Full transcript: Daniel H Pink on London Real
4:32 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. With me today is Miss Sonia Dubel. She’s been on the show twice before. She’s an accomplished yoga instructor, an actor, a singer, and a new mother of an ayahuasca baby.
4:44 Welcome back, Sonia. Thank you very much. And our guest today is Mr. Daniel Pink. He is a New York Times bestselling author of the book Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and his latest work, which is To Sell Is Human, The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, which we will be giving away today for the best quotes that are tweeted out there from this episode.
5:06 He’s a graduate of Yale Law School, which you make fun of a bit in your TED Talk. And so I’ll want to hear more about that later. But you also were a speechwriter for Al Gore at one point. In my misspent youth, yes, I work in politics. Okay, that’s good.
5:20 Fair enough. Welcome to London. It’s great to be here. How are the Brits treating you, or how do they normally treat you? They normally treat me quite, quite well.
5:28 As an American, the UK is very, very accessible. common language, a few different words, pretty easy to get around, nice place. Is it like Tarantino said, they got everything you have in the States, it’s just here, it’s a little different? What did you say? I think it’s a little bit different.
5:49 You know, they’ve got this thing about driving on the wrong side of the road, that’s going on, you’ve got some of the different vocabulary, but in general I think it’s a totally nice accessible place. In fact, on this particular trip I took my 16-year-old daughter with me, I’m here for a week. And so she came with me to just explore London. She hasn’t been here since she was six, which she barely remembers. So, so she’s out and about. I don’t even know where she is right now.
6:13 Okay. And you’re the, you’re our only guest has ever been from DC. So yeah, wow. We just don’t get, I mean, who lives in DC? I mean, they’re politicians or lobbyists. Well, we’ll get to that more in a bit, but this must be quite a change from DC. I’m guessing are people more polite here or is DC a pretty friendly place?
6:30 DC’s not that friendly of a place. I want to ask you more about DC because I haven’t heard that much about it. I was re-watching one of your videos in prep for this interview and it was… Good God, that sounds like punishment. Well, no, but it was one I had actually seen before and I was like, I didn’t know Daniel Pink did this video and it’s your one that has like 10 million views.
6:48 It’s the surprising truth about what motivates us, which I think was your 10-minute animation animation, which was put to a talk, I think you gave it the RSA one time. Exactly, here in London. Was it in London? That talk was here in London. And the animation is brilliantly done.
7:03 It really draws you into it. But I was watching, I’d seen it before, and I was like, oh, wow, this is really interesting. And it uncannily seemed like it was mirroring my life. And I was wondering if most people who watch it feel the same way? That it was mirroring your life?
7:17 That’s very ego-based. Yeah, exactly, very ego-based. Yes and no. I mean, maybe not mirroring people’s lives, but I think that people can see a kind of truth in it that is that if they excavate beneath the surface of the conventional wisdom they realize that people’s motivations are different and that their own motivations are different and that this might give them in some ways permission to think about it differently or even vocabulary to talk about it differently. Okay yeah there’s vocabulary in there I mean I found myself watching it and just to do a little bio and then I’ll move move on from here but the study was done at MIT and then I went to MIT and then I worked in the city which is the Wall Street here and then at one point they try to pile more compensation on you to get you to do more work and at some point that didn’t motivate me anymore and I left I think because I wanted more autonomy, mastery and purpose and that’s kind of what I’m doing now with London Real and it’s really weird and then I’m giving it away for free which is another part of your lecture.
8:13 So it was really trippy but it made me realize how much I really needed autonomy and mastering a new skill and then purpose because I didn’t have it there. Yeah, but I mean, I think that that’s just human nature. I think all of us You know, I think it’s human nature to want to be able to direct your own life in fact in some ways the history of humankind is about the resistance to control of our lives so that Human nature I think is to be fundamentally autonomous. This is why people stand in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square This is why people march on Tahir Square in in in Egypt. It’s that human beings have two different reactions to control. They comply or they defy. And I think that compliance only lasts a certain amount of time. And I don’t think it’s particularly healthy. I don’t think it’s good for organizations. I think that our nature is to be autonomous and self-directed.
9:03 I think our nature is to want to get better at something that matters. That’s mastery. And also I think that our nature is to want to know that what we do actually contributes. And so to the extent that animation has resonance, it has resonance only because it’s resonating to what I think is fundamentally people’s human nature. We want to feel valued.
9:25 We want to feel that we’re making a difference in the big picture. Yeah, I think so, or even smaller than that. What I found, I did a book, my very first book was a book called Free Agent Nation, and in that book I traveled around the United States interviewing hundreds of people who had sort of done what you did, Brian, left large organizations to go out on their own about why they were doing this, and I did long qualitative interviews with people. And what was so interesting is when I went through the transcripts of those interviews after they were completed, I kept hearing the same word over and over again, and that word was this, I felt I wasn’t making a contribution.
10:01 That word contribution came up a lot. That is, people are willing to work. But if they don’t know why they’re doing it, if they don’t see how what they do each day connects, if they don’t see why what they do each day matters, and not matters in the sense of solving the climate crisis, but matters in the sense like if they didn’t show up, somebody would care, feeling valued, as you’re saying, and I think that’s just a big, big, huge factor in human nature, and it’s one that I think is largely ignored inside of organizations.
10:32 Well, why is that? I mean, you’ve got a place like the US that runs businesses very efficiently, they get rid of companies, they make them go bankrupt, they outsource labor to China, how come haven’t figured this out or companies like Google figured this out with kind of more of a crunchy atmosphere yeah it’s a it’s that’s a hard question to answer because part of it is is that yeah I’m a big believer in simple explanations for things so when we look at why companies haven’t embraced many companies haven’t embraced these principles of autonomy mastery and purpose even though the science on it is very clear that it leads to higher performance. What’s the simple explanation for that? To me the simple explanation for that is inertia.
11:16 And it’s been a working model for so long, it’s like your own inner patterns. We sometimes recognize that our patterns are bad, but we just can’t get out of them. It takes a lot of awareness, strength, and also if something’s been working for so long and it’s just taking over, people are, you know, they just like, you know, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. So the new companies, the Googles and all these, you know, great, innovative companies, they are starting afresh.
11:46 They are starting with these new concepts. The old companies are going to soon be playing catch up when they really wake up to the fact that they need to. Yeah, eventually. Eventually. But, you know, if I do something one way on Tuesday, the odds are very, very good.
12:00 I’m going to do it the exact same way on Wednesday. And the question is, how do you get people off of that inexorable force of inertia? And it’s very, very difficult. It’s very difficult. This is why you see a lot of the companies that are practicing this different approach to motivation tend to be younger companies, one, but also tend to be companies that were created by a founder who’s still around.
12:26 So they still have some founder DNA in there. That is, they were basically that some of these principles are baked right in to the inception, whereas these other companies that have been around for a very, very long time have much greater difficulty introducing it, doing things differently. Who’s doing it right? I mean, do you say? I think one of the best companies out there doing things right is an Australian company called Atlassian.
12:50 Yeah. You mentioned that in the video. Yeah. But they do all kinds of interesting things. I like the FedEx days that you spoke about.
12:56 They do FedEx days, which is, for the viewers and listeners who don’t know, what Atlassian does is once a quarter on Thursday afternoons, they say to their software developers, go work on anything you want, as long as it’s not part of your regular job. It’s a full autonomy, and the only requirement is that you have to show what you’ve created to the rest of the company on Friday afternoon in this kind of fun meeting, and they call them FedEx days, or they called them FedEx days. FedEx, as in Federal Express.
13:21 Yeah. They really quickly come up with something great. You have to deliver something overnight. Now they actually do not call them FedEx days anymore because FedEx sent them a cease and desist letter. So they now call them ship it days.
13:35 But it turns out this one day of intense autonomy has led to all of these ideas for new products, fixes for existing products, improvements to internal processes. That’s one thing that they do that’s really interesting. They do a modified version of what some companies do of giving people not just that one day, but a certain percentage of their time on the job to work on whatever they want. They have done something that I think is really, really important and useful in that they have essentially abolished formal performance reviews, which most people on both sides of the table despise and which the research shows are woefully, woefully ineffective if not harmful.
14:20 And so they’ve rethought some of the orthodoxy about how you run companies. But this is a young company. The founders are still around. They were able to encode these principles at the very inception. But there are a lot of companies out there that are doing some really interesting, very novel practices.
14:38 Tim Ferriss was here a few weeks ago and he was talking about how he uses Gmail offline because he was saying every email you get sent is actually someone trying to take your time away from you. And it made me think of your new book to sell as human because like you said, every email is a pitch. And I mean, do you agree with that by the way? Do you think that the email is someone trying to basically take your time away in general? It’s a bit of a conspiracy.
15:01 I know it’s a generalization, but. It strikes me as slightly paranoid, but what about him? What about the emails that he’s sending? He’s trying to take, I mean. Well, that’s his agenda, right?
15:10 Right, right. So, I mean, first of all, I mean, just to be fair, email for me is just the bane of my existence. because there’s just too much of it and it does take an enormous amount of time. But there are, I think there are, what we need are some ways for people to understand how to make it more useful and more relevant. It’s also a huge efficiency to it.
15:32 That is, you know, let’s say that somebody who says that email, every email that he receives is this desire to take away his time. Let’s see what happens when we take his email away entirely. See how he reacts to that. So, you know, there is, but I do think that an email is, as you say, is a pitch, that is, it’s a plea for attention and engagement, and there are ways to do it more effectively, there are ways to do it so that it’s more useful to the recipient, there are ways to do it so that it’s better for you.
16:04 I think that with email as with so many things, the most important thing is to see it from the other person’s perspective. Write your email thinking about the perspective of the person on the receiving end, not on your end, I mean, not what your perspective is, take the other side’s perspective on it. And so, what’s gonna be useful here for the other side? Why would the other side wanna read this? Why would it be useful, helpful, entertaining, engaging to that other side?
16:29 And I think if you- Rather than just spam. Yeah. Yeah, which is, that is the most frustrating thing about email. But you know, I was really interested in the left brain, right brain metaphor you had going because I also feel like I am incredibly right-brained and I wondered you said you were working on because you believe that you’re sort of more left brain and you were working on your right brain skills. I wanted to know how how do you do that and how would I work on my left brain skills? Yeah well I mean the key thing is is that there’s a couple of key things here number one is that when I use left brain right brain it’s very much a metaphor as you said there’s been a lot of really stupid stuff written about left brain and right brain over the years. It’s one of those ideas where the popularization got way ahead of the science. But there are, you know, there are some differences in the two hemispheres of our brain. They have different functions, they have different specialties. We obviously use both sides for everything that we do, but that division of labor I think yields a very important metaphor. And in my view economically is that the logical linear left brain abilities are less valuable today because you can outsource them and you can automate them. The right brain abilities are harder to outsource, harder to automate, therefore I think more valuable.
17:43 And so that’s basically the nutshell economic argument. So for me as someone who’s pretty good at the kind of analytical spreadsheet, SAT, the analytical spreadsheet standardized test kinds of skills, that means I have some work to do. So what do I do to get better at it? Well, I mean, since writing this book, A Whole New Mind, first of all, I schooled myself in design, by talking to designers, by reading about design, by subscribing to design magazines.
18:12 I’m not going to be a great designer, but I understand design thinking much more than I did say 10 years ago, and that’s a profoundly important thing. And design, you mean by design, designing what exactly? Anything. Anything from graphic design, industrial design, architectural design, clothing design, basically, one of the things that the awakenings for me is that everything in our world is the product of a design decision. It didn’t just fall out of the sky, right? So the configuration of this room, there’s a design decision there. The insane London traffic, there’s a design decision, a bad one in the configuration of the roads.
18:51 The way the signs are displayed, there’s a design decision there. When you go in to buy a cup of coffee at a coffee shop, there’s a design decision embedded in that interaction. Yeah, everything is a design and hopefully you’re hoping for the best design, something that’s been thought out well, and very often that’s not the case. Precisely, but going back to this email point, you can’t just say they’re all idiots, they don’t make good design decisions. What it means is that you have to make good design decisions in your own life, so if you’re building it, so if you have a company, a brand, whatever, a website, you got to make sure that that website sees it from the user’s point of view and that it’s easy to navigate. For me, if you’re writing a book, I think very, very, I work very, very hard on the design, not the cover.
19:38 We’re not talking about cover, but the design of the book itself. What is the structure of the book itself? Does it hold together? Is it accessible? Does it allow people to understand the ideas that I’m talking about?
19:50 Is it simple? Is it easy to digest? Simplicity is probably the greatest and most undervalued virtue. Oh no, I have added simplicity. Are you impressed by Apple as a design company or do you see other companies that are?
20:03 No, I mean, Apple is, I mean, I think that one of the things about, yeah, sure, Apple, I mean, first one of the things about Apple is that it doesn’t have a lot of products. I think that’s where, I think there’s a kind of rigor. That’s a design. That’s a design decision. That’s a, it’s a strategic decision, but it’s a design decision and many strategic decisions end up being design decisions.
20:20 So it has relatively small number of products. I think they take the user into account very deeply in ways that other kinds of products and services don’t. So I think it’s a great design company. But to me, the way that, going back to Sonia’s question, is the way that I got better at this is by being more conscious of it, by schooling myself in it. And so I think that that can be really useful.
20:43 For you, here’s the thing. If somebody who considers themselves much more right brain than left brain, the most important thing I can emphasize to those folks is to be numerate. You don’t have to be a math whiz, but you have to be numerate. They should, everybody should take a statistics course. Everybody should take a statistics course.
21:07 You can understand the basics of it. Everybody should have a basic understanding of probability. You don’t have to have calculus. You don’t have to have trigonometry. You don’t, I mean, cause you, do you want to be a physicist or an engineer?
21:20 No, you don’t need to calculus for that, but you want to be a citizen, you better know stats and probability. You want to be a functioning business person, you better know stats and maybe probability and certainly a little bit of finance. So to me, it’s just basically what people call numeracy. If you’re more right brain than left brain, you can’t just run screaming from the room if somebody writes a number. You have to be numerate.
21:47 You don’t have to be like a huge great mathematician, but you have to be numerate. and I get that, do you hear that everybody? Yeah, get a statistical course, a statics course. You can take it, but you can take a stats course for free on Coursera or Udacity or those kinds of online things. But right-brain thinkers, it is the time in the sun now, that’s what you were saying?
22:06 I think that if you look at these skills, the left brain, the metaphorical left brain abilities and the metaphorically right brain abilities, the metaphorically right brain abilities are more valuable now. Because these can be commoditized. These can be commoditized, you know, you can, you can, um, certain kinds of accounting, you can do it faster on accounting software here in the UK. You know, if you, if you go to get a divorce, you’re going to pay your attorney for the divorce. A lot of money.
22:34 You can DIY it. You can DIY it online. All right. You can complete, you can do it all the way for it. Exactly. You can do it on software.
22:41 The other thing that’s happening in all, all range of practices is that you got other people who speak English, Let’s say India, who can do certain kinds of routine algorithmic work cheaper and faster and just as well. And this is what happened, I mean we’ve seen this movie before, this is what happened to routine mass production work a generation or two ago in England, in the United States. Routine mass production work, turning the same screw the same way, doesn’t get done in England, doesn’t get done in Great Britain, doesn’t get done in the United States.
23:15 It races to the cheapest cost provider, and what’s happening right now is that routine white-collar work, certain kinds of accounting, not all, certain kinds of engineering, not all, certain kinds of programming, certain kinds of law, that’s going the same route as routine blue-collar work. That it can be done faster by computers, cheaper by people overseas, and what that means is that the comparative advantage is with the things that are harder to outsource, harder to… Yeah, my brother actually works for Cisco Systems in Switzerland, and it’s a big, you know, huge hardware manufacturer for all the internet-based systems and things.
23:51 And he said the same thing. He said, Brian, he’s like, the Chinese will copy and make better all of our basic systems. He’s like, we don’t innovate and create the next big piece. The game changer, he’s like, we’re dead. And so it’s just, there’s so much, well, there’s pressure, but in the same way, you know, that’s where their value is added probably in the West.
24:11 But it goes back to Apple too, because what’s Apple good at? Apple not only are good design thinkers, but what have they done? Do you guys have iPads? Yeah. Yeah, and iPhones.
24:21 And iPhones. Okay, so did you know four years ago you were missing an iPad? Absolutely not, yeah. It’s giving the world something you didn’t know was missing, iterating something entirely. That’s what Jobs says, he didn’t take customer reviews, he’s like, they don’t know what they want, right?
24:34 And in order to have that sort of ability to actually give people what they didn’t know, you do have to have, you have to be a right brain thinker, somebody that’s not been housed, boxed, or taught a sort of set of, you know, equations that can be mimicked by a piece of machinery. You need to have that lateral thinking. Artists throughout time have been on one side with their legs and to really just stop the thinking brain, to really get out there with, you know, what’s available, what do we need, how can we make life easier, better, because that’s what innovation is.
25:03 Well that’s what artists do. Artists give the world something it didn’t know it was missing. That’s what poets do, that’s what sculptors do, that’s what theatrical artists do. And that is, to me, the most important cognitive skill. Now, you have to have the foundation of the left-brain appeal.
25:16 It’s not like the left-brain doesn’t matter. You have to have them, but they’re necessary but not sufficient. Otherwise nothing’s going to be done and Aaron is going to be… Right. It’s going to be spelled wrong and the numbers won’t add up.
25:27 Totally. Now how much is innovation at the end of the day selling these days? Because you could have the greatest idea, but if you can’t communicate it or get someone to act on it. And lefty. How much of that is selling, which is what you talk about in your book?
25:39 I think it’s huge. I mean, you know, it’s huge. You have to be able to explain something that people didn’t realize that they were missing and be compelling enough that they say, wow, I didn’t know that I needed that. And that’s an act of selling. That’s an act of identifying latent needs.
25:58 It’s an act of identifying problems people didn’t realize that they have. The other thing is that I think a lot of times certain innovations inside of companies don’t take hold, not because they’re poorly sold, because they’re just not that interesting. I could come up with a phone that makes toast, that’s an innovation, but who cares? The fact that if I come up with a phone that can make toast and it doesn’t take the world by storm, is that a failure of selling or is it just simply something that isn’t really all that great and interesting.
26:32 That’s still innovative. It’s innovative, but it’s not a necessity. It hasn’t made our lives better, because we don’t need a phone that makes toast. An innovation that is actually going to change the way we live or our lifestyle, enhance it. Because we’re looking for things that are going to enhance our current lifestyle.
26:49 How is that going to make it better? I’ve heard that marketing starts when you design the product. I mean, people have said that before. I think, again, not to deify Apple here, but one of the things that Apple does, different from other companies is that the typical process is that you the engineers and designers well first of all the market research people discover do their research whatever that’s worth the engineers engineer it the designers design it the then they pass it off to the marketers who market it and then they pass it off to the salespeople who sell it and what Apple does is it puts all those people around the table in the same room at the whiteboard stage.
27:32 So it’s not this kind of handoff from one function to another function to another function, it’s basically everybody is in there all the time. Because in some ways a design decision is a marketing decision, a marketing decision is a design decision, an engineering decision is a sales decision, and by having those multifunctional groups all around the table at the inception, you end up creating something that is just better. Now you talk about different sales pitches in your book, you have like the six different pitches.
27:58 Yeah. You have a great video on that, I was just wondering if you could just walk us through some of the basics. Sure, well the idea here is, you know, when we think about, it goes back to your email, your question is, which I think really important and what changed my view in this, in researching this book is, what’s the purpose of a pitch? Why do we pitch in the first place? And I always thought the purpose of a pitch was basically to convert.
28:17 So that I pitch something to you and you either say yes or no, and I convert you like that. Well, it turns out there’s some fascinating research from the University of California Davis in Stanford that followed around Hollywood screenwriters in the pitching process. They went with these Hollywood screenwriters. It’s very exhaustive research where they went to all these meetings, they recorded the meetings, they transcribed the conversations, they followed up to see what was going on.
28:41 It’s actually a paper that won a lot of awards. And what they found to me, the big takeaway from that for me, especially personally, is this, that the pitches that were most successful had a certain quality to them. Do you know what that was? Take a guess. I’m trying to think, I don’t want to say empathy, but.
29:00 Empathy is actually pretty close. Really? Empathy is actually pretty close. The pitches that worked the best were pitches that actually invited in the other person as a participant. So it’s not me saying, not me saying to you, I got this movie idea and you would say yes or no.
29:19 The pitches that were successful were I have this movie idea and you say, that’s interesting. What about if we did it this way? And then I say, oh yeah, that might be bad. It ended up being a sort of invitation to collaborate. It wasn’t a kind of single shot meant to convert, it was basically an invitation to engage and to collaborate.
29:38 And those were the ones that were most successful. And so we got, and most of us don’t, again, we look at it through the other side of the spectrum. Most of us, when we hear a pitch, we don’t convert immediately. We don’t say, oh, yeah, that’s great. Let me write a check.
29:53 No, we digest it. Right, and we want some collaboration and participation. So the purpose of a pitch is to engage. The purpose of a pitch is to invite a conversation. The purpose of a pitch is to bring the other side in.
30:05 And it turns out that there’s some really, really cool stuff on pitching and how we can do it better. The way you do that is how do you move somebody to want to be involved, to enjoy the topic or the subject? How do you deliver it? It’s not only, it’s partly delivered. Also I think it goes back to structure.
30:22 One good example would be we don’t pitch enough with questions. We tend to pitch with statements and it turns out there’s some very interesting research showing the conditions in which pitching with questions is more effective and what it shows pretty clearly is that pitching with questions is effective when the facts are clearly on your side, when the facts are clearly on your side. Is that a rhetorical question? Well, not clearly a rhetorical question.
30:46 It’s just so obvious that someone will say yes or… Not quite. I’ll give you an American example here. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was running for president. He was running against Jimmy Carter, who was elected in 1976.
31:00 Reagan’s argument essentially was that Carter had messed up the economy and deserved to be replaced. And because people’s economic situation had deteriorated from 1976 to 1980. That was basically his case. But Reagan was sort of an unknown. He actually had a bigger problem than being an unknown. He was known. That was his bigger problem and not as an actor and as a little bit of a scary dude. And what he did instead, instead of saying your economic situation has deteriorated over the last 48 months. A typical politician He asked a question.
31:34 He asked a question. He said, ask yourself, are you better off now than you were four years ago? Now here’s the interesting takeaway from this research. Questions by their very nature elicit an active response. Statements don’t always.
31:50 So if I ask you a question, even if you’re not answering it explicitly, it still gets your wheels turning just a little bit. So what happens? People look at that question from 1980 and say, are you better off now than you were four years ago? They look back four years and they say, oh no, things are much worse off. What do they do?
32:08 They’re taking an active role and they’re summoning more important than that, or equally important with the active role, is that they’re summoning their own reasons for agreeing with you. They come up, they basically reach your conclusion their own way. They reach their conclusion autonomously. They come up with their own intrinsic motivations for agreeing with you. Now, where this runs a foul is if the facts aren’t clearly on your side.
32:34 Because if the facts aren’t clearly on your side, they reason their way through, they engage a little bit, they have an active response, and they come up with their own reasons for disagreeing with you. And so when the facts are clearly on your side, pitching with questions is effective. When the facts are not clearly on your side, it’s not the right way to pitch. And yet, there is a slight point that I’m thinking, you know, if somebody is bold enough, If they’re trying to sell you on something and they’re bold enough to ask you a question, that they’re almost asking you to engage and think about the question, even if you didn’t answer that question or investigate the answer to that question, you are sold by the fact that they’ve asked that question, thinking that they are bold enough to ask that question, that if I sat down and really went back to look at it, I’m going to go with what you’re saying because there’s a part of you that thinks, okay, well, you’re strong enough to ask me that question, so I believe you’ve done your research, so I’m just going to go with that.
33:28 Do you know what I mean? That’s a good point. Yeah, that could be. That’d be an interesting test. It does require a certain amount of confidence to ask a question, because you don’t know what answer you’re going to get.
33:39 This is one reason, but it goes past these old-style sales techniques. There’s so many of the old-style sales techniques, they’re so irritating and they’re so ineffective, but one of the techniques is to always ask people questions that could be answered yes. Yes. Yes. The yes ladder, they call it, right?
33:56 Yeah. Exactly. You have to ask a question that we answered yes three times, and then you’ve sold. Yeah. Do people smell that a mile away these days, do you think?
34:03 Absolutely. Okay. I don’t think everybody does, but I think a lot of people do. Are you the kind of person who likes a good deal? No.
34:10 No. Exactly. Are you the kind of person who wants to buy something really useful at a fair price? No. No.
34:21 That’s so obvious. Yeah. dirty in this way. I think you had an article where you talked about like an introvert-extrovert salesman curve and with someone in the middle was the most successful. Yeah. Well, those are two different points. Yeah, two interesting, but two really interesting different points. I mean, one of them is, yeah, I do think a lot of us think of sales people as dirty. That is, and I’ve written about this, a big survey of the American workforce, sample of the American workforce, obviously, where we ask people, when you you think of sales or selling, what’s the first word that comes to mind? What’s the first word that comes to mind and people offered words? What would be your words?
34:56 No, yucky, I don’t know. Okay, yeah. If I think, I think dishonest sometimes. Dishonest, great. This is exactly what people give you the answers. They give you answers dishonest. One of the top 25 answers in this survey was yuck. No joke, absolutely. Yuck, Ugg, ick, fake, slimy, dishonest, manipulative, sleazy, smarmy, and that’s what we think about sales.
35:24 In my view, and I write about it in this book, is that that view of sales I think is woefully outdated. That view of sales is really not about sales, but it’s about the conditions of sales for a very long time, and what I mean by that is that most of what we know about sales comes from a world of information asymmetry, where the seller always had more information than the buyer. When the seller has more information than the buyer, the seller can rip you off.
35:46 This is why we have the principle of buyer beware. But we don’t have asymmetrical information relations between buyer and seller today. We have much more equal information relations. When sellers and buyers have equal amounts of information, that’s a very different world. You can’t be sleazy, slimy, and dishonest.
36:04 If you’re sleazy, slimy, and dishonest, you get found out. Even worse, people have a way to talk back. tell everybody on Twitter. So I think what that’s done is it’s forced people more to the high road. I think it’s a very different world of selling and this goes to your second point which is, if that’s right, how do you get good at it? And so once again I went to the social science for this book and one of the things that I found is that if you’re selling in a world of information equality, information parity, that is a very, very different kind of selling. Fundamentally different kind of selling than selling in a world of information asymmetry. Because in information asymmetry, the seller has the advantage. In information parity, nobody has the advantage. And so, how do you get better at this? And what I did is, going to the social sciences, identified three key qualities that are necessary as a place, basically foundational qualities. And they are attunement, buoyancy and clarity. A, B, C. A, attunement, B, buoyancy, C, clarity. Attunement, buoyancy and clarity.
37:03 Attunement is perspective taking. And you take the other person’s perspective. Buoyancy is how do you stay afloat on an ocean of rejection, which is what sales is in any kind of form. And the third thing is clarity, which we’ve talked a lot about here, you know, simplicity. How do you take murky situations and make them clear?
37:19 How do you go from solving existing problems, very left brain, to identifying problems people don’t realize that they have, very, very right brain. And so it’s those ABCs, attunement points in clarity, form the foundation of qualities that are necessary to sell your idea, to sell your product, to sell your service, to ask somebody, I mean to some extent to ask somebody out on a date, to get your kids to clean their room, to get your neighbors to move their car off of your driveway. And which goes to the point about introversion and extroversion.
37:55 A lot of what we think, a lot of us believe that extroverts are better salespeople. And what’s true is that extroverts are more likely to go into sales, more likely to get hired in sales jobs, more likely to get promoted. But the link between extroversion and sales performance, that is how much stuff gets sold, is basically non-existent. And there’s some new research out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, a guy named Adam Grant, who found that the most effective sellers were not strong introverts or strong extroverts, but people in the middle, what researchers call ambiverts, People who are a little bit extroverted, a little bit introverted.
38:31 And the reason that they’re skilled at it, arguably, is that they’re more attuned. They know when to speak, they know when to shut up. They know when to talk, they know when to listen. Extroverts talk too much, listen too little, come on too strong. Introverts don’t assert, don’t strike up conversations.
38:46 The people in the middle, the ambiverts, they’re more attuned. I mean, they’re ambidextrous, they can go left, they can go right, and they become much more effective at sales. So this idea that to be in sales you have to be this kind of glad handing, super gregarious, back slapping kind of person is just flatly wrong. I always try not to be that guy in the city because like that would be too much for most people. I think they just, they typify you as a certain type of person.
39:12 They think everything you’re doing is a pitch, and then after a while. Overbearing. Overbearing is a word that you often hear with people who are very strong on the extroversion scale, that as you measure people’s introversion and extroversion, people who test as very strong extroverts, other people often describe them as overbearing. Because ultimately, today, I feel as though we’ve got Google. We’ve all got the same information.
39:42 It’s an even playing field. But when you go to go and get something, or you’re trying to decide what you want from a salesperson today is you actually connect to who they are, like them as a person. Are they cool? Are you identifying with them first of all? So you’re buying them really effectively.
40:04 And then you want from them a lot more. You expect a lot more. You want them to tell you why their product is better. So you want them to have done their research across the board of products. Like if you want to buy a mobile phone, why should I take the iPhone instead of the Blackberry. I want to know that they’ve got this information, and then I’m going to trust them as a person. But the whole time, I’m subconsciously weighing them up as a person, so you’re buying people. I guess that’s always been the case, but before we were almost … There was more ability to bombard somebody into buying something because of the asymmetry of information.
40:37 It’s the information asymmetry? You were talking about … Yeah. Sure. I mean, you go to buy a cell phone, you can go online and compare packages on your own. You don’t have to rely only on that salesperson. You can go to your friends and you put a post of a note on Facebook and say, hey, I’m trying to decide between the Blackberry and the iPhone, what do you guys think?
40:54 And that person there, that salesperson, what they have to do is they have to understand what your needs are. They have to understand, okay, how are you using this phone?
41:07 They have to be more cognitive, don’t they? They have to think about who it is. Well, it’s interesting you said it, because attunement, perspective-taking, is very much a cognitive skill. It’s actually more left-brain skill than a right brain skill for the research shows, that you have to be able to understand people’s thoughts and understand their interests. But somebody like that, they don’t have a massive information advantage over people.
41:27 This is what you see all the time, even in business, did you do business to business sales? Not really. Yeah, it was B2B. Yeah, enter banking. Okay.
41:35 All right. So there you go. So in business to business sales, what’s happening more and more is that the customer, the buyer is entering the sales process at a far later stage because they can do a lot of their due diligence on their own. A lot of times, you know, cell phones aren’t a great example because they weren’t around for that long, but the car showroom, it’s car dealerships. One reason that people went into car showrooms 20 years ago is that that was the only place to know about cars.
42:04 You had to go in there. That’s what the information was. The information essentially was stored in that showroom and you didn’t have it and you didn’t have access to it. So you had to go out and go to the showroom and actually get the information. Now you have customers coming into the process far later because they’re able to get a lot of the information on their own.
42:24 And when they go to the car dealer, when they go to the car salesperson, they know just as much about Ford Fiesta as that Ford Fiesta salesman. It’s very interesting because it’s the same, I think the same relates to sort of all your left brain as doctors, lawyers. You know, in the past, you’d go to a doctor, my grandparents would go to a doctor, doctor would say, well, you’ve got this and this is your prescription and go away and come back and let me know how you’re doing in a month.
42:51 It doesn’t happen really today. People don’t go to a doctor and he goes, you’ve got this and go and take this. I mean, most, I’m not saying everybody does it, but most people have a certain level of autonomy today. What do you think I have? Google, Google, Google.
43:03 I’m going to do my research. I’m not going to just take any medication. I’m not going to buy anything you tell me. It’s a questioning period that we’ve entered into. People are more wanting their autonomy, they’re wanting to question things, they’re not just sucking it all up.
43:18 Just because something is printed on paper does not mean it’s gospel. There was a period where a book was so valuable, your books are very valuable, there’s a period where books were so valued and so it’s printed on paper therefore it must be true. We’re not in that anymore. It doesn’t exist. In fact, today it’s like, please stop killing the trees.
43:35 We don’t need a paper trail, just put your book on the net. So there’s a whole different era that we’re going into, and I’m wondering, this shift in consciousness, is that actually making us also … I mean, it’s been a bit of a religious turn, and I was interested when I was left brain, right brain, I was trying to get all right brain about it and think about how we’ve really shifted away from people buying into religion so much. What do you think of that?
44:04 People, it’s become, we’re turning, we’re becoming a lot more spiritual, a lot more questioning of, you know, any organization and religion and it’s very interesting to me. Yeah, I mean it varies a lot from country to country, it varies significantly from country to country. But, you know, here in the United States it’s much more religious, classically religious than in Western Europe. Yes, it is. Much, much more.
44:31 The idea that you have the head of the… Are your techniques used in religion the labor the labor part? I mean the idea that the head of the Labor Party here Miloban is says I don’t believe in God He says I’m an atheist. I Think it’d basically be impossible for anyone in Congress for anyone I don’t think I doubt well It’s probably been one or two politicians But the idea that someone running for president United States or governor of a state saying I don’t believe why do you think that?
44:59 Is there? It’s all, I’m not sure exactly. Are you nervous to speak about it? We end up being, no, we end up being, so religion has a different role, but I think one of the things that you see out there is that it’s partly a product of affluence that, and when I say affluence, I don’t mean people getting enormously rich, I mean people being liberated from the struggle for survival, and one of the things that happened, I mean the guy who won the Nobel Prize, a guy named Robert William Fogel, has written about this, what he calls the fourth, he calls it the fourth great awakening, that basically if, as more and more people are liberated from the struggle for survival, you see it in the United States, I’ll speak as an American, in the United States, at some level we have a bigger problem.
45:46 This would have been bizarre a hundred years ago, that the problem we have, the nutrition problem we have in the United States is that people have too much food. The problem in the United States is obesity, not malnutrition, not lack of food, but too many calories. People would have been dumbfounded by having that as a problem 100 years ago. What you have in this world of pretty significant material abundance is people saying, what’s it all about? Why am I here?
46:16 What’s my purpose? Sometimes they explore those questions through formal religion, but as you’re suggesting, and more they explore those questions through other kinds of mechanisms whether it is spirituality to some extent yoga I mean to a whole mix a whole kind of bricolage of of practices so I take this Buddhist practice and I take this self-help book and I take this other thing that I learned and I put into my own amalgam of belief. My eclectic understanding of how I want to live my life.
46:53 And again, we can argue whether that’s a good thing or a thing, but it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s undeniably a thing. I don’t think there’s any question about that. I don’t think there’s a judgment. I think a lot of people, even religious, really people that have grown up in a society that is very religious, I think they too are understanding the laws of nature, because what is spirituality? is who am I in the big picture, what’s my purpose, what am I here for, what are the laws of life that are unchanging no matter what society I find myself in.
47:27 Because society makes these rules, you know, that’s what you study, this is a social behavior. Is this something you’re gonna talk about more in like a future book? Like kind of go a bit more spiritual? Because a lot of your books are really practical like business wise and they have such a spiritual side to it. Something Sonya and I were talking about before the interview.
47:46 Right, you say you’d have dinner with Jesus Buddha and Muhammad and then write a book. Oh, yeah. Okay. Uh-huh. Yeah, because, I mean, I think Jesus Buddha and Muhammad are pretty significant historical figures who have a lot to say about, you know, I think it’s a really, really interesting question.
48:04 But, I mean, your question of what’s next, and it makes me think about this. If you think about all of the industries that have been disrupted, so big media disrupted. You look at a company like Dell, which was at the top of the world because it made PCs, and now it’s struggling and going private once again. You look at all these, you look at a company like Kodak. Kodak was a huge employer, internationally renowned company, all of a sudden disrupted.
48:40 And I think what’s interesting is I’m waiting for the ultimate disruptor of organized religion. That could easily happen. In our lifetime? I don’t know. I mean, think about it like, you know, just do the, you know, do the kind of analogy, you know, organized religion, Kodak is to organize religion as, no, I’m sorry, the Howard Resort, The Kodak got disrupted by the digital camera.
49:10 Organized religion will be disrupted by the web. Could be. I don’t know. But what is the digital camera of organized religion? It’s one institution aside from media.
49:22 I mean, media has been totally disrupted. Technology has disrupted, you know. What you’re saying is nothing is too big to fall. Nothing is too big to have a little makeover. You know, it’s, and I feel we are really moving and it’s an exponential movement into spirituality.
49:42 And again, the word, again, we’ve discussed this, Brian, and the word spirituality is a tricky one. It’s become so sort of, you know, wishy-washy. What is spirituality? Would your grandparents even know what that meant? No, no.
49:55 Spirituality almost means that you’re being religious without associating with the religion, doesn’t it? I just think it means that we are inspired to live the truth for ourselves, to ask questions, to understand our spirit, what our purpose is here. That’s what I think spirituality is, because spirituality is, I believe in something bigger. I want something bigger. I know there’s something more to just this treadmill of life, this go to work, and that’s in such a big way is what you’re trying to say with all everything you write.
50:28 You don’t just have to go to work. You don’t just have to be a worker or be a manager. You can inspire the workforce. You can find meaning in what you do, and there are ways to do it. I have one other question for Daniel.
50:39 Something that we talk about sometime in the show, I’m sure you wouldn’t get this question on the BBC. Yeah. But Sonia and I have both taken the ayahuasca, which is like an entheogen. Some people call it a psychedelic, but what it does is it really breaks down your ego to a very big way and makes you… You’ve got to walk me back here.
50:55 What is it again? Yeah. It’s called ayahuasca. It has the compound dimethyl tryptamine in it, which is very similar to psilocybin, which comes in a mushroom, also known as a magic mushroom. And Steven Jobs was famous to saying that his mushroom tryptamine creates some of the apple products.
51:11 But what it does is it actually deflates your ego to a huge extent and makes you much more empathetic. And I was just wondering if you thought that would ever make you a better salesperson. Getting having a hallucinogen? Yeah. or an egoteflating moment that might help in some way.
51:29 I don’t know, it’s a really interesting question about whether there are performance-enhancing drugs for salespeople. So if we have, you know, I think it’s an interesting question if there was a performance-enhancing drug for perspective-taking, that I wonder, it’s a really interesting question whether if you could take a drug that would allow me to be more acute at taking your perspective, or allow me to… Absolutely. Would a near-death experience potentially make you a better salesman?
51:53 Well, that jilted a bolt, didn’t she? Yeah, that’s an interesting one. So that changed her perspective on things. And that was basically what you’re describing, Brian, which is essentially ego deflation. Yeah.
52:05 That had, that’s an interesting one. That had, in some ways, a more spiritual cast to it. What I’m thinking of is blood doping for salespeople. Yeah. Did you mirror a lot of, watch a lot of salespeople in order to come up with a lot of the techniques of your books and were there certain salespeople that really stood out in your mind and were like, you know, this is the guy and they taught me things I never even saw.
52:26 Yeah, it’s sort of yes and no. I mean, I think that on the realm of general principles, yeah, I think, and they’re very counterintuitive, or they’re somewhat counterintuitive general principles. For instance, a lot of the very skilled salespeople I interviewed talked about the importance of humility, which actually in some ways goes to your point of ego deflation. They basically talked about the importance of being humble, the importance of listening, the importance of, you know, one woman said, it’s interesting because it is related to ego deflation.
52:53 One woman said something very interesting, she said, I put myself in the small chair so the customer can sit in the big chair. Which is ego deflation in some ways. And so there was that. One of the sales people I talked to talked a lot about his being soft spoken. That he felt that he was effective as a seller because he was soft spoken.
53:20 He wasn’t trying to dominate the conversation. He was listening. He was, you know, being attuned to how other people were. So I think those general, I think a lot of the general principles that come out of seeing someone else’s perspective, of making things clear and simple, of listening as much as talking, of humility, are really, you know, just kind of quieter virtues that help us get better at moving other people. I think attunement is the biggest, I mean, really being able to just because everybody’s so different.
53:54 You know, one way is not going to make you a salesman. You’ve got to be able to move with, you know, people like who I’m feeding, who’s this person? How can I… And it goes back to all the, you know, mimicking. I mean, I’m not saying you should mimic people and copy what they do and, you know, that’s also a thing of the past with the three yeses and stuff, but to be able to feel and…
54:15 Although there is a lot of evidence about mimicry. Yeah, well, the whole NLP, I mean, it is. Yeah, a little NLP doesn’t have much research behind it, but the idea of mimicry, I mean, there’s a lot of good, very solid social science on that, and I wish we could call it something else from mimicry. Yeah, because mimicry sounds like it’s just… Duplicitous.
54:33 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you look at how people behave in a natural environment, they mirror each other’s gestures, facial expressions, things like that, some very interesting research on waiters and waitresses showing that waiters and waitresses who repeat back the order word for word. They’re mimicking. You order something, I repeat it back word for word. They’re mimicking you.
54:56 Get higher tips. I believe it. So there’s something, I just hate the word, I hate the word mimicry, but the point here is that- It’s another subtle language with the body. Precisely. That it’s another channel of information coming in there.
55:11 It’s another way to understand where someone is coming from by simply being conscious of how are they sitting, how are they using their hands, what are their word choices. It’s just, to me, it’s just a wider, more expansive view of understanding where somebody is coming from. The idea that you can simply understand, all you have to do is just, all you can do is just close your eyes and simply get a, or even get a transcript of what someone is saying and that that’s going to fully allow you to understand their perspective is so flatly wrong.
55:37 I mean, we would never, ever, we would never, ever do that. I was just curious what advice you would give to someone who say 20 years old, who wants to be Daniel Pink someday, who wants to write these books. And I’m just curious if you would suggest they go to law school or not, or follow the career path that you took. I think the most important thing is that you don’t want to try to be anybody else. You want to be the best version of yourself you can be.
56:07 And so I think that if, first of all, no one’s out there saying, I want to be the next Dean of Pink, but if you want to go out there and, you know, believe me, if you want to go out there and if, but if you say, I want to be the next X, Y, or Z, I think that’s a bad idea in general, because, because there already is that other person. So you don’t want to be the, you want to be more wife brain about your thoughts, the ability of your future, you want to be, you want to be, you want to be the best version of yourself. Exactly.
56:34 You want to be the best version of yourself. I mean, it’s what Jerry Garcia reportedly said about, you know, the Grateful Dead. He said, you know, you don’t want to be the best, you don’t want to be the best at what you do. You want to be the only one who does what you do. And you know, I think that’s, I think that’s really what it is.
56:49 And so, you know, I think you can look at, I think you can look at other people and look at people who think you can admire the people and draw on their virtues and learn from them. But I think ultimately, to actually be effective, but also just to have integrity in your soul, You want to aim to be the best person, the best version of yourself that you can be. I don’t want my kids to be the next, I mean if I got to think about what my kids do, their key interests now.
57:19 I mean one of my daughters makes a lot of films, so I don’t want her to be the next Steven Spielberg. I want her to be the first Sophie of Pink. Exactly. You want her to cut her own path in life and leave her own legacy that’s so individual Absolutely. If each person lives there, you know, passion, that’s going to happen.
57:37 Do you have certain… I mean, I’m learning this whole parent thing, but do you have certain things like, I want you to go to university, or is that a way our parents used to think? Brian has a nine-year-old, so he’s thinking ahead. Is it too rigid, that whole concept, or do you have certain things where, like, you got to go to university, or is it these days you’re kind of like… You know, I mean, here’s the thing.
57:58 The evidence is pretty clear that if you go to university, it’s good for you right now. So, I mean, it’s pretty clear. Now, that does not mean that every single kid should go to university, no. And so, if one of my kids had said, I don’t wanna go to university, I would say, okay, what do you wanna do instead? If the answer was, I just wanna sit on a beach somewhere drinking pina coladas, I would say, that’s probably not a good alternative.
58:21 But if one of my kids said, well, I’ve got, our other daughter is a dancer. She said, you know what, I don’t wanna go to college. I wanna see if I, I wanna move to New York and see if I can make it as a dancer. All right, rock and roll. That’s great.
58:33 If one of my kids said, you know, I went to college for a year, but I’m going to start, I’m going to leave and start a company, awesome. Go for it. You know, college, university is always going to be there. Wow. And what do you think about, you know, I…
58:48 So I think for kids, I mean, you know, I always hasn’t given parenting advice. But I mean, I think for the most important things for kids is to, you know, articulate a broad set of principles and values, but more important than anything else, live those broad principles and values, because kids don’t listen to what you say, but they watch what you do. Exactly. But to live them, you mean as a parent, to live what you’re, to be your son. If I say, if I say, if one of my principles is
59:18 Don’t conform, be generous, work hard. And do the opposite. Yeah, and I’m like, not generous, and I’m lazy. And a conformist. You’re so incongruent.
59:30 Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, I always think that kids watch what parents say, but they watch what parents say, but they watch what they do.
59:40 Absolutely. I’m starting to see that more and more. Just a couple more questions and we’ll be finished, Daniel. Do you find that as you get older and maybe as you become a parent that your interests in your books change or that your work changes? I know we talked earlier about kind of what’s next for you in the future, but do you feel that in yourself?
59:55 Hmm. Yeah, it’s just a question. question. I never really thought about it in that exact way. Probably, probably. I mean, I think there is a, I think there’s always, at least for me, there’s always like a slightly higher bar because when I, I choose my book topics very seriously because I live with them for a very, very long time. And so, I’m now, so, you know, I did my first book.
1:00:25 I just thought it was cool that I was able to write a book. I mean, that was awesome. It’s like, wow, I just wrote a book, that’s just so awesome. And then I realized and basically became proof of that anybody can write a book. And so that becomes less significant and it really is, am I going to do something that’s meaningful to me and that matters to other people?
1:00:42 So I think that the bar has gotten higher over and over and over again. And the other thing is that I really am concerned about repeating myself, is I don’t want to be one of those writers who writes the same version of the book every three years. And we’ve seen that movie before, and it’s not pretty. But you know, repetition is the master of skill. And I mean, if you keep people go, oh, I’ve heard that before, but I love hearing things over and over again because we’ve become, you know, so automatic in the sort of things that don’t serve us that we need to listen to and, you know, nurture every day of our lives the good qualities, the ways that we want to be.
1:01:30 And you don’t want the same book. We don’t want the same book word for word. But I mean, you know, just I’m not saying that you should do that and definitely even when you look at what you write, you can see how one way of thinking leads into the next. Sure. I think that’s true, and I think that’s just growth.
1:01:47 I think that’s paying attention and growing. That said, there are plenty of people out there who write the same version of the book. They basically write the same book over and over again. It’s Hollywood, isn’t it? It’s fiction, non-fiction, a lot of different realms, and that just to me is completely unsatisfying.
1:02:06 I think when you start writing the same book again, I think that’s the time you say maybe you should do something else for a living. Well, you know, last question here, you know, I’ve seen the way that you, you not only write a book, but you get these great videos behind it. I think you use a radical media for one of your videos and I was wondering if you have advice to someone who’s writing a book right now. Should they treat it kind of like a, should they treat it like a movie launch or should they treat it like a long-term piece you’re going to be living with for three years and how much of it is online promotion that you do or media like this?
1:02:36 Well, on your first question, absolutely the latter, absolutely think of it as a long-term proposition. I think that a lot of books are not movies. Books are not mass media. Books are not mass media. And so the idea that you only have two weeks to make a book work I think is foolish. To me the way that a lot of books take hold is if the author is out there believing in the idea or believing in the story and it’s pretty relentless about going out and talking about that idea and talking about that story to anybody who will listen.
1:03:18 And because books are not a mass media, mass medium, you have a fighting chance doing that. It’s hard to, if you just look at the numbers, if you look at the revenue for even a successful book in a year, it’s often less than a single weekend of a big Hollywood movie, usually less than it and so I said the way you I think the way you spread ideas in this particular on this particular in this particular medium is much more grassroots much more grassroots it’s a niche meat it’s a it’s not a mass medium and if you just go out and find your audience serve your audience be generous to your audience help your audience I think that absolutely redounds to your benefit in the long run and back it up with other media as well the other media are just another way to help your ought to serve your audience I mean if If you think about it as a form of, if you think about it as a form, and this goes to one of the ideas in this book to sell as human.
1:04:15 If you think about it as a form of service, then I think it’s valuable. So you mentioned that RSA video, which I didn’t even do, the RSA people did that. Does that help sell my book? Maybe, probably does. But is it valuable in and of itself?
1:04:30 Yeah, absolutely. You don’t need to buy my book to get value of it out of that. It’s just another, it serves people out there and as a consequence of serving people and being generous, I think ultimately that redounds to your benefit. Yeah. I think a lot of people are finding that they give a lot of stuff away, and then ultimately they might buy that book, but they’re just constantly giving out that media anyway, so I think people appreciate it.
1:04:51 Good. Well, we are giving away five copies of your book to the best quote tweeted from this episode, which I’m sure Daniel appreciated, is a good selling technique. Oh, yeah. It doesn’t rhyme though. I wanted to get into that rhyming pitch.
1:05:01 I thought of Muhammad Ali when I heard you using rhyming in a pitch, but there’s some Some great stuff in there, To Sell is Human is the book, and thanks for the time today. I know you’re running all around London. Thanks for having me. It’s good to be in your high-tech elite studio. It’s comfortable.
1:05:16 It’s awesome. It’s comfy. It’s a great studio. Thank you. Sonya, thanks for being here.
1:05:21 Pleasure. It was completely, you know, Sonya’s here a lot of times and talks about spiritual topics and ayahuasca topics, but you were like a square peg in a round hole, but I think it’s good. Yeah, I’m not doing any ayahuasca. Sorry, guys. You say that now.
1:05:34 That’s alright, I’ll send you some videos. No, say never. But thanks Sonia and thanks Daniel, I appreciate it. It’s a pleasure. Alright, thank you guys.
