Salt, Fat, Acid, UXR?! (w/ Samin Nosrat)

When we started People Nerds, it was with the ethos that lots and lots of people—from artists and activists to authors—might leverage design, research, and human-centered principles to inform their work. But what about food? And specifically, those who spend their life creating culinary experiences both big and small?

To guide us, we're joined by Samin Nosrat—author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and a contributor to New York Times Cooking and the New York Times Magazine. We discuss how she thinks of herself as a researcher, her method for finding and sharing stories carefully, and what she's nerdy about when not in the kitchen.

Be sure to check out Samin at our People Nerds event later this fall, a one-day digital gathering to explore how human-centered practitioners from all industries are adapting to our new normal.

Show Notes
Explore recipes and her Netflix show
Discover Samin's Book: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

Transcript

Samin Nosrat:

Curiosity has fueled me my whole life, and it has certainly fueled me in the kitchen and in my writing. I think the thing that I always try and teach people is—it's right there for you too. You have this. It's in you. You were born with it. You were born with taste buds. You were born with likes and dislikes. 

(Intro music)

Karen:

Welcome to the People Nerds podcast, expanding your human-centered practice with unexpected sources of wisdom. I'm Karen and I'm joined, as always, by my colleague and friend, Ben. Hey, Ben.

Ben:

Hi, Karen. That's right. We are halfway through season one of the People Nerds podcast, congrats to you. We thought we would drop a special episode to celebrate.

Karen:

That is right. It is special because we are talking to some star power today. To celebrate our first season, we have brought in the one and only, Samin Nosrat, for this episode. Now, if you do not know who Samin Nosrat is, Ben, can you tell us a little bit about her?

Ben:

Happily. Yes, Samin Nosrat is a chef. She is the author of the James Beard award-winning Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which was picked up by Netflix as a documentary series. She is a contributing columnist for the New York Times Magazine, and I think as you'll hear today, she's a People Nerd.

Karen:

Yes. To my great chagrin, I actually could not be in this conversation because-

Ben:

Would you say you're salty?

Karen:

I would say I'm heated. Okay. That's beside the point. Today, Ben had the fantastic opportunity of talking with Samin to learn all about her work. She also shared some spectacular wisdom with us about research and storytelling in her line of work, which is deeply integral to the process of collecting recipes, refining them, and educating the public using them. She has amazing pieces of advice for us about how to translate these deeply personal sensory stories and artifacts to be more widely applicable and educational, which is something that all of us have to do as researchers, no matter what it is that we're researching.

Karen:

We're all in the business of collecting people's stories and sharing them out in a way that resonates. We're really excited to learn from Samin and just interact with her, because she just sounds like the most spectacular person. We are also excited to be chatting with her today because we're proud to announce that she will be speaking at our People Nerds 2022 event this fall.

Ben:

That's right. After my conversation with my new best friend, Samin Nosrat, we'll be previewing the event, walking through some of the speakers, some of the topics that we'll be covering and the theme, which is adapt. At the very top, you should know that People Nerds 2022 is free, it's digital, and we really want you to be there. It's happening this October, so you can learn more and register via a link that we're going to drop below.

Karen:

That's right, Ben, but first, People Nerds conversation with the spectacular Samin Nosrat.

Ben:

Welcome, Samin Nosrat. I'm so excited that you're here joining me.

Samin Nosrat:

Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Ben:

There's just so much that I want to discuss with you, but I wanted to kick it off by asking you about your work, your practice as a chef, the work that you do around the stories, and the narratives that you tell, and the role research plays. For our listeners, I'm using air quotes because, Samin, the People Nerds community brings together, artists, designers, certainly trained researchers, all these folks who look at practices of gathering insights and stories to share. How is your work overlapping with research, would you say?

Samin Nosrat:

Well, I love this question also because I... Can I just be like an honorary nerd, first of all?

Ben:

My god, please. Please, of course.

Samin Nosrat:

Okay. Thank you.

Ben:

Of course.

Samin Nosrat:

Oh, okay, good. Now that's settled. To me, probably if there's one flaw, one of my major flaws is that I would say I overdo it on the research. I want to always know as much as possible before I start solving a problem. But the beautiful thing about cooking and eating is that it's something that we all do every day. And so in some ways, like when people... And part of what I do I would say also is, there's so many sort of different levels at which what I do arrives in people's lives. And sometimes I just wrote a recipe that you come across. Sometimes it's that you came to me to learn a technique. Sometimes it's that you came to me to learn an entire philosophy of cooking. Sometimes I'm just a funny person you saw on Instagram or in a video.

Samin Nosrat:

And I have put a lot of thought into the way that I want to intersect in people's lives and what it is that I want to offer people. And I would say at the heart of that, the root of that, is something joyful, but also educational. And I always am asking like, "What's the point?" As much as I love beauty and deliciousness, if there's no function there, then I try not to put the thing out in the world. And so all of those things being said, when I'm trying to encourage people who maybe are a little bit intimidated about entering the kitchen, I'm like, "Listen, you actually already have a lifetime of experience at your fingertips, at your taste buds."

Ben:

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Samin Nosrat:

It's not that you don't know how to eat or how to taste. It's just that maybe you haven't been sort of paying attention, doing it thoughtfully or attentively. So all you have to do is, A, turn it on, turn on those receptors, and B, frankly, you probably already have opinions. You may just not have the language to express those opinions or the way to sort of put those opinions into words and then be able to turn it into cooking. So a big part of what I've tried to do is give that to people, but all of that has taken an undo amount of time and thought and sitting and Post-it notes and organizational note cards.

Ben:

Yes.

Samin Nosrat:

And all of that kind of stuff and going and looking at all the books and all the cultures and traveling and tasting and trying to figure out, what do people around the world have in common?

Samin Nosrat:

Where is the science? And I'm not a scientist, I'm kind of just nerdy on a very basic level about science, because it helps answer a little bit of why and how, which is helpful for people. But any sort of tool that I can give people to help them understand, that's what I'm looking for in my research. But in a lot of ways, I believe cooking, there isn't that much innovation in cooking when you take a step back and look at like humanity over millennia. I say that sort of a little bit tongue in cheek. Of course there are people inventing all sorts of new things, but I wasn't joking, there's seven ways to cook stuff.

Samin Nosrat:

You can grill, you can seer, you can saute, you can boil, and that's the same wherever you go in the world. Right? And that's kind of, to me, an amazing, wonderful thing to celebrate. And so the more information I can get, the more I can geek out on that, the more books I can look at... I'm sitting here at my desk under two huge bookshelves of just all these books from all over the world and that's how I researched Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, was just book, after book, after book, after book, after book. And at UC Berkeley, there's an amazing cookbook library and I just was constantly going there and trying to find out ways to disprove my own theory, because I was like, other people are going to try and do it so I should try and do it myself.

Samin Nosrat:

So I think, yeah, curiosity has fueled me my whole life and it has certainly fueled me in the kitchen and in my writing. And I think the thing that I always try and teach people is, it's right there for you too. This is not something between you and me, or between you and cooking, or between you and food. You have this, it's in, you were born with it. You were born with taste buds. You were born with likes and dislikes. You maybe just have been a little bit separated from that because of either capitalism or the way that a lot of us came to America in the last generation or two or three, and have been separated from maybe our own cultural traditions. And if you go back to, there are some countries that have held on so tightly to those food traditions and where those things still are passed down from generation to generation. And so a way that I try to think of myself is like, I'm that grandmother for you. Maybe you didn't get it from your own mom or your grandma, but maybe I can be that person for you.

Ben:

Yes, yes.

Samin Nosrat:

And so, yeah.

Ben:

That's a lovely transition to, a big part of the People Nerds community are folks that like to inject or translate stories as a way to sort of actionize empathy and really tell those stories from folks who might not have been heard historically in the creation of a product or a service. And they feel, distinctly so, the weight that comes with translating someone's experience, sharing someone's story when it may not be their own. Doubtless, you have and it's a part of your recent work, trying to spotlight and foreground different ways of thinking about, and certainly creating culinary experiences. Would you walk us through how you think through access and representation when you are sharing stories with your audiences?

Samin Nosrat:

For sure. Absolutely. Yeah. This is something I've thought about both as a cook and as a journalist. And ultimately I would say the place that I have come to, and also I think we put a lot of thought into this when we were making the documentary, the show. And for me, I think... I'll give sort of a two pronged answer. One is about the actual stories and who gets to tell the stories. And I think for me, whenever possible, I try to let people tell their own stories in their own words, because there is just not a way for me to do it that is better than them, and something will inevitably be lost in my interpretation of somebody else's experience. And frankly, if I'm trying to put somebody or give someone a platform who has historically not had it, then why am I making myself a middle person in there?

Samin Nosrat:

And so when I had a column at the New York Times, that meant working really hard to do interviews where I just listened as carefully as possible, and I got the quotes that I wanted and needed out of the person that I was interviewing and let them tell their story. And then let that turn into a recipe in their own words, like there was this wonderful woman who was giving me her grandmother's okra stew. And so it was not my interpretation of her okra stew. It was her okra stew. And so there's that, but I also have to balance that when it does come into the kitchen and into cooking a little bit with what I do, which is some of that translation of making things, I would say, accessible, possible for any cook in America or beyond to make something, to offer alternative ingredients that are maybe more accessible because it's not so easy to go to, I don't know, an Ethiopian grocery where you live.

Samin Nosrat:

So I'm always sort of balancing, how do I stay true to the way you would do it, and also give people an opportunity to make this thing because I want them to have an introduction to your culture. And maybe if I can get you curious about something, then you'll hopefully follow that curiosity to either travel to that place or travel to that place by buying a book or watching a movie or going and listening to a podcast where this person themselves is telling you a story. And so I understand that sometimes my role is as the, let's say, more popular person or the on-ramp to curiosity, and I have to use that, but I do that very sparingly and I try and do it really sensitively. And for me, it comes from like, listen until like 2017 when my book came out, and honestly 2018 when my show came out, before that, I had basically been an invisible person to the world.

Samin Nosrat:

I was a brown woman with a funny name that's impossible to spell and pronounce for most Americans, and had been consistently invisibilized and a constant target of racism and misogyny, which hasn't really changed. And so those are the formative experiences of my life and my career. And so when I see things out in the world and when I'm sort of making a choice about like, well, should I write this Mexican recipe? I'm like, well, who am I to do that? And sometimes the answer is, well, I grew up in San Diego.

Samin Nosrat:

I've loved Mexican food my whole life, and maybe if I can find some people to give me this recipe and I can credit them along the way, and I can tell the story of why this means something to me and contextualize it so it doesn't look like I'm taking from these people in this culture, then I think I can feel okay about that because I very vehemently don't believe you should only cook or talk about or think about or write about your own culture's food. I don't think that's at all the message. I think it's just doing it in a sensitive and careful way. And when, for example, my family's from Iran and in popular culture, people from Iran and from our part of the world have historically only been portrayed as terrorists on television. And so to then all of a sudden see our food being popular and expensive in trendy restaurants, but being cooked by white people, is really not fun. Or to see things, people like pick and choose what they want from our culture and take that, but not give us the opportunity to be more than just one-dimensional thing, that sucks. And so the last thing I would ever want to do is do that to anybody else.

Ben:

Your work strikes me as one that, and you've mentioned it a few times, you are striving to be a great democratizer. At the top, you talked about the foundational elements that can create food across different... Chefs across different kitchens. A lot of People Nerds try to socialize the practices that they use. Like, "Hey, why don't we go talk to these folks, but just give them a video camera and take us along on their commute," if we're trying to think about mobility or access needs and transportation, let's just have them show us what it looks like, and what they describe often makes them better at research and better at socializing insights internally. You've been working on democratizing and making cooking and the combination of ingredients easier, more enjoyable, and revelatory from an experience perspective, how has it changed you as someone who spends their time in a kitchen, out with the ingredients, in the world, thinking about flavors and spices and things? How has it shifted your work?

Samin Nosrat:

I mean, over the course of my career... I started cooking in like '99, 2000. So it's been like 23 years, I guess. And I think this is probably true for many cooks, at least many of the cooks I know, and I would imagine this happens in other fields as well, but in the beginning for maybe let's say the first six or seven years, I was obsessed with technique and knowing everything and learning everything and all the terms and eating in all the fanciest restaurants and knowing who's the best in the world. And one of my best friends was an another cook and we would go eat in restaurants and we would save up and go eat in all these fancy restaurants, and we would just sort of tear everything apart from a critical point of view, not to be mean, but just so we'd be like, "Well, what's this, what's this, what's this, what's this?"

Ben:

How did they use this? How did they prepare... Yeah.

Samin Nosrat:

We're like, "Would we do it this way? Would we..." And that honestly got so boring. I was like, this sucks. This took all of the joy out of eating. And it was just not fun. Also, nobody wanted to ever be around us, ever.

Ben:

Oh, gosh.

Samin Nosrat:

It was horrible. So at some point I was like, I don't want to be that person. I don't want to... Also, I very conscientiously now, I mean not that I eat in restaurants right now at all, but when I, for the last let's say 15 years when I've gone into restaurants, I very carefully choose to sit facing away from the kitchen, whereas before that I would always want to watch the kitchen and see what they were doing. Now I'm like, I don't want to watch. I want to unplug.

Ben:

Right. Yes.

Samin Nosrat:

I want to be here, to be present with the people I'm here with. And I think, this is going to seem kind of a little bit out of blue, but Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets and one of her great themes is paying attention. And to me it's a beautiful sort of almost holy grounding idea for living, for life, certainly for cooking. And I think for me, the way that my own teachings have sort of manifested in my life is that I've realized like, oh, some of the most skilled people, some of the most thrilling concepts and the thrilling ideas, you don't actually have to be in the fanciest laboratory kitchens. They're everywhere right around us waiting to be found.

Ben:

Sure, yeah.

Samin Nosrat:

I remember my colleague wrote this beautiful column for the Times magazine, maybe six or seven years ago, about this Yemeni flatbread that was, in a lot of ways, like the precursor to laminated dough. Laminated doughs are the kinds of flaky doughs where, usually butter, but any fat is kind of rolled out into like a fat slab and then folded inside of a rich, buttery dough, and then over time, the dough gets folded over and over again to create flaky layers. So you can think of a croissant is a classic laminated dough, or puff pastry. So these things turn into, over time, something that has many, many flaky layers. And if you were to ask me, "Where did laminated doughs originate?" I would be like, "Well, obviously France or Austria, that's where it comes from."

Samin Nosrat:

But when I read this column, it blew my mind because she went into this history of this amazing Yemeni flatbread, which is made with like clarified butter and it's a much more sort of crude or rudimentary way of doing it, not so sort of like perfect technique, perfect wise, but it's 800 years older. And it's related to rotis in India.

Ben:

Sure.

Samin Nosrat:

Which are also done the same way, basically, scallion pancakes are made throughout China, where you put fat into a dough and fold it over and over again until you get this delicious flaky thing. And so it was this kind of thing where I was like, "Oh my gosh, here I've been being like, of course, white Europeans invented laminated doughs," but actually for almost a thousand years longer, people in other parts of the world were doing this exact same thing that is so delicious.

Samin Nosrat:

And of course it makes sense. People will kind of come to the same conclusion if you give them the same ingredients. That's what I was saying. There's only seven ways of cooking. But we, because of just the way racism works and the way culture works, we will always sort of go toward a certain type of person to give them the praise. And so I think that's where the democratization shows up for me is, I'm now just looking around me at all times, wherever I go, whether it's my local Thai restaurant or some wonderful... I did actually eat inside of a restaurant. It was like the second time the whole pandemic. I went to this wonderful restaurant in San Francisco called San Ho Wan, which is a Korean restaurant from this fantastic, lauded chef, Corey Lee, who has all these fancy restaurants, but he came from the French Laundry and it's, technique wise, so excellent but it's his ancestral cooking. And so a lot of my Korean friends who've eaten there are like, "It's the most soulful food he's ever made." And I have to say, it was so delicious. It was so good.

Ben:

I believe it. Yeah.

Samin Nosrat:

It was so good.

Ben:

Sure.

Samin Nosrat:

And so, yeah. To me, I think there's something to learn everywhere and that's what I've kind of learned is, there's something for me to pay... As long as I'm paying attention, I can learn something from anyone. Here's another funny one, my assistant Gary who left recently, he couldn't cook a thing when he came to me.

Ben:

What a position for Gary to be in.

Samin Nosrat:

Yeah, I know. Gary's the best, but he did not come because of his cooking skills. And he has many skills, but they're mostly, I would say, cerebral skills, not so much in the physical world. And I had said to him, actually looking at my own self, something kind of racist in the beginning where I said, "Oh, does your mom cook really good Korean food?" Because his parents are from Korea.

Ben:

Okay.

Samin Nosrat:

And he's like, "No, actually my mom makes really good hash browns and breakfast burritos." He grew up in New Mexico where the breakfast burritos rain supreme.

Ben:

Oh, yes, yes.

Samin Nosrat:

And I was like, "Really? Her hash browns are the thing you miss the most?" And I was like, "Tell me more about these hash browns." Well, it turned out that when they had first come from Korea, his uncle had bought a diner, like a 24 hour diner or something, in LA, and that the guy who owned the diner had taught the recipes to the uncle when he sold them to him. And so one of the ways that this guy made the hash browns, and I don't know if he had figured out that this was the best way or if it was just one of those efficiencies in running a restaurant, is that he would boil the potatoes, just russet potatoes, he would boil them in the skin the night before.

Ben:

Oh, okay.

Samin Nosrat:

Yeah. Which is completely a new way of making hash browns that I've never heard of. He would boil them a whole the night before until they were tender and then let them drain and then put them in the fridge overnight. And then in the morning, he would peel them and grate them on the greater and then fry them. So that's how his mom makes hash browns. And when his mom makes hash browns, Gary was like, "These are the crispiest, most delicious hash browns of all time."

Ben:

Sure. Yeah.

Samin Nosrat:

So I tried it and it is so awesome. I'm going to put it in my next book. It's so awesome. And also it's really easy because you can break up the thing into two steps. It's a great way if you're having people over. You can also just do a whole bunch of potatoes and then grate them and make them over a course of a couple days, you can make a huge potato pancake.

Samin Nosrat:

I mean, it's so brilliant. And then I asked one of my food science nerd friends about it and he was like, "Oh, that kind of makes sense because you're gelatinizing the starches and doing this, this, and this." And it's one of those things where I'm assuming that they didn't figure out the science of it and that wasn't why they were doing it, but it ended up being this truly brilliant genius thing. And I learned that from Gary who can't like, tie his shoes. You know what I mean?

Ben:

Shout out to Gary. Love it. Gary coming with the hash browns fire, hash brown energy.

Samin Nosrat:

They're definitely going to be called Mrs. Lee's hash browns. Yeah.

Ben:

Yes. Yes. Well, it's been so wonderful to learn more about the ways that you foreground and spotlight and aperture different stories. I can't let you go without asking, because again, it's the People Nerds community and you said at the top you would love to be, I mean, you're an honorary, not an honorary, you are an official foundational member. What is something that you're nerdy about that folks might be surprised to hear or learn?

Samin Nosrat:

I don't know how surprising this is, but I would say I'm really into my garden, and to the point where I'm into the Latin names of all the plants.

Ben:

Oh man. Okay. Like you're rubbing the leaves and you can tell the...

Samin Nosrat:

Oh yeah.

Ben:

Yeah, sure.

Samin Nosrat:

I mean I'm really into plants and I think it seems like it would have come from food, but what's interesting is that it didn't actually come from there. My interest came from flowers, and I have this wonderful friend, these two friends, Sarah and Nicolet who are these incredible florists in New York, and they make these sorts of lush, Dutch master-style, flower arrangements. And I sort of fell in love with their work over the internet maybe 15 years ago and we befriended one another and I started sort of cooking for their classes and demonstrations. And I learned a ton about flower arranging and about flower geekery through them and all the different types of flowers and the Latin names of the flowers and where the flowers come from and the colors.

Ben:

Yeah.

Samin Nosrat:

And then once I had a chance to be a gardener, have a garden, I wanted to grow some of those flowers in my own garden. And then you start paying attention to flowers and gardens when you're walking around and the trees and the leaves and the foliage. And then eventually that extended back into the vegetable garden too. But it's funny because I didn't come to vegetable gardening through cooking, which is where maybe that would probably be the more direct route. But I love flowers so much. Yeah. I love flowers and I love a Latin name. I do.

Ben:

Fantastic. Well, Samin, it's been so nice to get a little bit of time with you. Thank you so very much for some of it. Obviously check out Samin wherever her thinking and creative endeavors might strike you. It was so nice to spend a little time, Samin.

Samin Nosrat:

Thank you so much. What a lovely, thoughtful conversation. Thank you for your great questions.

Ben:

Of course. Thanks

Samin Nosrat:

Take care.

Karen:

All right. And that was the fantastic Samin Nosrat. I am so jealous that I could not be in that conversation.

Ben:

Very, very, very grateful for Samin, my new best friend, for some of her time. It was clear to me that she connected with the People Nerds ethics, the focus on story empathy, and this broad set of activities that we talk about on each episode that you and I call research. So our thanks again to Samin for some of her time. You can follow Samin in her kitchen and in her garden at, at Chow Samin on Instagram or online at chowsamin.com.

Karen:

And again, we are so excited that Samin is going to be the keynote speaker at our People Nerds 2022 digital event, this fall, October 19th. Here at the end of the episode, we actually want to spend a little more time talking with you about what this event is, what it means for us, and why we hope that you're going to be there. So, Ben, do you want to kick us off and just tell us a little bit about what People Nerds the event actually is?

Ben:

Sure. Yeah. As we talk about here, we maintain a blog and a couple of other ways that you can engage with us online, a slack community, a newsletter. But we heard from enough people and ourselves were feeling that we wanted to connect in person to sort of bring the family together in a room, swap stories, sort of just be with one another and sort of feel that co experience that comes with an in-person meeting.

Karen:

It can just be such a siloed industry otherwise.

Ben:

Yes.

Karen:

Can be hard to know who else is out there, what else people are doing, and that's really something that's been behind People Nerds from the beginning.

Ben:

Yeah. Not everyone works at a place where UX has more than two people on a team. And so teams of one, small agencies, mixed and mingled with the large enterprise, SAS multinational sort of UXs embedded and very mature. We had Sarah Kenig as our keynote speaker, again, someone thinking about story and empathy much like Samin is. And again, the big takeaway for me was just how valuable it was for folks. Certainly the panels and presentations and cases were valuable, but just talking with one another, talking about tools, techniques, tactics for bringing stakeholders in. A lot of the things that we'll be doing at this digital event, but yeah, in 2019 it was just great to bring everyone together. But of course, 2020 happened and we are still living with that new reality. And so this year we have a digital first format. It is, as Karen said at the top, this October. It's going to be free for anyone who wants to join and be there. We'll just use a service where you can chat with one another and still connect. It'll look differently, but we wanted to make it as accessible to as many different kinds of folks as possible. And Karen, do you want to talk about our theme this year?

Karen:

Yeah, absolutely because I'm super excited about it. It feels so timely. Our theme this year is adapt, and we chose this theme after a lot of thought and research, I think for some reasons that might stand out as pretty obvious, right? Since our last event in 2019, the research landscape along with literally everything else in the world has changed enormously in ways that none of us could have possibly anticipated. And these years since then have really pushed all of us to rethink everything about how we do research. Our approaches to human-centered practice, the methods that we choose to use, and our overall work style collaboration style with our own teammates. I know this is true for me, it's definitely true for us over here at the People Nerds team, but we also did some research recently.

Karen:

You can find it on our blog at moves to modern research, but we found in that research that this is something that is on the mind of industry leaders just across the research space. Everyone has kind of been pushed off of this precipice into a new world of remote research, of remote working, and we all need to figure it out together. So we really wanted People Nerds to be a voice in that conversation. So this year's event is going to be all about that. It's going to be all about how we adapt and we're going to be bringing voices together from both within the UX community, as well as our unexpected sources of wisdom, like Samin, all to speak on what human-centered innovation is going to look like moving forward.

Ben:

That's right. We'll have cases where folks are using D Scouts qualitative research platform to talk about how they're making the case for that sort of empathy forward human centered insight. We have panels talking about things like inclusivity, accessibility, the Metaverse, and we'll have solo presentations with folks talking about how they're looping in stakeholders, how they're democratizing their practice while still maintaining rigor, and how they're, "doing" quote unquote, doing qualitative research in various different industries like healthcare, FinTech, and some of these other areas where we heard with our conversation with Veronica [inaudible 00:34:17], where there's sort of the maturity and the evolution is still happening. So once again, we would love to have you join us. I think you're going to, no matter where you are in the industry, no matter where you sit in an organization, if you're new to this space or if you're a senior team leader, you're going to come away with something. Again, we try to make it broadly appealing. They'll be ways for you to network with folks, chat, ask questions of our speakers. It's not just going to be one way. We really strive to make it, like we do with all of the things that we do here at People Nerds, we're trying to make it reciprocal, communicative, and two way.

Karen:

That's right. And also, Ben and I are very personally excited.

Ben:

Taking the show on the road, I guess

Karen:

We're very personally excited for you all to register and be there because both of us will also be there repping the People Nerds community, repping the podcast. We are going to be there moderating some panels, hanging out in discussions, networking, chatting with you, and also bringing our scouts, our participant pool, straight to you by bringing our scout sound off show on the road. We are going to be asking our scouts about how they adapt and to speak on different parts of our theme so that you can hear directly from our participants as well as all of these folks from both inside and outside of the UX community. So we can't wait to meet you. We really hope you register. Again, the date is October 19th. It is free for everyone. We will drop our registration information in the show notes. We so hope that you can join us.

Ben:

Yes. Thank you so much again to Samin. If you'd like to hear more podcasts like this, Karen and I would love for you to review the show and subscribe. If you like it, tell your friends, tell your family. Again, People Nerds is for all. You can learn more about People Nerds and read articles about how to upscale your practice and make your work more human centered at peoplenerds.com and we are available across all social media with the handle at Dscout.

Karen:

Thanks so much, Ben. It's been awesome to chat with you, although I couldn't be part of the Samin conversation

Ben:

We missed you. We did.

Karen:

Well, thank you. Thanks everyone for listening today. Tune in next time for more interesting conversations and food for thought from outside boundaries of UX. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time, nerds.

Ben:

Nerds.