Latest / The Bob Lefsetz Podcast / John Dick

Transcript

John Dick · The Bob Lefsetz Podcast

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: guest this week is CEO of Civic Science, John Dick.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: John Bob good to be here. I met John we
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: were on a piano for an Access TV show. Because
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Mark Cuban is involved on the board of Civic Science
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: doing Grammy predictions and John is in town. He sends
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: a weekly email talking about trends in the world at large.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Because ultimately, what would you call your company? Wouldn't call
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: a polling company. I would call us a polling company.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: I wish there was a sexier way to describe it,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: but we're a new breed of polling company, okay. And
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: he's always revealing fasciniating insights, so I thought it'd be
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: great to have him on the podcast. Let's start from
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: the beginning. You're in Pittsburgh. Correct, Why Pittsburgh the next
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: big thing? Pittsburgh is going through a tremendous renaissance. But
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: actually we're there. The company is there because carnegiel And
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: University is there, and the talent and technology that powers
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: the foundation of our company came from there, and so
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: um and it's a great place to live, and it's
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: a really emerging city with lots of talent and just
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: a smart place for us to Are you from Pittsburgh
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: born and raised? Yeah? Did you go to Carnegie Mill?
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: I did not. Where do you go to to Rollins
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: College in Winter Park, Florida? Okay? So then how did
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: you hook up with all these new technology things at
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: Carnegie Miller. Well, I started a company earlier in my
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: early twenties. Um sold that company in my late twenties.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: What was that company's called GSP. We helped early stage
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: tech and biotech companies do business with the government, very
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: different business. And so I exited that company and had
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: the business plan for what became Civic Science shortly after,
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: and I knew it had some technology needs and found
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: a couple of guys that knew how to solve those
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: technology needs. Okay, So why did you want to be
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: in the polling business? Because it's broken? And uh, well
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: two reasons. When it was broken and at a little
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: slower Why is it broken because people don't participate the
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: way they used to because we're too busy. Um, it's
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: not a pleasant experience for people to participate in polling
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: as it's sort of originally constructed. My phone's ringing while
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: I'm having dinner, or I have to sign up at
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: some web page and answer surveys all day for five bucks.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: And it's just not a user centric experience for anyone.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: And so what happened is landline phone ownerships started to plummet,
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: and the people who have landline phones don't look like
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: the ones who don't, and so the quality of the
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: data started to suffer. And then posters said, well, that's fine,
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: we'll we'll call cell phones. But people don't answer cell
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: phone calls from numbers they don't recognize, or at least
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: the people who do don't look like the ones who don't.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: And then you had the advent of what are called
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: survey panels, which are these websites people sign up at
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: and answer surveys for money. And those people don't look
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: like either of us. They are too much time on
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: their hands. Okay, just one other thing, generally speaking, because
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: you've lived in a place in Los Angeles, you're constantly
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: getting email whatever, Come participate for fifty a hundred dollars.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: What are those panels worth? Well, I mean, what are
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: they worth? They certainly are powering a lot of decision
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: making in commercial America. I don't think they should be
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: because the people who answer those surveys don't look like
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: the real world. They are people who are highly incentivized
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: by that financial incentive, and so they're heavily biased. Um,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: and then that financial reward inspire some of the wrong
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: behaviors too, And when you're trying to research someone as
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: opposed to getting their honest opinion about something. So that's
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: all been broken, and it started breaking twenty years ago.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: It started to really sort of, Um, the chickens kind
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: of came home to roost in the last election cycle.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: We see polling just isn't working the way that it
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: used to. Okay, we got we got a bunchet things
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: on what is the other reason you wanted to go
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: into this business? Because I think it needs to work.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: It needs we need to figure out a way to
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: understand what people think. There was a mindset ten or
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: fifteen years ago that social media was somehow going to
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: replace survey research is the way that we understood what
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: the world thinks, and it just doesn't work that way.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: I'm not myself on social media. I'm a curated version
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: of myself. We need a discreet means of understanding people's opinion.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: There's a reason we pull a curtain behind us on
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: election day, because if our opinions are subject to scrutiny
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: and peer pressure and invective, then we um, we don't
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: tell people what we think. Why did everybody get it so?
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, now we have Nate Silver, who now presently
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: at five thirty eight, used to be The New York
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: Times the previous election cycle. He balances polls. He got
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: it wrong, although he will say he thought the odds
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: of Trump being successful. Hire New York Times got it
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: completely wrong. What did we learn there? Well, on a
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: national level, from a popular vote standpoint, the posters were
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: pretty strong. I mean they said most of the averages
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: said Hillary Clinton would win by three percent, and she
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: wrote one roughly by three Um, we're broke down. Was
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: at state levels, where a couple of hundred thousand votes
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: across three or four states were able to swing the election.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: What did we learn about it in the grand scheme
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: of things was that there was an entire universe of
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: people out there who were piste off and we didn't
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: know about it. Um. One of the reasons, and we
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: study this a lot in our own data, Conservatives tend
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: to be much less outspoken on social media than their
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: liberal counterparts are. Why because they believe that when they
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: speak out on conservative issues, they are opening themselves up
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: to attack from the left, and so they tend to
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: keep their mouth shut. We've studied this extensively, and so
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: there was an entire um sub layer of us, the
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: US population that was piste off. But because they weren't
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: trumpeting it from the rooftops on social media, we didn't
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: know about it, and we didn't know about it until November. Okay,
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: so you move back to Pittsburgh, you align with these
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: people at Carnegie mellon what are the next steps in
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: starting civic science. Well, we had a lot of technology
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: and to build what was that technology, database and database
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: architecture designed to kind of find all the stuff we
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: can find in our data. We had to prove that
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: the data the methodology we were inventing worked. Now, the
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: methodology you started with when was this two eight? Is
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: that the same methodology you're still employing. Absolutely, So explained
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: to my what you with that methodology. So we encounter
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: people and polls and quizzes across the web. Inside of
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: content they're reading, it might be a polar quiz you
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: might see on a buzz feeder or Facebook of what
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: kind of wine or what kind of Simpson's character are you?
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: But more it's an opinion type of poll of the
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: day that you might find in an article you're reading
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: on your local newspaper, on a site like Paris Hilton
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: or Univision. We're generally asking somebody a couple of questions
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: at a time, no more than three or four, because
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: we know that if we add too many questions, we
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: start to see a decline and participation and that's no good. Um.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: We give people back, um instant results, which we think
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: is really important. So I answer a question, you know,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: what is my favorite color? And after I click, I'll
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: see what everybody else's favorite color is. Sure. Sure, we
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: don't generally ask favorite color, but yeah, sure, yeah, And
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: and we think there's some a lot of particularly today. Um.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: And what we hear back from people is they appreciate
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: that we're giving them the answers right back. It's unvarnished,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: unfiltered truth that here's what the world thinks, and here's
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: what people like you think, and it's not being passed
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: to you through the lens of a media company that
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: may have some bias now with somewhat Okay, what is
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: incentivizing them to answer the questions to begin with? Uh,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: it's that intrinsic benefit of a feeling like I'm participating
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: in something good, be the interestingness of the results that
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: I get back feeling like, Okay, I just learned something
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: about the rest of the world by virtue of my
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: participation in it. And do you compensate the sites where
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: you're quizzes are now? So how do they end up
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: being placed there? Um? They it's effectively a bartering arrangement. Um.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: But what they they learn things from the information that
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: we gather that help them grow their businesses, that we
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: help them improve their editorial functions and their ad sales. Okay,
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: So let's say you're on website A. You would approach
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: them and say, I want to do this, but I'm
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: going to share data with you that's going to be
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: your compensation. Correct. So how many sites are you presently on?
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: Well over a thousand at last count. Um? Very uh
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: piece together to give us a diverse representative view of
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: the US population. So we want to make sure we
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: have ample number of media companies that reach hispanics. An
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: ample number of media companies that reach women and so forth. Um,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: the media companies make a distinction from us that the
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: size of our poll sitting on their web page, that
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: we are delivering more value to them from that information
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: than they would get from a banner ad that was
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: sitting in that same place. And as long as we
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: can maintain that equilibrium, we can continue to collect that data.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: How do you choose what sites to place your quizzes on? Um? Well,
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: it's we have a team who goes out and sells
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: that essentially, and we do we prioritize at any given time,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: We prioritize sales to publishers or partnerships with publishers who
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: meet demographic imbalances in our sampling. So if we if
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: we notice over time, hey we're starting to get a
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: disproportionate number of men answering our polls, we want to
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: go and target sites that have a disproportionate audience of women. Okay,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: I am someone who never re answers those questions, So
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: that begs the question are certain people ultimately not included
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: in the sample? Yes? What do you do about that? Well,
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: it's a fundamental flaw. UM, I guess what we tell
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: the marketplace. And what we can prove in our research
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: is that because we've limited those barriers as much as possible,
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: that our audience looks more like the real world than
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: any other methodology you would think of. So you're not
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: going to be the person who signs up and answers
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: surveys all day for five bucks either. Um we are.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: We are all missing some portion of the US population.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: We're just missing a much smaller portion of the population.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: And do you sit in your office and say, how
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: do we reach those people? You just tell your customers
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: some people are unreachable. Um, we're not giving up. I
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: think we spend a ton of time trying to understand
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: what types of questions or what kind of interaction will
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: bring people who otherwise don't want to participate to participate in.
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: Our response rates as a result, have gone up a lot.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: The percentage of of people who see our polls on
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: a website and answer them has skyrocketed in the last
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: two years because we've invested very heavily in solving that problem.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: I would assume it's still below ten percent. Sure, sure, um,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: but if you think about what's that, how's that relate
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: to say, the likelihood of somebody clicking on an ad,
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: it's a hundred times more than that, right, because there's
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: there's something engaging about it, as opposed to, Oh, I'm
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: gonna click on this ad and somebody's gonna try and
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: try to try to sell me. And how many people
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: work at SIVEN Civic Science? Um? I think? And are
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: they all in Pittsburgh? All in way of one person
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: in New York? Okay? So what kind of companies uh,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: by your data? Um, pretty broad, large ones, primarily very
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: bigger sort of fortune five hundred types of enterprises. Consumer
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: facing companies were really strong and tech and telcom, media, banking, healthcare, restaurant,
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: and some retail. Okay, we were talking off camera, and
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: these are all household name the names you think they are,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: they are, but let's assume point of discussion. Telcom Okay,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: it is a very competitive marketplace. Everyone already has a smartphone.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: There are four competitors in the United States. What you
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: be able to tell a telecom company, Uh, there's going
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: to be a mix of things about attitudes towards their
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: specific company and their specific products. There's going to be
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: a mix of things about trends within their category. So
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: which of their competitors and maybe are more vulnerable than
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: others at a given point in time. And then the
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: more valuable stuff we do tends to look at how
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: various larger consumer trends and macro forces are affecting consumers
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: and how that relates to what mobile carriers they're going
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: to use, and and and um, how much of their
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: plan they're going to use. One thing we learned was
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: really fascinating pre and post election was the composition of
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: the people who were likely to switch mobile carriers changed
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: very dramatically from the summer of two thousand sixteen through
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: the summer. And what did your research tell you, Um,
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: Democrats were more likely to switch mobile carriers after the
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: election than they were before because they, UM, I switched
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: my mobile carrier generally to get a better financial deal, right,
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: and so it tends to correlate with my personal financial
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: situation or my consumer confidence. And so once um, Donald
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Trump was elected, these people, UM, a lot of Democrats
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: began to have a bleaker view of the economy and said,
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: you know what, I better go find a better deal
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: for myself. And we saw a higher rate of switchers
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: among Democrats during that period of time as opposed to
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: the summer before when they tended to be more likely
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: to be Republicans. Now, sitting here as a lay person,
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: one could say, also Sprint was offering comprehensive plans with
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: very cheaper free phones. T Mobile was very cheap, So
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: one might say, really it was plans were so cheap
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: people were incentivized for that reason as opposed to consumer confidence. Well,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: but still there's I chase a cheaper opportunity when I'm
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: looking when I have a less positive view of my
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: personal finances. So I would whether there was cause and
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: effect there or whether those companies were smart enough to
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: capitalize them what they knew was coming, which was more
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: price sensitivity in their core markets. UM. Hard to tell. Okay, Now,
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: many all these companies do use consumer research, but there's
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: a school of thought that research will tell you where
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: you've been, but it won't tell you where you're going. Oh,
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: that's the big part of our ethos as we focus
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: on looking through the windshield. So how do you do that? UM?
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: We look a lot at patterns and trends in this
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: history of data now that we have UM, those trends
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: tend to have a trajectory that we can look two months,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: six months out and see where they're headed. We ask
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: a lot of questions that are forward looking of people.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: What are your intentions? How likely you to do something
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: in the future. Um, there's ample backward looking data that
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: credit card companies have and people on the web have
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: based on things I clicked on yesterday and bought yesterday.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: We don't we don't need to augment that information. We
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: focus on where are people going to be spending their
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: money next week or next month. But you look famously,
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Steve Jobs did no consumer research, and he would come
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: up with products that people literally hadn't heard of, I
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: didn't think they needed, and then would clamor for good,
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: good work if you can get it. Okay, So he's
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: an anomaly. He's the outline absolutely. Okay. Yeah, how about
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Elon Musk probably of that ilk. But I think those
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: people are the exceptions, not the rule. Okay. So where's
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: it going? Well, Um, it's a mix of exciting and
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: terrifying all at once. Um, we are seeing some amazing
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: see changes right now, a lot of things related. UM.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: I don't think we fully appreciate yet the impact that
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: social media will have on our culture forever. I think
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: we intuitively get some of it, but I don't think
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: we're going to be able to diagnose any of that
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: for decades. But one of the things that that that
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: we notice a lot in our data is and and
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: everyone kind of can relate to this, is that because
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: I'm this kind of curated version of myself on social media,
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: I use social media as a way to make myself
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: look funnier and smarter and a better parent and more
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: adventurous and a better eater. And I think about that
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: consciously or not when I choose what to share, where
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: to check in. Uh. The flip side of that is
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: I have a high disincentive to say anything that is unpopular.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: And so we see and it goes back to the
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: common I made earlier about the election. People who believed
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: it was unpopular to support Donald Trump in two thousand
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: and sixteen just didn't talk about it, but they showed
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: up on election day and did. Now we're seeing it's
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: a little more um. People are a little bolder about
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: their support now than they were in But what's happening
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: is unpopular opinions tend to be suppressed on social media,
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: and so we have a sense of consensus that doesn't
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: really exist. But yes, if if, if you remember the
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: summer of two thousand and fifteen, UM when the Supreme
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: Court was ruling on gay marriage, it was a very
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: popular thing to have this rainbow tinted profile picture as
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: a as a solidarity. Right around that same summer, the
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: South Carolina State Legislature was being was debating taking the
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Confederate flag down from over the state Capitol building. There
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: were no equivalent Confederate flag filters over anybody's profile pictures,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: which is kind of surprising to me because I grew
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: up in a pretty rural part of Pennsylvania, where I
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: know lots of gun toting, right wing evangelical Christian types.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: You'd think that I would have an equal number of
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: rainbow printed tinted profile pictures and Confederate flag ones. But
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: I didn't, um because once Facebook had become a wash
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: with those rainbow filters, everybody who believed otherwise had a
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: significant disincentive from saying anything to the contrary because they
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: knew they'd be open to attack. So narratives that emerge
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: on social media and take take hold are very, very
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: difficult to change, and the impact that has on the
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: popularity of music, the popularity of brands and fashion. It's
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: it's almost a measurable today. Okay, Just so I understand
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: it is is it a skewed view of reality or
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: does it change reality? Or both both? I mean, I
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: think I think what we're what what what I'm suggesting
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: is that when we look back on this period of
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: history that it will have changed reality. Um. Well, I'm
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: a big believer that the reason the younger generation is
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: not as racist and gay marriage is accepted because they
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: saw a rainbow of colors and uh, different choices on
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: MTV and MTV dominated. So are we saying the same
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: thing that social media will ultimately affect what people believe?
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: There's no question about it. I think that it is.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Once a wave of popular opinion washes over, it moves people. Um,
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: it gets them to reconsider their points of view. Some
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: it gets others to really stig their heels in. So
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: what what are we learning with the backlash against Facebook
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: and social media presently? Well, there's a lot of technical
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: reasons for some of that that I don't think Facebook
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: should be blamed for. Um, this has all been happening
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: so fast, nobody, It's not like everybody saw it coming
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: and told Facebook to prepare itself. This was a whole
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: new frontier for them. I think they can fix it.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: I think what we're learning about from the election through
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: now is what and and social media is driving a
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: lot of this, which is this incessant kind of tribalism
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: in America that we have where um I want to
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: and it's and it's affecting UM this or what we
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: call sort of the stay at home economy as well,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: people don't want to go out in public as much
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: as that. We have a question that we track in
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: our database, which is do you would you say that
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: you want to go out, that you're going out more
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: or less than you did six months ago? Thirty three
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: percent of people and the last time we looked at
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: the state of a few weeks ago said that they're
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: going out in public, want to go out in public
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: less than they did six months ago. Why every time
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: there's a shooting, one person says or more people say,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to go out today, I'm just gonna
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: stay home. And and we've made it super easy for
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: people to stay home. And we're controlling our surroundings, were
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: curating the people that were around in in two thousand
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: and fifteen, we had at we have a question that says,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: do you generally like to be around people a lot?
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: It's very simple question. Percent of people in two thousand
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: fifteen said yes, I like to be around people a lot.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Today that number so it's about a decline in that
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: and that and that, and that doesn't seem like a
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: huge number or might. But what it's telling us is
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: people are saying, I don't want to go out and
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: sit in a restaurant and run a risk of sitting
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: next to somebody who's ranting on about some political issue
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: I disagree with. I'm going to stay at my home
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: where I've where I've curated my friend group on social media,
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: I've curated the media that I'm going to read and watch,
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: and I want to create a safe nest around myself.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: And I think social media has helped to propagate a
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: lot of that. And so projecting five years out as
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: opposed to three months, do you have a thought on that? Yeah,
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: I think it's gonna continue to play out that way.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: I think we're going to have UM. I think people
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: are a large portion of people are inherently introverted, but
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: it was always hard to be an introvert um. Now
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: I can have everything delivered to my doorstep. I never
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: have to the shop. I never have to leave to
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: see a movie. I actually and what happened. What's happening
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: is the commercial marketplace is moving towards those people were making.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: We're saying, if you don't want to leave your house,
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: you never have to. UM. Companies are vying to own
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: my quote unquote ecosystem. They want to have my internet,
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: my cell phone, my content, my They want my refrigerator
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: to talk to my doorbell, to my smartphone, to my
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: watch on my hand, and the companies are all fighting
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: to own that so that when I choose to stay
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: home and never leave, I'm only using one company. And
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: I think maybe five years from now that peaks and saturates,
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: but we're far from that. Stay right there. We'll be
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: back with more of my conversation with John Dick, an
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: expert on pulling an analytics right here on the Bob
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: Left Sets podcast. You're listening to the Bob Left Sets
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: podcast recorded here in Venice, California, at the tune In Studios.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Each week, I interview a new guest that dive into
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: their backgrounds, their career, current events and everything in between.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: If you like the podcast, subscribe, review the show, and
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: check out earlier episodes. You can hear them all on
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: tune in, Apple Podcasts, or your podcast player of choice.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: And now more with John Dick. In light of gun tragedies,
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Have you done any research on that that tells us
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: really were what America thinks? Um, And nothing that would
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: surprise you. UM. I think a lot of people and
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: this is not just our date. I think most of
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: the most data that you would see would say that
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: the majority of Americans, UM, support some stricter interpretation of,
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: if not if not stricter gun laws, stricter interpretation of
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: the gun laws that we have today. UM. But the
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: political environment is such that people don't want to give
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: any ground. One of the one of the unfortunate consequences
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: of tribalism isn't so much just that I want to
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: kind of organize only with people who agree with me
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: and believe me. But I start finding myself distrusting everybody else.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: And that's that's the part of this kind socio cultural
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: shift that scares us when we look at our data. Okay,
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: tell my audience, certain things you've learned that are counterintuitive. Um, well,
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: there's certainly I felt that it was counterintuitive that we
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: see this trend towards introversion among people, because I thought
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: we tended to be more likely to be so I
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: thought we were more social beings than we really are. UM.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: I don't think most of us ultimately want to be UM,
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: So that that kind of surprised me. Um. We see
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: relationships between things that I wouldn't have expected a few
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: years ago when restaurants spending started to decline in the US,
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: and it was kind of inexplicable at the time. Traditionally,
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: for for decades and decades, UM, restaurant spending is really
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: closely correlated to fuel prices, and because it's disposable income
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: and and and fuel prices affects everybody. If I have
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: a couple extra if I live in a rural town
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: in middle middle part of Pennsylvania, or I live in
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: a big city and drive a car, one of the
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: first things that I can notice in my bank account
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: as if I'm spending less money on gas and so Historically,
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: restaurant spending was very closely aligned with shifts and fuel prices,
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: but two years ago, restaurant spending was going down on
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: fuel prices were not going up. And we found in
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: our data, which is part of the benefit of being
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: able to study all of these things at once, is
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: that it turned out was very heavily correlated with how
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: much people were experiencing increases experiencing increases in their health
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: insurance premiums, that that was beginning to chip away more
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: at disposed healthcare costs were beginning to chip away at
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: disposable income at a faster rate than fuel prices were,
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: and that had never happened. How do you find that, Well,
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: because we're studying all of this stuff at once, we
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: look at all these lines on a chart to see
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: how they which one leads, one lags the other, How
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: related are they, does one seem to be a cause
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: of another, or do they just tend to follow or lead?
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: And it was pretty evident to us in looking at
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: two So we have two questions, say, um, it's actually
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: more complicated that, but imagine. And one question is would
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: you say you're spending more or less to eat out?
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: And another one is would you say you're spending more
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: or less on your health care? And we looked at
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: the people who answered yes to those two questions, they
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: were closely aligned to one another. Okay, but sometimes there
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: can be false correlations. Yeah, but that's just I mean,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: really smart statisticians know how to fare at that stuff out.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: How do you do it? Well? You test them, Um,
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: you continue to see if they if they continue to
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: play out over time, You ask questions different ways to
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: see if it's maybe just an error in the way
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: a person is interpreting the question. Um, we're we're certainly
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: mindful of that. We have a it's called a false
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: detection procedure that we use and it's essentially a coefficient
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: that we use to measure whether whether there's a false
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: positive in our data. Wow, no, wonder you have the
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: cardig email and people involved. Yeah that's so. Did you
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: learn anything else about health care? Um? Well no, I
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: mean it's a mess. Um. I think that we're we
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: saw a period of choice that hadn't existed before because
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: the Affordable Care Act and a lot of that's uncertain
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: right now. So it's a healthcare is a gray area
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: at the moment because we don't know what the future
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: of it's going to look like. Okay, so you're working
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: with Fortune five companies, how would they find you? Um?
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: They're either referred to us by somebody else we already
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: work with. We publish a lot of information. You mentioned
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: a little email that we do every Saturday morning that
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: finds its way into the hands of leaders. We don't
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: really have. We have a very very very small salesforce.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: We're not the kind of company that's trying to um
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: barge our way into your office to demo something for you.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: We typically, UM, somebody typically reaches out to us and says, hey,
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: I saw this study you published about this thing, and
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: I'd really like to understand how it affects my business.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: And that's usually where a business. Okay, so I hire you.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: Let's say I'm a software company. What will you do
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: for me? Well, first thing we have to do is
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: understand your business. How do you do that? UM? We
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: just spend time together. We do. We have what's called
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: a discovery process and a solution design process, which sounds
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: very bureaucratic, but it's just simply a process of us learning,
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: really what your blind spots are as a business, what
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: do you and and no one never knows what those
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: are in the first conversation because they don't think they
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: have any UM. So we we start to. We challenge
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: some of that, We ask what they know, and we
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: try to push back and we get a sense of
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: all right, where can we fill in some blanks about
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: their business? I told you earlier one of the unintuitive
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: things for me is that UM our our biggest clients
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: UM are companies that you would think don't need any
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: more data. I told you we have sort of one
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: open square on the tech Giant Bingo card of our business.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: That that, but all the others we have, And you
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: would think I would mention the names of those companies
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: and you'd say, well, I thought they already knew everything
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: about everyone. But what fascinates me about them is that,
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: and I think was what's a fundamental truth is the
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: more data those businesses have, the more questions they have,
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: the more things they don't know. And I think the
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: reason they've become the giants they are is because they
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: continue to be inquisitive and they continue to look under
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: rocks for the next big insight, and those tend to
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: be our best clients. So let's say you're a big
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: Silicon Valley company which is collecting reams of data constantly,
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: what would you literally provide UM context? Sometimes UM a
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: lot of the data that those companies have tells you what,
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: but they may not necessarily answer the why, and you
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: can answer that, yeah, they Our our specialty is the
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: why and the what next? Where do we think this
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: is going? Let's talk specifically about the music business. Sure,
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: what have you learned about the music business in your research? Um,
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: it's in a interesting stage of of cannibalization. That doesn't
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: people aren't listening to music more, um, cannibalization. So there's
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: a it's it's something of a zero sum game for
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: the players in the space. There. There aren't more hours
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: in the day. There aren't more people listening to music
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: than listen to it twenty years ago. So the fact
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: that music is more accessible people are or not listening
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: to more music there does not appear to be any
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: evidence of that, or at least new people listening to
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: music who aren't listening to it a lot before. And
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: so with all of the providers coming into the marketplace,
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: they are fighting over a finite pool of and now
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: it's a large pool, don't get me wrong, but but
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: there's it's finite, and there's not room for there's certainly
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: a room for, you know, multiple providers, but only to
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: the extent that they are dividing up our attention. I
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: think we will see some consolidation, and I don't mean
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: necessarily from a business standpoint, Um, one company buying another necessarily.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: But I think we will see more and more music
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: listeners gravitating the single sources of music than well. I
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: believe that for different ways we live in a we
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: will live in a winter and losery economy. Across the board,
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: we have incommittee, quality, etcetera. You want to go where
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: your friends are, and let's do successful companies have sixty
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: plus percent market You're online the roll click away, right,
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: and I think, well, that's a part of the virtuous circle. Um,
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: it's easier, but it's also desirable. Um. One of the
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: same thing with the kind of the at home tech ecosystem.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: If I have fewer passwords I have to remember, if
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: your tech support people I have to call, fewer interfaces
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: I have to learn. I mean, that's that's a highly
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: that's as desirable to me as my refrigerator talking to
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: my doorbell would be. Just the simplicity and the convenience
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: of it. I think that's all driving. Um, it's driving
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: what will what we expect to be a rapid pace
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: of consolidation, particularly in all media, but music in particular. Okay,
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: so there, let's assume there'll be fewer places that you
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: would ultimately gravitate to listen to music, or they have
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: larger market share. What about the acts themselves, Well, we
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: we don't need our data to tell anyone and you're
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: you know this better than we do that. It's just
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: much much easier for people to record at right. Um,
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: it's happening at an almost immeasurable pace because I can
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: just take a quick video of myself and slap it
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: on YouTube. Um. I think we are because of a
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: lot of the trends we see in social media. Um,
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: we see why. I know you have some thoughts on virality. Um,
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: things can go from small to big very fast, but
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: they can also go from big small very fast with
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: a misstep. And I think the adoption curve of of everything,
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: including music is truncated. So it's happening much faster than
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: it did years ago because there's fewer barriers to entry.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: The adoption curve. What is that, Well, it's it's the
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: extent to which Um, there are people out there who
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: will try everything. There are music fans who will listen
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: to every single artist they hear about, and then we
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: call those an early adopter. Um, there's a second phase
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: group of people will call a market maven in our terminology,
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: which is I try it and then I tell everyone
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: about it, and I go to social media and I say,
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: look at these songs I listened to check out this
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: band that I like. And those people have a lot
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: of power today. My sister is one of those people
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: in music. When she tells me about a band a
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: year later there at the Grammys, you know she's always
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: been that way. But UM, there's a third group of
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: people then, who wait for those market maven's to tell
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: them what to think. They don't want to make decisions
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: for themselves and not doing a ton of their own research,
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: going and reading reviews or any of that. They wait
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: for those friends they have like I do with my
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: sister who says, oh, you should go check out this
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: band because I don't have time to follow music. Now
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: with an overwhelming number of marketing messages, is the percentages
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: of early adopters, market maven's and passive listeners have those
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: numbers changed percentage wise? Not really? Um, it's a in fact,
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: we're working on a study on this right now. It's
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: it's remarkably consistent the percentage of people that fall into
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: those buckets. But what's happening is the progression from one
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: group to the next is happening much faster because the
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: connectivity between the early adopter to the market may even
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: to the lemmings who wait for those market mayven's to
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: tell them what to do. We're just much closer to
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: each other than we everywhere before. So every time I
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: turn on Facebook, there's the likelihood of my sister posting
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: some song that she just listened to that inspires me
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: to listen to it that I where five years ago
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: I had to wait for to call me on the
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: phone to do that. Yes, but also I would argue
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: that there's so many messages that it is harder to
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: get somebody to click or harder to pass on your
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: information today from a marketing standpoint, Sure, so that's why
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: social media is so powerful, because I don't know what
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: else to trust. But if my sister tells me, that's different,
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: and that's a hard thing for brands and marketers to
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: get their head around the power of the influencer, which
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: isn't necessary and I don't mean in a YouTube influencer
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: as much as I mean somebody in my social network
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: who I trust. One thing that we've seen in our
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: data indisputably over the last four or five years, we
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: track things like which of these kinds of advertising has
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: the most influence over your purchase decisions TV, radio, print, whatever.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: One of the lines on that chart is comments and
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: recommendations from my friends on social media, and that line
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: has climbed and climbed. It has its surpassed television for
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: the first time two summers ago and has stayed there.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: So I trust because I don't know what other media
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: to trust, and that's actually getting worse right. We can't
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: discern fake news from real news anymore. So the only
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: thing I can trust is what my sister tells me.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: So what is the future of advertising? I think what
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: we're seeing and what we're telling our clients is that
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: they have to understand that adoption curve, and they have
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: to understand that the way you communicate to an early
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: adopter is different than the way you communicate to a
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: market maven, which is different too than a way you
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: communicate to that third tier. To what degree your people
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: just tuning out advertising completely. Oh a lot. UM. I
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: think you've seen the advent of UM so called native
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: advertising in the last five or six years. So it's
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: advertising masquerading is a news article. UM. Advertising has to
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: be a lot less obtrusive in my life or intrusive. UM.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: And what you're seeing is brands focused on creating more
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: of an ongoing connection with somebody so they don't feel
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: like I'm being advert ties to all the time. It's
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: it's a much more subtle process than it was twenty
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: years ago. Okay, we'll return to this conversation with John Dick,
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: CEO of Civic Science in a moment. This is Bob
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: left Up. So I'm a writer and you could read
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: me at left Steps dot com if you haven't noticed already.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: I love getting a person story. I like to know
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: what makes them tick, specifically as it relates to successful
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: people who are changing the game in their respective field.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: I'm eager to get to the bottom of it on
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: this show and that same thing, and I'd like to
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: invite you to attend my music media summit in Santa
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: Barbara the last weekend in April. It's gonna be a
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: great way to connect with the movers and shakers in
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: the world of tech and music. Go to Music Media
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: Summit dot com for tickets and more information. And now
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: more with John Dick. Let's go back to uh lessons
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: you've learned. You were telling me earlier that you learned
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: that Android users correlate with more heart problems. Yeah, I
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: mean those are those are the kind of fun and
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: quirky but often useful things in our data. When you
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: study hundred thousand different questions that have been answered a
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: billion times, you find relationships between stuff that, Yes, if
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: you have an Android phone, you're more likely to have
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: a history of heart disease in your family. That is
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: not causality. That doesn't mean if you switch phones you
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: won't have heart disease. It means that people who have
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: the types of people who have Android phones are the
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: types of people who tend to have a higher rate
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: of heart disease in their family. And there's income and
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: and other kinds of proxy reasons for that, which makes
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: lots of sense when you explain it. But if I'm
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: a marketer at a pharmaceutical company, that's a pretty useful
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: discovery to find in a database that that relationship exists.
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: One of our absolute favorites is um, there is a
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: staggering correlation between how much people like Gary Busey and
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: how much they like Kia cars. Never been able to
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: explain it, but but I can tell you. I can
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: tell you five or six years ago that that little
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: bit of information formed the catalyst of a television campaign
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: for a regional network of Keya dealerships Star and Gary Boucy.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: I did that works? It worked like a charm. Wow. Okay,
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: a little bit more. How did you find that correlation?
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: Same thing? So we just have these really smart people
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: in smart technology that crawls around and all of this
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: data all the time and looks for those kinds of things.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: The kind of unexpected insight that one of our kind
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: of marketing sticks is that we answer questions you never
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: thought to ask. Okay, so do you go further and
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: try to get Okay, Gary Busey, he has kind of
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: an irreverence gear, gives a shit about life. And if
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: you're driving the Kia Squirrel car, it's kind of an
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: ugly car, but you're sort of saying the same thing. Yeah,
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: I mean, we get at we eventually you find the why.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: And as I mentioned, I think That's the kind of
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: the gray space we're trying to fill in the world
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: is why is that true? So finding that it's true
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: is one thing. Understanding why it's true is another. Because
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: the advertising or marketing or product decisions that that inspire
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: have to be They can't just be Oh, I don't
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: know why, but we're gonna do it anyway. We have
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: to help them understand why. Okay, so you're on a roll.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: Now tell us some more things you've learned in the data.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: Oh geez, you know there are things that millennials are
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: more likely to pick rock and rock paper scissors than
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: other generations. Yeah, I'm trying to think. What what do
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: we learn from that? Well, you can learn how to
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: take money off of millennials at rock paper scissors. Yes, Uh,
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: that one's kind of trite. Um. Lots of what I mentioned,
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: the healthcare and restaurants spending, those are the more serious
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: kinds of useful, impactful, well, irrelevant of whether it's counterintuitive.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: What other things might want to learn? What if someone
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: is an iPhone owner? What did you learn about iPhone owners? Well?
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: I can't touch that one. What I can say is, um,
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: we find one of my favorite areas of studies height.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: There is a there are tons and tons of correlations
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: in our data tied to whether somebody is taller or
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: shorter than their peer group or people their age and gender.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: There's there's and there's sociological reasons why that's true. But
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: taller people have different brand preferences, they have different media
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: consumption habits than shorter people do. And why is that? So?
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: We know over history taller people, generally when they were younger,
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: were better at physical sports than others. They tended to
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: that bread some confidence that manifests itself in the classroom
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: that um maybe helped the tall person stand out saying
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: a job interview or an admissions interview for a college.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: And you do that millions and millions and billions of
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: times over human history. And there are certain um proclivities
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: that tall people have that short people don't, and vice versa.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: And it's not always benefiting the tall people, by the way. UM.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: But but we have a question in our database that
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: essentially is like are you taller shorter? And people answer
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: that question because they want to know how they compare
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: to other tall people and other short people. But when
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: we've asked that question, hundreds of thousands of times and
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: studied millions of things about people based on their height.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: We find that there are indisputable relationships between your height
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: and your consumer behavior. For example, can you remember any
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: specific correlations. Um, Yeah, some of them are funny, I mean,
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: very obvious ones. Shorter people are less likely to go
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: see live music because they can't they can't see it.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: I think they see your answer. That's probably your answer. Actually,
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: the way we the insight was that shorter people were
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: actually more likely to watch access concerts on television. Now,
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: in the music business, we've gone to so called, you know,
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: festival seating in that the people stand. I personally hate it.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: I remember the old days when there was a seat
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: at the fill More East. Now the live companies would
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: tell you they can only put in certain number of
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: people because of fire marshal rules. That's a bunch of crap.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: They squeeze more people in if they're standing. But would
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: their business be increased if they had seats and the
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: short people could see One would think yeah, I mean certainly.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: If is an extent to which there's a person choosing
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: not to buy a ticket to a concert because they
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: don't feel like they're going to be able to see
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: well enough when they get there. That's what seemed to
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: me to be a pretty obvious measure for them to take. Wow,
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: that's very stimulating. Let's go to the reverse. Okay, No,
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: it really is, because I think this goes back to
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: your point that you're advising or working with household named companies,
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: Silicon Valley companies. We think of all the data, but
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: their insights. I mean, there's a lot of there's this
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: is something I have a lot of institutional beliefs that
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: I don't think are true, and the data can help
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: prove otherwise we are. There are certainly truisms um that
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: have at least evolved, if not are inherently untrue. UM
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: Like what really putting me on the spots some of
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: these No, I mean, I'll I'll think of um, well,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: we don't millennials today, so hate you know, I feel
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: like I talked about it all them all the time,
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: because that's so much of what our clients want to
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: know about. But this sort of trend towards introversion among
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: consumers is really being driven by a millennial population. They're
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: going to bed earlier, they're waking up earlier, they're drinking
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: less um. There are lots of trends about young people
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: today that UM and younger, I mean young could be
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: anywhere from you know, thirty five and under that UM
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: are perceived to be a function of them their generation. Oh,
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: millennials are aren't going to drive cars because millennials, well, uh,
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: we want to draw distinction between what's a generation and
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: what's a life stage phenomenon. So, yeah, twenty four year
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: olds don't want to drive cars. I don't want to
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: drive a car when I was twenty four either, But
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: but all of a sudden, you grow up and you
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: have kids and you've got to truck them around a
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: soccer practice. Guess what, Millennials are starting to buy cars.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: There was this, There were you know, gloom and doom
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: stories ten years ago that the auto manufacturers were screwed
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: because millennials were just going to take uber and ride
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: public transportation everywhere they went, and it's just not true.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: We had a call a few years ago from the
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: director of a very large zoo who called to ask
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: why millennials weren't coming to the zoo. Now this might
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: have been longer six seven years ago. They were freaking
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: out because millennials weren't coming to the zoo, And I said,
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: year olds ever come to the zoo? Right? You know?
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: We we want to draw these these sort of hyperbolic
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: conclusions about things that quote unquote millennials are doing today.
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: But there were twenty two year old millennials. I mean,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: so millennials technically what roughly eighteen to thirty four today?
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: I think of the life stages that encompasses. I could
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: be twenty two, smoking pots, sitting on my parents couch,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: or I could be thirty three with two kids and
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: a mortgage and two cars in my garage. And so
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: to make some blanket statements about what's definitively millennial versus
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: definitively gen X versus baby boomers, A, it's a okay,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: but let's go on a broad scale. In what ways
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: are millennials different from the generations they proceeded them? Well,
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: certainly digital connectivity and media consumption are absolutely true. Um,
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: these these these phenomena of the stay at home economy
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: and the the tribalism I mentioned before. Whether they're causing
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: it or whether they will be the first generation to
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: live fully within the confines of that, I don't know,
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: but it's certainly going to be the latter. They are
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: definitely going to be. They are driving a an era
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: of UM people staying in echo chambers, UM confining themselves
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: to a smaller group of people that they can curate
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: and can same thing with their media consumption. But you
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: can't open a major publication without people either selling or
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: analyzing ways to interact with millennials. Like especially millennials. You know,
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: you can't say anything negative to them. They're gonna cry,
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: They're gonna quit. Is that all horseshit or is that true?
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: I think that's a little overblown. I mean, most of
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: the people in my company fit the bill, fit the
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: deaf and isation of a millennial, and I don't find
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: that to be true at all. I think those are
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: those are fun stories for people to tell. I don't.
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: I don't have the gloomy view of, you know, millennials
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: killing the fabric of America or that will you read
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: a lot of I don't. It's I think it's overblown. UM.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you another another thing that's that's maybe a
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: truism that we can dispel is that one of the
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: this is a huge sort of shifted topic. One of
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: the biggest fallacies in the world today is that Donald
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: Trump uses Twitter to talk to the American people. The
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: American people are not on Twitter. Of Americans at most
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: are on Twitter, even of his voters, give or take.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: He is using Twitter to talk to the media who
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: carry his message to their little tribes of people who
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: read it, and so he doesn't care. And it's actually
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: quite brilliant. I'd have to tip my hat to the
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: way he's he's he's he handles it. I mean, he
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: tweets at three o'clock in the morning because he knows
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: he's setting the media landscape for the He's telling the
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: media what they're going to talk about that day. And
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: he doesn't care what CNN says about him because his
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: followers aren't watching CNN anyway. People don't trust information anymore.
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: They trust the distributors of that information. And so Donald
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: Trump seeds has ferry dust into Twitter, and those publications
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: run it to their individual tribes of readers. One um
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: one of the more profound trends that we see today
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: is even as even as consumption of every other form
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: of media is in decline, television ratings or down, sports
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: or down, newspaper readership is down radio listening is down.
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: The one thing that is skyrocketing is the readership of
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: political blogs political content online, which is a is a
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: harbinger of an ill future for so called objective media outlets,
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: because I don't want objective media. I want media that
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: affirms my existing beliefs and I and now there's so
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: much variety out there that I can go find it,
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: and it tends to be a blog who isn't trying
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: to appeal to the masses. UM that can tell me
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: exactly what I want to hear every time I click
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: on the web page. And Donald Trump has come along
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: in an era where he's benefiting from that immensely. Um So,
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: so he puts out his UM two morning tweets and
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: it's carried directly to the people he wanted wants to
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: carry it. Is he you believe he's consciously doing that?
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: I mean I think so. I think he knows that
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: he's communicating to his supporters through UM through the megaphones
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: of the media outlets that support him. What is your
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: research told you about the mid term elections? Well, uh,
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: funny you should ask that, because just today I was
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: reading some report on some of our data that is
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: speaking of um, we're seeing after sixteen months of very
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: positive growth and consumer sentiment, we've started to see over
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: the last month of fairly significant decline consumer confidence, economics sense,
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: people's attitudes or the job market and their personal finances,
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: and the out for the U s economy seems to
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: have peaked and is now beginning to slide. Um donivity
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: flawed as to why that is. Um, Well, I think
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: there was an artificial high in the first place. There
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: was a lot of sizzle, not a whole lot of
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: steak in terms of there was just optimism for optimism's sake.
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: There was a large sector of the US consumer population
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: who just believed things would get better. They tended to
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: be Republicans and the people who voted for Donald Trump
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: in the first place, even though they maybe not necessarily
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: had any reason to feel that way. Um. And so
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: we're next Tuesday in my hometown. There's a very significant
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: mid term special congressional election that the President's going there
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: on Saturday. Joe Biden was there yesterday, and I'm we're
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: not in the political prognostication business, but there's reason to
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: believe that this downturn in consumer sentiment because we do
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: know that that effects election cycles could have an impact
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: as as soon as next Tuesday on on a very
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: important it's a razor thin margin in that election, and
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: that could be the kind of downturn that might tip
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: it in the favor of the Democrat and Trump himself.
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: Now we read about his approval rating constantly. Is that
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: worth anything? Sure? I think so? I mean, is it
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: accurate the aggregate of If you take and one thing
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: we admire a lot about Nate Silver is he does
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: take into consideration a lot of different sources, and if
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: you normalize for the biases of one versus the other,
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: and those numbers, his approval numbers are fairly consistent. Um,
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: what matters more is whether who shows up to vote.
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: His approval ratings have haven't barged much at all. And
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: and and frankly, you know, there's what I think. The
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: estimate is about thirty of US adults actually voted for him.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: If you can take into consideration the the people who
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: are registered to vote, in the portion that actually came
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: out and voted for him, we're talking about just over
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: one third of the entire US population. And that's roughly
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: give or take three or four points at a time,
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: that people who still approve of him, And so public
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: approval doesn't mean anything unless people vote, and we know
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: that they don't. And and the biggest problem that posters
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: have isn't can I measure public opinion? It's can I
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: predict who's going to turn out on election day? Okay,
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: we talked about millennials. What have we learned about baby boomers? Well,
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: I have to um putting my personal points of view
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: aside on that. Um, you consider yourself a gen x er.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: I'm a gen xer. So should we start when we
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: learned about gen xers? Yeah? I mean, UM, conventional wisdom
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: would be there are a smaller bulge than the baby boomers.
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: They were in the wake of the baby boomers. They
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: feel on some level they missed out on woodstock in
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: the heyday, and they feel that the baby boomers raped
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: in pillage to their detriment. I think the latter is true.
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: I'm not necessarily sure. We feel feel like we missed
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: out on much. Um. I think we feel like we're
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: being we're responsible to clean up one group's mess to
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: make things better for another group, and we're not going
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: to get a benefit from either of them. That is
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: not a data that is a purely that is a
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: pure a subjective point of view of my own on
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: on the subject um. But we do see um. So
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: bringing it back to data, we see low we see
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: much lower divorce rates among gen xers. We see um
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: uh if you look at sort of declines in crime
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: rates over the last twenty years in the US. I'm
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: not saying that we're a more virtuous generation. We just
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: maybe didn't have as much time to to We're we're
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: all very busy. Um. What we do see one of
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: the biggest trends in the in the that's being driven
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: by gen X is the shift in um gender roles
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: in the family. Household responsibilities are shifting more and more
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: towards women, and men aren't picking up the slack um.
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: And that doesn't mean you know, uh, women are making
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: more larger household decisions about real estate, banking, things that
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: used to be kind of traditionally male decisions. Women are
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: making more of those decisions than they did in the past,
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: and men aren't doing much more. I mean, there are
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: men doing more cooking and more grocery shopping, but they're
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: not doing it at a rate that outweighs the increased
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: responsibility women are taking on in households. Um. I've we
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: have a piece that we wrote a couple of years
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: ago that still gets circulated around a lot, and it
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: was entitled women are getting a terrible deal because of that. Um,
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: you've got multi um spouse working or multi partner working households.
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: Women are bringing our while still making less money than
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: men overall, are starting to make more money and carrying
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: as much responsibility for households, and men are starting to
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: be to be free riders a little bit more than
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: we were before. And to the degree you've researched this,
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: what about the me too movement? Um, we don't. We
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: don't research that very much. Um, because it's unresearchable. Your
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: clients don't demand it now, I mean we don't, just
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: you know, we we don't. A lot of the not
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: all the research we do is because clients demanded a
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: lot of our clients say go research what's important and
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: come back and tell us the truth. You know, we are.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: We are out there searching for truth and then we
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: share it with the people we think can benefit from
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: the knowledge. And I think the me too movement is
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: a is somewhat related to this topic of of male
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: entitlement that that is pervasive or has been pervasive for years.
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: I think that's starting to lift. I just don't think
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: there's a whole lot we can add to the discussion
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: about it. Um it's a huge problem. It's wrong, it's um.
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: There's just not a lot of nuance that any data
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: is going to say about um, how right or wrong
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: or how wrong it is. Okay, so what about baby boomers?
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: You remember any insights on the baby boomers? Well, I
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: mean yes, Um, so baby boomers are much closer to
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: their kids than generations before them, and that has a
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: lot of effect on how they're making decisions about their
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: health care and and everything from their consumer decisions. We
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: work with a number of healthcare companies who sell devices.
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: I'll use an example of like a sleep apnea company.
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: They have a sleep at the machine. So for years
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: and years and years, you would advertise to the person
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: who suffered from sleep apnea, Well should you really or
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: should you advertise to the spouse who lives with the
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: person sleep apnea? And so we've seen that shift, of course.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: But but but across other areas of healthcare, when it
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: comes to medical devices, like say, say maybe not sleep
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: apnea where I can't sleep because the person beside me
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: is snoring. But other ailments like COPD or what have you. UM,
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: the the millennial is of significant influence over the baby
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: boomers decisions, and they're because they're closer than they were before.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: So we are challenging our our clients to think a
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: lot about UM advertising or influencing baby boomers by influencing
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: the people who influence them. And and that is a
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: trend that we've seen shift quite a bit. So ironically,
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: because baby boomers think they know everything, they don't. Well,
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: they may still think they do, but they are influenced
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: by other things. They are they are, and a lot
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: of it is driven by the closeness of the relationships
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: they've maintained with their kids, which is a very good thing.
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: By the way, UM that there is UM they're they're
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: either reliant on their younger children or they've just had
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: a closer relationship through as their kids got older. And
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: when you hear the stories of the millennials who are still,
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: you know, living in their parents houses, there's one of
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: the positive ends of that is the relationships between them
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: tend to be pretty good, pretty strong. Okay, we'll return
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: to this conversation with John Dick, CEO of Civic Science,
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: in a moment. Hi, this is Bob left sense. My
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: guests come to the tune In studios in Venice, California
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: to have these conversations with me. And if you ever
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: want to see what they look like where we take
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: the show, check out the photos and videos search at
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: tune In on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And now more
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: with CEO of Civic Science, John Dick, And what about
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: more macro trends. Who you mentioned cars? What is the
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: future of audibobiles because we read all the time in
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: the straight media that you know, autonomous driving is coming,
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: I think, okay, so that's definitely something we studied very closely.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: The vast majority of people are still very scared about
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: autonomous vehicles, particularly women, do not want to get in
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: a car that's driving itself. By the same time, and
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: we see things slip overnight, like we heard we heard
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: digital photography was gonna place film for at least ten years,
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: and then with the space of twelve months, seemed like
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: film disappeared and digital came upon us. So a lot
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: of people are fearful, but then when the product comes
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: in their influences like a O. Well, you know that
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: no one was online that all of a sudden, for
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: a couple of years, everyone was buying a computer just
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: to get online. So I'm just when people are fearful
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: of something, could the switch be faster than it used
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: to be? It could be, but it also, in the
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: case of autonomous vehicles, could go the other direction to
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: it only takes one hacker and some eastern block country
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: to take over a bunch of cars with a computer
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: and drive them into a crowd of people that no
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: one's ever gonna want to get into a driver less
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: vehicle for twenty years. I think that there's there's enough
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: fear and and skepticism about autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: in general that a couple of bad pr nightmares for
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: one of those cars doing what it's not supposed to
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: could kill it. Um there's no reason to believe that
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: will happen, but it's you could certainly foresee a situation
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: where whatever momentum driverless cars are gaining could be stopped
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: in its tracks. I think it's more likely we'll see
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: an evolution towards autonomous vehicles like we see evolution toward
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: alternative fuels um our alternative energy UM. You've got huge
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: infrastructure in the automobile industry and the fuel industry that
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: are going to slow a lot of that progress down UM.
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: And then you've got a lot of people who are
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: just skeptical about or or simply uncomfortable with the idea
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: of being in a car that they can't control. So
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: I don't expect it to be an overnight thing, And
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: there's nothing in our evidence. The evidence in our data
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: is that the percentage of people who are comfortable with
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: a driverless car has not grown much in the last
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: two years. It's the same group of people. I vastly
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: disagree with this, okay, just because I think that's what
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: people believe. But I think when you know, we have
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: the Tesla accident in Florida where the guy crashed into
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: a car, these stories are really amplified. And of course
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: we're talking about the pace of changes more quickly. It
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: happens more quickly these days. But if you go back
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: to even in the commercial jet age in the sixties,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: they did not have the flight control that they have today,
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: and they had accidents. Okay, people were fearful. They're still
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: fearful today, even the odds of having an accident are
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: really low, but the barrier to entry to getting a
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: ticket because deregulation in in airlines, there's a there's a
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: lot of things that may not be directly applicable. But
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: when the person next door gets a car or can
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: even better, can call up a car like Uber, and
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: you don't have to own a car, you don't have
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: to have a garage. I think the pace of change
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: happens very quickly. I mean I look at this like
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: the Internet. Most of the public was not Internet savvy,
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: and over the course of one to five years, everybody
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: was Internet savvy. So I'm not sure I agree with that.
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: What about climate change? You learn anything with climate change?
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: It's not something we study a lot um. People are
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: pretty setting their mindsets about that. We don't see a
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: lot of change. I will go back, so I appreciate
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: your your argument on the drive and let me let
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: me say that I'll be the first person to call
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: that driverless car to come pick me up. So I'm
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: hoping it comes as fast as possible because I could
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: do away with my car in a second, and I
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: think there's a chance that that could happen. All I'm
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: saying is there's also a chance you could go the
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: other direction pretty quickly. But I guess what I'm saying
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: is something it's irrelevant of driverless cars. One to what
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: degree our stories being amplified that ultimately have no impact. Okay,
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: there was a story back when these portals used to
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: be of much greater impact. I think it was on Yahoo.
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: They had a big thing saying tongue splitting was a
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: big thing. Okay, well, you literally split the end of
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: your tongue whatever. In reality, there were fewer than I believe,
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: certainly a few of the ten. I think it was
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: fewer than five people who'd ever done. There wasn't really
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: a trend, but people were writing about it. It's sort
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: of the flip side of the uh. People with unpopular opinions,
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: we're not putting them on social media so that these
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: stories that are amplified. This is something that's changed in
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: the Internet. There used to be something called a turntable hit. Well,
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: all the gatekeepers they were going to bang something and
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: it makes it looks like it's popular, but the public
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: isn't buying it. Now we can see whether the public
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: buys so I see. I mean, I think the New
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: York Times is the best we've got. I don't want
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: to make it right about right or left. It's just
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: that they have boots on the ground and in all
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: these places other people don't. Okay, but now more than ever,
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: the mainstream media will prints. I'm not talking about printing
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: hard news. Okay, there was a war here, that's something different.
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: But when they print softer news, I think it has
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: less impact and less accuracy than it ever did before.
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: That's indisputable, and it's and it's getting worse by the day. Uh.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: Two weeks ago, people were I had half dozen friends
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: of mine on social media shared a story about the
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: the idea that the students in Parkland were what were
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: the crisis actors? That meant there were a hundred and
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: seventeen thousand The one article that I saw had been
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: shared a hundred and seventeen thousand times. The average Facebook
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: user has three hundred and sixty eight friends. That means
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: roughly what thirty seven some million people saw that article
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: from a friend, leading them to believe it was true. Right,
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: So it doesn't. So so that the scale at which
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: misinformation can spread is is and we and we will
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: retract from that as consumers because we're gonna only get
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: burned by that so many times. So you're absolutely right.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: I think that's happening, and and I think it will
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: take five misguided stories about bad driverless cars probably could
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: spoil some group of people. Um but but uh, the
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: pace of misinformation, I don't know where that ends. By
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: the way, if I hope that people wise up and
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: become more scrutinizing and what they believe, but maybe they won't.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: I don't believe people. You know, it's interesting you're selling
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: that an analysis. I don't believe the average person has
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: the power of analysis. Oh no, That's why I was
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: saying earlier. I think one of the biggest challenges we
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: face as an erosion of trust of data. We talked
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: so much about big data and data science and all
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: of that, but I think the average consumer distrusts numbers
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: because based on who puts those numbers in front of them. Um.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: We I mentioned to you earlier when we were talking
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: that we were we've been approached from by media outlets
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: about sort of publishing or syndicating our numbers, and we
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: just won't do it because all of a sudden, we
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: lose we we we inherit the perception of bias that
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: those outlets have if they put their names. But the irony,
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: and I'm sure you're hearing it anyway, is people believe
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: you're biased anyway. True, true, But I can sleep better
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: at night if I have some control over well, I know.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, I I write about Spotify, and every day
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: I get people said, well, you're on the payroll. I'm
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: not on the perrol. It never took a cent. Okay,
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: I'm not saying therefore the opposite is gonna hapen to
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: take the money. But even if you are literally white clean,
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: these days, people believe you're not. Oh, I mean, we'll
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: we'll write, we'll put one blog post out about a topic,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: and on our Facebook page will be in the same
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: by one person accused of being a right wing hill
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: and on the next comment will be a left wing ship.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: I mean it. People will find the story they want
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: to find if your data doesn't precisely affirm their existing belief.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: What's a sad state of affairs? I mean, I grew
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: up an inner where there were many fewer media outlets
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: and you could agree on the facts. You can't even
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: agree on the facts, and even no you cannot know
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: and it's hard to give it. So any other macro
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: trends that you can give us. You're talking about, uh,
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: the cocooning, which ironically is what Faith cop popcorns at
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: a few decades back. But now we have the ability
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: with all these instat cart and Netflix to do that.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: Any other macro trends in the public. Well, So I
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: mentioned the the the true, the aspirational nature of social
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: media and what that's doing. UM. The impact that's having
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: on brands I think is pretty dramatic in terms of UM.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: I was on a I gave a talk at a
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: conference of about a year ago as a beauty industry conference,
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: and I sat with a woman who was an executive
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: of a big beauty company, and she was telling a
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: story about how the night before she had driven her son.
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: She was taking her son. That we were in New York.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: She was taking her son to soccer practice, and I
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: picture her in her land Rover in Westchester, right, and
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: he hadn't eaten dinner yet, so she drove him through
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: the drive through at a fast food restaurant to get
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: him some burgers. And she gets to the soccer fields
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: and all the suburban Westchester moms were standing there, and
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: she has a panic attack that these moms are going
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: to see that she'd taken her son of this fast
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: So she's telling the story and we're all laughing, but
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: she she stands up and she's shoving the stuff in
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: her bag so that moms won't see it. And so
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: we've been materialists are since one person had a nicer
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: loincloth than the other. Right, it's going back as much
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: as you know, as far back as you can go.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: Janis Joplin wrote about it in nineteen seventy and um,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: but we've never had the tools to or the purse,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: or the fear that ever that are that are purchase
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: and consumption decisions were on public display like they are now.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: And this was a case of a woman driving to
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: a parking lot with food in her car. But with
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: the cameras and the social media and the sharing and
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: the posting and all that, the decisions that I make
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: about where I eat and where I buy are are
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: on public display and subject to scrutiny like they've never
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: been before. So we've always had guilty pleasures, and I
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: might I may choose not to eat at a particular
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: fast food restaurant because it's unhealthy for me. But if
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: I do, I just don't post about it or brag
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: about it. But what about that woman who next time
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: her son hasn't eaten dinner, she actively chooses not to
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: go to that fast food restaurant because of the potential
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: trauma of being seen taking her son there. And now
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: that that bit very large fast food restaurant has lost
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: a customer or at least a visit, and think about
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: how often that might be happening at the scale. And
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: you look at some of these large brands, the Blue Chips,
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: CpG companies and others who have There are a lot
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: of reasons they can they can explain some of the
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: declines that they've had, But that has to be a
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: big part of it is that it's just not cool
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: to go there. It's not as cool to eat there.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: It's and I think that's going to affect music as well.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: I think I think being able to brag about the
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: concert I was at and that's always been there, but
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: it's never been amplified the way that it is now.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: Staying with the same thing, because this crosses bombs, we
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: learn that acquisition is down and experiences are up, especially
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: amongst millennials. Is your data absolutely very true? Yes, UM,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: wanting to experience restaurant spending is down, but the types
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: of restaurants that people are choosing to eat at are
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: more experiential, So certain types of restaurants are doing well.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: UM travel is certainly up. It's making it. It's a
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: it's quite a big blind spot for UM the FED
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: in terms of forecasting consumer spending because a lot of
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: those categories aren't measured by a lot of the federal
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: resources in terms of UM. You know, it's not store
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: receipts from Target and Walmart anymore. There's money being spent
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: somewhere that's not as visible, and that is a that
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: is a that is a fundamentally true trend. And it's
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: not just millennials. It's happening in gen X as well. Okay,
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: so if someone wants to check you out, they can
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: listen to this podcast. Is there anywhere they can go
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: online to see some of your data other than your quizzes? Uh,
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: Civic science dot com. Pretty straightforward, UM, anybody who would
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: like to UM. You mentioned earlier that little Saturday email
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: that I send out. It is it's kind of invitation
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: only but it is a it is a an awesome
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: list of people who read it and if anybody would
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: like to be added to that, they would could reach
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: out to you maybe to do that, but otherwise, UM yes,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: Civic Science dot com and um, we write a lot.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: It's um our blog is is a lot of content
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: every week, new things were studying, trends worth finding. Um.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: We do have some partnerships with some media outlets that
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: take our information and give it a spotlight for us.
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: But um, yeah, they can certainly reach out to us
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: if they want to be added to any of the
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: distribution lists of these kind of things that we're writing about.
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: And once again we haven't mentioned the names of the
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: company that employ Civic Science, but I know those names
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: and believe me, they're all the alphabet soup that you
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: believe they are. So once again, John Dick, CEO of
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: Civic Science, thanks so much for being here on the
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: Bob Left Sets Podcast. It was my pleasure, Bob, thank you.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: That wraps up this week's episode of the Bob Left
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: Sets Podcast, recorded here at Venice, California at the tune
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: In Studios. I hope you enjoyed this fascinating conversation with
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: the CEO of Civic Science John Dick, about market analytics,
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: the future of tech, the music industry, and consumer habits.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: As always, I welcome your feedback. Email me at Bob
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: at left sets dot com.