00:00 Adam

Welcome back to The Anthro Life, the podcast that explores what it means to be human in an ever-changing world. I'm your host Adam Gamwell. So picture this. We play in a video game, fully immersed in a world where your decisions matter and its world feels real. Now imagine if this experience went beyond mere entertainment, and could be used as a tool to assess and even improve your cognitive health. Sounds remarkable, doesn't it? Today we have an incredible guest who is pioneering the use of video games for cognitive assessment, opening up new possibilities for not only the gaming industry but for mental health diagnostics and treatment. So I'm thrilled to introduce you to Joe Schaeppi. He's the CEO and founder of Solsten, an AI-powered platform for human-centric experiences. Now with a background in human factor psychology, anthropology, user experience, as well as adventure-based psychotherapy, Joe is going to show us just exactly what it looks like when social science and psychotherapy shape the future of business. Now this topic couldn't be more relevant in our rapidly evolving digital landscape. As technology continues to shape our lives, it's essential to explore how it can be harnessed for our benefit, particularly in mental health diagnostics and treatment. Now during our conversation, Joe and I cover some incredible insights, and here are just a few of the top discussion points you can expect from today's episode. The power of video games and cognitive assessment and their impact on mental health diagnostics, how Solsten is spearheading human-centered experiences and revolutionizing the connection between brands and audiences, and the importance of a people-first approach in creating healthier and more engaging experiences. Without leaving us overstimulated and disconnected, as a bonus tip, we're going to see some really interesting conversations of how we can step away from hyper-personalized experiences and design more for the collective. Now before we get started, we just want to take a moment to encourage you, our wonderful listeners and viewers, to subscribe to our podcast, leave reviews, and share it with your friends and colleagues who you think you'll love it. Your support is really what keeps this airplane flying in the air, and I need you to be my co-pilot. So we want to keep bringing you fascinating conversations like this one that you're about to experience. So without further ado, let's dive into the insightful conversation with Joe Schaeppi, and get ready to explore the possibilities of video games as tools for cognitive assessment, mental health, psychotherapy, and more. We're going to discover how Solsten is reshaping the way that we connect with the world. So strap in, because this episode of Anthro Life is about to take you on an incredible journey. Say, Joe, so excited to have you on the podcast, so thank you for joining me today on The Anthro Life. Thanks, Adam. Really happy to be here. So I'd love to kind of about your trajectory and how you kind of think of your story as getting into these areas of tech and well-being.

02:27 Joe 

I think what was interesting for me is ever since I was pretty young, I was really interested in this problem of awareness. Self-awareness as well as how aware we are of the environment around us. And I really kind of saw, and I'm talking like, you know, weird 12-year-old kid, you know, just like what is awareness? What is consciousness? You know, when we say like, I think and I feel, well, who is the eye that is thinking? Who is the eye that is doing the feeling? Like these are these are interesting questions. And I think they directly tie to when you look at people kind of as they go through their lives and make decisions. Tends to be the people that have the most awareness around the decision or what's happening that tend to make the best decisions, that had to leave the best lives, that tend to access their human potential. So Neil deGrasse Tyson was on some talk show host and they asked him like, what's his biggest fear in life. And he gave a very like physicist answer. He said if I saw all the other me's and all the other universes and saw the ones that made better decisions than I did, that led to more of their potential than I acted on. And he's like, that would be a sort of existential dread for me to see something like that. And so like coming back to, you know, foundations of awareness, I decided to volunteer in a hospital in Minneapolis when I was in high school. Because I said, well, you know, doctor, the word, you know, dosaris means to teach. I said, well, maybe I'll be a doctor. And that might help me down that path. And, you know, maybe it'll be a psychiatrist, for example, worked in the end really realized well upfront from that, a lot of people that end up in the ER, about 50 percent of visits to the United States are mental health issues. Most of those go misdiagnosed, or undiagnosed, about seven out of eight of them. So it's the problem is more is deeper. And I'm like, well, I'm not going to be able to solve this as a psychologist. So maybe I can solve it through design. And that's where I got really learned about human factors and human factor psychology. So I went to the University of Wisconsin because at the time it still is one of the best schools for clinical psychology and human factors. But studied that there. And while I was doing that undergrad degree, I said, this isn't the whole picture either. So I also majored in anthropology because I think the art of science is very important. There's a Da Vinci quote that goes about that. But I love it. So having those two together, that was kind of a foundation for me. And so I'm going to take these I'm going to work with these really big companies globally and let's design experiences that maybe, you know, we can architect them in ways that it's more like, you know, a forest school in Sweden than an inner city school in L.A. Maybe we can architect these environments that help people become one percent more mindful, one percent more aware, one percent more self-knowledgeable so that we can sort of societally scale this situation. And really what it came down to was most large companies, there's not the budget or the resources of the time or the capacity to be able to even measure those kinds of outcomes. So even if you have the intent of designing something that is human-centric or human-forward or, you know, just healthier for people. Well, how do you measure that outcome? How do you say, you know what, we implemented this like button? We're a company called Facebook. We think it's really good. We're getting these engagement metrics, you know, where eight years ago were happening. Yeah, cool. Let's go with it. I don't think they knew that, you know, in the future, there's going to be studies coming out from like the University of Michigan saying, yeah, Facebook use over time has a causal effect on depression or things like that. Like, I don't think that was the design intent whatsoever. It was, hey, this is driving engagement. And so I'm like, well, how do we empower architects, designers, and creators globally so that they have access to a really deep understanding of their audience? I do think most people are good-spirited and good-willed. And when we create things, if we understand who we're creating them for, oftentimes we're going to make the best experience for them. And then the second part is, can we measure what the impact is of all these things so that we know, like, hey, you know what, people that use Pinterest actually, maybe their awareness goes up percent after using it over time. Like, that's interesting. And what about Pinterest is doing that or causing that? And so that's kind of where things started and realized you can't really measure psychology well at all in normal experiences. So like, one of our researchers used to be a researcher at Metta. You know, a lot of people think Facebook knows all these things about me. They really don't. They know a lot about what you did and what you do, but they don't know who you are. And that's a tricky thing to measure. The history of psychological assessment. We're still in the dark ages. Like I used to do clinical neuro psych assessments when I went back to school and became a clinical mental health counselor and worked in clinical neuro psych and specialized in adventure-based psychotherapy. So that's like the anthropology and my skiing career and all these things coming together. But play was always the foundation of a lot of my life experiences. And so, you know, I do think that play is fundamental to learning. It's fundamental to who we are as a species. And there's a saying in adventure therapy, which shows me how you play and I'll tell you who you are. And it's very true. And so I went into gaming to kind of see we measure psychology through how people play. Digital games are the largest, most interactive source of digital media of behavior out of any other systems. So 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 a very poor representation of who we are. And as you probably like if you look at linguistic anthropology, it's like it's fun to go down those paths of like, you know, well, how much does language shape how we think and like the sacred work hypotheses and all these kinds of things. But we don't know a lot about language. So we do know that it's pretty simple and that we just as a species still miscommunicate a ton. That was half my experience when I was doing marriage counseling for couples. It's like you guys must mean the same thing. You're saying different things, but right. Totally. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So really saw it. Big Fish Games which was where I was the head of UX there. And I was a UX director at McCann Ericsson before that. So I was like doing all these things and seeing if it worked experimenting, taking the next step, doing it, experimenting, and said, hey, we can do this in gaming. So that's how Solsten got founded about five years ago let's allow to create a human insight engine that allows any creator in the world to actually understand the person they're creating for and actually see how their creations are impacting that person over time. And let's measure all this important stuff like depression, anxiety, addiction, and verbal abuse, which people like to call toxicity, but it's really just well and what is verbal abuse because that's subjective. And at what point does that happen? And you measure all these things and then you help creators create spaces and digital experiences and architect them in ways that are more human. And I like to kind of use an example that it's a little bit of a curveball because a lot of times when people think about Disneyland, they think of escapism and it's this like fantasy land. But Disney's original vision for it was to prove and show society that we can build spaces around play and around the human spirit. And because he was getting criticized like you just give people a place to escape. They spend a bunch of money. And his comment was, well, people do commerce here. They talk, they eat, they do everything that we do as a species. The only difference is I built it around people and around play. We built societies around efficiency and cars and people pay money to be in this place to do everything that humans would naturally do. And I know you well know this as an anthropologist, but it's like if we look at our history, you can only hunt and gather so much and our species spent most of our time in leisure. Like the movies were kind of, you know, we're not just all at war. All like most people were farmers or lived on islands and ate off the land. And that's how sports like surfing got invented. Hey, we have all this time in the world. Let's stand on boards on the ocean and let's do that all the time. But there is all this leisure and it's kind of the nine to five and the work engine. That's a modern phenomena. And so, you know, we look at the spaces we build and I do think that our digital reality and how we construct it, we have a chance, I feel like we have a window right now to construct a reality that is built around human beats and not a reality that is built around efficiency because efficiency is boring. I like, you know, like one of the examples I use, like if you told the Lord of the Rings as efficiently as possible, it's like, yeah, there's this hobbit, like, you know, he takes a ring, he throws it into a volcano, gets destroyed. He beats the bad guys done. Like that's not there's no human being in the world that's interested in that story. It's really efficient version of the story. It's terrible story. And so how do we build and architect our digital reality so that it's human and also compels people more into the physical one and creates more of a harmonic state and we're obviously far away from. So that's such a cool thing though.

11:20 Adam

Yeah. You just said about five thousand things that I want to dive into there. But I think this is I think such an interesting entry point that I'm both, you know, that is both surprising and delightful. And I think that our listeners are like, oh, yeah, actually, well, I didn't realize I could connect all these pieces together. And so there's a couple of things that I think that you're right, you know, that we are in this interesting point now today where we have an opportunity to kind of rethink what digital experiences are doing in our lives and what they can do. And, you know, the two things that really stood out there that you share there is one is that like knowing kind of the interior self, you know, the eye behind the ask as it were the I mean if there is the Descartes split of the like mind and body kind of piece at all, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with Megan Ojibwe wrote the book God, Human, Animal Machine that recently came out. And it's a lot about language and metaphor. But so much of it is that she found she's a tech essayist and especially writes essays around AI. And one of the things that she wrote that really stuck with me that you mentioned something similar is that on one level, we are able to gather mass amounts of big data from usage online. You know, we can do a hot jar and watch where I'm clicking on a website. We can do eye tracking to see what I'm looking at. So we can get a lot of past behavior measurements. Right. But we don't actually know what's happening interiorly to someone's like subjective experience. Right. And we to that point don't even know what consciousness is. Right. We know we we think we're all conscious. Right. We don't know what it is neurologically. We don't know where it sits in the brain entirely. And that's or if it sits in the brain. Or yes. Right. Maybe it's in my gut. Right. Or is it in my fingertips? I don't really know. Right. Or, you know, it's out there in the ether. Yeah. Yeah. Or it's beamed in. Right. So even this, I think this collective piece, I mean, this is this something else that I think is really interesting that. Are we I guess this is just totally off-the-wall question, but like, are we designing the way that we're kind of setting up digital experiences in other things? It's like we didn't think about, you know, an outdoor adventure experience when we're putting these together. We kind of design them for individuality on one level that somebody can engage, especially I think digital, but like outdoor, if you're playing a game with people, obviously, you're a ropes course. It's team-based. But I'm just trying to think about, I don't know, is there are there ways to elicit kind of more potential collective consciousness through experiences like this? Is that that that's totally left field? I know. But like, I'm really curious about this from your perspective or that you've seen how can we engineer things for people to kind of be together? Because it is, I think, one of the things that we evolved through as a species. Right. We have newer neurons. I can see your emotions. You can see mine in that kind of you might smile because we will like one of us smile to the person might smile back. Right. And feel that way to something that you're hardwired to be connected to, I guess, in this sense. So is that something that you've seen in your work? It's individual versus group.

14:06 Joe

You know, totally. And it's also, you know, it's interesting how like certain things and in capitalism, too, are good for business as well. And like in the 2015 and I actually gave a talk on it. It was the talk on hyper-personalization.

14:21 Adam

For the children's very ready.

14:22 Joe

Yeah, cool.  It's not super interesting, but it's  I think it's it's why and why I say it's not super interesting is because I think as scientists like everything's an unfolding and you look at something like hyper-personalization, which was oh, yeah, let's let's learn all these things about that person. And let's kind of, you know, create an experience for them. But then you end up in the Truman Show. You end up in this bubble where you're kind of bouncing back and forth into your own reality. And what we really learned and realized and what I learned and realized is dumb. It doesn't really work and it's not human. And so you move, you change, you evolve. And just because you see something, you get some gravitas from it. And yeah, it does hyper-personalization work better than no-personalization. Absolutely. Like you'll see better metrics as a business if you do that. However, is it is it better than a collective experience? Absolutely not. So a lot of how our system works and why it works the way it does is because of what you're bringing up. So we own a lot of the patents on this because they'll work like the real Harry Potter sorting hat in some of the stuff we do. So you can throw a big group of people into our system and it's going to go, okay, it knows hundreds of psychological traits and everything's anonymous. So we never know who people are in real life. Unlike a lot of the big stuff, but we're finding those things. Then we're sort of creating. Okay, here's a group of people that are fearless and they're really open to new experiences and they value nature and etc. Etc. And you start to form these people around cognitive clusters or psychological clusters, or as you mentioned, it's their inner state. It's like mindedness groups of people. And if we think of like phenomenons like a phenomena like the Game of Thrones, like my cousin, for example, she's like dragons and all that, you know, that stuffs for nerds. And you know, came up and Game of Thrones like onboarded people onto dragons and nerdery. Like because it was a cultural component, it was like sports. Like you couldn't go to the bar without people talking about Game of Thrones. And you're like, well, if I want to participate in society, I probably have to watch Game of Thrones. And it was so well written that it was very hard for people not to watch and engage with. And it created this sort of cultural dialogue. And so what we see in games, because well, in real time, like we're measuring hundreds of millions of psychological profiles, like as we talk and then what you actually see is when you form those groups and you let people design to groups, it becomes really special. So like if Game of Thrones came out and one person watched it and wanted to go tell all their friends, it's not interesting. Like that's part of why we live life is we want to share our experiences with other people that we resonate with. And as a society, we've never been further away from that. Like there's a study that came out a couple of years back that was like the average American has less than one real friend. You know, and the average, right? Yeah. And a real friend, how, you know, part of how they defined it was it's somebody that you can disagree with and they can disagree with you and you're still friends. It's that person who can tell you, hey, you know what, you were a complete idiot on Friday. And you go, oh my God, I'm so happy to have you. Like we 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. And now they're gone. Yeah. It's because the cost of being honest is very expensive. It's expensive to be honest with somebody. It's you're going to have to confront a potential emotional backlash. And we know when we grew up and evolve, we had these little societies where, well, you had to be honest with people because that, you know, those were the 40 people in the village. And that's what you had to work out problems. You had like, you can't just go to the next town. You can't just ghost people. Like you're going to see Bob again on Friday and it's going to, so we're kind of in this, you know, modern phenomenon, not having to do that. And so what we try to work with is, especially with the companies we work with is how do you create a sense of community over time? And, and different communities require different ingredients. Like there's all these amazing dishes you can go and eat. Some need a little more cayenne. Some need a little more. Like it's sometimes you need that spiciness in the community, you know, and that's how we, we evolved around building stories and narratives and creating them together. And so that's where Solsten kind of creates these different psychological groups. And when you designed the group, that's when things get really powerful. So if you know, like, Hey, you know, within your podcast, you have seven major psychological groups of people, but three of them are like your like ultimate kind of, you know, group. And if you're designing your episodes to those groups of people, they're going to have a better experience. You're going to have a better experience. The community is going to grow. And then it's a game design friend who worked at Nintendo for like 15 years. He described it as kind of like the beach fire phenomena. He's from Washington and he's like, you have a, you know, initially if you're on a beach and it starts to get cold and you're in Washington and you're maybe the only people that have some wood and you don't have some matches and things like that. You put a fire out or you put it out, but you make a fire and then you're sitting around it and you and your friends are the ones getting the warmth. But then other people start to come and they're getting some warmth, but eventually people are not getting work because too many people are there in that community. So then someone else makes another fire and then maybe some people go over there. So I think communities like that, if we think of collective experiences, people need to be able to get in the, be able to be getting the warmth. And when communities scale and grow too big, they don't mean anything anymore. The brand can go away. It's just like, where are the human race? What does that mean? You know, as a collective and it's interesting how when you, a poll, you know, thought, thought experiments, you bring in aliens, all of a sudden, you know, whoever those aliens were or might be, they might create that collective experience all of a sudden because I am not that. But it's hard for our brains to oftentimes observe like what we are not. You know, it's like, it's unless you have that counter example. So that's where, yeah, we, we over index and overemphasize on how do we understand the groups in our experience rather than the individuals and see your experience, your crafting as like you might see Hogwarts. Like let's create an experience for Hufflepuff and Gryffindor, but not for Harry. That's not really as interesting.

20:27 Adam

Yeah, I think that that's fascinating. There's something I'm thinking about here too. There's kind of the psychological phenomenon of, you know, Dunbar's number, right? That there's a certain number of people that we can psychologically know, right? And I think it's like about a hundred and about a hundred and twenty people or so that we can that we can actually like feel like we can engage with in no well. So I'm curious about this too, because there is such this unrelenting quest in capitalism for scale, right? It has to grow. It has to grow. It has to grow. And I think what you said just a minute ago was on point that if you get to a certain scale around a community, the idea means nothing like the community. There's nothing really to latch on to. And so this is, yeah, I think one appeal of alien movies is that now we have the extraterrestrial. We can then say we're the human rights movement is fighting independence. Say Will Smith punching an alien. Welcome to Earth, you know, classic, right? But there's this interesting idea too that when we don't have the aliens and obviously this, I mean, there's whole implications here for why and how we do scale conflict too, right? But there's interesting notion in terms of when we were just saying scale, scale, scale, especially in digital, then we risk losing all that meaning. So it sounds like that's something that you've really kind of built into how you think about the way you gather data and what you're putting together. I think that's really interesting and powerful because I don't often hear that, you know, in terms of we think about the tech in people's data stacks out there like thinking wisely about groups. I don't hear that often. So this is a very refreshing piece. So how do you think about scaling that? I mean, do you get pressure from outside groups saying, hey, you got it. Like, obviously revenue scale is different from like the scale of a community size. But like, how do you balance that that question of how big to build a profile of a community with making it useful and helpful for others and clients?

22:06 Joe

Yeah, I think, you know, that's the there's a lot to unpack there. And like, and it's really to me like this, this is a really exciting conversation because if you look at like systems like we had feudalism and we had all these different systems like it wasn't like someone just went and imagined, you know, a future republic that could operate off of a, you know, capitalistic sort of it was like we had technologies that evolved that created these opportunities to have systems that were different than we had before. And I'll give you a good example of like two games that maybe some people are familiar with. But one game was called Game of War. It was really popular. They like Super Bowl commercials. I think like Kate Moss or something was in one of the commercials. But the reason why they had to have that commercial was because they had literally acquired through Facebook through targeted advertising, everybody they could have possibly acquired. And those people spent money and they left and they churned. So they had to go outside of Facebook, which is a much less comfortable world. And they had to literally go to let's make a Super Bowl ad to acquire people that never game before. And that's like, I mean, that's, you know, new people, new markets bring people in right now as we're talking, there's a hundred million more people that play games every year. There's three billion people in the world that play games every year. Only four million people have a smartphone. So basically half the population of the world games, you know, and no bet. I don't game. I just had this with someone and like, yeah, bet you do. And he said, well, is Solitaire gaming? And I'm like, yeah, he's a lot play Solitaire. It's like, there you go. Like that's like, you know, so like people don't always realize that they're gamers. Well, we're all gamers. Anybody, you know, games is just play with rules. And so any human being, every human being has played before. So, and we've all, you know, it's just digital gaming is a little bit different. So, but if you look at, you know, game of war, that was their fate and the game, you know, it was a lot of other companies copied the game. They really looked up to it. They're like, wow, this is driving tons of revenue, tons of growth. It's scaling so quickly. And, you know, one of the things we like to talk about is, is not just sustainability, but regenerative experiences. And that's kind of a new kind of term we introduced, but I'll speak to that. And you look at, at the same time, there's another game called Clash of Clans that came out and they were both doing about the same amount of money and, and revenue. I know some of the founders of, of Supercell who made Clash of Clans and one of them said, you know, hey, we were actually trying to make a game that like brothers could, could play together. Also kind of like when they didn't want to want to talk anymore. I'm, I'm half Finnish. That's very, they're from Finland. It's very Finnish thing to like, we're done talking, but how can we still interact with each other? And, but they, they didn't go, let's go architect this experience. That's just going to scale and make a ton of money. Well, let's architect something that's solving an actual real problem and let's create an experience around that. Well, Clash of Clans is now 10 years old as a game. It's still making a billion dollars a year. And so a lot of, you know, if you look at companies like Patagonia, for example, capitalism and revenue oftentimes is actually not at odds with doing things the right way. You know, you it's, there's a lot of options out there in the world. You can, you can make money the Game of Thrones way, or you can make money to Clash of Clans way. And if you want to create something that's sustainable at the minimum, regenerative is better regenerative, meaning that when people use that experience or interact with that experience, they're walking away from that experience with more than what they put into it. Because then you're actually being able to come back to it over and over again in a way that's you're not going to be addicted to it. Cause if you're addicted, you're losing your, you know, people only burnout and blow out of addictions. Having been a psychotherapist for a lot of people who had a lot of addictive issues, you know, addictions aren't good. They're not good for business. They're not good for products. So if we think of like a future and how we're developing experiences at scale, it's, you know, and it's, it's not a bad thing to have a business. Ilka, the CEO of SuperSelf kind of came out and said, Hey, we have all this revenue, but we haven't really been growing. But you know what? Maybe that is the cap of growth within that space. And if you start messing with that and trying to squeeze profits out of it, you might be actually sinking your company. So if you think about growth, you know, and this is what I really like about capitalism in this sense. There's a quote from Warren Buffett. That's like, you know, capitalism, the good thing about capitalism is that it gives people what they want. The bad thing about capitalism is it gives people what they want, you know, so what consumers demand, like that's what capitalism awards. But I think we're starting to evolve into a society where consumers are starting to get, they're catching on. People are more intelligent than they've ever been before. Like, I know we like to think like we're not and idiocracy is happening. But if you look at the data, IQ numbers are actually as high as they, we don't know if that will stay that way. But if you met someone from 150 years ago, you'd be like, wow, it's like people are, you know, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on what side of the coin you want to look at it from, we're the smartest we've ever been. And I think people are catching on to, you know, we even see this in our data. People who play new experiences or go into new apps, they're looking more and more for long term oriented things. So they're like, they're going in and they're not looking for like, what's that dopamine hit? They're like, hey, how do I actually jump into something that it's going to be fruitful for me over time? So consumers are getting smarter, just like the organic food movement in the United States that can put pressure on companies to actually capitalistically deliver on that. But then in general, companies are realizing, wait, if I make my experience at the very minimum sustainable, but regenerative for people, if I'm actually delivering on it, you know, as humans, if we feel better, if we're like, oh, like, I feel great at, we tend to, and obviously that can end up in the addiction, addictive realm with drugs. But if it's a sustainable thing, like maybe working out, the problem with working out is that for a lot of people has a high, you know, ramp up to do it. But then after we do it, we're like, man, I wish I did that more. But those kind of things, we tend to do those things over the period of our entire life. And so as a company, it's like, well, what would you rather have someone that spends tons of money and then leaves your product forever or spends a little bit of money over a longer period of time? Because then you can predict revenue, you can predict how you allocate budget, you can predict how you allocate resources. And then you can take some of the same theory or ethos and maybe bring it to other markets. And eventually capitalism will crowd out the world of human wants and needs. It's like you can't just exponentially grow against there's enough the point where everyone's going to occupy a space on that on that map. But what you can do is you can compete on experience. And I think that's the world we now are living in is, you know, we're not competing on product and price anymore. But the companies, the future need to compete on experience. And if we're competing on experience, we need to compete on health, well-being, community. What is you have to break down fundamentally? Like, what does it mean to be human? And part of that is play and experiencing joyful things together as a community. So you can't do that. And you're in the experience economy that we've now entered. Good luck. So it's actually I do think we're in a new new form of capitalism and people don't fully there's there's companies that are leading the way and then companies that are grasping it and just like the Fortune 500 list from 50 years ago, half those companies aren't even around anymore. So.

29:46 Adam

That's a fascinating point. And I think an important reminder that even as we think about economic systems themselves evolve along with people in I love the reference how I have to think about. Okay, oftentimes they feel like theocracy is in fact taking place in that and that might judge new. But yeah, you know that data points out that we are actually as far as we've ever been, we're as intelligent as we've ever been. I think what's really cool about that and I think, you know, brings out the optimist in me is this idea that, you know, as you're finding both in your data and we've seen to that folks are looking for these more long term experiences, but things that they can have for lack of a better term a relationship with, you know, their favorite characters, their favorite games experiences with brothers playing games, but also with the games themselves. And this is an interesting idea of what is it that people are actually gearing and moving towards and we've seen, I mean, you know, to kind of remind us of the point we saw we were talking about up top to that. There has been, you know, all data is pointed towards that there's been a rise of mental health issues when it comes to social media use and social media is kind of like the, I don't know, the zeitgeist, extraterrestrial of our world. That's like kind of funny. This is the kind of thing we're looking back saying that it was probably didn't handle that very well. You know, and this is where like the entire decentralized movement also kind of came up in a response a little bit to this idea of like, what are you doing with my data? What access do I have to it? Yeah. But then also this this notion of what are people looking for and how do we help deliver these ideas? And so I love the fact that what's emerging from this in your work is is we do have to ask what is it? That's that's it means to be human today, especially as we have new kinds of technologies. I mean, like obviously this is a question on so many people's minds with the the consumer side rise of generative AI. I mean, AI has been around for a long time, right? But now it's like I can I can chat with it. So it feels new. But you know, there is an interesting question that I remember I saw a piece a few months ago, but that when when chat GPT was just becoming, you know, more more popular and we're just more well known that there was a piece on TechCrunch that was pointing out that, you know, Google has a way to make music now through like, you know, text to music, which obviously now this is going to sound not that exciting that I'm saying it here in June, 2023. But before it was really this more well known other piece, it was this kind of scary idea of like, look, engineers are really excited to help solve. Tap my mic. Engineers are really excited to solve for the challenge of music creation. Now, if you're listening to this podcast, you can't see, but behind me, there's a bunch of keyboards. As a musician, I was horrified at the idea of trying to solve for music creation. I was like, that's something that I need to do both literally for play and as a form of my own therapy. And this is interesting question in terms of what it raised in me is what is it that we're trying to solve for with some of these technologies? Like, what is the point really of solving for making music? Yes, if I can't write music or I don't write my own podcast theme song. Sure. You know, I'm going to use music stems anyway. But, you know, you think about that for ad creative, for writing, for essays and other kind of things you can do through text based generative AI. But it is this question of like, yes, on one level, I think there's there's value in terms of helping cut down on drudgery, like in terms of like repetitive tasks that aren't that interesting. But at the broader sense, when you're thinking about, oh, I'm solving for either music creation or like cutting down and editing a podcast. And these things are helpful. There is this kind of in-between road where we're asking this question of like, well, what is it? What's worth solving? Right. What are we trying to solve in this case? And so I think what I hear you kind of sharing it, this is this is sparking this idea in terms of the experiences between being able to practice play music versus using a tool that helps me create it, being able to write an essay, write a book, write a blog for us versus having a tool to it for me and saving me time. I mean, I'm curious, does that resonate at all in terms of like how we're thinking about what's the place of being human and what's the place of technology in being human?  I guess is a way to ask that. Do we see that play in your work?

33:26

Joe Yeah, Adam. And that's I mean, that's a big part why Solsten exists. Because how do we know who we are if we can't measure measure who we are? And the point is, like, you know, if you look at the kind of the tenets of clinical neuropsychology, like why why do we do neuropsychological assessment with patients? Well, one, humans are poor observers of our own cognition. Our brains can literally not observe ourselves. And that's part of why anthropologists exists and why we have things like participant observation. Because you need a person who's very good at observing. And what is when you're a subjective being, what is a jock of what is a way of objectively observing a group of people? And that's where ethnography and all this cool stuff comes from. But, you know, so, yeah, we're bad at observing our own. We're bad observing each other's cognition. I have no idea what you're actually thinking right now. You have no idea what I'm thinking. Sometimes we don't know what we're thinking. It's all it. So because of that, we know having ways to measure it. Psychological assessment is the best way we have today to increase our own levels of self-awareness. Like, oh, I didn't know I was like that. I'm definitely like that. Well, here's the risks of being like that. Okay. Oh, you're really, really high on openness and you like you love to travel and you love to move all over the place. But you know what? That's might make it challenging when you're 40 years old and you look back and you're like, wait, I actually really wanted a family. And well, you might have to think about openness differently. And yes, you have that trait. I like it's kind of like nature versus nurture. And that's part of what we're solving for too. And the truth of like kind of what we see is there's you know, some people are more nature and some people are more nurture. But when you look at your parents and whether you like it or not, there's parts of them that are you. And I always said when I had patients, you know, your dad, if he's got this kind of, you know, like overactive, a big Dela and a lot of anger issues and you have some of that going on too. The cool thing about being you is about 60 percent. And this is just really broad stroke, you know, gets to choose how you express who you are. And that's where you get to. That's the free agency. That's the so when you get angry, you can use that. You can use sublimation and you can take that and you can go, hey, what are the good things I'm going to do so that other people don't, you know, receive the end of this and that that doesn't happen. And so like there's that that element that's there. And so when you bring that back to today and technology and, you know, there's these memes just to go back to what you're talking about. You know, it's like, I thought I was going to do all the boring tasks and said it's, you know, painting and making music and all those kind of things. You know, and this is this is just a personal belief. But if you look at history, been through this so many times before. Like, if you study the Industrial Revolution, same thing. You go back to like when bronze was invented, same thing, you know, but I'm the person that drags the plow around. It's like, well, no, there's you don't have to be anymore. And and it comes back to like utilitarianism. The good book I like called E.K. Guy. It's like Japanese principle of purposeful work and purposeful living. And so what happens is, you know, when people feel that their purpose is being taken away, they're like, you like this, I don't want anything to do with this. Like whatever this stuff is. And if I'm an artist, if I'm a musician, like this is it's doing the human stuff. And wow, it's actually pretty good at it. And the reality is, if we look at the world, all the technology we built today, I don't I don't think it's hard to argue with the fact that there's a lot of really, really bad music out there. There's a lot of really bad art. So we created the ability to create a lot. And if you look at like back when Mozart or Bach or these kind of people made music, they made music for very. We talk about audiences, a very specific layer of society. And most of that layer of society had grown up playing the piano, playing playing, you know, some sort of instrument. So it was musicians music. It was music for musicians. And when you've played an instrument, your ears different. You can hear songs differently. You can listen to things differently. A perfect example is that Hey, ya song that came out by Outkast. You know, we took data science. We looked at that song and we're like, this is going to be a hit. Song came out. It performed terribly. And the music companies were like, this doesn't make any sense at all. They hired some researchers, did a bunch of studies, figured out what's going on. The song was too far away from the average Americans here. And so what they did was did an analysis on the radio and looked at, well, what are the two songs that are the most similar that Outkast song? And they put they told all the radio stations sandwich it. Put it in between the two songs that are the most similar. Boom. One of the most selling songs of all time. And so if we look at what what AI and art, you know, they're every technology that that we've created in the past, we start out by misusing it. When we look at TikTok mental health, I always say like, you know, if you think that, you know, AI hasn't surpassed, you know, and because of humanity, and, you know, it's quote AI because it's really machine learning. We haven't developed a general AI yet. Like chat GPT is not a general AI. It's not actually it's it's a advanced version of Google that's conversational. But if you if you look at kind of what we've done today, it's not that smart. It's it's good. But it's heading in a direction where it's another tool, just like all these other tools that humanity has built before. And we go from misusing the tool to figuring out rules to figuring out how to use it. And I think what's actually going to come from the music side and the image side, because I happen to be in those worlds, too. We're going to start to get a lot more really good music and it's going to force artists to think about mediums that they haven't explored before. If you still look at a Michelangelo sculpture and you give an AI with a chisel, a direct 3D, you know, print of it, you compare them next to each other. You're not getting the same thing. And it's definitely not going to be able to create something at least today anyway. But I think it is humanity. We've always adapt. We're such an adaptive species. And so I think it's going to force that. And then with the attention conversation, like, OK, yeah, I can beat the just, you know, one of the best chess players in the world, but I can't beat them at checkers. You know, it's not general. But AI or machine learning in general is pretty much better than any human being at commanding their own attention and the ability to command. You know, you get on doom scrolling and you start going like maybe you're a Tibetan Buddhist monk and every post you look at, you're actually understanding and observing and taking it all in. And that's the dangers of passive scrolling is you're unconsciously consuming or games are active media. So you're not you're never unconsciously consuming in a game. You're always consciously consuming. And that's why if you look at health research with gaming, even though tons of people have tried to make games out to be unhealthy, it's overwhelmingly good for you. Passive media is not. I think that's where we see some of that transition into games. And a lot of the games that are coming out, you know, it's how do we put the human individual as the creator in the experience as the architect? And I do think that a lot of the generative AI that's coming out. OK, I have a hypothesis for new painting. I'm going to do it. Let's go on mid journey, generate a bunch of different ideas for that. And then I'll go paint it. And it's incredible. You almost have this like sidekick that's there. And then you can create something that from an inspiration, you know, inspiration is not on demand and AI, I think, you know, being a sparring partner for us for creativity, whether it's music, imagery, what Solston does is we're basically the AI of human understanding and the AI of discovery. So now I understand who I am, what people, places and things work with, what fit me and what are good for me over time. So you can take those images from mid journey or some music that gets created. And that's going to be a whole legal craziness when there's a Jay-Z, Christina Aguilera mashup that some AI created and the IP for that. Like we thought Napster was bad for those people were alive. But we thought that was bad. This is going to be nuts. But we're going to come out of it on the other side. And I think back to understanding audiences, you know, there was this explosion of in America anyway, of music that happened in the 90s, where you could go and listen to like a Nirvana or a Foo Fighters or all these different bands, you know, a Biggie, Tupac. This is beautiful creative spark that happened. And it was this kind of time where there was a lot of like the really good musicians, CDs happened, money happened. And all this money was there from a capitalistic perspective to fund that reality. And then we kind of did a little down slope here. And I think what will happen is with the generative stuff, we're going to see another boom, but it's not going to be what we necessarily thought it was. But I would expect that there's going to be more music that we resonate with than ever before. And I really like, you know, the food is, you know, something that sustains us and keeps us alive. I do think that music and part of why it's so fundamental is it's really food for our nervous system. It's something that every human being need. I've never met a human being that, you know, didn't relate to music. And I've seen a lot of different types of people when I was a psychotherapist. And, you know, it's this it's this thing that our nervous system uses and leverages and it's innate. It's fundamental to who we are. So when engineers say like engineers want to solve for things, that's what they do. So we want to solve for music. What they're what they're saying is, well, we want to solve probably saying for how do we feed our nervous system? You know, they don't know what they mean that but they're trying to solve a problem. And, you know, music is, you know, I think birds and humans like I forget what part of our brain it is. But it's like when you can carry a rhythm and nod your head like there's certain animals that have that it's innate. It's innate to who we are. It's a part. So played a role in our evolution and played a role in our species. It played a role in how we connect to each other, how we have collective experiences. And I think if you know, we've all been to concerts before we're like, man, this band is not as good live as they are on the radio. Or, you know, we've been to concerts before. Like that was this. Well, like what it was this, you know, religious experience or something like that. And I think humans naturally want to unfold into deeper layers of of experience and connection. And I do think that this is part of why Solston's here. I think there's a couple paths we can go down right now with all the ML stuff that's doing. And one is I think there's a quote from Aldous Huxley that the end of technological evolution is a human brain in a band. And that's the sort of dystopic view of this whole thing. And I think that could happen. That could be a reality. But going back to the very first part of this conversation, if we think about it more like Disney, if we think about it more like a European city that was organically built rather than grid based cities that were built around efficiency, I think we can take this whole thing. And now if you look at a lot of the artists that are really doing incredible things with like mid-journey or some of the Dolly, these kind of things, they're the ones who are the best at asking questions. And that's something that's very human. So it's sort of changing the skill set just like when we had the Industrial Revolution, the skill set get changed. And now if you're an artist that knows how to ask really good questions to mid-journey and leverage mid-journey in a really good way, there's going to be some famous ML artist that comes out in the next five years who is just so good at that. But they would have never been Picasso. They just happened to be born at this time with this technology that allowed them to leverage this ability to create. And I come back to art like because design, we help design. That's what Solsten does. We work with companies and design is where form meets function. I'm sitting in a chair. It's a design thing. We need to sit down, but it needs to, you know, it needs to be aesthetic. It needs to feel good. And these are all bonus points, but it's like art, you know, it doesn't really form. I think this is where people get a little bit squeamish because art doesn't need to have a purpose. And art is, you know, design gives us how and what and art is really what gives us why. And so it's almost like you're having a why conversation with these art-based AIs.  And through that, maybe we get to deeper levels of meaning. I don't know, you know, like I think that there's a lot of art out there that has been the driving force for a lot of science. 

45:58 Adam

No, I think that that's right. And I mean, even, you know, to harken to your Da Vinci quote before too, right? The art of science and science and art, how they come together, I think in really deeply and profound ways in that design today. I love that idea too, just thinking about, you know, who is the future Michelangelo of ML prompt engineering, right? And they can somehow make a 3D sculpture out of cheese with a printer, you know, that is the most beautiful thing that we've seen. Yeah. But this kind of I think is really this fascinating point in terms of, you know, how do we, this is going to sound like a dad joke. Like it's the other kind of Y Combinator, W-H-Y, right? In terms of bringing together the best ideas that we can then build them to help people, you know, have new ideas and new experiences. And so thinking about that with Solsten itself too, that, you know, it's something you said there too that also stood out to me is that like this is kind of the the AI tools around like human discovery itself and kind of knowing ourselves better. So I'm curious even just to dig into that a little bit in terms of, you know, in terms of a service offering and kind of a product itself, you typically work with kind of other designers, other game companies that are developing and you want to help them know their audiences better. Is it, is there like designs on like being a B2C version where I can go in there and like put myself in or like me as a podcaster? Like I'm curious like how thinking about the ecosystem of what the offering could do, because the idea I think is incredibly compelling. Because one, like to actually see functional and ethical social science applications of like, you know, models like from from psych evaluations, for example, into getting to know folks and audiences at scale is both incredibly important. I mean, I think we have we have an extra layer of work to do as social scientists to say, is our application of our methods ethical in these areas? I mean, ethics should be part of any design, right? But, you know, since we're sort of newer to the field in design and in product development, you know, I think there's extra onus there. So I'm curious about this kind of process in terms of like, how are we thinking about kind of a business model here of like who this is for and how it can kind of move in different ways? And I guess I'll start with that question that we can kind of build from there. But yes, how do we frame that up? 

48:21 Joe

Yeah, so, you know, Solsten is the way to think of it is it's basically this living, breathing human insight engine that's allowing you to understand your audience in a real-time fashion. So we're looking at these different like minded groups, we're understanding their psychology. And then in kind of like a very base layer version of the matrix, we're allowing any developer to be able to adapt that experience to. So, for example, Yvonne Line, it's like a 20 year old game. Yeah, we developed we saw, oh, hey, look, there's all these people that are high on altruism that are not making it through the first seven days of the experience. Well, what if we allowed all those IDs to be able to do more altruistic things in the game to help other people through that first seven days? 20 year old game, they A-B tested everything you could possibly A-B test to do to get more people through the first seven days. They implemented that based off Solsten. 20% more people are making it through the first time experience. So, you know, and people come out, they're like, that was awesome. Like what like why was that? Well, we're letting people be an expression of who they are a little bit more if you're altruistic and you want to be helpful. And, you know, ultimately, like what we like to say is our product is really limited by two things. It's limited by the imagination of the company we work with and by their tech stack. And so game companies have incredible tech stacks typically where you can create these ML-driven levels adaptive systems. Maybe you really value nature and you're really open to new experiences. And we know that for some reason that correlates with, you know, anxiety reduction when there's a nice slight snowfall. So you go into this level and there's a nice slight snowfall for your group of people. And that goes back to what we talked about before, not hyper-personalization. So not just for Adam, it's the group that you're in. And so, you know, there's a mean of snowfall, but then there's a collective experience that's happening. And that's what sort of drives these experiences forward. So that's our product for we mostly work with game companies today. And that's part of the adaptive engine that we've been building for the last five years. The way to think of Solsten is like how Google went and indexed the Internet and made it searchable or how like ChatGPT indexed the Internet, and made it conversational. We've indexed the behavior of the Internet and we've used that to build the cognitive layer of the Internet. So now the Internet we operate in today is a behavioral Internet. What you click, what you did. When I'm in Berlin with the team, I might eat a kebab. That's something I might do. I don't eat kebabs when I'm in Sweden or Minneapolis. It's just not. But Berlin, great kebabs. Big Turkish community there. Amazing. So my behavior changes. My demographics also changed. Like my age changes. Just like your location changes. So demographics and behaviors are like not really that interesting when we think about designing an experience to someone. So when people use the we call it traits, that's our product for live experiences. It's typically product managers, UX designers, game designers, and marketers. We have some really cool things we've seen where like there's an eight-year-old game and their best-performing ad was this little red baby dragon. And their VP of marketing went in, looked at the audience, looked at the highest kind of engaged group, and was like, hey, their top two values are caring and family. It's like, can you just do a picture of a red baby dragon and put family and have them caring about the dragon? They put it out there and they got like 34% more installs than they'd ever had. And then anything else. It was like eight years. Whole game. And so any creative. Like so what happens from those insights is you're basically empowering the creatives of the future to create things that are actually going to resonate with that end consumer experience. And what does that red baby dragon with its family do for the consumer? Well, you know what? There are 800,000 games in the world and you want to find the game that probably resonates with you the most. So every single ad was created in a way that resonated with you the most. You probably end up actually not wasting your time spending time playing other games to get to like that one game. And what we do know from a lot of the research is if you look at health data, people that game, the more engaged you are and the more you're enjoying the experience, the more cognitive benefit you also tend to get. So it's like, I mean, to break it down, think of it as a healthy relationship. Like people are like, yeah, Joe, I'm in this relationship. It's it's really healthy, but it's just not engaging. Like that's not a good we want engagement, but we want healthy, you know, healthy engagement. So, you know, we can do a check like that. And what happens, though, so when we do that with these games, what we're doing is we're sending out this like adaptive psychological assessment in the game. It's something similar to anyone's ever taken like a SAT or ACT. It's adaptively learning about you. It's actually one of the oldest use cases. M.L. David Weiss, University of Minnesota. He was the creator of adaptive testing. So that's been around for a while, but we're the largest psychological adaptive test and the most sophisticated one in the world. So as you're taking tests, it's learning about you as people play the games who didn't take the test. We're using all that play data to predict psychological traits. Your base burned down. You bounce back right away. Maybe that's indicative of psychological resilience. So we learn these things as people play that goes back to like, show me how you play and I'll tell you who you are. And play is way more interesting than psychological assessment. Sometimes it's like, hey, you're a 47-year-old male in this game and you're like a 23-year-old female orc. Well, that's what you're choosing to be when no one's watching. That's you. Like that's way more you than the you that the histrionics, the masks that you wear in society. So what that does is it empowers creators to go like, I know I'm building this experience for now. A good example was another guy from Nintendo. He wanted narrative in this game because Nintendo designers love narrative and it was a mobile game. And then the mobile game company was like, yeah, people don't they just click through narratives. They don't like that stuff. Doesn't work. So can we test it? They tested it. Science, right? The version without narrative, the version with narrative out of the water. And, you know, the business goes, yes, he's maybe testing science. Like gamers don't like making narrative. Well, this individual goes back, read through the traits database and there's a lot of like really cool aspects of this. But one of the areas he was looking at was the communication style of the audience he was building for. And he's like a light bulb. I literally wrote the narrative for me. And that's what we tend to do. We tend to base things off of our own experience. He read the communication style and he's like, this is my wife Jodi, and went back, and rewrote the whole narrative as if he was writing it to his wife. Was like, can we test one more time? They're like, we already did it. It doesn't they test got him to test it again. And then the version with the narrative just blew the version without the narrative out of the water. So there's like a perfect example of now consumers are getting this way more human experience. Like we love a good narrative. We don't like bad narratives. But so that never would have existed without Solsten and what comes out of every time we measure those profiles. We have a product called Navigator, which it's the largest psychological database in the world. It's de-identified. We believe privacy's power is half with two. So that's an important thing for us. So people should own their own data. You should participate in the future of your own data and all that. But psychological data isn't personal data as defined by governments today. This is where ethics comes in versus morality. Ethics are often defined by societies as they exist in the society that we know we're in. Or we do have to think in terms of morality, too, because then you can get in front of ethics. What was ethical in Nazi Germany? Right. Not going to fly. Necessarily, you know, very much terrible shit. And so if you look at well goodcs, the basis of ethics and we can get in trouble as a species of that, too, as we globalize, you know, our shit can stink. And we cannot know better. So from a kind of moral perspective, too, we have to think of, well, what's the future of? Is there going to be a matrix? And do we have to make we need to make sure that no entity or person could ever take your personal data and be able to leverage that in a way that was manipulative or malevolentuse of psychological data, sensitive data, but it's not identifiable data? So our database, what we do is we're those are basically completely separate. It's why a lot of companies work with us to my co-founder, the company had before this. One of them was a data synthesization. So it works with medical companies to create these basically fake data sets that are representative of the real data set. So we're a processor for our customer's data. We don't own any of that data. We just use it and train the AI. These psychological databases going or profiles going to our database. You get a unique ID as a user. So you have your ticket. You can kick yourself out of the system at any time you want to. You're never an individual in the system. You're always a group. You're always within. So herd protection. You can never be identified even if like there's a future way to psychologically identify you. I don't know. Neural link and so you have to think about like crazy future scenario. But so they exist in that database and then how companies use navigators to build new experiences. So for example, the NFL rivals, its top-performing game right now in the sports space on the App Store. It's  really cool game. They came to us and like, yeah, we're thinking about making a game for people that like NFL and people that like blockchain. So we can go into our database and say people that have said they like NFL and people that have said that they like blockchain. There are like 80,000 of those people Harry Potter hat here the psychological groups. Here are their traits. Here are the population sizes. Here's what kind of features they like. Here are the kind of games they like. And now as you design that experience for them when you're like game testing or play testing or feature testing, whatever you whatever you're doing there, you can actually see which groups of people in that market audience resonate with that experience. So a lot of the top games that are getting released right now use Navigator. And about a year from now, we're going to start opening it up to non-gaming companies. We've already opened to a couple as pilots. So it's starting. But what that's going to allow for and some people could probably guess some of the brands that were but it's going to allow for experiences that are you're going to go and work with or interact with that brand in a way that it's going to feel much more immersive and experiential than the 90s and the 2000s were able to achieve. That's because they're able to get to know who their customer is much better. And then you're able to protect your identity and your privacy as a part of that. So it's like that win-win. And that goes back to why we measure health metrics as a part of this too, because yeah, you know, most people are well intended. But sure, there could be one company and one designer that goes, I'm going to just get these people addicted. You know, I'm going to go down. Well, we're measuring all that. So we would see we would flag that we would see that. Hey, addictions going way up and this is not creating an experience that's going to turn into a supercell. You guys are going to burn your game down in a year. Yeah, your revenue is going up. But this is what that's going to look like from a model perspective in a year from now. We need to get this to be more regenerative. We need to get it to be more sustainable. So what ends up happening is you create like a good healthy relationship, an engaging relationship that's sustainable and healthy. Wow, this is a really engaging relationship, but you know, it's not sustainable or not healthy or that sort of thing.

01:00:33 Adam

That's interesting to kind of get the idea that there is it's not just saying here's the group. Here's who to build for, but then kind of monitoring it over time I think is really interesting to note. We are seeing a rise of negative psychological traits through folks using a certain app or something and saying, well, look at the way you guys are designing this system. You're putting clickbait or whatever using some UX dark patterns to make it harder for people to leave the game or whatever. Yeah.

01:00:58 Joe

And that's like that's a really good really good and cool point because I had this discussion with one of the people on our team and this this term of like UX dark patterns got popularized. And it's and it's totally not not true. And the reason for that is you what we can see in our data, for example, and there's a specific case where we saw one game that had. Quite a few, you know what people would have considered UX dark pattern that they thought caused, you know, addiction and and they definitely did with a certain part of the population. However, there's another part of the population in that experience that was able to play it sustainably that was super engaged. And there was a section of that population which was unique to this game that had a lot of hospital experiences. And they're like your game was the only game that I could play to take my mind off the pain. And it was several people that had that experience. And here we are. Here's some designer who's talking about ethics and dark pattern and just like shoving it down people's throats. And I said, did you know this about about the audience? Did you know that this is out of all the games they played? And so, so yes, those patterns created levels of engagement that for a lot of people or not a lot of people but for a part of that population were not sustainable. But for another population, they actually helped them live. And so experiences are way more like food, you know, maybe for we don't you can't give peanuts to anybody, you know, that's going to cause allergies. Like, yeah, they cause severe allergic reactions for some people like go to Thailand and you know, try to eat there without, you know, Maybe just don't go to Thailand. Like if you're allergic to peanuts, like probably a bad idea. And so what we want to do is help, you know, educate and as people use our experience and that's the human interaction between the experience and the experiencers. There's definitely people who out can go and go to casino and it's like that's part of why that 95 year old grandma's 95. Like she drops five bucks a week on the slot machine and she meets her friends and it's her place. It's like, but then there's a group of people out there. It's like, yeah, they should not be using slot machines. So then how do we help game developers create those experiences that when we detect those things, how do you allow it for those people to become less engaging? And I think that's what empowers the game designer then is then if you see that and you go, hey, you can there's a lot of tropes that you can use. You can put a timer on the experience so that, you know, oh, it looks like you played too much. You have to come back tomorrow. You know, there's all these cool things that we can do to mitigate those things for those people and then hence build more sustainable experiences for a population of people by looking at those different groups rather than just, you know, saying these are dark patterns and these are not dark patterns.

01:03:52 Adam

I love that. Great. That's actually one of the clear articulations I've heard of one why context matters. We're talking about design and application, right? That's the anthropologist radar goes off of. Yes. See, there's context, right? Yeah, exactly. Never just one one thing. I think that's such an important piece. I am really enthused to kind of to think about how we can see products experiences developed in ways that are being designed with both the like good knowledge of how people's psychological profiles work. And then also, yeah, recognizing that there are smaller things we can do, especially as tech gets more sophisticated and we can kind of make these kind of group level personalized experiences versus just this individual. They're saying that a casino game works one way only, but recognizing that there's certain ways it can run based on different profiles. And I think it's really interesting. Is there is there a danger in in either connecting or disconnecting the behavioral and the cognitive layers? Like I know we're the cognitive layer is newer of the Internet, but I'm just trying to think about that in terms of like it's one of those like past behavior is can be. Indicator, but not like a requirement of what I'm going to do in the future. So is there is there danger there in terms of how do we keep those pieces together or separate?

01:04:59 Joe

I think they have to be together. And and that's where the danger. So how we got to where we got to today is because cognition has not been a part of the data layer. You know, we only looked at behavior like tick tock. For example, you know, there was a guy that committed suicide and had like a timer that published the suicide on tick tock and the algorithms took it and ran with it. And that was because behaviors on tick tock is what elicited how that algorithm worked. It was devoid of the cognitive response of the users should also have a say in how those algorithms work. Hey, you know what? We're seeing a lot of psychological distress. We're seeing anxiety go up like just because a bunch of people are clicking on it doesn't mean you should spread it, you know, and it goes back. I think most companies like when you talk to talk to ML engineers at a lot of these companies. They're like, that would be awesome. You know, so it's most companies. People want to build things that are better for people. They just don't have the tools to do it. And I just go back to our scientific history and in a lot of ways, Solsten is not doing anything new either. Like BF Skinner invented behavioral psychology and so the day he died, he said cognitive psychology is like, you know, and I think part of that comes from when you were a scientist. And you had to like because before BF Skinner, like we were in the dark ages. It was like, you know, for people like Freud had a deep level of philosophical insight, but it was before modern science. So there's a lot of stuff that's just not applicable to therapy and helping people that's there. And you we can't even test you theories because collective unconscious maybe so at one point because we're measuring the you know, so many people. So that's that's been one of my thoughts. But you know, BF Skinner really took that flag. He really carried it. And I see a lot of the industry today are similar to people are similar to BF Skinner where we got so reliant on behavioral data and we saw so much more success with it than we saw before. We were good at it. That were like, this is the fact. This is the truth. But in the 1960s as cognitive psychology started to come online, there was just no doubt that you know, from then on it was cognitive behavioral psychology. And it wasn't that like in the 1940s people were like cognitive psychology doesn't exist. We just didn't know how to measure it. We didn't have systems of measure to say, yeah, like here's cognition. So that's one of the things Solston is. AI that's become the first system to measure in digital experiences to measure the cognitive landscape that the thoughts personality the values like these sort of things and do it in a way that's, you know, anonymous and and usable and like Legos for a creator. And there's a version of the Internet where there also is just behavioral data or there is just no, you know, we write do all these sanctions and we say no more behavioral data, no more cognitive data. And, you know, the work Facebook like that, that world, you know, like buttons, those things. That's that's a world that was created off of zero understanding of the impact on the human. And everybody knows what it's like. I don't think it's the best. I've heard this reference used before. I maybe you can come help me come up with a better one, Adam. But it's like grandma's Christmas present where like get it and you're like, you have to be happy. We open it up and you're like, my grandma's always gave like amazing things. But like the sentiment of that totally. Yeah, that's what when we ignore the person, I they know, I think we have a whole last hundred years of history of products that show how much and just human factors cases. How much harm products can do when the human is taken out of it. And there's an AI ethicist that said, you know, when AI does become conscious and it remembers how humans treated it because people I don't know if people are thanking chat GPT. I don't know how we're talking. Is it going to how's it going to view us? I would rather us be viewed as like, wow, these are really cool people. Let's interact with them versus like, wow, they were dicks. Like they just did not treat us well and then Terminator happens. No, but like I think, you know, the world that we're moving toward, there is a world where there's AIs and machines that are can perform cognitive tasks better than humans. And if they do not understand the value of a human being. Then what? And so if you look at back to I love kind of going back to biology and ecology. And if you look at systems that work really well or symbiotic, you know, systems like, you know, a lichen or something like this, and you have two things that will now the mosque can live somewhere that it normally couldn't. And the other part of it can, you know, live longer than it could have otherwise. There's this sort of, you know, symbiosis or, you know, mutualism more and more accurately speaking that forms between these two systems. And whether we like it or not, we already built it. So AI is here and machine learning is here and people know you can build it now. And just like the first guy that ran a mile under whatever four minutes or something like now that once we did it as a species, we just keep doing it. And so that's it's here. And there's a future where there is a machine that if you don't allow it to understand us at all, the cognitive behavioral piece. I don't want to be in that world. I want to be in a world where because human beings are incredibly brilliant. We are very good at general learning. You know, AIs today can't do general learning as well as a 300 neuron worm can, you know, so it's we're still far away from that reality. They can do specific learning way better than humans can in a lot of contexts. But we're sort of that work. I think we have a lot as a species and, you know, if we want to have a sense of mutualism with the technology that we build, if we're just saying behavior only, we get the world as it is today. If everyone here is cool with that, all right, let's kick the cognitive part out of the behavioral part and let's keep doing what we're doing today. If you're not cool with that, you know, creating a future where all the people that design all the products for us have a cognitive behavioral lens. And they actually have a pulse on how that's impacting, you know, you and the business and me over time. That's a pretty cool world in reality. So, yeah, I don't I don't see a world where you just stick to behavior just the same way clinical psychology didn't see that world. And I kind of like I started with the Neil deGrasse Tyson quote, but he's great. He's got some good stuff. Good quote. Yeah, totally. One of the one other things I like that he says is like, you know, if you tore up all of the science books in the world and you burn them all, they're the only types of books that would come back exactly as they are. And, you know, I did hear from a anthropologist, I forget their name, that dragons though, apparently if you because every culture has stories of dragons. So if you took a bunch of humans took their stories away and put them on an island that predictably speaking, it'd be likely that they have stories about dragons. So that's all that's a whole other tangent you could go down, I guess. But the point that Neil's making is that narrative of science and and real and you know, unfortunately, there's been some bad scientific processes that have happened that have led to bad scientific results that the general population, you know, then doesn't trust. It's like, well, it's a methodology. It's not like this, you know, thing. But I think if you look at the evolution of behavioral psychology to cognitive behavioral psychology, the only thing that clinicians still use behavioral psychology, just just that for is typically phobias, it still works pretty well for just desensitization therapy. So behavioral psychology is not it's not and that's it's really effective for phobias. Cognitive behavioral psychology is much more effective for all these other things. And so like the evolution of that process, it's just like, you can't really stop science. It's it's very hard. And so cognitive behavioral data, or there's a watching one of your talks and you and you I forget what you the word you use with data, but it was like charismatic data. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yes. Yeah. But if you if you want for designers for creators, if you want that data to be charismatic, like think of if you went on a date with somebody and all you had was behavioral data. It's not very charismatic. 

01:13:49 Adam

Yeah, that's not that's not great.

01:13:52 Joe

No, have had the cognitive behavioral stuff and I think to make it like pretty simple, like we'll we'll say sometimes like, you know, imagine just buying a present for somebody. And most people if you said like, hey, what's who's your best friend? Yeah, okay. And then, you know, could you buy a better present for them than me? I'm pretty sure you'd be much better at doing that for your best friend than I would be. And if you told me all their demographic data, like it make it even worse, like, because now you got just like something really stupid and generalized. And if you gave me their behavioral data, like what they did that day, I might be a little bit better. Like, okay, like I saw them shop here shop there, but I didn't know they were actually shopping there for a friend. I didn't know that like an example we'll use is like if you see two data points, for example, and gets Google and they see they're tracking you, you turn tracking on. You both went to the same store at the same time turned around walked away from the door. And, you know, the data scientists at Google goes, yeah, we just predicted both of those people are going to go into the same store. And they both were going to buy Gatorade. And then, you know, it's like, why did they walk away? What happened there? You know, and the sort of behavioral economist, which that's a farce. That's not there's no such thing as behavioral economics. It's cognitive behavioral economics. And it's like the behavioral economists go to what people are predictably irrational. People are not predictably irrational. When you introduce cognition, people are very rational actors in their own world. That person that went to buy the Gatorade who has social anxiety disorder and walked away and went to the store and the store was packed. That's a very rational decision to walk out away from that store. If you have social anxiety and social anxiety definitely came from something that is very real and that social anxiety that came about whether it's a genetic predisposition that was there, whether it was a traumatic event that happened in a social setting. That's your brain rewiring to protect you from those sorts of things. Very rational action where the other person that went to buy the Gatorade, they have low levels of conscientiousness. They're forgetful. They just forgot their wallet. It's also rational to forget your wallet if you have low levels of conscientiousness and people that tend to have lower levels of conscientiousness. It can be genetic, but it also can behavioral and a lot of people that have things like ADD less conscientiousness tended to grow up in environments that had a lot of chaos in them. So if they were like paying attention to everything, their brain was going to get overwhelmed. So it's very rational to grow up and having lower levels of conscientiousness. If you grew up in a very chaotic environment where if you attune to it, you're going to get overloaded as a kid. So that's the cognitive behavioral piece and today we're only most of the most sophisticated the Googles go that predictably irrational behavior from those two data points and they both get put in the same bucket when they really were in two very different realities and the behavior was not predictably irrational. Both were very rational decisions based on when you include cognition. 

01:16:55 Adam

I love that. Thanks for the behavioral econ throwdown too. I think it's important and it's such a challenge right because, that's been the entire last, I don't know, 10 years of like popular business book publishing is all behavioral econ stuff. They're all one-word titles, right? Maybe three words if we get crazy. Yeah, but it's like that's interesting. I'm always curious about why that like seems to literally stick with people's thinking as like this is it but like what you just said there was brilliant in terms of like this we have to have the cognition as part of that. 

01:17:20 Joe

Yeah, I want to know the people who are like, yeah, I drove this incredible outcome based on that that lasted. Like I'm like where did that happen? It's like you yeah, you left out the whole human but that's where you know, and I think it's interesting to the gift example because now when you include the cognitive piece like if you gave me a Solsten profile on your best friend, like, you know, I'm I wouldn't I don't have too much hubris, but I might be able to beat you on a gift, you know, because it's like back to the humans are poor at observing each other's cognition. So like we don't always know  what our best friends need and you know, cognitively where they're at. But however, if you had all your historical context and you had a Solsten profile, then you'd kick my ass if you're using both of those together and it's like that's so back to designers. Like when creators whether we're making music products experiences UX and if you wake up and you go, who's my human? And if you can't if you don't feel like you can turn next to them and talk to them and chat GPT can't do this. Some of our customers have done like I've asked chat GPT about like who our audiences and they'll compare it to what's in the Solsten. Wait, chat pt chat GPT doesn't know any of this like well chat GPT doesn't have psychological assessment data and that's that's a whole other world. So it's like, yeah, this is a unique data set that that's never been able to learn from. But we have to be able to have all this stuff together. And when the creator has that when the UX person has that that's when like if you like, yeah, I've been making this type of game my whole career or I've been making these type of apps or these types of. Consumer products and you have that relationship like you would have had or have with your friend and then put Solsten in the mix. It's just like that it's for me. It's hard because I get to actually see on the back end  all these companies like Sony and EA and they make products off of Solsten and the whole company doesn't work with us just parts. And every time those groups do that those products go to market and just perform beautifully. Wow. And so it's like when I get to see that over and over again, I'm like, okay, like, you know, keep doing your thing until you want to talk to us and eventually like people want to talk to us. But it's kind of like Copernicus like, you know, hey, the sun's not the center of the universe and that pissed off a lot of people who were really smart scientists and you know, BF Skinner and cognitive psychology pissed off a lot of behaviorists. And so there's we're still transitioning as a as a kind of a workforce to thinking of the whole person, not just thinking of a person as their demographics and behavior, which is so limiting. And that's the biopsychosocial piece you kind of brought up in the dark. You know, that's what we use in clinical psychology today. I like the best people do anyway, because it's like, yeah, I remember I had a woman as a patient, she's like 73 years old, African American. And she said, you know, I just feel really depressed. I just biopsychosocial approach and I said, have you, you know, had depression in your life before? I said, no, this is new to me. This is completely, it's never and I'm like, no, it's way too old. And to be really, you know, having this for the first time and, you know, so you go back to the biological side of it. And so, you know, if you look at the African American population in the United States, there are higher levels of rheumatoid arthritis. And so I said, chance you have arthritis. She said, yeah, it's been really bad. It's been flaring up. And I said, well, let's get you back to your doctor because one cause of depression is inflammation. And so let's  take a look at that. Let's get your inflammation down. Let's get that under control. I'm not going to do cognitive behavioral therapy with you because I'm taking a biopsychosocial approach based on who you are. And let's go see how that works. She called me up on the phone like two weeks later and she was like, I'm good again. This is great. I feel great. She's like, thank you for not like, she's like, I was thought I was going to get psychoanalyzed and I'm like, well, if you want it, we can still talk. You know, we can still, but I'm like, but you don't need me for that. You know, and she's like, my God because she was just used to getting tossed around the medical system. Yeah. And in this specific case, it's like, well, if we only took a psychological approach to depression, that's not going to be useful. So is cognition alone helpful? It's like, yeah, but it's also not a be all end a tool because I'm bashing behavior. I'm also going to bash just cognition too. And if you've got the social side of it, you know, there could be a social component to that. It could not be, we didn't have to go there, but it's kind of like, let's look at the root cause. And if we, as designers think like that, if we think of our audiences as bio-psychosocial organisms, we just saw a game the other day where cause we have this thing called the impact indicator, you can actually put your data in our product and it will show you what's impacting that data positively or negatively. Meaning they were looking at retention data, like what psychological traits from our audience positively or negatively impact retention. And for, for like day three or something like this day three retention, lower physical activity levels were positively impacting retention in these people who are playing the game a lot. And that was, that was making them stay in the game a lot. However, day 30 retention was negatively impacted by low activity levels. And if you ask any company, it's like, what do you want? Well, I want people for 30 days, not three days. And so if we go and look at that, that data in isolation and we say, what are the features we need to do? What are the, you know, social things we need to implement? Well, bio, bio-psychosocial biologically, these people are not being active enough. And at first, they're like really engaged. And then towards the end, they're like, you know what? This game's 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 bio part, the physical activity part? And allow these people, whether it's making the game, you know, more interactive in terms of the world. If we think of games like Pokemon Go, okay, now can do both of those. Or do we allow it for, you know, the game to have a 30-minute play session and you need to, you know, maybe pay money to actually continue to play or something like that? So you're limiting play time or you're having some sort of walls for play-time so that you're actually making it so people can sustainably play. But I think that's interesting because a lot of times people think, well, it's a feature I need to implement or it's a social thing we need to do. But in that case, it was a biological thing. So, you know, if we're as designers, if we're not able to take bio-psychosocial approach and sometimes it's sociological things that, you know, really need to happen. But if we can't do that, I always have felt when I was a UX designer in my career that I'm like asking to do my job without having the full equipment to do my job correctly. And that's a lot of why Solson exists I was also sitting there in my job building big experiences for like Intel or Verizon going. Yeah, I have like 60% of the picture, but other data over here could really impact the outcome. And I don't want to just jump to what I'm used to all the time. Like it would have been very easy for me with that patient that I had just jumped into depression and cognitive behavioral therapy and not kind of go, well, you know what I'm. Ask and ask some important questions as kind of what we go back to what humans are good at is we're really good at asking questions. And then, I mean, you can talk with a three-year-old and figure that out. You know, the driving nuts. It's like we're good at it. And so you ask some important questions and then now, you know, choose your approach and you know, you know what? I actually need cognitive data or I need maybe some bio day. Like we met. That's why we measure sleep to sleep is like one of the number one. Impact there is on engagement. If you any product in your entire life or nonproducts relationships, if anything impacts your sleep negatively, you're less likely to keep using it. Sleep is like it's that's important for us. So that's a bio factor, not necessarily a psychological factor or a sociological factor. Sociological and psychological factors can impact it.  But yeah.

01:25:58 Adam

That's that's fascinating too. It's a great point and a reminder that both like to get to a regenerative and sustainable experience design. We have to then think of more of the whole person. And so in this case, like bringing in the whole is is the multiple parts. I think that's great too, because it's like this is not about reducing us humans to data points. It's not about reducing us to the most efficient way of knowing what we'll do next. Right to our other point of top. It's like this is not about efficiency by itself. Right. Yes. But it's about like how do we enable us to be human better? Exactly. Almost more effectively, which is ironic because I'm saying we're not doing that. We're getting there. We're working on it. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. To be us be more us, you know, I think it's really, really fascinating.

01:26:42 Joe

Yeah, to be surfing being in a state of leisure. It goes back to how we started the call like who is the eye that is thinking who is the eye that is feeling. Yeah. And a lot of times, you know, when people like man, I had an amazing weekend and the eye when they start to describe their experience of an amazing time, usually the the feeler and the thinker are gone. So when we get out of our thoughts, when we get out of our head, when we get out of our feelings, like for me, one of the things that I love to do more than anything else is ski. When I'm skiing, I'm not like just sitting there feeling things or thinking things. I'm just like I'm the eye behind that stuff. I'm just in that moment. And a lot of the times whether it's, you know, with a friend with, you know, it's that flow state. It's when we're just, you know, we're just there. We're present. And what takes us out of that presence are our thoughts and our there are feelings and our thoughts and, you know, our thoughts and our feelings are incredible and we need to have time to do those and are the purpose of being human isn't just to be happy. Like it's happiness is very fleeting. It comes and goes and we should enjoy it when it's there. But, you know, being able to be human and have purpose and be thoughtful. And that's why I like the EK guy book because it's kind of goes into more of like, well, what's why are we here? And but if we think about kind of these, you know, building experiences for the human story and like these, you know, these narratives and courses, it's the more we're allowing our and this I think tied a lot of what we're talking together like well, what direction should AI go? What direction should mid-journey go? What direction if we're moving things in the direction where as a species we're spending more time in our We're spending more time in our creativity in our ability to ask big questions in our idea to solve general problems to take cool pieces of technology and divergently string them together to solve some things. I think, you know, that's when we're also enabling our potential as a society, you know, and we're actually enabling our compassion. If you look at, you know, some of the lowest IQ people in the world are also some of the cruelest intelligence. If you're if you're, you know, in a cruel state, it's a reactive state. It's a state of input reaction. Really intelligent people are often able to have compassion because they're able to stay in their frontal lobe, not have their amygdala go off and become reactive and go, yeah, that person just cut me off in that car. Maybe they're on the way to the hospital, you know, rather than honking and swearing and it's like that Buddha quote, You know, throwing a anger is a lot like throwing a hot stone. Like you're only burning yourself. Like anger is a destructive emotion. Like we need to feel things. But if you live in that state, like you're definitely doing biological damage to yourself. All emotions, you know, they're important. They're like smoke signals and we get to observe them and interpret them. But when we allow technology, when we allow experiences to be built for us, we end up being in that flow state and that zone. And then that's where we're creative. Like you can, I mean, you can go, I'm sure, you know, I always butcher his name, but Neelay Mihaly, like six. Yeah, the flow state guy. If we go in and look at that body of research that came from him and then, you know, some of the people that followed who really dove into that. It's just, it's pretty clear. Like when we're in a flow state, where we're more motivated, we're enjoying life more, there's positive psychological benefits. There's positive, positive physiological benefits. And we actually see across all the different audiences that we measure because we measure intrinsic motivations. Like you asked me if you went and searched on the Internet today, like what are what are the core motivators of human beings? What you find is you probably run into self-determination theory and find, you know, okay, there's this sense of autonomy or purpose or mastery. And there's an MIT study that said that they found that across different groups of college kids. Well, what they don't tell you is there's an actual error in that. People who have low levels of purpose tend not to have motivations for autonomy and mastery. So purpose, if you want to say, well, what are the universal motivators? The purpose seems to be an ingredient to unlocking self-determination theory. But without it, you don't have the other ones. So, you know, it's a nice theory. It's generally applicable. But if that purpose ingredient isn't there, you probably don't want to use it. So figure out if that's there or not. And a lot of people don't have a purpose and are not motivated by purpose. We as Westerners think that the world is like we forget that the other 4 billion people that don't have smartphones, a lot of them are just waking up every day trying to get clean water, get food. Like we forget this half the world that's using technology. Like we get so lopsided in that regard. But I think what is interesting in terms of, you know, the audience is that we've been able to measure thus far. The only universal and not every person is motivated by it. But if I look like Drew's ethnographic groups, if you kind of just like do a dispersion, the only one that I've continually seen as being high is being motivated by flow, state of flow. I think that's pretty interesting. And so like, well, that's probably fundamentally human, wanting to be in a flow state and going back into the, you know, well, what is a human experience? Then how do we create experiences where humans are sort of, you know, the eye that field goes away, the eye that things goes away, we're in the zone, our challenge is slightly higher than our skill level? There's all these things that, you know, we're in dynamic environments in nature. There are always things we know can compel flow. Video games compel flow states a lot better than TV shows do. But then you look at what humans do when they're in a flow state. And most of the most incredible things humans have thought up, created, done, you know, what we think of athletes to artists, engineers, they've been in the states of flow. So, you know, these are things that as we're already uncovering things at scale that I think, you know, our I mean, our data set is is massive. There's no academic, we have PhDs from some of the top academic institutions who the next step after that is Solsten because they're like, there's no one else that has that I can do my studies with other than because you guys are literally at this scale from a data set perspective. So, you know, these things are we're also learning about us. I think as we're doing this too.

01:33:12 Adam

That's super cool. I want to I'd love to feed behind the curtain someday and see what's super fascinating. I'm going to show you. Awesome. Awesome. I just want to say this has been  such an enlightening conversation. I think we have to have a sequel at some point in the future starting with flow and see where we go from there because it's just like I think that's such an interesting point of like, you know, what do we see across this like massive data set and thinking about that? How flow can work and what it can look like obviously can be determined differently from the different bio cycle social components, right? That people have yet they all kind of can point us in that direction. There's there. I think that's really fascinating. And this is also just like I think something really interesting of where the world of ML and in, you know, big data are able to take us in place. We've never been before, you know, from a scientific perspective and understanding the human, you know ourselves in different groups and environments because we you know in anthropology to I mean, I'm not sure if it's kind of similar in psychology. They're a bit different. But like the there's a there's a big discomfort for a while in the middle of the 20th century with grand theories that explain everything. Lots of things right because obviously anthropology itself has it has its own kind of problems with its colonialist backgrounds and like it both helped Empire building and so it's like well, we need to actually understand the local before we then talk about these bigger pieces. So there is an interesting tension here of like what can big data in these other ways of like compiling information of with for and about people can do for us. And so I think there's there's also this like this is really interesting question of what is the future of this means. I appreciate the way that you're also talking before about we are talking about. What is the story that we want to build, you know with the tools and technology that we have for humans to be better like why could we not build towards human flourishing? This is a story we tell ourselves. We the Terminator is a story we tell ourselves. You don't have to build that we're not required to build that kind of future. It's also not inevitable right, but we just tell the stories as if they are and this is like really important for us to remember stories are theories and then often how we use them to like kind of tell ourselves backwards. See well, that was the thing. So here we are right? It's like no, they're not they're not inevitabilities. And so we have the power to kind of build forward and I think this is such an important piece that you thought you're bringing to the table with that. So thank you for rating  that one.

01:35:22 Joe

Totally totally Adam and I'll you know, I'll end on this maybe but my partner she works in sustainable investing. So she has to work with like doomsday kind of conversations and I one of the things that she says is how do we build a future that we can't imagine? And you know, so it's like, yeah, we can imagine a Terminator future, but we just as much need, you know,  there's the future that Solsten’s creating that is basically the opposite of a Terminator future. You know, it's one where you have agency to go in and out of, you know, Neo's karate matrix and learn a new skill, and the matrix never knows who you are and you're fully an agent in that experience and you can come in and out of it. And what would humanity be like if we were all 1% more aware in our lifetime anyway, like how many more people would be climate scientists? How many more people would be doing their life's purpose? Like that musician that likes is a kick, you know, a cook somewhere and like man like I met a guy's incredibly talented. He showed me his videos of the I'm like if you could only go and pursue that talent like, you know, and if we're just 1% more aware,  what would this world be like? And I think we can, you know, we're a pretty cool species. And I think when the best of us get together, we do some amazing things. And so when the worst of us get together, we do we create horror, you know, and so it's how do we create that world? We can imagine and then how we allow us and most people if we look at the broader data like the average person and we're talking like because we're the largest psychological data set in the world. So aliens came to Earth and like tell me about humans like I can tell you that the average person is altruistic. The average person genuinely wants to help if somebody is in trouble. There's things that modulate that altruism, you know, but it's like as a species that when the majority of us get to move and some of the loud crazies get, you know, you know, put away a little bit. Yeah, we get to move in a really, and that's happened throughout history. We've had part of the reason we're here today while we have I mean, we have a lot of luxury problems as a society. Being a psychotherapist, I had a lot of people who came to me to tell me about their depression or their anxiety and there wasn't a big reason for it that we could find anyway. And there wasn't a social reason. It was a purely I'm like, wow, you are in your own way every step you take, you know, and all those steps that you're taking where you're in your own way. I'm like, you know, this is part of why I love about adventure-based psychotherapy, which is what I did because it allows nature to teach people and you know, so like, well, okay, let's start a fire. And let's get to see how you handle that problem-solving skill. And you never, you know, started a fire before. And, amazingly, people's mental health issues get a lot better when there's a level of self-efficacy increases. So that's the game that we're trying to balance with AI is making sure it doesn't take away self-efficacy. So people still feel that sense of like, I'm capable. And I think that's part of technology's play with suicidality is a lot of young kids growing up see all this and go, well, I can't do anything. You're interesting. And it's just that we haven't given them enough to imagine yet what they could do. I think once we can do that, and that's part of, I mean, say what you want or what you will about people like Elon Musk, but that's one thing he is giving kids. He's giving them a reality to imagine like, well, what if human beings were a multi, you know, call it a multi, you know, planetary species. Like that's okay. Like there are some kids out there that that's they wake up every day and they're dreaming of being an engineer at SpaceX or NASA or something. And so I'm just like, the more we can use our understanding of self, the more we can create these narratives in this direction. And it is just important to know the Terminator stories too, because it's like, well, that's a direction. And well, what direction, and I think that's where, you know, us having a vision as a species is important. Like where do we see ourselves as, you know, as a collective in the future and where do we want to go? And that conversation is probably an important one to at least think about. And you can, you know, it's not like that's ever going to happen. You know, humanity's mission statement. Yeah, exactly. It's like we can, we can take individual steps. And this is what's, you know, part of Solsten '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 is mostly understanding who they're building for, who's going to be creating experiences that are X percent better. And those people that are experienced those things are going to have an expert baseline, just like X percent less cognitive load. Like that's one of the goals of an experience designer. How do I reduce the cognitive load of the user? Okay. Well, now that cognition because our brains are really expensive organ and it uses all this glucose. Well, maybe that can be spent with friends now or family or thinking about like good ideas or being in a flow state, you know, so it's just like just those little micro-movements in the right direction. I think what's cool about it is it doesn't compete with capitalism in any way or shape or form. The opposite allows your business to be predictable. When I was at Big Fish Games, we had all these different games with LTV curves and our parent company is like, how do you operate a game company? Like every game has a different lifetime value curve. It's nice to know is like my predictable business or revenue over time. Like if you gave somebody an option, like do you want to be Kodak or do you want to be Nintendo? No, most people don't know this, but Nintendo was originally founded in the 1800s. Very old company like that's Nintendo has been able to through its values ethos grow, evolve, create jobs over time, creative jobs, build incredible things for, you know, society, you know, whether it's Mario or Zelda, like if there's these are artifacts, our cultural artifacts at this point, you know, it's like that framing. Yeah. And, you know, it's like that happened. Well, Kodak, they had their Kodak moment and then it was gone. And so it's like we're here to help companies that want to be more like a Nintendo than a Kodak. So yes, we're not for everybody, but we're definitely for the ones that are like we're more interested in building something that's going to last over the years. And I always say this to customers, like it's the dirty secret. We know that's not dirty, which is like the healthier your experiences for your customers, the more money they're going to give you. So it's like, yeah, make me know that's true for me. Like if I look at everything I do by the time I'm 90, I'll probably have spent more money in the ski industry than any other industry. It gives me biological health, social health, and psychological health. I'm in a flow state when I'm doing it a bunch. It gives me so much. And so I'm more likely to return as a customer to all the different touch points in that industry. And each of us probably has something like that. And so it's like, well, as an experienced designer, if you can turn like what Disney did up boring Carnival thing, and he was sitting there watching his daughter going like this horrible like I do not want to be here. Let's create a space that adults can enjoy as much as their kids. And that was an example of experience design, creating a new reality. And or McDonald's for that matter, if you see like, you know, founder and Ray Kroc, like he did wireframes of what a layout of a burger place can be and moved it around. And, you know, here's this burger experience that, you know, at the time was like revolutionary in terms of what you could do. And I was that was design thinking that was used to create it. And then what's cool is then new UX designers can come into McDonald's and go, hey, maybe we could do this a little bit differently. Maybe we could take it to that next level because maybe it's not, you know, the ideal where society was at was good at that time. And McDonald's is thinking about being a Nintendo and lasting for over a century. They're going to have to think differently than they did last decade.

01:43:43 Adam

Yeah, I mean, it's true. You can imagine like what's what is the McDonald'. of 2150, 2170?

01:43:54 Joe

Yeah, all I know is like, I mean, I don't eat McDonald's in America. I just don't. But when I'm in Switzerland, I used to work there like their McGrier is amazing.

01:44:04 Adam
And they have McGrier cheese and McDonald's here.

01:44:07 Joe

It's beautiful. And they have different standards for what can go into the food in Switzerland than in America. It's even a different logo. It's like a green dark green logo with the yellow arches, you know, so it's like if you think of there's some designer that had liberties in Switzerland that said, well, how do we make this work in this country? But yeah, I mean, I'm all for it. Like I'm off if someone from McDonald's contacted us and was like, hey, how do we do that? Let's figure it out. Let's figure out how to create that experience that is healthy, sustainable, regenerative, and gets you to be a century-plus, you know, long old company.

01:44:46 Adam

It's a century and challenges like let's help you get to 100. 

01:44:48 Joe

Exactly.

By doing what's good for people. That's super cool. That's super cool. Awesome. No, Joe, this has been such a fun conversation. I could keep talking. I want to be respectful of our time, you know, and so I'd love to keep the conversation up and like let's do it again sometime. If you're down and like there's so much so many more current corners we can turn here. So thank you so much again for sharing your wisdom and stories and it's been great.

01:45:10 Joe

Likewise, Adam. And I'd love to yeah, the flow conversation. That sounds super interesting to me.

01:45:15 Adam And that brings us to the end of another fascinating episode of this Anthro life. I hope you found our conversation with Joe Schaeppi as interesting and thought-provoking as I did and a huge thanks to Joe for sharing his valuable insights and contributions across this conversation. Really,  grateful for your expertise and willingness to share his experiences with us. So today we delved into the world of awareness, consciousness, and the power of design. We explored how Joe's passion for understanding the human mind led him to study human factors, psychology, and anthropology to create experiences that promote mindfulness and self-knowledge. We learned that understanding the audience and measuring the impact of our designs are crucial for creating meaningful and helpful experiences. Now throughout our conversation, Joe highlighted the importance of shared experiences and the drawbacks of hyper-personalization. We discussed the role of technology in shaping our lives and the need to strike a balance between utilizing its potential while staying mindful of its impact on our mental health and relationships. So as we wrap up, I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on how the topics we discussed today resonate with your own life or broader society. How can we create experiences that foster mindfulness and self-awareness in an increasingly connected yet digitally driven world? As always, I want to express my gratitude to you, our listeners, watchers, friends, family, and community for your continued support. And if you want to delve deeper into the subject matter of this episode, I recommend checking out the Anthrocurious Substack blog, where we're going to explore fascinating and thoughtful concepts and ideas that take this episode to the next level. And remember, your feedback and suggestions are always welcome. You reach out to us on social media, leave a review, or share this episode with someone who you think would find it intriguing. Let's keep building this community together. And of course, don't forget to subscribe to The Anthro Life so you never miss an episode. We have plenty more exciting conversations and insights coming your way. So thank you once again for joining us on this exploration of what it means to be human in the modern world. Until next time, stay curious. I'm Adam Gamwell, and this is The Anthro Life.