The Data Malarkey Podcast

To kick-off the second season of Data Malarkey, Sam Knowles talks to one of the all-time greats of academic psychology – Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. An experimental psychologist interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature, Steve is one of the most important public intellectuals – and best-selling authors – of the past 30 years. He came to global attention with his 1994 book, The Language Instinct, and followed that three years later with How The Mind Works.

In the 2000s, Steve's interests – and popular-science best sellers – have flexed and grown to cover nature and nurture, human progress, violence (or otherwise) in society, and most recently, rationality. Many listeners will be familiar with The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and – most recently – Rationality. A less well-known but important work is Steve's 2014 book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, and what it has to say about the Curse of Knowledge.

Garlanded by media, national and international associations, and academic institutions around the world, Steve is generally agreed to be one of the world's leading thinkers and most influential writers. He is that rarest of creatures – a serious, practicing academic who writes with great clarity for both his peers and an intelligent lay audience.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 18 May 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Steve spends his time reading, teaching, and writing – totally immersing himself when it comes to books. And when he's not doing that, he's walking, hiking, cycling, travelling and talking with his wife, the novelist and philosopher, Rebecca Goldstein. He also has a passion – and a real skill – for photography, a passion developed from his early-career research in visual cognition and his love of visual aesthetics.

This episode covers so much in just 45 minutes, from why the world is rather less violent than the news cycle might suggest to the replicability crisis in psychology; from our faulty belief that a sample will be representative of a population, to underpowered psychological research using too few experimental subjects. More than once, Steve refers to Amos Tversky's 1971 paper in Psychological Bulletin, "Belief in the law of small numbers". As Steve points out: "He did warn us. We should have listened!" For those unfamiliar with this seminal, overlooked paper – here it is.

And while we're very much in the wheelhouse of an academic psychologist at the height of his profession, at all times Steve avoids the Curse of Knowledge, which he defines as "the difficulty in imagining what it's like for some else not to know something that you know". As the Curse of Knowledge is a repeated target of Sam's in his data storytelling training, host and guest wig out about the Curse, which Steve also characterises as a lack of Theory of Mind.

Other topics covered in this episode include: what insight is and how to move from data to insight; the very real power of analogy (like the solar system for atomic structure) in driving breakthrough innovation and understanding; the dangers (and shortcomings) of AI. While Steve suspects the dangers have been overstated, he's all for minimising deep fakes – on news in particular – and fraud.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Steve's home page – https://stevenpinker.com

Photos by Steven Pinker – http://stevepinker.com

The Harvard Department of Psychology page for Steve – https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/steven-pinker

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

After six great guests, it's a wrap for Season One of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations with his mixed bag of academics, marketers, a leading voice in clearing down space junk, and a coach helping bring balance to our data-rich, digital lives.

Our conversations were recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, in February and March 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Professor Ana Adi, Quadriga University, Berlin

Professor Rusi Jaspal, University of Brighton

Katherine Courtney, Steering Board Chair of GNOSIS – the Global Network on Sustainability in Space

Laetitia Zinetti, RVP Southern Europe at DoubleVerify

Mark Evans – NED, coach, advisor, and former Chief Marketing Officer at Direct Line Group

Anastasia Dedyukhina, Chief Inspiration Officer, Consciously Digital

Three guests (Anastasia, Laetitia, and Ana) discussed both how they spend their time and how they manage to bring balance to their lives, taking active steps to avoid being overwhelmed by data; how they stay on the side of data common sense and avoid data malarkey.

Katherine showed herself to be a stellar data storyteller, talking about both the risks space junk presents, why it could easily take us back to the 1950s if it's not cleared out of the path of satellites, and how to convince primary school children we are not alone in the universe.

Rusi introduced us to Brains at the Bevy, a Brighton University initiative in which academics share their research findings and impact in a local community pub, demanding that they – too – are great data storytellers for the locals in the audience.

And Mark revealed why and how he champions neurodiversity in the workplace – and then owned up to his biggest, personal, data-driven blunder. It's all about cat food, and Quincy the office cat makes an on-cue appearance, swishing his ginger tail.

Data Malarkey is back with Season Two from 21 June, and do we have a guest for you. One of the world's leading public intellectuals and best-selling authors. Tune in again soon to learn who it is.

To find out how you ranks as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Anastasia Dedyukhina, the founder and Chief Inspiration Officer of Consciously Digital. Consciously Digital is a coaching, training and development company – it's more than that; it's a movement – that's looking to build a world in which technology brings out the best in humanity. And very definitely not the worst, as many of the apparently "free" social and digital platforms have done with such negative impact. When their currency is our attention, we and our mental and physical health are the losers.

Herself a digital marketer for more than a decade, Anastasia has first-hand experience of what it's like to constantly battle the dopamine hit of another like, share, or retweet. She rose to prominence and public attention in 2016 with her TEDxWandsworth talk titled "Could you live without a smartphone?", which currently has almost 400,000 views on YouTube. She followed this two years later with her powerful book, Homo Distractus – Fight for your choices and identity in the digital age, and is today one of the world's leading digital wellbeing coaches through her consultancy, Consciously Digital, which she founded before both the TED talk and the book came out.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 16 March 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Anastasia's business, Consciously Digital, is not anti-data or anti-tech. The company has 100-plus digital wellbeing coaches, all providing guidance to people of all ages so that they can get proper balance in their life when it comes to data, social and digital media platforms, and digital devices. Anastasia often finds herself outside, in the garden, and moving; walking, playing volleyball, and above all dancing. When doing any of those things, digital devices and social media don't have a chance to get in the way.

With a PhD in media and communication, Anastasia is very familiar with data and statistics, but in her current role she seeks to blend data-driven decision-making with softer skills. This hybrid – narrative AND numbers, stories AND statistics, shared with humanity and empathy – is her preferred mode of making sense of the world. A world which seems to have found a new god in Data.

The data we collect helps us to create more or less imperfect models of the world, and with a nod to the British statistician George Box, we agree that while "all models are wrong", nevertheless, "some are useful". Collecting data affects the data – just like particles being observed in physics change behaviour – and Anastasia shows herself to be very skilled at citing, reporting, and explaining the meaning of scientific (particularly psychological) studies. The one about wearables reporting on sleep patterns is worth the entry fee for this podcast alone.

In terms of practical advice for bringing balance into our digital lives, Anastasia recommends:

• Never looking at your phone (let alone doom-scrolling) when eating

• Keep your phone out of the bedroom

• Prioritise activities that give you energy – including movement and being in nature

• When you lose energy from too much time exposed to digital content, take a break

• Remove social media apps from your phone and only use them on less mobile devices

Very wise advice from someone who knows, who's been out of balance with digital and data, and now spends her time advising people how to find and enjoy the balance she's found for herself.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Anastasia's LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasiadedyukhina/

Consciously Digital – https://www.consciously-digital.com/

Anastasia's TEDxPeterborough talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOul_7qAOws&feature=youtu.be

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Mark Evans, one of the most successful marketers of his generation. Mark worked for ten years at Mars, rising to be Brand Director of Petcare Europe, before spells at 118118 Media UK and HSBC.

In 2012, Mark joined leading UK insurance business Direct Line Group where he helped to transform the business and the fortunes of its brands. Perhaps most notably – and in the teeth of stiff competition from the price comparison websites – he relaunched and reenergised the company's flagship Direct Line brand. In that time, as well as championing the role of data and analytics in the company's decision making, he even persuaded Harvey Keitel to reprise his role as Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction, and in the process to drive the brand to new heights.

In 2023, Mark's gone plural, and is a non-executive director, coach, speaker, and podcaster. Indeed, he's the regular co-host of "The Places We'll Go Marketing Show", now WITH well over 100 episodes. Guests have included many of the great names in modern marketing, from Unilever's Paul Polman to Professor Philip Kotter, from Mark Ritson to Byron Sharp – though for those who know these academic luminaries, they won't be surprised to hear Ritson and Sharp didn't appear together.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 14 March 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Mark describes his route into marketing as neither typical nor traditional. An economics graduate with a Masters in corporate finance, the job he was due to take up at Hill Samuel disappeared "in a puff of smoke", thanks to a corporate merger.

Throughout his career, he's brought the rigour, analytical skills, and test-and-learn approach of financial markets to a wide variety of different marketing roles. Every decision he's taken and encouraged his teams to take has been driven by the evidence. This has helped him to elevate marketing and marketing decision-making up the food chains in corporate hierarchies. It's driven by his desire to test, prove or disprove hypotheses, a skill he cut his teeth studying high school science.

We talk at length about the way that Direct Line Group uses the Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a measure of how likely customers are to recommend products and services to friends and family – as the single metric everyone in the business was measured against. This unified, simplified approach made it clear to everyone in the business how important both measurement and measurement of customer experience is to the top and bottom line. For the better experience customers have with a business, the more likely they are to remain customers – and recommend the company to others.

Mark details the transformation journey he led from 2019 to turn Direct Line into a properly agile business, as well as his passion for building and championing "whole brain teams" across the full spectrum of neurodiversity. Many on the systemizing end of the autistic spectrum are brilliant at solving analytical challenges but at the same time find the interview process difficult. This means that many who could be hugely valuable to all sorts of businesses remain outside the workforce. Mark details his experience of working with the social enterprise Auticon – whose purpose is to help businesses "become a destination for neurodivergent talent" – to address this.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Mark's LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/markevans2/

The Places We'll Go Marketing Show – https://open.spotify.com/show/3zajAP9qA031znCniJnHuV

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Laetitia Zinetti, Regional Vice President for Southern Europe of software company DoubleVerify. The company is on a mission to build a better advertising industry, helping brands to improve the effectiveness of their online ad spend, giving them clarity and confidence in their digital investment.

Sam first met and worked with Laetitia more than a decade ago when she arrived at Ebiquity – the independent media investment analysis business – to run the Paris office. In almost 13 years with the company, she rose to be Ebiquity's MD for Europe. Before that, Laetitia held senior media, marketing, and communications roles in two global transport businesses, first for the Australian national airline, Qantas, and then for the Nissan Motor Corporation.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 7 March 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Laetitia describes herself as a typical multi-tasking woman in business, juggling her career, partner, and children, meaning that she always has a "to do" list on the go. Delightfully, on Laetitia's list, there's always a blank box, a box that often gets filled but – while it remains blank – promises opportunity and possibility.

In running DoubleVerify in markets across Southern Europe, the stuff of Laetitia's data life are billions of impressions generated by online ads, tracked and captured by pixels on these ads. The pixels are invisible to users and are used assess who (or what – as still too often, it can often be bots rather than real humans) sees the ads, the context and environments in which the ads are served. A key focus for DoubleVerify is the concept of brand suitability. This goes several steps beyond the now-outdated concept of keywords and blacklists. Suitability is assessed by rigorous and complex semantic analysis of the context alongside which ads are served, and DoubleVerify employs more than 40 expert linguists to assess and advise on suitability.

Time and again during our discussion, Laetitia emphasises the importance of combining artificial or augmented intelligence with irreplaceable human intelligence as the key to cleaning up the digital ad business; of helping brands secure better and ultimately optimal business performance through ever-better marketing investment. This AI x HI combo is best evidenced in DoubleVerify's quarterly business reviews it creates for its clients: no more than 20 slides, and a human/empathetic narrative supported by genuine, data-driven insights.

With her feet more than firmly under the table, those in digital marketing should keep their eyes on the European conference agenda, where Laetitia will be sharing new research and thought leadership content commissioned by DoubleVerify, during the course of the year. The best place to find out where she'll be speaking? Laetitia's LinkedIn profile.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Laetitia's LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/laetitiazinetti/

Announcement of Laetitia's appointment on MR Web - https://www.mrweb.com/drno/news34747.htm

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Katherine Courtney, Chair of the Steering Board of GNOSIS, the Global Network on Sustainability In Space. Katherine has had a significant career in business, public life, and public service. After a decade in telecoms and communication, Katherine had a series of high profile civil service jobs – at the Home Office and Departments of Work & Pensions and Business, Innovation, & Skills. In 2016, she became Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 28 February 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Having been "in the right place at the right time" to become head of the UK Space Agency in 2016, the final frontier has remained a passion, driver, and employer ever since. From being a STEM (Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics) ambassador in U.K. primary schools, encouraging tweenagers to nurture their passion for space exploration, to heading the Global Network for Sustainability in Space, Katherine very definitely looks up – above the atmosphere and into the great beyond.

The GNOSIS Network brings together industry and academic experts to tackle the leading challenges facing the "man-made night sky" circling our planet, where the number of satellites has mushroomed five-fold to more than 10,000 in just 20 years. Space is becoming more congested, contested, and commercialised, just as the skies within the atmosphere did post-World War II with the explosion of international air travel.

In addition to thousands of satellites, there are also 130 million pieces of uncontrollable debris orbiting Earth, 29,000 of which are sized between an orange and a double-decker bus, all travelling at almost 18,000 mph. From these brief notes, it's clear that Katherine sees a critical role for data in storytelling – provided the numbers, which she claims to find hard to recall, are put in context.

Katherine tells a fabulous story of work she did while Director of Customer Insight at the U.K. Government's Department of Work & Pensions. She transformed her 600-strong team of rear-view-mirror-gazing number crunchers into an army of predictive analytics experts. By blending qualitative and quantitative data – as Professor Rusi Jaspal was discussing in the previous episode – and adopting techniques of consumer market research including customer journey mapping and personae development, she massively upped the DWP's insights game. This work enabled senior colleagues to walk in their customers shoes, to inhabit the lives of benefit claimants.

For Katherine – a dual U.K. / U.S. national – the worst misuse of data in living memory was POTUS45's refusal to accept the results of the November 2020 election, encouraging and fomenting his supporters to storm the Capitol. And while she's optimistic that U.S. democratic structures were able to withstand this wilful riding roughshod over what the numbers were saying, it was a salutary moment in the country's history.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Katherine's LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kcourtneybis/

Katherine on Twitter – https://twitter.com/kcourtneybis

GNOSIS – the Global Network for Sustainability In Space – https://gnosisnetwork.org. Delightfully, gnosis is the Ancient Greek for knowledge

GNOSIS on Twitter - https://twitter.com/GNOSIS_Space

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In the second episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks with Professor Rusi Jaspal. Rusi is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange – and a Professor of Psychology – at the University of Brighton. He's in charge of both the REF and the KEF – the university's preparations for the UK Government's seven-yearly Research Excellence Framework as well as its Knowledge Exchange Framework. This means that data and evidence, insight and impact are central to everything he does.

His own research is focused on psychological and physical health outcomes, especially in minority groups, including HIV prevention, care, and mental health. From psychological wellbeing among gay men to management of identities in conflict, from prejudice and discrimination to the psychological impact of the COVID pandemic.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 27 February 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

With Rusi's work split between his role as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange and as a Professor of Psychology, data, evidence, and data-driven decision-making is at the heart of everything he does. We talk more than once about the pioneering "Brains at the Bevy", a Community University Partnership Programme at which Brighton academics present their work at the Bevendean Community Pub in Moulsecoomb, the suburb of Brighton where the main campus of the University is located. The Bevy is the first community-owned pub on a housing estate in the UK, and the programme requires Brighton academics to explain the meaning and impact of their research to the local community in layman's terms. No opportunities for getting bogged down in too much data there, for sure. No role for the Curse of Knowledge.

Rusi talks about the mutually supportive role and value that qualitative research data has for quantitative data, and vice versa, as well as the difficulties of capturing elusive human qualities such as "self-esteem" in a single number. As a psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society, he feels a keen responsibility to ensure that his and his team's research findings are correct, clear, and easy-to-understand. To move from data to insight, Rusi often deploys theory – while always remaining aware that data must not be force-fitted to support a particular favourite theory. The moment of transition from data to insight requires honesty.

For Rusi, academic findings are best presented in the form of a story, though he urges caution in using the right type of data to draw conclusions about causation. While experimental data can allow us to generalise from the particular, cross-sectional survey data cannot and should not be.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Rusi's Twitter handle – https://twitter.com/ProfRJaspal

Rusi's Brighton University page – https://www.brighton.ac.uk/about-us/governance-and-structure/leadership/university-executive-board/professor-rusi-jaspal.aspx

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In the first episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks with Professor Ana Adi, Head of the Department of Corporate Communications, and Vice President of Quadriga University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Ana describes herself as a "digital humanist", whose work focuses on online strategic communications. This includes both corporate social responsibility and activist communication, and she has a special interest and expertise in communication that features innovative and online-based research methods.

This conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 24 February 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Our discussion touches on how Ana works with data and how she overcomes the challenges of working with incomplete data sets. In a current project, she's working with data from 25 countries in three languages. She's following a well-established (and always-evolving) playbook that sees her move from qualitative to quantitative research techniques to boil down data into themes and ultimately insights.

To get there, she pressure-tests data using five key questions:

• So what; what do the data mean?
• Is what we've learned different from current understanding?
• What's weird, different, or outlying?
• Who cares about these results?
• And what will those who care do differently as a consequence?

Ana's compelled by the art and the science of digital forensics and what data we leave behind reveals about us and our attitudes to data. In the maxim of the father of modern forensic science, Edmond Locard, "every contact leaves a trace". As a digital humanist, Ana's interested in determining the value of every interaction we have with the digital world, every trace we leave.

When it comes to data storytelling, Ana is attracted to the approach taken by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath in their seminal 2006 book, Made to Stick, and their use of analogies, metaphors, epithets, and proxies. By keeping it simple and dialling up the emotion and humanity of data at the root of a story, we humanise it and make it relatable.

Outside of the day-to-day, Ana calls out the ways in which her perennial quest for balance informs her work and her life/work balance, with recent experience both painting and playing the piano.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Ana's LinkedIn page – https://www.linkedin.com/in/anaadi/

Ana's "Women in PR" podcast – https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/women-in-pr/id1484683946

Ana's personal page – https://www.anaadi.net/

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

Data Malarkey is a new, fortnightly podcast hosted by master data storyteller, Sam Knowles. In each episode, Sam talks to leaders and leading thinkers in data storytelling. Guests will be from many and various different fields and categories – business, academia, sports analytics, charity and the third sector, and government departments. The first full episode will be available from 15 March 2023, when Sam will be joined by Professor Ana Adi from Quadriga University in Berlin.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we'll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.