Good Life Project - Influence For Good | Zoë Chance

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

If I offer the word influence, is your immediate reaction negative or positive? Zoë Chance (www.zoechance.com) has done the research. She knows what the reaction is for most people, it is not positive. But, that doesn’t have to be the case. What if influence could be a force for good? That’s what Chance all about. Her course on influence is one of the most popular at Yale School of Management, her behavioral economics framework is the foundation for Google’s global food policy guidelines and her work is often covered in places like The Economist, The New York Times, and the BBC. In today’s conversation, we also take a step back in time, explore Zoë’s personal journey, which started in a very different place. Prior to teaching at Yale, Zoë managed a $200 million segment of the Barbie brand and received her doctorate from Harvard Business School.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If I offer up the word influence or maybe persuasion, is your immediate reaction negative or positive? Well, my guest today, Zoe Chance, has actually done the research. He knows on a large scale what the reaction is for most people and I have to tell you, it is not positive. I wanted to sit down with Zoe today because she has been steeped in doing academic research, in teaching about it at Yale and elsewhere, and speaking around the world. And I wanted to deep dive into ideas around influence and persuasion because she is a

huge champion of something she would call influence for good. And I wanted to understand what that is and what it isn't, why we immediately associate manipulation with ideas around influence and persuasion, what some of the deeper internal biases and assumptions are that we make that we don't even realize that we're making that end up separating ourselves actually from other people and also from a deeper understanding of ourselves and how we deceive ourselves sometimes. We dive deep into all of these different ideas and it's really illuminating, powerful conversation. At the same time, we take a step back in time because Zoe's personal journey is pretty

fascinating and did not start out in any way, shape or form in the place that she has landed now. It's really fun to see how she navigated the various touch points along the way. Super excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman I knew you were gonna be fun On January 24th

Tell me how to fly this thing Mark Wahlberg You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die Don't shoot him, we need him Y'all need a pilot Flight Risk The Apple Watch Series 10 is here

It has the biggest display ever It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. I think we need to start out with a very revealing post that you shared about a month ago on Twitter, where you revealed to the world that in elementary school, you want to be Peter Pan. In middle school, you wanted to be a novelist. In high school, and I'm going to need more about this, you wanted to be Swedish. Grad school, you wanted to be Dan Ariely, who's a past guest on this show. And now, J. Vaughn Boffel. Can we go back to middle school? So were you the kid who was sort of like obsessed

with writing really early on? Or was that just this sort of fantasy of what a novelist's life was? No, I was totally obsessed. And even in elementary school, my best friend and I loved writing. We loved writing stories. And we both wanted to be professors. Her name and my name, we combined to be a pen name and we wrote stories together. And we were such nerds that we would stay in during recess and write stories. And our fifth grade teacher would also let us out of class if we were finished with stuff to go to the basement in our elementary school by ourselves and write stories, which now sounds so creepy, right? Like fifth graders hanging out alone in the basement but and then at the end of the year he

typed up all of our stories and he gave copies of these stories to us in a bound book and so we felt like we were published authors already and this was our thing and we were both going to be writers and she became a professor also she's a professor at Virginia Tech. Do you ever think and this is a fascination of mine I brought it up in other conversations, the idea of some random person stepping in and playing a role of saying there's something that you're doing or something about you that is truly of value, even if maybe other people don't acknowledge it. And you should embrace that, really lean into it. I'm curious what your experience has been in this because mine has been that that's been so confusing to me that I've been fairly good at a lot of stuff. I have never been this world-class genius in this one area where it was totally obvious.

But there have been all of these people in all of these different areas saying, you know, you should be a writer. You should be an artist. You should be a marketing person. You should go into math, and you should play professional sports at one time. And it's not that I should have done these things, really. It's just that when you're in a small cohort of people and you're rising to the top of a group of 20 or something, then people say, hey, this is your thing. And I felt like, I don't know that I'll

ever find a thing. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, what I was keying in on was like what that one teacher did when you were in fifth grade and said, like, I'm going to like keep doing this, and I'm going to turn it into a book to show you that this is really, you're doing something which is extraordinary and keep doing it. But it's a really interesting question, right? What if that keeps happening in all these different domains? Right. And rather than getting reinforcement along one, you're just getting them from people who you trust, who are like people of authority in all these different areas.

And it really doesn't, then it becomes maybe almost more confusing than helpful. Yeah. And especially when you're really passionate about school, teachers really like you. And so you try all of these different things. And because you're really passionate and you work really hard and you put your heart and soul into projects and they go, oh, wow, here's this person that I want to support. So in college, for example, I thought I should be Indiana Jones. And that didn't even make it onto the Twitter list.

But I had an anthropology professor who helped me drop out of school and create my whole plan for going down to southern Mexico to do research on my own and go to the jungle and go and hang out with the Mayan tribe, write down some stories and try to work with them, which was an adventure and a disaster and exciting. But yeah, I really didn't know what my thing should be till probably never, because the thing keeps changing. Yeah. This is such a fascination of mine, because I'm sort of in the process of constantly deconstructing what's the thing underneath the thing, can we actually identify some sort of through line? Yeah. I just have to share that I love your Sparkotype tool. Oh, cool. And what it said for me was just so right on. And it gave me an insight that I hadn't had before.

And usually assessments will tell you things that you know. And if it's something you completely didn't know, then it's maybe not a good assessment, right? Because it's probably wrong. But what the Sparkotype tool said is that my Sparkotype is sage, which is teacher, writer, speaker, share. So this is definitely true. And then the shadow one, so the sub-discipline of sparkotype is scientist. And this is, the insight that was helpful to me is that when you talk about how the shadow sparkotype serves your main one, that that's exactly what research is to me, that it's a tool for sharing and for disseminating knowledge. And I'm not just a scholar who wants to sit indoors and learn in my little cubicle and figure things out. I want to understand science so that I can share it with people. Yeah, that's so interesting. And I love the fact that it

resonated with you also. The one word that keeps getting repeated to us in feedback over and over and over is validated. People are telling us they feel validated very often because that, you know, the assessment shows them something that a lot of people have told them actually isn't okay to, like, you shouldn't be that. You know, because how are you going to earn a living doing that without really exploring, but what if that's just the essence of who you are? Maybe it's not the thing that it's going to earn a living, but I love that it was valuable to you. That's awesome. Do you believe that you could never be at the top of your field unless you're doing exactly what you're passionate about? That's a really interesting question. My instinctive answer is no, I think you probably could.

But I think it also depends on the domain. Because if you look at, you know, if you look at the research on greatness, you know, if you look at Candace Erickson's research, and it's like this whole body of work around that, you know, the level of discipline that it takes over an extended period of time and the volume of work that it takes to be extraordinary across any domain, it's so great. I think some people probably could put it in from some sort of extrinsic motivation or just need. I mean, I think if you had a capability in one particular area, and that was an area that was potentially valued a lot by society and compensated well, and you had a family here and maybe aging grandparents and maybe family somewhere else where, you know, and they were all relying on you to take care of them. That you would have this other extrinsic yet powerful motivator to do this level of deliberate practice for a really long time that would let you rise up to that place in whatever career it is.

But the whole time, the motivator wouldn't really be, it's the thing that you're here to do. The motivator would be a sense of almost responsibility, which is meaningful and powerful. It's interesting research, I'm sure you've seen it also, that showed that you can derive a certain amount of meaning from suffering, especially in the name of being in service of those you love, which is similar to Viktor Frankl's work. So it's a fascinating question. I mean, I'm curious, what do you think about it? I guess it depends what you mean by great or successful. And certainly a lot of people are successful and they hate their jobs. So there's no question that what you're saying is true.

And what I wonder is whether you can be the best. Right. Because you'll always be competing with people who are doing the thing that you're competing with, doing your job, say your lawyer, finance guy, whatever this is, doctor, who want to be leaving and going home. And you'll be competing with people who just love this and want to do it every second of the day. And I don't think you can compete at the highest, highest levels unless you love it and you want to do it every second of the day. And there may be days that you hate it. Yeah. Right?

Like everything. With intrinsic motivation. That's really interesting. And I agree with that. I think maybe the distinction I would make is I wonder if you could be the best but not stay the best. You know, I wonder if you could do the work long enough to get to that place where you're there, but to actually sustain that for an extended period of time, you'd have to keep

functioning at that level. And if it wasn't in some way an expression of something deeper, yeah, I agree. I can't imagine being able to sustain that and stay there. Like you could think, I don't know enough about sports to be able to think of an Olympic athlete that was pushed, pushed, pushed by their parents. And at some young age, they're winning Olympic medals, right? And then some people quit the sport or just teach or whatever, which is that kind of paradigm like you're talking about. And if you think of a sustained paradigm, like getting tenure in academia, and especially at schools like Yale, Harvard, Chicago, where it takes a decade to get there, you've shown yourself to be someone who just does this. And by the time you're a decade out, you're so dedicated to research. Like you can't sustain fake interest

for a decade. So at those kinds of schools, actually people just continue doing research, even though they don't have to. Yeah. No, I can, that completely makes sense to me. All right. So I think we're kind of on the same page, but it is really fascinating. So you were the type of kid also then that just, it sounds like you put your head down, you loved school, you worked really hard and pretty much shined, shone in all these different domains. I happened to be creative and athletic, but I did not shine socially. I was super, super shy and very self-conscious. Tell me more about that. I mean, how did that show up in your life? I was, you can imagine what a nerd I was, that my theory about why I was so not influential

and no one listened to me ever was that they literally didn't hear me because my voice was the same resonant frequency as the ambient sounds in the atmosphere. And I'm sure that the reality is just I was speaking quietly and probably with latency in conversations where the conversation had moved on because I was being self-conscious and thinking before I speak. And I started doing theater and that helped. And then when I was in high school, I was so scared of not being invited to do stuff that I just started planning stuff for people all the time. So I became, I nominated myself as the social ringleader and, you know, everyone else was just happy to have me planning things. But that was definitely out of fear.

Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting, right? Because it, you know, Ellen Henriksen? I don't. Working around social anxiety. And one of the things that she says, you know, when people are moving through or living with social anxiety is one of the, quote, cheats or the things to let you feel comfortable is to assign yourself a role. So if you're at a party, like, you know, like, and I, and I was that way very much as a kid also.

So I would just hang out in the kitchen. I would help out. So my role was like, I was the server and the cleaner. And so it's interesting, you took the role of the organizer, which almost like from the outside in, you would think, oh, this is the most extroverted, socially confident person. But in fact, it was sort of a buffer for the opposite. Yeah, definitely. And when I'm talking with students, so MBA students get coached on going to networking events, and they're supposed to go to all these networking events. And students who are introverted hate that, right? Like this is their

worst nightmare to have to go to networking events. And so, because I teach influence, they'll come and ask advice and definitely the taking a role and especially the helping out person and the helping out role is really comfortable for a lot of us. So I'll advise them to show up early, help set up, and then you can assign yourself the host role where you're trying to learn what people are interested in and introduce them. I love that. I actually want to circle back to the relationship between introversion, extroversion, and influence because I think, I'm guessing there's some really interesting stuff. So you go from there to sort of being the kid who's now at the center of attention to a certain extent. Maybe this some central role in a social network,

but still not the center of attention. Like I've never been particularly loud or gregarious or like telling big stories or things like that. Right. But I mean, so interesting. Do you feel like that is that's necessary to be the quote center of attention? Oh my gosh. I feel like that's necessary to be the, quote, center of attention? Oh, my gosh. I feel like I do a lot more listening than talking. And I feel like someone being the center of attention would do a lot more talking than listening. Curiosity of mine, because I'm much more wired like you. Yeah, I know. And I've always been sort of like, you're really curious. Could you have, because I think we always associate like

that person with being very loud and boisterous and being, you know, super charismatic. But more recently I've been sort of saying, okay, so are there exemplars that I know of who are gentle and quiet? And yet when they sit down in a chair, everyone around them gets quiet and leans in. And could you be the center of attention in almost like a profoundly different way and maybe even more effective and powerful? It's so interesting because I made a bunch of assumptions when you said center of attention, but when you think charismatic, it's easy to think of individuals like the Dalai Lama or like Oprah who are so present and they're so connected, but it's not that they're pushing their agenda or sharing their stories. They're really being present and listening with other people.

It's really interesting. And this is also connected to when, so I teach charisma workshops sometimes. It's just because this was the most requested influence skill. Oh, no kidding. When I ask people just open-endedly, hey, what would you like to learn about influence? And people spontaneously just say, I'd really like to be more charismatic. And I didn't feel particularly charismatic, but I was like, I'm really good at studying, so I can learn anything. So I will learn for you guys how to be charismatic, and then I will teach you. John Antonakis is the academic who's the world expert in charisma. And his seven-factor model is just way too cumbersome to be practical. I think it's very accurate for a descriptive model. But if you want to try

to be charismatic, you can't do seven things at once. And so I started asking people, okay, if you think of someone who's charismatic, what are some qualities of that person? Can we just try that right now? Yeah, sure. And see, okay. So if you think of just charismatic person who pops into your head. Richard Branson. Okay. And if you think of three charismatic person who pops into your head? Richard Branson. Okay. And if you think of three qualities of Richard Branson, like what does he do or who is he that makes him charismatic? Adventurous spirit, gregarious, and a risk taker. Really interesting.

And I would totally agree on all of those and Richard Branson. And this definitely connects with the informal research that I've been doing, asking hundreds of people this question. Almost all, about 85% of the qualities people list of charismatic individuals fall into two buckets being either about confidence or about connection. So you're adventurous and risk-taking are in the confidence bucket and gregarious is in connection, right? And so for people to portray confidence and connection, they don't have to be loud at all. And many of the most charismatic people are really better listeners or they're great listeners. No, I completely agree with that. Funny enough, I've never had the chance to meet Branson, but years ago I interviewed his mom, who's amazing. And he is her. I mean, she's a maverick. She's adventurous spirit. She's a risk taker. She has been her whole life. She's so funny. And she told the story about how when he was young, when he was really young, he was so painfully introverted and shy that they literally

pulled the car over once, kicked him out and drove home because they wanted him to have to talk to people to find his way back home. The rest of the story, by the way, is he never came home and eventually they freaked out because this was way before cell phones. And they found him hours later having dinner at like a neighbor's house, enjoying himself. It's kind of backfired, but it is interesting, sort of like that relationship right there. What an interesting way to grow up. Right. And also, why did you interview his mom? Because I could. I was actually, because whenever I see someone like him or a lot of other people,

I'm always curious about people's backstories, their origin stories, and the people who've played really important roles in their origin stories. So I curious so i had the opportunity to sit down with her and and you know learn all about her life which is amazing incredible and also a little bit about uh their life together which was really fun mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot?

Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Dropping back into you. So when you actually ended up in college and you studied anthropology or something else? I ended up majoring in English, creative writing. Okay, so back to the writing side of things. Yeah. Then you come out and somewhere after college is a career in acting. Yeah. So how does that, where does that fit?

And I wouldn't really call it a career. Okay. But I did acting professionally on stage in film and some directing. movie that ran late night for five years on Starz Encore because the director was a producer, but not movie producer, but some just like backside executive at Starz Encore. And it was this really low budget karate movie. And I got to meet this with the head of the U.S. Olympic taekwondo team, except that he was from Korea and an Asian guy wasn't allowed to have a romance. Like he wasn't allowed to be the leading character with a romance because racism. And so they cast this me as the lead female and then playing, and this was a high school movie where he's the Taekwondo teacher and I'm like the guidance counselor. And then they

cast this other white guy as the teacher who, because he's white, then is allowed to have a romance on screen. And then they're kids of all different races. But yeah, it was really, really a weird experience. And- Were you aware of all different races. But yeah, it was really, really a weird experience. Were you aware of sort of like the reasons why at the time or is it only on the inside? Yes. People were openly talking about it. That's got to be strange and upsetting to kind of be in the middle of that to a certain extent. A hundred percent.

And then I was just for, I would say probably the whole decade of my 20s, I was trying to navigate the ethics of the world and business and show business and figure out, I think that it took me an entire decade to figure out that bystanders are complicit. And if I'm participating, even as a bystander, then I'm complicit in what's going on. But there were many, many different situations where I was letting myself off the hook, including in my corporate work after that, where lies would be going on,

that I was part of the conspiracy, but I wasn't the person literally saying the words out loud. And I would just stand by and try to feel okay that, well, I didn't say it, right? Yeah. Yeah. So aging is great. I mean, it's interesting, right? Because I think age plays a lot in that. The work that you've chosen to do also plays a lot into like really understanding why we do what we do and why we don't do what we do. And also, we're certainly, in the last three, four years in the US, we are in a moment where lights are being shined really brightly. things that so often when you come from a place of privilege, it was a word that wasn't even used with so many people, let alone understood. And then when you realize, okay, that's actually

me, then I think a lot of people are just really asking questions, not necessarily having the answers at this point, but understanding, okay, there's more that I need to understand about how I am in the world and the choices that I make and the places and environments and cultures that I choose to say yes or no to and whether I say anything or not. It's a different world. Right, right. And when you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation, in what way do you speak up? Do you just say, no, I'm not going to be part of it? Do you speak out against it? Do you become part of it and try to make it better? And yeah, like you said, there's no easy answers, but I'm really glad that many of us are talking about it a lot more.

Yeah. So you were referencing that this came up when you sort of like entered the world of business as well. At some point you land at Mattel. Right. What were you actually doing there? I was a brand manager for Barbie. And it's not like the movie Big. And people in my generation saw this movie, and me being one of them, we thought that we were going to go and have this amazing job at a toy company. And everything is just going to be hilarious every day. But I was working at Barbie while market share for Barbie was just plummeting from 90% of

their category to 30% of their category. And this was also during the dot-com bubble bursting. And so really what was going on was the fascinating things that you can learn in a large company that's suddenly going from very profitable to losing money. And then all of these individuals and individual executives who have their bonuses on the line and everybody's scrambling to try to figure out how to make things work. So this was brand management is a general management kind of role. So you kind of get thrown in and try to swim.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. It seems like everywhere you've gone, you're not just doing the job. You're sort of like, there's a second script running in your head. You have a second job, which is deconstructing what's happening on a social dynamic level. Yeah, it's probably true in that mode a lot. And that's how I ended up doing the work of interpersonal influence because I'm doing a lot of that analysis, even subconsciously. This is going off on a sidebar, but I don't know if you know, but I find it interesting that apparently a lot of people who go into compliance kinds of jobs or influence jobs like sales come from families where they were growing up in abusive environments or environments of addiction. And my childhood wasn't like that, but I was definitely scared of my dad.

And he had a bad temper and he would just fly off the handle. And so there was this training in, you have to pay really, really close attention to social dynamics and someone else to predict what they're going to do. Yeah. I mean, it's like a hyper-vigilance. I was just talking to somebody recently also who said that she believes that in a lot of people, that also translates to a really fierce level of intuition. That's sort of in an always-on position. That's really interesting. Yeah. So you have that as sort of part of the driver for this perpetual state of scanning. And I don't notice it. I think that you're right, but it's subconscious.

So it's... Yeah, it's just your way of being. Yeah. Yeah. But it's also, it sounds like it's served you really well because it's made you aware of more than probably the average person is aware of in any given moment and in any given circumstance. I'm sure it has pluses and minuses. Yeah. Right. Then there's the head constantly maniacally spinning like, okay, just be present. So what is it that makes you go from the world of like corporate back into school and saying like, oh, there's something interesting that I want to actually go back into student mode.

So I had wanted to be a professor since I was in third grade, but it was hard to figure out what field that would be. And so I thought it would be anthropology or English or something, and that wasn't getting traction. There's the seed showing itself early, right? And when I was in business school, having made a really uninformed choice to go to business school, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Started a company, failed radically

before it even really got off the ground. And I thought, okay, great, I'm going to go and get an MBA. And because I was managing this little test prep company, teaching, training, doing marketing for that. My test scores were really, really high. So I got a scholarship to get an MBA. So, okay, great. Then while I realize entrepreneurs are miserable for the most part, I'm meeting all these entrepreneurs who are just working themselves to the bone and their businesses are not successful. And I'm going, oh, wait, wait, that's not what I thought I wanted. And then the one person that I met, well, I would have wanted to partner up with on a business. We tried for two years to come up with good ideas and all of our ideas were crap. And so we were graduating and he's going back to Toyota and I'm going,

I don't know what I'm going to do. But I was doing informational interviews of people in all these different fields to see who's happy, what do they do, what might I like. And I was doing informational interviews of my professors in addition to everyone else. And they seemed like they had great jobs. Sounded really fun. But I was married and my husband at the time said, listen, sugar, we moved to California for this two-year program. You've been in school. There's no way that another five years of this is okay for us. And that was really reasonable. It was fine. But then we got divorced and I was like, hey, maybe I should check out grad schools again. I found out my test scores were expiring in a month and I would never do so well again as I had

before when I was working in test prep. So I just applied madly without finding enough information about what I was getting into. I was accidentally working in marketing, so marketing was the thing. But I ended up meeting Dan Ariely in the application process. And then the choice that I made, so I started at MIT for my PhD. And the choice that I was making then was I want to go work with Dan Ariely, even more than which school it was that I was choosing. And he wasn't really doing marketing, marketing, as you know, much more psychology. Right. He was, you know, like once, I mean, behavioral economics, I guess, is sort of like the label. Although what it is, like what falls under that is so broad and so different depending on who's doing it.

So it was really about the person. It was really sort of like, this is an interesting guy. He's doing fascinating work. Yeah, kind of like all of us who ended up choosing a college major because we loved this one professor. And they have this huge effect on our lives. So Dan, who wasn't famous yet, but he was going to be famous soon, we just didn't know, he picked me up at the airport and he was like, we'll recognize each other because we'll both be wearing funny hats. Don't forget you're a funny hat. So he shows up

at the airport with a Santa Claus hat. He's Jewish and Israeli and easy to recognize in a Santa Claus hat. And he is super nice and bizarre and really fun and so engaging. And he brings me back to his house and I stay with his family and walk his son to preschool the next morning. And then we just hang out in a coffee shop for multiple hours just talking about research ideas. And it was so exciting and creative and creative and collaborative and completely different from all the other interviews that I had had at all the other schools. And when I said, listen, I'm coming to MIT, but I'm coming to work with you. If you leave, please take me with you. And so we had that deal arranged. Those were the terms and conditions.

Yeah. Except then he went on sabbatical and then he didn't come back. Right, because he ended up at Duke, didn't he? Yeah. Yeah. So, but you keep studying. With his protege, Mike Norton, who's amazing. Yeah, who has done some fascinating research also. And I guess now all of you have done research together at this point.

Yeah. What makes you start to... Because Dan was going on sabbatical, he's like, okay, Mike, while I'm gone, she's yours. And Mike was a first year professor. He was like, no, I can't advise anybody. And Dan's like, no, she's yours. I was Mike's first student. So you start to devote yourself to sort of like the exploration, the study. I mean, Dan, you know, is all about why we do what we do and runs all sorts of really kind of fun and interesting and strange experiments and challenging people. And it sounds like you take that and then the part of it, which becomes really fascinating to you

is influence and persuasion. Yeah. And the people doing good stuff aspect of influence and persuasion. And I was working on research projects on things like what happens when people are volunteering or what happens when people are giving money and some of the good things that come out of that besides the obvious help. And it makes you feel powerful and it makes you feel actually can make you feel you have more time when you volunteer because you feel so effective. You're doing this good thing for somebody, so you have this abundance feeling. And similarly, that when you're giving money to some good cause or other person, you feel really powerful and you feel really rich.

Yeah, the whole giver's glow effect. Yeah, yeah. And I had noticed even though, so I went from being a professional brand manager working in a big company to being a grad student and, you know, having my salary cut to a tiny pittance. But when I would give money to a homeless person, I would feel like, wow, I'm really doing okay. The idea of giving, how does that relate to, you mentioned giving for good or influence for good. What's the relationship there between giving and influence? So when I started teaching at Yale, they had some proposal for me to teach nonprofit marketing or something like this, which was nice.

And they were trying to be nice to me. And I said, hey, how about if I just invent a class that is the best of everything that I can bring to the table to do the most good that I can for the MBA students. And I'm going to create this class that's a combination of the behavioral economics and social psychology that I've been studying, the research that I've been doing, and my acting training,

and my sales and marketing background. And I love negotiations. So I've been doing a lot of work in that and coaching people on that and public speaking. So what if I bring all of this together in a class on influence? And this is the class that I wish that I could have taken as an MBA student, but we don't have stuff like that in business school. And the dean at Yale and my colleagues in the marketing department were nice enough to be like, okay, okay, whatever you want. And I negotiated that I would get to teach two sections of it in the next year, even if nobody really took my class in the first year. I negotiated to not have enrollment minimums, but the class was

just massively oversubscribed from day one because people were so hungry to learn about influence. And the way that I teach influence is a combination of it's getting and it's giving and it's growing, stepping out of your comfort zone and gratitude and all of these forces work together to help you become a more influential person. So it's the idea of not just transactional influence. Like, I love the book Influence by Bob Cialdini, but it's very transactional and just one-off sales based. And when I used to teach those techniques, the students or the executives that I would be teaching would be saying like, okay, I get that that works in marketing and sales, but the people I want to influence are my employees, my boss, my partner, my children. Children are the hardest, right? And those transactional influence techniques can't work in my real relationships because people will think I'm a jackass. Yeah. And I can kind of validate that. Really? I know those and I've tried them in all sorts of different domains in my life, like over the years is that, you know, would learn,

you know, Cialdini's six principles, right? And it is interesting when you sort of broaden the lens and say, well, what about influence in the context of everyday life and the relationships that I hold most dear and want to be most authentic and show up from a place of grace and respect? I think part of what I think is interesting about this also is the word influence in general and persuasion. If you just offer them to anybody and said positive or negative? I have. And it's negative. Is it strongly negative? Yeah, 80%. Wow. Why? Why do you think that is? People think that, many people think that influence is inherently manipulative and that you're trying to get somebody to do something that they don't want to do. And potentially using underhanded tactics. And we don't want.

We care. Let me step back. We appreciate the people we think of as being influential in our lives. We respect them. We love them. But we hate the idea of somebody else trying to influence us. And there's a weird gap between influence and influential. So the word influential has a very positive halo.

And the word influence has a very negative halo. And then if you talk about influence tactics, everybody hates it. Right. That's so interesting. I wonder if it sort of like butts heads with our own sense of free will. You know, it's like manipulation means that you're somehow getting me to do something that I really don't want to do. So you're screwing with my free will. Right. This idea that if you're trying to influence someone that you're the one with agency and they're just this passive person reacting to, you're trying to force them to do something, which of course is not at

all how it needs to be or should be. And that's not the kind of influence that works in the long run. So it's not just that these tactics work in these more distant relationships, but that they don't have people being committed to collaborations or working relationships or following through on something that they said if you use these transactional techniques. Yeah, you can get somebody to do something one time or maybe for a short amount of time. But here's my curiosity around that, though. that you were sharing that you really look at as sort of more broader sustained lifestyle influence or gratitude? And what are some of the other things that fold into this for you? Yeah, these four elements are getting, which is making things happen, right? This is influence, but it has a mutual reciprocal relationship with giving through reciprocity. but it's also even on a spiritual dimension that when you have abundance in your life, and I don't talk on a spiritual level when I'm teaching at Yale,

but I think it's okay on your podcast in this conversation. A lot of us stop ourselves from trying to be influential or for asking for what we need or even being influential and drawing boundaries because we don't want to be greedy. And when we're giving and we're generous and we actively practice generosity, we're giving ourselves the secure feeling of comfort of, okay, I'm not a greedy person. And if I know that I'm not a greedy person, then it's okay for me to ask. And then from the other person's, other party's

perspective, of course, generosity sparks reciprocity and makes them more inclined. And then I know you're familiar with Adam Grant's work on reciprocity styles, which I think is really interesting. So there's also the observation of when someone's a giver and they're all about doing as much good as they can for as many people. And they're motivated to just help. When they see you giving and being generous with other people, you're the person that they want to help because that's how they can leverage their own efforts and investments. And then there's growing, which is taking risks and stepping outside of your comfort zone, like the Richard Branson aspect of it. And the more you practice stepping out of your comfort zone, the more you're able to let yourself be audacious in ways that you wouldn't have. And become comfortable with discomfort. Most people that I've talked to don't stop being afraid. They just become more okay with living with the fear.

And they also realize that when they're taking social risks, there's this assumption that people are going to not like us. It functions in multiple ways, but ultimately it gets us to the place that a lot of our influence is trying to get us to, which is just the peace and satisfaction with life. But when we're grateful, then we're more comfortable trying to ask for stuff, do stuff, be audacious, because even if it doesn't succeed, we're able to be grateful for what we have. And then when we're expressing gratitude to other people, they become more generous with us. But the reciprocity and generosity, of course, doesn't work if we're just coming from a transactional place. And other people can tell. So when I'm talking about generosity, I mean real generosity and real gratitude. Yeah, more generosity of spirit, like it's coming from something. Yeah, like you are not expecting to be paid back by that person. You're not just priming the pump. Yeah, like you know that there's generally this pay it forward

and karma that comes back and has you be successful when you are generous. But if each person you do something for, you're expecting to get something back then you're not generous at all and yeah it's a turnoff people sense this so here's my curiosity around this i love those principles certainly try and live them as much as i can and and i completely agree i feel like when you can step into the world from sort of like those those ideals whether it's measurable or not like like the world responds to you. Yeah. They want to say yes. Right. Because I think they want to see people living that way and interacting with people

survive and flourish. And I think it's also, it's inspiring. You become a bit of a beacon. So here's the other curiosity around it though. A couple of years ago, I sat down with Maria Konnikova, who spent years studying the long con. Yeah, I love her book. Grifters, right? And it's functionally all the same stuff, but just with malicious intent. It's kind of scary. I have a concern about this with this book that I'm writing and with all of the stuff that I teach, because there will always be people who come from a very selfish place wanting to know, how can I use these tactics and techniques? Ultimately, the transactional techniques are a lot easier and they're a lot less costly.

But it's not that you can't fool people for a while into thinking, you know, that you're this wonderful, generous person that everybody would like to help. And especially, especially because those people, professional con artists, they can identify vulnerability and they prey on the vulnerable. And it's not just vulnerable individuals, but any of us in the moments when we're most vulnerable and desperate. So the idea that we should be able to judge somebody's character and not fall for that is just faulty because we don't know what we would do and what

we would ignore from a place of desperation. Yeah. I wonder if sometimes, because we all have a shadow side to us, right? There's something dark in all of us. There's something a little bit edgy. For some people, it's bigger. For some people, it's smaller. I wonder if sometimes, I'm so curious whether you've thought about this at all or written a research around it, whether one of the things that potentially stops us from doing or behaving in a way that we perceive as having influence or showing influence or being influential is that we know that somewhere deep inside, even though we're mostly good, there's some darkness.

And you almost question, am I really doing this for noble reasons? Like, is this right action? Yeah. So self-deception is another area of research that I've worked on a lot and with Dan and with Mike. And self-deception is so challenging to deal with as a human being because by definition, you can't know that it's going on. And a lot of researchers and philosophers believe that we developed self-deception in order to be able to deceive other people. So if you want to lie to someone else as effectively as possible, the best way to do that is believe your own lie.

That's interesting. Or be somebody who's trapped in the dark triad. If you've got a blend of sociopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, it's just, I think those are the people that we tend to be really scared of, and they exist. And then when they get hold of a deep and profound understanding of influence, it can be terrifying.

You brought up this idea of self-deception. You did some really fascinating research around this with Dan and Michael and I think one other person. With Francesca Gino. Francesca, right. Around, and could you share sort of like the, because of the setup for this, I thought was really fascinating around testing. The cheating studies? Yeah. The cheating ones, yeah. What we were curious to see is if cheating might make people feel smarter because they would self-deceive about how they did so well.

And the setup was that we gave people IQ type tests. And some of the people had an answer key at the bottom. And we ran this multiple times in different ways. So sometimes we would have it seem like they weren't supposed to see the answer key. Like I would just photocopy a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy until you could just barely see, right? And sometimes we were just forthright about it. And we would say, there's an answer key at the bottom. You can check your

answers, but please do your own work. And when you ask people, they do say, yeah, if you use the answer key in a situation like that, you're cheating. And we had other situations in which it was people taking an electronic test, and if you swipe your mouse down to the bottom, you could see the answer key, and it's kind of like this secret crutch. Then after people take the test, there's another test, and they have to predict how well they will do. And in many cases, we would pay them according to their accuracy and their performance. So you get to see the second test before you take it. So you know what's on there. And some of them are math problems and

things like you don't have enough time to figure out all of the answers, but you have a pretty good idea of how hard the test is. And what we found again and again and again is that people would predict that they would do about as well on the second test as they did on the first test, even if they totally cheated using the answer key. And it's not that everybody maxed out, like they're usually 10-point tests. It's not that they all maxed out to 10. And this is also interesting from a self-deception perspective, because you can't just look at the answer key and go, oh, okay, it's D-A-C-V, right? But if you are trying to get the answers and then you're checking and you're like, oh yeah, I kind of knew that, right? And then you can end up doing a couple of points better than you would have without the

answer key. You can really not know that the answer key affected you at all. So in effect, cheating makes people feel smarter. We also look to see how long does that effect last. And it takes about three iterations of reality to bring you back down to having an accurate view of yourself. So it's like the first time you take the test, you cheat. And you're like, oh my God, I'm a genius. You get a great score. Yeah. Like you kind of forget that you cheated.

Right. And you're like, oh, I must be smart. Right. And then the next time you take it and reality sets, well, no, reality doesn't set in right away. So you take it again and you don't do as well because you didn't cheat that time. Right. And you're like, oh yeah, stupid.

Right. Like I overslept. Yeah, that was just annoyingly hard, that one. Right. And you're like, oh yeah, stupid. Right. Like I overslept. Yeah. That was just annoyingly hard, that one. Right. So it takes like three tests for you to finally realize, oh, I only got that score originally because I cheated. To sort of like remove the self-deception. Yeah. But if you get the answers again, then immediately you self-deceive. Huh. Interesting. So we're looking for opportunities to feel good about ourselves. Yeah. I mean, I'm always fascinated by how we think we're so rational and we're just, I mean, this is all Dan's work, right?

We're just completely and utterly not only capable of being deceived by others, but also deceiving ourselves. And especially if it allows us to feel like, you know, we're standing in an identity, which is somehow better. Right. We're like, oh yeah, like that's clearly an identity which is somehow better. Right. We're like, oh yeah, that's clearly me, even though you know. Yeah. You're not there in a valid way. Yeah. And from an influence perspective, nice, well-intentioned people also assume that other people are rational.

And so we suck at influence in general because we just give people information and expect them to make the best decision. But since our decisions aren't influenced rationally nearly as much as we would hope, and they're influenced by all kinds of heuristics and visceral factors, and this isn't behavioral economic system one, system two, right? Gut decisions. When as influencers, we take that out of the equation or we think that it's not ethical to try to influence people through their emotions and shortcuts and things like this, like you see in consumer ads and stuff, then we just end up being much less influential because people don't follow the rules that we think they're supposed to follow. Yeah. And I think that's where we get tripped up again with the idea of, oh, I'm going to gain this skill of influence, right? Because it means that necessarily we can't just be the most, be like, how can you not understand? Like, I'm going to learn how to present the most logical, irrefutable argument possible. We also need to say, okay, I'm also going to play the

game of understanding the emotion here and how to, you know, work to try and create a certain emotion that will allow somebody to buy into whatever this idea is. Yeah. And then to actually take action. And we vastly underestimate how important it is to make it easy for them to take action. So we think, great, they said yes, or they remember. Like one of the biggest wastes of money in any social marketing campaign ever was the USDA five-a-day campaign. Do you remember this? No, I don't remember. you remember this? Like this was back in the 90s, between 1990 and 1995, the US government spent $50 million a year saying you should eat five fruits and vegetables a day. And awareness went from 8% of the population knowing you should eat that many fruits and vegetables to 32%. So great. It was this huge success. And then all of these other countries ended up replicating the campaign and five a day, five a day, five a day. So it raised awareness,

except the number of people who were actually eating five a day was 11% in 1990 and 11% in 1995. So they got the first step of making it easy to understand, easy to remember. It wasn't complicated, except it's so hard. And if you're not used to cooking vegetables, just knowing that you're supposed to have more vegetables doesn't help at all. And in fact, in the U.S., most vegetables bought at the supermarket get thrown away. Really? Wow. But it's amazing. And it's amazing to see the difference between, you know, like, okay, so there's a massive increase.

So it's like seven times increase in awareness of like, this is important to you. You get zero change in behavior. Yeah, awareness and intent are very different from actual behavior. So if you want to influence somebody, yeah, it's by making it easy, by making it as easy as possible. And the iconic example of a company that has mastered it is Amazon. And almost all of their innovations have been on the dimension of making it easier to buy from them. Like just about anything that you think of. But starting with just making it easier to sit on your couch than actually go to the store and brick and mortar. Stores start disappearing of interest to us.

Bookstores have gone away, right? Because you do want to browse books before you read them. And Amazon was like, okay, great. Click a button and you can have a couple of free chapters. And they one-click shopping. A statistic that most people don't know unless they're super nerds involved in digital marketing is that 78% of the items that customers put in a cart online don't get purchased. And so when Amazon said, hey, how about if we just keep your credit card information, click a button, and then boom, your purchase goes through, we're like, great. Subscribe and save. You order it once, and then it comes every month. And Alexa, I devalue my privacy enough to have one of these in my house. And it's just easy to speak your desires.

Do you remember when the dash button came out? Not a lot of people remember this. And it might even still exist because it was a failure. But it was still aiming to make it easier to buy the stuff that you want from Amazon. And it's these physical buttons that you could put wherever you want in your house. And each is attached to one product. Oh, I do remember that. They were around for like a hot minute. Yeah. So first of all, they didn't make it easy enough to actually use because you have to program it when you receive it. But it was too easy in a different way. So people who did

take the extra step to program it, and they put these buttons around in their house, they made it so easy for small children to just run around and be like, and, you know, 30 things of toilet paper show up at your house the next day. That's too funny, but it makes a lot of sense. You know, like remove the steps, remove all the things that would stop you from actually taking these actions. And it just kind of makes it, you know, if it's literally as easy as just clicking a button and then you have exactly what you want. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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So if there's something that we want to happen, right, something we know we want, it's good for us. We want it to happen, you know. And we remove all the barriers to just making it happen. So it's literally, it's almost impossible not to say yes to make this behavior. That's one side of the spectrum. What about the side of the spectrum where there's a behavior where we look at it, we're like, okay, so five a day, cool. But I don't actually want to eat five servings of vegetables a day. And you could literally, I mean, you could tell me like every day I'm going to drop off

an order at your front door with five vegetables a day. And I know it's good for me. But I just don't want to actually then take them inside, put them in the refrigerator and eat them. Yeah. This is probably going to get a little too specific because I've done some work on food and I love it and I'm interested in it. I did some consulting work with the Google food team and we were helping people try to make, we were trying to help people make healthy choices by accident without telling them you have to eat vegetables or whatever the decision was, fewer M&Ms, stuff like that. When there's a food that you don't like, it takes seven or eight exposures for you to have the possibility of liking it. So the first thing is just a lot

of people don't like vegetables. So one of the studies that we ran was with the five most hated vegetables. So there was beets and cabbage and parsnips. I hate parsnips. Brussels sprouts, I think they're delicious, but other people hate them. And we tried to make, so we made sure that they would be delicious. And then we put signage. So we asked chefs and Google chefs are phenomenal. So they made delicious vegetables. And then we just put these colorful signs that were curiosity stimulating where we weren't saying, eat this, we weren't saying it's delicious, we weren't saying it's healthy, but there were these weird facts and questions, like it would have the name of the beet dish, beautiful picture of it right

next to the beets, and say, did you know that the world's largest beet was grown by Dutchman Piet de Huide, and it weighed over 500 pounds. And you don't feel, you don't get the resistance that would come from somebody telling you, hey, Jonathan, you got to eat the beets, right? You're like, no, you don't tell me what to do. You're not the boss of me. But where it's just a curious fact, and then, you know, you get to make your own decision. Nobody's going to force you. And so people ate lots more vegetables, even of these hated ones. And the idea with that is just helping people try these foods. And if you try it enough times, then you might be open to liking it. Meal delivery or ingredient delivery services

are really doing a fantastic job of helping people in higher socioeconomic levels to be able to enjoy cooking vegetables because they tell you exactly what to do. They've, you know, already maybe chopped up the stuff for you. They make it as easy as possible, but it really doesn't help people on SNAP, things like that. Yeah. I mean, wouldn't it be good if we could figure out how to sort of democratize it to a certain extent? Yeah. And, and McDonald's is an example of a company that has offered health, much healthier foods at periodic intervals. And then they just say, listen, we would be happy to do this, but people don't buy it. So they will make

a healthy offering and then they'll pull it off the menu. Yeah. I mean, you wonder if they were aware of what you were just saying, saying, well, actually, there's a certain minimum number of exposures. Except like, why would you buy something at McDonald's? But I'm excited about the Impossible Burger getting sold at Burger King. And they're right now across the country rolling it out. So it's a meatless burger.

And the thing with that is that it tastes and looks and feels like a hamburger. I've tried one recently. How did you like it? Had you not told me that it was the Impossible Burger, I would have not known. Yeah. Yeah. I was really surprised. It was pretty cool. It was really interesting. Yeah. Beyond Meat is the competitor of Impossible Burger, and they're doing, to me, even a better job of marketing. And what's fascinating from an influence perspective is that they really, really get that, first of all, if you want as many people as possible to eat

less meat and eat more meat substitutes, you shouldn't be marketing to vegetarians and putting your stuff next to the black bean burgers, right? You need to market to meat eaters. And you shouldn't be marketing to vegetarians and putting your stuff next to the black bean burgers, right? You need to market to meat eaters and you can't tell them what to do because then they'll have a lot of resistance and say, you're not the boss of me. So none of their marketing is about ethics. None of it is about health. Some of it a little bit on sustainability and almost all of it on taste and flavor. And these burgers are much healthier than a meat burger that you can buy, but they're not going to tell you that. And they have another really cool influencer thing they did that you'll be excited about is that instead of getting celebrity endorsers and celebrity athletes, although they

have all of those connections to say, hey, this product is great. I love it. They've gotten celebrity athletes to invest in their company. And so they have a number of NBA players who've invested in Beyond Meat to show that they're really, it's not just that they're getting paid to put their name on it, but this is something they really believe in. Yeah. I love that. Getting behind it in a powerful way. When you think about the work that you've been doing recently and you think about the idea of, so part of influence is what's known, but part of influence is also what's unconscious,

what's subconscious. And when we look at the world today, there are almost like politically warring factions, social warring factions. There are conversations around race, gender, sexuality, identity, which is all great. They need to be had, you know, and it's amazing that on opposite sides of a chasm and just hurling things at each other and saying, why don't you see the world the way that I see the world? There's no middle, but there's almost an unwillingness to have the conversation, to invest in the energy of having a conversation and a belief that it is not my job to get you to understand this. You just should. And I understand there is oftentimes a difference between the morality of a situation and the reality of it. And there are issues of justice and burden that are very real.

And at the same time, the thing that we all want in the end is for people to come together and understand each other and to share a sense of humanity and dignity. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on these dynamics we're seeing unfolding now and how those relate to what you know

about how people might be able to have conversations in a way that's influential, respectful, somehow brings us together? It's a big question, I know. Huge topic, yeah. And it's a hot button all over nationally, internationally, and in a particular way on college campuses where there's a very

big tension between justice and free speech. This comes up a lot at liberal institutions like Yale, where, and you're talking about the burden of education, right? So there are a lot of students who are they're super woke and need everybody else to be on board with that. And then there are also a faction of students who are silent and some of them conservative, some of them maybe moderately liberal, but feel that they're not allowed to speak and share their views, and sometimes for really good reasons. Like, I had a colleague, and just to give you, and I'm sure you've heard about this stuff, but to give you an idea of how, in my mind, extreme this can be, a colleague of mine in the marketing department, teaching class, there's a laundry detergent commercial and says, and the market researchers found that women said this about the commercial, men said this about the commercial. And then one of our students went to the dean saying, to file a formal complaint that this

professor didn't, this professor failed them by not introducing this by saying first, now listen, I don't believe in binary genders, but when they did this research, the research team, you know, et cetera. And for a business school, that's really far beyond politically and from a communication standpoint where we are in teaching class to introduce any discussion of gender with that. But so when I'm teaching and just in conversations in general, I'm trying to always stand up for and protect people who are expressing minority views. And it's just that what we have now, which is really interesting, is some of the views that used to be minority views become majority views on places like college campus. And then other

views that used to be majority views are minority views that can't be expressed. And I want to share this challenge that we do in my class. Can I share this? Yeah, please. It's related. And it's one of my very favorite ones. Every week we do multiple challenges outside class. And this one is called the empathy challenge.

And this is how we practice talking with people who really disagree with us. And it starts with, you choose a topic that's a controversial topic that you yourself care deeply about. And then you find three people who fundamentally disagree with you. And you have a 15-minute conversation with each one of those people. And your goal is not to influence them. Your goal is to allow yourself to be influenced and develop empathy. And what you're trying to do, your objective is to figure out what values does that other person have that are driving their preference or their belief, which is so different from yours. And then you reflect

back your guesses about what their values are and what it is that they care about. And then they'll tell you might be wrong, but then you'll have a conversation with them about deep values. And these conversations can be really profound and transformational. First of all, this comes from some research, how when people are able to express their values or talk about their values. They feel more confident. Obviously, they feel validated. And they're also more open. So someone on the other side will be more open to having a conversation when they know that you care and when they think that you understand them. And then research finds, and it's been replicated in this project, that most of the time when someone disagrees with us, we project them into the extreme of the other side. And they're just usually not there because mathematically most people aren't, right? And some of the transformational conversations that have

happened have been students reaching out to people that they know, especially like students who had come out to family members who were unsupportive and upset even years ago and going back to those people and saying, I'd like to understand, please help me understand what is it about my choices that makes you uncomfortable? And in multiple cases, and in fact, so those three specific cases I'm thinking of, it turned out that the discomfort was just so much less than my students thought that it was. And so the relationship went a long way toward getting repaired just by understanding they don't hate me. They don't think that I'm horrible. They don't get it. And they don't agree with me, but they're not completely blocking me out of their lives in the way I thought. Another student talked to a friend who had gotten an abortion, and my student is very religious and very much against abortion. And when she was sharing this conversation with the class, she got teary describing it to us where she found out that her friend had been raped and she didn't know.

And that opened up just a whole new perspective on issues of abortion and ethics and what should you do. And just many, many, many of these conversations have beautiful outcomes. And not all of them. Like 5% of them end up with both people being pissed at each other. So it's not a magic bullet, but it can be really helpful. Yeah, but I mean, 95% is pretty good, even if it's a spectrum of some benefit, you know, across there. Yeah, and the ones that go south are typically, and actually maybe it's all been, I think all of them, at least that are

coming to mind, are people trying to bridge the political divide of conservative and liberal, and Trump supporters in particular. Yale's a very liberal school. Where I think those went wrong was in tackling something, trying to tackle something that's so fundamental and so broad, where people who were bridging, trying to bridge a political's so fundamental and so broad, where people who were trying to bridge a political divide but talking about a very specific issue, rather than just general viewpoints, they didn't have the same problem. Yeah, because it's like you really need to understand how has that person lived, what's happened to them in their lives to bring them to a point where they see the world the way that this one particular ideology reflects it.

I think that's the right word, that just discussing ideology is not a good topic for this kind of thing. I mean, it occurs to me also that that process on some level forces you to see the humanity of the person who's sitting across from you. And once that door opens, it becomes really hard to feel the same way about them, to feel the same level of otherness about them. And almost all values are shared. It's just that we have them in a different order. When you get to somebody's deepest values, almost certainly you can relate to them, like values like love and freedom and justice and safety. If there's a value that you're not

relating to, usually you can find something more fundamental and deeper below that that you can. So freedom and justice would be two values that clash regularly, right? And some of us have one higher, some have the other. And we can try to kill each other over disagreements about that, but we care about blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I'm curious also how this relates to some of the research that shows that when we see somebody else doing something that we disagree with, that we label as bad, we tend to label, we tend to look at them and say, this is not a good person who's made bad choices or doing bad things. That's a bad person. But when we effectively do the exact same thing in our own lives, we're good people. We just made a mistake or we did something bad. Right. The fundamental attribution error. Right. And such good marketing went into

that term, right? Oh my God, it's fundamental. Yeah. That we see other people's behavior as a result of who they are and our behavior as a result of the situation. Yeah. So maybe this empathy project, empathy challenge helps with that a little bit too. That's a great perspective. Yeah, absolutely. It definitely helps you not otherize the other person. And maybe if you can see where they're coming from, helps you understand the circumstances in which if you had lived through those, you might have similar beliefs as they do. I did that when I was pilot testing this before the 2016 election, and I was talking ignorant that I couldn't even imagine that he would actually win when I was doing this in September. So it would have been different later. But I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to vote for Donald Trump. myself voting for him, but for each one of those people, I felt like, okay, I totally get it. Why you, with your life circumstances and your values, why you would want to vote for this guy? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting also because that again, so it's interesting, right? So that

puts you in one place. It puts you sort of in a place of opening up a sense of connection and lessening the otherness and feeling empathy and understanding. Okay, I get it. Then the question is, okay, so now what do we do with that? Like, is it enough to just understand each other more? Because underneath that, we still want to say, but I want them to see the world the way I see it. And I want them to act in a certain way that I want them to act. Like, do we just forget about that? Or is that sort of a part two of like the empathy step part one? Now we're getting super deep. But when you say, I want them to see the world the way I see

it, and I want them to act the way I want them to, that's exactly what people get super resistant to. And I know that's why you're bringing it up. Yeah. So my question would be, what's ultimately your purpose? Because you can't ever force someone to see the world in a particular way or do something. You can express your view of the world in effectively and potentially influential ways. But if you can understand how someone does already view the world, then that's the possibility that we can find some common ground and some things that we agree on to start to move forward. Yeah. And I wonder if we change the end result too, away from, I need them to see things this way and take this action too. No, I just, what if it was good enough for us just to be able to actually see and understand each other as human beings, even though we don't agree? Would that, if that happened at scale, be enough to profoundly change the way that we move through the world and relate to each other and cooperate or

not? Sure it would. I mean, I don't know what is enough, right? But it would be tremendous if we could help people agree to disagree and not have disagreement entail disrespect. And there are all these areas that really we do fundamentally agree about, like abortion would be one, right? Nobody wants more abortions. Nobody wants to encourage abortions and try to have as many of them as possible, right? And we just really disagree about the ways of having that happen. Yeah. And I know you do a good job of not being political and I'm like throwing all this stuff out there.

No, but it's actually interesting. I don't think anybody, I think it's really hard to not be, quote, political these days if you have strong convictions and strong feelings. And I think we started this conversation, you know, a couple minutes in with you sharing how when you look back and, you know, many years ago in a certain situation where you knew there was injustice and you sat quiet, that there was, you know, a sense of being complicit. And I think when we come full circle now, yes, it's uncomfortable. You know, I certainly don't shy. I think it's important for all of us to a certain extent, to the level that we're comfortable with, to step into the conversation to the extent that it can be a conversation.

And if you have a point of view, be okay with that point of view. It's a moment in time where the world needs that right now. It feels like there's so many different directions that you and I can jam together. And maybe we'll have you back in the future to sort of like go through some other fun stuff. But as we sit here today in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Definitely gratitude. That I find that as long as I'm striving to try to change things in my life, it means that I'm finding things not good about it. And every time I come back to gratitude and

practice gratitude, it's a choice that's available to me that reminds me that life is absolutely miraculous just as it is. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code

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If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

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