Jesse Richardson: This is the great battle. It's not between good and evil. It's between the aspect of our psyche and our emotional reality that wants to dominate and win, and the aspect of our psyche that wants to cooperate and connect. It's not AI that's going to take your job, it's someone using AI that's going to take your Job. Over the last 300 years, the amount of pirates has been steadily decreasing whilst the temperature of the atmosphere has been increasing. So therefore, pirates cool the world and global warming is a hoax welcome to
Nathan Bush: Add to cart, Australia's leading e commerce
[Voiceover]: podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail.
Nathan Bush: Here's your host, Bushy. Welcome to another episode of Add to Cart. I'm Bushie and I'm joining you from the land of the terrible people, otherwise known as Brisbane, Australia on Add to cart. We welcome everyone to share and listen
[Voiceover]: to e commerce stories.
Nathan Bush: The more diverse the better. I want to especially welcome the traditional owners and the original storytellers of the land that we are on, our indigenous and Torres Strait Islander listeners to join us in our e commerce conversations and our community. Now, speaking of community, we are excited to have the Add to Cart campus open for access. What's the Add to Cart campus? I hear you say. Put simply, it's a learning community for e commerce professionals and it feels like it's what we've been building at Add
[Voiceover]: to Cart for many years.
Nathan Bush: Free to Join Campus has lunch and Learn webinars, the latest e commerce resources, a job board, and a heap of ways to learn with industry professionals and your peers. Whether you're an e commerce manager, a founder, or simply finding your path to a career in e commerce, we'd love
[Voiceover]: to see you in there.
Nathan Bush: We register to join campus@addtocart.com what's your success rate when you are trying to convince someone of an alternative opinion? I have to admit that as I've gotten older, I've cared less and less about convincing others of my opinion. I actually saw a meme the other day that said, if someone now says one plus one equals five, I'm now more likely to go okay then and walk away. But the fact is that in e commerce you there are many times where we have to convince people of our ideas, work through problems together, and unpack where other people are coming from. It is crucial and a great skill to have. But what if we're doing all of this with broken brain patterns? What if we could remove biases from our thinking to unlock new opportunities that we would have normally missed. As you might have guessed, today's episode is a bit different to our normal episodes, but it is one where 60 Minutes might not only have a profound impact on your e commerce business, but also your e commerce career and potentially how you approach life. Jesse Richardson is the founder and the CEO of Kitted Thinking Tools and the School of thought. Around 14 years ago, armed with a background in design, advertising and a man crush on Stephen Fry, which in itself is a great story, Jesse began a journey to educate the world on critical thinking, reason and understanding for the greater good. It started with a Creative Commons poster and deck of cards, grew into a crowdfunded offering, and is now a SaaS platform and a framework for businesses to harness the benefits of higher order thinking. Backed by some of the Internet's biggest thinkers such as the founder of DuckDuckGo and Harvard Psychology professors, this is one of our longer conversations on Add to cart, but this is a topic that is so fascinating and and Jesse is such an amazing explainer of complicated concepts,
[Voiceover]: I wanted to make the most of him.
Nathan Bush: In today's episode, Jesse shares the most common logical fallacies and how they work in our minds. He unpacks how to most effectively brainstorm as a team and gives us permission on why we should all unleash our inner 4 year old look out. There are a ton of resources in this chat if you want to find out more about any of the concepts that Jesse touches on. And for those of you interested in getting your hands on Jesse's cards and toolkits, Add to Cart listeners have a 50% discount, which you will get towards the end of the conversation.
[Voiceover]: So listen out for that.
Nathan Bush: I actually went and bought myself a set straight after this conversation. So thanks to our partners, Shopify plus and Deliver in Person. Here's our conversation with founder and CEO of Kitted Thinking Tools and the School of Thought, Jesse Richardson. Jesse, welcome to ADD to cart.
[Voiceover]: It is great to have you here. We had the pleasure of working together a fair few years ago, but your journey since has just been fascinating. How do you describe your personal mission, what you're doing today?
Jesse Richardson: So the mission of the nonprofit, which is kind of like a manifestation of, I guess my own personal mission is to popularize critical thinking, reason and understanding. That's kind of the distilled thing, the billboard, if you will, of what I guess we're trying to do, in a
Nathan Bush: nutshell, I want to dive into what critical thinking is, but your background, when
[Voiceover]: we worked together, gosh, almost 15 years ago, we were in advertising agencies. I was in strategy. You were heading up Creative Concepts. How did you go from the creative world of advertising into going, actually, I'm going to specialize in critical thinking?
Jesse Richardson: So it was actually a weird epiphany moment in a fish and chip shop that happened a few years before we met each other. And what happened was I was feeling kind of despairing about the state of the world more generally.
[Voiceover]: Is that because of the fish and chip shop?
Jesse Richardson: No, the fish and chip shop was really good. In fact, it was like it was fish lovers Rosalie can recommend. And I was biting into this fish burger and I was thinking about all these things that were kind of despairing, I thought, at the time. And essentially I was thinking, oh, we really need to teach the next generation how to think for themselves or we're all doomed. With the amount of change that's happening in the world, technologically and otherwise, if we don't kind of get these basics right of having people be independent thinkers, then the center will not hold it. Things are going to fall apart. And the epiphany part was thinking, well, not only is that kind of like maybe a relevant insight, because I've been interested in rationality and philosophy and all these sorts of subjects for a long time, just as my own sort of personal thing, but I thought, hang on. What we do in advertising and design is simplify things to make them digestible, to make them popularized, to make them engaging, to make them user experience, design. What if we took that academic world of understanding, critical thinking and reason and logic and scientific thinking and mashed that together with what we know from our practice within communications and creative industries to make critical thinking popularized, to put it in a way that was actually engaging, instead of just walls of text and academic tomes and elitist kind of white ivory towers of inaccessibility. So that was kind of the thing. That was the lightning bolt moment where I thought, oh, I should do something about this. So I had this. I had this grandiose and completely unrealistic vision for a Creative Commons online philosophy course that would be free to everyone in the world and would be crafted really beautifully and anyone could access it. And it would be, you know, kind of like, Carl Sagan is one of my intellectual heroes. And it would just be a distillation of that for critical reasoning. But I thought, that's going to cost millions of dollars. We need a proof of concept. So when I was working with you, some of our colleagues there, son Meaden and Andrew Smith, helped me out for a couple of months and we did a proof of concept for this kind of bigger idea to say, well, what if we took some of these academic concepts and made them accessible? And that was your logical fallacy is.com which took 24 of the most common fallacies of logic, things like ad hominem or appeal to nature, and put them into a single simple sentence that any 10 year old could understand with some nice graphics and animations and he could tag people in an online argument. And that went immediately viral and went nuts. That's awesome.
[Voiceover]: So I want to get into that
Nathan Bush: was saying this was.
[Voiceover]: Is it 15 years ago? 10 years ago?
Jesse Richardson: Yeah. What kind of talking that 2011, I think was. So, yeah, be about there 13, 14
Nathan Bush: years ago and saying you were kind of looking at the state of the
[Voiceover]: world and going, I'm just worried about how people are thinking. There's so much that has happened since then. Obviously we've had Covid, we've had elections, we've had uprisings left, right and center. How has your view on the world changed since since then? Are you more optimistic? Are you less?
Jesse Richardson: I had this idea at the start when we founded the nonprofit, that if we taught critical thinking in schools, that that could be enough to push the needle and make a real difference. And I still believe that's a really important thing. But something happened around 2016 when Trump Brexit happened, and it sort of, that shook me a bit and I started really reflecting on, hang on, what are we actually doing here and how effective is it? Take a zoomed out strategic view. And the takeout from that for me was that we are emotional and social creatures first, and rational creatures very much second. And so teaching critical thinking skills and the tactics, learning about fallacies and biases and ways to interpret media and media literacy, and these sorts of things are really important and shouldn't be forsaken. But it's really the mindset that we go into things with in the first place that really matters because you can weaponize fallacies and use them to close down arguments and, you know, be more irrational if you're, you know, that way inclined. It really takes intellectual humility and being honest with yourself to be able to be receptive and to progress both personally and collectively to a better place. And so we've sort of shifted our focus in the time in between. But certainly my fear that things might go to hell on a handbasket hasn't exactly been disconfirmed. And as far as whether I'm. I can't help but be an optimistic person. That's just my disposition, but rationally speaking, yeah, I'm pretty worried about a few things. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: You know that nervous feeling you get when you place your checked in luggage on that airport baggage machine? You're kind of just hoping that your luggage arrives at your destination on time and in perfect condition. It's the same in E commerce. You place a lot of trust in your last mile partners to deliver the final crucial element of the customer experience. Now imagine you are a premium product with over 100 years of customer experience expectations. That nervousness increases a lot. That's why Samsonite has chosen Deliver in Person for their reliable on time delivery to drive outstanding shopping experiences, enhance brand reputation, and significantly improve key delivery metrics. I mean, you can never be too careful when it comes to making sure luggage arrives on time and undamaged. Don't settle for less. Make your last mile experience the first thing that customers remember. Learn more about the incredible performance uplifts Samsonite has experienced since working with Deliver in person@deliverinperson.com case study Samsonite what I
[Voiceover]: love is that I think a lot of your thinking can be applied to how we obviously approach life, but also approach business and decision making. And we're going to dive into that. But I want to pick up on the journey because you've also got an amazing e commerce story here with some of the products. So you mentioned there that you set up School of Thought as a nonprofit and a Creative Commons project. Can we start there for people who may not know around Creative Commons what was the decision to go down that path rather than commercialize it from the start? And what is Creative Commons?
Jesse Richardson: Right. So Creative Commons essentially is a way to publish things such that other people can use them. And there's different Creative Commons licenses. We publish our materials at School of Thought under an attribution and non commercial license so people can use it in a business, but you can't just resell that as your own sort of thing and you have to give attribution and that's it. But other than that, people are free to download our resources, print them, use them in their school or university or whatever else. And the idea I guess behind it was altruistic in the first place. I was, you know, wanting to do this to try and help the world and do a thing that was good to balance out some of my ethical karma from working in advertising.
Nathan Bush: And so haven't done it.
Jesse Richardson: Yeah, it's a long road. But the reality of it was after we launched, we had all these posters for sale for free and we Said to people, you know, download these and get them printed locally. And we don't have to pay us anything, we're just making it freely available. And a bunch of people contacted me and said, this is really great, but it's going to cost me like you know, 80 bucks to print one version of this poster out at, you know, a one size or, you know, 24 by 36 inches. Why don't you get a run of them done and then you can make some money for your non profit. And we could, you know, and I was like, oh yeah, listen to your customers, that's a good idea. So we did that and they started selling, you know, relatively well. And then some other customers contacted us and said, oh, we did this. Another solution, a sister site for the fallacies, one called On Biases, on Cognitive Biases at your bias is an Icelandic domain for those in the know. And it was also went immediately viral and did really well. And we had people contacting us saying, why don't you make a deck of critical thinking cards because this would be really useful for me in my business, in my school, whatever. And we were like, oh yeah, we should listen to our customers. And so we did a Kickstarter and that went really well, raised I think about 6, 78 grand US and then we've been selling those like hotcakes ever since. We've sold about two and a half million dollars worth of them now.
[Voiceover]: Some two and a half million. That's amazing.
Nathan Bush: Tell us about those critical thinking cards
[Voiceover]: for people who haven't seen them. Give us an idea of what's in there. What are your favorite cards to help shape critical thinking?
Jesse Richardson: So they're essentially 24 fallacies of logic and 24 cognitive biases and three game cards which are ways that you can use them. And some examples of them might be like the appeal to nature fallacy, which is thinking that just because something's natural, therefore it's good, Right? And obviously natural things can be things like arsenic or murder, and they're not necessarily very good things. So the fact of something being natural doesn't necessarily mean that it's good. But we have this heuristic, we have this shortcut in thinking. We think, well, whole foods and natural things are better than plastics and various things that might be toxic to us. And that's a fine heuristic for us to have. But what happens with a lot of erroneous thinking is that we take these things that are true a lot of the time and presume them to be true all of the time. And what we need to do is just be a little bit more careful in our thinking and go, well, hang on, let's think about this for a minute reflectively and evaluatively. And then we get a better picture of things. So that's one example. Another example might be something like the false cause fallacy, which is thinking that just because one event follows another, that the previous event is therefore the cause of the following event. So an example that we use in the cards for this is that over the last 300 years, the amount of pirates has been steadily decreasing whilst the temperature of the atmosphere has been increasing. So therefore pirates cool the world and global warming is a hoax. So you see the kinds of errors in logic that can be easily made within that. So that's a couple of examples of fallacies.
[Voiceover]: I like that theory though. I just want to believe in that theory.
Jesse Richardson: It's a more convenient theory for us to believe in a convenient truth, as it were. And so, yeah, you can choose whatever you want to believe, it's up to you. But I would recommend that we all attempt to have a more reality based belief system. I think there might be some pretty severe ramifications if we don't. But an example of some biases that I find particularly relevant, one is called the curse of knowledge bias. And this is really relevant for when we're trying to teach anything to anybody else or onboard somebody because we know something, it seems simple and obvious to us and we can't imagine ourselves not knowing that information anymore. And as a consequence we tend to skirt over concepts that seem simple to us because we've been swimming in that water for a long time. But if we remain mindful that we were once upon a time not cognizant of those things and didn't quite understand them, being able to go slow enough that people can really understand and checking in on them importantly and getting feedback and going, does that make sense? And could you tell me what you take out of that as a process so that we're making sure that people actually understand is a really instructive way to apply, you know, biases that we might have in our professional lives.
[Voiceover]: Got such an amazing gift to be able to summarize these concepts really simply for people. And obviously that's shown in the success that you've had with School of Thought and kidded thinking tools. So thank you for explaining that everyone that you explained. Then I was like, I was thinking about my own scenarios and go, oh, yep, I can think of a scenario where I've had That situation, I've got the set of cards in the drawer at my desk, which I pull out occasionally when I'm trying to challenge or even think about some of the questions that I can ask here. It's like, they're really great thought provokers and I love having them on hand.
Nathan Bush: Tell us about.
[Voiceover]: You mentioned virality a couple of times there. And obviously a key part of this is the attribution that you ask for because you give so generously. Do you find that by giving first, that helped in terms of the virality and people felt that they had to get behind you and push this out for you?
Jesse Richardson: Yeah, that's definitely part of it. And just like people think of, like, sales funnels as being, you know, you've got to try and push someone into a sale, like, you know, either immediately or gently over time. But a better way of looking at that maybe is how can you offer value to your customers immediately, such that one, you establish trust and a value exchange that you. You can then build upon. So if you give your customers, for instance, some sort of freemium model where they're getting something of value to start with, and they can see that there's real quality, thoughtfulness, craft, whatever it is that they're looking for as a benefit behind it, they're going to be a hell of a lot more inclined to actually become a sales conversion for you down the line. I think that we should think about funnel marketing much more in terms of value propositions rather than, you know, just trying to herd, you know, sheep into the slaughter, as it were.
[Voiceover]: I love it. I love it. And I suppose it helps, too, when you get voiceovers from people like Stephen Fry.
Jesse Richardson: Yeah, that didn't hurt. So he. When we first launched the Fallacy site, we were on, like, a VPS server, and we'd be like, I don't know, we'll just chuck this out there, see how it goes, you know. And within, like, two days, it hit the front page of Reddit and Stephen Fry tweeted it and Jimmy Wales tweeted it and it melted our servers. So we had to, you know, scramble to get the back end up and running again. And so we, Stephen Fry, very kindly, after we reached out to him and thanked him for that, agreed to do the voiceover for one of our videos recently, which was probably the best moment of my whole life, because he's the literal embodiment of everything I love about human beings. He's intellectually astute and has got an amazing sense of humor, and he's just such A humane, kind, thoughtful, amazing human being that I've idolized for most of my life. So, yeah, that was a trip, man.
[Voiceover]: That's amazing.
Nathan Bush: Did you get to work with him
[Voiceover]: directly or was it kind of through his.
Jesse Richardson: No, through his people. I asked and they're like, no, Stephen shan't be. There's actually, there's the lady who was like his media person. Her name, I'm going to name drop her. And she's a lovely woman, but her name is Louise Fenimore and she's ever so British. And, you know, she's very, very kind about it, but you can just imagine, like, the prose of her emails. It's like attached, warmly, a crumpet. It was just like, just a very. So she very gently said, no, you shan't be directing Stephen directly. He will do a voiceover for you and you'll be very happy that that occurred. And I said, yes, that's. That's correct, Luis. Thank you very much.
[Voiceover]: That's very on brand for him, though, isn't it?
Jesse Richardson: Yeah, he's an introvert as well. You know, he doesn't like dealing with human beings all that much. And I have to say, like, he. Obviously, he's like. I would say him and Morgan Freeman, possibly the two best voiceover artists in the world as far as the voices that you want behind things. And so the script that we had for him, he just nailed, like, better than I could have imagined it on the first take. So it's not like he needed direction. It was more just from my own gratification that I wanted to meet him. But maybe one day we'll see.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, amazing. So I've noticed too, there's been. Obviously you've got school of thought, which is Creative Commons with a bit of E commerce attached to it, significant E commerce attached to it. And now there's a movement towards what you've launched with kitted thinking tools. And that seems more focused on the commercial sector, the business sector. Is that correct?
Jesse Richardson: That is correct. So it's funny, we have these presumptions about ourselves that I've been working in advertising for 25 years now, and there's a pretense of thinking, you know, what's going on. But the reality is that the people that know the most are humble enough to realize that they don't. It's the Dunning Kruger effect. And so we had been in market with these critical thinking guards for a couple of years, and we did a Creative Thinking Card Cards version as well. And I got an email one day from this guy saying he was an investor in London and he said, oh, you thought about doing like a more business to business version of these cards, you know, because they're like, the cards are just like little playing card size ones, you know, and they're great and you know, lots of people obviously like them. So I got this email a couple of years ago from this investor, an investment banker in London and he said, have you thought about doing some business to business versions of these critical thinking cards you've got? And I read it and I was like ah, I get a lot of emails and I was like. And I wrote him just a polite reply saying not really what we're about, we're a non profit so it's not particularly relevant for us. But thanks for the suggestion. Anyway, he wrote back and he said, oh, would you be interested to have us catch up on Skype and we could just talk this through because I really think you've got something here. And I was like, ah, yeah, I guess too closed off to things. So anyway, long story short, six months later he had convinced me to quit my day job and take on some investment and start a new company that was doing these business to business decks. And the initial ideas was would do a couple of decks of cards and see how they go. And that turned into a three year odyssey in which we developed nine products with different business verticals and a full software as a service platform that publishes everything under Creative Commons and a newsletter called Mental Model Mondays and a whole bunch of other stuff that we've just launched a couple of weeks ago.
[Voiceover]: So that's an amazing transformation and I love that you, you didn't close your thinking off and it led to this amazing opportunity. How has that changed your world now in terms of where you're focusing your time? Are you spending most of your time now on kitted thinking tools trying to change the thinking of business and commercial enterprises rather than the general population that you were doing previously?
Jesse Richardson: I have a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew and then just chewing really hard. So we're attempting to do both things at once and focusing on just recently on KITTED over everything else just because we're launching. But KITTED is a sponsor of School of Thought. So I took the investment on with the proviso that 5% of our profits go back to School of Thought to further that mission to popularize critical thinking, reason and understanding. So that was kind of always the basis of it. And now we're looking to essentially we've done obviously our Due diligence in finding, you know, we've got obviously product market first it to some extent as well with the critical thinking cards, but we're looking at these different business verticals and we're essentially just after launch, we're now testing a lot of our different products, creative landing pages, channels to identify lowest hanging fruits and scalability. And we'll be working on that over the coming months and years to get it to a point where we've scaled up and we have pretty ambitious targets that we're hoping to hit and we'll see how it goes. You know, don't count any chickens before they hatch. But we're hopeful that this is going to strike some good chords with a few different audiences.
[Voiceover]: You've got some pretty amazing investors behind you.
Jesse Richardson: Yeah, a couple of them. So one of our investors is Gabriel Weinberg, who is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo. I noticed actually that he bought some critical thinking posters and cards some years ago, maybe 10 years ago, and I just reached out to him and said, hey, I'm a big fan of what you're doing in the privacy space. And you know, he said, oh great. So anyway, we caught up on Zoom and you know, I've been mates ever since, so. And then, yeah, when he saw what we were doing, he wrote a book called Super Thinking the Big Book of Mental Models can recommend. And so he's been very interested in this mental model space. He also published a medium article on mental models that got a lot of traction. And so I've. With kitted thinking tools, what it's doing is taking a lot of those mental models that are used and making them digestible and modular so that they can be used by businesses. There's a really nice quote by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's second in command, the late great Charlie Munger, who said essentially everyone should learn the basic mental models. You should have a lattice work of mental models in your head to be a worldly wise person and that that will be the most important thing you learn in terms of business capability and strategic nous to be able to navigate the world. Once you've understood the fundamentals of physics and psychology and economics. These basic principles, not the deep theory, but the underlying principles that govern the universe. You'll be able to apply that in what he called a multimodular way. And that phrase, multimodular way was a big part of the inspiration for, for what we're doing with KITTED and taking all of these thinking tools. And we've got Four different categories of thinking tools and making them into cards so that you can digital cards and physical cards that you can put together in different ways to serve different purposes.
[Voiceover]: What do you mean by multi modular? So what is a modular thinking tool?
Jesse Richardson: So essentially a modularity is just having things in parts so that you can put them together. So Lego is one of the analogies I like to use is like think of kitten thinking tools as building blocks for higher order thinking. So for example, you might have like one of our thinking tools is a brainstorming tool called 10 ideas in 10 minutes. And that's a way of like getting your brain to shut up its critical voice. That's always saying, ah, that won't work. And just start the creative gears rolling and get into that flow state where you just, the pen is starting to move, the fingers are starting to fly on the keyboard. And once you get into that state, new connections start to happen more. Because you're no longer taking all of the 12 plus years of schooling you've had that have told you that you should only have one right answer and to not raise your voice unless you know what it is and actually become creative, which is what every four year old is before. They're taught not to do that because that part of you still exists. It's just been quietly strangled in the background of your mind. And once you get over that and you start thinking creatively again, you can start to all these ideas come out, but then you can use that together with other ones. So we can go, okay, let's have 10 ideas for 10 minutes thinking about this from the customer's perspective. One of our frame cards as the customers. And let's have a think about this in terms of the Pareto principle, which is about optimization, the 8020 rule. So let's think about 10 ideas in 10 minutes for the target audience, for the customer. And how do we optimize, how do we use the Pareto principle for that? So that's an example of how you could use thinking tools in a multimodular way in a workshop or a brainstorming session or a strategy session.
[Voiceover]: That's awesome.
Nathan Bush: Okay, so if we stick to that
[Voiceover]: theme of brainstorming and creative thinking, is the way we think also influenced by the environment in which we think. Are there secrets or tips that you have for creating the right environment, not just the right structure to thinking to kind of foster creativity?
Jesse Richardson: Absolutely. And one of the, I think best things, my favorite quote in the world is that by Bertrand Russell and he said the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so sure of themselves. Yet why is the people so full of doubts? And the insight there was was verified empirically by Dunning and Kruger in the 90s with the Dunning Kruger effect, which showed that essentially the loudest, most confident voices tend to be the ones you should trust the least, whereas the more quiet, introspective, reflective voices tend to have a lot more insight and depth to them. And domain knowledge comes into that as well. But the takeout there is that in any organization, in any brainstorming situation in particular, there are a whole lot of social biases and social influences going into what is the output and the outcomes of that brainstorming session or strategy session. And the key insight is that a lot of the best thinking is done by people with quiet voices. And we ought to foster a forum and a format to be able to hear everyone's voices and for it to be more democratic and more inclusive. Because a lot of the time it's extroverted, loud voiced people like me who tend to dominate rooms and conversations. And I like, I try to disabuse myself of this, but I struggle with it. And so having a format that does that for me is really useful. It's not throwing shade on anyone necessarily for being an extroverted loud person who likes circus. Often. Sometimes people aren't trying to squash other voices down, they're just oblivious to it. But you can use things like one of our tools is called a noni post. And the idea there is that rather than everyone brainstorming together and it's all a social environment, you instead work alone and write things down on post it notes as individual ideas. Again, that multimodular way of doing things rather than trying to come up with one big concept like here's a thought, here's a thought, here's a thought, just bung them all up onto a whiteboard together or a digital board like Miro or Canva or figjam and then assess the things with some moderation and facilitation to be able to say, well, hey, let's look at these things and the merits and let's play Angels advocate for this perspective, which is interesting. And those sorts of things rather than it just being, let's see what the existing social dynamics spit out into terms of, you know, who's going to dominate this conversation. And the CEO said something and we all agree with that.
[Voiceover]: I love the angels advocate. That was really cool. If we have people in our team who are naturally quiet and more introspective is it better to try and pull them into conversation, recognizing that they're quiet and they're introverted, and try and pull them into the conversation or let them be in their natural state and they'll contribute when they're ready? What's your take on that?
Jesse Richardson: I think probably more the latter. Creating an environment which, like, I'm always a fan of the idea of pull rather than push strategies. If you're trying to force something, it means there's something wrong with your premises, with your strategic basis. So if you create an environment that makes it comfortable enough that introverts are more likely to participate of their own volition, that's a much better outcome than if you try and make them do something in a way that they go, ugh, okay, I guess I have to. But generally speaking, a lot of the research shows that brainstorming individually tends to work a lot better. A lot of the time anyway. But there's like these two camps and it's like, I feel like this a lot with politics and other things. I'm like, ah, you're both wrong and both right. And so there was this. One of the takeouts there is that it's great to brainstorm individually into thinking, think individually and be really introspective and just get into your own flow state and then come together and discuss it and see if other people can contribute to your idea or you can contribute to theirs and then you can iterate on that as well. And what tends to happen is that most people do one or the other and they don't tend to iterate. And there's so much that we lose when we don't play and iterate and synthesize and try different things and, and, you know, use things together. It's often more than the sum of its parts.
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[Voiceover]: So a lot of our listeners will be making decisions on a regular basis within their roles. And it could be as simple as trying to decide what direction to go after a bunch of AB testing in a UX context, all the way through to making big investment decisions on new technology, new partners, new business directions. What are the most common restrictions on thinking that you see in a business context from people when they're trying to make those decisions?
Jesse Richardson: Oh, there's so many. It's hard to know what to choose from here. One that sprung immediately to mind when you were talking about a B testing is what we call the data bubble effect. And this is a pernicious idea or a pernicious bias that affects a lot of decision making where we look at the data that we have and we draw conclusions from those data and say, oh, well, clearly this is working and that isn't so, therefore we need to double down on this and get rid of that. And then the challenge to that is to say that a lot of the time the best decisions are not within the scope of what we already know. There's maybe an outside variable, a different market reality thing you haven't even thought about testing yet. And so introducing divergent creative thinking to data analytics is a really important part of it. What I mean by that is that if you're AB testing a particular, say, landing page or offer or whatever else, that's great, and those data are useful. But also think, well, hang on, what's the strategic underpinnings of this? Are we just doing two different copy variations of the same strategy? And that might get us a slightly better optimization. But other ways of even thinking about this, like what's the real value proposition for the customer here? Is there a different way we could frame this entirely? Is there a different market that we haven't thought about? And oftentimes people will go with what they know because it's safe and it's easy, and especially if it's financially viable and sustainable, they'll just stick to that. But there's often a lot of things that we miss and that we leave off the table because we haven't considered what else might be. And so part of all testing should be not just a B, testing what we know and drawing inferences from the data that we have, but assigning a good proportion of our testing and our thinking to what don't we know and especially what don't we know we don't know and how can we find out?
[Voiceover]: I love that. And even as you're talking there, I'm like, oh yeah, it's actually even wrong that it's called AB testing, because it's either like, this is the answer or this is the answer. It's one of those two. You're like, actually no, could fall anywhere outside of that. What are your tips then for people in organizations where they're really struggling with people they're trying to convince? So whether that be a boss, whether that be colleagues, whether that be a board, when you are trying to share your story or your perspective and you're just feeling like you're hitting a brick, brick wall. I like that you mentioned before that you've had to shift your own approach from hitting people over the head with your logic's wrong because of this. How do you kind of do that in a way to get people on board to realize that there's another way of thinking about the solutions or the problems that you're putting forward?
Jesse Richardson: Totally. So, yeah, the deep insight there is that an adversarial way of approaching things is seldom optimal. A much better way to do things is to, without being manipulative, to speak to people as equals and try. And I think the way I think about it when I'm like involved in something like this is like, how can I take what they're trying to say, recognize it, and pivot that into what I'm trying to put forward so that I'm not disagreeing with them? And you're wrong. Here's the right way, but rather I recognize what it is you're trying to say because that's valuable because of X, which immediately lowers the temperature of the room. And then you go, wouldn't it be great though, if we understood if we could, you know, this aspect of things? And it's often not an either or situation. The other really important thing I think is to show rather than tell. So rather than saying to people, oh, well, you know, my way's better, say, well, that's really interesting, let's test that. So let's run some meta ads or whatever with these two different propositions and see what works better, or let's interview people who are in the target market and ask them what they are. You might need to put your point of view forward and just put it as part of the testing. So it doesn't become an ego based thing, but rather a journey that we're on. Shoulder to shoulder rather than nose to nose is the analogy I like to use a lot of the time. And then the final thing I'd say on that is that if you are finding that your culture, your workplace or your leadership team are constantly stifling and toxic, then just trying to find ways around that are probably suboptimal at best. And the opportunity costs that you might be missing may be very significant. And so you should think about either. If you can't create a reality within where you are, that's where you can thrive. Look for somewhere else that might be more conducive to it.
[Voiceover]: They're such good tips. I really, really like there too that you emphasize that you need to take the ideas on. Because I think a lot of people in the back of their head, we've been taught in business training, it's like always acknowledge other people's ideas. So you hear it all the time. It's like, oh yeah, I think I can understand where you're coming from. That's really interesting. But here's what I really think. And it's like you're doing the verbal recognition, but you're actually not taking it on and you know, incorporating and folding it into your ideas and your solutions for it. It's like, yes, I recognize that, but look, let's go over here.
Jesse Richardson: And people know, right? Like they know if you're just trying to manipulate them into like, okay, okay, you said that thing, but actually this other thing, but actually trying to in good faith find like, yes, I can see what you're saying here and I agree with that part of it. I think maybe this might be and pose it as a question, what do you think? And then you've got reciprocity and people don't want to disagree with you in that context because you're both like being open and vulnerable as well. And so fostering on a deep philosophical level, this is the great battle of it's not between good and evil, it's between the aspect of our psyche and our emotional reality that wants to dominate and win and the aspect of our psyche and emotional reality that wants to cooperate and connect. And that latter one is the one is the wolf we should feed as the reality that we should pour our resources into because it invariably begets better outcomes. There is just no universe in which, if you can foster a collaborative, connected, understanding based culture, reality way of thinking that that doesn't get you better outcomes in your interpersonal relations in your career goals, in your sales figures, in your company financial projections. Everything comes from that reality. And we have this idea within a capitalist society that we have to be ruthless and cutthroat and it's a competition should be this fight between us and them. And it doesn't have to be like that. You can take a different mindset into business that is much more connected and collaborative and understanding based rather than, you know what I say goes and domination. And we need to win this interaction and whatever else.
[Voiceover]: I love that. And you mentioned ego before because I found personally it's like sometimes you can pick the people whose ideas define them and other people who have ideas, but they're not as attached to them because they're not part of their personal identity.
Jesse Richardson: Yes, 100%. That's, I think, a really pertinent and resonant insight that people get attached to their ideas. And it's like the Dunning Kruger effect is it's really hard to overcome then and they'll push those ideas and push that ideology and push that way of doing things. Whereas again, it's like the introverts thing. If people hold their ideas lightly and a little bit more circumspect, it's much easier to crush over their ideas, to not recognize the merits of where they're coming from. But often there's a lot more insight, depth and potential within those lightly held ideas than those that are held with, let's say, egotistically strong conviction.
[Voiceover]: Yes, I love it.
Jesse Richardson: All right.
[Voiceover]: In your TEDx talk, which was amazing. Anyone, look it up if you haven't already, because it is such a brilliant talk, you said never trust a brain, especially your own. So I am really interested with you because you are so deep in this and so knowledgeable around how our brain tricks us regularly. How do you stay on top of your own brain biases and challenge yourself in your thinking when you're so conscious of how it works?
Jesse Richardson: Well, the shorter answer is I don't. It's kind of like one of those things is that the deeper you go into this field of biases and the various ways that our brains trick us, the more you realize that it doesn't matter how much you learn about it, you're not immune to it. Like the great late Danny Kahneman who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. Very much advocate at this point. He was a deeply intellectually humble man and he said, look, you're not ever going to overcome all your biases. We can hope to mitigate them to some extent and that can be done through structural things that we put in place. And it can also be done individually through just becoming, I think, having a mindset that's more skeptical, rational and reflective. But you never like, completely get rid of it. You don't become unbiased. Everyone is biased by their own experiences, by these societal and culturally inculcated ideas and all these sorts of things. So you can never get rid of it. And the ironic thing, I guess, is that if you think you're already intellectually humble enough, you probably aren't. So that keeps you honest. It's not something you ever achieve. It's a process that we go through.
[Voiceover]: So then you must hold people to a pretty high standard when it comes to assessing their mental models and their thinking. Who do you put on a pedestal for? Who do you think has it sorted when it comes to recognizing their own critical thinking, their biases? Who does it?
Jesse Richardson: Well, well, ironically, they're the people that realize that they're not immune to it, I guess. And in particular, one of my great intellectual heroes is Dan Dennett, the philosopher who unfortunately passed away a few months ago. But he, he was instrumental in, for me, like, learning to. To think with more rationality and rigor. All of his books are fantastic and his essays. He's just a really keen thinker and made philosophy a lot more accessible for a lot of people as well. He was very straightforward and accessible and just intellectually open and curious. Julia Galef, who hosted a podcast called Rationally Speaking and wrote a book called the Scout Mindset. She's got a TED Talk as a very accessible way to get familiar with her work called the Scout Mindset, can recommend that. She's one of these people that is just really genuinely, again, intellectually humble and thoughtful and reflective. And one of the directors of School of Thought who recently joined us on the board is the author David McRaney, who recently released a book he got famous from a blog called you'd are not so Smart back in the Early Aughts, and then wrote a book under the same name. Highly recommend that. It makes learning about cognitive biases super accessible. And then he has also released a book recently called How Minds Change and is the most fascinating book I think I've read in a long, long time. And so rich with insight. Anyone that's interested in persuasion, marketing, the state of the world, politics, psychology, you know, people say the word must read, but it is a must read. It is just so well written and accessible, but also so rich with insight. And Ezra Klein is probably one of my favorite thinkers. He's often seen as a very left thinker. I think he's a very balanced thinker. He doesn't fit into any particular camps and he's just a very thoughtful, rigorous, reflective thinker.
[Voiceover]: Wow. I think the bookshelf that I've got behind me is going to be full after all your amazing recommendations today. I feel like I just need to go and read. So thank you for sharing all those today. Jesse. That's awesome. Where do you stand on AI and its impact in how we think?
Jesse Richardson: It's actually my favorite subject. So I have been following AI since the late 90s and I was an early fan of Ray Kurzweil who wrote the Singularities near in the Age of Spiritual Machines. He's a techno optimist and I was fascinated just by his thinking. I'm more of the camp in terms of my beliefs and probability of what's going to happen of Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudakowsky, who the opposite end of that spectrum, who are technopessimists, you might say. And I highly recommend Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence if anyone's interested in AI and where it's going to go and what the potential safety ramifications are in terms of alignment. That is the most accessible and academically kind of resonant book you can read. And it's fascinating besides any of like Eliezer Yudajkowski's essays as well. Sobering to say the least. Actually, the recommendation I'll give for anyone that's really interested in AI is there's a blog called Wait, but why? By an author called Tim Urban and he wrote a blog post series called the Path to Superintelligence and that is the best introduction to AI thinking that I can recommend. But tldr the threat of Artificial General Intelligence, having an intelligence explosion that goes into superintelligence is the biggest existential threat in the history of humanity, as far as I can tell, is my estimation.
[Voiceover]: Wow. I feel like we can't leave it there. We can't leave our interview on that. Are you doing anything? Are you doing anything with school of thought or kitted specifically around helping people manage AI inputs and outputs to counterbalance that?
Jesse Richardson: That's a good question. So I was talking on the big broad existential level, on the more near term level in terms of we have this phrase of that the knowledge economy is about to become the wisdom economy. And what we mean by that is that a lot of the menial work that has been done by a lot of US professionals working in various fields for many, many years is getting automated and more and more so all the time within creative industries, within legal, within marketing, within finance. It's happening everywhere already. The labor market shocks that we might see over the coming few years. There's a lot of different predictions in different directions, but one thing is certain is that the nature of professional work is going to change pretty rapidly. And one of the things that's interesting have two AI sort of related things that happened with Kitted as we were developing it. We had this kind of like very clean style with icons and so forth for each of the different thinking tools. And I was like, ah, it really needs some art and beauty. And I was thinking about like, you know, getting an illustrator or, you know, maybe I could do something or I didn't know. And then Midjourney came out halfway through the development process. Oh, this is interesting. So I spent a couple of months just like I got like a corporate account with Midjourney and just started playing with it and as you know, bushing, my, my background's in art direction and design and so started just playing with different prompts and then just created this like explosion of artwork that if I'd contracted an artist to do, it would have taken years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. But instead it was just me playing with Midjourney for a couple of months and coming up with these couple of hundred different kaleidoscope beautiful visual things. And so that happened. But also at the same time, the other insight was that what happened when GPT came out is that we realized, oh, the nature of professional work is going to change. And higher order thinking has always been valuable within organizations, but now it's becoming imperative because it's not AI that's going to take your job, it's someone using AI that's going to take your job. And they're going to be the person that understands how to use AI because they're thinking better. It's not because they've spent more time on ChatGPT or Midjourney or, you know, 11 labs or anything else than you have. It's because they understand what it can output and how they can use it, which is strategic thinking, critical thinking, creative thinking, and thinking about things in a way that isn't just, you know, painting by numbers. So that's the most valuable skill set that we're going to have as professionals within the coming five years. And it just so happens that we've created a multimodular thinking system that allows people to develop their professional development and also use those tools in a very practical way in their everyday workflows right out of the box. So that's kind of the pitch for kitted is that it's a way to future proof your business and your career from what's happening within AI and also to elevate the level of thinking within your organization so that people can rise to the challenges bearing down upon us.
[Voiceover]: I love it. I did not suspect that the images, because it is beautiful artwork, I had no idea that it was done by mid journey. I just assumed knowing you, knowing your background in art direction, that you'd spent hours and hours doing this. And I was like, oh, Jesse wouldn't do that. But I was like, so that's amazing that you are utilizing it even with your own background in art direction and creative, that you're like, actually the tools are there, let's use them, let's go.
Jesse Richardson: Well, it's actually, it's an interesting case study because you like a lot of people, like you can see what AI can do, what midjourney for example, or Dall E can do and you go, oh wow, that's really amazing. But how would I use it? And it's human and machine together where you get the best synthesis.
[Voiceover]: Right.
Jesse Richardson: So if you get a seasoned copywriter to use ChatGPT, you're going to get a really good result because they can break Brainstorm or that use it as a creative partner. But if you get someone who doesn't know how to do copywriting to write your E newsletter out of it or your blog post, it's not going to be that great. It's going to be mid at best. Right. And the same thing is true of visual art. If you get an art director, a creative director or a designer to use midjourney, it won't look like kind of a little bit fantasy art type anime things that most of it does. They can put promptcraft in it to use gouache, illustration, no grainy, retro, these sort of things to make things feel more artistic and beautiful than just your standard thing. And this is going to be an interesting deviation as we go forward is that yes, there's all of this content and all of this stuff that we can do, but the level of discernment is going to become more and more valuable.
[Voiceover]: Yes, I love that and I think Microsoft have nailed it in this instance of calling their tools copilot because I think if we're thinking about them as co pilots rather than.
Jesse Richardson: It's good branding. Yeah, agree.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, good branding.
Nathan Bush: So tell us more.
[Voiceover]: Jesse, you told us about the AI product there. If tell us more about kitted and some of the features and the tool sets that you've got that can help businesses and. Absolutely. Please plug. This is the plug part because I think after hearing this, people's minds will be blown and going, how do I actually bring this into my organization or my own professional development? So give us a little bit more of a taste of what's there in kitted.
Jesse Richardson: Sure. So there's two websites. The first one is Kitted K I T T E D app and that is essentially the, you know, the SaaS product and homepage for all of the thinking tools that are available digitally. And there's a discovery portal on there where you can, you know, explore different tools and so forth and articles and presentations called flows, all that sort of stuff. So I won't bang on about that too much more. The other one is Kitted Shop and that's our E commerce platform. And that's essentially all of the physical decks of cards that you can buy to have in your office meeting room. One of the use cases we like to tell people about is like, don't have to like implement this as part of, you know, some new curriculum that you need to do. Just giving people these thinking tools as prompts can be a really positive and easy way to get engagement. So if you put like, say, you know, a deck of these thinking tools into your boardroom or your meeting room, then next time you're having a strategy session, just having them out on the table, think, I haven't thought about like from that perspective. That's an interesting, you know, context to go about things and you just integrate it organically rather than it being this thing that, you know, the HR department forces everyone to do as a thing. You know, I much prefer the osmosis of actually using something, and that's how we've designed it, is that these cards can just be, you know, you can hand one out in a workshop, say, let's try this, or you can, you know, here's some different perspectives. Let's think about this from the stakeholders perspective. Let's think about from the investors, let's think about from the target market, tertiary market, whatever, you know, just be able to use them. So that's probably the best way is to just jump in, start trying to use some of them and having the tactile experiences. Physical cards really helps there. So we have a special discount code for listeners of ADD to cart that is active for the month of July, end of June, through to July, end of July. And that is bushy. 50 b u s h y 50. We used to call our host here bushy when we were working together. And so if you use that at checkout, you get 50% off your order. Order.
[Voiceover]: Beautiful.
Nathan Bush: And I think there's going to be
[Voiceover]: so many people take you up on that. What I love about it, and I went down the rabbit hole yesterday, is that you've designed tool sets that are very specific for people. So whether you're in design, there's a design tool set, there's a marketing tool set, there's a finance tool set. I think there's a. Is there an entrepreneurial or startup tool set?
Jesse Richardson: No, there's not one. But they kind of all are in a way.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you get onto the site and have a look around, I'm sure you'll find one that resonates really strongly for you to start with and then you'll expand out from there. So, Jesse, I love what you've created. It's just phenomenal. And you've blown my mind and really got me thinking around all the questions that I've fucked up over the years because I've come with assumptions and flawed men.
Jesse Richardson: You and me both, mate.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. So thank you so much for joining us today and sharing.
Jesse Richardson: It's been a pleasure.
[Voiceover]: It's just incredible story. Thank you.
Jesse Richardson: Awesome. Thanks, mate.
Nathan Bush: Mind blown.
[Voiceover]: Yep. Mind blown.
Nathan Bush: I don't know how I wrap up that conversation.
[Voiceover]: We touch on so many areas, but
Nathan Bush: as you can see, what can seem like a really high level philosophical conversation quickly turns into practicalities, not only for our business, but also for our teams
[Voiceover]: and ourselves in both our work lives
Nathan Bush: and our home lives. Once you start unpacking that and realizing how the human brain's working and how your human brain's working really becomes something that you continually loop back to in your own life. The last week has been a bit crazy. In analyzing my own thinking as I'm working, here are the three takeaways that I took away from that conversation with Jesse. Number one, reflect on your own biases. As Jesse was talking, I had all those flashbacks that you often have at midnight where you think of all the conversations and the decisions that I've made and thinking back to where I came from, a point of bias and potentially didn't get the best outcome. Now, the point isn't to conquer all of these biases. Jesse himself says that he still has them, but it is to recognize when they are present and when you are experiencing them. Only by recognizing them can we do something about them. Number two, create an environment that makes it easier for the small voices to be heard. I really like this one. I especially like that Jesse said that if you need to make a conscious play to pull quiet voices into the conversation, there might actually be something wrong in the environment itself that needs shaking up. Trying different formats, group sizes, types of brainstorming will help get more voices heard rather than forcing them into a conversation
[Voiceover]: that they're not comfortable with.
Nathan Bush: And number three, it's not AI that's going to take your job, it's someone using AI that's going to take your job. This was one of the topics that I was most curious to unpack with Jesse as I hadn't actually seen him since the AI explosion and I really wanted to know how how his critical thinking approach related to AI. He was pragmatic about it. We can't avoid AI, but understanding how to use AI plus the ability to lay critical thinking over the top of the AI outputs will put you in a much better place to reliably and safely incorporate AI in your day to day. As good as the human brain is, AI is unavoidable. Before you go, we'd love to invite you to join our free e commerce learning platform Add to CART Campus, meet other professionals and learn from e commerce experts to take your business and your e commerce career to the next level. Register to join campus@addtocart.com
Jesse Richardson: now.
Nathan Bush: If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague. Or even better, leave us a review on Spotify or Apple. It really makes a difference.
