Rory Sutherland Sneak Peak... The Psychology of ‘Boring’ Genius

0:00One of the things that's underrated, actually, by young people is suburbia. Yes. Because the image quality of it is terrible, but the actual utility of living in suburbia is fantastic. In other words, it's completely uncool, but it's utterly brilliant. I agree. You know, YouTube has become the operating manual, the instruction manual for literally millions of devices. And there's content there which always intrigues me because it's, in a sense, unbelievably boring. You know, it's how to unblock a frozen boiler vent pipe in extremely cold weather, okay, which you wouldn't really watch for entertainment value.

0:41But at the moment when your boiler vent pipe actually freezes up, it's more compelling, you know, than last year at Marinebad. It's just spectacular content. And so, you know, YouTube, one of the things I love about YouTube is it's incredibly useful. One of my proposals is I think we should take 1 % of the UK's education budget and just give the entire population YouTube premium. Most people, when you have something like an energy crisis, most people haven't got a clue what devices in their home cost money and use electricity and what don't. So you will get people literally going around turning off LED lights energetically, but then leaving a heater on.

1:24You have two cars that are parallel on a motorway. One of them is traveling at 70 miles an hour. The other one is traveling at 100 miles an hour. They come around a corner and simultaneously see that there's a tree right across the road. And they both break at the same moment when they see the tree. The car that was traveling at 70 miles an hour screeches to a halt half an inch from the tree, saving its occupant any energy. What speed is the car that was going at 100 miles an hour doing when it hits the tree? The most valuable role of marketing is not actually discovering the things that consumers say they want.

2:03The really valuable role of marketing is discovering those things which consumers really, really want but don't know how to ask for. at the ICI Nylon Factory in Pontypool. And there was an R &D function there. And one of the things these people bemoaned is they said, we went and we developed tons and tons of remarkable fabrics, fabrics that stayed clean, fabrics that kept you cool. You know, they said, scientifically, we were, you know, at the cutting edge of effectively using artificial fibers to produce really, really remarkable. I mean, they could produce, I know they produced things that felt like silk, because one of the people told me that they could produce artificial silk.

2:45And then everybody went and wore jeans. So we were there basically thinking what do consumers want logically. Meanwhile, what the consumer wanted from a pair of trousers was some weird psychological connection with the American West. I mean, go figure. I've asked people this because it doesn't make sense. I drove in this morning listening to an audio book. She'd said to me in 1994 that in 2025, you'll be on a one-hour drive, and in your car, you'll be able to listen to the whole of world music. Now, I know you young people think that's normal, okay? But most of your journeys, you'll spend listening to people talking.

3:27Fuck off. Right? If you look at the popularity of podcasts, that's not a short-form thing. What the fuck is going on there? And the only conclusion I can come to is that TV lost interest in conversation. If you'd asked me to predict that, no chance. I would have thought that music would predominate in the car. But for a lot of people, it does. But the explosion of the podcast is something that genuinely surprises me.