The Science-Based Tactics of Persuasion with Daniel Pink
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Hello and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and if you've ever wanted to try to get anyone else to do anything, whether that's asking for a raise or getting your kids to even just clean their room, you are going to love this episode because I'm talking to Dan Pink about his science-based approach to the art of persuasion.

Dan is one of my favorite authors. He's written five New York Times bestsellers. And in this episode, we'll talk about why persuasion is an important skill to learn and dive into all the techniques you need to become more persuasive in a non-selling and ethical way. We'll also talk about how to use persuasion to motivate yourself and go through some different ways to make pitches effective, even if they're just on email. I am thrilled to have Dan here again. So let's jump into it right after this.

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Dan, thanks for being here again. I am so glad to be here. Yeah. So I think a lot of people associate persuasion or sales with manipulation or coercion. And I'm curious why you think there's such a negative connotation there. I think it's because of information asymmetry. And as room-emptying a phrase as that is, it's a powerful concept. And here's what I mean by that. If you go back through the history of civilization, the history of commerce...

What you find is that most commercial transactions, that is one person selling something else to another person, it has been an environment of information asymmetry. The seller always had more information than the buyer. When the seller has more information than the buyer, the seller can rip you off. When the seller has more information than the buyer and the buyer doesn't have a way to talk back, the seller can really rip you off. And that's the way things were in sales for a very, very long time. I mean, I'm not joking around since the beginning of commercial transactions.

And then about 10 or 15 years ago, it changed. When you're in a world of information asymmetry, you're in a world of buyer beware. Literally, literally, that concept emanates from information asymmetry. You have to beware because the seller has an edge. What I think has happened now is that the scales have evened quite a bit. And so we're now in a world closer to information parity. And we just still haven't shaken off that...

Couple of thousand years of information asymmetry. And so we think of sales as sleazy and duplicitous because most of our experience with sales has been being buyers in a world of information asymmetry.

How would you redefine persuasion for people listening? It depends on what kind of persuasion you're talking about. When it comes to actually selling a product or a service, we are in a world of close to information parity. What that does to us is that we have to call into a whole different set of abilities. It's not about coercion. It's not about force. It's not about manipulation. It's about other things. And so one of the things that I did for this book that I wrote a little while back called To Sell is Human,

is I said, if this is right, that we are in white collar work, especially selling and persuading all the time. And I think that's absolutely the case that no matter what we do for a living, we are convincing and persuading and cajoling all the time.

And yet, as we just discussed, we're doing it in this remade landscape, not a world of information asymmetry as much, but a world of information parity. How do you do that? Here's the thing. We have some research on that. How do you persuade ethically and effectively in a world of information parity? That question isn't out there. But over the last 20 years or so, there's been an explosion of research in behavior and decision making, and we can piece it together. So are there certain personality types?

that are more persuasive than other personality types. If you have a flaw in your offering, should you conceal it or should you reveal it? How many claims is best in making a persuasive case? You know, one, two, three, four, five. Does mimicry, which we often hear about in conventional sales training, is that an effective tool?

What I tried to do is go wide and deep into this research to say, what does it take to be successful in this remade landscape? And it's a different set of skills. And it's a set of skills to more directly answer your question that involve, I think, more fundamentally human capabilities. Can you understand where someone else is coming from? Can you be clear? Can you serve people well? I think that constellation of skills is...

Very different from the constellation of skills that were necessary in a world where guys in checkered jackets sold crappy used cars to unsuspecting consumers. And you didn't call it out by name, but I imagine the Internet plays this massive role, if not the leading role in this new world of information change. The Internet is the reason for this move from information asymmetry to information parity. It happened so quickly in the span of how we think about things. All right. Let's say there's like 2000 years.

of commerce. 1,990 of those years, it was one way. And then for 10 years, it's the other way. If you think about in terms of a clock, it's like the world is one way until like 11 and 56 PM that day. And then the final four minutes of the day, everything is turned upside down. So I think it's hard for us to get our mind around. One way to do that, I think, and one thing that I've written about, and I think helps people grasp it, 25 years ago, if I went to buy a car, I would go to a

And the Toyota dealer would know more about cars than I did, more about Toyotas than I did, and more about Toyota Camrys than I could have, all right? Buyer beware. But now when my wife and I bought a car...

My wife literally walked into the car dealership with the factory invoice price of the car. You know, that's what I mean. Information asymmetry to information parity. So what that car dealer, that car seller and these car dealers are late to change in many ways. It has to sell in a fundamentally different way. You know, you use that example and a few others on sales. But does that.

This kind of persuasion tactics, do they live all throughout life and everywhere? Or do you think this is really a thing for people in that sales role? I think we're all in sales. I mean, I think that's one of the fundamental things going on in white collar work today. Look at it this way. People out there with real jobs generally got the job through a job description. But what I have found is that job descriptions and the reality of what people do all day on the job are often quite different.

An enormous part of it is selling and persuading, convincing, cajoling, influencing. It's not necessarily selling a car or a computer system or consulting services, but it's

trying to get your employee to do something differently or do it in a different way. It's trying to get your boss to stop doing something. It's trying to get somebody to be on your team rather than another team. You know, it's trying to get a group of people who want to go this way on a marketing campaign to go another way. And so a huge part of what we do every day on the job is selling. There are various reasons why that's become more prominent and it spans industries. Teachers sell.

Healthcare professionals sell. I have a kid who's a medical assistant at a nonprofit health clinic in Northern California. She's selling all the time.

trying to get people to change their behavior, trying to get people to do things that they might not want to do. Educators are selling all the time. This conversation I'm selling, I'm selling my set of ideas. When you send out your newsletter, your podcast, you're saying, hey, believe me, I'm trying to convince you. And so we live in this world today where we're selling all the time, but we're doing it in a world where the people to whom we're selling have as much information as we do, if not more. Right.

have a lot of choices and all kinds of ways to talk back. And I think that changes what it means to be a seller and a persuader. I'm going to assume that you believe everyone has the capacity to become more persuasive in their life. 100%. How do they learn to do that? It's a number of different things. We have this belief to be effective in sales and persuasion that you should be extroverted. All right.

Here's what the evidence shows. The evidence says that people who are more extroverted are more likely to go into sales jobs, more likely to get hired at sales jobs, more likely to get promoted at sales jobs. But there's some interesting research showing that when you actually look at their numbers, they're not more effective. Now, it doesn't mean that introverts are better sellers than extroverts. They're not. They're a little bit worse. It turns out that the most effective sellers are...

That is, they are somewhat introverted and somewhat extroverted. They're not strongly one way or another. The reason for that in the prefix ambi with the word ambidextrous, right? They can go left. They can go right. The people who are most effective are people who know when to speak up and know when to shut up. People who know when to push and when to hold back. So this idea that the most effective that to be effective in this world. OK, so you say, can anybody do it?

People suspect they cannot do it because they suspect that the way to do it is to be this gregarious, back-slapping, grinning, hey, buddy, what can I do to put you in a Ford Fiesta today kind of guy? And this is not right. This is not accurate. The best sellers are ambiverts. And the truth of the matter is that most of us are ambiverts. Myers-Briggs...

has sold us a bill of goods that you're either an I or an E, when in fact, personality psychologists, scientists who study personality recognize that introversion, extroversion exists on a spectrum. Nobody is like clearly one or the other. Most of us are in the middle, which means most of us have the native capacity to do that. So that's one thing. The second thing is that you have to understand what are the

basic aptitudes that are necessary in doing this. And I look at them as the new ABCs, drawing after the famous sales advice, ABC always be closing, right? There's a new set of ABCs. And this is what the science tells us are the aptitudes, the qualities really, that are most necessary to be effective in this world that we're describing.

So one of them is the A is attunement. So attunement is, can you get out of your own head and see things from someone else's point of view? It is a fundamentally powerful skill. It's not something we're natively good at, but it's something that all of us can learn. Can you get out of your own head and see things from someone else's point of view? Can you understand where they're coming from and find common ground? That's a powerful skill. There's some interesting techniques on how to do that better.

Attunement, the B is buoyancy. And with buoyancy, in doing some of this research, I shadowed a bunch of salespeople. And one guy who I shadowed, who was selling brushes door to door in the business district of San Francisco, okay? Tough freaking job. And he said, you have to understand that

Every day I face, in his words, an ocean of rejection. So when you're selling, you're getting rejected all the time. And if we're all selling, it means we're all getting rejected a lot. The boss is not going to do things your way. Your employee is not going to do something different. That person is not going to join your team. We hate rejection. So buoyancy is how do you stay afloat in that ocean of rejection? It's a very powerful skill for sales. It's a very powerful skill just for overall well-being. And finally is the clarity. So clarity has two dimensions. So one of them is...

If you go back to the old world of selling, the old world of selling, again, it was about information. The seller had a kind of, not quite a monopoly, but had control over the information that having access to information gave you an edge in any kind of persuasive encounter. But now everybody has access to that information. So you don't want to go from having access to information to

as a marker, say, of expertise, which has often been the case, that no longer matters. What really matters is not can you access information, but can you curate information? This is what you do, man. Can you make sense of information? Can you separate out the signal and the noise in information? That's the thing that's really important. So clarity is moving from accessing information to curating information. What's more is clarity.

In this world, all right, and it is deepening every day in part thanks to AI, we're sort of over-indexed on the skill of problem solving, right? It's a controversial statement, at least among educators. We're over-indexed on the skill of problem solving. And here's the thing in sales and many kinds of other kinds of persuasion. But if you're in sales, if your customer or your prospect knows exactly what they need,

They don't need you very much. They can solve the problem themselves. Where you're more valuable is when they don't know what their problem is or...

When they're wrong about their problem. And so the skill has shifted from problem solving to the skill of problem finding. Can you identify hidden problems? Can you surface latent problems? Can you look around the corner and anticipate problems? These are the skills that really matter. Can you see things from someone else's point of view? Can you stay afloat in that ocean of rejection? Can you move from accessing information to curating it and from solving existing problems to identifying hidden problems?

Those are very intellectually sophisticated skills. It is not simply like the line from Death of a Salesman about existing on a shoeshine and a smile. It is not about gregariousness. It is not about patting people on the back. It is not about being slimy or sleazy or duplicitous. It's about some pretty intellectually sophisticated skills that are fundamentally human. And it's ultimately at its core, Chris, is about serving other people.

At least in my head, this role of sales has changed dramatically in a very short amount of time. Okay, so I've got three skills, ABCs. You said intellectually sophisticated. Are there practices or exercises to go through to try to hone them and refine them? 100%, lots of things people can do. Let's talk about the advice that people get in sales and what is BS and what is not. So a lot of times, so there's conventional wisdom.

which we've exploded already, that extroverts make better salespeople. Not true. Truly, strong extroverts do not make better salespeople. They make worse salespeople. Strong introverts don't make better salespeople either. The people who are best are in the middle. So that's extroversion as the precondition for sales success.

wrong. Let's go to another one here. All right. Let's talk about mimicry. Now, many of us have been told that when you are trying to persuade somebody, you should mirror their responses, that you should sit the way that they're sitting, assume their posture, maybe even repeat their words. And we have an enormous amount of evidence from social and personality psychology showing that's true.

Okay, like that's one of the things in the research that says that some of that conventional wisdom is absolutely right, but it's not duplicitous. So here's the thing, attunement, that is getting inside of someone else's head. It's empathy plus perspective taking. What is it like to be Chris? What is it like to see the world through your eyes? What is it like to inhabit your mind and heart? A way to get better at that.

is mimicry. So truly, there's evidence that if I gesture the way that you do, I actually get a better handle on that. If I sit the way that you do, I get a better handle on that. Because human beings are natural mimickers. And you see this in everyday interaction. Just go out in the world one day. I live in Washington, D.C. I don't live in the suburbs. I live in the city of D.C. I walk a lot. If you go out and sort of put on your lens of like,

a wildlife biologist and walk through the streets of Washington, D.C., you can see it somewhat differently. And so for those of you who are in places like that, that have some degree of density, go out there and look and watch for mimicry. Watch people talking to each other, standing side by side, talking to each other. It looks almost choreographed.

They stand in a similar way. They gesture in similar ways. If you look at transcripts of conversations, you see people repeating words back and forth. We are natural mimickers because it's one way that we understand people. So being a little bit more conscious of that is valuable. Noticing it is valuable. Watching how somebody behaves and mimicking that is actually effective. It doesn't come off as duplicitous. Most people don't even know that it's happening because it's so natural. For those of you out there who are listening, who are in any kind of technical field,

There's a lot of really good evidence that repeating other people's words is effective. And that's especially true for things that are technical. You see this all the time with people who are in any kind of technical sales. They're selling to people who are not experts. And those non-experts will use the language that civilians use, the inexact, imprecise language of civilians. Repeat that language back, even if it's imprecise.

What often happens is that the experts will use expert language and the civilians will use civilian language. I'll give you one great study of this. There's a fair amount of research, believe it or not, on tipping. There's a study out of Holland, probably 12 years old now. Some of the servers...

at a restaurant. They would just take the order from customers. All right. And then some of them were told to repeat the order back word for word from the customer. If you look at the tips as a dependent variable in this study, the people who repeated the order back got 70, 70% more tips. So this is another example of how this mimicry can be an effective form of attunement.

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When you were talking about attunement, I thought you were going to go to speak less and listen more. But it sounds like there's a lot more other tactics as well. It's more sophisticated than that. Listen more and talk less as a persuasive tool. It's why strong extroverts aren't very good.

Honestly, they talk too much. They don't listen very well. But strong introverts don't talk enough because ultimately you're trying to change people's behaviors. You need a little bit more assertiveness. But there are also things like feelings of power. So if you're in a less powerful position, you're trying to persuade up people.

You're much better off talking about interests rather than emotions. There's some interesting research in negotiation showing that if you put people in a negotiation center, you say, go in and do this negotiation, then we see how well they do. Then we give another group to say, go into this negotiation. I want you to really focus on the other side's emotions and feelings. And then the third group, think about the other group's thoughts and interests. And it turns out that both the emotion group and the thoughts and interest groups do better than the control group. But

But the thoughts and interest groups do better than the emotions group. It's particularly true when persuading up. You're in a one down position of power. Focus on interest. Focus on interest. Focus on interest. Focus on interest. You're trying to get your boss to do something differently. Explain why it's a good deal for her. Explain why it's going to make her life easier. Now, if you're persuading down...

If you're the boss, there's a different set of skills that are necessary. And in this case, one of the things that you see is some very powerful research showing that feelings of power are inversely correlated with emotions.

perspective-taking. That is, the more powerful someone feels, the worse their perspective-taking abilities become. We see this a lot. There's some sociology research when it comes to things like status. High-status people, terrible perspective-takers on average. It doesn't mean obviously every high-status person is a bad perspective, but on average, low-status people, very good perspective-takers. Why? Because

Because they don't control the resources. They have to understand the people who do control the resources. We see this kind of inverse correlation. And so what happens is a lot of times bosses basically try to use force to get people to do stuff, which might work in the short term, but is a disaster in the long run. One of the things that bosses can do is actually temporarily reduce their feelings of power in persuading down people.

And actually, as a consequence, increase the acuity of their perspective taking. If we are in an alternative universe where I was your boss, obviously would never happen in a thousand years. And I want you to do something and you think it's a bad idea and you resist. My instinct is to be sort of coercive. But what I'm better off doing is actually saying, you know what? This sort of recalibrating in my head. It's like, hey, wait a second. Even though I'm the boss, even though I can fire Chris.

Maybe I'm less powerful than I think. Chris is very good. He can go get another job. I need him to be all in on doing this. And when I reduce my feelings of power, I'm better able to say, okay, what's in it for Chris to do this thing that I want to do? Why is it a good deal for him? Why does it make his life better?

So again, some of these very small techniques can increase our perspective taking, make us more persuasive because we're better able to find common ground with people. Okay. I feel like we hit attunement a lot. I want to quickly see if there are any tactics on buoyancy techniques.

I've had past conversations about rejection therapy, where you just practice asking for things that you know you'll get a no to. I don't know if that's the best or even... You know, I don't know. I know that technique. I don't know if there's any research on it. I sort of dig it as like an exercise. Take a week and everywhere you go, no matter what you're buying, you ask for a discount. You know, earlier today, we had to go out and run an errand and I was starving. We didn't have any food in our house. So we had to just pick up some sandwiches at the sandwich place up on Wisconsin Avenue.

I could have gone in there and said, you know, gotten my sandwiches from my wife and me and say, oh, can I have a 10% discount? And then go into the FedEx and said, can I have a 10% discount? And then gone to my allergist and said, can I have a 10%? I mean, you know, and everyone's going to say no, but a few people will say, yes, that's the amazing thing. So I kind of like it as an exercise. I think it's fun. I'll give you something that's more rooted in the research though, right? Because the truth of the matter is, I don't think you can be fully inoculated against rejection.

I don't think there's a permanent vaccine against that.

It stings everybody. And I say that from my own head and heart. I've been at this book writing thing for a freaking long time, like 20 plus years. All right. I've written a lot of books and you write books and people write reviews of them on Amazon. And some people are going to say, you're an idiot. You suck, whatever. All right. And I know that's like part of the game and it doesn't really matter. It still bugs me. All right. Because I'm a human being. I don't lose any sleep over it, but it still bugs me. Even I am not fully 100% inoculated against this.

And so people who are maybe a little bit younger, people who are a little less experienced, a very, very good technique that you can use. It's better than going around asking for a 10% discount everywhere. Although again, I think that's a fun exercise. It's based on some research by Martin Seligman, who's the famous, one of the parents of positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he followed around a bunch of life insurance salesmen, almost all men. And what he found is that the best predictor of their sales success

was their explanatory style. And it's a very good technique. I use it all the time.

is what he calls the three Ps. We don't like being rejected, okay? Even people like me who get rejected a lot, it's not like you dig it. You don't like it, right? And so what happens is, is that a lot of us, when we get rejected for anything, we catastrophize. We say, it's all my fault. It always happens. And it's going to ruin everything. And the three Ps are a way to, basically a form of not quite cognitive behavior therapy, but

maybe a sibling of it that allows you to rebut that catastrophizing. So three P's, personal. We always want to explain our rejections in terms of ourselves.

If I try to pitch a book to a TV program or something like that to cover it, and they reject me, I could say, oh, you know what? It's all my fault. I'm an idiot. I fucked it up, you know? Occasionally, that's the case. But in many cases, it has nothing to do with me. It's because they already have like eight things in the pipeline. It's because they already did a segment like this two weeks ago. When we get rejected, our tendency is to say, it's all my fault. And

What you want to do is the first P is personal, is you want to say, is this entirely personal? And very few things are that way. That is, is it all your fault? And it's probably not. All right. So talk to yourself the way you would to a compassionate friend. You go in there and say, it's all my fault. Is it really all your fault? Is it all your fault that that person said no to a date? No, because maybe that person is like,

anxious or unhappy or busy or something like that. It might not have anything to do with you. Second P, pervasive. I've been trying to sell these computer systems. I always get rejected. Pervasive. But is it pervasive? Rebut that. Did you sell anything two weeks ago? Have you ever sold anything before? It's not pervasive. And the third one is permanent. Again, we catastrophize. It's going to ruin everything.

Most things don't ruin everything. And so when you get rejected, ask yourself the three Ps. Is it personal? It's probably not entirely personal. Is it pervasive? It's probably not entirely pervasive. Is it permanent? It's not permanent. And that is a form of rebutting the sort of the catastrophizing feelings of rejection that we have. And as a consequence, it allows you to stay buoyant in that ocean of rejection. I love it.

Anytime you're facing rejection, just ask yourself those questions and it kind of, what's the effect? Often, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's if you're feeling really bad about rejection. Now, if you get rejected, you don't feel bad about it and you want to go on, it's like, yeah, that's cool. Some people are better at that than others. I get rejected a lot, but every once in a while, it really bugs me. And when it really bugs you,

Whether you're a veteran like me who gets rejected a lot and sometimes gets bothered by it, or you're a little less seasoned and you're just not used to getting rejected, in the face of that bad feeling, the three Ps are a very, very good technique. For me, this is similarly with reviews. When I see reviews that are like, you know what? For me, this isn't a fit. Great. And then when someone's like, I think this thing that's not true, I just...

You know, I'm like, oh, it just eats me aside. I'm like, I want to talk to you, but I can't because it's anonymous.

I had a newspaper column that came out last week, and I got a lot of feedback from it. And some of the stuff that people said, it's interesting. And I take that and it's like, okay, that's a good point. And others of it was just idiotic. There's another technique, it's sort of like the three Ps, it's called 10-10-10, which is you ask yourself, how much is this going to matter in 10 minutes, 10 weeks and 10 years? And so the person who sent me an idiotic email, it

It's probably not going to matter in 10 minutes, let alone in 10 weeks and certainly not in 10 years. So don't elevate it in that moment when you're feeling that peak. I like that. Just so we round it out on clarity, any tactics or things you should be doing in that department? One really good one that I like, a study out of Stanford, pretty interesting one where they put people in front of computer screen and

And a large number of participants put in front of a computer screen and then they had to assess whether they wanted to buy hiking boots. And so one group, they got the attributes of these hiking boots. And it's long list, like they have waterproof soles. They have indestructible shoelaces. They've been endorsed by a hiking magazine. They have an eight year warranty. Long list of positives. And then a separate group got hiking.

The same thing, a long list of positives. But at the very end, there was a small negative. But unfortunately, they only come in two styles. Okay, so, and so this is something that we face as persuaders, is when we have an offering, and our offering should be good. If you don't have a good offering, get a better offering, okay? Selling people bad stuff might be useful to you in the short run, but it's a disaster in the long run. This is actually a really important point where it's like, in a world of information asymmetry,

You can take the low road more often, but in a world of information parity, low road doesn't lead very far. So you got to have a good offering, but sometimes very rarely do we have a perfect offering, right? And so it might have a small weakness. It might have a small blemish. So the question is, do you reveal that small blemish or do you conceal it?

What this research showed is that the people who had the hiking boots that had the long list of positive attributes followed by the small negative were more likely to buy the hiking boots than the people who had simply the long list of positives. The why here I think is super interesting. It's not only about credibility. It's a little bit about that. But what it is more than anything else is this. The most important question is,

in certainly in sales and persuasion is, again, let's go back to advice. The most important thing is with them. What's in it for me? That's an important question. It's the second most important question. The most important question is compared to what? Human beings don't make decisions in absolute terms. We make them in relative terms. And so you want to trigger that compared to what question. And what happened in the long list of positives followed by the small negative

Wait, compared to this long list of, that's nothing. And so what it did is that it triggered a light that shined a light on those positives in a way that simply the list of positives did not. So if you have an offering,

And in no offering, it's perfect. And it has a small blemish. I think the evidence says reveal that small blemish. It's credibility enhancing. But what it also does is that it triggers the compared to what question and shines a light on all of those attributes. Now, a couple of things here. Number one has to be a small negative, a small blemish. All right. You know, it can't be. Oh, and they immediately start leaking days after buying. It's nothing like that. And then but also sequence matters here.

There's some evidence that in the sequence of your explanation, that the positives followed by a small negative is more effective than the small negative followed by the list of positives. Those are some things that are research-based and ethical that can help us become better respecters. I'll give you one more that's sort of like this in the world of clarity because I think it's super practical. Let's say you're making an argument or you're making claims to try to get someone to do something. So is one claim better than zero claims? Yep.

Like, Chris, I think you should do this because of one. Is one claim better than zero claims? Yes, it is. Is two claims better than one claim? Yes. Is three claims better than two claims? Yes. Is four claims better than three claims? No. There is this really interesting piece of research showing that if the other side knows you're trying to persuade them that

three is kind of the magic number that four it's like okay you're trying too hard and that you have basically rising returns up to three but then declining returns after three so stop at three there

There's something about threes in our brains, in our language, or something that is, I mean, truly. You've got ABC, you've got three Ps. No, but not me. But I just think in general, I mean, you have the Holy Trinity, you know, the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. That predates anything that I've written, believe me. You have this kind of series of threes. If you look at stand-up comedians and joke writers,

They're always conceiving their jokes in terms of threes. This is some very good research showing in persuasive encounters, stop at three. And you mentioned when you're talking about clarity that people can find solutions to the problems they have, but you have to help them maybe find problems they don't have. Is that about finding them or framing them? It's more about finding them than framing them. It's about getting to the heart of it. And one way to do that is a very annoying technique, but it's really useful is there's some big dispute over the parentage of this technique.

Okay. So we're just going to say that it's a lovely child of uncertain parentage because Toyota has claimed parentage over this. IDEO has claimed parentage over this. It's a technique that you might be familiar with called the five whys. If you say, hey, Dan, I need a lawnmower. Instead of saying, oh, here are the lawnmowers we have. You can say, why? And you say, because my grass is too long. Why? Could be that your problem is not that you need a lawnmower. It's because you need to move to a new house. And so

I find that a pretty interesting technique. The other thing that it does is that in B2B sales, where sales is really about...

expertise and knowing the business that you're selling to inside and out. B2B sales at a high level right now is basically a form of management consulting. One of the things that you can do is you go in there offering insights rather than trying to sell people stuff and developing genuine, genuine expertise that allows you to see things in a way that

The prospect often does not. In the same way that a very good doctor, you could go in there and say, okay, you know what I need? I need some antacid because I have this stomach ache. And a really good doctor can go in there and she can start asking questions that surface what's really going on there. We're going to find the real problem here rather than what you think is the problem.

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Any other tactics or techniques that someone in the middle of a... When I say negotiation or a persuasion or a sale, going back to our earlier conversation, I don't mean as a salesperson at a business, but convincing someone of your idea or convincing your children to do something. Are there...

other things outside of the ABCs? I'll give you a couple. Okay. So one I'm a big fan of, I read about it in Amanda Ripley's latest book, which is a technique. It's out there. It'd been in literature called looping. I don't know if you're familiar with looping, which is essentially, it's often true in a disagreement. And so one of the things that you can do to build affinity and to really understand where people are coming from to mitigate some of the flames and disagreements is what's called looping, which is where you ask a question.

Chris, why do you think that nobody should get vaccinated? Okay. All right. And instead of saying, I happen to think people should get vaccinated. And let's say I disagree with you that nobody should get vaccinated. My instinct is to say, what the fuck are you talking about? Of course, people should get vaccinated. Are you a moron? You know? Okay. So don't do that. Instead say, oh, Chris, why do you think people should not get vaccinated? And so I listened to, so I asked a question of you. All right. I listened to you.

I then recapitulate what you're saying. Oh, so you think that people shouldn't get vaccinated because a lot of these vaccinations are unproven and that they're really something that's being forced on us by big pharma. So I ask a question, I recapitulate it. Then I say, did I get that right? And that technique is a very good way of calming flames and really trying to find common ground with people when you disagree on some very controversial issues. I'll give you one on one of my...

Favorite ones. I'm like, it works for kids. You have to deploy it selectively. It's a therapeutic technique. I learned it from this guy named Michael Pantalon, who's a therapist, psychiatrist at Yale. It's called motivational interviewing. Have you heard of this one? I think I've seen you either write about it or talk about it, but keep going.

It's not mine. It's motivational interviewing. I love this. You got to deploy it effectively. Again, let's talk about a fantasy situation. What would be something that I want you to do? Maybe you're an employee, maybe you're a kid. What's something that I want you to do that you don't want to do? When you said kid, all I could think about was like trying to convince a child that this is the activity we want to do today.

So we want to go to the park and kid doesn't want to go to the park. I usually want to go to the park. What's going on? OK, so you're a kid and we've decided as a family that today we're going to the park and we've made plans to go to the park. And maybe it's not a park that's down the street. It's a park that we have to drive to. And maybe we've made plans to meet our friends at that park. OK, so we're going to the park. All right. But you're you're being recalcitrant. You're being a kid. You're saying I don't want to go to the park. All right. And it's in we're at a standstill of sorts.

I could say to you, hey, Chris, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 meaning you're not ready at all, 10 meaning that you are...

you're absolutely ready to go to the park. You're eager to go to the park. Where are you on a scale of one to 10? One, I don't want to go at all. 10, I'm ready to go right now. Where are you on that scale? You're probably at four right now. Okay, you're four. And now again, I'm a parent. And so if I heard a kid after making all these plans was only a four on a scale of 10, I was like, what the hell are you talking about? You should be an eight. All right. You say, I say to you, okay, Chris, you're a four. Okay, that's good. Why didn't you pick a lower number?

Now, this is the thing that's super interesting about it, right? My instinct as a parent is to say, what are you talking about a four? You should be a nine, dude. I say, so Chris, why aren't you a two or a three? Well, because I kind of like playing with Jose because he's fun and he's going to be at the park. You know, it is a nice day and I like to run around when the sun is out. What happens? This technique is a way to get people to start discussing their own reasons for doing something.

All right. Their own autonomous, intrinsically motivated reasons for doing something. And one of the things that is just foundational here about human nature, about the human condition, but also about persuasion itself, is that when people have their own reasons for doing something, not your reasons for doing something, if you have Chris's reasons for doing something,

you are more likely to believe in those reasons, endorse those reasons, and execute the behavior than if I try to force my reasons on you. And so this motivational interviewing technique on a scale of 1 to 10, and then why didn't you pick a lower number, is a way for persuaders to surface their

The targets own motivations for doing what you want them to do. And that's really powerful. And that's also, I think, more exalted because it's how we should treat human beings. We should let other human beings be self-determined. I don't want to be controlled. And as a consequence, if I don't want to be controlled, I shouldn't control others. But motivational interviewing is a way to help people see their own motivations for doing something and help us find common ground.

That was getting someone to not take your opinion or your beliefs and think of their own. Where do kind of third party social proof beliefs fit into this? Oh, huge. Your listeners out there, if you haven't read the book Influenced by Robert Cialdini, you should. You should read it right now. Cialdini, who is the father of persuasion science, he's now an emeritus professor at Arizona State. He talks about various principles of persuasion. One of them is exactly what you're talking about, social proof. That is when we look, when we're trying to decide what to do,

We look around for other people for cues about what that is. The more that you can bring social proof into the room, the better off you are. And in that classic study of Cialdini's, did it with a few colleagues 15 years ago, had to do with hanging up towels in hotels so that if you have a little tent card in a hotel room that says...

reuse your towel. It's good for the environment. You get a third of the people reusing their towels. But if you put up a tent card that says 75% of our guests who are given the chance to reuse their hotel towels, reuse them, you get a lot more people doing it. Because you see it in the work that the company Opower did a few years ago, where one way to get... You can harangue people to reduce their electric bills and their gas bills, or you can show them

what their neighbors are spending. And as a consequence, when they compare that, they say, well, wait a second, why is he paying so little? I got to save more energy, right? Social proof really is important. We don't think about that enough. So we talked about a lot of things you can do right. I want to kind of round this out with any of us are always going to be making, you know, sales persuasion, negotiation mistakes, right?

How do we reflect on what we're doing, evaluate ourselves and kind of iterate? So I think there's some things to avoid, which I really do think that for moral reasons, but also pragmatic reasons, just don't be unethical. Truly. I think it's just harder to be unethical. I think it's time consuming. I think it makes you feel bad. Don't be unethical. And I think it's easier to get caught today on a lot of that unethical stuff. I mean, AI and deep fakes and so forth might change that game a bit, but

for now, don't do that. You know, I think that one of the things you can do is just look at what you're doing very analytically. That is, do some self-distancing. Take a step back. So when you make a mistake, when you screw up, treat yourself with some degree of compassion and kindness. So if you had a colleague who made a mistake like you did, let's say you made a mistake selling something or it didn't work. Chances are, if you had a colleague doing that, you wouldn't just say, you idiot, what is wrong with you? You wouldn't excoriate them. So don't excoriate yourself. Treat yourself with kindness rather than compassion.

And think about it analytically. Take a step back and ask yourself, what did I learn from this and what am I going to do differently? There's a whole line of research on what's called self-distancing, where when we solve... Human beings are decent problem solvers, but we tend to be not very good at solving our own problems because we're too close to it. And so when we scrutinize our own failures in our work, we're often too close to it. One of my favorite decision-making heuristics of all is...

If you're stuck, ask yourself on what to do. Ask yourself, what would you tell your best friend to do as a consequence of it? And you probably know. There's an old Andy Grove technique. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, who said that when he was faced with a tough decision, he would often ask himself, if I were replaced tomorrow, what would my successor do?

And he almost always knew. Being kind to yourself in the face of mistakes and then taking some distance and looking at it analytically and extracting a lesson from it is something that we can do. Now, sometimes I've used that tactic. What would I tell my friend? I'm like, oh, now I know what I should do. But sometimes it's hard to do it. Are there tactics to persuade yourself to do things when you know the right thing and you're not doing it? Yeah, I'm a little bit OK on tricking yourself.

I'm not that keen on tricking others. So that's how I trick myself, present myself to do something I don't want to do, like say answer email or pick up some of the crap in my office. All right. I say to myself, okay, just do it for five minutes. You can do anything for five minutes. Once you get started, you end up doing a lot more of it. So it's like, oh, you know what? I answered email for 15 minutes on a guy. I cleared the decks pretty much. And that was it.

better than sitting and stewing it by. So I trick myself by saying, you only have to do it for five minutes. And by the way, the inverse of that works really well too. If you're like, gosh, I'd really love another Girl Scout cookie, which is seasonal right now. You say, I'll just get one in five minutes.

And in that five minutes, you've found some distraction and you no longer want that thing. And again, this is old news, but also just change your choice architecture too. If you don't want to eat crappy food, don't have Girl Scout cookies around. Try telling your neighbor's young children who are at your door, like, do you want to buy... It's like...

there's no option to not buy them. So here we go. So I'll give you something else. All right. So there's another really good technique in self-talk, which is to say, let's take something like eating dessert. If you say there's a big difference between saying, I can't eat dessert, I can't eat dessert, or saying, I don't eat dessert. You just have a hard and fast rule. And when you say, I don't eat dessert, it's easier to follow the rule. Oh, I don't eat dessert.

So what you can do, you can say, you know, whatever your neighbor's name is, Mary, Susie, I don't eat Girl Scout cookies. But what I'm going to do, because I want to support you, is I'm going to buy these boxes. And can you just give them to someone else who might want them? That way you've done the pro-social thing and bought the Girl Scout cookies, but you've saved your teeth and your weight. I like it. This is great. I mean, I think we covered a lot of persuasion tactics. I know you did an entire masterclass on them, which we'll link to in the show notes. I'm curious about a

a couple little tiny elements of it, which is about...

pitching. And when you're trying to do some of these persuasions, not in person, over email, over that kind of stuff, how do things change, right? If I'm trying to send an email to convince someone like I did you to come on the show or something like that, I don't get the chance to mimic them. I don't get the chance to ask them questions. Well, you do in a way. You actually can. So the question is, how do you do this kind of stuff when you're not in person? You use similar kinds of techniques. I'll give you an example. If someone emails me

and says, it might be something that I want to actually pursue. And they say, dear Mr. Pink, I will often respond to them, dear Ms. Rodriguez. But if they say, dear Dan, I'll respond with dear Mary. I'm basically mimicking them. I'm basically using their level of formality, their tone,

back to them. So I think that's one thing that you can do. It's hard with Zoom and even the phone and things like that. You can mimic language. You can mimic a little bit of the tonality. You can mimic a little bit of the formality. So that's one thing that you can do. And also, you know, if the stakes are really high, then try to figure out a way to do it in person, if that's at all possible.

What about when you have to go first, right? When you're cold outreaching via email and you're the first email, do you have thoughts on persuasion when it comes to first sentences, subject lines, all those kinds of things? There was one piece of research on this that I find useful. It's going to up your odds maybe a little bit. Basically, why do people open email? It turns out there are two things. It's utility and curiosity, right? So if you send me an email and it's clear in the subject line that it's going to be useful to me,

I can do that. I might open it. If you have a subject line that sparks curiosity, there's a marginal chance I'm going to open it more than a regular kind of email. So an email from somebody I haven't heard of that says, hello, probably not going to get a great open, right? An email who says, I have a really easy way to put into action one of the best ideas in your book.

I might open that. All right. It's curiosity and utility. Or I say, can I take two minutes to tell you the most useful thing I learned in your book? Blah, blah, blah. Right. I'm curious. So curiosity or utility? Marginally better. But the thing is, do you like getting cold outreach? I don't. You know, and so most of the time it doesn't work. The better approach is, you know, find a way to warm it up. That's been a tried and true tactic. And sometimes at scale, it's hard. It's hard at scale. I agree with you about that. I like the curiosity. I like thinking as a kind of rule.

Is the subject going to make someone curious or help them? Yeah. Utility or curiosity. I'll give you one other layer of that. When people have a very high volume, utility is better than curiosity. When they have a lower volume of incoming curiosity beats utility. Super helpful. So the, if you have a high volume, which it sounds like you do going to lead with the subject, um,

Can I help you sell more books? Can you talk a little bit about some of the work you're doing now? I know you have a new column in The Washington Post. Yeah, we just started this new project of The Washington Post called Why Not? It's an experiment, what we call possibility journalism. It's for the opinion page of The Washington Post. And one of the things that I've noticed out there in the world of I mean, I'm a Washingtonian. I used to work in politics in the media. We're spending so much time just screaming about who's right and who's wrong.

and not nearly enough time talking about what's possible. So we're doing this set of columns that I'm going to be writing over the next year, where we're taking ideas and saying, why not pay teachers a minimum of $100,000 a year if we really care about teachers? Why not have a

teams like the Washington Nationals, instead of selling to another billionaire, sell them to their fans. Why not make the amount every American pays in income tax public so we know who's paying their fair share and who's not? Why not give presents on your birthday rather than receive them? And so we're taking these ideas that are a little bit outside of the narrow window that we usually think about in our country, in our organizations, in our lives, and

and just throwing them out there and seeing what people think. And how much of it is brainstorming or research or like in the sake of teachers? I'm curious, not only why wouldn't we, what could happen? Is there a reason why not? Got to go read it. Well, no, it's a great point. One of the things is, is that if we want to pay teachers that much, it's going to cost a lot of money. That's a great point, Chris. What it does is it raises the question, hey, what do we care about? We

We can mouth what we care about, but what we put our money behind is actually what we care about. That's a big part of it. We got an incredible response to this column on paying teachers at least $100,000. Some people saying, what are you crazy? Teachers aren't worth that much. Other people saying, oh no, the unions would never go for it. Other people saying, that's the best idea I've ever heard. A guy in Pennsylvania who was a teacher, middle school and high school teacher for 15 years and a very good teacher. And he left to become a paper salesman.

because he wasn't being treated well and he didn't make enough money. It's heartbreaking to lose somebody like that.

I don't want to see everybody's income tax return, but I think there's a good argument to be made for knowing how much every American paid in federal income taxes and making that public. Because all of us, especially on tax day, feel like we're getting the shaft, that we're paying so much more than anybody else. But let's see that. And let's see who's paying their fair share. And I think a lot of us would be surprised. And this is not that outlandish, because anybody who owns real property...

has their property taxes public. So it's not like some kind of massive invasion. Anybody listening to this can go to the publicly available on the interwebs records of the District of Columbia government and find how much I paid in property taxes.

And so what I'd like to see, maybe, let's vet it, is whether we make everybody's income tax payments public to see who is paying their fair share. And I think it's a curious question about if we did something like that, whether that would cause a race to the top or a race to the bottom. Whether the flex would be how little people paid or how much people paid as a signal of how much money they made. But that's not something we ever talk about. So we're just taking these ideas out there and saying, hey, what's possible?

especially in a world right now where we seem to be always at each other's throat, where I think the sense of possibility has been dimmed considerably. We're just trying to use this platform to talk about these things. We got like 1300 submissions from readers for ideas that they had to why not ideas that they had. So it's super cool. I love it. I'll link to a couple of posts in the show notes. Dan, as always, thank you so much for joining me. This has been great.

A pleasure. Thanks for hipping us to the new credit card that we have in our wallet right now that we use. My wife always knows. We use this at the drugstore. We use this at the grocery store. We use this for travel. I love it. For those not listening, Dan showed off one of his new cards. I'm not going to ask him to do it now because you don't need your credit card number in the video. But it's always fun to hear stories from readers, especially when we go full circle. And the readers and the listeners are now the guests. Thank you for listening and reading and joining me. Always a pleasure, Chris. Thanks for your show.

That was incredible. If you want to go deeper on this, you should absolutely check out Dan's masterclass on persuasion. You can do that and get 15% off an annual subscription to masterclass at allthehacks.com slash masterclass.

And in light of persuasion, if you enjoyed this episode, I have one simple and easy ask for you. And it's just to click the follow or subscribe button in whatever podcast you're already in if you haven't done it already. Thank you so much in advance. And as always, please share any questions, thoughts, ideas, or whatever else you have for me to podcast at allthehacks.com. That's it for this week. I will see you next week.