Interview with MichaelAaron Flicker: Hacking the Human Mind
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What are the emotional drivers behind human decision-making?
One thing that all the listeners can think about is humans are much more emotionally driven than rationally driven. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman said, thinking is to humans like swimming is to cats.
That was Michael Aaron Flicker, co-author of Hacking the Human Mind, the behavioral science secrets behind 17 of the world's best brands. I'm Motley Fool producer Matt Greer. Now, we recently talked with Flicker about his new book. We talked loss aversion, the power of pratfalls, the rational and the not so rational.
Welcome to Motley Fool Conversations. I'm your host, Motley Fool contributor, Rich Lamello, along with Motley Fool Head of Strategic Operations, Shannon Jones. Today's guest is someone who sits at the crossroads of business consulting, advertising, and technology, and has spent his career helping some of the world's most influential brands understand how people really think and make decisions. Michael Aaron Flicker is the author of the compelling new book, Hacking the Human Mind. He's worked with companies ranging from Nike and Chubb to Evan Williams, JP Morgan, and AstraZeneca. His work zeroes in on the psychological forces that shape markets, shape brands, and ultimately shape investor behavior.
Michael, it's a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to The Motley Fool. Hi, Rich. Thanks for having me. Excited to be with you all today. Excellent. Well, Michael, for listeners who may not kind of know you or be familiar with your work yet, what's kind of the short version of your professional journey? A little bit of background.
I started my company when I was 14 years old in my parents' basement. And it was a time in 1997 when the world believed that... the internet was a great equalizing force. And maybe high school kids knew more about the internet than anybody else. And in that moment of opportunity, the kid I grew up with across the street and I formed our company. And we said, we're gonna do internet programming. We're gonna do computer programming on the internet. And that was really innovative at the time, almost silly, real computer programming rich, belonged in the domain of mainframes and big corporations. And the idea that anybody could do meaningful computer programming online was just unusual at the time and just crazy enough that they let a bunch of high school kids work for these big companies.
And the story of the last 28 years for me has always been at the intersection of thinking about how can we come up with smart ideas to solve problems. How can we solve things that others haven't been able to solve before? It's led me now to I own nine companies. We have a number of them in our professional services, a number of them of our own brands, but what connects them all and what's been so interesting is that behavioral science has been a key to understanding why people do what they do, and to really understand how they act in the real world. So much of what we learned in our years was you would run these studies and ask consumers, would you be open to buying this brand? Or would you be open to taking this medication?
And when you ask them that, they give you an answer, then you go into market and they do the exact opposite. How could that be that people don't follow what it is they say they're going to do? And so academia has built this body of research and academics that helps explain how consumers actually behave rather than how they claim they will behave. And this is a fascinating field for me. I got involved in it about 12, 13 years ago, and it's been a passion of mine ever since.
Yeah, I would love to hop in because in my role in strategic operations, I'm really at the intersection of our product teams and also work really closely with our CEO, who is a wonderful visionary, lots of ideas, but he's super passionate about for our members, especially as they go through market cycles, market downturns and everything to really realize this is a long term investing journey and to really ride the waves of those journeys, knowing that the market cycles come and go.
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