Evolutionary Ideas For Modern Problems - Sam Tatam

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 - 00:00 Intro 01:57 The Role of Evolution in Marketing 07:16 Different Species Evolve to Reach Same Results 16:50 Power of Simplification 27:05 Solving the Bullet Train’s Issues 35:41 How to Be Better at Making Decisions 44:38 Why do Rich People Drink Sparkling Water? 51:48 Optimising Duration & Experience 1:06:45 Where to Find Sam - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The classic Henry Ford production line, 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 the radical innovation of Henry Ford. It's like, it's just a butcher's disassembly line in reverse.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Why did you put a picture of a half eaten chocolate bar in your book?

• 0:22Speaker 00

  A really great, 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 Kat. And everyone knows how you eat a Kit Kat. 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 pattern. And it's a bit like someone scratching their nails down a chalkboard. You know what I mean? It's like breaking the pattern, like that's not the rule. You know what I mean? We know how to eat a, we know how to eat a Kit Kat. And that's an example of, of sort of the brain's pattnessity. I mean, we, we love, we see the world in, we see the world in patterns. Randomness doesn't make any sort of benefit to, to our, our survival.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  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, so the chocolate bar in, in, in question leads itself to a wonderful piece of behavioural design by a designer called Louv Brooms, who created a light switch. And the intention of the light switch was to encourage, to sort of nudge people to, to switch the lights off. And, 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 biting the end of a Kit Kat. It's just not how it's meant to be. So you're forever sort of feeling this sense of discomfort and are, and are inclined to turn the lights off again.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  So that's the, that's why there's an image of a, of a half eaten chocolate bar in the book.

• 1:57Chris Williamson?

  What job does evolution have in the world of marketing and consumer behaviour?

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Plays a huge role, and I think in two fronts. One, in in understanding that much of what we're seeking to influence is is evolved in its nature, desire, status, all of these are sort of evolutionary drivers. The the path I take in the in the book Evolutionary Ideas is more so that ideas also evolve. Just as we see biological evolution that adapts and 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 the patterns and you understand the solutions that those patterns

• 2:46Speaker 00

  provide us, then we can draw upon them to be more efficient in our in our marketing and and and more creative in in our marketing, I believe, too.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  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, um, yeah, it it does seem like there is a pedestalization of big innovation rather than incremental and definitely cross-category stuff as well.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And two reasons for 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 in the physical world, if we hear a loud bang, we assume that it required allowed sort of a large input by which to make the bang. A wonderful, I think it was a 60s study, but it was looking at crabs plays in 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?

• 4:18Speaker 00

  But in the world of ideas and psychology, it 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 of behavioural 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, and we've needed a sort of a bit of connective tissue to help us to go there. What, what's, why would Castrol Motor Oil ever seek advice or inspiration from Gatorade or Powerade? Right? And I, I've,

• 5:02Speaker 00

  I've worked with, with, with businesses like Castrol in the past, looking at engine lubricants. And we do creative reviews of Shell Helix and Valvoline and all the lubricant categories to see what they're doing creatively that year. But we'd never look at Powerade. 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, it's, it's doing its magic behind closed doors because of some magic secret ingredient, whether that's an iron four molecule for Powerade or Magnetek for Castrol. We're talking about the same human challenge here. So let's, let's give ourselves an excuse to sort of e- expand our scope of inspiration outside the category that we're in.

• 5:44Chris Williamson?

  Is that a 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?

• 5:55Speaker 00

  For, for me, that is. And that's, I mean, it's one of the most enjoyable parts, I think, of working in an agency. But I remember years ago, um, and I can't remember the exact nature of the, the, the challenge, but my old boss, Mark Saraf, the, um, strategy, um, head of, of Ogilvy in Australia, and we're working on Uncle Toby's oats. Right? So it's like classic Australian, down-to-earth oats. And, and we sat down, I remember where we're sitting, I don't remember the problem, but he said, I've seen the same problem for Jaguar. And I remember when when I was very junior into the business, I thought firstly, well, this guy's worked on Jaguar. How awesome is that? But the fact that he had the exposure to so many brands and challenges

• 6:37Speaker 00

  that he could connect a challenge for rolled oats with one that he's seen for for Jaguar Premium Sports Cars. And and I think that's 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 solutions, 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 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.

• 7:13Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:25Chris Williamson?

  Yes, and sharks are fish, but both of them independently came upon the dorsal fin. The thing at the top, I don't know what it does, presumably it steer. Is that what they steer with?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Stabilizes stabilizes the shark and the dolphin. And you're right. So both 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. Could what the the term has 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 triggering action like we've spoken about. It could be enhancing loyalty. This is the and what sort of constraints does that pose us? And therefore, what what have we convergently stumbled upon in in in the other industries and categories?

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  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. That looks great. Yeah, I'll have a bit of that. Whereas, obviously, in business and marketing, you can do that. We can. Yeah, precisely. So, an example from my industry, I ran 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

• 9:03Chris Williamson?

  from nothing. This is like Big Bang 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 the 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, when 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 going to be fun.

• 9:47Chris Williamson?

  We would do, "Something Big Is 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 Room 1 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 cross-category too, for me, I guess. If I have a big guest coming up, let's say that I'm bringing Jordan Peterson on the show, I'll tell people that I'm going to record with him two months before he comes

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  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 burnout and it starts to seem a little bit sort of tarnished.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Same old, same old.

• 10:59Chris Williamson?

  Yep. 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 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. So that's my equivalent example.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  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 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, out of nowhere, or finding something that speaks volumes that is, that needs not sort of be, be written in longhand. And that's where sort of signaling can, can help too. What's the, what's the powerful signal that speaks, that says everything? I mean, I explore

• 12:02Speaker 00

  that in the book around trust. 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, am I going to be stuck? Because this is a big choice to make, right? So it's really about endearing trust. And, and, and there are wonderful examples of lateral signals that you can draw upon, whether it's canaries going down coal mines that signal the fact that there's polluted sort of toxic air under, underground before the miners, all the way through to Van Halen, putting a clause in their, in their rider. The band had a clause for the setup of their, of their, of their concerts. They covered everything from the lighting to the tuning of the guitar.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  And just to make sure that the band promoters and the people setting up had followed the rules explicitly.

• 12:51Chris Williamson?

  Let me, 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 and the type of ampage and the staging and the lighting. And the hospitality rider is exactly as it says. It's, we need two ounces of the best local weed and we need four bottles of champagne and we want a fruit bowl and we want blah, blah, blah. Anyway, in the hospitality rider,

• 13:33Chris Williamson?

  this particular artist had put that they wanted a bowl of M and M's, but they wanted none of the blue ones in. They wanted all of the blue ones taken out. And what they did was they used the blue M and 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 and M's in the bowl? If there were no blue M and M's in the bowl, they can probably relax because if the guys have taken blue M and M's out, they're going to have the right amps out front. They're going to have the right video screen. So cool. So smart.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Genius. And it was, and that's, it's, it's, the example I was speaking 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 mate 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 like handle it with. And I love like just white gloves. It probably costs about 50p for a pair of white gloves when you, when you buy them on mass. 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, that again, we can look at a canary in a coal mine. We can borrow from a Van Halen rider. We can look at. Gloves in a wedding dress package and think, well, what's the example of that for a big night

• 14:55Speaker 00

  out? I mean, how much like, what's the, what's the, I won't try and tap dance on the front here, but it's like, what's the, the, the police investigation that's ongoing from the year before?

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean,

• 15:07Speaker 00

  that's kind of what you want.

• 15:08Chris Williamson?

  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

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:21Chris Williamson?

  social status amplifier, I guess. And as people walk past, they go, oh, bloody hell. Look at this. Look at the size of that. I mean, there's got to 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 will actually extend it 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.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Again, it's about trust. Again, it's about trust and, and providing social, it's like a testimonial on a, on an Amazon website. It's like a five star rating. It's like thousands of, that helps in, in gender trust. And, and I mean, filling restaurants from the front windows back, you know, and so you're walking past, they look busy. But these are things that, these are things that we've done intuitively for eons in nightclubs, in restaurants, on, on, on online discount stores. But if we understand that the term for that, or the, the, the codified idea is social proof or social norm, or if we're talking about a brown M and M clause being a signal, then we can start to help to sort of, again, define the area of investigation that we should explore.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  And for me, that's what behavioral science has done. It's given us this, 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.

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  I flew back from Rome a couple of days ago with my mum. 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

• 17:34Chris Williamson?

  and no nothing else, you know, 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?

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:43Chris Williamson?

  It seems completely stupid, but I like the idea of the simplification there.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  But it's a halfway point. I mean, there's, and there's, it's, there's been a lot on, online recently about sort of human centric plane tickets and how we might change them and provide imagery because, I mean, airports are a wonderful context for behavioural scientists because you can never assume that language is a constant. You're speaking to people under stress and pressure, where our sort of attentional resources are channeled. So it's a really, a really wonderful space. But I love that example as, as a, as a hack, even it's 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. You, the, the, the image above that in the book is of a, of a, 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

• 18:33Speaker 00

  can I get back to BBC One? And, 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 Qatar Airways 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, it's, you stumble across these in, in, in lots of different realms and it's, it's a fun space.

• 19:00Chris Williamson?

  What was the problem with Google Glass?

• 19:04Speaker 00

  The problem with Google Glass, I think, is they were all hung up with the the ability of integrating technology, that they missed the 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 one trip to the bathroom, live streaming a trip to the urinal, and that's the end of that's the end of Google Glass. So it was sort of very focused on on on specs and engineering solutions and the wonders of technology that have failed to address some of the the the larger challenges of our evolved psychology of privacy, of of trust, of purpose. What's interesting with Google Glass, I think, once you've started to sort of shift it from being an all encompassing

• 19:49Speaker 00

  social tool to a purposeful production aid. So I think Google Glass is now or similar technologies used in production roles. It's it's it's starting 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 one in certainly in the early days of Google Glass that that tripped them up.

• 20:13Chris Williamson?

  What are people using it for in production?

• 20:16Speaker 00

  I think they're using it to look at in I've written an article about sort of car manufacturing, so they can see that they're able to identify parts and order parts on the spot. It's it's this is to be used for that outcome. Then people are more comfortable wearing it for for a shorter period of time for for a clear outcome.

• 20:37Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 20:48Speaker 00

  That's right. That was in a big, a big factory in Connecticut.

• 20:52Chris Williamson?

  What was that? What do you do?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  So that was so we're looking at it was safety. It was safety as a as a as a key challenge. And and it's 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 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. Um. So every time we went to a factory, I think someone received like a thirty 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

• 21:37Speaker 00

  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 just, we're already like halfway, sort of taking the tie off and, and, and getting ready for, we sort of, our, our brain switches off. And this is a problem, obviously, in factories, when irrespective of your familiarity, that circular saw is still going to chop off your fingers. So what we actually borrowed from, so the, the step to the side was some insights around boxes. And actually, the, the Rio Olympics were the first Olympics to ban men from wearing headgear in boxing, because they found actually men are more likely to put themselves in a vulnerable

• 22:19Speaker 00

  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, in the recent Commonwealth Games that watched again, and, and the men didn't have, have, have headgear on. So, so what we needed to do actually is pose a, a, 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 can get someone 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, of personal protective equipment that had, so if we're looking at gloves, we created a, a, a set of gloves that had

• 23:01Speaker 00

  skeletons on the outside. So you could see just, it, it removed the, the, um, 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 experiments, working in safety is a fascinating area that is, I think there's a lot of work for psychology and creativity in safety. It's just a space that sometimes you would never expect Ogilvy to be in in in 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 gloves were more likely to feel vulnerable. So we're happy to have

• 23:45Speaker 00

  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 felt a greater risk of 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, you're in. But actually, it's sort of, we had a medical grade significance looking at 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 into safety.

• 24:24Chris Williamson?

  What about humpback whales? You looked at them?

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Humpback whales, we looked at, so humpback whales is is an example in in the book I explore of biomimicry. If I'm talking about the 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 organisation 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 tubercles on them. They have these little bumps. So it's a lovely example of the field of biomimicry. We mentioned before that animals can't look at each other and go, oh, I'd like a bit of those feathers. Like, oh, I could do some damage with that

• 25:11Speaker 00

  beak if only if only I had that beak. That they can't do it, but we can. I mean, so biomimicry 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 probiski to make pain-free needles, whether it's

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  No way, is that what they did?

• 25:36Speaker 00

  It's cool, man. And looking at the hair of rabbits to create air cooling systems, more efficient air cooling systems. So it's one of those, I mean, it's a deep vortex if you get into it, but it's, it's super cool. And, and, and for me, discovering biomimicry was the trigger for the book. Because I thought it's a biomimicry in design, in, in architecture, all the way back to Velcro being inspired by the spurs on a, on a, on a dog.

• 26:01Chris Williamson?

  Is that where it came from?

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I always forget the name of the gentleman who was walking his dog every day and kept having to, to, to remove the spurs, looked at them under the microscope and, and invented Velcro. So all these things that feel like groundbreaking revolutionary innovation, right, is actually an adapted solution. The, the, the, the classic Henry Ford production line was just a, he, he, 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, the, the radical innovation of Henry Ford, it's like, it's just a butcher's disassembly line in reverse. So biomimicry is, is a, is

• 26:44Speaker 00

  a big stepping off point for, for evolutionary ideas. But again, instead of borrowing from biological solutions like the hair of a jackrabbit or the, the, the beak of a keen fisher to make the Shinken Zen 500 more, more efficient going through, through tunnels, we look at evolved psychological solutions. We look at the cognitive realm and what we can borrow from that.

• 27:05Chris Williamson?

  What was the problem with the bullet train before they fixed it?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  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 5, the Shinkansen line that stretches between Tokyo and Osaka. So the challenge was set to reduce the time that the train took to pass that distance. They had experimental cars that could actually drive fast enough to manage it, but the faster the cars went, the more loud, the more noise they produced. So it became an auditory challenge, not a speed challenge. So there were two main problems on the Shinkansen. The first was a part of the train known as the pantograph. So it connects the train to the wires overhead.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  And as the train increased its speed, it gave a sort of a loud whooshing sound because of the turbulence created by these, sort of essentially what are wings on top. So what they did, and a gentleman called Eijin Natsu 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 on the pantograph, what they did was borrow from the owl. So the feathers of an owl, so the owl's a nocturnal predator. It's evolved to be able to sort of swoop down in darkness and stun its prey in virtual silence. And it does this because of what's known as micro serrations on its feathers.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  So if you imagine sort of small serrations on the feathers that chop up the turbulence. So instead of having this large whooshing sound, now you've created these micro turbulences that dissipate the sound. So essentially they created micro serrations on the pantograph. And the second bird of influence on the pantograph was the Adelie penguin. So that's what's known as a spindle shape, a bit like a football, you know, those tiny penguins that you often see sort of trying to escape a leopard seal, that's an Adelie. And they borrowed from the shape of the Adelie to shape the pantograph and address that specific issue. But the second problem on the Shinkansen was the many tunnels that exist on the line.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  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 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 borrowed from the kingfisher. So the kingfisher beak has evolved over millennia to have a really interesting sort of diamond shape. So it's got a really smooth angle from the sort of 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 stand its prey.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  I think it's a substance of 800 times denser without an issue. So by again adapting the shape of the kingfisher beak onto the shinkansen, they overcame the challenge of the 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 the issue with this narrative is that if it wasn't for the gentleman Eijin Atkatsu, that might not have happened. I mean, someone who was who was sort of deep into to his understanding of of birds, how can we make this more systematic? So it's not just so we're able to link. If you've got a, if you've got a challenge with aerodynamics, here's a battery of solutions that you can explore that are that address this.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Whether we have time or or interest to explore, but the next stepping stone then is is looking at systematic innovation of evolutionary solutions. And that story is is an engineering story. And a gentleman called Genrich Outschuler, who was a Soviet inventor,

• 31:01Speaker 00

  was quickly sort of snapped up by the Russian Navy in the Stalinist period to to work in their innovation hub and and essentially was looking at patents all day, going through the naval innovation hub and said, all these, none of these are innovations. You mean, and these are, these are all just similar solutions to problems in different disparate parts of the Navy. And he since then worked with some colleagues to assess 200,000 patents and identified them on their level of of inventiveness and found that as little as 1% is sort of true innovation. But what Al Shula did in his model TRIZ was start to then map out these patterns of solutions.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  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, or a retractable tape measure is an example of a nested doll. And nail polish 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, I promise, is how you then bring it together.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  So what they do in TRIZ 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'll give you nested doll. So you increase the volume without increasing the size. So you're faced with challenges then, how do I make an umbrella big enough to cover the human body but small enough to fit in a handbag? 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

• 33:11Speaker 00

  that people can't wear it? You look at the matrix and it gives you a sort of a shortlist 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.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  And we look at things like um decision making, how do we, how do we, how do we aid decisions without limiting choice? How do we, 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 Tris, we can start to say, well, here are some psychological principles that you should start with. So we go back to our nightclub conundrum. Well, that's maybe fundamentally a trust conundrum. And if we look at the chapter on, I don't want to keep hemming on about the book, but if we look at the discipline and 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've got to be more effective.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  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 believability 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, four, four abreast to one abreast, you're in that social proof or boosting trust. And then the third concept is operational transparency. So anything might be better is having like a live feed or, or, or you sort of, you can see, here are the kegs rolling up right now. Or, or maybe what you're doing in 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 going to be an awesome night. And if we can start there, then we're away.

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  I think that the operational transparency thing's an interesting one because part of what you're trying to do is make the event 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 pizzeria that has flour out front on, on the windowsill 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 bags of 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 decor. You know, this isn't just, you're going to walk into an empty room and nothing's going to be going on.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:41Chris Williamson?

  One of the contradictions that you've been talking about there, you say that 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's The Paradox of Choice is 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 jeans that are available now compared with 50 years ago, there was one type of jeans. You go in, you buy a type of jeans. 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

• 36:26Chris Williamson?

  get because it is much more precise toward exactly what you wanted. But it doesn't account for the fact that humans have loss aversion and choice anxiety and all of this stuff. They just, 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?

• 37:03Speaker 00

  So if we imagine our sort of our matrix then, so if we think of aiding decisions without limiting choice, then there are three areas that, and this is the start of the conversation, not the end of the conversation, but three areas we explore, looking at defaults, looking at prompts or helping people to actually sort of guiding people in their decision making and finally chunking. So to start with defaults, so defaults are, we often see defaults in, or think about defaults in sort of subscriptions. So. You're automatically subscribe if you say yes, you know, and it's already pre ticked that box. In most circumstances, we find that, again, people have sort of overloaded

• 37:44Speaker 00

  with information that if we can create a system or 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 Disneyland, they changed 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, 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 up, because it requires someone to make an alternative decision.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  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 creating a norm. Like, if you do this, you're some sort of deviant. What, you want chips for your kids? You know what I mean? And even simply, like, in the book, I reference a, like, a tap faucet in a shower somewhere. It's either in Japan or in the UK. The UK is an amazing place. Every shower's different. It blows my mind when you go to someone's house in the UK, first thing you need to ask for shower instructions. But it had a single number. It said 38 degrees. 38 degrees, and then it was sort of warmer or colder than that. But it just said 38

• 39:08Speaker 00

  degrees. And then you see, like, well, if I don't want 38, like, I'm breaking the, what does that say about me? So it just creates 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 research that's looked at organ donation and opt-in and opt-out forms. The second area that we explore there in decision making is actually starting to 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.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  The example I open up on, and it's not the same as Coke or Pepsi kind of choice, it's sort of, what am I going to do in this scenario? The example I start with in the book is an instance when a best mate'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 that was like, just help kick it off, just aided that, aided that process. And it was a lovely example of where I could have bought flowers, gone through with that,

• 40:31Speaker 00

  or I might have been stuck in this paralysis of, a different to of complexity paralysis, more of a social paralysis. We see that through to young children playing puzzles, where we sort of help them to decide which piece goes where by embossing the image in the bottom of the puzzle. We can see, oh, that's the giraffe, because actually there's a little picture of the giraffe in the space too. So we can just, we can just see that, and that goes all the way through to pre-filling 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 two empty boxes, I mean, that's the extreme of it. That can help us. And the last is around chunking, and I'm racing through these at a million miles an

• 41:13Speaker 00

  hour, but I want to sort of cover them if I can, is looking at chunking. And we can use chunking in two different ways to aid decision making. One is sort of as we expect, so chunking is a term used to sort of breaking up large pieces of information into small and meaningful chunks. We often see this in mobile phone numbers, where they're sort of chunked into sort of four digits series, so you sort of remember the pattern. I think the UK postal codes, I think the Royal Mail did a survey that said, actually, many people find their postcodes more easy to remember than their spouse's birthday or their 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

• 41:57Speaker 00

  decisions? And they could just list everything alphabetically. I mean, so you'd have the chicken after the, after the beef, as I go back to my, but, and then you'd have the, the, the ice cream before the, the, um, again, tap dancing with examples, but it doesn't meaningfully chunk up the menu. But, but what they do do is chunk it up into entrees, mains, desserts, they might even chunk it up into the proteins, you have chicken, seafood or beef. So they're chunking in a meaningful way. When you get your, um, your flat pack from Ikea, it doesn't just say, okay, now make it. And it, it chunks down the process into, to meaningful steps. So that's one way in which we can aid decision, chunking up large pieces of information into

• 42:38Speaker 00

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

• 43:20Speaker 00

  a list of sort of nine steps that you need to go through before you actually go to 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, 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, 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? I mean, that's just, it's paint. It's the same, it's the, it's the same platform, but it's been chunked down in its levels of dangerous. You, you, you look at a hypertension chart, they break down normal into low normal and high normal.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  I mean, it's almost normal, but they've just created a level of like high normal. So you'd better start worrying. I don't get too complacent here, high normal. And, and I, I just, I love that. When we discussed about creating value or defining a world to help people to navigate. Um, there, it's, it's, it's a rich, there's a rich world out there. I feel like, I mean, this is the part, I feel like I'm doing a lot of talking here, Chris. I hope it's okay. It's wonderful.

• 44:27Chris Williamson?

  That's why you're here, Sam. That's why you're the specialist. You, 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.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 44:55Chris Williamson?

  And I haven't got a fucking clue what's going on. And I was saying to them, what, what is it? 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 Pellegrino 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, 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?

• 45:38Chris Williamson?

  We need to have it with something, but water would be insane. But somehow a vodka Topo Chico just doesn't feel too, 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?

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there could be two sides to this. One is the individual, the other is the restaurant. So I think there's, again, if we're talking about signals of opulence and wealth, like paying for water, sort of is itself, it's like the peacock feather. It's like, oh, 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 than 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 Perrier or sparkling? They don't even offer you tap. So either way,

• 46:44Speaker 00

  you're having sparkling, you're having bottled water of some sort. So it could be driven by the restaurant, could be driven by the individual. But what's interesting is that it happens, it's predictable. And if you understand whether or not it's, again, this opulence of paying for something slightly needlessly, then that provides these evolved sort of status cues.

• 47:11Chris Williamson?

  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 half of it by the end of the evening. And it's the 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 seen, do you know Voss?

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, beautiful, beautiful packaging.

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well-designed bottle, it's very standout. Why would you need a standout 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 would be easier to have something like a Volvic, 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. What did, am I right in thinking you looked at something to do with the lid of San Pellegrino? Or did I make that up?

• 48:19Speaker 00

  We often explore, we often, as an organisation, we often talk about the lid of the San Pellegrino, the costly signal, again, the waste of the tinfoil on a San Pellegrino. Again, it's, it's just a subtle, 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 changed recently. I think they've actually taken away the tinfoil.

• 48:47Chris Williamson?

  You've got to save the turtles and the tortoises and stuff. We can't be wastefully costly.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Or in some instances, just change the, change the bottom line. You know, and it's.

• 48:57Chris Williamson?

  We could save money. Well, that's.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  If you.

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how many companies, I wonder how many companies are using the eco. I, I've said this for ages. I mean, you must have seen this if you've been travelling 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. But no, fuck you. Like, I know why you're doing this. You're not doing this because you care about the environment. You're doing this because you've been able to halve your cleaning costs over the last three years.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, there are two. And again, it's, and I've totally, totally, I've just, just been away actually. And you can see it and it was via the airport, which was just madness. I mean, we understand aviation's been hit so hard, but you sort of think about the commercial, a commercial outcome. But I think for, for, for, for San Pellegrino, I, I think it's, it can be hard on a spreadsheet to justify a useless piece of tinfoil if you don't understand what it does for you at a psychological level.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Again, it's sometimes we often say sort of the marketers wonder where sort of what 50% of your, 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 Super Bowl commercial. I suggest you're in, otherwise how do you afford it? So it's, so it's this, so Sam Pellegrino is a lovely example of a costly signal to help you, just like white gloves and 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, is of quality. Otherwise, we wouldn't be protecting it.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a lovely piece there.

• 50:48Chris Williamson?

  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 backend 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 the show 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 Jocka 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 how do you try and quantify that? Well, you don't. Does it show up on the balance sheet?

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  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, 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. Rory'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 Ogilvy, was it you guys that got brought in to reduce complaints at security in Heathrow?

• 52:17Chris Williamson?

  And you did that by putting signs 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 TRIZ mapped across onto psychology, what about experience and duration did you learn?

• 52:44Speaker 00

  Well, the first thing that I learned is what you touched on in the beginning. There 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 and a whale experiences it more slowly than we do.

• 53:05Chris Williamson?

  How do they know that? How do they know how fast a fly was?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  So what they did, so have you ever seen, have you ever seen like a TV being filmed by a camera, you know, and the camera picks up the flickers of a TV?

• 53:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  So, so I don't understand the technology behind it, but the processing speed of the camera is maybe faster than this. So you, so you see what the eyes can't essentially. So what they did was they, they put electrodes on a series of many different animals and, and showed them different speeds of flickering light. And if, if an animal could see the flicker, then that could show that their processing speed was faster, right? Because I think that's, I think that, and I don't know this as 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 a hundred percent on that, but that's, that's the way in which they explored how they could do this. And, and it sort of, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective as well, like

• 54:01Speaker 00

  it's no benefit for a whale to see the world faster than it can act upon. If it's six, 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 sort of action that. So, so having these differences in, in, in this species experience of time is, was I found a sort of 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, that can change our experience of time, sort of novel events, stress and pressure and familiarity.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  And so the more familiar, as I said, we've become earlier, sort of 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, we're, we're in a familiar environment. Whereas we're in a novel environment or under, under stress and pressure or, or in danger, our brain's looking to capture every element to help us to survive and 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.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  I mean, and people will say that the apple was on the screen longer than the cows. And it wasn't, it was the exact same time. But because your sort of 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 up train for the gazillionth time. So I found that anyway, just broadly a fascinating area. So a couple of things that we look at, one is about expectation. That be 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.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  And we feel uncomfortable, we feel stressed. Therefore, we're laying more of these of these memories, the time feels extended. When we we have an essence of expectation of what to experience, then 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. We have a four year old and a one year old. We got, we got sort of halfway and thought, jeez, 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 the homeward journey. So you might be feel like it takes a long time to get to a particular destination, but it's faster coming back.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  And one of the the justifications for this is now we have set our expectations to how long the trip is. Um. We know how far we're going to go, so it's going to be faster when we're coming home again. So so providing someone with a sense of expectation of outcome again, whether it's sixty minutes, forty minutes. And we can start to to shift that, I think. Um. In in Disneyland, they they tend to overinflate the expected times and say you wait for an hour, but it's really forty minutes. Because you're just sort of shaping expectations. Um. So expectation management is is is the first. The the the the second is basically just engaging the brain um with activity. So so one of the biggest um culprits of it's sort of experience duration is boredom.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  And again, another fascinating um 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. Uh, our our our brain and our body is telling us to do something else, you know, it's it's it's because we have less um 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 um mirrors on in an elevator that help people sort of do them to look at their makeup or do their tie. Um. That's that's a great example of just engaging 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 or while we're traveling.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Now, all the way to the extreme of the Eurostar, um that's um created a a a wonderful A I mask for kids riding between London and Paris. But as you go under the tunnel, you put the sort of the the mask on and um and you're transported to this foreign world under this under the sea. And before you know it, 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 sort of social social benefit. Um. And the last i- is looking at at the the what's known as the peak end effect, the the peak and and how it how it ends. And funnily enough, this was also brought up over the over the last week with my partner when we talked about our trip and the and the peak

• 59:08Speaker 00

  um experience, um 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 and positive endings. And that's not necessarily lifting the average experience from a six to a seven. That's fine. Like, what are some opportunities to sprinkle in some more tens? Then we can again and boost the experience without actually changing its duration.

• 59:36Chris Williamson?

  Another nightlife example for you here.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Please.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  We used to, 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 1:15 or whatever.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:52Chris Williamson?

  Uh, 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 realised is if we gave people a little, a little treat on the way out, that would maximise the end effect as well, because everybody has to leave. And some people are leaving early because they've backed off with a, 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.

• 1:00:19Chris Williamson?

  One of the issues you have in most cities is that nightclubs are not a million miles away from residential areas. And although the nightclubs 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 TikToks. 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 bucket, because the bucket just didn't feel like a, 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.

• 1:01:04Chris Williamson?

  And because you're sucking on a lollipop, you're not going to start chanting because you've got some sugar in your mouth.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  Wonderful.

• 1:01:10Chris Williamson?

  So we managed to come up with a solution for that as well.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  And that's a cracker. And again, and this is why I find, because I've, I've not explored the, the world of, of, of optimising an, an evening at a nightclub.

• 1:01:20Chris Williamson?

  You should do. This is where you're missing.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Now we should, but having, having a balloon drop, I mean, that's a, that's a, that's a wonderful, like, again, peak memorable moment.

• 1:01:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fuck, sorry. I got to give you another one. I got to give you another one. So imagine that you're in a big, a, a bigger club. We haven't done this for a while because you need a venue that's got a very high ceiling and 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 ball sometimes

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:01:50Chris Williamson?

  than what's going on on the pitch.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  In the match.

• 1:01:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so we realised that you could basically do the same thing and we created, 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 light 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

• 1:02:36Chris Williamson?

  the number of people going to the bathroom would be reduced, the number of people that were leaving would be reduced because they were mesmerised and maybe they got the opportunity to hit it and yeah, that was.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  No, it's cool. It's a wonderful canvas to consider and the more distinctive and fun again, the more memorable. Every car has a sports mode but only Tesla has ludicrous mode. I mean, it's just, there's in the book I write, it's actually from Chip and Dan Heath's, they found it for the power of moments. It's a hotel in Los Angeles. It's really a sort of a clapped up old hotel. It's called the Magic Castle Hotel, but it ranks.

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  I've been there.

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  Have you been to the Magic Castle Hotel?

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  I managed to sneak myself an invite a few years ago.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Perfect. And so you'll know better than me then. What they have is, tell us, what's the most memorable feature of the Magic Castle Hotel?

• 1:03:29Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:48Chris Williamson?

  Upon going in. Maybe this is the owl. I can't remember. There's a thing that you can go and 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, that was pretty insane. I do. It's just loads of stuff. I ended up getting pretty, pretty drunk that night. So my, my memory, my memory as I get further into the evening becomes more hazy. But yeah, it was, it was spectacular.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  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 hook or should I you in it's, it's, you're thinking about, you're thinking about the whispering owl, the, the, the, the strange piano. There's a, apparently there's a button beside the pool that you're, there's a, 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, a waiter with a, with a sort of a silver platter will bring you a free popsicle to the pool. So it's, again, it's just adding these moments of distinctiveness and, and, and that boosts memorability. And it's, it's not, again, every touch point from six to seven. It's finding these things that, that, that create more traction. Velcro for the brain.

• 1:05:00Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there's another one. It says the same from Virgin Atlantic on the, on the bottom of their salt and pepper. It says stolen from Virgin Atlantic. And it's, it's wonderful start. And, and, and it's, it's, and this is where I say, there's sort of similar examples. You can have a popsicle hotline at the, at the, at the Magic Castle Hotel in LA. There's Bob Bob Rickards in Soho in London that has a press for champagne button. It's really simple kind of concepts, but they just, again, they, they, they'd spark the brain. They capture more memories, you know, and therefore they can start to shape the, the memory of the experience rather than the, the, the, the actual experience. Because we navigate by the memory of it, not the, the, the time itself. I mean, that's

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  fleeting. But how we recall it is, is, is more powerful. Last thing, your lollipop solution. There's another piece of innovation that you might have found that also you reduced fights. Um. There's evidence around sugar consumption and aggression, particularly on alcohol. I mean, there's a, there's a, um, a group of volunteers in, in Sydney called the Red Frog Brigade. And they walk around the nightclubs handing out red frogs just to sort of boost glucose.

• 1:06:25Chris Williamson?

  What's a red frog?

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Red frog. Oh, so maybe that's it. It's a lolly. So it's a, maybe it's an Australia, a classic Australian. It's like a, like a lolly. But again, having a bit of sugar doesn't just sort of stop the, stop people from shouting. It probably actually stops people from, from being aggressive. And maybe they're both connected anyway, because you're not yelling abuse at someone, because you're sacking on a chopper chap.

• 1:06:45Chris Williamson?

  Sam Tatum, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do, where should they go?

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  Uh, look at me on, on, on LinkedIn, on, on Twitter, I think it's S underscore Tatum, T A T A M. Uh, if you're interested, check out the book Evolutionary Ideas on Amazon, all good booksellers. Um, it's been a, a labor of love and, and really fun to sort of talk through some of the elements of it. I've really enjoyed this conversation, mate. Thank you.

• 1:07:10Chris Williamson?

  Fun. I appreciate you. Cheers, mate.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

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