John Dick

I wish there was a sexier way to describe it, but we're a new breed of polling company, okay. And he's always revealing fasciniating insights, so I thought it'd be great to have him on the podcast. Let's start from the beginning. You're in Pittsburgh. Correct, Why Pittsburgh the next big thing? Pittsburgh is going through a tremendous renaissance. But

actually we're there. The company is there because carnegiel And University is there, and the talent and technology that powers the foundation of our company came from there, and so um and it's a great place to live, and it's a really emerging city with lots of talent and just a smart place for us to Are you from Pittsburgh born and raised? Yeah? Did you go to Carnegie Mill? I did not. Where do you go to to Rollins

College in Winter Park, Florida? Okay? So then how did you hook up with all these new technology things at Carnegie Miller. Well, I started a company earlier in my early twenties. Um sold that company in my late twenties. What was that company's called GSP. We helped early stage tech and biotech companies do business with the government, very

different business. And so I exited that company and had the business plan for what became Civic Science shortly after, and I knew it had some technology needs and found a couple of guys that knew how to solve those technology needs. Okay, So why did you want to be in the polling business? Because it's broken? And uh, well two reasons. When it was broken and at a little slower Why is it broken because people don't participate the

way they used to because we're too busy. Um, it's not a pleasant experience for people to participate in polling as it's sort of originally constructed. My phone's ringing while I'm having dinner, or I have to sign up at some web page and answer surveys all day for five bucks. And it's just not a user centric experience for anyone.

And so what happened is landline phone ownerships started to plummet, and the people who have landline phones don't look like the ones who don't, and so the quality of the data started to suffer. And then posters said, well, that's fine, we'll we'll call cell phones. But people don't answer cell phone calls from numbers they don't recognize, or at least the people who do don't look like the ones who don't.

And then you had the advent of what are called survey panels, which are these websites people sign up at and answer surveys for money. And those people don't look like either of us. They are too much time on their hands. Okay, just one other thing, generally speaking, because you've lived in a place in Los Angeles, you're constantly getting email whatever, Come participate for fifty a hundred dollars. What are those panels worth? Well, I mean, what are

they worth? They certainly are powering a lot of decision making in commercial America. I don't think they should be because the people who answer those surveys don't look like the real world. They are people who are highly incentivized by that financial incentive, and so they're heavily biased. Um, and then that financial reward inspire some of the wrong behaviors too, And when you're trying to research someone as

opposed to getting their honest opinion about something. So that's all been broken, and it started breaking twenty years ago. It started to really sort of, Um, the chickens kind of came home to roost in the last election cycle. We see polling just isn't working the way that it used to. Okay, we got we got a bunchet things on what is the other reason you wanted to go into this business? Because I think it needs to work. It needs we need to figure out a way to

understand what people think. There was a mindset ten or fifteen years ago that social media was somehow going to replace survey research is the way that we understood what the world thinks, and it just doesn't work that way. I'm not myself on social media. I'm a curated version of myself. We need a discreet means of understanding people's opinion.

There's a reason we pull a curtain behind us on election day, because if our opinions are subject to scrutiny and peer pressure and invective, then we um, we don't tell people what we think. Why did everybody get it so? I mean, now we have Nate Silver, who now presently at five thirty eight, used to be The New York Times the previous election cycle. He balances polls. He got it wrong, although he will say he thought the odds of Trump being successful. Hire New York Times got it

completely wrong. What did we learn there? Well, on a national level, from a popular vote standpoint, the posters were pretty strong. I mean they said most of the averages said Hillary Clinton would win by three percent, and she wrote one roughly by three Um, we're broke down. Was at state levels, where a couple of hundred thousand votes across three or four states were able to swing the election.

What did we learn about it in the grand scheme of things was that there was an entire universe of people out there who were piste off and we didn't know about it. Um. One of the reasons, and we study this a lot in our own data, Conservatives tend to be much less outspoken on social media than their liberal counterparts are. Why because they believe that when they speak out on conservative issues, they are opening themselves up to attack from the left, and so they tend to

keep their mouth shut. We've studied this extensively, and so there was an entire um sub layer of us, the US population that was piste off. But because they weren't trumpeting it from the rooftops on social media, we didn't know about it, and we didn't know about it until November. Okay, so you move back to Pittsburgh, you align with these people at Carnegie mellon what are the next steps in

starting civic science. Well, we had a lot of technology and to build what was that technology, database and database architecture designed to kind of find all the stuff we can find in our data. We had to prove that the data the methodology we were inventing worked. Now, the methodology you started with when was this two eight? Is that the same methodology you're still employing. Absolutely, So explained to my what you with that methodology. So we encounter

people and polls and quizzes across the web. Inside of content they're reading, it might be a polar quiz you might see on a buzz feeder or Facebook of what kind of wine or what kind of Simpson's character are you? But more it's an opinion type of poll of the day that you might find in an article you're reading on your local newspaper, on a site like Paris Hilton

or Univision. We're generally asking somebody a couple of questions at a time, no more than three or four, because we know that if we add too many questions, we start to see a decline and participation and that's no good. Um. We give people back, um instant results, which we think is really important. So I answer a question, you know, what is my favorite color? And after I click, I'll

see what everybody else's favorite color is. Sure. Sure, we don't generally ask favorite color, but yeah, sure, yeah, And and we think there's some a lot of particularly today. Um. And what we hear back from people is they appreciate

that we're giving them the answers right back. It's unvarnished, unfiltered truth that here's what the world thinks, and here's what people like you think, and it's not being passed to you through the lens of a media company that may have some bias now with somewhat Okay, what is

incentivizing them to answer the questions to begin with? Uh, it's that intrinsic benefit of a feeling like I'm participating in something good, be the interestingness of the results that I get back feeling like, Okay, I just learned something about the rest of the world by virtue of my participation in it. And do you compensate the sites where you're quizzes are now? So how do they end up

being placed there? Um? They it's effectively a bartering arrangement. Um. But what they they learn things from the information that we gather that help them grow their businesses, that we help them improve their editorial functions and their ad sales. Okay, So let's say you're on website A. You would approach them and say, I want to do this, but I'm going to share data with you that's going to be your compensation. Correct. So how many sites are you presently on?

Well over a thousand at last count. Um? Very uh piece together to give us a diverse representative view of the US population. So we want to make sure we have ample number of media companies that reach hispanics. An ample number of media companies that reach women and so forth. Um, the media companies make a distinction from us that the size of our poll sitting on their web page, that we are delivering more value to them from that information than they would get from a banner ad that was

sitting in that same place. And as long as we can maintain that equilibrium, we can continue to collect that data. How do you choose what sites to place your quizzes on? Um? Well, it's we have a team who goes out and sells that essentially, and we do we prioritize at any given time, We prioritize sales to publishers or partnerships with publishers who

meet demographic imbalances in our sampling. So if we if we notice over time, hey we're starting to get a disproportionate number of men answering our polls, we want to go and target sites that have a disproportionate audience of women. Okay, I am someone who never re answers those questions, So that begs the question are certain people ultimately not included in the sample? Yes? What do you do about that? Well, it's a fundamental flaw. UM, I guess what we tell

the marketplace. And what we can prove in our research is that because we've limited those barriers as much as possible, that our audience looks more like the real world than any other methodology you would think of. So you're not going to be the person who signs up and answers surveys all day for five bucks either. Um we are. We are all missing some portion of the US population. We're just missing a much smaller portion of the population. And do you sit in your office and say, how

do we reach those people? You just tell your customers some people are unreachable. Um, we're not giving up. I think we spend a ton of time trying to understand what types of questions or what kind of interaction will bring people who otherwise don't want to participate to participate in. Our response rates as a result, have gone up a lot.

The percentage of of people who see our polls on a website and answer them has skyrocketed in the last two years because we've invested very heavily in solving that problem.

I would assume it's still below ten percent. Sure, sure, um, but if you think about what's that, how's that relate to say, the likelihood of somebody clicking on an ad, it's a hundred times more than that, right, because there's there's something engaging about it, as opposed to, Oh, I'm gonna click on this ad and somebody's gonna try and try to try to sell me. And how many people work at SIVEN Civic Science? Um? I think? And are they all in Pittsburgh? All in way of one person

in New York? Okay? So what kind of companies uh, by your data? Um, pretty broad, large ones, primarily very bigger sort of fortune five hundred types of enterprises. Consumer facing companies were really strong and tech and telcom, media, banking, healthcare, restaurant, and some retail. Okay, we were talking off camera, and these are all household name the names you think they are, they are, but let's assume point of discussion. Telcom Okay,

it is a very competitive marketplace. Everyone already has a smartphone. There are four competitors in the United States. What you be able to tell a telecom company, Uh, there's going to be a mix of things about attitudes towards their specific company and their specific products. There's going to be a mix of things about trends within their category. So which of their competitors and maybe are more vulnerable than

others at a given point in time. And then the more valuable stuff we do tends to look at how various larger consumer trends and macro forces are affecting consumers and how that relates to what mobile carriers they're going to use, and and and um, how much of their

plan they're going to use. One thing we learned was really fascinating pre and post election was the composition of the people who were likely to switch mobile carriers changed very dramatically from the summer of two thousand sixteen through

the summer. And what did your research tell you, Um, Democrats were more likely to switch mobile carriers after the election than they were before because they, UM, I switched my mobile carrier generally to get a better financial deal, right, and so it tends to correlate with my personal financial

situation or my consumer confidence. And so once um, Donald Trump was elected, these people, UM, a lot of Democrats began to have a bleaker view of the economy and said, you know what, I better go find a better deal for myself. And we saw a higher rate of switchers among Democrats during that period of time as opposed to the summer before when they tended to be more likely to be Republicans. Now, sitting here as a lay person, one could say, also Sprint was offering comprehensive plans with

very cheaper free phones. T Mobile was very cheap, So one might say, really it was plans were so cheap people were incentivized for that reason as opposed to consumer confidence. Well, but still there's I chase a cheaper opportunity when I'm looking when I have a less positive view of my personal finances. So I would whether there was cause and effect there or whether those companies were smart enough to capitalize them what they knew was coming, which was more

price sensitivity in their core markets. UM. Hard to tell. Okay, Now, many all these companies do use consumer research, but there's a school of thought that research will tell you where you've been, but it won't tell you where you're going. Oh, that's the big part of our ethos as we focus on looking through the windshield. So how do you do that? UM?

We look a lot at patterns and trends in this history of data now that we have UM, those trends tend to have a trajectory that we can look two months, six months out and see where they're headed. We ask a lot of questions that are forward looking of people. What are your intentions? How likely you to do something in the future. Um, there's ample backward looking data that credit card companies have and people on the web have based on things I clicked on yesterday and bought yesterday.

We don't we don't need to augment that information. We focus on where are people going to be spending their money next week or next month. But you look famously, Steve Jobs did no consumer research, and he would come up with products that people literally hadn't heard of, I didn't think they needed, and then would clamor for good, good work if you can get it. Okay, So he's an anomaly. He's the outline absolutely. Okay. Yeah, how about Elon Musk probably of that ilk. But I think those

people are the exceptions, not the rule. Okay. So where's it going? Well, Um, it's a mix of exciting and terrifying all at once. Um, we are seeing some amazing see changes right now, a lot of things related. UM. I don't think we fully appreciate yet the impact that social media will have on our culture forever. I think we intuitively get some of it, but I don't think we're going to be able to diagnose any of that

for decades. But one of the things that that that we notice a lot in our data is and and everyone kind of can relate to this, is that because I'm this kind of curated version of myself on social media, I use social media as a way to make myself look funnier and smarter and a better parent and more adventurous and a better eater. And I think about that consciously or not when I choose what to share, where

to check in. Uh. The flip side of that is I have a high disincentive to say anything that is unpopular. And so we see and it goes back to the common I made earlier about the election. People who believed it was unpopular to support Donald Trump in two thousand and sixteen just didn't talk about it, but they showed up on election day and did. Now we're seeing it's

a little more um. People are a little bolder about their support now than they were in But what's happening is unpopular opinions tend to be suppressed on social media, and so we have a sense of consensus that doesn't really exist. But yes, if if, if you remember the summer of two thousand and fifteen, UM when the Supreme Court was ruling on gay marriage, it was a very popular thing to have this rainbow tinted profile picture as

a as a solidarity. Right around that same summer, the South Carolina State Legislature was being was debating taking the Confederate flag down from over the state Capitol building. There were no equivalent Confederate flag filters over anybody's profile pictures, which is kind of surprising to me because I grew up in a pretty rural part of Pennsylvania, where I know lots of gun toting, right wing evangelical Christian types. You'd think that I would have an equal number of

rainbow printed tinted profile pictures and Confederate flag ones. But I didn't, um because once Facebook had become a wash with those rainbow filters, everybody who believed otherwise had a significant disincentive from saying anything to the contrary because they knew they'd be open to attack. So narratives that emerge on social media and take take hold are very, very difficult to change, and the impact that has on the popularity of music, the popularity of brands and fashion. It's

it's almost a measurable today. Okay, Just so I understand it is is it a skewed view of reality or does it change reality? Or both both? I mean, I think I think what we're what what what I'm suggesting is that when we look back on this period of history that it will have changed reality. Um. Well, I'm a big believer that the reason the younger generation is not as racist and gay marriage is accepted because they saw a rainbow of colors and uh, different choices on

MTV and MTV dominated. So are we saying the same thing that social media will ultimately affect what people believe? There's no question about it. I think that it is. Once a wave of popular opinion washes over, it moves people. Um, it gets them to reconsider their points of view. Some it gets others to really stig their heels in. So what what are we learning with the backlash against Facebook

and social media presently? Well, there's a lot of technical reasons for some of that that I don't think Facebook should be blamed for. Um, this has all been happening so fast, nobody, It's not like everybody saw it coming and told Facebook to prepare itself. This was a whole new frontier for them. I think they can fix it.

I think what we're learning about from the election through now is what and and social media is driving a lot of this, which is this incessant kind of tribalism in America that we have where um I want to and it's and it's affecting UM this or what we call sort of the stay at home economy as well, people don't want to go out in public as much as that. We have a question that we track in our database, which is do you would you say that you want to go out, that you're going out more

or less than you did six months ago? Thirty three percent of people and the last time we looked at the state of a few weeks ago said that they're going out in public, want to go out in public less than they did six months ago. Why every time there's a shooting, one person says or more people say, I'm not going to go out today, I'm just gonna stay home. And and we've made it super easy for

people to stay home. And we're controlling our surroundings, were curating the people that were around in in two thousand and fifteen, we had at we have a question that says, do you generally like to be around people a lot? It's very simple question. Percent of people in two thousand fifteen said yes, I like to be around people a lot. Today that number so it's about a decline in that and that and that, and that doesn't seem like a

huge number or might. But what it's telling us is people are saying, I don't want to go out and sit in a restaurant and run a risk of sitting next to somebody who's ranting on about some political issue I disagree with. I'm going to stay at my home where I've where I've curated my friend group on social media, I've curated the media that I'm going to read and watch, and I want to create a safe nest around myself. And I think social media has helped to propagate a

lot of that. And so projecting five years out as opposed to three months, do you have a thought on that? Yeah, I think it's gonna continue to play out that way. I think we're going to have UM. I think people are a large portion of people are inherently introverted, but it was always hard to be an introvert um. Now I can have everything delivered to my doorstep. I never have to the shop. I never have to leave to

see a movie. I actually and what happened. What's happening is the commercial marketplace is moving towards those people were making. We're saying, if you don't want to leave your house, you never have to. UM. Companies are vying to own my quote unquote ecosystem. They want to have my internet, my cell phone, my content, my They want my refrigerator to talk to my doorbell, to my smartphone, to my watch on my hand, and the companies are all fighting to own that so that when I choose to stay

home and never leave, I'm only using one company. And I think maybe five years from now that peaks and saturates, but we're far from that. Stay right there. We'll be back with more of my conversation with John Dick, an expert on pulling an analytics right here on the Bob Left Sets podcast. You're listening to the Bob Left Sets podcast recorded here in Venice, California, at the tune In Studios.

Each week, I interview a new guest that dive into their backgrounds, their career, current events and everything in between. If you like the podcast, subscribe, review the show, and check out earlier episodes. You can hear them all on tune in, Apple Podcasts, or your podcast player of choice. And now more with John Dick. In light of gun tragedies, Have you done any research on that that tells us really were what America thinks? Um, And nothing that would

surprise you. UM. I think a lot of people and this is not just our date. I think most of the most data that you would see would say that the majority of Americans, UM, support some stricter interpretation of, if not if not stricter gun laws, stricter interpretation of the gun laws that we have today. UM. But the political environment is such that people don't want to give

any ground. One of the one of the unfortunate consequences of tribalism isn't so much just that I want to kind of organize only with people who agree with me and believe me. But I start finding myself distrusting everybody else. And that's that's the part of this kind socio cultural shift that scares us when we look at our data. Okay,

tell my audience, certain things you've learned that are counterintuitive. Um, well, there's certainly I felt that it was counterintuitive that we see this trend towards introversion among people, because I thought we tended to be more likely to be so I thought we were more social beings than we really are. UM. I don't think most of us ultimately want to be UM,

So that that kind of surprised me. Um. We see relationships between things that I wouldn't have expected a few years ago when restaurants spending started to decline in the US, and it was kind of inexplicable at the time. Traditionally, for for decades and decades, UM, restaurant spending is really closely correlated to fuel prices, and because it's disposable income

and and and fuel prices affects everybody. If I have a couple extra if I live in a rural town in middle middle part of Pennsylvania, or I live in a big city and drive a car, one of the first things that I can notice in my bank account as if I'm spending less money on gas and so Historically, restaurant spending was very closely aligned with shifts and fuel prices, but two years ago, restaurant spending was going down on

fuel prices were not going up. And we found in our data, which is part of the benefit of being able to study all of these things at once, is that it turned out was very heavily correlated with how much people were experiencing increases experiencing increases in their health insurance premiums, that that was beginning to chip away more at disposed healthcare costs were beginning to chip away at disposable income at a faster rate than fuel prices were,

and that had never happened. How do you find that, Well, because we're studying all of this stuff at once, we look at all these lines on a chart to see how they which one leads, one lags the other, How related are they, does one seem to be a cause of another, or do they just tend to follow or lead? And it was pretty evident to us in looking at two So we have two questions, say, um, it's actually

more complicated that, but imagine. And one question is would you say you're spending more or less to eat out? And another one is would you say you're spending more or less on your health care? And we looked at the people who answered yes to those two questions, they were closely aligned to one another. Okay, but sometimes there can be false correlations. Yeah, but that's just I mean, really smart statisticians know how to fare at that stuff out.

How do you do it? Well? You test them, Um, you continue to see if they if they continue to play out over time, You ask questions different ways to see if it's maybe just an error in the way a person is interpreting the question. Um, we're we're certainly mindful of that. We have a it's called a false detection procedure that we use and it's essentially a coefficient that we use to measure whether whether there's a false positive in our data. Wow, no, wonder you have the

cardig email and people involved. Yeah that's so. Did you learn anything else about health care? Um? Well no, I mean it's a mess. Um. I think that we're we saw a period of choice that hadn't existed before because the Affordable Care Act and a lot of that's uncertain right now. So it's a healthcare is a gray area at the moment because we don't know what the future of it's going to look like. Okay, so you're working with Fortune five companies, how would they find you? Um?

They're either referred to us by somebody else we already work with. We publish a lot of information. You mentioned a little email that we do every Saturday morning that finds its way into the hands of leaders. We don't really have. We have a very very very small salesforce. We're not the kind of company that's trying to um barge our way into your office to demo something for you.

We typically, UM, somebody typically reaches out to us and says, hey, I saw this study you published about this thing, and I'd really like to understand how it affects my business. And that's usually where a business. Okay, so I hire you. Let's say I'm a software company. What will you do for me? Well, first thing we have to do is understand your business. How do you do that? UM? We

just spend time together. We do. We have what's called a discovery process and a solution design process, which sounds very bureaucratic, but it's just simply a process of us learning, really what your blind spots are as a business, what do you and and no one never knows what those are in the first conversation because they don't think they

have any UM. So we we start to. We challenge some of that, We ask what they know, and we try to push back and we get a sense of all right, where can we fill in some blanks about their business? I told you earlier one of the unintuitive things for me is that UM our our biggest clients UM are companies that you would think don't need any more data. I told you we have sort of one open square on the tech Giant Bingo card of our business.

That that, but all the others we have, And you would think I would mention the names of those companies and you'd say, well, I thought they already knew everything about everyone. But what fascinates me about them is that, and I think was what's a fundamental truth is the more data those businesses have, the more questions they have,

the more things they don't know. And I think the reason they've become the giants they are is because they continue to be inquisitive and they continue to look under rocks for the next big insight, and those tend to be our best clients. So let's say you're a big Silicon Valley company which is collecting reams of data constantly,

what would you literally provide UM context? Sometimes UM a lot of the data that those companies have tells you what, but they may not necessarily answer the why, and you can answer that, yeah, they Our our specialty is the why and the what next? Where do we think this is going? Let's talk specifically about the music business. Sure, what have you learned about the music business in your research? Um, it's in a interesting stage of of cannibalization. That doesn't

people aren't listening to music more, um, cannibalization. So there's a it's it's something of a zero sum game for the players in the space. There. There aren't more hours in the day. There aren't more people listening to music than listen to it twenty years ago. So the fact that music is more accessible people are or not listening to more music there does not appear to be any evidence of that, or at least new people listening to

music who aren't listening to it a lot before. And so with all of the providers coming into the marketplace, they are fighting over a finite pool of and now it's a large pool, don't get me wrong, but but there's it's finite, and there's not room for there's certainly a room for, you know, multiple providers, but only to

the extent that they are dividing up our attention. I think we will see some consolidation, and I don't mean necessarily from a business standpoint, Um, one company buying another necessarily. But I think we will see more and more music listeners gravitating the single sources of music than well. I believe that for different ways we live in a we will live in a winter and losery economy. Across the board,

we have incommittee, quality, etcetera. You want to go where your friends are, and let's do successful companies have sixty plus percent market You're online the roll click away, right, and I think, well, that's a part of the virtuous circle. Um, it's easier, but it's also desirable. Um. One of the same thing with the kind of the at home tech ecosystem. If I have fewer passwords I have to remember, if your tech support people I have to call, fewer interfaces

I have to learn. I mean, that's that's a highly that's as desirable to me as my refrigerator talking to my doorbell would be. Just the simplicity and the convenience of it. I think that's all driving. Um, it's driving what will what we expect to be a rapid pace of consolidation, particularly in all media, but music in particular. Okay, so there, let's assume there'll be fewer places that you would ultimately gravitate to listen to music, or they have

larger market share. What about the acts themselves, Well, we we don't need our data to tell anyone and you're you know this better than we do that. It's just much much easier for people to record at right. Um, it's happening at an almost immeasurable pace because I can just take a quick video of myself and slap it on YouTube. Um. I think we are because of a lot of the trends we see in social media. Um,

we see why. I know you have some thoughts on virality. Um, things can go from small to big very fast, but they can also go from big small very fast with a misstep. And I think the adoption curve of of everything, including music is truncated. So it's happening much faster than it did years ago because there's fewer barriers to entry. The adoption curve. What is that, Well, it's it's the extent to which Um, there are people out there who

will try everything. There are music fans who will listen to every single artist they hear about, and then we call those an early adopter. Um, there's a second phase group of people will call a market maven in our terminology, which is I try it and then I tell everyone about it, and I go to social media and I say, look at these songs I listened to check out this band that I like. And those people have a lot of power today. My sister is one of those people

in music. When she tells me about a band a year later there at the Grammys, you know she's always been that way. But UM, there's a third group of people then, who wait for those market maven's to tell them what to think. They don't want to make decisions for themselves and not doing a ton of their own research, going and reading reviews or any of that. They wait for those friends they have like I do with my sister who says, oh, you should go check out this

band because I don't have time to follow music. Now with an overwhelming number of marketing messages, is the percentages of early adopters, market maven's and passive listeners have those numbers changed percentage wise? Not really? Um, it's a in fact, we're working on a study on this right now. It's it's remarkably consistent the percentage of people that fall into

those buckets. But what's happening is the progression from one group to the next is happening much faster because the connectivity between the early adopter to the market may even to the lemmings who wait for those market mayven's to tell them what to do. We're just much closer to

each other than we everywhere before. So every time I turn on Facebook, there's the likelihood of my sister posting some song that she just listened to that inspires me to listen to it that I where five years ago I had to wait for to call me on the

phone to do that. Yes, but also I would argue that there's so many messages that it is harder to get somebody to click or harder to pass on your information today from a marketing standpoint, Sure, so that's why social media is so powerful, because I don't know what

else to trust. But if my sister tells me, that's different, and that's a hard thing for brands and marketers to get their head around the power of the influencer, which isn't necessary and I don't mean in a YouTube influencer as much as I mean somebody in my social network

who I trust. One thing that we've seen in our data indisputably over the last four or five years, we track things like which of these kinds of advertising has the most influence over your purchase decisions TV, radio, print, whatever. One of the lines on that chart is comments and recommendations from my friends on social media, and that line has climbed and climbed. It has its surpassed television for the first time two summers ago and has stayed there.

So I trust because I don't know what other media to trust, and that's actually getting worse right. We can't discern fake news from real news anymore. So the only thing I can trust is what my sister tells me.

So what is the future of advertising? I think what we're seeing and what we're telling our clients is that they have to understand that adoption curve, and they have to understand that the way you communicate to an early adopter is different than the way you communicate to a market maven, which is different too than a way you communicate to that third tier. To what degree your people just tuning out advertising completely. Oh a lot. UM. I think you've seen the advent of UM so called native

advertising in the last five or six years. So it's advertising masquerading is a news article. UM. Advertising has to be a lot less obtrusive in my life or intrusive. UM. And what you're seeing is brands focused on creating more of an ongoing connection with somebody so they don't feel like I'm being advert ties to all the time. It's it's a much more subtle process than it was twenty years ago. Okay, we'll return to this conversation with John Dick, CEO of Civic Science in a moment. This is Bob

left Up. So I'm a writer and you could read me at left Steps dot com if you haven't noticed already. I love getting a person story. I like to know what makes them tick, specifically as it relates to successful people who are changing the game in their respective field. I'm eager to get to the bottom of it on this show and that same thing, and I'd like to invite you to attend my music media summit in Santa

Barbara the last weekend in April. It's gonna be a great way to connect with the movers and shakers in the world of tech and music. Go to Music Media Summit dot com for tickets and more information. And now more with John Dick. Let's go back to uh lessons you've learned. You were telling me earlier that you learned that Android users correlate with more heart problems. Yeah, I mean those are those are the kind of fun and

quirky but often useful things in our data. When you study hundred thousand different questions that have been answered a billion times, you find relationships between stuff that, Yes, if you have an Android phone, you're more likely to have a history of heart disease in your family. That is not causality. That doesn't mean if you switch phones you

won't have heart disease. It means that people who have the types of people who have Android phones are the types of people who tend to have a higher rate of heart disease in their family. And there's income and and other kinds of proxy reasons for that, which makes lots of sense when you explain it. But if I'm a marketer at a pharmaceutical company, that's a pretty useful discovery to find in a database that that relationship exists.

One of our absolute favorites is um, there is a staggering correlation between how much people like Gary Busey and how much they like Kia cars. Never been able to explain it, but but I can tell you. I can tell you five or six years ago that that little bit of information formed the catalyst of a television campaign for a regional network of Keya dealerships Star and Gary Boucy. I did that works? It worked like a charm. Wow. Okay, a little bit more. How did you find that correlation?

Same thing? So we just have these really smart people in smart technology that crawls around and all of this data all the time and looks for those kinds of things. The kind of unexpected insight that one of our kind of marketing sticks is that we answer questions you never thought to ask. Okay, so do you go further and try to get Okay, Gary Busey, he has kind of an irreverence gear, gives a shit about life. And if you're driving the Kia Squirrel car, it's kind of an

ugly car, but you're sort of saying the same thing. Yeah, I mean, we get at we eventually you find the why. And as I mentioned, I think That's the kind of the gray space we're trying to fill in the world is why is that true? So finding that it's true is one thing. Understanding why it's true is another. Because the advertising or marketing or product decisions that that inspire have to be They can't just be Oh, I don't know why, but we're gonna do it anyway. We have

to help them understand why. Okay, so you're on a roll. Now tell us some more things you've learned in the data. Oh geez, you know there are things that millennials are more likely to pick rock and rock paper scissors than other generations. Yeah, I'm trying to think. What what do we learn from that? Well, you can learn how to take money off of millennials at rock paper scissors. Yes, Uh,

that one's kind of trite. Um. Lots of what I mentioned, the healthcare and restaurants spending, those are the more serious kinds of useful, impactful, well, irrelevant of whether it's counterintuitive. What other things might want to learn? What if someone is an iPhone owner? What did you learn about iPhone owners? Well? I can't touch that one. What I can say is, um, we find one of my favorite areas of studies height.

There is a there are tons and tons of correlations in our data tied to whether somebody is taller or shorter than their peer group or people their age and gender. There's there's and there's sociological reasons why that's true. But taller people have different brand preferences, they have different media consumption habits than shorter people do. And why is that? So? We know over history taller people, generally when they were younger,

were better at physical sports than others. They tended to that bread some confidence that manifests itself in the classroom that um maybe helped the tall person stand out saying a job interview or an admissions interview for a college. And you do that millions and millions and billions of times over human history. And there are certain um proclivities that tall people have that short people don't, and vice versa.

And it's not always benefiting the tall people, by the way. UM. But but we have a question in our database that essentially is like are you taller shorter? And people answer that question because they want to know how they compare to other tall people and other short people. But when we've asked that question, hundreds of thousands of times and studied millions of things about people based on their height. We find that there are indisputable relationships between your height

and your consumer behavior. For example, can you remember any specific correlations. Um, Yeah, some of them are funny, I mean, very obvious ones. Shorter people are less likely to go see live music because they can't they can't see it. I think they see your answer. That's probably your answer. Actually, the way we the insight was that shorter people were actually more likely to watch access concerts on television. Now, in the music business, we've gone to so called, you know,

festival seating in that the people stand. I personally hate it. I remember the old days when there was a seat at the fill More East. Now the live companies would tell you they can only put in certain number of people because of fire marshal rules. That's a bunch of crap. They squeeze more people in if they're standing. But would their business be increased if they had seats and the short people could see One would think yeah, I mean certainly.

If is an extent to which there's a person choosing not to buy a ticket to a concert because they don't feel like they're going to be able to see well enough when they get there. That's what seemed to me to be a pretty obvious measure for them to take. Wow, that's very stimulating. Let's go to the reverse. Okay, No, it really is, because I think this goes back to your point that you're advising or working with household named companies, Silicon Valley companies. We think of all the data, but

their insights. I mean, there's a lot of there's this is something I have a lot of institutional beliefs that I don't think are true, and the data can help prove otherwise we are. There are certainly truisms um that

have at least evolved, if not are inherently untrue. UM Like what really putting me on the spots some of these No, I mean, I'll I'll think of um, well, we don't millennials today, so hate you know, I feel like I talked about it all them all the time, because that's so much of what our clients want to know about. But this sort of trend towards introversion among consumers is really being driven by a millennial population. They're going to bed earlier, they're waking up earlier, they're drinking

less um. There are lots of trends about young people today that UM and younger, I mean young could be anywhere from you know, thirty five and under that UM are perceived to be a function of them their generation. Oh, millennials are aren't going to drive cars because millennials, well, uh, we want to draw distinction between what's a generation and what's a life stage phenomenon. So, yeah, twenty four year

olds don't want to drive cars. I don't want to drive a car when I was twenty four either, But but all of a sudden, you grow up and you have kids and you've got to truck them around a soccer practice. Guess what, Millennials are starting to buy cars. There was this, There were you know, gloom and doom stories ten years ago that the auto manufacturers were screwed because millennials were just going to take uber and ride public transportation everywhere they went, and it's just not true.

We had a call a few years ago from the director of a very large zoo who called to ask why millennials weren't coming to the zoo. Now this might have been longer six seven years ago. They were freaking out because millennials weren't coming to the zoo, And I said, year olds ever come to the zoo? Right? You know? We we want to draw these these sort of hyperbolic conclusions about things that quote unquote millennials are doing today.

But there were twenty two year old millennials. I mean, so millennials technically what roughly eighteen to thirty four today? I think of the life stages that encompasses. I could be twenty two, smoking pots, sitting on my parents couch, or I could be thirty three with two kids and a mortgage and two cars in my garage. And so to make some blanket statements about what's definitively millennial versus definitively gen X versus baby boomers, A, it's a okay,

but let's go on a broad scale. In what ways are millennials different from the generations they proceeded them? Well, certainly digital connectivity and media consumption are absolutely true. Um, these these these phenomena of the stay at home economy and the the tribalism I mentioned before. Whether they're causing it or whether they will be the first generation to live fully within the confines of that, I don't know, but it's certainly going to be the latter. They are

definitely going to be. They are driving a an era of UM people staying in echo chambers, UM confining themselves to a smaller group of people that they can curate and can same thing with their media consumption. But you can't open a major publication without people either selling or analyzing ways to interact with millennials. Like especially millennials. You know, you can't say anything negative to them. They're gonna cry, They're gonna quit. Is that all horseshit or is that true?

I think that's a little overblown. I mean, most of the people in my company fit the bill, fit the deaf and isation of a millennial, and I don't find that to be true at all. I think those are those are fun stories for people to tell. I don't. I don't have the gloomy view of, you know, millennials killing the fabric of America or that will you read

a lot of I don't. It's I think it's overblown. UM. I'll tell you another another thing that's that's maybe a truism that we can dispel is that one of the this is a huge sort of shifted topic. One of the biggest fallacies in the world today is that Donald Trump uses Twitter to talk to the American people. The American people are not on Twitter. Of Americans at most are on Twitter, even of his voters, give or take.

He is using Twitter to talk to the media who carry his message to their little tribes of people who read it, and so he doesn't care. And it's actually quite brilliant. I'd have to tip my hat to the way he's he's he's he handles it. I mean, he tweets at three o'clock in the morning because he knows he's setting the media landscape for the He's telling the media what they're going to talk about that day. And he doesn't care what CNN says about him because his

followers aren't watching CNN anyway. People don't trust information anymore. They trust the distributors of that information. And so Donald Trump seeds has ferry dust into Twitter, and those publications run it to their individual tribes of readers. One um one of the more profound trends that we see today is even as even as consumption of every other form of media is in decline, television ratings or down, sports or down, newspaper readership is down radio listening is down.

The one thing that is skyrocketing is the readership of political blogs political content online, which is a is a harbinger of an ill future for so called objective media outlets, because I don't want objective media. I want media that affirms my existing beliefs and I and now there's so much variety out there that I can go find it, and it tends to be a blog who isn't trying to appeal to the masses. UM that can tell me exactly what I want to hear every time I click

on the web page. And Donald Trump has come along in an era where he's benefiting from that immensely. Um So, so he puts out his UM two morning tweets and it's carried directly to the people he wanted wants to carry it. Is he you believe he's consciously doing that? I mean I think so. I think he knows that he's communicating to his supporters through UM through the megaphones of the media outlets that support him. What is your

research told you about the mid term elections? Well, uh, funny you should ask that, because just today I was reading some report on some of our data that is speaking of um, we're seeing after sixteen months of very positive growth and consumer sentiment, we've started to see over the last month of fairly significant decline consumer confidence, economics sense, people's attitudes or the job market and their personal finances, and the out for the U s economy seems to

have peaked and is now beginning to slide. Um donivity flawed as to why that is. Um, Well, I think there was an artificial high in the first place. There was a lot of sizzle, not a whole lot of steak in terms of there was just optimism for optimism's sake. There was a large sector of the US consumer population who just believed things would get better. They tended to be Republicans and the people who voted for Donald Trump in the first place, even though they maybe not necessarily

had any reason to feel that way. Um. And so we're next Tuesday in my hometown. There's a very significant mid term special congressional election that the President's going there

on Saturday. Joe Biden was there yesterday, and I'm we're not in the political prognostication business, but there's reason to believe that this downturn in consumer sentiment because we do know that that effects election cycles could have an impact as as soon as next Tuesday on on a very important it's a razor thin margin in that election, and that could be the kind of downturn that might tip it in the favor of the Democrat and Trump himself.

Now we read about his approval rating constantly. Is that worth anything? Sure? I think so? I mean, is it accurate the aggregate of If you take and one thing we admire a lot about Nate Silver is he does take into consideration a lot of different sources, and if you normalize for the biases of one versus the other, and those numbers, his approval numbers are fairly consistent. Um, what matters more is whether who shows up to vote. His approval ratings have haven't barged much at all. And

and and frankly, you know, there's what I think. The estimate is about thirty of US adults actually voted for him. If you can take into consideration the the people who are registered to vote, in the portion that actually came out and voted for him, we're talking about just over one third of the entire US population. And that's roughly give or take three or four points at a time, that people who still approve of him, And so public approval doesn't mean anything unless people vote, and we know

that they don't. And and the biggest problem that posters have isn't can I measure public opinion? It's can I predict who's going to turn out on election day? Okay, we talked about millennials. What have we learned about baby boomers? Well, I have to um putting my personal points of view aside on that. Um, you consider yourself a gen x er. I'm a gen xer. So should we start when we

learned about gen xers? Yeah? I mean, UM, conventional wisdom would be there are a smaller bulge than the baby boomers. They were in the wake of the baby boomers. They feel on some level they missed out on woodstock in the heyday, and they feel that the baby boomers raped in pillage to their detriment. I think the latter is true. I'm not necessarily sure. We feel feel like we missed

out on much. Um. I think we feel like we're being we're responsible to clean up one group's mess to make things better for another group, and we're not going to get a benefit from either of them. That is not a data that is a purely that is a pure a subjective point of view of my own on on the subject um. But we do see um. So bringing it back to data, we see low we see much lower divorce rates among gen xers. We see um uh if you look at sort of declines in crime

rates over the last twenty years in the US. I'm not saying that we're a more virtuous generation. We just maybe didn't have as much time to to We're we're all very busy. Um. What we do see one of the biggest trends in the in the that's being driven by gen X is the shift in um gender roles in the family. Household responsibilities are shifting more and more towards women, and men aren't picking up the slack um.

And that doesn't mean you know, uh, women are making more larger household decisions about real estate, banking, things that used to be kind of traditionally male decisions. Women are making more of those decisions than they did in the past, and men aren't doing much more. I mean, there are men doing more cooking and more grocery shopping, but they're not doing it at a rate that outweighs the increased

responsibility women are taking on in households. Um. I've we have a piece that we wrote a couple of years ago that still gets circulated around a lot, and it was entitled women are getting a terrible deal because of that. Um, you've got multi um spouse working or multi partner working households.

Women are bringing our while still making less money than men overall, are starting to make more money and carrying as much responsibility for households, and men are starting to be to be free riders a little bit more than we were before. And to the degree you've researched this, what about the me too movement? Um, we don't. We don't research that very much. Um, because it's unresearchable. Your clients don't demand it now, I mean we don't, just

you know, we we don't. A lot of the not all the research we do is because clients demanded a lot of our clients say go research what's important and come back and tell us the truth. You know, we are. We are out there searching for truth and then we share it with the people we think can benefit from the knowledge. And I think the me too movement is a is somewhat related to this topic of of male entitlement that that is pervasive or has been pervasive for years.

I think that's starting to lift. I just don't think there's a whole lot we can add to the discussion about it. Um it's a huge problem. It's wrong, it's um. There's just not a lot of nuance that any data is going to say about um, how right or wrong or how wrong it is. Okay, so what about baby boomers?

You remember any insights on the baby boomers? Well, I mean yes, Um, so baby boomers are much closer to their kids than generations before them, and that has a lot of effect on how they're making decisions about their health care and and everything from their consumer decisions. We work with a number of healthcare companies who sell devices. I'll use an example of like a sleep apnea company.

They have a sleep at the machine. So for years and years and years, you would advertise to the person who suffered from sleep apnea, Well should you really or should you advertise to the spouse who lives with the person sleep apnea? And so we've seen that shift, of course. But but but across other areas of healthcare, when it comes to medical devices, like say, say maybe not sleep apnea where I can't sleep because the person beside me

is snoring. But other ailments like COPD or what have you. UM, the the millennial is of significant influence over the baby boomers decisions, and they're because they're closer than they were before. So we are challenging our our clients to think a lot about UM advertising or influencing baby boomers by influencing the people who influence them. And and that is a trend that we've seen shift quite a bit. So ironically,

because baby boomers think they know everything, they don't. Well, they may still think they do, but they are influenced by other things. They are they are, and a lot of it is driven by the closeness of the relationships they've maintained with their kids, which is a very good thing. By the way, UM that there is UM they're they're either reliant on their younger children or they've just had

a closer relationship through as their kids got older. And when you hear the stories of the millennials who are still, you know, living in their parents houses, there's one of the positive ends of that is the relationships between them tend to be pretty good, pretty strong. Okay, we'll return to this conversation with John Dick, CEO of Civic Science, in a moment. Hi, this is Bob left sense. My guests come to the tune In studios in Venice, California

to have these conversations with me. And if you ever want to see what they look like where we take the show, check out the photos and videos search at tune In on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And now more with CEO of Civic Science, John Dick, And what about

more macro trends. Who you mentioned cars? What is the future of audibobiles because we read all the time in the straight media that you know, autonomous driving is coming, I think, okay, so that's definitely something we studied very closely. The vast majority of people are still very scared about autonomous vehicles, particularly women, do not want to get in

a car that's driving itself. By the same time, and we see things slip overnight, like we heard we heard digital photography was gonna place film for at least ten years, and then with the space of twelve months, seemed like film disappeared and digital came upon us. So a lot of people are fearful, but then when the product comes in their influences like a O. Well, you know that no one was online that all of a sudden, for a couple of years, everyone was buying a computer just

to get online. So I'm just when people are fearful of something, could the switch be faster than it used to be? It could be, but it also, in the case of autonomous vehicles, could go the other direction to it only takes one hacker and some eastern block country to take over a bunch of cars with a computer and drive them into a crowd of people that no one's ever gonna want to get into a driver less

vehicle for twenty years. I think that there's there's enough fear and and skepticism about autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence in general that a couple of bad pr nightmares for one of those cars doing what it's not supposed to could kill it. Um there's no reason to believe that will happen, but it's you could certainly foresee a situation where whatever momentum driverless cars are gaining could be stopped

in its tracks. I think it's more likely we'll see an evolution towards autonomous vehicles like we see evolution toward alternative fuels um our alternative energy UM. You've got huge infrastructure in the automobile industry and the fuel industry that are going to slow a lot of that progress down UM. And then you've got a lot of people who are just skeptical about or or simply uncomfortable with the idea

of being in a car that they can't control. So I don't expect it to be an overnight thing, And there's nothing in our evidence. The evidence in our data is that the percentage of people who are comfortable with a driverless car has not grown much in the last two years. It's the same group of people. I vastly disagree with this, okay, just because I think that's what people believe. But I think when you know, we have the Tesla accident in Florida where the guy crashed into

a car, these stories are really amplified. And of course we're talking about the pace of changes more quickly. It happens more quickly these days. But if you go back to even in the commercial jet age in the sixties, they did not have the flight control that they have today,

and they had accidents. Okay, people were fearful. They're still fearful today, even the odds of having an accident are really low, but the barrier to entry to getting a ticket because deregulation in in airlines, there's a there's a lot of things that may not be directly applicable. But when the person next door gets a car or can even better, can call up a car like Uber, and you don't have to own a car, you don't have to have a garage. I think the pace of change

happens very quickly. I mean I look at this like the Internet. Most of the public was not Internet savvy, and over the course of one to five years, everybody was Internet savvy. So I'm not sure I agree with that. What about climate change? You learn anything with climate change? It's not something we study a lot um. People are pretty setting their mindsets about that. We don't see a

lot of change. I will go back, so I appreciate your your argument on the drive and let me let me say that I'll be the first person to call that driverless car to come pick me up. So I'm hoping it comes as fast as possible because I could do away with my car in a second, and I think there's a chance that that could happen. All I'm saying is there's also a chance you could go the other direction pretty quickly. But I guess what I'm saying

is something it's irrelevant of driverless cars. One to what degree our stories being amplified that ultimately have no impact. Okay, there was a story back when these portals used to be of much greater impact. I think it was on Yahoo. They had a big thing saying tongue splitting was a big thing. Okay, well, you literally split the end of your tongue whatever. In reality, there were fewer than I believe, certainly a few of the ten. I think it was

fewer than five people who'd ever done. There wasn't really a trend, but people were writing about it. It's sort of the flip side of the uh. People with unpopular opinions, we're not putting them on social media so that these stories that are amplified. This is something that's changed in the Internet. There used to be something called a turntable hit. Well, all the gatekeepers they were going to bang something and it makes it looks like it's popular, but the public

isn't buying it. Now we can see whether the public buys so I see. I mean, I think the New York Times is the best we've got. I don't want to make it right about right or left. It's just that they have boots on the ground and in all these places other people don't. Okay, but now more than ever, the mainstream media will prints. I'm not talking about printing hard news. Okay, there was a war here, that's something different.

But when they print softer news, I think it has less impact and less accuracy than it ever did before. That's indisputable, and it's and it's getting worse by the day. Uh. Two weeks ago, people were I had half dozen friends of mine on social media shared a story about the the idea that the students in Parkland were what were the crisis actors? That meant there were a hundred and seventeen thousand The one article that I saw had been

shared a hundred and seventeen thousand times. The average Facebook user has three hundred and sixty eight friends. That means roughly what thirty seven some million people saw that article from a friend, leading them to believe it was true. Right, So it doesn't. So so that the scale at which misinformation can spread is is and we and we will retract from that as consumers because we're gonna only get burned by that so many times. So you're absolutely right.

I think that's happening, and and I think it will take five misguided stories about bad driverless cars probably could spoil some group of people. Um but but uh, the pace of misinformation, I don't know where that ends. By the way, if I hope that people wise up and become more scrutinizing and what they believe, but maybe they won't. I don't believe people. You know, it's interesting you're selling that an analysis. I don't believe the average person has

the power of analysis. Oh no, That's why I was saying earlier. I think one of the biggest challenges we face as an erosion of trust of data. We talked so much about big data and data science and all of that, but I think the average consumer distrusts numbers

because based on who puts those numbers in front of them. Um. We I mentioned to you earlier when we were talking that we were we've been approached from by media outlets about sort of publishing or syndicating our numbers, and we just won't do it because all of a sudden, we lose we we we inherit the perception of bias that those outlets have if they put their names. But the irony, and I'm sure you're hearing it anyway, is people believe

you're biased anyway. True, true, But I can sleep better at night if I have some control over well, I know. I mean, I I write about Spotify, and every day I get people said, well, you're on the payroll. I'm not on the perrol. It never took a cent. Okay, I'm not saying therefore the opposite is gonna hapen to take the money. But even if you are literally white clean,

these days, people believe you're not. Oh, I mean, we'll we'll write, we'll put one blog post out about a topic, and on our Facebook page will be in the same by one person accused of being a right wing hill and on the next comment will be a left wing ship. I mean it. People will find the story they want to find if your data doesn't precisely affirm their existing belief. What's a sad state of affairs? I mean, I grew up an inner where there were many fewer media outlets

and you could agree on the facts. You can't even agree on the facts, and even no you cannot know and it's hard to give it. So any other macro trends that you can give us. You're talking about, uh, the cocooning, which ironically is what Faith cop popcorns at a few decades back. But now we have the ability with all these instat cart and Netflix to do that. Any other macro trends in the public. Well, So I mentioned the the the true, the aspirational nature of social

media and what that's doing. UM. The impact that's having on brands I think is pretty dramatic in terms of UM. I was on a I gave a talk at a conference of about a year ago as a beauty industry conference, and I sat with a woman who was an executive of a big beauty company, and she was telling a story about how the night before she had driven her son. She was taking her son. That we were in New York.

She was taking her son to soccer practice, and I picture her in her land Rover in Westchester, right, and he hadn't eaten dinner yet, so she drove him through the drive through at a fast food restaurant to get

him some burgers. And she gets to the soccer fields and all the suburban Westchester moms were standing there, and she has a panic attack that these moms are going to see that she'd taken her son of this fast So she's telling the story and we're all laughing, but she she stands up and she's shoving the stuff in her bag so that moms won't see it. And so we've been materialists are since one person had a nicer

loincloth than the other. Right, it's going back as much as you know, as far back as you can go. Janis Joplin wrote about it in nineteen seventy and um, but we've never had the tools to or the purse, or the fear that ever that are that are purchase and consumption decisions were on public display like they are now. And this was a case of a woman driving to

a parking lot with food in her car. But with the cameras and the social media and the sharing and the posting and all that, the decisions that I make about where I eat and where I buy are are on public display and subject to scrutiny like they've never been before. So we've always had guilty pleasures, and I might I may choose not to eat at a particular fast food restaurant because it's unhealthy for me. But if I do, I just don't post about it or brag

about it. But what about that woman who next time her son hasn't eaten dinner, she actively chooses not to go to that fast food restaurant because of the potential trauma of being seen taking her son there. And now that that bit very large fast food restaurant has lost a customer or at least a visit, and think about

how often that might be happening at the scale. And you look at some of these large brands, the Blue Chips, CpG companies and others who have There are a lot of reasons they can they can explain some of the declines that they've had, But that has to be a big part of it is that it's just not cool to go there. It's not as cool to eat there. It's and I think that's going to affect music as well.

I think I think being able to brag about the concert I was at and that's always been there, but it's never been amplified the way that it is now. Staying with the same thing, because this crosses bombs, we learn that acquisition is down and experiences are up, especially

amongst millennials. Is your data absolutely very true? Yes, UM, wanting to experience restaurant spending is down, but the types of restaurants that people are choosing to eat at are more experiential, So certain types of restaurants are doing well. UM travel is certainly up. It's making it. It's a it's quite a big blind spot for UM the FED in terms of forecasting consumer spending because a lot of those categories aren't measured by a lot of the federal

resources in terms of UM. You know, it's not store receipts from Target and Walmart anymore. There's money being spent somewhere that's not as visible, and that is a that is a that is a fundamentally true trend. And it's not just millennials. It's happening in gen X as well. Okay, so if someone wants to check you out, they can listen to this podcast. Is there anywhere they can go online to see some of your data other than your quizzes? Uh,

Civic science dot com. Pretty straightforward, UM, anybody who would like to UM. You mentioned earlier that little Saturday email that I send out. It is it's kind of invitation only but it is a it is a an awesome list of people who read it and if anybody would like to be added to that, they would could reach out to you maybe to do that, but otherwise, UM yes, Civic Science dot com and um, we write a lot. It's um our blog is is a lot of content

every week, new things were studying, trends worth finding. Um. We do have some partnerships with some media outlets that take our information and give it a spotlight for us. But um, yeah, they can certainly reach out to us if they want to be added to any of the distribution lists of these kind of things that we're writing about. And once again we haven't mentioned the names of the company that employ Civic Science, but I know those names and believe me, they're all the alphabet soup that you

believe they are. So once again, John Dick, CEO of Civic Science, thanks so much for being here on the Bob Left Sets Podcast. It was my pleasure, Bob, thank you. That wraps up this week's episode of the Bob Left Sets Podcast, recorded here at Venice, California at the tune In Studios. I hope you enjoyed this fascinating conversation with the CEO of Civic Science John Dick, about market analytics, the future of tech, the music industry, and consumer habits.

As always, I welcome your feedback. Email me at Bob at left sets dot com.