Modern WisdomHow Marketing Reshapes Our Brains | Prince Ghuman & Matt Johnson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 180
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,001 words- 0:00 – 0:57
Defining neuromarketing: using brain science to predict real behavior
- MJMatt Johnson
So really, it's, it's trying to use the, the insights from neuroscience to better accomplish the classic goals of marketing. And so, part of that is understanding the general principles about the brain and how the brain takes in information, how the brain learns, how the brain has experiences, remembers, makes decisions, and, and how to utilize the general principles which navigate that space to better accomplish marketing goals. Uh, and then secondly, it's really about trying to collect as much neuroscientific data as possible to address very specific marketing questions. So if you're comparing which trailer to use, if you're, you're marketing for a, a movie, for example, you can do a classic consumer group where you ask people. There's lots of evidence showing that people's explicit responses are very different from what the brain says and what they will do later on. And, and a much better cue for that can be a direct measure of actual neural responses. So that's sort of the other half of, of neuromarketing is actually collecting raw neuroscientific data.
- 0:57 – 8:56
How the book 'Blindsight' came to be: academia meets real-world marketing
- CWChris Williamson
(wind blowing) Gentlemen, welcome to the show. How are you?
- PGPrince Ghuman
Good. How are you doing?
- MJMatt Johnson
Doing well.
- CWChris Williamson
Very good indeed. This book, this Blindsight that I have in my hands, is one of the coolest things that I've read in absolutely ages. I get sent tons and tons of books, and this is like soft core porn to me, and also to the listeners today, I'm sure, as well. Fans of Richard Shott and Rory Sutherland and some of the other fantastic guests that we've had on today, I think you should have your notepads out because this is gonna be a real special one. So first off, gents, congrats on the book. Really good.
- MJMatt Johnson
Thank you.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Thank you so much, Chris. Really appreciate that. It was a-
- CWChris Williamson
How long were you- how long were you working on it?
- PGPrince Ghuman
(exhales) Two and a half. Two and a half years, roughly. I mean, it's still not out yet, so I would say we could even stretch it to three. We were working on it for a long time. I think how the book came about is a, is an interesting story as well.
- CWChris Williamson
Tell us. I wanna know.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Uh- uh, Matt, tell your side. His is really funny. (laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah, I mean, so, so, I mean, the, the book really is, is the melding of these two worlds, right? So I come from academic neuroscience. My first ... I was in ... I graduated from, from 25th grade when I, I stopped being in school finally. I've spent, uh, most of my lives in, in labs and, and libraries. Um, and I was really just driven by, uh, a curiosity. I really wanted to understand, uh, how the brain works, why we, we do the things we do, what sort of makes us tick. And, and it was really just driven by pure curiosity, really irrespective of any sort of application. And, and for me, that moment was, was really distilled when I finished my PhD thesis. Uh, what you do is you have your, your actual physical thesis. It's a, it's a bounded document, a bounded book. It's, it's fat, it's 200 pages, and there's a specific library with all the PhD theses go. And when I finished my PhD thesis, they're giving the bounded book and you put it in the library, and I put a $50 bill in that thesis. And I guarantee you that money is still there today-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
... 'cause nobody reads this research.
- CWChris Williamson
What was the title?
- MJMatt Johnson
And for me that-
- CWChris Williamson
What was the title?
- MJMatt Johnson
Oh, geez. The title was, uh, The Neural Basis of Language Learning in, uh, Autism Investigations with, uh, Behavioral and Neuroimaging Studies.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah? I mean, I've, I've heard of sex- I've heard of sexier thesis titles.
- PGPrince Ghuman
(laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs) So that-
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah.
- MJMatt Johnson
So, you know, that was Matt's journey, right? So while he was in labs and libraries, like you put it, um, I graduated, um, and I was fortunate enough to try to start and fail at my own first company while in my undergrad, and after that, I was the first marketer brought onto a startup. So I was the other way around. I was what I would call a, a pop psych nerd, right? So I would read a lot of pop psychology books from back in the day, Wisdom of Crowds, uh, Thinking Fast and Slow, all those books that we now, you know ... Uh, but they're still pop psych. They're not research. And I was lucky enough to be at a, uh, leadership position early on where I could test all that stuff. So I read about neural coupling, and I would go change my, my, uh, my website and test neural coupling, right? So having done that early on, I tried to read some of these researches that Matt and other people like Matt wrote, and there's only so much my brain can do after a while. I'm like, "You know, I simply don't possess the ... I'm, I'm a mortal and there's only so many abstracts you can read before you're just ..." As a marketer, you're like, "Just give me, just give me the gist of it so I can start to break-"
- CWChris Williamson
What do I need to do? Yeah.
- MJMatt Johnson
Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, I applied it to my own life, self-dev. You know, I, I grew a lot out of it 'cause it's psychology. It applies to so many things. So after f- doing that for about 10, 12 years, coincidentally, Matt and I met, uh, and we started teaching at Hope International University. He was the assistant dean and I was a professor brought on, and we started to teach neuromarketing class together. And that class turned into an idea for a textbook, and then we decided we don't want to write a textbook just for marketers. We want to write this book for consumers. And the last piece about me is, um, I, I'm a consumer like everyone else listening, like you, Chris, like Matt. I like buying cool things and, and, and using them and making them part of my life. Um, but recently, there's like this weird divide between marketers and consumers, so a lot of this book is written for consumers so they can understand what happens when marketing and brain mix, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, because I, I, I think we can have better products and enjoy them guilt-free as consumers and as marketers. We're just, we're just not there yet. There's like this weird level of distrust. So I'm hoping, uh, this book is sort of one way of doing that, on top of combining Matt's lab knowledge and my marketing application knowledge. And hopefully, you, hopefully you got a bit of that when you read the book.
- CWChris Williamson
Absolutely, yeah. I, uh, definitely did. So n- neuromarketing. That's the-
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
That's the term. Neuroscience-
- MJMatt Johnson
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... meets marketing.
- MJMatt Johnson
Right.
- 8:56 – 15:01
“Eating the menu”: mental models shape what we experience as reality
- CWChris Williamson
... and thought it had voted another way. Um, yeah, exactly. Like, it was just like a shock thing and their hand slipped or something. Uh, so yeah, let's get into the meat of it. Um, what does eating the menu mean?
- PGPrince Ghuman
Ooh. Matt, can I start and then you can, you can go into your mental models?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Uh, Eating the Menu was going to be the original title of a book. We loved it so much because we love Alan Watts. There's two things Matt and I love no matter what. It's Kanye and Alan Watts-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
... as a musician, as a musician. So don't, don't roast us for that. And Alan Watts has this amazing quote, "We don't just eat the food, we eat the menu." And we open the book with mental models, and, and Matt will go, go ham on telling you about mental models. But essentially, you're... well, before you even put that first bite of spaghetti in your mouth, all these other things have had a massive impact on actually impacting the taste of the food. And that was, for us, a great way to open the book. Obviously it changed the title, but yeah, Matt, tell us, tell us about mental models.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah, so I think this, for me, is, is one of the most interesting things about consumer neuroscience generally, is really this observation that we've known in perceptual neuroscience for decades now, which is that we don't experience the world directly. We don't really take in objective reality in, we take in our brain's mental model. So we're taking in information through the, through our eyes, through our ears, through our senses, and, and what we ultimately perceive in terms of our own internal subjective experience is our brain's best guess at what all of these senses are, are combining, uh, to really, uh, conjure up in terms of our own internal experience. So we don't experience reality directly, we experience our brain's mental model. So there's this, this fundamental gap between our own subjectivity and objectivity. And we, we talk about this in the book, that this gap really makes marketing magical. So if we just experienced the world the way it objectively is, and we're rational creatures and we go about and we're just taking in reality objectively, then there's no need for cool brands and, and really interesting ways of, of storytelling in marketing. This gap really is the opportunity for marketers to create our reality. And, and we see some really, really interesting examples of that, especially within food, which was, was one of the reasons why we wanted to name the book this, because it really does fundamentally shape our, our gustatory experience.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. There's a, a wonderful passage in the book that I'm gonna read now for the people that are listening, and this is about mental models. Remembering that the two mental models episodes I've done with George McGill are the first and second best played ever on Modern Wisdom. And yet, what we, the, the description we use of mental models was from much more of a self-development, uh, way. What George said was, "If you think of your brain as an iPhone, then mental models are the apps that you plug into the OS to give you different bits of functionality." So that was from a thinking tools perspective, but your approach for mental models-
- MJMatt Johnson
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... also makes sense. The quote is...
- PGPrince Ghuman
"Our brains don't experience reality directly. Instead, they construct a model of it, which neuroscientists call a mental model. Our brains are constantly modeling. Each time you take a bite of food, you aren't experiencing the food per se, but your brain's best guess at what the experience of eating that food should be like. The sensation of the tongue contributes to this model, but many other things can too. Mental models are incredibly impressionable and can be influenced by numerous factors. They're also hard, if not impossible to correct because we can never compare them to reality and see where they've gone wrong. All we can ever experience is the mental model itself. So when a brand or a business influences our mental models, they are directly influencing our experience of reality." That is so scary. That is terrifyingly scary. I mean, it's cool as hell, but it's so scary as well to realize that the, the way the waiter shakes your hand, the smell of the restaurant when you walk in, the fact that the silverware is in this particular way, the jingle that someone u- you know, the classical conditioning, everything is, in a very real sense, actually changing your reality.
- MJMatt Johnson
Absolutely. It's, it's like some Matrix shit. (laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
It... No, it's... Man, Chris, Chris, you're like, you're like in our brains. Our original intro for the book was all written around The Matrix scene, and then we realized we're too old.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
We realized not everyone has seen The Matrix, so we decided to ironically unplug that. Um, no, you're absolutely right. It really is. And, and, you know, part of it is going to creep the crap out of you, right? It's gonna creep you out. And then after a while, you come to realize that, okay, you walk into an Apple Store, you think, "Yes, of course, it's an Apple Store. It's a really well designed store. They thought about the layout and they're reducing friction." Done. Sure. But then you l- look at it from the perspective of mental models, man, before you even look at the first product, the fact that you're walking in, it's already impacting your sense of Apple, right? So you are already getting... Your brain's getting data points, right, immediately as you walk in. So in some ways, creating that experience for you, um, actually adds to your pleasure of said products, right? Um, just like... It's not as obvious as taste. That's why we use the concept of taste early on, because the taste, our tastes are so easily impressionable. Um, but brands are creating this for us, and sometimes it creeps you out because you think it's manipulation, and sometimes it actually genuinely adds value to your mental model of whatever's being sold, right? Um, there's the example of, uh, you know, there's a test, uh, they took a bunch of golfers and had them go smack some gol- uh, golf balls around, and one group got the, the golf, uh, got the, uh... I almost said rackets. As you can see, I, I don't play golf a lot. (laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
Golf clubs... Golf clubs with the, with the Nike logo and one without. And of course, the Nike logo hit further. So whatever their mental model was actually had a physical impact. A subjective aspect had an objective impact on performance. And they've done this over- And it was the same, the same golf club, just one had a Nike tick on? Yep, exactly.
- MJMatt Johnson
Exactly.
- 15:01 – 22:34
Taste as a playground for marketing: from dog food pâté to fooled sommeliers
- PGPrince Ghuman
Can you tell us the dog... the, the, uh, pate and dog food study?
- MJMatt Johnson
Oh, yeah, I'll let, I'll let Matt tell that one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, one of the reasons why we, we focused on this in the first chapter is that it really allows you to see just how deep this mental modeling goes. Because as Prince mentioned, our tastes are, are very, very impressionable. Vision is by strong... or by far our strongest taste. On the other side of the, the spectrum, tastes are, are, are... gustatory sensations really our weakest. Um, and so they did this interesting study, um, a few years ago where they, uh, had, uh, four types of really, really, really fancy pates. So they had duck pate, they had goose pate, uh, they had... They, they got these things from the distributors which actually supply Michelin star restaurants in Manhattan. And then for the fifth dish, they had dog food. And the actual dishes were prepared identically. So, uh, you put it in a, a blender and you make it a really, really nice visual consistency, you put a nice little garnish with some crackers, you serve it on a really, really nice plate, you have a waiter come by with a, with a white glove and, and serve it to you and, and speak in a sophisticated accent. And they told people, "All right, four of these are really, really, really delicious pate. The other fifth one, I'm not going to tell you which one, but that's dog food. Can you guess which one's dog food?" And nobody could. It was exactly synonymous with the taste of these really, really fancy Michelin star rated, uh, duck pate and, and goose pate. Uh, it's really the power of the visuals and the power of all of these extra-gustatory forces which, which shaped our reality to such an extent where we can't, we can't tell the difference between actual the taste of dog food and something we pay $65 for at Thomas Keller's restaurant in New York.
- PGPrince Ghuman
I mean, I wouldn't be having any of the pate, 'cause I think pate is, pate is just shite food. It's just b- it's baby food, it's reconstituted baby food.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
So some people might be thinking, "Well, that sounds all well and good, but pate is pate and you've just got some schmoes off the street," but there was a similar study done with sommeliers as well, right? And that one was... had it ratcheted up, the difficulty ratcheted up a little bit.
- MJMatt Johnson
Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so wine for whatever reason is just such a fun testing ground for neuromarketers. Um-
- PGPrince Ghuman
It's because it's full of twats, Matt.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
That's why. It's because it's full of knobs.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs) And, and now we have the... and now we have the science to prove it.
- PGPrince Ghuman
We can back it up. You've got an fMRI that categorically says that wine is for knobs, yeah.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. So there, there's all these interesting studies, even without the fMRI, they'll say, "If I just give you this bottle of wine and I've, I've taken the actual label off and I've put a fake label on that says it's from, uh, a really, really fancy winery in France, or it has a lot of syllables, you'll actually taste the same wine and report enjoying it more if you, one, uh, think it's expensive." So if it's the s- same exact wine and you, you tell somebody it's expensive versus cheap, same exact wine, same exact...... actual, uh, sensation happening at the tongue, but you actually experience the more expensive one better. You report that you like it better, you want it more often. Uh, more syllables on the label.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
Same exact wine, but you, you enjoy that more. If you're told it's from Northern California and not Northern Dakota, then you actually experience it to be more pleasurable. All of these crazy factors that have nothing to do with taste actually do influence people's direct mental models of the wine. And I think the real knockdown, uh, experiment there that, that you mentioned is done actually with sommeliers, who, if anybody, can tell the difference between a real wine and, and a fake one. This is, uh, you know, all of the, you know, the newbs that are just, uh, you know, drinking wine, and Two Buck Chuck, and all the 22-year-olds partying with, with, just trying to dr- get drunk off wine, the sommeliers should be a step above them. But studies have shown that they actually are prone to these same effects. Uh, and there was a study actually done, uh, in France where they, uh, took, uh, white wine and red wine. And the white wine, they actually just put some red food coloring into it and they gave it to sommeliers. And when sommeliers, people that are professionally trained, they get paid a six-figure salary for being wine experts, when they tasted this white wine with red food coloring, they actually reported that it had tastes like berries, and kind of a currant flavor, and a bit of nutmeg. All things that were in line with the color of the wine, but had nothing to do with the actual taste that was hitting their tongues. So yeah, mental models, these things run very, very, very deep. And, and even the best of us, the sommeliers are still prone to them.
- CWChris Williamson
I love it. Yeah. I mean, s- the, uh, there's a cool Netflix documentary, I think it might be called like Somms or something. And, um-
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I, have you seen that, Matt?
- MJMatt Johnson
Saw that. Yeah. It's really good.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, it is so bad. I don't even know if it's still on Netflix. If it... Go and have a little search, the people that are listening at home. Go and have a check out. It's really cool. Like, the training that those guys go through is ruth... It's like a, it's like the Tour de France, but for wine. And they're like, "Oh, I know it's from the, the northern slopes of the, the, like Milan province in Spain or the whatever, whatever." Like, so the fact that they've, uh, the fact they've been able to be fooled is pretty impressive.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah. It is, it is.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughing) Well, I can-
- PGPrince Ghuman
I, I can, I can say from firsthand experience, as I am such a knob, I studied to be a sommelier in college-
- CWChris Williamson
No way.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, fuck. Prince, I'm so sorry. I'm so- I was, I was ...
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughing) .
- CWChris Williamson
Our relationship went the worst way.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Matt ... The best part was, you know Matt was waiting. He's like, "I can't wait for Prince to jump in on this."
- CWChris Williamson
Chris is slowly, slowly putting his foot in it.
- PGPrince Ghuman
And Somm, Somm is a great documentary, whether, whether you believe in sommeliers or not. Uh, shout out to my buddy Ron Bonifacio, who started the restaurant that's in Somm quite a bit.
- 22:34 – 31:16
Anchors: how reference points steer value judgments and capture attention
- MJMatt Johnson
No, no. Hey, I have, I have a number of friends that are knobs who only drink beer, so yeah, it, it crosses, it crosses all, all, uh, alcoholic drinks. So, uh, next thing, how do brands use anchors to get our attention?
- PGPrince Ghuman
Ooh, that's great. Matt, you want to explain the foundation of anchors, and then I can, I can give, uh, I can give some examples?
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah, definitely. So one key to this mental modeling process is we, we can't experience the world objectively, as we, we talked about. And so we always look for, uh, some sort of reference point. We, we, uh, deal with all these, these sort of nebulous signals coming to us, we need some sort of reference point to be able to, to anchor our understanding. Uh, so you, you ... There, there's been interesting studies done with, uh ... This goes back to Kahneman and Tversky back in the late '80s, where they'll have people spin a, a wheel. They'll spin a wheel, it's a perfectly random process, and they'll ask them these really, really, really difficult questions, which they have no idea about. So they'll ask them, "Well, how many, uh, African countries are in, uh, the United Nations? Uh, how many Grammys did, uh, somebody of New Zealand descent win?" Uh, you know, all these random questions they have no idea. And what was interesting is this random wheel that just brought up a random number, uh, this actually influenced their estimations. So if they spun this wheel and it was random, it was transparently random, and it came up as 70, they would guess, "Well, 70% of African nations are in the EU." Or if they, they spun the wheel and it's three, they'd say, "Well, you know, two or three New Zealanders probably, you know, came to the Grammys." And it was perfectly random. They knew that they were random. It was transparently the most random process possible, uh, but these served as anchors. You have this, this, this, uh, this really, really, uh-... a nebulous problem space. We don't have anything to, to hold onto, and you seek some sort of reference point to understand this. Um, so this influences our, our judgment and decision-making, especially in uncertainty, and it really influences our attention as well. This is something that, uh, that brands, uh, use really in, in clever ways.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah. And I'll, and I'll give you some examples of how they use them. So, I'll give you, I'll give you one that's really easy for all of us to get, and you'll, we'll so fall for it. MSRPs, right? You walk into a store, there's an MSRP and it's crossed out, and for some reason that's anchored your value, your, your perception of the value of that product. Uh, the, the ... I'll tell this story quickly and I, and I'll move on, 'cause I do wanna go into the brand aspect of it, too. This is more pricing, uh, and marketing strategy behind pricing. JC Penney, one of the largest and one of the oldest, uh, department stores in the States, they ... Over 98% of their revenue came from sale items. What does that tell you? Translation: Shit is always on sale.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
Right? Mm-hmm. Right? Seriously. So you go, you walk into a JC Penney's, they always have a sale going on. And JC Penney wanted to change things up. They brought on the, uh, the head of retail for Apple, came on, and I have so much respect for this dude, because he said, "We're, we're no longer going to, going to practice, uh, vanity pricing. Let's get rid of the, the fake MSRP and let's drop the pricing even beyond that." So consumers, objectively, are getting a better deal and much more transparent way to communicate. What do you think happened the first quarter that they did that?
- MJMatt Johnson
Sales went down.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Sales tanked. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, after two quarters of trying it, they went back to the old way of doing it, and guess what happened?
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
Sales went back up.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
We love our anchors, okay? Our brains are like sailboats. We're constantly looking for places to anchor, right? So when we ... The less we know, the more we're perceptible to anchoring. So that's one. The other one is, um, and, and, and Matt can go into it a little bit more, but I, I wanna kinda tease this. Anchoring is also how attention works. To grab your attention, I have to anchor something against what ... I have to pick something that goes against the anchor. I have to zig when everything else is zagging, right? So you walk up to a refrigerator packed full of water bottles and you're thirsty and you're, you don't care if it's a dollar or five dollars to buy this water bottle, you just wanna pick a water bottle and you're brand agnostic. Guess where you're gonna go, your attention's gonna go towards. The anchor, the visual anchor is established by all these similar-looking plastic crappy bottles. When you see one bottle in a cardboard box, that's gonna drive your attention. Now, if that's not there, then the Voss water, made, looks, basically looks like a cologne bottle, right? That's gonna grab your attention. Although we didn't say attention, but anchoring does blow into attention. And that's one of the things where I think this is a good point, because Chris, we haven't really jumped into BE, right? And I know your audience loves BE. Matt and I love BE. BE has been sort of the crack that gets us into this neuromarketing, psych biases and heuristics, that world that you get pulled into, whether it's for self-help. For me, it was marketing. Um, so I think, I think this would be a good point, Matt, to talk about how we ... Matt and I love BE, okay? We have been convinced at just how freakishly irrational humans are. Matt knows it way more personally than I do, because he's a fricking neuroscientist, and I've seen it, and I've, and I've read all the books we all have. Dan Ariely, I, I wanna meet him and give him a hug when I see him, because it totally, uh, totally changed up how I thought about life, not just marketing. So neuromarketing, to go back to your initial question, right? Yes, it's neuroscience of marketing, but Matt and I see BE as a very important branch to a field of this stuff, right?
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
BE is the study of irrationality, and, and they've already proven many times over, we are super irrational. We like that. We like that that's raising the conversation about what's happening to your brain in the real world. Matt and I love it. We wanna take this momentum and go talk about all the other things. Now that you're into BE, let's, let's explore where this go ... You know, let's ... The proverbial rabbit hole, right? Let's see, there's much more to this than irrationality, and we wanna break that down. Only one of the chapters in the book, uh, in our book is really about BE. The rest of the chapters are stuff that we're hopeful- hoping goes beyond BE.
- MJMatt Johnson
Mm-hmm.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Right? So if you love BE, I think you'll love the book, but you'll also go, "Okay, one or two chapters touch on BE, and then they move on." And even anchors. Anchors are classic BE. We take anchors and then we use anchors to truly get you to understand the psychology of attention. So we can get into that if you want, if you want, if you wanna learn a little bit more about attention.
- MJMatt Johnson
I get it. Throw something at us, Matt. Go. Yeah. So I mean, one, one thing in terms of our attention is that it's, it's fundamentally, uh, driven by novelty. It's, it's fundamentally driven by new things. So, uh, we tend to habituate to constants. Uh, constants aren't super important to us from an evolutionary standpoint. If something's been there and, and hasn't changed and hasn't hurt us for a while, we're, we're gonna tend to sort of ignore it. It's gonna float into the background. And so, there's this process where new things become the background. There's this process of habituation, uh, something with our, uh ... It's a fact of our attention, how we, we perceive the world and, and take in information and, and attend to it consciously. And it's also, and we'll probably talk about this a little bit later, it's also how we perceive our own pleasure and, and our own happiness is, is navigated by this as well. Um, so what's interesting is, uh, in, in the consumer world, there's all these constants. Uh, you, you have items which were new at some point. Everybody copies it. It becomes sort of the new background. Uh, so Prince, you wanna give them the example of the, uh, how they do that in the automotive industry?
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah. So when I say, imagine a sports car, what colors come to your mind?
- MJMatt Johnson
Red.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Red, right? It's either, it was either gonna be red or yellow, right? When Nissan, about 15 years ago, relaunched their, their Z, their Z, excuse me, Chris, their 350Z.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
Um, it was this crazy burnt orange color, right? That's how you stand out. I'll give you an example from a smart car, Mercedes' own smart car, and they did a billboard where billboards are nice and square, 90 degrees. You drive past the freeway, 90, 90, 90. And then they had one that was crooked-... and immediately, your boring commute to traffic, your anchor is set to perfectly aligned billboards. There's one that's crooked, it immediately grabs your attention. Um, and, you know, I mean, we can give marketing examples all day, but let's take a pause for how this anchoring thing plays out in something I would argue is a universal language, humor. Right? That- that- that- that misdirection that leads to a punchline, that part of humor. Man, Matt and I, um, really big fans of Anthony Jeselnik. We only talk about it a little bit in the book-
- CWChris Williamson
Dude-
- PGPrince Ghuman
... because his jokes are way-
- CWChris Williamson
... I was-
- PGPrince Ghuman
... way too inappropriate.
- CWChris Williamson
... bro, I was laughing-
- PGPrince Ghuman
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... my head off when I was reading those.
- PGPrince Ghuman
(laughs)
- 31:16 – 36:45
Surprise and “violation of expectation”: comedy, creativity, and brand attention
- MJMatt Johnson
Cool. Um, so, attention. So, attention is anchored, uh, to anchors, and the example that Chris is about to tell you is of a guy named Anthony Jeselnik. And you may not like his brand of humor, but consider him a master of surprise. He constantly creates an anchor for you as a storyteller, and then he breaks that expectation in humorous and oftentimes offensive ways.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. So here's-
- MJMatt Johnson
That's-
- CWChris Williamson
... here's- here's three jokes for you, listeners. "My dad was amazing. He raised five boys all by himself without the rest of us knowing."
- PGPrince Ghuman
(laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Uh, "We just found out my little brother has a peanut allergy, which is very serious, I know. But still, I feel like my parents are totally overreacting. They caught me eating a tiny little bag of airline peanuts and they kicked me out of his funeral." (laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
(laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
The last one's the best. The last one's the best one by far. "I've got a kid in Africa that I feed, that I clothe, that I school, that I inoculate for 75 cents a day, which is practically nothing compared to what it cost me to send him there." (laughs) Man, those were so good. Um, so-
- PGPrince Ghuman
Wow.
- CWChris Williamson
... I- I absolutely love that. The, um, there was this term that you guys came up with that was called violation of expectation, and that is the neuroscience definition of surprise. I'm gonna- I'm gonna accuse people of violating my expectation all the time now.
- PGPrince Ghuman
(laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I absolutely adore that phrase.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Uh, Matt, yeah, tell him- tell them about violation of expectation.
- MJMatt Johnson
Uh, yeah, I mean, it just- just, uh, you know, as- as humans we're- we're naturally, uh, forward projecting creatures, right? So we're always trying to predict what's gonna happen next. Uh, if we weren't able to predict people's behavior, we- we, you know, probably wouldn't be alive for- for very long. We always have to stay, you know, within a reasonable, uh, future where we're away from the present. We're always trying to predict things. And so in our unconscious state, we're- we're trying to make predictions and these predictions sort of play out for us internally, and then if what actually happens is- is a major deviation from that, uh, it obviously leads us to be surprised. And that's what we mean by- by violation of expectation. And so, uh, when it comes to neuroscience, there's lots of ways to study. So there's studying the classic oddball paradigm where you give, uh, people a- a, uh, stimulus and it- it's in a certain location, and they become, uh, attenuated to looking at that certain location, and then you give them it at a completely different location. You get to understand sort of the- if you do this with fMRI, you get to understand the neural basis for- for what's this sort of redirection. And so, when this, uh, violation of expectation happens, you are having to- to recapitulate yourself and you form a new hypothesis based on that. Um, but the major thing in terms of consumer behavior is it drives your attention. So, whatever you've become accustomed to, whatever your sort of status quo is, if you have a huge violation from that in what you've come to expect from that status quo, it's gonna drive your attention. And I think the biggest example of that was Cadbury, Cadbury UK, uh, back in 2006. So Cadbury UK, classic, uh, F&B brand, and they had, uh, suffered, uh, some- some down revenue for a few years. There was a salmonella outbreak, and like, "Oh my God, we have to do something really, really, really amazing to get everybody to pay attention to us again." And probably the- the biggest thing they could possibly ever have done is they had a commercial, and this is Cadbury, mind you, this is a very classic British brand, and they had a gorilla playing, uh, In the Air of the Night, and that was the commercial.
- CWChris Williamson
Phil Collins, baby.
- MJMatt Johnson
And-
- CWChris Williamson
What- what an absolute-
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... banging tune.
- PGPrince Ghuman
(laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
What a banging tune.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Oh, man.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah, and so what- what's interesting is that, like, yeah, okay, if you listen to Phil Collins on, you know, Any Given Evening, there's no violation of expectation, but if you get it from Cadbury in a gorilla suit, you have a huge violation of expectation.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) What's going on?
- MJMatt Johnson
So it- it's not so much the actual stimulus itself but what has been preceding that, because that is what's gonna drive your expectation. And the- the final point about Cadbury which is interesting is they were like, "Oh my God, this worked amazing, let's go back to the same well," and it doesn't work. So they did this, a very similar ad about six months later, like, "All right, let's ride this, this gorilla Phil Collins thing," and of course everyone was, everyone saw it coming because their expectation had shaped it.
- CWChris Williamson
I remember, yeah.
- 36:45 – 48:46
Memory is not recording: selective encoding, reconstruction, and false memories
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, let's talk about, uh, experience and memory. I know you guys are big into memory. I know this is a- a part of the book that you dedicated a lot of time and research to. So let's talk about memory.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Let's-
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- PGPrince Ghuman
... let's do it. Um, can I, I just want to open with... All right, pretend like you didn't read the book, Chris. How would you define memory?
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, God. Can I recall something?
- PGPrince Ghuman
Perfect. Yeah, perfect. Uh, um, Matt, go for it. I think, I things are good if you start off and I'll jump in.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah. So first, memory is, is many, many things. So one of the things you, you know, learn in your first day of Psych 101 is you have this big chart and there's explicit memory, there's implicit memory, there's procedural memory, there's statistical learning, there's all these things. We're gonna sort of have one term that collapses across all of these. It's really our brain's attempt at connecting us to the past and attempt is, is really the key word here.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah.
- MJMatt Johnson
Um, so we feel... And it's, it's very strange as well, because it's, it's one of those areas where what we think of in terms of our own experiences and memories is actually very, very different from the way it actually works. We actually have a very poor intuition for how we record experiences and how we recall them later. So what it feels like is when we're having an experience, we're having an experience right now, we have the record button on internally. Our brain clicks that and we're just recording, we're taking in, everything in. And then when we're trying to recall this memory later, we feel like we're playing the rewind button. But it turns out that neither of those are true. So when we're having an experience, we're only taking in some of the information. So some information is, is weighted more heavily than others. So our, our brains prioritize certain pieces of information over others in terms of what's likely to be remembered later. So you probably remember your first kiss, but you probably don't remember first time you did taxes, right? So both of these things were experiences. You had your, your record button on, but only one is going to come to mind readily. So emotion plays a, a really, really huge role in making it more or less likely that this certain experience is going to be remembered later. And then you look at the recall of memory, uh, and that is just an incredibly reconstructive process. So the types of memories will be different that come to mind when we're in a certain sort of context. So if we are, we're drinking beer right now instead of wine, for example, probably all of our beer memories will, will come back. If we're having champagne, we'll probably think of, of all the associations we've had with champagne and celebration, this and that. So everything is context dependent as well. So, uh, memory is fascinating for this, this major chasm between what we feel like is memory and our memories and what memory actually is in terms of, of the science.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah. Yeah, I want to take a minute to connect memory back to attention. I know we, I know we bridged over to memory. One of the ways that you can encode a memory deeper is actually breaking the violation of expectation, right? So there's many different, uh, psychological experiences that help kind of bury that memory deeper. One of those is breaking expectation. And, um, we... I think, uh, Matt and I spoke to, I think her name was Debbie Lilly. She, she did the events for Oprah. Uh, she literally, she did the, "You get a car, you get a car, you get, you get a car."
- CWChris Williamson
No way.
- PGPrince Ghuman
She's the mastermind behind that. Yeah. I mean, we, we spoke to her for the book.
- CWChris Williamson
That's cool.
- PGPrince Ghuman
And what's, what's brilliant about Debbie is she's doing all these things intuitively, right? So she... Y- you know, she's not putting this violation of expectation and, and, and memory hacking, if you will, or, uh, uh, experiential marketing sort of, uh, framework. She just has been doing this so long, she's so good at it that she did it completely, uh, uh, by nature. But think about violation of expectation, now memory, right? You're sitting in this audience, you're lucky enough to get seats to go see Oprah Live. And all of a sudden, you know, Oprah gives away gifts, iPhones, what have you, and all of a sudden, boom, violation of expectation. Piece by piece, this person won a car. So everyone's stoked. All these people who got pulled out of the audience earlier, they got a car. "Okay. Oh my God, can't believe it. They've never given away a car on TV before. This is not Price Is Right and my brain is blown out." And then all of a sudden you find out, "Oh wait, we have another surprise for you." "Uh-oh, what is it?" And then you get a car, you get... And then it's just like layers and layers of violations-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
... uh, expectations being violated and no... And then when Matt and I look at it, no wonder why that is the most memorable Oprah moment, right? It is... It was 10 out of 10 on violation, violating our expectations repeatedly, and that's what encoded that memory so deeply in pop culture, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah. I mean, that's... It's, it's great. But, um, experiential marketing. So if you want to go back to brands, this is where the flirtation happens, right? In some ways, um, when we're creating like pop-up restaurants or pop-up brand experiences, super hot right now, right? Um, it's, it's, it's because they encode a deeper memory of you. You walk past an Adidas store for the 50th time in last year, it doesn't even register, right? But then if you walk past the park that you usually go to to go work out and then there's a shoebox the size of your apartment complex and it looks like the Adidas shoebox and you go in there, and guess what? They're selling Stan Smiths and Superstars, and then it's gone the week after. What do they do? They created a memory by violating your expectation of a normal commute. And that's something that... It's, it's that, like I said, flirtation is a good way because I want to be flirted as a consumer in those ways, you know? And then brands want to do it because yes, of course, like Matt said, it, it buries that memory in there. Um, what's really creepy about memory though, like to, to, to go back to what Matt said, you know, it's like hitting record and hitting play and we couldn't be further from the truth, is what happens further down the line. You know, what we call in the book memory remixed is really kind of creepy. Matt, you want to tell them about what happens to memory over time? Because that... I think that... I think it, I think it's really... I think the way you're going to put it is gonna be really creepy. Memory over time? The-
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah. Yeah. Recall of memory and how, how accurate, so to speak, (laughs) recall of memory can and cannot be.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So in, in terms of, of memory, so it is just this incredibly reconstructive process. We don't remember things as they objectively happened, or even as we actually experience them. So, uh, there's this subfield of, of memory research called false memories, uh, where, uh, we really see just how suggestible and how creative these memories are remixed, and this is pioneered by Elizabeth Loftus down at UC Irvine.
... also bring somebody into the lab and she'll say that she'd got a, an email from her parents. And the email said, "Oh, I was just, you know, I was..." The email was detailing this, this amazing trip, uh, that you took, uh, with your family to the circus. And there was, you know, beautiful blue sky and there was clouds, and you really, really, really wanted the popcorn, but your dad wouldn't let you get the pop. Do you remember that? And she's sort of just, you know, prodding them and, and sort of painting this picture for them. And after a while, and she's become adept at this her- herself, uh, she'll actually be able to implant a memory of this experience that never actually happened. And once this memory is implanted, it is as realistic as any of our actual memories of things that actually happened to us. And similar effects have actually recently shown with virtual reality as well. Where you'll, uh, bring... And this was done 10 years ago when virtual reality was not as, as potent and as realistic as it is today. This was done down at Stanford. And what they do is they bring children to the lab and they have them go on a, a dolphin diving trip where they're swimming with dolphins and it's very, a kind of cool surreal experience, all in just virtual reality. Then they brought the children back, I think it was two months later, and they filled a questionnaire. And, and part of this questionnaire had to do with this dolphin experience. And it turns out about half the children actually misremembered the experiences having been real.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
They thought their parents took them to SeaWorld and they actually swam with dolphins. So we have these experiences and our brain is, is constantly trying to put them together and doing its best guess at, at sort of making things consistent and make sense. And especially for, for young children, kids can really easily be tricked. In this case, thinking you actually swam with dolphins when really you just sat in a, you know, a really (laughs) boring lab and put on virtual reality goggles.
- CWChris Williamson
It's from a, a philosophical perspective, it's a really interesting question that. Like, what is a memory? If your experience of a thing is as vivid and deep and happy as having done the thing, then what's the difference between you having done the thing and not? And I was thinking about this. I was watching, um, The Devil Next Door on Netflix. Have you seen this? So it's a documentary-
- MJMatt Johnson
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... about a, a Ukrainian guy living in the United States who was found to be Ivan the Terrible, a Nazi death camp-
- MJMatt Johnson
Oh, wow.
- CWChris Williamson
... guard. And he'd come over after World War II and basically the, the, the entire trial was, was this person actually the person that was in the Nazi death camps? And they are bringing up people who... This is in maybe 2000, early 2000s. Um, so the survivors that were able to identify him, you know, you're talking like 60-year-olds, 70-year-old people that have been through a lot of trauma. You know, they were, by definition, they were survivors of places like Treblinka or, or Auschwitz or whatever. And, um, uh, first off, a lot of, um, the memory, uh, quality was called into effect. But I actually found a really interesting question being, um, how long after someone does something are they still culpable for the actions of their past self, you know? Like, is the guy-
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- 48:46 – 54:51
Peak-end rule: why endings (and peaks) dominate remembered experiences
- CWChris Williamson
... we do for memory then? What else causes memory to encode? We've got violation of expectation. What else can we do to ensure that we remember stuff?
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah. So one, one thing that you, uh, sort of touched on, uh, a bit actually that, that sort of is, is related to the philosophical, uh, aspect is, is the peak-end effect. And so this was pioneered, uh, w- by, uh, Daniel Kahneman as well, uh, using actually colonoscopies. So they had people come in. Uh, so you're already doing a colonoscopy, which is not a, a very, very, you know, comfortable type of, of procedure to undergo as far as procedures go.... and now you have this researcher who's like, "Well, we just want to know exactly how painful this is at every moment." And so he gives people a dial, and that's your instruction. Just as you're undergoing this painful procedure, how much pain are you feeling in that moment? And this really, uh, led us to, to believe that there was this big difference between what we experience and what we remember. So it turns out that it wasn't the average amount of pain that people experienced that, that led to painful memories. Uh, it was two things, the peak of the experience, so if, uh, not to get too graphic, but the, uh, the doctor's hand slips and, uh, it just causes this incredibly, you know, acute sense of pain, but just for a millisecond and then it goes back to normal. If there's a, a really, really intense peak, then if you ask the person two weeks later, "Well, how painful was that operation?" They'll be, "Oh, that was the worst operation of all time." So this peak has a major impact and also the end has a major impact as well. So if it was really painful at the end, the entire experience will be rated very painfully. And the reason it, it, uh, it segues into this philosophical conversation is because they did a follow-up experiment where like, well, the end seems to be very, very important. What if we artificially just elongate the whole procedure? They'll have the actual procedure, and then they'll have a period at the end where we'll just leave the colonoscopy device in there and nothing's happening. It's not comfortable, but it's not super painful. We'll make it longer so there's more overall pain, but the actual end of the procedure is gonna be less painful, and will they then remember the entire procedure as being less painful? And the answer is yes. So if you make the end, uh, less painful, even though the overall experience on average is more painful, you're in there for longer than you would have of, of otherwise, you'll actually remember the whole experience as being less painful. So it sort of poses this, this interesting ethical question. So is it okay to give somebody more pain, more aggregate pain if it means they'll actually remember the experience as being less painful?
- CWChris Williamson
This is like The Matrix.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
This is actually-
- MJMatt Johnson
Like The Matrix.
- CWChris Williamson
... like The Matrix, you know?
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's like, what world are we living in?
- MJMatt Johnson
It's, it's trippy. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Are we living in a world that our brains perceive, or are we living in the objective reality? And the fact that our brains are so fallible means that the two actually don't, don't match up barely at all. Like, it seems-
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... it seems like a, a complete miracle if your brain does manage to interpret what's going on around you accurately.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah, if we, or even just slightly tethered to, to real-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- MJMatt Johnson
... experience. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I know. It's unbelievable. So how, um, how can marketers, how's, how's this an opportunity for marketers when we get to experience and memory? How, how would the marketers fit into this?
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah, let's, uh, so let's, let's piggyback on the peak-end effect, right? Um, I'll give you a personal example, and then we can, and we can expand out. I, I recently did a TED Talk, and as I was writing it, 100% I'm thinking about peak-end effect. Okay, so you can apply this to when you're pitching startups for your idea or any time you're on, on this journey to, to be r- remembered. I was testing different peaks, so I had this funny moment in the TED Talk where I put my face on top of a doll. It makes no sense, if you haven't seen it.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
But that was 100% planned so that way I can have a peak in the entire 15-minute conversation that would be memorable. And, and for marketers, you can test multiple peaks, but for a talk, you got one to test, right? And then at the very end, I had a very specific callback that referred to something earlier, so that way I wanted the end to be memorable as well. So in just public speaking, you can use peak-end effect every time you talk, okay? Um, and, you know, when it comes to, uh, storytelling at a, at a grander scale with big budgets with films, films have an incentive to have a really good ending. That's why you don't often see movies that have a, have a, uh, how do I say this? Uh, an unsatisfactory ending, because people won't-
- CWChris Williamson
No, no resolution, for instance.
- PGPrince Ghuman
... get paid for whole movies. Yeah, yeah. It's because our brains, uh, we wanna remember the movie, uh, and, and we're already inclined to remember the end of it more, so they can't mess up the end, right? So, um, and it, there's sort of a self-help lesson here as well, right? Like, it's we... A lot of times we, we, we give a unfair amount of weight to the end of something, like a movie, right? You can have a movie that truly might even change the way you think about the world, love, whatever it might be, and then the last, you know, 15 minutes of a two-hour movie, it didn't end the way you liked it, and then that 15 minutes literally covers up the entire two hours of pure joy and whatever you want, wanna call it, and we do that all the time. We forget that the, uh, that the journey that got us there was actually really useful until the end. It's, it's like the old, you know, uh, uh, the William Shakespeare quote, "All's well that ends well." It's freakishly true, and our-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Totally true.
- PGPrince Ghuman
... memories are sort of packed with that, right? So, you know, so brands try to create... Like, go to a concert and, and you better have your biggest fireworks at the very end, but you also better have one peak moment in, between. You better bring out a guest star, uh, somewhere in between that is unexpected that'll r- that, that will remember the concert. Your whole set could've been trash, but if you have a great peak and a great ending, it won't be remembered as being a bad set.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) It's so easy. I always say-
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs) I know.
- CWChris Williamson
I al- it's unbelievable how easy ... We're ju- humans are terrible, aren't we? We're absolutely awful.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs) We, we are.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, so-
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- 54:51 – 1:01:10
Why we like what we like: mere exposure vs surprise, resolved by “NAS”
- CWChris Williamson
... why do we like what we like? There's certain preferences that we have. There's certain things that we lean toward and move away from. Is it just artifacts of an evolutionary time? Is it just fitness-enhancing stuff?
- MJMatt Johnson
It's, it's, it's a good question. Uh, so there, there's a lot of interesting science about preferences, and, uh, one, uh, really consistent finding is that we, uh, generally like things that we are familiar with.So, from an evolutionary standpoint again, if you've seen something multiple times, uh, and this thing hasn't eaten you, and it hasn't hurt you, and it hasn't caused you harm, then that thing is, is better than something unknown, on average. Uh, and so this is called the mere exposure effect. This is Robert Zajonc's famous, uh, work. There, there's many, many studies, it's a very consistent finding in, in psychology that, all else being equal, we, we tend to like things we're exposed to multiple times. And, and a lot of his famous work was actually done with, uh, Chinese characters. And so he brought, uh, non-Chinese speaking students into a lab and he showed them a bunch of Chinese characters, and just had them pay attention to them, look at them, become familiar with them. He brought them back two weeks later, and he showed them some of the characters he had seen before and some new characters, and he asked them, "Well, what do you think these mean?" And the students were like, "I have no idea. I don't speak Mandarin Chinese. I don't, I don't know what these symbols mean at all. Just, just humor me, just guess." And so they just guessed. They just assigned adjectives and nouns to these, these characters. And it turns out the ones that they had seen before, these got adjectives like happy, and love, and pleasure, and positive emotions, but one they hadn't seen before, these were things like table, lamp, re- just really regular, boring words. So just by virtue of, of seeing something multiple times, we tend to like it a, a bit more. Um, and so that's, that's one sort of major finding there, and then there's this seemingly sort of conflicting, uh, finding here, which is that we also love being surprised. So we love pleasure even more when we can't predict it. So when, when it's a violation of expectation, uh, we, we tend to like it a bit more. And so there's this, uh, a little bit of a, a, a, an apparent conflict there. One, we really, really like things that, uh, we're, we're exposed to multiple times, the exposure effect. On the other side, we have violation of expectation, prediction error, dopaminergic reaction, all these things from, uh, neuroscience showing us that we actually like a bit of randomness as well. And the way this is resolved is, is really interesting. Prince, you wanna ... Yeah.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah. So, I mean, it comes down to we like the safety of the familiar, but we also like the, um ... I don't want to say danger. But you also like the novelty of the unfamiliar, right? It's the old birds of a feather flock together, or is it opposites attract? Well, the answer is what Matt and I call NAS: new and safe. It's gotta be new enough, but also safe enough. So you can... When you start looking at this, and, um, Matt and I love the example of pop culture, from music to film. To truly look at this, you can see just how, um, familiar things can be, and they won't get the massive amount of adoption. Uh, but if they're too s- too, too out there, then they won't get massive amount of adoption. So if you're a marketer or an entrepreneur and you're making a product that you want to get massive adoption in, you have to think about NAS. Um, and an easy example of this is, look, if you wanna, uh ... If you want a new song to get more adoption, sandwich it in between two known songs. Immediately, that helps the likability of said new song. Um, the other way to think about it is in terms of just how culture slowly evolves, and you have certain things that were too, too new and unsafe that over time were normalized, and now ... And then they hit a peak, and then you hit, you know, the Gladwell tipping point, right? You think about, uh, modding cars was very much underground until Fast and Furious came out, right timing, and then normalized it, right? Um, the BDSM culture was very much underground and unsafe until Shades of Gray came out. And the history of Shades of Gray is fascinating 'cause it comes ... It was a fan fiction written off of Twilight, which itself is very much a very safe take on vampires, right? So ... But over time, as you chip away at this, you know, you look with the NAS glasses at how these things were able to even get popular. It's because they talked about something unsafe in a safe manner at a place where people didn't run away, and yet the novelty was still there.
- CWChris Williamson
That's so cool.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah, NAS is ... We ... Yeah. NAS is, NAS is super cool.
- CWChris Williamson
It's awesome. Um, have you heard ... Matt, this might be one for you. Have you heard-
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... about the, um, improvement in sleep quality when you hear the sound of a snoring dog or a crackling fire?
- MJMatt Johnson
No.
- CWChris Williamson
So-
- MJMatt Johnson
I haven't heard that.
- CWChris Williamson
You'll have to ... This could be me talking out of my ass, but I'm pretty certain it's not. Um, I was told about a study where they, uh, played sounds of dogs snoring and of fires crackling, and had a number of different control groups and a number of different bits. And the most, uh, impactful sound (dog growls) on someone's sleep was both fire crackling with dogs snoring, because through our evolutionary history, that would be something that we would be used to. (dog growls) The fire crackling meant we were still warm and safe from predators. The dog snoring meant that we had an alarm sound that was gonna go ... That was gonna protect us. And that actually is embedded in us now. So it's not a learned behavior, it's something which sits in there. And I thought that was so cool. Also, here's another one for you. Um, they did ... (laughs) They took a number of different groups of people and they looked at who lives the longest, right? So, uh, group number one, single all their life. No, no pets, no family. Um, they lived a, an amount of time. Then they took people who had, uh, family, family and dogs, and just dogs. And they realized that, uh, people on their own live a little bit shorter, people with family live longer, people with family and dogs live longer. But people with just dogs, no family, live longest of all. And I was like, "What does that tell us?" (laughs) And I was like-
- MJMatt Johnson
Oh, man.
- CWChris Williamson
... a crazy dog person right here. You got me, bro. So yeah, I, I thought-
- MJMatt Johnson
That's wonderful.
- CWChris Williamson
I thought that was, uh, some cool ... You can tell I just love dogs, man. I'm just waiting for ... Prince, I'm just waiting for you-
- MJMatt Johnson
Hey.
- CWChris Williamson
... to bring your dog back on. That's all I'm bothered about.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs)
- PGPrince Ghuman
Uh, he's, he's around here somewhere.
- 1:01:10 – 1:11:33
Pleasure, pain, and the hedonic treadmill: why anticipation often beats consumption
- CWChris Williamson
Just chilling. Um, okay. So let's talk ... You, you've just touched on BDSM there, so let's talk about pleasure and pain and, and, and how all of that links together.
- MJMatt Johnson
(laughs) I, I was wondering where you're going there for a little bit, Prince, but yeah.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
It's great.
- PGPrince Ghuman
All right, Matt, I'll let you take the alley and then we'll get into it.
- MJMatt Johnson
... uh, yeah. So, uh, first, uh, with pleasure. So, uh, pleasure's also, similar to memory, it's, it's really one of those areas where we, we think we sort of have a firm idea of, of what will make us happy, what will give us pleasure, um, but, uh, we're really, really bad at, at actually navigating this space. A lot of the, the theories that we have in terms of our own personal philosophies, even if we haven't explicitly, uh, made it known to ourself, just what it, what we're intuitively going by, uh, turn out to actually be against our own interest, and they don't make us as, as happy as we think we do. And one of the, the main ways this, this manifests is in terms of these, these very specific milestones. Um, so, uh, we think we're gonna be happy when we have 10,000 followers or 20,000 or 50- or whatever the case, you know, may be. And, uh, pleasure, just like attention, seems to attenuate very quickly over time. So, we hit this milestone and we're happy for, you know, the 20 minutes, we'll pop some shit, but whatever the case may be, and, uh, then we'll sort of go back to our, our regular baseline level of happiness. So, just like attention, pleasure seems to attenuate. Uh, there's this, uh, really, uh, beautiful graph that, uh, Adam Alter created. He's a marathon runner. He wrote Irresistible. Uh, and he-
- CWChris Williamson
Awesome book. Awesome book.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Irresistible, by the way. We love that book. Yeah.
- MJMatt Johnson
Great book.
- CWChris Williamson
So good.
- MJMatt Johnson
Uh-
- PGPrince Ghuman
Adam, yeah, yeah, Adam, we love Adam, we love Irresistible. We, he even gave us a shout-out for the book and he read it and he endorsed it, so it was, like, the biggest thank you so much, Adam. Adam's the man. Yeah. Thank you.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah. Absolutely.
- CWChris Williamson
Go ahead, Matt.
- MJMatt Johnson
So, Adam, Adam was talking about this from the context of our, our striving for pleasure on, um, platforms. On, on social media platforms and, and, uh, um, uh, internet platforms, uh, devices, 'cause there's always these sort of milestones you can strive for. You can always have, you know, this many followers or likes, whatever the case may be, and we think we're gonna be happy when we reach that, and he, he talks about this in the context of marathon runners. So, you think about marathon runners and there should be a, a, you know, a pretty even distribution of ability. Uh, so you, you, you think about something like finishing times for, for a marathon, it should reflect this general distribution. So, we're all, you know, we have a normal distribution in terms of our ability, there should be a normal distribution in terms of finishing time. That's not what we see at all. Around these relatively arbitrary cutoff points, you have a four-hour marathon, you know, three and a half hour, three-hour, two and a half hour, you see these, uh, surges. You see these, uh, these peaks. So, you're really, really, really trying to get that four-hour, really, really trying to get that three-hour if you, you know, know you're gonna get 3:45, you know, that's not a cool, you know, milestone to tell anybody, so you're not really gonna push yourself that, that extra amount. And there's all these really interesting anecdotal stories of, of people who, you know, worked for five, 10, 15 years to get that, you know, three-hour mile time, two and a half hour mile time, and they finally get it and it's, it's, you know, you'll, you'll celebrate that night and you'll feel good about it and it's a sense of accomplishment, um, but, you know, in, in terms of your overall level of happiness, you tend to go back down to, to your, your baseline. Um, so this is what Dan Gilbert and others call impact bias, where we're, we're generally bad at understanding just how events are going to impact us, impact our level of happiness. And so we, as, as a result, we, we can sometimes strive for the wrong thing. We sort of strive for this, this dangling carrot that isn't actually gonna make us happy. Once we get there, it's just gonna be dangled out in front of us even further.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Y- yeah. It's, you know, it's called the pursuit of happiness for a reason 'cause it ain't about achieving it, right? 'Cause the, the, the happiness, i- it goes away. It's in the chase. And I think one example that will never get old for me is a new iPhone every year. A new iPhone every year. You look forward to this thing, you don't know why you look forward to this thing. It comes out, you get it, and then you're moving on, right? But, man, Apple is brilliant for doing it. Do I know for sure if in the boardrooms at Apple, Apple's like, "Ooh, let's h- let's optimize this, uh, unpredictable, uh, uh, pleasure chase and this hedonic treadmill and keep getting them one..." Maybe, maybe not. I, I can't say for sure. Only Apple can say that. But I can... One thing Matt and I can say for sure is this is exactly why we fall for this. Every single year, new iPhone. We're in the chase of we think the new iPhone's gonna make us happy, pleasure peaks before- in the chase, and then you get it and then it's fleeting. It attenuates, like Matt said. And you can think about all those-
- CWChris Williamson
That's such a... I wa- Prince, I just wanted to interject there.
- PGPrince Ghuman
Oh. Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, am I right, am I right in saying that the anticipation of an event is often more pleasurable than the event itself? And this was actually, someone told me this about, um-
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... people getting ready for nights out. 'Cause I'm a club promoter, that's what I do, I'm a nightclub promoter.
- MJMatt Johnson
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And, um, they were rating people's happiness. Uh, I don't know how objective this was or whether it was a subjective measure.
- MJMatt Johnson
(clears throat)
- CWChris Williamson
And, uh, people's-
- MJMatt Johnson
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... happiness was rated at the highest just as they were about to call the taxi to go on the night out.
- PGPrince Ghuman
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
So, they've had the pre-drinks, maybe the girls have got ready with each other and they've done each other's makeup and they're having a few glasses of champagne or wine or whatever. And, um, that period was-
- 1:11:33 – 1:19:26
Neural coupling: how stories synchronize brains—and how brands get it wrong
- CWChris Williamson
And it's like sho- like you're shoplifting. Apparently, he's, he's in, uh, SF, so I guess it must be, that'll be where they'll be testing this sort of stuff. And, uh, he (laughs) was like, "It, it felt like, you know, I felt like such a boss. I felt like I'd shoplifted four Clif bars out of there, and then about 30 seconds later, my, uh, Apple Card Pay popped up and said like, 'You just got four Clif bars from Amazon Go store,'" or whatever. But yeah, yeah, I, I, I totally get it. So again, rolling on from that, neural coupling. I want to know what that means, because I saw it in the book and I, I didn't have time to read it. So what's, what's neural coupling?
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah. So this is a, uh, uh, a really interesting phenomena which, uh, really explains how we are able to communicate. So communication is one of those things where you just, you just say something, somebody understands it, and, and there, there's some sort of magic that takes place, but we don't really understand it. And it turns out that there is this really interesting alignment which takes places between speaker and listener. This is actually some research that I got to be a part of back in graduate school. So, what we did is we had our lab mate, Lauren, lie inside fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and we just eavesdrop on her brain as she told the story of her high school prom. And it was a really, really debaucherous story. There was alcohol involved.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MJMatt Johnson
There was, uh, lots of... But it was a very engrossing story. And so your, your task as a participant afterwards was just to lie awake when the fMRI story and listen to Lauren's story. So we recorded it. We had a special microphone. We got her to tell that story while she was in the scanner. And then, as a participant, you just lied in the scanner and listened to that story. And then after we got these, these two data points, now we have Lauren's brain as she's telling the story, we have the participant's brain as they're listening to that story. And what was interesting is we did a specific analysis to actually not see differences between the brains, but actually see where in the brain there was the most similarity over time. This is called intersubject correlation. So you can basically do a, a, a correlational analysis at every small little voxel in the brain to see how similar, uh, the brains of speaker and listeners were.... and it turns out that the more the person comprehended the story, the more similar their brain was to Lauren's brain. So we had everybody take a test after they got out of the scanner, just how much they
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
Episode duration: 1:55:46
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Transcript of episode 6aPfqhXYe9o
