Cakelin: ​You're listening to Defective Detective a podcast about your mind and body falling apart while the world falls apart and technology and data.

[00:00:17] Covid Denial, Kids, Mr. Rogers, and Andrew Tate

Sarah: The sad thing too is that the government's even taking a step further in, in some states to the point where, and I think this was New York, but don't quote me that if your kid wasn't physically in the school, they would send officers to do, like wellness checks for parents who had taken kids out of school due to Covid.

Cakelin: Think about why that is.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: It's because of the school to prison pipeline.

Sarah: Yeah. So they're even going that far. And it's also happening on universities too. I've seen a lot of students who are still trying to attend university and they're going around lugging an air purifier on a rig and taking it class to class and just because people can't wear a mask. It's pretty ridiculous the amount that people will go to say that it's personal freedom when it's like, I'm doing this to protect me and you. I don't want you to get sick.

I don't want anyone to get sick. Even if we're on different sides of the divide. I don't want anyone to get sick. Especially, and disabled people know this best because we are sick and we know what it's like.

Cakelin: And we're not sharing.

Sarah: Yeah, seriously, get your own. But honestly though, it's also a great experience, but it's hard to be sick all the time and it's a big responsibility and it's a lot of pressure on a person.

Cakelin: I don't want anybody to go through it.

Sarah: Yeah, I just don't want anyone to go through it, especially children. So, which it's unfortunately looking like numbers are very much climbing among..

Cakelin: Among kids. Yeah.

Sarah: And kids should just be able to be kids and have fun and play.

Cakelin: And what makes me upset about that is that they don't really understand, depending on their age, they don't know why. Why am I wearing a mask one day and not the next? I think I told you there was a little boy from my building who was standing by the elevator and he was like, Hey, are you gonna take the el You can take the elevator.

I'm not getting on it. And I was like, no, I actually can't take the elevator. I have to take the stairs because nobody wears masks in the elevator. And then he just looked at me and I was like, what should I say? Because immunocompromised is a giant. He was probably five. That's just a giant word.

Okay. We have to shorten immunocompromised to something. It's just too many fucking syllables. Why the fuck do incels get a two syllable, short, clever word combination? And we're a lugging around medically vulnerable and immunocompromised. It's just too much. And it's not enough to just say disabled because not all disabilities make you higher risk. It's just confusing. I am classified as immunocompromised by the CDC, but you are not. And we both have autoimmunes and it's just blah.

Sarah: Yes. It's very confusing. This brings up something interesting though. A tangent that I won't try to get too far into fall down the 

Cakelin: You can rabbit hole as much as you want darling.

Sarah: I feel that you bring up a good point about children because I had mentioned before that and I think you saw it too, or started to watch it, that the Mr. Rogers documentary on Netflix.

Cakelin: Oh yeah. I wasn't paying very much attention to it though. I was doing art at the same time.

Sarah: It's quite good. I love Mr. Rogers. I'm a big fan of PBS in general. There was a very interesting moment during his career that the show was on that I think is a good example. If the show was still around, we could do this with Covid. When the show was running, there was the assassination of jfk

Cakelin: Okay. Yeah. I'm remembering.

Sarah: People were just in utter shock and horrified. Going through all these stages of grief and disbelief and all of that. Children don't understand why their caregivers are crying or why people are upset. They don't understand. There was a part on the show where one of the producers or writers was talking to Mr. Rogers about should we address this? I feel like we should address this with kids. Because that's what the show was really about, was addressing a lot of these important parts of our lives that are kind of difficult to explain. He said, yeah, but I wanna do an entire week on it.

It really came down to explaining to children the JFK assassination in a way that they could understand it without being afraid and understanding what death is and really heavy topics for kids and for kids show. But it was really important for him that kids understood what was going on around them in the world.

I feel like if that show was still around, and if Mr. Rogers was still around, he would've definitely made probably a full week about Covid and about wearing masks and made a song. We would've gone to make believe town where the king in the monarchy and make belief obviously would be a sign of the government.

I think he would've done a great job explaining to children what Covid is without it being a terrifying experience. Unfortunately we don't have anything currently right now that I know of that can explain a situation like this to children like that show did..

Cakelin: Well, and it's not just kids. It's the same issue for adults to have to deal with an emotionally heavy subject and we're supposed to be objective about it. But that's not how humans work. We're emotionally driven. We're not objective. That's just a white supremacy characteristic. Mr. Roger's work was really important and it would be great if we had something like that now. A big issue is that there's just so much information out there and that gets really overwhelming for people and they can't sort through it. And now kids are exposed. It's not just that a kid could be exposed to Mr. Rogers, it's that children now are on the internet. So even if they were exposed to a Mr. Rogers explanation of stuff, they have all of these other influences on them. There's a bunch of young boys, oh, now I'm not gonna even remember the guy's name, but there's some alt-right guy who's like Jordan Peterson, I can't even remember his name. Do you know I'm about, Andrew? 

Sarah: I know what you're talking about. 

Cakelin: Something? Why? I don't know why I can't remember his name. But anyways, boys are getting radicalized into hostile sexism before they're even teenagers.

Sarah: I think it's Andrew Tate is who you're talking about. 

Cakelin: There we go. Andrew Tate. I've never watched anything of his. I've never been exposed to him. I've seen other people talk about him, but algorithms are gonna feed his shit to young boys because that's what gets views and that's what gets engagement. That's why I think it's so important to think about data and to think about objectives because we've built all of these things around metrics that just fuck us up. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

[00:08:05] User Interviewing for Covid Choices

Cakelin: So user interviews are meant to be part of a process where you design a product that people really wanna use. User interviews are more qualitative. You're talking to a person and you're getting their answers in words, but you're not asking them to rate something on a scale of one to 10. Right? Places often do surveys and track every single thing that a user does in a product, and then they make decisions based on a mix of this quantified data about our behavior, whether or not that's the behavior that we want. And qualitative interviews about how we're responding to things.

And one of the issues with humans is that we just make up reasons and we want other people to like us and things like that. So one part of user interviewing is meant to get around that process where you get the true motivation that a person had to do the thing that they did. So for example, if I was user interviewing you, what the thing that I had posed to do tonight? But if you're still up for it, I can still try to do it. I'm nervous because I've been working on products for so long and I've never done one before.

Oh, and also the book that I was reading today, Deploy Empathy was basically saying don't do this with somebody you know really well.

Sarah: Oh, 

Cakelin: And I was like, I'm doing this with someone I know really well first.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: Because I don't care about your rules and this is what I wanna do. 

Sarah: A safe space to like try this out.

Cakelin: We're recording it because I wanna put it on the podcast so that it exists out there. The better way to figure out what a human is going to do is to ask them what they have done. Asking a person, Hey, would you buy this product? Would you do X is a really bad idea because people don't really know what they're gonna do because most of our behavior isn't conscious cause that's how our brain conserves energy. I just feel like this isn't well understood by other people. So most of the time we make a choice based on our intuition and based on habit and based on emotions. Then after we make that choice, we'll rationalize it. This is what's happening with Covid. Somebody will go to a super spreader event and though the reason why they decided to go to the event was because people have these complicated emotional needs that are mostly related to socialization, right?

So people will be emotionally motivated to go to an event like Burning Man, right? So they'll justify it oh, I'm gonna take a test before I get there or something. But they're not really thinking that through. They're just making a choice on their emotions. A big choice, like going to Burning Man, they're probably gonna think about finances and stuff.

But overall we tend to just make a lot of unconscious choices that are emotionally driven. That ends up just being socially driven by default. Then after you go, they'll be like, oh, I didn't know it was gonna be a super spreader event. I didn't know is like, I'm not accountable, I'm not responsible, I'm innocent. I think that's the primary response that I've seen that has just blown my mind. That highly educated people who know to wear masks and do all these other things could be like, I didn't know it was gonna be a super spreader event. How?

Sarah: Or the other thing is, do require some sort of mask. Then they wear the mask, but then later on they go out socializing and eating dinner and all of this without a mask on. Then they're like, but, but they required masks. But you didn't wear the mask 24 7. And you sat around people. 

Cakelin: But even then..

Sarah: Drinking and eating with it off. So it's like..

Cakelin: Yeah, and even if they did wear the mask at all times indoors, there's still outdoor transmission.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: So it's this complicated mix of all these different behaviors. So if you gave somebody a covid survey before they were going to a conference where they were required to wear a mask and it was like, will you take your mask off at all? People would be like, no, of course I won't. Because they believe better of themselves than what they actually do in the moment.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: So then in some moments they'll end up taking their mask off to eat or whatever other things, or because other people are doing it or so many different reasons. And then after the event, if you give them another survey and you were like, did you ever take your mask off? Some people will be like, no, I didn't. Even if they did, because they'll rewrite their own memory because our memories are not meant to be an accurate portrayal of what happened.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: They're meant to help us predict the future. Or that person will be like, yeah, I took my mask off but we were outdoors and we were this and we were that.

They'll have this whole list of fucking justifications. Those justifications that they came up with post-event were not happening in their head when they made that decision. We make up reasons after we do things in order to convince each other.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: That's what the research has shown and to me that's fucking fascinating.

So all these times where I'm like, why the fuck did I do that? Why can't I get my behavior to align with what I think I want it to be? Are just because we're not meant to know. We're meant to act on instinct and you don't need to consciously have an objective reason for making those choices.

You just need to make choices that meet your needs at any moment. We have this shifting hierarchy of needs within us. Some of those are things like hunger or having to go to the bathroom or whatever, but the most complicated needs that we have are emotional and they're almost always related to social connection. So it's like when you understand human behavior, everything makes sense. It's still maddening. I don't know if maddening is ableist thing to use, but I do feel like as a person with mental illness, reclaiming it. 

Sarah: It's very frustrating.

Cakelin: Yes. It's expected and frustrating at the same time. It's hard to see it in myself. I've tried to explain this to other people. The two riskiest things that I did in the last year were both for friends' birthdays. One of them we were going to an outdoor event. We were gonna go see the lights at the zoo. And so I was like, we're gonna be outdoors the whole time, except for when I'm in the car and I'll wear a mask in the car. You know, like you have these plans.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: But then the plans don't work out because then after we did all of this, we decided to go to State Street and get hot chocolates or drinks somewhere. So I was thinking, oh, there'll probably be a coffee place that's open later and we can get stuff to go and we can drink them outside somewhere. Cuz it wasn't that cold.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: But there wasn't a place like that. So I went into a bar in December and it's like, Would I have done that if I was just walking around by myself? Fucking, no. And the bar was completely empty, but that doesn't matter because the people that were in it were breathing in the air earlier.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: I'm so lucky that I didn't get covid and I wore a mask inside. But then I ordered a drink and then when I drank out of it, I would take my mask off for just a second and put my mask back on right away.

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: Even though going into the evening, I was like, I'm not gonna be maskless indoors around anyone. In a way I still was. It's such a level of like complicated details. So if somebody was like, cake, did you wear a mask on this event? I would be like, yes, 80%, 90%. Do you know what I'm saying? It's so hard to even explain your own fucking behavior. The only other time was when like I went to a party in November for another friend's birthday.

I'm not friends with either of these two people anymore cause I ended the friendships with them because I didn't wanna be socially influenced like this. It's just so hard. It's not peer pressure. It is a feeling of being completely left out and of having no belonging and to just wanna be with your friends and to just wanna be around people. And so the only way that I've figured out how to deal with that is to not have people in my life or to only talk to people who don't live here. So there's no option of ever physically seeing them or to set a really strict boundary telling basically everyone that I'm not going to see them. Or it's to ignore people. Like I ignored the person yesterday who asked me to come meet up with them. And it, it's just tiring, you know? And so I feel like we desperately need tools to deal with Covid, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: Am I losing you, you getting too tired?

[00:17:36] Cognitive Overload from Covid and Disabilities Like Celiac

Sarah: No, no. I'm just thinking cause in terms of myself shocker, I don't have a lot of friends but I kind of think about this as overload from my brain. That's how I kind of experience covid stuff cause I'm not really around people very much at all. But the overload is very similar to like, when I, when I go out to.

Well, when I used to go out to like a restaurant to eat and checking my celiac all the time. It's kind of the same experience where I get overloaded. I walk in and I'm like, I'm already cataloging. Like how clean is it? Like what does the staff look like? I put in my order, what was their reaction? Did they smirk? How busy are they? I'm cataloging all of these factors to try to tabulate my risk of getting

Cakelin: Poison.

Sarah: Or, or yeah, gluten contamination. And then ending up extremely sick because again, I have celiac. 

Cakelin: Well, that's why I like to call it gluten poisoning.

Sarah: Yeah. Gluten poisoning. Yeah. 

Cakelin: Well, I don't think everybody knows what cross contamination is.

Sarah: So cross contamination is, say for instance there's a plate and you have a sandwich on it with regular bread, and then you take that off and there's nothing technically on the plate. And then you put my gluten-free sandwich on there. It is contaminated, so it's a molecular kind of a thing. Because anything over 20 parts per million we're talking very, very tiny. Can get me extremely sick.

Cakelin: The way that I usually try to explain this to other people is it's like a peanut allergy, because a lot of schools completely ban peanuts because any amount of exposure to a peanut for somebody who has that allergy is gonna result in anaphylaxis or anaphylactic shock or whatever, and they're gonna have to have an EpiPen. And you don't have an EpiPen reaction as far as I know.

Sarah: No, I do not. 

Cakelin: But you're still getting really sick. So,

Sarah: Yeah, I'm sick for an extremely long period of time. 

Cakelin: It's still the level of a peanut allergy to me. To me, that's the best way to explain it to other people if they don't know what cross-contamination is or they don't know.

Sarah: Yeah. My fun way of explaining it is since we're already in a pandemic, let's just up it to an apocalypse and say it's a zombie apocalypse. If you get zombie virus, if you eat it or get it in a cut or whatever cut. Obviously not for me, but I'm saying to that small micro level you turn into a zombie and a lot of people are like, oh, cuz they understand, they've seen zombie flicks and stuff. So that's a fun way for me to explain it. And a less awkward way of explaining it. That helps kind of break the ice.

Cakelin: In order for you to exist in public, even before the pandemic, because of having celiac at a cross-contamination level, you basically have to share your medical information and diagnosis in order to eat anywhere. And not only that, there are very few places that you can eat.

Sarah: Very few and those places you have to be really careful who you get. I went to one place I will not name. I had been there many times before and they had new staff and

Cakelin: And staff turnover is huge now.

Sarah: Yeah, and they had new staff and I tried to explain and her reaction was enough for me not to eat at the place. Scoffing at me and then kind of eyebrow raises. Just the kind of behavior that you get where you feel like you're not being taken seriously. To the point where if I feel that way at any place, I don't care how hungry I am, I will not eat. So I didn't, and I never went back. But that's the kind of level now of cataloging things in my environment and behavior and other people. I already did that with Celiac before the pandemic, and now I do it with Covid and Monkeypox and all these other things that are now popping up. And it's constant cataloging. What have I touched? What has been washed? Are those people coming over here? You're on constant high alert 24 7, just like you described before where you're walking outside and you're trying to predict people's behaviors that you don't know.

Cakelin: Yep.

Sarah: Is that person gonna cross the street? Are they gonna finish their cigarette? Are they, and it just puts a huge strain on a person to the point where you're just tired, you're exhausted all the time.

Cakelin: I feel like I'm constantly on the defensive just to survive.

Sarah: Always. Then eventually just, it takes its toll to the point where it's like people give up or if they just stop going outside.

Cakelin: If I didn't have Pepper, I would not leave my apartment.

Sarah: Yeah. It shouldn't be that way for anyone, but unfortunately removing mask mandates and not improving air ventilation has done that. That's the sad thing is we don't need an entire lockdown. Not like we ever had one, but just those two things. That's it. 

Cakelin: Mean, I've literally..

Sarah: It's a small ask.

Cakelin: I literally put that on Twitter. If everyone just wore N95 masks indoors, I would be able to see people. I'd be able to date. I'd be able to exist in the world because if everybody wore N95 masks indoors, the rates of covid transmission would go down. And so many more spaces and places would be accessible to me. I had to spend all this time looking for shampoo and conditioner and stuff online because even though my co-op is two blocks from me, I won't go inside.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: I have not been indoors anywhere, besides your apartment, I think. My friend's house, but I was masked inside. I'm masked at your place most of the time too.

Sarah: Yep.

[00:23:47] Disability: Mismatch with Context and Time

Cakelin: This is what I think about in terms of what a disability is. I don't like the social or medical models, so I just ditch both of them. I just think about disability as being a mismatch or a gap between what your body does and what it needs which is dynamic and your environment, which is also dynamic. So one of the things that I don't like, which is why I was telling you I didn't like this ADHD influencer, is I don't like it when people make it seem like nothing about a disability can ever change. I think there's a difference between recognizing that a limitation is constant and I'm trying to say this in a really careful way because I don't really know how to think about this in the best way, but there's been things about me that I thought were ingrained, adhd, autism traits and other stuff. And as I healed my trauma, they got better. I thought that I could never, I still have some pain, but I'm not in an extreme pain all the time. But there were definitely points in my life where I thought I would always be in pain.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: I think there are limitations or expectations that we have based on what's happening and that's normal. But in some cases, those things can change and or improve. In other cases, those are a static thing that you always need. You'll always probably need to avoid gluten unless there is a treatment that comes out.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: That's static for you. It's not like one day you're on a Saturday or something, you'd be fine if you ate gluten. That doesn't happen. Right? It's not like therapy is gonna remove your food allergy, right?

Sarah: Correct.

Cakelin: There are treatments and other things that can help. To me, it's that mismatch. It's that complicated fucking mismatch. And the more different environments you are in, the more combinations can happen of different shit. Being around another human being is like another environment. Cause that person, whatever the fuck they do, is gonna influence them. If you were around a person who dismissed your celiacs and they might not even be the person who's making your food, they could poison you. Do you know what I'm saying?

Our environment is not just this physical space that's around us. It's every single fucking human being that's around us. And that is what is broken. Because shared predictions are so important for how we function. That's why we can co-regulate each other's emotions.

That's why if a crowd gets panicked, everybody gets panicked and runs. It's evolved behavior that we have and it makes sense. Unfortunately, we're not all living in the same reality. Which means disabled people or anyone who's shielding, or anyone who still believes that covid is a real thing and is trying not to get it, are absorbing cognitive dissonance every time you try to be in a relationship or even be physically near people who are not doing that.

Sarah: Yeah. I definitely already had that with Celiac, where it's popular media unfortunately has used it as a joke, just like nut allergy stuff and a lot of other things. Then this is absorbed by the populace. Whoever watches these comedians or late night shows, it's been on a lot of different things. That's their perception of the disease. So when I am trying to gauge people around me, unfortunately, the safest way, and this also applies to Covid, the safest way for me to gauge and measure other people outside of myself is to think the absolute worst. Is to think that they've seen every single comedian and thinks that celiac is a joke and it's a hippie disease. 

Cakelin: You can't trust people by default. That's too dangerous.

Sarah: Exactly. It's to think everybody, all these people around me didn't get vaccinated because they don't believe it's real. So you automatically, by default have to think like that in order to survive, because otherwise, as you said, it's too dangerous to think otherwise. And that's a really hard mindset to be in 24 7 to think the worst of people. 

Cakelin: Except for you, I assume the worst in literally everyone else with their covid choices.

Sarah: Yay me.

Cakelin: I have maybe like one and a half friends that I assumed the worst a little bit less.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: I just don't know. The problem is that gap in information between knowing whether or not someone's gonna poison you gluten or poison you with covid.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: That's where that fucking information overload comes from because you can't evaluate every single fu.. it would be a project for you to call every single restaurant and find out whether or not they're, you know what I mean? It's already hard enough to find out if one restaurant will be safe enough. It's so hard to figure out whether or not one person will be covid safe. It feels like it's not even worth it to try. That person, whether or not they're covid safe, that's not a static trait. Just like you were saying that you went back to that restaurant and then they had new people and then those people were jackasses or whatever.

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: I can't assume, with the exception of you, because we're taking this really seriously, I can't assume that anybody else that they're gonna be taking the same precautions over time. Because the longer that this goes on, the more likely it is that people are, are gonna get lax. They're gonna be influenced by others around them. Even if you trust that person, how are you gonna trust all the people around them? That's what happened with the person that I was dating this spring where they were letting a friend of theirs stay with them for a month. They thought that if I talked to that person, if I had a video chat with them, that I would trust them enough to still see the person that I'm dating, even though they have someone living with them that I don't know. Whose behavior I don't know. At the same time, mask mandates were ending. So I was already not trusting people who had been in my life for fucking years.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: How do you do it? If you had somebody around you that did understand celiac and believed all of that, but somebody else in their network, in their orbit didn't, they're influencing them.

Sarah: Yeah. You're going to run into it and what I'm gonna say is that the stakes are too high.

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: They're too high to risk getting involved. If I get gluten poisoned, I'm severely ill for the next six months of my life. Is this piece of sushi worth it? No, it's not. Is it worth it for me to take off my mask and go into a bar to have one cocktail, but then face possible infection and one in three or one in five chance that you end up with some kind of long-term condition? Is that one cocktail worth it? No, it's not. But unfortunately people aren't even..

Cakelin: But see that's..

Sarah: thinking about that.. 

Cakelin: thing that's different about that is your thinking about your future self. You're thinking about what future Sarah is gonna have to deal with if you make this decision. Most people view their future selves as a stranger. Oh, is this one drink worth it? Well, current me wants to do this, so I'm gonna do it because I earned it cause I had a hard day at work, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Later, when their future self has to deal with consequences, they're just expecting their future self to do that. That's why integration with your different parts and healing trauma is so important. Because if you can't do that, then you don't see the importance of your future self. I think our future selves are more real for us because of having disabilities. I don't know, it's just a theory.

Sarah: No, I agree. That's what I was gonna say next, honestly, because you just have to..

Cakelin: considering what's gonna happen.

Sarah: Yeah. You're navigating a world that wasn't set up for you and isn't meant to help you. So you already have to predict what's going to happen in the future to you. Or think about possible consequences or situations. That's why, again, that's why Celiac works so great. As an example, I, again, invited to go out to dinner and I'm not talking during this pandemic, I'm saying there's no pandemic. But I'm invited to go out to dinner before in the past, and it was a place that I wasn't really super familiar with. I tried to do some research beforehand. Again, planning for the future, that's what I have to do, but I'm still not sure about it. I pack myself a snack bar and then if I show up there and they don't have anything, I am prepared then, and I don't go hungry. But you always have to think about the future when you're a disabled person and you're put into a situation where you're marginalized and that restaurant's not set up to feed me as the majority of people.

Cakelin: Mm.

Sarah: So I always have to be careful of certain situations like that and be prepared because the one time I wasn't, it was not a pleasant experience and I was very hungry. So I learned from my mistake that I had to really try to predict the future and any kind of outcome that could happen in the future in order to be prepared for it.

[00:33:54] Disability: Static to Dynamic Spectrum

Cakelin: That's kind of what I was trying to explain earlier is that prediction pretty solidly because celiacs is static and you know that you're gonna have to do that. So much of what I think is frustrating as a disabled person from my experiences is I don't know. I don't know if tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and I know that I'll have enough energy to take care of Pepper and probably feed myself.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: I don't know how much other energy I'm gonna have over that. I don't know what my emotional state is gonna be like. People who can wake up every day and have these packed schedules and this plan where they know who they're gonna be at any moment, it doesn't make any sense to me. I don't think it's good.

I don't personally think that that works for any human beings. I think it works more for some people, but I don't think it's an ideal state of being for anybody to have to sell your time for capitalism, you know?

Sarah: Yeah. Well, and..

Cakelin: I can't be on a nine to five. I'm not predictable.

Sarah: Yeah. Well, and I, I have celiac that's static. Yeah. But then I have fibromyalgia, which isn't, so then there's.. 

Cakelin: I wasn't trying to say all of your disabilities were static.

Sarah: Oh, no, no, no, no. I'm saying cause it's very interesting to have one static and one dynamic that's constantly shifting. So then I'm planning for the future with my celiac, but then I also have to take into account the present right now. How do I currently feel right now? And then balance the two. That can be incredibly hard. Take for example food. Like I have many things to cook and a lot of people who have celiac have to cook a lot because prepackaged is very expensive or gross. I can't order any takeout in my area. There's not a single place I can call.

So when I have a bad fibro day, I can't cook. So what am I going to eat? You're constantly balancing for the present too. So being a disabled person and again, these are only two conditions. You really have to live in the present and the future. You literally have to live in every single timeframe imaginable.

Cakelin: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah: A lot of people have more than one condition. Then again, you're navigating this in a world that is not set up to help you. 

[00:36:31] Showing Up Messy in Relationships and Social Personas

Cakelin: Wild to think that people interpret that as wanting attention when you consider the amount of energy. If anything, I'm trying so hard to hide that stuff from other people because I know how much it stresses me out to have these like thousand different fucking variables happening all the time.

The last thing that I wanna do is invite someone else into that tornado. Maybe that's internalized ableism that I need to work through. So not to go on a huge tangent, but that's actually what my current art collection is based around that. Nucleation Invitation.

It's the process of being disordered and then trying to form some sort of order. That's what nucleation is. To let go of what the outcomes would be is why it's an invitation. How do we see our internal mess and disorder? How do we allow other people to see that?

Because I think that's one of the reasons why I treasure our relationship is because you see me. You see my work when it's really messy.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: When nothing makes sense because I do have ADHD and everything feels connected in my brain. You cleaned up my vomit when I threw up everywhere after my concussion.

Sarah: That's true.

Cakelin: Tried to figure out whether or not I could get an ambulance. That's just the intense moments. But there's all these other times where I'm just like, dude, I'm a fucking mess right now. I have cockroaches.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: But I feel like most interactions, and to me, this is social media, is needing to present a certain version of yourself as an online persona.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: In order to exist in the world. So I try to be authentic on Twitter and TikTok. There's no authenticity on Instagram. It's just not gonna happen. I don't think either of us use Facebook anymore. It's just interesting because I don't wanna show certain things about myself to other people.

I don't wanna rely on anyone. And I know that's a real problem. I know that interdependence is central to community and all of these other things, but I just can't seem to figure it out. I can't seem to let go of the idea that I can control everything in my life and do it all on my own. I just don't even know what to do.

It was hard for me, even though I knew that you would probably wanna do it. It was hard for me to be like, Hey, can I, can I user interview you? Because it feels like such a big ask out of someone to take their time like that and to expect them to be open to answering any of your questions and to be doing that for free for you. So that you could make this company that potentially will make money.

And yet that's what all entrepreneurs, all founders and all creative types too. You have to be able to ask other people for things. So thank you because it allowed me to check off my help habit today and I haven't checked that baby off for a long time.

Sarah: Yeah, it's always nice to get a gold star up on there. I think it's important too to also realize that our relationship, like I've said before, is very different from, I think most relationships that people have. That we're very open on pretty much all levels. We talk about anything and everything, and we're also very open with, I don't know if weaknesses is the correct term, but with our needs, I guess is a better term. If we're tired, if we don't have the spoons, if we don't have the mental energy or capacity at that time, we're not afraid to say that because we understand one another and we don't misinterpret that information.

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: And if we do have questions about something that we're discussing or we, I don't hesitate to bring them up because I know that the relationship that we have, that you're not gonna laugh at me when I ask a question or when I forget something or whatever.

Whereas like if I did that in like a work environment with people that I don't trust or know very well, that's a real fear and that can happen. So I think having a relationship like this is really important. I wish more people had this. 

Cakelin: That's exactly what I'm saying. Wishing more people could have this.

Sarah: Yeah, and I think on the social aspect of it and the persona, again, it kind of comes back to this idea that a lot of people don't believe what they see on the media or they believe it wholeheartedly without questioning it when they really should. It just comes down to what they want to be believe and what reinforces those beliefs for them. So even if you are being a hundred percent real on, on social media there are gonna be people that call you out saying that it's not real. Just like what's going on right now in the disability community with articles that have surfaced about people with disabilities faking.

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: Being disabled, which is absolutely ridiculous. And infuriating. 

Cakelin: If there was a couple of people who are out there faking, does it fucking matter? It's the same thing as sexual assault survivors. I read one article ever that I feel like convincingly, the person who was in that article was faking their illness.

One. Only one time I've ever seen this where they had enough details where I was like, this is probably true. And still I was a little on the fence about it. But that's so fucking rare.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: It's like voter fraud. I think I retweeted that the other day.

Sarah: Yeah, you did. It was actually a really interesting tweet and then I retweeted it. Yay. Social media working for the good of the World. Yeah, I definitely liked that. 

[00:43:01] What Was Your Last Purchase for the Pandemic?

Cakelin: Can I try to interview you?

Sarah: Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, I'm totally fine with that.

Cakelin: So I have two different questions and one of them is a purchase and the other one is.. 

Sarah: Wait, the first one's a what?

Cakelin: Okay. So I have two different questions or two different topic areas that are problems that I would like to interview you. Obviously if you're interviewing someone, you're probably not explaining this shit to them and you're probably not interviewing your sister.

And you know what? I don't care about any of that. The two different user interview books that I will recommend, which I'll make sure to put in the show notes, is Deploy Empathy, which I'm like only a quarter of the way through, so I should probably not recommend it, but I am anyways and a lot of other people do.

And The Mom Test, which is by Rob Fitzpatrick and I've bought that book for other people too. I don't like the name of that book, the Mom Test, because it feels like there's gonna be some sort of sexism involved. But the premise of the book is to even get accurate answers from your mom, even though she would wanna be supportive of your ideas. It's sort of a similar concept to be doing that with my sister. Yeah. In deploy empathy, which I was reading today. They suggest doing this fake topic area instead of your actual problem area, which to me makes some sense, but then does that actually translate well? I think they're trying to lower the stakes so they think it would be easier for you to ask this generic question. The generic one that they do in the book is what was the last purchase you made of something that is new? It's not something that you regularly buy. Then they ask questions trying to get to the root of why the person made that purchase.

Like I was saying earlier, we don't really know why we do things. We might think that we have reasons in advance , but there are lots of different factors happening in our psyche that lead to us making choices . So I made up two questions related to Covid. The two questions I came up with was like, what was the last thing that you bought related to the pandemic? And then the question that I wanted to ask, because that's the problem area that I wanna build for is when was the last time you saw someone in person?

So do you wanna do one of those or do you wanna do both?

Sarah: Sure. Yeah, I can do both. I'll start with the first one. It would probably be, I bought them technically at the same time from two different websites, but I bought rubber gloves. Disposable rubber gloves, and a Lysol spray that was listed to kill Monkeypox. Disinfect Monkeypox. So they're slightly related to Covid. They were both for Monkeypox, but those were the last two things I bought. Should I explain in more detail why I bought them?

Cakelin: So this is the funny part for me, I have been reading user interviews.. I've read multiple books about it. I've heard people talk about this on podcasts, and I still didn't know what to ask you next.

Sarah: Oh, okay. So I..

Cakelin: I just wanna explain the user interviewing things you're supposed to get to people's root causes, right? Do you see how bad I am at this ? I'm opening my phone so I can look up a quote from the book.

Sarah: If I was doing the interview, what I would do is I'd say, oh, okay, so why did you choose those two products to purchase? And then that might lead to somebody saying, well, okay, for me, I looked up on a bunch of different websites what products were listed as effectively killing monkeypox on surfaces and such.

And that's how I made my product decision to buy that particular Lysol spray. And then the gloves. I had read that it can stay on surfaces for quite some time, especially like cloth and things like that. Soft surfaces. So that's why I made my decisions to pick those particular brands and products. So that would probably be the next question I would ask.

Cakelin: Let's just stick to one product. Let's do it with the gloves. How often do you wear the gloves?

Sarah: Anytime I leave the house. So anytime I go pick up groceries, anytime I take my garbage out, anytime I touch anything that's in a common area, I will put the gloves on. 

Cakelin: Was there an alternative that was not gloves that you considered? Did you consider just using hand sanitizer?

Sarah: No, because the research showed that hand sanitizer didn't work and that gloves were really the only option to give you the most adequate amount of protection.

Cakelin: And where were you getting the information about gloves working versus hand sanitizer or other things?

Sarah: I got it off from Twitter in the Covid precaution community that I'm engaged in. They had multiple scientific papers having to do with how it's transmitted and older government information before the government obviously cleansed their websites and changed their propaganda. So I followed that information. Then I just started looking for gloves. Then that broke down into I didn't realize there were different thicknesses of gloves and that mattered to a certain extent because I have longer nails.

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: I didn't want gloves that ripped because obviously that defeats the point. So then that brought me into one level step further to find out what thickness of gloves could withstand people with long nails. So then I also had to bring that into consideration when buying gloves.

Cakelin: And when you were doing this, did you think there's an ideal amount of money I would spend on this, or were you just I wanna spend the least amount of money.

Sarah: The least amount as possible or at least get, value out of each dollar I've spent that I felt that that was a good cost for something like that. Not overpriced or what have you.

Cakelin: So the last time that you wore the gloves, did you feel safer?

Sarah: Yes, a hundred percent, yes.

Cakelin: What color are the gloves?

Sarah: A white, opaque kind of a color.

Cakelin: I was expecting purple for some reason.

Sarah: Oh.

Cakelin: All of the surgical gloves that I've seen are either purple or blue. I think they're blue at Harley. I don't know if those are considered surgical gloves.

Sarah: No. I also got some blue ones from Target that are technically medical grade. And they're blue. And those are like the ones that are at Harley. But the ones that I picked up are kind of like surgical gloves. They're much thicker and they have a textured fingertips. So I can use my cell phone. Yeah. I can use my cell phone and stuff with them on. Yeah.

Cakelin: Then do you have to disinfect your phone or you're just making sure that you touch your phone before you've touched anything else with the gloves on?

Sarah: Well, I disinfect everything that has left the house pretty much like my keys, my car, my phone, all of that. But I wanted to make sure that I could use my phone with the gloves on if I was out, because I go to Woodman's, I have to call to say that I'm there and if I have the gloves on and it's not reading my fingers.

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: So I had to make sure that I could use a phone while I had the gloves on so I wouldn't have to take the gloves off and then struggle to put them back on and to use my phone.

Cakelin: Do you ever use a voice assistant to make calls?

Sarah: No, no, because it doesn't understand what I'm saying because I'm from the Midwest.

Cakelin: Oh, I usually have an easy time with Google. Sometimes I'll be talking to other people and one time this happened at my old job. It would just like pop up if I said something about it, and it's really awkward to be like, oh yeah, you're listening to me all the time, aren't you?

Sarah: Yeah, it's really creepy. That also freaks me out. It's the only reason why I don't like the alexas and stuff like that. It's super creepy. I don't even have my location turned on when I'm at home.

Cakelin: Those gloves sound really awesome. 

Sarah: Yeah, they're really freaking great.

Cakelin: After you got them and you did all this research to make sure that they're thick enough for your nails and that you could use your phone with it. Did you recommend the gloves to anyone else?

Sarah: Well, when I first got them, I actually had problems with them, because my hands were swollen at the time and I didn't realize it, so like I couldn't.. 

Cakelin: Oh. 

Sarah: Get the gloves on.

Cakelin: These are the ones that you said were too small?

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Because my hands were too swollen. So I couldn't get them on. Once I got past that and they ended up refunding me and I'm using so I feel bad about it, but

Cakelin: They ended up refunding you, but you're using them, is that what you said? 

Sarah: Yeah. Just because at the time I couldn't get my hands into them and I tried multiple pairs and then the box was absolutely fucking destroyed. It was not a pleasant purchase experience. We'll just put it at that. But I ended up being able to use them, but there's been other stuff that I've left reviews for. If I've bought them on a website, I'll leave a review and I'll attach pictures if I think the pictures are crappy because that's just the type of purchase person I am.

[00:52:35] Product Reviews and Prosocial Behavior

Cakelin: I don't think I've ever left a review for a product.

Sarah: I always do, and I've left pictures too, especially if something is, is wrong, I will definitely leave a super detailed message. I bought those stupid cotex pads and they changed their, the materials they used and they're awful. Horrible. And I was pissed off about it, and I still had some old ones, and I actually took pictures of the new ones next to the old ones.

I uploaded them and I opened them in paint and labeled them and stuff. I go to an extreme because I want people to have information that I wasn't given. It's a big thing about me. Then I uploaded them to the Target website and was trying to get people not to buy this product because I didn't want them to be disappointed like I was.

Cakelin: I just find those pro-social behaviors to be interesting because if you spend a lot of energy, you're taking energy away from stuff that you might build. It's also a free service to Target or Amazon or whoever has the review system.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: People leaving those reviews, they're basically taking that as free labor from people.

Sarah: I guess, yeah, that's true. But in a way, for me, it makes me feel better about the entire experience, especially if I've had a bad experience that I'm trying to save other people time and energy and a bad experience like what I had. Even though I am spending a bunch of energy, I feel like for me personally, it's well spent because I feel like I'm helping other people so they don't end up in the same situation that I did.

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: And especially when I'm reporting a bad product because then I called the company and I was like, I don't want people to end up in a situation where they've bought these pads or whatever and use 'em, and then they have an accident because they're not the same quality. You know? And I know what it's like to have that happen, and I don't want that to happen to someone else.

I always get on the line when I call in, if I do call into these customer places, they're always thanking me because it's abnormal behavior for someone to go to that length to try to get the information out there and protect other people. So they're always thanking me.

Cakelin: Part of why you're doing it is because the risk is large. The risk for somebody else to have an accident?

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Cakelin: Because of these pads is a high risk.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: And that's part of what goes into researching what products to buy.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: The risk that goes along with the product. Right?

Sarah: Yeah, yeah. Correct,

Cakelin: So risk of the gloves was whether or not your nails would pop a hole in the gloves, which would then defeat the purpose of the gloves.

Sarah: Correct.

Cakelin: And the other risk was not being able to use your phone when you needed to. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: And then the risk of the pads was that you would have an accident or a leak.

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: So you're just taking into consideration what the benefits and risks of the products are.

Sarah: Yep. And trying to share that information with other consumers.

Cakelin: Yeah. And so I'm not saying that it's a bad thing that you did that. I think it's admirable that you care about other people. But then when I asked you that question, then you gave me the root cause of it, which was that you wanna help others.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: And specifically you wanna help others avoid bad outcomes.

Sarah: Correct.

Cakelin: So I don't remember what it says in the book. I've just been asking you questions. I didn't actually follow whatever advice. I think that might be the problem for me is that if I try to do a podcast if I try to do a podcast and it's an outline, it feels restrictive to me. Whereas if I try to do it and it's the full script, every single word that I have to say, then okay, well I'm just reciting a script. That's fine. I guess a lot of advice is ambiguous rules to follow and I would just rather do whatever it is that my brain wants to do, does that make sense? Or whatever it is that I'm interested in that moment.

Sarah: Yeah. So that's why I said it'd be a good idea to have me on it. For example, earlier in our conversation, we were talking.. What the fuck were we talking about? We were talking about some topic or whatever, and then you said, oh, I read a book on that. And then I was like, that's great, and we can discuss that in another podcast. And you were like, yeah. And then we stayed on course with the current, cause we were already probably on a tangent as it is. But I noticed that when we were talking about something, I was like, oh, this could make us diverge even further. So then I took action to try to at least keep it on the same tangent we were on. Do you know what I'm saying?

So you can freestyle it a lot, but then it's also understanding when's a good time to stay on the current topic and when's a time that would be good to..

Cakelin: Well.. 

Sarah: ..Tangent off from it.

Cakelin: I think to me it was more interesting for me to see why you would make several purchasing decisions and not just one. I wanted to know what was the last thing that you bought that was pandemic related? I actually thought it was gonna be the Corsi fan box thing that you put together.

Sarah: Oh, maybe.

Cakelin: But

Sarah: I can't remember.

Cakelin: To me it's interesting cause it brought up multiple products and then you could see this underlying pattern of your values as a human, which to me is more interesting. But our actions don't always align with our values.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: The way that I think about it is that you're trying to predict what a person would do based on what they already do. That could be their values, their emotions, their identities, all this stuff. Although I don't like designing around personas that you just make up where you make up this fake person who has all these different qualities to them. Because there's just reasons. And that is a tangent that I'm sure I will talk about at some point. So can we do the other question?

[00:59:14] Story Driven Product Development: Problem Patterns

Sarah: Yeah. So if you wanted to do this question more like how you should do an interview thing where we don't talk about extra stuff and I just answer

Cakelin: Yeah, but I don't think that I'm gonna be like that. So that's actually trying to figure out how user interviewing will fit into a podcast format. Because when you user interview someone for a product, it's like 15 minutes and you stay really focused on this very specific thing about the person, and you don't get a lot of other information.

Sarah: Okay.

Cakelin: I don't really like that. It's productive, it's efficient, blah, whatever, right? There's all this information that comes up when people go on other people's podcasts that shows all these different user problems that they have, but it comes up through stories. We could have been on this whole podcast and I could have never asked you specifically what you purchased for the pandemic, but something else could have come up that would've led to you talking about those gloves.

Sarah: Okay.

Cakelin: To me either way is a fine way to surface the problems that people are having and the way that they're solving those problems, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: So I don't exactly know how to do this. There's no one right way. The thing about the Indie Hackers podcast, which is the only other example that I know that does this. I guess there's VC podcasts that also only have other investors or things on it, which seems kind of similar, but they're not building software products. Do you know what I'm saying?

So Indie Hackers, they don't do anything with the data. There have been people who have dug through like a hundred Indie Hacker interviews to look for patterns. If you were trying to build a product that you only wanted to sell to bootstrapped founders, the Indie Hackers podcast is a great way to not only find the information about how these people are approaching problems, but to find the problems too.

Do you know what I'm saying? I don't know. I would assume that we could both be on here and both interview someone, but it might be sometimes I interview them or you could interview someone without me too. I don't really care. But the people or person who is interviewing and the person who is on the show, eventually there are gonna be these patterns. Which is the same kind of patterns that we already see and experience and collect in our heads when we're on Twitter. Oh, this set of people have these problems and these are ways that they've solved it. Which is exactly what I was saying earlier when I was talking about the workstation thing and you were talking about somebody that you had talked to, I think on Twitter that you were giving them advice about something, right? Another disabled person.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: The process of being like, I have this problem and this is how I solved this problem. So I have the problem where sitting up right at a desk is hard for me and I solved it by having a couch desk and a pillow office. Then I can show that solution to another person who's having that problem.

When Brianne retweeted that tweet, a whole bunch of people responded. These are all the ways that we solved it. That kind of skips a step in user interviewing, which is to understand the motivation behind why somebody wanted to solve that problem. But that's because we already understand why we'd wanna solve that problem because we have the same problems because we're all disabled.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: So in most user interviewing situations, the person who is doing the user interview might not have that problem. So they don't understand.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: It's kind of an advantage, but it's also a disadvantage to have similar problems because you could overweight your own experience. And think, oh, I understand this problem so well because I have it. But in other ways you really can design better solutions and more innovative things because you have that problem and you can try them on yourself. You know what I'm saying?

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: So if you were wanting to make a product for people that helped people with celiac, right? You might have a bunch of different ideas already because you have celiacs. Let's say you are trying to solve the problem of how people with celiac date, that's your problem area, right?

Sarah: Yeah. 

Cakelin: And if you were going to interview someone, cause this is related to my second question, funnily enough, is that when you interviewed that person, the thing that you would start with would be like, when was the last time you went on a date? How did you figure out how that person was gonna be safe enough? What are the other things that you've tried? Do you know what I'm saying?

And so I feel like if you were doing that interviewing thing, you wouldn't have to get to the emotions that people have around this or to understand why they're doing it because you already get it. Cause you have celiacs. Right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: A big reason why user interviewing works. That they're trying to figure out values and emotions and things like that is because that's more predictive of a person's behavior than what they think they'll do. Right? But it's also tied to marketing because if you can learn the way that other people explain their problem, the problem that you are trying to suggest a solution for. You can use their language to explain the problem. In some ways that's good because then it's a better filter on the people that you wanna attract to your company or to your product. In another way it's bad because I feel it can often get into emotionally manipulative territory. There's a book that Seth Godin wrote on it called This is Marketing I think. He talks a lot about what permission marketing is. I don't have to write this story about how hard it is to be disabled. The thing that would be suggested to me is to use my story about how I've improved my health. So I would tell this really dark intro. You've got all these problems, you're chronically ill, everything sucks. Being disabled is so fucking hard, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: You're selling the person's own problem to them so that you can sell them a solution.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: Then two minutes later I'd be like, and then I did X and then my life was perfect and I was super healthy and all of these good things happen. Yeah. And like but that, that is how most marketing is. And I have talked about it on this podcast before and have written about it and things like that, that I don't wanna have a fucking narrative like that. I can't do it. It is so complicated to be disabled and chronically ill that I refuse to sell a clean narrative like that. And that's why I don't like that ADHD influencer dude.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah.

Cakelin: Because he sells ADHD to people as though they are permanently fucking broken.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: And then misinterprets research to support how broken they are. Even when the research article that he cited, the findings from that research article there was two or three different ways that they recommended that ADHD people could improve on the issue that was put forward. And he skipped both. He skipped all of it. He just completely ignored that and was like, ADHD people can't follow through on our intentions. That is bullshit. It's not true. So that's part of why I kind of wanna do user interviewing a little different, because I don't feel like I'm entitled to people's full reasonings for why they do the things that they do. Right?

Sarah: Yeah. You just have to ask open-ended questions.

Cakelin: Well open-ended and they have to be focused on the actions that people have taken, those two.

Sarah: You're kind of going to do this not knowing what you really want to talk about is what it sounds like. I'd just be like, I'm throwing a question out there, but what's an experience that you've had that you'd like to share with others that you feel that doesn't get enough attention or that you would like to explain or talk about?

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: So you already know that they're gonna bring up something that's important to them and their situation and what they go through. And then talk about their experience. And then as you listen to what they have to say about it, you start to look for trends or things that happen that you can then elaborate on.

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: Kind of like the interviews that I've seen on Twitch where a show will bring on like a guest or something.

Cakelin: I think the interviewing tends to go both ways. And the interviewer in more casual circumstances usually shares things about themselves. So that you're not just getting information from the other person, but you're also connecting to them. That doesn't happen in user interviews. It would happen for Cortland interviewing somebody on the Indie Hackers podcast. Cortland is also a bootstrapped founder. Right. But for user interviewers who work at a company, you're not supposed to say anything about who you are and what you think and what you've been through. It's like the therapy model. Where you don't share anything about yourself and only the other person shares. Which I feel has its uses, but feels kind of sterile to me.

Sarah: Yeah. That's definitely not how therapy works with me. Ha ha, ha ha.

Cakelin: I do learn things about my therapist, but the focus is supposed to be on the client.

Sarah: Yeah. It definitely is. Maybe a good therapist has this way of understanding when someone's talking about something and they're looking for if they're on the right way. They're more sharing the thing just for reassurance purposes. Like my covid stuff, when I talk about it in therapy , and I'm like, yeah, people just can't wear a mask. It's me just making a statement and she's like, yeah, I don't understand it either. I don't know, like a reassurance statement, I guess.

Cakelin: Well that what you just mentioned is loosely attunement. Attunement is more about emotional mirroring, but it's sort of something between attunement and validation. She's validating your experience.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: So you could do user interviewing and be validating the user's experience with that problem, which is helpful and perceived as empathetic. Right.

Sarah: Yeah.

[01:10:22] Nudge Covid Cards

Cakelin: It's kind of complicated what I'm trying to explain, but I think that there is a way to do it. Where problems naturally come up and there will be patterns around that problem. And then those small snippets of parts of the interview where that came up can be identified and then grouped together. And the reason why you only focus on the problems, is because people don't usually know what the best solution to their problems is. Because we have a limited amount of resources in our space. That's really what the entrepreneur is trying to do, is to understand the person's problem so well that they can make the best solution.

Whereas a lot of times what people do in user interviews or when they're really early on in a business is they'll just go around and pitch people their idea. So you're always starting from the idea standpoint, which means other people, when they hear their your idea, they'll just be supportive. Oh yeah, that sounds really cool. I can totally see that. And maybe they don't actually understand the idea that you're pitching, but you'll get all of this positive feedback which will basically lead you in the wrong direction because people aren't actually telling you that they'd use your product.

Even if they said that they would wanna use a product like that, it doesn't mean that they actually would, which is part of why I just haven't.. I have this idea of what the nudges ecosystem is. Of these huge problem patterns and these big areas of product potential. But I do not have, besides Covid cards, I do not have a very specific view of what those things would be. I just have a bunch of different potentials within a product space in my brain. Does that make sense?

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: If we had somebody on who was Celiacs and we had identified that one of the problem areas that we wanna explore is disabled people dating. I think that's huge.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: That's a big part of wanting to do these cards. So if I got a chance to interview somebody who has celiacs or other kinds of cross-contamination issues or food issues, that's just a giant part of dating, right? And making friends and any kind of socialization. So if you were to make a nudge card, you could put your information on there in a way that would help people understand what it is that they actually have to do instead of a way where you have to educate a person every time.

So then you have this shorthand. This is also like service dog cards. Whenever you buy a service dog vest or anything online, they send you this stack of cards that just have the ADA laws on them so that when people question you out in public about whether or not you should actually have a service dog and what the fuck does your dog do? And are you actually disabled and what's wrong with you? They can just give 'em one of those cards.

Sarah: You can buy travel ones for Celiac. So if you go to a different country, they're in a different language and saying like, I have this, I have Celiac and I need blah, blah, blah and whatever. And they're little plasticized cards. And I did that too. I typed out cards for my orders when I went out to eat at places, because I always ordered the same thing.

Cakelin: Yeah. 

Sarah: A blurb on the top of it about it. Then I had my order and I would just give it to the waiter and the waiter could give it to the people in the kitchen.

[01:14:01] Was That A Nudgie?

Cakelin: And so that in a way, that's like a nudgie right there. You nudged all of those people to do the thing that you needed them to do. In keep you safe.

Sarah: And it worked super well, cause people actually took it seriously. Then they were like, oh, it was a laminated card. It's not just some rando fucking person being a dick. And then it also had on there too, like..

Cakelin: No, go ahead.

Sarah: It also had on there too. Thank you. And feel free if you think that if my food's been contaminated, you can throw it out. I don't mind the wait. So I had disclaimers on there so that they didn't feel any pressure to get my order out right away or to feed me food that might possibly be contaminated. Cause that is also lost in translation when you're talking to the wait staff and then talking to the people in the kitchen. So they loved those cards. I had them for three different places and the people in the kitchen loved it because they could see exactly what was going on and they had a visual reminder of it. I mean, they love those freaking cards.

Cakelin: Now here's the thing. We were already talking about what it was like for you to have celiac and cross-contamination earlier. Right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: And the cards did not come up.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: So sometimes when you are trying to solve a problem and your user interviewing someone, that person might be doing something that's really similar to your idea and you might not end up discovering that. If I would've user interviewed you, when was the last time you went out to eat? It was probably when brother was here in 2021 and we ate outdoors.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: I think that was maybe the last time I was somewhere for eating. But if I asked you about the last time that you did something, which is usually what the user interviews are geared around.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Cakelin: You probably wouldn't have told me about the cards cause you didn't give a card when we went out to eat when brother was here. So I wouldn't have found out about that. Even though that card idea is exactly the digital thing that I want to build. People could get those printed. And I didn't even think about the fact that people would want to get those printed until you told me this, because I didn't know that. I never knew that you had done that. And so that's why I think it's kind of bullshit to say that you shouldn't interview somebody that you know really well. Because of course I would want to interview you knowing you really well because it went the same direction. I understand why a company needs to interview people that are random, that they don't know anything about. I get it. 

I just wanna do things in a more personal way, more neuro divergent way and in a way that is transparent. So I'm sharing the results of everything I figure out with other people. Like you just shared that with me. If I didn't already have the idea to make cards like this, that's your idea that you came up with to do that. Right? Users are providing these ideas of innovation that end up making companies a bunch of money, but they're never compensated for it. And I don't like that. I think there should be some way that users can be profiting off the company, which is why I've told you that the business model that I wanna do is something where people are making money on the site and it's existing by just skimming off the top. Cause I think that's the most friendly business model. It's better than SaaS. I'm not gonna charge disabled people $10 a month to access this. You know? I think that it's reasonable that if somebody wanted to make these cards and have them printed, that would be something that they would pay for.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: But I didn't even think about that as an option because it's not an option for me because I've never been in a circumstance where I would've handed somebody a card.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: Yet I did that when I had a service dog.

Sarah: Yeah. I saw the idea from like a gluten-free travel website where it's if you went to a different country and weren't a native speaker, how are you gonna tell them about your diet?

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: I was like, oh, that's great. Then I realized every time I was going to a restaurant, I just kept ordering the same fucking thing.

Cakelin: That's an overlapping problem space. It's food allergies while traveling.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: That's what makes user interviewing so complicated is cause you can accidentally end up talking about a different or related problem and not sure whether or not it applies to the same solution. So yeah, this was super productive for me, dude.

Sarah: Oh, that's good. I'm glad.