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  • Opportunities for AI in Accessibility

    Opportunities for AI in Accessibility

    In reading Joe Dolson’s recent piece on the intersection of AI and accessibility, I absolutely appreciated the skepticism that he has for AI in general as well as for the ways that many have been using it. In fact, I’m very skeptical of AI myself, despite my role at Microsoft as an accessibility innovation strategist who helps run the AI for Accessibility grant program. As with any tool, AI can be used in very constructive, inclusive, and accessible ways; and it can also be used in destructive, exclusive, and harmful ones. And there are a ton of uses somewhere in the mediocre middle as well.

    I’d like you to consider this a “yes… and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m not trying to refute any of what he’s saying but rather provide some visibility to projects and opportunities where AI can make meaningful differences for people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t real risks or pressing issues with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s possible in hopes that we’ll get there one day.

    Alternative text

    Joe’s piece spends a lot of time talking about computer-vision models generating alternative text. He highlights a ton of valid issues with the current state of things. And while computer-vision models continue to improve in the quality and richness of detail in their descriptions, their results aren’t great. As he rightly points out, the current state of image analysis is pretty poor—especially for certain image types—in large part because current AI systems examine images in isolation rather than within the contexts that they’re in (which is a consequence of having separate “foundation” models for text analysis and image analysis). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant (that should probably have descriptions) and those that are purely decorative (which might not need a description) either. Still, I still think there’s potential in this space.

    As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop authoring of alt text should absolutely be a thing. And if AI can pop in to offer a starting point for alt text—even if that starting point might be a prompt saying What is this BS? That’s not right at all… Let me try to offer a starting point—I think that’s a win.

    Taking things a step further, if we can specifically train a model to analyze image usage in context, it could help us more quickly identify which images are likely to be decorative and which ones likely require a description. That will help reinforce which contexts call for image descriptions and it’ll improve authors’ efficiency toward making their pages more accessible.

    While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way (even for humans), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s suppose that you came across a chart whose description was simply the title of the chart and the kind of visualization it was, such as: Pie chart comparing smartphone usage to feature phone usage among US households making under $30,000 a year. (That would be a pretty awful alt text for a chart since that would tend to leave many questions about the data unanswered, but then again, let’s suppose that that was the description that was in place.) If your browser knew that that image was a pie chart (because an onboard model concluded this), imagine a world where users could ask questions like these about the graphic:

    • Do more people use smartphones or feature phones?
    • How many more?
    • Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these buckets?
    • How many is that?

    Setting aside the realities of large language model (LLM) hallucinations—where a model just makes up plausible-sounding “facts”—for a moment, the opportunity to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for blind and low-vision folks as well as for people with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and so on. It could also be useful in educational contexts to help people who can see these charts, as is, to understand the data in the charts.

    Taking things a step further: What if you could ask your browser to simplify a complex chart? What if you could ask it to isolate a single line on a line graph? What if you could ask your browser to transpose the colors of the different lines to work better for form of color blindness you have? What if you could ask it to swap colors for patterns? Given these tools’ chat-based interfaces and our existing ability to manipulate images in today’s AI tools, that seems like a possibility.

    Now imagine a purpose-built model that could extract the information from that chart and convert it to another format. For example, perhaps it could turn that pie chart (or better yet, a series of pie charts) into more accessible (and useful) formats, like spreadsheets. That would be amazing!

    Matching algorithms

    Safiya Umoja Noble absolutely hit the nail on the head when she titled her book Algorithms of Oppression. While her book was focused on the ways that search engines reinforce racism, I think that it’s equally true that all computer models have the potential to amplify conflict, bias, and intolerance. Whether it’s Twitter always showing you the latest tweet from a bored billionaire, YouTube sending us into a Q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of what natural bodies look like, we know that poorly authored and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful. A lot of this stems from a lack of diversity among the people who shape and build them. When these platforms are built with inclusively baked in, however, there’s real potential for algorithm development to help people with disabilities.

    Take Mentra, for example. They are an employment network for neurodivergent people. They use an algorithm to match job seekers with potential employers based on over 75 data points. On the job-seeker side of things, it considers each candidate’s strengths, their necessary and preferred workplace accommodations, environmental sensitivities, and so on. On the employer side, it considers each work environment, communication factors related to each job, and the like. As a company run by neurodivergent folks, Mentra made the decision to flip the script when it came to typical employment sites. They use their algorithm to propose available candidates to companies, who can then connect with job seekers that they are interested in; reducing the emotional and physical labor on the job-seeker side of things.

    When more people with disabilities are involved in the creation of algorithms, that can reduce the chances that these algorithms will inflict harm on their communities. That’s why diverse teams are so important.

    Imagine that a social media company’s recommendation engine was tuned to analyze who you’re following and if it was tuned to prioritize follow recommendations for people who talked about similar things but who were different in some key ways from your existing sphere of influence. For example, if you were to follow a bunch of nondisabled white male academics who talk about AI, it could suggest that you follow academics who are disabled or aren’t white or aren’t male who also talk about AI. If you took its recommendations, perhaps you’d get a more holistic and nuanced understanding of what’s happening in the AI field. These same systems should also use their understanding of biases about particular communities—including, for instance, the disability community—to make sure that they aren’t recommending any of their users follow accounts that perpetuate biases against (or, worse, spewing hate toward) those groups.

    Other ways that AI can helps people with disabilities

    If I weren’t trying to put this together between other tasks, I’m sure that I could go on and on, providing all kinds of examples of how AI could be used to help people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

    • Voice preservation. You may have seen the VALL-E paper or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcement or you may be familiar with the voice-preservation offerings from Microsoft, Acapela, or others. It’s possible to train an AI model to replicate your voice, which can be a tremendous boon for people who have ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) or motor-neuron disease or other medical conditions that can lead to an inability to talk. This is, of course, the same tech that can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it’s something that we need to approach responsibly, but the tech has truly transformative potential.
    • Voice recognition. Researchers like those in the Speech Accessibility Project are paying people with disabilities for their help in collecting recordings of people with atypical speech. As I type, they are actively recruiting people with Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they have plans to expand this to other conditions as the project progresses. This research will result in more inclusive data sets that will let more people with disabilities use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services as well as control their computers and other devices more easily, using only their voice.
    • Text transformation. The current generation of LLMs is quite capable of adjusting existing text content without injecting hallucinations. This is hugely empowering for people with cognitive disabilities who may benefit from text summaries or simplified versions of text or even text that’s prepped for Bionic Reading.

    The importance of diverse teams and data

    We need to recognize that our differences matter. Our lived experiences are influenced by the intersections of the identities that we exist in. These lived experiences—with all their complexities (and joys and pain)—are valuable inputs to the software, services, and societies that we shape. Our differences need to be represented in the data that we use to train new models, and the folks who contribute that valuable information need to be compensated for sharing it with us. Inclusive data sets yield more robust models that foster more equitable outcomes.

    Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that you have content about disabilities that’s authored by people with a range of disabilities, and make sure that that’s well represented in the training data.

    Want a model that doesn’t use ableist language? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. That being said, when it comes to sensitivity reading, AI models won’t be replacing human copy editors anytime soon. 

    Want a coding copilot that gives you accessible recommendations from the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.


    I have no doubt that AI can and will harm people… today, tomorrow, and well into the future. But I also believe that we can acknowledge that and, with an eye towards accessibility (and, more broadly, inclusion), make thoughtful, considerate, and intentional changes in our approaches to AI that will reduce harm over time as well. Today, tomorrow, and well into the future.


    Many thanks to Kartik Sawhney for helping me with the development of this piece, Ashley Bischoff for her invaluable editorial assistance, and, of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

  • The Wax and the Wane of the Web

    The Wax and the Wane of the Web

    I offer a single bit of advice to friends and family when they become new parents: When you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Just as you start to get the hang of feedings, diapers, and regular naps, it’s time for solid food, potty training, and overnight sleeping. When you figure those out, it’s time for preschool and rare naps. The cycle goes on and on.

    The same applies for those of us working in design and development these days. Having worked on the web for almost three decades at this point, I’ve seen the regular wax and wane of ideas, techniques, and technologies. Each time that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some new idea or technology comes along to shake things up and remake our world.

    How we got here

    I built my first website in the mid-’90s. Design and development on the web back then was a free-for-all, with few established norms. For any layout aside from a single column, we used table elements, often with empty cells containing a single pixel spacer GIF to add empty space. We styled text with numerous font tags, nesting the tags every time we wanted to vary the font style. And we had only three or four typefaces to choose from: Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman. When Verdana and Georgia came out in 1996, we rejoiced because our options had nearly doubled. The only safe colors to choose from were the 216 “web safe” colors known to work across platforms. The few interactive elements (like contact forms, guest books, and counters) were mostly powered by CGI scripts (predominantly written in Perl at the time). Achieving any kind of unique look involved a pile of hacks all the way down. Interaction was often limited to specific pages in a site.

    The birth of web standards

    At the turn of the century, a new cycle started. Crufty code littered with table layouts and font tags waned, and a push for web standards waxed. Newer technologies like CSS got more widespread adoption by browsers makers, developers, and designers. This shift toward standards didn’t happen accidentally or overnight. It took active engagement between the W3C and browser vendors and heavy evangelism from folks like the Web Standards Project to build standards. A List Apart and books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman played key roles in teaching developers and designers why standards are important, how to implement them, and how to sell them to their organizations. And approaches like progressive enhancement introduced the idea that content should be available for all browsers—with additional enhancements available for more advanced browsers. Meanwhile, sites like the CSS Zen Garden showcased just how powerful and versatile CSS can be when combined with a solid semantic HTML structure.

    Server-side languages like PHP, Java, and .NET overtook Perl as the predominant back-end processors, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the trash bin. With these better server-side tools came the first era of web applications, starting with content-management systems (particularly in the blogging space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress). In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Suddenly, pages could update their content without needing to reload. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement let crafty designers and developers display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

    These new technologies, standards, and techniques reinvigorated the industry in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. But we still relied on tons of hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes (such as rounded or angled corners) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks). Complicated layouts required all manner of nested floats or absolute positioning (or both). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it easy for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, although at the cost of doubling or even quadrupling the download size of simple websites.

    The web as software platform

    The symbiosis between the front end and back end continued to improve, and that led to the current era of modern web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages (which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these tools came others, including collaborative version control, build automation, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

    At the same time, mobile devices became more capable, and they gave us internet access in our pockets. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

    This combination of capable mobile devices and powerful development tools contributed to the waxing of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and consume. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media offered connections on a global scale, with both the good and bad that that entails.

    Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? Jeremy Keith wrote “Of Time and the Web.” Or check out the “Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. Neal Agarwal also has a fun tour through “Internet Artifacts.”

    Where we are now

    In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to make a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all flavors. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

    Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I often learn about a new feature and check its browser support only to find that its coverage is already above 80 percent. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often isn’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.

    Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part of our technical debt.

    If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail (whether through poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors), there’s often no alternative, leaving users with blank or broken pages.

    Where do we go from here?

    Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks—for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

    Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. Weigh the costs of those developer-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What’s the cost to users? To future developers? To standards adoption? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve grown accustomed to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.

    Start from standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same isn’t always true of third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the ’90s still work just fine today. The same can’t always be said of sites built with frameworks even after just a couple years.

    Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Rather than rushing headlong to “move fast and break things,” use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with deliberation.

    Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. (Remember XHTML?) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.

    Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.

    Share and amplify. As you experiment, play, and learn, share what’s worked for you. Write on your own website, post on whichever social media site you prefer, or shout it from a TikTok. Write something for A List Apart! But take the time to amplify others too: find new voices, learn from them, and share what they’ve taught you.

    Go forth and make

    As designers and developers for the web (and beyond), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s imbue our values into the things that we create, and let’s make the web a better place for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, make it better, make it again, or make something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Every time you think that you’ve mastered the web, everything will change.

  • To Ignite a Personalization Practice, Run this Prepersonalization Workshop

    To Ignite a Personalization Practice, Run this Prepersonalization Workshop

    Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either way, you’re designing with data. Now what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many cautionary tales, no overnight successes, and few guides for the perplexed. 

    Between the fantasy of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company repeatedly imploring everyday consumers to buy additional toilet seats—the personalization gap is real. It’s an especially confounding place to be a digital professional without a map, a compass, or a plan.

    For those of you venturing into personalization, there’s no Lonely Planet and few tour guides because effective personalization is so specific to each organization’s talent, technology, and market position. 

    But you can ensure that your team has packed its bags sensibly.

    There’s a DIY formula to increase your chances for success. At minimum, you’ll defuse your boss’s irrational exuberance. Before the party you’ll need to effectively prepare.

    We call it prepersonalization.

    Behind the music

    Consider Spotify’s DJ feature, which debuted this past year.

    We’re used to seeing the polished final result of a personalization feature. Before the year-end award, the making-of backstory, or the behind-the-scenes victory lap, a personalized feature had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized. Before any personalization feature goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a backlog of worthy ideas for expressing customer experiences more dynamically.

    So how do you know where to place your personalization bets? How do you design consistent interactions that won’t trip up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many budgeted programs to justify their ongoing investments, they first needed one or more workshops to convene key stakeholders and internal customers of the technology. Make yours count.

    ​From Big Tech to fledgling startups, we’ve seen the same evolution up close with our clients. In our experiences with working on small and large personalization efforts, a program’s ultimate track record—and its ability to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and organize its design and technology efforts—turns on how effectively these prepersonalization activities play out.

    Time and again, we’ve seen effective workshops separate future success stories from unsuccessful efforts, saving countless time, resources, and collective well-being in the process.

    A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a switch-flip moment in your tech stack. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps: 

    1. customer experience optimization (CXO, also known as A/B testing or experimentation)
    2. always-on automations (whether rules-based or machine-generated)
    3. mature features or standalone product development (such as Spotify’s DJ experience)

    This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. You won’t need these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

    Set your kitchen timer

    How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can (and often do) span weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here’s a summary of our broader approach along with details on the essential first-day activities.

    The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

    1. Kickstart: This sets the terms of engagement as you focus on the opportunity as well as the readiness and drive of your team and your leadership. .
    2. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
    3. Work your plan: This phase is all about creating a competitive environment for team participants to individually pitch their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

    Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.

    Kickstart: Whet your appetite

    We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience.” It explores the personalization possibilities in your organization. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. This could be a content-management system combined with a marketing-automation platform. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

    Spark conversation by naming consumer examples and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions (such as onboarding sequences or wizards), notifications, and recommenders. We have a catalog of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

    This is all about setting the table. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? If you want a broader view, here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework.

    Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature (or something similar). In our cards, we divide connected experiences into five levels: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to focus the conversation on the merits of ongoing investment as well as the gap between what you deliver today and what you want to deliver in the future.

    Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is critical because it emphasizes how personalization can not only help your external customers but also affect your own ways of working. It’s also a reminder (which is why we used the word argument earlier) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

    Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. The intention here is to flesh out how different departments may view their own upsides to the effort, which can vary from one to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

    The third and final kickstart activity is about naming your personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? (We’re pretty sure that you do: it’s just a matter of recognizing the relative size of that need and its remedy.) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. Our Detractor card, for example, lists six stakeholder behaviors that hinder progress.

    Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As studies have shown, personalization efforts face many common barriers.

    At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good—you’re ready to continue.

    Hit that test kitchen

    Next, let’s look at what you’ll need to bring your personalization recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are sweeping and powerful, and they present broad options for how your organization can conduct its activities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

    What’s important here is to avoid treating the installed software like it were a dream kitchen from some fantasy remodeling project (as one of our client executives memorably put it). These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.

    The ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together over the course of the workshop. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.

    The dishes will come from recipes, and those recipes have set ingredients.

    Verify your ingredients

    Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure—andyou’ll validate with the right stakeholders present—that you have all the ingredients on hand to cook up your desired interaction (or that you can work out what needs to be added to your pantry). These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together. 

    This isn’t just about discovering requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team: 

    1. compare findings toward a unified approach for developing features, not unlike when artists paint with the same palette; 
    2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar; 
    3. and develop parity across performance measurements and key performance indicators too. 

    This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

    Compose your recipe

    What ingredients are important to you? Think of a who-what-when-why construct

    • Who are your key audience segments or groups?
    • What kind of content will you give them, in what design elements, and under what circumstances?
    • And for which business and user benefits?

    We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still encounter new possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

    Here are three examples for a subscription-based reading app, which you can generally follow along with right to left in the cards in the accompanying photo below. 

    1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with  a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
    2. Welcome automation: When there’s a newly registered user, an email is generated to call out the breadth of the content catalog and to make them a happier subscriber.
    3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

    A useful preworkshop activity may be to think through a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, although we’ve also found that this process sometimes flows best through cocreating the recipes themselves. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

    You can think of the later stages of the workshop as moving from recipes toward a cookbook in focus—like a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual “cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

    Better kitchens require better architecture

    Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware anyone who says otherwise. With that being said,  “Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes.”

    When personalization becomes a laugh line, it’s because a team is overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

    You can definitely stand the heat…

    Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will bring about the necessary focus and intention to succeed. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

    This workshop framework gives you a fighting shot at lasting success as well as sound beginnings. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. But if you use the same cookbook and shared recipes, you’ll have solid footing for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

    While there are associated costs toward investing in this kind of technology and product design, your ability to size up and confront your unique situation and your digital capabilities is time well spent. Don’t squander it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

  • User Research Is Storytelling

    User Research Is Storytelling

    Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting adventures. I even dreamed up ideas for movies that my friends and I could make and star in. But they never went any further. I did, however, end up working in user experience (UX). Now, I realize that there’s an element of theater to UX—I hadn’t really considered it before, but user research is storytelling. And to get the most out of user research, you need to tell a good story where you bring stakeholders—the product team and decision makers—along and get them interested in learning more.

    Think of your favorite movie. More than likely it follows a three-act structure that’s commonly seen in storytelling: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. The first act shows what exists today, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the conflict, where the action is. Here, problems grow or get worse. And the third and final act is the resolution. This is where the issues are resolved and the characters learn and change. I believe that this structure is also a great way to think about user research, and I think that it can be especially helpful in explaining user research to others.

    Use storytelling as a structure to do research

    It’s sad to say, but many have come to see research as being expendable. If budgets or timelines are tight, research tends to be one of the first things to go. Instead of investing in research, some product managers rely on designers or—worse—their own opinion to make the “right” choices for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get teams some of the way, but that approach can so easily miss out on solving users’ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.

    In the three-act structure, each act corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is critical to telling the whole story. Let’s look at the different acts and how they align with user research.

    Act one: setup

    The setup is all about understanding the background, and that’s where foundational research comes in. Foundational research (also called generative, discovery, or initial research) helps you understand users and identify their problems. You’re learning about what exists today, the challenges users have, and how the challenges affect them—just like in the movies. To do foundational research, you can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies (or both!), which can help you start to identify problems as well as opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a huge investment in time or money.

    Erika Hall writes about minimum viable ethnography, which can be as simple as spending 15 minutes with a user and asking them one thing: “‘Walk me through your day yesterday.’ That’s it. Present that one request. Shut up and listen to them for 15 minutes. Do your damndest to keep yourself and your interests out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography.” According to Hall, [This] will probably prove quite illuminating. In the highly unlikely case that you didn’t learn anything new or useful, carry on with enhanced confidence in your direction.”  

    This makes total sense to me. And I love that this makes user research so accessible. You don’t need to prepare a lot of documentation; you can just recruit participants and do it! This can yield a wealth of information about your users, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their lives. That’s really what act one is all about: understanding where users are coming from. 

    Jared Spool talks about the importance of foundational research and how it should form the bulk of your research. If you can draw from any additional user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can supplement what you’ve heard in the foundational studies or even point to areas that need further investigation. Together, all this data paints a clearer picture of the state of things and all its shortcomings. And that’s the beginning of a compelling story. It’s the point in the plot where you realize that the main characters—or the users in this case—are facing challenges that they need to overcome. Like in the movies, this is where you start to build empathy for the characters and root for them to succeed. And hopefully stakeholders are now doing the same. Their sympathy may be with their business, which could be losing money because users can’t complete certain tasks. Or maybe they do empathize with users’ struggles. Either way, act one is your initial hook to get the stakeholders interested and invested.

    Once stakeholders begin to understand the value of foundational research, that can open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making process. And that can guide product teams toward being more user-centered. This benefits everyone—users, the product, and stakeholders. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Storytelling is the key to this process, and knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to get stakeholders to really care about doing more research. 

    This brings us to act two, where you iteratively evaluate a design or concept to see whether it addresses the issues.

    Act two: conflict

    Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in act one. This usually involves directional research, such as usability tests, where you assess a potential solution (such as a design) to see whether it addresses the issues that you found. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process that’s tripping users up. Like act two in a movie, more issues will crop up along the way. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act. 

    Usability tests should typically include around five participants according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify most of the problems: “As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.” 

    There are parallels with storytelling here too; if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. Having fewer participants means that each user’s struggles will be more memorable and easier to relay to other stakeholders when talking about the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.

    Researchers have run usability tests in person for decades, but you can also conduct usability tests remotely using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You can think of in-person usability tests like going to a play and remote sessions as more like watching a movie. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time reactions—including surprise, agreement, disagreement, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors’ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

    If in-person usability testing is like watching a play—staged and controlled—then conducting usability testing in the field is like immersive theater where any two sessions might be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can go out to meet users at their location to do your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. As researchers, you have less control over how these sessions go, but this can sometimes help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests provide another level of detail that’s often missing from remote usability tests. 

    That’s not to say that the “movies”—remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote sessions can reach a wider audience. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. And they open the doors to a much wider geographical pool of users. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working. 

    The benefit of usability testing, whether remote or in person, is that you get to see real users interact with the designs in real time, and you can ask them questions to understand their thought processes and grasp of the solution. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is the heart of the story—where the excitement is—but there can be surprises too. This is equally true of usability tests. Often, participants will say unexpected things, which change the way that you look at things—and these twists in the story can move things in new directions. 

    Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users (foundational research), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. That’s because you’re narrowing the focus of what you’re getting feedback on, without understanding the users’ needs. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. It’s only feedback on a particular design in the context of a usability test.  

    On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This illustrates the importance of doing both foundational and directional research. 

    In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can help motivate stakeholders to address the issues that come up.

    Act three: resolution

    While the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can propel stakeholders into action, the third part is about resolving the problems from the first two acts. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the whole team to hear users’ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. And it lets the UX research and design teams clarify, suggest alternatives, or give more context behind their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

    This act is mostly told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.

    Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. “The most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved,” writes Duarte. “That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently.”

    This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides evidence for “what is”—the problems that you’ve identified. And “what could be”—your recommendations on how to address them. And so on and so forth.

    You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick mockups of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the end of the session when you’ve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage gives stakeholders the next steps and hopefully the momentum to take those steps!

    While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research: 

    • Act one: You meet the protagonists (the users) and the antagonists (the problems affecting users). This is the beginning of the plot. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. The output of these methods can include personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.
    • Act two: Next, there’s character development. There’s conflict and tension as the protagonists encounter problems and challenges, which they must overcome. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.
    • Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. In act three, researchers may use methods including presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures. 

    The researcher has multiple roles: they’re the storyteller, the director, and the producer. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters (in the research). And the stakeholders are the audience. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users’ stories through research. By the end, the stakeholders should walk away with a purpose and an eagerness to resolve the product’s ills. 

    So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. Ultimately, user research is a win-win for everyone, and you just need to get stakeholders interested in how the story ends.

  • From Beta to Bedrock: Build Products that Stick.

    From Beta to Bedrock: Build Products that Stick.

    As a product builder over too many years to mention, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months.

    Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on the line, user expectations running high, and a crowded market, it’s tempting to throw as many features at the wall as possible and hope something sticks. But this approach is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why:

    The pitfalls of feature-first development

    When you start building a financial product from the ground up, or are migrating existing customer journeys from paper or telephony channels onto online banking or mobile apps, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of creating new features. You might think, “If I can just add one more thing that solves this particular user problem, they’ll love me!” But what happens when you inevitably hit a roadblock because the narcs (your security team!) don’t like it? When a hard-fought feature isn’t as popular as you thought, or it breaks due to unforeseen complexity?

    This is where the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in. Jason Fried’s book Getting Real and his podcast Rework often touch on this idea, even if he doesn’t always call it that. An MVP is a product that provides just enough value to your users to keep them engaged, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or difficult to maintain. It sounds like an easy concept but it requires a razor sharp eye, a ruthless edge and having the courage to stick by your opinion because it is easy to be seduced by “the Columbo Effect”… when there’s always “just one more thing…” that someone wants to add.

    The problem with most finance apps, however, is that they often become a reflection of the internal politics of the business rather than an experience solely designed around the customer. This means that the focus is on delivering as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and desires of competing internal departments, rather than providing a clear value proposition that is focused on what the people out there in the real world want. As a result, these products can very easily bloat to become a mixed bag of confusing, unrelated and ultimately unlovable customer experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

    The importance of bedrock

    So what’s a better approach? How can we build products that are stable, user-friendly, and—most importantly—stick?

    That’s where the concept of “bedrock” comes in. Bedrock is the core element of your product that truly matters to users. It’s the fundamental building block that provides value and stays relevant over time.

    In the world of retail banking, which is where I work, the bedrock has got to be in and around the regular servicing journeys. People open their current account once in a blue moon but they look at it every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a month.

    Identifying the core tasks that people want to do and then relentlessly striving to make them easy to do, dependable, and trustworthy is where the gravy’s at.

    But how do you get to bedrock? By focusing on the “MVP” approach, prioritizing simplicity, and iterating towards a clear value proposition. This means cutting out unnecessary features and focusing on delivering real value to your users.

    It also means having some guts, because your colleagues might not always instantly share your vision to start with. And controversially, sometimes it can even mean making it clear to customers that you’re not going to come to their house and make their dinner. The occasional “opinionated user interface design” (i.e. clunky workaround for edge cases) might sometimes be what you need to use to test a concept or buy you space to work on something more important.

    Practical strategies for building financial products that stick

    So what are the key strategies I’ve learned from my own experience and research?

    1. Start with a clear “why”: What problem are you trying to solve? For whom? Make sure your mission is crystal clear before building anything. Make sure it aligns with your company’s objectives, too.
    2. Focus on a single, core feature and obsess on getting that right before moving on to something else: Resist the temptation to add too many features at once. Instead, choose one that delivers real value and iterate from there.
    3. Prioritize simplicity over complexity: Less is often more when it comes to financial products. Cut out unnecessary bells and whistles and keep the focus on what matters most.
    4. Embrace continuous iteration: Bedrock isn’t a fixed destination—it’s a dynamic process. Continuously gather user feedback, refine your product, and iterate towards that bedrock state.
    5. Stop, look and listen: Don’t just test your product as part of your delivery process—test it repeatedly in the field. Use it yourself. Run A/B tests. Gather user feedback. Talk to people who use it, and refine accordingly.

    The bedrock paradox

    There’s an interesting paradox at play here: building towards bedrock means sacrificing some short-term growth potential in favour of long-term stability. But the payoff is worth it—products built with a focus on bedrock will outlast and outperform their competitors, and deliver sustained value to users over time.

    So, how do you start your journey towards bedrock? Take it one step at a time. Start by identifying those core elements that truly matter to your users. Focus on building and refining a single, powerful feature that delivers real value. And above all, test obsessively—for, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker (whomever you believe!!), “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

  • Why Knowing Yourself Is Your Greatest Asset

    Why Knowing Yourself Is Your Greatest Asset

    Why Knowing Yourself Is Your Greatest Asset written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

    The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Suzy Welch In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Suzy Welch, New York Times bestselling author, business strategist, professor at NYU Stern, and creator of the Becoming You methodology. Known for her deep insights on leadership and personal transformation, Suzy brings decades of experience in […]

    Why Knowing Yourself Is Your Greatest Asset written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

    The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Suzy Welch

    In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Suzy Welch, New York Times bestselling author, business strategist, professor at NYU Stern, and creator of the Becoming You methodology. Known for her deep insights on leadership and personal transformation, Suzy brings decades of experience in journalism, corporate strategy, and education to help individuals align their values, aptitudes, and interests with their professional lives.

    Suzy shared how Becoming You was born from both personal upheaval and professional research. Drawing on her time at NYU and her own journey of reinvention, she offers a data-driven framework for anyone seeking a more authentic life and career purpose. Especially relevant for entrepreneurs and professionals navigating rapid change, Suzy’s method offers not just inspiration but real tools for self-discovery and meaningful direction.

    Key Takeaways:

    • Personal development starts with clarity: Understanding your core values isn’t optional—it’s foundational to every career and life decision.
    • There’s a method to finding purpose: Suzy’s Becoming You framework combines values assessment, aptitudes test, and economically viable interests to pinpoint your purpose-driven career path.
    • You can find purpose at any age: Whether you’re 25 or 65, it’s never too late to align your life with what matters most.
    • Fear is the biggest blocker to authenticity: From financial security to family expectations, identifying your “Four Horsemen of Values Destruction” can help you move forward.
    • Career coaching backed by research: Suzy’s insights stem from years of teaching at NYU Stern and working with people from all walks of life, making her approach both personal and scalable.
    • The entrepreneur mindset thrives on self-knowledge: Knowing who you are helps you build a business that reflects your values, fuels your energy, and sustains your work-life balance.
    • Don’t wait for crisis: You don’t need to hit rock bottom to start living authentically. The time to start becoming you is now.

    Chapters:

    • 00:09 Introducing Suzy Welsh
    • 01:24 What Inspired Becoming You
    • 03:02 Finding Your Purpose
    • 07:07 Moving Past the Fear of Finding Your Purpose
    • 00:10:25 Discovering Your Aptitudes
    • 13:26 The Balance Between Joy and Financial Security
    • 14:47 Finding You at Any Age
    • 16:56 Impact of AI on the Workplace

    More About Suzy Welch: 

    John Jantsch (00:00.952)

    Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch. My guest today is Susie Welch. She is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker and professor at NYU Stern School of Business. With a background in journalism and business strategy, she rose to prominence co-authoring business books with her late husband, Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE. We’re going talk about her new book today, Becoming You, the Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic

    life and careers. So Suzy, welcome to the show.

    Suzy Welch (00:33.75)

    I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

    John Jantsch (00:36.172)

    You bet. Now you, speaking of career, have had a very diverse career. I did a little looking into your background and you were actually a reporter on crime in Miami in the eighties. So that means you personally know Don Johnson, right?

    Suzy Welch (00:40.718)

    Well, it’s cause I’m old. It’s cause I’m old. mean, it’s like, you know, you hang around, you hang around a while and it happens.

    Suzy Welch (00:53.656)

    Yeah. Yeah. I was. I was.

    Suzy Welch (01:01.13)

    Yeah, know, I wish I did, but I do not. But you know, that show, Miami Vice, was not wrong. I mean, those were the years I was there. And I mean, look, it wasn’t as glamorous for us young, underpaid reporters, but the level of violence was, that’s what we experienced for sure.

    John Jantsch (01:07.004)

    Yeah.

    John Jantsch (01:18.67)

    Well, let’s talk a little bit about your book then. You’ve obviously written or been involved in writing books on a lot of topics. Becoming you to me feels very deeply personal. So is there anything about what’s going on now in the world that kind of made you say, is the time for this book?

    Suzy Welch (01:41.198)

    Yes and yes and yes and yes. I wrote Becoming You because I teach a class by the same name at NYU Stern School of Business. It’s extremely popular class and it’s funny when we first offered it a couple of years ago, the thought was, well, here’s an experiment. Let’s offer a class that I had created that helps people figure out how to live their authentic lives. And it was an experiment. It was like, let’s see who signs up. And then…

    What happened was everybody did. And there was a crazy amount of interest in this class. It just so happened we were coming out of the pandemic and people were asking, what’s it all about? Why do I work? Where do I work? How do I work? What does work anyway? And I had a class based on a methodology which I’d 15 years developing that helped answer those questions for you. Was it personal? Yes, because one, it’s the culmination of my life’s work.

    John Jantsch (02:07.598)

    Yeah.

    Suzy Welch (02:34.058)

    drawn a lot out of my PhD thesis. So it’s very personal in that this work is stuff I’ve been doing research on for a long time. But it was personal because after my husband passed away, I had to figure out who I was as well. And so I always say that I was becoming used first beta tester. It worked for me. And now it’s been now it’s been tested thousands of times and used by thousands of people. And so it’s not just my methodology, it’s been shared with the world in ways that are really, wonderful and humbling.

    So it’s personal, but it’s also not just for me at all.

    John Jantsch (03:08.878)

    So, you you talked about coming out of the pandemic and I think the pandemic really accelerated a lot of things. But I, you know, I’ve been in business 30 years and I’ve seen a hunger, a growing hunger. It used to be tamped down. Like, no, we don’t talk about our personal lives. We don’t talk about what we want. We just go to work, you know, and that’s what business is. And I’ve seen over 30 years a growing hunger for people wanting to have that conversation more.

    in business. And I’m wondering if you think that that has anything to do with the popularity. I mean, the business school doesn’t offer a lot of that kind of training.

    Suzy Welch (03:41.728)

    I think that there’s two different things going on. actually come, I’ve been in business 40 years and I would say that there was a lot more talking about our personal lives at work in the old days when there were no boundaries. And now the younger generation is, don’t want to talk about my personal life, but you know, get out of my business. Okay. So I do think that there’s sort of a, there’s darker boundaries for Jen.

    Z, I just taught a class, I also teach management at NYU and we had this exact conversation the other day. I do think that the conversation that’s happening much more that did not happen before was about purpose. It was like purpose, you’re lucky if you get it. And now people are much more likely to say after I think the pandemic accelerated a conversation where people said, I don’t want to wait until I’m 65 to start living.

    I wanna live right now. Now, many of your listeners are entrepreneurs and they’ve already made that decision. And they’ve said, I wanna live right now. I wanna design my own life. I want high agencies, what we call it in the Becoming You methodology. And I think that all the conversation around purpose is great. As long as you don’t get frustrated by it. Because what typically happens in this conversation, John, is that people say, you should find and live your purpose. And everybody goes, yeah. And then there’s no how, how do you do it? And so part of the…

    Part of the reason I love becoming you, and I wanna be coy about it, I really love the methodology, is because it’s the how. It says, okay, you wanna live your purpose, here’s how. Figure out your values. That’s really, really hard, but go ahead and do it. Here’s our seven exercises. Figure out your aptitude. Here are four exercises for that. And figure out your economically viable interests. Here are two exercises for that. You cannot just conjure up your purpose. And if you don’t do work to figure out what your purpose is, you’ll spend your whole life looking for it. And then you’ll hit it.

    And you’ll kind of be in your forties or fifties or sixties and you’ll say, gee, I wish I’d known this 20 years ago. so I do think that, you know, look, search for purpose, it’s as old as time. mean, like the Iliad, which was this, know, 1700 years old talks about search for purpose. so people have always been talking about it. think the change now, the freedom is that we’re able to freely say, I want to live a life of purpose.

    John Jantsch (05:46.222)

    Yeah, there’s sections, entire sections of bookstores, entire industry, you know, on that whole idea of find your purpose. I think you’re right. That’s a, frustrated is a great word because I see so many people saying, I’m being told to do that and I don’t know how. I think that that’s really, that really is the…

    Suzy Welch (06:02.85)

    Yeah, it’s so annoying. My whole book is an answer to that because I think it’s so woo woo and annoying. And it’s like, please tell the people how to find their purpose. What ends up happening in these books that are about purpose is that they’re just long stories about people who found their purpose. And it’s like, no, there’s actually a methodology. Let’s just put it to work. Either you can do it over the course of your life or you can do it faster. I like the faster version.

    John Jantsch (06:30.186)

    Let me propose this idea, and you can feel free to bat it down completely or amplify it. Does the search sometimes allow it to find you?

    Suzy Welch (06:45.006)

    I have to think about that for a second. Yeah, I mean, it will find you eventually because the arc of life is long and it bends towards authenticity. Eventually we become authentic because we cannot hold our breath our entire lives long. So eventually we become authentic unless the Grim Reaper gets us first. So we want to be authentic and we will keep on inching and crawling towards it. Sometimes it comes and finds us and we say the call of this purpose is so loud I can’t ignore it.

    I think it’s sometimes we meet in the middle, John. You know, we get a sense of what it is and we kind of creep towards it and then it comes galloping at us and we have to make a decision about whether we’re gonna have the courage to live it.

    John Jantsch (07:24.366)

    Yeah, again, you’re writing my questions for me. no, no, it makes for a beautiful conversation. I was going to bring up fear. And I think that that, a lot of times people find this thing and we’re like, Oh God, but I can’t. So how do you get past that fear?

    Suzy Welch (07:28.262)

    No, sorry, not that!

    Suzy Welch (07:42.534)

    you, okay, so that’s the work of our life. I mean, you’re welcome to humanity. I call these the four horsemen of values destruction. It’s all fear. The first is economic security. Or if I do this, I’ll never survive. And that’s a totally legitimate thing to fear if you’ve got kids and a mortgage and a life. But you know, everybody who’s ever lived their purpose took a big leap and said, if I want it badly enough, the money will come. And so then the second is expectations. That’s fear also. I can’t do this.

    My parents would never approve her. People like me don’t do this. I had a student one time, we did the becoming you methodology in the class and she came up to me in the last day and she said, every single thing we’ve done in this class leads to me being a Roomba teacher. And I said, that’s beautiful. And she said, I can’t do that. I have an MBA. And I said, I was unaware of the legislature that prohibited MBAs from teaching Roomba. And she said, no, what would my parents say? What would my classmates say? And I said, who cares what they say.

    John Jantsch (08:29.23)

    Yeah.

    Suzy Welch (08:36.526)

    It’s your life. Anyway, she went on to work in consulting. so then the other, then there’s events. Events often take us away from living our lives. know, spouse dies or you get a divorce, you get laid off, and then suddenly the life you wanted seems impossible. You can’t swim upstream to get it. And then there’s just expedience, which oftentimes it’s just simply easier than to stepping into fear.

    You know, I really want this thing, but it’s just easier to keep the life I’ve got, the B plus life I’ve got. And so everything gets in the way of us living our purpose, everything. The world is set up for it. And that’s why so few people do it.

    John Jantsch (09:18.2)

    You know, there’s a lot of research that shows some of the people that have ultimately made that giant leap kind of had their back against the wall. and it was like, I, I have no choice. whereas being sort of comfortable, makes it harder to make that choice. Would you say there’s, anything to, I’m not saying you go out and get your back against the wall, but, some sort of level of being pushed.

    Suzy Welch (09:39.894)

    I don’t want you to do that. No, I don’t want you to wait too good because it takes a long time for you to have your back up against the wall. I mean, I think that it’s what you say sounds very true. It often is that in the real world, we wait until we have no more choices and other but the alternative is that we just die in the velvet coffin. You know, that’s where it’s very comfortable. And we just sort of lay down next thing you know, the lid closes. I know that image is ugly, but it’s real. And

    But I think that you can get away from it if you say, very with a lot of intentionality, I don’t want that to happen to me. Let me not wait till I have my back up against the wall. Because by that time, things are usually pretty much a mess. And so there’s a way, there’s a different way of thinking. That’s why I say to my students, and everybody, I I teach becoming you both at NYU, but I also do an open enrollment course and people come from around the world to take becoming you at NYU in our open enrollment. And what I say is,

    John Jantsch (10:16.632)

    Yeah, yeah.

    Suzy Welch (10:31.98)

    Look, you can use this tool to just decide to use it right now. And in a couple of days, you’ll know what your purpose is because the process takes, you know, it takes a couple hours. Or you can have this tool in your back pocket. And when things start getting a little bit hairy, pull it out and start doing it then. But don’t wait until disaster strikes and you’ve got to jump. It won’t be as good.

    John Jantsch (10:51.658)

    So you break, and I might be missing some here, but you break the book, a great deal of time is spent on values, aptitudes, interests. Where do people usually get that wrong? Is there kind of a universal, like people always miss this part?

    Suzy Welch (11:07.416)

    They missed them all and thank God that they do because that’s why I’m employed. think that, look, people often know their values, but they don’t have words for them. That’s why I invented the language of values and test for it in the values bridge, which is the tool that I created to help people figure out what their values are ranked one to 15. But values are people often, they don’t have language to describe their values and they often live by their parents values or there’s partners values. So that’s one thing.

    Aptitudes is another big problem though. It’s not just values because we grow up with people telling us what we’re good at or what we should be good at and we don’t ever, it takes a long time to find out what we’re actually good at because the world eventually tells us. But we can be tested as early as 15 years old to find out what our cognitive aptitudes are. Are we generalists or are we specialists? Are we idea generators or idea processors? mean, there’s eight big cognitive aptitudes. They’re steady from age 15.

    you can be tested for them for $40. I mean, I think it’s pretty good money to spend. I know it’s not free. And there’s a lot of different ways to know. I mean, I have a test that shows whether or not you should be a leader. is just, are aptitudes. I have four different aptitudes. So there’s ways to test. But then the one that people generally know a little bit better is their interests. I call them economically viable interests, because it’s not just interests. It’s interests that can pay you, interests that are part of the economy that are growing. I think the problem there is that

    people’s aperture is sort of closed. They sort of know of three industries and they sort of, know, and they, but there’s 135 industries and there’s thousands of different types of jobs. And so sometimes our aperture of how many different kinds of jobs and lives exist gets shut down before it should. So frankly, everybody needs a little bit of help in every area. And some people come in fully loaded knowing their aptitudes, but they don’t know their values. And so look, it depends on the person. Everybody can use little tweaking in all the areas.

    John Jantsch (12:58.818)

    Well, and I think society rewards aptitudes probably more than they do values. mean, you certainly, know, values can certainly take you down probably faster than aptitudes or lack of values.

    Suzy Welch (13:05.004)

    Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah.

    Suzy Welch (13:14.186)

    You you give a word, you know, this is a great point. You are, that’s a very, very apt point is you’re paid for your aptitudes generally. Okay. So, and that’s why I, the reason why I like becoming you is because it’s saying like your purpose lies at the intersection of your values, your aptitudes and your interest. All three matter, not one more than the other. And, and so you’ve got to figure them all out and see what’s at the center of those three spheres.

    before you really know what your purpose is. But a lot of times people just end up doing what they’re good at, the aptitude’s part of it. Why? Because they just are paid for it. And you know, they’re like, I kind of hate it, but whatever, it’s a job.

    John Jantsch (13:52.718)

    Well, you talked about the Roomba teacher. Maybe they’re well paid. don’t know. does there need to be a balance between financial reality and joy? mean, do interests have to be economically viable?

    Suzy Welch (14:04.96)

    It depends on how much you value. It depends on how much you value money. Everybody has a different value on money and how much they want. There’s no one answer to that. There’s as many answers to that as there are human beings on the face of the earth. Because when you say, you know, economic security, financial security, for some people, that means they have the money for the rent that month. And I’ve met those people. They want just enough.

    so that they don’t even want stuff left over at the end of the year. They’ve gotten by and that’s how much money matters to them. I mean, I know a fisherman who has the most marvelous life. He would want his life. He’s so happy and he rides a bike, he raises bees and he fishes and he feeds himself from the land and he doesn’t, money is sort of like, means nothing to him, right? And then I’ve had students who wanted one helicopter per child and that would be economic. so you can’t, this is such a customized process for, know, because

    John Jantsch (14:48.046)

    Yeah.

    Yeah.

    Suzy Welch (14:57.646)

    Everybody values money a different amount. But you got to know the answer. I mean, that’s one of the hardest conversations we ever have with ourself because there’s a little stink off of wanting a lot of money. You don’t want to admit it out loud, but you better admit to yourself and the people who go very close to you, with people with whom you’re in relationship, how much it is for you. You got to own it. Otherwise, you’re just going to be lying your way to just unhappiness.

    John Jantsch (15:20.568)

    Yeah. I’m curious, you, because you do the open enrollment and you probably even do some, maybe you even do some personal coaching. but at the school, you probably work with a lot of folks that are looking for their first career, their first job. do you find differences, significant differences in somebody’s journey at 20 as opposed to at 40?

    Suzy Welch (15:41.004)

    I have taught becoming new to people from age 16 to 78. I teach undergraduates, MBAs, executive MBAs, and then in the open enrollment, I teach mothers returning from the workforce, people who have retired who are starting their next chapter. I’ve taught people at every different stage of life. I think that the unifying thing is that almost no one knows their values no matter where they are. that people are…

    there are people in their sixties who say, wait a minute. Yeah, that’s what I’m good at. I always had a sense that I was good at that. And so I think that the universal condition that sort of draws everyone together is people are all seeking purpose and have woefully limited data on themselves and are always overjoyed to get that data. And so, I mean, obviously kids who are coming out of the MBA program have got a very high value on affluence because they’ve got debt to pay. They’ve got, you know, but look, here’s the thing.

    John Jantsch (16:28.142)

    You

    Suzy Welch (16:38.796)

    They have different attitudes about how long they’re willing to take to pay it off. And if you have a low value of affluence, which is what we call the money value, you’ll say, look, if I pay it off in 30 years, I’m happy. And then there’s other people who say, I gotta pay it off tomorrow. I can’t take it. I don’t like that feeling. And so everything, those are both variables.

    John Jantsch (16:59.758)

    So can you become you at midlife?

    Suzy Welch (17:05.227)

    You can become you at 99 years old. I mean, I became me at age 60, okay? So, you know, I had a lot of shareholders in Suzy incorporated until that point. And then a lot of things changed in my life and I finally could say, okay, what is it, girl? And so you can become you. I have had so many people go through becoming you at this point. I have seen hundreds of people go become themselves, thousands at this point, become themselves at every different age.

    John Jantsch (17:08.568)

    You

    Suzy Welch (17:33.408)

    And so there’s, know, it’s not over till it’s really over. And that’s a beautiful thing.

    John Jantsch (17:41.336)

    So I think this is a record for this year. We were 17 minutes and 46 seconds into the show. I’m going to mention AI for the first time. What impact are you seeing or do you feel will come from the fact that so many careers, many, I mean, jobs have changed, right, over the years, but they’re changing so rapidly. I think right now that people are having trouble adjusting to who they want to be, what they want to do. What impact do think that’s going to have?

    Suzy Welch (17:49.667)

    Okay.

    Suzy Welch (18:02.712)

    crazy.

    Suzy Welch (18:08.002)

    Yeah. Yeah.

    Okay, so I love AI by the way, I use it every single day. I have seen it changed what I have to do in the classroom and I’ve stopped asking my students not to use it on questions. I just designed the questions so that AI can’t answer them as easily as they could. But it’s changing all jobs. So here, I think that AI’s impact is that it’s gonna keep changing things. There’s gonna be this absolute kind of 20 year period where everything gets turned upside down by AI and nobody knows how that’s gonna look. So actually,

    In that situation, you got to know the only thing you can know, who you are. So if the world keeps on changing, you can’t keep changing yourself for the world. You got to know what your values are, your aptitudes are, and your interests are. And then as the world changes, you fit yourself into that place where you belong. It’s ever more imperative to know who you are standing still, because the world is changing very quickly.

    John Jantsch (18:59.692)

    Yeah.

    John Jantsch (19:04.306)

    I think it again, maybe this is only a five-year think for the moment, but I really think that those human values are going to be more important as a lot of the aptitudes are actually replaced.

    Suzy Welch (19:18.286)

    Yeah, I mean, it’s very possible that what happens is that technical aptitudes will all be replaced by AI. so really everything, like I was at a conference the other day and a very, very prestigious CEO said, we are running as fast as we can towards experiences because AI will never be able to replace an experience. And so people who are very good, I say that sort of three things account for long-term success in life. And I call it PI, P-I-E,

    the quality of your relationships with people, the quality of your ideas and the quality of your execution. And I think at the end of the day, AI is just never going to be able to replace the quality of relationships with people. And it will have ideas. But I just actually had an encounter right before our conversation where I asked AI to do something and give you flat out stupid answer. And so, I mean, it’s not there yet with the ideas, but it will get there. And, you know, it’s never going to be able to bring a cast role to somebody who’s lost a partner.

    So I think that, you know, just its ability to get things done in the real world is just, it’s going to be left to human beings. So there’s room for us, we’re not going to go extinct, but nobody knows which way it’s going to go. And in that case, it’s ever more important for you to know what you value.

    John Jantsch (20:32.002)

    Yeah, I’m voting for EQ over IQ. How’s that? Suzy, again, I appreciate you taking a moment. Is there anywhere you would invite somebody to connect, find out more about your work, certainly about your book?

    Suzy Welch (20:35.872)

    Okay, I’ll vote with you.

    Suzy Welch (20:46.604)

    Yeah, by all means, go to my website, suzywelsch.com. You can pre-order my book there, or you can follow my newsletter, which is free. You can find out about all the digital tools I have, and you can listen to my podcast, Becoming You. If you’re a podcast listener, I’d love to have you come and hear me talk about values, aptitudes, and interests over there. So thank you for giving me the chance to say that.

    John Jantsch (21:06.21)

    You betcha. Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

    Suzy Welch (21:12.718)

    That’d be great. Thank you so much for having me, John.

    powered by

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    Blood of Zeus Season 3 Review: A Gods and Monsters Battle Royale

    This Heart of Zeus period 3 review doesn’t contain any spoilers. Have I reached the end of my string? Over the past few years, Netflix has actually dominated the grownup animation market, and the streaming service has accumulated quite a large library of content that has made it obvious that animation is a top priority. [ ] in the past as a mature adaptation of…

    On Den of Geek, a review of Heart of Zeus Season 3: A Gods and Monsters Battle Royale second appeared.

    In this unique Taskmaster year 19 picture, Jason Mantzoukas seems to enjoy himself way too much.

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    South of Midnight allows you to avoid director conflicts, and, believe it or not, that’s okay.

    South of Midnight just arrived, interested in playing like a gorgeous-looking game, and I was immediately taken aback by the art and outstanding performances in the cutscenes,” Zack warned us, and I was soon put off by the repetitive combat. However, as I was frantically combing through the game’s settings to determine what was what, I came across a flip that I had no idea what to expect: the” Boss neglect option.”

    Learn more at Kotaku.

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    ” In the last few years, shows like Silo and Fallout have gained worldwide attention for Apple TV + and Prime Video, and Netflix has now finally responded with a post-apocalyptic set of its own.” The Eternaut, a group of survivors who are battling an alien risk after a terrible snowstorm claimed the lives of millions of people, is Netflix’s newest collection.

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    Max is limiting login communicating, adage from Netflix. However, the cash capture might take some time to put into practice.

    While it’s simple to slam on Warner Bros. This is more or less the exact timetable Netflix worked out when it launched its own password-sharing assault a few years ago because of Discovery’s terribly unhappy decision-making. Before being tested in the United States in 2023, Netflix‘s program was first tested in Latin American nations like Chile and Peru. Netflix claimed that the problems did not actually discourage people from using Netflix, despite the fact that people and their precise mother did it.

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    The Dog Stars, Ridley Scott’s upcoming post-apocalyptic stories, has Benedict Wong on board.

    The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic thriller based on the Peter Heller novel, has a new cast member named Benedict Wong ( Weapons ). Character information are kept a secret. Along with Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin, and Guy Pearce, Wong joins an outfit led by Jacob Elordi. Following the duo’s collaboration on Prometheus ( 2012 ) and The Martian ( 2015 ), the movie reunites the actor and Scott. It is currently being shot in Italy.

    Learn more at Deadline.

    The first post on Den of Geek: Link Tank: Special Taskmaster Clip Featuring Jason Mantzoukas at his most turbulent best was first published.

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    In this unique Taskmaster year 19 picture, Jason Mantzoukas enjoys himself way too much.

    cnx. command. push ( function ( ) {cnx ( {playerId:” 106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530″, }). render ( “0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796” ), }),

    South of Midnight allows you to avoid boss conflicts, and, believe it or not, that’s fine.

    South of Midnight just arrived, interested in checking out such a gorgeous-looking sport, and I was immediately enthralled by the artwork and the remarkable achievements in the scenes, but as Zack warned us, I was immediately enthralled by the repeated battle. However, as I was frantically combing through the game’s settings to determine what was what, I came across a flip that I had no idea what to expect: the” Boss neglect option.”

    More information is available on Kotaku.

    Netflix has found an appreciative market for its music access, The Eternaut, following a pattern of post-apocalyptic triumphs on another streamers.

    ” In the last few years, Netflix has finally responded with a post-apocalyptic series of its own, just like Netflix’s Silo and Fallout have become international sensations for Apple TV + and Prime Video. The Eternaut, a group of survivors who are battling an alien risk after a terrible snowstorm claimed the lives of millions of people, is Netflix’s newest series.

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    Max is limiting login sharing, adage from Netflix. However, it does take some time to put the money get into practice.

    While it’s simple to slam on Warner Bros. This is essentially the same timeline Netflix used to create its own password-sharing assault a few years ago due to Discovery’s terribly controversial decision-making. Before being tested in the United States in 2023, Netflix‘s action was first tested in Latin American nations like Chile and Peru. People and their precise family complained about it, but Netflix claimed that those problems did not actually discourage people from using the service.

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    The Dog Stars, Ridley Scott’s upcoming post-apocalyptic stories, has Benedict Wong on table.

    The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic thriller based on the Peter Heller novel, has a new cast member named Benedict Wong ( Weapons ). Character information are kept a secret. Wong joins a group led by Jacob Elordi that even includes Guy Pearce, Josh Brolin, and Margaret Qualley. Following the duo’s collaboration on Prometheus ( 2012 ) and The Martian ( 2015 ), the movie reunites the actor and Scott. It is currently being shot in Italy.

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    In this unique Taskmaster year 19 picture, Jason Mantzoukas seems to enjoy himself way too much.

    cnx. powershell. push ( function ( ) {cnx ( {playerId:” 106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530″, }). render ( “0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796” ), }),

    South of Midnight allows you to avoid boss conflicts, and, believe it or not, that’s fine.

    ” I just loaded South of Midnight, interested in checking out such a gorgeous-looking match, and was immediately enthralled by the artwork and the remarkable achievements in the scenes, but as Zack warned us, I was immediately enthralled by the repeated battle. However, as I was frantically combing through the game’s settings to determine what was what, I came across a flip that I had no idea what to expect: the” Boss neglect option.”

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    ” In the last few decades, shows like Silo and Fallout have gained worldwide attention for Apple TV + and Prime Video, and Netflix has now finally responded with a post-apocalyptic set of its own.” The Eternaut, a group of survivors who are battling an alien risk after a terrible snowstorm claimed the lives of millions of people, is Netflix’s newest series.

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    Following Netflix’s case, Max is cracking down on login communicating. However, it does take some time to apply the funds get.

    While it’s simple to slam on Warner Bros. This is essentially the same timeframe Netflix worked out when it launched its unique password-sharing assault a few years ago because of Discovery’s terribly unhappy decision-making. Before being tested in the United States in 2023, Netflix‘s action was first tested in Latin American nations like Chile and Peru. People and their literal family complained about it, but Netflix claimed that those problems did not actually discourage people from using the service.

    Learn more at The A. V. Club.

    The Dog Stars, Ridley Scott’s upcoming post-apocalyptic stories, has Benedict Wong on table.

    The Dog Stars, Ridley Scott‘s post-apocalyptic thriller based on the Peter Heller novel, has Benedict Wong ( Weapons ) on its cast. Information about the characters are kept a secret. Wong joins a group led by Jacob Elordi that even includes Guy Pearce, Josh Brolin, and Margaret Qualley. Following the duo’s collaboration on Prometheus ( 2012 ) and The Martian ( 2015 ), the movie reunites the actor and Scott. It is currently being shot in Italy.

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    cnx. command. push ( function ( ) {cnx ( {playerId:” 106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530″, }). render ( “0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796” ), }),

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    South of Midnight just arrived, interested in checking out such a gorgeous-looking sport, and I was immediately enthralled by the artwork and the remarkable achievements in the scenes, but as Zack warned us, I was immediately enthralled by the repeated battle. However, as I was frantically combing through the game’s settings to determine what was what, I came across a flip that I had no idea what to expect: the” Boss neglect option.”

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    Netflix has found an appreciative market for its music access, The Eternaut, following a pattern of post-apocalyptic triumphs on another streamers.

    ” In the last few years, shows like Silo and Fallout have gained worldwide attention on Apple TV + and Prime Video, and Netflix has now created a post-apocalyptic series of its own.” The Eternaut, a group of survivors who battle an alien risk after a terrible snowstorm claimed the lives of millions of people, is Netflix’s newest collection.

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    While it’s simple to slam on Warner Bros. This is more or less the exact timetable Netflix worked out when it launched its own password-sharing assault a few years ago because of Discovery’s terribly unhappy decision-making. Before being tested in the United States in 2023, Netflix‘s action was first tested in Latin American nations like Chile and Peru. Netflix claimed that the problems did not actually discourage people from using Netflix, despite the fact that people and their precise mother did it.

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