THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Mark Earls is HERDmeister at HERD, his independent behavioral consultancy based in London. He previously served as Chair of Ogilvy’s Global Planning Council, Planning Director at St Luke’s Communications, and Head of Planning at Bates Dorland. He is the author of several influential books on behavior and creativity, including Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature, I’ll Have What She’s Having, Copy, Copy, Copy, and Welcome to the Creative Age.I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and I fell in love with the question because it was so big. But because it’s big, I tend to over-explain it—the way I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer in any way you want to. The question is: Where do you come from?Very good question. Where do I come from? That can be answered in lots of ways, and I think that tells us a lot about how I—and we—are.So I come from... My parents were the first out of the working class into education in their families. They both worked hard to get us a good education, and I got a scholarship. I found myself actually very lucky to have had that kind of education as a foundation. So that’s where I come from.Education has been my family’s escape from the working class, and, as it happens, that was probably a good call. The working class that existed at the time my parents were born was based in heavy industry—which is now gone.And where were you?A family all from South Wales. Coal and steel. My dad had a choice at 14: would he stay on at the grammar school, the high school, or would he take the pair of steel toe-capped boots that his father got him for his job down at the steel mill? That was his choice. He chose grammar school.Wow.Right, which was always a matter of tension between him and his family. It wasn’t the proper thing—sitting around reading books and smoking cigarettes. That’s not the proper way. Anyway, so that’s one strand of me.Another strand is that I was exposed from very early on to other cultures. My mother was a languages teacher, and I spent the time of puberty—before and after—on railways going across Europe to visit friends of the family or to do language courses. I studied languages at university, and I’ve mostly failed to use them—apart from a couple of German girlfriends.So my view has always been one of curiosity toward people. Not from a psychological perspective, I think—but from a cultural perspective. That’s turned out to be really important to me.I’ve always been interested in neuroscience. I was the first person who really started talking about Damasio in the ad world. Later on, people like Wendy Gordon started bringing that into market research and insights. I brought some of that through—and, I’m afraid, I introduced Rory Sutherland to Kahneman. That’s on me.You’ve got the Rory Sutherland-mobile now. But for me, culture is the thing. People are amazing. They live with shared beliefs, practices, and rituals. Culture is what makes us who we are. That’s where I come from—a view of human beings shaped by culture.There’s a photograph from a family album. I must be six or seven. My younger brother and sister are behind me on one of those fiberglass kids’ slides in the backyard. And I’m in front of them, doing jazz hands.I’ve always been someone who’s just really excited about the world—very positive. And when I’ve encountered some of the more cognitive-science-based views of human behavior in business and culture lately, I’ve been dismayed. There’s this disappointment at humanity’s inability to be rational.But we are amazing, extraordinary creatures—even the worst of us. Extraordinary. And that’s how I approach the problems I see.That’s so—my God, you said so much. So many things. And of course, I remember you putting these concepts forward. It was the first time I ever encountered them. I love what you just said in distinguishing between the kind of—is it sort of a culture of disappointed cognitive psychologists? That framing of our way of being in the world as a failure to be reasonable?Exactly. Our way of being in the world is amazing. Not all of us get it right, and all of us don’t get it right some of the time.The world—we are constantly renegotiating it. But we are still extraordinary.Absolutely extraordinary. If you think of one of the classic desert island questions: if you were marooned on a desert island, how would you get on? Could you build a shelter? Probably it would be a bit crap, honestly. But I could probably knock something together. Maybe it wouldn’t last a monsoon or a tornado, but it could be okay.Could you catch fish? I probably could. Could you build heating? No. Do you understand how the internal combustion engine works? Yeah, I guess so. Could you make one? No.All of these things—this know-how—we depend on so many other people to make our lives work. It’s like each of us stands at the front of an army of human history. It’s just amazing when you look at it that way. The stuff that we don’t have to think about individually because humanity—and its culture, its storing and transmission of knowledge across generations and geographies—is just amazing.No other species does that. It’s amazing.It really is. And it occurs to me—I’ve struggled with this too—that all the language around the unconscious and irrational... I always return to Lakoff. I think at some point he called it “imaginative reason.” That felt like the one time I encountered a framing of our decision-making, our behavior, as something positive and beautiful and celebratory.It is amazing. I’ve been lucky enough to do some collaboration with an academic based at the University of Kentucky, Professor Alex Bentley. We did a book together called I’ll Have What She’s Having. He’s an anthropologist and archaeologist. Mike O’Brien is another American archaeology professor. Their take on humanity is that our species is successful because of cultural evolution—our ability to store and spread information, knowledge, and know-how.You don’t have to think every day, “Now, how do I light a fire again?” You can just look: “Oh, that’s how he does it. Let’s do that.” My shorthand is learned from over there and from here and from my own practice. I don’t have to think about it.That cultural evolution—culture itself—is the thing that makes us different. Yes, our brains are amazing and our bodies are amazing too. Cognitive abilities are what they are, and they’re particularly suited for the lives we lead. But it’s our cultural capacity that’s the extraordinary bit.Do you remember a younger you? As a boy, what did you want to be when you grew up?Very good. I wanted to be a vet—a veterinarian. That’s what I wanted to be. I’ve always loved animals. I have my lovely Irish terrier sitting on the sofa here now, guarding us, making sure no one interrupts our interview. I’ve always loved animals, dogs in particular.I kept fish as a teenager. I think that was partly a distraction from my parents, partly from the troubles of puberty. Tropical fish—not unusual, is it? I’ve always loved the outdoors. Fishing was something I learned early on, and I loved it. I thought that would be a thing.My uncle was a chemist, a professor of chemistry, and he was sort of a role model for me. So I must have, in my head, combined the two things. It’s a science-y thing, even though I’m absolutely rubbish at—I struggled. I wasn’t rubbish. I struggled to get what I needed to in those subjects at high school. I was looking for something to combine the two.Yeah. So what are you doing now? Where are you, and what are you up to now?I’m based in London. I do a combination of three things. First, I’m writing and thinking—writing and thinking about this amazing thing that is humanity. I’m championing a couple of things right now, to be honest. One of them is my core thesis, which I call the “herd thesis.”It’s provocatively named because no one wants to be part of a herd—unless you’re a fan of that U.S. college football team called The Herd. But apart from that, the idea is that we’re not a “me” species. That’s probably where we first made contact, around that idea.The other thing I’m thinking about is how we think about time. It’s another cultural thing I think we’ve got wrong. I did a TED Talk on that this year and I’m looking to write a book about it next year. That’s a lot of fun. We can talk about that.Basically, I’m trying to share—I’m trying to tease out better maps of humanity. If you want to navigate the world, you need a good map. But if you want to navigate change, you need a really good map. And I’m trying to help enable that.So I’m writing and talking about that as well. I’ve also done a couple of really interesting projects this year, including one with an extraordinary contact lens business. I know nothing about that—I love spectacles, and I think anything that goes in the eyes is an abomination. But they were amazing people. And I was helping them understand how humanity really works—giving them better context for trying to solve problems and turning that into things they can test. That’s incredibly rewarding.So I do that kind of thing too. We talked a little before we started about doing this work in the nonprofit space. What kinds of questions do people come to you with?I call them tells—like in a poker game. Whatever the question is, people show tells. They say things like, “The innovation pipeline is so dull,” or, “It’s empty,” or, “Why are my people so slow? Why can’t we have good ideas? Why does nothing we try work?”So I come in as the person who knows about human behavior and explain why things are as they are, and how to unlock that. Not as a personal coach, though sometimes I do that unofficially within organizations. I help people identify and solve their own problems using human behavior.I’m curious about how you feel things have changed in this regard. I remember encountering your work when the ideas were really new. You introduced them in a very real way in the marketing community. I think I was probably young enough to believe that once we knew better, we’d all shift into a new way of being and operating. But growing older makes you realize that doesn’t happen. But, maybe that’s unfair?No, I think it’s fair. And I think it’s an opportunity to learn. One of the points I’ve made—perhaps unwittingly—is that telling people the answer, revealing the facts, very rarely creates change. And it’s frustrating because that’s what our culture is coded for—particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world: North America, Northern Europe. We believe if you give people information and data, they’ll clearly do the right thing.You see this mistake in politics, healthcare, and policymaking. Just tell people the thing and they’ll do it. Or worse, tell them the thing and give them a reason. That also doesn’t work.Essentially, my creed says that both as individuals and groups—this is a paraphrase of a paraphrase I made of Kahneman, which has now been attributed to Kahneman, which I love—humans are to thinking as cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but we’d rather not and will do anything to avoid it. So making people think—that hurts.Yes, it really does.That’s if we’re talking about individuals. But individuals exist in networks. And those networks, and the relationships between individuals, are what keep things as they are. That’s what sustains the status quo. And we rarely ask that question: Why are things the way they are?We imagine people are isolated. Give them the right information—about smoking, heart health, whatever—and they’ll change. But we know from things like 12-step programs, despite criticisms of their spiritual side, that there’s some efficacy in the fact that they pull people out of one network and place them into another.People don’t change because of information. They change because they’re removed from the environment that sustains the behavior and given a new one.I was a smoker for years. I worked on smoking cessation programs. I knew exactly how damaging it was. Did that make me stop? No. I knew all the information. We’d step outside meetings and say, “That was hard,” while lighting up. It’s just crazy, right?Yes.So I think the biggest thing is that when you tell people something, it doesn’t create change. You have to help them change. You have to engage. That’s where a lot of my consulting lies now—helping people understand why the network is as it is and how it keeps things in play. Then we work with the network to change it.To what degree did social media affect that? Because you were talking about this stuff way before social media. Did it deliver?We thought it would. I just posted something about what I call “digital medievalism.” We thought the social media revolution—the Cluetrain Manifesto guys, these visionaries—was going to democratize. It would liberate us. It would create a new Enlightenment where facts would matter more than authority.For a time, it felt like that. But it doesn’t anymore. It feels like a hate factory. That’s partly because of how the tech companies designed it. But also because of us.We’re not rational calculators. The scientific method is a cultural artifact—a process that allows us not to defer to authority or preference, but to arrive at something more reliable. We need that in the public space. Social media was supposed to offer that, but it didn’t.Every once in a while, a new platform pops up and promises it will be different and better—Substack, Bluesky, whatever. But absolute freedom creates a torrent of abuse. Group biases kick in quickly. Us vs. them. Selective perception. All of it. That’s where we are now.So social media has actually failed in its dream and is making the world worse, to be honest.What does The Herd Thesis have to say in 2025 about where we go from here?First, we have to accept that this individual-focused idea we have—that individuals are the ultimate unit of human action and value—is just wrong. We are social creatures—first, foremost, and last.Once we accept that, we begin to see that what matters are our connections: how we’re connected, who we’re connected to, what we share, what we do together. That’s the general policy direction. And we need to be aware that when someone draws a line between “us” and “them,” that’s exactly what they’re doing. We need to see it clearly.There’s an example in my next book. A verbal tick that appears in African-American vernacular, Caribbean dialects, and some UK dialects—swapping “ask” for “axe.” I was sitting in a coffee shop and heard a well-dressed, articulate woman say, “I resent that I have to effing axe for everything.”It wasn’t the swearing that struck me. It was “axe.” I realized I had an internal bias—that it signaled lower education, lower class. It made me stop. I went and looked it up. Turns out, it’s entirely legitimate. It appears in Chaucer, in the King James Bible, even in Shakespeare.Calling it an African-American vernacular feature, or a dialect thing, is just patronizing. It’s how we mark boundaries—who’s in and who’s out. We do that kind of thing constantly without realizing it. If we don’t recognize that, we lose our ability to choose.We’ve seen this in the UK recently, with a knife incident, for example. People jump over themselves to assert their side’s narrative.I remember reading The Cluetrain Manifesto too. Didn’t they say that everything was going to become a conversation?“Markets are conversations” was the great phrase. But yes, it’s been weaponized. That’s the dark side of the herd thesis.And we have to accept both the good and the bad. Someone once asked me, “Should we just keep this for the good guys? Should you be selling this to corporations?” No. Everyone needs to know this is how we are. Because it’s not just a tool for corporations or politics to exploit us. It’s something we can use to reconfigure our lives.I have a provocative question, and I’m going to put you on the spot. Here in the States, there’s a lot of conversation about misinformation and disinformation. And there’s something about that framework that seems really, like, incorrect. Can you help me understand why it feels the way it does?Yeah, I think the misinformation, I think, is a really, it’s a really interesting thing. And it’s very separate from disinformation.But misinformation is probably, let’s call it careless sharing of things that are not precisely true, for other purposes—whether it’s to signal to the group that you’re part of it, to point the group towards a particular action, to challenge someone who’s outside of the group, whatever it might be, right? That’s the reasons individuals in the network do it. I think that underneath it is this idea that information is the answer. Which is just not true, right?Yes.Yes. Information is not the answer. Information is part of the answer, but information is always colored and flavored.But it does—and it assumes some world of perfect information. A world where nobody is ever wrong. Where we all agree, implicitly, that we are correct. And you—who are a social being, sharing things to strengthen your relationships—are the one who is supposedly incorrect.Absolutely. It’s not incorrect. It’s just a form of cultural behavior.Yeah. I mean, one of the things I do is, if you turn the sounds down, right, and you go, so what kind of behavior is this that’s going on here? You could do it as god puppets, right, even. And that’s quite—so re-enact a conversation, go, what was going on there? And it’s not because I want people to be psychoanalysts, but to understand that actually this is not about the thing that’s being said.Oh. Can you say more about this?Yeah. So very often—so there’s a great guy, Paul Watzlawick, Austrian-American. I think he was a psychoanalyst. And he wrote an almost impenetrable book back in the ’60s called The Pragmatics of Human Communication. I don’t know if you know it.Yeah, I do.Okay, so Watzlawick—and I waded through it—but there’s a chunk of it which is really valuable, right? When he says there are broadly two kinds of human communication. There’s what he called digital, which is a bit confusing for us nowadays, but he was in the ’60s, which is information-based stuff. So I’m transferring information from me to you.That’s a sort of standard kind of thing that we understand. It’s all very powerful and strong in our culture, that idea.And he said there’s another bit, another kind of communication, which he calls phatic—P-H-A-T-I-C, phatic. And that’s about the relationship between you and me.And I think that’s the bit we ignore because you can’t easily digitize it. You can’t easily quantify it. And it doesn’t look like information in any way. So it can’t be important. So our culture screens that out. But that is much more important than you think.I do a thing—and if you see this on my website—I do a talk about how communication really works. And the first bit of it is me standing on stage for two and a half minutes not saying anything.And the audience feels really uncomfortable. And they then read into me and my standing there all kinds of s**t.So, I mean, the guy who—Morty, who’s one of—who’s the UK’s leading audience, TV audience research guy. He’s an amazing dude. I looked at my watch and Morty said out loud to the crowd, he says, it’s like you were the teacher telling us off because we were late back from lunch.Oh, wow.I was just looking at my watch, to be honest, to check what time it was, how long I’d been standing there. So it’s no big deal. I wasn’t saying anything, but they heard me.Because the relational stuff is there. They picked up—imagine the information there, which is a whole other thing. We need to think about the audience first. But I think that split between digital and phatic is really, really, really important.So this is part of the information-heavy world. And I think we know enough about that. It fits neatly with our engineering, factory mindset that has dominated—has built the British century and now the American century. And maybe the Chinese one after that. But information is not all of what it is to be human. It’s only a very small part.And our interaction with each other and our ability to decide things is not based on information. And that’s part of why we’re brilliant. So ignoring this huge chunk is, I think, a mistake.There’s something a little torturous about being, I guess, feeling attached to the institutions that I’m attached to, that they are very often run by people who are incapable of accepting this reality. And they really operate in the information space. And I think maybe a generation before it was OK to kind of say, hey, listen, there’s the commercial world out there. They get to do their marketing stuff. But we’re doing the grown-up—we’re doing the grown-up official stuff up here. So we deal in information and facts and that stuff.That’s been my experience where I feel like they very often—I’ve been—we talked about this before—I’ve been sort of the marketing guy with activist organizations who don’t want to accept responsibility for communicating into an environment, into culture, basically. How do you communicate with them? Does my diagnosis feel accurate to your experience?Yeah, no, I think that rings a lot of bells for me. So here’s an example. I love the activist mentality because you want to do something rather than just talk about it. And part of what motivates the feedback loop that motivates that is that people talk about what we’ve done. And some of the guys go, yeah, right on. And sometimes you upset your mother-in-law. That’s what you’re trying to do, right? And those stout patrons of the local church will be horrified by what you’ve done. That’s a buzz for you, right? And you as a group of people, look what we’ve done. We’ve upset the past.So yeah, let’s accept that action is a good thing and the feedback on that is really good. But what’s hard is that if you think from your—whether you’re corporate or you’re an activist organization—if you think about you being responsible for how the world is, you’re being unrealistic. The world is as it is because of things outside, people outside, relationships outside. You need to work with and twist those relationships in order to make the thing happen.You need to be interested in that to start with. But mostly people in activist organizations are interested in the debate about, would this be the best way to say it? Or would this be the priority we should really go for? Should it be solar over wind? And if so, how do we fund that? We think it’s the perfect way to do it. It’s just irrelevant, honestly.It’s what them out there think. How can you unpick it for them? How can you help them want to do this, do whatever it is? How do you make them want to embrace this? How do you help them to put it in their hands to make change?I am curious about—I remember you had the purpose idea, right? In these conversations and talking about two things, brand and then research and the implication. So you had the purpose idea. When did you discover brand? How do you feel about that word in 2025?Well, let’s see. I think it’s just heavily overblown, like a lot of things in the world of marketing. I suggested it originally as one way to think about how you might pull a community of people inside or outside the organisation together to point in the same direction. That’s what it was, right?Also, that I recognise that most jobs are what the late David Graeber called b******t jobs. Most people really just carrying on because it’s the paycheck and I’ve got kids in school and I’ve got to make the monthly rent or whatever, my mortgage, you know. It’s not that this is the meaning of their lives. Give people what the Lord John Browne, who used to run BP, used to call—and I worked with him—the volunteer margin. Give them that extra bit of something if they’re inside the organisation to believe in.Equally, if you look outside the organisation, people are desperate for meaning, as my old buddy Hugh MacLeod from Gapingvoid famously scribbled. They’re desperate for meaning and a sense in their lives and a sense that somebody has a cause that they can be part of or is aligned with their—you know, so they’re desperate for that. So use it if it’s relevant. And that’s the kicker, right? Because it’s mostly not.You have to choose, is this the time to do this or not? Is this where you’re going to bet the farm or not? Now, when the brilliant Silvia Lagnado and the team at Ogilvy London and Frankfurt reinvented Dove and the Real Beauty campaign way back—20 years ago now—that was an amazingly brave thing. And they navigated both Ogilvy’s internal barriers and the external barriers at Unilever, brilliantly. There was an extraordinary thing. They used purpose there because the brief was, unless you can make this a $2 billion brand—that’s Silvia’s brief—unless you can make it a $2 billion brand, we’re going to sell it.Oh, wow.So how can you make it a $2 billion brand? They looked around the landscape and realized—so noisy, hard to tell them apart, blah, blah, blah. And then looked over the other side to consumers, and basically young women felt awful about their bodies because of the way the beauty industry was doing and because of the way they were dealing with each other. So that’s the opportunity. So we can put purpose in there.It also—then you do it. So it’s appropriate, right? It’s relevant. It’s timely. But if everyone does purpose, then it’s just nonsense. And very quickly, the world sees through it.Yes.And it becomes a half-hearted thing. We’re in the first week of November here in the UK, and there’s charity for men’s health. Movember is big here. I don’t know if it is where you are. But men stop drinking and grow a ‘tache for the month of November. And they’re not allowed to grow a beard. You have to have a ‘tache only. I mean, particularly embarrassing. That’s the point. Now that’s something nice to be part of, right? It’s kind of nice to be part of that.But you don’t want it every day, most people. It’s quite hard for most people to do it most of the time. Even people who work in things like crisis aid or on the front line of things like domestic violence or homelessness or whatever—wherever they are in the world—they can’t live that all the time. They have to have other things in their lives, otherwise they burn up. And some people manage it better than others, but you can’t be the only thing. Lots of people have things that matter to them that aren’t their purpose. I think it’s just overblown and oversold.Can I just say, if you have a chance though, can I just put this up? This is the bandana that my dog is wearing through November. For Cancer Research UK, we’re walking 60 miles together in this month to raise money on cancer research because cancer is something that affected my life and my family’s life and many friends. Now, that’s a purpose for a small part of my life. If my life was dedicated to cancer, I wouldn’t be able to deal with it. I’m not an oncologist.You know there’s that terrible thing amongst surgeons and doctors and healthcare workers generally who see death regularly. They just have this strange dissociation from it. Sometimes it’s gallows humour and sometimes it’s just sick. But they have to survive because that can’t be it. So we can’t have a purpose all the time. In business and in behaviour change, it’s useful sometimes. But not for everything all the time.Yeah, I realise that my question—because I remember the purpose ideas animating brand in a way that was really interesting to me—that my question associated it with the madness around social mission and all the confusion the past 15 years. And that wasn’t my intent at all with the question.No, no, nor me.Okay. But do you understand where I’m coming—Yeah, yeah, no, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Because I’ve—yeah, because—and so, what do I want to ask now? Yeah, it just felt like—was that a conversation that happened a lot? How did you feel over the past several years? I just—it’s just a bit—maybe I’m being oversensitive.No, no, no, I think it’s fair. I think we need to own up to our mistakes. And I think that I allowed myself to be misunderstood, and the other people took it too seriously. It’s like, you know, that if someone comes to you with a problem, do you give them the same solution every time? I mean, for me, that’d be tedious, right?Yeah.I’ve got a correlate with that, which might lead us in a slightly different place, which is I’m obsessed with triage at the moment.Yeah, tell me.Asking what kind of problem this is so that you can solve it better. And I find myself repeatedly saying to my clients, don’t be House. Don’t try to be House. You know, the guy in the - the Hugh Laurie character. Don’t be House. House deals with the 0.01% of cases that no one else can solve. The rest of the team very rapidly triage and say, it’s this kind of problem. Therefore, this is the treatment path.Right.And they have quite a lot of types of problem they can identify, right? Because they’re really good. We should be doing that when we’re looking at an activist organization, a behaviour change community conversation, or whether it’s in corporations generally. I think we should be saying what kind of problem is this? It’s one of the things that in my change consulting workshops we focus a lot on. And I’ve even created an acronym for it: Why are things as they are? WATATA. Nobody spends any time bothering to do that. Why are things as they are? Explore that. Spend time triaging, digging around, triaging. So yeah, oh, things are as they are because of that.Allows us to say we’ve seen that before over here in this other situation. And what we did there, what we learned from doing that was this. Okay, so let’s take that learning and apply back here. Instead, we go, this is a problem that needs a House-type genius to solve.No, it doesn’t. It needs smart thinking, triaging, and accessing the knowledge of the rest of humanity, to be honest, but there we are.We have just a few minutes left, and I’m wondering what would you want people to know about your work? Or what does the herd thesis ask of leaders, of marketers, of people wanting to make change?So one of the interesting—one thing I think leaders need to think about, or anyone who wants to lead change, I think is true, is recognize that change—as status, the status quo—is a product of us. It’s a team game.It’s not about heroic individuals, which is the way the story always goes, right? After the fact we say, and I did this, and I did that, and all the case studies go, and then the insights team discovered this bit, or then the strategic planners did this, or then the blah, blah, blah, and you go, no, it’s not that. It’s us. We together solve these problems. We together make this happen. We together keep things as they are, because that’s sometimes a really good objective, right? How do we manage this so that we don’t lose? That’s a good way. But we do it together. We come to that conclusion, and then we execute it together.So I think that’s the first thing, is to recognize that whether it’s change or status, both are team games, and you as a leader there are part of the team. It’s not you. And it not being about you is, I think, really kind of an interesting thing for a leader to ponder.The second thing I think that—and we haven’t talked much about the time thing in this—but I think the other thing that leaders need to start to do is to help organizations prototype the future repeatedly. Not make it like something you do once a year on the off-site or allocate an innovation team or give McKinsey a bunch of hundred thousand dollars or a hundred million dollars or something. You need to do it yourself.You need to constantly be going, where are the things that could be better in this organization or outside in its customers or its end consumers? Where are the things that we might solve for the problems they’ve got? Constantly going, would that make a difference? Would that make a difference? Would that make a difference? Constantly doing that, because that is the way to prepare yourself for stuff—opportunities that come.And opportunities will come that you don’t imagine. You need to get ready for them rather than predict them and sort of eagle-eyed, you know, like one of those—remember from the old, these are those ’80s Superman-type movies—there’d be a guided missile that went upstream.Literally to the target. Really? That’s not how you get ready for the future. You don’t try and predict it. You identify many possible things and then prepare for it. Work out what you have to do.So I think that future leadership is a key part of leadership. It’s not an option. It’s not an option. Things keep changing really quickly and they will not change any more slowly and will not become any less difficult to deal with.So you have to prepare. I tell an anecdote to just land this one. Jude Bellingham, who plays for Real Madrid, an English soccer player—in the England team, always really mediocre at soccer tournaments—you’d think they’d be better, but no. And they’re about to be kicked out by Slovakia, the mighty Slovakia. It was three years ago now in the Euros. And in the 96th minute—so six minutes into overtime—England were one nil down, and a ball came across, frantic, and Bellingham executed a perfect overhead cycle, bicycle kick. Kicked the ball over his own head into the top corner, right? Amazing. A miracle.Truth is, that was not the first time he tried that in his life. He’d practiced for that scenario. Not precisely that—as in England would be about to go out of a tournament—but that situation: ball comes to him in that position, that he could do that.And that’s what elite sports people do. They prepare for lots of different scenarios. And that’s what real—that real excellence in elite sport is actually about. It’s preparing so you don’t have to think.If you have an organization, it takes forever for the organization to do anything. You can’t just press the button in the CEO’s office and go, right, here we go. We’re doing this. That’s the new strategy.Executing takes forever. So get the organization executing before it needs to. And some of those—it’s like bets, right? Across a horse race. You need to bet on them all. Where you put your money will tell you whether you make any money out of it ahead of the day. And you go, okay, this isn’t working. So let’s rip it out of there and put that money over here, which seems to be working. And now we need something in to solve this kind of—have anyone got anything? Let’s try that then. And you need to do that all the time.So be a future-forward leader and it will allow you to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as somebody once wrote.That’s the stuff that we—that’s the stuff that leaders need to do. And I’ve got a third thing that’s really, that’s really important for everyone to remember: that in the end, it’s just people.Numbers and technology and infrastructure and all of that are all great, but they’re all distractions from the basic difficult bit, which is people. Humans are extraordinary, but our world, our culture, and our business culture—and the leadership that we’ve trained through business schools and so on, whether it’s in marketing or in general management—is really good at engineering, information, technology. It’s really bad at humans.And I don’t mean get the HR department out. I mean humans—how humans work. How do you interact with each other? How do you get a group of people to do something? How do you understand what matters to them? And how do you help the team then to deliver against that stuff?Again and again and again. That’s really hard because we’re not trained for it. The good thing is, we’re brilliant at it as a species. So let’s go back to that stuff. I’d like to cut business school curricula in half and put half of it on the human stuff.My next question was going to be about—if you have time—I remember I always tell this story. I’m sure you know Grant McCracken.Oh, I know Grant very well. Yeah, yeah.I remember he wrote that book, Chief Culture Officer, and I remember him privately telling me this. I say it out loud all the time, so please forgive me, Grant. But him saying that the corporation—in the way that he uses that term—saw that title and they see the word culture and they think of themselves. Do you know what I mean?Yeah.And so there’s a narcissism within the corporation that makes it impossible to see the culture outside, which is what you’re always pointing everybody at.How do you—if somebody, so a leader says, hey, I hear everything you’re saying, but how do I learn about culture? How do I go out there in order to get the information I need in order to prototype the future? What kinds of guidance?So there are three or four things that we can do—and I’m not going to mention all our fabulous friends and colleagues in the insights world, particularly. You know, they are great, right? But I’m not going to talk about particular people, and they don’t get the respect that they deserve, I think, in corporations, and that’s a real problem.One. Now, one thing I do is I teach people to actually meet face-to-face in the real world with their customers. And it sounds really simple. I call it a buddy interview.Go speak to people. Go stand there. Stand there in the mall. If it’s a, you know, if it’s a healthcare intermediary, like a healthcare professional, go and meet the healthcare professional. Just ask them about what matters to them, what’s in their head, what’s going on for them. Not about you—about them. And just get that.Then, second thing—and this is to do with all interactions with people—listen really carefully to the words. And note them. We’ll come back to the words in a moment, but also note the body language.That’s—you know Dave, is it Dave McCaughan? The great Australian researcher, and I’m sure a qualitative researcher. I’m sure you’ve come across him. He’s a fantastic guy. He once told me that he, when he was a junior qualitative researcher doing focus groups across Australia, he was told, look at people’s feet. Look at the feet. Look at the feet. Because the feet tell you so much about what’s really going on.What is it like to be that person? We have this amazing ability to be imaginatively empathetic. Step into their shoes. How do they feel the world? Listen to that stuff. Watch it. Feel it.And I will say, when I was running ad agencies, I’d say to my teams, find something to like about our client and their customers. Find something—just something. Because it’s too easy to be cynical and push them away. Find something. What do you like about those guys? What is it that you really get that touches you? Hold on to that. Now use that as a sort of breakthrough point into the rest of their world.There are ways of formally listening to the language, but write down the words that people use. Jill Arou, who’s a brilliant practitioner in the UK, has written a book called How We Do Things Around Here. And it’s just won a couple of business prizes in the UK—business book prizes. The Way We Do Things Around Here.And I first worked with her years ago when she was doing great stuff with American Express. The words—she says there are three buckets. The words we use about us in here, and how we do what we do around here, reveal certain assumptions. The way we talk about the words we use and the way we talk about them out there—our customers—reveal an awful lot of assumptions we have about them. And then the way we talk about the way we interact with those people out there reveals an awful lot of assumptions. And that’s just a start point.But if you listen really carefully—which you, as a great qualitative, you get this, right? Listen. Why is that a word? Why is that word? That’s really weird that you should be saying that. Why should you be so on edge? When I say the word customer, what’s that? What’s that about? Tell me about that. That’s really interesting.So you don’t have to be an expert, like, in the language before you start. But the buddy interview—go meet people. Have scheduled time with buddies. Make sure that all of your executive have buddies they go and speak to all the time. It’s not a replacement for quantitative research, but it helps you with your empathetic imagination. So that’s that.And I think the other thing is, bake in feedback really early on. So I do these rapid innovation streaks. Let’s imagine it takes three days. And at the end of three days, a team of 12 people have created six ideas to solve existing problems in the business and prototype them, right? They’ve done that by very early on checking their thinking and their understanding with a buddy in the audience. Everybody should be doing that all of the time. And those might take money out of our market research industry, but I don’t care. Because I think it’s crucial that we take people away from the corporation or the activist community and go, who are the people? And what’s their world like? And how do I make their world work to get the change I want to see?So that’s that. And I think finally on this subject is—I think the—well, excuse me. Kate, what’s that audio? Sorry, that’s my construction guy. Let me—sorry, let me say that again.The final thing is that we need to remember it’s not about us, and it’s not about the thing. It really isn’t.There’s—I’m sure you know—the notion of a social object, which became quite interesting in the early days of the social web. And Malinowski—I think he was Polish—anthropologist, sociologist, did work in Oceania, so the Southern Pacific around the ’20s, I think it was. And he observed that the objects in the cultures he came across that were most prized were not prized because of their scarcity or because of the scarcity or value of the ingredients—their constituent parts—but by the way they were given away.You know, it was called the Kula ring, was what he—this is an amulet essentially. And he watched that go around. He monitored that, described that.And I think that’s really important—that many of the things that we think are most valuable and most important, many of the things that shape most of our lives, are valuable not because they’re valuable in themselves or because they’re scarce. It’s because of how they make us—allow us—to interact with other people.So it’s not about us, and it’s not about the information. It’s not about the thing. It’s about each other.Beautiful. Thank you so much for accepting the invitation. It was very generous, and thank you so much.You’re welcome. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Graham Booth is a brand strategy and communications consultant and founder of Movement, a UK consultancy established in 1997. He helps clients develop effective brand positioning and advertising through qualitative research. His clients include Coca-Cola, Aviva, Tesco, Innocent, and Paddy Power. His research has contributed to multiple IPA Effies award-winning campaigns.So, I know that you know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. When I learned this question, I just stole it, because it’s a really big question, and it’s a beautiful way to start the conversation. But because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it the way I’m doing 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?Well, it is a great question, Peter. And it’s kind of a classic qualitative question, isn’t it? Because it’s not just about the answer. It’s about how the person who’s answering the question interprets the question, because it is so open to interpretation.My answer, I guess, is not a geographical one. I was born in South London, in the suburbs of South London. It’s pretty much like the suburbs anywhere—it could be the suburbs of Birmingham, could be the suburbs of Leeds, suburbs of Manchester. You know, it was classically bland, homogeneous, even more so than it would be now.And I’ve always struggled with working out actually where I do come from, in geographic terms, because I’m much more interested in the sensibility and the culture and those aspects of things. So really, when I think about where I come from, it’s more kind of psychological, I suppose. Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious—I don’t mean it to—but more of a sort of psychological or personality background.Because I think how “where you come from” is significant to talk about now is in terms of how that impacts how you see the world and interact with people and so on. And, in relation to what we’re talking about, also to your practice as well.So for me—I’m buffing on too much, meandering—for me, I guess where I come from is that I’m a maker. Roy Langmaid—I don’t know if you know the name—Roy Langmaid was one of the qualitative research directs in the UK, still is, God bless him. But, you know, we met each other a number of times, and I did a course with him one time, and through various exercises we’d been doing, he identified me as a sense maker. And that kind of distilled it for me. I thought, “You know what? You’re absolutely right.” And it put a lot of things into place. And essentially, if I think about my journey, I started off making things.When I was a kid, I used to construct models of stuff. But also I would make stuff from scratch. I’d make stuff from timber, from matchsticks and cardboard boxes, just leftovers, all kinds of things. And I would construct houses and construct Formula One cars and all this kind of thing. I was intrinsically interested in how you can put things together to make something coherent.I thought, “You know what? You’re absolutely right.” And it put a lot of things into place. And essentially, if I think about my journey, I started off making things. When I was a kid, I used to construct models of stuff. But also I would make stuff from scratch. I’d make stuff from timber, from matchsticks and cardboard boxes, just leftovers, all kinds of things.I would construct houses and construct Formula One cars and all this kind of thing. I was intrinsically interested in how you can put things together to make something coherent. And I did that passionately as a child, through to when I was about 14.And then, bizarrely, my best subject at school was design—creative design. And I absolutely loved it. I look back on my schoolbooks now from when I was 13, 14, and I go, “My God, that’s just ridiculous.”But in my school, you couldn’t do creative design. They constructed the timetable in such a way that you couldn’t do creative design at the same time as doing academic subjects. So because I was academic, I couldn’t pursue design technology or creative design between the ages of 14 and 16.When I took exams—when you’re 16, we have a tranche of exams that decide whether you stay at school or whatever—I had to do geography and history rather than design and technology. And, you know, it didn’t do me any harm. At the end of the day, I read geography at Oxford, so it kind of worked out fair enough.But I think what really happened, when I reflect upon it, is I transitioned from making with my hands—physical making—to intellectual making. And in a way, there’s absolutely a parallel. I think the two things absolutely overlap, which is trying to make sense of pieces, of loads and loads of stuff, which you’ve got to put together and make sense of and make shapes of. So as a sense maker, I transitioned from doing that physically with my hands to doing it mentally, intellectually, with my head.So I think I’m still a maker. But I now make things in my head, because at the end of the day, that is what so much of what we did—and certainly what I do in qualitative research—is all about. You’ve just got this sea of data, and you’ve got to actually try and find the structure.Where’s the dynamism? Where’s the structure? Where’s the shape? How do we put it all together? How do we make something coherent that makes sense, that other people can then appreciate and understand?So it’s a sort of intellectual version of what I used to do physically as a child, in a weird kind of way. And interestingly enough, I sort of rediscovered this a year or two ago when I got back to photography, which is something that I’m very, very keen on. I did my first exhibition—it’s not like they’re grand exhibitions, I’m not doing stuff at Tate Britain or anything—but small exhibitions. And I’ve done three now.One of the brilliant things about when you display your work is you get to talk to people about it. And that’s really fascinating, because when you do something intuitively—as I think people who have a bit of a creative bent do—I never really analyzed it. But when people come and look at your work and they start talking to you about it, you start having to think about it.Okay, so why does that look like that? Why is it abstract reality? So it’s essentially mostly photographs of architecture, photographs of landscapes, and so on. What I do is I take a picture, and I know that in that picture is something interesting. I don’t quite know what it is, but there’s something more than just what I’m seeing.Elliott Erwitt, who’s a great American photographer, said words to the effect of: The point of photography is that you see the same thing as everybody else, but you see something different. It’s actually a brilliant term for what we do in qualitative research, as well as what he did in photography.And I completely identify with that, because what I do is I get it on my computer screen, and I play with it. I recrop it, I move the image around, and so on, until eventually I find—there it is. There’s what I was looking for. I knew it was there somewhere. I’ve now found it—bang. And there it is. So you found the pattern in the data. You found the pattern in the pixels.So it was then actually as a consequence of that that I wrote a piece for the Association for Qualitative Research over here, which I’m a member of, which actually drew the parallel between my photographic practice and my professional practice in qualitative research. And it occurred to me that maybe I’m not alone. Maybe there are other people, not just in qualitative research, but actually in all kinds of fields of business, who maybe, when you reflect upon it, can see a relationship between a personal passion and what they do for work—assuming they enjoy their work.So that parallel was really interesting. So at the end of the day, a sense maker. A sense maker of all of that stuff that people tell me in the interviews, you know, and all those pixels that appear when I put it up on the screen. I’m trying to work out what that picture’s about. So I guess that’s where I come from.Oh, it’s beautiful. I mean, I have so many things that I want to ask about. First, in particular, just to call out the fact that I don’t know how I encountered Roy Langmaid, but I did. And I really became a fan and reached out to him. We had an exchange, actually, I think, over the pandemic. I’ve invited him here for a conversation, but it just hasn’t worked out. So I’m a massive admirer of Roy. I think, in a way, I was—often I say that I was raised by wolves here in the States and then sort of reached back, I think, through my mentor and other people back to planning and research and then creative development, qualitative. So I have a lot of love for Roy Langmaid and the way that he talks about qualitative. So the idea that he called you a sense maker, I feel the significance of that. That sounds pretty good.Yeah, no, I mean, I should wear it. I should wear it on my T-shirt. I’m proud of that. He and Wendy Gordon are sort of seminal figures in qualitative research over here. In Wendy’s case, she certainly actually wrote the book. So I was so, so chuffed with that. And it touches on all kinds of—because also he’s a psychologist and I think psychotherapy as well, which is also another part of where I’m from.Because one of the things that really interested me, coming from that very flat background in the suburbs, was then I went to university and just encountered this other world. I was a state school educated kid, right? And I went to Oxford and in those days, 70% of the intake there was from private schools. So their parents had paid for them to be educated. A lot of them had been to boarding school. And I was just from a state day school in South London. I was the only one from my school to go to Oxford.So all of a sudden you’re there, you’re surrounded by all these people who come from a completely different background to you. That was extraordinary. I think that’s another aspect of it: difference, encountering difference. So coming from that very homogeneous background, encountering difference and going, “My God, actually my background isn’t everybody’s background. My life isn’t everybody’s background.”And then you compound that by going with your friends to their home for the weekends—you find yourself having dinner with their parents. And all of a sudden, the reason why you thought, “Why is Mike like that? Why does he do that?” Or, “Harry, why is he such a pain?” And then you see them with their parents and it all falls into place.And that, again, was a really, really subtle experience. So not only appreciating difference—because I think I’ve always had a curious mind, and that sort of dovetails with the whole sense maker thing—but then to actually see how different people’s backgrounds impact them as adults as well, and how varied and diverse people can be in those terms, was great.And that, I think, again, is something I just kind of carried forward into my practice—just a real curiosity. Again, it’s sensemaking. Why? Why are they like that? Why do they feel that? Why are they responding to this idea in the way that they responded? Why do they feel about the brand in that way? All of these things kind of dovetail and all overlap and it all kind of makes sense together, I think.Again, it’s sensemaking. Why? Why are they like that? Why do they feel that? Why are they responding to this idea in the way that they responded? Why do they feel about the brand in that way? All of these things kind of dovetail and all overlap and it all kind of makes sense together, I think.Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be? You’ve talked about it a little bit, but as a boy, what did you want to be when you grew up?I wanted to be an architect. Somebody gave me—one of my family, I don’t know, they must’ve seen something—they gave me a book, I think called Modern Buildings, as simple as that, when I was about 14. And it featured the work of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, several wonderful modern architects.And so when I look back at my sketchbooks now, I can see I was drawing extraordinary sort of three-dimensional house designs and stuff like that, which is just completely ridiculous. I wanted to be an architect, but again, I was taken away from that because—even though it wasn’t working with your hands—it was still drawing.You don’t really draw. You want to be a lawyer, you want to be an accountant, you want to be a medic. I came from a very aspiring, low middle-class family. So, basically, architects—they draw, don’t they? You don’t want to do that. You want to get a proper professional job.In retrospect, of course, I would have realized that architecture is a pretty professional job—you know, a mere seven years’ training. It’s pretty credible. But that was a dream that was eventually realized, because about five or six years ago, we eventually did manage to get ourselves—we designed, with an architect—a low energy house in the UK, which we moved into. So that was it. Finally got there, through a very sort of contorted route, finally got to that destination.So yeah, that’s what I wanted to do. Again, it all feeds into the same thing. It’s about creating stuff from pieces and creating something that is coherent and makes sense.So catch us up. Tell me—where are you now, and what do you do for work? How do you talk about what you do?Okay. So I started out in advertising. I worked in advertising agencies for the first six years. First three years were at Leo Burnett, as a matter of fact, in London. Then I worked at one of the hot creative agencies that grew up at the same time as BBH—BBH is still around, but GGT, where I was, isn’t.Dave Trott was a really seminal figure in my experience, and we might touch on that later on. But after about six years, the bit that really interested me was what people did with ideas. So I was the guy—I was an account handler, you know, a bag carrier for my sins. I was the guy who had to go and sit behind the glass with the clients and watch the groups.And when Rob, 10 minutes or half an hour into group seven, started slagging off the creative idea he was being presented with, I was like, “Well, you know, I think what Rob actually means is...”—busy trying to calm the client down and sell the idea. Because Dave Trott’s thing was always, “Don’t come back to the office if you haven’t sold the creative work.” That’s what he said to the account handlers.So anyway, that was the bit that really interested me. I stepped out after six years because that was the thing that interested me, and went straight into research. Within three years, I was running my own business in partnership with someone.We did that for 10 years. Then I stepped away from that partnership, set up my own business—there were about seven or eight of us. About six years ago, I went freelance. And it’s been fantastic.I mean, of course, it’s a roller coaster ride. But generally speaking, absolutely wonderful, wonderful work, fabulous clients. You get the clients you deserve. And therefore, I’m very, very glad that I deserve those clients, because my relationships with my clients are so, so good.Essentially, my work broadly splits into two. I do brand development and creative development. A lot of my work is ad development, though I’m increasingly stepping back from calling it ad development, since advertising is rapidly becoming the “A word.”I think the emphasis is on creative elements. And genuinely, I do creative development. It’s not just advertising—it is developing creative ideas, but also packaging design, pack graphics. Recently I did some work for a dog food business on pack graphics, also corporate identity—logos, if you like—and I’ve done some of that work for major businesses.So there’s that creative development side, which is about half of it. And then the other half is strategy development—principally, positioning development. And of course, the two are incredibly closely linked, needless to say.Quite often, it’ll be a project where I’ll do the strategy development and then we’ll move on to the creative development as well. In some cases, like this big international project I did last year, it was a two-stage project. It was a positioning exercise for an international schools network, as a matter of fact, who’ve got offices in America, Mexico, Spain, India, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia.They had a guy who became their marketing director who had worked as a marketing director at Diageo. So he knew his onions. He got me involved via the non-exec there, who I’ve known for a very long time from working on Coca-Cola. We did a positioning project internationally there, and then coming out of that we did the brand identity development. It had a huge impact on them. It’s been incredibly positive.So there’s an absolute process. If you’re going to do good creative development work, you need to get strategy. But equally, if you’re going to do good strategy work, you need to understand creative as well—because you need to understand how that can manifest and inspire great ideas.Because there are all kinds of really pedestrian brand propositions and brand strategy. Some of the stuff I see from some of the briefs—I say, “Oh my God, really? It’s just embarrassing.”Can you say more about that? About the relationship, the necessity that these things work together in that way?That’s really—it’s probably more obvious if you’re doing creative development that you need to understand strategy. One of the things I always say when I’m doing creative development—I work very closely with agencies. Unusually, because of my advertising agency background, they tend to trust me.Because, of course, research is notorious for, you know, “kill your creative baby at birth,” and creatives classically hate it. So I make a point of trying to engage the creative team in the research process: talk about the idea, ensure they’re there at the debrief, and so on.I really understand the creative idea. But another part of that is also saying: tell me about the strategy. What’s the strategic basis of this? Not just the marketing context, but how have you arrived at the proposition? Did you explore other areas? Why do you think this idea is going to have cut-through?Then what I always do is find a way—even towards the end of my focus groups, for example—to put the strategy in front of the consumer. Obviously not as an advertising agency strategy statement, but just as, “Funny enough, I was talking to the people who came up with this idea, and they told me what their intention is behind it. Because what they feel is that people feel so-and-so... So what they’re trying to do is...”Then I ask, “How do you feel about that?” And they tell me how they feel. Then I say, “Okay, how does that sort of fit with the advertising we’ve been talking about?”So what you’re doing is you’re doing a sense check against this stake in the ground—this is what this thing is supposed to be doing. One of the things that helps you do is work out if you’ve got issues with the idea, and on what level those issues exist. Is it the strategic foundation that’s flawed? Is it that the creative idea doesn’t deliver the strategy effectively? Or is it just executional?That’s a really critical thing in creative development research: to be able to identify at what level the issues arise, so you can actually, with your diagnostics, say, “Okay, this is what you need to address going forward.”Flipping it the other way, I’ve done lots of strategy development work. And you can arrive at a strategy that’s really pedestrian, that inspires nobody. Or you can come to a place that comes at it from an angle. What I’m really into, with both creative work and strategy work, is coming at it laterally—from the unexpected place—so that people go, “Oh, okay.”One of the things I’ve always said is that strategy should be something that I should be able to sit with my mate in the pub—or you should be able to go have a coffee with a friend—and when they say, “Oh, all right, what’d you get that for?” you can answer them.Human beings position things with each other all the time. In almost every interaction we have, we naturally position things without realizing it. And what you need is a position for your brand that you can say, and it doesn’t sound like it’s from Planet Marketing—it sounds like a genuine thing.You need to approach strategy and brand propositions, for me, as laterally as you do creative ideas. Because at the end of the day, yes, insight can be very powerful. You can find that insight and turn it your particular way, but you’ve got to find an angle on it. Because a lot of stuff is the same—you’ve got to be imaginative about strategy in the same way as you are about creative.Sorry, I’m buffing on too much about that. But I think that’s why, when you’re doing strategy development stuff, I’m just trying to push the envelope as much as possible. In fact, I’ll often do idea generation sessions with clients as well. So I won’t just do the strategy development research—I’ll actually help develop propositions too.All the time, I’m looking to develop stuff that’s a little bit edgy, that’s going to push the edges of things, to put into the research. Because it’s a bit of a case of: rubbish in, rubbish out. You’ve got to have some really good, stimulating stuff to take into the research.What do you love about it? Where’s the joy in it?Oh my God. Well, fortunately, I do love the work. I mean, I’ve been doing it for a very long time. And I really, really do love the work. I love working with creative people. I love creative ideas. I love all that stuff. But I think what I really love about it—what the real joy for me is—is talking to real people.It’s so easy in the world of advertising. We used to produce our ads in Soho, in the West End of London—an ivory tower. And then I’m off in some suburb in Birmingham, sitting in somebody’s front room, listening to people talk about it. It’s a different world. You’ve got to get out of your bubble.I actually regard it as a massive privilege to talk to ordinary people day in and day out, week after week. In my peer group, that’s pretty unusual. I’m the awkward bugger who, at a dinner party, when people start going, “Well, you know, people nowadays do blah, blah, blah,” I go, “Well, actually, I’m not entirely sure that’s right, because I’ve talked to people. And it’s not quite like that.”Most people go, “Whoa,” because most people don’t talk to ordinary people most of the time. Maybe they do their cleaning or drop their kids off at the babysitter, but they don’t actually listen. And it’s a real privilege, because it just takes the scales from your eyes. You can’t live in the bubble anymore. You can’t live in the echo chamber, because you know how real people live.And for me—as a privileged, middle-class, middle-aged male—I’m very aware of my privilege, to actually get out there all the time and talk to ordinary people. That’s a privilege. And of course, the way the world is heading, people are getting more and more separated, and less and less aware of the reality of other people’s lives. So it’s incredibly important.I’m very, very grateful for it. And I’ve learned an awful lot. Because one of the interesting things, you know, when you’re doing stuff—on baked beans, or on organic food, or Diet Coke—you’re incidentally learning stuff about people’s lives and lifestyles and values that is absolutely fascinating.So I think that’s what I love about it. I carry that with me. And yeah, I’m the guy who really annoys your guests at your dinner party. Well, you know, I think we share that. I think you’ve probably put in many more hours than I have, but I’m very aware of the fact that I’ve spent more time than the average person in conversation with everyday people, and how unique a point of view that is. And how different. I feel very grateful. I mean, I walked into a brand consultancy because I loved TV, and they put me in front of people and told me to ask them questions. And it made me a different kind of person just by virtue of having to do that kind of conversation with people. Unbelievably, I really feel grateful for that. And I love that you’re calling attention to it. How do you feel about it? Can you tell me more about what it’s done to you, to be a person who’s listened and asked as much?That’s a really good question. The danger is, I have to try to avoid being too angry. Not angry with the people I talk to, but angry with how people talk about the people I talk to.I’ll give you an example. You doubtless know Brexit—when we voted to come out of the European Union in 2016. Absolute catastrophic mistake. Something that will be the biggest act of self-harm in national history. I’ve heard it called—100% correct—complete lunacy. We shan’t get into the reasons why it took place. That’s a whole other discussion.But I’ll give you an example. I was actually training—doing my psychotherapy training, as a matter of fact—and I was going into London for one of my sessions. It was the day after the results had come in. Me and loads of people, of course, were just reeling from this horror that we were going to be exiting Europe.I could hear, just along the train carriage, somebody talking about it. Quite a posh guy. He was really angry about it. And I heard him say, “The thing is, these people shouldn’t be given the vote.”I thought to myself: do you know what? The reason they voted as they did is because of people like you—who have the arrogance and the ignorance to imagine these people are stupid and shouldn’t be allowed to vote.Actually, if you spend time with them, you realize they’re not. Very early on, one of the early projects I worked on was with a very mass market group of consumers. One of the things I noticed in the groups was how they struggled to articulate their feelings about things.This guy on the train would have thought, “See how stupid they are.” They’re not stupid, mate. The fact that they don’t have the language or the confidence to express their feelings, or maybe the verbal skills to articulate how they feel, doesn’t make them stupid.Unless you have that attitude, you’re only going to do more to push them away. It’s that terrible mistake Hillary Clinton made, when she referred to the “stupid people”—and she deservedly got absolutely clattered for that. It’s that ridiculous attitude that alienates people.That, for me, was one of the very earliest lightbulb moments. You work with that, and you give people different ways to express themselves. But also, just don’t make them feel inadequate for being unable to articulate. You help them find the words.You say, “I wonder if maybe it’s a little like this?” You help them find the language. People can be so patronizing.I remember sitting behind the glass with clients back in the day as well, hearing the way they would talk about the people who paid their bloody salaries and their bloody mortgages. I’m sorry—so long. Yeah, so long.So as you can tell, I get a bit—I get quite angry about it. That arrogance, that distance from the reality of ordinary people’s lives. I suppose that’s the bigger picture of what it’s done to me.Well, I mean, it’s beautiful. And I ask because I feel the same way. I mean, we assume responsibility—I assume responsibility—for the people that I talk to. It’s a real obligation and a commitment to represent them. And because I think there’s this—I want to transition into talking about….the word “method” is coming to mind. How do you do what you do? I think often qualitative interviewing, moderating, that stuff can be sort of invisible. It just looks like, “Oh, Graham’s an affable guy. He’s really good with those people, and he gets them to say interesting things.” But there’s a lot of skill. There’s a lot of craft at work. I wonder if you might talk a little bit—just executionally, operationally—how do you do what you do? What does it mean to have a conversation? What does it mean to listen and ask questions about creative and about people’s everyday lives?That’s a really good question. Just to illustrate that there’s so much more to it than meets the eye, I’ll tell you a little story.About 10 years ago, somebody I worked with in London went back to Dublin, and she got me over to run a two-day training course in qualitative research with the planning departments of her agency. So I did this thing for two days. At the end of it, I remember one of the planners came up to me and said, “My God, I never realized there was so much to it.”And thereafter, I got almost all of the qualitative research projects that agency did, because they had no idea of the intricacy of what was involved. I see this all the time.One of the things I’m obsessed about is stimulus material—getting stimulus material right. In both creative and strategy development, you’re often given these concept boards with massively overwritten propositions—strategy statements consisting of several sentences, often incorporating three or four different ideas. They’re surrounded by stock photos—women cartwheeling on beaches and so on.You show this to people and say, “How do you feel about the brand being talked about in this way?” And where do they begin? The language is opaque, it’s marketing language, and there are multiple ideas there. Which pictures are they responding to?So I developed this concept called invisible stimulus. The idea is: don’t use any stimulus.How do you put the idea in front of people? You talk about it as something you just noticed or heard. Like a chat down the pub: “So there I was at this company the other day, and they make this vodka. They put sloes in it. And they were telling me that apparently all the sloes are handpicked. What do you make of that?”And we have a chat about it. The first time I did that—using that very example—one of the participants said at the end, “Thanks, that was really good fun. I thought it was going to be boring marketing, but that was a really interesting conversation.”During that conversation, I put eight different positioning concepts in front of them.So I thought, okay, I’m onto something here. That’s a pretty extreme version. But what I often do in positioning research is turn the positionings into quotes from users of the brand.So rather than marketing artifacts trying to sell you something, it’s: “I’ve talked to people who use Brand X, and here are a few of the things they’ve said they like about it. I wonder if any of these connect with you?”Now you’re dealing with other human beings—not with a brand, but with how people feel about something. So stimulus is really important. I work really hard with clients on developing it.Similarly, in creative work, it’s all about identifying the right kind of stimulus for that idea. If you’re looking at advertising—say, three ideas in a project—it’s completely legitimate to use three different types of stimulus.Typically, less is more. In many cases, a vividly written narrative that lets people picture it in their own mind works better. Storyboards are the death of me—people get hung up on the staccato, static nature of them.Nowadays, you get AI imagery. Clients like the closer it gets to final execution, the better. But that’s not true. Because the final execution won’t look like that. It never does.What we need to be looking at is the idea—the ability of the idea to connect in a relevant and distinctive way, and convey the understanding we want people to take away about the brand. So it’s about the idea.They’ll say, “But you’re not comparing like with like. You’re using storyboards for that one, video for another, and a narrative for the third.”We’re not creating a level playing field for the stimulus—we’re creating a level playing field for the idea. And we use whatever stimulus best conveys the idea. I’m really obsessed with that—getting the stimulus right, whether strategic or creative. How you structure discussion is absolutely critical, too. Some people still start creative groups by saying, “What advertising do you like? What are your favorite ads?” You’ve screwed it from the start. You frame the whole thing. The group coalesces around some definition of “good advertising,” and if what you show doesn’t fit, it’s already in trouble.So never do that. And then there are all kinds of things about asking open questions, how you pursue a response, and so on.But obviously a critical part—and this is becoming more mission-critical with AI moving into our arena—is analysis. I’ve always called it the black box of qualitative research. It’s where the magic happens.What we don’t do is reportage. It’s all about interpretation—finding patterns in the data. We’re not probability aggregators. What often matters is that thing Robert said in group four that unlocked the whole project.So what? Why did he say that? What was he responding to? Why didn’t others say that? You develop hypotheses and test them against all the data. Constant cross-referencing.I’ve always described analysis as peeling the layers off an onion. You can’t get to the one beneath until you remove the one on top.Incidentally, one of the good things to come out of COVID is that most of our work is now on Zoom rather than face to face. God knows I love face to face—and I still do it, it’s stimulating—but I’d say we get 99% of the results online.One of the things that’s changed is that now clients watch almost all my groups. And what’s happened is they can now see the difference analysis makes. They’ve heard people talk. They go, “Okay, it’s like that.”Then next week, Graham comes back and does a debrief. And they go, “Wow. I hadn’t seen that coming.” Because what I’ve done is dug away and found the underlying patterns, motivations, implications for development. I’ve made sense of it. I’m a sense maker.I’ve shown them what the future could look like—something they never would’ve got to. Before, when they saw a couple of groups in a viewing studio out of, say, eight, they’d think, “Okay, maybe those two were anomalous.”Now, they’ve seen all eight. And still, when I come back, they say, “Wow.” Because they still wouldn’t have gotten what I present.I think it’s added massive value. That black box—they can now see that’s where the magic takes place. But we’re also massively under threat, because the budget holders don’t get to see that.And they’re saying, “Hey, we can get that done faster and cheaper.” Well, great—if you want to commoditize your insight so your brand loses competitive advantage over the next five years. Off you go, mate. But boy, that’s short-sighted.Yeah. I always like getting sort of foundational in a way about qualitative—and maybe this is what you’re talking about with the black box. What is it—and you’ve been at it for a while—how would you say qualitative has changed? And what is the proper role and the real value of qualitative? Because I hear in the stories you’re telling—and I’ve had these experiences too—where there’s a set of quantitative expectations that clients often bring into qualitative. So how do you articulate the value and purpose of qualitative, especially as we do enter this weird synthetic age?I think that’s a really good question. In terms of its results, I think it’s very justifiable on an ROI basis. You look at the amount you spend on proper, human-led qual—the return you can get on that is absolutely huge. Three campaigns I worked on last year won Effie’s Effectiveness Awards.Without bigging myself up too much, none of them would have turned out the way they did without the qualitative research. It helped them identify the most promising route, how to best optimize it, and—in one case—it enabled the client to buy a route they felt very uncomfortable with.The agency managed to persuade the client to include it as one of three routes. The client said, “Okay, well, I’ve got two I really like, so we’ll put that one in too.” And the route the agency had to really push for just absolutely nailed it. It made a huge difference.So I can cite the effectiveness of that. At one level, you can get a fantastic return on investment. You can persuade the C-suite to buy stuff they wouldn’t normally buy—if you can get it in front of the consumer.You can simply optimize ideas. Maybe you’ve got an idea, but there’s something going on that you can improve: “If you address that in this way...”Another thing I like to think about is that ideally, what you deliver doesn’t just apply to this creative route or brand positioning. It’s a framework. It gives people a way of thinking about other creative work they do—other brands within the portfolio.Because the insight you provide into human motivation and how people actually process communications—you really hope that builds a store of understanding that they’ll bring to their next campaign, or when they move on to another brand and work on repositioning.So my hope is that you’re giving people a broader framework of understanding—a wider set of reference points—that they can bring to bear on future projects, not just the one you worked on.And I think it’s incredibly important for us in our field now to really lobby and fight for the difference it makes. There’s a lot of pressure in the industry at the moment. And it’s incredibly short-sighted. We’ve got to keep reminding people of the value of what we do.Can you tell me a little bit more about one of those stories? They sound amazing—to the degree you’re comfortable.Yeah, well, I’ve written them up—you can read them. But the particular example I’m thinking of that pushed the envelope a little bit was in Ireland. There’s an Irish insurance business called FBD. The “F” stands for farmers—it originally did farmers’ insurance. But they’ve moved into household and car insurance and so on.They were suffering from a salience issue. So much of choosing financial services products is about salience—especially insurance. You need mental availability, trust, etc. They wanted to make it clear that FBD stood for support—that they’d be there for you in the event of a problem.Now, that’s arguably a bit generic. But they’re very embedded in Irish society, and they wanted to get that across. So the agency produced several routes intended to build that sense: this is an insurance company you should consider because they’ll be there for you, and they’re Irish—they’re embedded in the community.The agency developed three routes. One of them the client was really unsure about, because it didn’t do the “embedded in Irish society” bit. What it did was create theoretical meanings for the acronym FBD: “Fuchsia Bike Dads,” “Field of Butterfly Detectives,” and so on.Each was presented like: “FBD stands for Fuchsia Bike Dads”—three men in lycra, on pink bikes. Then, “Or does it stand for this?” Or this? And finally: “What it really stands for is support.”So you draw people in with something completely unexpected and memorable. And you’ll talk about it. All those things Dave Trott used to talk about when I was working at GGT 30 years ago—he was well ahead of his time. In the world of social media, talkability and shareability are absolutely critical now too.And it just really cut through. The really important thing was giving people a reason to remember FBD when they’re thinking, “My insurance is up for renewal—let’s have a look at FBD.”You’ve built that mental availability. It’s just there when you need to access it, which is how memory works. And it had a fantastic impact—measurable, in terms of market share, inquiries, etc. I can’t remember all the numbers, but it’s in the piece I wrote on LinkedIn.That research gave the client the confidence to buy a route they were uncomfortable with. It looks like no other insurance advertising out there. None of the worthiness. Just great fun—and it did the job.And also—it performed that same purpose of coming in at an angle, right?Yeah, a lateral angle. Completely. And the way I did that one—if I recall—I used a narrative script. I didn’t show them images of Fuchsia Bike Dads or Butterfly Detectives. I just said, “We see three men standing by their bicycles in pink lycra…” and so on.So it’s just Graham telling a story to a group of people, right?Well, you know, it is. And that’s something that clients sometimes feel a little uncomfortable with. Sometimes, if it’s a particular style of voiceover, we’ll get it pre-recorded. But I’ve done a lot of acting in my time, so I’m able to deliver things reasonably well.To give you an example of how well narrative scripts can work—there’s the insurance brand Aviva. I developed a campaign with them some years ago that ran for many years. It used a guy who’s a big comedy actor over here. He became their sort of signature: whenever you saw him in one of their ads, you knew it was Aviva. Though he always played different characters, just like he did on TV.They always had a comic element. Then they came to do a life insurance ad, and they weren’t sure if they should use this comic actor. Because life insurance is a bit… you know. But one of the three routes we put in—two were more conventional, but one used him, not in a comic role, playing it straight.He’s in the house, the family’s packing to go on holiday. He’s handing them things, staying out of the way. Then he’s standing on the stairs, just above the hallway. The daughter says to the mother, “It won’t be the same without Dad this year.” And she says, “I know.”I’m filling up even telling you—and she gives him a hug. Then we cut back to him.It was inspired by a movie—I can’t remember which one—but basically, he’s dead. And he’s looking down on his family. I delivered that as a narrative. I had people in tears in the group.Not because of my delivery—but because the narrative script was written really carefully. Usually, the agency gives me something the creatives wrote. I edit it. I take out technical directions like “clock wipe to...” and anything like “at this point we realize the brand is good for…”You have to let people take it for themselves. So I help them write it. But it shows the power—the emotional power—of something that’s really well written. It’s a story. And it was extraordinary. That convinced the client to go with the route they were least comfortable with.I love it. I love these stories because they shine a light. Well, I guess I want to finish with the time we have. I have to ask about mentors. If you have mentors or touchstones—you’ve already mentioned Roy. I’d love to hear more. Dave Trott is someone I’m aware of—I’ve watched some of his stuff on YouTube. Maybe talk a little about Roy Langmaid and Dave Trott. What you learned from them?Yeah. Roy reinforced my—well, I was fantastically lucky. The first guy I worked with when I moved from advertising into research was John Siddall. I don’t think he’s still with us, unfortunately. But he ran a business called Reflections.He just nailed it. He did everything right. Stimulus, structure, open questions, not framing—it was superb. I learned the basics from the right man. It was a fantastic place to start.Subsequently, when I employed people, I found myself having to “de-train” them. They hadn’t learned in the right place. They weren’t doing it right.Eventually, I started taking on graduate trainees so I could train them from scratch. Now, that might sound egotistical—like I’m threatened by difference. But I’d like to think it’s because I wanted people to do it the right way.John was fantastic. Dave Trott—oh my God. To be honest, in my first two or three years at Leo Burnett, I didn’t learn a great deal about advertising. I learned about advertising agencies.I learned about advertising when I went to GGT. They produced great work. Dave had no patience with me at all—I was one of those poncy, Oxford-educated bag carriers. He used to say, “Don’t come back to the office if you haven’t sold the work.”So I had very little patience from him. But, God, did he know what he was doing. Single-mindedness—that’s what I learned.He’d say—and I’m sure he got this from somewhere—“Graham, when are you more likely to catch a tennis ball? When I chuck you a dozen tennis balls or one?” Point made.So single-mindedness. Which applies strategically and creatively. And then: impact. The importance of impact. It doesn’t matter how clever your advertising is if it doesn’t get noticed. If it doesn’t stop people and make them pay attention.That was number one for him—create impact. It was a really seminal experience. I learned a huge amount. To be able to step out, after working two or three years with Dave, into research—that so informed the way I approach things.So yeah, probably John Siddall and Dave Trott were key figures. I would’ve loved to spend more time with Roy, but I never worked with him. It was just one or two encounters at training events that really informed things.One other thought—not quite a mentor, but a seminal experience—was sitting in debriefs when I was an account handler. You’d get the debrief from the researcher, get to the end, and think, “Brilliant. So what the devil do we do now?”They told you all the problems and gave no solutions.I was determined that when I went into research, I’d never do that. You will never come away from my debrief without a sense of the way forward. My company tagline is: Clarity. Direction. Progress.You give people incredible clarity—so they understand what’s happened. You give them direction—so they know which way to go. So they can make progress.That was absolutely a reaction to not getting that from so many debriefs I experienced in advertising. And that’s the reason creators hate research. Because there’s so much bad research out there. That’s the brutal truth.Beautiful. Graham, I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation. It’s been a real treat talking with you. Thank you very much.I’m sorry to have gone on and on and on, but it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for asking. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Grant McCracken, a cultural anthropologist and founder of Tailwind Radar, delves into the intersection of AI and culture. He discusses how corporations often misinterpret culture through a narcissistic lens instead of engaging with consumers. Grant shares his innovative use of AI as a research partner, emphasizing its capacity for nuanced cultural analysis. He also highlights the need for in-person ethnography to capture themes that AI might overlook. Additionally, he promotes his Culture Camp, merging anthropology and AI to explore future cultural scenarios.

Remi Carlioz, a French-born creative director and cultural strategist in New York, opens up about his layered identity shaped by luck and contradictions. He shares insights on his dual citizenship experience, the privilege of mobility, and his shift from politics to creative leadership. Remi critiques capitalism's harsh realities and discusses the role of creativity in combating misinformation and antisemitism. He also highlights his innovative work with Love Machine, which harnesses AI for ethical storytelling and artistic expression.

Melissa Vogel, PhD, is a business anthropologist specializing in business and organizational research. She founded the Business Anthropology program at Clemson University, directed UX research at Capital One, and leads Great Heron Insights LLC. Prior to this, she studied the Casma culture of Peru as an archaeologist. She has a regular series of short videos called The Anthro Minute, and a substack, On Being Human.Melissa’s writing.“From trowels to tech - how can an archeologist work for a Fortune 100 Company?” Anthropology Career Readiness Network“Articulating Anthropology’s Value to Business” with Adam Gamwell in Anthropology NewsSo, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It's a big, beautiful question—one of the reasons I use it—but because it's so big, I tend to over-explain it the way I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer—or not answer—any way you want to. The question is: Where do you come from?Yeah, that's a cool question because you can choose to answer it a number of different ways. I'm going to take it pretty literally. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. I’m a first-generation American. My dad's family immigrated from Europe after World War II, and honestly, the Midwest never really suited me. It was quite conservative for my taste, including my family.I was very fortunate that, when I was applying to colleges, my parents didn’t restrict me to the local area. I got into the college of my dreams, which was UCLA.Oh, wow.So, I'm a proud Bruin alum.What was the attraction to UCLA? Do you remember when it first entered your consciousness—when you first became aware of it?I think when I started looking at colleges in high school. I’ll be frank: one of my criteria was, how far can I get away from St. Louis?So again, I feel lucky that my parents told me, "You get the grades, and we’ll figure out how to send you where you want to go." I’ve always been the overachiever type—give me a goal, and I run for it. Or I give myself a goal.We did a little trip out West after I decided it would be really cool to go to school in California. We checked out UCLA, UC San Diego, and I think we swung by Arizona State as well—which was really interesting because, for years afterward, Arizona State just sent me postcard after postcard: "Why didn’t you come here?" I was like, "Because I went to UCLA—what do you think?" That was an easy choice. Sorry, ASU.But yeah, when we actually visited, I had already heard of the university—obviously, it’s world-famous and incredibly high quality. But then the campus was beautiful, and I loved the idea of being in a big city like L.A. It just seemed like it had everything to offer.My dad loves to tell the story of our campus tour. He asked the tour guide, “How many of your students come from out of state?” The guide said, “Oh, I don’t know the numbers, but it’s less than five percent.” So my dad was like, "Phew, well we won’t have to worry about this place."Surprise, Dad—I got in.I'm curious to return to that earlier thread. What does it mean to you to be from the Midwest—or maybe is there a story you can tell about growing up there that feels significant?Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I grew up in a pretty darn white suburb, and my parents very much prized education. Neither of them came from families with education—none of my grandparents finished high school. My dad had come over from Europe; my mom’s family was from rural Missouri.So when my dad announced he was going to quit his factory job and go to college, my grandmother apparently said, “Are you crazy? Nobody's going to pay you to sit around and read books.” And then when he eventually became a stockbroker, he was like, “Look, Mom—people are paying me to give me their money!”So yeah, it was a big deal for them to move to a location with a good school district. We were in this very affluent, white suburb, but we didn’t share the same values as a lot of the families around us because of my parents’ backgrounds. I never felt like I fit in there.This was the ’80s—it was all about conspicuous consumption, what brands you were wearing, who got what car for their birthday. My parents didn’t believe in any of that. We didn’t get an allowance. I actually continue this with my son—I think it was a great idea. My parents wanted us to learn that you have to work for your money. You don’t just get $5, $10, $20 a week because you exist.There were some chores we had to do for free, but a lot of them they paid us for, to prove the point: you do this work, you get paid. I figured out real quick I made the most money mowing the lawn, so I took that up as soon as my dad would let me. I started babysitting at 11, and eventually, when I was 15—because I’m a late-summer baby—I got a work permit to start waiting tables. I was always trying to figure out, “How do I make the most money in my current circumstances?”It was a kind of environment where, because there was so much homogeneity, people focused on things like, “Oh, they’re Catholic”—as if that was a big deal. But that’s how little diversity there was. It was a big deal if someone was Lutheran versus Methodist versus Catholic. And it was amazing if there was a Jewish kid in your class. Whoa.I just never wanted to be a part of that.One little fun story: when I went back for my sister’s graduation—she stayed in Missouri for college, like a lot of my friends did, and went to the University of Missouri—I ran into a girl who had been in my class. My sister's younger, so we were about three years older than her classmates. This girl said, “Melissa, you got out.” And I said, “You could too!” It was this amazing thing to her that I had managed to leave St. Louis.And yeah—my sister literally still lives a mile from where we grew up.If that—it might be less than a mile. Actually, it’s probably like half a mile.Well, it feels like a very... I mean, I grew up in the suburbs outside of Rochester, so the suburban experience is what I feel like you’re describing. Is that fair?Oh yeah, for sure.Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I mean, I hear you loud and clear on “get me out of here.” But did you know what you wanted to be?Oh yeah, I had lots of ideas. When I was in kindergarten, I wanted to be an astronaut—I think that was right around the time of Sally Ride—and I just thought it was the coolest thing to go to outer space. Unfortunately, as I got older and needed glasses—at least back then—that was a no-no. You couldn’t become an astronaut if you needed glasses, so that was out the window.Then I remember in second grade, like many second graders, I thought dinosaurs were the coolest thing. I asked my parents, “What do you call a scientist who studies dinosaurs?” and they said “a paleontologist.” So when my second grade teacher was asking the class what we wanted to be, I said “paleontologist”—and she didn’t even know what I was talking about.As I got older, again, I feel very fortunate. Because my dad was from Europe and both my parents enjoyed traveling, they took us with them to a lot of places other kids didn’t get to go. We went back to Europe a couple of times to see my dad’s family, and I developed a love of international travel very young. I think the first time we went to Spain to see his cousins, I was about 12 years old.I was studying German in school, since that’s the language my dad’s family spoke—although they spoke this obscure dialect I couldn’t understand after learning high German. We went to Germany a couple of years later. So, I really wanted a career that would allow me to see the world, learn other languages, and learn about other cultures.I only got a tiny introduction to what anthropology was in high school, but I didn’t fully understand how you could do that as a career—especially because I think what I was exposed to was more the evolutionary aspects of anthropology, which has never been my favorite part.When I started at UCLA, I was actually a political science and international relations major. On that same trip to Germany, we visited cousins in Austria and went to this really cool restaurant up on one of the little mountains. There was this big table of people, all speaking different languages, and there were women at different spots around the table translating. They looked very fancy—I don’t know who they were, maybe businesspeople or diplomats. I asked my parents, “What’s going on over there?” and my dad said, “It looks like they’re translating for them.” I thought, Oh, that would be cool. That was one of the possibilities I considered.I was lucky that I seemed to have inherited my dad’s ability with languages. He could speak German, French, and English pretty well—though he lost his French after moving to the U.S.—and he picked up a little Spanish along the way too. When I took German in school, it was super easy for me—embarrassingly easy—having been around it a bit with my family, even though it was a different dialect. Later, when I had to pick up Spanish to work in Latin America, that came pretty easily as well.I just knew I wanted something where I could travel the world.But when I got to UCLA and started political science, I was really disappointed. The classes were huge—hundreds of people in the lecture halls—and I have to admit, my poli-sci professors came off pretty arrogant. I remember in particular my international relations intro professor. He’d stroll in late and say, “Sorry folks, I just got in from Moscow. I’m not on West Coast time yet.” And I just thought, Oh wow, must be nice for you.I worked for him through a summer research program students could do, and we were basically writing his book for him. I was appalled. I don’t even know if we got mentioned in the acknowledgments. That’s crazy. The students were doing all the research. He would just talk into a recorder—he’d say, “Okay, this is what I want to cover in Chapter One, blah blah,” and we’d do everything else.In the meantime, I had luckily signed up for a couple of anthropology classes, and I just thought, These are my people. The students in the poli-sci classes were mostly pre-law and had very different goals in life. It felt almost like that same group back in St. Louis that I hadn’t fit into. The anthro kids, on the other hand, were from everywhere, doing all sorts of interesting things, very nonjudgmental, just interested in the world.So I found my people sophomore year and switched majors.Yeah, amazing. And catch us up—where are you now? What is the work you're doing? You’ve made a career out of anthropology. What have you been up to?Yeah, so when I switched majors, my dad was horrified. He was so hoping I was going to end up in law. The quote of his that I love to repeat is, “Anthropology? What do you want to be—poor for the rest of your life?” Yes, Dad, that’s my goal—to be poor for the rest of my life.But once I got into it, I was serious. Again, I set a goal and ran for it. I went all the way through my doctorate. At the time, I wasn’t really aware—because they don’t broadcast it in grad school—that there are non-academic ways to be an anthropologist. So I thought, Okay, what do I have to do to be a professor? That’s the only option, right?So I did that. And there were great things about being an academic. I mean, the best part is you get to research whatever you want. You just have to fund it yourself—but as long as you can find someone to give you a grant, go for it.It took me three years to get a tenure-track job. I had told myself, Okay, I’ve seen other folks just suffer—going from adjunct to adjunct, or visiting professorship to visiting professorship, moving all over the country—and I’m not doing that. I gave myself five years to get a tenure-track job, and I considered myself lucky that I got it in three.But when you're on the academic track, you go where the job is. You don’t have the luxury of saying, Well, I love California. I want to stay here. The job I got was in South Carolina. I had no family, no friends there, and honestly hadn’t been interested in living in the South. But you go where the job is, right?So I thought, Okay, I’m more fortunate than a lot of my peers—I got a tenure-track job. Let’s make lemonade.I helped build the program there. I was only the second anthropologist in the entire department. We built a major. Eventually, I became the grad director and converted their master’s in applied sociology into a master’s in social science—because I’d never had a sociology class in my life. I said, We’re going to have to update this if you want me to be grad director.I’d always wanted to get into administration, but that just wasn’t happening. I didn’t fit into their idea of who was going to be department chair or dean. And if your own university won’t give you that opportunity, no one else will give you the time of day.In the meantime, I’d always done applied research. I’ve always thought that was important. I’m very passionate about my discipline—I think anthropology has so much to offer the world. Everyone can be their own little anthropologist in their own way, if they’re so inclined.So I’d done applied research since grad school, and I just got more and more interested in doing that instead. I’d written something like 18 articles and two books on academic topics that—maybe, if I’m lucky—100 or 200 people ever read.You know, so I decided to create a business anthropology program. It took a lot of work and a few years to get through all the different approvals, and I was happy with the results. But at the same time, I was banging my head against the wall trying to get an administrative role and not getting anywhere.Luckily, at that point, I had met my partner, because I really needed the support to make the decision to leave academia. That was a huge, huge decision. I had invested 20 years of my life. I had tenure. I was a full professor. I was the director of a grad program. People don't just walk away from that—it’s unheard of. But I was deeply unhappy. Even though I had built this program, nobody in the administration seemed to care. Students liked it—they were thrilled to have a practical way to apply their anthropology degree—and it was slowly growing. It was still early days, but the administration just didn’t seem interested in me.I started to feel like I had hit a glass ceiling. I wasn’t going to be able to grow anymore. At the time, I was around 40-ish, early 40s, and I thought, I’m not okay with continuing in this situation for the next 20, 30, however many years I have left to work.So, after long discussions with my partner, I finally had the guts to say, Okay, I’m going to try applying for industry jobs, take my applied skills, and use them full-time. At first, we were trying to stay local because I have stepkids—we have a blended family—and it just wasn’t happening. And I hate to say this, but even in bigger cities like Charlotte or Atlanta, they just didn’t seem to understand how my experience translated to the business world, no matter how hard I tried to explain it.When my younger stepkids were ready to go off to college, we agreed we’d consider moving. And sure enough, the first place I applied to in D.C. hired me in six weeks, because it was very easy for folks around here to understand how my experience translated to market research.By then, that was my fourth market research company, but it wasn’t the first one full-time—because I did do a year full-time in between grad school and my academic job. It was a great place to transition out of academia. It was full of people just like me—former academics who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be in academia anymore. Just super smart people who knew what they were doing.But it was also the start of COVID.Oh wow.Yeah, so it was a tough time for all businesses, certainly for market research. It was just a struggle. But I’m really proud of what we were able to do there. I helped them dramatically update their program. I was the director, and eventually senior director, of qualitative research. I helped them update their pricing model—they were way underpricing their qual work. I created a more streamlined work process to bring timelines down. We expanded into all sorts of online qual, because before the pandemic, they hadn’t done any.So yeah, did some really cool things, despite the struggles.I want to return and talk about the transition, but before that, I was curious—I’d love to hear you celebrate anthropology. What makes anthropology so important? I can’t remember the language you used, but there’s something that anthropology does that nothing else does. How do you think about what makes it powerful?Yeah, well, you’ll have to watch me, or we’ll be here all day.I should note that I was introduced to you through The Anthro Minute, this beautiful series of wonderful little introductory videos on YouTube—I’ll share a link to it. I’m always excited to hear really accomplished people champion the beautiful things about anthropology. So, back to the question—what is the power of anthropology?Well, thanks for asking, because I did want to make sure to mention The Anthro Minute at some point.Oh yes, of course.So, for those who may not know—because I think anthropologists, unfortunately, have done a terrible job of explaining who we are, what we do, and why anyone should care—anthropology is the broadest of all the social sciences. It’s the study of every single aspect of humanity: the biological, the cultural, the linguistic, and our past. That’s literally our four subfields.And that’s what I love about it—you can completely immerse yourself in anything about humans that fascinates you. Everything from how we got to be Homo sapiens from our ancestors—I was a specialist in archaeology for a long time, so I loved learning about past civilizations. I loved that in archaeology you got to use all the subfields. Archaeologists need all of them. We don’t just know about the past—we know about cultural, linguistic, and biological anthropology because we use it in our work.Also, in the United States, graduate programs are usually what we call four-field programs. You have to know about all four fields and be able to teach at least a little bit of each to be competitive in the work environment. I loved that—it was so holistic, so comprehensive.But I also just love the fact that one of the major things anthropology teaches us is cultural relativism, meaning every culture is just as good as any other. There’s no superior culture—there’s no “this one’s better than that one.” They all have their own cultural logic as to why they do what they do. And I just thought that was fantastic. Having felt kind of like an outsider for a good chunk of my younger life, it was really appealing to me to understand that not every culture is like mine. They don’t all do things the way I do. Sometimes I like how they do it better.So yeah, I think anthropology has so much to offer everyday life, because it’s really just about understanding humans—who we are, where we come from, our beliefs, our behaviors that are passed down, that are learned and shared among groups of people.I created The Anthro Minute because people don’t know what we do. I mean, you walk up to someone on the street and ask, “What does a psychologist do?” and hopefully, at bare minimum, they can tell you what a therapist does. Maybe they’ll think of counseling, even if they don’t know all the subfields of psychology.But you walk up to someone on the street and ask what an anthropologist does, and they’re probably going to think of the retail store. That’s the first thing that comes to mind—Isn’t that a store? Or maybe they’ll think about archaeology, although a lot of times archaeologists are confused with paleontologists. No, we don’t dig up dinosaurs—which is kind of a bummer. I like dinosaurs.It’s so funny—Indiana Jones came to mind as you were talking.Oh yeah, that’s the number one response you get when you tell someone you’ve been an archaeologist. Certainly.But for some reason, it came up even just now as we were talking about anthropology, which is kind of funny. That’s strange. But of course, I completely agree. Anthropology—I'm not an anthropologist, but even qualitative research has, in my experience, done a very poor job of articulating itself. What do you love about the work? Of all the different things involved in what you do as an anthropologist, what’s the part you love most? Where’s the joy in it for you?I got to do what I wanted to do as a kid—I’ve gotten to see the world. And I’m not done.I got to spend 20 years working in Latin America—either being on or running projects in Nicaragua, Belize, and mostly Peru—and traveling to nearby countries while I was there. And then you get other opportunities because you have friends working in other areas, so you get to visit them. I got to visit friends in the UK. I had other friends I ended up visiting in Bali. You get around.And you get to see the insider’s view of things, because you’re not just there as a tourist all the time. I like being a tourist too, don’t get me wrong. But I really love the opportunity to get out in the world and understand how people live in different places—and try to see it the way they see it, if I can.That’s one of the big concepts in the anthropological perspective: balancing what we call the emic and the etic, the insider and the outsider perspectives. In my case, now that I do a lot of work in the United States, I’m not necessarily an outsider. But traditionally, we were outsiders trying to understand the insider perspective. And it works both ways.It’s a really wonderful way to—hopefully—understand the best of humanity. Although you’re probably going to come across some things that aren’t so great, too. But that’s what I love about it.What kinds of things were you exploring? Can you tell me a story about some of the research you’ve done?Yeah. Most of my work in Peru focused on a culture called the Casma, who are not very well known. Most folks—if they’ve heard of pre-colonial Peruvian cultures—only know about the Inca. Again, we haven’t done the greatest job of publicizing that.The Casma existed from about 700 to 1400 AD on the north coast of Peru. I was looking at the whole development of their civilization, but especially the origins of urban environments—so, Andean urbanism.The preservation you get on the coast of Peru is rivaled only by Egypt. It’s this incredibly dry desert, and what’s wonderful about that is you get a window into ancient people’s lives that can be hard to get in other climates where preservation isn’t as good.I was able to study and write books about how these people lived—how they built their cities, how they seemed to run their religion and their economy, what we could see about their social structure. I really tried to take as holistic a view as I could to understand them and how they fit into the larger picture of Peruvian prehistory.They came after a group called the Moche, who were very theocratic, with a lot of dependency on ritual and religion to maintain authority. After them comes an empire called the Chimu, who were very bureaucratic—very much like all roads lead to Chan Chan, which was their capital city. Very highly centralized.The Casma occupy this niche in between, showing a kind of transition—from people using spectacle and elaborate rituals to maintain authority (not that ritual ever goes away), to something with less emphasis on centralized bureaucracy, like with the Chimu.The Casma seem to have been this grassroots, local group that managed to get out from under the thumb of the Moche. Eventually, they fall under the Chimu, but for a few hundred years, they seem to have been running their own show. More of a heterarchy than a hierarchy.I think you said Andean urbanism, is that correct? What can you tell me? I mean, in my sort of narcissistic way, I’m really interested in urbanism and cities. What’s the most interesting thing you learned about Andean urbanism? What were cities like?Yeah, I mean, what was fascinating with the Casma—and so different from what we see after them with the Chimu—is that the growth of the cities seems to be pretty organic. While there is a more elite sector of their capital city at El Purgatorio, which has these grand compounds with big high walls, and within them small—not the big giant pyramids you think of, say, in Mexico—but small pyramidal mounds with either stairways or ramps, and plazas in front of them, they’re all inside these walled compounds, which is a long-standing tradition on the north coast.So they do have more formal elite sectors eventually, but when you start digging through those layers, you find all sorts of places where they’ve remodeled and built on top of what was a much more organic growth underneath. And as you see the rest of the city—and we get radiocarbon dates to support this—you can see where the city expanded around the side of this mountain and up onto a little saddle on top, where there was more of a working-class living sector.We see the differences in the material culture to recognize the different statuses of people and the different activities they’re doing, and indications of trade—both between the farmers in the valley and the fishermen on the coast, as well as with other nearby cultures up in the mountains and things like that. There are certain things that don’t grow on the coast, but we find them, so we know they’re trading for those.Yeah, I think that’s what’s really cool—to see how these larger and larger conglomerations of people just sort of organically pop up. Andean cities never seem to have gotten as big as, say, Central American cities like Teotihuacan or Tenochtitlan. We don’t have those massive piles of people together, and yet they were very complex.And if you’re familiar at all with the quipus that the Inka used—it’s a series of knotted strings used for accounting purposes—there was someone called a quipucamayoc, who was the person who kept the quipu and would read it for the ruler. To me, it was just fascinating to see that people can reach more complex levels of civilization in different ways. They didn’t have the written language that the Central Americans or folks in the Old World had, but they still had their own complicated way of keeping track of things and running cities and governments.So, for dramatic effect, I’m curious now to talk about the transition into business anthropology—being an anthropologist in the corporate space. What in God’s name do you do with that kind of thinking and perspective when trying to apply it to a market research context? How did that go?If you want, we can put in the show notes the article I wrote about this called From Trials to Tech: How an Archaeologist Ended Up at a Fortune 100 Company, because I make the argument that being an archaeologist actually gives you a lot of the skills you need to run a corporate team.Archaeologists don’t work alone—ever. Where some cultural or linguistic anthropologists might venture off into whatever area they’re trying to study all by themselves, we don’t do that. We always have a team, and it’s nearly always interdisciplinary. We can’t be masters of everything.So when I was directing projects, I had my faunal and floral expert who handled all those remains. I had my osteologist who handled the human skeletal remains. My expertise was more in architecture, ceramics, and iconography. But yeah, to do excavations, you need a lot of people. You learn, the hard way if you have to, how to manage a team, how to manage a budget.Also, when you’re working in another country—I never did archaeology in the United States—I always thought, Wow, that must be so easy. I mean, that may not be true, but when you’re working abroad, you have to navigate a foreign government, a foreign language. You’re expected to do permits and hiring and all sorts of stuff in that country. You need to adjust to their customs. You’re going to be eating their food. You need to fit in enough with their culture that you’re not putting yourself in jeopardy.And it behooves you to use all your cultural anthropology skills too. As much as I used to joke that the nice thing about archaeology is “my people don’t talk back,” the reality is there’s virtually no archaeological site in the world that isn’t near a modern community anymore. It really behooves you to take an interest in that local community from the beginning, and make sure you’re involving them in any way you can—and hopefully in a way that they appreciate, not in a way that makes them want you out.We would hire local workers, and we always had a public interest component where we’d ask, “Is there something you would like to get out of this work we’re doing?” For example, on my last project, they said, “We want to learn English.” So we did—we had informal Saturday classes for anyone who wanted to show up and learn how to speak some English.All of those skills translate directly to a corporate experience. You learn how to manage people, budgets, timelines, deal with different types of governmental regulations or communities. And you need to be able to relate to people.Part of the decision to switch from working in Peru to doing business anthropology primarily in the U.S. was that I had a family of my own by then. It’s extremely difficult to work internationally once you have kids. That was something that was important to me—I didn’t want to miss any part of my son’s life.So, on top of being frustrated in my career, I also didn’t want to be away from him. And it wasn’t feasible for my partner to spend every summer in Peru, like I’d been doing for 18 years. So it just made sense to go back to the applied work that I was also passionate about.I wanted people to see the value of anthropology for solving everyday business problems—which is what business anthropologists do. My original way into it was through market research, but eventually I transitioned into design anthropology, doing user experience work at a fintech. We had done a little of that at the market research company I was at as well.I also had been doing the third subfield of business anthropology, which is organizational culture work—especially around what later became known as DEI. When I first started doing it, it wasn’t called DEI, that was the later term. But I did that work in academic institutions and then through the market research firm.And that’s now what I want to do in my own company, which I’m starting right now.What were the challenges or difficulties in translating anthropology into market research—or in helping market researchers understand and make room for anthropology? Where did these things fit—or not fit—together as you tried to make it work?Well, I think one thing that helped a lot is that, as an archaeologist, we use both qualitative and quantitative data. We don’t restrict ourselves to one or the other. So, for example, I’ve literally mapped archaeological sites with a total station or a transit, and used survey software to create that—I used to have to do AutoCAD and all that kind of stuff.We take lots of measurements. We don’t do super sophisticated statistical analyses, but we do use statistics for various things—to group things into categories or for a lot of spatial analysis. So we’re quite comfortable moving between qual and quant. That made it pretty easy to translate into market research, where—to be successful—you really need to be comfortable with both.You don’t have to be a statistician, but if you’re really... I mean, that’s one thing I tried to help my teams with. I would certainly bill myself, if I had to, as more of a qualitative than quantitative person, because I don’t have the heavy stats background. But numbers don’t scare me.I’d really try to help my qual researchers understand the importance of being able to administer a survey, understand what the results mean, and how to properly represent those numbers. I was surprised when I entered the business world how many people didn’t seem to know how to do that.So, yeah—I think that helped. But I mean, you also just have to explain to people the hard way—with examples. And I was fortunate that I had been doing this work off and on the whole time. I don’t think it would’ve been so easy for me to transition if I hadn’t.I was doing it in grad school just to make extra money, but I had no idea I was building a muscle I would end up using full time. I always say, no experience is ever wasted. When I finished my PhD and didn’t have an academic job, I ended up working with other grad students at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evaluation. That was a team environment where we were the folks doing the fieldwork—going out and doing interviews, observations, different types of qualitative techniques, and also administering the surveys. Then our statisticians back at the university would do the heavier stats work for us, and we would write up the reports.I had no idea that job—which was just to pay the bills—was going to be what I would end up doing full time. That would've been, let’s see, like 15 years later. So there was just instance after instance where you’re doing something that uses your skill set, but mostly you’re just trying to pay the bills—and then you realize later, wow, I have all these foundational skills that I developed in all these jobs I picked up along the way.I know you're a member of EPIC, which is a beautiful organization. Do you have a point of view on the state of business anthropology—or anthropology in the corporate sector—and where we are today?Oh, yeah. I mean, we still have a big PR problem, which is one of the reasons I created The Anthro Minute. We've unfortunately been targeted politically. Even though we do what I think is really important, useful research on humans, we’ve unfortunately—since Margaret Mead died—not had a public spokesperson to really represent our discipline for decades.So people... we sort of were like, Oh yeah, we’re not going to worry about that—we just want to do our research and be left alone. And that’s been to our detriment, because now folks don’t know what we do. They think it’s frivolous. They don’t understand how it’s highly relevant to their everyday lives.The skills we build as anthropologists help companies build better products—things people actually want and need—understanding what customers are looking for to market those products and actually gain greater market share. Especially if you're going internationally and want to broaden the cultural audiences you’re selling to. And to improve their own cultures—to be workplaces where people actually want to be.Unfortunately, right now in the U.S., we’re in a really bad place. The trend has done a total 180. There’s a real lack of concern for humans—a lack of concern for what people want or need. A lack of caring about whether your employees like where they work. There just don’t seem to be enough companies that care about being a great place to work. I’m sure there are some, but that doesn’t seem to be the dominant trend this year.So, I think we really have our work cut out for us as anthropologists—to continue explaining why a deep understanding of humanity in all its variety, and globally—having that global mindset, not just this trend of being insular and focusing locally—why that matters.Because there’s no turning back the clock. We live in a global economy. That’s not going to stop. It’s going to continue. I think people like anthropologists—who can help you understand the world and people—are going to be much more successful than someone who thinks they can just turn inward, shut out the rest of the world, and shut out different opinions.I love that you mentioned Margaret Mead. I wonder if you might talk a little about her role—what was the role she played that you say is currently lacking?Well, I’ll be honest—I wasn’t alive, so this is just from what I’ve read. But yeah, my understanding is that she was the public figure for a long time in the United States. She published a column in Redbook, which was a popular women’s magazine at the time, and really made an effort to put herself out there.Unfortunately, as we now know even more than when Margaret Mead was alive, when you put yourself out there, you can become a target. So she certainly had to deal with some controversies during her lifetime. And with hindsight, we can always look back at someone’s work and say, “Oh, they should’ve done this better or that better,” or whatever.But she was one of the pioneering anthropologists that came out of the original circa 1900 group of anthropologists—all students of Franz Boas. For a while, there was a biological anthropologist doing research on love and attraction—and of course, now I’m blanking on her last name. I know her name was Helen, and I just lost the last name. But she did get a little bit of public attention for a while, which was great.Then... I don’t know if she decided she didn’t like it anymore, or people just weren’t as interested anymore. Like, she really stayed focused on her one subject area, so maybe that’s why. So yeah, I really think—and I’d be happy to be one of the people who tries—to become one of these public anthropologists who really helps people understand: Why do we need to know about other cultures? Why do we need to care what motivates human beings in different places?Because, you know, one of the areas where we tend to disagree with psychologists is in thinking that we all operate the same way. Anthropologists tend to celebrate the differences as well as the similarities across cultures.So, we’re kind of near the end of our time. What Anthro Minutes do you have coming up, or what topics will you be tackling, if you have any in the queue?Well, I had a request for more business anthro case studies, so I’m currently working on that. I’ve already mentioned a bunch of them as examples, and now I’m hunting down new ones, because I’d really like to have some that are more recent and a little more relevant. So that’s a work in progress.But the one coming out next week is about environmental anthropology and sustainability. Then there’ll be one after that talking more explicitly about user experience in the design anthropology world. And I’ll keep seeking out more case studies that really bring home for people the practical applications.And, you know, I only keep myself to under 90 seconds, so I can’t get that deep into any case study. But the more I can demonstrate for folks how anthropologists are actually impacting... you know, we have Go-Gurt and Toughbooks because of anthropologists, right? So, the different ways that we've led to innovations.Well, hold on—now I need to hear either a Go-Gurt story or a Toughbook story. Your choice.So, Sue Squires is an anthropologist who was doing research for—I believe it was a breakfast cereal company—and doing ethnography in people’s homes while they were getting ready for the day, getting off to school and work. Interviewing them as they were doing that, asking what they were looking for in breakfast foods.She made a lot of important observations. One of the things that’s really important about our primary methodology, participant observation, is that people will often say one thing and do another. So, you want to ask them, but you also want to watch them, if you can.She found that parents would talk about how important it was to give their kids a nutritious breakfast and send them off to school fueled to learn. This sounded great—like what every parent would want. But she was watching the kids do things that contradicted that—either refusing to eat what was put in front of them, secretly sneaking off and throwing it in the trash, or sneaking to the cupboard to get some kind of snack food to stick in their backpack for later. She noticed all of this going on.And at the same time, these poor, harried parents were just trying to get their kids ready and out the door. That led to the idea for Go-Gurt—that you could take yogurt on the go. The kids could eat it in the car.One thing I didn’t know—since I’ve not been a big Go-Gurt user myself—is that you can actually freeze Go-Gurt, stick it in your kid’s lunchbox in the morning, and by lunchtime it’s defrosted, but still safe to eat. It hasn’t gotten all hot and gross. So yeah, it was the idea of: how could we have a healthy breakfast food that kids can take with them on the go?That has to do with John Sherry at Intel. He was sent up to do research on Alaskan fishing boats—what they needed from a computer. He was watching these guys—if you’ve seen that show Deadliest Catch, where they’re throwing tons of fish on the deck, processing them, and blood and guts are flying everywhere—it’s just disgusting.He’s watching this and talking to them, and they’re like, “Look, what I really need from a computer is to be able to hose it down when I hose down the deck.” And out of that research eventually came what we now think of as rugged-use computers—Toughbooks that can stand up to conditions like fishing boats, construction sites, or other places where the more delicate computers of the past would have been a disaster.And that was Panasonic? Is that a Panasonic Toughbook—is that what it was?I think so. But John was working at Intel, so it must’ve been a partnership. That Toughbook brand—I remember it. I had never seen anything like it.Yeah, that story is really powerful.Awesome. Melissa, again, I really appreciate you accepting my invitation and sharing your wisdom with us. I’ll put all the links to all your good stuff here. It’s been wonderful to get to know you a little more, and I appreciate what you’re doing.Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was fun. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Philip McKenzie is a cultural anthropologist and strategist who founded InfluencerCon and hosts The Deep Dive podcast. A former Goldman Sachs trader, he has served as Chief Strategy Officer at MediaVillage, advises global organizations, and teaches at Hyper Island. I think you know this already, but I start all these conversations with the same question. I actually borrowed it from a friend of mine who lives in Hudson. She uses it to help people tell their stories, and I love it so much because it’s such a big question. And because it’s so big, I tend to over-explain it before I even ask. So I want you to know you’re in complete control—answer however you want, or not at all. I just really love the question. And the question is, where do you come from? Again, you’re in absolute control.Absolutely. Thank you for that. I think it’s a great question.Where I’m from is Brooklyn. I talk about Brooklyn all the time, and I always very specifically introduce myself as being from Brooklyn—which I think is distinct from saying I’m from New York.I’m a proud New Yorker, and I understand Brooklyn is part of New York, but anyone who’s a native New Yorker understands the specificity of the borough you’re from. Growing up, being from Brooklyn meant a lot. It shaped everything about who I am.My parents are from the Caribbean—my mom’s from Barbados, and my dad’s from Guyana. I’m the only one in my family born in New York—born in Brooklyn. And Brooklyn has the largest Caribbean and West Indian population outside of the West Indies. All the islands are represented: Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, Haiti—you name it.That microcosm of being in New York, but specifically being in Brooklyn, feels very different from being in other parts of the city. So, long-winded answer, but: I’m from Brooklyn.Beautiful. What part of Brooklyn were you from, and what was it like? Maybe tell me more—what does it mean to you to be from Brooklyn?Oh man, it means everything. I grew up in Brownsville, then moved to East Flatbush. I grew up in New York in the ‘70s and ‘80s—I graduated from high school in 1990, which I kind of use as a clear demarcation point. That was actually the year with the highest murder rate in New York City’s history. Crime has been declining ever since—current narratives in the media aside. If you only watched the news, you’d think New York was the Badlands, but it’s definitely not.Growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s was just different. It was the New York people tend to mythologize, which, culturally, was very important to me—even when I didn’t realize it at the time. I remember Reggie Jackson, the Yankees winning in ’77 and ’78, the blackout... all of that.I remember riots and looting in our neighborhood during the blackout in ’77. Those kinds of moments were just part of the world we grew up in. I joke with friends that graffiti was everywhere. The trains were covered in it. Back then, it was considered a crime. Now it’s a marker of gentrification—luxury condos feature graffiti murals to make them feel “authentic.”It’s wild how those things come full circle. That’s part of the Brooklyn identity for me—watching culture shift. One era’s criminality becomes another era’s marketing aesthetic.Yeah. That’s amazing. I mean, I remember all that too. We’re the same age—I graduated in 1990, but I was in the suburbs in Western New York.OK, yeah.But I definitely remember Reggie Jackson. The straw that stirred the drink.Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you have a sense of what young Philip imagined for himself?Yeah, I think I went through a bunch of different phases—wanting to be different things without really knowing what it took to become any of them.My parents got me a telescope pretty early—I must’ve been eight or nine. I don’t think I was ten yet. Cosmos was on PBS—the Carl Sagan documentary—and it just blew my mind. I didn’t understand all of it, but what I did understand was like, wow: space. The stars. That kind of wonder.So in my mind, I was going to be an astronomer. But that faded as I got older.I think I always had a curiosity, a desire to discover things. I used to go to work with my dad—he was a zoning consultant in the city. At the time, they were called expeditors, but zoning consultant is another term. New York City’s building code is a labyrinth, so architects and engineers would hire people like my dad to help them navigate their projects.Each borough has its own Department of Buildings, and in the summers I’d go with him across the city. That’s when I first saw Manhattan during the day, saw people going to work. That made a huge impression on me.My first thought was, “I want to be in business.” I didn’t know what that meant—I just knew I wanted to be a part of that world. My dad would be running around and I’d hang out at Barnes & Noble or Borders—back when Borders still existed. I’d get lost in the bookstores, reading, exploring.But the thing that stuck with me was seeing people in suits, carrying briefcases. That, to me, was business. And I knew I wanted to be in those canyons of buildings, in and around Wall Street. And eventually, I did all that.But I think the seed was planted back then—being in that environment, seeing those faces, and associating it all with success.And that was Manhattan—you’re talking about the experience of Manhattan.Yeah, exactly. Because the Department of Buildings used to be in the old municipal building. For those who might be familiar with New York City, the municipal building sits right off the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s this big, kind of Art Deco-looking building—like One New York Plaza.The city, the police department is right behind it. You’ve got the court building nearby. But the municipal building is a big government building. It was probably more fully occupied back then than it is now, because, you know, things have changed.Back in those days, the Department of Buildings was on the 20th floor. I used to spend a lot of time in that building.Then there were all the bookstores I mentioned earlier, along Broadway. A bunch of other stores too—like Trinity Church used to have a bookstore. There were all these little outlets that had magazines, books—places I would just wander around. We lived in a different society then, where a 10-year-old could roam the streets of New York alone.Right? And no one thought anything of it. Today, that parent would probably be arrested. But in the latchkey era? It was different.I love that conflation of business and a bookstore. I am in the world of business. And the experience of being in the world of business... was a bookstore. That sounds amazing.Yeah, yeah. Because walking to those bookstores was where I saw people doing things. Even the shoeshine guys—they always had magazines and stuff. That was a popular thing back then. If you watch an old movie from the ‘70s or ‘80s, you’d see someone getting their shoes shined on the street. I just attributed all of that to what, in my mind, was “business.”Awesome. So, catch us up—where are you now, and what are you doing in the world of business? If you’re still in that world, how do you talk about what you’re up to?Yeah, I’m definitely in the world of business. Officially, I’m a cultural anthropologist and strategist, and I’ve had my own consulting practice now for what feels like forever.I kind of reject the term “futurist” because I just don’t like the word. But basically, I help organizations understand culture. It’s more than just trying to be predictive—it’s a practice rooted in rigor around foresight and applying that within a broader cultural context.I use that to help organizations better understand their place in the world—not just to avoid pitfalls, but to identify potential opportunities. I’m happy with the work because it allows me to engage with a wide range of organizations. I always say I’m industry-agnostic—it doesn’t really matter what the business is, because it usually comes down to people.There are some things I won’t do, based on my own ethical compass—like defense work or anything I feel is about harming people. But beyond that, I’m open to engaging. That approach has allowed me to build a business that puts me in active contact with many different people and industries. It’s broadened my horizons beyond what I could have imagined as a kid—or even as a young professional.When I left business school, I worked for Goldman Sachs for many years. I was doing what I had envisioned as a kid: One New York Plaza, 50th floor, top of the world. Master of the universe on a massive trading desk.And even though, at the time, that was the thing I most wanted in the world—and I killed myself to get it—it turned out not to be what made me happy or fulfilled.Lots of lessons in there.Yeah. And what was it, to the degree you’re comfortable sharing? What caused the shift? I mean, we’ve known each other a bit, so I know some of the story. But what happened—what was the shift from the 50th floor to cultural anthropology?Yeah, you know, it wasn’t any one thing, to be honest. It was more of a gradual acceptance that I could have sat in that seat for a really long time—and made goo-gobs of money. Because a big part of my interest in that world was the money. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.You know, I used to joke with friends at business school that, for a kid like me coming out of Brooklyn, this was the most money you could make without having to throw or catch a ball—neither of which I was particularly good at doing professionally.So I was like, this Wall Street ticket is a huge opportunity for me. I went back to business school specifically to work at Goldman Sachs. I wasn’t even that enamored with Wall Street as a general idea—Goldman, specifically, was the draw for me. And trading, as an extension of that.So, to answer the question, I only share that to emphasize how much I did want that job. And the reasons I left weren’t specific to Goldman Sachs. I don’t really have anything negative to say about Goldman specifically. I think Goldman was just part of a larger culture that didn’t align with my values over the long haul.These environments can be really toxic. And I think a trading desk—particularly when I was trading, in the late ’90s into the 2000s—was a prime example. I can’t speak to what it looks like now, and maybe it’s better. Someone listening might say, “Oh, it’s not like that at all.” But my experience was that it was a very toxic environment.It can really grind you down. And even with that, those weren’t necessarily the reasons I left. I’m just recognizing what the environment was like. Because, in a lot of ways, I fit the profile of someone who would do that job.I’m a former athlete—high school and college—and trading desks are full of those types. A lot of military folks, ex-athletes, or a mix of both. It’s a very male environment. And the women there—again, when I was there—mirrored that. They often out-maled the males in many respects, in their demeanor and style.That doesn’t work for everybody. That kind of constant, what our president once called “locker room talk,” doesn’t align with everyone’s personality. It didn’t really bother me that much—but I knew it wasn’t going to make me happy in the long run.So I decided to leave. And I didn’t know what I was going to do next. It’s not like I left for a thing—I left just to leave.I spent some months in Argentina and Brazil. Then I came back, and that led to this second iteration of myself as a professional. I started working with some friends I went to school with—friends and fraternity brothers. They had started a nonprofit, and that eventually led to us starting a multicultural agency called Free DMC.We published a magazine called Free Magazine, and we were fully engaged with lifestyle brands around multicultural marketing—helping them reach this elusive audience they didn’t fully understand. And we were part of that audience. That audience was shifting tremendously at the time we were growing the business, and we just plugged right into that. That’s really where all of my interest in culture led to what I do now.Yeah. I’m so fascinated—I just did a project on young analysts and associates, the recruitment experience for investment banking. I spent a lot of time in that space, and I feel like you and I could probably talk for hours about the anthropology of that whole recruitment process and the culture of those banks. It is a crazy process, but it also—and I saw this from the other side, too—it really speaks to how significant finance is in our broader culture. There’s this extreme hazing or initiation process around it that’s just... in plain sight.Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I ran the summer analyst program at Goldman. Because at Goldman, you wear multiple hats. My job-job was on the trading desk. But they ask professionals to run a lot of these programs. So it was me and two other folks, in different areas, who ran the summer analyst program for equities.And it was the same thing I had experienced as a summer associate: 80, 90 kids jammed into the bullpen, being run around the city for 10 to 12 weeks. Right. You were just expected to live, breathe, sleep the “Goldman experience.” Stay late, get there early, go out socially with Goldman people. It was full-on—like, it never stopped.Yeah, it’s a crazy thing. So I want to talk about... what’s an example? Can you tell a story about the kind of work you love to do now?Yeah—two examples. I work with Hyper Island, and this is more of an academic example, but I love what Hyper Island is all about. I’ve been working with them for a few years now, basically as a supervisor for students going through their IRP process, which is essentially their master’s thesis.You really get the opportunity to get under the hood and help someone younger—though not necessarily young, because it is a master’s program, but younger than me. Which, at this point, is not miraculous in any way—just a statement of fact. Class of ’90.Exactly.You get to work with these folks on shaping what will be their final thesis as they finish the program. And selfishly, I learn a lot from these students. Honestly, I think they impart more to me than I give to them.But you also get to provide some real, practical knowledge based on what you’re seeing out in the field. So when they’re building a research project or a product, or incorporating research into their thesis—I’ve done all that. I’ve done a ton of ethnographies.I’m big on the qualitative side of the business. I think there are really important stories to uncover through longer-form interviews and deeper engagement.What I’ve noticed with this newer generation is the opposite—they’re very focused on just doing the quantitative stuff. They’re not necessarily strong with numbers, and they’re often skeptical of qualitative work... but they don’t really know why.They just feel like, “My thing is data”—whatever that means to them. So I get the chance to talk to them about opening up to the qualitative side. Because that’s the culture piece. That’s the human layer. Working with those students has been really incredible for me.So that’s one engagement. And then, on a completely different side, I work with a client in venture—helping them figure out how to do venture in a way that creates better outcomes. Not just for investors, but also for the founders.It’s been an incredible ride. It’s an incredibly strong team, with a clear focus and a sharp investment thesis—so all the boxes are checked. But what’s really inspiring is the foresight the partners have. They’re thinking about how their firm fits into a much larger infrastructure.Just like how Wall Street has its own culture and way of being, venture has its own rhythm, its own norms—and especially with the way technology shapes so much of our world.That’s the bigger story. And the fact that they see that clearly, and want to think long-term about how they grow their business—that’s been deeply inspiring to me.Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?The joy is in discovering really big things—and then bringing them to life. I often tell clients, prospective clients, or collaborators: I am not the holder of the answers.There are a lot of people in this space who present themselves as having the answers. Like, “Work with me and I’ll help you increase your ROI,” or, “I’ll make sure your strategy moves in the right direction.”I stay away from that approach, because I don’t think it reflects what any of us can actually deliver. We don’t know. And because I work with many different types of organizations, I’m not going to be the expert on every business I walk into. That would be impossible.What I do try to discern is: where are there foundational similarities across industries? What universal themes can we discover and work through together?All of my work depends on teams and deep collaboration. I can’t do this if I walk into an organization and people aren’t willing to give me truthful, accurate answers. I can’t just make it up myself.So it really depends on the willingness of the organization to share. What I’ve found—and then I’ll stop here—is that a lot of times, an organization will come to me with one project. But once I start digging in, it often has very little to do with what they originally presented.They’ll say, “We just implemented these new systems, and we’re having trouble getting people to use them. Can you help us understand where the gaps are?”And then I dig in—and it has nothing to do with the systems. For example, I worked with a media company that had grown by acquisition. They had done three or four fairly large acquisitions over four or five years. So the company had grown quickly.They had reporting schedules, forms, processes—all the usual stuff. But they said, “It’s not working. What’s the problem?” And the issue wasn’t the forms. It was that people didn’t trust the reporting lines inside the organization.The company had all these formal lines—this person reports to that person, and this team feeds into that team. But after working with them for a few months, I realized the place was full of indirect lines that no one was seeing or acknowledging.They thought things were working in a static, top-down way—but they weren’t. It wasn’t about the reporting methodology at all. The real issue was trust within the organization.Right. So those are just a couple of examples, I guess.Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to say whether I advocate for it. What I’d say is—I just use it. You know, these distinctions we lean on... to a certain extent, they’re kind of false. Right? We’re caught in these dichotomies—right brain vs. left brain, technical vs. non-technical—and we treat them like gospel in professional settings.People throw around terms like “hard skills” and “soft skills,” or “skilled” vs. “unskilled” labor. But all of those definitions miss the richness of how we actually interact to solve problems.From my perspective, as someone who leans toward long-form interviews—like yourself—yeah, of course I can send out a bunch of surveys. But I find that surveys usually just lead me to more questions.The structure of a survey is set up to check a box or fill in a field. But there are very few things in life where I can give you a meaningful answer just by checking a box. So the whole model feels kind of weird to me. And then we try to compensate by saying, “Well, we’ll send this to a lot of people,” as if volume will make up for depth.But to me, you’re just collecting a bunch of half-answers—or assumptive data—that often fits into a narrative you’ve already built. You’re looking for something to prove it out, hoping the numbers will materialize a solution. And I find that hard to believe.I just think you’ve got to get under the hood with people and ask them more questions. Even if the sample size is small, that doesn’t mean the observations aren’t deep. Like—I don’t need a hundred 70-degree days to know I love 70-degree days. I kind of only need one.Have you ever heard this? I share it too often, but there’s that quote that goes around: “The plural of anecdote is not data.” It’s one of those popular phrases people throw out. But when you dig into it, that’s actually a bastardization of the original quote. It came from a Stanford economics professor, and what he actually said was: “The plural of anecdote is data.” We just have this weird bias toward numbers and measurement. I love how you were describing surveys—this idea that just by measuring something, it somehow becomes more real.That’s it. And maybe I’m overstating it, but I try to bring these things together. Because even the word data—it’s loaded. It pushes you toward a very technical or technological understanding of the phenomenon you’re trying to explore.But we take in so much information, and we sense so many things. That’s actually the language I prefer: What we take in. How we make sense of the world. Can you try to break that down into data? Perhaps. But I push back on this idea that we’re machines. We’re not computers.This logic-heavy worldview has become the dominant story—and it’s not a new story. It’s a 500-year-old Age of Enlightenment story. But it’s a broken story. Because it doesn’t allow us to put equal weight on the things that truly matter.It reminds me of the trading floor. People would say, “To be a trader, you’ve got to be able to process tons of information and manage risk.” And yeah, that’s true. That’s what they talked about—managing risk, operating with imperfect information.But it was also a place full of emotional ding-dongs.I always said the trading desk was just an excuse for adults to act like children.Throw things. Blow up. Break things—literally break things. Phones, monitors—all kinds of stuff.And that behavior was just chalked up to testosterone and “being a man.” But when you see emotions expressed in other bodies, in other spaces, we discredit them. Exactly. Emotions held in some bodies make sense. In other bodies, they’re dismissed.That’s what I try to unpack. I try to move away from these binaries. People say, “Turn off your emotions. Be logical. Don’t get emotional.” And I’m like—I’m emotional about everything. Emotions are what make us feel alive.Yeah. I love that. I love what you’re saying—it’s a perfect segue into your podcast. I want to hear you talk about where it came from. I’ve been introduced to so many ideas and incredible thinkers through it—especially from corners of the world I wasn’t familiar with. So how do you think about what you’re doing with the show, and how do you invite people into the conversation?Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the kind words about the show. It’s called The Deep Dive, and I’ve been doing it for five years now. I actually came to podcasting through a previous show called Two Dope Boys and a Podcast, which was an homage to OutKast’s second album, ATLiens—specifically, the track Two Dope Boyz in a Cadillac.It was me and Michael Brooks, who has since passed away. Michael really introduced me to podcasting—he was already part of that world. He co-hosted The Majority Report with Sam Seder.Michael and I were just friends. We’d sit around my kitchen, put a bottle down between us, and just talk—about all kinds of b******t. And at some point, we were like, “Man, these conversations are pretty awesome. People might actually want to listen to them.”That became Two Dope Boys and a Podcast. We did that show for a little over two years—amazing team, and I loved working with him.He passed away—not due to COVID, but during the COVID period. Michael was a huge, huge star. I often wonder, in the times we’re in now, where he would be, and what he’d be building. He had already built so much.He was really my entry point into podcasting. Later, he launched The Michael Brooks Show, which was his own thing. I wasn’t looking to start another podcast or get back into that world. But the opportunity came up to create The Deep Dive—a show where I could just sit down, have a conversation like this one, and see where it goes.And so The Deep Dive was born. It’s a Culture & Insights show—at least the way I define Culture & Insights. I try to talk to a wide range of people who I think have interesting ideas. There’s connective tissue between episodes, but it’s not the kind of show where you’re going to hear me talk to the same type of guest every week.They probably skew toward design, and there’s always a lot of economics, history, and politics woven in. I think those are inseparable from how we view everything else.But I say I’m in it for the books and the good conversations. Not everyone I interview has written a book, but many have, and I get to dive into some really dope ideas with great people—folks I might not have a chance to talk to otherwise.For example, I’m going to be interviewing Cory Doctorow again in a couple of weeks. He’s always writing—super prolific. He’s got a new book coming out on “enshittification,” which is a term he coined to describe how tech systems deteriorate over time.I asked him, “Hey, want to come back on the show?” and he said, “Yeah, I’m down.” I’ve got the book, I’m reading it now, and we’ll probably record in October.But like—if I just emailed Cory Doctorow out of the blue, I don’t know if he’d sit down with me for 90 minutes. He’s got a lot of stuff to do, right? But having The Deep Dive gives me that kind of access.Another example is Saree Makdisi—I’ve interviewed him twice and will again later this week. Just another incredible thinker whose work I admire. So the show is really my greedy way of getting into people’s worlds and having great conversations. That’s what it’s about.It’s been really well received, and I’m so grateful for the support. I get amazing responses from listeners all over the world, and honestly, I have no idea how they even find the show.I’m not on a network. I don’t buy ads on Facebook. I’m not even on Facebook. But people find it. They share it. A lot of teachers and professors assign it, so I’ll see spikes in older episodes and realize—“Oh, that must be on someone’s syllabus now.”It’s incredibly rewarding. And I’m always grateful when people agree to come on, because I know it’s a real commitment of their time and energy. But they go down the rabbit hole with me, and I love that.Nice. Well, congratulations on what you’ve built—it’s really wonderful.Thanks.I have two questions I often ask—I tend to combine them, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it’ll make sense to you. First: do you have any mentors? Who are the people who’ve influenced you? And second: are there any touchstones—ideas or concepts—you find yourself returning to again and again?Yeah. I’ll do mentors first. That’s a tough one. I have a few obvious ones I can name. Some of them might sound cliché, but my dad is definitely someone I’d put in that category. He showed me everything about New York growing up. He took me everywhere. I know the city as well as I do because of him.While a lot of kids were just hanging around Brooklyn, my dad would take me and my sister into the city. We went to the top of the Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. We did the Circle Line, the Day Line.He took us on all these little adventures. That had a big impact on me as a kid. It gave me a deep appreciation for the city I was in.I love New York. I love Brooklyn—even though it irritates me sometimes, the way it’s changed. But my deep passion for all things New York and Brooklyn really came from those trips with my dad. My high school track coach was another major influence—Mr. Malik. Shout out to Mr. Malik.He gave us lessons that weren’t just about track—they were about life. We were really close as a team. Going to Brooklyn Tech was another huge turning point. That’s where I started running track, so it all came together.It’s kind of a perfect New York story. For those who don’t know, Brooklyn Tech is one of the three specialized high schools in New York. We were mostly a bunch of immigrant kids from all over the city. My graduating class alone was almost a thousand kids—so it was also huge.And we all got along. That was the thing. I was in high school during some pretty polarized times in New York City. There was a lot of regular violence, but also police violence. The Central Park Five case happened when I was in high school—those young guys who were falsely accused and later exonerated.There was Howard Beach. The Bensonhurst killing. It was a time that, if you only looked at the headlines, seemed incredibly polarizing.But then you had us—these super diverse kids from all over: Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island—and we all got along.One of my closest friends was this white guy—I won’t say his name here to protect his privacy—but he’s an awesome dude. One of my best friends in high school. He gave me Led Zeppelin IV. The first time I ever got that cassette tape, it was from him. We were on the track team together. He gave me that tape, and it changed my entire trajectory on music.And that’s just how we were. I can’t say we were always super kind to one another—we were just regular kids—but we didn’t bring the b******t that was going on around the city into Tech.We had our friend groups, but we got along. So when I hear all these stories now about people not getting along, I’m like, how the f**k is that possible? We were dealing with so much more, and we still found ways to coexist.Anyway, I’ll leave the mentor piece there. There were others—people on the team. One guy I ran with was a sophomore when I was a freshman. Coach Malik used to give us our summer training program. Since we were from all over the city, we didn’t see each other again until the fall.He never checked up on us. We kept our own calendars. One day we asked him, “Coach, how do you know we’re doing the workouts over the summer?”He said, “If you do the workouts, I’ll know. And if you don’t do the workouts, I’ll know. It’ll be obvious.”It was one of those early lessons in trust.And that older teammate? He called me up and said, “Hey, we live kind of near each other. Let’s run together over the summer.” That summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I made huge progress—physically, yes, but more than that, I learned something deeper. He didn’t have to train with me. He extended himself.He pulled me along. And that became a lifelong lesson: always help people. In every part of my life, someone has helped me—sometimes when I didn’t even realize I needed help. Someone always extended a hand.So I try to carry that with me in everything I do—personally and professionally. It’s one of the saddest things to me: how helping others has become commoditized. People say, “If you want 15 minutes of my time, you’ve got to do this, book that...” F**k off, man. Just take the f*****g call. Answer the email. Who cares? I will die on that hill.No one is that busy. I don’t believe it. Either you’re lying to yourself, or you’re lying to the rest of us. That’s my thing. And I learned it from that teammate—and I’ve tried to carry it with me ever since.Yeah. And the other question—what was it again?Touchstones.Right, right. Touchstones. That’s a weird one, but I’ll keep it short.One of the best decisions I ever made was going to Howard University. It changed everything for me. And I bring that up because it was another one of those pivotal, transitional moments.Like I said earlier, my parents are from the West Indies. They didn’t go to college in the U.S. My dad took some college classes while on a student visa, but didn’t finish. My mom didn’t attend college at all.So the Black college experience was foreign to them—and to me, initially. But during high school, I started to find my political self, which was different even from my parents’. I watched Eyes on the Prize, Roots—all of that. My life as a progressive person was taking shape.And Spike Lee was right across the street from my high school. He took over an old firehouse, turned it into his studio and home. I’d see him all the time. He filmed a video for School Daze—that “Doing the Butt” scene—in my high school. That’s how present he was in my world.And School Daze, of course, is all about a fictional Black college, modeled on Morehouse. So everything in my politics was pointing me toward an HBCU experience. Howard was, in my view, the best. So I said, “I’m going to Howard.”None of my teachers understood the decision. My dad would go to parent-teacher night, and my AP English and AP History teachers were like, “Philip is so well-adjusted... we’re surprised he wants to go to Howard.”It was this existential crisis for them.Even my coach was surprised at first. Howard was a big running school, and I was tracking for a track scholarship.He actually reminded me of this recently—about a year ago—when I saw him. I explained why I chose Howard, and he said, “Once you told me that, it made perfect sense. I never second-guessed you after that.”To me, it was important. Getting an education in an all-Black environment is no less valuable than getting one in an all-white environment. So it was a political and philosophical decision. And I surrounded myself with some of the greatest people I’ve ever known. We’ve all joined the ranks of the many Howard alumni who’ve gone on to do amazing things.It changed everything for me. I pledged my fraternity there. Those are the people who have carried me through my life since I first set foot on campus. Lifelong friends. People I’ve worked with. My fraternity. So shout out to all the bros—and yes, going to Howard was the best decision I ever made.That’s such a beautiful story. And maybe I’m being super naïve, but—what were they surprised about? Was it just the perception of historically Black colleges being inferior?Exactly. And it doesn’t make them bad people—it was just the prevailing bias. Being at Brooklyn Tech, the expectation was that I’d go to an Ivy League school, or a top engineering school—RPI, Carnegie Mellon, something like that. Howard wasn’t even on their radar.The underlying assumption was: “Howard isn’t as good as the places your son could be going.” But I was decked out in Malcolm X gear, all of that. Actually, I was going through some old storage stuff recently and found one of my drafting notebooks—because I was an architecture major at Tech.Oh, right—your dad worked in zoning. Is that what got you into it?Yeah, exactly. So I opened this old notebook, and it was filled with Black radical stuff—“By Any Means Necessary,” “Black Panther Party,” all of that. And I thought—yo, I was always this dude. If people think that came later, nah. This was 14-year-old me. It was Public Enemy. Boogie Down Productions. Hip-hop at the time.All of that was politically shifting how I saw the world and my place in it. That led me to Howard. And Howard led me to everything else.Yeah. I mean, I feel like we could talk for another hour. But I want to thank you so much—this has been such a joy. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. I love what you’re doing.Thank you. It was great to be here—thank you so much. Oh, thank you, man. Anything for you. You call, I answer. And I love what you’re doing. Like I told you before we started recording—I listen to the show, I check out the transcripts. Sometimes it’s actually faster for me to read than to listen.Same—I’m a reader too.You bring on such amazing guests—thoughtful, deep thinkers. I love that, because we need more thoughtfulness in the world, not less.Yes. If we can model some thoughtfulness and curiosity, maybe we can make the world a better place. Thanks, Philip.Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Sam Pressler, co-founder of Connective Tissue and founder of the Armed Services Arts Partnership, dives deep into the essence of community. He shares how his upbringing in Wayne, New Jersey, and the influence of his grandmother shaped his commitment to civic engagement. Pressler discusses the disconnect in modern society, using research insights and historical context. He outlines three paths for renewal, advocating for cultural relocalization and structural change, while highlighting innovative local initiatives that bring people together and foster a sense of belonging.

Meg Kinney is an ethnographer, strategist and co-founder of Bad Babysitter, a consultancy blending documentary storytelling with brand strategy. Named MRS/ICG Independent Researcher of the Year in 2017, she's worked with Fortune 500 companies like Procter & Gamble, Walmart, and Nordstrom. Featured in Gillian Tett's "Anthro-Vision," Kinney pioneered video-based shopper ethnography and holds a Master's in Natural Resources from Virginia Tech.I start every conversation with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. It's such a beautiful question, I borrowed it. And it's such a big question, 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 total control. You can answer or not answer in any way that you want to. And the question is: Where do you come from?Oh gosh, I love that. I think I identify myself as coming more from a time than a place—so, the 60s and 70s in Indianapolis, Indiana. More and more, I realize just where I get certain character traits or things I've needed to unlearn. As I really make a point of trying to grow as a person—not just stumbling through life kind of growth, but the actual intentional, "I only have so many years left" kind of growth—I find myself reflecting a lot on my childhood.So much of who I am is informed by the early 70s in a very conservative place. And, without getting too much into it, I had... I was that house on the street where parents of kids were like, “I don’t want you spending the night over there,” or, “I don’t want you going down there.” We were kind of set off in the neighborhood a lot. There was just a lot that always went down at my house.It was a time where things were very stigmatized. My mother suffered mental health issues. My parents got divorced—that didn’t really happen much. I'm the youngest of three, and my older brother and sister were never in school with me; they were always just enough older. But being the 70s, they were very much a part of that scene.I just think I’m from a time that has informed me a lot. But Indianapolis—and I wouldn’t trade a Midwestern upbringing for anything. I think it gives you a very deeply embedded sense of humility. Respect is a big theme, and an agrarian work ethic, and all that. But eventually, it was a place that I realized I simply must leave.Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah. I mean, the funny answer that I used to give—without even knowing what it really meant—was, “I want to be a landscape architect.” I don’t know why. But I always loved the outdoors—still do. Spent a lot of time by myself outside in deep and imaginative play. And something about the creative process...So when I went to college, I really wanted... I started out studying fine arts. I’ve always loved the arts. And then quickly realized that I was not going to be an artist. But yeah, something in a creative field of some kind.Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.And I'm curious—you talked a little bit about it—what did it mean? Can you tell a story about 70s Indianapolis? What it was like growing up?Well, I mean, only from my little purview. I didn’t have a lot of adult supervision. I was around a lot of adults. So when I wasn’t left unattended, I was around adults.My dad had a bar. He and his second wife had a bar and a catering business. So I washed dishes at a really young age, but was around the regulars at his bar. My brother and sister—their curse was they could pretty much do whatever they wanted, as long as they took me with them.So, I think by comparison to most kids under ten, I probably saw a lot of things. But as I’ve become more reflective, I’ve realized that really did create a bit of a template for what I do today. I’ve always been an observer, and kind of been most comfortable on the perimeter of something—just sort of seeing things play out.Music was a big part of it. There was a soundtrack, as we all know, to that time. And that, to this day, is an immediate rocket ship right back to times and places.It was in the city. It was kind of rural until it became suburban.What was the bar?Oh, it was called Lord Byron’s British Club.Wow.Yes. It was kind of the neighborhood place for— as I used to say—men who drove Cadillac’s, drank scotch, and wore Sansabelt slacks. You kind of know... I think that helps you locate it.But yeah, my dad, you know, he always found something new to do. He was always self-employed. So he was a builder, then he was in real estate, then he was in the restaurant business, and then he was back. He was very scrappy that way.But yeah, growing up in the bar was kind of fun. And interestingly, I’ve made this connection recently that I’ve always liked being on the service side of an equation. I started out in agency life, and now, as an independent consultant, I’ve worked client-side exactly two times in my career—and they were both very short-lived.So I think it kind of cast the die for me to be in service. I like that. I derived a lot of joy from interacting with people, taking their dishes away, chit-chatting with them, asking if they needed anything else. I liked that—and I still do.Yeah. So catch us up. Tell us—where are you, what are you doing, what’s the work that you’re doing?Well, it’s funny, I talked to somebody the other day who said, as we evolve as independent people, the trick is to never have to actually quit what you do, or quit your company’s name or your website, and start over. Instead, just try to peel layers and make the water go a different direction.Since 2008, I’ve been an independent consultant, using ethnography—or just the ethnographic lens—as a way to contextualize data and tell stories around numbers that can align people, and hopefully make things more human in the process. It’s always sort of been a humble pursuit. Affectionately, I’ve always just said, “Giving a damn is a competitive strategy.”I started my career in the agency business and came up through the ranks in advertising as an account planner, then a strategist, and then led a big insight and strategy group for a publicly traded agency network. I did that whole thing and kind of stepped away from it right at the apex because I realized I really just love qualitative understanding of things.I’ve always been more interested in the immeasurable than the measurable. But, you know, I exist in capitalism, so I completely respect the numbers side of things. I’ve just always thought that helping explain things in human terms—to provide interpretation of numbers and what they actually mean, and why you should care, and the decisions you could make that would benefit you and the people you’re trying to serve at the same time—just seemed like something I wanted to do.I was fortunate that I had met enough people in my advertising career that when I hung my own shingle, they were like, “Hey, we want to bring you into this.” And that just kind of evolved into—I just like to help people get through the mud. When people are stuck, I like helping them get unstuck, whether it’s being paralyzed by too much information, or the market isn’t behaving the way they think it’s supposed to behave, and they don’t know where to go next.I like parachuting into something kind of messy and helping find the signal in the noise.So—long-winded answer—but to my original point about not really quitting your business and opening a new one: now, probably due to a combination of the market, synthetic users, preoccupation with AI, and a little bit of ageism… a lot of my clients who sponsored my projects have retired. It’s a different time for somebody like me.And I know there’s a role—now more than ever, I think. I think what I bring to the table is probably needed more than ever. But that’s not the shiny thing right now. So I feel like presently I’m kind of in a bit of a “waiting out the storm.”I will say during the pandemic, I kind of hit the ejection button. That was my second client-side thing, and I had two years in the cannabis industry—which was a fascinating education in and of itself. But yeah.Yeah, well, I identify quite a bit with what you’ve just described—about waiting out the storm, and just how sort of confounding the current moment is. And having woken up and been in this for so long—or realizing that it has been so long. I appreciate you being open about that. And I wonder, maybe just to return to first principles, what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you? When you talk about giving a damn—I love "giving a damn" as a competitive advantage. Yeah, what do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?Oh, gosh. On a very practical level, I mean, I love fieldwork. I just love being out in the mix, in situations I know nothing about, for the sole purpose of building trust with somebody so that they'll open their world up to me. I love that entire exchange, and I personally take a lot of pride in that.I really think I can talk to anybody. I can shapeshift. And, you know, quick shout-out to people who have interviewing skills—not everyone has the gift. I just love the fieldwork. I love talking to people.From the business application side, where I derive a lot of joy is when what I bring back contextualizes whatever business problem people are wringing their hands around. When what I bring aligns the room—I love it when I can tell a story from the field that explains data they're looking at but don’t understand what drives it.I love when I can come in and say, “Let me tell you a story,” or better yet, “Let me push play.” Let me play you some footage, because we do video-based ethnography whenever we can. Or just the introduction of the camera in the setting—whether we’re shooting it or the participant is capturing things. I love when you can align a room.Because misinterpretation is so easy, right? Everyone is looking at a business problem through the lens of what the expectations are on them—what am I held accountable for? I kind of call this the strategy cul-de-sac, where a CEO will be like, “Okay, this is what the numbers are saying, this is what we're doing, this is our initiative.” Everyone interprets it through their own lens, goes off, deploys in the way they think they're supposed to—and the needle never moves, right?And then they come back, and it’s like, “What is happening?” There’s nothing like stories from the field to loosen that up and help people realize, “Oh my gosh, you mean that simple thing we're doing in this part of our sales training is creating this speed bump for us?” I love it when the light bulb goes on.Yeah. And I feel like—I mean, we met, or interacted, or connected—I don't know if it was... it feels like ages ago. And, you know, your name—Bad Babysitter—I remember meeting you a long time ago, and it always occurred to me that you guys were really early in video. Really advocating video first, ethnography out front.And I don’t know if that’s factually true, but I wonder—looking back—how has it changed? Where are we? Because I have that same experience too—the power of pushing play. Just a three-minute clip of somebody telling a story just blows the doors off so much, if you can align everybody.So what is my question? I think my question is: What was it like leading with video ethnography in 2008? And how has it changed now? Where are we in the lifecycle of that kind of research and storytelling?Yeah. Man, I appreciate that you come from that era—not to, like, wax nostalgic—but where I really got into it was, I had an amazing boss when I worked in the agency business. He just really believed in my whole approach. And I didn’t even know anything about anthropology.It wasn’t until I met some anthropologists at Procter & Gamble, just as, you know, an agency person. And they said, “You know, you're an ethnographer.” And I was like, “What is that?” And then I learned, “Oh, what is video ethnography?” I just loved that idea of enrolling a research subject in the telling of their own story.It was like, “Oh, we’re going to make a documentary film about you. And it can be whatever you want it to be about. And I’m here to just help you do that.”That was before everyone had a camera in their pocket, right? So it was a rig. And my boss—I said to him, “You know what would drive incredible business for us? If we did a proprietary study.” And he actually funded me to do a year-long proprietary study about the culture of shopping in America.We had a video guy at the agency who did corporate, institutional videos. I grabbed him, and we went into the field. We didn’t know what we were doing. These were clunky rigs, but we were just out there explaining to people—and people got on board. We were doing shop-alongs, and then we rigged the secret camera. I’m sure you did that too. You didn’t used to be able to have a camera in a retail environment.Those were incredible days. But that work product—that deliverable—was incredible. That study was responsible for explosive agency growth.I wanted to do more of it. As people started having cameras in their pockets, there was this shift: “Okay, now I want it through your perspective.” Those are artifacts that are interesting in and of themselves—giving people tasks to do, or reflections, and that sort of thing.I still, though, whenever we can, like to do the old-school version. It’s slimmer now—my partner uses an iPhone. Sometimes he has a bigger DSLR camera. But I still like to be the one capturing the things, because I do think zooming in on things or panning wide at certain times is effective in telling a story. There’s a little bit of film wisdom there.But yeah, it’s changed completely. I’m not opposed to research subjects taking the imagery themselves, at all. But the creating of an industry around that has produced a lot of junk.Well—yes. Yes. Can you say more about this?Oh, and, you know, there are many research tools out there. All of them have a time and a place. But, you know, the whole—in the name of expediency—“Well, can’t we just get 10 people in this age group to go take pictures of things they think are cool?” Sure. Yeah. I don’t know what you think you’re getting, but okay.So, again, as you and I have to evolve, it’s like, all right, that’s a tool in the box. But deep understanding of human motivation and all that does not come from that method.No, it’s interesting. It brings up so much. I mean, a question I had sort of lingering and waiting—because you talked about your instinct for people, being in the interview, being someone who’s interested in people. So there’s one question about the role of the researcher, because very often—I say this a lot—I feel like I’m really good at this, but that my ability becomes invisible because it just looks like a conversation.You know what I mean? Like you say, it’s not something anyone can observe as a notable, remarkable skill. It’s just, “Oh wow, look, Meg’s really great with people,” or “Peter’s really nice with that person.”Or “Well, that’s a great recruit. That person really has command of their thoughts.” That’s right. That’s right. And then the other—so I want—that’s like the bulk of the question. And then I want to bracket your observation about this—I guess is it auto-ethnography? Or the outsourcing of data collection to the consumer. But you used that word “just.” I feel like I have an argument against the word.“Can we just...” Anytime anybody uses that phrase, I feel like they’re doing real harm to something. You know what I mean? “Can we just do this?” It’s just sort of like, well, there’s so much you’re erasing from the process.So I guess my question is: What’s the role of the researcher? And maybe, what have you learned? What does it mean to you to be somebody who talks to people and tries to understand them? Yeah, I think that’s the question.Yeah. I mean, with my clients, the way I come at it always is: What kind of decisions do you need to make from whatever I deliver to you? I am here to help you have confidence in your decisions. I am going to give you that confidence because I’m firing your own human instincts. Yes, you’ve got a lot of numbers. I’m not here to change your interpretation of that. I’m here to help your instincts fire. I’m here to help you smell an emergent signal.So, what decisions do you need to make? What’s preventing you from making your decision? Let’s design research that gives you that. Because I don’t have any interest in research that’s inert, or leaves people still hungry, or like, “Well, so what?”The researcher has been defending their role in the C-suite for as long as I’ve been doing it. So your question, what does it mean to be a researcher today? I’m trying to find new language to describe that.Leaders are always going to need instincts—even with AI. We have to have our instincts. And that’s as much being in touch with your natural environment as getting out of your box. I think collectively there is anxiety around that, with the emergence of the absolute steamroller that is AI.But I’ve got to find the language. People are hearing: “Hey, we’re still going to need people.” The machine doesn’t have taste. The machine can’t probe. The machine can’t ask why. The machine can’t see an emergent signal. The machine’s only about the probabilities of things. It’s predictable. It’s a flattener. All that.We’re hearing that—but at this moment, the fervor and the gold rush is too strong. So I’m not like in a “let’s ride it out” mindset, but I do feel like it’s going to come back around to the question: What is the role of the researcher today?There are those leaders who are always ahead and have always gotten it. And frankly, they’ve always believed in ethnographic work. For everyone else, it’s like: What is the thing that research can say that fits into the slipstream of the conversations that are happening now, that are so efficiency-driven?I always come back to: every leader who’s accountable in a company is always afraid of getting it wrong, right? I want to help people say, “We did the best we could to understand the situation.”I’m not a person who is here to give anyone predictability. But I am a person who’s here to say, “I can help you feel it. You can trust yourself.”Yes. Well, I wanted to ask about the word “instinct.” You keep returning to this idea of instincts. It’s about qualitative understanding. What’s the role of instinct in qualitative understanding? What do you think qualitative actually does for your clients?I think—generally speaking—it’s always just this constant reminder that people are gonna people, you know?I mean, I’m sure you’ve had these situations where there’s this tiny thing you’ve observed or that you hear, but it unlocks so much, right? I think, yeah, it reminds you that humans will surprise you. It reminds you that there are many different ways to get what you want. Giving a damn is one of them.Like, “Hey, we could innovate over here. It would help these people. It would actually be a net positive for your customer. And it would positively impact your bottom line.”I’m always like, “Is that something you might be interested in?”You know? I mean, I have countless stories from the field of that happening. But I don’t—I’m not answering your question. I am somebody who loves emotion. I’ve always loved emotion. I’ve always felt emotion. Why we try to zero it out of a professional situation, I have no idea.I’m fond of saying, every business problem is a human problem. Even if you’re talking about raising the price of something and people don’t buy it—that’s a human problem. People didn’t see the value, and you’re doing that.Everything is about trying to get people to do something—everything in business. You’re trying to get people to do something you want, behave the way you want them to. And qualitative is this reminder that there are so many ways to do that, that can be a net positive, that can be differentiating, that can spark innovation, or can just be kinder.Yeah, as far as—it’s interesting, the role of qualitative. I know you interviewed Simon, and I love his UXification of Research paper. The idea of generative research is now taking a backseat to qualitative being: “Tell me what you think of this.” “How about this prototype?” I think there will be a big swing.I do. I’m optimistic. I think the pendulum will swing.Now, will I still be here for that? I don’t know.But yeah, that’s a long-winded, very indirect, non-answer to your question about qualitative. But the language—I’m presently, as you can see, struggling to determine what is the thing I can say as I’m pitching projects. Because there are plenty of people who are there to take care of efficiency.Yes.I will drop into your workflow, and I will conduct my research and design it in a way that is compatible with the way you work. But I am not here to help you do anything more efficiently.Yeah. This reminds me of when John Dutton invited me to answer this question for his newsletter. It was kind of, “What’s the role of qualitative in the age of AI and synthetic users?” And it really sparked a real existential crisis. Because when you really look closely at generative AI, it really does—or mimics, or looks like—most things that I think I do. And that’s why the synthetic user stuff is growing the way that it’s growing. Because it looks like it’s doing what we do.But yeah, I really had to come to terms with what it is that we do. And I was attracted to your use of the word instinct, because I feel like qualitative probably apologizes too much for being... you know, or tries to... or abandons the humanity of the work too quickly in order to get access to the C-suite.But what we really do is this sort of magical form of understanding that’s not—like you said, what is it? You said something about the immeasurable up front. What’s the line that you say?Oh, I’ve just always been more interested in the immeasurable than the measurable.Yeah, that’s right. But I think you’re making a really good point about maybe we need to hold the line more as qualitative researchers and not be apologetic. Or build the value in.Sorry—yeah. What did you say?I love what you were saying about maybe we shouldn’t apologize for its squishiness. Yes, right. Because I’m here to take what we’ve learned and put it into the business equation—but let’s let it be squishy. Let’s let it be unruly.Yes. And I feel like—tell me what you think about this—that qualitative, through the business lens, very often looks like a bad form of quantitative. Or some other thing that’s not really connected to data (number one) or real understanding (number two).And so we haven’t even made the case yet to sit alongside quantitative. You know what I mean? Just to sit next to quantitative as a necessary partner that delivers a particular kind of data, collected a particular kind of way, that delivers a particular kind of understanding.That’s not—you don’t even compare it. It’s like... you’re not even in the same boat. And what I came down to is the idea of intuition.Because I’ve had the experience that you’ve had, where you press play on one person telling the tiniest little story about their experience in a category, and it just blows the doors off of the internal understanding of the business.And it’s a story. You know what I mean? It’s not a number. There’s not a measurement in it. And people are—it blows their minds. And it changes everything.Oh my gosh, yes. And I live for those moments.I have a story that I like to tell about that very thing. So I was working with Benjamin Moore. I ended up working with them for like three years, across their entire ecosystem—but beginning with the homeowners and understanding: When is the paint purchase occasion?Well, the quantitative longitudinal studies that they’d always done said, “Why are you painting?” And, you know, you would have regions of people—Benjamin Moore would say, “Well, it’s when you’re moving and you need to improve the value of your home.”You have smoke damage, you have water damage, or you’re bored. That’s when people decide to paint. And this was just institutional understanding—that that was it.So every year they would benchmark to see the changes in that, using the same quantitative instrument over and over again, and tie many of their programs to moving these things.Oh my gosh. You go in and you play one four-minute vignette of a woman talking about—after losing her daughter, she knew her grief was over when she was willing to repaint her room and take it down.Then you hear a guy, in the same vignette, say, “I had this woman who was this wild lover. I was shooting way above the rim, and we were lying in bed, and she’s like, ‘You should paint this room green.’” And he’s like, “We were standing in this room—it was a horrible color green.”And we ask, “Are you still together?” And he’s like, “No.”And the whole C-suite bursts out laughing, right?So you take them from a lump in their throat about a woman who uses paint symbolically to tell herself she can move through her grief, and answer it with this sheepish guy who painted his bedroom this awful color—for sex.You can’t get that any other way.And to your point, that blew the whole thing open. And we were like, so it is emotional. It’s not transactional.That’s right. Right.There are moments in life.And what if we just changed the language at retail to say:What are you going through right now that has you wanting to change?“Oh, we’re having a baby.”“Oh, we just got married.”You know—all these things.And so that’s just one example of how one marketing tactic, sales language, benefits the retailer, benefits the brand—all those things. But you would never get that if you didn’t go spend hours with people talking about paint and life.Yeah, that’s so beautiful. I mean, those really are the thrill. They really are the thrill, because it is a totally different kind of understanding. I like to describe it as: it smuggles in so much information. Do you know what I mean?Right.It’s just sort of like—yes, they don’t see it coming, and they can’t read—when I say “they,” I’m talking about client-side people who are fluent in, I guess, what I think of as an analytical understanding that quantitative data gives. But maybe they’re uncomfortable with the kind of intuitive understanding—or instinctual understanding—you describe from qualitative. And they can’t resist it, because it is sort of elemental. It’s human in that way.Yes. And you’re right—I love this idea that it smuggles in. Because, you know, another layer: the woman moving through grief was basically a ringer for Fran Drescher.She was a New Yorker. She had her little teacup dog. She was dressed head-to-toe leopard. She was very sassy—but then immediately softened when she talked about the loss of her daughter.Right.And so, also, there’s the visual trick that’s being played on the client. And the guy who painted for the woman—a really tall, kind of awkward guy, you know. And it just... there’s so many things. So many layers. To your point, smuggling is a great word for that. It’s just so full. And I don’t know. To me, that kind of work, and that kind of experience you have when you show—when this connection happens, where everyone in the boardroom is suddenly really feeling the business situation—it’s like...I just want to say, “You could feel like this all the time. We can have way more fun than this. And we can drive business.”So, in preparing for our conversation, I dug around a little bit, and I wasn’t aware that your work was featured in Gillian Tett’s book. And there’s a Primrose School by me—I think it’s still around. But I wanted to give you a chance to tell that story. And for anybody who doesn’t know: Jillian Tett, anthropologist at the Financial Times, wrote a book called Anthro-Vision, advocating for all the stuff we’re talking about. What was it like? Can you tell that story about Primrose and what it was like to be featured like that?Oh, that’s so nice of you to bring that up. Yeah, I had submitted a paper to EPIC, which is a global community of people using the ethnographic lens to advance business. I’d submitted it to the annual conference—it got accepted—and I presented the case study. And Gillian Tett happened to be in the audience.Oh, wow.Which was interesting. It was in Providence, Rhode Island. I didn’t know who she was. But then, like two months afterward, I got a call from the PR people at Primrose who were like, “Great job getting in the Financial Times.”We really appreciate that. And I was like, the what? And they’re like, “You—we got mentioned in the Financial Times.” And I was like, “We did?” So Gillian had written—when she was editor-at-large, still for that publication—she’d written about the presentation. And I was like, wow. That was... that was really nice.And then, oddly enough, not too long after that, she reached out directly and said, “Hey, I’m writing this book, and I’m really interested in how you used an anthropological approach to solving this company’s business issues.”Primrose—for those who don’t know—it’s like a billion-dollar early education company.Oh boy.And they have—I think they’re probably up to over 500 franchises of preschools. An incredible story. A female founder, Jo Kirshner, is a supernova. It’s a really incredible company.And again, we ended up with a three-year gig with them, doing their whole ecosystem. But it began with: How does a new generation of parents go about making this decision? Because they had all this data that indicated, “We’re moving people through the funnel. Great. We’re running our social ads. They’re clicking on it. They’re going to the pages on the website. We’re directing them to the tour page. They’re booking the tour.”And then—they’re not signing up. What is happening?And the CEO, Jo, she had a hunch. She said, “I think our franchisees maybe come from a different era of parenting. What’s happening here?”So we did a six-month study—spending time with young parents navigating the decision. Ones who rejected Primrose, ones who had just enrolled, and ones who were at the very beginning of that journey—going with them on school tours.One of the really fascinating things about that was just explaining that this generation is in a peer-to-peer world, and you’re talking to them about your pedagogy up here.You need to break that. Because it used to be Dr. Spock—we had the experts, right? It was one-to-many. And we were like, “No, no, no. You’ve got to—you’re a peer.”So there was a lot of work around just language. And what parents wanted—they wanted resilient kids. It’s like: “My child will learn to read. I don’t need him learning cursive or reading at four. I want him to understand how to be with others.”A lot of generational things like that.But then, one of the other things—again, you could never do this without this kind of research—was going on the tours. Over and over again, when we would be with a young mom and she had her baby—this is for moms giving up for the first time, right? It’s not like, “Oh, he’s three and we’re changing preschools.” It’s, “My baby,” you know?And every tour would start with: you meet the parents—and we always pretended to be like an aunt or something. “Oh, this is my aunt and uncle—they’re going to go along on the tour with us.”Every time, the school director—when they got into the room where the babies are—would immediately launch into how clean the room was. Because apparently, in quantitative surveys, constantly benchmarked in ratings and reviews, cleanliness is obviously a big deal.So they’re like, “Oh, cleanliness is a huge deal—let’s launch into cleanliness.” And every single time, they would give the baby to a teacher—just to put the mom at ease—and the director’s talking about cleaning solutions. And the mom looked nauseous. Just really destabilized. Nothing spoken—purely observed.We noticed this. And when we got back in the car, we’d say, “So when she was talking about the cleaning...” and all these moms were like, “I’m worried if these people are going to love my child. I don’t care about bleach concentrate.”And we were able to go back and say, “You know what? Just don’t say anything for the first minute. Let there be silence.”Just a little tweak like that in the tour was one of those things that unleashed a whole...It’s like—let mom process. Yeah. And get to bleach later. So again—just, you know, thank you for asking.Oh, of course. I definitely feel like I have a weird little underdog complex as a qualitative ethnographic type person. So I’m always excited by moments when it gets celebrated and championed. I was excited to—I don’t know that I knew that when it happened—so I was happy to hear you talk about it.And we have a little bit of time left, and I was curious—you mentioned EPIC. Talk to me about EPIC. Talk to me, maybe about—are you still on the board there? Is that right?I just joined the board.All right. There we go.Yeah. It’s my first board ever.Congratulations. All grown up.I know. Baby’s going places. Yeah.Talk to me about EPIC and what excites you about it and the role. Yeah. I mean, I guess—where does it fit in everything we’re talking about?Yeah. I found—well, both Hal and I found—EPIC 10 years ago. We’ve been members for 10 years, and it was truly out of a moment of just feeling isolation, being in this weird little niche, trying to do business development. Just like, oh my gosh, we need people. We need our people.And just Googling around and stumbling upon this organization that initially—I’ll be honest—I was like, what is this? It has the word “ethnography,” they have a conference, but they talk in ways I don’t understand. And it felt very academic.And it is—it has quite the academic backbone, in the best possible way. But we just rolled the dice and were like, well, this conference is in New York. Let’s just go. And if it’s a bust, hey, we’re in New York City. That’ll be our own good-time growing.So we went. And EPIC is—it’s not a trade group, because it has no agenda. It’s not there to ratify standards or anything like that, that a trade organization might. They describe themselves as a community. It’s global.The language it’s used for the last 10 years—it’s a 20-year-old organization—has been about advancing the value of ethnography in business. Of course, as you might imagine, we’re grappling with the word “ethnography.” It’s the most meaningful method that is so misunderstood.But it is a group. It’s UX researchers, it’s design researchers, it’s anthropologists, it’s social scientists. It’s people like me. I call it purebreds and pound puppies. I’m a pound puppy.Wait—I was going to say, who’s who there? I’m a pound puppy.Yeah. Well, you need them both, right? They do different things.And every year, there’s an annual conference. You can submit to do a case study, a paper, a Pecha Kucha, a speculative design installation. And it’s been a really special, special group where you can go and openly debate things, right?It is that safe space of people who care deeply about the human social science perspective in business. But we’re not in the business of absolutes, right? So there’s lots to debate. And there’s a lot of application of theory versus what actually just happens in the real world.So it’s been a lovely professional oasis—and a lovely debate arena.We’re having our big conference in Helsinki in two weeks. And I think we’re going to try to do a big membership drive at the start of the year.But like many organizations post-pandemic, people are like, “Ah, do I really need to get on a plane? Do I really need to go be there? Can’t I just join virtually?” Or, “Here are all these other virtual webinars, and I never even need to leave my desk.”So we’re kind of suffering that situation, as many in-person events do.So yeah, I kind of came on the board because I have a marketing background. And most people come from other backgrounds—there are a lot of people from socio-technical research, and that sort of thing.So yeah, that’s my remit: to help them get some sea legs under them and broaden the aperture, because it really is for anyone who cares about this thing called humanity and believes that humanity and business don’t have to be mutually exclusive.Beautiful. I want to thank you so much. We’re kind of running out of our time. This has been a blast. It’s nice to see you again. And this is just a real treat. So thank you so much for accepting my invitation.You’re so kind. I’m not used to—I’m not comfortable being the one dominating conversations. So thank you for finding all the buttons to hit play. That didn’t hurt a bit, Peter.Nice. High compliment.I appreciate it very much. Thank you so much. I love what you’re doing. Please don’t stop.That’s kind. Thank you very much. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Linn Davis, Program Director at Healthy Democracy, specializes in civic assembly design. He discusses the transformative power of collaborative versus adversarial politics and how civic assemblies foster empathy among participants. Davis shares insights on the emotional rewards of witnessing strangers form connections while tackling complex issues. He also outlines innovative governance ideas, including the proposal for permanent assemblies to enhance democratic ownership and trust in everyday citizens' deliberative capabilities.

Elle Griffin, a writer and publisher of The Elysian, delves into imaginative approaches to governance and culture. She shares her journey from a nomadic Air Force childhood to becoming a journalist at major outlets. Griffin defends bold creativity in journalism, emphasizing the importance of reimagining political systems. She explores feminist utopias and highlights the need for hopeful futures over bleak narratives. Additionally, she discusses her upcoming book on capitalism and the joy of crafting personalized news, encouraging a more engaged and visionary audience.