Rory Sutherland

I think that a fairly large proportion of the population are...

by naturists to an extent, by which I don't mean wandering around the streets with their schlongs out.

But I mean that on a beach, in a field, in sunny weather, in some sort of privacy, they would like to wander around with no clothes on because it's good for you.

It exposes your whole body to sunlight.

You get a lot of vitamin D. It's generally healthful.

And my argument about sunbathing is evolution made it pretty enjoyable.

Maybe it's not all bad.

And there are some schools of thought in dermatology, which made a case that actually weirdly, although it enhances the risk of skin cancer, it improves cardiovascular health.

So there was a study actually among Swedes where there was a higher instance of skin cancer among Swedish sunbed addicts, but they actually had a higher life expectancy, which they didn't expect.

So quite often, you see, what we do is we measure the narrow effect of a behavior, but not the broader effect.

Quite interesting in terms of how we might get things wrong.

By the way, I wouldn't do it on a beach if there were children present.

But if you go to parts of Europe, particularly Germans, will just wander around naked.

Now, I think at some level, if there are no children.

Now, in the United States, that would be perceived in a completely different way.

So quite a lot of these things are arbitrary.

They're just, in other words, you know, if doing something makes you weird, there is a point at which you reach a threshold, vegetarianism, veganism, et cetera, where it goes from being weird to mainstream.

So what I'm saying is it's not an even process.

And sometimes you never get to the threshold.

I think a large part of it comes down to, you know, Michael Polanyi