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 – 15:00
So really, it's, it's…
- 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.
- 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.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Exactly. …
- PGPrince Ghuman
on? Yep, exactly.
- MJMatt Johnson
Exactly.
- 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."
- 30:00 – 45:00
Red. …
- PGPrince Ghuman
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)
- CWChris Williamson
So, I don't know. It- it's okay if you don't want to say it, but it's my show, I'm gonna say whatever the- whatever the fuck I want. So, keep on telling us about attention, I'm gonna find these jokes.
- PGPrince Ghuman
(laughs)
- 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.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Mm-hmm. …
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- CWChris Williamson
... that's Ivan the Terrible... Like, imagine if he'd done 40 years of good work. He didn't, but 40 years of charity work and he'd turned a corner and he was essentially by all definition a new person. You know, every cell in your body, I think, is it seven years it's replaced?
- MJMatt Johnson
Right. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
So it's like there isn't even a cell in that... The only thing that that person that you're looking at has in common with the person that you saw before is they share experiences and their body took up the exact spatial dimensions that it's taken up and no one else has. That's the only thing that they have in common. But I think it's a really interesting philosophical question, right? Like, what is, um, what is a, an experience when it relates to it being a memory if the memory can be fudged so easily as for someone to then think it's something else? It's a fascinating topic.
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, we, we are these sort of perpetually changing beings. Uh, we, we are constantly changing. We're a slightly different person from one day to the next. Every time we wake up in the morning, we're a slightly different person. And really what is holding us all together is really memory. It's our, our memory of our past, our memory of yesterday, our memory of our coherent self all of those years ago. And so we're, we're not really the same person in terms of, of all of those different experiences. We can be a very different person. We can change fundamentally. There's actually examples of, of people who, uh, did something horrible. They, uh, actually had a, a, uh, a brain tumor that, that seemed to be directly predicate that horrible act. You have a, a tumor in a region called the amygdala, which has to do with our, our fear response, and it seems that that directly contributed to this violent act the person did. You take out the brain tumor, uh, and you have a person who is, is no more likely to commit a violent crime in, in the future than anybody else in, in society. And so do you punish that person? Do you even see them in, in the same way? Um, and, and yeah, somebody gets to the same sort of philosophical question as, as, as you were getting at there. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's, it's absolutely fascinating. I think there's that... Is it the guy that climbed the bell tower that Sam Harris uses in his, in his book Waking Up. That's the example, the famous example, right? And he asked him se- he asked the people to do an autopsy on him after he shot himself and his family and like five passersby, which is obviously just terrifying in itself. Um, what else can-
- MJMatt Johnson
Yeah.
- 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.
- 1:00:00 – 1:13:52
Oh, man. …
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- 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.
Episode duration: 1:55:46
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode 6aPfqhXYe9o
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome