 Sir Paul, welcome to the podcast. What an honor to have you on the show. For those of you who don't know Paul, he is one of the best. I was going to, I'm going to probably get this wrong. I was going to say neuroscientists, but I know that it's a neuro economist. Is that right? Yeah, behavioral neuroscientists, it's fine. Just casual, any behavioral neuroscientists. But Paul, you may have known him from multiple amazing TED Talks. He's worked with some of the biggest companies in the world and he also works at one of the biggest universities in the States as well. So just an incredibly smart, knowledgeable, wonderful and marvelous person and has a brilliant new book out, which is why we're on this podcast. So Paul, welcome. What an honor. Thank you so much, Chris. Oh, really, that's my honor. So lower your expectations. Johnson. How did you get into this? I mean, I know all the stuff you're doing now and it's absolutely incredible, but did you wake up one morning and just think, wow, okay, I'm really interested in sort of what makes people tick and how did you get into this? Yeah, how much time do you have? A couple of ways. I think human social behaviors are really fascinating and there's a real conflict between the standard views in biology and economics and social science. Is nature really red in tooth and claw? If so, why am I not stealing everything all the time? Why am I not hurting everybody? So how do we understand human positive social behaviors, which kind of makes the world go around? How do we live around all these humans? You live in London, right? So how can you actually survive around strangers? Almost no other animals do that unless they're genetically related to those other creatures. So we're very unusual organisms and so it really compelled me to begin running experiments to understand, in particular, how humans cooperate so effectively and easily. Yeah, it's amazing and I think one of the things I thought was fascinating going back to some of your earlier work, which you do talk about a little bit in your current book, is this idea of trust being actually like a chemical reaction, which I thought was kind of interesting. Was that, I think it was like sort of there was this link between trust and wealth? Yeah, it was one of the kind of one of the first kind of big discoveries we made in my lab was this signal, this neurochemical signal oxytocin that seems to index the degree to which you appear to be safe, trustworthy, okay to cooperate with and that, you know, knowing about that signal, which really hadn't been known before, tells us a lot about why we see variations in this behavior. So what promotes oxytocin release? What inhibits it? Why do we see this cooperative behavior? And as you said, that was driven by, hey, why has you have Western countries been rich for a thousand years, you know, the Denmark's, the Norway's and countries like Mexico or Colombia or, you know, Argentina struggle to reach those levels. And so, you know, that seems like a really good question and trust is a big part of that. So when you have an environment, legal formal environment and a social environment in which people cooperate very easily, then you have that social cooperation leads to economic cooperation, which creates wealth and everybody's better off or almost everybody's better off. And so, you know, there's a, there's a good kind of social reason to think about, you know, why some countries are rich, aside countries are poor, but it also gets down to that individual behavior. What are the individuals doing? Is this a malfunction in people's brains in Mexico? That's, there's no, it's that they're responding to the, again, social legal kind of environments they find themselves in. Where we think of Denmark, one of the highest trust countries, you know, they're all cousins, right? There's only five million of them. They all speak Danish. They're the only people in the world to speak that language. So of course, it's easy to cooperate with people that are similar to you. So anyway, so the neuroscience kind of elucidates that, but also gives clear recommendations on how to build high trust environments. For example, at work. I thought it was fascinating as you're saying you could sort of artificially create this. I think in one of your talks, you had a nasal spray or something to sort of increase the levels of oxytocin in your brain and then, and then sort of artificially create the sort of more trust. I mean, could we do that? Can we start, start sharing nasal sprays all over the world where things are going not so well and maybe build more trust and kindness? Or is it, is that too much of a crazy idea? Yes, hugs my drugs, right? So I really want to think about how to do this naturally. So you're right. Yeah, we were the first group to view synthetic oxytocin to human brains and showed that not only can you increase trust, cooperation, generosity, a whole bunch of other things, but it really shows causally that this is the right mechanism for us to look at. But yeah, I don't want to go around drugging people. I really want to understand the factors that inhibit it. So one of the big inhibitors for oxytocin release and trust is high levels of testosterone, right? So you and I used to be, you know, young males, testosterone poisoned. And what happens? Young males get involved in a crime more. They're certainly less empathic. Oxytocin increases empathy. They don't cooperate as nicely. And so there's upsides and downsides. On the other hand, young men are the ones who go to war who want to go into risky professions. And so there's something beautiful about that as well. So again, I think having the underlying neuroscience of social behavior is really elucidates something about our human nature and how weird and wonderful we are. And I think we should celebrate all of that and really embrace people for who they are and not just say, not point fingers, right? We're all weird in our own special way. And so that's cool. And society somehow conglomerates us and we can get along and mostly and, you know, do cool stuff together. Thank God we can get along. Well, sort of brought you on to your latest book. It's called Immersion, available at all good bookstores and bad bookstores worldwide. What got you into this? Firstly, congratulations. It's quite a complex topic, but you've managed to approach it in a way that makes it very easy to understand. And it's full of lots of beautiful stories. And if anyone has anything to do with product development, marketing, sales, 1000%, this is a central reading for you. Because it's all about how to make those experiences better. And it really, really loved it. So thank you for doing a great job on taking a complex subject and making it really easy to understand that. Yeah. What was the precursor to this, to know a bit more about it? Yeah, sort of two factors. One was, you know, we are moving into the experience economy. And we do want to have great experiences, whether it's at Walmart or some high-end store, you know, we really want to have those experiences, right? Those are with enough income. I don't want to have a terrible experience no matter where I am. And yet, so many of the things that we experience from a consumption perspective are either mundane or frustrating. And that just seems weird to me. Like, we should know how to do this better. But the origin of this really was funding from the post-911 war on terror in which the U.S. government fight in my lab for many years and millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to identify signals in the brain that would consistently and accurately predict what people would do after a message or an experience. So we were tasked by the U.S. government to create a neurologic prediction engine to train soldiers to be more effective communicators. And I think this is a very noble goal. Let's use words, whether they're weapons, to try to encourage both allies and potential enemies to cooperate with the U.S. Great. I want to help with that. I want to help reduce conflict. I'm excited about that. And just years and years are really hard, lots of laboratory experiments. But what this led to was the discovery of what seems to be the brain's valuation mechanism for social-emotional experiences. So the punchline here is that if you can create a sufficiently valuable experience to my brain, then you're much more likely to influence my behavior. So once you have that mechanism in the brain, you go, okay, this is interesting. So now I can address that initial problem, which is why is going to the bank so boring? And why can't it be interesting and exciting? And so it's really looking at, a lot of this is looking at not only marketing and entertainment, but really that EX to CX mapping, how to create an environment in which employees are so excited about the service they're providing that influences customers. So this neurologic state we discovered up called immersion, which again is this sort of second-by-second valuation that the brain applies to understanding where this experience is sufficiently valuable that I should invest the metabolic resources to really process this full information. So as you know, Chris, the brain's very energy hungry, just wants to idle. But when we see this immersive state, it's actually metabolically costly. It's like one of our subscribers to the software platform we built called Immersion, we're going to use one bad word called the give a shit measure. And that's what I really want. I want you to care about what I'm doing, right? So I'm creating this experience, this movie, this marketing material, this customer experience, this corporate training or education. Gosh, you and I have been to zillions of corporate training things, and most of them are just sleepers, man. You just sit in the back of the room and go, wow, this guy's terrible. So we were because we built a software platform that can pull these immersion data in real time from algorithms, reply to smartwatches, the books based on 50,000 brain observations in so many areas where I couldn't have run all those experiments, but we have people every day using the platform. And I got to get all that data and drive general principles on what an extraordinary experience looks like across these different realms. But again, that's, I think, what we really want, right? And when you get it, it's amazing. I just came back last month from South Africa, amazing country. I loved it, some of the best meals in my life. So it's about 24 hours for me to get home. And so the first flight I think is about 15, 16 hours. And I had the world's best flight attendant. Like it's a long flight. You're sleeping, you're eating, you're watching some movies, right? This guy was so attentive. Like, oh, let me get you, I was drinking like Dink a Diet Coke or whatever, you know, and trying to be semi healthy. And it goes, oh, your ice is melted. Let me, I'm like, oh, it's all right. He goes, no, no, no, no, that's my job. Let me get you a fresh Diet Coke. I'm like, wow, that's one. Like, that's, and smile, like this guy loved his job. And I told him at the end, like, you made this long flight so enjoyable. Thank you United Airlines. I'm going to give him a plug. Right? So that's what I want. I want that guy who's so excited, who loves the service, you know, who's making that experience so valuable for me that I remember it now, you know, a month later, like, Oh, this is great. So ultimately, I think the book is about how to create higher customer lifetime value by creating the opportunity to have an extraordinary experience. Yeah. And I thought what was, you know, something I kind of always believed but never been able to necessarily explain in an easy way is that often traditional market research falls very short on, on actually how people really feel about things as though traditional research often is, is, is, is, you know, people, people are very bad at explaining this, their feelings, I guess. So, so when you ask how, how things are, it's like, yeah, I think it was okay, or yeah, I like that or not like that. It, it, what I thought was so fascinating about your research is it's, it's looking literally deeper by looking at the chemicals that have been released in people's bodies. So you sort of, you can't cheat it in a way. Have you done sort of comparative testing sets between like what the traditional research said and, and what your research showed? And like, what was, have you got any great examples of that? We do, yeah. And so I think, you know, we like to say people lie consciously because we're asking them an impossible question to relate their unconscious emotional responses. So if you ask me, Chris, how much I'm enjoying this conversation, you know, I'll give you a number, but it's worse than that. Actually, this is how much I'm enjoying. I have been 90 out of 100. I am having a great time. 93. 93 are killing it, right? So again, that's coming out of the brainstem. I can't fake this, you know, either it's happening or not. But if we ask you, you know, how much on a self rating, how much do I enjoy this? Well, compared to what? Compared to my kids, forget my kids, they talk back to me, can I buy my dog, my dog's perfect, right? My dog's a seven out of seven. So, but they're just different scales. And so once we have this tool, and once we made this tool available to the world, then you can really ask interesting questions. So here's the story, I'll tell you about that when we all started my academic lab and giant 100,000 machines and, you know, 20 PhDs and lots of published research. When companies started coming to the lab with two cases full of money saying, Hey, we want to create more effective marketing or a better movie trailer or a better customer experience. Then I sort of, you know, my scientist hat goes on like, maybe, maybe I'm just lucky. Maybe all the science we published in the last 10 or 15 years. Who knows, you know, does it really work outside the laboratory? That's the question. And so we were coming up on the Super Bowl, arguably the apotheosis of advertising are very, very expensive. I said, Oh, why don't we measure the Super Bowl commercials, which for years and years have been rated, you know, this ad meter has people rate how much they like them, and we'll predict those, those, you know, ratings by thousands of thousands of people. That's got to be great. So we ran this study at a bar because we can get data in real time. So say, Hey, we recruited a bunch of people, we're going to pay for your drinks and food. You got to hang out six, watch the Super Bowl, and we brought some wearables in. And we found a zero correlation between what people said they liked on these ad meter ratings and what tickled their brain, what was most immersive to them. So then you go home, you know, and you go, man, I suck, right? My, I got to get a different job. Obviously, I don't know what I'm doing. I should, you know, find some other thing to do. And then, you know, next day I woke up like three in the morning stressed out and I was like, well, you know, maybe those were insane people. Maybe we collected the data wrong. I mean, there could be all kinds of reasons. So all those Super Bowl commercials are online. So it's like, okay, take a breath. Let's rerun this next week with new people and use the Super Bowl from the year before because we can find all those commercials. And we have those ratings. We found the same thing every year that what people say and what tickles their brain are unrelated, mostly unrelated. If they were related, every movie would be a hit, every commercial would move product, right? Which is not true at all. So what we discovered was that if you look at objective measures of impact, like YouTube views of those commercials a month after the release, YouTube comments, nice positive correlation with neurologic immersion. If you look at those metrics and related to the self-report measure, there's a negative correlation. So the more people say they like a commercial, the fewer views it gets online. So whatever that liking measure is, it's just thrown away. I just don't want to get involved in it. One of the stories I loved in the book, you talked about how you asked this chap, I think it was about Manchester United, how it felt about Manchester United. And then he asked questions about his daughter or something. And basically it showed that he loved Manchester United more than his daughter. I mean, well, not love, but that's the wrong word. But yeah, it's got more excited about. Yeah. So again, what's interesting about the brain is that it's very conservative. That is nature preserves these mechanisms. So the very similar approach for loving a person, loving an experience, loving a product, they all run very similarly. There are slight differences, but I'm okay with using the word brand love or love for, I'm a super fan of this movie. Neurologically, those are reasonably equivalent. Yeah. I mean, again, just before we hopped on this call, I was saying one of my favorite people in the world is a guy called Josie Paul. He's sort of like one of the most famous advertising people in India. I mean, he's famous worldwide, but particularly famous and loved in India. And he got in touch with you. Well, you got in touch with him. I think you had read something that he had said at Cannes Lions and then ended up doing some studies with his agency. I'd love to know a little bit more about that. And what was some of the outcomes to that as well? Like, how did it help that? Yeah. So Josie Paul, who's the president of BBDO Asia, I didn't know he was famous at the time, said at Cannes Lions many years ago, probably, our ads are so creative that they cause the brain to release oxytocin. So oxytocin is my gig. That's the stuff I discovered. And the way you measure that is very rapid blood draws. And I was pretty sure BBDO didn't do any blood draws on. So anyway, wonderful internet. I found a memo PDF memo with his email on an email them. And I don't know, two hours later, literally wrote back like, Paul, Zach, we know you. Edward said, like, hey, I'm super interested. Like, you know, I'm sort of skeptical that you measured it. But if you're interested, like, I'm happy to help. And he said, yeah, yeah, we'd love to talk to you. And it couldn't have been nicer connecting with their head of strategy in Asia. Got a Mandy Wilson, BBDO, who's now become a good friend. And BBDO is a very smart agency. And they said, okay, we're going to measure this. I said, look, we don't need to use blood draws anymore. We have this way to measure this effect called immersion, which is actually more predictive than just oxytocin, oxytocin and some other neurochemicals that are inducing electrical activity that we can measure with wearables. They said, well, we're skeptical. I like skeptical. I'm a scientist. A skeptical is great. They said, so we're going to send you a bunch of ads that our clients that we created that our clients have rated for sales bump. And you do whatever magical science you're doing. And then you tell us which are the best ads for each brand. Blinded. I said, okay, that's great. Right. So that satisfies my also my skeptical nature that maybe I've just been lucky all this time. And so anyway, at that time, we're able to predict with 83% accuracy, which ads were best. We missed one brand, which was a Bud Light that they later said, oh, by the way, they had concert that they sponsored. They have swag giveaways at bars. And so they threw us a red herring and the you know, the technology didn't pick up the red herring. So, but now we're consistently able to predict with 90, 95% sales bumps, buzz, whether his tongs can be a hit when it's first released or not, because the brain kind of knows. And so again, I think once we found this key evaluation mechanism for what the brain really values, you can ask so many interesting questions, first for prediction, but also who loves it the most? Who are your super fans, right? Find those neurologically. We have a lot of people using our technology for corporate training, which we have established is often terrible. And so how do I do that? So Accenture has found that people cannot stay immersed in training for more than 20 minutes without a change in the kind of presentation you do. So no one speaks for more than 20 minutes at Accenture training now based on our data. And then there's a switch, they watch a video, they do some table work, they discuss another right, you have to mix it up because again, that brain really wants to return to baseline. And baseline means I'm not expending the investment to absorb this information. I'm so glad you say that. I mean, we have a new learning platform and I'm very dyslexic and the reason why I built it was I thought traditional education, particularly online was super boring. So everything is split up into these kind of little five, 10 minute chunks, which kind of happily fits with what you're saying. And we mix up the different tasks at the end of each 10 minute session. So yeah, that's awesome. I thought the other thing I thought was very interesting was in that research about advertising, you mentioned kind of the peak end rule I think as well, which was that a lot of experiences, I guess it's something that I know a lot from watching lots of ads is you go, what was that ad for again? Like, is that really cool one where this happens and you can't remember the brand? And your research was showing that actually you should try and attach the brand logo or the van with the brand at a peak moment in order to create that more solid link. And most advertising doesn't do that. Like it just puts it at the end. It's like, bought to you by Volkswagen. Yeah, exactly. So it's a nice, so we all know, I guess we all know, let's be clear on that. So the most effective way to sustain immersion is having a narrative arc. Aristotle knew this 2,300 years ago, it works. So rising tension, conflict, human interaction, all that stuff. We're super interested in humans because we're social creatures. There's no shortage of stories that we want to see watch here. So that's great. But you're right. So many ads have this narrative arc, then they reduce the tension, reduce the immersion and then pop in their logo at the end. And you're like, what? So we found 2 things. One is, because there's a strong correlation between immersion and information recall weeks later, that you're going to remember most the, sorry, the thing you remember most would be those peak immersion points. And so have the logo, have the call to action at a peak immersion moment, that if you can do that at the end, all to the good, because people tend to remember the member of the end is something more than the middle. But, you know, we've seen some wonderful ads, just suppress the names, but very large life insurance companies have used our technology. And they'll have like a real kind of, you know, say life insurance or, you know, something of disaster insurance property. And they'll have like a car with a logo, you know, showing the agent getting out while your home is, I don't know, on fire or something. Okay, that's great. That's branding. So that home on fire, people are sad and you're like, and you've got the branding behind it. That's really smart, right? So by having this second by second objective data, companies can now edit those advertising so that you can create the most effective recall, if you're going to think about life insurance or health insurance or property insurance or whatever that product is. And then you're going to a store, let's say it's a, you know, consumer product. And I see that in cap with that same logo and that same, that I recall that nice immersive story I saw in the commercial, and I'm influenced to buy. So having said all that Chris, as you know, has a whole section of the book on the ethics of measuring benactivity and trying to influence people. And as long as you're not coerced, as long as you have time to say no, or say, you know, you can show me the world's best commercial for diapers with little babies with those giant eyes and they're so cute, but I don't have infants at home, my kids are grown. So, you know, I'll see that I'll get a little pleasure out of it. And then I'll just flush it out of my brain because it's not relevant to me. So I think, you know, if we're going to communicate to individuals, which is not going to stop, we might as well do it as effectively as possible. And as long as you do have a chance to have time and you have opportunities to say no, then we're still ethically in a safe space. We can still do this and not worry about it. And honestly, when I, you know, worked for the US government, every six months we were required en masse to have a group with an ethicist about the ethics of trying to influence people. And so we spent a lot of time really thinking about this. And so that, that ability to say no is very important. If you have seen a company doing that really badly, that's a good question. In advertising, I guess. Yeah, I don't have a good advertising example. I think, you know, the, the agree to the, you know, the rules of the software you're downloading, like no one reads that, right? Cause it's too fricking long. It's got kind of a jargon. So that worries me, right? And so I think there are a lot of interesting companies now that are thinking about your online digital identity, like creating a digital twin, and you can either sell your data to a company and get paid for it or not. But I think really that data should be owned by you. So when we, you know, create software, this kind of software, you know, this data is, is owned by you, the individual. Now, a company may pay to see aggregated anonymized data that may have tags for, you know, gender and I don't know age or something, but that's, that's not going to de-identify or identify the data. Sorry. And so it's always going to be groups. But if you want to share this data on, this is a new app we have on Emotional Fitness called Tuesdays, free by the way. So you go to the app store and get it. Brilliant. I just downloaded it. It was amazing. Thank you. We've dropped. We need to do better in this. Come on, bring it up. All right. So, you know, this data is unique to me. It's valuable. If I want to share that with my family or with my, my doctor, I can choose to do that, but I own it. And I think it's very important that we have lots of data protections. And so we're super concerned about this. And as you know, I've done a lot of work on, on morality and ethics as well. And the science of that. And so it's, it's important to me personally that we're not abusing people's data in any way that could be harmful to them or it's just, just, just wrong, I think to use people's personal data. So, you know, I think Apple's kind of made an interesting, you know, approach now where they're not letting you collect all the cookies on their sites. And so they're, you know, they're putting in more data privacy into their products. Yeah, it seems like Google and Facebook seemed to, whether they are or not doing it in real life, they seem to spend a lot of time in their messaging saying how secure things are and limiting cookies and all those kind of things. So it seems like things are moving, luckily, in the right direction, I hope. But the other, going back to the book, the other thing I thought was amazing was this link between highly immersive experiences and highly profitable businesses. As it seems, there seemed to be a direct correlation between companies that are really good at doing these immersive experiences and their bottom line, which I thought was also pretty, pretty fascinating. What was the, what were some of the examples that you found that proved that point? Yeah, I think for some of the, you know, you can think of immersion as kind of like a flow state or it's kind of the neural correlate of that where you're losing track of time. It's really valuable. We do find on self-report that people who, I mean, have high immersion also say they enjoy the experience. So that's great. We, we want to enjoyable. The other direction doesn't work. I've asked you if it's enjoyable. It may or may not be immersive. So we have to be careful on the logic. But I think really bundling the human component around the product or service is a key way to increase immersion. So by adding a social layer, sorry, my dog now is awaking because he hears me talking. Okay. So adding a social layer to almost anything improves it. So let's do corporate training. Let's go back to Accenture. So, you know, lots of training is done online now due to on your own time. But what we found in the data is consistently, if I'm in a room together with a bunch of colleagues and we're working on this training, it's going to be more immersion, which means I enjoy it more. I retain more information. So going back to the office, Chris, it's a really big deal, right? So, you know, I'm working from home today, you're in the office, but being around those humans, having those random interactions, having those discussions over coffee or lunch, they actually create more value because, yeah, we might talk about movies or a cute guy or girl I saw or whatever. But then, obviously, you know, we'll talk about work a little bit. So I think, you know, one key takeaway is adding a social layer almost always increases immersion. I should read this fascinating study. There was the biggest study ever on meetings that was done by some Google researchers. And they just did a global study finding out what were the most productive teams? How did they run and what made the good teams separate from the bad teams or the productive teams separate from the less productive teams? And one of the ones, one of the big impacts that they were, one of the biggest things that they found, was actually a really small thing that teams did. The teams that took five minutes at the beginning of each meeting to talk about something over the day, how things are going, like talk about each other's personal lives and what they like, what they don't like. Those teams ended up getting way more done than the teams who just went into a meeting were like, right, like, we're going to just immediately go at it. And I thought that was very interesting. So that didn't, I probably wouldn't have expected that, like, whenever I deal, particularly with people who are like developers, you know, they, they don't ever want to talk about my experience. They don't want to talk about themselves. They want to talk about like, right, what's the quickest way I can get out of this meeting? Did you do any research on that at all? Like finding that these sort of creating these social bonds actually means helps increase productivity or effectiveness? Yeah, it does. You know, first of all, as human beings, we're naturally going to form social relationships at work, wherever we are. That's just what we do, that we're hyper social, where I call it promiscuously social. We'll interact with almost anybody, right? So walking down the road, say, how do people, you know, I have a dog, I walk my dog, people come talk to me all the time. I'm a big guy, you know, six, four, and, and, you know, I should be maybe scary looking, maybe not, maybe I'm a super sweetheart guy, but, you know, I've got a big dog, people come up and talk to me all the time, right? So again, chimpanzees, gorillas, they don't do that. That's just, that's not normal behavior for most animals. So I think the takeaway here is that at work, we're going to form relationships. And when we have those caring relationships with others, then we're going to work harder, because my team depends on me, right? I'm getting paid, and that's a motivation, and I have a boss who's given me direction and something. But when I have those people that, that depend on me, people I trust, people who I've built relationships with, I just put more effort in. And so that's why I think going to the office is so important, because it's just more natural to have that chit chat. Now, we, before we recorded, we did chat a little bit, right? But it's, it's just easier in person. You know, think of my group, you know, in the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, everything's, you know, no one can go talk to each other. We tried doing this sort of online happy hour. And the first one was so fun. And the second one was not very fun, and we never did a third one. But now, like when you go to your friends or the pub, it's so much fun, right? To hang out with humans. There's noise. There's energy. Like, so if you can create that at work, where we have a chance to bond. So I'm a big believer in cheating, Chris. So, you know, offer beer and pizza on Friday at five o'clock for people in the office, you know, do the Google thing, have lunch with a small window where everyone has to get together and they have their meals together, like set up a system where people want to be in the office and think of the office as this sort of social emotional hub, where the most exciting things are happening. And even if I don't have to come to the office, I want to come to the office because that's where the cool people are. Yeah, I mean, did you find any fascinating research of things that happened during COVID? And then, were there any like lasting effects for things that you've been researching? I mean, sorry, I know that's a very open, random question, but We were doing a lot of research on pre COVID on sort of online meetings versus in person. And so I think that was a previous question you asked, and I didn't answer it well. What we find is that this online 2D world gives you between 50 to 75% of the immersion of an in person meeting. So it's not bad, right? We still get it. This is still fine. Again, immersion correlates with information recall. So, you know, I'm getting half or little more than half on an online meeting versus in person meeting in person. I guess hard to space out we're shoulder to shoulder, all kinds of things are going on that make that meeting more effective. So the 2D world is not terrible, but it's not quite as good. And so during the pandemic, we did measure immersion in team meetings, a number of large technology companies that whose names you would know. And we found is that there's a huge effect as you suggested of the leader. So we found is a lot of meetings, there was good psychological safety with a measure physiologic psychological safety, people are comfortable, they have bandwidth to absorb, and then immersion would would stay high. So that's kind of even have that peak end rule where it'd be really high like, okay, we're going to do this week, we're going to do this great thing. Other people, other team leaders just drove down immersion drove down psychological safety in the course of the meeting. Now, I don't have recordings of those meetings, but I am guessing like some of the developers you talked about that here's this guy who's our tech companies, here's a guy who's got deadlines to meet and he's stressing out his team. Hey, you guys are going to be talking faster. We're going to do this thing. But hey, we're running out of time. The meeting's almost over. I'm like, you're stressing your team out, right? This is not good. So I think this is where data comes in. So these are bad people. It's the people who really haven't developed those social skills. And even though you can have a trainer help you by having that data and going, here's your data. It's getting worse and worse over the last 15 minutes, the people might as well not even be in online because they're not getting anything. So that's also interesting that immersion, maybe this is the key takeaway. Immersion is contagious. If I'm a customer service agent and I'm having a great time on United Airlines or at my shop, I'm going to infect my customers and they're going to have a great time too. If I'm a leader and I am stressing you out and I'm, I don't know, screaming at you, I'm, you know, that's going to shut you down. You know, your defensive mode, right? So really think about the impact you have on others and even though we all know that intuitively somehow having that data and go, oh, okay, I see I'm not as effective as I think I am because my team is not able to absorb the information because I'm either stressing them out or like we've had some professors, not me, but, you know, who speak in a mono tone, right? So if I don't put energy into this discussion, then you're not going to pick up that energy and we don't have a great conversation. So let me summarize this in a simple way, Chris. Sorry, I'm going long. No, I love the long explanation. Oh, thank you. Three things people can do to be more effective communicators. One is first establish psychological safety. Make sure people are comfortable. If the room's too cold, if you've been sitting in this chair for two hours already and your butt hurts, you're just burning bandwidth where you're not going to get that communication as effectively in their brain. So make people comfortable. So get a cup of coffee. Let's take a break before we get going. Little chit-chat, as you said, Chris, great idea. That's first. Second is think about structuring the content in these smaller chunks, just as you have done, Chris, small but in immersive chunks, small chunks that really make an impact and then give people a chance to reiterate what they've learned. Make this participatory communication. So two way, not one way. And the third is, as I said earlier, think about how you deliver it, right? So if you deliver it with energy, with passion, if you're excited, then the group's going to get excited too. If it's the dullest thing ever, I mean, even, I'm just going to pick on accountants, but you know, even an accountant can be excited about accounting and hopefully can get people who have to hear about accounting, at least a little bit excited. Like, hey, I'm your CPA. I know you don't want to spend half an hour with me, but here's why it's going to be important for you. I'm going to help you save 25% of your taxes this year. Like, oh, okay. I'm listening. I want to do that. I want to pay less taxes if that's legal. Yeah, I want to hear about it. So again, think about how to create that environment so that I'm comfortable, I structure the content well, and I'm delivering it effectively. So Chris, I'm a terrible, I go to the TED conferences regularly. I'm a terrible person to go with in the audience, because I will critique people because we actually have measured TED Talks and you know, that's in the book. And I've given a lot. And you know, people often will do this chronological approach and they bury the lead, right? So start with a lead, right? Remember, the brain is this lazy, lazy organ. And so what's the reason I'm here? In my example, I'm going to save you 25% of your taxes this year. Okay, now I'm into that. Tell me, you know, tell me how to do that, right? Or, you know, so really think about that structuring that communication so it's as effective as possible. And that really means kind of opening heart. Amazing. I know that we're running out of time. So I just want to try and find some ways to finish on a peak. So I've got sort of three things I noted down. One was you just said that you go to all the TED Talks and I'm massively jealous. What is your favorite TED Talk that you've listened to or seen recently or just of all time? Like, if you had to pick just one, and it can't be your own one, because everyone should definitely go and watch pools. But like, if it had to be someone else's, which your one is of course up there with Ken Robinson and everyone else. Yeah. There's a wonderful talk, you know, it's always your friends, right? So my friend, Matt Ridley, who's a zoologist in the UK and Lord of the Member of Parliament, has a wonderful talk called Ideas Having Sex about where innovation comes from and ideas are combinatoric and he's a zoologist and he's British and he's brilliant. And so anyway, that's one of the ones to look at. What we found in that study of the TED Talks, by the way, was that a 10% increase in immersion was associated with 176,000 more online views for your TED Talk. So again, when you speak at Big Ted, you have nine, 10 months to practice, so you have a lot of rehearsals, they give you lots of feedback. But you know, really refining that communication for any of us, right? If I wanted to make an impact, like that's a huge size effect, right? So, you know, I think oftentimes when we speak, we don't rehearse, we don't practice, we don't get feedback. I'm not saying you have to measure rent activity, but you know, I workshop my TED Talk for, you know, seven months over and over and over. My poor, poor friends and colleagues are like, okay, let me try it again, give me feedback and little things, you know, like energy, like I was so stressed just to remember that 18 minutes of material. So yeah, anyway, Matt Ridley, wonderful TED Talk. I love the way that in all of the things that we've been talking about, it often does seem to be these very small things can have a dramatically big impact. And I think that's just such a, it's such a nice thing to know, because often, you know, you're dealing with things where it's like, oh, to make a big impact, you need to like have some big ginormous thing. And with psychology, neuroscience, it does often seem to be small things have a very big impact. So yeah, I'd love you to know. The two final things, one was your favorite brand or company that creates immersive experiences that you, you know, is there like, I know you mentioned United earlier, but are there any where you've studied where you're like, oh my God, this brand has it waxed, like they nailed it. That's a good question. I'm so biased by the data. And I think I'm NDA probably from discussing too much of that. You know, there's so many different realms. I'm going to, I'm going to avoid the question by saying that, you know, within the corporate training space, Accenture has an extraordinarily good job. I spent many, many years working with them on a customer service basis. Zappos online shoe and clothing seller does an extraordinary job. Their longest phone call to date with a customer is 10 hours, 10 continuous hours, like they will stay on with as long as you need if it's a great experience. So they talk about making a personal emotional connection to that customer. Brilliant. I think in the customer experience space, you know, I think the entertainment world, I've done a lot of work with the movie studios. So I think extending now, all these studios have fandom departments, so creating fan fiction. I'm going to Comic Con, like all that is really a way to extend the impact of the entertainment that they produce. I think those are really smart. I'll just suppress the names of the studios we work with, but I think all the studios have gotten very, very smart about not only just franchises, but really building this huge base of super fans for their products. And then the final thing would be if you had to give like three top tips for making immersive experiences, what would they be? Number one, open hot. Number two, use a narrative structure, really have authentic emotions, have people who are displaying them. Even if they're actors, they actors can simulate authentic emotions, right? So really think about that. And then finally, have a call to action. If you have immersed me, you have captured what I care about. So don't be afraid to try to close the sale, get me to do something, right? If you're communicating to me, it's not presumably just to amuse me. So here's an example, Chris, that drives me insane. These multimillion dollar Super Bowl commercials that go online and they don't pay that $15 an hour intern to put a hotlink. Like I love this product. Now I got to look forward on it. Put a freaking hotlink in there. I'll buy it now, right? So if you captured me, give me an option to an option, you're not coercing me, give me an option to buy, but buy now. Don't wait, right? Make it easy. Dr. Lord's, Paul, Jay, Zach, what an actually honor. If you want to find out more about Paul, the best place to go to, I'm guessing is your website, which is pauljzac, Zach spelled Z-A-K dot com, full of lots of amazing things and links to your books and all the other wonderful things. Paul, it's been such an honor. You are a total legend. Thank you so much for making the world a happier, healthier place and for making millions of people's lives a little bit better. I really appreciate that. I love the grandness of your goals and your visions and it's amazing. So really, really appreciate your time. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Chris. You're absolutely lovely. So it was a pleasure to have spent time with you.