Creative Confidence Podcast

A handful of genuinely interesting ideas surface - power-directionality in curiosity, predatory curiosity, and priming as a meeting tactic - but they are surrounded by extended road-trip storytelling, personal anecdotes, and platitudes that substantially dilute the per-minute yield for a B2B operator.

“if you have more social power in a, uh, situation, it is actually more important for you to be curious. And if you have less social power in a situation, it's more important for you to do what's called perspective giving”

“predatory curiosity is a near enemy of curiosity. It looks like it, but it actually isn't it”

Predatory curiosity and the power-directionality framing borrowed from Emile Bruno's research are reasonably fresh lenses, but the bulk of the episode recycles standard leadership ideas - psychological safety, belonging vs. inclusion, storytelling as connection - dressed in curiosity vocabulary without genuinely challenging received wisdom.

“predatory curiosity is a near enemy of curiosity. It looks like it, but it actually isn't it. So that is when...someone is asking questions...and then bam, it's like a gotcha moment”

“your curiosity is earned, not deserved”

Scott Shigeoka is a published author and head of a curiosity-focused role at a design museum, but his practitioner experience is almost entirely civic and social - road trips, community organizers, political dialogue - with almost no direct track record leading or scaling a B2B organization; he functions largely as a thought-leader/speaker rather than an operator.

“he's the head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, and he's currently driving a giant purple van across the country”

“I wrote a book on curiosity, y', all, and I feel like I need to constantly be reminded to do it myself, especially with the people that I feel closest to, like my family”

A creditable number of named researchers and studies appear (Dr. Samantha Moore Berg, Emile Bruno, Dr. Kurt Gray, PolicyLink), but there are essentially no business metrics, company case studies, or quantified outcomes that a B2B operator could benchmark against; the evidence base is social-science academic rather than commercially grounded.

“Dr. Samantha Moore Berg out of Utah, that our meta perceptions, which are our ideas of how others see us, are our perceptions of how other groups view our groups. Our meta perceptions are very inaccurate, and they're often exaggerated towards the negative”

“a lot of that comes from Emile Bruno's work as a researcher”

The host prepares adequately, moves between topics with some structure, and occasionally surfaces useful distinctions (inclusion vs. belonging, conviction vs. hubris), but she frequently validates rather than probes, shares lengthy personal anecdotes that redirect focus to herself, and never challenges a single claim; the lightning round is entirely personality-driven filler.

“Gosh, that's amazing. I was also thinking, I mean, I don't know if you've been whitewater rafting, but, like, the noise of the river is astounding”

“I recently was working on a new financial forecast. We do them every quarter. It's the most joyous part of my life, I have to tell you”