Do you cringe at the mere mention of the word, “insights”? What about its fancier cousin, “actionable insights”? We do, too. As a matter of fact, on this episode, we discovered that Moe has developed an uncontrollable reflex: any time she utters the word, her hands shoot up uncontrolled to form air quotes. Alas! Our podcast is an audio medium! What about those poor souls who got hired into an “Insights & Analytics” team within their company? Egad! Nonetheless, inspired by an email exchange with a listener, we took a run at the subject with Chris Kocek, CEO of Gallant Branding, who both wrote a book and hosts a podcast on the topic of insights!
Photo by Gio Bartlett on Unsplash
0:00:05.8 Announcer: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language.
0:00:13.8 Michael Helbling: Hey, everybody, welcome. It’s the Analytics Power Hour, and this is episode 268. I was talking to the CEO of a company last week, and he said the problem he hears from his peers is we all have this data, but we still lack insights. It just so happens that a lot of us probably hear something similar to that all the time. In fact, this episode was inspired by a question from listener Christopher Lind. So thank you, Christopher. And I think in this conversation, we’ll have some interesting back and forth on this. We did do an episode similar to this one a long, long time ago, episode 67 with Rod Jacka. But I think it’s well past time.
0:00:55.4 Tim Wilson: 76. Just to make sure that…
0:00:57.4 MH: Yeah. Episode 76, like 1976.
0:01:00.7 TW: They listen for the whole episode. They’re like, when are they gonna talk about insights?
0:01:04.0 MH: Yeah. Anyways, that’s my cue to introduce my co hosts. Hey, Moe. Moe Kiss, welcome. How’s it going?
0:01:12.7 Moe Kiss: Oh, pretty great. How are you?
0:01:15.3 MH: Awesome. I’m excited to talk about insights.
0:01:17.9 MK: I’m a bit riled up to talk about insights. It’s been…
0:01:20.4 MH: I’m excited.
0:01:21.3 MK: It’s a topic for me of late.
0:01:23.1 MH: I think I’m also like that. So this is good. And Tim Wilson, welcome.
0:01:29.4 TW: Hello.
0:01:32.0 MH: Tim, I hope you can keep up today. That’s all I have to say is just listen…
0:01:35.2 MK: No extreme opinions.
0:01:36.9 MH: Yep, yep. Yeah. And I’m Michael Helbling, and we also have a guest I’m very excited about. Chris Kocek is the founder and CEO of Gallant, a branding studio based in Austin, Texas.
0:01:49.9 S?: [0:01:49.9] ____.
0:01:51.9 MH: He’s also the author of the book Any Insights Yet? And hosts a podcast with the same name. And today he is our guest. Welcome to the show, Chris.
0:02:00.2 Chris Kocek: Thanks for having me.
0:02:00.7 MH: So this is exciting for a couple of reasons. So obviously, Chris, all three of us are sort of data and analytics nerds. You come more from a branding and positioning and marketing and strategy background. And so I’m really excited to contrast sort of what you’ve been gleaning and what you wrote your book on with sort of how we in the data space might like, sort of observe and talk about. So that juxtaposition is something I’m sort of excited to observe throughout our conversation today. But maybe as a starting point, what got you thinking about this in the first place? Why did this sort of become an area of focus and then that spawned the book and the podcast and things like that?
0:02:40.4 CK: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I had written a book prior to this one called the Practical Pocket Guide to Account Planning.
0:02:47.4 MH: Oh, I need that book.
0:02:49.8 CK: And there was a chapter in it called Finding Insights. And it was a short chapter, it was like three pages long. And students and professors and professionals either wrote to me or came up to me after certain talks and they would say, oh, really like the book, but I wish that chapter were longer. So I said, okay, well, let me work on a second edition and I’ll make that chapter longer. And I started doing more interviews and thinking about it from different angles. And then the chapter just kind of ballooned into its own book because there is a lot of disagreement, a lot of conversation and debate around what insights are. And so there was definitely a lot of material for it.
0:03:29.6 MH: All right, so before we go much further, Chris, maybe it’d be great to just have you define, from your perspective, what is an insight?
0:03:38.1 CK: Well, that’s a great question, but I’m going to flip it for a second and say, let’s define what an insight is not.
0:03:43.9 TW: Oh, I like this better.
0:03:45.5 MH: Oh, okay. Plot thickens.
0:03:49.1 CK: Because actually when I was doing the research for the book, I went and interviewed all these different people, creative directors, strategists, just people from all walks of life and backgrounds, and just asked, what’s your definition of an insight? And the definitions were all over the place. And so that made me think, okay, I think I need to first through, I don’t know, deduction or process of elimination, I need to figure out what an insight is not and then see what’s left on the table. Because there were some overlaps and some similarities. Things like unexpected truth or a different way of looking at things, or the aha moment. Those kinds of things were pretty consistent. But what I have come to say a lot of times is an insight is not a data point. A data point is just a data point. It can be a really powerful data point and you can have data driven insights. The data point can be something that triggers, something that says, let’s chase this down, let’s see where this leads us. But a data point is just a data point. A trend is not an insight. That’s really, to me, just a collection of data points all going in the same direction.
0:04:57.5 CK: It’s not an observation. An observation is not an insight. And even a human truth, I say, is not an insight. Because there are a lot of human truths that make us say, oh, yeah, that’s true. It doesn’t do anything for us. I call it the tired human truth or the worn out human truth? Moms and dads are time poor. Yep, it’s true, but what’s the twist on it? So there has to usually be some element of a twist to it. And so my definition of an insight is it’s like this constellation. I wrap my definition in a metaphor, which is that an insight is a constellation of these different stars or these different dots coming together. So it’s when you connect a data point with a human truth, with a customer pain point, with some other counterintuitive piece of information or an observation. You bring those all together and then you might have an insight.
0:06:02.8 TW: Mean, I think even the saying… I mean, saying a data point, sure, I think the trend. I just, the… And I obviously, I read your book. I absolutely love the rigor that you put on it. It’s so common in the world of reports and analyses. Especially like recurring reports. The business partner wants the… They expect I’m getting a deck. What are the insights? So it’s kind of like the bar gets forcibly lowered. If you have the bar really, really high, then you have to kind of stand and say, yes, we have no insights. It doesn’t mean we don’t have useful information, actionable information, information worth discussing that is that interesting and we could do stuff with. But that word. Because it… You can’t say insights without like seeing a light bulb. And that’s what people want. So I just wonder if there was somebody say, what if it’s an unexpected trend? How can you say that’s not an insight? Would be a… I don’t know.
0:07:14.7 MK: I find that whenever I use the word insight now, and as Chris was speaking, I was really unpicking everything in my mind. But I really love the starting point of what it isn’t. But I think the thing is, like, whenever I say insights now, I use… I do the air quotes. I’m like, oh, insights. And I just like, it’s almost like I avoid even defining it or thinking about what it truly means because, maybe this is contrarian, but like, I don’t give a shit. I’m like, we talked about this topic so long ago, 2017. The primary problem I have right now is that I still have business leaders who are like, we need more insights. And I’m like, I just don’t even use the word. And I’m saying sitting here thinking about decks that have been shared and like pieces of work that have come past Me lately and I don’t see data folk saying insights. I definitely see learnings on there a lot. And I’m curious to unpick, in my mind, our job is to help the business make better decisions. Both Chris and Tim talk a lot about, like, to make better decisions, you need to ask better questions.
0:08:29.8 MK: So where to you is… Is learnings and insights, like a complete overlap? Are they a Venn diagram? Are they like different things? Am I just… Is in my mind, is learnings just a different way to say insights? I said a lot of stuff there.
0:08:47.4 CK: It’s a lot of good questions. We’ll unpack them one by one. So I think that to me, a learning and an insight are two different things. They’re in different places on the spectrum. I think that an insight on one of your previous episodes that you mentioned, episode 76, this idea of actionable insight, that’s kind of redundant. Because if it’s not actionable, it’s not an insight in my book. So you have to get excited by this thing. It has to make your eyes light up. You have to say, oh, now that’s interesting. That’s different than what we’ve seen before, what we’ve talked about before. That’s taking us in a new direction. So a learning can still be very valuable, but a learning by itself probably isn’t going to light up the night sky or light up people’s eyes and get them taking notes and be like, okay, I’m already writing new ideas down based on this thing. A learning may do that, they may take some notes, but there’s an energy to an insight that just lights everybody up. You guys have probably all been there before when that happens.
0:09:57.3 MH: So it’s sort of like an expansion of knowledge or the identification of an opportunity in some system or context is sort of maybe the way to rephrase it. Is that right?
0:10:10.2 CK: Yeah, I think that’s fair. Context plays a huge role in the discovery or the discovery of the beginning of an insight. Again, one of the things that I think is really critical to creating insights is the articulation piece. So you can have the data, you can have the customer pain points, things like that. But if you don’t connect those dots and then articulate it in a pithy, short, compelling and persuasive way, then you’ve just got like a bunch of car parts sitting around. You don’t have an engine, you don’t have a rocket ship, you’ve just got a bunch of car parts lying around.
0:10:44.9 MH: Interesting. So would you say that even the communication of it is part of the insight itself?
0:10:50.0 CK: It’s a critical part of it, yeah.
0:10:51.8 MH: Interesting. No, I’m fascinated by that actually. That’s good.
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0:12:04.1 TW: To me, that was that… It’s kind of later in the book, if I recall correctly, that you actually talk about that being part of the challenge. If it’s something that you’re like, I found this thing, aha. My light bulb went on. Let me put up one slide and everybody looks at it and the harps play, the angels sing, the light comes on and everybody’s like, oh, my God. We have fundamentally changed the business. It doesn’t happen that way. In the rigorous definition that you’re using, it does definitionally have… You have to take the people on a, on a journey. Look, if you take this customer pain, if you take this data, if you take this kind of creative thought and you put them together and it should be the sort of thing that people have to kind of grapple with a bit but that’s not like the…
0:12:56.5 TW: In the business world there is such this unrealistic expectation that somebody is going to arrive with the simple, pithy, mind blowing thing. And we are kind of constantly chasing egregiously unrealistic expectations. And I’ll two quick rants like I think every BI platform, every analytics platform, if you poke around in their marketing literature, they talk about how you will be gathering insights, putting insights in the hands of your users, actionable insights…
0:13:33.8 MH: Easily surface insights.
0:13:36.6 TW: And then organizationally there are many, if not most enterprises have an insights organization or an insights and analytics organization. And that was for me, the little aha. That I do think there’s this separate… The world of research kind of rebranded themselves as insights. And I think there’s lots of reasons for that. And I mean, I worked on a team that was customer insights and analytics, and it bothered the shit out of me. And I was like, why… It’s years. I mean, this is literally 10 years ago. And it’s been within the last six months that I was like, oh, that’s because the research team sat in that group. And if you ask them, they will say, well, no, but that’s like, we really engage with the customers. We talk to the customers so we can truly deliver insights. I’m like, but you can also do focus group research and get useful learnings that you can make decisions on that aren’t insight.
0:14:36.0 TW: So I feel like organizationally that was like a whole roll that said, sure, I know our solution to this disconnect. Let’s just egregiously mislabel what we do and not help things at all.
0:14:48.3 CK: Well, it sounds more exciting, right? If you’re in a meeting and you raise your hand, you say, I have an insight, people are probably going to stop and want to listen to what you have to say because what you’re implying is you have something deeper. You have access to something deeper that not everybody can see on the surface. But whereas if you raised your hand and you said, I have a data point, or even better, I have an observation. Most people are probably going to be like, yeah, thanks, hand down.
0:15:13.1 TW: But I think analysts have. The ones who have learned that… I think Moe, I feel like you’re like talking to the… You’re an organization that has matured and said that is a… That’s a risky move. Because when you say I have an insight and then you deliver a trend or something interesting that was unknown, there’s a very good chance that somebody in the room will say, that’s not an insight. And they’re right. But they’ll also ask, they’ll say, bring me more insights. Like, that’s…
0:15:43.1 MK: I think that’s the bigger risk. I actually was once asked to rename my team to Funnel Insights, which for those who aren’t aware, I used to give a presentation called why Funnels Suck. So that was in and of itself very challenging. But the idea that our team was going to have the name Insights in it. I was like, I can’t sleep at night. This is not okay.
0:16:06.2 TW: I think that’s like double level gaslighting. That’s amazing. Which is pretty… Nice move.
0:16:10.4 MK: Which I was like, there are not many hills I die on, but this is one I was like, I prepared to die on this hill. I think what I’m wrestling with right now is it feels like the way that we’re defining insight is it has a very high bar for one. And I don’t know if stakeholders necessarily appreciate that bar being high for one. I think, like you said, they might see a trend like sales going down and be like, that’s an insight. They might… There’s different expectations of where that bar is, but it also feels like there’s this expectation of a contrary point to a belief we had previously. So for an insight to be valuable, it has to challenge something that we previously thought was true. Am I interpreting that correctly?
0:17:05.7 CK: I think that that’s definitely part of it. I think there has to be a surprising or unexpected twist to it. Just like a good story, you hang on because you say, oh, plot twist. Not everything we thought was true is now untrue. That’s not necessarily the case. But this element that we’ve been seeing, or where we’ve been seeing a contradiction in data, that’s a really, really fertile place for insights, is when you have contradictory data points and you say, what’s going on here? Both of these things are true, and yet they’re opposites of each other. So we need to dig deeper. We need to go between the polar spectrum and we need to find out what’s actually going on. So it is that digging. I wanted to share, just to take it out of the abstract and not just linger on this idea of like the definition of an insight. But I wanted to build an insight with you guys today.
0:17:57.9 MH: Oh, boy…
0:18:00.6 CK: You guys interested in doing that?
0:18:00.8 TW: That’s what happened. You bring a professional on this is… Oh, boy, is this guy like a branding genius or something? Sounds like he knows what he’s talking.
0:18:08.9 MH: Yeah, let’s say he made Val and me do role playing on an episode that’s coming up, on his podcast in a bit.
0:18:15.4 CK: So role playing is just a great projective technique, gets you. Gets you out of your head and out of your own skin and you become someone else for a little while. So okay, let’s… Hopefully everybody who’s listening knows about Netflix, that streaming service that we all share the passwords to. So we’re going to build this insight. And I’m not saying that the stars in the constellation are all of the stars, but we’re going to take some big ones. And what I like to say is that all of these stars I’m about to kind of highlight or point to, everybody could see them. Everybody could see them as things were happening. But it was only the founders of Netflix that were able to connect the dots and build a new business model that changed the whole category. So the first star in the sky was a tech shift. And that’s oftentimes something that leads you toward an insight that there’s a pretty major sea change in technology. So the tech shift for Netflix was the shift.
0:19:16.0 TW: I mean, that’s not that applicable right now because there’s no major sea changes in technology right now.
0:19:20.1 MH: Yeah, we’re not really living through any big, major technology changes right now, so.
0:19:24.5 MK: Sorry.
0:19:26.8 MH: But maybe in the future. Thanks, Tim. We’re never going to get through this.
0:19:31.7 CK: Well, I was actually going to say there’s so much technology that’s happening and just like tumbling over technology, over technology, over technology. Remember when internet of things was on every investor deck. Now every investor deck has AI somewhere multiple times inside of it. So the big tech shift for Netflix or for anybody who was going to come along was the product format shift from VHS to DVDs. That was a major tech shift. And obviously Blockbuster switched over to DVDs. But the thing that I often say is that Netflix wouldn’t exist if we were still dealing with VHS because you couldn’t ship them through the mail. So that’s a major tech shift. Another star in the sky that was a big cultural shift was this in person browsing, shifting over to web browsing. So Amazon launched in 1994, Netflix launched in 1997. That wasn’t an accident, wasn’t a mistake. People were starting to become more comfortable with browsing certain things online.
0:20:35.3 CK: And what Amazon was doing at the time was, basically as a giant book catalog in the beginning. And how do people decide on books? They read the dust jacket or the back cover. They say whether they want to buy it or not. And so Netflix had that same kind of observation, which you could say is the third star in the sky, which is that the main product is movie summaries. How do you choose a movie? Very similar to how you choose a book, at a bookstore, right? So those were three of the stars in the sky. Another. Another star in the sky. And this is one that you guys are hopefully going to appreciate. I call them WTF Data points. So what the fuck data points. Data points that make you say, what the fuck? So it was around the idea of annoying customer late fees, right? Or sort of annoying late fees for customers. And I found a stat that said in 2000, Blockbuster had $800 million worth of late fees. That was 16% of their revenue.
0:21:36.1 MK: That’s true. I had a good couple hundred.
0:21:38.6 TW: Oh, wow. Yeah, Moe, you know what, that doesn’t surprise me.
0:21:47.6 MK: Carry on.
0:21:49.3 CK: So that was a real customer pain point, right? Like people hated the late fees, getting dinged with those late fees. And you see a data point like that and you say, that’s a lot. So there’s a lot of pent up aggression and frustration from customers who are like, can somebody build a system that doesn’t penalize me for misplacing my video or not being able to get it returned on time? Another customer pain point was just never enough copies of the video I want. How many people remember going to the video store looking for something that wasn’t Spider-Man, or maybe it was Spider-Man. You still couldn’t get it. Because that was the thing that Blockbuster did back in the day, was they were like, okay, people love the Blockbusters. We’re gonna have a whole wall full of Spider-Man. And that…
0:22:34.8 MK: Chris, I’m getting so nostalgic. This is my childhood so deeply. Going to Blockbuster on Friday night and like the wall would be out and it’d be like, damn it.
0:22:45.7 MH: Yeah, one movie you want, There’s a whole wall and there’s none left in there.
0:22:51.3 CK: And then the third pain point, which… Not to knock a hole in your nostalgic childhood, but just going to the video store, like, this is where it’s going to really trip you up here. But going to the video store and browsing or returning videos on time, that became a pain point. As people, as we became accustomed to, well, how can I get it faster and not have to go anywhere? So Netflix, I’m not talking about the Netflix of today, by the way. I’m talking about Netflix Red Envelope Netflix, right? So the way that they approached it was they said, okay, we’re going to create a whole new business model from rentals to subscriptions. We’re not going to do brick and mortar. We’re going to have a centralized distribution point. That’s the different warehouses. And then we’re going to have a totally different delivery system through the United States Postal Service. And apparently they studied the USPS for like 500 hours. They wanted to know the ins and outs of how the USPS worked. And then the third, a third thing that made them successful was their data driven recommendations. So if you liked this, you’re probably gonna like this, this and this. So they keep you on the platform, makes it very sticky.
0:24:01.9 CK: And they had like, I think their initial product was like $7.99. So if you went to Blockbuster twice, it’d be the same price. So they connected all those stars in the sky and they said, okay, we’re gonna come up with a whole new category, which is this online video delivery system, which then eventually turned into streaming and the rest is history. But, everybody could see those dots, those stars in the sky, but they couldn’t connect them or they couldn’t connect them fast enough and they didn’t quite know how to make it work.
0:24:35.4 TW: Do they definitionally need to be able to… I feel like that’s an example where all the stars were available. And I also remember very quickly them saying, and ultimately DVDs are going to go away and it’s just going to all be streaming. And I was like, yeah, that’s never going to happen. So, yeah, just that was… There’s never have a SaaS CRM. But I guess from an analytics perspective, it feels like there is rich data, there could be stars that are found. Because I guess to extend the analogy, you get a newer or better telescope, or you point the telescope in another direction and say, well, hey, we found another star that still is… That star could become part of the insight. It’s unlikely that that star is the insight, right?
0:25:23.5 CK: Very rarely, no single star is the insight. It’s something that connects to something else. And this thing with Netflix, I think the subtitle of the book is Connect the Dots, Create New Categories, Transform Your Business. And so this kind of insight that we’re talking about, where you create a whole new category, that’s very rare. I mean, we could probably think of a handful of businesses. Canva being one of them, Uber being one of them, Airbnb being one of them. Where they said, hey, there’s something going on, we gotta connect all these dots and boom, we’ve got this whole new way of thinking of things. TikTok same thing.
0:26:07.3 MK: So, funnily enough, Canva also came to mind for me as you were telling that story.
0:26:12.3 S1: I don’t know. I just keep thinking about, what if there was this world where insights as a term didn’t exist. And in this case, I would… I don’t know, I feel like that’s a sign of incredible product market fit and having an incredible business idea. But I’m like, I don’t know. There’s something about it that’s like sitting with me of how does that sit as an insight. I don’t know. There’s something about it that’s not jelly.
0:26:47.6 MH: But isn’t that a… I’m thinking of like business school and I’m gonna… Is it Blue Ocean? Like a strategy…
0:26:52.2 MK: Yeah, Blue Ocean.
0:26:54.6 MH: Is a Blue Ocean that essentially, if you’ve identified Blue Ocean, which. These are like insights at a business model level. But it seems like identifying a Blue Ocean Strategy of, we’ve defined a new thing. Definition to do a Blue Ocean, you’ve got to have kind of multiple factors coming in to it. So it feels like Netflix and Canva are both kind of Blue Ocean. I don’t know.
0:27:25.0 MK: But then, okay, here’s the… Here’s why my mind is a complete contradiction because, totally agree, my old CEO was obsessed with that book Blue Ocean Strategy. So I’ve read a thousand times. I would see the starting of Netflix as Blue Ocean Strategy. And then they’re like pivot from say, like DVDs to subscriptions. That was a strategy decision, but likely fueled by some really incredible insights. So am I just a contradiction?
0:27:56.9 CK: Well, the thing about insights is that they are incredibly uncomfortable. You have to be comfortable sitting in the uncomfortable because you will have contradictory data points, contradictory thoughts. You live with a lot of cognitive dissonance in the insights business. And so it’s okay. The way you’re feeling is perfectly appropriate. It’s perfectly normal.
0:28:20.6 MK: It’s one of those things, though. I was reflecting earlier as we were speaking, for a business to basically make use of insights in the way that we’re discussing today, you actually have to be a really mature business because ultimately if the idea, the definition and the way we’re discussing it, my takeaway is that you’re going to have way fewer insights because the bar is exceptionally high. And when you do share them, they’re normally disrupting a belief that we already had. So it’s like you actually have to be a pretty mature business from a… Willing to deal with challenging your own assumptions. Probably like a strong backbone of experimentation, which I know you reference in your book as well. There has to be like kind of this cultural breeding ground for this level of insights to be successful.
0:29:20.2 CK: So you’re right, Moe. Yeah, I think there definitely needs to be a culture at the organization that allows for this almost like team of rivals aspect where you can safely challenge each other and ask, what about this? Because one of the things I talk about in the book is you’ve got to be able to stress test the insight. You’ve got to have a team of people around who can ask questions, attempt to poke holes in it in a safe space before you reveal it to the larger audience. So selling an insight is as much of an art as building one in the first place.
0:29:54.7 CK: We just did one for Netflix, which I would say was perhaps a… The tech shift was maybe the tail end of the constellation. It was the beginning part of it. But here’s another one which I talk about in the book. There’s a company here in the US Called Mamava, and it’s a lactation pod. So for nursing moms or dads who are bottle feeding their kids, their babies. So that one started with an observation. It wasn’t a data point. It was an observation by Sasha Meyer, one of the co-founders, who said she had a baby and she started noticing all these women nursing babies in bathroom stalls.
0:30:37.3 CK: And she said, this is the most unsanitary place to prepare a meal. And yet this is what moms all around the country are doing. And then she kind of followed that red thread or she pulled on that red thread. And one of the techniques I talk about is keep asking why. It’s a really powerful technique for getting closer to an insight. And so she noticed that. And then she said, why are breastfeeding and pumping materials always black? Why is that? So she started digging into that and maybe I’ll reveal it in just a second.
0:31:20.1 CK: But another why question she asked was, well, actually her answer to that question was they’re made to be black because they’re intentionally made to be invisible. The black material that’s being used, it’s not hot pink. It’s not something that’s meant to stand out. It’s black for a reason. Now why is… What is that reason? She then connected the dot to something else. She said, well, I think it’s because it’s meant to be invisible. People don’t want to be seen or make a commotion or say, okay, I’m about to start breastfeeding.
0:31:56.2 CK: So then that begs the question for her, why is breastfeeding made to be invisible? So she kept pulling on that red thread and asking different questions. And then there were certain timing variables where I don’t think Mamava would have existed 30 years ago because with social media, with the rise of social media, more moms started talking about their experiences on social media, about breastfeeding in bathroom stalls, about feeling cramped and I don’t know, almost like second class citizens.
0:32:28.5 CK: And then there was some data that had come out where there were more studies showing that the long term health and wellness benefits of nursing. So there was this convergence of different things happening and one of the biggest pieces actually was a piece of legislation in the Affordable Care Act which said if you have 50 or more employees, you have to provide lactation space for them. So that was a big thing too. So she actually had the idea many years before they launched, but there were some other stars in the sky that needed to align before they could actually launch. And so, lactation pods didn’t exist. And I would say that that was triggered by an observation, not by a data point.
0:33:10.8 CK: She probably found some other data points that helped build the case for it. But, a single data point isn’t necessarily the insight.
0:33:18.8 MH: I would admit I have a, maybe an unfair reaction to the five whys because it’s been like… And you didn’t say five whys, but you kind of make the why, why, why case.
0:33:31.6 CK: Keep asking why. Yep.
0:33:33.2 MH: Partly because when I see it often talked about it it’s kind of a sign of laziness. It’s who’s asking why? I guess maybe that’s… I’ve seen it more from. You should keep asking your business partner why. I think you’re coming at it from this is a way that a brand manager or a product owner or somebody, it is a tool they could try out to try to get themselves to think more deeply. I just need to acknowledge that the number of slides passing in front of my face where somebody’s got why, why, why? And then they kind of stand up and they’re like, and here’s what I do as an analyst. I just keep asking why? And they’re, it’s…
0:34:22.1 MK: I’m anti five wise. Just also which is insane since I love Simon Sinek. But I am also…
0:34:27.5 MH: Oh, in that case I am completely on board because I do not want to be caught in violent agreement with Moe.
0:34:34.5 CK: So you’re right. Like I think on that episode, episode 76, somebody had said something like, it’s not about just pushing harder on a door or pushing harder on a brick wall. And I’m paraphrasing, but like it’s about finding a different angle. How do you ask why in a slightly different way or how do you push from two or three different angles at the same time? That’s how you’re going to get to perhaps a different place. And I often say that people think that it’s just child’s play. Oh, every three year old asks why all the time. Why is the sky blue? And stuff like that. But it’s actually, it’s a very powerful technique because if you take the question seriously, it can lead to some very serious business innovations. Like think about TikTok. People were like, why are people risking intellectual property infringement to put these songs in their Instagram videos and whatnot. And TikTok came along and was like, why don’t we just make that part of the business model so everybody gets paid. You can use the… You can use the music, you can use this different stuff and makes for more entertainment. That’s not the only thing that makes TikTok successful.
0:35:49.7 MH: Yeah, it’s our rotten brains. It’s the human condition is unfortunately supporting them. But so these examples, and maybe it is, on the one hand it’s easier to use kind of an entire business model, business approach, major business pivot for insights. It does feel like there’s a place for, at a smaller level within an organization where someone has a responsibility to achieve X, whatever, sell more of their product line or…
0:36:31.8 MK: 80% growth in users.
0:36:35.9 MH: The what?
0:36:37.4 MK: 80% year on year growth in users, like just throwing it out there.
0:36:40.3 CK: That’s a goal that an organization might be tasked with someone in an organization.
0:36:48.7 MH: Quite hypothetically. And so that like, and I guess maybe that’s the example so far have been, where is there an opportunity for a business that could have a sustainable competitive advantage? Let’s just, we’ll run through Porter’s Five Forces in a bit. We’ll do the full every MBA buzzword possible. But if it’s starting with instead this is an outcome or an objective that needs to be achieved and there is a lot of data and there is a lot of research and more research can be done and more thinking can be done. Do you have thoughts on how you tie searching for insights in a way I guess part of it is you must be willing to say, I might not find insights by Friday. I…
0:37:35.6 CK: You absolutely should set that expectation.
0:37:37.6 MH: Yeah.
0:37:39.0 CK: And I know that that’s the pressure within the organizations. Again, in episode 76 you guys were talking about. People say this presentation needs more insights or need five more insights by such and such time. It’s built into the contract. We will deliver 10 insights by the end of Q1. And I think that setting that expectation is a very dangerous thing, because if you’re applying this definition of what an insight is, which is it’s fairly rare to get seven different dots connected in such a way and then articulate it in a really powerful way that you say, we’ve got something really new here. One thing I want to point out is that the alternate title for the book was No Insights Necessary.
0:38:24.4 MK: That’s interesting.
0:38:24.8 CK: Because what I found through the research process and looking at these different businesses and campaigns that have been incredibly successful is sometimes a really good data point can be enough of a springboard to launch you into the stratosphere. But the idea is to use the different techniques. Keep asking why. Create a debate. Reframe the question. These are a few of the techniques I talk about in the book. But using those different techniques will get you closer to an insight. But you don’t need the insight to make great work. You need something to get the ball rolling. Sometimes you just hitch that to an amazing creative process, and now you’re Old Spice.
0:39:17.6 CK: And you’ve got a campaign that just took the world by storm back in… All the way back in 2010. And that was based off a data point that something like 60 or 70% of body washes of men’s body washes is bought by women for their men. So it’s kind of like, wow, that’s interesting. And that sparked all kinds of ideas.
0:39:38.7 MK: I think what I’m finding challenging is that from like a business lens perspective, if we say, like we have this really high bar for what an insight is, the business should ultimately expect to get less of them. And maybe this is why I try and avoid using the word insight. Insert air quote. Because I feel like I then would spend my whole time trying to train people on what an insight is and isn’t. And I don’t know. There is a lot of stuff going on at the moment in the US that I won’t get to in the weeds of, but I do wonder how important it is.
0:40:20.0 MH: But why? Why, Moe? Why? And why? Why?
0:40:23.7 MK: How important it is to stick to a term or terminology that is not going to help you get to the outcome that you want. And I’m thinking about this a lot in, there’s, like I said a lot of stuff going on in the US and it’s like, do I really care about the word we use for something, or do I care about the intent and where we want to get to? And it’s…
0:40:50.4 CK: Totally.
0:40:51.5 MK: I had a very in depth conversation yesterday specifically about this, and where I’ve kind of landed is I don’t really care about the words we use. I care about that we get there, that we achieve the goal. And what you’re describing as an insight, I care that we do that process. Do I care that we call it an insight? Not really. And like, when stakeholders say to me, I want more insights, I want my team to be building me dashboards and really analyzing them for insights every week for me. I don’t care enough to sit them down and be like, this is what an insight truly is. I’m just like, oh, what I hear is that you want a strategic partner who can help you uncover observations, data points, learnings, and partner with you on what the best next step is. And we might get that in multiple different ways.
0:41:45.1 CK: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t go into meetings and have a a little bell, like at a hotel that goes ding every time someone uses the word insight incorrectly. That’s certainly not the goal at all. It’s always in service of what are we going to do to move the business forward. That said, Mark Twain has a wonderful quote about words where he says the difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
0:42:17.7 MK: I feel like I need someone to explain that to me. The difference between…
0:42:22.3 CK: The lightning bug is just a little, little blink.
0:42:25.6 MK: Oh, oh, wow.
0:42:27.5 CK: The lightning has all the power.
0:42:31.8 MK: Oh, I see.
0:42:34.5 CK: So when you…
0:42:35.6 MH: Mark Twain would say something like that.
0:42:37.7 CK: A lot of quotes are attributed to Mark Twain. I think that one’s legitimate. But getting that just the right word. Think about Airbnb. And I know this is a campaign word, but it was built on some research that they did. But this idea of belonging. It’s a pretty powerful word. And you could say a lot of other words that are adjacent to it doesn’t quite have the same impact. So I think we can all… I would think we would all agree that choosing the right word when presenting something can be a legitimate difference between something that falls flat and something that really sparks people’s imaginations and ideas. But back to your point, Moe. I don’t think that… I tend to interchange the word or the phrase aha moment or I don’t use… I don’t raise my hand, say, I have an epiphany I’d like to share, because epiphany starts to get you into a different territory. But I think, something you guys have all been saying is, why does everybody use this word insights all the time? It sounds more powerful, it sounds more exciting.
0:43:50.8 CK: But if you can find something interesting in the data or have one of those situations where you say, I noticed this the other day and it made me go, huh. Grab that tiger by the tail and see where it takes you. Because it can still be very, very effective in taking you to a new place.
0:44:14.3 TW: Which we haven’t really… We haven’t really talked about validating insights, which I don’t know whether it’s a chicken or an egg. If you have opposed data points and you say, if I can come up with an idea or an explanation that reconciles these two seemingly contradictory things, it feels like that could be an insight that could also be a potential insight that then needs to be validated through the collection of more data. We haven’t really covered… You’re putting these different things together. But I think almost by definition those points of light don’t exist to be put together. Somebody’s putting them together. It seems like it’s also, there are times where it’s worth, okay, now shine a light right on that. Take the Netflix example of the annoyed by late fees. And that’s maybe generally understood. It’s bubbled up in some research. Okay, we actually need to figure out how big is this pain. And we could actually go figure out a way to design a study or do some research to say, is this a nuisance that they will live with for the next… It’s just part of life or is this something that they would see value in having an alternative?
0:45:39.5 CK: Right.
0:45:40.7 TW: So I feel like there’s that an insight could be the sort of thing that gets brought to a collective to say, I think, could it be possible that these things are going on and they collectively sort of refine it? And then it’s like, well, how we don’t want to run with that if this thing… If it turns out we’ve just convinced ourselves that that one plus one is three on Tuesdays and we’ve come up with a reason that we think that’s the case. We might want to say let’s all have a conversation and figure out and this is where research or experimentation or analytics could come into play to say we want to make sure that’s really… We want to have a higher level of confidence in that insight. Like do you come into to that as well that it sort of starts to come into focus and confidence in the organization. It’s not just taking what I’ve found and thought about, but I may need to actually do some net new work, data collection or analysis or experimentation to say we really validated this insight. We should really run with this.
0:46:49.2 CK: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I often say that an insight should include key data observations or trends. But don’t confuse those things with the actual insight. They’re the backup, they’re the support. And you’re going to have skeptics who are rightly skeptical. Anybody, who comes into a space and says, oh, I got something that’s going to paradigm shift, you’re going to have a lot of people who are like, nah, I don’t think so. And I’m going to poke all these holes in it. So you want that, you want to invite that. I actually have a checklist in the book for how to tell if you have an insight. So the very first… And it’s an acronym and the acronym is insight, I-N-S-I-G-H-T. So the first thing is the I. Does it inspire action? When you tell somebody your insight, does that make them lean in or does it make them fall asleep? Does it make them go, mm-hmm? Or does it make them go, uh-huh. That’s a little bit different. It’s gotta be not obvious. That’s the N. So I’m cheating here. But the not obvious leads you to this idea of like reframing the problem in a unique way.
0:47:55.6 CK: The S is it’s got to be simple to explain. I always say the billboard rule, 10 words or fewer. If you can’t sell your insight in 10 words or fewer, go back and rewrite it. Make it shorter, make it pithier. The second I in insight, it’s got to include key data observations or trends. The G in insight, it’s got to give your brand a clear advantage. If it doesn’t tie back to your brand, I wouldn’t say it’s an insight because you can’t act on it. It’s an interesting thing. Or maybe, it’s an insight for another brand, but you’re trying to help the home team win. So that’s a great insight for that shoe brand. But we work in a technology company, so it’s not going to help us.
0:48:43.2 TW: Well, yeah, on the… I mean, you say brand because I think you… I mean you kind of work in sort of the brand world. That’s another one that feels like it could be narrower that if it doesn’t… If it’s not something you could act on within whatever your scope, it may not be the brand. It could be the service experience or it could be…
0:49:09.1 CK: Absolutely.
0:49:10.0 TW: The marketing channels or something. That’s fair game?
0:49:14.3 CK: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any unit within the business. Absolutely. And the last two letters, H stands for human truth. So again, I say, like, human truths are an important part of building insights, but the human truth by itself is not the insight, it’s the re-articulated human truth with something new. And then the T is taps into a cultural tension. It doesn’t always have to tap into a cultural tension, but if you can, you end up in a territory like Dove. They tapped into the cultural tension around beauty standards and they have been riding that wave for over 15 years. That the campaign, the Dove campaign for real beauty is still going strong. So it can help. It’s not mandatory. I actually say if you can check the box on five of those. How many letters are there? Eight. Seven. Seven letters in the word insight. If you can check five of them, you might actually be on your way to having a genuine insight.
0:50:20.8 TW: You can’t just go with like the… Was it Potter Stewart? The obscenity. I’ll know it when I see it because I feel like that’s still where we operate.
0:50:31.1 MH: Still a lot of people with intuition out there. But the most important thing I heard today, Chris, was that it’s not really the analytics person’s job to come up with the insights. And that’s where I’m gonna stop us.
0:50:50.4 CK: That’s right, you’re off the hook. You are off… You bring the data and you let someone else interpret the tea leaves.
0:50:57.3 MH: Yeah. What do you mean I’m bringing insights? You’re the person who’s supposed to have the big ideas. Haven’t you read this book? I’m just gonna keep a stack of them on my desk.
0:51:10.2 TW: I mean, it did… We haven’t really hit… It does feel like that there can and should be kind of a… There often can be a collective. When we start tapping, whose job is it to generate insights? Like that is kind of a missed framing of… I mean, you were making a joke. But it is like analysts are supposed to bring insights. And I think absolutely. It’s like, sure, analysts should participate, but that is an impossible bar when you’ve got a product manager or brand manager, a CEO who’s actually should have more of the definitional capacity in their role to consider those things.
0:51:45.9 MK: Or not even that. Has like enough visibility of all the different stars across the company to be able to connect the dots.
0:51:53.9 TW: Yeah, that’s better stated.
0:51:57.0 CK: Insight building is a team sport, that’s for sure. And I think it works best in companies that don’t have silos. Where you have people from different departments coming together, looking at the same thing and saying, I see it from this angle, it’s a little different. Here’s how the light shines through that prism from my angle. And then somebody else says, well, here’s what I see from my angle. It’s almost like the… What is it? Hands on an elephant exercise. If you blindfold people and you put your hands on the elephant. Except it’s got like a more positive spin. Everybody kind of… I’m going to mix my metaphors here, but you’re basically tilling the soil. Okay, totally mixing the metaphors. Went from elephant to soil.
0:52:45.3 MH: So you use the elephant to till the soil.
0:52:47.5 CK: That’s exactly right. Okay, that’s exactly right.
0:52:49.8 MH: Totally on board.
0:52:50.5 CK: The fertilizer from the elephant makes the soil that much richer. But you till the soil together and make sure you have a really good copywriter or a writer on your team because they’re the wordsmith who’s going to twist things around and play with words to get people to see things in a new way. Sometimes a clever turn of phrase is all you need to get to get that fire lit.
0:53:21.4 MH: All right, well, we do have to start to wrap up. This has been very good and very interesting conversation. I think what I like about this one and what I was excited about has really come to pass, which is, Chris, your take on this from sort of a different angle than what most of us experience kind of helps refine this for us in a different way and recontextualize this word insights and what it is, what it’s not. And thank you. This is really, really helpful and kind of fun. It’s fun to think about Netflix for a little minute.
0:53:54.5 CK: Well, don’t have a crisis of conscience just because you’re like, oh, my gosh, have I not been bringing insights this whole time? You guys have been bringing value…
0:54:04.0 MH: We’re all well past that point in our careers. We’re now on the embittered part of, like, what do you mean? I’m supposed to bring insights. So, yeah. But for our more junior listeners, that’s a really good piece of advice. All right. One thing we love to do is go around, share something that might be of interest to our listeners. We call it our Last Call. Chris, you’re our guest. Do you have a last call you’d like to share?
0:54:25.5 CK: I have a couple, if I can.
0:54:27.0 MH: Yeah, of course.
0:54:28.1 CK: All right, so one of them is Steve Martin’s book, Born Standing Up. It’s not a brand new book by any means, but it is a wonderful memoir by Steve Martin. And a couple things out of that book, actually, he talks about, I was in comedy for 18 years. I spent 10 years learning, four years refining, and four years a wild success. And I just love that example because, you think, oh, no, he was on top of it the whole time. He played thousands of shows before. I mean, he would do like four shows a day sometimes, according to the memoir, 25 minute sets, but he would do, four shows back to back. And it just that practice and refinement and to some extent, you might call it some A/B testing of his material. He would try out different things, learn, which got the biggest laughs and go from there.
0:55:21.0 CK: But he has this thing about opening lines in the book. He loves, great opening lines. And he tells this story about Richard Pryor being late to the Troubadour by almost two hours. He said he might have had the best opening line of anybody because after showing up, the crowd’s angry. They’ve been sitting there waiting for two hours. And his opening line was, hope I’m funny. So he actually highly recommends against coming out and saying, how’s everybody doing tonight? Because he says you kind of give up the opportunity to start strong. And so I recommend that book. I love that book a whole bunch. And then my second last call is, Any Insights Yet Season 2, the podcast is coming out where we. We interview some really smart folks. Some of whom are sitting right here today.
0:56:15.0 MH: Nice.
0:56:15.6 TW: So this almost feels like the host for host swap, that is actually not what’s going on, in the least. We’re certainly not that organized, but this is not a formal cross promotion.
0:56:30.2 CK: Yeah, we can cut that out if we want to, but Any Insights Yet Season 2 is coming out and I’m excited about who we talk to and really just explore. How do they connect the dots. Different people connect dots in different ways. It’s like Reese’s. There’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s. There’s no wrong way to connect the dots.
0:56:49.6 MH: Nice. All right, Moe, what about you? What’s your last call?
0:56:54.0 MK: Well, firstly, next week is Canva Create. So I’m gonna be in Los Angeles at SoFi Stadium, and I’m hoping that a few people might be coming along that I can say hello to. So I will be in the US next week. So, yeah, pretty pumped about that one. My real last call, though. So for anyone that knows me very well, I have a deep love and appreciation of champagne. I’ve been to France, to the Clicquot house, and if anything, it just like made my passion for champagne and particularly the brand Verve Clicquot double down. Because she was a female entrepreneur who was just like a complete badass. Completely disrupted the industry. And the more I learn about her, the more I love and lean into the brand. But yeah, the movie the Widow Clicquot is out at the moment, which I went to see, and I was actually a bit… I really enjoyed it, but I was a bit frustrated because I feel like they sold the story short. So one of the innovations that she came up with was basically like, instead of storing the bottles flat, you put them at a 45 degree angle so that you can pop out the sediment.
0:58:06.7 MK: And like in the movie, they just kind of like glossed over it. And I was like, no, that like literally is still used in champagne making today. That is like complete disruption of the industry. Anyway, needless to say, I decided to pick up a copy of the Widow Clicquot, which is a book that I’ve had on my backlist for ages to read about. But I assume that I knew everything and so I’ve started reading that. I’m about halfway through it. It is not for the faint hearted. It goes into the absolute minutiae of like the French Revolution of winemaking processes, all of that sort of stuff. And it’s very dense, but I am absolutely loving it. And so if you want to put down a workbook and just read about something else delightful and amazing female entrepreneur. And just like the French wine industry, it’s… Yeah, it’s been a really fun ride. I’m really here for it.
0:58:58.6 MH: Nice.
0:59:00.0 TW: It’s not my last call, but that was… And Moe, I just forgot to text you. I mean, I wanted to. I was driving, but past host Tim Harford, Cautionary Tales did a the Widow who Disrupted Champagne episode. I will say it was like a sponsored by Chase for Business. So they had the CEO of Chase for Business on. So it was a little weird. It was one of those, like usually unlistenable type kind of brand sponsored ones. But I knew nothing about the Widow Clicquot and the whole story. And they covered some of that as well. And that’s just a podcast episode for someone who wants to get a surface level.
0:59:39.3 MK: I would have to listen [0:59:40.3] ____.
0:59:40.7 MH: It sound like you could make a whole podcast about it. Anyways. All right, Tim, what’s your last call?
0:59:48.1 TW: What’s my actual last call?
0:59:49.8 MH: Yeah. What’s your…
0:59:51.0 TW: So I’m going to do two. Want to be quick. One is plugging. I’m sure many listeners of this already know Juliana Jackson, but she launched a Substack a few months ago and she is always very kind of thoughtful, strongly opinionated, usually takes positions that are a little contrarian, and then she backs them up. I’ll call out specifically, Attention Is Intelligence: What AI Gets Right and What it Never Will. Which was one of her earlier posts. But so if you’re into subscribing to substacks, I recommend Juliana’s. The other’s a little sillier, which is Sani Manic. He’s the host of the No Hacks podcast, but I don’t really understand exactly his role. But he’s also works on Podpacer, and Podpacer has this Roast My Podcast where you can put in any podcast. And I told him I thought this was like finally a good use for… Unalloyed good use for generative AI. It basically is a it will pull the last few episodes of the podcast, run it through kind of a large language model, and you get to pick whether you want mild, medium or harsh roasting of the podcast. And it’ll provide like a summary.
1:01:07.5 TW: So we are often asking listeners to, go in and rate the show. And I’m sure they’re thinking, but how can I say in a creative way the sorts of things I want to put into a Apple Podcast rating. But you can use Roast My Podcast. They’re kind of long. I’ll read one paragraph of our show being roasted. And let’s talk about the hosts, Michael, Moe, Tim, Val, and Julie. So you’ll note that we found an LLM that does include Michael as the… One of the hosts.
1:01:35.8 MH: It’s time for that.
1:01:36.9 TW: So they’re like the Avengers of analytics. If the Avengers superpower was putting you to sleep. They’re so deep into data that they probably calculate the optimal times to blink during the podcast. And can we address the fact that every episode sounds like they’re recording from inside an Excel file? Seriously, I half expect Clippy to pop up and offer suggestions on pivot tables mid episode. So that’s like one of four paragraphs that I got from the roast. So if you have a podcast or you want to make fun of the some middle aged dudes that you know who have a podcast, it’s an excellent tool.
1:02:07.8 MK: Tim, have you done Roast My LinkedIn yet? That’s also highly entertaining.
1:02:12.4 MH: Yeah, it is.
1:02:13.1 MK: Oh, yeah.
1:02:14.1 TW: Okay.
1:02:14.5 MH: It’ll take your LinkedIn profile and roast it. And it hurts. It really hurts.
1:02:19.1 TW: That’s outstanding. Now that I talk about the fact that I’m highly endorsed for [1:02:23.5] ____ in my little tagline on my LinkedIn. Okay, well, there we go. So Moe, you’ve got like a. An add on to my. This has never happened.
1:02:33.3 MK: I know. Look at us. We’re like collaborating and stuff. We almost agree.
1:02:37.0 MH: I believe we’re like three letters away from an insight here or something I don’t know. I haven’t been keeping track.
1:02:44.1 TW: But why? Why is this happening? Michael, what’s your last call?
1:02:47.7 MH: All right. Well, interestingly enough, and actually I’ve been reading Juliana Jackson’s newsletter as well. But another one that I’ve been getting a lot out of is one by Christopher Barry, who started a newsletter recently in mostly about AI or what he’s calling the Intelligence Economy. And whenever Christopher’s involved, it’s usually much smarter than me. And he reviews a number of like, academic papers and research and things like that that are happening in the AI space. The websites. I don’t know how to pronounce it. It’s Gatodo or Gatodo or Gatodo or I don’t know. But anyways, G-A-T-O-D-O.com but I’m finding I’m really excited every week to get that newsletter and read through it. And it’s kind of sparking cool thoughts and things that could in theory become an insight in the… Under the right conditions, but not insights in and of themselves. Anyways, so that’s my last call. All right. And as you’ve been listening. You’ve probably been thinking to yourself, wow, this is fascinating. I’d like to learn more or I want to talk about this. Well, to learn more, there’s an easy way to do that. Chris has a book called Any Insights Yet? And you can get that book from Amazon or any other bookseller.
1:04:07.0 MH: So that’s one way to do that. But we’d also love to hear from you. You can reach out to us directly, and the best way to do that is through the Measure chat Slack group or LinkedIn. Or you can just email us directly at contact@analyticshour.io. And wherever platform you’re listening on. Let me just make a quick pitch to you. Rate, review, thumbs up, whatever the system is, subscribe, whatever that system is. Algorithms matter to us in more deeply ways that in just more than just dopamine. They matter because it makes the show get to the audience that needs to hear it. So anything you can do to help us out, if you’re enjoying it, you think others should listen, do that for us. So we’d be very appreciative. All right, Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a lot of fun and I predicted accurately it would be this interesting cross section because of your background and expertise and sort of ours, I like where the conversation landed today. So thank you.
1:05:09.9 CK: Thanks for having me. And when worlds collide, new worlds are made.
1:05:14.2 MH: I like it. I like it.
1:05:16.3 TW: Did Mark Twain say that?
1:05:17.9 CK: No, I got that in a fortune cookie.
1:05:20.6 MH: Okay, but why? So anyways, that’s going to be the takeaway for me is, but why? One thing I am not asking why about is how much we appreciate our producer Josh Crowhurst. Thank you, Josh, for everything you do to help this show be possible. And I think I speak for both of my co-hosts, no matter what you call it, insight, learning, whatever. Remember this. Keep analyzing.
1:05:48.6 Announcer: Thanks for listening. Let’s keep the conversation going with your comments, suggestions and questions on Twitter at @analyticshour, on the web at analyticshour.io, our LinkedIn group, and the Measure chat Slack group. Music for the podcast by Josh Crowhurst.
1:06:04.5 Charles Barkely: So smart guys wanted to fit in. So they made up a term called analytics. Analytics don’t work.
1:06:11.2 S?: Do the analytics say, go for it no matter who’s going for it. So if you and I were on the field, the analytics say, go for it. It’s the stupidest, laziest, lamest thing I’ve ever heard for reasoning in competition.
1:06:26.6 TW: Just kidding, everybody. April Fools. No insights today.
1:06:32.9 MK: Can I also just say I didn’t skim the old Insights episode. We did a good job. Like it wasn’t shit. Don’t [1:06:41.4] ____ us.
1:06:44.5 TW: Rock flag and why, why, why, why.
1:06:55.2 MK: Wait?
1:06:56.1 MH: I was worried you were about to do five of them.
1:06:57.8 MK: You did four, I’m like why didn’t you do five?
1:07:00.3 MH: Yeah, that last one was so big, I was like, is he gonna do a fifth? That was good. Leave them hang… Always leave them wanting more. Tim, that was…
[laughter]
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