Modern Wisdom - #539 - Sam Tatam - Evolutionary Ideas For Modern Problems

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

Sam Tatam is the Head of Behavioural Science at Ogilvy Growth & Innovation and an author. When it comes to solving modern problems, it turns out that evolution might have a lot of the answers. Rather than revolutionary ideas, evolutionary ideas and solutions that already exist in the animal kingdom can help us with all manner of challenges. Expect to learn how the wings of an owl helped fix problems in the bullet train, how the ears of a hare assist wind turbines, why Google Glass failed, how come Airline Tickets are so confusing, why all my rich friends drink sparkling water, how companies can aid customer decision without limiting choice and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on all Optimal Carnivore’s products at www.amazon.com/optimalcarnivore (use code: WISDOMSAVE10) Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) (USA - https://amzn.to/3b2fQbR and use 15MINUTES) Extra Stuff: Buy Evolutionary Ideas - https://amzn.to/3ViYgD5 Follow Sam on Twitter - https://twitter.com/s_tatam  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Sam Tatum. He's the head of behavioral science at Oglevy Growth and Innovation and an author. When it comes to solving modern problems, it turns out that evolution might have a lot of the answers already, rather than revolutionary ideas, evolutionary ideas and solutions that already exist in the animal kingdom can help us with all manner of challenges. Expect to learn how the wings of an owl helped fix problems with the bullet train, how the ears of a hare assist wind turbines, why Google Glass failed, how come airline tickets are so confusing, why all of my rich friends drink sparkling water, how companies

can aid customer decisions without limiting choice, and much more. Don't forget you might be listening but not subscribed and that's going to make you TREZ-SAD. So go to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the screen or the plus button in the top right hand corner on Apple Podcasts. I thank you very much. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Sam Tatum. Sam Tayden, Puckham Lishon. Thanks so much Chris, it's great to be on. Why did you put a picture of a half-eaten chocolate bar in your book?

A really great question, that's deep in the book when we're talking about triggering action, how we can get people to respond and the chocolate bar in itself is a kit cat and everyone knows how you eat a kit cat you eat it sort of finger by finger but the image that you're referring to is an image of someone taking a big hunk out of the end and it sort of breaks the fact you know in there it's a bit like someone scratching their nails down a chalkboard. You know, and it's like breaking the pat like, that's not the rule.

You know, we know how do we know how to get kept. And that's an example of sort of the brain's patonicity. You know, we love, we see the world in patterns. Randomness doesn't make any sort of benefit to our survival. So spotting patterns and following these systems make a lot of sense. And if we can deviate from that, we can help people to sort of write it. So the chocolate bar in question leads itself

to a wonderful piece of behavioral design, by a designer called Louvre Bruns, who created a light switch. And the intention of a light switch. And the intention of the light switch was to encourage to sort of nudge people to switch the lights off. And he did this by creating a light switch that when the lights are off, it makes a beautiful zebra pattern. But as soon as you switch the light on, it breaks the pattern.

It's a bit like, by the end of a kit cat, it's just not how it's meant to be. So you forever sort of feel in this sense of discomfort and anurine climb to turn the lights off again. So that's why there's an image of a half-eaten chocolate bar on the book. What job does evolution have in the world of marketing and consumer behavior? It plays a huge role, and I think in two fronts. One, in understanding much of what we're seeking to influences is evolved in its nature, desire, status, all of these are sort of evolutionary drivers. The path I take in the book evolutionary ideas is more so that ideas also evolve. Just as we see biological evolution that adapts and some solutions prevail and some become extinct, and we can see patterns in these solutions in biology. We can also see these patterns in ideas. And if you understand the patterns and you understand

the solutions that those patterns provide us, then we can draw upon them to be more efficient in our marketing and more creative in our marketing. I quite like the insight that novel problems don't require novel solutions. There's this quote from Thomas Edison that says, your idea needs to only be original in its adaptation to your problem, which is lovely because you think there are a lot of cross-category solutions that somebody in an airline has come up with that could be used by a person that's trying to start a cleaning business or whatever it might be. And yeah, it does seem like there is

a pedestalization of big innovation rather than incremental and definitely cross-category stuff as well. Absolutely. And two reasons for this. One is that we have a sort of a proportionality. We have this assumption that big problems require big solutions. If we hear in the physical world, if we hear a loud bang, we assume that it required a large input by which to make the bang. I'm a wonderful, I think it's a 60 study, but it was looking at crabs, plays and casinos where you roll the dice.

And they found that if people needed a high number, they were more likely to roll the dice harder. And if you needed a low number, you roll it softly, really lovely example of proportionality. So this assumption that it's great, hey, it's why we thought it's so hard for us to believe that mosquitoes can cause something as catastrophic as yellow fever. How can something so small cause something so big? But in the world of ideas and psychology, certainly can big, big sort of outcomes can be caused by small solutions. And that's a big argument for sort of nudge theory, and that's been written a lot in innovation

and behavioral science. But what I get really interested in is that a solution or a problem that might feel novel to you is likely not novel to someone else in another category. And as you say, Chris, we're so blinded by the industry that we're in and often the category tropes that we're defined by, that we don't look outside the category. And we've needed a sort of a bit of connective tissue to help us to go there.

What's why would Castrol motor all ever seek advice or inspiration from Gatorade or Powerade? Right? And I've worked with business like Castrol in the past looking at engine lubricants and we do creative reviews of Shell Helix and valveline and all the lubricant categories to see what they're doing creatively that year. But we'd never look at power rate. But if we understood that both are in the same, that they're faced with the same challenge, we need to convince people to pay a premium for a product that they can't see is actually working. It's doing its magic behind closed doors because of some magic secret ingredient,

whether that's an iron for molecule for powerade or magnetect for castrol, we're talking about the same human challenge here. So let's give ourselves an excuse to sort of expand our scope of inspiration outside the category that we're in. Is that the superpower of being an agency that works outside of companies? A marketing department that's held within a particular business itself is going to be much more siloed?

For me, that is. And that's one of the most enjoyable parts, I think, of working in an agency. But I remember years ago, and I can't remember the exact answer that the challenge, but my, well, firstly, well, this guy has worked on Jaguar, how awesome is that? But the fact that he had the exposure to so many brands and challenges, that he could connect to challenge for role-dotes with one that he's seen for Jaguar Premium Sports Cows. And I think that's a blessing of being in an agency, but it's also something I think if you make it part of your job to seek sort of cross category challenges and cross category solution. So you can bring them to spaces that they otherwise wouldn't belong.

And that goes back to what I was speaking about that that connective tissue, what helps us to define the area of exploration and to justify why we can bring that solution into a category that it might never be seen before. To draw this across to evolution, I think you make a parallel between Gatorade and Castrol and Dolphins and Sharks. The fact that Dolphins are mammals, yes, and Sharks of fish, but both of them independently came upon the Dorsalfin, the thing at the top. I don't know what it does, presumably, it's stear. Is that what they steer with? Stabilizes the shark on the dolphin, and you're right. So both sort of two categorically different species of animal, under the same environmental constraints, right? The need to survive swim fast, capture prey in water,

what the term is convergently evolved on the dorsal fin. So we can start to see two different species have done this in nature. How might we see two different species of organization do that when faced with the same challenge? It's not water, but it could be trigger reaction like we're spoken about. It could be enhancing loyalty. This is what sort of constraints does that pose us, and therefore, what have we converged in the poll to stumble across in other industries and categories? The issue that you have in evolution is that the animals can't look at the features that

other animals have and said, oh, that looks great. Yeah, I'll have a bit of that. Whereas obviously in business and marketing, you can do that. Yeah, precisely. So an example from my industry, I run nightclubs for a very long time, and one of the things that you're trying to do there is generate excitement, anticipation, engagement, trust, social cohesion, status, all of that. From basically nothing, Rory's idea of alchemy, this is whatever one step before that is, this is me creating something from nothing, this is like big bank theory, because every different venue is doing the same thing. No matter how much you try and dress up nightlife, it is people getting drunk in

a room to music. That's it. And you can change the price points and change the music and change the branding and do whatever. And what we found, this was an insight I got from evolutionary psychology actually, the fact that humans are anticipatory beings. And a lot of the time it seems like we enjoy our anticipation of the event sometimes more than the actual event itself. So what we started to do in advance of Freshers Week on all of the new students would arrive, we would bring out these really protracted launch sequences.

Let's say that we're about to release a new event. We've got this new event that's coming up and it's gonna be fun. We would do something big as coming teaser eight weeks before the event, then maybe the venue that it's going to be at or the day that it's going to be on seven weeks before. And then there would be a full release video that's coming and people would know when the full release video was coming. And then just this really drawn out launch procedure. And then in the build up to that as well, we might release the Rheumon

DJs and the room 2 DJs. And then we're going to have this thing and this thing and this thing. And I found that it really generated excitement and anticipation out of nowhere. And that's something that I've drawn across for the podcast as well. Now that I apply that, so this is CrossCategory 2 for me, I guess, if I have a big guest coming up, like say that I'm bringing John Peterson on the show, I'll tell people that I'm going to record with him two months before he comes on the show. And then there'll be a photo from behind the scenes and then there'll be a countdown timer that's going to happen until the episode goes live and stuff like that. People need stuff to look forward to. And this is for anybody that's trying to release

anything, whether you're a personal trainer that's releasing a new plan online or whatever, I really, really think that the power of a protracted build-up sequence to it really, as long as you don't do it too frequently because then you get burnt out and it starts to seem a little bit sort of tarnished. But if you use it, I would say maximum of once per six months, I reckon that you can get away with that kind of frequency and it just months, I reckon you can get away with that kind of frequency and it just builds engagement and people are genuinely bought in. They're like, oh, this is kind of a narrative. It's sort of like a soap opera and I know what's going on and I'm excited. That's my equivalent example. And you're right and neuroimaging studies have looked at the brain's experience of pleasure and actually the anticipation of is just as valuable. It lights up our brain just as much as the receiving of the reward, right? And it's why concepts like variable reward are so

important that sometimes you win and sometimes you don't because it's actually about the hunger for the for the next for the next bit of success. Another way to think of it might be what what helps you and I love this sort of conjuring value out of nowhere or finding something that speaks volumes that That needs not sort of be be written in longhand and that's where sort of signaling can help to like what's the What's the powerful signal that speaks that says everything? I mean I Explore that in the book around trust. I mean what you're saying is I am is my money going to be do I trust that this is a genuine I mean, what you're saying is, is my money going to be, do I trust that this is a genuine, a genuine big night out?

Is this where actually everyone in the uni is going to go, oh, am I going to be stuck? Because this is a big choice to make, right? So it's really bad in dear interest, and there are wonderful examples of, sort of, lateral signals that you can draw upon, whether it's canaries going down coal mines, that signal the fact that there's pollutes sort of toxic air underground before the mine. It's all the way through to Van Halen and putting a clause in there in their rider, the band had a clause for the setup of their concerts that covered everything from the lighting to the tuning of the guitar. And just to

make sure that the band promoters and the people setting up had followed the rules explicitly. Let me give you my, let me, let me give you my favorite band rider. Now, I want to say it was Red Hot Chili Peppers, but it might be somebody else. So people that aren't used to live shows might not know this, but there's typically two riders that a artist will have. One will be the tech rider and the other will be the hospitality rider. Tech rider is all of the specifics about the distance that they need to be in the type of ampage and the staging and the lighting. And the hospitality rider is exactly as it says.

We need two ounces of the best local weed and we need four bottles of champagne and we want the fruit bowl and we want blah blah blah. Anyway, in the hospitality rider, this particular artist had put that they wanted a bowl of M&M's, but they wanted none of the blue ones in. They wanted all of the blue ones taking out. And what they did was they used the blue M&M test as a rough heuristic for how much they needed to scrutinize the rest of the rider. Because if they went in the first thing that they would

look at in the hospitality room was, are there any blue M&Ms in the bowl? If there were no blue M&Ms in the bowl, they can probably relax because if the guys have taken blue M&Ms out, they're gonna have the right amps out front. They're gonna have the right video screen. So cool so Genius genius and it was and that and that's it

The example of speed is van Halen and they wrote it as a clause You know and and it means that you can see one thing and it says everything I don't have to bother looking at anything else a good made of mine sells wedding dresses and he told me we've just started like when we send people the dress We've just given them like gloves to let handle it with and I love like just white gloves It probably cost about 50p for a pair of white gloves when you buy them on that and for me That's just such an awesome piece of of marketing that just says wow. This is amazing material Don't touch this not wearing gloves and it's simple things like that that again

We can look at a canary in a coal mine. We can borrow from a van Halen rider, and we can look at gloves in a wedding dress package and think, well, what's the example of that for a big nine out? How much the, what's the, I won't try and tap turns on the front here, but it's like, what's the police investigation that's ongoing from the year before? Well, I mean, that's not what you want. An example of what we could use and what a lot of clubs have used in the past is slowing entry to extend the queue. A queue is a hard to fake signal of popularity.

It's a social status amplifier, I guess. And as people walk past, they go, oh, no, no, no, no. Look at the size of that? I mean it's gonna be something and we always take photos and you make sure that there's a photo of the queue because and obviously People then do queue packing which is to make the queue thinner You can actually take it from a four wide queue to a three wide queue or a two and a half wide queue Which are actually extended out and if you never if you take the photo exactly from the side you can't see how deep it is So there's all manner of fuckery that's going on in an effort to try.

Yeah, but again, it's about trust. Again, it's about trust and providing social, it's like a testimonial on an Amazon website. It's like a five-star rating. It's like a thousands of, that helps in gender trust and I mean, filling restaurants from the front windows back, you know, and so you walk and pass that little busy. These are things that we've done intuitively for eons in nightclubs and restaurants on online discount stores. But if we understand that the term for that or the codified idea is social proof or social norm, or if we're talking

about a brown M&M clause being as a signal, then we can start to help to sort of, again, define the era of investigation that we should explore. And for me, that's what behavioral sciences done. It's given us this language, this codification that can help us more easily navigate evolved ideas. Once we can see them, then the challenge is missing them. It becomes an affliction. You start to sort of see these examples everywhere.

I flew back from Rome a couple of days ago with my mom and one of the things that I was looking at was the printed ticket that I had. And a lot of people will be checking in online, but if you do end up getting a printed ticket, the volume of information that's on there is absolutely insane. And I saw in your book that someone had simplified that by creating a sleeve that you slot the ticket into, and it refines down all of this information, and it creates little windows, and over the windows are gate boarding time seat number, perhaps something like that. First off, I do need to ask the question of why in a world where you get an iPhone in a case that has no instruction manual and

no nothing else. It's really that the entire process has been refined and it's beautiful. Why it is that all of this information needs to be printed on a piece of ticket. It seems completely stupid, but I like the idea of the simplification there. But it's a halfway point. There's been a lot online recently about human-centric plane tickets and how we might change them and provide imagery because airports are a wonderful context for Bavila scientists because you can ever assume that language is a constant. You're speaking to people under stress and pressure, where are sort of attentionary resources that are channeled.

So it's a really, a really wonderful space. But I love that example as a hack, even its midway point. But I use that in the book as an example again, as just like the dolphin and the shark have converged upon the same solution. The image above that in the book is of a remote controller for a TV, someone's probably gone around to their nan's house, who keeps turning on the Korean news and wondering how on earth can I get back to BBC One.

And they've literally just taped over all the buttons not to use. So they've simplified the remote control as a bit of a hack. And Katara always did it on purpose. And so in two different industries addressing the challenge of complexity reduction, they've sort of convergently evolved on the same solution. And I, you stumble across these in lots of different realms and it's a fun space. What was the problem with Google Glass? The problem with Google Glass, I think, is that they were more hung up with the ability of

integrating technology that they missed some of the social challenges that they would be faced with. Not being able to see what the person in front of you might be looking at or exploring. I sort of quip in the book, like it just takes one trip to the bathroom, live streaming, a trip to the urinal, and that's the end of Google Glass. So it was very focused on specs and engineering solutions and the wonders of technology that it failed to address some of the larger challenges of our evolved

psychology of privacy, of trust, of purpose. What's interesting with Google Glass, I think once you've started to shift it from being an all-encompassing social tool to a purposeful production aid. So I think Google Glass is now a similar technology is used in production roles. It's done to spike interest again, giving it a sort of clearly defined role. So you can address that the technology is still valuable if you give it a purpose. And so that's why in certainly in the early days of Google Glass that that tripped them up.

What are people using it for in production? I think they're using it to look at in a vignadeical about sort of like car manufacturing. So they can see that they're able to identify parts and order parts on the spot. It's where you can, again, be more purposeful that this is to be used for that outcome. Then people are more comfortable wearing it for a shorter period of time for a clear outcome. Didn't you guys do something in Connecticut where you were trying to reduce people chopping the fingers off and dropping heavy stuff on their feet? That was in a warehouse or something as well. That's right. There was a big factory in Connecticut.

What was that? What do you do? So that was safety as a key challenge. And one of the examples is a great, for me, it's a great example of an evolved idea. One of the problems when we move into factories and factory safety is that we're talking about individuals who work long shifts over a long amount of time with what is often high repetition work. So every time we went to a factory, I think someone received like a 30-year milestone. So we're talking about like people who are working in the same factory for a long time, doing quite specific tasks. And the challenge with safety and

risk-taking is the more familiar you are within an environment, the more risks you take. You sort of switch off a little bit. I think a third of car accidents occurred a mile from your home. I mean we can all sort of identify that. We're already halfway sort of taking the tile and and getting ready for our brains which is off. And this is a problem obviously in factories when irrespective of your familiarity, that circular source still going to chop off your fingers. So what we actually borrowed from, so the step to the side was some insights around boxes. And actually, the Rio Olympics were the first Olympics

to ban men from wearing head gear in boxing, because they found actually men are more likely to put themselves in a vulnerable position, more likely to actually experience a concussion if you had a headgear on. So they changed the policy in Rio to actually remove the headgears in the recent Commonwealth Games that watched again and the men didn't have had had gear on. So what we needed to do actually is pose a challenging question to heads of health and safety rather than saying how can we keep your workers safe? The question was, how can we make your workers feel

at greater risk, feel a bit more exposed? If you could get something to feel more exposed, you're sort of naturally more likely to take care of yourself. So what we did was develop a series of personal protective equipment that had, so if we're looking at gloves, we created a set of gloves that had skeletons on the outside. So you could see just it removed the the the sense of your fingers being an extension of the tool

and a reminder that it is a vulnerable extension of you. And and we ran some experience working in safety is a fascinating area that is I think there's a lot of work for psychology and creativity and safety. It's just a space that sometimes you would never expect a Ogle V2B in these kinds of spaces, but there's a huge role for us. And we found that people wearing in this experimental paradigm, people wearing the gloves were more likely to feel vulnerable.

So we're having to have a correlation between vulnerability and risk-taking, so those that wore the gloves were more likely to feel vulnerable. And those who wore the gloves were a greater risk of cuts from low-level injury, like a box cutter, for example, which sort of makes sense. If you're looking at a circular saw, you're still going to chop your fingers off. It's not going to, it's not going to, you're in. But actually, we had a medical grade significance looking at different injuries compared to just normal hands and compared to normal gloves.

So it's, again, a nice small shift borrowed from boxing that we can bring into safety. What about humpback whales? You looked at them. Humpback whales, we looked at it was so humpback whales is an example in the book I explore of biomimicry. If I'm talking about the same example, Chris, tell me if not so humpback whales have been a piece of inspiration for a business called whale power. So whale power is an organization that have found that you can create wind turbines that increase the lift and reduce the drag if you borrow from the shape of humpback whale fins that have these things called tubalicals on them. They have these little bumps. So

it's a lovely example of the field of biomemically. And we mentioned before that animals can't look at each other and go, oh, I'd like a bit of those feathers. Or I could do some damage with that beak, if only I had that beak, that they can't do it. But we can. So biomemically is a whole field that looks at borrowing, stealing from evolved biology in nature and adapting it to human problems. Whether that's a wind turbine, like a humpback whale, whether that's looking at mosquito, probiskey to make pain-free needles, whether it's cool. No way. That's what they did. It's cool, mate. And looking at the hair of rabbits to create air cooling systems, more efficient air cooling systems.

So it's one of those, what, I mean, there's a deep vortex if you get into it, but it's super cool. And for me, discovering biomemically was the trigger for the book. So I thought, so biomemically in design, in architecture, all the way back to Velcro being inspired by the Spurs on a dog.

Is that where it went from? Yeah, so I always forget the name of the gentleman who walking his dog every day and kept having to remove the Spurs, looked at the man at the microscope and invented Velcro. So all these things that feel like groundbreaking revolution re-innovation is actually an adapted solution. The classic Henry Ford production line was just a, he borrowed that from a slaughterhouse in Chicago, but instead of having cars on a pulley that built, they had cows on a pulley that were dismantled, he just reversed it.

And again, it's like the radical innovation of Henry Ford, it's just a purchase disassembly line in reverse. So biomemocries is a big stepping-off point for evolutionary ideas. But again, instead of borrowing from biological solutions, like the hair of a Jack rabbit, or the beak of a keen fisher to make the shinkansen 500 and more efficient going through tunnels, we look at evolved psychological solutions.

So we look at the cognitive realm and what we can borrow from that. What was the problem with the bullet train before they fixed it? So the problem with the bullet train was actually a sound problem. So the challenge was to reduce the time that, and this is the shinkansen line that stretches between Tokyo and Osaka. So the challenge was set to reduce the time that it took the train to pass that distance. They had experimental cars that could actually drive fast enough to manage it, but the faster the car went, the more loud, the more noise they produced.

So it became an auditory challenge, not a speed challenge. So there are two main problems on the shinkansen. The first part of the train known as the pantograph. So it connects the train to the wise overhead. And as the train increased its speed, it gave a loud, washing sound because of the turbulence created by these sort of essentially what a wind's on top. So what they did, and a gentleman called E. Gynet Katso was in charge of the program. And he was, fortunately, an avid bird watcher. So fascinated with birds and fascinated with engineering

and these two loves came together on this project. So to reduce the sound of the pentograph, what they did was borrow from the owl. So the feathers of an owl, so the owls and an octurnal predator, it's evolved to be able to sort of swoop down and darkness and stand that's prey in virtual silence. And it does this because of what's known as micro serrations on its feathers. So if you imagine sort of small serrations on the feathers, chop up the turbulence. So instead of having this large washing sound, now you created these micro-terbalances that dissipated the sound. So essentially, they created micro-serrations on the pentograph. And the second bird of influence on the pentograph was the Adely penguin. So it's what's known as a spindle shape, a bit like a football. You know,

there's tiny penguins that you often see sort of trying to escape a leopard seal, that's an Adele. And they borrowed from the shape of the Adele to shape the pentograph and address that specific issue. But the second problem on the shinkansen was the many tunnels that exist on the line. So again, a bit like a shark and a dolphin have to address the environmental constraint of water. This train needed to address the environmental constraint of like a series and a dolphin have to address the environmental constraint of water. This train needed to address the environmental constraint of like a series of tunnels. How can we penetrate a series of tunnels without creating what's known as a tunnel boom? It's a bit like a

shot of a gun, a pistol being fired. And in this instance, this is where they borrow from the Kingfisher. So the King Fischer beak has evolved over a millennia to have a really interesting sort of diamond shape. So it's got a really smooth angle from the head to the tip of the beak, but it does so in an interesting diamond shape. And it's able to, because of this, it's able to sort of go from the air to the water

to a stand that's prey. I think it's a substance of 800 times denser without an issue. So by again adapting the shape of the King Fischerbeak onto the Schinkansen, they overcame the challenge of the tunnel booms. So it's a, and I love that story again. It's a classic example of biomimicry,

but it shows that we can do this on purpose. But the issue with this narrative is that if it wasn't for the gentleman, E. Gynet Katzu, that might not have happened. I mean, someone who was sort of deep into his understanding of birds, how can we make this more systematic? So it's not just so we were able to link, if you've got a challenge with aerodynamics, here's a battery of solutions that you can explore that address this. Whether we have time or interest to explore, but the next stepping stone then is looking

at systematic innovation of evolutionary solutions. And that story is an engineering story. And a gentleman called Genrich Outshola, who was a Soviet inventor, was quickly sort of snapped up by the Russian Navy in the Stalinist period to work in the renovation hub and essentially was looking at patents all day, going through the naval innovation hub and said all these, none of these are innovations. These are all just similar solutions to problems in different parts of the Navy. He since then worked with some colleagues to assess 200,000 patents and identified them on their level of inventiveness and found that as little as 1% is sort of true innovation. But what Alchule did in his model TRIZ was start to then map out these patterns of solutions.

So just as you can have species of animals that are codified by the presence of a spinal cord or warm blood or gills, he started to do it with engineering solutions. So one inventive principle is the concept of a nested doll, a bit like a classic Russian doll. And if you imagine that, then you can start to think of a telescopic camera lens is an example of a nested doll. A retractable tape measure is an example of a nested doll. An L-polished that has the brush that goes in the bottle is an example of a nested doll.

So we can start to see these patterns of solutions in engineering. And the final piece, Chris, before I let you get a word in our promise, is how you then bring it together. So what they do in TRIs is they've created a matrix. And the matrix, the x and the y-axis look at measurable attributes, like volume, length, weight, durability, and you can map then. If I'm looking to increase the volume of something without increasing its size, for example, then you look at the matrix that will give you nested dull. So you can increase the volume without increasing the size. So

you face with challenges then, how do I make an umbrella big enough to cover the human body, but small enough to fit in the hand bagbag and you look at that on the matrix and it gives you a starting point for innovation. How do I make a bulletproof jacket strong enough to stop a bullet but not so heavy that people can't wear it? You look at the matrix and it gives you a sort of a short list of the principles to start from. And that's what we begin to do in evolutionary ideas, again, in psychology. But rather than size, length, and weight, and volume, we look at things like trust, and we look at things like decision making. How do we aid decisions without limiting choice? How do we trigger action without forcing response? How do we boost loyalty without increasing incentives?

How do we improve experiences without changing their duration? And for each similar to the trees, we can start to say, well, here are some psychological principles that you should start with. So we go back to our nightclub, Kanandrum. Well, that's maybe fundamentally a trust Kanandrum. And if we look at the chapter on, or if we keep hanging on about the book, but if we look at the chapter on or everybody keep

hanging on about the book, but if we look at the discipline, think about, okay, how do we increase trust without changing the truth? This isn't about lying to people. This is about using what we got to be more effective. And we look at the inventive principles or the psychological inventive principles. Funnily enough, they're exactly what we've talked about. It's signaling. I mean, what's a small signal that can help increase belief ability that this is going to be the night of my life? What's social proof you're in? So as you said about Q hacking or I love the term,

where you went from four abreast to one abreast, you're in that social proof of a boosting trust. And then the third concept is operational transparency. So it might be better as having a live feed or you can see here are the kegs rolling up right now. Or maybe what you're doing and building anticipations, again, making people feel like they can see the work that's happening behind the scenes

to help them believe that it's gonna be an awesome night. And if we can start there, then we're away. I think that the operational transparency things are an interesting one because part of what you're trying to do is make the events sufficiently exclusive that people can't get access to it without being there. So I know operational transparency, some examples of that would be a pizza rear

that has flour out front on the windows, sill, or whatever that engenders people to believe that they're making their own dough. They still might be buying it in, but they've just got some fiber flour outside. But yeah, I wonder what, perhaps operational transparency would have been included in here we are booking the DJs and here we are

dressing the venue, here's some photos of the deck or this isn't just a, you're gonna walk into an empty room, nothing's gonna be going on. Yes. One of the contradictions that you've been talking about there, you say the innovation is the resolution of these contradictions. One of the interesting ones that I've been playing around with a lot recently is how to aid decisions without limiting choice because Barry Schwartz is the paradox of choice.

It's something that I can't unsee anymore and I keep, it just keeps on arising in front of me, for the people that haven't seen it, it's this great TED talk that you should absolutely listen to from maybe 10 or 15 years ago. Barry uses this example of all of the different types of genes that are available now compared with 50 years ago, there was one type of genes. You go in, you buy a type of genes.

The utilitarian rationalists would say, well, if you get to have as many choices and options as possible, that allows you to maximize the utility that you can get because it is much more precise toward exactly what you wanted, but it doesn't account for the fact that humans have loss of version and choice anxiety and all of this stuff. They can't bear the decision and it causes paralysis by analysis. People walk out of the store having bought no jeans and also feeling ashamed at the fact that they couldn't choose a pair as opposed to going in and just having one. So the paradox of decision versus choice is something I think that is really prevalent given how many

decisions and opportunities and options people have now. So what are some of the solutions? How can we help people to make a decision without limiting their choice too much? So if we imagine our matrix then, so if we think of 18 decisions without limiting choice, then there are three areas, and this is the start of the conversation, at the end of the conversation, but three areas we explore,

looking at defaults, looking at prompts or helping people to actually and guiding people in their decision making and finally chunking. So to start with defaults, we often see defaults in, or think about defaults in subscription. So you're automatically subscribed if you say yes, you and it's already pre-ticked that box. In most circumstances we find that, again, people have sort of overloaded with information that if we can create a system, create an environment that elicits our desired choice or an individual's beneficial choice as a direct outcome, then

that's setting the default. So I think in in they'd change the default menu on the kids' meals from chips to apples and from soda to orange juice. I mean people could still order soda, people could still buy chips, but the default was now apples and juice. And it changed the calorie intake significantly, just by changing the default, the way that it's set retake significantly just by changing the default the way that it's set up because it requires someone to make an alternative decision. And there's a few things about defaults. One is that yes, it's sort of the line of best fit. The other is that it almost feels like it's it's creating a norm. Like if you do this, you're some sort of deviant. What you want chips for your kids, you know, you know, I mean, it even simply lie in the book I referenced, like a tap faucet in

a shower somewhere, either in Japan or in the UK, the UK is an amazing play, every shower is different. It blows my mind. When you go to the office of the UK, you need to ask for a shower instructions, but it had a single number of 38 degrees. You know, 38 degrees and then it was what's the warmer or colder than that, but it just said 38 degrees.

And then you see like, well, if I don't want 38, like I'm breaking the, what does that say about me? You know, instead of just create this assumption that that's the desired outcome. So, so long and short of it is that to aid decision making without limiting choice, we can start to change the defaults. So that's a default either that helps someone have more apples than they do have chips in a restaurant all the way through to researchers locked at organ donation and opt-in and opt-out forms. The second area that we explore there

in decision making is actually starting to help pre-fill some of the information for people in advance. So people can sort of see or remove what is a difficult decision. The example I open up on, and it's not the same as co-core Pepsi kind of choice, sort of what am I going to do in this scenario? The example I start within the book is an instance when a bestmate's mother sadly passed away and I was about to send flowers and I was sort of at that point in the online journey to leave a message and I'm terrible at those things. But there was an option to have just some prompts or some inspiration just a couple of small prompts

It was like just help kick it off. I just aided that aided that process Um, and it was a lovely example of where I could have bought flowers gone through with that or I might have been stuck in this paralysis of a different to complexity paralysis More of a social paralysis Um, we see that through to young children playing puzzles where we sort of help them to decide which piece goes whereby embossing the image in the bottom of the puzzle. We can see that's the giraffe because actually there's a little picture of the giraffe in the space too. So we can just see that and that goes all the way through to prefilling forms for university enrollment. So just giving someone a little nudge in the right direction or just prompting someone with name or email rather than to empty boxes.

I mean, that's the extreme of it. That can help us. And the last is around chunky. And I'm racing through these at a million miles an hour, but I want to sort of cover them if I can, is looking at chunking. And we can use chunky in two different ways to aid decision making.

One is sort of as we expect. So chunky is a term used to sort of breaking up large pieces of information into smaller meaningful chunks. We often see this in mobile phone numbers where they sort of chunked into sort of four digit series. So you sort of remember the pattern. I think the UK postal codes are, I think the Royal Mail did a survey that said actually many people find their post codes more easy to remember than their spouse's birth. They all, they're anniversary. They're designed to be memorable based on how

they're chunked. But if we think of chunking, often go to like, how does a restaurant help you aid decisions? And they could just list everything alphabetically. So you'd have the chicken after the beef as I go back to my... And then you'd have the ice cream before... Again, tap dancing with the example. But it doesn't meaningfully chunk up the menu. But what they do do is chunk it up into entrez, mains, desserts, they might even chunk it up into the proteins. You have chicken, seafood or beef, so they chunk it in a meaningful way. When you get your flat pack from IKEA, it doesn't just say, okay, now make it, you know, it chunks down the process into meaningful steps. So that's one way in which we can add decision. Chunking up large pieces of information into smaller meaningful

pieces. The element of chunking that I find even more interesting is when you actually start to make what is a deceptively simple choice a larger decision. So you actually add chunks. So the best example that I've come across of this is looking at the presumption of innocence in legal cases and the burden of proof. And oftentimes you might imagine whether they're either guilty or not guilty. But what many legal firms do is actually just map up the burden of proof.

So it's sort of innocent, highly likely innocent. There's a list of sort of nine steps that you need to go through before you actually go to a guilty beyond reasonable doubt. So it sort of expands this decision making process. So you actually need to go through nine levels of innocence before you get to guilt. So it's actually sort of chunked up what seems like a binary decision into multiple stages. In the physical realm, we see that on the London tube, we see the sort of the designated standing areas on the tube. What is the area that's deemed to be safe? And what is the area that's a little bit dangerous? And what is the sort of

the mind, the gap? You know, that's just, it's paint. It's the same, it's the same platform, but it's been chunked down at its levels of dangerous. You look at a hypertension chart, they break down normal into low normal and high normal. I mean, I thought it was normal, but they've just created a level of like high normal. So you better start worrying. I don't get to complacent here, high normal. And I just, I love that.

We discussed about creating value or defining a world to help people to navigate. It's a rich world out there. I feel like I'm doing a lot of talking here, Chris. I hope it's okay. That's why you're here, Sam. That's why you're the specialist. You've just mentioned about restaurants and restaurant experiences.

I mentioned that I'd just gone to Rome. I noticed something for a while that all of my rich friends, as soon as they ascended out of the working class and into the lower echelons of the beautiful stratosphere that is the middle class, all started drinking sparkling water when we went out for dinner. And I haven't got a fucking clue what's going on. It was saying to them, what is it? Is there some secret Mason, society, handshake thing that goes on where everybody accepts that you've got to start ordering San Pelagrino as soon as you get to the table? And then I found myself, ashamedly, at the

start of this year, I found myself ordering a Topo Chico, which is a Mexican sparkling water. And it's, if you think that you don't like sparkling water, I challenge you to have a Topo Chico and think that it's not good. Yeah, that was a Petersonian solution because Jordan and Michaela and the rest of their family are allergic to everything. So for them to have an alcoholic drink, they need to have vodka with, well, what can we have it with? We need to have it with something, but water would be insane, but somehow a vodka topochiko

just doesn't feel too ridiculous. My point being, what do you think's going on? Why is it that rich people like to drink sparkling water and didn't you look at the top of a San Pellegrino, the lid of a San Pellegrino as well? Yeah, I think that could be two sides of this. One is the individual, the other is the restaurant. So I think there's again, if we talk about signals of opulence and wealth, like paying for water, sort of is itself, it's like the peacock feather, it's like,

this waste that I can afford, I mean, is a signal of my gravitas and fitness, right? So at an individual level, paying for water might provide sort of more social status that it does hydration. The other side could be actually the restaurants that you frequent with friends in the stratospheric middle class have a placebo choice. They might say, do you want perier or sparkling? You know, they don't even offer you tap. So either way, you're having sparkling. You're having you're having bottom border of some sort. So it could be, it could be driven by the restaurant,

could be driven by the individual, but it's what's interesting is that it happens. It's predictable, you know, and if you understand whether or not it's again this opulence of know, and if you understand whether or not it's, again, this opulence of paying for something slightly needlessly, then that provides these, these are all sort of status cues. Well, again, my background in Nightlife, conspicuous consumption was a very, very common, you know, the biggest bottle of vodka. You know that five guys aren't even going to be able to get through a half of it by the end of the evening. And it's pouring it over their watches,

or they're giving away glasses for free, or they're spraying champagne. This is all conspicuous consumption happening, right? And I wonder whether, yeah, the unnecessary expensive, you see this with Voss, have you said you know Voss? Yeah, beautiful packaging. Yeah, well designed bottle, it's very stand out. Why would you need a stand out bottle of water?

It's just water, why isn't it more utilitarian? It's completely circular, which means it's like a cylinder, which means it's actually quite difficult to pack away. If you were to ever take it anywhere, it'd be easier to have something like a volvick, which has got maybe rounded edges, but is more kind of cubic and rectangular. Well, the reason is that everybody knows even if they haven't seen the logo, if they see the silhouette of the bottle, they know that that's a bottle

of water that costs seven pounds. So that makes sense. Well, I'm a right in thinking you looked at something to do with the lid of sun pelligrino, or did I make that up? Well, we often explore, we often, as an organisation, we often talk about that the lid of the Sun Pellegrino, that the costly signal, again, the waste of the tinfoil on a Sun Pellegrino, again, it's just a subtle nod to the fact that we've invested enough in this product to justify the investment of a little bit more

to have it sealed off with aluminium. That change recently, I think they've actually taken away the tinfoil and a reason to design it. You've got to say the turtles and the tortoises and stuff who can't be wastefully costly for them. Or some instances change the bottom line. We can say about that. I wonder how many companies are using the eco. I've said this for ages. I mean, you must have seen this if you've been traveling anywhere.

Hotels are absolutely riding off of, they're playing this perfect balance between COVID and the green movement in order to not come and clean your room. Well, no, fuck you, like I know why you're doing this. We're not doing this because you care about the environment. You're doing this because you've been able to half your cleaning costs over the last three years. Yeah, there are two, and again, and I've just been away actually, and you can see it,

and it was by the airport, which was just madness. I mean, we understand aviation's been hit so hard, but you sort of think about a commercial outcome. But I think for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, understand what it does for you at a psychological level. Again, sometimes you often say that the market is wonder where, what 50% of your advertising is wasted and actually the wasted proportion might be the most valuable bit. It shows that you've got money to burn to bring your product. If you've got money to burn to bring your product to the market, then people must be buying it. It's rare for failing products or to have a superbook commercial. I'd suggest you're in,

otherwise how do you afford it? So Sam Pelagrino is a lovely example of a costly signal to help you, just like white gloves in a wedding dress. It's a little bit of investment to help you trust that what goes within the box, what's underneath the foil is of quality. Otherwise, we wouldn't be protecting it. It's a lovely piece there. That is a really nice insight around the cost of marketing overall and the stuff that maybe doesn't drive clicks or conversions on the back end or whatever. So with brands that I work with for the podcast or whatever, they're looking to try and track whether or not people

are interested in the products that I'm talking about. And I'm like, well, I use them. I would hope that the people that listen to show you are interested as well. But a big chunk of it is, well, how do you put a value on being associated with Jordan Peterson's name or Jocker Willink's name, or that these are the sort of brand associations that are very difficult to buy

Literally, you can't buy them. These people aren't for sale. So yeah, how do you try and quantify that? Well, you don't does it show up on the balance sheet? Well, I Don't know maybe Aggregated and smeared across the next five years across a bunch of purchases that are tiny little nudges towards decisions and blah, blah. But yeah, it's very interesting thinking about that. The other contradiction that I thought that was super interesting to me was improving experience without changing duration because our passive subjective experience of time is something that I've always been pretty fascinated with and the way that we can speed that up and slow it down.

Rawri's example about the innovation of Uber, it wasn't the fact that you could order it from anywhere, it's that you knew how long it was going to be until the taxi arrived. I'm pretty sure that Ogle V was it you guys that got brought in to reduce complaints at security and Heathrow and you did that by putting fine, saying 60 minutes from here, 45 minutes from here, 30 minutes from here, and previously it was an engineering problem that was going to be, oh, we need to put, we can have a different type of scanning system and the belt can go at four miles per hour quicker and we'll have a whatever, no, it's not an engineering problem, it's a psychology problem. So using your new framework, your Trizz mapped across

onto psychology, what about experience and duration did you learn? Well, the first thing that I learned is what you touched on the beginning that was a fascinating part of research in the book was about the malleability of our experience of time, all the way through to looking into species that a fly experiences time much faster than we do in a whale experiences more slow than we do. How did they know how fast they did? Have you ever seen a TV being filmed by a camera?

The camera picks up the flickers of a TV? I don't understand the technology behind that, but the processing speed of the camera is maybe faster than this. So, you see what the eyes can't, essentially. So what they did was they put electrodes on a series of many different animals and showed them different speeds of flickering light. And if an animal could see the flicker then that could show that they're processing to be faster, right? Because I think that I think that I don't know this is a fact

But I think they said the dogs might be able to see the flicker, but we can't see the flicker So I'm not 100% on that but that's that's the way in which they explored how they could do this and It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective as well. Like it's no benefit for a whale to see the world faster than it can act upon. If a whale was to see the world as fast as a fly, it would just be like sort of depressed all the time because it can't do anything about it.

Whereas a hawk needs to see the world faster than a whale, because it can't do that. So having these differences in the species experience of time was I found a fascinating piece, but then when we look even within our own species, that time can be experienced very differently. And a couple of different things that can change our experience of time, novel events, stress and pressure and familiarity. And so the more familiar, as I said, we come earlier, the more we begin to switch off, our attentional resources tend to go down. We don't tend to absorb as much information.

Our brain is not taking as many photos all the time. It doesn't need to, because we're in a familiar environment, whereas we're in a novel environment or under stress and pressure or in danger, our brains look into capture every element to help us to survive, and that that that that focus of resources extends our experience of time. And they find this sort of experimentally through different paradigms, one thing's called the oddball effect. So you might see a series of cows flicking on a screen, and then they'll throw up an apple. And people will say that the apple was on the screen longer than the cows, and it wasn't,

it's the exact same time. But because your brain starts to switch off and not need to read as much information of the cows, this new image of an apple sort of focuses your attention and stretches that time. Whereas we also can forget putting out the rubbish and catching our train for the gazillionth time. So I found that anyway, just broad the fastening area.

So a couple of things that we look at, one is about expectation, that having an expectation of an outcome, we can change the experience duration. So if we're waiting without information on coming, then that time feels extended. And we feel uncomfortable, we feel stressed. Therefore we're laying more of these memories, the time feels extended. When we have an essence of expectation

of what to experience in that time goes faster. So one, and my partner and I were talking about this recently, actually, we did a, we did a, it was a really dangerous bushwalk, so we have a four year old and a one year older, we got sort of halfway and thought, geez, I wish we didn't do this, but on the way back, we sort of thought

that was faster than the way out. And there's, it's called the return trip effect. And often people experience that the outgoing journey is longer than the homeward journey. So you might feel like it takes a long time to get to a particular destination, but it's fast to coming back. And one of the justifications for this is now we have set our expectations to how long the trip is. We know how far we're going to go, so it's going to be faster when we're coming home again. So providing someone with a sense of expectation of outcome again, whether it's 60 minutes,

40 minutes, and we can start to shift that, I think, in Disneyland, they tend to over-inflate the expected times and say, you wait for an hour, but it's really 40 minutes, because you're just sort of shaping expectations. So expectation management is the first. The second is basically just engaging the brain with activity, so it's one of the biggest culprits of experience duration is boredom. And again, another fascinating one, whereas when we're bored, we often think that we're sort of experience duration is boredom. And again, another fascinating one,

whereas when we're bored, we often think that we're sort of just like doing nothing. But when we're bored, we're actually really stressed. Our brain and our body is telling us to do something else. It's because we have less reproductive or social benefits of sitting there doing nothing. So when we're actually bored, we're really stressed, when we're stressed, time slows down.

So it's like a double whammy. So just engaging the brain, and whether that's the classic mirrors in an elevator that help people sort of do their, to look at their makeup or do their tie, that's a great example of just engaging the brain, and we can see elevators around the world putting in little games and things like that now just to keep us occupied while we're waiting while we're traveling. All the way to the extreme of the Eurostar that created a wonderful AI mask for kids riding between London and Paris. As you go under the tunnel you put the mask on and you're transported to this foreign world under the sea and before you

know you've popped up on the other side. So rather than sitting there bored, you're just sort of engaging the brain, tricking it into believing that it's experiencing some other social benefit. And the last is looking at what's known as the peak end effect, the peak and how it ends. And funnily enough, this was also brought up over the last week with my partner when we talked about our trip and the peak experience was certainly this bushwalk. But we tend to remember events based on their peak, how extremely positive or negative they are

and how they end. And so if we can start to manufacture more peaks and positive endings, and that's not necessarily lifting the average experience from a six to a seven, that's fine. What are some opportunities to sprinkle in some more tens? Then we can again and boost the experience without actually changing its duration. Another nightlife example for you here. We used to, it was so during the evening we would have an event schedule, the schedule would be stuff like confetti drop at midnight and balloon drop at 12.30 and

Stage games at 115 or whatever. Yes. So that was peaks, right? And the peaks are often we leave that up to the DJ mostly that combined with a little bit of production But one of the things we realized is if we gave people a little treat on the way out, that would maximize the end effect as well, because everybody has to leave. And some people are leaving early because they've backed off with a partner for the night, or maybe because they've had a little bit too much to drink, so they don't maybe need one. And we actually managed to combine two really great strategies here. One of the issues you have in most cities is that night clubs are not a million miles away from residential areas and although the night clubs themselves will be sufficiently soundproofed to avoid leakage going out above the decibel level that is for the noise

pollution, you can't mandate the same for the people that leave. The patrons that leave go outside and they start doing football chants and they start screaming and shouting at each other and recording tick tox. So what we did to combine both of these was we gave people lollipops on the way out. Just nice little lollipops and there was someone handing them to them rather than the book it to the book it just didn't feel like a nice experience. It was a pretty girl or a good looking lad and he would be handing out, oh there you go, there's a lollipop. The lollipop was the end effect. it made them feel like they'd been well treated, it was given out by somebody that left a good lasting impression,

and because you're sucking on a lollipop, you're not gonna start chanting, because you've got some sugar in your mouth. Wonderful. So we managed to come up with a solution for that as well. Yeah, that's a cracker again, and this is why I find, because I've not explored the world of optimizing

and evening and another time. Sam, you should do, this is where you're missing. Now we should, but having a balloon drop, because I've not explored the world of optimizing it in evening and evening and evening. Sam, you should do. Now we should. But having a balloon drop, you know, that's a wonderful, like, again, peak, memorable moment. Oh, fuck, sorry. I've got to give you another one.

I've got to give you another one. So imagine that you're in a big club. We haven't done this for a while because you need a venue that's got a very high ceiling in a big dance floor. You'll remember if you're at a sports game, and there is a single beach ball being battered around, you're more concerned with what's going on with the beach balls sometimes.

Yes. than what's going on in the pitch. In the match. Yeah, so we realized that you could basically do the same thing, and we created, we stole this from a bunch of festivals, moderate weight balloons that are massive, they're sort of like bigger than a beach ball, a couple of feet across. We would inflate those and we would knock those out into the crowd and then we would light

them from the back so that as you were seeing these balloons go through the air, there were just these, the club would be pretty dark except for some lights striking the balloons. And it was just an unbelievable way to keep people occupied and you would see exits would be reduced during that time. What you're trying to do is not only get the crowd in but hold the crowd as well because you don't want people to leave to go elsewhere and you would see the number of people going to the bathroom would be reduced, the number of people that were leaving would be reduced because they were mesmerized and maybe they got the opportunity to hit it and yeah, that was cool. It's a wonderful canvas to consider and the more

distinctive and fun again, the more more memorable every car has a sports mode, but only Tesla has ludicrous mode. I mean, it's just there's a in the book I write, it's actually from Chip and Dan Heath, they found it for the power of moments. It's a hotel in Los Angeles. It's really sort of a clap-up old hotel. It's called the Magic Castle Hotel, but it ranks pretty good.

I've been to the Magic Castle Hotel. I managed to sneak myself in invite a few years ago. Perfect. And so you'll know better than me then. And what they have is a, tell us, what's the most memorable feature of the magic castle hotel? You whisper to an owl to get in. I think is it an owl?

I feel like it's a statue of an owl. And you need to go up and whisper to it. And then this sliding bookcase opens up. No phones, no nothing else. So that created an anticipatory effect that, oh, this is something that's special, it's confidential. Yes. Upon going in, maybe this is the owl. I can't remember. There's a thing that you can go whisper a song to. And if you whisper a song to it, the piano that has nobody sat in front of it starts playing the song that you just whispered. That was cool. That was pretty insane. I did, it was just loads of

stuff. I ended up getting pretty drunk that night, so my memory, as I get further into the evening becomes more hazy, but yeah, it was spectacular. But you're not worried, the most important thing is you're not worried about the thread count. You're not worried about sort of whether your towels are left on the hall court. You're thinking about the whispering owl, the strange piano. Apparently there's a button beside the pool that you're, there's a phone, a little phone box that you lift up and you ask, it's a popsicle hotline. And if you lift up the phone, someone will wait with a silver platter will bring you a free popsicle to the pool. So again, it's just adding these

moments of distinctiveness and that boost memorability. And it's not, again, every touch point from six to seven. It's finding these things that create more traction, Velcro for the brain. I think maybe there's an argument to be made that Malmaison have a good end effect to their customer experience. I think that they literally had a sign below the toiletries saying the best toiletries that you'll ever steal. Yeah, and there's another one, it says the same from Virgin Atlantic on the on the

bottom of this salt and pepper, it's stolen from Virgin Atlantic. And it's wonderful start and and it's and this is where I say there's sort of similar examples. You can have a popsicle hotline of the the the the magic castle hotel in LA. There's Bob Bob Riccats and Soho in London that has a press for champagne button. You know, it's really simple a kind of concepts, but they just, again, they'd spark the brain, they capture more memories. And therefore, they can start to shape the memory of the experience rather than the actual experience, because we never get by the memory of it, not the time itself. I mean, that's fleeting, but how we recall it is more powerful.

Last thing, your lollipop solution, there's another piece of innovation that you might have found that also you reduce fights. There's evidence around sugar consumption and aggression, particularly on alcohol. I mean, there's a group of volunteers in Sydney called the Red Frog Brigade, and they walk around the nightclubs

handing out red frogs, just in sort of boost glucose. Or the red frogs, like a log. Red frog, or so maybe that's a little lolly. So maybe it's in a classic Australia, it's like a lolly. But again, having a bit of sugar doesn't just sort of stop people from shouting. It probably actually stopped people from being aggressive and maybe they both connected anyway, because you're not yelling abuse at someone, you're just sacking on a chopper chop.

Sam Taitam, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do, where should they go? Look at me on LinkedIn, on Twitter, I think it's S underscore Taitam, T-A-T-A-M. If you're interested, check out the book Evolutionary Ideas on Amazon or good booksellers. It's been a labor of love and really fun to sort of talk through some of the elements of it. I've really enjoyed this conversation mate. Thank you. I appreciate you. Cheers mate. Cheers. Get away, get away