The Analytics Power Hour

Before there was BI, there were "decision support systems." Somewhere along the way, we seem to have quietly dropped the "decision support" part and just kept the systems. Zohar Strinka, founder of Analytics Strategies and creator of the Meta-Problem Method, joined us to put the point back where it belongs: if nothing is going to be done differently after the analysis, then the analysis had exactly zero effect on the world. But -- and this is the part that's easy to miss -- that does NOT mean marching up to a stakeholder and demanding, "What decision are you going to make?" People don't want a model that hands them the right answer. They want to understand and weigh the trade-offs themselves, which means good decision support looks a lot more like a really well-informed pro/con list than a score. We got into problem spaces, high-yield problems, the cost of being wrong in each direction, why "we have all this data, so the answer must be in here" is really just a person pulverizing a bag of rocks hoping for diamonds, and, ultimately, peanut butter.
This episode is brought to you, in part, by our sponsors, Stape and Prism from Ask-Y.
For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Stephen Follows has spent 15 years turning film-industry curiosity into a career — asking questions like how much movies really earn, why poster colors have shifted over decades, and whether old studio domains are still up for grabs. In this episode, he joined us to talk about building that unusual path, the cautionary tale of TheNumbers.com, and his theory about Sandra Bullock. Go start your passion project.
This episode is brought to you, in part, by our sponsors, Prism from Ask-Y and Stape. 
For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Everyone's posting their AI projects online like proud pet owners sharing videos of their cat doing something marginally impressive — cute, occasionally clever, sometimes a little cringe. And the Analytics Power Hour is no different! In this co-hosts-only episode, Tim, Michael, and Julie skip the thought leadership hot takes and just… compare notes. What have they actually built? What broke? What surprised them? From a custom GPT podcast librarian to a full-blown show production app wired up to Neon, Vercel, Resend, and about five other things Michael is only sort of sure he set up correctly, to a Gemini Gem that simulates a client interaction so realistically it raises your blood pressure in a safe environment — there's a lot of ground covered. Plus: why AI-generated communication has a Stevia aftertaste, why deploying AI context across a team is way harder than it looks, and why the LLM will absolutely tell you what you want to hear about your Meta spend if you give it half a chance.
This episode is brought to you, in part, by our sponsors, Stape and Prism from Ask-Y.
For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Twenty years of digital marketing created something of a monster: companies poured enormous investment into analytics teams, MarTech stacks, media capabilities, and data infrastructure—and then watched all those functions march off into their respective silos to work really, really hard at producing activity rather than impact. Rusty Rahmer, founder of Starize AI and author of Working As Designed, joined Michael, Julie, and Val to dig into why that happened, why it's still happening, and what it actually takes to flip the shovel over and use the right end. Along the way, Rusty—who Val correctly identified early as a spontaneous analogy machine—explained why customer journey maps on walls are basically the statistical average American life that literally nobody lives, why waffle fries are structurally superior to ridged chips (and what that has to do with cross-functional team design), and why the most important question a marketing leader can ask a room full of executives is also the one most likely to be met with complete silence.
This episode is brought to you, in part, by our sponsors, Stape and Prism from Ask-Y.
For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Here's a question analysts almost never ask themselves before walking into a room: why am I actually here? Not "because it's the weekly meeting" or "because someone asked me to pull the campaign readout." But WHY—what difference will the information coming out of my mouth make, and for whom? Aleya Harris, bestselling author, TEDx speaker, and strategic storytelling advisor, joined Tim and Moe to dig into exactly this kind of thing—and she did not pull her punches. Analysts are often the smartest people in the room, she says, and that might actually be the problem. The gap between "here's what the data shows" and "here's what we should do about it" is precisely where story lives, and it turns out storytelling isn't some soft, hand-wavy thing marketing people do—it's a repeatable, learnable framework that has been working on human brains for millennia. Plus: a cautionary tale about ranking on page one for the wrong keywords, the tweaking-the-deck death spiral decoded, and an elevator pitch exercise that reveals your carefully crafted slide deck says something completely different than what you actually think.
This episode is brought to you, in part, by our sponsors, Stape and Prism from Ask-Y.
For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.