Zoe Chance is a behavioral scientist at the Yale School of Management and one of its most popular instructors. She worked her way up from telemarketing and door-to-door sales to managing Mattel’s Barbie brand’s $200 million business to Yale. Zoe’s research has been published in The New York Times, BBC, The Economist, and the Harvard Business Review. Her popular TEDx talk, “How to Make a Behavior Addictive,” has over 600,000 views. Zoe received her doctorate degree from Harvard, her MBA from the University of Southern California, and her bachelor’s degree from Haverford College. Zoe’s latest book is called Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen. If you are a Bob Cialdini or Katy Milkman fan, you’ll love this book. This is the longest episode of Remarkable People because it overfloweth with practical and tactical advice about influencing, persuading, and change. I tried to find stuff to cut, but I couldn’t. What can I say?
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. I'm on a mission to make you remarkable.
Today's guest, who's helping me make you remarkable, is Zoe Chance.
She's a behavioral scientist at The Yale School of Management, and one of its most popular instructors.
She worked her way up from telemarketing and door-to-door sales, to managing Mattel's Barbie's brand, a $200 million business, all the way to The Yale School of Management.
Zoe's research has been published in The New York Times, BBC, The Economist, and Harvard Business Review.
Her popular TED Talk, How to Make a Behavior Addictive, has over 600,000 views.
Zoe received her doctorate degree from Harvard, her MBA from the University of Southern California, and Zoe's latest book is called Influence is Your Superpower, the science of winning hearts, sparking change, and making good things happen.
If you are a Bob Cialdini or Katy Milkman fan, you'll love this book.
This is the longest episode of Remarkable People because it overflowed with practical and tactical advice about influence, persuasion, and change.
I tried to find stuff to cut, but I couldn't. What can I say?
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. Now, here's the remarkable Zoe Chance.
I'm going to read you a sentence and then I'm going to ask you for a grade. Right? You teach MBAs, you teach students. You know how to grade people, right?
Zoe Chance:
So do you, right?
Guy Kawasaki:
Not like you do. I don't have the most popular course in the Yale MBA program.
Okay. You ready?
Zoe Chance:
Ready.
Guy Kawasaki:
People can become more remarkable simply by listening to my podcast because my remarkable guests reveal their best practices and secrets. How's that for framing?
Zoe Chance:
A+.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Now you say that to everybody.
Zoe Chance:
It's a winner. You got definitely the mysterious frame, some monumental, manageable stuff going on. No wonder your podcast is so popular, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Actually, I want it to be more popular so that I gravitated towards the framing chapter immediately.
Zoe Chance:
Being a wordsmith, you know a lot about it.
Guy Kawasaki:
I guess. I don't know, but you're the teacher.
Now, would you tell me if I had a C or B-minus frame?
Zoe Chance:
No, I would probably give you an A-minus if you sucked.
Guy Kawasaki:
An A+ is not that great, then?
Zoe Chance:
An A would've been, "That was pretty good." A-plus, you nailed it. Now all of my students are going to be like, "Oh, my God I suck. Now I know I suck."
Guy Kawasaki:
Second question, I want to know how you influenced the diet of Google employees?
Zoe Chance:
We were brought on to try to help employees mindlessly make healthier eating choices. Because if you tried to strong-arm people, anybody, parents know this with their children... If you try to force people to eat healthier, they're going to fight you. They will fight you with whatever means they have. You've spent time at Google.
I'm just going to guess.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Zoe Chance:
You visited the campus?
Guy Kawasaki:
That's why I asked.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah. There's just delicious, fresh food every freaking where. I think an unofficial manifesto has been that there needs to be food available for every employee no matter where they are every moment of the day within 150 feet. A lot of this food is delicious. A lot of it is healthy. A lot of it is junk. It's a mix of whatever people want.
People complained.
Employees of Google call themselves Googlers, new Googlers get called Nooglers. People complain about what they call the Noogler-fifteen, which is the Freshman-fifteen where you go to college and you drink a lot of beer, and you gain fifteen pounds.
Guy Kawasaki:
Right.
Zoe Chance:
You join Google. You have all this food available, and you gain fifteen pounds. What we did was we did a number of experiments with the Google Food Team using principles of behavioral economics to nudge people's choices in a healthy direction, where we're never going to restrict what they can eat, but a lot of this centered around making it a little bit more difficult to get the unhealthy food.
One study we did was just pure observation, there's no intervention, where there's a break room with a snack area and two different coffee machines. One is closer. One is further. We just sent spies to watch and see, after people go get coffee, did they go and get a snack?
It turned out that 50 percent more people were getting snacks if they got their coffee from the close coffee machine. The direction is not surprising at all. We all know we do things that are easy, but we just tend to underestimate how powerful that is.
I feel silly saying this to you, especially with your history from Apple. Of all people, you know how important it is to make things easy, to do what you want.
In this particular case, all these people who don't realize it are mindlessly snacking just because of where they got their coffee, and men are doing it a little bit more. If you're a guy who drinks three drinks a day, you're going to gain about four pounds a year.
When we presented this, there was an architect in the room who's been designing with his firm all of the break rooms for all of Google and other places. He calls back to his headquarters immediately to say, "Hey, guys. We need to redesign how we do the break rooms to just separate the drinks from the snacks."
This is an example of one of the simplest interventions to influence people's behavior. It's just separating. You can do it at your house. I've done it at my house.
Guy Kawasaki:
I got to talk to my wife tonight. I grabbed a handful of nuts just before I got to this session.
Zoe Chance:
Because they're right there and it's easy, right?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yup.
Zoe Chance:
I don't aspire to be aesthetic and eat perfectly clean all the time, but I was eating more junk and my family was eating more junk than we wanted. We put our cookies and chips, and stuff in an opaque container in the cabinet where you'd open it up and you'd see the container, but we just forgot what was in it. Our junk food actually molded; it turned green before we ate it.
Yeah. It works. Behavioral interventions for influencing behavior are so often much more powerful and influential than all the stuff that we do to try to change people's minds.
Guy Kawasaki:
A couple weeks ago, I interviewed someone. They were talking about the power of habits, specifically tiny habits.
Zoe Chance:
Is this BJ Fogg?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Exactly.
Zoe Chance:
He's great.
Guy Kawasaki:
I got him between surf sessions.
Anyway, I was discussing this hypothetical situation, because it's not true of my family, that a teenage boy would never, ever put his laundry in the basket. BJ came up with the idea that I should buy... Not I, my friend should buy this little basketball rim and put it over the laundry basket because BJ said, "You got to get him into the habit of doing things he would've done anyway, but now it's fun and it serves a double purpose."
I have had mixed results. It wasn't the clear win I was hoping for.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah. It sounds really fun, but it actually is still creating work.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
That works great for socks, but not for pants because the rim is not a full-size rim. But anyway, I digress.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah. I really wonder about a lot of the things we're trying to influence people to do, especially as managers, also as parents. I struggle with my daughter just like every other parent with their kids, but should we just be giving rather than struggling? Does it actually matter if your son puts his laundry in the basket?
I don't know. Why?
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know. It's my OCD-ness. I don't know. I could make his door spring-loaded, so it shuts it and then I'd never see the mess. Then life is good.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah. There you go.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's another solution.
Zoe Chance:
That's a very different thing to say, "I don't want to see your dirty laundry on the floor", than, "You can't put your laundry on the floor."
Guy Kawasaki:
He doesn't listen to my podcast. We're safe.
Zoe Chance:
Good. Okay. Good.
Have you ever asked your son what it would take for him to put laundry in the basket? Because he probably knows.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Buy a car.
Zoe Chance:
He knows how to bargain. Good job training him.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's a school of thought that it doesn't matter how you get people to do good habits as long as they start forming good habits. It becomes a habit to form good habits. If it takes a car...
This was a discussion I had with John List of the University of Chicago because he had an experiment with an elementary school. They created an experimental elementary school in Chicago. They were actually paying, I think, either kids and/or parents to attend school. A lot of people, that just set them off. "You're ruining education. You're demotivating them. You're ruining their motivation."
It's not about money, it means, for these people. For these conditions, if you can get them into the habit any way you can, it's a win. I like that theory.
Zoe Chance:
It's so complicated, intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Sometimes, the extrinsic rewards can build a habit, but it's really, really rare. My guess, in that situation, is that when these kids and parents were getting paid for the kids to go to school, that the kids probably stayed in school because they actually realized that they liked it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Zoe Chance:
Right?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, yes.
Zoe Chance:
Then they're getting intrinsic rewards from it. The extrinsic rewards can get you to try something, but it's the pleasure and the enjoyment, and things like that that get you to continue.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have to say that I've had on my podcast, as you heard, John List, Angela Duckworth, Katy Milkman, Bob Cialdini twice, David Aaker-
Zoe Chance:
Daughter, Jennifer Aaker.
Guy Kawasaki:
Jennifer Aaker, yup. The happy person.
Now I have you. So my life is almost complete.
I am very curious, do you have anywhere that you and Bob Cialdini significantly diverge on any behavioral, economic, social psychology practices?
Zoe Chance:
We're very like-minded and also we have a big zone of difference about how our work gets applied. I'll explain a little bit. Bob Cialdini, many of your listeners know, he wrote this book called Influence in 1985. It sold, I don't know, thirty million copies or something. I think it was eight million copies by now, but eight, thirty million, who's counting at that point?
Bob Cialdini is part of the reason that I came to academia in the first place because I loved this book so much; it was my absolute favorite book. It has become the bible of transactional sales. What he's focusing on in that work especially, less so in his newer work, on his newer book, Persuasion, is how to influence one-off situational behaviors to get somebody to do the thing you want in that moment.
Where I diverge from that practice, but Bob totally agrees with me on the philosophy, is that really what we want to do is be building relationships and having people who want to collaborate with us, say yes to us, generally as a human being, that this is ultimately how you have a long-term influence.
It's very different from the transactional influence that can feel manipulative if somebody sees what you're doing. One of Bob Cialdini's main six principles is scarcity and that's what you see everywhere, in every single transactional sales situation.
I used to work in transactional sales, and I've done all of this. It's not evil, but you tell people you have a limited supply or they have to buy it right now. You put people on their back foot by feeling the urgency that just drives them into an irrational mindset and you feel like, "I have to have that thing." But then it ends up creating a lot of regret afterwards. That's an example. Bob Cialdini, you know that I love you. If you hear this, hear it in that light.
Guy Kawasaki:
He is the greatest. You just mentioned scarcity is one of his six principles. This morning I got an email from NetJets, where-
Zoe Chance:
What is NetJets?
Guy Kawasaki:
NetJets is where you eat a timeshare on private airplanes.
Zoe Chance:
Okay. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
The starting paragraph is something like, "There are limited amount of black card memberships available, Guy." I'm like, "Uh-huh." There's so many people pounding on paying 10,000 bucks an hour to... I have to limit, anyway.
Zoe Chance:
Right? If you call them tomorrow, they're going to be like, "Oh, nope. Sorry. That was a one-time deal."
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Right.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah. Most scarcity influence practices are just not even real. That's also why we feel manipulated like in that situation, exactly like you're talking about.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. You can only invite a few other people to Gmail right now because it's in beta test.
Are kind and smart people at a disadvantage when it comes to influencing others?
Zoe Chance:
They can be at a disadvantage. They're at a disadvantage if they don't understand how it works, which most of us don't understand how it works.
Actually, they have a double liability. Because if you are kind, you're likely to be really careful not to use influence techniques and strategies because you don't want to be manipulative.
Then if you're smart, you have a totally different problem; that's you assume people are much more rational than they are in their decision making. You tend to be working on crafting your perfect arguments, which is fine and good, but that is at a later stage. If you've skipped the first stage of getting their attention and second of all, getting them interested in listening to you, then it doesn't matter how great your arguments are.
But the kind person part is the even bigger problem in all of this. Because if we who want to do good things in the world and help each other out and create a good society, if we are not studying and practicing influence, then we just leave it to the domain of the power hungry people who are.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's suppose that I'm a smart person listening to this. Then the natural follow-on question is: What is the role of facts in decision making and influence, then?
Zoe Chance:
It's a really deep question. Facts are simply less persuasive than we think. It doesn't make them less important than we think, but they're less persuasive than we think because so much of what we do, our decisions and our behavior, are guided unconsciously.
In the book, I talk about the two systems that a lot of your readers will be familiar with that are officially called System One and System One. I use a different analogy in the book.
But researchers who study unconscious decisions and behavior estimate that your unconscious system guides 95 percent of everything you think and everything you do, but you don't know because it's unconscious. We can't perceive it.
So we imagine ourselves to be in that 5 percent of the time were doing something consciously and with great intention.
Like not your son, but your friend's son with the laundry. It's not like he's consciously intending to put his clothes on the floor. They just go to the floor. It's not even a choice.
Guy Kawasaki:
Exactly.
Zoe Chance:
You're asking him to make a conscious choice in a situation where there's no conscious thinking happening. That's part of what's really hard.
Guy Kawasaki:
You alluded to this System One and System One, but I think you have a much, much better label for them, which is Gators versus Judges.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
What a brilliant dichotomy.
Zoe Chance:
Thanks. I used this analogy, the dichotomy, just because as a teacher of behavioral economics, I found it's very hard for people, even the super smart people that I teach, like MBA students and CEOs who come through, to remember which one is System One and which one is System Two and that's because it takes a lot of conscious intention to remember and figure out.
But gators and judges, gators are the primal, intuitive, emotional, gut, and habitual decision-making system. Then judges are the conscious, slow, rational, effortful, seemingly objective, seemingly rational decision-making system. It's easy to remember those.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think that you might be able to measure the moral fiber of a person by eliciting their reaction to your concept that 95 percent of decision making is gator-driven, not by the judge. When I read Gators versus Judges, my reaction was, "Shit. This is just not right." If the wrong people learn that it's a gator world, they're going to take advantage of it. I was disturbed that this is true.
Zoe Chance:
That's fascinating. Also, you've done so much work in consumer marketing. It's largely not surprising to people who work in consumer marketing. It's just that we don't think of our friends, family, colleagues, bosses, and employees in that same light. No.
Wouldn't you agree that when we're thinking of “the customer” that we do assume that customers behave this way?
Guy Kawasaki:
As opposed to people you care about?
Zoe Chance:
Yeah. Literally.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. But are you saying that to be successful, you've got to be you thinking like someone throwing raw meat at a gator, you got to get it right in front of his nose?
Zoe Chance:
Yes. I literally am.
Guy Kawasaki:
You are saying that?
Zoe Chance:
I truly am. The raw meat situation that you're talking about is just... If you want to influence somebody's behavior no matter who they are, the most important thing you can do is make it as easy as possible for them to take action.
If we're thinking about gators and meat, the meat needs to go directly next to the alligator's jaws or the alligator's not even going to move because it's so incredibly lazy. This is even yourself. It's not just the people you care about, but you with the behaviors that you want to change.
The reason that you're not fulfilling your hopes and dreams, and New Year's resolutions is that it's not easy for you to do it and it's very difficult to resist temptation. I don't think of it as being insulting or disrespectful to use this analogy of, “Yeah, if you want somebody to do the thing you'd like them to do, you just have to make it as easy as possible. There's not an alternative.”
Guy Kawasaki:
Is there a concept of reverse gatoring? Because let's suppose that I didn't want black people to vote, so I'm going to make it as difficult as possible. Put every barrier in front of them.
Is that the reverse gator theory?
Zoe Chance:
Hell yes. It goes way beyond just the gators, but 100 percent. This is exactly what's going on with voting right now in the United States, where a lot of the barriers are not obstacles that prevent people from voting. They just make it more difficult to vote and that means that far fewer people will vote.
Guy Kawasaki:
Many people think that I am too political and I take too much of a stand. You can imagine my perspective in all this. But honestly, Zoe, I am sixty-seven years old; I don't give a shit anymore. They can love it or leave it.
Now, do you ever thought that by suppressing voting rights, it may help you in the short-term, winning the school districts and the state legislatures? But ultimately, the demographics are going to bite you in the ass and you are going to regret this in the long run. Or do you think this can succeed?
Zoe Chance:
I believe in the Martin Luther King ideal that the long arm of history bends toward justice. I hope that's true and I think we have to hope that's true. We also have to fight like hell. You and I both said at the beginning of our conversation, "Oh, it's not going to politics", and here we are.
But what we're talking about is not so much partisan politics that I know we don't want to get into the weeds of that, but we're talking about democracy and suppression of democracy. To me, this goes far beyond political parties and political issues.
This is just a deep, fundamental human right that's being violated. To me, there's no both sides on this issue. That if you choose to live in a democracy, you fundamentally have the right to vote and it should be as easy as possible.
Guy Kawasaki:
Amen. Amen.
Zoe Chance:
Guy, I love it that you're like, "Listen, I'm sixty-seven. I just do whatever I want, and I don't care what people think."
I think that a lot of people find their authentic voice later in life and that feeling that you have. I'm wondering if you have any advice for people like the people you and I teach, who are a lot younger than we are.
Is there a way to get to that place earlier where you just say the thing that's in your heart because it's the truth?
Guy Kawasaki:
It took me sixty-seven years. I would never have said something like that when I was thirty. It's a lot of factors.
Number one, it's not like I'm a billionaire, but there is very little someone could do to me, not hire me for a speech or not buy my book or whatever, that will materially affect my life. So there's money might not buy you happiness, but it may buy you independence.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
So that's number one. And number two at sixty-seven, at least two thirds of your life is over, so what are you holding back for? I mean, the clock is ticking. And then the third one, this is a story, so in November of 2016 or so, I was in Germany and I had dinner with two friends, they're in their forties, and Trumpism had ...
The whole thing had started at that point and we're going into the election and all that, and these guys say to me, "Listen, you guy, to this day we question our grandparents. What were you thinking? How could you let Adolf Hitler come to power?" And so they said to me, "Guy, if you want your grandchildren to be wondering did you resist? Then don't take a stand. But if you want your grandchildren to not wonder did grandpa take a stance against the fall of democracy? You got to go on the record." And I felt convicted by that, and I came back to America, and I was all in on Hillary.
All the rest is history, so that's why. Anyway ...
Zoe Chance:
I feel really moved by that, and I appreciate you sharing it. And you sharing that story means so much to other people listening.
I got very politically involved in some, but not enough in 2016, and then more in 2020. And I've done other stuff in the past, but I had two specific friends who were super successful, and they left their jobs to spend their whole entire life campaigning for Biden, and because they left their life to campaign for Biden and that's all that they were doing, I ended up that year donating two months of my income to this election, which was far more than I had ever done. And volunteering, and I've been for a while showing up at the polls to volunteer and doing things like that, which is fun, but it's a small thing.
But this was me making a really meaningful sacrifice, specifically because of my friends, so even though we try to not talk about politics and get people down, when we can share stories like that, it's a really big deal and we help other people do it too, so thank you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, thank you. We're really going off the map here, but there have been many times where I take this very specific stance and there are people who in the comments on social media say, "Guy, you're pissing off half of your audience."
And I tell them, "I'm not pissing off half of my audience, QAnon is not listening to me. They're never going to listen to me. The American Nazi party is not going to hire me. I don't have to worry about it." Like anyway.
Zoe Chance:
And you and I do work with a whole lot of Republicans on all different kinds of projects and our colleagues and our students and things like that, but that is the line. They are not QAnon, they're not the Nazi party, and it's not human beings who are voting different.
I'm speaking for myself, I shouldn't speak for you. I'm just making a big assumption because of the kind of work that you do. I assume that you're not canceling everyone who voted differently than you did in these elections, but it's the lawmakers who frustrate you and get you really angry like they get me angry.
Guy Kawasaki:
When are people most likely to be influence-able?
Zoe Chance:
People are most likely to be influence-able when you, yourself, are also influence-able when you're talking with them, if we're talking about a conversation. There is nudge kinds of influences that you can do to influence people just when they're distracted and busy with other things, so they can be influence-able in that way, in a different way.
But if we're talking to somebody in a conversation, the leap that most people don't make because they don't even realize that they need to, is that actually, when you open your own mind, that's what it takes to have another person open their mind.
Guy Kawasaki:
And are you talking about trying to influence the person at United Airlines to upgrade you to first class? Are you trying to influence ...?
Zoe Chance:
No, it really depends what kind of situation we're talking about because in that kind of situation, they're doing their job and they're in a rush and you have one chance to say something and hope that it lands, and it's likely not going to because they're not really doing a lot of upgrades just based on charm and charisma at the gate.
But at the very least, what you still have an opportunity to do, even in the most fleeting situation, is be warm, and it's so simple. And you're great at this, you know it already, but the two dimensions of social judgments that all of us are making all the time, mostly unconsciously, are warmth and competence.
And warmth is do I like that person?
And competence I do I trust that person? Are they intelligent? Are they good at what they do?
And warmth, judgments happen first.
They happen instantly, instantaneously all the time. They're very, very sticky, and if you don't like the person, it doesn't matter how smart and how competent they are, you just don't care what they have to offer, and you don't want any part of anything to do with them.
But if you like the person, then you're willing to excuse all kinds of shortcomings, so people are far more influence-able when we approach them with warmth in whatever context we're talking about.
Guy Kawasaki:
And this is totally gator kicking in right here?
Zoe Chance:
Yes, a hundred percent gator.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what makes a person be perceived as warm?
Zoe Chance:
What would you say?
Guy Kawasaki:
I would say ... In person, I would say a Duchenne smile.
Zoe Chance:
That's so fancy. Tell our listeners what a Duchenne smile is.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think many people think that a smile is caused by your jaw and your teeth, and a Duchenne smile, the concept is it's caused by your eyes. And so the eyes are the key to a smile, whereas gritting your teeth like you have a pencil in it, and gritting your teeth and smiling that way is not perceived as a sincere smile.
Zoe Chance:
It's not perceived as sincere because apparently it's not sincere.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's that.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah. Yeah, and it's hard, although researchers will say it's impossible to have a Duchenne smile if you're not being sincere. As a former actor, I can tell you it's not at all impossible, it's very possible to do it. But yes, authenticity and smiles comes across in our eyes.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what would you say?
Zoe Chance:
Smiling is big. Smiling is big and we can hear it on the phone too. Even if you and I weren't seeing each other, we can tell when each other are smiling.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Zoe Chance:
We can hear it in our voices. And when we make eye contact with people in a friendly way, we pay attention to them, we use their name. And a really simple one that most people don't know how important it is, is to ask follow up questions in conversations. And researchers at Harvard have found that people who ask follow up questions are better liked, specifically by that person that they're asking questions of. And they do things like if ...
They'll have a speed dating study and people who ask follow up questions are more likely to get a second date, but then they will play the conversation to another listener and see how much they like those two people. And it doesn't matter if you're just observing someone, if they're asking follow up questions.
Actually, now that I'm saying this out loud, I'm realizing “Oh no, I'm saying so about your audience, Guy.”
So I'm sure they care about you asking follow up questions, but I definitely care about you asking follow up questions and caring about us as a person.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you're saying when you meet somebody and you find out, I don't know, you both work at Apple or something, you have a follow up question. I don't know, what department did you work in? Or were you there with Steve Jobs? Or I mean, what's a good follow up question?
Zoe Chance:
It's so funny that you're the one asking me what's a good follow up question.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, you're the expert.
Zoe Chance:
No, no, no. You're the expert interviewer, you're the expert on follow questions, and I'm curious to ask you, and I know you do a lot of preparation and I really appreciate it, and what amount of your interviewing people is pulling the thread where you feel curious about something when you're asking a follow up question? I don't think that's prepared. Is it just your innate curiosity or is there something else driving it?
Guy Kawasaki:
It's my innate curiosity and the sheer intellectual processing ability to come up with great follow up. Quite modestly. No, when I prepare ... For example, for this one, I read through the book and I honed in on the framing question, and the framing question, because it's a real question to me, how do I explain my podcast? I struggle with that, until today.
But even more importantly in the back of my mind for a podcast, I have a theory that the first question is the most important, and my intent with the first question on every podcast is ‘I want the guest to say to himself or herself, ‘Holy shit, this guy really prepared. He didn't just read the Wikipedia entry about me, this guy was in chapter fourteen, and he is trying to have a framing question that is manageable and mysterious, and monumental. I want you to know that I read that in chapter eight, and I took it to heart, and this is not a producer handing me Wikipedia saying, ‘Here, go for it."’
Zoe Chance:
Yeah, that was insane. Why do you do that?
Guy Kawasaki:
Because I think it sets the tone for the whole podcast because from that point on the guest knows, holy shit. Sometimes I listen to that public radio station and I hear them ask questions, and these are people you would consider the best podcasters in the world and they ask questions like, "Your mother killed your father when you were five. How did you feel?"
What a dumb shit question. How did I feel? Eh, I tried to block the memory of my mother killing my father, and that was forty-five years ago. Do I remember what I felt that day?
And I will tell you that one of the things that makes me happiest about an interview, not that I'm trying to lead you on to say this is that when the person is either, "That's a good question." But that could just be conversation filler, "That's a good question." Or, "I'm glad you asked."
But no, the comment that makes me the most happy is when somebody says, "No one has ever asked me that question before."
Zoe Chance:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I hope I ask questions that no one has ever asked you before.
Zoe Chance:
And you talk to a lot of people who do a hell of a lot of interviews.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, yeah.
Zoe Chance:
So there aren't that many questions that no one has asked you before.
Guy Kawasaki:
Absolutely, there are. Yep, yep. Back on track here. So I want to know why are people afraid to ask for stuff?
Zoe Chance:
People are really afraid, deeply, to not be liked, and we have this deep seeded, probably evolutionary, fear of getting rejected, and if you think about human history, if you got kicked out of the tribe, then you would die. You would literally die, so you would die if people don't like you.
And there are studies, like Naomi Eisenberger runs these very cool fMRI studies where she'll have people playing a game of catch in the fMRI scanner, and it's not physical catch, this is a video game of catch.
There are three participants and one of them starts getting left out because the other two are Confederates, and the person who's getting left out and is experiencing rejection, is having brain scanned, and what Naomi Eisenberger is finding is that they experience the social pain just like physical pain. It's the same areas of our brain that are hurting us when we get rejected as when we actually get punched in the face.
So we're afraid to ask because we are afraid for people not to like us, but there are a whole lot of other deep things that go into this about feelings of shame and even fear of greatness is a crazy one.
And this is far afield from regular behavioral economics kinds of experiments like we started with, but I've been teaching this class for are about a decade now and I get to read student's private journals where every week they turn in a journal, they do a real-world influence challenge, and then they're reflecting on their experiences and on their thoughts.
So I've been lucky to have this insight into people's deep psyche and secret private thoughts about the fears that they have around influence, and I've talked to a lot of people. And it's really not just the people that we might think… like someone who seems shy or powerless or doesn't belong, but people like frat boys and CEOs and Wall Street bankers.
Pretty much everyone I've ever taught or spoken with about this has some area of their life in which they're afraid to ask, and the two biggest ones for people tend to be money for themselves and love, romantic situations.
Guy Kawasaki:
And how do you overcome this?
Zoe Chance:
Practice.
Guy Kawasaki:
You mean ask for money, ask for money and sex all the time?
Zoe Chance:
I did say love, I didn't say sex.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, sorry. Sorry.
Zoe Chance:
I think asking for sex all the time will probably backfire and asking for money all the time would backfire too. We don't want to go back and pester the same people for the same thing all the time. They will get annoyed.
But what we do in class over these seven weeks, it's a bootcamp kind of class, where every single week we practice asking and we also practice generosity, and we also practice gratitude.
And this stuff wasn't in the book, it's maybe the second book, but we're creating a cycle of influence where we're becoming more influential and we're getting more by the stuff that we ask for, but we're also giving a lot and practicing the gratitude that naturally should come along with the amassing of power through influence.
And maybe not ironically, but not obviously, this is a key part of becoming a more influential person and becoming someone that people like and want to say yes to because they see the good that you're doing in the world. And then you yourself see the good that you're doing in the world and so you don't feel as ashamed to ask when you're doing a lot of good for a lot of other people as well.
Guy Kawasaki:
Flipping this over, you also discuss the benefits of learning to say no.
Zoe Chance:
Yes. Yeah, we start with no even, and anybody listening to the podcast, I invite you, if you feel like it, to just try as a challenge twenty-four hours of no. For the next twenty-four say no to everything, everyone, literally every request, with the caveat that of course, don't ruin your life.
But say no to tiny things, big things, even say no to things that you want to say yes to, at least until you have the experience of how did it feel to say no, and then how did it land? What was the response on the other side? If you have to change your mind afterward, it's fine.
But people are so consistently surprised how difficult it is, how enlightening it is. Most of us have some idea of whether or not we have a problem being a people pleaser, and most of us find out that we're even more of a people pleaser than we thought that we were, and our default response is just to say yes, and we feel super uncomfortable saying no to somebody, especially someone we know, because we think that they will, again, not like us because of saying no, just like we're afraid they'll not like us because we're asking.
But the reality is that if you say no in a simple way, like no, or no, thank you, or yeah, sorry, but no, people are not going to not like you. And if you say no in a warm way, "Oh my gosh, that is an amazing offer and I would totally love to do that in another universe. In this one it's completely not possible."
Then it's not just that they're not going to not like you, but they'll actually like you more. You're communicating genuinely with them, and you're drawing a boundary and you're modeling healthy boundaries for other people, and so you're making it more comfortable for them to say no as well.
Guy Kawasaki:
And if I were to try this, let's say you're going to do this with your family, do you prep your family and say, "Okay, for the next twenty-four hours, I'm saying no." Or do you just ...
Zoe Chance:
No, don't do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Not surprise them.
Zoe Chance:
Surprise them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just surprise them?
Zoe Chance:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just don't do it.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah. However, if there's somebody that you're spending a lot of time with over those twenty-four hours, then I would say just say no to the first thing that they ask you and that's where you get the learning because you got to experience saying no to that person, they got to experience you saying no to them, but then beyond that, if there's ten more requests and it's just “No, no, no”…I don't want to be responsible for your divorce, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, thank you.
Zoe Chance:
There's one more thing about the practicing saying no, when you help other people feel more comfortable saying no to you because you have these healthy boundaries, you're losing this edge of neediness that's repulsive when you ask, so you become a better asker when you become a better no sayer.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really? You become a better asker when you become a better no-er?
Zoe Chance:
No-er, yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let me wrap my brain around that. Huh?
Zoe Chance:
So thinking through, when you have been practicing your right to self-determination, you have agency and you decide consciously, do I want to say yes or no to this? Actually, no. Do I want to say yes or no to this? Actually, I wish I could say yes, but the answer is no. You have healthy boundaries, and then when someone says no to you, you're not taking it personally because they have a life, and they have a right to make their own decisions.
And just like when you say no to somebody, it usually doesn't have anything to do with them. You internalize that when somebody says no to you, it probably has nothing to do with you. And so then when you're approaching people, you don't have that needy fear of rejection that's actually making rejection more likely to happen.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have a practical solution. I have a person who helps me and I have two email addresses. One is obviously GuyKawasaki@gmail, and I have another one, and so she has access to all mail that goes to GuyKawasaki@gmail, and then she tries to handle whatever she can and whatever she can't, she forwards to me.
Then I give her a one-word response, yes or no. And then she communicates the 'no' to the people in a warm manner, so she's actually better at being me than I am.
Zoe Chance:
That's amazing.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have drawn that barrier, and it works. It works because I have a hard time saying no.
Zoe Chance:
It gets easier with practice, but I don't think it ever gets to be just super easy and fun. I share your feeling, but I don't share your assistant that gets to monitor my email. So I do most of my own no's, although I do have of other people helping with some stuff.
But yeah, like I still feel that ... I want to say yes to everyone because I like people, and a lot of the stuff that they're asking or offering is cool, and if I had a lot of time, I would do it. And I don't know if that's true for you too, but it's more about limited time.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll tell you another thing that I learned that I used to get asked oh, I swear once a day, "Could you review my pitch?"
Zoe Chance:
Oh, I'm sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay?
Zoe Chance:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
And reviewing your pitch, believe it or not, if you truly did it and commented and wrote stuff out, it takes two hours, let's say.
Zoe Chance:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I would tell people, "I will do this if you donate $500 to my son's hockey team at the University of California, at Berkeley. So I don't want the money. I'm not doing it for money, I just want you to donate $500 bucks to show that you really want it."
Zoe Chance:
That's amazing.
Guy Kawasaki:
And you know what?
Zoe Chance:
Almost nobody did.
Guy Kawasaki:
99.9 percent of people disappeared after that.
Zoe Chance:
How crazy is that? Can I just ask, like at that point in time or whenever, how much would you have charged if somebody approached you with a business proposition to say, "I'd like you to review my pitch."
You go give a keynote and I have no idea how many tens of thousands of dollars you get, but you spending two hours is worth thousands and thousands of dollars, and you're willing to donate your time for them to spend $500.
Guy Kawasaki:
Right. And so my interpretation is so you don't think my time is worth $250 bucks an hour. I mean, how else can you interpret it?
Zoe Chance:
I interpret it differently, but yes. But that is literally how it ends up. The way that I interpret it though is that it's shifting this dynamic from a communal dynamic of somebody asking somebody for a favor, even though it's a stranger and a famous stranger and it's actually inappropriate, but still it's a favor kind of dynamic that they're perceiving on their side.
And then you're saying, "Okay, yes, for money." And you've turned it into a transaction, and the warmth gets sucked out of it for a lot of them, even though what you're actually doing is really nice.
So I don't think you should change what you're doing. I think what you're doing is great. It's great because you don't need to make time and you shouldn't make time for all of the world asking you for help on their pitches.
And then of course, there are a bunch of people who are not just not valuing your time, like they might actually, if you put up a thing on your website and said, "Hey everybody, I'm going to sell my time for $250 an hour this weekend, and I'll review as many pitches as you want." And you would get a bazillion people applying for that.
So in my class we have a reach out to a hero challenge and students reach out to people like you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah?
Zoe Chance:
Who they see as a role model and a mentor. Like you, who they see as a role model and a mentor. In my class, you're not allowed to ask for something. You're just showering love on that person and that's all you're allowed to do.
Although some of them bend the rules and they do ask for things, but it's so exciting and it's so scary for them to reach out to you, that they're hoping that they might possibly get a response from you.
They're fearing rejection, and they're assuming they are going to hear nothing, but that some people, when they hear back this thing that sounds like a negotiation, it sounds like a transaction and it sounds a little bit like rejection, even though it's the opposite. It's the opposite.
But Guy, don't change what you're doing if you still ever do this kind of thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why are you saying that? It seems like I am not warmly rejecting them. I am turning it into a transaction, which is what you argue against.
Zoe Chance:
Right. Yeah, because they're saying, "Hey, will you do me a favor?" And in essence, you're saying, "No, I'm not going to do you a favor because you're a stranger and that would be crazy. But actually, I can do something incredibly generous, where I'll do something awesome if you do something awesome", but that still does shift it into a transaction.
A lot of people are turned off by transactional interactions with each other. We do a lot of this when we try to influence people by giving a sweetener to the deal, and we're pushing people away by saying, "Hey, if you do this thing, then I'll do this thing that's awesome."
But Guy, in your case, you're not trying to influence them to make the $500 donation. You're just offering a gift that they're saying no to, and thank God they're saying no. Thank God they're saying no. It's great.
It's great. It's perfect. Can I share one more thing about this particular issue, topic, that a lot of people don't know? That there are so many busy, successful, famous people who are willing to do so much more for charity than they're willing to do for money.
Even in the world of market research, if you are... Let's just say reaching out to doctors who are busy, successful, have plenty of money, and you want to do a half hour interview with them or you want to get them to do a survey. You have to give them $250 if you're going to pay them to do the interview or the survey.
But if it's money for charity, they will do this for twenty-five dollars. It's a similar situation to what you're talking about where for you, you're saying, "I'll donate my time. That's not a transaction", and these doctors too are saying, "It's not a transaction." I hope that I didn't just do something terrible for all of the kind, successful, already wealthy people in the world.
Guy Kawasaki:
They'll get over it.
Zoe Chance:
They'll get over it. Thank you.
Guy Kawasaki:
What is the relationship between generosity and happiness? Because I think there are a lot of people who would say the two are in direct opposition. That if you're generous, you're not happy because you're giving stuff away.
Zoe Chance:
Are those generous people or selfish people who are saying that?
Guy Kawasaki:
Probably selfish.
Zoe Chance:
That could be totally true for them. It's not that there aren't some jerks and selfish people in the world who are maybe sociopaths and they're just motivated by getting what they can get for themselves. In Adam Grant's work, he calls those people "takers", easy shorthand, but the majority of us, and on average just people in general, when they are giving time, giving money, giving advice, when we're helping other people out, we feel better physically.
We feel better mentally. We feel more powerful, even physically stronger. There is a limit, of course. There's a limit to how much giving we can do, the amount of volunteering over which people don't get all of the health benefits and things like that. God, now that I started saying it, I have to go and double check it. I think that it's forty hours a year.
So if you're volunteering basically more than around an hour a week of volunteer time, if you have a regular job, then maybe you're starting to hurt yourself.
We know a lot about caregiver burnout. There are limits to all of this, but people are happier spending money on other people than on themselves in general. In studies, groups of people like HIV patients have found that those who provided support to other HIV patients actually have their viral load decrease, even more than the people who are receiving social support.
It's not a bad thing for us to be helpers and for us to be giving other people opportunities to be helpers too. We just need to take care of our boundaries and respect that they take care of theirs as well.
Guy Kawasaki:
You will let me know if I'm asking you too many questions, because I don't want to overstep the boundaries of your generosity here.
Discuss the problem of the overuse of first-person pronouns.
Zoe Chance:
You really did prepare so deeply. You haven't read the book you don't know, but Guy is asking questions from chapters all over the book. Most people who invite you to their podcast, you can tell that they've only read the first three chapters because they don't ask you about anything beyond that.
First person pronouns like I, me, mine, are more commonly used by people who feel disempowered. In a whole bunch of research, many, many studies doing textual analyses of speeches, emails, conversations, all kinds of talking that we do, people in more powerful roles or who feel more powerful use fewer of those first person pronouns. They might say "we", they might say "us", they might say "you".
We don't see the differences on that, but they're not talking about themselves as much because their attention isn't directed as much to themselves. When we are in a lower position in a status hierarchy, or when we're in an economically tough situation, when we're broke, when we're sick, when we're sad, when we're depressed, we can't help focusing on our own feelings.
And then also, we really care what the other person thinks about us when we're talking to them. We have this boomerang diminisher thing that we do, where we'll use first person pronouns in phrases like, "I just thought", "I was kind of wondering", "I hope you don't mind, but..."
And we're trying to show that we're not a threat and hoping that will make the other person like us, but it only does the first. Clearly, you're not a threat if you're acting like that, but it doesn't make the other person like you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Of course, the exception to this is probably Martin Luther King, but...
Zoe Chance:
Say more about I Have A Dream.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, exactly. Right. This is the day after Martin Luther King Day.
Zoe Chance:
It's not that you should never talk about yourself and never talk about your dreams, and it's not that you should never use first person pronouns. But it's interesting to notice in other people's conversations.
If you want to see how much you're doing this, check your own emails so that you don't have to be having this complicated self-regulation going on in a conversation that would make you not able to be present in the conversation, but you can do it in emails.
If you want to change this habit of the diminishers, a really easy thing to do to shift is just ask the other person a question. Instead of saying, "I just thought", "I was kind of wondering", you can just say, "Hey, what would you think about X?"
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's say that you had a magic email client or word processor, and it just banned the word "I". You could not type "I" capitalized. Do you think that... I mean, seriously, this could change how people perceive you? Just that?
Zoe Chance:
Yes, I think they would perceive you as being super weird and you would alienate them. They would be trying to have a normal conversation and you would sound like an AI or something like that. Yeah, so don't be weird and extreme, of course.
But if there was a program that say, before you send out an email, was like, "Hey, looks like you used the word "I" six times in a four-sentence email. Are you sure you want to do that?" I think you would be annoyed for a little while, but then you would get in the habit and it would just be a short period of time until you could shift. Potentially, that could shift your mindset.
But I don't know, we would have to test it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Maybe people from Grammarly are listening and they'll add that in the Grammarly Pro edition. I kind of followed, but I can't say that I'm certain what you are saying about Elizabeth Holmes lowering her voice. What was the point of that?
Zoe Chance:
Why was she doing that? She was doing that, I believe, because she had heard a lot of us that lower voices are perceived to be more influential, and people tend to be more inclined to follow a leader with a lower voice. How people have interpreted that is to talk like this, right?
And then, she got slammed for sounding inauthentic because she sounded like she was trying to sound like an old man with a six pack a day habit. But what's really going on in the situations where people are preferring lower voices is that we can hear people's resonant voice when they're relaxed. It's in contrast to the tight, screechy voice when we're uncomfortable, and it's just very hard to listen to.
This is good news for women and anyone else who doesn't have a naturally lower booming voice. You definitely don't need to try to do that. But if you can practice speaking in your natural low register, it's much easier and more enjoyable for people to listen to guy.
Guy, can I ask you a question?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Zoe Chance:
This is on a different topic, but going deep, and it's in my head from our earlier part of our conversation, do you have advice for people who are influential and they have learned the skills that you have? Maybe it's not at your level, but they know how to entice people, charm them.
They're enthusiastic, they're charismatic, and they find themselves in a situation where they have to be evangelizing some product or service that they don't actually believe in.
Do they have to leave their job?
Guy Kawasaki:
We have to take some things off the plate. If you are a single parent and you need the job, you need the money, put food and clothes, that's one situation. But if it's not that...
Let's say it's not dire financial, "I have to be employed", I would say that it is virtually impossible to evangelize something you don't believe in, because evangelism comes from a Greek word meaning bringing the good news. By definition, if you're bringing the good news, it's something you believe in, so you can't bring the good news of something you don't believe in.
And so, it's kind of an oxymoron.
Zoe Chance:
I feel like you're just being tricky to get out of this.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why?
Zoe Chance:
Getting to technical Greek and like, "Technically, it's not evangelizing." Maybe it's because of a personal experience that I had, which is also not in the book, but when I was working at Mattel and I was a brand manager for the SpongeBob brand, I got an award for best presentation during Toy Fair at the company and the prize was you got to get a day off, it's great, all these people are telling me...
I'd given this pitch forty times over the course of the week to CEOs of Toys R Us, Walmart, K-Mart, and stuff. All these people are telling me, "Your enthusiasm for SpongeBob really came across." I believe I was evangelizing SpongeBob, but the truth was that I hated SpongeBob. I just had a lot of acting training.
To go Greek on you as well, the enthusiasm comes from "enthousiasmos", which is also Greek and it means to be possessed by the gods. It's the opposite of demonic possession. It used to mean something good and literal for the Greeks, like the Oracle of Delphi. But then it shifted over time to become religious charlatan.
In the 1800s, it was called enthusiastic, because they're just spouting bull crap and pretending that it's divine. I think that's what I was doing as a SpongeBob manager. I was just spouting bull crap, but trying to come across as somebody being real and authentic, and an evangelist who maybe just didn't have faith.
Guy Kawasaki:
Someone once told me once you can fake sincerity, you've got it made. Wrap your mind around that. We got to find the Greek word, root word for sinceros or whatever it means, the opposite of we think it now means.
I didn't mean to evade your question, but in my pure world, there are things I could not evangelize. If Microsoft called me up a said evangelize MS-DOS, no, I could not do it because I don't believe in it.
However, I will tell you that there are lots of people who believe in that you need to find your passion. Once you find your passion, the money will come. Life is good, all that kind of stuff. I have a slightly different theory. I believe that scenario is possible, don't get me wrong. I use this hypothetical example.
Let's say you're a programmer, great programmer. You get hired by MyPets.com and you sell pet food. This company sells pet food, dog, cat, pet food. You don't even have a dog or a cat. You don't really care about dogs or cats. You're just an engineer.
You're really good at Python or something, and you get this great job. You are employee number six at MyPets.com. Five years later, your 2 percent of the company is now worth $200,000,000. I would make the case that you probably will love dogs and cats.
Next question. I'm going to read to you from your book, and I just love this paragraph. I hope who ever aspired to be "charismatic" reads this, the most important paragraph you could ever read if you want to be charismatic. You ready? I'm quoting from the gospel according to Zoe 1.1.
"Charisma isn't something you are. It is something you do, which places is it within your control. You can become more charismatic by adjusting the way you interact with people." I would say that's contrary to most thinking that Steve Jobs was born charismatic. You have to be born charismatic.
Let's talk about charisma for a second here. How do you become more charismatic?
Zoe Chance:
Great. You, I'm sure, know a lot about Steve Jobs' journey. I really don't at all, but some people are born charismatic. It's just that a lot of people we think of as being charismatic weren’t born that way at all.
I write in the book about Prince. He's one of them. I love Prince's music. He was a hero to me, icon, and I was so, so, so, so, so excited when I finally got to see him in concert, in person. I was an adult, and we're waiting there in his tiny, little Las Vegas lounge for him to come on stage.
For two hours, we're waiting, and the tension is building, and he comes on stage, and he looks directly into my eyes and says something like, "Are we alone?" I turned to the person who was with me, a behavioral scientist named Eldar Shafir.
I turn to Eldar Shafir, I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm going to faint." And then the woman next to me on the other side, someone I don't even know, she just drops to the floor unconscious in a dead faint. The paramedics who take her away, I asked, "Has this ever happened before?" And they said, "It's not unusual."
Prince was so freaking charismatic that he could make people lose consciousness. However, he started out not just not being that charismatic, but being almost anti-charismatic. He was so shy and so quiet that when Warner Brothers had hired him and he produced an album and he had a number one hit, they wouldn't let him go on tour because when they saw him in concert, he just turned slowly, with his back to the wall, and he just played his music to the wall because he was too shy to even talk to people.
I share some very specific tips in the book, but the one most important thing for becoming charismatic is that you put your focus on one other person at a time. It's back to the attentional focus thing like we started talking about with pronouns. In order to have people pay attention to you, the secret is to pay attention to them. In a group of people, the secret is to do this one by one. The rest of the people in the group will feel a vicarious connection to you when you make a real connection with one of those people.
Guy Kawasaki:
That leads us to the question of, how are you supposed to do this in a Zoom world?
Zoe Chance:
One super tactical thing that we can do is, but it feels really weird, it has to do with the camera and making eye contact with the camera. When I'm teaching, what I'll try to do is when I'm talking to people, I focus on the camera because they're listening to me.
And so, they're looking at my face, and if I'm looking at the camera, it looks like I'm making eye contact with them. But when I'm listening to someone, then it doesn't matter. I can look at their face. I don't need to be looking at the camera, so that's one tiny, little thing.
And then, another thing we can do that's very helpful for people leading meetings online is to use people's names a lot, because that just immediately brings them back to the room.
Actually, while we're on the topic of Zoom meetings, this has nothing to do with charisma, but super helpful for attention in Zoom meetings is to just invite people to be using the chat all the time, anytime that they want, so they can channel their multitasking into the meeting, instead of channeling their multitasking into email and all this other stuff.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know what your setup is, but you're a professional. I'm using an iMac here, and I have a DSLR behind a teleprompter that's reflecting a second screen. I think I am looking right into your eyes, but your eyes are on a teleprompter in front of the camera.
Zoe Chance:
That's amazing. I want to copy you. It definitely looks like you're looking into my eyes. Absolutely.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is my setup here. I'll send you this picture. This teleprompter is, I don't know, 150 bucks. This little monitor is another 150. So 250 bucks, you could learn how to fake sincerity in Zoom meetings.
That's what I'm trying to tell you. I don't think you said the name of it. It's called shining, right?
Zoe Chance:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is what Prince did, right?
Zoe Chance:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, I want to discuss what I do. You tell me if it's so freaking smart, you never thought of it before, et cetera, et cetera, or "Guy, you're delusional.”
Zoe Chance:
Or could get an A minus?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, I want to get A minus or A plus. I have a theory. I have seen many, many people speak and I would say the extreme is probably Cheryl Sandberg. When Cheryl Sandberg comes to speak for you, I swear she has an entourage of ten people.
Her personal assistant has a personal assistant. Her PR person has a PR person. Her security guard has a security guard. There's ten people. Let's just say that there are rider contracts, not for Cheryl Sandberg, but there are rider contracts for people.
If Beyonce walks in the room, you cannot make eye contact. Nobody can make eye contact backstage and all this kind of stuff. I don't know if it's Beyonce, but something like that. I have a theory.
There's also a theory of speaking that you need to focus, get back into the speaker-ready-room and just focus, don't interact, blah, blah, blah.
And then, there's Guy's theory. Guy's theory is, before a speech, this was in real life when we still had those things, before I speak, I would go into the audience and I would meet as many people as I could. If they wanted selfies during the break before my speech, I would take selfies. I would autograph, I would do anything.
I'd do that. And then, this is Guy's Shining 2.0, because I had a theory that one thing that determines the success of a speech is how you are at that moment.
And so then I thought, what makes you confident is when you look out and you see people in the audience who are smiling and laughing and making eye contact.
Now, how can you increase the probability of that? If you would go out and meet them and take selfies and autograph their books, they are so happy when you start speaking that it just beams energy into your persona.
That's my theory of shining pro, that you go out and you make these contacts so that when you're on stage... This is A plus-plus?
Zoe Chance:
It's A plus-plus. Yeah, it's fully next level.
For a lot of speakers who aren't as comfortable as you are on stage or the people who feel like they need to go to the back of the room and go to the green room and be preparing or whatever, that's totally fine too.
You don't need to do the socializing beforehand. And then, there're also people like me will show up to big events where most people have no idea who I am, and they see me and they're like, "Who is that weirdo person saying hi to me?" If you're not recognizable, it's just more effortful.
So if you're not recognizable, it's just more effortful to be doing the schmoozing before your talk. For me, it's super easy and fun to do that afterward, or in a room or a situation where it's a group that's invited me and they are there to hear me.
Then it's very easy to socialize with them and super fun and a hundred percent. But I had some experiences where I'm trying to meet people, but it's this series of awkward pieces of small talk where they have no idea who I am and it's not selfies.
It's like, totally not the selfies. So it doesn't have that lift off feeling.
But after this book launch, and then everybody's going to know who I am and then I'm going to pull the Guy maneuver of shining 2.0, and all you all will be doing selfies with me and will be kicking it back, drinking champagne before the talk instead of just after.
Guy Kawasaki:
Remember me when you're rich and famous. So when Bob Cialdini is calling you up for advice, you let me know and-
Zoe Chance:
Now he call me for advice. He's going to be like, “Zoe, what are you doing? You're bringing me down. You're throwing shade on my stuff.”
Guy Kawasaki:
I can make the case that you know, his concept of persuasion. You mentioned his book. So this is pre-shining. This is to ensure shining happens. Pre shining. You heard it here first now. We're good.
Zoe Chance:
Can I share` that with people when I'm offering advice?
Guy Kawasaki:
Of course!
Zoe Chance:
I will absolutely credit you and-
Guy Kawasaki:
Don't need to credit me.
Zoe Chance:
No, it's more compelling if I credit you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, then do it.
Zoe Chance:
I'm not being generous. I'm being selfish. Then people would be like "Oh, that's what guy does. It must be a great idea."
Guy Kawasaki:
How does one, when you're on the opposite side of your book and Bob Jodi's book and Katy Milkman's book and Angela Tucker's book and David Aker's book, when you're the opposite side, how does one detect and resist influence and persuasion and negatively manipulation?
Zoe Chance:
Super important. And increasingly as you study influence, and you're becoming more influential, you see all of these strategies in the world, and you're realizing how much people are trying to influence you and get you to do stuff.
I write about nine different red flags that you can look for. But the most important one is the hardest one to perceive because it's being in the ether. You don't know that you are not thinking rationally. You don't know that you're back in the gator space and you're not able to be making good, smart, objective, rational decisions. And people who have malevolent or manipulative wishes will do whatever they can to get you into that state. And any emotion at all can put you in that state.
So fear, anger, excitement, greed, lust, spiritual rapture, any highly emotional state can put you into the ether. And when somebody's trying to persuade you to do something and urgency usually goes along with it, scarcity that we talked about, the simplest best thing that you can do is just step back and take time.
With the silly NetJets’s thing, I don't think that they're evil using scarcity, but saying, "Oh, we only have a certain number of memberships", or whatever, but like just step back and chill and be willing to miss a few opportunities in your life that actually do vanish in order to have the benefit of all of the bad opportunities in your life that you don't actually go for.
And another, just really simple red flag to look for is people who don't take your no for an answer when you're firm and direct about your no. If you are wishy-washy about saying no, then you don't know if they just didn't understand.
So you may have to go beyond being nice and just be very direct and just, "No, thank you, I'm not interested". That's not rude, but it's very direct. And then if there's still... but you at least know that they're trying to get something from you, and they don't care how you feel about it.
So being direct, when you say no, will help you identify those people who don't say have your best interests at heart.
Guy Kawasaki:
But there's dozens of experts and authors who are saying, "Don't take no for an answer, persist, keep going at it".
So how do you separate the people who are won't take no for an answer.
Zoe Chance:
For you personally, as the influencer, what I suggest is ask permission to follow up. That's how you'd not take no for an answer in an influential, polite, good relationship sort of way and say, "Okay, I get that this is not a good idea for you right now. Is it okay? Could I follow up with you next month, next year", or whatever, and then you get to decide yes or no.
And if you say no, then I should never follow up with you because you've been very clear to me. And if you say yes, then you've given me permission. And then when I do follow up, then I get to say, "So you said it was okay if I checked in with you and here now we are". And then you will be more inclined to say yes to me pay attention to me and all of those things.
So they're not wrong about following up, but don't take no for an answer. If you just stop, there could just easily go to the realm of aggression and just pissing people off. So it's not just me saying morally, it's not a good idea. It's just not an effective thing to do.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's a spinoff corollary from that, which is if you are really a definite and more or less permanent no, don't try to be more acceptable by saying, "Right now I'm busy. Not at this time". If you it's a hard cold no. If you say that, because you're inviting them to follow up and then you're compounding the problem.
Zoe Chance:
If you make an excuse, if you give an objection, then you're giving them a way back in at a later state. So yes, I definitely recommend that if you are not interested, you let them know you're not interested. There will be all kinds of situations where say, somebody will ask me for advice.
Like they ask you for advice, but I'm not as nice as you are. And so I will say no, but I don't just say no, I'm busy right now out because I know I'm going to be busy from now until forever. And I'll say something like, “I wish this was the kind of thing that I had time for”, or like a stranger asks for a coffee chat or something like that. Which a lot of people do say yes to. I really don't do that. That's just not part of my thing.
And I get asked so much because I teach asking, I just asked all the time for stuff. And so, I'll say, I wish this is the kind of thing I wish I was able to say yes to. I wish I had time, but in that kind of framing then people get, it's not that she's busy right now. It's that this is in a whole category of things that she says no to.
Guy Kawasaki:
But what if somebody says she's full of shit? She doesn't wish she has time for this. She's trying to not say no.
Zoe Chance:
Yes, yes, no. I would not say that unless it's true.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Zoe Chance:
Thank you. No, if it's something I'm not interested in, I would just say thank you. Or maybe not thank you them or that's not really my thing, but good luck.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's funny because in LinkedIn, when you get a LinkedIn person to person message, there's these default answers and one of them is something like "No, I'm not interested". And I hesitate to click on that because I think man, that seems like awfully succinct, and cold, and brutal, but it may be the right way. Did you tell them to do it that way? It sure looks like it.
Zoe Chance:
So I would probably never use that button on LinkedIn. And I'm really curious. Maybe one of the LinkedIn people is listening and can tell you or me, please tell me how many people actually use the button that says, "No, I'm not interested".
Part of what you're perceiving in that guy is that when we're writing messages to each other, we're very easily perceived to be harsh. Far more than meant and warmth is very hard to convey. So we have to be really specifically intentional about conveying warmth in written messaging even more than verbally. Because when somebody asks you something and you can be like, "No, I'm not interested".
And that doesn't sound evil. It's just, okay, they're not interested. But when you write, "No, I'm not interested", on LinkedIn, you sound like just a sadist.
Guy Kawasaki:
This has been a very interesting conversation. There's so many layers of the onion here. However, my experience in is that even a no yields a positive response, as you mentioned earlier, because many times it's a hard and fast no. And the response I get is, “I never expected you to answer.”
So thank you very much even for answering. So it's kind of like a win-win there.
Zoe Chance:
Wait a sec, let me ask you about this because I, and I'm having so much fun in this conversation and I'm learning a lot so thank you, that I have the experience where people will often ask me for something and to do something, some advice, whatever.
And I say no, and then they follow up with another request because I responded to them, and I feel like maybe I should just have not responded in the first place. So I have somebody who two days ago, this is a former student and Willie if you're listening, I'm really sorry.
So he sends me an email with a picture of a wallet with my face on it and it says, “Dream Big Always.” And he's offering to mail me this wallet and also asking me for advice for his new business. And I feel like I'm super busy right now.
So I'm not able, even if I wanted to do the consultative advice, but also in the line where he says, "Dear professor Chance", Chance is in a different font. And then there's the rest of the glowing letter about what a big difference I made in his life.
But so obviously he sent this to all these other people and I'm just one of the many people and he's putting each of our faces on whatever wallet or something.
So I thought I should not respond even to tease him about the text and be like, I got your number because then we'll just be in a conversation of him still trying to ask for well time that I don't feel like giving.
Guy Kawasaki:
This may be a good segue to my second to the last question but I think as a woman, there would be a very different response to that. I think that is over the edge. I would just ignore that. I would throw that away. In fact, I would not only throw it away, I would mark it a spam so that anytime he follows up, it's gone automatically because-
Zoe Chance:
It is my former student so like-
Guy Kawasaki:
You know this?
Zoe Chance:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
That changes things.
Zoe Chance:
It's not random stranger hitting on me or something like creepy like that. Just a socially awkward former student. And I just don't have time to give business advice for his thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
You need to get a virtual assistant who will be your heavy.
Zoe Chance:
I have a virtual assistant but she's not saying no to me…Caris, we're going to have this conversation. And having a virtual assistant, for all of you listening, will help you be far more influential.
Guy Kawasaki:
And it'll help you be more charismatic because now people are going to get actual formal no’s and they're going to be so tickled pink to get a response at all. They're going to think that even though she's so busy, at least she responded, so it's a net game.
But if people listening can't afford a virtual assistant, there's the poor man's virtual assistant.
So there are these things called text expansion programs. Do you know what these are?
Zoe Chance:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
On the Macintosh, Macintosh is built into the keyboard system. So you usually don't have to buy anything, but there's ones that do it better. I use one called text expander.
And so what you do is you write a trigger. And so this trigger has to be something that would not occur normally in correspondent.
Zoe Chance:
Oh, I have these I've programmed a bunch of them.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you type F no, the F can stand for anything anymore, but F no, and F no expands to, “Thank you very much for reaching out to me, I'm really flattered of your interest. But at this time, I'm just unable to do this because of constrained on my whatever.”
And so they think they got this really personalized, warm, sincere rejection, and all you did was type three letters F no.
Zoe Chance:
All right. Nobody could improve on an F no that text expands to something beautiful. And about affording a virtual assistant. I didn't mean to be glib about that, but lot more people can afford a virtual assistant than think that they can afford a virtual assistant. And I started with a virtual assistant three hours a week, twenty-five-dollars an hour. And she could do at least ten hours of work for me in three hours for her because she's so, so, so, so good at it.
So I'm not saying that everybody can get a virtual assistant, but if you have a professional job already, you can.
Guy Kawasaki:
I just need your best tips for women as they are negotiating influencing and persuading.
Zoe Chance:
Women have a little bit more challenge in this domain than men, because we get backlash that men don't get more easily when we are not warm, but men listen to this too, because the simple advice about expressing warmth and also asking ambitiously for what you want, need, desire, wish for, would like have to do, warmth and ambition go together really well for women and men.
It's just that men don't get dinged as hard as women do if they don't do the warmth part. But warmth helps with everybody. We all know about gender pay gaps and things like that.
The ambitious asking part is also super important. When women ask for as much as men do they get paid as much as men do. It's just that for a variety of reasons, we don't ask for as much as men do. And we don't ask as often as men do for things like raises and promotions, we don't ask for as much money as men do when we take jobs.
And this isn't the whole reason for the gender pay gap, but this is a contributor to the gender pay gap. And there are multiple studies that I write about in my book showing that it's not that people hate us for asking for more, and often they're happy to say yes. It's just that because of sexism, we need to be warm when we do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, so that's your tip? Ask for more, more often?
Zoe Chance:
And be warm, but you're not going to go to your boss eighty-nine times and ask for more raises. But another mistake that women make is when we're looking for benchmark, because you want to go in with evidence to say, "Here's what I would like to have, earn, make", you want to give some reasons to say, and “Here's what other people are making. Here's what I could get in this other situation.”
So you want evidence and it's very important to not just ask women for that evidence because of the pay gap that we talked about.
So it's really important to ask men as well as women. It can be hard to ask people or sometimes rude to ask people, "Hey, what are they paying you?", can be super awkward, but people are very forthcoming when they're at a higher position in the organization to say, "Hey, what are people in the roles below you earning, or back when you were in that role? What was the salary range for that kind of thing?", and they're much more willing to tell you numbers.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why don't women just figure out what they want and add 25 percent?
Zoe Chance:
Well, for a lot of women, it should be far more than 25 percent.
Guy Kawasaki:
Even better.
Zoe Chance:
It really depends for the specific person, but I would say unscientifically start by asking your girlfriends for advice. And your girlfriends will have a better idea than you do, what you might be worth in this situation that you're in. And definitely ask your guy friends as well. And when I say girlfriends, I mean girlfriends outside of work.
Women and men have different social networks or men tend to socialize at work, and women tend to socialize outside of work. So those women outside of work will just be saying, "You've got this, you're worth more than that". And they will pump you up and help you out.
Guy Kawasaki:
My very last question. Let's say, Joe Biden calls you up and says, "Zoe, leave academia, join politics. I'm going to name you to the secretary of influence".
Zoe Chance:
You're on Joe. Done.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what would you do for vaccination for voter rights, whatever, how would you advise Joe Biden to be more persuasive or successful? More whatever.
Zoe Chance:
So I feel like I'm going to fall into a hole, the next few steps in this conversation, wherever it goes. But also what you're asking me, essentially, guy is “Zoe, how would you solve the intractable problems in our country that everyone's been trying to solve for the past three years or more? And for many of these that billions of dollars and foreign superpowers are working against.”
Guy Kawasaki:
Exactly. That's what I said.
Zoe Chance:
That's all really, I guess that one of the things that I would start with just very simply would be regulation of social media. And it's been way, way, way, way, way too long that we've let it go on as the wild west and imagining that companies like Facebook are going to regulate themselves. And that's just obviously insane.
And this is where much of the misinformation and disinformation campaigns are going on that are powerfully, powerfully swaying people's minds. And the media conglomeration that's happening is also really doing a disservice to democracy.
So I would invest in public fraud casting as well. And if I just got to have a magic wand that I could sweep and anything would happen, one of the big policies that I would change for long run, real massive societal influence would be to sweep away the laws that have property taxes, be what funds education, because we are just reinforced seeing the inequities that we have.
And I would invest broadly in public education. I hope that Jill Biden could somehow find a way to do that. And when we have better educated people, and more equitably educated people, they'll also be better equipped to make these decisions.
Guy Kawasaki:
But just so I can be sure I'm reading properly between the tea leaves here. So you're saying that because education is dependent on property taxes, and property taxes are lower, where people are less educated, it becomes a downward spiral.
Zoe Chance:
Yes, yes. And vice versa for the upward spiral in the wealthy area. It's insane and I don't know of other countries that do this. It's totally crazy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Another insane and totally crazy thing is look at the amount of money we spend even adjust it for population on the military. Let's just have one less aircraft carrier and double the department of education budget. I don't understand that at all.
Zoe Chance:
It's a lot. And I don't understand at all the nuances of where that money goes. I know that having the most powerful military in the world does a whole lot for the security of the United States.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you being sarcastic or serious?
Zoe Chance:
No, no. I'm serious about that part. The military that we have helps prop up our economy. And it also does a lot of things around the world that are terrible.
So I have a lot of vets in my class who come through. I teach a lot of military guys and my dad was in the military as well. These people are some of the greatest students.
So the military does a pH job of educating leadership. And lots of professors will talk about, we love having vets in our class because they do the reading. They pay attention, they listen, they ask follow up questions and they listen to their fellow students. Everybody likes having these kinds of leaders in class. And so a lot of the super smart and talented people in our country, when they don't have enough money, especially to go to college, going toward the military because that's this other crazy way that we fund education.
I'm sure that if I were in charge of the military budget, I would do super different things. I would be funding something a lot more like a Peace Corps, like a volunteer core that is going to teach leadership to people who don't have to go through the kinds of military training they go through.
Now, like Pete Budgie wanted to do, I would add absolutely fund that, but the aircraft carriers and stuff, you're probably right. I just don't know anything about it.
Guy Kawasaki:
So education-
Zoe Chance:
Double down on it.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's how about single down on it? My God. I would not be where I am, where not for the sacrifices my parents made for my education.
Zoe, we have just broken the record. This is the longest podcast recording 120 episodes. I just want you to know that.
Zoe Chance:
This has been my longest of way fewer than that. And it's been truly, just such a pleasure and such an honor. And I've just loved talking with you. So thank you.
Guy Kawasaki:
So if you've listened to this point, we are approximately one hour and thirty-one minutes into this podcast, which is roughly 50 percent longer than most episodes. But I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed interviewing Zoe Chance.
Lots of practical and tactical stuff in this interview. Oh my Lord.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast.
We're on a mission to make you remarkable.
And the we is Peg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, Jeff Sieh, Madisun Nuismer, Luis Magana, and Alexis Nishimura.
Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.