✶Explainer
Why Naming a Water 'Liquid Death' Works as Branding
Sutherland admires the perversity of naming a product the literal opposite of what it is. He ties Liquid Death to the early-90s ethical 'Death Cigarettes' brand and argues brand imagery is consumed as much as the product itself.
- Calling a still, healthy water 'Liquid Death' with a skull creates a unique, memorable brand position
- The move echoes Death Cigarettes: black packaging, skull, honesty as differentiation
- You drink the imagery as much as the drink — associations are as powerful as the reality
- Perverse, counter-category naming buys attention that literal naming cannot
“you're drinking imagery as much as you're drinking a drink, and the associations are as powerful as the reality, essentially”
#branding#marketing#positioning
✶Explainer
Why 4K Barely Beats HD and 60fps Feels Fake
For fast motion your brain assembles the image, so 4K only shows its advantage on slow or static scenes — which is why TV showrooms loop close-ups of ants and jellyfish. Sutherland and Williamson explain the Joe Rogan studio backlash: 60fps shows motion without the natural blur your eyes expect.
- In fast movement (sport) your brain fills in the image, so 4K adds little over HD
- Showrooms demo 4K/8K with slow, static subjects because that's where resolution shows
- Your eyes naturally see motion blur — wiggle your hand and you don't see every position
- 60fps removes that blur, making footage feel artificial; the Rogan studio was fixed by dropping to 25/30fps
“60 FPS is displaying a type of video that your eyes are not used to seeing in the real world, which is what makes it…”
#perception#technology#video
✶Explainer
Japanese Musical Roads: Designing Incentives into the Surface
Sutherland cites the Japanese 'road organ' — corrugated strips that play a pleasant tune only if you drive at the legal speed. He contrasts it with a stretch of the M25 whose ribbed concrete perversely feels smoother the faster you go, rewarding speeding.
- Tuned road ridges produce a nice melody at legal speed via tyre noise
- Drive too fast and the tune becomes unpleasant — feedback aligned with the desired behaviour
- A poorly designed ribbed M25 stretch is less unpleasant the faster you go, incentivising speed
- Sensory feedback can enforce rules more elegantly than signs or enforcement
“the tune only sounds only good if you're traveling at the legal speed”
#behavioral-science#incentives#design
✶Explainer
Why People Prefer Slow Live Chat to Faster Phone Support
Live chat is far slower than a phone call — agents handle three customers at once with boilerplate — yet customer satisfaction is much higher. Sutherland suggests you can multitask while chatting, and the transcript carries over when you're passed to another agent, killing the need to repeat yourself.
- Live chat is economically viable because agents juggle multiple customers with cut-and-paste answers
- Despite being slower than speech, satisfaction is markedly higher
- You can do something else while chatting instead of being held hostage to a call
- Transcripts transfer between agents, removing the misery of repeating your problem
“it's much, much slower than a spoken phone call. And yet the levels of customer satisfaction, even though it's slower, are much, much higher”
#customer-experience#behavioral-science#service-design
✶Explainer
Why Cyclists Ride Aggressively — and Regenerative Braking Fixes the Psychology
Sutherland argues cyclists run reds and cut corners because accelerating is painful and slow, creating a 'maintain momentum at any cost' sunk-cost mentality. An electric car's regenerative braking removes the resentment of slowing because you feel the energy returning to the battery.
- On a bike, acceleration is painful and slow, so riders hoard momentum and take risks to keep it
- It's a sunk-cost problem: giving up hard-won kinetic energy feels like a loss
- Regenerative braking recaptures momentum, so slowing no longer feels wasteful
- The result is a calmer, resentment-free style of driving — 'energy back into the tank for later'
“they have this mentality of maintain momentum at any cost which causes them to sort of leap onto the pavement ignore red lights”
#behavioral-science#electric-vehicles#psychology
✶Explainer
Why People Eat at McDonald's in Milan: Decatastrophising, Not Optimising
Sutherland uses Taleb's observation that travellers eat McDonald's in Milan station not to find the best meal but to avoid a disastrous one. Much behaviour that looks irrational is people minimising downside rather than maximising upside — and brand preference works the same way.
- Travellers choose McDonald's for a near-zero chance of a bad or rip-off meal, not the best meal
- Many 'irrational' behaviours are decatastrophising — minimising worst-case, not optimising
- Never call people irrational until you know what they are actually trying to do
- Brand preference is largely 'I'll pay more to be confident it won't be shit'
“what they're trying to do is to get something to eat which has a very, very low chance of being disappointing or a rip off”
#behavioral-science#decision-making#risk
✶Explainer
Why Big Brands Deliver: Reputation as a Sunk Cost You Can Lose
Sutherland explains the reputational mechanism: a company that has sunk billions into a brand has far more future revenue to lose by selling a bad product than an unknown maker. That's why a no-name Amazon brand ('Wujagu') has little incentive to invest in quality control.
- You pay a premium for a Samsung TV mainly to be confident it won't be terrible
- A big brand's sunk investment makes selling a dud costly in lost future profit
- Unknown scrabble-rack Amazon brands have no reputation at stake, so no reason to guard quality
- Reputation functions as collateral that guarantees behaviour
“if you've invested billions in your brand as a massive sunk cost, you have much more to lose in terms of future revenue and profit…”
#branding#trust#economics
✶Explainer
The Quiet Power of Defaults: Samsung's Hub and the First In-Flight Tile
Sutherland describes how Samsung can make its Smart Hub the default landing screen — and be paid by the BBC for iPlayer placement — steering what millions watch. Williamson adds that in-flight entertainment views follow a power law: the first tiles shown capture the overwhelming share.
- Modern Samsung TVs route users to the Smart Hub via easy 'home'/'back' buttons, controlling the default view
- Broadcasters reportedly pay for prominent placement (e.g. iPlayer) in that hub
- In-flight viewing is dominated by whatever appears on the first screen of tiles
- First position, like being above the fold on Google, captures a power-law share of attention
“the thing that appears first gets 50%... it's the same as being above the fold on Google”
#defaults#attention#product-design
✶Explainer
Monothinking: Measuring Ignorance by One-Cause Explanations
Williamson shares a concept he calls 'monothinking': you can gauge someone's ignorance by how many different phenomena they explain with the same single cause — blaming war, poverty and pollution all on capitalism. Sutherland links it to monotheism and offers a deliberately mischievous counter-example.
- Blaming many varied problems on one cause signals demand for answers outstripping supply
- A Hindu friend calls it 'monotheorism' — the Western urge for one god behind everything
- 'All social ills are down to social media' is flagged as too easy
- Sutherland's mischief: some coarsening of behaviour may trace to the decline in smoking, a relaxing drug
“you can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer”
#thinking#explanations#bias