Modern Wisdom - #180 - Prince Ghuman & Matt Johnson - How Marketing Reshapes Our Brains

Episode Date: June 6, 2020

Matt Johnson PhD is a Neuroscientist and Prince Ghuman is a Neuro-Marketer. Combining the insights of Neuroscience & Consumer Psychology can help us to understand our own behaviour and how marketing affects us in unique and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Expect to learn why our brains don't experience reality directly, how you can make dog food taste like pate, the role of impulse in decision making, what neuroscience's definition of surprise is, how pleasure & pain affect our drive to buy and much more... Sponsor: Shop Eleiko’s full range at https://www.shop.eleiko.com (enter code MW15 for 15% off everything) Extra Stuff: Buy Blindsight - http://getbook.at/blindsight Follow Prince & Matt on Twitter - https://twitter.com/pop_neuro Check out Prince & Matt's Website - https://www.popneuro.com/ Watch Prince's Tedx Talk - https://youtu.be/LpJvuPOG40M Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello friends, welcome back. My guests today are Prince Gument and Matt Johnson and we are talking about how marketing reshapes our brains. One of the favorite topics that I talk about on this podcast is consumer behavior, behavioral economics and psychology and today we go through an absolute ton. Matt is a neuroscientist and princes a marketer. When you combine those two together, you get some fantastic insights into how marketing affects us in unique and sometimes very counter-insuitive ways.

So today, expect to learn why our brains don't actually experience reality directly, how you can make dog food taste like pate, the role of impulse in decision making, what neuroscience is definition of surprises, how pleasure and pain affect our drive to buy, and much more. In other news, I've been thinking about doing

some solo podcast episodes. I've been listening to far too much Chris Dilea recently. You should totally go and check out his podcast if you haven't already. And I love how much freedom he has to just talk about whatever he wants without any agenda or topic. So I'm considering doing that. Let me know what you think. If you think it would be a good idea or whatever, just give me a DM wherever you follow me. What else is going on? We have so many recordings lined up over the next few months, including Ethan Supply from Remember

the Titans on his 100 and hundreds of pounds weight loss journey. Sargon of a Cad is coming back on Michael Matsola, who is the director behind Dr. Stephen Greer's new UFO documentary. Rutger Breggman, who broke the internet with his story about the real world lord of the flies situation which went on with some kids from Tonga, so many amazing guests coming up and we're still going strong at three episodes a week. Thank you for tuning in and supporting the podcast. If you're sending it to your friends, if you're given us five stars, if you've made sure you've hit the subscribe button, I am giving you a virtual, but yet still socially distanced hug, or bro fist over the internet

bro fist sounds terrible, doesn't it? You know, I mean fist bump. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. You make my day, and I'm so glad that you're joining me on this journey as we scour the world for interesting and fascinating humans. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful prince and mat. This book, this blind site that I have in my hands is one of the coolest things that I've read in absolutely ages. I get sent tons and tons of books and this is like soft core porn to me. And also to the listeners today, I'm sure as well, fans of Richard Shoton,

Rory Sutherland and some of the other fantastic guests that we've had on. Today, I think you should have your note pads out because this is gonna be a real special one. So first off, Jans, congrats on the book. Really good. Thank you so much, Chris. Really appreciate that. How long were you working on it? Two and a half, two and a half years, roughly.

I mean, it's still not out yet, so I would say we could even stretch it to three. We were working up for a long time. I think how the book came about is an interesting story as well. Tell us. How do I know? Matt, tell your side. This is really fine. Yeah. I mean, so, so I mean, the book really is, is the melting of these two worlds, right? So I come from academic neuroscience. My first, I was in, I graduated from 25th grade when I stopped being in school. Finally, I spent most of my lives and labs and libraries. And I was really just driven by a curiosity.

I really wanted to understand how the brain works, why we do the things we do, what sort of makes us tick. And it was really just driven by a pure curiosity, really irrespective of any sort of application. And for me that moment was really distilled when I finished my PhD thesis. What you do is you have your actual physical thesis. It's a bounded document about it book. It's fad, it's Twitter pages.

And there's a specific library with all the PhD thesis go. And when I finished my PhD thesis, you're giving about a book and you put a library, I put a $50 bill in that thesis. And I guarantee you that money is still there today. What was the title? The title was the neural basis of language learning in autism, investigations with behavioral and neural imaging studies. Yeah, I mean, I've heard of sexy, I've heard of sexiest thesis titles. So that, you know, that was Matt's journey, right? So while he was in labs and libraries, like you put it, I graduated and I was fortunate enough to try to start and fail up my own first company while in my undergrad. And after that, I was the first marketer brought onto a startup.

So I was the other way around. I was what I would call a pop-psych nerd, right? So I would read a lot of pop psychology books from back in the day, wisdom of crowds, think it fast and slow, all those books that we now, you know, but they're still a pop site, they're not research. And I was lucky enough to be at a leadership position early on record, test all that stuff. So I read about neural coupling and I would go change my, my, my website and test neural coupling, right? So having done that early on, I tried to read some of these researches that Matt and other people like Matt wrote. And there's only so much my brain can do after a while. I'm like, you know, I simply don't possess the, I'm a mortal. And there's only so many abstracts you can read before.

You're just as a marketer, you're like, just give me just give me the gist of it. So I don't do what I need to do. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, I applied it to my own life, self-dev, you know, I grew a lot out of it, because it's psychology. It applies to so many things. So after doing that for about 10, 12 years, coincidentally, Matt and I met, and we started teaching at Halt International University. He was the assistant dean, and I was a professor brought on.

And we started to teach their marketing class together, and the class turned into an idea for a textbook, and then we decided we don't want to write a textbook just for marketers. I'm going to write this book for consumers. And the last piece about me is I'm a consumer like everyone else listening like you Chris like Matt I like buying cool things and and and using them and making them part of my life. But recently there's like this weird divide between marketers and consumers. So a lot of this book is written over consumers so they can understand what happens when marketing and brain mix sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally because I think

we can have better products and enjoy them guilt-free as consumers and as marketers. We're just not there yet. There's like this weird level of distress. I'm hoping this book is sort of one way of doing that on top of combining that lab knowledge and my marketing application knowledge. And hopefully, hopefully you got a bit of that when you read the book. Absolutely. Yeah, definitely did. So new row marketing. That's the term, neuroscience meets marketing. Right. Cool. So how the brain works and then how you can apply that to effectively market products within the marketplace.

Yeah. So really it's trying to utilize the insights from neuroscience to better accomplish the classicals of marketing. And so part of that is understanding the general principles about the brain and how the brain takes an information, how the brain learns, has experiences, remembers, makes decisions, and how to utilize the general principles which navigate that space to better accomplish marketing goals.

And then secondly, it's really about trying to collect as much neuroscientific data as possible to address very specific marketing questions. So if you're comparing which trailer to use if you're you're marketing for a movie, for example, you can do a classic sort of consumer group when you ask people, there's lots of evidence showing that people's explicit responses are very different from what the brain says and what they will do later on and are much better cute for that

can be a direct measure of actual neural responses. So the other half of neuromarketing is actually collecting raw neuroscientific data. And Chris, I think you'll like the story just to pick it back off of what Matt just said. This is a real life example. Cheeto is the did a commercial, and they put it in focus groups. This is a marketing aspect, right? You put all these people in focus groups, you make them watch the commercial, and you ask hey, what do you think of the commercial? Do you like it? Did you not like it? And they

ask you all these qualitative questions. In this case, the commercial was considered too mean, let out way too mean. And then they hired on a different firm who put people in FMRI, functional, magnetic, resonance imaging machines. Put them in there, ask the same questions. magnetic resonance imaging machines, put them in there, ask the same questions. And when they were asked the questions in the machine, a part of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, which is your pleasure center, lit up. But when they asked the questions outside of the machine, similar response to me. So what was originally going to be a reason to no longer publish the commercials, they went ahead and did it anyways and they were hit. So you can go YouTube these right now. They're the the the the underground Cheetos commercials where like this lady is doing her laundry in a laundromat and this other lady just took take I'll

take all of her clothes out and dump some right she goes other people are waiting for the laundry too and after that the chest of the Cheetos comes in, she goes, those are her whites. You know what to do. And then she grabs the cheeto, throws it in and ruins her whites. And it's like that. Like, you can see in a porkers group, it's like, it's too mean. Either us, as people in the focus group, are ready to admit to ourselves that we enjoy a little bit of mayhem, or we genuinely don't, but part of your brain, brain doesn't lie, right? And if you can look into the brain, you can be able to see that pleasure's going off. So they went ahead with it and they got massive adoption. This is before the days of virality on YouTube

and Instagram. But that's a perfect example of how what's marketing versus what's neural marketing, and how you can get just cool insights out of that. Amazing example of that is what happened with the exit polls in Trump's election versus the actual numbers. You know? That was more... That was obviously more cognizant. People were aware of the fact

that they were lying. It wasn't as if their brain had voted one way and they came out and voted and voted another way. Yeah, exactly. It was just like a shock thing in their hand, slipped or something. So yeah, let's get into the meat of it. What does eating the menu mean? Oh, Matt, can I start? And then you can go and say, yeah, I'm too much. Eating the menu was going to be the original title of the book. We loved it so much because we love Alan Watts. There's two things Matt and I love, no matter what.

It's Kanye and Alan Watts as a musician. As a musician, so don't roast us for that. And Alan Watts as a musician. So don't roast us for that. And Alan Watts has this amazing quote. We don't just eat the food, we eat the menu. And we open the book with mental models and Matt will go, go ham on telling you about mental models. But essentially, before you even put that first bite

of spaghetti in your mouth, all these other things have had a massive impact on actually impacting the taste of the food. And that was for us a great way to open the book. Obviously, it changed the title. But yeah, Matt, tell us about mental models. Yeah, so I think this, for me, is one of the most interesting things about consumer neuroscience

generally. It's really this observation that we've known in perceptual neuroscience for decades now, which is that we don't experience the world directly. We don't really take in objective reality in, we take in our brain's mental model. So we're taking in information through with the through our eyes, our ears, our senses, and what we ultimately perceive in terms of our own internal subjective experiences of brain's best guess at what all of these senses are combining to really conjure up in terms of our own internal experience. So we don't experience reality directly.

We experience our brain's mental model. So this fundamental gap between our own subjectivity and objectivity. And we talk about this in both of this gap really makes marketing magical. So we just experience the world the way it objectively is or rational creatures We talk about this in bulk, this gap really makes marketing magical. We just experience the world the way it objectively is, or rational creatures we go about, and we're just taking in reality objectively. There's no need for cool brands and really interesting ways of storytelling and marketing. This gap really is the opportunity for marketers to create our reality. And we see some really, really interesting examples of that, especially within food, which was one of the reasons

why we wanted to name the book this, because it really does fundamentally shape our new security experience. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. There's a wonderful passage in the book that I'm going to read now for the people that are listening. And this is about mental models. Remembering that the two mental models' episodes,

I've done with George McGill, are the first and second best played ever on modern wisdom. And yet what we, the description we use of mental models was from much more of a self-development way. What George said was if you think of your brain as an iPhone, then mental models are the apps that you plug into the OS to give you different bits of functionality. So that was from a thinking tools perspective, but your approach for mental models also makes sense. Nicole is our brains don't experience reality directly. Instead they construct a model of it, which neuroscientists call a mental model. Our brains are constantly modeling.

Each time you take a bite of food, you aren't experiencing the food per se, but your brain's best guess at what the experience of eating that food should be like. The sensation at the tongue contributes to this model but many other things can too. Mental models are incredibly impressionable and can be influenced by numerous factors. They're also hard if not impossible to correct because we can never compare them to reality and see where they've gone wrong. All we can ever experience is the mental model itself. So when a brand or a business influences our mental models, they are directly influencing our experience of reality.

That is so scary. That is terrifyingly scary. I mean, it's cool as hell, but it's so scary as well to realize that the way the weight assakes your hand, the smell of the restaurant when you walk in, the fact that the silverware is in this particular way, the jingle that someone, you know, the classical condition, everything is in a very real sense actually changing your reality.

Absolutely. It's like some matrix shit. I know it's mad Chris, Chris, you're like, you're like in our brains, our original intro for the book was all written around the matrix scene and then we realized we're too old. We realized not everyone is in the matrix, so we decided to ironically unplug that. No, you're absolutely right. It really is. And you know, part of it is going to creep the crap out of you.

Like, it's going to creep you out. And then after a while, you come to realize that, OK, you walk into an Apple store. You think, yes, of course, it's an Apple store. It's a really well-designed store that thought about the layout and the reducing friction done. Sure. But then you look at it from the perspective of mental models.

Man, before you even look at the first product, the fact that you're walking in, it's already impacting your sense of Apple, right? So you are already getting your brains getting data points, right? Immediately as you walk in. So in some ways, creating that experience for you actually adds to your pleasure of said products, right? Just like, it's not as obvious as taste.

That's what we use the concept of taste early on because the taste, our tastes are so easily impressionable, but brands are creating this for us. And sometimes it creeps you out because think it's manipulation. And sometimes it actually genuinely adds value to your mental model of whatever's being sold, right? There's the example of, you know,

there's a test that took a bunch of golfers and had them go as maximum golf balls around and one group got the golf, got the Almosa de Racas, as you can see, I've played golf clubs. Golf clubs, golf clubs with the Nike logo and one without. And of course, the Nike logo hit further. So whatever the mental model was actually had a physical impact. A subjective aspect had an objective impact on performance. And it was the same golf club, just one had a

night take on. Yeah, exactly. Can you tell us the dog, the, the, uh, pty and dog food study? Oh yeah, I'll let Matt tell that. Yeah, yeah, so What are the reasons why we we focused on this in the first chapter? Is it really allows you to see just how deep this mental model And goes because as Prince mentioned our tastes are are very very impressionable Vision is by strong our by far strongest taste on the other side of the spectrum tastes our Goussertoris sensations really are weakest. And so they did this interesting study a few years ago where they had four types of really, really, really fancy pate. So they had duck pate, they had Gouss pate, they had, they got these things from the distributors which actually

supply Michelin style restaurants in Manhattan and then for the fifth dish they had dog food and the actual dishes were prepared identically so you put it in a blender and you make it a really really nice visual consistency you put a nice little garnish with some crackers you serve it on really, really nice visual consistency. You put a nice little garnish with some crackers. You serve it on a really, really nice plate. You have a waiter come by with a white glove and serve it to you and speak in a sophisticated accent. And they told people, all right, four of these

are really, really, really delicious pate. The other fifth one, not going to tell you which one, but that's dog food. Can you guess which one's dog food? And nobody could. It was exactly synonymous with the taste of these really, really fancy Michelin star rated duck pate and goose pate. It's really the power of the visuals and the power of all of these extra-goose-tutory forces which would shape our reality to such an extent. We can't tell the difference between actual the taste of dog food

and something we pay $65 for at Thomas Keller's restaurant in New York. I mean, I wouldn't be having any of the pate because I think pate is just shite food. It's just baby food, reconstitute baby food. So some people might be thinking, well, that sounds all well and good. But pate is pate and you've just got some shmows off the street.

But there was a similar study done with some elias as well, right? And that one was added, ratchet it up, the difficulty ratcheted it up a little bit. Absolutely. Yeah, so why, and for whatever reason, it's just such a fun testing ground for neuromarketers. It's because it's full of twat, that's why it's because it's full of twat smat, that's why. It's because it's full of knobs. And now we have the, and now we have the science to prove it. We can back it up. You've got an FMRI that categorically says

that wine is for knobs, yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. So there's all these interesting studies, even without the FMRI, they'll say, if I just give you this bottle of wine, and I've taken the actual label off, and I've put a fake label on that says it's from a really, really fancy winery in France, or it has a lot of syllables, you'll actually taste the same wine and report and join it more if you want, I think it's expensive. So it's the same exact wine, and you tell somebody's expensive

versus cheap, same exact wine, same exact actual sensation happening at the tongue. You actually experience the more expensive one better. You report that you like it better, you want it more often, more syllables on the label, same exact wine, but you enjoy that more. If you're told it's from Northern California and not Northern Dakota, then you actually experience it to be more pleasurable. All of these crazy factors that I've not been to do with pace actually do influence people's direct mental models of the wine. And I think the

real knockdown experiment there that you mentioned is done actually with semiliates who if anybody can tell the difference between a real wine and a fake wine. This is all you know all of the you the nubes that are just, you know, drinking wine and two buck chuck and all the 22 year old party in with just trying to get drunk off wine. The semeliers should be a step above them, but studies have shown that they actually are prone to be same effects.

And the study actually done in France where they took white wine and red wine. And the white wine, they actually just put some red food coloring into it. And they gave it to civil years. And when civil years, people that professionally trained, they get paid a six-figure salary for being wine experts. When they tasted this white wine with red food coloring, they actually reported that it had tastes like berries and kind of a current flavor,

and a bit of nutmeg, all things that were in line with the color of the wine, but that nut's going to do with the actual taste that was hitting their tongues. So yeah, mental models, these things run very, very, very deep and even the best of us, the semeliers are still prone to them. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a cool Netflix documentary. I think it might be called like Soms or something. And if you've seen that, Matt. It's not that good. Oh, really good. It is so bad.

I don't even know if it's still a Netflix. If you go and have a little search, the people that are listening at home, go and have a check out, it's really cool. Like the training that those guys go through is ruthless. It's like the tour de France, but for wine. And they're like, I know it's from the northern slopes of the Milan province in Spain or the whatever, whatever.

So the fact that they've been able to be fooled, it's pretty impressive. Well, I can say from firsthand experience as I am such a knob, I studied to be a smart guy. No way! Oh, fuck! I'm so sorry, I'm sorry. I studied to be a smart guy. No way. Oh, fuck. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

I was so, I'm so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry.

I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry.

I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. I was so sorry. documentary whether whether you believe in some all years or not. Shout out to my buddy Ron Bonifacio who started the restaurant that's in some quite a bit. But to go back to what we're saying, look, you're right. Wine is a great place to study this because in my opinion, you've got to get a base level deliciousness for wine and after that it's the subjective experience, right? But no, in college we did that. We brown-backed wine as broke college students and then we drank them so we could not tell which grape it was. And yes, of course, lo and behold, over time,

we're able to tell, right? But I am not at the level as at the documentary that you're talking. I can't tell you that it's from the north, northern part of Italy, vintage 2001, not 2000 because those year the grapes were absolutely pissed. No, I can't. Crazy. That's not true. But to go to bring back to, you know, I'm not, I don't discriminate. I like all my liations equally. For beer though, if you go to a proper beer bar, you buy a pilsner. What kind of glass does it come in? Tall one.

A tall pilsner glass like the tall skinny slender pilsner glass. You buy a Belgian. What kind of glass does it come in? It comes in a Belgian snifter, right? And then you, you know, whatever that might be. So whether we, you know, it's kind of fun to play tribalism right now, right? Beer versus wine drinkers, but ultimately beer drinkers, you go to a beer bar that actually gives you proper glass

based on the beer you're buying. That is 100% influencing your mental model of that beer before you have them to ever take your first sip. Pills are glasses for pills, nurse, nifters for whatever they might be for quads and whatever beers you want to get into. That's 100% that. And then we haven't even gotten into, again, we're not tasting the beer, we're tasting the menu, or in this case, the glass, before we actually put the beer in our face, it's crazy.

I love it. So now, for not knobs are not limited to wine. I have a number of friends that are knobs who only drink beer, so yeah, it crosses, it crosses all alcoholic drinks. So next thing, how do brands use anchors to get our attention? Oh, that's great. Matt, you want to explain the foundation of anchors? And then I can give some examples.

Yeah, definitely. So one key to this mental modeling process is we can't experience what exactly is we talked about. And so we always look for some sort of reference point. We deal with all these these sort of nebulous signals coming to us. We need some sort of reference point to be able to anchor our understanding. So, there's been interesting studies done with this was back to Connemon Diversity back in the late 80s, where they'll have people spin a wheel.

Well, spin a wheel to perfectly random process, and they'll ask them these really, really, really difficult questions, which they have no idea about. So, ask them, well, how many African countries are in the United Nations? How many Grammys did somebody of New Zealand descent win? You know, all these random questions, they have no idea. And what was interesting is this random wheel that just brought up a random number, this actually influenced their estimation. So if they spun this wheel, and it was random,

it was transparency random, and it came up as 70, they would guess, well, 70% of African nations are in the EU, or if they spun the wheel, and it's three, they'd say, well, you know, two or three New Zealanders probably came to the Gramics, and it was perfectly random. They knew they were random. It was transparently the most random process possible.

But these serve as anchors. You have this really, really nebulous problem space. You don't have anything to hold on to. And you see some sort of reference point to understand this. So this influences our judgment and decision making, especially in uncertainty, it really influences our attention as well. This is something that brands use really in clever ways. Yeah, and I'll give you some examples of how they use them. So I'll give you one that's really

easy for all of us to get, and you'll still fall for it. MSRP's, right? You walk into a store, there's an MSRP and it's crossed out, and for some reason that's anchored your value, your perception of the value of that product. I'll tell the story quickly and I'll move on because I don't want to go into the brand aspect of it, too. This is more pricing and marketing strategy behind pricing. JC Penny, one of the largest and one of the oldest department stores in the States, they over 98% of their revenue came from sale items. What does that tell you? Translation, shit is always on sale, right?

Right, seriously. So you're walking to JC Penney's, they always have a sale going on. And JC Penney wanted to change things up, they brought on the head of retail for Apple, came on. And I have so much respect for this dude, because he said, we're no longer going to go into practice uh vanity pricing. Let's get rid of the fake MSRP and let's drop the pricing

even beyond that. So consumers objectively are getting a better deal and much more transparent way to communicate. What do you think happened the first quarter that they did that? Sales went sales. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So uh after two quarters of trying it, they went back to the old way of doing it and guess what happened? There was one back up. We love our anchors, okay? Our brains are like sailboats. We're constantly looking for places to anchor, right?

So when we, the less we know, the more we're perceptible to anchoring. So that's one. The other one is, and Matt can go into it a little bit more, but I want to tease this. Anchoring is also how attention works. To grab your attention, I have to anchor something against what, I have to pick something that goes against the anchor. I have to zig when everything else is hacking, right?

So you walk up to a refrigerator, full of water bottles and you're thirsty and you don't care if it's a dollar or $5 to buy this water bottle, you just wanna pick a water bottle and you're a brand agnostic. Guess where you're gonna go, your attention's gonna go towards. The anchor, the visual anchor was established by all these similar looking plastic crappy bottles.

And you see one bottle in the cardboard box, that's gonna drive your attention. And if that's not there, then the boss water made, basically, looks like a clone bottle, right? That's going to grab your attention. Although we didn't say attention, but anchoring does blow into attention. And that's one of the things where I think this is a good point because, Chris, we haven't really jumped into BE, right? And I know your audience loves BE, Matt and I love BE.

BE has been sort of the crack that gets us into this neural marketing, psych, biases and heuristics, that world that you get pulled into, whether it's for self-help, for me it was marketing. So I think this would be a good point, Matt, to talk about how we, Matt and I love BE, okay? We have been convinced at just how freakishly irrational humans are. Matt knows it way more personally than I do because he's a freaking neuroscientist and I've seen it and I've read all the books we all have. Dan Ariely, I want to meet him and give him a hug when I see him because it totally changed

up how I thought about life, not just marketing. So neural marketing to go back to your initial question, right? Yes, it's neuroscience and marketing, but not an ICBE as a very important branch to a field of this stuff, right? BE is a study of irrationality, and they've already proven many times over years, super irrational. We like that. We like that. That's raising the conversation about what's happening to your brain in the real world. Not, and I love it. We want to take this momentum and go talk about all the other things. Now that you're into BE, let's explore where this goat, you know, let's the proverbial rabbit hole, right? There's much more to this than irrationality and we want to break that down. Only one of

the chapters in the book, in our book, is really about BE. The rest of the chapters are stuff that we're hoping goes beyond BE. So if you love BE, I think you'll love the book, but you'll also go, okay, one or two chapters, touch on BE and then then move on. And even anchors, anchors are classic BE. We take anchors and then we use anchors to truly get you to understand the psychology of attention. So we can get into that if you want.

If you want to learn a little bit more about attention. I get it, throw something out of smoke. Yeah, so I mean,. Throw something out of the map. Yeah. So I mean, one thing in terms of our attention is that it's fundamentally driven by novelty. It's fundamentally driven by new things. So we tend to habituate to constants. Constance aren't super important to us

from an evolutionary standpoint. Something's been there and hasn't changed and hasn't heard us for a while. We're going to tend to sort of ignore, it's going to float into the background. And so there's this process where new things become the background. This is this process of habituation. It's something with our, it's an effect of our attention. Now we perceive the world and take an information and attend to it consciously.

And it's also when we'll probably talk about this a bit later, it's also how we perceive our own pleasure and our own happiness is navigated by this as well. So what's interesting is in the consumer world, there's all these constants. You have items which were new at some points, everybody copies it, it becomes sort of the new background. So, you want to give an example of how they do that in the automotive industry? Yeah, so when I say, imagine a sports car, what colors come to your mind? Red.

Red, right? It was going to be red or yellow, right? When Nissan about 15 years ago, relaunched their Z, their Z, excuse me, Chris, their 350 Z, it was this crazy, burnt orange color, right? That's how you stand out. I'll give you an example from a smart car, Mercedes-Benz on smart car, and they did a billboard where billboards are nice and square 90 degrees. You drive past the freeway, 1990, 90, 90, and then they had one. That was cricket. And immediately, you're boring commute to traffic. Your anchor is set to perfectly aligned billboards.

It's one that's cricket. You immediately grabs your attention. And we can give marketing examples all day, but let's take a pause for how this anchoring thing plays out in something I would argue is a universal language humor Right that that that that missed direction that leads to a punchline that part of humor man Matt and I Really big fans of Anthony Jessloneck. We only talk about it a little bit in the book because this jokes are always way too inappropriate I was laughing my

When I was reading those. So I don't know. It's okay if you don't want to say it, but it's my show. I'm going to say whatever the fuck I want. So keep on telling us about attention. I'm going to find these jokes. So attention. So attention is anchored to anchors.

And the example that Chris is about to tell you is of a guy named Anthony Jesselman. And you may not like his brand of humor, but consider him a master of surprise. He constantly creates an anchor for you as a storyteller. And then he breaks that expectation in humorous and oftentimes offensive ways. Yeah. so his three jokes for you listeners, my dad was amazing. He raised five boys all by himself without the rest of us knowing.

Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. We just found out my little brother has a peanut allergy, which is very serious, I know. But still, I feel like my parents are totally overreacting.

They caught me eating a tiny little bag of airline peanuts, and they kicked me out of his funeral. The last one's the best. The last one's the best one I've ever. I've got a kid in Africa that I feed, that I clothes, that I school, that I inoculate for 75 cents a day, which is practically nothing compared to what it cost me to send him there. Run, those were so good.

So I absolutely loved that. The, um, it was this term that you guys came up with that was called Violation of Expectation, and that is the Neuros called, violation of expectation. And that is the neuroscience definition of surprise. I'm gonna accuse people of violating my expectation all the time now. I absolutely adore that phrase. Matt, yeah, tell them about violation of expectation. Yeah, I mean, just as humans,

we're naturally forward projecting creatures, right? So we're always trying to predict what's going to happen next. If we weren't able to predict people's behavior, we probably wouldn't be alive for very long. We always have to stay within a reasonable future away from the press and we're always trying to predict things. And so in our unconscious state, we're trying to make predictions and these predictions that play out for us internally. And then if what actually happens is a major deviation from that, it obviously leads

us to be surprised. And that's what we've been by, by violation of expectation. And so when it comes to neuroscience, there's lots of ways to study. So it's a study in the classic oddball paradigm where you give people a stimulus, and it's in a certain location, and they become attenuated to looking at that certain location, and then you give them in at a completely different location. You get to understand if you do this with FRA,

you get to understand the neural basis for what's this sort of redirection. And so when this violation of expectation happens, you are having to recapitulate yourself and you form a new hypothesis based on that. But the major thing in terms of consumer behavior is it drives your attention. So whatever you've become across from to,

whatever your sort of status quo is, if you have a huge violation from that and what you've come to expect from that status quo, it's gonna drive your attention. And the biggest example of that was Cadbury, Cadbury, UK, back in 2006. So Cadbury, UK, classic F&B brands, and they had suffered some down revenue for a few years

as a seminella outbreak, and like, oh my God, we have to do something really, really, really, really amazing to get everybody to pay attention to us again. And probably the biggest thing they could possibly ever have done is they had a commercial, and this is Cadbury mind. This is a very classic British brand, and they had a gorilla playing in the air the night. And that was a commercial.

Phil Colleyn. Yes, baby. What an absolute binding tune. What a banging tune. Oh, man. And so what's interesting is that like, yeah, okay, you listen to Phil Collins on, you know, any given evening, there's no violation of expectation.

But if you get it from Cadbury, Ruger Rilasuke, give a huge violation of expectation. What's going on? So it's not so much the actual stimulus itself, but what has been proceeding that is what's going to drive your expectation. And the final point about camera, which is interesting is they're like, oh my god, this is work amazing. Let's go back to the saying, well, and it doesn't work. So they did this a very similar ad about six months later. Like, all right, let's ride this gorilla filled Collins thing. And of course, everyone was, everyone saw it coming.

I remember, yeah. I even remember when they brought it out. Wasn't it something, wasn't the gorilla doing summer else this time? Yeah, something with the airplane or, yes, it was, it was the same theme, but it was something slightly different. But they didn't, yeah, they didn't zag quite as much as they should, but everybody saw it coming because it was, you know, for me once, you can't for me twice other things. So yeah, it's just really interesting how these expectations get established and then, you know, once you buy like people's expectations, you really can't do it again until they build

a new expectation. Yeah, I suppose also there, there's too much randomness. You know, if you get known as like the random brand, there's too much randomness. If you get known as the random brand, that's still an expectation, right? The expectation is randomness. So you might actually be best off just doing like a really boring advert, you know, just get like the guy in the shirt with no tie

and like just the suit jacket on talking about your insurance premiums or whatever. So let's talk about experience and memory. I know you guys are big into memory. I know this is a part of the book that you dedicated a lot of time in research too. So let's talk about memory. Let's do it.

Can I, I just want to open with, all right, pretend like you didn't read the book, Chris, how would you define memory? Oh God, can I recall something? Perfect, yeah, perfect. Can I recall something? Perfect. Yeah, perfect. Matt, go for it. I think it's a good if you start off and I'll jump in.

Yeah, so first memory is many, many things. So one of the things that you learn in your first day is like, what is it? You have this big chart. There's explicit memory. There's implicit memory. There's procedure memory. There's statistical learning.

There's all these things. We're going to have one term that collapse across all of these. It's really our brain's attempt at connecting us to the past. And attempt is really the keyword. Yeah. So we feel, and it's very strange as well because it's one of those areas where what we think of in terms of our own experiences and memories, it's actually very, very different from the way it actually works. We actually have a very poor intuition for how we record experiences and how we recall them later.

So what it feels like is we're having an experience, we're having an experience right now, we have the record button on internally. Our brain clicks that and we're just recording, we're taking in everything in. And then we're trying to recall this memory later, we feel like we're playing the rewinds button. But it turns out that neither of those are true. So when we're having an

experience, we're only taking in some of the information. So some information is weighted more heavily than others. So our brains prioritize certain piece of information for others in terms of what's likely to be remembered later. So you probably remember your first kiss, but you probably don't remember first time you did taxes, right? So both of these things were experiences. You had your record button on, but only one is going to come to mind readily.

So emotion plays a really, really huge role in making it more or less likely that this certain experience is going to be remembered later. And then you look at the recall of memory. And that is just an incredibly reconstructive process. So the types of memories will be different that come to mind. We want a certain sort of context. So if we are, we're drinking beer right now and some wine, for example, probably all of

our beer memories, we'll come back if we're having champagne, we'll probably think of all the associations we've had with champagne and celebration, and that, so everything is context dependent as well. So memory is fascinating for this major cast in between what we feel like is memory and our memories, and what memory actually is in terms of the science. Yeah. Yeah, I want to take a minute to connect memory back to attention. I know we bridged over to memory.

One of the ways that you can encode a memory deeper is actually breaking the violation of expectation. Right. So there's many different psychological experiences that help kind of bury that memory deeper. One of those is breaking expectation. And we, I think Matt and I spoke to, I think her name was Debbie Lilly. She did the events for Oprah. She literally, she did the you get a car,

you get a car, you get a car, she has a machine behind that. Yeah, we spoke to her for the book. That's good. And what's brilliant about Debbie is, she's doing all these things intuitively. Right, so she's not putting this violation of expectation and memory hacking, if you will,

or an experiential marketing sort of framework. She just has been doing this so long. She's so good at it that she did it completely by nature. But think about violation of expectation now memory, right? You're sitting in this audience, you're lucky enough to get seats to go see Oprah live. And all of a sudden, Oprah gives away gifts, iPhones, what have you, and all of a sudden, boom, violation expectation, piece by piece, this person won a car.

So everyone's stoked. All these people who got pulled out of the audience earlier, they got a car. Okay, oh my God, can't believe it. They've never given away a car on TV before. This is not prices right, my brain is blown out. And then all of a sudden you find out, oh wait, we have another surprise for you. Uh-oh, what is it?

And then you get a car, you get, and then it's just like layers and layers of violations. Expectations being violated and then when Matt not look at it, no wonder why that is the most memorable, over moment, right? It is, it was 10 out of 10 on violation, violating our expectations repeatedly, and that's what encoded that memory

so deeply in pop culture. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's, it's great, but experiential marketing, so if we go back to brands, this is where the flirtation happens, right? In some ways, when we're creating like pop up restaurants or pop up brand experiences,

super hot right now, right? It's because they encode a deeper memory of you. You walk past in a data store for the 50th time in last year, it doesn't even register, right? But then if you walk past the park that you usually go to to go work out and then there's a shoe box the size of your apartment complex and it looks like the a data shoe box and you go in there

and guess what, they're selling Stan Smith's and Superstars and then it looks like the Adidas shoebox and you go in there and guess what? They're selling Stan Smith's Superstars and then it's gone the week after. What do they do? They created a memory by violating your expectation of a normal commute and that's something that it's that like I said flirtation is a good way because I want to be floored as a consumer in those ways, you know, and then brands want to do it because, yes, of course, like Matt said, it buries that memory in there. What's really creepy about memory, though, like to go back to what Matt said, it's like hitting record and hitting play and we couldn't be further from the truth, is what happens

further down the line. What we call the book memory remixed is really kind of creepy. Now, you want to tell him about what happens to memory over time? Because I think that I think it's really, I think the way you're going to put it is going to be of creepy. No, you want to tell them about what happens to memory over time? Because I think the way you're going to put it is going to be really creepy. Memory over time? Yeah. Yeah, recall of memory and how accurate, so to speak,

recall of memory can and cannot be. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So in terms of memory, so it is just this incredibly reconstructive process. We don't remember things as they objectively happen or even as we actually experienced them. So there's this subfield of memory research called false memories, where we really see just how suggestible and how creative these memories are remakes. And this is pioneered by Elizabeth

Loptis, down at UC Irvine. So bring somebody in from lab and she'll say that she got an email from her parents. And the email said, oh, I was just, you know, the email was detailing this, this amazing trip that you took with your family to the circus. And there was, you know, beautiful blue sky and there was clouds. And you really, really, really wanted the popcorn, but your dad wouldn't let you get the parking. Remember that? She's sort of just prodding them and just painting this picture for them. And after a while, and she's become adapted this to herself, she'll actually be able to

implant a memory of this experience that never actually happened. And once this memory is implanted, it is as realistic as any of our actual memories of things that actually happened to us. And similar effects have actually recently shown with virtual reality as well. Where you'll bring, and this was done 10 years ago, when virtual reality was not as potent as realistic it is today, it's done down at Stanford. And what they give is they bring children to the lab and they have them go on a dolphin diving trip where they're swimming with dolphins.

And it's very kind of cool, surreal experience, all in just virtual reality. Then they brought the children back. I think it was two months later. And they filled a questionnaire and part of this questionnaire had to do with this dolphin experience. And it turns out about half the children actually misread member of the experiences haven't been real. They thought their parents took them to SeaWorld and they actually swam with dolphins. So we have these experiences, not brain is constantly trying to put them together and doing its best guess.

It's sort of making things consistent and makes sense. And especially for young children, it can really easily be tricked. In this case, they can actually swim with dolphins and really just sat in a, you know, a really boring lab and put on virtual reality goggles. It's from a philosophical perspective. It's a really interesting question that.

Like, what is a memory? If your experience of a thing is as vivid and deep and happy as having done the thing, then what's the difference between you having done the thing and not? Now, I was thinking about this. I was watching the devil next door on Netflix. Have you seen this? So it's a documentary about a Ukrainian guy living in the United States who was found to be Ivan the terrible a Nazi death camp guard and he'd come over after World War II and basically the entire trial was was

this person actually the person that was in the Nazi death camps and they are bringing up people who this is in maybe 2000, early 2000s. So the survivors that were able to identify him, you're talking like 60 year old, 70 year old people, they've been through a lot of trauma, they were by definition, there were survivors of places like Treblinker or Auschwitz or whatever. And the first off, a lot of the memory quality

was called into effect. But I actually found a really interesting question being How long after someone does something are they still culpable for the actions of their past self? You know like is the guy that's Ivan the terrible like imagine if he'd done 40 years of good what he didn't but 40 years of charity work and he turned a corner and he was essentially by all definition a new person, you know, every cell in your body I think is it seven years? It's replaced. So it's like the reason even a cell in that the only thing that that person that you're looking at has in common with the person that you saw before is they share experiences and their body took up the exact or before is they share experiences and their body took up the exact spatial dimensions that it's taken up and no one else has. That's the only thing that they have in common.

But I think it's a really interesting philosophical question, right? Like, what is an experience when it relates to it being a memory if the memory can be fudged so easily as for someone to then think it's something else, to fascinating topic. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, we are these sort of perpetually changing beings. We are constantly changing where a slightly different person from one day to the next every time we wake up.

And the morning we're a slightly different person and really what is holding this all together is really memory. It's our memory of our path, our memory of yesterday, our memory of our core here and self all of those years ago. And so we're not really the same person in terms of all of those different experiences. We can be a very different person, we can change fundamentally. There's actually examples of people who did something horrible. They actually had a brain tumor that seemed to be directly predicate that horrible act.

You have a tumor in a region called the amygdala, which has to do with our fear response, and it seems that that directly contributed to this violent act the person did. You take out the rain tumor and you have a person who is no more likely to commit a violent crime in the future than anybody else in society.

And so do you punish that person, do you even seize them in the same way? And yes, I'm gonna get to the same sort of philosophical question as you were getting out there. Yeah. It's absolutely fascinating. I think the guy that climbed the bell tower that Sam Harris uses in his book waking up,

that's the famous example, right? And he asked the people to do an autopsy on him after he shot himself and his family and like five passes by, which is obviously just terrifying in itself. What else can we do for memory then? What else causes memory to encode? We've got violation of expectation. What else can we do to ensure that we remember stuff? Yeah, so one thing that you touched on a bit actually that sort of is related to the philosophical aspect is the peak end effect. And so this was pioneered by Dan O'Coniman as well,

using actually colonoscopies. So yeah, people come in. So you're already doing colonoscopies, it does not a very, very comfortable type of procedure to undergo as far as procedures go. And now you have this researcher who's like, well, we just want to know exactly how painful this is at every moment.

And so it gives people a dial, and that's your instruction. Just as you're undergoing this painful procedure, how much pain you're feeling in that moment. And this really led us to believe that there was a good difference between what we experienced and what we remember. So it turns out that it wasn't the average amount of pain that people experienced that led to painful memories.

It was two things, the peak of the experience. So if not to get too graphic, but the doctor's hand slips, and it just causes this incredibly acute sense of pain, but just for a millisecond. And then it goes back to normal. If there's a really, really intense peak, then if you ask the person to explain it, well, how painful is that operation? The way off that was the worst operation of all time. So this peak has a major impact, and also the end has a major impact as well. So it was really painful at the end. The entire experience will be rated very painfully.

And the reason it segues into this philosophical conversation is because they did a follow-up experiment, but like, well, the end seems to be very, very important. What if we artificially just elongate the whole procedure? They'll have the actual procedure, then they'll have a period at the end where we'll just leave the colonoscopy device in there and nothing's happening. It's not comfortable, but it's not super painful.

We'll make it longer, so there's more overall pain, but the actual end of the procedure is gonna be less painful. And will they then remember the entire procedure is being less painful? And the answer is yes. So if you make the end less painful, even though the overall experience on average

is more painful, you're in there for longer than you would have otherwise, you actually remember the whole experience is is more painful. You're in there for longer than you would have otherwise. You actually remember the whole experience is being less painful. So it sort of poses this interesting ethical question. So is it okay to give somebody more pain, more aggregate pain if it means they'll actually remember the experience as being less painful?

This is like the matrix. This is actually like the matrix. You know, it's like, what world are we living in? Are we living in a world that our brains perceive? Are we living in the objective reality? And the fact that our brains are so fallible means that the two actually don't match up, barely at all.

But it seems like a complete miracle if your brain does manage to interpret what's going on around you accurately. Yeah, we're even just slightly tethered to real experience. Yeah, I know. It's unbelievable. So how can market is? How's this an opportunity for market is when we get to experience and memory, how would the market fit into this? Yeah, so let's piggyback on the peak end effect. I'll give you a personal example and then we can expand out. I recently did a TED talk and as I was writing it, 100% I'm thinking about peak end effect. You can apply this to when you're pitching startups for your idea or anytime you're on this journey to be remembered. I was testing

different peaks, so I had this funny moment in the TED Talk where I put my face on top of a Dell, it makes no sense if you haven't seen it. But that was 100% planned so that we can have a peak in the entire 15-minute conversation that would be memorable. For marketers, you can test multiple peaks, but for a talk, you got one to test, right? And then, at the very end, I had a very specific callback that referred to something earlier so that I wanted the end to be memorable as well. So in just public speaking,

you can use peak end effect every time you talk, okay? And, you know, when it comes to storytelling at a grander scale with big budgets, with films, films have an incentive to have a really good ending. That's why you don't often see movies that have a... How do I say this? An unsatisfactory ending because people don't take any information for this. Yeah, it's because our brains...

We want to remember the movie and we're already inclined to remember the end of it more so they can't mess up the end, right? so and it there's sort of a self-help lesson here as well, right? Like it's we a lot of times we we give an unfair amount of weight to the end of something like a movie Right, you can have a movie that truly might even change the way you think about the world, love, whatever it might be. And then the last, you know, 15 minutes of a two-hour movie, it didn't end the way you liked it. And then that 15 minutes literally covers up entire two hours of pure joy and whatever you want to call it. And we do that all the time. We forget that the that the journey that got us there

was actually really useful until the end. It's like the old, you know, the William Shakespeare quote, all as well that ends well, it's freakishly true. And I'm not really sort of packed with that, right? So brands try to create, like go to a concert and you better have your biggest fireworks at the very end, but you also better have one peak moment in between. You better bring out a guest star somewhere in between that is unexpected, that will remember the concert. Your whole set could have been trash, but

if you have a great peak and a great ending, it won't be remembered as being a bad set. It's so easy. It's unbelievable how easy. Human are terrible, aren't we? Right, see. We are. So, why do we like what we like? There's certain preferences that we have, there's certain things that we lean toward and move away from. Is it just artifacts of an evolutionary time?

Is it just fitness enhancing stuff? It's an answer a good question. So there's a lot of interesting science about preferences. And one really consistent finding is that we generally like things that we are familiar with. So from an evolutionary standpoint again, if you've seen something multiple times and this thing has an eatin' you, and it hasn't hurt you, and it hasn't caused you harm,

then that thing is better than something unknown, on average. And so this is called the mere exposure practice as Robert Science is famous work. There's many, many studies. It's a very consistent finding in psychology that all of us being equal, we tend to like things we're exposed to multiple times. And a lot of his famous work was actually done

with Chinese characters. And so he brought non-Chinese speaking students into a lab and he showed them a bunch of Chinese characters. And just have them pay attention to them, look at them, become familiar with them. He brought them back to explainer and he showed them some of the characters he had seen before and some new characters.

And he asked them, well, what do you think these mean? And the students were like, I have no idea. I don't speak Mandarin Chinese. I don't know what these symbols mean at all. And he's just, just human being just guests. And so they just guests, they just assigned adjectives and nouns to these characters. And it turns out the ones that they had seen before,

these got adjectives like happy and love and pleasure and positive emotions. So when they hadn't seen before, these were things like table, lamb, but it's really regular boring words. So just by virtue of seeing something multiple times, we tend to like it a bit more. And so that's one sort of major finding there. And then there's this seemingly sort of conflicting finding here,

which is that we also love being surprised. So we love pleasure even more when we can't predict it. So when it's a violation of expectation, we tend to like it a bit more. And so there's this, a little bit of a pair of conflict there. One, we really, really like things that we're exposed to multiple times, we expose effects. On the other side, we have violations of expectation, prediction error, dopaminergic reaction, all these things from neuroscience showing us that we actually like a bit of randomness as well. And the way

this is resolved is really interesting. Prince, you want to, yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it comes down to we like the safety of the familiar, but we also like the, I don't want to say danger, but you to we like the safety of the familiar, but we also like the, I don't want to say danger, but you're also like the novelty of the unfamiliar, right? It's the old birds of a feather flock together, or is it opposite to track? What the answer is, what Matt and I call knots, new and safe.

It's got to be new enough, but also safe enough. So you can, when you start looking at this and Matt and I love the example of pop culture from music to film, to truly look at this, you can see just how familiar things can be, and they won't get the massive amount of adoption. But if they're too out there, then they won't get massive amount of adoption. So if you're a marketer or an entrepreneur and you're making a product that you want to get massive adoption and you have to think about nots. And an easy example of this how culture slowly evolves and you have certain things that were too new and unsafe that over time were normalized and now and then they hit a peak and then you hit the Gladwell tipping point.

You think about modern cars was very much underground until fast and furious came out right timing and didn't normalize it. The BDSM culture was very much underground and unsafe until Shade's a Grey came out right timing and didn't normalize it, right? The BDSM culture was very much underground and unsafe until Shade's a Grey came out. And the history of Shade's a Grey is fascinating because it was a fan fiction written off of Twilight, which itself is very safe take on vampires, right? So, but over time, as you chip away at this,

you look with the Nas glasses at how these things were able to even get popular. It's because they talked about something unsafe in a safe manner at a place where people didn't run away and yet the novelty was still there. Yeah, NAS is super cool. It's awesome. Have you heard, Matt, this might be one for you. Have you heard about the improvement in sleep quality when you hear the sound of a snoring dog or a crackling fire. No, so you'll have to... This could be me talking out of my ass, but I'm pretty certain it's not. I was told about study where they played sounds of dog snoring and a fire's crackling and had a number of different control

groups and a number of different bits. And the most impactful sound on someone's sleep was both fire crackling with dog snoring because through our revolutionary history, that would be something that we would be used to. The fire crackling meant we were still warm and safe from predators, the dog snoring meant that we had an alarm sound that was going to protect us. And that actually is embedded in us now. So it's not a learned behavior, it's something which sits in there. And I thought that was so cool. Also, here's another one for you. They took a number of different groups of people and they looked at who lives the longest, right? So group number one, single all their life, no pets, no family. They lived an amount of time.

Then they took people who had family and dogs and just dogs. And they realized that people on their own live a little bit shorter. People with family, live longer. People with family and dogs live longer, but people with just dogs, no family live longest of all. I was like, what the hell is that? That was crazy dog person right here. You got me, bro.

So yeah, I thought that was a, some cool, you can tell I just love dogs, man. Just waiting for Prince, I'm just waiting for you to bring your dog back on that's all I'm He's around here showing just chilling. Um, okay, so let's talk you just touched on bd sm There so let's talk about pleasure and pain and and how all of that links together I'll let you take the alien and we'll give it to Yeah, so first with pleasure.

So pleasure is also similar to memory. It's really one of those areas where we think we sort of have a firm idea of what we'll make as happy, what we'll give us pleasure. But we're really, really bad at actually navigating this space. A lot of the theories that we have in terms of our own personal philosophies, even if we haven't explicitly made it known to ourselves, just what we're intuitively going by, turn out to actually be against our own interests. And they don't make us as happy as we think we do. And one of the main ways this manifests in terms of these very specific milestones.

So we think we're going to be happy when we have 10,000 followers, this manifestes in terms of these very specific milestones. So we think we're going to be happy when we have 10,000 followers, 20,000. Whatever the case may be, and a pleasure, just like attention, seems to attenuate very quickly over time. We hit this milestone, and we're happy for 20 minutes. We'll pop some shit. I pick whatever the case may be. And then we'll sort of go back to our regular baseline level of happiness.

So just like attention, pleasure seems to attenuate. There's this really beautiful graph that Adam Alter created. He's a marathon runner, he wrote, you're resistant. And he speaks. Awesome book, awesome book, Arizona by the way. We love that book. So, Eris. Yeah. We love that book. So good. Yeah.

Adam. Yeah. Adam, we love Adam. We love Eris. He even gave us a shout out for the book, and he read it and he endorsed it. So it was like the biggest. Thank you so much, Adam.

Adam's a man. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Absolutely. So Adam, Adam was talking about this from the context of our striving for pleasure on platforms, on social media platforms and internet platforms, devices, because there's always these sort

of milestones you can strive for. You can always have, you know, this many followers or likes where the case may be. And we think we're going to be having movies that mean you can talk about this is the context of marathon runners. So you think about marathon runners, and there should be a pretty even distribution of ability. So you think about something like finishing times for a marathon, it should reflect this general distribution. So we're all, you know, we have a normal distribution in terms of our ability, there should be a normal distribution in terms of finishing time.

Let's not what we see at all around these, well, it's the arbitrary cut-off points. You have a four-hour marathon, you know, three and a half-hour, three-hour, two-and-a-half-hour. You see these surges. You see these peaks. So you're really, really, really trying to get that four-hour, really, really trying to get that three-hour. If you, you know, know you're going to get 3.45, you know, that's not a cool, you know, milestone to tell anybody. So you're not really going to push yourself that extra amount. And there's all these really interesting and total stories of people who worked for 5, 10, 15 years to get that 3 hour mile time, 2 and a half hour mile time, and they finally

get it. And you'll celebrate that night, you'll feel good about it in a sense of accomplishment. But in terms of your overall level of happiness, you tend to go back down to your baseline. So this is what Dan Gilbert and others call impact bias. Well, we're generally bad at understanding just how events are going to impact us, impact our level of happiness. And so as a result, we can sometimes strive for the wrong thing. We sort of strive for this dangling carrot

that isn't actually going to make it happy. Once we get there, it's just going to be dangled out in front of us even further. Yeah, it's called the pursuit of happiness for a reason because it ain't about achieving it, right? Because the happiness, it goes away. It's in the chase. And I think one example that will never get old for me

is a new iPhone every year. A new iPhone every year. You look forward to this thing. You don't know why you look forward to this thing. It comes out, you get it, and then you're moving on, right? But man, Apple is brilliant for doing it. Do I know for sure if in the boardrooms at Apple, Apple's like, ooh, let's optimize this unpredictable

pleasure chase and this hedonic treadmill and keep getting them one. Maybe, maybe not, I can't say for sure, only Apple can say that, but I can, one thing Matt and I can say for sure, is this is exactly why I would be fall for this every single year, new iPhone. We're in the chase of, we think the new iPhone's gonna make us happy, pleasure peaks before in the chase and then you get it

and then it's fleeting, It attenuates like Matt said. That's a good idea. And you can think about all those. Prints, I was wondering, interject. Am I right in saying that the anticipation of an event is often more pleasurable than the event itself. And this was actually, someone told me this about people getting ready for nights out. Because I'm a club promoter, that's what I do.

I'm a nightclub promoter. And they were rating people's happiness. I don't know how objective this was or whether it was a subjective measure. And people's happiness was rated at the highest just as they were about to call the taxi to go on the night out. So they've had the pre drinks. Maybe the girls have got ready with each other and they've done each other's makeup and they're having a few glasses of champagne or wine or whatever. And that period was, you know, thing that was better. Is that aligned with what you guys have found? Absolutely.

It's such a great example. It's exactly what neuroscientists have found in a range of stimuli. So when you take out club and put chocolate cake, you actually experience pleasure to measure this in the nuclear succumbence in terms of the dopinergic response. You get the optimal response right before it touches your tongue. Really, you find anticipation itself to be intrinsically rewarding and intrinsically pleasurable. And a lot of times, it's a good question. It may have some evolutionary origins that we are driven to chase. If you imagine you really, really, really want to eat this delicious bison.

You finally reach that bison, you get it. It's just as good as you thought it was going to be. Your brain created a model for how this is going to taste and you finally taste it. It drove you to catch this bison. Once you get this bison, it was as good as your brain promise. It was going to be you've never feel the need to chase another bison ever again. You need to have this sort of light discrepancy between what you think it's going to feel like and what you think it's going to taste like and what it actually does.

It's going to keep us moving. Contentment is a fantastic human emotion, but it is an evolutionary debt that exists. Yeah, absolutely. So a content caveman is a dead caveman. So our pleasure systems are constantly are pushing us to seek more. Yeah, it's reproduction. It's food. Think about it because you're forced to push yourself to achieve something food or a partner and then you want more food, right? If we didn't want to continue to have sex, we wouldn't have more children and we wouldn't have, and human race with that, like Matt said it perfectly. A content caveman is a dead caveman indeed. Have you heard this quote from Shopenhauer about after copulation. Have you heard this? No, what is it?

Directly after copulation, the devil's laughter is heard. That's Shopenhauer and he's identifying that whatever it is, the post-coital depression, that a lot of men say that they suffer with. You do it and you're like, that was fantastic, you know, it's not your problem, but there's just this like kind of inkling of an existential crisis that's just blooming

at the back of my head. And I don't actually know why it's there and it's, Shuban, I was such on it there and you're totally right, like, why would you go and have sex again if sex every time that you had sex was as satisfying as you thought it was going to be, or why would you then go and chase down the bison. So I guess this satisfaction

being programmed into us is fitness enhancing for us to continue to chase that satisfaction, right? Absolutely. Yeah. It's almost like you've taught me something today, gentlemen. I'm just learning and absorbing it like a sponge. So we've talked about pleasure and pain. How does that affect our drive to buy? How do market is tap into that?

I mean, it's either turn up the pleasure or turn down the pain to get to a purchase, right? So the pleasure that I received from the purchase of said product must be so high that whatever pain it took me to achieve it, it overrides it or the other way around. The most objective form of pain when buying a product is the money that goes out of your wallet into the wallet of the other company. You think about just over the years the payment technology and how friction-free it's gotten, right? You know,

I remember thinking it was weird that I can have a lyric from my favorite song 10 years ago, type that into Amazon and it'll complete the purchase. Not even have to do that. You know, Alexa, buy me a new notebook and it's already... Alexa, don't buy me new notebook. PayPal was a game changer because you don't have to tap into credit card but that was almost 20 years old now, right? Like, so the pain of payments is good for everyone. It's good for you if you want to slide pass

and not have to stop to think, it's bad for you if you have bad spending habits, but it's good for everyone settling you stuff. So we can go down the rabbit hole of pain and what that actually means in terms of user experience and customer experience, but nonetheless reducing pain increasing the pleasure helps by purchases and you can see now the put apple in that perspective, right? They didn't want to do retail until the retail right and the retail of nothing else is a textbook example of how to create minimal friction as much as possible. And of course, the plus derived from Apple products has been well documented. And that's, you know, that's not the only reason why they're successful. But that's a great perspective to look at

Apple. Part of the whole experience, right? So I had a Alex Cantrowitz son, who's a tech reporter for Buzzfeed, and he's got this new book out called Always Day One. And he went into one of these new Amazon pantry stores where you just pick up stuff and walk out and it's like your shoplifting apparently, he's in SF. So I guess that'll be where they'll be testing this sort of stuff. And it was like, it felt like such a boss,

I felt like a shoplifted four cliff bars out of there and then about 30 seconds later My Apple card pay popped up and said like you just got four cliff bars from Amazon go store or whatever But yeah, yeah, I totally get it. So again Rolling on from that neural coupling. I want to know what that means because I saw it in the book and I didn't have time to read it So what's what's a neural coupling? Yeah, so this is a really interesting phenomena which really explains how we are able to communicate. So communications is one of those things where you just you just say something, somebody understands it and there's some sort of magic that takes place, but we don't really understand it. And it turns

out that there is this really interesting alignment which takes place between speaker and listener. And there's actually some research that I got to be a part of back in graduate school. So what we did is we had our lab met Lauren, line side FRI, function of magnetic residence imaging, and we just eavesdrop on her brain as she told the story of her high school prom. And it was a really, really debauchery story. There was out of all involved. There was lots of, it was a very engrossing story. So your task as a participant afterwards

was just a lightweight for the FRI story and listen to Lauren's story. So we recorded it. We had a special microphone. We got her to tell that story while she's a scanner. And then as a participant, you just lie down the scanner and listen to that story. And then after we got these two data points, now we have Lauren's brain, as she's telling the story,

we have the participants brain as they're listening to that story. And what was interesting is we did a specific analysis to actually not see differences between the brains, but actually see where in the brain there was the most similarity over time. This is called intersubject correlation. So you can basically do a correlational analysis of every small little voxel in the brain to see how similar the brains of speaker and listeners were. And it turns out that the more the person comprehended the story, the more similar their brain was to Lauren's brain.

So we had everybody take a test after they got to the scanner, just how much of good is in the story, this true false question, this multiple choice question, just an objective measure of understanding, and we use that to correlate with the intersubtac correlation analysis. And the more you understood the story, the more similar your brain was to

Lauren's brain and so this is really interesting way of thinking about communication so my job as the speaker if I'm trying to communicate something It's my job as a speaker to inculcate the same brain activity in my brain as I'm telling the story into your brain and the better I'm able to do that, more my brain looks like your brain, the better I've succeeded as a communicator. And so this is the phenomena of neurocoupling. So that's actually the end goal of communication

in a kind of a very broad definition is to make the other person's brain experience the same thing that your brain is experiencing. Exactly, exactly. And actually, this has been studied with movies as well. So one of the other experiments we did was actually look at how similar people's brains are as they're watching the same film. So we sit down on a movie theater, we all ate something different for breakfast, one of

us broke up with his or her boyfriend, we all had different experiences going into it, but it turns out there's this one director who when you sit down and you watch their films, everyone's brains are almost identical. Any guesses for this is Chris? Conantarantina? No, that's, he was getting up in there. This is Alfred Hitchcock.

No way. So Alfred Hitchcock just has this incredible ability to have this gripping effect on his audience. So on that day, does it matter what you A for Breakfast? Does it matter what relationship status you are? When you sit down for an Alfred Hitchcock movie, you are having the same experience as the person next year. So it's a really, really sort of foundational way

in which communication takes place. We really have a shared experience. And we can see that manifested through shared neural activation. That's sick. Yeah. So cool. It's wild. It's communication really is like a game of Tetris. It's how I can manipulate the piece being the sender and have the fit and the receiver's mind to truly connect, literally to connect. What, to connect. And you see this in brands all the time and I love it because I can give you all these great examples of how brands have done really well with neural coupling, but I think it's more fun to look at when this grew up.

So let's look at one example of how this grew up, right? As a marker, you're always communicating. It doesn't matter if you're the head of HR or the head of CEO, you got to communicate to your team, right? So one of the things, so where in San Francisco, Oakland and one of the things is there's just not right now because it's COVID, but in general, there's a massive competition to hire people, right? So tech companies are doing all sorts of stuff to bring on new employees, and they're fighting over each other. It's wild. And of course, Microsoft wants a piece of the pie. This is exactly how you don't nearly couple. Of course, I'm going to read this out loud. Nourle coupling would be,

if we're sitting with Joe Rogan, there's a way we talk that would be different from us being interviewed by Barbara Walters. We're nearly coupling. We're going to say honest to our brand, but we're going to nearly couple to our brand, but we're going to be a nerly couple to make sure that we resonate with the audience, right? So this is Microsoft's attempt at bringing new interns on. Let me see if I have it.

I've had it written out. So this is an actual email. We have a screenshot of it on the website. That's up. The email opens up like this. Hey, Bay intern. I am Kim, a Microsoft University recruiter. My crew is coming down from our HQ from Seattle

to hang out with you on the kind of Bay Area interns at Internal Paloza on 7-11. But more importantly, and this shit is in all caps, bold, underline, amatallicize, all debuff. We're throwing an exclusive after party, not of the event at our San Francisco office and you're invited. There will be hell of party, not of the event at our San Francisco office and you're invited.

There will be hell of norms, lots of drinks, the best beats. And just like last year, we're breaking up the Yammer beer bond. How to have Prince make it stop. Last one, hell yes, to getting lit on a Monday night. Make it stop. So the loves of you know what? But that's what they're trying to do. They're trying. They don't know, they might not know what normal coupling is, but innately you know that if I connect with you by communicating with you the way you want to be communicated, you'll connect with me back.

This is a failure. There's obviously a minimum and maximum authenticity that brands need to catch within, getting outside of whatever the authenticity equivalent of the overt and window is and falling outside of that. It causes my toes to kill. It's just so cringy. It is. And you know, in some part of the world with a different brand, you could probably deliver that authentically for a different type of audience, but it just didn't fill authentic and- If that was a front house. And if that was a front initiation, or something, you'd be like, yeah.

Yeah, hell yes to getting lit on a Monday night. Yep, no, that's exactly what it is. It's, yeah, authentic. Our brains have a BS meter. We're no, that's exactly what it is. It's, yeah, often, you know, our brains have a BS meter, you know, we're constantly looking at patterns in the world. And if there's one thing our brains are decent at is the BS meter, you know, we might not know why, but there's that feeling we might get every now and then and it's your brain trying to pick up a break in a pattern that you may not be totally conscious of. It's interesting. Yeah, so we touched on Mr. Alt is work earlier on and I know that you guys did some stuff to do with

how compulsive behavior gets monetized in the digital age. Can we touch on that? Yeah, how much time? Definitely, we definitely get. I'll say this and I know I'm going to piss off all the marketers listening for this. When it comes to products that are tech products that are free, and I'm using quotes here, engagement is another way of measuring addiction. Engagement is just not socially vilified, right? People, you know, you look at YouTube's engagement statistics, IG's engagement, engagement engagement engagement.

It's a very nice way of saying, this is, well, this is how good I am at keeping you hooked. Now, it's not always a bad thing because sometimes people do want to be engaged. If you want to binge on Netflix, the Netflix has all the incentive in the world to help create an experience that helps you binge. I'm not saying it's all bad, but just know that engagement is a nice way of saying, we got you hooked for this long. And there's many different things. I think Matt, you should break down the Zignar effect. I think that's a good way to start this off.

Yeah, well maybe first just connecting it back with pleasure a bit, because it does connect actually with something we talked about before, which is this idea of pleasure and surprise. So we like things a bit more when we can't predict they're going to happen. And the really scary thing is, is that then when we were on a reward schedule, which we

can't predict, that actually shapes behavior to a far greater extent. And so what a lot of these platforms do is they deliver an anticipated pleasure. And so you go on your Instagram feed, you go on your Facebook feed, you go on Snapchat, and there's something akin to the newsfeed. And you know, it's generally going to be plentiful. There's going to be something in there that you're going to like, be there when it's going to happen, where it's going to happen,

how am I going to be delivered? And this element of uncertainty in a very strange way actually drives behavior in a really potent way. And this comes back to experiment which we've done in 1966. This is Michael Zeele and his famous pigeon experiment. We gave pigeons a ability to pick at a lever and get a reward. And there was two different levers set up. One, you could pick the lever and you would get

a kernel of food, something rewarding pick the lever and you would get a kernel of food, something rewarding to the pigeon, every three picks. The other one, you peck the lever and on average you get a kernel of food, every three packs, report packs. But you don't know when it's going to happen. So sometimes you get it immediately, sometimes you get two in a row, three in a row, sometimes you peck for seven times, you don't get one. So you don't know what it's going to happen. It has a variable reward schedule, is what it's called.

And to everyone's surprise, the pigeons could not stop pecking at the variable schedule. So instead of getting this kernel of food consistently, when they could expect it, they wanted one that actually introduced a little bit of variable pleasure. Because that's a pleasure that really drives behavior in a very sort of variable pleasure, because that's a pleasure that really drives behavior in a very sort of strange way, to end up to sort of strange workings of our dopaminergic system. We find anticipation, more rewarding.

We can't predict somebody's gonna happen. We're anticipating it, and anticipation itself is rewarding and keeps us going. And this is exactly what a lot of these tech platforms have converged on to. So you know that your Instagram feed is going to be generally pleasurable. It's going to be somebody's cute baby, your dog, for you, for you, Chris, somebody's cute puppy, or their dog. But you don't know when it's going to happen, you don't know where they're going to be in the park.

You don't know, there's some element of uncertainty, this general pleasurable experience. And that is this really, really key reward system that drives behavior compulsively. And it's really interesting looking back at the evolution of these platforms. So Facebook being the famous example. So way back in Princetonized College Days, Facebook was just a series of these individual pages. You just went on people's page and you liked the photo

or you poked them, invited them for a vampire, whatever these weird apps were on Facebook. And when they created the actual common newsfeed, everybody hated it. They actually wrote to the head of product these very, very vicious emails, oh my God, you ruined Facebook. This is before Hashtag, this is canceled Facebook,

everybody hated it. But what was interesting is they looked at the stats and their actual time on sites skyrocketed. So people claim to hate this thing, but having this was the key way of introducing this variable reward and this caused time on sites and an engagement to skyrocket. So yeah, these platforms have really converged

onto this fundamental way in which our pleasant system's work and they sort of contorted it away where they maximize users time on site. Did you see, I can't remember the lady's name. She used to work for, as a consultant for Casinos, and she's now involved with Tristan Harris at the Center for Humane Technology. And she wrote a book about all of the crazy ways,

I'll try and find it and I'll send it to you guys. It's so good. The crazy ways that casinos keep people on the floor. For instance, the carpets never have right angles in the patterns. The way that the flow of people is encouraged around and this, that any other. There's a weight. I don't know if it's still programmed into Twitter because obviously kind of the veil got released here. But when you log on to Twitter on your phone, there is a programmed weight between when you arrive on the site and when the notification number pops up on the notification bell.

And that weight is precisely the same length of time that it takes a slot machine to go from hitting the button until coming back. And this lady had identified it. And as soon as you realize that these guys are playing around with the same stuff that Vegas casinos are doing and using variable rewards and stuff like that, That's when you know that you're like, I am up against a power that is so far beyond. And Chris, this goes back to what we said earlier. We have to bridge this gap, man. Right? Like, I'm lucky enough to be a consumer and a marketer. And that's, you know, it's not transparent. You know what I mean? You're going into a casino, at least you know that this entire experience is designed to get you to gamble.

There's age limits. And even then, it's your own volition that you do it. You don't know that when you're signing up for IG, right? You don't exactly, and we haven't even gone down the rabbit hole of what's going to happen with this data down the line, which is really paying for it. That's a whole other conversation, right? So of course, you know, like it kind of breaks my heart a bit to hear you say, oh, when they're playing with the same stuff that the casinos are to create these apps for us, that

does break my heart because that's the distrust that I talked about in the very beginning. It does make you not trust apps, even though, yeah, I want to go on Twitter and read dope shit. I want to go on Facebook and keep and touch my old friends. But there is that level of distrust. And us as marketers have to own that. And us as consumers have to own it too. And there's, and there's, you know, we can talk more about how to exactly to own it. But that's sort of why we wrote this book is to reduce that distrust. We want consumers to know the psychological impact. We also want consumers to own the fact that,

we want to use these products. I couldn't agree just to one. There's so much distrust between consumers, I think, and market is at the moment. And it's when marketers have been able to weaponize particular parts of our behavior in ways that we didn't request them to do, you know? And I could go on about this range. I had a Kiway, the CEO of the light phone. I had him on. He was episode 10 And that was you know, two and a bit years ago. So I've been thinking about this for quite a while. A lot of the listeners

Will be very familiar with it as well, but you are right I think that there needs to be a corner that's perhaps turned by marketers generally. I don't mind Rory Sutherland or Richard Shorten or Bruce Duckworth or whoever it might be or you guys using known psychological effects to make me love brands. You know, I want to feel warm. I want to feel like if I buy a Harley Davidson, I'm going to be like a free wheel in mother, you know, it just iron made and blasting out the sides. Like, that's cool.

I don't mind that. But there is, I think that there was an asymmetry in terms of who had the weapons in this for a while, you know? And it's like that some people manage to run away so much further ahead of where consumers were, the fight was almost unfair. And I think that might have been the advent of mobile technology.

And we've seen this before. We've seen innovation comes in and in highly capital societies like the US, where we're primarily innovation and capitalism, secondarily consumer rights and consumer advocates, right? That's, you can see a history of public policy and how it always favors capitalism. We have really cool products.

And then consumers eventually find out what it took to get there and then they catch up and the policy catches up. And then the cool innovation comes up. So we're always playing catch up. And I think, I think if that's how life is in the US, great. But it's time for policy to catch up. But I think you're right, though.

I love that you said that there's an imbalance of this weaponry of sorts. And I think it's really easy to point the finger out Facebook. And I think you can go do it. Everyone can do it. I'm not defending Facebook. What I really want to do, though, is I want to empower the consumers, man.

I believe like consumer power isn't this bullshit thing that we talk about. I genuinely believe in the power of the consumer. I think that if you, me, and Matt, convinced five people each to pay a dollar a month for Instagram to have a private Instagram and stop doing all the shady shit that they do, Instagram will want to do that. It's, we have found ourselves in this weird, oxymoron state. We want free as consumers, especially in the internet world.

Like, think about all the work you're putting in right now to put this podcast together, right? We're not paying you, we're not paying us, we're just spending our hard-earned time to do this. Why are you not charging for this podcast that is tremendous value? Well, because people aren't willing to pay for it You know what I mean. So what do we do?

Like so so there's the need and what I'm saying with the bridging thing is let's have that conversation Right if consumers come out and say I'll pay a dollar for an app that is not that is an alternative to WhatsApp Then someone will actually have an incentive to make that and create a new business model. The business model in modern tech is built upon free, free being the consumer and how much they will in a pay. So as soon as that changes, we force the business models to change. New business models will rise and fall. I don't know if you use signal or telegram or brave, all these browsers and all these chat apps are now finally going, we don't want to do a database approach on creating a free product.

Brave did it by creating their own cryptocurrency, and that's how keeps it private. Signal right now is not even asking for money, and it's encrypted and text messaging no matter what. Five years ago, didn't exist now, they do. So eventually they're going to start asking for donations and eventually that evolves into a place where it's like consumers get what they want

and the people making these products, marketers just programmed to create stuff that plugs in your attention because it's as soon consumers will forever want free. And I think we're coming, I think slowly we're coming to the point where it's wishful thinking partially but also trying to predict something. I think that we're coming to the point where, you know, wishful thinking partially, but also trying to predict something. I think that might change. I don't know how long it'll take, but I've changed,

but I think it might change. I think conversations like these with you, and you're really, you're the vessel through which people learn this stuff, right? Like, you're the vessel, you have, you're the transport of this information and you're not the only one. We've got immense interest in people talking about the stuff that's in the book. I think that's a sign of stuff shifting. And I think as people learn for it more, they're really going to realize that dollar a month is not that much to pay for a messaging app that you use a thousand times a month. That doesn't track, you know, that you're crying about your dog or you're going to break

up and using that to sell you some weird shit. I hope this is where we go. I truly hope this is where we go because the distrust is not a good place to be. Yeah, man. I'm fully, fully on board. I think there's a lot of deep programming that needs to be done, sort of consumer expectations about what's happened

in your right. There's been such a flurry. There was such a flurry of innovation probably the last 15 years that the weaponry that brands, marketers, tech companies had to play with was so much further ahead from even our cultural and our social norms. You know, we didn't even have words to describe the sorts of things that were happening to us, like tech addiction or screen time, all of these sorts of things. There are only recent inventions in so that we now have an objective measure of how we can manage our own use of these new products.

You're totally right. The innovation's gonna move more quickly than first the policy can, then the social norms, then the way that people learn to deal with it and all this sort of stuff. So I genuinely norms, then the way that people learn to deal with it and all this sort of stuff. So, you know, I genuinely do believe that the more that people can educate themselves about how brands and how companies use psychological effects,

and this is one of the main reasons that I love doing the podcast, and specifically have a very soft spot for purpose in life, psychology, biases, eaves like stuff like that be. The reason is that I think understanding why we are the way we are and why we like the things we like, and then also perhaps even giving people at least a little bit of a sight of how they could deprogram some of those unconscious wants and needs allows them to experience life in the most liberated way that they can.

Because until you deprogram all of that stuff, the best that you can hope for is to become a famous, rich, or wealthy slave. That's the best that you can hope for. That's all you've got to play around with. Until you decide that you're going to say no, until you decide to deprogram this stuff, big advocate for sobriety for the same reason. I like people pushing themselves to go sober in a world that tells them to drink because as soon as you realize that you choose to drink, not you have to drink, because it's just what everybody does, it makes a really big change. And I think

whatever equivalent, this is kind of like sobriety for consumers. Blind sites are a little bit like going sober for consumers, which actually I actually really like. So I've got three, three questions. I'm going to ask you guys now to finish up. First one, this is for each of you. What was your favorite study from your research during all of the research? What was the favorite thing that you guys stumbled across? Could have been something you already knew about or something new? Ooh, this is tough. I'll take this one first, Matt, if that's okay with it. Yeah. Man, this goes down the freakish, the weird matrix theme that we've converged upon in here.

I'll do the Hayne study on pushing buttons. So they put people in the FM or M-Sheed and they have them choose between two things. Bluebike, redbike, you know, fluffy dog, hairless dog, whatever, and they're looking at these images and they have them choose between two things. Bluebike, redbike, you know, fluffy dog, hairless dog, whatever, and they're looking at these images and they're simply asking them, choose one, okay? But looking at the brain, they were able to predict before the person even push the button, which one they were going to predict, which one they were going to choose. Not just one second, half a second, a full seven freaking seconds before they click the button, they know what button you're going to pick. And this isn't like 60% certainty.

We're talking absolute certainty, seven seconds before pushing the button. Seven seconds is a lot of time. Colby has made a career at Reston Peace out of hitting jump shots at the seven second line. Seven second is a lifetime. The fact that, and I love that study, A, it's kind of creepy in matrix E, right? But also, let's take a step back.

We think we are objective pilots on the life of a near plane that we're on. We think we know exactly why we're doing what we're doing and when we do it. And at least when we do it part is completely incorrect, right? There's parts of the brain that some conscious that is that where we can measure right now in life and Lifetime that will tell us what you're going to do before you actually do it. So you're not this objective Pilot is think you are so that's what there's so many, but I'll pick that one

Friends, yeah, I think about it. I sent one of my good buddies Luke into the worst two-week spiral of depression of his life by teaching him that free will wasn't real So I read-pilled him I read-pilled him about Sam Harris's free will speech on Joe Rogan and I didn't seem for I didn't seem for two weeks And he came back and he took me to one side and he was like dude I've been in the worst mood with you ever for the last two weeks So I felt that my life had no meaning. I had this thing. But he's like, but then I actually have come out the other side now and I've realized that it's totally fine that I actually, you know, I'm on this journey and blah, blah.

And I was like, you have been to hell and back in this place for two weeks. And this is the problem with giving people concepts, but yeah, I absolutely love that seven seconds before someone knows what they're going to do. And it does show the fallibility of our belief that we are the pilots of our own actions, right? So Matt, what's what's your pick from the from the litter? Yeah, so for me, it's actually a study which is a fine similar conclusions about free will through a different way. And this is through the lens of memory. So I'm a huge memory geek. This is what a lot of my PhD work focused on.

So this is the Nesbitt and Wilson study from the 70s. So they just had people enter into the lab and they had this array of stockings on the wall. And they chose stockings because nobody really knows anything about stockings. Everybody has baseline preferences for stockings. So it's an area of high uncertainty. And they just ask the people,

well, which stockings do you want? Which ones do you think are the best? And so they made their selection, and then they asked them, well, why did you make that selection? And it turns out that humans for this very strange reason, nobody quite knows, we have this right-side bias. So when we walk into a room, we tend to go to the right side. We look at a picture, we tend to look to the right side of the picture.

And it's the same thing with the stocking array. So people regard this as the color whatever, just pick the ones on the right, because they have no idea. But what was interesting about these studies, they ask me why don't you pick the ones that you picked. And it was like, oh, well, I like the color on this one. It kind of just spoke to me. This one reminded me of my grandmother, this buddy, this one, it kind of just spoke to me. This one reminded me of my grandmother, this buddy, this one, the cloth felt really, really, really, really, high quality. All of these reasons that had nothing to do with their actual choice. So everybody just picked

the one on the right side of the array, but nobody had any idea that they had this bias. And so once you make this, it just went to show that once you make a, so one, we go into a decision. We don't know all the full variables and factors that lead us to make a choice. And once we make this choice, we feel this need to justify our decision. We feel this need to confabulate to see ourselves as consistent beings and to explain it to ourselves

in a way that makes sense. So this to be was a really, really fascinating experiment. They've done similar studies with jam, they bring consumers into a room, they have which which jam do you like, and they'll pick the one on the right just because it's the one on the right, and then they ask why, oh, because I love blueberry, I love all these reasons that I've nothing to do with the actual choice. It was that choice, it's made that they just confagulate it to themselves. So a lot of what marketing is is making these, by these little tweaks, to then allow consumers

not necessarily to inform their choice, but to allow them to justify it to themselves afterwards. So we find this example of Hummer, for example, where they have hummers and nobody buys hummers for, say, people buy hummers because huge gas goes like this, you would have to feel like a man, whatever. That's really the, it's a hedonic motivation to buy a Hummer generally. But they found when they put these little decals on the Hummer, hey, why did you buy a Hum,

and the decals say, safety ratings or this and that, people will claim it was the safety ratings, which led them to buy the Hummer in the first place. As you find these little things that don't necessarily factor into the choice, but allow us to justify it to ourselves later. So for me is the Nesbit study and this whole idea of compagulation, which is super fascinating. So cool. I guess the problem is that as we've identified today, anybody that's listening and still considers themselves a rational objective

decision maker, evidently hasn't taken in anything that we've talked about because you're just a mess of hormones and water and muscles desperately trying to see the world for something that resembles what it is. And it's not at all, and you're just living in like Willy Wonka land. It's like fucking Dr. Zeus out there, isn't it? Yeah, but it's worth just to make one point for you. So it's worth

pointing out as well that it's not as if Prince and I haven't researched this and written this book that were somehow like a mute to all these things. Yeah, we're no better than than anybody else. So once you see how the sausage is made, you don't not want the sausage, you know, so we're, you know, you just hate yourself more for having eaten it. Yeah, you just gave you a sense. Yeah, pretty much. Did you, you, you hear Daniel Kahneman on the knowledge project with Shane Parrish last year? No, Daniel Kahneman basically doesn't do podcasts, right? But Shane Parrish, guy behind FS.log, phantom street, basically doesn't do podcasts, right, but Shane Parrish guy behind FS.blog

phantom street unbelievable blogger top top level podcaster. He's booked on modern wisdom as soon as this lockdown finishes I'm gonna go to Canada and see him and Ottawa But he gets Daniel Cahneman on and he asks Daniel so has your 40-50 year career of understanding these heuristics and biases, has it helped you to become a more rational human being in any way? And Daniel's answer was essentially no.

He was like, you know, you've got a Nobel prize winner in front of you who's spent his entire life working out how the brain works. And he was like, no, I'm still just kind of just as screwed as everybody else. Now if there's no hope for Daniel Kahneman, then us, us mere mortals have absolutely no chance at all. So, second to the last question, you're each stuck on a desert island with only one mental model psychological effect or bias each.

Which one are you taking with you? Ooh, one bias. Which one am I taking with me? So what's my favorite bias? I don't know. If you have an answer, gum, I gotta think about it for a second. Ooh, I think I would take in the impact bias.

So the impact bias basically says that we are generally poor at sort of understanding how things affect our overall happiness. As Dan Gilbert says, we underrate our psychological immune systems. For me, whatever happens on the desert island, I hope I would have to have that bite of my ass or bite of my ass. Get bit by a crab and lose a toe. It's fine. If I get to a new part of the island and find some delicious coconuts, that's fine. If I, you know, get to a new part of the Ireland and find some delicious

coconuts, that's fine too, but you know, it's a bit level headed because I'm just going to fall down to my regular baseline. Right. That's so much more sophisticated than I thought. I thought you were just going to say, like, inversion or the contrast effect. Map versus terrain or something like that. And you've actually taken something with you that's like a Batman utility belt that's going to help you survive. That's pretty impressive. The pressure is on now, Prince, what are you going to go for? My mind is strictly survivalist. The hedon and treadmill. Look, if I'm stuck on an island,

I want to be in the shitty pursuit of happiness that keeps me hunting and hunting and hunting because it increases my chance of survival. So I'm going to go with that. The fact that pleasure is fleeting and it's going to hopefully increase my likelihood of surviving on an iron by myself. I've got it. I love it. So final thing is what does the future of marketing have in store, what are your guys' predictions as we move forward into the future? Ooh, Matt, I'll take this one first. Yeah. Oh Matt, I'll take this one first. Yeah, yeah. I think we touched upon this earlier. I think the future of marketing

is going to be more psychological. Okay, I think the future of marketing is going to be psychological for companies that are not big. Right now people who know neural marketing in terms of companies are bigger brands, the Coca-Cola's the world, and of course, the data companies of the world, Google and Facebook.

I think we're getting to a point where small to mid-sized companies will be able to exercise some of this stuff. I think the future of marketing is psychographics. I think we've been in a- What's psychographics? Sorry. Psychographics are an understanding of your customers' psychology and it sort of

piggybacks on the word demographics. Demographics is a sex location, all these different ways, all these quantifiable ways. Well, you put your customers in the category. Psychographics are more what I call APO. It's your attitudes and your principles and your interests and your opinions, right? It's not just about a sex location, it's about APO. It's your attitudes and your principles and your interests and your opinions. It's not just about aid, sex, location. It's about APO. It's all those little psychological aspects of you that make you who you are. I think the future is psychographics.

And the future is no longer going to be stuck in a Fortune 500 company's data bank. But I also think for consumers, in the same way, we thought we had power when you can review a bad real estate agent or a bad restaurant on Yelp and give them five stars, I think we are, and this is, it might take a lot longer than five years, but I think the future is ownership of data. The future is you, me, Matt as consumers, wake up and say, we want to own our data, right? Our data is being harvested in the creepy matrix sense for so long, and we've been drunk and high off of free that we've let it happen.

I think in future, we will. And I think that will be the rise and fall of business models, and I think that will be sort of the catching up we talked about earlier until some other stuff happens. I think that's the one that I my heart truly believes maybe not my brain as much but my heart truly believes that we will find ways to to have a sense of ownership and control over our own data. Not just point finger at Facebook and say you're evil. No, no, no, find a happy meeting and open that conversation. Awesome. Yeah, so for me, it's definitely another heart answer.

This is the way I would really like to see things unfold. And that is through experience. And this is very, very COVID contingent. So we're going to have to see how things play out there. But we've seen in recent years this sort of presurgence of experiential marketing. So if you look at the digital world, you can go on Spotify, you can have any song

that's ever been written, any digital recording at the Click-A-Bot button. You go on Amazon or Netflix, Amazon Prime or Netflix, you can watch any movie that's ever been in any archive ever. So these digital experiences are commodified. And what we can't commodify is direct experience. You can't commodify the experience of going to an amazing concert and having that moment-to-moment experience, and that actually encoded memory that you're going to take for the rest of your lives. And what we're

seeing now, and what we did see prior to the pandemic, is a lot of these major publishers and companies that work in digital industries actually going to the experience side. So the New Yorker Festival, for example, the New Yorker magazine, obviously, and a lot of their revenue has been going steadily down as most publishers have, because most of this, they do have a fervent loyal fan base, but you can get digital content and get articles on long, relatively free, as long as you're right with, with you know, advocate and advocate on.

But what they've done is actually move to experiences. They have a New Yorker Festival every year, where they have stages we can hear from and ask questions to your favorite podcast host, so your writers will have different ways in which you can interact with the platform and direct way. And we see this in the music industry where the only way musicians can make music is through concerts.

And so you have this huge resurgence in now musicians actually stepping up their game in massive ways in terms of actually providing an incredible moment to moment experiences and with lights and with people and coming out and storytelling and all of these amazing things, which you just can't commodify in the digital space. So I think that's one way I hope, and again, this is very COVID contingent, this is one way in which marketing will go. The digital world is always going to be there. It's made plenty of money in the digital space, but these are going to be commodified products. And really world is always going to be there. It's made plenty of money in the digital space, but these are going to be commodified products and really where people are going to differentiate, is providing these incredible moments of moment-to-moment conscious experience. It just can't be commodified in the same way.

That's super cool. I have to say it sounds like that experiential, overwhelming sensation solution is almost like the antithesis of the convenience era that we found ourselves in, right? Everything's so much more easy. You can deliver a room, a five-star meal to your house while you watch Amazon Prime and then you get an Uber to the, you know, we work station and do all this sort of stuff. You have all of these things that are making life easier and easier. And then almost as a consumer, you want a signal from the things

that you're purchasing that this wasn't easy. You know where's the costly signalling, where's the effortful signalling that's coming in here? That's what I want and you're totally right. I keep talking about this dot dot dot in London which is the most advanced virtual reality experience on the planet at the moment. Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds in AR, VR and holographic projection with real life actors and fire and all sorts of other stuff. And I will never forget that. I'll never ever forget. It was a terrible date. I actually went with a chick and like it was a perfect date to go with a chick though because for two hours we didn't have to speak to each other. So in one way it was a fantastic date and in another way it was a complete catastrophe. But I won't forget that.

And the same, you see cold play, waves of light up wristbands going across. So you see like, pinks, like in a 40s now, flying upside down, whizzing around stadiums and stuff like that Travis Barker upside down drumming. You know, all this sort of thing, you are right, the stepping up of this experience. And what we said today,

some of the things that it hits on, intensity, novelty, the violation of expectation, all of that thing is going to further embed the memories in your mind. You're going to have this connection with the brand, you know, and then if Budweiser comes out and sponsors Blink 182 or, you know, Motorola do a tie-in with pink or whatever it is, that's the opportunity for brands there. I guess to harness real influence, real genuine goodwill as opposed to weaponizing it with just psychological tricks because our amygdala hasn't been able to catch up yet. So guys, honestly, this will be up there with one of the longest podcasts I think that I've ever done. I could keep going, honestly could.. So blind sight, the most hidden ways marketing reshapes our brain, when is it out?

Cause I've just got an advanced review copy that says, may, when's it out? It come, well, before we tell you about the book, I just want to say Chris, thank you, man, you play a very pivotal role in this whole thing. Matt and I are so passionate about this stuff, but we wouldn't be able to share this stuff with you if you didn't have people like you who genuinely

gave a shit about this stuff and made it because you're, you really are an important part of the process, man. You are the vessel of information. We create the information. We hope it gets caught up. So first of all, thank you so much. And you've done it in a way. We studied your podcast, man. We looked at, we saw you have Paul Blumon. We freaking love Paul Blum. You know, you got near-owl. You have some of these rockstar guys that we look up to. You have them on here. And you got now, man. You guys are one of them. Now you're in with the rock stars, Roland with the big boys now. So, no, so thank you for owning that, man. You're, you're, you're doing something really special here. And I really hope you get a lot of success out of

this. This is not easy work. Thank you. And we appreciate that. And secondly, thank you for putting us on goals without saying. One thing though, just like a total moment of vulnerability. We didn't write this book for money. First time authors don't make shit. That's, it's an honest dirty truth about publishing. We were not, you know, if Kanye decided to write a book, he'd be first on my foot. Yeah, he'd make a lot of money. We are simply passionate neuroscience and marketing geeks who found a message that we wanted to desperately share with the world. And that is how we put in the grueling intense hours it takes for two people to think as one and write this book. So this is, if nothing else, it's been a massive labor of love. And to hear you tell us that you loved it so much,

it means the world to us, man. So we do, so you know, like the listeners look, what we covered so far, Chris' list is so much longer than we've covered. The book is so much longer than we cover. There's so much other shit to talk about. But ultimately, look, by the book or don't buy the book, the blog is free. It's all there for you. We really just want this to go out. There's the average person knows a little bit more

about this stuff, just like we know a little bit more by user experience. So Chris, thank you for being a person who sort of helps us disseminate this info, man. I couldn't be more happy. Honestly, this aligns perfectly with the things I'm interested in. So what's the, tell us what the blog is, where can we get the book, where when to come out, all that stuff? Book will be on Amazon and any other, any other major book retailer. So,

if you're anti-Amazon, that's fine. It's on Amazon. It comes out May 19th. The, the Kindle version, the digital version of May 19th globally. Otherwise, it's sort of staggered, depending on COVID and delivery situation locally. So the official date is May 19th. I'll make sure that this goes out just after May 19th, and I'll make sure that we schedule this to go just after that. So I'll try and line it up with that. What about the blog? What's the blog?

The blog is popneuro, like popsyke, popneuro.com. And completely free, come hang out with us. We talk about Korean pop music and neuroscience and Kanye and neuroscience and all that kinds of weird stuff plus neuroscience. So it's a bite size version of the book. So please check us out. That's awesome.

What about following you guys online, Matt? Prince, where can we find you online? You guys on Twitter or anything? Yeah, so I'm at Twitter. Matt Johnson is me. And yes, I'm on Twitter or anything? Yeah, so I'm at Twitter. It met Johnson is me. And yes, I'm on, I'm on Twitter as Prince Gument 24, eight. And if none of those, if those are too hard to remember, pop Neuros on, on Twitter as well, just at pop Neuros and we're on

that as well. I'll make sure that I do a full, a full rundown of everything. So the link to the book, the link to the blog, the link to Martin Prince and pop Neuros Twitter will be in the show notes below. Oh, we made it. That was so good. For the listeners that are still with us, I really hope that you enjoyed it. That's absolutely fantastic.

Boys, you need to do blind sight too. So I'm going to send this, I'm going to send the recommendation. I've already told Richard Shotton that he needs to get on it, the author of the choice factory, and I'm going to be sending it to Rory Sutherland as well, the guy that wrote Alchemy. Rory's a J-man. Episode 49, I think, on this podcast, and you just blew me away. Go and buy it.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you're interested in marketing and behavioural economics and all that interesting stuff, all the things we've gone through today, go hassle the guys online. You know what to do. If you enjoyed the episode, like, share, subscribe, give me a message. Let me know what you thought. This has been so, so cool today, and I could keep going, but I really need the bathroom now. So, gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. Prince, give the dog a kiss for me, please.

Mark, guys, thank you. I'll catch you.