Brian and Andrew sit down with Angela Chavez, Insights Manager at Dig Insights and UGA MMR graduate, ahead of her first-ever conference presentation at the Future of Insights Summit in Athens this August.

Angela's talk is called "Learning Research in a Rapidly Changing World," and this episode is a preview of exactly that. She walks through what it has actually been like to enter the industry as AI was exploding, going from hesitant early adopter to someone who opens ChatGPT as a reflex, all while growing from analyst to manager.

The conversation also gets into Dig Insights' tech-forward approach and what Angela's early career experience reveals for senior leaders trying to figure out how to onboard, train, and develop the next generation of researchers right now.

Key Takeaways:

• What it is actually like to learn research and AI at the same time, in real time

• How Angela balances keeping up with new tools while still doing the work

• Where the gap between academic foundation and real-world practice still shows up

• Why early career researchers have a perspective that senior leaders should be paying attention to

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Andrew is back from his honeymoon, and Brian is very glad to have him. This one is part reunion, part rant, and entirely worth listening to.

First, the honeymoon stories. American Airlines lost three out of four bags for six days. The Vatican Special Police detained Andrew and his wife in the Sistine Chapel after mistaking them for a couple who had made terrorist threats. The Secret Service showed up at the wedding because of a drone and a Vice President flying nearby. All of this is true.

Then it gets into industry territory. Brian recaps the Verisoul-sponsored Cincinnati Reds event that brought together 40 companies and became an impromptu who's who of the Cincinnati research community, with a surprise appearance from Insights Association CEO Anita Watkins. The conversation builds into a genuine debate about who actually has the microphone in market research right now, whether the loudest voices at conferences are the most credible ones, and what it means that the biggest booths increasingly belong to companies with outside capital rather than the most rigorous methodologies.

Brian and Andrew close with a quick AI check-in, a plug for the upcoming July 9th webinar on the trust deficit in sample, and a tease of future episodes where they plan to screen share and show what they are actually building.

Key Takeaways:

• Why the Vatican Special Police detained Andrew and Brooke on their honeymoon, and how it ended

• Why Verisol's Cincinnati Reds event was one of the best community-building moments the local research scene has seen

• Whether the people with the loudest voices at industry conferences are the right ones to have the microphone

• What traditional research firms can do to compete for visibility in a world where outside capital buys the biggest booths

• Why AI is now part of daily life, not just a work tool, and what Brian has been quietly building with it

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Brian sits down with Samuel Cohen, CEO of Fairgen, for a no-fluff conversation about what is actually happening in synthetic data and who is positioned to win as the space matures.

Samuel cuts through the vendor noise fast: most companies claiming to train models on millions of survey responses are not doing that. What is under the hood is usually far simpler, and the lack of transparency is quietly eroding trust in the whole category. Fairgen's answer is to model at the individual level and be open about how it works.

The conversation also covers how collapsing time to insight is changing research workflows, where digital twins fit alongside real respondents in the next few years, and Samuel's unfiltered take on which players are well-positioned and which ones need to rethink their model now.

Key Takeaways:

• Why the data behind the model matters far more than which LLM is powering it

• What most synthetic vendors are actually doing versus what they claim

• Who wins as synthetic data matures and who is in trouble

• What are the best use cases for Digital Twins & Synthetic Data

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Connect with the CEO of Fairgen, Samuel Cohen:

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• Fairgen