Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…hare with you, which was there's an English guy who went over from the BBC for BBC 4, which is like the PBS of PBS, okay? It's the really niche, niche, educational hardcore factual British TV channel. And he went to see if there are any programs to buy from the Danish state broadcaster, and he ended up buying a series called The Killing. He bought the first season of The Killing went for 24,000 pounds, so about $30,000 he paid to run The Killing, which had aired on Danish television about a year and a half earlier and been quite successful in Denmark, but nowhere else. And he paid 24,000 pounds, $30,000 and aired it on BBC 4, and then it became hugely popular, and then it migrated to BBC 2, and then Netflix came along and bought the rights to the series. You'll probably remember this. So actually the Danish state broadcaster ended up, he said, "There should be a statue of me outside this Danish broadcaster because I ended up making them tens of millions of pounds by both selling the rights to the original series and also by Netflix buying the rights to the basic storyline." I said, "Well, why did you do that?" I said, "What made you buy it?" And he said, great phrase. He said, "Well, if you're British," true also if you're American, by the way, he said, "If you're British, the great thing about Scandinavians is they're just the right amount of weird." So if you think about it, if you have to watch something set in Denmark and you live in San Francisco, it's not like watching something set in Korea or Somalia. You're not sitting there going, "What the hell is going on here? Why is this man doing this?" Basically, they're a bit like us, they're enough like us that we basically figure out what's going on, but they're weird enough to make it just that little bit more interesting. And I think that's part of the reason for the popularity of Scandi Noir and Scandi Crime is they're the right amount of weird, and I think that's true of product design. I think with Raymond Loewe, I think the thing was he made a fan, if I got the story right, he made a fad that was insanely quiet and people didn't believe it worked because it was just too quiet. And years later, I remember that story because there was a guy who had this extraordinary machine learning and AI device that was being used by engineers, and he was producing I think it was an electric toothbrush or it might've been a razor, it was either a men's razor, with an electric motor, which was they could somehow make it insanely quiet by using some weird machine learning algorithm about what caused the noise. I said to him, "Look, be a bit careful because it's probably a good idea to make a razor a bit quieter, but if you make it too quiet, we genuinely won't believe it's working. Actually, it's the crackly noise whether you rub it over your face and it's the buzz of the thing and the vibration of the thing that actually convinces us it's doing a job. And you can overdo this. You can over optimize for things." I love all these examples you're sharing of ways products stand out sometimes by accident, sometimes intentionally. If I were to zoom out and try to describe what you encourage people to do, you basically are intent on convincing people to think less logically, to think less rationally, which I think is pretty counterintuitive to a lot of people, especially in business where they're told, "Be more rational, be more logical. " I think what it is psychology is a branch of complexity theory, and there are lots of things in it which are nonlinear butterfly effects, small things that have a huge effect, and there are also lots of things which are, if you like yin and yang. In other words, what I say is the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. I always say there are two great ways to check into a hotel. One of them is insanely high touch and the other way is no touch. It'd be pretty cool to check into a hotel where basically you just walked in with your mobile phone and unlocked your room. That'd be pretty cool. It's also pretty cool if you go to the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong that they take you up to your room, show you how to use the television, the shower, I hope, because that's always a baffling thing and that actually make you a cup of tea in the room while you're filling out the paperwork at your vast desk. They're both pretty great ways to check into a hotel. They're complete opposites, but they are distinctive. I think understanding the fact that what we're trying to do is we're trying to run the world of business entirely to a reductionist kind of maths and physics and finance model where everything's linear and everything works in straight lines and everything's proportionate, and the opposite of a good idea is wrong, and the past is a fantastic guide to the future. We're basing our decision making on high school maths questions. It always bothers me by the way that intelligence tests are multiple choice. The SAT is a multiple choice in the US I think, aren't they? Very weirdly, a great aunt of mine actually, who spent some time in the US I think at Princeton, was actually involved with the guy who designed those early intelligence tests. By the way, she had her doubts. One of the things she commented on was that basically if they did an intelligence test in which white academics didn't come top, they rejected it as a measure of intelligence. So they found, for example, I think that Native Americans and African-Americans were, for instance, better at memorizing poetry than white people were, and all credit to my great aunt. They rejected this then as a measure of intelligence because it didn't fit their narrative. But the other thing that bothers me, I'm slightly proud of my great aunt for spotting this, calling this out as a bit of bullshit to be honest, but the other thing that always bothers me is that by definition, multiple choice questions have a single right answer. Theoretically, you could have multiple right answers and you simply have to choose one that is acceptable, but basically they've got a right answer and three wrong answers. That's how you do multiple choice questions. But real life decisions aren't like that. You can have multiple right answers, and also you don't have all the information you need to answer the question contained within the question.…

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