333. Designing the Future of Saving: Behavioral Science Strategies for Financial Success - Vishal George

Welcome to episode 333 of the Brainy Business, Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Vishal George, author of Money Mindsets. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation I am joined by Vishal George. Vishal is a serial experimenter and founder of Behavioral by Design. He combines behavioral science with human centered design and systems thinking to help teams with tools to think like a behavioral scientist. He works to make behavioral science more accessible for social impact, financial well being and sustainability. The work he does is diverse, including running experiments with the government to evaluate evidence based strategies for businesses to reduce their carbon footprints, co designing interventions to improve the patient experience at hospitals in New Zealand, and helping a large organization to have the capacity to apply behavioral science tools at scale. But Vishal is also the author of the book Money Mindsets which is about humans potential to rewire our mindsets toward financial wellbeing and it is the main focus of our discussion today. It's all about including behavioral science and understanding our brains so we can be better with money, whether that's in a business approach or individually. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for everything, including related past episodes, links to articles and books including Money Mindsets, a full time stamp summary of the episode and so much more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com333 now let's jump right in. Vishal George, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Kia Ora, welcome.

So excited to have you here with us today. We've had this episode in the making for quite some time and I'm excited that we're finally having the conversation. For everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and your background and the work that you do?

Yes, totally. So I'm a behavioral scientist based in Aotearoa, New Zealand and I work towards combining the field of behavioral science, which I know the Brainy Business is all about, with human centered design and systems thinking. And what I really do is build capability and teams to think like a behavioral scientist. And I work with teams on social impact challenges, financial well being and sustainability.

Awesome. Do you have any examples of projects or things just to show people what that kind of means of the type of work that you do or how you help people?

Yes, great question. So an example of a project or what a project could look like. Last year I worked with the government in New Zealand. One of the big areas of concern is sustainability for businesses. And the challenge which we worked on, or the behavioral challenge, so to say, was how might we get businesses to reduce their carbon emissions? And you might think that there are many different ways to go about this. So you might have a leadership board, for example, and companies which are reducing their carbon footprint or highly sustainable can be on this publicly visible leadership board. Or you may want to create a platform for young people to voice their concerns about the environment. That may be another motivator which might encourage businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. So you have many different competing strategies which can help towards this goal. And what we did work on was to design a robust experiment to start testing out some of these strategies. So we work on two levels. One level is understanding the challenge and designing potential possible solutions. And the second where it gets really interesting is you really have no idea which idea is going to be most effective in the context of your challenge. Quite often the literature that we look at is applicable to another country or another context. But we really wanted to test out in a New Zealand context which strategy is most likely to change behavior. So we ran an online test and we give a higher likelihood for certain strategies which becomes part of government R and D and government strategy to move businesses along their sustainability journey.

Interesting. Have any of those gone live and if so, have talkable results yet or not quite there yet?

Yes, I can give you the winning strategy. And it's quite funny, these strategies, in hindsight, they are also obvious. We tested out 18 different strategies and there were many different ideas. But the clear winner which emerged was A the messenger effect. So the idea being who communicates the information is more important than what information is communicated and B is who's the most effective messenger to encourage businesses. It turns out that the next generation, young people, businesses are more likely to listen to their voice, so their voice has a powerful impact to motivate businesses.

It's interesting though, because I mean, so often we get kind of stuck in that status quo of the way we've done things and how we like it and the way that we like, because a lot of the leaders may be of a different generation than like we Were saying that, like, you know, next cohort to be coming in. And so it's. Even if they say they want to listen to them, they might not always. So that's cool to hear that in, you know, in your scenario, what tested out and worked was, you know, that next generation of people.

Yeah. Something which we forget about quite easily is that ultimately businesses are run by people and people have human wants and needs of wanting to love and be loved and wanting to be seen and appreciated for doing good work, for leaving a legacy behind, for leaving a stronger economy behind, leaving a better environment behind. And we can really tap into some of those human parts of a business. And it's easy to be cynical about a business as this giant organization which does nothing. But if you look at the people who run the business, business, they have real human needs and wants and that can be tapped into.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I, I do love. Kind of like you're saying, I've had enough people on the show that have talked about where that. That weird thing that you throw in. Right. You're like, well, let's just see. Like, it's the like, thing that seems like it's so out there and it more. I don't want to say always, more often than not or whatever, but so often that it ends up being the thing that performs the. A thing that seems totally random and like, you would never do it. But that's, you know, like you were saying you tested 18 things to get to the one that you ended up using. And I think that's an important lesson for people in business because, like, one, if you're doing a test, how many times did you actually get to 18 ideas that were viable enough to do a test and, like, give them, you know, some meat to be able to test them out and to say, like, okay, like, we. We've got enough here to. To do this. And if you're trying to fill in the gaps. Right. Like, well, I guess we could do it this way. You end up with something that seems weird, but those sort of peripheral things often are where you get into those really innovative ideas. The obvious stuff is obvious, but that doesn't mean it's going to work. Right.

Yeah, I was really pushing for. There's a question of how many ideas do you test and how many ideas should you come up with? And I was really pushing towards. We know when we have enough ideas, when we have a few ideas in the list which can get someone fired from their job. It's a good rule of thumb. And we did have some high risk ideas out there. We were testing it in a safe platform. One of the high risk ideas which I wanted to push forward was Big Brother sort of idea of customers are watching which businesses are reducing their carbon footprint. And this whole priming effect which we wanted to test out realistically, it may not have been the most feasible strategy. There may have been unintended consequences. But I think part of the process of coming up with good ideas is also coming up with those little silly, counterintuitive, out of the box ideas. And somewhere along the lines you find these golden ideas which come up when you allow yourself to come up with a few silly ideas too.

Yeah, definitely. And that's like coming up with that thing that's a little bit too far. But because you went too far, then coming back a little bit, you find something that's maybe more comfortable, that is still further than you would have gone if you hadn't, you know, taken the time to evaluate all those options.

Yes, we're human beings and we like safety in the middle ground. There's the classic middle option bias where we tend to not pick extremes. And I like the framing of it. By pushing the boundaries of having some extreme ideas and some extreme bad ideas which are required, that helps you navigate and find the middle ground of what's a idea which you feel you feel safe about, you feel comfortable in. And like you said, testing it out. I think the key lies in testing it within context because we all think we have the most incredible ideas. But when you put things out there, you get a better feedback loop of is it really a good idea or was that just a good idea in my head?

Yeah. And sometimes the thing that you see so clearly and you totally get it and then you put it out there and it's very confusing to everyone else because like you said, they're not in your head. So helping to figure out even some of those bugs in a safe space is good too.

Yes, totally.

Thank you for having that little step into some of the work that you've done and into your background. And today we're talking about a book that you have written. Congratulations. Exciting to have our book Babies in the world is always great. I know in the pretty recorded conversation we were talking about writing books and how we go about those processes. But I guess just even to go from there, you know, what inspired you to write your book and what'd you write it for? What is it about?

My inspiration behind writing itself is. And this belief is being reinforced the more and more I spend time on YouTube and podcasts is that we have. We don't have too many good influencers out there. We have especially for maybe a young male audience, 20s to 40s. There's a lot of toxic material out there. Talking about subjects like our emotions and our feelings are often squashed away and into the side. And I was looking at what are different topics which bring up some of the emotions within us which help us maybe understand our own emotions. Also understand the emotions of others around us may help us empathize with people around us and especially people in different circumstances and different situations. And my book is about money. Money stirs all sorts of emotions in us. And part of my own process was understand what emotions arise when I think about money. And I had interviewed some friends, interviewed some colleagues, interviewed almost everyone who I would meet and ask them about what feelings come to mind when they think about money. And going back into people's early childhood experiences, what comes up. So the analogy which I use in the book is we have these money scripts. Quite often they emerge from our families, our socio cultural environment, some of the significant life events, and we walk around the world carrying these money scripts. Quite often we don't even know who the author is of our script. And the challenge which I present to the reader is can we rewrite our money story? Can we acknowledge the feelings that come up when we think about money? And what are the feelings which are helpful? What are the feelings which may steer us away from our money goals? So it involves both understanding our money story and then reflecting on which part of this money script do we want to carry forward?

Yeah. And it is amazing how much of our lives and experiences and the way we approach things is based on stuff we don't remember or we don't think should impact the choices that we make. One of the examples I really thought was interesting in your book where you were talking about the children in households where you're asking a lot of questions, which I of course was thinking about my own littles and how, you know, my husband and I definitely make an effort to let the kids ask lots of questions because I know the importance of asking and having the space to be curious. You know, that's something that's really important to me for the kids. But seeing what you were talking about for that and knowing what that might be, setting them up for positivity in the future was kind of exciting. So can you share a little bit about that importance of even just something as simple as, you know, encouraging kids and them having the space to ask questions yes, totally.

Great question. And I believe money is our final taboo topic. We're more comfortable talking about politics. If you look at social media and Twitter, we're more than comfortable talking about politics, religion. We're comfortable talking about sex. I had a conversation recently about what it's like for a polyamorous person to be living in a world which is monogamous. We're also comfortable with posting our COVID test results online. But the topic of money brings discomfort. And I think there's lots which we can learn from kids. Kids do this right and we innately as humans do this right. So one of the statistics which did emerge, and it won't surprise anyone with children that children between 3 to 5 ask around 300 questions per day. And that's a lot. But somehow as adults we kind of like lose that innate human capacity to ask questions. Like think about when was the last time you asked your neighbor of how much money is there in the bank balance? That's serious discomfort over there. But a kid would be more than happy asking that question. Also maybe asking your brother in law how much does he take home from work at the end of the month? That's another discomfort question. And I think there's. I make the case that this curiosity which kids have and we all innately have as human beings, that's one of our superpowers when we think about money and how we get better at managing our money is to start asking these uncomfortable questions about money and to really cultivate curiosity as a habit in our lives.

Yeah. Do you have any suggestions for whether it's so I know you know, I really like in the book. So you have. It's concise and robust. So there's a lot going on but it's not lots and lots of fluff. So we're able to get through it quickly and get the tidbits and that each chapter is short and though has like some thoughtful prompts at the end. It's a good mix of. Of stuff in there. So I appreciated that. And I know one of the question prompts at the end was suggesting to have somebody go, I think ask a question like this of someone. Right. Kind of the nudge to go ask a friend or someone about how much money they save every month or something. I think. Or how much money they put away in savings was one of the questions I think you put as a prompt in there somewhere. And like other than, you know, just I guess, what's your advice for people that if they want to start to do this and a Question of why, why is it important to break through that stigma and maybe start having questions about money? And do you have suggestions for people if they want to help others, you know, to kind of break through that barrier?

Yeah, very, very good question. And I think also a very timely question. We live in a world where we have an abundance of financial products and services. Some of them are not in our best interest, some of them are for convenience, but it may lead to overspending. So we have buy now, pay later, which is all too tempting. We have Amazon's just walk out technology, so customers can walk into one of these stores, pick up what they like, and they can walk out without having to physically take out their wallet, take out their debit card, take out the Apple pay. They can walk in, pick up what they like, and walk out. And what that leads to, and what some of these technologies and financial products lead to is overspending. And something which I have been curious about is the psychological pain of paying. So when we do spend money in the supermarket, and if you actually hand out cash, for example, that really leaves a visceral pain in the body. You feel like you're parting away with some of your precious time and work which you've put in. But when you walk straight out of a store, you don't have that pain of pain which is activated. So one of the ways which we can think about, how do we get more curious about some of this phenomenon? Curiosity works like a muscle. The more we use it, the more we exercise it, the more we grow it. So a question which I have been reflecting on is how do we cultivate more curiosity in our lives? And there are two ways of building curiosity. There's two types of curiosity, if you'd like. There's diversity curiosity, which is this idea of craving novelty, craving new information, craving stimuli. And all of us are naturally very good at this. We can think about watching cat videos on YouTube as one form of diversity curiosity. It's very easy to continue watching and to click on the next video and to click on the next video. And along with diversity curiosity, there's another type of curiosity which takes a little bit more effort, which is epistemic curiosity. And this involves focus and attention. So we can think of a PhD researcher looking at the psychology of money and all the factors which contribute to good saving behavior as a form of epistemic curiosity. When you go really, really deep, deep into a subject or a topic, be it permaculture, be it art history, any topic, but when we zoom in and go deep that epistemic curiosity and they both complement each other really well. So one strategy to get better at epistemic curiosity is to cluster our reading. This is strategy recommended by Tyler Cohen. So if you want to become more aware about saving and spending behaviors, you can read a cluster of books on the topics. You can read, say, how to Change by Kathy Milkman. You can read Atomic Habits by James Clear, you can read the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. And you read books which are interrelated and interconnected and you go quite deep into the topic. And I think that's one way we can safeguard ourselves against with the emergence of new technologies and the ease at which we spend by building our curiosity about the topic of money. But also adjacent topics like habits, motivation and behavior change that can all aid us to spending our money more intentionally and in a way that makes us feel more fulfilled and gives us a meaning and purpose in life.

Yeah, I love that. And you touched on this a little bit. And so one I'll definitely be already had it written down top of the list that the episode on the pain of paying will absolutely be linked in the show notes for everybody as well as many others, you know, related to what we're talking about today. One of the things that I really liked and just the way you framed and talked about it in the book is the visible spending and invisible saving and our history of like how you used to save in a visible way. But we don't really have that anymore. And I really like the way you talked about that problem. Can you share a little bit about that?

Yeah. And I think this is one of the dilemmas with not asking our brother in law how much money they take home. In the past we didn't need to ask these questions if you would come home after your day's work, you could see how many cattle your neighbors had and that was their savings. They didn't have an invisible digital bank account or something which is a cryptocurrency in some offshore account. People's savings were very, very visible and that was a strong motivator and also indicator of what's a good amount of savings to keep. So you'd come home and you would get a signal. I think that's flipped with the emergence of digital currency especially. It's flipped that we don't see how much money someone has saved anymore. But what's very visible is how much they're spending. So we can see what car someone pulls out of their driveway with. We can see how many people are sitting outside a Busy cafe, having a bougie brunch. So spending behaviors are very, very visible now. And somehow saving behaviors are not very visible because we. We don't talk about it and it's not really visibly accessible. And there's a simple heuristic which we apply when we think about what we draw, what draws our focus and our attention. It's quite often the things which we see is the things which we gravitate towards and what we're seeing. Take social media, for example. We get a good idea of what people are doing on their Saturday night, but what we don't get to see is how much money someone's putting away in their bank balance. So we don't have that social cohesion and motivation because that's largely left invisible.

Yeah. It is an interesting conundrum too, because when you think about things like saving or paying off debt or being debt free, these sorts of goals that, you know, many of us have, hopefully all at some point, but, you know, you don't. Then it's like, well, I don't want to brag, right. That's the thing, right. Because I know that not everybody is. Has been able to not have the debt or whatever. And so, you know, like. Well, I don't want people to feel like it's like I'm showing off because I don't have a car payment or something, you know. But then if you don't talk about it, then, and nobody's talking about it, it's perpetuating a problem. And then people can just assume that nobody has anything. Of course everyone has car payments because that's just what you have. And that's how it might feel if nobody ever talks about it. But there are plenty of people who don't have car payments and happy to be in the club. We're sharing about sharing, taking the stigma away. We don't have car payments here in the Palmer household, so it's achievable, but we should talk about it more.

Yes. One of the maybe challenges which add to this is we're really good at making decisions for our present selves. So if I am craving for a croissant right now, I can reach out for one. I can go to the bakery near my house and get one. I can probably push a button on some app and have it delivered to my doorstep. But it's incredibly difficult for us to make decisions for our future selves. Our future selves are not present by definition, so they're not able to postpone our decision to have a croissant. Right now. And I believe that banks and fintechs and other players can play a role in facilitating this. We can think about the individual challenge that exists to save money and to notice how much money someone else is saving. But then there are system level changes which can be introduced. And I think that there's this incredible opportunity for banks and fintechs to get better at not just balancing financial well being and designing products for our current selves, I.e. credit card schemes and buy now pay later schemes, but also looking at what are helpful products which they can introduce which will benefit our future selves. And how can banks and fintechs nudge us towards a better future self as well?

Yeah, I'll definitely, when I got to talk to Hal Hirschfeld about your future self, his book, which, you know, I'll link that episode in the show notes too. I was the nerdiest fan girl of all time because time discounting is my very, very favorite. So I was so excited to talk to him about, about that in a way that was hopefully not too ridiculous. And you know, it's important to note because I know there are lots of people that work at financial institutions that listen to the show and fintech and all of this and credit cards are really good products in a lot of ways. Like we, we have. None of these are inherently bad things, right? There are predatory things that have been built out of some of these. But you think about something like a mortgage, like you couldn't, if you couldn't live in a house until you had enough money to be able to pay cash for one, that would be a problem, right? And same thing with, you know, having access to vehicles and things like that. It's made it to where we're able to have things that help us to have a better positive life and get to work in better jobs and go to school and you know, really, really great things. And understanding the balance and the mind space that we have for those consumers of what they where they may misstep and knowing that it can be really difficult the things that we think people need to hear or want to hear or how we should share it or you need to give this big long disclosure. But it's, you know, not necessarily in a way that's helping someone make those better choices and really understanding that underlying human behavior. And for a long time it's because we didn't know, you know, what was going on. But now that the information is becoming more available, I think there's such a great opportunity for all those financial services companies of all Kinds that truly are wanting to help people to be able to have better lives. And I know there are many, many, many, most of them, you know, that are out there. And so being able to think about this all in a different way with this behavioral lens, I think is such an awesome opportunity for companies to create really, really cool and innovative products and communities or forums or like a company could be able to present information in a way that makes it so people can have these conversations about money in a way that it would be really difficult for a bunch of individual humans to do. But knowing that that can actually shift a landscape in a way that makes it easier for everyone to save because of how we are a herding species. And it can, you know, there's just opportunity out there. And I shall step off of my soapbox now and I'll let you. I just sort of rambled. Do you have any thoughts on my ramblings?

Yes, great ramblings. And I love how you highlighted that they're not necessarily bad products and say, credit cards, for examples. I have reservations about buy now, pay later, which, which I do believe is a bad product. I'm willing to change my mind on it. But let's take some of these products are not bad products in isolation. It's how they utilized or adopted, or it may negatively impact a small percentage of customers. And I think the opportunity then is how do we design them for human beings and human behaviors. So how do we create more behaviorally informed products? One of the dilemmas which I struggle with is keeping my phone away at night. It's all too tempting for my present self at night to get on there, watch cat videos, and stimulate myself with everything my mind craves for and desires in the moment. That does have a cost for my future self. I get less sleep, I feel less rested. And if you think of what's a behaviorally informed product which can help and support my future self in this case, one of the examples I love to talk about is Arianna Huffington's company, Thrive Global. They have a product called the Phone Bed Charging Station. And what this allows you to do is to charge, tuck your bed away at night, put it to sleep into a blanket, charge up your phone while it's asleep, and you do it as a household. So as a family, you might all plug in your phones at night. There's some social accountability in it. If there's a phone missing, you might feel accountable to your family members because you may agree to do it together as a family. There's some social proofing if you see three other phones out there. It's like, oh, yeah, I can put away my phone too, because mom, dad and my brother have put away their phones, for example. So there's an opportunity for us to explore how do we create more behaviorally informed products in the financial service space as well. The products in isolation, like you mentioned, they're not necessarily good or bad products, but how do we better design these products with human behaviors in mind?

Definitely I could talk about these all day. I think that, you know, I have a background in financial services as well and have a lot of clients in that space and have worked in that space. And so I know there are so many cool opportunities of ways to design different products and stuff. So now is our. We almost always have a choose your own adventure moment in the show because I have all the questions I want to ask and we don't have all the time for the conversations about them. So one thing I had notes that I was wanting to ask you about is, you know, there's kind of two schools of thought when it comes to the, you know, understanding our habits and nudges. And so you can have the conscious processing of like being really thoughtful, being more intentional, focusing on less when it comes and having those savings goals more prevalent, or thinking about designing products that maybe are a little bit more difficult, but it's for the right things, you know, for people that they'll have more intrinsic motivation versus the other side of that, like invisible saving, that you don't even have to think about it. So easy we take it away. You know, the. You remove that barrier. You know, they're kind of two ways you could go about designing products or services and thinking about human behavior. And if you have thoughts about them and. Or one being maybe better than the other or. Or not. So that's like one path. The other kind of piece was. I loved all this stuff. Of course, Ayelet Fishback is a big friend of the show. And so talking about the. The goals and motivation and what draws us to setting and actually achieving goals, I think is a whole other side that's sort of related, but not exactly. And so now you can choose. And I guess there's always door number three that if you don't like either of those and you wanted to talk about something else in our last few minutes, you can do that too.

Or instead, I love all three doors. I might open, open the first door. Arlette is the expert on goal setting, and I think that'll be very good context to link up any of the.

Conversations and her episode will be. Yep, got her. She's in there. She's in the notes, everybody.

Yes. Let's talk about habits. And I think this one's a hard one to overcome and I think very, there's some very clear takeaways of what banks and fintechs can do better in this space. One of the stories that I narrate from the book is the story of Kaya who is having challenges with saving money. One of the goals she has is to save a few thousand dollars at the end of the year. And during that year, it's about the third month of the year, her favorite band is playing in the city and it only happens once in a lifetime. Her favorite jazz band, she wants to go for it and she notices that front row seats only cost about $60 more and she's going to get front row seats. This happens once in a lifetime. So she'll hold a savings goal, but she'll spend on this, on this one time expense. It's her favorite band. The same week her television breaks down, unfortunately, bad coincidence. She needs to get a replacement tv. She doesn't want an upgrade, she wants the same TV replaced. Which when she walks into the store, the salesperson convinces her it's a bad idea to invest money into an outdated tv. It's going to be redundant in a few days or a few weeks. And she's convinced to upgrade to the latest 4K TV. All the, all the features, good sound system and all that jazz. She only replaces a TV once every five years, so she might as well splurge a little bit more to get a slightly better upgrade. The same week as her 10 year wedding anniversary, which happens not very often. So she wants to celebrate the occasion and decides to spend money on getting catering and having a fancy cocktail bar. And what you'll notice from this narrative or all these stories is it's extremely easy to spend money, especially on one time expenses because they happen pretty infrequently in isolation. But when we pull all of them together, they add up quite a lot. And I think the opportunity for banks and fintechs is to think about how do we create products which make it easy to save money. So we have a lot of products, a lot of services which make it easy to spend money and a lot of people and influencers which encourage us to spend money. But how do we balance that side of the equation with tools and products which make it as easy to save money as it is to spend money? One of the banks which I work with over here in New Zealand ASB bank, they have a product called Save the Change. Essentially. What this essentially does is it makes savings incredibly easy. So you might Want to spend $4.60 on your cup of coffee. What this program does is it rounds up the balance so the 40 cents goes straight into your savings account, from your current or your checking account. So without thinking about it, when you go out to buy a cup of coffee, 40 cents goes straight into your savings account. You don't even have to think about it, and you can set your own defaults so you could round it up to the nearest 10th dollar, in which case $5,40 goes from your current account to your savings account. And when it comes to thinking about what might change our habits or what might break our habits, both friction and fluency can play a big role. In this case, removing the friction of getting someone to move money from one account to the other and just automating the process every time you spend some money goes from your current account, your savings account. Removing some of those barriers and some of those friction points makes it easier for someone to save money. At the same time. I do believe there's a role for adding friction. I was thinking about the case of business travel, for example, and lots of employees need to travel across the country, across continents for meetings. And one of the challenges for companies, especially companies which are trying to reduce their expenses, reduce their carbon footprint, is to have someone, how about asking an employee if do they need business travel? If they do need business travel, could they write two lines explaining why it will be useful or helpful for the company for the person to be well rested? So you're not taking out the option for someone not to travel business or someone not to make the trip. But you are introducing a little bit of pain, a little bit of friction to see if that travel is really necessary. Could they do it over zoom? If it's a short haul flight, could they manage economy? Could they land maybe the previous night and get sleep at a hotel? So adding a little bit of friction can also break some of the habits. Especially companies which are looking at making changes. A little bit of friction can really test out is this really needed? And also it could support the company with some of their sustainability goals which they all trying to move towards.

Awesome. I love it. And yeah, it's the. How many people get weeded out in the like. Well, you can, you can just book, like you said, coach seats, no questions asked, just go do the thing. And if you want to have this thing, like you said, you have to write your two sentences, which is not a huge barrier, but for some people it's not worth it. So it's, it would be interesting to see how, how that could work. And what's cool is, you know, that's a simple sort of policy thing that, that sort of thing can save a lot of money, but it doesn't actually have, it doesn't cost a lot of money to put into place. Right. So yeah, interesting and a cool opportunity for people to look at within their businesses to find those weird kind of like we say, the weird thing that you think that seems sort of random but can really, really work. It brings us really full circle. So, Vishal, thank you so much for chatting today. For everyone who I know is going to be so excited to go get their copy of your book and to connect and learn more, you know, what is their best path to do all that?

Yeah, the book is called Money Mindsets. It's available on Amazon. You can check out the book also on my website. And yeah, feel free to connect with me on social. I'm Most active on LinkedIn. Always happy to connect, have a chat. So those are the channels to reach me.

Awesome. Well, we will of course put the links in the show notes for everyone to make it nice and easy as always. And again, thanks so much for joining me. It was fun to chat with you today.

Thank you, Melina, super grateful to have this conversation and love the work which you're doing to making behavioral economics more accessible with your podcast.

Oh, thank you. Thank you again to Vishal George for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, because of my long history with financial institutions, I always love being able to talk and think about money. When you think about it, it's really strange how weird people are when it comes to talking about money. As Vishal said, we're comfortable talking about so many other things these days, some more than others. Sure. But when you think about the upside that comes from having conversations about money and goals and finances and saving, it's really hard to argue for why these types of conversations should be avoided. If you were listening to the conversation today and thought I could never talk about that, or I could never ask that, consider if this is rooted in any real data or if it's just a trick your brain is playing because it's feels like this could be scary. And maybe don't start with the most difficult person to have a conversation with. You can start small. You can start with anyone. Do you have a close friend or family member you could talk to a professional you can ask questions of. Even going and searching on Reddit or watching videos on YouTube could help. Be wary, of course, who you listen to when it comes to advice about your money. I'm simply making a suggestion for where you could go to feel more comfortable talking about and hearing people talk about money, making that more of a normalized experience. So who are your people who would celebrate your goals and achievements with you in any space? Is there a Facebook group or whatever the platform is these days of people who are actively trying to pay off debt or save for a vacation or whatever your goals are where you can be somewhat anonymous but still have the value of a community? I'm sure there is. And if you go to find something, if you do find something, you know, let me know. Come share it with me. And as I said, I know from experience that so many financial institutions, especially credit unions, have financial counselors and team members who are trained to help with budget planning and goals. And many of them do this for free. It's just a service that the institution offers. You just have to be willing to ask the question to have the conversation. And hopefully today's episode helped you to have a little more comfort with that idea. If you do have something you're saving for or another financial goal you want to share, please do find me on social media and share it with me. I'm the Brainy biz pretty much everywhere and Melina Palmer on LinkedIn and tag Vishal as well. Of course, if that feels a bit too public, you can email me melinathebrainybirds business.com too. There are links to both of our handles and Vishal's book and related past episodes, a full timestamp summary of the conversation and more, all waiting for you in the show notes, which can be found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 333 and thank you again to Vishal George for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next time for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.