Rory Sutherland: preference

Transcript context

…The Remarkable tablet? Remarkable. Okay, people like that actually because it allows you to do less. It allows you to concentrate because you don't get emails, you don't get distractions, et cetera. But the wine box should have basically... It keeps for weeks. It's got its own tap. You can have a glass of wine in the evening without opening a bottle and letting the other five glasses go off. You're not forced to become a raging alcoholic if you live alone, which you are with wine bottles. All of these things, vastly better keeping in the fridge. Didn't succeed. Entirely psychological. In terms of logical products, and it was fascinating. The Japanese toilet, why the hell is that? I looked at you recently at the most expensive flat in London, which is some place in Knightsbridge, which is going for $110 million or something and you're going to wipe your own ass. It's 110 million for this place and the toilets, now, I imagine if there's a Middle Eastern owner, they'll go and retrofit some bum guns in there. How flaming weird is that? Seriously strange. And you realize that actually, I mean Google Glass, it was a kind of marketing. They launched a bit too soon. Then they only gave the bloody glasses to developers. Now with the best will of the world, developers probably aren't the world's coolest people. They're not the people you want to have walking around your bar wearing Google Glass. The user imagery wasn't that great. And so you have these really interesting phenomena. I would've bought Google Glass actually even at the insane launch price of about $1,000 because I would really, really like being able to walk around. Now, I don't know what I'm talking to you now. I don't know what the time is. I don't know when my next meeting starts. I don't know what the weather's like outside. If I just had regular in eye updates, a heads-up display for shit that's going on in my life that just reminds me of stuff I'd easily pay, without having to look at a digital watch, which I've bought these bloody, both Android and Apple watches, and nah. I might as well get my phone out basically. I've got an ordinary analog watch here, but actually having something which you can wear, which just goes, "Your next meeting starts in five minutes. The guy you're talking to is called Lenny." All that stuff would be really, really good. I have no idea whether the Meta Portal TV apart from this business of the privacy thing with Facebook, but if any product deserved to succeed in the pandemic for crying out loud, it was video conferencing on your TV, and yet it just didn't. The other thing I'd say is don't think because a product's failed in the past that you shouldn't try again, because you know that famous thing that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result? That's not the definition of insanity. That's the definition of a complex system that actually quite a lot of Internet ideas failed. ng the same thing again and again and expecting a different result? That's not the definition of insanity. That's the definition of a complex system that actually quite a lot of Internet ideas failed. Quite a lot of online ideas failed because they were just mistimed. Because typically some good ideas were too early. Great little thing actually called the Chumby, which I had about three of them, and they were little Internet connected devices, and they just cycled through little screens, which would say... Little applets, like little kind of... You're probably an iPhone user, but what we call them Widgets on the screen, and they go, "These are the trains through a local station. They're on time, they're not on time, they're running late. This is the weather. This is the latest newsflash from the New York Times." And they just cycle through that stuff and they'd sit in a little cuddly little thing. I had about three of these. I thought they're fantastic. But again, I'll give you two examples of this about timing. No, hold on. It's 1989. I sign out a mobile phone. It's like a brick. It's made by Motorola. Sign out a mobile phone from the office in 1989 because I'm going to a meeting somewhere off site and I need to be contactable. So you didn't have your own mobile phone. No. The office had about eight of them, and you signed one out and they were kept charging in the office. You signed one out, you told your team what your number was for the day, and you set out to your trip. So I'm walking down Oxford Street with this mobile phone and someone rings me, so I haven't got any choice. I have to answer it. So I'm speaking on a mobile phone in Oxford Street, one of the busiest streets in London in 1989, two people shout abuse at me from passing cars for using a mobile phone. A second case, let me see if I can date this. It would be about 2000 and crikey, about 2003, 2004, there was a company started by some American expats called Food Ferry in London, and I think it was a hybrid CD-ROM. You actually had a CD-ROM of most of the stuff, and you went online, you ordered your groceries and they delivered them to you. And I mentioned to someone, it would've been the early two thousands that actually ordered my home groceries on the Internet, and they laughed in my face. Just literally, they went over, they said, "Hey, you'll never get this guy. He fucking orders his groceries on the Internet." And this is my point I'm saying is that there's this huge psychological hurdle to changing behavior or to getting people to adopt behavior which is slightly unusual. One story, I then bought my own mobile phone. It was '89 I was borrowing the phone. It would've been about '95, '96 when I actually had my own mobile phone, maybe '94. I'm trying to work it out. And I'm on the top of a bus in London and somebody rings me and they ring me from the States. It's my friend Ted who was a biochemist pen, I think at the time. And I said something on the phone. I'm sitting on the top of a bus and I said something on the phone, which made it obvious I was speaking to someone in America. It was like, "What time is it with you?" Or, "What's the weather like over there?"…

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