This is the full transcript for Episode #269 of the Wild Business Growth Podcast featuring Joe Schaeppi – Video Game Brain Tester, Co-Founder of Solsten. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
Joe Schaeppi 0:00
People spend time and money on what they value. And people resonate with who they are.
Max Branstetter 0:04
Hello, welcome back to the Wild Business Growth Podcast. This is your place hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, Founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting. And you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is Episode 269, and today’s guest is Joe Schaeppi. Joe is the Co-Founder and CEO of Solsten, where he is pioneering cognitive assessment if I could pronounce it by the use of video games and involves flow state, it’s super cool. And the possibilities are endless. This interview covers some wild, wild wild, not just west, but wild topics, including adventure-based psychotherapy, theories about the universe, how cities are designed user experience, and skiing in Switzerland. It is Mr. Schaeppi. Enjoyyyyyyy the showwwwww!
Aaaaalrightyyyyy we’re here with Joe Schaeppi, one of the most fun names to say and Co-Founder and CEO of Solsten. Doing some really, really cool innovative things, Joe, so excited to share it up with you today. I’m sorry. Thanks for Thanks for joining. How are you doing today?
Joe Schaeppi 1:56
Doing well, Max, thank you. Yeah, I’m doing well. Perfect. Cool. Well,
Max Branstetter 2:02
we, of course, are going to get into the solstice story and all sorts of cool things in the video game space and some AI and kind of almost futuristic things as well. But before that, I heard that you were a are are a ski ambassador for The North Face? Or was was a what was a? How did that chapter of your life come about? Well,
Joe Schaeppi 2:26
it all kind of started I grew up ski racing at this little tiny hill in Minnesota, in the US called Buck Hill. It’s this place where people who know like Lindsey Vonn or some other professional skiers, we all all grew up racing at this little place. And yeah, I ended up doing freestyle skiing in college, got an interest in sponsorship from a Swedish company to go to Switzerland. So left Madison found the closest school to Germany, I could find it was kind of a fun story, because the sponsorship was only based if I was in Switzerland. My last name Swiss. So I had to figure something out. Because they’re like, Yeah, we want to sponsor you. I’m like, okay, cool. Oh, you’re in Wisconsin. No. So when to Switzerland, and you know, ended up having, you know, some some really good footage clips, got into photography. Some person at the north face, found me on Instagram. And it’s kind of a cool story, like they were looking for more. Jimmy Chen type pokes. So he ended up telling me that Jimmy chin just just by himself, basically did more advertising dollars for the north face than all their Olympic athletes combined. So they were they were looking for people who had a sense for photography. And that was a part of my earlier career, did photos and galleries, things like that. And also were athletes. It was a fun thing. It was fun. While it lasted maybe four years that I was doing that with the north face. But that was on the site. So it was while I was actually I was an adventure based psychotherapist, and doing UX design. While that was all happening. So I was kind of joking. Like, yeah, that would have been nice when I was 21. And a little bit more dumb and insane when your your frontal lobe isn’t all there and you’re young man. But it’s probably good at the same time that it happened later in my career. So I was balancing that with seeing patients and yeah, doing UX design. As a as a director for big ad agency. That’s a fantastic
Max Branstetter 4:27
word 21 and dumb
Joe Schaeppi 4:31
if you’re if you’re 21 You think you’re a genius. You know, wait till you get older, I guess
Max Branstetter 4:37
that’s probably like the peak of confidence and ego is when you’re around that age. Yeah. Yep. So that’s an incredible journey that you’re on. Shout out. My wife Dana and my brother-in-law, her brother, Adam, who both were ski racers as well growing up and so they have many very, very, very many fun memories about that. So you didn’t know you had that in common with this podcast. So bam, there you go. But going to Switzerland spending years there like that had to be the adventure of a lifetime. Like, how would you characterize your journey there?
Joe Schaeppi 5:11
Yeah, it was interesting because I, I ended up going there because of this whole extreme thing. And then dad’s side of the family Smith, but I grew up in the United States. I mean, for us at the time is incredible, because we were just skiing for five days a week while doing a little bit of school. And I had a friend who he was actually sponsored by another American company who was in the same boat. So we both got over that the same time we were roommates. We kept each other accountable enough to be I think, safe enough. But just awesome partner. While I was there, I met met someone named Mari Willis, who she was like, early at the Xerox lab back when that was like a design center and just incredible, incredible name and UX, especially, I think, you know, through the late 90s 2000s. It was definitely someone you would know, and was in Verbier a actually. And she heard me talk, talking about human factors, and found me in the party and said, You need to come and work for me. So actually went back to the US and then ended up going back to Switzerland, again, to run a user experience lab or a bunch of startups work with a fortune 500 company there. So yeah, it’s it’s I mean, it’s been a really cool part of my career. And it’s partially what led into Sulston. So, yeah.
Max Branstetter 6:36
You mentioned adventure-based psychotherapy, which I just had to look at my notes just to make sure that I said it, right, because it sounds really cool. And I’ve heard of something like it, but I really don’t know exactly what it is. What is that? Yeah,
Joe Schaeppi 6:52
sometimes people will confuse it with wilderness therapy with you know, it’s like, you have all these therapy words, like massage therapists, or wilderness therapists, adventure based psychotherapy. If you’re a clinical mental health counselor, if you’re a psychologist, it’s basically an offshoot of therapeutic remedies, based on adventure, and adventure is an interesting word. Because wilderness just implies you’re going outside and, and all that. What’s interesting about adventure, so when, when people are at a point where there’s risk perception, and there’s a sufficient amount of risk perception, what’s cool is we you know, we produce epinephrine or adrenaline, which acts as kind of like, neuro lubricant. So if you think about your dendrites in your brain moving around and associating with different things, it’s easier to allow them to reassociate when you’re in a state where there’s a little bit of adrenaline, and it makes sense. Like, if you’re running from the lion, you probably want to be able to come up with some interesting ideas, and clever things. So it’s good for neuroplasticity. And so what adventure therapists do, they work in Adventure studying, so whether it’s back to skiing or surfing could be things like high ropes, though things where there’s a perception of risk. And what you’re doing is you’re working with a means of safety. So it’s the idea is they’re perceiving risks, but they’re not actually in a in a spot for danger, they’re in a spot for fun. So you’re using this thing called you stress or positive stress, to be able to it’s kind of think of it as like maybe reverse PTSD, where you’re putting in intense situations, but they’re fun. And then you’re doing cognitive behavioral therapy as you would as a normal psychologist or therapist, but you’re doing it in an adventure setting. And what’s powerful about that is, if you if you look at play, for example, or being in a state of play, people from a neurological perspective, you can create a new piece of it from a neurogenesis side of things, you can create a new synapse, within about 10 repetitive times of a thing, it takes about 500 times to do something like that, when you’re just on a couch or not in a state of play. So adventure therapy is incredibly proficient at helping to rewire the brain, and to help individuals with, you know, a number of different psychological issues, but also human potential. And not just issues. But hey, I’m trying to break through this one aspect of self where I keep repeating the same behavior over and over again, in my personal life or relationship or work, and I want to get better. So it’s a great way to open up the mind, practice that went to school for it, and did a lot of neuro psych evals as a part of it. So I was in Utah. So you have like, you know, people with traumatic brain injuries or skiers hit their head, that sort of thing. You do neuro psych evals to really understand what’s going on. And then adventure therapy is the modality of choice. For me, for me, it’s not it’s not suitable for all clients and patients, but it’s, it’s incredible in terms of results.
Max Branstetter 9:53
We appreciate you sharing that and it’s a really, really cool space to be in. It’s just amazing that you can do How quick things happens and how it totally changes things when you when you are doing something active or when you’re in kind of a different environment like that. And you mentioned that you mentioned the term we use dress, which I remember learning, I think it was the first time I learned that was in middle school health class, which at the time, they were describing it as like positive stress. And like when you’re doing something challenging, like sometimes it’s stressful, but it’s for the benefit. But also in hindsight, I think it was kind of just their way of saying, do your homework, because there’s a lot of us stress with homework, and they’re like, No, that’s good stress, you got to do it to get your homework done. But I think you use it in a bunch of different environment.
Joe Schaeppi 10:37
It was like that school was definitely progressive in teaching you guys that like I did not learn that at that age. But it’s also like, you know, when when people ask me, like, what video games should I play? Or what activities should I do? And the answer like that’s going to have mental health benefits. If you look at the research is pretty clear. It’s like the one that you’re having the most fun doing. So if you’re doing something that’s fun, and there’s stress associated with it, that’s your stress. But I don’t know if all homework for all kids is fun. So might not have been you stressed that the kids were and Like honestly, I don’t know if homework is that stressful? Maybe for some kids, but more just like a pain, I guess like you want to be playing outside or, or these days, I guess, you know, playing video games and things like that. But yeah.
Max Branstetter 11:24
Right. And I think for me, I’m still kind of traumatized from like, when I took my first bio class that had like, you know, you had to read like a ton of pages every night. Like, I’m not the fastest reader in the world. So like, some of that bio stuff was interesting. But also, like, I don’t want to spend three hours every night, like struggling through pages of words, I don’t know. Speaking of fun in video games, so that segues swimmingly, shout out alliteration to Sulston and some of the really really cool stuff that you and the team are doing today. Where was the inflection point from like some of the stuff you were doing in that adventure psychotherapy world? To like, oh, we can actually use insights like this and insights from video games to create a business around? I would
Joe Schaeppi 12:13
like sometimes people ask me like, when did you come up with the idea for Sulston? And it wasn’t like we didn’t, I didn’t brainstorm something. Since I’ve been pretty young. I’ve been really interested in human potential unconsciousness, Neil deGrasse Tyson is on this, like, it’s like tonight show or something. And everyone’s talking about what their biggest fear is being stung by a bee things like that. And Neil comes up, and he’s like, seeing all the other versions myself of myself and all the other universes and seeing the ones that live up to their potential better than I did. Like, it’s a very, you know, physicist existential way of looking at it. But what other what, who was a better husband, who was a better father, who was a better scientist, all these sorts of things. And so being really curious about human potential and the limits of, of who we are you, you end up following this path of psychological assessment. So psychological assessment, taking questionnaires, many people have taken things like the Myers-Briggs, where they’ll tell you their their type, you know, I’m a, e and TJ or something like that, you know, we don’t use those clinically, they’re not reliable and valid enough. Maybe people know, their, their Harry Potter character or something like that. But we’re all we’re all trying to everyone fundamentally, you know, when you ask yourself the question, Who am I? We all struggle with that to varying different degrees and in different contexts. Who am I and what am I? And when you say things like I think, or I feel, who’s doing the feeling and who’s doing the thinking, when you say, I think, well, who’s the thinker? And that’s consciousness, and we don’t know what the hell that is, like, I think Carl Sagan said something like, there’s two scientific problems. We aren’t even close to figuring out one’s quantum mechanics and quantum physics and others consciousness. So following that path of psychology, and that’s part of why I went into UX and human factors really early on, I wanted to see how could you design environments and architect environments in a way that’s suitable for human potential. So like, if you’re in a city and in America, I forget who said this. But they basically said, you know, whoever created American cities must really hate people. Because American cities were were built on grids. They were built around efficiency, you know, they’re built for cars. And they did a really good job of that you go to a small town in Italy, like why does this feel good? Well, you can’t you’re gonna bump into people. The streets are built around people. There’s a town center, like there’s human beings organically. We’re a part of the development of those cities. And similarly speaking, when we architect environments, like the one we’re on right now, the computer that we sit on all day, like how much of that is done thinking about human potential, the human spirit and human well being? So that’s, that was my path in terms of UX. I was always doing psychological assessment with those two too. And in the background, I had this somewhat separate life, which was my ski life and all that fun stuff like that. And so yeah, I started digging in and you know, looking at play flow states, all this sort of stuff, and really seen human potential and how much it’s connected to flow. And the best way to induce flow is when your challenge is slightly higher than your skill level. And you’re in a dynamic environment in nature. Second, best way, probably video games. So video games are like the most accessible version of play in the world. Not everybody, you know, something like over 90% of kids who grew up in Denver and Colorado, have never even been to the mountains, and they see them every day. But it’s not always accessible. 3 billion out of the 4 billion people in the world that have smartphones, play a video game at least once a day. So when we look at play, and the access to play, it’s right on your phone, it’s right on your computer. So that’s what made me start to go down the path of video games and play and saying, Hey, can I do a lot of this adventure psychology stuff, and assessment stuff, because we’re the most authentic version of ourselves when we play? Can I do that through games. So he became the head of UX at a company called Big Fish Games that started that hypothesis and journey. And when I saw that, A, you could actually measure psychological traits, while people were playing. That was like, a low moment, because it was a hypothesis, it wasn’t necessarily true. Because most behavior data is not always indicative of your psychology. Like you’re living in Berlin, and you don’t know you’ve done a kebab, because that’s what you can get in Berlin, and then you’re back in, I don’t know San Francisco. It’s not like a food that’s, that’s just readily available, you’d have to really seek it out. So behavior can be really can change a lot. If you’ll get like games, you know, from a swearing perspective, like, well, two players, like one might say, like, hey, Fu, bro, and other one says fu bro. And these two, like engagement goes up over time. And it’s like, they’re best friends. And that’s just how they talk to each other. Where are these other two, maybe one reported for like toxicity. So you know, what we say is not really indicative of who we are or the circumstances, what we do is not always indicative, but how we play, there’s this quote that I love, it’s show me how you play and I’ll tell you who you are. So you get to learn a lot about people in a state of play. And you also back to neurogenesis and how our brain can grow. Play is amazing at doing that adventure, even better. So I’d love if we could get everybody outside and, and you know, skiing and sailing and surfing and hiking and doing all these things. But most people don’t always have access to that. So that’s what led us to the path to sawston and starting starting Solsten.
Max Branstetter 17:49
So many fascinating points there. I mean, you took us around the world with examples from Italy, to Denver to Berlin to San Francisco. So appreciate the world door there. But it all goes back to fun and play and flow. And there’s so many ways to bring about flow, we had a guest in Episode 265 volt avulsion Smith, which I’ve practiced that name a lot as well, who literally leads watercolor meditation workshops, because it’s like the watercolor can get you into that flow state, obviously meditation as well. So both of those together, so it’s, there’s just so many fascinating ways to do that. But in terms of video games, what are the some of the most interesting things that you can learn about people or about an audience through
Joe Schaeppi 18:38
gaming, everything? So
Max Branstetter 18:41
I want to make you list off all 100,000. I noticed, yeah,
Joe Schaeppi 18:45
we can learn about about who we are pre 1960 brief psychology 101 Lesson, we add this stuff called behavioral psychology, BF Skinner, he really brought it into the forefront after Freud and psychoanalytic didn’t really work out and have didn’t have too much efficacy. Well 1960s came along, and cognitive psychology started, we were really bad at measuring the brain and cognition. So it wasn’t until much farther like lunch later on, where we actually started to be able to apply it. Under cognitive psychology, you have theory of personality, you know, which is like, what are your traits and traits are things that are enduring? So like, you know, everyone talks about interests, or Mark Zuckerberg, he looks at Facebook interests, sure, but like interest change. When I was a kid, I played Pogs I play Pogs anymore. If you do, like, that’s cool, still, like if that’s your thing, and that’s amazing. But, you know, our interests change, and maybe my interest for skiing hasn’t changed, but it’s, it’s probably evolved. And I do it in different way now. So you have certain interests that stick others that don’t but your personality on the other hand, most of our personality starts to get formed when we’re, I mean, it’s already there. There’s a lot of genetic components to it. So you can see a young niece or nephew or if you have a young child and Oh my gosh, they’re like their grandpa or their, like their mom, like, you can start to already see these traits that are that are there and they’re pre installed. And that’s how we talk about AI. So human beings have 4.5 billion years of evolution of pre installed packages, basically, when we’re born. So we already know how to do quite a lot of things, we already have traits. So when people play games, we’re measuring hundreds of different psychological traits from the play. Sometimes it’s, you know, things that we don’t even know like, it’s it’s strings of events that we can see have a very high, when you look at like an affinity with, we basically send out an adaptive questionnaire in the game. So we use that as a baseline from a validity perspective. So if we’re if your base gets destroyed, and you rebuild it, what we know is people who rebuild their bases really quick, tend to be more resilient. But then in that game, if we see that it’s not lining up with the questionnaire that we’re using for validity, then what we’re doing is going, Oh, well, what is it loading on? What is it related to and in that particular game, maybe for some people, it’s related to competitiveness, because it’s not about rebuilding the base fast, they just really want to beat that other person. Like, that’s what it’s about what play aligning play with adaptive psychological assessment. By adaptive I mean, if you’ve ever taken like the AC T or sa t, and it’s learning about you like how good you are at physics, that’s basically what our questionnaire does. It learns about you as you’re as you’re taking it. We combine that with all this play data and telemetry, so similar to like, how chat GPT There’s a joke, I think Sam said it, where he’s like, Yeah, we scraped the whole internet, we’re selling it back to you $20 A month, they took all this data that’s publicly available, and they used it to create this really cool language learning model. Well, with salsa, what we did is took all the most authentic behavior of the internet, which is game data. And we’re using that to predict psychological profiles, psychological traits, and allow developers builders Imagineers, to be able to actually empathize and know who they’re building for, and creating, like, just experience that is next level. That’s how we got into it. But yeah, the base building things. One example. You know, resilience, extraversion, introversion, your motivations, your values, all these things that make you view are what we’re able to measure from the play data.
Max Branstetter 22:28
How does it actually work? Like if I’m a company that wants to partner with Sulston, like, how does that actually work? And what insights can you get from working with Sulston that you can fuel back into your business? Most
Joe Schaeppi 22:42
companies today are only working off of demographics and behavior data when they do stuff for their customers. And this is the reason why so many brands and businesses just fall flat with their audiences. I mean, you can cite everything to you know, not to be political, but like what happened to Bud Light, to look at different brands in the past where they just did not nail what’s going on with their audience? Well, when you look at demographics, as an example, take Ozzy Osbourne and King Charles, they’re both the same age, they’re both from the UK, they’re both in the high income tier. They’re both, you know, Caucasian men, demographically, they’re actually almost identical.
Max Branstetter 23:20
They’re the same person.
Joe Schaeppi 23:22
And I’m just going, and but there’s somebody at some company, right now, as we talk, saying, Oh, we’re making something for 45 year old women, we’re making something for 23 year old males, they’re their Gen, their Gen Z, or they’re millennials. And they’re basing the whole product, the whole design framework off of that. And you know, you and I both know, and everyone listening knows that, like, if you were to like, I don’t know, take Ozzy versus King Charles, I don’t know out on a night
Max Branstetter 23:50
or like in a boxing match.
Joe Schaeppi 23:52
Yeah, very, very different. That’s another thing. But like, very different, very different outcomes, you’d make different things for them, you’d have different experiences with them. And then behavior data, same thing. Like if you’re, let’s say, you’re your Google, and you have Google Maps, Google’s looking at our behavior data. And they predicted that we’re going to go buy something from a specific store. And then we go to the store, we turn around, we walk away, so does another person and we both have the same exact behavior patterns. If you ask somebody at Google, they probably say, well, human beings are just predictably irrational, which is true if you only look at behavior, when you take into account cognition, human beings are very rational. So what Sulston might know, for example, about those two users is like, one’s really high on social anxiety. And it was crowded that day. So it’s very rational thing if you’re socially anxious, and a store is super crowded to walk away. So we could say, hey, there’s a store two blocks up has the same thing. You were buying, not crowded, let’s go the other person had the exact same behavior. Maybe they’re just really forgetful and they’ve got their wallet. That’s it. And then they’re distracted. So they’re like, Well, I’m just going to walk to my friend’s house like that same person, same exact behavior, but essentially really needed a different thing. Maybe they needed a push notification that was like, Hey, did you remember to bring your wallet today? What can businesses do with with Sulston is basically access the hearts of their audiences, who they really are the thing you actually need to create for them. So we like to think when you’re building new features when you’re building new marketing assets, any experience that you’re architecting actually knowing who your audience is, and I think there’s something my dad told me, and yet he is entrepreneur as well, he had a company for like, 30 years, but he said you your job as an entrepreneur is to understand where audience and where people are going, and meet them there. And a lot of people build based on what is and what, what was, you know, they compare themselves? Look, let me look at the competitor. Let me look at that other, you know, other podcasts that’s similar to mine, what are they doing that I’m not. And the reality is, what already has existed, people’s experiential expectations increase. So like COVID happened, for example, we can see this data, like, if you look at people’s expectations for game content, game quality app content, over COVID, it went from like, everyone was really cool eating at McDonald’s all the time, to now like you have like Michelin star people. And they go back to McDonald’s. And like we used to eat that not bashing McDonald’s, that has its place in time. But on that side of things. So when you look to the future, once you understand who people are, you know, it fills out all these different use cases. So we have two major products. One is basically it’s called navigator. It’s basically an insight platform. So you can go, Hey, I’m making something for NFL people. And we can pull up those psychological profiles. It does like a real time Harry Potter hat thing where it’s like, here’s the different psychological groups, here’s all here’s, here’s what house you’re in that Yeah, and it’s all generative. So it’s not like predefined but exactly. So creates that. And so it’s really like a insight engine for creators, and then whether they’re marketing or building stuff. And then our traits product is measuring your audience in real time. And that’s really about resonance. So we can do everything from you know, matching people to matching objects to matching. So if you think of like, you go on Netflix, and you’re like, Okay, I’m gonna watch, I don’t know, frozen, with your, your cousin or something. How
Max Branstetter 27:37
did you? Are you looking at our data from last night? Yeah.
Joe Schaeppi 27:43
But let’s just let’s just say that that’s there. And then you finish. And then it’s like, because you watch frozen, you should watch frozen, too. And you’re like, huh, yeah, that we’re good. It’s taking relevant information. But resonance, like, what Netflix or Disney plus would say is that they have a discoverability problem. Because there’s just so much content, what they actually have as a resonance problem, it’s what content Am I surfacing to max or whomever based on who they are and what they sourced and fills in that resonance gap. So companies use our traits product to basically run and operate live services. So it’s an API where you can match people match places match things, not based on what their ages are, what they did, but based on who they are. So it’s really cool, in terms of what it ends up being able to determine. I’m
Max Branstetter 28:34
a huge fan of psychographics and like behavioral characteristics and things in that ballpark. Like I totally agree that people spend way too much time on demographics and like just kind of like basic information that won’t get you that far. I’ve seen it with my own podcast production business, like I was asked on a previous show, who’s our target customer and I think when people say target customer a lot say like, oh, like 30 to 45 year old women who you know, live on the east coast or west coast, you know, something like that, pretty like from the from the gecko. Like I realized that like our target customer is it has nothing to do with anything like that. Like it’s it’s business owners who who know that they can benefit from podcasting and know that their business can benefit from podcasting but they also know that by no means is it in their best interest to like do all the behind the scenes and like all the time consuming aspects that make a podcast so like, that’s always been the focus of just like making that super clear. And like when I have calls with prospective clients and talk about that, you can just feel them go like yes, yes, like that’s me. And so it’s a beautiful thing when you can kind of tap into the mind of what people actually want and so it’s really really cool what what you in the company are doing,
Joe Schaeppi 29:55
imagine in that to see you add to it, you know, like, out of all their biggest fans values, for example, like they value, let’s say leadership, and all their personality traits, like they’re really high on altruism. And now in the messaging, it talks about how you can become a leader, and that you’re gonna be able to help other people. And what if you knew that within a 99% accuracy, and what happens to conversion rates at that point is nuts. Because you’re actually people spend time and money on what they value. And people resonate with who they are. So if you’re, if everyone knows, like that on or person who’s like, super altruistic, and you’re like, Hey, there’s this thing where you know, this local charity event, you can help other Oh, she’s already there. Yeah. Or he’s already there. So you’re actually able to tap in to the resonance factor. And a lot of people say, Well, we already do all that we have a lot of behavior information, we have all this stuff. And I’m like, It’s not about what you do. It’s about the local maximum you’re creating for yourself. It’s about what opportunity could you have hit? That you didn’t? Because you didn’t tap into the heart of it all. But yeah, just really cool.
Max Branstetter 31:05
And you have the opportunity to tap the signup button. Max podcasting.com/newsletter. And that is how you sign up. Oh, you gotta be good me for the podcasting to the max newsletter, short and sweet email for me every Thursday, that includes entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship tips, podcasting tips, and the worst pun that you will see that day. So you could sign up and Max podcasting.com/newsletter. Now let’s go deeper. I love to dive a bit more into the specifics. And this, like, I don’t know how much of this is patented trade secrets. IP, like so obviously, whatever you’re comfortable, you
Joe Schaeppi 31:50
can you can read the patents there live, so he can search them. Perfect,
Max Branstetter 31:55
cool, we’ll do that. They’ll be part of my use dress homework, use dice.
Joe Schaeppi 32:00
If you needed to build The Matrix, you would have to have at least two of the patents we have. So
Max Branstetter 32:06
perfect. That might be what Netflix recommends next. What are some of the most interesting insights that have come about through your research and work with Sulston? Like, what are some of those moments with clients that you’ve been like, oh, wow, this is like, bam, bam, bam, like circle this on a map like, this is interesting. There’s two
Joe Schaeppi 32:26
parts of this. There’s the macro part, that’s just fascinating. Because we have the largest psychological database in the world. So like, every year, for example, we do 2020. Like this year, it’s like 2022 to 2023. Because we measure hundreds and millions of people, how did how did people’s psychology change year over year? And like we look at this last year, and like what’s gone on, and most traits don’t change. Like, they’re, they’re pretty stable. But I think it’s pretty interesting that from 2022. And we measure like, our data is from across 120 different countries, statistically, one of the traits that actually shifted the most his people from 2022, to the end of 2023, tend to have become I know, I mentioned altruism, wanting to help others tend to have become more altruistic. So that’s like a human fact that, you know, if aliens came to Earth, and we’re like, what are human beings up to? There’s a human fact, that’s pretty interesting. Because we always think about how it’s easy to have a negative bias and go the world’s tough and it’s a hard place and things like that. But it’s like, there’s so much positivity, when you actually dig into the data, another trait amongst that was being motivated by persistence. That was something that actually increased. So it seems that some of the tough stuff that happened from COVID, to you know, things that are going on in the world right now, people are becoming more altruistic and a little bit more persistent. So that one’s cool. But then what actual clients where it gets gets fun. So we have like, everything from older games, for example, that we work with, like Supercell has a game called hayday. A lot of people know it, or there’s another game called EVE Online, it’s really big game. What we’re able to do is look at all the stuff going on in the game, and our AI is able to predict what traits are most important based on what KPIs the person cares about most. And we do this outside of gaming as well. Like we work with customers like peloton, for example. But one of the cool ones since I’m on the altruism train, I’ll stick to that. Like, what was cool about because we’re measuring hundreds and hundreds of traits, but a lot of people will go like, yeah, all this trait is jargon. So I try to stick to one or two. But with altruism, what was really cool in EVE Online, we noticed that people were not making it through the first seven days of experience, and they can hook up their data. And what our AI is able to do is predict what are the number one factors for the different groups in the game that’s causing that. And what we actually found was that altruism was positively related to day seven engagement and beyond. So you as their API and we said, hey, just any moment in the game where people are able to help other people, or if this was an experience that was like that didn’t have healthy moments, which you just build something where people can help others, what they were doing is basically taking those user IDs and running them into moments where they’re able to help other people. And their day seven retention went up by 20%. So that’s pretty cool. Hey, as an example, they built an event based off specific values and personality traits of their audience. Their engagement went up by 22%. They used it as values like caring was really high for their audience. So how are people able to care about other people during this event, I think they were pretty high on like extraversion, individualism. So you’re taking these things into account, you know, if you’re more extroverted audience, maybe there’s a crowd and people get together, and they go dancing, and they play versus reading a book by yourself in the evening. So all these things these met these things matter quite a bit with messaging and value propositions, that’s a really easy one. Because you can literally just change certain words around like we had a company just recently. It’s they’re called mythical games. So if you go on the app store right now, and go to the top 10 apps and sports. One of the number ones is a game called NFL Rivals, and they had all their best performing creatives, their best performing ads, and what they actually knew, we measure about 72 values on people. And this is interesting. So people that like the NFL are in the 96th percentile globally, for valuing leadership. Leadership is an very important value for the average NFL watcher person, not everyone, but the key person is especially so we just put in the ad a Will you be that leader in shows the game playing, they the person needs help, they’re struggling a little bit, put it in there 50% increase in installs from their top performing creative. So that’s really interesting. And then we have stuff like player matching, where and the back end, for example, we did this with a large, large experience, AAA game, and what you can actually see, the algorithm will show you, these people did not match because this person is low on power distance and high on competitiveness or dominant competitiveness. So it actually finds on a per person basis, like why people are not matching and why they are, and then optimizes over time. And our whole goal is building something called bounded reciprocity, which it’s kind of like bounded reciprocity. I was gonna guess that exactly, you know, one of those random words that we all learned in fifth grade.
Max Branstetter 37:40
Just like eustress. Yeah, exactly. That was in health class bonded reciprocity, reciprocity, I can’t even pronounce it that either exactly
Joe Schaeppi 37:46
like the simple way of explaining it. It’s like you have that friend that you’ll go to the bar, and you’ll buy beers for them. And you’ll never even think about asking them for $1. And then think of a complete stranger or even a person you might not like at work, and you bought beers, and you’re waiting for the dollar to come over, you’re expecting them to get the next round. So when bounded reciprocity increases, we know that friendship increases over time and depth of friendship increases over time. So we optimize pretty much all we do for resonance and actual, like, intimate, like human intimacy, like are these people actually likely to stay friends and become friends? So how do we create an internet that’s more human than and less like the efficiency driven streets of? of? I don’t know. Yes. The
Max Branstetter 38:34
Those are awesome. Case studies in I think what the NFL in leadership, you just explain why. Everybody is so hard on the head coaches in the GM, yeah, it
Joe Schaeppi 38:45
makes sense. It makes sense. But people value this what were they focus on? And we’re focused focus goes energy follows. So like, yeah, that’s us now that
Max Branstetter 38:58
Well, thank you very much. So let’s nail our way. That was terrible segue. But let’s wrap up. Let’s wrap up, Shaeppi, with some rapid-fire q&a, you ready for it? Yep. All right, let’s get Wild. I will not be as articulate with these questions as your analogies and metaphors throughout this. So certain events, but what is the hardest, most Saturday screwed up? What is the most difficult, most challenging mountain that you’ve ever skied on?
Joe Schaeppi 39:29
Bec des Rosses in Verbier. Look it up. It’s where the Freeride World Tour. It’s pretty crazy. Yeah. Awesome. Well,
Max Branstetter 39:36
there you go. I’m sure I’m sure it’s a real thing. I’m sure you were just making them out. No, I would have a lot of trouble with it. What’s the video game in your life that has put you in the best flowstate ever?
Joe Schaeppi 39:49
Probably Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Max Branstetter 39:54
Shout out Zelda awesome. What is the most beautiful town or area you’ve been in, in Switzerland.
Joe Schaeppi 40:02
Okay, I can’t give away one because secret. I think the whole Do you want to say it like this was person now a balloon in Lauterbrunnen. It’s like Wengen, Stechelberg. This whole area is just, it’s gorgeous. But there’s a lot of beautiful tastes, but that from a tourist perspective, people are visiting uncomfortable with that one because that one used to. It used to not be but now it’s people have found it. So
Max Branstetter 40:27
yeah, we don’t need to reveal your, your hidden gem there. But now Switzerland overall, it’s definitely on the bucket list. It just looks amazing. I even I think that’s a good de stressor as well. Like if you have a really stressed just google image, Switzerland.
Joe Schaeppi 40:44
Absolutely.
Max Branstetter 40:44
What would be your dream, adventure or activity to just do some time?
Joe Schaeppi 40:53
Well done most of them. So for me like, because I didn’t tell you I lived in New Zealand for a while as a ski photographer, and I surf there a lot and live in Norway, and I’m in Sweden right now in the Nordics. And I’ve gotten to have a lot of that. And I think adventure for me right now is more on the going within. And what we’re doing at Solsten, like what Solsten means it’s the little Icelandic spar that Nordic Viking people actually use to sail to the United States to sail the North America. And it was used to navigate when it was cloudy. So is this kind of thought it was magical, but it’s actually really scientific. And it’s what allowed him to do that and what we’re doing that Sulston I feel like it’s the adventure of a lifetime. Like, we can uncover more about what it means to be human and consciousness and things like that. So yeah, when I ski and sail and surf and do that stuff, right now, it’s, I’m just living I’m just loving it. You know, I’m not there to go off cliffs anymore. If it’s if there’s enough snow and things like that, fine, but I got a lot of that out of me. I was younger. Not that I’m old now. But yeah,
Max Branstetter 42:01
yeah, exactly. And then last one, so you mentioned earlier, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s maybe tongue in cheek, maybe not commentary on parallel universes or universe SCI universe. However you say that. I’m just curious, from your perspective, like, is there a theory about the universe or like astrophysics theory, like something in that world, pun intended, that you just find really, really interesting?
Joe Schaeppi 42:26
I’m going to come back to consciousness, perhaps, you know, everything is consciousness, perhaps like, there’s an upload and download system that’s going on? And perhaps why we haven’t uncovered what consciousness is, and why we don’t really understand quantum physics as perhaps they’re connected. So I think when you start digging into theory of mind, and the our lead data scientist is actually used to be a particle physicist at CERN. And I think there’s a lot of part of like, why is this topic interesting to her, then? Well, she’s we’ve been around for six years at this point. So yeah, I’m not gonna say like string theory or anything like that, but read, maybe start with Carl Jung, and go from there. And there’s some MIT I think publishes every few years, like a really good book. Or it’s, it’s like a body of all their publications on kind of theory of mind and research that’s related to that. And you can start to cross stuff with the quantum realm a bit, but we still don’t know anything. And that’s part of why Solsten and adventure is maybe we get to learn something about consciousness makes
Max Branstetter 43:34
for lots and lots of fascinating discussions, perhaps over a beverage and perhaps in Sweden or Switzerland or Norway, but yeah, Joe, thank you so much. This has been an absolute blast. Just think it’s super cool and energizing and inspiring what you’re doing with Solstice and where is the best place for people to learn more about Solstice as well as connect with you online?
Joe Schaeppi 43:57
Yeah, you can go to Solsten.io that’s our website otherwise if you go to WellBeing.Solsten.io We actually have a an assessment we put up pro bono where you can see some of your psychology data and stuff it’s like a medical grade thing so really cool. It’s not that it’s not a toy one like Myers-Briggs or something like I’m probably get in trouble for that. But there’s, there’s a book called The Personality Brokers or something that talks about the past of that, but those two and then if you want to add me on LinkedIn, it’s just I have an email blocker for super random people. But yeah, you can add me on LinkedIn of the Talk or just send me a message happy happy to talk. Yeah. And
Max Branstetter 44:40
apologies to those who are deemed super random but no, I will make sure to do that assessment after this. That’s super cool. I got my test taking mindset so let’s do it. But thanks again. Last thing, Final Thoughts, stage is yours it could be a quote where it’s to live by another theory from the unit whatever you find send us home here.
Joe Schaeppi 45:01
No, this is this was a blast, Max, I just thank you for having me. You’re very talented podcaster so I’ve been doing this like my thank you. Yeah, this is really fun. So just appreciate appreciate you taking the time with me. Awesome.
Max Branstetter 45:13
It means a lot. And this was actually this was actually all done by AI robots. Are you listening? No. It’s
Joe Schaeppi 45:21
a whole Solsten experience. Surprise.
Max Branstetter 45:28
Mind-blowing on mind-blowing on mind-blowing. Try saying that 75 times fast. But Joe, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, sharing your stories and ideas and flow states and adventures. And thank you, Wild Listeners, for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more Wild stories like this one, make sure to follow or subscribe, whichever you depending it’s very people are very split on that term. Follow the Wild Business Growth Podcast on your favorite podcast platform and tell a friend about the podcast and send them maybe this episode if you want to blow their mind. You can also find us on Goodpods, where theyre are good, good podcasts and podcast recommendations and podcast people. And for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up to the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. That’s at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter. Until next time, let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!
