334. Cracking the Code of Human Decision-Making: Insights from Tim Ash (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 334 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode is all about unleashing your primal brain with Tim Ash. 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, Malik Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is a refresh of my conversation with Tim Ash about his book Unleash youh Primal Brain, which first aired in October of 2020. Tim is a wealth of information on the brain as well as how and why we have evolved to be the way we are. This is really fundamental to behavioral economics and behavioral science because if you and can start to see the underlying logic in the decisions the brain is making, what may trigger one response versus another, it can make it easier to predict what someone might do in a particular moment. This is really important in business as you look to set up tests or think through an experience journey because it lets you be really thoughtful about how you present information and gives you an opportunity to see if what you thought would happen lines up or if there might be something else at play. As you know, planning for what you think people should do often doesn't get you to the real behavior, at least when you're thinking of it from the perspective of a logical conscious brain. However, when you understand how the brain has evolved and those primal instincts, like.

Some of what Tim is going to.

Be talking about today, it really helps you to predict, plan and design for what people will actually do. And that's what we're always looking for here at the Brainy Business. I'll of course let Tim tell you all about it as we revisit this conversation on unleashing your primal brain really quickly. Don't forget there are links for everything, including past episodes, books like Unleash youh Primal Brain articles and more, all waiting for you in the show notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 334. All right, let's talk about unleashing your primal brain. Tim Ash, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thanks so much Melinda.

I am very excited to have you on the show today talking about primal brains and just how our brains have developed over many, many moons. So maybe tell a little bit about you who you are and you know, how you got this fascination with brains, all things brainy?

Well, I started early when I came out to University of California, San Diego. Got a full ride UC Regents academic scholarship there. And my undergrad majors were computer engineering and cognitive science, which was in the psychology department at the time. And then I stayed there for grad school and studied neural networks or what would now be called machine learning or artificial intelligence, and had the real interdisciplinary stew. So I'm interacting with neuroscientists, linguists, economists, computer people, electrical engineers. UCSD was a real kind of synthesis and breaking out of silos kind of place. And everybody played with everyone. So I've always had this fascination. Then I went and started my own marketing agency and applied these principles to clients like Google and Nestle and Facebook, and we created 1.2 billion in value, basically using neuromarketing techniques. And so now I've come around full circle and I just want to use this for ethical reasons and not necessarily for, you know, manipulation or discord or pulling money out of people's wallets. So I just want to level the playing field and explain to everyone, not just our clients, about how our brains really evolved and to kind of get more perspective, understand ourselves better.

Yeah.

And so definitely vast background. And for those who. So we don't do the video here, but I can see we've got the. I commented when you popped up of the wall of priming in that Tim's background is maybe 4, 500 speaker badges in a nice collage behind him.

Yeah, they wallpaper. It's cheaper than wallpaper. Always joking. But it's. Yeah, I've done a keynote speech or two, couple hundred plus over four continents. So that's a lot of fun.

Yeah. So just let's jump in on it. So how did our brains evolve? Talk to us about the brain. How do you like to talk about it?

I like to think of it as. So my red thread through all of this is the brains didn't just pop into existence and, you know, there's this uniquely human brain that just came about that we're the product of evolution. And in order to understand us, you have to understand the whole evolutionary arc. There's stuff we borrowed from and share with very early forms of life that are still around. And then think of the brain as kind of a band aid on top of a fix, on top of an upgrade and you know, but we got here as a result of that whole arc of evolution. Evolution. So it's important to understand it from that standpoint yeah.

And so we've got all sorts of things going on with the chemicals in the brain. And you talk about emotion. I know there's stuff on herding, so you have a chapter or a little section, I guess that's about life without brains and why we need them.

Yeah, well, so, so let's start with the, at the very beginning, in a sense, your life has been around on earth for about three and a half billion years. Sophisticated brains are at least 500 million years old. And the transition why we need brains came about as a needing to respond to fast changes in our environment resulting from movement. So it was only moving animals that need a brain. Plants don't need one. They have all kinds of adaptive behaviors. You know, they open only when there's sunlight, they try to sink roots towards where there's water. So you can think of all that's kind of intelligent. They heal wounds with SAP, you know, but really those are not learned responses, they're just kind of built in automatic. So insects and animals need brains because we're in a world of movement in order to think fast enough to survive in that environment. That's what brains are really for.

Yeah.

And so we developed those brains and knowing that they do take up a lot of power and energy, they, they've got a lot going on, which is why we need our, you know, where I talk about it as subconscious and conscious and there's also, you know, system one, system two, you know, that sort of thing. But can you talk a little bit about how you approach the thought about rules in the brain and how that those heuristics or biases.

Sure. Well, I think, you know, you hit on something that's important. The brain is a very energy intensive system, so it better be justifying itself, it better be paying the freight, as it were. And human brains in particular are incredibly expensive to maintain even compared to you. Think of a smart primates like our closest cousins, chimps, gorillas and so on, they use about 8% of their resting metabolism to power their brains. We use about a quarter, so three times as much. And that's a huge energy output and it better be doing something useful. So you can think of the body as balancing between digestion, voluntary movement and just brain. And when you run out of energy, you need sleep and rest. So those are kind of the, that's the performance envelope in which we're experiencing life for human beings. The brains, the reason it burns up three times more energy is that newer part of the brain, not the subconscious, is really there to Model our complex social relationships. There's a lot of misconceptions about that, that our brains are really there for inventing microwave ovens and sending people to the moon. But that kind of thinking, brain two plus two is for, is not what it's for. Whenever we're not doing computational or planning task like that, we default to modeling our environment socially. So I'll give you an example. So it's like, hey, Melinda, if I met your friend who went out with your cousin, who dated his sister and who works for your business partner, and I decide to do something rude to them, what are the consequences of that? And how will the power dynamics in the tribe shift? So to be able to model that in real time, that's really what the new part of the brain is for. It's not for logical reasoning. It's for really accurate social dynamics.

And so that is the sort of original evolution as to why this developed for us humans as we were getting into those more complex tribal life, but as our environment. You know, I guess that evolution allowed us to build a world around us that far exceeds what the brain was actually built for, you know, faster than it can evolve, right?

That's exactly right. Well, I mean, basically, actually, evolution is accelerating and certain things are evolving in human beings faster, but still on the timescale of society. I mean, we're about to drive off of a climate crisis cliff, and who knows whether even life on earth continues. Probably the sixth large extinction event in the planet's history coming up here. But you know, for the timescale of decades or hundreds of years, there's no evolution. Practically speaking, we're frozen in time and we have to make do with the brains that developed on the plains of East Africa 200,000 years ago, even in the most recent kind of adaptations. But you're right, we have to try to apply them to these super complicated multi billion person hive societies and civilizations we've created. And they're not really designed for that.

Right, well, and so you talked about some work you had done in social media media world. Right. For Facebook, I think you mentioned, and some other groups, I'm sure. So how in that, like the social networking space, I guess, what, what insights do you have to.

To share?

I know that's been a pretty big topic these days too.

Yeah, well, you know, it's, it's interesting. One of the things that makes us distinctly human and one of the key insights I think from the book is, is understanding that we made an evolutionary bet on culture, spread other animals that range over Wide ecological niches. Squirrels, for example, they were huge. Size differences from 10 grams to 6 kilograms. Some have bat like wings, others have rotating ankles so they can run head first down trees. Others hibernate in the heat of the desert sun. Human beings didn't make that kind of adaptation. Pygmies in Africa are about a meter 50. The Dutch are the world's tallest at a meter 83. You know, they're not huge physical adaptations. What we made the bet on was culture spread. And we actually evolve physically for culture spread. And so the bet is that we can learn more from our surrounding tribe by aping them and copying them than we can ever in a lifetime of direct experience. And that's what gives us our evolutionary edge. So the implications of that for things like tribalism and social media are vast.

Right.

And so that's kind of our mirror neurons. We decided to capitalize on them in a way that some other species have not.

Well, mirror neurons exist and there's definitely higher density of certain kinds of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are actually weird because they tune to different things. So some can be tuned to watching somebody do something. Others are tuned to imagining that they're doing something even when they're out of our sight, you know, behind some kind of obstacle. So that we share with other animals as well. But the larger adaptations, like give you an example, our brains are very plastic. Late into life, you know, we were very immature physically. And that's also our brains can grow and we can kind of download the cultural package. I don't know if you've ever seen the Matrix movies, but it's like, teach me how to fly this helicopter right now. And you do you download that? Well, that's basically what we're doing by mimicking our surrounding tribe. But to do that, we actually have to put our body development on hold, which is why teenagers rapidly mature only later in life. We want a smaller body so we can devote more energy to wiring up our brain. Another example is like we're born covered with fat. I mean, no other animal when it's born is just like this big blob. And we use that fat to isolate all of the neurons and the brain connection so there's no cross talk or electrical issues. So these are weird adaptations at a physical level in order to spread culture.

Yeah, no, that is interesting where you think it's so fascinating to us as humans to say that, you know, when giraffes are born or cows, you know, they just start walking right away and you go, what? That's amazing. How strange that they do that. But really, we're the weirdos, right?

Where are the weirdos that take. Take the most care the longest time, but we're spending our time mimicking, like you say, mirroring. But not just the physical movements, but also the beliefs and values and downloading that from the people around us. So in order to create culture, you need kind of two things. You need to be able to learn and figure out who to learn from, and you need to have somebody willing to teach you. So unlike just male guerrilla dominance or something like that, amongst other mammals, we also have this thing called prestige. We actually get a big emotional payoff by paying it forward, by mentoring, by teaching other people. If I came to you and said, hey, Melinda, tell me everything you know about the brain, and you're like, screw you. That's taking me decades to get that knowledge. Well, culture spread ends, you know, so we have to actually, again, be cooperative and evolve for helping other people learn from us. And if we're an expert in some domain, we get enjoyment by helping others and transmitting knowledge.

Yeah.

So that actually, when you were talking about the mirror neuron thing and kind of jumping in on that piece, it reminded me that just within this last week of us having this conversation, I know the episode will come out a little bit later, but I had a listener reach out to me on LinkedIn and ask a question where they had recently listened to my episode on Mirror Neurons, which will be linked in the show notes. And he was asking about the statement of where mirror neurons don't fire for random gestures. Right. So if I'm just waving my arms around, it doesn't necessarily. I'm not like needing to learn from that experience. But it was talking about when you're picking up a teacup and how the context matters. So when you had crumbs around, it would fire neurons differently. If it looks like you're cleaning up when versus if you're going to be taking a sip, versus if it's just on a white background picking up the cup. And so he was asking this question of if we know why and how it sort of discerns which things have the context and how any of that works. Do you have an answer to that question?

Well, like I said, apparently there's evolutionary reasons for some of this. So some of it is modeling, so things that are out of our sight that we need to be able to imagine what someone's doing. So there's kind of continuity, and it's tied to theory of mind. And I want to be able to model what's inside of another person's head. Others have direct survival goals, things like feeding. We're very keyed in on how to eat and how to interpret people's gestures. And a lot of it is actually physical skill rehearsal. Again, because we have these physically retarded bodies in terms of development, kids can't practice running and jumping, but if they see an adult doing it, they're actually simulating that and wiring up the connections for voluntary muscle control without moving their muscles. So thinking again, from evolutionary standpoint, there are mirror neurons that do each of the things that I described, and it's because it helps with survival.

Right?

Yeah. That was the kind of explanation that I was giving in saying that I am not by any means any sort of, like, leading expert in mirror neurons. But the piece being, to me is sort of if somebody's just randomly kind of waving their arms around, as far as I'm concerned, and I see them across a room, I have no need to learn from what they're doing. It just looks strange and I'm not paying attention. Doesn't mean anything. So my neurons aren't firing. If someone says, oh, they're doing this new dance move, you know, then I can go, oh, and then I want to watch, and my neurons are going to fire.

So you bring up some kind of a related important thing. And I remember I was talking about culture spread and how we want to learn from what we want to teach others. But one of the huge puzzles that needed to be unlocked from an evolutionary standpoint is who do I learn from, what do I learn, and who do I learn from? And we want to basically learn from successful examples of people. Okay, so sometimes that often it meant older people because just by being older, they've survived, they're still around to teach us, so they must know something. But a lot of it has to do, again, with creating a sense of tribal cohesion. So across all cultures and ages, we prefer to learn from co ethnics, people that look like us, co gender. We don't get socialized into being, in your case, you know, a woman, because you're around women. It's. You actually are wired to say, okay, this person's like me, so I'm going to learn from them. People that speak the same language or even the same dialect. Even before we can understand words, we prefer the babble of people speaking our dialect, nonsense words, than the babble of people speaking another dialect. So all of that kind of reinforces tribalism and group cohesion. We're essentially going to Learn from people that are most like us.

So do you have any tips from your research and within the book as far as these days? Now, we want to overcome those biases in a lot of ways and to kind of open up those networks. And I know there's, you know, expanding circles of empathy have been. Has been talked about a little bit when Gleb Zabersky was on the show. Do you have thoughts on that process and how we can work with and against those traits?

You know, I'm not super hopeful, in a sense, if you're talking about society or politics, so I'll just. I'll just put that up front. I used to be an optimist, and now I feel that I'm becoming a realist, and the reality isn't looking too good. What I mean by that is our advantage wasn't as individuals, we're not the strongest or the smartest. In fact, because of the huge energy needs of our brain, we have to have weaker bodies. So we're kind of wimpy. We walk on two legs. Our shoulder joints are weak, our backs hurt. You know, this is just not a good thing. And that's all to give the brain the extra power that it needs. So here we are for banding in little, little tribes, learning cultural stuff from the people around us. And the whole point of it is to have an advantage against other tribes. So literally, from a survival standpoint, we want to cooperate inside the tribe. But much of human evolution can be described in terms of which other tribes we wiped out or, you know, dominated. And we naturally form into tribes. I mean, I remember I was in Australia once and I went to see an Aussie rules football, and it was in Brisbane. But I wasn't rooting for the Brisbane team. I was rooting, like the person that brought me there for the Carlton team. And I bought one of their little scarves and everything. And all of a sudden, I'm a Carlton fan, you know, in her family that went back three generations. But I kind of like got on the tribal bandwagon with her. So we'll form tribes over the stupidest kinds of things, and that's also part of our nature. And then once somebody locks into that tribe, it's very, very hard to have them accept other views. The other, the enemy. And we see that with these kind of social media echo chambers. And so the big task is pulling towards the center and somehow, like you say, having a larger circle of empathy. Actually, an interesting side note, I did read some sociological research that said if you think about These concentric circles of empathy. Right. That progressive and conservative people, I don't mean politically, but rather conservative as in cautious, tend to have different spheres of concern. That for conservative people, it's more local, it's about me, my family, my church, my town. Then for progressive people, it's more universal. It's my country or my all human beings on the planet or all sentient beings on the planet. I mean, you don't find a lot of PETA supporters among conservative people because caring about animals, which is even beyond caring about all people, is wider sphere of concern. And so I just found that to be very interesting. So one of the antidotes I give at the very end of my book is try to attach the larger and larger tribes, go meet with people that are different, talk to them. I mean, we all have the same basic needs, and that's what the book is about. Well, all 8 billion of us on the planet share, but we definitely have different cultural downloads inside of our heads.

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's where I think about it. And I talk about this in some of my presentations on change management. When you're looking at a company and where a lot of businesses get siloed, most businesses are very, very siloed. Right. And you end up having this team against that team. And if they win, the marketing versus.

Sales or sale or marketing versus finance.

Right.

Product marketing versus the world, I guess is sort of.

Yeah. Pretty much everyone against marketing. I can.

Yeah, we're cut from that same marketing cloth. So I get that. And when you embrace that and say, this is our team and we're against you, it's just so much more difficult to have a company that can be really successful that there, you're just making it so much more harder on everybody. Instead of saying, we are all team, company, whatever the business is, we're team Facebook, team Amazon, you know, whatever that is.

And even there, though, that's one of the things that there are antidotes to this in the sense of, like, we know that large synchronized group activities have an effect on us. So whether that's singing in the church choir or doing tai chi in the park, I mean, it can be even with total strangers that you've never met and that you know, or that you don't like people you don't like. But participation and synchronized group activities, even doing the wave in a sports stadium, actually makes us feel better and brings us closer together. So that's one way, if you can get people to do the dumbest whatever. Like you're at the Company event. Let's bring all the departments together and do the hokey pokey. Okay. That's going to have a positive impact.

That's good to know. I am potentially one of the weirdos of the world, which I know that anyway. So I'm definitely one of the weirdos of the world. So I am a person who will not do the wave.

Okay, well, you know, there's weird and there's that acronym, what is it? Western educated. You know, there's, there's that we are weird because in the west we go against basic human nature. Now culture is so strong. You know, we think we're individuals. That's a key component. Like I'm an individual. My particular happiness matters. You know, I have agency in the world and all of this stuff. That's a very western idea. Most of the world in the Far east, you know, thinks more communally, get along harmony. That's actually much more in line with the basic biology of it. But culture is so strong that even the notion that I'm an individual, that was implanted culturally into your head by your surrounding tribe.

Right.

You weren't in the west, you wouldn't think like that. You know, we think we're like, no person is an island. No one can tell me what to do or I'm such an iconoclast. Well, that notion of being an individual was itself something that was snuck into your head via back door culturally.

Right, I know. And it's a funny thing that was making me think of the. So the book the Time Machine from eons ago these days.

Right.

But so where you end up with.

Yeah, H.G. wells.

Yeah, yeah. With the. So you have the Morlocks of which if you think about. In a world where if this like sort of westernized culture versus others, I mean, we really would develop just so differently in the traits that go on in our group versus others. And it's not sunlight or not, but it does have an impact overall if it's allowed to perpetuate long enough.

Yeah. And by the way, I'll just talk about individualism and loneliness and kind of that whole axis. So we're the most hypersocial of all animals. I mentioned that we're there to model the modern part of the brain is there to model all the social interactions. We have a close group size. Robin Dunbar was. Did a lot of research around this. About 100 to 200 people that we can have direct relationships with. And outside of that, you know, it's. It's more of strangers. You know, we can Cooperate at the level of ideas with billions of people, but not know them personally. But one of the things that's key about us is this hypersocial nature and this need for connection. All mammals have it, but we have it to an extreme degree. So the worst thing you can do to somebody is isolate them and all the social sanctions. If you don't spread the appropriate culture, if you don't bend to the will of your tribe, if you don't put the right political sign in for your front yard based on where you live, there's this escalating kind of degree of compliance. We're there, we're kind of all censors of other people's behaviors, keeping them in line to make sure that culture spreads effectively in our. Our tribe. So, you know, it could be ostracism, it could be denial of economic or mating opportunities. It could be banishment, it could be death ultimately, if it's extreme enough. And that is there to keep that kind of cultural fidelity. But, like, one of the worst things you can do to someone is cast them out of the group, right? I used to live near Philadelphia when I went to high school. There's that famous art museum with Rocky, you know, pumping his fist on top of the steps, not too far from that, like within a quarter mile. That is the penitentiary. And this was like, in the early 1800s, they developed this thing where the idea was that human beings are intrinsically good. That was the belief. And the only reason they become criminals is because they had bad influences around them. So if you just keep them in a cell with the good book, with The Bible, for 24 hours a day, they'll come back to their better true nature. And basically, people went insane, right? And you see this in the maximum security prisons where they keep the lights on all the time. You're in your cage 23 hours a day. We cannot be isolated. That literally drives us insane.

Which that's why, you know, solitary confinement is the big threat, is inhuman.

It's just we're gonna look back on this 50, 100 years from now, if we're all still here, and say, that was just. Oh, my God, that was so dickens, you know?

Yeah, I think we all get it on some level. But it's when I guess those punishments come in or whatever it is, or you think about ostracizing the group. I mean, even as, you know, as we're developing as children, right, where the group of the cool kids don't want to hang out with you, or you're not part of that you weren't invited.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's why all those. I have two teenagers. It's very painful going through junior high and high school and all. I mean, their problems are just as real and they have strong hormones as well. But the social stuff, that's when it first develops as you transfer your allegiance from your parents to your larger group of peers. And that's the transition that teenagers are making. In fact, when you ask them about their self image, they'll access that part of their brain that has to do with the model of how other people perceive them. It's not even like you asked me about me. This is me. No, it's like you asked me about me. What do my friends think of me or other people think. Right. So that becomes much more important. If once you're a parent, you get to that stage, you see that you have no influence on them. Their peers do is they're transferring and reattaching to a different tribe. For mom and dad.

Yeah. That made me think of. I'm a big fan of doves real beauty campaign stuff that they've done over the years and specifically where they had the. And it might have been. Actually, now that I'm saying it might have been secret, but whoever had the like a girl campaign to say if you throw like a girl, if you play, if you run like a girl, if you do this like a girl. And there you can see the small children, young girls, where if you say run like a girl and they just run right. As hard as they can because they're. But there was the certain point where it becomes this wimpy mockery of whatever.

The action is that happens right in those teenage years. Like if you look at girls school performance, they're always outperforming boys, especially early on. And then when you hit puberty, boom in a couple of years, self esteem declines. You care about what your friends all think about you. And a lot of them go off the rails academically because of that reason.

Right.

And so knowing that if there was a simple answer, this would be something that was solved already. But as a. You know, many people listening have children of that age or soon to be or just if we think about. Because we keep those traits over time, especially if it's worked for us to feels like it's worked for us. You know, maybe we keep some of those tendencies as we get into business and relationships and might be, you know, we still have that premise of being like a girl and that that's bad. And all these phrasings and Such. Do you have any tips as it's, you know, raising good humans and, you know, sort of beyond that point, I guess, or the way we can change in ourselves.

So what you're talking about is changing your cultural package, right? And I think that there's. There's. At the wiring level, the first five are critical. Knowing that you're loved, that you're physically safe, all of that. In a way, it's like our brains are so big. By the way, here's another odd evolutionary thing. We're born premature. You know, they always talk about babies that are up to three months old as being in the fourth trimester because they're still developing, but they just couldn't have fit through the woman's, you know, the birth canal and the. And the hips if their head got any bigger. So we kind of do a lot of our brain development out of the womb, even though it should be prenatal. So the first five years is almost like at the level of whatever you experience, then that's hardwired, that becomes part of your biology, that's even independent of culture or anything like that. So that can't be changed. And so it's really important to make the first five, from a nutritional standpoint, sleep standpoint, social attachment, that stuff's really critical, and you can't undo it later in life. Unfortunately, that part pretty much becomes you in terms of social attitudes and things like that. I think that any exercises that invoke empathy are important. So call it. My wife's a social worker. She talks a lot about cultural competency and you have training in it. And it's like understanding the beliefs of certain groups and how they approach things. Well, you know, you have to. If you make people model what the behaviors or the experience of other people, that that automatically kicks in. Empathy. And then they have a more so direct experience with other people and forcing them to walk a mile in other people's shoes. They. That's your best prescription, really.

Right.

Well, that's the. That power of novelty and story and how our brains are really wired for that experience. It gets back to the mirror neurons and all that too, so.

Well, okay, but I want to say something about storytelling, because storytelling has got a couple of evolutionary principles. We love language, and that's one of our edge advantages evolutionarily. But primarily storytelling is there one thing is to simulate experience and do things that we can't directly do. Like, I don't know if you've seen the movie Sophie's Choice with Meryl Streep. She's World War II concentration camp, she has to decide which of her children to send to the gas chambers. I mean, nobody wants to be in that situation, Right? But you can vicariously live it by watching that movie without doing the damage to yourself. So it's a form of simulation, just like REM sleep is a form of simulation. It's like running away from the bear. We actually stop all of our voluntary muscular movements so we don't hurt ourselves, but we're simulating nightmare scenarios very often because that's training for how to do it and waking life without paying the price. Same thing for stories, right? Told stories, movies. But the other really important, underestimated reason for storytelling is to maintain cultural cohesion. Again, it's to maintain the values of our tribe so that knowledge spreads faster and we have an evolutionary edge. The problem with that, and this is where I have a problem with just kind of the more simplistic argument about mirror neurons is the cultural package determines how we examine and experience the same story. Let me give you a quick example that I use in the book. So if I told you a story about the matador who deftly sideswipes with his cape, and as the charging bull passes an inch from his body, plunges the sword from above into his shoulder blades and hits its heart and kills it, right? So if you're in Spain, some people would say, okay, that's about the noble matador, about being the impeccable warrior, about heroism, about standing up to giant forces of uncontrolled nature. And then if you're with PETA, you're thinking, okay, this is animal torture, and by buying tickets to this, you're sanctioning it, and this is barbaric and should be stopped immediately. Same objective story I just told you is going to be experienced very differently based on your cultural package, Right?

And I've been talking a lot about context in all of the application of behavioral science, behavioral economics, and knowing that context is hugely important. And that's where you have that example there of knowing what the backstory is that someone has when and who you're talking to.

Let's call it values.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

So, you know, we're talking about that concentric circles of empathy. And so let's take conservative people versus progressive people. And again, same objective reality, which is in the US, family separation at the border of people trying to claim asylum and kids in cages and stuff like that. So for the progress, aggressive people, it's like, are you kidding me? We're all human beings. I can't Believe you're doing that to children. Right. And for the more conservative people, they have a more local sphere of concern. It's like, well, doesn't look like me. Not in my town, didn't go to my church. Right. So to them, it's outside of their sphere of concern. So they're interpreting it very differently.

Yeah. Like you said, I feel like I've already asked the like, so how do we change that? But I think that kind of shows which side of the progressive conservative where I land.

Well, I'm very open about that, you know. Yeah. I'm becoming a raging, raging communist in my old age. You know, I was born in the Soviet Union and I've kind of come full circle to that. No, I'm just kidding.

Oh, goodness. Well, and I think, you know, we touched that touches a little bit where you're talking about the way we're talking about the value, the story, the understanding, the motivations, and some of that is very tied in. I want to mention Will Leach and his book Marketing to Mind States.

Yeah, we have Marketing to Mind States. Yeah.

And he's been on the show twice now since he's one of my colleagues at Texas A and M University in the new certificate program where we're teaching. And so I believe that might be. Be sort of how we got connected as well.

Yeah, well, he's read my book and was kind enough to provide a blurb for it.

Yeah, yeah, He's. He is a super awesome guy. I'm a big fan and I think it ties in a lot in some of understanding that brain space and how that applies into marketing, messaging as well as interpersonal relationships and all of this, you know, it's all tied in together. And you know, Nira Al, who I believe also had a blurb for your book and he's been on the show.

Yes, he did. Yeah. Yours had two great books, Hooked and Indistractable is his latest one.

Yeah, yeah, yep. That's. He came on and talked about Indistractable and that's where I think it's very. A similar path like you're talking about. You know, he wrote Hooked and then kind of the Undoing.

Yes.

And then that's like you're saying you had your work and now looking at this unleashed your primal brain and how that is a different perspective.

Well, I'd say my reason for writing the book is this isn't an applied book. This. You get tons of insights out of it if you're a marketer or business leader or sales or persuasion. But this is just as important for relationships. I cover gender differences and culture like I said, tribalism, belief systems, all of that. Or for personal development, understanding creativity and sleep and whether chasing happiness is a good idea at the neurochemical level and the side effects of that. So this is really like the operating system being human 101. It's not an applied book. It's just to distill all that in a non scientific, non jargony way and make it accessible.

Yeah, just a more in depth of where a lot of the concepts that the listeners have heard on the show and where we talk about how the brain works and if you want more and way more on what that all means and just a really fascinating dig in on the brain and how it got to be the way that it is to understand that on a deeper level, this book of unleashing your primal brain is very much the way to go.

Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean I just looking at it is explaining the why behind it. I mean I'm a practitioner like you. I was in marketing. Right. So there's behavioral economists, there's people changing habits at the individual level, like you know, invest for your retirement and eat your broccoli kind of stuff. Right. Or social policy or medical imaging. But everybody's like those proverbial men around the elephant touching different parts of it and describing it differently. And I'm saying like here's the elephant. It's evolution. If you want to understand the why behind it, you know, you have to see how it all evolved and then you. All of this stuff kind of makes more sense.

Yeah, absolutely. Well there will definitely be a link for the book in the show notes.

That's easy. It's primalbrain.com so that's.

That was where we were going. Right. So what's the best way to get in contact with you and find more information, which it sounds like checking out? Primalbrain.com is the.

Well if you want to get in touch with me about speaking or the online marketing consulting or anything like that, that's Timash.com also pretty easy T I M A s h but primalbrain.com specifically about the book. It has a table of contents, the intro and somewhere where to get it. Of course. And it's available in ebook, audiobook. I know some people prefer that. And in the US pre release autograph copies you can get on my site directly. Woohoo.

Awesome. Well that is fantastic. Again we'll have all those links and just thank you again Tim for joining me today and you thank talking about the new book and all the amazing work that you've been doing on the brain.

No, it's. It's my absolute pleasure.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about unleashing your primal brain today? For me, I always love digging in a little deeper to find that story behind the story, to ask a great question and find something that others don't necessarily see, to find out why we do the things we do and how to better communicate with anyone. I really love how Tim's work gets so deep into our nature to understand human behavior at this primal level. It's really cool to see how we've evolved over time and how that impacts the decisions people make today as well as what makes us successful or areas for potential improvement. There are several episodes linked for you in the show notes, including some some that have come out after this one originally aired that I think are really.

Tied in to what Tim and I.

Discussed in this interview. First off, you'll find my conversation with Marcus Collins on his book for the Culture. Because Tim talked so much about culture today and how our tribal tendencies impact behavior, I knew that conversation with Marcus would be a great fit here and it's such a great book and conversation. I've also linked to my first interview with Gleb Sapersky because we talked about something similar in this that conversation as well. Plus, I've got my conversation with Doug Kenrick and David Lundberg Kenrick on their book Solving Modern Problems with a Stone Age Brain. My top recommended next episode after this one because it's so related to everything we talked about with Tim and taking that to the next level of application in life and work in a really cool way.

You're going to love that one.

And in case you're wondering why I chose to refresh this episode today, it's because of my conversation this coming Friday with Siggy Hale, a neuroscientist who has made his way into industry but has over a decade of work and research in neurodiversity, specifically adhd. In our conversation we talk about how to understand your brain's natural tendencies and work with them so you can optimize for your brain type. With a big fan focus on adhd, it's such a fascinating conversation. I can't wait to share it with you.

If you aren't yet subscribed to the.

Brainy Business podcast, now's a great time to do so. To be sure you don't miss that episode when it comes out in a few days and to make it easy. There's a link in the show notes, of course, along with links to those related past episodes and books, as well as a timestamp summary of the episode and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and atthebrainybusiness.com 334 and just like that, episode 334 on unleashing your primal brain with Tim Ash is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Siggy Hale discussing neurodiversity at work. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don'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. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.