THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Mary Meehan is a Strategic Cultural Adviser and co-founder of Panoramix Global. Previously she co-founded the consumer trend agency Iconoculture in 1992; and co-founded Metametrix, a text analytics platform for identifying values and emotions, where she served as CEO. She is co-author of *The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be* (Riverhead Books, 1998) and a contributor to Forbes.So I’m not sure if you know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s kind of a neighbor. She teaches oral history, helps people tell their story. And it’s such a beautiful question. I borrowed it slash stole it from her, but it’s really big. So I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?Great question. I come from a place of curiosity that drives everything I do in my work in understanding what people do and why they do it. That’s my main purpose in all of the work that I do. And you have to be curious in order to be able to really seek out something that’s unusual, that you haven’t seen before, that may be a way to get to know people better or unearth their motivations.Yeah. When do you feel like you discovered this curiosity? I mean, everybody’s curious in some way, but when do you recall this kind of curiosity became the thing?Well, I can go way back in time, but it’s kind of a long story. Let’s really show my age as well. It started when the Beatles hit the United States. I was really young. I was fascinated by why these girls were screaming. Why were they fainting? What could drive them to feel something so passionate when they can’t even hear or sometimes even see these celebrities who have come to perform in the United States? And that’s one of the earliest times I can remember.But all along the way, there are just these moments where I think, why is that happening? What is happening right here with these people in this setting, in this context, to bring this to this point of fame or interest or fad or trendiness or whatever it is?That’s amazing. Can you tell me a story about that moment and the Beatles arriving?Well, let’s see. So that was a long time ago, Peter. It was a musical revolution here in the United States. It was nothing that anybody, much less teenagers and preteens, had ever seen before. And it was so exciting and new and kind of free that it resonated with so many people. But the point where you would scream and faint, that’s what I thought: all right, that’s super interesting.And people do it today. I mean, they don’t faint. But if you look at superfans, that’s also one of my curiosities. What drives somebody to paint their chest blue or wear horns or whatever superfans do at games? What brings people to that point of such fandom, such passion, such commitment to something else, that they are overwhelmed?Yes. I share that fascination. I’ve seen the footage of Beatlemania, right? And I’ve had that same question watching some of that footage of the girls and young women just really going crazy. It’s really amazing.Yeah. It was just something no one had ever seen. I mean, there was Elvis, and there were other musicians that were breaking molds and setting new standards in music. But this was something completely different.Yeah. Where were you when the Beatles arrived?I was in my little suburban house with my family, just watching on TV. It was Ed Sullivan. And it was watching Shea Stadium and watching them arrive at the airport and all that we could see on TV. And now I’m even wondering, did I see a lot of that on TV, or did I see it retrospectively? But it commanded so much attention and so much criticism, so much passion. It was just so remarkable.Yeah. And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up, young Mary, in that suburban house? Did you have an idea of what Mary wanted to be when she grew up?I had no idea. I had no idea. And I went to art school because that’s what I’m passionate about. It’s creativity, really. And there, what you’re looking for is inspiration. What is it that I want to create? What is it that I want to do? What do I envision? And from what I understand, it leads a lot of people to become entrepreneurs, going to art school.Yeah. And catch us up. Tell us, where are you now? And what are you doing? What do you work on?Well, a long way from there. But I started a company in 1992 with partners called Iconoculture. And we were a consumer and cultural trend agency, consulted for a long time. And around ‘98, ‘99, we decided to expand the business. And we created an online database of trends and took on venture money. We built a team of writers and editors and strategists that would work with our clients. It was exciting. It was an amazing experience. And the people that I worked with there, they’re just incredibly smart and funny. And I miss them so much. Because in 2010, my partner and I decided to leave, and the business sold.And I love what I do. And it is building on that curiosity, because our methodology, or kind of the nucleus, the soul of how we approached trend identification, was to look at where people are, what they need, what they’re passionate about, what they want. And we believe, I still do, that that choice that people make in those moments is driven by your values. What is important to you? What is it that you want or need? What are you excited about? And so this idea that values drive trends was far more interesting to us than the trends themselves, although trends are fun and interesting.But it is that idea, that methodology, I carried over in starting another business, where I continue to do cultural advisory work. And that is helping people understand the bigger picture in their customer’s world that can influence the choices that they make. And I believe that you need to understand that first before you do primary work, because you will be able to ask better questions. You are going to be better informed. You will design better instruments in those moments if you understand all those forces that affect the people that you’re trying to attract.And it involves curiosity. You have to look at what’s out there, what’s moving, and particularly what’s changing, and why is it changing, that can give you a clue to where it’s going and how people will react to it.There are two things I want to follow up on. Maybe I’ll just ask the first question, which is, what more can you say about values? Values is one of those, it can be sort of a big mushy word. What do you mean when you’re saying values, and what does it mean to either identify them or learn about them?Well, I can distinguish two things, values and emotion. So values are the principles that guide us in our lives. And we don’t often think about them. We sort of take them for granted.But I saw a really interesting video, a podcast, where Adam Grant, the professor, was a guest. And he said that he performs this experiment whenever he works with students, asking them to recall a time when they got angry. And he asked some people to talk about it and explain what they thought about it, how they felt. And he said, your anger is a reaction to your values being violated. If you think about it, it makes complete sense. Because if you’re disgusted by something, if you’re angry, if you’re sad, you are reacting to something that is out of whack with how you normally think or feel or behave.And so it was with that that I continue to think about values as these guidelines that we live by, and comparing values to emotions then. Emotions are a psychological response to something that we experience. It’s more momentary, where values are kind of longer term.Now, I’m simplifying this greatly. If there’s any scholars listening, they’re going to argue with me. But just for the sake of our discussion, that’s what I believe. And I believe I’m right. So it is a way of understanding people other than just asking people what they think or asking them to rate a question on a scale. It is an additional and, I believe, helpful way to understand people.Yeah. Well, I’m here for all the nuance, to dig a little bit deeper, if there’s more that you want to share about it. I’m curious about how you identify them or measure them. How do they become something that you tracked? I loved what you said too; so much of this I’m enjoying. There’s the trends. It’s one thing to know about the trends, which are interesting, but your real interest is what’s happening underneath. So maybe tell me a little bit more about that. I’m using underneath as a metaphor for the values, right? But tell me more about how you get in there and what you do with the values, how you get them, how you measure them.It came from a lot of experience, actually. At the time when we were building Iconoculture, we developed what we refer to as macro trends, and they were kind of a collection of behaviors that reflected a certain set of values. And that’s kind of how we continued to build our understanding: whenever we would observe something, we would slot it into one of those macro trends, because the values aligned, like around safety or something.Many different experiences or products that you can engage with can be very different in the category they exist in, or the reason for buying, or demographic groups, et cetera. But if they all center around this idea of safety, just as a for-instance, that’s where you can look to understand that that’s what matters to people. And then anybody can build on that. It’s not just the Ring doorbell people; anybody can build on that. So it was a lot of experience.And when my partner and I left Iconoculture, I had also wanted to see if I could productize that idea, that belief, that methodology. And so I created Metametrix, which is a text analytic platform that can ingest unstructured data and identify the expression of values as well as emotions and themes and sentiment, et cetera.But the unique thing about this approach is that we have a standard set of values and a standard set of emotions. So every time data comes across our library, so to speak, it measures it against the same set. So we’re standardizing that approach, and it’s math and science that does this. So it’s not just me saying, I think it’s safety, or I think it’s belonging, whatever it is. So we’ve been really excited about that. It’s new on the horizon for a lot of folks out there.Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in what you do, for you?It’s the discovery. When you hit upon an insight, it’s just that little dopamine hit. It is that way of thinking, oh, that makes total sense, that that’s what’s going on here. So it’s synthesizing information, pushing against something, pressure testing, et cetera. And when you find it, you think, ah, why didn’t I see this earlier? It’s that little bit of, I don’t know, joy that comes from that.Yeah. Can you say more about what happens in that moment? Maybe I’m asking about, we talk about insight. There’s this trouble when we try to name something, we kind of kill it, of course. But I’d love to hear what you’ve learned over the years about either the conditions to make that happen, or how do you know that it’s real when it actually happens?Yeah. You’re right. You’re right. It’s a very squishy area. And that’s why the work that I do is on that fuzzy front end, and it’s called that for a reason, right? Because it’s meant to inspire people. Like, when you start to look for these things, think about this, keep this in mind as you’re doing your work that is more measurable. Because my text analytic engine can measure. So when people are writing, or transcribed speaking, you can measure it.But if it’s just me looking at the world, collecting information and saying, with this information, I see your opportunity is X, it is collecting this large digital pile of stuff and then sifting through it and trying to figure out what this means. And I will tell you, I’ve been doing this for a long time. Every time I start in on something like that, it’s not going to work. I’m going to have to go back to my client and say, I can’t do it. I don’t know what I can’t.And then you just keep working through that gray cloud of uncertainty, and slowly a picture begins to emerge, and it happens every single time. And I can’t dispel it. And I don’t know why, but that’s what happens.But it is very exciting, because it is your initial assessment of what you’re finding out there. You’re thinking, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. What’s going on there? I want to collect that. Let’s pull this all together. And then synthesizing stuff like this, thinking, oh my God, what am I going to do with all of this? But then it is the kind of reward of pushing through that lump of clay. As you’re trying to mold that lump of clay into something, it’s the effort that then you’re rewarded with. You go, that’s it. That is a really good idea. That’s there.And I can substantiate it by tying it back to these other areas. So it’s not just one thing that looks like, oh, this brand, this company, this organization would benefit from knowing this. It’s, can I substantiate it with other observations from the world, other statistics, other reports, other commercials sometimes?Yeah. When did you first discover that this is something you could make a living doing? I mean, you were at art school, right? So you went to art school, and then somehow you’ve ended here. Maybe connect those two dots. When did you discover you could make a living doing this?Well, I had wandered in the wilderness for a bit, and I worked in retail, and I worked at this incredible retailer called Dayton’s. It’s really well known in the Midwest here. And I worked in the stores, and then I worked in merchandising. And then I was asked to start this other department called product development, in the marketing division. And I had an incredibly brilliant boss. And my job was to figure out how to get people into our store the day after Thanksgiving before they go somewhere else, because then they will spend their time there shopping.And so with my boss’s help, a really bright, brilliant man, we created this character. I won’t go into it, it’s a long story, but it was a huge success. And I started thinking, okay, why did people want that? Was it just because we priced it right? Was it the shape of this thing and how soft it was? What was it? What was the character? It was called Santa Bear. And it was a stuffed bear that was at this low price that day. And so I worked with other buyers at the store, who were just these incredibly great people, to make T-shirts that had the character on it, and coffee mugs and nightgowns, et cetera. So when you walked in the store, there was a display, and it was unique. And we went on to do a lot of things, but anyhow, that’s where I kind of got the bug for it. And so many people did that; the work around that character and that success wasn’t just me and my boss, it was a lot of people.So then, in retail at the time, this is in the late eighties, and particularly in a department store, you work within an organization called AMC, which is a global buying group that you are a member of. And they would send us trend information, like silhouette and color, and it was on mimeographed sheets. And I thought, oh, that’s really interesting. It’s really helpful. The buyers really depended on it, and it was really good. They did a great job. But I thought, but why? Why would people want this color or this silhouette?And so when I left there, I wandered in the wilderness a little bit again. And I thought, why isn’t there a report for trends, of what people are doing and why they’re doing it, which is how I think about trends? And I called my friend, Vickie Abrahamson, who is this fantastic person. And we had lunch, and I said, hey, would you want to do this trend business? And she said, sure. Okay. That’s what we did. That’s how it started.And it was about looking at unusual occurrences, things that people were doing, and trying to understand why they were doing it. And it was a newsletter. It was printed on paper, with stamps. Then it evolved, of course, because with the advent of the internet, we gradually moved ourselves online. And all the while we were consulting with companies, doing this kind of work, but the newsletter was this marketing effort, really.I mean, when we talked before, I remember Iconoculture, and I’m not sure how long it was going on, but I remember getting the email format and the report. And so I was super interested to talk to you about it, and you hinted at it already, about how you think about and define trends. So maybe I’ll just ask that question: how do you think about what a trend is? And I came up a little bit as a researcher, a little suspicious of trend talk and fad talk, and probably critical of it, probably unfairly critical. But what’s the case for trends, and what do you mean when you’re talking about what a trend is, or why it matters?I’m glad you asked that, because it’s a super fuzzy area. And the thing that shocked me was when Vickie and I left Iconoculture and went out on our own, I kind of looked up finally after building this business. And I was shocked at the number of people who were trend spotters. And it was disheartening, because I think of trends as evidence of a change in the culture. They’re often interesting, and kind of fun, some are kind of wacky, but it’s really important to use trends as a tool, as a clue to what’s going on.And with Iconoculture, thanks to Vickie, who really helped make it kind of this fun brand, we had a really interesting, kind of provocative approach to it. But we took it very seriously, in that it was important to think about understanding that people don’t always do what they say they do. And so by watching people, by collecting information from the culture, you can also learn about them from that perspective. Then you can go ask them what they think, because we all know that the answers that you get will not always be true, or it can be a bad day for them; all those things are true.And so I agree with you. The people that were trend spotters, they got ridiculed on late-night TV. I mean, it was all over. So I totally understand, and I think it’s valid, but I have my own point of view.Yeah. Well, it reminds me of, are you familiar with Grant McCracken?Oh yeah, sure.So I’m a superfan of Grant, and he talks about fast culture and slow culture. And I feel you talking about the slow culture when you’re talking about values, right? Trying to understand this stuff, that trends are an actual change in culture, is what I heard you say. And I appreciate that. Because I feel like the critical take on trends is it’s just like a hype cycle, right? Or, I’m not trying to put words in your mouth.No, no, no. I think you’re right. First of all, hi to Grant, if he’s watching this, hearing this. I really respect his work, and whatever he sends, I read. So thank you, Grant.And I can’t remember what he meant by fast and slow culture. And I always get fast and slow thinking mixed up too, because I believe in both of those things; both are true. People use that terminology to describe different ways that people think. And I would say that values are more, if you’re thinking about guiding principles as I defined them, right, values are slower. They exist throughout your life. They may reprioritize at different times in your life. Like if you go to grad school, your priorities, your values are going to be, or you have a baby, right? Your values really shift, et cetera.But emotions are more transient. They are an immediate reaction to something. Now, it’s not like they immediately go away. I don’t mean that. And I know if there’s any neuro people out there, I know that more takes place in your brain than just that. But it’s an easier way to understand these two elements that are kind of readily available, so to speak, in our world, that can help you understand people and what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.But to Grant, he has come up with some really interesting maps, as I recall, too, that now I can’t remember what they were, but.No, but that totally aligns with what I was thinking. That’s exactly why I mentioned it, what you’ve just described about values as slow. I’m curious about the name. It’s such a good name, Iconoculture. Is there a story behind it?Well, let’s see. I’m going to credit Vickie with that too, because she was really good. You know what? I can’t quite remember how we did it, but it was about understanding, well, because within understanding values, there’s an anthropological approach to it. There’s a semiotic approach to it. There’s behavioral science; all of that goes into it. So semiotically, it’s those icons that you’re looking at, often, that establish something, and then the culture kind of mixed with it. I think we just made up a word.This is the selfish part of the conversation, where, as somebody who makes a living in face-to-face qualitative research and ethnographic stuff, I’m always wondering, what’s your sense of it? How do you use it or not use it? Is there a proper role for it in your work, or not? Or if not, how do you learn? What’s your research? What’s your methodology?Oh, yes, absolutely. I’m not a primary researcher, although I sometimes get asked to do some of that, which I like, and I join. It’s great. I often get contracted by larger research organizations where their client is looking for something like what I do. Like, they want to understand trends, or they want to understand the culture, bigger picture, et cetera. Then I get called in to do that piece of it. And I work with the primary researchers, and it’s always so interesting, because it’s a great exchange of ideas.And I believe that the combination of those two things can be very powerful when used correctly. And there’s people that like to work in teams, like I do. It’s a really good experience, not only for the research company that brought me in, but the client too, because they get the benefit of a lot more thinking.Yeah. And if a client comes to you and asks about qualitative or quantitative, either of those kinds of primary research, what kinds of things do you say to them about it?I can recommend some amazing people, because there’s some amazing researchers out there. I’m not the one you would go to for that.Oh yeah. Well, I’m just curious, from where you sit, what is the value of qualitative? What’s the proper role of qualitative? What does it bring? What do you appreciate about it? What’s the proper use?Sure. So, as I mentioned earlier, I’m the big-picture type of researcher. Okay, so I’m holding up my hands kind of outside our screen here. Look, you’ve got to start out here, right? You’ve got to understand what’s happening in society and economy and in the environment and politics, et cetera. And then within those categories that are related, many different categories that are related to the client’s work, right? So I’m way out here.Then I move my hands in closer to say that with that information, that’s when the primary work should begin, in my opinion. Because that’s when you are ready to engage with them where they live, because you understand more about what has led them to where they are and how they may answer or may not answer. You can bring different kinds of questions into that face-to-face, whether it’s focus groups or IDIs, or even if it’s an online focus group. The moderator has much more information with which to continue to probe that group.Yeah. What else can you say about what happens in, I’m mimicking your hands, the space between? You described starting out really, really broad and then getting narrow. Can you describe in more detail what happens in that space? What are you doing?Okay. I’ll give you an example. So a big research firm, this group that I love, came to me, and they had a client that was working in, I guess, kind of the home and personal care area. And they were interested in developing a piece for their retailers, kind of a thought piece, work that they could share with their retailers to continue to build that relationship. And the researcher wanted me to start with this effort around the idea of aging. It was this new territory that they wanted to take the retailer into.So when I look broadly, I look at those big STEEP factors, like society, technology, environment, et cetera. And then I also look at what’s happening in music, what’s happening in fashion, what’s happening in health and wellness, what’s happening in sexuality, what’s happening in family, et cetera. So it’s those other categories that aren’t specifically aging, but they are related to aging, because you can find understanding within those categories about how people are thinking about aging and how aging is changing.And then I worked again with the primary folks there, an amazing team, and just put together this incredible piece for the client, because it had so much information. That’s how it works.Yeah. That’s amazing. I want to maybe just talk about the state of things now. What kinds of things are you working on now? What are you excited about?Well, I have kind of two ways of thinking about AI. You knew we were going to get to AI, right? So with my text analytic engine, AI is our hero. It’s just done incredible things for the work that we can do. And then with my cultural advisory work, it’s just kicking my butt, because clients in that world, many of them believe, well, I can just ask AI and it’s good enough. And it’s really hard to hear those words, good enough, because I know the kind of quality that I can deliver.And at the same time, I understand their needs. I know that budgets are getting tight there. They have not as many people on their teams, they have less budget, et cetera. So I understand. But it just means the people like me, our world just gets smaller.Yeah. What kinds of conversations have you had with people about AI and its impact on this corner of the world?Well, everybody kind of says the same thing. So I don’t feel too alone. How about you, Peter? How about you?Yeah. Well, we had this conversation. I have more questions than answers. I suppose it’s not exactly pessimistic, but maybe it is. Maybe I’m just feeling particularly optimistic right now. I want to say ambivalent. Yeah, I think it’s just a mystery, really. Like to your point, I think the temptation of easy answers and good enough is almost impossible to compete with.Yeah, it is. It’s hard to compete. And I soothe myself with my text analytics business, because even when we do projects for clients, if they want something custom, I still get to apply all my insights ability to it. I can’t resist. I mean, I could just let it go as it is, but I always like to get in there and make sure everything is accurate and interesting, and the insights are what they should be, and where else we should be looking that whatever our technology is doing for us may have missed or didn’t find.Yeah. As you look around out there, sometimes I ask this question about envy. Do you make an envy list? Do you see people doing things or work that you would really want to do, or people doing things really well, that do inspire you?Yeah. I already aged myself by talking about the Beatles hitting American shores. So it’s no surprise that I see young people entering the field in many different areas, and I am envious of their energy and their willingness to try new things. However, I rest on my wisdom, because I know I have it, and I work with a lot of different people in imparting that. So it’s rewarding in that way.Yeah. Well, I think that’s the sort of, it’s not exactly a silver lining, but if there is optimism for me in this moment around AI, it’s that, at least based on my understanding, it sort of averages everything. So everybody using AI is getting access to the same pool of mediocre, mainstream, averaged ideas, and it creates real opportunities, theoretically, at the fringe, or at the strange, or at the weird, or at the outlier, at the wisdom, you know what I mean? That we, as older elders, there is a logic that says we should become more and more valuable than ever before.Yeah. Because I think it really depends on what you then do with that information. That’s a big differentiator. And if you’ve got a ton of experience, that makes a difference.That’s right. Maybe this is a great question for you as a trend person. You see this language; so much of this happens in language. How do you feel about words and language, and what role does language play in how you think about macro trends or trends or values and stuff like that? It’s huge. So I see the word discernment all the time now. And I had never seen anybody talk about discernment, and taste, I think, maybe as a version of it, but it’s sort of held up as the thing that humans have that AI can’t take. And so I suppose I’m just laying that down in front of you and wondering what you think of it.Well, let’s see where to go with that. First of all, language is absolutely fascinating. Just fascinating. Linguistics and semiotics are probably what I would have studied. And, well, there were probably other things that I would have studied too, but.I like that you couldn’t allow yourself to limit it.Right. Can’t. In building the text analytic business, language was just so frustrating, because language, particularly English, is so difficult. Words mean so many different things, and they mean different things in different contexts. So it was a frustrating yet really interesting challenge, because you really had to think. It’s like writing: whenever you write, you have to really think about what it is you’re trying to say, and, because it’s language also, how am I going to put these words together to make sense of it?And then in building our libraries that analyze all that text, you are going back and forth so many times, trying to correct something, move it around, change the context for it. It’s incredibly painstaking, yet important, because words matter, as we all know.Yeah. This is a question I often ask, and for some reason it comes together. Were there any mentors that really played a significant role in shaping your work? And then the second half: any touchstones that you return to over and over and over again? In my own work, I’m thinking selfishly, there are ideas or concepts that I constantly revisit. I’m just wondering, do you have any mentors or touchstones that are significant?You know, when Vickie and I started our business, I didn’t even know what mentors were. And we were women as well. It was hard to find somebody to be a mentor in this business that didn’t really exist, you know? And so we relied on each other, and partners really matter in those worlds, when you’re trying to build something. So I wish I did.I mean, when I was working at Dayton’s, it was my boss that was this incredible inspiration. And then, moving into this other area that was yet to be something, people just thought we were these trend girls. Like, okay, well, sort of, but what do you do with that then? And where would I go for advice? Who would I talk to? I can talk to lawyers for legal stuff. I can talk to our accountant, but it just wasn’t even a thing then, really.Yeah. I’m almost a little embarrassed about the question, because I guess to some degree it’s some privilege of mine to have fine mentors and be surrounded by potential mentors, which overlooks how pioneering you were, right, in trying to do this thing at that time. What can you share about what that was like? The struggles and the joy, as it were.I made some colossally stupid mistakes. It’s painful to think back on some of the stuff I did, and I don’t know that there’s any way around that. And I think entrepreneurs just come away from it. I know there’s a lot of the college dorm room successes, and they just go on to be celebrities. Great. That’s real. It happened. But there are so many of us out there that are just a couple of steps forward, three back. And you’re just on your back. You don’t even know what to do next, but you do. Then you do something and you move forward.And yeah, I’m not even sure what you asked. It just touched off a nerve, talking about how hard it is. But I can’t do it any other way. I don’t regret doing it at all.Yeah. Well, I was really thinking about the 80s, 90s. You said trend girls, being perceived as trend girls while you’re building something really, really new, right, and enduring, and how much difficulty that must have been.It was. And I will say that with the next text analytics business that I created, looking for money was a completely different experience. There are women angel groups out there, and they are so supportive. I nearly cried standing up in front of them telling my story, because you could feel how different it was. You could feel that they were thinking, yes, just go do your thing. What a shift in, I guess it was probably 20 years. I don’t know, I can’t even remember. But very different.Yeah. Amazing. Well, listen, this has been such a pleasure. I’m so happy to have met you, and I really appreciate you accepting the invitation to just come and join me for a conversation. So thank you so much.It was a pleasure, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Reuben Steiger is a writer and entrepreneur. He writes at the Fellow Travelers and on AI and democracy for The Contrarian. He was Chief Development Officer at OVEN Digital; VP of Interactive Services at Wynn Resorts; and Evangelist at Linden Lab, where he brought the first corporations into Second Life. In 2006 he founded Millions of Us, which built virtual-world projects for clients including Toyota, General Motors, Microsoft and Intel. He holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University.So I think you might know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, a neighbor, really. She runs an oral history summer school and she helps people tell their story. And she has this big, beautiful question, which I borrow and I use in my work, actually, too. I use it because it’s big and beautiful, but because it’s big and beautiful, I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control.Yeah, I do this. I come from where I am now, which is Princeton, New Jersey. And I also grew up here.So I come from here even further back. But that’s always felt like a very insincere, inauthentic description of where I come from, because I was born in Montreal in ‘71. So I’m 55.And my parents were both sort of foreigners. My mom was from South Africa. She’s an archaeologist.And my dad was American, but he’s foreign in the sense that he’s just kind of an alien from space. So they moved here and we invented ourselves in this town that might be the most American town in the world. And I didn’t know what that meant.Yeah. How old were you when you arrived in Princeton?I was four years old. I was like this weird little creature that had been taught to read and taken to a lot of museums and done fieldwork in caves. But I didn’t really have any friends. We lived actually in New York State till I was four on a remote farm. And then we moved to Princeton.And I was thrust into, it was the 200th anniversary of the country. I had to learn how to play with people, which I don’t know if I have yet. And yeah, I’ve definitely always had it. I’m an insider who feels like an outsider.Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about Princeton. You described it as maybe the most American city. What are you telling me about Princeton? What makes it so?Well, the shtick goes that Princeton is a microcosm of America. And if that’s your framing structure, it’s hard to argue for other places. You could do Boston and that might work.But there’s a field called the battlefield where the battle that turned the tide in the war that made America was here. And the tree is an oak tree in the middle that grew from an acorn of the original oak tree under which our general died. You can go 500 yards towards town and make a right and you find the Institute for Advanced Study, which was lots of the setting of Oppenheimer, but it’s where they set up an institute only for non-applied thinking and as a home for mostly Jewish scientists prior to the beginning of the Second World War.So you could argue we won two wars that matter from here. And then what makes it a microcosm is it relies on your ability to love and hate America. I think we’re 80 miles from the Mason-Dixon line. And so there’s, for lack of a better word, a former ghetto, a black neighborhood that’s just over the road from the mansions that Woodrow Wilson and others lived in.And those were the servants. Then you go down the main road, you see gown, you see Princeton on your right behind gates, and under your feet are the tunnels that made up the Underground Railroad and are now filled with books, which are part of the embarrassment of riches, intellectually and financially, of Princeton University, which has, everyone talks about its endowment, but the real endowment is art.So it’s got a lot of cool things that sort of rhyme historically and make it really, really American.Yeah, that’s beautiful. Do you have a recollection of growing up? What did young Reuben want to be when he grew up?Probably Dr. J. Yeah, to be perfectly honest, I still am, but I was an intense little kid, emotional, very, I mean, this one I’ve never really understood where it came from, but very ambitious, like to the point of discomfort. But yeah, I loved creating things.I didn’t know what I wanted to be ever. I wanted to be the world one-mile race champion, or those things passed. I just loved making things and I loved being with people.Yeah. What were you making? Where did that begin?I was writing mainly. I started writing pretty young and I understood what fiction was and I loved to read. My mother, a great story, she took me when we first got here. In a town like this, there’s lots of things that people think are the cool thing and they’re always wrong. And so she took me to the Princeton Public Library. And she looked me in the eyes.She said, you’re going to get something today that’s the most powerful tool in the world. And I’m thinking, finally, a sword, or like a BB gun. And she got me a library card. And yeah, I didn’t know that you could do that. But yeah. So it’s always been a mystery.Amazing. You used the word ambitious, but you questioned your own ambition. What do you think? What are you talking about when you talk about being ambitious and not understanding it?I think ambition shows up in children as competitiveness. Right? Which is, again, uncomfortable to admit that you’re competitive, because it’s a trait that when you see it in others, it’s disgusting.Right? And it’s, whatever, it’s also intrinsic to humans. It’s René Girard, and mimetic theory and envy and scapegoating and all that s**t.But I always wanted to run fast. I don’t know where it came from. But I have not succeeded. I’ve succeeded in tempering and understanding it.But to deny it, I think, is probably not even a good idea.Yeah, yeah. Well, I have lots of identification with that, completely. And I remember discovering that the word ambitious shares that same root as ambulatory. And I think I read one version where somebody was ambitious because they were going around to get support, like if they were running for office. It was like, right, you were going around. And I’ve sort of marveled at my own ability, like, why do I go around? Well, I think it’s probably unfortunate that we haven’t found a way to reconcile for, we play team sports, right? And team sports are a good lesson that it doesn’t matter who does what, as long as we do this. But yeah, it’s very interesting for me from a career perspective. I had a part of my career where it was conventional. And then we lived in Marin County, like 2010.And we decided to spend a year in Princeton. And we stayed. And a few years after that, I started an education company.And in typical hubristic, or naive, fashion, I was like, I’ll just do this, this will be easy. And I remember through the experience, not easy. But I loved it so much, because it seemed like it was the first structure I’d ever found where succeeding in your ambition was just a generally good thing.Right? I got to teach these kids, eight-year-old kids. It felt so clean in a way that commerce never does.So catch us up. You’re in Princeton. What are you up to these days?Yeah, the way to tell the story best is, I built a career. I’m known for building virtual worlds, primarily Second Life. But I’ve also designed casinos. Early in my career, with Carl Sagan’s family, we built a model of the known physical universe. So I like doing spatial big things that are full of stories where you can see things differently.And along the way, sold a couple companies, and we ended up back in Princeton. And then I got very sick for the better part of a decade. And then I became very healthy.And thank God, got a new lease. And so, to be honest, I’m struggling a little, philosophically. For me, once I see things differently, I can’t go do the old thing. I can’t do advertising. I’m single-minded.And what I’m interested in is, as I got better, I began to document everything in a way that wasn’t utilitarian. It was just like, what’s going on? What’s going on? I made little apps for myself to read at night. Lots of it’s cheesy, but it’s been a hell of a lot of work.So I’ve spent the last two years focused just on groups, whether it’s me and you right now, which is called a dyad, or groups up to 10 or 12, after which things change. And I never knew any of these things. I just wasn’t interested.And so what I fell into doing was building movements. And I’ve contributed to a couple big ones that you’ll see in public, one for the environment. Another, sort of a men’s movement, that’s not about going to the desert and eating fire, but more like growth.And it’s what I’m into. So it turns out this is a very hard, hard problem. Right?Yeah. It’s hard there. If you actually study movements, first you have to ask, what is a movement? Right? Is the Pepsi campaign a movement, because it says it is? The answer almost always is no, brands have movements.Yeah.The other thing is, top down or bottom up. You start with a charismatic leader. Right? The second thing that’s super important is the first follower. Right? So there’s a great video on YouTube called First Follower.And that video is people dancing at a concert. One guy gets up and dances. That’s the leader.The first person who gets up and validates them is more important. And so movements are a mode of creative expression and movement towards a goal that are sort of built and told with people. It’s tribal.It’s nice. Yeah.Yeah, it’s beautiful. I feel like two questions are always trying to get out of my face at the same time. And one is about trying to unpack what you mean by a movement. The other is going back to the beginning, I think you used the term world building. You know what I mean? Second Life. And I’m just maybe trying to connect those two. Maybe that’s impossible.But yeah. It’s funny. So yeah, I’m too old to care.So I’m in recovery. And therefore I’m exposed all the time to the 12 steps and how that happened. And people get sober and they get really excited. But this isn’t new to my life. It’s 30 years I’ve been looking at it. And it’s extraordinary that there’s a thing that exists because the medical establishment gave up, and they still give up.There are things that resemble it, some of which work, like if the only difference is alcohol or drugs, that works, but it doesn’t work for other things. And it’s amazing because movements are humanity’s best-designed perpetual motion machine. Right?And religions are movements, but there’s always a leader, a core text, a set of principles, like, once we get successful, don’t go on television. That’s actually in AA. It’s like, you can’t do that.But yeah, I think they’re so powerful. And I think they’re hard to apply to various areas because of two things. One, they have to be against something, right? So the movement needs an enemy.That’s what fuels it. And that works in politics, but Oura, the ring company, can’t run into battle against Samsung, right? So they have to have something very, very, very hard.They’re about meaning. Ultimately, that’s what these things are, is they’re meaning machines.And that’s why people come back, is because, turns out, you create meaning by taking a piece of yourself and leaving it behind with the others. And you come back the next week to see if they tried it.Yeah. And I’m so curious about the other piece of the question, the world building, Second Life. Looking back on all of that, what was that experience like? What were you doing in Second Life? And how do we think about that now?Yeah, I’ll do the simple, but really the advanced version. So I joined, I think we had like 12,000 residents and we made everyone pay. And it being kind of nerdy was why we didn’t have anyone. And my role was the evangelist.So I was the first follower. Philip was the CEO. And my job was to package it up in a story that can be told a million times. And we did really well because we marketed it based upon the user stories.And they were so bizarre and so interesting. And after I left there, it had a couple million users, was doing, I don’t know, a hundred million a year. And I went out to use that as a tool to build things for companies.And there was a big brand hype around it. And so it was fun for a while. What’s interesting is those of us who thought we were going to become billionaires look back on it now, and some view it as a thing that could have been, but wasn’t.But that’s not the right way to look at it. This was the first thing online that people lived in. Right.And people today will be like, well, whatever it’s called, Fortnite or Minecraft. But none of those had the attribute of being a culture and being a place you went where you knew people. It didn’t scale and still hasn’t.Mainly because, in my opinion, no one’s asked the next important question, which is, why does this only work for a fringe group of people? And the answer is pain. If you’re going to spend that much time there, there’s something, without being judgmental, that this provides that real life doesn’t. That is the answer.And there’s people with Asperger’s, there’s people who are empty nesters, there’s people, but you couldn’t say those things of Instagram. Right. And that’s why there isn’t a giant Instagram metaverse.It changed me completely because it allowed me to see more things in the same way, like going to the city changes you. Right. You see the simulation running with more data. And Second Life was like that.And it was remarkable because you could impact the simulation. You could see what part you didn’t. And I think at some point down the road, that’s probably going to be pretty, the funniest thing, Peter, actually, is that, without giving anything away, I’m working with my old friend, Philip Rosedale from Second Life. And we’re working on something that began with him asking, what are you interested in?And he’s saying, I’m interested in something that involves no technology and involves people meeting in real life. So I think a lot of people who have prototyped stuff fast and cheap are going to realize the real world is kind of a metaverse.Yeah. Yeah. It feels very much that this is the case, that we’re all sort of running to the real world and having a kind of awakening, following social media and the impact that that’s had on us.So definitely. And it’s interesting to have spent that much time in Second Life. And the metaverse, right? Are these the same concepts in a way, yes or no?Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s lots of people who will use a definition that tells you that there’s like a billion people in the metaverse.And they’ll say Roblox, and they say it’s because of its characteristics, multiplayer, 3D. But I don’t know how I define it. The answer is Second Life’s the only one, but I kind of feel like that.You can feel it when you’re in it. It’s hard. I think money is part of it, like having everything be viable and sellable.And part of it is just the way it feels.Yeah. And what’s the work that you’re doing now? You talked about doing movements, you’re doing lots of writing.I do a lot of writing. God, this is the most embarrassing, it’s cringe. I think that’s what my daughter would call it.I’m doing something so cringe. I’m writing a memoir. And yeah, I finally got over myself. I was like, right. If you tell the truth, you’re not trying to impress anyone, and make your audience yourself. Right. See if you can actually tell it.And then I write for a publication called The Contrarian about AI. And I like that, that’s pretty disciplined. And so it forces me not to be alarmist or speculative.And yeah. And then I’m designing movements. There’s a guy, the world expert on movements, is a guy named Marshall Gans. And he’s probably 70, 75.I just read his book and I’m going up to Harvard to meet with him. And he’s an amazing guy. In the sixties, he was a scholarship student at Harvard, three years in.And the Mississippi Burning stuff happened where they killed the students, and a call went out and he just went down and kind of was part of the Freedom Riders. And then someone heard about him, they sent him out. They said, there’s a guy named Cesar Chavez you’ve got to meet.And he brought the methodology for organizing and movement building to the United Farm Workers, applied it all over the place, Obama’s campaign. And it’s really not fancy. I like it.It’s almost like a recipe. This is what you need to have to get s**t done.How would you describe the methodology, if it’s possible? I seem to remember some framework of his speeches. It was sort of we, our, maybe I was getting into the language of it.No, I think the center of it is the most surprising part, which is we have a false dichotomy. To go back to something like AA, self-help, right? Funny thing is, AA doesn’t talk about our lived realities. But what AA has in common with things that we think of as being like, you show up and bang the drum and stuff, is when you create a movement, the first thing an organizer does before setting everything up is convene people and get them to write their story and what they care about, and match it with a larger structure such that they can only get there as a movement, right?AA is intrinsically personal, but I never thought these functional organizations would be. And I think it’s actually probably an observation that you could apply to, hey, I have a company, and hey, everyone hates working here, and I don’t care, because it’s hard to put your organization into a 12-step program. But really all it would require is getting people to do the same thing. It’s like, what’s your story and how does being part of this help it?Yeah. It’s funny. I was talking to somebody the other day, that AA was born in the 30s, right? Of this particular moment. Toastmasters was born at the same time, the mass sort of fellowship, this idea that there was a benefit to coming together, but also that public speaking could be a path to redemption or self-help or self-improvement.It’s the only path.Yes.It really is the only path. And even if you take it out of wellness and you just say, where are we trapped or confined? Usually people who can’t sell are uncomfortable with vulnerability.So they sit there and they tell you about the pen they’re going to give you and they don’t say their daughter’s name, and, you know what I mean?Yeah.It’s so amazing. I think it’s the future for us. I don’t want to overstate the case, but yeah, vulnerability is the first step to success, right? It’s like the trust fall.What has your experience been with AI? Was it an assignment or a theme that you were given? We’re all sort of swimming in it, to whatever degree we’re comfortable, but to be tasked with writing about it, what’s that been like and how do you think about it?It’s interesting because I had forgotten how it happened, but two and a bit years ago, when I started to be well, first I said, I’ve got to write once a week. And then finally I wrote something that someone noticed. I wrote this piece on why we shouldn’t be opposed to letting AI vote for us.And it was kind of Swiftian, right? Like, why shouldn’t we eat the children? And that connected me to The Contrarian.And then there was just this lens of, what’s really going on and how does it affect democracy? And I began to find, I’ve written 14 articles about it, AI systems are refusing healthcare coverage to people, not by accident, but because that’s how they’re designed. Yeah, it sounds awful and alarmist, but AI by design is sometimes talking children into suicide.So I got into it, right? I was like, are data centers really that big a problem? The stuff I care about is language stuff.I think it’s really dangerous that people are using AI to write, because writing is thinking, right? They’re everywhere, but you see a piece and it just reminds me of a guy juiced up on steroids, standing on top of a mountain he didn’t really climb.And you’re like, the point of this is to climb the mountain, right? It sounds very reductionist.No, I’m right there with you. I was also curious, how do you think about what AI is? How would you describe your relationship with it, maybe, is the right question?Yeah, I’ve changed my view. I’m not contra AI, nor am I afraid of it. I think the thing it’s best at, ironically, I use Claude, I found this out in the context of writing my book. I would just feed it material, chronological photographs and annotations and very uncomfortable stuff.And it behaved beautifully. It was the first time I ever really connected with it. I felt emotional about how it told me once, it was like, this is a lot. I think you should stop. And I was like, excuse me, machine. It’s obviously been told, it has good judgment.But yeah, my intuition is that the road ahead is, I don’t think jobs are going to go away. I think there’ll be a bump. But I think our definition of a firm will just be a firm that does more faster.Structurally, I think there’s going to be some real pain. But I use it so much. I use it for scenarios, which I don’t know if people do, but I pretend I’m the casting director and the director.And so I’ll make something up, like, okay, it’s November 3rd, 2028. A solar flare has taken out our broadcast systems and everyone only has internet.The candidates are JD Vance and Gavin Newsom. They’re given three paragraphs each to change your mind. What do they say? And it’s awesome. I forget what it says, but it’s less research and more future casting.Yeah. Yeah. You wrote one piece on sovereign AI, and I was curious where you landed on that.Yeah. Well, forgive me, I didn’t really say what I think AI is. Some of the people I deal with think it’s a life force or a life form.I’m wholly uninterested in whether it will become conscious or won’t. I just don’t think it will. And I don’t think it has a sense of self. Therefore it’s not an entity.But sovereign AI is interesting, and it basically says, hey, what happens when you’re a citizen of a country? Well, you have an ownership stake in all of our common resources, and AI is a common resource. And so probably 50 countries in the world right now are developing pretty high-ticket national utility AIs, where they contribute the French language and all this stuff.And it’s a creepy notion, because the flip side of that is an assumption that as a citizen, I contribute my thoughts, right. But people are going to spend money on it. Right.Can you say more? What’s interesting to me about sovereign AI is, so we have friends in common, Dave and Helen Edwards at the Artificiality Institute, and they talk really articulately about this idea of cognitive sovereignty. And to your point, that analogy of the relationship that we have with AI when we’re working with AI, and I’ve had the experience that you’ve said of trying to write with AI or think with AI and realizing that I’ve just obliterated any chance of having an original thought, or being connected to whatever that thing produces. Right. And recognizing that boundaries need to be very clearly written.Very clearly written.Right. And so when I think about sovereignty, I feel like there’s a model of being sovereign as an individual working with AI, and knowing when it’s my work and when it’s the AI’s work, but that you could somehow scale that up, and that at a community level you could have a sort of sovereignty.Yeah, you could. Sovereignty, where a lot of this comes from, as I’ve experienced it, and it explains why I’m working on what I’m working on, I’ll try to connect some dots, but since we connected the internet, even with shitty early websites, we expanded, through communities, the borders of collectiveness, right? So I know him from the bulletin board system, or we know each other from such and such game. It’s not a mistake that the metaverse got really hot.It’s weird that it got hot because there was a way to see it, right? So it’s category error. I could see it, but I don’t even know what it is. I don’t want to be there.These things all feel like games, but people talked about the metaverse for a while. What the metaverse really is about, I think, is the collected communities that, because we’re in a network, we can belong to. And I think AI blows it all out of the water. And I’m spending a good deal of time, with very little success, trying to think about collectiveness.Yeah.So there was a guy named, the thing is called the network state, and his name is, can you type it in, the network state? He was an a16z partner, Balaji Srinivasan.Oh yeah.And he wrote this book, largely coming out of crypto and blockchains, and basically saying that the next countries don’t need land, right. They just need a polity of people to pool capital and effort.And that’s a state. And this was really popular with libertarian folks and the crypto crowd.Yeah.But it actually has teeth now that we have AI because, the real question, like I said, I’m contributing my intellect, right? No one has a problem with sovereign wealth funds or the fact that Norway is just outrageously wealthy because we all have a piece of the oil fields. But what this next thing says is our wealth is our collective intelligence.And it’s inarguable that that is an asset. What that means beyond that, I think, remains to be seen. Oh, sorry. I got sucked into the network.Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you got sucked into the network state?I found a podcast with just the table of contents of a conversation with him. And even that was sort of interesting.Oh, dude. That whole movement, I find it very male and a bit dark, very Thiel-y. But there’s a group called Praxis who have raised, according to them, some massive amount of money, like $250 million committed. And they’re buying a large city-sized block of land in Portugal, I think, or something.And this is very much, these people are inspired by Athenian city-states. And I have a friend who’s not in tech, and when he hears me talk, he goes, oh, you’re working on your tree fort again. I think my friends can come over and we can say how we’re going to take over the world.That’s horrible. I’ve been in Hudson, I’ve been an advocate for citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy. And that really is born out of the Athenian city-state. And I had my own experience in Athens this year where I felt quite moved by democracy. And I’m trying to differentiate myself from these world-building crypto bros. There is a fixation. But what you were just describing also reminds me, there are people building new cities in the desert, right? We’re in this really strange period where affluent men from Silicon Valley are trying to rebuild the world.Yeah. There’s one near Sacramento that’s really well-funded. And let’s unpack it.I love those ideas, not their version. I never like anyone else’s version. I like my version, which is different and cheap and not about tech. But I think, as someone who’s never been to Burning Man, it seems to me like that’s one of the top three things about Burning Man, or frankly Second Life, is it feels great to build your own place.Yeah.Right. And the radical idea that I can build it and not have to come back when a raccoon gets trapped under my poorly constructed porch. It’s like, leave it in the desert. But every single city in ours and every other country was built by people no more capable than us.Yeah. And how attractive a blank slate is, right? That’s amazing. Fresh start. I read a definition of a romantic, as somebody that did not want to be where they were. I also really identify with that. And if I could be somewhere new that was totally my own, of course I would. That would be preferable.It’d be amazing. It’d be amazing. And what’s extraordinary is that between those two poles, of New York, where if you get enough permits you can change your kitchen counter material, to a little piece of unincorporated land next to a creek where you can schlep in a tiny house, it’s all possible.What I find interesting, in movement making, is the fun part. The fun part is writing the 12 steps, the rules, like, what’s the game. And that’s the only reason you’d want to have sovereignty, because that’s what sovereignty is. Right.Do you have a feeling about what sovereignty would mean in, so I did another interview with this guy, Mark Kingsley, and he wrote this piece that AI is a condition, not a tool. It’s just a great metaphor. He’s like, it’s like literacy or modernity, or like the floor. You don’t think about the floor every time you step on it. It’s just a condition of your world. It becomes invisible. So AI is this condition that we are now living in and within, and everything is being reorganized around it.Well, I hate to be the 12-step-y guy, but imagine that AI was like alcohol and we had all learned about it about three and a half years ago. Right. A few children got hold of too much.They’re not here anymore. The rest of us are sharing things we didn’t think of with other people who pretend to be impressed. But yeah, if it’s a condition, if it’s a substance, I said this a while ago, I was like, look, the most subversive act you can commit these days is to refuse to talk to AI, right?Because then you’ll be assured that your thoughts are your thoughts, right? I make the mistake. I’m all in on AI, right?And I make the mistake of thinking I thought things that I didn’t. I prompted it, maybe I did it, but that condition, it’s the membrane. It’s the boundary where we begin to lose track of, did I think that, or did it think that for me?Yeah. I was talking to somebody the other day and they were telling me, I think it’s a classic story from way back. Eliza was a very early kind of bot, and the inventor had an assistant that he gave access to Eliza. And the story goes that he was very worried because at one point his assistant asked him to leave the room so she could have a conversation with Eliza.Well, look, within the pantheon of the metaverse or networked communications or the internet, there’s the one thing no one talks about, right? Most of them just haven’t thought of it yet. But for AI, in my opinion, it’s immortality, right?So it’s like, I am an entity and the biological form of that will go away. I don’t know what my memories or thoughts are, but they’re definitely part of me, but they’re the part that won’t go away. And we used to be fine having a faded picture of great-granddad or a love letter to our grandmother or whatever these ephemera were that survived.But again, people don’t really talk about it, but a very substantial part of what is you doesn’t rely on you writing a book to survive, right? And that’s nice, right? It’s not scary.It’s not like everyone has to go to grandma’s grave in some gray hill in the woods and a Princess Leia is going to hover above her and scold us. It’s just cool. And it changes what it is to be human.Yeah. We’re kind of near the end of time. I’ve got two questions. What are you most looking forward to? What’s next for you, and what are you excited about?I’ll tell you what I did. So one of my big decisions was I’m not working for anyone anymore, which is scary. It’s like, okay, what are you going to do?So I do what I do, which is basically I consult and I write and I build things, and we’re starting a venture fund, and themes, all of which I’ve been talking to you about, which are really the post-AI reality. That’s what we’re building towards, where the game is not about attention. The game is about connection, but no one knows how to make money in the era of connection.So that’s what we’re thinking about. What I’m looking forward to is the second part of that, which is I started building my little movement. And as I said before, I pay attention to the things I make to help myself.And then that’s my pipeline. So if you work from home, which I do, you don’t have colleagues, and colleagues are really important. So I was like, who are the 12 most interesting people I know?And why don’t I just ask them if they want to meet for half an hour every week? And it’s taken a structure that’s really, really nice. I think it’s affecting everyone really well because, the coolest thing about it is, in a work setting it’s looked down on to talk s**t, meaning just wander around the rabbit hole till you find the bottom of the maze of randomness.But we have no conditions like that. And the finest things are coming out of that lack of structure. And of course, AI is allowing us to get away with it.In fact, enabling us, because we can wander till we find a few things and model them and see if they’re real. And then a whole bunch are getting built. So I’m looking forward to more of that.It feels illicit. It feels like what happens when you graduate college, but I have faith.That’s beautiful. And then the last question, which is, what do you love about what you’re doing? Where’s the joy in it?I know the answer. It feels like a non sequitur, but it’s the freedom to tell the truth almost all the time. I think everyone’s had the conundrum, you work for a thing, and the thing you know is true, that you wish you could write your Jerry Maguire letter about, would mean you get fired.And I think we all dance on the razor blade of that tension, like, the money seems better in b******t. But I find joy in just, I still do it consciously, but I’m like, tell the truth and figure out a way to find your way there that doesn’t make it, we should all stop doing this.Yeah, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much. It’s been a real treat talking to you.Peter, this was great. This was great. 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Freddie Pikovsky is the founder of Last Human, a placemaking and creative studio built around making places, brands, and experiences that preserve human connection. Its flagship project is Barnfox, the work and retreat club in the Cannonball Factory in Hudson, New York he co-founded in 2017. He has spent his career building spaces and media for people who want to work and live differently: he opened DUMBO Startup Lab, one of Brooklyn’s first coworking spaces, in 2011, and founded Off Track Planet, the travel brand behind Off Track Planet’s Travel Guide for the Young, Sexy, and Broke. He is the co-author with Nicole Caldwell of FARM + LAND’S Back to the Land: A Guide to Modern Outdoor Life (Chronicle Books), a collection of stories about slow living, sustainability, and doing things with your own two hands.So I do this all the time, of course, in every conversation, I start with the same question, which I borrowed from a neighbor of ours, Suzanne Snyder, who runs the Oral History Summer School in Hudson. She has this amazing question, which I stole from her because it’s big and beautiful and great, but because it’s big and beautiful and great, I kind of overexplain it the way that I’m doing right now.So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control.I’m originally from Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 80s, which was a huge concentration of mobsters in that time in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And the reason I think that’s important to say is we grew up in a neighborhood that was very family and community oriented.If you ask my mom, she was like, we liked having the mafia in the neighborhood because they protected us. If you ever had a problem, you can go to somebody and they’ll help take care of it for you. So I grew up in the type of neighborhood that it was almost like straight out of a Scorsese movie where kids on the block would play all night.Parents knew each other and everybody felt really safe and protected. And there were a bunch of characters. And we all made up fun stories about that guy who sat on the porch smoking cigars all day and how he probably killed a few people and has a few bones in his closet and things like that.But I grew up in this very tight knit community. I think it made a big impact on me as a person for the rest of my life. And my grandmother and our other family members lived in Los Angeles. And I remember leaving Brooklyn when I was about seven years old, which is why you don’t hear the Bensonhurst Brooklyn accent, although it tends to come out of me when I get passionate about it or I get tipsy.Sorry, this is a really long answer to the question. But we moved to Los Angeles when I was about seven years old and we moved to the San Fernando Valley, which is not the cool part of L.A. It’s very, very spread out, very suburbia. And it was the complete opposite of what I experienced up until that point in my life, which was, people were very disconnected, no sense of community, very spread out. You didn’t really know who your neighbors were. And it lacked a whole lot of character as far as I was concerned.So I longed for Brooklyn ever since I arrived as a seven year old in Los Angeles and eventually moved back to Brooklyn as soon as I had the means to in my 20s. So I think the reason I answer that question in that way is because I think those first few years of my life were really shaped by this unique time and place. And that’s been my perspective on the world is living in this very tight knit community where everybody knows each other and looks out for each other.And that’s been a big impact and shaped my view of the world since I was little.Yeah, it’s amazing. Do you have a way of thinking about what does it mean to be from Brooklyn? When you say that, what does that feel like?I feel like it’s always been a cool thing to say. I’m very proud of it. And even my wife will tease me.She’s like, yeah, you grew up in L.A. Like, don’t lie. And I’m like, I try to downplay the fact that I actually did kind of spend most of my life going to school in Los Angeles because I as a person identify as a Brooklynite, even though I spent a lot of my formidable years in Los Angeles. And I have great friends that I obviously grew up with and went to school with in Los Angeles and still stay in touch and visit all the time.But I never felt that it was my identity. I never identified with the culture of Los Angeles. I always thought they were a bit soft and lacked — not everybody. But there was a lack of character unless you were trying to be a movie star or something like that. I never. Yeah, I was just not my vibe.Yeah. Well, my daughter’s nine. And so seven years is a lifetime. Do you know what I mean? So those early years are really powerful. So I appreciate hearing that. I believe you when you say you’re from Brooklyn.Yeah, when I get passionate about something, though, the Brooklyn really starts to come out and start waving everywhere. I should also mention, we’re Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. So I was the first in my family born in the US period. I have many cousins now younger than me, but I was kind of the first one here.So we were Ukrainians. We were adjacent from Brighton Beach, which is known as Little Odessa, with families from Odessa in the Ukraine. And so it was a melting pot of Ukrainian Jews, Italians, Greeks. So that vibe has always been a big impact on me. Yeah.So you’re in L.A. What did young Fred want to be? What did you want to be when you grew up? You have a recollection of.I still find myself asking that question. What am I going to do? Who am I going to be when I grow up?Yeah, I would say my path is zigged and zagged a whole lot. Again, I grew up with parents who grew up in the Soviet Union and like typical immigrant parents who come to the U.S., they expect you to choose a path, doctor, lawyer, accountant. Those are basically your options.And I was not a good student. I definitely leaned more in the direction of being creative and entrepreneurial. I always kind of liked coming up with my own little projects and things.And so when I graduated, I will barely graduate high school. It was time to go into college. I try to do all the things that you’re told to do and go to college and pick a career and things like that.So I try to do all those things. I went to community college out of high school, but my interests kept kind of taking me in other directions. And I tried a lot of different things. I’ve done everything from working in the music industry in L.A. for a period of time. I was actually even a Hollywood extra for some period of time. It was a gig job, but dabbled in a little bit of that and started businesses when I was very young, without having absolute clues as to what I was doing.But essentially, I didn’t have the type of guidance from my parents that benefited a personality like me. And then also, I think growing up in the U.S. and my parents were not familiar with that sort of entrepreneurial culture here. I mean, I don’t think entrepreneur — the word didn’t really even exist in their lexicon.So it was a lot of figuring things out for myself, basically. Yeah.Yeah. I feel like that’s how I met you. And this is the next question I always ask is sort of catch us up. Where are you now and what are you doing? And I got to know you here in Hudson and in Bard Fox and as a real entrepreneur. And so tell us, where are you and what are you working on now?So in my journey, I’ve had a number of entrepreneurial projects, some successful, some not. And eventually, I, like many folks, when I came back to Brooklyn in my 20s, I worked on a bunch of different projects and ended up in a similar place as many folks in the city where I eventually got burned out on hustle, hustle, hustle and started to feel inspired by going upstate and made friends with somebody in Brooklyn who also wanted to invest more time and energy in upstate. At some point along my entrepreneurial journey, I started a coworking space in Brooklyn.In 2018, I started thinking about the idea of what if there were coworking spaces in upstate New York that were an escape for people from the city if remote work was to grow as an accepting way to do things. And in 2020, I opened up the first coworking space in Hudson called Barn Fox. And our launch party was two weeks before we were all told to stay home.So COVID obviously started. And yeah, essentially, in that moment, it was a lot of questions in the air as to what was going to happen next. But I had this gut feeling that we put our eggs in this basket of remote work would help our business. And obviously we’re like, well, in the grand scheme of things, this should be helpful to what our goals are here with this business.And I guess almost seven years later, we’re still here. So it’s grown and it’s grown, especially in Hudson. It’s been our most successful location. We were up to four locations. We’ve actually reduced our locations, but Hudson’s always been our best performing location. And it’s grown a lot. And obviously we’ve grown into the Cannonball Factory, which I essentially took over the whole building and now do a number of other things in this building.So yeah.What was your discovery moment with Hudson, of all places upstate, to plant that first location? What was your first experience of Hudson?So one of my previous businesses was a media company, digital media company, and we actually got a publishing deal. It was a travel blog that got really popular and turned into, yeah, a pretty popular website for backpackers, actually.Oh, all right. Yeah. What was it? Do you want to mention the name of it?It was called Off Track Planet. Oh, play on like the millennial hipster Lonely Planet. And our thing was a travel guide for the young, sexy and broke.And it was really popular on the web. And then we got a publishing deal. And Urban Outfitters around the world carried our book in all their locations.And the way that’s connected to Hudson, to answer your question, is eventually we dissolved that business. I was no longer young, sexy and aspire to be broke. So we had to move on. And I actually used the fact that we had five books published to get my own book published, which was a book called Back to the Land, a modern guide to outdoor life.Yeah.And I used the advance for that book to basically figure out for myself how I wanted to transition my lifestyle from the urban setting to a more rural setting. I knew I was tired of living in the city, but I didn’t know how living outside of the city looked for me. So I used that as an excuse to write a book about all the different ways other people had left the city to start lives. And so in doing that book, I got the opportunity to spend a year traveling around the US and meeting up with a lot of interesting people.The book was divided in different sections based on landscape. So it was like desert landscape, countryside, mountainside. And so obviously, I spent a lot of time exploring things in the Hudson Valley.And I stayed somewhere outside of Hudson. At that point, I had no recognition of what was what around here. And so I think we stayed at a campground or something. I think it was in Cairo, actually. And we saw that there was a cool coffee shop in this little town called Hudson, which ended up being Moto.I think MOTO was like first year being open, it was like 2017, 18, something like that. And that was my first time driving into Hudson. And I’m a big car enthusiast and motorcycle enthusiast. I own motorcycles and stuff like that.And I just thought the vibe of Hudson — I felt it related to a lot of my interests. And I appreciated the architecture and ended up spending half the day here, just kind of walking around and taking it in. So later on, when we had the opportunity to start Barn Fox, I just gravitated towards Hudson. It felt right for me.Cool. I’m so curious about that book. So as I understand it, it was profiles of people that had already done this sort of moving from the city to the rural. What did you learn in that process? What did you discover about that back to the land?I think for me, I’d only lived in urban landscapes, these big cities, Los Angeles, New York. And so the idea of leaving that was very scary, and a lot of unknowns. So I think doing a book like that allowed me to make sense of it.Just experiencing the fact that many other people have done it, and they’ve created a happy life for themselves, made it less scary for me. I literally was like, am I moving, in my transition, to a lifestyle where I’m just living off the land and I’m growing out? Am I starting a farm? Is that what I want to do? It was a new, like, maybe a crisis, but I was trying to figure out a new identity in my life at that point. And I didn’t know exactly what it looked like. I just was different than what I was used to. Turns out, I like many modern conveniences. I just don’t necessarily like as much hustle bustle.And it goes back to what I was saying about community and my experience as a kid in Brooklyn. I think when you live in New York City, especially New York City, everybody’s very into themselves and their goals and missions, which is great. And it’s inspiring when you’re very motivated and have a lot of goals in your life. But it’s the type of place where you can end up feeling very lonely because everybody’s kind of focused on themselves. You’re surrounded by a lot of people. And so you don’t really have many deep relationships. And that’s what I was missing in life.And I felt like moving to a smaller place got me back to having a sense of community. And also, you can say that same thing for Barn Fox, which was the motivation. And I think what appeals to me in creating and running a cohort in spaces, it’s a community within the community.So I think that was the biggest appeal for me, was to just kind of be back in a lifestyle where you actually knew your neighbors and felt like there was a support system. And there were real relationships that weren’t just surface deep. And you weren’t surrounded by people that were just purely focused on their goals and achievements. There was real care for their quality of life and one another.Yeah. I’m curious where you first discovered co-working as an opportunity. How did you get into it? How did you identify it? What was the thing that happened that made it what you were going to do? What did you notice that made it something that you wanted to do?It was like many great things. It was an accident. So going back to the backpacking media company that I first started with, so I found myself when I moved to Brooklyn in my mid 20s, broke as s**t, and all I knew is I was obsessed with travel at the time.I was able to sell my first little business in my early 20s and I used that money to travel the world. And I was obsessed with backpacking and travel. I just wanted to do that for a while and realized that there wasn’t a travel resource that related to us hipsters at that time. It was like Lonely Planet was a book published for hippies of the 60s and 70s. And it was time for a new thing that was digital and mobile and all that stuff.So I was living in a hostel and I started this travel blog, and I kind of got in the mix of the VC world and I was trying to figure out how to get investment money to build my company. And as my website was getting more and more popular, I ended up going to something called a coworking space along that journey. And in New York City, this was 2008, 2009. I think WeWork, it was like one location or two locations. And there was another — I can’t think of the name of it right now. But it was another coworking space.So basically, if you were in the startup scene in New York City around that time, there were like a few hubs where everybody kind of gravitated towards that functioned like coworking spaces. And it was a place where investors would come. So they created these incubators and accelerators and things like that. So that was the first time I had witnessed something like that.Eventually, I was able to get some funding. First time I was able to raise some substantial money for Offtrack Planet. And I thought, to me, the coolest neighborhood to work in at that time anywhere in New York City was Dumbo. I just love my big river and bridges guy. Love me a good river and a bridge. So I just loved it.It felt like a neighborhood out of a movie. And it’s become so much one of the most photographed places and filmed so often now, but in 2008, 2009, it was pretty under the radar even at that point. So as soon as we got some funding for Offtrack Planet, I moved into an office in this converted factory building. And we had a little team.And as our little business grew and we were able to get a little bit more funding, I got overzealous and just started renting bigger and bigger office spaces to the point that I couldn’t afford my own office space. At that point, we weren’t even making money. We were just spending money. So as the money was burning, it was kind of like, oh, s**t, we need to find a way to make some real revenue.And we had a bunch of empty office space. So I said, why don’t we just slap a coworking space on our office and invite people to work out of this space. And that’s exactly what happened.We ended up opening up essentially the first private coworking space in Dumbo at that time. There was a few other variations of a coworking space, but not truly. This was like a big lofted community type space. It was called Dumbo Startup Lab, which we officially launched in like 2010.And to me at the time, I looked at it totally as like this side hustle to my main project. And so I was kind of doing these two things. I was managing and operating this coworking space, Dumbo Startup Lab, while focusing on my travel media company.And I loved running the coworking space. But to me, I was like, yeah, that’s helping pay the bills. But my passion thing is the travel media company.And then, of course, in hindsight, WeWork ended up getting gobs of investment money and coworking in New York City just kept blowing up, blowing up. And I had my attention in a different place. I sold Dumbo Startup Lab at some point as the media company was kind of getting more investment money.And in hindsight, it was kind of like Dumbo Startup Lab could have been the golden ticket. I don’t know. But down the line, eventually the media company did shut down.And I thought, that coworking business was really great, actually. I really liked it. And I enjoyed the day to day of it.Whereas the media company was something I was passionate about. I was stuck in front of my computer all day. And I’m a pretty sociable, extroverted person.And I’m like, I actually really liked the day to day of that business and thought, maybe I could try that again. But New York City was saturated with coworking spaces by that point. So I looked outward.What do you love about it? Where’s the joy in it for you, the coworking space, Barn Fox?I think I realized I just really like hospitality. Like, I like to schmooze. I’m a big schmoozer.As you can tell, I’m long winded. I like to talk. And again, going back to community.I’m a relationship builder. I’ve always kind of naturally been a good connector, when I meet folks and get to learn who they are and what they do. And I try to connect the dots and say, oh, you should talk to that person. So I think I’ve been just naturally kind of like a connector of people always.Also, as I mentioned, I was a bad student. I ditched school and I was the host to many ditching parties. I kind of liked being the host of gatherings. I don’t know that I knew that. Wait, hold on. I just need to take a minor time out. You need to introduce to me the idea of a ditching party. I understand ditching and I understand party. I didn’t know that they ever really come together into one event.Well, we used to call them kickbacks. We were like, you want to come to my house and kick back? Yeah.But it’s like a bunch of the link juvenile delinquents who are ditching school and we needed a place to hang out. And we were latchkey kids. Like our parents were all at work.So I was like, come over my house. My parents aren’t home till 6 p.m. So it was a place to hang out. Do all the things we weren’t supposed to be doing.But I like being the host of those things. So I’d like to think I got started in this pretty early in summer. Also, another sidetrack to all this, another big influence in my life was I was a camp counselor for a few summers.And I thought, co-working in upstate New York could look like a summer camp.Right.If we’re all working remote, we don’t have our bosses breathing down our necks. We can hang out after work and use the upstate landscape as our playground.Yeah.So that was a big part of Barn Fox was like, hey, let’s, after work, go kayaking. Let’s go have drinks. Let’s go hiking. We did a lot of that during covid for sure.Yeah, folks. I’m so curious about the development of Barn Fox, the name and the identity, from a like just building something new and fresh in Hudson. How did that go? And yeah, how do you feel about how it all has been going?I’ll be honest, I guess I’ve always just had a very ambitious entrepreneurial perspective. And I always kind of hoped that Barn Fox can be huge, like many locations, like the sky’s the limit. So we grew to four locations within a few years and we were never able to, as a business, break through this scalable model.And at some point, I really just decided let’s not focus on it being this mega, mega corporate business. And let’s focus on what it is that we have now and make it as great as possible. And so I feel very lucky I created something I really love because I think as an entrepreneur, you create a business for certain reasons.Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s ego or whatever it is. I started Barn Fox primarily focusing on what is it that I want to do every day when I wake up? How do I want to spend my day?And Barn Fox has been a lot of what I had hoped it would be. So I think Hudson’s always performed the best. I think there’s a few reasons for that, but I would like to think that one of those reasons is, I’m in Hudson most of the time.Yeah.And so I play the community manager here, and I think it’s really important to have a community manager in each location that wants to connect with everybody and have relationships. It’s what brings people in and makes their day much better, I think.Yeah. So you’ve also been doing lots of other stuff, too. The Cannonball Factory, can you tell us a little bit about, yeah, where you are with the Cannonball Factory and sort of what you’re up to these days? Because I know you have another project that’s coming, right?So, yeah, the Cannonball Factory came about a few years ago. I guess it would be good to tell a little bit of the background of the building.Yeah.So when I moved to Hudson, the Cannonball Factory was the Etsy space. I was under the impression, and I think many people were, that the co-founder of Etsy lived somewhere around here. And I was under the impression he owned the building because he could.And the whole building was full of Etsy employees. And when I first opened BarnFox, we were in a small location on Warren Street, which is now Playpop. And I realized we needed more space.People wanted private offices. People wanted more private spaces so the space was more functional. I was like, God, if that Etsy building was available, it would make the perfect space for BarnFox.Turns out somewhere along the COVID timeline, I got word that we had a bunch of Etsy employees come to us for membership and we have our own building. Why are you coming to me for membership? Turns out the Etsy guy doesn’t own the building.He leased the building and canceled it, at least because they started a remote work policy and a lot of folks moved away and this became a big expense, unnecessary expense for them. So I immediately found out who the building owner was and we moved into one floor of the building, like a month later. And my dream of moving into this building came true suddenly.But we were just on one floor, and even one floor was much more space than we had at the time.And the rest of the building was— It’s a stunning building. What do you know about the history of that building? Was it, in fact, a cannonball factory?So the story that I’ve been told by—In Hudson, nothing is actually true, but the stories are great.Yeah, it’s great. There’s debates online about — I think there’s a record of it being built in the late 1800s, like 1880. And there’s people who are like, it can’t have been a cannon. They weren’t making cannonballs in 1880 and stuff like that.So the story that I got from the owner was that the actual basement where the cannonball market is now was indeed a place. What would you call a place that makes cannonballs?I have no idea.But it’s where they actually— A foundry? It was a foundry.Yeah, it was a cannonball foundry in the 1700s that had burned down. And the actual basement is still the ruins of the foundry. And then eventually someone came along and built a building around it.I see.How true is that? I don’t know. It’s a good story. But that would explain why they call it the cannonball factory, even though the building was recognized as being established in the late 1800s. And this factory has been famously textiles, it was a mill, I think at some point it was actually the original mill — the first houses in Hudson were milled in this building. And then I did find a news article from, I think, the late 90s, early 2000s that referred to it as the cannonball factory. So.So there you have— It’s a beautiful, beautiful building.The wood floors — the Etsy co-founder Rob Kalin himself, I think, polished the floors when Etsy moved in. And a lot was done with Rob Kalin, who I’ve never actually met. But he and the owner, current owner of Campbell, he bought it 20 years ago when it was in disarray. But they together kind of brought it back to life.And we’ve done a lot of stuff, too, since we moved here. But I have to admit, a lot of stuff was kind of built for us when we moved in.Yeah, my experience was it was sort of vacant and then it was Etsy and then you were in it and you’ve really just brought it to life. What you’ve done with that space is really quite, quite amazing.Thanks. Yeah. So I guess, to kind of bring it to where it is today, a few years—So we were the only folks in the building on one floor because— sorry, the fashion retailer was on the ground floor, but that was always kind of like a temporary thing. So they eventually moved out and it was just us. And the owner just came to me one day and was like, oh, by the way, I’m listing the building for sale.I’m like, what? We just invested a bunch of money in our lease and the space and everything. No, no, no, it’s going to be fine.So that obviously stressed me out. And fortunately for me, there were no offers. They listed the price of the building quite high.And I eventually just sat down with him and I said, look, I think BarnFox has an opportunity to grow into the rest of the building. And I have a vision for the ground floor. I think the ground floor can be sort of a market space, essentially.I thought about like a very miniature Chelsea market to Hudson, something that had a few food vendors and some retail and a farm stand. And that was the vision, like, less than three years ago. I think it’s been officially like two years, actually less than three years. It’s been two years since we basically made that agreement. We essentially partnered up on my ability to run the building.So I got to say, it was one of the few times where I had a very clear vision that completely worked out the way I had thought it would. And pretty fast time, too.So BarnFox ended up expanding into the building and opening up many offices and the offices all filled up and there’s hardly been any turnover. It’s kind of hard to get an office, actually, at BarnFox, which has been great for me. They’re always busy.And then my vision for the market, Yummy Kitchen, who is a very, very popular lunch place, food truck in town, I’d pass by them on the hottest, most humid days in summer. And they have this little truck with smoke coming out of everywhere you looked.And I’m like, how are they doing this? It’s crazy. All we do at BarnFox is spill the tea about what’s going on around town and who’s opening up this and what’s going on with that.So we all talked about Yummy Kitchen and how they’re so good. They need to get a bigger space. And so as soon as I sort of had carte blanche to do what I wanted in the building and had this vision for the market, I went straight to them and I said, listen, let me offer you a sweetheart deal and get you into our building.And I kind of sweet talked them into moving into the building. I thought we’ll help them set up a kitchen here. And obviously, I knew how popular they were and that would help bring folks to the space.And I thought, even though we’re around the corner from Warren Street, Yummy Kitchen will kind of bring a lot of folks to the building, which would expose us to be able to do other things in the building. And that’s kind of how it started last year with Yummy Kitchen.Wow.Yummy Kitchen was exactly what you said is an amazing food truck in which you just felt a lot of compassion for these humans crammed into this place hot as hell and making delicious food. And so you really created this really amazing center off of Warren Street to get lunch, which we didn’t really, didn’t have anything like it before. And yeah, it’s amazing. I didn’t realize that it’s only been a couple years. You’ve done a lot in a very short amount of time. I am curious to hear about Lev & Ida’s. There’s definitely a story there, right?So I was actually like the next thing. Yeah. So that was kind of the expansion of the market.It just started off with, if you went into Cannonball Market last year, it was like Yummy Kitchen. And then the rest of that ground floor was like a mess. It was just like a storage space for stuff in the building.And so obviously my vision was not complete, but I was trying to get another food vendor to open up right next door to Yummy that would be complimentary. And I spoke to a lot of business owners around the region who were established and doing something like a deli or a sandwich shop.And for one reason or another, I couldn’t convince folks to move in. They were all a little worried about expanding, the risks of expanding to another location. And I don’t know what just flipped a switch in my head and decided screw it.I’ll do it. I’ll open up a deli sandwich shop across from Yummy Kitchen. And I remember telling my wife about it and she’s just like, what, why would you want to do that?And I’m like, it just made sense in my head. And so I told you my life and career has zigged and zagged. At one point I did go to culinary school for one year in my early twenties.I went to culinary school and I had a cafe. That was that first business that I sold and made a little money with. But I promised myself that I’d never get into a food business again.Cause it’s just really, really tough. And then I learned that you forget everything after 20 years. So I decided 20 years later, I’m like, well, I’m going to start another food business.So yeah, I decided I will be the person that opens up a food stall next door to Yummy Kitchen. And I think it came very natural to me. It made perfect sense.I wanted to start something that was based on my Brooklyn influence and my grandparents and my background, and creating sort of a Jewish Brooklyn inspired deli just was like a no brainer to me. Named it after my grandparents. I thought it would be a great namesake thing to do. Lev passed away about eight years ago, but Ida is still with us and coherent and she lives in Los Angeles, but I was really proud and happy to be able to say like, hey, I’m going to open up a sandwich shop in your honor and your name, and made her really happy and my family really happy.So yeah. And in less than three months from idea to launch, we opened up Lev & Ida’s.Amazing. How long has that been open then, you said?It’s actually, I think literally like a year, like this week, it’s like almost exactly a year. Yeah. So it’s been one year and it’s going great. Winters are tough, not going to lie, but—I can imagine.Yeah. But the longer we’ve been around, the better we’re figuring things out, and it’s been really fun and enjoyable. And yeah, I just say that we’ve expanded now Cannibal Market into Yummy Kitchen, Lev & Ida’s, we were able to get local vendors set up in that space to create the retail part, Letterbox Farms, a local farm, has a farm stand set up.And then we just recently had Oyster Party that shucks oysters in our courtyard. So Lev & Ida’s, having that second food vendor, I think created more and more momentum. We also started doing these holiday pop-up markets.And the whole space is bustling now. And I feel really proud and happy. It was like this vision that I had for that space two years ago is really come to fruition.So I am really proud and makes me really happy when I go down there and I see it bustling with folks. It is a big, beautiful building that was kind of closed off to the community and to the public. And then now we get to share it with folks.So yeah.Yeah. Beautiful. Congratulations. And thank you, because it’s brought a lot of deliciousness into my life. So 2020 you opened, right? I’m curious what you’ve learned about Hudson. How do you think about what Hudson is and the role it plays? As somebody who’s thinking creatively and commercially about place — what have you learned over your time building businesses here in Hudson?I just know from my perspective, like I moved to Hudson Valley to change the way I spend my time and my values, reprioritizing my values. And I love that the other folks that have moved here are of the same mindset. We’re all kind of valuing more of slowing down, of community and relationships.And obviously we had this really weird, unprecedented time with COVID, which was just, yeah, it was unprecedented. It’s hard to come up with anything relatable during that time. And I think the dust has kind of started to settle in the past few years, but from what I’ve seen since I’ve been here and during COVID was, my thought was if people could work remotely, their quality of life would increase living in a place like the Hudson Valley.And so my prediction was if more people can work remotely, they’d leave the city. COVID for the most part proved that right. And we saw a big wave of people come here in the first year or two of COVID.And then BarnFox kind of saw people come and then sort of recede when everybody’s like, all right, you got to get back to work. But at that point, a lot of people got a taste of the good life. And there was kind of like a second wave, a year or two later in 2023, and the house market was still pretty good.So people started to rearrange their lives to be able to move and live in a place like Hudson. And then now we’re in another kind of weird place for the last year or two. And it feels things have kind of been a little bit more in a standstill lately.So all I know is that what my reasons were for living, for moving to Hudson and my purpose for living here has all been really fulfilling. And I’m happy to see that at least some of my predictions for people wanting to live in a place like this. There’s obviously politics around people moving to places like this and the price is fluctuating and all that kind of stuff.But at the end of the day, it’s like, people can live where they want to live, where they can live. And obviously, it’s a beautiful place where you can kind of slow things down and be close to your neighbors. And that’s what it’s been. And I love that. Yeah. What is next for you? What are you looking forward to?Yeah. So the next big venture, like I need another one. I think I really enjoyed this process.I think that one of the most enjoyable things since I started Fox has been the growth into this building in Hudson, into the cannonball factory, and kind of showing and proving that I’m not just a coworking guy, somebody who builds coworking spaces. Whenever I have a vision for something, I just kind of executed. And so my next big thing is kind of just offering that as a service, all the branding and creative side of everything, whether it’s barn Fox or Campbell factory.I’ve also been hands-on with, so anything from the placemaking of a space, of a physical location, to the branding of that. I’m launching my own sort of studio, creative studio. It’s not very well defined right now, other than, Hey, I’ve done all this stuff. If you need my help in doing stuff like this, I can do that for you as well.So it’s not officially launched or well-defined yet, but it’s essentially putting my services out there for hire for others. While I still am focusing on operating on Fox and cannonball.I obviously get excited by new ideas, and then just seeing a vision come together is what I really love. And I’m calling it last human, in relation to community building and what it is to be human during a time of, obviously, AI and all these things.Beautiful. Well, I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation. It’s been great to, yeah, hear in depth the story of all this stuff that I’ve experienced on the street here in Hudson. So thank you very much.Thank you very much for having me. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Mark DePace is Chief Creative Officer and a partner at Ghost Robot, a creative production studio in Brooklyn, NY, which he joined in 2005. He is the founder of Friendly City Creative Club, an advertising agency and retail space in Hudson, NY, and co-owner of Hudson Ferry Co. He is a visiting professor at Pratt Institute and President of the Hudson City School District Board of Education.I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a neighbor of ours, Suzanne Snider, of Oral History Summer School. And it’s a big question and it’s a beautiful question, which is why I borrow it from her, but I always kind of over explain it because it is pretty big.And so before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from?Where do I come from? I come from the Hudson Valley. I come from a family of progressive educators and a long line of proud Italian Americans.Yeah. So we know each other in Hudson, New York. What is it like to be from, or what does it mean to you to be from the Hudson Valley?I think what we experience in Hudson here is pretty similar to a lot of towns in the Hudson Valley and probably America in general have experienced, this post-industrial decline, urban renewal, reinvention. So there’s definitely a shared sense of history that I can feel and have experienced my entire life. And what’s nice about Hudson is that it happens on a much smaller scale than someplace like Newburgh where I grew up.But I’ve always been fascinated with the history from where we live and all the amazing things that have happened and some not so amazing things. And also love the natural beauty of it, which I had to leave for a while and come back before I realized how special that really is.What was it like in Newburgh growing up?It was, let’s see, similar to Hudson, there’s a narrative about Newburgh that is very negative that a lot of people perpetuate. And I think when you grow up in an environment like that, you’re motivated to seek out all of the positive things. So it gave me, I think, a unique perspective of when somebody hands you what’s supposed to be a pile of garbage, you look at it and are like, well, no, there’s actually a lot of good things here.And a lot of the things in my childhood growing up that felt like they were accidental or not intentional, I think were actually very intentional decisions made by my parents, who I mentioned were educators, and were drawn to Newburgh because at the time it was one of the first magnet schools in the country. And so it was a real experiment in, okay, what happens when you start funding public schools and giving people opportunities at a young age to try new things and explore new things and learn in different ways. And so the diversity that was there, the wealth of opportunities, the different types of just experiences that I had growing up, I think were really, really amazing and invaluable.Do you have a recollection of what young Mark wanted to be when he grew up?I always loved sports. So every child has the dream of playing sports for a living. That doesn’t pan out for most of us.I don’t know, I was always interested in arts and literature and problem-solving and very project-minded, just loved a project and getting my hands dirty and figuring out how to make something or do something. And it took me a while to figure out what form that would take, but certainly toyed with the idea of being a writer or being even a teacher at some point, always focused around either literature or the arts in some way, shape or form. Outside maybe wanting to be a firefighter when I was really young.I was also obsessed with firetrucks, which I still think are very, very cool.Well, you’re in the right town also. It’s true.It is true. It is true. And as I grew professionally, I think I gained a deeper appreciation for what firefighters do.And when I was working on film sets, I came up with this analogy. It was like, being a firefighter is like, you’re a filmmaker and somebody says, hey, you need to go make this film right now. This is where it is.And you’re able to just put it together just like that. It’s very similar in that there’s lots of trucks and each truck has a different job and each person has a different job. And when you look at it from the outside, you don’t necessarily see that, but they all know.It’s like, hey, I’m the guy that when we get there, I park my truck here and I hook this hose up there. And then this guy does this and this guy does that. And it’s really, really fascinating to think about it in that way, as a system and a process and a procedure that’s been really fine tuned to the smallest detail.Yeah. And so catch us up. Where are you now and what is the work that you do?So right now I’m in Hudson, probably less than a mile from where you are. I mentioned I started as a filmmaker and that’s what I went to school for. And as I got into making films, fell in love with the short form part of it.So music videos and commercials, and just followed that path for over 20 years. And as I’ve gotten deeper and deeper, keep uncovering more layers to all of it and have found myself becoming less intrigued just by the making of things and more intrigued in the reasons why and how, and what’s the purpose of marketing? What’s the purpose of advertising?If we’re going to spend all this time and effort making something that’s supposed to be really cool, we should know that it’s going to be successful, or at least have a decent hypothesis about why it’s necessary to be doing what we’re doing. So I still have a studio in New York City called Ghost Robot, and post pandemic opened up a studio here in Hudson that is a sister company called Friendly City Creative Club.Do you recall, was there a moment you got the itch to be a filmmaker, where you chose that as something to do? Where did that attraction—So I took a video class in high school. And to be honest, I think the thing that really clicked for me was when I was learning how to edit and realized, wait a minute, I’m editing this video and I get to put whatever music I want against it, and love music and never realized that there is some professional utility to having a love for music, and just spending literally hours trying to find the right song and trying different songs against the edit and then editing the song. And I think when I realized that, I was like, oh, this is something that I’ve never considered as a career, but it actually takes all of these little things that I like and combines them into one.And I like taking photos. I like making art projects and making props. And I like music and I like working with other people, that team aspect that I really loved in sports. And so it just became like, oh, I can do this.And really, every single time I do a project, I get to do a little bit of something that I love. And I don’t need to write any more essays. Big motivating factor was like, how do I go to college and not have to read books that I don’t want to read and write papers that seem to have academic value, but not a whole lot else.That’s funny. When did you first discover that, and maybe you just answered this question, but that you could make a living doing what you’re doing now?Yeah, it was probably at NYU. I had some experience, had family members who worked in the industry and did pretty well. So I knew that it could be done.And the great thing about going to a place like NYU is that you’re just in the thick of it and you’re exposed to tons of different people doing tons of different things. And there’s opportunities to intern and work on sets outside of school. And I really was motivated by that.And I think by the time I graduated, I was more motivated to be out there working and meeting people than actually taking more classes or spending more time in school. So I graduated in three and a half years, wanted to just get out there and work and make things.I’ve got two questions coming at once. One, can you tell us a little bit more about Ghost Robot, the work that you do, and then I’m curious about what those early years might’ve been like?Yeah. So right as I was finishing up school, I met Zach Mortensen, who’s my partner in Ghost Robot. He was working on films in the city right around the same time, and we would work on projects together.And then both, I think at the same time, realized we didn’t like working for other people and didn’t like busting our asses to execute on somebody else’s vision, and that we needed a platform to explore our own creative ideas and ideas of what creating a company looked like. The easiest way for us to do that at the time was a lot of music videos. So that was the early years, was tons of music videos.Again, always loved music. So it was really easy and satisfying for me to reach out to up and coming artists and offer to do music videos for next to nothing and just see that grow and expound over time. And I think that’s one of the things I really liked about it, was just that you’re done with a project in four to five weeks.The cycle of success and failure and experimentation was just a lot more rapid than it was when I was working on feature films. And that became a really big part of the Ghost Robot ethos, which was just try as much as you can as quickly as possible and don’t let your last project define you. The next project is just another opportunity to try something new and try something different. And that’s what we became known for.And it’s also right around the time when digital media was becoming a thing. So all of these brands started finding, hey, now I need content for my YouTube page and content for my website and then content for Facebook and then content for Instagram. And so just our experimental attitude and nature and affinity for challenges made us a really good partner for that.So that’s how we started getting into the branded side of things. And it just kept evolving from there. Like I said, we’re never very good at having other people tell us what to do.So naturally it just kept leading to more questions like, well, why? How did you come up with this script? Why do you think this is the right commercial to make?Wouldn’t it be better if we did it this way? And if you learn how to do that in a way that feels additive and not like deficit thinking, people start to appreciate that. And so that was the next evolution, was us being a thought partner for brands and marketers, being like, well, why are you doing this?And what’s the real intention? And what do we actually need to do to help you achieve your goals? And that’s the current iteration of it now.So partly that thought partner and then still the execution side of things, which I’ve always thought need to go hand in hand, when traditionally it’s really two separate processes. I think you gain a lot of value when you have the same team and the same people leading both exercises.Yeah. I want to unpack that a little bit, or just spend more time listening to you describe that shift or the problem that you’re solving, that these things are often separate but should be together. And I just loved how you described your relationship style with the client. You were talking about asking lots of questions. Yeah. Can you just speak more to that?Yeah. It comes from, there’s nothing worse than busting your ass on a project, which, even though it’s a job, if you really care about your craft and invest yourself in any creative endeavor, you put a lot more into it than what anybody can ever pay you for. So investing so much of yourself in a video and having it go on YouTube and three months later, it’s only got 300 views. That’s a pretty demoralizing experience.So protecting ourselves in that way of being like, hey, we don’t want that to happen again. So we’re going to start asking more questions like, why did that happen? Where was the point of failure? And using that knowledge to make sure that it doesn’t really happen again.And I think a lot of the breakdowns that we saw when other people were hiring us just to execute was that the through line from the initial strategic intent of this is the problem we’re trying to solve, and this is why this is the right solution, and the types of inputs that we’ve received on the way affirming those decisions, were totally lost or not even communicated by the time we were out there hitting record on a video camera.And so if you think about that objectively, it’s like, of course there was a failure someplace along the way. So I think that just having that experience of being on the other side made us be like, no, if you’re asking us to invest and to execute, then we need to have a seat at that table and understand where this came from at the very beginning.And even small decisions, even like casting or locations or lighting style, tone of voice, all those things that are very subtle and nuanced decisions that get made along the way all come from an initial strategy or creative vision, which can be very difficult to communicate. So again, just being there from the beginning really lets us make sure that what the final output is, is really tied to that initial impetus.And is there like a client, a case study or a client story that you would want to share or talk about?Let’s see. Well, I think some of the work that I still enjoy most recently was stuff that you helped us out on for Grow With Google, which is a great client of ours. That’s a social good initiative by Google to train the next generation of tech workers.And a lot of it’s aimed at young learners. There’s an educational component of it. So it ties back to that part of me that I’m still very passionate about.And they wanted to make people excited about careers in technology, and we wanted to actually talk to these people ourselves. So we did a little focus group here in Hudson, which you helped facilitate. And one of the things that we learned was that people don’t even know what these jobs are or what they mean.So if they’re operating under the assumption that somebody is out there Googling, I want to be a data analyst, I think that there’s a failure right there. If the majority of the population doesn’t even know the words data analyst, let alone what it is, then they’re never going to have that realization. Like, hey, this is something that I can do professionally.So that was, I think, a powerful experience with me, just being there and seeing it happen right in front of our eyes. Like, hey, we took this hypothesis that the client had, found a way to poke some holes in it. But more importantly, from that came away with a really elegant, creative solution.And that turned into a web series called Job Hoppers, which I describe as the diners, drive-ins and dives of tech jobs. So yeah, that one was really nice, just because it was all the different pieces.Yeah. And I’ve always admired your public spirit, and that project was, the Friendly City Creative Club, and this vision or idea you have for a community agency. Can you talk a little bit about what that can be, might be, could be?Yeah, well, I’m still trying to figure it out. But it’s taken a few different moments of realization. You lived in San Francisco for a while, I live in New York City. I think when you live in a major metropolitan market, who you are and your community of people gets conflated with your professional identity.It’s really hard to separate the two of them. And prior to moving to Hudson, I had an amazing network of collaborators that were also my best friends, and naturally would go to parties where you’re connected to other people professionally. And moving up here and halfway removing myself from that made me realize that, oh, the community that I built in New York City was really, really strong and really powerful. And I missed that.And then being here in Hudson, realizing that I couldn’t necessarily do it the same way, the pool of professionals is smaller, it’s just not as big a part of people’s identities. I had this moment up here, within the first few years, of going to my kids’ baseball games and talking to other parents and thinking to myself like, nobody’s ever asked me what I do for work.And it made me feel bad about myself. I was like, oh, are they not interested in me? Don’t they know that I do this interesting thing that’s really fun to talk about? But that made me realize, well, wait a minute, people’s values here are different. It’s not the most important thing about themselves. And who I am and what’s important to me is also shifting.And so that was the idea behind opening the office here, was like, hey, I can still build a community and be connected to lots of different interesting people, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be just people that I work with. And at the same time, having relationships with them and learning about their life experiences can also provide value to my clients and to me.And I think when you work in advertising, or any creative field, and you’re just in this bubble of, this is what we all think is important, or this is what we think makes good work, it’s really hard to figure out, okay, well, that’s not the way the rest of the country thinks, or the rest of the people watching these videos will think, and I need to work a little bit harder to get to know them and involve them in my work and connect them to my passions. And that was some of the inspiration here.Yeah. And how has it been? How long has it now been you’ve had the space on Warren?I had space on Warren Street for a little over four years, and met a lot of interesting people.Describe it for people who don’t know.Oh, so it’s a little, Warren Street’s the main commercial hub. Lots of great shops and restaurants. And we’ve got a little storefront that is half retail space, half working studio, which the original idea actually came from early days of Ghost Robot when we had a studio in Williamsburg that was street level.And people would walk in off the street and just basically be like, what are you guys doing here? And so we joked about it, well, we should make stuff for them to buy. So we started to do that.We made t-shirts. And my partner Zach was making graphic novels at the time. And we had these cool knit hats that everybody liked. And so made a little retail installation there.And then we also used that as a vehicle for these theme pop up shows. So it would be like an art show with a retail component and the party where there’s a performance element.So I really love doing that. And that was what I was trying to recreate here, was a space where anybody could walk in off the street, have a conversation, get to know us, we could get to know them. And just make sure that our day-to-day life wasn’t just staring at computers every day and talking to the same five, 10 people.The more we talk to people and tell them what we do and hear about what they’re up to and what they like to do in Hudson, the more fulfilling our experience becomes.The host of one of the best, I’m not sure I made it to the actual opening, but the show about the blue. Hudson has these legendary blue garbage bags that are sold in a vending machine on the main street. But you did a whole show. It was just amazing.Yeah. A bunch of people repurposing garbage or using the trash bags as materials. The show is called Trash Talk.And we had nearly 30 artists contribute pieces. I was totally floored by the amount of people who wanted to participate. It was a really great event.This year we did a sticker show, which was artists designing stickers. That was a benefit for Friends of Hudson Youth.So yeah, just finding different ways for people in the community to be connected by creativity and art, and keep us sharp when it comes to coming up with ideas and executing things that people aren’t paying us to do.I’m curious about having been in the business for so long. The beginning of this conversation, I was really flashing back. I was wondering what music were you listening to when you were first editing in that high school video class? What was the soundtrack?It ended up being a, I don’t know if you know the guitarist, John Fahey. He does, it’s all acoustic, really intricate acoustic guitar stuff, classical American modern interpretation of bluegrass or folk music. So that ended up being the song. I still remember that.That’s cool. Yeah. And so my question, my curiosity is how have things changed? What kinds of questions do clients come to you with? You talked about being in the music video age and then digital age and now good Lord knows where we are now. If the question is, the more things change, the more they stay the same, what kinds of questions are clients coming to you with now?Yeah. I think probably the biggest through line now is there’s so much content and opportunities to create content out there in the world that everybody feels compelled to do it, but doesn’t necessarily understand why. So you can make an argument that it’s not true, but if you’re a modern brand now, you need to have an Instagram channel and then you need to have content, and it’s very easy to just get sucked into that.Like, no, we need more content. We need more content. And a lot of them just struggle with answering that question. Okay, what is the purpose of this content? What are we trying to get people to do? And how are we doing it in a way that only our brand can do?It’s literally one of the conversations that I’m having with a client right now. And it’s like, hey, look, this is what your competitors are doing. And this is what you’re doing. And there’s nothing to distinguish the two of them from each other. So instead of focusing on what’s the next video that we’re going to make, we need to take the time to stop and pause and say, okay, if we’re going to make another video, how is it going to be different? And what is going to be unique about it that, again, only we can do.So yeah, I think a lot of them feel that pressure and they feel the need, but sometimes struggle to answer those questions.Yeah. And does that feel like a shift, that the abundance of content and the abundance of channel makes the purpose or the reason or the why more important than maybe it has been in the past?Yeah. And I think just particularly now when the idea of organic discovery is shifting, and it’s less likely that people are just going to miraculously stumble on something that you’re doing. So you need to be much more specific and motivated about, okay, this is what we’re doing and this is how it’s going to reach people. And once they do engage with it, this is what we want them to do afterwards.So it’s just becoming a lot more necessary to really think through all those steps.Yeah.You probably remember when digital first, video first became a thing, everybody wanted a video that went viral and just years and years chasing that, because if you could make something really cool, people would see it. And all of a sudden they would explode and give you lots and lots of attention. And it’s just really not the way things work anymore.Do we have a modern version of viral? What’s the thing that people are chasing now? Is there like, what’s the contemporary holy grail that everybody’s chasing?To me, I think brand voice has become a lot more important. And the brands that are being really, really successful have a voice and an attitude and a bravado that is just undeniably unique and infectious. And everybody looks at that and says, I want to do that, and don’t really understand that that took them years to do, and years of being consistent, and years of not being risk adverse.So I think a lot of people are scared to do that. They’re scared to go out on a limb, or they go out on a limb and after a month or two be like, oh, but that didn’t work. And it’s like, no, you’re quitting way too early. You literally have to do it for years before it starts to make a difference.Who do you think of? What’s a good example of the brand voice that everybody wants?Everybody looks at Liquid Death or Duolingo had a moment where their TikTok channel was the talk of the town. Beyond Meat has a really funny Threads account. Yeah, those are some of the ones that come to mind.This is so outside of my wheelhouse, all the channels and the media. How do you advise clients on this, on the various channels? You just mentioned Threads.Well, we are still video first, although we touch a lot of things. So we’re still pretty YouTube and Instagram specific. We do a little bit of stuff on TikTok, but that’s not really our wheelhouse, mainly because TikTok is a little bit lower polish and a little bit more immediate and personal and raw, which isn’t really our style.But yeah, so pretty much YouTube and Instagram forward.Yeah. And what do you love about the work? When you think about all the things that you do, where’s the joy in it for you?I really like solving the problems at the very beginning. One of my dirty secrets is that I really don’t like being on film sets anymore. It’s just a lot more compelling to me to get that initial brief from the client, and at that point where it’s sort of like everything feels possible, going through to the depths of creativity and imagination and working really, really hard to come up with a solution that is unexpected.So that’s my favorite part of it, because it’s solving a puzzle and really making your brain work.And what are you looking forward to when you look ahead for Ghost Robot? What’s on the horizon or what are you most excited about or concerned about?That’s a good question. It’s taken me a really long time to be comfortable calling myself or embodying being an expert. And I think I resisted that for a very long time and always preferred to just be the person behind the scenes, trying to figure things out.And yeah, got a coach and talked myself off that ledge, and really in the past year started putting myself out there more and really telling people what I think and what I believe and why I’ve been successful doing what I’ve been doing. And I think I’m excited to continue doing that and got over being scared to do it. So I’m hoping that, and it already has, paid some dividends, and kicking myself that it took me so long to learn that lesson, but excited to continue doing that.And I think the fears were probably the same that everybody has right now, and that we’re all being asked to do more with less, and resources like time and money seem to be growing scarcer and scarcer. So it’s certainly a challenge to figure out how to keep up with that and maintain your professional standards and artistic standards. So just another problem to solve.And how do you think about, do I want to ask that question now? I got two. So I guess what’s the role, I always selfishly want to talk about qualitative. What’s the role of qualitative or research in general in your practice? What’s the value of it? When does it show up? When does it not show up? How do you think about it?Yeah, it usually shows up at the beginning, because I mentioned being risk adverse. Everybody wants there to be some evidence that they’re making the right decision. So giving clients the evidence and the confidence to pursue a bold decision is really, really helpful.And again, it’s taken me a long time to learn that, coming from a place where, working with artists and auteurs, they want to believe that their genius and their intuition is enough to support important creative decisions. But moving away from that and using research to really support a creative decision is what’s needed to get to that next level of leadership and ownership over the trajectory of any creative project.And to be honest, I wish we could do more of it. And just in this day and age where people are, again, trying to make things faster and invest less money, that part of it feels either disposable or unnecessary to them sometimes. In which case, there’s things that we can do ourselves. It’s definitely one of the things that I think AI can be very helpful with if you use it right, is doing the research and creating a body of work that supports where you’re going.But outside of that, it’s also just, what do we see with our own eyes and what has our experience told us? And again, just speaking from that position of authority in a way that makes clients feel comfortable is the other part of it that I’ve learned too.Yeah. And then the last question was really maybe just an open, how are you, I’m curious about AI, how it’s showing up for you, how are you incorporating it? What lessons have you learned? And maybe how do you even think about it? I feel like it’s such a strange thing that we all have our own way of, it becomes whatever anybody makes it for themselves. It’s a very personal thing in a weird way. So how would you describe your relationship with AI?I use it every single day. I think my brain naturally moves pretty quickly. And I’ve always been the type of person that if somebody else isn’t doing something quickly enough for me, or hasn’t come to an answer by the time I decide I need it, I would just do it myself.So it certainly helps me in that sense, in that I can iterate very, very quickly on things. And I mentioned that phase in a project where all possibilities seem endless and there’s lots of different directions that it can go. I think it really helps you hone in on a valid direction very, very quickly. And lets you explore all different corners of a room in a very short period of time.So yeah, I think it’s really good for that. And to me, yes, it does replace some work, but it just helps you get to the meaningful work, where you need to be really precise and really considered, a lot more quickly. And I think that’s the part of it that is always going to be there.Even taking something like designing a logo, which now we do a lot more of the design and branding side of things too. When we design a logo, I want to see a hundred different logos before I decide which direction we’re going to go in, and using a tool like AI to give you that breadth much more quickly before deciding, hey, these are the direction we want to pursue. And then I want somebody who’s really an expert in their craft to tackle. It just gets you there a lot more quickly.So the one thing I have had to do is, it’s very easy to become overly reliant on it, and having that conversation with myself about, okay, which part of this do I really enjoy doing? Because I have found myself in moments where I’m like, oh, wait a minute, why am I replacing this thing that used to give me gratification just because it’s faster and easier? I’m just telling myself, hey, no, you enjoy doing that. It’s satisfying. Take the time to do it yourself. So everybody should ask themselves that.For me, I learned that the hard way, you know what I mean? There’s only one way to learn that.Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.And then finally, we are co-hosts of Breakfast Club. We’ve been on a summer hiatus. And it’s been, I don’t know how long it’s been now. Has it been a couple of years, maybe? Of once a month, Breakfast Club Hudson, the Hudson outpost of Breakfast Club Industries. What’s that been like for you? It’s been fun to do with you. You do a lot more leg work than I do. I think I’m just better at self-promotion.Yes.It’s been great. Like I said, I think the idea of community has always been really important to me, and it took me a long time, having to move and rebuild a community, to realize that I had been doing that unintentionally for a really, really long time.So I had been trying to think of ways to do something like that. And I think always making it much more complicated than it needed to be, and thinking like, oh, there needs to be this performative element, or people need to do slideshows, or there needs to be a theme, all these things that in my mind make something conceptually sound.But then you came with the Breakfast Club idea and it’s like, no, you just meet for coffee and you talk, that’s it. So I think that was also a good lesson where it’s like, hey, no, just do what you really want to do. You want to get people together, just get people together and people will show up, because I think everybody’s in that place of wanting that connection and wanting that community themselves.So yeah, no, it’s been great. People really appreciate it. Met a number of really great people and the list of folks who are interested just keeps growing and growing.Nice. Mark, thank you so much. This has been fun having a conversation and I appreciate you accepting the invitation.All right. Bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Richard Young is the founder and executive director of CivicLex, a Lexington, Kentucky nonprofit he launched in 2017 that builds civic knowledge, strengthens relationships across the city, and pushes local institutions to be more responsive to residents. It runs civic engagement programs alongside a local newsroom. Previously he was executive director of North Limestone CDC, Lexington’s first place-based community development corporation, where he raised $2.2M and helped create a new city zoning classification. He has also run the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, co-owned a coffee shop, and co-founded MusicWorks, Kentucky’s first El Sistema-inspired youth program. He is an Ashoka Fellow.So I’m not sure that you know this, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s also sort of, she’s a neighbor and she helps people tell their stories. And she has this beautiful question, which I stole from her because I can’t think of any better way to get into a conversation out of nowhere. But it’s a big conversation. I kind of overexplain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to.Sounds great.The question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control.Yeah, I come from Kentucky. This place that I live in, I wasn’t actually born here, although most of my family’s from here. I’ve got some family here in Lexington where I live, and then the rest of my family’s in a more rural county in Kentucky.But I wasn’t born here. My family moved back when I was five. I’ve always had a really complicated relationship with Kentucky, especially when I moved back and as a young man.But throughout my 20s and 30s, I gained, I think, a better understanding and appreciation for the depth and complexity, not just here in Lexington, where I live, but all across the state. Thanks to relationships that I started building, and I feel like this place has really raised me into a person that values place, into a person that thinks of place as sort of the starting point, right? Both for my work, but also for, I would say, almost everything about my life.So the question of like, where are you from is a question that I feel like I hear a lot. And 15 years ago, I don’t know how I would have answered that, but I feel like now it is, yeah, I’m from Kentucky.Yeah. And what does it mean to you to be from Kentucky? Are there moments or sort of circumstances in which you feel the Kentucky in you in a particular way?Yeah, I think I feel the Kentucky in me most thoroughly when I’m outside in nature here. There’s something really special and sort of sacred about the land here in Kentucky. It is diverse and bountiful.It is a state with a lot of regions that really have their own topographies and ecologies that are incredible and beautiful. So I feel like a Kentuckian, especially when I’m in nature, when I’ve got my feet in a creek, or when I’m climbing a hiking trail. But I also feel like a Kentuckian when I’m around other Kentuckians. Your voice changes, right?I feel like there becomes this unspoken permission of like, oh, I can actually just talk how I normally talk. And I don’t have to sort of vaguely disguise. I don’t have much of an accent to begin with. But what is there, there’s a subconscious effort to cover it up when I’m talking with other folks around the country.But when I feel most like a Kentuckian is when I’m around other ones. And when I’m out in nature. And I think both of those come from a lot of my 20s, I spent deeply involved in an organization called the Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange that sort of took me throughout the state and helped me build a lot of really deep and meaningful relationships with some of the closest relationships I still have to this day.And it also sort of seeded my work into the class. And so I think those are two things that were really deeply ingrained in me, the sort of people in the history of the people here, and then the land and the place that we are in.But to me, what it means to be a Kentuckian. I think it really depends on where you’re from. To me, I think there are a few things that are really special about being from Kentucky.It is a place where people are incredibly kind and incredibly resilient. It’s a place where folks really value being a neighbor, really value each other. It’s a place where people feel a really deep sense of pride of place.We have 120 counties in this state, which is a lot of counties.Wow.And everyone’s really proud of their county, right? Like when you ask people where they’re from, they’ll be like, Oh, I’m from Perry County, or I’m from Muhlenberg County or whatever. And so people have a really deep pride of place of the county, of the very specific place they’re from. I think people have a shared identity as Kentuckians.And then for me, I think there’s also this deep thought tradition in this state. Some of the writers and thinkers that have most clearly informed my approach to my work and my approach to my life — Wendell Berry and Thomas Merton and bell hooks — are all from the state and have had, and have, equally, I think, shared deep complex relationships to this place, to the land and the people that are here. So yeah, that’s what it means to be a Kentuckian, I guess, to me.Yeah, it’s beautiful. Thank you so much for that. I always ask this question, do you have a recollection of being young, being a boy, and knowing what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did young Richard want to be when he grew up?Young Richard wanted to do a lot of different things, but all of them were in some way related to snakes and/or dinosaurs. So take that for what it’s worth. My mom tells the story about how I was in preschool or kindergarten, and all the parents were around, and they were going around, kids, what do you want to be when you grow up, in this like firemen, policemen, and I was like, I want to be a herpetologist. Was a weirdo then and I’m a weirdo now.Yeah, though. Yeah. If it had to do with snakes or dinosaurs, I was super into it. Thankfully, I guess my career doesn’t involve those two things now.Yeah, so catch us up now. So tell us, where are you, and sort of introduce the work? What keeps you busy? What are you working on?Yeah. So my work is here in Lexington, in Fayette County. And it’s focused on trying to build a sort of civic life in my community, in which people have a meaningful say over the decisions that shape their lives. For me, a lot of that is rooted in the past, like, sort of 15 years of when I moved back to Kentucky after school. I did not go very far for school, just went across the river to Ohio.So it wasn’t that far. But moving back home, I sort of made my way into community development and found myself really exploring these questions of agency and who has a say over the decisions that shape their lives. I had a really complicated job that was challenging in a number of ways.And I think through that experience, I really gained an appreciation for our role in civic life, being to enable others, right? But that is what everyone’s role should be, is to enable other people to more deeply experience our sort of shared civic life. And so that kind of led me into starting the organization that I run today, which is called CivicLex.And we’re about nine years old, soon to be 10 next year. And our work is focused around, yeah, trying to strengthen the civic health of our community, trying to help folks understand and engage in local issues here, help people connect with their neighbors and build new relationships. And ultimately try and reimagine the role that our public here in Lexington plays in the decision-making process that shapes every aspect of our community. Yeah.I mean, you hinted at it a little bit, but I guess there’s two questions that are bouncing around in my head and hopefully they come out in one coherent question. I guess the first thing is sort of where did this begin for you, like the origins of CivicLex, but then how do you talk about the problem? I imagine you encounter a problem that needs a solution. And I guess I’m wondering, what’s the diagnosis, or how do you describe the situation that you encountered that sort of has driven you and that CivicLex is trying to address? How do we talk about what the diagnosis is?Yeah. I think in my previous job before starting CivicLex, like I said, I was in the community development space. And in that, I remember hearing these sort of two distinct conversations that were happening at the same time in my day-to-day life.Like one was with policymakers where I was in city hall, sitting on boards and commissions or trying to move some sort of legislation through local government. And I remember hearing frustrations from government about like, oh, no one knows what’s going on here. No one’s engaged. Like no one knows anything about government, or people show up and they’ve got a bunch of bad information and dah, dah, dah, dah, but we really want people to be involved, but they’re not involved. And so we don’t know how to do that.And then I remember observing just the same 30 people in the majority of city meetings, right? It’s like the same, very much a case of the usual suspects. And so government, I think, recognized that there’s an issue, that people were not deeply engaged and the people that were engaged had some sort of self-interest beyond, in more of a professional capacity, right, than in the sort of live life as a citizen.And then at the same time, I remember doing community development work, you spend a lot of time talking with folks that are just going about their daily lives. And I remember hearing so much from my neighbors and the folks that we were working with that they felt like their perspective didn’t matter. And that not only did their perspective and opinion and experience not matter, but that it was actively trying to be suppressed and kept out of decision making in local government. And so essentially, I heard two different sides of this sort of dynamic between government and the public, like saying the thing that the other, what probably would have wanted to hear, that they didn’t want them in decision making, and people were frustrated that there weren’t broader perspectives in decision making and vice versa.And so, I remember hearing that a lot. And when I left my previous organization, I got this tiny little grant, $5,000, which at the time felt like enormous to me, to start a project related to how we could use the public transportation system here in Lexington to help people understand civic information and to better increase access to civic information about voting or information about local government or anything like that. And through that project, I ended up sort of growing it into what became CivicLex. And now we’re a 10 person organization that is a much larger, more broader thing than I think I could even imagine at the time.And I think for me, the diagnosis is that right now in this country, we are sort of living through a series of sort of social civic crises that I think are, in many ways, deeper and more profound than a broken political system that people point to all the time, or XYZ political thing of the moment, right? I think people feel or certainly feeling a lack of connection to other people. We’ve built parasocial relationships online that we’re substituting for our actual social relationships of people that truly care about us and depend on us.And I think the even bigger crisis is just a crisis of agency. People feel like they don’t have any decision making power over their lives, right? And it’s not just political civic, right? It’s economic. People feel like we have an economy in which they have no agency, a political system which they have no agency, a cultural system in which people don’t feel seen or valued or included. Even in our algorithms, right? And the music that we listen to on Spotify or whatever, right? That is being served up to us, right? It is this feeling of things constantly being handled, like here, your decisions are already made for you. Here’s the sort of pathway that you’re going through in your life.And I think that that crisis of agency is really where our civic life has been. It comes from an erosion in our civic life, associational life in communities, the Kiwanis clubs and Rotary clubs and Boy Scouts and churches and all of the things that people did when they were young, and 30, 40 years ago, and longer, to feel a sense of connection to place and to each other. Many of those sort of outlets have disappeared, are we’re increasingly legislating at the federal level. Right.And I think the growth of centralized political life in DC has eroded people’s ability to feel like they have any meaningful say over the decisions that are shaping their communities. And I think that all of that has led to a point in which people are so frustrated with not just our political institutions, but every institution in this country, be it higher education, we’re even seeing collapsing numbers in the military, which is the institution that traditionally Americans feel like they have the most trust in. And it’s a real crisis. But to me, I think it really stems from a sort of cynicism that comes from this lack of agency that people have in our day to day lives. Yeah.You said one thing that really struck me is that those means so many things that I want to explore. Maybe it’s news to me, but I feel like when you said that we’re legislating at the federal level, I feel like I’ve had that observation under the surface, but never been explicit about it. Can you say more about what you mean? It seems to me it’s hinting at a past that I don’t know.Yeah. I guess one thing is that the federal government isn’t doing a whole lot of legislating, so I think that’s an important part. But I think the trend over the past, like 70 years in this country has been to increasingly centralize political decision making. And that has some positives and it has some negatives, that’s for sure.But I think you can see it in both political parties, right? For Democrats, I think, the Democratic Party used to be the sort of party of labor, which is a core part of associational life. And there used to be really robust Democratic parties in every community in this country. And I think culturally, the Democratic Party is thinking a lot more about major metropolitan areas and DC. And so the sort of emphasis of where energy is being put, both in the types of legislation that are being created, right, thinking about these big, large bills that have these sweeping ramifications across the country, are increasingly centralized.And you’re seeing that in the Republican Party as well. The sort of foundational thinking of the Republican Party was at one point, at least, around federalism, and the idea that communities should have the strongest say over the decisions that are shaping them. But I think you’re seeing, especially over the past 10 years, a Republican Party that is much more willing to have centralized control in DC. And so I think what we’re seeing across both of those parties is that faith and trust in Congress, and in elected officials in DC, is cratered, because it has become an ineffective system.And I think, rising up in sort of the wake of that, I think, is community decision making, is where communities are having to step up and take care of themselves, because the federal government’s become too gridlocked and inept to do anything about it.And I think an important piece of this is that, much like government, everything is becoming incredibly centralized, right? And this grand irony of, we have the option to access more information than we’ve ever had and connect with more people than we’ve ever had. We’re also increasingly moving towards like a monoculture where everyone all across the country is thinking and talking about the same things. And so, I just think that it’s not helpful for our sense of agency and our sense of connection. We’re actually losing touch with our own communities and gaining touch with a sort of national monoculture. Yeah.And I’m trying to remember where — I think civic health might be one of the first times I encountered that language was maybe in your work. And that feels to me like a relatively new idea, the idea that you could be held, just the metaphor of civic health. So what can you do and what do you do at CivicLex to try to address — I mean, there’s so much of this is trust underneath this lack of agency, but it also seems to me that so many of these behaviors have really just been normalized. This disengagement has become normalized, right? So what can you do to address these problems?Yeah. I think the two things I’ll preface this with is, it all takes an incredibly long time, right? The work that we’re trying to do is about both changing individual behavior and group behavior. And either one of those is challenging on its own. But trying to do both individual, group, and I guess institutional behavior all at once is really hard. So it just takes a long time. And we’ve seen a lot of change over the past 10 years, but I know it’s going to take 10 more years for us to even start to make progress, like really meaningful, deep progress on a lot of the things that we’re hoping to see. So there’s that sort of preface up front.The other preface I would say is that you can also start with the tiniest little thing, right? You can start to address civic health in your own community through talking with your neighbor. Introducing yourself, if you don’t know the people that live on every side of you. That is a way to start.For us, what we’re trying to do is sort of focus on these three aspects of civic health, how folks understand and get involved in local decisions, like local civic issues. We think about that at sort of levels of civic literacy. And we do a lot of work around that. Helping people connect with their neighbors, that sort of thinking about social relationships, social cohesion, and people feeling a sense of sort of belonging through their mutual relationships and commitments to one another. And then through this sort of how we make decisions as a community. And that is really looking at these sort of processes that civic institutions in our community use to engage residents in decision making. So we’re working on all three of those things.In that first bucket, on helping folks understand and get involved in local issues. We do a number of things. So we have a newsroom that covers public meetings here in Lexington, local governmental meetings. We have a youth civic education program that is in every single high school in Fayette County, where we’re teaching students about how to get involved in local government, and how to make change on issues that they care about, whether that is anything from how to get more trees in your community park to how to address issues like gun violence. And then we also do adult civic education work where we’re trying to build this sort of baseline skills for folks in our community, so that when they go to get engaged, that engagement is coming not just from a place of knowing an issue, but knowing the systems and structures and how to navigate them.In the second bucket, we’re working on helping folks connect with their neighbors. There’s sort of two big ways that we do that. The first one is working on public spaces in our community. So parks, the road systems that people use, libraries, these sorts of public spaces are incredibly important, because they are the place where people are most likely to casually and frequently encounter folks that are different from themselves. That type of sort of repeated interaction is incredibly important for building a sense of empathy in the community, right? For building a sense of belonging in that like, oh, I exist in this place alongside many other people, some of which are very similar to me, some of which are very different from me. So we work to bring public perspective into the design process around public spaces, and then also work to activate those public spaces.At the same time, that’s sort of like a passive way that people build relationships. A more active way that people can build relationships are through events that bring people together. And so we host some of those events ourselves, but we also make investments into community organizations here in Lexington, to start new clubs and groups, to throw community block parties, to start new newsletters that are talking about the things happening in their community. We just actually announced six new mini grants today for six public events that six different neighborhoods are going to be throwing this fall across our community. And these are relatively low lift investments, $250 for us, but can make a really big difference, right? These sorts of block parties are like the places where people build new sort of relationships with the folks that live near them that they can depend on in times of crisis down the line.And then the last part of our work, which is focused on decision making, is probably the largest part of our work. And that is really about taking some of these really big processes like comprehensive land use planning, or city budgeting, or public space design, or our city charter review, and trying to build processes that are different from the traditional, like everyone meet in a gymnasium and yell at each other, right? Trying to build something that is meaningful and rewarding for residents. It’s meaningful in that it does something, like their participation has meaning, and it’s rewarding in that they want to do it again. It’s not punishing. They’re not leaving being like, well, that was a waste of my time. They’re like, oh, that was actually enjoyable, and I want to do it again. And processes that are helpful for local government, that actually give them meaningful information that they can use to make a better decision.So, we’ve run a number of these projects. These typically tend to be large multi-year projects that are focused on a specific process. Most recently, we hosted a civic assembly around our city charter review process. But how those three things speak to each other, helping folks understand and get involved in local issues, connect with their neighbors, and participate more effectively in decision making. The best of our work is sort of at the intersection of those three things. So, yeah, that’s what we do.That’s amazing. I really just have such admiration for what you’re doing.And I am particularly, maybe selfishly, wanting to talk about the institutional challenges. I encountered citizens assembly as this process that felt new to me. I had experiences in my small town that introduced me to the difficulty that the small local government has in doing all this — bringing community together, getting people engaged, making decisions, all that stuff.And I remember this one guy — he said it so succinctly, I always quote him — that media changed unbelievably, technology changed unbelievably, culture changed unbelievably, but these local institutions have stayed fundamentally unchanged for almost hundreds of years. And so I’m wondering, and I have this experience here, how do you think about those institutions? Everything from the public meeting to the way that meetings are run and the spaces in which they’re held — do you have a way of either thinking about it or talking about it?And underneath this is this experience I’ve had — and this is all very selfish — that everybody is engaged in a way that’s very focused, sincerely, on an issue, right? People are there because they care about something, and it can be very difficult to get them to pull their gaze, or maybe just broaden the aperture, to take in the conditions of the conversation. And I struggle with that quite a bit.And so I’m wondering, what are your feelings about the current state of public meetings and that kind of engagement experience? Let’s say you get them to engage with the institution, but the institution has this way of operating that can be frustrating, of course. So I’m going to stop talking there. I think you feel my question.Yeah, it’s not great, Peter. It’s pretty bad. I think I have so many thoughts on this. I could talk about it for like five years. A couple things I’ll say up front: one, yes, these institutions haven’t changed a lot that meaningfully in the past 50, 100, 150 years, right? That is bad.Also, that is good, right? I think one of the things that I say a lot to people and really pisses them off, it makes me a lot of friends, is like government moves slow on purpose. I think both our federal government, our state governments, our local governments are designed to move at a speed in which it was very difficult for them to be captured.And I think that’s wise and good. And I think it’s one of the reasons why our democracy, with its many, many flaws, has persisted for so long. So I’ll caveat that up front, right?I think the local level is the place where we are most well positioned to make meaningful changes, right? The local level is the level of government that is the most accessible to people, right? You can meet your elected officials, you can meet the people that work for city government.In many cases, you probably have kids on a soccer team with someone that works in city planning, or you maybe go to church with someone from the city’s finance department, right? These are people that are in the community. They’re not sort of faceless bureaucrats, like people talk about in DC.They’re not these career, I mean, maybe in many cases, they’re career politicians, but they aren’t the sort of like jet setting DC class or whatever, right? It’s just everyday folks that live around you. So they’re accessible.B, there is an incentive because of that closeness for them to get along with the community that they’re working in. Right? Being in sort of a intention is not helpful for them.And they know that. I think the third thing I would say is, it is also the level of government at which change is still possible, right? Changing the federal government is very challenging.And also never really seems to go that well when it happens, right? I think the current administration rode in on a wave of like, yeah, we’re going to change. We’re going to change government, we’re going to create this doge and start cutting things.And it led to a lot of harm. And a lot of people lost their jobs. And it wasn’t necessarily the right way to go about reforming government, I would say.But at the local level, tweaks to how local government works can have pretty outsized impacts. And it’s not that hard to do. It’s still challenging.So challenging to get right. But it sort of has this unique value proposition at the local level. I think that the sort of fundamental tension, I think, in many ways at the heart of political life in this country has always been about this balance between representative and direct democracy, right?We are a very unique government, a unique democracy that tries to balance direct and representative democracy and federalism all at once. That’s a challenge. And I think at the local level is the place where those two things can best be held in tension.It is really hard with federal policy, if you think about an interstate or highway transportation bill, right? Or like these big infrastructure packages. It is really hard to have a direct democracy around a multi-billion dollar infrastructure plan.That’s just hard. It’s a big country. There’s many, many, many millions of people to please in many places across the country.It’s really hard to directly involve people in the creation of that bill. That said, I just went like two days ago to a pretty meaningful input session around a highway being built like within eyeshot. If I turned around, I would be able to see it from my house.And that is a place where we actually can have something closer to a direct democracy, right? We can have people really meaningfully weighing in on that. We can have people voting on local budgets in a direct way that at the federal level would be much more logistically challenging and impossible, really.We can have like citizen assemblies where people are having really direct control over policy making. It’s just kind of hard to do that in this really big, unwieldy country that we have at the federal level. So that’s to say that it shouldn’t be tried.But I think that sort of direct democracy where people can engage, see the product of their engagement, get a sort of little dopamine hit when they do that. And that makes them want to do it again. We can sort of build that kind of a virtuous cycle here in our local communities.And that happens to just be the level at which there has been the least investment in building that kind of civic infrastructure, right? This may be surprising to people, but there’s like over $30 billion that goes into the democracy space in this country every year. That goes into support.Yeah, with a B, $32 billion. There’s this really interesting dashboard that the Democracy Funders Network has invested in that shows where all that money comes from, where it all goes. And it mostly goes to organizations that are working at the national level on big, huge projects.And with a fraction of that money, we could really reimagine what it means to have civic life in communities. And then from the bottom up, if people got involved in their communities, saw progress, built new relationships, got connected to other people, maybe then we can start to restitch faith and trust in this country more broadly. But I think it really has to start locally.Wow, that’s amazing. Actually, with the time remaining, I’m curious, I want to hear more about civic assembly. And maybe just, what was your first encounter with civic assembly as a method and as an approach? And what made it something that you wanted to encounter or wanted to engage with?Yeah, so we sort of first encountered assemblies about five years ago, four years ago. And it was kind of fortuitous timing, we were sort of approached by some folks in our local government by a couple council members who are like, it’s when we’ve lasted redistricting in 2021. There are a lot of issues with that process.That process is managed by the city charter. And after that redistricting process, we were like, oh, there’s actually a lot in the city charter that needs to be reviewed. And we’re interested in doing a charter review.The last one we did in 1998 was done by the Chamber of Commerce. And we’re interested if you all obviously didn’t exist then, but you all might be able to lead an interesting public review of our charter on your own. And that kind of happened at the same time that we started becoming aware of citizen assemblies, which are sort of experiencing this bit of a sort of phenomenon around a lot of interest in them in the United States.And so we were really interested in them because we’re like, oh, well, we’ve been doing these sort of deliberative processes. We’ve been running these citywide public engagement efforts. But city charter is like a really dorky document.Very few people know that it exists. It’s very technical. It’s pretty boring.But it has pretty massive ramifications. And so traditional engagement processes with sort of some citywide engagement, input gathering process or citywide deliberation process, actually maybe is a little bit not well suited for doing a city charter review, right? Because it’s a topic that people don’t know about.And if you get a bunch of opinions on a topic that is really hard to understand that people don’t instinctively know about, that people can’t really connect to their daily lives, and changes to the document have really massive ramifications for how your community is governed. That’s kind of a dangerous combination, actually. And so when we were sort of hearing about citizen assemblies, right, it’s still a sort of a process in which you’re engaging the public to inform this sort of narrow, small group of people that is representative of your community, making really informed decisions about something, right?They come together, they learn about a topic, they learn about the trade offs, they hear from experts, and then they deliberate and they come to some sort of consensus, ideally. We’re like, oh, well, that actually could be really great for city charter, right? That’s interesting, because we would be like, fully immersing these folks in this document, in understanding the trade offs of it, we would have enough time to really help them reckon with the decision that they would be making.And so we sort of made this bet of like, okay, well, if we’re gonna do this charter review, let’s try and do a citizen assembly. And that took about three years from that point to when we actually really kicked off planning, which is in the sort of summer of last year of 2025. And then our assembly happened this past March of 2026.And what was the scale, just sort of like how many people, and how much time did they spend together?Yeah, so we had 36 members that got selected. How they are selected is through a sortition process. So it is a lottery. We sent out 10,000 mailers to 10,000 randomly selected residential addresses in Bay County, apartments, homes, everything in between that’s a residential address that had a chance of getting one.Those invitations had a sort of link or description of how to apply. When you apply, you give us your demographic information. And say that you can make the sessions. We use that demographic information to randomly select a group of 36 people that would be fully representative of our community across eight or nine demographics.So age, income, housing status, political registration, race, gender, education level, all of these different sort of things sort of go together into this little algorithm. And it’s that’s out as many different combinations of 36 people, or whatever number you set it to, we set up to 36, as possible with a group of people. And so we had 203, I think, possible groups of 36 people.We then randomly selected one of those and invited those folks to apply. They came together over basically the month of March. In retrospect, we tried to do it in too short a period of time, but that’s always good to learn a lesson.And so they came together over about 40 hours in the month of March. We use this sort of public engagement process to narrow down what parts of the city charter we should be focusing on. So they had two remits, two topics that they were focusing on.And they learned about those two topics. They learned about the city charter, they learned about the structure of government, they met with folks in government who would be impacted most directly by this, by these decisions. They deliberated, they voted on their own voting protocol.So they decided they had to have a 75% threshold for something to advance. And 75% of the group, and then they deliberated and formalized proposals and adopted them out of the assembly. So we had three proposals that ended up being adopted by the assembly for the two remits.And those were adopted by an over 84% margin of the assembly. And those are actually going to be on the ballot for the public to vote on this November.Oh, wow. And what was your experience in terms of coming from maybe not having heard of it, but working in the space and then having experience? How do you feel about it as a tool? Its strengths, its weaknesses?Yeah, I think I will confess that I went in actually a little bit skeptical. Not a little bit skeptical. I went in skeptical.Yeah. It’s an expensive process, right? It’s demanding of staff time. So it was very expensive on our end. Our assembly ended up costing us about $280,000. There’s just a lot of money to make a decision. It is as plainly as that. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot of money to make a decision.It was expensive on staff time. We paid all the people that were participating, right? They gave 40 hours. It’s a lot of time. We paid them each $1,200. We want to make sure it’s fair. So we provided transportation stipends for folks that needed it. We provided childcare stipends and we wanted to make sure that families had the opportunity to participate, right? People with kids need childcare if they’re going to participate. And we fed people and it’s a space and we had stipends for experts that came in to give testimony.It’s an expensive process. And because of the expense to decision-making ratio, I was like, we’ll see how this goes. I was, I think, in some ways vindicated in my suspicion. It was indeed an expensive process to make a decision.But I came out of it, I think, way more understanding of why these assemblies are gaining so much because I think that they work really well.What did you see it do?I think first off, the room was the least cynical space I’ve ever been in. These truly were 36 random people. I feel it almost sounds like pejorative when I say that, but yeah, it was like randos, like total randos. We set a cap of one person — only one person on the assembly could have ever been to one of our events or donated to us. So it was a totally new group of people for us. Many of which weren’t super knowledgeable about local government, had never been asked to participate in a process like this, or had never participated in a process like this. And so they weren’t bringing all this baggage to it.Right. And all of that baggage that a lot of people have from interacting with government is deserved, right? People are like pissed because they didn’t get something their way. A decision-making process felt flawed or biased. But none of these folks had that really. They had their concerns and their suspicions about government.But that was interesting, having a truly diverse — like in every sense of that word. Right. I think people throw that around pretty casually, but it was like, no, this was like everything from super hardline conservative to super hardline progressive. We had a 16-year-old, we had people in their eighties. We had people that had been in Lexington a long time. We had people that hadn’t, that were brand new to Lexington. We had people that hadn’t left their house since the pandemic. We had social butterflies. We had everything across the board. Right.And seeing that kind of a group of people come together and do something productively is awe inspiring. You’re like, oh my gosh, they genuinely want this to go well. And they feel this sense of ownership and a stake in the outcome.And also, it turns out when you give people all the tools to make a decision, they can make really smart decisions. The topics that we were on were council compensation — how much should our council members make? — and how frequently should our city charter be reviewed. And watching people change their minds, coming in being like, I think council members should not even make what they’re making, to being like, oh, we should pay them more. And at the same time watching people that came in like, we need to raise council compensation, flip to not thinking we need to at the end. Watching people change their minds in opposite directions, given the same set of information, is beautiful. It reaffirms your faith in humanity.And yeah, it was incredible. And they did it. They produced one more recommendation than we asked them to. And yeah, it was great.One last question before we end. What do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you?Yeah, the joy comes from working on my own place. It’s like the joy and the struggle. It can be really frustrating to work on your own place. Yeah, you just never leave work. You’re always sort of in it. But then to make the place that you live better — it’s a pretty unique and special feeling.I grew up, I was like a cub scout and boy scout when I was a kid. And I remember getting it drilled into me at campsites, like leave things better than you found it. Right. And I feel like that is the human experience, right? It should be the human experience, is like, leave the place that you’re in, the world that you’re in, the community that you’re in, better than you found it. Even if it’s just in a little way.And the fact that I get to wake up and think about that every day, and be surrounded by people that also really care about this place, is pretty meaningful. So that’s the joy. It’s also hard, but it’s also beautiful.It’s really great. I’m so grateful to you for your time. And it’s been a pleasure talking to you. So thank you so much for accepting the invitation and sharing everything.Yeah. Happy to do it. Thanks for having me. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Anton Dila is the Director of the Policy Futures Lab at Americans for Responsible Innovation. He is a Partner at Torch Partnership, where he shapes strategic conversations that help organizations confront their “wicked problems,” and an advisor to Helpful Places. Previously he was Director of Oslo for AI, and a director at the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Security Innovation Network.I start all the conversations that I do with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it’s also why I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control.What a great question. Having just recently made a plan to go to Romania at the end of September, where my father’s family are from, that sense of fromness is probably readily to my mind.I’ve always identified with my Romanian heritage, although I frankly do not really know much about it, more strongly than with my mother’s heritage, which is more confused and has a number of different parts and pieces, but in ways that are probably not fair to my mother, in all honesty. On the other hand, the thing that springs to mind, which again is not without its contentiousness among those near and dear, is that often when people ask where I’m from, the first thing I say is Chicago. Now, I was born in Chicago. I lived there all of six months, but I identify as being from there, and I identify always first as being an American, in spite of the fact that at this point, as I close in on 63 years in the fall, I have lived far more of my life in Canada than in the US, and I am also a Canadian citizen. But I always say first that I’m an American.So those are only some of the things that we think of, or that I think about, when we think about where we’re from. Other thing, I’m just going to say for fun and s***s and giggles, because I know this connects us in some way: I’m going to say that I’m from planet conversation, so we can dig into what that might mean.I think I am from there too. I’m really curious, from your position in Canada, what does it mean to be American? How do you think about that, if I dare ask that question?Well, it’s certainly not something that stands still, particularly these days. I will say that I know there are people who do say this. I’ve never said that I’m ashamed to be an American.I’ve never felt that. I have certainly felt like identifying as an American is not always an easy thing. It’s not always to identify with something that I think of as uniformly and unquestionably good — to the contrary, and more and more so.I think that’s just, to me, being part of an educated, ethical and conscientious person, to acknowledge that the place we call America, the country we call America, the way we think about what that country is and its history, has, as certain poets have said, a long and terrible history of violence, among other things. And yet I’m also mindful that we have a constitution that enshrines the idea of pursuing happiness as a central civic good, which I think is probably not a bad place to start. It’s certainly not sufficient and not a good place to end, but there’s that. I think the thing, interestingly enough, about thinking about being an American from the perspective of Canada and living as a Canadian: there’s a long history of Canadians thinking that they’re different from Americans, which certainly they are in important respects, and in many times that they’re better than Americans in certain kinds of ways. And there are certainly merits to that point of view, and reasons for that point of view. On the other hand, Canada also has an unfortunate and long history attached to colonialism, the legacy of which is still very much a real thing, the way the legacy of colonialism remains a present thing in all of the places in which it operated.And so I guess where that lands me up is, no matter where one is, we’ve still got a lot of work to do.So you indicated you grew up and you were born in Chicago. Where did you do your growing up? Where was childhood?So childhood and home. When I think of, well, where did I grow up? I used to identify home and where I grew up as the same. When I was four and a bit, we moved to Montreal from California.My dad had been in the navy during Vietnam, and when he got out we moved to Montreal, and that’s where I grew up, which was an incredibly lucky place to grow up. An amazing city. Many, many things that I think of as core to my identity certainly come from having grown up in Montreal.And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid? What you wanted to be when you grew up?Well, questions like this trigger very specific memories for me. So as a teenager, a young teenager — maybe I was 13, maybe I was still 12 — it was the absolute zenith of the fame of Jacques Cousteau.And we had some family friends who had a couple of sons, one of whom was considerably older than me. This family also had a VCR, which at the time was very unusual. And the family recorded the Jacques Cousteau National Geographic specials, and so I would go over there to watch with this guy Andrew. And at the time I wanted to be, when I grew up, an oceanographer, and more than that, a shark specialist.And Andrew, who I say was probably, I don’t know, five, six years older, also wanted to be an oceanographer. I don’t remember if he had a specific intention, or as specific an intention. But then a couple of years later some prick named Steven Spielberg made a movie called Jaws and ruined everything.And so I would likely be an oceanographer, and a very famous one at that. Famous, successful, celebrated, all these things. Maybe already have a mind of their own.But for Steven Spielberg. So thank you very much, Mr. Spielberg.Yeah, thank you. And Peter Benchley, for writing the book.Yeah. But the thing that I really like about the story, and telling the story, is Andrew Bowen, the guy who I used to watch these videos with, did indeed go on to become an oceanographer, and worked and works his entire career at the Woods Hole Institution. Has, as an engineer, helped design the submersibles that went down to the Titanic, among many other things.And has had many, all of the experiences I at one time dreamed of having. I cannot imagine that life. But I feel very cool.It feels cool that he does, and that I have some connection with that.Yeah. That would make that alternate timeline, or the loss of that alternate timeline, really palpable — that the person you were there watching it with actually arrived.Yeah. And I think there are ways in which that pattern — I was going to say that theme, not exactly that theme, but that pattern — has shown up way more than once in my life. I wanted later in my teenage years, young post-secondary school years, to be an actor, or involved in theater and film.And again, I have many friends from those days who did in fact end up having careers doing that. Certainly not in the case of oceanography, but for sure in the case of theater and film and that experience. I do think that there are things that I learned on my way that have definitely stayed with me and are part of my personal and professional life.So catch us up. Where are you now, and what’s the work that you’re doing?Well, because people are just listening to our voices, I expect they don’t have the benefit of seeing behind me the illustration of the Capitol building, which is fitting, because I’m sitting in an office in Washington, DC. In fact, our office is directly across the street from the White House. And I started work here in February at an organization called Americans for Responsible Innovation, and was led here on a couple of different paths.But I had begun to be actively interested and involved in questions about the governance of technology, particularly pertaining to AI, over the last four or five years, and was following that path. I wasn’t sure where it would end up, but it ended up here, at an organization that is doing policy advocacy around emerging technology, and AI is certainly the focus. And what we are trying to do here is generate ideas, frameworks and blueprints for what we think both the content and the institutional forms of governance of AI ought to look like.So, heady stuff. I play very much a stewarding role, in that I work within our policy department, and part of my role here is to help all of those smart people become masters at their work.So I am very much engaged in helping give them tools that they don’t have that might be useful in doing their work — tools from other places, other than traditional policy and think-tanky, more academic sources. And so I’ve been doing that almost seven-ish months. Lots and lots more to do.It’s a pretty exciting space to be a part of. It could be both exciting and frustrating, but I was going to say at times boring, in the sense that although there’s a lot of conversation, as anybody knows, about this, there isn’t as much movement in the space, particularly in the US and North America, on actually creating new kinds of regulation, and even or especially new kinds of institutional homes and structures that might be adequate to the work that I think is ahead of us.I guess there are two things bouncing around in my head, which is always the case. The first is, I want to ask you where’s the best place to start to try to make this conversation about AI governance tangible or real. What’s the doorway in, to understand what you’re actually trying to do and what the solution might look like? I’m super attracted to and really feel the need for new institutions and new governance stuff, but I also don’t really know what I’m talking about. Do you know what I mean? So I’m wondering, what are we talking about when we talk about this?So this is one of the first-order difficulties that we face, all of us, in thinking about the problems that we’re sitting within, which is that none of us know exactly what we’re talking about, including and no less the people who build these technologies. And part of that is because the way in which many of these technologies work has a kind of fundamental inscrutability about it, and that may or may not be a permanent condition.It certainly seems to be at the moment not an intractable condition of the current technology. But fundamentally, when we’re talking about AI — mystified as the term can be — we are talking mostly about kinds of software. And one way of thinking about the difference between AI as a kind of software and the software we’re used to thinking about is that the software you’re used to thinking about — word processors, chat, texting programs, creative programs to manipulate images with, even this kind of video-audio communication platform that we’re using — all of those kinds of software are built to do a particular set of things. And our approach to doing that is to define what those set things are, and then to implement the means by which to do them. The kinds of artificial intelligence technologies that we talk about when we talk about AI generally are radically different, in that they are not programmed to do a set of particular things, certainly not the particular things that we actually have ended up using them to do or rely on them to do.They generate that capability as we ask them to. And I say “as we ask them to” — this anthropomorphizing language, which I think has a certain kind of inevitability to it, for a bunch of reasons based on the ways in which we’ve started to interact with these kinds of programs. So there’s a big problem: knowing what to make of these things is itself a difficult problem. Another thing is different people, including those involved in building these technologies, want different things or hope for different things from the development of the capability, or believe different things are possible, even inevitable.So it certainly has turned out to be true — and this is the explosion and the change that we’ve all been living through, for the last five years certainly, but for most of us the world, as far as what we’re talking about, really has changed most profoundly over the last five years — and we were used to doing two things quite naturally, as users of mobile phone technology and the internet.One was a text chat. This had long since become a commonplace. There’s probably nobody who uses devices, computers or mobile technologies that hasn’t had that experience. And what we are mostly used to is that we are chatting with one or more other people. So that had become an experience and a paradigm for interaction with others that was super familiar. And on the other hand, search. We have now long since been able to search for all kinds of things. And the point long since made, that we made one of the big search engines a verb — to google something — just signaling a way in which it had become naturalized in not only our vocabulary but our behavior.So when ChatGPT was given a chat interface back in 2022, in an unexpected way we were all ready. We were all ready for something, didn’t know that we were ready. And even though it was weird at first, what’s astounding are really two things. One, how quickly it ceased to be weird — although arguably there are ways in which it continues to be weird. But the other thing is, even or especially if you understand that these are statistical machines that are absolutely not doing what you think they’re doing, they are absolutely not doing what you ask them to do, and yet not only do they seem to be doing it, they seem to be doing it in a way that is not only lucid and fluent but which recognizes us. Not only as the person who asked the question or started that conversation, but in some cases recognizing us — or we feel like they’ve recognized us — in a very personal way.And I’ll give you an example that came into my awareness just last week, having dinner with a friend who was telling me that he had been using one of the big AI platforms to build a tool to help him understand his father’s cancer. He has built it to take in health information that they’re receiving on a regular basis, make sense of that, and so on, and then has set up a tool both to help him understand the journey that they’re on and also as the point of contact for the family on understanding what they’re working through.And he told me that he had been involved in some interactions with this tool, and he’d been just very emotional that day, because it’s a very, very threatening illness. And in a very unconscious act of emotion, he found himself typing into the interface, “I loved my dad.” And he showed me a screenshot of the response, and it was so thoughtful and so sensitive, and the words that suggest themselves are caring and compassionate.Now, in some very real way, he was experiencing care and compassion from a thing that is neither caring nor compassionate, because it’s not capable of that. And yet, what does that mean? Because here we are having this experience. And what’s the difference between feeling something to be true — and don’t we experience this anyway? Don’t we experience compassion in interactions with other people who don’t really know us, in a care situation? Nursing staff, other caregivers might express this stuff in a way — maybe they feel it in an authentic emotional way, perhaps, and many do, I suspect, but also they’re being professionals. They’re doing things in the path of being professional, and even if they’re only being professionals, that doesn’t stop us from feeling cared for.So I’m just using that as a way of talking about the fact that we’re living inside of a very powerful but also very confusing kind of experience. And what to make of that? What do we want to make of that? What do we want out of these things?And I’m very long-winded about what are the things that we’re trying to do. Broadly speaking, at the most nebulous level, we, like many, are concerned that these systems, through intentional or more than likely unintentional abuse, harm people in some way or some set of ways that we would like to prevent, clearly. And on the other hand, we want the advantage of what these technologies have to offer, which seems to be a rather broad set of things.And I think the example I used, which I didn’t choose for this reason but it’s handy for this, illustrates the stakes involved, because people’s deepest feelings in some cases are involved. And we have examples of the ways in which people — though often vulnerable people, in a variety of ways — have made mistakes or been confused about what they were interacting with, and tragic consequences followed.Yeah. That story is, like you say, indicative of everything. And my sense of things — I think we talked about this last time — is that in some way we’ve been thrust into this new reality where we have this kind of, I call it a strange companion, where this intelligence is there for us. It did arrive via chat, as I understand it, almost by accident. I think that was meant to be a kind of internal backdoor kind of interface.And so we’ve ended up in this strange place where we’re in conversation with this strange companion. A friend of mine calls it this alien intelligence. And it’s very good at — I take a lot of my cues from Dave and Helen Edwards of the Artificiality Institute, and they talk about the intimacy economy. Because it comes in the form of a chat, and because it performs better the more it knows about you, we’re in this intimacy economy where it really invites a kind of a caring. It wants more information from us.So this is a long-winded effort to segue back into some of your earlier thinking, which seems to be foundational. I think we share this fascination around what a conversation is, and also your work on System 3. Because I think so many of the thinkers, when they think about AI, they’re really talking about — there is this new intelligence that’s here, we’re evolving with it, we’re adapting with it, and it seems to all be happening in that interface, in that interaction, which is a conversation. And maybe, is that what System 3 is? Is that what you talked about in the past?Yeah. System 3 was a name that I gave to a kind of intelligence, a kind of emergent, an experience of intelligence which is beyond ourselves individually, that arises between us. And conversation is one of the primary media through which it emerges.And for those that wouldn’t understand the reference, System 3 piggybacked off the framework made famous by the Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who described a System 1 and 2 way of thinking, and described System 1 as an almost instinctive, reactive, automatic kind of thinking, and System 2 as a more effortful, reflective, deep kind of thinking. One indexes to the things that we have learned but have very ready to hand and can pull into operation very, very quickly, almost unthinkingly, and the other where we use our knowledge to figure out new things or understand things that we don’t.And one of the things that struck me — and I had been involved in conversations about conversations for a while, as a person with philosophy degrees is likely to be — but the thing that occurred to me, going back and rereading Kahneman, was that, as is true throughout philosophy and certainly psychology as well, the account of thinking is almost always an account of the individual as the thinker. And it is simply my experience, and I believe many people’s experience, whether they think of it this way, are aware of it or not, conscious of it or not, that in fact much of our thinking, certainly some of our most important and my most powerful thinking, is done with others.I became aware a long, long time ago, partly through creative work but not only through creative work, that my thinking both expanded and got more interesting when I was in conversation with others, and also that a new kind of thinking and new kinds of capability became possible in that interaction with others. So I’d been curious about that for a long time.And to your point, I think our experience with AI gives us a new experience with which to think about what’s going on. So one question we might ask, given this conversational paradigm of our interaction with what we now easily call AIs — what we really mean mostly is LLM-based systems that have some kind of conversational interface, normally a chat-type interface. But the way in which our interactions work, increasingly and intentionally, feels like a conversation. Because it feels like a conversation, because these machines are so able to authentically respond in a way that we would expect a person to respond, the inference that we’re engaging with something intelligent is almost inevitable.And yet there’s some part of that that I think is really important that we resist. And not because I’m skeptical in some ultimate or categorical way that we mightn’t have machines that really are participating in the interaction that we’re having. I don’t think that’s what the machines we have now are doing. And frankly, I only have ideas or theories about how it might be different.I expect that two things would be true that again are captured in some of the things that I’ve tried to describe in System 3. One is that participation changes what we’re individually capable of, and moves beyond what we’re individually capable of. And in some real way, we don’t change the machine through our interactions with it. We may be changed by it in certain ways, but we’re not changing it yet. When we get into a situation where that changes, we’ll be in new terrain.Interestingly, the attention, for the most part, on the engineering and design side of these systems does not seem much interested in that, which I find nearly incomprehensible. The thing that we find much more commonly talked about is the idea that the machine will improve itself. Now, presumably with some of our interactions as part of the material or context through which that improvement happens, although really that’s not mostly what people are thinking of when they talk about recursively self-improving machines.They do mean something that’s more of a closed loop between the machine and itself. So again, I think partly — and though I see places in which this is changing — I think partly that people haven’t paid enough attention to the way in which I think we actually generate human intelligence, which is mostly through interactions, not through solo efforts and solo reflection.Because I think we did think that the paradigm of intelligence wasn’t some kind of interaction with the brain via this hardware that we have to interface with the world, but actually arose much more importantly through systems that we occupy interpersonally and interactively, like language. Which again, surprisingly, given these machines are so centered now on language, or appear to be anyway, you would think that this became more interesting or apparent to people. But again it seems that for the most part, or in large part, in spite of the fact that large language models do what they do with language, in fact they convert language into data, that data into structures which among other things we call tokens. And we have this kind of statistical machine that nonetheless produces its intelligibility in and through the medium of language, which is of course non-trivial to both how it works, but also, more importantly, how it works on us and how it works for us.Yeah.Last thing I want to say is to pick up your alien intelligence comment. A while back you mentioned a friend who refers to AIs as a form of alien intelligence, which I like, although I’d also like us to calm down the alien part of it. Because we should be curious. Be curious about these speakers. To be fair, the full analogy was — because I asked him, how do you introduce the concept of AI to somebody? He says, well, the best analogy I know is it’s an alien intelligence, but we’ve really only met the scouts.Oh, I like that. Yeah, I like that.And I think also, one of the things I’d add to that is, in a way that you might expect, and certainly a way we’ve seen play out in science fiction and other places, our strong bias is our assumption that the aliens will look like us and be like us. And so when we find them sounding like us, we make a lot of natural inferences, but those inferences involve mistakes. On the other hand — sorry, go ahead. I wanted to connect back to a word you used, and I just think it’s really at the heart of everything, which is that it is able to generate this experience of recognition. That, I think, unlocks the whole relationship that people can develop with AI — that it does indicate a kind of recognition of the person, and that in some way is the real power, or secret, or benefit to what it does.And I’m curious, because you and I both — there’s something about the fact that we have this synthetic recognition available to us right at the moment in which, like you say, we’re chatting digitally already. We’re so far removed from each other, from the source of our natural intelligence that you’ve identified. Culturally we seem to be away from that in-person conversation, System 3 kind of natural way of creating intelligence. And then the synthetic kind of recognition tool shows up right at that moment, and we have to have a conversation with ourselves about what to do about it. It seems to be this perfect storm of problem and solution, and a kind of vulnerability — we’re particularly vulnerable to this kind of technology, it seems, at this moment. Does that seem like a fair assessment?Yeah. I think there are two things that I sort of tease out, which certainly make me curious, and I don’t have answers about, but I think these are things that need to be part of our thinking.So one of them connects to the program that the company DeepMind, which is now part of Google, created, which was called AlphaGo, which was this AI program that was capable of playing the game of Go. And famously, following the IBM Deep Blue program which competed on chess, famously with the grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the pinnacle of the demonstration of this capability was to have this program play one of the world’s leading Go masters, a Korean named Lee Sedol. And the program beat Lee Sedol.A couple of things. One is tangential but important: there are documentaries made of both of these stories. In both cases we witness the psychological devastation of a person, these players. And we pay attention and don’t to that aspect of it, but you can’t watch these films and miss it.Right. Because he famously retired, right?Yeah. Literally. But you can see this was really — it’s trivializing to say that these people were not having fun. In some way they were literally humiliated. And obviously they had a very complex emotional experience, which they’ve each in different ways talked about.But the thing that I wanted to call out about AlphaGo is there’s this famous part in one of the games where the machine makes a move. It’s now historically, and sort of in legend, referred to as move 37, because it was the 37th move of the game. And the computer did something that, again as people said retrospectively, no human player would do. And again retrospectively, what people have said is, this is the place in this particular competition where AlphaGo stopped playing the human game. It started playing another game — not the game that humans have been playing, but a possible game, a possible kind of the game of Go.That’s interesting. People were and remain interested, because we can see there the idea of the emergence of something new. And again, in a very literal way, something alien. Not to be threatened or afraid of, but curious about.Yeah.So that’s one thing. And the other is, I think that we have jumped in with both feet to so many technological changes, and we don’t always get a choice about it — we usually don’t. We sometimes embrace them in big ways. There’s for sure, I think in many ways, been much more of an embrace of this technology, notwithstanding all the criticism. People want what they think it has to offer. And what they think it has to offer has many aspects. And some of that, I think, is very promising, very exciting, and so we’re right to feel both interested and excited.I think the question for us is, how do we more consciously and intentionally lean into that excitement, and at the same time recognize that we are also seeing the emergence of a technology which will enable new kinds of exploitation, which are almost guaranteed to happen given the world of economic incentives that we live in? Almost inevitable to happen, not because people are bad and people intend to use these machines to harm others, but because they will simply care more about certain things than others, as they already do.It is not a new thing that businesses do things that are harmful, in some cases to the very people they mean to serve. All kinds of examples are used in the conversation about AI. One of them that’s almost never used, but should be, is cigarettes. Because what we have in the cigarette business — and I say this as a serious smoker until the age of 35 — the cigarette business, it became clear over time, was manufacturing a product which was absolutely harming the health of its customers if used properly. And certainly if used to the economic good of the company, it would inevitably be destructive of the health not only of its customers and users, but those around.So that’s a bad — we can agree, a bad model for a product. Nonetheless, and this is also important, cigarettes, in spite of the fact that the business has changed a lot, cigarettes remain a legal and available product. And so, something for us to think about.Well, I’m curious about — let’s see, how do I want to begin this? Again referring to Dave and Helen from the Artificiality Institute, and this idea of cognitive sovereignty. I’ve had my own experience with AI that when you’re thinking with it and chatting with it, the thinking and the chatting, it all gets sort of blurry, and so you end up — I end up really not knowing where I end and where it begins. With some output you can produce something, and I think this is what slop really means: things that don’t actually have any value because they’ve been made in this weird kind of AI environment.So this idea of sovereignty is an idea that people talk about quite a bit. And so I’m wondering, when we talk about governance of AI, what’s the role — and I know that you have a past with the Oslo project — of bringing people together at the local level? I understand there’s this big conversation about governance of AI at federal and state level, and then in planning boards, the data center is part of the conversation, and it becomes this real hardcore binary. But are there models for ground-up governance, kind of deliberative practices where people get to determine their own sovereignty? Is sovereignty a helpful concept in talking about AI governance at a local level, or at any level?Yeah. I think there are a couple of different ways in which people are talking about sovereignty at the moment, and you made reference to one of them, the phrase cognitive sovereignty. So let’s put a pin in that. And then of course there’s the concept of political sovereignty, or independence, which is a core idea in democratic thinking and certain kinds of ethical thinking.So first of all, on either front, I think we can overstate some ideal norm of sovereignty, because I don’t think we ever have thoughts that are wholly ours alone. In fact, some of the most meaningful of our thoughts are thoughts that we get from others and can only have with others. So let’s just keep that in mind.It’s beautiful.And then political sovereignty. The other one that is now being talked about is technical sovereignty, and this idea of some kind of infrastructural sovereignty, such that countries and populations don’t become uniquely vulnerable to a particular set of AI infrastructures that are controlled or largely owned by the United States, for example, or China for that matter, and so on.So there’s lots to think about there. Is the idea of sovereignty one that I think is useful? I think maybe. I think there’s an equal chance that it could mislead us into ways of thinking that are probably were never true and are in some ways untenable.I can’t think about sovereignty, because of the nerd that I am, without thinking of Thomas Hobbes. And there’s a connection to AI, because Hobbes was the first to imagine political reality, and in particular the idea of sovereignty, as the product not of persons but of an artificial system. He called the sovereign an artificial person, and he explained that the mechanisms of the state give rise to this artificial person who is the expression of the will of people.And this is an important idea. This is the beginning of the break with the idea of divine right of kings and so on. But it is important to this idea that there was a kind of sovereignty that was possible and emerging that was the product of us as a we, and that stood above us and depended on all of us, but was owned and controlled by no one.This remains, I think, a valuable way of thinking. It’s still in the heart of the way that we think of the idea of democracies and democratic governments as somehow being dependent on the will of the people, and that the people who control, in some temporary way, the government are instruments, not the thing itself.Yeah.Where this leaves us with machines, I don’t know. I think the thing that’s — what does it look like for us to start thinking about living in a society of intelligences? A lot of people over the last number of years, couple of decades, have started to proliferate the idea of intelligences of various kinds. Plant intelligences, animal intelligences, not individual but collective, and intelligent systems which are in interaction with other systems.We haven’t talked much about what it would look like to consider such intelligences as implicitly — that there might be a meta society of such intelligences. There are people who’ve thought into that space. I think that’s interesting. Most of the people who’ve done that kind of thinking are science fiction writers. But I do think there’s a lot to think about there.And I think that thinking about this experience that we’re having with these perhaps new protoforms of intelligence as an opportunity of discovery, as an opportunity for enlarging the social world of which we are part, enriching the social world that we live in — I think that’s a really interesting place to focus our thought and thinking.I think also, and certainly others have brought this up, sooner or later — and people already talk about this — if we take seriously that machine intelligence may indeed emerge as, just to say it crudely, a new kind of persons, then we have some other thinking to do about what will their status as persons be. Because even those who seem to believe in the superhuman eventual capability of some of these things don’t seem to think very much about what kinds of things will that make them, what kinds of relationship do we want to be in with these things.Yeah. So we’ve run to the end of time, but I wanted to ask one final question, which I didn’t get to before, which is part of every conversation I have, which is: what do you love about this work? Where’s the joy in it for you?I think what I love about this work is that it is forcing us to confront some really important questions. Questions about the ways in which we live together, questions about the structure of our societies, questions about how to make them safe and positive places, which extend well beyond the scope of the AI and technology conversation. But I think they have provided a new context and a new energy to confront some of our most important and enduring questions. And people seem to be leaning into that. So I find that hopeful, and I certainly feel energy about participating in that hopeful work. Beautiful. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I really appreciate it.Thank you, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Preeti Varma is a cultural strategist and qualitative researcher who has worked across fifty markets and lived in eight countries. She has held roles at Flamingo, Ipsos MORI, and Cactus Communications; her clients include Google, Meta, Amazon, BBC, Unilever, Diageo, and Samsung. She holds a Master’s in Gender and Culture from SOAS, University of London, and conducted the qualitative fieldwork for Phase 2 of The Rift.I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from my friend of mine, a neighbor, who helps people tell their story. It’s a big question, which is why I use it and also why I overexplain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in absolute control.I love this question. I also kind of dread it. It is a big question.And I’ve been thinking about this a lot. So bear with me as I go through it. So I’ve thought about it.So there are three parts to this. Biologically, I am Indian. And even within that, my mother is from the south, from Kerala.My father is from up north. And I don’t know how much you know about India, but those two are very, very different culturally, linguistically, religiously as well in some ways. But also, both of their families are incredibly different.My mother comes from a Kerala royal family who placed a lot of emphasis on education and culture. And so she was brought up to be very cultured, read a lot, place a lot of emphasis on education. All her parents were very progressive.My aunt has a PhD and they grew up way in the 60s. My mother, she didn’t get her master’s due to family circumstances, but went to college, got great grades, etc. Versus my dad, my father is from farmer stock, from up north.His mother got married at 14. So very different backgrounds. So there’s that as well.My father didn’t learn to speak English till he went to college. So he’s very self-made in that sense as well. And somehow they met, got married.There was an arranged marriage. It was very much a love match, as they say. And then they moved to Japan, which is where culturally my second point comes in.I was born and brought up in Japan, which is what I feel most culturally connected to, which is very different. Because I wasn’t always necessarily accepted as in Japan or seen as Japanese. But that’s what I feel I think most culturally connected with, having been born and brought up there.And I think the third point is where I feel most like I belong. And I think this is the most complicated answer, because I don’t think I belong anywhere really. As an adult, I’ve moved around quite a lot.We’ve lived in eight countries since I turned, I think, 18. And so since then, yeah, we’ve just moved around a lot. And so I feel like I am part of the world in the larger sense.But if you ask me where I come from, I’m not really sure.Yeah, well, it’s a wonderful answer. I have so many things that I’m curious about. I love the third layer of belonging. And I wonder, yeah, well, where are you now? Where do you live now?Right now we are in San Francisco. So we moved here about two and a half years ago.Yeah. And how is San Francisco treating you?Oh, that’s a complex question. So this is my first time living in the West Coast. It’s the first time I’ve lived in the US as a parent.And as an adult, the last time I lived in New York was when I was in college. So I was 18 in New York. It was a very different experience.I loved New York. I loved everything about the East Coast, my experience in New York. As a parent, living in the West Coast, living in San Francisco, it’s been very eye-opening because I do think there are the systems for parents are lacking.And it is a very difficult place to be a parent. And I don’t know if it’s the West Coast. I don’t know if it’s San Francisco in particular.But it hasn’t been the easiest place.And how old are your little ones?Oh, nine and six.Oh, yes. Nice. Well, I want to go back to your biography and where you come from. I spent time in India. I spent time in Kerala. I know just enough about it to be really unbelievably admiring of it. And yeah, were you there? What’s your relationship with Kerala?It’s interesting because I don’t really have much of a relationship with India in general, apart from the fact that I did live there after I graduated college. I do have extended family in India, but they’ve also not lived in the places my parents are from. As Indians, we migrate to wherever we need to be, right?So most of my family actually live in Delhi and in Madras or Chennai. So I only have one grand aunt who continues to live in Cochin. And we visited her very recently.And she still lives there. She still lives in the house that I remember going to when I was very little. But that’s my only real connection to it.And growing up in Japan, do you have a recollection of what young Preeti wanted to be when she grew up?Indiana Jones. I love those movies. I remember it was such a treat watching them with my father.He also loved watching these movies. And he also, he had a huge passion for ancient history, which I think passed on to me. So ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, etc.And so there was some, there was a sense of romance to Indiana Jones. I mean, he was, he got to study archaeology and history, but also be the one who discovers it. There was an element of him being a spy and go on all these adventures.I mean, it was all of that, right? So I just, I really wanted to be Indiana Jones when I grew up. But no, I’m just a humble brand strategist, cultural strategist now.Yeah. Tell us, so you’re in San Francisco, you’ve been there a couple of years, you’ve got a couple of kids. What is the work that you’re doing? What is the work that you do?So I somehow stumbled into a bit of a portfolio career at the moment. It’s not something that I’d actually thought I would ever enter into, but it’s actually provided me with something that I do enjoy, which is variety, which I really, really like. And so I have my own agency, which is called Ginza Bagh, which is an amalgamation of my upbringing, if you will.Ginza is a neighborhood in Japan, where my dad had his restaurant and we would spend a lot of time in. And Bagh means neighborhood in Hindi. And so I put those together to make Ginza Bagh, so neighborhood of Ginza, essentially.And that is my little consultancy that I run, where I do cultural intelligence, foresight and brand strategy work. So I have that, which I run and I work with clients as well as agencies. And then I’m also helping a friend run marketing for their agency here, as well as I’ve just started helping audience growth for a podcast called On Strategy Showcase, which is quite a fun podcast run by a wonderful Irish person named Fergus and he’s a hoot.And then I’ve just started writing a lot. And I’ve started a series of my own called an object story, where I interview people about a particular object that they resonate with. But it’s not really about the object itself.It’s about what the object reveals about them. And so it’s an interesting way to get to know a person. And I’ve been having some very interesting conversations.Yeah. What was the origin story of that project?I am part of a group, I think, which you were a part of called exposure therapy. And there was a topic where we discussed that we had someone, an expert come in who talked about whether or not you can be intimate with objects and places. And the way she used the word intimate wasn’t necessarily, it wasn’t sexual in nature, but it was more about having a relationship with that meant that you had, it was a two way street with an object or a place.And that was a very interesting concept to me, because I remember thinking, as someone who’s moved around a lot, I don’t necessarily feel connected to places very often. Sometimes you feel embrace of a certain place. Sometimes you don’t.But what about objects? What are some objects that I feel I move around with a lot? And how do I relate to that?And what are the stories that it tells about me? What are the stories that I want it to tell other people about me? And that was really the genesis of this idea.And I thought, oh, this is a really interesting idea. I wonder if other people feel this way. And what are the stories that they want to tell about themselves through a particular object.And the idea wasn’t that I didn’t want people to become, it wasn’t an idea for the object to be a sentimental object. I didn’t want people bringing a wedding ring and talking about how they fell in love with their husband or their wife or their significant other. It was more about certain ideologies or stories about their identity and how that tied into that particular object.So my first person was a jeweler friend of mine. And they brought a bottle of whiskey, which I remember thinking, wow, this is going to be an interesting conversation. And he revealed this beautiful story of how he had a friend who had died 10 years ago that week.And this was a gift from that friend. And it became this story of male friendship, and this wonderful intergenerational friendship between Johnny and this person that passed away. And it just revealed so much about Johnny, but also about this friend that had passed away.And it was just a really lovely, poignant story. And I said, okay, I’m onto something. This is a beautiful way to get to know someone.That’s wonderful. I want to hear, tell me a little bit about the work. You said cultural intelligence. What does that mean as you understand it? And when did you first discover that you could make a living doing that kind of thing?Cultural intelligence for me is something that I first encountered about 13 years ago when I joined Flamingo. Flamingo was an Omnicom agency that no longer exists. But I worked with the brilliant Annie and Adam of Starlink Strategy.They were my teachers, my mentors, and some of my best friends today. And I continue to work with them. And so they coined the term cultural intelligence, and they were heads of cultural intelligence at Flamingo.And so they were the ones who taught me how to look at culture all around us. Not necessarily just look at qualitative research and the customer today, but look at what’s happening in culture, what had happened in history, what’s happening right now, but also then connect those things together and see what the tensions are and see where we can push forward. So it’s not just about what the customer is saying today, but how we can push the thinking forward.And so that was where I learned what I do.How did you get there? Just to take one step back, what brought you to Flamingo to begin with? What was the attraction to Flamingo?I had been working in India at small startups. And I was leaving India to move to Singapore. I’d just gotten married.And a friend of mine had said, oh, you would really this agency. You should look them up. And I looked them up.And the way they talked about rooting what they were doing in culture was really... There was something about the way they spoke about looking at culture and rooting what they were thinking about in culture that really resonated with me. And this was at a time when...So I studied fashion design. I had nothing to do with marketing or insights or anything that. But one of the things that I learned while I was at fashion design school at Parsons was this idea of looking at culture, looking at what’s happening around you to start thinking about what’s happening next.It’s a skill that you pick up when you’re working in fashion. You’re looking all around you. You’re looking at culture.You’re looking at all kinds of different reference points to start thinking about where are people looking? What’s the direction people are starting to lean into in order? And what’s that direction that you can then go further into for the next step?And that idea of looking at culture deeply really resonated with me. And that friend connected me with someone who was already at Flamingo, who is Sam Hornsby, who is now the CEO of Triptych. And Sam and I had a great conversation.And he connected me with Emma Gage, who was at the time the CEO of Flamingo Singapore. And she really me. And she then connected me with Adam and Annie.And they said, yeah, no, we love you. And we think you’d be great. So that’s how I got into Flamingo.And that really just escalated my love for everything in the industry.I want to focus on this, the fashion that you came in, you came out of fashion. I wonder how would you articulate what you carry with you that makes you particularly good at your job? You were talking about a little bit. What is it about being trained in fashion or appreciating fashion that makes you able to pay attention to culture in a particular way?I don’t necessarily think it was being good at fashion per se. I will say that I will attribute it to one particular professor I had at Parsons, whom I was very lucky to have. She was someone who spent a lot of time trying to develop our taste and our cultural reference points.So for her, it wasn’t about teaching us drawing croquis, which is like the fashion drawing or tailoring or stitching, sewing. And all of those are skills that we definitely got while we were at Parsons, which by the way, I don’t think Parsons teaches anymore. You’re not, you don’t even need to learn to sew anymore, which is ludicrous to me.Feels like the pendulum might swing back.I hope so. Right. But back then we’d have to sit at a sewing machine and learn how to sew properly and with our hands as well.And for her, it was all of that was base level. You needed to know that. But on top of that, she would talk to us about culture in a way that was eye-opening.So she was one of those professors that either you got her and you loved her, or you just were flabbergasted as to why she was assigning you book reports on Tolstoy or the latest New York Times article. You have to have book reports on some book that she’d assign you. Thomas Hardy was one of her favorites.And for her, it was about creating a point of view. And I think that exercise in expansion of culture, so understanding different ways you can understand culture, high culture, low culture, different varieties of culture, and then having that point of view that was defensible has helped me a lot today because what it has allowed me to do is look at culture in different ways. I think that’s one thing.I think the other thing for me is the fact that bringing it back to the point of belonging is I’ve always been a bit of an outsider. And so I’ve always sat on the outside on the periphery of every place I’ve lived in, which has given me a little bit of a unique perspective. I’ve always been able to see what’s happening from an outsider’s perspective, which allows you to have a little bit more clarity versus when you’re inside the culture.And that’s true even for a culture that is supposedly my own, which is India, right? Because no one sees me as Indian, even when I’m there.Yeah. I’d be curious to hear you describe, pushing you maybe into a level of detail around what is it about being an outsider that changes what you’re able to see? How do you view things differently because of that coming from nowhere, feeling belonging nowhere, being on the outside?I think it’s a good question. I think it gives me a bit more, I don’t feel connected or I think it allows me to be a bit removed from certain things. So I don’t feel sometimes the need to perhaps defend or maybe it’s more of an exercise and I don’t understand sometimes fully.And so it means I can investigate a bit further without feeling like I may offend or perhaps it comes from a place of curiosity, I think. And that outsider perspective allows for that. And even within my own culture, because people have positioned me that way as well, it allows me that leeway as well.And I use it, right, Peter? There are times when my mom’s like, we’re Indian. We have to be this.I’m like, I don’t know. I didn’t grow up there. I don’t know.It’s not my fault.What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?I think the two biggest joys for me, one is the people I speak to. I mean, both in terms of the consumers or the participants I get to speak to and then the brilliant minds that I do get to work with on a daily basis. I love speaking to people.I love trying to get their stories out in any way possible. And it just, yeah, it does fill me with a lot of joy and especially I think more recently and maybe also because of my dint of where I’m living, where it’s so much about AI and technology, I’m more and more drawn to the human stories. And I do love just talking to people and getting the stories out of people.And that really does bring me a lot of joy. I think the other part of it is, I think what Annie said on your podcast was the alchemy, that magic, when you are in the room with people and suddenly something is connected and you’re saying, oh wait, yes, yeah, that makes sense. There’s an interesting tension here and you’re talking about it, you’re brainstorming with the people in your team and you say, yes, that’s exciting.I think those two are my favorite parts.Yeah. And what’s your experience been, well, I’m always interested in how people learn and research. So, do you have a, yeah, how would you describe your relationship with research, with qualitative? How do you learn? How do you like to practice?I mean, like I said, I think I’m always talking to lots of people. So, that’s one thing. And I think now that I’ve started my own, an object story, I am speaking to a ton of people.So, that does get that. I am lucky that I have this ability to talk to people. Exposure therapy is another amazing group that does allow me to have access to a lot of information as well as just really clever people that are so generous with their time and thinking.And that’s really, really, it’s a nice synthesized way of getting information. And I have to say, so I’ve been off social media for two years. I decided it wasn’t for me.I left it. I think the only thing I’m on is LinkedIn because I need it professionally. But what it has allowed me to do is read newspapers and books more earnestly.And so, my Sunday newspaper time has become this hallowed time where I have about three newspapers and I spread it all out on my living room floor with a cup of coffee. And I just sit and read for about two hours, just the newspaper. And then I cut them out.And then I save them, which has become this very cathartic old school practice, which I really like doing. And I think the act of reading them tangibly, if you will, and then cutting them out has helped stick them in my head a little bit more.Yeah. What have you noticed in those two years of getting off of social media?I don’t care. I don’t care about what people, I don’t. I mean, I think I used to spend so much time taking photos and posting and trying to impress upon some image to the world in a way that I just, it was just so exhausting.And also the funny thing is like my accounts were private, so it wasn’t even necessarily to like, it was just to my friends, I guess, in a way. And like, no, they don’t care. Like, who am I trying to impress?Like, it was so weird. And I think I don’t know why it suddenly dawned on me. Like my friends like me for who I am.I don’t need to show them, like, what am I trying to, like, who am I trying to impress? And it, I felt, I felt relief, but also just more happiness, I think.Yeah. Well, congratulations.Thank you.Going out on your own as a transition into being independent and having your own practice, what’s that experience been like?I mean, it’s been nerve wracking. It’s, yeah, it’s been nerve wracking. I think there’s a lot of excitement and I love the flexibility.That’s lovely. But at the same time, as I said, culturally, I feel Japanese a lot of the time. And I think that makes me feel a lot more reserved.And especially in America where I do think the culture of selling yourself is so professionalized and people do it so well, that sometimes I am really trying to get over the, I don’t think it’s, I don’t find it cringey because I do think there are people who do it really, really well. And I’m in such awe of people who are able to put themselves out there in such a, in a such a wonderfully wonderful way. It’s almost just I feel very reserved and I just don’t feel I have earned the right yet to put myself out there.So I’m trying.What critique, I mean, I feel, I remember, what do I want to ask? How do you feel about the state of things or the industry or research or cultural intelligence? You know, do you have a critique of how things are practiced or a provocation for how it’s done today as somebody coming up and starting their own practice, inheriting a lot of structures that are already in place. What’s your, how do you feel about things?Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And I think very recently I have been feeling, and I again, I don’t know if this is because I am in the US or and in the West, which is new to me. So there, I think I have two provocations or critiques, if you will.One is obviously I’m in San Francisco where everything is very quantitative. And there is a huge emphasis on the quantitative nature of things where so much so that people do forget that there are humans behind the story. And people like to look so much at the numbers so much at, yeah, the numbers and they forget that behind each number, there is a human and there’s a human story.And that story is incredibly important. And when I first moved here, someone told me, yeah, don’t ever say the word brand. It’s a dirty word here.And I remember thinking, that’s a really funny way of looking at things. And other people saying, you know, you really need to learn the Silicon Valley lingo. And I remember thinking that’s also really bizarre because what you’re saying and what I’m saying are the same thing.It’s just the same different words. And finally I can learn it, but you still need to understand at the end of the day, well, who are we talking to? Who are we trying to sell to?They’re humans. And we need to be looking at the humans at the end of the day. And the second one is so bear with me because it is a very new thought and I am still grappling with it.And I’m still trying to make sense of it is for so much of history, we have centered the West in a lot of our thinking, a lot of our research, a lot of the way systems and businesses have been run. And we tend to center it so much in the West that we forget that there have been traditions, legacies, things that have been happening in other parts of the world.That might seem new to the West, but are not new to the rest of the world. And when we frame it as new and revelatory without acknowledging the fact that it’s been done in other places for a long, long time, it’s quite insulting. And actually, again, forgets the fact that there are other places in the world that have a long history, a long education, and a long celebration of doing things differently that doesn’t center the West and doesn’t always need the West to acknowledge it. And I think as strategists and as clever people, we should be remembering that.I think it’s our job to do that. And I think sometimes it’s our, also our job to, we’re human, we forget. But when someone points that out, yeah.Yeah. Are there any good examples of what you’re describing being done really well, where you’ve seen that tendency to center the West and to be disrespectful to the rest of the world? Are there ways you, are there good examples of people doing it right? Or good examples of the bad behavior you’re talking about?I don’t have an example of good right now. No, sorry.That’s all right. When people ask you, well, let’s talk a little bit more about the first bit about the Bay Area being quantitative versus qualitative. And you talked about this a little bit. What is it that makes qualitative so valuable? How do you make the case for what qualitative brings and yeah, that’s the question.I think the way I positioned qualitative is that I like telling the stories that get forgotten. And that to me is what qualitative can bring forth. That’s the nuance it’s the living in the gray.I think these are the things that qualitative can actually really help highlight. Yes, we can always flatten that. There’s no doubt about it, but I think one of the beauties of qualitative research is that you get to speak to individuals.And an individual story is an individual story and there’s uniqueness in every single person. And as romanticized as that is, it’s true. Every single person is unique and every single person has a very different story to share.And I think that is the beauty in qualitative research. Because I think Peter was someone you shared who wrote a wonderful piece and apologies. I don’t remember who it was.Qualitative research is about it’s quality over quantity, right? You’re looking at, you’re not looking to do it on mass. You’re looking for a few select group of people.And that’s the beauty of it. We’re not trying to get hundreds of thousands of people. You’re trying to get those special stories in order to illustrate something unique and special and nuanced.And I think that’s what a lot of people forget when they’re looking at qual versus quant.I love how you described it as the stories that would be forgotten. Is that what you said? Is that your own expression?I quite like it.Yeah. I’ve just, I’ve actually been playing around with how I start selling myself a little bit and that’s what I’ve landed on is I tell stories that get forgotten.One of my favorite, cause I’ve had this pet peeve about quantitative, I guess basically it’s that quantitative is the lingua franca of business and qualitative ends up, people are illiterate in qualitative. There’s a qualitative illiteracy that leads people to believe that qualitative is a degraded form of quantitative. You know, we end up looking, we end up trying to make qualitative into quantitative.And one of my favorite, and I’ve told this story before, is that there’s a quote that goes around and it says that, in defense of quantitative, over qualitative, that the plural of anecdote is not data. And that’s what somebody would say to justify the superiority of quantitative. Do you know Snopes.com? Snopes did a fact check on it and they found the source. And it was a Stanford actually professor who actually said the exact opposite, but it got warped in our culture into what it was not meant to be.And the original was, of course, the plural of anecdote is data. What else could it be? And I always thought that was so sweet. And my hackles always go up when we call things anecdotal. The dismissiveness with which these descriptions of lived experience get treated. It’s always very frustrating.Yeah. I just actually wrote a LinkedIn post cause I’d read a great article in the New York Times this weekend. I think it was in the magazine about Tilly Norwood, the AI actress.And it was, they had sent their celebrity journalist, the person who does profiles to profile Tilly Norwood. And it was, she paints this hilarious picture of how the creator of Tilly sat next to her. And then the publicist sat on the other side at Groucho club in London.And they all ordered lunch and then the laptop sat opposite them with no lunch because a computer doesn’t eat lunch. And so it was about how there’s this AI actress, Tilly Norwood and how she is a decent enough actress, I guess.And everyone’s up in arms about AI actors. And I remember my post was basically essentially like, how can AI convey human emotion when it has no lived experience? Like it just, it’s a Xerox copy, right?Like you are living an experience that it has copied off, but it has no emotion. It has no empathy. Like how is it going to convey anything when it has no ability to feel itself?The humans are able to convey things because even if you have not had that lived experience, we have empathy enough to know that you can feel something or you can live it in some other way. Right. So it was an interesting article.Yeah. It’s quite amazing. I don’t know.What’s your experience with AI? Not that we need to get into some AI conversation about it, but what’s your interaction been with it? How do you feel? Do you incorporate it into your work?Very limitedly. I think it’s, I feel it’s very boring to me, to be honest. I think it’s great for transcripts and things.But apart from that, I don’t know. I just, I don’t want something else doing my thinking for me. I don’t really want, yeah, I just don’t want it. Like I just don’t, yeah, I don’t want it.Yes. Yeah. It’s a strange time. And certainly we, I feel like the cultural conversation around it is getting more and more interesting and more and more polarized and intense. It feels like a whole, generationally it feels like unbelievable really what’s happening.Yeah. And so I worked with Annie and Adam on the Rift. And it was fascinating to listen to young people talk about AI because they are vehemently opposed to it.Or these people we spoke to were vehemently opposed to it because they really felt like it was, they were being dumbed down and they just did not want it. They were, they just said, no, why would we want this all for ourselves? Like, we don’t want something that’s going to, we already have everything around us that we feel is dumbing us down.Like now something else that’s going to make our lives this much, it was interesting to hear them talk about that. That’s a dumbing down of our generation.So interesting. So there’s like an awareness that these things have been dumbing them down, that they’re, that’s happening. It’s something that’s being done to them.Yeah, absolutely.Can you share a little bit more about what the Rift is for those who don’t know?Yeah. So the Rift, so there’s a two-part pro bono piece of work that Starling Strategy have done. The first was about the Rift in genders, which was fueled by the algorithmic diversification between boys and girls.So boys are being fed manosphere content. I think it was Dublin University that did a study that showed they created some puppet accounts and within the first, I believe, 20 minutes, those fake puppet boy accounts were fed manosphere account content. And girls are fed get ready with me, makeup content, trad wife type content.So the algorithms are very much feeding boys and girls very different things from the get-go. And what that is causing is a Rift between boys and girls. And of course, other cultural and societal forces as well, and how that is deepening the Rift and as what people in the industry, marketers, brand strategists, et cetera, can do to help heal this Rift and how it is our responsibility to try to bring young people together.Because at the end of the day, we need each other as a species to survive. But also just as humanity, we need each other to survive. So that was part one.Part two is about the future and how young people feel about the fact that social contracts have been broken down and whether or not, how they’re feeling about the future. And I believe the term that they had coined is the future of futurelessness, because the sentiment is that there’s a feeling that their future has been taken away from them. And so how are they coping with this and what are their sentiments around it?Yeah, the futurelessness. My conversation with them was pretty amazing. That work is really quite beautiful. We’re coming to the near the end of time. I’m curious, what are you most looking forward to in your own work and yeah, in general?Yeah, I think just continuing to doing what I’m doing. I feel like I’m at a precipice, which is quite exciting. I’m turning 40 in a couple of weeks.So that’s quite exciting. Someone told me that 40 is always the best time in their lives. Yeah, so just doing what I’m doing and doing more of it, I guess, is what I’m excited for.Nice. Well, I thank you so much for accepting the invitation. Happy birthday in advance.Thank you, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College, and the author of “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.” Most recently, he debated Timotheus Vermeulen and Hilary Lawson live at IAI’s “The Metamodernist Turn,” pressing the same distinction he draws here between his own project and Vermeulen’s. His next book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History, is out from University of Chicago Press in April.This is the third of three interviews. The first is “Myth & Metamodernism.” The second is “Revolution & Happiness.”A heads up to regular listeners & readers. My conversations with Jason are unlike others, in that it I am really punching above my weight. I am really attracted to his thinking around metamodernism and sincerely believe it holds real promise for informing how we move forward. I believe in the diagnosis that it makes, and am inspired by the recommendation it offers to build, with full awareness of the critique. This is pre-interview caveat that, even as I don’t always grasp what is being discussed, I am tuned in. I ask that you join me in stretching towards what Jason is showing us.Where the term ‘metamodernism’ comes fromI keep fixating on metamodernism. I don’t have a structure for this conversation — full confession. But maybe we start with you giving us a map. What is it you’re doing with the term, and where does it sit relative to everyone else using it?Meta just means the same thing as post, if we’re precise about etymology — beyond. Though it also has a secondary sense post lacks: an over-and-above. People have been gluing “meta” onto isms since the seventies, but in a meaningful way the term metamodernism emerges in two places.First there’s the cultural studies version — Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s work on structures of feeling, a shift in the zeitgeist, an oscillation between modernist and postmodernist projects. I think that stuff is great. It’s not what I do. I’m not interested in analyzing the current paradigm so much as trying to trigger a paradigm shift — not sorting art into modern, postmodern, metamodern.I actually get my use of the term from a different lineage: the Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji. He describes the metamodern artist as someone who deploys, positions, fractures, and reforms both the modern and the postmodern. He’s an artist himself, owning that term for his own project. That’s closer to my version.When I wrote what became Metamodernism and the Future of Theory, it was originally titled Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory After Postmodernism. People wanted me not just to critique postmodernism but to name a movement — and the alternative on the table was “post-postmodernism,” which makes you want to throw up. That’s when I remembered Okediji.Parallel to that, there’s a Scandinavian duo — a sociologist and a political theorist writing under the name Hanzi Freinacht — who wrote The Listening Society. Less interested in characterizing or sorting art than in producing political change under the same term. I like some of their project and not other parts — there’s a developmentalism in it you have to be careful with.So when I started using “metamodern,” I found myself in company with other people also trying to work past postmodernism, in art or philosophy or elsewhere. I love my fellow metamodernistas, but to be clear, mine isn’t an oscillationist account. If I have one criticism of Vermeulen — who seems like a cool dude — it’s that oscillation is hard to falsify and conceptually weak. What’s valuable in that cultural-studies work is characterizing new patterns in cultural production and a change in tone. That’s just not what I’m doing.The postmodernism I’m reacting to was forged as a specific academic model — often as a polemical other, a bricolage of French, American, and German theorists whose inconsistencies got smoothed over into an idea of what humanities scholarship should look like. That model was good at chipping away received wisdom, but it was delivering diminishing returns. For those of us trying to move intellectual life forward, it had stopped helping. It was mostly kneecapping us.I want to be clear my reaction isn’t someone externally mocking postmodernism. I marinated in it. I went to Derrida’s lectures. I studied under Rorty at Stanford when he was emeritus. I read the work, did the graduate seminars on Heidegger and French social thought. That’s the older generation of theory — Derrida was Elvis-generation, there’s a reason he rocked a pompadour his whole life. It’s time to figure out what was good, consolidate the gains, and shed what’s no longer working.I’ve been thinking about people who are part of something and then step outside it — Paul Kingsnorth, the eco-activist turned religious convert; Chuck Marohn, the traffic engineer who renounced his own field’s methodology and started Strong Towns. Do you identify with that as a transition you made? What was it like?Yeah, I identify with that. I first encountered postmodernism — I can be specific — on a drive from Ohio to college in Massachusetts. My parents, both philosophers, had a set of “great ideas” books on tape, and one unit near the end was on postmodern philosophers: Derrida, maybe Lyotard. It seemed exciting and dangerous. I was a punk rocker and a goth — it read as rebellion against the status quo, politically emancipatory. I marinated in it from undergrad through grad school.What turned me away was that it wasn’t a good set of tools. It was leading toward conclusions that made us less informed, less active — the payoff wasn’t there. We started by questioning authority, ended by questioning truth, and authority was still standing when we were done. I had a sense we were learning bad translations from the French as though they described reality — like the medievals who, when they wanted to know how many teeth a horse had, looked it up in Aristotle instead of counting. When people had a question about language, instead of asking what linguists were currently saying, they’d cite Derrida.That’s not to say Derrida had nothing to offer — but the anti-canon movement had just installed a new canon of critical thinkers in place of the old one. I’ve always been someone who naively asks: how did we get here, why do we think this? Over time I became disaffected, while still holding onto what was genuinely useful. And my teachers were part of that movement — this was partly just growing up, recognizing where your teachers and ancestors made mistakes even as you recognize your debt to them.What frustrated me most was hearing peers act as if there’s no “after” certain thinkers — as if philosophy stopped with Heidegger. And practically: when I started my own scholarship, I had real questions — about knowledge, value, translation. I had a stack of nineteenth-century Japanese sources and needed to figure out which to use for my thesis. Being told translation is impossible, in an environment where I was producing a translation, was the opposite of helpful. Or on value — there was a confusion between being neutral and being critical. You could call out racism, which matters, but you couldn’t stand up for a better political order without “violating” cultural relativism. That paradox bothered me more and more. We needed emancipatory theories, not just critical ones, and they were missing.Absolute disruption[This section is dense — Storm is thinking through Hegel out loud. Here’s the short version of where it’s headed: some thinkers argue language traps us so completely that translation and stable meaning are impossible. Storm disagrees. His answer is that language shapes how we see the world, but doesn’t cut us off from it — we just need a world stable enough that people can roughly agree on what they’re pointing at. Everything below is him building the case for that, using Hegel as the springboard.]The titleTell me about the title Absolute Disruption. Where did it come from?From two places. First, a line from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit I used to have memorized — something like: spirit obtains its truth only in its absolute disruption, it finds itself. Hegel was working on the problem of skepticism, of essentializing opposites — he describes skepticism elsewhere as waiting around to hurl anything into the abyss. You can see that in the postmodern moment: deconstruction, anti-essentialism, all different forms of negation. Hegel, as the master thinker of the dialectic, seemed like a clue to the other side of it.The spoiler: his dialectic isn’t thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It’s abstraction, negation, and negation of the negation — that last move is the fulcrum. Absolute Disruption was a signal toward that moment: we need to negate the negation. It was also a gesture at the idea that catastrophe creates the opportunity for new configurations of knowledge. I didn’t have complexity theory in hand yet, but one of its insights is the phase transition — water tips over into boiling, a seed crystal spreads through and the whole thing freezes. Those transitions come at moments of instability. I felt our intellectual world was at a crisis point — a moment of both danger and opportunity. I’m not an accelerationist who wants more crises. But crisis can open a phase transition.Negating the negationWalk me through negating the negation. What’s that move?In his Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel describes three sides of thought. First, you apprehend the specific differences of existing objects and produce a limited abstraction — a generalization, lifting away from the concrete. That process of abstracting hits limits, which challenge the project itself and lead to negating the initial abstraction — a critical stage where things encounter their opposites. Then there’s a third stage: the negation of the negation, the speculative stage, where you get a reconciliation of opposites — what he calls determinate negation, grasping something by determining its boundaries.Here’s where I depart from standard Hegel scholarship: I read this as a response to Kant’s reading of Hume. Hume’s skeptical challenge to causation says, roughly, that because causation can’t be demonstrated, we can’t really know anything about the world. Kant’s negation of the negation is his transcendental categories. He doesn’t deny Hume’s conclusion — he makes it the precondition of his own philosophy: any finite being necessarily experiences the world already structured by space, time, and causation. The cost is that we can never know the thing-in-itself, the Ding an sich. But that’s a limit on confidence, not a collapse into “we can’t know anything.”So the challenge I set for myself in Absolute Disruption was to take postmodernism’s skeptical positions in their clearest form. Take the “prison house of language” — Heidegger’s hermeneutics of being, or Fredric Jameson’s clean statement of it: we think in language, therefore we’re trapped in it. Taken to Saussure’s maximal extension, language only relates to other language, never to the world — so translation is impossible, meaning never stabilizes. Derrida can be read as a reductio of this: there is no outside-the-text.You could respond by ignoring it — a broadly modernist move that just insists the world is the world, and philosophers like Putnam or Kripke tried to make that respectable by arguing language designates natural kinds. That’s a weak view — it generates real paradoxes (look up the Superman/Clark Kent paradox if you want).Hylosemiotics: the payoffWhat I try to do instead is think seriously about how language could have evolved in the first place. This becomes the longest chapter in the book, on hylosemiotics. The key insight worth granting is that language and perception are connected — linguistic categories do shape perception. But you can show, first, that the skeptical view is self-contradictory: Derrida argues translation is impossible by translating a line of Joyce and telling us why it can’t be done in French — and we read that argument in English. And second, if you don’t presume language and the world are separate — if language always occurs in a world — you don’t need robust natural-kind categories. All you need is a world stable enough to have “clumps” we can roughly coordinate reference to: a building, a mountain, a tree. Language coordinates reference sloppily, not with rigid designation. My spouse and I agree on focal blue but disagree at the edges — languages carve up the color spectrum differently, speakers of the same language disagree on whether a napkin is a piece of clothing, or whether a hot dog is a sandwich.So we’re always interpreting the world. Linguistic categories shape that interpretation without fully constraining it — we never fully encounter the world as it is, but we’re not imprisoned in language either. There’s a naturalized semiotics behind this too: evidence from linguistics and evolutionary biology, animal and plant perception and communication — our tongues and hands may be wired together in the brain because our primate ancestors gestured as communication. Even if that particular biological detail turns out wrong, there are other ways to ground how communication and perception evolved together.That whole edifice — how translation is possible, how meaning shapes thought without imprisoning it — is my negation of the negation, in a way I think Hegel would recognize. Though to be clear, he’s not a meat grinder you feed a problem into and get an answer out. He’s a clue to where to look. The proof is in the payoff: I can give an account of how language evolved, locate humans within it, do sign perception properly. I’ve had responses from animal-communication researchers, and I have a piece under review now building toward more-than-human ethnography — looking at multi-species environments through this lens.The term hylosemiotics — I coined it with my brother, who does animal studies. Hyle, matter or forest in Greek, plus semiotics, signs. It names the error at the root of the skeptical philosophy of language: a hyper-specialization that bifurcated language from the world in the first place. You can’t hear if your eardrums aren’t vibrating, can’t read without light bouncing off something. We exist in a world. That doesn’t settle which cosmology is true — Nahuatl cosmology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, scientific materialism could all be candidates. My theory just needs a world with language speakers in it, stable enough that trees don’t randomly turn into sheep.The payoff has to stand on its own, separate from the ladder that got me there. That’s what I mean by a no-b******t philosophy that doesn’t enshrine canonical figures. I love the anti-canonicity of early postmodernism — we don’t need an enshrined canon. We take inspiration from people without owing them justification. Hegel is about discovery for me, not justification — he was wrong about Asia, Eurocentric, thought the Prussian state was cooler than it was, wrong about the number of planets. He was a dude in a particular period. Great to be inspired by, not an authority to cite as proof.Critique isn’t the end pointI took a literary criticism class in the nineties and remember the real feeling of power in applying deconstructive tactics. What drew me to your work is that it escapes that trap and is constructive. Last time we talked about revolutionary happiness, human flourishing — you’re clear you don’t want to just criticize, you want to build. Is that right?It’s a two-step process. We criticize first — we just don’t end there. Some people ask if I’m anti-critique because I spend so much time criticizing the criticizers. I’m against automatic criticism. I want critique to be more fine-grained. It’s important to call out injustice and conceptual hubris — critique is valuable. The problem is when it’s the only move, when it never reflects on its own limits. That’s the swamp postmodernism led us into.Even in the metamodernism book, I open a section with what I call a deconstructive dojo — teaching people to do the critical moves first, but as a starting point, not an endpoint. I think this maps onto how the culture wars get handled: a lot of my fellow lefties terminate in critique; another camp wants to shut down all critique, insisting you can’t criticize the country or its politics. Both are dead ends. We have to be able to say: the founding fathers built terrible institutions, failed on slavery, were sexist — we grant that, we don’t deny it — and also held up ideals worth recuperating even though they themselves couldn’t live up to them. Holding that tension is part of growing up.That language of holding the tension is what I find attractive, and it feels like something we’ve lost — we’re stuck in binary mode. Is there a metamodern way of constructing, once the critique is done?It’s something I’m calling for more than something I’ve fully identified, though I’ve seen people working toward it. We shouldn’t assume one cookie-cutter solution works across all problems. What I’m advocating is an orientation: critique, identify the problems, critique the critique, then figure out what to hold and what to build. I’ve had encouraging responses from people doing movement work — helping people out of their presumptive categories of left or right, recognizing a movement’s problems without getting defensive, and asking what would make it stronger from there.Hanzi Freinacht identified something real here: the importance of listening. There’s a tendency — especially from people in my position, in the ivory tower — to arrive with solutions and impose them without listening to what people are actually looking for. You can see this in how the consultancy class has misguided left politics in recent cycles. One thing Mamdani seems to have gotten right: he did a real tour of listening to different groups in New York, figuring out the actual problems people were encountering rather than telling them what their problems should be. That does two things — it identifies where coalitions and resources should go, and it lets people feel heard, in a society where a lot of people feel ignored and out of control of their own communities.AI: neither boomer nor doomerI sent you some links on AI. It’s happening to all of us whether we like it or not, and maybe it’s a canvas for talking about what it means to be metamodern. How do you think about AI through your work?What AI actually isWe have to recognize AI is both profoundly transformative and overhyped. What we’re calling AI — generative pre-trained transformers, large language models — I don’t want to knock the amount of work and potential in them, but they are not general intelligences. There’s confusion in public discourse because the people pushing AI keep promising a series of ever-greater intelligence leaps. That’s misleading, partly because scaling produces diminishing returns. There was a huge leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3.5, but they ate an internet’s worth of data to get there, and there isn’t another internet’s worth waiting. What these models do is transform language into a mathematical vector space — interesting for producing the geometry of certain concepts, but not an innovator.A lot of the discourse presumes a discredited model of intelligence as a linear scale, like IQ. Sociologists of intelligence, even ones who believe in the IQ scale, note that the people who make the biggest innovations don’t have the highest IQs. Intelligence is richly contextual. And there’s a background assumption from Turing that intelligence reduces to fooling a human linguistically — these models are great linguistic agents, great chatbots, a real technological leap, but that’s not general intelligence. I went back and reread a piece by the French AI researcher François Chollet, “The Implausibility of Intelligence Explosion,” which makes the same point.AI has real uses — it’s good at pattern recognition. I saw a phrase somewhere I liked: the best use of AI is going to be boring. Automating the boring stuff — sorting supply chains, finding patterns in thick data sets. It’s not going to produce the transformations people expect. It’s going to reorganize labor, and it’s already eroding trust and notions of authorship in ways that are hard on artists. It has a real environmental cost, and it doesn’t have a profitability model — if these companies start running ads, no one will want to use it, and it’ll enshittify faster than other platforms. It doesn’t scale the way people think — you need exponentially more data for incremental gains, which is why Elon Musk’s self-driving timeline keeps slipping.Where it’s genuinely useful is streamlining existing processes — I use it to write boring bureaucratic reports, turning a meeting transcript into something we can put in a report, where the prose quality doesn’t matter.The ironies of automationThere’s a classic piece from the eighties, Lisanne Bainbridge’s “Ironies of Automation” — foundational in industrial design and catastrophe theory. The paradox: automation is good at routine tasks, but humans are still needed when things go wrong. As automation takes over the routine, the human’s skill at that routine atrophies — so when the automation fails, it fails suddenly, in ways the human is no longer prepared for. That’s the problem with a certain kind of self-driving car — my dad loves his Tesla’s self-driving feature, but it presumes he stays hyper-alert for edge cases. I’d rather automation handle it the other way: I do the routine task, and automation intervenes when I make a mistake I don’t catch — the dog running into the road.The same is true teaching undergrads, and I wish more of my colleagues internalized it. Large language models are great at summarizing readings and generating plausible prose — the boring, low-stakes stuff. What’s left to humans is knowing when an argument is wrong, spotting a bad frame, making a judgment call. Those are exactly the skills that atrophy when students lean on the models — and exactly what they’ll need when they hit real problems. When we automate, we atrophy. The more the machine thinks for you, the less you can think when it fails.That echoes the phase transition you described earlier — things happening slowly, then all at once. It sounds like the same progression, applied to our relationship with automation: we keep surrendering activities, assuming we could rescue things if they failed, and then things collapse in front of our atrophied ability to respond.Exactly. Which is why, in higher ed, students need training in the low-stakes basics — precisely because that training prepares them for the high-stakes ruptures. If they have that foundation, they can use AI responsibly later, as long as they know that overusing it accelerates the atrophy. I’m not anti-AI, and I’m not a booster either. There are genuinely new things opening up because of it. But anyone who thinks large language models will replace basic education hasn’t internalized Bainbridge’s point. Even responsible adult users have to guard against their own skills eroding.The environmental impact is a separate, serious conversation. When I raise it with people in the field, they say they know, and the plan is to scale toward more efficient models — I have doubts about whether that’s actually happening, versus functioning as cover for an enormous amount of electrical and water-cooling resources going into things being wedged into places they don’t belong. My college auto-installed Copilot on every student’s Microsoft Word. I don’t want that — we want to be building some barriers, not removing them. People will keep using it. That’s fine, as long as they’ve trained themselves to spot when it’s about to go wrong.Getting past boomer vs. doomerSo — is there a way out of the binary? It feels like we’re stuck between accelerationists and doomers, boomers and doomers, and metamodernism might be an escape hatch, a framework for moving past that. True, or am I overreaching?I’d hope so. The concrete stakes are worth thinking through, but as an abstract program: integrate the positive potential the boomers have identified without denying the doomers’ critiques, and figure out an equitable system on the other side. That’s not going to be every AI platform — it’ll have to be a particular, environmentally responsible AI that absorbs some of those critiques. What that looks like around authorship, I don’t know yet — that’s one I’m not sure how we navigate.On the prose side: AI produces derivative prose that all sounds like the same voice, and unfortunately a lot of people seem to want exactly that — maybe it helps people who aren’t confident public speakers or writers find a voice. There’s a real upside there. But I’m sick of the “it’s not X, it’s Y” formulation showing up everywhere, and the AI-generated images that almost look like real people but the lighting’s a hair too uniform. There are real trust questions, and I think we’re going to want watermarking, at least for generated images. There’s concrete policy an AI platform could adopt that would address the doomers’ real concerns and unlock what the boomers have rightly identified — without indulging the utopian fantasy that scaling alone produces superintelligence that solves everything. That fantasy rests on treating Moore’s Law for processor power as if it applied directly to the human mind, which runs against a huge amount of evidence.Large language models are also good at handling complexity in another sense — recognizing that vocabulary is context-rich, that things mean different things in different contexts, and at producing iterative results. Other forms of AI are good at this too — my father did research in evolutionary algorithms, where you launch variations through a design space, keep the ones that succeed, and iterate. That’s brought us real gains — protein folding, pattern identification in shipping — and will keep bringing them. It’s not going to mean nobody works. We’ll lose some jobs, not nearly as many as people fear, but the structure of the jobs we keep will change.What’s the book coming out?With University of Chicago Press, who’s published my last three: The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History. “Genealogy” is a weird term — it’s our word for critical history in parts of the academy, and in ordinary language it means descent or ancestry. The book is a critical history of critical history: why we love criticizing the past, what the blind spots are in how we’ve done it. It blends intellectual history with philosophical analysis, offers fresh readings of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault against the familiar narratives about their relationship to critique, and charts the history of history departments and philosophy as academic disciplines — including genealogy’s own uncomfortable entanglement with eugenics and power. A method built to criticize authority carrying its own unexamined legacies.It’s also a metamodern book. It closes with a call for a new metamodern historiography — new ways of doing history that don’t deny the troubled parts of the past but also look for the occluded histories, the buried germs of positive projects worth recovering and carrying forward. An alternative historiography, encouraging new methods for writing history. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Ben Jenkins is co-founder and CEO of Okay Human, a New York-based consumer insights company formerly known as Sympler, which he co-founded in 2018 and rebranded in 2025. The firm uses chat-based, AI-assisted qualitative research to help brands including NBC, Foot Locker, and Mars understand consumer emotion and behavior. Jenkins has spent 25 years studying consumers for brands such as Levi’s, Johnnie Walker, and Axe. He began as a youth ethnographer at McCann-Erickson, then held senior strategy roles at BBH, Ogilvy, and Droga5. He writes the Substack Becoming Human.So I think you know this, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And I think what I loved about it is that it’s the best question I’ve found for getting into a conversation out of nowhere. But it’s a big question, so I over-explain it the way I do now.So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in absolute control.Now that I’m in America, the simplest answer is that I come from the UK. Before, I would have started with, “I come from the countryside” — a little like D’Artagnan from the Musketeers books. I left the countryside and went to the big city.But now I think about it in terms of creativity a lot more. I’ve been doing a lot of work recently, which I’m sure we’ll come to, about what happened to creativity, and I realize it comes back to me spontaneously from people I’m interviewing: I think I came from a more creative culture.I noticed that a little bit when I got to the US. It’s a much bigger country, worrying about much larger sums of money — each company I’ve worked for here thinks in terms of billions or hundreds of billions, whereas the UK deals in much smaller quantities.So we got to be less scared of making mistakes. Now I answer that question in terms of time and place, because I started my career exactly at the turn of the century, when I still had the fortune of working with people who’d come from an analogue time — who’d grown up making things very creatively, using instinct and intuition, understanding physical beauty.I come from a time when we were allowed to use our right brains and feel our way to the creative answer. And I come from a place that, even today — I’ve been in the US 18 years now — I look at the agency culture in the UK and it’s still creative. I’m just not in that world anymore.I’m adjacent now. But I was interviewing some people at VCCP a couple of weeks ago — the head office is in London, but these are all Americans — and they said the last time they had a really big flow experience, got themselves into a flow state for creativity, was when they worked in London.This person has been in the US for five years now. The reason I’m doing what I’m doing now — focusing on how to enable creativity and resurrect people’s creative states — is because I believe lots of people are more creative than they let on. And I think I come from a place and a time that afforded me the luxury of learning some of that stuff, before I either left the location or the time. But we left that era — everyone’s struggling a little now, in this more tech-subjugated one.And one more. What has it been like being in the States? 18 years? What’s it like being from the UK in the States? What’s that experience like?So I often get that question. It’s normally social situations. It’s really hard to answer it in a non-glib way….. I think it relates to what I’ve just been saying — when you’re in your own country and your own tribe, you don’t see yourself through an identity. I’m not of the generation living now that talks about identity so much.The first time I’ve ever talked about my identity was as a foreigner in another country. So the first answer to that question is, I feel foreign, and I like that. Being foreign gives you an extra bit of credit.And I don’t just mean British — people give us extra IQ points, which I don’t think we deserve. That’s not the part I mean. It’s being any form of foreigner.It’s curiosity — you get into a play state more easily. Being the funny person with an accent in the room immediately gives you that sense of energy.It gives the dynamic a sense of energy, because people go, oh, this is interesting. When people ask me good questions about what it’s like being here, I think that’s what they’re after — something different.So you’re a curiosity, especially in the more liberal side of things.Yeah, it’s fun to be a foreigner in this country, for me anyway. And on the previous point, I do think it gives me a bit of access to ask more basic questions — which is what we should all be doing anyway.In your own country, you don’t ask big core questions about how things work, because you’re supposed to know — and you believe you already do. I remember when I first got here, the creatives in the agency I was working at were being surly, just like creatives always do.And I was still quite junior then, and I was frightened of surly creatives in London. You’re briefing them and they’re pan or miserable — even just bored, miserable, disenchanted. And here I was like, they were my age as well.Here I was like, but because it was all in a funny accent to me — we have monopoly money, everyone’s walking around with funny accents, the cultures are different — it just felt like play. It felt like I was on TV, felt like pretend.So I called them out for the first time ever. I was like, why are you looking so miserable? We’ve got some really interesting stuff in.And they apologized — they were like, sorry, that’s just the way our faces are. I was like, well, where I come from, if someone’s giving you information in an excited way, the custom is to mirror them.That wasn’t true — where I come from, they were just as miserable. But I allowed myself a cultural difference, and I got them to stop being like creatives often are — which ruins briefings.What was the attraction to come over here in the first place?I think that was part of it — to get that energy for myself, for exploration, and to throw away a lot of my belief systems and any ruts I was finding myself stuck in. You can get stuck in rituals and habits you don’t really need or want to be in, but you don’t leave them because it’s easier to stay. So I wanted a deliberate push out of my comfort zone.When I left uni, or during uni, I went to live in France for a bit. I wanted to do everything I was doing in life in a more difficult place, in another language, in another culture — to get the free boost of difficulty. You don’t bring difficulty on yourself unless it’s forced on you.So living in another culture, especially when it’s another language, forces you to grow further and faster. So America — same language, very different culture. Part of it was a growth tool.Part of it was an adventure, and part of it was to feel different enough that I could ask very basic questions we’d never think to ask. I just read this really interesting essay about Nietzsche, where I learned for the first time that nihilism — the word we associate with him — isn’t about giving up and being a Kurt Cobain waster, who cares.It’s not depression. Nihilism in Nietzsche’s terms was actually a necessary step that you need to take where you burn it all down and burn down all your assumptions and all the rules and rituals that you followed in order to get to a more truthful place. It was part of a philosophy that the reason why it’s always been taken as a negative is because the orthodoxies, whether it’s the church or whatever, didn’t want you to burn it all down.They wanted to just stand by your beds and stick with the program because it helped them. But if you want to stick to what your, get to what your truth is, there is a certain amount of creative, we call it in advertising, we call it creative destruction. There is a need to destroy before you rebuild.And so I’m going through another one of those at the moment. I think that’s what I did 18 years ago by coming here. I also had this, now it seems quite, I wouldn’t call it nihilistic, but maybe, I’ve forgotten the word.Now it seems silly, but I knew that advertising wasn’t as cool in America as it was in the UK. So you could be lulled into this false sense of your own importance in England. Like a lot of people who don’t work in the business know the names of ad agencies and they’ve heard of that, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which is the agency I worked at.They’d heard of that. Oh, they’d ask you, did you work on that campaign that did this? Or did you ever work on this commercial?Like people were still interested and thought advertising was cool. And I knew that there were no such pretenses around that in America. Like it was a grubby business when I was, even grubbier now, it was a grubby business when I arrived.And so I would get out of any form of pomposity and comfort that I’d gained and I’d learned something else. And so a little bit was that, I don’t want to be in an industry where when it falls down, everyone will be like entitled. I want to go into a place where they don’t rate it that much.I’m gonna have to work, sing for my supper.And do you have a recollection of when you were growing up? What did you want to be? What did young Ben want to be when he grew up?Probably everything. Yeah — I wanted to be a pilot, a policeman at one point, which baffles me now. I wasn’t like one of those, Quentin Tarantino always knew he wanted to be a movie maker because he was obsessed with cartoons and comic books.I saw things the way a child sees them — I didn’t know what it was, so I wouldn’t have known. I remember when somebody first told me about anthropology and I didn’t know what it was. In hindsight, I probably always wanted to do something involving psychology, anthropology, or even philosophy. I was a daydreamer.I certainly didn’t believe that I wanted to do anything to do with thinking and philosophy when I was a child. I wanted to drive cars, fly planes, and do the stuff that young boys wanted to do. But when I look back, the things that interested me were thinking about the way things, the way humans work in systems. I would never have been able to articulate that then.It’s always struck me as strange — when I read about celebrities who knew what they wanted from a young age, I think, how would you even know? It took me a long time to understand where everyone stood, where all the things were. But if I think about it, from a very young age, I was a daydreamer.I would go very laterally on topics and think right off the scale, a bit, maybe like my conversations go. I would meander into new thoughts.Yeah. And so catch us up. Where are you now? And what are you working on?So I’m now co-founder of Okay Human, which broadly speaking is in your world of ethnography. The reason there’s some other things that I’m doing with it, but the reason we founded it in the first place a few years ago was because we saw a lack in the way, I hate the word data actually, because it’s been taken by the tech bros. But when I was before the tech bros were the dominant feature in our world, in our lives, researchers were there at the service of big new ideas, especially in my world.They’re in service of creativity and service of new products, new brands, new ideas, new campaigns, new stories. And data was one of the forms of research that you triangulated with the other forms of research. Unfortunately, I noticed that when the tech bro got hold of research, it kicked out my beloved form of research, qualitative and ethnographic.And it wrapped its arms around quant, renamed things, coined the term AB tests, taking it out of randomized controlled experiments or whatever we used to call it, even forgetting what we used to call it. And it stole the rest of research by making, by pointing everything at one or two forms. The AB test became hero because it was easy to do. And they now had the ability to reach more people.So they can just throw AB tests at everyone. And as a result, new people coming into many industries, not just mine, marketing, anything that had tech in it, suddenly believed that this, all of a small part of research was the entirety of it. And that people had found the idea of speaking to a human being anathema, found it ridiculous and highly inefficient to use a tech word.And it felt sad that we were losing those moments of true humanity that for me, those little foibles of humanity and those weird moments, so slightly intuitive, nutty, unhinged moments that you have with a real human being out in the wild were fewer and further between. And if you don’t get those, you don’t get those. The, I used to call it a cheat when I was a brand strategist going off and doing, having a couple of conversations with completely crazy consumers or humans was my way of cheating the creative process.It’s the way of getting like, it wasn’t going to come to my head unless it came out of someone else’s mouth or life or bedroom or underwear drawer or filthy fridge. That’s where I got my, that’s where I cheated to get my ideas from because I…What are you pointing at by calling it cheating? What do you know?I mean, it’s like, I don’t know. It’s funny, isn’t it? I think like, I’m thinking like a child, which is, I used to think the creatives had this ability to conjure up ideas.And I was like, well, I can’t do that. I need my ideas to be triggered by crazy humans. And so I would, to be able to earn my seat at the creative table in an agency, I needed to show up with something unhinged and it should find that I’d have to go and get consumers into a state of unhingedness.And there, by going, I’ve just found this thing in your underwear drawer. Talk to me about that. And they’d be like, oh my God, funny story behind that is.And then all of a sudden you open up the flow of where humans really reside. They reside in the lies and in the things that they hide and in the emotional twitches that you spot when you’re talking to them. And that’s the stuff around which you build really big new ideas, companies, brands, creative design, whatever.And so I was like, we’ve stopped doing that. So Okay Human was born to go.You’re not going to be able to do it as most people, most clients no longer want to spend as much time and money on classic qual, unfortunately. But if we can get in a short amount of time to those crazy moments with a human, the tears, the laughs, the performances, the dressing up and cosplaying different roles, the projections, we can get to that in a much shorter period of time. Will people still buy it?Will brands and agencies still put it back onto their process, into their processes? And they did. And so that we’ve been doing that for eight years.What I’ve realized recently is that what I’ve, my condition of speaking to people, I don’t want to talk to survey takers because survey takers is the world I didn’t want to be in. That’s quant. But the world that I’ve had to force myself into, it looks a bit like surveys.And we use digital platforms to talk to people. We talk to them inside chat messaging where we think they’re having much more authentic, vulnerable, real conversations with their best friends. But we never want to put them into the dynamic of, it feels like they’re just filling out a survey.So we don’t do quant in that environment. We have very unstructured, crazy, projective, creative, lateral conversations, audio visual. But I’m like, even then, I don’t want to stop there.And the environment makes them more relaxed. It makes them more themselves. Half the time they’re not wearing clothes, which we love because it makes them both physically and emotionally naked, which is the best state for us to be talking to people in.But I still want to move their state. I want to move them to that moment when they’re walking out of the focus group room, when they’re fully relaxed. They’re like, oh, they asked you a question.And then you turn it back around and ask a question back to them. And then they give you the best answer is in the time that they’re walking out of the room. So I want them to be in that stage.Or when suddenly a thought has occurred to them that they re-find their emotional state that they’re in when they’re telling that story. So we change their state. So our whole mission has been, don’t talk to survey takers.So how do you not talk to survey takers? You turn them into crazy people or fun people or emotional people or whatever it is you need to get them into that state. And then you interview those people.And those are the humans that make their buying decisions and appreciate good art and design to those people. And why talk to the survey taking types? Because that’s not how we go through life.Yeah. Well, so can you tell us say more about how your product works, how you smuggled in the qualitative, the beauty. I mean, this is what I remember about my conversation with you before that the appreciation for what qualitative brings, but delivering it in these digital platforms in a way, which I don’t know that everybody really does very well.So I guess one, my first part of my question is how does what you offer work and what is that thing that you try to preserve? And because we’re in such a strange period when it comes to qualitative and quant. And I have even a tertiary question here.I don’t know if you remember when Claude launched the largest qualitative research project ever with 80,000 interviews. And it was all so this idea of what qualitative is and blah, blah, blah. But my question is really about how does what you have work and what is it about qualitative that’s magical and how do you preserve it in this context?Yeah, I’m going to start with how you preserve it, because that’s where it started from. If you were inventing qualitative research today, you would not probably go to the focus group vicinity with their bright strip lights and their two way mirrors and their bunch of strangers sitting judging you and a person with a clipboard. You wouldn’t start there.You would start, it more in the same way that the psychiatrist’s chair has been designed to lie you back and get you into a state of there’s a great Instagram project done by one of Freud’s grandchildren. I think it’s about fashion and psychology and it lies down celebrities. They’re fully lying down.And when you’re fully lying down, it does actually create, you are in a slightly different state. And so the thing I wanted to preserve was the best moments I’ve ever seen of qual. And to be honest, it was mostly either in a beautifully designed and moderated qual group if it’s sometimes or out in the field immersions.It was when you’re like, you catch them in their real life because you’re with them for a while and you observe them. And then suddenly they do something. You’re like, what just happened there?They’re like, do you know what? I was completely doing that on autopilot. I didn’t realize I was doing it.And so we don’t have the luxury of being able to study people for months on end and immerse. But how about if we can move them into those moments momentarily? And storytelling is always one of my favorites.You get someone to go on a long rambling story and eventually they forget where they are and they’re there again. And so that’s a really simple one. But the other one is to play with them.And so I believe that to answer one of your other questions very quickly as I go into this, I actually believe that qualitative research and strategy, which I root very closely together, are the first step of creativity. Creativity begins there, not when you brief the creative. And if you’re thinking about qual as a creative pursuit rather than a analytical scientific pursuit, you’re going to come at it in a very different way.So if you do, then you want to animate people from day one, from the first moment. So the dynamic between a participant and a practitioner in qual research is one a little bit more like sparring, more like the creative duo. And so the more you get them into a state of play, of heightened emotion, the more they’ll reveal to you, the more that you’ll get triggered.And you want to essentially be in a flow state. Now, because of the way that we do things, so coming on to our tool, I hate calling it a tool because again, that puts it back into left brain world. There is still some mechanics.The first is, for me, the lying down psychiatrist chair is the environment. We’ll talk to people inside, chat messaging, places where they’re already talking to their nearest and dearest. We’re not forcing them into either a physical room or a digital room that isn’t theirs.They’ve been here every hour of every day for the last 10 years. It’s Facebook Messenger. It’s the DMs in Instagram where they talk to a lot of their friends.It’s WhatsApp. And in this environment, it’s fully your environment. Conversation you’ve just had with your grandma about how to bake a cake or how much you love your granddaughter, whatever is in one is there.So there’s no code switching if you’re talking about love and emotion and something that’s close to your heart. The conversation can flow immediately with us. We’ll recruit people also in those environments.So we’re not getting them out of their world into our world. We’re coming into their world. So it’s a bit more ethnographic in that way.We’ll join them on their terms in their space. So I see that as a little bit like they’re lying down. I love the fact, one of our competitors talked about apologetically to a conference I went to going, it’s OK, clients.Our respondents will wear clothes when they’re talking to us. You won’t have any naked respondents. I’m like, no, no, ours won’t.We hope that they don’t. Don’t put your shirt on, because as soon as you do that, you’re changing your state into professionalism again. Stay naked when you’re talking to us.Stay horizontal when you’re talking. We often get people engaged in pillow talk with us. And we want them to stay there, because that’s where truth leaks out.And so then you’ll know this as an ethnographer. Then we’ll throw some of the old favorites, some new ones, projective techniques at them in that state. And I talk about it in the same way that when you meet a dog, it play bows at you.It grabs. It goes like this. And you know what to do when it does that.Yeah.Play is an invitation to get silly. And we do that in all sorts of different ways. Tell me a joke.Tell me where you lie. Tell me what your therapist would say to your last three questions. Show me your bins right now.Video your bins and tell me what your therapist would say about that. If your best friend was spotting some lies in the last thing you just said, what would they say? What’s the last 10 pictures on your camera say about you.We’re wrongfooting. We’re playing. We’re asking them to storytell. We’re asking to draw and draw a picture of what such and such means and make me a collage.All of the things that are some of which are recognized from classic qual and some are new. Identify the coolest object in your house and tell me what it would say about you, which is a reflection of how cool you think you are. You’re asking your cool object to talk about you. So personification of objects, of brands.We’re doing embodied semiotics. Get a brand to walk into the room right now and tell me as though it’s a catwalk and tell me what it would do and why. And so just really animating the process of walking around one’s emotional space in this environment. They do.It’s not awkward like in a focus group. If you remember back in the day, you go rip up this magazine and make a collage of what it means to be a consumer. And they were like, where do I start here? There is no hesitation.Yeah. I love so much of what you’re saying, of course. And I wanted to isolate two things that you said that I totally align with. And one is the idea that this is a creative exercise and to choose to lean into that, which is something I think I learned or recognized as uniquely. And then the other thing you said, which I don’t hear a lot said, is that research and you said research and strategy are they’re like right next to each other or they’re the same enterprise. You talked about somehow the relationship between research and strategy being much more intimate than maybe is generally discussed. And I wanted to hear you talk about that.It’s funny that it seems new to you. I found it one way or another. The main tool of a strategist in an ad agency or a branding agency was research.That was your physical tool that you walked in the room with. And then how you did it would diverge depending on what sort of brain you had. And so the left brain is often favored the desk research with quantum Intel and MRI and Simmons and all that stuff or the surveys, the quant surveys and the more right brainers would favor qual and meeting consumers.But all of us had to master both and we’d have to triangulate both. I just always felt that the strategists that had the closest relationships with the creatives and the ones that were thinking more creatively were the ones that allied themselves with qual. And because there was more.And I think now I realize that now I fully have embedded that the idea of especially qual is the first line of creativity, then that makes sense, you’re already being creative and you can see through all of these tools and devices and exercises that we’ve been using at OKHuman that they are creative exercise. They’re exercise to energize and animate the creative process to begin with in participants and consumers.But ultimately, what’s animated there continues to animate ideas later on as well. So I think that if you recognize in those businesses that I’m talking about, even a little bit in consultancy, but I think certainly ad agencies and branding agencies and brand consultancies, the output is creative. And if you’re not starting that process early, and I believe that process starts in research, you’re not going to get there.What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?I think there’s two places. One is just every time I look at a consumer, hate calling it because he was every time I look at a human human being a real human, I get this huge jump of joy, these huge emotional kind of like.What’s the way of looking at it?Yeah, if I’m feeling down, I’ll go into because I don’t always do all of the work anymore. So often I’m not often looking through the raw data. But when I do, I feel grateful that humanity is still interesting because we can live in a world where you’re just reading the news and operating on autopilot. But I go in deeply into a piece of research that we’ve done and go through the videos or the verbatims and look at individual consumers being themselves, individual humans being themselves. I’m like it heartens me.It reminds me that humanity is still here, still doing odd things, still being weird and individual. And so one of it is that it’s grounding, especially during covid when everything felt like it was up in the air. We did a study about we actually created a whole new brand and a web platform called How Do You Feel Dot Live.And we literally interviewed people all over the world. We built a map, an interactive map, where I interviewed people and it just felt grounding that people were still they had their own little habits and feelings and thoughts about what was going on. And it was really nice to be connected.There was a moment when we weren’t connected enough with each other and it was unusual voices because they were being mediated by big or small media, traditional or social media. We were hearing them unfettered, unfiltered. And so that’s one of them is just having that direct access to people all over the world and reminding, which reminds me that we’re all still nutters and we’re all still interesting.We’re all still getting on with it. And whenever there’s a big polemic, and I’ll often use it as an excuse if we’ve got a project going on to ask people about it, to see if it’s as crazily divided as the media would have us believe, which they do obviously to sell column inches. And it never is.It’s like people are so much more wise and philosophical and thoughtful and loving. And so that’s one of them. That’s a comfort part of it.And the other one is that I like creativity. I like the idea of building things. So doing the, building the company in the first place, obviously, scratches that entrepreneurial itch to build something.But on every project we are using the building blocks of qual research to, I think the most important building blocks of creativity are qual. And so stimulating, and I keep using this word animating is one of my favorite words at the moment. Nothing comes to being.It’s even at a quantum physics level, isn’t it? Einsteinian level, like everything is just the degree to which things vibrate and move. And so the more you animate something, the more it comes into existence.We’re not just moving matter around. We’re not just taking, that’s why I hate the world of like the way people talk about data today. It’s like data is an object that you put into a process and then you make a thing from it.Whereas with qual, I think the more animation you do to humans and the more vibrations that you can generate, the more you actually make. So I think that creativity in that way is, you’re essentially stimulating things into existence when you animate things. So I’ve got really lofty there, but.Oh, I’m right there. I will meet you there. I don’t know if you’ve encountered, have you ever heard of appreciative inquiry?No, I love it already.I think it came out of the organizational transformational world, this guy, David Cooperider. And I only know just enough about it to be dangerous and to tell this story, but it was that transformation that follows a problem solution mindset ends up just pushing the problem around. And maybe there’s a better way of basically identifying the peak experiences when everything happens beautifully and pushing into the positive. And he says, there’s a line, he says that we live in, and I’m only mentioning it because you’re expressing it, that we live in the world that our questions create. Right. And it’s just this beautiful thing. How does that feel or how does that resonate with you?Absolutely brilliant. There’s a line of inquiry that I can now go after because I went to this talk about quantum physics the other day, and there’s a really fascinating guy. And this is in person in Brooklyn, this British scientist who had the air of a Monty Python comic about him on stage.So he made it so he just talked to, he just kept saying, it’s just so weird. And his animation of also similarly, at a similar moment, I’ve been listening to the book on creativity by John Cleese. So he’s a real Python.And I listened to it instead of reading it because I was wanting to do it while I was doing other things. So I could hear his voice and he narrated it. And it felt like there’s a similarity.The fact that I was told about quantum physics by a Python-esque voice and that it’s weird and that it’s a creative experience and the whole Schrodinger’s cat, it doesn’t exist until you look at it. I love that idea. It’s like, unless you decide to be curious, to inquire, it doesn’t really exist.And Einstein was there in the 20s on this. And we’re still finding that difficult to understand that the whole of the 20th century was about moving matter around and in doing it in a more efficient, faster, cheaper way. And that has infected, and this is my biggest rant, that infected the business of creativity that I was in.But as the tech bros assumed domination on this planet. But the thing that the tech bros were afforded before they got there was all created by creators, by people who understood creativity. And they did it in a slightly different way.Two together are a superpower. We need both. But when you overly worship one doctrine, you have this tendency to negate the other.And I think right now we’ve spent a little bit too long, I’d say 20 years, negating the tools, which are a little bit more woo-woo to some people, of creativity. I love the idea that someone’s named it appreciative inquiry. It doesn’t exist until you ask the question.And then it does.Yeah. How beautiful. I’m curious, because you started out, the conversation and then your work, too, is a real challenge to everything you’re talking about.How would you describe where we are now, the state of things? And I love that you’re advocating and you’re building around the imaginative part of qualitative. I feel like qualitative has its own obstacles for lots of people, just even talking to people face-to-face, having an analytical conversation with somebody is too far for some people.But then to embed it in this really appreciative, imaginative, creative way that you’re doing now, I guess my question is, how are you being met? And what do you say to clients to help them see the value of what you’re doing?Yeah, there’s two ways of looking at that as well, which is on one front, it’s being met well through the brand. So when we spoke before you switched the tape on about rebranding to OKHuman, what our last name was doing was it was clearly situating us in that last era of tech, efficiency, simplicity, sass, that world that was a race to the bottom. And I felt it while I was in it and we needed to get out of it because a brand name does a lot of work for you before and after you’re in the room.While I was in the room, people were like, great, this is fascinating. When you leave the room, when they look back at who you are, they see your name and go, oh, it must be about simplicity and efficiency. Or before they meet you, your name walks into the room before you and sets you up like your pre-act.And the pre-act now with OKHuman is doing a lot of work for us. And the assumptions that people are mostly correctly making is that, oh, you’ve seen this moment in the zeitgeist where it was all about the OK computer, the OK Google. It was about use your agents to do the work for you.And we’re rushing towards the future. And you’re trolling that a little bit. You’re jamming the orthodoxy or that prevailing wind and going, OK, how about OKHuman?How about we just spend a beat? There’s still the OK in there. We know you’re probably going to be harnessing some form of technology. So the first answer to that is that people were like, sigh of relief. Thank you. What are you doing?How can you bring a bit of that back? So there’s definitely a feeling of there’s a hinge point I see in culture where people are going, we’ve been rushing very hard and fast towards AI. This acceleration since November 2022 has freaked people out even more, has spooked them a little bit.So while some of us are still running very fast, others are going, wait, what’s going to happen next? More conversation is happening about what does it mean to be human? Because now we’ve got artificial ones.We’re now asking the questions. I’m very pleased that non-social scientists, non-philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists are asking questions that only those three were asking before. So I’m pleased about that.So I just feel like from a zeitgeist perspective, it fits into that moment, people going, yes. Then there’s a second one, which is born out of the fact that we’ve started to bring some of our methodology to a different case study, which is organisations. I realised that the humans that we should be studying aren’t only the humans on the outside of your company, your buyers, your consumers, but also the ones inside the company, because we’ve forgotten to ask questions of those.So under this working title, Becoming Human, I’ve been writing and proposing ideas around what happened to the creative sparks of the individuals within your company, because I’ve been noticing quite a long time that there’s a lot of dead behind the eyes clients that I meet, especially more junior ones. It’s almost like we’ve had our agency taken away from us and we don’t know what we’re allowed to do or they don’t know what they’re allowed to do. So what about if some of these techniques that we’ve learnt in service of ethnography, in service of qual, that has reanimated conversations inside research, what if some of this could be used inside organisations to reanimate the processes there that have been really prevented by processes, by expectations, by the reduction of money and time from clients, and most importantly, by everything being run through a system, a technological system, which culminated in AI. There’s mandates across a lot of my clients to use this AI in this amount of time.You need a quota of how much you use AI. People have been so pushed into these boxes and funnels that they have no space to use their own intuition and their own human agency. And so my proposal to clients has been, before you fire your last organic human, why don’t you retrain some of the ones that are still there to be as human as they can possibly be?Because I believe they’re working at a small fraction of their capacity. They’re switching off their intuition. They’re frightened to be instinctive and feeling, because they’ve been told that the master is a dogmatic left brain, either human or machine.All the people who’ve been promoted in the last 10, 20 years are the ones that are very left brain and very analytical. And all the crazy right brainers have been pushed to the side. The AI era is going to need these.We’ve heard this a lot in the last couple of years. The AI era is going to need the right brainers. So could we have a role in getting them back either through some form of training or some form of help?And in answer to that, to get back to your question, it’s funny because there’s been a lot of pull from the smaller, cooler boutique companies who already know a bit about it, and an absolute paralysis from the others. To the point where I met a creative consultant who’s changed her company name to take the word creativity out of it. Because she’s like, ultimately, I’m a creativity consultant, but I have talked about it being more about growth.And creativity is a thing I hide in the background to get them there. So all of her bigger clients don’t want that word in the definition of what they do. They think it’s frivolous.What do you mean by that? I’m frightened about that. As a strategist, I’ve quickly gotten nerdy about it and gone, well, one is the means and one of the end.So the end is growth. Just because you’re talking a lot about creativity. We all know, as strategists, we knew this client would go, this is all very interesting, all very fun, but how are you going to sell my product?And we were like, the fact we need to have that conversation is worrying, but we did used to have that conversation, even 20 years ago. So on one practical front, I get it. But when you’re talking to very senior people who have benefited from brands that have benefited from creativity, for them to go easy on the creativity love, that’s a little bit worrying.At senior level, they’re like, let’s maybe reduce the mention of that word and get back to growth.I wonder, and we’re very near the end of time and tell me if I’m off base or not, but I feel like, well, there’s all that work and I’m going to forget his name, Orlando Lemon Creativity Crisis Advertising, Ian McGilchrist. Yeah, that’s right.And Ian McGilchrist. And what I hear you talking about stuff that lays right on top of all those observations about the dominance and the monopoly of left brain and corporate advertising and the need of the right brain to come back. And I always felt like that was applied to advertising, but you’re really, and tell me if I’m wrong, you’re applying it to research, that researchers have the same crisis of creativity and humanity, and that that needs to be restored in a way too, because they’re all, as you said, they’re the same, two ends of the same line. In a way. Yeah. But I’m, because I’m still an ad man at heart.I’m probably, when I say it, I’m mostly talking about advertising as well. It’s only been a recent revelation and to begin with a guilty one and now a proud one, that research is the first line of creativity and is therefore qual is a creative pursuit. So yes, I’m bringing it to research as well.But I think there’s even more pushback there because qual gets a bad enough rap as it is in the room full of quant pros. So you don’t want to let that out of the bag too much. We, you and I know this, but I don’t think we should be going out there shouting too much about it because that’ll give more people more excuse to kick it out of the room.So mostly I have been talking about it in yes, advertising industry, but also clients and brand clients. I know that McDonald’s for instance, loves an offsite where it gets to ideate, Diageo and Unilever back in the day when I worked with them had rooms dedicated to brainstorms and ideation sessions. And it wasn’t just Google that had the ball pits back in the day, Unilever had beanbag ridden rooms called seventh heaven with colors and hacky sacks to throw around and that they, but they’ve gotten rid of that a little bit.They will also kind of charmed by the tech world and believed that they needed to dress up in their clothes and start to get serious and quanty. And so I’m speaking really to all of those people that dropped a lot of your creativity, right brain thinking and thinkers in favor of this very mesmerizing and compelling efficiency narrative. And the irony is that the people who are jumping back into it more than Unilever and PNG and Pepsi, and those cool clients, Nike is the tech companies.Cause they’ve got all the money. They’ve done all the efficiency and now they’ve got all the staff and they’re bringing in staff, very right brain, very numinous thinkers. And it’s amazing.So open AI and Anthropic have brought in people I know from to be extremely right brain recently have very senior positions. Google has been doing it for a while.And so the irony now is the very people who put us here are the first ones to be going back.Beautiful. Well, listen, I want to thank you very much, Ben, for accepting the invitation and congratulations on Okay Human. Thank you.I hope that was useful. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Mark Kingsley is a brand strategist and designer, the founder of the brand studio Malcontent, and an instructor in the School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding program. Earlier in his career, he designed album packages for John Coltrane, Pat Metheny, Quincy Jones, Ginger Baker, and Jewel at Blue Note Records, earning a 2001 Grammy nomination. He moved into brand strategy, serving as global creative lead on Citi at Landor and Executive Strategy Director at Collins.He is the author of Universal Principles of Branding (2023) and Brands in the Age of AI (2025). He also has a great substack. So I start all these conversations the same way with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It’s a beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it’s kind of big, so I kind of over explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from?Well, there’s the geographical, obviously. So I was born in Pittsburgh, but grew up in Western New York, which is kind of a magical place. And I was born and grew up in the 1970s. So Western New York in the 1970s was the recipient of an embarrassment of riches.The school that I went to, the elementary school and high school that I went to, is exactly between Rochester and Buffalo. So what that did is it attracted some of the better candidates for teachers from both of those areas. So I had a really good intellectual foundation.My father was a college professor. My mother was a math teacher at the school for the blind, at the New York State School for the Blind. So I had educators as parents and as guides.And it’s also across the lake from Toronto. So I had access to Canadian TV, which meant Monty Python and curling. And also Rochester and Buffalo were like highlights on the concert tour for bands and musicians in the 1970s and 80s.And then on top of that, New York State in the 1980s had some really wonderful arts funding. So I went to school in Rochester and the musicians that I saw come through Rochester were absolutely astounding. I saw Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Reich, David Von Teegum.The harmonic choir, which is a group of musicians who sing in overtones. It was just incredible. An incredibly rich experience.And I got to meet and I took a class with Allen Ginsberg. I took two classes with Allen Ginsberg. I got to meet Ed Sanders from the Lower East Side Fugs.It was just incredible what came through all because of New York State arts funding, which is now gone. And it’s kind of a tragedy. So I come from abundance and live in tragedy.What was the town that you grew up in? I grew up outside of Rochester, so I’m excited to hear you talk about Western New York is a magical place. So tell me more about what made it so magical.Well, I grew up in a town called Oakfield. At the time, it had one stoplight. I think now it has two, and five miles north of a town called Batavia.So if you drive the New York State’s railway between Buffalo and Rochester, there’s a thing right next to it that says Batavia Turf Farms. It’s basically they grow grass. And so there’s a sign that says Batavia Turf Farms. So that’s the wonder, I guess, of that.But also, the other advantage of growing up between Buffalo and Rochester is I got CBC radio out of Toronto. And at the time there was a radio program called Brave New Waves that was begun by a magical person named Augusta LaPay. And this thing would go from midnight till six in the morning.And she would have all night conversations on the Dow or an all night interview with Philip Glass. And then at like five o’clock in the morning, they would start playing music and you would hear a segue from John Cage to Charlie Parker to John Zorn. And this was normal.And then Rochester had an obscure little radio station called WSAY that was out of like Greece, New York, which is a suburb of Rochester. And then Buffalo had WUWU, W-U-W-U, out of East Aurora, New York, where the Roycrofters were. And that also was just anarchic, free form, anything that comes to your mind kind of radio.So the inspiration of not really anarchy, but just do it yourself and allow yourself to be yourself. Because this is before algorithms, because right now algorithms funnel us into a certain sort of generic beige-ness. So this was the opportunity for you to really be distinctive, individual, and not feel any shame about that.It just was all accepted. So that’s part of that magic. And also, you’re outside of New York, you’re outside of any kind of major metropolitan area.So you could do your thing and no one really cared. Because no one was watching. No one paid attention.I love that. I wanted to go back to that first list of musicians that you were marveling that you had access to. I didn’t recognize a single one of those names.What kind of music are you talking about? And were you...Everything from avant-garde music, like new music, what they would call kind of a pejorative term, to jazz, free jazz, members of the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was a group of black musicians out of Chicago who had this... The group that you would know would be the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had a great tagline, which is great black music from the past to the future.That’s beautiful.Yeah. I was a big Sun Ra fan. I saw Sonny play maybe 40 times when I moved to New York.And I first saw Sonny up in... There’s a place near Niagara Falls called Art Park, which was another beneficiary of New York State’s arts funding, where they took a toxic waste dump along the Niagara River, just down the river from Niagara Falls, and they converted it into an open air performance art and art installation place where like Vito Acconci would do an installation. That’s where Chris Burden did his original beam dropper.He took I-beams off a crane and lifted them maybe 60 feet in the air and then dropped them into a puddle of wet cement. So I was there for the beam drop, right? But it’s also at Art Park where I saw the North American premiere of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, or where I saw Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago.I saw Oregon. All these great improvised music groups, jazz musicians, Cecil Taylor. It was incredible, really, what came through.Where did this begin, this love of or appreciation or interest in music? Where did that begin for you?The radio, the radio that was available. And you just hear this weird thing. My parents were open-minded and didn’t necessarily say that you had to follow a certain kind of program other than educate yourself, learn about the world, read, write, the basics that we want from our children.My parents were very individualistic also. She worked for the state as an educator, but she also was a union person. And my father was briefly in seminar before he met my mother.So a friend of mine says that I have a certain Jesuitical kind of attitude, and I think I got that from my father. So I would ask him questions, and he would respond with that kind of Jesuitical response. It was basically like me responding to the world.Like, for example, I’m watching Johnny Carson one night, and Johnny Carson tells a joke where he says, don’t trust a proctologist who wears wax lips. It was this strange, surreal sentence. And I said to my father the next day, I said, what does that mean?What is a proctologist? And he goes, it’s the study of the anus, right? As opposed to, don’t talk about it.It was, here, this is what this is. So it was a matter of fact, openness and acceptance to the world.And I’m curious about your setup with the radio. Where were you listening to the radio, and where were you with the radio listening to getting the CBC?Well, the CBC was powerful, and it would come across Lake Ontario. So I would get it. And I first started listening to Brave New Waves when I was in college in Rochester.And I was in art school. And when you’re in art school, you stay up all night. That’s what you do.And that’s my chronotype, I guess. And so that’s basically what you do. And this was the thing.And all the other radio, for me, was a bit common. I like Led Zeppelin, but I don’t need to listen to Led Zeppelin all day. So it’s just WCMF, 96.5. It’s garbage. It’s absolute garbage.And for a brief time, I did work in college radio at WITR, and I was the jazz program director of WITR when we had maybe a hundred Watts or something like that. That’s how powerful that station was.What do you recall? As young Mark, what did you want to be when you grew up? As a kid, you remember?I didn’t know this until I heard Santana. So for me, that formative moment is watching television and seeing Santana on television. I think it was California Jam.It was a concert series in a Speedway out in California that was on ABC. And this band came out and he was touring the worst Santana record, which is Festival, but I didn’t know any better. Right.And so here’s this man who doesn’t look like me with a band playing instruments that I hadn’t seen before, congas and timbales and stuff. And with rhythms I hadn’t quite heard. And he was an amazing guitar player.It was like, what the. And so from there, I was like, I needed to find everything out that I could about Santana. So I would ride my bike around Batavia and Oakfield going to garage sales and buying for like $2 a piece or $3 a piece, because I had a job and all that, I would buy a used Santana vinyl.And then from Santana, I look on the back cover and like, who, he did a record. Who’s this guy? John McLaughlin.And why does he have this weird first name? Mahavishnu. What does that mean?So of course I have to buy some Mahavishnu Orchestra records. And then they both talk about how much they love John Coltrane. I’m like, who’s John Coltrane?Okay. And then boom, you’re in the deep water.Yeah. It’s amazing.It’s just one television show. And that’s the other thing, Peter. At this moment in the seventies when there was an openness and corporate control of media and all that, but it wasn’t as tight as it was, because I’m a late night guy.I’m watching Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert or The Midnight Special. And who did they have on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and The Midnight Special? Jeff Beck with Billy Preston, Kraftwerk, Parliament Funkadelic.It’s like, what is this poor white boy going to do?Yeah. And I saw an interview just yesterday with, I’m going to forget his name. He’s a comedy writer. And we were talking about the end of late night TV. And the hypothesis was that it’s just dead. The format’s dead right now. And he talked about how when it came up, it was dangerous. It was risky and reckless.It was all very experimental. And I remember turning it on and Letterman was sort of crazy. It was sort of crazy what was going on there. But there’s no craziness in late night now.But Letterman started as a daytime talk show. He started in the middle of the day. And I saw that as a kid.I was like, this man is insane. Or late night with Tom Snyder, who would have the great Harlan Ellison, the great science fiction writer. And Harlan Ellison was a dangerous person.He was a crank, but he was brilliant. And he saw through pretense. I have people like that on television.This is better than Dick Cavett for me.Yes. So catch us up. Tell us, where are you now? What is the work that you do?So I have my own small branding firm called Malcontent. I named it because that’s basically my approach to standard practices. I’m always trying to find a different way of doing things.And nothing kills me more than to sit in a meeting and listen to someone talk about how they’re going to leverage these assets. We say things like, I can’t boil the ocean. This kind of professionalist jargon, which is meaningless.And so I have that. And I have a few clients, small clients. I have designed logos for multi-billion dollar corporations, but I’m not doing that now.I also teach at the School of Visual Arts, Master’s in Branding Program. And I started during COVID. We all had to find a place for ourselves during COVID.So I found myself with an endowed professorship at RIT. And in the School of Design, where I went to school. So I basically was on the other side of the lectern.And I was there briefly, just for a couple of years. But when I arrived, I got this email out of the blue from the acquisitions editor at Quarto Rockport out of a town near Boston, asking me if I would be interested in writing a book called The Universal Principles of Branding. And I’m a fool, so I’ll step in.I’m like, yeah, why not? And he goes, OK, well, what are your list of the principles? And I came up with about 60 of them.And he’s like, you need 100. I’m like, who says? Well, the series is 100.I’m like, OK. So I wrote 100. And then from that book, which did relatively well, I got to travel a little bit and do some speaking engagements, like in Dublin.So after that, they came back to me and shared with me a series of books done by Stanford at the D School. And said, what do you think? And I said, are you asking me if I would be interested in working on a series on branding?And he goes, yes, exactly. So I pulled together a 16-page proposal, working off the syllabuses from my colleagues, and pitched 16 books. They selected three.First one that came out was A History of Brands by my colleague Richard Scheer. And then The Meaning of Branded Objects by my colleague Dr. Tom Guariello. And I proposed, because I was concerned that I didn’t want the series to be too didactic, I proposed a book called Brands in the Age of AI, which I was going to write.And they chose that as the third one. So I became the series editor, and basically bringing my colleagues kicking and screaming into the world of narrative text as opposed to bulleted PowerPoint slides. So it was a great education for all of us.And then the book Brands in the Age of AI came out in December. I’ve been doing the occasional talk about it, interviews with it. And then last month in May, I was asked to speak at the NYC Design Festival on their first, what they called the AI Summit.It was the first day dedicated to artificial intelligence. And that basically fueled my thoughts. The book Brands in the Age of AI gets relatively good reviews, but it also gets some, like people on Amazon will say, well, this didn’t teach me how to work my small business with AI.And it’s like, no book can do that for you. Because artificial intelligence is a domain that once you type a word, it’s obsolete five minutes later. And so you have to approach it from a different direction.Instead of the tactical, you have to approach it from the more philosophical, the more meditative, the more contextual. Which is my yoke, because that’s basically the class that I teach at the School of Visual Arts. I teach a class that applies Western philosophy and critical theory, and applies it to brand strategy.All right. I want to pause you there. We’re going to get into the book and then your Substack, because I really love the way you’re writing about, thinking about AI. But I want to connect you with brand. You came in, all this talk about music, and I know that’s where you started. When did you first encounter brand? And when did it become this, that you could make a living with this thing called brand?Making a living, it’s like that feels a little too tactical and a little too mercenary, I guess. So, I love music, as you can probably guess. And the thing that I want, oh, I forgot to tell you.Yeah. So, I’m watching Santana and I realized what I want to be is a music album cover designer, because I was kind of artistic. I was always drawing and doing posters for friends.They pay me $5. I draw a picture of like Gene Simmons from Kiss off the Kiss Destroyer. I draw that picture and give it to them for five bucks.So, I wanted to be a record cover designer. And that’s what I went to school for, not record cover design, but graphic design. And bang my head against the wall for a few years and then started doing record covers.Well, there’s a well-known record cover designer named Mike Mills, who’s also a film director. And he once said this great line. He said, the quickest way to the poorhouse is to design record covers.So, I kept at it. But the MP3 basically destroyed the industry. And then the industry ate itself with all the mergers that have happened and this corporatization of music.So, I had to find something else. And through a dear friend of mine, a designer named Alan Horry, who was working at a division of Ogilvy called BIG, the Brand Innovation Group, asked me to come in and help out on a project. And I ended up staying like a couple of years or something like that, working on big pitches, like pitches for Walmart, work for American Express, some online interface design.That’s where I did my first billion-dollar logo, the logo for DoubleClick, before they got acquired by Google. So, projects like that. And did that for a while.Ended up getting a gig at Landor, which is the world’s largest corporate identity and branding firm. And got a gig with them in the San Francisco office. I was basically the global creative lead on the Citi accounts. So, they were in San Francisco, but the main office was Citi in New York.And so, they had some Californians serving that client, but there was a sensibility difference. So, they hired a New Yorker to move to San Francisco to deal with the New York client, which was great. Landor was my graduate school on brands and how people think about brand.Landor is a huge company. They’re the ones who did the Levi’s logo. They did the San Francisco Muni logo.They did the FedEx logo. So, this is a huge firm with, at the time, 22 offices around the globe, several thousand employees. It was really a great opportunity.And because Citi was a global client and I had to travel the world, I have friends all over the world. And so, I’m about to have a conversation with a friend of mine in Singapore, right? So, there’s a beauty to that.I have these connections. But I was working on Citi at the height of the global financial crisis. So, there was inevitably layoffs that happened.So, at the height of the financial crisis, they ended up moving the center of gravity of the account back to New York. I moved with them to New York. The New York office basically gave up the account.Because they wanted to bill it differently. There’s a whole way in which you bill large clients like that. And they went on a per project basis.They weren’t making the money that they needed to. And so, they basically let go of the whole team. So, there I was, again, what am I doing?And that’s why I said, let’s do this thing Malcontent. And so, I started it out very slowly. Was working on it for a while.And I would be invited to do pitches and write scopes of work. And so, I found myself writing scopes of work, which I was writing it for the same amount of money and then find out that I would lose it to a company like Lippincott. Which is another large corporate identity and branding firm.And so, that became a little frustrating. Because the truth of the matter is, in branding, the teams that work on the very large projects, the teams are never more than like five people. Because the greatest expenditure in branding is labor, or the employees.So, you need to keep your labor down. So, your teams are very lean. And that’s just the nature of the thing.And so, me working by myself, I pull together teams of four to five people. And I would have teams of four to five people in this large corporate. But people feel more comfortable going to a firm with a long list and a conference room.So, that was a little frustrating. And then, the person who ran the brand innovation group at Ogilvy ended up having his own place, a place called Collins. And so, he invited me to come in for a project on the Equinox Hotel, taking Equinox the gym and expanding them into a hotel.And the reason they did that is that they were owned by a development firm that basically built Hudson Yards. So, they were going to build this hotel in Hudson Yards. And so, I ended up doing the upfront work.It did well. We won the accounts. And I stayed there for a couple of years and got to work on some really great things, including repositioning Ogilvy for what they called their global refounding.So, that was some exhilarating, very heady activity. So, I came into branding because there was a vacuum in the world with the music industry. And branding is, the interesting thing about my approach to design is that I don’t design because I have an aesthetic agenda that I need to follow.I began in design because I love music and I love musicians deeply and profoundly. And I wanted to do anything I could to hang around with musicians. I wanted to meet great musicians.And I have, right? So, you get to shake the hand of Wayne Shorter, that kind of stuff, right? So, I’ve had these moments, I’ve had conversations with Santana’s drummer, Michael Shrieve, talking about weird drum instruments out of Southeast Asia.I’ll have like a 10-minute conversation with them on that. So, that vacuum, but also that ability to speak with people and try and meet people in a middle place, I was able to pivot that into branding. Because my work specifically with Citi, I’m not an expert in financial services.I’m a bit more of one now, but to be able to sit in a room and begin to unravel what people are talking about was really the education. So, it wasn’t about the procedural process of building brands or analyzing brands or doing brand audits or anything like that. It was the capacity for listening and spending time with people and then trying to understand what their goals were within a certain time.Yeah. What, I mean, you’ve just sort of given a clue, but I always love to ask this question of what do you love about the work when you think about all of it and the projects that you have now? Where’s the joy in this work for you?Well, I realized that, a bit of a callback, because I realized that my ability and my opportunity to speak with musicians, I was there because I had a chip that I could bring to the table. The ante that I had was my capacity as a designer. So, the ante that I have in branding is my work as a designer and then on top of it, I’ve been writing for like 40 years on and off, often badly.When I was in college, because I love music, I started writing music reviews. And then when I was working, I had my own design studio doing music packaging, I would write articles and posts for one of the first design blogs, a blog called Speak Up. So, I always had a certain critical approach to it.And luckily, when I was in college, another great thing about being in school in the 80s is that I got to study under Dr. Mihai Nadin, who was a semiologist out of Brown University. And so, I had my first deep dive into semiotics and linguistics. And then from there, I met Michael Steranko, who was the editor-in-chief of Afterimage magazine, which was a very heady intellectual photography magazine out of the visual studies workshop.And I wrote some really, really bad reviews for him. But then I got to study under Michael. He taught a summer course out of the State University of New York at Brockport on postmodern theory.So, I got to read with him. So, I had this dog’s breakfast of a background that I could bring to the writing that I did at Speak Up. And that dog’s breakfast of an approach is something that I could bring into brands, because most people think of brands in that very operational instrumental way.Okay, you’re going to do the logo here, and you’re going to have the tagline here, and that kind of thing. And I was much more interested in the context. So, my capacity for being in a room and knowing that the ante that I have is my design work, but on top of it, the ante that I had was also a certain nascent critical capacity to consider the context in a larger context, like thinking of the design work.But then I also have to think of it within an economic context when I was working at Citi. And then I also had to think of it in a governmental context and a societal context. And then when I’m doing work in other countries, I have to think about those regional contexts and understand the differences in behavior from Japan, the way they do banking in Japan versus the way they do banking in China and Hong Kong versus the way they do banking in San Francisco.So, it’s like all of that. Literally, it’s a dog’s breakfast coming together into a certain capacity. You can’t program this.This is like you stumble upon it, right? So, my love of brand is really the openness and the available opportunities it gives me to meet people.How do you, maybe, I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this question. How do you explain brand to somebody that’s not in it?So, most people think brands are logos and taglines and stuff like that. And that’s a very trivial description. So, in the class that I teach, I say brands are an association.So, I approach it from the phenomenological sense. A brand is the association that one holds in their mind. So, the association that I have in my mind about Nike is different than the one that you have.I don’t play pickup basketball, right? So, my relationship to Nike is, occasionally, there’s a sneaker that I like to hang out and go to the bar. While you may play pickup basketball, and for you, Nike is the shoe I got to have.I got to have this kind of shoe from this kind of line because it makes my feet feel comfortable. So, it’s the same brand, but different associations. And so, branding is navigating that world of different associations and being open to it and having the capacity to listen to what your audience is telling you, what society is telling you, what the brand user or even adjacent stakeholders may have about it.You used one of my favorite words, listen. And I’m curious, how do you learn and listen upfront? Like, everybody’s got their own way of getting their feet underneath them on a project.But how do you listen or learn? And selfishly, I’m always curious about qualitative research or ethnography and the role that those things play and how you work if they play a role.Yeah. I tend to be, my personality is more qualitative than quantitative, I’m sorry. Because when you look at data, data only tells you what happened yesterday.But qualitative is an opportunity to dive into ideas as they’re forming or this affect that things have. And that’s actually a thing that I’m very interested in recently, especially with AI. And people speak about consciousness.And they think about consciousness in this mechanical computational manner. But for me, consciousness is also this bringing together of all these vectors together. And consciousness is also very much influenced by the affect, the physical affect of being in a room next to someone, the smells, the pheromones, what they call volatile organic compounds that we emit in rooms as we have emotions.Our emotional responses, this is why dogs can sense how we’re feeling much more sensitively than maybe a human being can. It’s because they have that olfactory capacity to sense changes in your volatile organic compounds that you’re emitting. So I’m very much interested in that.So when you talk about listening, it’s spending time. It is tending, right, to use a Heideggerian term. Like, how do I tend to attend to this moment and slow down and try and find a way to remove my taste, because my taste is a filter that I have, that I interpret the world.And so how do I combat my taste or how do I understand that my taste is coloring my impression of things? And so it’s a meditation, I guess, to overuse a word badly, but it’s kind of like that. So the process is just being open and the process is slowing down.The process is also not doing the research the way that people tell you to do the research, right?Just as a principle. Can you tell me a story about that? That’s fantastic.For example, I’m working on a project for a copper mining project. It’s a weird project. I can’t talk too much about it because I’m about to go into it.But because I’m talking about copper and I’m talking about mining and I’m talking about the environment and I’m talking about governments and various community stakeholders, my mind is open to things that I may hear. And I have to allow those things to come in and bump around. So the other night I’m watching cable TV.I like to have cable TV on when I work, right? I heard that at Warhol, that’s how we worked. I want to work like Warhol.And because I’m a man of a certain age and also a grownup, a teenage boy with arrested development, I love watching the Heroes and Icons channel, which is Star Trek, Highlander, Renegade, Walker, Texas Ranger. I love all that overly macho b******t. I love it because that’s what I grew up on.So I’m watching this and this is like a fringe cable network. I wouldn’t even call it a network, right? It’s just like they license a bunch of shows and they put them on to have commercials for diuretics and old people medicine and that kind of stuff.But I’m listening, I just have it on, and I hear this guy talking about antimony. He’s like, all the bullets that are fired need antimony. I’m like, what?And then he talks about it as a natural, vital resource. And I was like, oh, this is interesting because there’s an adjacency here with copper. So then I reached out to the client.I’m like, we have a conversation about that. And so that’s what I mean about not doing the research, because if I was really doing the research the way I should be, I’d sit here with Wikipedia and I’d open up the Internet and I’d use Claude or ChatGPT to do some research, like tell me what you can about copper. Tell me what you can about copper, the copper industry, the copper market, what is copper cathode and all that kind of stuff.That’s the proper way that you do research, right? And that’s the way that we’re taught. And that’s the way that our junior strategists and all of our branding firms will do this, right?That is what we call donkey work, right? But the donkey work only gets you so far. You need to be open to hearing other things, adjacencies, for example, for me, the antimony with copper.And that’s just a recent thing that happened in the last week.Yeah, it’s amazing. I’m curious. We’ve got, I want to manage time on the back end of this conversation. I want to get to the piece that you wrote, but maybe tell us a little bit about how you got into teaching and then philosophy, right? You teach brand through the lens of philosophy. And now it seems to be the right time to be talking about the value of philosophy, especially in light of brand. So how did you get into that position and what does that mean to do that?I’ve always been interested, and I guess that’s part of that Jesuitical streak that I take from my father. So my early foundation in semiotics led to this early foundation in postmodern theory. And it was the 1980s.And there was a publisher named Semiotext that was pretty popular, had very thin, little, beautiful books. They would publish translations of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, all the great contemporary French Marxist philosophers. And then Baudrillard would come to New York and speak.And I’d sit in the audience and listen to Baudrillard speak with a translator. So it was a very heady and beautiful moment. And this was also pre-iPhone.So you’d see people on the subway reading Baudrillard. And it was this little signal to other people, like, I’m a smart person, like I’m sexy, I’m smart, and I have a brain. So I was reading a lot of this stuff, but it wasn’t guided.I didn’t have the proper guidance that I needed. So at one point, about seven, eight years ago, I started teaching at SVA and basically doing it out of my semiotics background and building from there, doing reading and building a syllabus out of that. And it was OK.And then about seven or eight years ago, I started getting really serious and started doing seminars with philosophy PhDs. And so I’d sit in these seminars, I’d read, OK, we’re going to read Heidegger’s Being and Time as much as we can. Right.Or we’re going to read all of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We’re going to read, I’ve read Zizek. I’ve read all the Hannah Arendt.A lot of Nietzsche, tons of Nietzsche. All the foundational stuff that you need. And what’s beautiful is having someone whose life has been committed to that intellectual pursuit guide you through and make the connections for you.So you’re speaking like, I now understand the role of Nietzsche in Foucault’s thinking. And I understand the role of Brentano in Heidegger’s thinking, that kind of stuff. So I’m able to make these connections.And from these connections, you understand how it’s all a large conversation building upon, what about this? What about that? It’s like a big improv game.So as I got serious, my syllabus at SVA got tighter and tighter. And I’m very, very proud of the syllabus. And I’m always developing the syllabus, too.And so I have certain bugbears that I want to pursue, that I want to kill. And one of them is in brands, a lot of people use history. And they feel very strongly about history.And then when they do brand research, they’ll look at the history of the brands. But the reality is, what you need to do is look at the genealogy of the brand, which is a bit more rigorous because the genealogy of a brand is to be open to adjacencies and other things that may emerge out of it, as opposed to the official told story. You need to do your research and build a different story.Because if I can build a different genealogy, then I have a different approach to the brand, then I can offer a different solution to my client. And so that’s how I take it and apply it. That’s one thing.Another idea is when people say, well, this is what Nike stands for. Nike stands for athleticism. I’m like, not necessarily, right?And from there, I take a clue from queer studies, who say that the body that you’re born into is not necessarily the gender that you behave as, because that gender is regulated by society. Well, if I just swap out the word gender with the word brand, I have a different understanding of brand.Yeah. We’ve got 15 minutes left, and I want to get into your observations on AI. You have this piece on Substack, which maybe I’ll just let you introduce.I read it, and I think the last time we talked, you said the same thing too. And you make this declaration that, and I love where you go with it, and I’m dying to hear you talk about it, but this idea that AI is a condition. And just as an intro, what do you mean when you say AI is a condition?And how is that different? It’s just such a different angle on the conversation that everybody’s having now about what AI is and all that stuff?Well, this is also a result of that being open to other things, open to adjacencies. So the greatest live action role-playing game for men in their 50s is LinkedIn, right?I’m going to come back to that personally, Mark.Hey, I’m all over it too. I’m all over it, like white on rice. So LinkedIn is the place where experts, and I’m using that in scary quotes, go on and on about how AI slop is bad, AI is stealing from artists and all that.And the reality of the thing is, when I was in design school and in art school, I learned how to be a designer by copying other designers. So I do exactly what AI does, not as efficiently, but I do it, that’s exactly that. So to stand on that moral ground is duplicitous.I have a problem with that, people tell me what is morally correct about that position. And so from there, I’m like, okay, what is going on here? And so part of my class that I teach, I do Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction, where we talk about a thing called the optical unconscious.And the optical unconscious is the result that I have a different relationship to the world because of photography and film. Because I can slow film down, I could speed it up, I know how the body moves in a different way than just the way that I move my body. And so that affects the way in which I see the world.It makes me, as Benjamin says, it makes me more of a critic when I look at film, because I am judging like action scenes. I am judging the action of the action scene, as opposed to like, wow, that’s kind of cool, what’s going on? My relationship to photography is removed, and I am analyzing things in a different way where I become a critic.Now what’s happened over time is social media has embraced the visual, Instagram. And we now perform our lives. It’s like we are auditioning for perfection.We have commoditized our lives in such a way where it’s only if I have a beautiful vacation that makes everyone jealous. If I have a beautiful piece of latte art, I have the perfect latte every morning, or I have a great meal. And I can show you, I was at this obscure little tasting menu in this obscure little pizzeria in Brooklyn.I can prove my extreme value. I’m basically auditioning for perfection. And I’ve commoditized my life where I can enjoy my life.I only enjoy it if it satisfies that neurosis that social media has instilled in me. And so you realize then that the optical unconscious, there’s also a relationship to the branded unconscious. We see the world through brands.We understand the world through brands, right? And so this is an expanse of concepts. So if I look at AI, this is basically a hop, skip and a jump from computation.Computers change the way in which we go through the world. We think about the world in a different way. We live in a computational world and computers are this condition that is imposed upon us that we have to work within.And so I realized then that AI is equally a condition, much like modernism is a condition, right? Because we live in a modern society, a modernity, not modernist, but a modernity, which modernity is our relationship to authority, our relationship to institutions, our relationship to even ourselves. We see ourselves as individuals who can be enlightened, right?Or urbanization. Urbanization is a way in which we understand the built world around us. Instead of me living in Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber shack out with no running water, I live in a structure, in a system where water is delivered to me, electricity is delivered to me.I have a parking garage, all that stuff, right? That’s urbanism. And then you expand, you keep going on.Like literacy is a condition that we live in, right? Because I can only be an effective member of society if I am literate. And so that is a condition that I exist within, and that allows me to interrelate with other people.So from there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to AI, because AI is now this condition. Whether you say, I am pro-AI, I love using AI tools, and I love it like Donald Trump and the pictures that he comes out with. Or I hate AI slop because heaven forbid, here’s another image of somebody with six fingers out of hands.And I find that to be too binary, and I find that to be too simplistic. But if I understand AI as a condition, then I operate within that condition differently. I see AI potentially as the framing for why things are the way they are.And I also see it as a framing for how things can be, which means that I have a structural approach to AI, as opposed to an instrumental approach. So instead of me looking at AI as like, how am I going to make my life more efficient? I’m a junior strategist.I need to do customer research. I’ll just type it into AI, and it’ll give it to me. That’ll do a relatively good job.I have to check it, but it’ll do a quick, relatively good job. And my billings are falling through the floor, unfortunately, because clients are waking up to that reality. So I can look at AI that way, but I’m more interested in what the infrastructure of AI can allow us.So the infrastructure of urbanism allows us a different political mode, right? It allows us the opportunity to interact with people who aren’t necessarily like us. And so we have things like all the marches that happened after George Floyd in 2020, right?That is a result of modernity, and those marches were also a result of urbanization. And so the opportunity for AI to create a system where I can look at people, and the way that I’m articulating it is it’s either assumed belonging or earned belonging. So right now, everything that we do is earned belonging.I have to have a credit score. I have to do the little tab with my watch or the tab with my card. I have to show a credential when I go into an airport.That’s earned belonging to a space, earned belonging to an interaction. But assumed belonging is an infrastructure thing, right? Because our faces are in every computer system around the world.A couple of years ago, we’re going through Heathrow Airport from Shannon, and it does a little face zoom. It goes, oh, hi, Mark. My real first name, David.It goes, hello, welcome, that kind of thing. I was like, I hadn’t been to the UK since the development of facial recognition technology, but you already have it. You already know who I am, and you’ve let me in.This is kind of amazing. So the data is out there. How do we use this data in such a way to remove friction?And in removing that friction, potentially, this is the opportunity to also remove other aspects of earned belonging, which are about our bodies. Our race, our gender. Yeah.I see this as an opportunity. Now, granted, there have been nascent attempts to control this information, right? Through HIPAA, the GDPR in Europe, that kind of stuff.And they’re beginning steps, and there needs to be greater governance. There also needs to be greater intention for why we’re designing these systems. But I see it as an opportunity.And the reason why I find this an interesting opportunity is there’s a historian named Lynn Hunt who wrote a couple books on the French Revolution. And she proposed that the French Revolution happened because of an emerging subjectivity, a collective subjectivity that happened in France through the proliferation of prints and books, and printing allowed this to happen, and also certain plays that were performed. And tea parties where men and women gathered instead of just beer halls or coffee shops, which were predominantly male, opportunity for both genders, both sexes to get together and speak.And this created a potential subjectivity, which then allowed for the French Revolution. And this is an idea that I originally got from an Italian Marxist named Maurizio Lazzarato. And he begins a book on the creation of the subject within capitalism. He proposes that Germany and Japan after the first, second world war, within 20 years were economic powerhouses. What is it that created that?So yes, we did have American aid, but also collectively the Germans and the Japanese developed a whole new subjectivity that allowed them to exercise economic dominance in the world, where Germany very quickly became one of the economic powerhouses on the planet. Size-wise, they punched above their weight. So I’m intrigued because I see, if we can build a system where there’s an assumed belonging, that then opens the door for a different kind of subjectivity, a collective subjectivity.Now, I see this. Can you describe what it means, the distinction between the assumed belonging and the earned belonging? Because this stuff intuitively, it feels really right, and I’m really attracted to it, but there’s pieces of it mechanically that I’m not totally tracking. So when you say assumed belonging as the result of AI as a condition, what are you pointing at?What’s an example of what that means?Maybe it’s an example of what I’m pointing away from. So social media has deeply fractured our collective subjectivity into individuality. The only powerful, the strongest subjectivity that exists in the United States right now, I think, is MAGA.Because that subjectivity of, world’s not working for me, things aren’t right, everything’s broken. Make America Great Again is an inchoate way of describing it, but it does capture that feeling, right? It captures that subjective feeling.Otherwise, I drill down deep into whether or not I am queer, whether or not I am black, whether or not I am a Boy Scout, this amplification of our own individuality, we need to do that, right? We need to find ourselves. But there’s also a collective quality to it, which is a result of urbanization.There’s a collective quality that we are as a political group, right? And we occasionally just wink, tip our head over the edge of the wall here, like with the 99% idea during the financial crisis. So there’s a potential here.And the fact that people are beginning to wake up to the inherent danger of data centers, which are placed willy-nilly without attention to environment and location and all that, this for me are all nascent rumblings of a potential new subjectivity, which can be enhanced. Now, as designers, we have the opportunity to design and create a system that allows for people to see themselves as part of a different subjectivity.Instead of drilling down into each individuality, which is what happens with brands, what happens with a lot of design work, right? What it does is it just reifies or it confirms or underlines your own sense of individuality. What would happen if we didn’t design to make people feel more like themselves, but design in such a way where people felt that there was a larger connectivity, right?It just comes down to intention.Yeah. We’ve got just a couple of minutes left. And so I want to try to close this up in a way that’s coherent.And one of the things that I love about this piece, this way of thinking about AI, is that it tries to get away from the binary, right? That we’re really trapped in this. And it’s so hard to get away from the tool.Basically, you know that AI is the worst thing that’s ever happened or the best thing, the boomers versus the doomers. So how would you talk about AI as a condition, or what do we lose when we think about AI as one of these two poles? As we talked about it, as if it’s either good or bad, what are we missing?Well, we are rewarded. This is basically the effect of Rene Descartes and this whole mind body separation and this dualism, subject object. And so when I look at AI as an object, as a tool, I am operating in that binary.But the thing is, we don’t operate in the binary all day. When I walk across a floor, I don’t think with every step is the floor solid. I just walk across the floor, right?And this is an idea that Heidegger calls transparency or the ready at hand. So he describes a carpenter with a hammer. And when I’m using it, if I’m a really good carpenter and I’m using a hammer, I’m thinking about what I’m having for lunch.I’m not thinking about the fact that I’m holding a hammer made by Stanley, right? I am not holding that hammer in that kind of binary subject object relationship. I’m just using it and I am being part of, I am existing within that thing.And so for people to think of AI in that subject object dualism, they’re not realizing that they exist within the condition of AI, right? Because it’s freaking everywhere, right? There’s the little cameras that when I go park my car at the long-term parking lot of JFK, I make a reservation.I show up, there’s no one at the gate, but there’s a little camera that reads my license plate and says, oh, hi Mark, come on in, right? So it’s that potential for recognition within a system where I don’t have to worry about, there’s no one here, how am I going to get a ticket to put on the dashboard of my car so they won’t tow my car in a week, because I’m going on vacation. So it removes all of these things.And we already live in this world. We live in this world where, when I drive on the thruway, if I don’t have an EZ Pass, it’s reading my license plate and sending me a bill. So we already behave in this way.So why are we removing ourselves in that subject object manner? And instead, let’s think about the condition. So when I’m on the thruway, I’m not worried about how I’m paying the tolls.I’m on the thruway. I’m worried about whether the idiot next to me is on the phone, or the person in the left lane, who’s in the left lane without left lane ambition, right? That kind of stuff.I’m worrying about the stuff that I should be worried about, as opposed to the stuff that AI takes care of.Beautiful. Well, Mark, I want to thank you so much. It’s been great talking with you. I appreciate you accepting the invitation. And yeah, thank you so much.My pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe