What product teams can learn from the author of Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card, Author

You want your feedback to come from people who can faithfully report their response. Now, if you can have them linked up to a lie detector that is moment by moment tied to the film, maybe you could get their natural response. But even then, people don't respond the same way to the same things. And time after time, I've heard about movies that have hook endings. They had a more daring, darker ending, but the focus group hated it. Focus groups will always hate it. It's just like in taste tests, they'll always prefer the sweet version over the non sweet version. Then you get new Coke and a.

Disaster Hi everyone, I'm Kristen Berman and this is the Irrational Mind. This podcast is for product marketing design people, people who want to know more about how their customers think and get inspired to build and grow products that work. And to do that, I'm talking to people who really get human behavior. Today we're going deep into the mind of someone who wrote one of the most popular sci fi novels ever, Orson Card Scott, author of Ender's Games. The novel won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, the two most prestigious honors in science fiction, which solidified its status as a classic. It is, of course, a longtime bestseller and often required reading in middle schools across the US for those that haven't read or it's been a minute, the Recap Ender's Games is a story of a child prodigy, Ender, who is recruited by the Earth's military to attend Battle School, where he is rigorously trained in combat simulations against other children. As Ender rises through the ranks, he is subjected to increasingly complex and brutal scenarios designed to test his tactical genius, culminating in an ultimate test to save Earth. In this interview, Orson will reveal how he crafted the story, how he designs characters, and how he solicits feedback on his writing. The Pod is basically a long form monologue by Orson, so I'm going to kick this off with three things to listen to and ways you can connect his insights to your daily work building and growing products. So first, Orson keeps you interested in the plot because the plot is happening to you. You're Ender. You're in Ender's head. This is not only the secret sauce to the whole book, but specifically why the intro is so gripping and memorable. You discover stuff the same time Ender does. This viewpoint keeps us turning the page and excited for more. The insight is more for top of the funnel growth folks. Can you show new users the product's pain point from their viewpoint and in a way that makes them really feel it? Orson gives an example of dropping a fully cooked dinner on the floor right before serving your family. We all understand how terrible that could be, and so when Domino's comes in with the solution, just order pizza. We're kind of bought in. This may seem obvious, but it's a back to basics marketing principle on using emotion and narrative to drive action. Second call out. Orson doesn't allow you to read something the wrong way. This means he'll rewrite sentences, use italics, anything he can do to get you to read it how he wants you to read it. And he doesn't blame the reader, he blames his sentence structure. This is a bit like the Japanese idea pokeyoke. Pokeyoke means mistake proofing or error prevention and is a technique used in manufacturing to prevent errors before they occur. Plugs don't allow us to plug them in the wrong way. There is a larger prong and a smaller prong. Pedal placement on cars makes it very, very difficult for us to confuse the gas and the brake. That's a good thing. This is a seminal lesson for product designers that Orson explains in the show. If a user is not doing the thing you want them to do, it's likely less about their preferences and more that your design is allowing them to fail. And finally, Orson gives the most useful framework for getting product feedback I have ever heard. Both when we write and when we develop and design products, we need to get feedback from users at some point. And Orson takes a bit of a Steve Jobs approach. Don't talk to the user. He never asks for real feedback. He never asks for an opinion if someone likes it or doesn't or why. Instead, he observes people as they read. He figures out where they pause, what they don't understand, and what they don't remember. And then he, as the expert expert, figures out how to fix it. This is basically what smart product people end up codifying in their user research process. You don't believe what people say about why they like or don't like your feature. You believe what people do. This is also, coincidentally, the essence of hacking, behavior change, and what my team of behavioral scientists do daily. If you had a lie detector, Orson says, you could get away with something different, but you don't. Overall would recommend listening to Orson and reading Ender's games if you haven't getting a peek into how a world expert design stories and crafts narratives will only help you build better products. And on a more personal note, my day job is CEO of Irrational Labs. Irrational Labs is a SWAT team of behavioral scientists. We help companies Design and build products that customers use, love and pay for. This podcast is an exploration of behavior change across different domains. If you like it, you may also like working with us. Give me a shout@hellorationallabs.com and mention the podcast. And also throw us a bone. I mean, review on Apple or Spotify podcasts. Thank you in advance. It really does help in your writing and you have a talent for capturing the reader's attention. Some would call it a page turner. Can you talk a little bit about how you do this? Like, how do you keep us moving through so quickly and consistently?

This is one of the odd things I've. I've read all my life. You know, my parents subscribed to Writer's Digest because my dad had ambitions. But I read many times, ways to snag the reader's attention, Hooks, Jeopardy, et cetera, et cetera. And I found that in going to other people's movies and reading other people's books, none of them work. In fact, I find most of them obvious and repellent. So that if somebody's relying on a cheap hook, chances are very good I'm not going to get to page three and I'm not going to buy the book because they don't work. They're obvious contrivances. I have found that the best way to get people involved in a story is to tell them what the story is about. You know, if you were at a pitch meeting in Hollywood and you'd say little kids are sent to school in space in order to learn how to command space fleets, that is a better hook than anything I could come up with. And so essentially, that's how Ender's game begins. Within the first chapter, all of that is laid out. And within the first few pages we have Ender. What Ender does is he get is put in jeopardy and pain that he was not expecting. Somebody that he felt like he should trust betrayed him. He was cynical enough to know that when they said, this won't hurt a bit, it meant this will hurt a lot. He knew that we see that in his thoughts, but he was not prepared for how much pain he would be in or how dangerous the procedure would be. And so using Ender's viewpoint, he did not know what was going on. So as he found out, we find out. And so that's the expository strategy that you use. You use your viewpoint character and you make sure that there are key things that, that your viewpoint character doesn't know that he discovers. And so we're with him on A discovery. Now, that makes it so that exposition isn't a big expository lump. Now, reader, you have to understand that. No, we don't do that. We don't do Thomas Hardy's trick of saying her hair was the color of the painting by Titian in the Tate Museum in London. He did that all the time. And I thought, yes, because he's only writing to people who've been to the Tate, who. Which is a very small, select group of English. Those things don't work. But what does work is the reader discovers things along with the viewpoint character. And that means that the reader can be lied to. Not because the writer is withholding information, that's a cheap trick, but because the viewpoint character doesn't know it yet. And that lack of knowledge means that I can tell what's going to be happening. I can set it up, I can make it clear immediately. And the best way to tell people that they want to read your story is to start telling them what the story is going to be. The only English classes I ever took were a couple of creative writing classes and a poetry class. And I remember when I wrote a short story for one class, remember the professor's name and all. He gave it a C. And I thought, this is just wrong. This is a good story, because it had captured me so. So he. One of the things he did was have us read our own stories aloud. And after he heard me read my story aloud, he gave it an A. Because I understood how to read. I was an actor at the time. I was a. I had done lots and lots of readings. I did readers, theater. But it's not just that. It's that I understood how to make the story alive, make the dialogue live, make. At the same time, I was a playwright, and I learned another important lesson which has to do with what you asked about engaging people. Actors will. If there is any way to read a line wrong while saying all the words, actors will find that way and use it and insist on it. And the only way to fix it is to rewrite the line until it can't be said their way, until it can only be said my way. But the main thing is to make the dialogue so that it must be clear. And here's why this works so well in fiction. With plays, you can always recast if an actor can't handle it. But with fiction, the only actor is the reader. That reader is improvising cold, reading all the dialogue of all the characters. Now, if I write an ambiguous bit of dialogue, they're going to read it wrong and they're going to miss something. Some of the experience. Either the emotions will be wrong or the meaning will be misunderstood, or it just won't make any sense at all. So I make frequent use of italics to emphasize certain words because in. In our language, or in our language, or in. Well, that was enough. In our. That was enough. Because that's all I could think of. In our language, stress indicates how you read. So if you want the reader to get it right, you italicize the stressed word and they will instinctively do it right, because as they're reading, that word feels emphasized, it feels underlined. And so by making it so that it can't be read wrong, you make it so that the reader is always engaged in what the characters are saying. The reader is never going, what? What is he saying? What? And then you use your viewpoint character to let us know what the viewpoint character intends by everything he's doing. So why is the opening of Ender's game work? Because we know it does. It works because we're inside the head of a bright kid. We see him being smarter than the people around him without ever having to say, ender Wiggin was a really smart kid. He was the smartest kid in any room he'd ever been in in his life. We don't have to do that as exposition. I don't have to have another character say it, I just do it. From inside his head, the reader sees him being smart. This is one of the problems why some people can't write genius characters. They're just plain not smart enough. It's easy to write a dumb character because everybody can be dumber than they are. But it's hard to act the part of somebody smarter than you are. The only trick that most actors know is to affect a British accent.

Fair.

If you want to appear smart, then you must talk like this, because this is the way smart villains talk. It's just pathetic. And so I get the reader to identify with Ender, to respect Ender, and then to watch him go through a grueling, dangerous, life threatening experience, not knowing what it's about. And then it's immediately followed by his having lost his marker of status, he no longer has the chip in the back of his head. And he assumes this means he's flunked out, just like his older brother and sister did, because they went through this and they flunked out. And so he goes home in despair. And then his older brother is there to ridicule him, to mock him. Nobody who has an older. Older sibling has been spared from being ridiculed and mocked. I mean, that's a common thing in families with more than one child. And even in families with only one child, I'm sure they have a cousin who's willing to supply the want. But we see him in a family right away in the short story. No, we saw him only in the Battle School already. But here we watch him as he discovers that, in fact, he did not wash out. That in fact, the violent encounter that he had on the way home from school from a kid who'd always been wanting to pick on him but couldn't because he had that. Whatever. I can't remember what I called it. A chip in the back of his head. It was observing everything. The what?

Monitor.

The monitor. Yes, the monitor. That's a much better word than the chip in the back of his head. And so when he fights him, we see what Ender is thinking. We see him process the fact that if he beats this guy up, the other kids are going to beat him up. If he is able to persuade them not to, they're just going to wait for another chance to beat him up, to get even. So the only way he can win and not have to keep fighting this is to take Stilson, the character who's. Who's attacking him, and beat him into the ground. He isn't thinking, I'm going to kill him. He's thinking, I'm going to make this so memorable that he never wants to tangle with me again. Now, Ender had not had me training in fighting, except with his brother. But what he had was, and people will tell you this, he was berserk. And it terrified the other kids. And so when he came home, he had come from that. He was exhausted from that. The reader went through all of it with him. The reader knows nothing about what Valentine is thinking. The reader knows nothing about what Peter is thinking, except for what they say and do. And so we only get the evidence that Ender has, which is how they act toward him. So Valentine, while she smacks his hand away from the chocolate chip cookie dough, is nevertheless his protector, his confidant, his friend so far, the love of his life. And his brother is the monster. He is the enemy. He is the hive queen. He is the bugger. He is the thing that is trying to destroy Ender. And then when Graff comes and interviews him, he explains as much of what he is thinking as he can to graffiti. And so we understand Graff's decision to accept him into Battle School. We Agree with it. And see, that is the thing that you want. It's like a salesman in a way, when the salesmen are taught. Get them to agree, get them saying yes, yes, yes. So that they're not thinking, no, no, no.

Okay, let's. Let's theorize together about how a. So basically when we're working with a product team is trying to. They say onboard a user. That means like you're signing up for a new product or service. Yeah. They don't know you at all. You don't know them. And there's this period of time called onboarding, which kind. I'm trying to relate that to the intro of Ender's Gammas. How would they take those insights into their onboarding?

Well, I've never had a product that I wanted to onboard people with. But the key psychological element is that you give them an experience that puts them in the scene. See, I watch some advertising campaigns. Maybe they work because they say the name of the product over and over, but anytime I see an emu or flow, I will change channels or at least mute it and do something else till it's over because I am fed up. And here's the thing, I was fed up the first time I saw them. Nothing about those ads onboards me, nothing. But you put Dennis Hastert in the middle of an intersection on a chair, and I'm on board with State Farm. He's intriguing. He's a guy I have liked from his other. The other roles he's played. He's the second most common president in American film and television next to Morgan Freeman. And they're both beloved in that role. But by putting him there, I'm on board already because I like him. When you want to onboard people, you give them someone to be or someone to like. Giving them someone to like is easier, but it doesn't last as long and doesn't strike as deep. Giving them someone to be. Like in an ad where there's been a disaster and like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. That means something. People have problems in their lives and sometimes a good neighbor is there. And to have that image of the State Farm, that's wonderful. The current Domino's ad that's going out where somebody has a disaster, a food related disaster, and they need a replacement immediately. I am in that. Everyone has had something like that happen or feared that it would happen. And here's the thing. We also know pizza will always. Please. Pizza will always. You can say, I dropped the turkey on the ground. I could have dusted it off. But I chose Domino's instead. You have won over your audience immediately. And when those people come up out of a drawer, out of a tree trunk, all the places they come from, it's wonderful. It is a terrific onboarding ad. If you had never had a Domino's pizza from that ad, I would want to order one just to see, because I'm on board.

So you're basically giving people the use case. You're saying, like, look, let's say something terrible happens. This is a tornado, a natural event. Call State Farm. Look, something almost terrible happens. Your party.

Oh, no, you don't have to call State Farm. They come to you. That's what their ad says. I hope it's true.

Yeah, that's nice. So basically they're kind of. They're like putting you in the scene, like asking you to imagine what it would be like to be this person and then giving you the solution.

And if it's a well done ad, they will spend the money to make the situation look real. Because if it doesn't look real, it gets way less of the empathy. So you're already spending way more money on commercials than you sometimes think they're worth. But the way to make it worth something is to spend enough money to make it excellent, to make it so that it is memorable. The product name is rooted in people's minds and they know why they need it. They these commercials about, well, you know, Ted, he just dropped out of a heart attack. Well, did he have insurance? No. What about you? Do you have insurance? No, we haven't gotten around to it yet. They have the example of the guy who died and the people who are rueful about his death. And that's what you're supposed to be thinking about. What if I died today? What would my family do? When I had my stroke 10 years ago, I had just signed two massive contracts and I was going to leave my wife having to refund the advance money that would have chewed up all of the insurance we had at that time. She would have been left with nothing except for the royalties from Andrews Game every six months. I then, as I recovered from the stroke, had to write those books and fulfill those contracts. And I did, because I had to leave my family in a financially sound position. Now, that ad is striking to the heart, especially of men who, regardless of what we say in our society, men regard themselves as the breadwinner. They know that that's the only job they have.

In your stories or stories in your novels, do you try to change that or how do you try to change that kind of status signaling that happens in society? Or can you?

I can and I do to a degree. But when people live in the world of my book, it has to correspond with the world they live in 90% of the time, probably 99% of the time. Or they start going, that's not how it works. That's not true, that's not right. And they do enough of those unconsciously, they're not necessarily saying it out loud. And eventually they throw the book against the wall and never open it again because they are being rejected by the book. It's not that they reject the book, it's that the book is presenting a reality that, that rejects the reality experienced by the reader. So there's a limit to how far you can take them into another world. Unless it's a deliberately utopian novel. And then your readership is really small to begin with because utopian novels were really boring.

Basically what you're saying is, is it is easier to write about a thing if you know the thing and it may be easiest if you are the thing. So I'm going to relate it back to tech right now. A lot of times we try to build products for, for problems that we don't personally have. So, and that's, that's a good thing. You know, if you think about kind of the people who know engineering, they should be building products for lots of different problems.

If only one, if one legged people were the only people who could make prosthetic legs, the world would be a lot poorer for it.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so it is good that we're trying to solve problems for other folks even if we don't have the problems. But it's also very, very difficult because you don't have the problem. And so it seems like you have figured something out here. And you've mentioned you've written about gifted children and you have been a gifted children. It seems like you've had a child who's the gifted child. But what about the other people you write about, soldiers, et cetera, that you haven't been.

I've known them too. As the author of Ender's Game. I get invited to a lot of things that have military people to meetings that I had no place at because I didn't know anything and I don't know anything and I say so at the beginning and, and then I usually end up being the only person who says the things that the officers sitting in the, around the edge of the room who never speak the thing they want to have said. And so afterwards, I'm always congratulated by soldiers. Oh, you got this. Because I know them. I know how they're thinking. Because I've read military stuff since I, you know, I know how good commanders think. And I did not know how much I knew when I wrote Ender's Game. I inadvertently made Ender a brilliant commander in a way that works in the real world. So almost from the start, Ender's Game was used as a training manual in leadership at the Marine University in Quantico and various other places. Not because they're planning for war on war in space, though heaven knows that's coming, but because they're. They have to command groups of soldiers effectively with few losses, taking them into battle and winning, defeating the enemy. When you have that responsibility and because of your orders, chances rise very high that some of these men that you know and like are going to die because of your orders. You have to make darn sure that you know what you're doing. And that's why McClellan was such a bad general. He really felt bad about the deaths. So he would not commit his troops to battle even when he outnumbered the enemy three to one. And the enemy was really prepared to retreat fast because they were going to lose. He wouldn't attack because he had Pinkerton always telling him that the enemy had four times the strength they actually had. And so McClellan was a bad general because he did not put his men at risk, because he could not stand to have them die in droves. They eventually did in Antietam, but he didn't choose that battle. Lee did. And so when you're looking at how command works, you see their attitude toward their own soldiers, that they have to risk their men's lives and yet they have to know their men so well that they could not help but love even the obnoxious ones. And that's management is you have to know and love your people. If you have disdain for any of your people, it will get to them. They will see it, and you've lost that person. You cannot lead that person because he knows you despise him. He's going to subvert you. If he's that kind of person, if he's vindictive, he's going to hold a grudge forever or he's going to find other employment.

It's very interesting because the idea of management, we don't typically associate with, like, liking your employees. Like, you just have to manage them.

But what you're saying is, I'm going to Use a more radical term. You have to love your employees. You have to be at least as concerned about their career advancement as your own. You have to have some idea of what they really want. Are they ambitious? Do they want your job? Train them for your job, prepare them for your job, show them what you're doing. And yeah, if one of them sneaks in and takes it away from you, you did a good job of teaching them and that person's an asshole. So you can't convert a person from a jerk to a good person. But you can train them, prepare them, and they will see that they are learning how to do the job that they're supposed to do. You have to have them teach you their job so that they get a sense that you understand what they're doing. There are managers who remain aloof because it doesn't do to mix with the troops. That's a commander who's going to lose every battle he fights.

So just to summarize this idea, you're basically saying kind of not only is it important to know your employees deeply, but also know yourself maybe a little bit. And then I think you make the point in, in the book around knowing the enemy, which is a very interesting one as you think about kind of competitive products that, you know, Andrew has to know and love the enemy. And obviously that could hurt at some critical moments. But knowing that could, you know, also make him a better leader.

Yes, absolutely. I learned that from reading about Napoleon because he led as if he had a spy inside the enemy general's camp. But he didn't. What he had was experience with moronic generals in the French army. He knew what stupid terrified generals do. And so he knew what the stupid, terrified general on the other side was going to do. And the more they realized that it was Napoleon who was against them. The guy who beat this guy and that guy and that guy, the scareder and more stupid they became. And so he could anticipate his enemies actions. Now, did he love his enemies? In a sense he became them. He must have loved them because he became a stupid, frightened general. He became them as he advanced and had more to lose. His boldness was gone and he went. You know, going into Russia was bold, but it was stupid there. It's not that there had been an earlier invasion that failed. It's that he had apparently never heard of Winter. He had never been to Russia. He had no experience of what it was going to be like. So Napoleon became his stupid enemies, but he didn't have contempt for them. He knew what it is that they would do well, and he allowed for that. He made sure that he never faced them head on because they outnumbered him and they could bring more, more force to bear. He made sure that he came from surprising directions. So in thinking about how you engage with your employees, your underlings, the love is essential, the kindness is essential. If you are a leader and you are a red, a screamer, a shouter, a demanding person who says, why wasn't this done yesterday? Because we're just hearing about it for the first time today, sir. Shut up. You know, that's. If you're that kind of guy, you need to change because everybody under you hates you and they're not going to do their best work when you're not in the room.

A lot of times people get feedback from, from peers, their users. You know, we have a lot of incoming and some of it's noise and some of it is correct. And so over the years, you've probably gotten a lot of feedback about your writing. And so how do you distinguish between the things that actually have a thread that you're saying, oh, that, that's interesting. Let me pull on that. Versus maybe some things that you wouldn't want to pay attention to.

Okay, here's how I sort out my feedback. If the person has a degree in English and sounds like it in the review, worthless. It's not even good for toilet paper because it's usually on slick paper. It's just useless. My worst students, when I was teaching freshman English at Notre Dame, my worst students were the two English majors because they were always looking for the wrong thing in everything and trying to sound literature smart, which they weren't. And so they were bad at it, but they hated it when I, a mere science fiction writer, graded them down for being bad writers. Anyway, so I got feedback from those two and I ignored it because. Because they were worthless. I taught the other students who actually wanted to learn and had respect for good ideas when they heard them. They didn't have to have respect for me per se, they had to have respect for good ideas. When you are giving, getting feedback, the people who are valuable are not the ones who give you advice on how to fix something. The novel's just too long. You need to make it shorter. That is always false advice. Invariably, in my experience, if someone tells you your story, your novel, whatever is too long, you. It needs to be lengthened substantially because you're not giving them enough information to keep them interested. But that's not something that is counterintuitive. So I Have to learn how to interpret the comments of laypeople. Why is he saying this? What made him think it was too long? Well, because he was bored. And he was bored because it was boring. I need to make things have more life and more tension in them for the characters. So I learned how to listen to the untrained, and I learned how to listen to the overtrained. But then I trained my wife and several other people to be useful, wise readers. And here's what wise feedback is for a writer. They will put a mark in the margin of your manuscript every time they're confused and have to go back and reread to make sure what's happening. And if you want, you can put a C to say, confusion. And. And then you keep going. You're not correcting any typos. You're not looking for anything except story things. And then there are places where you go, oh, come on. And you don't believe it. Mark it and put a B there. Belief. I don't believe. And then you go, wow. You don't call out to the person sitting in the other room. What does this. You know? No. Then you have the fact that sometimes you stop reading and you start counting marks on the wall. You start saying, now I really want to get rid of that popcorn ceiling. When that happens, it really is boring. You really have lost them. And again, they need to be given something else to care about. I don't want their advice about what to do. They're not writers, and they don't want to give me advice about what to do. They want to tell me a full, honest report of the experience of using my story. And so the doubt, the unconcern and the unclarity. Unclarity is the problem when the. They have to go back and reread to figure out what was happening. And the solution to that is to take the information and either move or duplicate it much earlier in the story so that they already have it in mind or emphasize it a little bit more so that they get. Or if you didn't have the information there at all, for heaven's sake, supply it. Their feedback is naked feedback. It is the raw experience. It's like you would never go to a doctor again. If you walked into the room, he took one look at you and said, aspirin. You'd say, don't you want to find out what's wrong? He said, I know what's wrong. You got the flu. Everybody else has the flu. Aspirin. Go home, lie down, rest and you'd never go back to that guy, would you? And that's what you need from AS feedback is symptoms. Now, some focus groups try for that. Anytime you don't like what's happening, you push a button. But there's so many reasons to not like it. You can dislike it because you really love that character and they're going through a hard time and you feel bad. So you press dislike. Or somebody uses a word, you go like, press dislike even though the scene's brilliant, et cetera. You don't, you know, that's too undifferentiated. But if they're writing things down, they're also not watching. And so how do you have a focus group tell you what's going on in your presentation, in your commercial, or whatever it is you're showing them? Also, focus groups know that they're there in order to find fault. So the thing that I learned as a proofreader, that if you are handed some and a copy editor, if you're handed a manuscript that's double spaced, you will find far more errors in it than if you're handed a printed book and told find the errors. It can have all the same errors. But if it's a manuscript, you will find errors because you know it's rough. It's not going to be the finished product. But when it's the finished product, unless you're a skilled proofreader like I became and can't shake now, you don't even see the typos in books or you notice and you go, oh, that's a typo and move on. Me, I have to correct them in the book and before I can go on. But you, you don't want them looking for mistakes. You don't want them looking for errors. You want your feedback to come from people who can faithfully report their response. Now, if you can have them linked up to a lie detector that is moment by moment tied to the film, maybe you could get their natural response. But even then, people don't respond the same way to the same things. And time after time, I've heard about movies that have okay endings. They had a more daring, darker ending, but the focus group hated it. Focus groups will always hate it. It's just like in taste tests. They'll always prefer the sweet version over the non sweet version. Then you get New Coke and a disaster, a financial disaster for the company. Because the focus groups always tell you, sweet is better, happy is better, because that's how they feel. You take an audience that has just been raked over the coals and somebody on screen opens up a box and Gwyneth Paltrow's head is in it. You're destroyed, devastated. And you don't get over it by the end of the movie. You just don't. And you come out of the movie going, it was so powerful. But I just hate that this character. Ah. And then somebody says, don't spoil it. I haven't seen it. Okay, okay. Just be prepared. Terrible things happen in this movie and you're. The very fact that you're emotional about it tells them this must be a really good movie. And they'll go, and seven was a hit. So I never saw it. By the way, I don't go to movies that whose purpose is to scare me or make me feel tense. I have enough problems with my heart already. But the raw the feedback, the better. If people are giving you their opinions, they're not. Well, they are lying. Usually they think they know what you want to hear. They will praise that which is not praiseworthy. They will praise your errors because they think that's what you want to hear.

Yeah, this is great feedback. For feedback processes that we use to getting feedback to feedback. It is a lot in line with behavior change, which is basically we pay attention to the behavior people are doing. Are they continuing or not continuing versus why are you doing this? Where we don't really have access to well, why don't I like a thing or not? I just.

But that's the. See that, that why question. That is the key to everything. It's the key to all storytelling and feedback, focus groups, et cetera. Those are storytelling. We never in the real world ever, ever, ever know why. Any good scientist who thinks about it enough will go, yeah, we never know why. We make guesses about why. We design experiments that will give X result if Y is true and X result if Y is false. But when we get a true result, we still don't know that there's not a circumstance in which it is not true. You only know when you get a negative result that this is not always true. Here's a circumstance where it was not true. You can never know, even if you ask people right at that moment, why are you feeling it? Why were you upset? They don't know. It's an unconscious process and they will make up something because we always do. Of course I hit him. He said this. That's not why you hit him. Said I to my 2 year old daughter who hit her older brother when I was watching. But she didn't know and they She's a much better actress. So she cried and acted like he hit her. And he had a very poor cry. It didn't sound real. So if I had walked in on that, I would have thought that, yes, Jeffrey hit Emily in the head with a block, but no, it was the reverse. I saw it and she didn't know why. Why did you hit him? Well, she was two. Two year olds don't know why anything, but nobody knows why. Everyone has had the experience of thinking back on some horrible experience in the past and going, now I know why I did that. At the time, you thought you knew why, but now you know why. Well, you don't really. You just know a better, more believable reason. So asking people why gets you almost nothing because they don't know why.

Thank you for listening. If you like the show, go to irrationalabs.com to say hello to us or post a review on Apple or Spotify. Big thank you to the show's two Jacks. Jack Buer, our writer, and Jack Steger, our genius editor. Until next time.