Thinking on Thinking

As engineers we do not learn to take responsibility for our users' attention -- and in fact we learn the opposite -- grab more market share at all costs! Where has this perspective taken us? We explore this idea from the view of Meta's choices, but also from the perspective of defaults, and how when we perceive something as a constant, it completely changes our frame of reference when we p...

We've started to seeing difference in the way we think and create since we started using LLMs. From tactical things like remembering ear-worms, to abstract things like how we value ideas, we've found ChatGPT & Midjourney & GenAI have changed the way we think, work and create. Kahran and Divya also discuss thieves cant, translation, learning, curating and accessibility of information. It's one of o...

Motivating yourself, especially on self-driven projects, can be hard. Once you finally have something works, how do you keep evolving it? We talk this week on breaking out of creative ruts and how to evolve, using the podcast as a meta example. Theme music is by Steve Combs , available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com

How do different understandings of 'what you do' affect the course of a company? How do they affect you as a person? Kahran and Divya talk about how they got to joyus studio's single line vision, and share ideas to help others get there with their learnings. Theme music is by Steve Combs , available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_132...

How do you create pre-experiences to put people in the right mindset for your experience? How do those create expectations you can exceed? In this wide reaching conversation we discuss Seth Godin, activation energy, fine dining (including Mesa, Eleven Madison Park, and other Michelin 3-star restaurants, tho not by name!) and what it means to create expectations (and how we as designers create them...

We know different learners learn differently, but how do different learners create works, get inspiration, or decide products or services are right for them? The customer journey changes for different types of learners. This week we look at how we use wish lists, how we solve problems, and how we buy things, both products, goods, and services.

Is it right to have work from home when not everyone can? How do we resolve moral questions about fairness in a post-COVID world? This week we explore post-COVID work, thinking about how local governments, small businesses, and larger businesses, including tech companies, can navigate questions of costs, morals and what values are worth paying for.

How do things work out for successful people? How do you make things work out for yourself? Is it positive psychology, or can you actually influence outcomes just by trying to make it happen? We explore these questions, and others, in this episode -- though we start off with Divya doing an amazing job of explaining nuclear physics! Like who knew that every element with an atomic number higher than...

What values are you willing to pay for? Does it change for your personal life, versus your work persona? When does ethical stop feeling ethical? This week, Divya and Kahran explore these questions in the context of today’s society, today's technology and the nature of late capitalism. 

Kahran shares some of the lessons and thinking that guide his attitudes towards investing, saving and other types of finance in this wide reaching episode that looks at how to leverage your skills and assets to create more freedom. Theme music is by Steve Combs , available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com

What will happen when we have more and more AI systems as our co-pilots? This week we revisit episode 8 from season 1 to see how our thoughts have changed in the last 6 months, and its incredible to hear how we had to look up Stable Diffision, and GPT3, versus today when these terms just roll off the tongue! (Our conversation on AI continues in the last episode of season 2 - episode 20: Working in...

Where can we apply GenAI to our work to accelerate progress? We talk about this in conjunction with drugs! and marketing tools! and more! and also touch on the incredible progress in AI of the past few weeks. For our previous thinking on AI, check out ep 8, last season. ⁠Theme music is by Steve Combs⁠ , available here:  https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_...

As free-thinkers and believers in agency, we were very surprised to realize in this conversation that we believe obedience has its place -- and can be required to create big, complex things that take belief, when sometime's logic and data would tell us something else. Join Kahran and Divya to explore where to use discipline, where to use obedience, and how compliance comes into this mix in thi...

We always applaud courage but not always daring? Daring is for rogues and courage is for knights, whether they choose to be good or evil. Do we always want to foster courage, but not always daring? Divya and Kahran explore this topic, and share stories, tidbits and a sprinkle of joy of life in-between. Theme music is by Steve Combs , available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/S...

How leveraged are you, and how afraid are you of looking at your assets in your life as being leverage-able? In this episode we think on the word leverage, both from a personal finance side and a social side. How can you leverage what you have, and what does it mean to leverage social connections, as different from capital assets? In our exploration of the word and the concept, we spend some time...

This episode we talk about spaces and how Divya has a resistance towards designing them because of a lack of heuristics and Kahran shares how he thinks about spaces. A major part of being open to changing your mind is the process through which you change your mind and reorient yourself in a new direction. Fortunately we were recording this time when we came across something that one of us changed...

What leads to you building trust? Where do you start from in trusting things? Are you like Divya, and start from 0, or like Kahran, and start from +10? Does it change for you depending on the context? We talk this week about the Westin in Paris, the Oberoi hotels, and other moments that have gone wrong and how those moments have built emotional trust. We also talk about how brands can delight you,...

What drives loyalty? Why do we spend lots of time with some brands, but don’t feel loyalty towards them? What about the opposite — sometimes we feel very loyal to brands we may rarely purchase from? This week we talk about BTS, Nike and other brands that drive lots of loyalty among their customer base. We quickly agree that having multiple points for people to “meet” the brand is important, but wh...

How do we grow to care about things? Does a sense of care result in loyalty? What is the difference between caring and being invested? This week we set off to talk about how people grow to care about brands, things and other people, but end up spending more of the discussion on the why question -- why do people start caring about those brands, things and other people? We also spend some time talki...

How can you better prepare yourself to make decisions, especially when you have been putting off that decision? This week we talk about strategies for making decisions with uncertainty, and share our hypothesis for making what keeps us from making decisions and how (we think) we can get past those key decision points. We also share some thoughts about how we’ve struggled with our own marketing and...

Are there always more customers? Is there always more attention? Is this way of marketing, and life, sustainable?  This week we think about time-bound behaviors! When is a solution right for now, and how does having an end-date make it easier to deal with difficult things? What keeps us from designing with an end date in mind? How does it change when its a personal habit versus a product or a comp...

We have loved publishing the first season of Thinking on Thinking. We will be back in Jan 2023 with Season 2, where we will dive deeper in ideas around motivation, behavior and more! Also stay tuned to see some our special guests in Season 2!

How do you make decisions? What helps and what doesn’t? What stops you from making said decisions and what aids you in making them faster? How do you get your creative work done? Is art never finished, only abandoned or Is it just a matter of removing the pieces of the stone that are not a part of the sculpture. This week we discuss things that we look for when we are making decisions, what mental...

Can taking blood on your hands be a kindness? Is it a niceness? What does it mean to be nice vs. kind? Can kind things be done in a polite way, or is politeness and niceness tied at the hip? This week, we briefly talk about kindness (vs niceness) in ending relationships before getting deeply caught up in kindness in death before turning our attention to unpacking the interplay between niceness and...

What will happen as we have more and more AI systems as our co-pilots? How will we value things when AI has been involved in the creation? And is this the same trend towards commoditization of higher and higher skilled labor? This week, we talk different AI systems we have met in our lives — DALL-E, the image creation AI, Github’s Copilot, the AI peer programer, and GPT3, the AI text generation to...