applying knowledge derived from the study of people to the affairs of populations
April 27th, 2009
I got quoted in Salon.com saying “fuck”, which was entirely in context in the story and I stand by the quote as an accurate description of the effect I was discussing, Apparently HR now has a little file for me; the PR folks put the article in the morning article roundup that goes to the whole company, and there were several complaints to HR about my language. Which I was a little surprised at, honestly. Who complains to their HR department about the cursing of someone they’ve never met?
I owe only one person an apology, and I make it here:
sorry Mom.
April 27th, 2009
For people who don’t do them often, which is most everyone I know, media interviews are generally surreal experiences. There may be some point at which it becomes fairly standard and you end up like a rock star, doing what seems like just another show, but until then, you spend most of your time feeling like an idiot. Plus, and I find this ridiculous, there are none of the perks of rock stardom: no groupies, no dressing room, and no free sandwiches. I’m alright without the groupies and dressing room, but at the very least, give me some free food. Even grad students get pizza for showing up to talks.
It all starts with some sort of media opportunity. Your PR person calls (Dave does Thrive’s, and he’s a juggernaut; if you get a chance to pick your person, find someone that actually believes in what you do and you’re golden) and tells you that there is something for you to do. If you get lucky, it is all wrapped up in a neat little package for you: go here at this time and talk about this thing to this person for this outlet. If you get unlucky, you come into the office and it isn’t Dave on the phone but rather the media outlet itself and they just start asking you questions.
(This actually happened to me just before I left for SXSW, literally an hour before I needed to leave the office. I had just stopped by to pick up a legal pad with some notes on it that I wanted to review on the plane, and someone just handed me the phone. It was actually a fairly major magazine, and I literally have no recollection of what I said, which could be interesting when the story comes out. If I said anything bad about anyone’s mother, I apologize in advance.)
Once you find out the opp, you try to prepare yourself. Usually you’ve got a day or two to figure it out, although the general rule is the more major the outlet (particular for news and anything involving audio or video), the less time they give you: a reporter calls in the morning for a story she has to submit to her editor at four, so she basically needs you to get on the phone and have something smart to stay within an hour or so.
Actually, a surprising amount of time, it doesn’t actually matter that it is smart. Instead, interesting seems to be a decent proxy, and if you manage to make it accessible, you’re golden. Which isn’t actually as bad as it sounds, considering that the best teachers are the ones that actually teach you something. Giving a good interview has a lot in common with teaching a good class: in order for it to be worthwhile, you have to package information in a digestible way.
Except this is your big change, so you want to sound awesome, so you end up rambling on endlessly and using as many big words as possible. Even if the cynic in me says that reporters want you to just shut up and give them the soundbite, I think they may actually be working in all of our best interest by trying to keep things consumable. There is a tremendous amount to know in the world and news is one way of filtering it into packages we can receive. One could argue that is dumbing things down and I think we have to be careful, but maybe news is just another form of scaffolding, helping us get to that next plateau. Even the cynics can get down with that, and I’m happy to accept that it may just be driven by ratings numbers, with this potentially interesting side effect.
Back to the topic at hand. So you pick up the phone or go into a studio and then try to sound intelligent, but only in microscopic bursts, easily digestible packets where you end up saying most of what you want to say, but never quite all of it. Having read first-person accounts of games by pro athletes, I don’t think it is entirely dissimilar. There is an odd disjointed feeling to it, because you realize what you are doing wrong at the time and yet you can’t stop yourself from doing it. It is sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion, where words come out and all you are actually doing is praying that you don’t scratch your crotch on live TV.
And there are all these bizarre technical details that you never think about. We all expect some makeup and hair fixing (although this doesn’t happen nearly as often as you might think), but it is tough to remember that there is going to be someone dropping a microphone wire down your shirt and attempting to attach a battery pack to your belt. I always manage to end up sitting on the stupid pack, which then digs into my back for the entire interview. A designer engineer could make a fortune making those things slightly less awkwardly shaped.
Also, studio furniture is dramatically not comfortable. I’m a bit spoiled by my chair at work, but honestly, everything ends up being just a little over-plush and too low to the ground. I always end up sinking into the back of the chair, which gives me a sort of hunched appearance when I’m talking. And I’m a tall gent, which also means that I hunch over even further when the reporter is female and not as tall as I am. In an effort to maintain eye contact and not make them look up, I compress my spine and sort of scootch down in my chair. I always imagine Andre The Giant must have had a hard time.
Kyron. Not just some sort of sci-fi planet, but an actual infographic term for the little thing that shows up underneath you on TV when you get interviewed. Name, title. The problem is, nobody ever communicates these things in writing, so you end up spelling your name for people just before you go on air. Which actually may not be a bad thing, since that way people at least hear your name. When they don’t, you end up with that CN8 interview where they call me “Matt Wall, the E.R.T psychologist”. Awesome. Thanks guys.
Kyrons also make for highly amusing conversations between you and your PR folks. This is actually verbatim from me and Dave today.
me: KI-RON?
KIE-RON?
Dave: ki
as in the greek letter chi
me: mrraw.
chi-ron
got it
i’m taking notes
Inevitably, kyrons also mean I have to have the “doctor” conversation. Technically, I’m not a doctor because I don’t have my doctorate. In reality, I’m not a doctor because I have nothing to do with the medical profession. Either way, no one should put Dr. before my name on a kyron. But producers really, really love people with titles and they always seem to want to find a way to make me one. I try to explain that I left my PhD program to join Thrive and I even tell them the story about how the company lured me away by actually doing good things for people. It is a good story; producers do not care. They want me to get my doctorate. They try to just throw the label on there, like I won’t notice and point out “I’m actually not a doctor”. Which I always feel dumb doing: it feels like pointing out the obvious. “Oh by the way, I’m not a woman.” Yes, thank you, we noticed.
In the interview itself, there are an array of mistakes I always make that are actually sort of funny, as long as you aren’t the one making them. For example, I always seem to be trying to agree with the interviewer, even if I don’t actually agree with them. They say something, I say “Absolutely!” and then follow that up with whatever I actually think, which may or may not be in agreement with what they just said.
Interviewer: “So people are really going all out this holiday season?”
Me: “Absolutely! Most people are really cutting back because of the economy and we see a lot of people out bargain shopping to really stretch their dollars.”
This is almost always followed up by nodding my head like I have a slinky for a spine. Other notable physical tics include shifting back and forth while standing and using my hands to explain absolutely everything, even things that don’t need explaining. I often look at the camera instead of the host (I’m secretly tempted to mouth “Hi Mom”). I’m still waiting to trip and fall during an entrance.
My voice always cracks during the intro and outro. My pitch modulation isn’t great even on the best of days, but at the beginning, I’m just eager to get it started and at the end, I’m so beleaguered, that all the sudden I have to instantly go through all the stages of puberty at the same time. I sound like Jack White from The White Stripes (who is a great musician and I love what he does, but if you ever see him interviewed, his voice is all over the place) and it is hilarious.
Then there is time. I did an interview for The Today Show this afternoon and I know from my watch that it took less than 15 minutes, end-to-end. But when you’re doing it, it feels like it takes forever and yet never quite long enough. For one thing, the whole thing is slowed down because you’re both talking and watching yourself talk, trying to correct what you’ve done. That is part of what contribute to the rambling answers, I think: you recognize that you didn’t actually say what you wanted to say in the last answer, so you keep talking in the hopes that it will come out in this answer. The problem is that it is like trying to pack for a five day vacation in a Mini Cooper - you can do it, but it ends up looking pretty ugly.
Content is always a real problem for me, because I want to both say things the interviewer needs as well as squeezing in the important stuff that can actually help people or change things. It is like trying to pitch a baseball and a tennis ball at the same time. The difference in weights is always throwing me off and I think, years from now, I’ll still always be a little afraid that I didn’t actually say the stuff that really mattered.
March 16th, 2009
In a recent Vanity Fair article, Michael Lewis wrote about the collapse of Iceland’s economy and the massive amount of debt that the entire country took on.
Using debt-to-GDP as a measure, Iceland has twice as much debt as the US has, and they managed to do it in just four short years, which is actually sort of impressive, in a how-fast-can-you-hit-bottom sort of way.
Reminds me of Brewster’s Millions: that kind of debt requires some serious consumption.
I was discussing the downfall of the country with Avi (one of Thrive’s cofounders) last night during a great TexMex dinner here at SXSW, and he was curious about my perspective on how such a small, generally well-ordered society could buy so much so quickly. My answer: keeping up with the Joneses.
Iceland is a country with only around nine last names; everyone and everything is related, both figuratively and literally. My friends from there are intensely affable, perhaps some of the friendliest folks I know, and given to extreme generosity. They are also just a little bit crazy, but in the good, I’d-want-to-party-with-them-sort-of way. I can easily imagine a situation in which some of them started spending beyond their means and others just sort of went along with it, sucked in by a one-upsmanship that meant ever increasing consumer spending of the sort that can, quite literally, ruin a country.
It is easy to say that we are resistant to this sort of effect, which psychologists call “social comparison”, but I’m not so sure that anyone really is. I often reference the following study, which I think proves the point quite nicely:
Imagine you have two jobs. One offers you $45K a year, while everyone is making only $40K. The other offers you $55K, but everyone else will be making $60K. Which one would make you happier? Almost without exception, people recognize that the objectively poorer job is the one they’d rather have, because they’d feel comparatively rich, and they are willing to pay $10K for that feeling. And I’m right there with them: it is almost certainly true that the $45K people will be happier and that that happiness is almost certainly worth the money.
So how does this relate to SXSW and Twitter? Last night, I got back to my hotel room around ten, after a wonderfully pleasant meal and great conversation with Avi, who I haven’t seen as often as I’d like, since we’re both out fighting to make Thrive better for our users. It was, by objective standards, a great night: I have an inexpensive but quality meal which the company paid for, I had great conversation with one of my best friends, and it was early enough that I could expect some quality sleep.
Back in the room, I kicked off my shoes and booted up my laptop (curse you, Hyatt, for your pay-to-play internet: wrap it into my room fee instead of hitting me with it after!) to take care of a few lingering issues from the day and to check out the company Twitter feed, which we’ve been using to contact folks here at SXSW so that we can spread the word about financial literacy every way we have the chance.
And in doing so, I completely killed my happiness.
Twitter is the ultimate in keeping up with the joneses. It has objective measures (followers) along which you can compare yourself to both friends and foes, and it has the topic (#) search, which allows you to look at what people who are doing what you do are enjoying. The trouble is that running a quick #SXSW search in order to keep up so that we can market affectively resulted in a torrent of posts about bars and clubs and events that people were happily drinking their way through. And there is nothing like a stream of “I’m young and having fun” tweets to make you feel like a dope for being in your room at 10:30 at night.
It wasn’t that I was actually genuinely unsatisfied with my current state of affairs: I was fat and happy in my warm hotel room. But it did honestly and genuinely erode that warm fuzzy feeling I was having, all because I looked in for a moment on the lives of others.
And the internet is full of ways to do that. Friend feeds and blog rolls and RSS and Twitter streams, all designed to tell you what other people are doing. And our technology makes it both easier to compare and more vivid: not only could I find the folks at SXSW who were out partying, but I could watch them post smiling pictures from their various events. I could picture myself there, in the moment, a somehow cooler version of myself.
I’m not someone that is particularly preoccupied by cool: after all, I am a rather geeky scientist and am generally fairly content with that. I’m also one of the happiest people I know, both by personal nature and because of the choices I’ve made about what is important to me. Yet Twitter’s insidious reach managed to penetrate even my fuzzy glow.
It is easy to simply say that it won’t affect you, that Twitter enhances your happiness, and that you like it. And I like Twitter too, for some things and in some ways. But I do think it has dangers, pitfalls, traps that are worth watching out for, and social comparison is the biggest of them. It isn’t always good to know what everyone is doing, because as has been pointed out almost constantly in various media, actually doing the authentic things that you enjoy is almost certain to bring you more happiness than trying to keep up with cool.
The reason this comes out so strongly on the Thrive blog is that it is precisely the lesson behind Iceland. It isn’t like these SXSW parties are free: the events themselves are, but getting here, staying here, and getting into the festival at all certainly aren’t. I have to wonder how many times Twitter or the Facebook friend feed have pushed people in the direction of buying something that they wouldn’t ordinarily buy.
Do you dress differently, if you know that what you are wearing to the party will be broadcasted to the world on Facebook? Cool has almost always come with a price tag, which is why marketers pay so much to know what it is and to try to generate it. There are dozens of psych and marketing studies that show that cool increases consumption of virtually everything, from food to clothes to music and movies. Consumption is driven by identity, and who doesn’t want to identify with cool?
And there are ways in which that is OK – I’m not suggesting everyone ditch their nice jeans and start roaming the world in identical jumpsuits. Self-expression can make people intensely happy, and we know that a healthy self-identity is a big part of lasting satisfaction with your life. But we need to ask, at SXSW and everywhere else, just how big we’re willing to make that price tag.
For me, I’ll still be monitoring the @SXSW topic, because it is a part of the job I’m here to do: a certain amount of schmoozing is necessary to promote your message, and frankly, the good that Thrive does for people is worth more than a little bit of my personal happiness. But I’ll also be taking it a little easier, and trusting that interested parties at SXSW will come find me instead. I’ll be geeky-looking scientist, only slightly cool, talking to whoever wants to about how we all (and Thrive) can change consumption, the politics of personal finance, and our own minds.
February 5th, 2009
TechCrunch loves Aaron Patzer, and so they had him do another guest column for them last week. In it, he offers his CEO version of data analysis, in which he suggests that trends alone are enough to make valid statements. Not so, Mr. Patzer, not so. My reply, ripped straight from TechCrunch, is below.
(Full disclosure: I’m the behavioral psychologist at Thrive, a service in the personal finance space that does some similar things to Mint. So when I say Thrive does this differently, I’m only saying “Aaron did this wrong” because we figured out how to do it right.)
I absolutely agree with Patzer, as do a number of people here, about the importance of data - as any good psychologist will tell you, informed analysis of quantitative data is critical to understanding human behavior (and thus, understanding how to improve it).
But this post is a prime example of why you have actual trained social scientists doing your data analysis and not CEO/Founders without an understanding of the data that they are publishing out to the world. There are some huge problems here, some of which others have identified (non-representativeness, etc.) and others that no one has mentioned, like:
1) The fact that Mint can’t guarantee how correct their categorization data is. They are relying on their categorization algorithm and the manual categorizations of users. Have they ever confirmed those measures against actual user behavior? I assume not.
We do here at Thrive: basically, what happens is I take one of our user testers actual financial statements, look at how we categorized them in our algorithm and what the user changed, then compare that to the actual transaction categorizations and the categorization of the data by anonymous raters. That way, we at least know the degree to which our data is accurate.
2) Mint doesn’t know your whole balance sheet. It may just be that more loans are now accepted by Yodlee (which handles Mint’s back end) so that more people are able to get their loan accounts into Mint and therefore average loan appears to have “increased”. There are ways to both programatically and statistically correct for that: based on his comment response, I’d be surprised if Mint did them.
3) This one is even more important: there is no control condition here. The problem is that not only are the people that use Mint a tiny subsection of the population (at last published account, it was 60% men, for example), but they are also potential influenced by their usage of Mint. By tracking their spending through Mint, they may be shifting around their spending patterns, thereby bringing them even farther from the national norms.
For example, it may be that Mint users are taking on extra debt because Mint isn’t actually giving them feedback on their debt or helping them to understand their debt-to-income ratio, and is instead encouraging them to focus only on their transactions, which is a fairly myopic view of financial health and may actually be putting them in a worse position.
What we need is to compare Mint users to non-Mint users and make sure you know the systematic differences between them. We do this at Thrive, for example, in order to make sure we are actually helping people: we compare people’s spending patterns both to their previous spending habits before they joined Thrive, their spending habits over time with Thrive, and the spending habits of non-Thrive users at the same time. This was, we can isolate the affect of our recommendations on people controlling both for the exposure to recommendations and the changes in the general economic climate of the country. It is just one more way we’re committed to good science.
Frankly, I’m with the user who said that data is good, Mint’s handling of data isn’t so good. I don’t think we’re focusing on the negative aspects of the service as much as the troubling lack of analysis present in this article. Be interesting to know why TechCrunch asked Aaron to do this: does Mint not have anyone that does actual data quantitative analysis?
And on a personal note: that last quote scares the crap out of me. Data is valuable and, if used correctly, can be of critical importance in helping us to raise the personal finances of people everywhere. But it should be core to your mission to actually help people with it, and when Aaron says it is a “valuable byproduct” of startups, I certainly hope he is committed to not selling that to advertisers and other entities that will use it to destroy the very savings goals that are supposed to be part of the personal finance space.
January 28th, 2009
Saw a brown pigeon today. Not a dark brown but a light clay color, like the dirt in Eastern Oregon, soil that has been cooked too long by the sun and needs to come out of the oven.
Honestly, it was unsettling and uncomfortable and maybe even a little scary. It is easy it is to assume that all things are one way, through repetition that becomes expectation. It is the worst part of abusive environments - people learn to think that evil things are the norm and when kindness finds them, they are just as suspicious as I was of a brown pigeon.
I’ve been that particular pigeon before, and even recently, I can think of a girl who I had drinks with that looked at me that way. Despite being intelligent and attractive, she falls in with the women I’ve known who can’t rely on anyone, who are afraid of anything soft and fuzzy and kind because those are the things that die and leave and get crushed. We are peculiar with our pigeons, and it is a shame when they get that grey.