CW 460 – Daniel Pink – Motivation and the Hidden Science of our Lives with Host of National Geographic's 'Crowd Control'

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Welcome to Creating wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven't thought of before. And a new slant on investing fresh new approaches to America's best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He's been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman. This is episode number 460. 460. Happy New Year to everybody all around the world. With our listeners in 164 countries, I guess, you know, I guess all around the world that's one thing we really have pretty much in common. New year, at least a new calendar year. Of course there are different calendars. There's the Chinese New Year which takes place I believe late in late January. Anyway, to all of you celebrating this new year, Happy New Year to you. Our guest today, because this is a tenth show, our guest today. Every show that ends in zero we go off topic and just talk about something of general life interest. And our guest today is awesome. His name is Daniel Pink, Dan Pink. And you've maybe heard of him, he's a pretty well known guy. He's author of five very provocative books including three long running New York Times best selling books, A Whole New Mind Drive and To Sell as Human. Dan's books have been translated into 34 languages and he sold over 2 million copies worldwide. He's also the host and co executive producer of Crowd Control, a new television series about human behavior on the National Geographic Channel. He will be coming to us in a bit here after I talk to you for a few minutes from Washington D.C. where he lives with his wife and three kids. That's got to keep him busy. Okay, so it's a new year. What are your New Year's resolutions? Well, one that I hope I can convince you is a worthy resolution is to, number one really, really, really resolve to move as much of your financial life from the earned income role, which is that good old thing, J O B A job and a job could be your own business. But either one, you know, that's active income. And active income, especially when it's in a job, a job sometimes has that acronym just over broke a job. Now, I know that's not true for most of our listeners because a lot of you guys have pretty high level jobs and that's wonderful. But it still is active income. And the moment you stop working, your income stops. So we're here to help you move into that non earned income category, that investment income category, and that category where, you know, your investment portfolio is as passive as possible. You know me, I don't believe there's any such thing as a truly passive investment. Even money in the bank is not truly passive. So every investment requires attention. You know, on our side of it, there aren't very many moving parts. So it doesn't require that much attention. I know occasionally when you have a difficult time with property or something, maybe you think it requires a lot of attention. But overall, you know, when you really add up the amount of time, it's not very much. That's why I wanted to bring to you the last couple of case studies as we are moving into the new year here into 2015, because I thought hearing from David Porter and his story, investing in those Indianapolis properties and in Phoenix, he really did a great job and bought at the right time and is up over $700,000 on his portfolio. And you know, of course, that's two episodes ago. You can listen to that one. And then Fernando, well, he's a big fish for sure. I mean, 70 units, 50 properties. Some of those are duplexes and fourplexes and things like that. We'll just call them plexes. So 70 units total. He's done a fantastic job with his portfolio as well. So we've got many, many other clients who have done great things as well. And we've profiled them on prior episodes over the last, you know, 460 episodes there. Go back and check those out. The key terms would be if you go to jasonhartman.com and you want to search for those interviews, you know, if you just type the word client, you'll find them. Or if you type case study, you'll find them. Words like that. I know with so much content out there in all these episodes, it's not like I can direct you to a specific episode. Exactly. But with the search feature on the jasonhartman.com website, you can find things pretty darn easily. So resolutions, New Year's resolutions. Okay. One of them I want you to think of you Know, of course, is the one I just mentioned to you. But drilling down on that a little bit, I want you to think of a balance sheet, okay? So everybody has seen a balance sheet at one time or another in their life. Maybe, you know, a lot of you listening are accountants, your CPAs, financial people. You've probably created many balance sheets. And what is on that balance sheet? Well, in one column we have assets, and in another column we have liabilities. And when you subtract the liabilities from the assets, you get the net worth of the person or the company, right? If you have a million dollars in assets and you have $500,000 in liabilities, then that means your balance sheet shows a net worth of $500,000. Similarly, if you have $10 million in assets and 5 million in liabilities, well, then your net worth is $5 million. So here's the thing, though. One of the first duties that you must do in this new year is you must make sure you are putting all of your assets to work. And I know from talking to you and hearing your situation and your stories that many of you listening have a lot of assets that are sitting on the sidelines. And think about it, if you owned a business and you had a bunch of employees, you wouldn't allow those employees, hopefully to be lazy and not work or not produce very much work, right? If you had a farm and you had a crop and your crop wasn't producing enough, you would hopefully manage it and optimize it so that it would produce as much as possible. So the same is true with our assets. We have assets, and many of us have assets we're not using. You know, we have money sitting in the bank earning 0.5% interest. That's absurd. When we can pretty Darn easily earn 12% or 14% or 25 or 35 or even 45% on that money. In a low inflation, low yield environment, really the environment we've been in for about the past year, whereas before that we had some fairly significant inflation in the years prior. But it does seem to have tamed a bit in this environment, the low yield, low inflation environment, it is incumbent upon us to win the race by simply getting yield. And in getting that yield, you know, think, think about it. If everyone else is making 0.5% on their money, which means, believe me, you look at the deposit numbers in banks, that's what a lot of people are making, just half a percent. It's unbelievable how disgusting that is, right? If you make 10%, well, then you're Outdoing those people by a multiple of 20, 20, you are creating wealth 20 times faster than they are. So if you can just look at this as a competition with yourself, and you've got these unused assets, what are they? Well, they're equity sitting in. In any property. But, you know, usually the biggest culprit is one's home. In the home in which they live, they've got a bunch of untapped equity sitting there. You know, when you got a. A 1099 on all of your different accounts, you know, they give you a tax statement that says you earned X return on this bank account, on this stock account, on, you know, whatever, right? In this mutual fund, you'll get reported to the IRS for that return that you earned. Well, how many of you got a return on equity? Yeah, I thought so. See, there's a metric called return on equity that real estate investors use or just financial people in general, could be equity in anything. And I submit to you that that is a bogus metric. It's not legitimate. There is really no return on equity. There is only return on investment. So, Roe, return on equity is really a bit of a misnomer. Okay? It's return on investment. So if you have half a million dollars of equity sitting in your home and you're not using it, that money has gone to sleep. It is a lazy employee, it is a deadbeat, and it should be fired in the new year. And you should put that equity to work where it will get a higher return. Same goes with a bank account, and the same may well go with stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. You know how I feel about those things. Although, you know, stock investors have been riding a bit of a wave lately, but, you know, that will have an accounting or as they say, an adjustment or correction soon. Other people call it a crash, but, you know, Wall street calls it a correction. What sounds better to you? A correction or a crash? I think I'd rather have a correction. Sounds a little more mild, right? But here's one of the big assets on the balance sheet. Well, it's really never on the balance sheet because most people don't even view it as an asset. But it is a very, very powerful asset. And I want you to make sure you use this asset. The asset is. Can you guess it? Let me see if you can guess. The asset starts with a C, A C, A B, C, the third letter in the Alphabet. This is a very important asset. And I will bet that probably everybody listening is not exploiting this asset to its full, fullest potential. They're not using it as much as it can possibly be used. What is that asset that starts with a C? Credit? It is credit. Credit is an asset. Your ability to borrow is an asset because that can help you control more income property. And as long as you're using credit in a prudent, logical fashion, okay? In a conservative, prudent, logical fashion, it is a huge asset. Use your ability to borrow, use your credit, okay? That's one of the greatest things about income property. It is not only the most historically proven asset class in America, if not the entire world, it is not only the most tax favored asset in America, but it is also the most debt friendly asset. And when I say debt friendly, it means that lenders feel very secure about loaning on real estate compared to any other asset. Look, try and get a loan on your business, try and get a loan on anything else. It's never as favorable as the real estate loan because real estate, and I'd say especially income property, because you don't pay your own debts with income property, you outsource them to other people is the most debt friendly asset. And debt when it comes to income, property is my favorite four letter word. It is a really, really powerful thing. As long as you use it correctly. It's a very, very powerful tool. The credit is a huge asset on the asset column of that balance sheet, okay? So make sure you use it in the new year. Now I bet another, maybe more, probably much more obvious asset that a lot of you aren't using is money in a retirement account in an ira. Are you self directing your ira? I sure hope you are. And you know, maybe a 401k too. There are some nuances there. We're going to be talking about this at our upcoming Meet the Masters event quite extensively, but a lot of those unused assets are in there too. Now you can't borrow as well inside of retirement accounts. You can do borrowing, but it's not as debt friendly as outside of the account. So what I would say is that that money inside the account, you want to use that for cash purposes of income property. If you've tapped out your number of loans and you're a cash buyer, basically, then that's an option. But I think what might even be a better, more attractive option is investing in the discounted land contracts. And we will be presenting that, of course, we had it a few episodes ago, we talked about that and we will be presenting it at the upcoming Meet the Masters event. And I think that's going to be a very exciting Thing for things like retirement plan money, it just lends itself, pardon the pun, lends itself perfectly to that type of account and investment. Okay? So New Year's resolutions, put things to work. Get all your assets to work, get your money deployed, get it into prudent, historically proven income properties, not the speculative junk where you're planning on appreciation. That's not an investment. That's a gamble. That's a speculation. You know, it's funny. I was talking to someone yesterday. She was saying, you know, next time you go to Las Vegas, you got to go this place. It's a really fun place to gamble. And, you know, she launches into this whole conversation about why it's so great. And I said, I don't gamble. Okay? You know, so don't gamble with your investments either. Now, you know, you can have some riskier types of investments that might pay off bigger returns if they work. But really, appreciation. When you're looking at appreciation and thinking you're an investor, you're not an. You're right, you're a gambler. You're not an investor if you're investing for appreciation. So don't do that, okay? Invest for cash flow in really prudent, simple properties that make sense the day you buy them. Following my ten Commandments of successful investing. Another thing I want to mention, since it is a new year, every new year, there are all these new laws. And you know how I feel about laws. I'm not a huge fan of them. And the reason is, is because these laws sometimes are so nonsensical, and it gives the government the opportunity to make all of us criminals. Okay. When I was brought up, my mom used to say to me, jason, ignorance of the law is no excuse. And I thought, okay, well, that means, you know, as a citizen, I have the responsibility of knowing the laws. We all have that responsibility. But guess what? This year in the new year and most of them went into effect today, the Socialist Republic of California has 930 new laws that go into effect. And every year it seems like more. You know, I remember a few years ago, it was like 600 and something. And a few years ago, one. One year in the future, it was like 700 and something new laws, and then it was 800 and something new laws, and now it's 930 new laws. Do you know them all? No, I bet you don't. And that's just one state, okay. Probably one of the worst states. Okay? Many other states, probably every other state has a whole bunch of new laws, too. I'm sure Arizona does as well. And then there are new federal laws now. How many times do you hear about laws being repealed? Hmm, crickets. How many laws do you hear about being repealed? Yeah, I thought so. I never seem to hear about a law being repealed. I only hear about new laws. 2000 years ago a Roman gave this quote and I think you pronounce the name Tacitus. Okay, who said the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. And I don't think I ran this episode yet for you, but I recorded the author, who's a lawyer by the way, the author of a good book called three Felonies a Day. And he basically showed how we're all committing three felonies a day and we don't even know it. Okay, good, well intentioned citizens are breaking laws constantly. Anyway, I think that has aired already on my holistic survival show, maybe my American Monetary association show. And I don't think we ran that one on the Creating wealth show yet, but we might in the future as a, as a tenth episode. It's pretty amazing. And let me just go over really quickly a couple of these kind of funny, odd laws that were called out in an article by news or some of the most interesting new laws that take effect today. Okay? Wine lovers in Massachusetts can finally have out of state wineries ship them bottles of wine. So, you know, big deal. Can you believe there was a law against that? Kind of amazing. In California, of course they have the animal laws going into effect. And by the way, you know, I don't mind this if it wasn't a law. I think what it should be is it should be a consumer choice where the consumers will hopefully choose the right thing. Listen, I'm an animal lover, okay? You know, I was a vegetarian for several years, but I gave that up. I don't think that's a good, good idea, just so you know. But I did try it. And this is the. A 2008 ballot initiative aimed at making life better for animals takes effect today, giving more space to egg laying hens, breeding sows and veal calves. And I would never eat veal because I think that is cruel and unusual punishment. Okay? But the consumers, of course this will make prices skyrocket. And who will it affect most? The poor, of course. It always affects every law, affects them the most in the most negative ways. This should just be a disclosure thing and consumers should make a choice on this stuff. Okay, let's see what else here. Oh boy. This one is going to be just a nightmare. Yes officially means yes. In California, where a new law regarding college students is now in place. An affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity is now required. And silence or lack of resistance does not mean consent. Oh my God. That one is. That is just a Pandora's box. Now listen, you know, there have been a ton of stories lately of, you know, date rape and things like this going on in college campuses. And having lived near ASU for two years, I don't live there anymore. But when I first moved to Arizona, I lived close to Arizona State University for a couple of years. And you know, I kind of saw what goes on. It's not good. Okay, Gosh, you know, this is a little, quite literally a he said, she said thing. This is going to be. The lawyer's got to love a law like that. I don't know how to solve the problem. Probably a lot of it stems from the alcohol problem, which is a whole nother issue. That one is a. That's just a Pandora's box. I can imagine. Okay, you can't throw away your old computer, TV or video game console in New York because it's now legally required that you recycle these items instead. Undocumented immigrants, you mean. Now that's a slightly more politically correct term. Maybe illegal immigrants is actually the proper word, I don't know. But they can now get driver's licenses in California. And of course they get a whole bunch of other benefits too. You, you know, it's amazing that if you're legal in many cases, you don't get as many benefits as the illegal people do. But I digress. Okay, In Indiana you gotta have a license plate to drive a motor scooter. Now because a lot of people who lost their licenses for drunk driving were driving unsafely on their scooters and they gotta report them. Oh, Massachusetts now finally has hold open clips on self service gasoline pumps. So that'll make a lot of people happier in winter because they don't have to stand out there filling up the tank. You know, I don't know why they never had those before. I guess Massachusetts thought that was a problem. Now this is the funniest one of all. And I think this, I know this is in New York according to the article, but I think this also went into effect a similar law in California. Get this one, folks. And then we'll get to Daniel Pink. Okay, this is the last of my editorializing here. A bonus law starting next month in New York, and I believe this is California too. It will now be illegal to take a selfie with a lion, tiger or other big cat. The law passed after such photos started gaining popularity online, particularly with some young men on dating sites. The Associated Press notes. So oh my gosh, you have to make a law against that. You can't just have the Darwin Awards for idiots that take selfies with tigers and get eaten by them. Oh, what are we doing in this world? It's just crazy. Okay, anyway, let's get to our guest Dan Pink. He's got some great TED talks out there, by the way. You might want to look those up. He's got some good stuff to say in the interview here too. So as we do on all 10th shows, we're not on the topic of real estate strictly or personal finance today we're talking about stuff of general interest. So here is our guest, Daniel Pink. It's my pleasure to welcome a name you certainly know, and that is Daniel Pink. He has done many things and authored many books. He's host of a new series on National Geographic entitled Crowd Control. He's a contributing editor for Wired, former chief speechwriter for Al Gore, and aide to Secretary of State Robert Reich. He's a best selling author of To Sell Is the Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Also a whole new why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future Drive, the Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us and many, many others. I'll leave it at that and let him talk about the rest. Dan, welcome. How are you?

I'm good, Jason. Thanks for having me on the show.

Well, it's great to have you. Give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located?

Geography? I AM in Washington, D.C. okay, good.

The belly of the government beast indeed.

Yep, yep, yep. And I don't live in the Maryland or Virginia suburbs. I live right here in the District of Columbia. So I have plenty of taxation and no representation.

I love it. Well, considering that's coming from an Al Gore, Robert Reich guy, I'm kind of surprised you say that, but okay.

It's like the old line about how a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. I would say that a social liberal fiscal conservative is a Democrat who's become self employed.

I love it. And at least you're candid about it too. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, hey, your new show is fascinating. Tell us what you're doing on Nat Geo's crowd control show.

Yeah, this is a really great show. I mean, I'm Biased, obviously, but it's a really great show. And what we do is this. We go out and look for problems. We look for big problems. Things like people speeding which results in a lot of deaths. Things like airline safety and also some small problems, things like people who don't pick up their dog poop or people who double dip guacamole. And then we use some. We looked at the behavioral science, we looked to this whole body of research in psychology and economics and to some extent sociology. We sort of say, okay, what does the research tell us? And then we, we have this fabulous team of designers and technologists and we go out there and come up with a solution. We put it in place out there in the real world and see what happens. And sometimes we do a great job of solving these problems. A lot of times we do, sometimes we don't do so well.

How did you approach solving? I mean, pick a problem you like. You do some stuff on sales and persuasion too. You took a beef jerky seller and doubled his sales and all kinds of, I mean, pick whatever you want. There's so many.

So, I mean, there's so many things that other. Tell you about that in a second. I'll tell you. One of the ones that we did was just really, really fun was the problem is people don't exercise enough. And yet when we're given moments to exercise in our day to day lives, we often ignore them. Classic example of that is when we're faced with a choice of taking the escalator or taking the stairs. And we take the escalator. So how do you get more people to take the stairs? What we did, building on an idea that was done in Sweden, is we went to, we went to lower Manhattan, very close to Wall street and there was an escalator and a set of stairs and we transformed the stairs into beatbox stairs. So every time someone stepped on a step, it made a beatbox sound like, you know, boom, Wicked. Ticket, ticket. And suddenly we had everybody taking the stairs. So instead of, you know, it's an interesting strategy instead of saying you have to exercise your. Shame on you for not exercising or wagging your finger at people to exercise. All we did was make the choice of climbing the stairs a little bit more fun. And it had a dramatic effect on how people, on how people behave.

So what you did is you gamified stairs. And not only gamified it, but made it an opportunity for self expression.

I think there's something to that. No joke. I mean, I mean we made it into a. You Know, it wasn't a game in the sense that there was. It wasn't pure gamification in the sense that there weren't points or anything like that. It really was partly about self expression, but it's also, you know, as much about sort of social things. So what we had is we had people going up and down the stairs together. We had people trying to make music together and, pardon the pun, make music together, you know. Yeah, right, right. And so what we had was. So what we ended up doing was changing people's behavior in a subtle, non coercive way. And we got more people exercising. But, you know, on the sales one too, we spent a lot of time thinking about money as well and the sales one. What we decided to do was can we use some of the science of persuasion and selling to help this guy, this guy named Brian, He's a small entrepreneur. He makes basically artisanal homemade beef jerky and he sells it at farmer's markets. So we went to him, went with him to a farmer's market in New York, New York state. And I was in his booth and saw how he was doing things. And then we said, you know what, let's try some different things, some different strategies based on what the research tells us. So what we did for him was we had him, he was saying he was offering up. He had a little plate behind the desk behind his counter in the farmer's market. And he said, would you like a taste? Would you like a taste? Would you like a taste? And we encouraged him to come out from behind the booth and actually use the word free all the time because everybody loves free stuff. Free triggers are kind of psychosis in our head. And so instead of saying, would you like a taste? Would you like some free beef jerky? Would you like some free beef jerky? Would you like a free sample? And he suddenly got a lot more people that way. We also triggered the principle of reciprocity in that one reason that companies stores use free samples is that human beings are natively reciprocal. So if you do something for me, I'm inclined to do something for you. And so by giving somebody something for free, they're. They might say, oh, wow, you did me a solid. I'll do you a solid by buying some of your jerky. And the third thing that we did, which is really interesting, some very, very interesting research that shows that the power of rhymes, that rhymes increase what cognitive scientists call processing fluency. That is, they go down easier and actually are believed more deeply. So we had them out there Using rhymes saying, don't be a turkey. Try some free jerky. Or trying to.

How did that work?

It worked great. It was amazing because it was entertaining. It was entertaining, but it also. More than entertaining, it was like, oh, it stuck. It's like, oh, yeah, I've got to be a fool not to have some free beef jerky. We also did one a little bit more explicitly on his branding, because a lot of the beef jerky that's sold in stores is, you know, very, very heavily processed, not particularly good ingredients or anything like that. And we had him out there saying, my jerky is no mystery. I know its history because it's homemade and artisanal and all that. And this combination of things ended up doubling this guy's sales, and he's still using them. And so what we're trying to do is show, if you pay attention to a little bit of the science, if you think a little bit differently, you can do a little bit better out there.

Yeah, fantastic. Okay, so you used Chris Anderson's free concept, and I love that book, by the way. And then you got Robert Cialdini's reciprocal.

Absolutely right.

So you've blended all of this great stuff. Yeah. And so his sales, they doubled.

His sales doubled on that afternoon, and they've continued to do very, very well. I mean, he changed the way that he did things. And you're exactly right. I'm glad that you had tipped Chris Anderson and Robert Cialdini, because, I mean, Anderson's book really showed some of the kind of psychosis that takes over when people hit free. And Robert Cialdini's book influence is, to me, one of the very best nonfiction books anybody in business could read. And I just think it's a classic, incredible book. And his principle of reciprocity is so powerful. And this is exactly what we're trying to do. We're trying to take these things that are in those. Well, Cialdini is an academic. Anderson is not. But these things that seem a little academic, some of this research that is a little bit buried and, like, bring it to the surface and say, hey, you can use this to make your community better. You can use this to get a little more exercise. You can use this to sell some more beef jerky.

Yeah, fantastic. Okay, so do you have, like, one of those that worked the best? Did you keep stats on all of the different approaches, or did he sort of blend them all together?

Well, we kept stats on everything. That was a very important part of the show. We would always establish what the baseline metric was for something. And then we would see whether our intervention improved it. Now it's hard to, you know, some of the stuff is apples and oranges. So it's hard to compare. It's hard to compare which one worked better than the other. So if we're trying to get people to. If we're trying to get people to use the revolving doors rather than the side doors versus how do you get people to apply sunscreen on the beach? It's hard to compare those two things. But a lot of the stuff that we did worked. Occasionally we did stuff that actually made the problem worse. But we show that on the air too. I mean, we're trying to be. This is not one of those kind of confected, very artificial reality shows. Like when we go. Like, we did stuff that. I mean, classic example of this is we took on the problem of bike theft in New Orleans. And I had this. What I thought was a. I still think it's a brilliant idea, I have to say. So it's an idea.

We'll be the judge of that.

Well, yeah, people were the judge of it, as you'll see in a moment.

Okay.

You could be the judge. They were really the jury. They issued their verdict pretty swiftly on this one. So bike theft in New Orleans is a big problem because just the way that New Orleans is configured, certain neighborhoods are easier to get into through bike rather than car. But, you know, New Orleans has a lot of challenges. And so the police can't be everywhere. So we heard about this thing that they did in one city in India where they also had insufficient police presence. What they did there is they created these cardboard cutout, life size cardboard cutout police officers. Almost like if you think about like a scarecrow. That's basically what it was.

Right.

And the idea is that if someone sees it from afar, you really can't tell whether it's a real police officer or not. I mean, you really can't. And then also there's a kind of a secondary theory that simply the image of authority can affect people's behavior. So we use that. And then we even double down and use some research on how. There's some very interesting research on how men with especially wide faces, that is, if the ratio of the width of their face to a certain aspect of the height of their face is very large, that's a marker for aggression. Some very interesting research on that.

You know, that's interesting because I've heard that people that have. Or I guess men.

Yeah.

Only men.

Right.

Prisons are full of men with really short thumbs.

I don't know about that one yet. I've heard that one. But it is. It's. They're full of men with really short faces. It's really quite remarkable. If you measure the width of your face basically against the ratio of the width of your face at its widest point to essentially the height from your eyebrows to the top of your lip, men with a very high ratio that correlates with aggression. And there's something. I mean, it's freaky. It's freaky research.

That is freaky. Okay, but. So, Dan, you know, that's really quite interesting. And then it begs the question of, are they maybe if that facial characteristic is considered, for example, and I don't know if it is or not, less attractive? Right. Are they more aggressive because life didn't open doors for them? Or are those genetics causing that face to be that way? And that's a trait of a more aggressive person? You know, like, you know, what do you make of that?

That's a great question. I don't know.

Chicken or egg?

I think the answer to chicken or egg in that case is yes, that, you know, that it's both. And that in that case the facial width to height ratio is physiological. I mean, it has to do with the presence of testosterone. So it's a physiological characteristic. It's not necessarily the case that it's not considered attractive. But what it might do is that if people are. If it does, if it is a marker for aggression, that is, it correlates with aggression, doesn't mean that every man with a high facial width to height ratio is going to be a murder.

Yeah, no, of course not. But it might suggest a predilection, you know.

Right. And so. And so if I'm a little bit more aggressive than another person, then maybe I'm not going to flourish as well at school, say, which could make me more aggressive.

But it could make you a great athlete, for example.

Well, give you a great example of this. I mean, you're spot on. I mean, there is research out there showing that you can. That somebody. Some researchers went out and they took the. The NHL, the National Hockey League, the yearbooks for each team and measured the facial width to height ratio of each player. And that correlated almost perfectly with penalty minutes. So I think it's a really, really cool, really cool topic. I didn't get a lot of it on the air. I was a little sort of. But what we had was we have people in our crew. Like everyone wanted me to measure their face.

Yeah. Right. No, I'm busy measuring my face right now.

I measured mine. I do not. I have a, like a slightly, I'm a pretty slightly above the median in my facial. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Super aggressive.

That was obviously a survival mechanism in the more barbaric era, you know, from times gone past or maybe present times in some places.

Oh yeah, Well, I mean, yeah, sure, certainly that there was, I mean, evolution probably selected for some amount of aggressiveness. Not probably wild amounts, but probably some amounts because you're more likely to survive. And anyway, taking this all the way back to bike theft in New Orleans. So we found an actor with an especially wide face and had him pose for these cardboard cutouts. Okay. He really looked menacing. He looked like, you know, he was going to kick your butt. And we put him in a police uniform and we put these life size cardboard cutouts of a cop in bike theft hotspots all over New Orleans to try to deter bike theft. We measured the bike theft before, we measured the bike theft after. And here's what happened. The number of bike thefts went down. But that's the good news. The bad news is that the reason was that people stole all the cutouts. After a day, all the cutouts had been stolen. So that was one that didn't work that well. So my best. So this is, that's what I'm saying. It's like I thought this was such an awesome idea. We're going to nail this thing. It's going to be such a cost effective solution for police forces and it totally backfired.

You know, the title of one of your books to sell is Human. Why did you pick that title? Why is Selling Human?

Well, I mean, first of all, it's something that all of us do all the time. And whether we like it or not, if you look at how, especially on the job, just think about on the job, let alone in other aspects of our life, you look on the job how people actually spend their time. They're spending an enormous portion of it persuading, influencing, convincing, cajoling. So you're an employee and you're trying to get your boss to free up some resources, or you go to a meeting and you're pitching an idea, or you're a boss and you're trying to get your employees to do something different or do something in a different way. We're selling all the time. That's one reason that it's human. The second reason that is human, probably the deeper reason, is that today, especially in a world where no one has a Monopoly on information where there isn't as much asymmetric information as before. Is that the way to do it? Well, the way to be effective as a persuader, a convincer, a seller is to actually be a little bit more human, to draw on some fundamentally human characteristics, like the ability to take someone else's perspective, the ability to listen, the ability to, as I said before, to see things from someone else's point of view, the ability to put the other person first, those kinds of fundamentally human qualities and actually make us more successful today.

Yeah, very interesting. Now, in the NatGeo show, you discovered something interesting, that there's a connection between saving for retirement and using sunscreen.

Yeah, believe it or not, there is. This is interesting. So there's some great research out of nyu, a guy named Hal Hirschfeld who was wondering, why don't people save for retirement? Okay. It's crazy, right? I mean, it's totally against your interest to save for retirement.

You mean it's with your interest.

Right, sorry. It's totally against your interest not to save for retirement.

Yeah, okay, Okay.

I mean, you're crazy not to. It's a foolish move. And the reason is what economists call hyperbolic discounting, which is what you and I and other human beings call. Human beings stink at planning for the future. We much prefer, we're much more likely to take small payoffs now to larger payoffs in the future. So Hirschfeld was trying to solve this problem. Why do people not save for retirement? What he discovered was something really, really intriguing is that we think of ourselves today and ourselves. Let's take someone who's in his or her 40s, someone who's in her 40s thinks about herself in her 70s as a different person. And so, like, why would, like, you know, I mean, I like you, Jason, but I'm not going to save money for your retirement, you know.

Darn.

And so, you know, and so they think of him as a different person. And so what Hirschfeld decided to do was if I were to show. Let's take. We have a 45 year old, call her Maria. We have 45 year old Maria. We want her to save her retirement. He did this experiment where if people saw an age advanced photograph of themselves, you know, the software that allows you to see what you might look like at age 70 or 75, if they saw themselves at age 75, that closed the gap between their view of themselves today and their view of themselves tomorrow. It said, oh, wait, that is me. And it made them more likely to save for retirement. Okay, fascinating. Research.

So what happened with the sunscreen?

Well, so we did the same. So we said, let's use that for sunscreen. People don't use sunscreen. There's skin cancer. People get skin cancer. And yet the incidence of applying sunscreen is much lower than you would think. So we went to the Jersey Shore and we set up a photo booth. And the photo booth said, come in and see a vision of your future. And what we did is we had people come in and they pressed a few buttons. We took their photograph and using software, showed them what their skin would look like with 20 or 25 years of sun exposure. You got it. You got it. That's exactly it. I mean, that's what people said. Oh, boy. You know, they were yelping. And as a consequence of that, people started applying sunscreen. They would come out of our photo booth and start applying sunscreen because, you know, they were thinking they were basically choosing the short term payoff. Ooh, the sun feels really nice to the longer term reward, which is not dying. But they had a hard time thinking of themselves in the future and themselves today as the same person. And this photo booth that we devised, built on this research on retirement savings, ended up really increasing the use of sunscreen among people. And we had people. It was really amazing. We had people leave the photo. Photo booth and immediately, like, ask for sunscreen and start applying it because they were so horrified about what they looked at.

It sounds like what we tend to do is, I mean, you know, in economics, we all know about the concept of, you know, net present value, or at least a lot of us do. And, you know, when I talk about inflation in my various seminars, I always quote one of my. My childhood teachers about inflation. And it was Wimpy from Popeye. And he always said, I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. You know, he understands the future value of money, which would be lower than it was today. Right. And so it sounds like we discount our future self. And that's just a human tendency, isn't it? And maybe it comes from back in evolutionary days when we didn't know if we would live that long. You know, I mean, we still don't, but it's much more certain than maybe it has ever has been in human history. Right.

So I think that's actually a really good point. That explanation makes a ton of sense to me in that you didn't have, you know, that you didn't even have to. I mean, you didn't have to have. Let's take something like you know, you know, like you're talking about the time or net present value or time value of money. Like that was not a, that was not a concept when we were evolving because, well, first of all, we didn't have money. Second of all, we didn't have a lot of money.

We didn't have much of a future.

You know, so basically, so basically you're just trying to get through the day. You're starting to make sure that the saber tooth tiger doesn't eat you today so you can wake up on Thursday. And I think that's probably part of why we have that kind of cognitive bias toward the short term payoff versus the long term payoff, which is why a lot of us go awry and why we need certain kinds of interventions to help us behave a little bit better. It's not because we're bad people. It's just because, as you're at least maybe just implying or maybe suggesting altogether, is that our brains are not perfectly equipped for the modern world. So this is why you could do this is why. What's effective are things like, let's go back to retirement savings. You know, people work at a company, they have a chance to contribute to their 401k and get it matched and they don't do it. And so one of the most effective things to style that problem was automatic enrollment. You basically change the default so people are immediately. People are automatically enrolled in their 401k program at the company. They can opt out, but no one does because we just go through these default behaviors. And so there are ways, as we were talking about at the top of the program, there are these subtle, non coercive ways to help change people's behavior, change our own behavior for the better.

What motivates us? You talk a lot about motivation. What motivates us and how can we motivate others? The age old question, I guess the first person we got to motivate as ourselves. Right. But how can we be better at motivation?

Well, I mean, you know, we're motivated by a lot of things. I mean, let's go back to what you were talking about before. We're motivated by biological things. You know, we eat when we're hungry, we drink when we're thirsty. That's a form of motivation. We are motivated by rewards and punishments. There's no question about that. In certain circumstances, if you reward behavior, you'll get more of it. If you punish behavior, you'll get less of it. But I think what we missed out on is that human beings have another set of motivators that at some level, economists and even biologists have a harder time explaining, which is that we do things because we like them, we do things because we get better at them, we do things because it's the right thing to do. We do things because we like having control over our own lives. And that third set of motivators, these more kind of intrinsic motivators, are also really, really important. And I think the problem we have in organizations is that we only rely those first two sets, those biological motivators and those reward and punishment behaviors, and don't take a three dimensional view of people. So I think that's at the heart of the problem in terms of. But one of the great scholars in motivation, a guy named Edward Deasy, who's at the University of Rochester, really one of the legendary figures in the scientific study of motivation, said something really, really important. He said, you know, we got to get past this idea that motivation is something that one person does to another and understand that it's something that we do for ourselves. So instead of trying to motivate other people, you know, in a controlling way, you're much better off trying to change the context, change the environment so that they can motivate themselves.

How do we change that context and environment? And how do they motivate themselves? I mean, we need to, we need to leave it to them.

Yes and no. I mean, all kinds of things. Let's take the example, let's take some. It really depends on what people are doing. So. But there's a lot of evidence showing, for instance, that. I'll give you a great study that explains this. So it's a study of fundraisers at the University of Michigan. These are work study students who are making phone calls to University of Michigan alumni to raise money for the school. And so the researchers divided the callers, the student callers, the student fundraisers into three groups. And everybody's treated exactly the same. They have the same list of, you know, same kind of call list, same scripts, et cetera, et cetera. The only thing different is what they do for the five minutes before they get on the phone. So the first group is the control group. So they read, you know, five minutes of something neutral, you know, about like answer Bs or something like that. The second group, for the five minutes before they get on the phone, they read letters from people who used to work at the call center testifying to the personal benefit of having work there. So my name is Jason. I worked at this call center for a Year and a half as an undergraduate, I learned communication skills and sales skills, and I'm now a banker in New York, and it's been very useful to me. And the third group also read letters, but they read letters from people who were on the receiving end of the money that was raised. So they'd get a letter saying, my name is Jane Smith. My parents couldn't afford to send me to college, but I got a scholarship to the University of Michigan funded by some of the money raised here. And I'm now a pediatrician in Saginaw. Okay, so three groups. One group is our control group. Second group, five minutes of reading about the personal benefit. Third group, five minutes of reading about the purpose. And it turned out that the third group performed twice as well, earned twice the amount of weekly pledges, twice the amount of donation money as the other groups. And it was simply that five minute intervention of essentially explaining to people, like, why are you doing this in the first place? Why did you raise money? What's the point?

I've heard about the studies where, you know, someone will want to cut in line in front of someone and literally, by using the word, because it makes it completely different, even if the reason is totally stupid, you know, like, can I cut in front of you because I'm in a hurry. Well, obviously you're in a hurry. Duh.

That's a really interesting one. That's a really interesting one too. I think that that's gonna work in the short term. And, you know, Cialdini, you mentioned before, has written about that particular study. It's a fascinating study that might work in the short term. I think, you know, if you go into the workplace and you want people to perform well, if people know why they're doing what they're doing, they're gonna. They're gonna perform a little bit better. And so there's all this. There's a lot of research out there showing, for instance, that, you know, there's another piece of research on lifeguards that if you have lifeguards, toward the end of the summer, read an article about lifeguards who saved people's lives, those and others. And the other lifeguards don't read that article. They read again about ants and bees or something like that, that the guards who were reminded of, like, what lifeguards do and why they do it are much more likely to re up for the next summer. And so, you know, again, it's. It's not. So what you're not doing is you're not saying you can do it. You got this. Or you're not threatening people if you don't do this right, I'm going to blah, blah, blah. You know, you're doing something a little bit more subtle. And in the workplace, the key is basically to hire great people. Hire great people. That's hugely important. Hire great people, pay them well and fairly, and then give them some autonomy over their work. Help them get better at something that matters and help them understand not only how to do what they're doing, but why they're doing it in the first place and showing them the contribution they're making. And that ends up being a very effective recipe for enduring motivation.

There's really just no question, is there, Daniel, that the human being wants to have a purpose and a mission and a reason. I mean, it's not just about, you know, for example, in the workplace making a living or making money. It's much deeper than that, isn't it?

It is. You know, I mean, human beings in general want to have a sense of meaning, and it's, you know, it's part of who we are. And people, you know, seek that understanding of meaning in different ways. Some through religion, some through science, some through the workplace, some through volunteer activities. But that's, you know, it's how we are. It's what makes our species, I think, different from other species that I'm not sure that even, you know, higher level cognitive species like apes or dolphins or pigs are sitting around wherever dolphins and pigs and chimpanzees sit. Probably not at a bar, but wherever they're sitting.

That would be a good joke.

Yeah. A dolphin, a pig and a monkey walked into a bar. They're not sitting around saying, well, why am I? I don't think a dolphin is saying, why am I here? I don't think that a pig is saying, well, why? What's the point of all this?

Well, we don't know.

We don't know.

It's yet to be discovered. But I agree, I agree, it doesn't seem like it.

If there were a way to know, and we were taking bets, I would bet on they're not thinking about that. But you're absolutely right. We don't know. But we certainly know that from a very early age. That's what human beings do. They want a sense of meaning. They want a sense of purpose. They want to get up in the morning and do something where it matters, where it makes a contribution, and where if they didn't show up, somebody would care.

Absolutely. That's a very, very good point. So for everybody listening, you need to try and institute that in your workplace and in your personal life and, and you know, it'll just make you a lot more effective. So that's, that's very good message, Daniel. Tell people where they can best find you. I mean, you're all over the place. But is it danpink.com is that the best website?

Yeah, you can find me at danpink.com-a n p-I n k.com on Twitter @DanielPink. DanielPink and also on the National Geographic Channel. The show is Crowd Control. It's on Monday nights on national geographic channel at 9pm Eastern, 8pm Central, and then also again on at 9pm Pacific time as well.

Good stuff. Well, closing thought on any part of your work, Dan, whether it be motivation or whatever, I'll just give you the last word.

Yeah, you know, I mean, you know, I'm not that different from anybody else. I'm not different from, I mean, I'm just like everybody else. Like I want to do something that matters and have a purpose and what, you know, I want to feed my family, obviously, but once I feed my family and once they kids have winter coats, you know, you think about why you do what you do. And to me, both this television show and the books that I'm writing, if someone out there, a few people out there, do things a little differently, make their own lives a little bit better, I feel pretty good about that.

Daniel Pink, thank you for joining us, Jason.

Thanks for having me.

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