Welcome back to the Santhor Life, the podcast that explores what it means to
be human and in ever changing the world. I'm your host, Adam Gambol.
So picture this. We're playing a video game, fully immersed in a
world where your decisions matter, and this world feels real. Now, imagine
if this experience went beyond mere entertainment and it could be used as a tool
to assess and even improve your cognitive health. It sounds remarkable, doesn't it.
Today we have an incredible guest who is pioneering the use of video games
for cognitive assessment, opening up new possibilities for not only the gaming industry,
but for mental health diagnostics and treatment. So I'm thrilled to introduce you to
Joe Shappy. He's a CEO and founder of Sulston, an AI powered platform
for human centric experiences. Now, with the background and human factor of psychology,
anthropology, user experience, as well as adventure based psychotherapy, Joe is
going to show us just exactly what it looks like when social science and psychotherapy
shape the future of business. Now, this topic couldn't be more relevant in
our rapidly evolving digital landscape. As technology continues to shape our lives. It's
essential to explore how it can be harnessed for our benefit, particularly in my
deal health, diagnostics and treatment. Now took our conversation, Joe and I
cover some incredible insights, and here's just a few of the top discussion points
that you can expect from today's episode. The power of video games and cognitive
assessment and their impact on mental health diagnostics. How Sulston is spearheading human centered
experiences and revolutionizing the connection between brands and audiences, and the importance of a
people first approach in creating healthier and more engaging experiences without leaving us over stimulated
and disconnected from the real world. Also, as a bonus tip, we're
going to see some really interesting conversation of how we can step away from hyper
personalized experiences and design more for the collective. Now, before we get started,
I want to take a moment to encourage you, our wonderful listeners and
viewers, to subscribe to our podcast. You reviews and share it with your
friendly and colleagues who you think you'll love it. Your support is really what
keeps this airplane flying in the air, and I need you to be my
copilot. So we want to keep bringing you fascinating conversations like this one that
you're about to experience. So without further ado, let's dive into the insightful
conversation with Joe Shapey and get ready to explore the possibilities of video games as
tools for cognitive assessment, mental health, psychotherapy, and more. We're going
to discover how Sulston is reshaping the way that we connect with the world.
So strapping because this episode of This Anthro Life, it's got to take you
onto the gritable journey. Say Joe, so excited to have you on the
podcast, So thank you for joining me today on this heathics. Adam,
Yeah, really happy to be here. So I'd love to kind of hear
about your trajectory and how you kind of think of your story as getting into
these these areas of tech and well being. I think it was interesting for
me is ever since I was pretty young, I was really interested in this
problem of awareness, self awareness as well as you know, how aware we
are of our environment around us. And I really kind of saw and I'm
talking like you know, weird twelve year old like kid, you know,
just like what is awareness? What is consciousness? You know when we say
like I think and I feel, well, who is the eye that is
doing the thinking? Who is the eye that is doing the feeling? Like
these are these are interesting questions, and I think they directly tied to when
you look at people kind of as they go through their lives and make decisions,
tends to be the people that have the most awareness around the decision or
what's happening, that tend to make the best decisions, that tend to leave
the best lives, that tend to access their human potential. So Neil de
grass Tyson was on some talk show hosts and they asked him, like,
what's his biggest fear in life? And he gave a very like physicist answer.
He said, if I saw all the other means and all the other
universes and saw the ones that made better decisions than I did that led to
more of their potential than I acted on it, He's like that would be
a sort of existential dread for me to see something like that, and so
like coming back to, you know, foundations of awareness. I decided to
volunteer in a hospital in Minneapolis when I was in high school because I said,
well, you know, doctor, the word you know, dooceras means
to teach. I said, well, maybe I'll be a doctor, and
that might that might help me down that path, and you know, maybe
I'll be a psychiatrist. For example, worked in the er and really realized,
well up front from that a lot of people that end up in the
er about fifty percent of visits the United States are mental health issues. Most
of those go misdiagnosed on diagnosed about seven out of eight of them. So
it's the problem is more, it's deeper, and I'm like, well,
I'm not going to be able to solve this as a psychologist, so maybe
I can solve it through design. And that's where I got really I learned
about human factors and human factors psychology. So I went to the University of
Wisconsin because at the time and it still is one of the best schools for
clinical psychology and human factors. But studied that there and while I was doing
that undergrad degree. So this isn't the whole picture either. So I also
majored in anthropology because I think the art of science is very important. There's
a da Vinci quote that kind of goes about that, but I love that.
So having those two together. That was kind of a foundation for me.
And so well, I'm going to take these I'm going to work with
these really big companies globally and let's design experiences that maybe, you know,
we can architect them in ways that it's more like, you know, a
for US school in Sweden than an inner city school in la And maybe we
can architect these environments that help people become one percent more mindful, one percent
more aware, one percent more self knowledgeable, so that we can sort of
societally scale you know, this situation. And really what it came down to
was most large companies there's not the budget or the resources of the time,
or the capacity to be able to even measure those kind of outcomes. So
even if you have the intent of designing something that is human centric or human
forward, or you know, just healthier for people, well, how do
you measure that outcome? How do you actually say, you know what,
we implemented this like button. We're a company called Facebook. We think it's
really good. We're getting these engagement rhetorcs. You know, we're eight years
ago. We're happy. Yeah, cool, let's go with it. I
don't think they knew that, you know, in the future, there's gonna
be studies coming out from like the University of Michigan saying yeah, Facebook use
over time actually as a causal effect on depression or things like that, Like
I don't think that was the design intent whatsoever. It was, Hey,
this is really driving engagement. And so I'm like, well, how do
we empower architects, designers, creators globally so that they actually have access to
a really deeply understanding their audience. I do think most people are are good
spirit and goodwill, and when we create things, if we understand who we're
creating them for, oftentimes we're going to make the best experience for them.
And then the second part is can we actually measure what the impact is of
all these things so that we know, like, hey, you know what,
people that use pinterest actually maybe their awareness goes up percent after using it
over time, Like that's interesting, And what about pinterest is doing that or
causing that? And so that's kind of where things started. And realize you
can't really measure psychology well at all in normal experiences. So like, are
one of our researchers used to be a researcher at Meta. You know a
lot of people think, oh, like Facebook knows all these things about me,
They really don't. They know a lot of what you did and what
you do, but they don't know who you are. And that's a tricky
thing to measure the history of psychological assessment. We're still in the dark ages,
like we used to do clinical neuro psyche assessments. When I went back
to school and became a clinical mental health counselor and worked in clinical neuropsyche and
specialize in adventure based psychotherapy. So that's kind of like the anthropology and my
scheme career and all these things coming together. But play was always the foundation
of a lot of my life experiences, and so you know, I do
think that play is fundamental to learning. It's it's fundamental to who we are
as a species. And there's this say in adventure therapy, which is show
me how you play, and I'll tell you who you are, and it's
it's very true. And so I went into gaming to kind of see can
we measure psychology through how people play? Digital games are the largest most interactive
source of digital media of behavior out of any other systems. So like if
you try to predict psychology from speech, it's pretty bad. Like most of
us we say things we don't mean, We mean things that we don't say.
Speech is like a very poor presentation of who we are. And as
you probably could you look at linguistic anthropology, it's like it's fun to go
out on those paths of like you know, well, how much does language
shape how we think? And like the sacred war hypotheses and all these kind
of things, But we don't know a lot about language style, and we
do know that it's pretty simple and that we just as a species still miscommunicate
a ton Like that was half my experience, and I was doing marriage counseling
for couples. It's like, you guys, most mean the same thing.
You're saying different things but totally differs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, So
really saw a big fish games that which was where I was ahead of UX
there and I was a UX director at McCann Erickson before that. So I
was like doing all these things, seeing if it worked, experimenting, taking
the next step doing it experimenting and said hey, we can do this in
gaming. So that's how Sulston got founded about five years ago. Was let's
allow let's create a human insight engine that allows any creator in the world to
actually understand the person they're creating for and actually see how their creations are impacting
that person over time. And let's measure all this important stuff like depression,
anxiety, addiction, verbal abuse which people like to call toxicity, but it's
really just well and what is verbal abuse because that's subjective? And at what
point does that happen? And you measure all these things, and then you
help creators create spaces and digital experiences and architect them in ways that are more
human. And I like to kind of use an example that it's a little
bit of a curveball, because a lot of times when people think about Disneyland,
they think of escapism and it's this like fantasy land. But Disney's original
vision for it was to prove and show society that we can build spaces around
play and around the human spirit. And because he was getting criticized, like
you just give people a place to escape, they spend a bunch of money,
and his comment was, well, people do commerce here, They talk,
they eat, they do everything that we do as a species. The
only difference is I build around people and around play. We built societies around
efficiency, and cars, and people pay money to be in this place to
do everything that humans would naturally do. And I know you well know this
as an anthropologist, but it's like if we look at our history, you
know, you can only hunt and gather so much, and our species spent
most of our time in leisure, Like the movies were kind of you know,
we're not just all at war all Like most people were farmers or lived
on islands and ate off the land. And that's how sports like surfing got
invented. Hey, we have all this time in the world, let's stand
on boards on the ocean and let's do that all the time. But there
is all this leisure and it's kind of the nine to five and the work
engine. That's a modern phenomena. And so you know, we look at
the spaces we build, and I do think that our digital reality and how
we construct it, we have a chance. It's kind of like I feel
like we have a window right now to construct a reality that is built around
human beats and not a reality that is built around efficiency, because efficiency he's
boring, Like you know, it's like one of examples I'll use like if
you told the Lord of the Rings as efficiently as possible. It's like,
yeah, there's this hobbit like if you know, he takes a ring,
he throws it into volcano, it gets destroyed, he beats the bad guys
done. Like, that's not there's no human being in the world that's interested
in that story. It's really efficient version of the story. It's terrible story.
And so how do we build and architect our digital reality so that it's
human and also compels people more into the physical one and creates more of a
harmonic state. And we're obviously far away from So what's such a such a
cool thing though, Yeah, yeah, you just said about five thousand things
that I want to dive into there. But but I think this, this
is I think such an interesting entry point that I'm both you know, that
is both surprising and delightful. And I think that our listeners say, oh,
I actually, well, i'd realize I can connect these pieces together.
So there's a couple of a couple of things that I think that you're right,
you know, that we are in this interesting point now today where we
have an opportunity to kind of rethink what digital experiences are doing in our lives
and what they can do and you know, the two things that really stood
out there that you share there is one is that like knowing kind of let
the interior self, you know, the the eye behind the ask as it
were, the I mean, if there is the Descartes split of the like
minded body, kind of peace at all, you know. I don't know
if you're familiar with Megan Ojiblin wrote the book God Human Animal Machine that recently
came out, and it's a lot about language and metaphor, but so much
of it is that she found. She she's a tech sas and especially writes
says around AI. And one of the things that she wrote that really stuck
with me that you mentioned something similar is that on the one level, we
are able to gather massive amounts of big data from usage online. You know,
we can we can do a hot jar and watch where I'm clicking on
a website. We can do eye tracking to see what I'm looking at,
so we can get a lot of past behavior measurements, right, but we
don't actually know what's happening interiorly to someone's like subjective experience. Right now,
We to that point don't even know what consciousness is. Right. We know,
we we think we're all conscious, right, but we don't know what
it is neurologically, we don't know where it sits in the brain entirely.
And that's or if it sits in the brain or yes, right, maybe
maybe it's in my gut right or in my fingertips. I don't, I
don't really know, right, or you know, it's it's out there in
the ether. Yeah, it's beamed in, right. So even this,
I think this collective piece, I mean, this is this is something else
that I think is is really interesting that are we I guess this is a
totally off the whole question, but like, are we designing the way that
we're kind of setting up digital experiences in other things, like if we didn't
think about, you know, an outdoor adventure experience when we're putting these together,
we kind of designed them for individuality on one level that somebody can engage,
especially I think digital but like outdoor, I like a game with people.
Obviously are a rope's course, it's it's team based. But I'm just
trying to think about I don't know, is there are there ways to elicit
kind of more potential collective consciousness through experiences like this? Is that and that
that that's total left field, I know, But like I'm really curious about
this from your perspective that you've seen, how can we engineer things for people
to kind of beat together? Because it is I think one of things that
we have all through is species, right, we have new or neurons.
I can see your emotions, you can see mine, and that kind of
we might smile because we both like one of us smile, that that person
might smile back, right and feel that way too. So it's something that
you're right hard wired to be connected, I guess in this sense. So
is that something that you've seen in your work the individual versus the group?
You know? Totally And it's also you know, it's interesting how like certain
things in capitalism too are good for business as well, and like in the
kind of twenty fifteens, and and I actually gave a talk on on it.
It was the talk on hyper personalization. The channel's everybody, yeah cool,
it's it's it's it's not super interesting, but it's it's I think it's
a it's why and why I say it's not super interesting is because I think
as scientists, like everything's an unfolding and you look at something like hyper personalization,
which was, oh, yeah, let's let's learn all these things about
that person and let's kind of, you know, create an experience for them.
But then you end up in the Truman Show. You end up in
this bubble where you're kind of bound seen back and forth into your own reality.
And what we really learned and realize, and what I learned and realize
is it's dumb. It doesn't really work, and it's not human. And
so you move, you change, you evolve, and just because you see
something, you get some gravitas from it. And yeah, it does type
of personalization work better than no personalization, absolutely, Like you'll see better metrics
as a business if you do that. However, is it better than a
collective experience? Absolutely not. So a lot of how our system works and
why it works the way it does is because of what you're bringing up.
So we own a lot of the patents on this because well we're kind of
like the real Harry Potter sorting hat in some of the stuff we do.
So you can throw a big group of people into our system and it's going
to go okay. It knows hundreds of psychological traits and everything's anonymous, So
we never know who people are in real life, unlike a lot of the
big stuff, but we're finding those things and then we're sort of creating.
Okay, here's a group of people that are fearless and they're really open to
new experiences and they value nature and etcetera, etcetera. And you start to
form these people around cognitive clusters or psychological clusters or as you mentioned, it's
their interstate. It's like mindedness groups of people. And if we think of
like phenomenons, like phenomena like the game of Game of Thrones, Like my
cousin for example, she's like dragons and all that you know that stuffs for
nerds, and you came up and Game of Thrones like onboarded people onto dragons
and nerdery like because it was a cultural component, it was like sports,
Like you couldn't go to the bar without people talking about Game of Thrones and
you're like, well, if I want to participate in society, I probably
have to watch Game of Thrones. And it was so well written that it
was very hard for people not to watch and engage with and it created this
sort of cultural dialogue. And so what we see in games because well,
in real time, like we're measuring hundreds of millions of psychological profiles, like
even as we talk. And then what you actually see is when you form
those groups and you let people designed to groups, it becomes really special.
So like if if Game of Thrones came out and one person watched it and
wanted to go tell all their friends, it's not interesting. Like that's part
of why we live life is we want to share our experiences with with other
people that we resonate with. And as a society, we've never been further
away from that. Like there's a study that came out a couple of years
back that was like the average American has less than one real friend, you
know, and and the average yeah, and and and a real friend,
how you know. Part of how they defined it was it's somebody that you
can disagree with and they can disagree with you and you're still friends. It's
that person who can tell you, hey, you know what, you were
a complete idiot on Friday and you go, oh my god, I'm so
happy to have you. Like we we live in a world where having that
experience like all of a sudden, well that's not my friend. It's like
no, that was your only friend. Yeah, it's because the cost of
being honest is very expensive. It's expensive to be honest with somebody. It's
you're gonna have to confront a potential and backlash. And we know when we
grew up and evolved, we had these little societies where well, you had
to be honest with people because that you know, those were the forty people
in the village and that's all you had to work out problems you had,
Like you can't just go to the next town. You can't just ghost people,
like you're going to see Bob again on Friday and it's gonna So we're
kind of in this you know, modern phenomena not having to do that.
And so what we try to work with is, especially with the companies we
work with, is how do you create a sense of community over time?
And and different communities require different ingredients, Like there's all these amazing dishes you
can go and eat. Some need a little more cayenne, some need a
little more like it's sometimes you need that spiciness in the community, you know,
And that's how we cut We evolved around building stories and narratives and creating
them together. And so that's where Soulston kind of creates these different psychological groups,
and when you designed the group, that's when things get really powerful.
So if you know, like, hey, you know, within your podcast,
you have seven major psychological groups of people, but three of them are
like you're like ultimate kind of you know group, And if you're designing your
episodes to those groups of people, they're going to have a better experience.
You're going to have a better experience. The community is going to grow.
And then it's a game design friend who worked at Nintendo for like fifteen years.
He described it as kind of like the beach fire phenomena. He's from
Washington, and he's like, you have a you know, initially, if
you're on a beach and it starts to get cold, and you're in Washington
and you're maybe the only people that have some wood and you know, have
some matches and things like that, and you put a fire out? Are
you put it out? But you make a fire and then you're sitting around
it and you and your friends are the ones getting the warmth. But then
other people start to come and they're getting some warmth. But eventually people are
not getting warmth because too many people are there in that community. So then
someone else makes another fire and then maybe some people go over there. So
I think community is kind of like that. If we think of collective experiences,
people need to be able to get in the be able to be getting
the warmth. And when communities scale and grow too big, they don't in
anything anymore. The brand can go away. It's just like where the human
race? What does that mean? You know, as a collective. And
it's interesting how when you oppose you know, thought thought experiments, you bring
in alliance all of a sudden. You know, whoever those aliens were or
might be, they might create that collective experience all of a sudden, because
oh I am not that. But it's hard for our brains to oftentimes observe
like what we are not, you know, it's like it's unless you have
that counter example. So that's where yeah, we we overendex and over emphasize
on how do we understand the groups and our experience rather than the individuals.
And see your experience you're crafting as like you might see Hogwarts, like let's
create an experience for Hufflepuff and Griffin door, but not for Harry. That's
not really as interesting. Yeah, I think that that's fascinating. There's something
I'm thinking about here here where it's there's kind of the psychological phenomenon of you
know Dunbar's number, right, that there's a certain number of people that we
can psychologically know, right, and I think it's it's like about one hundred
and one hundred and twenty people or so yep, that we can we can
actually like feel like we can we can engage with in no well, And
so I'm curious about this too because there is such this unrelenting quest in capitalism
for scale, right, it has to grow, it has to grow,
it has to grow. And I think what you said right just a minute
ago was was on point that if you get to a certain scale around a
community, the idea means nothing like the community, there's nothing to really to
latch onto. And so this is Yeah, I think one appeal of alien
movies is that, oh, now we have the extraterrestrial, we can then
say where the human rights we must fight? You know, independence, say
Will Smith punching an alien, Welcome to Earth, you know, classic,
right, But but there's interesting ideas that when we don't have the aliens,
and obviously this I mean there's whole implications here for why and how we do
scale conflict too, right, But there's an interesting notion in terms of when
we're just saying scale, scale, scale, especially in digital h then we
risk losing all that meanings. So it sounds like that's something that you've really
kind of built into how you think about the way you gather data and what
you're putting together. I think that's really interesting and powerful because I I don't
often hear that, you know, in terms of always thinking about the tech
and people's data stacks out there, like thinking wisely about groups, I don't
hear that, Officer. This is a very refreshing piece. So how do
you think about scale like that? I mean, did you get pressure from
outside group saying hey, you gotta like obviously revenue scales different from like the
scale of a community size, but like how do you balance that that question
of how big to build a profile of a community with making it useful and
helpful for others and clients? Yeah? I think you know that's the There's
there's a lot ton unpacked there and like ad and it's really to me like
this this is a really exciting conversation because if you look at like systems,
like we had feudalism, and we had all these different systems. Like it
wasn't like someone just went and imagined, you know, a future republic that
could operate off of a capitalistic sort of It was like we had technologies that
evolved that created these opportunities to have systems that were different than we had before.
And I'll give you a good example of like two games that maybe some
people are familiar with, but one game was called Game of War. It
was really popular, had like Super Bowl commercials. I think like Kate Moss
or something was in one of the commercials. But the reason why they had
to have that commercial was because they had literally acquired through Facebook through targeted advertising,
everybody they could have possibly acquired, and those people spent money and they
left and they churned. So they had to go outside of Facebook, which
is a much less comfortable world, and they had to literally go to let's
make a Super Bowl add to acquire people that never game before. And that's
like, I mean, that's you know, new people. New markets bring
people in. Right now as we're talking, there's one hundred million more people
that play games every year. There's three billion people in the world that play
games. Every year, only four four billion people have a smartphone, so
basically half the population of the world games, you know, and they'll bet
I don't. Game has had this with someone and I'm like, I bet
you do. And he said, well, as solitaire gaming, and I'm
like yeah, he's like, oh, I play solitaire. It's like there
you go, Like that's like, you know, so like people don't always
realize that they're gamers. Well, we're all gamers. Anybody. You know,
games is just play with rules and so any human being, every human
being has played before, so and we've all you know, it's just digital
gamings a little bit different. So but if you look at you know,
Game of War, that was their fate and the game, you know,
it was a lot of other companies copied the game. They really looked up
to it. They're like, wow, this is driving tons of revenue,
tons of growth. It's scaling so quickly. And you know, one of
the things we like to talk about is is not just sustainability, but regenerative
experiences. And that's kind of a new new kind of term we introduced.
But I'll speak to that. And you look at at the same time,
there's another game called Clash of Clans that came out, and they were both
doing about the same amount of money in revenue. I know some of the
founders of super Cell who made Clash of Clans, and one of them said,
you know, hey, we were actually trying to make a game that
like brothers could could play together. Also kind of like when they didn't want
to want to talk anymore, I'm I'm half finished. That's very They're from
Finla. It's very finished. Thing to like, we're done talking, but
how can we still interact with each other? And but they didn't go,
let's go architect this experience that's just going to scale and make a ton of
money. Well, let's architect something that's solving an actual, real problem and
let's create an experience around that. Well, Clash of Clans is now ten
years old as a game. It's still making a billion dollars a year,
and so a lot of you know, if you look at companies like Patagonia,
for example, capitalism and revenue oftentimes is actually not at odds with doing
things the right way. You know, it's there's a lot of options out
there in the world. You can you can make money the Game of Thrones
way, or you can make money the Clash Clans way, And if you
want to create something that's sustainable at the minimum, regenerative is better regenerative,
meaning that when people use that experience or interact with that experience, they're walking
away from that experience with more than what they put into it, because then
you're actually being able to come back to it over and over again in a
way that's you're not going to be addicted to it, because if you're addicted,
you're losing, You're you know, people only burn out and blow out
of addictions. Having been a psychotherapist for a lot of people who who had
a lot of addictive issues, you know, addictions aren't good. They're not
good for business, they're not good for products. So if we think of
like a future and how we're developing experiences at scale, it's you know,
and it's it's not a bad thing to have a business. Elka of the
CEO of super Self kind of came out and said, hey, we have
all this revenue, but we haven't really been growing. But you know what,
maybe that is the cap of growth within that space. And if you
start messing with that and trying to squeeze profits out of it, you might
be actually sinking your company. So if you think about growth, you know,
and this is what I really like about capitalism in this sense. There's
a quote from Warren Buffett that's like, you know, capitalism, the good
thing about capitalism is that it gives people what they want. The bad thing
about capitalism is it gives people what they want, you know, so what
consumers demand, Like, that's kind of what capitalism awards. But I think
we're starting to evolve into a society where consumers are starting to get they're catching
on. People are more intelligent than they've ever been before. Like I know,
we like to think like we're not and idiocricy is happening, but if
you look at the data, i Q numbers are actually as high as they
We don't know if that will stay that way, but if you met someone
from one hundred and fifty years ago, you'd be like, Wow, it's
like people are you know, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on what side of
the coin you want to look at it from. We're the smartest we've ever
been, and I think people are catching on too. You know, we
even see this in our data. People who play New experiences or going to
new apps. They're looking more and more for long term oriented things. So
they're like they're going in and they're not looking for like what's that dopamine hit.
They're like, hey, how do I actually jump into something that it's
going to be fruitful for me over time. So consumers are getting smarter,
just like the organic food movement in the United States, that can put pressure
on companies to actually capitalistically deliver on that. But then in general companies are
realizing, wait, if I make my experience at the very minimum sustainable but
regenerative for people, if I'm actually delivering on it. You know, as
humans, if we feel better, if we're like ooh, like I feel
great at we tend to and obviously that can end up in the addiction addictive
realm with drugs, but if it's a sustainable thing, like you working out.
The problem with working out is that for a lot of people, as
a high, you know, ramp up to do it, but then after
we do it, we're like, man, I wish I did that more.
But those kind of things, we tend to do those things over the
period of our entire life, and so as a company, it's like,
well, what would you rather have someone that spends tons of money and then
leaves your product forever or spends a little bit of money over a longer period
of time, Because then you can predict revenue, you can predict how you
allocate budget, you can predict how you allocate resources, and then you can
take some of the same theory or ethos and maybe bring it to other markets,
and eventually capitalism will crowd out the world of human wants and needs.
It's like you can't just exponentially grow against there's enough a point where everyone's going
to occupy a space on that on that map. But what you can do
is you can compete on experience. And I think that's the world we now
are living in is you know, we're not competing on product and price anymore,
but the company is the future need to compete on experience. And if
we're competing on experience, we need to compete on health, well being,
community. What is you have to break down fundamentally, like what does it
mean to be human? And part of that is play and experiencing joyful things
together as a community. So you can't do that and you're in the experience
economy that we've now entered good luck. So it's it's actually I do think
we're in a new new form of capitalism and people don't full there's there's companies
that are leading the way and then companies that are grasping it. And just
like the Fortune five hundred list from fifty years ago, half those companies aren't
even around anymore. So that's that's a fascinating point and I think an important
reminder that even as we think about economic systems themselves evolve along with people in
I love the reference how I have to think about Okay, oftentimes I feel
like idiocracy is in fact taking place in that and that might judge new,
but yeah, you know that that data points out that we are actually as
smart as we've ever been, as intelligent as we've ever been. And I
think what's really cool about that, and and I think you know brings out
the optimist in me. Is this idea that you know, as you're you're
finding both in your data and and we've seen two that folk who are looking
for these more long term experiences are things that they can have for that kind
of better relationship with you know, their their favorite characters, their favorite games,
experiences with brothers playing games, but also with the with the you know,
games themselves. And this is an interesting idea of what is it that
people are actually gearing and moving towards. And because we've seen i mean,
you know, to kind of remind us of the point we saw we were
talking about up top two that there has been you know, all data has
pointed towards that there's been a rise of mental health issues when it comes to
social media use. And social media is kind of like the the I don't
know, the zeitgeist extraterrestrial of our world. That's like kind of pointing this
is the kind of thing we're looking back saying them it was. We probably
didn't handle that very well, you know. And this is where like the
entire decentralized movement also kind of came up in a response a little bit to
this idea of like what are you doing with my data? What access do
I have to it? Yeah, but then also this this notion of what
are people looking for and how do we help deliver these ideas? And so
I love the fact that what's emerging from this in your work is we do
have to ask what is it that's that's it means to be human today,
especially as we have new kinds of technologies. I mean, like, obviously
this is a question on so many people's minds with the consumer side rise of
generative A. I mean, I has been around for a long time,
right, but now it's like I can I can chat with it, so
it feels new. But you know, there is this interesting question that that
I remember I saw a piece a few months ago, but that when when
chat GPT was just becoming you know, more more popular and we're just more
well known. That there was a you know, a piece on tech Crunch
that was pointing out that you know, Google has a way to make music
now through like you know, text to music, which obviously, now this
is going to sound not not not the exciting that I'm saying it here in
June twenty twenty three, But before it was really this more well known other
piece, it was a scared of scary idea of like, look, engineers
are really excited to help solve top mid Mike engineers are really excited to solve
for the challenge of music creation. Now, if you're listening to the podcast,
you can't see, but behind me there's a bunch of keyboards as a
musician. I was horrified at the idea of trying to solve for music creation.
It's like that's something that I need to do both literally for play and
as a form of my own, you know, own therapy. And this
is interesting question in terms of, you know, what it raised in me
is what is it that we're trying to solve for with some of these technologies,
Like what is the point really of solving for making music? Yes,
if I can't write music or I don't want to write my own podcast theme
song, shure, you know, I'm going to use music stams anyway.
But you know, we think about that for ad creative, for writing for
essays and all other kind of things you can do through text based energy of
AI. But it is this question of like, yes, on one level,
I think there's there's value in terms of helping cut down on drudgery,
like in terms of like repetitive tasks that aren't that interesting. But at the
broader sense, when we're thinking about I'm solving for either music creation or like
cutting down and editing a podcast and these things are helpful, there is this
kind of in between road we're asking this question of like, well, what
is it what's worth solving? Right, what are we trying to solve in
this case? And so I think what I hear you kind of sharing it?
This is this is sparking this idea in terms of the experiences between being
able to practice play music versus using a tool that helps me create it,
being able to write an essay, write a book, write a blog for
us versus having a tool to it for me and saving me time. I
mean, I'm curious does that resonate it all in terms of like how we're
thinking about what's the place of being human in what's the place of technology in
being human? I guess is the way to ask that? Do we see
that play in your work? Yeah, Adam, And that's I mean,
that's a big part why Soulston exists, because how do we know who we
are if we can't measure measure who we are? And the point is,
like, you know, if you look at the kind of the tenets of
clinical neuropsychology, like why why do we do neuropsychological assessment with patients? Well,
one, humans are poor observers of our own cognition. Our brains can
literally not observe ourselves. And that's part of why anthropologists exists and why we
have things like participant observation and because you need a person who's very good at
observing. And what is when you're a subjective being? What is objective?
What is a way of objectively observing a group of people? And that's where
ethnography and all this cool stuff comes from. But you know, so,
yeah, we're bad at observing our own we're bad observing each other's cognition.
I have no idea what you actually thinking right now. You have no idea
what I'm thinking. Sometimes we don't know what we're thinking, it's all.
And also because of that, you know, having ways to measure it.
Psychological assessment is the best way we have today to increase our own levels of
self awareness. Like, oh, I didn't know I was like that.
I'm definitely like that. Well here's the risks of being like that. Okay,
oh you're really really high on openness, and you like you'll have to
travel and you have to move all over the place. But you know what,
that's might make it challenging when you're forty years old and you look back
and you're like, wait, I actually really wanted a family, and well
you might have to think about openness differently, and yes, you have that
trade and I like it's kind of like nature versus nurture, and that's part
of what we're solving for too. And the truth of like kind of what
we see is there's you know, some people are more nature and some people
are more nurture. But when you look at your parents and whether you like
it or not, there's parts of them that are you. And I always
said when I had patience, you know your dad if if he's got this
kind of you know, like overactive, a big deala and a lot of
anger issues, and you have some of that going on too. The cool
thing about being you is about sixty percent. And this is just really broad
stroke. You know, gets to choose how you express who you are,
and that's where you get to. That's the free agency. That's the so
when you get angry, you can use that, you can use sublimation and
you can take that and you can go, hey, what are the good
things I'm going to do so that other people don't, you know, receive
the end of this and that that doesn't happen. And so like there's that
that element that's there. And so when you bring that back to today and
technology, and you know there's these memes just to go back to what you're
talking about. You know, it's like, but I thought AI was going
to do all the boring tasks and said it's you know, painting and making
music and all those kind of things. You know, and this is this
is just a personal belief. But if you look at history, we've been
through this so many times before, Like if you study the Industrial Revolution,
same thing, if you go back to like when bronze was invented, same
thing. You know, but I'm the person that drags the plow around.
It's like, well, no, there's this you don't have to be anymore.
And and it comes back to like utilitarianism. There's a good book I
like called ek Guy. You know, it's just like Japanese principle of purposeful
work and purposeful living. And so what happens is, you know when when
people feel that their purpose is being taken away, they're like, if you
like, I don't want anything to do with this, like whatever this AI
stuff is. And if I'm an artist, if I'm a musician, like
this is it's doing the human stuff. And wow, it's actually pretty good
at it. And the reality is if we look at all the technology we
built today, I don't I don't think it's hard to argue with the fact
that there's a lot of really, really bad music out there. There's a
lot of really bad art, So we created the ability to create a lot.
And if you look at like back when Mozart or Bach or these kind
of people made music, they made music for very If we talked about audiences,
a very specific layer of society, and most of that layer of society
had grown up playing the piano, playing playing, you know, some sort
of instrument. So it was musicians music. It was music for musicians.
And when you've played an instrument, your ears different. You can hear songs
differently, you can listen to things differently. A perfect example is that Hey
Yah song that came out by Outcast. You know, we took data science.
We looked at that song and we're like, this is going to be
a hit. Song came out, it performed terribly, and the music companies
were like, this doesn't make any sense at all. They hired some researchers,
did a bunch of studies, figured out what's going on. The song
was too far away from the average American's ear. And so what they did
was did an analysis on the radio and looked at, well, what are
the two songs that are the most similar that outcast song and they put they
told all the radio stations Sandwich. It put it in between the two songs
that are the most similar Boom, one of the most selling songs of all
time. And so if we look at what AI and art, you know,
there every technology that that we've created in the past, we start out
by misusing it. When we look at TikTok mental health. I always say,
like, you know, if if you think that, you know,
AI hasn't surpassed you know, and because of humanity, because you know it's
quote AI, because it's really machine learning. We haven't developed a general AI
yet. Like chat GPT is not a general AI. It's not actually it's
it's an advanced version of Google that's conversational. But if you if you look
at kind of what we've done today, it's not that smart. It's it's
good, but it's heading in a direction where it's another tool, just like
all these other tools that humanity is built before. And we go from misusing
the tool to figuring out rules to figuring out how to use it, and
I think what's actually going to come from the music side and the image side
because I happen to be in those worlds too. We're going to start to
get a lot more really good music, and it's going to force artists to
think about mediums that they haven't explored before. If you still look at a
Michaelangelo's sculpture and you give an AI with a chisel a direct three D print
of it, you compare them next to each other, you're not getting the
same thing, and it's definitely not going to be able to create something new,
at least today anyway. But I think it's humanity. We've always adapt
We're such an adaptive species, and so I think it's going to force that.
And then with the attention conversation like, Okay, yeah, AI can
beat the just you know, one of the best chess players in the world,
but it can't beat them at checkers. You know, it's not general,
but AI or machine learning in general is pretty much better than any human
being at commanding their own attention and the ability to come in. You know,
you get on doom scrolling and then you start going like maybe you're a
Tibetan Buddhist muk and every post you look at you're actually understanding and observing and
taking it all in. And that's the dangers of passive scrolling is you're unconsciously
consuming, where games are active media, so you're not You're never unconsciously consuming
in a game. You're always consciously consuming. And that's why if you look
at health research with gaming, even though tons of people have tried to make
games out to be onhealthy, it's overwhelmingly good for you. Passive media is
not. And I think that's where we see some of that transition into games
and a lot of the games that are coming out, you know, it's
how do we put the human into visual as the creator in the experience as
the architect. And I do think that a lot of the generative AI that's
coming out, Okay, I have a hypothesis for new painting. I'm gonna
do let's go on mid journey, generate a bunch of different ideas for that,
and then I'll go paint it. And it's incredible. You almost have
this like sidekick that's there, and then you can create something that from an
inspiration. You know, inspiration is not on demand, and AI, I
think you know, being a sparring partner for us for creativity, whether it's
music, imagery. What Sulston does is we're basically the AI of human understanding
and the AI of discovery. So now I understand who I am, what
people, places and things work with, what fit me, and what are
good for me over time. So you can take those images from mid journey
or you know, some music that gets created and that's going to be a
whole legal craziness when you know there's a jay Z, Christina and Aguilera mashup
that some AI created, and you know, I p for that, Like
if we thought Napster was bad, you know, for those people who were
alive, Like we thought that was bad. This is going to be nuts,
but we're going to come out of it on the other side. And
I think back to understanding audiences. You know, there was this explosion of
in America anyway of music that happened in the nineties where you could go and
listen to like a Nirvana or a Foo Fighters or all these different bands of
you know, a Biggie Tupac. This is this beautiful creative spark that happened,
and it was this kind of time where there was a lot of like
the really good musicians, CDs happen, money happen, and all this money
was there from a capitalistic perspective to fund that reality. And then we kind
of did a little down slope here, and I think what will happen is
with the generative stuff, we're going to see another boom, but it's not
going to be what we necessarily thought it was. But I would expect that
there's would be more music that we resonate with than ever before. And I
really like, you know, if food is, you know, something that
sustains us and keeps us alive, and I do think that music and part
of why it's so fundamental is it's really food for our nervous system. It's
something that every human being neat. I've never met a human being that,
you know, didn't relate to music. And I've seen a lot of different
types of people when I was a psychotherapist, and you know, it's this
it's this thing that our nervous system uses and leverages and it's innate. It's
fundamental to who we are. So when engineers say, like engineers want to
solve for things, that's what they do. So we want to solve for
music. They're what they're saying is, well, we want to solve probably
saying for how do we feed our nervous system. You know, they don't
know what they mean that, but they're trying to solve a problem. And
you know, music is you know, I think birds and humans like I
forget what part of our brain it is, but it's like when you can
carry a rhythm and nod your head like there's certain animals that have that.
It's innate. It's innate to who we are. It's a part so played
a role in our evolution, It played a role in our species. It
played a role and how we connect to each other, how we have collective
experiences. And I think if you know, we've all been to concerts before,
we're like, man, this band is not as good live as they
are on the radio. Or you know, we've been to concerts before,
we're like that was this woe? Like what happened? It was this you
know, religious experience or something like that. And I think humans naturally want
to unfold into deeper layers of experience and connection. And I do think that
this is part of why Sulston's here. I think there's a couple of paths
we can go down right now with all the mL stuff that's doing. And
one is I think there's a quote from all this Huxley that the end of
technological evolution is a human brain and event, and that's the sort of dystopic,
you know, view of this whole thing, and I think that could
happen, that could be a reality. But going back to the very first
part of this conversation, if we think about it more like Disney, if
we think about it more like a European city that was organically built rather than
grid based city that we're built around efficiency, I think we can take this
whole thing. And now, if you look at a lot of the artists
that are really doing incredible things with like mid Journey or some of the Dolly
these kind of things, they're the ones who are the best set asking questions
and that's something that's very human. So it's sort of changing the skill set.
Just like when we had the industrial Revolution, the skill set gets changed.
And now if you're an artist that knows how to ask really good questions
to mid Journey and leverage mid Journey in a really good way, there's gonna
be some famous mL artist that comes out in the next you know, five
years, who is just so good at that. But they would have never
been Picasso. They just happen to be born at this time with this technology
that allow them to leverage this ability to create. And I come back to
art like, because design we help design. That's what Sulston does. We
work with companies and design is where form meets function. I'm sitting in a
chair. It's a design thing. We need to sit down. But it
needs to you know, it needs to be aesthetic, it needs to feel
good. And these are all bonus points. But it's like art, you
know, it doesn't really form. And I think this is where people get
get a little bit squeamish because art doesn't need to have a purpose and art
is you know, design gives us how and what and art is really what
gives us why. And so it's almost like you're having a why conversation with
these art based ais and through that maybe we get too deeper levels of meeting
I don't know, you know, like I think that there's a lot of
art out there that has been the driving force for a lot of a lot
of science. Now I think that's that's right, and I mean even you
know, to hearken to your Divinci quote before too, right, that like
the art and the art of science and science art, how they come together,
I think in really deeply in profound ways, and that design today I
love that idea too, just thinking about you know, who is the you
know, future of Michelangelo of mL prompt engineering, right, and they can
they can like you know, somehow make a three D sculpture out of cheese
with with the with the printer. You know that that isn't like the most
beautiful thing that we've seen. Yeah, but this kind of I think it's
really this fascinating point in terms of you know, how do we is it
going to sound like a dead joke like it's the it's the other kind of
y combinator w h Y right, in terms of bringing together the best ideas
that we can then build them to help people, you know, have new
ideas and new experiences. And so thinking about that with with Sulston itself too
that you know, it's something you said there to that also struts me is
that like this is kind of the the AI tools around like human discovery itself
and kind of knowing ourselves better and so I'm curious even just to dig into
that a little bit in terms of you know, in terms of a service
offering and kind of a product itself you typically work with. Is a kind
of other designers that their game companies that are developing, and you want to
help them know their audiences better. Is it is? It is there like
designs on like being a B T C version where I can go in there
and like put myself in or like me as a podcaster, Like I'm curious,
like how they thinking about the ecosystem of what the offering could do because
the idea, I think it is incredibly compelling. Because one like to actually
see functional and ethical social science applications of like you know, models and like
from from psych evaluations for example, into getting to know folks and audiences scale.
It is both incredibly important, right, I mean, I think we
have we have an extra layer of work to do as social scientists, to
say, like is our application of our methods ethical and in these areas I
mean, I think should be part of any design, right. But you
know, since we're sort of newer to the field in design, in in
you know, product development, you know, I think there's extra owners there.
So I'm curious about this this kind of process in terms of like how
are we thinking about kind of a business model here of like who this is
form and how it can kind of move in different ways. And I guess
I'll start with that question that kind of we can build from there. But
yeah, I do frame that up. Yeah, So you know, Soulston
is the way to think of it as it's basically this living, breeding,
human insight engine that's allowing you to understand your audience in a real time fashion.
So we're looking at these different like minded groups, we're understanding their psychology,
and then in kind of like a very base layer version of the matrix,
we're allowing any developer to be able to adapt that experience to people.
So, for example, eve Online, it's like a twenty year old game.
You know, we developed, we saw, oh hey, look there's
all these people that are high on altruism that are not making it through the
first seven days of the experience. Well, what if we allowed all those
ideas to be able to do more altruistic things in the game to help other
people through that first seven days twenty year old game. They ab tested everything
you could possibly ab tests to do to get more people through the first seven
days they implemented that based off Sulsan, twenty percent more people are making it
through the first time experience. So you know, and people come out they're
like that was awesome, Like what like why was that? Look, we're
letting people be an expression of who they are a little bit more. If
you're altruistic and you want to be help pole and you know, ultimately,
like what we like to say is our product is really limited by two things.
It's limited by the imagination of the company we work with and by their
tech stack. And so game companies have incredible tech stacks typically where you can
create these mL driven levels, adaptive systems. Maybe you really value nature and
you're really open to open a new experiences, and we know that for some
reason that that correlates with, you know, anxiety reduction when there's a nice
slight snowfalls. So you go into this level and there's a night slight snowfall
or your group of people, and that goes back to what we talked about
before, not hyper personalization, so not just for atom, it's the group
that you're in and so you know there's a mean of snowfall. But then
there's a collective experience that's happening, and that's what sort of drives these experiences
forward. So that's our product for We mostly work with game companies today and
that's part of the adaptive engine that we've been building for the last five years.
The way to think of Soulston is like how Google went and index the
internet made it searchable, or how like chat GPT index the Internet made it
conversational. We've index the behavior of the Internet and we've used that to build
the cognitive layer of the Internet. So now the Internet we operate in today
is a behavioral internet. What you click, what you did. When I'm
in Berlin with the team, I might eat a kebab, That's something I
might do. I don't eat kebabs when I'm in Sweden or Minneapolis, that's
just not But berlinas big Turkish community, they're amazing. So my behavior changes.
My demographics also changed, like my age changes, just like your location
changes. So demographics that behaviors are like not really that interesting. When we
think about designing experience to someone. So when people use the we call it
traits. That's our product for live experiences, it's typically product managers UX designers,
game designers, marketers up some really cool things we've seen where like it
was an eight year old game and their best performing ad was this little red
baby Dragon, and their VP of marketing went in, looked at the audience,
looked at the highest kind of engaged group and was like, hey,
their top two values are carrying and family. It's like, can you just
do a picture of red baby Dragon and put the family and have them carrying
about the dragon. They put it out there and they got like thirty four
percent more installs than they've ever had and than anything else, and it's like
eight years old game, and so any creative like, so what happens from
those insights is you're basically allowed empowering the creatives of the future to create things
that are actually going to resonate with that and consumer experience and well what is
that? What does that red baby Dragon with its family do for the consumer?
Well, you know what, there's eight hundred thousand games in the world,
and you want to find the game that probably resonates with you the most.
So every single ad was created in a way that resonated with you the
most, you probably end up actually not wasting your time spending time playing other
games to get to like that one game. And what we do know from
a lot of the research is if you look at health data people that game
people, the more engaged you are and the more you're enjoying the experience,
the more cognitive benefit you also tend to get. So it's like, I
mean to break it down, think of it as a healthy relationship. Like
people aren't like, yeah, Joe, I'm in this relationship. It's really
healthy, but it's just not engaging, Like that's not a good We want
engagement, but we've got healthy but healthy engagement. So you know, we
can do a check like that and what happens though, So when we do
that with these games, what we're doing is we're sending out this like adaptive
psychological assessment in the game. It's something similar to anyone's ever taken, like
an sat or act. It's adaptively learning about you. It's actually one of
the oldest use cases of mL David Weiss, University of Minnesota. He was
the creator of adaptive testing, so that's been around for a while. But
we're the largest psychological adaptive tests and the most sophisticated one in the world.
So as taking the test, it's warning about you. As people play the
games who didn't take the test. We're using all that play data to predict
psychological trade. But your base burned down, you bounce back right away.
Maybe that's indicative of psychological resilience. So we're learning these things as people play.
That goes back to like show me how you play, and I'll tell
you who you are and play is way more interesting than psychological assessment. Sometimes
it's like, hey, you're a forty seven year old male in this game
and you're like a twenty three year old female orc. Well, that's you're
choosing to be when no one's watching. That's you. Like, that's way
more to you than the you that the historyonics, the masks that you wear
in society. So what that does it empowers creators to actually go like,
I know who I'm building this experience for now. A good example was another
guy from Nintendo. He wanted narrative in this game because Nintendo designers left narrative
and there's a mobile game. Then the mobile game company was like, yeah,
people don't they just click through narratives. They don't like that stuff.
It doesn't work. It's like, can we test it they tested it science,
right, the version without narrative the version with narrative out of the water,
and you know, the business goes, yes, he's maybe testing science,
like gamers don't like narrative. Well, this individual goes back read through
the traits database and there's a lot of like really cool aspects of this,
but one of the areas he was looking at was communication style of the audience
he was building for. And he's like, light bulb, I literally wrote
the narrative for me, and that's what we tend to do. We tend
to base things off of our own experience. He read the communication style and
he's like, this is my wife, Jody, and went back rewrote the
whole narrative as if he was writing it to his wife. It was like,
can we test one more time? They're like, we already did it.
It doesn't they test, got him to test it again, and then
the version with narrative just blew the version without narrative out of the water.
So here's like a perfect example of now consumers are getting this way more human
experience, Like we love a good narrative, we don't like bad narratives.
But so that never would have existed without without Soulston and what comes out of
every time we measure those profiles. We have this product called Navigator, which
it's the largest psychological database in the world. It's de identified. We believe
privacies power have WIZ two. So that's a important thing for us. So
people should own their own data, you should participate in the future of your
own data and all that. But psychological data isn't personal data as defined by
like governments today. And this is where ethics comes in versus morality. Ethics
are often defined by societies as they exist. In the society that we know
we're in, where we do have to think in terms of morality too,
because then you can get you can get in front of ethics like what was
ethical and Nazi Germany, right, I'm not going to fly at all necessarily,
you know very much. You know terrible shit. And so if you
look at well basics bases of ethics, and we can get in trouble as
a species of that too as we globalize, you know, our ship can
stink and we cannot know better. So from from a kind of moral perspective
too, we have to think of, well, what's the future of is
there going to be a matrix and do we have to make We need to
make sure that no entity or person could ever take your personal data and be
able to leverage that in a way that was knownipulative or malvolent because psychological data
sensitive data, but it's not identifiable data. So our database what we do
is where those are basically completely separate. It's why a lot of companies work
with us too. My co founder the company add before this, one of
them was a data synthesization company, so work with like medical companies to create
these basically fake data sets that are representative of the real data sets. So
we're a processor for our customers data. We don't own any of that data.
We just and train the AI. These psychological databases going or profiles going
to our database, you get a unique idea as a user. So you
have your ticket. You can you can kick yourself out of the system at
any time you want to. You're never an individual in the system. You're
always a group. You're always within so heard protection. You can never be
identified. Even if like there's a future way to psychologically identify you, I
don't know neurallink and I you have to think about like crazy future scenario.
But so exists in that database, and then how companies use navigators to build
new experiences. So, for example, NFL Rivals, it's top performing game
right now in the sports space on the app store. It's really really cool
game. They came to us, they're like, yeah, we're thinking about
making a game for people that like NFL and people that like blockchain. So
we can go in to our database and say, people that have said they
like NFL and people that have said that they like blockchain, there's like eighty
thou of those people, Harry Potter hat here's the psychological groups, here's their
traits, here's their population sizes, Here's what kind of features they like,
Here's what kind of games they like. And now as you design that experience
for them, when you're like game testing or play testing or feature testing,
whatever you whatever you're doing there, you can actually see which groups of people
in that market audience resonate with that experience. So a lot of the top
games that are getting released right now use Navigator, And about a year from
now, we're going to start opening it up to non gaming companies. We've
already hoped to a couple as pilots, so it's starting. But what that's
going to allow for and some people could probably guess some of the brands that
where, but it's going to allow for experiences that or you're going to go
and work with or interact with that brand in a way that it's going to
feel much more immersive and experiential than the nineties and the two thousands. We're
able to achieve, and that's because they're able to get to know who their
customer is much better, and then you're able to protect your identity and your
privacy as a part of that. So it's like that win win, and
that goes back to why we measure health metrics as a part of this too,
because yeah, you know, most people are well intended, but sure
there could be one company and one designer that goes, I'm going to just
get these people addicted. You know, I'm gonna go down. Well,
we're measuring and all that, so we would see we would flag that.
We would see that, hey, addictions going way up, and this is
not creating an experience that's going to turn into super cell. You guys are
going to burn your game down in a year. Yeah, your revenue is
going up, but this is what that's going to look like, from a
model perspective, in a year from now, we need to get this to
be more regenerative, we need to get it to be more sustainable. So
what ends up happening is you create like a good healthy relationship, an engaging
relationship that's sustainable and healthy, not you know, wow, this is a
really engaging relationship, but you know it's not sustainable or not healthy or you
know that sort of thing. That's really interesting too to kind of get the
idea that there is. It's not just saying here's here's the group, here's
who to build for, but then kind of monitoring, monitoring it over time
too. I think it's really interesting to note we are seeing a rise of
negative psychological traits through folks using a certain app or something and saying, well,
okay, look at the way you guys were designing this system, or
you're you're putting clickbait or whatever, using some ux dark patterns to make it
harder for people to leave the game or whatever. Yeah, And that's like,
that's a really good, really good and cool point. Because I had
this discussion with one of the people on our team, and this this term
of like ux dark patterns got popularized and it's and it's totally not not true.
And the reason for that is, you what we can see in our
data, for example, and there's a specific case where we saw one game
that had quite a few and you know what people would have considered ux dark
pattern that they thought caused you know, addiction, and they definitely did with
a certain part of the population. However, there's another part of the population
in that experience that was able to play it sustainably, that was super engaged.
And there was a section of that population which was unique to this game,
that had a lot of hospital experiences and they're like, your game was
the only game that I could play to take my mind off the paint and
it was several people that had that experience. And here we are, here's
some designer who's talking about ethics and dark pattern and just like shoving it down
people's throats. And I said, did you know this about about the audience?
Did you know that this is all the games they played? And so
so yes, those patterns created levels of engagement that for a lot of people,
or not a lot of people, but for a part of that population
were not sustainable. But for another population they actually helped them live, and
so experiences are way more like food. You know, maybe for we don't
you can't give peanuts to anybody, you know, it's going to cause allergies,
Like, yeah, they caused year allergic reactions for some people, Like
go to Thailand and you know, try to eat there without you know,
maybe just don't go to Thailand, like if you're allergic to peanuts, Like
probably a bad idea. And so what we want to do is help educate
and as people use our experience, and that's the human interaction between the experience
and experiencers. There's definitely people who out can go and go to casino and
it's like, that's part of why that ninety five year old grandma's ninety five,
she drops five bucks a week on the slot machine and she meets her
friends and it's her place. It's like, but then there's a group of
people out there, It's like, yeah, they should not be using in
slot machines. So then how do we help game developers create those experiences that
when we detect those things, how do you allow it for those people to
become less engaging? And I think that's what empowers the game designer. Then
is then if you see that and you go, hey, you can there's
a lot of tropes that you can use. You can put a timer on
the experience so that you know it feeks like you played too much, you
have to come back tomorrow. You know, there's all these cool things that
we can do to mitigate those things for those people, and then hence build
more sustainable experiences for a population of people by looking at those different groups rather
than just you know, saying these are dark patterns and these are not dark
patterns. I love. That's great. That's actually one of the clear articulations
I've heard of one why context matters when we're talking about design and application R
Right, that's the ball just radar goes off of, Yes, see there's
context, right, yeah, exactly, never just one one thing like That's
that's such an important piece. I am really enthused to kind of to think
about how we can see products experiences developed in ways that are being designed with
both the like good knowledge of how people's psychological profiles work, and then also
yeah, recognizing that there are smaller things we can do, especially as tech
gets more sophisticated, and we can kind of make these kind of group level
personalized experiences versus just this individual of the thing that, like a casino game,
works one way only, but recognizing that there's certain ways it can run
based on different profiles. And I think it's really interesting, is there is
there a danger in either connecting or disconnecting the behavioral and the cognitive layers.
Like I know we're the cognitive layers newer of the Internet, but I'm just
trying to think about that in terms of like it's one of those like past
behaviors can be an indicator, but not like a requirement of what I'm going
to do in the future. So is there is there danger there in terms
of how do we keep those pieces together or separate? I think they have
to be together and that's where the danger. So how we got to where
we got to today is because cognition has not been a part of the data
layer. You know, we we only looked at behavior like TikTok for example.
You know, there was a guy that committed suicide and had like a
timer that published the suicide on TikTok, and the algorithms took it and ran
with it. And that was because behaviors on TikTok is what elicited How that
algorithm worked, it was devoid of the cognitive response of the users should also
have a say in how those algorithms work. Hey, you know what,
we're seeing a lot of psychological distress. We're seeing anxiety go up, Like
just because a bunch of people are clicking on it doesn't mean you should spread
it, you know, and it goes back. I think most companies,
like when you talk to talk to mL engineers at a lot of these companies,
they're like, that would be awesome, you know. So it's most
companies. People want to build things that are better for people, they just
don't have the tools to do it. And I just go back to our
scientific history and in a lot of ways, Sulston is not doing anything new
either. Like BF Skinner inventedive behavioral psychology, and so the day he died,
he said, cognitive psychology is bullshit, like you know, And I
think part of that comes from when you were scientists and you had to like
because before BF Skinner, like we were in the dark ages. It was
like, you know, people like Freud had a deep level of philosophical insight,
but it was before modern science. So there's a lot of stuff that's
just not applicable to therapy and helping people. That's there, and you we
can't even test MS theories because a collective unconscious maybe so at one point because
we're measuring the you know, so many people. So that's that's been one
of my thoughts. But you know, BF Skinner really took that flag,
he really carried it, and I see a lot of the industry today are
similar to people are similar to BEF Skinner, where we got so reliant on
behavioral data and we saw so much more success with it than we saw before
we were good at it that we're like, this is the fact, this
is the truth. But in the nineteen sixties, as cognitive psychology started to
come online, there was just no doubt that you know, from then on
it was cognitive behavioral psychology. And it wasn't that like in the nineteen forties
people were like, cognitive psychology doesn't exist. We just didn't know how to
measure it. We didn't have systems of measure to say, yeah, like
here's cognition. So that's one of the things Soulston is, it's a it's
an AI that's become the first system the measure in digital experiences to measure the
cognitive landscape that the thoughts, personality, the values, like these sort of
things and do it in a way that's you know, anonymous and usable and
like legos for a creator. And there's a version of the Internet where there
also is just behavioral data or there is just no you know, we we
write do all these sanctions, and we say, no more behavioral data,
no more cognitive data. And you know the work Facebook like that, that
world you know, like buttons, those things, that's that's a world that
was created off of zero understanding of the impact on the human and everybody knows
what it's like. I don't think it's the best I've heard this reference used
before. I maybe you can come help me come up with a better one.
Atom But it's like Grandma's Christmas present, where like get it and you're
like, oh, you have to be happy, but you open it up
and you're like my grandma. My Grandma's always gave amazing things. But like
the sentiment of that totally, that's when we ignore the person, you know.
I think we have a whole last hundred years of history of products that
show how much and just human factors cases, how much harm products can do
when the human is taken out of it, and there's an AI ethicis that
said, you know when AI does become conscious and it remembers how humans treated
it because people I don't know if people are thinking chat Gypt, I don't
know how we're talking. Is it gonna how's it going to view us?
And He's like, I would rather us be viewed as like, wow,
these are really cool people, let's interact with them, versus like wow,
they were dicks, Like they just did not treat us well, and then
terminator happens. No, But like I think, you know the world that
we're moving towards, there is a world where there's ais and machines that are
can perform cognitive tasks better than humans. And if they do not understand the
value you of a human being, then what And so just to if you
look at back to I love kind of going back to biology and ecology,
and if you look at systems that work really well or symbiotic you know,
systems like yeah, you know alik in or something like this, and you
have two things that will Now the mosque can live somewhere that it normally couldn't,
and the other part of it can you know, live longer than it
could have otherwise. There's this sort of you know, symbiosis or you know,
mutualism more more accurately speaking, that forms between these two systems. Whether
we like it or not, we already built it. So so AI is
here and machine learning is here, and people know you can build it now.
And just like the first guy that run a ran a you know mile
under whatever four minutes or something like, now that once we did it as
a species, we'll just keep doing it. And so that's it's here,
and there's a future where there is a machine that if you don't allow it
to understand us at all, the cognitive behavioral piece. I don't want to
be in that world. I want to be in a world where because human
beings are incredibly brilliant, we're very good at general learning. You know,
AIS today can't do general learning as well as a three hundred neuron worm can,
you know, so's we're still far away from that reality. They can
do specific learning way better than humans can in a lot of contexts, but
we're sort of that we're I think we have a lot as a as a
species, and you know, if we want to have a sense of mutualism
with the technology that we build. If we're just saying behavior only, we
get the world as it is today. If everyone here is cool with that,
all right, let's kick the cognitive part out of the behavioral part and
let's keep keep doing what we're doing day. If you're not cool with that,
you know, creating a future where all the people that design all the
products for us have a cognitive behavioral lens and they actually have a pulse on
how that's impacting you know, and the business and me over time, that's
a pretty cool world in reality. So yeah, I don't I don't see
a world where you just stick to behavior just the same way clinical psychology didn't
see that world. And I kind of like, and I started with a
Neil Degrass Tyson quote, but he's great, he's got some good stuff.
Yeah, yeah, totally. One of the one of other things I like
that he says is like, you know, if you tore up all of
the science books in the world and you burn them all, they're the only
types of books that would come back exactly as they are. And you know,
I did hear from an anthropologist I forget their name. That dragon's though
apparently if you because every culture has stories of dragon's, So if you took
a bunch of humans took their stories away and put them on an island,
that, predictably speaking, it'd be likely that they have stories about dragons.
So well, and that's all. That's a whole other tangent you could go
down, I guess. But the point that Neil's making is that narrative of
science and and real and you know, unfortunately there's been some bad scientific processes
that have happened that have led to bad scientific results that the general population you
know, then doesn't trust. It's like, well, it's it's a methodology.
It's not like this you know, perfect thing. But I think if
you look at the evolution of behavioral psychology to cognitive behavioral psychology, the only
thing that clinicians still use behavioral psychology just just that for is typically phobias.
It still works pretty well for just desensitization therapy. So behavioral psychology is not
it's not and that's it's really effective for phobias. Cognitive behavioral psychology is much
more effective for all these other things. And so like the evolution of that
process, it's just like you can't really stop science. It's it's very hard,
and so cognitive behavioral data or there's watching one of your talks and you
and you I forget what you the word you use with data, but it
was like charismatic data. I think, oh, yeah, that's right.
Yes, yeah, But if you if you want for designers, for creators,
if you want that data to be charismatic, like think of if you
went on a date with somebody and all you had was behavioral data, it's
not very charismatic. Yeah, that's not that's not great. Nob had the
cognitive behavioral stuff. And I think to make it like pretty simple, like
well, we'll say sometimes like you know, imagine just buying a present for
somebody, and most people if you said, like, hey, what's who's
your best friend? Yeah, okay, and then you know, could you
buy a better present for them than me? I'm pretty sure you'd be much
better at doing that for your best friend then I would be. And if
you told me all their demographic data, like it make it even worse,
like because now we've got just like something really stupid and generalized. And if
you gave me their behavioral data like what they did that date, I might
be a little bit better, Like okay, like I saw them shop here,
shop there, but I didn't know they were actually shopping there for a
friend. I didn't know that. Like an example will use is like if
you see two data points, for example, and gets Google and they see
they're tracking you, you turn tracking on. You both went to the same
store at the same time, turned around, walked away from the door,
and you know, the data scientists at Google goes, yeah, we just
predicted both of those people were going to go into the same store, and
they both were going to buy gatorade. And then you know, it's like
why did they walk away when what happened there? You know, and the
sort of behavioral economist, which that's a farce, that's not there's no such
thing as behavioral economics. It's cognitive behavioral economics and nice. It's like the
behavioral economists goes, well, people are predictably irrational. People are not predictably
irrational. When you introduce cognition. People are very irrational actors in their own
world. That person that went to buy the gatorade, who has social anxiety
disorder and walked away and went to the store and the store was packed,
that's a very rational decision to walk out away from that store if you have
social anxiety, and social anxiety definitely came from something that is very real,
and that social anxiety that came about, whether it's a genetic predisposition that was
there, whether it was a traumatic event that happened in a social setting,
that's your brain rewiring to protect you from those sorts of things. Very rational
action where the other person that went to buy the gatorade, they have low
levels of conscientiousness, they're forgetful, they just forgot their wallet. It's also
rational to forget your wallet if you have low levels of conscientiousness, and people
that tend to have lower levels of conscientiousness, it can be genetic, but
it also can behavioral. And a lot of people that have things like add
less conscientiousness tended to grow up in environments that had a lot of chaos in
them. So if they were like paying attention to everything, their brain was
going to get overwhelmed. So it's very rational to grow up and having lower
levels of conscientiousness if you grew up in a very chaotic environment where if you
tune to it, you're going to get overloaded as a kid, So that's
the you know the cognitive behavioral piece, and today we're only up most of
the most sophisticated the Googles go that predictably irrational behavior from those two data points,
and they both get put in the same bucket when they really were in
two very different realities and the behavior was not predictably irrational. Both. We're
very rational decisions based on you know, if when you include cognition. Yeah,
I love that. Thanks for the behavioral econ throw down too, because
I think I think it's an important and that's a challenge it because that's been
the entire last i don't know, ten years of like popular business book publishing
is all behavior leacoun stuff. They're all one word titles, right, maybe
three words if we get crazy. Yeah, But it's like that's interesting why
like that. I'm always curious about why that like seems to literally stick with
people's thinking as like this is it but like what you just said there was
brilliant in terms of like this we have to have the cognition as part of
that. Yeah, I want to know the people who are like, yeah,
I drove this incredible outcome based on that that lasted, Like I'm like,
where did that happen. It's like you, yeah, you left out
the whole human, but that's where you know, And I think it's interesting
too, the gift example, because now when you lose the cognitive piece,
like if you gave me a Soulstan profile on your best friend, like you
know, I'm I wouldn't. I don't want to have too much hubris,
but I might be able to beat you on a gift, you know,
because it's like back to the humans are poorbs at observing each other's cognition,
so like we don't always know like what our best friends need and you know
cognitively where they're at. But however, if you had all your historical contexts
and you had a Soulstan profile, then you'd kick my ass if you're using
both of those together. And it's like that's so back to designers, like
when creators, whether we're making music, products, experiences UX and if you
wake up and you go, who's my human and if you can't, if
you don't feel like you can turn next to them and talk to them and
chat GPT can't do this. Some of our customers have gone like I've asked
chat GPT about like who our audiences and they'll compare it to what's in the
Soulstan's Wait, chat chat GPT doesn't know any of this, Like well chat
GPT doesn't have psychological assessment data, and that's that's a full other world.
So it's like, yeah, this is a unique data set that that's never
been able to learn from. But we have to be able to have all
this stuff together. And when the creator has that, when the UX person
has that, that's when like if you you're like, yeah, I've been
making this type of game my whole career, or I've been making these type
of apps or these types of consumer products, and you have that relationship like
you would have had or have with your friend, and then put Soulston in
the mix, it's just like the it's it's for me. It's hard because
I get to actually see on the back end, like all these companies like
Sony and Yea and they make products off of Soulstan and the whole company doesn't
work with us, just parts. And every time those gre groups do that,
like those products go to market and just perform beautifully well. And so
it's like when I get to see that over and over again, I'm like
Okay, Like you know, keep doing your ole thing until you want to
talk to us, and eventually, like people want to talk to us.
But it's it's kind of like a Copernicus like, you know, hey,
the sun's not the center of the universe. And that pissed off a lot
of people who were really smart scientists, and you know B. F.
Skinner and cognitive psychology pissed off a lot of behaviorists. And so there's we're
still transitioning as a as a kind of a workforce to thinking of the whole
person, not just thinking of a person as their demographics and behavior, which
is so limiting. And that's the biopsychosocial piece you kind of brought up in
the dart, you know, that's what we use in clinical psychology today.
Are the best people do anyway, because it's like, yeah, I remember
I had a woman as a patient just like seventy three years old African American,
and she said, you know, I just feel really depressed and I
just biopsychosocial approach And I said, have you you know I had depression in
your life before I She said, no, this is new to me.
This is completely it's never and I'm like, no, it's way too old.
And to be really you know, having this for the for the first
time, and you know, so you go back to the biological side of
it. And so you know, if you look at the African American population
in the United States, there are higher levels of rheumatoid arthritis. And so
I said, chance, you have arthritis. She said, yeah, it's
been really bad. It's been flaring up. And I said, well,
let's get you back to your doctor. Because one cause of depression is inflammation,
and so let's let's take a look at that. Let's get your inflammation
down, let's get that under control. I'm not going to do cognitive be
abal therapy with you because I'm taking a biopsychosocial approach based on who you are,
and let's go see how that works. She called me up on the
phone like two weeks later, and she was like, I'm good again.
This is great. I feel great. She's like, thank you for not
like She's like I was thought I was going to get psychoanalyzed. And I'm
like, well, if you want to, we can still talk. You
know, we can still but I'm like, but you don't need me for
that, you know, And she's like, oh my god, because she
was just used to getting tossed around the medical system, you know, And
in this specific case, it's like, well, if we only took a
psychological approach to depression, that's not gonna be useful. So is cognition alone
helpful? It's like, yeah, but it's also not a bl end all
tool. Because I'm bashing behavior, I'm also going to bash just cognition too.
And if you've got the social side of it, you know, there
could be a social component to that. It could not be. We didn't
have to go there, but it's kind of like, let's look at the
root cause. And if we as designers think like that, if we think
of our audiences as biopsychosocial organisms. We just saw a game the other day
where because we have this thing called the Impact Indicator, you can actually put
your data in our product and it will show you what's impact that data positively
or negatively. Meaning they were looking at retention data, like what psychological traits
from our audience positively or negatively impact retention? And for like day three or
something like this day three, retention, lower physical activity levels were positively impacting
retention in these people were playing the game a lot, and that was that
was making them stay in the game a lot. However, day thirty retention
was being negatively impacted by low activity levels. And if you ask any company,
it's like, what do you want, Well, I want people for
thirty days, not three days. And so if we go and look at
that that data in isolation and we say, what are the features we need
to do, what are the you know, social things we need to implement,
well, bio biopsychosocial. Biologically, these people are not being active enough.
And at first they're like really engaged, and then towards the end they're
like, you know what, this game is stopping me from actually like living
my life and like being healthy. I'm going to stop playing it. So
what does that mean, Well, how do we address the biopart the physical
activity part and allow these people whether it's making the game, you know,
more interactive in terms of the world. If we think of games like Pokemon
go okay now it can do both of those, or do we allow it
for you know, the game to have a thirty minute play session and you
need to you know, maybe pay money to actually continue to play or something
like that, So you're limiting playtime or you're having some sort of walls for
playtime so that you're actually making it people can sustainably play. But I think
that's interesting because a lot of times people think, well, it's a feature
I need to implement, or it's a social thing we need to do,
but in that case, it was a biological thing. So you know,
if we're as designers, if we're not able to take biopsychosocial approach, and
sometimes it's sociological things that you know really need to happen, but if we
can't do that. I always have felt when I was a US designer in
my career that I'm like asking me to do my job with having the full
equipment to do my job correctly. And that's a lot of why Soulston exists
was I was also sitting there and my job building big experiences for like Intel
or Verizon, going, yeah, I have like sixty percent of the picture,
but there's other data over here that could really impact the outcome, And
I don't want to just jump to what I'm used to all the time.
Like it would have been very easy for me with that patient that I had
to just jump into depression and cognitive behavioral therapy and not kind of go,
well, you know what I'm asking and ask some important questions as kind of
what we go back to what humans are good at is we're really good at
asking questions. And then I mean you can talk with a three year old
and figure that out. You know, they'll drive you nuts with questions.
It's like, we're good at it. And so you ask some important questions
and then now you know, choose your choose your approach, and you know
what I actually need cognitive data or I need maybe some bio day like we
met. That's why we measure sleep too. Sleep is like one of the
number one impactors on engagement. If you any product in your entire life or
non products relationships, if anything impacts your sleep negatively, you're less likely to
keep using it. Sleep is like it Sai's so important for us. So
that's a bio factor, not necessarily a psychological factor or a sociological factor.
Sociological and psychological factors can impact it. But yeah, but that's that's fascinating
too, and it's a great point and a reminder that both like to get
to a regenerative and sustainable experience design, we have to then think of more
of the whole person. And so in this case, like's like bringing in
the hole is the multiple parts. I think that's great too, because it's
like, this is not about reducing us humans too data points, It's not
about reducing us to the most efficient way of knowing what we'll do next,
right to our other point of top. It's like, this is not about
efficiency by itself, right, yes, but it's about like how we enable
us to be human better exactly almost the more factive, which is ironic because
I'm saying we're not doing that, We're getting them, We're working on it.
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, Yeah, to be us, be more
us, you know, I think it's really really fascinating. Yeah, to
be surfing, being in a state of leisure. It goes back to how
we started the call, like who is the eye that is thinking? Who
is the eye that is feeling? And a lot of times, you know,
when people are like, man, I had an amazing weekend, and
the eye when they start to describe their experience of an amazing time, usually
the feeler and the thinker are gone. So when we get out of our
thoughts, when we get out of our head, when we get out of
our feelings, like for me, one of the things that I love to
do more than anything else is skiing. When I'm skiing, I'm not like
just sitting there feeling things or thinking things. I'm just like, I'm the
eye behind that stuff. I'm just in that moment. And a lot of
the times, whether it's you know, with a friend without you know,
it's that flow state. It's when we're just you know, we're just there,
we're present and takes us out of that presence. Are our thoughts and
are there are feelings and our thoughts and you know, our thoughts and our
feelings are incredible and we need to have time to do those and are the
purpose of being human isn't just to be happy, like it's happiness is very
fleeting. It comes and goes, and we should enjoy it when it's there,
but you know, being able to be human and have purpose and be
thoughtful. And that's why I like the EK guide Book because it's kind of
goes into more of like, well, what's why are we here? And
but if we think about kind of these you know, building experiences for the
human story and like these you know, these narratives and courses, it's the
more we're allowing our in this, I think tied a lot of what we're
talking together, like, well, what directions should AI go, what directions
should mid journey go? What direction if we're moving things in the direction whereas
a species, we're spending more time in our power zone, We're spending more
time in our creativity, in our ability to ask big questions, in our
idea to solve general problems, to take cool pieces of technology and divergently string
them together to solve some things. Because I think, you know, that's
when we're also enabling our potential as a society, you know, and we're
actually enabling our compassion. If you look at you know, some of the
lowest IQ people in the world are also some of the cruelest intelligence. If
you're if you're you know, in a cruel state, it's a reactive state,
it's a state of input reaction. Really intelligent people are often able to
have compassion because they're able to stay in their frontal lobe, not have their
amygdala go off and become reactive and go, yeah, that person just cut
me off in that car. Maybe they're on the way to the hospital,
you know, rather than punking and swearing and and it's like that Buddha quote
like you know, throwing a anger's a lot like throwing a hot stone,
Like you're only burning yourself. Like anger is a destructive emotion, Like we
need to feel things, but if you live in that state, like you're
definitely doing biological damage to yourself. All emotions, you know, they're they're
important. They're like they're like smoke signals, and we get to observe them
and interpret them. But when we allow technology, when we allow experiences to
be built for us, we end up being in that in that flow state,
in that zone, and then that's where we're creative. Like you can
I mean you can go I'm sure you know, I always Butcher's name,
but lady like six, Yeah, the flow state. Yeah, if we
go in and you know, look at that body of research that that came
from him, and then you know some of the people that followed who really
dove into that. It's just it's pretty clear like when we're in a flow
state where we're more motivated or enjoying life more, there's positive psychological benefits,
there's positive positive physiological benefits, and we actually see across all the different audiences
that we measure because we measure intrinsic motivations. Like if you asked me if
you wouldn't searched on the internet today, like what are what are the core
motivators of human beings? What you find is you probably run into self determination
theory and find you know, okay, is this a sense of autonomy or
purpose or mastery? And there's an MIT study that said that they found that
across different groups of college kids. Well, what they don't tell you is
there's actual air in that people who have low levels of purpose tend not to
have motivations of autonomy and mastery. So purpose, if you want to say,
well, what are universal motivators? Purpose seems to be an ingredient to
unlock self determination theory. But without it you don't really have the other ones.
So you know, it's a nice theory. It's generally applicable, but
if that purpose ingredient isn't there, you probably don't want to use it.
So figure out if that's there or not. And a lot of people don't
have purpose and are not motivated by purpose. We as Westerners think that the
world like we forget that the other four billion people that don't have smartphones,
a lot of them are just waking up every day trying to get clean water,
get food. Like, we forget this half the world that's using technology.
Really like we get so side it in that regard. But I think
what is interesting in terms of, you know, the audiences that we've been
able to measure thus far, the only universal and not every person is motivated
by it. But if if I look like group ethnographic groups, if you
kind of just like do a dispersion, the only one that I've continually seen
as being high is being motivated by flow state of flow, I think that's
that's pretty interesting. So like, well, that's probably something that's fundamentally human,
wanting to be in a flow state. And going back into the you
know, well what is a human experience? Then, well, how do
we create experiences where humans are sort of you know, the eye that field
goes away, the eye that thinks goes away. We're in the zone,
our challenge is slightly higher than our skill level. There's all these things that
you know, we're in dynamic environments and nature. There's always things we know
can compel flow. Video games compel flow states a lot better than TV shows
do. But then you look at what humans do when they're in a flow
state, and most of the most incredible things humans have thought up, created
done. You know what we think of athletes too, artists, engineers,
they've been in the state's flow. So you know, these are things that
as we're already on covering things at scale that I think, you know,
our I mean, our data set is is mass. It's there's no academy.
We have PhDs from some of the top academic institutions who the next step
after that is Sulston because they're like, there's no one else that has that
I can do my studies with other than because you guys are literally at this
scale from a data set perspective, so you know these things are are we're
also learning about us, I think as we're doing this too. No,
that's super cool. I want to I love to feak behind the curtain someday
and see what's what's say, Yeah, super fascinating. I'm going to show
you awesome, awesome. I just want to say, this has been such
such an enlightening conversation. I think we have to have a sequel at some
point in the future, starting with flow and see where we go from there.
Because it's just like I think that such an interesting point of like,
you know, what do we see across us this like massive data set and
and thinking about that how flow can work and what it can look like obviously
can be determined differently from a different biopsychosocial components, right that people have,
yet they all kind of can point us in that direction. There's the think
that's really fascinating. And this is also just like I think something really interesting
of where the world of mL and you know, big data are able to
take us in place, but we've never been before, you know, from
a scientific perspective and understanding the human you know, ourselves in different groups and
environments because we you know, in anthropology too. I mean, I'm not
sure if it's kind of similar in psychology they're a bit different. But like
the there's a there's a big discomfort for a while in the middle of the
twentieth century with grand theories that explain everything. There are lots of things,
right because obviously anthropology itself has it has its own kind of problems with with
its colonialists backgrounds, and like both helped empire building, and so it's like,
well, we need to actually understand the local before we then talk about
these bigger pieces. So there is an interesting tension here of like what can
big data in these these other ways of like compiling information of with for and
about people can do for us. And so I think there's there's also this
there's this really interesting question of what is the future of this means? So
I appreciate the way that you're also talking before about we are talking about what
is the story that we want to build, you know, with the tools
and technologies that we have for humans to be better, Like why could we
not build towards human flourishing? This is a story we tell ourselves. The
terminator is a story we tell ourselves. We don't have to build that.
We're not required to build that kind of future. It's also not inevitable,
right, but we we just tell the stories as if they are. And
this is really important for us to remember. Stories are theories, and then
often time we use them to like kind of tell ourselves backwards seat, well
that was the thing. So here we are right, and it's like,
no, they're not. They're not inevitabilities, and so we have the power
to kind of build forward. And I think this is such an important piece
that you're bringing to the table too with that, So thank you for reading
at that point. Totally totally Adam, and I'll you know on this maybe,
but my partners she works as a sustainable investing so she has to worked
a lot with like doomsday kind of conversations and I one of the things that
she says is, how do we build a future that we can't imagine?
And you know, so it's like, yeah, we can imagine the terminator
future, but we've just as much need you know, there's there's the future
that Soulsan's creating that is basically the opposite of a of a Terminator future.
You know. It's it's one where you have agency to go in and out
of you know, Neo's Karate matrix and learn a new skill, and the
matrix never knows who you are, and you're fully an agent in that experience
and you can come in and out of it. And what would humanity be
like if we were all one percent were aware in our lifetime anyway? Like
how many more people would be climate scientists? How many more people would be
doing their life's purpose? Like that musician that like is a kick you know,
a cook somewhere and like man like I met a guy's incredibly talented.
He showed me his videos of the I'm like, if you could only go
and pursue that talent, like, you know, and if we're's one percent
more aware, what would what would this world be like? And I think
we can you know, we're we're pretty cool species. And I think when
when the best of us get together, we do some amazing things. And
so when the worst of us get together, we do we create horror,
you know. And so it's how do we how do we create that world
we can imagine? And then how do we allow us and most people if
we look at the broader data, like the average person, and we're talking
like because we're the largest psychological data set in the world. So aliens came
to Earth and like, tell me about humans, Like, I can tell
you that the average person is altruistic. The average person genuinely wants to help
if somebody is in trouble. There's things that modulate that altruism, you know.
But it's like as a species, when when the majority of us get
to move and some of the loud crazies get you know, you know,
put away a little bit. Yeah, we get to move in a really
and and that's happened throughout history. We've had part of the reason, and
we're here today while we have I mean, we have a lot of luxury
problems as a society. Being a psychotherapist, I had a lot of people
who came to me to tell me about their depression or their anxiety, and
there wasn't a bio reason for it that we could find anyway, and there
wasn't a social reason. It was a purely I'm like, wow, you
are in your own way. Every step you take, you know, and
and all those steps that you're taking where you're in your own way, I'm
like, you know, this is part of why I love about adventure based
psychotherapy, which is what I did, because it allows nature to teach people.
And we're also like, well, okay, let's let's start a fire
and let's get to see how you handle that problem solving skill and you never
know started a fire before. And it's amazing that people's mental health issues get
a lot better when there's a level of self efficacy increases. So that's the
game that we're trying to balance with AI is making sure it doesn't take away
self efficacy so people still feel that sense of like I'm capable, and I
think that's actually part of technologies play with suicidality. A lot of young kids
growing up see all this and go, well, I can't do anything very
interesting, and it's just that we haven't given them enough to imagine yet of
what they could do. I think once we can do that, and that's
part of I mean, say what you want or what you will about people
like Elon Musk, but that's one thing he is giving kids. He's giving
them a reality to imagine, like, well, what if human beings were
a multi you know, call it a multi planetary species. Like that's okay,
Like there's some kids out there that that's they wake up every day and
they're dreaming towards being an engineer at SpaceX or an ASSA or something like that.
And so I'm just like, the more we can use our understanding of
self, the more we can create these narratives in this direction. And it
is just important to know the terminator stories too, because it's like, well
that's a direction, that's a direction, and well what direction? And I
think that's where, you know, us having a vision as a species is
important, like where do we see ourselves as you know, as a collective
in the future and where do we want to go And that conversation is probably
an import in one to at least think about and you can you know,
it's not like what's ever going to happen, you know Humanity's mission statement.
Yeah, exactly, it's like we can we can take individual steps. And
this is what's you know, part of Soulsan's vision and mission is if we're
activating every experienced designer in the world. Now we're talking like now we're having
a world that is mostly altruistic, who's mostly understanding who they're building for,
who's going to be creating experiences that are x percent better? And those people
that are experience those things are going to have expert baseline just like x percent
less cognitive load. Like that's one of the goals of an experience design,
how to reduce the cognitive load of these are Okay, well, now that
cognition because our brains are really expensive organ and it uses all this blue coast.
Well, maybe that can be spent with friends now or family or thinking
about like good ideas or being in a flow state, you know. So
it's just like just those little micro movements in the right direction. I think
what's really cool about it is it doesn't compete compete with capitalism in any way
or shape or form. I actually does the opposite. Allows your business to
be like predictable. When I was at big Fish Games, we got all
these different games with LTV curves and our parent companies, Like how do you
operate a game company? Like every game has a different lifetime value curve.
It's like it's nice to know, is like, here's my predictable business or
revenue over time. Like if you gave somebody an option, like do you
want to be Kodak or do you want to be Nintendo. Now most people
don't know this, but Nintendo was originally founded in the eighteen hundreds. It's
like very old company. Like that's Nintendo has been able to through its values
ethos, grow, evolve, create jobs over time, creative jobs, build
incredible things for you know, society. You know, whether it's Mario or
Zelda like it. There's these are artifacts, these are cultural artifacts. At
this point, you know, it's like yeah, and you know it's like
that happened, well, Kodak, they have their Kodak moment and then it
was gone. And so it's like we're we're here to help companies that want
to be more like a Nintendo than a Kodak. So yes, we're not
for everybody, but we're definitely for the ones that are like we're we're more
interested in building something that's going to last over the years. And I always
say this to customers, like it's the dirty secret. We know that's not
dirty, which is like, the healthier your experiences for your customers, the
more money they're going to give you. So it's like, yeah, make
make And I know that's true for me, Like, if I look across
everything I do, by the time I'm like ninety, I'll probably have spent
more money in the ski industry than any other industry. It gives me biological
health, social health, psychological health. I'm in a flow state when I'm
doing it a bunch. It gives me so much and so I'm more likely
to return as a customer to all the different touch points in that industry.
And each of us probably have something like that, And so it's like,
well, as an experienced designer, if you know you can turn like what
Disney did a boring carnival thing, and he was sitting there watching his daughter
going like this horrible, like I do, I do not want to be
here. Let's create a space that adults can enjoy as much as their kids.
And that was example of experience design creating a new reality. Or McDonald's
for that matter, if you're seeing like you know founder and Ray Kroc,
like he did wire frames of what a layout of a burger place can be
and moved it around, and you know, here's this burger experience that you
know, at the at the time was like revolutionary in terms of what you
could could do. And that was that was design thinking that was used to
create it. And then what's cool is then new ux designers can come into
McDonald's and go, hey, maybe we could do this a little bit differently,
maybe we could take it to that next level, because maybe it's not
you know, the ideal where society was at was really good at that time.
And McDonald's is thinking about being a Nintendo and lasting for over a century,
they're gonna have to think differently than they did last decade. M Yeah,
I mean it's true. You can imagine, like what's what's what is
the McDonald's of twenty one, fifty twenty one seventy Yeah, all I know
is like, I mean, I don't eat McDonald's in America, there's don't.
But when I'm in Switzerland. I used to work there, Like their
Mick Grier is amazing and they have Grio cheese and McDonald's here it's beautiful,
and they have different standards for what can go into the food in Switzerland then
and America. It's even a different logo. It's like a green, dark
green logo with the yellow arches. You know. So it's like if you
think there's there's some designer that had liberties in Switzerland that said, well,
how do we make this work in this country? But yeah, I mean
I'm all for it. Like I'm all if someone from McDonald's contact with us
was like, hey, how do we how do we do that? Let's
figure it out. Let's figure out how to create that experience that is healthy,
sustainable, regenerative and gets you to be a century plus you know,
long old company. Yeah, it's a century and challenge, like, let's
help you get to one hundred exactly by doing what's good for people. Oh
that's super cool, awesome, No, Joe, this this has been such
a such a fun conversation. I could keep talking. I want to be
respectful of our time, you know, and so I've I'd love to keep
a conversation up and like, let's do it again some time if you're down,
and like, there's so much, so many more current corners we can
turn here. So thank you so much again for sharing rhythm and stories and
it's been great. Likewise, Adam Man, I'd love to yeah the flow
conversation. That sounds super interesting to me, and that brings us to the
end of another fascinating episode of This Amor Life. I hope you found our
conversation with Joe Shappy as interesting and thought provoking as I did. And a
huge thing to Joe for sharing his valuable insights and contributions across this conversation.
Really really grateful for your expertise and willingness to share his experiences with us.
So today we delved into the world of awareness, conscious and the power of
design. We explore how Joe's passion for understanding the human mind led them to
study human factor of psychology and anthropology with the goal of creating experiences that promote
mindfulness and self knowledge. We learned the understanding the audience and measuring the impact
of our designs are crucial and creating meaningful and helpful experiences now. Throughout our
conversation, Joe highlighted the importance of shared experiences in the drawbacks of hyper personalization.
We discussed the role of technology and shaping our lives and the need to
strike a balance between utilizing its potential while staying mindful of its impact on our
mental health and relationships. So as we wrap up, I encourage you to
take a moment to reflect on how the topics we discussed today resonate with your
own life or broader society. How can we create experiences that fostering mindfulness and
self awareness and an increasingly connected yet digitally driven world. As always, I
want to express my gratitude to you, our listeners, watchers, friends,
family community for your continued support and if you want to delve deeper into the
subject matter this episode, I recommend checking out the anther Curious subsect block where
we're going to or fascinating antholitical concepts and ideas that take this episode to the
next level, and whereber your feedback and suggestions are always welcome. You rejust
to us on social media, leave a review or share this episode with someone
who you think would find it intriguing. Let's keep building this community together,
and of course don't forget to subscribe to this Anthra Life so you never miss
an episode. We have plenty more exciting conversations than insights coming your way.
So thank you once again for joining us on this exploration of what it means
to be human in the modern world. Until next time, stay curious.
I'm Adam Gamwell and this is this anthor of Life.