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This week on the Get More Smarter Podcast, our guest is Elizabeth Jarosz, a market researcher with Ipsos who specializes in conducting focus groups, including using “neurometrics,” essentially biofeedback technology that adds additional layers to respondents’ answers so researchers can really get at what they’re feeling in addition to what they’re saying. For instance, Elizabeth told us about devices that measure galvanic skin response, aka, do your palms get sweaty (or knees week, arms are heavy, etc.), and computer facial recognition analysis to see if the emotions coming through your face match or mask what you’re saying in response to questions.
She also told us about her passion project, Behind the Glass, which started as a social experiment in 2016, garnering over 1.5 million views on Facebook. The basic idea is you interview two opposing groups about each other in a focus group setting, but the twist is you allow each group to observe the other unknowingly. Then you bring them together to facilitate a conversation attempting to heal the divide between them. Here’s a clip from a Behind the Glass episode where Elizabeth interviews undocumented immigrants and Trump supporters and then brings them together in the end:
It’s an interesting concept that led to a very interesting interview, and we hope you enjoy it! While you’re at it, go ahead and subscribe to Elizabeth’s YouTube channel so she can keep growing her audience (and pop on over to ours while you’re at it and hit that subscribe button!)
For the non-interview portion of the pod, Jason and I dance on the ashes of the Matt Gaetz Attorney General nomination while nervously singing “be careful what you wish for you just might get it” as it becomes clear that bribe-taking-Four-Seasons-Total-Landscaping-press-conference-attendee-and-likely-foreign-agent-Florida-Attorney-General-Pam Bondi is next in line and will likely be confirmed despite her long list of obvious disqualifications, such as taking a $25,000 check to a political action committee from Donald Trump and then declining to pursue the crimial case against Trump University.
We also, for the very first (and likely last) time ever, agree with Colorado State Board of Education Member-elect and Former Colorado Republican Party Chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown that the fact that Gaetz won’t be prowling the halls of the Justice Department without an arresting officer is an objectively good thing:
We then examine guy-with-questionable-fashion-choices-and-holy-shit-are-those-literally-Christian-dominionist-tattoos-wait-and-he-was-also-credibly-accused-of-sexual-assault-once-wait-why-didn’t-he-ever-go-to-jail-for-this?
And that’s not the end of the disqualifications, unfortunately:
Jason finds a silver lining in all of this, namely that Trump is clearly not playing 5D chess, instead, that’s he’s likely playing Candyland, except we’re the pieces and the board is the actual planet earth in this actual reality.
We then examine how Project 2025 is going to impact the administration and the country (read: despite all the lies and feigned ignorance about it, it is the agenda):
And take a deep dive into the election results from Colorado’s closet congressional race, where Gabe-ish evans eked out a win over Dr. Yadira Caraveo in an election that will be one of the handful that kept the GOP in charge of the US House of Representatives.
We then pop over to our cousin blog ColoradoPols.com where Jason examines how it’s going in Aurora, Colorado’s third most populous city and the only one run by Republicans (bad, and about to get worse, especially if you’re an immigrant, undocumented or otherwise, or if you’re related to anyone with Temporary Protected Status).
That’s it for us this week! If you loved listening to it as much as we loved recording it, you can thank us by subscribing to the pod wherever you listen, following us over on Nice Twitter aka Threads, or New Old Twitter AKA Bluesky, and forwarding this email or sharing this post with your friends, your enemies, and your favorite former contestant on The Apprentice! THANK YOU so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time!
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