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I’m a journalist and a communications expert. My job, in both roles, is to find ideas that people haven’t yet put into words—the anecdote that could become a front-page story, the framing that could crystallize a founder’s philosophy into something a customer remembers.
In an hour interview with someone, it might not be until minute 45 that we start getting into the good stuff. In two hours, there may only be one thing that stands out to me—a side story, a detail, some color. A little piece of gold dust. An investor I’ve worked closely with calls these “extraction sessions.” I call the people who do them well Socrates-as-a-service.
Those details and stories aren’t on the internet. They’re not in any model. And the model hasn’t replicated yet how I pull them out of people. The gap between what AI can do and what a great human questioner can surface is still wide—and it’s the gap where the best stories live. If you don’t have some way to surface that information in your organization, your brand and messaging are going to sound like all the other twice-boiled content out there.
Osakan bread and the wisdom within
The stuff that I’m looking for has a name in management theory: “tacit knowledge.” The term comes from scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, who defined it with the phrase, “We can know more than we can tell.” It’s the expertise and intuition that lives in our bodies and resists being turned into a document.
In a frequently cited 1991 article, Japanese management expert Ikujiro Nonaka argued that while Western companies excelled at “information processing,” Japanese companies specialized in the “creation of knowledge,” through a feedback loop that turned tacit knowledge into a competitive advantage. His most memorable example: In the 1980s, the Osaka-based Matsushita Electric Company was struggling to get the kneading right in a bread machine. They sent a software developer to apprentice with a baker at a local hotel famous for its luscious loaves. The knowledge she brought back helped the team perfect the dough-stretching technology inside the machine and ultimately create a top-selling device.
I am sure that the lucky engineer asked the baker a lot of questions, but there was certainly a lot she absorbed just from watching. Indeed, Polanyi argued that tacit knowledge exists outside of numbers or symbolic language—the kind of systemization that AI requires to ingest information.
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This is interesting. I would argue that AI is perhaps ideally positioned to actually notice/detect these "specks of gold" because they are inherently outliers, if I'm not mistaken. AI more than anything knows what "normal" looks like, what average interviewee responses will be. What the person being interviewed is most likely to say given the industry and role they're in. Etc. I haven't experimented with this but I can't help wondering if even current AI could pull some of these key bits out with the right prompt that had it first categorize everything by how "expected" it was, and then focus on the unexpected/unusual. If current AI can't do it yet, it seems like a rich area for experimentation, prompt development, etc.
@Oshyan Thank you so much for reading! Definitely agree it's a rich area for experimentation, and I'm super curious to hear about any good prompts or methodologies here.
I find most podcasts to be almost long form infomercials selling an idea or a service or a book or a ..... whatever it is that day. And everything around that sales pitch is simply a way to get the audience to buy into the authority of the sales person. the great conversations are the ones where there's a real give and take and somewhere along the line there's a twist. Most people who end up on podcasts are truly professionals, used to telling a story, pitching an idea. It is only when you ge them out of that mode that you get the gold. the real reason they are where they are. And it is so rare to see. the Werner Herzog story you wrote about is exactly that moment. A fourth wall break revealing the truth.
Over a decade-and-a-half ago, my wife and I were lucky enough to host an "internet radio" talk show, "Walking A Walk", which featured hour-long (at least) conversations with folks from our great U.S. Military branches, both active duty and veterans (and their families) alike. Intentionally, our conversations centered on their military service, which of necessity included their values, morals, their sense of citizenship and service to Country.
I guess we must have stumbled upon much of what you describe as "Socrates as a Service" (I really like this phrase), as many (most) of our guests, after confessing to fear of the microphone ("I've never been on radio before!"), would say at end-of-program, and with self-amazement, "I've never talked about this before, not even with my family...", followed by "How did you get me to talk about this?!" I'd usually respond with something like "It was just your time to tell us about it...", something general like that.
But it was the questions -- we focused on honest, respectful, and yet curious questions, and strove to support them as their stories came out. In the best of those conversations, we laughed together with our guest, and we often cried with them too. The nuggets of gold... we recognized them when we found them, but we didn't explicitly dig for them. I'd guess that we discovered, through patient practice in a safe format, that their tacit knowledge of their own service, and the service of their close colleagues, was where their real "Stories of Bravery and Service" were truly located.
Thanks for helping make this all more clear to me, even at the remove of all these years since those precious conversations occurred.