As a listener of this show, you’re someone interested in using your time to make things that make things better, and this conversation with David Dylan Thomas will help you do that.
David’s work centers on the intersection of bias, design, and social justice. He’s the author of the new book, Design for Cognitive Bias, serves as a Content Strategy Advocate at Think Company, and is the creator and host of the Cognitive Bias Podcast.
David’s developed digital strategies for major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. He’s also a prolific public speaker on topics at the intersection of bias, design, and justice, and has presented at conferences such as TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, Confab, the Wharton Web Conference and many more.
This is a conversation about the power we each have to affect the world around us. David’s work will help you to see the ways that we are each unavoidably biased, and more importantly, what we can each do about it. No matter what it is you do, understanding cognitive bias will help you do it better for everyone that it affects.
Whether you realize it or not, you are a designer — we are all designers of something — whether it be a system, products, meetings, spaces, conversations, or something else. And as a designer, understanding bias will help you do more good with your work.
Please enjoy, David Dylan Thomas.
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Resources mentioned
People, books, companies, resources etc mentioned in episode
- David Dylan Thomas
- Implicit Association Test – Harvard
- Rebuild Black Business
- Concepts
- Related ENLIVEN episodes
- Dan Gould: Fighting unconscious bias and attacking systemic problems with entrepreneurship (ENLIVEN #19)
- Alex Hillman (episode soon to be released)
- Marty Cagan – ethical risk
- Design Justice Network
- Media
Transcript
Transcripts may contain some typos. With some episodes lasting ~2 hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Andrew 00:01:48 David, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Good, thanks for having me. Absolutely. It’s a real pleasure because your work I think has really, really falls into category of things that I think is easily overlooked, but it’s especially important as we are really rethinking. How do we, how do we design systems? How do we think about systems? How do we fix broken systems? Uh, and the responsibility that we all have for that is so beautifully captured in your work. You know, as I was saying in the intro, I originally encountered your work through the lens of cognitive bias and design, and I was, Oh, cool. You know, with my background in product, that really speaks to me. But as I got deeper into it, I read your book. I was like, Oh wait, this we’re really having a conversation about here about like power and responsibility that we all have. And I think that is going to be a really timely conversation. So I’m just excited to have this, have you here today, it’s a real, real privilege for me.
David 00:02:34 I appreciate that. And you’re right. I mean, I think that
Andrew 00:02:38 2020 is among other things, the time of reckoning and a lot of that reckoning is people trying to parse their responsibility. Like why is the role the way it is? And is it my fault, right? Or, or, or on the other end, am I benefiting from it somehow in a way that’s unethical. And while this book isn’t necessarily about that specifically, it is about trying place, our role
David 00:03:00 As designers, as makers of things, as people who make, who help other people make decisions, like what can we do to make sure that we’re, you know, using that power wisely, ethically, responsibly, what is it that we need to understand about how people make decisions that can empower us to use our design product powers for good, instead of evil? Because I think what we’re realizing now is that those powers have been used for evil for a very long time now.
Andrew 00:03:32 Yeah, absolutely. You know, before we hit record, we were just chatting about, uh, I believe it’s the new Netflix special, the social dilemma, which was never one of my lesson. I hoped to watch it last night before we had this conversation, but I didn’t get to it in time. So why is that so timely? What’s going on there?
David 00:03:45 So I’m watching, uh, like I’m about 30 minutes into it. I started literally watching it last night, uh, about, and I’m, I’m watching it thinking, why am I watching this? Like I spend all day thinking about this stuff, but it’s really, really good. And I know, I know it’s like, but it’s, but it’s sort of like sort of a lot of the folks who were instrumental to building the modern web and the social networks, the power and the economic models that the social networks run on. Like literally the former head of monetization for Facebook is one of the people they interview. And it’s a lot of sort of Mia culpa around. Yeah. We actually kind of knew what psychological levers we were pulling. You know, we learned about them at Stanford. Okay. Like we, there were, there was no oops about this. It was very much a, we wanted to get people engaged and using these platforms all the time because we, that was key to our business model.
David 00:04:37 Um, and we wanted to gather as much data about it and then, and figure out how to, you know, um, monetize that. So understanding that my, the, the, the subtitle for design, for cognitive bias, when it’s a talk and not a book, the subtitle is using mental shortcuts for good, instead of evil. And I always kind of joke at the beginning of the talk. Like, we can’t talk about how to use them fruitful, but that’s a different talk, but not really like conscious of just how consciously people have actually used these shortcuts for their own monetary gain, not for the betterment of society, but for the betterment of the shareholder. Um, and I was kind of aware it was happening. I wasn’t aware. And like I said, I’m only a half hour in, but so far it’s far worse than I imagined. Uh, and the, the degree of just how consciously these biases, the scientifically studied biases were being used to make products more addictive. I mean, it’s just not even a question of, of ups. It’s no, let’s learn about these, these psychological phenomenon and figure out how to literally make design choices that will take advantage of it.
Andrew 00:05:42 So this is straight up manipulation. Yeah.
David 00:05:44 And it’s tricky too, because like, I feel like the natural response to a book like this, and thankfully it hasn’t happened as much, but the natural response to something like for cognitive biases, Oh crap. You’re trying to teach us how to manipulate people. And the fact of the matter is there is no version of the world of the built world that is not manipulation. Like I’m walking through my house and the walls are painted a certain way,
Andrew 00:06:14 Color, whatever color
David 00:06:16 They’re painted is going to influence my decision making. However wide that hallway is, is going to influence my decision, making whatever the shape of that door knob, right? Any design choice, whether it is intended to or not is going to have an impact on the, on the person experiencing that choice. Um, you don’t get to not manipulate people. You get to perhaps do it by accident. You get to perhaps try not to think about it and hope that it, that random assortment of choices doesn’t impact them negatively. But what you don’t get to do is say I’ve created neutral design. There is no such thing. And I think that’s one of the big lessons that we’re experiencing in 2020 is that there is no such thing as neutral design. There’s no such thing as a neutral police force or a neutral policing policy, or completely unbiased approach to governing or capitalism or any system like systems are never, ever, ever neutral. Um, and so that, that to me, so my like rock I’m throwing in the pond is around, okay. If we can all accept that here are some design choices that I hope and that I have some evidence to suggest will help society. Right?
Andrew 00:07:29 You and your wife are both sides, very scientifically minded. Your wife, I believe is a, is a pediatric neuropsychologist. Yes, you have kids. And I’m just really curious, you know, as I think I’ve heard, you mentioned bias is inevitable, right? There’s no, no such thing as an unbiased person and unbiased system and unbiased fill in the blank. So we have to deal with it. We can’t get around it. How does that impact you as a parent? Sure.
David 00:07:51 So part of it is I feel like I have a get of jail free card and parenting decisions that have to do with health or mental health, because my wife is like literally a scientist who has studied this her whole life. And sort of like, if you think this is the right thing to do, I am, I am on board. I’m not going to try to say, I know more about like mental health. Um, but, uh, but in terms of like, thinking about that bias aspect, like it all comes down to pattern recognition, right? And so one of the things that you discover as you study cognitive biases, that whatever that shortcut is that your mind is using, it’s usually based on something that’s worked in the past or something, some pattern that it’s seen in the past. So, um, uh, our kid who is 11 now, back when he was maybe six or seven, had asked us the question about female scientists, famous female scientists, and my wife and I, uh, between the two of us and keep in mind, she’s literally a female scientist, uh, could maybe come up with three or four.
David 00:08:45 And that was very embarrassing. And we realized, okay, there’s something wrong here. So we bought basically the big book of female scientists, and every night we’d read to him a different chapter and that would become this nightly reading. And the idea was setting up a pattern where female equals scientists and scientists equals female, right. And that hopefully is setting up a counter pattern to what the rest of the world is going to tell them. And TV is another books, which is that, Oh, scientists equals, um, uh, older, white male in a lab coat. Right. Um, so I can’t completely like eliminate that, but I can at least present some alternative patterns that hopefully he’ll kind of have that for free, right. As he gets older, rather than have to unlearn that like so many of us do, if you’ve ever taken the implicit association test, which is a very difficult, um, you’ll know that you have many terrible patterns.
David 00:09:39 I, for one, am very ashamed to say, when I took the test around, uh, women in careers, the association, basically the test is a bunch of distincts flashed in front of you that you have to kind of react to. And at the end, it kind of tells you what you are associating with. What, and for me, one of the tests, I came out, associating women more with the home than with careers, which I am like super ashamed of. And I obviously don’t explicitly adhere to, but that’s the pattern like if you don’t give me time to think that’s the pattern that I’m going to default to because that’s the parent that’s been set up. So when I think about parenting, I think very much about, okay, what patterns are being set for him right now? And what can I do to create positive patterns? One Oh one level here for anyone who’s not familiar with that term, when you say bias or cognitive bias, what is that?
David 00:10:26 Sure. So understand that you need to make something like a trillion decisions a day, right? Even right now, I’m making decisions about how fast to talk, what to do with my hands, where to look. And if I thought carefully about every single one of those decisions, I’d never get anything done. So most of our lives, thankfully are running autopilot. We just take lots and lots of shortcuts. And usually that’s a good thing, but sometimes those shortcuts lead us to errors and those errors are what we call cognitive biases. And so if you imagine something, one of the more harmless ones is called illusion of control, and it can be exemplified by, um, you’re playing a game where you have to roll a die. Um, and if you need a really high number, you’ll tend to throw that die really hard. If you need a lower number, you’ll tend to roll the dice a little more gently. And as I say that, it should be obvious, right? Oh, it makes no difference how hard you throw the dye, but when you’re actually doing it, it makes perfect sense. Like, of course you need to throw the by heart, or I need to know
Andrew 00:11:22 What are you talking about? I need to be gentle with the David. I need to be careful. I need to too,
David 00:11:28 Like, you’re we don’t like to not have control. So it’s situations that we have no control. We like to create the illusion of having control. And we embody that by how hard we throw the die. So that I think is sort of like an example of how on autopilot we’re making these decisions that don’t make any actual sense. Our minds are sort of jumped to that. That would be a harmless example, but there are plenty of harmful examples that we need to watch out for. So we’ve established
Andrew 00:11:54 That bias is inherent. We’ve all got it. Uh, we can’t avoid having it. So the inevitable question, and I’m sure we’ll spend a lot of time talking about this is, you know, okay, what do we do about it? Um, but I was hoping maybe a good way to frame this up for people. One of the analogies I’ve heard you use is that bias is like alcoholism. That was hoping you could say a little bit more about that.
David 00:12:15 So I’m an alcoholic once they’ve acknowledged that they have a problem, uh, and that they have very little control over that problem starts to create guard rails for themselves. Right. And one of the things that they know to do is to not go into a bar, right. Uh, and it’s not because bars are inherently evil it’s because they know in that context, they are, they’re going to have difficulty doing the right thing or doing what’s healthy for them and for other people. Um, if you think about the example of, uh, there’s a study where, um, if you have two identical resumes and the only difference is the name at the top of the resume, uh, resumes. If you’re talking about a male dominated field resumes with a male name at the top bullet go forward, uh, resumes with a female name at the top will stay behind.
David 00:13:00 And they’ve seen this in study after study. So if you think about what’s happening, right, the hiring manager is looking at that resume. And even if they explicitly do not believe that men are better at, you know, programming, let’s say than women, something about the pattern that’s been set up in their lives around who gets to be a developer, is making them give the resume with a female name at the top of the side eye. So they cannot be trusted with the name at the top of the resume, right? They are an alcoholic in terms of making poor choices when it being presented with that context. So you don’t show them the name, right? This is part of the motivation between behind anonymized hiring is to say, we’re going to make it so that you can’t see the name because a it’s not helping you to make the hiring decision.
David 00:13:48 Anyway, it’s not like there’s some crucial information in that name. That’s telling you how qualified the person is. And B it’s actually making the decision, making your decision, making powers worse because you are, you have a tendency, you have a bias towards men for this position that is unconscious. That is implicit, that you’re not thinking about and will like faster than you can realize you’ve done. It is going to kick in. So let’s not give you that option. Let’s just take that away. Just like saying let’s make, let’s lock all the doors, all the, all the doors and all the bars, right? You just, we can’t trust you around this information. Um, so that’s what I mean, when I say it’s kind of like alcoholism at the same time. I don’t want to push that too far because alcoholism is a disease biases and exactly a disease.
David 00:14:31 It is, it is a tendency and it’s a parents. We built up over time and it shows up when you’re thinking very quickly when you’re trying to make decisions quickly and get through a thousand resumes in a week. So it’s not like there’s nothing you could do to work on it, but the work is long term, right? And there is kind of similar to alcoholism. Like it is a long journey you’re going on to continually improve, try to act in a way that’s more healthy toward yourself and others. And I don’t want to, like you get into this weird situation around fault and responsibility when you push that analogy too far. But I do want to say, it’s like, if you know, you’ve got a tendency that you don’t have total control over, it’s a good idea to put guard rails around that tendency.
Andrew 00:15:11 I’m glad you said that because I think that’s a larger point, not just about like faults around that, but I think especially given how charged everything has been this year, there’s a heightened sensitivity everywhere. And people are, I think everybody’s feeling especially sensitive to, Oh man, one more thing. I’ve screwed up. One more thing that I, you know, I’m at fault for whatever. I’ve certainly felt that at times too. And it felt whether it’s shame, guilt, frustration, anger, I’m curious what you see. Cause I’m guessing you have seen people navigate this space in a variety of environments. The way I’ve been trying to navigate it for myself is to say, first of all, to distinguish between shame and guilt shame is I’m a bad person. Whereas guilt is I did something bad. So first of all was to make that distinction and then to say, okay, I may have unwittingly, unconsciously done something harmful or bad. I don’t like that. Now it’s on me to try and do better. And it’s not going to, it may not be pretty. It might take me awhile to get it right. But I got to try, how do you actually coach people through that? Because I feel like that’s a real tipping point where if people don’t, if they can’t psychologically see a way through the shame, the guilt, the whatever they won’t engage is that’s a hundred.
David 00:16:17 What do you see? Uh, I think everybody should get therapy. I agree. I, as I was writing the book, like literally in the same month that I got the email saying, yes, we want you to write this book. I was also diagnosed with clinical depression. Oh man. And, uh, in a way it’s really good at happened to then, because imagine someone who’s been diagnosed with clinical depression trying to get through 2020 without therapy and without antidepressants. So I’m glad it happened to then. So I could kind of go through basic training of living with depression before I got to like the big game that is 2020. Um, that was really at the core of my therapy is this notion of moving away from a mindset of you are a good person or you’re a bad person. And every interaction you have in life is this you being on trial for being a good person or a bad person.
David 00:17:08 And the outcome of re interaction is going to be that it’s like, yeah, that’s a lot of stress to live under, right. Versus a paradigm of your, a person who has these values and your actions can hew closer to these values or further away from these values. And you get to decide right before you make the action, like how close, right? How are you going to behave in this situation? And how close is that to those values, right? That is a very, like a judgment free. Isn’t the right word. So much as like less accusatory and more helpful to yourself and to others approach. I think because now it’s not about, are you a good person or a bad person it’s about, are you living to your values? And that’s honestly the tension that we see, especially in racism. So rather than becoming about I’m a good person or I’m a bad person, it becomes about are the actions I’m taking, aligning to my values.
David 00:18:00 And I think that a lot of what you’re seeing in the racism discussions today and that white fragility and those reactions to that sensitivity is I thought I was a good person. You’re telling me I’m not. I like to see myself as a good person and not racist. You’re telling me I am. And that conflict is what people get defensive about rather than approaching that from, Hey, here are the values I want to adhere to. And they are anti-racist values. You’re telling me that my actions, right, or that I am benefiting from a system that is not aligned to those values. Okay. Now it becomes about how do I go on a journey to get my actions to better Alliance disease, anti-racist values, right? And that’s a less accusatory position and more of a, Hey, let’s work the problem position. And it’s never that easy.
David 00:18:47 Uh, and maybe it shouldn’t be, but, uh, but I do feel like that’s a more positive approach and it’s rooted, at least for me, it’s rooted in therapy. Right. And, and that then I can use. So when I talk about the book, I do talk about, I do a lot of very careful use of we as opposed to you, right. And things like that to sort of say like, Hey, we’re just as susceptible. And when I give examples, like this is one of the key examples I gave when I talk about confirmation bias and how easy it is to leave good design on the table as a sort of a number game where you make a really stupid mistake. And, but the way I frame that example is by, well, if I were taking this test, I do this. Right. But I’d be wrong because blah, blah, blah. Right. And I frame it that way to sort of be like, Hey, look, we are all stupid sometimes, right? Or not even stupid. We all just think too quickly. Sometimes there’s no shame in it. It’s just this thing. Now here, let me give you some tools to help you think slower.
Andrew 00:19:42 I’m so glad you brought up the implicit framing around race where people sort of react. So they’re so sensitive to it. It’s, I mean, it’s, it’s a difficult conversation. It’s a critical conversation. And I mean, critical, not in like critique critiquing of someone necessarily. I mean, it’s important. I just want to underscore that point. If anyone hasn’t read the book, white fragility, please go read that book. What you’re referring to in there is called the good, bad binary learning to see that frame, which I didn’t know was there. It was incredibly helpful. So first of all, just as an aside, if you’re listening to this and you, and that was it all interesting, please go read that book. It’s incredibly important. I think it’s a really good pivot point into framing. I think you and I share a love, video, love, hate relationship for framing, or maybe it’s a F a hate slash fascinated relationship with it. It’s so powerful. It’s so important and it’s pervasive and it kind of controls everything. Can you just talk a little bit more about framing? I think it’s one of those things where people think they understand it, but they don’t fully get it. And I’m hoping you can kind of ground us there. And we’ll just use that as a jumping off point. Sure.
David 00:20:44 So framing the framing effect is in my opinion, the most dangerous bias in the world, and it starts out very innocently. So an example would be walking into a store and you see a sign that says beef, 95% lean and another sign next to it that says beef 5% fat, which one do you buy? The 95% lean, of course. Right. And they’re the same thing. If you think about it for a second, but I framed it in a certain way. So that one option seems more attractive than the other. Um, we could do the same thing with condoms. This kind of is 99% effective. This condom has a 1% failure rate. Yeah.
Andrew 00:21:20 Death rates of drugs, right? It’s this one has killed this many people versus this one to save this many people,
David 00:21:25 But we will, we will make choices based on how it’s been framed. And it’s very difficult to get around that. Um, so that’s, you know, harmless enough if you’re talking about like beef, but what if I say, Hey, would you rather go to Warren April? Or should we go to Warren? May. Yeah. Right. See what I did there. Yeah. Like all suddenly we’re going to war, wait a minute. Or should we arm teachers or not like, what have I completely left now out of that conversation, gun control, right. Or if I say the word, uh, immigration, what’s one of the first words that pops into your head wall. You picture a wall in your head. How did we get there? Cause if you go like six years ago, when I say immigration, we’re talking about a lot of things, but I don’t immediately think of, Oh, I now have to determine whether or not we have a wall.
David 00:22:10 That’s where we have to start that conversation. So framing is hugely impactful and it’s, and, and I think love, hate is a good word because it can also be used for good. So there’s another experiments where you have an audience and you show them a senior citizen behind the wheel of a car and you ask them, should this person drive this car and you get a policy discussion. And some people are like, Oh, old people are bad at everything. Don’t let them drive. And other people are like, that’s ages. How dare you. People should do what they want. And all you learn at the end of that conversation is who’s on what side you can show that same photo to a different audience and ask how might this person drive this car? And what you get is a design discussion. And some people are saying, Oh, wait, if you change the shape of the steering wheel or what if we moved the dashboard and what you learned by the end of that conversation is different ways that person might be able to drive that car.
David 00:22:56 All I did was change a couple words in that question. And I got a completely different conversation. You change the frame, you change the conversation. In fact, I could Iris out even more and say, how can we do a better job of moving people around? Because that’s why that person was in that car in the first place. Uh, cause he was here and he wanted it to be over there. And now if I frame it that way, public transportation is on the table. Right? So how we frame things is hugely impactful. And as, and as practice owners, I think we know that because how might we questions, right? Or sort of endemic to product design and to human centered design. Like, like that’s a thing that’s kind of hot in design thinking.
Andrew 00:23:35 And I’m also glad that that specifically the, how might we, questions has kind of that one seems to have jumped into the mainstream. Like I’ve heard that in rooms now that are not rooms that are thoughtful about design right now. That’s great to hear it because I
David 00:23:46 Think it is a very useful frame, but it is a frame. But to your point about like, it is, it controls everything. The really, so framing effect is dangerous. Cause you can use it to start a war. Right. But the real reason it’s dangerous in my opinion is because when I give those examples, people think they walk into a room, they see a situation and they pick which frame like they’re picking a pair of glasses to put on and view that situation through that frame. What makes the framing effects so dangerous is that you were already wearing glasses. When you walked in the room, you already had a frame and you didn’t even know it. That’s, what’s so dangerous.
Andrew 00:24:24 And I love the quote. You start that, that the user or the, sorry, the self bias chapter with that. I don’t remember it exactly, but it’s the most dangerous, um, the most dangerous belief you hold is the one you don’t know, you hold the hardest,
David 00:24:34 This assumption to sort of tackle is the one you don’t realize you’re making. Yes. There’s a similar one that opens the movie, the big short witches. It’s like, it’s not the thing you don’t know about. That gets you. It’s the thing you’re absolutely sure about.
Andrew 00:24:47 That’s a really nice way to frame a frame framing. Let’s push in on this one because I read the book and as I was thinking about it, you know, some of the things that were in the book, some of the biases, you know, I had heard of before and then some other ones were totally new to me like cognitive fluency. I was like, Oh, I wasn’t even aware of that. But framing I think is kind of the Motherload of this or at least for me, and I’m curious, framing effects, everything we do. Like you said, just a minute ago, right? It affects how we think, how we show up how we design systems. And we’re all designing systems. Whether we can think of ourselves as designers or not. And it thinks it also even affects how we read, how we consume information. Um, I was reading a book, uh, last week about reading a book, a book by the way, called how to take smart notes.
Andrew 00:25:26 Uh, it’s totally changed the way I think about consuming information and processing information highly recommended. And one of the points the author made there was that the foundational skill for critical thinking is the ability to identify and suss out and challenge frames, especially the, the hidden frames. And I was like, Oh man, he’s right. How do you do it though? I, I, that’s the one where I’m like, Oh man, if we can get good at this, we can get even 1% better at finding the frames that we’re trapped in. That would be huge. So how do we do this? How do we get better at this
David 00:25:58 Dependence? So this is why, I mean, sees a whole other frame. This is why the self made man myth is so dangerous is because it makes us think the way to become successful in America is to do everything yourself and to take credit for yourself. Right? It’s we look at bill Gates, we look at a Steve jobs, look at Mark Zuckerberg and we celebrate their genius. We celebrate their wealth and we see it as this very singular thing in part, because to go to a completely different bias availability, heuristic, it’s just easier. It’s just easier to credit one person. Yeah. Like our minds are busy. Oh, don’t tell me that he worked with this other person and that the idea for this came from this other place that I haven’t even heard that person, how many names do I have to remember now? Right. Like we like that myth.
David 00:26:42 But the problem that myth is it makes us think that we need to rely on ourselves and think solely about it. Like the only person that matters is me and I can succeed on my own, which, you know, nothing could be further from the truth. It makes us blind to systems. Right? So you see these stories of people being like, well, I got here on my own. Why should we help out other people? And it’s like, did you though, let’s talk about where you went to school. Let’s talk about the jobs your parents had. Let’s talk about the money, talk about systemic privilege. Right? And that, and again, that’s part of the reason people have trouble with concepts like privilege is they require you to think about systems and systems are so much harder to think about then the soul genius. Can I just think about the soul genius?
David 00:27:20 It’s so much easier. So when we think that way, it’s very hard for us to realize that we need help and help is how we get to challenging our own biases. It’s the most efficient way to challenge your own biases, to bring someone to the table who has no idea what you’re talking about. Right. It has a completely different lived experience and can take one, look at what you’re doing and call bullshit on it. Right. But take one, look at what you’re doing and say, that’s ridiculous. Don’t you know about this, this and this, right? Uh, and then the best way to challenge their biases, to bring another person that, right? Like you create this interdependent chain of people who are able to challenge each other’s biases and bring these different perspectives to the table. And then you get that sort of like blind man and the elephant moment where it’s like, okay, it is actually all of these things at once.
David 00:28:07 If you can just put the puzzle pieces together properly, you get a more realistic picture of what reality is actually like. Cause again, we have this myth that we see reality cleanly and here all hero recommend tornado Landers, the user illusion, user illusion, um, which is just all about how good your brain. It is a full you into thinking. You’re seeing reality as it actually is, but you’re not like I said, many of the decisions you make, you’re making faster than your mind can process. So after the fact, your mind tells you, Oh, you made it. You, you consciously made that decision, Pat you on the head. Good job. Right. When in fact that was totally not what happened. Our minds are so good at rationalizing anything. I think it’s truly incredible. To be honest, this is kind of why I got into psychology in the first place.
David 00:28:51 Cause I started to appreciate, you know, through my wife who had been studying this for years and introduced me to the writings of folks, like all of her Sachs. I remember reading all of her sex, the man who mistook his wife for a hat, which is fascinating. And there’s one Casey brings up of blind sightedness, which is basically someone’s ocular apparatus. Like their eyes basically could no longer take in light. Like they could not physically, they could not see, but the optic nerve, like the actual processing piece was still perfectly intact. And so they thought they could see, and they had a completely convincing environments around them that they could see. And they could describe, they say what w w tell me about the rooms. Right. And they get describing perfect detail that room. But if you threw like a baseball for them to catch would just hit him in the head.
David 00:29:40 Right. So when I realized, Oh my God, our minds are these perfect fooling us machines. I’m like I had at both this moment of panic of like, Oh crap. I can’t really a hundred percent rely on my own brain. Am I in the matrix? Right. And to Holy crap, what an incredible machine, like at the same time, this reverence and awe and absolute terror around the power of the mind. So if you’re starting from that mindset of like, Oh, I can’t totally trust this thing in my head, you start to, you start to look for assistance and say, okay, well maybe if we get enough of us in a room and we can find how many of us actually agree on if that is a clock or if that’s a rutabaga, we can get like a 90% certainty. That’s actually a rutabaga. Okay, good. All right, let’s go on to the next thing. Like that’s what science is supposed to be doing. It’s supposed to be saying, I can’t just trust my own experiments. Let me check if I’m wrong, you all try this other thing. And now let’s try the opposite and see if we still get the same results.
Andrew 00:30:40 Yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s the essence of peer review and repeatability in science, right? Like the point is we’re looking for truth and no one it’s pretty uncommon for one person to be able or, or one, even one group of people to be able to find what is capital T true, hence peer review journals, et cetera, et cetera. You’ve talked a lot about guardrails. What are the types of guardrails they can employ? And what are some of the most common ones that are effective for people? Like what are the high leverage guardrails that it’s like, Hey, I know everyone’s short on time. Start with just doing these.
David 00:31:08 Yeah. And, and whenever I talk about these guardrails, I try to emphasize a budget that if you want these things to last, if you want these things to have meaning, put them in the budget. Cause I think everyone who’s either had clients and been on that side or been on the client side or been in a business or even a startup. Um, you know, that if it doesn’t exist on the budget, it doesn’t exist. Right. Um, you know, we, we were in a capitalist society that you’re generally for-profit businesses, a budget is, um, budget creates reality. And so that is a reason, you know, to start small, if this is something where, you know, you’re not the founder and you’re trying to introduce something, uh, so a great thing you can do at the beginning of a project at the beginning of the sprint, whatever it is, is to have the people on the team, kind of do a kind of an assumption audit where you say, okay, what are our backgrounds?
David 00:32:01 What are our perspectives? What are our lived experiences? And people, you know, only self identify as you feel comfortable. But you know, I am a black man. I grew up in America. Um, I am a full citizen. I had an education. I went to college. I grew up in the North. Uh, I’m fairly wealthy. I have access to the internet. English is my first language. Like all these different things. I am a man. Uh, I’m a black man, right? Like all of these things are going to inform the design, whether you realize it or not. And so you’d get all of those on the table and you ask yourself, how might these, this collective intersectional identity inform the right? And then even more critically say, okay, who’s not here. Right? Anybody, uh, formerly incarcerated here? No. Okay. Good to know anybody who isn’t, uh, English as their first language here.
David 00:32:50 No. Okay. Interesting. Right. When you started listing out some of these alternate identities whose voices will not be heard, right. If we just stick to our own perspective and then you ask the same question, okay. If these folks voices are not heard, how might that absence impact the design? Right. A little speculation there. And then finally you start to ask the question, well, if we wanted to invite those voices, not just invite, but I say, I use the term honor, honor those voices and even give power to those voices. How might we do that? Right. Does that mean doing participatory design? Does that mean like, you know, what, what does that look like for us? So that then you can go forward, but the rest of the project, conscious of the choices you are making and not sort of making a default choice of a, why didn’t you ever talk to that person?
David 00:33:37 It didn’t even occur to me that we could, okay, now it does. And you can still say, Hey, you know what? We just don’t have the time. But if later on you were like, Oh man, we really should talk to that person. You realize that was a conscious choice. Not just a, Oh well, you know, so the reason I like introducing that first, because that is a one to two hour meeting. Okay. I can say, Hey, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve budgeted, uh, 200 hours, a thousand hours for this project. Um, I just want to have those hours to make it a little less likely we’re going to do something messed up, right. Or red team, blue team, red team, blue team is a phenomenon where you have a blue team who kind of does most of the research and, you know, builds like the prototype or maybe gets as far as wire frame, whatever, like stage you want to say, like if we go any further, we’re really now committing funds to this thing right before you to get to whatever that key commitment stage is, where it’s sold more of an idea.
David 00:34:31 You have a red team come in for one day. And the red team’s job is to go to war with the blue team. And they’re there to see all of the good design that was left on the table. All the more efficient solutions that were overlooked, all the harmful things that people didn’t realize this thing might do. If we put it out in the wild, right? All the things that blue team didn’t see, cause they were so in love with their initial idea. And again, I’m asking for one day out of a six month project, right? To make it a little less likely that I put something harmful in the world. And as you see these things start to hopefully improve the design process and improve the product and lower your number of lawsuits, whatever it is that motivates you, you know, um, you start to say, Oh, maybe we should do two red teams like one on month, three and one in month five, or maybe we should have each of these teams do some assumption audits here.
David 00:35:20 Or maybe after the assumption audit, we actually will do some participatory design and start to give some of the power to the groups that are impacted or we’ll add this group to the research study, who we wouldn’t have even thought of before. Right. But that’s how you can sort of slowly. But again, every time you make that decision, write it down, say how much it’s going cost and put it in the budget so that when the project manager is looking to shorten the sprint, they’re like, Oh, I can’t shorten it here. Cause that’s actually considered critical to success. Right. Because that’s what often happens is we say, we want diversity. We say we want inclusive design. Uh, and, but we never budget for it. So guess what? It never happens or gets cut.
Andrew 00:35:57 No glad you said that because one of the questions that I’ve been really wondering is what are the other ways this gets tripped up where good intentions don’t get realized,
David 00:36:07 Uh, it’s the money. I mean, I’ll be perfectly blunt there. I mean, if I am, if I just took $10 million to try to get to my next level with my product, am I going to walk into my shareholders and say, ah, it’s going to take an extra month because we need to make sure we’re not hurting anybody. Am I even going to use language that blunt with the person who just gave me $10 million, right? There is the way that we finance product does not necessarily lend itself to those kinds of decisions they can occasionally or even often puts you at odds with those kinds of decisions. So going back to the documentary that I’m halfway into, right. Which I cannot wait to watch. Yeah. They’re talking to the head of monetization, the former head of monetization for Facebook, who’s brought in, I think maybe a couple of years in to figure out how is this thing gonna make money.
David 00:36:57 Right. And as soon as you do you think of that as an economic decision, but what I think people don’t realize is it’s actually a social justice decision that, that like fundamental concept, that economic decisions are social justice decisions, which we’ve kind of just not seen like actively turned away from for a very, very long time, probably since like anti monopolistic laws were actually on the books in the forties. Like, yeah. So you walk into the Trump thinking, Oh, I need to figure out how to make Facebook money. What’s the most efficient way to do that. Let’s do ads and you think, and now it’s just a question of, well, in order for ads to work, people need to see the ads or people to see the ads and for them to be more targeted because Hey, Google is doing that already. And it’s pretty impressive.
David 00:37:46 Um, we need to do as much as we can about them. So we’re certainly at the right time and you just, it’s easy to get wrapped up in solving that problem. How do I get the most people to see the most ads that are gonna be the most impactful, right? How might we, right. It’s easy to just go down that road and be like, this is what we need to do without thinking for one second about even two chess moves later, what happens, right? Where do you actually, and who are you now beholden to? Because the second you make the choice to say, Oh, this is going to be an ad funded model. You now place the advertisers at a higher category than the users. You now have to satisfy the advertisers first and the user second. And that whole Maxim of if your product is free, you are, the product comes from that, which is a social justice decision, not solely an economic one.
David 00:38:41 Um, that’s, that’s how, that’s why it’s so hard to walk into a situation like that and be like, yeah, but have you considered, um, ethical design? Yeah. You know, someone who I think is a real ally in this, in making this change. And I, I really, uh, love this. It’s I’ve seen the first person I saw say it. I’m not going to say he’s the originator, but it’s the first time I came across it. Are you familiar with Marty Kagan’s work? I don’t think I haven’t done. So Marty Cagan is, uh, he’s often referred to as kind of like the godfather of like modern tech, product management. Um, so hugely influential person, certainly in my career. And I think for a lot of other people, you know, certainly the last like 20 years, if he he’s been one of the people really pushing out and helping educate people about what really great product management looks like, he used to say, there’s four big risks.
David 00:39:31 He started introducing a fifth question, which was, should we do this right. Which was adding like, okay, cool. We’ve, we’ve identified four big risks, but there’s actually a fifth risk. No one’s talking about, which is ethical risk. Should we do this? Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. I think you two are really overlapping there. And I just wanted to call that out because I think there’s a real resonance there. Well, yeah. And I mean, it’s the old, you know, uh, in Malcolm trust park thing, you spent so much time trying to figure if he could do it, he didn’t stop to ask if you should. Right. I mean, and that’s really actually going back to the eighties, right. When the book came out, this is what gets so tricky. Right. Because it’s weird that we have to talk about ethical design as a subcategory.
David 00:40:12 Like, just think about that for a second. That’s weird. We’re saying there’s design. Oh, and for a little extra, you can get ethical design. Right. And it’s like, wait, so what was the design I was doing before? Was I paying for like, we don’t start there. And I think part of this is just growing up in a capitalist society. There’s a reason those, the first four, none of the first four were should we, there is a world in which you actually start with should. Right. That’s a perfect, there’s nothing. There’s no scientific reason you can’t start with. Should, there are economic reasons you’re not incentivized to start with should, but there’s no like your brain doesn’t break. If you start with, should, you could just as easily start there when we go to school and there are business ethics courses. But when we go to school, we don’t spend a year learning about ethics and then learn our trade.
David 00:41:05 We learn our trade. And then in some industries where the trade has really, really hurt people, we have to get licensed. And we have to like learn a little bit about ethics too. Right. So if you want to be a doctor, if you want to be a lawyer, Hey, guess what? Like, you’re going to have to learn lean, learn at least a little bit about ethics, right? That’s a big den now. Um, but we don’t think of starting with the should either in the way, we’re educated about business and product. Uh, and, and this is about business, right? Like it isn’t just product design that suffers this. It’s pretty much any line of making money. You don’t start about learning about that line of making money by learning about ethics. You start by learning about, Hey, here’s how you sell things. Here’s how you determine what will and won’t sell.
David 00:41:45 Right. We start with the money. And I think that’s a fundamental problem. I think inevitably if you start with the money you’re going to hurt somebody and then have to backtrack and be like, Oh, well tell me about that ethics thing again. Right? And now you’re in a position where you’ve built this thing that runs in part, on being unethical and treating people poorly that, you know, have to like figure out how to decouple without undercutting your business and then rebuild somehow. And again, this gets back to the question before you’re asking about like, what kind of pushback do you get? The pushback is you’re going to ruin my business. In fact, the really dark pushback is, um, I’m kind of making money off of being unethical. Can you like pump the brakes on this whole ethical shit?
Andrew 00:42:30 Wow. This might be a leap too far, but it’s where my mind is going right now. I think I’m hearing a question being asked by people in all sorts of domains about how do we shift the frame from doing less harm to doing more good. Yeah. This is actually my personal issue with like I have spent the last four years of my life working on technology to make the environment and human environment interfaces better. But I personally have issue. I take issue with the framing of that entire conversation as sustainability because in a world framed by sustainability, everything’s about minimizing damage. And so the best you could ever do in that frame is zero. The best you could do is no harm what I like a lot better. And that just to make this a, give a concrete example of shifting the frame from sustainability to regenerative to, okay, let’s take the ceiling off this thing, let’s say the best is no longer zero, zero is the baseline. And so that’s, that’s something that I think is sort of foundational to my own thinking. And it just, it just became explicit as I was listening to you. I just want, first of all, thank you for saying whatever you said, but I just think that’s really interesting, right? Of like everything we’re seeing here for me, that’s how I’m framing it. What do you see?
David 00:43:36 I see exactly that. So I’ll give you an example from race. So right now we’re living in an age where the George Floyd’s, the Brianna Taylor’s. Um, the, the, that ancestry of, of murder of black people is getting more spotlight than it has previously. It was always there, but now there was a focus on it. Like we have never seen before. There’s a level of protests. There’s a level of, in some small pockets change that we had not seen before. And that is good. But what it is driven by mostly is guilt and shame. And the way it positions black people is as victims. It positions them as the metaphor I’ve been using is that it’s sort of like when you’re walking down the street and you see somebody that you owe money, you’re convicted in your heart, that you owe the money and more locked likely than not.
David 00:44:28 You don’t actually want to see them. You’d duck into a, you like that. Like you don’t, you don’t have a good feeling about that person. You feel beholden to them and it’s good cause you are, but you don’t love them. You don’t want good things for them necessarily. You really just want them to leave you alone. You don’t want to be bothered with the feelings that that’s bringing up. So you try to think how quickly, how little can I give to make this go away to make that person not have a reason to be angry at me. Right? That’s where that defensive white fragility posture comes from. How can I feel good about myself in the presence of this person? What’s the least I can do to feel good about myself in the presence of this person, which frankly is an improvement over. Oh, it’s okay.
David 00:45:11 If that person dies, that’s where we were before. Right? We’re still there in a lot of ways, but more than we were before, we’re at that, Oh, I owe that guy money. Right? Which again, I’ll take the money. If we want to start, the reparations conversation wants to do it. But, but that is a, that is, that is a zero. Let’s just get to zero, like to give you an environment of example with, with black people, right. And that is a better place, but where would I, where I would love us to be is the, I love black people. I value black people. I want good things for black people. I think black people are beautiful, right? Because the things that we think are beautiful, we do good things for proactively, right? We decide that we’re going to invest in those things proactively without having to be shown pictures of dead black people and, and, and pictures of people who are being murdered by the systems we benefit from.
David 00:46:05 Right. We don’t need that to motivate us to do good for black people in a world where black is beautiful. That’s why things like into the spider verse or black Panther was such pivotal moments, right? Uh, for a pop culture fan, like me to see that crosses were one of the most successful movies of all time centered blackness and gave me a vision of black superiority, like the central conflict in that movie. I can’t tell you how subversive it is that the central conflict in that movie was just how much black and should we impose on white on the, on the, on the white world. But that’s really kind of what the central conflict of the movie is. It’s like, should be forced on the world or should we just give it generously? You know?
David 00:46:49 Um, but that notion, right, that’s where I want us to get to that. To me is the version of saying like, Hey, we are going to do something positive versus we’re going to try to just stop doing bad. Right. And I think that takes real sacrifice, but it’s coming from a completely different place. It’s coming from a Colombian frame, right? It’s not the frame of, Oh, I owe that guy money. So now I gotta figure out how to make it right. And I’d rather do it with as little effort as possible. Cause this feels uncomfortable to a place of, Oh my God, that man is beautiful. Tell me how I can. It’s being a fan. Think about fan behavior, fan behavior, you take something you love and you spend hours of your life watching that thing, talking to that, not that thing, making art about that thing, putting effort into, uh, worshiping and, and enjoying and, and reveling in that thing.
David 00:47:40 Right. Um, and so nobody makes the MCU the most successful franchise in the world because they feel guilty about how they treated Hawkeye. No, they love the MCU. They love these characters. They love these stories. They argue about these stories and this spends lots and lots of money on those stories without having to be guilted into it because they love it. I want people to be a fan of blackness, right? I want people to be a fan of all this diversity that we have, that is a better place than feeling guilty and afraid of it.
Andrew 00:48:17 Absolutely. Thank you so much for that. I want to underscore everything David just said. And I also just want to encourage anyone listening to this, to think about that frame. Like, you know, one of the things I’m wondering about after reading your book is how do I challenge frames? How do I see the frames more? And how do I challenge them? My interpretation of the main thing we can do to overcome the negative effects of bias is to slow it down, right? Slow down our thinking in some way. So we can get past that little shortcut. And one of the things I’m trying to figure out for myself is how do I see the frames that I can’t, you know, that I’m blind to right now? And how do I slow it down? How do I challenge those trains? And so I just, one of the tools I found are I am finding to be useful for that, that I encourage all of us to just try on, to see what happens is, Hmm, am I, am I motivated to do less bad or more good? I think that might be an interesting one to try on.
David 00:49:09 Well, the reason I’m really hopeful about this whole project is that, you know, I am identifying some really nasty shit, but when I point toward the future, I’m not doing it alone either. There’s a huge community of people doing amazing work. And like the, the resources section of my book is actually the most valuable part of the book. Like you can skip all you can, so you can skip any bladder and just read the resources. Like that’s something that these are the people doing the actual work. Um, so there’s like design justice network just to name one key player and all of that. But, um, the, the problems I’m pointing out around frames around confirmation bias for thousands of years, we’ve been building tools to fight this. So we act like, Oh my God designed to suddenly come to this reckoning moment where they realize there’s this thing called ethics.
David 00:49:59 How, how can, how can we ever produce an ethical company? How can we ever produce an ethical product? If only we had tools, if only people had been thinking about ethics for two thousand three thousand four thousand years, right before we got to this and had literal questions to ask yourself that have been tried and many different industries and many different disciplines and made them more ethical and less harmful over time, even war has had people try to find out who to ethic more ethically, kill each other, uh, with more thought than we’ve put into designing products. So, um, like think about it. There are rules for war, more than there are rules for design that have to do with ethics, right? There’s no Geneva convention for design. Like, think about that for a second. Let me put it that way. Right. But that’s what gives me hope is that we don’t have to build the wheel from scratch.
David 00:50:49 We don’t have to invent ethics to confront us. We don’t have to infect, uh, more ethical products flows. There’s already two or three different key inclusive design frameworks just circulating out there right now you can, you can Google inclusive design and get results. That’s the thing you can Google ethical design and get results. That’s the thing like this, isn’t, I’m not this snarky, but when people ask me about ethical design, I could just be like, well, let me Google that for you. You haven’t really looked to be a jerk about it, but, but that’s, but that gives me hope. That gives he’s like, if I can, I can identify the problem here and talk about these biases and talk about these things and say, Hey, guess what? There’s hope people have been working on this and other fields for a long time. Our job is to adapt the wheel and encourage others to use the wheel, but we don’t have to invent it and we don’t have to do it alone. Like again, going back to that notion, it would be a bad idea for us to do it alone. We, if we’ve learned nothing else, it’s anything we build. We need to build with other people, preferably people with less power than we have.
Andrew 00:51:46 I thank you for saying that. And, and especially the fact that two lessons that I’m taking away from this conversation about how to do this better are number one, to realize that I’m not alone. Know if you just said, there’s a lot of people out there trying to do things better and we need each other. So find each other. And secondly, is that, um, I actually a really subtle one is it reminds me to just lean into as much as I can having a growth mindset, right? Thinking about, you know, those things like going back to the good, bad binary, right? It’s like, Oh, if everything I do is framed in this battle for worthiness, uh, and in my, uh, my self worth is on the line with every single thing I do in that fixed mindset kind of way, like, damn, that’s going to be exhausting.
Andrew 00:52:29 And that doesn’t, that doesn’t bode well. So to like lean back into the growth mindset and that your value as a person is not because of how good you are at something right now. Right? Like for me, I, everything, one thing I’ve done for myself that has been helping me in this practically speaking is to emotionally reward myself for showing up fully. Even if I completely fuck it up by first criteria for, did I feel successful today? Was, did I fully show up? And that for me is criteria one. And it’s very powerful. So I’d love to kind of shift an answer to close out the conversation here. A couple of rapid fire questions. We’ve already covered so much ground, but these are just a couple of fun, fun questions. I asked everybody their short questions. Your answers don’t have to be a, so the first one is just, what’s a quote that is important to you. And what about it speaks to you? So,
David 00:53:16 Um, and I believe this is a former former yesterday’s, but, um, so Alex Hillman gave me
Andrew 00:53:21 The best piece of advice I’ve ever, ever gotten. And that is, it is
David 00:53:26 Impossible to listen and react at the same time. That has stayed with me since I heard it in 2013. And I’ve practiced active listening ever since. But if you think about that quote, right, like it feels true. I hear you’re at a party. You’re talking to somebody and they start telling a story and you hear the first bit of the story and immediately react. And in your brain, you’re thinking, Oh, I’ve got a great quote about this story. I’ve got a great story of my own. That likes even better than this story. I can’t wait to, I can’t wait for this person to shut up so I can say my thing. Right. And while all of that processing is going on, you stopped listening. You really didn’t hear you weren’t present. As you said before for you, you weren’t showing up anymore for that conversation.
David 00:54:04 Right. So you have to, again, going back to things that go on autopilot, do you have to actively shut that shit down and say, no, I am just going to stay. I’m just going to be here and listen to what this person has to say. That’s all I’m going to do. And I have to look literally like I have a heads up display in my head, or I just have the words to listen. Right. Just sort of over, over that, just to just remind myself, shut up, actually pay attention to what this person is saying. And what’s amazing about that is I have seen people’s body language change when they realize they’re actually being listened to. Right. And they just like you more because odds are, you’re the first person to do that for them all day. Right. Cause we don’t listen to each other. Right. But I find that that has served me better than probably any other quote I can think of. And I can tell you that, like I can definitely think of situations where I wish I had talked less. I can almost never think of a situation where I wish I had talked to more good point.
Andrew 00:54:55 So next question is what is a question that you would have the listener start asking themselves? You know, if there’s something where you could just like plant a bug in the listener’s ear and say, Hey, just ask yourself this question every day, or every time you walk into a meeting or whatever, what would you have them ask themselves?
David 00:55:11 How is this going to impact someone less powerful than I am? Okay. I think that’s good for business decisions, design decisions. It forces you to start to add to a acknowledge. There are people less powerful than you and that your actions can and will impact them. So I think that that’s a good one. Just to get you in the habit of thinking outside of your immediate zone. Perfect.
Andrew 00:55:33 One question, I just, I’m always fascinated to learn how the people I’m talking to sort of got where they are. You know, when you think back about who or what has really shaped you, who’s really shaped how you show up and influenced you who or what comes to mind.
David 00:55:44 So there’s the entire acknowledgement section of my book, but the, the, the, the, the main ones that come to mind, there’s my mother who absolutely insisted that I get an education, um, and went into a great deal of debt to make sure I did and who at the same time encouraged me that I could be whoever or whatever I want it to be. Uh, and those were vital, vital things to instill in someone so young, uh, and at an early age, just to sort of, you know, get that for free and then operate from there. Um, so I will always, I mean, that’s, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what you did for me, but those, in terms of like, you know, my success, I think the key factors, uh, and this is my wife, who’s been incredibly supportive who sort of opens my mind, has been like there for me in all of these decisions, um, throughout, um, and, you know, there’s every single thing, you know, again, showing up every single day, showing up for me in ways that, you know, make my life so much better.
David 00:56:41 And men, you know, going back to where we talking about for, she was one of the early ones to recognize, Oh, maybe you should see if you might be suffering from clinical depression. It’s like, she rang that bell. And I think God, she did. Um, and my son, who’s amazing and, and, uh, you know, challenging and smart and funny and kind, and all of these things like, uh, like I think he, I think he influences me in ways. I don’t realize cause you think of yourself as influencing your children. But I think that it’s, it’s a two way street, I think maybe even more so in the other direction. Um, but those are the names that really immediately jumped to mind, but there’s been so many people again, I want to deconstruct the single made man myth. There’ve been so many people who’ve been critical in big and small ways to me being literally sitting in this chair, talking to you right now.
Andrew 00:57:29 Awesome. Well, I am so glad they did because it’s been an absolute pleasure for me and a privilege. And I’m so glad to get to know you better to spend this time with you. So first of all, thank you. Thank you for what you’re doing for your work. Keep it up and just sort of in closing out, Dave, what would you like to leave the audience with?
David 00:57:42 Uh, honestly, the first thing that comes to mind is support black business. Like that’s been my closing, a lot of things going back to the like, love black people thing. I think right now, one of the best move best acts of allyship you can make is to empower the black community economically, especially in a time of COVID. I’m gonna encourage folks when we can send us out to go to real a rebuilt black business.com, which will give you 14,000 options for supporting black business. But the challenge I’ve been giving people is okay in the next week, uh, you know, buy from 10 black businesses, just make it happen. Right. Awesome. Now I’ll come up with some kind of reward for you.
Andrew 00:58:22 Fantastic. Thank you. And for listeners who want to reach out to you, engage with your work, where would you like them to go?
David 00:58:28 The number one place is David Dylan, thomas.com. You can buy my book there. You can have hire me to come speak at your thing there. You can just say, Hey, let’s chat there. You can get my newsletter. They’re all. It’s all one stop shopping for me. Uh, David Dylan, Thomas doctor.
Andrew 00:58:43 Awesome. And we will absolutely link to all that stuff in the show notes. And I can also say as a reader, please go get the book. If you have enjoyed this conversation, we have just barely scratched the surface of some of the depth in the book. It’s well worth your time. It’s actually a quick read too, which is something you don’t often, you cannot often say for something that goes to the depth that this conversation and topic does. So do yourself a favor. Do the world a favor, go get the book and read it actually more important link. Don’t just get it, read it. Well, David, first of all, again, thank you. And an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks.
David 00:59:11 You too. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.