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Farrah Bostic: The Transcript Is Not the Story — AI, Human Judgment & Deep Meaning · 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project

• Paige Williams: Welcome to 100 Stories, the Narrative Intelligence Project. I'm your host, Paige Williams. I am talking with 100 thinkers, creators, researchers, leaders, and people shaped by profound change as I explore the emerging field of narrative intelligence. At the center is one question: How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one? What I learn will help shape the field and the foundational book that I'm writing about it. This is 100 Stories. today I am speaking with Farrah Bostic, who runs the Difference Engine, hosts a show called Crosstabs and listens to people for a living. I invited Farrah because she is an expert strategist, and listening to people is her number one tool in her toolkit. And so I'm excited to learn for Farrah about what she's learned about writing and listening. Welcome. I'm so glad to have you here. Farrah Bostic: I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. Paige Williams: Can you tell me about the work that's most shape how you see yourself in the world? Farrah Bostic: there's sort of the the general work of sitting in rooms with people who are not like me that has probably done all of that. and so there's l lots of you know, I can tell stories about a million different projects we worked on and different topics. But I think just the the thing that's coming into my mind is we just did a big project for the New York Public Library and I interviewed a woman in her apartment and I you know I got to her I got to her address. It's sort of the top of the upper west side, the bottom of Harlem. the building from the outside looks nice on a street full of very nice apartment buildings. And I walk in and kind of get the first hint of like, this is one of the older buildings with longer term residence. I didn't have all my kind of profile information in front of me so I couldn't quite remember how old she was. and so I kind of in my mind thought, well, I'm probably walking into, you know, a senior's apartment on the upper west side. And instead I walked into a Nitja Vouchers SRO. Paige Williams: what? Farrah Bostic: single room occupancy. so this is a one room with like a half galley kitchen along one wall, a bed, a table pushed up against the window with a big TV on it, a little wardrobe and it's like a dorm. and a shared bathroom with the next adjoining SRO. And, you know, she's fresh out of the shower, she's still getting her clothes on, she's got her kittens running around being insane. and I had this h like tem just like little flash of I am intruding on someone else's space and maybe shouldn't be here. Just Paige Williams: Mm. Farrah Bostic: this like little moment of I don't I don't know I don't know that I'm really invited to this particular location. but I was, right? Like we'd agreed and we'd had lots of back and forth. And so years of doing this was just like, nope, she invited us. This is where she wanted to do it. We gave her the option of doing it remotely or meeting her somewhere or Coming to her apartment and she said to come here. And this is her world, and it is my privilege actually to step into this for the next hour and a half and get to know her a little bit. and I think the constant, like kind of kickback of assumptions and the sort of moment where it's like. You know, I have not lived in her conditions. but funnily enough, we are like basically exactly the same age. Like her birthday was like the day before or after mine or something, and we're like the same year, same everything. Entirely different lives. And it was just this kind of moment that is it's what I love about the work, which is like not even like there but for the grace of God, but like look at that. Look at look at the miracles of everybody's twists and turns. And now I'm just gonna sit here in her reality. I'm not gonna bring her into a sterile environment and make her sit across a gray conference table with a, you know, two way mirror behind me and microphones everywhere and whatever. I'm just gonna have my iPhone and a camera that is not competing with the air conditioning unit in here. or yeah, a microphone that wasn't competing and just do the best I can to get through this conversation with someone who has been through a lot. and talk to her about reading. And talk to her about books and libraries and how she grew up and all of the rest of that and just sit with it. And I think the thing that I I think it is like a a a character trait that I've always had. Like for whatever reason, my friends in high school were the kids who needed the most help. and I couldn't help them. I was also a child, but I could not judge them. And I seem to have resting, I'm not judging you face, even if I very much am. But like being invited into those moments and being allowed to sit there with somebody and just like be in their reality for a little while is the thing that I find. I walk out of every room that I share with someone I've never met before, thinking that people are pretty great. Paige Williams: What brought you to listening sessions and the qualitative research? Farrah Bostic: It was a little bit accidental. like I said, I started out as a copywriter in an ad agency and kept getting handed creative briefs and going, hmm, I think this is lazy. I don't think this is how people really live. I don't think anybody wants to be talked to like this. And then got kind of walked into a job at Chiat Day working on Apple and with multiple kind of boss changes, got in sort of asked to write along on in home interviews about how people were listening to digital music as we were getting ready to launch the iPod. And so that was the first time that I had done that. I'd been a student journalist in college. So it's not like I'd never interviewed anybody before, but like going and sitting in someone's house and asking them about how they make playlists or whatever was kind of new to me. and then when I moved to New York to go to graduate school, I was I have I have ADHD and I had been working in ad agencies and the entertainment business. And so like I was in law school and somehow this wasn't enough work for me. and so like, you know, four hours a day of class, four or five hours a day of homework, what do I do with the rest of my time? Was sort of where my 25-year-old head was at. And so I emailed a bunch of ad agencies whose work I'd liked when I was a copywriter and said, I'm looking for freelance work. And Robin Hafitz emailed me back and said, Do you moderate? And I Furiously emailed my college advisor and said, What's that mean? And she said, it means, you know, interviewing people doing focus groups. And I was I did a few of those in my last job. Didn't know that's what that was called. Said yes and learned how to moderate from one of the best in the business. and that's and just really loved it, like sitting in a room asking people to do stuff they haven't been asked to do since they were in kindergarten sometimes, you know, like funny little projective techniques and storytelling and role-playing and collaging and whatever. Like it was fun. And it was this reminder that you can dumb everybody down. You can expect the least of people and they will live down to that. You can expect people to do something that they don't do all the time, and they'll do that too. And like that just always made me feel extremely optimistic. And so I was like, I like this work. I'll keep doing this. Paige Williams: What how what do you contribute your creativity and and being able to continually evolve and pivot your story to growing up? What did you learn about that growing up? Farrah Bostic: My I think probably a lot of it comes from my dad who you know was born in West Virginia, moved to Southern California when he was about twelve. so that was a pretty big upheaval. You know, you move to Orange County after growing up in Bluefield and it's the late fifties, and you're gonna get beaten up for that accent. So you drop that accent as quickly as you can. And the advice he gave me when I was first looking for work was you know, don't go through the front door. Always do an end run around around HR, around whoever the kind of gatekeeper is, because they're not the one who actually decides. And the other thing he sort of said was essentially fake it till you make it. Like you can you're smart, you'll figure it out. You don't actually have to apply for jobs that you already know how to do everything. You you can you can like assess quickly whether you're capable of figuring out how to do that job and then go do it. And so I think all of that together was that. That and my parents were also both very invested in Us but my brother and I being well rounded, whatever that meant. And so like we had to do some kind of sport and we had to play an instrument and we had to do some other kind of liberal artsy thing. And so, you know, I did journalism and I did the debate team and my brother did a bit of drama and ran track and whatever. And so like I think some of it is just like, how hard can it be? Try new stuff. Paige Williams: What did you do on the debate team? Farrah Bostic: I did cross examination debate, I did extemporaneous speaking and I did impromptu speaking because I memorized things accidentally, not on purpose. So Paige Williams: Farrah, I feel like we're the same person. Farrah Bostic: Ha ha ha. Paige Williams: I do think that that debate really looking back shaped a lot of my future work. Just those skills that we learned. Farrah Bostic: Yeah. Absolutely. Paige Williams: when you think about the role of persuasion versus listening in the work of narrative and qualitative Farrah Bostic: Mm. Paige Williams: research, how do you think about those two different things? Farrah Bostic: a thing that I have said from time to time to clients is, you hire me, but I actually work for your customer. And so, you know, I have to listen to my clients. I have to listen actually in some ways more than or in a different way, I guess, to the clients than to the customer. The customer's not particularly incentivized to, you know, talk a lot of BS. Like they either like a thing or they don't, they use it or they don't, you know, whatever. But the clients are often juggling internal politics and their own sense of status, and they have fears that they don't want to articulate or haven't had an opportunity to articulate. there are things that they think are rules that cannot be broken. You know, there's just a lot of unsaid stuff inside of organizations and institutions. so it's a different kind of listening with them. And some of that just becomes kind of pattern matching where over 20 some years of doing this, you start to get the vibe that something is unsaid. And so my thing is to just go pull the thread immediately. Like I see something fraying here. I'm just gonna yank on that and you tell me what's up. And so there is the but but the persuasion is not like the people I'm talking to who are their customers, I'm not trying to persuade them of anything. That is literally not my job. My job is simply to listen to them and then to some degree persuade my clients to listen to them too. And translate a little bit into business speak and into strategic thinking and into good judgment what the things that these people have told me means and what the implications are for what they have ahead of them. And I think a lot of what I try to do is to persuade them to make a good decision, even if there's a risk it won't work out. And because I think they will be happier with that decision, they will learn more from that decision, they will be able to make better decisions later if they prioritize making a good ch a good decision over the one that they think gets them to their KPI fastest. Paige Williams: Right. What I just got curious about this yesterday. So I had an experience that led Farrah Bostic: Mm. Paige Williams: me to this curiosity. And you're the perfect person to for me to ask about this because you do listening sessions as well. Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: So this whole the point of my listening sessions is to understand what narrative intelligence might be and what it's not. So how do you deal with you can have someone say the exact same thing, right? They can have the exact same transcript as someone Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: else. I mean, it w just say there's two people, they have the same transcript. But there is a different narrative when you're listening based on other things besides their words, their body language. their environment, their air, how they stand, Farrah Bostic: Mm. Paige Williams: how they sit, how they lean in, or how they hold back. Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: And then we're forming perceptions about who they are and about the truth of the narrative, not based on their words, but about our experience of them as a whole. So Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: then when you're listening and reporting back, here's what was said, do you account for not just what here was said, but the felt experience of that listening session. Because also you're Farrah Bostic: Yes. Paige Williams: evaluating that through your own lens and judgment of them. Farrah Bostic: Absolutely. I mean I think the f the first thing that I really try to do is lower the stakes as much as I possibly can so that there Paige Williams: Mm-hmm. Farrah Bostic: is you know, a vanishingly small amount of temptation to try to guess what I want to hear and tell me that. So that's kind of the the first thing. There's a lot of concern and polling and market research about sort of performative responses and social desirability bias and all of this sort of stuff of, you know, people people saying what they think you want to hear. And I'm always like, I don't know how they would find out what I want to hear. Like they've just met me. They walked into a they drove into an office park They went up an elevator one whole floor. They went down a gray corridor into a gray room with a gray table and a bunch of gray chairs sitting under fluorescent lights. And some stranger walks in. They don't know what I want to hear. They don't even really know why they're there. so that's one part of it. It's just like lower the stakes, lower the stakes, lower the stakes. But you're absolutely right. And I there's a story I often tell. We did a project when I worked at a at a company called Hall Partners. We used to have Microsoft as a client, and they had a set of software that was designed for network security, essentially. And they they called it it was called Microsoft Forefront. It was edge security. So sort of the edge of your network, making sure that you didn't have data leaks and that sort of thing. And the agency had come up with a digital banner ad campaign that was actually very funny. and it was a a a very trite ad formulation like X is easy, Y is easier, right? Seen it a million times in advertising. But these were like, you know, fighting off a zombie with a staple, a stapler, easy. Installing Microsoft Forefront, easier. I'm I'm I'm I'm butchering it, but it was like zombies and ninjas and spies and you know, comic book kind of characters. And given the audience of IT decision makers, actually it was kind of perfect. Like there's a pretty heavy overlap between Dudes are really into technology and dudes who are really into comics and and sci-fi and and stuff like that. We did focus groups in Tokyo. And I was in the back room listening and watching, and I had a simultaneous translator, and I had done a ton of observing focus groups in Tokyo. And one of the things about that as a market is, you know, people observe the social norms of people who live in Tokyo. And so there's a fair amount of p you know there's a lot of politeness, there's a lot of deference. people don't tend to talk over each other. They taught me a way of disagreeing disagreeably actually because people in focus groups in Japan would often say, for me it's different when they wanted to disagree. And so at least that's how my translator translated it. And so it wasn't I disagree. It was for me it's different. And so I adopted that and offer it to people I'm interviewing, you know, in focus group settings frequently as a way to disagree if they need to. but the thing about this group was they were smiling and they were touching the ads on the table and there was laughter. And in a business to business software category, this is not a thing that happens a lot of the time. Not a lot of giggling, not a lot of like, hey, let me look at that again. certainly not a lot of like interaction with each other and there was a lot of interaction with each other. But if you read the transcripts, the words coming out of people's mouths were, I've never seen this before in this category. I I don't think I've ever seen anyone try to be funny before about something so serious. You know, and so if you read the transcripts, you would think this campaign's too risky for this market. But if you sat in the room and watched the way people interacted with it, You just like push all the chips in. Like, and so th it was Paige Williams: Gold. Farrah Bostic: gold. It was like even you just don't get this kind of reaction. Not in this category, not for this brand, not in this market, with this audience. And here we are getting an emotional response and a positive emotional response. We should take it. This is an opportunity. And I I that was probably maybe one of the first times that I really sort of fought for a position with clients that like you are you need to not read the transcripts. You need to go watch the video. And just like turn turn off the sound and just watch them. If you just turn off the sound and watch them, you will see something different than what you read on the transcript. and and I swear to God, they were doing these things. And this this there, you know, there's some there were some cultural sensitivities. simultaneously there had been a kind of resurgence of conversation about spying controversies between Japan and Korea. And so the spy thing was a little touchy. But everything else was fine, right? Everything else was cool. So, like, sure, okay, this one maybe not, but you had like five of these characters. You can run four of them. You should see what happens. Like they're they're mostly just surprised. Like, but they're having a good time. So, like, let people have a good time. And they they did run that campaign. but it it took a lot of convincing because on the page it said, I don't know, no one ever did this before. and there was a real assumption that like that was a warning, not just a huh I've never seen this before. Paige Williams: Yeah, that's so interesting. You need to watch, not read to understand. Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: Wow. Will you share a transformative moment from your life who that shaped who you are? Farrah Bostic: Hmm. Paige Williams: And when I ask that I mean like a moment when you were living one way and there was a big aha and then you had to shift. Farrah Bostic: So this is this is I when I lived in LA, I think that things, you know, when you're in your early 20s, it's not like things are easy. There's not a lot of jobs for people in their early 20s ever. Like, especially if you're trying to do something in a creative field, there aren't a ton of junior jobs for anything. but I had been pretty lucky. Like I I had a decent network that, you know. built off of, you know, friends of friends. I, you know, d partly because of debate training, partly just because of my personality. Like I can talk to anybody. You know, that was that that made interviewing relatively easy. but I think that that had led me to be on a bit of autopilot for a lot of things, including a relationship that I was in where I had sort of moved in with a boyfriend because I changed jobs. And so I went from living in Los Feliz Village, working in Studio City, and he lived in Studio City, to living in Los Feliz Village and working in Marina Del Rey and having to drive a minimum of forty-five minutes each way. And that was if everything was working perfectly. and so suddenly we were seeing each other less because my commute was crazy and whatever. And so like the expedient solution here was to move in together. And you know, a year or so later, a year and a half later, maybe, I think I just sort of had this moment where I like looked up and went, What am I doing here? Like, this is I didn't really want to live in LA. it was the first dot com crash. So things that were hard to begin with had gotten a lot harder. This boyfriend was not the boyfriend. and like What and I had I had taken a job at a magazine company because the the situation with my boss at the other job had become untenable. And I had to change my hair color. So like I had I I still do it. Like I have a kind of I dye this dark and I, you know, lighten up my hair on the top. But this was very stark. I had seen it in a Versace ad and had to have it. And it was a two-toned like bleach blonde on the bottom, dark almost black on the bottom. on the yeah. Bleachbond on the top, black on the bottom. And the new job said I couldn't have that hair color. So I had to be a brunette for the first time in my life. because it was the only way to quickly solve the problem. And so it's just like, none of this is what I want. This is all just expedience. Like, it was more convenient for me to live in Studio City with the boyfriend. It was more convenient for me to get this job and just more convenient therefore to dye my hair. And I don't want to do any of this. I just don't want to do any of it. And so I just sort of had this moment where I was like, I don't have to. I quit all of it. And so broke up with a boyfriend, quit the job, went home to Portland for the summer and then moved to New York in the fall. Paige Williams: have you done that several times throughout your life? Farrah Bostic: Not really. I mean, my my dad had to move one year when I was a kid and but we moved right back to the neighborhood we were in before. I think that that was the first moment that it occurred to me that quitting wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It wasn't about Paige Williams: Mm. Farrah Bostic: it wasn't a it didn't have anything to say about whether I was a responsible person or, you know, that that sort of thing. And so that was the first time that that happened. The second time that that realization hit me again was I was working for a research company that had been acquired. And there was a lot of horse trading about whether I was gonna be in this team or that team, or maybe they were gonna move me to Ohio to work out of the Cincinnati non-office. And I was like, I don't think you get to decide where I live actually. and so I just again had this like moment. I was listening in on a conference call about my fate, and I was like. There is this other option, which is that I can say no to all of this and go do something else. And and so I did. But there's just sort of I tend to like get invested in a thing and really stick with it. And then there kind of comes a moment where you look around and realize you've done all you can do. Or you know, like there's no more runway left. That this is there's no up from here, there's nothing harder coming along, there's nothing more interesting coming along. or something happens where people are trying to like remove agency. and that does tend to make me itchy. But I'll tolerate it for a fairly long time. And then go, look at that. I gotta go. which Paige Williams: Hit my limit. Farrah Bostic: which does like, I think, make other people's heads spin a little bit because they don't know that like I was I became aware of the stuckness or the need to change something, usually about six months before I actually change it. But I don't necessarily tell everybody that that's what I'm starting to think until I'm ready to do it. Paige Williams: Right. I'm looking at these five capacities of narrative intelligence and and one is, you know, coming to understand. And then one is looking at the choices and then choosing Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: a different, you know, having the agency and the flexibility to choose something new and then actually live it. Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: And I'm deeply interested in this moment of, I understand I'm going this way and I can shift it, but can I actually shift into it and then live Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: it? When you've hit those moments in your life, what do you what's been your experience in that moment? Farrah Bostic: So I go into a kind of I mean, I go into research mode, I guess. You know, for some reason I had this flash of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where like there's a there's a block of the show that's research mode. We're like, they go hit the books, they're in the library. and so there's a lot of that. There's a lot of like, what are all of my options? And sometimes I do my hyper focus straight into a spreadsheet and like work out all of the details and like try to map out like the work back schedule of what would it take for me to get from here to there, or to set this thing up or to start this thing or whatever. And then once I've kind of got a sketch in my head of this is gonna take this much time. It's gonna cost that much money. I need to do these steps. I can get help doing these other steps. Once I have the shape of it in my head, then it's go time. But there is also a thing that starts to happen of it's like go now or risk never going. I think there's Paige Williams: Mm. Farrah Bostic: like maybe the th and it's not like I've done it. Like there isn't a ton of times where I've like forever. I don't know I don't know, I'm not dead yet. So there's no nothing's forever, but I tend to make the decision as opposed to not making the decision. And but I think I have some sort of fear of like I'll miss a moment. Like if I don't go now, some part of this is gonna close. And I won't be able to do it the way I wanted to do it or to the degree that I wanted to do it. So I then Paige Williams: Yeah, and Farrah Bostic: do like I just go, it doesn't matter. Like forget about all the plans. Just run. Like so that happens. Paige Williams: You're like literally in one of those moments right now with the boxes behind you about to prepare to Farrah Bostic: yeah. Paige Williams: move across the country. Farrah Bostic: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, I mean it's Paige Williams: So take what you just said and put it there. Like you're in that moment right now. Farrah Bostic: Yes. Yes. I spent the the morning before we got on this call, I was downstairs finishing, packing up all my tools. and putting other things in bags and setting other things aside to be donated. this is the part that weirdly I think I I live in a tension of like loving it and hating it at the same time. Like it's a lot of detail work which makes me anxious and but it's also a lot of doing stuff physically especially and And that's fun in some way. But I think the other thing that has happened is literally in the last week I said to my husband that we need to kind of move because it's El Niño and we're gonna drive across country with our dog in the back of our car. And there's a lot of prep that has to happen in order to make that happen. And then we have to pick a route and we have to be prepared for that and where are we gonna end up when we get there and and it's easier for me if I have a a day. Like I I'm working like this is the day we're packing up the car and driving off. I can work back everything else from there. but yes, we're this like whole year has been a well by the by the fall we'll be in Portland. Well, it's fall and we're not there yet. So now I'm now I'm feeling that we gotta go or we're not gonna go until the spring. Paige Williams: Mm, just like you were saying, if I don't do it now. Farrah Bostic: Yeah. Yep. Paige Williams: You've said that data doesn't simply exist. We decide what to measure, how to measure it, what counts. At what point does narrative enter the process of creating data? Farrah Bostic: From the beginning, Paige Williams: Mm-hmm. Farrah Bostic: the the way that any questionnaire, for example, gets designed is with an output in mind. You know, you know you want to be able to say something about the people or the thing that you are studying. And often it starts with some sort of question that you have that you want an answer to. And that answer is itself a story that needs to be told. And so you are going to decide what questions to ask or what things you want to document or what data you want to find that has already been created by someone else based on the structure of the story you think you're going to want to tell at the end. Almost always that structure changes between the beginning and the end, at least in the work that that we do. but you know, I was shaking fist at YouTube last night listening to a podcast where they were talking about a question on a poll about, you know, voters being asked which party they trusted more on a variety of things. And one of the podcast hosts said something along the lines of And so what do the great and good American people think it means to trust the Democratic Party on prices? Like what do they think it is exactly that Democrats are going to do to bring prices down? And, you know, how do they understand any of that? And I was sort of like, first of all, my man, you have to understand. They have been handed like a questionnaire has is on their screen. The question is, how much do you trust the Democratic Party on prices? And it's a Likert scale question, probably five or seven point scale of not at all to very much. And they're not really given the option to skip it. Like maybe they can, but probably they can't. And so they have to pick one of those things. If you wanted to know how they think that works, you'd have to have a conversation with them. And you'd have to ask them, how do you think that works? Like, what what do you think Democrats are gonna do to bring down prices is an open-ended question. On a scale of one to five, how much do you trust Democrats to fix prices? Is not an open-ended conversation. People are bringing a universe of assumptions and mental models and brand attributes and whatever else into their into the way that they answer that question. And so they're also bringing their own story into their answers. But like the person who asked that question wanted to spit out a trust story. They wanted to be able to say, Democrats are trusted on this, Republicans are trusted on that. That means this for the midterms. That's the story they want to be able to tell. So that's why they asked that question. They're not asking that question to assess how much people understand the impact any political actor has on gas prices, you know. So Paige Williams: Yeah. Farrah Bostic: always, always the questions are intended to. get you to a place where you can tell a story to get a response. So you're never just like, I don't even know how you would begin actually to like have no story in in your mind at all and just go start asking people questions. Like I guess you could just sort of like post up and like stare at people for a while. but it's and then you're then you would be asking them to narrativize what they're doing because it's like that either makes sense to you or it doesn't. Why are you doing that is a story. But from the very beginning, from the moment you figure out what questions you want to ask, there is at least a hypothetical story that you want to tell. And then there's a question of how willing you are to be wrong about your first idea. Paige Williams: Yeah, yeah. In in the Demo you traced how a story about an entire generation could grow from surprisingly limited evidence and become something the culture treated as true. How does an interpretation become a narrative that is powerful enough? To survive contradictory evidence. Whew. Farrah Bostic: when Adam Pierno and I started in the demo, we both found generational narratives, particularly in the world of marketing, to be annoying mostly. Like this kind of thing that were used as shorthands for describing large groups of people who by definition can't be monolithic. You know, if you're describing 60 million people, that's not a group. That's like a country. and so we started to sort of dig in on where did this even begin? How did this story start? What were the agendas of the people who started the story? What is it about the thing, you know, what are the elements of the story that have remained kind of steady state as this group of people, millennials in particular, are now in their 40s. Yeah, at the point in time that we started in the demo, they were You know, over half of them were in were 40 at that point, or older. And yet we're still talking about them as like failure to launch and never gonna be able to own a home, never gonna get married, never gonna have children, even though they were catching up and doing all of those things. that they were, you know, this trusting of institutions generation, this motivated to do good generation. This optimistic generation. And I was like, I don't know. I think maybe since 2008 some things have changed. And maybe you would all like to update your priors about this group of people for whom like they are different because they're now married and in the workforce and well into the workforce and have children or have mortgages, who have aging parents, who are dealing with chronic conditions, who are. Living in the world that we live in and have gone through the things that we have gone through in the last 20 years. Maybe, maybe we should revisit what we thought was true about them when they were 17 and see if we want to tell a different story now. but I think that that story, I mean, generational narratives, we were I was I was talking to someone the other day about this. People are still talking about Gen Z as if they are children, but they're in the workforce. They're in their 20s now. And so, like. But there is just this thing about those types of narratives where we like give the group of people a name, we tell a fairly tidy story about them, that like hangs together, like it's it's internally very consistent. you can pin some data points onto it that seem to be consistent with that story. and then you can like that then you don't ever have to think about it again. That's just who those people are. It becomes, you know, the the the joke about generations is that it's astrology for marketers. And so it's like millennials, they're Capricorns. You know, Capricorns are always Capricorns, no matter how old they are. And it's like, no, no, actually, you can't say that about 60 million people. And the interesting thing, actually, about the way that story evolved over time was as this group of people who were going to be as of The you know, book Millennials Rising that comes out in 2000, the next greatest generation. this was gonna be the optimistic, digital native, innovative, affluent, up into the right generation. And then events occurred, you know, the financial crisis, forever wars, political upheaval, economic, you know. Stagnation, the internet, all sorts of things, but you know, social media. But the these things changed what the actual outcomes worked out to be. So those 18-year-olds who were gonna be all up and to the right were getting to be well into their thirties before they bought their first home, into their thirties before they got married, into their thirties before they had their first children, were not having as many children as I guess people expected them to. were not as affluent, were showing up as more pessimistic in polling, you know, were not as liberal as people assumed that they were, that they were much more politically diverse than than previously assumed. that for all that they answered surveys about all else being equal, I would prefer to have ethically sourced goods that are sustainable and yada yada yada. Like, well, all else being equal is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, as long as those things are harder to get and more expensive. Then they're gonna pick something else. And so there was this, you know, essentially like a heel turn of the generation that was like, are they actually villains? Are they selfish and lazy and liars and hypocrites and failing to launch? And is that what we should under they they betrayed us, the great us out here who are observing them? and that was really how when the data turned and it didn't go the way they predicted, Because of course it didn't and that wasn't their fault and it was out of their control. We decided it was their fault. And and that was the way to cope with it. Instead of having to say, Well, hang on, you know, we dealt them a really weird hand with the financial crisis. And you know, the post nine eleven world is a weird world. And now it's, you know, as as Adam and I were doing this show, it's sort of as COVID. So now we've got COVID adding to the all of the the craziness of that. And You know, life's not getting any easier out here, particularly particularly in the US. And but the way that er the sort of public discourse shifted around them was not to say, well, maybe we were wrong at the outset. Maybe this isn't determinative. I mean, the the other thing you have to know is the origin story for millennials was written by the same people who gave us what is it called? The th the Fourth Turning. you know, the this whole kind of narrative of like there are these sort of generational patterns. And so you have a greatest generation and then there's a different, you know, there's four types of generations essentially. And Steve Bannon is a huge fan of this this way of thinking. so ta take take what you will from that inference. But it's kind of millenarian thinking. It's this kind of like things are inevitable and there's a prophetic quality to it. And so we're making this prophecy about 60 million people and that they failed to live up to their divine prophecy is on them. It's not that the prophecy was always bullshit. Like and so that that to me is we see it over and over again. I mean, to some degree, any conspiracy theory works the same way where it's like, well, the the prophecy didn't, you know, QAnon. The prophecy did the storm did not come. Or maybe it did. Or maybe it hasn't come yet. Or the storm actually takes this other form now. well, by Trump they didn't mean senior, they meant junior. Like you can always adapt the story to still stay true for you in some way. And if it doesn't, well, the conspiracy goes all the way to the top. You know, like there there's just like there's a we cope. We get attached to a story, and when it doesn't work out the way we want it to, it's someone else's fault. Or I can make it work. I can make this story stick. Paige Williams: you started to allude to this and I wanna ask you aga I wanna ask you who's the we who's creating the prophecy of a whole generation? Is it marketers and pollsters? Farrah Bostic: I mean in the case of Millennials, it was these these the the guys who wrote Millennials Rising, And he had just sort of decided. I mean, he'd sort of developed his own sort of theory of the case about this kind of, I don't know, almost like eternal return of, you know, types of generations. Like he was looking at the grand sweep of history and saying that it's not the circumstances of the thirties and forties that led to the cr the the the greatest generation. It was something about them. Like they were special, they were born under a good sign. And so they were innately, uniquely suited to be the type of people who would go and defeat the Nazis. And every four generations, you get a group like that who will, you know, catapult us into the future, fight the good fight, be on the side of progress. and then the other generations have other characteristics. But the You know, again, like you've decided to take demographics and history and eco economics and political economy and mash it all together into a fairy tale. And but like treat it like it's real. And as we dug into the origins of that book and like went back and reread the book and looked at all the footnotes and all of that, it was this kind of smattering of desk research. Of like a little bit of demography and a little bit of just like headlines. Like there was a lot of stuff that was pulled from op-eds in Time magazine or Newsweek or whatever. And you know, so opinion writers having opinions becoming the basis for interpreting the data itself. And then they did a primary survey, but the primary survey they did was of high school students in McLean, Virginia. Because they lived in McLean, Virginia. And so they had access to those schools. McLean is one of the wealthiest towns in America. It is populated by kids whose parents work at the State Department or are diplomats or who are government contractors, particularly military contractors. They live in 4,000 plus square foot homes. they all have lots of, you know, stamps in their passports. Some of them, their parents are foreign diplomats who live there. They're getting chauffeured with security to school. This is not a representative school district. It's just not. And so asking them about their relationship to government and authority and their optimism for the future and all of that, like, well, of course. Like, look at look at their current circumstances. I mean, this is the point, this is also at the point in time where. During the Clinton years, that whole area of the DMV grew exponential ex exponentially because of so much more outsourcing of government functions to private to the private sector. So you had way more government contractors, tons of home building, house house prices skyrocketing, all of these the swamp. Paige Williams: The swamp. It's the swamp. Farrah Bostic: Yeah, they built the swamp. And so these kids were, you know, from the bottom of the lagoon. And like You know, it's not their fault. That's that's they weren't you know, they didn't choose that life. But they also weren't you know, they they weren't kids in you know. Amarillo, Texas. Like, you know, Paige Williams: That's right. Farrah Bostic: you know. that is when that's your data set. Like, let's be honest, you are intentionally or unintentionally cherry picking. And so, like, you've already decided that there's some great pattern of the universe, and we can start with thinking about the greatest generation, the world the World War Two generation, and then we can like chunk it out in twenty-one-ish year generations after that. And look at that. This group of people who will be turning eighteen in the year two thousand or whatever, eighteen to twenty one in in two thousand, they are four the Fourth generation after that one. So we're we're recurring now, we're repeating the pattern. Let's go find them. Look at that. They're right here in McLean, Virginia. Now let's read some headlines and some op-eds and some trend pieces and make it all fit together. And Paige Williams: Yeah. Farrah Bostic: so it's a very nice story. A lot of marketers loved that book because it gave them an idea about how to talk to young consumers. And in marketing, there is an absolute cult of the young because there is a mistaken belief that loyalty is a thing that exists. Brand loyalty is a thing that exists. And so there's this idea that if we get young, we'll have them for the rest of their lives. And so how do we appeal to the youngest consumers is an obsession of marketers. that I also think is a a mistake most of the time. There are a lot of other people with money to spend. You might want to talk to them sometimes. Paige Williams: Mm. In your experience, regardless of truth, who gets the attention and holds the power to allow people to believe a narrative, whether it's true or not? And where does that come from? Like why do we glom on to some stories as truth regardless of if it's true or not? Farrah Bostic: think a l a lot th this is actually a very active question. I was possibly ranting about someone who has a big platform this morning to my husband about why is this guy rich and famous? You know, I I think that a lot of it is Who you know and who knows you, how good you are at telling a story, how consistent you are at telling the story, how much you can kind of enc you know, give that story a tagline. Like the idea that the millennials were the next greatest generation was just such a and that they were digital natives. Those those two pieces together Paige Williams: Yeah. Farrah Bostic: were so powerful that all of the kind of first tech, you know, first kind of internet boom companies. They were many of them some of them were started by millennials. Most of them actually were started by Gen Xers, frankly. But the and older. But the idea that this optimistic loves technology, knows how to navigate it, doesn't have to be explain, you know, don't need explanations. what a perfect audience for all of these companies that are trying to get you to buy your pet supplies online and you know, buy books online and buy all the all the things online. the I think there is also hooking into a pre-existing set of preferences. So like you are adding to people's beliefs as opposed to upending them. so there's already a belief that young people have potential. And they are generally optimistic and they're generally open to new things and new ideas. And if you get them young, then you'll have them for life. And, you know, there's just this like belief in what being young means. And what being young means to marketers, first of all, is mostly to be young and upper middle class to affluent. it's not to be young and, you know, lower middle class or In the precariat. Like that that's not that's not who we're imagining most of the time. so I think there's it's a clear, consistent story told the same way over and over again with a hook and then also an anchor in something you already believe. And then you've you're you feel validated but updated, you know. Paige Williams: That makes a lot of sense. It makes me think of like, that that that story gives me hope, so I'm going with it. Farrah Bostic: Ha ha ha one of the most interesting things about this project we just did with the library is people love the library. They love it. They don't go, but they love it. Paige Williams: Yeah. Farrah Bostic: they think highly of it, they would be devastated if it disappeared. But for a variety of reasons that are good reasons, they've stopped going. And so you have to hold in your head two things at the same time. You are loved if you're the library. Like people will go to the mattresses for you if someone comes along and says, that's it, we're yanking your funding. No more libraries. even people who have not set foot in a library in 20 years will come to your defense. But then you got to figure out how do you get them to come. Because the way that you don't need them to come to your defense is to have them come all the time, right? If people are in the library checking out books all the time, then you don't have to sing for your supper in quite the same way for whoever's funding you. And That's a different set of questions altogether. It's a much harder set of questions. You know, if it was just get people to like the library, well, that's one prescription. but instead it's how do you get people to use the library? Well, that's a much more complicated problem. and I think the other thing that's funny is like they you know, sometimes you have clients who would prefer it if the story was the reason we're not getting traction, we're not growing or whatever, or things aren't changing. is because there's something wrong with our offer. Like the product's not good enough. And candidly as a researcher, it's a lot easier for everybody if that's true. Cause then you fix the product. Then you tell people that you fixed it. But if the product's fine and just but it's not relevant or it's not in people's faces or it hasn't figured out a way to fit people's lives, then that's actually a much harder thing to fix. Cause now it's that part of that equation is not within your immediate control. And so I think that is maybe I'll add that to my formula here. The other part of it is what feels like something you you can fiddle those dials. It's not it's not completely enough of it is destiny so you don't have to worry about it. It's not your responsibility, but the parts you can control are controllable and you can keep that that hockey stick going up. Paige Williams: Mm, beautiful. Love that. It makes so much sense. you've written that the best organizations aren't data driven, they're judgment driven. So what is human judgment doing that data cannot? And how do we distinguish good judgment from the bias dressed up as intuition? Farrah Bostic: Mm. good judgment needs good data. for sure. You you need to be able to encounter reality and take the punch. but I think, you know, years ago I worked with a company called Silverado Senior Living that does memory care. And so they have assisted living facilities, they have at-home care, they have end-of-life, you know, hospice care. And We presented our research in a board meeting. And that was maybe like the second board meeting I'd ever presented in. But the founder, CEO of that company made decisions in the room with the board during the presentation. And the reason they could do that is that they were exceptionally clear about. why they were doing what they were doing and what it was that enabled them to do that well. So there was a conversation, for example, about you know, there were some families who were frustrated with not being able to hold on to an at-home nurse for very long. They kind of churned through the job quite a bit. And so there was this conversation about, you know, people get frustrated with that. Sometimes they get a nurse they don't like, but when they get a nurse, they aren't sure that they're That nurse is going to stick around. How do you solve that problem? Well, one of the ways you solve that problem is you pay these people more and you you work on setting up systems where you can guarantee them schedules. And there was a conversation amongst the board members about, well, you know, how are we doing on all of that? And somebody in the room said, Well, you know, we're we're on par with the rest of the industry. And the CEO said, We don't do on par with the rest of the industry. And so Like that was that. Like that was kind of the end of that conversation. And the decision was made to do performance reviews and and raises and raise everybody's a little bit and then, you know, incentivize keeping people who got good res, you know, good reviews from p from families. but that started from a point of view about how to care for people with dementia. And it was like they had a The line they always used was join them on the journey that they're on, which is another thing that I have adopted for myself and in talking to people is like, I'm not here to steer. I am here with you for the hour and a half of the leg that you're on. And and that enabled them to be extremely consistent about the way that they offered care to their to their patients and and community members. And it is also how it enabled them to decide whether something wasn't performing up to snuff. Be and and and offered them flexibility as well. Different centers could do different things because the whole point was being responsive to these people's needs, not treating them like infants because they're not. They've lived whole lives before they develop dementia. and so how do we make sure that they live the best life they can all the way up to the end? And that's how you make decisions there. It's not what's best for the bottom line, what's best for our investors, you know, that they just absolutely rejected that theory of the case. And part of that is like, it's much better for them not to have churn. It's much better for you to when you finally get to the point where you decide to put your loved one into care, you take them to Silverado and they stay there until they're done. It's easier on the business for Silverado, it's easier on the families, frankly. but like that incentivizes them to do what's right. instead of just thinking about so they they measured more on things like churn and not on things like straight up profit. but they had to decide that that was the way they wanted to make decisions. And so a lot of times that changes, you know, because circumstances change and then leadership changes, you know, you get a very principled president or CEO of a company, something like the pandemic happens, the board gets nervous, they replace the CEO, and now we have a totally different set of priorities. but it starts with that. It starts with why are we doing what we do? What do we think are the essential pieces of doing that well? And then you make your decisions accordingly. But you do that with information, of course. but you're looking for information that assists you in that filtering process as opposed to just what everybody else is into or whatever, you know. Validates your priors. Paige Williams: Right. That makes so much sense. When I work with organizations, I'm always like, let's look at the narrative before we think about strategy. 'Cause we have to understand what's driving this in the first place Farrah Bostic: Absolutely. Paige Williams: before we shift it. Farrah Bostic: Yeah. Yeah, you have to figure out what the existing story is first before you can start introducing new ones. Paige Williams: What becomes more important about human judgment? And are you concerned that AI can scale a bad narrative simply because the assumptions were already embedded in the questions or the data? Farrah Bostic: So we have been playing with AI tools a lot this year. Paige Williams: Tell me everything. Farrah Bostic: for us, when we've done projects where it's like 50 plus interviews and it's a ton of. you know, hour-long conversations with people and loads of data. It is helpful for me to go query that data, which has frankly been a career-long goal of like how can you structure unstructured data, which is what what qualitative research and in interviews is. so that's great. The problem that I have found with it, and you can massage it a little bit to be a little bit better at this, but it really does look for the things that are the most common responses. it does not look for it ignores rather the outlier, unless you specifically say, you know, what are the top five things people said about this thing and what are the counter arguments that you that were also offered? Like what were the things that went against those trends? and even then, you know, it's so-so at it. I think the thing is if you've been doing this for as long as you and I've been interviewing people, you get these summaries back and it's just like somehow you didn't get it. somehow the machine like Paige Williams: Yeah. Farrah Bostic: doesn't know what you know about those interactions. And even if it's like, yes, all of those topics were discussed, and yes, people did more or less say those things, and the engines are getting better at not hallucinating quotes and that kind of stuff. So that's great. it's still not it, right? Like there's still like a a chunky gooey middle that it just never quite is able to apprehend. Like it just never quite gets there. And so I find frequently that I've started to think about it more as like a solve for the blank page problem of like just get it started and then I will have a reaction. And if the reaction is yes and then that's great. I'll start, I know where to look Because I probably did all of the interviews, or I did most of them, or I've listened to them all, so I know where to go find it. this querying tool makes it easier for me to go find it. What did, you know, what did Rangy say about that? What did Teresa say about that? What did Sarah say about that? Like I can go ask that question specifically because I did those interviews and I know what they said. but that kind of means it's like it's it's unclear to me how much it is. making my work more efficient, certainly. And all it does is reinforce how much like the power of the work that we do when it really makes an impact on clients is in the human-to-human connection and in th like we talked about at the very beginning, the body language of it all. Like the transcript does not know how many of our respondents for this project we worked on this summer cried. Like they they don't know. Unaware. And so they don't know how emotionally laden that part of the conversation was. They just know what was said because all it has is the transcript. It's not listening to the interview or watching the interview. and I think the to some degree what it maybe has done in qualitative research is like raise the floor. Like now there's you don't sort of interview 40 people but really only pay attention to ten ten interviews because those are the ones that stood out to you. You can kind of pay attention to all of them or at least sort and sift and code them all. And and that's helpful. But I just think it misses it misses the thing that gives anything real deep meaning. And then I think on this sort of question of scaling a bad narrative, they do it all the time. All the time. I have conversations with Claude where I'm asking it to do some desk research about something for me, and it spits back a summary and tells me that this was the cause of that. And I'm like, I was there, that wasn't the cause of that. Like, and it's like, you're right. I forgot. Well, you know, you didn't you didn't embed in the question every possible thing for me to chase down. And so therefore, I chased down the most popular narratives of it and repackaged them for you. So that that is that is a thing that happens all the time. And And I think the problem there is. A lot of people that I encounter in the world, particularly of marketing, but not exclusively marketing, also in in p political polling, is we're back to those embedded narratives, right? They're so deeply ingrained that people don't read widely. They don't go out and see for themselves, they don't experience enough diverse things and people. And so the thing that confirms what they already knew is the thing that they accept as true. And that's basically what AI does too. So it is a reinforcing loop. And and it's not especially good, you know, inter at least with the LLMs. I I don't know what people are doing with scientific discovery, but for us, it's not particularly good at sort of sensing emergent behavior in humans, right? You can't tell that things are changing. Paige Williams: I would love to dig into this a little bit because my own work with this project, but I also do sense making by listening interviews for social impact, you know, grand ideas. Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: So right now we're doing a research study about where is innovation in the child welfare system and where is it not. And what Farrah Bostic: Mm. Paige Williams: we learned from the listening session is people don't even have a definition of innovation. Like we have to go back to or start from there. And when we're using generative AI to make sense of some of the listening sessions, what you said really resonated, and that was deep meaning. It has Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: no ability to have deep meaning. And so what that makes me question is what does deep meaning mean? And then when you said sensing emergent behavior, that's what we found too. It has no awareness. And I think from my perspective As far as I've gotten on it, and I'd love to get your perspective on it, it's because it does not have a felt life experience. It is only trained on experience. And so it can only be a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of some learning that it was trained on. And it's Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: never been at the intersection of having to make a hard decision and then having the consequence of having made that decision and then moving forward from that decision. To me, that's what creates deep meaning in us. From your Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: perspective, will you talk about that point of inflection of human judgment versus what AI is actually doing and what it can't do? Farrah Bostic: something in what you just said made made me think of this. it is summarizing all the summaries, right? It is it is reading what has been written about something. But there are a lot of people in all kinds of systems. I mean, we we did something a couple of years ago around probation and parole. There's not a lot of like interview transcripts publicly available with people who have gone through probation and parole. and there's certainly not a lot of like, I don't know, the the the New York Times op-ed page is not writing about the experience of being on probation and parole. Like the kind of sources that it has been trained on and the things that it has read don't contain a lot of that. And so, you know, it can tell you about. You know, it can read the it can read the papers from the professionals that have synthesized the experience from the parole and probation officers' perspective, right? But but not from the parolee or probationer's perspective. and when you get into those types of conversations and you just sort of ask people, like, How did you get here? Right? You're you're you're on parole now. How did you get here? And And so I'll I'll kind of by way of of illustration, I'll tell this story. I interviewed a woman who was in Wisconsin. She had been she had dental issues. And they got worse when she was pregnant, and some of her teeth fell out while she was pregnant, and she went to she didn't have insurance, she went to the dentist, she couldn't afford dental surgery, so the dentist prescribed her opioids. And so she became addicted to opioid medication. never, you know, did not in that period of time ever get the the dental problems actually fully addressed. developed a drug addiction, got arrested for buying street level opioids as opposed to going to the pharmacy. probably got to a point where the pharmacy wouldn't fill the the script anymore. and then was put on probation on as a first charge and went with her boyfriend to buy drugs but they literally like crossed a street and were now in a different county and she didn't realize they were now in a different county and part of her probation conditions were that she did not leave the county. So now not only is she vi not only is she caught buying drugs, she has violated a technical condition of her probationary agreement. so that makes it worse. She gets arrested and sentenced to prison this time. And when she arrives, one of the things that happens on intake is like they catalog all of your tattoos if you have them all kind of like distinguishing body marks. She had an insane clown posse tattoo, which is a band. And according to the FBI, that is a gang symbol. And so she went under federal supervision in the state penitentiary. And the good news about that is they also did a medical exam and found that her mouth was so infected that she was on the verge of sepsis. And so she finally got the dental surgery that started this whole ball rolling in prison. but when she got out, you know, she had managed to find, you know, a basement apartment, a work from home job. This was COVID. and She was terrified to leave her house because she was just so afraid of losing her liberty again. she was unaware that she would have qualified for the state Medicaid program, which is called Badger Care under the Affordable Care Act, that probably would have s fended off all of this because the dental problem wasn't had reached a medical stage and would have been covered by medical insurance. But she didn't know any of that because she was too poor to have access to help to find that out, right? And so you get these stories out of it. And then you go sit in a sh in a Chicago Hilton with a bunch of people from the American Probation and Parole Association talking about this experience is so traumatic. And the experience of being on probation and parole is a f is still a form of incarceration. What you are living under is not freedom, it is the threat of reincarceration daily. The list of conditions gets longer and longer over time. Many of them have nothing to do with the underlying charge. I talked to a woman who wasn't allowed to have alcohol in her home. She'd been convicted of a financial crime. I don't know what the alcohol would have to do with it. She didn't have a drug problem of any kind, but it was just standard in that in Fulton County, Georgia, to have those conditions. or maybe it was Makem County, I can't remember. But anyway, sitting in this room and saying to them, even your so-called frequent flyers are so freaked out when they sit down with you after they've been released. Or sent over from the courthouse if they've just been turfed immediately into probation, that they can't hear you. They don't know what you said. And the piece of paper that you hand them may or may not be found later. And so they don't ever know what the rules actually are because they're too stressed out to internalize the rules and they're too complicated. And there's no persistent place where those rules live. It's just a piece of paper. And now you want them to keep track of their appointments with you. You want them to have reliable transportation to get to you, you want them to have a cell phone, you want you like you want them to have all of these things, but you're not giving that to them. And you're wondering why these people violate. And it's like cause you have forgotten what it's like. You never knew what it was like because you weren't on that side of the table, but like you think they get used to it. And that was the great like revelation in the room was what do you mean they never get used to it? And I was like, I just don't think you ever get used to having your liberty seized. Like I j it is, it is a trauma that repeats as opposed to being resolved. You don't become kind of acclimated to the possibility that at any moment you're gonna have crossed the wrong street and now you're in technical violation of parole and you're going back to prison. Like that is that is not a thing most people are walking around in the world with. And I just don't Like I my worry is like I see particularly like survey based research do this and they'll ask questions that don't get at that, right? You never get to the part of the story where it's like, and now I don't leave my house because I'm too terrified that if I walk out the doors, I'm gonna get picked up because I'm gonna have done something wrong and I won't know what it was. If I just stay inside, I probably can't get into trouble. And so that doesn't come up. Instead, what comes up is the publicly reported data about recidivism rates and technical violations and failure to appear and all of that stuff. And so we work back from that. These people are just reprobates, man. Literally. And and so you never get that part. And the AI is never gonna get that part because the AI is never gonna sit down and like tell me your whole story. I mean, I suppose you could set up some sort of research platform where the chat bot asks all those questions. But I think they're still gonna summarize it for the person actually asking the question. And the person actually asking the question isn't starting from the point of view of what is the actual human experience of this like. It's instead this very, you know, like when you're a kid and you you screw up and do something wrong and your parent is like, why'd you do that? And it's like, well, I wasn't actually trying to. Right. Like I was trying to do something else and I broke something. The why'd you violate your probation conditions more often than not is like I didn't know I was. And so what's what's the answer to that question? It's I don't know. on a survey, that just comes back as don't know. And then we all get to judge them for being stupid. But the reality is like they just weren't they never had a full internalized model of what it meant to be in compliance. And so you know, that that that is the part that I just I just don't believe the AI has the embodiment, the historicity, the the culture, the community, the empathy, any of that stuff to actually open up to those conversations, like to know to ask. Cause nobody else is asking those questions. So why would it? It's a prediction based machine. So I don't know. I I I just think like even if someday it can, it doesn't now. And I think we are having too much of an AI conversation that is about it's Theoretical potential and not about what it actually does today. And so we are giving away too much of what makes us really good at understanding each other. And I personally believe that we actually are very good at understanding each other if we try. That's why there are so many of us. We are a collaborative species, basically surviving through communication. So, like, I think we've still got the upper hand on this. And as long as we do. The extra layer that we have is not only can we do all that sense making, we can do something with it. And like, unless you're actually appointing Claude to be the CEO of your company, you still have to make the decision and you will be held responsible for it. And so as long as that's the case, as long as you're the person being held re accountable for it, it's on you to make a good decision. And you shouldn't actually hand that over to something. That you don't understand. Paige Williams: Amen. I love this thought about the decision factor and then when you were telling the story, about really getting down like deep meaning and sense making comes from getting down to the causes and conditions. Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: And that's what AI is not doing currently. Farrah Bostic: it's also a thing that a lot of human researchers don't do. Someone says something uncomfortable and they're like, Okay, next question as opposed to like just sitting for a minute. Paige Williams: Tell me more about that. Farrah Bostic: Yeah. And like that's where everything actually s lives. It doesn't live in the like in the first response. It doesn't live in the Likert scale, you know, one to five. It's a four. You know, like that's that is such a dull, muffled signal in the world. And then you sit with someone and they tell you about, you know, the first librarian they met. Or the day they realized they wanted to be a nurse. I mean, that's where all of it actually happens. So it's it's not over here in these closed ended questions. It's it's in the open ends all the time. Paige Williams: Don't mean to belabor this point, but I'm just thinking about it so much. Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: And the open-ended question, the open-ended answer, if it is a new answer, if it is a new lived experience of a human, Farrah Bostic: Mm-hmm. Paige Williams: and an LLM hasn't been trained or taught that experience, it has no idea how to interpret because it's new. It's it's not generative, Farrah Bostic: Mm-mm. No. It's new. Yep. Paige Williams: right? Farrah Bostic: Yep. I mean, one assumes it gets sort of thrown into some great training hopper of like the next time it encounters that type of answer, it will learn that that's a type of answer that might be given. But this is what I was saying before of like it gives you the most commonly said things. It gives you the consensus answers. You know, you load it full of, you know, hour-long transcripts and It gives you the obvious stuff that I didn't need to go to the trouble of uploading the documents for. I did the interviews. I know they all said that. Like, what's the interesting stuff, you know? Paige Williams: I just had this image, remember in school we had these what were they called? But they were these forms like this and you'd and you'd circle in the A, B, C, D. The Scantron, yeah. Farrah Bostic: the Scantron, yeah. Paige Williams: It's always set to see. Farrah Bostic: Mm hmm. yeah. Every time. Paige Williams: If you don't know, fill in C, that's AI. Farrah Bostic: Yep. Yep. If you don't know Villaincy, it's exactly right. The and that is the other thing, is like it is it is designed to give you some answer. It is not designed to say, I don't know. That seems complicated. You know. Paige Williams: Yeah. Generate text. Yeah. It's a text generator. Farrah Bostic: Yeah. Paige Williams: Thanks for walking through that with me. I've been thinking about it a lot. 'Cause I do use it and also it has so many limits. When you think of the phrase narrative intelligence and if you were creating the definition of what it might mean, how would you define it? Farrah Bostic: in any event, when we're doing the kind of work that's about like how to make a brand grow. Honestly, it is all story. It's all narrative. The thing that I often tell clients is that a brand is a story we all know, and until it is a story we all know it's not a brand yet. And so, like you can have done branding work, you can have a logo and a tagline and you know, a shelf space at Walmart, but that does not make it a brand until we all know, or enough of us know the story, enough of us recognize it out of the corner of our eye, it is not yet a brand. And not all brands are loved, not all brands are ever gonna be loved. In fact, most of them never will be by most people. But the way we understand almost everything we encounter is through narration. Like our brains, someone else puts it put it this way, and I love it, our brains are stowaways inside of our bodies. The the brain itself does not have eyes. It relies on ext external, you know, all these external devices to send signal back to it. And then it tries to interpret that information based on what it has correctly interpreted before. That means that quite literally every experience we have is a narrative experience. We are constantly narrating everything that we go through because that is how the brain processes information. Some people have the actual like voice in their head that's talking, some people think in pictures, whatever, but the process that we are going through in order to make sense of and meaning of our day-to-day lives is a narrativizing thing. So narrative intelligence is, in my view, actual human intelligence. That's why I loved this question. This is the drum I bang all the time. The only thing that matters is the story. Like you have to find out what people's story is about what they do, why they do it, why they choose to do it with these things or these people or in these places, because they understand their experience through the story they have told themselves about that experience. And everything else, like trying to get some objective truth about what really happened, is Almost neither here nor there, like it won't matter. Like that's not how they experienced it. So why would you come in and try to impose some other version of reality on them from where you're standing? it won't make any sense to them. It certainly won't feel true. they would have to really want to think a different story about the things they have experienced in order to be open to you telling them, well, actually. And so I just think like I think it's an essential idea. I think the place where it gets tricky is I think and you know, anyone who's been through therapy, and I love therapy, hopefully has received advice along the lines of something my my dad used to say, which was, that was then and this is now. We can get stuck in our stories. And and I think this goes back even to what we were saying before about millennials. Like everyone kind of got stuck in a story about millennials. And when the story didn't work out the way that we thought it was going to, we had to twist the story to make it the story was always true. You guys failed to live up to it. And if you continue to believe that what happens when I do X, and that's how you narrative your life or your business decisions or, you know, your PR problems or whatever. Then that stops you from making different decisions. And so, like, you either make no decisions and let things happen to you, or you repeat and repeat and repeat the problem over and over again. Maybe a better story about a time of transformation was when I was sitting with my therapist and talking about how my boyfriends had nothing in common except this one thing that they all had in common. And it was like, I have been dating the same guy this whole time. I thought they were different because they had different kinds of jobs and they didn't look alike and they, you know, came from different parts of the country and different religions and different different all the things. But almost all of them, especially the bad ones, had the same family story. Dad was a liar or a cheater, mom was up on a pedestal. And once I figured that out, I was like, well shit, now I know what I'm looking for. I know I know when to say nice to meet you, but no thank you. Because like if that's your story, we're not it's not going I am not compatible with that. And like once you figure out what that story is, and sometimes we know what it is and sometimes we don't, you can choose a different story that serves you better, that's based on better information, even. But like we can get stuck in a well, every time I do X, Y happens. And I think the freeing idea is, well, that's what happened. I can do something else. And maybe I'll get a different result. And so that's the only kind of caution that I want to put on my enthusiasm for narrative intelligence. I think it is how we make sense of the world, how we interact with each other, how we survive as as humans, how we make progress, how we create things. and I think we can get stuck in stories that aren't the only story available to us. I'll put it that way. It's not necessarily that they're untrue, but it's that they are not the only story. We could be living in. Paige Williams: Would you say then that narrative intelligence, if it if we're calling it an intelligence, is our ability to be able to recognize that, shift it, choose something else and then live more free? Farrah Bostic: Yes. My favorite thing that Zohran Mamdani says is we can make other decisions. Like that's just it is available to us. We can make other decisions. But first we have to see the story we're living in. So yes, 100% Paige Williams: Farrah, thank you so much. This has been so enlightening and such a delight. Farrah Bostic: This has been a lot of fun, Paige. Thank you for having me. Paige Williams: Before we close, here's what I'm taking from this conversation about narrative intelligence. Farrah made something very clear to me. There is no such thing as data without interpretation. The questions we choose to ask already contain assumptions about what matters and what kind of story we expect to be able to tell at the end. The real discipline is whether we're willing to let what we learn change the story we started with. Sometimes the words themselves aren't enough. Farrah told the story of watching people respond physically and emotionally to an advertising campaign in Tokyo. If you had read only the transcript, you might have concluded they were Skeptical. If you watch them, the smiling, laughing, touching the ads, you saw something entirely different. You had to watch, not just read to understand. And that feels increasingly important as AI becomes part of how we make sense of enormous amounts of information. Farrah uses AI tools and sees their value, but she also described what they tend to miss, and that's the outlier, the uncomfortable answer, the emotional weight of an interaction, the thing that doesn't fit the dominant pattern. She said the meaning often lives after the first answer. When we stay long enough to ask, tell me more. And then we came back to agency. Farrah said we can get stuck inside stories that may not even be false. They're simply just not the only story available to us. And once we can see that the story we're living inside, another possibility appears. We can make other decisions. So maybe narrative intelligence isn't about finding the one true story. Maybe it's about becoming capable of noticing the story shaping what we see, asking whether it still fits what is actually happening, and staying open long enough to encounter what we didn't expect, and then remembering that another story and another decision may still be available to us. So let me ask you what story have you accepted as settled, and what might you see differently if you looked again? This is one hundred stories.