Adam Talkington on Conversation & Interaction

Adam Talkington is Head of Ethnography at Further&Further, a strategy and research firm known for immersive cultural insight work with brands like Spotify, Boston Beer, and Adidas. Trained as a sociologist, Adam began his career in academic research. He now leads a team focused on helping brands uncover deep human truths—and isn’t afraid to challenge client comfort zones in the process.

So I start all these conversations with the same question—which I actually borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story.It’s a big question, and I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. But before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in total control. You can answer however you want—or not at all. The question is: Where do you come from?

I come from California. And I come from a lot of tragedy, I would say. I mean, I’m a conversation analyst, so I’m interested in the way you asked that question—not the words, but how you asked it. We could talk about that.

But yeah, I’m originally from LA. And I come from a pretty broken family. I think both of those things have been really important to who I am.

It’s funny, even the question “Where do you come from?”—that’s something I sometimes get on the street. I've lived in really, really white places ever since I’ve been an adult. And as a sort of ethnically ambiguous brown guy, people will walk up to me like, “Where are you from?”

And I’ll just mess with them—“I’m from California.”And they’re like, “No, no, no, where are your parents from?”And I say, “California.”

So in some ways, California is actually a really important place. It’s a huge mix of people. LA is such a fascinating and amazing, diverse place—you’ve got Latinos, white people, Black people, Koreans, whatever. A huge diversity of people. That’s really important to who I am.

Understanding those roots has been a big journey for me—something I wasn’t really able to close the loop on until a couple years ago. So yeah, the California part is really important.

I’m also pretty open about the fact that I was a foster kid. I lived with my grandparents when I was two, and I was taken away from my mom when I was four. I grew up in the foster care system until I was almost 13.

A lot of that time, I lived with my aunt and uncle, which was really privileged and fortunate. They gave me a kind of stability and sensibility I probably wouldn’t have gotten in other homes.

But I also lived in a lot of stranger homes—foster homes, that is. It was an important part of my story. It was a kind of lonely and weird feeling for a long time. And I ended up studying informal foster care for my dissertation in sociology.

So it was something that—once I realized how many people go through these non-traditional and somewhat traumatic childhood experiences—I saw it was a thing nobody really talked about. But it was something we could try to understand.

That realization became not only a major focus of my PhD, but also something that helped me make sense of my own experiences—not as something isolating, but as something that could be a bridge. A way to see what others are going through, and to understand the particulars of their stories.

Yeah. I'm trying to think of what to ask. I'm curious—what does it mean to you to have been raised in foster homes? And when did you first realize that was your story?

When did I realize the meaning, or when did I realize I was raised in foster homes?

Probably a little of both.

Yeah. I mean, I was four when I was taken away from my mom. So I remember everything about it.

It’s deeply imprinted in my psyche. I think there were a whole series of realizations over time. But I remember living with my aunt and uncle—we were in a tiny little mountain town in Northern California. My uncle worked at the lumber mill, and we lived just behind it.

So even though I had traumatic experiences in childhood, I also had some really beautiful ones—growing up in the woods, getting lost for an entire day behind the lumber mill while my uncle worked.

I remember wanting to ask friends if they wanted to have a sleepover. Or they'd ask me, and I'd say, “Yeah, let me ask my mom.” But then I’d catch myself and say, “Oh—I mean, my aunt, my uncle.”So there was this kind of linguistic difference in how I talked about things, and that started to shape how I experienced myself and my story as a kid. But yeah, it’s something I knew kind of from the start.

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did young Adam imagine?

I had no idea. I remember having this thought—this sort of projection—of what I’d look like as a college-aged person.

I imagined myself as gangly, with acne... I don’t know, I think I had this 90s sitcom version in my head of what I’d look like and be like. Maybe that’s fairly normal. Maybe that says something, I don’t know. But no, I couldn’t have told you what I wanted to do for work or in life.

So catch us up. Where are you now? Where are you living, and what are you doing?

I live in Portland, Oregon. I did my PhD in sociology, focusing broadly on social interaction. Along the way, I did research on how testing and diagnosis happens for kids on the autism spectrum, and also on informal fostering among relatives.

So I had this very serious research program that I was deeply invested in. But as I neared the end of grad school, I saw that even my brilliant colleagues—people I really admired—were struggling to get jobs in academia.

And with the experience of the pandemic layered on top of that, I started thinking seriously about doing something else.

I remember reaching out to Eve Ejsmont, who was a research director at Further and Further. I just asked her how someone gets their foot in the door in that industry. And it kind of snowballed from there.

I ended up meeting Ian Pierpoint and Meg Weisenberg, who lead Further and Further, and eventually joined the agency. It’s been this amazing unlock—bringing my particular skills into a new industry. New for me, at least, even though I’m not new to research.

It’s been an incredible arena for collaboration and figuring out how to do better and better work with people.

Yeah, yeah. I know—I’ve met Megan. And I’ve always admired Further and Further from a distance. That’s how you ended up on my radar, actually—through LinkedIn and the things you share. I’m curious to talk about that a bit. You’ve described yourself as a conversation analyst, and your PhD was about social interaction. You have a very specific way of talking about what you focused on. How do you describe that work? What do the terms “conversation analyst” and “social interaction” really mean?

I’d say there’s almost a hierarchy there. You’ve got the broader field of studies of social interaction.

For me, in grad school, I very quickly fell in with Alice Goffman—who’s the daughter of a really famous sociologist, Erving Goffman. He died when she was a baby, so she didn’t really know him, but she comes from this sort of academic royalty.

In any case, Goffman represents a whole approach to the study of mundane life. He really popularized the idea of understanding social interaction and public behavior by diving into what Thomas and Znaniecki called the definition of the situation.

A lot of people who took sociology in college probably read his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, where he presents a kind of dramaturgical view of society—we’re all playing roles.

But the roles we play are constantly shifting depending on how we define the situation. No one person has the sole authority to define it; we do it together, in concert.

It’s a kind of working consensus about what the situation is. Like right now—this is an interview. We both understand that, and we’re doing “interviewee-type” things that sustain that shared understanding.

Goffman was famous for diving into the mundane particulars of life. He studied institutionalized life in asylums—he actually spent time with people who had been institutionalized and looked closely at the process of being socialized into that environment, and what it did to people psychologically. So “social interaction” can be really broad. And yes, Goffman was an ethnographer—a quintessential one.

Is that right? I didn’t know that was the case with Erving Goffman.

Oh yeah. His dissertation was done in the UK—he studied farm life. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life actually came out of that dissertation. Asylums was based on his time in mental institutions, looking at that process firsthand.

But he also wrote a lot about public behavior. He took copious notes on things he saw happening in public life. There’s his work on Interaction Ritual, for example. The ritual element is a huge part of his larger theory—he took Durkheim’s ideas about ritual from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and scaled them down.

Instead of looking at rituals in a grand, religious sense, he looked at how ritual happens between people in everyday, concrete experiences. He was mapping that all over life.

His big thing was about looking at public life. Because when you think about it, when you come across a stranger, there’s so much you have to be able to do and communicate really quickly—at least in the world he was studying.

But yeah, he was an ethnographer. One of his most famous pieces was about the interaction order—this idea that you can explain what’s happening with exactly what’s present in the local environment, rather than resorting to abstract concepts from somewhere else.

That framework is something a lot of people in social interaction studies draw from, including conversation analysts.

Conversation analysis itself is a specific approach. It was actually pioneered by one of Goffman’s students, Harvey Sacks, along with Emanuel Schegloff—and, oh my God, I’m blanking on her name. It’ll come back to me.

But conversation analysis is a way of looking at the common-sense order of things. It started with research on suicide hotlines. The practical issue was this: people would call in, but they wouldn’t give their names. And that was a concern, because clearly something serious was going on—they felt the need to reach out—but there was no way to follow up with them.

So the researchers wanted to understand how those conversations worked—and whether there was something they could do differently to encourage people to share identifying info.

Harvey Sacks and Manny Schegloff started analyzing those conversations and realized: there’s an order to this. They published a paper on turn-taking—that was the first structure they picked up on. From there, a whole beautiful architecture of how conversation works began to unfold. And when you think about it, conversations—across cultures, globally—are organized by turns.

What’s amazing is that turn-taking requires you to listen closely enough to my turn to know when a unit might be ending—when it’s going to end in a way that invites you to take over, or to offer a nod, or a “mm-hmm,” or any number of small signals.

Those responses—what conversation analysts call “continuation markers”—can be encouraging or discouraging, they can show agreement or alignment, or create distance. Later researchers dug into how those signals shape interaction, like showing agreement with a story or challenging a point.

Another key feature is adjacency pairs—like question and answer.

So, for example, if you ask, “Where are you from?”—that question makes a certain kind of response conditionally relevant. It creates a field of possible next turns.

And the way you ask the question shapes how I hear it—and how I respond. We’re shaping each other through the interaction. And here's the key: if I don’t answer your question, you can hold me socially accountable.

How would I do that?

Well, imagine this. You say, “Adam, where are you from?” And I reply, “Well, I just had a bowl of yogurt and put raspberries in it—because raspberries are so delicious.”

What would you say, Peter?

That’s interesting. I mean, as someone who’s really spent a lot of time interviewing, I’ve trained myself to follow where people go. But I think… what would I do? I’d honor the response. I’d probably say, “Oh yeah, man, right. I love raspberries. That’s great.” And then—I’d return to the question. I’d ask again.

So that’s the accountability piece. You’d repeat the question, and you might do so in a way that suggests—explicitly or tacitly—that maybe there was an issue with audio, or with hearing, or understanding. So you reformulate the question again, now with different information, or with different intonation. You might stretch things out in a certain way.

When we do conversation analytic exercises, we work with these really dense transcripts of everything that happens in communication. And you're not looking at how one person uses language to get their meaning across—you're looking at how both parties involved in the interaction are co-producing meaning.

Because neither one of us gets to steer the ship alone. We have to do it together.

Yeah. Oh man, I love this stuff.

This is the most exciting stuff. I don’t have any of the academic background you have, but I find it really thrilling. I’m thinking about so many different things.

And I always come back to—maybe you can explain this to me—the Ursula Le Guin essay. Have you ever read Listening is Telling? The one with the diagrams she draws?

I don’t know it, but Ursula Le Guin is from Portland.

Oh, no way.

Yeah, it’s one of our claims to fame. But I’ll have to check out the piece. Tell me about it.

Oh man, it’s amazing. The hypothesis is—it’s called Listening is Telling. And she actually drew two diagrams. One describes the conventional way we think about communication: two boxes—you’re a box, I’m a box—and there’s a tube between us. I’m the sender, transmitting bits of information through the tube to you. And you’re the receiver. We take turns passing info back and forth through the tube.

But she says: anyone who’s actually been in a real conversation knows that’s not how it works at all. Instead, she presents amoeba sex as the appropriate metaphor for human conversation—because it’s intersubjective, it’s reciprocal, and we get lost in the telling. Everything you’ve been describing. She follows that logic and says, basically, listening is the same as telling. They’re part of the same process.

That really blew me away. I’d been doing research for a long time and had my own unstructured experiences of what happens in conversation—but I hadn’t heard it articulated like that before.

It made me think of conversation as a place—something you enter into with someone. And you can also not be in that place, even when you’re trying to. And not being in that place, while trying to be in a conversation, is horrible.

Yeah. Thank you for the recommendation—that sounds really interesting.

We used to call it the conduit model of communication. And I think that underlies a lot of what we’re grappling with now—especially in questions about AI and intelligence. That model misses some of the fundamentals.

Because when we think about information and how it gets produced, the conduit model conflates communication with transfer. And that’s the model Ursula Le Guin was trying to take apart and replace.

It also sounds really familiar—one of the most relevant connections for me is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher.

Oh yeah.

You might’ve read this, or maybe not, but he has an essay on what he calls the organic circuit.

Oh, no—I don’t know that one at all.

It’s really resonant with what you were just describing. Dewey was close with William James, who wrote the first book on psychology and was also a pioneering figure in pragmatist thought.

James had this model of stimulus and response. He gives the classic example of a child touching a flame and then pulling their hand back: the flame is the stimulus, the movement of the hand is the response.

But Dewey, in this fairly short essay, just completely takes that model apart. He argues it’s not just a matter of stimulus and response—there’s a projected action, a kind of movement that’s already happening before the stimulus occurs.

The understanding of the stimulus only makes sense within the framework of that movement—like the movement of the hand.

So what he’s doing is showing that things are part of a coordinated whole. It’s so powerful. And you can apply it to communication, but also to how individuals operate. Eventually we’ll probably get into the current work I’m doing, but to me, this is foundational.

When I think about how people work, I think about all these layers of ongoing “projects” in their lives—small, personal ones; bigger ones shared with people they’re close to; shared projects within communities; and even large-scale societal discourses.

All of these things shape the trajectory, the channel of coordinated action, within which any stimulus has to be understood and interpreted. That’s the essential work.

Yes. Your description of the Dewey piece feels like a complete takedown of conventional market research—the focus group, the whole practice of extracting people from their lived experience, stimulating them, and then somehow evaluating their response as if it exists outside of their life project.

Yeah, I mean—market research, for sure. But I think a lot of research in general.

I kind of cut my teeth in a really amazing sociology department. Wisconsin has one of two Institutes for Research on Poverty—do those even exist anymore? I don’t know what the current administration has done with them.

But I got to spend time around amazing demographers, economists, and other people really leading their fields—just incredibly smart folks.

And I found that the smartest ones used those tools with a kind of awareness. Like, yes, you can build constructs, find relationships between variables, work hard to construct them in more valid ways. But at the end of the day, there are limits.

Because if you don’t know that what you have to explain are things that actually happen in the world—not just things that happen in your dataset—then you’re missing something fundamental. When you're trying to explain things in the world, you can't remove people from their real lives. Everything is understood through that lens.

How does this work show up in what you're doing now? Can you tell me a little bit about the work you do at Further and Further?

Well, Further & Further—Ian and Meg started it based on the limitations of that traditional focus group model. You know, the model where you bring people into a strange room, give them a sandwich and a hundred bucks, and ask them a narrow set of questions.

They realized—especially through their experience with documentary filmmaking—that if you follow a person’s story, you get a much richer understanding of who they are and how that relates to the core question.

So I think Further & Further was built on that realization. You’d have to ask Ian and Meg to get their version of the origin story, but that's how I understand it.

Now, our mission is what we call Five Day Brands. The idea is to spend as much time with people as possible—to really immerse ourselves in their world, their relationships, their moods, and everything that changes across those five days.

So when we do ask critical questions, we’re not asking them in a vacuum—we already have a sense of who this person is, spread out over the context of their life. That gives us a kind of ecological validity. That’s the term I would use.

What I think is amazing is that Ian and Meg come to this from very different backgrounds, but we all coalesce around trying to understand people’s stories from the first-person perspective—with the understanding that this is valuable to the work on the other side.

So a lot of our projects are foundational strategy—positioning work, for example—but increasingly we’re doing innovation work too, or digging into specific target audiences.

I love it when people light up during a debrief—especially creatives. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience—you probably have. When you give people something rich about a person—their story, these lived details—you see a creative in the room go: “Oh... I can do something with that.”

I love giving people insights that feel genuinely usable and informative. So I’m always thinking about that practical edge—how to take this deep, rich exploration of people and their worlds and make it usable for the people we're working with.

What do you love about it? Where’s the joy in the work for you?

There’s a lot of joy in a lot of places, to be honest, Peter.

Coming out of academia and into this work, I found the collaboration here so much more rewarding. In academia, everything is tied to your name—you want your name first. You’re competing with your peers for a small number of slots at an R1 university.

Even though I really liked and admired a lot of the people I worked with, structurally speaking, we were in competition with one another.

Now, I’m doing this work where we’re just throwing our best ideas, observations, and insights at the problem—trying to get somewhere that’s both the truest possible and the most useful to someone else.

And I love meeting people. It’s literally my job to meet people—like this—and then go out and spend time with them in their lives.

So a typical project for us might start with an online board stage, where we get to know people and their stories. We get a sense of what a week with them could look like.

Then we travel to a location—maybe three or four people in that city—and split up our time over the week, spending time with each of them. We have documentary filmmakers on staff, and throughout the work, I get to meet all these people. I think that’s amazing.

Trying to figure out new aspects of life to appreciate in every person you meet—it’s such a beautiful way to experience the world. I feel really privileged. And there’s collaboration at every point.

Researchers working with other researchers in different markets, collaborating with filmmakers—so I’m doing the research part, trying to understand and spend time with people, while we’re also creating space and time to make a film that moves people. A film that brings a person’s story to life, to help convey that story to clients in a way that informs their work.

So yeah—there’s a lot to love.

I always like to get to the elemental questions. Like: What is qualitative research to you? What makes it important? I ask partly because I’m always trying to make the case for my own career—but also because I think it’s just a vital question. How do you explain what makes qualitative research useful? Why is it so important?

Yeah. Well, I think the world only happens where it actually happens, you know?

There’s this conventional idea in research that something is more true if you can say a larger number of people do it. But the only way you get to that understanding is that somewhere, someone is filling out a survey. Or someone is clicking something. And there's an apparatus that captures that behavior.

All of those are situated activities. So I think of qualitative research as a way of either circumventing the middleman, or just getting into the context where you actually see behavior happening.

The reason to do qualitative research is—you know, Erving Goffman wrote this great essay called Where the Action Is. He was studying casinos, I think, at the time. He was breaking apart probability structures.

Like, if you say something is “up to chance”—like flipping a coin—it’s only because you haven’t accounted for all the variables. But if you studied the coin’s exact asymmetries, the weight, and everything else, you'd better understand how it’s going to land.

Take that framework and apply it to any other kind of probabilistic outcome you might research. You go where the action is—where things are actually happening. That’s how you come to understand things on their own terms.

And when you’re dealing with people, that becomes even more important. Because the one thing you don’t want to do is build an understanding that’s inconsistent with how people experience and understand their own lives and stories.

The other question I like to ask—and I’ll admit it’s self-interested, since the newsletter is called The Business of Meaning—is this: Do you have a sense of what we mean when we say “meaning”? What is meaning?

Meaning... I think what’s so interesting is—we’re never really doing it alone, are we?

Even when you think you’re having a private, subjective experience, you’re still borrowing from society to have that experience.

That’s what language is, you know? And to stay at the more esoteric level—think of Wittgenstein and his idea that there’s no private language. That’s one of his famous lines, I think from the Brown Book.

So even language itself—going back to the conduit model of communication—raises the question: Do we have these pure thoughts and experiences that just get transmitted through a tube?

Or is it that language gives us a kind of resource—a set of tools—for building an understanding of what it is we’re actually doing? When you look at stories, and the role of narrative in people’s lives, I think it becomes even more clear.

I don’t know if you follow a lot of the neuroscience work on this, but so many people seem to be saying the same thing: stories are essential for survival. It’s about understanding what you’re doing, where risk is, how you avoid risk, and how you make decisions that help you survive in the long term.

You need to be able to catalog and interpret different kinds of experiences in ways that inform your future decisions. So I subscribe to that very evolutionary understanding of meaning.

But—God—we live in an amazing world now, one with so many more layers than just basic survival. We’ve built this wild cognitive architecture that lets us create all kinds of atmospheres and environments.

Meaning, to me, is how that architecture gets applied across this huge tapestry of coexistence we’ve created with one another. And the frontiers of that are still expanding—we haven’t explored all of them. So there’s always more to discover and understand about what things mean from someone else’s perspective.

Yeah, that’s beautiful. It reminds me of the idea of evolutionary value—of meaning or significance. It makes me think of Stephen Asma, who wrote The Evolution of Imagination.

He was one of the first people I interviewed because I found his work so inspiring. He touches on some of the same ideas as Ursula Le Guin—challenging the model of the purely rational, self-interested actor. He proposes a whole new way of thinking about imagination. He calls it mythopoetic cognition.

It’s a very academic but also deeply human case for meaning that’s mythic—not constrained by this obsession with being hyper-rational. We seem to have this cultural prejudice against imagination, emotion, and what’s often dismissed as unreason.

And yet, as you said with the neuroscience, that’s who we are. Yeah—Lakoff calls it imaginative reason. He talks about how we split these things apart, but in truth, we move through the world shaped by both. So honoring imagination—and all the heroic, symbolic, or emotional stuff that comes with it—that’s necessary.

Yeah, and now that you’re bringing this back, you’re reminding me of one of my favorite ethnographers, Jack Katz, who’s at UCLA—I think he’s emeritus now.

He wrote this incredible book called How Emotions Work. The first chapter is called Pissed Off in L.A. Each chapter focuses on a different emotion, and that one is about anger.

He had student ethnographers spending time with people in traffic in L.A., trying to understand the process. His whole theory of emotion has this three-part structure, and you could easily apply it to meaning too.

He focuses on the fine-grained, interactional aspects of experience—like the shaking of the fist, the way a car moves in traffic, all of it. He’s showing that these physical, social cues are part of the emotional process.

Here’s your lightly edited transcript section, cleaned up for clarity and flow while preserving the original tone and meaning:

And then it’s related to your own personal project. That person in the car—they’re literally going somewhere. And they understand themselves as moving within a story: this is where I’m going, this is what I’m doing.

I was just in L.A. doing a research project and spoke with someone who’s a yogi. She teaches yoga—now mostly online—but she used to teach in person at studios all around L.A.

It was so funny—she told this story about how she would teach a calm, grounding class, get everyone into a peaceful headspace... and then have to jump in her car and drive through L.A. traffic to the next studio. And then she’d have to reset and reenter that same peaceful, mindful headspace.

So you think about that story—literally “where I’m going” becomes the container she uses to make sense of the particulars of her experience. And then there’s the community level of that story, too. She also knows what it means to be in L.A. traffic—and there’s a shared, communal narrative about that.

That narrative might also connect to something bigger—a broader cultural story about life in the U.S. right now.

So there are these different levels of storytelling that shape her meaning-making. And in How Emotions Work, Katz explains emotion as the process of metamorphosis—it unfolds in relation to these three layers of meaning.

How about your own work—how have you grown or changed as a researcher? How do you carry these theories with you into your work, and what have you learned about how you learn?

I mean, yeah—I’ve been doing research for a long time now, probably 13 years. I started out doing drug court evaluation research. I don’t know if you know about drug courts—they’re for people who’ve been convicted of a crime, but where substance use was seen as the core issue.

So instead of a standard sentence, the judge assigns them to a different kind of program. I would find people on probation or parole, and I did interviews with folks in prisons.

Then I shifted into the social interaction work, which focused more on children. And now I’m doing this research where I hang out with people for a week—for brand projects.

So I’ve had really different research experiences. And I think a lot of that is about growth. I don’t think it’s all about the knowledge—the frameworks or theories, even though I love that stuff.

For me, those ideas help articulate things I already feel are important. But the deeper learning is about something else. We have an intern right now at Further and Further who’s about to do some interviews, and I was giving him advice.

I told him: the first thing you have to do is really know yourself. Because when you’re talking to someone, you have to come across as yourself.

And you’re going to adjust—you’re going to show different versions of yourself depending on the context. Because you’re a distributed self. You’ll show up a little differently to different people, in different situations.

So to really have this understanding of how you come across, right? We started out talking about how I’m Californian, kind of ethnically ambiguous, I talk too much, my name is Adam Hockington, I’m a conversation analyst—which is funny in itself. I’m very emotional, I’m a Cancer.

There are all these different aspects of who I am. And I think now, growing as a researcher hasn’t meant going deeper and deeper into theory.

I’m giving myself more space to talk about theory with you, just because this seems to be a podcast about research methodology, ideas, and all that. But in practice, the growth has been more about thinking carefully about how I come across to people—and how that brings out different kinds of things in them.

In anthropology—my background is in social anthropology, even though it's technically within sociology—there was this move to acknowledge your own social position.

It was this reflexive moment. For a while, you’d see it in all the articles:“I’m a straight white male, working in an indigenous community,” and so on. They’d list these identity categories.

But I think the real point of that wasn’t just to check boxes—it was to ask:How does who I am, and the way I show up, influence what I can see or not see in a particular experience or social atmosphere?

So when I think about how I’ve grown as a researcher, it really comes down to that: Getting sharper and more honest about who I am. What advantages does that give me in this situation? What disadvantages?

Being honest about the mix of those things—so that with any person I’m interacting with, I have the best chance of learning the most about them on their terms. And understanding how my presence might be shaping those terms—so I can at least try to control for it.

That’s wonderful. Well, listen—we’ve very quickly filled our time. I just want to thank you so much. This has been a blast. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation.

Yeah—it’s been wonderful to talk to you.

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