 Rory, welcome! So lovely to have you with us today, and I'm also joined by the incredible Louise who may or may not actually be interviewing Rory at NudgeStop this year, so this is a sort of a small taste of something that you may see at NudgeStop itself. But yeah, we're celebrating NudgeStop 10 years this year, which is a remarkable feat, so bravo Rory, and we just thought this conversation will just go into a little bit about how it started and really what people have to look forward to this year. So yeah, if you want to... Absolutely superb! Is there a very quick evolution that you can share, Rory, with us, and then maybe a little taste of what's coming up? Well, evolution, interesting question. Well, it's first of all our 10th anniversary, and we think we've reached a point now after 10 years where we can break a rule which was occasionally breached in the past, where we can invite a few people back, and so we'll be starting to do that a little bit more. But what we have is, I hope, is enough that at any sector you're in, most of the talks will be relevant. And also, at the same time, cover what is a fairly broad definition of behavioral science. You know, don't get me wrong, I think that there are some areas of behavioral science which are much more important than others. I think choice architecture is a very, very important and still very, very robust finding, which needs to be given far more prominence, perhaps. And that's one of the reasons why we've got, for example, Paco Underhill, who's the great author of the New York Times bestseller, Why We Buy. We've also got what you might call the dawn of choice architecture, which is Eric Johnson, who is at Columbia Business School at Columbia University. But it's a, you know, it's a gloriously, I think, broad area, which is it won't, like many academic conferences, become monotonous through over-focus on the same things. And it will be inexcusable in a field as rich as behavioral science if we were to do this. But equally, I think we've kept it grounded enough so that it's a very healthy mixture. And I make no apology for this of, you know, fairly high-end research, which is still awaiting practical application. But at the same time, we also have a very, very good mixture of theoreticians and practitioners. Mayor Shankar, for example, the cognitive scientist is the senior director of behavioral economics at Google. You know, you don't get much bigger than that in the applied behavioral science field. We also have, for example, Shalina Jan Mohamed, who's one of our local voices, who's an Ogilvy colleague of mine, who's perhaps the world's leading expert on understanding and engaging with Muslim consumers. So, Louise, how's the book? We cover the waterfront, put it that way. I love as well that what I always find brilliant about Nodstock is it's this beautiful combination of, firstly, it's very accessible, very enjoyable, but it's always a beautiful combination of behavioral science and creativity. Yes. I think the two go very well together. I think you're uniquely placed to provide. I think it's absolutely vital to understand that behavioral science is not a prescriptive science. It doesn't tell you what to do. It tells you where to look. And its principal value, which is why, by the way, it's not always popular, okay? Or it's not always welcomed, but it expands the possible solution space. And it means that there are 10 places to look rather than two. And economics has typically given you sort of two places to look in the field of incentives. You either bribe people for doing something or you find them for not doing something. And it tends to narrow the field of inquiry. Now, of course, in business decision making or institutional or political decision making, that very narrowness is often bizarrely popular. Because if you can claim, here I stand, I can do no other, okay, because the model tells me I have to do this, then you may not be making a very good decision, but you are fairly safe from blame. If you can pretend that what you are doing, the model told me to do it is the 21st century equivalent of I was only following orders in the 20th century, okay? But at the same time, the principal value is it massively widens the scope for creative and inventive inquiry. And I think, I think, you know, you can't separate it from creativity. I don't think it tells you what to do. I think it tells you where to look and it tells you, you know, which perhaps normally unexplored avenues might be worth actually exploring in this case. Great. Whilst you're talking about diversity of thought, Rory, that one of your guests is Matthew Said and his great talk about it's not just a collection of brilliance, but we have to have all diverse voices in the room. Brilliant people are surprisingly prone to, I think, a cognitive failing we all have, which is once we make sense of something to our own satisfaction, we stop asking questions and we stop looking. And so a group of, as Matthew Said's wonderful work in the book Rebel Ideas shows, a group of highly intelligent, you know, high IQ, but cognitively very similar people are hugely prone to two things, one of which is massive blind spots because there will be aspects of the problem they simply do not see, wedded as they are to a particular sort of model that gives them essentially legibility of the problem. Okay. They're also, I think, disproportionately prone that when you fail, you simply double down on your failures. And those, I think, are two qualities of groups which are not cognitively or otherwise diverse, I mean, diversity of background, diversity of ethnicity, diversity of gender. I mean, they're all part of a much wider and more important aspect, which is, you know, diversity of opinion, if you like. I mean, I was, I was, you know, I was pleased. I don't necessarily agree with the guy, but I thought the interesting view from the HSBC environmental spokesman by dint of being different was important. Because I don't think in real world situations, we can ever be completely right or completely wrong, by the way, you know, okay, that exists in what laughably called the hard sciences, which of course, in some respects, easy, because there is a single right answer. I think that the attempt to obtain scientific certainties in anything involving human behavior or other complex systems, markets, ecosystems, for example, I think the, I think the need to believe oneself completely right is actually a very, very dangerous mental failing to actually apply to any of those instances of systems, which simply defy easy quantification. And you were saying, Rory, that it's this great mix of sort of established writers and then research papers. And of course, you've got Rob Henderson, who's an American psychologist, but also is a studying PhD. And his talk sounds like it's going to be very interesting. He's interested in luxury luxury beliefs. Rob's interesting because he grew up in a series of orphanages in pretty tough circumstances in Los Angeles. And what is interesting is that I think he has the capacity, Paul Dolan is another such person, who has the capacity to look at what you might call the self appointed middle class intelligentsia with an outsider's view. And quite a lot of what emerges might be said to be beliefs that are held, not because they solve a problem, but because they what they say about the person who holds them. And I think there is an area where there are beliefs, which are almost a form of costly signaling, you know, I believe this because I can afford to not like those skinned people who are threatened by these things. I am, of course, above such concerns, and therefore can actually signal my status by holding, you know, beliefs which, to be honest, probably don't hold up much to empirical reality. But that's not the point. And I think Rob's healthy skepticism towards those opinions is incredibly valuable. And he's, you know, brilliantly placed actually to spot things. It's rather like, you know, whoever discovered water, it sure as hell wasn't a fish. And I think I think many of us, and particularly if you look at very homogeneous industries like marketing, which historically tended to employ from quite a narrow category of personality, not talking necessarily about gender or ethnicity, but that, you know, all marketers, for example, characterized by being very high on the openness scale, and therefore tend to either dismiss or fail to comprehend what you might call more conservative points of view. There is a very large swath of the population, by the way, who doesn't want anything to change. Okay, their basic mentality is, you know, I'm fairly content where things are. I know what I'm doing. You know, I can survive. Can you please leave things alone? Now to a marketer, that mindset, maybe when they get to 70 or 80, they actually hit that mindset a little bit. But to a young marketer, such a mental approach to the world, which is held by huge strains of the population is pretty much, you know, incomprehensible. And so, yeah, I think this question of cognitive diversity, you also get some really interesting surprises. I think it's notable that people, for example, there's a fine line between OCD and creativity. And, you know, you might ask the question, how healthy is it that we're effectively medicating creativity? Okay, right. But also, I argue that there's a very interesting finding so that people who are slightly on the autism spectrum, okay, make very good social scientists, because things that are instinctive to the neurotypical actually have to be understood by people who aren't neurotypical. So as a result, they work things out from first principles in a way that most people don't. And that gives them actually a heightened understanding of human social interaction, rather than, as you may assume, a kind of weakened one. It's probably why in advertising, you see a lot of sort of rare to be neurodiverse people, and there's a lot of a lot of dyslexic creatives out there. That's, I mean, the collection with dyslexia and entrepreneurialism, for example, has to be, you know, has to be investigated more, because, you know, it may be a question of what you focus on. It may be a question of having some sort of sight that others lack, don't know. But it's certainly, in some cases, it must be statistically significant. At one stage, I think the majority of people on the board of Tesco, and this is at the height of their success, were actually dyslexic. So I've always seen it as a, as, as, as overwhelmingly in my life of benefit, apart from when I was at school. I think if you have to deal with rigid structures, it, it makes life really challenging for you. But this actually leads to a much, a much overlooked question, which is we may be focusing, we may be doing the wrong thing right, rather than the right thing wrong. Okay, I think that's a Peter Drucker quote, and it's much better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right, but an awful lot of business is actually focused on optimizing, you know, something which shouldn't be optimized in the first place. Okay. And one of the questions I've raised there is about equality of opportunity. Okay, which without necessarily us noticing, comes to imply two things. Okay, equality of opportunity, one that life should naturally hierarchical, and all that matters is that the right people get to the top. So it's kind of dismissive of the idea of greater egalitarianism, I would argue, because it's all about, you know, we're gonna have winners and losers here guys, but the vital thing is that the, you know, the people who win can then lay claim to being deserving of their position, which then creates, by the way, the, the, the follow on problem that they become self-entitled and completely unconscious of the role of luck and fortune in their position. Okay. But the second thing is we probably should actually be trying to design a world that's focused on diversity of opportunity, plurality of opportunity, not equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity suggests you have to apply the same criteria to everybody and then rank them. I don't think that's a great, I don't think, you know, there will always be some degree of status and hierarchy. One of the interesting things about the business world, in fairness to the business world, unlike, say, politics or academia, is it provides you with quite a lot of ways to feel successful. You know, you can have a guy who starts a scaffolding firm, can make a hell of a lot more money than someone who starts a law firm. That's, that's not a bug, that's a feature, in my opinion. Yeah, that's brilliant. I know, I know we've gone, as, as with all our conversations, we always go slightly off topic, which is, I love going the countryside route. But I guess we should go back to Nudge Stonk once the, once the, are there any speakers that you're really, really looking forward to this year? Sylvia Pan is kind of one of the gods of VR and augmented reality. She's at Goldsmiths. And she's a computer scientist. And I suppose as everybody is in VR, a kind of phenomenologist. Obviously, I'm looking forward to Jess Groom, who's my former partner and co-founder of the behavioral science practice, who no longer works with us, but is coming back to mark the 10th year of Nudge Stonk. We have some fascinating speakers, for example, Jamie Hamill is utterly fascinating in specializing in sustainability, strategy, and creative thinking. And that's, that's an absolutely tremendous person. And for those of you, you know, someone who's fairly much a celebrity in the, you know, Dan Pink, obviously, how could one not be? In fact, it's bizarre that we've never had Dan Pink in the previous nine years of our existence. Well, now we have. I don't think he needs much introduction. And of course, from the Wharton School, there's Katie Milkman. And Katie had a very, very good reason for not speaking last year, which is she was exclusively dedicated to pandemic questions, both last year and the year before. But we now have enough, you know, new, less virulent strains, perhaps, or less, less painful strains of COVID, give us the opportunity to, to invite Katie this year, which is absolutely tremendous. She's, she's the host of Charles Schwab's behavioral economics podcast choiceology. And again, one of those many, interestingly, behavioral scientists who's migrated to the business school in their university as well, which I think is perhaps indicative that its natural home is among what you might call the natural, the natural place for behavioral sciences, what David Ogilvy always wanted for the ad agency, which is he hated it when people referred to Ogilvy as the university of advertising, because he said it made it sound kind of theoretical and academic. And he preferred to think of it as the teaching hospital of advertising, which is a place which both practices and conducts research, and where, where each of those two components complements the other. And so I love that you've got your, your Ogilvy braces on today as well. No, they should be mandatory in my opinion. But I, I'm one of the last few people who I'm a bit of a fan, to be honest, it's not entirely branding. It's also that I'm a big fan as a fat man. I'm also a big fan of high-waisted trousers. So there's more going on. We gave, we gave red braces to everyone in the Ogilvy Cape Town office when I was, when I was there. It's great fun. The only downside is occasionally you get an American presenting and they say, I remember David Ogilvy standing there and his red suspenders. And all the British people are going, God, that's an image I can't get out of my head. Okay. That's something I wish I could unsee, right? But apart from calling them red suspenders, which is alarming, yeah, I'm all in favour of. And you were mentioning. Just for any Americans watching, suspenders in Britain means what you call a Garter belt. Okay. That's why we find it disturbing. You were mentioning Katie there. And what Katie Miltman has so brilliantly done, everybody's very disparaging of pop science, but she's so brilliantly bought that, brought her subject in the book, How to Change, out of the lab, as so many behavioural scientists have successfully done this year and into sort of the popular conversation, hasn't she, Rory? Absolutely that. And actually, this is a lovely discipline. I make no, I mean, okay, if you're a purist, you would regard the fact that this is an area of discipline which has spawned airport literature, including my own, I might add. Okay. You would regard that as a, as, you know, something to criticise it for. I absolutely disagree because I think that the, the best thing we can do, the second best thing we can do with behavioural sciences, practice it. The best thing and the most valuable thing we can do is actually disseminate it. If it simply means, even if, to be honest, a slight misunderstanding of the literature causes someone to consider or attempt something they otherwise wouldn't have tried, then I'd argue that, you know, the effect is probably net positive under the right testing circumstances. I'm not talking necessarily about medical testing, but you get my point. Okay. If it actually just broadens people's, broadens people's conception of what value might mean. Okay. That's, that's doing a public service, in my opinion. And, and just very quickly, because I know we're running out of time, we've got a public service. Is your washing machine going into the spin cycle there, Chris? Not, not, not me. Okay. There's something in the background. I was just wondering, yeah, I just thought, I like it. I think it's verite. I think it's authentic, so don't worry about it. Somebody's washing machines hitting the spin cycle. A tour of Louise's house. We've got a, one of the things that, that we've created with Louise and your help and your team's help is we, if anyone's listening and they want to, to, to prime themselves for NudgeDoc this year, we've actually created a, absolutely. Can't buy totally free NudgeDoc course. So if you go to 42courses.com, you'll see that there is a NudgeDoc course there that looks back at the best talks over the last 10 years. And there's a lovely introduction from yourself. Isn't that, isn't that, by the way, fantastic? In the extent to which, I mean, okay, if you, if you consider the Brexit debate where there was absolute paranoia about the free movement of goods, if you impose small tariffs, okay. Yet let's ask a bigger question, okay, and let's be optimistic. What really matters actually in enriching humanity is the movement of ideas, not the movement of goods. The great thing about the movement of ideas is that it isn't a kind of zero sum game. You know, and great thing is, you know, ideas in and of themselves don't use up much, don't create much carbon, right? And so, you know, one of the things that strikes me as bizarre is the same people who were, you know, gutted by, you know, small tariffs on the movement of goods should be correspondingly really excited by Zoom and videoconferencing and online courses like your own, which have suddenly, inordinately increased the free flow of ideas, but also done something equally, perhaps more important, which is completely removed what was invisible geographical discrimination. And this is what we discovered when we took Nudge Stock online, okay. If you hold a course in London, a one day course in London, okay, that course might cost 400 quid for Londoners to attend. If you live in Glasgow, it costs you 1500. And if you live in Cape Town, it costs you four grand. Okay. Now, and if, you know, if you live in rural Botswana, well, you ain't going, right? Okay. Now, that extraordinary, you know, asymmetry of availability. I attended during lockdown a course on insect epidemiology, which was hosted by Duke University in North Carolina. And midway through the conference, I remember myself thinking, if I'd gone to the finance department and said, I need a return flight to Raleigh Durham to attend a course on insect epidemiology, you know, I think I would have got fairly short shrift, to be absolutely honest. But, but here we are, you know, and actually the rewards to the curious now, and particularly to the curious and remote, in other words, people who happen not to live in a mega city. And you know, I'm talking about Birmingham. I'm not, you know, I'm not necessarily talking about, you know, you know, Kiribati or some obscure atoll in the Pacific Ocean. I mean, although it equally applies to them, that effective complete evenness, if you take, okay, time zone is a little bit of a question. But that extraordinary egalitarianism of access is something we should really be celebrating much more than we have done. Yeah. So it's incredible. I'm really looking forward to where this goes in the future. I know that we've kind of run out of time, but I had one final silly question that we've started to ask everyone when they come on these podcasts. So my question to you, Ori, is would you rather live in a world where you always had to dance instead of walking? Or would you rather live in a world where you always have to sing instead of talking? Sing. I'm not a natural dancer and find it, you know, it's a bit like Dr. Johnson on sex. The pleasure is momentary and the position ridiculous. So yes, I would probably end up, to be honest, falling back on a form of plain song, rather than something necessarily more tuneful. But yes, singing rather than speaking would be a preferable, you know, trade-off to dancing rather than walking. I'd quite like to hear a rapping Rory Sutton. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think that's where I'd have to go. Yeah. Thank you so much. And thank you, Louise, for joining as well. You're going to have a lovely chat with Rory as well at Nudgestock, looking back at the 10 years. So if anyone needs to sign up for Nudgestock, good news is you just need to go to nudgestock.com. And the sign up is absolutely free. And you'd be silly to miss out on it. It's going to be an incredible event. But Rory, thank you so much for joining. And Louise, thank you. As ever, a pleasure. And I know, of course, not to close the tab until the upload is complete. Thank you so much. Cheers.