574. Incentives and The Littery

Welcome to episode 574 of The Brainy Business, understanding the psychology of why people buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Michael Manike, founder and CEO of The Littery. Ready? Let's get started. You are listening to The Brainy Business Podcast, where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain-friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer. Hello, hello, everyone. My name is Melina Palmer, and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Have you ever been deeply passionate about something you know matters, but struggled to get other people to care enough to actually do something about it? Maybe it's a sustainability initiative, a new process at work, an enhanced experience you're trying to implement with your customers, or even getting your kids to do their chores. You know it's important. You can clearly see the benefits. And yet, getting people to change their behavior can feel surprisingly difficult. So how do you get people to buy in? That question is at the heart of today's episode, because today's guest looked at one of the most visible behavior problems in the world, litter, and decided to tackle the massive problem of getting people everywhere to properly throw away and sort their garbage every single time. It's something cities, companies, and organizations have been trying to solve for decades. And instead of asking how to convince people to care more, he approached the problem from a completely different behavioral angle, which you'll hear all about during today's conversation, which originally aired at the end of 2019 and has absolutely been one of my very favorite case studies. If you've heard me give a talk or read one of my books or listened to various episodes of the show, you've potentially heard me talk about the literary because it is such a great way where people just get it, right? We've all tried and understand how difficult it can be to get people to throw things away. And this behavioral shift, this brainy idea is so, so powerful. And I love being able to reshare the full story here of what has happened with the literary and how it came to be. So I'm super excited for you to hear the story behind it. As you listen, keep this question in mind. When you're trying to change behavior, are you focusing on the message you want people to hear or the motivation that will actually move them to act? Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com slash 574. Now let's jump right in. Michael Manike, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast. Thank you, Melina. Nice being here. Absolutely. So I'm so, so excited to talk with you today. As I said in the intro, I learned about you through the behavioral economics group on LinkedIn, which I think now has almost 40,000 followers, people within that group. And someone had shared an article about what you were doing and I think the competition that you were in. And I was just amazed. I'm so excited about it. And so I sent you a connection request and a message saying, this is maybe a little bit weird, but you don't know me, but would you be willing to talk to me? So thankfully you were willing to talk to me and we can share about what you're doing at the literary. So I would love if you can just give some background about the company and how it came about for the audience listening. Yeah, thank you. I guess I'm kind of weird too that I like, I get like the intrigue when someone reaches out that, you know, from the other side of the world with that kind of question that you did. So it was a good way of doing it, I guess. Yeah, my company is called Deliterate, and it's actually in the name we have the problem and we have the solution. So the first thing I invented was the name, because Deliterate, if you look it up, it's a word that doesn't exist anywhere. But now it exists. So what we're doing is I have basically, as long as I can remember, been quite annoyed. And it has increased the older I get about people's behavior when it comes to littering. And the reason behind my frustration is because I think it's totally unnecessary. Right. Mostly. There is always littering, only a few steps away. So it seems so unnecessary. And at some point, some years back, I came up with an idea. because I understood that it's a behavioral problem. I mean, before there were humans on Earth, you couldn't find litter. So it's us creating it, kind of obvious. So I came up with the idea. Maybe since it's a behavioral problem or basically an attitudinal problem, we have an attitude that litter is just trash, you know, whatever, it doesn't matter. If we change the attitude to litter, the behavior change would follow. That was my idea. And what would be strong enough? Because I know that it has been a lot of these organizations in America. You have Keep America Beautiful. I'm from Sweden. We have the similar organization. When I was young, in the 60s, I'm that old. I learned in school about, to be honest, it was in the 70s when I was in school. But I learned about, you know, you shouldn't live or you should go to the being. It's bad for the environment. Already in the 70s. So, but if you look at my generation and the next generation, we all learned that in school, but the problem has not gone away. And this is a long time ago. So education only doesn't seem to work. It's probably good because I guess if we didn't have education, oh, I don't want to think about how the streets would look like or the oceans. But it's not helping as much as it has to. so then i came up with the lottery thing because you know lotteries is something that has been around i've done some research it started 4 000 years ago in china wow so it's quite it's quite you can say it's a proven business model right and as you know lotteries exist all over the world so it doesn't seem to matter what type of ethnic group you are or what social what do you call it class or class lotteries they work on all units because it taps into something that you know the greed in us if there is money in something people get excited so I thought maybe I could turn all litter into lottery tickets because you don't treat lottery tickets I mean if you imagine a scratch card if you haven't checked it it's still unused you wouldn't throw it away or if you dropped it you wouldn't leave it on the ground right so that was my basic idea and and from that point i started doing a lot of research about the the how the how could i invent a business model that makes it possible to actually pay out price money if people stop littering and hit the litter bins because that wasn't that that wasn't obvious after a year or to with a lot of research because I'm not in the waste management business. I was coming from the real estate business. I saw a way how to do it. And then I did a test in Sweden, in my home country, because if you get an idea, I think most people believe in their own ideas. At least I did. And I felt this is great. And I, of course, talk with people and they say, it sounds like a good idea. But I wanted to test it. Would people actually change their behavior before I ended my old career and started a new business? And I did. And I can tell you more about that. But basically, what happened was that the results were even better than I suspected. And that made me throw myself out there and start this company. Absolutely. And I love the example that we're going to get into here for how it works. But the summary, as far as my understanding of the littery is that you have an app on the phone. And so if I throw away garbage or litter and I put it sorted properly in the right bin there, it's a smart litter bin, garbage can, whatever you want to call it. And that it knows that I threw litter away. I put it in the right bin and then I get a lottery ticket on my phone and can win up to however much. Of course, when we have enough cities as customers, it could be, you know, it could be the next Powerball. If you have the vision that this is adopted in a bigger scale, then you could be set for life. Right. And so one of the things we were talking about before we started recording on the call here is that with behavioral change, one of the things, it seems like you can't get people to change their behavior. That's something people say all the time. Well, you can't, you can't change it. That's what people have always done. Like you said, people, humans have been littering for a very long time and we've tried to educate. It doesn't work. So you can't quote unquote, can't change behavior. But one of the things I talk about on the podcast all the time and why I love what you've brought into play here is if you find the way that the brain naturally is triggered and making decisions and can attach yourself to a process that already exists, you can actually change behavior incredibly easily without a lot of effort. Obviously, you've put a lot of effort into creating the bins and all that. We've talked about that a little bit and potentially come back to it at the end. Of course, but not the real driver. Getting them to change. Yeah, yeah. Great. So with that, to show just how well this works, I want, if you can share with us the movie theater example, I believe that was what you were talking about. Yeah, I would like to do that. Yeah, but you're absolutely true there because what you can change quite easily. And I think a lot of people miss the target sometimes because we focus on the behavior of change. And that's hard. We all know that. We all had maybe new year resolutions and like in February, we lost again, you know. It's like, oh, typically me. But what we can do is what is easier. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's to change the attitude to something. And then also, in this case, it's about if the attitude is that litter is just trash. It has no value. Of course, you treat it as trash. And I will come to my example soon. And also, if you think that there are no smart litter bins around, I mean, that could turn your litter into a lottery ticket because there are no such litter bins. Not yet. Yeah. So then, of course, today's situation is the attitude is it's just trash. And the environment around us doesn't facilitate any system that could turn it into gold, so to speak. So it's no wonder, I think, that we have the problem. So what we did when we tested it, because I wanted to test the concept, could just the concept of turning litter into lottery tickets, or rather, if you throw the litter in a bin, you could get rewarded with a ticket. Would that change people's attitude and following that behavior? So in Sweden, we have a cinema chain that's like almost a monopoly. They seem to have all the theaters. And I guess I'm not sure if it's the same in America. If I think back, I've been in theaters there. And after every movie, when they light up the theater, you can find so much litter and popcorn and whatever in the rows. Right. And people don't take their cups with them or the empty, just leave it. That's someone's job to clean that up, sort of an attitude. Yeah. It's like one of the places that's the worst places on earth because it's like you have a license to live because you pay the ticket. So I thought my thought was if we could see a change here, it would be quite good proof of the effect. And also the other reason why we use theaters is because if we made tests outside, I mean, in Sweden, the weather is, you know, sometimes it's great but mostly bad it can be very hard to compare because we had to have a reference group when we measured everything right smart so what we did we chose four theaters in a city called malme and the malme is kind of an interesting city in sweden it's the third largest city but the most interesting is that it has 181 nationalities living in this city wow so it lacks only 10 to have the whole world's population. And that was one of the reasons why we chose it, because it's very multicultural. And I wanted to check, you know, does it matter where you come from or not? So it was a good opportunity. And then we had four of the theaters in this city. For one month, we did the research or measured how people acted regarding littering. And I got some volunteers from the environmental program at the Malmo University to help me. So there were students measuring everything, how much litter was left on the floor so to speak in the theater and how much litter ended up in the bins that were present in the theater and how much of the litter was correctly sorted There were three options. So we measured all this for one month. So now we knew how people were acting as normal. And then when the test started, in Sweden, in these theaters, They have one of the staff welcoming the audience. And this was done the normal way during the reference period, saying basically, hi, welcome. Today we're going to watch this film. If something is a problem with the movie, please come out and look me up and I'll help you. If you have to go to the restroom, it's that way out. And please, after the movie is over, I would love if you put your litter in the right bins. that's the normal pitch so the only thing they changed now was that in the end when they asked them to put the literary in the right bins they said if you do that you will get a lottery ticket and with that ticket the first price will be 5000 euros it's like 5000 dollars almost and that was the first price and the second to price number 100 would be a couple of extra cinema tickets so it was one big price and a lot of you know small prices and of course i was to be honest i was really worried because a lot of these nationalities living in malme not all speak swedish yet so this pitch was in swedish uh so we made a like a picture that was shown on the screen showing basically when they pitched that if you throw litter in bins you can get lottery pictures and like with images. Right. And people, I think, understood it. It's kind of easy. Everybody knows about Locker. Right. So the results were totally amazing. For one month, we did this with the audiences in these four theaters. And 100% of the litter in these saloons where we'd run the tests ended up in the bins. And that's compared to 71% for the reference people. Wow. So when it came to the sorting, 100% was correctly sorted. That shows that people can sort because the reference group, the correct sorted was only 23%. So it was amazing. And we observed also when the light came up after the movies. I did myself and I couldn't be at all places at the same time. So we had these volunteers working. and we all noticed the same behavior. People were holding on to their trash like it was something valuable because we didn't have our machines as you explained how they work. It was quite a good explanation actually. So we had the volunteers giving out the lottery ticket for each litter. They didn't intervene. They just watched if you throw your litter in the right bin. And people are smart. So it's not hard if it's test. or if it's papers, they know the difference. But if you don't get an incentive, maybe you don't sort correctly, as it turned out. So the thing was that people hold on to their litter, and we could see that female, they were funny, the women, they started opening their purses, their handbags, looking for some extra receipts or something. Because you got one ticket per litter. so it was actually we had this suspected that some people wouldn't bother but we couldn't find those they treated the litter as valuable and a lot of mostly men were running around looking in the rows you know to find some litter but since nobody littered there was not so that was the how the test and that was one thing that i would like to mention that was so fantastic because Because before we started the testing, I was there reviewing the theaters and I met with this one man. He told me he had worked for 36 years in this theater in Malmo as a machinist, you know, running the, I don't know what you call it, the projector. Right, yeah. And he said to me when I explained what we were going to do, he said, Michael, I really liked the idea. but I have to tell you he said with all this experience it won't work and he said it like he wanted to share something with me and I said oh that's really sad to hear it why don't you think it will work and he said and this is like I'm quoting he said Michael people are like pigs we have to clean the theaters after every session and it's been like that as long as I've worked it. Great. So that was what he said before we even started the measuring and the testing. So it was kind of, you know, I was thinking, am I so stupid believing in this? Because he seemed to know what he was talking about. But of course, then he came to me after one of the first nights when we had started the test period. And he said, Michael, this is, he was like, you know, I don't know how to explain it, but a letterbox, I think you say in America, or, you know, like... Oh, like mouth agape. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it would have been like, you know, Donald Duck cartoon, the mouth was like... He was totally amazed, you know, because he couldn't really believe what he saw. That was proof enough for me to quit my old career and actually start this company and go to find investors because I knew to do this is a big, big challenge because this is a global problem and we have to build a system that's very intelligent. As you told, our smart litter bins, they are really smart. They are solar powered so they can stand alone. They don't need any infrastructure. And they will recognize you if you have your phone on you. And I guess that's a new body part of humanity. Right. And so you don't need to, it's not that you have to open the app, I'm throwing something away now. It just uses, is it geolocation or? Once you have, of course you have to have download our app. But once you've done that, you can have your phone in your purse or in your pocket, wherever. As soon as you open the hopper of our bins and throw something in there, it knows that you're there because it turns your phone. I don't know how technical it should be, but it turns your phone into a beacon and the bin can recognize the beacon. So we know it was you, and that's how we can address a lottery ticket to your account in your app. But you don't have to take out the phone or do anything. You just act as normal when you throw something there. But then we're not only having the ambition to solve the littering problem. That's the main focus because, you know, all the problems that comes with it. But we also at the same time want to help people sort correctly. because the planet is suffering from another problem, a big challenge. We're using too much of our resources. I think on average, the global average is 1.6 planets we're using at this moment. And we only have one. So it won't be a viable way of leaving it to our next generation. So what we want to do is to help people sort correctly because if we sort correctly, we create more value of the recyclables and it's easier to recycle them. Right. So inside the bin, we have a camera. And that camera uses computer vision. It's artificial intelligence where the camera can, you know, basically as a human, we can see the difference between a pet bottle or a cigarette butt or a metal can or... Piece of pizza. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, piece of pizza, yeah. Or if someone would try to cheat, it can see, oh, it's a stone, you know. Oh, yeah. Maybe the stone belongs in the nature. So that's how we can help if the people throw the litter in the right litter bin. Let's say it's for paper. If you throw paper there, you get a lot of ridiculous. But if you hit the plastic bin with the paper, you will get a notification saying, thank you, Melina. Thank you for hitting the bin. That was great. I'm sorry. it won't be a lottery ticket reward this time because it was the wrong bin. But if you hit the paper bin next time, Melina, you will get your lottery ticket. And when we have tested this, people learn super fast. I bet. Because imagine if you get like a powerful lottery ticket each time you do right, you will probably, that's a good, I think, way of viewing it. Yeah, absolutely. And I really enjoyed when we were talking about this in sort of our pre-call, You were explaining about the artificial intelligence and building that in and how that was a piece that you thought would be easier to where, you know, it seems like there must be pictures of all of these things. And I can just program, you know, you or the team, you know, we can just program it in and it'll just identify if this is paper, this is plastic, there are things. But that is not what happened. I was because, as I told you, I've been in the real estate business and we don't use AI, at least not when I worked there. and especially not image recognition. So I learned a lot when we did the R&D because I was very naive. I thought there are a lot of pictures around the internet on trash, so maybe you can train your AI model on that. But that's not how AI works. AI is smart, but it's actually not that smart. So you have to train all the data sets with the material in the same condition as the camera is located. And in our case, the camera is located inside a bin. So it has to be the right lighting. We have sold all these things, so it works now. But if you look around on the internet and try to find data sets of images with different types of litter inside bins, you will find zero. Yeah. Because why would anyone have taken pictures of that before? Before this? I mean, yeah. Nobody did. So my first thought that it would be easy was more showing that I was very naive when it came to AI. But luckily, we have found a way of solving it. And at this stage, we are at now, we're still at the early stage, that the AI has to be trained further. So today it's like, you know, when you train kids, I asked you also in our pre-talk that you have kids. And, you know, when you train them when they're really small, they're kind of stupid. You think, will they ever learn, you know? And it's the same with AI. You have to train it a lot. Right. But it gets smarter over time. So, of course, our AI, even though the infrastructure is there and it works, it has to be trained more thoroughly. Because let's say someone gets the idea that this happens because it's money involved that, oh, I can take some gravel off from the ground and throw it in the bin and I get lottery tickets. Perfect. But the AI will see, oh, this seems to belong in the nature. Right. Leaves don't count. It needs to be paper, right? Yeah, exactly. So you get the nudge that thank you for hitting the bin, but this seems to belong in the nature. So you don't get the lottery ticket. So it's an efficient way of there is no gain from cheating. Right. But of course, there are some materials maybe that our AI still hasn't learned. But we have solved it at this stage in the way that in the terms and conditions of the lottery, when we have the drawing, we have an image of each lottery ticket is connected to one image. Oh, of the litter? Yeah, because when you go to the litter bin and throw something in there, it creates a lottery ticket. And that lottery ticket has like a number. But it also is connected with the image of what you throw in there. So let's say that the AI didn't spot correctly. It could happen, you know, that it gave you a lottery ticket, even for a stone. Let's say that. Then when the drawing happens, and let's say that your stone ticket, so to speak, wins the prize. before we publish the winning tickets we check manually in the beginning before the ai is we check each ticket and we can see oh this is stone and then you won't win because we have already in the terms that some materials are not you know like give you a thing so so we we have a like workaround for that during the period the ai evolves and i'm sure you've worked in this is the previous banker financial institution person in me and that there's I'm sure there's something so that you don't have receipts with account numbers that are being publicly put out into the have you thought about that piece as far as how do you mean so if I went to the bank and I got a receipt that has my account number on it and I throw this piece of paper in the bin and then there's a picture from the paper that's in the bin that's material that I don't want out that was a really interesting question. I actually never got that one before. But what I can tell you is that, of course, our system is we following the in Europe we have the GDPR laws They are even Strict Yeah they are stricter than you have in the U So all this information is secure information So the images also. So it's nothing that other people can... So it doesn't publish and say, this is the Kleenex tissue that I threw away to win? No. No, so when I explained, it's only internally to check that no one has cheated. A cheating person will win the lottery. That would be bad, but it's not publicly known at all. You can rest assured. Perfect. But it's a good way of using your own bank account. You can reuse it and get a lottery. Right, right. Interesting. so you're talking about how it's a a newer company you're very young right now and that so if you can explain a little bit about so you've been through the you went through the research stage and determined it was viable so that you could leave your old career to start this new piece you did more research brought in ai i know that you moved to a new country and they're building all these things and if you can let us know sort of where are you now and what's on the horizon for the literary yeah so what happened was when i had when we proved this with the theaters i decided this is the thing we're going to do this it took me like a half year and then i got my first investors on board because i mainly had a powerpoint and the proof of the concept so it takes a while to get investors on board on that crazy idea but i did and one of my investors was a Latvian state-owned or is a Latvian state-owned company. And the other is a Swedish global company in the waste collection industry. So with these two investors, I incorporated a company in Latvia because that was one of the conditions for the Latvian investor. And I thought it was fun because Latvia was a new country for me and they have a very nice capital called Riga. So I relocated there, we started the company, and then we had the funding to start building the system. So today we have the technology, as I explained, working. But of course, it's a prototype stage, you could say. It's not like an iPhone 10 or something like that. There are still things to be polished on. So that's what we've been doing since actually incorporation was in early April. And now we have all this stuff running. So the next phase is to pilot it in a city. Because our business model is that cities today, they put out contracts for litter removal. Those are normally performed by waste management companies using human labor to pick up litter. That's how it works all over the world. Sometimes it can be in-house staff employed by the municipality, but that's the thing. So the business model is we go for these contracts, and instead of doing it the old-fashioned way to treat the symptoms using litter pickers, pick up after you and me, we use the revenues from the contract to finance our smart litter bin system that we put in the city, and also the price money. And of course, we have to have some backup litter pickers because we're still at this early stage. We really don't know exactly how effective, even though the tests in the theaters were super effective, we can't really rely on that it would be 100%. Of course, nobody is 100% today because if cities were 100% today, you wouldn't see any litter in the ocean. But you understand what I mean, I hope. So the stage we are at, we have an agreement with a French municipality called Issy de Molinault. So we're going to pilot for at least a year in their city. It's in the Paris area, but it's not in the central Paris. It's just on the border of Paris. To be able to do that, we need to, because we can't, when you have a new solution, I wish it would have been simpler, especially when you're trying to solve a global really bad problem. But our business model is depending on procured contracts from municipalities. Sure. And procurement is, you know, that's a solution to make a fair, you know, contract. So it's not corrupted and stuff. So it's a good idea when someone came up with it. And it's like the way it's done globally. But on the flip side, maybe the hard part with procurement is when you come with totally new solutions, procurement is like it doesn't understand. It's like AI doesn't understand in the beginning, you know? Right. So we have to prove it. And to prove it, we can't get a regular contract. So we have to finance most of the piloting ourselves. So what the stage I'm at now is that I'm raising funding to be able to do this piloting for a year. We have to manufacture a lot of bins. We have to have an organization in place to run the whole thing. We have to have prize money and everything as it's supposed to be. So at this stage, we have raised half the funding we need. So we have come a long way. But to actually start it, we're aiming to start in the first quarter of 2020. Oh, awesome. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I'm currently talking with multiple investors. So, in a week, it could be done, but it could take four weeks. It could take eight. You never know. It's kind of interesting. Right. But it's a challenge. But as soon as we have the funding in place, we have all the other stuff, the agreements in place. And we also have a consortium of very strong key players that's in the waste management industry to help us. One of the largest waste management companies is one of our partners. It's a French company called Suez. We also have an American company as a partner, Coca-Cola, because they understand that maybe they are not themselves a leader, but their customers actually do that quite a lot. So they believe that this is a potential thing that could help their customers actually behave better. And we have some others too, but we have World Wildlife Foundation. Because I didn't tell you, we have built in our concept. This was my idea from the beginning that I wanted to create something where people could get the feeling that while doing this good thing, putting the litter in the right place, they are also helping the world in a bigger sense. Right. So 10% of all winnings that's paid out goes to some NGO. It could be World Wildlife Foundation because they're working with littering problems. Of course. But it could also be like a local municipality, a customer of ours. they could have something they want to target a problem that's very local so 10 of the money goes to something you know doing something good for humanity and if you as a customer i call you a customer if there's no litter in the bins you don't have to pay anything you have to do that you could in your app put the on default you could choose that all your tickets will go to this so if your tickets win the money goes to that you know an ngo of your choice cool that's another thing we actually have a lot of other drivers built in in the system and i guess you're gonna ask me about that otherwise i will tell you but it's not only it's not only the lottery tickets but the lottery tickets is what we use to how should i put it to attract people into downloading the app and, you know, start using the system. And then we have a lot of other stuff to keep you. So it's a lasting change. Right, right. And I want to ask about there, you talked about some of the professors that you've worked with. And I know you have a professor of, I don't know if it's behavioral economics specifically, but you have a very notable person on your board, I believe you had said. And then you were talking with a few of the economists about lotteries. They understand, but they've never bought a ticket. And I think this is a really telling example of how this can work and make such a great impact for people, if you can tell a little bit about that story. I will do that. I'll tell you about the behavioral science expert that we have on our team. But first, I think I know what you're thinking about, because in our pre-talk, I happened to mention this. It was when I was working with a couple of AI professors, and they're really smart people and they're very good at mathematics. So they were around 40 years old, both of them, and they told me, Michael, we really like your idea. I was interviewing them about AI, how it works and what I can expect. And they said, we like it, but it won't work, you know, because who is stupid enough to buy a lot of it? We can do the math. The odds are horrible. And I said, okay, I understand. But I told them that, you know, I asked them, you know, that lotters have been around 4,000 years and it's regulated in every country for a reason, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But those are stupid people. I'm just courting them. And then I said, OK, let's try this. And I said, I reach into my pocket because I often have scratch cards there because I get these some sometimes this. How do you call it? Skepticism. yeah yeah yeah that's a good word so i took the most skeptic guy of the two and i said i give you this scratch card it's unused you can and the one i gave him you could win like 300 000 euros and that's quite a lot of money right so i gave it to him and i said it's yours on one condition and he was like what condition as soon as you have got it you have to drop it on the ground and he was like okay sure and he took it and he dropped it and then he looked at me and now what yeah it's it's on the ground but it you know yeah but you we can't leave it there so he reached down and pick it up but i said i didn't say yeah you pick it up you have to drop it why are you picking it up and he said he looked at me i said i was stupid you know like of course I pick it up. I can win. Exactly. It could be a winning ticket. He was so as he was looking at me, you know, like, are you crazy? Of course, I will pick it up. You gave it to me. And then I, you know, I said, like, I rest my case. And we started laughing, all of us. And I understand that some people don't buy lottery tickets. If you're in America, you have the Powerball. Right. And the odds of winning the Powerball is 1 in 292.5 million. Not great. That's bad. Not great. But still, it's the world's biggest lottery. Right. Because people work, we think this way that you don't buy a lottery ticket, assuming you're going to win $1. You're assuming you're going to hit the jackpot. Right. And as soon as you bought the ticket, you get the dopamine kick. That's why lotteries, sadly, are addictive. Right. But if you get addicted to our lottery, what will happen is that you don't get the problem that you get with other lotteries. That you can, if you start buying so many tickets that you go bankrupt yourself. Here in our case, you will get a lot of fresh air, a lot of exercise. You clean up your city. And potentially if you do that a lot, I guess you will win some too. So it's, you know, that's the big difference here. We don't charge you. You just do the right thing. That was a kind of interesting moment to see the reaction. And it's so telling in, you know, so I'll make sure to link to the episodes on optimism bias in the show notes, as well as, you know, in this case, this is a framing example, too. When you're thinking about the idea of paying out money to buy a ticket, they would say, that's silly. Why would anyone do that? Or that's stupid, right? Yeah. When it's just a free thing and it's sitting on the ground, why would I not pick it up? That's stupid, right? So when you reframe the position and you turn all the garbage into something that has value, that it could be this great thing, it just completely changes the conversation and the behavior. And that's why I love everything about it. I'm so excited. Yeah. And that's so cool because you're more scientifically trained than I am. In this particular category, perhaps. I know that you have a lot of training I don't have. But it's great. I'm more acting out of intuition, but because I've been working with sales all my life, so I've seen a lot of people, what triggers them and not. But this is exactly what is so interesting because the attitude to, in this case, litter, can change so quick. Because if you look at the cigarette butt and you see a cigarette butt, But if you today when I look at the cigarette butt, can you guess what I see with my internal eyes? I see like a lottery ticket. Right Yeah And then when it reframed like that it changed directly If it stupid to pick up cigarette butts today it stupid not to pick them up tomorrow Tomorrow. Right. Right. So it's really interesting. And then to talk about our professor that we have on board, his name is Agnes Stiebe. I think, I don't know how you call it when you get your like professorship or when you do the research. Tenure or something. Yeah, yeah, something like that. You know, I'm not English-speaking native, but he did that at MIT in America. But now he's based in Paris at the university there, which is very... That was also how we got connected because we were doing our piloting there. So he heard about what we were doing, and he called me and said, let's talk. And from then, that day on, he is part of our team. And he has introduced other social principles that we use within our smart technology system. Of course, there is the learning thing because we have to learn people, teach them that the litter just became a potential object. But then there is also other stuff like we can compare. if you imagine in a city you have different parts of the city townships different areas so we can compare how we can show them in the app and actually on the bins also with screens how what's happening around you and that also we can also show because today people in their mind especially in cities that very dirty the belief of the norm is that the norm is deliberate So what does it matter if I do? You know, everybody's doing it. Hurting behavior, yeah. Yeah, but since our bins are smart and we know the population, we can show you that the norm suddenly is actually hitting the bins. Right. And that can turn the spiral positive. You know, that human beings, we are quite interesting. We want to do or behave as the norm, at least most of us. Right. So that's another thing we can use. We can also use things like competition. We can, you know, you can compete against your friends or city against city. A lot of these things we are going to try out during the pilot, you know, how to calibrate and find the best ways of doing it. But these are things that are very interesting, I think. another one that i believe a lot in is also the the cooperative thing that people's you know the feeling of that you're building something so actually the 10 that i told you about we can use that for showing that together doing sorting and collecting litter we don't always have to pick it up we can just take the coffee mug directly to the bin instead of first littering and then pick it up but you understand so we can show them within the system in the app and let's say that the municipality has a goal maybe some of the money we raise together by doing the right thing should go to a new whatever playground for kids or something extra for the elderly people in the community or whatever that municipality has chosen as a you know thing to collaborate we can show how we're getting closer to that goal. The progress. Yeah. Awesome. I love it. I think it's obviously so well thought out and you have such a great diverse team. I can't wait to see them when they're there. I'll definitely keep me updated and I can keep the group updated. We'll make sure to put pictures on social media when they're out in Paris. It's going to be great. And for any listeners that are in France, definitely, if you are able to go check them out when they're launched early 2020. Yeah, you're welcome to come and test them. I would love to. I would love to come and check them out when they're around. So you mentioned that you're working on some investment to which we'll just go ahead and say, hey, anybody who's listening, if that's you, if you're the person that wants to invest in the literary, definitely should reach out to Michael. What's the best way for people to get in contact with you if they want to support or have questions or a municipality might be listening? I mean, who knows who's on the other end of this? What's the best way to find you? And for those of us that just want to know what's going on, how should we do that? Yeah, I do like this. Please contact me if you have any ideas, because I really want to solve this problem, but it's a huge problem. So I understand you can't do it alone. And I have a really amazing team. But to come to the next milestone, so to speak, we really need the extra funding. and of course if there are municipalities interested in here, sure we'll listen. I have to say, I was attending the C40 conference three, four weeks ago in Copenhagen. That's, you know, the 94 of the biggest cities in the world are fighting climate change and I was mingling there and that resulted in like 20 mayors from around the world contacted me afterwards. So last week I had a meeting with the Paris mayor and next week I'm meeting with the Bristol mayor and in two weeks I have meeting with the LA, Los Angeles mayor. Awesome. He also got elected as the new president of C40. Just saying this because it's really, I can see that cities understand that, you know, this could actually help them a great deal. Absolutely awesome. But how to reach out? I would say the easiest way is to go to the literary, the literary.com. you won't find the perfect website because our focus and all the money we have raised we are putting to build the system not a fantastic website since we're not launched yet you know so we don't the focus has not been built so you won't find a such a great website but you find the information there and how you can contact us perfect so so in that perspective it would work just fine i guess love it and i'll put a link to that in the show notes for anybody who wants to go check that out so they can contact you and i'm so excited uh do you have any any final thoughts about litter or behavioral science or actually that's the funny thing because i'm learning more and more about the behavioral science and it's uh i understand that you have you have like focused on this and this become a part of your life because it's super intriguing right yeah it is And it's so interesting how you can see how we as human species, if you have the right triggers and right things and right framework, we're like, you know, we just go where we're supposed to go. But we have to help people see it. Right. Know which buttons to push and how to move it. Yeah. And I think one thing I would like to say is that I understand and I think you'll probably talk a lot about this. a lot of people, we're not targeting to change 100% of all humanity or all people's behavior, because that would probably not work. Because there is a lot of science saying that like a certain group, they just don't give a damn. At least not about this. And there are some that already are doing this. Now I'm talking about the littering problem. They're sorting, they're not littering, they're doing everything by the book, so perfect. So we shouldn't forget that. A lot of people are doing this great today. But the big group, the big group, that's actually sometimes me, myself, you know, in life, if I, to be honest, it has happened. But since I've been quite annoyed about this, I've tried to be quite good. But anyway, the big group, if we can push them into being more like the ones that's already perfect, by using these incentives that then we can actually solve the problem it doesn't matter if some people still litter i'm pretty sure and the tests show that someone else will then be incentivized to go pick that up where otherwise it wouldn't have been worth the effort yeah when i talk with the mayors of cities that are in emerging countries i met like the mayor of Johannesburg, for example, he was like, he thought whole community would, you know, go crazy because there are so much lottery tickets laying around in his city, you know, meaning trash. Right. And there are a lot and a lot of poor people without jobs. So, of course, this could really be a game changer. Let's hope that. So what I would like to say in the end is if you have any questions, suggestions, ideas, or whatever, or if you want to invest even greater, then reach out. And as we say in our slogan, when litter hits the bins, everybody wins. I love it. So that would be a good ending, I guess. that's the perfect ending. There's nothing more to say. It's perfect. We'll have links in the show notes, like I said. And again, Michael, thank you so much for telling us about the literary and what you're doing there. It's a wonderful, wonderful project. Thank you for having me and good luck with your podcast because I think it's great. Thank you. Appreciate it. And thank you again to Michael Manike for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, this is one of those examples that has stuck with me ever since I first learned about it, which is why I share the literary so often in talks, workshops, episodes, and my books, because it highlights something incredibly important about behavior change. When we want people to do something differently, we often start by trying to convince them to care about it as much as we do and in the same way that we do. But that approach can make behavior change much harder than it needs to be and often darn near impossible. Instead, the literary took a step back and asked a very different question. What is the action we want people to take? And what might actually motivate someone to do that in the moment? They looked for ways to line up with the brain's natural tendencies. And thanks to optimism bias and some other brainy rules, a lottery ticket turned out to be a pretty compelling answer. And what I love about this example is that it reminds us that the motivation doesn't have to be perfect. It isn't all or nothing. and often when you try for all, you get nothing. Someone being motivated by the potential of winning the lottery is actually pretty selfish. They might not care about the environment at all. But if you only get one thing at the end of the day, which is usually the case, the question is, do you want them to care about that thing in the same way that you do or do you just want the bottle in the recycling bin? More often than not, especially in the beginning, the behavior, even a tiny shift, is enough because once that behavior begins, habits can form. This can impact norms and make it so eventually those people may even be more open to learning about the bigger reasons behind the change, though you might not need that either. But the first step is getting the action to happen. And even before that is knowing the action that you want and also then knowing which behavioral principle you want to test to see if you can get that action to actually happen. And that is something I love doing with teams, helping them to understand some of these concepts that are going to apply to the exact goal and project that they have in mind. So you don't have to invest in knowing the hundreds of concepts. I do and can help you with that. This lesson applies far beyond litter and recycling. It applies to marketing, product design, leadership, internal change initiatives, and really any situation where you need people to buy in and take action, which is pretty much everything. So if this example has you thinking about how behavioral science could help your team frame messages, shape behavior, or create better experiences, I'd love to talk with you about workshops, speaking, or training opportunities. The literary is just one of the examples I use when talking about change management and training teams on question storming, one of my very favorite things, and more. If this is something you think would be a fit for your organization or event, or just wanna learn more about, I'd love to hear from you. Please visit thebrainybusiness.com slash contact or email me directly, melina at thebrainybusiness.com to start that conversation. I can't wait to see if we're a fit for each other. As we close out the show, here's a question to ponder. Where might you be trying to convince people to care more when you could instead focus on motivating the behavioral shift you need? Whether it's an answer to that question or something else that stood out to you during the episode, please do come share whatever it is with me on social media. You're going to find me in the show as The Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere. And I'm Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy, as well as links for my top related past episodes, books, ways to get in touch, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com slash 574. And thank you again to Michael Manike for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next time for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful. Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain-friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.