Watching Richard Shotton and Rory Sutherland in a round of idea ping-pong is an absolute delight. They’ve been discussing the new $499 Dyson toothbrush and Shotters blasted this down-the-line winner on price anchoring:
“You show people Ben & Jerry's and compare it to Tesco's and ask how good [value] the Ben & Jerry's is and they say it's bloody awful [...] You show them Ben & Jerry's next to a super expensive Halo Top [...] People would say it's amazing [...] So Dyson I think could be having that impact in the market. Either as Rory says they follow up with something slightly cheaper and it looks good value in comparison. Or it has this impact on suddenly making the Waterpik offering look cheap.”
Eat your heart out Google Trends, Riley Walz has built Kids Trends. It charts 100 million drawings to show what kids have been into over the last 20 years.
Horses are down, jellyfish are up and sharks are flat. Now ya know 🤷♀️
The folk at Columbia University have found that the correlation between digital twins and their corresponding humans is as strong as the link between height and intelligence. As someone who’s both short AND human, I’m pleased to say that number is 0.2. Aka small.
The researchers documented 5 ways in which digital twins distort human behaviour, including underdispersion:
“Twins make everyone sound more alike than we really are. In fact, their answers were closer to the base LLM than to the people they’re meant to replicate!”
Related, Mark Ritson on why Anthropic is still using humans in their market research.
The great Jasmine Bina will see you now. And your appointment this time is all about how cleanliness has moved from our homes, to our bodies and now to our minds:
“What is now a moral imperative to keep your body clean is becoming a moral imperative to keep your mind clean. The wellness playbook of eat the right foods, drink the right water, and take the right supplements is now moving beyond the corporeal to the mental. The one thing we know about wellness is that it overlays nearly every other category, so just as physical wellness took over the world, we will soon see mental and spiritual wellness leapfrog it.”
Any Human Ever deals you a random life from the 100 billion people who have ever been born. It draws a birth year, geographic location and the life story you would likely have experienced.
The Nobel Prize’s raspberry blowing younger sibling, the Ig Nobel Prize, has wrapped for another year. The 2026 winners include an aerodynamic study of nose blowing, splash-free urinals and smelly teenagers. This couldn’t be more my thing if it was called “Fran’s Thing”.
A sublime life hack from Stan Holden that I’m adopting immediately:
Bon weekend,
Fran