Hi, I'm Kahran. Hi, I'm Divya. Thinking. Thinking. And this is
Thinking on Thinking. And welcome to the 30th episode of Thinking on Thinking. This week we talked about the ideas of constants and permanence in ideas. How culturally or as groups we kind of take as a given that certain things are the way they are. And sometimes they aren't necessarily the way they are.
We explored through a couple of different topics, but it was definitely one of our favorite episodes that we are ending our third season with. And we hope you enjoyed it as well. Something we were talking about just before recording this episode was just that we've gotten some feedback that episode 28 was kind of just difficult to understand. And I was thinking about it and I feel like I think part of it was because we have spent so much time thinking about how difficult it is to start things and how difficult it is to, I don't know, that disconnect between what you want to do and what you actually do and like who you want to be and who you actually behave. And we spend a lot of time, I think, kind of like in that place on those topics.
So, yeah, it's not super surprising to me because I think that topic is a little bit of an applied version of those. Yeah, I also was unsure because so like both of the people who gave this feedback are people who have not known me for too long. Like they've known me like one person has known me for maybe six months, one person has known me for like a year and a half. They are really smart people and they're really nice people, but I don't think they're particularly familiar with me, which means that they might not be particularly familiar with our thinking process. And I don't know how much they listen to podcasts.
But I was also thinking about it in terms of, huh, like what does this feedback tell us that are we becoming to in our own heads or to niche almost like you know if somebody were to listen to an episode of Dear Hank and John, somebody who doesn't understand block brothers or hasn't been familiar with their content would be like guys, I am so lost. What are these things that you're talking about and what are these jokes that you're making? Oh, I tried to listen to it and I was so lost. And I've like listened to all the anthropocene reviewed.
I've read like all of John Green's books actually at this point, at least maybe 80% of them, right? And I still was so lost because I've never watched their YouTube. So I've never seen that much of Hank and you can't just drop into their podcast really easily. Hmm. That is so interesting. Yeah, because like I think that feedback just makes me think that oh, you guys are probably like Dear Hank and John.
It's just so interesting because I was smiling a little bit while you were talking there because I was thinking about how I grew up in a context where if someone has a question, other people have that question, but they're afraid to raise their hands. Like it's just something we're like very much taught as children, right? You should always ask the question because you're not just asking it for yourself. You're asking it for all the people who want to ask the question but are afraid to raise their hands. And you know, being the kind of person I am, I'm like, oh, wait, I'm helping people by asking questions.
Oh my God. Yes. But it's interesting because I was thinking about the feedback in that context, right? Where I was like, oh, if you know someone is saying this, there's probably 10 other people who felt this but didn't raise their hand, right? But I was smiling because I was thinking about how you came to a very different context where you were like, hmm, you know, what qualifiers should I put on this incoming information? Or how should I contextualize this incoming information appropriately so that I understand just where it goes, right?
Like how much weight should I put on it? Where should it be applicable? What does it tell me outside of the information in itself? Right? Like you were looking at all these kind of like factors around it. I was like, oh, that was right. I mean, I've still asked them for like, you know, more detailed feedback because this feedback was given in kind of like a social setting.
So of course, there isn't all of the information, you know, like a lot of it was just lost because a lot of people were speaking up and random stuff was happening. Yeah, I think that is such an interesting thing to point out because I think that I have generally seen feedback for art that I have made in precisely that manner. I think this is like how I have generally ingested information about my art, like feedback about my art. It's not going to be for everyone. Like somebody who likes very gothic or very grungy work is never going to appreciate what I create.
Or even like, you know, somebody who likes very realistic work is not going to appreciate what I create. But don't you feel like this is part of our target audience? Right? Because like I was working on a case study about our podcast and I was trying to write like who our target audience was as part of like one of the sections of the case study. And so I was saying, I think it was people who are interested in self improvement, but also an intersection place with people who are entrepreneurs and maybe it's not an intersection of actual union. Yeah, so I kind of called out those groups and I feel like aren't these these two people who gave the feedback are kind of like startup founder, right?
Like they are in that space. Yeah, that is so interesting because like I would think that our podcast was be interesting to people who like to think about things in a particular way. And also to people who listen to podcasts quite regularly. You know, for the longest time, whenever we have talked about segmentation, I have always felt a little bit off about it. Whether it is segmentation of like, you know, our potential customers or our clients potential customers. Like I've always had a very unexplainable but this doesn't sit right with me kind of attitude towards it.
And I think today I was watching a video where they were talking about the difference between instrumental solving and communicative solving or something like that. Basically, it's like, are you doing things because they fit in a particular category? Or are you doing things because they communicate a certain feeling to give a more elaborate example? He shows a bunch of different images. Like for example, one image is like, you know, Pride Parade and it's a Goldman Shacks showing their pride symbols.
Like it's a lot of rainbows and a lot of like, you know, very brightly colored people. And then the other side is this like girl with colored hair kind of quirky dressing. And it's just her face. Right. And like the question is which one of these pictures feels queer to you. And then of course, it's the, you know, vaguely bisexual looking girl that 86% of the people chose as like, you know, more queer picture.
Same thing, like, you know, a similar image. And basically what he was ultimately trying to explain was that when you look at the way rainbow imagery is used by corporate and capitalistic sort of culture, they are trying to communicate a series of check boxes. And when a human is trying to communicate their identity, what they are trying to do is actually express themselves. Basically, capitalists do not have anything to express.
They are just trying to check boxes while this person actually does have something to express. And so they fit the category a lot better. And the people who are in group actually do understand it. Like in his survey, which was some 8,000 participants, 96% of them were queer. And like, it's just interesting that like there were a bunch of different, like three different images like this and almost always like the skew was heavily on the side of like close to 80% skew.
Towards the side of, you know, non-capitalistic imagery. And it's just, um... Well, that one seems like a pretty extreme example too though, right? Like... No, but like, think about it.
Of course, this video was about the socio-political, like, capitalistic. This rainbow economy or some stuff like that. Like, I don't remember what exactly. Like, it was a very entertaining and interesting video. But I think that like my brain naturally tries to form the boxes around communicative system rather than the instrumental system.
And that is why the checkboxes never really sit right with me because I feel like even if you check all the boxes, it doesn't really matter because it still might not connect with the person. For example, going back to John and Hank, the reason why I feel connected to them, they are... I did not know Hank was bisexual for the longest time, but they are too seemingly straight, like 10 plus years older than me, mediocrely rich men from America. Like, I should not be finding connection with them, right?
But the fact that they both love creating things, they love creating things together. And there is an earnestness with which they look at the world. That is what I think their entire community, that is what connects the community to them. So these are not checkboxes, right? Well, no, but that is a, I mean, that is a characteristic.
And that's the whole point, that like just because something can seem like characteristic, being interested in creating things can show up in 100 different ways. Correct. But you still can put together a series of behaviors that you can make someone step through that will help reveal to you what's either right, either false positives or false negatives, right? You'll choose which side you want to bias towards. The way you created the category, you said that it would be people who are entrepreneurial, people who would be doing this, not about how they feel or how they think.
No, you're quite right. The way this person also described it is like, you know, you go from sort of putting a label on someone rather than understanding their action. You go from a verb to a noun. And that is where the sort of break happens. You know, that's so interesting.
That actually kind of reminds me of something that we were talking about in last episode, but how one of the things about working with chat GBT is once you see it in one way, it almost makes you, you have to think of why not to do it that way. Yeah, it creates a normal right. Yeah. And so I think that's interesting because I had it generate all of the case studies initially, right?
So I worked with it on maybe five or six of them. And so we had created an audience and the audiences were all in that way, right? Like, and I didn't stop to really question, like, because it's one of the things where now that you pushed me on it, it feels so obvious to me, right? Where I'm like, oh, right? Why was I not thinking about it like that?
Of course, the kind of people that we would be interested in our podcast are not so much shaped by their current vocation as much as they're shaped by the way they think and how they spend their time, right? But that's when I was kind of walking back through, like, why did I kind of, I didn't examine that part of the problem, right? I kind of took that and said, oh, yeah, this is, this is, it's fine. No, it's just interesting. I mean, it's also like you are also fighting against a bigger force there, which is audiences are, you know, 99% of the time defined in a certain way, which is around their vocation and, you know, the demographics and yeah, you're absolutely right.
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think that it's very valid and it's also very valid that chat GPT did it that way, but it just, I don't know until I saw that video today, I never really understood that. Oh, this is why it never connects with me because my brain keeps throwing back at me that the box is invalid, like the box will not fit and will not form a deep connection. Like this box doesn't define people like us do things like this.
That's a crazy example. But a few months ago, I was in Mexico with my husband for someone's wedding, and we stayed at this place called XR it. And it was basically like, at least to me and I've never spent very much time that like Disney went under Disney World, but it felt to me like it was that except designed for totally non American audience. So just these small little things that hadn't really realized are so important to to like an American audience, which is like American audiences very centered around privacy. And, right, like you're never going to use an outdoor space if you feel like everyone can see you and these were just designed where like four or 500 people could see you and still people are lying out and you know, tiny swimsuits on their balconies. Right, like it was just it was it felt very much more like, like Southern European, like kind of like Spain or like like Latino culture right like it was designed for.
And I was just thinking about how it's so interesting, like you don't really almost realize how many things are are kind of cultural signaling until you realize until you see them that they're in places where they're not right. And I think some of what we're what we're talking about here is kind of coming from that space, right. Yeah, it's almost like forcing one to ask, do fish have a word for water. Yeah, and I think something like kind of in a related but also slightly different space I've been thinking about in the US there's not as much text message span. So it's interesting because I feel like, like there it's like culturally India is actually a lot more evolved than than America is, or because eventually I think everyone is going to reach for India is where there's so much text message spam that people just don't read most of their texts people only read WhatsApp, or you know, like some sort of more direct form of communication.
And so, and most of us like that right. So, I don't know where I think, yeah, I think like different cultures are progressing in different ways but I think a lot of times because we're responding to the same forces, like people are on on similar sort of roads. I'm not sure if like the definitions of like, of how technology looks at audiences and technology looks at like, like, I don't know just product design, they've become so pervasive though that I don't know if that that is something that like there are cultural differences in different parts of the world. You know, like we have these kind of accepted ideas that yes, an audience is young recently married woman with kids under five right like that is almost like world over we started thinking about audiences in that way. And I think are we on a cultural shift anywhere where we start to think about oh you know, in audiences someone who has had kind of life experiences that make them deeply value money, but also deeply value connection, but not put as much weight on maybe Maybe appearances are going to say uncertainty but yeah maybe like appearances and uncertainty right and then like how do you design a product for someone who would those are the things they value and these are the things that they're willing to maybe sacrifice and how do you think about how much to pay for that.
Because also think about how much people's willingness to pay for that is especially before you're going to connect with people at different level. You know as you were talking about it it also made me think of I am sure that like a lot of social media companies, especially meta was really close to a different way of looking at people because if you just think about somebody who has three friends that they regularly talk to versus somebody who has like 50 friends but they do not DM anybody versus somebody who has like 50 friends and they do DM them all the time. These could be people who are going to the same college who are studying the exact same thing who have parents in the same social bracket but are exhibiting extremely different behaviors and like rather than thinking about oh this is just additional information beyond their age and gender and what not. It could actually be like okay let's think about this is a product honestly I don't know they might have done it at some level but I don't think that like you know they pivoted around thinking about people just in terms of their social connections. Yeah no you're totally right because they were willing to do sentiment analysis so they knew if you were getting happier or sadder.
So then they would be able to see if certain connections were building happiness or sadness and because they're willing to suggest friends right like you know and they knew that there was some percentage of people would click on the suggested friend some percentage of time right so that's just like that's just then just numbers you can try and optimize. Yeah it's really interesting the choices they made because they really could have done really different things right they could have helped people find more connection and less loneliness and they kind of didn't choose to really. So I feel like right now we have a very silicon valley definition of what is connection and what is loneliness. It is partially evolved from like you know your sort of World War two era psychoanalysts giving some understanding of psychology but I think that loneliness looks very different for different people like you and I have experienced this like both of us at different points we want to see people in different contexts like yesterday was my sister's birthday so the previous night we went for a party like we had a party at her place there were a bunch of close friends it was a lot of fun but also yesterday she and I hung out for three hours and we just don't.
You know my friend like my closest friend and I we often talk about this that yeah we have been meeting just in social like format we have to meet one on one right like how we feel connection is so different depending on where we are emotionally where we are in a relationship with somebody and. Like that's such a complex understanding of like you know if I'm not seeing any one or five of my close friends for 15 days in a month setting regardless of how much socialization I might have done I am not going to feel connected and I'm going to start feeling lonely. Sure I totally give you this right but I think like if you remember who you were in like the early 2010s right and then think about some of the you know maybe more like magical Facebook pieces you may be seeing like I have a friend. Who was a few years older than me in high school and she describes herself I think as a Syrian Jewish bisexual which which I just love. But but we'll like have these incredibly kind of like heartfelt posts right about just like kind of her experience and like Oakland where she was living and now she's in Portland.
And she's a therapist and works with kind of disadvantaged communities and just had like a lot of life experiences herself. Right and I just feel like you know if Facebook had showed you more of those kinds of posts and you know for me that's a post that make me react in a certain way right because I feel you know emotionally in a in a way that I think stores my feelings of empathy and compassion right. Whereas I think that they kind of like they biased for posts that kind of stir the most intensity of reaction which kind of regardless of what side it went to. And that I think it's you know yes you may eventually need the connection in real life but I think they'll kind of like spill overs from what it's kind of content and how the content you're seeing online is making you feel. I don't know I just think like it wasn't really a place that you necessarily have to throw up to your hands in the air and be like oh yeah whatever it drives the most engagement because like we knew what kind of engagement was doing early on.
No fair fair no I think I was talking more from the perspective of I think that they could have had a richer definition of connection and like not just a unidimensional one and while I was giving a real life example I did mean it that they could have a richer definition of connection. But you were also saying I think you were both saying the same thing but from different examples but I fully agree I also think that like this is where that articulation of instrumental versus communicative really made a lot of sense to me because yeah if you want to like sort of fill an excel sheet then engagement is a good metric. And then defining engagement of how much likes and comments and shares something gets and you weigh it differently and it's just like very neatly fits in an equation and you can put it in that excel sheet and that's awesome. But oh this person felt a little bit happier today because they saw this thing about this friend that you were talking about who lived in Oakland and like you know would share these heartfelt things. You felt a bit more connection to her like a like is not vibrant enough to capture that.
Yeah and like probably because of how much she's shared through these posts over the years is like the reason I still feel connected to her even though we haven't seen each other in more than a decade you know. But I don't think it's impossible for them to have captured right like I think it would have been a challenge but I think it isn't yeah you would have been able to use the same sort of sentiment analysis to kind of give a sense of strength of connection. Like post engagement all sorts of things. I have a very harsh statement here. I think they couldn't do it because they were all engineers.
I know if I agree with that I think they couldn't do it because they didn't want to prioritize it you know because they were all engineers. Because they were all engineers. Yeah. No because like think about it. I mean as somebody who was trained as an engineer and had to shift thinking in a more liberal arts he stands.
Yeah. I can see the shift in my thinking like telling a 22 year old engineer philosophy is important because it helps you perspectiveize the world. He's going to reply with you don't know I think logically I know how the world works and you are wrong. And there is like zero interest in thinking about world in a non categorical manner. And I read your pure sciences forces you to think about it and the like you know the earlier thing that you said that a lot of these things are so imbibed that you don't even think about this is questionable or this is a design variable.
That's interesting. Reminds me of something I was talking about with my therapist a couple of days ago that I realized I've been spending more time you know just in like things I feel like give me small dopamine hits. Right and I was giving her as an example that like my response time on new messages is like at worst it's like 30 minutes right but usually it's like two minutes right regardless of the type of day regardless of what I'm doing. And it's just because like you just get a new message and particularly if you get a new grinder message right it's like this thrill of like oh did someone think you were hot right. So that's the thing that she and I were kind of realizing though is I think it's just because I haven't seen like I haven't been able to spend time with a lot of my close friends and a lot of that is because of how New York is it's just it's hard to kind of make time and find time.
Everyone is very busy right and so you know you end up kind of chasing these these smaller moments. I wonder how one would become more sensitive to it because like see how you just did that thing here. This is how New York is and you just thought of that as a permanent variable like it could not as a variable but as a constant travel. Well it's almost like I didn't want the you to feel bad right or maybe our listener to feel bad like that's the that's the instinct you have right you're like oh you know you know you're not going to be like that. You want to assure someone that oh it's fine right like yes I have this problem but like it's fine because of this thing so you don't need to feel bad for me.
Interesting right and in this case it was like oh New York is the shared experience that all these people are here are having so you don't need to worry about me because I'm in a situation where this is normal for everyone here. Hmm but also like labeling it as normal would make it harder for you to think that oh this could be changeable right that is what we are talking about. Yeah and the reason why I'm like able to so easily kind of engage with you on it is because like my therapist and I have talked about it right it's something that we're making a plan around right where I'm trying to like have various kind of strategies for like things that I'll do kind of to help me both find more people to connect with and to kind of connect with my friends more easily on a regular basis. So I'm someone who like if you just looked at the metrics of my behavior right I might only spend an hour and a half on Instagram a day but I'm someone who I can context which really easily so I might look at Instagram for seven seconds a thousand times in my day. Oh my god okay.
Because I just will look at it I'll respond to that message I'll go back to what I'm doing so if I was you know the one building it and looking at those analytics I wouldn't necessarily see an issue potentially right I would be like oh yeah look my my user is coming back to my app they're spending a reasonable amount of time in it and I think that idea that you kind of have a responsibility like what does it happen when someone is checking my app a thousand times in a day for multiple days for years. Yeah. Right or even like what does it happen when do I have a responsibility when someone spending a quarter of their waking hours on my app. You know like where do those but I don't think you start from there right no one no one teaches you when you're learning how to build things that like oh yeah you have a responsibility to the people you're building for. No there is an anti responsibility culture rather.
Because almost always the conversations around product building whether it is the VCs or it's the founders they come around. Oh there are only 24 hours in a day and my user can only spend so much of it with me and how can I keep most of it on my platform. And it's such a it's such a dark thought like it's almost like thinking oh I have a best friend but like how can I make sure that she talks to nobody else. That's what that thought is right. Yeah yeah I mean it's something I think we talked about a while ago I mean maybe in our even our first or second season but this idea of like sustainability and attention.
Yeah I don't think that idea even in the last year has really started to grow very much in the industry that like people's attention is a resource and as designers we have to be cognizant of the fact that we are exhausting it. Yeah but it's like kind of like a public good you know and I don't think like as a society especially a capitalist society we were very good at valuing public goods I don't know that's a contentious statement. No that is very true from whatever we are seeing right now but I think that a very interestingly hopeful thought that I've come across a couple of times recently is. So one of the new friends that I've made she like via a community she has a podcast which is about care and building with care. So like she interviews people who are parents and people who are building things in this world generally who are a mix of artists and programmers and how are those people thinking about things.
And that is interesting because like somebody who comes from an art background and then goes into development will have a very different set of criteria. One of the people who gave us the feedback but also the friend who is basically leading the Genai community in Bangalore. He was talking about how there are a lot of people who are way more experienced and who are probably way better at this stuff. It's just that we care and because we care we show up and because we show up again and again persistently we are going to do better than them because we care. And there's one more instance that is like slipping my mind right now.
But I was just like either the shape of my bubble has started shifting towards people who care or the world has started shifting towards people who care are getting rewarded. I don't know it could be either but I was delighted in both cases. Yeah that's interesting. You reminded me actually how when I was first starting out in my career and this is the early or mid 2000s and I did some internships at Microsoft. It was still that era where Microsoft would hire as and then it was PMs or program managers but there was this big focus on hiring people who were not from a tech industry.
It was important that you understood people. So you would have people whose background was in HR or an art or something and those were the people who were kind of the program managers because you were responsible for the product and for helping people use the product well. It's interesting because yeah I think those were kind of people who cared about people as kind of the primary trait and then I think the industry grew so much that we kind of swung away from that and I wonder if now maybe we're starting to swing back. I don't know I had an interesting conversation with a young man a couple of weeks ago who was really focused on the notion that he wanted to build software that would last and would deliver value to people for a long time right maybe like generations but he was like you know I don't care if I make money from the software what really matters to me is building something that adds value to the world and so open source the way he kind of understood it was so important to him. That was kind of even making it difficult for him to think about what job he wanted to do because this like this kind of building something that would have lasting value was such an important driver.
So I don't know I mean maybe there are people who are thinking more about public goods differently and right and how do we value them and how do we kind of help people. And even kind of in that notion actually now I'm thinking about it there are more and more apps that I think help do what I always kind of hope things would do which is like in your best moments help you make decisions for your worst moments. Right so like like I have a fitness app now that it really requires nothing from me during what I'm at the gym right and even kind of in like the planning it just made it so I had to set up my kind of plan once. Right and now I can do check-ins I can engage more with it and I can't invest more when I want to right so in those moments but in the moments when I don't really want to it's kind of persistent kind of like Duolingo is right it's kind of persistent in those moments when you don't feel like doing it to get you to do it because in your moment when you really want to do it. You really did want to do it you made a decision for yourself.
Interesting. So that is you know that is helping you achieve the goals you're after which is kind of thinking about at least helping the user versus just wanting to be from something from the user. Yeah yeah just like a child being like no give me more give me more give me more. Yeah yeah yeah. I think it would be a good an interesting topic for us to kind of explore. I know we kind of had meant to talk a little bit about the season ahead where but maybe worth even just spending a minute or two because I think with our next season which we're starting with our next episode we're planning to move to more of an interview format.
And I think kind of maybe talking to some of our guests about the sustainability and attention and how they are thinking about it in their industries or even just in their lives is kind of an interesting idea. Oh yeah actually that might be a good exercise for us to do just like go through a roster again and think about what are the topics that keep coming back and what are the themes that keep coming back. And maybe those are the lenses. I mean on a broad level how do you think is the tone of our podcast almost always but like you know what are the different things that we keep weaving those threads around. It would be interesting to just ask whoever we are interviewing around those things I really like this idea of sustainability and attention and just like asking different people what their different perspectives for those would be. Yeah it actually was top of mind for me because I was reviewing some of our older documents a few days ago or I think it was actually just yesterday.
And I think we had like traits for the future or something was something that we wrote down at one point and they were like kind of ideas that we wanted to incorporate into the company. I don't know I really get you've been very good about that I feel like and pushing us for that but I feel like writing like kind of you're thinking down at different points just so helpful because then you can kind of refer back to it. A lot of times there are these ideas that you you know you had half formed at one point and now when you look back at it you're like yes sustainability and attention is exactly what we're trying to think about and talk about in a lot of ways. But yeah no this is this has been really fun. I love exploring these ideas with you.
Oh my God same. Oh my God now we're going to have to do it privately and have to actually interview people. Yeah but I'm excited. Okay bye. Bye.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Thinking on Thinking. Our theme music is by Steve Goomes. If you found this topic to be interesting or have other topics you wish we would explore on a future episode please reach out to us at our website joyus.studio. .