Building Regenerative Experiences: How Cognitive Data can Revolutionize Design

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome back to the Santhor Life,the podcast that explores what it means to
be human and in ever changing theworld. I'm your host, Adam Gambol.
So picture this. We're playing avideo game, fully immersed in a
world where your decisions matter, andthis world feels real. Now, imagine
if this experience went beyond mere entertainmentand it could be used as a tool
to assess and even improve your cognitivehealth. It sounds remarkable, doesn't it.

(00:23):
Today we have an incredible guest whois pioneering the use of video games
for cognitive assessment, opening up newpossibilities 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 andfounder of Sulston, an AI powered platform
for human centric experiences. Now,with the background and human factor of psychology,

(00:43):
anthropology, user experience, as wellas adventure based psychotherapy, Joe is
going to show us just exactly whatit 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. Astechnology continues to shape our lives. It's
essential to explore how it can beharnessed for our benefit, particularly in my

(01:03):
deal health, diagnostics and treatment.Now took our conversation, Joe and I
cover some incredible insights, and here'sjust 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 healthdiagnostics. How Sulston is spearheading human centered
experiences and revolutionizing the connection between brandsand audiences, and the importance of a

(01:25):
people first approach in creating healthier andmore 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 conversationof how we can step away from hyper
personalized experiences and design more for thecollective. Now, before we get started,
I want to take a moment toencourage you, our wonderful listeners and
viewers, to subscribe to our podcast. You reviews and share it with your

(01:47):
friendly and colleagues who you think you'lllove 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 keepbringing you fascinating conversations like this one that
you're about to experience. So withoutfurther ado, let's dive into the insightful
conversation with Joe Shapey and get readyto 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 theway that we connect with the world.

(02:10):
So strapping because this episode of ThisAnthro 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 joiningme 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 kindof think of your story as getting into
these these areas of tech and wellbeing. I think it was interesting for
me is ever since I was prettyyoung, I was really interested in this

(02:32):
problem of awareness, self awareness aswell 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 twelveyear old like kid, you know,
just like what is awareness? Whatis consciousness? You know when we say
like I think and I feel,well, who is the eye that is
doing the thinking? Who is theeye that is doing the feeling? Like

(02:53):
these are these are interesting questions,and I think they directly tied to when
you look at people kind of asthey go through their lives and make decisions,
tends to be the people that havethe most awareness around the decision or
what's happening, that tend to makethe best decisions, that tend to leave
the best lives, that tend toaccess their human potential. So Neil de

(03:15):
grass Tyson was on some talk showhosts 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 allthe other means and all the other
universes and saw the ones that madebetter decisions than I did that led to
more of their potential than I actedon it, He's like that would be
a sort of existential dread for meto see something like that, and so

(03:37):
like coming back to, you know, foundations of awareness. I decided to
volunteer in a hospital in Minneapolis whenI 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 downthat path, and you know, maybe
I'll be a psychiatrist. For example, worked in the er and really realized,

(03:57):
well up front from that a lotof people that end up in the
er about fifty percent of visits theUnited States are mental health issues. Most
of those go misdiagnosed on diagnosed aboutseven out of eight of them. So
it's the problem is more, it'sdeeper, and I'm like, well,
I'm not going to be able tosolve this as a psychologist, so maybe
I can solve it through design.And that's where I got really I learned

(04:18):
about human factors and human factors psychology. So I went to the University of
Wisconsin because at the time and itstill is one of the best schools for
clinical psychology and human factors. Butstudied that there and while I was doing
that undergrad degree. So this isn'tthe whole picture either. So I also
majored in anthropology because I think theart of science is very important. There's

(04:42):
a da Vinci quote that kind ofgoes about that, but I love that.
So having those two together. Thatwas kind of a foundation for me.
And so well, I'm going totake these I'm going to work with
these really big companies globally and let'sdesign experiences that maybe, you know,
we can architect them in ways thatit's more like, you know, a
for US school in Sweden than aninner city school in la And maybe we

(05:02):
can architect these environments that help peoplebecome one percent more mindful, one percent
more aware, one percent more selfknowledgeable, 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 thebudget or the resources of the time,
or the capacity to be able toeven measure those kind of outcomes. So

(05:25):
even if you have the intent ofdesigning something that is human centric or human
forward, or you know, justhealthier for people, well, how do
you measure that outcome? How doyou actually say, you know what,
we implemented this like button. We'rea company called Facebook. We think it's
really good. We're getting these engagementrhetorcs. You know, we're eight years
ago. We're happy. Yeah,cool, let's go with it. I

(05:46):
don't think they knew that, youknow, in the future, there's gonna
be studies coming out from like theUniversity of Michigan saying yeah, Facebook use
over time actually as a causal effecton depression or things like that, Like
I don't think that was the designintent whatsoever. It was, Hey,
this is really driving engagement. Andso I'm like, well, how do
we empower architects, designers, creatorsglobally so that they actually have access to

(06:08):
a really deeply understanding their audience.I do think most people are are good
spirit and goodwill, and when wecreate things, if we understand who we're
creating them for, oftentimes we're goingto make the best experience for them.
And then the second part is canwe 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 theirawareness goes up percent after using it

(06:30):
over time, Like that's interesting,And what about pinterest is doing that or
causing that? And so that's kindof where things started. And realize you
can't really measure psychology well at allin normal experiences. So like, are
one of our researchers used to bea 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 alot of what you did and what

(06:51):
you do, but they don't knowwho you are. And that's a tricky
thing to measure the history of psychologicalassessment. We're still in the dark ages,
like we used to do clinical neuropsyche assessments. When I went back
to school and became a clinical mentalhealth counselor and worked in clinical neuropsyche and
specialize in adventure based psychotherapy. Sothat's kind of like the anthropology and my

(07:15):
scheme career and all these things comingtogether. 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 thissay in adventure therapy, which is show
me how you play, and I'lltell you who you are, and it's
it's very true. And so Iwent into gaming to kind of see can

(07:39):
we measure psychology through how people play? Digital games are the largest most interactive
source of digital media of behavior outof 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 presentationof who we are. And as

(08:01):
you probably could you look at linguisticanthropology, it's like it's fun to go
out on those paths of like youknow, well, how much does language
shape how we think? And likethe sacred war hypotheses and all these kind
of things, But we don't knowa lot about language style, and we
do know that it's pretty simple andthat we just as a species still miscommunicate
a ton Like that was half myexperience, and I was doing marriage counseling

(08:22):
for couples. It's like, youguys, most mean the same thing.
You're saying different things but totally differs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, So
really saw a big fish games thatwhich was where I was ahead of UX
there and I was a UX directorat McCann Erickson before that. So I
was like doing all these things,seeing if it worked, experimenting, taking

(08:43):
the next step doing it experimenting andsaid hey, we can do this in
gaming. So that's how Sulston gotfounded about five years ago. Was let's
allow let's create a human insight enginethat allows any creator in the world to
actually understand the person they're creating forand actually see how their creations are impacting
that person over time. And let'smeasure all this important stuff like depression,

(09:07):
anxiety, addiction, verbal abuse whichpeople like to call toxicity, but it's
really just well and what is verbalabuse because that's subjective? And at what
point does that happen? And youmeasure all these things, and then you
help creators create spaces and digital experiencesand architect them in ways that are more
human. And I like to kindof use an example that it's a little

(09:28):
bit of a curveball, because alot of times when people think about Disneyland,
they think of escapism and it's thislike fantasy land. But Disney's original
vision for it was to prove andshow 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 toescape, they spend a bunch of money,

(09:50):
and his comment was, well,people do commerce here, They talk,
they eat, they do everything thatwe do as a species. The
only difference is I build around peopleand around play. We built societies around
efficiency, and cars, and peoplepay money to be in this place to
do everything that humans would naturally do. And I know you well know this

(10:11):
as an anthropologist, but it's likeif we look at our history, you
know, you can only hunt andgather 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 allLike 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 allthis time in the world, let's stand

(10:33):
on boards on the ocean and let'sdo that all the time. But there
is all this leisure and it's kindof 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 Ido think that our digital reality and how
we construct it, we have achance. It's kind of like I feel
like we have a window right nowto construct a reality that is built around

(10:54):
human beats and not a reality thatis built around efficiency, because efficiency he's
boring, Like you know, it'slike one of examples I'll use like if
you told the Lord of the Ringsas efficiently as possible. It's like,
yeah, there's this hobbit like ifyou know, he takes a ring,
he throws it into volcano, itgets destroyed, he beats the bad guys
done. Like, that's not there'sno human being in the world that's interested

(11:16):
in that story. It's really efficientversion of the story. It's terrible story.
And so how do we build andarchitect our digital reality so that it's
human and also compels people more intothe physical one and creates more of a
harmonic state. And we're obviously faraway from So what's such a such a
cool thing though, Yeah, yeah, you just said about five thousand things

(11:39):
that I want to dive into there. But but I think this, this
is I think such an interesting entrypoint that I'm both you know, that
is both surprising and delightful. AndI think that our listeners say, oh,
I actually, well, i'd realizeI can connect these pieces together.
So there's a couple of a coupleof things that I think that you're right,
you know, that we are inthis interesting point now today where we

(12:01):
have an opportunity to kind of rethinkwhat digital experiences are doing in our lives
and what they can do and youknow, the two things that really stood
out there that you share there isone is that like knowing kind of let
the interior self, you know,the the eye behind the ask as it
were, the I mean, ifthere is the Descartes split of the like
minded body, kind of peace atall, you know. I don't know

(12:22):
if you're familiar with Megan Ojiblin wrotethe book God Human Animal Machine that recently
came out, and it's a lotabout 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 ofthe things that she wrote that really stuck
with me that you mentioned something similaris that on the one level, we
are able to gather massive amounts ofbig data from usage online. You know,

(12:43):
we can we can do a hotjar and watch where I'm clicking on
a website. We can do eyetracking to see what I'm looking at,
so we can get a lot ofpast behavior measurements, right, but we
don't actually know what's happening interiorly tosomeone's like subjective experience. Right now,
We to that point don't even knowwhat 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 knowwhere it sits in the brain entirely.

(13:05):
And that's or if it sits inthe brain or yes, right, maybe
maybe it's in my gut right orin my fingertips. I don't, I
don't really know, right, oryou know, it's it's out there in
the ether. Yeah, it's beamedin, right. So even this,
I think this collective piece, Imean, this is this is something else
that I think is is really interestingthat are we I guess this is a
totally off the whole question, butlike, are we designing the way that

(13:26):
we're kind of setting up digital experiencesin other things, like if we didn't
think about, you know, anoutdoor adventure experience when we're putting these together,
we kind of designed them for individualityon 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'sit's team based. But I'm just
trying to think about I don't know, is there are there ways to elicit

(13:46):
kind of more potential collective consciousness throughexperiences like this? Is that and that
that that's total left field, Iknow, 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? Becauseit is I think one of things that
we have all through is species,right, we have new or neurons.
I can see your emotions, youcan see mine, and that kind of
we might smile because we both likeone of us smile, that that person
might smile back, right and feelthat way too. So it's something that

(14:09):
you're right hard wired to be connected, I guess in this sense. So
is that something that you've seen inyour work the individual versus the group?
You know? Totally And it's alsoyou know, it's interesting how like certain
things in capitalism too are good forbusiness as well, and like in the
kind of twenty fifteens, and andI actually gave a talk on on it.

(14:30):
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 sayit's not super interesting is because I think
as scientists, like everything's an unfoldingand you look at something like hyper personalization,
which was, oh, yeah,let's let's learn all these things about

(14:52):
that person and let's kind of,you know, create an experience for them.
But then you end up in theTruman Show. You end up in
this bubble where you're kind of boundseen 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 reallywork, and it's not human. And
so you move, you change,you evolve, and just because you see
something, you get some gravitas fromit. And yeah, it does type

(15:16):
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. Soa lot of how our system works and
why it works the way it doesis because of what you're bringing up.
So we own a lot of thepatents on this because well we're kind of
like the real Harry Potter sorting hatin some of the stuff we do.

(15:39):
So you can throw a big groupof people into our system and it's going
to go okay. It knows hundredsof psychological traits and everything's anonymous, So
we never know who people are inreal life, unlike a lot of the
big stuff, but we're finding thosethings and then we're sort of creating.
Okay, here's a group of peoplethat are fearless and they're really open to
new experiences and they value nature andetcetera, etcetera. And you start to

(16:00):
form these people around cognitive clusters orpsychological clusters or as you mentioned, it's
their interstate. It's like mindedness groupsof people. And if we think of
like phenomenons, like phenomena like thegame of Game of Thrones, Like my
cousin for example, she's like dragonsand all that you know that stuffs for
nerds, and you came up andGame of Thrones like onboarded people onto dragons

(16:26):
and nerdery like because it was acultural component, it was like sports,
Like you couldn't go to the barwithout people talking about Game of Thrones and
you're like, well, if Iwant 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 towatch and engage with and it created this
sort of cultural dialogue. And sowhat we see in games because well,

(16:49):
in real time, like we're measuringhundreds of millions of psychological profiles, like
even as we talk. And thenwhat you actually see is when you form
those groups and you let people designedto groups, it becomes really special.
So like if if Game of Thronescame 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 wewant to share our experiences with with other

(17:11):
people that we resonate with. Andas a society, we've never been further
away from that. Like there's astudy that came out a couple of years
back that was like the average Americanhas less than one real friend, you
know, and and the average yeah, and and and a real friend,
how you know. Part of howthey defined it was it's somebody that you
can disagree with and they can disagreewith you and you're still friends. It's

(17:34):
that person who can tell you,hey, you know what, you were
a complete idiot on Friday and yougo, oh my god, I'm so
happy to have you. Like wewe 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'sexpensive to be honest with somebody. It's

(17:56):
you're gonna have to confront a potentialand backlash. And we know when we
grew up and evolved, we hadthese little societies where well, you had
to be honest with people because thatyou know, those were the forty people
in the village and that's all youhad to work out problems you had,
Like you can't just go to thenext town. You can't just ghost people,
like you're going to see Bob againon Friday and it's gonna So we're

(18:18):
kind of in this you know,modern phenomena not having to do that.
And so what we try to workwith is, especially with the companies we
work with, is how do youcreate 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 needa little more cayenne, some need a
little more like it's sometimes you needthat spiciness in the community, you know,

(18:41):
And that's how we cut We evolvedaround building stories and narratives and creating
them together. And so that's whereSoulston 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 ofpeople, but three of them are
like you're like ultimate kind of youknow group, And if you're designing your

(19:06):
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 friendwho worked at Nintendo for like fifteen years.
He described it as kind of likethe beach fire phenomena. He's from
Washington, and he's like, youhave a you know, initially, if
you're on a beach and it startsto get cold, and you're in Washington
and you're maybe the only people thathave some wood and you know, have

(19:29):
some matches and things like that,and you put a fire out? Are
you put it out? But youmake a fire and then you're sitting around
it and you and your friends arethe ones getting the warmth. But then
other people start to come and they'regetting some warmth. But eventually people are
not getting warmth because too many peopleare there in that community. So then
someone else makes another fire and thenmaybe some people go over there. So

(19:51):
I think community is kind of likethat. If we think of collective experiences,
people need to be able to getin the be able to be getting
the warmth. And when communities scaleand grow too big, they don't in
anything anymore. The brand can goaway. 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 youknow, thought thought experiments, you bring
in alliance all of a sudden.You know, whoever those aliens were or

(20:14):
might be, they might create thatcollective experience all of a sudden, because
oh I am not that. Butit's hard for our brains to oftentimes observe
like what we are not, youknow, it's like it's unless you have
that counter example. So that's whereyeah, we we overendex and over emphasize
on how do we understand the groupsand our experience rather than the individuals.
And see your experience you're crafting aslike you might see Hogwarts, like let's

(20:37):
create an experience for Hufflepuff and Griffindoor, 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'sthere's kind of the psychological phenomenon of you
know Dunbar's number, right, thatthere's a certain number of people that we
can psychologically know, right, andI think it's it's like about one hundred
and one hundred and twenty people orso yep, that we can we can

(21:00):
actually like feel like we can wecan engage with in no well, And
so I'm curious about this too becausethere is such this unrelenting quest in capitalism
for scale, right, it hasto grow, it has to grow,
it has to grow. And Ithink what you said right just a minute
ago was was on point that ifyou get to a certain scale around a
community, the idea means nothing likethe community, there's nothing to really to
latch onto. And so this isYeah, I think one appeal of alien

(21:23):
movies is that, oh, nowwe have the extraterrestrial, we can then
say where the human rights we mustfight? You know, independence, say
Will Smith punching an alien, Welcometo Earth, you know, classic,
right, But but there's interesting ideasthat when we don't have the aliens,
and obviously this I mean there's wholeimplications here for why and how we do
scale conflict too, right, Butthere's an interesting notion in terms of when

(21:45):
we're just saying scale, scale,scale, especially in digital h then we
risk losing all that meanings. Soit sounds like that's something that you've really
kind of built into how you thinkabout the way you gather data and what
you're putting together. I think that'sreally 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

(22:07):
hear that, Officer. This isa very refreshing piece. So how do
you think about scale like that?I mean, did you get pressure from
outside group saying hey, you gottalike obviously revenue scales different from like the
scale of a community size, butlike how do you balance that that question
of how big to build a profileof a community with making it useful and
helpful for others and clients? Yeah? I think you know that's the There's

(22:27):
there's a lot ton unpacked there andlike ad and it's really to me like
this this is a really exciting conversationbecause if you look at like systems,
like we had feudalism, and wehad 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 sortof It was like we had technologies that

(22:49):
evolved that created these opportunities to havesystems that were different than we had before.
And I'll give you a good exampleof like two games that maybe some
people are familiar with, but onegame was called Game of War. It
was really popular, had like SuperBowl commercials. I think like Kate Moss
or something was in one of thecommercials. But the reason why they had

(23:11):
to have that commercial was because theyhad 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 theyhad to go outside of Facebook, which
is a much less comfortable world,and they had to literally go to let's

(23:33):
make a Super Bowl add to acquirepeople that never game before. And that's
like, I mean, that's youknow, new people. New markets bring
people in. Right now as we'retalking, there's one hundred million more people
that play games every year. There'sthree billion people in the world that play
games. Every year, only fourfour billion people have a smartphone, so
basically half the population of the worldgames, you know, and they'll bet

(23:56):
I don't. Game has had thiswith 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 andso any human being, every human
being has played before, so andwe've all you know, it's just digital

(24:18):
gamings a little bit different. Sobut if you look at you know,
Game of War, that was theirfate and the game, you know,
it was a lot of other companiescopied the game. They really looked up
to it. They're like, wow, this is driving tons of revenue,
tons of growth. It's scaling soquickly. And you know, one of
the things we like to talk aboutis is not just sustainability, but regenerative

(24:40):
experiences. And that's kind of anew new kind of term we introduced.
But I'll speak to that. Andyou look at at the same time,
there's another game called Clash of Clansthat came out, and they were both
doing about the same amount of moneyin revenue. I know some of the
founders of super Cell who made Clashof Clans, and one of them said,
you know, hey, we wereactually trying to make a game that

(25:00):
like brothers could could play together.Also kind of like when they didn't want
to want to talk anymore, I'mI'm half finished. That's very They're from
Finla. It's very finished. Thingto like, we're done talking, but
how can we still interact with eachother? And but they didn't go,
let's go architect this experience that's justgoing to scale and make a ton of
money. Well, let's architect somethingthat's solving an actual, real problem and

(25:23):
let's create an experience around that.Well, Clash of Clans is now ten
years old as a game. It'sstill 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 oftentimesis actually not at odds with doing
things the right way. You know, it's there's a lot of options out

(25:45):
there in the world. You canyou can make money the Game of Thrones
way, or you can make moneythe Clash Clans way, And if you
want to create something that's sustainable atthe minimum, regenerative is better regenerative,
meaning that when people use that experienceor interact with that experience, they're walking
away from that experience with more thanwhat they put into it, because then
you're actually being able to come backto it over and over again in a

(26:08):
way that's you're not going to beaddicted 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 psychotherapistfor a lot of people who who had
a lot of addictive issues, youknow, addictions aren't good. They're not
good for business, they're not goodfor products. So if we think of
like a future and how we're developingexperiences at scale, it's you know,

(26:30):
and it's it's not a bad thingto have a business. Elka of the
CEO of super Self kind of cameout and said, hey, we have
all this revenue, but we haven'treally been growing. But you know what,
maybe that is the cap of growthwithin that space. And if you
start messing with that and trying tosqueeze profits out of it, you might

(26:51):
be actually sinking your company. Soif you think about growth, you know,
and this is what I really likeabout 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 givespeople what they want. The bad thing
about capitalism is it gives people whatthey want, you know, so what
consumers demand, Like, that's kindof what capitalism awards. But I think

(27:12):
we're starting to evolve into a societywhere consumers are starting to get they're catching
on. People are more intelligent thanthey've ever been before. Like I know,
we like to think like we're notand idiocricy is happening, but if
you look at the data, iQ numbers are actually as high as they
We don't know if that will staythat way, but if you met someone
from one hundred and fifty years ago, you'd be like, Wow, it's

(27:34):
like people are you know, unfortunatelyor fortunately, depending on what side of
the coin you want to look atit from. We're the smartest we've ever
been, and I think people arecatching 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 andmore for long term oriented things. So
they're like they're going in and they'renot looking for like what's that dopamine hit.

(27:56):
They're like, hey, how doI actually jump into something that it's
going to be fruitful for me overtime. So consumers are getting smarter,
just like the organic food movement inthe United States, that can put pressure
on companies to actually capitalistically deliver onthat. But then in general companies are
realizing, wait, if I makemy experience at the very minimum sustainable but

(28:18):
regenerative for people, if I'm actuallydelivering on it. You know, as
humans, if we feel better,if we're like ooh, like I feel
great at we tend to and obviouslythat can end up in the addiction addictive
realm with drugs, but if it'sa sustainable thing, like you working out.
The problem with working out is thatfor a lot of people, as
a high, you know, rampup to do it, but then after

(28:41):
we do it, we're like,man, I wish I did that more.
But those kind of things, wetend to do those things over the
period of our entire life, andso as a company, it's like,
well, what would you rather havesomeone that spends tons of money and then
leaves your product forever or spends alittle bit of money over a longer period
of time, Because then you canpredict revenue, you can predict how you

(29:02):
allocate budget, you can predict howyou allocate resources, and then you can
take some of the same theory orethos and maybe bring it to other markets,
and eventually capitalism will crowd out theworld of human wants and needs.
It's like you can't just exponentially growagainst there's enough a point where everyone's going
to occupy a space on that onthat map. But what you can do

(29:23):
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 needto compete on experience. And if
we're competing on experience, we needto compete on health, well being,
community. What is you have tobreak down fundamentally, like what does it
mean to be human? And partof that is play and experiencing joyful things

(29:45):
together as a community. So youcan'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 ofcapitalism and people don't full there's there's companies
that are leading the way and thencompanies that are grasping it. And just
like the Fortune five hundred list fromfifty years ago, half those companies aren't

(30:08):
even around anymore. So that's that'sa fascinating point and I think an important
reminder that even as we think abouteconomic systems themselves evolve along with people in
I love the reference how I haveto think about Okay, oftentimes I feel
like idiocracy is in fact taking placein that and that might judge new,

(30:29):
but yeah, you know that thatdata points out that we are actually as
smart as we've ever been, asintelligent 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 thisidea that you know, as you're you're
finding both in your data and andwe've seen two that folk who are looking
for these more long term experiences arethings that they can have for that kind

(30:51):
of better relationship with you know,their their favorite characters, their favorite games,
experiences with brothers playing games, butalso with the with the you know,
games themselves. And this is aninteresting 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 remindus of the point we saw we were
talking about up top two that therehas been you know, all data has

(31:12):
pointed towards that there's been a riseof mental health issues when it comes to
social media use. And social mediais kind of like the the I don't
know, the zeitgeist extraterrestrial of ourworld. That's like kind of pointing this
is the kind of thing we're lookingback saying them it was. We probably
didn't handle that very well, youknow. And this is where like the
entire decentralized movement also kind of cameup in a response a little bit to

(31:32):
this idea of like what are youdoing 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 dowe help deliver these ideas? And so
I love the fact that what's emergingfrom this in your work is we do
have to ask what is it that'sthat's it means to be human today,
especially as we have new kinds oftechnologies. I mean, like, obviously
this is a question on so manypeople's minds with the consumer side rise of

(31:55):
generative A. I mean, Ihas been around for a long time,
right, but now it's like Ican 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 afew 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 ayou 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, textto music, which obviously, now this

(32:19):
is going to sound not not notthe exciting that I'm saying it here in
June twenty twenty three, But beforeit was really this more well known other
piece, it was a scared ofscary idea of like, look, engineers
are really excited to help solve topmid 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 methere's a bunch of keyboards as a
musician. I was horrified at theidea of trying to solve for music creation.

(32:43):
It's like that's something that I needto 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 tryingto solve for with some of these technologies,
Like what is the point really ofsolving for making music? Yes,
if I can't write music or Idon'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 aboutthat for ad creative, for writing for

(33:05):
essays and all other kind of thingsyou can do through text based energy of
AI. But it is this questionof like, yes, on one level,
I think there's there's value in termsof helping cut down on drudgery,
like in terms of like repetitive tasksthat aren't that interesting. But at the
broader sense, when we're thinking aboutI'm solving for either music creation or like
cutting down and editing a podcast andthese things are helpful, there is this
kind of in between road we're askingthis question of like, well, what

(33:27):
is it what's worth solving? Right, what are we trying to solve in
this case? And so I thinkwhat I hear you kind of sharing it?
This is this is sparking this ideain terms of the experiences between being
able to practice play music versus usinga 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 itfor me and saving me time. I
mean, I'm curious does that resonateit all in terms of like how we're
thinking about what's the place of beinghuman in what's the place of technology in

(33:50):
being human? I guess is theway 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 whowe are? And the point is,
like, you know, if youlook at the kind of the tenets of
clinical neuropsychology, like why why dowe do neuropsychological assessment with patients? Well,

(34:10):
one, humans are poor observers ofour own cognition. Our brains can
literally not observe ourselves. And that'spart of why anthropologists exists and why we
have things like participant observation and becauseyou need a person who's very good at
observing. And what is when you'rea subjective being? What is objective?
What is a way of objectively observinga group of people? And that's where

(34:32):
ethnography and all this cool stuff comesfrom. But you know, so,
yeah, we're bad at observing ourown we're bad observing each other's cognition.
I have no idea what you actuallythinking right now. You have no idea
what I'm thinking. Sometimes we don'tknow what we're thinking, it's all.
And also because of that, youknow, having ways to measure it.
Psychological assessment is the best way wehave today to increase our own levels of

(34:52):
self awareness. Like, oh,I didn't know I was like that.
I'm definitely like that. Well here'sthe 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 allover the place. But you know what,
that's might make it challenging when you'reforty years old and you look back
and you're like, wait, Iactually really wanted a family, and well
you might have to think about opennessdifferently, and yes, you have that

(35:15):
trade and I like it's kind oflike 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 youlook at your parents and whether you like
it or not, there's parts ofthem that are you. And I always
said when I had patience, youknow your dad if if he's got this

(35:36):
kind of you know, like overactive, a big deala and a lot of
anger issues, and you have someof that going on too. The cool
thing about being you is about sixtypercent. And this is just really broad
stroke. You know, gets tochoose 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 canuse that, you can use sublimation and
you can take that and you cango, hey, what are the good

(35:59):
things I'm going to do so thatother people don't, you know, receive
the end of this and that thatdoesn't happen. And so like there's that
that element that's there. And sowhen you bring that back to today and
technology, and you know there's thesememes just to go back to what you're
talking about. You know, it'slike, but I thought AI was going
to do all the boring tasks andsaid it's you know, painting and making
music and all those kind of things. You know, and this is this

(36:22):
is just a personal belief. Butif 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 backto like when bronze was invented, same
thing. You know, but I'mthe person that drags the plow around.
It's like, well, no,there's this you don't have to be anymore.

(36:43):
And and it comes back to likeutilitarianism. 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 sowhat happens is, you know when when
people feel that their purpose is beingtaken away, they're like, if you
like, I don't want anything todo with this, like whatever this AI
stuff is. And if I'm anartist, if I'm a musician, like

(37:06):
this is it's doing the human stuff. And wow, it's actually pretty good
at it. And the reality isif we look at all the technology we
built today, I don't I don'tthink 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, Sowe created the ability to create a lot.
And if you look at like backwhen Mozart or Bach or these kind

(37:28):
of people made music, they mademusic 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 musiciansmusic. It was music for musicians.
And when you've played an instrument,your ears different. You can hear songs

(37:49):
differently, you can listen to thingsdifferently. 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'relike, this is going to be
a hit. Song came out,it performed terribly, and the music companies
were like, this doesn't make anysense at all. They hired some researchers,
did a bunch of studies, figuredout what's going on. The song

(38:13):
was too far away from the averageAmerican's ear. And so what they did
was did an analysis on the radioand looked at, well, what are
the two songs that are the mostsimilar 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

(38:34):
time. And so if we lookat what AI and art, you know,
there every technology that that we've createdin the past, we start out
by misusing it. When we lookat TikTok mental health. I always say,
like, you know, if ifyou think that, you know,
AI hasn't surpassed you know, andbecause of humanity, because you know it's

(38:55):
quote AI, because it's really machinelearning. We haven't developed a general AI
yet. Like chat GPT is nota general AI. It's not actually it's
it's an advanced version of Google that'sconversational. But if you if you look
at kind of what we've done today, it's not that smart. It's it's

(39:15):
good, but it's heading in adirection where it's another tool, just like
all these other tools that humanity isbuilt before. And we go from misusing
the tool to figuring out rules tofiguring out how to use it, and
I think what's actually going to comefrom the music side and the image side
because I happen to be in thoseworlds too. We're going to start to
get a lot more really good music, and it's going to force artists to

(39:37):
think about mediums that they haven't exploredbefore. If you still look at a
Michaelangelo's sculpture and you give an AIwith a chisel a direct three D print
of it, you compare them nextto each other, you're not getting the
same thing, and it's definitely notgoing to be able to create something new,
at least today anyway. But Ithink it's humanity. We've always adapt

(39:58):
We're such an adaptive species, andso I think it's going to force that.
And then with the attention conversation like, Okay, yeah, AI can
beat the just you know, oneof 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 generalis pretty much better than any human
being at commanding their own attention andthe ability to come in. You know,

(40:20):
you get on doom scrolling and thenyou start going like maybe you're a
Tibetan Buddhist muk and every post youlook at you're actually understanding and observing and
taking it all in. And that'sthe 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 consciouslyconsuming. And that's why if you look

(40:43):
at health research with gaming, eventhough tons of people have tried to make
games out to be onhealthy, it'soverwhelmingly good for you. Passive media is
not. And I think that's wherewe see some of that transition into games
and a lot of the games thatare coming out, you know, it's
how do we put the human intovisual as the creator in the experience as
the architect. And I do thinkthat a lot of the generative AI that's

(41:07):
coming out, Okay, I havea 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, andthen you can create something that from an
inspiration. You know, inspiration isnot on demand, and AI, I
think you know, being a sparringpartner for us for creativity, whether it's

(41:30):
music, imagery. What Sulston doesis we're basically the AI of human understanding
and the AI of discovery. Sonow I understand who I am, what
people, places and things work with, what fit me, and what are
good for me over time. Soyou can take those images from mid journey
or you know, some music thatgets created and that's going to be a
whole legal craziness when you know there'sa jay Z, Christina and Aguilera mashup

(41:55):
that some AI created, and youknow, I p for that, Like
if we thought Napster was bad,you know, for those people who were
alive, Like we thought that wasbad. This is going to be nuts,
but we're going to come out ofit on the other side. And
I think back to understanding audiences.You know, there was this explosion of
in America anyway of music that happenedin the nineties where you could go and

(42:19):
listen to like a Nirvana or aFoo 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 timewhere there was a lot of like
the really good musicians, CDs happen, money happen, and all this money
was there from a capitalistic perspective tofund that reality. And then we kind

(42:43):
of did a little down slope here, and I think what will happen is
with the generative stuff, we're goingto see another boom, but it's not
going to be what we necessarily thoughtit was. But I would expect that
there's would be more music that weresonate with than ever before. And I
really like, you know, iffood is, you know, something that
sustains us and keeps us alive,and I do think that music and part

(43:05):
of why it's so fundamental is it'sreally 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 apsychotherapist, and you know, it's this
it's this thing that our nervous systemuses and leverages and it's innate. It's
fundamental to who we are. Sowhen engineers say, like engineers want to

(43:28):
solve for things, that's what theydo. 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 ournervous system. You know, they don't
know what they mean that, butthey'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 itis, but it's like when you can
carry a rhythm and nod your headlike there's certain animals that have that.

(43:51):
It's innate. It's innate to whowe are. It's a part so played
a role in our evolution, Itplayed a role in our species. It
played a role and how we connectto each other, how we have collective
experiences. And I think if youknow, we've all been to concerts before,
we're like, man, this bandis not as good live as they
are on the radio. Or youknow, we've been to concerts before,
we're like that was this woe?Like what happened? It was this you

(44:15):
know, religious experience or something likethat. And I think humans naturally want
to unfold into deeper layers of experienceand 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 withall the mL stuff that's doing. And
one is I think there's a quotefrom all this Huxley that the end of

(44:36):
technological evolution is a human brain andevent, and that's the sort of dystopic,
you know, view of this wholething, and I think that could
happen, that could be a reality. But going back to the very first
part of this conversation, if wethink about it more like Disney, if
we think about it more like aEuropean city that was organically built rather than

(44:58):
grid based city that we're built aroundefficiency, I think we can take this
whole thing. And now, ifyou look at a lot of the artists
that are really doing incredible things withlike mid Journey or some of the Dolly
these kind of things, they're theones who are the best set asking questions
and that's something that's very human.So it's sort of changing the skill set.

(45:19):
Just like when we had the industrialRevolution, the skill set gets changed.
And now if you're an artist thatknows how to ask really good questions
to mid Journey and leverage mid Journeyin a really good way, there's gonna
be some famous mL artist that comesout in the next you know, five
years, who is just so goodat that. But they would have never
been Picasso. They just happen tobe born at this time with this technology

(45:42):
that allow them to leverage this abilityto create. And I come back to
art like, because design we helpdesign. That's what Sulston does. We
work with companies and design is whereform 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 needsto be aesthetic, it needs to feel
good. And these are all bonuspoints. But it's like art, you

(46:04):
know, it doesn't really form.And I think this is where people get
get a little bit squeamish because artdoesn't need to have a purpose and art
is you know, design gives ushow and what and art is really what
gives us why. And so it'salmost like you're having a why conversation with
these art based ais and through thatmaybe we get too deeper levels of meeting

(46:28):
I don't know, you know,like I think that there's a lot of
art out there that has been thedriving force for a lot of a lot
of science. Now I think that'sthat's right, and I mean even you
know, to hearken to your Divinciquote before too, right, that like
the art and the art of scienceand science art, how they come together,
I think in really deeply in profoundways, and that design today I

(46:49):
love that idea too, just thinkingabout you know, who is the you
know, future of Michelangelo of mLprompt engineering, right, and they can
they can like you know, somehowmake 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 ofyou know, how do we is it

(47:13):
going to sound like a dead jokelike 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 tohelp people, you know, have new
ideas and new experiences. And sothinking about that with with Sulston itself too
that you know, it's something yousaid there to that also struts me is
that like this is kind of thethe AI tools around like human discovery itself

(47:34):
and kind of knowing ourselves better andso I'm curious even just to dig into
that a little bit in terms ofyou know, in terms of a service
offering and kind of a product itselfyou typically work with. Is a kind
of other designers that their game companiesthat 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 TC version where I can go in there
and like put myself in or likeme as a podcaster, Like I'm curious,

(47:57):
like how they thinking about the ecosystemof what the offering could do because
the idea, I think it isincredibly compelling. Because one like to actually
see functional and ethical social science applicationsof 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 ofwork to do as social scientists, to

(48:20):
say, like is our application ofour methods ethical and in these areas I
mean, I think should be partof any design, right. But you
know, since we're sort of newerto the field in design, in in
you know, product development, youknow, I think there's extra owners there.
So I'm curious about this this kindof process in terms of like how
are we thinking about kind of abusiness model here of like who this is

(48:42):
form and how it can kind ofmove in different ways. And I guess
I'll start with that question that kindof we can build from there. But
yeah, I do frame that up. Yeah, So you know, Soulston
is the way to think of itas it's basically this living, breeding,
human insight engine that's allowing you tounderstand your audience in a real time fashion.

(49:02):
So we're looking at these different likeminded groups, we're understanding their psychology,
and then in kind of like avery base layer version of the matrix,
we're allowing any developer to be ableto adapt that experience to people.
So, for example, eve Online, it's like a twenty year old game.
You know, we developed, wesaw, oh hey, look there's

(49:22):
all these people that are high onaltruism 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 morealtruistic things in the game to help other
people through that first seven days twentyyear old game. They ab tested everything
you could possibly ab tests to doto get more people through the first seven

(49:44):
days they implemented that based off Sulsan, twenty percent more people are making it
through the first time experience. Soyou know, and people come out they're
like that was awesome, Like whatlike why was that? Look, we're
letting people be an expression of whothey are a little bit more. If
you're altruistic and you want to behelp pole and you know, ultimately,
like what we like to say isour product is really limited by two things.

(50:05):
It's limited by the imagination of thecompany we work with and by their
tech stack. And so game companieshave incredible tech stacks typically where you can
create these mL driven levels, adaptivesystems. Maybe you really value nature and
you're really open to open a newexperiences, and we know that for some
reason that that correlates with, youknow, anxiety reduction when there's a nice

(50:30):
slight snowfalls. So you go intothis level and there's a night slight snowfall
or your group of people, andthat goes back to what we talked about
before, not hyper personalization, sonot just for atom, it's the group
that you're in and so you knowthere'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 forWe mostly work with game companies today and

(50:55):
that's part of the adaptive engine thatwe've been building for the last five years.
The way to think of Soulston islike how Google went and index the
internet made it searchable, or howlike chat GPT index the Internet made it
conversational. We've index the behavior ofthe Internet and we've used that to build
the cognitive layer of the Internet.So now the Internet we operate in today

(51:17):
is a behavioral internet. What youclick, what you did. When I'm
in Berlin with the team, Imight eat a kebab, That's something I
might do. I don't eat kebabswhen 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 myage changes, just like your location

(51:40):
changes. So demographics that behaviors arelike 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 liveexperiences, it's typically product managers UX designers,
game designers, marketers up some reallycool things we've seen where like it

(52:01):
was an eight year old game andtheir best performing ad was this little red
baby Dragon, and their VP ofmarketing went in, looked at the audience,
looked at the highest kind of engagedgroup and was like, hey,
their top two values are carrying andfamily. It's like, can you just
do a picture of red baby Dragonand put the family and have them carrying
about the dragon. They put itout there and they got like thirty four

(52:23):
percent more installs than they've ever hadand than anything else, and it's like
eight years old game, and soany creative like, so what happens from
those insights is you're basically allowed empoweringthe creatives of the future to create things
that are actually going to resonate withthat and consumer experience and well what is
that? What does that red babyDragon with its family do for the consumer?

(52:45):
Well, you know what, there'seight hundred thousand games in the world,
and you want to find the gamethat probably resonates with you the most.
So every single ad was created ina way that resonated with you the
most, you probably end up actuallynot wasting your time spending time playing other
games to get to like that onegame. And what we do know from
a lot of the research is ifyou look at health data people that game

(53:06):
people, the more engaged you areand the more you're enjoying the experience,
the more cognitive benefit you also tendto get. So it's like, I
mean to break it down, thinkof 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 buthealthy engagement. So you know, we

(53:28):
can do a check like that andwhat happens though, So when we do
that with these games, what we'redoing is we're sending out this like adaptive
psychological assessment in the game. It'ssomething similar to anyone's ever taken, like
an sat or act. It's adaptivelylearning about you. It's actually one of
the oldest use cases of mL DavidWeiss, University of Minnesota. He was

(53:49):
the creator of adaptive testing, sothat's been around for a while. But
we're the largest psychological adaptive tests andthe most sophisticated one in the world.
So as taking the test, it'swarning 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 burneddown, you bounce back right away.
Maybe that's indicative of psychological resilience.So we're learning these things as people play.

(54:15):
That goes back to like show mehow you play, and I'll tell
you who you are and play isway more interesting than psychological assessment. Sometimes
it's like, hey, you're aforty seven year old male in this game
and you're like a twenty three yearold 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 thatthe historyonics, the masks that you wear

(54:37):
in society. So what that doesit empowers creators to actually go like,
I know who I'm building this experiencefor now. A good example was another
guy from Nintendo. He wanted narrativein this game because Nintendo designers left narrative
and there's a mobile game. Thenthe mobile game company was like, yeah,

(54:58):
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 theversion 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

(55:22):
the traits database and there's a lotof like really cool aspects of this,
but one of the areas he waslooking at was communication style of the audience
he was building for. And he'slike, light bulb, I literally wrote
the narrative for me, and that'swhat we tend to do. We tend
to base things off of our ownexperience. He read the communication style and

(55:42):
he's like, this is my wife, Jody, and went back rewrote the
whole narrative as if he was writingit 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 himto test it again, and then
the version with narrative just blew theversion without narrative out of the water.
So here's like a perfect example ofnow consumers are getting this way more human

(56:05):
experience, Like we love a goodnarrative, we don't like bad narratives.
But so that never would have existedwithout 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 theworld. It's de identified. We believe
privacies power have WIZ two. Sothat's a important thing for us. So

(56:28):
people should own their own data,you should participate in the future of your
own data and all that. Butpsychological data isn't personal data as defined by
like governments today. And this iswhere ethics comes in versus morality. Ethics
are often defined by societies as theyexist. In the society that we know
we're in, where we do haveto think in terms of morality too,
because then you can get you canget in front of ethics like what was

(56:51):
ethical and Nazi Germany, right,I'm not going to fly at all necessarily,
you know very much. You knowterrible 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 weglobalize, you know, our ship can
stink and we cannot know better.So from from a kind of moral perspective

(57:14):
too, we have to think of, well, what's the future of is
there going to be a matrix anddo we have to make We need to
make sure that no entity or personcould ever take your personal data and be
able to leverage that in a waythat was knownipulative or malvolent because psychological data
sensitive data, but it's not identifiabledata. So our database what we do

(57:37):
is where those are basically completely separate. It's why a lot of companies work
with us too. My co founderthe 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 arerepresentative of the real data sets. So
we're a processor for our customers data. We don't own any of that data.

(57:59):
We just and train the AI.These psychological databases going or profiles going
to our database, you get aunique idea as a user. So you
have your ticket. You can youcan kick yourself out of the system at
any time you want to. You'renever an individual in the system. You're
always a group. You're always withinso heard protection. You can never be

(58:19):
identified. Even if like there's afuture way to psychologically identify you, I
don't know neurallink and I you haveto 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 onthe app store. It's really really cool

(58:44):
game. They came to us,they're like, yeah, we're thinking about
making a game for people that likeNFL and people that like blockchain. So
we can go in to our databaseand say, people that have said they
like NFL and people that have saidthat they like blockchain, there's like eighty
thou of those people, Harry Potterhat here's the psychological groups, here's their
traits, here's their population sizes,Here's what kind of features they like,

(59:07):
Here's what kind of games they like. And now as you design that experience
for them, when you're like gametesting 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 thatexperience. So a lot of the top
games that are getting released right nowuse Navigator, And about a year from

(59:30):
now, we're going to start openingit 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 peoplecould probably guess some of the brands that
where, but it's going to allowfor experiences that or you're going to go
and work with or interact with thatbrand in a way that it's going to

(59:51):
feel much more immersive and experiential thanthe nineties and the two thousands. We're
able to achieve, and that's becausethey're able to get to know who their
customer is much better, and thenyou'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 measurehealth metrics as a part of this too,
because yeah, you know, mostpeople are well intended, but sure

(01:00:15):
there could be one company and onedesigner 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, sowe 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 toturn into super cell. You guys are
going to burn your game down ina year. Yeah, your revenue is
going up, but this is whatthat's going to look like, from a

(01:00:37):
model perspective, in a year fromnow, we need to get this to
be more regenerative, we need toget it to be more sustainable. So
what ends up happening is you createlike a good healthy relationship, an engaging
relationship that's sustainable and healthy, notyou know, wow, this is a
really engaging relationship, but you knowit's not sustainable or not healthy or you
know that sort of thing. That'sreally interesting too to kind of get the

(01:01:00):
idea that there is. It's notjust saying here's here's the group, here's
who to build for, but thenkind of monitoring, monitoring it over time
too. I think it's really interestingto note we are seeing a rise of
negative psychological traits through folks using acertain app or something and saying, well,
okay, look at the way youguys were designing this system, or
you're you're putting clickbait or whatever,using some ux dark patterns to make it

(01:01:22):
harder for people to leave the gameor whatever. Yeah, And that's like,
that's a really good, really goodand cool point. Because I had
this discussion with one of the peopleon our team, and this this term
of like ux dark patterns got popularizedand it's and it's totally not not true.
And the reason for that is,you what we can see in our

(01:01:42):
data, for example, and there'sa specific case where we saw one game
that had quite a few and youknow 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 toplay it sustainably, that was super engaged.

(01:02:07):
And there was a section of thatpopulation which was unique to this game,
that had a lot of hospital experiencesand they're like, your game was
the only game that I could playto take my mind off the paint and
it was several people that had thatexperience. And here we are, here's
some designer who's talking about ethics anddark pattern and just like shoving it down

(01:02:29):
people's throats. And I said,did you know this about about the audience?
Did you know that this is allthe games they played? And so
so yes, those patterns created levelsof 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 anotherpopulation they actually helped them live, and

(01:02:49):
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 yearallergic 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 sowhat we want to do is help educate

(01:03:14):
and as people use our experience,and that's the human interaction between the experience
and experiencers. There's definitely people whoout can go and go to casino and
it's like, that's part of whythat ninety five year old grandma's ninety five,
she drops five bucks a week onthe slot machine and she meets her
friends and it's her place. It'slike, but then there's a group of

(01:03:37):
people out there, It's like,yeah, they should not be using in
slot machines. So then how dowe help game developers create those experiences that
when we detect those things, howdo you allow it for those people to
become less engaging? And I thinkthat's what empowers the game designer. Then
is then if you see that andyou go, hey, you can there's
a lot of tropes that you canuse. You can put a timer on

(01:03:58):
the experience so that you know itfeeks like you played too much, you
have to come back tomorrow. Youknow, there's all these cool things that
we can do to mitigate those thingsfor those people, and then hence build
more sustainable experiences for a population ofpeople by looking at those different groups rather
than just you know, saying theseare dark patterns and these are not dark
patterns. I love. That's great. That's actually one of the clear articulations

(01:04:21):
I've heard of one why context matterswhen we're talking about design and application R
Right, that's the ball just radargoes off of, Yes, see there's
context, right, yeah, exactly, never just one one thing like That's
that's such an important piece. Iam really enthused to kind of to think
about how we can see products experiencesdeveloped in ways that are being designed with

(01:04:45):
both the like good knowledge of howpeople's psychological profiles work, and then also
yeah, recognizing that there are smallerthings we can do, especially as tech
gets more sophisticated, and we cankind of make these kind of group level
personalized experiences versus just this individual ofthe thing that, like a casino game,
works one way only, but recognizingthat there's certain ways it can run
based on different profiles. And Ithink it's really interesting, is there is

(01:05:08):
there a danger in either connecting ordisconnecting the behavioral and the cognitive layers.
Like I know we're the cognitive layersnewer of the Internet, but I'm just
trying to think about that in termsof like it's one of those like past
behaviors can be an indicator, butnot like a requirement of what I'm going
to do in the future. Sois there is there danger there in terms
of how do we keep those piecestogether or separate? I think they have
to be together and that's where thedanger. So how we got to where

(01:05:31):
we got to today is because cognitionhas not been a part of the data
layer. You know, we weonly looked at behavior like TikTok for example.
You know, there was a guythat 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 becausebehaviors on TikTok is what elicited How that

(01:05:56):
algorithm worked, it was devoid ofthe cognitive response of the users should also
have a say in how those algorithmswork. 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 areclicking on it doesn't mean you should spread
it, you know, and itgoes back. I think most companies,
like when you talk to talk tomL engineers at a lot of these companies,

(01:06:17):
they're like, that would be awesome, you know. So it's most
companies. People want to build thingsthat 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 ofways, Sulston is not doing anything new
either. Like BF Skinner inventedive behavioralpsychology, and so the day he died,

(01:06:40):
he said, cognitive psychology is bullshit, like you know, And I
think part of that comes from whenyou were scientists and you had to like
because before BF Skinner, like wewere in the dark ages. It was
like, you know, people likeFreud had a deep level of philosophical insight,
but it was before modern science.So there's a lot of stuff that's

(01:07:01):
just not applicable to therapy and helpingpeople. That's there, and you we
can't even test MS theories because acollective unconscious maybe so at one point because
we're measuring the you know, somany 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 Isee a lot of the industry today are

(01:07:24):
similar to people are similar to BEFSkinner, where we got so reliant on
behavioral data and we saw so muchmore success with it than we saw before
we were good at it that we'relike, this is the fact, this
is the truth. But in thenineteen sixties, as cognitive psychology started to
come online, there was just nodoubt that you know, from then on

(01:07:45):
it was cognitive behavioral psychology. Andit wasn't that like in the nineteen forties
people were like, cognitive psychology doesn'texist. We just didn't know how to
measure it. We didn't have systemsof measure to say, yeah, like
here's cognition. So that's one ofthe things Soulston is, it's a it's
an AI that's become the first systemthe measure in digital experiences to measure the

(01:08:05):
cognitive landscape that the thoughts, personality, the values, like these sort of
things and do it in a waythat's you know, anonymous and usable and
like legos for a creator. Andthere's a version of the Internet where there
also is just behavioral data or thereis just no you know, we we

(01:08:28):
write do all these sanctions, andwe say, no more behavioral data,
no more cognitive data. And youknow 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 ofthe impact on the human and everybody knows
what it's like. I don't thinkit's the best I've heard this reference used

(01:08:49):
before. I maybe you can comehelp 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 tobe happy, but you open it up
and you're like my grandma. MyGrandma's always gave amazing things. But like
the sentiment of that totally, that'swhen we ignore the person, you know.

(01:09:09):
I think we have a whole lasthundred years of history of products that
show how much and just human factorscases, how much harm products can do
when the human is taken out ofit, and there's an AI ethicis that
said, you know when AI doesbecome conscious and it remembers how humans treated
it because people I don't know ifpeople are thinking chat Gypt, I don't

(01:09:33):
know how we're talking. Is itgonna how's it going to view us?
And He's like, I would ratherus be viewed as like, wow,
these are really cool people, let'sinteract with them, versus like wow,
they were dicks, Like they justdid not treat us well, and then
terminator happens. No, But likeI think, you know the world that
we're moving towards, there is aworld where there's ais and machines that are

(01:09:54):
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 kindof going back to biology and ecology,
and if you look at systems thatwork really well or symbiotic you know,
systems like yeah, you know alikin or something like this, and you

(01:10:16):
have two things that will Now themosque can live somewhere that it normally couldn't,
and the other part of it canyou know, live longer than it
could have otherwise. There's this sortof you know, symbiosis or you know,
mutualism more more accurately speaking, thatforms between these two systems. Whether
we like it or not, wealready built it. So so AI is
here and machine learning is here,and people know you can build it now.

(01:10:40):
And just like the first guy thatrun 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 doingit. And so that's it's here,
and there's a future where there isa machine that if you don't allow it
to understand us at all, thecognitive behavioral piece. I don't want to

(01:11:01):
be in that world. I wantto be in a world where because human
beings are incredibly brilliant, we're verygood at general learning. You know,
AIS today can't do general learning aswell as a three hundred neuron worm can,
you know, so's we're still faraway from that reality. They can
do specific learning way better than humanscan in a lot of contexts, but

(01:11:24):
we're sort of that we're I thinkwe have a lot as a as a
species, and you know, ifwe 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 cognitivepart out of the behavioral part and
let's keep keep doing what we're doingday. If you're not cool with that,

(01:11:47):
you know, creating a future whereall the people that design all the
products for us have a cognitive behaviorallens and they actually have a pulse on
how that's impacting you know, andthe 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 tobehavior just the same way clinical psychology didn't

(01:12:13):
see that world. And I kindof like, and I started with a
Neil Degrass Tyson quote, but he'sgreat, he's got some good stuff.
Yeah, yeah, totally. Oneof the one of other things I like
that he says is like, youknow, if you tore up all of
the science books in the world andyou burn them all, they're the only
types of books that would come backexactly as they are. And you know,

(01:12:34):
I did hear from an anthropologist Iforget their name. That dragon's though
apparently if you because every culture hasstories of dragon's, So if you took
a bunch of humans took their storiesaway and put them on an island,
that, predictably speaking, it'd belikely 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 thepoint that Neil's making is that narrative of

(01:12:59):
science and and real and you know, unfortunately there's been some bad scientific processes
that have happened that have led tobad scientific results that the general population you
know, then doesn't trust. It'slike, 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 behavioralpsychology to cognitive behavioral psychology, the only

(01:13:24):
thing that clinicians still use behavioral psychologyjust just that for is typically phobias.
It still works pretty well for justdesensitization therapy. So behavioral psychology is not
it's not and that's it's really effectivefor phobias. Cognitive behavioral psychology is much
more effective for all these other things. And so like the evolution of that

(01:13:47):
process, it's just like you can'treally stop science. It's it's very hard,
and so cognitive behavioral data or there'swatching one of your talks and you
and you I forget what you theword you use with data, but it
was like charismatic data. I think, oh, yeah, that's right.
Yes, yeah, But if youif you want for designers, for creators,

(01:14:08):
if you want that data to becharismatic, like think of if you
went on a date with somebody andall you had was behavioral data, it's
not very charismatic. Yeah, that'snot that's not great. Nob had the
cognitive behavioral stuff. And I thinkto make it like pretty simple, like
well, we'll say sometimes like youknow, imagine just buying a present for

(01:14:29):
somebody, and most people if yousaid, like, hey, what's who's
your best friend? Yeah, okay, and then you know, could you
buy a better present for them thanme? I'm pretty sure you'd be much
better at doing that for your bestfriend 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 likesomething really stupid and generalized. And if
you gave me their behavioral data likewhat they did that date, I might

(01:14:53):
be a little bit better, Likeokay, like I saw them shop here,
shop there, but I didn't knowthey 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, forexample, and gets Google and they see
they're tracking you, you turn trackingon. You both went to the same
store at the same time, turnedaround, walked away from the door,

(01:15:14):
and you know, the data scientistsat Google goes, yeah, we just
predicted both of those people were goingto 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 whathappened there? You know, and the
sort of behavioral economist, which that'sa farce, that's not there's no such

(01:15:35):
thing as behavioral economics. It's cognitivebehavioral economics and nice. It's like the
behavioral economists goes, well, peopleare predictably irrational. People are not predictably
irrational. When you introduce cognition.People are very irrational actors in their own
world. That person that went tobuy the gatorade, who has social anxiety

(01:15:56):
disorder and walked away and went tothe store and the store was packed,
that's a very rational decision to walkout away from that store if you have
social anxiety, and social anxiety definitelycame 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 traumaticevent that happened in a social setting,
that's your brain rewiring to protect youfrom those sorts of things. Very rational

(01:16:20):
action where the other person that wentto 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 youhave low levels of conscientiousness, and people
that tend to have lower levels ofconscientiousness, it can be genetic, but
it also can behavioral. And alot of people that have things like add

(01:16:43):
less conscientiousness tended to grow up inenvironments that had a lot of chaos in
them. So if they were likepaying attention to everything, their brain was
going to get overwhelmed. So it'svery rational to grow up and having lower
levels of conscientiousness if you grew upin a very chaotic environment where if you
tune to it, you're going toget overloaded as a kid, So that's
the you know the cognitive behavioral piece, and today we're only up most of

(01:17:08):
the most sophisticated the Googles go thatpredictably irrational behavior from those two data points,
and they both get put in thesame bucket when they really were in
two very different realities and the behaviorwas not predictably irrational. Both. We're
very rational decisions based on you know, if when you include cognition. Yeah,
I love that. Thanks for thebehavioral econ throw down too, because

(01:17:30):
I think I think it's an importantand 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'reall 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 aboutwhy that like seems to literally stick with
people's thinking as like this is itbut like what you just said there was

(01:17:53):
brilliant in terms of like this wehave to have the cognition as part of
that. Yeah, I want toknow the people who are like, yeah,
I drove this incredible outcome based onthat that lasted, Like I'm like,
where did that happen. It's likeyou, yeah, you left out
the whole human, but that's whereyou know, And I think it's interesting
too, the gift example, becausenow when you lose the cognitive piece,
like if you gave me a Soulstanprofile on your best friend, like you

(01:18:18):
know, I'm I wouldn't. Idon't want to have too much hubris,
but I might be able to beatyou on a gift, you know,
because it's like back to the humansare poorbs at observing each other's cognition,
so like we don't always know likewhat our best friends need and you know
cognitively where they're at. But however, if you had all your historical contexts

(01:18:39):
and you had a Soulstan profile,then you'd kick my ass if you're using
both of those together. And it'slike 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'smy human and if you can't, if
you don't feel like you can turnnext to them and talk to them and
chat GPT can't do this. Someof our customers have gone like I've asked

(01:19:00):
chat GPT about like who our audiencesand they'll compare it to what's in the
Soulstan's Wait, chat chat GPT doesn'tknow 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, thisis a unique data set that that's never
been able to learn from. Butwe have to be able to have all

(01:19:24):
this stuff together. And when thecreator has that, when the UX person
has that, that's when like ifyou you're like, yeah, I've been
making this type of game my wholecareer, or I've been making these type
of apps or these types of consumerproducts, and you have that relationship like
you would have had or have withyour friend, and then put Soulston in
the mix, it's just like theit's it's for me. It's hard because

(01:19:47):
I get to actually see on theback end, like all these companies like
Sony and Yea and they make productsoff 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 andjust perform beautifully well. And so
it's like when I get to seethat over and over again, I'm like

(01:20:08):
Okay, Like you know, keepdoing 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 aCopernicus like, you know, hey,
the sun's not the center of theuniverse. And that pissed off a lot
of people who were really smart scientists, and you know B. F.
Skinner and cognitive psychology pissed off alot of behaviorists. And so there's we're

(01:20:31):
still transitioning as a as a kindof a workforce to thinking of the whole
person, not just thinking of aperson as their demographics and behavior, which
is so limiting. And that's thebiopsychosocial piece you kind of brought up in
the dart, you know, that'swhat we use in clinical psychology today.
Are the best people do anyway,because it's like, yeah, I remember

(01:20:54):
I had a woman as a patientjust 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'mlike, no, it's way too old.

(01:21:17):
And to be really you know,having this for the for the first
time, and you know, soyou 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 arehigher levels of rheumatoid arthritis. And so
I said, chance, you havearthritis. She said, yeah, it's
been really bad. It's been flaringup. And I said, well,

(01:21:39):
let's get you back to your doctor. Because one cause of depression is inflammation,
and so let's let's take a lookat 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 takinga 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, andshe was like, I'm good again.

(01:22:01):
This is great. I feel great. She's like, thank you for not
like She's like I was thought Iwas going to get psychoanalyzed. And I'm
like, well, if you wantto, we can still talk. You
know, we can still but I'mlike, but you don't need me for
that, you know, And she'slike, oh my god, because she
was just used to getting tossed aroundthe medical system, you know, And
in this specific case, it's like, well, if we only took a
psychological approach to depression, that's notgonna be useful. So is cognition alone

(01:22:27):
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 sideof it, you know, there
could be a social component to that. It could not be. We didn't
have to go there, but it'skind of like, let's look at the
root cause. And if we asdesigners think like that, if we think
of our audiences as biopsychosocial organisms.We just saw a game the other day

(01:22:51):
where because we have this thing calledthe Impact Indicator, you can actually put
your data in our product and itwill show you what's impact that data positively
or negatively. Meaning they were lookingat retention data, like what psychological traits
from our audience positively or negatively impactretention? And for like day three or

(01:23:12):
something like this day three, retention, lower physical activity levels were positively impacting
retention in these people were playing thegame a lot, and that was that
was making them stay in the gamea lot. However, day thirty retention
was being negatively impacted by low activitylevels. And if you ask any company,

(01:23:33):
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 wesay, what are the features we need
to do, what are the youknow, social things we need to implement,
well, bio biopsychosocial. Biologically,these people are not being active enough.

(01:23:54):
And at first they're like really engaged, and then towards the end they're
like, you know what, thisgame 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 whetherit's making the game, you know,
more interactive in terms of the world. If we think of games like Pokemon

(01:24:15):
go okay now it can do bothof those, or do we allow it
for you know, the game tohave a thirty minute play session and you
need to you know, maybe paymoney to actually continue to play or something
like that, So you're limiting playtimeor you're having some sort of walls for
playtime so that you're actually making itpeople can sustainably play. But I think
that's interesting because a lot of timespeople think, well, it's a feature

(01:24:36):
I need to implement, or it'sa social thing we need to do,
but in that case, it wasa biological thing. So you know,
if we're as designers, if we'renot able to take biopsychosocial approach, and
sometimes it's sociological things that you knowreally need to happen, but if we
can't do that. I always havefelt when I was a US designer in
my career that I'm like asking meto do my job with having the full

(01:25:00):
equipment to do my job correctly.And that's a lot of why Soulston exists
was I was also sitting there andmy 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 thatcould really impact the outcome, And
I don't want to just jump towhat I'm used to all the time.
Like it would have been very easyfor me with that patient that I had

(01:25:24):
to just jump into depression and cognitivebehavioral therapy and not kind of go,
well, you know what I'm askingand ask some important questions as kind of
what we go back to what humansare good at is we're really good at
asking questions. And then I meanyou can talk with a three year old
and figure that out. You know, they'll drive you nuts with questions.

(01:25:45):
It's like, we're good at it. And so you ask some important questions
and then now you know, chooseyour choose your approach, and you know
what I actually need cognitive data orI need maybe some bio day like we
met. That's why we measure sleeptoo. Sleep is like one of the
number one impactors on engagement. Ifyou any product in your entire life or
non products relationships, if anything impactsyour sleep negatively, you're less likely to

(01:26:10):
keep using it. Sleep is likeit Sai's so important for us. So
that's a bio factor, not necessarilya 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 pointand a reminder that both like to get

(01:26:30):
to a regenerative and sustainable experience design, we have to then think of more
of the whole person. And soin 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 reducingus humans too data points, It's not
about reducing us to the most efficientway of knowing what we'll do next,
right to our other point of top. It's like, this is not about

(01:26:50):
efficiency by itself, right, yes, but it's about like how we enable
us to be human better exactly almostthe 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 thinkit's really really fascinating. Yeah, to
be surfing, being in a stateof leisure. It goes back to how

(01:27:13):
we started the call, like whois 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 describetheir 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 ofour head, when we get out of
our feelings, like for me,one of the things that I love to

(01:27:36):
do more than anything else is skiing. When I'm skiing, I'm not like
just sitting there feeling things or thinkingthings. I'm just like, I'm the
eye behind that stuff. I'm justin 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 whenwe're just you know, we're just there,
we're present and takes us out ofthat presence. Are our thoughts and

(01:28:00):
are there are feelings and our thoughtsand you know, our thoughts and our
feelings are incredible and we need tohave time to do those and are the
purpose of being human isn't just tobe 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 tobe human and have purpose and be
thoughtful. And that's why I likethe EK guide Book because it's kind of
goes into more of like, well, what's why are we here? And

(01:28:23):
but if we think about kind ofthese 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 directionif we're moving things in the direction whereas

(01:28:44):
a species, we're spending more timein our power zone, We're spending more
time in our creativity, in ourability to ask big questions, in our
idea to solve general problems, totake 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 asa society, you know, and we're

(01:29:04):
actually enabling our compassion. If youlook at you know, some of the
lowest IQ people in the world arealso some of the cruelest intelligence. If
you're if you're you know, ina 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 stayin their frontal lobe, not have their

(01:29:28):
amygdala go off and become reactive andgo, yeah, that person just cut
me off in that car. Maybethey're on the way to the hospital,
you know, rather than punking andswearing and and it's like that Buddha quote
like you know, throwing a anger'sa lot like throwing a hot stone,
Like you're only burning yourself. Likeanger is a destructive emotion, Like we

(01:29:48):
need to feel things, but ifyou 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 smokesignals, and we get to observe them
and interpret them. But when weallow technology, when we allow experiences to
be built for us, we endup being in that in that flow state,

(01:30:11):
in that zone, and then that'swhere we're creative. Like you can
I mean you can go I'm sureyou know, I always Butcher's name,
but lady like six, Yeah,the flow state. Yeah, if we
go in and you know, lookat that body of research that that came
from him, and then you knowsome of the people that followed who really
dove into that. It's just it'spretty clear like when we're in a flow

(01:30:31):
state where we're more motivated or enjoyinglife more, there's positive psychological benefits,
there's positive positive physiological benefits, andwe actually see across all the different audiences
that we measure because we measure intrinsicmotivations. Like if you asked me if
you wouldn't searched on the internet today, like what are what are the core

(01:30:54):
motivators of human beings? What youfind 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 anMIT 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 whohave low levels of purpose tend not to

(01:31:16):
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 withoutit you don't really have the other ones.
So you know, it's a nicetheory. It's generally applicable, but
if that purpose ingredient isn't there,you probably don't want to use it.

(01:31:38):
So figure out if that's there ornot. And a lot of people don't
have purpose and are not motivated bypurpose. We as Westerners think that the
world like we forget that the otherfour billion people that don't have smartphones,
a lot of them are just wakingup every day trying to get clean water,
get food. Like, we forgetthis half the world that's using technology.
Really like we get so side itin that regard. But I think

(01:32:00):
what is interesting in terms of,you know, the audiences that we've been
able to measure thus far, theonly universal and not every person is motivated
by it. But if if Ilook 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 byflow state of flow, I think that's

(01:32:24):
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 humanexperience? Then, well, how do
we create experiences where humans are sortof you know, the eye that field
goes away, the eye that thinksgoes away. We're in the zone,
our challenge is slightly higher than ourskill level. There's all these things that

(01:32:46):
you know, we're in dynamic environmentsand nature. There's always things we know
can compel flow. Video games compelflow states a lot better than TV shows
do. But then you look atwhat humans do when they're in a flow
state, and most of the mostincredible things humans have thought up, created
done. You know what we thinkof athletes too, artists, engineers,
they've been in the state's flow.So you know, these are things that

(01:33:10):
as we're already on covering things atscale that I think, you know,
our I mean, our data setis is mass. It's there's no academy.
We have PhDs from some of thetop 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 otherthan because you guys are literally at this
scale from a data set perspective,so you know these things are are we're

(01:33:34):
also learning about us, I thinkas we're doing this too. No,
that's super cool. I want toI 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 justwant to say, this has been such
such an enlightening conversation. I thinkwe have to have a sequel at some
point in the future, starting withflow and see where we go from there.

(01:33:55):
Because it's just like I think thatsuch an interesting point of like,
you know, what do we seeacross us this like massive data set and
and thinking about that how flow canwork and what it can look like obviously
can be determined differently from a differentbiopsychosocial components, right that people have,
yet they all kind of can pointus in that direction. There's the think
that's really fascinating. And this isalso just like I think something really interesting

(01:34:19):
of where the world of mL andyou know, big data are able to
take us in place, but we'venever been before, you know, from
a scientific perspective and understanding the humanyou know, ourselves in different groups and
environments because we you know, inanthropology too. I mean, I'm not
sure if it's kind of similar inpsychology they're a bit different. But like
the there's a there's a big discomfortfor a while in the middle of the

(01:34:40):
twentieth century with grand theories that explaineverything. There are lots of things,
right because obviously anthropology itself has ithas its own kind of problems with with
its colonialists backgrounds, and like bothhelped empire building, and so it's like,
well, we need to actually understandthe local before we then talk about
these bigger pieces. So there isan interesting tension here of like what can
big data in these these other waysof like compiling information of with for and

(01:35:01):
about people can do for us.And so I think there's there's also this
there's this really interesting question of whatis the future of this means? So
I appreciate the way that you're alsotalking before about we are talking about what
is the story that we want tobuild, you know, with the tools
and technologies that we have for humansto be better, Like why could we
not build towards human flourishing? Thisis a story we tell ourselves. The
terminator is a story we tell ourselves. We don't have to build that.

(01:35:24):
We're not required to build that kindof future. It's also not inevitable,
right, but we we just tellthe stories as if they are. And
this is really important for us toremember. Stories are theories, and then
often time we use them to likekind of tell ourselves backwards seat, well
that was the thing. So herewe are right, and it's like,
no, they're not. They're notinevitabilities, and so we have the power
to kind of build forward. AndI think this is such an important piece

(01:35:45):
that you're bringing to the table toowith 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 asustainable investing so she has to worked
a lot with like doomsday kind ofconversations and I one of the things that
she says is, how do webuild a future that we can't imagine?

(01:36:08):
And you know, so it's like, yeah, we can imagine the terminator
future, but we've just as muchneed you know, there's there's the future
that Soulsan's creating that is basically theopposite of a of a Terminator future.
You know. It's it's one whereyou have agency to go in and out
of you know, Neo's Karate matrixand learn a new skill, and the

(01:36:29):
matrix never knows who you are,and you're fully an agent in that experience
and you can come in and outof it. And what would humanity be
like if we were all one percentwere aware in our lifetime anyway? Like
how many more people would be climatescientists? How many more people would be
doing their life's purpose? Like thatmusician that like is a kick you know,
a cook somewhere and like man likeI met a guy's incredibly talented.

(01:36:51):
He showed me his videos of theI'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 wouldthis world be like? And I think
we can you know, we're we'repretty cool species. And I think when
when the best of us get together, we do some amazing things. And

(01:37:12):
so when the worst of us gettogether, we do we create horror,
you know. And so it's howdo we how do we create that world
we can imagine? And then howdo 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 dataset in the world. So aliens came
to Earth and like, tell meabout humans, Like, I can tell

(01:37:33):
you that the average person is altruistic. The average person genuinely wants to help
if somebody is in trouble. There'sthings 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 loudcrazies get you know, you know,

(01:37:53):
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 Imean, we have a lot of luxury
problems as a society. Being apsychotherapist, I had a lot of people
who came to me to tell meabout their depression or their anxiety, and
there wasn't a bio reason for itthat we could find anyway, and there

(01:38:15):
wasn't a social reason. It wasa purely I'm like, wow, you
are in your own way. Everystep you take, you know, and
and all those steps that you're takingwhere you're in your own way, I'm
like, you know, this ispart 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

(01:38:36):
and let's get to see how youhandle that problem solving skill and you never
know started a fire before. Andit's amazing that people's mental health issues get
a lot better when there's a levelof self efficacy increases. So that's the
game that we're trying to balance withAI is making sure it doesn't take away
self efficacy so people still feel thatsense of like I'm capable, and I
think that's actually part of technologies playwith suicidality. A lot of young kids

(01:39:00):
growing up see all this and go, well, I can't do anything very
interesting, and it's just that wehaven't given them enough to imagine yet of
what they could do. I thinkonce we can do that, and that's
part of I mean, say whatyou want or what you will about people
like Elon Musk, but that's onething he is giving kids. He's giving
them a reality to imagine, like, well, what if human beings were
a multi you know, call ita multi planetary species. Like that's okay,

(01:39:26):
Like there's some kids out there thatthat's they wake up every day and
they're dreaming towards being an engineer atSpaceX or an ASSA or something like that.
And so I'm just like, themore we can use our understanding of
self, the more we can createthese narratives in this direction. And it
is just important to know the terminatorstories too, because it's like, well
that's a direction, that's a direction, and well what direction? And I

(01:39:47):
think that's where, you know,us having a vision as a species is
important, like where do we seeourselves as you know, as a collective
in the future and where do wewant to go And that conversation is probably
an import in one to at leastthink about and you can you know,
it's not like what's ever going tohappen, you know Humanity's mission statement.
Yeah, exactly, it's like wecan we can take individual steps. And

(01:40:10):
this is what's you know, partof 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 thatare x percent better? And those people

(01:40:30):
that are experience those things are goingto have expert baseline just like x percent
less cognitive load. Like that's oneof the goals of an experience design,
how to reduce the cognitive load ofthese are Okay, well, now that
cognition because our brains are really expensiveorgan and it uses all this blue coast.
Well, maybe that can be spentwith friends now or family or thinking

(01:40:51):
about like good ideas or being ina flow state, you know. So
it's just like just those little micromovements in the right direction. I think
what's really cool about it is itdoesn't compete compete with capitalism in any way
or shape or form. I actuallydoes the opposite. Allows your business to
be like predictable. When I wasat big Fish Games, we got all

(01:41:13):
these different games with LTV curves andour parent companies, Like how do you
operate a game company? Like everygame 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 yougave somebody an option, like do you
want to be Kodak or do youwant to be Nintendo. Now most people

(01:41:34):
don't know this, but Nintendo wasoriginally founded in the eighteen hundreds. It's
like very old company. Like that'sNintendo has been able to through its values
ethos, grow, evolve, createjobs over time, creative jobs, build
incredible things for you know, society. You know, whether it's Mario or

(01:41:55):
Zelda like it. There's these areartifacts, these are cultural artifacts. At
this point, you know, it'slike 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 likewe're we're here to help companies that want
to be more like a Nintendo thana Kodak. So yes, we're not

(01:42:16):
for everybody, but we're definitely forthe ones that are like we're we're more
interested in building something that's going tolast over the years. And I always
say this to customers, like it'sthe dirty secret. We know that's not
dirty, which is like, thehealthier 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 forme, Like, if I look across

(01:42:38):
everything I do, by the timeI'm like ninety, I'll probably have spent
more money in the ski industry thanany 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 givesme so much and so I'm more likely
to return as a customer to allthe different touch points in that industry.

(01:43:00):
And each of us probably have somethinglike 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 Ido, I do not want to be
here. Let's create a space thatadults can enjoy as much as their kids.

(01:43:23):
And that was example of experience designcreating a new reality. Or McDonald's
for that matter, if you're seeinglike you know founder and Ray Kroc,
like he did wire frames of whata layout of a burger place can be
and moved it around, and youknow, here's this burger experience that you
know, at the at the timewas like revolutionary in terms of what you

(01:43:45):
could could do. And that wasthat was design thinking that was used to
create it. And then what's coolis then new ux designers can come into
McDonald's and go, hey, maybewe could do this a little bit differently,
maybe we could take it to thatnext level, because maybe it's not
you know, the ideal where societywas at was really good at that time.
And McDonald's is thinking about being aNintendo and lasting for over a century,

(01:44:10):
they're gonna have to think differently thanthey did last decade. M Yeah,
I mean it's true. You canimagine, like what's what's what is
the McDonald's of twenty one, fiftytwenty one seventy Yeah, all I know
is like, I mean, Idon't eat McDonald's in America, there's don't.
But when I'm in Switzerland. Iused to work there, Like their
Mick Grier is amazing and they haveGrio cheese and McDonald's here it's beautiful,

(01:44:33):
and they have different standards for whatcan go into the food in Switzerland then
and America. It's even a differentlogo. 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 hadliberties in Switzerland that said, well,
how do we make this work inthis country? But yeah, I mean

(01:44:56):
I'm all for it. Like I'mall if someone from McDonald's contact with us
was like, hey, how dowe how do we do that? Let's
figure it out. Let's figure outhow to create that experience that is healthy,
sustainable, regenerative and gets you tobe a century plus you know,
long old company. Yeah, it'sa century and challenge, like, let's
help you get to one hundred exactlyby doing what's good for people. Oh

(01:45:18):
that's super cool, awesome, No, Joe, this this has been such
a such a fun conversation. Icould 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'sdo 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 somuch again for sharing rhythm and stories and
it's been great. Likewise, AdamMan, I'd love to yeah the flow

(01:45:40):
conversation. That sounds super interesting tome, and that brings us to the
end of another fascinating episode of ThisAmor Life. I hope you found our
conversation with Joe Shappy as interesting andthought provoking as I did. And a
huge thing to Joe for sharing hisvaluable insights and contributions across this conversation.
Really really grateful for your expertise andwillingness to share his experiences with us.
So today we delved into the worldof awareness, conscious and the power of

(01:46:00):
design. We explore how Joe's passionfor understanding the human mind led them to
study human factor of psychology and anthropologywith the goal of creating experiences that promote
mindfulness and self knowledge. We learnedthe understanding the audience and measuring the impact
of our designs are crucial and creatingmeaningful and helpful experiences now. Throughout our
conversation, Joe highlighted the importance ofshared experiences in the drawbacks of hyper personalization.

(01:46:25):
We discussed the role of technology andshaping our lives and the need to
strike a balance between utilizing its potentialwhile staying mindful of its impact on our
mental health and relationships. So aswe wrap up, I encourage you to
take a moment to reflect on howthe topics we discussed today resonate with your
own life or broader society. Howcan we create experiences that fostering mindfulness and
self awareness and an increasingly connected yetdigitally driven world. As always, I

(01:46:48):
want to express my gratitude to you, our listeners, watchers, friends,
family community for your continued support andif you want to delve deeper into the
subject matter this episode, I recommendchecking out the anther Curious subsect block where
we're going to or fascinating antholitical conceptsand ideas that take this episode to the
next level, and whereber your feedbackand suggestions are always welcome. You rejust

(01:47:08):
to us on social media, leavea 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 subscribeto this Anthra Life so you never miss
an episode. We have plenty moreexciting conversations than insights coming your way.
So thank you once again for joiningus 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 thisanthor of Life.

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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

All Episodes

Building Regenerative Experiences: How Cognitive Data can Revolutionize Design

Dateline NBC