Ep. 1356: Richard Shotton with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Michael Covel's Trend Following

Michael Covel

Investing, Business

4.6 • 730 Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

My guest today is Richard Shotton. Richard is the founder of Astroten, a consultancy that applies behavioral science to marketing. He regularly runs training session with brands, big and small, using insights from behavioral science to help solve their problems.

The topic is his co-authored book Hacking the Human Mind: The Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World’s Best Brands.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

Reciprocity and perceptual fluency in behavior
Apple’s use of behavioral science and concrete language
Simplicity and clear communication
Ethics of behavioral science in business and society
Scarcity, specialization, and brand positioning

Jump in!

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I’m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I’m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show.

To start? I’d like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/

You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/

Can’t get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast

My social media platforms:
Twitter: @covel
Facebook: @trendfollowing
LinkedIn: @covel
Instagram: @mikecovel

Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You know, in this podcast, if it comes down to behavioral economics, behavioral finance, something
0:05.0	to do with behavior, something to do with psychology, I'm usually always going to go there.
0:10.2	Because the psychological side, our mind, human nature is so connected to my trading world.
0:18.1	So even if the subject is slightly different like it is today, it all fits.
0:24.0	My guest today is Richard Schotton, his book, Hacking the Human Mind, the Behavioral Science
0:29.3	Secrets Behind 17 of the World's Best Brands. Ladies and gentlemen, if you can't learn something
0:35.8	from this conversation, if you can't learn something from Richard's book, you might not be able to learn.
0:42.9	Without any further delay from me, let's jump right into my guest today, Richard Schotton.
0:48.1	Thank you. Something interesting that you did, and having done this podcast since 2012, hundreds of guests, as you note, a lot of interesting ones that you know a lot about. I would say
1:13.6	five to 10 percent of guests have asked me in advance what topics we might cover or what kinds of
1:21.5	questions. And you did. And you're the first person since starting this podcast in 2012 to ask the thought process behind that.
1:29.9	I don't know what I've assumed about it. I've usually just said, well, I really don't have
1:32.9	questions, but I've never asked anybody why they might think that could be useful. So the floor is
1:39.0	yours. It's a slightly strange situation of podcast. It's not often you talk for a whole hour about
1:45.0	what's your kind of forte. And I think sometimes knowing maybe the first few questions just
1:50.0	lets you warm up a bit more naturally. So that was my thinking, but completely happy to go in cold
1:55.3	as well. I'm going to be cocky about this. I guess you could sometimes get on a podcast with
1:59.9	somebody who might be somewhere on the spectrum, is reading from a sheet of questions, is not conversational, and then you like, I'm panicked.
2:08.0	That's the bigger risk, actually, where people have, here are the 10 questions and we are going to go through them in this order and we're not going to deviate.
2:15.4	And then it feels like the world's worst
2:17.8	job interview rather than an interesting podcast. So I think that's something to be avoided.
2:21.8	This gets into where we're going to go today on how consumers take in information or experiences
	...

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