months or something one I don't have charging at home and um I'm shortly to get charging installed
at home but um I I delayed and
54:41
fudged around and needed to liaise with the neighbors about having a new three-phase Supply um
uh put in and uh oddly given that that's a period of about 15 16 months I have found it surprisingly
non-problematic to actually have an electric car without home charging so for any londoners this
thing you go well we can't get an electric car because there's nowhere for us to charge you know
charge at home particularly given the athlete feeble distances London has managed to drive um uh I
don't think that there is actually
55:14
a problem I I genuinely don't think that is an issue um in the slightest um and also the the weird
pleasure of driving an electric car with regenerative braking and single pedal driving uh is a
pleasure that never goes away or hasn't yet I drove my first uh Tesla Model why is that the big one
why is the big one uh the taller one yeah correct um but it was the ludicrous or the Plaid edition of
this thing or whatever and for the first time ever I was just pulling it after going from not to 16 some
terrifying amount of
55:52
time uh I then was trying to pull around the corner and took my foot off the accelerator like you
would to allow it to Coast around the corner yes and the [ __ ] thing stopped I thought hang on a
second so I I take my foot off of the accelerator and the brakes get deployed yes like okay right this
is an entire new type of driving most of the braking will actually be regenerative so that's it so uh in
a conventional car particularly in automatic when you take the foot of the accelerator the car
continues to Coast
56:19
creeps because it would be it would be way would it be wasteful for it not to Coast uh in a sense
because you'd be throwing away momentum okay whereas an electric car because the momentum
actually gets recaptured by the battery um uh there's no particular reason why uh you shouldn't just
decelerate with the accelerator uh with no particular need I mean I go for miles at a time without
using the brakes in any shape or form uh you just anticipate by throttling off the car slows down the
brake lights come on even if the brakes
56:53
aren't deployed sometimes to notified cars behind you that you're going to be accelerating at a
fastest Pace than they might typically expect um but it's actually um uh it's a lovely way to drive
partly because you don't have a feeling of resentment when you lose speed what makes cyclist
wankers okay I I tried an electric bike that strikes me as quite an interesting technology for two
reasons which is that um the dirty secret of bikes as I said is that when you cycle uphill it's no faster
than walking
57:28
secondly there is only a limited range of demographies and levels of physical fitness who can really
cycle thirdly acceleration is painful and slow okay fourthly very large areas of the Earth's surface
are totally all suited to cycling I mean Lisbon for example or bath okay or one of those hillies or
Durham I mean you know okay you know having a bike in Durham Newcastle wouldn't be terrible
but there would be chunks of Newcastle which would be awful I imagine right and um so you know
when you factor that
58:04
in the electric bike which basically means that uphill and accelerating and for people who are less
than you know Lance Armstrong fit okay um it actually becomes a viable mode of Transport
assuming the weather's good enough or assuming that you design a completely different kind of
bike which actually has some sort of protection from the elements which I suppose is another
consideration because the great Advantage there is a you'll be able to make bikes slightly inefficient
fatter tires for Comfort wider seats also
58:39
possibly some sort of rain shielding because the electricity will basically counterbalance the
aerodynamic inefficiencies of those things so that you can actually cycling something which isn't
absolutely optimized around titanium and narrow tires which are hopeless in urban environments
for example you know you know you hit a pothole at the wrong angle and you know there's Total
Carnage and disaster so the electric bike is interesting I have to say um and um uh I I gave I gave
one of those a brief test drive and was quite and it was
59:17
quite quite quite impressed in fact um it took a little bit of Mastery but that's probably because it's
bloody years since I've cycled it all um and uh other things um but that does strike me as quite
significant because um one of the reasons and this is what this is where I come back to the electric
car regenerative braking okay one of the reasons cyclists are [ __ ] is that because accelerating is
really painful they have this mentality of maintain momentum at any cost which causes them to sort
of leap onto the
59:49
pavement ignore red lights go at precipitous speed through roundabouts without paying much
attention I don't totally blame them for that because you know if you imagine driving a car where
every time you press you press the accelerator you know electrodes in your testicles gave you a
sharp burst of pain you know we'd all drive like [ __ ] and in the bike you know because it's painful
getting up speed and it's slow they have this sunk cost problem which is they're desperately
unwilling to slow
1:00:19
down in this it's absolutely necessary but the great thing with the electric card regenerative braking
is because you feel you're getting your energy back when you slow you don't have that same fear
same resentence or feeling if you're forced to slow down a bit instead of going this bastard by
turning so slowly has robbed me of my hard-won kinetic energy you just go oh okay energy back
into the tank for later and then off you go again electric vehicles are very very good for things like
delivery vehicles which do a
1:00:52
lot of stop go motoring well I mean that was the original milk float right in the UK that was a Tesla
before it was a Tesla what's happening you you're moving through different Vapes here what's
happening with the vaping debate at the moment I've seen uh certain companies have been cracked
down on for uh making flavors that are basically too tasty that kind of entice young younger kids to
get into vaping and stuff like that my own views this is a total nonsense okay in that this um watch
if I know it's not the world's
1:01:24
most common are you commonly use streaming service but Plex has which you can get on Smart
TVs and so on and Google Chrome tv someone once gave me an illegal login to that where I could
watch every movie ever created someone gave me like an access code to it's like a hard drive it's
like you can stream hard drives and stuff right yeah absolutely right but Plex has on it a film called
One Billion Lives which is obviously made by vaping enthusiasts but it actually um Co-op some
pretty hard ass serious medical scientists talking about the
1:02:01
fact that you know because in middle class Western milia the number of people smoking is small
um then people tend to think of the smoking problem as having been solved but if you take the
world's population as a whole they would uh their argument is that look The Wider legalization um
the um deregulation of vaping and other forms of nicotine delivery device has the potential to save a
billion lives and their accusations sometimes leveled at Big Pharma some have not been tobacco big
tobacco is oddly in a sense
1:02:38
because they've invested in vaping Technologies they're not actually the um uh the evil presence
you might have expected but big Pharma which had invested in a lot of Fairly ineffectual patches
and sprays and guns only to find that at the last minute some hipsters came up with a better idea um
has played dirty and the the extent to which governments have been persuaded to ban flavors to
band disposables for example there's an environmental case for batting disposables um and also the
endless recurrence of this argument oh but
1:03:17
children have been doing it okay well my argument there is I've got two children aged 21 at
University surrounded by a pretty active drug culture and a lot of booze okay worry number 407 on
my list is they might take up vaping okay of all the things they could do you know something which
has actually pretty trivial short medium and I would argue long-term effects that has very few
negative externalities on the people around them um you know the demonization of nicotine as
distinct from um burning tobacco has been one of the most extraordinary
1:03:56
kind of wasted human efforts or misdirected human efforts uh of the last 20 years because it's you
know it's coffee basically and there's you know as a drug it's that kind of thing now um the children
argument that one of the great things is that flavors by getting you hooked on a flavor that's very
unlike the flavor of burning tobacco is a great way of getting people off smoking right because
switching back to smoking cigarettes and kind of horrible um does it you know do I care that 23
year olds who can get hold of ecstasy
1:04:32
you know LSD cocaine Etc do I care that they're buying else bars not really and I I always think it's
a you know that oh the children oh the young people it's got a [ __ ] argument actually because um I
mean off you know I shouldn't say this I won't say it actually because I prefer not to share the
information but actually I mean even smoking cigarettes below a certain age provided you quit and
that's a very big provided by the way um doesn't have massively deleterious effects on on health
yeah the concern is
1:05:07
the Gateway right I mean I've noticed this especially since being in Texas it's a Gateway out uh it
really is a gateway is it a gateway to cigarettes we've seen absolutely zero evidence of that I would
have said yeah that's a good point that's a really good point actually and it is definitely the Gateway
so what's happening so you're in Texas at the moment yeah so I live here now I've been here for just
under a year and um because of the existing culture of dip dipping tobacco
1:05:36
over here yeah um snooze those little pillowcases yes that you slot in between your lip and your
gum those are insanely popular over here this is absolutely everyone hammers these and they come
in all manner of different flavors and different sizes they they do a two milligram all the way up to a
20 milligram nicotine dosage yeah yeah I mean 20 milligram would make me immediately want to
throw up but yeah that's that's something that people use but it's so interesting because the culture's
already been primed here
1:06:09
through the existing Heritage of dip and using dipping tobacco which this is the cooler less
disgusting I don't need to have a bottle and into it every 30 seconds or whatever because I've got
some awful buildup in my mouth uh that's that's incredibly popular over here so so how is Texas
more liberal than most States in regulating vaping as well I'm not sure about that I mean the Vapes
are everywhere they're sold on the street they're sold in corner shops people are using them indoors
in comedy
1:06:41
clubs and gigs in bars everywhere that I go yeah this is this is where I like Texas actually I don't
know what people said before I moved here everyone was like oh you're going to kind of the diluted
down like PG version of Texas by going to Austin it's a blue dog that is true yeah it's a blue dot in a
red ocean and I don't know it might just be a selection effect for the people that I hang around but
I'm like I see no no hints of blue here at all like there's I don't see a massive amount of
progressivism or
1:07:10
liberal overreach or you know the the woke tards in the street like there's none of that that I see in
Austin it just seems like it just seems like Texas with young people it's University it's had a great
music town it's fantastic Food Town it's a brilliant town and actually uh also people tend to take on
to an extent the mores of the of the pre-existing culture um and I I I've only been I've only been to
Austin once I absolutely loved it but um uh I um uh but I also I also love Houston Dallas
everywhere I've been in
1:07:46
Texas I found people absolutely Charming I I like that thing of screw this I'm gonna Vape at the
comedy club you know that's like kind of independence of my independent mindedness yeah is
really really healthy talk to me you've been big into this ergodicity thing for for quite a while I was
thinking about how that and Bayesian updating and all the rest of it kind of applies to people's life
design have you got a a good way that people can increase their chances of getting lucky in life one
thing I think that you might say is
1:08:20
an intelligent evolutionary adaptation is that the younger it's more experimental in the old for a
reason um which is that they have less experience to draw on so they need to experiment more but
they also have more future life to profit from experimentation so if older people become more
conservative it's partly a perfectly rational response effectively summed up in the phrase I know
what I like okay and they have more experience to draw on and therefore um you know the
likelihood that they'll suddenly discover a new holiday
1:08:57
destination which is 200 better than their best current estimate of what a holiday destination would
be is low when you're 70 whereas when you're 25 it's it's by no means impossible right you can
discover something which is sensationally better um that's interesting the fact that when you're old
even if you do discover something sensationally better you've only got five years to enjoy it also
probably makes older people conservative because the lifetime remaining gains to experimentation
are
1:09:30
also shorter so the fact that we see that decline in openness as people go on through life is uh is to
some extent probably a sensible evolutionary mechanism in all kinds of ways so is there is the
applied solution there for younger people to say yes to monu experiences to go on adventures but
but not to get massively angry with older people uh for not doing so there's another book which I
really recommend actually to everybody listening called algorithms to live by which is by I think
Brian Christian and
1:10:02
somebody Griffiths um of Griffith actually and um uh one of the most interesting things which if
you're old was one of the best things I've read in terms of uh generally uplifting information the
reason when you get older that you find it often slower to retrieve information is not because of
deteriorating mental faculties it's because you know more okay or you've accumulated more
information and therefore more of what you know needs to be stored in kind of the slower access
parts of the brain
1:10:37
so that one of the reasons why you know I mean you notice this extraordinary if you see there's a
university ChalleNGe Program in the UK and then there's the kind of there's the celebrity
University challenge around Christmas where people tend to be in their 40s and 50s and the people
of their 40s and 50s kind of know more but they're much much slower at extracting the information
and the reason is that the amount that can be stored on kind of RAM is finite and therefore more of
what you know as an old person actually takes
1:11:08
time to retrieve so much wisdom that you've got to dig through and and actually if you told her you
know because a lot of people when they hit their 40s and 50s are convinced that this phenomenon is
a sign of mental deterioration you know you know you go yeah you know French chat ate a cake
did get in you know Marcel Buck proust right whereas the 22 year old on University challenge just
goes air Marcel Bruce okay is deeply disquieting I think to a lot of older people and if you told them
this it would massively cheer them up
1:11:43
just as actually I think it's quite important to tell people that um is it particularly men that your level
of Happiness weirdly tends to uh be a little bit u-shaped that people in middle age have the lowest
level of Life satisfaction and then it actually rises again more or less continuously after you pass
through sort of Middleton is it middle to late middle age I can't remember but there's some period
the biggest uh the biggest suicide risk for men at the moment is 40 to 45.
1:12:14
it seems to be this was uh Max Dickens and Matt Rudd uh both two separate books last year uh one
was Billy no mates and the other from uh Matt Rudd who is the guy from the Sunday Times I can't
quite remember the name of it but he was good and he was on the show um was algorithms to live
by the book where Brian suggested that if you were trying to find a partner you should yeah 33
people in and then once you find a person who is better than those first 33 you just go with them
yeah I don't know because you probably don't
1:12:51
have to have an extensive relationship with all 33 you know because that will you know living with
people for a year and then ditching them 33 times would not make you popular perhaps um but the
the it's known for in a very sexist way as the secretary problem because it was first posed as a um
you could only interview secretaries one at a time uh you um once you've rejected someone you
have no chance of following up it's a slightly artificial artificial depiction of the problem and the
question is how you know how many should
1:13:26
you interview uh before you reach this point where you go okay the next one who comes along and
it's it's partly the explore exploits trade-off and it's partly the trade-off between uh having too little
information to Benchmark what a good secretary might be like versus having too few secretaries
left that you're in danger of running out and so I think it is if you have a hundred secretaries lined up
I think the optimal strategy is something is it 60 something I think it was a currency I thought it was
in the 30s yeah I think
1:13:58
it might be in the 30s um the interview the first 30 and then you've you've set your Peak the best of
the 30 you've seen and then the next as soon as one comes along who's better than or as good as that
you choose that away you go one of the things that I've been noticing online especially in the post-
trump world this Allure of black and white thinking which has been quite reductionist people uh
seem to be ever more seduced by uh low nuance yes I've actually so for example the evening
expresses
1:14:37
itself with um being unwilling to accept that something might be acceptable in a comedy club which
is unacceptable in a business meeting or a church meeting or whatever it may be yes so the
unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that the rules change according to context um and therefore
demanding that you can and the thing the thing about it is I think it is characteristic of people in
their late teens and perhaps early twenties I think there's something kind of slightly sophomoric
about it in that most older
1:15:14
people once they've been particularly if they spend any time working in an office know that the
answer to a hell of a lot of questions is it depends okay and there's something fundamentally wrong
with our education system if it isn't effectively showing people that a very large number of
questions should be answered with I don't know I need more information and this need to be able to
make an absolute pronouncement on almost anything regardless of context uh is it is fundamentally
a bit weird so
1:15:53
if you take the transgender question you know well here's an example okay in every single social
situation I can imagine okay you would treat a transgender person uh uh uh as a member of their
preferred gender um in accordance with their identity but as a doctor it would be completely wrong
to treat a transgender person as though they were female okay because obviously you have to make
an acknowledgment for special circumstances and therefore it doesn't seem to be impossible that
you can say well maybe
1:16:28
in prisons or women as refuges we need to actually rethink this General principle in other words
you have a principle which is true to the extent that it is possible to make it true but where you may
have to actually make concessions according to certain particular situations in the same but I I had a
it's a very simple thing which is um I'll argue with the classic example of this which is something
which divides a completely different group of people I not uh you know turfs or Builders from the
actual feminists which is in the UK
1:17:03
that apologies to Americans because the general patterns of behavior are totally different in the US
okay is it okay to drive in the Middle Lane of the motorway okay the answer to that is actually and
people people will take an incredibly strong View and the answer to that is cut has to be it depends
right because given that cars can only travel at a slower speed when you have a high level of traffic
density okay if you had everybody traveling at 60 miles an hour and insisting on all traveling on the
left-hand Lane of the
1:17:37
motorway leaving the other two lanes empty okay that would massively slow down traffic it'd be an
incredible waste to Road okay so it is not actually wrong to use the Middle Lane of the motorway
under all circumstances you should obviously be fairly attentive to what's happening behind you
and so on and so forth but what people want to do is they they don't accept this fact that in a
complex system you occasionally need to take account of more than one or two or three factors in
making a decision
1:18:08
what's this Allure towards black and white thinking or the uh displeasure that people have with
more subtle or complex or nuanced opinions where does that come from do you think um you get a
lot of people well you could argue uh that um a lot of people found that Clarity and religion uh a
hundred years ago that people who wanted that I need to be told you know you know a series of
good heuristics by which to live life without having to work everything out for first principles
which isn't a totally ridiculous requirements okay uh they
1:18:46
would you know they would have found a religion to accommodate that or that you know
something of that kind whereas I the one thing that does worry me is does it come from our
education system which is leading people to believe that there must be a right answer there is an up
in other words you know what are the interesting things when you get curious about decision
science is not everything's an optimization problem they're an awful lot of human behaviors which
make no sense to people who are inverted commas
1:19:18
rationalists because they assume that what the person is trying to do is to optimize when actually
what they're trying to do is to de-catastrophize at the same Talib and I uh the the observation that
people in Milan railway station are eating at McDonald's okay they're not trying to get the best meal
they can find in Milan okay what they're doing is basically you know there will be search costs and
everything else attributed to that granted but what they're trying to do is to get something
1:19:45
to eat which has a very very low chance of making the meal or being disappointing or a rip-off and
McDonald's is absolutely brilliant at not being crap and so depend you know it's very very
dangerous to declare people irrational unless you know deep down both consciously and
unconsciously what they're really trying to do and brand preference I always give the argument that
a large part of brand preference is not I want Samsung TVs because they're better but it's I'll happily
pay a hundred bucks more for a
1:20:15
Samsung TV because I'm fairly confident it's not going to be [ __ ] and when you think about it the
reputational mechanism works because if you've invested billions in your brand as a massive sunk
costs you have much more to lose in terms of future revenue and profit through selling a [ __ ]
television than someone who nobody's ever heard of you know whether you go on Amazon and
search for TV and you get all those kind of scrabble-racked Brands called rujagu or whatever right
well why should they
1:20:46
care why should they invest in quality control because they don't really have a reputation at stake in
the first place I heard that Sky glass which was attempt yep was uh I I saw a bunch of reviews as it
was coming out and then once it came out from tech people and it just got smashed it got
completely annihilated as the protein pancake problem which is what I've referred to when you try
and blend two products that previously were very well optimized on their own into one product
which is [ __ ] than either of them
1:21:20
were and worse than they both would be separately so protein powders have been pretty well
optimized they're quite tasty they're pretty much a Nesquik that's got 30 grams of protein in
pancakes for almost all of time have been fantastic if you try and make good protein pancakes they
usually end up being a clumpy horrible mess and what Sky's tried to do is integrate your Sky
membership into a television so that it is a One-Stop shop but the TV underperforms the sky system
the interacts with it is bad and it's trying
1:21:49
to beat a Kindle Fire stick which is absolutely blazing fast and already people's existing fantastic
Samsung TV which they they know and the interface is optimized as well it's very interesting isn't it
because I mean one of the things I talk about with television the other way which is fascinating is
that um uh there is an amount of money and nobody knows what it is I imagine you could get it to a
freedom of information request that the BBC has to pay Samsung to put iPlayer in a prominent
position and the
1:22:21
Samsung Smart Hub and Samsung has it in its power indeed has already done so to make the Hub
the default starting point for all viewing periods when I first got a Samsung TV years ago you could
activate the Hub but it was by pressing a very weird button on which was one of about 47 buttons
on the remote control as well we all know you never press the weird buttons on your remote control
because they make your TV go weird I'll recovery for you know the next half hour the aspect ratios
are for all of the blacks
1:22:58
green number two appear by which I mean literally a number two appears in the top left of the
screen you know and you can't make it go away you know that kind of thing and the modern
Samsung TV comes with two remote controls one of which is blissfully simple and that's the one
you use all the time and every time you you're not sure what to do you press a button with a house
on it which is something we feel incredibly comfortable doing you either press back or house and
surprise surprise that takes you to the
1:23:29
Samsung Smart Hub it previously we turned on a TV and probably it was broadcast TV by default
then it was Sky by default and now it's whatever Samsung wants it to be I love the power they enjoy
in that is absolutely spectacular yes so there will be at some point later this year I haven't signed a
contract yet but um this podcast is going to be featured on a number of Airlines and it's going to be
able to be used in in-flight entertainment and as the discussion has gone on I asked this particular
guy that
1:24:01
is handling the acquisition of the content on the library um what he intends on doing with it and he
said some insane percentage image of what gets viewed on in-flight entertainment is based on the
first screen's tiles of what shows up so if you want everybody to watch bullet train with Brad Pitt
and that's tile number three of six it's going to get it's the same as being above the fold on Google
right it's like you're on the first page of Google or basically you're not on Google because
everybody's going to
1:24:32
click on something on the first page usually the first result so it's a power law distribution the thing
that appears first gets 50 the thing that appears yeah 100 going back to the thing that you said about
young people I learned a concept that I gave a term to from a friend gwynda Bogle and he said you
can gauge someone's Ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer
those who blame many different issues like War poverty or pollution on just one cause like
capitalism a recycling explanations
1:25:02
because the demand for answers outstrips their supply and I referred to that as mono thinking yeah a
friend of mine calls it who's Indian interesting he calls it monotheism we're not far off and as a
Hindu he always jokes that um people in the west have a particular propensity to monotherism
because they need one God to be behind everything whereas he says it's a Hindu they're completely
happy with ambiguity very good very and they're polytheistic and I mean you know one of the
interesting ones is that you know all
1:25:39
social ills are down to social media always strikes me as a bit too [ __ ] easy and I've always said
one of my mischievous ones is that uh some part of what might be more obnoxious behavior in
people may be down to the decline in smoking now if you think about it if you have a society if you
have a society where uh which 20 30 years ago 50 to 60 percent of people regularly took what was a
kind of relaxing drug okay and now that's down to 10 you would expect and of course the effect
could be magnified through social network effects
1:26:19
you would expect some change just as if you put everybody on you know well open it's okay to
notice a change in general Behavior surely Mass withdrawal from drugs is going to have some
visible effect and yet it has been assumed that that that effect can't be there well why not I mean one
of the weirdest theories is that you know there's an equal body of belief which suggests a very
eccentric opinion that you know tobacco tea coffee were major contributors to the enlightenment
and so you know it is it is going to be
1:26:57
I have to say but you're right the the the um the need to go yes because capitalism or you know
there's a wonderful sketch about this that dates back to you know where you you recite something
bad that has happened to go Thatcher okay Brad now you know it's it's is slightly amusing to me
which is that's um to people born long after actually Thatcher left office okay it's seen as this
absolutely pivotal changing point in British history where beforehand everything was supposedly
absolutely
1:27:31
lovely it was like the Beatles and flowers completely forgetting the 1970s altogether okay and then
you had that shirt and it all got nasty ingredients self-interested and actually you know I you know I
mean tree Thatcher there was a lot of extraordinary human unpleasantness of all kinds maybe it was
less greedy that possibly is true but there were all forms of manifestation of genuine really
malicious nastiness and unpleasantness which if anything diminished in the 1980s um and it but it's
so easy to have you
1:28:10
know as you said the stupidity I mean actually creativity is also trying to imagine um things that
could be much more important factors that they are generally given credit for you know is this
because um uh you know uh and actually I'm you know I mean uh it's a classic case of wanting the
rules of a simple system also to apply to a complex system and I've been talking to doctors recently
about obesity and it looks as though there may be a group of people who are fat very largely simply
because they're um
1:28:49
their biome uh the microbiota uh in their gut are just very good at extracting energy from food and
so you eat the same some people have whatever reason a mix of microflora which just aren't that
great at extracting calorific value from food I mean things like you know I mean that's another
classic case in one the whole Mind Body dualism thing is a classic case of saying you know okay in
order to make the world comprehensible I'm going to pretend these things are entirely unrelated and
that you have willpower and that you
1:29:27
know your body and your bodily State your digestive State and so forth has no influence on your
behavior and that's again an attempt to say okay what we'll do is we'll divide the world into water
type compartments for purposes of tractability and comprehension and proceed from there and you
know it's it's great in high school physics to do that [ __ ] it doesn't really work anywhere else I
mean the extreme cases to say that science is a bit of a calm because it hives off that very small
proportion of big
1:29:59
decisions that can actually be solved definitively uh with a single right answer and where you have
all the data you need to make the decision um at the very start of the process okay um and it hives
those off uh pointster is extraordinary success scenarios like engineering um and effectively lays the
effectively claims the credit for writing the exam first and then solving it it's marking its own
homework to some extent because anybody can be clever if they give them 5 000 exam questions
okay and they're
1:30:38
asked to solve the ten they like the best what can people expect from you next what are you doing
for the rest of this year um I'm going to be writing a book called slogan I think which is how um
you know it takes sort of 30 40 50 of the world's best advertising lines and then dissects them with
kind of Behavioral Science angle to say what they tell us about ourselves are unconscious and our
society that's cool so looking at persuasion I think that can be quite interesting um I'm a big fan of
this business of
1:31:10
taking something and um just looking at it through a peculiar lens there's a wonderful thing on
YouTube which is I don't know if you've ever seen the YouTube channel ask your mortician have
you no what's that no okay so ask your optician as a woman who works as a Undertaker or
mortician in the United States and there's a film she made about 30 minutes long which is why
didn't JFK have an open casket or why did JFK's casket stay closed now you know the whole
Kennedy assassination thing is the most you know over raked uh
1:31:45
period of you know three days in 20th century history pretty much okay you know every single
thing every single person in the crowd in the Zapruder film has been subject to kind of microscopic
analysis but this is just taking the whole thing and telling the story from the point of view of you
know the morticians you know again obviously where they got the tasket from the fact that the fact
that the um the fact that the Secret Service commandeered the hearse from the local mortician to
drive to Love Field I think it was where Air
1:32:20
Force One was waiting had no idea how to operate the detaching mechanism that allowed you to
remove a coffin from the earth and so in order to get the coffin in the plane there were basically
loads of Secret Service guys with crowbars basically scratching this thing to bits no way to get it out
of the Earth because they refused to take anybody they refused to take anybody from The
Undertakers with them they just commandeer the vehicle and so it what it is is it takes a very very
familiar well-worn story and just
1:32:54
adds a completely new perspective on it you know sheds completely new lunch that's where mono
thinking becomes interesting right if you have a single optimizing functions absolutely so that what
I'd call that nerd thinking where you actually take a very very different uh point of view um what
you're doing then with mono thinking is I think complementary to the main dialogue if all you're
doing is taking everybody else's mono thinking okay you're just contributing to the two-
dimensionality
1:33:27
of the whole field but if you actually go over at 90 degrees orthogonally and say okay uh what
Shadows of cast if we point the light over here that's when it gets interesting amazing do you know
there's no no understanding that asking mortician is the complete definitive but what it does is it's a
completely fresh light on what was going on yes very interesting very interesting thing there was a
Texas um uh I guess he must have been uh what do you call it uh once you call it when you have
um the guy the guy who is the Texas
1:34:02
coroner in Dallas okay and one of the reasons there was such a massive conspiracy theory as they
refused to let this coroner perform the autopsy and he's often portrayed as being a bit of an ass
because he refused to let the president's body go and be flown back to DC but he was entirely
correct if a death occurs in Texas in his jurisdiction it's absolutely his responsibility to do it whether
it's the president of the United States or someone found dead in a shop doorway and so it's very
interesting
1:34:34
from that point of view because I'd always heard of this guy as like being like Mr difficult trying to
muscle in I don't know absolutely not not that case at all he was entirely correct in what he was
trying to do and they were entirely wrong and this is ask a morticians yeah asking mortician I think
it's called yeah phenomenal um do you know Richard shotton he wrote The Choice Factory a few
years ago I know Richard very well he's absolutely fantastic behavioral scientist he's got a new
book
1:34:59
out this year he's got a new book out I've got it if I've got it right but remind me what the book's
called it's called um give me one second I'll get it up in my calendar you might get it before me
though um where is he on is it next week no is it the week after no is it the week after that there it is
oh no that's Richard rangham the guy that wrote uh who is also great Richard shotton is coming on
where the [ __ ] is he uh anyway he's in he's in here somewhere anyway there's I'm very excited for
that I know
1:35:29
that you and him have a lot of crossover um do you know the story of how his uh what's it called
Astro 10 his company name no I I because my wife was just asking about that saying what's this
Astro 10 thing so go on tell me the story you'll have to ask him for the full the full description
however he found online some uh company that had used a behavioral Insight in a very smart way
and he loved it he then registered astro10.
1:36:02
com and all of his email addresses and went to companies house and maybe got the trademark as
well and all the rest of it and then only later realized that it was actually called Astro Teng or
something there was a g on the end and I see he'd typo the entire thing he'd actually misspelled this
uh but preferred the version of it that he came up with and now he's lumbered with it for the rest of
time uh Oprah Winfrey is a similar case where actually the Old Testament character is called orpa
not Oprah and the cleverest one of all which was a
1:36:34
deliberate kind of perversity Cliff Richard who will be probably not well known to American
listeners but was a massive kind of uh pop star and still is indeed in the UK he's kind of the I
suppose you might sort of vehicle in the British Johnny Halliday okay but he was originally I can't
remember what his real name is but it's not Cliff Richard okay these originally going to be called
Cliff Richards and I think he was his managers who said no no we'll call you Cliff Richard why
because then every time you get
1:37:06
interviewed on TV the interview is going to call you Cliff Richards or call you Mr Richards and you
get a chance to correct him which means everybody gets to hear your name twice wow so that was
the uh um I mean the surprising actually that a surprising number of names arise through
completely there's another name which also arose to a complete misunderstanding do you know the
story do you know the story of Salvador Dali of why so Salvador Dali's parents had a child born
about nine months before Dali was and they named him Salvador Dali and
1:37:46
he died only a couple of days after he was born they're then basically almost immediately conceived
again and had another child that was born nine months later and they were adamant that he was a
Reincarnation of that dead son so they called him Salvador they called him the name of the son that
had already gone uh Elvis is interesting because it's widely believed that um the middle name of
Elvis Aaron Presley spelled a-r-o-n okay is an ignorant uh typo or or misspelling either by the
parents or by the um
1:38:21
whoever registered the birth in fact it's the Welsh spelling of Aaron and whether Elvis is Welsh or
not is open to debate um stop trying to you would you have a lot of affinity with the Welsh people
and Country stop trying to adopt everybody for your absolutely his dad was convinced I think that
they were Welsh I was convinced that President he came from the priscelli hills where there is wait
for it a church of Saint Elvis there's only one church of Saint Elvis anywhere in the world it's in
pembrokeshire not far from
1:38:57
the priscelli hills I think what might have been happening is Vernon was it Elvis's Dad I think I
think it was verbum um Vernon was convinced of the family as well so in the same way but by the
way that Johnny Cash seemed to be actually convinced that he was part native American even
though his ancestry was entirely Scottish here's a question for you here's a question as a proud
loosely associated Welshman how how has it become that Irish has a cultural impact on the world
you've got Irish areas in New York people
1:39:31
understand St Patrick's Day they've generally got themselves a a cultural foothold to Scots as well
the bagpipes they've got the hats they've got The Tartan they've got everything yeah well should the
United States um suddenly enough they were Fair Thomas Jefferson okay basically Welsh um uh
but the they seem to assimilate faster and you get Welsh communities in Pennsylvania mining
communities you get all those places called Bethesda and so forth you also get those places and
Bryn Mawr which I think is in Connecticut
1:40:05
isn't it must be named after the Welsh Bryn Mawr um but so you you do you do get Welsh
communities and obviously Patagonia in uh uh in in in in South America what okay um uh but they
haven't done as good a job of marketing themselves uh as um uh because the Welsh um I think the
Welsh what you might call diaspora and Hillary Clinton for example is part Welsh uh will agree to
differ on Elvis I have no idea to be able to do honest um uh about Elvis Presley's bloodline and I'm
sure that people have researched
1:40:49
it in absolutely enormous depth uh but um uh no you know whereas Trump would mention his
scottishness I don't think Hillary Clinton ever mentioned her Welsh nurse what The Branding
problem is with well she would have been absolutely no electoral value to play on your emotionless
Hillary or having problems uh and um I mean I've also you know and um uh Frank Lloyd Wright
was conscious of his welshness now interestingly uh so you know uh Taliesin is um uh a Welsh
phrase meaning shining brow and uh Frank was was pretty conscious of
1:41:27
his Welsh ancestry uh were there other there was also an absolutely fantastic mafioso character in
Chicago who is kind of a number two to Al Capone called Murray the camel Humphries whose
parents I think came from Kano in powers or somewhere um but um so you have this kind of you
know I mean undoubtedly they're pretty well represented proportionately um although Davis has
always felt is in the US rather than IES um the Jefferson Davis I guess is actually I think you know
he's actually a Welsh origin but it but the the the
1:42:05
interest in promulgating or promoting it versus the Irish or the Scots um seems to be much much
lower I have to say maybe maybe you could try and appeal to the Welsh government and speak to
them and say if you could do a Rebrand perhaps no so um let me I'll think of a few more there are
um actually the early presidents were disproportionate Washington I don't think was but I've got a
vague idea that Adams and and quite a few of the early presidents um were um were fairly heavily
Welsh and then um there's also an interesting intonation
1:42:49
which may or may not be true that Welsh surnames are quite common among African-Americans
because of a Welsh Quaker thing where things like underground railroads and so forth tend to be
run by Quakers who tended to be Welsh but I I've read that how plausible that is I don't know it
could be highly fanciful um but um no it is it is kind of interesting um because I know you could I
suppose you could say you know do Anglo-Saxon Americans have a particular sense of uh identity
too um which is an interesting question you
1:43:27
know and so the the Scots and the Irish and there's a little you know you think you're absolutely
right that the small country syndrome where people tend to be slightly more proud of ancestry from
a less populous country um but again I suppose you know German Americans have never you know
I mean the population of the US is probably more German by ancestry than it is British not quite um
interesting question um uh possibly more than English but if you include the whole of the British
Isles no um but uh you you get the odd you get
1:44:02
the odd thing in Milwaukee places like that just as you get the Swedish Thing in in Minnesota I
would love to hear a Welsh American Blended accent that would be that would be one hell of a
cacophony coming out yeah I mean one Theory I did here is that the Welsh being fairly sort of easy
going um uh you know wood within one generation basically completely blend in either just
allowed themselves to dilute down into the local colors and just dilute Dan the very funny comedian
who I think you'll enjoy called Andrew
1:44:34
is it Schultz you come across him yeah he's been on the show oh he's been on the show yeah I
thought what was absolutely hysterical is I was watching him on YouTube doing a show in Hawaii
taking the piss out of people who moved to Hawaii because he said his mother's Scottish okay was
born in Scotland and she's lived in New York for almost all her adult life but she is still completely
Scottish in Her speech and her behavior and mannerisms she said you don't get my mother going
[ __ ] you
1:45:04
Etc but people move to Hawaii and three weeks later they're all there going Aloha and using
Hawaiian phrases he was kind of calling out [ __ ] calling everyone a howling that's what they call
the people that are from out of town look Rory let's bring this one home I always love speaking to
you mate um I'm gonna be back in London at some point this year so I'll definitely give you enough
to catch up the absolutely Splendid yeah thank you mate catch you later on all the best what's
happening
1:45:31
people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection
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