The truth about people.
Looking Outside True Crime.
When is it a good time to release a true crime podcast episode? Turns out, never, if you’re in the US.
I had a really great first meeting with Jenn Vogel, my latest guest on the Looking Outside podcast. We were both over in Chicago for a work conference and she was like something of a celebrity there. Quickly I learned how down-to-earth she is, and obviously an awesome human being because she could talk about her dog as much as I can talk about mine. The other, uncommon, thing we had in common was a love of true crime.
Liking true crime is almost like a personality trait and the butt of some jokes. Particularly for women who spend their day doing “normal” things, only to unwind and escape at the end of a long hard day learning about serial killers. The SNL skit comes to mind. That’s the central premise of Only Murders in the Building. Everyone wants to do a podcast and everyone loves true crime stories at the moment. (How original I feel right now.)
So it was super exciting to jump on our podcast mic’s back in early May for Jenn and I chat all things true crime. From a business perspective.
What does corporate work life have to do with serial killers?
Whether you’re in the business of marketing, insights, foresight, strategy … you are actually in the business of people. Observing and understanding human beings is a critical part of being able to create something your business can give people to react to. Ultimately, whether you’re B2B selling software or B2C selling iPhones, and especially if you’re in Academia or Government, your success of failure is dependent on people buying, or buying into, your ‘shit’. (Another reason Sales people are under-valued, a podcast for another day.)
Now picture you’re talking about consumer insights in your organization, or creating market segmentation. You’re probably seeing something about “human needs”, a little on what their pain points are, probably a fair bit about their day to day life (demographics, consumption occasions), and in sophisticated organizations maybe even a bit about social values and cultural norms shaping them.
We want to see the good in people. We actually have a positivity bias (the Pollyanna Principle). So, often these portraits in business are inherently positive. “They feel angry when they see litter on the ground”, “they want to recycle more but can’t afford to”, “they want to be more connected to their neighbors and local communities”, “they care about local farmers”, “they want more flexibility at work because it means they can spend more time with the family” are some made-up examples. Or my favorite floater at the moment, “they want to buy from brands that align with their personal values”. All of these things are true. As is the opposite. It really just … depends.
We don’t just want flexible work to rush home to the kids, we also want the freedom to run chores in the middle of the day and get some alone time. We do want to buy direct from the farmer, but not if the market is so far away that we have to carry heavy bags of vegies for blocks. We care about the environment but, man, sometimes buying a water bottle when you’re out is easier than bringing one with you. We care about people, but also find them really annoying. We want fair and equal treatment for the poor, but not if it impacts our land value. We want our values known and heard, but we need to serve up a dinner the family will actually eat. We want companies to be more ethical, for government to follow through with their promises, but we are not always making ethical choices, and we do not always follow through with what we say we will do. We want to think we’re very unique and different, but sometimes we just want to fit in.
This is natural. Meet the human being, we are flawed, we are imperfect. We aspire to be and do better, but, you know, not all the time, and not with everyone, and not with every thing. We are complicated.
That’s a part of what Jenn and I discuss on the True Crime episode. Our interest in the darkness that lies within human being is very much linked with what we do in our day jobs; however they come, we work hard to really see people. Flaws, contradictions, hypocrisy and all. These people who commit crimes, sometimes they are sociopathic, psychotic, egomaniacal, bizarre, off center … but sometimes they are flawed human beings.
And the spotlight on them should perhaps grow a little bigger, so we see more often not just who the victims of their crimes are, but how those victims survive that trauma. That’s another very human thing; not just talking about what people like, need and aspire to be, but talking about what they experienced and how that’s changed them.
Incidentally, I saw a LinkedIn post recently from someone (no credit to be given) complaining that business podcast hosts spend too much time on the guest’s personal history and not enough on what they do. Because you can’t apply how someone was raised but you can apply their learned skills. How is it that we believe the two can be separated? Decision making is largely subconscious. We run on autopilot most of the time and then post rationalize why we did something the way we did it. We live with our own personal bias to what we hold ‘true’ every day, and what’s ‘true’ is often what’s very simple for our mind to process. We are shaped by a mix of our environment and our upbringing. The complexity in seeing and understanding human beings then must extend to that; to learning about how we do things but also where that automatic, subconscious decision making stems from.
There is so much great material coming through in business planning leveraging behavioral economics, addressing cognitive biases, that’s really bringing that complexity and breadth to us understanding ourselves, our workplace and ultimately our consumers. Dan Ariely is a great one to follow on this. Adam Grant doesn’t need my recommendation but will always get it. And of course we’ve had Melina Palmer on the show in Episode 2 speaking to behavioral science.
There’s a lot more for us to face into. And a part of that means we need to get a little uncomfortable.
But not everyone can or wants to do that, at least not in jumping in the deep end with true crime for the un-officiated, uninterested or weak stomached.
And, of course, there is a time and place.
Which brings me back to the original question. I woke up the day of the Fourth of July to the news of a shooting in an affluent neighborhood in Chicago. The morning after I awoke reading of a shooting at a fireworks display in Philadelphia. Then another in Wisconsin. My podcast on True Crime had already been published. I was on a subway platform in Manhattan re-listening to it to check if it maybe warranted a deletion. The last thing I wanted to be was insensitive. So here was giving it a critical once over in NYC. New York City: the place where there were 14 separate incidences of shootings over the Fourth of July long weekend. The place where you hear about tourists shot in Time Square, mums with strollers shot in the Upper West Side, people shot while buying groceries, workers shot on the morning train commute …
There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. What’s worse – feelings of emotional exhaustion hearing the horrid stories that won’t stop coming through your morning news scroll? Feelings of exacerbation at inaction on gun access? Feelings of concern about rising mental health issues with young people? Feelings of anxiety as this is reported on constantly and continuously, in sparking a glorification or glamorization of crime? Or perhaps it’s no feelings at all. It’s the desensitization that is perhaps worst to feel.
There is only so much outrage our heart can take. Waiting for a moment of reprieve from violence at the moment, in many parts of the world, not just the US, is a fool’s game.
So perhaps we are better off in looking into the uncomfortable. Feeling the horror. Trying to understand the experiences that led to this. And really seeing the victims. Because outrage, just like empathy, just like kindness, just like happiness and just like violence are a part of what makes us human. And we are all in the business of better understanding each other.
Listen to the True Crime episode with Jenn Vogel:
