Rory Sutherland

That would be the dream.

You have a lot of lakes.

Yes.

I'd always heard that as a kind of...

Well, I met someone you missed interview, by the way, called Philip K. Howard.

who's written various books called Life Without Lawyers.

He's just written a book which is coming out right now called, I think it's Can Do, which is restoring the spirit of American can do.

And he argues that a large part of economic decline and social malaise

has come from the over-intrusion of law and regulation into practices which should properly be left to subjective human judgment.

That we've created a culture where people are so afraid of making a subjective decision

that they fall back on often totally inappropriate rules and regulations.

And there are a whole bunch of people who are employed, not always by the government, just as much by the private sector, who are much more interested in adherence to approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.

Because you can't get fired.

But if I do that, if I have a little head-eyed parapet, there's no upside.

And there's considerable reputational risk and career risk from doing something slightly perverse and different.

But there are a whole bunch of arguments.

First of all, an awful lot of quality human decision making of necessity has to be tacit,

and instinctive, not regulatory.

There are various people, I think it might be Michael Polanyi, who says, most of life is like a kaleidoscope.

We never completely encounter the same situation twice.