Episode 48: David Dylan Thomas - Understanding design, content and bias

Kristina Halvorson:
This is the content strategy podcast and I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson. On each and every episode I interview someone I admire who’s doing meaningful work in content strategy and all its adjacent disciplines. If you care about making content more useful, usable and inclusive for all, welcome in, you have found your people.

A quick note before we get started. If you’re a fan of content strategy you may be familiar with Confab, which is the conference my company Brain Traffic produces. Well, after a stellar twelve year run, next spring will be our very last Confab. I know it is going to be our best event yet and we would love to have you join us. So visit confab events dot com, check out the program and all our incredible speakers, and if you decide to register you can use promo code PODCAST100 to save $100 off any in-person ticket. That is promo code PODCAST100 because you are hearing about it on a podcast. Hope to see you there.

Hey everybody, it's me. I know. I've been gone a long time. Life just tends to get in the way of passion projects and that is definitely what this podcast is. It is a passion project because I get to talk to extraordinary human beings and good news, I have yet another extraordinary human being with me here today, and I'm going to tell you all about him. His name is David Dylan Thomas, and he's the author of Design for Cognitive Bias. He's also the creator and host of the Cognitive Bias Podcast and a 20 year practitioner of content strategy in UX. He has consulted with major clients in the entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance and retail industries. And as the founder and CEO of David Dylan Thomas LLC, he offers workshops and presentations on inclusive design and the role of bias in making decisions. He also has spoken at about 22 conferences, which I am not going to read off, except I'll throw in TED NYC and South by Southwest Interactive, because those are... Oh, and CONFAB. That's fancy too. Hi, David Dylan Thomas.

David Dylan Thomas:
Hello, Kristina Halvorson. How are you doing?

Kristina Halvorson:
I'm so happy to be talking to you. How are you doing?

David Dylan Thomas:
Good, busy, scared for the world, all at the same time.

Kristina Halvorson:
Oh, I know. I'm so tired of being scared for the world though. I mean, at some point you just have to throw up your hands. I will say, after rolling my eyes about this forever and ever, I got an app that's called Three Good Things. It reminds you of, "Think of three good things that happened today," and you have to write them down. And I'm waiting for the magic to kick in, my friend. And everybody else is like, "Oh, gratitude changed my life." And I'm like, "I don't know, man. I've been gratituding for two weeks."

David Dylan Thomas:
I do make it a habit to look at as many happy news sources as sad ones, which is to say normal ones, I guess. So that's helpful, but it's a balance. It's a seesaw.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, I agree. There have definitely been times over the last couple of years that I have just gone on a media fast where I've just been, "World, I know it's tough. I know I should be a better informed citizen, but right now I'm just going to turn on the TV and just watch cartoons or whatever." So I support you in your happy media pursuit.

We could talk about this part of it for the entire thing, but because this is the Content Strategy Podcast, I feel the need to discuss content strategy with you. Speaking of which, I always start this podcast by asking folks to tell me a little bit about how they came to content strategy. So I wonder if you wouldn't take a few minutes and share your journey with our happy listeners?

David Dylan Thomas:
So yeah, I think, like most content strategy journeys, it is very roundabout. I like to take the content and strategy journeys separately. So the content piece, when I became obsessed with storytelling as a kid, I remember writing short stories when I was nine and just falling in love with writing from a very early age and from a career perspective that's been in filmmaking, which is something I've been doing since I was in high school. And strictly speaking on the web, and this is a bit where the strategy comes in, my very first real job-job, with benefits and such, was working for the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. Basically, it was a program for gifted writers, so basically junior high and high school kids, who tested really well for writing and we would give them college level writing courses.

So I was sort of an online tutor for this distant education course, our students were all over the world and they would submit their work in narrative nonfiction to a forum, which it's surprising how little that's changed since the year 2000. It's basically the same interface. It's like Reddit without all the angst. And they would workshop each other's work, and I kind of fell in love with the idea that these people from all over the world, who would otherwise never have met each other, get to share each other's work and passions and just talk. And these incredibly civil discussions about what at the time and still are heated topics, like homeschooling. A lot of them were homeschooled and they would have these very intelligent, nuanced discussions about and learn from each other what that was like.

So I started out with this very optimistic vision of the web and eventually I started getting roles when I moved to... That was in Baltimore. I moved to Philadelphia when my wife got a job here and eventually found a role as the online editor in chief of a series of print magazines back when that was a thing. Each print magazine, five of them, all had web presences. I was in charge of the web presences. And without knowing it, I was doing content strategy. I was thinking about structure, I was thinking about release, and I was thinking about when to degrade content. All of the things that a content strategist needs to get good at, I was getting good at before it really had a name that I knew. So this is around 2006 to 2010 maybe.

Then my next role was in the foundation world. And it was still very much nurture the content on this website, nurture content creators. But the title was not that. But I still remember my first or second day on the job, I had to do a content migration. And I remember getting stickies and just putting stickies up on the wall to map out which content on the website was changing frequently and which was not. I didn't know the word site map, but that's what I was doing. In retrospect, I had been doing content strategy for almost 10 years before I actually got a business card that said "content strategy", which was when I came to work at EPAM, which is a digital strategy firm, actually building websites.

Then I came to Think Company, another experience design firm with the explicit mandate to build out a content strategy practice, which I'm proud to say I did. They've got a ton of content strategists now. But that sort of second decade of proper content strategy, with a business card, came after about 10 years of informal but no less rigorous content strategy.

Kristina Halvorson:
I have to say, I've had a lot of guests on this podcast, and you are the very first one who's been, "It all started when I was nine years old." So I just want to give you a high five for that. But yeah, I think this is a story that I just never get tired of hearing, because you're right, and we just come from so many different places, but somehow I think we all find our way through this combination of creative thinking and very pragmatic problem solving where we're doing the thing before we know what the thing is called.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah and I think it has to be that way, at least for a while, because it's really only in the past five years it's become the kind of formal practice where you can actually go to school for it or want to be it as a child. When I was nine, it was the mid-'80s. What is content strategy? What is the web even? I could not aspire to be a content strategist at that point.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, I tell my 18 year old who's looking at colleges right now, and I keep telling him that I'm like, "Yo, my job did not exist for many years after I graduated from college. So be chill. Do liberal arts, do what you want to do." And it's funny because I know that a lot of folks listening, I don't know how many of you are tired of hearing, "Back in the day," when I get calls with people I've known for a long time. But A, it doesn't seem that long ago which, young listeners, you will understand when you are our age.

But two, we are still having so many of the same conversations that we were having that long ago that just carries over like, "Okay, I've been put into a new position and I need to figure out how to care for the content on this website over time. And whoever just left the position did a terrible job of documenting the changes they made or what was working. So let me pull out my handy post-it notes and just start sticking stuff up on the wall." That still happens, whether or not we have a formal practice outlined or no matter what our job descriptions say.

David Dylan Thomas:
Over 20 years, I never stopped having to give the 'justify your existence' presentation to stakeholders.

Kristina Halvorson:
Ugh, I know.

David Dylan Thomas:
So when does that end?

Kristina Halvorson:
I know. And we're all so tired of giving it. So now I want to talk about how you came into the work that you're doing today, because the work you're doing now is not necessarily content strategy proper, although content strategy is so big, so many things. But talk to me about the work that you're doing now. Tell me about your book. First of all, you wrote that book how many years ago now?

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, came out in August of 2020. So yeah, it's a couple years now it's been out.

Kristina Halvorson:
Happy Birthday.

David Dylan Thomas:
Thank you. So parallel to my interest and day job doing UX and content strategy, I've always kind of been fascinated by the brain. My mom was a psychology grad from UCLA, my wife is a pediatric neuropsychologist, so I've always been adjacent to people who knew a lot about the brain and I learned a lot from them. But the real tipping point came when, as a part of my job at EPAM, actually, I went to go to South by Southwest and I saw a talk by Iris Bohnet called Gender Equality by Design, which I highly recommend our listeners look up on YouTube. It's a fantastic talk. But a lot of what she was talking about were making these correlations between here's how the brain works and here's how design works on that. So if I want people to turn off the light when they leave their hotel room, it's a lot for me to expect them to just remember that every time.

But if I take advantage of the fact that, if I just have a thing where the only way the light works is if you actually stick your room key into a slot, now I get the lights turned off for free every time they leave. So I'm using the design to leverage things I know about human behavior. So that was sort of a tipping point where I'm like, "Okay, all these different forms of inequality, all these sorts of things that are really troubling, can be addressed in part. Especially the part that people are doing without knowing it, can be addressed, in part, through design. So let me dig into that."

And one thing led to another, and it went from me basically becoming obsessed with it, and learning about it and talking about it all the time to the point where my friends were like, "Dave, please just get a podcast," which is how the podcast came about. And then the podcast led to me giving talks about it. And then the talks led to me actually doing a book. But yeah, that was how I got into this world of taking my passion project, which was just learning about bias and talking about it, and marrying it to my day job of, "Okay, here's UX and content strategy. How do these two things go together?"

Kristina Halvorson:
So let me go back for just a minute to something that you said that I think will help bring the concept of what you're discussing to life. You said that what was really exciting and interesting to you and started getting your neurons really firing was to think that, "Okay, if we can take design and start to use it to address some of the inequalities that we see every day in the products that we use and the websites that we visit," can you give me a couple examples of what you're talking about there?

David Dylan Thomas:
Sure. Yeah. So the low hanging fruit there is anonymized resumes. So as it turns out, if you have two identical resumes, and the only difference between the two resumes is the name at the top of the resume, if it is a female sounding name, it tends to stay on the pile. If it is a male sounding name, it tends to keep going through the process. This is as much overt sexism as it is if I ask someone, "Hey, you need to hire a web developer." When I say the words web developer, what might pop into their head, without them even thinking about it, is a skinny white guy. And it's not because they actually think that men are better at programming than women, but the pattern that they've seen over time in movies and television, and maybe even in some offices they've worked at, establishes that equation.

When they see a name at the top of a resume that doesn't quite fit that pattern, all of a sudden they're giving the resume the side eye. Again, without knowing it. And so that part of bias, which is this unconscious part, not this overt, "I really genuinely think that women are worse at this job." That's the part where you can say, "Okay, as a piece of content, do you actually need the name to help you achieve what this piece of content is trying to help you achieve, which is to find someone to fill this role? What about the name is helping you make that decision?"

So from a signal to noise standpoint, the signals are the qualifications or the experience. The noise might be actually things about their identity that, because of the patterns you've grown up with, might actually bias you. In my workshop, we do an exercise where we take a look at a LinkedIn page and we try to eliminate items that we think might be biasing and don't actually help you pick the person that's right for the role. Very often you are taking a lot off of that LinkedIn page, right? Because most of it is more social and not as much of it is about, "Okay, can this person do the job?"

Kristina Halvorson:
So this is interesting from just the standpoint of, like you said, it's low hanging fruit. Okay, for a recruitment standpoint and a name that can make sense. Talk to me a little bit then about how, if you're doing these workshops for user experience designers or content strategists in particular, what are your next steps then? Do you have additional exercises where they're really taking a look at their own work? Or talk to me a little bit about how you translate that over even more to this field of practice when you're working with these folks.

David Dylan Thomas:
Absolutely. It's very important to me that when people take my workshop the very next day they can start implementing some of the things I've talked about. A lot of what I talk about, it has to do with process. So there is an inclusive design practice called an assumption audit, where basically before you even begin the work, let's say it's a web redesign or a content migration, whatever that project is, you basically get the team in a room and you ask five questions. One, what are the identities represented in this room? And you're really only self-identifying as you feel comfortable, but you are thinking about things like age or literacy or neurodivergence, et cetera. And then you ask, "Okay, well how might those identities influence the work that we're doing here?" And then you ask the third question, which is, "Who's not in the room?" And then you ask the fourth question, which is, "Okay, well how might that absence of perspective compromise the work we're doing?"

And then the fifth question becomes around, "Okay, how do we include, honor and give power to some of those voices in this project? Especially if they're going to be affected by the work, but have no say in the work." So those five questions, we do an exercise around that in the workshop, but I sort of prompt people to say, "Okay, I want you to consider trying this on your next project," right? Because this is maybe a two hour meeting that you might have at the beginning of a project.

So from a time standpoint, if you think about the number of hours involved in most major content strategy projects, that's not a huge commitment. It's not a huge amount to ask for in the budget or in the project plan, but it could have a very huge difference even in just how you view the work going forward. Because even if you find out, "Okay, I really wish we could talk to these people, but there's not time," you will be thinking about them at the very least in the back of your head because you've been primed to do that by having this exercise. And I have five or six assignments I give people at the end of the workshop, but that's one of them to say, "How do you fit some of these relatively low tech, but very moving, very, very, very meaningful conversations into your process?"

Kristina Halvorson:
I think that, at least many of the folks that I know as I've seen conferences evolve and talks evolve and conversations in the workplace evolve, diversity, equity, inclusion, just gets mushed together in that nice little handy DEI acronym. But I think that mostly people are just like, "Okay, that means equality and it means making sure everybody has a seat at the table. It means overcoming racism and prejudice, et cetera." But the piece of it that's not in there is exactly what you just described, which is we need these voices at the table so that we become aware of our own bias, not just so there's different and diverse opinions at the table, right? And that I think is a nuance that a lot of people just don't necessarily get walking into the conversation. And so how do you see light bulbs go off in these meetings, in these workshops?

David Dylan Thomas:
What I really notice is the difference between folks who, and I'll be blunt, this is often folks of color, especially women of color versus folks not of color. And the women of color, I won't say they get less out of the conversation, but they almost have more to contribute, right? Because they know.

Kristina Halvorson:
Right.

David Dylan Thomas:
One of the big exercises is to take this hypothetical product that's supposed to sort of stop crime in your neighborhood and think about how your biases, if you're building this product, might interfere. And there's a very distinct difference between people who have no trouble imagining how that could go wrong and people who it takes a minute. They have to really think through that piece. So that's the light bulb piece, is understanding that, simply, because you have a different relationship to the topic of the product.

I like picking crime because that's a thing where everyone has some relationship to it, but very different relationships to it. Even if they all agree on things like Black Lives Matter or any of these other bigger, more countrywide issues. They have a personal history or not with crime that's going to influence who they are thinking about when they build the product. So that I think is the light bulb for a lot of people is sort of saying, "Okay, what I'm really trying to address here is not just establishing your bonafides as an ally or anything like that. It's really just what are you thinking about and who are you thinking about when you work on this content strategy? And how can I remind you that there are people you're not used to thinking about, or that your company, or your agency may not be used to having you think about when you build products?"

Kristina Halvorson:
So what are some of the tools that you recommend or that you see really work that you've been introduced to in these client environments that are able to keep those, like you said, meaningful contributions and conversations at the forefront during website or product development?

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, there's no substitute for participatory design, which is to say nothing about us without us. So if you are working on something that is going to impact indigenous populations, if you are working on something that's going to be impacting rural populations, have them on the team, have them paid for their work. That to me is the gold standard. But that is also, of course, the most difficult logistically and financially. I think that the lower hanging fruit is always stuff you can just do in your head. So one of the exercises that we do it's called speculative design. And so you basically say, "Okay, I want you to tell a story about how this product might be harmful to a particular group of people or individuals. Either intentionally or not, how might that go wrong?" Because that's something as designers and content strategists we're not encouraged to think about as often.

I think part of that is just how we sell content strategy. No one says, "Hey, we're going to migrate your content and everything's going to be worse." No, you say, "I'm going to tell you how much easier it's going to be to do this and how much easier it's going to be to do that when this web design is done. Look at all these cool new features." But for every new feature that could go right, at least five things could go wrong. So it's our responsibility to spend at least as much time designing for those outcomes. But, again, those aren't the outcomes we're... Some of us who write error messages are trained to think about those outcomes. But a lot of us are more about, "Okay, what's the ideal customer experience? Let me design for that. Let me sell that." But these exercises are saying, "No, I want you to deliberately think about a bad outcome and use your imagination when you do it." It's just to help you, again, open your eyes to possibilities or populations you hadn't considered.

Kristina Halvorson:
Do you ever get into rooms with folks, or Zoom rooms or whatever, and find that you're just banging your head against the wall with some of these participants?

David Dylan Thomas:
I rarely. And I think the reason is, to be honest, good marketing. Because I have a rate card and it says, "This is what I talk about, this is the name of the workshop and this is what's in it." And if you read that and you're not interested, you're not going to hire me, right? Because I'm not cheap. Not only are you going to say, "I deliberately want you to talk about inclusive design in all these populations, but I want to pay you a lot of money to do it." If you've already kind of jumped over that hurdle, the odds are you're going to be fairly receptive.

What's interesting is when I do get resistance, it's more around being afraid of doing the wrong thing. It's sort of like saying, "Hey, I want to do more inclusive design, but I'm afraid if I take this step or that step, it could be misinterpreted and people might not like me." There's this sensitivity of, "I don't want to offend anyone and genuinely I don't want to hurt anyone," and when that happens, what I have to do is walk people through the unfortunate but very true fact that if you engage in inclusive design, you are not going to be a hero, right? Because the very people you are trying to help do not agree on how you should help them. So there's no version of inclusive design where you're actually making everyone who is being oppressed happy. It just doesn't happen.

Kristina Halvorson:
What?!

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, I know, right?

Kristina Halvorson:
That's it.

David Dylan Thomas:
What a crock.

Kristina Halvorson:
This podcast is over. I thought you could help.

David Dylan Thomas:
What a sham. I wanted to be liked, damn it.

Kristina Halvorson:
You're a charlatan. Yeah, all right. Sorry.

David Dylan Thomas:
Because I filter out the people who aren't even interested just by the nature of the work, what I will then get are people who are interested but are afraid, which I think, I'm afraid, right? I've done things where I'm like, "Oh, I thought that was the right thing and it actually really legitimately pissed that person off and they were angry at me." And that's the breaks, right? I am tempted in those moments to say, "Okay, that's it. Burn it all down. I'm never going give another talk or do another workshop." But the truth is, on the whole, and again, this is me based on what other people say, not what I think, it's helping. And that's the job. I mean, even as content strategists, our approaches, our solutions are guesses. Hopefully well informed guesses, hopefully well educated guesses, but they are guesses.

We do not actually know exactly how that content model is going to play out for the user, exactly how that migration is going to work out for the people in the call center. We hope and we pray, but at the end of the day, it is our best guess and hopefully we have the opportunity to learn from that and move on. But if it's true there in, I guess, non-inclusive content strategy, I don't even know what you want to call that, it is all the more true when you're dealing with people's feelings and systems of oppression and all these other bigger issues.

Kristina Halvorson:
David, I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast are dealing with separate but related issues in terms of having big breakthrough moments like this, being introduced to a new way of doing things or a new way of thinking about things, going back into the workplace, super fired up about how things are going to change and then it just falls off because it can be uncomfortable or it can feel expensive or an extra step of the work.

If you've come in and you've introduced this, and light bulbs have gone off and people are committed to the work, what are some ways you have seen really be effective in terms of embedding this perspective into culture or into work routines and ongoing processes, cadence, whatever?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, one of the last biases I talk about in the workshop it's called consistency bias. And the way it works is if I go up to you and I say, "Hey, Kristina, can I put this big giant sign on your lawn?" Odds are you're going to say no. But if I say, "Hey, can I put this really tiny, you're not even going to notice it, it's like the size of a thumbtack?" You're more likely to say yes. If you say yes and I come back two weeks later and I'm like, "Hey, Kristina, can I put this big giant sign on your lawn?" You're more likely to say yes because you're sign people now. People like to make decisions that are consistent with their former decisions. So if I want to roll out inclusive design it my company, I could say, "Hey, we're going to form the inclusive design committee, and we're going to meet on Mondays and we're going to overhaul the entire design system soup to nuts." That is basically going to be a meeting engine.

Or I could say, "Hey, boss, on this next project, can I do an assumption audit? It's a two hour meeting and this is a 600 hour project. Can I just get two hours?" More likely to say yes. If they say yes, and I do assumption audits on three, four more projects and I come back and say, "Hey, for this next project, can I do a red team blue team?" This is an exercise where you bring in another team to basically check your work for bias. It takes about a day. "I want to do a red team blue team. It takes a day, but this is a hundred day project." More likely to say yes because hey, I guess we're inclusive design people now.

One of the tactics is to think small, think local, think what is the smallest unit of control you have? What's the smallest ask you can make that is likely to get a yes and that it's likely to move you closer to the goal that you can then leverage for a slightly bigger ask? It's the foot in the door versus saying, "Okay, we're going to do a whole revolution." Whole revolutions like that usually only work if they're coming from the top down. If you're trying to work bottom up, it can be more effective to say, "Let me just make this little change. You might not even notice it," and then suddenly I'm making a slightly bigger change and a slightly bigger change. That, I think, is a more manageable and reasonable way to make change once you go back than to say, "Okay, fist in the air, we're going to tear it all down."

Kristina Halvorson:
And I have to say, I would like you to write this in tablet form and then I would like you to send a copy of it to every single solo content strategist or content designer you know. Because I feel like so much of the time, we find ourselves sitting around either waiting for permission to do a thing or waiting for somebody to ask to do a thing, or we take advocacy as a thing that we do in terms of going around and explaining what we do, and telling people how we can help them and suggesting that they invite us to the meeting versus, like you said, let's just do the thing.

And it doesn't have to be all the thing right out of the gate. Let's just do one thing, and what a great way to look at it as, if you do this thing a couple of times, then cognitively, people's brains are more likely to say yes when you ask for the bigger thing. That's just genius.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah. And people like to think well of themselves. So if they said yes to you... It's counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to get people to like you is to get them to do you a favor. Because what happens is, in their mind, they're like, "Well, I don't do favors for jerks. You must be a nice person. Okay, let me do you another favor." Right? So it builds this social capital too. And they've shown that lots of small wins, just from a mental health perspective, lots of small wins bring more happiness than a few big wins. So just doing a thing that you know you can do and get away with or have to be successful, even if it's small, will actually bring you better mental health than shooting for the moon and then nothing happening at all.

Kristina Halvorson:
You are blowing my mind right now. Your brain hacks that you're talking about... Have you just been manipulating me the entire time I've known you? How did you get on this podcast?

David Dylan Thomas:
Who am I anyway, right?

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right. Is your name even David? No, this is fantastic. So tell me about what comes next? I mean, your job right now, you're doing these workshops, you're highly sought after. I see you speaking at, in fact every conference, or you're giving a thumbs up from some bookstore on some trade show floor. What are you thinking about next? What do you think the future might hold?

David Dylan Thomas:
So for me, it's a mix of things. So, yes, I'm continuing to, excuse me, ride or die for this book. And people are thankfully still interested. So continue to do workshops and talks and all that stuff. And that's a steady-ish stream of income, knock wood, and thankful that it has been a successful business. And I should clarify here, so checking my privilege, I have a wife with a very good job that is very stable. And so my contribution is more about, "Hey, can we do that roof work that we wanted to do for 10 years?" Not, "Hey, do we get to keep the house?" Right? So it is a privileged position I'm in. That having been said, it is in fact doing surprisingly well. So March of 2021, to clarify, I quit my job at Think Company and went full-time speaker and workshop giver and book money earner.

And for me what's next, honestly, is screenwriting. So I have this thing, I don't want to say it's on the side, I'd say it's maybe 50% of my attention. The other 50% of my attention from a professional perspective is I've been working on a screenplay for about two years now. Next year I go into a phase where I'm trying to create a budget for that to find out how should I raise money for this thing. And it's my goal to, over the next few years, actually make this movie. And it's a weird shift to think about, "Oh, content strategist. Next step's obviously make a movie."

But it is actually as core to my being as being a presenter, because I've been doing it I'd say even longer. I was working on movies ever since high school and I was actually a terrible public speaker in high school. But yeah, that's my next step is working on this... It's basically a social justice horror screenplay. So that is now taking as much of my time as going out and giving talks or working on new talks or anything like that.

Kristina Halvorson:
Okay. So, A, that's amazing. You're amazing. I will happily be your reader if you need a reader. B, I don't know if you know this, but I majored in theater in college and I'm telling you I'm a good actor. So you if you need a middle-aged white lady to show up and, I don't know, be a Karen, I could do that. Is that a character? I don't know. Call me.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, definitely. I'll have my people call your people and we'll set it up.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right. Seriously, that is so exciting. And just the breadth and depth of your accomplishments, and thinking and varied experience is just so fascinating and inspiring to me. And yeah, I just think you're the coolest. So thank you so much for being here with me today and for sharing your insights, and wisdom and brain hacks with our audience. And I wonder if you would take a moment to tell folks where they can find you on the internet?

David Dylan Thomas:
So the easiest thing to do is to go to daviddylanthomas.com. That's got all my socials on there, it's got a way to get in touch with me, you can learn more about my work, you can buy my book there. It's the one stop shopping. So I would just hit that up and from there you can find all my other socials.

Kristina Halvorson:
Can you make a movie trailer? Is it too early for that?

David Dylan Thomas:
So if I did, it would be stop motion with little Star Wars characters or something.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yes!

David Dylan Thomas:
I'm just at the screenplay level, but that is a very tempting path to take.

Kristina Halvorson:
You know who could help you with that? His name is Sean Tubridy.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh my God.

Kristina Halvorson:
He works for Brain Traffic.

David Dylan Thomas:
Don't tempt me. You know Sean would build the sets...

Kristina Halvorson:
I know, I will say...

David Dylan Thomas:
It would just be amazing. Actually, I should do that.

Kristina Halvorson:
Listener, I will include in show notes for this one the closing credits for Button, the recent content design conference that David Dylan Thomas so happily-

David Dylan Thomas:
Are those online? Can I watch those?

Kristina Halvorson:
Oh, I'm pretty sure they are.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh my god, they're so cool.

Kristina Halvorson:
So, anyway, Star Wars figures, mini sets, et cetera.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yes.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah. All right. Well thank you so much. I wish you well and the world is a better place with you in it, so I have hope.

David Dylan Thomas:
Thank you so much, Kristina. It's been great talking to you.

Kristina Halvorson:
Thanks. Bye-bye.

Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.