Transcription
If you'd invented Uber before there was 3G, the mapping wouldn't have worked, or would have been massively frustrating.
Okay, so quite often you have to wait for two or three other things to be developed before your idea, or you have to wait for them to be adopted. Bubble tea. Okay, God, now I do buy the stuff; I quite like it.
You like it?
Yeah. My theory is they were doing this experiment with incentives to pigeons, and effectively the pigeon would peck a switch, and you'd give it three food pellets. Okay, and what would happen is the pet pigeons would fairly reliably peck the switch; they get the three pellets, and then after they'd eaten enough pellets, they go, "That's kind of enough, I think I'll kind of give that a break now," and they go off and do some other pigeon stuff, on people or whatever. Okay, and then while they were doing the experiment, which is supposed to be a simple experiment on sort of Pavlovian incentives and rewards, they ran low on pellets for some reason. I—it was just an accident, so they they tweaked the dispenser so rather than dispensing three pellets, it would sometimes dispense one, sometimes three, sometimes two, sometimes zero. The pigeons went bonkers. What you'd effectively created was a pigeon fruit machine, where now they didn't know what to expect when they pecked the switch, and so they just pecked at it furiously, a bit like someone at Vegas endlessly feeding coins into a fruit machine. And that was called variable reinforcement theory, which is that if you do something which has a variable effect, it's somehow weirdly more addictive than something that's a kind of constant reward and return. My theory with bubble tea is because you don't quite know what you're going to get.
Wow. Right. Okay, so it's a game within yourself, and that's why you enjoy that, possibly. The very fact that actually you don't quite know what's going to happen actually makes it appealing.