I can’t think of a period within my lifetime when Americans were more polarized than they are today, and I’m not just talking about the red/blue political division that was laid bare in last month’s presidential election. Every day it seems like the gulf widens between our nation’s heads and hearts, as technology and tradition tussle in a tug-of-war tearing our intellect and emotions in opposite directions.
Stepping into that breach is Janine Klein, an Orlando-based actress turned entrepreneur, who has built a successful small business by bridging the gap between artists and the Air Force. It’s an old joke that “military intelligence” is an oxymoron, but “military emotional intelligence” soon might not be, thanks to Klein’s company, Eii (eiieq.com), and their clever combination of cutting-edge video games and old-fashioned improvisation.
If Janine Klein’s name rings a bell, it’s probably because she’s been making appearances in this column for nearly 15 years, starting with a shout-out for the 2010 Fab Fringe fundraiser, and her powerhouse performances have been featured in countless previews and reviews over the years. A native of New Jersey who was raised in Florida by theater-loving parents, Klein initially studied opera at North Carolina School of the Arts before switching to musical theater. She’s since played everything from the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz and Misery‘s Annie Wilkes to a RuPaul’s Drag Race backup singer, supporting her best friend Joshua Eads (aka Ginger Minj), with whom she co-starred in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, as well as countless Sleuths Mystery Dinner shows.
You might not expect a drag-friendly diva to become the CEO and sole owner of a company that trains members of the armed forces, but Klein’s career path was forever changed when she witnessed a demonstration at UCF of TeachLivE, a prototype online virtual classroom. “I was obsessed with the technology,” she says. She recalls thinking, “This is the missing piece; this is the missing link. This is role play on steroids! This can transform the world.’ I was blown away by it.”
After initially working for the company that purchased that technology, then being laid off during the pandemic, Klein formed her own LLC called Eii — for “Emotional Intelligence Institute” — and reached out to some programmers behind one of today’s most popular online games.
“I called everyone I could find on LinkedIn that worked at Roblox to tell them that I was doing this incredible work with these avatars with the Air Force, and they were blown away,” says Klein, who ended up getting customized military uniform avatars and several years’ worth of server data for free. “They were instrumental to the success and the growth.”
Today, Eii has developed its own avatar and claims scores of Air Force bases on its client roster, but the basics remain the same: Trained actors adopt personas and interact with officer trainees in emotionally sensitive scenarios — ranging from death notifications and sexual assault to suicide prevention — in the guise of CGI characters, which Klein says are intentionally crude to avoid the uncanny valley.
“If you’ve got a Polar Express look going, you’re freaking people out. There’s something about these avatars, keeping them cartoonish and just emotional enough, that does not hurt the participant. They don’t focus on the way the person looks [and] it’s somehow disarming.”
Their exteriors may be artificial, but although Klein anticipates leveraging AI someday, for now the intelligence beneath Eii’s avatars remains entirely human, and often driven by Orlando-based actors. “I can’t imagine a robot giving a death notification that their son [or] their daughter has died in battle [that’s] going to be authentic. And I haven’t found any machines that can duplicate what a sexual assault victim feels like internally.”
As a self-described “treehugger,” Klein didn’t set out to be a military contractor, but says that soldiers are the ones who needed Eii’s services most. “At the end of the day, they’re real people. It took me a while to get used to that they’re not just lieutenant colonels; they’re human beings.”
In fact, the company is branching out into white-label services for leadership consultants, and looking for more ways to train first responders and veterans. “I want to help people find their own internal creativity that they never really had a chance to explore when they were in the military, and I want to find a way to help people find what speaks to them creatively.”
Over and over again during our conversation, Klein brought up the importance of “empathy.” That’s a quality many fear is endangered, especially under the incoming administration, but Klein sounds confident that Eii’s retention-boosting training will continue to be in demand, as long as leaders still need to have difficult conversations about topics like denied promotions and postpartum depression.
“I want people to not feel alone, [and] the main thing is just knowing that we’re all one human race together. I want people to know that they’re OK.” That’s what Klein says she told the game developers who helped launch her business, and the same spirit also inspires her as an artist: “I just want to keep the human involved in the human conversations as long as humanly possible.”
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This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2024.