Rory Sutherland

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

And his idea of a tacit skill, which is we know more than we can tell.

There are some generally good rules, which is write conversationally.

Much more conversationally than people think they should write because everybody thinks they have to write a... Actually, I'll give you two examples of this.

David Ogilvie, all his books are incredibly readable because I think he was a copywriter first and an author second.

His prose style is very good.

And he also adopts a clever trick, which I've stolen and which...

a few other people, is that he writes extremely plainly for the most part, but will throw in the odd sesquipedalian long word just to remind the reader that, you know, you're not an idiot.

You know, it's almost there to flatter the reader as much as it is to flatter the writer.

Conan Doyle, I was talking to Rick Rubin about this.

He and I both grew up on those Sherlock Holmes short stories, which are not only models of thinking and deduction and a fantastic lesson for mental gymnastics, I think.