Espresso: Rory Sutherland, "I am Right, You Are Wrong You Dumb Piece of Shit"

0:28So, you know, you have this strange thing. but I wouldn't want to become that invested in a point of view. Okay. And the strange thing is nobody responds to that opinion on Twitter. Middle of the road opinion. It doesn't garner any response. It doesn't get retweeted. It doesn't get replied to. But also, stranger still, you feel really weird writing it. You know, as you type and press send, you feel slightly ridiculous that Twitter opinions are supposed to be kind of the equivalent of a kind of bitch slap or you know or or a or a highly contrarian position and when you write something seemingly banal not only does it get no attention and no traction and so you do have a very strange media world in which opinions which are to some extent ridiculous

1:21effectively out compete in an evolutionary sense opinions which are moderate and perfectly sensible yeah i mean you know our opinion you know for we mentioned this i think on the last podcast which is your you know a perfectly sane opinion on starbucks is i don't think it's the last word on coffee but equally i'm quite glad there's a lot of them around because i can always i can always get a pretty good coffee anywhere i want to go yeah but that opinion doesn't gain traction in a social media environment where people just go i hate it or i love it and so we live in this sort of slightly weird marmite world yeah you can't nothing even as brands now in turn pulling this like through brand you've got to stand for something like it's it's kind of almost like it spawns out of that social media this is like who can be the most um there was a piece about this i don't know if you saw um if you're the brand surreal and uh uh days one's alcohol free beer and one's uh uh i like protein cereal that's right and they they've done this they i think their marketing is is absolutely genius i think they've done um a great job and it's all very tongue-in-cheek so i think the guy came from innocent um as in their marketing director but it's all like they'll they'll do like kind of what i'm wearing now they'll be like does every entrepreneur in london have to wear this and i'll do a photo shoot dress like this it's a piss take it's i think it's hilarious but then uh and it is it's divisive but but i think the best marketing and the best anything is divisive i think if you otherwise you become like a vapid vanilla just meh and anyway so some some reporter got hold of it for the grocer and wrote this piece and he'd done some like research i just thought it was a fucking stupid article but he's basically saying one of their things was um they'd done this billboard saying look dad you'd i'd ask for a tenner look at me now they just got into saying to me something like that very like lovely yeah lovely yeah yeah lovely anyway some guys gone into it and looked up and he's just like yeah your dad's a gazillion now something like that but and it's and straight away everyone's piled in yes piled in with and as you say it's either so it's extremes it's marmite it's either um you know challenger brands and fmcg is built for um it's built for like rich kids who can actually afford to take these risks and set up these businesses this side the other side is oh it's not built for working class people and i kind of i agree it's kind of in the middle it's like yeah these kids them their dad may be super rich but they've still worked their bollocks they've still they've still traded something yeah they've still traded something and they're still trying to do something So, but as you say, it goes back.

4:09Yeah, please God, we might have more people. Yeah, but everything, everyone wants everything in every kind of, every, and this is just talking about this specific niche. But it's like everything has to be binary these days. Nothing can be, as you say, if you take a walk down the middle and say, please, Morgan, in small doses, you feel like a weirdo. I think what comes out of that is that a fundamental, I mean, you may know, you will have seen him on the podcast circuit, Rob Henderson. yes i was listening to him last night on chris williamson a brilliant guy the coiner of the phrase luxury beliefs and there's an additional take i'll have on that which is that people could you define yes i ought to explain this so rob's thesis he grew up in foster homes in los angeles he's just published a book uh which i really recommend it's actually a bestseller in the u.s already uh called troubled about his childhood and um he effectively had a you know he i think has only a couple of memories of his mother don't think he ever knew his biological father ended up being fostered and fostered in turn in a slightly dysfunctional home and i think you know he rob would probably agree when i said that he got his shit together by joining the usaf to some extent and then ended up uh going to yale and then usa air force us us air force yeah Yeah.

5:28And one of the interesting points of the book is that the stability of your home background has a bigger determinant on your future success. This is not, by the way, I want to be absolutely clear about this. This isn't destiny. Okay. It's simply statistics. But if you look at statistics, then generally people's life outcomes are more predicated on the kind of stability of their family background than on family wealth or an education and yet what rob noticed is that when he got to yale it was fashionable to say you know i think marriage is just a social construct you know and uh you know i think people should be free to you know live in you know open partnerships with the you know polyamory and so on you know you know that now those people themselves didn't adopt those behaviors but it was fashionable to advocate for them yeah and he argued that this was and he coined the phrase uh effectively uh you know fashionable beliefs in that there were beliefs that people held not because they really believed in them or that there was empirical evidence that these beliefs were indeed true or useful but simply because it raised your status holding that belief wow there are certain leaves it's very interesting if you talk for example on the question of cannabis legalization okay now by definition if you've got into yale okay you're probably not a stoner and you don't have a major problem with drugs because if you did have a major problem with drugs you probably wouldn't have got there but it's very fashionable people who've got there who don't have a problem to go yeah it should all be decriminalized and blah blah blah simply because that's a belief which has become almost arbitrarily fashionable.

7:13And so you cleave to the beliefs that high-status people tend to have, regardless of anything else, simply because they make you look good and feel good. Yeah. Now, what's interesting to me is that to some extent, the political left might have taken a wrong turn here, because if your principal motivation is the redistribution of wealth and resources, there are ways psychologically where you can get rich people to give their money to poorer people and still feel good about it. There are all sorts of psychological tricks. I mean, that's philanthropy after all. That's the Gates Foundation at an extreme level, but it's also paying tax, paying duties.

7:57Airlines have worked out ways in which rich people pay considerably more to fly to the same destination than poor people there are lots of ways in which you can separate the wealthy from their money without making them feel bad but there's no way you can remove someone's or reduce someone's status and still leave and leave them feeling better quick one guys espressos have got a brand new sponsor unleashed unleashes inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use unleashed daily islands i bloody love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins no way your stock is don't miss availability look your favorite brands literally use unleashed as their backbone candy kittens tiny rebel trip always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with josh and his wonderful sales team at unleashed they're amazing even nothing comes of it and even better news you'll get your first month free if you reference hungary thank you that mechanism just doesn't exist in my opinion so by turning politics into a status war between tribes where each group seeks in many ways to essentially promote policies and beliefs which make their own group look and feel good and uh and which perhaps demonstrate their commitment to a group that holds those beliefs and thereby diminishing the status of people who disagree with you you'll never change anybody's mind now if you look at advertising you can look at all the world's advertising you will not see a single for example advertisement from ford going if you drive a gm car you're a moron okay now i'm sure it's been tried in fact i know it was tried but it never i think it never ran it was in the very late days of um bill burnback i think where they kind of showed monkeys drinking other brands of beer and that that was an ad which burnback himself killed because he said what we're trying to do is to win over our competitors drinkers and you're portraying them as as apes yeah okay you can't change people's minds by diminishing their status okay i mean the least persuasive message you can possibly say you can possibly construct is effectively i am right and you're wrong you dumb piece of shit okay it's not persuasive in many ways if you want to persuade people you do the opposite you practice flattery or you do things that elevate their status or make them feel good about doing something and as i said you can make people feel good about surrendering money and resources and time okay and all sorts of voluntary activity goes on in life we've got evolutionary mechanisms for that what we haven't got as far as i can see is any evolutionary mechanism by which i can actually reduce my status and feel good about it have you read of heard of um will store's status game yeah i've read it it's fantastic i've literally i've the science of storytelling um the status game yes and his point is absolutely fair which is that your percent i mean this is where of course you know great restaurants aren't always about food okay okay it's about in particularly in places like new york i mean i find it a bit irritating in new york you say where are you going this evening you name the restaurant they go oh that was so last year and you go well is the food any good because i'm not really interested in whether it's last year or this year but you have this kind of weird kind of i guess it's a positive feedback effect where places just become hyper fashionable for a time and then basically hit a peak and fall off i think london and the uk is less guilty of that generally we a good restaurant can remain a good restaurant for decades much more easily yeah i think social media is is is what pulls gasoline on the status and the sort of beginnings of the status because it's like i think what will actually when i said I think I said fashionable beliefs he actually calls them luxury beliefs luxury beliefs, yeah, fashionable beliefs, luxury beliefs but I think pulling this again into kind of food and drink, the ultimate as you said you can't say you buy a Ford because you're a fucking moron but where I think this has almost gone to next level is you know those vegan meat brands who their way of almost saying it is we're going to like look, we're not going to be like tofu or um uh like tofu what's the other one tempeh which is like a kind of i know exactly you know exactly what it is they're going to say we are we are in terms of this binary piece we're talking about earlier so we are um we are bacon we are and it's almost you had of course the brand which i think is now owned by unilever called the vegetarian butcher you had a brilliant branding effort in beyond meat yeah which was effectively saying this isn't a compromise this isn't actually a substitute for meat it's actually meatier than meat itself yeah and that's a very clever branding in a sense you know um tesla very cleverly did it with electric cars because it had always been assumed that an electric car was a kind of compromise you know that it was slower it obviously had lower range that's kind of inevitable at least at this stage but you know it had you know that you bought an electric car entirely as an act of self-sacrifice to benefit the planet and tesla comes along with a car which is basically a saloon car which has the performance of a supercar yeah okay i mean literally it squares the circle if you like it it doesn't it actually says this isn't a contradiction at all there's no there's actually no compromise required when you have an electric car you can have an electric car which is a better car but that question of of turning politics into a status game where you seek to demean, for example, I mean, calling people racist for things which are not remotely evidence of racism on the part of the person using the language, for instance.

14:06Particularly some of that status game, I think, is evidenced by people taking up arms on behalf of minority groups rather than actually letting the minority groups speak for themselves i find something creepy about that well that's back i want to hear from trans people i don't want to hear from a bunch of political activists affecting to speak on behalf of the trans community i want trans voices on the tv talking about their own personal experience okay and so when you have those people who essentially take up a kind of white savior approach that's a status game that's a luxury belief going on there now it happens on the other side as well i'm not suggesting this isn't in any way one-sided what i'm saying is that there is no real form of persuasion that's effective that is preceded by the humiliation of the person you're trying to persuade wait say that again so there isn't there i don't know of any effective form of persuasion other than the worst kind of stalinist show trial okay where you effectively torture someone into confessing but i don't know an effective enduring form of persuasion which starts off by humiliating the person you're seeking to persuade yes yes yes yes okay so what what you can learn from the advertising industry i'm often find myself criticizing these things not because i necessarily disagree with the intention behind them but because i think they're just adopting very poor tactics if you wish to succeed now okay there are behaviors you can stigmatize okay you can stigmatize drink driving and that works but actually effectively stigmatizing what you might call the foundation myths or the core identity of the person themselves okay uh that's not going to that's not going to succeed if something is deeply entwined with someone's identity okay then effectively you will impress your own peer group your own in-group if you successfully humiliate the opposition off is that right yeah yeah sorry yeah um and what someone called this is the footballification of politics you know if you look at football fans they love yelling you know really but you know abuse at the opposing fans okay yeah that doesn't you never get anybody who's you know what's the great mill ball phrase no one likes us we don't care okay that That behaviour makes you feel great if you're a Chelsea fan abusing, you know, the fans of poorer northern sides by waving money in the air.

16:41I'm sure it's great fun. It may make you feel great and make you look good in terms of your standing within your own particular crowd. But there's not a single recorded instance of someone going, you know, you're right. I'm going to abandon my support for Middlesbrough or Newcastle United. And I'm going to become a Chelsea fan because of that activity. it doesn't work that way now what we've got to remember is that because football loyalties are entirely kind of baked in it isn't really an attempt to persuade it's an attempt to humiliate okay and it's entirely tribal but it's not a healthy thing it doesn't it's not really a vehicle for voluntary social change through collective consensus yeah it's um are you right to just i'll go and do that yeah it bubbles up it's um i think the the point about the the kind of the extremism point we were talking about earlier about people jumping on the bandwagon thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having you if you want the full episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please stay friends as well means the world to me