17 Raw Lessons About Human Nature - Steven Bartlett - #688

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Steven Bartlett. He's the founder of Social Chain, an entrepreneur, a podcaster and an author. How to become a functioning human is a difficult skill to work out. Should I focus on achieving goals or inner peace? Can I become confident without becoming arrogant? Thankfully, Steven has spent the last two years distilling a ton of lessons into his new book, and today we get to go through my favorites. Expect to learn how Steven's equation for unbreakable discipline works, the biggest lesson from dealing with mainstream media pylons, why there are so few actual practitioners in the world, how to stop being your biggest critic, why your weirdness is the ultimate competitive advantage, how Steven discovered he was riddled with fake ambition, and much more. I really enjoy these episodes where we just get to break down and play about with new ideas that we've come up with or found on the internet and get to discuss them between us. It's kind of like a jazz club freestyle riff with a ton of new and interesting insights. Steven has spent a lot of time speaking to very, very cool people. And I very much value the things that he's got to say. There is an awful lot to take away from this one. If you are new here, or if you're a long time listener, don't forget that you might be listening, but not subscribed. And that means you will miss episodes when they go up. The next few months has the biggest guests that I've ever brought on Modern Wisdom. Some absolute world-class, storming returners and new guests. And you do not want to miss them. You would be trez sad. So navigate to Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you were listening, and press the subscribe button. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Steven Bartlett.
You are a guy who likes stories and likes ideas. So am I. So today, I want to go through some of the best ideas that I've learned from you over the last year or so. first one, the frame matters more than the picture. What's that mean?

**Steven Bartlett** (2:16)
I think often in life, whether it's marketing or innovation, when we're building companies or products or making content, we fall into the trap of thinking that the thing we're creating in and of itself is doing all of the work to tell the story. But when I looked at tons of studies, when I looked at apples and art galleries, and when I looked at Coca-Cola studies that they did, where they put Coca-Cola in a glass and then Pepsi in another glass, and then did a different study where they showed you which one was which, it's so clear that much of the work is being done in psychology, not in reality. What I mean by that is if we just think about the Apple Store, every electronic store you've ever walked into in your life is kind of like a crazy jungle of wires, right? That's how electronics stores always were. What Apple did differently and which helped them to justify the cost of a $2,000 smartphone was they gave the iPhone space in the shop. We intuitively know that real estate is expensive. The space that the object is given actually pours into the value of the object itself. In an Apple Store, because it has two feet either side of it, the frame in which it's presented is telling you that this item in the middle is high value. The context you've always seen that kind of framing in is an art gallery where you have one-off special pieces. The other thing I think is so critical to what Apple do so well is they only show you one of each device and they keep the rest in the back room. If we think about scarcity creating value, things that are perceived to be in limited supply like pieces of art, whether they're typically one-offs, are seen in higher value. The frame in which you present something is doing so much of the work to communicate the value of the thing within it. Even in the Pepsi Coca-Cola studies, which are super famous from back in the day, people would rate the Coca-Cola drink more highly when it came in the can, and you could see what you were drinking. They would say, that's the better one. But when they removed the can and told people that the Pepsi was a Coca-Cola, or they had blind cups with nothing written on them, people chose the Pepsi. The frame and the story there are making people believe that something tastes entirely better. So it's not just about value, it's about taste and sense and really at its core, psychology.