Gunny Scarfo on the Unknown & Unvalued

Gunny Scarfo is the co-founder of Nonfiction Research. Previously, he was Head of Strategy at VICE Media's digital agency, and Head of Strategy at Tenthwave, as well as the Inaugural Board President at Brooklyn Poets.

He responded to my newsletter one day a few years ago, and we’ve stayed in touch since. I was excited to meet for the first time with this conversation.

Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me. Nice to meet you face to face finally.

I know. I'm going to intercede your normal first question and ask you what you and I just talked about before we started recording. We're subverting the genre. I was just saying that I've been on a handful of podcasts and not once has anyone talked to me in advance and said, "Hey, here's what I, as an artist, am trying to bring forth in my podcasts. Don't talk so much about yourself, talk about your work," or "Don't talk about your company, talk about yourself. I'm trying to do this podcast to inspire young people coming up," or anything like that. So let me begin your interview by asking you the question: What do you hope to bring out of these conversations with people? Because I'm a fan of yours. I love your work.

Yeah, I appreciate it. We've just only met but it makes perfect sense that this is how you would arrive. I appreciate the question, and calling me an artist to describe it is also very flattering. I feel like the answer is that I backed into it, you know what I mean? Like it was a way of not doing something else, and then I realized that I had people receiving the email and saying nice things to me about it. Then I realized, oh wait, I could actually talk to them because I'm a people person. I am curious about people and, as an independent, I'm alone a lot. So it's also this opportunity to connect and hear how other people talk about their work. I think that's what I did - not come in with a structured approach. I invited people into conversation and then I've developed this flow.

I think what I want is to get to know people, understand their relationship with work, and then I want them to tell me that qualitative research is important and why. That's my explicit selfish motivation. I'm curious about how research, the work that I do, fits in the world that everybody else inhabits.

I love that. You describe yourself as a "brand listener." I've never seen that term before and I love it. I think it's a really bold choice to describe yourself as a listener because everyone else is looking to talk. Everyone else is listening to profess how brilliant they are at this or that, or advance their POV on this or explicate their thought leadership. To describe yourself as a listener, I think, is really bold and fun.

I love hearing that. It was very conscious. After years of being a moderator in the corporate market research machine and feeling like an instrument that wasn't really respected, I wanted to celebrate what's happening when you're actually listening to people and trying to understand them and explore their experience.

The French have an expression - I can't speak French, so I can't say it, but I think it translates to something like "professional deformation." It's the aspect of your work that deforms who you are as a person, for better or worse. You will meet someone and just immediately look at their shoes. It's the impact that your work has on you. One of the things that I find is after, I don't know, hundreds or thousands of conversations with people where your job is to listen, you develop a different ear for what people say. I'm going to verbosely set up this question to see if you experience this:

A normal person will hear a sentence like, "Oh, I went skydiving last week with my brother in Colorado." A normal person will hear that sentence and try to relate to it, like "Oh, my friend is skydiving." But as a listener, as an interviewer, you don't do that. You hear every piece of that sentence as a thread that you could pull to go deeper: "Is this the first time you've gone skydiving? How close are you with your brother? Is he still living in Colorado? Did you grow up in Colorado? Do you normally do daredevil things or is this just a one-off sort of thing?" As a listener, you hear every phrase that a person says within a sentence as a potential thread.

Building up to my very leading question, it drives me nuts in casual conversation when I'm in a group of people just socially, and no one is pulling any thread. Someone says something and I'm like, "Wow, there are 14 interesting things I'd love to know," but then people just move on. I'm curious if you have this, because if there's another person on Earth that has this, it might be you. Go ahead and disappoint me, but do you experience this as well?

Oh, my God. Absolutely. I really couldn't say it any better. I often thank my first job - I thought it was an ad agency, but it wasn't, it was a brand consultancy. They said, "Go talk to people," and then they made it my job to ask questions and pretend like I was listening. At that point, I don't know if I was seeing threads, but I knew that I had to ask questions. Yeah, I feel that's made me sensitive to all the threads. You become thread fluent in a way, or literate maybe, in a way that some people don't have.

It reminds me of a guy - I think his name is Georg Kuhlwind, my therapist recommended this guy. He wrote a book called "From Normal to Healthy." Somewhere in the beginning, he says, "We don't know what a person is and we don't know what words are." I think it speaks to what you're talking about. We have an idea of what a word is, like "Oh, that just means that thing," but no, the word is just the beginning. It's endless. You can follow it forever. So anyway, yeah.

I will seed the microphone and let you ask questions, but I can't stop. I just want to point out that one of the things I think makes your conversations different than most podcasts that I listen to - I feel like calling your conversations a podcast is almost an insult. But I think your conversations are different because you pull threads, you ask follow-up questions. I think oftentimes, especially in business-related podcasts, there's a set of questions that you hear the interviewer ask. Then somebody says something, but the interviewer doesn't pull the thread, and you're like, "Goddammit, pull the thread, man!" The conversations end up being almost this litany of disappointments, like I just collect things that could have been explored. But I find that your conversations with people tend to be more organic, free-flowing, and all that.

Nice. I really appreciate the fact that you're listening. I appreciate the hesitancy around the word "podcast." I also try to talk about it as a "conversation series," but it's very clunky. All right. So I want to begin the way that I always begin with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine, and you're in absolute control. You can answer it any way or not answer it any way that you want. The question is: Where do you come from?

First of all, I want to tell you that I've heard you ask this question to a couple of people and you've described it as a very powerful question, which I think it is. But I think the most powerful thing is that you start with it. It grounds the conversation in such a way that everything that follows is shaped by it. So whatever a person's grounding story is gives shape to everything that comes after. I think that's the real genius of it.

I want to answer this question by talking about something that I've wanted to talk about publicly but haven't had a venue for. I would say that I am born from the tension that comes from living a dual life as a kid - living simultaneously in two different worlds.

On the one hand was my school life growing up, which was very much grounded in the everyday struggles of everyday people trying to defy the odds to get by. I went to school in a city called Coatesville, Pennsylvania. It's a city outside of Philadelphia that has endured more struggles than any city ought to have to endure. It doesn't get a lot of national recognition except in messed-up situations. Some major news organization described the city as "two square miles of ghetto," not what you want as your brand. And Sports Illustrated once wrote about our humble home that "the only thriving retail trade downtown is crack." So that's the reputation of it, and in some ways it's true. 99% of students that I went to middle school with were low-income, 92% below grade level in math, 70% below grade level in reading. There were a lot of drugs and violence in middle school, 9th grade, and 10th grade.

But I was surrounded by other kids who were defying odds to just do amazing everyday things. You knew you weren't fancy when you went to Coatesville schools. You did not delude yourself into thinking that you were fancy or destined for greatness or something like that. So that was one half, and I would not trade even the difficult parts of that experience for anything. I loved it. I identified with it, even the difficulties.

On the other hand was my home life. In my home life, I was surrounded by expectations of achievement. I was going to take college classes in the summer as a 13-year-old, going to leadership seminars. I would go to all these places away from there and I was surrounded by private school kids and kids who came from a whole other thing. So I was caught in between three things: school life, home life (I did not live inside the boundaries of Coatesville, I lived in the middle of the woods in a house built in the 1700s, it was like my own little Walden Pond world), and then I was going to these leadership seminars and nerd camps with private school kids who had these lives and futures that I aspired to.

There was a tension in that situation, between the lives of the kids that I went to school with and the lives of the kids that I went to these camps and seminars with. I identified with both of those. I wanted to go to a fancy school someday, but I did not want to leave Coatesville to go to any other high school. I knew that the kids that I went to school with were just as talented and capable as the kids that I went to summer stuff with. And I knew that those private school and nerd kids were destined to go on to become leaders. It was really clear at 14 years old, it was obvious.

I knew that they didn't know anything about our life in Coatesville. There was no sense whatsoever that anybody in the world of business, entertainment, or political leadership had any clue about our lives, feelings, or experiences in that school or in the lives around that school. So I think, for reasons that might sound noble now but really are just about the drives and pathologies of being a teenage kid trapped between two worlds, I wanted to resolve those two. I wanted to find a way to, for the good of everyone, bring the street into the conference room.

That was the tension that drove me as a teenager. I don't think I realized the extent to which it still drives the work that I do today until, when Ben Zeidler and I started Nonfiction in 2018, we had a conversation with our logo designer, the young woman who was creating our brand identity. She was amazing and she did one of those interviews that designers do, where she asks, "Okay, if you were a car, what car would you be?" At first I cringed because I was like, "Oh God, not one of these." But as she went on, I started thinking about growing up in Coatesville and wanting to be true to that life, but also wanting to drag it into the world of these leaders and business culture and everything in the future. I think in that weird logo call, I ended up discovering where I'm from, to answer your question.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Can you tell me more about that experience of the projective technique, the imagery questions? What did you discover in that process that surprised you?

I think it's easy to miss things that are obvious in your life. You know this from a life of studying others, as I do, but I don't always apply it to myself the way I wish I could. As you get older, you make so many rational decisions as you go: Should I take this job? Should I be a freelancer? Should I continue dating this person? Should I change the way I eat? These are all things that, in the moment, you're trying to do your best to make decisions that are good for you and that correspond to your values. But you probably don't take each one of those decisions as an archaeological project into your own source of identity. If you do, you're probably living a life that is both more enlightened and more maddening than most people.

You start to lose some of the source drives in you, even when you're aware of them. I don't think I realized - I had not gone back and reconnected the mission of what we do at Nonfiction, which Ben and I had tried to do for years even before we became Nonfiction, to my own middle school trauma, basically. But yeah, it's there. The link is embarrassingly direct.

Yeah. And I love that you had the experience of it for yourself, that you had this design, this creative task, that opened this opportunity to connect at a meaningful level like that. I think it's beautiful that you had that experience. I love it.

So do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid? Did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up?

I did. When I was a kid, I was like a lot of overachieving dickheads - I wanted to be president. But over time, that became a lot less appealing. What did appeal to me was the role of a communications specialist for a leader, for a president. I'll give you my embarrassing example in a moment.

I was always struck by how I thought politicians, leaders, companies could communicate better. I always saw this gap in how they actually communicated with everyday people versus the way that I thought they should. The year was, I think it was '92 - Bill Clinton was running for president and he had this young communications advisor on his campaign and subsequently his White House named George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos at the time was, I think, under 35, so he was super young for that world. He wore jeans everywhere, which at the time was super edgy. To wear jeans in the White House was like, "Holy s**t, who is this guy who's so brilliant and so valuable to the president that he can just wear jeans in the White House?" That's crazy. I really looked up to Stephanopoulos.

When I went to school at Columbia, where Stephanopoulos taught at that time, I took his class on presidential communications. It was amazing, but I was so intimidated by the idea of being in a room with this guy that I'd looked up to that I actually skipped probably 75% of the classes. I'm lucky that I got by on whatever grade I got. I have a couple of amazing moments from that class where I learned a lot that I could tell as a story, but the truth is I was so intimidated by it that I just skipped out on it, which is crazy.

Later in my life, I think what I wanted to be when I grew up was somebody who helped other people communicate better. At some point, I dropped the politics part - that felt like a hamster wheel for me personally. I felt like business had a lot more power to influence people's lives. Maybe that was a more fashionable opinion back then.

What was going on? What was intimidating about it?

I think that when you come face to face with the embodiment of what you have projected onto a person as being the embodiment of your discipline, the thing that you want to be most, when you want to be that thing so hard that if you aren't that thing, it could maybe annihilate your sense of identity... it's simultaneously alluring but also catastrophic.

I think when you get older, not every interaction, not every situation holds your entire self-worth within it. But at that time, especially in my first year at Columbia, I was intimidated by Columbia. I didn't really think I belonged. I didn't know that I belonged coming from Coatesville. That was part of it too.

Tell me, where are you now? And what are you doing? You mentioned Nonfiction. How do you describe your work and what you're doing?

Okay, so this is supposed to be the softball question that you get. And I always think, "How do we do it?" We've had conversations within Nonfiction about how we're supposed to explain what we do to our grandmother when they ask.

The easy way to say it is that we really only do one thing. And that one thing is that we study people. Specifically, we try to study the parts of their lives that are underneath what they normally share with researchers. We try to live in that space between what people feel deeply and what they normally talk about to others.

Financial struggles are something we love to explore. Our first public report was called "The Secret Financial Lives of Americans." We've spent a lot of time with people in their most private moments, whether it's moneyor pregnancy or intimate relationships or family dinner times. We've been unchaperoned inside of prisons. We've sat with people in their health care appointments while they're receiving health news. We've spent time with people as they've wrestled with addiction.

We study those parts of people's lives - not always that deep and intimate, but the parts of people's lives that tend not to show up in conference rooms. And then we take those findings and we drive them into the heart of conference rooms of organizations. Then we hope and pray that people do something with them.

We don't do strategy or comms planning. We're not a consultancy. We just study people and we try to study the parts that don't normally show up. And then we hope good things happen. We've been fortunate - good things have happened. We can try to impress people by saying that our research has inspired Super Bowl commercials, new public service campaigns, a new division at Disney, new flavors of Doritos coming out next year, and stuff like that. So it runs the gamut.

But the way that we've set up Nonfiction is that we only do the studying people part. It's a life dedicated to putting yourself aside and listening, as you would know better than anyone. And then trying to figure out which of these things that we've heard from people are things that could drive change, and I mean that in both the highfalutin sense and the "they want a new Dorito" sense, that helps them and helps an organization or a company.

Yeah. What's the joy in it for you? What do you love about your work and what you're doing?

I've got two joys. I'm at a stage in my career where I have the luxury of two joys. I'm a two-joy career, Peter.

The first joy is the work itself. Spending your life just trying to understand other people is a blessing. The things that people share with us - and I mean us, you and I, as well as everyone in the industry - when you spend your life listening to people's innermost thoughts and feelings and desires for new stuff, you are privileged. It's almost as if you're traveling to a place that no one else has seen.

It shapes you as a person, mostly for the better, in that it deepens your heart. It allows you to, in everyday life, when someone cuts you off on the road, start questioning, "I wonder what they're going through right now. Was that malice? Was that incompetence? Did they not know? Are they in a hurry? Do they have a job interview?" You start to have this deeper level of empathy that most of the time is an asset, sometimes a liability. But that's the first joy.

The second joy is watching other people do it. We now have 13 people at Nonfiction. And now I get to watch other people have those discoveries and I get to benefit from hearing them come back from a tear-filled conversation with someone where that person worked through things that they had never thought about before. I get to see other people make non-fictiony work. What a joy that is, to see the people in our company just do incredible things.

Nonfiction is so distinct and it's - I just love everything that you guys have put out, the public reports, your point of view, the attitude that you guys bring to telling these stories and gathering these stories is really beautiful. What's the, maybe you've told me a little bit about it, but what was the germ? What's the origin story for this "studying people, all we do is study people underneath"? Where did that all come from? Because you, I was looking at your LinkedIn, you weren't always in this space. So how did you, yeah, what was the origin story of this kind of "studying people" focus and attitude?

I think it came from being bad at my job in a way. I think many of our lives are like concentric circles of trying to get closer and closer to the thing that feels like us. And maybe you start as, I don't know, a window washer or something because that's the job you could get. But after washing windows, you start caring more about windows. Now you get into window sales, but in order to sell windows, you have to understand windows. So then you get into window manufacturing and you're one of the top three window manufacturers in the state. And then you break off and you start your own business making the world's best windows, and they're only made for certain situations.

I think a lot of people's lives, despite that preposterous example, look like that. You start doing this thing and you start getting closer. You can only learn over time what you really want to be doing, or you don't even know that job exists.

But the more recent version of it is that Ben and I worked together at a company that kept getting acquired. It got acquired like three or four times. So we worked for the same company the whole time, but the names kept changing. Now it's Accenture Interactive, the world's largest digital agency. But when we started, it was like 25 people on a concrete floor.

We worked together starting in 2011 or 2012. Ben had come from the world of real research and I had come from digital advertising, digital marketing kind of stuff. We collided in this digital agency. We were both relatively junior folks in the company, I'd say.

Through a whole bunch of ups and downs, we started working together. Ben wanted to start a research department in the company and nobody wanted a research department in the agency. The leader of the agency, who became a mentor to both of us, Drew Raymond, just an incredible human being, basically decided to give Ben a chance. He said, "I'm going to let you start a research department, but you have to continue working your existing job and do the research department. And if you mess it up, I'm going to fire you." And he said that in front of everybody, which is a pretty good motivator to succeed in a department.

Drew had a very bold style of leadership that Ben and I both really responded to. He continues to be a mentor to this day. Ben started a research company, a research department within the company. Over the years, I became head of strategy, he became head of research automatically upon starting the department, and then grew out his team.

Together we would get research for projects from the companies that you've heard of a million times. A client would pass us research that they had done internally. And we would just look at the research and be like, "What the hell are we supposed to do with this?" It just didn't feel like it captured the thing that we needed to know about human beings so that we could go make marketing that would deeply resonate with people's souls.

So we just started doing it on our own. We didn't - we just did it out of dissatisfaction with everything else. I think maybe there's still a tinge of that in us. It was deeply unpopular what we were doing within the company. People were like, "Hey, why don't you get back to your desk?" They didn't think we were working.

We would go out to talk to people or to observe people or to immerse ourselves in situations. They just didn't think we were working. So there were debates about whether we could get - whether it had to be PTO or whatever. But we had some early successes, which built the appetite for the insights that came out of it. And then it became a crucial part of the agency, to the agency's credit.

I don't know, I think to this day, if Drew would not have thought that work was important and given us a wide leash and some provocations, I don't think we'd be where we are today. Good looking out. Thanks for that, Drew Raymond. But that's where it started.

I was a strategist - I was supposed to do strategy, but I just didn't want to do strategy based off of, I don't know, garbage insights that I thought I was getting. And we each had one job after that in between starting Nonfiction. Ben went to L2 with Scott Galloway, which got bought by Gartner while he was there. I went to Vice Media and I was head of strategy at Vice Media's digital agency.

I think I was below average at my job probably, because I cared about this one part, which was, "Hey, let's dive in and immerse and understand people." And I was not good at the part where you turn things into these abstract diagrams, and then you have to do comms planning where it's "How are we going to bring this message to life on Snapchat?" And I was like, "I could give three s***s how we bring the message to life on Snapchat," which legitimately made me not great at my job.

But it was also during the time that I was at Vice that I realized, "Oh, okay. I'm not actually - I don't actually care deeply about strategy as a whole. I only really care about this one part."

When Ben and I decided to create Nonfiction, we had discussed this kind of a thing for years, including one time where we took Drew out to breakfast in a Breather room and we tried to convince him to let us spin the strategy and research departments off of our agency, which Drew shut down immediately. God bless him for listening to that.

So anyway, when we started Nonfiction, we were just like, "Yeah, what if we created a company where we only did the parts that we actually like doing and just tried to be the best in the world at bringing the stuff that's beneath the surface to the surface?" And I'm glad we did. Although every consultant we've ever hired has just told us, "Oh, you guys should really look into becoming a consultancy" or "What if you offer strategy services?" And it's no. That's not in the cards.

How has it changed and what's your take on the sort of - I'm really just curious about how you articulate the value of what you do to clients. What do clients come to you asking for and yeah, what's - maybe that's the question. I love the idea that you came out of a defiant moment. And then also that when you went to do the work - cause this is something I experienced too - that this kind of work is invisible. It just looks like people being who they are in the world. You know what I mean? Like my research looks like me having conversation with someone else. And so people are like, "That's not..." And so there's - it's invisible in a very meaningful way. And you had that experience, which I think is fantastic. So how do you - how do you articulate the - how do you make the value visible for people? I think - and then how has - how, what makes that important today or how has it changed in terms of the clients and the kinds of challenges you think they're facing?

On one hand, we spend 0% of our time trying to convince anyone that this work is valuable. And I think that's a very important part of what we do. We have spent 0 seconds, 0 minutes, 0 days in the last 6 years trying to convince anyone that research is something that they ought to do.

Don Draper has some line in Mad Men where he says, "Jesus lives in your heart or he doesn't" or something like that. And I relate to that because this is not a recommendation for anybody - I think a normal company that wants to stay in business should probably be trying to proactively sell research to people. And there's no doubt that we have taken a financial hit for not trying to do that.

However, the good news is we get to spend 100% of our time talking to people who already feel like they need to understand something that they don't know. Being able to start from that position where you, the client, already know, already believe, already have Jesus in your heart - you already believe that there is something that you need to know about your customer that you don't already know - that is a tremendous advantage. And I mean that in every way. It makes the work better. And it is part of what differentiates how our work, I think, maybe feels when it's in public, because we get to start from that place.

So in that way, I don't think that we actually do try to convince anyone of value. However, the real value in Nonfiction's work - but we should say all work in this space, I'll stick to us - the value in our work, I believe, only comes, and this is a high bar to set for yourself, it's insane, but it only comes when we can uncover something that wasn't previously known or wasn't previously recognized to be important, even if it was known. That's where I think listening matters.

And so there is listening that is inherently valuable on a human level, but what we do is something which is that plus something else. Because we charge companies money to fund the studies that help them, we also have a responsibility - we have a responsibility to the people that we're studying first, to bring their voices to the table. But we have a responsibility to the client who's creating this work and funding this work to bring them something that they can do something with.

For us - I know people get icky about working for companies these days, I feel like, or I feel like if money is involved, then it can't be good for the world or something. And there's validity to that perspective, but we are on the hunt for the things that we can find in people's lives that we can help them with. And in order to help them, we need to be able to bring back something to the company that they can do something with.

If all we bring back to the client is a bunch of stuff that they've heard before or a bunch of stuff that is intellectually interesting in the abstract - it would have made a fascinating article in some literary magazine from 20 years ago - it's not good enough. It's not good enough.

And I think if you were to ask people at Nonfiction, "What's the worst thing about working at Nonfiction?", my guess is that they would say the pressure on every single project to deliver something that the client has never heard before or has not valued before. And in that sense, the value that you asked about, of qualitative research, or in our case bridging qual and quant and all sorts of crazy s**t, is that we are going to bring you something that you can do something with. It's going to help your customer and it's going to help you. Finding that is a tiny Venn diagram. But we're small and we can take on projects where we believe we can do it. Yeah, in one sense, we never argue for the value. And in another sense, the value is built in because if we don't find you something juicy, we have failed.

Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about how - your approach? I've read a little bit about it, but how do you - a client comes to you, you have this objective to find something that they'd never heard before or didn't value before. How do you think about learning and discovering that stuff?

The first thing that we do is we formulate the whole study into a single simple question called "the burning question." We make sure that the client and everyone involved in the agency, if there's an agency involved, we make sure that everyone agrees that they do not already know the answer to this question and that were we to find an answer to this question, it would change something for them - potentially change the marketing, the brand, the product, the new product that they could develop, the way that they talk to customers, whatever it might be.

So we start every project that way and we're religious about it. That's the first thing. And that's pre-Statement of Work. That's "Are we going to do this thing or not?"

Then once we begin the work, the first thing that we do is a stage that we call "edge finding," which is where we try to find the edge of what is currently known and understood. We spend a week, maybe two weeks on that. At the end of that, the person leading the research, their responsibility is to know everything of what is known - the academic studies, the book that was written in the '70s about it, that documentary that was released four years ago on Netflix but wasn't that watched - everything that's been talked about on social media. We have a team of people who go nuts for a week to two weeks covering all of that ground to understand all of that. And then research can begin.

I have found in my own life, some of the biggest failures in my own work have been times where I didn't do edge finding well enough. During an interview or during some other technique, I glommed onto some insight that I thought was great. But it turns out, it was not great. It was within the edge of what was already known, but I didn't know that at that time. And I went and I presented it to a client and they said, "Nah, I already knew it." And then I died inside and I swore that I would never do that again. Even these days, I feel like it's a risk.

So when we started Nonfiction, we were hardcore about edge finding because, done well, it's a guarantee that you are insulating yourself from that horrific situation at the end of a project. You know what's known and what's not known.

If I can drone on for another moment about this, because I think it's actually maybe the most important thing I can say to anyone who's listening to this - qualitative research is about developing an ear for what is important. You as a qualitative researcher, you are inundated with data. You're talking to people for hours at a time and then you're going and you're immersing in people's worlds. There's no shortage of stuff to take in. Anyone can do that work. That is not difficult. And that is not masterful.

It is developing an ear for what is new and important and potentially revolutionary that is what great qualitative research is. But you cannot have that ear within the project unless you've done your edge finding and you know what is not new, what is not important.

So in order to have that moment of eureka halfway through a research project, you have to earn it in the first couple of weeks where you are swallowing everything that the world has ever thought or known or talked about around this issue.

It's wonderful. We only have a few minutes left and there's so much more I want to ask you about, but the burning question - can you - what can you tell me about how you get there and what makes it an effective burning question? Because that also - it's just a beautiful thing that you begin in this shared understanding of an unanswered question.

I stole that from two places. I think I stole it from Hagerty's book on creativity and there was also a book years ago by Mario Pricken called "Creative Advertising" that was just showing different ads. Then at the end of the book, it gives some advice on how to run brainstorms essentially. One of his pieces of advice, in a book I read in I don't know, 2004 or something, is that you should always in a brainstorm phrase the prompt as a question. That blew me away when he said it because it forces you to really hone things into something manageable.

I'll give you an example of this. Years ago, Sean Brown at Disney approached us. Disney has a wing of their business that manages educational trips to Disney. So teachers bring their kids on a field trip to Disney, and then they go through this program that provides an educational experience. They take them behind the scenes at Space Mountain and turn on the lights and they study physics and all sorts of stuff.

Sean Brown was leading marketing for that. And Sean, to his credit, realized a challenge that they had, which is that many of the teachers who had year after year brought their students to Disney for this educational trip were getting up into their fifties and they're going to retire at some point. If you look at the shape of the distribution of teachers, it's a bit U-shaped. You have a bunch of young, like 20-something teachers and you have a bunch of older teachers.

He realized Disney had many digits of millions of dollars predicated upon the implicit assumption that 20-year-old teachers were going to want the same things out of a Disney field trip that these 55-year-old teachers wanted. Sean saw that and recognized that they needed to understand younger teachers and then be able to work backwards to pioneer things that Disney could compete with.

So the burning question for that project was "What do 20-something-year-old teachers truly want out of field trips and how could Disney provide something that no one else could?" Bang.

Bang, that's right. That's wonderful.

Great burning question. Now we can go drive around the back roads of Georgia and Florida to spend time in teacher lunchrooms. We can find the forms that teachers use to request field trips from principals. We can interview kids, parents, chaperones. We went to these sessions that private parochial schools used to talk about their school to basically sell parents on the school. We saw how field trips were used in those presentations sometimes.

And we ended up coming back with some counterintuitive findings that Sean, who is amazing at starting research and turning research into insights that change a business, transformed into something that today is called Disney Imagination Campus and has a gazillion kids go through every year, learning STEM, leadership, incredible stuff that is super relevant to the teachers, young and old, that want to bring their kids to Disney.

Beautiful. That's an amazing story. And I want to - it's the end of the hour. And I just want to say thank you. It was nice to meet you. We've emailed for years, and you're an early supporter of the newsletter. So it's nice to meet face to face. And I just really enjoyed the conversation, even though you turned the tables on me, which is fine. Of course. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I know people say nice things at the end of these conversations, but genuinely, please keep up the good work. These conversations are amazing. And as I said to you before we started recording, your Friday email is the one email that I skip to open. I skip over to my computer to open it every Friday morning. In fact, I think I'm going to go do that now.

Thank you for that image. And thank you so much. And yeah. Thanks, Gunny.

All right. Thanks. Bye.

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