Dan Ariely: the hidden forces that shape your customers' decisions

32:39But then what I realized is, what most insurance companies do is they then project manage all the restoration back to the originals. And what they were doing was transferring the liability to me for anything that went overspent. And of course we go overspent. And also it minimized all the administration from their point of view. So it's just a case of we'll settle. Here's the chat. I mean, in my case, they were quite fair. They took their quote and my quote and went halfway between the two, which ended up probably okay. But yeah, it was interesting that that was their approach. Yeah. So they said, okay, so how do you solve it?

33:12So I said one solution, but this is the solution we ended up adopting, is to make it from a two-party game to a three-party game. So when anybody signs up for this insurance company, they pick a charity that they love the most in the world. Let's say it's the World Wildlife Fund. And this company now has a name, it's called Lemonade. When life gives you lemons. This company takes a fixed percent, let's say 20 % of the premium. And they say, this is our profit. We'll never take more. But if you joined and you said that your favorite charity in the world is the World Wildlife Fund, you're joining a pool of people who love the World Wildlife Fund.

34:02And we collect premiums and we pay claims. and at the end of the year, if there's money left over in the pool, it goes to the World Wildlife Fund. So the insurance company basically is saying up front, look, we are not going to make more money if we reject the claim. We don't want to be in that situation, right? You basically say, morally, I don't want to be in a situation where I make more money if I am unethical to you. But also if you as a customer cheats, who are you cheating? Yeah. Your favorite charity. Right. So it's a really nice solution. And if you look at the statistics on Lemonade, you'll see it's an unbelievably loved insurance company.

34:56And all kinds of things, all kinds of other good things come from this model. So for example, I think the record is to accept claims in about two seconds. Because the moment you trust people, things, and of course you have AI and so on, things are much, much, much, much faster. So this for me is an example of how you can, if you start looking at an industry from scratch and you say, what is the behavioral economics psychological issue? And you say the issue is trust. Insurance is a crazy trust situation. You have to really trust it. They'll be there for you. And if you don't have trust, everything is very expensive.

35:38So let's build a business model like that. That's fascinating that. I wanted to ask you as well about pricing, actually, because you'd think pricing is like the most rational thing ever, wouldn't you? But actually, there's a lot of kind of irrationality that comes through pricing. I mean, the one I remember from your first book that sort of made me smile was looking at how good looking people were. the George Clooney kind of thing. Explain a bit about that because it turns out that pricing, your relative pricing is a lot more important than your absolute pricing and how you frame it as well. Yeah, so pricing is a fascinating topic.

36:12And maybe to start with, I'll give you my metaphor for the human mind. So I think of the human mind as a vintage Swiss army knife. and let's two, vintage and Swiss army knife let's start with the Swiss army knife the human mind is basically a collection of tools we have tools to deal with food, mating dangers and so on the Swiss army knife is not really good at anything you wouldn't say oh I need a can opener, let me find the Swiss army knife I need tweezers, let me find no, it's benefit is that it's a lot of tools in a compact packaging. And our mind is the same thing. We're not that great in most things, but we're quite good at it and it's quite compact and we can carry it with us.

37:07But our Swiss army knife is an old Swiss army knife, vintage. It was designed for a period a long time ago when we roamed the savannah and had to deal with food and so on. But still, that's the Swiss army knife that we carry with us. So we get to the modern world and we don't have the right tools. So we rely on our ancient tools and they're not that good, but we make do with them. We don't understand how bad they are, but we don't have a tool for understanding compound interest. We don't have a tool to understand discounts and we don't have a tool to judge value in terms of money. So we use these other tools, and that's the source of the mistakes we make.

37:50So we already mentioned this pain of paying, right? Why is cash different than credit cards? Why is Apple Pay or Google Pay different than even a credit card? What happens when we pay with those things? We don't even remember how much we just paid. We all get surprised at the end of the month with our credit card bill because we are really bad at this. so the relativity effect that you're referring to relativity is a strategy that we apply across lots of things think about this room that we're sitting in it feels perfectly bright lit how much light do we have compared to sunlight just a fraction but our whole system basically gets used to the overall level and we just judge things in relative ways Your eyes are darker than your skin and so on.

38:42So relativity is a really good algorithm that we apply across many, many different things, including pricing. So when you say how expensive is expensive, I don't know. Compared to what? Like, you know, how much would you pay for a house? How much would you pay for a cup of coffee? Well, it depends on what's next to it. And the next to it could be a medium-sized coffee compared to large. and it could be a different house, but it could also be something else. So if we think about how much are we paying for a microphone, we might compare it to another gadget. So we do lots of things. What's a reasonable price?

39:24Let me understand how it is priced compared to other things. Compared to what? Whatever is comfortable to compare between. Just because we're talking about your house, I'll give you a housing example. So when you show people houses and you give them different asking prices, their bids change. How much they think their house is worth changes, right? And it gets closer to their asking price. When you look at professional real estate agents, they're also influenced. Not to the same degree, but they're also influenced. Or another example, you take people who move to a new city. If you move from an expensive city to a cheap city, people end up buying too much of a house.

40:16If you move from a cheap city to an expensive city, you buy too little of a house. You're still connected to the relative price of the place you moved from. If you rent for a year or two, the effect goes away because you got used to the new price. So relativity is very much everywhere. But I'll give you another example, one of my favorites. Part of how much you're willing to pay for something depends on fairness. And fairness is basically asking, how much did people work for me? So think about an example. Imagine you come to visit me at the university. You're parking next to a parking meter. You look in your pockets.

41:00You don't have a quarter. somebody passes by. You say, excuse me, do you have a quarter? And the person says, yes, I have a quarter. I'll sell it to you for a dollar. Most people say, I'm not paying you a dollar for a quarter. I'll take my chances with City Hall. Case number two, parking, parking meter. You don't have a quarter. Somebody passes by. You say, excuse me, do you have a quarter? And that person says, I don't have a quarter, but I'll tell you what. There's a bank not too far from here. If you want, I'll run really fast to that bank. I'll change a dollar for quarters. I'll come really quickly back.

41:34But if I run all this way to the bank and back for you, would you give me a dollar for my trouble? Now you think it's a great deal. Now in every objective way, you're worse off. You have to wait and you get sweaty coins. But why are you happier? Because somebody worked for you. And it turns out that this principle is very general, that we don't pay for what we get, It's not just for what we get. A lot of the components, the willingness to pay, is influenced by how much it costs, how much the person put effort into it. We just had coffee. People in the U.S. pay a lot of money for somebody who drips their coffee for them or do something like this.

42:22How much would you pay if the coffee was already in a bucket and they just poured it to a cup, it would feel very different. And it's true for lots of things. And, you know, lots of companies basically say people should appreciate the service we're giving them or the product we're giving them, and they don't need to know the details. Not true. Not true. Understanding the details sometimes increase the enjoyment from a product and almost always increases willingness to pay. I'll give you one example from pricing. So I went to visit this bank in a country I will not say, and we were talking about some banking-related issues, and then somebody came to the meeting, and he said that they have a new program.

43:15This was not the topic of our discussion, but they're going to stop charging people ATM fees. and he said, oh, my goodness, we're rolling this out in a few weeks, and we're expecting huge applause from our customers and so on. And I say, I think people would hate you for cutting the ATM price. So how can that be? I say, you think that people would say, thank you for not charging me anymore. I think people would say, oh, you bastards, why did you charge me for the last 10 years? and you know we disagreed on that I said look this is what I think you should do I think you should stop this program of doing it for free and I think instead of doing it for free you should tell people when they come to the ATM you should tell people the price of a transaction on an ATM is X let's say$1.50 but we understand that not everybody has the money so if you want to pay less pay as much as you want up to zero.

44:22Now I said, what would you do with this message? The worst you could do is get zero, but you would give people the sense that this is not free. I mean, ATMs cost money, right? You have the machine, people come to fill money, there's technology, there's data, there's all kinds of things. Of course, it was two, three weeks before launch, they didn't do it, and I was correct. People really hated them. for what they were doing. But it tells you again that pricing is not just pricing. You would say from a rational perspective, people are saying, oh my goodness, it's the same ATM, and now they're charging me less.

45:02What a great idea. But of course the psychology is much more complex than that. By the way, name your own price. Fascinating, fascinating topic. We just did a really interesting, it was an experiment, but we did it to help an organization that had like an event where people were buying tickets. And they wanted to reduce the price of the tickets. So imagine that the regular ticket is$100, but they want students to be able to apply, so they wanted$35. So you could say something like students 35, not students 100, but maybe there are people who are not students and can't afford it. So their thought was to reduce their tickets to 35 and then to find some philanthropist who would make up the difference.

45:56And I said, you know, that's just not the right approach. Why don't you tell people? $100 is the real price. If you can't afford it, pay 35. so I said to start with you'll not get 35 from everybody some people would pay 100 and it's about the morality of the people maybe not everybody who could afford it some people would trade it but at least it will not be zero but I said on top of that put another price level that says but if you're financially okay and you can subsidize another person go ahead and do that And think about this. You're saying it's not us against you. It's not the event versus you, the ticket holders.

46:43It's all of you ticket holders are a community. And if you have money, why don't you fund another community member who can't pay their price? And it ended up being fantastic. It ended up being fantastic. There was even one person who donated for 10 people. Really? Wow. For 10 people. So, you know, name your own price and fairness and question of community. Like, you know, it doesn't sound like money, but the psychology of money is really fascinating. It's sort of like the social contract versus economic one, isn't it? I mean, weirdly, my very, very first economics lecture at university, I studied economics and finance.

47:24It was probably where my love of behavioral economics started because the lecture was trying to explain the difference between total cost and marginal. costs right and the story he told was um he had booked um a holiday no his friend had booked a holiday and um they're they're getting this cottage by the sea and they had some spare uh capacity and they really had some spare rooms and over dinner they said would you like to come along and so the lecturer said that being an economics professor he said we'd love to come along we will offer to pay the marginal cost for us coming along so the extra food the extra wine maybe there's any more petrol to pick us up on the way.

48:00And the friend turned him down sort of thing because it wasn't fair because it's like, well, you know, the cost of, you know, we're saving you all the cost of holiday and you're paying the marginal cost. And I just thought, you know, who would accept that because it's kind of breaking the rules of friendship, which is, you know, you're in it together, you want to split the costs and that's how most people would do it. But yeah, in that question, though, it's also interesting whether these people stayed their friends. Well, exactly. Exactly, didn't have many friends after that. You know, there's a couple of things where economists, so there was a study that looked at who donates to charity, and it turns out the economics department is the lowest.

48:38Economics is a very interesting profession. It's a profession that gets you to think that everybody is rational and to adopt this perspective. Everybody is, you know, it's a wonderful framework. Like it's so interesting and engaging, and it explains some of the variance, but it makes you feel that it explains lots of the variance. But if you buy into it, you expect people to be perfectly rational actors. And when people are not perfectly rational actors, like what he should have offered these people on the holidays is the marginal cost plus a pound, right? How could they reject that? They would be generous.

49:19It would be a pound. It would be a pound. Because if you just offer them the marginal cost, there would be neutral. There's no neutral. But you could have offered them an extra pound. Now they should have taken the deal. But economists get those things wrong because they don't only think of themselves as rational, but they think that other people are rational. Nobody has ever done a study on how romantic life for economists. Well, that would be a very good study. What happens with gifts, what happens with all kinds of things. Yeah, because everything is utility in economics. How do I maximize utility in every transaction?

49:53But as you say in your books as well, we know from system one, is that people make decisions a lot more based on how they feel than how they think. Yeah, and it's perfectly fine, right? So if you say, for example, talk about gifts. I love gifts. And gifts are not about an economic value. Like, I will not buy you socks. I wouldn't put 20 pounds in your bank account this is not a gift if it's about a gift then you basically say what are the things that would lubricate our social exchange what are the things that would get us to act better so maybe I'll ask you what's the best gift you've ever given and the best gift you ever got probably i've just turned 50 congratulations thank you and i'd say everything associated with that like the you know the photos so my brothers for example um recreate in fact they they borrowed the podcast artwork and they recreated it to tell different stories of our relationship over the years kind of thing um so not much cost involved in that but they'd gone to a lot of effort and it was quite funny the way the different they created different titles to describe different personality traits for me.

51:14And they did a talk at the dinner kind of thing. And my family brought, you know, designed some lovely photos of all the holidays we've been on and did it in a collage and that kind of thing. So, yeah, I'd say those things that were symbolic of relationship probably were the most meaningful. Yeah, because it's a concrete reminder and it's a lot of work and it tells you something about their thoughts about you. It's an interesting thing to think about what are really good gifts, what are we trying to get to it. So I'll tell you about one gift. This is a gift at the workplace, so much lower. I can tell you later about personal gifts.

51:58But the people who work with me at the lab, every year I try to do an end-of-the-year gift, and I don't start with what I want to give. I start with what I want to convey or what I want to change. And the things I wanted people to get reinforcement for is the fact that I care about them in general, not just as people working with me, but I care about people. The gift is not backward-looking, it's forward-looking. And I want to do something for them that they couldn't do themselves. Or not couldn't, but wouldn't do themselves. So my favorite one was a year where I asked everybody to write one paragraph about something they want to learn up to 10 days somewhere in the world.

52:51And I said, I'll send you to learn that thing. Coach, cheap hotels, but I'll send you to do that. And it was amazing because people did lots of wonderful things. They learned all the way from cartooning to drumming to yoga to French, all kinds of things that people wanted to do. Of course, you don't learn anything fully in 10 days, but it was also a wonderful year because people kept on coming and going and they kept on anticipating and coming back and describing what they were doing. And I think it conveyed all the feelings. It conveyed that I cared about them as people. It wasn't a, here's a course in statistics.

53:34right it was something that i thought they couldn't do they wouldn't do it for themselves because it was a little expensive and in a little bit of time and it was forward looking right it's not payment for the back like you did x i'm i'm giving you a something but it says look we have an ongoing relationship and i care about your your well-being in general forward looking you're right actually it's kind of like it's effort and uh personalization a bit isn't it so my younger daughter lilia is a massive fan of crumble cookies which we don't have in the uk so every time i come over to new york uh you know i have to go and find a crumble cookies outlet and she's online looking because they change the cookies every week right so she's online going daddy can you order the snickerdoodle uh you know with a you know with a cookies and cream and she'll have looked up all the different options and then i have to go and find grumble cookies obviously order the they come in this beautiful long box you know nicely laid out bright pink and then i have to carry it you know pack it in my bags carry it through security get it on the plane on in the train in the car all the way back to the sort of thing so the effort that goes through and funnily enough actually when everyone notices it on on the plane as well because it's with bright packaging so it always starts conversations i have to tell the story this is for my daughter who you know did a sort of thing But it's partly the effort, isn't it?

54:55Signalling the effort you're going to and the fact that it's personal to the person you're buying it for. Yeah. And are you trying to, you know, we talked about effort before. Are you trying to remind her of the effort when you give it to her? Not to make you feel guilty. No, I always remind her of the effort. Honestly, I just explain the effort. But, you know, there are also ways to do that, right? So you probably don't want to say, look how much time you cost me. but you could imagine telling her saying look buying you these cookies was really wonderful because I knew you wanted them and I was looking forward to going to the store and as I was buying them I was thinking about you and then I was carrying them in the plane and the whole time I was thinking how happy you would be when you got the cookies and now we're here and here are the cookies and I want you to just remember how much I love you every time you have one of them, right?

55:51And if you think about that kind of a story, it's a story that endows the cookies with a meaning that is not just about the taste of the cookie. And I think that part of the things we don't do enough is to endow things with meaning. And I'll tell you kind of a funny story, not funny, but a story that happened to me. So there's a guy, Bill Harlan, who is a wine grower in California. Supposedly fantastic wines. I've drank them, but I'm not a wine connoisseur. But anyway, I really like the guy. And from time to time I go and I spend some time with him. And on this particular day I spend a whole day with him.

56:40And I look at the soil and picking the grapes and doing all the process and so on. and we have dinner and he gives me a bottle of wine. He says, Dan, this wine we picked when you, me, Dan, were 30 years old, so quite a few years ago, and we got 100 points from Parker. 100? 100 points. And he said, I want you to keep this wine until you're 50 and drink it when you're 50. So I was 45 at the time, about 45. So then I had this bottle of wine, and I kept it somewhere visible. Maybe I should have kept it in some cooler place, but I wanted to see it. And it was a reminder of when I was 30. And it was a reminder of my beautiful, wonderful day with Bill.

57:38And it was a reminder that I have some time to wait until the wine will be ready. And then when I turned 50, I didn't want to drink it because I got attached to this bottle and wine and remembering the day with Bill and it's a beautiful day in California and really wonderful discussion. But I did have to drink it. So I bought a decanter. I bought a decanter and I decanted that wine into the decanter and the decanter got some of the meaning of the wine. So now when I see that decanter, it's the decanter that connected to that day with Bill and so on. Now, if you think about that or, you know, the cookies for your daughter and so on, I think we don't do enough of that.

58:24And maybe wine is kind of the best even category to think about meaning because wine is one of the few categories that we have a consumption vocabulary around. we have tannin, complexity, acidity, leg we pick up the glass in many ways you could say, oh this is fake people can't tell the difference your taste bud cannot tell the difference in the wine and people argue about that but in another level it's not about whether your taste bud can do something different it's about attention so if I sit next to my laptop and drink a glass of wine I'm not going to pay much attention. I'm not going to particularly enjoy it.

59:10It's going to be okay. But if I stop and look and smell and slow down and sip and so on, the whole experience is very valuable. So kind of there's meaning that is connected and basically occupies more of our higher function in our brains. And then there's also the experience itself that we could direct by creating consumption vocabulary. Yeah, the environment to wine is so important, isn't it? Where you are, who you're with. I mean, I've had like the same wine in one country and then again in another country. It's completely different just because I'm in the vineyard, the sun's shining, I'm outdoors, and with somebody telling me about it, it's incredible.

59:54Yeah, I went to a vineyard. I had such a good time. The owner was amazing and a beautiful day with a friend. When I got home with the same bottles of wine, I couldn't drink them. Yes, I know. Exactly. I've had that experience so many times. Maybe pivoting slightly from good times to less good times, actually, because you've written a new book, Misbelief. I read it last night and it just blew my mind. For anyone who's not read it yet, describe, because, you know, your career in behavioral science started with a pretty bad event for you personally. And then this is another pretty bad event that happened to you that inspired another book.

1:00:33What happened to... So during COVID, I did not realize for a while, but I became very hated. There were a group of people who thought that I helped about bringing COVID. They called me the chief consciousness architect. They thought I was part of the cabal, the Illuminati, and I was part of the conspiracy. And they gave me a lot of power. They said, how can it be that people are so compliant? It must be that you're working to get people to be like sheep and so on. But it was tough. I had death threats, people burning my books. It was very, very aggressive. And there was like one day when I discovered that.

1:01:15And I spent about a month trying to prove that this was not correct. Failed miserably, really miserably. And then at the end of that month, I said, okay, I have to understand what's going on. And, you know, kind of misinformation, fake news has been around for a while, right? What's happening in the UK, what's happening in the US, the world over. But it was kind of in the background. But all of a sudden, there was something very powerful about somebody saying to me, you did this. And I said, no, I didn't do this. Like, people were sure I had a contract with Pfizer. And there was nothing I could do.

1:02:02show. I even told somebody, I'll show them my tax returns to see that I... Anyway. So I describe in a short way my experience. That's not the main point of the book. The book is really saying, okay, I gave up on explaining myself. Let me understand these people. In general, the approach of behavioral economics and psychology is to say that things are not random. The reason we have relativity, the pain of pain and so on, there's a reason to it. And in the same way, I think that conspiracies or misbeliefs are not for nothing. They are maybe not a desirable reaction, but they are a reaction to something.

1:02:47And I basically describe, the book is a description of the process by which this new world of information is attacking us. and it's almost like an introduction to psychology textbook because it covers emotion and stress, it covers the cognitive process, the personality process and the social process and it describes this machinery that is taking good, kind, wonderful people and turning them into something very different. And we kind of all have these people in our lives and the question is what happened to them and then what can we do about it And also what should we do as a society? So that's really what the book is.

1:03:30I will say that as I dug deeper and deeper and talked to more and more people, on one hand, I realized how big the problem was. You know, if 10 years ago we would have made a list of the big problems of society, misinformation wouldn't have been there. Now it's one of the biggest ones. And it's one of the biggest ones because we have lots of challenges that we have to solve as a society. And if we can't agree on anything, we can't move forward, right? And it's true. It's true for almost all countries. So I think that we have to understand this and we have to figure out some mechanisms. And there are some things that we could do individually, but there are some things we need to solve as a society.

1:04:20Do you think that you spoke to, you actually spoke, didn't you, personally to a lot of the people that were writing the stuff about you? Oh, yeah. Do you think, are people doing it intentionally? Or is there a conspiracy to conspiracy? Are they kind of setting out to unsettle what they perceive as, or are these people unconsciously going, you call it the funnel, don't you? Are they unconsciously kind of going through those stages? is. So there's no question that there are big forces behind lots of social media in the form of bots from all kinds of dark regimes around the world. I don't think I'm connected to that.

1:04:59So I don't think I'm sufficiently important that somebody in, you know, country X would say, let's get Dan down. Now, do bots help? Of course, because a lot of these bots, once they see a fight, they join in because they want to create fights. But I don't think I was a target of anything. I think it was started naturally. And I think, so, So, you know, the woman who I think started it, like patient zero, and the woman that as far as I could identify started it was somebody who was very stressed about what was happening with her son and masks and so on. And she read that I was advising the Ministry of Education.

1:05:56She knew because she really liked my research before that I did some projects on vaccines. and she knew that I worked with the Gates Foundation. Now, I worked with the Gates Foundation on child nutrition in Africa, but not. But anyway, she connected the dots, made a story, and then it got a life of its own. And it got a life so much of its own that at some point, I became like a social currency. I think the half a beard was also helpful for them because it's so easy to villainize. You had half and half, half devil, why didn't you, your whole face was burned, things like that. But I think that she connected the dots, the non-existing connection, and made the story out of there, and then it just got a life of its own.

1:06:51And when things get a life of their own, it just gets very popular. But I gave Chachi Pitti the book, and I asked you to summarize it in one word and it said empathy i was very happy with this you're very empathetic in the book actually because you i mean most people would be angry yeah most people would be defensive most people go on the attack but to your credit what you do is try and understand first and use it a bit like with your original you know when you had your burns is you wanted to understand and use that process which i guess is healing isn't it in a way yeah for you personally isn't it but that's a really healthy kind of approach to advocacy most people don't have that toolkit when this stuff happens right it is yeah it is it was it was in some way my my way of coping was not was not to get angry with them and this but to but to try and to try and understand and and as a social scientist it was very natural for me to do that and you know there's lots of things to talk about but maybe we'll mention one one factor so we said that there are four elements and and the thing that starts people down the funnel of misbelief is stress.

1:08:00And maybe I'll give one example of how this works. So there's something we call white noise. And in hearing white noise, it's like full spectrum noise. In vision, it's about, it's like imagine a painting with red, with black and white dots randomly sorted out. That's called white noise. And imagine I show you one of those and I say, hey, do you see a figure? And you say, yes and no, I show you the next one. The next one, I show you 50 of those. What happens when we're stressed? It turns out that when we're stressed, we see more images. And why is it? Imagine you're an animal in the jungle and you think there's a tiger somewhere.

1:08:42Your system is completely honed in to say, oh, these two leaves are moving, there must be something there, right? When we're stressed, our system gets you into overdrive to explain the world to ourselves. And that's exactly what happened to these women and happened to lots of other people under stress. And stress can come from COVID, finance, what's happening with AI, what is happening in terms of the war in Ukraine, what's happening in Gaza, who are these Houthis, what's happening with Iran, and so on and so forth. My students, by the way, are very stressed about will they have a job with everything coming with AI.

1:09:21So the first necessary condition is stress. And if you're happy and resilient, you're not looking for alternative explanations, but when something bad is happening and you're stressed, you're looking for something to explain that, and you go into that. And then there's lots of other processes, the cognitive, the personality, but maybe let's mention one other one which we call shibboleth. And it's part of the social element. and the term Shibboleth comes from a story in the Bible that these two tribes had a war, they settled on two sides of the river and then when they walked around, they wanted to know if the people that they meet are from their tribe or the other tribe.

1:10:00And it just so happened that they pronounced the name of the plant Shibboleth slightly differently. One of them said Shibboleth, one of them said Seaboleth. So imagine I walk around, I have a plant and I say, hey, you, how do you call this plant? And if you call it the way I call it, We're friends, we're brothers, we're from the same tribe. If you call it like the other tribe, I have to fight you or chase you away. Now, we now use this term shibbolet for a discussion that is not about the facts, but it's about identity. Because I show you the plant and say, what's the name of this plant? Do I really care about the plant?

1:10:34No, I care about identity. And if you look at a lot of things in our political sphere, or you look at lots of things in social media, you can recognize Shibboleth once you have this lens you can say oh it's very confusing, is this about the fact or is this about identity and you can say okay, it's not really about the fact it is about identity and the discussion about identity is a very different discussion I'm protesting, I'm saying things it has nothing to do with the facts it has to do with showing my purity my values my anti-pro whatever for and as you say in the book it's not a left or right thing is it both left and right are equally you know liable to to have the it's almost signaling isn't it your allegiance to the cause it doesn't really matter whether the truth of truth in that sense doesn't matter it's the signaling that's right and everybody thinks that the other side has lots of misbeliefs and their side is completely accurate it is also interesting to i give some examples in the book for asking people to reflect on their most basic beliefs and how sure they are and where they got it from.

1:11:46But what would have happened if you were born with the same you, were born to a family with the opposite political opinion than your parents? Oh, interesting. Right. What do you think your beliefs would be? And most people say, you know, I would have been different. So we have a, in retrospect, we can say, oh, all of my beliefs are reasoned and thoughtful and they're based on facts and logic. But a lot of them are not. We don't know that much and so on. Now you have a real ability to put your finger on some hot topics. Where are you going next? What's the next book in your mind? So I have a website called the Center for Advanced Bureaucracy.

1:12:37I complain about bureaucracy. I think it's one of the... Slowing me up to that one. Yeah. But I have two large topics that I'm working on mostly these days. One is about thinking about the last chapter of people's lives. So I'm thinking about a journey from the time that people get a terminal illness diagnosis until the end of life, and trying to understand all the mistakes that people do in that process and how we can help. And, you know, there are lots of mistakes. Like in the beginning, people become patients rather than people with an illness. It's like a job, and you basically say, okay, my job is to adhere to medicine.

1:13:15No, no, no. Your job is to live and figure out this. People buy into the medical perspective of prolonging life at all costs. People end up taking extra treatment that they don't want. people end up dying in hospital when they don't want. So there's lots of mistakes along the way that I'm trying to analyze, understand, and offer some solutions. So that's one. And then the second one is thinking about how do we live a life that is more fulfilling by making bolder decisions. So whenever you have a risk, there's an upside and downside. and the upside is where improvement comes from and the downside is mistakes.

1:13:59And I think that risk is the spice of life. People think variety is the spice of life. No, I think that risk is the real spice of life. The challenge is that when you have a choice and you have an upside and a downside, the downsides are capturing too much of our attention. We're too afraid to fail. We're afraid of people hating us socially. We're afraid of cancel culture. So we live a timid life. And when you look at young people these days, they live even a more timid life than we do. There's some really sad statistics on young people not dating as much, not expressing romantic love, not sharing their feelings.

1:14:47And the world is becoming more like that. When we started talking and I said something about sexuality and scars, it's a punishing world, right? You can imagine, I'm very happy I'm not afraid of saying this, but there's something about this world that there's some topics that we don't talk about and so on. And, you know, we've all made mistakes. And we all know that we would love to share those mistakes because there's no reason for everybody to repeat the same mistakes again, right? So I've made a ton of mistakes. And it will give me great pleasure to know that I'm helping some people not relive those mistakes exactly the same.

1:15:37So I think I'm analyzing the reasons. So I'm writing this book where I'm trying to analyze the reasons why. The first part is why we're making, why are we so afraid? And then the second one is to come up with solutions. So I'm just trying to, I'm now in the solution part of it and I'm really, really enjoying it. But I'll tell you two other things. I started writing kids' books. Oh, did you? Yeah, just finished the second one and I'm writing the third. The first one is on procrastination. I think it will be out later in the year maybe beginning next year the second one is about allowances and the third will be about white lies and then I don't know if you know but I helped write a TV show that is loosely based on my life it's now showing the second season on NBC do you star yourself?

1:16:31no no no it's a real TV show there's a real actor but he also has burns not as much as I do and he was burned in a different way He teaches behavioral economics and he's helping the FBI solve his crime. And then the other thing I'm trying to do kind of for the fund is that the same people who did the show asked me to pitch a reality show that is social science based. So I'm now thinking about that. So the creative side of my life is very, very. Well, you're definitely taking the risks and not letting fear of failure get in your way. Actually, you just reminded me of something I think we chatted about before, but I remember going to Tel Aviv and meeting a venture capitalist and I was fascinated by how he chose to invest in the people.

1:17:20And he flipped on his head and said, if you walk in here and tell me you haven't failed, that's our conversation over. and what he was really interested in is how you come back from failure and what and what you've learned and you know he was looking to invest in people that have been through that process learned from it and moved on which was always fascinating yeah and and i think there's a lot to it it's not just a failure it's also knowing that these people are resilient right you you want you want somebody that that understands failure and you want somebody who's developed the resilience to deal with all kinds of things.

1:17:53It doesn't have to be fair. Actually, I met the Olympic swimming coach for the Australian team that won gold last two Olympics, Dean Boxall, massively exciting guy, really, really pumped up, enthusiastic. And he said, look, with the Gen Z, everyone says to me, you know, how do you coach Gen Z? And he said, don't ever tell me that they don't work as hard. They work as hard as any set of athletes I've ever had in my life. the difference comes when they don't succeed yeah he said i have to become psychologist and he said all my job now is talking them through what happens when they don't reach their standards that they've set for themselves he said that that's that's the difference you know the ability to pick yourself back up and go again which you've got lots of experience of obviously what you've been through so so you're well placed to uh to write the book dan thank you mate it's been uh an absolute pleasure i feel like we've just skimmed the surface we did we did it's um you know it feels like we should continue this on the pint of somewhere in the pub.

1:18:55I think that's exactly what we should do. And just to say, everyone out there, go look up Dan. Get his books. They're absolutely fascinating. And it's like a whole world of fascinating social science awaits you. So go check it out. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

1:19:28If you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on x at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn, where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.