399. Engaging Minds: How Clear Communication Can Drive Better Choices with Max Mawby

Welcome to episode 399 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why people buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Max Maube, Managing director of Applied Behavioral Science at Thinks Insight and Strategy. 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'm joined by Max Maube. Max is a leading practitioner in applying insights from behavioral science to drive positive change over an applied behavioral science career spanning the private and public sectors. His research has influenced major regulation and his intervention design has influenced products live in the market. Yes, you're going to hear a bit about both areas today. Max has pioneered the use of online experiments at the Behavioral Insights team Varian Kantar Public and now thinks to help clients make confident investments and rollout decisions. Max is passionate about applied behavioral science and how it can improve our lives. In particular, he's interested in driving positive financial behaviors, sustainable decisions, and using behavioral insight to make design inclusive for all. 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 my top related past episodes, articles and books. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 399now. Let's jump right in. Max.

Ma.

Welcome to the Brainy Business podcast. Like for the world, we were just having a conversation. I feel like, Max, you have to explain because you said this is like part of your history of teaching people to speak with an English accent, which I am apparently terrible at because here, here in the US I would have said ma bee and I was like.

Morbi, more in your throat.

So. And now it's all in my own mind. I will. I feel like I will never get it right, but I'll get over that. It's my new mission to be able to say your name properly at our next meeting and interaction. So, Max, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast. Excited to have you here. For everyone who does not yet know you, can you please share a little bit about your background and the work that you do and no, this is like the intro and we're like really going to get into it too. So you. Yeah, we got this.

Sure. So my name is Max Morbi. Delighted to be here. Thank you. So I'm the managing director for Applied Behavioral Science at Thinks Insight and Strategy. So what that means is I try and apply insights from psychology, economics, all of the other kind of basket of academic fields that feed into Applied Behavioral Science to get to good outcomes for our clients. And I think really interestingly for me, those clients are public. I do have a history working for the UK government, also worked for public sector research organisations including Behavioural Insights Team, private sector organizations. I do a lot of work and have done a lot of work in financial decision making and third sector organizations, which is really fascinating and interesting because often they have such interesting and fascinating projects to bring you. So yeah, I started my career as a, as a civil servant Red Nudge. I fell down the rabbit hole like this is a brilliant way of approaching things. And I went to study in Copenhagen and really retrained, doing a master's there and then was lucky enough to work at the Behavioral Insights team where I founded their financial behavior team. I also worked in the financial services industry in fintech, in a little fintech called Plum, and then co founded the behavioral practice at Virion before I ended up at thinx.

And as I'm sure everyone who's listening can appreciate, this is where we're saying, all right, tell me more about this one and I want to hear more about that. And like how. What was that like? Right. So when I so first shout out to our mutual friend Joe Evershed for making the introduction from Gorilla Experiment Builder, we'll link to her episode of course in the show Notes for Everybod. But she had said, hey, you two should talk. You should really have Max on the show. And then as I started digging in on your background, I was really interested and as I told you, a lot of it being helping to build this behavioral science practice into an organization and knowing that that's something you've kind of done a few times now and coming into to think. So let's just know that the bulk of this is just understanding the amazing story that is Max. Like that's what we're doing today. I feel like. So whether it's from the beginning or wherever you think the right starting point is of some of that behavioral work of like how you even go about being that first in a space. Because I know there are a lot of people listening that want to be able to help their teams to infuse some behavioral science, but aren't really sure where to start.

Okay, so maybe I should start with a story of a failure that happened to me when I did. I read Nudge quite early. I think I read it pretty much when it came out. And at the time I was a graduate civil servant in the British civil service and really was very, very enthused by this idea that oh, it isn't just about pushing harder and making the perfect argument. There are actually other ways that we can get to change. And that felt pretty revolutionary for me at the time. I gave the book to a senior civil servant at the time, said, you know, we should really, really be focusing on this and, and really be working on this. And I don't think I ever got the book back. Certainly didn't ever end up doing that work in that part of my career. So I suppose the first thing I'd say maybe is that, you know, you will have probably a couple of tries at this if you're looking to get into this field or you're thinking about, you know, how you could apply it within your existing job. You know, you will fail probably at least once. And I certainly did before I ended up being a bonafide a applier of the field.

Yes. Right. So the stick to it. Iveness. Right. We're going to be. Don't feel discouraged if that first person or those first couple of people don't get it or that first company doesn't get it. You know, long game sort of approach.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think, you know, the fantastic privilege of being able to be in this field is that often like certainly the way I've done it working in Behavioral Insights Team and now at thinx is as a consultant. And what that means is that you get lots and lots and lots of different challenges. And that means that there'll be many where you fail to learn behavioral science and there'll be some where it just really, really works. Maybe slight tangent here, but I actually think that there being a bit of humility about where behavioral science is an applicable approach to drive change or indeed evaluate and measure change and where it is maybe not so applicable is something that I think is really important for the field where it is now. There was this, there was this kind of mania between, I don't know, like 2014, 2017, like where just everything became a nudge. Absolutely everything was a nudge. And I think we're kind of recovering from that now and starting to work out where it fits. So I suppose, yeah, my main piece of advice would be, you know, try and find a way to line up lots of opportunities and then see whether where it would Fit whether that's within your existing or organization or whether you are just, you know, trying to work out an organization that powerful science would actually be a useful addition to what they do.

Right. And helping the. It's as much about the organization being ready for it as it is. Like if you can find a champion somewhere, right. If you're not high enough in whatever the organization is or you're looking to enter a new team, if there's someone that gets it that's up there, right. That can be enough to be able to get some, some leeway. And I know we've had people on the show too, that one of the tips that has come up a lot is, and I, I definitely share this is like you don't have to start with a big, giant, expensive, high profile project to be able to start testing things. Right. You can do a little something, be taking care to understand, like have a control group with it, do your due diligence on things. So and know what you're looking to test. And then you can show like, look, we had a lift from here to here, I tried this thing. And then when someone's interested, we've hooked them, then we can start to talk about the behavioral pieces under it and say, you know, if we had some money, if we had a, if I had some space, some time for this, imagine what we could do.

Yeah. And if you think about the real success of the field, I think certainly in policy where I started was that it did offer actually quick, cheaper than many of the other options, ways to get some change. And actually some change for a low price is often actually quite attractive. Just in the policy field. Right. There's plenty of private sector or charitable sector places where you can deliver something interesting at a low cost and that can be the start of a journey which you can then actually look to scale up and look to find more impactful ways of working for.

Sure, definitely. Do you have any favorite projects or insights that you learned from like maybe your time at Behavioral Insights Team or from something else?

Sure. So I mean, I may be off the top of my head. Some of the work that we've been doing, which we did use Gorilla for, which is fantastic and fantastic platform. Love working with Joe and the team was some work we did in the UK on pensions and looking at how people can actually make better decisions with their pensions. So there's this very difficult problem which is set up by the regulation in the the UK which essentially means that many people who need advice on their finances, whether it's their pensions or whether it's some other aspect, can't actually access it. Because essentially what the regulation does is set up anything that provides a personalized recommendation as financial advice or regulated financial advice. And there are very serious kind of requirements on anybody providing that and pretty scary liabilities if you get something wrong or you make an incorrect recommendation. And everything else which is basically just providing information is financial guidance. And so we worked with the British pensions industry and what we were trying to do was answer the research question, well, what if we could provide personalized guidance? In this case it was a digital journey because we were testing it online. And what we were able to show is that that kind of just bold information which we used as the control group actually only led to 14% of people in our experiment being able to make a good financial decision about withdrawing a lump sum from their pension. When we added in a personalized recommendation, personalized guidance and we had some nice simple little choice architecture in there. A an old collaborator of mine called it the Drink Me button. Just very simple like colour popping button, making it easy to make the right decision. We put it all the way up to 76% of people able to get to a good financial outcome when making a withdrawal or a lump sum withdrawal from their pension. And I really love that project obviously because it had a great whacking, great effect. I just mentioned two of the arms they work for, but also because I think it's a really great example of where if there is something that isn't going right that you can see an old client in this case saw that there's a big gap here in terms of how we could help people. But you are constrained from actually testing something out there in the live world. In this case because of regulations, you can through online experimentation get some really powerful results. And we've talked to much of the regulatory architecture in the UK after this and there's been some really, really fantastic initial consultation policy proposals which I like to think we may have influenced off the back of it. So yeah, if you're asking, that's probably the one that comes to, to mind at the moment.

Well, I love that and for all sorts of reasons of course, as you said, big impact, big results and to show that you can be. I know that for there are a lot of people, whether it's financial services industries or anything else that's listening. Having to have and train a person and like a team of people that can be giving this type of advice is something that is very expensive and so to know and of course you know Developing the system that can give personalized devices also expensive. But being able to know that there are some digital solutions that can be effective and be valuable over time, as we're looking into versions with AI, machine learning, what have you, where you can be leveraging technology to give great advice that then maybe a human can follow up on and have conversations with someone is something that's really, I think, exciting and should be exciting for people to know. You can work the behavior and the technology in together. They don't, you know, they go hand in hand. Even if it may not seem like it on the surface sometimes.

Yeah. Amen. And I think, you know, half of I always, always think, correct me if you think I'm wrong, that half of kind of applying behavioral science is the great ideas that we draw from the literature. And so much work me and my team do is like, well, here's this piece in the literature and here's this fantastic way of achieving an outcome that you want to achieve. So the nice little example from this is that drink me button, which is essentially like, press this button and good things will happen. And there's oodles of literature about like visual salience and color popping that we just drew on for that. Right. So that's half of it, but the other half is actually producing evidence. And I think if you are sitting in an industry body or you're sitting anywhere else in a public or charitable sector organization and you're wanting to get something done, the empiricism of behavioural science is actually your way of making the case because it makes a really clear. If you have a clear result like that, it makes a really clear investable case for your board, for whoever the decision maker is to go. Well, actually there's, there's some pretty strong causal evidence here. And yes, it may not generalize perfectly to every situation, but within the experiment that's been conducted, we have high confidence that this is what's happened. And that is a kind of persuasive form of evidence that I find really works. I suppose.

Yes, for sure. And I very much. I'm always saying, you know, context matters. We, we need to understand the literature. And like you were saying, as far as the generalizability, which is nothing is perfectly generalizable ever. Right. I guess there's something that would fall outside of that, but like, it's not a. This worked this one time. And so it will work exactly the same way in every single situation forever and ever. Right. That just doesn't really happen. So we want to understand what were they doing what was happening there. How does that translate to what we're doing over here? What might we do that's similar? What might we need to do differently because of who we talking to? Really understanding all those contextual pieces is so important when you're going to design the experiment, the project, whatever it happens to be. So I love this segue because I wanted to ask you about the. So obviously you have an extensive background in the field and so you already know a lot of the literature that you would go to in the literature review phase. However, if you like, let's say so client comes to you. I find often the problem they think is the problem isn't the real problem. So there's some like finding what the problem is and then you're thinking about where we're going and literature view. Can you walk through kind of those phases you would go through with the project? And it could be with this example you just gave, or maybe it'll be more hypothetical. If it needs to be. What does that look like? That as someone who's listening to the show, who I know is thinking, all right, I'm going to take my notes, I'm ready to go, go. I want, I want to practice, right? Like, what would you say is that kind of path that you would go through with a typical client?

So I mean, the first thing to say is if you want to do it, I mean, give us a call. You can, you can Google my name. And we are a consultancy.

Hey, it's in the show notes, man. It's here. We're ready.

But yeah, so let's say, yeah, let's say you, you come with a problem like that. And I think actually the projects that I described is open source. It's out there if you Google it or we'll put it in the show notes. And actually there is at least a presentation and probably a written report as well which describes this process that we went through. And I think I completely agree. Like, you will get a problem and you're like, there are many aspects to that problem and you will want to explore that. And I think before you go about suggesting solutions or solutionizing, as someone in my team challenges me sometimes jumping to solutionizing, you definitely want to do as much exploratory work as possible. And I think the first thing that I often do is try and set a structure around the specific problem. So whether that's just a user journey, whether that's something more researchy like theory of change or a logic model, and then we'll use that to structure I think the discussion about well, what actually is the problem? What are the actual maybe research questions if we're in a research world that we're going to ask and therefore once we've got the research questions like what are the methods that are appropriate to answer those research questions. And I think if you can do that first bit with clients it's always really great. Although as I'm sure you realize and I certainly do sometimes you get broad research questions and that's kind of not on the cards but I really like it. And as we did in the ABI work we were able to work with them on that. And for example on pensions, there are many pension decisions which would benefit from a little bit of personalised guidance. So having done research with the industry and with customers as well, we felt that withdrawing a lump sum was actually the clearest case where a bit of personalised guidance could help. But there are many other decisions on the pension journey where you could actually do some work. Things like setting a withdrawal rate, things like actually deciding how to invest, you know, all of these are potential options, personalised guidance. But it was that kind of winnowing out and narrowing down at the front end of this project that actually really helped us focus on a place where it turns out personalized guidance was really, really helpful.

Right, yeah. So you went through. There are a lot of follow up now research questions. Part of what we were talking about earlier, right of saying like you do the first thing get some good results and then that can be, you know, something that's going to help you to be able to have like people realize like oh yeah, we want to be doing more of this testing because look at what we might be able to see if we, we move forward. So you have the research question. This may for our listener like this is either provided to them of saying like well this is what you need to figure out or ideally they were able to help shape the research question in some way but that exists now. What's the next step? Are we jumping right into literature review? Are we looking for where we want people to go versus where they are now doing some, some east. You know what, what's up?

So I actually, I should, should shout out. So I'm helping out on the nudge a thon this year which is a UK student competition where lots of different teams compete to come up with some fantastic behaviorally informed interventions and projects to for example evaluate the impact of them. That yeah, that can really drive change in the world. And I was talking to them about different Frameworks and we met and east was mentioned and I think the criticism that it got from these bright young things of east was that it is very solutions focused but it doesn't have a way of kind of forming the problem. So if you're talking about east, you know I started my behavioral science career, behavioral Insights team.

I should and please do elaborate on what east is for those who aren't yet familiar that are listening. I know I threw out the term.

You've thrown it to me. I'm going, oh yeah, see you start talking about it. Well, I can shout out, just say that there's a reason that the Behavioural Insights team are so famous and have done so much great work is because they were one of the first places who really were able to simply summarize a lot of the literature that exists and put it into a usable format. And that's all east is. It's a mnemonic. Let's make it. If you want change to happen, firstly make it easy, it's definitely the most important. Secondly, make it attractive and that's not just physical attractiveness, that's like attract attention. Thirdly, make it social, as in we are all social creatures and are very influenced by the social media around us. And finally make it timely. Like actually change happens at moments where people are open to it. And this has been popularized, kind of renamed by Katie Milkman et al as like the fresh start effect. So essentially what east is, is a really good way of if you don't want to read all the literature, just having a quick, having a quick mnemonic to remember if you want change to happen, try these things. So I wouldn't jump to it at that point, I think is my answer to your question.

For sure. So then what is the next step? Do we do literature review, you know, and, and what are your key sources? As if you're going to be doing some literature review. Like I said, I know that you have stuff up here. As we get familiar and become experts in a field, we start to say, oh, that's this. Like you said, oh, Katie Milkman, Fresh start effect. Like boop, got it right. But for people that don't have those things yet, where, where would you recommend that they start? Like you have a new person on your team.

So I think the advice I'd give a new person on my team would probably be quite different to someone who was just coming into it. I think if someone who's just coming into it is wanting to use it, I actually would say starting with east is quite A good is quite a good way because it's a simple and easy way in. If it was on my team, I would be expecting them to have that.

Sure to have that.

That's not too old a term of the literature. And I would actually be wanting them just to be able to pretty quickly use a search engine for literature, whether it's Google Scholar or whatever else, whatever other platform that we are using, and be able to actually kind of already be forming the questions because they know the kind of bank of literature that's out there. So yeah, I think once we've got the questions we're looking to think about actually is there any existing evidence on it? I'd be actually looking to the literature as soon as we could. But I think if you're not an expert in the field and you're just looking to come into it and you've read some of the existing, like the big name books, just as I did when I started actually, you know, I would say easter pretty good place. I mean it's not that young anymore, so the literature has moved on, but it's a very good way in, I think.

Right, right, yeah. And so we've got Google Scholar as an option for some people to go investigating, learn some new stuff. Do, do you have any top journals or things like as we're looking at what's coming up into the future, any what, what do you read when you're looking to see what's, what's new?

So maybe this is revealing too much, but I'm not actually sitting there reading my favorite journals. On what?

On the, on the reg. You're not just like daily reading a full new journal? Okay, all right.

No, sadly I'm not. I am reading those things, but the way that I discover them is actually through social media. So actually Twitter or whatever it's called now has its problems, but actually if what you're looking to do is get into a very specific part of human knowledge, actually you will find a community on something like Twitter. That's just what I like. That will be able to direct you actually towards some of the cool research that's coming out. And I find that actually that's probably the most common way that I discover cool new research is actually somebody who I respect or whose work I like actually getting really excited about a piece of work that's been published in a journal. And I mean I'm not an academic, so I shouldn't talk about the quality of different journals, but I definitely have read quite a lot of stuff in behavioural Public policy. Coming from government world originally and actually I find often in Nature Human behavior, you will often see quite simple parsimonious papers which if you're into behavioral science, then you should know that actually the founders of the field, one of their big things was writing really simple, not too long papers. And actually I like any journal that's willing to put, I suppose in my head. Natural Human Behavior is one of those awesome.

I love that. Thank you for sharing and for everyone. We always put links in the show notes about connecting with you, which we'll get to as we kind of close out the show in a minute. But if you're on the X Twitter, whatever we call it these days, as you say, what's your handle? Who, who are you out there on Twitter? Do we not know who you are?

Off the top of my head?

No. I'll find you, I'll send it to you. Funny. I love it. We'll make sure we're gonna. You'll have so many new followers now that you'll have to remember your, your handle for, for sharing. So. Okay, perfect. Well, before we indeed close out the show here, do you have any. Oh, I know, I know, I know. The thing I want to talk to you about was plain numbers. We are going to talk about plain numbers. So now that I've said that and people are saying, what's that thing? You get to go tell us about it.

So plain numbers are a fantastic social enterprise in the UK who do brilliant work where what they're trying to do is simplify the way that companies are communicating with their customers, particularly about numbers. And for any of you who are UK listeners, you may have heard of something called the Plain English campaign. I don't actually know whether that's international. Do you recognize it, Melina?

The term in plain English sort of deal is something I've heard a lot, but and I'm not sure if it is sourced from here, much as we were talking about the term of like lobbing a softball, we don't understand the origins. If anyone listening knows we. Where that came from, we would like to know that as well. But yes, so I've heard that as a phrase and I don't know which came first, the phrase or the project of plain English.

Okay, well, yeah, I'm pretty sure it is originally UK based and actually it's essentially the numbers version of that in how I would talk about it. And sorry, Mike, if you're listening to this, he's the CEO and I've mischaracterized it, but yeah, essentially they do fantastic work where they apply the expertise of Mike, who's the CEO, who founded the enterprise, who ran a numeracy charity for 10 years to actually how companies communicate. And I did some research to help test their approach and was able to see, really, I should emphasize that I've talked, talked about an example of my recent project where we had really, really big changes and I'm going to talk about another example now. I should emphasize for anybody who's listening that if you're running lots of experiments, you have to be prepared that most of the time it's not going to knock things out of the park. It's not going to be huge, huge changes. But for plain numbers and the example I gave earlier, it really, really was. And I was just really blown away by the strength of the changes in actual functional understanding. When we applied the plate numbers approach to things like people's water bills, people's credit card information, there was all kinds of different things in the first project. And they really are going from strength to strength and fantastic. To see the work that they're doing and to see the work that I did with them in UK regulation. There's this fantastic new regulation in the UK called the Consumer Duty, which focuses firms regulatory duties on financial outcomes of their customers, not just broad disclosure, which for anybody in the behavioral world tears their hair out and they're like, oh, you must tell people these 60 things. Well, you know, people can take in about three or four in a normal sitting, you know, so the work that I did with them ended up in regulation and they are going from strength to strength. In fact, I talked to them earlier today. So yeah, for anybody who's thinking in the financial services industry about how to communicate numbers, give them a Google and yeah, have a look because I think the work they do is brilliant, perfect.

And so for an example of like you're saying on a water bill or something, or the financial statement, can you share a little bit about like what it might have been and then a recommendation of what it changes, change too, to help people kind of visualize and see what we're talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I should emphasize I'm not the keeper of the plain numbers approach, I'm merely a teacher of it. But obviously it uses many of the concepts that we are familiar with in applied behavioral science and things like making it easier for people to understand something. It sounds banal, but actually when you think about many financial services companies or actually utilities companies are also really, really offenders. In this case, they will put Very complex algorithms for how they may have calculated your interest or calculated your water bill. And actually no normal person actually is going to be able to understand the massive long algorithm that takes up two lines of the page and certainly not going to be able to understand it in the time that they take reading their bill. So actually, if you can do the maths for people, I think that is the most impactful part of the approach that Mike and his colleagues work on. But, you know, you can Google it and have a look. And there's many other things that they suggest which work brilliantly according to the experiments that I ran for them.

Perfect. Well, we'll definitely link to that in the show notes as well for people to check out. But I do think it's funny where sometimes even where it'll be like the expert and then you ask, okay, so can you tell me what this means? And even they have to like really dig in and say, well, but if, I guess if this, then it, this would be if your disclosure information and the stuff is at that level, like there's some opportunity to make it easier for people to understand. Especially because I know for the companies and people that are list that listen to this show, you want people to make good choices for themselves to understand what's going on. We're in it to help people. Right. There may be some bad people out there. You're not welcome in, in the audience, so, you know, get out. Right. But like we want the, the people that listen to the show want to help people to do good things, to make good choices about their own finances or whatever else. And so if you can find a way to communicate, that's going to make it easier for them to do what's in their best interest and something they like. I mean, that's what behavioral science is all about. That's like what drew me to the field of helping people while they still have that free choice and saying things in plain English, plain numbers, plain whatever your language is. Right. But like plain words, plain numbers. It just again, like you said, it sounds like, well, well, of course. Right, yeah. And are you actually doing it a lot of the time? We're. We're not. When you stop and, and look at it, you're really not. Yeah.

Amen. And, and one of the things that keeps me working in this field is that actually there's conversation to be had with a lot of people about whether that is babying people. And actually I really don't think it is. I think it's fundamentally humane to go, well, actually how much realistic attention does this person have to pay to this credit card bill? And then you think about, well, what can a normal person realistically take in in terms of information given the amount of attention that they can pay. And you know, I hope it's not news to anyone that most people don't read the bills that they get for any length of time. And therefore that means that you're just, it's just better for your customers and it will be better for your business, I'd argue, because you're going to get people understanding a little bit more if you can simplify what you're presenting to them in that minimal time. Now, it's always possible and I think you should always think about adding lots and lots more information. You will have legal disclosure requirements, but you layer that information and you get people in and you recruit more of their attention or allow them to pay more of their attention. Like don't overload people because it's fundamentally not good for anyone. Right. Like who wants to be reading their like credit card bill and working out how the interest is been charged like.

Line by line as we're having to just be really like with a magnifying glass. Yeah, we don't have the capacity to do that with everything all of the time because there's too much information coming at us everywhere. And people have families and other things and jobs and stuff. Right. We and Instagram. Right. There's, there's distraction out there too.

So make them stupid, you know, and that's, you know, the classic is like, oh well, you didn't read it, you're stupid. Or you know, you're, you're a poor decision maker or something. No, you're just human. And you know, like, obviously there will be times when you will need to recruit enough of people's attention to read a 60 page piece. You know, terms and conditions. You know, maybe you're buying a house or you get a mortgage or something, but even then I'd argue that there are enough people who won't, that it's in your interest. You're designing these things to try and layer that information and not overload just that level of attention that all of us have to pay normally.

Right. If the only way it can work is if someone is able to give it undivided attention for 100 pages worth of reading, it's probably not going to work out very well. Right?

Yeah. I mean, it's amazing how many, how much of my career has been about trying to, trying to work on that problem because you know, you can be working very hard and you can think, oh, we've told them everything we need to tell them. And actually you're doing quite the opposite.

Right? Right. Yeah, for sure. Creating that Overwhelm, which I have an episode on Overwhelm and what it does to decision making that I will be linking in the show notes for everyone along with several others based on the conversation we've had here and books and things and your contact information. And so for everyone who's wanting to learn more, get in touch. Follow you at Maximus Malby on Twitter. What are the other ways that they would be connecting to you to to learn more and whatnot?

So link up with me on LinkedIn if it's a professional thing or you can email me, why not at Mmorby, That's M a w b yinxinsight.com Perfect.

And everyone listening, you may or may not know we don't actually put email addresses in the show notes because Max, I care about you and spam is a real thing. So if you want that email address, do your like 30 second skip back, write it down and then you can send the email and we'll link to the Thinks website as well as your LinkedIn and everything in the show notes. So thank you so much again for joining me on the show. It was delightful to chat with you, as expected. So thanks for being here.

Pleasure.

Thank you again to Max Mawby for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation for me? I hope you enjoyed hearing a bit about Max, his background and his history of being able to build up behavioral science practices at multiple organizations, as well as some of his methods and recommendations for those who are getting started in the space. And speaking of reflecting on history, did you catch that this is episode 399 of the Brainy Business podcast. What an amazing whirlwind it has been over these almost six years and well over a million downloads. So cool. Thank you for being here. Whether this is your first episode with the Brainy business or you've been here since the beginning, thank you for these first 399 and here's looking forward to 400 and on to our next big milestone. If you don't already, please do follow me. Melina Palmer and the Brainy Business across social media media, you'll find me as the brainy biz pretty much everywhere and Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. Also, if you haven't already, please do rate and review the show and refer your friends and share it with people. It all helps in continuing to be able to create great content like this for you as we close out the show. Don't forget about those show notes, which include links to my top related past episodes, episodes and books, ways to connect with Max and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 399 and thank you again to Max Maulby for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for the 400th brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. 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 as be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.