November 23, 2025 • 32 mins
Show Notes: Titi and Zakiya talk to behavioral economist Dr. Dan Ariely to unpack why Black Friday still pulls us in even when we swear we’re “saving.” They dig into the psychology behind sales, scarcity, cart reminders, buy now pay later, and why credit cards numb the pain of paying. They also look at how our “vintage” brains try to navigate money in a world built to separate us from it. If you’ve ever convinced yourself something was “basically free,” this lab is for you.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm t T and I'm Zakiah and this is Dope Labs.
Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore
science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Are you doing Black Friday shopping this year or what?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
No, I'm doing Black Friday saving? Okay, in this economy,
put those dollars back in your pocket. There's only two
of them, but put them back. What about you?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
You know, it's been a long time since I participated
in Black Friday. I usually like to do like the
pre Black Friday sales that they like, you know, game
you on where it's like, oh you get a sneak
peek to our Black Friday sales. Those things get me
every time. But this year, this economy, you know, we
got to think a little bit smarter.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah, well, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
It sounded like think it's smarter, but also maybe dipping
your toe in the waters based on what you're just saying,
tricking myself, you know, doing a bunch of girl math
to say, oh, yeah, I didn't spend any money this
Black Friday, right, this is how it was supposed to be.
I needed this stuff. But you know what our minds
are tricking us all the time. And people may think
there's no science to Black Friday shopping and the deals,
(01:17):
but there is now. I know a long time ago
we knew that Amazon Prime Day was a bus and
we gave up on that right. But for Black Friday,
I still have questions. So let's jump into it.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
What do we know?
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I think we know that Black Friday is a very
special holiday. Can I call it that?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I think so.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
For a lot of folks, people are camping out. I
don't know if they're still fist fighting, but I remember
that they were fist fighting back in the day trying
to get those flat screen TVs.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I think the flat screen TV. If there was an
ornament for America, that's it because it runs on capitalism
and consumerism. Put a flat screen TV on your.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Christmas treet this year.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
I know that Black Friday has often been an economic
indicator or an indicator for what the shopping season is
going to be, what people are willing to spend, And
even as we've seen perse Strings Titan that over time,
people still spend on this day. And we just had
an episode where we talked about the economy, and so
I'm wondering how you know, with this new influx of
(02:18):
what doctor West was calling discouraged workers, so people who
were you know, on the job market, but then you know,
got tired of applying for jobs and so aren't applying anymore.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
How that will impact Black Friday sales? Are those people
saving or are they feeling like, oh, let me spend
during a time where there's more discounts. I don't know
how that psychology works.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
I don't think I know the psychology of any of it,
and I need help because I think I've seen a
lot of the like Doorbusters and the lines you know,
lining up in advance that's gone away, but there are
digital substitutes for that, like where it says twenty three
people have this in their car, and I'm like, I
better hurry up and check out.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Is that a thing? Is that real? Is something wrong
with me?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Every time there's something wrong with both of us.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I think we have to get into it because it
feels like it's a little bit of economics and psychology
tied together.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Mine all my money, money on my mind.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
For today's lab we're looking at Black Friday. And I
know people sometimes think like, oh what I buy is
my business and you know there's no science to it,
but I don't think so we have to look at
like free shipping and there's only three left, Like why.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Do those things hijack our brains?
Speaker 1 (03:35):
And what's happening? Especially when I get an email that
says I left something in my car? It works every time,
it works every time. I'm like that poor little item
I needed.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
So we're here to get some answers about that.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
My name is done. Really, I'm a professor of psychology
and behavior economics at university, and I do research on
human irusianality and just kind of to help us think
about human irrationality. I think about what gets us to
act in ways that we don't know and don't seem
(04:11):
to be logical. Now, I don't mean that they are
not logical, but they're not the standard logic.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
How people behave around spending really varies with a personal person.
I know me as a key, are not spending the same,
We're not spending the same. I'm fast and furious with it.
My friends, she's cold and calculated. But what types of
questions are you answering in your work? Like what can
we learn from your work?
Speaker 4 (04:35):
I try to uncover what is the logic by which
we work, and the logic is often interesting and curious
and not consistent. So for example, you could say, why
would we stand in line for forty five minutes to
get a cone of Ben and Jerry's ice cream? That's
(04:58):
what cost us to dollars. It doesn't make sense rationally,
but when you think about the allure free and so on,
you can understand what it is. So there's a logic
to what we do as human beings, just that the
logic is not the we calculate, we trade off, and
we do we do the writing. So that's that's the
(05:19):
kind of thing that I try to uncover.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
H So this is a study of the human mind
and how it makes decisions.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
My metaphor for the human mind is that it's a
vintage Swiss army knife. Two parts Swiss army knife and vintage.
Let's start with the Swiss army knife part. The Swiss
army knife is kind of okay in lots of things,
but it's not really excellent in anything. It's greatness come
(05:46):
from the fact that there's lots of tools that can
do lots of different things, and our mind is a
little bit like that too, not particularly excellent in anything,
quite okay in lots of things, and we can carry
it with us. It's a vintage Sweet Sarmon knife. And
what I mean by that is that our set of
(06:06):
tools in our mind to deal with the world evolved
in a very different evolutionary period. We were roaming the savannah,
we were dealing with hunting, we were dealing with lions.
Money is a new invention. We were not evolutionary designed
to deal with money. We don't have a detector in
our brain to figure out money. We think about compound
(06:29):
interest and so on. So when we come to deal
with money, we have these ancient tools that are were
never that good.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
I like the vintage Swiss army knife. Yes, metaphor, because
we've talked about anxiety in today's world, like our brains
are not caught up to a cell phone and to
somebody texting you saying can we talk later? That feels
like the snake, you know, it feels like the terror
because we have these old systems. What are the consumer
(06:57):
issues that you think are could be it root costs
or brain but like what's affecting and hurting people the
most right now?
Speaker 4 (07:06):
So you know, money is an amazing invention. It allows
society to move forward in all kinds of unbelievable ways. Right,
if we didn't have money, how society looks like. Right,
money is amazing. But money requires that we think about
opportunity costs. Money requires that we think about now versus later.
(07:30):
Spending now is unbelievably emotional. It really holds us and
we feel like something. We are not good at delaying rewards,
so we end up overspending now, sometimes even taking debt.
That brings us into the second problem, which is we're
(07:54):
not really good at understanding compound interest. In all of
the world, I would say the poverty trap is that
low income individuals take a loan at a high interest
rate and then it's very, very hard to escape. So
those are kind of fundamental about money. They're not about
(08:16):
shopping and so on, but they're fundamentally about money. The
other thing I would say is that we have not
yet figured out the way to make saving fun. Like
think about it. Shopping certainly fun, fun, Saving like it's
(08:37):
this invisible activity, like when was the last time you
went to your friends and you say tity, You wouldn't
believe it. I saved two thousand dollars and I found
a better insurance and I'm paying. It's not part of
the conversation.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
It never is. Yes, And you know what that makes
me think about, based on what you were just saying,
how it's like way more fun to spend now rather
than think about spending later. It makes me think about
the buy now, pay later apps and things like that. Yes,
that is relatively new to our way of spending. There
(09:18):
were things like layaway you would get the wouldn't get
the product till you finished paying. But now you can
get the product you've only paid a little bit, and
then you keep paying until you've paid it off. In
simple terms, what's happening in our brains when we make
a purchase and get to split that into future payments,
and what mechanisms make the buy now, pay later feel
(09:41):
easier than a credit card?
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Ye? So, so what happened with the buy now, pay
later is First of all, the terminology is very good, right.
It doesn't tell you pay much more later. It doesn't
say anything about the interest. It doesn't say buy things
you don't really need and pay for them later. The
(10:07):
world has a vast interest in something that is not
consistent with our best interest. In mind, Every coffee shop
wants to sell you another coffee. Every restaurant want to
sell you another dessert. Every supermarket want to send you
another cook Now you can go to the supermarket with
a plan what's called the shopping list. But the supermarket
(10:31):
also has a plan.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
It does, it does.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
And their plan is not the same as your plan,
and they control the environment. They decide what to put
it hige level and what to put it the checkout.
We live in the world in which people have plans
to part us from our money. And then there's all
kinds of tricks. So let's start with it, like the
(10:55):
most basic trick. The most basic trick is called a sale.
Imagine that there's a shirt for fifty dollars versus another
store the same shirt, and they say this used to
be one hundred dollars and now it's on fifty percent
off and it's fifty dollars. Now why, like, when you
(11:21):
think about sale, a sale, something is it's fifty Why
would you care what it used to cost at some
part time in the history? Right? You shouldn't. You should
say is this shirt worth this price to me? Yes?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Or no?
Speaker 4 (11:36):
Why do we care that it used to be one
thousand dollars and now it's fifty, but we do why
would we do a deal? That's right? That's right. What
happens is that we have a really hard time assessing value.
If I show you a shirt, I say, how much
is it worth? I don't really know, very hard to
(11:59):
figure out. But if it used to be one hundred
dollars and now it's fifty, it's probably a good deal.
So it's kind of a lazy way to compute value
without thinking about how valuable is another show to you. Now,
when you pay for something, you should care about what
it is that you're getting, but we don't. Why it's
(12:22):
very hard to estimate the value of what we're getting,
so we estimate other things, like how much work has
gone into that.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So as a freelancer doing different work, the better I
get at moving through projects, I have people on standby
that I can subcontract out to help.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
I feel like when it took.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
A long time and there was a lot of back
and forth, but really I didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
At that point.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
People were like, oh, you've worked so hard, and now
they're like, you turn this around in twenty four hours.
We charge you this, sir, but also you didn't have
to wait consider this, you know.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
And that's and that's because that's because the question is
you think that people can assess the real value of
your work, but they can't, so so they assess efforts.
So there's this story wait.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
For thinking they can do it, or then from that VNA.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
Because because you know, if you if you go back
to the vintage twist army knife, they are not equipped
with a way to evaluate your work, so they're evaluating
something else. There's a there's this story that Picasso is
sitting on a bench and a woman come and says, Picasso,
(13:51):
I'm a huge fan. Would you draw a picture of
painting of me? And he takes his pen and does
this thing, and in thirty seconds she has this thing
and she looks at it. She said, you know what,
you have captured my essence. I don't know how you
do it, Like there's only one line and you've captured
my essence. He said, how much is it? And it
(14:12):
says it's five hundred dollars. He says five hundred dollars
for thirty seconds. No, no, it's five hundred dollars for thirty
years and thirty seconds.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Yeah, my experience over time.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
That's right. Now, we can say that, but the truth
is it's really hard. Fairness and effort are very much,
deeply embedded in us, and we use them as the
strategy to evaluate things.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
We said a lot about Black Friday and shopping and
spending money, but I feel like not everything can be
completely bad. There's always a little bit of good there, right,
no absolute evil, Like, what's the silver lining.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
On this h chaotic evil? Chaotic good?
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Black Friday is very special. It's one day of the year.
It's one day of the year. Now, imagine that you
went on an expensive meal. Imagine that usually you go
out and you spend one hundred dollars on dinner and
you buy the second chip this morning on the menu.
(15:19):
Imagine that on some Tuesday, at some point you decide
to double your restaurant spending and double the wine. What
are the odds? So it was Tuesday, what's the odds
that the following Tuesday you will not say to yourself,
maybe I'm a two hundred dollars per dinner person, not
(15:40):
one hundred dollars person. So the point I want to
make is, then when we deviate from a regular strategy,
an upscale on a regular Tuesday, there's no guarantee that
we will not do it again and again and again
on the next Tuesday.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
This is what happened to me becoming friends with tt
on Tuesday. She's just she's just led me to a
life of extravagance instead of a.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
One time they go. But imagine that you only met
her and became extravagant with her one day a year. Now,
it would not become a routine. So one of the
things we showed is that when people increased the amount
(16:28):
of spending and quality of their spending on a regular Tuesday,
there's a big chance it would become a habit. When
they do it on a very special day, Oh, I'm
only doing it on my birthday or Valentine's Day or
Black Friday, then it remains constrained. So I think that actually,
(16:52):
you know, we spend too much, we waste, we spend
in lines too much. I mean, there's all kinds of
things to talk about the negative side, but I think
there's also some think protective on saying I'm responsible most
of the year, and I'm going to pick a day
in the year to be less responsible, and because it's
this day, that everybody does on the same day and
(17:14):
so on. It would protect me from being irresponsible throughout
the year.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
I feel like a lot of spending, Like Sophora is
a store that sells makeup and hair stuff and they
have Sephora Day where they say all their prices are
going down, and all of these influencers that now I'm
convinced they're being paid to do these videos, get on
social media and say this is what you should should
(17:41):
buy during the Sephora sale. This is my favorite foundation,
this is my favorite mascara, this is my favorite shampoo,
this is my favorite conditioner. I've listed everything for you.
These are the most amazing products and they're going to
be on discount on Sophora Day. And you see so
many of those videos you start to feel like, oh am,
I going to miss out on the opportunity by the
(18:04):
saying will it be sold out? And so it feels
like with social media and influencer culture, it's making people
have this fear of missing out and then spending money
that they typically wouldn't spend.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
So, just to be clear what we talked about the
benefits of Black Friday, that it doesn't apply to Sepphori day.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
That's right, you tell her.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
And the reason and the reason is that the way
that our mind works is that this is a day
we go a little extra crazy spending, but it's only
on that day. But if you do sphor a day,
it's basically like you just spent on one day of
(18:51):
the year, but there'll be other days in other places.
And you basically are opening yourself up to say I'm
a sucker for special days day.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Now, and they're doing the stories, are doing it often enough.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Every week is a special.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
But let's talk about the thing you described. A UNI
described a version of something that is going away, and
that's called scarcity. You said, it's a day. The next day,
I would feel bad about it. Right, it's basically how
does it work, it says, And there's not a lot
of it, there's just some of it. Whatever is available
(19:31):
will go away. It will not be to the next day.
And scarcity gets us to think in a different way. Right,
if you say, oh, this, this makeup would always be
there at this price, you would say not interested, get
it next time. But this makeup is going tomorrow. Now
(19:51):
you start thinking, what if tomorrow I will decide I
want it and it will be not available. I would
feel terrible. I don't want to feel terrible, so let
me buy it now so that I will not feel terrible.
So scarcity is another really interesting trick. It's called counterfactual thinking.
(20:12):
You say, what if I will want it and it
will not be there? I would say to myself, I
was not careful. I didn't think why I didn't buy it,
and therefore we buy it. I'll give you an example
where this is really strong.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Oh that's what I want to hear about.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
You go and buy a new electronics. Let's say it's
a big screen TV, standard American thing to do on
Black Prides, and the salesperson says, tity, this TV is
not coming with an extended warranty. The warranty is just
for a year. How would you feel if a year
(20:53):
and three days from now, few of this a little
part of the screen did not work so well and
you did not buy the extended warranty? How would you feel?
And you think to yourself, I would feel very stupid. Yes,
I would say, why on that Black Friday didn't I
(21:14):
buy the extended warranty when the person offered it to me?
So you say, you know what at the extended on.
Many of those places make more money on the extended
warranty that they make on the electronic themselves. Because the
electronics we compare, we think about, and so on they
(21:35):
extended warranty. It's kind of an emotional buy on top
of something.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
All this just makes me think about girl math, like
I was talking about before, and so that is the
mental gymnastics that I do that allows me to feel
like spending my money isn't so bad. You know, Like
if I'm returning something and then I get store credit
and I get something else with that store credit, that's
something else that I just bought is free.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Okay, that's a direct line.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
That's not how that works.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
One other interesting place where we do mistakes with money
is what's called the pain of paying. So imagine that
tonight you go to dinner. Imagine expensive dinner that's a
two hundred dollars and you can either pay with cash
or with credit card, which one would feel worse.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Cash Why, I don't know, I have no idea, but
it does.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
It turns out that the thing that is worse with
cash is the timing of the payment and the consumption
that when we pay with a credit card, we pay
some time later. When we prepay, we buy like a
gift certificate, we pay way in advance. If you go
to a restaurant with the gift certificate, it feels great.
(23:03):
It feels free. When when you pay later it doesn't
feel as bad. Paying at the time of consumption feels
very bad.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Now.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
The pain of paying is about this idea that when
we part with money, it's not just about opportunity costs
and so on. There's some almost like a moral cost.
And the more cost has to do with how do
we feel at the moment of spending. So things like
credit cards are protecting us from feeling bad. Apple pay,
(23:39):
Google Pay. Even worse, we don't even understand what work
what we're spending. So a good piece of advice for
Black Friday is to say, make a plan of what
you want to buy. That's number one, right, Buying things
is fine. Just make sure it's what you want, not
what somebody else wants. And then and then the second
(24:02):
thing is take the amount of money that you want
to take out and spend that amount. Wow, right, make
sure you don't go over it.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
I like that.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
That's that's very very important because the credit card is
kind of numbing the pain of pain. Yes, And what
you want to do is you want to feel the
pain of pain. You want to say the pain of
pain is basically getting anything. Do I really want this
or not? You want that?
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Thought?
Speaker 4 (24:35):
So that's also an important element, like the payment method
has an impact on how we feel about the payment.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
There are always viral videos and then the recaps with
strong opinions on going out to eat with a group
and what happens when the bill arrives, because some folks
don't want to split the bill evenly because they're on
a budget, and they're like, I only had an appetizer
and water and it if you going out with tit,
she's having lobster the entree as the appetizer and a
(25:05):
cocktail okay, and sometimes more than one.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
If it's more than one, help us.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
We're gonna have fun tonight.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
But why do people get all cagy and weird and
talking about they don't want to be friends?
Speaker 3 (25:16):
And somebody ordered too mini apps?
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Like what is it about meal time and the bill
that makes us turn on each other?
Speaker 2 (25:23):
You're not yourself when you're hungry or after you just
ate it things.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
When we do research, we try to isolate every element,
and in real life many times there are multiple elements
at the same time. So this story starts with escalating spending. Yes,
you think you'll come to do appetizers, and restaurants are
good at that, right, And if there's alcohol, inhibition goes
(25:50):
down and you say, oh, yes, So restaurants are excellent
in getting us not to think about rices and just
to think about food. And there's a social element of
somebody's ordering, and when it's unclear who is paying for it,
(26:11):
there's like shying away from responsibility. Right, it's like a
mob behavior. Who is responsible? I don't really know who
ordered all of this, And because you didn't say everybody,
it's equals splitting or something that people are kind of.
(26:32):
It's like a mob behavior basically. So when it's the
same group of friend going, I really like the approach
of one person buying for everybody and alternating who is
the person buying. If she would have said to people,
send me the money your share, people would have because
she paid, and we are kind of wired for reciprocity,
(26:55):
it could be very hard to walk from her.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Is there anything that you feel like this is one
piece that people need to know like even if it's
not Black Friday, but just holiday vibes, Like we get
in a holiday spirit and that goes longer than one day.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Like is there anything you want people to be thinking about?
Speaker 4 (27:14):
So there are two other things I want people to
think about as we get closer to the holidays. The
first thing is that it is better to save for
dis questionary spending than to borrow. So if you plan
for the holiday season, try to save the money so
(27:35):
you have it in advance and then spend it rather
than spend it and then hope to pay it later. Now,
the last thing I want to say is, you know,
we talked about the pain of pain. One of the
things that the pain of pain teaches us is also
something about what is a good gift? So the question
(27:58):
of what is a good gift, there's lots of is
to think about it, but one way that comes from
the pain of pain is the good gift is a
gift that somebody wants but feel guilty buying for themselves.
So imagine you walk down the street and you see
a hat and it's a beautiful hat, and you're not
(28:21):
the head person. You never had the hat, but you're curious.
You go in the store, you put it on your head.
It's beautiful, you like the color of the shape, but
you look at the price tag and it's crazy expensive,
and you said to yourself, I'm not the had person.
I'm not going to buy this hat. And you get
home and you find out that your significant other bought
(28:42):
you that exact head from your joint checking account. How
do you feel? Most people say I feel gratitude. I
don't say to her, honey, you know I looked at
this hat and decide not to buy it. Please return
it to the store and put the money back into
a checking count. Example for something that people want but
feel guilty about buying, and a good you know, like
(29:06):
between friends, Like I don't need to give my friends money,
like I wouldn't directly deposit money into the checking account.
I want to do something for them that they would
do themselves. So something that people feel guilty about.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Tit does this for me very nice.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
I do it for all the people that I love.
I'm like, I wouldn't need this for me, but here's
five hundred dollars for a spot.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
Ay when we did a study on gifts, and what
we learned was that gift givers don't want to take risks,
but the people who get the gifts often wish that
people took more more risks. And I think, you know,
(29:55):
if I give you a gift, I want you to
think about me. I want that gift to be a
mechanism for us to start caring more about each other.
I'm not giving you a gift because you can't. You
don't have enough money to buy a bottle of wine,
and I need to subsidize that. So real gifts, not
gifts that you know, you eat a bar of chocolate
and it goes away. Real gifts, it takes a risk.
(30:20):
You buy somebody hat, you buy them a drum set,
you get them a chair. It's risky, yeah, but the
risk has payoff in terms of friendship.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
I found this so interesting because it really made me
rethink the way that I think about spending, Like maybe
I should stop doing all this girl math and really
just save my money. And have you know these special
days where I'm spending rather than making every day a
special day?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Yeah, you know, I think every time we have an
episode that shows me how the brain betrays me. My
brain doesn't know what to do with money, of course,
you know, and we didn't even get into the like
emotional ties with money as much as we could have.
There's so much there. There's so much also historical things
like what you learned from your family, what your friends do.
(31:13):
It's expensive to be friends with t T y'all.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Don't lie. It's very expensive to be as the kid's friend. Listen,
it is very expensive. You must like carry on, we're
just peasing a poe.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
I want to know you know, now that we know
Black Friday isn't so bad. I want to hear from
our listeners like, what are y'all getting? Are you getting anything?
What's your take? Is there a special thing you've been
saving up for all year? Have you seen a really
good deal? Do you think good deals still exists?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
And also send me the links in the DM because
maybe I want that thing too.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
I've learned nothing, nothing, y'all.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
You see how hard it is to change your mind.
You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs.
Podcast TT is on X and Instagram, at d R
Underscore T.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
S h O, and you can find Zakiya at z
said so.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Dope Labs is a production of Lamanada Media.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our producer is
Issara Acevez. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed
by James farber Lamanada Media's Vice President of Partnerships and
Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart Podcast is
Katrina Norbel.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Marketing lead is Alison Kanter.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Original music composed and produced by Takayasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura,
with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive
produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Watte.
I'm t T and I'm Zakiah and this is Dope Labs.
Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore
science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Are you doing Black Friday shopping this year or what?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
No, I'm doing Black Friday saving? Okay, in this economy,
put those dollars back in your pocket. There's only two
of them, but put them back. What about you?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
You know, it's been a long time since I participated
in Black Friday. I usually like to do like the
pre Black Friday sales that they like, you know, game
you on where it's like, oh you get a sneak
peek to our Black Friday sales. Those things get me
every time. But this year, this economy, you know, we
got to think a little bit smarter.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah, well, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
It sounded like think it's smarter, but also maybe dipping
your toe in the waters based on what you're just saying,
tricking myself, you know, doing a bunch of girl math
to say, oh, yeah, I didn't spend any money this
Black Friday, right, this is how it was supposed to be.
I needed this stuff. But you know what our minds
are tricking us all the time. And people may think
there's no science to Black Friday shopping and the deals,
(01:17):
but there is now. I know a long time ago
we knew that Amazon Prime Day was a bus and
we gave up on that right. But for Black Friday,
I still have questions. So let's jump into it.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
What do we know?
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I think we know that Black Friday is a very
special holiday. Can I call it that?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I think so.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
For a lot of folks, people are camping out. I
don't know if they're still fist fighting, but I remember
that they were fist fighting back in the day trying
to get those flat screen TVs.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I think the flat screen TV. If there was an
ornament for America, that's it because it runs on capitalism
and consumerism. Put a flat screen TV on your.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Christmas treet this year.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
I know that Black Friday has often been an economic
indicator or an indicator for what the shopping season is
going to be, what people are willing to spend, And
even as we've seen perse Strings Titan that over time,
people still spend on this day. And we just had
an episode where we talked about the economy, and so
I'm wondering how you know, with this new influx of
(02:18):
what doctor West was calling discouraged workers, so people who
were you know, on the job market, but then you know,
got tired of applying for jobs and so aren't applying anymore.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
How that will impact Black Friday sales? Are those people
saving or are they feeling like, oh, let me spend
during a time where there's more discounts. I don't know
how that psychology works.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
I don't think I know the psychology of any of it,
and I need help because I think I've seen a
lot of the like Doorbusters and the lines you know,
lining up in advance that's gone away, but there are
digital substitutes for that, like where it says twenty three
people have this in their car, and I'm like, I
better hurry up and check out.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Is that a thing? Is that real? Is something wrong
with me?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Every time there's something wrong with both of us.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I think we have to get into it because it
feels like it's a little bit of economics and psychology
tied together.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Mine all my money, money on my mind.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
For today's lab we're looking at Black Friday. And I
know people sometimes think like, oh what I buy is
my business and you know there's no science to it,
but I don't think so we have to look at
like free shipping and there's only three left, Like why.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Do those things hijack our brains?
Speaker 1 (03:35):
And what's happening? Especially when I get an email that
says I left something in my car? It works every time,
it works every time. I'm like that poor little item
I needed.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
So we're here to get some answers about that.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
My name is done. Really, I'm a professor of psychology
and behavior economics at university, and I do research on
human irusianality and just kind of to help us think
about human irrationality. I think about what gets us to
act in ways that we don't know and don't seem
(04:11):
to be logical. Now, I don't mean that they are
not logical, but they're not the standard logic.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
How people behave around spending really varies with a personal person.
I know me as a key, are not spending the same,
We're not spending the same. I'm fast and furious with it.
My friends, she's cold and calculated. But what types of
questions are you answering in your work? Like what can
we learn from your work?
Speaker 4 (04:35):
I try to uncover what is the logic by which
we work, and the logic is often interesting and curious
and not consistent. So for example, you could say, why
would we stand in line for forty five minutes to
get a cone of Ben and Jerry's ice cream? That's
(04:58):
what cost us to dollars. It doesn't make sense rationally,
but when you think about the allure free and so on,
you can understand what it is. So there's a logic
to what we do as human beings, just that the
logic is not the we calculate, we trade off, and
we do we do the writing. So that's that's the
(05:19):
kind of thing that I try to uncover.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
H So this is a study of the human mind
and how it makes decisions.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
My metaphor for the human mind is that it's a
vintage Swiss army knife. Two parts Swiss army knife and vintage.
Let's start with the Swiss army knife part. The Swiss
army knife is kind of okay in lots of things,
but it's not really excellent in anything. It's greatness come
(05:46):
from the fact that there's lots of tools that can
do lots of different things, and our mind is a
little bit like that too, not particularly excellent in anything,
quite okay in lots of things, and we can carry
it with us. It's a vintage Sweet Sarmon knife. And
what I mean by that is that our set of
(06:06):
tools in our mind to deal with the world evolved
in a very different evolutionary period. We were roaming the savannah,
we were dealing with hunting, we were dealing with lions.
Money is a new invention. We were not evolutionary designed
to deal with money. We don't have a detector in
our brain to figure out money. We think about compound
(06:29):
interest and so on. So when we come to deal
with money, we have these ancient tools that are were
never that good.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
I like the vintage Swiss army knife. Yes, metaphor, because
we've talked about anxiety in today's world, like our brains
are not caught up to a cell phone and to
somebody texting you saying can we talk later? That feels
like the snake, you know, it feels like the terror
because we have these old systems. What are the consumer
(06:57):
issues that you think are could be it root costs
or brain but like what's affecting and hurting people the
most right now?
Speaker 4 (07:06):
So you know, money is an amazing invention. It allows
society to move forward in all kinds of unbelievable ways. Right,
if we didn't have money, how society looks like. Right,
money is amazing. But money requires that we think about
opportunity costs. Money requires that we think about now versus later.
(07:30):
Spending now is unbelievably emotional. It really holds us and
we feel like something. We are not good at delaying rewards,
so we end up overspending now, sometimes even taking debt.
That brings us into the second problem, which is we're
(07:54):
not really good at understanding compound interest. In all of
the world, I would say the poverty trap is that
low income individuals take a loan at a high interest
rate and then it's very, very hard to escape. So
those are kind of fundamental about money. They're not about
(08:16):
shopping and so on, but they're fundamentally about money. The
other thing I would say is that we have not
yet figured out the way to make saving fun. Like
think about it. Shopping certainly fun, fun, Saving like it's
(08:37):
this invisible activity, like when was the last time you
went to your friends and you say tity, You wouldn't
believe it. I saved two thousand dollars and I found
a better insurance and I'm paying. It's not part of
the conversation.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
It never is. Yes, And you know what that makes
me think about, based on what you were just saying,
how it's like way more fun to spend now rather
than think about spending later. It makes me think about
the buy now, pay later apps and things like that. Yes,
that is relatively new to our way of spending. There
(09:18):
were things like layaway you would get the wouldn't get
the product till you finished paying. But now you can
get the product you've only paid a little bit, and
then you keep paying until you've paid it off. In
simple terms, what's happening in our brains when we make
a purchase and get to split that into future payments,
and what mechanisms make the buy now, pay later feel
(09:41):
easier than a credit card?
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Ye? So, so what happened with the buy now, pay
later is First of all, the terminology is very good, right.
It doesn't tell you pay much more later. It doesn't
say anything about the interest. It doesn't say buy things
you don't really need and pay for them later. The
(10:07):
world has a vast interest in something that is not
consistent with our best interest. In mind, Every coffee shop
wants to sell you another coffee. Every restaurant want to
sell you another dessert. Every supermarket want to send you
another cook Now you can go to the supermarket with
a plan what's called the shopping list. But the supermarket
(10:31):
also has a plan.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
It does, it does.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
And their plan is not the same as your plan,
and they control the environment. They decide what to put
it hige level and what to put it the checkout.
We live in the world in which people have plans
to part us from our money. And then there's all
kinds of tricks. So let's start with it, like the
(10:55):
most basic trick. The most basic trick is called a sale.
Imagine that there's a shirt for fifty dollars versus another
store the same shirt, and they say this used to
be one hundred dollars and now it's on fifty percent
off and it's fifty dollars. Now why, like, when you
(11:21):
think about sale, a sale, something is it's fifty Why
would you care what it used to cost at some
part time in the history? Right? You shouldn't. You should
say is this shirt worth this price to me? Yes?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Or no?
Speaker 4 (11:36):
Why do we care that it used to be one
thousand dollars and now it's fifty, but we do why
would we do a deal? That's right? That's right. What
happens is that we have a really hard time assessing value.
If I show you a shirt, I say, how much
is it worth? I don't really know, very hard to
(11:59):
figure out. But if it used to be one hundred
dollars and now it's fifty, it's probably a good deal.
So it's kind of a lazy way to compute value
without thinking about how valuable is another show to you. Now,
when you pay for something, you should care about what
it is that you're getting, but we don't. Why it's
(12:22):
very hard to estimate the value of what we're getting,
so we estimate other things, like how much work has
gone into that.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So as a freelancer doing different work, the better I
get at moving through projects, I have people on standby
that I can subcontract out to help.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
I feel like when it took.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
A long time and there was a lot of back
and forth, but really I didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
At that point.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
People were like, oh, you've worked so hard, and now
they're like, you turn this around in twenty four hours.
We charge you this, sir, but also you didn't have
to wait consider this, you know.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
And that's and that's because that's because the question is
you think that people can assess the real value of
your work, but they can't, so so they assess efforts.
So there's this story wait.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
For thinking they can do it, or then from that VNA.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
Because because you know, if you if you go back
to the vintage twist army knife, they are not equipped
with a way to evaluate your work, so they're evaluating
something else. There's a there's this story that Picasso is
sitting on a bench and a woman come and says, Picasso,
(13:51):
I'm a huge fan. Would you draw a picture of
painting of me? And he takes his pen and does
this thing, and in thirty seconds she has this thing
and she looks at it. She said, you know what,
you have captured my essence. I don't know how you
do it, Like there's only one line and you've captured
my essence. He said, how much is it? And it
(14:12):
says it's five hundred dollars. He says five hundred dollars
for thirty seconds. No, no, it's five hundred dollars for thirty
years and thirty seconds.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Yeah, my experience over time.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
That's right. Now, we can say that, but the truth
is it's really hard. Fairness and effort are very much,
deeply embedded in us, and we use them as the
strategy to evaluate things.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
We said a lot about Black Friday and shopping and
spending money, but I feel like not everything can be
completely bad. There's always a little bit of good there, right,
no absolute evil, Like, what's the silver lining.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
On this h chaotic evil? Chaotic good?
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Black Friday is very special. It's one day of the year.
It's one day of the year. Now, imagine that you
went on an expensive meal. Imagine that usually you go
out and you spend one hundred dollars on dinner and
you buy the second chip this morning on the menu.
(15:19):
Imagine that on some Tuesday, at some point you decide
to double your restaurant spending and double the wine. What
are the odds? So it was Tuesday, what's the odds
that the following Tuesday you will not say to yourself,
maybe I'm a two hundred dollars per dinner person, not
(15:40):
one hundred dollars person. So the point I want to
make is, then when we deviate from a regular strategy,
an upscale on a regular Tuesday, there's no guarantee that
we will not do it again and again and again
on the next Tuesday.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
This is what happened to me becoming friends with tt
on Tuesday. She's just she's just led me to a
life of extravagance instead of a.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
One time they go. But imagine that you only met
her and became extravagant with her one day a year. Now,
it would not become a routine. So one of the
things we showed is that when people increased the amount
(16:28):
of spending and quality of their spending on a regular Tuesday,
there's a big chance it would become a habit. When
they do it on a very special day, Oh, I'm
only doing it on my birthday or Valentine's Day or
Black Friday, then it remains constrained. So I think that actually,
(16:52):
you know, we spend too much, we waste, we spend
in lines too much. I mean, there's all kinds of
things to talk about the negative side, but I think
there's also some think protective on saying I'm responsible most
of the year, and I'm going to pick a day
in the year to be less responsible, and because it's
this day, that everybody does on the same day and
(17:14):
so on. It would protect me from being irresponsible throughout
the year.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
I feel like a lot of spending, Like Sophora is
a store that sells makeup and hair stuff and they
have Sephora Day where they say all their prices are
going down, and all of these influencers that now I'm
convinced they're being paid to do these videos, get on
social media and say this is what you should should
(17:41):
buy during the Sephora sale. This is my favorite foundation,
this is my favorite mascara, this is my favorite shampoo,
this is my favorite conditioner. I've listed everything for you.
These are the most amazing products and they're going to
be on discount on Sophora Day. And you see so
many of those videos you start to feel like, oh am,
I going to miss out on the opportunity by the
(18:04):
saying will it be sold out? And so it feels
like with social media and influencer culture, it's making people
have this fear of missing out and then spending money
that they typically wouldn't spend.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
So, just to be clear what we talked about the
benefits of Black Friday, that it doesn't apply to Sepphori day.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
That's right, you tell her.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
And the reason and the reason is that the way
that our mind works is that this is a day
we go a little extra crazy spending, but it's only
on that day. But if you do sphor a day,
it's basically like you just spent on one day of
(18:51):
the year, but there'll be other days in other places.
And you basically are opening yourself up to say I'm
a sucker for special days day.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Now, and they're doing the stories, are doing it often enough.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Every week is a special.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
But let's talk about the thing you described. A UNI
described a version of something that is going away, and
that's called scarcity. You said, it's a day. The next day,
I would feel bad about it. Right, it's basically how
does it work, it says, And there's not a lot
of it, there's just some of it. Whatever is available
(19:31):
will go away. It will not be to the next day.
And scarcity gets us to think in a different way. Right,
if you say, oh, this, this makeup would always be
there at this price, you would say not interested, get
it next time. But this makeup is going tomorrow. Now
(19:51):
you start thinking, what if tomorrow I will decide I
want it and it will be not available. I would
feel terrible. I don't want to feel terrible, so let
me buy it now so that I will not feel terrible.
So scarcity is another really interesting trick. It's called counterfactual thinking.
(20:12):
You say, what if I will want it and it
will not be there? I would say to myself, I
was not careful. I didn't think why I didn't buy it,
and therefore we buy it. I'll give you an example
where this is really strong.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Oh that's what I want to hear about.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
You go and buy a new electronics. Let's say it's
a big screen TV, standard American thing to do on
Black Prides, and the salesperson says, tity, this TV is
not coming with an extended warranty. The warranty is just
for a year. How would you feel if a year
(20:53):
and three days from now, few of this a little
part of the screen did not work so well and
you did not buy the extended warranty? How would you feel?
And you think to yourself, I would feel very stupid. Yes,
I would say, why on that Black Friday didn't I
(21:14):
buy the extended warranty when the person offered it to me?
So you say, you know what at the extended on.
Many of those places make more money on the extended
warranty that they make on the electronic themselves. Because the
electronics we compare, we think about, and so on they
(21:35):
extended warranty. It's kind of an emotional buy on top
of something.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
All this just makes me think about girl math, like
I was talking about before, and so that is the
mental gymnastics that I do that allows me to feel
like spending my money isn't so bad. You know, Like
if I'm returning something and then I get store credit
and I get something else with that store credit, that's
something else that I just bought is free.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Okay, that's a direct line.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
That's not how that works.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
One other interesting place where we do mistakes with money
is what's called the pain of paying. So imagine that
tonight you go to dinner. Imagine expensive dinner that's a
two hundred dollars and you can either pay with cash
or with credit card, which one would feel worse.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Cash Why, I don't know, I have no idea, but
it does.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
It turns out that the thing that is worse with
cash is the timing of the payment and the consumption
that when we pay with a credit card, we pay
some time later. When we prepay, we buy like a
gift certificate, we pay way in advance. If you go
to a restaurant with the gift certificate, it feels great.
(23:03):
It feels free. When when you pay later it doesn't
feel as bad. Paying at the time of consumption feels
very bad.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Now.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
The pain of paying is about this idea that when
we part with money, it's not just about opportunity costs
and so on. There's some almost like a moral cost.
And the more cost has to do with how do
we feel at the moment of spending. So things like
credit cards are protecting us from feeling bad. Apple pay,
(23:39):
Google Pay. Even worse, we don't even understand what work
what we're spending. So a good piece of advice for
Black Friday is to say, make a plan of what
you want to buy. That's number one, right, Buying things
is fine. Just make sure it's what you want, not
what somebody else wants. And then and then the second
(24:02):
thing is take the amount of money that you want
to take out and spend that amount. Wow, right, make
sure you don't go over it.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
I like that.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
That's that's very very important because the credit card is
kind of numbing the pain of pain. Yes, And what
you want to do is you want to feel the
pain of pain. You want to say the pain of
pain is basically getting anything. Do I really want this
or not? You want that?
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Thought?
Speaker 4 (24:35):
So that's also an important element, like the payment method
has an impact on how we feel about the payment.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
There are always viral videos and then the recaps with
strong opinions on going out to eat with a group
and what happens when the bill arrives, because some folks
don't want to split the bill evenly because they're on
a budget, and they're like, I only had an appetizer
and water and it if you going out with tit,
she's having lobster the entree as the appetizer and a
(25:05):
cocktail okay, and sometimes more than one.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
If it's more than one, help us.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
We're gonna have fun tonight.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
But why do people get all cagy and weird and
talking about they don't want to be friends?
Speaker 3 (25:16):
And somebody ordered too mini apps?
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Like what is it about meal time and the bill
that makes us turn on each other?
Speaker 2 (25:23):
You're not yourself when you're hungry or after you just
ate it things.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
When we do research, we try to isolate every element,
and in real life many times there are multiple elements
at the same time. So this story starts with escalating spending. Yes,
you think you'll come to do appetizers, and restaurants are
good at that, right, And if there's alcohol, inhibition goes
(25:50):
down and you say, oh, yes, So restaurants are excellent
in getting us not to think about rices and just
to think about food. And there's a social element of
somebody's ordering, and when it's unclear who is paying for it,
(26:11):
there's like shying away from responsibility. Right, it's like a
mob behavior. Who is responsible? I don't really know who
ordered all of this, And because you didn't say everybody,
it's equals splitting or something that people are kind of.
(26:32):
It's like a mob behavior basically. So when it's the
same group of friend going, I really like the approach
of one person buying for everybody and alternating who is
the person buying. If she would have said to people,
send me the money your share, people would have because
she paid, and we are kind of wired for reciprocity,
(26:55):
it could be very hard to walk from her.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Is there anything that you feel like this is one
piece that people need to know like even if it's
not Black Friday, but just holiday vibes, Like we get
in a holiday spirit and that goes longer than one day.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Like is there anything you want people to be thinking about?
Speaker 4 (27:14):
So there are two other things I want people to
think about as we get closer to the holidays. The
first thing is that it is better to save for
dis questionary spending than to borrow. So if you plan
for the holiday season, try to save the money so
(27:35):
you have it in advance and then spend it rather
than spend it and then hope to pay it later. Now,
the last thing I want to say is, you know,
we talked about the pain of pain. One of the
things that the pain of pain teaches us is also
something about what is a good gift? So the question
(27:58):
of what is a good gift, there's lots of is
to think about it, but one way that comes from
the pain of pain is the good gift is a
gift that somebody wants but feel guilty buying for themselves.
So imagine you walk down the street and you see
a hat and it's a beautiful hat, and you're not
(28:21):
the head person. You never had the hat, but you're curious.
You go in the store, you put it on your head.
It's beautiful, you like the color of the shape, but
you look at the price tag and it's crazy expensive,
and you said to yourself, I'm not the had person.
I'm not going to buy this hat. And you get
home and you find out that your significant other bought
(28:42):
you that exact head from your joint checking account. How
do you feel? Most people say I feel gratitude. I
don't say to her, honey, you know I looked at
this hat and decide not to buy it. Please return
it to the store and put the money back into
a checking count. Example for something that people want but
feel guilty about buying, and a good you know, like
(29:06):
between friends, Like I don't need to give my friends money,
like I wouldn't directly deposit money into the checking account.
I want to do something for them that they would
do themselves. So something that people feel guilty about.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Tit does this for me very nice.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
I do it for all the people that I love.
I'm like, I wouldn't need this for me, but here's
five hundred dollars for a spot.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
Ay when we did a study on gifts, and what
we learned was that gift givers don't want to take risks,
but the people who get the gifts often wish that
people took more more risks. And I think, you know,
(29:55):
if I give you a gift, I want you to
think about me. I want that gift to be a
mechanism for us to start caring more about each other.
I'm not giving you a gift because you can't. You
don't have enough money to buy a bottle of wine,
and I need to subsidize that. So real gifts, not
gifts that you know, you eat a bar of chocolate
and it goes away. Real gifts, it takes a risk.
(30:20):
You buy somebody hat, you buy them a drum set,
you get them a chair. It's risky, yeah, but the
risk has payoff in terms of friendship.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
I found this so interesting because it really made me
rethink the way that I think about spending, Like maybe
I should stop doing all this girl math and really
just save my money. And have you know these special
days where I'm spending rather than making every day a
special day?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Yeah, you know, I think every time we have an
episode that shows me how the brain betrays me. My
brain doesn't know what to do with money, of course,
you know, and we didn't even get into the like
emotional ties with money as much as we could have.
There's so much there. There's so much also historical things
like what you learned from your family, what your friends do.
(31:13):
It's expensive to be friends with t T y'all.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Don't lie. It's very expensive to be as the kid's friend. Listen,
it is very expensive. You must like carry on, we're
just peasing a poe.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
I want to know you know, now that we know
Black Friday isn't so bad. I want to hear from
our listeners like, what are y'all getting? Are you getting anything?
What's your take? Is there a special thing you've been
saving up for all year? Have you seen a really
good deal? Do you think good deals still exists?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
And also send me the links in the DM because
maybe I want that thing too.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
I've learned nothing, nothing, y'all.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
You see how hard it is to change your mind.
You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs.
Podcast TT is on X and Instagram, at d R
Underscore T.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
S h O, and you can find Zakiya at z
said so.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Dope Labs is a production of Lamanada Media.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our producer is
Issara Acevez. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed
by James farber Lamanada Media's Vice President of Partnerships and
Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart Podcast is
Katrina Norbel.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Marketing lead is Alison Kanter.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Original music composed and produced by Takayasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura,
with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive
produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Watte.
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