YouSaid · the spoken record

Rory Sutherland

lines on the record: 160
first: 2025-12-09
most recent: 2025-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“technology and provided people are looking at both with a reasonable amount of imagination. I'm not angry with a bit. I'm only angry with accountants and lawyers and economists, not because they do what they do, but because they have too much power doing. And they've achieved a kind of monopoly over decision making, which I don't think they have a reasonable claim to.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't purely define the problem in psychology free terminology. Just as in America you have a temperature and you have a feels like temperature, which is by the way, very, very intelligent thing because what makes us feel hot is not just the ambient temperature. It's a combination of temperature, humidity, breeze, and I think there's one other factor when they do the fields-like temperature. There's something like temperature so many feet above the ground that they factor in. Now, when I'm going outside, I'm not going to do chemical experiments. I don't need to know what the ambient temperature is. I need to know, will I feel hot? And in the same way, I think there's something really important here, which is that do not define an objective which is designed to serve human beings without considering psychological factors, because you might be able to solve your problem very, very cheaply and efficiently by changing the psychology, not by changing the psychology.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I'm not saying next to a rough pub. I don't want to have fights outside my house. But most people, particularly older people, would hate the idea of being an extra Republic because they crap on about noise and the beer garden and all that stuff. I personally, the noise of a pub, a good, happy pub, is music to me. I don't get to sleep before midnight anyway, so it's not going to keep me awake. Railway line. Personally, to me, it's a bonus to most people. It's negative. Go and look for those things where you can arbitrage. What's possible. That would be my attitude. Now, similarly, if you've got a problem to solve,”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I'm really clear on, and we've made this mistake, all creative people have made this mistake, which is to go, oh no, that rationality's silly. What you need is creativity. What you need is two strings to your bow. Okay. This is a complementary mode of problem solving. It works best in parallel with some rational or quantitative or data-driven measures. But the quantitative and data-driven measures should not be allowed to crowd it out. So when I say the reason someone bought a house because of me is I said when you're looking for a house, don't optimize because everybody will want that house. Instead find something the house has which most people won't like but you don't care about Next to a pub”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just expanding the adjacent possible as a very pretentious article, but push the pebble a bit further. That's it, I mean, you know, one of the reasons I do a lot of this stick stuff is because the feedback I got was every now and then someone comes up to me and says, I made a different decision because of something you said. Someone said to me, I bought my house because of your shit. I thought they might be about to hit me. He's still here.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The consumer is exactly the winner in all this But going back to that family business thing that undoubtedly if you can harness other motivations alongside the profit motives, most people working for a company, unless you've bought them off with massive stock options because they're in the senior management, most people don't get up in the morning to enrich the shareowners and they're not. I don't get up every morning. I don't know what a big shareholder is of my company. It's probably like the state of Wisconsin DMV pension fund. Well, for the vest in the will, I don't wish them any ill will. But I don't get up in the morning because I go, oh, I really worry about those DMV people's pensions in Wisconsin. I can worry about customers. I can worry about colleagues. That's a natural human motivation to serve those people.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a whole load of families which are kind of weird warring families. And sometimes the family business has a motivation which actually consumers”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the Japanese invaded, the tiny Christian population refused to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor, and some of them were martyred for refusing to effectively pay due respect to the divinity of the Japanese emperor. And therefore, it became the patriotic religion because it was seen as a deeply patriotic entity. So I've got a hunch that you deep down, if you go by Hyundai or a Genesis or something like that, there's a dual motivation here. Let's make a bit of money. That's purely. So similarly, if you want to look for anthropological reasons to buy, an awful lot of German businesses are driven by sibling rivalry. So Puma versus Adidas, Aldi North versus Aldi South, there's a whole weird family rift in the German car industry, which is too complicated for me to understand about Porsche and the family who own Pinch.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jonagant by, and this mostly applied to electric cars as well. Always good reason to buy Korean stuff. Do you know why? Why is it? They're going to do that anyway. The Koreans are going to make fantastic tech of fantastic cars, regardless of the profit motive. Do you know why? To wind up the Japanese. So they've got two motivations. Other people are just trying to make money. Deep down, do you know why the largest Episcopalian church in the world is in Seoul? This is really fascinating. I'm going to sell for the first time. I've never been. But the last four presidents of Korea have been variously like Catholic, Presbyterian. Now, before the Japanese invasion, Christianity was a tiny niche missionary religion in Korea.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they go, well, if Ford's doing it, it must be okay. So one of the gifts of having a strong brand is your power to really disrupt and create new categories. New categories of transit. For example, which we need. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to fuck off 600 horsepower electric car. But when I go into London, I want a microlino or an itty billy little thing because that's appropriate to the task. And my argument is that they could have done something there. They could have used their power to do something. And, you know, the finance people killed it, really. What was it called? Project, something rather. Never remember. But no, no, they're just changing the shape of things and making the camera a bit better. Come on, guys. By the way.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I thought they had the brand power to create for places like New York and London, a form of microtransport which was really, really cool, really, really efficient. The brand power you have, you see, you know, if your apple or Ford or whatever, people will buy a weird product from you much more readily than they will from Alpha Romeo, really.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an adornment. And so their failure to understand the wider context within which they were operating, which is the job of marketing, is exactly the reason nerds hate marketing because they think in a perfect world nerd metrics win out. But the consumer is much more bothered by the fact that when you get to the bottom of the iPhone scroll, it gives the little bounce. You could, if we're to be absolutely honest, you could ridicule Ives and Jobs over their obsession with bezels and champhers and things like that. But of course multiply that by a billion owners using the thing. And that probably matters a lot more, in fact, than by the way, I mean, I lost faith in Apple when they cancelled the car.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now nobody in the tech world would go The slight problem with this PC isn't the fact that the clock speed or the processing power or the RAM is insufficient. The problem is if I put this device in any room of my house, it turns that room into an office. If you put an IBM PC, a great IBM PC in any room in your house, including, you might as well put a fucking photocopier in a bloody filing cabinet in the room. Whereas when Jolly Ive comes along and has that lickable The i You can actually put that in any room of the house, it actually enhances”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are people in every field, like in the camera world, there are people called measure betas. They're denigrated as measure betas because they're obsessed with the numerical qualities of the camera. Focal legs and all that stuff. And they don't take very good photographs. And saying that the best, I mean, undoubtedly, by the way, I mean, Beta Max is the famous example where they failed to capture network effects. In a world where there are network effects, yeah, by the way, the best technology probably often doesn't win. I think that's probably fair. Everybody was competing to make a slightly faster IBM compatible PC, but they were all grey and beig”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very engineering point of view because you're judging technology by its engineering qualities rather than its human appeal.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody's done that yet for AI. Now maybe this weird thing that Johnny Ive is concocting, which is some sort of weird pendant which talks to your mobile phone. Maybe that's what it is. There is this”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will be my brother who persuades me to get solar panels or a heat pump or something of that kind. But big ideas don't require the classic geek idea is our idea is so good it will sell itself. Since your fellow Canadian Stuart Butterfield, isn't it, who founded Slack? He says the only real measure of innovation is behavioral change that the only real measure of whether an innovation is significant is whether it both in first order and second order ways changes the way people behave. Now an interesting question is Is AI at that point yet? And my second question is the lesson of all tech is that loads and loads of geeks compete through for technological numerical superiority by some measure or other And then someone else comes along with a cute user interface and makes all the money, which basically Steve Jobs.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're asking them to do something they haven't done before, and both of which create a kind of disquiet. And so providing people with conviction and reassurance, quite often, I suspect, by the way, in the early stages of a technology, that happens one-to-one. That, you know, it was my brother. He's an astrophysicist, so he knows all the bloody maths about kilowatt hours and stuff. So my brother provided me with the reassurance to buy my first electric car. A fence. I don't think if he hadn't bought an electric car, I've now had three, would I bought an electric car? No.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to, yeah, you have to overcome it because just as a camera has a default mode, the human default mode is do what I did before, do what everybody else does. I feel comfortable doing that. Very, very rational default mode. There's nothing silly about that in terms of, if you think about it, our evolutionary brain architecture. Those two things make a lot of sense. But it does mean, and something I only realized about a year ago, 35 years after I've started working in the business, is that as a consequence of that, big innovative new ideas don't require less marketing. They require more because you're asking people at the initial stages, you're asking someone to do something that nobody else has done.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, you're almost always up against a problem which is that the two human default modes do what everybody else does and do what I've done before for obvious reasons. What you've done before and what everybody else always does is not necessarily optimal, but it's much less likely to be catastrophic than trying something new that nobody else ever does. So whatever herd species and we're kind of habitual species. So in the marketing of something which is genuinely new, you're the Tesla, the electric car, there is a degree of extreme anxiety which you don't encounter when you repeat by or when you buy the brand leader.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Practice. Or whether you thought it was some weird newfangled thing that you couldn't possibly trust. I don't know. But sometimes, do you ever watch Preshalwalk on YouTube? You know, those mathematical puzzles, geometry puzzles? I really recommend them because weirdly I find myself on YouTube watching people sort of mathematical equations for fun, which I never thought I'd do. But fresh telewalker, and I can't remember what it's called something like something decision, something, anyway. It's great little YouTube channel. It's not that little. You've got a huge following. And sometimes there's a geometry puzzle which looks completely impossible to solve until you just draw one extra line at which point the solution becomes obvious. And so sometimes in marketing, all you've got to do is tell people a fact. It's not always about persuasion. It's not always about getting people. It's simply putting people in a, you know, a state of knowledge or belief or conviction that this thing can make a difference to them.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of just absolutely brilliant clarity, those are astonishing. But in terms of persuasion, there are various things. So you use generally verbs of movement. You use verbs in preference to adjectives and adjectives in preference to adverbs, I think. You tend to use Anglo-Saxon words rather than the romance words for the most part without being silly about it. You convert a feature into a benefit. There's also an element where sometimes all you need to do is tell people a fact. Now, I don't know any evidence about this, and I'd like to know it, and I ask this question, which is of the people who are anti vaxers during COVID, was there a difference between the people who are basically happy with the idea of a vaccine and the people who weren't partly driven by whether you knew that vaccination dated back to the 18th century and smallpox. In other words, it was a 250-year-old medical.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a fantastic lesson for mental gymnastics, I think. They're also, Kings the Amis believe this, that he's one of the greatest prose writers in the English language. Because bear in mind, a lot of that stuff's written in 1880. You read a lot of stuff that's written in 1880. Fuck, does that be so fucking? Oh, God, hold on. I'll have to go back to page 27 to work out who on earth Mr. Homer.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a large part of it comes down to Michael Polani. And his idea of a tacit scale, which is we know more than we can tell. There are some generally good rules which is right conversationally, much more conversationally than people think they should write because everybody thinks they have to write. Actually, I'll give you two examples of this. David Ogilvy, all his books are incredibly readable because I think he was a copywriter first and an author second. His pro style is very good. And he also adopts a clever trick which I've stolen and which a few other people is that he writes extremely plainly for the most part, but will throw in the odd sesquipedelian long word just to remind the reader that you're not an idiot. It's almost there to flatter the reader as much as it is to flatter the writer. Conan Doyle, I was talking to Rick Rubin about this. He and I both grew up on those Sherlock Holmes short stories, which are not only models of thinking and deduction and, you know.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, quite a lot of these things are armatory. They're just, in other words, if doing something makes you weird, there is a point at which you reach a threshold vegetarianism, veganism, etc., where it goes from being weird to mainstream. So what I'm saying is it's not an even process And sometimes you never get to the threshold.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cancer among Swedish sunbed addicts, but they actually had a higher life expectancy, which they didn't expect. So quite often you see what we do is we measure the narrow effect of a behavior but not the broader effect. Quite interesting in terms of how we might get things wrong. By the way, I wouldn't do it on a beach as there were children present. And then, you know, but if you go to parks of Europe, particularly Germans will just wander around naked. Now, I think at some level, if there are no children, now, in the United States, that would be perceived in a completely different way.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's Buddhist practice where you basically expose your perineum to direct sunlight. I think that a fairly large proportion of the population are naturists to an extent, by which I don't mean wandering around the streets with their schlongs out, but I mean that on a beach, in a field, in sunny weather, in some sort of privacy, they would like to wander around with no clothes on because it's good for you. It exposes your whole body to sunlight. You get a lot of vitamin D. You know, it's generally healthful. And my argument about sunbathing is, well, evolution made it pretty enjoyable. Maybe it's not all bad. And there are some schools of thought in dermatology which may occasion. Although it enhances the risk of skin cancer, it improves cardiovascular health. So there was a study actually among Swedes where there was a higher instance of skin.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, you've got to be 59 to notice this stuff. There's a lot of it happens over a quite a long time frame. It's been a slow. I've got a theory that all British men would wear shorts all the time if it weren't for social pressure. I also think, for example, okay, here's an interesting one. I don't know if you're into perineal sunning.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it occurred to them I was funnily enough hit by a car at my fault, Viamsianist, I failed to signal before manoeuvring. I was hit by a car. Nobody suggested it was my parents' fault for allowing me to cycle around the place. That was just a normal thing you did. And then you get these weird, I've got a few theories. For example, what are the things that are products of social norms where you can suddenly hit a threshold tattoos among the middle class would have been an interesting thing in Britain? Is this true in Canada as well? So perfectly middle class people now have body art. And it's normalized it would have been deeply weird in any middle class milieu to see someone with a tattoo in the 1970s or 1960s.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was completely normal. Be My parents would have been locked up for several of the things which I was allowed to do when I was young. Now, what happens, I think, is that you reach a threshold or a tipping point where In my childhood, let's say someone had abducted me, or I'd been hit by a car. I'll give these that yeah 1974, 75, 76, that kind of era. If I'd been hit by a car cycling to Monmouth or I'd been abducted by a paedophile, okay, my parents would have been described as unlucky. You get past the threshold where that behavior becomes weird and now my parents will be held as irresponsible and would be blamed.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, it is completely a game, and apparently they can demand information which the IRS can't demand. I mean, it is absolutely bizarre. You have a co-op board which will in occasion kick people out as well. But what probably happens is that this is very similar, by the way, with the necessity of children playing outside, which is once the behavior drops below a certain threshold, You have an inflection point. So my parents couldn't believe this. When I was 2025 and I told them that when I was 11 I used to cycle 11 miles to the nearest town to see my grandmother on my own at the age of 11. And then when I told them which they did know, I used to, at the age of sort of 11, climb up onto the apex of the roof and just wander around on the roof 30 feet up.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The behavior so that it's not necessary. Now, I understand that people don't want to put their underpants, you know, I suspect that a lot of it is those weird housing associations already have rules that say you can't do it. And then bit by bit the social norm spreads. Those American housing associations basically like living in a Nazi regime, isn't it? You know, it's like those co-op apartments in New York, which are, I mean, in London, we never tolerate that degree of kind of intrusion before we're allowed to move into a property.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because, yep, it's slow. I'm going to acknowledge that. It's not as fast as an old fashioned dryer. However, the energy efficiency of a dryer with a heat pump. Or better still, Americans, if you live in Arizona, dry your clothes outside. Because this is something that's slightly bemusing, because in Britain we didn't have the social stigma of hanging clothes up to dry, to the same extent. Now, we do now. Nobody would hang clothes up. But that's just a social stigma. Now, in Britain, fairness, we've got a fairly climate, you're Canadian, okay? There are plenty of times of the year where your underpants can be hanging there for three months. They might freeze, but they wouldn't noticeably dry. But I do find it slightly weird in the US, where if you're somewhere like Arizona, you could literally hang them up for, I was in Foot Aventura, in an island in the Clarice. And the amusing thing was you literally, they had a washing machine but no dry, you put it up on the line about 40 minutes later.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to make an unusual foray into environmental responsibility here, folks, everybody listening. Do, if there's a do, simple thing you can do, two things. Put on your appliances at times when there is an abundance of clean electricity. You don't have to change what you do. You just have to change when you do it. Secondly, if you've got a dryer that doesn't have a heat pump, get a dryer with a heat pump.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we genuinely didn't care, okay, if we had no shame, you're absolutely right. I mean, no one, you know, I'm sure, by the way, I think also a lot of valuable goods are affordable now by everybody because they started as luxury goods. I always mention this because it's such a silly boast. My grandparents were the fourth family in Wales to own a dishwasher. And it cost about a hundred and something pounds, at a time when their house, which was a very nice house, cost them four thousand pounds.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a serious question here which is can we take an innate and immutable human instinct and harness it for good rather than for ill? And Geoffrey Miller's example here is let's imagine two parallel tribes. Bluntly put, in one tribe the men folk signal their desirability as mates by fighting each other with axes That's a negative sum game. In the neighbouring tribe they signal their desirability of mates by going hunting and trying to bring home meat which they then share with the rest of the tribe. That's a positive sum game. So there is this really complicated question which is undoubtedly human pursuit of status has both positive and negative externalities depending on the currency you choose to signal. And also it's not totally It's not totally easy to say whether it's negative or positive. I mean”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was tribes in the northwest who practiced this potlatch thing where you destroyed things of value as kind of a signaling mechanism.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because in the sparkling, in the champagne business, it doesn't matter how good the drink is if people think you've bought it for $8.95. It's not doing the job it's supposed to do, which is to signal generosity, to signal hospitality, automark a special occasion. You know, oh, I see you've taken out the good stuff because it's my birthday. And that's, I mean, you're a Canadian, right? Potlatch was, I think, a practice by the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Was that right? Where they destroyed possessions.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“patently at some level we're massively calibrated to care about the repute of others. And that's why some things need to be expensive because then it's a costly signal. It's Peacock's tail. So the guy who rescued the British sparkling wine industry effectively did so by improving quality by 10%, 20%, and then putting up price by about 150%.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of thing within us which we can't turn off. The currencies will change, the status currencies change with fashion and time and everything else. You know, there was a time where having a digital watch was the highest status thing in my school. If you were the first kid with an LED digital watch, people were in awe of you. So these things change. But nonetheless it's probably innate. Would it be nice if we had the power to completely disregard the opinions of others? Well, yes and no. I mean, I think such a society might be better in some respects. I also think it would be kind of atrocious because people would kind of go shopping naked. You know, is shame necessary, this book by Jennifer Jackwood, actually. You know, I mean, as a social species,”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that's not I don't think that's totally simple. I think if you were a rail car obsessive in your next door neighbour bought a Ferrari you'd actually be delighted because you could go out and talk about talk vectoring and adaptive air suspension or whatever it may be okay or the you know the normally aspirated V12 and you'd probably be made happier by that purchase so I don't think it's absolutely simple I think Jay Leno and Jay Leno's garage makes him one of the world's great philanthropists because he goes and spends a fortune on extremely rare cars and then shares his passion with an audience of millions if you are a car enthusiast you know it's an extraordinary case by the way of translating money into something which is both a selfish pleasure and a generous pleasure it's complicated but when you read these books and you realize that status is effectively a kind of”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The selfish gene is when you read them, you are at, you know, if you're someone of any kind of sensitivity, you are at risk of experiencing depressive episodes after reading them. Because not because they're not true, but because they are. And you go, God, am I really that shallow? I do things because they feel good. I explain why I do them. But deep down the evolutionary and emotional reason I'm doing these things is really to show off or to establish, you know, some sort of one-upmanship or status. It's kind of complicated. Do I by one piece of conspicuous consumption as is argued by various people like Lord Layard in the UK? Do I make my neighbours less happy if I buy a newer, better car? Because what I've done is I've changed their comparative frame and therefore my pleasure comes at the expense of theirs.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Geoffrey Miller is fundamentally right that a lot of what we're doing is to advertise ourselves to other people. and the mating mind and spent two books I think you really should read because they're extremely good that a lot of a third book by my compatriot Will Store, The Status Game, which you must know. Have you ever read it? Fantastic. I've heard of it. And I have to admit, the only caveat I give.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“TV is a source of long term entertainment is spectacularly chit. So having a really good television on which to enjoy, because you're not going to go forch racing at the weekend, you know, you're not going to be there effectively going to Glindbourne or popping up to the bloody, you know, metropolitan opera. Therefore, having a really large television is a perfectly rational decision.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, no, no. He said it's extremely good value for money because it makes me feel good every single day when I put it on, and in twenty years time I'll give it to my son. twenty one years time I don't know how old his son was, I'll pass it on to my son who can enjoy exactly the same thing. So as a repository of meaning, Costper Entertainment Hour is quite interesting because it was used to explain the fact that relatively poor young people will spend $90, $100 on a computer game, which seems like a lot of money until you realize that they might play that game for $80,000, 90, 100 hours, or more. Super true. So it's super cheap. I mean, compared to going to the cinema where it's $10 per entertainment hour, more if you buy popcorn. So it's quite an interesting metric. One of the things that used to make me really annoyed in Britain was when people, rich people got really snarky about poor people having large televisions. And I said, look, if you haven't got much money,”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand a bag, like a man's watch, can be worn every day. So one of the reasons why those things are expensive is to use a very interesting measure, cost per entertainment hour. I wear a Casio G shock, I think it was 130 quid because I actually decided as a gross rationalist that the best watch is one that's cheap enough to wear in the shower so you don't have to take the thing off every day. But Paul Dolan, Professor Paul Dolan, who's the behavioral scientist at London School of Economics, I met him when I first met him. I said, I'm intrigued because you've worked with Daniel Kahneman on happiness. And I notice you wear a Rolex.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I visibly have resources to spare Quite a large part of this stuff is actually signaling to ourselves, which is because I'm worth it. I deserve this. I'm the kind of person who drives this. It provides me with a kind of ego boost, a sense of reassurance, whatever it may be. So consequently, if you think about part of the reason why bags became very expensive is that very high-end clothing Only be worn in quite specific situations.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife just came back from somewhere where there was quite a nice night dress in Harrod's, I think it was in London, which was £1,800. Now, you have to remember that there are quite a lot of goods where the purpose of the good emotionally is to, well, let's take the end line. I often think there's a lot of hidden truth in advertising end lines. The L'Oreal end line, because I'm worth it. Some part of that is the person advertising to themselves. So, you know, when you drive around in your brand new blinged up Tesla, albeit slightly keyed, okay, you're not actually doing it to pick up chicks. I mean, maybe you have no idea what you do in your private time. Okay. But if, let's say you bought a bright red sports car, yes, one purpose of it in a particular group would probably be...”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of those things, by the way, weirdly, you can resell them for more than the purchase price, because in some cases the Kelly bag, for example, they won't sell it for you until you've been a fairly reliable customer of theirs for some time, and therefore the price on eBay is higher than the price they charge in the store. So, by the way, it's complicated. But Veblen goods, effectively a large proportion of goods depend for their value on being perceived to be expensive.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same long rights liar. It is in their interests for human rights to capture a greater and greater part of public discourse at the expense of democratic bodies. And consequently, it's, you know, you're not really in the dispensation of justice. You're in the amplification of grievance business. It's very different.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source