With the Motley Film Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill.

Dan Pank has written several best-selling books, the most recent of which is entitled

When, The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

I talked with Dan about the book in front of a live audience, and while some of the book

deals with things like sleep patterns and physical health, at least one section should be of

interest to every investor.

For the research Dan Pank studied when he was writing the book, has to do with the quarterly

conference calls that public companies hold when they release their earnings reports.

The findings that the tenor and tone of calls held in the afternoon are much more negative

than conference calls held in the morning.

So a lot of the insights that we have about behavioral science for a long time, and this

is legit, came from things like, we assembled 71 undergraduate students.

We put 35 in this condition, we put 36 in this condition, and we ran an experiment to

see what the difference was.

And that's cool, that's scientific method.

What's happening now is that big data is allowing scholars of all kinds to find really,

really interesting insights using massive amounts of information, I mean, just spectacular.

And so that's how this, so that's the study that Chris is talking about, did this.

So as you guys know, there are transcripts of these conference calls for companies, all

right?

Public companies, they're transcripts, transcripts are publicly available.

There is now software out there that evaluates text, and one of the things that it does,

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