Humor That Works with Drew Tarvin

Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.

Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr. Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”

To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.

Now, here’s Roger.

Roger Dooley:     Welcome to Brainfluence, I’m Roger Dooley. Our guest this week is an engineer, which means he probably knows what a Venn diagram is, you know those diagrams with the circles that intersect with each other. He’s also a comedian. Back to the Venn diagram, if you have a circle for engineers and one for comedians, the intersection is probably really small, in fact maybe just one person small. If it is, that person would be Andrew Tarvin. He claims he’s the first humor engineer, and he trains individuals and businesses to use humor to get better results in the workplace. He’s worked with companies like Microsoft and the FBI, an organization known everywhere for its sense of humor. Drew’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal and Fast Company, and is the author of the new book Humor That Works: The Missing Skill for Success and Happiness at Work. Welcome to the show, Drew.

Andrew Tarvin:    Well, thank you so much for having me, and you’re right, I do love me some Venn diagrams.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, well I just couldn’t resist that thing of, got to be an impossibly small subset of people. I mean, I’ve known funny engineers, but most of those funny engineers are more funny in the peculiar sense rather than the humorous sense.

Andrew Tarvin:    Yeah, absolutely.

Roger Dooley:     Just saying. I might be one of those too, you never know.

Andrew Tarvin:    Yeah, for sure. It’s actually an interesting intersection between engineering and humor, because I think there’s actually some overlap that people don’t recognize. Like I think of humor in a way as sometimes like a logic problem, and we as engineers like solving problems, and so in a way, having that engineering mindset can help with developing and/or delivering humor.

Roger Dooley:     Really? Well, that’s good. That gives hope for us engineers everywhere. It seems like usually engineer humor is kind of geeky though, you know? Pranks like disassembling the Dean’s care and reassembling it on building roof or something like that, or in his office. How did you get to where you are today?

Andrew Tarvin:    Well, we’ll start with the engineering side, and I’ve always been an engineer. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with efficiency, or really since before I can remember, because I was born three weeks early, so apparently even in the womb I was like, “I don’t need a full nine months. I’m ready to go right now, mom.” I’ve always been focused on efficiency.

Roger Dooley:     I’m sure your mom appreciated that.

Andrew Tarvin:    Yep, exactly. She was like, “Yeah, get him out a little bit sooner.” As you mentioned, my full name is Andrew, but I go by Drew because it’s more efficient, four letters, one syllable. Always been obsessed with efficiency, so I went to Ohio State, got a degree in computer science and engineering, spent time at Proctor and Gamble as an IT project manager, so that’s the engineering background. The comedy background started at Ohio State. My best friend wanted to start an improv comedy group, needed people, and basically forced me to join.

What I didn’t have in comedy skill, I made up for in comedy project management. I brought the engineering mindset to it. I was like, “All right, if we’re going to do a group, then we’re going to meet three times a week and we’re going to practice those three times, we’ll also going to have a business meeting every Monday. We’re going to film all of our shows and go back and watch it as a game tape.” That was kind of my introduction into humor, and I started to realize what I was learning as an improviser and standup comedian was actually helping me with the hardest resource that I ever had to manage and work with at PNG, which was other humans.

Roger Dooley:     I’ve heard that improv is often recommended for leaders, actually just about anybody, presenters, simply because it enables you to think in a quick and creative way. Would you agree with that?

Andrew Tarvin:    Absolutely I agree with that. I know Al Norda, who you’ve had on the show before, runs a center in Long Island that uses a lot of improv to teach communication skills to scientists and other groups, because the beauty of improv is that, like you said, not only does it help develop the skill of thinking on your feet, reacting a little bit more, building off of ideas, being more present. But the cool thing that I like about it and the reason why we use it in a lot of our programs is that it also gives you a chance to practice the skill that you’re talking about. It’s sometimes so difficult to find safe environments where you can practice how do you listen more effectively, how do you lead in these ways, and improv gives you a chance to practice that skill in a fun, effective way.

Roger Dooley:     Makes a lot of sense. First, Drew, congrats on the book. It’s really a fun read, and I think even people who would never, or rarely at least, open a business book and enjoy the the stories and the humor. One thing that surprised me, early in the book you talk about a trillion dollars per year in lost productivity. In my new book, Friction, I talk about a three trillion dollar number. Mine is due to excess management, bureaucracy and bad processes, coming from a Harvard Business Review article. Tell me about your trillion dollar number and what that’s composed of.

Andrew Tarvin:    The trillion dollar number, which I think you’re spot on, it’s probably even larger than that, but the trillion dollar number that I speak to is kind of the culmination of three key areas. One is disengagement, so the estimate for the cost of disengaged employees, which they say is about 70% of employees are disengaged at their work, and that leads to about 500 billion dollars in lost productivity in terms of people, do they actually show up, do they care about being there, is there absenteeism, is there presenteeism, where people are actually there but not actually doing all that much work. There’s an additional kind of 311 billion that’s related to the idea of healthcare costs, because of increase in stress and increase in terms of the hard direct costs of around 68 billion dollars where just people who are more stressed in the workplace have a more likelihood, they have more challenges in health.

I don’t know this, do you consider yourself a type A person?

Roger Dooley:     Yes, I would say so.

Andrew Tarvin:    I would say I’m type A as well, and one of the fascinating things that I found when researching the book was that the type A distinction was originally created for people who were at higher risk for heart disease.

Roger Dooley:     So it’s not a good thing to be a type A, necessarily.

Andrew Tarvin:    Right, exactly. We’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m type A, I’m ambitious.” And it’s like, well, it also means you might die sooner. But it’s because people who are ambitious, who have that increased stress, if they’re not relieving that stress there’s an increased cost there. There’s also a cost for things like turnover. The trillion dollar problem is really, and what we say in the book, is that it’s in how we work. The current way of working isn’t actually working, and so what we’re proposing is an evolution in terms of how we think about work, because it used to be that work should feel like work. When we thought about work, it’s a place that we physically go to, we leave it there when it’s done, we have this work life balance theoretically, and whether you enjoy it or not isn’t important, it’s much more about it’s putting food on the table.

But now with the amount of time that we’re spending at work and how work has evolved, and how our emotions impact our ability to get work done, how we do our work becomes very important.

Roger Dooley:     I think to some degree, we’re addressing the same problem in different ways, and that’s employee disengagement. I cite some of the same numbers that you do in my book, and part of my solution is eliminating tasks that really don’t serve the objective of a company, they don’t help the customer, they aren’t interesting for the person doing them, but because those are the rules, the processes, or whatever they have to be done. It’s very demotivating for people. You are looking at that same kind of disengagement, but from a different standpoint, that by addressing some of the emotional aspects using humor, you can work on that. Which I think is great, because I don’t think there’s a single approach for everything.

Andrew Tarvin:    Right, I think both are absolutely needed. Both in terms of process and the what of work that we’re doing in the workplace, and also the how. Understanding and managing the human that’s actually doing those tasks. I completely agree that both are needed.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. You know, specifically in my book I avoid interpersonal friction, because sometimes when you talk about friction at work, they immediately think of the toxic boss or the coworker who’s a real jerk and obnoxious, but at the very start of the book I say, “We’re not going to talk about that.” But it seems to me that in the concept of your book, humor is one way to eliminate or at least reduce that kind of friction. Do you see humor as sort of a social lubricant? Which sounds kind of strange in retrospection there, but do you see it as a way that can sort of smooth the way when do you have people who are abrasive and rubbing up against each other?

Andrew Tarvin:    Yeah, I think that it is. In the framework of the book we suggest, we think that there are basically five skills at work. No matter what your job is, what you do, there’s five things that you need to be able to do. You need to be able to execute, complete an actual task, whatever it happens to be. Whether that is send an email or fry the french fries, or shave an Alpaca, if that’s what you do. You need to be able to think strategically, think about how we solve problems, and creatively critically. We need to be able to communication, or what Thomas Harold called verbal fluency, the ability to articulate the intelligence that you have and do it in a way that other people understand. You need to be able to connect, which I’ll come back to, and you need to be able to lead and influence people towards a common goal.

One of the key areas of connection, of able to connect with people, I think humor is a great skill for that. We know from psychologists that people become closer together when they have shared experiences, whether those experiences are positive or negative. There’s already a number of shared experiences that we have in the workplace that bring us closer together in the sense of coming together to try to resolve something by a deadline, or dealing with budget cuts together, or whatever happens to be in the workplace, and so humor can be a positive shared experience. When you share a laugh with someone, when you share a smile, you become closer together. That’s why Victor Borge said the shortest distance between two people is a smile.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, I like that. Yeah, we could all agree that the people in accounting are the problem and make jokes about them perhaps.

Andrew Tarvin:    Right.

Roger Dooley:     Drew, you list 30 benefits that you get from humor at work, and I thought it would be fun to see how many you could recite from memory, but since I can’t actually see you I’d have no way of knowing if you were really just looking at the book or not, so we won’t do that. But why don’t you name a few of those benefits that the individual gets, and maybe in particular one or two that are surprising?

Andrew Tarvin:    Certainly. Out of the 30, I would probably be able to do 10 or 15 off the top of my head for sure, but I know the categories that they fall into, and they fall across those five skills that we talk about. For example, we know that humor can help improve communication, specifically, one, it can get people to pay attention more, two, it can improve understanding of a concept, three, it can help with longterm memory retention. We know that we can switch gears and that it can help us with our thinking process, so we know that humor can help to increase blood flow to the body, which ultimately can also help us to boost our overall brain power. We know that it can help us see new perspectives and new tangents. Some of the more interesting ones that I think are valuable.

Roger Dooley:     So there’s a headline right there, humor makes you smarter.

Andrew Tarvin:    Yeah, it does. Absolutely. In fact, there’s an entire book written about how there’s a group of anthropologists who believe that humor is a large factor in our evolution as humans, that once we got to the certain stage of being able to survive and run away from the Saber Tooth tigers and all of that, humor was kind of the next level that people sought out in mates as a way, as an evolutionary tactic. How do you differentiate between multiple people that seem pretty similar? Well, the one that makes you laugh more, you’re drawn to. Which is still another one of the benefits, it increases likeability and attractiveness in people, in studies that they’ve done.

Roger Dooley:     I’m trying to visualize hunter gather humor, but…

Andrew Tarvin:    Right.

Roger Dooley:     I guess you had to be there.

Andrew Tarvin:    Yeah, the cave drawings and the pointing to bushes and things like that, yeah, I don’t know what it would be, but I’m sure it was great. Hopefully puns.

Roger Dooley:     Hiding the the big spider in somebody else’s sleeping area.

Andrew Tarvin:    Yeah, exactly, or putting a raccoon on your head for it to be your hat. I don’t know. There’s something I’m going to have to think about. Or you go back to the Geico Gate cave person, episodes of the commercials. Maybe that was their sense of humor. One of my favorite ones, that humor does or laughter does burn calories. If you were to laugh consistently every day, you would burn up to about 4 pounds every single year. You could lose up to about 4 pounds every year, and 10 to 15 minutes of laughter burns as many calories as five minutes of aerobic exercise, 10 minutes of dancing, or 15 minutes of milking a cow.

Roger Dooley:     Great for the agricultural people who are listening, but that’s pretty impressive, and certainly a lot more fun than many of those activities. Good to know, although you’d probably have to work to laugh that much continuously. I’m curious, are you the kind of person that can watch a video and be physically laughing while you’re doing it? Personally, I am probably less so. I can watch something that’s very amusing and I can be enjoying it, but I’ll be rather passive on the outside.

Andrew Tarvin:    Well, yeah, if I’m by myself, and that’s what’s interesting, going back to the humor and connection piece, is that humor is very much a social construct. We know that people are much more likely to laugh if they’re there with a group of people. And so yeah, if I’m sitting by myself watching a YouTube video on my own, I’m a lot less likely to laugh than if I’m with a group of people and they seem to be enjoying it. That being said, there’s certainly times where I’ll be watching something on my own and I’ll smile to myself or find that it’s amusing, but if I’m by myself I’m rarely going to laugh out loud. That kind of speaks to the idea that humor very much is a social function. We know that when people are together with a group of people, they’re much more likely to laugh out loud than if they’re on their own.

That’s not to say that I’m not sometimes on a plane watching a Netflix comedy special and just kind of laughing to myself, people kind of giving me weird side eyes, but the majority, if I’m by myself, I’m not going to laugh, but if I’m with a group of people enjoying a movie, then certainly I will laugh out loud.

Roger Dooley:     Hence the use of laugh tracks, I guess, in comedies, where just the sound of other people laughing would enable the listener or the viewer to enjoy it more.

Andrew Tarvin:    Yeah, that’s exactly why they were there.

Roger Dooley:     Is there actual data showing that humor benefits organizations? I mean, I can imagine some managers being skeptical that it’s anything really more than just sort of a feel good thing, but doesn’t have a lot of science behind it.

Andrew Tarvin:    That’s, to me, why I’m so passionate about humor, is because there is scientific proof that it works. As you mentioned, there are 30 benefits of using humor in the workplace for the individual, and then there are also research backed examples of humor when it is part of the culture. When you create a more positive workplace culture and use humor as part of that, you see an increase in morale, you see that it increases company loyalty. People who are in a fun organization are less likely to leave within the next year, so it decreases turnover, it increases overall job satisfaction, boost engagement, reduces absenteeism. A number of these benefits, and in one study they found that it raised profits. Organizations that had humor as part of their culture were more profitable than organizations that they looked at that didn’t have it.

Roger Dooley:     What’s an example of an organization that has humor as part of its culture?

Andrew Tarvin:    I think the stereotype ones to go to certainly are Southwest, in terms of how they create things. You also can look at a company like Google and the way that they talk about some of their research, how they do things. Zappos has, part of their culture is fun as a value. Those are some of the known ones, but then also a number of smaller organizations have it, and a lot of times it may not even be completely at the organization level, but at like a team level or a department level. You can see benefits there, like in the book Smarter, Faster, Better they talk about how psychological safety is one of the most important attributes for an effective team at a team level, and humor, particularly improvisation and the mindset of ‘yes, and?’ from improvisation, is one of those ones that can help you to create psychological safety.

Roger Dooley:     What kinds of humor are there? People think of humor and they think of telling jokes, but jokes are just a subset of humor, right?

Andrew Tarvin:    Yeah, exactly. Humor is more broad than comedy. A lot of times people hear humor in the workplace and they’re like, “Wait, I have to start telling jokes in the workplace? I have to become a standup comedian?” That’s not what we’re talking about. Humor is defined as a comic, absurd, or incongruous quality causing amusement. One of the biggest things to recognize with humor in the workplace is we’re not talking about necessarily making the workplace funny so much as making the workplace a little bit more fun.

Roger Dooley:     Is there a danger aspect to humor? I mean, particularly these days you’ve got people who are complaining about either harassment or perhaps other remarks that they find offensive, and I think as an individual, sometimes it’s difficult to predict exactly how 100% of your audience is going to react to a certain remark. How do you suggest people thread that needle and be amusing but avoid missteps that are going to be offensive to somebody?

Andrew Tarvin:    Well, I think you make a great point, that there are certainly some dangers to humor. We want to make sure that our humor is appropriate for the workplace, and so I think a couple of things to help people go through that path and use the appropriate forms of humor is, one, they recognize when humor is inappropriate. Humor can be inappropriate typically because of an inappropriate target. You kind of point your humor at someone specific, and that can be inappropriate depending on who you’re talking to and what your relationship is to that person. It can have an inappropriate topic, so using humor in the workplace is not an excuse to talk about sex, drugs and rock and roll, or things that you wouldn’t normally otherwise talk about, and the third thing is that humor can at an inappropriate time. If you’ve just fired someone, not necessarily the time that you want to break out your Frozen musical impression and like, “Let them go, let them go.”

Those are the three reasons typically why humor is inappropriate in the workplace. Target, topic, and time. A way to avoid that is, one, a little bit deeper dive, what we frame as how to use humor effectively, is understanding your humor MAP. You map stands for your Medium, Audience, and Purpose. Medium is how are you going to execute that humor, audience is who is going to receive that humor, what do they need, what do they know, what do they expect, and what is your relationship to them. Then finally, what is your purpose for using humor. Rather than just using humor for the sake of humor, are you going to use humor specifically to try to get people to pay attention, or are you going to use it to try to build rapport with someone? Because those are different styles of humor that may use.

A simplified version of that, or a good general rule of thumb for using humor in the workplace is the newspaper rule. Would you want whatever it is that you said or did showing up on the front page of your hometown newspaper for your boss to read, or your parents to read, or for your parakeet to read, or whatever? If you’re like, “Ah, I don’t know if I’d want my boss seeing me do that impersonation of him”, then probably not appropriate for the workplace.

Roger Dooley:     That makes sense. I think the first one, the target piece, is really important because it’s so dependent on your relationship with the person. If you and I are best buddies, we can get away with teasing each other, even insulting each other a little bit, and we both know that we’re kidding. We probably wouldn’t do that to a total stranger, but there’s that sort of middle ground where maybe you think you’re on good enough terms with somebody to poke fun at them, but maybe they don’t share that belief and instead are offended or hurt by it.

Andrew Tarvin:    Right, and that’s one of the cultural changes that we’ve had. I’ve talked with a number of people who work in the UK or grew up in the UK and then come to the US to do work here, and typically the UK sense of humor is to rib or poke fun at each other right away, even as strangers, as part of a fun getting to know you type of mentality. Whereas in the US, it sometimes comes across as too aggressive or too sarcastic.

Roger Dooley:     Interesting. Are there any cultures around the world that seem quite humorless to you? Since you’ve spoken around the world, or trained around the world.

Andrew Tarvin:    Well, I’ve never found any human that has no sense of humor whatsoever. I’ve found people with very specific forms of senses of humor, or specific senses of humor that they have, but none without any sense of humor. That being said though, there are some cultures that I feel like have more of a level of acceptance for humor specifically in the workplace. Japanese and some Chinese cultures that I’ve worked with, it’s been a little bit of a bigger barrier because they feel like, “Oh, no, don’t show any emotion within the workplace at all.” But at the end of the day, it’s still humans that are working, and I still believe that humans, when they can find things that are more fun or find ways to do their work in a way that is more fun, they are more engaged in their work, they are more likely to do it. It changes the type of humor that you’ll use, but again, I haven’t met or worked with any culture, let’s say zero sense of humor whatsoever.

Roger Dooley:     Well, that’s good to know. There’s hope for all of us. Do you ever do topical humor for a particular assignment, like your invited to the Casket Makers Trade Association or something? Do you prepare for that topically, or do you pretty much follow a similar script?

Andrew Tarvin:    It’s a mix of both. I’m a big believer in structure, I think that structure can help us to be more creative and more humorous. I think a lot of times, people think of creativity as being completely unrestricted and free, but people don’t realize how much structure can help. I just recently went to a J.R.R Tolkien exhibit here in New York City, and it talked about all the structure that he had when writing the Lord of The Rings trilogy, to the point that he had basically what was the equivalent of a spreadsheet tracking each day and what each of the cast of characters were doing that day. I’m a big believer in structure, so within my programs I have structured so that there’s a time for the content that I know works and is general, and then there are specific spots where I slot in customized humor for that organization.

For example, I always start my presentations with a set story, and that story is going to be modified based on the group that I talk to, but it’s pretty structured, pretty scripted, but then after I’ve said that story and structured and kind of set up what I’m going to talk about that day, I’ll usually go into, “And I’m incredibly excited to be here with this group”, and I’ll give some customized reasons why I’m excited, kind of speaking to their organization or maybe even to the location that we’re in or some jokes about the hotel that we’re staying in, or some observational humor about the room. Whatever it happens to be. So, the answer is yes, it’s kind of both.

Roger Dooley:     Great. Well, other than buy your book, which I highly recommend as a great starting point for anyone who wants to incorporate a little more humor into their workplace, what are a couple of ways that our listeners could start on their own to use humor a little more effectively?

Andrew Tarvin:    I think the biggest thing to, one, just make the choice to. To start and to develop a humor habit. One way to do that is to create a humor notebook. As you’re going through the world, and this could be an actual physical notebook or it could be in Evernote, which is where mine is, but as you go through and experience things that make you laugh or that you find humorous, jot them down in the notebook. That way, one, you’re training yourself to be on the lookout for it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the idea of the reticular activating system? It’s that idea that if you or a loved one buys a certain car, you start to see that car everywhere.

Roger Dooley:     Sure.

Andrew Tarvin:    That’s RAS, or reticular activating system, which is basically, it’s not to say that there’s more of those cars in existence now, it’s just that you’ve kind of triggered something in your brain that makes you notice that a little bit more. When you start a humor notebook, you start to notice things in the world that are kind of humorous, and so what we say is it’s not that funny things happen to funny people, it’s that funny people see the world in a funny way. Just by tracking those instances or the things that you find curious or funny, or the funny stories that happen to you, tracking them in one spot means, one, you experience them or see them more, but two, when you then want to go back and say add humor to a presentation or you’re thinking about, you’re going to a networking event and you’re getting ready to introduce yourself to a bunch of people, how can you incorporate humor as part of that introduction.

Rather than starting from scratch and sitting down and being like, “Okay, be funny”, which is hard to do, you can go to the humor notebook as a source. Anything that you can do to create it as a habit, recognizing that it’s not what you do a single time, but more of how you do your work, I think can be a great way to start to incorporate it.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, that’s really interesting. It sort of brings us full circle. What I’ve found is when I do a speech about friction or have a conversation with somebody about friction, pretty soon they are noticing it everywhere themselves. Once you start seeing it, you see more of it. Very analogous to what you’re talking about, and in fact my own personal technique I use Evernote, but I encounter friction a lot on the web. As I’m visiting websites, I see these ridiculous examples of bad user interfaces and bad customer experience, and so I make great use of my screen grab button and whenever I see one of these things, I’ll take a picture of it. That both, I think does what you’re saying, it activates me to keep seeing more of this stuff, but also it’s a resource, so if I want an example, man, I’ve got hundreds of these things now that I can draw on and find the best one.

Andrew Tarvin:    Absolutely. I think in way, boredom is a form of friction. When people are bored and what they do, there’s kind of a friction in terms of them wanting to do it. Humor is just one solution to removing maybe some of that friction for yourself, because if you’re getting ready to do a task, and you’re like, “Oh my god, this is going to be boring”, and this is one of the prompts that started me using humor in the workplace, I remember being in this meeting at PNG and I was incredibly bored. I almost wanted to cry I was so bored. The problem of course was that I was the one leading the meeting. And so it’s like all right, if I’m bored while I’m talking, they’ve got to be bored while listening. You’re much less likely to do something if you’re like, “I have to go to the meeting and it’s going to be terrible, either because I’m leading it or whatever,” or, “I’m giving this presentation and I don’t even like the content”, you’re going to be a lot less engaged in it. Whereas, if you can go to that humor notebook, you have that mindset to say, “Okay, how can I just make this more fun?”

The final strategy, the bonus strategy that we share in the book is to simply think one smile per hour. What’s one thing that you can do each hour of the day that brings a smile to your face or the face of someone else? That could be through the humor notebook, it could be an observation of things, it could be in sending a funny video to someone. We’re a big believer that you don’t have to always be the creator of humor, instead you can kind of be the shepherd of humor, the conduit of humor. If you find a funny video or a funny cartoon or something online, you can share that with your team and talk about how it makes a point that you’re trying to make.

Roger Dooley:     Humor curation. Well hey, let me remind our audience that today we’re talking with Andrew Tarvin, self proclaimed humor engineer and author of the new book Humor That Works: The Missing Skill for Success and Happiness at Work. Drew, how can people find you?

Andrew Tarvin:    Well, they can find me, if you type in ‘humor engineer’, I am the first result. Then after that it’s all jokes about engineers, which is also a lot of fun. But kind of more specifically, I am @drewtarvin on all of the social media. That includes Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. I recently discovered that I still have a MySpace page, I don’t know why, and it’s a very old picture, but technically if you’re on MySpace you can reach me there. You can find if you’re interested in using humor if you go to humorthatworks.com. It’s our site that has resources for individuals and organizations, and our goal is to provide a bunch of free resources and other options for if you want to start using humor, but you have a place to start. Or you can find out more personally about me and some of the speaking and things that I do at drewtarvin.com

I’m hugely passionate about this subject, so if people have questions or anything like that, certainly feel free to reach out and I’m happy to share as much as I can.

Roger Dooley:     That’s great. Well, we will link to all those places and to any other resources we spoke about on the show notes page at rogerdooley.com/podcast. And we’ll have a text version of our conversation there as well. Drew, thanks for being on the show. It’s been a lot of fun.

Andrew Tarvin:    Yeah, thank you so much for having me, and also to be out there helping to make it less of a frictionful world, and hopefully humor can be one of those strategies that people use.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, definitely. For sure.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.

And remember, Roger’s new book Friction is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”

For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to rogerdooley.com/friction.