Kindness is Contagious - How doing good is a formula for success

Chris Kiefer (00:01.146)

Welcome back to another episode of The Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kieffer and I am here with David Gass, who is the founder of the Bureau of Small Projects. David, first of all, thank you so much for coming on.

David Gaz (00:13.634)

Chris, thank you for having me. I love what you do.

Chris Kiefer (00:17.175)

So tell me what is the Bureau of Small Projects?

David Gaz (00:21.698)

Oh, I'd love to. So we're an ad agency or a branding agency. I guess I'd probably call us more of a branding agency. We work with small businesses, startups, and nonprofits, and generally businesses that are making a difference in the world. And I can tell you the whole story of why we do that if you've got patience and you'd like to hear it. There's a lot of intent around why we do what we do.

Chris Kiefer (00:41.194)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (00:51.102)

Got it. I would love to start to jump into this idea of the kindness is contagious. That's a, I feel like that would be, that was something that caught my attention with what you have been doing. And it looks like it's a movie now. I'm sure it was an idea before it was a movie, but tell us a little bit about that.

David Gaz (01:13.454)

Oh, I'd love to. So, Kindness is Contagious, it's kind of started out as a documentary film. Where it happens, I used to be a partner in a firm that worked exclusively with Fortune 500 businesses and big brands. And this was now going on about 10 years ago. But while I was in this company, we were politically, I think in a very similar time like today where everybody kind of was mean to each other, treated each other poorly.

I'm starting to think we've always been that way. And I was getting really frustrated because a lot of it was trickling over in the business. Clients weren't treating people on our team very well. People on our team weren't treating other people very well in our company. And I stumbled across this article by these two guys, James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, who had scientifically proven that kindness is contagious.

that if I do, they're from Harvard University, super smart guys, and they scientifically prove, and not like the secret where you throw stuff out in the university and it comes back, but hard science, that if I do something nice for you, you'll do something nice for four more people statistically, and then each of those four people will do something nice for four more people, and so on and so on. And I was blown away when I read about this.

And so immediately being in branding and marketing my whole life, I thought, gosh, we love anything viral like that. How cool. And then having this issue with people treating people poorly in the company and our clients and all of that, I thought maybe this could solve my problem. So I, I used the resources we had at our disposal, which were pretty considerable to produce a feature length documentary, Kindness is

a film all about being nice, but then more importantly, the benefits of being nice. Because talking to these people, and then James Fowler introduced me to these guys, Dash or Keltner at UC Berkeley, then they introduced me to folks at Stanford, at Yale, it kind of, the connections were contagious as well. And so I met all of these really smart people in the realm of science, in the science of kindness. And

David Gaz (03:30.582)

The unanimous decision or the proof, the scientific evidence suggested that this whole thing about nice guys finishing last is completely wrong, just totally bogus. Nice guys actually on average make more money than not nice people, which really surprised me. You always think that mean people get rich real fast. But the vast majority of them wind up in jail. So I think that's why over the long run, the nice people do well.

They have better jobs, which made sense, because who hires jerks? They get more promotions. Again, who promotes jerks? You promote people that have your back. Better family lives, of course. More friends, which in today's social media world is super important. And then the thing that blew me away more than anything is they live longer. That nice, kind people actually, scientifically proven, live longer than not nice people.

Chris Kiefer (04:27.366)

Mmm.

David Gaz (04:28.658)

And so Chris, being an entrepreneur, I started my first business, which is an ice cream truck when I was 16 years old. And so being a lifelong, and I'm no youngster, lifelong serial entrepreneur, the next thing I wanted to know was how does this play in the business world? And so we interviewed as part of the film, businesses like Silicon Valley startups, nonprofits, healthcare organizations.

businesses that were using kindness as a tool for success. And at that point I got really jealous because these guys, their day job was making the world a better place. And my day job was sucking every last penny out of people's pockets. And so I wanted to think about what could I do to change that and make my day job be making the world a better place too.

My son was born around the same time, and when you have kids, you start thinking about what you hand off to the next generation. And so with that in mind, I came up with the idea that what if I teach the people who are making the world a better place how to suck every last penny out of people's pockets, but put it to use for good?

Chris Kiefer (05:47.79)

I was just going to say, why are those mutually exclusive? Why can't you do that? And then, you know, that, cause I feel like with nonprofits, one of the problems oftentimes is that they think they don't need to run like an efficient, profitable business. You know? Um,

David Gaz (06:04.65)

Yeah, and you know, I think people generally who are nice, they don't think about money. They don't wanna talk about money, which is good. I mean, I kinda like that about them, but I wanna see them succeed. And I'd love to see nonprofits, the more money they take in, the more people they can help. And so that's why I thought if I taught them all the sneaky little tricks that we learned working with Fortune 500 companies, like although...

Branding and marketing tricks and stuff like that they use to make money Why not teach it to the people who are really doing good in the world?

Chris Kiefer (06:38.654)

Hmm. Yeah. Um, that's awesome. And so, uh, how has that gone since, uh, teaching, like, is this, is the teaching of these topics, like that's the movie or that's back to the Bureau of small projects.

David Gaz (06:53.462)

Well, the Bureau is kind of showing you all the ways that, or the movie is all about showing people all the ways that kindness can help you succeed in life. And it's kind of more general, teaching all the sneaky little marketing tricks and stuff like that. That's what the Bureau does. And it turns out that these people wanted to learn how to suck every last penny out of people's pockets. Who knew?

Chris Kiefer (07:09.798)

Got it.

Chris Kiefer (07:17.176)

Who's the who did?

David Gaz (07:18.594)

Yeah, all of the all of these nonprofits, startups making a difference nonprofits and small businesses making a difference in the world. Those kind of people. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (07:29.73)

Absolutely. And so what's the like, how can someone watch this documentary or where what's the easiest way to see it?

David Gaz (07:38.878)

Well, it's we got great distribution for it. CineDime, which is a humongous distributor, took us on. It's basically anywhere Amazon, iTunes, you know, any place that you look, except for Netflix, because they didn't want to pay enough money to CineDime to do it, which was a shame, because I don't think that kind of should be about money.

But for anybody that wants a free copy, there was a loophole that they missed the educational. They got all the rights, international rights, the film, everything, which is good. I'm glad we had a powerhouse distributor behind it, but they forgot about the educational rights. So anybody listening to this podcast, just email me at the Bureau of Small Projects, and as long as you learn from the film, I'll give you a free copy.

Chris Kiefer (08:30.94)

Ah, interesting. That's awesome.

David Gaz (08:32.418)

You have to learn from it though because we only have educational rights.

Chris Kiefer (08:36.554)

That's awesome. I had never, I knew nothing about that. Sounds like an interesting world of distribution. So yeah, another thing I know that you are big on is the wheel of fortune marketing process.

David Gaz (08:54.634)

Yes, well, this goes around to all these sneaky little tricks that we use that we kind of repurpose from my old life, working with Fortune 500 and, you know, companies and big brands. Um, marketing, you know, like smaller companies, they think when they're doing marketing, they're just going to run some ads and get results. And big brands are all about data. And the Wheel of Fortune marketing process that we use.

And again, use this stuff responsibly. I'm gonna tell you a bunch of little sneaky tricks after that. But the Wheel of Fortune, basically what it does is it starts out with strategy. Most smaller companies, when they think of branding, they think of a logo, they think of colors, they think of fonts, stuff like that. Big brands, they think of strategy. And how do you get that strategy out to the world?

So if you want to attract business to yourself, if you want to attract customers, members, if you're a nonprofit, you know, users, if you have an app or something like that, what you have to do is think of the strategy and basically what is it about you, your product, your service, your company that's different and better than your competitors? It's all focused around that. What makes you different?

And then once you can get that down to a sentence or so, that's the headline of your ads. And it's also the, it would be like the headline on your website or wherever those ads lead. So then the key thing is you need to apply that strategy to the ads. You need to apply that to the homepage of your website or wherever the ads lead. And then the thing that everybody forgets is you gotta look at the data.

because anybody that tells you they know all the secrets of marketing and branding and all that stuff, we're beyond that, we're in the age of data. Nobody knows anything like the Wolf of Wall Street, it's all the fugazi, nobody knows anything about stocks are gonna go up or down, least of all stock brokers. Same thing with ads, nobody knows what ads are gonna work, what branding stuff's gonna work, what headlines are gonna work, least of all marketing people. So you have to look at the data.

David Gaz (11:12.202)

Then you adjust the strategy based on the data, reapply it to the headline of your ads. And the ads doesn't have to be a digital ad. It could be a poster, a billboard. It could be a postcard, whatever you're using to get people to come to your website. I like websites because it's a very easy way to track all the data. You know, you can do it in stores and brick and mortar, but it's a lot harder.

And then you reapply the new strategy to your website, to different sections of the website. Look at the heat maps and analytics and the data that comes from that. And then if your changes made it worse, revert back to where it was working well. And then if it makes it better, use that as your new starting point. And then look at the data. Adjust your strategy, your ads, your learning page, data.

ads, strategy ads, landing page, et cetera, et cetera.

Chris Kiefer (12:10.13)

Hmm and so very methodical it's like a scientific process for running a campaign

David Gaz (12:18.014)

Yep. And that's one of the sneaky, part of the sneaky little tricks that we do with, um, with smaller organizations, big brands, as you know, and it's all about the data, you know, they track everything, um, and smaller organizations, they don't do it so much, but there are so many tools that are basically free tools or inexpensive tools out there. You can track anything. And from a business standpoint, you know, it's all good.

The privacy thing, nobody's really trying to find out about your personal life. You hear a lot on the news about people invading people's privacy with this stuff. Nobody's trying to do that. They're just trying to sell you stuff.

Chris Kiefer (12:58.528)

All right, interesting. So what else is on your mind these days? What are you up to? What's the goal for David in the next three to five years?

David Gaz (13:11.954)

I don't you know that it's interesting that you bring that up. I was listening to your episode that you just released with your grandfather and I thought that was really beautiful. It was really poetic and then I noticed that you asked a question about goals and I thought your goal the way you talked about goals was really interesting that you had mentioned don't do a goal that you can achieve

I'm paraphrasing here, you set up much better than I am, but you mentioned do a goal that's hard because if you hit your goal and you're like 50 years old, what do you do with the rest of your life? But I wanna start a conversation maybe with you. What if you forgot goals altogether and started thinking about the path? Because that's what I've always done my whole life.

And I'm not quite as old as your grandfather by a long shot, but I'm getting up there. And I'm a big advocate of the path. Because the journey, yes, following a path rather than having a goal. Because I think people, when they have a goal, they tend to not look at all the things that surround them. And they stay laser focused on their goal, and they miss opportunities. In Silicon Valley, everybody talks about doing the pivot.

Chris Kiefer (14:16.762)

journey. Yeah.

David Gaz (14:37.114)

And companies that stay laser focused on a goal, they often fail because they don't hit their goal. But if you notice we're not hitting our goal, but you're looking at opportunities, you're looking at the path, you can pivot, change your goal, go down another path, and then it becomes about the journey.

Chris Kiefer (14:55.722)

Hmm. So, uh, yes, I, I mean, I have stuff to say on that. Did you have a, was there a direct question on that or any other comment on that?

David Gaz (15:06.462)

Not really a question. I wanted to just kind of have you entertain that. I thought what you were saying about goals was interesting. When I was, I remember when I was in school, I was told shoot for the, shoot for the stars and if you, you know, if you shoot for the moon and you make, you make it halfway, you know, you're just like in the upper atmosphere of the earth. But if you shoot for the stars and you make it halfway, you're a million times farther than the moon.

Chris Kiefer (15:23.742)

You miss.

Chris Kiefer (15:35.334)

Hmm.

David Gaz (15:35.574)

And I used to love that metaphor, but now I'm really into the path. You know, you just follow the path. Go look at, go on an adventure. You know, without knowing where it's going to lead, it just looks like an interesting path to go down. And then, you know, all you have are opportunities.

Chris Kiefer (15:54.202)

Yeah, what I would say is the, to me, like the goal, it's almost like, because I agree with you that if someone is like, the goal is to buy, you know, the, some business or buy the lake house. And that's like my goal. Obviously you're gonna get there and it's like, okay, hmm, like what now, right? And you have to find a new thing. To me, it's like,

What is the lifelong pursuit that you can never get to? That's like your North Star. And then 100%, I agree with what you're saying, you have to make sure that you design the journey and your mission to that end, which is never going to end. Am I back?

Chris Kiefer (16:47.258)

Okay, so I was gonna say, I'm closing some other stuff, I wonder if this will help at all.

David Gaz (16:50.986)

I think we froze, Chris.

Chris Kiefer (16:58.134)

And you can hear me fine. No lag now. Okay. Um, yeah, I think that there's a balance in my opinion of, uh, if you're just focusing purely on the journey, like you can go, you could end up going in circles, but having a, you know, a great time in the moment, but you don't really, you know, know the direction that you're heading. Whereas like, you can still have fun on the journey and you should plan. Like, I, like using the analogy of the road trip.

David Gaz (17:07.03)

Yeah, you're back. I think we froze there for a second.

David Gaz (17:23.883)

Yeah, I know we're

Chris Kiefer (17:27.91)

Like if I'm, if I'm going to go drive my car across the country and I just start going, uh, I guess depending upon what your, you know, your high level objective was, you could have a good time doing that. But I feel like just knowing that at some one way or another, I want to get to the East coast, you know, as like a starting point and then, but the difference was what the lifelong thing would be like, let's say that it was just, you know,

It was a never ending horizon that you could just keep going forever and ever and ever. And that's where you have to make sure that you're the, the excursion or the journey. It's like, Hey, we're going to stop and we're going to explore every six hours. We're going to find a campsite and you know, um, and make sure that we have time to play games as a family and you know, do all, have a well balanced life in the pursuit of whatever that goal is. If that makes sense.

David Gaz (18:48.51)

It does, it does. I want to kind of take this down a little bit of a path too. The next film that I'm going to be doing after Kindness is Contagious is a film all about luck. And where this film kind of originated is I was reading this book called The Luck Factor by a guy named Richard Wiseman.

And he did one of the coolest scientific experiments I've ever heard of. And if you haven't noticed, I'm kind of a science guy, a science geek. Um, what he did is he took 200 profoundly unlucky people and 200 profoundly lucky people and said, I'm going to figure out what this luck thing is all about. And he did all these kinds of experiments geared around figuring out what luck is.

Chris Kiefer (19:27.192)

Mmm.

David Gaz (19:41.734)

and nothing at all indicated that it was something supernatural or magical. It was all behavior. One of the behaviors that the lucky people had is they didn't set goals, they were curious. They observed things. I'll give you a hardcore example and you probably may have heard of this example, but not known it was part of this study.

I had heard about this example before as well. And then when I read the book, I was just freaked out that it was part of this particular study. He took all of these people and he put them in a room. And he gave them a newspaper. And he said, count all of the pictures in the newspaper. And if you guess correctly, you've got 10 minutes to do it. If you guess correctly, I'll give you $20. And so about $20.

Five, six minutes or so, most of the lucky people dropped the newspaper off on his desk and said there's 423 pictures in this newspaper.

The unlucky people were still counting well after the 10 minutes had expired because 400 is a lot to count to. It was a pretty thick newspaper, it's a lot to count up like that. And so how did these lucky people know the number of pictures in there? Well, the headline on the front page said there are 426 pictures in this newspaper.

Chris Kiefer (21:02.861)

Mmm.

Chris Kiefer (21:14.366)

Hmm. Curiosity is, uh, that's something I'm obsessed with. I think, um, that's one of the reasons why I do the podcast is because it's just an opportunity with the people that I get to meet to come across, it's like a, an opportunity to practice being curious in real life with people and just like, all right, I'm going to ask you questions for 30 minutes and see if I can learn something from you, you know, and the fact that turns out you can learn something from everybody, you know,

David Gaz (21:16.43)

And the unlucky people were so focused on the task at hand, the goal of counting all of the pictures, that they completely missed the headline. The lucky people were looking around, kind of taking it easy, kind of soaking everything in before they started, and they're like, oh, look, it's right in the headline. Boom, done.

Chris Kiefer (21:44.134)

So I absolutely love that. And that's it. I love that little anecdote too.

Chris Kiefer (21:57.835)

Maybe. Well, is that actually goes directly into my question I ask everybody, which is three book recommendations and why.

David Gaz (22:13.098)

Yeah, well you'd strike me as somebody that doesn't need to read the book because you probably have all of the behaviors that lucky people have.

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (22:27.956)

Hmm.

David Gaz (22:33.37)

The first one would definitely be the Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman for exactly the reasons. It teaches you all the behaviors on how to be lucky. The thing that's beautiful about behavior and why I wanted to do the movie is because behavior can be changed. If you're an unlucky person, change your behavior and you'll turn into a lucky person. Who doesn't want to be a lucky person? The other one would be anti-fragile.

Chris Kiefer (22:34.314)

Absolutely.

David Gaz (23:03.126)

This is more of a business book recommendation. It's by Nicholas Taleb. Anti-fragile is very, very interesting. I think it's a business book, but I think it's about philosophy of modern life. The whole premise of anti-fragile is previously, or kind of, I think, the standard way of looking at businesses, are there's fragile businesses and there's strong

Often the strong businesses fail. And this book was written right around the dot com revolution when all of these businesses that, you know, that were just killing it the next day, they all just ceased to exist, they disappeared. And I think around, um, like crypto and stuff like that, we're having another, um, resurgence of that maybe with AI as well. And his take on this that I think just.

perfectly sums up life these days is antifragile is the opposite of fragile not strong. And what it means is that like when you're when you're lifting weights, right? You've got weak people and you've got strong people that lift weights, but the people who constantly lift weights their muscles get stronger and stronger and stronger. You don't just stop it being strong.

Chris Kiefer (24:26.462)

Hmm

David Gaz (24:27.69)

You constantly do it. You tear it down. You break down. You abuse your body. You abuse your muscle. And then your muscle replenishes itself even better than it was before. And that's the metaphor that he uses in anti-fragile. That it's not fragile and strong. It's fragile and anti-fragile and the strong company's in the middle. And the world's changing so quickly now that if you're like, woohoo, we're strong, you're done. You're a dinosaur.

that you have to be always lifting weights, flexing your muscles, learning more. I think it works well as a person from a personal standpoint as well. I notice a lot of friends of mine that'll say, oh, the world's passed me by. They just gave my job, fired me and gave my job to somebody younger that works for half my salary. And as a business owner, of course, I'm gonna, if somebody half your, you know, younger than you can do your job, just as well as you at half the salary, I'm gonna give it to them as well.

Chris Kiefer (25:19.378)

That's true. I love that. It's like, hey, if you aren't, yeah, there's new stuff being created all the time that you have the opportunity to be become one of the leading experts on because nobody else has had a running start, you know. And what's the last book?

David Gaz (25:27.398)

What you have to do is always stay ahead of everything. Be anti-fragile. Always be learning. Always be trying new things. The world changes so quickly that if you start something now, in two years you will be an expert. And everything that you were good at two years ago will be obsolete.

Chris Kiefer (25:39.858)

Hmm. And then what is a favorite movie?

David Gaz (25:58.45)

is A River Runs Through It. It's a poetic book about fly fishing.

Chris Kiefer (26:04.941)

Oh.

David Gaz (26:07.854)

Favorite movie? It's funny because I wanted to say A River Runs Through It. They made a movie of that and I love that as well. My Kindness Is Contagious wants to say pay it forward. But the real favorite movie I think is one by Denis Villeneuve that came out a couple years ago called Arrival. And it was just a poetic movie that just made you really appreciate everything you have at this moment in life. It's a science fiction movie.

Chris Kiefer (26:13.426)

That's about aliens, right? And they're communicating, they have to figure out how to communicate with the aliens that invade our planet.

Chris Kiefer (26:28.991)

Hmm.

David Gaz (26:36.47)

But it was one of the most fun.

David Gaz (26:44.826)

Yeah, well the aliens weren't invading. We thought they were invading. They weren't invading. What they did is it's about language. And what they did is they came to Earth, everybody freaked out and thought they're invading. The army got involved and they brought in a linguist to communicate with them. And the way that the alien's language was structured is within their existence time doesn't

Chris Kiefer (26:58.44)

Mmm.

David Gaz (27:13.742)

because their language was circular. And so instead of having a beginning of a sentence and an end of a sentence, it was all one thing. And so the aliens could see the future and the past at the same time. And the reason that they were visiting us is they're going to need our help in 3000 years. So they wanted to give us a gift right now, and the gift was their language.

Chris Kiefer (27:17.41)

Mmm.

Chris Kiefer (27:31.946)

Hmm.

David Gaz (27:41.77)

And then the sub story that makes it especially poetic to me was the lead, the protagonist in this film, they had a child and the child had terminal cancer. And the film happened before the child was born, but because she had learned the language, she saw the future and the past and everything all as one, not as a line. And

Chris Kiefer (27:42.526)

Hmm

Chris Kiefer (28:04.79)

Mmm. Love that. Well, yeah, this has been this has been awesome, David. I really appreciate your time. What is the preferred method of contact if someone wants to get in touch with you?

David Gaz (28:08.81)

She split up with her husband because knowing that their child was going to have terminal cancer, why did they have the child in the first place? And the beautiful poetic thing about the movie is it didn't matter. They had this child for 15 beautiful years and that's what was most valuable and most important.

David Gaz (28:31.18)

Yeah.

David Gaz (28:40.37)

I Google any combination of bureaus, small and projects and we'll be the first site that comes up. There's an email at the bottom where you can click the contact us form at the top and then send me an email. I'll give you a copy of the film for free. If you want to help with anything, please just shout out as well. We're all here to help people who want to make the world a better place.

Chris Kiefer (28:41.298)

That's funny. I did exactly what you said. Bureau, small project, and you're right there. Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks so much, David. Thank you for being generous with your time and yeah, we'll be seeing you around.

David Gaz (29:19.047)

My pleasure, Chris. Thanks for having me on.