Michelle Murphy Niedziela - Off to See the Wizard

Dr. Michelle Murphy Niedziela is a behavioral neuroscientist and founder of Nerdoscientist, specializing in integrating consumer neuroscience, behavioral science, and traditional research methods to decode consumer response. With a multidisciplinary approach, she helps organizations apply cognitive science tools to drive product innovation and strategy, bridging the gap between consumer perception, decision-making, and product experience.
 
Links: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-niedziela-phd-b581a712/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/nerdoscientist/

www.nerdoscientist.com

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Dr. John Ennis Welcome to AigoraCast, conversations with industry experts on how new technologies are impacting sensory and consumer science. Hi, I'm Dr. John Ennis, President of Aigora. In this episode, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. Michelle Nagella, founder of NERDAO Scientist. I always love speaking with Michelle, and this conversation was no different. In particular, I enjoyed hearing her thoughts on the Wizard of Oz approach to testing as a way to prepare for AI. But there were many other gems throughout the conversation. We hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. And remember to subscribe to AigoraCast to hear more conversations like this one in the future. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of AigoraCast. Today, I'm very happy to have my longtime friend, Dr. Michelle Murphy-Najela on the show. Dr. Michelle Murphy-Najela Michelle is a behavioral neuroscientist and founder of NERDOScientists, specializing in integrating consumer neuroscience, behavioral science, and traditional research methods to decode consumer response. With a multidisciplinary approach, she helps bring organizations, She helps organizations apply cognitive science tools to drive product innovation and strategy, bridging the gap between consumer perception, decision making, and product experience. Michelle, welcome back to the show.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Thanks. It's been a hot minute.


Dr. John Ennis Yeah, you were episode number 3, actually. On the original.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I'm a little crazy.


Dr. John Ennis I go to a cast, and I think we're at 1: 10 or something now. So yeah, time flies.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela It's funny. I remember you sent me via mail a Yeti microphone to use that I then sent back to you.


Dr. John Ennis Oh, right. Those are the overhead. I forgot about that. That Yeti might be down here, actually. Yeah.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Oh, the original.


Dr. John Ennis The original, yeah. It's not needed. Post-pandemic, it became less of a problem. Everyone had quality Actually, that was a long time ago. Well, that's funny. Well, neither of us have aged a day, so I think we could just pick up right where we left off.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela: A hundred percent, yeah. Right.


Dr. John Ennis Okay, sounds great. When we last spoke, you were at HCD, but you've now since started NERDOScientist, where you are research doula. My sister's a doula. I should be able to say that word. Maybe let's go into what it means to be a research doula and what is your role. How do you help your clients now at NERDOScientist?


Dr. Michelle Niedziela It stemmed from trying to describe what it is that I do now, because it can be confusing. Do you necessarily absolutely need to have me on all your projects? No, not necessarily. But in talking to people, you do need to be able to describe what you do in a way that they understand. I felt like research doula encompassed that a little bit. I have a friend that's also an actual doula. Of course, a doula helps someone birth their baby. A lot of that process is education in the beginning, really helping the person understand the process and what's going to happen, but also plan. I feel like in the research process, I'm certainly helping my clients do that. Then during the process of the actual research, working as an advocate. At least an actual doula might advocate for your plan to your doctor. I can do that for internal stakeholders or external vendors you're working with, making sure you're getting what you want from your research. Then also in the end, making sure that you're getting your research goals. Then how can we carry that forward into actions and understanding and learning and all that thing.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela So, yes, research doula. That's what I do.


Dr. John Ennis That's good. But you're not an actual doula in this part of time. You just picked the title.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Just picked the title, yes.


Dr. John Ennis Okay, fair enough. My sister has all sorts of stories about being a doula. So it's interesting. Well, that's great. So then when did you start that? Because I was out of the field for a little while there while I was running my startup, and I'm still running my startup, but I'm back now at Aigora and getting caught up. So maybe you can catch me up on your journey since we last spoke.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Yeah. I mean, it was something that happened slowly over time. I was working at HCD and doing all the things, the cool stuff that HCD was doing anyway, but started getting more involved in behavioral science organizations like Bessey and getting involved with SSP. I found myself more in an advisory role. I started getting added to private boards within companies where they just wanted somebody as an expert to be on the board to inform about, in my case, consumer neuroscience. They didn't necessarily want to hire someone to be on staff full-time, but having these SME boards was a thing that a lot of people what we're doing. It was slowly happening over time. I'd been at HCD for over 10 years, amazingly. It was time for a change. There were things I wanted to do in my life. You know how it is. You also wanted to own your own business and do your own thing and have control over your own thoughts and plans. Oh, yeah. It gives you a lot of flexibility.


Dr. John Ennis Yeah. No, that's good. I can relate to that because I was 10 years at the Institute for Perception under my dad. And it reached a point where we were aligned on a lot of things. At some point, you want freedom and do your own thing. And I can relate to that. I'm unemployment. I could never work for anybody.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I found that as well. I'm not sure I could ever go back into the machine. I don't think they'd want me, actually.


Dr. John Ennis No, I would I might be a good employee who knows, but I don't think that's really my thing.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I also really like the idea of jumping around, though. I learn a lot by not being on one product or one brand. I think one minute doing something in the car area, one minute doing marketing, next minute doing sensory. Jumping all over the place really serves the way, I think.


Dr. John Ennis No, that's right. And honestly, it's good for companies. There are people like you and me out there because we work cross-pollinators. We learn things and we go from one area to the next. I think that's definitely good. Okay, great. Now, one topic that I've seen you post about on LinkedIn, I think we need to get into this because it's probably take up most of the show, is the discussion LLMs and AI and chat bots, and what you've described as the Wizard of Oz approach. Just big picture, how do you see the AI revolution that's happening impacting our field? What advice do you have for your clients when it comes to the use of AI and sensory consumer research?


Dr. Michelle Niedziela It's funny. The past year and a half, I'd say, or maybe past two years, I keep getting invited to give talks on AI and LLMs, and I am in no way an AI expert. But I'm a dabbler, and I like learning things, and I like playing around with things, and I like thinking about things in different ways, and I love gathering new tools to do in different ways. I mean, that's just been my history. I saw a lot of what was going on with AI and LLMs as being an opportunity. What was it? Ssp last year, for example, working with John Aville, we did a workshop. At the time, it's like a million years ago in AI years. But at the time, not a lot of people were using AI. We viewed it as an opportunity to encourage people to learn more and very much like a primer. That was part of me learning. Now, I have this bizarre historical background with people that work in AI. Some of my closest friends, when I was in high school, worked in human and machine cognition, worked at the Human and Machine Cognition Institute, actually, in Pensacola, Florida.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I stayed close with those people and have seen how they've grown over the years. Another really good friend of mine that actually brought in for that workshop at SSP, Ryan, he actually works for Google now, but at the time he was at Copilot. Getting to see everything that they've been doing and all the new innovations, again, like you were saying before, cross-pollinating and learning from whatever people are doing, has kept me interested in finding ways to use these things. I've been playing around with this stuff for a while. Then earlier this year, being invited to ACEMS to talk about what I was seeing as far as being able to use LLMs to simulate research, not to get synthetic data. I think that's a completely different topic that has a lot of... It's a minefield. But I like the idea of testing out research plans to be able to look for problems. Now, while I was in that journey to try to use LLMs to do that, to test out research protocols and see where pitfalls might be, a friend of mine, actually, who was at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, published a paper last year, doing this thing called Wizard of Oz Experiments.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I heard of them before because I was really interested, again, cross-pollination. I'd gone to an advertising research foundation meeting, a billion years ago, 10 years ago, and somebody was talking about design fiction. That And I just really loved that idea of just making up an entirely slightly believable scenario and testing people's reaction to it. And that fits in really well with Wizard of Oz, where, again, it's like a not real scenario, where where you have this Wizard that is guiding someone through an experiment. And you can see where they're having hiccups and interact with them. And Wizard of Oz is basically they think they're interacting with a It's actually a human. His paper, David Iman Shama, he was talking about using LLMs to have, instead of a Wizard of Oz, having a Wizard of LLM situation where you had them talking to each other and running through an experiment and seeing how he could test for problems. So very much in the same way of thinking that I was already thinking. So I find this to be a really intriguing idea, especially now that we are starting to implement more chatbots in our consumer research.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela This idea that maybe we can simulate some of those studies before we actually bring human participants in so that we can maybe improve upon steady designs, right?
Dr. John Ennis Yes. You can definitely... Something that I think... One way to think about LLMs and their value is they allow you to get right to the frontier of what's generally known about something. Now, oftentimes, companies know a lot more than what's generally known. And so what a company knows might be more informed than, say, what Google knows. But you could have, for example, if LLMs had existed when Chevy launched the NoVA, an LLM would have told you that was a bad idea. There's a lot of examples like this. In fact, even, I mean, this is a little more controversial, but when Bud Light had that whole bruhaha a couple of years ago where they're getting boycotted, so there's a bad campaign that's unpopular. I asked them at the time. I asked them on ChatGPT that day. I said, Hey, do you think this is a good idea for the Zad campaign? They said, No, probably the conservative drinkers are not going to like this. And it said it immediately. Probably as a first pass through anything for putting… I can definitely see that with experimental design because there could be all sorts of things you're just not thinking about.


Dr. John Ennis Where general knowledge is actually good enough to find potential pitfall. So I certainly agree with that. And I think the capability keeps getting better and better because you've got vision models. You could show a screen, you could say, what's the very obvious problems with this layout? And you don't need any real… There's enough information generally available to know this layout is going to be confusing to people or these questions are going to be... You can spot a lot of problems using these different generative models.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Yeah. The research that I I've done it at ACEMS was I was just playing around one day and decided to have LLMs just make max diff data. So just making some synthetic max stiff data. And then, okay, if we are talking about that for, say, laundry detergent, we want to know about Fresh, what happens if we were to take that and run an implicit study? So I just mocked up an implicit study and had it come up with data as well. And then I just went back and like, well, what am I missing here? Because with an idea like Fresh is exactly where I think a lot of companies, excuse me, struggle. Because Fresh doesn't differentiate. And it's a problem that pretty much every CPG, whether it's food or personal care, struggled with. Consumers want something to be fresh, but we don't know how to properly study that. I was just exploring the idea and presented that on, Okay, if we run a couple of different studies, can I use an LLM in a simulation to pinpoint why I'm not getting differentiation without having to run a bunch of studies and fail consistently?


Dr. John Ennis I agree with that 100%, that you can use them for spotting potential problems and also for brainstorming. If you need to brainstorm, for sure.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Trying to come up with new ways to solve for those problems, which is pretty much what I do as a consultant. Now, I still don't think that AI is any way going to replace what I do as a research doula, because it still needs me to prompt those ideas. It does take some skill and some knowledge on my part to be able to do that correctly. You still have to deal with all the biases that come with LLMs talking to one another and all of that, for business. It can definitely go down different routes. I made sure in all my presentations to always stress that never stop at that synthetic data. It's only for the purposes of troubleshooting.


Dr. John Ennis Right. Exploration. Yeah. Screen. I totally agree with everything you've said there. The thing that I find with LLMs is LLMs. One thing that's interesting is, maybe different from almost any other tool in human history, the LLMs or the generative models, more generally, really depend on who's using them. I think the thing that's dangerous about it is if you have something like a power saw or something like that. It's obvious, you know when you don't know how to use a power saw. You don't even necessarily try to use it or you go get training or whatever. But everyone thinks that they can talk. Everyone thinks, Oh, I can use this model. But actually, how you use it really matters. It makes a huge difference to results. I think a lot of people have had bad experiences with chatbots or with the LLMs. At the end of the day, it's funny because you don't want to be... I actually made friends with somebody because of this on LinkedIn, but someone was complaining about how they were getting bad results for trying to use, I don't know, ChatGPT for something or other. I replied, Is that rude thing you can say to people, skill issue?


Dr. John Ennis I didn't say skill issue, but I said, Keep practicing, you'll get better. She replies, Well, thanks for the advice. We actually became friends. It was Maria Keckler, actually. She was on the show on a GoraCast, and she is really enthusiastic and wants to learn how to use them properly. But I think people really do need to understand that these tools are They're unique, and they're actually more powerful. In your hands, you're going to get more out of using it. You're going to be able to go deeper into the space. You're going to pull out the information you need. Somebody who just pretends that they can get the same information, like someone who doesn't know anything and tries to use an LLM to replace the research tool as making a major mistake.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I'm glad you bring this up because when you see people complain about the utility of using an LLM for brainstorming, for example, they argue that you get a lot of hallucinations or incorrect information. I think that is entirely because they're just not prompting correctly. Also what you're using it for. I think the prime example is when people ask the LLM to find the number of letters, a specific letter and a word, right? Or asking it to Google things, and it gives them back four or four errors on the links. Why are you doing that?


Dr. John Ennis Yes, exactly. You don't use a hammer to put a screen. That's not actually a good use. Yeah, exactly. That 100% agree.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I think that you should expect it to give you bad results because that's actually not what it's good at. I think if you try to remember that the LLM is not a super smart person, I think that too many people think that artificial intelligence, maybe it's by design because of the name, artificial intelligence. They think that it must be smarter. But in fact, it really is just a bunch of code that is doing predictive text, like super fancy predictive text. So what's the most logical thing to follow after it said this thing or after you said that thing? So if you think about it that way rather than as Google, because it's a terrible Google, it's good in some sense. But only you got to use that the right way, too. You can certainly use it to Google. And I guess my friend that's now at Gemini would argue with me on that point. But I think you just have to learn and experience, like you're saying. I think you got to practice, and you got to let of this idea that it's some super smart being.


Dr. John Ennis No, that's right. It is an extremely useful tool is what it is. There's some things it's great at, and there's some things that... I honestly, I used to worry a little bit about all the jobs going away and all this business. That's never going to happen. I'm more convinced to that than ever. I do think that we can become way more productive. But somebody has to steer the ship, and somebody has to know what's important and what to work on. It isn't just down to the... Even if the bots, the models never made mistakes, and they do sometimes just straight make mistakes. But even if they never made mistakes, they need guidance. And only a human can really give them guidance. And that leads into one of the ideas that I have about sensory and AI. I think that the human experience is going to start to really get elevated because these models, they are trained on a lot of data or whatever, but they're not evolved organisms. They're not like you and me, where the chemical senses are the oldest senses, and they've evolved, and we have this drive to survive, and that's connected to our emotions, and it's connected to our chemical senses.


Dr. John Ennis It's all very deeply entwined. The models don't have anything like that. They just execute. They It's completely apathetic.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela That's what's really brilliant. I got to share the paper with you from Shama because some of the heuristic checks they did on the Wizard of LLM's study was checking for a couple of things. How much did it go negative or did it go towards bias? So a bias check. But then also how repetitive was it? So when you have LLMs talking to each other, it can start to echo and just repeat what the other one said. And so it was really interesting to see those checks just behaviorally, what the LLMs were doing within their own conversation. So it's really interesting when you look at that versus maybe what humans do. So I think a really interesting study would actually be to see, okay, if you did a Wizard of LLM study and then a Wizard of Oz study on these chat bots that are being used in sensory surveys. What might you get as results? I would be really interested in seeing that. Yeah.


Dr. John Ennis Well, that would come down, I would also expect a lot to the prompt engineering of the Wizard of LLM system. Because if you say to these agents, Okay, you're playing this role, you're playing this role, and you have very elaborate instructions, and you have... When the agent goes to respond, they know everything they've said, and they know everything that the other agent has said, and they have instructions that they shouldn't agree all the time. But then at the end of the day, you need a human to make the decisions about what should the behavior be like. Right. And then, it's just going to iterate forever. I think there's always going to be one level up where you're going to need a human there deciding how should this thing behave.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Well, someone's got to monitor as well to make sure it hasn't gone down a bad path, because we've certainly seen the news where that's happened, right?


Dr. John Ennis Oh, sure. Yeah, that's right. And of course, psychologically, yeah. Anyway, you for sure are going to have chatbot induced psychosis. I think that extreme agreeableness is not good. It's not good for someone to talk to somebody that always agrees with That isn't good for people.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I really think it's important to have human interaction. Something I really like to do is keep regular meetings with people that are smarter than me. Because I think it's good to talk to humans with a different perspective. The problem I see a lot of times with LLMs, when you do these brainstorming sessions, is that it is very both complementary and very supportive. Anything I say to it, it's like, That is a really great idea.


Dr. John Ennis You have to tell it. Look, be really critical. I want the truth. Yes. I'm going to really yell at it to get it.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela That's the key, I think, on using the LLMs as a way to check your study protocols and maybe test out study protocols, is that you want to make sure you're framing it as, let's tear this apart, and maybe even very specifically about what your overall goals are. So again, if it is for something like, is there a better way to diagnose fresh? You have to be very directive about that. I like to think of the LLMs as being an extremely smart, but also extremely naive intern, right? Right. Very eager to please, very capable, but also very problematic. It does take maybe even more work to some degree. Yes. But it's beneficial in the end, right?


Dr. John Ennis No, that's right. No, it's great. It's an exciting time. It's a great time. So let's talk about other... Something I'm really interested right now is AI video and AI music, because I think that these present... In fact, I'm going to be giving a webinar soon.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I saw.


Dr. John Ennis And it's a free webinar I'll be giving. It'll be opening on Monday. It'll probably be actually by the time this goes live. I think that AI for communication is a really interesting topic. I think that in sensory, a problem that we have is we do really interesting research. But then the executives are often marketing people, and they don't really care about the nerdy details of the product. They think it doesn't really matter. Oftentimes, they think this might be changing a little bit. But for the longest time, I worked a lot of work with the beer industry, and they talked about the stuff that was in the bottle as the liquid. They just called it the liquid. They didn't care what the liquid was. Just give me the liquid, and we will figure out how to sell it. It was all the marketing people. I think that something we can do a better job of in is helping the business side of the business understand why what we're doing is really important and connecting it to the human experience. I'm actually really enthusiastic about using video and music, which AI music, I don't know how much you've really played with this with it.


Dr. John Ennis But like Suno, for example, is one of the big platforms. It's amazing. In 10 seconds, you can get actually quite good songs, especially if you put the word K-pop in there. K-pop is the ketchup of music genres.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Very popular right now, especially among our children, right? Yes.


Dr. John Ennis Probably if my children are home, K-pop Demon Hunters is on.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Oh, yeah. That's all we heard all summer. We did an extensive 45-day road trip, which is one of those things that you can only do if you're an independent consultant.


Dr. John Ennis Oh, wow. Okay. Well, that's its own topic. We can sit on your road trip. But I think, though, that that's really important because we have this attention. We have attention economy. We've got people on board. You have some new dashboard and you want to get people to use it inside a company. And so I think music video, you have a study. I actually, just for fun, because GLP-1 is a hot topic right now. I pulled together all the publicly available information I could get on GLP-1s, and I made a song about GLP-1s and breakfast cereals. I thought, Okay, you have to socialize, and you have to sell the results of your experiments. I think songs are a good way to do that. But I'm just wondering, what are your thoughts on these other modalities?


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I say you run a Wizard of Oz study on how weird people think it is, right? Oh, interesting.


Dr. John Ennis I just do weird things.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela I say weird things because one of the things that Wizard of Oz is used for is to see how believable a chatbot would be. When you think about its use in human-to-machine interactions. One thing that's definitely coming up as AI is being used more and more for music and video and all those things is we are getting to the point where it's a very fine for that uncanny valley. I think that savvy people can still really point it out. I do wonder, It might be interesting to say, expose some marketing people to such a way of community-negating conversation and walk them through that, find out how they feel in the moment. That's interesting. Whether that uncanny valley is going to help or are they going to overcome that? Is it gimmicky? Because that's one of the questions that you end up asking in a Wizard of Oz situation. I think that finding new ways of communication is really good, especially if there's groups of people that don't particularly like graphs, and that they need messaging, they need buzz, and they need something that they can show at a town hall. I think that that is really valuable.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela So there really is something to that, I think. But I I guess just because, yeah, research doula here. I got to do research, research, research, have those babies. No, that's right. I would want to do the research on it.


Dr. John Ennis Yeah, that's interesting. We know the Gemini models, you mentioned your friend, they're multimodal. They might go, too. They can actually watch videos. Act the role of a skeptical marketing executive. Yeah. Watch this video. Yeah.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Do you think it's weird?


Dr. John Ennis No, that's right. Get feedback. No, for sure. And then you make it better. Exactly. How about now? That's really interesting.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela But I know. I think it's cool. It's really fun.


Dr. John Ennis But at the end of the day, you got to show it to a real marketing executive eventually.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Of course. I think we agree on that. But before you get to that point, you might as well do the test to find out how awkward is this going to be. I think most marketing people would appreciate that.


Dr. John Ennis Yeah, that's right. You can definitely get closer to the target.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela That's good.


Dr. John Ennis Well, great. Well, we're almost out of time, actually. It's always so easy to talk to But let's maybe close with, how do you see... Because I usually ask a question about advice for young people right now. It's hard because honestly, I personally have no idea what's going to happen. I have my own opinions. I don't worry I do think people should be using as many tools as they can all the time to just get used to things, because facilitating these tools is really important. It's a big advantage right now, actually. But what would be your advice to some person, first, second year, out of school, or maybe grad student? What advice would you have for them for how to successfully navigate the next few years?


Dr. Michelle Niedziela There's a thing that everybody has been saying, which is that it's not that you're going to be... So this isn't new. It's not that you're going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by someone who uses AI. So you definitely need to become familiar, and I totally agree with that. I would also like to look into how younger people, fresh coming out with fresh eyes, and not all maybe the bias that we have as traditional researchers, traditional sensory people, see how the newer generations are using the tools, because I think there might be some novelty there. I recall, in 20 years ago, watching one of my nieces with a regular point and shoot camera. She was trying to enlarge the camera screen, but it wouldn't because that wasn't something that happened back then. But 100 %, that's what we do now. Yeah. All the time. So I think there is something to looking at how younger people and people fresh out of college might be using these tools. That would be really informative for us old folk, right? I think that- Those who were raised in the before times. Yeah, in the before times, right?


Dr. Michelle Niedziela But I would caution having constantly been seeing Gail Seville get up on stage and preach to everybody about the importance of where we came from, that there's still value in understanding how these things work from a traditional sensory perspective. We got to keep that in mind because ultimately, we have to guide these LLMs. If we don't understand how the sensory works, how the consumer works, how the business works, we're not going to be able to do that very well. My advice, I don't want to say that a young person has to know everything, but get a little bit of as much as you can, right?


Dr. John Ennis Right. No, I definitely agree with that. Whenever you go back and you read old textbooks, I was talking to my wife about this this morning, that I got a bunch when I was When we were writing with Vanessa and Julian and Terry, we were writing that book on data science for sensor consumer science. I got Box's book, and I got some of the old textbooks, early data science textbooks. It is honestly amazing how smart those people Oh, yeah. You had hand-drawn graphs that someone took a picture of, but the content was incredibly deep. I think it's the same way with our field where, like you said, if you don't know where you came from, you don't know the culture and the history of the field, then you're not going to have any nuance. I do think there's a risk with LLMs that you're going to have a regression to the mean, where there'll be more or less... I think there's two possibilities. One is everything just gets homogenized and it becomes AI slot where all the websites look the same or whatever. The other is, you actually do your own reading and get a sense of what you bring that's special and different, and then use AI to do everything else so you can focus on the thing that you're particularly good at.


Dr. John Ennis Then I think AI presents the chance for all of us to be excellent because I really honestly believe I get a lot of grief on LinkedIn for this, but I'm not a... I'm a live to work guy in the sense that I think everybody has something they're supposed to be doing. And when they're doing it, they don't feel the same. It doesn't withdraw their energy the same way. If you're doing what you're supposed to do, it gives you energy. I think that when people are working a job they hate, that's a sign they're doing the wrong job. I think AI can help people do the thing that they were meant to do. But if you don't, like you said, explore and try different things and learn different things, you have no idea really what your thing is. You have to try lots of stuff.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Oh, 100 %. I need the LLMs, and I need the AI to help me become the research doula that I could possibly be. But I fully recognize the luxury I have to be able to do that. So I've gotten to a point in my career that I can do that and do what I really love and a life that can support that even if I need to take for life balance, I like to be able to take time off, taking that 45 days off. So I think that there is a life balance for me that is really important, but it's all where your joy comes from. And certainly, I love what I'm doing right now and the excitement that I'm able to pull from a presentation I saw 15 years ago on design fiction, and pull that into something, into LLMs, and pull that into research design. I think that that is really cool, right? And that's an opportunity that brings excitement to me. And I hope everybody can find that joy. And maybe they can if they start utilizing more LLMs to explore these crazy ideas that you might have stuck in your head somewhere.


Dr. John Ennis Yeah, really interesting. It's good. Yeah, so it was good. I want to I'm going to have to think about your 45-day trip also at some point. Maybe next time we catch up first.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela A lot of vacation is an adventure.


Dr. John Ennis I would like at some point to actually take some time off, but I find it so hard to do. I don't know. I just can't do it.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela You got a lot going on.


Dr. John Ennis Yeah. I'm also a workaholic, so I have my own issues. But anyway. All right. Well, Michelle, it's a pleasure, as always. And how can people reach you? What's the best way to- The easiest is to go to nerdoscientist.



Dr. Michelle Niedziela www.nerdoscientist.comYou can set up a meeting through there. You can message me through there, or find me on LinkedIn.


Dr. John Ennis Okay, perfect. And we'll put your links in the show notes as well. So thanks a lot, Michelle.


Dr. Michelle Niedziela Thank you.


Dr. John Ennis Okay, that's it. Hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you did, please help us grow our audience by telling your friend about AigoraCast and leaving us a positive review on iTunes, and if you'd like to learn more about Aigora, please visit us at www.aigora.com Thanks.

AigoraCast Episode Off to See the Wizard, a conversation with

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