SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome back to Inspire AI, where we explore the human stories behind the technology shaping our future. I'm your host, Jason McGuinty. And every week we dive into the ideas, innovations, and individuals redefining what it means to live and lead an age of intelligent machines. In so many organizations today, maybe even yours, we're asking important questions about culture, belonging, and engagement. We send out surveys, analyze data, track how our people are feeling. But even with all that information, it's easy to wonder, are we really hearing what people mean when they respond? Today's guest is to build a career around exploring that very gap between what we measure and what we feel. Andy Citizen is a technologist, innovator, and humanist who's worked across some of the biggest shifts in our digital era, from the rise of the internet and big data to the frontiers of machine learning and AI. After years of helping global organizations modernize and move to the cloud, Andy stepped back to reflect on how technology could better serve human connection. That led him to the current role as CTO of Share More Stories, where he's pioneering new ways to combine psychology, storytelling, and AI to help organizations listen, not just at scale, but with heart. Their platform seek bridges the worlds of qualitative storytelling and quantitative insight. It's helping leaders move beyond survey scores to truly understand the emotions, motivations, and the values of their people. And in today's conversation, we'll explore how stories can become data and how, when treated with empathy, data can bring organizations closer to their communities, employees, and customers. Hey Andy, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00: 2:08

Jason, it's brilliant to be here with you tonight.

SPEAKER_01: 2:11

Outstanding. Let's move in pretty quickly to uh the meat of the conversation. I would love your perspective on how your career has followed the evolution of digital technology and early internet innovations to today's AI-powered systems. So can you start off by telling our audience what patterns have you seen in how technology changes us as humans and not just our tools?

SPEAKER_00: 2:37

Well, we're starting out big. That's great. Um, you know, that is a great question, and we could spend all our time just on that one question alone. I have had a pretty long career, and I've been in merging tech for primarily all of it. And uh, you know, we've always heard that all this standards, like, you know, all this new tech's going to take our jobs, or we're gonna have to uh retrain ourselves, and and it it does transform us almost every big wave we've had. We transform who we are as people and as workers and and and as spouses and as family members and everything else. Um I I don't think it takes as many jobs as everybody worries about, but it is becoming really interesting right now because it's becoming less about the bits and the bytes and more about the digital content, right? Like content is becoming so important and it is so uh immense and and deep around us. And um that content is uh some not only becoming our companion and sometimes our our entertainment and everything, but it's actually becoming our reality in a lot of ways. So I think one of the major things we have to think about right now and uh is you know, how do we establish human agency in that process as we go into the next few waves of how technology will evolve us?

SPEAKER_01: 4:00

Indeed. Yeah, that that sounds absolutely right to me. So, with your extensive background, I know that you described uh in 2016 a sabbatical about a moment that you needed to step back from the digital noise. What did you learn about how we can thrive, not just survive in this hyper-connected world?

SPEAKER_00: 4:22

That's a great, great question. And I you know, I had the opportunity to take a little time off. I had a great resume, had a great career, and I and you know, it gave me the chance to realize I didn't actually want to be the person I was. And so I did a little reinvention. I went a little crazy. I actually looked at mass nutrition and looked at things like protein per acre, cows to crickets. And I actually spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how many crickets you could actually grow on an acre of land. But I also realized pretty quickly in the process that it was if I was going to be valuable, it's gonna be back around what I'd spent a lot of time around. That was the intersection where humans meet digital. And uh, I really wanted to um understand where we took that forward. And it and in this world right now, it's become a really important thing to focus on because humans are uh an intermix, a cocktail with digital today. And you think about like uh uh you know, Taylor Swift, uh Kendrick Lamar, you know, we have all these influencers. It's like sometimes it's hard to tell where the tech and where the the human begins. So it's a it's a really fun time to be in that space.

SPEAKER_01: 5:32

Love those examples. So there are definitely many organizations that rely on anonymous surveys, mine as well. And engagement data. We want to understand our our company's culture, our team, what what our team values the most. But you've built a platform that listens in a completely different way through long form stories. What inspired your company to take that path?

SPEAKER_00: 5:58

That's interesting. You it's uh and it and I want to be clear, I NPS matters, right? Like what people are doing matters. Uh, there's nothing wrong with the approaches we've taken. But what we found is that it and most of our customers are in a place where they're like, we feel like we're still missing something. We're not making the connection we want to have. And we'll talk about that, I'm sure, as in as we go forward. But first, let me answer your question about stories and why stories matter. Well, you know, what's neat about stories? We just talked about all this emerging evolution of tech and digital content. Stories are actually the opposite direction, they're primitive, they take us back to our earliest uh spots. I'd like to say it takes us back to our brainstem, you know, back to our lizard brain, right? And um allows us to connect it in a much more simple way that is also deeply felt by almost every human, if not all. And you know, think about campfires, think about Mark Twain, think about any version of a story you want to. There's this unique and heartfelt connection that we have with it. Um, we also are different people when we tell a story. If you ask me to write about, you know, this hammer I bought that the handle broke on, you know, online system and I'm I'm ranting about it, or if you know I'm doing a survey at work and I'm not really sure if it's anonymous, you know, uh all these things kind of come in and impact that content sometimes, right? But a story, if you tell a story for, you know, say three pages, and we've prompted you to ask about something that is kind of relevant and probably something you care about. Maybe it's about your kids or your dad or you know, first time you went fishing or whatever that story's about, by the time you type that out, you're going back into your memory, you're reminding yourself what that story is. And you might not actually have it exactly the way it happened, but for you, it's your memory of that story, and it matters to you the way you tell it. And you bring that forward. And when you tell that story, what we find is most of our customers are like, Wow, I didn't know I needed to tell that story. I'm so glad you pulled it out of me. I uh and they get therapy from it. Like it's it was uh kind of an unintended uh win as part of our strategy, is our participants tend to get a lot of value out of creating a voice for memory that they haven't talked about in a while. So stories matter in a in a lot of ways, but those are some of the core.

SPEAKER_01: 8:22

Yeah, this is a bit of an uh side question. How do you bridge a personal story like that into what the company is looking for that that supports the that particular associate or the the organization in an in and of itself?

SPEAKER_00: 8:39

Yeah, I I think it has a we for us, it's a it's kind of a uh the beginning of the process. We start with a learning roadmap. Matter of fact, we're putting generative AI into the learning roadmap product part of the process to help our you know, our sponsors, our customers to figure out what they are trying to figure out, right? What is the question they want to ask? Because often they have a constituency, a community of people uh that maybe they're talking to regularly, but in a more survey-based way, or they haven't talked to at all. Maybe there's a new product they're launching, or they feel like there's a group of people that are not being represented in a product or service they offer. Um, they can set that up and stage it. And usually in the process of understanding who that community is and what our customer wants to conversate with them about, we find the story to tell. Now, you know, we did some work with Listen Ventures. They want to talk to the middle-aged women, women, and understand what it feels like to be a middle-aged woman. And and, you know, that's a really challenging, it's a connector, it's not a challenge, it's a like a very powerful person in human society, right? They are usually caregiving to their older generation, they're taking care of the younger generation, they have a spouse, they have pets, they have jobs. You know, there's no one more important, pivotal and important to uh American society than the middle-aged woman. So, you know, when you reach out to that person and and they they wanted to know what it felt like to be that person and what kinds of things do they need from the industry at large. And um, so when you ask that question, they bring forward stories like, hey, you know what, I've been taking care of my mom for six months and I'm it's killing me, right? Like here, and and so it's not a direct product sale, but it what it does is starts to help define the need definition of a community of people through a collection of stories. And whether you read the stories in quotes or you're doing analysis that pulls some of that network forward, that's how they that's one way we get to connect to all of them.

SPEAKER_01: 10:47

That's brilliant. All right. So I've heard share more stories described as bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative research. Uh, for leaders who live in a data-driven environment, how do you help them particularly see the power and the practicality of combining those two worlds?

SPEAKER_00: 11:06

Yeah, it's a it's a really strong question because it is uh it because of the way we're slicing the space, it is often hits traditional thinking and like, well, well, which side of the continuum are you on? And we're kind of splitting it right down the middle. Uh, if you think about a focus group, maybe you put five people in a room, you ask them some questions, they talk, you get one-fifth of all those people's stories over the course of an hour. But you probably only did that with 30 people. Um, and that's qualitative, right? You get a lot of content, but you're actually only you're sharing often sharing the space with people. So you're only getting the portion that they're talking, and then you're only going to do that with so many people because it's kind of an expensive part of the process. The other end you have quantitative, where you're maybe doing tens of thousands of hits or reviews or scores against web site activity. And here you have just tons of data to work with, but you know, it I and I derogatorily call them monkey clicks, you know, it's all us monkeys out there clicking on things, right? And so, you know, you can learn things from that, they're both important. Um, but what we're finding is there's a space in between that, a sweet spot that is, you know, collecting something like a story is more qualitative because it's a it's you know, you know, 150, 300, 500 words of content, which by the way is really nice to process with AI. Um, but we can do that with our app, our platform uh at a web scale level. So, you know, if we want to do that for 500 people, want to do that for a thousand people, we can reach out and we've automated a lot of our processes. So our prediction engines that run on cloud all can run automatically behind the scenes. So we don't need the humans to do a lot of the processing that we would have, say, a year to two or three years ago. So we're kind of splitting the difference between them.

SPEAKER_01: 12:55

I see, I see.

SPEAKER_00: 12:56

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 12:57

So your platform analyzes stories using AI models, looking at emotions like joy, anxiety, and the need for structure. For leaders who are used to interpreting pulse surveys or engagement scores in PS, of course, how does this kind of emotional insight change the way they understand the true health of their organization?

SPEAKER_00: 13:20

I've been warned not to get too geeky and too uh technical on this. So I'm gonna keep my, you know, I'm gonna keep the bar high on this uh because we could go really deep on it. I love this space. And so what we do, as I as you mentioned, we use generative AI, I think I said earlier, uh, in various aspects of our product, it's kind of cellular, is what I like to call it, but we also do something else called predictive AI, classification AI, where we're predicting a venti model or a kind of a Likert scale, very low, low, medium, high, very high. And we score against emotives or attitudes, uh things like joy, sentiment, uh, need for structure, anxiety, um, you know, all these different uh, you know, altruism is one we track and um it self-transcendence, even. And when we score that against the stories, we've collected enough stories to train the stories to recognize high levels of that and low levels of that. And what's really interesting is these individual emotions we have a score on, but they actually travel together, things like variance and covariance. I won't get into the details of that, but we can track the the inner relationships of that data as it flows through this community together. And I'll give a, you know, and and that is super powerful because all of a sudden, you know, something like you know, something we learned early is that happiness or sentiment is kind of a shallow emotion, um, but joy is a deep, longer-term emotion. In our interpretation of that, you can be happy or sad, but joy is something you might keep a little longer. And um it's it's a little more intrinsic to our our our core. Um, take my interpretation as you like, but that's that's one of the things we pull from our our work. And you know, another great example is I'll talk about the YMCA for a second. Um they uh they did some really interesting work around um wanting to kind of work on customer service, but also employee experience as part of our customer experience and employee experience. And they they have this kind of brilliant model that is if we take care of our employees and and their well-being, they'll be great. Our customers will be benefited from that work. So it's kind of an inside out look. And one of the scores they had, uh, I won't talk in detail, but you know, they had a kind of a high um uh achievement with altruism. And that sounds okay. Well, the altruistic people and achievement-oriented traveling together in a positive correlation that's really cool. Well, it's actually pretty unique because if you look at normal corporations where you know your achievers are often those people coming out of business school and really want to get it done and just go after it, you know, everything necessary to make it happen. Altruism is usually tracking pretty low. It's usually a pretty negative correlation in our past work. So it was fun to see that come out in a different way, partly because of the unique culture of that one corporation or that company. So, you know, that's the kind of interrelationship and why it's important that we're tracking all these different scores and then looking across for for the patterns in the complexity of the data.

SPEAKER_01: 16:29

I see. That's pretty fascinating. Being a longtime member of the why, I can appreciate that too. So you've shared that when leaders start reading these stories, they often have real emotional reaction, that they're changed by them, if you will. Why do you think that kind of empathy is so rare in traditional feedback systems?

SPEAKER_00: 16:51

Yeah, it's it's it's really interesting because you know, I'm the science guy, I want to get in the details and uh talk about the tech. And uh and almost no one ever wants to go as deep as I want to go in that, obviously. And uh, but what was really interesting is we started pulling this.

SPEAKER_01: 17:08

You just don't hang out with the right crowd.

SPEAKER_00: 17:10

I I know, I just we don't have enough of me in the company, right? Like we're we're still startup, we're growing. So, you know, I I gotta get I gotta get better friends, you know. We'll go with that. Um, but you know what we what we learned is we started rolling out the web app, we started to scale at bigger levels and really getting some interesting customers, and almost every one of those customers, one or two of the people we talk to will start collecting stories. It'll be a couple weeks in, you know, it's just starting to happen. We maybe we send over a little quip here, or they'll peek in and look at a sample, and and they'll be profoundly moved. They'll be like, Oh my gosh, this is a story. And we're like, Yeah, that's what we do is stories. And and like that, and it's obviously I'm I'm joking with them, but what's matters in this process is they they finally realize that this isn't just another survey, that they're actually getting deep stories, like, you know, hey, you know what, my my mother died in my arms kind of story. Like, you know, wow, I can't believe this person shared that with me. Well, what you didn't realize is that person wanted a voice and wanted to share that with you, and they wanted to tell you what they needed. And so as this is where the aha is for a lot of our customers, it's not at the analysis phase, but when they start seeing the stories come in and they start realizing I've never had this data before, I've never known this customer or constituent the way I'm going to know them now. And that that's profound, and it's it's a great thing to be part of.

SPEAKER_01: 18:35

Yeah, I agree. And something resonated with me there is I feel like people have so much more to share than what what you can get out of a survey, and they want to share it. They they feel like they're you know, by sharing that, maybe their life can improve, their work situation can improve, their leadership can see the world through their eyes for a moment. I think that's that's really that's really profound. Um, the value, the value I would say, like you're pulling from there.

SPEAKER_00: 19:05

Um yeah, and I'm gonna hook on that for a second and say that um, you know, our our customers, our our customers are getting that value, but our participants are also getting that value. As you mentioned, they get voice and often things that they would love to share their voice with, and they love the idea that this customer, you know, that they buy or use or or are somehow related to cares to know what they have to say. So it's a win-win kind of model, like just the sheer fact that you've asked already has changed the perspective of your brand, which is really cool.

SPEAKER_01: 19:41

A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, that it builds trust like immediately when you're asking them for their their insights and looking to share their perspectives of the world in ways that you can't get from a survey. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So tell tell me a little bit about your environmental work. I think the uh ghost pots were uh effort where you know tech meets purpose. I think that's that's a fascinating story. Can you share it with us?

SPEAKER_00: 20:12

Yeah, well, I will try to keep it in a digest form. Um I, you know, I it's partly redemption for me traveling too much. And I was in a I I missed I missed recycles for I think it was six years because I was never home on a Wednesday. You know, like I was in a plane uh so much for so long of my life. Yeah, 20 years or so, I was all over the globe. And so part of that I realized once I took the sabbatical was I just wasn't invested enough. And it mattered to my health, but it also mattered to my community. And that's one thing I would tell everybody to make sure you do is use your feet, get out, meet people, but we'll come back to that. Um, Ghostbots. I I we have a we're have the luxury to have a place down off the Chesapeake, and you know, I wanted looking for ways to get back. I joined a board down there that has been kind of working on the fishery and the shorelines, and and uh I I wanted to give back, and we had this opportunity to do ghost bots with Vim's and Noah had a program that they had put together.

SPEAKER_01: 21:16

Um, and it's it was intriguing because just can you explain for our to our audience what ghost pots are?

SPEAKER_00: 21:23

Ghost spots. Well, you know what a ghost pot. Ghost pot is a crab pot that has been one of two, we call ghost bots one of two types abandoned pots, a pot that got, let's say a pot floated away and the crabber lost track. Sometimes call watermen grabber, same person, um, in our in my vernacular, but it might have gotten lost or they forgot it, or somehow it fell out of their path. And it might sit there for three years with a float sitting on it, or even worse, something cut the line, broke the line, pulled the float down with grasses or whatever, but the float left the top of the water, and now this pot is sitting on the floor of the water, say 10, 12 feet underwater, maybe even more, just sitting there catching, killing, catching, and killing. Because every time you catch and kill, it becomes bait for the next one. And so that's a derelict crab pot, is what a ghost pot is for us. And you know, the basic stats are there's 33 million of revenue lost uh associated with this each year. There's about 3 million that die in these pots, uh, six million caught. Um, that don't just catch crabs, they catch turtles and fish and baby, baby otters. Luckily, I've never run into that one, but you know, there's all sorts of things that can get trapped in these birds. And um, yeah, they're just not good. They're not good for the fishery, you know, and it's not good for the crabbers. Crabbers spend about 60 bucks a pot. And so it's like six grand in lost pots each year. Um, that's not counting the catch that's in those pots that they lose. Now, I'm gonna give you one little bit and I'll stop again. But um the uh the the problem is because the regulatory requirements of all this, we can't pull pots with the permit from but January to March 15th, which is when there is no crab season. The rest of it's mostly crab season. So um, you know, we're only allowed to pull them when they're off, they're not they're not sitting out there with floats, which is kind of silly because these are all on the bottom without floats, but you know, that's the current regulations. And so that's that's what we did last year, that's what we'll do this year. We're went from one team last year to three teams this year, and we're pulling pots off the bottom in you know, 30 degree weather and 36 degree water temperatures and 20 mile an hour wind. So it's uh it's rigorous.

SPEAKER_01: 23:37

And and just just so I I I hear, right? This is a very manual effort, um, environmental like impact, but no, you're you're not really using technology per se.

SPEAKER_00: 23:49

Well, it that's a great question because yes, we are, and uh it is manual effort, and you're exhausted because these pots uh weigh I'm gonna say 40 to 80 pounds. They can be full of mud, sea grapes are these big water vines, they can have fish in them or dead crabs or whatever, or live crabs. Um, and you pull I put I pulled them up on kayaks and I pulled them up on small skiffs last year with the team. And the kayak is a is an art, not not many people can do it on a kayak. It's uh it's a little hard to lift that much and not break your secondary line of stability. Um, and it was precarious a few times, but uh it is about technology because we're using sonar to find these things. Last year we used side sonar, which is you know an image shooting out each side, and we learned how to turn on the pot. And that was what last year was about. We went from like taking 60 minutes on average to pull them in, find them and pull them in, to three to four to six minutes to pull them in, and that's great with a$300 sonar. It wasn't expensive stuff, and that was proven last year. We want to go forward, but we still don't think that's a crapper level of quality, of efficiency. Because let me stop for a second to explain why we're doing this, is to change the profit motive, to you know, uh to bring new tech to a traditional industry that they use tech, they they just don't use every piece of tech out there, and we want to enable that human market that is the this old-time, you know, traditional Markham seafood. And that new tech is called Forb scan. There's three or four different products out there, but essentially being able to shoot a really strong quality image, we're like$3,500 to run these systems, and that will allow you to go right to that pot. And we think if we can put that and pilot that on crab water crab boat, and over the winter, uh, we can teach that team to pull that and we will change the motive from you know throwing away 60 bucks because I don't have time to pull that thing out of the water in season to I know how to pull it out now. So only take me a couple minutes. I'm gonna take my pot back because I'm gonna lose the 60 bucks, I'm not gonna lose my catch. And why does that matter? It matters because now that pot's not sitting in the water for 300 days until we can pull it again if it's lost and you don't kill anything, probably in the process. If it's two or three days after it was lost, that crabmer can get it back out, keep his see her or her seafood, and move forward to the next one. So it's a it's a we want to revitalize the industry doing this, showing them that technology can do this, showing them that there is a profit mode. They know there's a profit mode. We just want to get within the magical equation to make that the right profit mode of the efficiency process that they will enable themselves to do. And you know, we think we get one or two doing this, we can get you know five, and then we can get 10 or 50 and keep going from there. And all of a sudden, the problem that is ghost pots starts to go away.

SPEAKER_01: 26:51

No more ghost pots, dream of the day.

SPEAKER_00: 26:54

Probably one or two, but you know, I gotta have something to do.

SPEAKER_01: 26:58

Well, you'll find a different issue to work on.

SPEAKER_00: 27:01

Yeah, well, yeah, I started looking around because I you can't fish in the winter, there's no fish. So, you know, you're out there, you gotta do something. So yeah, ghost spots it is.

SPEAKER_01: 27:10

So, so what did you learn about community impact? Um, whether that's through conservation or corporate storytelling that you think business and tech leaders might overlook about their people, their teams, and their values?

SPEAKER_00: 27:23

That's a great question. And I I started answering three times while you're talking. I was so excited about it. Um the the answer is trust matters. And you know, we learned this at Sharon World Stories, trust. To get authentic stories from people, we have to establish trust. And so, you know, in our corporate corporate world, that that's really important. But it's also important into this industry because the the answers are there. It's not hard to see a potential solution, but if you take the the equations of economy, uh regulatory and political infighting that's happened for a hundred years between different organizations, no one's at fault, but you know, everybody's part of it, and that no one trusts anybody. So, you know, that's why we have to pull them out of the water in the winter, even because it's someone's property. Well, if I don't have a float, it's at the bottom of the river, and they're not pulling them up as nobody's property, in my view. Um, don't quote me on that. But those those are the kinds so we're working within a a less than optimal model until you start bringing people together. And that's why this hasn't been about let's force more regulation on, let's actually make you more money, let's let's give you some technology, see how you do with it. And so, what we want to do, we mentioned the pilot in the winter, but what I want to do is leave that on the boat, give it to the give it to the grabber, and check back with them a couple times over the season and say, hey, did you lose 20% like you did last year? Or did you lose 10%? Did you lose 5%? You know, how did it change your, you know, did you use it? You didn't? Okay, well, it was kind of a waste. Or, you know, did I impact your business? Did I impact your your family's livelihood and your livelihood in the process? And again, we talked about win-wins a minute ago. I think it's a win-win. If you approach us the right way, we can we can get everybody on board behind a good idea. And so we're just trying to right now prove that this is truly a good idea.

SPEAKER_01: 29:17

Yep. Fantastic. What kind of thing? I think I think it's a wonderful thing being able to abridge your you know expertise of technology and and creating um impact uh and value through your your community. I'm sure that was part of your pivot in 2016, but uh it's great to great to find that there are people out there that um you know want to leverage their their talent and skills to make the world a better place.

SPEAKER_00: 29:46

People people always care. And it's just uh and and I think uh that's a that's a big thing about technology, is we gotta keep and we gotta remember that, you know. I I haven't said it yet. I expect to say it a couple of times, but like I'm constantly you. The opinion that we need to red and blue pill ourselves, right? You got a big production engine running through your corporation of marketing or technology, red and blue at every you know, you know, which pill you're taking, step outside, get organic for a minute, look back at it, and then get back in, right? Like we we have to we have to connect. And uh, you know, this is this is one of the ways I find a really good way to connect. And and you know, everybody at the table has really good intentions. So it's just about making sure everybody understands.

SPEAKER_01: 30:30

Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Communication. So thinking about bringing us back to how AI integrates with every aspect of work. What what advice would you give leaders who want to use the tools to deepen empathy and not just efficiency?

SPEAKER_00: 30:50

Yeah, I think it's uh it's getting easier to do business. You know, if you think about capitalism in general, you know, you go back to financial banks of you know, 1900s or railroads, or you know, when it took to manufacture the first major iron ship. Uh, those things were really that was all we could focus on at some point in the past. But now, you know, those are easier aspects of our business. They're still serious. I'm not not downplaying the value and the effort that goes into that. But we've found time to do other things within corporations. And so capitalism, in a way, has almost become too easy. And I don't want to kick off a provocative thought there, but you know, it's getting uh it's easier to globally connect and get out and create a revenue streams associated with that. So as we do that, because it's easier, we have to be careful with the technology. It's like I started this with about you know human agency. I think we have to really consider you know the the individual in this as we go forward, not only because we should care that they're our constituent and our customer and so forth, but you know, some level of societal health and well-being is important that it's all we keep going in that direction. So I, you know, I I you know the uh this the astronaut Guerin said something recently that I really loved, and that was that he was flying around the space station. He's like, it's very he looked down at this fragile marble, and he's like, you know, I've kind of flipped on what I used to think, and now I think it's planet society economy. And I really like the sentiment of his saying there in that we we have to worry about the planet. There's you know, all the data centers are throwing in with AI right now. What does that do? And you know, I spoke at a resiliency conference conference about AI there well about a month ago, and and man, I got I got a real good uh talking to about all the resiliency issues associated with AI. And and it and well, thoughtfully so, right? And so but we have to think of that, we have to think about you know how humans play out in this whole thing. And when you when you're just a you know you're you're you're a manager or a C level uh within a company, uh I mentioned red and blue pillar, right? Like figure out a way to step away from the production engine that is the company and consider the aspects that matter, you know, what matters? What what humans matter that mix? How do you bring them into the story? How do you know what they care about? What do they need from you? I like to say, you know, it's not the question that you that that we the answers to the questions we ask, but to learn the question we should have asked you in the first place, and um, you know, part of that has to be different techniques, and and so share more stories is bringing some of that to the table, giving us new ways to connect to people and get a deeper understanding. But we need to do more of that as we go forward and and and understand the human in the mix.

SPEAKER_01: 33:50

Yeah, that brings it home for me. I got one more question for you.

SPEAKER_00: 33:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 33:55

So what's next for share more stories? And what gives you hope about the future of human connection in this increasingly digital world?

SPEAKER_00: 34:05

Great. Okay. Well, I think share more is, you know, we're gonna be like that old joke, you know, uh 40 years overnight success kind of story. Uh, we're we're 10 years into this this environment and we're we're to a place where the world is starting to understand who we are. And, you know, it it was an interesting journey to learn what it meant to offer what we offered. And it was it was also challenging to find that the customers wouldn't figure out who what exactly we did until we were done. Uh, it's really hard to market something that people don't figure out until they're finished executing what you actually did. Good news is they were all happy, but uh, you know, so we are now seeing, you know, chief experience officers, we're seeing CMOs really start to prioritize this type of thinking in uh what be partly because of the maturation of marketing today. We've done a lot of the other stuff, we've figured it out, we've got strategies. So how do we go next? What's the next step? And we believe what we're doing is in the trend of what is the next step. So we hope to ride that wave and um you know enjoy that that experience. Um, what's the next in the future of technology? I hope, you know, I hope you see a lot of uh, you know, COVID brought a lot of nature connection for individuals. I'm seeing a lot of kind of alternative programs where people are, you know, doing community walks and uh doing local library activities, and and I hope to see um I hope to see that kind of make it way its way into technology. I'd like to see us, you know, algorithm what's the analog it a little bit, right? Like as we go more and more digital, how do we, how does analog become, you know, we become fandoms of analog. You sell LPs came back and so forth. I think we're gonna just see more and more of that where people are reconnecting with aspects of humanity that are maybe not efficient or most optimal in the current tech realm that we're in, but because they speak to them in other ways. And and so yeah, I think I think we're in a weird, interesting, I said weird and I mean it, but interesting period of our our our um existence. And it's really, I feel like in pivotal, I think we have to we have we have the opportunity to be the Jetsons or Terminator, right? And so I I think we all want to ride the wave and and be a little more like George. So you know, I think we have to consider that and all the aspects of that meet what that means.

SPEAKER_01: 36:43

Yeah, I I love the Jetsons. Um it's it it is it's a future that I wouldn't mind living in as long as the earth can thrive, right? And we haven't destroyed it by then and have to live in the upper atmosphere because the ground isn't any good or anything crazy like that.

SPEAKER_00: 37:00

Yeah, when no one really knows what the Jetsons ground looks like. I mean, come on, there's a there's a origin story that you know would be really good video.

SPEAKER_01: 37:11

I think they should bring back the Jetsons, honestly, with all these great graphics they got.

SPEAKER_00: 37:16

Yeah, I mean, there there was somebody that did some mock-ups. There was a it was like generative AI little shorts of old 50s, you know, Popeye Jetsons, and they're actually pretty cool. I uh I I I I wormholed them or rabbit holed them for a little bit uh one time. So yeah, you know, we have mainstreamed yet.

SPEAKER_01: 37:37

I have to check that out. So a surprise question that I like to ask all of my guests on the show is if you had a superpower, what would it be and why?

SPEAKER_00: 37:51

I'm trying not to be boring. I'm I'm I was gonna say strength and in in invincibility because I kind of live that way, even though I'm probably not either. Um, but I like to I I have a motto that says, My wife or my wife will kill me eventually, right? Because that's the way I like to live. But uh I actually would prefer uh, and this seems almost campy, but I I prefer to better understand people. And it literally has nothing to do with back shot. We just podcasted all about that, but I would love to interpret people better. I am left-handed, uh ADHD, cognitive, divergent, you know, I'm a weird dude, and I I I live in a fun world, but I also am also not connected with people. So I guess my superpower would be to more to appreciate everyone for the place that they are. And I'm gonna stop there. I'm just let it ride.

SPEAKER_01: 38:46

That's beautiful, man. Hey, there's no there's no wrong answer there. So I'll I'll just go ahead and wrap it up for us today. Um, when I think about anonymous surveys, they they of course give us a snapshot of what's going on in the health of the organization. But stories, they give us a mirror. They show us not just where we are, but who we are. And maybe that's what every great leader needs to understand first. So, Andy, thank you so much for joining us today on Inspire AI. Your work is a powerful reminder that beyond every data point, it's a human story, and that listening deeply might be the most transformative technology of all. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 39:33

Thank you.