🎧 Episode 7: How I Decided To Leave Denmark for Wyoming + Bonus Feature on Hume AI
Today I’m publishing Episode 7of my podcast How I Decided — How I Decided To Leave Denmark for Wyoming.
🎙 You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Youtube
Be sure to click ‘Follow’ on Spotify and also follow the How I Decided Instagram!
My guest is Ida Krause. Ida and I met at NYU last year through NYU tennis and we instantly connected over our shared enthusiasm for the sport. I’ve honestly been avoiding discussing tennis in How I Decided for a bit now but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to have Ida on the show. Ida grew up her whole life in Denmark playing tennis and when it came to choosing where to play college tennis in the US she chose to play at the University of Wyoming. For those who are unfamiliar with what it’s like to live in Wyoming or Denmark, let’s just say that these two places could not be more different. What I love particularly about this episode is that Ida’s story reinforces the idea that after we make a big decision like where to go to college, our work is far from done…we still face challenges we have to overcome.
In our conversation we discuss:
- 00:00 Intro
- 02:32 Growing up Playing Tennis in Denmark
- 09:39 Choosing a School Outside of Your Comfort Zone!
- 13:27 Making the College Decision With Limited Information and Help
- 16:48 Persevering Through a Rough First 6 Months in College
- 22:50 Living in the US vs Denmark
- 24:22 The Impact of Tennis on Ida’s Life
- 28:10 This or That!
Takeaways
- For Ida, framing her decision around where she could grow the most by being outside of our comfort zone helped her land at a great spot. By choosing a path that’s very different from what you’re comfortable with ,you give yourself the opportunity to learn new things and meet people different from you.
- At the same time, choosing something outside of comfort zone isn’t always smooth sailing. Ida really struggled in her first 6 months of college. I think this can happen to a lot of us where we’re adjusting to new people and surroundings and we start to imagine if the grass is greener elsewhere. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but in Ida’s situation she was aware that if she just stuck with it a little longer she could really grow from that adversity and now she looks back upon her time in Wyoming really fondly.
- This also relates to an idea called mental time travel, which is what I think Ida was doing when she was in that rough patch at Wyoming. It’s the idea that in the moment something may suck, but if you imagine yourself in the future looking back on that moment, doing mental time travel so to speak, you’ll laugh at it or actually see how you became a better person through those times. So if you can have that tool in your pocket to recognize that things just seem bad in the heat of the moment, then you can get yourself to push through and not make a hasty decision to transfer to another school or give up on what you’re doing.
Hume AI
I came across this AI tool that can parse through a video like this podcast episode for example and measures levels of certain emotions by analyzing facial expressions from the video. I thought it was the coolest thing and I tried to see what were the most intense emotions expressed during my conversation with Ida!
Each frame from the podcast video is recorded and for each frame a score from 0–1 is given to all 48 of the emotion labels. The scores reflect the likelihood that an average human perceiver would use that emotion dimension to describe a given expression, and higher score values reflect higher intensity of facial expression. I then took the median score from all the frames for all the emotions to find the most intense emotions from the episode.
Top 3 most intense emotions
- Interest: 0.53
- Amusement: 0.48
- Joy: 0.4
Other notable emotions
- Admiration: 0.21
- Awkwardness: 0.20 (curious to see how this changes from episode to episode!)
- Satisfaction: 0.30
I also found the highest single value for each emotion throughout all frames in the episode and actually found that there was one frame in the episode where Joy was at 1.01! I looked up the timestamp and found that it was during the This or That section.
I’m still not entirely sure how to use this data to help with my podcast, but I wanted to give it a try and I’ll certainly continue to do it to see if I can find patterns. You can check out the full data set yourself here!
Referenced
- Lenny’s Podcast — I get a lot of inspiration from this!
- Lenny’s Podcast episode with Annie Duke on Decision-Making
Where to find Ida
Where to find Alex
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-yang15/
Thank you so much for reading and listening. If you’re interested in decision-making like I am, would love to connect and share notes! Think there’s anything I should’ve followed up on in my convo with Ida? Reach out and let me know!
