Rory Sutherland is one of the world’s leading consumer behaviour experts, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising and an author. Every moment of the day, you're being marketed to. From the instant you check your phone in the morning to the subtle strategies behind political campaigns. So how can you decode the world around you and master the art of marketing? Expect to learn how effective companies will be at getting their employees back in office, Rory’s thoughts on Jaguars rebrand, what Rory thinks of the current state of British culture at the moment, what causes Overton windows to shift, what the Myth of Collective Wisdom is, the assessment of Trumps successful marketing campaign for president, If people who pay more taxes should get special privileges, how to make a boring product interesting, what makes a brand cool and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: How are companies managing the return to office post-lockdown?
So talking about lockdown, how effective do you think companies will be at dragging people back into the office?
It's interesting, actually, because in the UK, for whatever reason, There are exceptions. If you go to tech companies, there's tumbleweed. You know, companies which are very strongly kind of tech engineering driven still seem to be very empty. What I know best is the ad industry. And actually, they're generally a fairly gregarious bunch.
And I think it's returned to a pretty acceptable kind of equilibrium. And by the way, personally, I don't want to see people in the office five days a week because everybody who's engaged in some sort of part of the knowledge economy, 20% to 40% of your working week is going to be stuff where you just need to truckle down, choose your own environment, and get on with it.
And you're much more likely to be more productive if you have some degree of discretion over where and when you work for those tasks that you perform on your own. But there is this value of what you might call serendipity, coaching, for example, co-creation, collaboration, which I think still requires some degree of co-location.
You know, it helps to have people in the same place at the same time for all kinds of reasons. However, what's weird is that the level of absenteeism, if you want, I don't want to call it that, but you know what I mean, okay, is much, much higher in the US and Canada than it is in the UK. Was sick leave?
Well, some of it's probably geographical in the simple sense that there are people who've moved. In other words, it's difficult in the UK to move so far away from the office that you can't come in for one or two days of the week. You have to choose an island somewhere or go to Scotland, I guess.
Um, in the US, there does seem to have been a sort of widespread dispersion of people to a distance away from their place of work, where it's a flight away, not a train ride away. But it's not, it's absolutely not what I would have predicted. Because if anything...
The US had a very strong culture of presenteeism, of people effectively getting in early, staying late, being absolutely desperate to show their face. And the office occupancy rates are much, much lower in the US and Canada than they are in Europe or the UK. Yeah.
One of our mutual friends has a team that works remotely around the world. So they speak to each other on Slack, but they don't see each other in the office. And as part of a team building exercise, I think every so often they bring people together. And he thought this would be brilliant. Everyone's going to get to know each other. They're going to become friends.
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Chapter 2: Why do people request pay raises after in-person meetups?
That arriving at a hotel, which is notionally a five-star hotel, and kind of, you know, just being met with an automatic door. Even if it's a very fancy automatic door. Americans want a London hotel, okay? If you take American, or for that matter, Asian tourists, they want London to be a bit London-y with a guy in a top hat, okay?
A friend of mine booked some friends from Los Angeles in the Hempel Hotel. which was... I don't think it exists anymore. It was in Bayswater. But it was kind of like an LA hotel, which was in London W2. And they were gutted, these Los Angelinos. I mean, they were very cool people, right? But they said, if I come to London, I want horse brasses. I want hunting prints. Yeah. Okay. And so...
There are all these nuances which I think are very, very easy to lose because costs are quantifiable and instantaneous. And opportunity costs, lost opportunities, lost revenue, that's slow and it's generally hard to actually quantify. A lovely story about this, which I wrote about actually in The Spectator, but people won't mind hearing it once more, I hope.
I'm driving along this dual carriageway on the Welsh borders and we wanted to buy some milk and the motorway service station appeared to be closed. All the lights were off. The kind of, you know, the petrol fuel logo was off. The fuel prices were off. It looked, you know, like, as I said, like the Bates Motel. It was completely kind of unlit. My wife said, oh, bugger, it's closed.
We needed to buy her bloody lacto-free milk because she's convinced she has lactose intolerance. But I said, no, hold on a second. I remember going there on Christmas Day. I'm sure that a place that opens on Christmas Day wouldn't close at 7 o'clock in the evening. Let's just go in anyway.
And sure enough, we find a fully functioning 24-hour store with, I think, you know, might have been a Starbucks or something as well or a Burger King. And we're the only customers. It's hardly surprising we're the only customers because for everybody else on the road, it looks like the place is closed. So I go up to the guy behind the tiller. I'm a marketing person.
You're pissing away revenue here. This is insane. Every 10 minutes, there are three cars driving past going, oh, shit, you're closed. So I go up to the guy behind the tiller. Why are the lights off on the road? He goes, oh, yeah, I think the guy on the last shift forgot to turn them on. There was no urgency. Now, it occurred to me when I left, the lights were still off when I left.
If that guy had nicked a lion bar at two o'clock in the morning and been picked up on CCTV, there would have been a kind of inquiry. He might have lost his job. There would be extreme disciplinary action. Cost of the Lion Bar is about, you know, one pound in lost revenue, okay? The cost of leaving the lights off is probably, certainly in revenue terms... £200 an hour, maybe more.
Maybe £1,000 that night.
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Chapter 3: What technological advancements could enhance remote work?
Well, I certainly know the way that traffic flows work, that if you hit a red light, you're more likely to hit subsequent red lights. That's it. Right. Okay.
I thought that was... There's something called riding the green wave, where if you obey the speed limit, you can basically keep going through... That's only if you hit the first green, though.
If you hit the first red, you think, I'm fucked here for every one that I'm going to hit. Well, you and your massive muscle car won't be... I can try and go as quickly as possible. which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical.
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That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. Just going back to the UK for a second, let's say that Starmer brought you in or whoever it is that does tourism, brought you in to improve UK culture, sort of tourist destination type thing. Have you got any sort of branding or psychological interventions which would maybe be low cost that could make the UK more attractive across the board?
For tourists? Yeah, for tourists or for people to stay. We've got the second in the world, the UK's second in the world for millionaire exits in 2024. China, fucking literal communist dictatorship, authoritarian hellscape, was first with about... You've got to watch the super rich because the super rich don't give a shit about democracy, okay?
Because they can capture power using money rather than using rights. And the super rich... I mean, if you look at Dubai, which has done a fantastic job of effectively saying,
um we're just going to make this place unbelievably attractive for wealthy people to live here in terms of low taxes okay uh very low crime rate okay uh you have um uh cheap labor which rich people really love you know most of us are you know uh you know in other words you get lots of people doing stuff for you so the service industries are fantastic
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