Rory Sutherland

For almost 40 years, Rory Sutherland has worked over the one of the world's most prestigious advertising agencies where he serves as Vice Chairman. Since the late 1980s, he's worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet, like American Express and British Airways. Described as the world's leading ad strategies by a shame parish and a marketing trailblazer by Stephen Bartlett, subsequently, he's become a best selling author and keynote speaker heard by millions. You might think that personal fame and success came as a result of his work and association with Ogreby, but I would argue it didn't. The method he used to build his own authority is available to anyone, even someone at the start of their career. In this episode, I'm going to tell the story of how Rory Sutherland became an undisputed authority. Chapter 1, The R&D Lab Rory completes his degree in Classics at Cambridge University in 1988. He briefly trains to become a teacher until the realization hits him that he was headed for a lifetime spent entirely in educational institutions. In his view, what I made the generation of older school masters impressive at his grammar school in South Wales was they'd done something before becoming teachers. They also had terrible cars. Rory had been fascinated by advertising from about the age of seven. So when he pivots away from teaching, he applies to about six different advertising agencies to enter their graduate training schemes. He gets accepted by Ogreby and made the direct, a branch of Ogreby and worked as a planner before becoming a junior copywriter. Here he is speaking with J. Cunfries on the room where it happened. I got a job in direct marketing, which is a niche area of advertising, which at the time I joined was mostly direct mail, a bit of outbound telemarketing and press ads with coupons and 0800 phone numbers. Over the next two decades, Rory rose through the creative ranks of Ogreby. From junior copywriter in 1988 to head of copy in 1995, creative director in 1997 and eventually vice chairman of Ogreby Group UK in 2005. Along the way, he worked on major accounts like American Express, Dove and IBM. In 2008, an opportunity erupted. Rory is elected president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, IPA. The IPA is the UK's trade body for advertising agencies. It's 258 member agencies handle over 85% of all UK advertising spend, making it the authoritative voice of British advertising. I asked Rory, how did that opportunity come about? They simply suggested that I stand. I was the first creative person to do it. It was founded in 1917 and everybody beforehand had historically been an advertising account man. Later on, in a few cases, become senior people from media agencies. I think my predecessor, Dave Passen, was possibly the first media agency head to take the role. It really appealed to me because agency spent ages and ages obsessing about what you might call the value of the agency, what makes their agency different from other people's agencies, when truth there is that much difference. If we're being honest about it, there are occasionally capability differences and there are also skill set differences, but agencies obsess about this kind of thing. In fact, what really interested me was the category problem, which is how an earth do you help advertising agencies? Because as I said, various business decisions taken over the last 20 to 30, well, yeah, actually a bit long in about 40 years, have done everything that is possible to diminish their influence and stature and to some extent their earnings from client companies because they've defined themselves by what they do not how they think. My particular enthusiasm was to take behavioral science and psychology and re-inject it back into the advertising category. Notice that Rory says re-inject behavioral sciences back into advertising. My activity was in fact not an invention but a resurrection. What Rory's talking about here is that from the 1923 to the 1970s, large ad agencies in New York and London hired psychologists to work inside the agency. For example, John B. Watson, the man who popularized scientific theory of behaviorism, joined JWT in 1920. One of the first ad firms to apply behaviorist principles to advertising. Another example, her to Herzog, an Austrian American social scientist with a PhD in psychology left academia in 1943 to join Mechanix and Marker Research Department. But then ad agencies, as Rory puts it, became fixated on their output, not on their input, if you like, which was, I think, a problem. Prior to his election as president of the IPA, Rory had made a discovery of his own, which explains this fixation on behavioral science. Rory is speaking on the rival scratch podcast. Rory was the first to apply for the job. I was thinking, "This is the discipline I've been missing all my life. I was always convinced there was this scientific discipline or area of inquiry, which I used to call the thing for which we have no name. Effectively, it was the science of human action and decision making. And as it happened, I should have maybe, you know, if I'd Googled more actively, I would have discovered pre-existing people like Herbert Simon, going back to the 1940s and 50s and so on. But it was a kind of epiphany because I finally realized that I wasn't completely mad that there were other people who found this curious and wanted to know more about it." So as a consequence of this discovery and epiphany, Rory decides he'll make behavioral psychology, the central plank of his residency at the IPA. So what I wanted to understand is central plank. What does that mean? What did you do? You have a two-year presidency once you're elected as president of the IPA. And it is normal to have a presidential agenda, which is what you hope to achieve or at least focus on in your two years in office. And it's a good focus. You know, you obviously do many more things than that. You know, obviously encouraging talented young people to enter the industry is and will always be an important part of that role, for instance, making sure the agency has access to talent. That is an important role. But you also have your two-year presidential agenda, which is something you can realistically hope to achieve or at least seed within that two-year period. And mine was basically behavioral science. And there were two reasons for it, which is one, I realized that a lot of advertising made intuitive use of behavioral science but found it very difficult to explain what it was doing, which often made it seem perverse or weird to the clients it served, when in fact it made perfect sense to the members of psychology. And secondly, I also thought there was a defensive part to this because if all our clients had read Daniel Cardiman or Nudge or whatever, the agency people didn't have a clue what they were talking about, we'd look stupid and further lose relevance. Maurice Stint ends after two years as president of the IPA in 2011 and through those two years he's been deeply entrenched in behavioral science. More than ever, it's abundantly clear that humans do not conform to rational behavior when making decisions. We make irrational decisions. In Rory's mind, the purpose of marketing is to understand the areas where human behavior differs significantly from what a person might logically assume versus the behavior they will actually take irrationally. An example of a brand that's absolutely nail this distinction is Red Bull. His Rory Sutherland speak him with Patrick O'Shaughnessy. One of the very rational ways to think about businesses that you're always trying to do things better, faster or cheaper. I have in mind your Coke versus Red Bull example as to why this might not always be a good or true idea. Could you expand upon that? There's no evidence and Red Bull. There's no evidence whatsoever and there's no logic to suggest that there's a massive gap in the market for a drink that tastes worse than Coke, costs more than Coke and comes in a smaller can. And indeed, if you've done market research, everybody would have told you to get lost. And indeed, when they tested the taste, people did tell them to get lost. That is one of those things which is an extraordinarily well rewarded case of capitalism rewarding you disproportionately the more counter-intuitive your ideas. To be honest, if your idea makes sense, someone will already have tried it. And to what I say, if there are logical solutions in this problem, someone will already have found it. So the place to look if you want to have disproportionate upside in investment is investing something which has an element of absurdity to you. - How can you tell the difference between an absurd idea that should never see the light of day and an equally absurd idea that focus groups will tell you is terrible, but actually contains an element of genius like Red Bull. Well, now that he's finished as president of the IPA, that's what Brewery plans to do at OVV. Set up an R&D department that can figure all of this out. Higher psychology graduates like Ad Agents is used to do with the view of taking the best of behavioral economic theory and applying it to the problems the agency encounters in a state-of-day work, delivering strategy and campaigns with that disproportionate upside. At OV, Roe is in the right environment. It's a business with a culture of experimentation. His Roe, speaking on the real famous podcast. - We both practice and teach. And our teaching informs our practice and our practice informs our teaching. So OVV is always, I think, from the lines he says, you don't want to become an agency of chin stroking intellectuals who never actually affect or execute anything. That's equally disastrous. But equally, OVV has never been anti-intellectual. It's always been fairly receptive to new ideas, new models. - The problem is, there's no money in the business for that kind of innovation. So how are they going to fund it? - A very clever colleague of mine, Nicole Yershon, needed to fund a laboratory in which we experimented with new tech and new ideas. It was kind of the R&D function for OVV. And she couldn't get funding for it. And she said, well, what if instead of giving speeches and talks for free, what if you charge for them and use the money to fund the lab, which is how it all got started? As a consequence of this, I only realized this about a month ago. This is why intuition is so important because often you don't know what you're really doing while you're doing it. Now, as a consequence of that, I get invited to speak at things which weren't marketing or advertising conferences. I thought, well, since they're paying to fund this lab, I might as well turn up. As a consequence of that, I didn't do what most advertising people did, which would show a lot of ads. I showed some ads, but I also talked in general because I realized that most of the people at a compliance conference will never be in a position where they have to make an advertisement. So the advertisement isn't that interesting to them, except to the extent that it illustrates a different approach to problem solving, which is psychological, rather than, let's say, technological or deterministic in some way. Anyway, as a consequence of that, and I only realized this a month or two ago, what made this different was I wasn't selling what we did. I was selling how we thought. And in the advertising industry, what we do is quite valuable and sometimes extraordinarily valuable, sometimes not very valuable at all, sometimes probably deeply unattractive. But what is valuable from it? And of course, people within the ad agency don't realize how distinctive and rare it is. Hence the Chinese proverb, if you want to understand water, do not ask a fish. As a consequence, I started selling how we think not what we do. And when you do that, you accidentally discover that the, what you might call the potential market for your wares, is a hundred times larger than I think the conventional advertising agency has realized. Why would selling the thinking multiply the market size by a 100? Because the way we think is something that anybody can practice. The other advantage of making this behavioral science unit self-funded is that it gave Rory a massive degree of autonomy. Within reason, he could take it in any direction he wanted. Speak about whatever he chose to on stage, because now that he's bringing speaking fees into the firm, he becomes the most cost effective vice chairman in the company. In that title of vice chairman, it was as Rory puts it, "A gribly vague." And that came with advances. To some extent allowed me to write my own job description. A very good friend called JP Ranga Swami. He was chief technology officer, I think a BT for a time, a variety of other very interesting jobs, very interesting man. He refuses to take a job with a large organization unless the job title is new. And he argues, "I step into some of the else's job title, I will automatically be judged comparatively by what my predecessor did, and that doesn't necessarily allow me to maximize the value I can bring to the organization." And so one of the questions I think we need to ask is that everybody is defined by what they do, not what they're for. The Rory Southern that we know today, TikTok sensation, the viral TED speaker author of Alchemy, it's this version with just heard who talks about how advertisers think, not what they do. Up to this point, he was well respected and known within advertising circles, but not particularly outside of them. But this new version, whose fame and notoriety expand beyond the industry, this all came about through his creative exploration of figuring out how to launch the behavioral science lab that where the acts as a differentiated toography and subsequently how he deliver value to the new audiences he was speaking to who were not interested in the mechanics of developing an ad. Chapter two, Fattaelp. Let's go back to the time prior to re-launching the behavioral science lab at Ogrivy, a period where he's in the thick of his career as an admin. In the acknowledgment section of his book, Alchemy, Brie thinks the dead spiders, I asked Brie, who or what are the dead spiders? So it's a wonderful group of people. It was founded almost, I think, as a joke as a kind of dinner club. Has met for a while, but there was a company called Red Spider and somebody misnamed it, "Dead Spider." That was, I think, Charlie Robinson's company was Red Spider, very, very interesting planning company, but it was a fantastic mixture of now-older advertising people. Mark Eels, Belongs, I Belong, the late Jerry Bullmore, Belong, Paul Feldwick and so on. Every now and then, we just meet to have an incredibly agreeable dinner, typically somewhere in London. Okay, so just expanding on that then, 'cause you referenced them in new acknowledgments of Alchemy. Ah, my goodness, yes, I wanted to tell you, you'd heard of them. So obviously, good friends. Why did you feel that impulse, if you like, or that they didn't do? Requirement to reference them in acknowledgments. Oh, because the conversations there, both with those people, independently and at the dinners and occasional get-togethers, were of just disproportionate value. This idea of disproportionate value, it aligns with the same teleps concept of Fat Tales. Fat Tales means a small number of observations in a given data set will represent the bulk of statistical properties. His Rory, speaking to that point. If you play poker, if you play Blackjack, what you really notice is that a small proportion of your hands in the course of an evening really disproportionately contribute to your winnings. And, you know, a large number of hands, you may make a bit of money, lose a bit of money, but there are some outsize hands, which can lead out, in terms of how much you win or sometimes how much you lose. And it's vitally important, I think, to understand that's also true about real life. I think it's also true about advertising, by the way, which is that what we're trying to do with life is we're trying to measure it as though value is proportionate to time that every quantum of time has to be matched to a quantum of revenue. For example, I worked on American Express for, you know, getting on for 10, 12 years. Looking back, I didn't realize it at the time because everything seems equally important at the time, but a small proportion of your activity or your discoveries in a way contribute at absolutely outsized proportion of the value. Looking back at that time on American Express, that the most of the things we did were worthwhile in some shape or form, they had to be done. But, you know, a small proportion of those pieces of activity, maybe three or four, really delivered nearly all of the long-term economic value from what we were doing. And I think that's all too true of sort of conversations and events. And it's particularly true that every now and then you'll have a conversation or you'll read a sentence or you'll have an insight, which is just a thousand times, you know, you might read five sentences in a book. And those five sentences are literally, you know, a thousand times more valuable than all the other sentences in the book. And I think just accepting that and getting away from this idea that we have to optimise the parts to optimise. the whole and the idea that life is proportionate. It fundamentally changes your philosophy because you argue that actually what I'm really here for is to try and get lucky as often as I possibly can. And that was the point Rory was making about the dead spiders. Jeremy Bulmore, I'm doubtfully among them. Still I think the best writer on advertising in the 20th century. And every now and then you understood something which you didn't understand before. And those moments of kind of enlightenment or epiphany are really really important. If you've listened to other episodes of Undisputed Authority you might be noticing a thread here. The game has to get lucky to increase your surface area of luck. You can't predict which work will get you that lucky break, which podcast episode gets tweeted to millions, which blog post gets forwarded to the right editor or which client introduces you to the opportunity that changes your business. So you do excellent work. Excellent. That's defined by the clients you seek to serve, ship it where those clients can find it and stay in the game long enough for that disproportionate moment to arrive. That was the game Rory played in advertising for decades and it's the game he plays now as an authority. The main purpose of advertising is in fact stay alive long enough to get lucky to have one of those outlier effects where you have an idea which is worth £50 million, a billion dollars in some cases. That won't happen every day if you're working week. So judging people's productivity, how billable they are on Wednesday is simply a moronic. I've already shared some of the fat tail events that shaped Rory's path to becoming an Undisputed Authority. But follow this thread with me. First, I ask Rory where did the seeds come from the idea behind his best-selling book? How come he? Bloody hell. I needed to write a book. I think the title only emerged. The title only emerged, I think halfway through writing it. Where the first seeds arose was really the accidental discovery that came about through doing public speaking. So, as I mentioned in my last interview, I was doing public speaking for free. I ended up speaking to audiences who weren't marketers and I realised very quickly there's no point in just talking about what we do here because 99% of these people will never be asked to make a TV commercial or run a poster campaign or even a direct mail campaign, whatever it may be. So of necessity, if you like, it was a bit like stand-up comedy in that you had a set and you continually, you had a kind of modular set and you continually experimented with it to see what resonated. That reference on comedians tracks. That is how the very best stand-up comedians write their Netflix specials in the same way Rory wrote best-selling book through iteration. Here's comedian Jimmy Carr speaking with Louis Thoreau on his writing process. I think systems better than goals. I think I write every day and then try stuff every night. That seems like a pretty good system. So it's just constant. Constantly writing new stuff, trying new stuff. At the end of the show, I'll get a piece of paper out at the very end and I'll try like 10 new jokes. And some of them will work and some of them won't. And then you're constantly kind of building the next show. So you've got these kind of little building blocks of Lego. I've liked all that's a joke that works and that's a joke that works and what would go well together and what's a good sequence. So you're constantly, you're never looking at a blank page. You're constantly looking at stuff and writing and trying to improve. And I guess your hit rate gets a little bit better over the years, but not much. I'll write so many jokes that don't work. It's amazing. And you can kind of never really second guess what the audience is going to do. Okay. Now back to Rory and his process for uncovering the ideas behind his book. What I noticed was that when you talked about what it was very good to talk about what we did because showing two or three TV commercials can be highly illuminating and illustrative of a point. But if I just stood up and talked of 40 compliance officers about making TV ads, they'd think nice TV at Eastmore, but not much use in my everyday life. Whereas when I started talking about how we think rather than what we do, hence the title of the next book, Manthink, when you start talking about how we think rather than what we do, the target audience becomes much much bigger. And then to my joy, I discovered that the target audience for the book and the effective customer base for the book was 20 times broader than I'd anticipated. You said you had to write a book. Why did you have to write a book? Because I'd received an advance to write a bloody book. And I'd have to pay it back if I didn't write the bloody book. That's okay. That's how it works to some extent. The other reason was, if you look at it purely from a commercial point of view, there's a whole kind of flywheel effect. If you do speaking, writing, you know, coaching, talking, the book is part of the flywheel. And having written a book, you can do the other things with a degree of extracredibility, but also because I felt I had something worth saying. And so it didn't seem a total waste of my time to commit that to paper, rather than merely committing it to YouTube or whatever. That book deal where we get is with Penguin Random House. So deal with a major publisher, which opens all sorts of other doors. How does he get the deal with Penguin Random House? It's the fat taligan. How did you get the deal? How did that come in? Through wonderful, again, this is what I mean about things being fat-tailed. I can't remember how I first met Max and John Brockman, but they were US literary agents in the world of what you might call science writing. And I would like to say intelligent nonfiction. So John Brockman for many, many decades had been a kind of, how would I describe it? Almost an impressario, I think, is the right description. Among all manner of extraordinarily interesting people, whether it be the sort of the Dawkinsites or the Pinkerites, it may well have been through Nassim Talib. Are you friends with Nassim? Yes, I mention him. Not only that, friends is not doing it justice because he's been an absolutely enormous influence on how I think about the world. Because interestingly, at its best, statistics, when well practiced, is a kind of art form. It's a form of high creativity because it's involved, it involves seeing what everybody else sees, but concluding something technically different. But you were a fan of his work before you were friends with him? Yeah, that's right. Yes, before I even met him, I think I first met him at a spectator dinner. Rory mentions the spectator here. If you're not based in the UK, you may not be aware of the spectator. It's a 200-year-old British weekly magazine covering politics and culture with witty, often contrarian commentary in the UK, similar in prestige to the New Yorker or Atlantic. Rory's a spectator dinner because he writes a spectator. So again, how did he get that opportunity? The fat towel. How did you get the opportunity with the spectator? This is, I hate to say this because it's kind of depressing, but it's true, that nearly all the significant things that happened to you are actually lucky. I knew someone very brilliant at Ogle V, whose wife was also very brilliant, who was brought in by Matthew Dancona, then the editor, to assemble an interesting group of people around the table. Matthew then said, "I'd like you to write in a kick." I've been a lifetime spectator fan. My father had the spectator. There were copies of the spectator in my home when I was sort of 11 or whatever. This was in the 60s and the late 70s. I wasn't reading in the 60s. I was four years old, but this was the time when very few people subscribed. The subscription dipped very, very low for a time. And time is a good lifetime. Lawlesson, Matthew said, "I'd like you to write an occasional column on technology. Happy to oblige." Then by a glorious accent, they wanted a sports writer, which was Roger Alton. And Roger, who I think recently had been the editor of the observer, said, "I'm happy to write a sports column, but I'm only happy to do it fortnightly, not weekly." And so Matthew then said, "Would you be happy to do the other fortnight?" Which, by the way, was probably the luckiest accent because it would be nice to write a column weekly to begin with. It might have driven me insane, or I might simply have lacked the necessary material to keep it interesting. And so, you know, all shit happens this way. We just spend our time reverse engineering our lives to pretend that it didn't. You know, "Mick and Keith," I'm not by the way, I'm not suggesting equivalence, okay? You know, "But Mick and Keith met by accident on a train." And there's a great book by Brian K. L. W. A. S called Fluke, which effectively makes the point that most of the world, there's a wonderfully banal sounding phrase in evolutionary biology, which is things are the way they are because they got that way, which sounds completely banal until you realize it's quite profound. And this is really important. The only thing you can do is you can't control luck but you can control to some degree the odds of being exposed to its upside. And all these lucky breaks, they increase worries fame amongst widening circles of people, and that fame compounds, bringing with it greater and greater opportunities. Here's Rory speaking with DARRENLY. When you're famous, people bring you opportunities that you never even knew existed in the first place. It has a value in all kinds of ways, not all of which you can define in advance. In fact, the majority of which you probably can't define in advance. And one of the things that does worry me is that in the advertising business, it seems a bit banal to go to someone and say, "We're going to make you famous." But actually, it's a perfectly healthy aspiration simply because if you're not famous, you have to find all your customers, okay? Or viewers, in the case of, you know, if you're a YouTube star, okay? If you're at the point where you are not famous, you have to find your customers. When you become famous, customers whose existence you never even envisaged will come and find you. That's a kind of escape velocity, that's a step change. And so, my only argument is that we're developing a very instrumentalist approach to marketing, which is the purpose of this thing is to achieve that. Chapter 3. Noticing what others only see. We've established that life and business is fat-tailed, and that the name of the game is increasing your surface area of luck. All undoubtedly true, all factors in worry success. But there's one other key ingredient I play here. It's not all down to luck. Rory has craft in delivering messages and insights that resonate. So what exactly does Rory's craft look like? First, I want to share with you an example of Rory's genius. This is what audiences, both online and in person, go crazy for. The power of irrational thinking. Here he is, delivering his TED Talk, life lessons of an Adman. This is a train which goes from London to Paris. The question was given to a bunch of engineers about 15 years ago. How do we make the journey to Paris better? They came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend £6 billion building completely new tracks from London to the coast and knocking about 40 minutes off a three and a half hour journey time. Now, call me Mr. Pickie, I'm just an Adman, but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey, merely to make it shorter. Now, what is the hedonic opportunity cost of spending £6 billion on a railway track? Here's my naive advertising man suggestion. What you should in fact do is employ all of the world's top male and female supermodels. Pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free shadow patrouse for the entire duration of the journey. Now, you'll still have about £3 billion left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down. Now, here's another naive advertising man's question again. And this shows that engineers, medical people, scientific people have an obsession with solving the problems of reality. We're actually most problems once you reach a basic level of wealth in society. Most problems actually problems of perception. Brilliant, right? Here's another. This time, Rory talking with Patrick Oshornesy about the genius of five guys. Five guys. That's another one because the price you pay for your burger is insane. Now, where they've been very clever, I think, in five guys is you spend a huge amount of money on the thing where you believe that money makes a big difference, the quality of the burger. But then they kind of do a vault fast because the extras, the things you add to the burger are all free. You can have double jalapenos, a brown sauce that may only be in the UK. You pay for it a bit of extra for cheese and bacon. But on top of that, all the other toppings are free. The peanuts are free. The drink, green fills are unlimited. And the fries are insanely generous because they actually give you a free scoop of fries on top of the amount that's denominated by the size of the cup. Now, there's something really clever going on there because what that is is getting you to pay willingly for something you care about while being fairly generous with the ancillary stuff. Rory is masterful at simultaneously noticing things that are both obvious and overlooked. You hear the five guys in allergy and you immediately think, "Yeah, of course. This makes a lot of sense. I'd never thought about it before." Then he often supports those real world observations with science, solidifying them, making them credible. That's the pattern. Spots something both obvious and overlooked, then reference the underlying science of why it works. He doesn't invent anything. He gives language and arguments to things we've seen, we've just not noticed. That pattern runs through many authorities. Here's Rory speaking on the Infinite Loop's podcast. I've read and reviewed Matt Ridley's book How Innovation Happens. Like quite a few other writers, I'd include Talib and I'd also include the author of what is it? Science, sex and profits, Terence Keely. They suggest that innovation is mostly a backwards process where practitioners make the progress, which is later codified by scientists and academics. As with Darwin, in many ways, pigeon breeders and dog breeders already understood as far as it was necessary for application, the principles of selection. But what they didn't do is codified. And the process quite often happens backwards. Rory walks through the world with his eyes open. Certainly in the context of marketing and human decision making. That's the data, all right? Real human and business activity. He's always picking up signals. But then he's also reading widely. He even speaks to this when delivering career advice on the 111 podcast series. One of the things I would recommend is a certain degree of randomness, certainly early in your career, in the long term pays off because it gives you versatility and it gives you breadth. The idea that the modern employee in truth has to be good at more than one thing. Or at least you have to be very good and with depth in one thing. But you need to have breadth than a variety of related fields. He uses reading from fields outside of marketing and advertising to explain the data inside of marketing and advertising. It's what I call a broad perspective, narrowly implemented. In other words, he notices the strange way that five guys priced their burgers, then he uses behavioral science literature to explain why that works. His worry again, speaking with Patrick O'Shawery. Now one of my great points about pattern recognition in behavioral science is this isn't about laws. That's Newtonian physics. This is about spotting recurring patterns. Complex systems are like that. There are laws. There are patterns. And I often make the argument that you can spot a pattern in something. Okay. In something utterly trivial like burger sales. And you can redeploy that insight in something absolutely massive like taxation. What would happen, for example, in the UK, if you adopted the five guys approach to tax? And all your income tax was hypothesated towards things people really cared about. It was schools and education and health. And then the tax you didn't notice paying like sales tax. That went towards things like defense and so on and so forth. Now, I think what five guys has done is they've invented kind of hypothesated pricing, which is really clever because you're probably subsidizing your fries or your peanuts with the cost of the burger. But you're paying more for the thing you really want to pay for. And yet you feel you're getting a pretty damn good deal on the fries. I think the great thing about psychological anomalies is they manifest themselves in a kind of fractal way, where something you can discover at a very small scale can just as easily be deployed towards something big. So whilst the points were remade about fat tails and surface area of luck are absolutely true, he's genius for developing a broad perspective and applying it narrowly. That is his magic. Intentionally or otherwise, that I believe is the method Rory has used to become an authority inside and outside of his industry. And that method has nothing to do with the prestigious name of Ogrevey on his CV. In fact, this broad perspective of behavioral science and using it to explain advertising, I think he could have used this to build his authority and advertising, even if he had no background in the industry whatsoever. How do I know this? Because somebody already did. Harry Dryer is the founder of Marketing Examples. A website and newsletter with over 180,000 newsletter subscribers. It's a door amongst many in the marketing communities. Marketing examples breaks down real campaigns from companies like Airbnb and Stripe into simple, visual, side-by-side comparisons showing what works, what doesn't and why. Any. built this with no formal marketing background. He'd only finished studying economics at university two years before launching marketing examples. Here is Harry speaking with content UK. I didn't have a design background and I took a design, I looked at this someone called Steve Shoga if you Google him. He's got a really, he's made some really good design tips and actually marketing examples is a complete clone of what he did for design. He made these kind of incredibly detailed design tips and I thought I'm going to do the same thing for marketing. Harry collects hundreds of ads and examples of copywriting each week. That's the observing and collecting data part. Then where Rory Sutherland takes his broad perspective from behavioral sciences, that's his outside source to explain the data. Harry dry gets his broad perspective from UX design. He uses UX design principles or other UX design techniques and applies that technique to a specific field adds a marketing. And just as Rory found his luck through the fat tail, so did Harry. One particular example on a piece of marketing by Kanye West's easy dating up got him his first break and that was followed by a landing page guide that went viral. Like Rory, Harry's walking through the world with his eyes open. Curious, making connections between disparate fields and that really is what Rory is a master of. Now the extent of Rory's success, maybe we could put someone down to his craft and almost 40 years of experience in the ad industry, plus any connections he made along the way. But the method behind his success, that's available to anyone. Developing the craft of articulating observations that simultaneously obvious and overlooked, then supporting them with explanations from behavioral science. This combination, consistent presence with genuine insight is what separates Rory from every other advertising executive at every other prestigious agency. That is how Rory Sutherland became the undisputed authority. Thanks for listening. I'm Liam Carly and I help experts develop package and publish unique insights. I hope you enjoyed this episode and if you did consider subscribing. And one other thing, I've created a free email series called The Ten Patterns of Disruptive Wisdom. In my research of undisputed authorities, these are the consistent behavioral patterns I noticed among those who rise to the top. To get the email series head to Liam Carly.co.uk. Link is in the description.