Episode 253 Scott Adams: A Persuasion Lesson While Persuading You to Try the Interface App
Date: 2018-10-09 | Duration: 36:43
Topics
Key persuasion tips throughout the discussion Why, how, when to use various persuasion techniques, demonstrated
Transcript
The Simultaneous Sip
Hey everybody, come on in here. It’s time for a special Coffee with Scott Adams. I hope you have your coffee. If you do, this would be the time to sip it because it’s time for the bonus sip, the extra sip, the simultaneous sip. Grab your cup, your mug, your vessel, your glass, fill it with your favorite beverage and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Now, what I’m going to do today is different from my normal thing. I promised I would give you a lesson on persuasion and I would wrap it around a lesson in actually—well, I’m actually going to persuade you. I’m going to try to persuade you to use the app my startup has created. So, we’ll be talking about the app, but I’ll keep stopping as I go to point out any technique I’m using so you should learn how to do a pitch for any kind of product or offering.
Introducing Interface by WhenHub
Let me jump right in. This is the app. It’s called Interface by WhenHub, and it’s for either being an expert or contacting an expert. If you want to be an expert, you get to set your own price. You could be paid in regular, ordinary money, or you could be paid in our own cryptocurrency that we created for the app. I won’t get into those details for now, but assume that you can get on the app and you could say, “My price is 12 an hour, or $500 an hour, depending on what you’re offering.
In our world, an expert could be any kind of expert. I’ll actually make a call here so you can see it. The app is available in stores right now, in the App Store for both Apple and Google.
Wait, stop. Let me tell you what persuasion I’ve already used.
Persuasion Tip: The Small Ask
Number one: Do you think the simultaneous sip is just for fun? Well, when I do it on my regular Periscopes, it’s sort of a bonding exercise. It’s for fun; people say they like it, and it’s sort of branding. But in the context of selling something, in the context of persuading, there’s a little persuasion rule: Asking somebody to do anything, no matter how minor, gets them in the mood to do more.
It’s very important to get somebody to do something very small that has no cost to them whatsoever. So, the simultaneous sip in this context is getting people to pace me, to match me, to feel comfortable with me, to enjoy an experience with me no matter how minor, and to do something I asked you to do. That was the first technique in case you missed it.
Persuasion Tip: Visual Speed and Simplicity
Now, you also want to be visual, and you want to be visual fast. Being visual alone is great, but being visual fast makes a difference. You notice that I was only in this for a few seconds before I held it up. I can describe things forever, but seeing it is just a whole different impression. Your visual sense dominates your senses.
If you’re going to give a pitch, the wrong way to do it is to start with, “Well, we had a problem, and here’s our concept, and we worked the concept, and we thought about it, and our business model is this.” Nobody cares. Get to the picture. Here it is. That’s a real app. It does two things: be an expert or contact an expert to make a video call. BAM, you’re done.
Now the person I’m trying to persuade—which is you in this case—has a visual idea. Now I can put all kinds of detail on it and you’ve got a framework that you can attach things to. Go visual, go fast, and go simple. Simple is very important. How hard was it for you to understand? It’s an app. It’s available now. You can be an expert and set your own price, or you can call an expert and it’s a video call. Simple, simple, simple. There is more complexity to it, there are different ways to pay, etc., but you don’t need to know that for now. So, stay with me.
Persuasion Tip: Social Proof and Dr. Drew
Now I’m going to do a little more visual persuasion. I’m going to give you some examples of how people could use the app. Some of these might apply to you, but some of them might not. The important thing I’m going to show you is how telling the story and bringing you into the scene really makes a difference.
Imagine we’ve got doctors on here; we’re bringing on some doctors now. You may know that Dr. Drew has used the app and we hope he’ll use it again. Now, did you see what I just did? I just used a famous name. I said this famous person, Dr. Drew—a famous doctor from radio and TV and internet and everywhere else—has used the app. That’s a way to attach the app to somebody who is notable and important and knows what they’re doing. It’s sort of a social proof.
Another part of the social proof is when you first sign on to the app, it tells you how many other people are on the app. It tells you lots of people use this. We’ve had over 50,000 people sign up, and so you immediately say, “Well, if 50,000 people signed up, that’s something.”
Use Cases: From Emergency Care to Tutoring
Let me give you several examples of how to use the app. Let’s say you’re one of the people who is on the scene of an accident. You’re not the first person there; you’re one of the 20 people who gather around any accident. The first people there know some first aid; they’re not doctors, but maybe they’re putting on a tourniquet or something and they’re helping the person who has been hurt.
You’d like to help too, but there are only so many hands and legs that can be on the patient. As you help, you pick up the app, you find a doctor, you contact the doctor, and you say, “Look, we’ve got a situation. Can you just hold on in case we have a question?” Then as you’re helping, you just say, “I’ve got a doctor on the line. If you’ve got a question, let me know.” Maybe you take the video over and let the doctor see what the situation is. You say, “Are we doing everything right?” The doctor says, “Put the tourniquet a little higher.” The doctor says, “Put a blanket over them because they’ve got maybe some shock.” Immediately, you have added value to this highly important situation. That’s optional, you might never be asked, but you’d have that option.
Let’s say you’ve got a kid who wants to do homework and you don’t know how to help them on that homework. You pick up the app, call an expert who’s tutoring on that subject, and put your phone on the kitchen table. You don’t want your kid to be on the phone with an adult if you’re not watching, but you stay in the room. You can make dinner and your kid is getting tutored at the same time.
Let’s say you need translation. Perhaps you’re police or providing other kinds of services and you run into a situation where you really need somebody to translate for you and you need it right now. On the app, find somebody who speaks French, call them up and say, “Look, I got somebody here, can you translate for me?” Boom, you’re done.
Tech Support and the Power of Faces
Let’s say you want to do tech support for your company and you’re not a giant company. Let’s say you’re a small company and you want to be up and running with tech support. Well, you could just get on the app, set your price to zero—we don’t care if you charge zero or anything, we’re not concerned with how much you charge. You can just make it zero and then people can call you up on the app. You could put a notice about it. At some point, we’ll have a way to add a button to your webpage.
Let’s do that now. Let’s say I wanted to get tech support about the app itself. I would hit “Expert” and I would see that there’s a list of people who have been recently on the app. That tells you that real people have been experts on the app, and you can see what kinds of things people have been doing. That’s just, again, another social proof. Here are real people; they’ve been doing things.
Did you notice there was also something else that I did? I’ll bet you different faces are really influential. It’s not an accident that Facebook is popular. It’s not an accident that Tinder and dating apps are popular. People like faces; they have an unusually large impact on us. We’re just wired for faces. So, we put faces on here. Faces are good. If you can put faces on stuff, you’re way ahead of the game in terms of engaging other people.
I open the app and I say I want to find out something about the Interface app. Certainly, I could just put “Interface” in the search bar and it would pop up. Let’s do that. Interface, first few letters, and it pops up. Sure enough, I’ll take one of those choices, and look, it’s one of our developers.
Live Demo with a Developer
He’s on there and he’ll take my call. I push one button. I can put the slider for any time I want—15 minutes is fine. I’m just going to call him and then hang up. This is a test call while I’m on Periscope. I just did voice-to-text because it was faster. Push one button, tell them I understand the rules, and then I hit it.
It is now connecting. Now, he won’t know my phone number or contact, and I won’t know his phone number or contact. It’s happening through the app. And there is Jonathan. Say hi! So, if we were going to ask Jonathan a question, we were on a video call, we’re live. I promised him that I wouldn’t bother him while he’s working—he’s in the middle of a deep dive on some technology—so I’m just going to say thanks. Thanks, John. Bye for now.
Jonathan’s gone, and then I can rate him. I’m going to say, “Man, that was a five-star call.” The ratings of the experts will be more useful over time as more people get rated. So, you just saw the demonstration. There were faces, I kept it simple, it was visual. All good. I also kept it short, which was good.
Persuasion Tip: Thinking Past the Sale
Let me give you a few more techniques. One of the techniques I like to talk about is making the customer think past the sale. The “sale” is I’m going to try to get you to download the free app. It’s free to download; you don’t ever have to use it, and it’s in both the Apple and the Google stores.
But notice what I did: I put you in the scene of you using the app in the future. You imagined yourself in the kitchen with the kid who needs tutoring. You imagined yourself at the scene of an accident. You imagined yourself calling somebody for tech support. You imagined yourself perhaps signing up as an expert. We had somebody sign up recently just for conversation. If you wanted to have somebody to talk to over lunch, you could call this person—a nice woman in Iowa who will just talk to you about whatever you want.
By making you think about how you use it, I’ve made you think past the decision of downloading it. That’s always a good technique. The car salesman won’t say, “Do you want to buy this car?” The car salesman will say, “You know, you’ll probably want to play the radio a lot in this car.” You’re thinking about being in the car and playing the radio, and you’ve already thought past the decision of getting it.
Persuasion Tip: Addressing Fear and Social Needs
It’s also helpful to tie your persuasion to things that people care about. For example: Can you use this app to save your life? If you could, that would be good persuasion because fear is very persuasive. If you can convince people that it’s a way to lessen their fear, that’s very powerful. Now, this app isn’t really optimized for that, although I can imagine ways in which it would keep you safer—that would be sort of a hard explanation in this case.
In this case, the things that people would look to as the benefit of the app would be not just that you can use it to call somebody and get information. You’ve seen some examples where I had some really big ideas, but I didn’t know how they would evolve until I talked to a few experts that were hard to find. If you have a big idea, it might cost you a lot of money, but let’s say for twenty-five dollars, you can talk to somebody who really knows this area and they can tell you whether it’s worth going forward.
Somebody said, “Adult entertainers.” There’s nothing to stop anybody from using the app for anything they want. We do expect some adult entertainers will find the app at some point. I don’t believe there are any on there at the moment.
Think about this: you’re using the app and you can work at home. If you get a regular group of people who call you—especially let’s say you’re doing some kind of counseling or therapy, or you’re a Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor. How much would it be worth to someone who has an addiction problem to be able to talk to somebody very quickly to just keep them from using? Like, “I need somebody right now, and it doesn’t matter who, I just need to talk to somebody who understands this.”
Think about it in terms of money. You have to put yourself in the mind of the person you’re trying to persuade and say, “What would they want?” People want money. They want a way to work at home. They want an easy way to make money in between their regular job and other things they have to do.
But there’s a bigger call in this one. I contend that if this app becomes big, it’s really a civilization-changing kind of experience because it fills in this enormous gap between the things that you can Google and get a good answer to—and you can Google a lot of stuff, but it’s not good for a lot of stuff that you really need to just talk to somebody about—and actually hiring somebody and paying $400 an hour. There’s this enormous range of things that society needs to understand in order to move forward.
Let’s say you wanted to help somebody in the inner cities. You wanted to be a mentor. You wanted to tell somebody how to start a business, how to manage their money, how to keep their money. Think of all the things that people need to know but don’t have mentors for. They don’t have anybody who knows things in their circle. In my circle, I’m surrounded by people who know a lot. I’m in a very lucky position, partly because of my job, partly because of where I live, but I can find an expert in just about anything—and somebody who’s a world-class expert. Most people can’t.
Most people are sort of landlocked by the fact that they need a certain kind of expertise and they don’t know how to find it. They don’t need more than maybe a hundred dollars’ worth of expertise, but if they can’t find it, they’re not going anywhere. So, this could fill the gap. I think it could make a huge difference to civilization—to people who don’t have mentors, people who don’t have access to information in the normal way that other people do.
Think of it as something that you can be part of to help it grow. You don’t even have to use it. You might just want to sign on, try it out, tell a friend about it, or recommend it to somebody you think could benefit from it. It’s bigger than just “Do you want to use it?” There’s a whole societal thing about this that’s probably more important than, say, a Facebook. Facebook is great, but maybe we could have been better off without it. Something like this fills an enormous social need.
The Hero Effect and Going Viral
Notice that I’ve been very permissive in describing how somebody would use it. I give lots of examples and I made sure you know there’s no wrong way to do it. You could just sign up as an expert on jump rope and the worst that could happen is nobody would contact you and ask for your advice. It’s always good to be permissive in letting people imagine what they could do with it because you might be having an idea right now that I couldn’t have thought about. There’s somebody watching this who’s thinking, “Hey, I’ll bet I could use that app to do X,” and I would never have thought of X. By being permissive and giving you some examples, you can fill in some of the selling yourself.
When we get to a specific ask, then you want to be very specific. When I ask you at the end of this to consider downloading it—it’s free, it’ll take you all of 30 seconds to search for it—just look for Interface by WhenHub. It’s on the Google Store and the Apple Store. That’s all I’ll ask. I’ll ask for that one little thing, but it’s very clear. Your ask needs to be so clear and simple, but you want people’s imagination to be as expansive as possible. That’s your optimal situation, and you saw me just create that.
Now, just looking at my notes to see what else I want to tell you. Here’s another tip on how to make something viral. The way you make something viral is you want to have something about it that just speaks to people. It says what they were already thinking, but it says it better than they were thinking, for example. Or maybe it’s funny. So, there has to be something about the content that’s interesting and provocative. That could be any form, but it has to be interesting and provocative.
The next thing you want it to be is sort of something that you’d like to say, but it’s being said better in this content. People will forward things that agree with them; people rarely forward things they disagree with. So, you want to find something that people agree with and they understand.
Here is the next part: it would make them a hero for sharing it. It’s the “hero effect.” When you’re watching this, have you said to yourself, “There’s somebody I know who is maybe… maybe they have a disability, they can’t leave the house. Maybe they have kids and they’d like to make some money without leaving the house.” For whatever reason, they just need money, and it’s an app they can use. You would be a hero simply for suggesting that they look into it. Maybe they use it, maybe they don’t, but you would be a hero. That’s part of what makes things viral. If you give people a way to be a hero—a small hero, but a hero.
Persuasion Tip: Tying to the Headlines
The other thing that is good is tying what you’re doing to the headlines. If you can tie your product to the headlines, you have a gigantic advantage in getting people to forward it and talk about it. Watch me do that right now.
We saw in the news that there was a lot of questions about memory. What if, when there are headlines about memory and we’re questioning whether Christine Ford, for example—Dr. Ford—we’re questioning whether her memory was good or what we should know about the accuracy of memory over 35 years? Well, there could be experts, such as this expert Carmen Simon, who wrote Impossible to Ignore. This is a book very much about the techniques I’m talking about, in which you’re creating memorable content to influence decisions. Wouldn’t you love to hear from a memory expert in the context of the headlines?
Likewise, if a plane goes down, wouldn’t you like to have an aviation expert who knows about that plane? The Interface app would allow anybody who is an expert on anything that’s being talked about in the news to just go on, and then the media can decide, “Hey, we need an expert, we need to understand this thing. Give us an expert. Oh, here we go, here’s an expert on that very thing.” The Interface app works with headlines better than most things. But in general, you want to tie your thing to a trend, to a headline.
[The Network Effect and the Power of “You”]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYGoPaQoqyo&t=1423s)
There’s also a network effect. It’s a way to make your product sticky. Here are some examples: If you join Facebook and you’ve put all your pictures on there and you’ve got a bunch of friends, if somebody created another Facebook tomorrow, it would be a big problem for you to get off of that Facebook and move to the brand new Facebook. The network effect is that everybody is using the same product you are, and you don’t want to lose that group. You want to stay with them. That’s why Twitter is hard to reproduce, it’s why Facebook is hard to reproduce, and why LinkedIn is hard to reproduce. Because once they have enough users, if you go to any other place, you’re going to a smaller network—and why would you?
The Interface app has that potential. It has the potential to have enough experts on it that if you were going to be an expert, why would you go anywhere else? Because this is the one that has all the customers. This is the one that has all the experts. If somebody tried a new one after this one gets big, they would have some trouble attracting people. They would be in the same position that we’re in right now.
You can help that network effect happen by using the product. By the way, the word “you” tends to be very influential. I’m stopping for another persuasion tip. When you say “you,” it makes people think, “Me? What about me? I love me. Let’s talk about me.”
And then you say: you can help the Interface by WhenHub app develop over time a network effect that makes it far more valuable for everybody using it. It allows the experts to make more money, it allows the users to find more experts, and it allows everybody to connect information with the people who need it. It’s like lubrication for society. And you—you can be part of that, and it takes almost no effort. All you have to do is say, “I saw this Periscope. This cartoonist was talking about it.”
Establishing Credentials
If this were a normal pitch with a normal startup, I would introduce the team and I would tell you all about our qualifications. But because most of you know me, you know that I’m a cartoonist. You may not know I have a degree in economics. You might not know that I have an MBA from Berkeley. You might not know I have 16 years of large business experience that ranges from marketing to strategy to finance to technology. You may not know that I’ve started food companies, I’ve owned restaurants, I’ve been involved in a number of startups, and the Dilbert business has, at different times, been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of throughput.
Normally, you would want to push those credentials. It’s a little less important in my case, but I did it anyway because it always works. If there was anybody here who didn’t know I have a serious business background, it was good to tell you that. Let me pause here and see if you have any questions. So, either as soon as you get off the app or if you have a second screen open, you might want to download the app. Just search for Interface by WhenHub. It’s free and you can kick the tires yourself.
Q&A: Cryptocurrency and Verifying Experts
Somebody’s asking, “Why tokens instead of cash?” We take tokens and cash. If you’re an expert and you only want to be paid in regular old cash, you can do that. You just select that option. The other option is to be paid in the cryptocurrency that we created just for the app. If you use the cryptocurrency, we don’t take a cut. Anybody who gets paid in our own cryptocurrency is taking a risk that the value of the crypto will go down or up. There’s an upside potential, but there’s also a downside risk because cryptocurrency fluctuates.
At the moment, it is trading on the LATOKEN exchange, for example, and I think it’s equivalent to like two and a half cents right now, which would be actually pretty good for a startup. The value of those tokens will fluctuate with demand for the tokens, which will fluctuate in a direct way with how popular the app is. So, if you were to accept payment in WHEN, there is some possibility that that WHEN token could increase in value and then you could trade it on an exchange.
If you don’t want to bother with cryptocurrency or exchanges—and that would be 95% of you—you don’t have to. There’s no requirement to know any of that. If you wanted to tiptoe into the crypto world, well, the app comes with a wallet built into it, and you could start just getting a toe wet in trying to figure out how crypto works in a very low-risk way.
“Must you have a LinkedIn account to be an expert?” No. In the first version, just to keep things simple, we asked people to have a LinkedIn account, but right now you can just put in your bio and have the icon show online.
“How do you know that someone who says they’re a doctor is a real doctor?” Excellent question. If that doctor happens to be Dr. Drew, it’s pretty obvious. So, that’s the first answer. Secondly, I’m going to give you a specific reason for that, but I can’t tell you yet—there will be some doctors coming onto the app, doctors plural, and there will be a mechanism so that you can tell that they’re vetted. There will be a mechanism to do that. I can’t tell you more about that, but in a few weeks, that should be up and running. But yes, in the case of a doctor, you do want some kind of assurance that you actually are talking to a real doctor, and ideally one that is licensed to practice in your state.
Now, we also allow that for the first minute or so, the charge doesn’t kick in. So, if you call somebody and you look at them, in 60 seconds you’re going to know if this is a real person or not. You won’t be a hundred percent sure, but you usually know, right? And then you can just cut the call and you won’t be charged.
Final Logistics and Closing Remarks
“What’s the persuasion behind the name Interface?” Frankly, it’s hard to find a name that’s not already taken. You don’t have a lot of options when it comes to picking names, but Interface has actually “face” right in the name, so that’s a big plus. That’s one of the things I liked about it persuasion-wise. And you are interfacing with one other person. Given the few names that have not been taken, it’s pretty good.
“How did the experts get more money by taking tokens or cash?” If they take cash, there’s a 20% fee that we take out of it. So, you should price accordingly because between the bank and what we take, it’s 20%. If you’re paid in WHEN, there’s nothing taken out of it, but the value of the WHEN might be less than the value of $1.00. You would have to be careful that you knew what the value of the WHEN was so that you don’t underprice or overprice.
You can do it on phones or you can use it on a tablet. If you’re using the app on a tablet, be sure to download the phone version because we don’t make a tablet version. It works just fine on a tablet, but you have to download the phone version onto your tablet for now. At some point, we’ll have a tablet version.
Liability concerns? Not really, because we are a communication platform. If somebody makes a phone call with a doctor, the phone company doesn’t have a liability. If you email your doctor—as I do, I email my doctor quite often—there’s no liability for the email company. It’s just a communication vehicle.
A link to the site? If you want to see information on it, go to whenhub.com. How can you check the value of WHEN tokens? Go to latoken.com and just type in WEN and you’ll see its current price.
Doctors, of course, do have liability—somebody asks that question—but they also have liability insurance. Right now, we take credit cards. Refund-wise, you can contact us and, depending on the situation, we’ll see what we can do. There’s a contact in the app so you can contact the company.
Anybody can use it. It’s international. If you want to do your transactions and you don’t want your bank involved, then you can use the crypto option, and then there are no banking records and no banks involved.
How many apps have been downloaded so far? Last I checked, there were over 50,000 people who signed up. I don’t know how many downloaded, but that’s someone who downloaded and signed up.
“Your cat is too skinny and won’t walk. Who do I talk to?” I saw this morning there was a veterinarian on here, actually. So, you might try that. I don’t know if there’s still a veterinarian on there, but there was recently.
Did you learn anything from this? Independent of what you thought of the app, did you learn anything about persuasion and do you have any other questions? I’m seeing lots of yeses. Oh, good. I’m very happy people are saying yes, they are learning something. I didn’t want to do this unless I had value, and it looks like you did. I’m very happy about that, very pleased.
If you want to learn more about persuasion, you would look at my book Win Bigly. It teaches persuasion; it’s wrapped around the story of the 2016 election so you can learn what the President does persuasion-wise as well as other people.
1099s issued? No, but that’s a good question; I should probably look into that. I’m going to sign off now. What was that book name again? My book is called Win Bigly, and the other book I recommended on the question of memory is Impossible to Ignore. The Impossible to Ignore book is the one you would want to read to learn how to make presentations that people will remember and persuade.
That’s all for now. I hope this was fun and informative, and I’ll talk to you later.