How Marketing Reshapes Our Brains | Prince Ghuman & Matt Johnson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 180

Matt Johnson PhD is a Neuroscientist and Prince Ghuman is a Neuro-Marketer. Combining the insights of Neuroscience & Consumer Psychology can help us to understand our own behaviour and how marketing affects us in unique and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Expect to learn why our brains don't experience reality directly, how you can make dog food taste like pate, the role of impulse in decision making, what neuroscience's definition of surprise is, how pleasure & pain affect our drive to buy and much more... Sponsor: Shop Eleiko’s full range at https://www.shop.eleiko.com (enter code MW15 for 15% off everything) Extra Stuff: Buy Blindsight - https://amzn.to/2AxBWAG Follow Prince & Matt on Twitter - https://twitter.com/pop_neuro Check out Prince & Matt's Website - https://www.popneuro.com/ Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #marketing #behaviour #psychology - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So really, it's trying to use the insights from neuroscience to better accomplish the classic goals of marketing. And so part of that is understanding the general principles about the brain and how the brain takes in information, how the brain learns, the brain has experiences, remembers, makes decisions, and how to utilize the general principles which navigate that space to better accomplish marketing goals. And then secondly, it's really about trying to collect as much neuroscientific data as possible to address very specific marketing questions. So if you're comparing which trailer to use, if you're marketing for a movie, for example, you can do a classic consumer group, you ask people, there's lots of evidence showing that people's explicit responses are very different from what the brain says and what

• 0:44Speaker 00

  they will do later on, and a much better cue for that can be a direct measure of actual neural responses. So that's sort of the other half of neuro-marketing is actually collecting raw neuroscientific data.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  Gentlemen, welcome to the show. How are you?

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Good.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Very good indeed. This book, This Blind Sight, that I have in my hands, is one of the coolest things that I've read in absolutely ages. I get sent tons and tons of books, and this is like softcore porn to me and also to the listeners today, I'm sure as well, fans of Richard Shotten, Rory Sutherland, and some of the other fantastic guests that we've had on today. I think you should have your notepads out because this is going to be a real special one. So first off, gents, congrats on the book. Really good.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, Chris. Really appreciate that.

• 1:36Chris Williamson?

  How long were you working on it?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Two and a half, two and a half years, roughly. I mean, it's still not out yet, so I would say we could even stretch it to three. We were working on it for a long time. I think how the book came about is an interesting story as well.

• 1:51Chris Williamson?

  Tell us, I want to know.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Uh, Matt, tell your side. His is really funny.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so, so, I mean, the, the book really is, is the melding of these two worlds, right? So I come from academic neuroscience. My first, I was in, I graduated from, from 25th grade when I, I've stopped being in school. Finally, I spent most of my lives in, in labs and, and libraries. Um, and I was really just driven by a curiosity. I really wanted to understand how the brain works, why we, we do the things we do, what sort of makes us tick. And, and it was really just driven by a pure curiosity, really irrespective of any sort of application. And, and for me, that moment was, was really distilled when I finished my PhD thesis. Uh, what you do is you have your, your actual physical thesis. It's a, it's a bounded document, a bounded book. It's, it's fat, it's sort of pages.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  And there's a specific library where all the PhD pieces go. And when I finished my PhD thesis, you're giving the bound a book and you put in library and I put a $50 bill in that thesis. And I guarantee you that money is still there today.

• 2:54Chris Williamson?

  What was the title?

• 2:56Speaker 00

  Oh geez, the title was, uh, "The Neurobasis of Language Learning in Autism: Investigations with Behavioral and Neuroimaging Studies."

• 3:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, I've, I've heard of, I've heard of sexier thesis titles.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  So that, you know, that was Matt's journey, right? So while he was in labs and libraries, like you put it, um, I graduated, um, and I was fortunate enough to try to start and fail at my own first company while in my undergrad. And after that, I was the first marketer brought on to a startup. So I was the other way around. I was what I would call a pop psych nerd, right? So I would read a lot of pop psychology books from back in the day. Wisdom of Crowds, uh, Think Fast and Slow, all those books that we now, you know, but they're still pop psych, they're not research. And I was lucky enough to be at a leadership position early on, record test, all that stuff. So I read about neural coupling and

• 3:55Speaker 02

  I would go change my, my, uh, my website and test neural coupling, right? So having done that early on, I tried to read some of these researches that Matt and other people like Matt wrote. And there's only so much my brain can do after a while. I'm like, you know, I simply don't possess. I'm a mortal and there's only so many abstracts you can read before you're just as a marketer, you're like, just give me, just give me the gist of it.

• 4:18Chris Williamson?

  What do I need to do?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. And yeah, I applied it to my own life, self dev, you know, I grew a lot out of it because it's psychology, it applies to so many things. So after doing that for about 10, 12 years, coincidentally, Matt and I met, uh, and we started teaching at Hope International University. He was the assistant dean and I was a professor brought on and we started to teach neuro marketing class together and the class turned into an idea for a textbook. And then we decided we don't want to write a textbook just for marketers, we want to write this book for consumers. And the last piece about me is, um, I, I'm a consumer like everyone else listening, like you, Chris, like Matt, I like buying cool things and, and, and using them and making them part of my life. Um, but recently there's like this weird divide between marketers and consumers.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  So a lot of this book is written for consumers so they can understand what happens when marketing and brain mix, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, because I, I, I think we can have better products and enjoy them guilt free as consumers and as marketers. We're just, we're just not there yet. There's like this weird level of distrust. So I'm hoping, uh, this book is sort of one way of doing that on top of combining Matt's lab knowledge and my marketing application knowledge. And hopefully, hopefully you got a bit of that when you read the book.

• 5:36Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Yeah, I definitely did. So neuro marketing, that's the, that's the term neuroscience meets marketing.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:46Chris Williamson?

  Cool. So how the brain works and then how you can apply that to effectively market products within the marketplace?

• 5:53Speaker 02

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

• 6:16Speaker 00

  And then secondly, it's really about trying to collect as much neuroscientific data as possible to address very specific marketing questions. So if you're comparing which trailer to use, if you're marketing for a movie, for example, you can do a classic sort of consumer group, you ask people. There's lots of evidence showing that people's explicit responses are very different from what the brain says and what they will do later on, and a much better cue for that can be a direct measure of actual neural responses. So that's sort of the other half of neuro marketing is actually collecting raw neuroscientific data.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  And Chris, I think you'll like the story, just to piggyback off of what Matt just said. This is a real life example. Cheetos, they did a commercial and they put in focus groups, and this is a marketing aspect, right? You put all these people in focus groups, you make them watch the commercial, and you ask, hey, what do you think of the commercial? Did you like it? Did you not like it? And they ask you all these qualitative questions. In this case, the commercial was considered too mean, flat out, way too mean. And then they hired on a different firm who put people in FMRI, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machines, put them in there, asked the same questions. And when they were asked the questions in the machine, a part of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, which is your pleasure center, lit up.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  But when they asked the questions outside of the machine, similar response, too mean. So what was originally going to be a reason to no longer publish the commercials, they went ahead and did it anyways, and they were a hit. So you can go YouTube these right now. They're the underground Cheetos commercials where like this lady is doing her laundry in a laundromat, and this other lady just takes all of her clothes out and dumps them, right? She goes, other people are waiting for the laundry too. And after that, the chest of the cheeto comes in, she goes, those are her whites. You know what to do. And then she grabs a cheeto, throws it in there and ruins her whites. And it's like that. Like you can see in the focus group, it's like it's too mean. Either either us as people in the focus group aren't ready to admit to ourselves that we enjoy a little bit of mayhem.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Or we genuinely don't, but out of your brain, brain doesn't lie, right? And if you can look into their brain, you can be able to see that pleasure is going off. So they went ahead with it and they got massive adoption. This is before the days of virality on YouTube and Instagram. But nonetheless, that's a perfect example of how what's marketing versus what's neuromarketing and how you can get just cool insights out of that.

• 8:40Chris Williamson?

  Amazing example of that is what happened with the exit polls in Trump's election versus the actual numbers. You know, like that was more, that was obviously more cognizant. People were aware of the fact that they were lying. It wasn't as if their brain had voted one way and they came out and thought it had voted another way. Yeah, exactly. It was just like a shock thing and their hand slipped or something. So yeah, let's get into the meat of it. What does eating the menu mean?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Ooh, Matt, can I start and then you can you can go into.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Eating the menu was going to be the original title of the book. We loved it so much because we love Alan Watts. There's two things Matt and I love, no matter what. It's Kanye and Alan Watts as a musician, as a musician. So don't roast us for that. And Alan Watts has this amazing quote, "We don't just eat the food, we eat the menu." And we opened the book with mental models and Matt will go go ham on telling you about mental models. But essentially, before you even put that first bite of spaghetti in your mouth, all these other things have had a massive impact on actually impacting the taste of the food. And that was for us a great way to open the book. Obviously it changed the title, but yeah, Matt, tell us, tell us about mental models.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think this for me is one of the most interesting things about consumer neuroscience generally is really this observation that we've known in perceptual neuroscience for decades now, which is that we don't experience the world directly. We don't really take in objective reality in, we take in our brain's mental model. So we're taking in information through our eyes, through our ears, through our senses. And what we ultimately perceive in terms of our own internal subjective experience is our brain's best guess at what all of these senses are combining to really conjure up in terms of our own internal experience. We don't experience reality directly, we experience our brain's mental model. So there's this fundamental gap between our own subjectivity

• 10:40Speaker 00

  and objectivity. We talk about this in the book, this gap really makes marketing magical. So if we just experience the world the way it objectively is, we're rational creatures, we go about and we're just taking in reality objectively, and there's no need for cool brands and really interesting ways of storytelling and marketing. This gap really is the opportunity for marketers to create our reality. And we see some really, really interesting examples of that, especially within food, which was one of the reasons why we wanted to name the book this, because it really does fundamentally shape our auditory experience.

• 11:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. There's a wonderful passage in the book that I'm going to read now for the people that are listening. And this is about mental models. Remembering that the two mental models episodes I've done with George McGill are the first and second best played ever on Modern Wisdom. And yet, what we, the description we use of mental models was from much more of a self-development way. What George said was, if you think of your brain as an iPhone, then mental models are the apps that you plug into the OS to give you different bits of functionality. So that was from a thinking tools perspective, but your approach for mental models also makes sense. The quote is, "Our brains don't experience reality directly. Instead, they construct a model

• 11:56Chris Williamson?

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

• 12:41Chris Williamson?

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

• 13:03Chris Williamson?

  It's like some Matrix shit.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  I know it's, man, Chris, Chris, you're like, you're like in our brains. Our original intro for the book was all written around the Matrix scene. And then we realized we're too old. We realized not everyone has seen The Matrix, so we decided to ironically unplug that.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  No, you're absolutely right. It really is. And you know, part of it is going to creep the crap out of you. Like it's going to creep you out. And then after a while, you come to realize that, okay, you walk into an Apple store, you think, yes, of course it's an Apple store. It's a really well-designed store that thought about the layout and the reducing friction. Done. Sure. But then you look at it from the perspective of mental models. Man, before you even look at the first product, the fact that you're walking in, it's already impacting your sense of Apple, right? So you are already getting, your brain's getting data points, right? Immediately as you walk in. So in some ways, creating that experience for you actually adds to your pleasure of said products, right?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Just like, it's not as obvious as taste. That's why we use the concept of taste early on because the taste, our tastes are so easily impressionable. But brands are creating this for us. And sometimes it creeps you out because you think it's manipulation. And sometimes it actually genuinely adds value to your mental model of whatever's being sold. Right? There's the example of, you know, there's a test that took a bunch of golfers and had them go smack some golf, golf balls around. And one group got the golf.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Got the, I almost said rackets. As you can see, I play golf clubs. Golf clubs with the Nike logo and one without. And of course, Nike logo hit further. So whatever the mental model was actually had a physical impact. A subjective aspect had an objective impact on performance.

• 14:56Chris Williamson?

  And it was the same, the same golf club, just one had a Nike tick on.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly.

• 15:01Chris Williamson?

  Can you tell us the pate and dog food study?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I'll let Matt tell.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the reasons why we focused on this in the first chapter is that it really allows you to see just how deep this mental modeling goes because as Prince mentioned, our tastes are very, very impressionable. Vision is by far our strongest taste. On the other side of the spectrum, tastes are gustatory sensations really are weakest. And so they did this interesting study a few years ago where they had four types of really, really, really fancy pate. So they had duck pate, they had goose pate. They got these things from the distributors which actually supply Michelin star restaurants in Manhattan.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  And then for the fifth dish, they had dog food. And the actual dishes were prepared identically. So you put it in a blender and you make it a really, really nice visual consistency. You put a nice little garnish with some crackers, you serve it on a really, really nice plate. You have a waiter come by with a white glove and serve it to you and speak in a sophisticated accent. And they told people, all right, four of these are really, really, really delicious pate. The other fifth one, not gonna tell you which one, but that's dog food. Can you guess which one's dog food? And nobody could. It was exactly synonymous with the taste of these really, really fancy Michelin star rated duck pate and goose pate.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  It's really the power of the visuals and the power of all of these extra gustatory forces which shaped our reality to such an extent where we can't, we can't tell the difference between actually the taste of dog food and something we pay $65 for at Thomas Keller's restaurant in New York.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  I mean. I wouldn't be having any of the pate because I think pate is pate is just shite food. It's just ba- it's baby food, reconstitute baby food. So some people might be thinking, well, that sounds all well and good, but pate is pate and you've just got some schmoes off the street. But there was a similar study done with sommeliers as well, right? And that one was had it ratcheted up, the difficulty ratcheted up a little bit.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah, so wine, for whatever reason, is just such a fun testing ground for neuro marketers.

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  It's because it's full of twats, Matt. That's why it's because it's full of knobs.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  And now we have the, and now we have the science to prove it.

• 17:32Chris Williamson?

  We can back it up. You've got an FMRI that categorically says that wine is for knobs. Yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, absolutely. So there's, there's all these interesting studies, even without the FMRI, they'll say, if I just give you this bottle of wine and I've, I've taken the actual label off and I've put a fake label on that says it's from a really, really fancy winery in France, or it has a lot of syllables, you'll actually taste the same wine and report enjoying it more if you, one, think it's expensive. So it's the same, same exact wine and you, you tell somebody it's expensive versus cheap, same exact wine, same exact actual sensation happening at the tongue, you actually experience the more expensive one better. You report that you like it better, you want it more often. More syllables on the label, same exact wine, but you, you enjoy that more.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  If you're told it's from Northern California and not Northern Dakota, then you actually experience it to be more pleasurable. All of these crazy factors that have nothing to do with taste actually do influence people's direct mental models of the wine. And I think the real knockdown experiment there that you mentioned is done actually with sommeliers, who if anybody can tell the difference between a real wine and, and a fake wine, this is, you know, all of the, you know, the noobs that are just, you know, drinking wine and two buck chuck and all the 22 year olds partying with, with just trying to get drunk off wine, the sommeliers should be a step above them. But studies have shown that they actually are prone to these same effects.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  And there was a study actually done in France where they took white wine and red wine. And the white wine, they actually just put some red food coloring into it. And they gave it to sommeliers. And when sommeliers, people that are professionally trained, that get paid a six-figure salary for being wine experts, when they tasted this white wine with red food coloring, they actually reported that it had tastes like berries and kind of a currant flavor and a bit of nutmeg. All things that were in line with the color of the wine, but had nothing to do with the actual taste that was hitting their tongues. So yeah, mental models, these things run very, very, very deep. And even the best of us, the sommeliers, are still prone to them.

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Yeah. I mean, there's a cool Netflix documentary. I think it might be called like Somms or something. And have you seen that, Matt?

• 19:47Speaker 00

  I saw that. Yeah.

• 19:48Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it is so bad. I don't even know if it's still on Netflix. If it, go and have a little search, the people that are listening at home, go and have a check out. It's really cool. Like the training that those guys go through is ruthless. It's like, it's like the Tour de France, but for wine. And they're like, oh, I know it's from the northern slopes of the, like Milan province in Spain or the whatever, whatever. Like, so the fact that they've, the fact they've been able to be fooled is pretty impressive.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  It is. I can, I can say from firsthand experience, as I am such a knob, I studied to be a sommelier.

• 20:24Chris Williamson?

  No way. Oh, fuck. Friends, I'm so sorry. I'm so, our relationship, I'm on the worst way.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Matt, the best part was, you know, Matt was waiting. He's like, I can't wait for.

• 20:36Chris Williamson?

  Chris is slowly, slowly putting his foot in it.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  And Somms, Somms is a great documentary, whether, whether you believe in sommeliers or not. Shout out to my buddy Ron Bonifacio, who started the restaurant that's in Somms quite a bit. But to go back to what we were saying, look. You're right. Wine is a great place to study this because i- in my, in my opinion, you've got to get a base level deliciousness for wine. And after that, it's the subjective experience, right? Um, but no, in college, we did that. We brown bagged wine as broke college students and then we drank them. So we could not tell which grape it was. And yes, of course, lo and behold, over time we're able to tell, right? But I am not at the level as at the documentary that you're talking. I can't tell you that it's from the north, northern part of Italy, vintage 2001, not 2000. Cause those year, the grapes were absolute piss. No, I can't.

• 21:24Chris Williamson?

  Crazy.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  But to go to bring back to, uh, you know, I'm not, I don't discriminate. I like all my libations equally. Um, for beer though, if you've gone to a proper beer bar, you buy a Pilsner, what kind of glass does it come in?

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  Tall one?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  A tall Pilsner glass, like the tall, skinny, slender Pilsner glass.

• 21:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  You buy a Belgian, what kind of glass does it come in? It comes in a Belgian snifter, right? And then you, you know, whatever that might be. So whether we, you know, it's kind of fun to, to play tribalism right now, right? Beer versus wine drinkers, but ultimately beer drinkers, you go to a beer bar that actually gives you proper glass based on the beer you're buying. That is 100% influencing your mental model of that beer before you have to ever take your first sip. Pilsner glasses for Pilsners, sniffers for, uh, whatever they might be, um, uh, for, for quads and whatever beers you want to get into. That's 100% that. And then, you know, and we haven't even gotten into, again, we're not tasting, uh, the beer. We're tasting the menu, or in this case, the glass before we actually put the beer in our face. It's crazy.

• 22:30Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  So now for that, knobs are not limited to wine.

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  Hey, I, I have, I have a number of friends that are knobs who only drink beer. So yeah, it crosses, it crosses all, all, uh, alcoholic drinks. So, uh, next thing, how do brands use anchors to get our attention?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great. Matt, you want to explain the foundation of anchors? And then I can, I can give, I can give some examples.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. So one key to this mental modeling process is we, we can't express words objectively as we, we talked about it. So we always look for some sort of reference point. We, we deal with all these, these sort of nebulous signals coming to us. We need some sort of reference point to be able to, to anchor our understanding. Uh, so you, you, there, there's been interesting studies done with, uh, this was back to Kahneman and Tversky back in the late eighties, where they'll have people spin a, a wheel. They'll spin a wheel. It's a perfectly random process and they'll ask them these really, really, really difficult questions, which they have no idea about. So I'll ask them, well, how many, uh, African countries are in, uh, the United Nations? Uh, how many Grammys did,

• 23:37Speaker 00

  uh, somebody of New Zealand descent win? Uh, you know, all these random questions, they have no idea. And what was interesting is this random wheel that just brought up a random number, uh, this actually influenced their estimation. So if they spun this wheel and it was random, it was transparently random and it came up as 70, they would guess, well, 70% of African nations are in the EU. Or if they, they spun the wheel and it's three, they say, well, you know, two or three New Zealanders probably, you know, came to the Grammys. And it was perfectly random. They knew they were random. It was transparently the most random process possible. Uh, but these served as anchors. You have this, this, uh, this really, really, uh, nebulous problem space. We don't have anything to, to hold

• 24:20Speaker 00

  on to and you seek some sort of reference point to understand this. Um, so this influences our, our judgment and decision making, especially in uncertainty. And it really influences our attention as well. This is somebody that, uh, that brands, uh, use really in, in clever ways.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I'll, and I'll give you some examples of how they use them. So I'll give you, I'll give you one that's really easy for all of us to get and you'll, we'll still fall for it. MSRP's, right? You walk into a store, there's an MSRP and it's crossed out and for some reason that's anchored your value, your, your perception of the value of that product. Uh, the, I'll tell the story quickly and I'll, I'll move on because I didn't want to go into the brand aspect of it too. This is more pricing, uh, and marketing strategy behind pricing. JCPenney, one of the largest and one of the oldest department stores in the States, they, over ninety-eight percent of their revenue came from sale items. What does that tell you? Translation, shit is always on sale, right? Right? Seriously. So you walk into JCPenney's, they always have a sale going on. And JCPenney wanted to change things up.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  They brought on the head of retail for Apple, came on. And I have so much respect for this dude because he said, "We're no longer going to practice vanity pricing. Let's get rid of the fake MSRP and let's drop the pricing even beyond that." So consumers objectively are getting a better deal and much more transparent way to communicate. What do you think happened in the first quarter that they did that?

• 25:42Chris Williamson?

  Sales went down.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Sales, yeah, yeah, yeah. So after two quarters of trying it, they went back to the old way of doing it. And guess what happened? Sales went back up. We love our anchors, okay? Our brains are like sailboats. We're constantly looking for places to anchor. Right? So when we, the less we know, the more we're perceptible to anchoring. So that's one. The other one is, and Matt can go into it a little bit more, but I want to kind of tease this. Anchoring is also how attention works. To grab your attention, I have to anchor something against what, I have to pick something that goes against the anchor. I have to zig when everything else is zagging, right? So you walk up to a refrigerator packed full of water bottles and you're thirsty and you're,

• 26:28Speaker 02

  you don't care if it's a dollar or five dollars to buy this water bottle. You just want to pick a water bottle and you're a brand agnostic. Guess where you're gonna go, your attention's gonna go towards? The anchor, the visual anchor is established by all these similar looking plastic crappy bottles. And you see one bottle in a cardboard box, that's gonna drive your attention. And if that's not there, then the Voss water made, looks, basically looks like a cologne bottle, right? That's gonna grab your attention. Although we didn't say attention, but anchoring does blow into attention. And that's one of the things where I think this is a good point because Chris, we haven't really jumped into BE, right? And I know your audience loves BE, Matt and I love BE. BE has been sort of the crack that gets us into this neuromarketing psych biases and heuristics.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  That world that you get pulled into, whether it's for self-help, for me, it was marketing. So I think, I think this would be a good point, Matt, to talk about how we, Matt and I love BE. Okay, we have been convinced at just how freakishly irrational humans are. Matt knows it way more personally than I do because he's a freaking neuroscientist and I've seen it. And I've, and I've read all the books we all have, Dan Ariely. I, I want to meet him and give him a hug when I see him because it totally, totally changed up how I thought about life, not just marketing. So neuromarketing, to go back to your initial question, right? Yes, it's neuroscience and marketing, but Matt and I see BE as a very important branch to a field of this stuff.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Right? BE is a study of irrationality and, and they've already proven many times over, we are super irrational. We like that, we like that, that's raising the conversation about what's happening to your brain in the real world. Matt and I love it, we want to take this momentum and go talk about all the other things. Now that you're into BE, let's, let's explore where this go, you know, let's, the proverbial rabbit hole, right? Let's see, there's much more to this than irrationality and we want to break that down. Only one of the chapters in the book, in our book is really about BE. The rest of the chapters are stuff that we're hopefully hoping goes beyond BE, right? So if you love BE, I think you'll love the book, but you'll also go, okay, one or two chapters, touch on BE and then to move on. And even anchors, anchors are classic BE.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  We take anchors and then we use anchors to truly get you to understand the psychology of attention. So we can get into that if you want, if you want, if you want to learn a little bit more about attention.

• 28:44Chris Williamson?

  I get it, throw something at us, Matt.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, one thing in terms of our attention is that it's fundamentally driven by novelty. It's fundamentally driven by new things. So we tend to habituate to constants. Constance aren't super important to us from an evolutionary standpoint. If something's been there and hasn't changed and hasn't hurt us for a while, we're gonna tend to sort of ignore it's gonna float into the background. And so there's this process where new things become the background. This is a process of habituation. It's something with our, it's a fact of our attention, how we perceive the world and take in information and attend to it consciously. And it's also, and we'll probably talk about this a bit later,

• 29:31Speaker 00

  it's also how we perceive our own pleasure and our own happiness is navigated by this as well. So what's interesting is in the consumer world, there's all these constants. You have items which were new at some point. Everybody copies it, it becomes sort of the new background. So Prince, you wanna give an example of the, how they do that in the automotive industry?

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when I say imagine a sports car, what colors come to your mind?

• 30:00Chris Williamson?

  Red.

• 30:02Speaker 02

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

• 30:36Speaker 02

  And, you know, I mean, we can give marketing examples all day, but let's take a pause for how this anchoring thing plays out in something I would argue is a universal language. Humor, right? That misdirection that leads to a punchline, that part of humor. Man, Matt and I...

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Really big fans of Anthony Jeselnik. We only talk about it a little bit in the book because his jokes are way too inappropriate.

• 31:02Chris Williamson?

  I was laughing my head off when I was reading those. So I don't know. It's okay if you don't want to say it, but it's my show. I'm gonna say whatever the fuck I want. So keep on telling us about attention. I'm gonna find these jokes.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  So attention. So attention is anchored to anchors. And the example that Chris is about to tell you is of a guy named Anthony Jeselnik. And you may not like his brand of humor, but consider him a master of surprise. He constantly creates an anchor for you as a storyteller, and then he breaks that expectation in humorous and oftentimes offensive ways.

• 31:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So here's three jokes for you listeners. My dad was amazing. He raised five boys all by himself without the rest of us knowing.

• 32:01Chris Williamson?

  We just found out my little brother has a peanut allergy, which is very serious, I know. But still, I feel like my parents are totally overreacting. They caught me eating a tiny little bag of airline peanuts and they kicked me out of his funeral.

• 32:16Chris Williamson?

  The last one's the best. The last one's the best one by far. I've got a kid in Africa that I feed, that I clothe, that I school, that I inoculate for 75 cents a day, which is practically nothing compared to what it cost me to send him there.

• 32:34Chris Williamson?

  Those were so good. So I absolutely loved that. It was this term that you guys came up with that was called violation of expectation. And that is the neuroscience definition of surprise. I'm gonna accuse people of violating my expectation all the time now. I absolutely adore that phrase.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Matt, yeah, tell them about violation of expectation.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, I mean, it just, just, uh, you know, as, as humans, we're, we're naturally uh, forward projecting creatures, right? So we're always trying to predict what's gonna happen next. Uh, if we weren't able to predict people's behavior, we, we, you know, probably wouldn't be alive for, for very long. We always have to stay, you know, within a reasonable, uh, future where we're away from the present, always trying to predict things. And so in our unconscious state, we're, we're trying to make predictions and these predictions sort of play out for us internally. And then if what actually happens is, is a major deviation from that, uh, it obviously leads us to be surprised. And that's what we mean by, by violation of expectation. And so, uh, when it comes to neuroscience, there's lots of ways to study.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  So it's a study in the classic oddball paradigm where you give, uh, people a, a, uh, stimulus and it's in a certain location and they become, uh, attentive to looking at that certain location. And then you give them it at a completely different location. You get to understand sort of the, if you do this with a prior, you get to understand the neural basis for, for what's this sort of redirection. And so when this violation of expectation happens, you are having to, to recapitulate yourself and you form a new hypothesis based on that. Um, but the major thing in terms of consumer behavior is it drives your attention. So whatever you've become accustomed to, whatever your sort of status quo is, if you have a huge violation from that and what you've come to expect from that status quo, it's gonna drive your attention.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  And the biggest example of that was Cadbury, Cadbury UK, uh, back in 2006. So Cadbury UK, classic, uh, F and B brand and they had, uh, suffered, uh, some, some down revenue for a few years with a salmonella outbreak and like, oh my God, we have to do something really, really, really amazing to get everybody to pay attention to us again. And probably the, the biggest thing they could possibly ever have done is they had a commercial, and this is Cadbury mine, this is a very classic British brand, and they had a gorilla playing, uh, in the air the night. And that was a commercial.

• 35:04Chris Williamson?

  Phil Collins, baby. What, what an absolute banging tune. What a banging tune.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Oh man.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  And so what what's interesting is that like, yeah, okay, you listen to Phil Collins on, you know, any given evening, there's no violation of expectation. But if you get it from Cadbury through a gorilla suit, you have a huge violation of expectation. So it's not so much the actual stimulus itself, but what has been preceding that? Because that is what's going to drive your expectation. And the the final point about Cadbury, which is interesting, is they're like, oh, my God, this worked amazing. Let's go back to the same well. And it doesn't work. So they did this a very similar ad about six months later, like, all right, let's ride this this gorilla Phil Collins thing. And of course, everyone was everyone saw it coming.

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  I remember, yeah. I even I even remember when they brought that. Wasn't it something? Wasn't the gorilla doing something else this time?

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, something with an airplane or yes, it was it was the same theme, but it was something slightly different. But they didn't. Yeah, they didn't zag quite as as, you know, as as much as they should. But everybody saw it coming because it was, you know, fool me once, you can't fool me twice sort of thing. So yeah, it's just really interesting how these expectations get established. And then, you know, once you, once you violate people's expectation, you really can't do it again until they build a new expectation.

• 36:20Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh. Yeah, I suppose also there there's too much randomness. You know, if you get known as like the random brand, that's still an expectation, right? The expectation is randomness. So you might actually be best off just doing like a really boring advert. You know, just get like the guy, guy in the the shirt with no tie and like just the suit jacket on talking about your insurance premiums or whatever. So let's talk about experience and memory. I know you guys are big into memory. I know this is a part of the book that you dedicated a lot of time and research to. So let's talk about memory.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Let's do it. Can I? I just want to open with, all right, pretend like you didn't read the book. Chris, how would you define memory?

• 37:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, God, can I recall something?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Perfect. Yeah, perfect. Uh, Matt, go for it. I think I think it's a good if you start off and I'll jump in.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so first memory is is many, many things. So one of the things that you, you know, learn in your first day of psych one on one is you have this big chart and there's explicit memory, there's implicit memory, there's procedural memory, there's statistical learning, there's all these things. We're gonna sort of have one term that collapsed across all of these. It's really our brains attempt at connecting us to the past. And attempt is is really the keyword.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Uh, so we feel, and it's it's very strange as well, because it's it's one of those areas where what we think of in terms of our own experiences and memories is actually very, very different from the way it actually works. We actually have a very poor intuition for how we record experiences and how we recall them later. So what it feels like is we're having an experience, we're having experience right now, we have the record button on internally. Our brain clicks that and we're just recording, we're taking in everything in. And then we're trying to recall this memory later, we feel like we're playing the rewind button. But it turns out that neither of those are true. So when we're having an experience, we're only taking in some of the information. So some information is is weighted more heavily than others.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  So our our brains prioritize certain pieces of information over others in terms of what's likely to be remembered later. So you probably remember your first kiss, but you probably don't remember first time you did taxes, right? So both of these things were experiences, you had your your record button on, but only one is going to come to mind readily. So emotion plays a really, really huge role in making it more or less likely that this certain experience is gonna be remembered later. And then you look at the recall of memory, uh, and that is just an incredibly reconstructive process. So the types of memories will be different that come to mind when we're in a certain sort of context. So if we are, we're drinking beer right now instead of wine, for example, probably all of our beer memories will will come back.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  If we're having champagne, we'll probably think of of all the associations we've had with champagne and celebration, this and that. So everything is context dependent as well. So uh, memory is fascinating for this, this major chasm between what we feel like is memory and our memories and what memory actually is in terms of of the science.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I want to take a minute to connect memory back to attention. I know we bridged over to memory. One of the ways that you can encode a memory deeper is actually breaking the violation of expectation. Right, so there's many different psychological experiences that'll help kind of bury that memory deeper. One of those is breaking expectation. And we, I think Matt and I spoke to, I think her name was Debbie Lilly. She did the events for Oprah. She literally, she did the you get a car, you get a car, you get a car. She's the mastermind behind that. Yeah, I mean, we spoke to her for the book. And what's brilliant about Debbie is she's doing all these things intuitively.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Right, so she, you know, she's not putting this violation of expectation and memory hacking, if you will, or experiential marketing sort of framework. She just has been doing this so long, she's so good at it that she did it completely by nature. But think about violation of expectation now, memory, right? You're sitting in this audience, you're lucky enough to get seats to go see Oprah live. And all of a sudden, you know, Oprah gives away gifts, iPhones, what have you. And all of a sudden, boom, violation of expectation. Piece by piece, this person won a car. So everyone's stoked. All these people who got pulled out of the audience earlier, they got a car. Okay, oh my God, can't believe it. They've never given away a car on TV before. This is not Price is Right, my brain is blown out. And then all of a sudden, you find out, oh wait, we have another surprise for you. Uh oh, what is it?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  And then you get a car, you get, and then it's just like layers and layers of violations. Expectations being violated. And no, and then when Matt now look at it, no wonder why that is the most memorable Oprah moment. Right, it is, it was 10 out of 10 on violation, violating our expectations repeatedly. And that's what encoded that memory so deeply in pop culture. Right? Yeah, I mean, that's, it's, it's great. But experiential marketing, so if we want to go back to brands, this is where the flirtation happens. Right, in some ways, when we're creating like pop-up restaurants or pop-up brand experiences, super hot right now, right? It's, it's, it's because they encode a deeper memory of you.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  You walk past an Adidas store for the 50th time in last year, it doesn't even register. Right, but then if you walk past the park that you usually go to to go work out and then there's a shoebox the size of your apartment complex and it's looks like the Adidas shoebox and you go in there and guess what they're selling Stan Smith's and Superstars and then it's gone the week after. What do they do? They created a memory by violating your expectation of a normal commute. And that's something that it's it's that like I said flirtation is a good way because I want to be flirted as a consumer in those ways, you know, and then brands want to do it because yes, of course, like Matt said, it it buries that memory in there. What's really creepy about memory, though, like to to go back to what

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Matt said, you know, it's like hitting record and hitting play and we couldn't be further from the truth, is what happens further down the line, you know, what we call in the book memory remixed is really kind of creepy. Matt, you want to tell them about what happens to memory over time? Because I think that I think I think it's really, I think the way you're going to put it is going to be really creepy.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Memory over time?

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, recall of memory and how how accurate, so to speak, recall of memory can and cannot be.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in in terms of of memory, so it is just this incredibly reconstructive process. We don't remember things as they objectively happened or even as we actually experienced them. So there's this subfield of of memory research called false memories, where we really see just how suggestible and how creative these memories are remixed. And this is pioneered by Elizabeth Loftus down at UC Irvine. So bring somebody into the lab and she'll say that she got a an email from her parents and the email said, oh, I was just, you know, I was the email was detailing this this amazing trip that you took with your family to the circus and there was, you know, beautiful blue sky and there was clouds and you really, really, really wanted the popcorn, but your dad wouldn't

• 43:24Speaker 00

  let you get the park. Remember that? And she's sort of just, you know, prodding them and and so painting this picture for them. And after a while and she's become adept at this her herself, she'll actually be able to implant a memory of this experience that never actually happened. And once this memory is implanted, it is as realistic as any of our actual memories of things that actually happened to us. And similar effects have actually recently shown with virtual reality as well, where you'll bring, and this was done 10 years ago, when virtual reality was not as potent and as realistic as it is today, this is done down at Stanford. And what they do is they bring children to the lab and they have them go on a dolphin diving trip, where they're swimming with dolphins, and it's

• 44:08Speaker 00

  very kind of cool surreal experience, all in just virtual reality. Then they brought the children back, I think it was two months later, and they filled a questionnaire, and part of this questionnaire had to do with this dolphin experience. And it turns out about half the children actually misremembered the experiences having been real. They thought their parents took them to SeaWorld, and they actually swam with dolphins. So we have these experiences, and our brain is constantly trying to put them together and doing its best guess, and sort of making things consistent and make sense. And especially for young children, this can really easily be tricked. In this case, thinking you actually swam with dolphins and really just sat in a, you know, a really boring lab and put on virtual reality goggles.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  It's from a philosophical perspective, it's a really interesting question that, like, what is a memory? If your experience of a thing is as vivid and deep and happy as having done the thing, then what's the difference between you having done the thing and not? And I was thinking about this, I was watching The Devil Next Door on Netflix, have you seen this? So it's a documentary about a Ukrainian guy living in the United States who was found to be Ivan the Terrible, a Nazi death camp guard. And he'd come over

• 45:33Chris Williamson?

  after World War II, and basically the entire trial was, was this person actually the person that was in the Nazi death camps? And they are bringing up people who, this is in maybe 2000s, early 2000s, so the survivors that were able to identify him, you know, you're Like sixty year old, seventy year old people, they've been through a lot of trauma, you know, there was by definition, there were survivors of places like Treblinka or Auschwitz or whatever. And first off, a lot of the memory quality was called into effect, but I actually found a really interesting question being,

• 46:11Chris Williamson?

  how long after someone does something, are they still culpable for the actions of their past self? You know, like, is the guy that's Ivan the Terrible, like, imagine if he'd done forty years of good, well, he didn't, but forty years of charity work and he'd turned a corner and he was essentially, by all definition, a new person, you know, every cell in your body, I think, is it seven years it's replaced? So it's like, there isn't even a cell in that. The only thing that that person that you're looking at has in common with the person that you saw before, is they share experiences and their body took up the exact spatial dimensions that it's taken up and no one else has. That's the only thing that they have in common.

• 46:52Chris Williamson?

  But I think it's a really interesting philosophical question, right? Like, what is, what is an experience when it relates to it being a memory? If the memory can be fudged so easily as for someone to then think it's something else? It's a fascinating topic.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, we are these sort of perpetually changing beings. We are constantly changing. We're a slightly different person from one day to the next. Every time we wake up in the morning, we're a slightly different person. And really what is holding us all together, it's really memory. It's our memory of our past, our memory of yesterday, our memory of our coherent self, all of those years ago. And so we're not really the same person in terms of all of those different experiences. We can be a very different person. We can change fundamentally. But there's actually examples of people who did something horrible. They actually had a brain tumor

• 47:51Speaker 00

  that seemed to be directly predicate that horrible act. You have a tumor in a region called the amygdala, which has to do with our fear response. And it seems that that directly contributed to this violent act the person did. You take out the brain tumor. And you have a person who is no more likely to commit a violent crime in the future than anybody else in society. And so do you punish that person? Do you even see them in the same way? And yeah, somebody gets to the same sort of philosophical question as you were getting at there. Yeah.

• 48:28Chris Williamson?

  It's absolutely fascinating. I think there's that is the guy that climbed the bell tower that Sam Harris uses in his in his book, Waking Up. That's the example, the famous example, right? And he asked him, he asked the people to do an autopsy on him after he shot himself and his family and like five passes by, which is obviously just terrifying in itself. What else can we do for memory then? What else causes memory to encode? We've got violation of expectation. What else can we do to ensure that we remember stuff?

• 48:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So one thing that you sort of touched on a bit, actually, that sort of is related to the philosophical aspect is the peak end effect. And so this was pioneered by Dan Kahneman as well, using actually colonoscopies. So yeah, people come in. So you're already doing a colonoscopy, which is not a very, very, you know, comfortable type of procedure to undergo as far as procedures go. And now you have this researcher who's like, well, we just want to know exactly how painful this is at every moment. And so it gives people a dial. And that's your instruction. Just as you're undergoing this painful procedure, how much pain are you feeling in that moment? And this really led

• 49:34Speaker 00

  us to believe that there was a big difference between what we experienced and what we remember. So it turns out that it wasn't the average amount of pain that people experienced that led to painful memories. It was two things, the peak of the experience. So if, not to get too graphic, but the doctor's hand slips and it just causes this incredibly, you know, acute sense of pain, but just for a millisecond. And then it goes back to normal. If there's a really, really intense peak. Then if you ask the person two weeks later, well, how painful was that operation? They'll be, oh, that was the worst operation of all time. So this peak has a major impact and also the end has a major impact as well. So it was really painful at the end. The entire experience will be rated very painfully.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  And the reason it it uh it segues into this philosophical conversation is because they did a follow up experiment. But like, well, the end seems to be very, very important. What if we artificially just elongate the whole procedure? They'll have the actual procedure and they'll have a period at the end where we'll just leave the colonoscopy device in there. And nothing's happening. It's not comfortable, but it's not super painful. We'll make it longer so there's more overall pain, but the actual end of the procedure is going to be less painful. And will they then remember the entire procedure as being less painful? And the answer is yes. So if you make the end uh less painful, even though the overall experience on average is more painful,

• 51:03Speaker 00

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

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  This is like the matrix. This is actually like the matrix, you know? It's like, what world are we living in? Are we living in the world that our brains perceive? Or are we living in the objective reality? And the fact that our brains are so fallible means that the two actually don't don't match up barely at all. But it seems it seems like a a complete miracle if your brain does manage to interpret what's going on around you accurately.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, if we were even just slightly tethered to to real experience.

• 51:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know. It's unbelievable. So how um how can marketers? How's how's this an opportunity for marketers when we get to experience and memory? How how would the marketers fit into this?

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's uh, so let's, let's piggyback on the peak end effect, right? Um, I'll give you a personal example and then we can, and we can expand out. I, I recently did a TED Talk and as I was writing it, 100% I'm thinking about peak end effect. Okay, so you can apply this to when you're pitching startups for your idea, or anytime you're on, on this journey to, to be remembered. I was testing different peaks, so I had this funny moment in the TED Talk where I put my face on top of Adele. It makes no sense if you haven't seen it. But that was 100% planned so that way I can have a peak in the entire 15-minute conversation. That would be memorable and, and for marketers, you can test multiple peaks, but for a talk, you got one to test, right?

• 52:45Speaker 02

  And then, at the very end, I had a very specific callback that referred to something earlier, so that way I wanted the end to be memorable as well. So, in just public speaking, you can use peak end effect every time you talk, okay? Um, and you know, when it comes to storytelling at a, at a grander scale with big budgets, with films, films have an incentive to have a really good ending. That's why you don't often see movies that have a, have a, uh, how do I say this? Uh, an unsatisfactory ending because people won't get the whole movie. Yeah, yeah, it's because our brains, uh, we wanna remember the movie,

• 53:27Speaker 02

  uh, and, and we're already inclined to remember the end of it more, so they can't mess up the end, right? So, um, and there's sort of a self-help lesson here as well, right? Like it's, we, a lot of times, we, we, we give an unfair amount of weight to the end of something, like a movie, right? You can have a movie that truly might even change the way you think about the world, love, whatever it might be, and then the last, you know, 15 minutes of a two-hour movie, it didn't end the way you liked it, and then that 15 minutes literally covers up the entire two hours of pure joy and whatever you wanna call it, and we do that all the time. We forget that the, that the journey that got us there was actually really useful until the end. It's, it's like the old, you know, the William Shakespeare quote, "All's well that ends well."

• 54:13Speaker 02

  It's freakishly true, and our memory's sort of packed with that, right? So-

• 54:19Speaker 00

  You know, so brands try to create, like, go to a concert and, and you better have your biggest fireworks at the very end, but you also better have one peak moment in between. You better bring out a guest star somewhere in between that is unexpected, that'll, that, that will remember the concert. Your whole set could have been trash, but if you have a great peak and a great ending, it won't be remembered as being a bad set.

• 54:40Chris Williamson?

  It's so easy. I honestly, it's unbelievable how easy, we're just, humans are terrible, aren't we?

• 54:48Speaker 00

  We are.

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  Um, so why do we like what we like? There's certain preferences that we have, there's certain things that we lean toward and move away from. Is it just artifacts of an evolutionary time? Is it just fitness enhancing stuff?

• 55:04Speaker 00

  That's, that's, that's a good question. Uh, so there, there's a lot of interesting science about preferences. And, uh, one, uh, really consistent finding is that we, uh, generally like things that we are familiar with. So from an evolutionary standpoint, again, if you've seen something multiple times, uh, and this thing hasn't eaten you and it hasn't hurt you and it hasn't caused you harm, then that thing is, is better than something unknown on average. Uh, and so this is called the mere exposure effect. This is Robert science's famous, uh, work. There, there's many, many studies. It's a very consistent finding in, in psychology that all else being equal, we, we tend to like things we're exposed to multiple times. And, and a lot of his famous work was actually done with, uh, Chinese characters.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  And so he brought, uh, non-Chinese speaking students into a lab and he showed them a bunch of Chinese characters. And just have them pay attention to them, look at them, become familiar with them. He brought them back two weeks later and he showed them some of the characters he had seen before and some new characters. And he asked them, well, what do you think these mean? And the students were like, I have no idea. I don't speak Mandarin Chinese. I don't, I don't know what these symbols mean at all. It's just, just, just humor me, just guess. And so they just guess, they just assigned adjectives and nouns to these, these characters. And it turns out the ones that they had seen before, these got adjectives like happy and love and pleasure and positive emotions. The one they hadn't seen before, these were things like table, lamb, but just really regular boring words.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  So just by virtue of, of seeing something multiple times, we tend to like it a bit more. And so that's that's one sort of major finding there. And then there's this seemingly sort of conflicting finding here, which is that we also love being surprised. So we love pleasure even more when we can't predict it. So when it's a violation of expectation, we tend to like it a bit more. And so there's this a little bit of a apparent conflict there. One, we really, really like things that we're exposed to multiple times, the exposure effect. On the other side, we have violation of expectation, prediction error, dopaminergic reaction, all these things from neuroscience showing us that we actually like a bit of randomness as well.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  And the way this is resolved is really interesting. Prince, you wanna? Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I mean, it comes down to we like the safety of the familiar, but we also like the, I don't want to say danger, but you also like the novelty of the unfamiliar, right? It's the old birds of a feather flock together, or is it opposites attract? Well, the answer is what Matt and I call NOS, new and safe. It's got to be new enough, but also safe enough. So you can, when you start looking at this, and Matt and I love the example of pop culture, from music to film, to truly look at this, you can see just how familiar things can be, and they won't get the massive amount of adoption. But if they're too set, too, too out there, then they won't get massive amount of adoption.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  So if you're a marketer or an entrepreneur and you're making a product that you want to get massive adoption in, you have to think about NOS. And an easy example of this is, look, if you want, if you want a new song to get more adoption, sandwich it in between two known songs immediately. That helps the likability of said new song. The other way to think about it is in terms of just how culture slowly evolves. And you have certain things that were too, too new and unsafe that over time were normalized. And now, and then they hit a peak, and then you hit, you know, the Gladwell tipping point, right? You think about, uh, modding cars was very much underground until Fast and Furious came out, right? Timing and then normalized it, right?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  The BDSM culture was very much underground and unsafe until Shades of Grey came out. And the history of Shades of Grey is fascinating because it comes It was a fan fiction written off of Twilight, which itself is very much a very safe take on vampires, right? So, but over time, as you chip away at this, you know, you look with the Nas glasses at how these things were able to even get popular. It's because they talked about something unsafe in a safe manner at a place where people didn't run away and yet the novelty was still there.

• 59:12Chris Williamson?

  That's so cool.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, Nas is, Nas is super cool.

• 59:16Chris Williamson?

  It's awesome. Um, have you heard, Matt, this might be one for you. Have you heard about the improvement in sleep quality when you hear the sound of a snoring dog or a crackling fire?

• 59:31Speaker 02

  No, I haven't heard that.

• 59:32Chris Williamson?

  You'll have to, this could be me talking out of my ass, but I'm pretty certain it's not. Um, I was told about a study where they played sounds of dogs snoring and of fires crackling and had a number of different control groups and a number of different bits. And the most impactful sound on someone's sleep was both fire crackling with dog snoring, because through our evolutionary history, that would be something that we would be used to. The fire crackling meant we were still warm and safe from predators. The dog snoring meant that we had an alarm sound that was gonna go, that was gonna protect us. And that actually is embedded in us now. So it's not a learned behavior. It's something

• 1:00:15Chris Williamson?

  which sits in there. And I thought that was so cool. Also, here's another one for you.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  They did, they took a number of different groups of people and they looked at who lives the longest, right? So, group number one, single, all their life, no, no pets, no family. They lived an amount of time. Then they took people who had family, family and dogs and just dogs. And they realized that people on their own live a little bit shorter, people with family live longer, people with family and dogs live longer, but people with just dogs, no family, live longest of all. I was like, what does that tell us?

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:00:57Chris Williamson?

  Crazy dog person right here. You got me, bro. So, yeah, I thought, I thought that was some cool, you can tell I just love dogs, man. Just waiting for Prince. I'm just waiting for you to bring your dog back on. That's all I'm bothered about.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  He's around here somewhere.

• 1:01:10Chris Williamson?

  Just chilling. Um, okay. So let's talk, you've just touched on BDSM there. So let's talk about pleasure and pain and how all of that links together.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  I was wondering where you're going there, bro.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  All right, Matt, I'll let you take the alley and then we'll get into it.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Um, so, uh, we think we're going to be happy when we have 10,000 followers or 20,000, whatever the case, you know, may be. And, uh, pleasure, just like attention, seems to attenuate very quickly over time. So we hit this milestone and we're happy for, you know, the 20 minutes, we'll pop some champagne, whatever the case may be. And, uh, then we'll sort of go back to our, our regular baseline level of happiness. So just like attention, pleasure seems to attenuate. Uh, there's this, uh, really, uh, beautiful graph that, uh, Adam Alter created. He's a marathon runner. He wrote Irresistible.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  Uh, awesome book, awesome book, Irresistible, by the way. So good. Yeah, yeah, Adam, we love Adam. We love Irresistible. We, he even gave us a shout out for the book and he read it and he endorsed it. So it was like the biggest, thank you so much, Adam. Adam's the man. Yeah, thank you.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So Adam, Adam was talking about this in the context of our, our striving for pleasure on, um, platforms, on, on social media platforms and, and, uh, um, uh, internet platforms, uh, devices. Cause there's always these sort of milestones you can strive for. You can always have, you know, this many followers or likes, whatever the case may be. And we think we're going to be happy when we peak that. And he, he talks about this in the context of marathon runners. So you think about marathon runners and there should be a, you know, a pretty even distribution of ability. Uh, so you, you think about something like finishing times for, for a marathon, it should reflect this general distribution. So we're all, you know, we have a normal distribution in terms of our ability, there should be a normal distribution in terms of finishing time. But it's not what we see at all.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  Around these relatively arbitrary cutoff points, you have a four hour marathon, you know, three and a half hour, three hour, two and a half hour. You see these, uh, surges, you see these, uh, these peaks. So you're really, really, really trying to get that four hour, really, really trying to get that three hour. If you, you know, know you're going to get three forty-five, you know, that's not a cool, you know, milestone to tell anybody. So you're not really going to push yourself that, that extra amount. And there's all these really interesting anecdotal stories of, of people who, you know, worked for five, 10, 15 years to get that, you know, three hour mile time, two and a half hour mile time, and they finally get it and it's, it's, you know, you go, you'll celebrate that night, you'll feel good about it and it's a sense of accomplishment. Um, but you know, in, in terms of your overall level of happiness, you tend to go back down to, to your, your baseline.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  Um, this is what Dan Gilbert and others call impact bias, where we're, we're generally bad at understanding just how events are going to impact us, impact our level of happiness. And so we, as a result, we, we can sometimes strive for the wrong thing. We sort of strive for this, this dangling carrot that isn't actually going to make it happy. Once we get there, it's just going to be dangled out in front of us even further.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, you know, it's called the pursuit of happiness for a reason because it ain't about achieving it, right? Cause the, the, the happiness, i- it goes away. It's in the chase. And I think one example that will never get old for me is a new iPhone every year. A new iPhone every year. You look forward to this thing, you don't know why you look forward to this thing. It comes out, you get it and then you're moving on, right? But man, Apple is brilliant for doing it. Do I know for sure if in the boardrooms at Apple, Apple's like, ooh, let's hot, let's optimize this unpredictable, uh, uh, pleasure chase and this hedonic treadmill and keep getting them one, maybe, maybe not. I, I can't say for sure. Only Apple can say that, but I can, one thing Matt and I can say for sure is this is exactly

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  why we fall for this every single year, new iPhone. We're in the chase of, we think the new iPhone's going to make us happy.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  Pleasure peaks before in the taste and then you get it and then it's fleeting. It attenuates like Matt said.

• 1:05:48Chris Williamson?

  That's such a

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  And you can think about all those.

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  Prince, I just want to interject there. Am I right? Am I right in saying that the anticipation of an event is often more pleasurable than the event itself? And this was actually, someone told me this about people getting ready for nights out. Cause I'm a club promoter. That's what I do. I'm a nightclub promoter and they were rating people's happiness. I don't know how objective this was or whether it was a subjective measure. And people's happiness was rated at the highest, just as they were about to call the taxi to go on the night out. So they've had the pre-drinks, maybe the girls have got ready with each other and they've done each other's makeup. And they're having a few glasses of champagne or wine or whatever. And that period was

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  You know.

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

  Thing that was best. Does that align with what you guys have found?

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Absolutely. It's such a, it's such a great example. Cause that's exactly what neuroscientists have found in a range of stimuli. So when you, you know, take out club and put chocolate cake, you actually experience pleasure. You can measure this in the nucleus accumbens in terms of the delphinergic response. You get sort of the optimal response right before it touches your tongue. Really, we find anticipation itself to be intrinsically rewarding and intrinsically pleasurable. And a lot of times

• 1:06:59Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  It's, it's a good question. It's, it's, it may have some evolutionary origins that we are sort of driven to chase. So if you imagine you really, really, really, really want to eat this, you know, delicious bison. And you finally reach that bison, you get it and you, it's just as good as you thought it was going to be. Your, your brain created a model for how this is going to taste. And you finally taste it. It, it drove you to, to catch this bison. Once you get this bison, it was as good as, as your brain promised it was going to be. You'd never feel the need to chase another bison ever again. Uh, so you need to have this sort of slight discrepancy between what you think it's going to feel like and what you think it's going to taste like and what it actually does. It's sort of keep us moving.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  Contentment is a fantastic human emotion, but it is an evolutionary

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't exist.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So a content caveman is, is a dead caveman. So our, our, our pleasure systems are constantly are pushing us to, to seek more.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's reproduction, it's food. Think about it because you're you're forced to push yourself to achieve something, food or a partner, and then you want more food, right? If we didn't want to continue to have sex, we wouldn't have more children and we wouldn't and human race would die. Like Matt said it perfectly, a content caveman is a dead caveman. Indeed.

• 1:08:19Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard this quote from Schopenhauer about after copulation? Have you heard this?

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:08:27Chris Williamson?

  What is it? "Directly after copulation, the devil's laughter is heard."

• 1:08:34Chris Williamson?

  That's Schopenhauer and he's identifying the like, whatever it is, the post-coital depression that a lot of men say that they suffer with. You do it and you're like, that was, that was fantastic. You, you know, it's not your problem, but there's just this like, kind of inkling of an existential crisis that's just looming at the back of my head. And I don't actually know why it's there. And it's Schopenhauer touched on it then. You're totally right. Like, why would you go and have sex again if sex, every time that you had sex was as satisfying as you thought it was going to be? Or why would you then go and chase down the bison? So I guess dissatisfaction being programmed into us is fitness enhancing for us to continue to chase that satisfaction, right?

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:09:19Chris Williamson?

  It's almost like you've taught me something today, gentlemen. I'm just learning, absorbing it, absorbing it like a, like a sponge. So we've talked about, about pleasure and pain. How does that affect our drive to buy? How do, how do marketers tap into that?

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  I mean, it's either turn up the pleasure or turn down the pain to get to a purchase, right? So the pleasure that I receive from the purchase of said product must be so high that whatever pain it took me to achieve it, it overrides it or the other way around, right? The most objective form of pain when buying a product is the money that goes out of your wallet into the wallet of the other company, right? So you think about just over the years, the payment technology and how friction free it's gotten, right? You know, I remember thinking it was weird that I can have a lyric from my favorite song 10 years ago, type that into Amazon and it'll complete the purchase. Now I don't even have to do that, you know? Alexa, buy me a new notebook. And it's already, Alexa, don't buy me a new notebook.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  PayPal was a game changer because you don't have to type in your credit card, but that was almost 20 years old now, right? Like, so the pain of payments is good for everyone. It's good for you if you want to slide past and not have to stop to think. It's bad for you if you have bad spending habits, but it's good for everyone selling you stuff. So we can go down the rabbit hole of pain and what that actually means in terms of user experience and customer experience. But nonetheless, reducing pain, increasing the pleasure helps buy purchases. And you can see now that put Apple in that perspective, right? They didn't want to do retail until they did retail right. And the retail, if nothing else, is a textbook example of how to create minimal friction as much as possible. And of course, the pleasure derived from Apple products has been well documented.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  And that's, you know, that's not the only reason why they're successful, but that's a great perspective to look at Apple.

• 1:11:12Chris Williamson?

  Part of the whole experience, right? So I had Alex Kantrowitz on, who's a tech reporter for BuzzFeed, and he's got this new book out called Always Day One. And he went into one of these new Amazon pantry stores where you, yeah, where you, you just pick up stuff and walk out. And it's like, like you're shoplifting, apparently. He's, he's in SF, so I guess there must be, that'll be why they'll be testing this sort of stuff. And it was like, it felt like, I felt like such a boss. I felt like I'd shoplifted four Cliff bars out of there. And then about 30 seconds later, my Apple Card Pay popped up and said like, you just got four Cliff bars from Amazon's ghost store or whatever. But yeah, I totally get it.

• 1:11:56Chris Williamson?

  So again, rolling on from that, neural coupling. I want to know what that means because I saw it in the book and I didn't have time to read it. So what's, what's neural coupling?

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is a really interesting phenomena, which really explains how we are able to communicate. So communication is one of those things where you just, you just say something, somebody understands it and, and there's some sort of magic that takes place, but we don't really understand it. It turns out that there is this really interesting alignment, which takes place between speaker and listener. And this is actually some research that I got to be a part of back in graduate school. So what we did is we had our lab mate Lauren lie inside fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and we just eavesdrop on her brain as she told the story of her high school prom.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  And it was a really, really debaucherous story. There was alcohol involved. There was lots of... It was a very engrossing story. So your task as a participant afterwards was just to lie awake in the FMI story and listen to Lauren's story. So we recorded it. We had a special microphone. We got her to tell that story while she's in the scanner. And then as a participant, you just lie in the scanner and listen to that story. And then after you got these two data points, now we have Lauren's brain as she's telling the story. We have the participant's brain as they're listening to that story. And what was interesting is we did a specific analysis to actually not see differences between the brains, but actually see where in the brain there was the most similarity over time. This is called intersubject correlation.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  So you can basically do a correlational analysis of every small little voxel in the brain to see how similar the brains of speaker and listeners were. And it turns out that the more the person comprehended the story, the more similar their brain was to Lauren's brain. So we had everybody take a test after they got out of the scanner, just how much you knew this story, this true false question, this multiple choice question, just an objective measure of understanding. And we use that to correlate with the intersubject correlation analysis. And the more you understood the story, the more similar your brain was to Lauren's brain. And so this is really interesting way of thinking about communication. So my job

• 1:14:13Speaker 00

  as a speaker, if I'm trying to communicate something, it's my job as a speaker to inculcate the same brain activity in my brain as I'm telling the story into your brain. And the better I'm able to do that, the more my brain looks like your brain, the better I've succeeded as a communicator. And so this is the phenomena of neural coupling.

• 1:14:35Chris Williamson?

  So that's actually the end goal of communication in a kind of a very broad definition is to make the other person's brain experience the same thing that your brain is experiencing.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And actually, this has been studied with with movies as well. So one of the other experiments we did was actually look at how similar people's brains are as they're watching the same film. So we sit down in a movie theater, we all ate something different for breakfast. One of us, you know, broke up with his or her boyfriend, you know, we all had different experiences going into it. Uh, but it turns out there's this one director, who when you sit down and you watch their films, everyone's brains are almost identical. Any, any guesses who this is, Chris?

• 1:15:16Chris Williamson?

  Quentin Tarantino?

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  No, that he was, he was up there. This is Alfred Hitchcock.

• 1:15:21Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  So Alfred Hitchcock just has this incredible ability to to have this gripping effect on his audience. So on that day, doesn't matter what you ate for breakfast, doesn't matter what relationship status you are. When you sit down for an Alfred Hitchcock movie, you are having the same experience as the person next to you. Um, so it's, it's a really, really sort of foundational way in which communication takes place. We, we really have a, a shared experience and we can see that manifested through shared neural activation.

• 1:15:48Chris Williamson?

  That's sick.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so cool.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  It's, it's wild. It's, communication really is like a game of, uh, Tetris. It's how I can manipulate the piece being the sender and have it fit in the receiver's mind to truly connect, literally to connect. Um, what, I mean, and you see this in, in, in brands all the time. And I love it because I can give you all these great examples of how brands have done really well with neural coupling. But I think it's more fun to look at when this grew up. So let's look at one example of how this grew up, right? As a marketer, you're always communicating. It doesn't matter if you're the head of HR or the head of COO, you gotta communicate to your team, right? So one of the things, so we're in San Francisco, Oakland, and one of the things is there's, there's just not right now because it's COVID, but in general, there's a massive competition to hire people, right?

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  So tech companies are doing all sorts of stuff to bring on new, new employees. They're fighting over each other. It's wild. And of course, Microsoft wants a piece of the pie, right? So this is exactly how you don't neuraly couple. So of course, there's a, I'm gonna read this out loud. Okay. Neural coupling would be like if we were on, if we're sitting with Joe Rogan, there's a way we talk would be different from us being interviewed by Barbara Walters, right? We're neuraly coupling, we're gonna stay honest to our brand, but we're gonna neuraly couple to make sure that we resonate with the audience, right? So this is Microsoft's attempt at bringing new interns on. Let me see if I have it, I had it written out. So this is an actual email. We have a screenshot of it on the website that's up.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  The email opens up like this. "Hey, Bay intern, I am Kim, a Microsoft University recruiter. My crew is coming down from our HQ to Seattle, to hang out with you and the crowd of Bay Area interns at Internapalooza on 7-Eleven. But more importantly," and this shit is in all caps, bold, underline, and italicized, "all the above. We're throwing an exclusive after-party, night of the event, at our San Francisco office, and you're invited. There will be hella noms, lots of drinks, the best beats, and just like last year, we're breaking out the Yammer beer bong tables."

• 1:17:55Chris Williamson?

  To print, make it stop.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  Wait for it, wait for it. Last one. Hell yes to getting lit on a Monday night.

• 1:18:02Chris Williamson?

  Make it stop.

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  For the love of God.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  But you know what? But that's what they're trying to do. They're trying, they don't know, they might not know what neural coupling is, but innately, you know that if I connect with you by communicating with you the way you want to be communicated, you'll connect with me back. This is a failure.

• 1:18:21Chris Williamson?

  There's obviously a minimum and maximum authenticity that brands need to catch with. And getting outside of whatever the authenticity equivalent of the Overton window is, and falling outside of that, it causes my toes to curl.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just, it's just, it's just so cringey. It is. And you know, in some part of the world with a different brand, you could probably deliver that authentically for the different type of audience. But it just didn't feel authentic.

• 1:18:53Chris Williamson?

  If that was a frat house, you know, like if that was a frat initiation or something, you'd be like, yeah.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Hell yes to getting lit on a Monday night. Yep. No, that's exactly what it is. It's a, yeah, authentic. You know, our brains have a BS meter. You know, we're constantly looking at patterns in the world. And if there's one thing our brains are decent at is the BS meter, you know? We might not know why, but there, there's that, that feeling we might get every now and then. And it's, it's your brain trying to pick up a break in a pattern that you may not be totally conscious of. It's interesting.

• 1:19:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So we touched on Mr. Alter's work earlier on, and I know that you guys did some stuff to do with how compulsive behavior gets monetized in the digital age. Can we touch on that?

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, how much time? Definitely. We definitely can. I'll say this, and I know I'm going to piss off all the marketers listening to this. When it comes to products that are tech products that are free, and I'm using quotes here, engagement is another way of measuring addiction. Engagement is just not socially vilified, right? People, you know, you look at YouTube's engagement statistics, IG is engagement, engagement, engagement, engagement. It's a very nice way of saying, this is how well, this is how good I am at keeping you hooked. Okay? Now, it's not always a bad thing, because sometimes people do want to be engaged. If you want to Netflix, if you want to binge on Netflix, then Netflix has all the incentive in the world

• 1:20:19Speaker 02

  to help create an experience that helps you binge, right? So I'm not saying it's all bad, but just know that engagement is a nice way of saying, we got you hooked for this long. And there's many different things. I think, Matt, you should, you should break down the Zignaric effect. I think that's a good, good way to start this off.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, maybe first just connecting it back with with pleasure a bit because it does connect actually with something we we talked about before, which is this idea of pleasure and surprise. So we like things a bit more when we can't predict that they're going to happen. And the really scary thing is is that then when we were on a reward schedule, which we can't predict, that actually shapes behavior to a far greater extent. And so what what a lot of these platforms do is they deliver an anticipated pleasure. And so you go on your Instagram feed, you go on your Facebook feed, you go on Snapchat, and there's something akin to the news feed. And you know, it's generally going to be pleasurable. There's going to be something in there that you're going to like. But you

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  don't know when it's going to happen, where it's going to happen, how it's going to be delivered. And this element of uncertainty in a very strange way actually drives behavior in a really potent way. And this comes back to experiments which were done in the 1960s. Michael Zeiler and his famous pigeon experiment, where he gave pigeons a ability to peck at a lever and get a reward. And there was two different levers set up. One, you could peck the lever, and you would get a kernel of food, something rewarding to the pigeon, every three pecks. The other one, you peck the lever, and on average, you get a kernel of food every three pecks or four pecks. But you don't know when it's going to happen. So sometimes you get it immediately. Sometimes you get two in a row, three in a row. Sometimes you peck for seven times, you don't get one. So you don't know what is going to happen.

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  It has a variable reward schedule, is what it's called. And to everyone's surprise, the pigeons could not stop pecking at the variable schedule. So instead of getting this kernel of food consistently when they could expect it, they wanted one that actually introduced a little bit of variable pleasure. Because that's the pleasure that really drives behavior in a very sort of strange way, going back to sort of strange workings of our dopamine nervous system, where we find anticipation more rewarding. We can't predict something's going to happen, we're anticipating it. And anticipation itself is rewarding and keeps us going. And this is exactly what a lot of these tech platforms have converged onto. So you know that your Instagram feed is going to be generally pleasurable. It's going to

• 1:22:49Speaker 00

  be somebody's cute baby or dog. For you, for you, Chris, somebody's cute puppy or their dog. Uh, but you don't know when it's gonna happen. You don't know uh where they're gonna be in the park. You don't know. There, there's some element of uncertainty, this general pleasure of experience, and that is this really, really key uh reward system that drives behavior compulsively. And it's really interesting, looking back at the, the evolution of these platforms. So uh, Facebook being the, the famous example. So way back in Princetonized College days, Facebook was just a series of these individual pages. You just went on people's pages and you liked a photo or you poked them or invited them for vampire, whatever these weird apps were on Facebook. And when they created the, the actual common news feed,

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  everybody hated it. They actually wrote to the head of product, these very, very vicious emails. Oh, my God, you, you ruined Facebook. This is before uh, before hashtag, this is cancel Facebook. Everybody hated it. But what was interesting is they looked at the stats and their actual time on site skyrocketed. So people claimed to hate this thing, but having this, this was the key way of introducing this variable reward, and this caused time on site and, and engagement to skyrocket. So uh, yeah, these, these, these platforms have really converged onto this fundamental way in which our pleasure systems work, and they've sort of contorted it a way where they maximize users' time on site.

• 1:24:09Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, I can't remember the lady's name. She used to work for, as a consultant for casinos, and she's now involved with Tristan Harris at the, the Center for Humane Technology. And um, she wrote a book about all of the crazy ways. I'll, I'll try and, I'll try and find it and I'll send it to you guys. It's so good. Um, the crazy ways that casinos keep people on the floor. So for instance, the carpets never have right angles in the patterns. Um, the way that the flow of people is encouraged around and this, that and the other. And um, there's a wait. I don't know if it's still programmed into Twitter, because obviously kind of the veil got released here. But um, when you

• 1:24:50Chris Williamson?

  log on to Twitter on your phone, there is a programmed wait between when you arrive on the site and when the notification number pops up on the notification bell, and that wait Is precisely the same length of time that it takes a slot machine to go from hitting the button until coming back. And this lady had identified it. And as soon as you realize that these guys are playing around with the same stuff that like Vegas casinos are doing and using variable rewards and stuff like that, that's when you know that you're like, I am up against a power that is so, so far beyond.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  And Chris, this goes back to what we said, or what I said earlier. We have to bridge this gap, man, right? Like, it's, I'm lucky enough to be a consumer and a marketer. And that's, you know, it's not transparent. You know what I mean? You're going into a casino, at least you know that this entire experience is designed to get you to gamble. There's age limits. And even then, it's your, it's your, out of your own volition that you do it. You don't know that when you're signing up for IG, right? You don't exactly, and we haven't even gone down the rabbit hole of what's going to happen with this data down the line, which is really paying for it. That's a whole other conversation. Right? So of course, you know, like, it kind of, it kind of breaks my heart a bit to hear you say, oh, when they're playing with the same stuff that the casinos are to create these apps for

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

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

• 1:26:52Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more, man. There's, there's so much, so much distrust, you know, between consumers, I think, and marketers at the moment. And it's when, it's when marketers have been able to weaponize particular parts of our behavior in ways that we didn't request them to do, you know? And I could go on about this for ages. I had Kai Wei. The CEO of the Light Phone, I had him on, he was episode 10. And that was, you know, two and a bit years ago. So I've been thinking about this for quite a while. A lot of the listeners will be very familiar with it as well, but you are right. I think that there needs to be a corner that's perhaps turned by marketers generally.

• 1:27:32Chris Williamson?

  You know, I don't mind Rory Sutherland or Richard Shotten or Bruce Duckworth, or whoever it might be, or you guys using known psychological effects to make me love brands, you know? I want, I want to feel warm. I want to feel like if I buy a Harley Davidson, I'm going to be like a freewheeling mother. You know, it just Iron Maiden blasting out the sides like that's cool. I don't mind that. But there is, I think that there was an asymmetry in terms of who had the weapons in this for a while, you know? And it's like the, some people managed to run away so much further ahead of where consumers were. The, um, the, the fight was almost unfair. And I think that might be, that might have been the advent of mobile technology.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  And we've seen this before. We've seen innovation comes in and in highly capitalist societies like the US, where we're primarily innovation and capitalism, secondarily consumer rights and consumer advocates, right? That's, you can see a history of public policy and how it always favors capitalism. We have really cool products and then consumers eventually find out what it takes to get there. And then they catch up and the policy catches up and then the cool, and then the cool innovation comes up. So we're always playing catch up. And I think, I think if that's how life is in the US, great, you know? But, but it's time for policy to catch up. But I think you're right though. I, I, I love that you said that there's an imbalance of, of this weaponry of sorts. And I think it's really easy to point the finger at Facebook and I think you can go do, everyone can do it.

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  I'm not defending Facebook. What I really want to do though, is I want to empower the consumers, man. I believe like consumer power isn't this bullshit thing that we talk about. I genuinely believe in the power of the consumer. I think that if you, me and Matt convinced five people each to pay a dollar a month for Instagram, to have a private Instagram and stop doing all this shady shit that they do. Instagram will want to do that. It's we have found ourselves in this weird oxymoron state. We want free as consumers, especially in the internet world. Like, think about all the work you're putting in right now to put this podcast together. Right? We're not paying you, you're not paying us. We're just spending our hard-earned time to do this. Why are you not charging for this podcast that is tremendous value? Well, because people aren't willing to pay for it.

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? So what do we do? Like, so, so there's, there needs, and, and what I'm saying with the bridging thing is, let's have that conversation. Right? If consumers come out and say, I'll pay a dollar for an app that is not, that is an alternative to WhatsApp. Then someone will actually have an incentive to make that and create a new business model. The business model in modern tech is built upon free. Free being the consumer and how much they're willing to pay. Right? So as soon as that changes, we force the business models to change. New business models will rise and fall. Um, you know, a, and, and, you know, I don't know if you use Signal or Telegram or Brave.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  All these browsers and all these chat apps are now finally going, we don't want to do a database approach on creating a free product. Uh, Brave did it by creating their own cryptocurrency and that's how it keeps it private. Um, Signal right now is not even asking for money and it's encrypted end-to-end text messaging. No matter what. So, um, five years ago, didn't exist. Now they do. So eventually they're going to start asking for donations and eventually that evolves into a place where it's like consumers get what they want. And the people making these products, marketers just programmed to create stuff that plugs in your attention because you just assume consumers will forever want free. And I don't, I think we're coming, I think slowly we're coming to the point where, you know, wishful thinking partially, but also trying to predict something. I think that might change.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  I don't know how long it'll take for that to change, but I think it might change. I think, I think conversations like these with you and you're really the, the, you're the vessel through which people learn this stuff. Right? Like, you're the vessel, you're, you're, you, you have, you're the transport of this information and you're not the only one. Like, we've got immense interest in people talking about this stuff that's in the book. I think that's a sign of stuff shifting. And, and I think as people learn for it more, they're really going to realize a dollar a month is not that much to pay for. A messaging app that you use a thousand times a month that doesn't track. You know, that you're crying about your dog or you're going through a breakup and using that to sell you some weird shit, you know? It's I hope this is where we go. I truly hope this is where we go because the distrust

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  is not is not a good place to be.

• 1:31:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, I I'm fully, fully on board. I think there's a lot of deprogramming that needs to be done. Sort of consumer expectations about what's happened. And you're right, there's been such a flurry, or there was such a flurry of innovation, probably the last 15 years, that the weaponry that brands, marketers, tech companies had to play with was so much further ahead from even our cultural and our social norms. You know, we didn't even have words to describe the sorts of things that were happening to us, you know, like tech addiction or screen time, you know, all of these sorts of things. They're only recent inventions in so that we now have an objective measure of how we can manage our own use of these new products. You're totally right. The innovation is going to

• 1:32:40Chris Williamson?

  move more quickly than first the policy can, then the social norms, then the way that people learn to deal with it and all this sort of stuff. So, you know, I genuinely do believe that the more that people can educate themselves about how brands and how companies use psychological effects. And this is, this is one of the main reasons that I love doing the podcast and specifically have a very soft spot for purpose in life, psychology, biases, Eve psych, stuff like that. The reason is that I think understanding why we are the way we are and why we like the things we like. And then also perhaps even giving people at least a little bit of a sight of how they could deprogram some of those unconscious

• 1:33:20Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:34:03Chris Williamson?

  Blind sight's a little bit like going sober for consumers, which I actually, I actually really like. So I've got three, three questions. I'm going to ask you guys now to finish up. First one, this is for each of you. What was your favorite study from your research during all of the research? What was the favorite thing that you guys stumbled across? Could have been something you already knew about or something new?

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  Oh, this is tough. I'll take this one first, Matt, if that's okay with you.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  Man, this goes down the freakish, the weird matrix theme that we've converged upon in here. I'll do the Hain study on pushing buttons. So they put people in an FMRI machine and they had them choose between two things. Blue bike, red bike, you know, fluffy dog, hairless dog, whatever. And they're looking at these images and they're simply asking them, choose one. Okay. But looking at the brain, they were able to predict before the person even pushed the button, which one they were going to predict, which one they were going to choose. Not just one second, half a second, a full seven freaking seconds before they click the button. They know what button you're going to pick. And this isn't like 60% certainty.

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  We're talking absolute certainty, seven seconds before pushing the button. Seven seconds is a lot of time. Colby has made a career, rest in peace, out of hitting jump shots at the seven second line. Seven second is a lifetime. The fact that, and I love that study, A, it's kind of creepy and matrixy, right? But also, let's take a step back. We think we are objective pilots on the life of an airplane that we're on. We think we know exactly why we're doing what we're doing and when we do it. And at least when we do it, part is completely incorrect, right? There's, there's parts of the brain, the subconscious that is, that we can measure right now in life, in lifetime, that will tell us what you're going to do before you actually do it. So you're not this objective pilot, I think you are.

• 1:35:58Speaker 02

  So that's what, there's so many, but I picked that one because it keeps me up every time I think about it.

• 1:36:02Chris Williamson?

  I sent one of my good buddies, Luke, into the worst two week spiral of depression of his life by teaching him that free will wasn't real. So I red pilled him, I red pilled him about Sam Harris's free will speech on Joe Rogan. And I didn't see him for, I didn't see him for two weeks and he came back and he took me to one side. And he was like, dude, I've been in the worst mood with you ever for the last two weeks. So I felt that my life had no meaning. I had this, that and the other. But he's like, but then actually I've come out the other side now and I've realised that it's totally fine. That I actually, you know, I'm on this journey and blah, blah. And I was like, you have been to hell and back in the space of two weeks. And this is the problem with giving people concepts, but yeah, I absolutely love that. Seven seconds before someone knows what they're going to do.

• 1:36:45Chris Williamson?

  And it does show the fallibility of our belief that we are the pilots of our own actions. Right. So Matt, what's, what's your pick from the, from the litter?

• 1:36:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So for me, it's, it's actually a study which is, uh, finds similar conclusions about free will through a different way. And this is through the lens of memory. So I'm a huge memory geek. This is what a lot of my PhD work focused on. So this is the, uh, the Nesbit and Wilson study from the seventies. So they just had people enter into the lab and they had this array of stockings on the wall. And they chose stockings because nobody really knows, you know, anything about stockings. Nobody has, you know, baseline preferences for stockings. So it's an area of high uncertainty. And they just asked the people, well, which stockings do you want? Which ones do you think are the best? And so they made their selection and then they asked them, well, why did you make that selection?

• 1:37:35Speaker 00

  And it turns out that humans, for this very strange reason, nobody quite knows, we have this right side bias. So when we walk into a room, we tend to go to the right side. We look at a picture, we tend to look to the right side of the picture. And the same thing with the stocking array. So people regardless of the colour, whatever, just pick the ones on the right. Cause they have no idea. But what the, what was interesting about the, the studies, they asked me, well, why did you pick the ones that you picked? And it was like, oh, well, I liked the colour on this one. It kind of just, you know, spoke to me. This one reminded me of my grandmother, this buddy, uh, this one, you know, the, the, the cloth felt, you know, really, really, really, you know, high quality. All of these reasons that had nothing to do with their actual choice.

• 1:38:16Speaker 00

  So everybody just picked the one on the right side of the array, but nobody had any idea that they had this bias. And so once you make this, it just, it just went to show that once you make a, so one, we go into a decision. We don't know all the full variables and factors that lead us to make a choice. And once we make this choice, we feel this need to justify our decision. We feel this need to to confabulate, to see ourselves as as consistent beings and to explain it to ourselves in a way that makes sense. So this to me was was a really, really fascinating experiment. They've done similar studies with jam. They bring consumers into a room, they have which which jams do you like? And they'll pick, you know, the one on the right, just because it's the one on the right.

• 1:38:59Speaker 00

  And then they ask why, oh, because I love blueberry, I love, you know, all these reasons that have nothing to do with the actual choice. It was that choice is made, they just confabulate it to themselves. So a lot of what marketing is, is is making these, finding these little tweaks to then allow consumers not necessarily to inform their choice, but to allow them to justify it to themselves afterwards. So we find this example of of Hummer, for example, where they have Hummers and nobody buys Hummers for, say, people buy Hummers because, you know, huge gas guzzling thing, you want to feel like a man, whatever. That's really the, it's a hedonic motivation to buy a Hummer generally. But they found when they put these little decals on the Hummer, hey, why did you buy a Hummer? And and the decals say, you know, safety ratings or this and that, people will claim

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  it was the safety ratings which led them to buy the Hummer in the first place. And so you find these little things that that don't necessarily factor into the choice, but allow us to justify it to ourselves later. So for me, it's the the Nesbit study and this whole idea of confabulation, which is is super fascinating.

• 1:39:58Chris Williamson?

  So cool. I guess the problem is that as we've identified today, anybody that's listening and still considers themselves a rational, objective decision maker evidently hasn't taken in anything that we've talked about, because you're just a mess of hormones and water and and muscles desperately trying to see the world for something that resembles what it is, and it's not at all. And you're just living in like Willy Wonka land. It's like fucking Dr. Zeus out there, isn't it?

• 1:40:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's worth, just just to just to make one point, Chris. So it's worth pointing out as well that it's not as if Prince and I haven't researched this and and written this book that we're somehow like immune to all these effects. We're we're no better than than anybody else. So once you see how the sausage is made, you don't not want the sausage, you know? So we're, you know, putting all these.

• 1:40:46Chris Williamson?

  You just hate yourself more for having eaten it.

• 1:40:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, you just gave, you know, a sense, yeah, pretty much, a humble, a humble sense of sausage eating.

• 1:40:54Chris Williamson?

  Did you hear Daniel Kahneman on The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish last year?

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:41:02Chris Williamson?

  So Daniel Kahneman basically doesn't do podcasts, right? But Shane Parrish, guy behind FS dot blog Farnham Street, unbelievable blogger, top, top level podcaster. He's booked on Modern Wisdom as soon as this lockdown finishes, I'm going to go to Canada and see him in Ottawa. But he gets Daniel Kahneman on and he asks Daniel, so has your 40, 50 year career of understanding these heuristics and biases, has it helped you to become a more rational human being in any way? And Daniel's answer was essentially no. He was like, you know, you've got a Nobel Prize winner in front of you who's spent his entire life working out how the brain works. And he's like, no, I'm still just kind of just as screwed as everybody else.

• 1:41:46Chris Williamson?

  And if there's no hope for Daniel Kahneman, then us, us mere mortals have absolutely no chance at all. So second to last question, you're each stuck on a desert island with only one mental model, psychological effect or bias each. Which one are you taking with you?

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  Oh, one bias.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  Which one am I taking with me? So what's my favorite bias? I don't know, Matt, if you have an answer, I gotta think about it for a second.

• 1:42:14Speaker 00

  Ooh, I think I would take in the, uh, the impact bias. So the impact bias basically says that we, we are generally poor at sort of understanding how things affect our overall happiness. And we, as Dan Gilbert says, we, we underrate our psychological immune systems. So for me, whatever happens on the desert island, I hope I would have that bias in mind to remind me, you know, if I, you know, get bit by a crab and I lose a toe, it's fine. If I, you know, get, get, get to a new part of the island and find some delicious coconuts, that's fine too. But, you know, let's get a bit level headed because I'm just going to fall down to my, my regular baseline.

• 1:42:52Chris Williamson?

  That's so much more sophisticated than I thought. I thought you were just going to say like inversion or the contrast effect or like map versus terrain or something like that. And you've actually taken something with you that's like a Batman utility belt that's going to help you survive. That's pretty, that's pretty impressive. The pressure's on now, Prince, what you, what are you going to go for?

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  Mine is strictly survivalist. The hedonist treadmill. Look, if I'm stuck on an island, I want to be in the shitty pursuit of happiness that keeps me hunting and hunting and hunting because it increases my chance of survival. So I'm gonna go with that. The fact that pleasure is fleeting and it's gonna hopefully increase my likelihood of surviving on an island by myself.

• 1:43:32Chris Williamson?

  I've got it. I love it. So, final thing is, what does the future of marketing have in store? What are your guys' predictions as we move forward into the future?

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  Ooh, Matt, I'll take this one first.

• 1:43:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:47Speaker 02

  I, I, I think, we touched upon this earlier. I think the future of marketing is going to be more psychological. Okay. I think the future of marketing is going to be psychological

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  for companies that are not big. Right now, people who know neuromarketing in terms of companies are bigger brands, the Coca Colas of the world, and of course, the, the data companies of the world, Google and Facebook. I think, I think we're getting to a point where small to mid-sized companies will be able to exercise some of this stuff. I think the future of marketing is psychographics. I think we've been-

• 1:44:22Chris Williamson?

  What's psychographics? Sorry?

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  Psychographics are an understanding of your customer's psychology and it, and it sort of piggybacks on the, on the word demographics. Demographics is age, sex, location, all these different ways, all these quantifiable ways, where you put your customers in a category. Psychographics are more what I call APO. It's your, it's your attitudes and your principles and your interests and your opinions, right? It's not just about age, sex, location, it's about APO. It's all those little psychological aspects of you that make you who you are, right? So I think the future is psychographics. And the future is no longer going to be stuck in a Fortune 500 company's databank. But I also think for consumers, in the same way we thought we had power, when you can review a bad real estate agent or a bad restaurant

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  on Yelp and give them five stars, I think we are, and this is, it might take a lot longer than five years, but I think the future is ownership of data. The future is you, me, Matt as consumers wake up and say, we want to own our data. Right? Our data is being harvested in the creepy matrix sense for so long. And we've been drunk and high off of free that we've let it happen. I think in future we will, and I think that will be the rise and fall of business models. And I think that will be sort of the catching up we talked about earlier until some other stuff happens. I think that's the one that I my heart truly believes, maybe not my brain as much, but my heart truly believes

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  that we will find ways to to have a sense of ownership and control over our own data. Not just point finger at Facebook and say you're evil. No, no, no, find find a happy medium and open that conversation.

• 1:46:04Chris Williamson?

  Awesome. Matt?

• 1:46:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So for me, it's definitely another another hard answer. This is the way I would I would really like to see things unfold, and that is through experience. And this is very, very COVID contingent, so we're gonna have to see how things play out there. But we've seen in recent years a sort of resurgence of experiential marketing. So if you look at the digital world, you can go on Spotify, you can have any song that's ever been written, every any every digit recorded at the click of a button. You go on Amazon or Netflix, Amazon Prime or Netflix, you can watch any movie that's ever been in any archive ever. So these digital experiences are commodified. And what we can't commodify is direct experience.

• 1:46:47Speaker 00

  You can't commodify the experience of going to an amazing concert and having that moment to moment experience and that actually encoded memory that you're going to take for the rest of your lives. And what we're seeing now and what what we did see prior to the pandemic is a lot of these major publishers and companies that work in digital industries actually going to the experience side. So the New Yorker Festival, for example, so New Yorker magazine, obviously, and a lot of their their revenue has been going steadily down as as most publishers have. Because most of this, they do have a fervent loyal fanbase. But you can get digital content, you can get articles online relatively free as long as you're all right with with having an ad blocker on.

• 1:47:32Speaker 00

  But what they've done is actually moved to experiences. They have the New Yorker Festival every year where they have stages where you can hear from and ask questions to your favorite podcast hosts, to your writers, and they'll have different ways in which you can interact with the platform in a direct way. And we see this in the music industry where the only way musicians can make music is through concerts. And so you have this huge resurgence in now musicians actually stepping up their game in massive ways in terms of actually providing an incredible moment-to-moment experiences with lights and with people and coming out and storytelling and all of these amazing things which you just can't commodify in the digital space.

• 1:48:15Speaker 00

  So I think that's one way, I hope, and again, this is very COVID contingent, this is one way in which marketing will go. The digital world is always going to be there, there's made plenty of money in the digital space, but these are going to be commodified products. And really where people are going to differentiate is providing these incredible moment-to-moment conscious experiences which just can't be commodified in the same way.

• 1:48:35Chris Williamson?

  That's super cool. I have to say, it sounds like that experiential overwhelming sensation solution is almost like the antithesis of the convenience era that we found ourselves in, right?

• 1:48:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:49Chris Williamson?

  Everything's so much more easy. You can Deliveroo a five-star meal to your house while you watch Amazon Prime and then you get an Uber to the WeWork station and do all this sort of stuff. You have all of these things that are making life easier and easier. And then almost as a consumer, you want a signal from the things that you're purchasing that this wasn't easy. You know, where's the costly signaling? Where's the effortful signaling that's coming in here? That's what I want. And you're totally right. I keep talking about this .dot-dot-dot in London, which is the most advanced virtual reality experience on the planet at the moment. It's Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds in AR/VR and holographic projection with real-life actors and fire and all sorts of other stuff.

• 1:49:29Chris Williamson?

  I will never forget that. I'll never ever forget. It was a terrible date. I actually went with a chick and like it was a perfect date to go with a chick though, because for two hours, we didn't have to speak to each other. So in one way, it was a fantastic date and in another way, it was a complete catastrophe. But you know, I won't forget that. And the same, you see Coldplay, waves of light up wristbands going across. So you see like, Pink, Pink's like in her 40s now, flying upside down, whizzing around stadiums and stuff like that. Travis Barker upside down drumming, you know, all this sort of thing. You are right. The stepping up of this experience.

• 1:50:05Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:50:46Chris Williamson?

  Blind Sight, The Mostly Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brain. When is it out? Because I've just got an advanced review copy that says May. When's it out?

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  Well, before we tell you about the book, I just want to say, Chris, thank you, man. You play a very pivotal role in this whole thing. Matt and I are so passionate about this stuff, but we wouldn't be able to share this stuff with you if it didn't have people like you who genuinely gave a shit about this stuff and made it because you're, you really are an important part of the process, man. You are the vessel of information. We create the information. We hope it gets caught up. So first of all, thank you so much. And you've done it in a way. We studied your podcast, man. We looked at, we saw you have Paul Bloom on. We freaking love Paul Bloom. You know, you got Neil Al, you had some of these rock star guys that we look up to. You had them on here.

• 1:51:34Chris Williamson?

  You're one of them now, man. You guys are one of them now. You're in with the rock stars, rolling with the big boys now.

• 1:51:39Speaker 02

  So, no, so thank you for owning that, man. You're, you're, you're doing something really special here and I really hope you get a lot of success out of this. This is not easy work.

• 1:51:47Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  And we appreciate that. And secondly, thank you for putting us on Goz without saying, one thing though, just like a total moment of vulnerability. We don't, we didn't write this book for money. First time authors don't make shit. That's the honest dirty truth about publishing. We weren't nobody, we're not, you know, if, if Kanye decided to write a book, he'd be first time author. Yeah, he'd make a lot of money. We are simply passionate neuroscience and marketing geeks who found a message that we wanted to desperately share with the world. And that is how we put in the grueling intense hours it takes for two people to think as one and write this book. So this is, if nothing else, it's been a massive labor of love and to hear you tell us that you loved it so much.

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  It means the world to us, man. So we, we do, so you know, like the listeners, look, what we covered so far, Chris's list is so much longer than we've covered. The book is so much longer than we covered. There's so much other shit to talk about, but ultimately, look, buy the book or don't buy the book. The blog is free. It's all there for you. We really just want this to go out there so the average person knows a little bit more about this stuff, just like we know a little bit more about user experience. So Chris, thank you for being the person who sort of helps us disseminate this info, man.

• 1:53:01Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't be, couldn't be more happy. Honestly, this aligns perfectly with the things I'm interested in. So what's the, tell us what the blog is, where, where can we get the book, where, um, when's it come out, all that stuff?

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  Book will be on Amazon and any other, any other major book retailer. So if you're anti Amazon, that's fine. It's on Amazon. It comes out May 19th. The, the Kindle version, the digital version, May 19th globally. Otherwise it's sort of staggered depending on COVID and delivery situation locally. So the official date is May 19th.

• 1:53:31Chris Williamson?

  I'll make sure, I'll make sure that this goes out just after May 19th and I'll make sure that we schedule this to go, uh, just after that. So I'll try and, I'll try and line, line it up with that. What about the blog? What's the, what's the blog?

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  The blog, the blog is popneuro, like poppsych, popneuro.com.

• 1:53:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:53:46Speaker 02

  And completely free. Come, come hang out with us. We talk about Korean pop music and neuroscience and Kanye and neuroscience and all kinds of weird stuff, plus nerve friends. So it's, it's a bite sized version of the book. So please check us out.

• 1:53:58Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. What about following you guys online? Matt Prince, where can we find you online? You guys on Twitter or anything?

• 1:54:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I'm at Twitter at Matt Johnson is me.

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm on Twitter as PrinceGoomin248. And if those are too hard to remember, Pop Neuro is on Twitter as well, just @PopNeuro. And we're on that as well.

• 1:54:18Chris Williamson?

  I'll make sure that I do a full rundown of everything. So the link to the book, the link to the blog, the link to Matt and Prince and Pop Neuro's Twitter will be in the show notes below. Oh, we made it. That was so good. For the listeners that are still with us, I really hope that you enjoyed it. That's absolutely fantastic. Boys, you need to do, you need to do Blind Sight 2. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna send this. I'm gonna send the recommendation. I've already told Richard Shotten that he needs to get on it, the author of The Choice Factory. And I'm going to be sending it to Rory Sutherland as well, the guy that wrote Alchemy. Rory's a G man. He was episode 49, I think, on this podcast, and he just blew me away. So go buy it. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're interested in marketing

• 1:55:03Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  I'll catch you later. All right, Chris. Have a good night.