Hello, my friends, welcome to Five Brilliant Things, where I sit down with fascinating people to talk about the things they love.

My guest today is Rory Sutherland, a fascinating speaker, author and an expert in advertising techniques.

Now, I should fess up.

Rory did not stick to the brief.

This is an interview where he talks about everything.

We talk about cars, consumerism, Red Bull, Diet Coke,

going on holiday of Wales.

Why his postman should have a jet ski?

Yeah.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy.

Here is Rory Sutherland and his umpteen brilliant thing. why his postman should have a jet ski. Yeah. Anyways, I hope you enjoy.

Here is Rory Sutherland and his umpteen brilliant things.

Absolute pleasure to meet you, sir.

Delighted as well. We've been chatting for five minutes and already I think you be a fantastic addition to any dinner party. Do you know? I hope so. I bet you always get plonked in the middle. I'm a terrible addition to a drinks party because I fucking hate them. Oh really? That business where everybody stands in a room and you can't hear a goddamn word anybody's saying. Oh no of course that's not. No, I don't see you there. I see you sat down. Dinner parties I'm happy with. Yeah, in the middle. No one's putting you on the edge. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm really excited to see the things that you select. And we were talking beforehand and you sort of had, your plan was to make them quite provocative. They all begin with C and that's simply a filtration, an arbitrary filtration mechanism. Because actually, one of the things I love about this thing is that it's very, very easy for comedians to basically dis on things. Yeah. Because, let's face it, it's much more fun being rude about things. It's easier. And it's a lot easier.

Yeah. I mean, it's very interesting, working in advertising where basically you're paid to be nice about things and then writing journalism, say, for the spectator. Okay. One of the things I always feel when I sit down to write a bit of journalism, I was like, piss, this is easy because I can actually be rude about things. Yes. And it is important, okay,

that we rebalance the general conversational tenor in the country towards the positive,

because there's a fundamental negativity bias in news. And one reason for that, by the way,

is that bad news tends to be fast and good

news tends to be slow. Yes. So things that improve, it happens gradually over time, so it isn't

newsworthy, okay? And bad news tends to be rapid and sudden and unexpected. So in a 24-hour

rolling news cycle, we get a disproportionate

amount of bad news rather than good. And it's quite interesting being 59 for that reason,

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