#190 - How to Navigate the Constant Change in UX Research with Learners CEO Alec Levin

I promise you, you do not want your company's executive team deciding how research is going to be and developing that vision for you. I promise it's going to suck. There's going to be a lot of layoffs and a lot of failed launches and fail directions and then they're going to have to like hire a bunch of people back and they don't know why it didn't work because AI was going to do it all. This is our moment. Talk about the balance sheet of the hard. Well, what's some of the good with it? Hard is all this change with AI. The good is that everyone is right now open minded because nobody knows what work looks like anymore. So if you p a compelling vision for how you can contribute in a materially much more beneficial way to what your organization is trying to accomplish, people will be open to hearing that. Hey, this is Erin May and this is Carol Guest. And this is Awkward Silences. Awkward Silences is brought to you by User Interviews, the fastest way to recruit targeted high quality participants for any kind of research. Hello everyone and welcome back to Awkward Silences. We're here with one of our favorite all time guests, one of our rare repeat guests. We've got Alec Levin, the one and only co founder and CEO of Learners. And we're here to talk about all the things, all the research things, all the things. So thanks for being here, Alec. It's my pleasure. Genuinely. One of the things that has brought me a lot of joy over the years in doing all this learner stuff was like there's been a bunch of people that we have got to like be in the trenches with different trenches, but together for years and years and years and get to know each other and see all the growth and whatnot. And it's been amazing knowing you for like already well over half a decade I think. And you know, getting to know each other and work together and all these things and see all the things and go through all the things. So this is beautiful, this is great. Likewise. And yeah, don't get me crying at the beginning of the episode. We have to wait till the end. But you know, it's better to be in a trench together, that's for sure. So that's what Learners is all about. That's right. Getting in there together. So yeah, we're going to talk about change. We're going to talk about navigating the constant change in uxr. And speaking of over half a decade we've known each other and worked together. I think Change has been the only constant in that period and indeed it's the only constant in life. Right. But what is, I think, new is the acceleration of change, the kind of change, right? The enormity of change, the level of ambiguity and uncertainty and all these things is at an 11, where maybe before it was at a 7 or something like that. So that is new. But I think we can assume that change is with us and the ability to navigate this sort of change in uncertainty is an important skill and will continue to be one for researchers and folks doing research. Agreement, 100% agree. Something that I've been saying a lot recently along these lines is I've been in the worst ways possible, introduced to all the fun in and outs of accounting and bookkeeping learners is now a multinational technically, which is so fun to learn how to manage. But one of the things that has been interesting is just like everything is a balance sheet, right? You know, you tabulate something here, there's an expense, but you get a thing, right? You generate a revenue, but you have to, you, oh, owe a service now and whatnot. Inputs, outputs, costs, benefits a hundred percent. Yeah. And I think one of the healthier ways of looking at these moments of change is what's the balance sheet, right, in the sense of what's the cost? The cost is I'm losing my feeling of security. I'm losing the comfort of this structure that I've been operating in for a long time. And all that is hard and painful and genuinely for all of us. But let's look at the other side. It also comes with unbelievable opportunity, unbelievable change, right? Yes, you do have people trying to do more research than aren't researchers. But guess what? You can write software now, you can generate prototypes now, you can do the PM's job if you want too. So, like in this period of change, the hard things and the painful things are always more present in our mind because that's how our brains are wired. But it's also exciting too. It's also good stuff too. Well, Alec, before we dig too much into the future and where we kind of see things going, maybe just to touch on how you got here and what's your relationship with research and researchers and how did you get to this spot now with learners? Yeah, I mean, I love research. I love it as like conceptually in principle. All the messy stuff with research of the weird details, the contradictions that people have about things that they say like all that is where the art is to me. And I think it's just a wonderful thing to try and unravel all these mysteries that are people that we try and learn about. And I think it's a really interesting, fun, intellectual thing. So I've always been, like, very excited and interested in that sort of stuff. And, you know, I haven't been a researcher for, like, too long now. But my way of staying connected is just spending lots of time with people who are leading research teams, who are students, who are new to the field, who've been in the field a while, talking to people about what the interesting challenges they're working on. And that's kind of how I try and stay connected to what's going on. And even also, like, stuff that's like research adjacent, like talking to the vendors on what they're working on and where they think they need to take their products and services, talking to the hiring managers about what kind of skills they're looking for and what's changed there. So learners is in some ways just an embodiment of that. I think one of the things that I've found of all the problems our entire community faces, there are individuals who have the answers, right? They've navigated the change already. They just don't know you yet. And like, a big thing of what we try and do with learners is like, well, can we give you a platform to communicate this with everyone? Can we record it? Can we live stream it? Can we share it? Can we also connect you with other people so you can build a relationship with somebody that can benefit from that from knowing you and hopefully in a mutually beneficial way? Like, those are the places where there's just so much opportunity to like, really accelerate our growth and our development as a field. But we are not doing a great job at sharing, connecting with each other, talking about the things. The people who are working on really hard things are super busy. They're really locked in. But we got to get them talking, we got to get them sharing, right? And for everyone else, we got to be asking for help. What are the things we're struggling with? With. Let's be candid about that. Let's ask those questions. Let's be a little vulnerable. So I think that is just like this permanent challenge that I'm really, really excited about. Because when you start, first of all, there's like no cost, right, of making a connection between people. There's marginal cost to, like, making content, but the benefits are enormous, right? And they can compound too. So you're just getting one plus one equals like 45 after enough time. And so those. That's really exciting to me. That's the balance sheet that the CFOs like, back to the. Back to the balance sheet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Low cost, high impact. Hopefully it's in the revenue column, not the expense column. Right? No, it's funny, like, 10 years ago, seven years ago, you know, when I would think about any kind of, like, trade event, business event, you'd sort of get this, like, networking hour, right? And it's like, oh, what a drag. And I'm like, kind of here for the content. And I feel like that's really flipped. Maybe it was Covid, maybe it was the pervasiveness of tech in our lives. Maybe it was event leaders like you and others really thinking about the experience of the event. Both, like, getting good people together, making the event feel fun, creating organic feeling opportunities to network. But nowadays it feels like this is why people are going to events. They're hungry for community and for finding those people that they can learn from, teach something to in a way that you really can't replicate any other way. 100%. I think there's a. There's, like, probably a handful of things going on here. One is there's. There's more and more content than ever. And so people can maybe think that they can find different answers and less and less connection. And especially with COVID like, we tried being alone physically and connected digitally, and I think people, after a couple of years of that, found that very unsatisfying. And there's something about breaking bread with people where you just feel like you know each other and you trust each other. And I don't know if it's possible to ever replicate that online. I think also, like, a lot of the conferences pre Covid, a lot of events pre Covid, the way that they got companies to shell out big money for tickets was with, like, spectacle. Michelle Obama speaking at Qualtrics. Bono's here, right? Bono's here. Right. Like, you know, which could be really fun and cool. Okay. And a lot of conferences are. Were boondoggles. I mean, it's so hard to get an event off the ground, but once you do, some of these events were making an unbelievable amount of money. Right? And for better or for worse, we came just early enough to beat Covid, but just late enough to not get to a stage where we were able to do that. So we always had to be, like, nimble and responding to people and whatever. I think the amount of personalization content needs now to be great, like, really great, is. It's hard. So even if you look at our program, it's not like it used to be called UXR Conf. We changed it to Research Week and broke it out into six distinct programs. Because I don't expect everybody to come and watch the whole thing. I just want you to come for the things that you are going to be like, this is for me. And then the rest of the time like making new friends, making new relationships, that's what everybody wants. And it feels good and it in a fulfilling way, not in like the way like ice cream feels good, you know. Well, hey, don't diss ice cream, you know. But I would never know. I think there'll be ice cream at the event too. So there better be. I love ice cream. There better be. Now stick it in the coffee. Little affogato. Yeah. Okay, so you're talking to researchers all the time. Not a practicing researcher, but you got the cred, you've done it before, obviously. AI and let's talk about that. But like what are you hearing? What are people excited about? What are they stressed about? Where are we on some of these kind of change curves? What are the vibes? What are the topics? Yeah, I think there's like a handful. I don't know how big the handful is, but there's a handful of individuals that are like way out on the distribution curve of like this next level practice thing. And some of the stuff that, that I've heard from them is like, I'm like, wow, that's a lot. So you know, for example, obviously we know that AI tools can do interviews and surveys and this and that, but they've really taken it to a next level where things are. They're designing studies where a lot of the synthesis can happen automatically and prototypes can be designed in figma automatically and then code can be written. So instead of a research report, it's here's the PR that you should merge to production. And researchers are doing this. Yeah. And that is like a level that I could not have imagined even two years ago. That is. Seems a little insane to me. So I think there's like a lot of. But how do you get there and how does it work? And I think there's also a lot of slop, obviously that's just like going through the motions, but there's not really anything behind it. And as I wish I could remember who said this to me. I can't remember someone said this to me, but I keep using it. But bad research doesn't stink. It's not obvious when it's crap. And I think one of the parts of the conversation that's really important is not just like we're all going to wholesale change the way we work to this new way. I don't think that's going to be the case, but it's rather what are the situations in which where different ways of working that are now available to us all of a sudden make sense. Right. So there are probably a bunch of ways where you can take a simple example would be churn surveys. And instead of just every month you look at all the results and be like maybe we should investigate this, maybe you should investigate that instead. You can have tools that are talking to churned customers, suggesting product changes, prototyping them out in figma and coding them up and then you can just review them. That is a situation in which some of these new types of workflows could work really well. But I don't believe that that is going to be something where you're doing discovery research trying to go multi product. I don't think that approach is going to work at all because it doesn't have the taste, the context, the intuition. All that stuff really matters when you go into an interview. I still think that it needs a lot more old fashioned way. Yeah. So for discovery research, for the evaluative, for the big strategic, for the long term, long outlook stuff. Well, first of all, is anyone doing long outlook stuff anymore? It's like we're all living one week at a time here. Well, that's a good question. What does discovery research look like now that we're moving so fast and the future is so uncertain? So this is a bit part of a bigger thing. I think discovery research is more important than ever. Right? Yeah, I think it's way more important. I think the positive way of looking at our situation is there's a bunch of lowish value stuff that we've been doing that we don't have to do anymore and that we should be glad. Right. I don't ever want to do a usability test for as long as I live. Yeah. I don't find usability tests exciting. Yeah, well they're not exciting, they're not bringing joy. And to your point, they have marginal utility. Right. And that's why maybe you should keep doing them but find a way to make it ten, a hundred times more efficient. Yes, but even so, yes, I agree with that. But usability test is also something that I think AI might be better than us because I can only do 10 a week. Right. So maybe you don't call it a usability test anymore and maybe it doesn't have to be done by a researcher. But if an AI is doing 100010 minute usability tests and is able to do it across all of our different customer segments with all the different demographic profiles. Right, like synthetic users. If I'm doing usability tests, well, that's a technical question that I don't have an answer to yet. I'm not sure. Okay. I think there's a place for it, but I don't think it's that. But I'm not sure. But like, for example, if you do usability tests with senior citizens, you will learn things that you will not learn when you're doing usability tests with a bunch of Gen Alphas. But we only do 10 at a time when we do a launch. So, like, are you really going to get a sample of senior citizens and Gen Alpha? No, you're just going to skip it. You're just going to do Millennials. That's what we all. They're easy to reach. But I think the bigger thing, I'm excited about the moonshot research program that Christina is doing because this kind of touches on some of this. But like, of all the things that our field suffers from and there's a few of big doozies that we suffer from, one of the biggest ones and probably my, my biggest problem is, is a lack of vision for like, what we could be, who we could be. Now, I have a point of view of what this could look like that I think is exciting and compelling and whatever. But I don't know if I've ever heard people express, this is how research could be done. Right. This is the role that we could play and it's exciting. And I think that a lot of this AI stuff, the net result is we're going to stop doing a lot of lower value stuff. We're going to have to do a lot more of this really ambiguous, mysterious stuff that we're uniquely well positioned to do that I don't think AI will maybe ever be good enough at. But maybe I'm wrong on that. Can somebody paint a picture of what that looks like and then pitch it internally and pitch it to the community and say, this is what I'm excited about, this is the way I want to work, this is what I think is better and I'm going to fight for it? That'd be nice. I haven't seen it. Yeah, well, a, I would love to hear your vision because I do want to talk about is research still a good career and for who and under what conditions and what does that look like. But I think in the first wave of AI is like, oh, I can do 10% more stuff. That's cool. But I think we're now in the moment of how do we actually, as organizations change the way we work? How do we blow up the org chart, redefine roles? Right? And so how does research fit into that? Is it AI can do this busy work, or PMs and designers are doing a lot of this low value kind of research that's embedded into the product development side cycle. They can do that. So what's left for me? And is AI part of that or is this just like old school artisan stuff to your point? Yeah. So I, I have my answers, but for anybody who hears that question and they don't have their answer, that's a moment for, for introspection. I'm telling you, I had this experience early in my career where I'm like, this shit is easy. One day people are going to find out that like, I don't actually bring a lot of value to the table, right? Because I just, all I, to me, I'm like, all I do is talk, just have conversations with people and then figure out what they want and whatever. Now there's just like with software engineers who just very quickly picked it up at the age of 13 or whatever they picked up, you know, writing code, you know, there's a way that your mind works that makes you particularly good at it because that's a skill. It's a real skill. And it was only really when I watched other people do interviews and I'm like, that was weird and terrible and I can't, like we didn't learn anything from that. Did I realize that? Okay, like, I have a predisposition to being good at that and why is that the case and whatever. But like, we should know what's left for us. It's not what's left for us, it's what's available to us. Right? We might lose X and Y and Z, like usability testing and writing surveys, but we get all this other stuff now. I think we should be able to introspect and say, like, what are we excited about, what am I excited about and what am I talented at? I think when you think about the skills of the, of that matter, I think there's some, probably some new stuff that's relevant, but a lot of the core stuff is the same to me. One of the things that's always been frustrating in hiring processes that I've seen and been involved in is there's this over index on methodology that I don't care about. I think you can learn methods. I don't think that's hard. And I think communication is really important. But you get to learn that through the interview. The hardest thing, the thing that you really want to know is can you evaluate evidence? Can you design thoughtful studies that generate useful evidence that you can synthesize with creativity and ideas into? Like, here's where we're going to go next. That's the real job. That's really hard. Well, like that is still as valuable as ever in my opinion. I don't know how long it's going to take for AI to come for that. Maybe never, I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah, I think it could be never. But I think this is what we're so good at and it's still important. So why don't we give away all this other stuff and say, you know what, why don't I go out into the wild and I'm going to do a bunch of research on how we go multi product and then I'm going to actually develop some prototypes, show them to customers, get the feedback on those prototypes, present to the team, show the code that was written, show how you know all this stuff. You can do all that now, that's all available to us. Yeah, that never was possible before. And if you're somebody in management who's like, do I invest in research? Do I not invest in research? If you're saying, hey, what our research team is capable of doing now is not just like understanding some customer needs and bringing those insights back for like PMs to noodle on and designers to lawn. But no, they'll actually go and try and develop a representation of these learnings and demonstrate that they have efficacy and that they work. How much more valuable is your team? Yeah, like that to me is a lot of what future discovery research could look like that would be really, really positive and worth investing in. Right. Because a critique you would hear of research in the past or even present day is right. Where's the opinion in this? Don't write the insights. Need to have opinions. A recommendation like, where are you in this? You've talked to all these people. What do you think we should do? Right. Don't just give us this neutral sort of deck. Right. And so you take that a step further and like show it to me. Right with the prototypes. And so that feels like a big difference is not, not necessarily in the research methodology to your point itself, although I'm sure there will be Little AI ways here and there to speed that up. But ultimately, hopefully still talking to people, observing them, analyzing without a doubt. But then you can speed up or add fidelity to those recommendations by doing a little build. We have this self inflicted cage that we live in sometimes and it's like we don't have agency. We can't do things. Someone has to ask us to do things for us to do things. Someone has to do all the groundwork for us to allow us to, you know, pave the road. Right. Or it's like you're still halfway in the ivory tower. No. Like, no, you're part of this thing. This is industry, man. Awkward interruption. This episode of awkward silences, like every episode of Awkward Silences is brought to you by user interviews. We know that finding participants for research is hard. User interviews is the fastest way to recruit targeted, high quality participants for any kind of research. We're not a testing platform. Instead we're fully focused on making sure you can get just in time insights for your product development, business strategy, marketing and more. Go to userinterviews.com awkward to get your first three participants free. 100%. And this is one of our like diseases as a craft that we are a little too docile or a lot too docile and just waiting for somebody to like create the opportunity for us. And I think it's time to grab life by the horns. There's a lot of change right now and I promise you, you do not want your company's executive team deciding how research is going to be and developing that vision for you. I promise it's going to suck, right? There's going to be a lot of layoffs and a lot of failed, like launches and failed directions and then they're going to have to like hire a bunch of people back and they don't know why it didn't work because the AI was going to do it all. Whatever. This is our moment. Talk about the balance sheet of the hard. Well, what's some of the good with it? Hard is all this change with AI. The good is that everyone is right now open minded because nobody knows what work looks like anymore. Everybody's open to anything. So if you pitch a compelling vision for how you can contribute in a materially, much more beneficial way to what your organization is trying to accomplish. People will be open to hearing that. They'll be like, tell us more. It's on us to paint the vision for how we think this could be what we want it to be. And you can just DM people on Slack and say you'd like to have a conversation about the vision of this team and how we can work differently and how we can be more effective. You can just do that. You can email, you can email your CEO if you want. I don't know if that's a good idea. But you could just do it. Like let's just do it. But you could certainly do one of my favorite things which is talk to each other, right? Oh yeah, sure. Right. And then share your experience with other people so we can learn from it. Right, right, right. Yeah. Why are we so much more scared of our coworkers than our customers? Everyone you work with in principle is you have vested interest in your, literally in your own, in your collective success. Right, right. Your coworkers, if you're successful, they're more likely to be successful. If they're successful, you're more likely to be successful. Stock goes up into the right. If we all do the right things. That's right. Lift all boats should be pretty open to this. So I hear you saying you have a vision. You don't want to, you know, tell everyone what their vision should be. Hold. That's cool. Cool. But what are some of the things you're seeing? People who are starting to crack the code on this, what are they doing? What are they thinking about? Right. They're breaking out of the mold, thinking about the future, reinventing themselves and their practices. There's a few things that I think are like areas for growth or for like opportunity. One is there's I think a lot of research that is relatively simple but required a lot of humans before, that doesn't anymore. That could be a gold mine for organizations. So for example, it's probably now a sane thing to do to have like just constant behavioral segmentation research. You know, your marketing team wants to know certainly about all your customers behaviors and how they differ in different segments and the way they communicate differently. And they want to know that because that'll make all their marketing efforts much more effective. When they can tailor in the enterprise, they use this terminology and they talk in this way. And so you know, and they work in teams that look like this. So we can actually, when we do our LinkedIn ad campaigns, we can have something that's going to be more effective. So that sort of research is all of a sudden that's on the table. You can just have that running 24, seven probably. So there's these like types of new kinds of research that would have been onerous before that. Now all of a sudden you can Just spin them up and those are great candidates for those like pure AI workflows I think. Right. Lots of data collection, a little bit of prying in the conversation every churn survey, you know how to process that information. It doesn't change. It's like a permanent interesting question with a repeatable and synthesis and analysis process. Why are they leaving? What did they say? What features? You know, like what were the follow up answers? Okay, cool. Let's like track. I don't know. So I think that's one thing. I think another thing is there's like new technology. So I don't know what synthetic users and data is going to be good for yet. I've seen some stuff that look promising. It looks like for like packaging research, it's pretty good maybe so I'm told by people who have a vested interest in people believing that, you know, I believe that cross functional research is going to make a lot more sense where research teams are setting up tools for other people to use. So for example, I think there's going to be a version of usability tests that software engineers deploy. And so when you're getting ready to push code from staging to production and you want to roll it out bit by bit, you might want to have these automated usability tests that go with it before you roll it out to every single user in the user base. Right. So I think that's an opportunity and I also think there's this. One of the reasons I think why research has had a hard time with executive buy in is it's very hard to make our outputs visible in a way that executives want and manipulatable by executives in a way they want. And I think now's our opportunity to go and like build those dashboards. Like every executive of every company should know why they're competitive. They should know why they are losing customers in this segment or that segment. They should know what their lifetime values are of different customers and how value propositions can correlate with those lifetime values. Nobody knows this stuff right now. Certainly not on how it changes. Like every day your product changes and our understanding of the customers is years old. And so those are other, other things where if we could make that stuff visible, like so many people are just flying blind with very generic understandings of what's going on in the market. We can solve for that now. So those are some areas where we can and should be looking of. Like where are places where we can do what used to be low value automated research with really automated workflows to process what we're learning and generate outcomes from that? Where are new technology, where can we experiment with it and bring it into our workflows? And how do we get more parts of the business able to access the things we're learning and manipulate it in ways that make sense for them? Yeah, yeah. And I'm very interested. I'm curious if you've seen anything we haven't talked about along these lines of product teams are shipping so fast now, like so fast. And that means if more stuff is shipping, we need more research. And by more research, I don't need more studies. I mean more insights, more ideas of good things to ship. I mean you could ship without them. But we know how that goes. Right. And so how are researchers keeping pace with this? Is it with AI moderated research, is it with fast methods? Or are there workflow organizational changes you're seeing researchers make to be able to get that just in time research to get in there at that speed? Yeah, I don't think anything that's like been really figured out. Some companies that were big enough had these like rapid research teams which I think was imperfect solution to these problems. This to me is a great area where everyone listening can and should be thinking, how would I solve that problem today? I don't know the answer and I'm probably not best positioned to answer that question because I'm not. I don't even. We have our own little team that works in very weird ways. But like, I don't know how like product teams are working today in the same way that I used to eight years ago. And I think this is a supreme candidate for like, let's come up with a vision, let's try some things and see what works. Right. And we'll iterate a few times. But like the technology is there, we can totally solve this. It's probably going to take a few swings in the bat, but there might even be more than one answer. Like I don't, I really don't know. Right, yeah, because there's so many variables. But like I'm here, I'm a researcher, I have these fundamental skills that, yeah, I can apply to this unknown situation. And we're going to try some stuff and some of it's going to work and some of it's not. But this is a problem we're solving and it's super contextual. Right. Like if you're working with a team of designers that live and breathe research or, or even maybe just have an uncanny intuition about what people want. Right. That's going to look very different from building in a heavy engineering culture, building tools for engineers where like the tool is maybe just mostly an API. It's unlikely there will be one answer. I think which is why it's important we're like taking the reins here, pitching your teammates. That's the thing. Take the reins or someone's going to take them for you. That's it. That's. And it's going to be way worse. It's going to be so bad if non researchers are taking these research reins because there's so much that understanding and contextual knowledge that you have about how to do this well that they're just never been exposed to. Right. I remember back in the day, way back when the way you did a user interview was you had a script, you had to print it out on paper, you had to ask the questions in the exact same way. Or wasn't high fidelity. Or it wasn't. Had no efficacy. Which is insane. Yes. Because you need to build rapport with people. But I'd watch these designers like doing these and I'm like literally look up from the page and look at that person in the face. Like, just look at them for a second and they're like super uncomfortable right now. And you can't see it because you don't know and you don't know where to look. I'm telling you, there's many versions of that right now with all the people you work with. You don't want those people setting up this new era of research at your company for you. You got to try and pitch it. By the way, if it works, it will be fantastic for your career. So many benefits here. We just gotta try 100%. And like, not to be too woo woo about it, but you know, for like humanity. I mean, God, who knows what's happening with this AI? We're gonna have all over our everything. Like, I want someone thinking about how I interact with it. General people are not taking the AI stuff seriously enough. And AI people I think are taking it way too serious. I had a conversation with somebody you're talking about. All the jobs are going to disappear because AI can make your coffee now. And I'm like, I don't want AI to make my coffee. If I'm going to go order a cocktail, I promise you I do not want it from a robot bartender. I want it from a human being. Probably one that looks way cooler than me. Tom Cruise cocktail, 100%. Like, what are we talking about? And she's like, yeah, but what if it's $2. I'm like, no, I'll pay for the expensive cocktail. It's about the ambiance. It's not about the cocktail. Right. And so if you're too wrapped up in it, you just lose sight of the humanity and the fact that we are not efficiency machines. If we were, the makeup industry wouldn't exist. There's no premise other than, like, feeling like you look beautiful. Right. And there's male versions of this too, obviously. But there's all sorts of things that we do for our sense of self worth and ego. I remember there's a company I did some consulting for that did, like, disappearing tattoos. Right. And there is some fantastic interviews that I did there. But there was some people who would get these disappearing tattoos and put them on their body in places no one else could see. They were, like, completely hidden under their clothes. And they're like, tell me more about that, like, what's going on there? There was, like, a thing during the presidential debate. I won't say who was, but there's a woman who had. Someone made a remark about her, and it was a meme thing. And. And this person got, like, this disappearing tattoo that said, like, it was Nasty Woman or something like that. And it was just something that she would look at. It was just for her to feel. You're telling me that AI is going to somehow do that? I don't think so. Right. There's, like, so many things like that. And we will lose sight of all the humanity if we get all this, like, efficiency focus, and we'll lose opportunities, real market opportunities, real product opportunities. That's right. We have a role to play here. It's actually really important. Don't let Jesus take the wheel. You grab the steering wheel and drive the fucking car. Don't let AI Jesus save. No, AI Jesus is not going to save us. Well, that's. That's for fucking sure. All right. Anything else you want to jump into before we hit our rapid fire section? I just want to say, because it's been a long time since we've known each other that it is. We've seen the field grow, and that's been amazing. We've seen all that you guys have accomplished. So amazing to see. I'm just so happy for your whole situation and where you guys ended up. And, like, we've interacted with lots of people over the years, right? And it's so special to find people that. That really give a shit. And you guys have been among those people, and it's been so great to See the growth and success you. Because I think it's more prevalent in our space than it may be other spaces. But, like, when you see people who give a shit when, like, hell yeah. This is what this is all about. This is the whole thing. This is what all this life shit is about. So I'm so happy. I'm thrilled. I get to be like, your last guest. What an honor. And like, hell yeah. Yeah. Crying again. Yeah, right back at you. I think the number one thing I hire for is people who give a shit. And I think there's no way I would have been here at this company this long both without co founders and people that I work with that give a shit. But also this community of researchers, I'm telling you, they're cool people who care about what they do, who care about other people, and that has really sustained my energy and interest over the years. So love it. It's been awesome. It's beautiful. All right, favorite interview question. You don't interview people anymore. Favorite. I don't know, what's your favorite, like, icebreaker? Okay. Yeah. You talk to people all the time. Yeah. What's your favorite mingling icebreaker question? I like asking people what's the most fun thing they've worked on recently. Yeah. Yeah. Usually that gets people to open up pretty quick. Yeah, that's maybe. Maybe my answer. Yep. What are some of your favorite resources right now? I know you have learners, has events and content. JoinLearners.com what else are you liking? I know it's not popular in our community, but I love Twitter. I love Twitter. It's so great. Oh, X. X, yeah, whatever. I still. I don't think I'll call it X. I like the name Twitter. It's so great. And if you can find. There's so many people who. There's not a ton of research people, which I think is a shame. But like, there's tons of like, you know, designers and engineers and product people who just, like, put demos out there. And it's just. It just shows you, like so much of what's new and what's possible. And I think, I think that in general, researchers, we're looking a lot inside and there's time to space for that, but I think there's a lot we could learn by looking outside of our field at what everyone else is doing. And I think that that's probably one of the biggest growth areas for us. Excellent. Any good handles? Any people you follow? Are you following, like, hashtags? How are you finding good stuff? No hashtags mostly. People. People we can drop some in the show notes, too. There's a bunch of anthropic engineers that are sharing a bunch of demos of stuff they build. Like the folks that do the cloud code stuff. I think Aaron Levy, who's the CEO of Box, shares a ton of really interesting stuff. If you're working in B2B companies for, like, how they're trying to reshape how their companies work, there's the open cloud guy. That's way too much for me. Totally insane. I'm not doing that. Totally insane. I'm all the way out. Claude has their version now. I'm 0% in. I do not want currently an AI to be texting my wife on my behalf. Those are some good ones. But yeah, just to, like, be exposed to what's out there. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. And to, like, open. Right, like, as we were saying, like, have a vision of the future. Hard to do that without diverging a bit. So, yeah, for sure. Awesome. And then where can folks find you? When this airs, Research week will be over. It will have been a week or two in the past, so there will be another one presumably. But yes, where can folks find you? Well, we're hopefully going to be going to more folks with a larger plan for more events and more locations for next year. So that's one thing I would say you should definitely check out our YouTube, which will have our live streams if you want to catch any of the talks that you missed. There's some really great AI content and content for IC researchers and managers and all sorts. All sorts of stuff. You have some really spicy career takes from managers who at least a couple of which are in a position where they're able to dispel some rumors and be candid. So that'll be fun. And then, you know, LinkedIn. I'm sadly on LinkedIn all the time, so you can find me there, too. I know every time I log in, I'm like, why am I here again? Yeah, they got me. They got me. Yeah. Hell yeah. Well, thanks so much for coming by again and congrats on the new San Francisco area home. Yes, new home. Here we are. See you soon. See you soon. Great to see, Aaron. You too. Thanks for listening to Awkward Silences brought to you by user Interviews theme music by Fragile Gang. Hey there, Awkward Silences listener. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, we always appreciate a rating or review on your podcast app of choice. We'd also love to hear from you with feedback, guest topics or ideas so that we can improve your podcast listening experience. We're running a quick survey so you can share your thoughts on what you like about the show, which episodes you like best, which subjects you'd like to hear more about, which stuff you're sick of, and and more just about you, the fans that have kept us on the air for the past five years. We know surveys usually suck. See episode 21 with Erica hall for more on that. But this one's quick and useful, we promise. Thanks for helping us make this the best podcast it can be. 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