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How do you create priorities and how do you figure out where to put what?
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So we actually had lots of success.
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We got people to call their mothers and drink water and exercise and reading is incredible.
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You talk to people about reading and people say, I haven t read, and then you say, you know what?
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Read 15 minutes a day.
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Just put it in your calendar, read 15 minutes a day.
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It helps you fall asleep better and you say you want to read.
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It s amazing what you could do in 15 minutes a day if you do it.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with behavioral economist and best-selling author, Dan Ariely.
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You should listen to this episode if you want to learn how our brains make decisions, and more importantly, why we decide the things we do, how we re never truly rational, unbiased, or impartial, even if it s our job to do just that.
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We ll also see what time it is to best go before a judge, and why transparency in our lives can often backfire.
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And last but not least, how motivation works
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how it doesn t work, and how we can use our own psychology against ourselves.
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So enjoy this one with Dan Ariely.
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And by the way, if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the AOC toolbox, where we discuss things like body language and nonverbal communication.
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We also discuss persuasion, networking, negotiation, mentorship, and everything else we teach here at the Art of Charm.
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If you re in the US, just text charmed,
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to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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Alright, here s Dan Ariely.
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It takes a lot of effort for me to get unflustered later on in the day.
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So if I wake up, like I did this morning at 4.45 a.m.
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for a radio appearance, and then I try to go back to sleep, that s the cardinal mistake.
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Once I try to go back to sleep, if that doesn t work, I end up stressing about not being able to sleep, and then that ll carry through, and then going into traffic and everything, it s just like, this morning I woke up and Jen s like, are you okay?
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It s just like one thing after another.
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I feel like there s a skill, especially in a business, that you have to have, which I am currently developing, where you are able to un-fluster yourself very, very quickly.
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Otherwise, you ll just get washed down the drain with every little problem that pops up.
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Yeah, and there s a couple of versions of the story that you could have that have different mechanisms.
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So one is falling asleep, right?
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What happens if you wake up and you try to fall asleep?
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And there s actually really interesting research showing that when people try to fall asleep,
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they interpret the difficulty as an indication that something is wrong.
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So all of a sudden, it s not just that you fall asleep, you say, oh, why can t I fall asleep?
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And these thoughts are making it harder and harder to fall asleep.
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But this idea of resetting, the idea of resetting in general is very, very important.
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And resetting can be in lots of scales.
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So there s this notion called the what the hell effect.
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People mostly know this effect from dieting.
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that you re on a diet, you re on a strict diet, and then you eat a muffin.
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And you said to yourself, I m not on a diet, I might as well have a burger and fries and a milkshake for lunch and then a chocolate cake for dinner.
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And the notion is that we view ourself in a binary way.
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We re either good or bad.
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And if you re 92% good, you can still think of yourself as a good category.
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But if you re 78% good, is it really worth effort to move to 92%?
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So basically what happened is that
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As long as we re not on the good side, we say what the hell, because we don t enjoy the middle ground.
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The middle ground is not helping us define who we are.
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So we find this in dishonesty, that when people start behaving badly, continuing is very easy.
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We find it in dieting.
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We find it in failing in all kinds of ways.
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And there are these religious mechanisms that get you to restart things.
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Think about the Catholic confession.
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Oh yeah, there you go.
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What s the logic of the Catholic confession?
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Clean slate.
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That s right.
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You could say it s a crazy mechanism, right?
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Because if you know that you can sin and get absolved, what should you do?
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Right, just go for it.
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And not only that, just go for it just before confession, right?
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Because you minimize time in purgatory, right?
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The only thing, if the mindset was the only thing I want to do is not to die without confession, still on the way to confession you set up.
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But of course, that s not how confession works.
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Confession works by restarting a new page.
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And we do this at night, right, where each day is a new day.
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Calories, right?
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Nature doesn t count calories by the day.
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That if you ate a muffin in the morning, whatever you do in the afternoon is still in the same category.
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But that s why New Year is an important thing.
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There s all these questions of how do we reset it.
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In Judaism, there s the Day of Atonement.
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That s all on the dishonesty side, but I think it s a much more general thing, that if you re in a rut, what can you do to reset?
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And if you just say, let me reset, I don t think that s going to work.
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You need some kind of ritual, some kind of statement, and then try something different.
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If I were you, and you kind of early in the morning discover that you re in a rut, do something different.
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Go for a run, do 10 pushups.
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I usually work out.
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Yeah, I usually work out if it s in the middle of the day.
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If it s 8 p.m., I just go, all right, a lot of things are going wrong today, they don t need to be solved today.
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I can just go to bed early, and then I ll get up early the next day, and I ll have more time and a clean slate to take care of everything.
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Clean slate is interesting, and we ve done some experiments on this, on dishonesty in particular, when we get people to cheat, and then we change how they cheat, and we give them a chance to confess, and it turns out that the two elements of confession, of admitting what you ve done wrong, and asking for forgiveness are both crucial, you need both of them.
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So you say, here s what I did wrong,
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sorry, let me start fresh, those help.
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And we don t have enough of those mechanisms in civic society, right?
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We don t.
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Why do you think that is?
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Because I don t think we have the intuition of the separation of the self.
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I mean, we have some of that intuition around New Year resolution.
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Sure.
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But we don t have enough of that intuition that says, I can put a stop and say my past self,
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is not an indication necessarily of who I m going to be.
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I think the intuition is that we are a much more continuous self, and if we understood that we can take these somehow artificial gaps and restart, we would use it more often.
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Yeah, it seems like a trick I should have learned decades ago, that when I m having an off day, work out and reset.
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or I d like to say I don t have off days that often, but I do work from home, so I m able to recover, or an off day seems a little bit less of a lull, because I m not in front of a lot of people until I do something like this, and then you see your mistakes are highlighted, kind of, even for yourself, because whereas if something goes wrong and no one s around and I can fix it quietly, it doesn t seem like a big problem.
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When you re late for your own thing and nobody knows, no big deal.
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When you re late and people go, look man,
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I got crap to do today, what s your problem?
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Then you go, okay, maybe I need to get it back together, it becomes harder.
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By the way, it s not just about other people observing, it s about awareness more generally.
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So we find, for example, that if people work in front of a mirror, they are less dishonest.
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We find that if you have, this was an experiment that was done in England, where they had kind of an honor coffee bar,
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So you pay on your own.
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You pay on your own, they tell you what the amount is, and they change the pictures above the money collection box.
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And sometimes it was a picture of eyes, and sometimes a picture of flowers.
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And people left three times more money when it was a picture of eyes.
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Now, when you see a picture of eyes, you don t think to yourself, ooh, somebody s looking.
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You don t confuse that this is a camera or something like that.
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But there is an awareness of the outside perspective.
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you re all of a sudden a bit more aware to yourself.
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Think about walking in front of a big display window where you can actually see your shadow.
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or a reflection of yourself.
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There s an increased awareness of ourselves, and it gets us to behave very differently.
0
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So, actually, lots of behaviors, it s as if we re turning a slightly blind eye to our own behavior, right?
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You ask people, how healthy were you?
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What have you done?
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We kind of delude ourselves very quickly that we are much nicer,
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Sure.
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I mean, story of everybody s life, right?
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How did you eat last week?
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Oh, it was pretty healthy.
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Well, okay, I went to McDonald s like three times.
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Well, I drank, but that was the weekend, so that doesn t really count in my answer.
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And there s all kinds of things like that that everyone does.
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And the moment you have kind of the outside perspective, your accountability increases a little bit, and people behave better.
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Look at undergrads.
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We did some studies on productivity.
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Undergrads rarely study in the dorm room.
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they go to the library or they go to somewhere public.
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Why?
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Because they want to meet girls, but there s probably another reason.
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So one is, of course, they think they ll stay in the room, they ll just go to sleep.
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But they also want to have the feeling that somebody might look at their screen.
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So if nobody s looking, they can spend the whole day Facebook, YouTube, and so on, but if in the library, they have high responsibility to other people around, somebody could pass by, they would feel that they re wasting their time, and that actually helps them kind of adhere to the commitment
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to study at least a little bit.
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I can see that.
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I mean, I was a much better student in law school than I was in undergrad, and I ll tell ya, working in the quiet reading room where it looks like, I went to Michigan, so it s like bookshelves, and it s a stone room, and everyone s quiet, everyone s taking it pretty seriously, and they don t let just anybody in there.
1
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You have to be a certified, you know, bar-accredited attorney or a student at that law school, you know, undergrads, et cetera.
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So you go into this area where it s like the ritual is
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quiet study, get it done.
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So if you re there and you re playing poker, there were those guys that were just so socially inept that even sitting in a place like that where you re supposed to be working, it just lost all of its effect after a while.
1
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But I ll tell you, when I went in there, I kind of wanted to get out of there because it was intense, and so I got my studying done and I got out of there because otherwise it was over.
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And there is the question of what is the environment tells us that our role should be?
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Sure, yeah.
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And we accept that role and then we
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and the consequence of that, which is why it s so hard.
1
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I mean, you said you work at home.
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Sometimes it s very hard to work from home because there s this mixture of roles.
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The environment basically reminds us about what our role is, and the environment gives us all kinds of different cues.
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It s time to do the laundry, make lunch.
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Make another lunch.
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Yes, make a little snack.
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The environment of working from home took me years to be able to work effectively from home.
1
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I would say six years ago, five years ago, I would get started around 2 p.m.
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because it was hard to get out of bed because there was nobody waiting for you and then you d get up and you d go to the gym and then you d make some food and then you re kind of tired and then you want to make some calls and then you look for the easiest thing because you haven t planned out your day or you d have gotten up early and gotten something done.
1
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So you just start with the easy activity and then it s five o clock and you go,
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I can t start that big project thing now.
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It s too late in the day, I ll do it tomorrow.
1
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Yeah, by the way, this problem is not just limited to 2 p.m.
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and 5 p.m.
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If you think about the things we have to do, we have a lot of small tasks that we just have to do.
1
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And what s interesting is they give us a bizarre sense of reward because it makes us feel as if we re making progress.
1
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And the official name for this is structured procrastination.
1
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And basically, the prototype for this is making to-do lists.
1
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You make a to-do list, and item number one is make a to-do list.
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And you cross it out.
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You write things and you cross them out, and you haven t done that much.
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In fact, you ve taken time away from making real progress and just made the list.
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And by the way, there s some good list.
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The process of doing small things and checking them off gives us a sense as if we re making progress.
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where the hard things are very bizarre because they don t give us a sense of, the sense of progress is very elusive.
1
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Like imagine you spend the whole- It s blunted by that struggle that you d go through to get it done.
1
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Yeah.
1
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Right?
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So first of all, it s a long term, right?
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You could spend the whole day and you can say, you come home and you re significant, I said, what did you do?
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You say, honey, today I was thinking.
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The whole day, I thought.
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Nothing good came out, but I was thinking, you know, make all kind of mistakes, maybe I m thinking a little bit better now, but you don t feel like it was a useful day.
1
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Whereas you say, I got to inbox zero, oh my goodness, now it s an achievement.
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And do this.
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There s another bizarre thing about progress, which I kind of worry a little bit about digital tools.
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You know, I wrote a few books,
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I think that for every book, I maybe edited it.
1
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I m not talking about writing.
1
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Maybe edited it 50 times, right, where you read it again and rethink about it and change some things and just edit and edit and edit.
1
SPEAKER_01
The whole thing 50 times?
1
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Yeah, about.
1
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That sounds like an absolutely horrendous amount of work.
1
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It s a lot of work, but it s actually quite pleasurable.
1
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Over time, I think I write slower and I enjoy it more.
1
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That s great.
1
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For me, it s a little bit like, I m not such a good writer, but it s a little bit like wine, where I think about sentences
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Now, if you have a deadline, that s a different story, but if you re just writing, it s a very wonderful activity.
1
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But anyway, the first book, for Predictably Irrational, I had this version of it that took me a long time, and I look at it, and I had the thought of, why didn t I just write this version to start with?
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Why did we have all the other versions?
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Why can t I read?
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Now, imagine you wrote everything on hard copy.
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you would have kind of a sense of your progression.
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh, you mean like you re handwriting it and then you re-handwrite it.
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Let s say you did.
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I m not recommending it.
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But let s say you did.
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But you had a hard copy of all the versions.
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You would probably understand some of the progress in your own thinking.
1
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Sure.
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You would say, oh, I really thought about that example and later on I understood something else and I changed it and so on.
1
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But in a digital world, when we just write on top of other things, and there s no history for the progress of thought, it s much easier to say, I should have started here.
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Write this, because you don t actually understand the journey of thinking.
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And I think it s one of the problems is that we don t understand how much
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time thinking takes and how the pure efforts and the pure focusing and trying to resolve a problem and think about all the angles actually get you somewhere.
1
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Now sometimes you go in a direction, discover it was just a waste of time, but you come back and you refine your thinking.
1
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It s an activity that gives you very little short-term reward.
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It s incredibly valuable.
1
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But if you say, what would get me to think at the end of the day that I had a productive day?
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If I thought for four more hours or answered email for four more hours, however,
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What would make you happier at the end of the month, year, or at the end of your life?
1
SPEAKER_00
10 books or zero inbox?
1
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That s right.
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When you get to your deathbed, you could say, I had 278 days of zero inbox in my lifetime.
1
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What an achievement.
1
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So we do the urgent, and it s actually a very sad thing.
1
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I think there s something about the electronic way in which the world is progressing.
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that we have more of those things that give us the short.
1
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Dopamine head, yeah.
1
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I got something, I got something.
1
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I have a feeling that on Monday morning, there s a huge group of people who show up to work, don t really feel like doing anything, work just seems too daunting, so instead they email me.
1
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If they email you, yeah.
1
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You know, what can I do to feel like I ve done some work?
1
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It s not just me, of course, but we do this, make work that give us a sense of progress without delving to the things that actually give us long-term satisfaction.
1
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I agree with that 100%.
1
SPEAKER_00
I see this a lot, especially, like you said, with people who decide to email you.
1
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I do see this a lot because we run live training programs in Los Angeles, and a lot of times people will write in and they ll say,
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I m really thinking about doing this live training program in Los Angeles.
1
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I really wanna come out and meet all you guys and get all these different nonverbal communication skills that we teach at the Art of Charm handled.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I go, great, let s do that.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I say, send me your phone number and I ll put you in touch with Jen or whoever, Brock or whoever s answering the calls and getting people registered for the programs that week.
1
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And sometimes they ll send me their number and then after that they get all the information and they go, yeah, yeah, it s great, I m just gonna plan it all out.
1
SPEAKER_00
80% of those people, you never hear from them again, and it took me forever to figure that out.
1
SPEAKER_00
Was it our materials?
1
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Was it the pricing?
1
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Was it the distance?
1
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And sure, there s some people who just can t travel, they don t want to or whatever, but the majority of the people, they felt like since they asked for the information, they got the information, they laid out all the information, it s on their computer, it s saved, they already reached out and they emailed me, they already took
1
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the first five steps in their mind.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so they ll happily put it on the back burner, tuck it away in a drawer, and it s really, really frustrating.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we get a lot of guys who come through years later that say, I don t know why this took me so long.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the answer, in my opinion, is, well, because you thought you were doing something the whole time.
1
SPEAKER_00
It just wasn t anything important.
1
SPEAKER_00
It was like washing the car, putting gas in the car, inflating all the tires on the car, and then going back in your living room, flipping on the TV and going, why am I not at work yet?
1
SPEAKER_00
I need to go to work.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, I already did the other stuff.
1
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The car s ready.
1
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I can do that whenever I want.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you re basically resting on your laurels.
1
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Resting on your laurels.
1
SPEAKER_01
You re kind of saying, this thing has 10 steps.
1
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The last one is a big one.
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SPEAKER_01
But let s just call them 10 steps.
1
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I ve done five out of the 10.
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SPEAKER_01
I m basically an expert already.
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SPEAKER_00
The problem is when your laurels are made out of crappy tinsel and plastic, and you re supposed to do something ironclad, you re in trouble if you re resting on those laurels.
1
SPEAKER_01
There s another thing which is called implementation intention, if you know that term.
1
SPEAKER_01
No, I never heard that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Implementation intention is the idea that we have very fuzzy plans for life, and we make concrete plans only in very specific cases, or only when we get close to the event.
1
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So let s say where you want to go on vacation next summer,
1
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And I said, what would you need to go to plan your vacation?
1
SPEAKER_01
And he would say, you know, I ll have to decide where to go and get a flight ticket.
1
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It will be at that level.
1
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Two days before the event, you will think about very specific things.
1
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You will think about immunization and passport, who s going to take care of your dog and who will water the plant.
1
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Long term in advance, we have these very, very fuzzy plans that don t actually help us make any progress.
1
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And the plans get consolidated only when we get very close to the event.
1
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One experiment we did was this was in a local supermarket that was selling kind of sandwiches and drinks for lunch.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it was a supermarket, but lunch
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lunch activity was mostly people coming to buy a sandwich and a drink.
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And people on average were spending $6.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we gave people a coupon that said, spend $8, get a dollar off.
2
SPEAKER_00
And what happened?
2
SPEAKER_00
Basically, we got lots of people to spend $8, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Valuable.
2
SPEAKER_00
There were some people, we gave them a coupon that said, spend $4 or more, get a dollar off.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know what happened to those people?
2
SPEAKER_00
They spend less.
2
SPEAKER_00
Why?
2
SPEAKER_00
They could have spent six and get a dollar off, but the $4 kind of got them to think that they should try and aim for $4.
2
SPEAKER_00
I see.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they did.
2
SPEAKER_00
But here s the interesting thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
This coupon of saying, spend $8, get a dollar off, some people got it outside of the store, 12 feet before they entered the store.
2
SPEAKER_00
And some people got it once they entered the store.
2
SPEAKER_00
What happened?
2
SPEAKER_00
The effect of the coupon was higher for people who got it outside of the store.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because outside of the store, they had very fuzzy plans about what they were going to get.
2
SPEAKER_00
They knew they were going to get a sandwich and a drink, but which sandwich and which drink could change.
2
SPEAKER_00
They haven t thought about it yet.
2
SPEAKER_00
They haven t thought about it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So they got a coupon that says spend $8, get $1 off.
2
SPEAKER_00
They said, oh, let s spend $8.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then when they got to the counter, that was their starting point.
2
SPEAKER_00
Once people enter the store, they already got concrete plans of what they wanted to do, and they already had a specific sandwich and a specific drink in mind, and then when you give them a coupon, it doesn t change their behavior in the same way.
2
SPEAKER_00
So a big part of it is to think about what are our concrete plans for acting.
2
SPEAKER_00
Acting doesn t come about by having very general plans of what to do in life.
2
SPEAKER_00
Action comes from having concrete plans and even putting it into your calendar and say when you re going to do it.
2
SPEAKER_00
The question is what kind of things cause us to create concrete plans?
2
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes it s the closeness of the event in time, like you get close to the sandwich counter, you know, you need to pick one up.
2
SPEAKER_00
But in your case, if you have some long-term goal, you might do the easy things because it gives you short-term satisfaction as if you re making progress.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the things that are more difficult
2
SPEAKER_00
you never get them to be concrete.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s no urgency to put them on the agenda, so they never get executed.
2
SPEAKER_03
Right, that s why people have to-do lists that have things on them that say, write book, at the top, and it s been there for three years, and it s never getting checked off.
2
SPEAKER_03
Even page one doesn t say that.
2
SPEAKER_03
You know you re doing structured procrastination well when you re putting things on your checklist, your to-do list, that you ve already done, just so that you can cross them out.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s right, then you re a master, then you got the PhD in structured procrastination.
2
SPEAKER_03
At one point, I started doing things like that, and then I thought, okay, this is objectively not helpful at all.
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Now, back to the show.
2
SPEAKER_03
I figured out that the number one productivity tool for me personally, and for most people, that s underutilizes the calendar.
2
SPEAKER_03
Because we always think we need these reminders and these Pomodoro timer 20 second bursts of work.
2
SPEAKER_03
But if you don t know the day before or the day after.
2
SPEAKER_00
20 seconds?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, or 20 minutes or whatever it is.
2
SPEAKER_03
It depends how intense your work is.
2
SPEAKER_03
That s the workout, the 20 second Tabata timer.
2
SPEAKER_03
But if you re doing the 20 minutes of work as hard as you can, but you don t know what you re gonna do, you re in trouble.
2
SPEAKER_03
And honestly, I ve had people who come learn from us or come work for the Art of Charm, they re not as productive as they wanna be and they think they need all this, we call it productivity porn, where it s like the latest app that gets you to do something 12 seconds faster.
2
SPEAKER_03
What you really need is a calendar, and then when you have all those things structured in there, you can also put the big things on the calendar so that they get done, and everything else that s smaller just fills in around it.
2
SPEAKER_03
And you just make those appointments and those gym memberships and everything that you ve got in there as equally important so you don t skip them.
2
SPEAKER_03
But it s a lot easier said than done, because once you have that calendar, you re faced with the accountability that you slept over that 8 a.m.
2
SPEAKER_03
time slot where you were gonna study Chinese.
2
SPEAKER_03
You know, you slept through that, and now you know that.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s harder to backwards ration
2
SPEAKER_03
rationalize that that was okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and the calendar has all kind of challenges.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think the calendar is a very, it s actually a wonderful but also a very misguided tool.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, the calendar was designed for coordination with other people.
2
SPEAKER_00
So what do we have?
2
SPEAKER_00
We have, it s based on time, and at 3 p.m.
2
SPEAKER_00
you re going to meet somebody for this kind of meeting, and it s really good for that.
2
SPEAKER_00
But if you think about something like working on a book,
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, we can do a hack.
2
SPEAKER_00
We can say every day from nine to 11, I ll do this book.
2
SPEAKER_00
But shouldn t some days be from 8.30 to 11, and sometimes in the evenings and so on?
2
SPEAKER_00
The problem is that there s a lot of things that are not easily written down in the correct time on the calendar.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you have a task that might take 1,000 hours, there s no natural way to put it on the calendar.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you have a task that takes three minutes,
2
SPEAKER_00
like drinking a glass of water or calling your mother.
2
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t fit on your calendar either.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the calendar is really optimized for meetings.
2
SPEAKER_03
You only call your mom for three minutes?
2
SPEAKER_00
No, 15, 20.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the calendar is not good for lots of things.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, that s true.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s good for some things.
2
SPEAKER_00
So what happens is that the rest of it, you can actually try and do a hack and write them anyway, even though it s not ideal.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, like a one hour block where you do 20 different little things?
2
SPEAKER_00
That s right, so you say, time for little things, time for email, time for Facebook, big chunk of time to do important tasks, but you don t know what it will be.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you can do hacks around that, but that s so time consuming and it s not perfect.
2
SPEAKER_00
What happens is most people don t do that.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then what happens, they look at their calendar and you say, oh my goodness, I m free, I have nothing to do.
2
SPEAKER_00
What should I do with this time?
2
SPEAKER_00
Netflix.
2
SPEAKER_00
Meeting.
2
SPEAKER_00
Somebody s asking for a meeting, of course I can.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s a little suggestions we give people, which is to, if somebody s asking you to do something a year from now, ask yourself whether you would do it next week.
2
SPEAKER_03
That is such a great idea.
2
SPEAKER_03
I read that in your book and I thought, this is life changing.
2
SPEAKER_03
Because the problem, and this bears repeating, if somebody asks you to do something a long time from now, ask yourself if you would do it next week.
2
SPEAKER_03
Because the problem that I had up until very recently, and I think in part,
2
SPEAKER_03
from reading some of your work, I realized, wow, I do this to myself all the time.
2
SPEAKER_03
Oh yeah, I ll totally travel to Idaho for your birthday party in three months.
2
SPEAKER_03
Why wouldn t I do that?
2
SPEAKER_03
And then two weeks before that, I look at my monthly calendar and I go, why do I have plans to go to Idaho for this birthday party?
2
SPEAKER_02
How do I get out of this?
2
SPEAKER_02
How do I not do that?
2
SPEAKER_00
And then there s another approach, which is, we use the term cancellation.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is the happiness you get when something was canceled.
2
SPEAKER_00
So when somebody asked you to do something, you simulate in your mind how happy would you be if the day before they canceled.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if you re really happy.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that s the thing, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
That you re going to be very busy next year, just like you are today, just the details are not written.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we don t understand the opportunity cost of time.
2
SPEAKER_00
We understand the opportunity cost of time of today.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like if you ask me to do something else today, I can t.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m booked solid, there s no way.
2
SPEAKER_00
2018, look at my calendar, it looks quite free.
2
SPEAKER_00
Nothing.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the calendar, I don t think the calendar is enough.
2
SPEAKER_00
I do think we need extra hacks around it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Look, the big meaningful things that we want to do
2
SPEAKER_00
take time and they don t give us the same jolt of momentary satisfaction when we do them.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sadly, long-term happiness, nobody reports that answering more emails give them long-term happiness.
2
SPEAKER_00
So how do we get the important?
3
SPEAKER_01
to way more than the urgent.
3
SPEAKER_01
And how do we say no?
3
SPEAKER_01
How do we basically say, you know what?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I have a million emails.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I know I will not be able to get to all of them.
3
SPEAKER_01
But there s this thing that is a high priority for me, and I want to make sure that I don t procrastinate it every day and therefore never get to it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I want to make sure I start.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we need some hacks around the calendar to help us do this, some discipline.
3
SPEAKER_01
around that.
3
SPEAKER_00
So do you have calendar hacks or hacks around the calendar other than just making sure you have the appropriate amounts of time blocked off?
3
SPEAKER_01
So a few years ago, we actually had a little startup called Timeful, that we tried to do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what we tried to do was to ask people, what do you want to do?
3
SPEAKER_01
And we would seed people with things like, I want to read more, I want to exercise, I want to call my mother, I have these big projects.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then we would take those things, and we had kind of an AI background, and schedule for people in specific times, and also see when people did them
3
SPEAKER_01
and not, and then we would, over time, try to schedule in better times.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we learn lots of things.
3
SPEAKER_01
We learn, for example, that the first two hours of the day are generally hours that people have high cognitive capacity.
3
SPEAKER_00
Really?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m not talking like 5 a.m., you woke up at five today.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was awful.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re not talking five to seven.
3
SPEAKER_01
But nine to 11 are usually very good hours for people.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if you come to the office at nine, and you have kind of high capacity, and the first two hours you do email and Facebook.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s all wasted.
3
SPEAKER_01
You just took, the hours that we have high capacity are so precious.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have a few of those a day.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they re so much more productive than the hours after lunch where you can hardly function.
3
SPEAKER_01
And nevertheless, we don t use them right.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we would also try to take this into account.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like our model was, imagine you re a factory and you have lots of different tasks coming your way, and you have some hours that you re productive and some hours you re not productive.
3
SPEAKER_01
And how do you create priorities and how do you figure out where to put what?
3
SPEAKER_01
So we actually had
3
SPEAKER_01
Lots of success.
3
SPEAKER_01
We got people to call their mothers and drink water and exercise.
3
SPEAKER_01
And reading is incredible.
3
SPEAKER_01
You talk to people about reading and people say, I haven t read.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then you say, you know what?
3
SPEAKER_01
Read 15 minutes a day.
3
SPEAKER_01
Just put it in your calendar, read 15 minutes a day.
3
SPEAKER_01
It helps you fall asleep better.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you say you want to read.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s amazing what you could do in 15 minutes a day if you do it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or writing.
3
SPEAKER_01
An average book has, let s say, 80,000 words.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you wrote 1,000 words a day,
3
SPEAKER_01
how many days would it take you to write a book?
3
SPEAKER_00
Three months, counting all the editing and the days you took off to do other things.
3
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, you say if you wrote 1,000 words a day, if you wrote 500 words a day, you could produce two books a year.
3
SPEAKER_01
Almost nobody is at that level of productivity because we just don t get it.
3
SPEAKER_01
The amount of low productivity we have is just painful.
3
SPEAKER_00
And to put that in perspective, I remember when I was a kid counting approximately how many words I could write on one of those standard college-ruled papers.
3
SPEAKER_00
That was 500 words.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s not that much writing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Email, you re writing much more than 500 words a day, but it s a very different story.
3
SPEAKER_01
Actually thinking and slowly and writing and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
B.F.
3
SPEAKER_01
Skinner, the famous psychologist, basically had this rule that he would come to the office and he would write, I think, 730 words and he would stop on the words.
3
SPEAKER_01
730 words, middle of a sentence and stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
He didn t stop, but he had this very, and he was unbelievably prolific.
3
SPEAKER_01
So trying to figure out how we prioritize the things that are actually important for us and stick to it is very useful.
3
SPEAKER_01
Here s another thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
I became very interested in rules.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the thing is that if you leave things to your own judgment every time,
3
SPEAKER_01
you re likely to fail every time.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was gonna say, I hope he doesn t say that s the best way to do it, because that strategy has not worked for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s terrible, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
But the moment you have a rule, you basically have taken some decision out of your mind.
3
SPEAKER_01
And actually, there s an interesting story.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s an orthodox Jewish scholar, Kolelyel Dessler, who said that if you take all the Jewish people,
3
SPEAKER_01
and you order them from the least religious person on the left to the most religious person on the right, and that s true for all religions.
3
SPEAKER_01
One of the differences is they have more and more rules that dictate their lives that are outside of their considerations.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, so if you re a secular person, you have to decide about everything.
3
SPEAKER_01
What you dress, and what you eat, and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
As you become more and more religious, religion doesn t regulate everything in life, but it regulates more and more.
3
SPEAKER_01
You don t have a question of what you re going to do Saturday.
3
SPEAKER_00
Especially if you re a Hasidic Jew, or Ger, you know that sect, Ger?
3
SPEAKER_00
Super strict.
3
SPEAKER_01
The decision has been carried out for you, and it s kind of interesting.
3
SPEAKER_01
When I travel, I sometimes try to meet chief rabbis.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m very curious about religion.
3
SPEAKER_01
Think about, you re interested in startups.
3
SPEAKER_01
What are the most successful social institutions out there?
3
SPEAKER_01
And I m using the word successful in terms of survival, not in terms of necessarily positive impacts on human life.
3
SPEAKER_00
Clearly, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
What s working so well?
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s lots of things.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s lots of things about religion.
3
SPEAKER_01
There are complex organizations.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I asked the chief rabbi of England and of South Africa, I said, if I was going to keep one of the 10 commandments, what would you recommend?
3
SPEAKER_01
What do you think they recommended?
3
SPEAKER_01
I m guessing it s gonna be the one that s like the Sabbath or something.
3
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
Really?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why?
3
SPEAKER_01
And they both said the same thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
They said, look, first of all, you don t need a commandment telling you not to kill.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of obvious.
3
SPEAKER_01
But some of them are less obvious, but they say, if you think about progress in life, we think that taking a day off
3
SPEAKER_01
decrease progress.
3
SPEAKER_01
What we don t see is how much freedom it gives us and how much clarity of mind and rest and so on to create this.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I actually tried once a random Sabbath and once on the Day of Atonement.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t work on the Sabbath.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not a lot.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a very interesting process to be in a day that you say on this day there s no electronics.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because usually when I m home, no matter what I do, 15, 25% of my brain is occupied by the email that I m probably getting.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like as we speak now, you re probably simulating what kind of email you re having, all the things you re not answering, your phone is off, maybe all this notification, who did you respond.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s very hard not to have part of our mind being busy.
3
SPEAKER_01
But when you say, this is a day, there s no electronics, and not only that, it has a higher order meaning.
3
SPEAKER_01
Even if you don t believe in God, you say there s a social agreement about this being an issue.
3
SPEAKER_01
Imagine that every day you considered whether you should recycle or not.
3
SPEAKER_01
Should I recycle?
3
SPEAKER_01
How much benefit is it giving the municipality?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s cold outside, it s raining.
3
SPEAKER_01
On many days you would decide not worth it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But if you had the rule that said good people recycle,
3
SPEAKER_01
Very different story.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, every instant is not just about yes or no to recycle.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s about the fact that there s a principle that you want to adhere to.
3
SPEAKER_01
Being a vegetarian basically helps people do something that they want, but by having this rule and having a moral judgment around it, being vegan even more, it helps people adhere to those rules.
3
SPEAKER_01
So in the same way, I think that with productivity,
3
SPEAKER_01
There s all kinds of rules that we can create, and we might not want to give them the same moral judgments that vegans have about the rest of us, but I think that those things would certainly help with productivity.
3
SPEAKER_00
So are these all identity-based behaviors, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s, okay, you are a vegan, you are Jewish, you are Catholic, because it seems like you could use that to shape other people s behavior, and not necessarily in a nefarious way.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you could do this with kids, for example,
3
SPEAKER_00
If your kid won t share, I don t have kids, so this could be out of the left field, but if your kid won t share, you can say, what would Captain America do?
3
SPEAKER_00
Would Captain America share?
3
SPEAKER_00
Instead of, why don t you want to share?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I don t want to, I want the whole piece of candy.
3
SPEAKER_00
You say, well, would Captain America share?
3
SPEAKER_00
Captain America might share.
3
SPEAKER_01
So identity is very helpful.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s very helpful because it creates this sense of continuity.
3
SPEAKER_01
So even, for example, saying people, do you save or are you a saver?
3
SPEAKER_01
Are you a voter?
3
SPEAKER_01
Basically, all of those things that create identity help.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, you can have rules without identity, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
You could say, every day from eight to nine, I don t open email, I don t open Facebook, I don t open YouTube, I just write.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you can have a rule like this, and you can try to adhere to it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m a writer is more powerful.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but if you want to add to it, there s all kinds of things you can add in terms of motivation.
3
SPEAKER_01
Identity is helpful, public commitment, I mean, there s all kinds of things that you could do to make it more powerful.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you re a vegetarian,
3
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of funny, I m a vegetarian at home.
3
SPEAKER_01
At home we never eat meat.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it s multiple reasons.
3
SPEAKER_01
Some ideology about animals, some worry about modern agriculture, and some health.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it s not identity.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not identity in a strong way because I m not a vegetarian.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I created two separate contexts where I don t do it at home, but when I m traveling, I have different rules.
3
SPEAKER_01
I travel a lot.
3
SPEAKER_01
The rule is whatever s easier and most tastiest on the menu is what you eat.
3
SPEAKER_01
Give me two of those.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the moment, if you can get people to have it as an identity,
3
SPEAKER_01
it s much easier to maintain the rule.
4
SPEAKER_01
we stay late, we work hard, we help each other out, we don t steal office supply, whatever it is you want, because that s how we roll here at, I don t know, Apple, NASDAQ, whatever it is.
4
SPEAKER_01
We go the extra mile.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you can see that in the marketing, but if you can do that with your employees and your team,
4
SPEAKER_01
or loyalty, if you re talent recruiting, people are constantly being recruited away from you like they are here in Silicon Valley, if loyalty is the identity that your company has, you might stand to benefit strongly from that as an organization.
4
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
4
SPEAKER_00
People seek identity in many, many ways.
4
SPEAKER_00
And there s so many ways in which we don t allow people to extract all the joy of identity that they could.
4
SPEAKER_00
When I was still teaching at MIT, I had kind of a strange life, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
I do research, and I do research on chocolate and bionicles, and I give people a chance to steal money from me.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I had this assistant.
4
SPEAKER_00
He had this very strange job because basically he had to fight with MIT accounting people to reimburse me for chocolates and Legos and people stealing money.
4
SPEAKER_00
But his life was basically constrained to an interface with SAP and the MIT accounting people.
4
SPEAKER_00
How long did he last in that position?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, I wanted to buy a vending machine, and they were appalled.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, why do I want a vending machine, and where s my business?
4
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, so the guy was just suffering.
4
SPEAKER_00
He was actually an important part of the research process, because without him we couldn t have done anything.
4
SPEAKER_00
How are you gonna get your vending machine?
4
SPEAKER_00
he also had no idea why he was doing anything that he was doing.
4
SPEAKER_00
So after a while, I started inviting him to our lab meetings.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, he was an administrator.
4
SPEAKER_00
His job was to put numbers into an SAP form that somebody else would push another button and so on, that was his job.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I invited him to a lab meeting and he was not a PhD student, he was not a researcher, but he got a glimpse of why we were doing what we were doing.
4
SPEAKER_00
And his understanding and his commitment to his role was very, very different afterward.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think too often we have kind of the Charlie Chaplin modern days kind of approach to people who work, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
People are just doing widgets or people are just kind of labor and we can just replace them.
4
SPEAKER_00
Some companies, particularly some of the big ones in Silicon Valley have this idea that all programmers should be interchangeable.
4
SPEAKER_00
If somebody leaves, we could just move a little bit of the people around, and we all have cubicles.
4
SPEAKER_00
And cubicles, I think, there s some companies, less here, less in Silicon Valley, but there s some companies that the cubicles, people don t even have the same cubicle every day.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was in the book, wasn t it?
4
SPEAKER_01
I just read about this.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
This was in Payoff.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_00
I wrote about this.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s some companies that people come in the morning, and there s just rows of empty cubicles, and if you come earlier in the morning, you get to pick a good one,
4
SPEAKER_00
but you can never have a picture and you can have nothing, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And it just gives you the notion that you re replaceable.
4
SPEAKER_01
It reminds me of that movie, it s an old black and white German movie, I think it s called Metropolis or something, have you seen it?
4
SPEAKER_01
Where they re just pushing coal levers in some sweaty basement somewhere?
4
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that we treat too many people like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
No, it s not exactly like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
But if you think about the continuum between doing something which is completely mechanical, without thinking, without knowing, and you think about the other way, which is to know why you re doing it and seeing the people that you bring joy and have a full set of understanding of your role in the world,
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t think we take advantage of that continuum.
4
SPEAKER_00
If we were any company and we would start bringing testimonials from customers about how their lives have changed in a positive way, we would take time from people s lives.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you could say, oh, my employer should do another two forms at SAP.
4
SPEAKER_00
rather than listen to some customer talking about how much improvement they got in aspect X, Y, or Z. And we have this functional view that said, let s not waste our time, because the real job, what s their obligation, is to fill all these forms, and we don t think about the fact that they should care about these forms, and they should want to do them well, and they should want to do them in a way that is improving things, and they might stay a little later.
4
SPEAKER_00
Caring is something that we can get only by increasing more the meaning of what people are doing, and we don t do a good job there.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we can do that through, in part, through identity.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_01
Nice, I love that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Thanks for listening and supporting the Art of Charm.
4
SPEAKER_01
For a list of all the amazing sponsors and discount codes, visit theartofcharm.com slash advertisers.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, back to the show.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have a great documentary that I saw a long time ago.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, years ago.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was the first time I emailed you out of the blue.
4
SPEAKER_01
The documentary, which we ll link up in the show notes here, you talk a lot about cheating and lying, and I d love to hear some of the conclusions, because first of all, I believe that pretty much everybody at some point in their life, no matter how good of a person they are, has cheated on something, in school, or a game, or hopefully not anything more severe than that, but we know it happens.
4
SPEAKER_01
Why do people cheat in the first place?
4
SPEAKER_00
So actually, dishonesty, first of all, is a fascinating topic by itself, but it s also a wonderful lens to think about almost everything in life.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because the model we have for dishonesty is a cost-benefit analysis.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a model in which people say, what do I stand to gain, what do I stand to lose?
4
SPEAKER_00
here s a bodega, how much money do they have, what s the chance I ll get caught, how much time will I get in prison, let me figure out if that s a good idea to steal, to rob the place.
4
SPEAKER_00
The reality is that, first of all, we don t know.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, if I asked you, I gave you a list of potential crimes, and I say, how much time will you get in prison for each of those?
4
SPEAKER_01
And I m an attorney, and I have no idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I guarantee you, even a criminal lawyer probably wouldn t have exact idea.
4
SPEAKER_00
So A, we don t really know.
4
SPEAKER_00
But also, that s not how we think about things.
4
SPEAKER_00
Instead, what s interesting is we have this internal judgment about what we feel good and bad about.
4
SPEAKER_00
And what we feel good and bad about is about our conscience.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s not about outcomes in life.
4
SPEAKER_00
And what s interesting is that it turns out that dishonesty is all about rationalizations.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s all about the question of what can you do
4
SPEAKER_00
and get away with, and not get away with from the perspective of not being caught, get away with from the perspective of you not think of yourself as a bad person.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s what can you do and still maintain the idea that you re a wonderful, caring human being.
4
SPEAKER_00
And lots of things help this rationalization.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s always the case about what can you do and still feel that you re okay.
4
SPEAKER_00
And lots of things help that.
4
SPEAKER_00
everybody else is doing it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was screwed before, it s my turn.
4
SPEAKER_00
I own a vending machine, I ll tell you about this vending machine experiment.
4
SPEAKER_00
I set up the vending machine to say 75 cents for each candy, but the inside of the machine I set up to be zero.
4
SPEAKER_00
So what happens is no matter how much money you put, the machine said everything is changed, let s give you back everything and the candy.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you come in, there s all these buttons, you put your money, you press the button, you get your candy and all your money back.
4
SPEAKER_00
And there s a big sign that says, if something is wrong with the machine, please call this number.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s my cell phone number, so I know when people are calling.
4
SPEAKER_00
So question number one, what percentage of the people called?
4
SPEAKER_01
Probably not that many.
4
SPEAKER_00
Zero.
4
SPEAKER_01
Zero, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Because when I think, is something wrong with this machine, I mean, my candy didn t come out, my money stayed in there.
4
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
Not, it gave me free candy.
4
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
So what happened is, so nobody called, and then how many candies do you think people took?
4
SPEAKER_00
I think it was empty after a certain period of time.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was, but how many, the average person, how many candies did they take?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, would one person just empty the machine?
4
SPEAKER_01
No, I don t think so.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think at some point, they re gonna go, I ve had enough.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I don t think it would just be one, would it?
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the majority took either three or four.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that sounds about right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Nobody took five.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re revealing your own level of dishonesty.
4
SPEAKER_00
I know.
4
SPEAKER_00
But nobody took five.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s good.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think what they were saying is they were saying something like, I remember this other vending machine.
4
SPEAKER_00
that took my money and didn t give me a candy.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is vending machine justice.
4
SPEAKER_00
Karma.
4
SPEAKER_00
Karma.
4
SPEAKER_00
Actually, the only mystery is why it takes so long for the world to get back to me.
4
SPEAKER_01
I should have been getting this for free years ago.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right, that s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that other vending machine must have been a close relative of this one.
4
SPEAKER_00
It just, you know, we re evening things out.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, rationalization is a big part of it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And lots of things help rationalization.
4
SPEAKER_00
By the way, it s kind of shocking that we have this model of cost-benefit analysis.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s not just that we have this model, but we do legislation based on that.
4
SPEAKER_00
So think about something like the death penalty.
4
SPEAKER_00
The death penalty is based on the idea that people would say, oh, I don t want to die, let me not commit this crime.
4
SPEAKER_00
Imagine you come home at night and you re pissed off with your significant other.
4
SPEAKER_00
When you go to the kitchen and you take a big knife and you say, oh, we have the death penalty here, let s do something else.
4
SPEAKER_00
The results show that the death penalty has no effect.
4
SPEAKER_00
California, three strikes and you re out.
4
SPEAKER_00
No effect.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, especially because it s not proportional to the crime.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, if you shoplift three times and now you re in jail for life, it s ridiculous.
4
SPEAKER_00
But not only is it ridiculous, it wasn t a deterrent, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t as if people said, oh, I had twice already, let me stop now.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is just not how people think.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, it would be nice if people thought this way.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like, I m on my second strike, I really shouldn t steal that Fifth Avenue candy bar from the vending machine.
4
SPEAKER_00
Let me change my life now.
4
SPEAKER_00
So what happened is that we have this model of how people behave.
4
SPEAKER_00
The model is inaccurate.
5
SPEAKER_00
we go ahead and we design the world.
5
SPEAKER_00
We create legislation and rules and litigation.
5
SPEAKER_00
We try to change how we regulate banking based on this wrong model about how the world works.
5
SPEAKER_00
So in fact, if we understood how the world worked from the beginning, we would set up the system in a much better way.
5
SPEAKER_00
So think about Wall Street.
5
SPEAKER_00
Are they really psychopaths who are trying to steal our money in 2007, eight and so on?
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, some of those people that I worked with certainly were, but I think the majority are probably just people who are, one, rationalizing, you know, oh, my parents were poor and I was poor growing up, so now I m ready.
5
SPEAKER_00
And not just that, they say everybody s doing it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Everybody s doing it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s true, everybody they know is doing it.
5
SPEAKER_00
and they would say things like, nobody would buy it if it doesn t make sense, and it s rational, and this is what I m supposed to do, and I m doing it for the shareholders, and this is my fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of the company.
5
SPEAKER_00
People make up these stories, and we don t regulate that.
5
SPEAKER_00
So instead of regulating conflicts of interest,
5
SPEAKER_00
We re trying to, we re treating the problem as if the real issue is planned dishonesty rather than something that comes from incremental behavior design and slippery slopes.
5
SPEAKER_01
If we re talking about lying instead of cheating, like shifting from cheating to lying, how does this affect our brain?
5
SPEAKER_01
Because in the documentary, it seems like there s an assertion that the brain might adapt to being untruthful, to telling untruths.
5
SPEAKER_00
The term I try to use is dishonesty.
5
SPEAKER_00
instead of lying?
5
SPEAKER_00
Instead of lying, because I think that I would much prefer to describe the act as being dishonest, whereas I think lying implies intention.
5
SPEAKER_00
A lot of times, because of rationalization, yes, you are lying, but do you truly understand at that moment that you were lying?
5
SPEAKER_00
I m not so sure.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it depends.
5
SPEAKER_01
In certain cases, for sure not.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, think about something like Robin Hood.
5
SPEAKER_00
Imagine Robin Hood stealing from the rich.
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you think he felt bad?
5
SPEAKER_01
No, I ve seen that cartoon.
5
SPEAKER_00
He didn t feel bad at all.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, the act can be described as dishonest, but lying, I think, is actually much less common than people think.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think there are many more cases where it s,
5
SPEAKER_00
wishful blindness, and sometimes self-deception, or not complete awareness of what we re doing.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I think it s a much better way to think about it.
5
SPEAKER_00
But there s a question.
5
SPEAKER_01
My question was, does our brain then adapt to that dishonesty?
5
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_01
And how does it adapt?
5
SPEAKER_01
What s this process look like?
5
SPEAKER_01
What are we seeing here?
5
SPEAKER_00
So the brain mostly reacts to changes, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
So when you move from the outside to the inside, in the beginning it looks very dark.
5
SPEAKER_00
A few minutes into it, your brain is used to it.
5
SPEAKER_00
Adaptation is about the fact that you get used to what you have.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like in the morning when you put your clothes on, you knew you were putting them on.
5
SPEAKER_00
You were aware.
5
SPEAKER_00
But later in the day, you don t notice that anymore.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s what the brain is supposed to do.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s supposed to kind of get us to be neutral at the level of constant activation and just pay attention to things that are deviating from that.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the same thing happens with lying, that the moment of dishonesty, the moment you start acting in a dishonest way,
5
SPEAKER_00
It s not as surprising.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s just kind of in the background.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of like the light changes a bit.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s just the normal state of affairs.
5
SPEAKER_00
So again, if you think about us as being dishonest because we do cost-benefit analysis and we calculate all the time and so on, that s a very different model.
5
SPEAKER_00
But if you say what makes me feel comfortable and uncomfortable, the question is do you even notice it?
5
SPEAKER_00
And the answer is we often don t even notice it.
5
SPEAKER_00
Why?
5
SPEAKER_00
Because we ve done it so much, it s just the norm.
5
SPEAKER_00
Here s an experiment.
5
SPEAKER_00
You take two people that don t know each other, you put them in a room, and you say, please introduce yourself.
5
SPEAKER_00
Talk to the other person for 10 minutes.
5
SPEAKER_00
They introduce themselves.
5
SPEAKER_00
10 minutes later, you put them into separate room, and you say, did you lie in these 10 minutes?
5
SPEAKER_00
And almost everybody says no.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then you say, luckily we taped everything you ve said.
5
SPEAKER_00
why don t we play it back to you sentence by sentence and tell us which each sentence, was it perfectly true, truthful or not?
5
SPEAKER_00
On average, people say that they lie between two and three times after you do this exercise.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, what happened is that social lying, we just do all the time.
5
SPEAKER_00
What kind of examples are we talking about?
5
SPEAKER_00
I just told you, you look nice.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is a terrible shirt with these white pants.
5
SPEAKER_00
I know.
5
SPEAKER_01
Nailed it on the example.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was a little too fast.
5
SPEAKER_00
But no, the reality is that we have a lot of social niceties, for example.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m not saying that people get to a room and, you know, kind of selling the Brooklyn Bridge to somebody.
5
SPEAKER_00
But we have all kinds of things.
5
SPEAKER_00
We exaggerate about our GPA and, you know, if it s an undergrad, we say nicer things about, I mean, this is a part of the social niceties of the world, is we kind of feel smooth over some uncomfortable things in life and we do it for ourselves and we do it for other people.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, at the moment that we do it, do we catch ourselves?
5
SPEAKER_00
I say, oh my goodness, I told him I was late because, like you told me today that you were late because there was traffic.
5
SPEAKER_01
Right, that was actually true.
5
SPEAKER_00
How many times in your life have you blamed traffic when, in fact, it was just that you got up too late and started working too late and should have,
5
SPEAKER_01
You know what, I actually, as of the past few months and years, I never lie about anything consciously.
5
SPEAKER_01
The social lying probably happens, but today if I were running late because I got up too late, I probably wouldn t have said I got up too late, I would have just said I m running late and then just left it blank at the end.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I had what I thought was a good reason, so I was like, oh yes, traffic.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now I m additionally late because of traffic.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, what would happen if you got up late and there was traffic?
5
SPEAKER_00
You wouldn t say, I got up late and there was traffic.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, I would have just been, thank you traffic, all right.
5
SPEAKER_00
And we don t catch ourselves doing it, because it s kind of such a part of the standard norm.
5
SPEAKER_00
And now we talk about just white lies and social lying, but of course it goes into all kinds of things at the moment you start doing something.
5
SPEAKER_00
It just become your model of working.
5
SPEAKER_00
You don t pay attention to it.
5
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t register.
5
SPEAKER_01
This could be a slippery slope, or does that not bear out?
5
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_00
A guy that we interviewed for the movie, his name is Joe Pepp.
5
SPEAKER_00
Joe was a cyclist.
5
SPEAKER_00
He was cycling for the U.S.
5
SPEAKER_00
Olympic team.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, right.
5
SPEAKER_00
Very, very good cyclist.
5
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, he cycled for the Olympic team, went back to school, got his degree.
5
SPEAKER_00
went back to cycling, first race, he feels he is just as good, everybody else is slightly better.
5
SPEAKER_00
That night, he cries, cycling was all his, well, one of his friends gives him an address and the name of a physician.
5
SPEAKER_00
He goes to see this physician, white coat, stethoscope, gives him a prescription for EPO, EPO is a cancer drug that increases the production of red blood cells.
5
SPEAKER_00
goes to the pharmacy, give him the prescription, they give him the prescription, the insurance company pays for it, he only pays the deductible, goes back to his room, he takes all kinds of medication for health, I mean legal stuff.
5
SPEAKER_00
But he also injects this one time, then another time, then another time, then another time, then he discovers everybody in the team does it, then they do it together, later on there s a shortage of EPO, but he has friends on the Chinese team, they put him in touch,
5
SPEAKER_00
with factory in China, he imports EPO.
5
SPEAKER_00
Another team hears about it, they ask him to import as well.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s a good guy, he helps them as well.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now he s a drug dealer.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now he s a drug dealer.
5
SPEAKER_00
Think about this story.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you talk to Joe when he was like 19, racing for the Olympic team, and you say, Joe, what are the odds that you will become a drug dealer?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he would say, are you out of your mind?
5
SPEAKER_01
Never, I would never do that.
5
SPEAKER_00
My life is cycling.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is what I love doing.
5
SPEAKER_00
I can t imagine, first of all, I can t imagine being a drug dealer, but I can t imagine doing anything that would risk the thing in life that I love so much.
5
SPEAKER_01
Sure, hurt the sport, hurt his ability to play the sport, he s banned.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s banned, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
But when you talk about saying, don t think about the last step, think about the first step.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now put yourself in Joe s situation.
5
SPEAKER_00
Imagine that cycling was all you loved,
5
SPEAKER_00
you finish your undergrad, you re back to cycling, you don t do well.
5
SPEAKER_00
Don t you cry that night?
5
SPEAKER_00
Don t you talk to a friend?
5
SPEAKER_00
Of course you do.
5
SPEAKER_00
They give you a name for a doctor and don t you go?
5
SPEAKER_00
Of course you go.
5
SPEAKER_00
The doctor gives you a prescription.
5
SPEAKER_00
Don t you go to the pharmacy?
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s from a doctor, so there s nothing wrong with it.
5
SPEAKER_00
The pharmacy fills it up.
5
SPEAKER_00
Don t you take it?
5
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you took it, don t you take the first injection?
5
SPEAKER_00
Of course.
5
SPEAKER_00
Think about that stuff.
5
SPEAKER_00
When would you stop?
5
SPEAKER_00
I asked you about what kind of thing does he think would have made him stop.
5
SPEAKER_00
He said if the pharmacy declined his claim.
5
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
5
SPEAKER_00
But other than that, when would we have stopped?
5
SPEAKER_00
It s very easy to judge from the outside.
5
SPEAKER_00
By the way, when you look at criminal behavior, we often see the last point.
5
SPEAKER_01
Sure, yeah, you see the violent crime and whatever else.
5
SPEAKER_00
But the slippery slope is actually an incredibly important thing to do and we often look at the first transgression as only it s the first time and it s just the beginning and it s small and it s so on.
5
SPEAKER_00
The fact is, we need to be careful.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because it s true, it s the first time, and it s true it s very sad, but it also means there s a chance for a slippery slope and we need to worry about that.
5
SPEAKER_01
So what can we do to reverse the process?
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s say I m starting to, let s say, man, I m late because of traffic, but then, man, everybody always believes traffic excuse, so I m just gonna be late all the time and not care, and I m always just gonna say traffic, and people will be too polite
6
SPEAKER_01
I didn t say anything, and well, if I can lie about that, why don t I just lie to somebody else about this other thing?
6
SPEAKER_01
How do I catch myself, or how do I catch others before it s too late?
6
SPEAKER_01
Is there a way to reverse this process?
6
SPEAKER_01
Because it seems to get easier, as you said.
6
SPEAKER_00
So first of all, the sad thing is we don t have a slippery improvement.
6
SPEAKER_01
No slippery upward climb?
6
SPEAKER_00
Not slippery upward.
6
SPEAKER_00
For an upward climb, what you need to do is you need to have a decision point and fresh page.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s no, oh, I m lying up to now three times a week about being late.
6
SPEAKER_00
Every month improve it by 10%.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing like that.
6
SPEAKER_00
What you need to do is create a rule
6
SPEAKER_00
that say, this is not the right behavior, and from now on.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, there is a group of people who are trying to be radically honest.
6
SPEAKER_00
The movement started in Germany.
6
SPEAKER_00
That sounds about right.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m not sure I want to be married to somebody who told me the absolute truth all the time.
6
SPEAKER_00
Your shoes are ugly.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I think we do need to figure out what are the important things in life where we need to regulate ourselves, and how do we do things there.
6
SPEAKER_00
So as a university professor, there s all kinds of places where I could create serious conflicts of interest for myself.
6
SPEAKER_00
Can my students work on a project that I m interested in?
6
SPEAKER_00
that I get to do some outside of university activity.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I told you about the startup.
6
SPEAKER_00
It would have been fun to take my students and get them to work on this project, but it creates conflicts of interest.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I decided not to.
6
SPEAKER_00
I was asked to be an expert witness in a class action lawsuit.
6
SPEAKER_00
They pay lots of money.
6
SPEAKER_00
I decided to do it.
6
SPEAKER_00
only if I would do it for free.
6
SPEAKER_01
Really?
6
SPEAKER_01
They must have been really thrilled to have you on board for free.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, I asked them to donate the money.
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh, good, okay.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, make those guys pay.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there s no reason not to get them to pay, but I picked a charity and I said, please, pass the money to the charity.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, that was an expensive decision because it took me some time and the money could have gone to me, it went to this charity, which I was very happy about, but still, it s an expensive decision.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I said to myself, I don t want to be paid to have an opinion.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because I know how corrosive conflicts of interest are.
6
SPEAKER_01
Look, one of the best investments in the US, the best investment is lobbying.
6
SPEAKER_01
And you know why?
6
SPEAKER_00
Because people are cheap.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you can buy somebody a beer and a sandwich or maybe a steak or fish, vegetable.
6
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, you can buy somebody a beer and all of a sudden they start looking at life from your perspective.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you know what, it s a beautiful thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
Why is it a beautiful thing?
6
SPEAKER_00
Because the two of us can meet, we can have a beer and we start liking each other better.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a wonderful thing on the social realm.
6
SPEAKER_00
Do you want to mix it with lobbying?
6
SPEAKER_01
Not so much.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t want somebody else making a decision on my behalf because somebody else bought them a beer.
6
SPEAKER_00
Or on taxpayers behind because somebody bought them a beer.
6
SPEAKER_00
So conflicts of interest are one of those things that are incredibly corrosive, but we don t see it.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, think about yourself.
6
SPEAKER_00
Do you see how you are biased by some conflicts of interest?
6
SPEAKER_00
Very hard to see it.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s tough, and I have to look at these things with a very sober eye.
6
SPEAKER_01
And also, sometimes my fiance now, she ll say something like, maybe you should look at it this other way, and you don t want to look at it that way, because you d rather cash the check.
6
SPEAKER_01
You d rather do it your way, instead of thinking, well, how other people s feelings or their business might be affected by it.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s hard.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I decided, as I was doing this research on dishonesty, and as I was starting to understand the corrosive effects of conflicts of interest, I decided to try and reduce the conflicts of interest in my life.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there s two parts, it s like, what are the cases where I could have a conflict of interest?
6
SPEAKER_00
Somebody pays me to have an opinion, or a company is hiring me, and then on the other side, I was trying to think about the people who are service providers for me.
6
SPEAKER_00
financial advisors, physician, dentist, and so on.
6
SPEAKER_00
They have a conflict of interest, and how do I try to reduce that?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s always scary.
6
SPEAKER_00
Very scary.
6
SPEAKER_00
By the way, it s very tough to go to your doctor and ask them, I think you have a conflict of interest, I would like a second opinion.
6
SPEAKER_00
It is such a violation of trust.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re basically saying, and there s no way to say it s not you, it s just human nature.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think everybody is.
6
SPEAKER_01
Look, everybody is trying to kill me with drug prescriptions that I don t need, so I m just gonna ask another doctor.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I really want to know your, tell me which drug company has paid you recently to have an opinion.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a terrible situation, and we really, very unpleasant.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s very unpleasant to go to a doctor.
6
SPEAKER_00
And to keep in your mind the fact that their recommendations and what you will take will have an impact on their financial outcome.
6
SPEAKER_00
And to realize that it s not that they re bad people, but they could be biased by that, and you might be the one paying the bill for their biases.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a terrible, it s a very unpleasant thought, but I think it s also true.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it has to be, because doctors are human, and if they share all the same faults, which they do, then it s true.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and you know, and you see it.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you see that when you go to surgeons, they recommend surgery, you go to, I mean, everybody recommends what they get to benefit from.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and then even if they re blind to that, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
Like, oh, you should definitely get the surgery, and another doctor says, well, I would only do that under these conditions.
6
SPEAKER_01
But meanwhile, they re trying to throw you under the knife right then.
6
SPEAKER_00
And again, it s not because they re saying, ooh, let me charge this person a bit more.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s because if you get paid for surgery, everybody seems like a surgical case.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right, what s that expression when you re... If you re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
6
SPEAKER_00
Looks like a nail, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
I always get that wrong, but that s exactly what I was looking for.
6
SPEAKER_01
So this question has been sort of gnawing at me since you d mentioned that cheating is behavioral.
6
SPEAKER_01
Do you think it s cultural, do you think it s human, or do you think it s a combination of both?
6
SPEAKER_00
So it is both.
6
SPEAKER_00
So first of all, let me tell you how we measure dishonesty.
6
SPEAKER_00
So we give people a die, like a regular six-sided die, and we say, why don t you throw this die, and we ll give you whatever it comes up on.
6
SPEAKER_00
comes in one, we ll give you $1, $2, $2, $3, $3, and so on.
6
SPEAKER_00
You can get paid based on the top side or the bottom side.
6
SPEAKER_00
Top or bottom, you decide, but don t tell us.
6
SPEAKER_00
So if you re in the experiment, I would say, please think top or bottom, but don t tell me.
6
SPEAKER_00
You have it?
6
SPEAKER_00
Keep it in mind.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now roll the die.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you roll the die, and it comes with five on the bottom and two on the top.
6
SPEAKER_00
And now I say, what did you pick?
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, if you picked bottom, you say bottom, and you get $5, no problem.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you happen to pick top,
6
SPEAKER_00
Now you have a dilemma.
6
SPEAKER_00
Do you say the truth, top, and get $2, or do you change your mind and you say bottom and get $5?
6
SPEAKER_00
And people do this 20 times, and every time they think top or bottom, they decide, they roll, they see what happened, they tell us what they chose, and you run these experiments, you see that people are unbelievably lucky.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, much higher than chance.
6
SPEAKER_00
Much higher than chance.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, people don t get 20 out of 20, but they get 13 or 14, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
So people cheat a little bit.
6
SPEAKER_00
Luck has a nice feature of focusing on the 6-1 die tosses.
6
SPEAKER_00
These are the ones that people get it more right than the 3-4 one.
6
SPEAKER_00
The next one, somehow luck doesn t care so much.
6
SPEAKER_00
So we run these experiments.
6
SPEAKER_00
We try them in many countries.
6
SPEAKER_00
I grew up in Israel.
6
SPEAKER_00
I tried Israel.
6
SPEAKER_00
Israel is just like the Americans.
6
SPEAKER_01
See, that s good to know.
6
SPEAKER_01
I lived in Israel for a while, and I ll tell you, a lot of my Americanisms did not go over well.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like, hi, how are you?
6
SPEAKER_01
You don t care, why are you asking me?
6
SPEAKER_01
Tough neighborhood, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s an episode, so we ll come back to this, but Francesco Gino, my Italian collaborator, said, come to Italy, we ll show you what the Italians can do.
6
SPEAKER_01
What cheating looks like?
6
SPEAKER_00
Just the same.
6
SPEAKER_00
We tried Turkey, China, Germany, Portugal, South Africa, Kenya.
6
SPEAKER_00
We tried Colombia, Japan.
6
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, we tried lots of places.
6
SPEAKER_00
What about Russia?
6
SPEAKER_00
We did not try Russia.
6
SPEAKER_00
We did try England and we did try Canada because the Canadians always think that they re better than everybody else.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re not.
6
SPEAKER_01
Good.
6
SPEAKER_01
You hear that, Canada?
6
SPEAKER_00
So, but here s the thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you ve traveled to lots of places.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know
6
SPEAKER_00
that dishonesty feels very different in different places.
6
SPEAKER_00
How can it be that we don t find a difference?
6
SPEAKER_00
And this is an important point about social science.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a task about cheating.
6
SPEAKER_00
but it s an abstract general task.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s something that people have not encountered before.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not embedded in their culture.
6
SPEAKER_00
So because of that, that task is checking the basic human ability to cheat a little bit and feel good about it.
6
SPEAKER_00
And from that perspective, we re all the same.
6
SPEAKER_00
Just because you re born Japanese or German or American doesn t change your ability to rationalize small dishonesty.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s true, but it doesn t mean that culture doesn t matter.
6
SPEAKER_00
In what way culture matters?
6
SPEAKER_00
Culture doesn t change you as a human being.
6
SPEAKER_00
Culture change you in a domain-by-domain specific way.
6
SPEAKER_00
When I ask my students how many of them have illegally downloaded music on their computers, they all do.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right, everybody would admit that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Everybody admits it.
6
SPEAKER_00
They don t seem to be ashamed.
6
SPEAKER_00
They know it s illegal.
6
SPEAKER_00
I ask them about illegal downloads.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not as if they don t know.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, does that mean that they are corrupt as human beings?
6
SPEAKER_00
No.
6
SPEAKER_00
What it means is they took this one activity, which is called illegal downloads, and said, this is not a moral question.
6
SPEAKER_00
This is something like, this is how we do things.
6
SPEAKER_01
I deserve the new Beyonce album.
6
SPEAKER_00
And actually, I talked to a mobster, which was very interesting.
7
SPEAKER_01
life, he did lots of terrible things.
7
SPEAKER_01
And you could think that he has no morals, but that wasn t true.
7
SPEAKER_01
He had two types of lives.
7
SPEAKER_01
He has life within the family and outside of the family.
7
SPEAKER_01
Outside of the family, it was just about maximizing wealth.
7
SPEAKER_01
There was no honor, there was no morality.
7
SPEAKER_01
It was just about cheating as much as possible, assuming you can get it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Inside of the family, he had very strict morals.
7
SPEAKER_01
His handshake was his handshake, his word was his word.
7
SPEAKER_01
There was very strict rules.
7
SPEAKER_01
Now, that s kind of an extreme case, but this is what culture does.
7
SPEAKER_01
Culture takes domains of life,
7
SPEAKER_01
and say this is not the moral.
7
SPEAKER_01
So for example, even bribing.
7
SPEAKER_01
Different places in the world feel differently about who you bribe.
7
SPEAKER_01
In South Africa, for example, it s perfectly fine to bribe a policeman who catches you spitting.
7
SPEAKER_01
People actually talk over dinner about how little money they had to spend to get away with it.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of a point of bragging.
7
SPEAKER_01
In Kenya, it seems to be quite fine to bribe municipality.
7
SPEAKER_01
Culture does matter.
7
SPEAKER_01
But the way culture matters, it doesn t change who we are.
7
SPEAKER_01
It changes how we apply to specific domains in life.
7
SPEAKER_00
Think about- Right, it doesn t change the degree, it just changes where we apply it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Think about infidelity.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you remember when Mitterrand, the French president, passed away, his mistress was at his state funeral with their illegitimate child.
7
SPEAKER_01
Oh my goodness.
7
SPEAKER_01
Now, imagine the US.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that just, so unlike, it would be front page news.
7
SPEAKER_01
Who will show up to Clinton s state funeral when he passes?
7
SPEAKER_00
Probably not Monica Lewinsky, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
But if you think about this, are we more moral than the French in general?
7
SPEAKER_01
No, but are there some areas in life
7
SPEAKER_01
when we at least outside have very different rules about what behavior is like.
7
SPEAKER_01
So that s how culture matters.
7
SPEAKER_01
Culture is not a backbone change to humanity.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s a way that we apply our understanding about what s acceptable in specific domains.
7
SPEAKER_01
People in startups.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know, we talk about dishonesty.
7
SPEAKER_01
I ask lots of people about how they decide what a user is.
7
SPEAKER_01
People in startup, how many users we have, and what s an active user, and what do we call this.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s how you get investment.
7
SPEAKER_01
It is a party of dishonesty.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m sure.
7
SPEAKER_01
But they all know it, and they all kind of have rules about how it s actually okay in that domain to exaggerate in all kinds of, by the way, it s terrible for the industry, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
you have to inflate, it s like a recommendation letter from college.
7
SPEAKER_01
But if everybody inflates, then nobody trusts these numbers, so it destroys the whole thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, think about that as a general rule, not just about dishonesty, is that deep down we re similar, but culture gives us rules to how to apply our decision making in different domains separately.
7
SPEAKER_00
Now, this is all behavioral economics.
7
SPEAKER_00
How did you get interested in this field in the first place?
7
SPEAKER_01
My initial interest was not so much in behavioral economics, but I was badly injured when I was 18, and I was in the hospital for a very, very long time, about three years.
7
SPEAKER_01
And there were all kinds of things in the hospital that I just didn t like.
7
SPEAKER_01
One of them was the process of bandage removal.
7
SPEAKER_01
But there s lots of things that the nurses and doctors did to me that I thought were just wrong.
7
SPEAKER_01
When I left the hospital, I did some experiments on pain.
7
SPEAKER_01
I did some other things.
7
SPEAKER_01
I found all kinds of ways in which the intuition
7
SPEAKER_01
of the nurses and doctors were just not the right ones.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I thought about, you know, you have to take the bandages of burn patients, or you have to give people medications for pain, or you do all kinds of things.
7
SPEAKER_01
What are the places where we don t have a good model of the world?
7
SPEAKER_01
We operate as if we know how the world works, but because our model is wrong, we inflict more pain and increase suffering.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s true for lots of things, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
There s lots of things that we just don t understand how the world works.
7
SPEAKER_01
And because of that, we just create more misery in the world.
7
SPEAKER_01
So think about how we waste our time, think about how we waste our money, how we waste our health.
7
SPEAKER_01
What is our understanding?
7
SPEAKER_01
Think about something like food.
7
SPEAKER_01
There s this very basic belief that if we only told people how much calories are in different dishes, people would eat better.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that has not happened.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know what?
7
SPEAKER_01
It turns out it doesn t.
7
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t matter.
7
SPEAKER_01
Actually, so we did this experiment with Panda Express.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know Panda Express?
7
SPEAKER_00
I do, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve eaten there a couple of times because I went to college and never again.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s fast food, Chinese food, essentially.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s fast food, Chinese food.
7
SPEAKER_01
They mostly sell something called orange chicken.
7
SPEAKER_00
Orange chicken?
7
SPEAKER_01
Orange chicken.
7
SPEAKER_01
And orange chicken is fried twice.
7
SPEAKER_01
It has salt.
7
SPEAKER_01
incredibly unhealthy and incredibly tasty at the same time.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it is delicious.
7
SPEAKER_00
They probably put crack in there.
7
SPEAKER_01
We did a study with them in which we put calorie labeling on every item in the menu.
7
SPEAKER_01
What happened?
7
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely nothing.
7
SPEAKER_00
Nothing, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
New York City forced every fast food place to put calorie information on the menu.
7
SPEAKER_01
What happened?
7
SPEAKER_01
Basically nothing.
7
SPEAKER_01
By the way, there were a few poor neighborhoods where people started eating worse.
7
SPEAKER_01
Why?
7
SPEAKER_01
Because they saw this table of money per calorie and they were trying to maximize calories per dollar.
7
SPEAKER_01
But in general, nothing happened.
7
SPEAKER_01
But we think that the only thing we need to do is to give people information and then people will change behavior.
7
SPEAKER_01
Or think about something called financial literacy.
7
SPEAKER_01
We say, oh, just tell people about money, they ll behave better.
7
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t change habits.
7
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t work.
7
SPEAKER_01
From all the good human habits, like things we do well as Americans.
7
SPEAKER_01
You say, oh, people basically behave well on this.
7
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think tooth brushing.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, okay, so really simple stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
Washing your hands before you eat, things like that.
7
SPEAKER_01
Washing your hands is not as common.
7
SPEAKER_00
Really?
7
SPEAKER_00
That s kind of gross.
7
SPEAKER_01
Sadly, it s not, but you look at what we do well.
7
SPEAKER_01
We reduce smoking from about 40% to 20%.
7
SPEAKER_01
People wear seat belts.
7
SPEAKER_00
Seat belts, yeah, good call.
7
SPEAKER_01
You look at those things, and you say, how many of them?
7
SPEAKER_01
are driven by information.
7
SPEAKER_01
That we told people, you know, it s dangerous to drive without a seatbelt, why don t you do it?
7
SPEAKER_01
And people say, oh yes, of course.
7
SPEAKER_01
Or we told people, oh no, smoking can kill you.
7
SPEAKER_01
And people say, oh, I had no idea, let me change behavior.
7
SPEAKER_01
There s not a single documented case, I think, where just giving people information helped.
7
SPEAKER_01
Think about smoking.
7
SPEAKER_01
Smoking helped by villainizing smokers with secondhand smoke.
7
SPEAKER_01
The scientific evidence for secondhand smoke
7
SPEAKER_01
It s tenuous.
7
SPEAKER_01
You have to smoke a lot of it to do this.
7
SPEAKER_01
But by calling something secondhand smoke, we villainized smokers or we made them feel bad.
7
SPEAKER_01
We increased taxes on cigarettes dramatically and we basically banned it from all kinds of places.
7
SPEAKER_01
It was not the information, it was not the Surgeon General telling you that this is unhealthy.
7
SPEAKER_00
It has to be an emotional thing as well, I think, sometimes.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and you know, villainizing people, very, very emotional.
7
SPEAKER_01
Seatbelts were annoying beeps in the car, taxes, fines, kids in the back screaming, why don t you have the seatbelt?
7
SPEAKER_01
And also the reminder that you have from the bus.
7
SPEAKER_01
But you look at those behaviors, all of them come about not about information.
7
SPEAKER_01
They all come from something else.
7
SPEAKER_01
But nevertheless, we keep on having the ideology that if we only told people, people would behave differently.
7
SPEAKER_01
By the way, texting and driving, did you know texting and driving is dangerous?
7
SPEAKER_01
Of course I did, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
Nevertheless, I m sure you ve texted and drove.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t drive anymore.
7
SPEAKER_00
Even when I m driving, I won t text and drive because, not just because I m such a good person, but because I am so, so distractible.
7
SPEAKER_00
And nothing scares me more than...
7
SPEAKER_00
being in the car and then maybe I m on the speakerphone call or something, even the speakerphone, the hands-free, totally legal, I m driving and I go, wait a minute, where am I and where am I going?
7
SPEAKER_00
How did I get so far away from, oh man, I made a wrong turn like four miles ago.
7
SPEAKER_00
If that s happening to me on the hands-free, what s gonna happen when I m typing and not even looking at the road?
7
SPEAKER_00
I know I m gonna get in trouble doing that.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I think most people either don t realize it or they re better drivers than me or some combination of those two things.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think they re not realizing it.
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It s probably a big one.
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So it turns out that information just doesn t help and we need to figure out what are the ways in which we can re-engineer the environment to get people to behave differently.
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My interest started with pain, because I said, you know, okay, doctors have these bad intuitions about what would make time in hospital more miserable or less miserable.
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You were younger back, this is, you were... Yeah, yeah, I was just 18.
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Over the years, I expanded this, and I thought about all kinds of places in which we don t understand how the world works, and if we understood a little bit better, we could make us a little bit better.
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And here s the thing, look at this room.
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Think about how many things we have here,
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that overcome our physical limitations.
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We have chairs, these are incredibly comfortable chairs, we have light, we have air conditioning, we have all of these things because we realize we need help.
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There s a teleprompter behind you, I mean this place especially is loaded, yeah.
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What about the mental world?
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what about the world in which you have to choose health insurance, or what about the world in which you have to decide how much to save for retirement, or what kind of medical treatment to take?
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In those worlds, we somehow assume people are perfectly capable.
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I am just willing to let you decide how much you re going to save for retirement.
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And I m just going to give you all the options for all the medical procedures, and you decide.
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I mean, you go to a doctor now.
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and you have some illness, and they say, who am I to tell you what to do?
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It s your life.
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Here s the medical literature.
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You read and you decide what is the right treatment.
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I think we need to understand how complex our mental life is, and it s getting all the time more complex.
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I mean 50 years ago, how much did you have to know about finance in order to make good financial decisions?
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Not that much.
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You had defined benefits.
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You had a pension.
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Life was rather simple.
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People didn t live as much after retirement, so you didn t have to save as much.
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Now it s incredibly complex.
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So people need more to know more.
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Life is much more complex and we don t have more time to learn how to be good and all of those things.
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My mission is to do kind of good social engineering.
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Social engineering, common theme of the show.
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From the good perspective, is to basically say, let s take our human limitations into account, and let s figure out what s the version of the chair.
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Like, you know, we ve spent so much time making chairs comfortable.
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What is the version of the chair to help people figure out how much to save for retirement?
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And how to trade off happiness now with happiness in the future?
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And let s figure out what is the version of these things that get people to take their medication on time.
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get us to eat less, all of those things.
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And I think there s just a ton of progress to make.
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And sadly, we re not doing it in the right way.
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I think we re actually going backward.
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Why do you think that?
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Because we re creating a temptation society.
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So think about what is the goal of every company that is around you?
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Their goal is to tempt you to do something that is good for them right now.
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Right now, yeah.
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Spend money.
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So everybody wants your time, money, and attention right now.
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Now, you might want to be healthy in 30 years from now.
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Who else has this motivation?
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Maybe your mother, maybe Jenny.
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But mostly, the entities that surround you have a very different interest in mind, and they control the environment.
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So Dunkin  Donuts is trying to get you to eat one more donut today.
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And Facebook is trying.
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And Facebook is trying to get you to log into Facebook a few more times a day.
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Also knocking it out of the park.
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Really killing it.
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And we re kind of slightly helpless because they control our environment.
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And we make decisions that are partially based on our environment, and they design the environment with their short-term interest in mind, not our long-term interest.
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And we see in the book, in Predictably Irrational, there s so many interesting examples of the social engineering, both going right and going wrong, from executive compensation to German judges essentially handing down harsher sentences based on a die roll, which was kind of terrifying.
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There s so many interesting concepts in here.
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One thing that I found that was accidentally very apropos is you stated that our expectations excessively influence how we perceive events.
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Immediately what came to mind was the shootings of unarmed black men from police because of the expectations based on media, based on maybe things that have happened to them in their line of work that are exacerbating this problem.
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Do you see that pattern?
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The work I ve done on expectation is mostly around placebo for pain, when people expect the medication to be more helpful, it does become more helpful.
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When people pay more for medication, it s better.
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When people think the beer is better or the wine, it s better.
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But there s all kinds of work on eyewitness testimony.
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where you put people in a room and they observe a big screen movie of some shooting and they don t know that there s going to be a shooting and just something happened and then there s a shooting and people run.
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And then you take them out and you say, what happened?
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And most people see the black guy as the shooter.
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And it s because we don t have a full video.
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I mean, we have the experience that we re viewing life as a video, but we don t.
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We take snap.
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shots of particular instances, and then we fill the gaps from our brain, not from reality.
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We think we see with our eyes, but we really see a lot with our brain, and we think we experience the world with our senses, but a lot of it is done by what s called top-down, that we expect a particular thing, and then we see what we expect to see.
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Because of that, by the way, this is not to forgive or to, excuse any behavior, but if somebody is making a movement,
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and you think of them as a dancer, or you think of them as somebody who might have a gun, you re going to look at that movement in very different ways.
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You might describe even things like the speed of the movement.
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You might describe the direction of the movement.
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Our brain has an incredible capacity of trying to predict the future all the time, and to see whether our predictions are correct.
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So you have a sense of what reality is,
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you re trying to predict what it is, you re not predicting all possible futures, you re predicting one particular future, and then you see whether what you re predicting is actually coming into reality, so you get a lot of self-confirming evidence just because that s what you look for, which doesn t excuse prejudice, but it actually says how important it is to eliminate, because the moment you have
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There s really not much you can do about it.
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It s very hard if you have prejudice at the moment not to have different interpretations of reality.
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So we as humans constantly trying to predict that future or that outcome of the future action or something like this is always influenced by our prejudice.
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How do we do as humans as a whole when we try to predict things?
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Are we generally good or are we generally wrong?
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Well, there s a lot of things that we get wrong in predictions.
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In most cases, it s not too bad, right?
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Because I can say, you know, where do I predict you will walk, or what do I predict you will say, and so on.
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And if it doesn t fit, that s okay.
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Yeah, the consequences are minimal.
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If I all of a sudden have a device that can kill you, I m looking at how you lean toward me as an aggressive mood, rather than you re trying to tie your shoe, now there s a lot of
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a lot of risk.
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So it depends on the stakes, right?
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And here s the worst thing, is that the fact that those things are on people s mind all the time, actually contribute to the expectation.
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Sure, with the media and this thing becoming more common, a lot of people were asking,
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is this a new epidemic or are we just shedding light on something that s been there the whole time?
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And the answer is probably it s a little bit of both, but the expectations that somebody s going to be a violent person, it s not coincidental that they happen to look exactly like these other people that had found themselves in the exact same situations over the past few months, past few years.
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It s an incredibly sad, self-reinforcing social phenomenon.
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Tell us about the new book.
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Tell us about motivation and payoff.
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I ve done lots of different types of work.
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Part of the thing that we actually don t know a lot about, the body of academic knowledge is not that large about, is about motivation at the workplace.
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And the reason for that is that it s just really hard to do.
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So I can sell some stuff, I can give people painkillers, I can change the prices of the painkillers, I can get people to steal some money from me.
8
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But what is really hard to do is to basically change people s bonuses for six months and see what happens.
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Or to give people large,
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bonuses, like we gave people a five month bonus in one experiment, so they could make a tremendous amount of money.
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This body of work is actually, I think took advantage of some of the early success we had, because all of a sudden companies were willing to work with us, so I couldn t do things like this without
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10 years ago, right?
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Without Intel and Microsoft and big companies allowing us to run experiments on employees and getting them to have real bonuses and different amounts and different incentive structure.
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What s so amazing about motivation is that we have this incredible capacity to be motivated by things.
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I mean, you look at this and you say, people are motivated by the way we help other people.
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and by our sense of progress, and by pride, and by achievement.
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If you just wrote the equation for motivation, it would include lots and lots of things.
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Mostly, we don t think of any of this.
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Sometimes we have an intuition about some of them, but we don t think very deeply about motivation.
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Mostly we think about something like, oh, let s just pay people.
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Now, paying people is fine.
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I have nothing against paying people, but it doesn t always work.
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It doesn t always work well.
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It can sometimes backfire.
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You can pay something, but some payment methods actually decrease motivation, run increasing.
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And the thing about motivation,
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I think of it like the perpetual motion machine.
8
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So in physics, people look for this energy machine that keeps on working and working and working.
8
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Motivation is one of those things that if we understand it, everybody benefits.
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So if you work for me and you re more motivated, I benefit and you benefit.
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You enjoy work more and I get more value out of it.
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It s not a zero sum game.
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The pie can become larger.
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So what I m hoping is that people take a deeper look
8
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at motivation, they will think about all of the elements that I try to describe in terms of meaning and sense of completion, identity, and so on, and try to figure out how do we expand the pie, how do we get everybody to benefit from this.
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Some of the conclusions are really, really interesting.
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People are nearly twice as productive when their work has meaning, and almost everyone underestimates that effect.
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is an enormous multiplier by any standard.
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Imagine if all of your team members were twice as productive, and it didn t necessarily require a doubling of their salary.
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I mean, this is an economically game-changing.
8
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That s right, and this was in a production setting where you can actually measure what people do.
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You know, there s some jobs, like your job, still harder to measure productivity, but there are other things.
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But the things that we should be doing and we don t do, but then there s also the things that we do and we should do.
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So it s actually quite sad to see how many motivation choking behaviors we have.
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360 evaluations, sometimes bonuses.
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there was a big consulting company I talked to about their bonuses.
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And I said, you know, I would love to do a study with you about bonuses and well-being and how much bonus people get, what they expect to get, how it works.
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And the CEO told me that bonus season is the most miserable season in a company.
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Why?
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He said everybody just concerned all the time thinking about what will be their bonus.
9
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Because it s not just the amount of money, it s also an evaluation and it s a judgment and so on.
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And he said, I don t want to draw any more attention to bonuses.
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And I said, look, the whole reason you have bonuses is to draw attention to it, right?
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But you know, you want people to think about the bonus and work hard and so on.
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If you tell me that the fact that you have bonuses is causing people to be less happy,
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then shouldn t you question bonuses to start with?
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The whole idea of bonus is that you want people to behave a certain way, you put a big pile of money in that direction, people would work in that direction.
9
SPEAKER_00
But if all you do is to get people to be distracted, because they keep on thinking, will I make it, will I not, what will Joe make, how much am I making, what s the comparison?
9
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Is this motivating?
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Because if nothing else, they re spending lots of time on this activity.
9
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Yeah, one of the executive compensation studies, I guess, that you d run, these experiments, was they experimented with making their compensation totally transparent.
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And the theory was, alright, if we publish all of this information for these executives, there s gonna be sort of a shrinking of this because there s gonna be an element of shame attached to it, but what happened instead was everybody got brutally competitive now that they could see each other s salaries and executive compensation ended up going up.
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Going up, yep.
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Because what happened was they did not compare themselves to the employees within the company, they compared themselves to the other friends, CEOs at other companies.
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Right, people that they thought were on their level.
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I met this guy, he was in charge of compensation in a big bank.
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I gave a talk on compensation and relativity and comparison.
9
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And he said, you know, now that you tell me about this, he said, I just realized that we have a database where the salaries for everybody is available.
9
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And he said, if that database got leaked, probably everybody but the person at the top would be upset.
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Because everybody thinks they re a little better than the idiot, the other idiot.
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And why is the other idiot getting paid more?
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There was a company I visited that had a 16 point rating
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approach to their employees, and it was in quarter of percent.
9
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And it translated into a bonus, and the total bonus was something like $4,000.
9
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So if you had 16 points, you could get $4,000, but the jump between 14.25 to 14.5 was not a big financial issue, right?
9
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people were unbelievably upset over a quarter of a point difference.
9
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Why?
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Because you re judging.
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You re judging me.
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If you got 14 and a half and I got 14 points in a quarter, why are you better than me?
9
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It s exactly it.
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It says you re better than me objectively on this scale and I cannot have that.
9
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So we can think about all the ways in which we could increase motivation, but the easier one is to first say let s not do things that kill motivation.
9
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And that should be kind of step one is let s look carefully about what we re doing and make sure we don t do the bad things.
9
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Why aren t we good at predicting our own motivations or our own motivation killers?
9
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So there s actually lots of things that come with it, but one of the things is that the experience
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of flow or the experience of joy at work is a very different experience than a thoughtful experience about what motivates us, right?
9
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What you re trying to do is you re trying to think about this engaged process.
9
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And this engaged process is actually about not thinking about it.
9
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The engaged process is about saying, I love what I m doing.
9
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I m really enjoying it.
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I m in the flow.
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I don t want this to stop.
9
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When you reason about that, we don t understand what that includes.
9
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So we say, oh, I need more money.
9
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But the fact is that for you to be fully engrossed in what you re doing and derive joy at the moment, it actually means not thinking about work.
9
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But when you think about work, you think about work, so you re kind of in a different state of mind.
9
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It s as if you re trying to, when you re awake, it s very hard to predict what s happening when you re asleep, and when you re asleep, it s hard to predict when you re awake.
9
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We engage this process of trying to deliberately thinking about what s going on in a state that is so different.
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from the state that we re in, that we don t have good intuition about that.
9
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Right, so all we can look at are patterns, like, well, I know when I go to this place and I m hungry, I order too many things, but that s kind of as advanced as we get.
9
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That s right, and we don t notice a lot of the nuances as well, right?
9
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So when you say, how much do you order, we have a record of this, but when you say,
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Motivation also varies and fluctuates, and we don t have enough experience over it.
9
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Like ordering food, you order multiple times, you have experience, but with motivation, you would need to have lots of variations, so we also don t have lots of experience.
9
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Now if you think about it, to get good understanding of motivation, you have to try lots of different workplaces over a very long time, and then be able to attribute
9
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how motivated you were to this condition.
9
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So, but this is why.
9
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Through all of your human bias as well, right?
9
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And this is why research is so good, right?
9
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Because with research you say, I don t expect you as individuals to collect all this data.
9
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I know you used to do lots of things on dating.
9
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Dating is one of the things people have terrible intuitions.
9
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Because how many people have you dated?
9
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I mean, if you dated a lot, it s a dozen.
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I mean, how many people have you lived with for prolonged periods of time?
9
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Very, very few.
9
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How would you develop an intuition about what works well or not?
9
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You would have to date lots of people, try different approaches, see what works and doesn t work.
9
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We don t have that luxury.
9
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Even if you were able to do that for yourself, which is what we endeavored to do at The Art of Charm, you then have to go, here s what s going to work for you, based on my experience.
9
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First you have to get decades and decades of experience, and then you have to show what s gonna work for other people, and that s just as hard.
9
SPEAKER_00
And if you think about compensation or motivation in the workplace, these experiments are just very hard.
9
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They take lots of time, they require lots of effort, very hard to do individually.
9
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And every company has an ideology,
9
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about what compensation should be like and what motivation, and it s not just about companies.
9
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It s about organizations and families.
9
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Everything has the notion of motivation, and everybody has ideas about it.
9
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But when you ask people, like, how sure are you that your ideas are working and there s any evidence for this?
9
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Nobody does.
9
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Dan, is there anything that I haven t asked you that you want to make sure you deliver?
9
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I think that we used to think that the big mysteries of life is what s in the stars, and maybe microbiology, and of course these are big mysteries.
9
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But for me, I think that the human mystery is wonderful.
9
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And even though it s just in front of us, there s so much we don t know.
9
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We drink coffee every day, the truth is there s lots of things we don t understand about coffee.
9
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We use money every day, lots of things we don t understand about it.
9
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We try to motivate people every day, and we don t still understand what it is.
9
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And the process of social science, in which we try different things and try to measure objectively what s going on and attributing and trying to improve things over time, I think is a wonderful process.
9
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So when people read or listen or think about those topics, I think the real benefit is to say, what can I take from my life?
9
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What are the things about my life that I m not observing?
9
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Can I be a bit better in observing my own life?
9
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try to implement something, and then hopefully also can I try to experiment with something?
9
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Is there something I would like to try out in a few different ways and see what leads to a better outcome?
9
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Thanks so much, Dan.
9
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My pleasure.
9
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Really interesting episode today.
9
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Been waiting to have Dan on the show for a long time.
9
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Definitely check out his books.
9
SPEAKER_01
We re gonna link to a bunch of those in the show notes, including Pay Off, his latest book on motivation.
9
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And if you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Dan on Twitter.
9
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well as other resources mentioned on the show.
9
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You can tap the album art in the podcast player on your phone to see the show notes for this episode.
9
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We ll link to those show notes right on your phone.
9
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I m also on Twitter.
9
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at The Art of Charm, and it s a great way to get a hold of me, Producer Jason, or anything else having to do with the show.
9
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Boot camps are live programs.
9
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We run them every week, but they fill up real fast.
9
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Check them out, bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
9
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Of course, that is the best way to learn from us, live and direct here, and I also want to encourage you to join our AOC challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or if you re here in the States, you can text charmed, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
9
SPEAKER_01
That challenge is about improving your networking and connection skills and inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
9
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We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolbox that I mentioned earlier in the show, and I got regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
9
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I do those every week, and it ll make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker.
9
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or text charmed in the U.S.
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SPEAKER_00
to 33444.
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For full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the podcast, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
10
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.