How Storytelling Leaves a Lasting Legacy - Verdell Walker

In today’s episode, I chat with Verdell Walker, a seasoned consumer-oriented content and marketing professional and board director. Verdell is highly regarded by her peers as a thought leader and someone who fosters an inclusive environment, demonstrated by her effectiveness in leading and working collaboratively with teams. She serves on the board of directors of Scholastic, Inc, and has held roles at Spotify, Mattel, and Sesame Workshop - the makers of Sesame Street. 

With stints at such iconic brands, a good place for us to start was the tension between legacy and innovation. How did this factor into Verdell’s thinking? 

We discussed her enduring legacy at Spotify; developing the brand’s first slate of original kids & family podcasts and garnering nearly 400K listeners less than 5 months after launch! What did she learn taking that journey?

And we closed discussing the future of content. In an era punctuated by AI, how will organic creativity shine through?

Verdell Walker

Verdell Walker is a seasoned consumer-oriented Content and Marketing professional and board director. She has a proven track record of developing and executing innovative strategies that achieve bottom line growth and increase brand value. She is highly regarded by her peers as a thought leader and someone who fosters an inclusive environment, demonstrated by her effectiveness in leading and working collaboratively with teams.

Walker serves on the board of directors of Scholastic, Inc, and has held roles at Spotify, Mattel, and Sesame Workshop. Walker received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Economics and Middle Eastern Studies from Trinity College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She also holds the CERT Certificate in Cybersecurity Oversight from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Matt Burns

Matt Burns is an award-winning executive, social entrepreneur and speaker. He believes in the power of community, simplicity & technology.

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Transcript

Verdell Walker: It.

Verdell Walker: There are different levels of diversity, and.

Verdell Walker: The voices that are allowed to be.

Verdell Walker: Get to be in that room.

Verdell Walker: So that's just one tiny example of having an environment of psychological safety, where people feeling safe, expressing at a dissenting point of view, and then also knowing that the people around you are open to it, open to having their mind.

Verdell Walker: Constraints.

Matt Burns: Strains drive innovation hey, everyone, it's Matt here for another episode of thinking Inside the Box, a show where we discuss the innovative ways organizations and their leaders overcome complex issues at work. If you're interested in checking out our other content, you can find us at our shiny new website, insidetheboxpodcast.com, and on all other, uh, favourite podcast platforms by searching thinking inside the box.

Matt Burns: And if you enjoy the work we're.

Matt Burns: Doing here, consider leaving us a five star rating, a comment, and subscribing it.

Matt Burns: Ensures you get updated whenever we release.

Matt Burns: New content and really helps amplify our message. In today's episode, I chat with Verdell Walker, a seasoned consumer oriented content and marketing professional and board director. Verdell is highly regarded by her peers as a thought leader and as someone who fosters an inclusive environment, demonstrated by her effectiveness in leading and working collaboratively with a number of teams.

Matt Burns: Today, she serves on the board of.

Matt Burns: Directors at Scholastic, Inc. And has previously held roles at Spotify, Mattel and the Sesame Workshop, the makers of Sesame street. With stints at such iconic brands, a.

Matt Burns: Good place for us to start was.

Matt Burns: The tension between legacy and innovation, and how did this factor into Fidel's thinking and, ultimately, her storytelling? We discussed her enduring legacy at Spotify, developing the brand's first slate of original kids and family podcasts, garnering nearly 400,000 listeners in less than five months. After launch, we asked questions like, what did she learn along the way? What would she do differently? And we close, discussing the future of content in an era punctuated by AI, how will organic creativity shine through? It was another in a long line of memorable conversations, and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did recording it. And now I bring you Verdell Walker.

Verdell Walker: There we go.

Matt Burns: I've never been more happy to hear recording in progress. Verdell Walker, how are you doing today?

Verdell Walker: I'm doing wonderful. How are you?

Matt Burns: I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Matt Burns: Uh, for those who don't know who you are, a bit about your background.

Matt Burns: Your experiences, and what's led you to today.

Verdell Walker: So, Verdell Walker, uh, I like to say I'm from a two stop light town in west Georgia, on the border of Georgia and Alabama, and stories, uh, are my passion stories and storytelling and connecting with users. I think that's been kind of the through line throughout my whole career. Started on Wall street, and I was telling stories through financial models and the investment reports that I was writing to tell investors what to do with the stocks that I covered, all the way to the brand campaigns that I worked on at Mattel and Spotify. So had a lot of stents, um, in a number of different big companies. Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Journal, then went to business school because I wanted to round out my business, uh, toolkit, expand it from finance and strategy, then, uh, spent a little over a year working at Sesame Workshop, which is a nonprofit behind Sesame street. And yes, that was every bit as cool as it sounds. Then, said Mattel, uh, working on Thomas train engine, then also at, uh, Spotify. And I also serve on the board of directors of scholastic. So a lot of experience and a lot of work in the kids and family space and education.

Matt Burns: It's a fascinating space, and we're going to try and poke a little bit at some of those stories. And I know there's some good ones, both in terms of the ones you've experienced and the ones you've helped tell, because you've worked with some really iconic brands. You mentioned a number of them in your intro, the Mattel being one, sesame workshop, and then also Spotify. I'm just curious. These are, in some cases, exceptionally iconic brands that people have a very strong connection to multi generations.

Verdell Walker: Right.

Matt Burns: How do you strike a balance when you're creating a brand and thinking about its legacy, but also embracing the inevitable innovation to kind of roll with the know?

Verdell Walker: Matt, I think what's important, what I've always tried to keep in mind, is just stay rooted in brand purpose. Like you were like, um, people fall in love with and develop an affinity for brands for a reason.

Verdell Walker: And I've had the honor of working on some brands that are, in some cases, like, over 100 plus years old.

Verdell Walker: So there's a lot of brand equity and affinity that's being built, and I think you really have to stand in the fact that what that brand means to people. Um, I'll give you an example. Two examples, actually. First, so when I was at Sesame workshop, I spent a lot of time working on the international editions of Sesame street. One in particular was Takalani Sesame, and that, uh, is the south african edition of the show. So Takalani was created in response to the AIDS crisis in South Africa. And so after 20 years on the air, obviously it wasn't the only thing that contributed to the AIDS crisis being under control, but it was a part of that. And so they were in a situation where, what does this show mean now that the AIDS crisis is under control? And a lot of the work that I did was just helping them figure out what that show should stand for for the next 20 years. Like, what kind of themes and topics should it tackle for south, uh, african society? But while the thematic focus may have changed, the mission stayed the same, and that was serving the educational needs of south african kids and families and their socio emotional needs. So everything that you had to do from that point on, like, no matter what topic or thing that you want to tackle, you had to stay rooted in that focus. And same thing when I worked on, uh, Thomas and friends at, like, we experimented with a lot of different things to kind of expand the reach of that brand, but everything was rooted in.

Verdell Walker: The brand purpose of Thomas, which is friendship.

Verdell Walker: Friendship was the most important thing, um, in that brand DNA, and just being there with a child for its biggest moments, for his or her biggest moments in their life. And Thomas was, for a lot of kids, their first best friend. Right. And so everything was rooted in that core DNA of friendship. And I also think it's just kind of taking. It's important to take really a strategic, data driven approach to content. Thinking about content, need states. That was where I started with everything. Even as pursuing kind of new, innovative formats, any different stories to tell. Everything was started with the user.

Verdell Walker: Like, what do they need at a particular time of day?

Verdell Walker: And for a lot of my career, it's been like, people who are 3ft tall, so they're experiencing life for the first time, and so many first. And sometimes that can be exciting, it can be scary, it can be overwhelming. Like, what do they need at a particular time of day? And I think what's interesting in particular about kids and family entertainment is that, uh, you have a bifurcated end user, so you're also serving that 3ft tall.

Verdell Walker: Person, but there's a gatekeeper in their.

Verdell Walker: Life who's typically mom, um, but a parent, a grandparent, a teacher. So you have to think about their needs state as well, what do they need during the day and as they serve that kid. So that makes kind of like kids and family content, I think, doubly challenging in many ways, because there are two people that you have to please there.

Matt Burns: Well, I think it's this collision of storytelling and deeply rooted humanity, and then also this data driven thinking that is really what fascinates me about the work that you do and the things that you worked on in the past, because seemingly those two things couldn't be any more dissimilar. And yet they come together in this really wonderful collage, as it were, of, I'm sure, a combination of customer surveys and testing, and you're working with various stakeholder groups, some of which are quite louder than others, and, um, some of which you go to and some of which come to you and you're managing that, and then you're also managing ratings and the business side and having to look at APIs.

Verdell Walker: Alphabet soup, right?

Matt Burns: Yeah, exactly. And all this wonderful kind of work goes in the front and at the end of the day it comes out and there's a result where it gets distilled down into a number and trying to harmonize those two things. I think it's really interesting, and I love the fact that you speak about always returning back to the missions. I think that adds clarity to that seemingly odd pairing. Um, and I just would love to understand, as you're working with stakeholders in particular, how do you navigate that? How do you navigate that really sticky middle spot of trying to not be all things to all people, but try and make everyone feel like they're at least listened to and heard in a complicated process?

Verdell Walker: I think the most important thing, Matt.

Verdell Walker: Is always focusing on the why. Um, I was saying this to someone the other day, it's just I noticed.

Verdell Walker: That there's always a tendency to jump.

Verdell Walker: To the KPI without getting the OKR set first. And for those who don't know, OKR, objective and key result, right, your KPI will reveal itself.

Verdell Walker: But if you don't do the work to sit down and think about what is your objective and key result, what.

Verdell Walker: Is that thing you're driving towards?

Verdell Walker: Whether it's increasing revenue or increasing brand awareness, increasing brand affinity, getting new users on your platform, whatever it is, I think a lot of times people will just rush to develop metrics and say, we're tracking these metrics and this is how we're performing against benchmarks and whatnot, without taking the time to sit there and think about what is the key.

Verdell Walker: Result that you're driving towards.

Verdell Walker: And secondly, I think of content too, like a product. A lot of people may disagree with that point of view, but at the end of the day, it's the same thing that people who build apps or websites or digital products are like. You are developing a product that is meant to serve a consumer need and content is exactly like a tv show or a podcast or a TikTok. Video or whatnot. When you're creating those, it is meant to serve a specific need, or it should be, because it should be user driven. It's like you want to sit there and think about. It's like, how do I want my fan, my consumer? Consumer?

Verdell Walker: I kind of shy away from that word because it's just so capitalistic sometimes.

Verdell Walker: Yes, we work in companies, but people are more than just our consumption habits, right? So I try to say things like fan or user or someone like that. Again, words mean things, right?

Verdell Walker: Um, but what are they feeling?

Verdell Walker: What are they doing? What do they need? What do they say that they need? What are the unspoken things that they say that they're not saying that they need? What are we trying to fill there? What problem are we trying to solve? What job are we trying to get done there? So I think once everybody is good, you have to get everybody clear on that key result and who you are trying to serve and the problem that.

Verdell Walker: You are trying to serve for that.

Verdell Walker: Person, group of people that you're trying to reach. And as far as making sure everybody is heard, I know this is just simple, right? But you ask people, you talk to them, you ask people's opinions, right? And I, uh, always just try to come to the table with not just my opinion or how I feel, but this is what I believe based on these facts, based on these observations, based on these insights, and put myself in the shoes of the person opposite to me, honestly, what are they being compensated on? What are incentives are important? Their goals? What are they incentivized to do? At the end of the day, maybe it's crass, but it's just like, what is their paycheck based on? They paid on commission or they paid on salary? It's just like, what are they going to be asked? What are they going to be speaking to when they're, um, doing their reviews with their manager, right? Because that's how people are motivated. I think just taking the time to understand someone else's motivation and what they need to get done and their jobs to be done and how you can work in partnership together. That's often been half the battle. A boss of mine told me that one day, know, when I was working at the Wall Street Journal, we worked a lot with salespeople, and I was having a hard time kind of relating to some of them. And he sat me down and he was like, listen, Vertell, these people, they.

Verdell Walker: Get paid on commission. They have quotas to hit, right? And that just kind of unlocks something.

Verdell Walker: In 25 year old Verdell's brain she.

Verdell Walker: Hadn'T thought about before. It's like. So that's why they were acting. It just.

Verdell Walker: Sometimes someone just has to say something.

Verdell Walker: Obvious, and I've taken that throughout my career. Right. What are other people's incentives?

Verdell Walker: So, hopefully that answers your question, Matt.

Verdell Walker: Yeah, it does.

Verdell Walker: Sometimes as simple as just asking, just being straight up with people, it's just like, what are you trying to do? What do you need? What are your goals?

Matt Burns: And in the attention economy that we're all living in now, it's hard to.

Matt Burns: Get people's attention to ask them a question.

Matt Burns: So when you have the opportunity, it's important that you take it, because it is a gift. Um, I don't know about you, but I attend more meetings now where people are checked out than I did before. Just, by extension, the fact that we're on Zoom calls and people are on camera. And I'd like to think that people are paying full attention. But if personal experience tells me anything, sometimes you have a ring of the doorbell or you have a message that comes in unexpected and you're not fully attentive as you would have been maybe in, uh, an in person meeting. So you have to fight really hard to just be present in your work, to say nothing of managing more complicated stakeholders that you're talking about here. It's, for me, a, uh, really interesting space, because when you think about this new world that we're living in, there's very much a significant change in how we're looking at the interactions with content and with knowledge and with information than we once did. I mean, I grew up in a world where most of my bosses were.

Matt Burns: Baby boomers, and they came from a.

Matt Burns: World where information was currency, and it was withheld and it was guarded and it was walled off, and it was sometimes privileged information. And we've now entered into a space now where everyone has the ability to create and distribute, um, air quotes information, and it places a premium on getting it right. And that's why I'm curious.

Matt Burns: One thing I saw in your background.

Matt Burns: You stepped into board advisory roles really early in your career. Most people that I talk to are doing so in the kind of later chapters of their career, looking as a way to kind of give back or a way to kind of maybe take a partial foot off the gas. But you lump this on top of a full time job, really trying to add value at the board level. I'm just curious, what was the motivation behind jumping into that fray, and did it meet your expectations?

Verdell Walker: I realized that I wanted to have.

Verdell Walker: Like, a writer impact. Right.

Verdell Walker: Just when I think about, kind of.

Verdell Walker: Like, my portfolio of activities, it's my day job, it's the community work that I do, it's the mentorship and just always thinking about, how can I have.

Verdell Walker: Impact at a wider scale and touch more people at once. And board service seemed to be a great way to make impact like that at scale, because then you can touch an organization. So it really was a drive. It's just like wanting to have a wider impact. And then I had the opportunity to attend training through a wonderful program through Santa Clara University called Black Corporate Board Readiness. And it is a program that is modeled on another program from Santa, um, Clara called the Women's Corporate Board Readiness Program. So BCVR, um, is all about getting black professionals training to make them board ready for board service. And so before I did that training, Matt, I didn't know what I didn't know.

Verdell Walker: You talk about information being, uh, currency, right?

Verdell Walker: Like, this was like, what is the duty of care and duty of loyalty? What is director's liability insurance, fiduciary responsibility? All of these things that I knew, kind of, like, at a high level. But that program really took me through, and then the rest of my cohort, I was the first inaugural cohort, um, of VCVR, and just took us through what it meant to be a board director. And how you show up in the boardroom and being on a board is just being on another team, really. It's like you're another team of people, and it's a little bit different, because when you're an executive, you're in the weave. You're doing the work, you're rolling up your sleeve.

Verdell Walker: You're doing the thing, right? But a board director, you're not doing.

Verdell Walker: The thing we taught us in BCVR. It's noses in and fingers out. Like, your job is to support management. It is to be a sounding board for management, to push back on management when they talk about their strategy and the things that they are wanting to do. Um, and to represent the interests of shareholders. Um, another key job of the board is the hiring and the firing of the CEO, which can be fraught at times if you've seen in the news with certain organizations where the board can either get caught slipping or have had to take aggressive action. So I think my board service, in terms of meeting my expectations, it has exceeded my expectations, Matt, um, because I have been able to have an impact on the organization I'm part of, which is scholastic in so many different ways. And it's made me a better executive because it's given me an enterprise view of how to tackle really hard and thorny challenges in today's fast moving business environment. And honestly, it just makes me sharper in my day job. And it's become kind of my personal ministry in life to get more diverse.

Verdell Walker: Executives on boards and to get that.

Verdell Walker: Talent, more women, more people from historically excluded backgrounds as well, to represent in the boardroom, because those voices are needed. One, because that's what consumers look like, uh, our days. And also because having those diverse opinions, I strongly believe, leads to sharper outcomes and better business decisions.

Matt Burns: Hey, everyone, it's Matt here. I hope you're enjoying today's conversation.

Matt Burns: And before we continue, I want to.

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Verdell Walker: So, it's totally exceeded my expectations, and I'm so humbled and just so excited to be a board director. And I look forward to continuing to do that. And I feel really lucky to have the ability to do that at kind of an earlier stage in my career. As you said, in a lot of.

Matt Burns: Cases, uh, an accomplishment that speaks to what you're talking about, which is adding.

Matt Burns: More diverse voices around the table. Proverbial table, and I couldn't agree with you more.

Matt Burns: Answers and outcomes are always better when you add more diverse perspectives. I've seen it in practice, and there's lots of data. The data bears out that is actually true. That's where it gets really interesting. When you talk about changing the ways of doing things and embracing a newer way, because sometimes the data and the practice don't always line up.

Verdell Walker: They don't. Um.

Matt Burns: And that's something that I had to learn the hard way in the business world. At points in my career, I led large analytics practices that would reveal both problem and solution, but spent a majority of my time managing relationships when the reactions came out based on the result. And I learned very quickly, to your point, that was my introduction. A lot of ways to motivation, because I realized that when you create incentives for people to be skeptics and question accuracy of information, you never actually get to the dialogue around how do we be at better? And that you need to create conditions for the healthy discussion if you're going to actually get improvement over time.

Verdell Walker: Yes.

Verdell Walker: You have to create an environment of psychological safety.

Verdell Walker: Like, I do this as just like.

Verdell Walker: An executive, and I also strive to.

Verdell Walker: Do this in the boardroom and everywhere else, too. And I feel really lucky in particular on the scholastic board, we are great about, um, respectfully disagreeing at times as well.

Verdell Walker: But it all goes back to the point. It's just like, we are a team, and we're all marching towards the same thing. And I think one of the things.

Verdell Walker: That'S made me successful in my career is being able to make people feel.

Verdell Walker: Safe opening up to me, and that was learned through many years of trial and error and hard practice, too, but building that relationship with folks and also just making it safe to have a dialogue and also to disagree. So, when I joined the board of.

Verdell Walker: Scholastic, I single handedly brought down the average age by, like, 30 plus years. And the discussions that we have, too.

Verdell Walker: I am bringing a perspective that a lot of my colleagues had never heard before.

Matt Burns: Sure.

Verdell Walker: Things like, uh, maybe we should pay.

Verdell Walker: The head of our ergs or whatnot.

Verdell Walker: And there definitely have been times when I've said things or brought a different perspective, they'll turn and look at me, and it's like, I have never heard.

Verdell Walker: Anyone say anything like that before.

Verdell Walker: I have never heard that before. And one example, we were talking about diversity and inclusion work, and who does.

Verdell Walker: That work in an organization?

Verdell Walker: And I had put forth a point of view is that a lot of times, I tend to shy away from such work because it is typically undervalued and it is not compensated, and it does not come up in advancement discussions. And a lot of it is just.

Verdell Walker: Like unpaid emotional labor, particularly from those who are from historically excluded backgrounds.

Verdell Walker: And a lot of my colleagues had.

Verdell Walker: Never heard that dissenting point of view before, and they were very grateful to hear that dissenting point of view.

Verdell Walker: And that's the beauty of having differing opinions and people who come from different walks of life. And it's not just about race and gender, right?

Verdell Walker: There are different levels of diversity, and.

Verdell Walker: The voices that are allowed to be.

Verdell Walker: Get to be in that room.

Verdell Walker: So that's just one tiny example of having an environment of psychological safety, where people feeling safe, expressing in, uh, a dissenting point of view, and then also knowing that the people around you are open to it, open to having their minds changed.

Matt Burns: That's when you really get progress, and.

Matt Burns: That'S when you really start to see a fundamental shift in an operating model. And again, I understand, for individuals that are resistant to change, history has told us that incrementalism is a key factor for success. But we're now moving into an era where incrementalism is no longer a practical option. You have to be willing to question things in a way that you didn't before, and there will be external factors that will drive this discussion in a way that you simply can't avoid AI. Like, you're just not going to be able to say, okay, I'm just going to opt out of AI. AI is going to be ubiquitous.

Verdell Walker: Yes, exactly.

Matt Burns: Now, you may not need to understand how to code so that you can write applications and direct prompts for AI, but it will become a filter, a cloaking, uh, mechanism over almost every digital device that you have going for, because it's going to make your life easier and more connected. Now that's going to make people really uncomfortable. And at the same time, it's not an uncomfortable obsession for people like you and I, who've been living in this data world for quite some time, and looking at macro trends and understanding that we're not looking at individual, we're looking at macro, and we're looking at large quantities of information and then using them in part to inform decisions that go forward, not to isolate specifically no cause. And one of the things I think about an organization that's done this exceptionally well is Spotify, a company that really came into the market pushing a strong data backbone, and the algorithm, which very quickly distinguished itself in terms of its ability to match people's preferences with the right types of programming. And over time, I know that one of your legacies, if you will, from that organization was developing the brand's first original kids and family podcasts. And in that time, you garnered close to 400,000 listeners in less than five months, which is an incredible accomplishment, I can tell you, from having a podcast. And I'm very curious about the journey of somebody who is creating storytelling, creating narrative, creating content, and then using a new medium with which to communicate that content, in this case, the Spotify platform. And what were some of the discussions that you had kind of in the ideation phase? And what was that journey like for you? Kind of going through that.

Verdell Walker: So I was head of kids and.

Verdell Walker: Family audio, too, and was the first person to hold that role. And when I came in, I had two goals, Matt. One was to create the HBO of Kids audio content. I use HBO, um, intentionally there, because they have built a brand, right, that is rooted in quality. And I wanted our content to have.

Verdell Walker: That same level of cachets. Like when people were tuning in to Spotify kids and family originals, they have the same expectation of quality, because kids and families. Kids and families deserve that. To really elevate families taste and raise the bar for their content expectations. And for me, the OKR, to use that acronym again, was elevating audio to the same level as tv and video.

Verdell Walker: And families media diets. That's a hard goal, right? But that was the long term north star that I was charging towards, my.

Verdell Walker: Team and I, and having child development being at the center of that, that was just branded into me from my time at Mattel and Sesame workshop, is you have to sculpt the content, the product, the experience, in a way that is developmentally appropriate. So that was the first goal. And the second goal was windows and mirrors. So, helping kids and families see themselves the mirror and also see into the lives and the worlds of people who.

Verdell Walker: Are not like them, the window.

Verdell Walker: So diversity and inclusion was, uh, at the core and at the foundation from the very beginning. That's not something that we have to retroactively do. It was there from the beginning, and I drilled that into my team, I.

Verdell Walker: Drilled that into my cross functional stakeholders. That was something that was very important. And so establishing those two overarching goals, everything flowed from there in terms of kind of our content strategy.

Verdell Walker: Like, we built content in three key verticals. Entertainment content, purely entertainment. Because fun is a need, too, I.

Verdell Walker: Always say fun is a need.

Verdell Walker: Basic human need, a basic human need. Educational content and routine content. Thinking about a child's day from morning to night, where are the times of day? And the instances where we can win with the content intervention that delights the child and also serves a job to.

Verdell Walker: Be done of the parent or the educator.

Verdell Walker: And I want to go back to the fun thing in particular, too, because even if something is kind of, like.

Verdell Walker: Educational or it's built around a routine or a part of your day. Like, fun is the kind of basic need for kids.

Verdell Walker: I just believe, let kids be kids for as long as possible, because they have, like, decades, uh, ahead of them to worry about scary and overwhelming stuff. Let kids be kids. Fun is always that other need. It is fun. And let's teach you about ocean animals. It's fun. And let's teach you about being, um, in a garden and, like, nature work. So parents are going to make their kids engage with content they don't like. I don't care how educational or nutritious it is. Like, if the kid don't like it.

Verdell Walker: They'Re not going to do it.

Verdell Walker: So fun is the need, and fun is the foundation. And so, um, those were kind of like, the overarching principles there. It's just like, keep it fun. You want it to be entertaining. It's taking the time to craft great stories and to craft a wonderful experience. And like you said, I'm really proud we've got awards to show for that. Garden keeper. Gus was one of the shows that I loved deeply. It was, um, a nominee for a 2023 Kids Screen award for best podcast. The Arabian Nights was another show that we had put out, too. It was just named one of common sense media's best podcasts of the year for 2023.

Matt Burns: Congratulations.

Verdell Walker: Thank you. So, yeah, we've got a little awards on the mantle, too, in addition to the content itself. Another thing I would love to touch on that I'm really proud of is.

Verdell Walker: Sound up, kids and family.

Verdell Walker: So, sound up is a longstanding Spotify program that gives equipment and funding and training to podcasters, particularly from historically excluded backgrounds. And the kids and family accelerator that we did was the first genre specific flavor of sound up. And I think it's been. Honestly, it's the thing I was most.

Verdell Walker: Proud of, uh, from my entire time at Spotify.

Verdell Walker: The thing I was most proud of is, like, we brought in ten creators to create shows for kids and families, and we brought them to Los Angeles for in depth training. We gave them equipment, we gave them money to produce a pilot episode. Uh, one of the graduates, Toni Kennedy, she has released her show. She had, uh, recorded her pilot episode in part of Sound up. She's released her show called what's Poppin'Penny, and I'm just so deeply proud of her. I'm like a proud mom seeing this.

Verdell Walker: Out in the world, you know, my.

Verdell Walker: Most impactful expressions of leadership have always.

Verdell Walker: Been my efforts to empower others to tell their own stories.

Verdell Walker: And that is just one of the, um, sound up kids and family accelerator is one of the ways I showed.

Verdell Walker: Up in the world. So, yeah, a lot of Adele airtime there, but I really just kind of wanted to, uh, give that shot.

Matt Burns: Changing lives. Changing lives and telling cool stories.

Verdell Walker: And I think that's cool stories.

Matt Burns: And let's be honest, last three years have not been easy for anybody. And of course, there's a sliding scale. I'm not trying to segment one over the other, but it's been challenging for the collective.

Verdell Walker: Yeah, I always say it's just like post pandemic. During the pandemic, everybody was living in their own special flavor of hell.

Verdell Walker: Hell looked different for different people, but it was your own particular flavor of hell.

Matt Burns: And for a lot of individuals, community and content was a real source of comfort and togetherness and escape. And for that reason, I don't want to move past it. At the same time, for me, one thing that we've touched on a couple of times in this conversation that I'd, uh, be remiss if I didn't double click on it is artificial intelligence. So, artificial intelligence, we're hearing it now in almost every other news story and article. It seems to be popping up all over the place. You get your predictable doomsday narratives mixed in with your greatest latest use case narratives, and everything in between. I'm just curious, as you think about the future of programming, of content, of communication, of education, you can pick whatever umbrella term you'd like. How do you see artificial intelligence influencing that in the future? I get it. It's a massive question. So maybe let's limit it to the next couple of years. From a consumer perspective, what can we expect to see as far as innovations in the space that you can put your thumb on?

Verdell Walker: Yeah. So I kind of look at this from three different point of views, and we'll talk about them in term, like as a user and as an executive and part of an enterprise. And then also, lastly, from a moral standpoint.

Verdell Walker: So from a user perspective, um, there is so much consternation about being replaced.

Verdell Walker: And again, this stuff changes on a daily basis. Right. But as for now, I worry less about people being replaced and more about people not putting their heads in a.

Verdell Walker: Stand and getting out there and learning.

Verdell Walker: How to use the tools.

Verdell Walker: I think there are a lot of folks out there who are a little too gleeful about the job replacing potential, and that's really kind of gross to me. But I think for a lot of people, I want them to be comfortable.

Verdell Walker: Experimenting with these tools. I think that's the thing of tomorrow, because it's a tool, right? If you looked at anything that Chat GPT, um, spits out, like, 99.9% of that is not ready for prime time.

Verdell Walker: It needs a smart human to finesse.

Verdell Walker: It a little bit, and sometimes a lot of it, to make it ready for prime time.

Verdell Walker: And so something that really fascinates me about a lot of these tools is, ah, that, like you were saying earlier, the importance of prompt engineering. I have never seen anything so illustrative.

Verdell Walker: Of the adage garbage in, garbage out.

Verdell Walker: Than AI, because crafting a thoughtful, nuanced prompt is the only way to get a thoughtful, nuanced answer from chat, GPT and like the rest of them. And it just seems to me that.

Verdell Walker: Prompt craft in particular requires a very.

Verdell Walker: Strong grasp of language and grammar and an expansive knowledge of areas like history and art and literature and culture, subjects.

Verdell Walker: That are often derided, right, or thought of as not that important.

Verdell Walker: But having knowledge of these areas is.

Verdell Walker: Just clearly essential to creating something, creating a prompt that can get you closer to what you want.

Verdell Walker: I think AI as it stands today, who knows if that be true tomorrow, even next year. But as it stands today, it's great.

Verdell Walker: For grunt work, honestly. It empowers talented people to be creative and to work faster.

Verdell Walker: So that's kind of how I see.

Verdell Walker: It from the user perspective.

Verdell Walker: So now, putting on my executive hat.

Verdell Walker: Right, the executive and board director in.

Verdell Walker: The enterprise level, I think, um, one of the things that excites me about tomorrow and today of these is one of the things that excites me about this from that perspective is the ability to kind of create your own large language models. If you're a company, you've produced reams and reams and reams of data and documents, from customer service chats to your.

Verdell Walker: Own presentations, memos, and emails.

Verdell Walker: There's probably enough there in the average.

Verdell Walker: Company that's been around for a couple.

Verdell Walker: Of years to create your own kind of like, or small language model, right? So I think from an executive perspective there, one of the things that I'm just really excited about is creating kind of custom models, and I think, um, that's going to be a place where you see a lot of kind of innovation. A lot of companies tackle this, and also from this lens. And this bleeds a little bit into my moral pov too. But from an enterprise level, thinking about the resources that are involved in this, like, for example, there's a tremendous amount of water being used to cool the.

Verdell Walker: Servers that power AI, right?

Verdell Walker: I think I remember reading in the information that Microsoft alone used more than 2500 Olympic sized swimming pools of water.

Verdell Walker: In its data centers last year.

Matt Burns: Wow.

Verdell Walker: So think about what that means from.

Verdell Walker: A resource perspective, from expenditure m, um, perspective, and that ESG layer.

Verdell Walker: Right?

Verdell Walker: Like thinking about the environmental impact of that. I think that the environmental impact in particular is something that doesn't get a.

Verdell Walker: Lot of play in media, maybe because it's not sexier enough, but with stories.

Verdell Walker: As I started reading about, particularly the water usage around that too, and I.

Verdell Walker: Was like, that is actually a massive.

Verdell Walker: Problem for governments, for organizations, for companies to deal with the resource intensive nature of that. So that is going to be something else that will have to be tackled. And secondarily is anything that's built by people is going to have bias built into it.

Verdell Walker: Right?

Verdell Walker: And so how are companies going to make sure that what's coming out is nothing can ever be devoid of bias, right?

Verdell Walker: But you really have to think about.

Verdell Walker: Uh, who is building these models, what is it being trained on? And kind of like filtering out biased answers. That is a high degree of enterprise risk. Right? Let's know. Someone just gets chat CPT to spit something out in a memo, and God forbid they post the tweet or the TikTok video and whatnot, and it hadn't been looked at properly.

Verdell Walker: And now it's out there in the world with something that should have been out, that should not be out there in the world, and that's not brand.

Verdell Walker: Aligned, that's a massive problem. So that's kind of like where I'm thinking about this from the executive standpoint. And then also, I would be remiss.

Verdell Walker: If I didn't touch on the moral.

Verdell Walker: Standpoint of this, too. And again, water usage and the environmental impact falls under this umbrella, but also.

Verdell Walker: Paying for the ip that these models are trained on, like Wikipedia and SEC filings are one thing, but books and scripts and other copyrighted uncomfortable. It makes me feel a lot, uh, of uncomfortable, honestly.

Verdell Walker: The writers Guild just fought and won a battle to gain AI protections for writers. Um, if you're not in Hollywood, you may not have been following those closely, but the writers Guild is the union that represents television and film and screenplay writers, and they were rightfully concerned about, uh, the impact of AI on their business. And I think, um, something else that recently came out that really made me sit up is a large venture capital firm said that, uh, their investment decisions were predicated on not paying for those inputs. And if it's decided that they have to pay for those inputs, then that completely changes their investment thesis. And right now the US copyright office is getting closer to creating new rules and regulations around generative AI and how that technology will use the work of.

Verdell Walker: Authors and other creators.

Verdell Walker: And that's something that I'm like on.

Verdell Walker: Pins and needles waiting for to see what they rule.

Verdell Walker: And I look at this and as a writer myself, it just doesn't feel good to have your ip used without consent or payment.

Verdell Walker: It's hard to write books and novels like as someone who has done it before, multiple times. And that's just the things that I do on the side, not counting the stuff that I do on the day. It's. It's hard to write that stuff.

Verdell Walker: There's a lot of brain power and.

Verdell Walker: A lot of heart power in that too.

Verdell Walker: And the Atlantic published an article where they actually had a corresponding database where you can type in authors and books and whatnot and see what is in these data sources. And a lot of it is very.

Verdell Walker: Popular books from authors that I love and some things that are clearly still under copyright.

Verdell Walker: And when I look at this from a moral perspective, and just because something's hard and expensive doesn't mean that it's not worth doing. So I'm really interested to see what the copyright office, how they will land in terms of making sure people are compensated for that.

Verdell Walker: And that's just text based stuff. Let's not even get into artists, right, because their work feeds kind of like the image generating AI models as well.

Matt Burns: It's a lot, and you've raised a number of really interesting points, and I will just try and chip away at them in the segments that you've bucket them. So let's start with the organization, the employee, as it were. I think you're right. A phrase that I like that I've.

Matt Burns: Heard a few times is you're unlikely to be replaced by AI, but you're.

Matt Burns: Very likely to be replaced by somebody who uses AI 100%.

Verdell Walker: You'll be replaced by somebody who's good at it, who is not afraid of it, and who knows how to use.

Matt Burns: It well, because it's a force multiplier.

Matt Burns: And to your point, it's not going to give you the pinpoint accurate, beautifully crafted solution, but it's an eager intern and that it's going to get you most of the way there and then you're going to need to bring it the rest of the way there. And that's probably a good process for most people, and that it's going to save them a lot of time, save them a lot of research and provided they use good sources and good prompts.

Verdell Walker: They'Re going to probably and free them.

Verdell Walker: Up for the higher order work that humans should be doing anyway.

Matt Burns: Frankly, I share your concern that I think in a utopian view, I would hope that if you're working an obscene amount of hours per week, let's just say 60 plus hours per week, and you're not being paid for that, mind you, that efficiencies that are be gained by technologies will be able to be recouped by people who are spending the time and that they'll be able to work 50 hours a week. My gut tells me that's probably not the case, that they're probably going to expect them to produce more in the shorter period of time with the same amount of hours you're spending right now.

Verdell Walker: Probably another podcast. Matt yeah.

Matt Burns: I think this segments to the next part of your bucket, which is I think there's a responsibility of the people that are creating and shepherding the technology, if it's internally or externally. I was really surprised to see organizations and leaders have different reactions to Chat GPT some in the market were openly embracing it. Some were saying, can't be in our company, we're going to block it and everything in between. And I think after the hysteria has kind of died down, we're getting to a place where the responsible use of AI is encouraged, understanding the limitations, understanding that as the person using the large language model, you still bear the responsibility of the output and need to do your work and do your due diligence. And you have a responsibility to ensuring things are properly cited and researched. At the same time, I think it's incumbent upon leaders and organizations to put parameters on how they're going to use artificial intelligence around the data in their organizations because they're going to be able to look at internal stats that previously were invisible. As a board member, I expect that you'll be able to see a much more rich, data driven view of the health of an organization than what you presently see today, which is curated stats put onto PowerPoint slides that are then presented to you in a very curated kind of dog and pony show experience. But in the future, you'll be able to pinpoint data using artificial intelligence that will tell you where you have opportunities, where you have some risk, where you have some big wins that you want to celebrate. And I think that's really exciting for leaders. But I think to your point, if we overlay the right ethics and integrity on our ideation and use of the tool, I think we're going to get really good results. I think if we don't, then I think we're going to get what we put into it. And I encourage people that are experimenting and learning with the tool that they consider the ethics of it, whether it's the environmental ethics, the social ethics, the employment ethics, and making sure that there.

Verdell Walker: Are, again, we're going to go back to it. Diverse voices in the room. Like, it shouldn't just be programmers in the room, the people who are building the models in the room, determining how it gets made. It's lots of people from different points of view being able to feed into that, to create a robust and responsible framework for how to use AI and its outputs. And not just how to use AI, but how you build your model. Right? What are the inputs that you allow to go into it as well? You want lots of different voices at the table for this because it is going to, uh, affect everyone, so everyone should be able to feed into those discussions.

Matt Burns: This has been a great conversation.

Matt Burns: I really have enjoyed where we've gone the time, all the richness of the stories, as well as just your perspective. Thank you so much for Adele, for the opportunity to speak today.

Verdell Walker: Thank you for having me. I loved it.

Matt Burns: Ento HR is a digital transformation consultancy working at the intersection of strategy, technology and people operations. We partner with organizations, private equity and venture capital firms to accelerate value creation and identify the organization's highest leverage initiatives. And this can take place in many forms, from strategic planning and alignment to technology procurement, implementation and integration, along with organizational design, process reengineering and change management. With our proven track record of working with complex, high growth organizations, we provide, uh, a lens that goes beyond the balance sheet, increasing enterprise readiness, resilience, and value. For more information, check us out@bentohr.com.