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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would probably agree because fundamentally as a branch of the law that is not a partial. Because human rights lawyers, it isn't, you know that great phrase is Sinclair Lewis or someone which is it is difficult to get someone to disbelieve something when their salary is dependent on believing it and just as management consultants have a huge incentive to sell in digital transformation programs to their clients and therefore we have a culture in business which more or less doesn't assumes that any money spent on tech is money well spent. They don't look at the opportunity cost should we have a better call center? Had a good way 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
“Their family, I agree, all Collier said is, look, this is inordinately more complicated. It is one of the things he said is the right, for example, of recent immigrants to family reunification is a bit dubious because you're giving someone a right which the native population do not have. So I can't pick five Canadians and get them British citizenship. You see?”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“example on this debate which changed my mind a bit. Very, very good Oxford economist called Paul Collier wrote this economically balanced assessment of general migration and made some, you know, pointed out that on both sides of what you might call the balance sheet. It was immeasurably more complicated for example if Nigeria trains doctors who then immediately hoof it to the United States How is that possibly a good thing overall in that a poor country trains doctors who move to a rich country which arguably has enough doctors from a country which doesn't have enough? That's not, you know, you have to depends on the...”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which is held by a fairly large swath of the population. Regardless, by the way, the rights and wrongs of the whole thing, I'm not even getting into this now, it's deeply dangerous because people go, well, if that makes me far right, it looks like I'm far right. I mean, insulting, calling people deplorables is a terrible, terrible way of getting deplorables to gang up against you.”
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, in other words, if you literally take an opinion which may be held, by the way, from my own personal standpoint, I'm pretty benignly disposed to immigration within reason. However, I also believe in democracy. And if a significant proportion of the population disagrees with me, I owe it to them to hear them out because their circumstances are different to my own. You know, I might be beneficially, you know. One of the slightly annoying things is people who are very rich, people who are pro-immigration because they say their Polish housekeeper is wonderful. Well, that is an experience of immigration, which is not shared perhaps by any means by the other 98% of people. I'm conscious of the fact that depending on where you are, you see the world differently. That's inevitable. And the job of a democracy is to accept the majority opinion even when it goes against your own. And so describing and vilifying an opinion.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How many of these people who are hypersensitized on one side or the other? How many of them really exist? By the way, don't include things like one of the things I find really disturbing is the practice of the media describing people who say oppose uncontrolled immigration and describe them as a far right group Because that is that, you kn Normal people are described as far.”
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 have to confess, I was only dimly aware of his existence beforehand, perhaps because I'm a bread. I'd heard the name and I knew.”
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 it strikes me as highly problematic in the UK. I'm not one of those people in Belgium. I'm not JD Vance. I don't believe that free speech is completely dead in the UK. But there are worrying signs where people who make a complaint on the basis that they found something disturbing can then call in, that's not police matter, unless it involves a direct threat of physical action. I mean, simply being disquieted by something can't 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
“They're not being convinced because otherwise I could have been misunderstood there, you see. But I now have no idea. Literally no idea whether the person's guilty of some utterly trivial infraction which would only have offended 0.01% of the population.”
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 now have no idea I've literally had to book people for speaking engagements. You go on their Wikipedia page and it says accused of inappropriate behavior. Now, I have no idea whether the next Epstein or whether they told a knock-nock joke that two people found unpleasant. Do you have them in Canada? Knock knock.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is I don't think phrases like uncomfortable or offended or inappropriate You know that you get these things where your presence here people would find it you know would feel unsafe triggering okay They don't really belong in the public sphere You know they're matters which for you know a few hundred thousand years we simply sorted out amongst ourselves we didn't have we didn't make recourse to the university dean or the supreme court in cases where we were bothered by things because you accepted that's just part of life and we were allowed then creatively to find ways to get along without recourse to some sort of spurious rule book consequently you know I don't I don't think those phrases like in a I mean this is one of the worst things that happens you say you know was accused someone who's described in the newspapers being accused of inappropriate behavior now”
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 the extent to which social media provide the mainstream media with the tool. I mean, in 1975, if you wanted to find someone who was outraged by the Sydney Sweeney advertisement, you actually have to do some legwork, wouldn't you? Now it's one search on X or Blue sky or whatever it may be. Willful misunderstanding is another thing that is another technique which is deployed. It's perfectly obvious. I mean, it's perfectly obvious that that ad is not intended to mean Sidney Sweeney is the flower of Aryan womanhood. It's not that. Now, in a perfect world, had they had more budget, maybe they would have had three celebrities of different ethnicities or genders or whatever it may be. But nonetheless, this business where you effectively affect to be outraged by things. Well, I'll give you a lovely story about this. I always forget.”
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 say anxiously that everybody always blames social media. I would argue that the mainstream media, it is always in your interest, and this is a problem in journalism, it's always in your interest to provoke a fight because then you have something to cover. Nobody's interested in reading about peace and harmony, they're interested in reading about discord and argument and dispute. By the way, that's an evolutionary tendency if we're sitting here and we heard a fight break out across the street. We be there with our noses pressed up against the glass. If we heard people amicably discussing the weather, we wouldn't pay at the slightest attention where we've fundamentally evolved to pay attention to conflict.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way you have to really watch it in Which is, I think it's fundamentally dangerous to invest too much of your own identity in a political standpoint to the point where I've seen it in people, both sides become effectively deranged. Now, you could say that's the effect of the people who attack them and that the derangement wouldn't happen and wouldn't be necessary in a different kind of media environment”
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's a kind of weird sensitivity signaling which generally has nothing to do with the groups you are trying to protect, which is just, it's sometimes called a purity spiral, where you effectively signal your moral or political purity by signaling extraordinary heightened sensitivity to anything that might conceivably offend someone else, even if the group on whose behalf you claim to be campaigning is completely unconcerned by it.”
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 can speak for Gillette where the evidence was that it was, and by the way, the research showed it was deeply problematic with a large swathe of people. Has American Eagle suffered? I doubt it. In some ways you could argue it's an ingenious marketing strategy, which is that you press the hot buttons of 1% of the population so they then repeat your message accompanied by their own signaling outrage. Meanwhile, you get free media coverage practically everywhere.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is based on a false premise that people know what they want to begin with. Now, I would argue when you don't create differentiation, everybody suffers. Now, let me explain, because if you have a differentiated car market, it makes the car market more valuable overall to investors because there is more variety within the market. It benefits the companies because they can achieve a reasonable profit on what they do, because it has some degree of scarcity or uniqueness, and it benefits the consumer because the consumer ends up with more choice. What often happens is you have something like a regulated telecoms market, or you have a regulated insurance market, and everybody is forced to compete along the same dimension. And what you end up with is just red ocean competition, and nobody wins.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where your wonderful compatriot, Rodriguell Martin, raised me upon him, makes this point that economists have this fancy of the world of companies in direct competition driving down price and increasing efficiency while supplying the same thing.”
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 you think about it, they survive as Land Rover Range Rover because they have effectively created the category they dominate. Right. So I want more.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, fine. You see that, you know. Do you have a sticker on it that says I bought this before Elon went mad or anything like that? So the Canadians don't key your car. key”
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 aspire to managerial roles. Do you see what I mean? And so I've always bought slightly weird cars. I don't know. I've been trying to know what you have. What do you have back in Canada?”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I work in advertising I'm a massive car lover. I really, really like, for example, the Chris Bangalera BMWs I thought were magnificent. I really, really like this because can't buy one. And the reason is because part of my stick. Is being a bit left field. And if I drive around in an Audi, it kind of screams, I work in financial services.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They fundamentally made a mistake. I can't blame them for doing it because we all do this. We all benchmark against our most obvious competitor. Don't benchmark against your most obvious competitor. All you'll do is make yourself a copy of them. And Jaguar was always trying to compete head-to-head with BMW Mercedes nowaday. And bluntly put because of the scale of those entities, it was always going to lose. Because if you're the kind of person who's happy to buy a BMW, an Audi or a Mercedes, and you're also happy to buy a Jaguar, you'll probably end up buying an Audi, a Mercedes or a BMW. Simply to, you know, because of scale, Winnite's all effects, all manner of other things. So if Jaguar needs to survive in the electric car age, making its cars in the UK, which is a Jaguar lover ideally want them to continue to do, they've got to find a different kind of target audience rather than benchmarking themselves against companies which have gains to scale and a whole load of advantages they can't replicate. And so going for what you might call the”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They wanted it to look unlike I would argue, I mean, I was talking to Rick Rubin who was in Hawaii, and he'd heard about the Jaguar ad it wasn't an ad, by the way. You know that, didn't you? It never ran as an advertisement. It was a brand film they showed at the launch of the car. And then I had a right wing podcast in the UK going, you know, it utters the most outrageous anti-conservative sentiment, which is copy nothing. Copy nothing was the exhortation of Sir William Lyons, who founded Jaguar, you know, I think he said it in 1932. He was the original founder of the car company. You've also got to understand their position. What are they trying to do? So I'm just explaining this just in wider context, which is...”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in this case, my argument was okay, all it was they hadn't made Dylan Mulvaney the face of Bud Light. And I think creating these cultural flashpoints through confected outrage is something to be disparaged when the rights do it and when the left do it. I think it's equally absurd because you have, in any communication, you have to understand context and the intention of the person producing the communication. Now, in the case of Jaguar,”
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 gender thing isn't quite the flashpoint in the UK or Canada as it is in the United States. Did you know, for example, that when it came out, I find this quite interesting. In Britain we've had pantomime for 200 years, men dressing up as women, women dressing up as attractive women dressing up as young boys, Shakespeare. You know, cross-dressing. Some like it hot was a highly controversial film with all the studios in the United States when it came out because it involved men dressing up as women. Now, in the UK, my grandmother went to see it. She was a sort of conservative woman in a Welsh provincial town. It would not have occurred to her, literally, that there was anything controversial about this at all. It was simply funny.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To your core target audience The butter like thing to put in context was a influencer marketing campaign of which most people in the company were probably unaware where they sent personalized cannabis and bud light to a variety of different influences, one of whom was Dylan Mulvaney. Now I've got to confess about this. As a Brit, you're Canadian.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“overwhelmingly male for fairly obvious reasons, and they produced an ad which I would argue and even my wife would argue was needlessly insulting towards men, in that it conflated the Me Too movement with barbecuing. Okay, in other words, it seemed to take a definition of toxic masculinity, which went the whole spectrum from things which all right thinking men would quite rightly condemn to things which, for example, two boys having a small scrap on a patch of grass, which all primates play fights. It's not, you know, still get me wrong, sorry, if there's a kid wailing on another kid with a plank of wood, you know, I'll be quick to condemn it, but I'm not totally the on play fighting thing, barbecuing, I don't think is particularly objectionable. And that was a case where it was almost a kind of act of deliberate effrontery.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get into they could not have necessarily anticipated that because it was confected outrage. Look, I'm politically on the right, okay? I get just as angry from confected outrage on the right, which is, oh, they've gone woke, da den when, you know, you're merely showing, you know, a mix of ethnic groups in your advertising or something. This is bullshit, right? And the right to do it and the left do it. There's confected outrage on the left, I would argue, about American Eagle, and it's confected outrage on the right. It's done for signaling purposes by a very narrow group of people. Do those cases actually damage the business. I don't know the figures. Gillette did. There was an extremely, now this wasn't confected outrage because Gillette ran an advertisement. They realized they had to move on perhaps from the best a man can get, despite the fact obviously that their customer base is overwhelmed.”
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 you have a great marketing idea which continues to add value for the next 15 years, it's different. Some of that credit should be offset against your current marketing costs. Fair”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“50% of your effort in life once you ensured the fact that you're not going to starve to death, die, etc. You know, you've looked after your children should be attempts to get lucky. In other words, Nassim would say, I love this phrase, increasing your surface area exposure to positive upside optionality. Finding opportunity.”
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, you're all fired. You accept the fact that you spend a load of money effectively, this is the brutal truth. You don't find entrepreneurs in chess clubs. You find entrepreneurs in casinos. They're playing poker. They're playing backgammon. They're playing games of chance with an occasional very high payoff. A lot of life is exactly like that, but you don't know where the huge payoff is going to come in advance. The people who are running these organizations for the benefit of financial predictability are trying to make it chess. They're trying to turn it into a reductionist game where the most you can score is one for a win. Trying to effectively pretend it's a high variance mechanism, a low, sorry, a low variance mechanistic predictable process.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percentage of what you do. It's Jeff Beaslos' point about in business. In baseball, you can only score four. In business, you can score a thousand. In marketing, when you score a thousand, and the purpose, half the purpose of marketing is not operational, gradual incremental improvement. It's finding another way to hit the ball out of the park and score a hundred. If you cannot claim the credit for that except to the extent that it delivers value in the quarter in which you had the idea or the financial year in which you had the idea, you are underfunding your marketing effort. So it's like saying, imagine you went to JK Rowling and said, yep, you have the royalties on the Harry Potter books, but only on the first edition. And consequently long term marketing ideas, when you're paid by the hour, or when you're evaluated by the quarter as marketers would ben't going to a pharmaceutical research company and said you invent a blockbuster drug.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, by yeah, by yeah, by yeah. You cannot offset any of those costs against the value you created in 2023 by having a huge hit. Let me give you an example. There's an enormous idea for a very large, enormous American, let's say fast-moving consumer goods company. It was an idea conceived by Oglevy, Australia. It has made that company in excess of a billion dollars in the last ten years. It's still running, it runs in something like a hundred markets. Still useful today. For that idea, the agency in Australia got paid three hundred fifty thousand Australian dollars, or rather that's what they made from it. So in other words, you have a billion dollar idea, you get to buy a small flat in a crap part of Sydney. Now, what I'm saying is that this is not me bleating about the advertising industry. It's saying that anything like R&D or marketing, which is fat tailed, in other words a small...”
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 demanding that every quantum of effort has to be matched to a quantum of value creation in some neat proportion. This is so the way market, never mind advertising that okay, right, let's look at the whole of marketing as a discipline within an organization of which advertising is not necessarily very important part. You know, for a lot of organizations, it may be relatively trivial what they actually spend on bought communication. On the other hand, you know, how you design your reception or, you know, whatever, that still affects the application of psychology to value creation. Let's say you have a brilliant idea. And the value of that idea goes on for 10 years. I've seen this happen all the time. The agency, let's say an agency had... They are held responsible for every single unit of cost they incur.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketing from the madmen era. That's still true today? I think there was an understanding then and the remuneration of agencies respected this because you were paid on commission. So if you had a big idea and you came up with a campaign and the client spent millions running the campaign, you made money from that campaign for years after you'd conceived it. So it was rather like having royalties on a book. Oh, okay. We didn't realize that at the time. Then media independence came along and so we had to be paid by the hour like lawyers and management consultants and we've never recovered because it's a catastrophic way to be paid. And the reason it's a catastrophic way to be paid, my argument is that marketing is actually fat tailed. So is innovation R and D pharmaceutical research science in other words five to ten percent of what you do delivers perhaps 110% of the value and therefore paying people by the hour”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's all right, but can you do a bit better? You know, is there an ad that says the same thing but in a more emotionally engaging way? Is there an ad that says the same thing in a way that's funny? Is there an ad that says this in a way people will remember or will act on? So what is funny about being an advertising creative? I spent 20 years of my life either in or managing those departments is the rational solution is where you start. You use it as a springboard to something better. There's a famous quote, you know, fascinatingly from Niels Bohr who said you're not thinking you are merely being logical. I think you'll know that. He was an interesting guy, wasn't he? In terms of his, because he also was the person who said the opposite of a good idea. In boring physics, the opposite of a good idea is wrong. But in high-level physics, the opposite of a good idea might be another good idea. Yeah. What can we learn from?”
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's also the capacity for imagination, creativity, common sense, you know, etc. We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard. This is what's weird about working in advertising, by the way, and I think it's probably similar to theoretical physics, and it's probably similar to entrepreneurialism, which is what's unusual about those fields is that rationality is the bronze standard. In advertising, if someone says, you know, this is the problem and you come up with a completely rational solution, people don't go, right, that's perfect, let's go and do it, as they would do in a finance setting or a compliance setting. In most of decision-making in institutions, rationality, i.e. quality of argumentation is the gold standard. In advertising, if you came up with a rational ad, people go,”
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 it should, in fact, be the last resort. What happened to common sense? Well, this is the argument being that your fellow countrymen, what's his name Ralston Saul, John Ralston Sall, have you come across him? You Canadians totally underrate yourselves. You produce wonderful people and you're always trying to import people like me from the UK or people from the US. John Rolston Saul wrote this book, which I think is called Voltaire's Bastards. And he argues that human brains have evolved with a variety of mental capabilities, only one of which is the capacity for reason.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anybody could claim to be allergic. There were an interesting case in England where someone broke into a theme park or some park of some kind. And then, while drunk, dove into a pond, which wasn't very deep, and hurt themselves, and then sued a ridge in the lower corn, they said there should have been a notice warning of the shallow water because you could reasonably anticipate this problem. And then it went up to the high, whatever it was, the Norlords at the time. And they said, if you took this ruling to its natural consequences, you would have no lakes. You would have no swimming. You would have no swings. You'd have no playgrounds because everything would have to be girt around with warnings about every possible anticipated negative consequence that could arise from this part of the environment. And so what happens is that you've created a kind of idea, I suppose, where the legal solution has become the default.”
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 legal structures to a situation which is in many cases not really adequately captured by law or where a legal decision is made which makes perfect sense within one setting but which sets a precedent which leads to ludicrous second order consequences. So for example if you accept the fact that a I think has happened in one of Philip K. Howard's cases, someone demanded that trees were dropped down in their streets because one of their grandchildren was allergic to the nut that came off the tree. The argument would be that if you accept that, which may seem kind-hearted and generous within that particular frame of reference, ultimately you've opened up the path to widespread deforestation because nobody can grow a tree anywhere to which any”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is inherently lawyers love it, of course, because they make money out of this, arguably the legal system, particularly in the United States, has strayed into all kinds of areas which were once settled by two humans amicably discussing something and possibly finding a creative resolution to the trade-off that's replaced by effectively we will take this to a legal decision and that starts to infect, particularly because there's no tort law reform in the US, and that's partly because I was told yesterday trial lawyers are among largest donors to the Democratic Party because they resist any kind of tort law reform. This has led to things that should be solved through our evolved human talent for conflict resolution, being solved through totally inappropriate application.”
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 I had eyed parapet, there's no upside and there's considerable reputational risk and career risk. Doing something slightly perverse and different. But there are a whole bunch of arguments, first of all an awful lot of quality human decision making, of necessity has to be tacit and instinctive, not regulatory. There are various people. I think it might be Michael Polanyi who says most of life is like a kaleidoscope. We never completely encounter the same situation twice. And therefore regulating for the universal when in fact the great evolutionary gift of the human brain is adapting to context.”
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 met someone you must interview, by the way, called Philip K Howard, who's written various books called Life Without Lawyers. He's just written a book which is coming out right now called, I think it's Can Do, which is restoring the spirit of American can-do. And he argues that a large part of economic decline and social malaise has come from the overintrusion of law and regulation into practices which should properly be left to subjective human judgment, that we've created a culture where people are so afraid of making a subjective decision that they fall back on often totally inappropriate rules and regulations, and there are a whole bunch of people who are employed not always by the government, just as much by the private sector, who are much more interested in adherence to approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having a cottage on a lake on which yours is the only cottage is the kind of gold standard for Canadian property. That would be the dream of a lot of lakes. I'd always heard that as 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
“I mean, Bufford, okay, you're quite rightly your hero, he was obsessed with the quality of the management of companies with whom he invested, wasn't he? You're obsessed with personal factors. I've read a lot in.”
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 Yeah, yeah. I mean, Bonnie Blue would do really well in this because she's all about the numbers, not about the quality of the relationship. Funny enough, she did work in NHS finance procurement, ironically. Finance recruitment. She recruited people for National Health Service finance. So her approach to sex is merely an extrapolation of what she learned, I think, recruiting finance people for the national health service. All about the quantity, not about the value creation, the relationship.”
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 all about short term transactional bottom-of-the-funnel click-through. How can you shovel money to meta in a slightly more efficient way? It's not about long-term value creation at all. Now, don't get me wrong, all that bottom of the funnel, short-term transactional stuff is very important to get right. I'm not disparaging it, but it's only a third of the game And then on instant the other two-thirds of the game, because they don't make money if someone spends money on their call center or upgrades their call center staff or allows the call center staff to call out.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and custom of value over time they're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anybody in a tech industry, just as anybody in advertising myself included is overweighted towards a belief in the ability of advertising to solve all problems. And I will truly admit that I am guilty as charged. However, ad people don't get that much opportunity to convince other people of the rightness of their argument. What has happened is that in marketing, for example, the tech companies, the consulting firms that sell stacks, and I owe a lot of this to a guy called Adele Borky, very interesting, self-taught Libyan marketing writer, former boxer. Adel Borky, and I coined the phrase technoplasmosis by analogy with toxoplasmosis, which is tech people and consultants have taken over the finance department so that the marketing metrics, the finance department has faith in and demands from marketing are not”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source