The Shirky Principle

Rob Bell:
Hello, and welcome to Sketchplanations, the podcast.

Do you suffer from too much knowledge?

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I'm Rob Bell, professional voice artist.

On the way in, you'll have met Sketchplanations' guru Jono Hey.

He's always on cue with a pen slash stylus in his hand and a nifty idea up his sleeve.

And if it's a wacky anecdote and a slap on the back you're after, look no further than our very own Tom Pellereau.

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Terms and conditions apply and listeners must be over or under any age whatsoever and not be a complete balance, off a subject to availability of internet and possession of an inquisitive mind.

Good evening, chaps.

Jono Hey:
How are you doing?

Rob Bell:
I'm good.

Thank you, mate.

I'm very, very well.

I'm very, very well.

I've done a few ads, radio ads, terms and conditions, you type things as well.

Jono Hey:
I can tell.

Rob Bell:
Those clauses at the end are really difficult to do in a voice record.

Jono Hey:
I thought they always sped them up, but you did that real time.

I'm really impressed.

Rob Bell:
What they tend to do, you kind of go for it as best you can without it sounding stupid.

And then they will cut out any breaths or gasps for air.

And if it can fit, it's all about fitting in the time slot you've got.

But I was looking this up and I was really intrigued to find that those T's and C's equate to over 120 million pounds per year that's spent on radio adverts just to cover those T's and C's in terms of how much advertisers are having to pay extra for the slots.

That's a lot of money.

Over 120 million pounds per year on T's and C's.

Jono Hey:
It's quite interesting.

I always find them fascinating because they're just such a direct analogue to small print.

It's like you just took visual stuff and it was small print and then you took audio stuff and you made small print audio.

And small for audio is fast, which is fast and incomprehensible.

I guess it could be quiet as well.

But you don't, right?

It has to be fast.

It's fascinating.

Tom Pellereau:
I wonder if there's a minimum font, there's a minimum volume required or a minimum maximum speed of talking.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, like a maximum allowable speed for those terms and conditions to actually be valid.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Sorry, it's too fast.

Nobody can understand it.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
So I was thinking that, you know, it's one of the geniuses of Apple ad campaigns is that there is typically almost no small print, often none.

And sometimes they make a deal of the small print.

It says, you know, like, what used to be, you know, shot on iPhone or something, it would be a market down in the corner or something like that.

Then they made a thing of that.

But yes, but somehow they managed to do the advert without it at all.

And I think it's like really clever, isn't it?

To be able to do an ad and not have any of that extra qualification that you need to do.

It's very cool.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, it's cool.

Jono Hey:
When you said, do you suffer from too much knowledge?

It's really interesting because I remember investigating that to some respect when I was at Berkeley and I was studying metaphor at the time, which sounds mad.

But I was studying metaphors and I was looking at metaphors for data, information, knowledge and wisdom.

And there's this lovely, there's a sketch which is quite popular one, the data information knowledge wisdom chain, we should do an episode on it from a poem by TS.

Eliot.

But it's really interesting that you can't really suffer from too much knowledge and you can't add too much wisdom, but you can definitely have too much information and you can definitely have too much data.

Too much data and information overwhelm you, too much knowledge is like, well hang on, it's just knowledge.

Rob Bell:
What a treat.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, yeah.

So it's sort of fascinating.

They're just like different things and how are they different?

Tom Pellereau:
But I think you can be given too much knowledge or given too much wisdom.

Can you?

If someone is trying to give you wisdom.

Rob Bell:
When it comes to advice.

Tom Pellereau:
Yes.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Is it just information then until like you haven't made it wisdom?

You had to transform the information into knowledge and then wisdom.

Process it and then it's not too much anymore.

Rob Bell:
Is the difference between knowledge and wisdom experience?

Jono Hey:
Good question.

Rob Bell:
Is there an equation there?

I don't know.

Tom Pellereau:
Doesn't need to be an equation for everything.

Rob Bell:
Wow, I'm not sure about that, Tommy.

I'm not sure about that.

But just coming back to you, like radio ads, quickly.

There are some accents that you definitely hear more on radio ads than others.

And I was trying to do some research on this and I actually found some recent work done by Channel 4 analyzing accents in TV commercials.

And sadly, the outcome was that very much the old stereotypes of British accents still stand quite firm in terms of how they're being used and how different accents are portraying different characters, which is a bit of a shame, I thought.

Jono Hey:
Stereotypes die hard.

Rob Bell:
They do.

Jono Hey:
And you're always like in an ad, as you say, because you pay for every second, you're just shortcutting as much as you can, right?

Of course.

You go straight through to what's the simplest way to get this across to somebody.

Rob Bell:
Of course.

Jono Hey:
And so I guess, yeah, it's very easy to end up playing to play into stereotypes.

I thought you were going to say, like, I thought that the Scottish voice accent was supposed to be really good for like call centres.

Rob Bell:
Trusted.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, like we everybody just you warm to it.

Rob Bell:
I think I don't know why I said call centres, but I think no, no, call centres and and ads.

Yeah.

I mean, there was another discovery from this research about the Scottish ads.

But I don't think any of these are fair, and I'm not going to go into them.

Jono Hey:
Disagree.

Take your data and I throw it out the window.

Rob Bell:
Well, I know what they're suggesting and I know what their research as they well, from what they say their research says, but I don't want to get into it because I don't think it's I don't think it's right.

Jono Hey:
Good.

Rob Bell:
But how would you describe your accents?

Each of you?

Mine is very standard southern English kind of home counties ish.

On my voice agents websites, it's listed as I'm listed sorry, as having a native London accent, which I don't even think that's quite right.

Standard southern English is me, I think accents a bit funny.

Jono Hey:
It's a bit like a fish not realizing that swimming in water, it's quite difficult to tell your own accent, but it's quite easy for other people to tell it.

Rob Bell:
Well, but go on, have a go.

Jono Hey:
I don't know.

I'm just southern England, I'm not very good with it.

Rob Bell:
Do you think Jono, there's any hangover from when you developed a bit of American or should I say probably mid Atlantic twang, having lived in California for so long?

Jono Hey:
The only when I start presenting or speaking with Americans, and then there definitely is it will never leave me.

Rob Bell:
And that's when anybody who knows you now just starts looking at each other again.

Why is he doing that?

Jono Hey:
Exactly, exactly, I don't mean to.

Rob Bell:
Tommy?

Tom Pellereau:
Depending on how tired or how pure on my diction I'm being.

Some people say I have quite a posh accent sometimes.

But I also know that I kind of go into the sort of London a little bit.

But that's also not me.

So probably home counties.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, home, home counties.

Let's say you're very home counties, Tommy.

You're definitely the nearest to RP or receive pronunciation out of the three of us.

Tom Pellereau:
Thank you.

I think.

Jono Hey:
What's receive pronunciation?

Rob Bell:
Receive pronunciation is...

Tom Pellereau:
I never knew that's what RP is dead for.

I knew RP, but yes.

Rob Bell:
That's another name for it.

The Queen's English.

The term receive pronunciation is usually credited to the British phonetician, Daniel Jones.

I think it received is as in received wisdom.

Come back to wisdom accepted or approved, especially for any kind of public broadcast as it used to be.

Tom Pellereau:
BBC World Service, the very sort of RP.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

There you go.

And let me reassure you listeners that whatever your native accent, dialect or language even, there is no judgment here.

And on that note, let's podcast.

This week, we're talking about something called The Shirky Principle, a term based on a quote from the contemporary American technology writer, Clay Shirky.

And the principle states that institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

And we'll come on to that in a bit.

Jono's rather enjoyable sketch that portrays this adage should be up on your screens now, so I'll just give you a quick second to take that in.

And if you can't see it, then A, hard lines, but B, head along to sketchplanations.com and find it there.

The direct link to that is also in the episode description down below, so you should have no trouble in finding it.

And as you listen along to this episode, if you think of examples where you've come across The Shirky Principle, then ping us an email about it to hello at sketchplanations.com or you can leave us a note or comment on social media.

As always, we'll be going through some of your comments and messages at the end of the episode.

And we should also mention that you can watch a slightly extended version of the podcast up on YouTube if you fancy that.

Great.

Right then, Jono, over to you.

I mean, I absolutely love the humour in this sketch.

The mechanic's little face is the thing of pure joy for me.

It's great.

But let's get to the number of it.

What does this sketch portray?

And what is The Shirky Principle all about?

Jono Hey:
It's not actually something that Clay Shirky didn't call it The Shirky Principle, but he's a brilliant thinker about technology, education, media, society.

And it was actually named by someone called Kevin Kelly, who was a founder of Wired magazine, among many other things, as The Shirky Principle when he picked out from one of Clay Shirky's talks, this idea that institutions will preserve the problem to which they're solution.

And it's not meant to be like an insidious thing.

He says, in many ways, you bring something forward to solve a problem, you become so dedicated to that problem that you're the solution to, that you inadvertently end up perpetuating the problem.

And I first came across it actually from the, I think it's from the book and some talks around that by Clay Shirky, called Cognitive Surplus.

And I don't know if you came across that, but that's actually a really interesting, there's lots of really interesting ideas throughout this book.

And that in particular, what he was talking about with cognitive surpluses, is like how, just answering this question, how do groups get anything done?

Right?

So if you've got a group of people and you want to get something done, it's quite difficult to coordinate them.

And so what typically happens, you have the, what do you call coordination costs.

And so you create things like institutions or companies or governments or committees or problems or whatever as a way to coordinate the activities of a group.

And what he was really interested in was the way media was enabling many people with free time, that was the surplus, the free capacity to actually do some of the things that these organizations or institutions were doing, in some cases much better than the institutions themselves.

And very often, you saw some resistance from these institutions who were there to try and solve these problems from the new ways of doing things that the media allowed.

Let's get really concrete in the sketch.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
So you've got this young mechanic who has a car disappeared in half its garage, and he said, good news, I fixed all the cars so well that they won't need to come in again.

And you got the manager, he's got, oh, great, wait, what, because obviously, the whole point that exists there is servicing cars, and if no cars are coming in, then the business is out of business.

Of course, all the customers are happy.

And I think you see that a little bit, like the first reaction from the manager is, oh, that's great.

Everybody's happy.

And then you're like, oh, no, our business is gone.

And of course, your business is gone is a good thing, because you were there to make sure that the cars are running, the cars are running.

But of course, it's not great if you lose your job over that.

And so there's a lot of resistance to those kind of things.

And so you might be inadvertently going, actually, well, I'm not saying you're going to fix the cars so that they necessarily come back.

But there's not there's not much incentive to fix them so they never come back if you run a garage.

And so that's that sort of illustrative of the problem.

Rob Bell:
What I like about how you've explained that there, Jono, is you've repeated it a couple of times actually about inadvertently ending up in this scenario that the Shirky Phenomenon describes.

That sits quite well with me is this kind of quirky phenomenon of modern life where there are lots of services and lots of companies and offering up lots of things for us to as consumers to digest.

But I'm also aware and I have some examples as well where companies have kind of intentionally perpetuated a problem to maintain business or maintain income.

But I think what's important to note is that where Clay Shirky was coming from in his description of this phenomena was very much unintentional.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

And I think just generally in business and there's lots of different connections I think that you can make.

And we touched on them a little bit with them.

I don't know if you remember the discussion of the Peter principle.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
And in the Peter principle, I think I brought up this idea that was proposed.

If you manage to make it so that your job got done without you, you should be paid for the rest of your life without having to do the job because the job's being done.

But nobody ever does that.

And so people are sort of incentivized to keep their jobs.

And I think, you know, you take like, you know, what's often seen as like the big evil at the moment, like the oil industry at the moment might be seen to perpetuating the need for the oil industry.

Now, it might not be that that's the case, but I think a lot of people might view it that way rather than switching to like, here's a new way of doing things.

It's like, oh no, we still need to, we still need oil for all of these things.

So it can be seen as like a deliberate thing.

I think there are a few other examples of that we could discuss.

Rob Bell:
We can, and we should go into some examples, but Tommy, I wanted to come to you and ask whether this is something you're aware of with your work.

I mean, that's basically the question I always come to you with at this point in the podcast.

Tom Pellereau:
This is a real passion for me, and I can give countless examples of ones that I've been involved with fighting against and ones for other people.

One of my heroes, James Dyson, I don't know if you know, but originally he tried to license his bagless vacuum to Hoover, right?

And he was turned down countless times by other vacuum manufacturers because the bag industry for the Hoover was worth about $500 million a year selling those bags.

And here he was with a Hoover with a vacuum that was better, that didn't need replacement of bags every three to six months.

So he very much hit against that.

And in the end, when he did eventually bring his out, which took him a huge amount of effort, I don't think it's well worth reading his book because the effort that he went through to get his device to market in the end.

And in the end, he had to sue Hoover because they then copied him to try and kill him.

And he got $4 million from them in a court case.

So that is just a really nice example that when we think back, Hoover had no interest in getting rid of the bag because they were just making so much money from it.

And who gains from the bag?

No one really.

It's going in the bin.

It's horrible.

And as Jono said last week, there's no such thing as just throwing something away.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

So glad you bring up that example.

It's such a good one.

I think there are a lot of parallels wherever you have like a consumable.

That essentially is the business model, which I think is very much true for printers, right?

You're very much incentivised.

We sell a cheap printer and you make the money on the cartridges.

So you want people to keep printing.

And of course you do.

That's what the business is set up to do.

But maybe you don't need to print anymore, but you're not incentivised to necessarily go, oh, we'll do online solutions and we won't print anymore.

Even though eventually those might take over.

And I think a classic example there is like Kodak versus digital cameras where you've got a huge amount of business selling film and developing film.

And you obviously have, and to be fair, as far as I know, they completely missed the boat on that one, you know, sticking with the old technology.

Tom Pellereau:
And ironically, they were their first.

Kodak created some of the first digital cameras and technologies because they were so big in it, but they deliberately, as I understand it, deliberately crushed it because they had no way of selling film in the digital camera world.

Rob Bell:
It's an amazing case study, isn't it?

It's interesting you bring up printers and printer cartridges, because I saw that in 2017, a French lawsuit was brought against printer companies Epson, HP, Canon and Brother, alleging that the companies had designed their printers to display false signals telling customers that the components were hearing expiration.

It was quite quick research, but I couldn't find the outcome of that.

But there was definitely some intentional Shirky being alleged, at least in that case.

Tom Pellereau:
That's a tricky one.

Jono Hey:
With printing, I think Clay Shirky mentions the invention of the printing press.

I mean, he's really interested in what people do with media, but I was just...

And he said, for example, people just come up with stuff with new media.

He said, erotic novels came 150 years before scientific journals, after the printing press was invented.

A pattern that continues to this day, probably.

But I was just imagining the monks who used to copy out all the massive books, trying to preserve the value of copying books and how the printing press is not superior in any way.

You know, you can just imagine the resistance there might have been towards it at the time.

Obviously, I couldn't find an article from the monks on that.

Rob Bell:
Just on that, there was another one that I found in the first half of the 20th century, something called the Phoebus Cartel, a group of the world's largest lightbulb manufacturers.

And the cartel's main business was to lower the life expectancy of all lightbulbs sold, from two and a half thousand hours to a thousand hours.

They cynically and deliberately engineered products to fail so you'd have to buy more of them.

Jono Hey:
They're really true.

Tom Pellereau:
He's read it on the internet.

Jono Hey:
It's funny because I was going to say, I was going to say, well, it's written in front of people, I put it in the note on the sketch, because I remember reading an article about the lightbulb industry and the move to LED lights, I actually think is genuinely really interesting because you've now got lights that will last 10 plus 15 years or whatever.

And so they're boldly putting themselves potentially out of business by making their lights last forever, like what are you going to do once everything's changed to LED lights?

And fortunately, it looks like they're not.

Tom Pellereau:
That's where legislation, I think, is one of the areas that legislation can be quite important to kind of force these things to happen, because we've been involved in some quite big battles with, for example, the cotton wool pads that you use to remove makeup.

I think most people will look at those cotton wool pads and go, well, you know, they're cotton, that must be recyclable, but it's not.

Those cotton wool pads are not recyclable at all.

They go to landfill and they just fill up landfill.

I'm working with a couple of retailers who, I must say, one of the retailers almost came to us about that.

We've developed these bamboo and these are machine washable.

So these are fabric and they can be machine washed, I think it's 5000 times.

But it has been quite a tricky message to get across with consumers because they are obviously quite a bit more expensive.

So people would rather spend three pounds on a big pack of cotton wool than eight pounds on sort of 10 of these or 12 of these that they can keep on reusing.

But when you see them on the shelf, there's a big pack versus a little pack.

But actually, I've got to say it was the retailers who and waitress have just taken them on Tesco because I've had them for quite a long time and I've been really impressed but it has been a bit of a swim against the tide in that respect.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

So there's the culture of us as purchasers needs to change to buy quality and think ahead.

But that's not very easy when you're faced with that decision in the store.

Should I buy the three pound one or the 10 pound one?

Rob Bell:
I was interested and started thinking about how consumers, how can we as consumers help ourselves by acknowledging that the Shirky Principle exists and that sometimes we might fall foul to it.

And I've found a few tips around it.

And the first is basically asking yourself, is this product that is supposedly solving a problem, is that genuinely a problem?

Is it genuinely a problem I have?

And is this product the way to solve it for me?

And asking yourself that question.

And Tommy, that's probably a good example with the pads you're talking about there.

A second thing was to have a target in mind.

It relates very specifically and very well to having PT sessions in the gym.

Right.

So if you have a target of I want to lose weight and I want to lose this much weight to here, to, I don't know, 70 kilos, whatever it might be.

Once you get there, the PT, the personal trainer, probably wants you to keep having personal trainer sessions, but you've reached your target.

So have a target in mind.

And the third one is about just educating yourself.

So read independent reviews, I don't know, maybe newspaper articles about the problem and possible solutions to it as well.

So I guess inform yourself, educate yourself around it.

Three little tips I read about how we as consumers can protect ourselves against the Shirky principle.

But it's not always obvious when it's in front of you, I don't think, I don't know.

Tom Pellereau:
And another battle we had was with makeup brush manufacturers.

So there is a leading makeup brush manufacturer who has a cleaner and it's really rubbish because actually they don't want their makeup brushes to be cleaned.

They want people to buy new ones.

So when we came along with a makeup brush cleaner that does it really quickly, really effectively and makes the brushes brand new almost seemingly afterwards, we tried to do some partnerships with them and they didn't want to know.

They really didn't want to know.

And it was so, I was like, but our product works so well with yours.

You must love it.

And we couldn't seemingly get through the front door with them.

And I suspect it's because they weren't interested in people cleaning them.

They wanted people to buy new ones.

Rob Bell:
It's interesting that kind of example because to me, if companies then go about offering substandard items because they need them to deteriorate, then people lose confidence in that brand and that manufacturer.

So it does feel like it's a very fine line of a tightrope to be walked.

Jono Hey:
Maybe the balance of price and quality is working, right?

Because people are buying them.

And I mean, it's interesting, like we started this idea, like maybe this is sort of somewhat inadvertent.

But if nothing else, it's very rational, right?

Like, you know, what am I going to do?

Like, drive our business out of business?

Like, we've got people depending on this for our salaries and all this, and we pay our mortgage or whatever.

So it's not unreasonable and it's funny because it's much easier to think about examples of other people doing this than it is you.

And I'm trying to think there's all these people like looking at my career and going, Jono is stuck in the past, perpetuating the problem that he's the solution to, which should just embrace this new thing.

It's probably the kids saying that about me, really, to be honest.

Rob Bell:
I was really conscious of that and I by no means want this to become a finger pointing podcast.

By no means.

Tom Pellereau:
OK, so here's on a positive spin of it.

Duncan Bannetime, one of the famous dragons den, which in the UK is a bit like the shark tank in America.

Duncan Bannetime, his second business, which was possibly one of his most successful, he had an idea where he was working with a lot of builders, with contractors, because he was building care homes and leisure centres and things.

He realised that often the builders probably knew ways to save money, but there wouldn't necessarily be a benefit to them if they shared those ways of saving money, because they would potentially be getting less money themselves.

So he had agreements where he was like to the builders, if you find a way of saving me money, I will give you half of that money.

So if you come to me with an idea that's going to save us 10 grand on this building project, 50 grand, I will give you half of it.

In the fact that he's still saving half of it, and they probably would never have come to him with the ideas if he hadn't given them that offer.

It's a very nice idea.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, that's really nice.

I think one of the most challenging examples is drugs and diseases, where if you make a drug that treats a disease, and that brings in enormous amounts of money, then you're not necessarily that incentivized to make the disease disappear straight away, because you sell a lot of the drug that treats it.

And I think, you know, very, must be a difficult one for like major pharmaceuticals to balance the sort of like, where do we work between treating and eradicating diseases without also going out of business?

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Tom Pellereau:
And we could go even further on that sort of side in terms of the military industrial complex.

Do you know how much last year the Americans exported in weapons, the highest figure ever, $230 billion worth of weapons exports last year?

Rob Bell:
Right.

Tom Pellereau:
That's an unbelievable amount of money.

And you know, it's a tricky one, right?

You know, they're in defense, but also they benefit when wars are happening.

So I think that's a really, really difficult balance, I would imagine, for those in power to weigh out between the two.

Jono Hey:
I'm not always convinced about that.

Like, it's easy to imagine characters in a film.

Tom Pellereau:
Yes, for sure.

Jono Hey:
Chuckling at how they've managed to, you know, buy a big house because they've got this contract and they've started a war or something.

But I sort of struggle to feel that these people really exist in real life.

Tom Pellereau:
I hope you're right.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

I mean, maybe they do.

Because I think planned obsolescence in devices is a classic one, which I think gets a lot of talk about it.

Definitely it's true, batteries deteriorate on phones and things like that.

It does definitely happen that the moment the warranty wears out, something goes wrong with your device.

I happen to know a lot of people who work at a lot of companies and individually, I certainly don't think that anybody there is sitting down planning and scheming these things.

But if you were to read everything that people write about these companies, and I don't know the full story, but I'm always a bit less clear that these things are deliberate than they may seem or that other people might put out.

Rob Bell:
What we are doing here, we are walking on eggshells around areas that are contentious around The Shirky Principle.

And there's another one, we tend to steer clear of politics in this podcast, and I'm very happy about that, because this isn't a politics podcast.

But let's just say that I've heard it argued that The Shirky Principle also applies in politics as well.

Institutions trying to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.

Perhaps that could refer to different parties' policies or government departments, but I don't think I need to say any more about that.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I mean, and I don't know about politics specifically, but like if you're an institution, you're trying to get stuff done in order to solve a problem, you create a team to work on it.

Maybe you make a committee that's going to review it.

Maybe there's a regular scheduled meeting in other environments.

You might be paid to be on that committee, for example.

But I think at a company, you often have like, oh, we created this thing.

We've got a regular meeting and that's needed for a while.

But after a while, maybe it becomes not needed.

And it's very easy for that to keep carrying on and in other environments where you're paid to be on that committee and maybe that's good for you, you might keep emphasizing the value that that committee is giving up rather than think, oh, I'm going to dissolve that and lose my role in it.

I worked with a really good product manager once and whenever he put in a recurring meeting, he always put an end date on it so that, and it wasn't that you couldn't carry it on, but it was a forced decision point to ask, do we still want this meeting?

Do we still think this has value and this is the best way to solve it?

And I always thought that was a really good way because it's so easy.

You're like, oh, here we are at the regular Thursday TPM slot meeting because we set it up a year ago.

Rob Bell:
You touched on this earlier, Jono, in a different context, but talking about the fact that sometimes Shirky Principle will occur, but unintentionally, just because of sheer momentum behind a particular project or a particular solution and no one's actually stopped to think, oh, is there a different way or a better way to do this?

Can I reference a comedy sketch?

Do you know Mitchell & Webb?

Tom Pellereau:
Yes.

Rob Bell:
British comedians, David Mitchell and Robert Webb, they had a comedy sketch show together and in this particular sketch, they're in a boardroom and one of them's given a presentation about the toothbrush innovations that they've brought about as this toothbrush manufacturer to make people buy the next toothbrush.

So the first one was putting a kink in it and like, yeah, we got them to buy more toothbrushes.

We told them the kink makes it a better brush.

And then they talk about putting the bristles on a slant.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, that did it.

Rob Bell:
That put up sales by 60 odd percent.

Then we told them, but by making the bristles blue, you can tell when you need a new toothbrush.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They were buying it as soon as it wasn't blue.

Jono Hey:
They're going out and buying more.

Rob Bell:
They're like, right.

So what's next?

And they're sitting around going, I think we've taken it as far as we can go.

No, I think we can get people to believe they have to brush their tongues.

No, no one would be so stupid to believe that.

Yeah, they will.

We'll put like a little brush on the back of the toothbrush, a little one.

They'll buy it.

They'll buy it.

Tom Pellereau:
I thought the end of that story is going to be that they then get the toothbrush that never wore out and yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone bought it and it was great.

And then a month later, like that's how I thought you were going to end that story.

Rob Bell:
It's a story of classic Shirky principle in the most intentional way possible.

Jono Hey:
I think Tom's ending is really good because having worked in products in many ways and trying to solve problems that people have with new things, I can see that a lot of those things might have value.

And I'm not the same particularly those toothbrush things, but they are doing a comedy sketch about it because there's resistance to the new ways of doing things as well.

And to go a bit big on it, but like I've read this book, Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Have you ever heard of that one?

It's really, it's really fascinating.

I think it has relevant, there's a bit of relevance here is by Thomas Kuhn.

And the general idea is like, how do we go from like, you know, the model of the world, universe that everything went around the earth to the earth goes around the sun and similar things like that as your big discoveries in science and sometimes in order for these things to actually move from one model to the next, like, you literally like the people have to die and retire, like the people who previously who stayed their whole careers and their existence on on proving that this is the way it is, and all these upstarts are showing these other things they literally had to like retire and go off and then and then you're free to do to do new things.

And so you see like people just have this resistance to you know, like the what I was getting to with the toothbrushes is, you know, maybe kids will look at toothbrushes and you look at really old toothbrushes, you'll be like, this doesn't even do my tongue.

I don't know when to replace it.

This is awful.

And it's an electric toothbrushes, you know, was that a fad dentists always recommend the electric toothbrushes.

They say it's better probably is better.

I don't know.

Yeah, so tricky.

I'm a bit conflicted.

Rob Bell:
I like Tom's ending, what are some quite contemporary examples of of that with the digital camera people?

Yeah, for sure.

Jono Hey:
Supermarket checkouts.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Like self checkouts, I think where there's resistance, resistance, public resistance, maybe and maybe even employee resistance and I've got I've got another sketch about Tom and I know quite a lot about s curves, right?

Jono Hey:
The technology usually goes in an s curve that and when you get to the top of an s curve, you've made the existing checkout system as good as you possibly can and the new one that comes is is typically a bit worse.

And so people don't want to use a lot of people don't want to use a new one because it is a bit worse.

And so some of it is that it takes a while to like iron out all the kinks of new products and new processes to make it as good as the other one.

And then you can't do it.

So a blockbuster and Netflix is a classic one and blockbusters doubling down on stores and deliveries and the rental experience when Netflix and Netflix, unbelievably one of the very few companies that completely cannibalise themselves, their DVD distribution service with streaming.

And they cannibalise themselves before somebody else did, which is amazing.

I think taxi services, ride sharing apps, another one, streaming music and CDs.

You remember how much battle there was about preserving the existing music industry and now streaming is just a status query.

Tom Pellereau:
Rob another one is mobile phones, the Nokia and Sony Ericsson and that were convinced that people would, they'd want keys on the keyboard, you know, and obviously Blackree brought out the big ones and they were like, and then what?

I had a Sony Ericsson that was a touch screen and it was pretty good, but as brands, they were like, no, no, no, people will always want the keys.

They won't trust a touch screen.

And then Apple's iPhone, the first one, do you remember it was by far, you know, it was completely different when it first came out in the fact that they took that risk of just making a full screen with a keypad up until that point, the others were convinced that no one would want to type onto a screen.

Rob Bell:
What else would anyone like to add on the Shirky Principle?

Tom Pellereau:
Wow, we've done drugs manufacturers, we've done war, we've done Dyson, we've done Bannertime.

I've plugged three of my products, I think Jono's plugged one of his books.

You know, really, what more can you want from us?

Rob Bell:
Is there a conclusion?

Is there a round off?

Tom Pellereau:
I think your point, Rob, of us being aware of it and having tips to try and avoid it is incredibly powerful.

Very good.

Rob Bell:
Because, well, is it a bad thing?

Is it always a bad thing?

Tom Pellereau:
He's probably always a reality.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, it's just a thing.

Rob Bell:
Just a thing.

I was going to make two final points very quickly.

I came across an example, perhaps an example of The Shirky Principle in nature.

So with parasitic creatures.

So there's a parasitic wasp that lays its eggs inside a live caterpillar.

Yes.

Inside the abdomen of a live caterpillar.

And those larvae develop by ingesting the inside of the caterpillar.

But they can't go so far.

There's a fine balance.

If they eat too much of it, the caterpillar dies and then they don't have any food source.

So they can't kill their host because they need that fresh meat to develop.

Is that Shirky Principle?

Jono Hey:
It's a pretty gruesome example.

Rob Bell:
It's horrible, isn't it?

I mean, let me read the definition again.

So the definition, here we go.

Every entity, a wasp larvae, tends to prolong the problem it's solving.

Tom Pellereau:
Is it a problem it's solving?

Rob Bell:
The caterpillar is prolonging the problem it's solving.

Difficult.

Jono Hey:
Not sure.

Rob Bell:
Not sure.

But what does apply?

A quote from novelist and social reformer Upton Sinclair who said that it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Jono Hey:
Yes.

Rob Bell:
Have you brought that up before as well, Jono?

Or Tommy?

Jono Hey:
Jono has.

I have a feeling I might have come up in the Peter Principle because it's a very similar sort of thing.

Yeah, it did.

Absolutely.

Rob Bell:
Nice to be reminded of it.

Tom Pellereau:
And it's probably important for us all to be conscious of it as well.

Jono Hey:
Well, it's hard.

I feel like I'm very aware of other people doing the Shirky Principle, but can I spot it in myself?

I don't know.

We should all agree to spot it.

You say, Jono, you're doing that thing again.

Rob Bell:
This is good.

I didn't think about this.

I hadn't thought about this.

Let's go away and I promise to do this for next week because I'm sure now that I'm sat here thinking about it, I'm sure there are examples of me doing this, of me prolonging a problem that I'm the solution to.

I don't know what problems I'm the solution to, but...

Jono Hey:
Lack of Sketchplanations podcast.

Rob Bell:
Well, yeah.

Tom Pellereau:
I think potentially we should stop recording this.

Rob Bell:
Okay, let's put it this way then.

I hadn't thought about it like that, Jono, but that has now got my mind racing trying to think of examples of me being a Shirky Principle example of oneself.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, yeah, no, I'll have a think over the next week of places where I might be inadvertently of course preserving the problem to which I'm the solution when there may be better ways of doing things.

Yeah, I'll look out for that.

Tom Pellereau:
I sometimes think with my kids that I kind of build a scenario up with them to then yell at them as it were.

I sometimes do wonder if sometimes I am the cause of the kind of at the end of it just getting so irritated that I have to yell and it's almost like, do you know, I don't know but Jono never yells at his children, sure.

Rob Bell:
There must be examples of stuff I do.

I will think about this.

Jono Hey:
You don't have to think, just ask someone else.

Tom Pellereau:
I can tell you immediately.

Rob Bell:
Go off air and I'll tell you straight away.

Tom Pellereau:
And you can tell me about myself, it's much easier to see it than people.

Jono Hey:
It's painful.

We can make it humble.

Rob Bell:
Having spent the majority of this podcast explaining and discussing The Shirky Principle, if I were to now intentionally try and apply it, I'd have to raise another fundamental question about The Shirky Principle that confuses our listeners' understanding of what we've just been talking about and set it up for next week so they'd have to come back for more.

Thankfully, that makes my brain hurt too much to even consider doing so instead, I'll warmly invite you to come back next week for a chat about a different topic.

And in the meantime, let us know your thoughts or personal examples of The Shirky Principle.

Examples that you're aware of yourself, perhaps.

You almost undoubtedly have experienced it somewhere.

You can email us on hello at sketchplanations.com or send us a message on the socials.

We'll be back in a moment with your correspondence from last week.

But for now, thanks very much for listening.

Go well, stay well.

Jono Hey:
Goodbye.

Cheers, everyone.

Rob Bell:
Hello, it's postbag time.

Actually, Jono, before we delve into the postbag this week, let me just tell you quickly about the podcast website.

It's our new command center for everything Sketchplanations, the podcast, related.

Obviously, you've got all the episodes up there, so you've got all the artwork, there's all the accompanying notes, there's transcriptions now for each episode.

You can see the usually slightly extended video versions of most of the episodes up there as well.

It's also another place you can get in touch with us.

In touch about previous episodes, about topics or sketches you'd like us to cover in future episodes, as well as any general comments or feedback about the podcast.

You can obviously always email us, but through the website, you can leave us messages through the contact form there, or rather excitingly, you can leave us a voice note, which is brilliant.

So all of that is at sketchplanations.com forward slash podcast, or just Google it, Sketchplanations podcast, you'll find it.

Right, let's get into our messages I'll post back from this week then.

So messages I'm going to read out all relate back again to our episode, maybe three episodes ago, on fun at the beach.

I'm so pleased we're still getting messages about that.

So Dan emailed in saying, I just listened to the fun at the beach episode and thoroughly enjoyed the debate of beach versus mountains.

Now, when you were talking about the Dune de Pila, it reminded me of the fact that you can combine beaches and mountains.

Dan goes on to say, and that is through sandboarding.

All of you on the podcast enjoy skiing as well as the beach.

So why not combine the two?

I did so in Huacachina in Peru.

And whilst it will never replace snowboarding, it's a lovely hot weather alternative and a great opportunity for a full body exfoliation when you stack it.

Yeah, I'm sure it is.

Oh man, I'm thinking about that now.

That's going to hurt.

Say what would be good.

It's not going to work though, is it?

One of the things we talked about in that episode was how when the tide comes up and then recedes again, the beach has been wiped clean.

All of the marks, all of the footprints have gone.

That's not going to be the case on San June, is it?

Because it would be nice to get your fresh tracks down.

But no, obviously the tide's not going to go reach the top of San June.

Okay, still work to be done on that.

Thank you for your email, though, Dan.

We've had another message here about the beach episodes from Sally.

Sally says, it was so nice to think back about the beach for an hour and what it really means whilst listening to the episode.

I've never taken such a deep dive into why it makes me so happy.

So thank you for that.

You're welcome for that, Sally.

I think it made three of us quite happy talking about that as well.

I think it's one of the easiest episodes we've ever done because we just sat talking about things we really like.

We didn't have to research too much on it.

Sally goes on to say, I also enjoyed the beginning of that episode when you discussed getting phrases and songs wrong.

I always thought the Michael Jackson song was Billy's Jeans.

It turns out the song makes so much more sense when its actual title, Billy Jean, is used.

Yeah, Billy's Jeans.

Now I'm curious to know what a song about Billy's Jeans would be.

Who's Billy?

Anyway, that's the beauty of egg corns, isn't it?

Thank you for your message, Sally.

I've had an email from another Dan saying, I was walking with my, again this is about egg corns, I was walking with my other half today and I asked her if she knew what it was called when someone alters a phrase by accident.

She said she did as she listens to a podcast called Something Rhymes with Purple, which I highly recommend.

Thank you for that recommendation.

She said, that's an ear corn.

And Dan says, and that made me laugh as she basically egg corned herself.

Thank you for that.

And this, well since the last episode, we've also had a couple of comments or a few comments, but I'll read a couple out now about, there were messages that were left around our episode on fubbing.

So the act of fubbing those around you when you are distracted by your phone.

So phone snubbing, fubbing.

And I think this might have been because of recent stories in the press and the media about government policy in the UK anyway, about banning under-16s from buying mobile phones.

So Anna via LinkedIn says, that's the first time I've heard this term.

Now I'll use it again and again.

I can get into bad fubbing habits at times.

Not good.

It's not good, Anna.

And if you listen to the fubbing episode, I think it's episode three in series one, you'll hear my views on fubbing as well.

Not good.

And finally, this week we've had a message, again, this is on fubbing, well, it was left around the fubbing episode, but it's about the use of mobile phones really.

Kathy on Instagram says, when my son was a high school, only a couple of years ago, everything was on an app.

So they had their timetable, their homework, their lunch money, all accessible via an app.

And they're being given such mixed messages.

Don't use your phone, but at the same time, you can't get through your school day without it.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, who am I to comment on government policies, or at least proposed policies, but there's perhaps a little bit more thinking needs doing on that particular aspect of life.

I mean, I do agree as laid out very clearly in the filming episode, that phones are for me, and I'm welcome distraction personally, but also for people around me.

Anyway, there we go.

I won't get up on my soapbox again.

Thank you very much all for your messages and for all your correspondence.

Even if we don't get to read them out here on the podcast, we do read every single thing that you send through to us.

So please do keep them coming in.

As I say, multiple ways to get in touch with us now.

So I look forward to going through this again on the next episode.

But for now, I'll say cheerio!

All music on this podcast is sourced from the very talented Franc Cinelli.

And you can find loads more tracks at franccinelli.com.