Rory Sutherland

Absolutely, you can separate them.

And that's why, you know...

In a weird kind of way, I think you notice sometimes that the queue for the priority lane in security is longer than the queue for the amateur lane.

But frequent business travelers will still join the priority lane on the assumption that the people in front of them are more competent.

And there's a George Clooney up in the air gag about that.

Right.

And so it is very interesting because is it irrational if it's a very reliable mechanism

So, all right, one example would be, I don't think it works very well nowadays because there are enough posh spivs around.

But in the 19th century, if you were a posh and respected real estate agent, you had a lot of reputational skin in the game in the local community, both commercially and

in people, you know, so you are highly vulnerable to reputational damage, both commercially and also socially.

Because, you know, a small town or a, you know, would have been to a large extent a prestige economy.

and therefore dealing with the posh local estate agent rather than some guy who claims to be cheap is not irrational.

The commission may be higher, whatever it may be, but in terms of reputational skin in the game as insurance against being treated appallingly,

And, you know, I think there's a kind of weird thing going on, which is that, you know, the job of the real estate agent is to some extent to be the person who stays behind in the place where the house is sold to suffer the reputational consequences of, you know, of anything outrageous.

Because the vendor of the house isn't really reputationally vulnerable if they're moving 300 miles away.

And so, you know, some of the role of these intermediaries is just highly complicated.

Right.

But when I say that, you know, we fundamentally seem to attach very, very high weighting

to, for example, a call center experience versus website design.

I'm not suggesting for a second website design isn't really important.