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Foreign.
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Welcome back to Uncensored cmo and one of the topics that truly fascinates me is behavioural science and how we can use it in a marketing context. One of the world's experts, Dan Ariely, author of many, many books, really knows his stuff, if you've read it. Predictably Irrational is one of the most game changing books on behavioral science. He's also written a book more recently called Misbelief about how social media and conspiracy theories take hold and the impact it has and what you can do about it. Dan is a fascinating guy. We have a conversation that covers so many different topics. He is really interesting and he brings such practical wisdom from behavioral science and how we can use it to be better marketers. Here it is ladies and gentlemen. We are here on Uncensored CMO and I'm meeting professor Dan Ariely. Dan, welcome to the show.
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A
Lovely to be here.
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Now anyone watching this on video might notice that you're sporting half a beard.
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A
I am.
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B
I'm having a guess. There's a story behind the beard.
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A
There is a story behind. Actually there's a story that is a combination of some things about me and some things about social science. So it's a, it's a good story. But how does it look to you? You know, it's been a while since I asked anybody like you look, I mean you've seen me in a couple of videos but it's the first time you we meet face to face. How does it look to you?
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B
I think you do, you do it very well. It's super smooth on one side and it's a full on beard on the other. It's got some asymmetry to it. You put it off. Well, do people get see you from one side and they, they. And then they see from another side and they think you're someone else.
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A
Yeah, but how odd does it look to you?
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B
It's actually less odd now I've met you.
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A
Okay.
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B
Whereas online I was like oh, what's that? Is it, is it some trick? Is it sort of. I was it to get noticed, you know.
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A
Okay, so what's the story of this hafibield? So. So this half a beard has a few reasons. The first one is that many years ago I was badly burned. Most of my body is covered with scars. My hands, most of my body. And the scars have a few features to them. It's a tougher skin, it's not flexible, there's no sweat glands. There's also no hair. So this side of my face is all burns. So hair just doesn't grow on this side. And it just so happened that my burn was almost symmetrical. If you look close by, it's not exactly, but you know, that's the just the shape of the burn. So that's reason one. But of course I could shave and if I shaved they would look less odd, it will be less strikingly strange. And for many years I shaved. And then a few years ago I went on a month long hike. I was a serious, I am still a workaholic. But at some point I said when I was a kid I used to hike. I haven't hiked in many, many years. Let me go back and try and hike and I'll take a month to do it. So I did a month long hike which was fantastic. And at the end of this month long hike I looked sort of like this. A little bit less white, a little bit more hair. And I looked in the mirror for the first time and it looked very strange to me. Like I really didn't like it. I can only imagine what it feels like to other people who look at me because it felt very strange to me. I look at my face, I couldn't recognize it, I couldn't see the point. And I was going to go back to shaving, but I thought that I would keep the hafibield for a while. I said, you know, I took me a month to grow it, I'm going to shave it, I will never do it again. So let me give it a few more weeks for this happy bird. And to my surprise I started getting things from people about this affability. Now what, what were the things for? These were people who told me that they had their own injury and they were always trying to hide their injury. For example, there was a woman who actually left me a note in my mailbox. She worked at a youth center not too far from me. She said that she was also burned and she has always wore long sleeve shirts to cover her burns. There was another woman in her 50s who told me that she had a car accident when she was 17 and she didn't wear a skirt or a dress since. And she's going to start. So you know, these people thought I was doing it on purpose, right? Here I am, I don't care about my injury. I'm going to not hide my asymmetry. And I didn't correct him. I didn't say it was a mistake. But I decided to keep. And they have a beard for a while longer is like a public service announcement. You Know, there's a. It's tough to be injured. It's tough to be different. And I thought, if I can help people be a little bit less bashful about this, this would be a good. A good step. But the really surprising thing, and this is where social science comes to play, happened about four months down the line. So I'm four months into this half a beard adventure, and all of a sudden I realized that I feel differently about my own. My own injury. You know, for. For many years, I felt like the. The man in the Iron mask. Remember that story? I felt I was trapped in these scar tissue. The scar tissue is. Is tough. It limits movements. It's difficult to regulate temperature. It has all kinds of things in it. And I felt like inside there was the same Dan before I got injured, but I was kind of wrapped in this rapper that was aggressive. Actually, you know, this car's shrink. I mean, it's an issue. And all of a sudden I felt less antagonistic. I felt it was not me and the injury kind of fighting, like, who is the real me. But I felt this is just part of the story of my life. And I started kind of with a very much different level of sexual acceptance. Self acceptance, including sexual acceptance. Yeah. You know, getting. Getting undressed romantically with. With scars is a challenge. And. And anyway, I. Everything improved. Everything improved all of a sudden. And I thought to myself, what happened? Why, why now? And what I realized is that these people who said they were stopping hiding is also what I was doing. So imagine somebody like me half shaving. I wake up in the morning, smooth on one side, stubble on the other side. And in the act of half shaving is also the act of hiding. You know, I would be more non symmetrical before shaving. I would be less non symmetrical after shaving. And I actually remember that I was. I was shaving to be less noticed. Right. Like, people would notice the scars less and so on. And letting go of that was incredibly healthy. Now, this is also what brings me to what I think social science is about. I think social science is about discovering these versions of half beards. Right. What are the things that we're doing? For good reason. Right. I thought that being less noticed would be a good. A good idea. It ended up being a bad idea. But social science is supposed to help us discover those things. Here are the things that we think are good for us, but in fact they are not. And here are the things that we should be doing. And it's very hard to discover by ourselves. Because if you asked me if you asked me 10 years ago, how would it feel like to be with the half a beard, I would have fantastic intuition about day one. Day one will be terrible. People would ask questions, kids would laugh and so on. But if you ask me and what would be the adaptation process over four months and what would other changes would it create? I wouldn't be able to predict. So anyway, so that's what I think social science is about, is finding these little tricks of how we really function and get us to adopt them in a better way.
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B
Yeah, I think it's fascinating. And well done you as well, because I know you started your journey, didn't you, in behavioral science actually as a result of your accidents, didn't you, which is your very first insights, were in the hospital recovering.
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A
Yeah, not so much insights, but it started with complaining, complaining about bandage removal. When the nurses thought that the right approach is to remove bandages quickly, rip them one by one. Somebody with 70% burns, it's not fast, no matter how quickly you rip it. And I thought it was the wrong approach. And I argued with them and so on it. And then when I started studying at the university, my first experiments were about duration and pain and is it better to rip bandages off quickly or slowly? And it turns out that slowly, slowly is better. And again, this for me was a pivotal moment. It's about saying, here are the nurses, wonderful, kind people who are doing everything they can to help their patients. And nevertheless they're making some systematic mistakes. It's because their intuitions, the intuitions are wrong. Can I, can I deviate for a second?
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B
Please do. Yeah.
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A
In general, I have a very positive approach for life. Lots of bad things happen to me, but I have a very positive approach to life. And I've been talking in the last few days with somebody and I tried to write something about this. How come I have such a positive approach for life? And you know, even though hospital was a terrible experience and I was there for about three years, I saw the potential of humanity. Like think about your life. How many times have people shown up and acted in a surprisingly positive way? If you think about. Doesn't happen too often. Right. We have kind of a standard life, we have friends. But. But how often do you. Does it happen that somebody is showing up in a serious way and then surprising you in a positive way above that. And I had three years where. In a pivotal point in my life when I was just a teenager, where people showed up in a. And exceeded expectations and nurses, doctors. Yeah, not everybody, not all the time, but I basically kind of grew up, I think, in an environment where there was an opportunity for people to. To prove to me how amazing they were. So. So I think that since then, I have this sense that if something goes wrong, there's a lot of people who would. Who would help, who would live up to the occasion, and also that the potential for. For help is. Is just amazing.
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B
It's amazing, isn't it? I mean, the two ways I can relate to that. When. When I was 23, I broke my neck cleaning vertebra, cleaning half and got taken to hospital. And I was. I mean, the doctor said in 15 years, I was the second person he'd seen survive an accident of that severity. I remember when I had. I had to be kind of isolated on the bed and had sandbags, you know, either side of my head to stop me in my sleep turning because it would have caused paralysis. I had to monitor me every 20 minutes. They were checking. I could still feel my fingers and toes because the first 24 hours, 40 hours, pretty, pretty risky. And I remember when my parents got down to see me and they were surprised at how positive I was, and I said, I've just survived death. So my mindset was one of, I'm, you know, it's unbelievable to be alive and I'm, you know, I've. I've actually got through it. And then the other one was five years ago, our house burnt down and we only just got out and. But the fire brigade were amazing. Everyone was amazing. And, you know, the love and support and everything, but similar sort of feeling is, in fact, this was Covid. This was the Christmas just before COVID started.
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A
Oh, wow.
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B
So when everyone was going into their Covid panic, we were rebuilding a house and actually almost missed Covid in a weird sense because we were so preoccupied with. I mean, we lost everything, right? So we didn't have a single thing. You know, all the photos and clothes and, you know, all that kind of went. But again, you just get this sense of, well, we, we're here, we're together, you know, we got through it sort of thing. Amazing. It's just. But that comment you made, the people that have the positive outlook in. In, you know, challenging circumstances, you know, really rings true.
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A
How does it feel to kind of like Inbox zero your life? You start from scratch.
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B
Amazingly liberating, you mean. You're not supposed to say this. I know, but actually, I remember going the day after, going to the shops, and I just bought two of everything. Two trousers, two T shirts, two jumpers, two Coats, two shoes, so I could wash one and wear the other. And oddly, that felt great because I didn't have to choose what to wear. You know, the decision was kind of like automatic. When we rebuilt the house, it was. In fact, maybe it's therapy because we redesigned it with our life in mind for where we are now. We bought the house 16 years earlier, so it was before kids, you know, now we've got kids and they're getting older and they got their own independence, that sort of thing. So there was therapy in just redesigning it, but only having what you need actually was surprisingly nice. I mean, the things that were upsetting is the things you'd imagine, which is when my daughters say, oh, have you got the video from when we went on holiday when I was 8? Or have you got the school sports day when I won this? And then suddenly you realize that you haven't got those photos. I mean, we've been able to recover some from hard drives and that kind of thing, but there's sort of like this long period of life that's missing, and that's probably the main thing. And it's interesting as my daughter's reacted very differently. Amy, my oldest, she just went straight into designing a designer bedroom. It was like, right, I'm gonna have this and I'm gonna have that, and. And Lilia, my younger, wanted to recreate what had been in the past identically, down to the color of the door, the pattern on the furniture, you know, all the. You know, she wanted it recreated perfectly. So it's interesting psychologically, we all deal, don't we, in, you know, in different ways?
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A
Yeah, it is. It is interesting to think about what is a. A good process for restarting and how much of it is possessions and memories. And even. Even at home, it is.
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B
I recommend it, but without the tragedy. If you could skip the tragedy and just do the kind of, you know, zeroing, I think that would be quite a good thing.
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A
Yeah, I. I wonder. Wonder if people would have the guts to. To get rid of a lot of things.
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B
It really does shine a light on actually what you actually need as a human being in life. It brings that into stark contrast when you. When you're sat there and everything's gone, you're going, what do I actually need? It's about 10% of what you have, you know, so it's a good lesson from that point of view that we. And it also creates stress, doesn't it? The more things you have, the more stress it creates. The, you know, you've Got to manage it all and so on. So there's a lesson there. So I did a talk last year at Cannes called the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull. And I did it with my good collaborator mine, Adam Morgan. And we were trying to look at the cost of being dull in advertising. So that was the context in which we're doing it. But we then tried to say, how do you not make things dull? And actually we came across this old academic paper from 1972, guy called Murray S. Davis. And it was called that's Interesting. And it was all about what makes something interesting. And I think he was looking at academic papers and what made one more red than the other. And the conclusion struck me, actually, because he said, when you deny an underlying assumption of your audience is what makes. And I just thought that's almost what behavioral science is so good at, isn't it? Is that you think it was this. Naturally, it's that. And the illustration we had actually. I mean, again, it was advertising festival. There was an advert where a mobile phone network in France showed what you believe to be the French men's team playing football. And they're scoring incredible goals. The crowd's going wild, you know, and the commentary's there and it gets to a crescendo and then halfway through the ad, it rewinds and you realize you've seen the women's team and what they've done is they've changed the heads. They've literally just, with cgi, just swapped the heads out sort of thing. And because at System One, we measure emotional response, we could see second by second, people were very happy in the first half. And then it switches to the incredible surprise. And actually, surprise is a great way of holding someone's attention. And what. I wonder what wondered from. You've written many, many books and obviously you're an expert in this area. What have been the most for you personally, most surprising discoveries.
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A
So maybe before I say this, it also, I think a good theory for humor, when you ask what is what is funny, you want to violate some assumption, but you can't violate it too quickly. Like there's a sense of. In humor, at least you. Sometimes it's too early for a joke, you know, maybe in two years or something. Or maybe it's too close to comfort. So I absolutely think that this is a really nice part about, about social science, that it's, you know, sometimes it's revealing things that we thought were there, but sometimes it's revealing things that we. Our intuition were different than that. Like the the half a beard story. But, but there's another important element in, in social science, which is how do you fight? Let's say people get surprised in the ad. Okay, so in the ad you got people surprised, you got the extra attention, you got everything you wanted. In, in social science, we want in addition for that is to people remember that they don't predict very well. So when it comes to apply their intuition in the next rounds, they will not do it in the same way. So we're also fighting against hindsight bias. So when I give a talk, for example, or when I try to talk to somebody, I don't want them to hear a result. Be surprised, let's say, have higher attention, all the things you want. But then a minute later said, oh yes, I knew that all along. Because that, oh yes, I knew it all along is a, is a dangerous path. Because then maybe I fixed that initial part. But I haven't helped you understand how our intuition fails. So, so much so, so often when I, when I talk, I ask people to predict the results. So I, I say, here's an experiment, we've done this. What do you think of the results? Please raise your hand if you think A, B or C and I get the results. And then I say, okay, here are the real results. And that not only helps with the surprise, but it also helps people say, okay, so just let's realize that we're wrong. Another thing I used to do more, I do it a little bit less now, is to use visual illusions. Because visual illusion is just a way to show that we're all wrong and we're all wrong in the same, in the same way, right? And it's saying, okay, so we have this brain that is taking information from the outside, interpreting it. The brain is not a passive organ, it's an active organ that interprets it. And, and it serves to us something that is biased or wrong and so on. And, and let's just realize that we don't see the world. We see the world after it's been processed by our brains and our brains do to everybody. It's not, you know, at least in the visual illusion, it's basically everybody has the same, the same illusion. So I think it's very, very important, it's very important to realize that we, our senses are not very accurate, that our reasoning mechanism doesn't always see things as they are. And then to keep on being a little humble and because only if you're humble, you'll test things, you'll get data, you'll have different hypothesis, you'll think more. More carefully, and so on. Anyway, so some of the most surprising things for me. So there is something that I used to be surprised about, and I'm sadly not surprised any longer. And it's about the impact of little things. The first time that I did an experiment on the default bias, and you said to yourself, my goodness, you know, you change something that is so meaningless and so many people change their mind, it's just amazing. You Pre select option 1 for people, they choose option 1. You pre select option 2, they choose option 2. And when the decision is more important, it actually becomes a stronger bias. So I would say that everything that has to do with choice architecture used to surprise me a lot because, you know, the general intuition is people make decisions, and to switch it to, say the interface makes a lot of decision was very hard to get used to it. Now that I got used to it, it's. It no longer surprises me, but I think that was early on, some of the biggest surprises. The thing that I think has been the most interesting in the last few years was an experiment we did in a slum in Kenya called Kibera. And we tried to get people to save a little bit of money for a rainy day. And we tried lots of different approaches. We send them reminders. We send them reminders from their kids, we gave them money, we lost aversion, all kinds of things. But we also had a coin, a coin that we made in China for about 20 cents. Most of it was shipping. And the coin had 24 numbers etched on the edges for the 24 weeks of the program. And we said, please keep the coin in your hut. And every week, take a knife and scratch the number of the week. Week 1, 2, 3, 4, scratch it like a minus if you didn't save. Scratch it up and down if you saved. And that coin doubled savings compared to everything else. And, you know, I came up with this coin idea because I thought it would work. But the fact that it worked so well, it worked better than a 20% match with loss aversion. Like, it really worked much better than anything else surprised me. Now, in retrospect, it got me to think a lot differently, and I'll tell you how it got me to think so I think that when it comes to spending money, we could do things that are visible and things that are invisible. Visible things is buying fruit, candy, water, kerosene. If you're in Kibera, doing invisible things, saving money, buying insurance, paying debt. And in general, if you think about the breadwinner that just happened to make some money today. They want to do visible things because they want their family member to maybe say thank you, but we also want them to do invisible things. And it's like an unfair fight between the visible and the non visible. And what this coin did in Kibera, nobody visits each other's huts. It's like, you know, it's not a social issue, but it was a way for the parents to communicate to themselves, to their significant other and to the kid that there's another economic activity happening. You know, usually if you buy a piece of fruit, somebody might say thank you. If you mark on the coin, maybe somebody would appreciate you. I don't think it'll get to a thank you level, but it will be less invisible. And I think it's actually a very important thing about the world in general that we have lots of things that are very important. Take your medication, save money, buy insurance that are largely, largely invisible. And we need to make them more visible if we want to start creating more incentives and motivation around them. So that, that one, the experiment was surprising and I started seeing this visible and invisible in lots of places after that.
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B
That's really, really interesting. It's a bit like, similar to the point be quite an old one this. But the pain when you actually give cash versus the pain experience when you put over a card, it's a bit like that, isn't it? You've got the feeling, physical handing over the, the dollars versus the, versus the plastic which doesn't have that same, you know, kind of.
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A
That's right. So this, this is really about attention, right? So if I pay with cash, I pay more attention. I feel what's called the pain of paying. I pay with the credit card. It's not as clear when I'm paying. I'm not paying much attention to. It may. I'll pay later. I, it. It doesn't feel the same. The invisible visible is a more extreme version of this because when something is invisible, you're not even giving the credit card, right? There's no, there's no sign of it. Like if we had dinner and I paid with a credit card, by the way, thanks for breakfast. But you know, I know you paid for breakfast, so, so. But there are some things that we don't even know are happening. Like think about your kids, right? What do they know about insurance, savings, how much you. They. They probably see you not being home much. What like, you know, there's, there's a very interesting situation where you're doing lots for your kids, Most of it they're unaware of.
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B
Well, I, I, I, I. Well, the insurance one's good, actually, from the house fire, because, you know.
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A
Oh, yeah.
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B
You don't need insurance until something goes wrong. And when something goes wrong, the insurance is the most important thing in the world.
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A
So.
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B
So one thing I'm quite evangelical about is I tell everybody, check your house insurance. Because actually, the bit of the story I didn't tell you was after the fire, but after the fire, the house burnt down. We then discovered that we weren't technically insured because they, the insurance company, claimed that we had put the wrong number of bedrooms listed on the, on the documents. Now, we didn't have the documents because they'd burnt and I then spent two weeks investigating, phoning up the archive department and all. Anyway, I did a long investigation trial. In the end, it was their mistake, but they actually wrote to us a legal letter to say we're not insured. So for a period of three weeks, we had not only lost our house, we actually thought we wouldn't be able to, you know.
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A
Well, so what happened? You did write the number?
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B
Well, it's quite funny, actually. So first thing I did is I was absolutely certain it was correct because when we bought the house new and at the time in the uk, your insurance had to be linked to your mortgage. So I phoned the mortgage provider and I said, can you send me the documents from when the mortgage was taken out? And it said the correct number of bedrooms. Second thing I did is I phoned up, pretending to be a new customer and said, could you give me a quote for how much you would pay? What are the premiums on this particular house? And gave me the address and I matched the bank statements to the premium. Interesting thing, though, I was paying the full premium for 16 years. They hadn't given me any discount because you're supposed to get this discount every year as you don't make a claim. So I made that point on the letter. And the third thing I did is I had a mortgage broker who dealt with the insurance and I said, on his system before it then got sent through to their system. What? He put it in his system and he'd put the correct number in. So I put the evidence, sent it to them, and then I got this very apologetic call from someone very senior in the insurance company saying, we've investigated, it's entirely our mistake and that it was a manual computer. It was a computer error. When they went from physical records to Digital Records about 10 years earlier, someone had keyed in the wrong number of bedrooms.
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A
But. But then they should have reduced your premium.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
And they didn't.
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B
They didn't. I know.
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A
What, what do you think? Was this a trick for them to try and get out of it or do you think it was a real mistake?
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B
I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I assumed it was a. Well, I took them at face value actually. I assumed that it was an input error. And that's true. That's good question. Actually I gave them benefit of the doubt. Most people said they're just trying to get out of it. And I was like, well that would be, you know, I've got enough evidence to suggest that, you know, it was, it was true. And they were very. Well, the apology actually was very sincere and it had gone up to the serious claims level in the insurance company. So someone very senior who, you know, picked up the phone. But that was after a legal letter that I'd got telling me that I wasn't insured and that they, they were wiping their hands of any liability. So they'd gone very heavy handed.
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A
That's amazing.
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B
Then I got the apology.
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A
So I don't know if you know, but I, I helped to create a business model for an insurance company that solves this problem.
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B
Wow.
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A
So quite a few years ago, two entrepreneurs came to talk to me and kind of behavioral economics has kind of a range of what we're good at. We're really good at little details like give me any sign up flow and I can improve conversion and give me any kind of repeated behavior and I can probably increase engagement. Right. There's a range of it that is like the study of little things that you don't think matters but end up. And when you look at them with a fresh eye and knowing what we know about complexity and default bias and so on, you can improve things. But it's also a really good framework to design things from scratch. We say, okay, so what are we really trying to achieve here? So a few years ago, a couple of entrepreneurs came to me and they said that they wanted to start a digital insurance company. And I said, great. And they said, would you join us? And I said, no, I don't see any reason to join a digital insurance company, but I'm wishing you all the luck in the world. And they said, what can we do to convince you to join? And I said, look, from my perspective, from a social science perspective, the real challenge with insurance is trust. And I would be interested if we could create a business model that fixes the trust problem. So they said what do you mean? I said think about it. Insurance is a two actor problem. You have the insurance company and you have the client. The client pays, pays, pays. 17 years, you pay, you pay, pay. At some point something bad happens and you want to get paid and the insurance company wants to not pay. It's a very simple, it's a very simple situation. They make more money if they don't pay. And I don't think they're evil people. But the incentives are there for them not to pay. Right. It's designed for that. Now you as the consumer know that they're not going to pay. So what do you do? Exaggerate your claim? I mean lots of people who don't trust. So we create a system with no trust. The insurance doesn't pay and then people exaggerate and the insurance know that people exaggerate so they make it harder to exaggerate and make, they make the whole process different. I said the whole thing, if you think about it, is a system with no trust and everybody is trying to outsmart the, the other side. And it's a very, very costly system. You know, the cost to adjudicate a claim is very high and like the, the what's called dead weight loss. Like because there's no trust. Like how many weeks you had to spend working on this. I'm sure it's not the end of how much time it took you to.
- [32:27]
B
Well, the interesting thing in this situation was I think it's unusual what they did, but we had to itemize everything, get a quote, all that sort of thing. But then they just wrote me a check for the amount and I thought, oh, how generous. But then what I realized is what most insurance companies do is they then project manage all the, all the restoration back to the originals. And what they were doing was transferring the liability to me for anything that went overspent. And of course we go overspent. And also it minimized all the administration from their point of view. So it's just a case of we'll settle, here's the check. I mean in my case they were quite fair. They took their quote and my quote and went halfway between the two. Which ended up probably okay. But yeah, it was interesting that that was their approach.
- [33:10]
A
Yeah, so, so they said okay, so how do you solve it? So I said one solution. But this is the solution we ended up adopting is to make it from a two party game to a three party game. So when anybody sign up, signs up for this insurance company, they pick A charity that they love the most in the world. Let's say it's the World Wildlife Fund. And this company now has a name. It's called Lemonade. When life gives you lemons, this company takes a fixed percent, let's say 20% of the premium. And they say this is our profit, we'll never take more. But if you joined and you said that your favorite charity in the world is the World Wildlife Fund, you're joining a pool of people who love the World Wildlife Fund. And we collect premiums and we pay claims, and at the end of the year, if there's money left over in the pool, it goes to the World Wildlife Fund. So the insurance company basically is saying up front, look, we are not going to make more money if we reject the claim. We don't want to be in that situation. Right. You basically say, morally, I don't want to be in a situation where I make more money if I am unethical to you. But also if you as a customer cheats, who are you cheating? Yeah, your favorite insur.
- [34:39]
B
Your favorite charity.
- [34:41]
A
Right. So, so it's a really nice, it's a really nice solution. And, and if you look, if you look at the statistics on this, on, on Lemonade, you'll see it's an unbelievably loved insurance company. And all kinds of things, all kinds of other good things come from this model. So for example, I think the record is to accept claims in, in about two seconds. Because the moment you trust people. Yeah, things, and of course you have AI and so on, things are much, much, much, much faster. So this for me is an example of how you can, if you start looking at an industry from scratch, and you say, what is the behavioral, economic, psychological issue? And you say the issue is trust. Insurance is a crazy trust situation. You have to really trust that they'll be there for you. And if you don't have trust, everything is very expensive. So let's, let's build a business model like that.
- [35:41]
B
That's fascinating that I wanted to ask you as well about pricing, actually, because you'd think pricing is like the most rational thing ever, wouldn't you? But, but actually there's a lot of, kind of irrationality that comes through pricing. I mean, the one I remember from your first book that sort of made me smile was looking at how good looking people were, the George Clooney kind of thing. But explain a bit about that because it turns out that pricing, your relative pricing is a lot more important than your absolute pricing and how you frame it as well.
- [36:08]
A
Yeah. So pricing is a fascinating. It's a fascinating topic. And maybe to start with, I'll give you my metaphor for the human mind. So I think of the human mind as a vintage Swiss army knife. Two vintage and Swiss army knife. Let's start with the Swiss army knife. The human mind is basically a collection of tools. We have tools to deal with food, mating dangers and so on. The Swiss army knife is not really good at anything. Right. You wouldn't say, oh, I need the can opener, let me find the Swiss army knife. I need tweezers, let me find. No. Its benefit is that it's a lot of tools in a compact packaging. And our mind is the same thing. We're not that great in most things, but we're quite good at it and it's quite compact and we can carry it with us. But our Swiss army knife is a. Is an old Swiss army knife, vintage. It was designed for a period long time ago when we roamed the savannah and had to deal with food and so on. But. But still, that's the Swiss army knife that we carry with us. So we get to the modern world and we don't have the, the right tools. So we rely on our ancient tools and they're not that good, but we make do with them and we don't understand how bad they are. But we don't have a tool for understanding compound interest. We don't have a tool to understand discounts, and we don't have a tool to judge value in terms of money. So we use these other tools and that's the source of the mistakes we make. So we already mentioned this pain of paying. Why is cash different than credit cards? Why is Apple Pay or Google Pay different? And even a credit card, what happens when we pay with those things? We don't even remember how much we just paid. We all get surprised at the end of the month with our credit card bill because we are really bad at this. So the, the relativity effect that you're referring to. Relativity is a strategy that we apply across lots of things. Think about this room that we're sitting in. It feels perfect, perfectly bright, lit. How much light do we have compared to sunlight? Just a fraction. But our whole system basically get used to the overall level and we just judge things in relative ways. Right. Your eyes are darker than your skin and so on. So relativity is a really good algorithm that we apply across many, many different things, including, including pricing. So when you say how expensive is expensive? I don't know compared to what? Like you Know how much, how much would you pay for a house? How much would you pay for, for a cup of coffee? Well, depends on what, what's next to it. And the next to it could be a medium sized coffee compared to large. And it could be a different house, but it could also be something else. So if we are thinking about how much are we paying for a microphone, you know, we might compare it to another, another gadget. So we do lots of things are, what's a reasonable price? Let me understand how it is priced compared to other things. Compared to what? Whatever is comfortable to compare between. Just because we're talking about your house, I'll give you a housing example. So when you show people houses and you give them different asking prices, their bids change, how much they think the house is worth changes and it gets closer to the asking price. When you look at professional real estate agents, they're also influenced. Not to the same degree, but they're also influenced. Another example, you take people who move to a new city. If you move from an expensive city to a cheap city, people end up buying too much of a house. If you buy move from a cheap city to an expensive city, you buy too little of a house, you're still connected to the relative price of the place you moved from. If you rent for a year or two, the effect goes away because you got used to the new price. So relativity is very much everywhere. But I'll give you another example, one of my favorites. Part of how much you're willing to pay for something depends on fairness. And fairness is basically asking how much did people work for me? So think about an example. Imagine you come to visit me at the university. You're parking next to a parking meter. You look in your pockets, you don't have a quarter. Somebody passes by, you say, excuse me, do you have a quarter? And the person says, yes, I have a quarter, I'll sell it to you for a dollar. Most people say, I'm not paying you a dollar for a quarter. I'll take my chances with city Hall. Case number two, parking. Parking meter, you don't have a quarter. Somebody passes by, you say, excuse me, do you have a quarter? And that person says, I don't have a quarter. But I'll tell you what, there's a bank not too far from here. If you want, I'll run really fast that bank, I'll change a dollar for quarters, I'll come really quickly back. But if I run all this way to the bank and back for you, would you give me a dollar? For my trouble now you think it's a great deal. Now in every objective way you're worse off, you have to wait and you get sweaty coins. But why are you happier because somebody worked for you? And it turns out that this principle is very general, that we don't pay, pay for what we get, not just for what we get. A lot of the components, the willingness to pay is influenced by how much it cost, how much, how much the person put effort, effort into it. We just had coffee. You know, people in the US like pay a lot of money for somebody who drips their coffee for them or do something like this. How much would you pay if the coffee was already in the bucket and they just poured it to a cup? It would, it would, it would feel very different. And it's true for lots of things. And you know, lots of companies basically say people should appreciate the service we're giving them or the product we're giving them. And they don't need to know the details. Not true, not true. Understanding the details sometimes increase the enjoyment from a product and almost always increased increases willingness to pay. I'll give you one, one example from, from pricing. So I went to visit this bank in, in a country, I will not say, and we were talking about some, some banking related issues and then somebody came to the meeting and he said that they have a new program. This was not the topic of our discussion, but they're going to stop charging people ATM fees. And he said, oh my goodness, we're rolling this out in a few weeks and we're expecting huge applause from our customers and so on. And I say, I think people would hate you for cutting the ATM price. So how can that be? I say, you think that people would say thank you for not charging me anymore. I think people would say, oh you bastards, why did you charge me for the last 10 years? And you know, we disagreed on that. I said, look, this is what I think you should do. I think you should stop this program of doing it for free. And I think instead of doing it for free, you should tell people when they come to the atm, you should tell people the price of an, of a transaction on ATM is X, let's say $1.50. But we understand that not everybody has the money. So if you want to pay less, pay as much as you want, up to zero. Now. I said, what would you do with this message? The worst you could do is get zero. But you would give people the sense that this is not free. I mean, ATMs cost money, right? You have the machine people come to fill money. There's technology, there's data, there's all kinds of things. Of course, it was two, three weeks before launch. They, they didn't do it. And, and I was correct. People, people really hated them for what, for what they were doing. But it tells you, it tells you again that, that pricing is not just pricing. You, you would say from a rational perspective, people are saying, oh, my goodness, it's, it's the same atm. And now they're charging me less. What a great, what a great idea. But, but of course, the psychology is much more, much more complex than that. By the way, name your own price. Fascinating, fascinating topic. We just did a really interesting. It was an experiment, but we did it to help an organization that had an event where people were buying tickets and they wanted to reduce the price of the tickets. So imagine that the regular ticket is $100, but they want students to be able to apply, so they wanted $35. So you could say something like students 35, not student 100, but maybe there are people who are not students and can't afford it. So their thought was to reduce the tickets to 35 and then to find some philanthropist who would make up the difference. And I said, you know, that's just not the right approach. Why don't you tell people $100 is the real price. If you can't afford it, pay 35. So I said, to start with, you'll not get 35 from everybody. Some people would pay 100. And it's about the morality of the people, maybe not everybody who could afford it. Right? Some people would cheat it, but at least it will not be zero. But I said on top of that, put another price level that says, but if you're financially okay and you can subsidize another person, go ahead and do that. Right? And think about this. You're saying it's not us against you, it's not the event versus you, the ticket holders, it's all of you. Ticket holders are a community. And if you have money, why don't you find another community member who can't pay their price? And it ended up being fantastic. It ended up being fantastic. There was even one person who donated for 10. Really, for 10 people. So, you know, name, name your own price and fairness and question of community. Like, you know, it's, it doesn't sound like money, but the psychology of money is really fascinating.
- [47:15]
B
It's sort of like the social contract versus economic one, isn't it? I mean, weirdly, my very, very first economics lecture at university. I studied economics and finance. It was probably where my love of behavior economics started, because I. The. The lecturer was trying to explain the difference between total cost and marginal cost. Right. And the story he told was he had booked a holiday. No, his friend had booked a holiday and they're getting this cottage by the sea. And they had some spare capacity in the room. They had some spare rooms. And over dinner they said, would you like to come along? And so the lecturer said that being an economics professor, he said, we'd love to come along. We will offer to pay the marginal cost for us coming along. So the extra food, the extra wine, maybe there's any more petrol to pick us up on the way. And the friend turned him down sort of thing because it wasn't fair. Because it's like, well, the cost of. We're saving you all the cost of holiday and you're paying the marginal cost. And I just thought, who would accept that? Because it's kind of breaking the rules of friendship, which is you're in it together, you want to split the cost. And that's how most people would do it.
- [48:18]
A
Yeah, in that. In that question. It's also interesting whether these people stayed their friends.
- [48:24]
B
Exactly. He didn't have many friends after that.
- [48:25]
A
You know, there's a couple of things where economists. So there was a study that looked at who donates to charity, and it turns out the economics department is the lowest. You know, economics is a very interesting profession. It's a profession that gets you to think that everybody is rational and to adopt this perspective. Everybody's. You know, it's a. It's a. It's a wonderful framework. Like, it's a. It's so interesting and engaging and it explains. Explains some of the variants, but it makes you feel that. It explains lots of the variants. But if you buy into it, you expect people to be perfectly rational actors. And when people are not perfectly rational actors, like what he should have offered is these people on the holidays is the marginal cost plus a pound. Right. How could they reject that? They would be.
- [49:18]
B
Yes, they would be generous.
- [49:19]
A
It would be a pound. It would be a pound. Like, because if we just offered them the marginal cost, they would be neutral. There's no neutral. But, you know, you could have offered them an extra pound. Now they should have taken. Taken the deal. But, but economists get those things wrong because they don't only think of themselves as rational, but they think that other people. Exactly are rational. Nobody has ever done a study on how romantic life for economists.
- [49:44]
B
Well, that would be a very good study.
- [49:46]
A
What happens with gifts? What happens with all kinds of things?
- [49:49]
B
Yeah. Because everything is utility. E commerce is how do I maximize utility in every transaction. But as you say in your books as well, we know from System One is that people make decisions a lot more based on how they feel than how they think.
- [50:02]
A
Yeah. And it's perfectly fine. Right. So if you say, for example, talk about gifts. I love gifts. And gifts are not about an economic value. Like, I will not buy you socks. I wouldn't put £20 in your bank account. That's like, this is not a gift. Right. If it's about a gift, then you basically say, what are the things that would lubricate our social exchange? What are the things that would get us to act better? So maybe, maybe I'll ask you what's the, what's the best gift you've ever given in the best gift you ever got?
- [50:44]
B
Probably I've just turned 50.
- [50:46]
A
Congratulations.
- [50:47]
B
Thank you. And I'd say everything associated with that, like the, you know, the photos. So my brothers, for example, recreate, in fact, they borrowed the podcast artwork and they recreated it to tell different stories of our relationship over the years kind of thing. So not much cost involved in that, but they'd gone to a lot of effort. And it was quite funny the way the different. They created different titles to describe different personality traits for me. And they did a talk at the dinner kind of thing and my family brought, you know, designed some lovely photos of all the holidays we've been on and did it in a collage and that kind of thing. So, yeah, I'd say, I'd say those things that were symbolic of relationship probably were the most meaningful.
- [51:30]
A
Yeah. Because. Because there, it's a concrete reminder and it's a lot of work and it tells you something about their, their thoughts about you. It's an interesting thing to think about. What are really good gifts? What are we trying to. To get to it? So I'll, I'll tell you about one gift. This is a gift at the workplace. So, you know, much lower. I can tell you later about personal gifts, but the people who work for me with me at the lab, every year I try to do an end of the year gift. And I, I don't start with what I want to give. I start with what I want to convey or what I want to change. And the things I wanted people to get reinforcement for is the fact that I care about them in general, not just as people working with me, but I care about people. The Gift is not backward looking, it's forward looking. And I want to do something for them that they couldn't do themselves or not couldn't, but wouldn't do themselves. So my favorite one was a year where I asked everybody to write one paragraph about something they want to learn up to 10 days somewhere in the world. And I said, I'll send you to learn that thing.
- [52:55]
B
Wow.
- [52:57]
A
Coach, cheap hotels. But I'll. I'll send you to do, to do that. And it was amazing because people did lots of wonderful things. They learned all the way from cartooning to drumming to yoga to French. All kinds of things that people wanted to, to do. Of course you don't learn anything fully in 10 days but. And it was also a wonderful year because people kept on coming and going and they kept on anticipating and coming back and describing what they were doing and, and I think it conveyed all the feelings. It conveyed that I cared about them as people. It wasn't a, here's a course in statistics, right. It was something that I thought they couldn't do. They wouldn't do it for themselves because it was a little expensive and in a little bit of time. And it was forward looking, right. It's not payment for the battle like you did. X I'm giving you something. But it says look, we have an ongoing relationship and I care about your, your well being in general. Forward looking.
- [54:01]
B
You're right. Actually it's kind of like it's effort and personalization a bit, isn't it? So my younger daughter Lilia is, is a massive fan of crumbl cookies which we don't have in the uk. So every time I come over to New York, you know, I have to go and find a crumble cookies outlet. And she's online looking. Cause they change the cookies every week, right? So she's online going, daddy, can you order the snickerdoodle? You know, with a, you know, with a cookies and cream. And she'd have looked up all the different options. And then I have to go and find crumble cookies, obviously order the, they come in this beautiful long box, you know, nicely laid out, bright pink. And then I have to carry it know, pack it in my bags, carry it through security, get it on the plane, on the, in the train, in the car, all the way back to sort of thing. So the effort that goes through and funnily enough actually when everyone noticed it on, on the plane as well because it's with bright packaging. So it always starts conversations. I have to tell the story. This is for my daughter, who, you know, sort of thing. But it's partly the effort, isn't it signaling the effort you're going to and the fact that it's personal to the person you're buying it for?
- [55:00]
A
Yeah. And are you trying to. You know, we talked about effort before. Are you trying to remind her of the effort when you give it to her? Not if it makes I feel guilty, no.
- [55:10]
B
I always remind her of the effort, honestly. I just explained.
- [55:13]
A
But, you know, there are also ways to do that. Right. So. So you probably don't want to say, look, how much time you. You cost me. But you could imagine telling her, you say, look, buying you these cookies was. Was really wonderful because I knew you wanted them, and I was looking forward to going to the store. And as I was buying them, I was thinking about you. And then I was carrying them in the plane. And the whole time I was thinking how happy you would be when you got the cookies. And now we're here, and here are the cookies. And I want you to just remember how much I love you every time you have one of them. Right. And. And if you think about that kind of a story, it's a story that endows the cookies with. With a meaning that is not just about the taste of the. Of the cookie. And I think that part of the. The things we don't do enough is to endow things with meaning. And I'll tell you kind of a funny story. Not funny, but a story that happened to me. So I. There's a guy, Bill Harland, who is a wine grower in California, supposedly fantastic wines. I've drank them, but I'm not a wine connoisseur, but anyway, I really like the guy. And from time to time I go and I spend some time with him. And on this particular day, I spend. I spend the whole day with him. And I look at the. The soil and picking the grapes and all, doing all the process and so on. And we have dinner, and he gives me a bottle of wine. He says, dan, this wine we picked when you. Me. Dan was 30 years old, so quite a few years ago. And we got 100 points from Parker. And he said, I want you to keep this wine until you're 50 and drink it when you're 50. So I was 45 at the time, and about 45. So. So then I had this bottle of wine, and I kept it somewhere visible. Maybe I should have kept it in some, you know, like, cooler place, but I wanted to see it. And it was. It was a reminder of when I was 30. And it was a reminder of my beautiful, wonderful day with Bill. And it was a reminder that, you know, I have some time to wait until the wine will be ready. And then when I turned 50, I didn't want to drink it because I got attached to this bottle and wine and remembering the day with Bill and it's beautiful day in California and really wonderful discussion. But I did have to drink it. So I bought a decanter, I bought the decanter and I decanted that wine into the decanter and the decanter got some of the meaning of the wine. So now when I see that decanter, it's the decanter that connected to that day with Bill and so on. Now, if you think about that or, you know, the cookies for your daughter and so on, I think we don't do enough of that. And maybe wine is kind of the best even category to think about meaning. Because wine is one of the few categories that we have a consumption vocabulary around. Right. We have tannin complexity, acidity leg. We pick up the glass in many ways. You could say, oh, this is fake. You know, people can't tell the difference in your taste bud, cannot tell the difference in the wine. And people argue about it. But in another level, it's not about whether your taste bud can do something different. It's about attention. So if I sit next to my laptop and drink a glass of wine, I'm not going to pay much attention, I'm not going to particularly enjoy. It's going to be okay. But if I stop and look and smell and slow down and sip and so on, the whole experience is very valuable. So kind of there's meaning that is connected and basically occupies more of our higher function in our brains. And then. And then there's also the experience itself that we could direct by creating consumption vocabulary.
- [59:38]
B
Yeah. The environment to wine is so important, isn't it? Where you are, who you're with. I mean, I've had like the same wine in one country and then again in another country, it's completely different. Just because I'm in the vineyard, the sun's shining, I'm outdoors and with somebody telling me about it. It's incredible.
- [59:54]
A
Yeah. I went to a vineyard, I had such a good time, the owner was amazing. And a beautiful day with a friend. When I got home with the same bottles of wine, I couldn't drink them.
- [60:07]
B
Yes, I know, exactly. I've had that experience so many times, maybe pivoting slightly from good times to less Good times, actually, because you've written a new book, Misbelief. I read it last night and it just blew my mind. For anyone who's not read it yet, describe. Because, you know, your career in behavioral science started with a pretty bad event for you personally. And then this is another pretty bad event that happened to you that inspired another book. What happened to.
- [60:35]
A
So during COVID I did not realize for a while, but I became very hated. There were a group of people who thought that I helped about bringing Covid. They called me the chief consciousness architect. They thought I was part of the cabal, the Illuminati, and I was part of the conspiracy. And they gave me a lot of power. They said, how can it be that people are so compliant? It must be that, you know, you're working to get people to be like sheep and so on. But it was tough. Death threats, people burning my books. It was. It was very, very aggressive. And there was like one day when I discovered that. And I spent about a month trying to proved that this was not correct. Failed miserably. Really miserably. And then at the end of that month, I said, okay, I have to understand what's going on. And, you know, kind of misinformation. Fake news has been around for a while, right? What's happening in the uk what's happening in. In the US the world. The world over. But. But it was kind of in the background. But all of a sudden there was something very powerful about somebody saying, me, you did this? And I said, no, I didn't do this. Like, people were sure. I had a contract with Pfizer and there was nothing I could do to. To show. I even. I even told somebody, I'll show them my tax returns to see that. I. Anyway, so I describe in a short way my experience. That's not the main point of the book. The book is really saying, okay, I gave up on explaining myself. Let me understand these people. And in general, the approach of behavioral economics and psychology is to say that things are not random. The reason we have relativity, the pain of pain and so on, there's a reason to it. And in the same way I think that conspiracies or misbeliefs are not for nothing. They are maybe not a desirable reaction, but they are a reaction to something. And I basically describe. The book is a description of the process by which this new world of information is attacking us. And it's almost like an Introduction to Psychology textbook because it covers emotion and stress. It covers the cognitive process, the personality process, and the social process. And it describes this machinery that is taking good, kind, wonderful people and turning them into something very different. And we kind of all have these people in our lives, and. And the question is, what. What happened to them? And then what can we do about it? And also what should we do as a society? So that's really what. What the book is. I will say that as I dug deeper and deeper and talked to more and more people, on one hand, I. I realized how big the problem was. You know, if 10 years ago, we would have made a list of the big problems of society, misinformation wouldn't have been there. Now it's one of the biggest ones, and it's one of the biggest ones because we have lots of challenges that we have to solve as a society. And if we can't agree on anything, we can't move forward. Right? And it's true. It's true for almost all countries. So I think that we have to understand this and we have to figure out some mechanisms, and there are some things that we could do individually, but there are some things we need to solve as a society.
- [64:21]
B
Do you think that you spoke. So you actually spoke, didn't you, personally, to a lot of the people that were writing the stuff about you?
- [64:27]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [64:27]
B
Do you think, are people doing it intentionally or is it. Is there conspiracies? Are they kind of setting out to unsettle what they perceive as your. Or are these people unconsciously going. You call it the funnel, don't you, in the book? Are they unconsciously kind of going through those stages?
- [64:45]
A
So, so there, there's no question that there are big forces behind lots of social media in the form of bots from all kinds of dark regimes around the world. I don't think I'm connected to that, so I don't think I'm sufficiently important that somebody in, you know, Country X would say, let's, let's get Dan down. Now. Do bots help? Of course. Because a lot of these bots, once they see a fight, they join in because they. They want to create. To create fights. But I. I don't think I was a target of. Of anything. I think it was started naturally. And, and I think so. You know, the, the woman who I think started it, like Patient Zero and the woman that, as far as I could identify started it was somebody who is very stressed about what was happening with her son in masks and so on. And she read that I was advising the Ministry of Education, she knew, because she really liked my research before that I did some projects on vaccines and she knew that I worked with the Gates foundation, now I worked with the Gates foundation on child nutrition in Africa, but not, but anyway, she connected the dots, made a story and then it got a life of its, of its own. And it got a life so much of its own that at some point I became like a social currency. I think the half a beard, you know, was, was also helpful because. Helpful, I mean, not helpful for them because it's, it's so easy to villainize. Right? Half and half, half devil. Why didn't you. Your whole face was burned, things like that. But I think that she, she, she connected the dots, the non existing connection and made the story out of there and then it just got a life of its own. And when things get a life of their own, it's just very, very popular. But I gave ChatGPT the book and I asked you to summarize it in one word and it said empathy. I was very happy with this.
- [67:04]
B
You're very empathetic in the book actually because you, I mean most people will be angry. Yeah, most people would be defensive, most people go on the attack. But to your credit, what you do is try and understand first and use it a bit like with your, you know, when you had your burns is you wanted to understand and use that process which I guess is healing, isn't it, in a way for you personally, isn't it? But that's a really healthy kind of approach to advocacy. Most people don't have that toolkit when this stuff happens, right?
- [67:33]
A
It is, yeah, it is, it was, it was in some way. My, my way of coping was not, was not to get angry with them in this, but to, but to try and, to try and understand. And as a social scientist it was very natural for me to do that. And you know, there's lots of things to talk about, but maybe we'll mention one factor. So we said that there are four elements and the thing that starts people down the funnel of misbelief is stress. And maybe I'll give one example of how this works. So there's something we call white noise. And in hearing white noise, like full spectrum noise in vision, it's about, it's like imagine a painting with red, with black and white dots randomly sorted out. That's called white noise. And imagine I show you one of those and I say, hey, do you see a figure? And you say yes or no? I show you the next one, the next one. I show you 50 of those. What happens when we're Stressed. It turns out that when we're stressed, we see more images. And why. Why is it. Imagine you're an animal in the jungle and you think there's a tiger somewhere. Your system is completely honed in to say, oh, these two leaves are moving. There must be something there, right? When we're stressed, our system gets into overdrive to explain the world to ourselves. And that's exactly what happened to this woman and happened to lots of other people under stress. And stress can come from COVID Finance, what's happening with AI, what is happening in terms of the war in Ukraine, what's happening in Gaza, who are these Houthis, what's happening with Iran, and so on and so forth. My students, by the way, are very stressed about will they have a job with everything coming with AI. So the first necessary condition is stress. And if you're happy and resilient, you're not looking for alternative explanations, but when something bad is happening in your stress, you're looking for something to explain that, and you go into that. And then there's lots of other processes, the cognitive, the personality. But maybe let's mention one another one, which we call shibboleth, and it's part of the social element. And the term shibboleth comes from a story in the Bible that these two tribes had a war. They settled on two sides of the river, and then when they walked around, they wanted to know if the people that they meet are from their tribe or the other tribe. And it just so happened that they pronounced the name of the plant Shibolet slightly differently. One of them said Shibolet, one of them said C. Bollet. So imagine I walk around, I have a plant, and I say, hey, you, how do you call this plant? And if you call it the way I call it, we're friends, we're brothers, we're from the same tribe. If you call it like the other tribe, I have to fight you or chase you away. Now, we now use this term shibboleth, for a discussion that is not about the facts, but it's about identity. Because I show you the plant and say, what's the name of this plant? Do I really care about the plant? No, I care about identity. And if you look at a lot of things in our political sphere or you look at lots of things in social media, you. You can recognize Shibolit. You know, once you have this lens, you could say, oh, it's very confusing. Is this about the fact or this about identity? And you can say, okay, it's not really about the fact. It is about identity. And the discussion that is about identity is, is a very different, is a very different discussion. I'm protesting, I'm saying things. It has nothing to do with the facts. It has to do with showing my purity, my values, my anti. Pro. Whatever.
- [71:14]
B
And as you say in the book, it's not a left or right thing, is it? Both left and right are equally, you know, liable to, to have the. It's almost signaling, isn't it, your allegiance to the cause. It doesn't really matter whether the truth of truth in that sense doesn't matter. It's the signaling that's right.
- [71:30]
A
In the tribe, everybody thinks that the other side has lots of misbeliefs and their side is completely accurate. It is also interesting to. I give some examples in the book for asking people to reflect on their most basic beliefs and how sure they are and where they got it from. But what would have happened if you were born with the same, you were born to a family with the opposite political opinion than your parents?
- [71:57]
B
Oh, interesting, right?
- [71:58]
A
What, what, what do you think your beliefs would be? And most people say, you know, I would have been different. So, you know, we, we, we have a, in retrospect, we can say, oh, all of my beliefs are reasoned and thoughtful and they're based on facts and logic, but a lot of them are not. We don't know that much. And so on.
- [72:23]
B
Now you have a real ability to put your finger on some hot topics. Where, where are you going next? What, what's the next book in your, in your mind?
- [72:32]
A
So I have a website called the center for Advanced Bureaucracy. We complain about bureaucracy. I think it's one of the one. But I have two large topics that I'm working on mostly these days. One is about thinking about the last chapter of people's lives. So I'm thinking about a journey from the time that people get a terminal illness diagnosis until the end of life and trying to understand all the mistakes that people do in that process and how we can help. And you know, there are lots of mistakes. Like in the beginning, people become patients rather than people with an illness. It's like a job. And you basically say, okay, my job is to adhere to medicine. No, no, your job is to live and figure out this. People buy into the medical perspective of prolonging life at all costs. People end up taking extra treatment that they don't want. People end up dying in hospital when they don't want. So there's lots of mistakes along the way that I'm trying to analyze, understand, and offer some solutions. So that's one. And then the second one is thinking about how do we live a life that is more fulfilling by making bolder decisions. So whenever you have a risk, there's an upside and downside. And the upside is where improvement come from. And the downside is mistakes. And I think that risk is the spice of life. People think variety is the spice of life? No, I think that risk is the real spice of life. The challenge is that when you have a choice and you have an upside and a downside, the downsides are capturing too much of our attention. We're too afraid to fail. We're afraid of people hating us socially. We're afraid of cancel culture. So we live a timid life. And when you look at young people these days, they live even a more timid life than we do. There's some really sad statistics on young people not dating as much, not expressing romantic love, not sharing their feelings. And, and the world is becoming more like that. You know, when we, when we started talking and I said something about sexuality and, and scars and, and you know, the, you know, it's, it's, it's a world. It's a world. It's a punishing world. Right. You can, you can imagine. I'm very happy. I'm not afraid of, of saying this, but, but there, there's. There's something about this world that there's some topics that we don't talk about and, and so on. And, and you know, we've all made mistakes and we, we all know that we would love to share those mistakes because there's no reason for everybody to repeat the same mistakes again. Right. So I've made a ton of mistakes and it will give me great pleasure to know that I'm helping some people not relive those mistakes. Exactly the same. So, so I think I'm. I'm analyzing the reasons. I'm so writing this book where I'm trying to analyze the reasons why. The first part is why we're making. Why are we so afraid? And then the second one is to come up with solutions. So I'm just trying to. I'm now in the solution part of it and I'm really, really enjoying it. But I'll tell you two other things. I started writing kids books.
- [76:05]
B
Oh, did you?
- [76:05]
A
Yeah. Just finished the second one and I'm writing the third. The first one is on procrastination, I think will be out later in the year, maybe beginning next year. The second one is about allowances and the third will be about white lies. And then I don't know if you know, but I helped write a TV show that is loosely based on my life. It's now showing the second season on NBC.
- [76:30]
B
Do you style yourself?
- [76:31]
A
No, no, no. It's like it's a real TV show. There's a real actor.
- [76:34]
B
Okay.
- [76:35]
A
But he also has burns. Not as much as I do. And he was burned in a different way. He teaches behavioral economics and he's helping the FBI solves crime. And then the other thing I'm trying to do, kind of for the fun, is that the same people who did the show asked me to pitch a reality show that is social science based. So now thinking about that. So the creative side of my life.
- [77:01]
B
Is very, very well, you're definitely taking the risks and not letting fear of failure get in your way. Actually, you just reminded me of something I think we chatted about before. But I remember going to Tel Aviv and meeting a venture capitalist and I was fascinated by how he chose to invest in the people. And he flipped on his head and said, if you, if you walk in here and tell me you haven't failed, that's our conversation over. And what he was really interested in is how you come back from failure and what, and what you've learned. And you know, he was looking to invest in people that have been through that process, learned from it and moved on, which was always fascinating.
- [77:38]
A
Yeah. And I think there's a lot to it. It's not just a failure. It's also knowing that these people are resilient. You want somebody that understands failure and you want somebody who has developed the resilience to deal with all kinds of things. Doesn't have to be.
- [77:55]
B
I met the, the Olympic swimming coach for the Australian team that won gold last two Olympics. Dean Boxall. Massively exciting guy. Really, really pumped up, enthusiastic. And he said, look, with the Gen Z, everyone says to me, you know, how do you, how do you coach Gen Z? And he said, don't ever tell me that they don't work as hard. They work as hard as anyone, any, you know, set of athletes I've ever had in my life. The difference comes when they don't succeed. He said, I have to become psychologist. And he said, all my job now is talking them through what happens when they don't reach their standards that they've set for themselves. He said that that's, that's the difference, you know, the ability to pick yourself back up and go again, which you've got lots of experience of obviously what you've been through. So, so you're well placed to, to write the book. Dan, thank you, mate. It's been an absolute pleasure. I feel like we've just skim the surface.
- [78:46]
A
We did, we did it. You know, it, it, it feels, it feels like we, we should continue this on the, on the pint of somewhere in the, in the pub.
- [78:56]
B
I think that's exactly what we should do. And just to say everyone out there, go look up Dan down get his books. They're absolutely fascinating and it is like a whole world of fascinating social science awaits you. So thank you very much. Go check it out.
- [79:08]
A
Was a pleasure.
- [79:09]
B
Thank you very much for listening or watching uncensored. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do I'm over on x uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.