THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Tara Isabella Burton is an American novelist, essayist, and theologian whose work explores religion, enchantment, and self-creation. Her books include the nonfiction works Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, and a forthcoming study of magic and modernity. She has a great substack - The Lost Word.So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. It's a big, beautiful question—which is why I use it. But because it's big and beautiful, I overexplain it the way that I'm doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer in any way that you want to.I'm very excited. Only a little afraid.The question is: where do you come from?Ah, I will choose to answer that question—a sort of semi-combination of ideologically and personally. I am a 19th-century Anglo-Catholic Christian existentialist who loves T.S. Eliot too much, ex-theater kid, New Yorker, halachically Jewish—but a convert, as are so many. And I think how I approach both the theology side of my work and the fiction side of my work, and increasingly with The Lost Word and other projects, is an attempt to find an intersection or a kind of dialogue that bridges both, or doesn’t segment both.I will say that in the middle of that answer, "theater kid" popped out. That’s the real answer. Can you tell me a story about being a theater kid in New York City?Absolutely. So when I was 13 years old, I transferred into a school—or tested into a school—called Hunter, Hunter College High School, which is this test-only, weird, gifted-kid public school, but not part of the public school system. As you might imagine from a bunch of smart, weird New Yorkers, it was a kind of revelation for me coming in.And I was 13 years old the first year, and I immediately found my people—or who I hoped would be my people—in the Shakespeare Club. There was a production of Much Ado About Nothing, and I was the messenger. I was very excited to be cast, so being the messenger was a big deal. Of course, I absolutely idolized everybody else in the production.People kept dropping out, or getting injured, or getting sick, as tends to be the case in high school productions. So I kept sort of ascending through the ranks. By the time we performed, I ended up playing Borachio, the villain’s right-hand man.And I just remember the cast party that we had, which was actually in my— I lived near to the school, so it was in my house. The sense of all these people who were so much cooler than I was, and so much more interesting. And because they were sort of smart and weird teenagers, they were incredibly well-read, but none of us knew how to make sense of what we read except by applying it specifically to our lives.I think there was someone reading Frank O’Hara at the table, and someone told me that I was Jack Kerouac. Someone else told me that I was Isabel Archer. I think that’s what we were all reading at the time.And I think it was like two in the morning, and it was the first time I ever drank alcohol. And I thought: this is what I want. This kind of conversation, this obsession with beauty, this feeling of what I did not at the time think of as collective effervescence. But we have created this beautiful thing. We have created this production, and we are celebrating it in this way—where the ideas, and the people, and obviously all of the implicit crushes that were going on, were just beneath the surface.And somehow—I don’t know how this happened—we ended up in the East Village at 5 in the morning. I think we gave my poor mother a heart attack. She’d gone to bed. We all just snuck out. Veselka was 24 hours back then. I think it is now. Yeah.And I basically decided I was just going to chase that forever. And that’s basically what I’ve been doing ever since.Oh wow. That’s so beautiful. There’s a question I ask, which is always like: do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? And I feel like you just gave that answer. But how would you respond to that?I wanted to be a writer, actually. On my desk, which is in my office—to my left—there is a little note. I think I wrote “I will be a writer when I grow up” when I was 10, on some stationery. I framed it, and I just keep it on my desk because I’m very sentimental.I think I actually found it among my grandmother’s things after she died. And yeah, I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I always knew I was weirdly obsessed with the God stuff for a relatively secularly raised child.I think I once joked to a friend that I was like a horse girl for God. That was my thing—saints, theology, go to the library. I was like, I have to figure out what religion to be. I’ll learn about all of them. There was a time I really liked the Jains because they liked animals, and I liked animals. My theological sense was not super developed at that time.But yeah, it’s basically been like—I read Oscar Wilde when I was 13. I was interested in decadence and dandyism and theology. I did my doctoral dissertation on decadence and dandyism and theology. I wrote a book on self-creation involving decadence and dandyism and theology.And I’m now working on a book on magic, which deals heavily with 19th-century French occultists and decadence and dandyism and theology. So really, I think what we’re learning from this conversation is that I should be more open to new interests than I am.I don’t know. That’s maybe not the conclusion I might have drawn. I’m curious—at 10 years old, what was a writer to you? What did you think of?I very much thought of myself as a fiction writer first—as a novelist first. I still do, even as so much of my work is not just that. But I got lost in novels. And I thought—and I no longer think this necessarily—that they had the key to real life, where they felt realer than real life. I think that’s a very common way for a sort of smart, awkward kid to be. I think now the relationship is less obvious.I think if you're not engaged in your real life, you're doing something wrong. But there is something about the intensity of encountering a text. And I think, when I was younger, that meant something beautiful—something that made you aware of an enchanted register in which you could experience the world in a different way.I still haven't worked out how that all led me to Christianity. And I think something I still think about—and don't really have a satisfactory answer for—as a novelist, or as someone who thinks about novels, is: what happens after the aesthetic stage? What happens after you fall in love with books because they make you realize something, and then you have a sense of reality, or a sense of this grander story and an enchanted world? What role does reading novels serve then? And I think that's what I'm wrestling with now.I'm reading The Way We Live Now by Trollope, which I haven't read since I was sixteen or seventeen. It's interesting to read with an eye toward: I know I love this book, but why do I love it? So, you know, in a week or two, I'll have an answer. But by then the podcast will be over.So catch us up—tell me, where are you now, and how do you talk about what you do?I usually start by saying I wear many hats, which—whether or not I'm actually wearing a hat—is great. It's great that I am a novelist. I usually call myself a theologian-slash-culture critic-slash-historian. The nonfiction work doesn't have as easy a title as novelist.But basically, I think about art, God, language, magic, eros, and enchantment for a living.I'm working on my fourth novel now. I'm working on an intellectual history of modernity and magic—that’s the one with the deadline, so that’s the one I should really finish first. I'm a lecturer at the Catholic University of America. As of a couple weeks ago, I just started work on a Templeton grant to research the relationship between beauty and spiritual transcendence, particularly among the spiritual-but-not-religious.I'll be working on a book on beauty and transcendence as a result of that. I teach at Catholic—I teach creative writing. Last term, I taught basically theological aesthetics for creative writers: what is the purpose of fiction? Now go write some.And I just launched a new Substack, The Lost Word, to try and work out some of these questions in public with my friends. I think that basically everything I do is, in some way, connected to trying to work out the same set of questions that have obsessed me since I was very small. Hopefully, it will also make me a better writer of fiction to think about these questions.Although often, it feels like thinking about these questions makes me over-intellectualize things—makes it harder to write fiction. So we'll see.How clear are these questions to you? Do you have them with you all the time? Or—what are they?How clear are the answers, or how clear are the questions?How clear? I'm just curious—the way you referenced them, they felt very concrete.I mean, I don't have them written down. But basically, the sort of vague sense I have is: what do we do with human creativity vis-à-vis God's creativity? Because I've spent too much time going down the esoteric rabbit hole: what do we do with the noetic realm? Or what is the reality of that realm vis-à-vis the material realm?Are we doing magic when we write fiction? Are we hijacking people's imaginations? Am I accidentally committing an act of sorcery every time I write a novel? If not, why not? Jesus is the incarnate Word—does that, in some way, stabilize our sense of language?I'm really influenced by George Steiner, who writes about this in Real Presences, from a slightly different perspective, of course. But this idea—that there is a God, that the concept of God guarantees a kind of fundamental relationship between word and meaning.And actually, Charles Taylor's recent Cosmic Connections has also really shaped my thinking on this—this idea that perhaps these connections aren't just the relationship of language to meaning, but also that language can be understood non-verbally, or as correspondences between things that aren't just about the spoken word in a particular language.So I'd say I don't have a list of questions written down. But I wrote about this in my first Substack piece—I really like Confessions, the way Augustine opens it...And one of the things that he does is—it feels like he’s taking an idea as far as it can go. He’s like, well, if this and this… but if this is true, then is that also true? And we see him think—it’s, you know, I don’t have it to hand—but it’s something like, well, if I’m making space for you in my soul, then does that mean you’re not there already? And if you’re really big, then do you feel everything?It feels like a lot of these questions I’m working through in a way where it’s not so much that I have answers, but I go in one direction and go, okay, there’s a problem there. How is Christ the incarnate word? And what does that mean for language? And also, is spoken language, in some way, creating reality or not?It’s really just in my head all the time—which is, you know, sometimes really fun and rewarding. And sometimes it makes me less fun at parties.When would you say you realized that you could make a living doing this?Oh gosh—can I make a living doing this?My career is kind of a big accident. I was living in Tbilisi in college part-time because my mother, who was in international development, had a job at the now-defunct USAID. I was doing a doctoral program at Oxford on dandyism and self-creation in the theology department. I was funded, so I had this three-year window where I actually had what seemed to me like a huge income—for a grad student.And I thought, well, if I want to be a freelance writer, and I want to be a writer, this is a good time to pitch and get started, and do things where one does not often have a decent income. And I kind of totally randomly won a writing contest—a travel writing contest run by The Spectator. It was called the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, for a piece about Tbilisi.And suddenly, I had this thing people would pay me to do, which was be a travel writer. And I started there because that’s what people wanted. Georgia was, at the time, a cool place—not a lot of people had been—so there was a lot of demand for on-the-ground reporting about Tbilisi bars or what have you.And I was able to—once editors listened to me a little—start doing some Caucasus religion stories. I think I wrote for Al Jazeera on the Sufi mystics in the Pankisi Gorge, which is a sort of ethnically Chechen region within Georgia. And suddenly… suddenly I was writing.I ended up selling my first novel in my last year of grad school. And about a month later, I got a job as the religion reporter at Vox.com. That’s V Vox, not F Fox—I always have to clarify that on podcasts.I moved back to New York with my very, very new degree in hand and left academia, and became a beat journalist at a very interesting time. It was 2017–2018, early in the Trump administration—lots of stories about white evangelicals and Trump, and what was then known as the alt-right. But also, resistance witches and the witches hexing Trump.It was a very Ruth Bader Ginsburg votive-candle sort of era.Because Vox catered to what one might uncharitably refer to as the coastal liberal elite, the stories they were interested in—and this was online journalism, so click-driven—shaped my coverage. I was encouraged to do more stories about astrology and witches hexing Trump.Somewhere in there, as is so often the case, an article I’d written for Aeon about cults led to a request to submit a book proposal for an academic book about cults, which somehow turned into a book proposal for a general publisher instead—because they paid more money. That became Strange Rites—a book that was not at all about cults.Because I had this Strange Rites project going on while I was at Vox, it became much less about cults as a phenomenon, and more about religious sensibilities among the spiritual-but-not-religious. So it became this sort of complete accident of a career—I started out as a travel writer in Tbilisi and ended up writing Strange Rites based on my work at Vox.It’s been kind of unconventional. About 18 months in, I left Vox to work full-time on book projects. I’ve been writing books ever since and have not been gainfully, full-time employed until two weeks ago.And I now, once again, have a 401(k). It’s exciting.You got a job.Oh yeah. I’m full-time. I’m now a lecturer at Catholic University of America, as a result of the Templeton grant. So I am now no longer a freelancer.What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?Oh man—I just get to think about the coolest things all the time. And I get to talk to people about them.I love writing fiction, but it is lonely. It is lonely, and it makes me miserable. And so much of the fiction I write—I mean, I would say this about any writer—is bad. Your drafts are bad until they get good. Even if you’re the best writer in the world, probably most of what you write is bad.Unless I’m in a very particular mental place—I have a particular setting, which usually involves not having internet for several months and being in total isolation—I can do that, and it’s great. Otherwise, it’s lonely.What I found, kind of unexpectedly, about the nonfiction writing world is that it's less lonely. I can have conversations like this one with you on a podcast. There are Subs. Having been off social media for ages, I'm kind of bullish on Substack. It's fun. I'm making friends.And I think there is—it feels like a cast party. I love not only being able to think about the stuff, write about the stuff, but to be able to do it in conversation with other people. I think that balance of being able to go away—I was on my roof this morning, where there is no internet, reading a book and reviewing it, with no contact with the outside world—and then coming down and talking to you feels like a really good balance.Yeah. Well, again, I’m so appreciative of you being here. My first encounter with you, I guess, was Strange Rites, which felt like this beautiful book, talking about things in a way that you don’t always see. I felt like I hadn’t seen something like it in a while. What was it like writing that? How did it come to be?Yeah, it's a bit of a surprise. I had this book deal to write a book about cults. I had this job at Vox. The book was very overdue, because a full-time job does not leave a lot of time to write a book. So I finally left Vox. I said, I’ve got to get serious. And suddenly, the book came together.I think the writing of it was relatively quick, because so much of the research ended up being what I'd been doing at Vox for the previous 18 months. Whether it was contacts I'd made in the rationalist community, among the witches, or in Harry Potter fandom—suddenly, the book came together.And of all the books I’ve written, it’s the one I re-encounter the most. If someone’s reaching out to me to give a talk or a lecture, it’s probably because of Strange Rites. I think it’s on a lot of college curriculums, because it is—hopefully—very accessible. It was not written as an academic book.But at the same time, I’m enough of an ex-academic to try to be as academic as I can be while still being readable. And I really loved writing it. I think my next two nonfiction books—The Self-Made, which is out now, and the one I’m working on now, on magic—are a little more academic. Or at least a little more historical in scope.There’s something kind of fun about being able to, as I did in Strange Rites, include historical context. There are chapters on New Thought and spiritualism. But being able to just do cultural analysis was rewarding. It’s something I’m hoping to get back to a little more in this magic book.What did you take away from Strange Rites? Where do you end up? That was five or six years ago now?Yeah, it came out in 2020. I wrote it in 2019.How would you describe where we are now, compared to 2020?I still joke someone should pay me to write Too Strange Rites. Occasionally I think about doing a Tumblr—just picking out “Strange Rites–coded” things I see in the world.Not to be like “I was right,” but I do think the things I saw in 2020 are so much more extreme now, post-pandemic—particularly in wellness culture. Although a certain kind of wellness culture feels like we’ve hit peak saturation. I don’t think SoulCycle has the cultural capital it once did.In 2020, you still had these different camps. You had SoulCycle wellness. You had what I called the atavistic right—Jordan Peterson was more of an edge case then, although he’s gotten more extreme. There were the techno-utopians in the tech world. There were the resistance witches.And what it seems to me now is that we’ve seen a lot more bleed among those tribes. For whatever reason, my sense is that the left-coded—what was then called social justice warriors, and later called “woke”—that sacralized version of that has lost its mimetic power, as well as its political power.Even in the run-up to the 2024 election, you didn’t see that many Kamala Harris votive candles. I’m sure there were witches for Kamala, but it didn’t have the same kind of trendy, popular appeal as the anti-Trump witches did. Maybe it was overexposure, or it had already become a marketing slogan and felt disingenuous. I’m not entirely sure.Whereas it feels like that kind of inchoate enchantment—the tech right, the atavistic right, actually traditionalist Christian—Make America Healthy Again—coalition is really coalescing into a coalition.That is absolutely not my natural political home at all. But I do find it very, very interesting. That slightly more—reluctantly put—right-coded weird stuff, or just the anti-establishment weird stuff, or maybe the anti–quote unquote–rational…“Anti-woke” seems too simplistic, and “anti-rational” isn’t quite right either. But I think there’s a privileging of a certain idea of vibes that seems to be linked in some way with sex and sexuality. Particularly traditional, gender-essentialist sex roles, and the erotic creative—the celebration of erotic creative power, or the power of the ingenious technical engineer—as opposed to what they would code as…And this is really interesting because I think it's analogous to a lot of 19th-century reactionary language. This idea that democracy made everyone the same, and democracy got rid of natural hierarchies, and liberalism and equality just made us—there's a fundamental human power not being tapped because we’ve stamped it out.That’s very much the language Nietzsche uses about ressentiment. It’s the language that a lot of 19th-century dandies used about the death of aristocracy. And it is a language that's used, I think, here too—against what they call “the woke.” And for whatever reason—and I'm happy to tease it out, but I don't have a clear diagnosis—the reaction against what they see as a kind of flattening is strong enough to make very, very strange bedfellows out of tech titans and traditionalist Catholics.I'm thinking of relationships between, I don’t know, Jordan Peterson and Bishop Robert Barron, who has Jordan Peterson on his podcast. Or the relationship between Peter Thiel and large sections of the Catholic intellectual universe. I haven’t read—well, I always read just enough to be dangerous—but I feel like I’ve read... is it Reno, and his idea of the strong gods?Yeah. Strong Gods: The Return of the Strong Gods, Rusty Reno.I’m very curious because, as someone who likes things like beauty and goodness and truth—I think those are generally good things—I think perhaps returning to a model of belief in objective... not to say objective beauty, that’s a little too far, but that there are some transcendent goods that human action reaches, that not everything is relative—I’m probably broadly in agreement with that.And yet—big caveat—I don’t really see, as a practicing Christian, how you can fund it. There’s so much that is fundamentally anti-hierarchical about Christianity. It was carnivalesque. Your God died. Your king came in on a donkey. There’s a real moral, ethical, theological, cosmic demand that you do not think of, I don’t know, beautiful statue-like Greek bodies as the ideal of what beauty is.At the same time, yes, beauty seems to be something—or the ability to find the beautiful does seem to lead people to a sense of transcendence. But there does seem to be a return to a generalized desire for a kind of hierarchical, authoritarian, truth—ostensibly truth-based—model of existence, rather than a pure personal, relativistic, “all truths are equal.”And yet—and I make this case much more in the magic book—I think the way it has manifested itself is actually quite nihilistic and quite anti-truth. It ends up being about what you can convince people of, or what attention—as a kind of currency—you can wield, or an energy you can harness.But it does seem to me to be profoundly anti-Christian.We’ve got a little bit of time left—I want to hear more about the book you’re working on: the magic one.Oh yes. So it doesn’t have a title yet. I think the working title is Old Gods, although I like The Lost Word now that I’m doing the Substack on it. I don’t know what my editor will think at the end of it.But basically, it’s an intellectual history of modernity and magic.And by magic, I mean specifically the learned—what you might call the learned magic tradition. Other sources call it the Western esoteric tradition. So: Hermetic magic, Solomonic magic, Kabbalah, leading into the Rosicrucians, the Theosophists a little bit, all the way through Crowley, through the transhumanists of the 20th century.I’m trying to draw a historical lineage of the belief in human self-transcendence and self-divinization through a gnosis that is both internal and personal, but also about speaking the language of the cosmos—knowing how things fit together, how things work, what the correspondences are.The sort of paradigmatic figures—excuse me a second, there’s a fly—the paradigmatic figures here are the technologist, the artist, and the user of words. I’m interested in how, pretty consistently from the Renaissance to the present day, historical and political movements are intertwined with the history of Freemasonry or Rosicrucianism.I'm thinking about the development of the Royal Society in London in the 17th and 18th centuries. I'm thinking about the rise of nationalism in Europe, and its association with Freemasonry—from Washington to Garibaldi, both arguably Masons—to the development of the internet specifically.And there is a vague connection I’m trying to identify—more substantive, documented connections—between what you might consider the broad “esoteric idea” umbrella and these ideas about the networked noetic realm on which the contemporary internet is built.The place I want to end up—where I think I’m ending up, hopefully—is that the internet is a space where the laws of magic are real. On the internet, magic exists. You can shape reality with your mind. You can get inside other people’s heads and transform their attention, transform their desires—their desires, their energies, their erotic capacities get channeled in a particular direction. And they vote in certain ways, and they spend money in certain ways, and suddenly material reality does shift.This is something—this is Ioan Couliano here, not me—but something he identified. And this was long before the internet. He identified Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century magician, as the inventor of mass media, precisely because of Bruno’s work on the magic of binding—of binding and chaining people.Giordano Bruno’s writings on magic tend to be about—not purely psychological, that would reduce it too much—but about getting inside that part of people. Because we’re working with Renaissance views of the human body and soul, it’s often not clear or consistent what that intermediary thing is. It’s not the immortal soul. It’s not the physical body.It’s spirit. It’s fantasy. It's phantasy—the place where sense impressions get turned into ideas. And again, not everyone has the same model of what that is, but that intermediary realm seems to be the realm where magic operates.And now we get to dial into or connect with that realm all the time.Well, that’s—I mean, that’s just thrilling. And I feel like so much of what you’re sharing speaks to the excitement of... I don’t know that you run into a lot of cultural critics who are exploring things through a mystical or theological lens. I appreciate that so much.It reminds me of what you were just talking about—I think it’s Kreipel? Jeffrey Kripal—when he points out, and I mention this a lot, that telepathy—reading—is a form of telepathy, right? It’s a kind of magic. I don’t know how you feel about that, but the idea of telepathy as feeling from afar, and the idea that you can use words to elicit an emotional reaction from someone you've never met—that’s itself kind of magical. How does that correspond with your own explorations?I buy it. I agree with it. It freaks me out when I think about it too much. Christians aren’t supposed to do magic.But I think—and there’s that Arthur C. Clarke quote, the famous one—that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It seems that’s the case for language as the ultimate technology.But then I think it challenges us to think: if we think of language as a technology—and I think especially in the era of AI, so to speak—we have to think about what technology actually is, and what that is vis-à-vis who we are as human beings. We are, and always have been—and I say this as someone with a flip phone—a technological species. Part of being human is to be technological, to be linguistic in some way.And that doesn’t even necessarily need to mean—or exclusively mean—verbal language.I’m reviewing a book for The Wall Street Journal now. It’s a reissue of Roger Shattuck’s The Forbidden Experiment, about this wild boy found in early 19th-century France, and trying to teach him language. It’s something that’s been on my mind.I guess the question is: is there a language of the universe? Is there a fundamental set of correspondences or meanings already there? And is our language an imitation of that, an appropriation of that, a co-creation of that? What is the relationship between our human language—and any other technological ways we engage with the world—and the purely natural, purely given world?And I think that’s a question about who we are.One way of putting it is that magic deals with the theological character of human creativity—or the cosmic... I’ve referred to it as a sacralization of human imagination. And depending on what your wider theological commitments are, that could be a good thing, a bad thing, a dangerous thing.What interests me as a Christian is that—we don’t want you to do divination. We don’t want you to do magic. Like, don’t summon demons. Some of that stuff is pretty clear cut.But we do have: God becomes man so that man might become God. We do have traditions of theosis, of divinization. We do have a Word that is made flesh. And that’s important. There is a promise that death will be defeated—albeit in a resurrection way, not in a never-dying way.And I think it’s important to think about—and I get into this in the book too—that whatever orthodox Christianity is now (lowercase “o” orthodox, not like Eastern Orthodox), it comes out of the same discursive, intellectual miasma as a lot of the so-called magical tradition—which is to say, late antique Alexandria.That’s where the Gnostics are working stuff out. That’s where—depending on how you historicize it—the Hermetic tradition is working itself out. Where Neoplatonists, who are kind of... we haven’t talked about them yet, but they’re very important in the story, are working themselves out.And where early Christianity and all these different groups of people are figuring out the same question. One way of putting it is: What is the relationship between Jewish history and classical Greek conceptions of God—God as being something beyond space and time—versus a conception of God acting in history?There’s the question of what parts of humanity are immortal, and what parts are not. And while, you know, I think we’re right—I think the whole “Jesus dying and coming back” thing is pretty important here—I do think it makes sense that all these different groups of people are coming up with different answers to the same questions, informed by each other.Even Augustine—I want to say this carefully—he started out, I believe, as a Neoplatonist. And you have a lot of back-and-forth: Christian Gnostics, Gnostic Christians. Because, you know, they’re all hanging out in the same city, in Alexandria.So I think one way I like to frame the question, historically, is: it’s not magic vs. Christianity, or esotericism vs. Christianity—so much as this is a kind of stepchild or stepbrother. These are cousins—working with enough similarities that, when the magical worldview becomes more ascendant, you see it. And I think right now, I’d even venture to say it’s a kind of implicit civil religion in America in 2025. Like, people who don’t think about Solomonic magic—or Christianity, for that matter—are probably thinking about vibes, and manifesting, and creating your own reality.You’re calling that the implicit civil religion?Yes. I’ll defend that if I have to.We’ve got two minutes left. I quite like it. But I’m curious—maybe this is a “so what” question—but what are we talking about when we talk about meaning? I feel like that’s at the center of all your work. And maybe it’s an obtuse, annoying question, but I’d love to hear how you approach it.We talk about being in a meaning crisis, right? We talk about sense-making—and I feel like all of these things kind of overlap. How would you respond to that idea? What are we talking about when we talk about meaning?I think the way I’d put it—because I’ve been thinking a lot about language at the moment—is: is there (and I think this is from George Steiner’s Real Presences)... is there anything to what we say? Is there a relationship that is more than conventional or pragmatic between the signs of the world and that which they signify?And I don’t mean something simple like: I say “dog” in English and it means “dog,” but in French it’s chien—that’s just convention. I don’t think it can be as simple as saying there’s one true language in which all things make sense.Although the quest for the Adamic language was absolutely a part of the magical tradition—whether it was Hebrew or Enochian—the idea that if you just got the language right, you’d get to the heart of things.But I think maybe the way I’d put it is: the cosmos has a language, and human language is in dialogue with it. I’m looking at some trees out my window. Is a tree just a tree? Does it say anything? How is it related to wood? To stories about the changing seasons? To the purpose of trees? To books and paper? There’s something more than just humans telling convenient stories to feel better about death when we look at them.I don’t know what that language is—and I don’t think it’s just the Hermetic idea of correspondences, like: this tree is associated with this planet, so use this tree on a Thursday for this kind of magic. I see why that’s appealing. But the part of me that’s Christian and doesn’t want to do magic feels like something is missing there.Although, also, the allegorical Christian tradition does say things like: rosemary is Mary’s drying herb; we’ve got the Feast of the Assumption this week; we associate this plant with this part of the theological story.So I think there are different ways to approach it. And obviously, I don’t think you have to be a Christian to think the universe has a language.But this idea—a structure between things and other things, where the relationship is more than merely conventional—to me, that’s the heart of meaning. And that’s why it grounds human language: because human language is a response to—what I would call—God’s language. Though perhaps one could find a more secular-friendly term for it.And one final question: what do you make of the idea that we’re in a meaning crisis?I believe we are. I absolutely believe we are. Maybe less than we were a couple years ago. When I started writing on this topic, it seemed like everyone felt we were in a crisis. Everyone felt a loss of meaning. There was curiosity about religion. There was curiosity about meaning-making—because it seemed like we didn’t have it, or it felt very absent.Whereas now—this could just be because I’m in particular circles—it feels like everyone around me is actively invested in this question. In a way, the sheer act of working through it makes it feel more like a creative crisis than a desiccated one. But again, that could just be because I got so into this topic that I get to talk about it all the time—which is a great way not to feel meaningless.Awesome. Again, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. It’s been a blast. Thank you so much. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Josh McManus is a Partner at M|B|P, an advisory firm that helps communities and organizations grow their economic and social potential. He is known nationally for revitalizing post-industrial cities through place-based development, small-business growth, and organizations that combine social impact with market success. As COO of Rock Ventures, he oversaw the transformation of 14 million square feet of Detroit real estate. Earlier, he co-founded CreateHere in Chattanooga to spark grassroots business growth. His work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and The EconomAll right, Josh, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it's a really big, beautiful question, which is why I borrow it. But because it's so big, I over-explain it the way that I'm doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?I come from—I identify as coming from—a little tiny town called Rock Mart. That is in the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia. It's a place where those people native to that land were quarantined in the northwest part of the state prior to the Trail of Tears. And it's a place that's very reflective of post-industrial change.The town was arranged first around a slate mill, and then later around a cotton processing plant that took cotton and turned it into belts for tires—because before tires were steel-belted, they were cotton-belted.Oh, I did not know that.And so it's a little microcosm of the industry and post-industry across the U.S. And it's a place that is sort of firmly footed in my sort of ethos and outlook on the world.Yeah. Yeah. What does it mean to you to be from the Appalachian foothills, from that town?I think that in the national political narrative, there's always a gross oversimplification of people that are from a very—actually a huge—geographic footprint that's called Appalachia. And what it means for me is that I think that I live firmly rooted in an understanding of what it means to be working class. And everybody that comes from where I came from is, at best, working class.And I went to school with a full strata—but a full strata of working class, right? You're either on the north side or the south side of working class. And I think it really has informed everything that I've done and everything that I continue to do—that sort of grounded perspective that is actually quite egalitarian, somewhat nostalgic to a time when people lived in close proximity to each other no matter what the background was. And I think that sort of instructs how I believe that democracy can, should, would work if deployed correctly.How would you describe the childhood you had there?Yeah, interestingly, I very much identify as being from Rockmart, but I was born in DeKalb General, which would be in what's defined as Atlanta. And I went home to Gwinnett County, which was the fastest-growing county in the nation at the time—just a white flight commuter suburb. And then, in third grade, I was sort of taken out of this fastest-growing county in the nation and put into what I've later described as the slowest-growing county in the nation.Not so much—I mean, it's had some forward progress—but it was a very slow place. But that juxtaposition I think is fascinating relative to what we're experiencing as a world right now: some people are living in the fastest-growing places in the nation, in these coastal mega-regions, and then everybody else is living in what one of my heroes, Samuel Mockbee, called the forgotten places and the forgotten people, and what some folks would call flyover country. And so I'm acutely oriented to that juxtaposition of these different lives that people are living, all defined as American.Do you have a recollection of what young Josh wanted to be when he grew up?Absolutely. Yeah. He wanted to be an architect and go to Georgia Tech.Wow. Where did that come from?I think, well, I had a tremendous Lego collection, which I still have some of, and I play a lot of Lego with my son. And so I think the instinct to build came from that. I also did have these formative moments with this city and the growth that was Atlanta, which has become such a metropolis now and one of the last bastions of upward mobility in the country.And so my dad would always commute to work from wherever we were. And so when we were in North Georgia, he would commute to Atlanta to work. So I was one of the kids who had exposure to the city.And so I think seeing those buildings, playing with Lego, seeing the size and scale of the skyline—and then, pretty early on, someone gave me a book about Frank Lloyd Wright. And I remember recently recalling a couple of reports that I did—you know, when you had to assemble information, cut stuff out, paste it, and all that. One of my reports was definitely on Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.Wow. As a kid, like elementary as you're talking?Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. One was on Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and one was on Milton Hershey's Hershey, Pennsylvania.Well, that's a perfect segue now. So at this point, I usually ask: catch us up. Where are you now and what do you do?Yeah. Yeah. I did end up going to Georgia Tech in a circuitous way. I did not become an architect—I'm not a formally trained architect—but I have become sort of an idea architect.You know, it's hard to completely define my career, but problem-solving in post-industrial places is a big piece of it. What I call P3RE, which is public-private partnership real estate, is a big piece of it. And in some ways, I’m trying to solve the complexities of what I saw laid out before me growing up in that Appalachian foothill town.You know, so many folks there were dependent on the mill, which had been a Goodyear mill. There had also previously been one in a little—not even a town, almost a hollow—next to it, called Aragon. But everybody depended on the mills, and if the mills were going, then life was okay.And so I then, bathed in that, got involved in Chattanooga's turnaround beginning in the ’90s. Chapter one of my career was Chattanooga and its regaining of post-industrial population loss—becoming one of the repeatedly named “Best Outside Cities” in the country and “Gig City.” I then took that to chapter two, which was Detroit.And Detroit was—I went in around 2010, and I got recruited to help on transformation from a philanthropic standpoint. And so that chapter runs, you know, from 2010 until now. And I'm just now taking a deep interest in the Deep South, even deeper than where I grew up—so Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Black Belt of Alabama—as sort of my perspective, chapter three of problem solving in post-industrial places. Yeah. Yeah.Can we start at chapter one, and maybe Chattanooga is that story? But for people who don't know how much is in, you know, what you talk about—post-industrial problem solving—you’re so efficient in how you communicate. What does it mean? What are we talking about when we're talking about solving problems in post-industrial cities in America?Yeah. Well, Chattanooga in 1969—which is before I was born—but I have these folks I call my adopted grandparents that were leaders in the change. Chattanooga was described by Walter Cronkite on CBS News as the dirtiest city in America.So, topographically, it’s a saucer of land. So if you were doing heavy industry inside that saucer, the dirty air just kind of sat there. So there were stories of, you know, if you wore a white shirt to work, you had to change it at lunch because the collar had turned brown, that sort of thing.And these are mostly stories you would typically hear about, you know, New England and the Midwest. But if you think about how industry moved in the United States—just south of Chattanooga is Dalton, Georgia, which was at one time the carpet capital of the world. But, you know, textiles start in New England, gravitate down to the Midwest, and then to the South, and then offshore. And almost everything does that.Another suburb of Chattanooga is called South Pittsburgh, and that was based upon the rolled steel industry that did the same thing. You know, some of it started in New England, moves to the Midwest, moves to the South, moves offshore.And so Chattanooga had a lot of the same problems that all the cities that you wince when you hear about in the Midwest had. And even some of the cities that, you know, you wince when you hear about in the Northeast—these are all places that I've either been a part of, guest lectured in, whatever. You’re, you know, your Camden’s, your Newark’s—every state has their sort of post-industrial places that they don’t like talking about a whole lot.So, in Chattanooga, the work was—you’re losing population, which means you’re then losing tax base. So then you’re asking your existing residents—because of the way that you monetize municipalities in most cases—you’re asking your existing residents to pay more to get less, and that becomes a negatively reinforcing cycle.And, you know, sometimes urbanists will call that white flight. More so, it’s typically resource flight. If you have money to get out of a municipality that’s on the downward spiral, you do. And then what that leaves left over is people that don’t have that sort of physical mobility, and typically don’t have economic mobility.So it co-locates and isolates pockets of poverty, which have really negative outcomes when that happens. Yeah. So that happened in Chattanooga.And I had, you know, about a dozen people—some of which I call my adopted grandparents—that sort of banded together in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and they started engaging in civic intervention in a variety of ways. And they got philanthropy involved, they got the municipality involved, they got the people involved.And I’d say one of the most important things they did was they, you know, defined a destination that was different from where they were at that time. So there was something called Chattanooga Venture and Vision 2000, and they decided they wanted to be the best midsize city in the country.And they did that through a public engagement process—something called nominal group theory. And nominal group is something that we’ve all done before, which is more or less mass ideation, and then you get some sort of voting mechanism.And so, like, you know, paper dots at the time is what it was. So people come up with ideas, and then they get some voting capability with these paper dots, and then it’s supposed to show you where the will of the people is.If you do nominal group in a community enough times, people—activists—learn how to game the system. So they ask everybody to put their dots on their thing. So you can’t always use nominal group, but—What’s the methodology there? I mean, I’m sure, is that… yeah, what’s the…The best way to do it? Yeah. It needs to be a little bit more blind in my experience, because you have mimesis set in. So, even if nobody’s gaming the system, the sort of tribal nature of humans is that if something’s got a lot of dots on it, they’re really inclined to consider whether they should put a dot on it or not.I feel like that’s been called the—I think in advertising, there’s this law that they call the Matthew effect or something like that—that big things get bigger. The benefit of big is big, or the bigness is a producer of bigness.Yeah. Well, I’m a—I don’t want to call it a fan—but I’m a student of René Girard’s work, which is now somewhat championed by Luke Burgess. And a lot of the notions with mimesis are that we want what we want because other people want it. Those dots on something are an instruction—a subconscious instruction—that maybe you should want that too. Yeah. Yeah.It’s beautiful. I’ve seen him, I’ve encountered him recently too, in Luke Burgis as well. And what was I going to say? Well, actually, so I’ve interrupted you. Is there more to the thought that you’re in now before I ask the question?So, with Chattanooga, it was about changing the narrative and then doing demonstration projects—a lot of which were this P3RE, public-private partnership real estate. The world’s largest freshwater aquarium is a great example of that: city involvement, county involvement, private philanthropy involvement, land that was purchased from the private sector.And then sitting an entity beside that to do economic development around it as a sort of economic development of last resort. But if you look at it—I think the aquarium was $25 million pounds—I was talking to a friend in Chattanooga yesterday, pound for pound one of the best philanthropic interventions that’s ever happened because of the tax revenues, hotel/motel, jobs creation that has spun off of it over the years.But at the time it was considered a white elephant, a boondoggle. There was a lot of, “Hey, we should just use this money to subsidize the city budget because people are under heavy burden right now. We need police, we need fire, we need school”—all the things that you hear when people don’t understand macro mathematics.And the Chattanooga story—I could spend two days just talking about it—but Chattanooga changed their narrative. Actually, it’s important to say what I learned ultimately from Chattanooga is that you have to change the story. You have to begin to live that new story and narrative.And you have to shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance, which is very hard to do in post-industrial places because you’ve been living with a pie that gets smaller and smaller every year, handing out smaller slices. And so that notion that there could ever be abundance re-emerge—and that working together could work—violates everybody’s instincts that are involved. And so this has become ultimately the big to-do in every city that I’ve ever worked in: can you begin to rebuild the abundance muscle? Yeah.Where are we? I feel like the Chattanooga goes back a ways, right? And I feel like that was the first...Yeah, it’s a 50-year overnight success.But that work, when was that work? Was that ’90s? Is that what you said?Yeah. So they began in the late ’70s. I came into the work in the late ’90s. I led a wave that was late ’90s to 2010. But the friend that I was on the phone with yesterday—he’s now leading quantum computing efforts that will ultimately result in public-private partnership, real estate, and educational stuff.And so, in some ways, it never ends. But I will say that Chattanooga now has the flywheel of net new taxpayers so that it doesn’t have to be so much on a wing and a prayer and cobbled together by philanthropy and that sort of thing. You now have some municipal revenues. You now have some bullish for-profit actors. You’ve got a more healthy ecosystem of an economy.Yeah. What’s the question I want to ask? I’m just curious about cities in general. So that was going back 20 years ago, and there was a particular narrative, maybe even just about any city or all cities in the United States. Where are we now in sort of the history of cities? Is it the same? Are cities struggling in the same way as Chattanooga was then, or changed since then in terms of how the role that cities play and what’s possible for a post-industrial city in 2025?Yeah. It’s a good question that I’m quite ponderous about. And I would say I was baptized in—all of my knowledge on cities is a bit sort of like folk knowledge. I’m autodidactic. I just read voraciously.And so I haven’t been through a traditional curriculum. But what was going on in the Brookings and the more formal cities places as I’ve come up and come through was this sort of notion of the inevitability of urbanity. Sort of by 2075 or whatever, that most people will live in, quote-unquote, cities. And we were well on that trajectory.And then we ran into COVID and populism at the same time. And I still think the net arc is towards urbanity. My sort of my own reasoned position is that American suburbanism is anomalous, and it was created by the World Wars—but specifically World War II.So, when you come back from World War II, you’ve got these forces in place where you’ve desegregated the military. So it’s now inevitable you’re going to desegregate the population. And that puts all sorts of social forces in play.You’ve then got your Eisenhower interstate going on. You’ve got all these tools—governmental tools—like the GI Bill and a lot of housing intervention, all of which had some good actors in and a lot of very bad actors. And so you saw this sort of race to suburbanization, which then sort of spread people out.The other sort of military reason for that was the introduction of the H-bomb and then the N-bomb. It puts you in a place where you didn’t want to consolidate industrial capacity anymore. Because if you could drop a nuclear bomb on the center of Detroit and take out a large amount of capacity, that wasn’t a good strategy. So then you start putting plants and people in all these sort of different places.But I’ve not traveled anywhere that I find this suburban condition other than the United States. Yeah.I had heard that explanation for the suburbs—that it was like a military defensive strategy, right? Or sort of.Yeah.I had never… I mean, it blows my mind. I mean, I grew up in the burbs, of course. So I was an adult man before I discovered that the neighborhood that I grew in had been sort of inspired by that kind of thinking, that kind of strategy. It’s really outrageous. So where are we now? Yeah. So one of the things—and this is germane to things that I think you’re going to be thinking about—is we are left with this sort of urban form where most of the city limits were set during the time of horse and buggy. And so there’s a real question of a broken business model around municipalities.And so you take Hudson there where you are, right? There’s a lot of people outside of that city limit that depend on that city limit, right? They come in to transact commerce. They come in to actually do their business. And depending on what the sort of monetization scheme is, they very well may not be paying their fair share for the benefit they’re gaining from having that co-location of assets, amenities, infrastructure.So we have a real question before us, and it’s sort of like GDP—are we going to keep it where cities can only survive if you can grow population inside of that original arbitrary borderland? And you see some examples where this has been challenged.So, like in the state of Tennessee, Nashville is the only major municipality that has fully, functionally merged city and county and sort of taken away that dichotomy of, like, I’ll use the city, but I will benefit from tax infusion in the county.I love—I mean, of course this diagnosis is perfect, and I’m learning even about Hudson as you describe it—but what explains the broken business model? You mentioned horse and buggy, but why is the business model broken for a post-industrial city?Yeah. So, by and large, we’ve monetized cities on property tax. And so it’s on a property tax levy inside the city limits, and cities have had an ebb and flow of who’s actually living inside the city limits and what the uses are.And also, some cities have been very challenged by a number of parcels being taken off the roster because of their “charitable use.” And so what happens is you then become constrained in how you can put together resources for your city, and a lot of states have proactively said, “Yeah, that’s your only levy capability.” Like, we maintain most of the taxation capability.And some places are allowed to put additions on to their sales tax and that sort of thing, and to retain it for a specific geographic barrier. But what you have—for me, sort of like as part pragmatist, part philosopher—if you could walk all the way back and say, okay, when these arbitrary borderlines and boundaries were laid out, they were in the time of horse and buggy…So if I lived in the city of Detroit, which is 140 square miles, I’m pretty much doing everything that I do inside that 140 square miles, because it’s not pragmatic for me on the daily to ride my horse 40 miles out into the country and be able to evade participation in taxation.Well, I’m talking to you right now from Maine, but we have a real question here in that my taxing municipality from a property tax standpoint is Bar Harbor, and our taxes are going up precipitously in part because our actual residents have been falling. Well, our year-round residents have been falling.And so you’ve got the same amount of people responsible for building the new school—that’s what we’re really getting taxed on right now. But then we have 5 million people a year visit and benefit from all of our… they actually sort of take over our town, and they don’t bear much of the tax burden at all.Whereas, if you think about it, if you built that business model from scratch tomorrow, you would be like, okay, well, the people who come for a week at a time, two weeks at a time, and take inordinate benefit from it—and actually take it over for the time they’re here—they should probably subsidize the year-round residents, or at least be pari passu with the year-round residents.But that’s not the way the game was designed. And we’re not really good at going back and rethinking taxation structure. We’re not good at first principles of, like, wait, how did this business model originate? We’re not even good at saying that a city is a business model. We just sort of accept it as “it is what it is.” Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. What do you—there’s a lot of other stuff to talk about—but what do you love about your work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you?The joy in it for me—interestingly, because it yields in a place-based way. So, like, I’ll go to Detroit this week, and I will experience a place that’s better because of projects that I’ve had the good fortune to help with.But the joy in it for me is the teaching. It’s the sort of professorial work of helping people see these other thought models. And I’ve worked with a lot of young people in doing this work over time.I call most of them my kids. And so seeing them take the ideas and build upon them and make them their own, and sort of live out their ideas of what great cities are and can become—that’s the joy. And spending time with them and watching them grow.Because I think that goes to a sort of core part of my outlook on the world, which is: legacy is not buildings with your name on it—which is sort of what old, resourced people have thought for a long time, right? Name a building, name something at a college after you. But I’m quite convinced, and I have a sort of belief I call the “humanity immune system,” which is like, you know, people—there’s a certain set that are like leukocytes, healing blood cells. And the more people that become living leukocytes and healing blood cells in communities, that’s actually what makes a community great or not.It’s not the building stock. It’s not the special projects that somebody’s done. It’s not the public art. You know, it’s the hearts and minds of the people that occupy and operate these places. And so that’s why the people part is the joyful part to me. Yeah.What is the work that you do? Is there a way you can sort of describe what it takes to turn—I mean, to turn a city around? You talked about the shift in mindset from, you know, the scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. What do you do with a community or within a community to make that happen? And what’s the—you know, how do you describe what you’re doing?Yeah. Well, I’ve had to turn it into—because I think it’s hard to understand, and, you know, I can’t… I’ve never gotten really good at defining it and describing it. But what I can say—I just use a case study, right, as I’m thinking a lot right now and I’m really hopeful that I get to work in Jackson, Mississippi right now. And so I’ll just use that as the example as to how I think about a place and go to work on it.And Jackson’s really interesting in that it’s like Detroit and Memphis, in that it’s, you know, one of the three most/least diverse cities in the United States. Most diverse in that it’s over 80% African American, least diverse in that it’s highly economically homogeneous. And it’s a blue dot in the middle of a red place. It’s just, you know, fascinating from an urban thinker, urban practitioner standpoint.What I do is I have developed a 20-step process over time. And I use that process repeatedly in the course of my work. And the first thing—and I, you know, I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not—but there’s an Einstein quote about, you know, “Give me an hour to solve a problem, and I’ll spend, you know, the first 45 minutes defining the problem.”That’s the first step for me too. It’s like, you know, people are like, “Oh, we need…” You know, so I have to be invited to help in the place. If I’m invited to help in a place, then usually people start presenting me symptoms. And the symptom might be like, downtown’s empty.And I’m like, okay, well, let’s look at that. Let’s not assume that that’s the problem. Let’s analyze it and then work to determine what the true underlying problem is relative to that symptom.In the case of downtown abandonment, it oftentimes is about the failing master narrative of the city. And it’s about the fact that there’s been a ton of deferred maintenance. And so that leaves you in this position where, you know, the suburban mall is a much better argument for where to go than the urban core.Hmm. So, and also oftentimes there’s been shifts in business patterns. There’s been changes fundamentally in the type of work being done in the community. Your macro employers may have shifted. So you have to dig into all of that.You use the 20-step process to first analyze, fall in love with the problem, identify assets, physically map the place, also map any sort of points of potential you have. Where do you still have people that are coming and going?And then once you get everything sort of laid out under a problem set, then you can start getting into conversation with folks about, you know, what are your ideas? What are your hopes? What are your dreams? What do we have that we could use to sort of deploy together to create some form of energy?We do a lot of ideation. Try not to go with the first idea that we come up with. Do a lot of business modeling, because even with work that’s non-profit, you still need a business model that works over time, because permanent subsidy doesn’t play out as being a good idea.Packaging and design, and then you go into implementation. And the implementation is built on—we have about, I think we’re at like 265 lessons learned in this work so far. And they’ve all been documented.So, you know, anytime you learn a lesson—like one that comes to mind, I try to make them as short and pithy as possible—but like, “Community engagement, not community enragement” is one of the lessons learned. And the way you design public input forums can lead you to one of those or the other. And so those documented lessons then get used with this 20-step process.The head fake of the whole thing is that you’re actually teaching people how to problem-solve and work together. I mean, of course, it’s great whatever you—actually I’m excited—I’ll be in Jackson in two weeks, and we’re going to talk about gateways and some public cleanups of neighborhoods that have, you know, a lot of refuse and tires and that sort of stuff. Hopefully we’ll figure that out. Hopefully we’ll do a giant cleanup. Hopefully we’ll fill up, you know, dumpsters and dumpsters.But, like, what you’re really trying to do is build that civic engagement, civic problem-solving muscle. And when these cities got really fast-growing and, you know, wealthy—like Detroit, 1953, that was the high point of its population—they had so much tax money that you didn’t have to do neighborhood cleanup, right? You’d just be like, well, let the city take care of that.It’s when you go to decreasing revenue that you have to shift responsibility back to the… and there’s no known and logical way right now to do that. So then you just get to complete fail state, and then you have to start piecing it back together. And I like to piece those things together without just saying that, you know, subsidy taxation is the only way to solve it. Usually some creativity can help along the way too. Yeah. Yeah.What is the—this is where sort of my worlds kind of overlap—where it’s sort of, you know, in my professional life as a researcher, helping companies try to understand the people they serve better, you know, and living in a small town with no planning capacity, no public input, the whole process of how the city tries to learn about itself and improve itself is so broken, or not… sort of non-existent, really. And I’m just wondering, how—you talked about community engagement—what is the sort of the model right now? How does a small city like Hudson think about community engagement around issues of development?Yeah. I think that one of the biggest problems with community input, and how you get to NIMBYism, is that usually community engagement is a referendum on a singular idea. And it’s almost impossible to contextualize it.And so it’s like, well, you know, I want to build this 400-unit mixed-use, you know, and then I have to decide, like, what do I feel about that? And then I have to put all my biases into that. So, like, am I scared of people that are different than me? Or am I worried about my rent going up, or whatever?And I think that when Chattanooga did the “We want to be the best mid-sized city in America” or in Detroit, you know, our mantra was to stop population loss—you could then evaluate that 400-unit mixed-use or mixed-income development against your North Star, which is stopping the population loss. And then all of a sudden it’s like, man, it’s not yes or no.It’s like, how do we add those 400 units? Because we’ve agreed together that there is somewhere bigger and better that we’re going. And I—I think I mentioned this to you on our preview call—but I recently met a guy in Texas who, you know, is hell-bent that they’re going to become the healthiest city in the state of Texas.And you also can imagine that, right? If you decide to do, you know, a referendum on whether you should have park space or not—well, park space is like, “Well, I’m not sure. Are we taking money away from the school or the old folks’ home or whatever?” But it’s like, oh, if we’re going to be the healthiest city in Texas, and we’re generally aligned on that, then outdoor space that’s proximal to people that don’t have outdoor access would probably be something that’s important to us. Yeah.So, I—I—I think that no matter what size you are as a community, you should have a strong idea of where you’re going. And then—I’m very analog—I think you should also have a place where you’re documenting, you know, all of your master planning. Like, where are we going? And then, what do we think that’s going to look like so that we could think about this together?If I decided, you know, Detroit would be a lot healthier with a million people than it is with the 600,000 it has right now—from a taxation standpoint—it’s so easy for you to understand where you are. It’s so hard for you to understand where you might go.And I think that the sort of the kid that wanted to be an architect in me recognizes that—for architects—the rendering is the most important thing, because you’re selling people on a world that doesn’t exist yet. And for nine out of ten people, that’s a very hard thing to imagine.And, you know, letting go of a little bit of tax dollars or suffering through some construction process is harder if I don’t know what that end state is that I’m going to get to, and I believe that that’s going to inherently be better for me.That’s beautiful. I mean, I just loved hearing all of that stuff. That’s certainly been my experience here in Hudson. We’ve kind of come to the end of the hour. There’s so much more I want to ask and talk about, but we’ll have to do that another time. But thank you so much for joining me.Yeah. Yeah. It’s been my absolute pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Thomas Klaffke is a foresight researcher in Berlin, and the author of Creative Destruction, a weekly newsletter exploring thought-provoking reframings to help build regenerative systems. Previously Head of Research at TrendWatching, he led trend analysis for clients including Adidas, Porsche, and Lufthansa. So I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a neighbor of mine. She helps people tell their story. It's a big question—that's why I love it—but because it's big, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing right now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer however you like. It's impossible to make a mistake.The question is: Where do you come from? And again, you're in total control.Okay, where do I come from? Well, location-wise, I come from the south of Germany, from a small village near the Alps, close to Switzerland and Austria, but still in Germany. Actually, it's near Lake Constance, the biggest lake in Germany.It’s a small village—very residential, with some farms, a small school, and so on. I guess it was a kind of typical German middle-class background. I lived there for the first 18 years of my life. It was a very safe environment. My dad was a policeman, so maybe even safer with a dad like that. Just a very typical German middle-class upbringing, I’d say.But I was always interested in leaving that safety behind—going out into the world, experiencing other cultures, places, and regions. So after high school, I moved to Chicago in the United States to work in a soup kitchen for homeless people. I was there for a year as a full-time volunteer. One big reason was, of course, to learn or improve my English.After that, I went to Bavaria to study. During my studies, I spent a year in Indonesia, lived there, did internships, worked. Then I moved back to Germany, spent some time in Cologne, and eventually settled in Berlin, where I’ve been for about 12 or 13 years now. I also had a short stint in Cape Town, South Africa, for about a year.So, from a very small village in southern Germany, I’ve been fortunate to live and work across different continents and cultures. That’s really shaped how I look at the world and the kinds of tools and methods I use in my work. And now I’m here in Berlin.Do you remember, as a boy, what you wanted to be when you grew up?Well, I remember at first I just wanted to surf. I was really drawn to Hawaii and the idea of studying there. My family and I went to Indonesia once too, and I got to surf there—that experience really stuck with me. I wanted to do something more sporty. That was probably in my early teens. Later on, I got more and more into computers, the internet, and design.So I wanted to become more of a kind of graphic designer, product designer, something like that. And then, however, I went into business and culture studies in the end—that’s what I did as a bachelor’s degree. And then later on, which is what I’m doing right now, I did a master’s in future studies and then kind of moved into this foresight field.Yeah. I’m curious about growing up in the village that you grew up in. It’s not an environment that I have a very clear sense of—I think I have a very romantic and likely naive idea of what that was like. But what was it like growing up in that village? You mentioned a giant lake. How do you describe your childhood there?Yeah, it was a really nice childhood. I’d say in general it was very—well, that’s why I described it as safe. I mean, kind of, you know, everything was working. When I look back and try to remember things, there’s always something nice happening. Lots of kids just playing freely on the streets, or in some fields, or at the nearby farmers’, things like that.I mean, yeah, several friends of mine had either parents or their uncle or so having like a farm, so we kind of hung out there because there was always so much space and so much, you know, stuff you could do. So doing a lot of that. And yeah, in the summer, enjoying the lake. In the winter, enjoying the Alps—snowboarding, skiing, things like that.Yeah. And what was the attraction to surfing? What was that like—discovering surfing?I was always into snowboarding. And I remember that I was a very avid reader of snowboarding magazines back then. And yeah, I think I even once won a little contest they had—a sketching contest or something—and I won a snowboarding jacket and so on. So yeah.And then, of course, those magazines were always talking also about surfing and other kinds of adventure sports. And I always kind of watched the world championships in surfing. And I always liked the lifestyle, I guess.Yeah. And your move to Chicago—how did that come about?Yeah. So back in the day in Germany, we still had this thing where, as a boy, you had to go to the military after high school. Or as an alternative, you could do some kind of social service. And I didn’t want to go to the military, so I tried to do a social service thing.And then I found out that you could also do it abroad, and that there were certain organizations where you could still get kind of the accreditation or the certificate for doing that. And I found, yeah, this organization—it was kind of a Franciscan organization in Chicago. They had one of the biggest soup kitchens there for the homeless, and one of the biggest shelters as well.And yeah, I applied there, and they took me. I was there with around eight or nine other Germans who did the same, and also a couple of Americans who were working there too.What was that experience like?It was crazy. It was really kind of the big—you know, up until that stage, I think I was very much in my own little, you know, village bubble or so. And then moving there was really—yeah, it completely changed me. It had a big impact on me, because my English back then—I mean, it's gotten worse now actually—but back then, it was really bad, and I struggled a lot in the beginning.And yeah, just dealing with lots of homeless people and people that were also on drugs and stuff, right from the beginning basically, was a little bit tricky. But it was also really—I mean, looking back, it was one of the best years I've had so far in my life, I would say. Because, you know, I was living together with all of these other volunteers, these other Germans, but also Americans. We had our own little kind of apartment above the soup kitchen.And it was such a nice and fulfilling kind of work as well. I mean, sometimes it was quite stressful, and there were some—you know, we had to call the police a lot and that kind of thing—but in general, it was just very fulfilling.And it was also, I mean, for us, kind of experiencing this new world of the USA and America and this big city. For most of us, especially the Germans, it was the biggest city we’d ever been to. And on top of that, really doing work that felt very rewarding, because it had this immediate impact—immediate feedback. Lots of people would come to you each evening and thank you for the meal you gave them, and those kinds of things. So yeah, it was a really, really nice time.Yeah. So catch us up—tell us where you are now and what you're doing for work, and what you're focused on mostly these days.Yes. So right now, as I said, I’m based in Berlin. I’ve been here quite a long time. I moved here for my master’s degree in future studies and then stayed—working at agencies or consultancies in the marketing, innovation, and foresight fields.And since around two years ago, I’ve been working freelance or doing my own thing. In particular, I have a Substack called Creative Destruction, where I share what I call “framings” and “reframings.”Basically, it all started with me just wanting some kind of vehicle or space where I could share ideas or interesting finds—articles, concepts, things I come across while doing research. And it then became something that I now call framings or reframings, as I’ve tried to add a little more structure to it.In essence, what I’m trying to share with people are interesting concepts that help them understand the chaotic world we’re living in—and also ways of building better systems. And “better,” for me, means more regenerative or sustainable systems, but also just better-designed and more beautiful things.So yeah, that’s what I’m mainly doing right now. The newsletter is something I publish every week. And on top of that, I’m also doing freelance work.And how did you—well, I love the Substack. I’ve been following it for quite a while. I love what you put out on a weekly basis.I'm curious about the future studies. How did you come to discover that as a program? I've heard you mention it—you said culture studies and then future studies. When did you first discover that this was something you could do for work? I mean, that you could study culture, or study the future, or prepare for the future? When did you first sort of decide or realize that you could do this for a living?Yeah. So during my first studies—which was international business and cultural studies—I spent a year in Indonesia, in Jakarta. And there, I worked for a German political foundation. My job was basically to read the English-speaking newspapers and then summarize what was happening in the country for the German foundation’s head office, and so on.And that was already kind of looking at trends and developments within the region—Southeast Asia in general, but also Indonesia specifically. And yeah, because the region was already quite emerging back then, it was interesting to see how things were changing. That made me more aware of this idea of looking into the future and seeing how trends are emerging.Back then, I was also really into technology. The concept of transhumanism was a big thing for me. I’m actually kind of anti-transhuman now, but at the time, I was really into the idea of how technology could help us augment human capabilities and all that. I read Ray Kurzweil—a futurist from San Francisco, or I think he's working at Google now—and I was fascinated by all of that.That kind of led me to start thinking more seriously about future studies and foresight. And then I found this study program here in Berlin, applied, and got in.And that was like the singularity, right?Exactly. Yeah, the singularity. I was really into that back in the day. It was quite an interesting concept, and the way Ray Kurzweil and others presented it was really compelling.Back then I was also reading a lot about longevity stuff—those big ideas and the prominent figures in that space—and all of that made me very excited about the future. That’s how I got into it.Since then, like I said, my views have changed quite a lot. But that was what brought me into the field.Because I’m not sure I totally understand the singularity and transhumanism—so as best you can, what was exciting to you about it? What was the attraction? I feel like we all kind of bumped into it around that time. I remember seeing it out there and thinking, oh wow, this seems like a beautiful, shiny way of looking at the future. But I never really looked deep enough to get a full understanding of it. So for you—what was exciting about it?Yeah, I mean—it’s a good question. I think what fascinated me back then was this idea of, I don’t know, like expanding what it means to be human. You know, using technology to overcome some of our limitations, whether that's biological or cognitive or whatever.And I think also this promise of kind of infinite growth, or infinite improvement, was something that really drew me in at the time. There was this idea of, like, we’re just at the beginning of something. We can become so much more—live longer, become smarter, be more connected, things like that. That felt very exciting.And also, I think there was a bit of a kind of spiritual angle to it. It’s not presented that way necessarily, but it felt a bit like this belief in something bigger, or something kind of transcendent, but grounded in science and tech. So for me it was also a kind of worldview, or a kind of hope for the future.But yeah, now I see it all a bit more critically. I think back then I didn’t think so much about what gets lost when you try to optimize everything, or what it actually means to be human in the first place. So yeah, now I’m more skeptical, but that was the initial excitement for me.So when you say now you’re more skeptical, what shifted for you? Was there a moment where something changed?I think it wasn’t one moment. It was more a gradual process. The more I worked in the field, the more I got exposed to different perspectives, different critiques. And I think I also just got older, you know? I became a bit more grounded, maybe a bit more humble about what we can really do with technology.And I started to see that a lot of the problems we face—climate, inequality, mental health—these aren’t things we can just tech our way out of. They need deeper changes. So now I’m more focused on the social side of things, on systems thinking, on how we can build better structures that support life—not just optimize it.Also, a lot of the transhumanist stuff just started to feel a bit... I don’t know, disconnected. Like, who is this actually for? Who benefits? It often felt very centered on a narrow idea of progress that didn’t include most people.So yeah, I guess it was a slow shift, but I think now I’m more interested in regeneration than optimization. In making things more livable, not just more efficient.I'm not quite sure. I guess maybe it was this kind of superhuman appeal—the idea of being able to rapidly enhance your capabilities or something like that. Maybe that was one of the appeals. Also, this idea of a future event that would change everything very disruptively—there was something compelling about that kind of transformation of the world.Yeah, something like that.And how would you say your feelings have changed? I mean, the world has changed quite a bit, obviously. But I'm wondering—how do you think about it or feel about it now?Yeah, I mean, in general, I've become a bit more skeptical about technology, and also this idea of technological solutionism. I guess what I bought into back then was more of the Silicon Valley narrative—that technology and computing could rapidly change all sorts of things. Not just solving certain diseases, but also transforming society in a big, spectacular way.What’s changed is just the experience of the last, say, 10 or 15 years, and how technology has actually impacted societies and systems. And also my own experience working in business consulting—getting a more inside look at how large corporations operate, what tactics they use, how the business world is structured, and so on.Throughout my career, I’ve gone deeper into certain rabbit holes that revealed system dynamics I now feel quite skeptical or concerned about—things I used to feel more excited by.So, you have the Substack and the consulting work. Is there overlap between the two? Or what's the relationship?Yeah. I mean, my freelance or consulting work is still mostly focused on foresight in general. So doing things like scenario workshops or scenario development for companies.Right now, I’m working on a report about climate adaptation for a startup accelerator here in Berlin. So it's more about looking into trends, developments, scenario thinking—the usual foresight stuff. I do try to bring in my ideas around reframing and narrative, which I focus on more in the newsletter. But I haven’t yet had a project that’s been specifically centered on that.Can you tell me—how do you talk about your foresight work to someone who hasn’t encountered foresight or doesn’t know why it’s important? What is foresight, and how do you work?Yeah, I mean, foresight is, I would say, basically just thinking about the future—thinking about the views of the future that already exist in our present. Just analyzing how I could do it in an organizational setting—how an organization thinks about its future and the external future. And then, through that process, maybe gaining a better understanding of oneself as an organization, but also of the external world. And from there, being able to refine certain strategies or use it in innovation work.Yeah. So, I mean, what we usually do within foresight work is look at different types of futures or different future scenarios—the more plausible futures, the probable ones, the preferred ones—the whole future cone. And then, through workshops or research, we try to get a better picture of these different futures and see how that can help align with strategies, innovation, and things like that.Yeah. And what do you love about foresight work? Where’s the joy in it for you?Yeah, I think that’s changed a little bit over time. I mean, the answer links back a bit to when I was more into the transhumanism approach in the beginning. So at first, it was really about the excitement of “What will the future hold?”—what life could be like in 10, 20, or 50 years. Just diving deep into that question.And I still find that very interesting—looking at the implications of certain technologies, not just for next year, but 50 years from now. That kind of long-term thinking is still really compelling.But what I also really like now about futures work is that the process itself gives us more agency. I call it "imagination agency." It helps us see that the way things are—or the way we perceive reality and the future—is just one way of looking at it. There are other possibilities. So it unlocks a kind of reimagining ability, and I find that really exciting.I'm also trying to dive more deeply into that imagination element within foresight right now.Yeah. Can you tell me more about that? I mean, imagination—how do you think about it? What excites you about it? And what are you hoping to do with it or how are you hoping to work with it?Yeah. So I believe we’re in a bit of a crisis of imagination. Certain systems and their narratives have narrowed down the possible future paths. There are elements that diminish our ability to imagine alternatives—other futures.At the same time, older narratives or ideologies are breaking down. So I think it's really important to strengthen our capacity to think differently and imagine otherwise. That’s why I think this element—imagination—is so important right now.A lot of the people reading my work come from the systems change sector or the sustainability consulting world. And many people in those movements say we’re missing a coherent narrative of a sustainable future. You know—how will it really look? Given the technologies we already have and the systems already in place, how do we get from here to there? What would that actually look like?Answering that question—solving that challenge—requires imagination. And that’s why I think future studies and foresight can be really helpful.Yeah. Are there—or in what ways do you—work with imagination? Are there particular tools or methods or processes that you use? I think you used the phrase... was it “imagination agency”? I’m curious how that actually looks in practice. How do you work with clients or others to, yeah, bring imagination into the process?Yeah. I mean, there’s kind of a basic foundational approach to that. For example, in keynotes or presentations for people who maybe don’t have any background in foresight or futures thinking, I’ll often start by showing a little bit of the history of future thinking—like how people imagined today’s world 50 years ago. How certain technologies were talked about in the news at the time, and so on.Those little stories give people perspective—how some things were super exciting at one point, and then, over time, kind of leveled off because there wasn’t that much substance there. That already gives people a kind of permission to look at today’s dominant narratives about the future in a more critical way.That’s something I think most foresight people do—sharing a brief history of predictions or imagined futures, and then comparing that to how things actually turned out.Another thing I use a lot—and probably the tool I rely on most—is this idea of reframing or framing, which is based on a tool called the iceberg model. It comes from systems thinking and futures studies. There’s also something called causal layered analysis by a guy named Sohail Inayatullah. That tool really helps you dig deeper into the ideologies, metaphors, and myths behind systems or topics.It’s something I use all the time, both in my research and in client projects. I use it to explore the underlying worldviews behind a particular system—understanding the power dynamics, how those systems came into being, what their history is, and which actors were involved. That’s kind of the deconstructive part of the work.And then from there, you can think about new myths or new worldviews. You can reframe things using creative tools—like putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, exploring different perspectives, that kind of thing. It helps surface new ideologies that completely shift how we look at certain topics. And that’s what opens up new ideas—new imaginations. So yeah, those are the tools I use.Is there a story you can tell—like a project or a client example—where this has worked in practice? And if not, no pressure, I don’t mean to put you on the spot...Yeah, not really a clear one, I think. But one thing I’m working on right now is a Climate Adaptation and Resilience project. The scope of the project is to look at developments and trends within climate adaptation and resilience—and also to explore what startup opportunities or investment opportunities exist within that space.What I did at the beginning was look at how we’ve built human systems—how we structure them, how they function—and then I tried to unpack the narratives within that. And I compared those to how nature builds systems or processes. Because nature seems to have figured out a lot about adaptation and resilience.There are some great examples in ecosystems or animal behavior where adaptation and resilience are deeply embedded—and I tried to use that comparison as a kind of framing tool for the project.And then we compared that with human systems, and you come to this conclusion that we’re now living in a world where nature is changing, but human systems were built for a world that was very stable, very certain, very rigid.So within this project—we're still working on it—we’re trying to combine this nature-based approach with the human system perspective and find ways to merge the two. Yeah, that’s maybe one example.But yeah, in my newsletter, I go down these rabbit holes around certain topics and try to uncover alternative narratives all the time.Yeah, I mean, that’s what I find—it’s the reason I invited you. I find the newsletter a source of real inspiration, because it’s so obviously imaginative and optimistic in a way. And I guess it kind of operates from—well, it’s right there in the title, Creative Destruction—that we’re in a moment where real transformation is necessary and possible, if you’re willing to embrace it. That’s how I take it, anyway.And that framing is such a powerful, necessary tool for any kind of change, right? So I’m curious—yeah, talk to me about framing and reframing. You’ve really organized your work around that, and the role of narrative in this process. I’d love to hear you talk about what a frame is for you, and what it means to frame something.I always like going back to fundamentals—like a kind of “Framing 101.” How do you think about what it means to frame something, and why is it important at all?Yeah. So, I have to say—there’s a kind of theoretical basis to all of this that started for me already during my master’s program. I was looking at this idea of structural determinism from two biologists and philosophers, Maturana and Varela, from Chile. It’s a really interesting idea that’s rooted in constructivist philosophy.It’s been a long time since I went deep into that theory, but the basic idea is that we’re always constructing the world as we look at it. That our perception is always influenced—by the experiences we’ve had, by our internal biases, and also by external stimuli that reach us.So whenever we look at the world, we’re not seeing it directly—we’re seeing it through a frame, through a structure or lens that’s shaped by all of that.And that theory—that way of thinking—really stuck with me. Especially as it relates to sense-making. I think foresight is really about sense-making, or at least it shares that goal: trying to figure things out.That approach—this idea of framing as a way of understanding the world—I’ve always found it really interesting and useful.So that’s the theoretical foundation of how I got into it. And then, like I described earlier, the iceberg model or causal layered analysis is a specific tool that also helps you explore that framing more deeply.But then, on the other hand, with the newsletter and the things I’ve been sharing there—I didn’t start with the idea of “I’m going to explore frames” or “I’m going to do research about reframing.” It actually started more with just finding interesting concepts—ideas that help describe certain developments in the world, or capture something about the current zeitgeist.But through doing that—publishing almost weekly for a couple of years now—I started to realize that if I structured it more, if I gave it a bit more form, it naturally lent itself to the idea of framing and reframing. And that’s when I started bringing it all together for myself.My main definition of framing—or reframing—is that it's the process or act of giving some aspect of perceived reality more prominence. It helps people understand that aspect more clearly, and ideally, it also encourages reflection.The “better understanding” part of my work is where I try to identify the zeitgeist—what feels like the spirit or texture of our time—and then find concepts or ideas that describe it well. A lot of readers tell me that I’ve helped them name or define a feeling they’ve had for a while but couldn’t quite put into words. That’s what I’m always trying to do: find the language or framework that helps clarify something already felt.And this kind of deeper understanding, I think, is really important. It offers a different kind of access to knowledge than just the rational, analytical approach—the kind that focuses only on data or surface-level facts.The reflection part is also essential. A frame doesn’t just show you something out in the world; it also shows you your own perspective. It can act like a mirror, helping you become aware of how you’re seeing things—and that awareness can open the door to shifting your perspective or imagining differently. That’s where this idea of “imagination agency” comes in.So again, for me, it’s a combination of theoretical grounding and the practice of just doing the work—collecting interesting things and then trying to trace a thread through them, to see what connects them.Recently, I shared a deeper dive into what I think of as reframing—a kind of methodology I’ve started calling the craft of reframing. I use the word craft because it really came together through doing—through making and experimenting. It’s not just an intellectual activity. It’s also a hands-on process.Somewhere in there, you described reframing as a different way of accessing knowledge. Do you remember what you meant?Yeah, I was referring to that deeper understanding. I’ve written about this in my newsletter and in a couple of articles, or shared work from others who touch on similar ideas.In the Western world—or the Global North—there’s a dominant approach to knowledge that’s very rational and often focused on control: controlling systems, optimizing outcomes. But there’s also another way of engaging with knowledge that’s more relational. It creates a deeper connection with a system or an environment. It’s less about control and more about resonance.There’s a concept called resonance I find really interesting—it's from the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa. He talks about resonance as a mode of relating to the world that’s defined by strong, meaningful connections—ones that can actually transform you internally.It’s quite abstract, but for me, it describes this more intuitive, felt kind of knowledge. And I think that’s often missing—especially in the consulting world.Are there other ideas you’re wrestling with right now—things you’re trying to name or label? What are you noticing?Just in general, you mean?Yeah.Yeah, one thing I’m thinking about quite a lot right now—I want to do a deep dive on it, but I think I need a little more time to think and research—is this idea I came across in an article about communal dreaming. It connects back to the crisis of imagination: how can we unlock our ability to imagine new ways of doing things, new ways of building systems?In general, I have this feeling that innovation has become much more shallow. So I’m asking: how can we innovate more deeply, more disruptively, more creatively? I’ve been exploring a few different elements of that challenge, and communal dreaming struck me as a really interesting one.The article talked about how, in some ancestral or Indigenous cultures, it’s common to share dreams communally and interpret them together—make sense of them collectively. And sometimes those cultures treat dreams as a kind of alternate access to reality, as a subconscious form of knowledge.I just found that a really compelling idea, especially in relation to how we think about the future. There’s so much future-phobia right now, and it makes me wonder: have we stopped dreaming? Are we even capable of dreaming anymore? And if not, how can we start again? How can we share our dreams—not necessarily literal ones, but in a more metaphorical, imaginative sense?That’s beautiful. You mentioned future phobia—I think I get what you mean, but can you say more about that?Yeah. Future phobia is kind of this idea that we’re locked into a certain kind of future—a trajectory that’s already headed somewhere, and not somewhere good. I mean, of course, this is just my view—maybe a view shaped by living in Berlin, in Europe, in the Global North—but still.It’s this sense that we’re headed toward worsening climate crisis, automation that could massively disrupt jobs and the economy, financial instability, rising living costs, unaffordable housing. And then also this growing sense that technology—especially digital technology—is delivering more negative outcomes than benefits.There’s a feeling that the story of progress has kind of broken down. And that collapse in belief, I think, contributes to future phobia.One way people seem to respond to that, consciously or not, is through nostalgia. You see it in conservative political movements, but also in culture—people turning to old music, old movies, old aesthetics. Clinging to cultural artifacts from the past.It’s funny—you’re reminding me of this line I always quote from my first job, which was at a consultancy. One of the principals there was this really sharp, intellectually seductive guy. He had a kind of guru energy—one of those people where you’re not always sure if what he’s saying is real or not, but it still lands somehow.And he had this line I always think about. He said, “We consume what we are afraid we are losing.” It’s such a strange but striking way of articulating something.Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t know if it connects exactly, but I’ve written about a related idea. In German, we have this word: Weltschmerz. It’s kind of translated as “world pain”—that you’re feeling the suffering of the world, basically. I once wrote a piece about how we should go deeper into that feeling, instead of trying to solve it through what I called “supplements”—or through quantity.The idea was: we’re feeling this loss of beauty in the world, and there’s this deep world depression, this Weltschmerz. But it doesn’t really change us. It doesn’t make us act differently, because we’re quenching it with a kind of supplement. That could be doomscrolling, entertainment, escapism, new technologies, new stories of promise—all kinds of things.So that’s how I looked at it.In that piece, I included a quote from Daniel Schmachtenberger, who talks a lot about the Metacrisis. He was once asked on stage—after giving a really bleak assessment of the state of the world—"Doesn’t this make you super depressed?" And he basically said, “Yes. And I want people to be even more depressed. Because if they aren’t, I genuinely think we’ve lost some part of our humanity.”Like, you’re not fully human if the larger crises we’re facing don’t make you at least somewhat depressed. And then he reframed it: that kind of depression is actually a love for life. It’s a longing for beauty, for something good.And I thought—yeah, going deeper into this Weltschmerz, this world pain, might actually help us see how much beauty we still have in the world. And maybe, from that recognition, we’d be more likely to act—more likely to change things.That’s beautiful. What would that look like? Do you have a sense of what it would mean to really lean into that longing—into that loneliness that’s actually a longing for beauty?Yeah, it’s a big question. Well….I’m just following your lead!I think, in general, a very simple—but difficult—thing that I always come back to is: slowing down. I really feel like everything is moving too fast. And just a bit of slowing down might help us pause and think more carefully before we act.And within that slowing down, maybe we’d also find a greater appreciation for beauty—staying with that concept. A deeper appreciation for art, for quality, for craftsmanship, for those kinds of things. I think that alone could move us a little in the right direction.And then, in terms of bigger systems change—of course there are many things that could be done. But what excites me most right now is this idea of community-powered systems.This idea of co-ops, of building things together in a more people-based, democratic way. That’s what I find really interesting at the moment.Beautiful. Thomas, we’ve come to the end of the hour. I want to thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. I love the newsletter—I’ll add links for everyone to sign up. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.Yeah, thank you as well. I really enjoyed this. Thanks. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Natalie Black is the Founder and CEO of Culture x Curate, a strategic foresight and brand advisory based in Atlanta. She also serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Mia (Mission Impact Academy), empowering women globally through tech skills training. For over 20 years, Natalie has worked with Fortune 100 companies including Coca-Cola, UPS, AT&T, Estee Lauder, and The Home Depot.So I start all these conversations with the same question, which is one I borrowed from a friend of mine—who’s actually a neighbor—and she helps people tell their story. It’s such a beautiful question, I borrow it. But because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it, the way I’m doing right now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control. You can answer—or not answer—in any way that you want to, and it’s impossible to make a mistake. So the question is: Where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control, and you can answer—or not answer—however you’d like.Gosh, what a gut punch, the way you set that up. And I love that you said, "You're in total control." That is amazing, because it is such a—God—such a deep question.So I think of it in terms of physically—where am I from—and philosophically. I grew up on Long Island, Nassau County. And as a child growing up on Long Island, all you’re trying to do is get off Long Island.You have dreams of, you know, "I’m part of the bridge and tunnel crew." You get into Manhattan every moment you can, and you have dreams—or at least I did—like, "When I grow up, I’m going to move to SoHo. It’s going to be great. I’m going to be in fashion and beauty." It was the precursor to Sex and the City, before Sex and the City was a thing.And then I left and never looked back. Now I’m a tourist in New York, because I live in Atlanta. And I look at it with such deep fondness—having had such a suburban life.I’m a suburbanite. Having trees and neighbors and neighborhoods, right? That was like the OG framework for a neighborhood.And being part of a diverse community in a diverse space—I love that part about my upbringing in New York. That part is a gift.So yeah—Long Islander, suburbanite. But philosophically, I think that was the beginning of me coming from a place of wonder and awe and curiosity. I often describe myself as intellectually promiscuous.And I think where I came from started that—because there was always something to taste, to smell, to try, to poke at, to feel. That’s something so special about being in New York—everywhere: upstate, downstate, all of it. That kind of spark gets embedded in you. And it becomes lifelong.Do you have recollections of, as a girl, what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah. I—seriously, this is so cliché—but I grew up in the late ’80s, early ’90s. That whole culture shaped me. I read Sybil, the novel, at age 10 because I was always interested in what makes people tick. You know, why do we do the things we do? What are the decisions we make? All of that.So I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist. But I also fell in love with glossies. I had every single magazine. And, you know, you don't think about it then—because I was a child—that pop culture shapes you. I had YM, Seventeen, all of the magazines—Spin, Rolling Stone, everything. If it was a magazine, I was in love with it.I was in love with the imagery. I was in love with the words. I was in love with the stories they were telling me about the world—and ultimately about myself and my place in it.So I said, well, if New York is the manufacturer of cool and pop culture, I want to be there. And I want to be in fashion and beauty. So that’s what I did.You’ll see this as a running theme: I started showing up to offices and places and meetings I had no business being in. I would just say, “I’m here, I’m an intern,” or “I’m here for the shoot.” I’ve crashed sets—things like that. Just because I wanted to be there. I wanted to learn. Because no one was willing to tell you, “Start here,” at least in my circle. So I was like, fine, I’ll just show up.I didn’t realize at the time that I was taking in strategy and research and observation—all of that. I just knew I wanted to do this. I wanted to learn how. And I wanted to learn everything about how—not just the end product, not just how it gets to the shelves or how the photoshoots happen or how the clothes are made. I wanted to learn everything.It wasn’t until I got older—went to college—and struggled in college because I wanted to be a psychiatrist, but I didn’t want to be pre-med. That felt too straight and narrow. I’m good at school, but it was boring.So I decided to create my own degree based on what I was interested in. I did bioethics and social biology. That allowed me to take psych, biophysics, sociology, political science—all the things. I just did a smorgasbord of classes and got my degree in that.At the same time, I was working in comms—at the time, it was street marketing and youth culture. Again, just showing up, like, “Yeah, I can manage accounts.” Just doing that. And I started to really formulate what my career could look like in my twenties.Then I started getting the shape of what ended up being a brand comms, brand PR, brand marketing kind of career.You mentioned—did you say social biology? What is that? Can you tell me more about it?Well, I was an impulsive 20-year-old, you know? So I was like, “Social biology—sure.” But actually, no—it was more than that.At the time, I was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And again, I was playing around with my love of human behavior. My mom was in healthcare—she was a nurse. I didn’t necessarily want med school, but I did want to tap into the human side of healthcare.Ethics was becoming a big thing—this global conversation—because of CRISPR and all these other innovations that were coming out. I loved the dialogue happening both at the academic level and at the practitioner level. I realized, wow, you can actually merge the physical sciences and the social sciences to really derive meaning.There was all this unprecedented innovation. Globalization was happening at a rapid pace. And no one knew what to do. No one knew what arenas or spaces were best suited to have constructive conversations that could move humanity forward in a beneficial way—for all humanity.And I thought, that’s where I need to be. Somewhere in the center of that. Not because I wanted it to be all about my thoughts or perspective, but because that’s where the global, future-shaping conversations were happening. And I just—if I could observe, learn, absorb—fantastic.But I didn’t want to be just on the tactical side, where things get discussed, and then you’re told, “Here, eat it, now do it,” with no context behind it.Yeah, I really identify with that. I feel like I had a suburban experience, too, where the whole world came to me through magazines and newspapers. And I just couldn’t get there fast enough.So, catch us up. Where are you now? What are your days like, and what are you working on?Yeah. So now, as a woman of a certain age, I’ve settled. I got my urban dreams out—New York, Boston, proper. I did all the things. And you realize, okay, this is great, this is cool—but it doesn’t exactly play out the way you think it will. Still, it gives you a certain grit.And at some point, you say, all right, I’m ready for the next level. Now I’m settled in a suburb of Atlanta. I still like to be close enough to the action, but not in the thick of it. I’m an interloper.So I like to go in and out, but I’ve traversed my entire career—which looks like a splatter map—and that was on purpose. I went from agency to small brand startup to big brand to big agency, and all of that bouncing around... at the time, it might’ve looked like I was scatterbrained and didn’t have any direction.But I did. I may not have been able to articulate it well enough, but I knew that I wanted to be part of building a brand that closely understood who they were interacting with. Again, that was strategy, right?So I was doing that and realized—after years of being a strategist and a communicator—that I got, I think, a combination of tired and bored. Tired of the pace at which large brands were moving, the lack of interest in doing any deeper studies around humans and communities, and just... how different teams were not speaking to each other.So I was like, screw it—I’m gonna start my own consultancy. Again, being very impulsive—that’s also a theme in my life and career. I started a consultancy called Culture by Curate, and my remit was to inject foresight and futures into traditional brand strategy, to impart a deep understanding of cultural intelligence—building brands for meaning.And that doesn’t have to be airy-fairy or ethereal. A lot of brand strategists say, “We’re a business. We’re in the business of making money.” Sure—you can make money and still be part of a collective that pushes meaning, derives meaning, and still makes money.Yeah. It sounds amazing. Can you tell me a little bit about what you mean when you talk about foresight—what that looks like and what it is?Yeah. You know what? The word now is so overused. I’m actually a little happy about that. And I’ll say—my background, as I mentioned, I don’t have a traditional pedigree in foresight or futures. I didn’t go to school for it. I’m kind of like a school child, right? I read things, I have conversations, I take courses—things like that. And then I just kind of go, “Okay, I’m going to do it in real time.”So what I found was—brand strategy tends to think in terms of campaigns, buyer journeys, KPIs, things like that. If you’re doing architecture, it’s narrative and messaging and personas. But it's very limited in how it thinks long-term—maybe two or three years out. And even that’s pushing it. You’re really thinking in spurts—quarters.It doesn’t account for, you know, when the proverbial s**t hits the fan. What if your audience grows up or decides something differently? People move. We evolve—based on where we are in life, where we grow up, where we move, what we do. You’re not the same person, fundamentally, as you move through life. And brand strategy traditionally doesn’t account for that.So I encountered foresight as—what corporate would call—strategic planning. Like, “What does our customer look like three years from now?” But even that felt too prosaic. Then I realized there’s a whole school of thought around systems. How does a system evolve? What does that look like for us as human beings?And I said, this is the kind of thinking brand strategy needs. It’s imagining. It’s experimentation. It’s play. It’s rigorous scientific inquiry. It’s all the things—all the skills that make human beings good at what they do—applied to brand strategy.So foresight, for me, is not about predicting the future or saying what’s going to happen. It’s more about coming up with “what ifs,” playing around with them, and being able to build on top of that.What kinds of questions do people come to you with? When do they pick up the phone and call?Well, right now, it's all about AI. It's all about AI. And it’s nice—I think we’ve turned a corner a little bit when it comes to utility. Everyone was rushing to talk about productivity and efficiencies. And now, it’s nice that we’re no longer centering the conversation on AI as just a tool for efficiency and productivity.Now, at least in the conversations I’m having with clients, it’s more like: “So we have these tools—how do we use them as co-creators, as co-pilots, so that we can be better at connecting?” And that’s such an open-ended, endless question. There’s no final answer, because we evolve, and we grow—but it’s the right question to play around with.It gives us the opportunity to say, for instance, “Now I can study, communicate, and convene with many different communities at scale—because of AI.” It doesn’t remove the need for me to interact or, I would say, to embed and embody. It doesn’t replace that. It just allows me to think about things I previously couldn’t—because of the size of the world, the nuance, and the complexity of human beings and culture. So those are the kinds of conversations I’m having right now.Yeah, what do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you?It’s meaning, honestly. What an appropriate conversation. There’s so much we, as human beings, are blind to—and part of that has just been given, right? It’s not necessarily because we’re all completely self-unaware. I think it’s that we’re moving through the world, through systems—of work, society, everything we endure as living, breathing individuals—and we’re often on autopilot.We usually only start looking for deeper meaning when there’s a tower moment, when something jolts our very identity. Then we question, then we rediscover, then we reconfigure. That’s a beautiful process. It’s a messy process—but beautiful.And the work I do is like: Let’s lean into that. Let’s not avoid the messiness of being human. Sure, you want to build a customer journey and create personas? Great. But that’s one-dimensional. That may check certain boxes, but it doesn’t account for the totality of who someone is and what they’re experiencing.Let’s lean into that complexity so we can better understand where you, the brand, fit into someone’s life—and vice versa. And the result might be something entirely new. Whether it’s a product, a service, or even just a new way of engaging, it’s something new, rather than just transactional.They’re not just consumers. They’re beings. We are beings. So let’s remove this notion that we are one activity—that we’re only valuable if we consume, and you’re only valuable if you make. That is just an outdated way of looking at things.Yeah. Can you tell me a story about that?Yeah. I’ll talk about a client in health science. And the reason this is interesting is, number one, I’m industry agnostic. Meaning, discovery, curiosity—those things are industry agnostic. You can apply the same approach whether it’s CPG, automotive, or life sciences.This particular client had conducted both qualitative and quantitative research, which is fantastic—being able to do that and analyze the results. But what was missing was the nuance: the differences between rural, urban, and suburban communities.And I think, especially in sectors like pharma or life sciences, everyone wants to replicate what I call “the Obama strategy”—right? Grassroots: knock on doors, hand out pamphlets, do micro-this, micro-that—because it worked.But the time, energy, and effort to do that is substantial. And you have to be willing, ready, and open to learn some things that might be uncomfortable. So the idea of saying, “We’re targeting these three groups, these three sets of communities, and ultimately we want them to come in for genetic testing... we’re going to talk about how amazing genetic testing is, what you’ll learn, and it’ll go from there—it’ll be fantastic”—well, that doesn’t always work.Number one, there's the question of awareness. You can say “genetic testing” or “DNA testing”—those are two different ways to describe it. What's the level of awareness and comfort, not just with the procedure, but with the information? Where does it fit in their life?Ideally, a busy family of four is going to look at genetic testing very differently than a millennial—or an alpha kid—living in the city. So again, level-set: what’s their awareness of what it is and what the benefits are?People don’t think in terms of just features and benefits. We know this. Some of those frameworks are broken. But when you tap into what it will mean to them—how it helps bolster their identity and their purpose, based on what they assign meaning to, not what we assign—then you begin to have a different conversation.We found that for older folks in the South, in rural areas and even suburbs, the conversation around legacy and family health history really resonated. In the North and the West, it was more about longevity and biohacking. Using those kinds of terms—that was the key. Different conversation, same result.So again, when you tap into what things mean for people—how they assign meaning in their life, how they see themselves, and those aspirational (not even goals, but dimensions) of their personality—then you can have a conversation that’s actually grounded in reality and still get a so-called “desired behavior.”Yeah, that's awesome. Because you pointed it out—and it's irresistible—this series is called That Business of Meaning. So, what do we mean when we say “meaning”? What are we talking about?Gosh.It's the million-dollar question.It’s a million-dollar question. And you know, I was a philosophy minor, so I love this question. This is great. And it’s what makes your conversations so compelling—because you can get a million and one different answers.Meaning is sense, right? It’s how I see myself, what I think about who I am, what I do, where I am, and what kind of impact I have. It’s identity, it’s values, it’s beliefs. It’s that internal system I’ve built—some of it given to me, some of it absorbed—and then I chew it up and spit it back out And that becomes my small place in this human journey.And wow, right? That’s nebulous—but that is meaning. Because we’re all going to end up in the same place, right? All of us. No matter where we come from or what we do—we’re all ending up in the same place.So for a brief moment in time, our thoughts and actions are creating an imprint that signals: this is what it is to be human. And so it’s not an unknowable answer—it’s just not a concrete one. Which is nice... but also beautiful.Mm-hmm. I love your use of the word sense. And earlier you said embed and embody. Are those words you use often?I do. Because in my journey of discovery—both career and personal—we talked about it earlier, right? You do the academic thing: semiotics, culture, anthropology, sociology. The very underpinnings of academic inquiry into meaning.And it’s fantastic. It gives you a basis. It gives meaning to things you might not be able to articulate in the moment—it gives you a framework. But then you also discover different pockets and dimensions of how human beings are doing the work.Part of that includes the metaphysical. And there’s a whole language in the metaphysical and esoteric space. People there use words like co-create, embody, and embed. And those are beautiful terms—they sometimes get a bad rap.But the profound sense of what they’re trying to encapsulate absolutely has a place in business. Because when you say desired behavior, that’s one shot. It keeps things very temporal. And it also moves the goalposts every time a person evolves in their so-called customer journey.But when you say embody and embed—that’s deeper. Now, I’m no longer just purchasing Clorox. Now the idea of cleanliness, organization, and togetherness becomes embedded in deep meaning in my life.Me buying Clorox, for instance—true story, client story—that’s the output of that deeper meaning. It becomes a ritual. Not just the cleaning itself, but my relationship with that thing is helping me build that ritual and that sense.Yeah, what is the Clorox story? Can you share? I'm a sucker for a CPG story.CPGs are amazing, right? We are so surrounded by product and stuff. And when you go beyond packaging, media spend, and channel optimization—beyond those tactics—you start to realize that some of the meaning is given to us. I’m told that Clorox is amazing. It'll make my house super clean. And I’ll be the toast of the town because I have the cleanest house on the block.But the Clorox story happened at the height of the pandemic, when we were all forced to reckon with and reassign meaning and value in our lives. The social distancing, the disruption of daily activity—all of it. I mean, for the first time in our collective human experience—at least while being fully aware and alive—we all went through it together.So now, we were forming new relationships with these products and services. Some of it was a grieving—for our old lives and the old ways of doing things. And that needed to happen.Something I used to clean a toilet, or put a drop of in to wash dishes, now meant something more. Some of the work I was tapped to do was to figure out what that was. Because it wasn’t just about keeping coronavirus out of the house so my family wouldn’t get sick.It became an embodied ideal—of legacy, protection, care, stewardship. Because that was one time when we were all looking out for one another. That was the only way. There was this “we’re all in this together” kind of rally cry. So it became a notion of stewardship.And then prices were getting jacked up—because scarcity was a thing, fear was a thing. But there was almost no amount of money people wouldn’t pay. And the ultimate output of that deliverable was: how do we carry that meaning forward? Once this moment in time evolves into something else—how do we continue that meaning?Yeah. And the meaning was stewardship? That was the idea?Stewardship.And can you tell me more about what that means?Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s about exploring old ideas, old words, and emotions.Oh my gosh, yes.Things like kith and kin. What does that look like? What does that mean? No one speaks like that anymore, right? And now we have nothing but time and the ability to explore ourselves in relation to one another.The through-line sentiment is stewardship: I take care of myself, and by doing that, I’m better able to take care of you—and vice versa. And when we take care of one another, something beautiful emerges from that: fauna and flora, community—things that happen organically because there’s a reciprocal relationship of care.Care against the coronavirus. Care about income. Care through sharing meals and outdoor spaces as we reconfigure this life in the wake of emergency.So stewardship was the theme. And you can still see it now in some of the messaging—it’s not as strongly stated anymore, because there’s been a hard pivot. So you had to say things like community, care, frontline—those became emergency signal words. But that message of stewardship still runs throughout their campaigns.Beautiful. I love that stuff. It sounds wonderful. I’m curious—when was the first time you realized you could make a living doing this kind of thing?Oh boy. That was twofold.First, you started this conversation with the idea that you’re in control. And I think I realized that early on—when I was crashing through windows, showing up in meetings, doing things I had no business doing—just because I wanted to be in control.That was probably early twenties. No matter what was thrown in my way—I became a mom early, I went to school, I did all the things. It’s not a sob story; it’s just what you do to live and thrive.And I realized, Wow. If I can be resilient enough to say, “Okay, today I’m a makeup artist, I guess I’m going to this video shoot,” or “I’m doing a book signing and now I’m a publicist,” or “I’m launching a digital magazine,” or “I’m helping an artist,” or “I’m working on the Google acquisition of Motorola”—then I can make a living at this.I was doing all these things because I said I could. It doesn’t take long to learn. Everyone’s figuring it out along the way—even the most seasoned experts.So I realized you can make a living at this. You just need a word to describe it—something people can latch onto so they don’t question it. The brain loves containers. It’s a hard intellectual exercise to break out of them, but we need those containers to start the conversation.That’s when I was like, I’m a strategist. I can’t say, “Hey, I’m a professional thinker and figure-outer”—people would say, “What the hell does that mean? I’m not paying you to do that.”But I am a strategist. I’m a planner. I’m a futurist. Words like that help people understand the containers of what I do, the value I bring, and what we’re going to explore. There are no real lines or boundaries, but I use a container to introduce the conversation.And that realization—that aha moment—came in my early twenties.Really? And what was the word? Was it strategist?Yeah, first it was strategist. That came from being a digital strategist and a digital PR strategist—back when social media was still in its infancy. It was the MySpace era, and brands like Coty came knocking, saying, “There are these folks online who seem to have an audience—we want to tap into that.”So I started doing that. I worked on JLo’s Glow and Glow Miami campaigns—it was digital PR, and we were doing events. It wasn’t exactly happenstance, but it kind of was.Then I started helping brands think about how people behave in these new online spaces, how that compares to how they interact in real life, how language evolves, how style and activity evolve. That’s thinking. That’s exploration. That’s strategy. And that became the basis of how I started calling myself a strategist.And then, when I finally got to agencies, I was told, “Oh, you're not a strategist. You didn’t get your MBA at Wharton. You didn’t do these things.” And I was like, “Oh... okay.”So I figured, all right, I need some business strategy principles. And that’s when I started calling myself an emerging venture strategist—things like that. Because it just made it so much easier for people to understand what I was actually doing, which was sense-making, place-making, meaning-making.Oh, I love it. I want to know about the name—I love the name of your advisory: Culture by Curate. Can you tell me the origin story of that name?Yeah. I think just now—over the past, I’d say, three to five years—brands are really beginning to understand how ubiquitous and important culture is to us as human beings. Culture drives commerce—not the other way around.And there are, I mean, gosh—when I say nuance, and we talk about subcultures and things like that—those are really oversimplified containers. They’re tools for brands and brand practitioners to try to understand the invisible and visible ways we interact: the signals, how we dress, what we do, what we say, what we think, where we go, how we play, what we do together as a group versus in different groups—or as individuals.Customs. Codes. All of those things—that’s what makes up culture. And I think brands often don’t understand that all of that evolves through interaction—with the outside world, and with each other. And that’s curation, right?It’s putting things together in groups, letting them spin off, evolve, form new meanings. You are curating an experience. You are curating an identity. You are curating meaning.So, in a fever dream one night, I was playing around with names—like “The Cultural Intelligence Advisory” or “This” or “That.” And all the while, in the back of my mind, I was thinking about the academics who do this—who study this for a living. I wanted to give deference to them.Because their work gives shape to a lot of what I’m doing. But I’m not an academic. I think for a living, sure—but I’m not a rigorously applied academic thinker. And there’s a place for that kind of work, because it gives us frameworks we can actually use in the real world.So in a way, I realized—I’m curating that collective intelligence myself. And when I said that to myself, I was like: Ah. There we go. Culture by Curate.It’s what I do. It’s how I’ve lived. It’s how I approach my work. It’s what brands need in order to create new frameworks for how they operate. And ultimately, it’s how we all exist in this bubble of the world—with each other.How—what have you observed has changed since you started? You’ve been in this space, working with organizations. I love how you talk about culture. You say there’s a growing recognition that culture drives commerce, not the other way around.How have things changed in terms of how your clients understand—or don’t understand—culture? Who gets it, and who still doesn’t?I’m finding that the appetite to understand culture has definitely grown—which is great. And not just because it’s great for business, but because it’s great for the evolution of humankind.Why is that? I’m curious—I want to follow up. Why do you think it’s such a good thing that organizations become fluent in culture?I think—there are so many different conversations happening right now about systems thinking, systems destruction, and systems recreation. And that can feel really big and heavy, especially to the uninitiated—for those who aren’t in this kind of work, or who aren’t academics. It can feel unsolvable, like, I can’t take part in that.But when you say, “We’re in culture thinking, in culture exploration,” then you’re doing a piece of that work. And it becomes a beacon—of hope, and of place. Like, I have a place in this larger work of reconstructing systems so that they benefit everybody.And that includes business. Because when you think about the extractive, exploitative nature of business, it’s easy to say, I can’t solve that. I’ve got to make money to live and eat. That’s the reality—we’re in a system where we need to do that.But at the same time, you also don’t want to contribute to harmful behavior anymore—to people or planet. And that can feel so big—because you’re just one person doing one thing.But if you say, “Hey, what if I could help business understand relationships better—beyond just buying?”—then it becomes a slow crack in a system that was built for a world that no longer exists. A system that’s no longer serving us. It’s a slow dismantling. A changing of hearts, minds, and actions.That’s why I think it’s a great thing for businesses to understand meaning, people, and culture. Because then it becomes—well, it’s like giving medicine to a child. NyQuil tastes terrible, but it helps you sleep. And as a parent, you’re like, This is going to help you sleep, and Mommy needs to sleep too.So what do you do? You put it in a little bit of juice. It sweetens the taste just enough. And now they’re doing the thing—they’re taking the medicine—and it’s not so bad. And then, after a while, maybe they don’t need the juice. Maybe you can graduate them to a pill. (True story, by the way.) But it’s the same notion.And how would you—actually, let me go back. What have you noticed has changed?I’d say the appetite for understanding culture is still there—and growing. But it’s still often framed as, “I want to understand culture so I can figure out what’s cool and package it and sell people more stuff.”That’s still there. But at least the door is cracked open. Because now I can say, “Great—you’ve got culture with a capital C, and then you’ve got sneaker culture, digital culture, luxury culture”—all these fractures, or splinters, of what culture is.So again, if I have to work in bite-sized shifts, that’s fine. The appetite is there for discussion and exploration. And then I can say, “Let’s talk about meaning as it relates to commerce.” What you’re really doing is slowly helping them understand that there’s more than what meets the eye—the buying part, the spectacle part.Another thing that’s changed is that a lot more practitioners are talking about culture, which is fantastic. These aren’t just pundits—they’re people actively participating in the exploration. Some have been exalted as experts, and that’s fine—because at least the conversation is moving forward. I'm okay with the conversation moving forward—as long as it does move forward. And it is. So that’s great.You reminded me of Grant McCracken. Are you familiar with Grant?Yes.I mean, he’s a hero of mine. I remember him mentioning his book Chief Culture Officer—it’s a beautiful book with a great idea. I recall him—maybe I shouldn’t be telling this story—but he sort of confessed he was exasperated that corporations, generally speaking, would see the word culture and immediately think only of themselves. They wouldn’t recognize the invitation in that word.Like, “No, no, no—not your internal culture. The culture outside.”And I think that’s one of the tragic realities—or at least a core difficulty—of doing this kind of work. Does that resonate with you?Absolutely. And I think everything is connected—including that exact challenge.I think a lot about parenthood because it’s a big part of my life. When you said that, I immediately thought of adolescence. In adolescence, you’re trying to raise a human being to understand who they are in a healthy context—and how they fit into the world. But it’s also a deeply self-centered time in life.That self-centeredness is necessary to reach the next stage. And yes, it’s frustrating and infuriating, but also essential. I think of organizations the same way.A business would love to treat itself as a separate entity—like, “We’re doing this in the name of business,” as if that absolves any responsibility for thinking critically about what you’re actually doing. But organizations are made up of people. Full stop.So when businesses start to think about culture, and they go, “Well, let’s start with internal culture”—I’ve worked on those projects, internal culture, ERGs, DEI initiatives—all of that. At the very least, it’s a small step in the right direction. It’s a way of acknowledging: “We are made up of people who have thoughts, experiences, feelings, and behaviors.”That’s dipping your toe in the water of meaning.But then, quickly, it becomes too big—too overwhelming, too complex. They start all these ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) and BSGs (Business Support Groups) because they suddenly realize: “Oh... people think differently. They’re experiencing things we weren’t aware of. They see their work differently. Some are upset. Some are happy. Some are disengaged.”And then, the question becomes—why? Why is that happening?Sometimes, that work goes nowhere. But still—it’s a beginning. A tipping point. And often, it’s the marketing and communications teams who take that momentum and start turning their focus outward—toward the culture beyond the organization. Same practice. Just disjointed. But it’s a step in the right direction.How do you—just curious—how do you work? This is a selfish part of the conversation: I’m a qualitative researcher, and I’m always advocating for the benefit of qualitative research. What role does it play for you, if any? And how do you help organizations connect with or understand culture?I’m always pushing for qualitative and quantitative research. Always.Here’s the thing: I love being around smart people. I absolutely love being around people who are smarter than me. And that’s not just lip service.Because honestly—I was a terrible employee. Now that I’m on my own, it’s different. But back then, if I was the smartest person in the room—or even just thought I was—I would disengage. I’d already figured out the plot. Part of that’s ADHD. If it’s taken 20 minutes to get to the point and I already got there? I’ve checked out. I’m done. I’m thinking, We’re still talking about this?So I need the challenge of being around people who know more than me, who think differently than me, who are true experts in something.That’s when I light up. I think, Oh, I want to learn.That’s just—I want to say, oh, this is great. Because it really feels like something beautiful is happening—this exchange. That’s what research does for me.So I partner with researchers. Number one, they’re deep in it. They understand it. I know enough to be dangerous—I say that all the time. I know enough to know the value, to speak the language, to understand the parts and the process.But I’m always working with people who are fully immersed—who really know the work. Because then we can sit and vibe, and discuss, and debate, and explore ideas together. And from there, we get aligned—and bring the client into that space too.I collaborate. I no longer work in terms of, “Okay, here’s a campaign” or “Here’s a fixed framework.” Frameworks are important, yes—but my goal is to help brand teams re-familiarize themselves with research. To fall back in love with curiosity and play.Sure, use your frameworks and funnels—I get that. I can work within them. I have. But I’m also asking, What else? What’s more?That’s how I work with brands. I acknowledge the tools and systems they’re already using—that’s great. But I also look beyond them.And part of that is working through the research: commissioning it, understanding it, and then, yes, distilling it into insights. I love insights. And then asking again: What else? What’s more?Beautiful. This hour went by very quickly. I want to thank you so much for the conversation. It was a real pleasure. I appreciate it.Likewise. I could talk to you forever. Thank you for the opportunity. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Simon Roberts is an anthropologist and co-founder and Partner at Stripe Partners in London. Simon’s 25-year career has included founding the UK’s first dedicated ethnographic research company and running an innovation lab at Intel. He is currently Board President of EPIC People. His book “The Power of Not Thinking” was shortlisted for The Business Book Awards 2021.Stripe Partners have one of the best newsletters going: Frame. And, here is Simon’s story told in comic book form. Here is his piece “The UX-ification of research” referenced in our conversation.I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend—a neighbor, actually—who helps people tell their stories. It’s such a beautiful question that I borrowed it from her, but it’s also a big one.So I tend to overexplain it, just like I’m doing now. But before we dive in, I want you to know that you’re in complete control—you can answer or not answer however you’d like. And the question is: Where do you come from?Well, 23andMe—when I did it, maybe foolishly, many years ago—told me that genetically, I come from the Celtic fringes of the United Kingdom. A bit of Wales, a bit of Ireland, and a bit of Scotland.And weirdly, to the extent that I know, that’s broadly true. My father’s side of the family were all Welsh. Biographically, it lines up too—I spent eight years at university in Edinburgh and five years working at Intel in Ireland. So, genetically and biographically—biologically, as it were—that’s where I kind of come from.Yeah.There’s probably a deeper answer, but that’s an answer.As an American, I don’t have the nuance of Welsh, Scottish, or Irish identities. What does it mean to be Welsh—to come from Wales?Well, the second part of the answer to that first question is that, broadly speaking, I had an extremely—extremely—I was about to say "typical," but more like typical slash privileged—upbringing as a white, middle-class male in the Home Counties. So I don’t know what it’s like to grow up Welsh, aside from having a few Welsh relatives.But in general, I think being Scottish, Welsh, or certain types of Irish often means that England is the colonial—or pseudo-colonial—bully breathing down your neck.Right.Scotland has moved toward independence, at least politically in some respects. Wales, to a more limited extent. And, of course, the Irish question rolls on. So yeah, I think you’d have to ask properly Welsh, Scottish, or Irish people what it really means to be from there, particularly in relation to England. But I’m certainly aware of England’s colonial history.Yeah. I didn’t mean to put you in a politically fraught situation right at the start. Do you have any recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid? Like, what did you want to be when you grew up?Honestly, I don’t think I have any memory whatsoever of wanting to be anything in particular when I was young. And as I keep telling my children—or others who come to me for career advice—thanks to a long degree at Edinburgh University—four years, followed by another four for a PhD, which I grant you isn’t as long as an American PhD in anthropology—I managed to delay figuring out what I wanted to do until I was 28, nearly 29.Partly because I didn’t know. And I still really didn’t know until I finished my PhD. Then, I at least knew what I didn’t want to do. And what I couldn’t do—or, at least, some things I wouldn't be able to do.And I’ve been making it up ever since. But I certainly have no childhood memory of wanting to be a train driver or any of the classic things kids say. You know, in Britain, they say, "I want to be a train driver." I can’t imagine Italians say that. They probably say, “I want to drive a Ferrari in a Grand Prix.”But the British? “Yeah, I’d like to be a train driver.” I didn’t even want to be one of those. And I’m too blind to be a train driver anyway.And so catch us up—where are you now, and what is the work that you're doing?Yeah, what is the work I’m doing? Where am I now? I mean, in many ways, I think I’m still doing what I’ve been doing since I figured out what I wanted to do—which was to apply anthropology in a way that was neither full-throated academia nor surface-level market research.From the start, my aim has been to sit somewhere in a Venn diagram between commercial research and academic rigor. And I’ve been trying to locate myself in that in-between space ever since.I don’t have a long list of past roles on my LinkedIn. I did a stint in corporate—it wasn’t really for me. I’ve mostly worked in consultancy. Now, I’m 13 years into the journey—I think you’re meant to call it that—as a founder at Stripe Partners. And yeah, we’re sticking to the knitting, innovating where we can, and I’m still just trying to do good work.I go into every project with a healthy dose of fear about my inability to learn things properly. I’m always—yeah—always on tenterhooks.How do you describe Stripe Partners, if you're ever asked?I should be one of the most qualified people to answer that question succinctly, but I forever find myself completely unable to explain it clearly.Fundamentally, we’re an innovation and strategy business that combines social science, data science, and design—approaches, methodologies, ways of seeing the world—to solve problems and help large businesses chart the future. We have a particular tilt toward large technology companies.That’s about as good a description as I can give.Yeah, it’s a cruel question, that one.I think the problem is that I always answer it while making a bunch of assumptions—about what people know about consultancy, about anthropology, whether they’ve heard the word ethnography, or what they think data science means. And because of all those assumptions, I usually make a mess of it.Sometimes, the simplest way of putting it is: we help solve gnarly problems for people with good research. That’s another way to say it.What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?I think the joy is, ultimately, being given a difficult problem and getting to a satisfying resolution. That’s what’s rewarding.Most of our projects last about three months—that’s the average, I’d say, over the last 13 years. Twelve weeks is long enough to get deep into something without getting completely swallowed by it. It’s enough time to understand the background context—organizational, cultural, political, whatever it may be—so that you can frame your findings in a way that’s impactful.But it’s not so long that you get bogged down in the topic, or in your client’s category, or in the politics and internal dynamics of the organization. It’s a nice balance—deep enough to be meaningful, but with just enough air in your lungs so you can come back up and be ready to dive into something else.That’s one answer.Another is that I really enjoy being intellectually challenged. And I suspect—though I hope it’s not true, but I think it probably is—that many people, broadly speaking, in the industries we work in are often wracked with imposter syndrome.And they’re probably at the less experienced, younger end of the community of practitioners. I sort of love and hate the continual feeling that I’m a complete imposter—that I’m not going to be able to solve the problem, that I’m not going to land it neatly, that the project is going to be a complete failure, and no one will ever want to work with me again.I know it sounds like a slightly sadomasochistic urge, but I’m somewhat driven by that. It keeps me pushing myself. And after doing this for close to 25 years—well, whatever works, right? It keeps you on your toes, and it stops you from becoming complacent. Because complacency, in any walk of life, isn’t helpful.You’ve referenced a few times that around 28 you discovered what you might want to do. But when did you first encounter the idea that you could actually make a living doing this kind of thing?A very simple—if slightly niche—answer: I ended up working in a brand consultancy that had been spun out of an ad agency called TBWA in London. This was in late 1999. The rationale was to help dot-com startups build their brands, understand their customers, figure out what they were doing in the world, and then, in a sense, pass them back to TBWA to spend their funding on marketing.I did a project for a now-defunct online toy retailer called Toyzone, which was backed by a group of high-profile investors—people like Matthew Freud of Freud Communications. I went off and did some ethnography for them, got completely thrown into the deep end, and presented what I imagine was a fairly terrible slide deck to the founders and the ad agency folks.But they were like, “Wow, that was amazing.” And I thought, Oh, well—maybe I can do this. I mean, it was the first time I’d ever done it. But it worked.So yes, that’s kind of a smug—and possibly complacent—answer. But it made me realize that you actually could do this kind of work. I can’t even remember what academic framework I used, but it was something clever—but not too clever. Just enough.And it gave me this early sense that the idea executives don’t have time for thinking or ideas is total nonsense. That people do have time to be pushed and challenged. They don’t just want a page full of verbatims from a focus group. There are other ways.You were surprised there was receptivity to that kind of thinking inside the corporate structure?Yeah, I suppose so. Although, to be fair, it was a scrappy little startup—not exactly a corporate behemoth.But still, the way you said it—it sounded like you were surprised they didn’t think it was all b******t.Right. I mean, I think they were thoughtful people. As investors, they’d already made a lot of money, and they were jumping on the next bandwagon, which at the time was the dot-com boom.And then there were planners at the ad agency. Ad agencies are full of different kinds of people—some more thoughtful than others. But the planners tend to regard themselves as the most thoughtful. There were some very friendly planners in the mix who responded positively. They said, “Yeah, this is great—you’ve given me something I can play with.”So that gave me just enough confidence to believe there was a “there” there—something I could figure out and build on.But then I made a pretty rash decision: I left that startup brand consultancy after only a year. I had very little formal training—even in an industry that essentially makes it all up as it goes along.You know, I had no formal training. And—this is a true story—I basically built a little website using some code I scraped off nameless blogs. I created a web page in Microsoft FrontPage, and then I sold Google Ads—not Instagram ads—for $0.02, or more precisely, $0.002 per click, using the keyword “ethnography.”I thought, Let’s see if anyone wants to buy ethnography.At the same time, I did what I’ve always done: tried to meet lots of people. I’ve always been proactive about building a network and finding interesting people to talk to.And through that, I found a really interesting, tech-focused think tank in the UK. They brought me in as an ethnographer-in-residence. It paid a few standing bills and gave me the freedom to experiment a bit on the side. And that was it—just making it all up as I went along, which, if we’re honest, is what most careers look like in hindsight.Yeah, it’s amazing. Listening to that story, I was thinking about where I was in 1999—and realizing how long ago that actually is. A lot has changed. How would you describe the changes in that Venn diagram you talked about—between academic rigor and commercial market research—and the role ethnography plays in it?Yeah, it’s something I think about a lot. Probably too much. It’s a bit of an inside baseball kind of question—but it’s a good one.When I first started out, focus groups were the thing in qualitative work. There was a little bit of ethnography happening in London, but it was really at the margins. It was incredibly hard to make a case for small-n studies. Incredibly hard to justify spending half a day with a single person.And to be perfectly honest, while the little micro-business I had was successful in its own terms, it was hard work. So I jumped ship to Intel—at a time when a wave was building, particularly in corporate America and tech companies. There was this growing swell of interest. In my intake alone, 35 to 40 ethnographers or anthropologists joined Intel. It was a wave, and I rode it.If you want to periodize it, the application of anthropology and ethnography in business can be dated back as far as the 1920s, depending on what you’ve read—and with good reason. But I think there was a big surge from the early 2000s to around 2010–2015.Then came the rise of terms like “UXR”—User Experience Research. And with it, a kind of consolidation—a shift, really. As I’ve written about critically, there was a “UX-ification” of the field. The focus shifted—not always, but often—toward less deep, more tactical questions.What we had at Intel was the ability to think in extremely long wavelengths, to approach problems deeply and broadly. That’s changed. The wave crested, and then a different kind of wave emerged—this UXR wave.Which brings us back to where we started this conversation, even before the microphone was on. We're now in this slightly strange moment—a time of relentless cost optimization, process orientation, and professionalization. In some ways, those things have taken over within UXR.And now, of course, our new interloper: AI.So it’s a very different environment. At this point, I think of it in three distinct phases—each of which I’ve had the pleasure (or misfortune) of riding through.Yeah. Well, I loved that piece you wrote—the one you referenced—”The UX-ification of research.” Do you have thoughts about the acronyms? I’m always struck by how odd they are—UX, CX—this strangely robotic naming of what is essentially a qualitative interface between an organization and its users. It just feels so strange to me.Yeah, it is. I suppose I haven’t really thought much about it, apart from just noting it. I mean, it would be interesting to check Google Trends—when did “UXR” actually start gaining traction as a label for a type of researcher?Because, you know, Rick Robinson and Elab, and some of that early Sapient-era stuff—that was “experience modeling,” right? As far as I know, the word “experience” entered the nomenclature in the late ’90s or early 2000s.So, in many ways, it’s fine. Everybody needs labels—labels are useful for other people. But I do think the perennial problem UXRs face is actually the “R” at the end. It signals that you do one specific kind of thing and that you occupy a particular slot in a process. It positions you as someone who provides input, rather than someone who drives an overall process.So UXR, in service of product management, has created a kind of asymmetry. And I think—and this might be a bit controversial—but I think the current obsession with research ops, with optimization, with process, with bowing down to rules that we didn’t create but that others imposed… it’s left us in a position that feels somewhat inferior. We’re beneath the centers of power.That said, researchers—at least since they’ve been in businesses—have always felt they deserved a seat at or near the top table but rarely got it. Maybe there’s something about what we do, or who we are, that just doesn’t quite enable that. Of course, there are exceptions—at Intel, I knew researchers who rose to extremely senior roles. So it’s not impossible.But at some point, you do have to be willing to step back from the “researcher” part and take on other kinds of responsibilities—ones that may be more mundane, more political, less fun. I think it’s very hard to be a fully embodied, full-throated researcher and a shoulder-padded, swaggering executive.I don’t know. Maybe that’s okay. I’m happy.How have you navigated that?I’ve navigated it by running my own businesses.And I think—speaking for myself, but also for my two co-founders and the rest of the partners at Stripe Partners—what we value most about the business is, broadly, that we run our own ship. We make our own decisions. Our targets are our own. They’re not imposed by someone else. We can chart our own course. We can be nimble.We get to decide.And it’s funny—there are a lot of founders who peacock around on LinkedIn talking about being founders, but they’re usually in tech. I think it’s interesting that people who run research and strategy businesses don’t really lean into that founder identity—the “founder mindset,” the “habits of great founders,” all that stuff. But we are founders. We’re businesspeople.We just tend to emphasize the research part of our identities, rather than the business part, in how we present ourselves. But we have mouths to feed, bills to pay, P&Ls to manage, profit margins to protect—all the same realities any business has. It’s just that we’re craftspeople at heart. We’d rather look at the world through a project than a spreadsheet.Yeah, well, that’s beautiful. All those forces you just described—those are exactly the ones that squeeze craft out of research. People get flattened by the machinery of mediocrity. So I’m curious: how do you make space for the kind of work you want to do? Ethnography, craft—the parts that get squeezed out elsewhere—how do you create space for that?I mean, I think fundamentally, by advocating for craft—right? I remember, in the very early years of Stripe Partners, we had endless conversations about, in simple terms: how do we want to be seen? Do we want to be seen as strategy people, innovation people, or researchers?And I think the simple answer is: all three.But research shouldn’t be seen as a dirty word. It shouldn’t be regarded merely as an input into “strategy” or “innovation”—and if you’re reading the transcript, those should be in bold, with quote marks. We’ve always wanted to lean into research and be strong advocates for doing it properly.Because it matters.Having a robust—if not foolproof—understanding of the world gives you the foundation to address not just the problem that brought you to write the brief, but all sorts of other eventualities too. We’ve always taken the view: let’s not be bashful about what we do. We believe in the power of research to help businesses get things done.And if that resonates with you, you’re probably going to make a good client.That’s not to downplay the importance of other things that make research successful. But we’re in a moment, as you know, where there are tools everywhere claiming to do incredibly complex things at the push of a button—sometimes with synthetic users or similar shortcuts.That makes our stance more important than ever.I read recently that the policy unit in Number 10 Downing Street was using synthetic user panels to help decide policy. And to me, there’s no greater illustration of why we have a government that promised a lot and has delivered very little of substance—because it’s not even talking to people.There are dark forces at work, and we need to be alert to them. Yes, we need to be efficient. Yes, we sometimes need to optimize processes, move faster. But we also need to be careful about what we’re letting into our corner of the commercial world. A lot of these tools are far less useful than they claim to be.Yeah. The synthetic user stuff—I remember someone asking me, “How do you make the case for qualitative research in the age of all these tools?” It really threw me. That was right around the time you and I were interacting around synthetic users. And it got existential really fast. These things are strange. How do you make the case for what you called a ‘singular understanding of the world’? What’s the value this kind of work brings—especially now, with all these cheap, easy replicas?Well, I think it goes back to this fundamental question: is research just an input, or is it something more? Is it an experience? A process? A dialogic process—a kind of exchange that you go through with clients?Very early on, we stumbled into—or maybe deliberately developed—a way of doing research that is about as far removed from synthetic users as you can get. We call it the ethnographic research studio.It’s a simple idea: if you want to understand the world, you go into the world. That much is obvious. That’s what anthropologists, ethnographers, and good market researchers have always done.But our twist was: do it with clients. Do it in a compressed, focused time frame—a week, maybe 10 days. Focus rigorously on the core problem you’re trying to solve, the questions you’re trying to answer. And take people on a journey—one that goes beyond interviews. It's about creating experiences: cocktail parties with experts at your Airbnb, dinners, guided immersions—anything that brings people closer to the world they’re trying to understand.And what we quickly discovered is: it works. It delivers a strong first set of answers, fast. The team can walk away and immediately start acting while we dig deeper, synthesize, and make meaning of what was learned. So it’s fast, it’s deep, and it’s highly embodied—a word I’ve become really interested in.It gives people—clients—verbal and nonverbal resources they can draw from later. Even subconsciously, they replay that research as they go on to do their work. It embeds.We’ve been doing it since 2013. We still get a lot of interest in it. In fact, we’ve got a team off to Atlanta next week to do just that with some clients.It works. It’s fun. It reinvigorates our clients. It reminds them that there are real people out there in the world they’re building for. And it’s magical. It puts a smile on my face, on our team’s faces, on our clients’ faces. I think even the participants enjoy it.So it’s just—an all-around knockout. A great experience, great value for money, a great way to learn about the world.And no synthetic users involved.Here’s a lightly edited and polished version of your transcript. The language has been smoothed for readability, but all tone, voice, and nuance are preserved:What do you think it is that puts the smile on people’s faces? What were you thinking when you said that?I just think it's the happy, it's just….I was doing one of these with a client—who must remain nameless—in Chicago about three weeks ago. We spent a week digging into stuff related to television, and I took a UX writer and a designer to meet two women.They happened to be living in what I think are called “drunk houses” in the U.S.—which is probably not the most appropriate term—but essentially, it was a women’s refuge for recovering alcoholics. A very different environment.And we walked out two and a half hours later, and they were just like, “Wow. There was so much in there.” And I said, “Yeah... you haven’t seen anything yet. We’re doing this all week.”I think it’s just that—corporate environments are very sequestered. If you live in the Bay Area, you get on your shiny white bus, you’re driven to a nice campus, you’ve got the micro-kitchen, all the amenities. You go to a lot of meetings, and you don’t have to pay for anything. You forget that there’s a whole other America out there.Someone once told me about their brother who works at Meta—he picked something up at Hudson News in the airport and just walked off with it. Someone had to run after him. He’d completely forgotten that, in the real world, you have to pay for things. He was just on autopilot. But Hudson News isn’t a micro-kitchen.So, I think the smiles come from that reconnection with the world. It’s the most thunderingly obvious thing to say, but it matters more than almost anything else. If we don’t do that, everything gets reduced to personas and numbers on spreadsheets—just disembodied entities we can’t truly make decisions about unless we understand what makes them tick. As humans. As flesh, blood, bones, beating hearts. That stuff matters.You need to feel it.Corporate strategy, in my view, is completely unfeeling. And—this is a longer answer—but whenever private equity firms buy food franchises, what do they do? They value-engineer the hell out of them. All the magic disappears. Why? Because they’re running businesses through spreadsheets, with very little emotional connection to the food, the customers, the neighborhoods. But if you're going to scale a food franchise, it's not about shaving off a few tortilla chips to save pennies on margins.That’s always been the thing for me: businesses have a natural tendency to distance themselves from the worlds they serve. And our job is to bring them—and their people—back into the world, and use that as the foundation for doing something meaningful for their customers.Yeah, it’s beautiful. You mentioned “embodiment,” which of course connects to your book The Power of Not Thinking. What was the origin of that? When did it occur to you that this was something people would want to talk about—needed to hear?The simple answer is: we did one of our research studios. I write about it in the book—we took a team from Duracell on a camping trip. It was completely nuts. But it worked.All of us—the core of Stripe Partners at the time, me, Tom, and Tom—we came out of it just going, “Wow.” High-fives all around. “That was f*****g amazing. That actually worked.”We got somewhere incredible with that group in one week. And then came the question: Why? Why did it work?That’s really what the book is—an attempt to answer that question. And I owe a huge debt to Tom and Tom for shaping that thinking. My name’s on the front, but the ideas were a shared effort.It comes back to what we were just talking about. Businesses disappear into themselves. They lose touch. So how do you get people out of that?Yes, great—you take them out into the world. But what happens then? Why does that work? What happens when your body experiences something, as opposed to just analyzing cells in a spreadsheet or flipping through PowerPoint slides?That was really the starting point.Then came the process of figuring out what kind of book that might become—which is a whole other story. But it was a fun experience. A difficult one, especially while running a business that was, at the time, much smaller.I have a copy here, and I love the cover. I’m sure there are different versions, but mine has this kind of generic figure holding its own head.Yeah. Well, I’m sure any author will tell you—when you see a cover or even a version of the cover, you think, OK, this is actually going to be a book. It’s exciting.But yeah, I mean, I’m sure you don’t need or want me to sit here and publicize the book. I’m not very good at that. And I quickly realized that 80 percent of writing a book is actually publicizing it—not just writing it.But I am increasingly feeling like the ideas in it are more important than ever. Even if I didn’t articulate them as well as I could have, I still think they matter—especially in the context of where the research industry is going. I think they’re relevant to policymakers and decision-makers, and their ongoing inability to really get down with people and understand their worlds.And of course, it's even more relevant now in the context of AI. I think—perhaps with the exception of what I wrote about robotics, which is going through a really interesting phase thanks to advances in general AI—I still stand by what I wrote about AI more broadly.Jan LeCun at Meta put it beautifully the other day: a child, by the age of four, has received as much data as the most powerful large language model (LLM). In other words, most of what we know—about ourselves, about the world, about other people—is not represented in any way inside an LLM.And I think we need to quit this idea that these things are “intelligent” in any meaningful way—unless we actually sit down and define what we mean by intelligence. They can’t reason the way humans can. They don’t know most of what humans know.That’s not to say they aren’t useful, or that you can’t do some things more quickly or efficiently with them. But I think we’ve slightly lost our collective mind.So the question becomes: how do we want to respond to this?I’d say with an open mind—but also a good deal of skepticism. Because I imagine most of the big tech companies touting these systems would love for us to believe they’re more powerful than they really are. That would suit them. But we don’t have to play along with that script.Yeah. What do you see next? I mean, maybe a silly question—but when you look ahead, when you think about the role of synthetic research or synthetic users or whatever we want to call it—what happens?I don’t know. I really don’t know what I see.More broadly, with AI—there’s no doubt this is powerful stuff. It’s world-changing. But as Roy Amara said: we tend to overestimate the impact in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.And I think that’s true here. Right now, we’re probably overestimating its short-term effects—but underestimating what it will do in the long run.And that’s what’s scary. Not the technology itself, but the fact that we’ve welcomed it into our lives so uncritically. It doesn’t seem like we’ve done a huge amount of thinking about what it means—for us, for the value of what we do, for work.So, in the context of research, it’s as I said earlier: be careful what you wish for. If you want to automate yourself out of existence, well—you’re doing a bloody fine job of it. And you’re doing all of this based on a technology that’s been around for, what, a year and a half? Two years? Right?Meanwhile, we’ve got this technology called the body—which has been around for hundreds of thousands of years—and it seems to work pretty well for a lot of what we’re trying to do, which is make sense of the world.Especially in earlier phases of human history, when the world was bigger, badder, and nastier than it is now—even if it still feels like a bit of a mess today. Our bodies are pretty good. They’re well-tested. It’s well-tried kit.So I never cease to marvel at how quickly people will jump on the latest thing. Never ceases to amaze me how many “experts” pop up overnight. You’d think they’d been working on this stuff forever. It’s amazing.So yeah, I’m a healthy skeptic. At Stripe Partners, we’re trying to think carefully about how we introduce AI into our work—how we do it ethically, how it makes sense for our clients legally and from a data protection perspective. And how we use it to be more rigorous, more robust in what we do.At the same time, of course, we’re also trying to serve some of the needs of our paymasters—whether that’s doing things a bit more quickly or, occasionally, a bit more cheaply. But that doesn’t mean we throw everything out and go all-in.It seems to me that much of the industry is just putting all their chips on red. And I’m not sure red is going to come in. Or maybe it will come in—but not for a while. And we haven’t really thought it through. So yeah. I worry.Yeah. That’s a beautiful spot to end our conversation. I do have one silly question, though. I’m curious about the name Stripe Partners. Is there a story behind that?Yeah. Again—kind of like the question about what we do—what’s the good or right answer?I think we wanted something simple. I mean, we obviously needed to find a URL—which wasn’t easy, even years after the dot-com boom. So adding “Partners” made sense; it allowed us to pick another word, then attach “Partners” to it and grab a workable domain.There were three of us at the start. And “Stripe”… well, I think we wanted to communicate something simple, clean, and abstract—but also something that suggested structure, form, even movement.It wasn’t meant to be too literal. We didn’t want to be called something like “Insight Co.” or “Innovation Group” or anything overly obvious. “Stripe” felt open-ended enough to grow with, while “Partners” grounded it in the fact that collaboration is central to what we do—both internally and with clients.So yeah, practical reasons like finding a domain, but also a kind of quiet metaphor in the name. It felt right.We wanted the name to communicate, in some sense, a degree of alacrity—efficiency and speed. Which kind of goes back to where we began, right? Academic research is obviously more rigorous, more time-consuming, and—yes—in many cases, much more thoughtful than the three- or four-month projects I’ve described.But I do think that a certain degree of robustness and rigor can be achieved within that timeframe. So maybe it’s not the speediest research in the world, but it’s still research with depth.So “Stripe” was meant to signify some speed, I think. I believe that was the origin story.And you know—we’ve never been contacted by the lawyers at Stripe, the finance company, which is probably a good thing… because they’re a bit wealthier than us.Well, Simon, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you.And if you don’t already subscribe to Peter’s lovely weekly missive—with five excellent topics, or thematic buckets, or whatever you want to call them—you jolly well should.Beautiful. I thank you for that.All right. 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Michael Powell is a Partner at Practica Group. A cultural anthropologist by training, with a PhD from Rice University, he has been an ethnographic research consultant since 2006. He is the author of, “The Sound of Friction: How to Do Things With Listening” EPIC 2023I start all these conversations with the same question. I borrowed it from a friend of mine who lives in Hudson. She helps people tell their stories, and it's a big, beautiful question—which is exactly why I use it. Because it's so big, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. So before I ask, I want you to know you're in total control. You can answer however—or not at all. It’s probably the longest lead-in to any question ever. The question is: Where do you come from? Again, you're in total control. Answer however you like.I'm from suburban Chicago originally—that’s where I grew up. I was born in the ’70s.Reflecting on it—and I’ve listened to some of your past conversations, so I had this in mind—I know a lot of folks have interesting things to say about the quirks of where they came from. But for me, there’s something very plain, even monotonous and homogenous, about growing up in suburban Chicago. It’s a product of the suburbanization that began in the 1960s—what people call “white flight.” It created this sense of designed sameness, where everything felt pleasant and easy.There was a certain kind of privilege baked into it—one that’s not immediately obvious or easy to recognize. Looking back now, especially as someone who works as a cultural anthropologist and social scientist in the corporate world, I see how that upbringing shaped me.John Hughes comes to mind as a cultural marker. All of those ’80s films—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles—were set in suburban Chicago. You could see the contrast between the suburbs and the city. Something different was happening in each, and while we enjoyed our bubble, we could sense that difference.I actually started out at art school—art school dropout here—and then went on to university where I majored in anthropology. I continued to graduate school for anthropology too. That whole path was, in many ways, about coming to understand my own positionality—where I’m coming from. That’s always felt important in the work we do as qualitative researchers and ethnographers.I’m not sure where that answer ends, exactly—it’s a broad question. Do you have a recollection, as a child, of what you wanted to be when you grew up?Not really.I really identify with what you’re saying. I also grew up in the suburbs, and everything you just shared resonates deeply with me. I'm tempted to ask a question that might feel a bit blunt—but since you mentioned the privilege of the suburbs, how would you articulate what that privilege actually is?I think it's about a certain lack of worry. Of course, some of that had to do with my parents shielding me from anything that might be threatening. But day to day, I remember the sense of freedom. Even in the ’80s, when there were occasional scares about child abductions, by and large, we just wandered off into the neighborhood, hung out with friends, and came home when the streetlights came on. That was our signal it was time for dinner.I think that sense of ease was also tied to the broader global context of the time. We were living through the tail end of the Cold War, leading up to 1989 and the so-called “end of history” in the ’90s. That period didn’t last long, but there was a sense of global stability for a while—not everywhere, of course, but certainly in the United States, and especially in suburban communities like mine.So, catch us up—where are you now, and what kind of work are you doing?I live in Houston, Texas, and I’m a partner at Practica Group. We’re a relatively small research consulting firm that focuses mostly on ethnographic work. We have partners in Chicago and Brooklyn, but I’m the only one in Houston.We work with a range of clients—mostly U.S.-based—on a variety of projects. Some are consumer and marketing-focused, others are more about user experience and technology. It really spans a pretty broad spectrum.You mentioned art school earlier. When did you first come across this kind of work? When did you realize it was something you could pursue professionally?I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do as a kid. It wasn’t until high school that I started to find art compelling. I had always enjoyed creating things, even though it wasn’t something that people around me really understood. My parents didn’t go to college, and while they were interested and somewhat supportive, they didn’t have a clear sense of what a creative career could actually look like. That lack of a roadmap probably contributed to my decision to leave art school.But even during my time at the University of Illinois, I was exploring different paths, and I somehow found my way to anthropology—maybe through friends. It immediately resonated. Yes, it’s a social science and yes, it’s rigorous. But it also felt creative, thoughtful, and even philosophical in a way that really drew me in.It starts with the simple premise that other people—and groups of people—often think in ways that are radically different from me and from one another. What does that look like? How do they make sense of the world?I still consider anthropology a deeply creative discipline for a variety of reasons.That’s not something most people would immediately associate with anthropology. What do you mean when you say it’s creative? Can you say more about that?Sure. Let me take you to graduate school. I went to Rice University, which is in Houston. Funny enough, I didn’t really want to be in Houston, but it keeps pulling me back.Rice’s anthropology department is quite renowned. My advisor, George Marcus, was part of a major movement in the 1980s—a kind of internal critique of anthropology that ended up reshaping the field. He co-authored and edited a couple of key books during that period. One of them, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, written with Michael Fischer in 1986, argued that anthropology needed to become more relevant—more engaged with Western, First World cultures. It pushed the field to study powerful groups and social currents in places like the U.S., while still drawing on the history and methods of anthropology to do so.The other book, Writing Culture, was heavily influenced by literary theory. Its core idea is that there's no simple, transparent link between what we observe in the field and what we write in our ethnographies. Writing itself—representation—is a creative act. That opened the door to all kinds of critique, some of it difficult or even uncomfortable, especially around anthropology's historical complicities. But it was also incredibly productive.At Rice, this kind of experimentation—what became known as “experimental ethnography”—was central. My advisor, George Marcus, later focused on what he called “multi-sited ethnography.” The idea was: How can a discipline so rooted in “thick description” and close, immersive fieldwork adapt to studying global phenomena? How do we hold onto the richness of that thick description while addressing more diffuse, interconnected contexts?So there’s this ongoing tension between the “thick” and the “thin.” And the creative opportunity is in figuring out how to still tell meaningful stories and do real ethnography in these global, multi-sited contexts. What does that look like?What would you say has been the impact of George Marcus on your work? I often ask people about mentors or touchstones who’ve shaped them. It sounds like Marcus was a major figure for you.Absolutely. George Marcus has been a mentor in every sense. His influence continues to shape my thinking and approach to the work I do.Yeah. Well, not being an academic, it's really been a process of mediating and translating a lot of these more intellectual conversations into a professional discipline. But if I go back to what I did in graduate school—I spent a year living in Warsaw, studying the emergence of anti-corruption policy. It started with an interest in the circulation of freedom of information laws. There were earlier versions elsewhere, but one of the first prominent communities around that topic emerged in the United States with the Freedom of Information Act.Poland didn’t pass a similar law until well after the fall of communism. And when I arrived, I realized the law had actually developed within a broader context of anti-corruption efforts. That itself was tied to a global shift in development policy. For a long time, the theory had been that corruption helped grease the wheels of an economy—it let things happen. But in the late ’90s, institutions like the World Bank began to shift their stance, arguing instead that transparency was key.According to this new thinking, the path to development in so-called “Third World” countries lay in building market-driven economies. And for markets to function effectively, transparency was essential. So the narrative shifted: eliminating corruption became central to enabling transparent, efficient markets.This recast the meaning of freedom of information laws. In the U.S., the law was passed in the 1960s but didn’t take on real significance until the 1970s, largely in response to Watergate and the political climate of that era. It was seen as a democratic tool. Superficially, it looked the same in Poland—but in reality, it wasn’t. In Poland, it was embedded in a global development discourse.My research essentially asked, what is corruption? I wrote an article at one point arguing that these laws represent a kind of “paranoia within reason.” They claim to promote transparency, but they’re always partial. Full transparency is likely impossible. So people are left to fill in the gaps, and they do so in really fascinating ways. These systems, which are meant to be rational and clear, often end up generating more paranoia—not less.We tend to view global economic and political regimes as highly rational, especially bureaucratic ones. But in practice, they create conditions for paranoid thinking. Instead of clarity, they make it even harder to figure out what’s really going on.So, the work I do now is still rooted in this effort to understand complex, modern systems as they’ve emerged. I like tackling thorny, multi-layered problems—unpacking the mess. I mentioned policy and transparency earlier, but you see similar issues arise in business strategies. The companies we work with put forth elaborate plans and theories, which add even more layers to the complexity we’re trying to make sense of.So, if someone wants me to study why people are buying a certain kind of coffee, I’ll do that. But I’m never doing it without considering all the other layers of context that shape those behaviors.Yeah. What has it been like? I mean, I guess there are a few things bouncing around in my mind. I mean, the growth of anthropology in the commercial sector has happened over my career, certainly, and we’ve met each other through EPIC, which is this beautiful community. But what’s it been like being a trained academic anthropologist, entering the commercial space, and finding purchase and finding work—and trying to do the kinds of work that you want to do or that you were trained to do—in a commercial context? What’s that been like?Yeah, it’s been sort of following the opportunities as they arise. I didn’t really have a strong plan when I first entered this. I had moved to Los Angeles and found some others who were doing this kind of work—other anthropologists—and sort of joined in on some existing projects.And after a year or so—because that is a very difficult way to get into a freelance career...Which way?Without any real experience in the professional world.As an anthropologist looking for work.Yeah, you’re just supposed to start asking people, “We’ll critique culture.” There’s a lot to learn.I like that.I found an opening at a design firm in Los Angeles. They were called Shook Kelley. There are two guys—Terry Shook in Charlotte and Kevin Kelley, who started in Charlotte and moved to Los Angeles—two architects who were just very interested in, especially Kevin Kelley, brand in terms of retail and placemaking, urban districts. A wide range of different kinds of projects that he was involved in, and trying to grow that business, and had never worked with anyone doing research.And so I just got plugged into all of these projects in the pipeline and mostly spent my time there helping design grocery stores—a lot of food retail, convenience stores too, some restaurants, but then a variety of other kinds of places: place-based businesses, financial services, universities, urban districts.What did you learn about the American supermarket in that time—or grocery experience?Yeah. Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about grocery stores. I’ve always been very fascinated. I think this does tie back to that suburban—you know, the suburban origins—that there is something very homogeneous about these grocery stores.There’s this old joke among grocery executives that if you were to blindfold a grocery executive and place them in aisle five of a grocery store anywhere in the nation, they wouldn’t be able to tell you which store they were in. There might be a few little brand logos here and there, a few little cues that might help you, but by and large—and especially prior to 10 years ago—I think things are starting to slowly change. But for most of America, you can’t tell the difference.And what do you make of that?It’s absurd. Yeah. Kind of amazing. Fascinating. Like, what has caused this monstrosity—and all the health-related issues and problems that it has generated as well.Yeah.Why has it been so difficult to start a food company and to do something interesting or different?Early on—so this would have been like the late 2000s—we had a client in Arizona, and I was there spending time visiting stores and doing research, talking to people. And they had a concept store out—it must have been outside of Tucson. I can’t recall exactly. It was well out of the way. And it was a fascinating store. It was sort of circular. And the idea being that the core of the store is produce. And this is what we value most.And so we’re going to have everything revolve around it. It’s like, wow, that’s so cool. This is the kind of thing that a design firm should be doing—cutting-edge, let’s do this. We’re going to shake things up and make people think.But I talked to the store manager, and he was basically saying, we’re going to have to close this place down. This is not working. Because it’s so foreign to people. And when you get into these institutions of everyday life, people don’t want to be thinking about grocery shopping—at least not every time they go to the grocery store. Once in a while, maybe.I always call it: there’s food culture A and food culture B in America. Food culture A is sort of the hip and cool and sexy stuff. It’s the restaurants, what’s on TV, social media—it’s what we want to talk about, what we want to imagine our food life to be. And then food culture B is: this is how we actually shop. This is what we actually eat.And there are so many reasons why it’s just not possible to live in food culture A. Nor would you even want to, I don’t think. It’s more entertainment. It’s more for show. It’s all very fascinating.And when you read all the trend reports out there about “this is where food is going,” and “we’re going to be drinking this,” most of it lives in that other world. It doesn’t have a huge amount of relevance to how most people, on most days, eat and think about their food.Which is frustrating, because I’ve worked on projects with people on food justice projects—so-called food deserts. And it’s very difficult to get them attuned to: okay, what is it that we can do? What are the levers of change? What is possible to maybe make a more equitable food environment possible? And it’s deeply frustrating work.What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you, just personally?You know, even back then when we were working on these grocery stores—well, there were a few things—but one was that you could open up a grocery store that we spent two years designing, and now tens of thousands of people who live there are coming to that store and shopping there. They’re eating there.And it’s not radically different. It’s not a new human. But it’s different. Things have changed. And you’ve actually helped shape lives—even if it is just that everyday life that people tend to be overlooking. It matters. It’s truly meaningful to them.And then to work with some of those clients—it was kind of interesting, because our firm is not very big. And so the giant corporate chains—they’re not necessarily working with us. But there was this whole world of more regional chains and smaller chains that needed reinvention and were kind of stuck—not quite sure what comes next.So, to work with some of those chains—some of them family-owned for generations—and to help them find their way has always been very exciting and gratifying. To see, okay, this is not a monolithic industry. There are possibilities to make things happen and to make change happen.So yeah, those are some of the things that I find very interesting. In more recent years, I think what’s been really interesting is—because I started, the more I was working at this design firm, and I stopped working there probably about seven or eight years ago—I was more and more working on strategic kinds of plans. More design, research informing design, and design strategy, brand strategy, even corporate strategy.And then in more recent years, I’ve been getting more back to the craft of research. And I find that very gratifying—talking to people, trying to make sense of the research, struggling through that, and through the EPIC community, sharing those insights, sharing those struggles. I’ve been doing some work recently on teaching interviewing, and I’ve been developing a course on analysis and synthesis as well.It’s beautiful. I want to segue from what we’ve been talking about into that work—your work on listening, which I think is really amazing. How do you—I'm wondering if you’ve ever encountered sort of conventional research—and how do you articulate the value that your anthropological background brings to that question of what’s possible or what’s not possible? You know what I mean?Like, these people who are in charge of businesses, who may not be fluent in anthropology, but of course they want growth, they want innovation, they want—what did you say—food culture A, you know what I mean? How does an anthropologist help somebody like that? What do you bring that a more conventional approach doesn’t get? How do you make the case, I guess, is what I’m saying. Yeah, and I often feel like I’m constantly starting from scratch.Why is that, do you think?I’m not good with boilerplates. And I feel like it is sort of antithetical to the ethnographic approach.I love it.And so we’re constantly hand-wringing and tearing our hair out like, “What are we going to do? I don’t know.”Yeah.As if we’ve never done this before and haven’t been doing it for decades. But I think that’s a good approach.Which is a good approach?Well, I think that our clients have the luxury of having a theory and being very sure about that theory: “This is how humans are. This is what people do.” And I don’t have that luxury. I don’t feel like I know. Maybe. I’m like, “Maybe, maybe not. Let’s talk to them. Let’s find out. Let’s see.”Because with that certainty comes—there’s a connection between that certainty of their theories and their thinking and the certainty of their strategies, and their approach, and their direction, and the design of things. And so, until you start to shake things up and find some cracks and fissures—“Okay, well, maybe… What about this?”—let’s try exploring something else and being curious.And that’s where things like listening, I think, are so valuable. Because when we are—you know, I mean, listening is such a funny thing, because of course we do it. We all know how to do this, right? We’ve been doing this forever.But not. We learn to listen. Listening is very cultural. It’s a cultural practice. And we learn to listen for certain things. And when we can step back, step away from that, and try to listen differently—listen for different things—then that creates the opportunity for people to speak differently.Because people recognize, they can understand and pick up on how we’re listening to them. And people are far more diverse and hard to pin down—and just strange, weird. People are much weirder than I think most folks in business, including in a lot of business research, give them credit for.You know, you continually find that a company that makes coffee, a company that sells groceries, thinks of people coming into their grocery store as “grocery store shoppers.” And it’s only natural. That’s why you came here. This is what you do, right?But of course, you’ve got all these other things. When I was a kid, my first jobs were—I worked at the grocery store. I was a bagger, cleaning up grocery stores. I drove an ice cream truck for a couple of summers. You see some things, you know?Oh, yeah.You start to see that they’re bringing all kinds of other baggage into this place. It’s open to everyone. Just—everyone. So whatever you thought you knew, stand inside a convenience store for a couple of days and just watch what happens, and you’ll inevitably be surprised.And I think it’s that sense of openness and possibility—which I feel like is core to, whether it’s interviewing or other kinds of ethnographic research methods—that something will happen. I’ve gotten into the same sort of conundrum where you can’t tell a client, “Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”It’s serendipitous. That’s not a very reassuring sell.I think you’d have to charge an extraordinary amount of money if that was the pitch. Do you know what I mean? You’d just have to put a giant price tag on it to make that seem persuasive.Either that, or just charge nothing. Wait until you see the ideas—and then we’ll bill accordingly. “How valuable was that to you?”I don’t know.That’s right.Yeah. How do you maintain that sense of surprise and serendipity——but then do it in this formulaic way? We keep finding ways to do that and to tell these stories—sharing stories of how other projects have turned out, even though the process was indirect.I think that has to be the way: just to keep sharing those stories and telling those stories again and again—especially when surprising things happen.There’s a really interesting relationship between the methods of practice, like listening, and the question of: what is analysis? What are we trying to get to? One of the most provocative areas in my mind is around surprise.That it's when we hear something surprising—that's when we know it might be insightful or valuable. Because it’s always a question: surprising to whom? I mean, it's not just trivia. That’s one kind of surprise.Right.It's not that. It's surprising in a relevant way—relevant to our research questions or our project.Can you tell me a story of surprise?Yeah. I'm trying to think of which one. Every project, I feel like, captures a surprise. There was a project I was just sharing recently. A number come to mind. This was kind of an older project I did a while back when I was in L.A. We were working with a Christian university. I spent a lot of time doing research, talking to all these different students—MBA students and others.We came back to the client and explained that most people didn’t really think of this as a Christian university. A lot of students were surprised, after a year or two, to realize, Wait a minute... And then they would leave.Oh my gosh.There were master’s students who were like, Well, I can just disregard all that because I got my credential. I got my MBA. This was a big surprise to many of the people leading the institution.So much so that they were rebelling against the research: How did you do this? Who did you talk to? Somebody was crying. Other people were upset. You just knew—it was like a bomb went off inside the organization. They needed to do something about it. They thought they were hiring us to do a brand study.Right.We did. But it was very surprising to them—in a productive way. They had to deal with it. How do we change things to respond to that? This is not the kind of surprise we want.It’s beautiful. I have a quote I go to over and over again. I never know where it came from—but it’s from David Graeber. It’s long, and I can’t do it justice now, but he builds this very logical progression of conditions about history and how it’s made to say, basically, that our humanity is inseparable from our capacity to surprise one another. That the measure of our humanity is what we do not know about the other. And so surprise is the measure of what makes us human—that we can surprise each other and be surprised by another. I just think it’s beautiful.Yeah. I mean, it’s really remarkable—and undervalued in many ways.Yes. We’re so certain—to your point. I love what you said about the grocery store owner who just sees grocery store shoppers. It’s like a perfect closed system. There’s no need for any more information. All is known and simply runs.But we have a little bit of time left, and I want to dive into your work on listening—that friction where you ask the question (and maybe you can do it better justice): What does listening do? And we talked about it when you were doing that project. We spoke once, and my experience—and I’ve shared this before—is I feel like listening is sort of invisible.In a way, interviewing is a skill that—you know, when you see a good interviewer working, you don’t really notice. You just think they’re maybe a friendly person, just sort of having a conversation. It’s not a visible skill. But also, it’s seen as passive, not active.And so I’m wondering: what were you doing? Tell us a little bit about that project—about what does listening do? Yeah, yeah. It started because of a project I was working on. It was this year-long, ethnographic, interviewing-based project on Latino voters in Texas. And we wanted to know: Why don’t more Latinos vote in Texas?These are eligible voters who don’t vote. And so it was in the lead-up to the 2020 election. We talked to over 100 people, and then just before we were about to deliver this study, the pandemic began. And the funder knew, yes, this is going to have some kind of impact. But we can’t talk to everybody again. So let’s talk to—let’s talk to just the non-voters. We had a segmentation of the people we interviewed.Just talk to the non-voters and ask them, How are you feeling in this moment? And when we called them back and just talked to them on the phone—somewhat briefly—a considerable number of them, when we asked about voting, said, You know, I’ve been thinking—ever since we had that conversation, I’ve been thinking about this. And I don’t know that all of them were going to go vote, but it was on their mind in a new way.We at no point told them that they should go vote. But the act of having that conversation—just asking them questions, letting them talk, and having them feel like, Oh, someone’s listening to you talk about this—it created this sort of gravity. Suddenly, my opinions matter in a way that maybe they didn’t matter before.And that, to me, felt like—yes, it is a kind of reciprocity in the interview process—but it also is an example of how listening can do things. Listening is not just a passive act. What it does—that’s a bit of anarchy. You’re unleashing something.I can’t tell you: Are they going to vote Democrat or Republican? Are they going to vote all the time? I don’t know. What are we unleashing? I don’t know. But we’re regenerating something here. There’s something being produced, which I think is very exciting.So I kind of started from there. That project around listening captured my attention for this reason. It had some threads to other projects that I had been aware of or been part of—including an artist, Elana Mann, who had been doing some listening projects prior to that. She’s an LA-based artist.She had done this project—it’s a bit like Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present—kind of project, sort of like sitting and listening with someone, talking about listening. And we took a tour. Instead of just listening to each other, I walked with her around. We were in Chinatown in LA, over near the train station there, the market. And that really kind of resonated with her—that here we weren’t just listening to another person, but to an environment.And so that sort of started a conversation between us about listening and the different kinds of things that listening might do, which has been very intriguing and productive for me—to kind of think through, Well, what are some other ways that listening might be employed in our work?So I’ve been trying to explore that more. I wrote a paper for EPIC about that—kind of explores the different modalities of listening that are part of the interviewing process, which I think we approach in too simplistic a way. That it’s just attentive listening, active listening, very careful listening. But actually, there are different kinds of listening going on when you’re doing an interview.Yeah. Can you talk about that? I’m curious—having done this project, how do you think about the conventional way we think of listening, and what are these other ways that listening happens?Well, for an interview like this—or an ethnographic interview, very similar, pretty much the same—we’re trying to create a sense of comfort. And it’s very conversational, like a chat among friends. And so we’re trying to—if you’re feeling safe and comfortable—okay, well then you’ll share information.That’s true, but it’s also a contrived situation. There’s nothing natural about it. This is not a normal thing that people do.And even if you go to early anthropology—that’s not anthropology. Like Franz Boas, he was talking to people, and that’s what—but social scientists were not. Max Weber, Karl Marx—were not doing interviews with people. That was not a thing people did.And so you can kind of look at the legacy of—some call it the interview society—that we form. It’s a special format that we have to have an interaction. And then we work within that format. So already our listening is kind of—it’s embedded in that sort of contextual framework.And then you can start to look at and compare it to other—like, let’s say you’re talking to a friend or relative. You’re not taking notes. You’re not thinking about the questions or the next question.So when you’re doing this interview, you’re completing the interview, you’re listening for certain things. You’re taking note of certain things and listening for that—and trying to be responsive.So when you come back to something I said at the outset of the interview, it's a sign of respect. It's also a way to say, Okay, we're connecting here. I'm demonstrating that I'm listening to you, which changes the way that I engage.There's also things like—when you're working for a client—there are research questions, intellectual questions that you have in mind, that you ask for, seek responses to, and have conversations around. So you're listening in those ways and on these other intellectual and cognitive levels that—again—these are not normal, not natural things.What you mentioned—the interview society—what is that as an idea?Yeah, so I was having—because I talk with a lot of anthropologists and researchers about how they do interviews—and Patty Sunderland told me this great story about how, when she had started (she's one of the founders of Practica Group), when she had started doing this professional kind of research in the ’80s and ’90s, you'd always have this time of rapport building. Like, a lot of back and forth.And she said, in recent years, people don’t want me to share. Usually, you’d be talking about—let’s say—grocery stores, and you might share as the interviewer, Oh yeah, this is where I shop, and have some back and forth. And she’s saying more and more people don’t—not only do they not need that to get going—they don’t want that.I’m—this is my interview. I’m the star here. These ideas coming from, you know, talk shows in the ’80s, ’90s—now podcasts—and you listen to podcasts and they’re very weird. There are very few good interviewers in the podcast world because most of them are... there’s a lot of rambling. There’s a lot of comedy—looking for like comedic moments—and a lot of propaganda and selling.Yeah. I love—I mean, that observation about the interview society is amazing. I'm flashing back to moments—maybe it was an interview with Grant McCracken—about how he’s talked about celebrity and how we interact with phones and social media and stuff like that.And I feel like I’ve had that experience too in interviews. Because you're kind of trained—it’s part of the process of giving, right? To sort of participate in that way. And I can—I’ve had the experience where I feel like the person's like, Just shut up. I’m not here to listen to you. Like, That’s great, but you're just eating up my time, basically.There’s this short story I recall David Foster Wallace wrote—I think it’s from the collection Girl with Curious Hair—and it’s about this celebrity, unnamed celebrity, going on to an unnamed talk show. It was clearly Letterman, when Letterman was kind of edgy.And the whole story is about, What’s he going to say? And then, What does he actually mean? How do I say it in a way? Do I want to come off as smart? Or just more genuine and play it straight? And just all of the sort of back and forth and the ironies and all the hand-wringing of that format.I think now—it’s sort of laughable to read a story like that and the kind of mental gymnastics that people were going through. Because now we have all these other ways to play it. And the interviewer is requesting an authentic self to show up.Which I think is—well, I think it’s nonsense.Yeah. Well, listen, we're at the end of our time. This has been so much fun. I could continue for another hour. I really appreciate you.Yeah, it’s been fun. So thank you so much.Thank you.Thank you, Peter. Yeah, it’s been—it’s been fun. It’s really nice. And now that I’m reflecting on this, I’m like, Well, I need to ask Peter more questions.Another time, maybe.Please.[We ended it here, then proceeded to get into a great conversation - so turned it on again.]Yeah, we're talking about the anarchy of listening. Yes, you mentioned that when you listen, you’re inviting anarchy in, in a way.Yeah, and I think it’s because we often restrict ourselves. We put limits on how we talk—being careful, thinking about the social norms of how we should be. And this does go back, like I said, to what David Graeber was writing about in terms of anarchy. It’s not about rebellion. It’s not about fighting the man. It’s about the idea that we have the capacity to act as we think best, based on our own common sense. But often, we’re not allowed to be adults. There’s a certain way we’re supposed to speak, certain things that make us sound smart.Yes. I love how it really shines a light on—well, you talked about certainty and uncertainty—that listening requires a pretty broad openness. There’s that really tacky quote: you shouldn’t listen unless you’re willing to be changed. Have you heard that one? Yeah. It feels sort of tacky in my mind. It’s kind of Hallmark-y, but also fundamentally true. Too often, we’re not actually open. We’re listening, but not open to being transformed by what we hear. What you're saying is that listening, when done properly, is anarchic—or anarchistic?For both the listener and the one being listened to.Yeah. Especially if there’s a real interest or willingness to do something. I’ve had bosses, worked places where they said, “We’re going to listen. We’re open to ideas. The customer support line is open—tell us what you think.” B******t. They weren’t going to change anything. They weren’t even interested. Not even a little bit.That’s right.And this is why, going back to politics, you can’t go on a listening tour if you’re not really going to change. Like, no—really—I don’t know what to do, so we’re here to listen and let’s see what happens.That’s a radical notion. That’s the kind of anarchy I have in mind: a self-organizing system, where people choose to do what makes sense to them. Why is our common sense or community sense any less valid? There’s no elevated vantage point in bureaucracy or government where someone sees everything. That perspective doesn’t exist. There’s always that paranoia—maybe someone actually is pulling the strings?Yes. And this brings us full circle. In my own experience living in a small town, there's this expectation of transparency that becomes totally unrealistic. It drives this feverish need for more information—information that’s not actually connected to producing anything valuable. It becomes a distraction. Just some crazy theater where nobody’s ever really satisfied with what they’ve heard, and nothing’s really been decided. Everyone’s just performing these weird roles inside a structure.So—and I love this idea—it’s really resonating with me, because I think too often, more often than not, we show up with something already in mind. An outcome, an idea, a concept. We’re only listening to get someone’s approval or just to get through it. We're not actually creating anything together.Does the language of co-creation mean anything to you? I know it was sort of in vogue for a moment. It speaks to something aspirational, but it always struck me as... I don’t know, maybe I’m just against hyphens.Yeah, I also—it kind of rubs me the wrong way.Yeah.You know, architects have this whole thing about community. They might call it listening: “Oh, we’re going to listen to the community.” And it’s this very almost coercive format. Like, we’ve got the community in the room, we invite people, ten folks show up—and that’s the community. They stick Post-its on things they like. But to me, the problem with that is the mediation involved.There’s analysis we can do as researchers that changes the shape of things. Translation is required. Designing a master plan for a city isn’t something most people do. And if you’ve never encountered that kind of work, you won’t know what you’re looking at. You can understand pieces of it, and that’s why mediation is needed. That’s something a researcher can do. Some designers can do it too, but they’re part of that chain of mediation.So it’s never just, “Oh, we heard what they had to say, so that counts.”That’s right.You need to process it. That’s the work of analysis. And it doesn’t always happen in the moment of listening.The other part of the anarchy of listening that really struck me—and I want to hear you say more about this—is about norms. That we’re always abiding by norms. I think about awkwardness as what happens when those norms fall away. It’s like a kind of vertigo—you don’t know what to do. And so we panic, because there’s no script. Can you say more about norms and the anarchy of listening?Well, you know, it’s interesting, because—okay—there’s this one model where we’re trying to get at an “authentic voice.” Like, “This is what you say to normal people, but really—come on—let’s get inside, let’s hear your deep, dark secret or something.” And there are all kinds of ethical issues with that.But the other problem is that we’re all a kind of multiplicity of identities. So, I can ask you one thing—but if I’m not aware and conscious of the positionality in discussing things… like, right now, we’re talking as collegial researchers, fellow researchers, so we’re speaking a certain way. But what if I start asking you questions about being a parent—about listening to your kids or your child? That completely changes the frame of the conversation.And I can shift it again by asking about how you talk to a neighbor, or to the auto mechanic when you show up there. There are different codes we’re constantly switching between to make sense of each context and to be heard in those spaces. Because I don’t talk to you like I talk to my kids. And they don’t listen to me the way you listen to me. Which is scary. Yeah.Because—s**t—I’ve told my son the same thing again and again and again, and you’re like, he doesn’t listen. But he is listening to some other things. He’s picking up on something else. And, of course, there's a completely different political dynamic there too.It’s funny. I mean, this is a very meta observation, but we got into this conversation about the anarchy of listening after we had stopped recording the interview. I think it’s partly because I had sort of shifted out of being “the interviewer,” and we were just having a much more familiar conversation. We got into a topic with an energy that was totally different from what had happened before. And then we decided to record again—which I think is kind of fascinating.Yeah. No, it does come back to positionality. Charles Briggs wrote this great book in the ’80s about “Learning How to Ask.”Oh wow.It’s about considering all the micro-politics of the interview situation, and all the different cultural frames that are possible. I remember, long ago—after we talked about listening for that EPIC paper, because I was speaking to all kinds of people—I was like, okay, I need to come up with experiments and see who’s going to follow through. And one experiment I tossed your way was: what if instead of an interviewer and an interviewee, we had two interviewees talking to each other?Right.So like, remove ourselves—and that frame—and all the biases and categories we have in mind. What would happen if they were just talking to one another, and we could somehow choreograph that? I have no idea how that would work. It's a bizarre anarchy.Well, isn’t that a little bit of what a podcast is? That’s what just came to me, thinking about it. Just people rambling. But anyway.Yeah. Well, there are two of your grocery store customers.Right.Or maybe it’s an avid customer talking to somebody who’s on the fence. But just unleash the conversation. What happens? I don’t know. What are they talking about? What are they going to argue about?Yeah.Or do they care? I don’t know.I love it.Just to like, remove ourselves from it. Because—well—I don’t know that we can.Yeah.But to kind of step away from—Right.Because we do things.Just introduce them to each other, basically, on behalf of a client, and sort of see what happens. Have them report whatever comes out of the conversation.Or have it recorded.Yeah.There are just all these different ways we could play with that. I don’t know if it’s a good solution.Yeah. No—well—I’m now gathering what you were talking about. I didn’t get it at first. And I definitely know there are people who’ve brought groups together to argue over a topic. You know what I mean? Like, just recruit people on opposite sides of an issue. I mean, of course that’s used in debate or politics, but even in consumer stuff too. Just take sides, make a case, and play like that. But that's play.But yeah, no, it’s interesting.Yeah.I confess that my bias is—I just... it's selfish, I think. I just want to be talking to people. Designing a research project where I’m not talking to people—it’s like... I don’t know. It defeats the purpose for me.Yeah. Well, because we are mediating all these things. This is super valuable. So to me, it keeps coming back to that sense of positionality. This is who I am. This is where I’m coming from.I was doing an interview in—Atlanta, a few weeks ago—talking about mobility technology. We went to South Atlanta and talked to this lady. And we knew race played a role in Atlanta history and mobility, access, inequities—things like that. And here’s this one person—she’s a Black person—and two white interviewers show up. She’s not talking about race.Right.And somebody else said, “Well, so this doesn’t matter to her.” It’s like, no.Right.Because if you know who you are, and the context you’re stepping into—she couldn’t tell us the kinds of things she might tell her friends or family or others. I don’t know. There’s another lived reality she’s dealing with that she’s not going to share with us.Right. Yeah. Beautiful. Well, thank you again.It’s always the conversation after the conversation. Anthropologists always talk about this. They’re like, “Oh, just keep the recorder running.”That’s right. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Oliver Sweet is an ethnographer who leads the Ethnography Centre of Excellence at Ipsos MORI. He has led research across 35+ countries for clients including Unilever, Tesco, UNICEF, and the UK Department of Health. He is a board member of the AQR, a published author, and an advocate for immersive, empathetic, and participant-led qualitative research. He has a great newsletter CultureStack. I start all these conversations with the same question—a big one that I borrowed from a friend who helps people tell their stories. Because it’s such a big question, I tend to over-explain it—just like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in complete control. You can answer—or not answer—however you like.The question is: Where do you come from?You know, I think it’s the way you ask that question—the intonation—that makes it so good. Because I can interpret it in so many ways. Before I answer, I just want to point out the obvious: being asked that question in conversation—rather than reading it—prompts a completely different kind of response. So, good question.So, where am I from? I’m a Londoner living in London, which I take some pride in, because there aren’t that many Londoners in London anymore. Whenever I meet someone and they ask where I’m from, and I say London, they respond, “Oh my God, I haven’t met a Londoner in ages.” London is such a melting pot of diversity, and I think it was when people started reacting that way that I started to feel proud of being from here.I actually moved around a lot growing up. That constant moving is one of the things that shaped me. When I tell people we moved every two or three years, they often ask if my parents were in the military or something. But no—they were just restless. They got bored easily and liked new places. That restlessness probably rubbed off on me. I like new experiences, new environments. But still, yes—I'm a Londoner.I went through a phase when my parents moved to France during my teenage years. For a while, I claimed I was French. I enjoyed saying it—it had a certain comedy value. But then I met a few fluent French speakers, and that quickly exposed the truth. My French is pigeon French at best. So now I’ve gone back to identifying as a Londoner, which feels more genuine—and it seems to have some kudos again, which it didn’t always have.What does it mean to be a Londoner? People assume certain things about you, which is one of the fascinating parts of identity. It’s not just what you think—it’s what others project onto you. People assume you know the city, that you know its secrets and history, where to go and where not to go. Because London carries a certain cultural cachet, that assumption of being cultured gets projected onto you too—like, you must go to the theatre, attend exhibitions, that sort of thing.Ironically, if you’re a true Londoner, you probably don’t explore the city that much. It’s usually the visitors who engage more with the cultural side of London. Still, I enjoy being from here. I do know my way around. And I love the memories—different neighborhoods hold different chapters of my life. Visiting those places feels like opening up little time capsules.My experience is the opposite—I moved away. I’m nowhere near where I grew up, and I’ve had moments where I’ve felt the absence of that deep connection to place. It’s powerful—there’s something grounding about being able to revisit your past in a physical way.I think that’s true. Maybe that’s why, after all these years, I’ve returned to calling myself a Londoner. I grew up here, spent time away, and now that I’m back, there’s a renewed pride. I can access that history.I’ve heard you ask this question many times, but I’ve never heard you answer it.Nobody asks me. I appreciate the opportunity. I think my answer is: I come from the burbs. I come from the suburbs—a very ordinary American suburb outside of Rochester, New York. I often say every other house looked the same, they just smelled different. I have this strong self-image of being a very ordinary, suburban, middle-class American kid.And what kind of feeling does that bring up for you? Is it pride? Or is that sort of... probably a deep ambivalence, I think. A lot of my work has taken place in the suburbs of American cities. They're important places for many of our clients. So, I think having grown up in that environment gives me access to a mindset and worldview that a lot of research clients are actively trying to understand. That, in itself, is a powerful thing to know.That’s beautiful.I'm curious—when you were a boy, did you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up, other than French?Absolutely not. I spent years wandering around the UK, Europe, and other parts of the world trying to "find myself"—which sounds like a cliché. But really, I was just a bit lost, doing things I enjoyed without a clear path. The throughline was that I loved meeting people and having new experiences. No one tells you that there's a career in that.I only found my way into this work later—at 27. That’s when I became a proper researcher and ethnographer. And I realized all the things I’d been doing for fun—what I thought was just drifting—were actually meaningful. There was this thing called “insight.” All those stories from my twenties, from traveling and living abroad, turned out to have value.I thought I was just confused. But in truth, the world of market research tends to gather curious people who had no idea they were going to end up here. I’d love to change that, to raise awareness earlier on, but I haven’t figured out how yet.Before we go further into that, catch us up—where are you now, and what do you do?I work at Ipsos, a large global research agency, where I’m Head of Ethnography. I've held this role for about 16 or 17 years. Over time, I’ve had opportunities to take different jobs or pursue promotions, but I’ve turned most of them down because I genuinely love what I do.I run a team of over 15 people—ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, artists, documentary filmmakers. It’s a multidisciplinary group. We work around the world on client projects, digging into complex, often tangled questions. We do this by spending time with people, immersing ourselves in the cultures they live in.That’s what keeps me going year after year: the richness of cultural understanding we gain. Recently, we’ve worked in places like Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea to understand cocoa farming, and in various parts of the UK exploring how people do their laundry. The projects are varied, but the throughline is always this: how does culture shape behavior?Culture is this amorphous, fascinating force. It’s everywhere, it shapes all of us, and I never tire of exploring it. I truly love my job.Where is the joy in it for you? You've already expressed a lot of admiration for the work, but how would you describe the source of joy?The joy comes from two places. First, it’s about meeting people and learning how others live. It sounds a bit cliché, but it really is about stepping outside your bubble. You get to see how other people prioritize their lives—what matters to them, and how different those priorities are from your own.We live in echo chambers, both online and offline. We socialize with people who think like us, live like us. And that’s dangerous. The more you get out of that environment and into others’, the more you learn—not just about them, but about yourself. That’s the first source of joy.The second is intellectual curiosity. I love the process of sitting with a complex cultural question and pulling it apart over time. Something like: What does elitism mean today? Why is it praised in some circles and condemned in others? How does a new cultural narrative form that shifts behavior and identity? So yes—meeting people and indulging in intellectual curiosity. Those are the parts I love most.You mentioned it earlier, but when did you realize you could actually make a living doing this?I was very lucky. In my mid-twenties, after bouncing between seven jobs in four years, I realized I needed to find a real career. I used to tell myself I didn’t like those jobs—but if I’m honest, they probably didn’t like me either.At the time, I was working at Ipsos, doing survey research. It wasn’t a great fit—I’m not great with numbers—so I’m not even sure how I landed that job. But then someone from another department stepped in: Johanna Shapira.She had come from Ogilvy, where she ran an ethnographic group called Ogilvy Discovery, and had just started the ethnography practice at Ipsos UK. I was thinking about leaving, and she invited me to try this new work. She saw something in me, something I hadn’t yet seen in myself.She taught me how to be an ethnographer. I already had the academic background—social sciences, psychology, sociology, a bit of anthropology—but she showed me how to make that thinking relevant to the world today. She even helped me realize that those so-called "lost years" of travel had value in this work.That was about 17 years ago. I went from jumping between jobs to finding something I loved. And Johanna—she was one of those rare bosses who truly focused on you as a person, more than the business. In our appraisals, she’d make just two or three observations about my behavior, and I’d find myself in tears—because she was spot-on. She helped me grow, personally and professionally.So yes, I found this work through someone who believed in me, taught me, and gave me the room to become who I needed to be.In that time, how would you describe the changes you’ve seen in the understanding and application of ethnography?Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think ethnography has evolved in two or three distinct ways.First—and this is something I’ll never fully understand—in the world of market research, marketing, and innovation, ethnography is often seen as the “new and cool” thing to do. And yet, it’s probably the oldest discipline in this space—much older than surveys or focus groups. Despite that, it still carries this label of being fresh and exciting.As a result, a lot of agencies and researchers have tried to add value to their work by rebranding it as something ethnographic—“ethno light,” “ethno research,” or simply sticking a video camera in front of someone and calling it ethnography. I have a pet hate for the term “ethno.” To me, if you’re doing “ethno,” you’re not doing ethnography. It describes something incomplete. I think people shy away from the full depth and rigor that proper ethnography requires.About five to ten years ago, clients began to lose interest in ethnography because they didn’t see it as especially applicable or actionable. But as more clients adopted a global mindset, they began looking for answers beyond personality typologies. A lot of market research, especially segmentation, focuses on personality types. That’s useful—but only part of the picture.The other part is culture. Where you grow up—India, the U.S., Argentina, China—shapes you deeply. Your upbringing, the social norms, the structure of daily life—all of it plays a significant role in who you become. I’d go so far as to say culture shapes your personality to a large degree.Historically, marketing has favored the idea of comparable units—having a consumer segment in Brazil that maps cleanly onto a segment in the U.S. But that just doesn’t hold up. In the last seven or eight years—pre-pandemic even—there’s been a renewed desire to understand the cultural backdrop behind behavior. That’s led to a form of ethnography that’s less about producing glossy videos and more about understanding how culture influences us.Of course, there are ongoing pressures around speed and budget—everyone faces those. But ethnography seems to be having a resurgence. People need to understand culture now more than ever. And I think that’s only going to intensify as artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in what we do. AI, by its nature, tends to cluster around the mainstream. But ethnography is often about the fringes—those edge cases where culture is changing, where innovation happens, and where inclusion matters.The more clearly AI maps the center, the more we’ll need ethnography to explore the edges.What is a proper ethnography? For much of my career, that word wasn’t even said aloud. It wasn’t a thing, and now it’s become common—but often misused or misunderstood. So for you, what makes something truly ethnographic? What must be true for it to be valuable?I’ve often been accused of being a purist, which I refute—because there are academics who think what I do is a complete bastardization. So, there's a spectrum. The real question is: how much time and effort are you investing to truly understand why people do what they do?Ethnography can happen over a month, a week, a day—maybe even an hour or two, though that’s pushing it. The point is not the length of time but the depth of understanding. You need to connect several elements.You need a deep grasp of the culture someone lives in. That can be researched before you even meet them—understanding their influences, what they watch, where they spend time online. You need to know where they grew up, what their environment was like, their neighborhood, their social context. You learn a lot just by being with someone, observing the world they navigate.Ultimately, it’s about understanding how culture informs behavior, and how that shapes attitudes. Most non-ethnographic work starts with attitudes and then tries to deduce behaviors. I prefer to start the other way around. What people say is useful—but I want to dig into what that really means.Ethnography is about creating meaning. It’s about understanding the system of meaning someone lives within. And there are many valid ways to do that—even if you're not a purist.Not everyone listening may fully understand what ethnography is, even at a basic level. Can you share a story that really demonstrates what you mean by it—something that brings it to life?Yes, absolutely. That’s probably a good idea, seeing as I’ve been talking around it. The first ethnography I ever did is a great example.We were doing research in the north of England, in a fairly deprived rural town. One of the participants had taken part in a telephone interview. He said that he liked to go for a long walk each day, that he ate healthily, and that he often went to the park. That was the limited information I had going in.I also knew, based on how he was recruited, that he was clinically obese and had diabetes. So, I was really interested in understanding his situation, especially because, on the surface, it seemed contradictory.I called him and asked if I could spend the day with him for an ethnographic interview. At that point, I already had some understanding of Oldham, the town, from previous work, so I had a sense of the broader context.We planned to spend the whole day together—from around 9 a.m. through dinner. The idea was to see different points in his day: his routines, his interactions with family or friends, his meals, and his diabetes management. That’s what I’d call a solid market research ethnography—one where you’re fully dedicated to observing and understanding someone in their own environment. You put your phone away, forget about distractions, and just be with them.Within ten minutes of arriving, he told me he had to take his medication. He sat down in the kitchen, pulled down his trousers, and gave himself an injection in the leg. I wasn’t quite expecting that—not for my first ethnography. It caught me off guard, but it was fascinating. I asked why he was doing it at that moment, and he just said, “I don’t know. I do it morning and evening.” I asked if he needed to do it around meals or if he should be measuring his levels, and he replied, “I don’t bother with any of that. I just do it morning and evening.”So already, I was learning something meaningful about his relationship with his condition—far more than we’d ever get from a survey.Later, he said, “Let’s go for a walk. I need to walk the dog.” But instead of walking, he shuffled outside and got on his mobility scooter. We went for a four-mile “walk” through the park that way. So, the “daily walk” he had mentioned in the phone interview wasn’t really a walk at all.Then, at lunchtime, he grilled his sausages instead of frying them—that was his idea of healthy eating. These were the kinds of compromises he was making. He didn’t want to go out, but he had to because of the dog. He didn’t want to grill sausages, but he thought it was better than frying. These were real decisions he was making with the resources and knowledge he had.As we talked, I learned more about his background. He had been a truck driver for 25 years. When he developed diabetes, his eyesight began to fail, and he had to stop working. His entire social life had revolved around his job, and now it was gone. He became isolated in his community. The town itself had racial tensions and had experienced riots, and he felt confined—trapped. He had far bigger concerns than the health authority’s goals for improving his lifestyle. He was dealing with issues like neighbors occasionally egging his door.Spending the day with him revealed all of that. It was a profound window into someone’s world. And from there, we can ask: how do we support people like him—people in those circumstances?That’s beautiful. What kinds of conversations do you have with clients? When does Ipsos call you in? I always imagine it like the red phone from Batman—when does someone call Oliver? What’s that first conversation like?I love that image. I do actually remember having a red phone on my desk once. It was ridiculous—but kind of hilarious.I think the best time to bring in ethnographic research is when you know something’s missing, but you don’t quite know what it is. In a lot of traditional research, the process starts with clearly defined objectives: “Here’s what we want to find out—go and get the answers.” If you already know exactly what you're asking, ethnography might not be the right tool.But when the problem is murky, when you’re unsure of what the real question is—that’s the perfect time. That’s when I get most excited. Maybe the client has a target audience, but they don’t really understand what that audience does, let alone why they do it. There are too many unknowns, especially around behavior and meaning.We work a lot in consumer packaged goods. And every product that someone buys carries some kind of meaning. Even something as routine as buying laundry detergent has emotional and cultural weight behind it.It means they’re striving for a hassle-free life. Or it’s about taking pride in sending their kids out the door looking presentable. Or it’s the satisfaction of knowing something’s been done right. It can mean many, many things.But every single product—whether it’s laundry detergent, a chocolate bar, or a smartphone—carries meaning. And that’s what we’re always trying to decode. But I feel like I’m preaching to the choir here, especially since your newsletter is called The Business of Meaning. You understand—there’s purpose behind everything.Yes, but I was going to ask: what do we mean when we talk about "meaning"? I take a kind of perverse joy in going back to basic concepts I’m drawn to. So, what does meaning mean to you?That’s a great question. And it’s something I’ve been working through over time. I’ve developed a framework to explain how we think about meaning—what we call a cultural framework. It’s built on the idea that meaning is a system.When I conduct research, I’m always trying to explore three things. They’re deeply interrelated. When you find the connections between them, you begin to understand meaning more clearly.The first is identity: Who is this person? How do they express themselves? How do others see them? What are their stylistic choices, the signals they send? That’s the individual level.Then we look at community: How are they connecting with others? That could be at work, at school, with friends, or online. Identity and community are linked—it’s through community that identity is often reinforced or performed.The third piece is belief systems: What beliefs or values underpin that identity and community? This includes ideology, morality, personal values—all the stuff that gives shape to someone’s worldview.When you connect identity, community, and belief systems, that’s when you can really see what something means. And meaning is fluid—you can shift or reshape it.One of the early projects I worked on was about trying to engage young boys who were displaying antisocial behavior on the streets of London. The question was: how can we get them to go to the local youth centre?The youth centre was well-funded and had great facilities, but the boys simply didn’t want to go. What we discovered was that the boys wanted a space that felt unregulated—a place where they weren’t being watched. They wanted freedom to explore this emerging form of masculinity. That was their identity.In terms of community, they wanted to be in environments that didn’t feel sterile or restrictive. And their belief system was rooted in discovery—figuring out who they were, both individually and as a group.We looked at what the youth centre represented: different social codes, a different kind of order and structure. The meanings didn’t align. The boys weren’t rejecting the youth centre as such—they were rejecting the values it implicitly stood for.So, our suggestion to the youth centre was: don’t try to attract the boys directly through table tennis, computers, or football tables. Instead, attract the girls. Because if the girls go, the boys will follow. And then it becomes a safer, more vibrant environment for everyone. That became part of the strategy. So, understanding meaning through identity, community, and belief allowed us to unlock a more effective, culturally attuned solution.That’s wonderful. You mentioned earlier that ethnography had a sort of moment, or maybe even matured a bit in the years leading up to the pandemic. But the pandemic clearly drew a hard line across so many of these practices. How did you respond to that moment, and what impact do you think it’s had on how ethnography is done?I had to do the biggest U-turn of my entire career.For years, I insisted that real ethnography required being physically present with people. None of this “digital ethnography” stuff. I dismissed it as shallow, surface-level work.Then the pandemic hit. Flights were canceled. We couldn’t travel. We couldn’t go into people’s homes. I had a team of about 15 or 16 people, and none of us knew when—or if—things would return to normal. We were worried about our jobs. So we sat down and did some serious soul-searching.We acknowledged that digital ethnography was out there, but we had always resisted it. We thought it didn’t go deep enough. But we had no choice. So we asked ourselves: if we must do this digitally, how do we do it in a way that still honors the core principles of ethnography?And we realized something important. Digital gave us time. Instead of spending one or two days with someone in person, we could now spend two, three, even four weeks with them—because they were home, and available. We leaned into that.We also focused on reflection. It wasn’t just about getting participants to film themselves with their phones. We set up regular interviews—weekly or even more frequent—and encouraged people to reflect deeply on their own lives.It became less about capturing “natural” behavior in a single burst, and more about creating a space for participants to observe themselves, to articulate and process what they were experiencing. And that turned out to be rich in a completely different way.To really understand someone’s belief system, you have to have a deep conversation. You have to ask lots of “why” questions to get beneath the surface. So, we also decided to do a lot of cultural research beforehand and use that to pose hypotheses to people—to give them something to reflect on and respond to.We took a big gamble. We recruited around ten households in each of five different countries—so fifty households in total. Then we told our clients, “Look, we know you’ve canceled all your planned research work, but we’re going to launch a new syndicated study. The cost of entry will be very low, and in return, we’ll send you a report every single week about what’s unfolding during the pandemic.”The plan was to ask participants to film themselves using their mobile phones, to have regular conversations with us, and to let us explore the cultural and political context they were living in. And we followed through. We produced a weekly report for about nine months.It was exhausting. But we sent that same report to six different clients who had signed up, and honestly, it was a lifeline. At the time, we had zero other work. It was also a way for us to learn—fast—how to do digital ethnography well.Because this wasn’t just people showing us their homes and saying, “This is my kitchen.” It was about getting them to reflect deeply, to have meaningful conversations within their own households. For example, we’d ask them to talk to their families about food: Has it become more exciting? More boring? What’s changed?And what we saw was an emotional rollercoaster. In the early weeks, people fell in love with food again. They wanted something to do with their hands. They baked bread, played board games, got into crafts. When you strip away the distractions and give people time, you realize they’re innately creative. They want to make things. They want to do something.That explosion of creativity lasted maybe six or seven weeks. You saw it in the rainbows in windows, the clapping for carers, the singing from balconies. And then... it all became tiresome. People got stir-crazy. They missed each other. The novelty wore off.But that’s when something else kicked in: reflection. When you’re stuck at home, you have time to reassess your values—your priorities, your work, your family. People started to realize that the lives they were living pre-pandemic didn’t really align with who they wanted to be. They didn’t want to spend two hours commuting every day. They wanted to be at home with their kids.The move to remote work changed everything. Now that we’re trying to shift back to hybrid, no one wants to go into the office five days a week if it means losing that precious time.Our values were fundamentally reassessed. Take the murder of George Floyd, for example. That wasn’t the first instance of racial violence, but because the whole world was at home—re-evaluating their moral frameworks—and because the footage was so raw and unfiltered, people responded differently. It was a turning point. It wasn’t just that event; it was the context. People had the time, space, and emotional capacity to reckon with it.And that was fascinating to watch unfold. Exhausting, yes—but also deeply meaningful.I can’t imagine doing that while also going through your own pandemic experience.Exactly. That was the other layer—processing our own lives while documenting everyone else’s.So, how would you describe the state of ethnography now—especially when it comes to digital versus in-person? Where do you stand now, post-pandemic, as a former purist?I think I’ve found a way to frame it that works pretty well. What we’ve learned is that digital ethnography—when done properly—can be incredibly confessional.Yes, it’s amazing to meet someone in person. But when someone is alone, with their phone, and reflecting on their own life, that solitude can create a powerful space for honesty. Some of the work we’ve done on obesity in recent years—people recording their thoughts alone—has been incredibly raw and revealing.They’ve told us things they could never say to their partners, or even to us if we were sitting across from them. That requires trust, of course, which is why we don’t just do a couple of “mobile diary” entries. We build that relationship over two, three, even four weeks. And the emotional depth we get can be profound.On the other hand, face-to-face ethnography—when done well—delivers surprises. It allows you to follow people, go where they go, see what they see. That’s when you discover things no one expected. And it’s a harder sell, because clients always ask: “What kind of things are you going to find?” And the honest answer is, “I don’t know.” But that’s the point.So, I’ve come to think of it this way: digital ethnography gives you confessions, and in-person ethnography gives you surprises. That’s a useful way to think about the strengths of each.That’s a beautiful distinction. And it ties back to something you mentioned earlier—that your favorite kind of brief is when the client doesn’t quite know what they’re looking for. How do you describe that sweet spot—the mindset of a client who’s willing to go on that kind of discovery journey with you, into the unknown?So it can be quite tricky. But this is actually, I think, the role of thought leadership. Ipsos is an enormous agency, and we do a lot of research all the time. My team is always out talking to people, spending time with them. And we start to notice patterns—things that repeat across studies, even when we’re not looking for them.Three or four years ago, someone on my team said, “This whole notion of masculinity is getting weird—it’s warped, it’s difficult.” And they wanted to dig into it. We brought the idea to a couple of our beer clients at the time. They were mildly receptive—“Yeah, maybe, whatever.” So we said, fine. We’ll look into it ourselves.As a piece of thought leadership, we set out to explore toxic masculinity, modern masculinity, changing role models, and how all of this plays out online. The insights were eye-opening. And much of what we uncovered is now part of everyday conversation. But we were looking at it years ago.About nine months after finishing the work, we brought it to clients and said, “This matters.” And suddenly they got it. They came forward and said, “OK, now I see what you mean.”We had a similar experience with health care—specifically, the experience of women in health care. We observed that women were being treated very differently. At first, clients responded with the usual hesitation: “Maybe... sure, if you say so.” But when we did the work, we showed how women were often labeled “hysterical” for symptoms that were, in fact, common and valid. The language, the treatment—it all needed to be reexamined. Pharmaceutical companies started coming to us saying, “Yes. We need to address this.”Right now, we’re working on a study about elitism. Everyone assumes that’s a political topic—something to do with populism. But it’s much broader than that. Businesses don’t have political immunity anymore. Everything they do is under scrutiny.Being labeled “elitist” can completely shift how the public sees your company. And often, you don’t get advance warning. Suddenly you’re tagged with this label, and your corporate reputation is at stake. So that’s the focus: how does politics enter the business sphere? And how does it influence corporate reputation?I see this as a call to arms for the industry. We can’t just follow the client. Yes, of course—we follow their needs, their questions. But we also have a responsibility to look outward and say, “Here’s what we’re seeing across the world. Here’s what we believe matters. Here’s what you should be paying attention to.”We can lead—not just respond.Yeah, it’s amazing. I feel like the power is sort of hidden. You said you were looking at this three or four years ago, and now it’s everywhere. So this kind of work gives you early notice. Can you say more about that?It feels like the value of this work is that it gives you a perspective on what’s coming—long before other methodologies can. But maybe it’s hard to articulate that. It’s true, but not always true in the moment, if that makes sense. Do you know what I mean?Yes, I do know what you mean. It’s crucial to look at the fringes of society. That’s where the early signals come from.The masculinity example is a good one. It started when someone on my team heard her daughter come home from school and say, “I don’t want to go to school—the boys are being such dicks.” She kept hearing similar things: “The boys are so annoying,” “They’re shouting at the teacher,” “They’re saying things like, ‘Miss, make me a sandwich.’”She thought, “This is strange.” So we started listening more closely to these signals.When we get a research brief, it’s easy to focus on the mainstream—because that’s what clients usually want. They need to understand their core audience. That’s fair. But we should always include someone from the fringes, because people on the margins often give us a preview of what’s coming.There are many ways to do this.For example, this same researcher started looking at masculinity across different projects. We’d ask, “What does it feel like to be a man today?”People would say, “Oh, it’s great. Obviously, being a man is great.” But then they’d follow with, “But, you know, it’s women’s moment right now. Equality is moving forward.”Still—we didn’t quite believe them. There was something in their tone. Was it really great for them?There were early warning signs in the way people talked.She did something simple but brilliant: she created a dummy Instagram account. She named it something like “The Real Bob,” and she started following a network of male influencers. These were guys promoting a very specific version of masculinity—talking about how to care for yourself, how to make sure your woman respects you, and how not to let her “step out of line.”By following who they followed, she went deeper and deeper into this network—what we now call the “manosphere.” It was a dark, self-reinforcing world that was easy to miss unless you were looking. But it was there. And it was growing.Social media echo chambers make it easy to overlook what people are really consuming. But with the right strategy, you can uncover it. Set up a dummy account. Use keywords that align with your topic. See what emerges. Follow the threads.It can be researched. It can be done.And I’ll say this: in nearly all of our projects, we should be looking at the fringes a lot more. Yeah, we're kind of near the end of time, and I've got two questions at war in my mind. One is about AI, and the other is that I want to hear more about the confessional benefit of digital ethnography—what happens there. And then, I don’t know, maybe some tricks of the trade? Having spent as much time as you have in conversation with other people, how do you think about what it means to ask a question or to listen to somebody?Ah, good question. The thing to do—or I have found, anyway—is that you get some confessional stuff in face-to-face ethnography as well. I think at the end of a day spent with someone, you often find they say, “You know what, I’ve not necessarily had this experience before... I’ve just realized that you’ve focused on me the whole time.”It feels wonderfully indulgent for the participant. They’ll start to open up: “Let me tell you a bit more about me... I’ll tell you a bit more.”And I think that’s such a lovely thing to do.So fundamentally, whether you’re working face-to-face or digitally, you need to gain someone’s trust. And to gain that trust, you need to be absolutely authentic about who you are.Tell them stories about yourself. There’s this idea in research that we shouldn’t share anything about ourselves because it might bias the process—but that just keeps it surface-level. It prevents you from establishing genuine trust.You need to be fully transparent: who you are, what you know, what you don’t. People will feel comfortable with you—even if you're completely different from them—if you’re being real.Then, give them the attention they deserve. That part can be exhausting. I’ve come out of a day of ethnographic interviews feeling completely wiped out. And it’s not like I’ve done all that much—just asked a few well-timed questions.But mentally, you're hyper-vigilant. You’re observing everything they do, everything they say, how they say it. You’re listening for repetition—"They’ve mentioned this three times, so it must matter."You’re noticing not just what’s present, but what’s absent. You’re asking, “Why are they doing this... and why aren’t they doing that?”It’s intense, even though it feels relaxed in the moment.That’s how you establish trust in a face-to-face setting. It’s harder online.One of the tips and tricks we always share is this: when you’re asking participants to film aspects of their life—for instance, if you’ve done a Zoom interview and now ask them to show parts of their daily routine—you need to model it first.So if you ask, “Can you show me how you do breakfast?”—you show them your breakfast. Say, “Welcome to my kitchen. I really like this space. Here’s where I store everything. This is what I do in the morning.”You’re giving something of yourself.Because why would they keep giving you something meaningful if they’re not getting anything back? Yes, they might receive a monetary incentive, but that’s not enough for an authentic exchange. You need more.That’s what we’ve learned in our digital work—we need to work even harder to give participants something. We send them video tasks. We don’t just post a question on a bulletin board and call it digital ethnography. That won’t yield confessional responses.So, I think it’s about giving something.Beautiful. Oliver, I want to thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun, and I really appreciate it.I’ve loved this conversation. It’s been a very real conversation, so thank you very much.And thank you for inviting me to this chat. I’ve followed your newsletter and your work for some time—so it’s a real privilege.That’s very kind. 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Cyril Maury is a Partner at Stripe Partners, where he leads strategy and innovation work for global technology clients including Meta, Microsoft, and Spotify. Based in Barcelona, he specializes in integrating social science and data to guide product strategy and business model development. Late in our conversation, we discuss these two pieces: “When place matters again: strategic guidelines for a splintered world” from May 2025, and ”Interpreting Artificial Intelligence: the influence and implications of metaphors” from Sept 2023.I always start these conversations with a question I borrowed from a friend—someone who helps people tell their stories. It’s a big, beautiful question, and I love it so much that I tend to over-explain it before asking. But before I do, I want you to know you’re in complete control. You can answer however you like, and there’s no way to get it wrong. The question is: Where do you come from?I come from France, which is the obvious answer. But there’s more to it. My mother is Vietnamese, and my father is French, though with roots in Algeria, another former French colony. In many ways, I’m an unusual product of colonialism—a strange outcome of its complicated legacy.Maybe because of that background, I became curious about the world early on. I grew up in Grenoble, a provincial city in the French Alps, and I quickly became interested in history, geography, and people. I wanted to see how the world looked beyond my immediate surroundings.As soon as I could, I pursued exchange programs through university. In France, the typical path is to move from the provinces to Paris. I did that, and once in Paris, I realized there was even more beyond France itself. I spent time in the U.S., doing a year at UC Santa Barbara—an incredibly beautiful place—and then spent a few years in Latin America: São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Bogotá. Eventually, I moved on to the Middle East, to Iran, eager to explore still more cultures.During that journey, it struck me: what if I could make understanding people my job? What could be better than being paid to do what we all enjoy—being curious about others’ lives and stories? That realization led me into the world of research and consulting. I started my career in Spain at agencies focused on understanding behavior and helping companies develop better products based on that understanding.After Spain, I returned to France. About five years ago, I joined Stripe Partners, a decentralized agency headquartered in London. We have people working everywhere—from Hong Kong to Edinburgh to Berlin. I’m currently based in Barcelona, which is where I’m speaking from now.Growing up, I was very aware of the absence of my mother’s Vietnamese heritage in our home. She was born in Saigon, when it was still a French territory. During the war, she left for France. I was born a few years after she arrived, in the early 1980s, a time when France emphasized full integration into the Republic. That meant speaking French and adopting French customs. My mother followed that path. She never spoke Vietnamese to me or my brother—not a single word. I speak English, Spanish, and Portuguese, but I can’t say anything in Vietnamese.She had very few Vietnamese friends. We would hear her speak Vietnamese on the phone occasionally—mostly with family in the United States—but she would always close the door. It created this strange feeling: a culture present only in its absence. I grew up knowing that something was different, even if I couldn’t name it. As I got older, I came to understand it as a consequence of colonialism, but as a child, it simply felt... odd.As a kid, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to be. What I did have was an intense curiosity—about people, about cultures, about how things worked elsewhere. That curiosity led me, step by step, to where I am now. I studied political science to understand ideas and ways of thinking. Then I went to business school to learn the more practical aspects of the world. Along the way, I kept seeking opportunities to live and study abroad.Toward the end of business school, I met someone—just a friend of a friend—who had started working at an innovation consultancy in Spain. He said, “This seems like something you’d enjoy.” And he was right. On paper, it made sense. That was almost twenty years ago, and I’ve been doing it ever since.And tell me, catch us up. You're in Barcelona. Tell me a little bit about what you're doing and the work that you're, what are you working on?Yeah. So I'm based in Barcelona, a partner at Stripe Partners.What we do at Stripe Partners is, largely, we have a number of methodologies and tools that help us surface and understand people. Originally, what we're known for is ethnography. Some of the founders are PhDs in anthropology, and we really started by trying to leverage that set of tools as much as possible.As we grew as a company, we added other tools to give us different lenses on human behavior—primarily data science. We now have a healthy and cutting-edge data science practice.The last pillar of what we do is design. We also have designers who do design research and all kinds of work to, one, understand user insights in different ways, and two, ensure that the understanding we develop can be used to inform digital product strategies in the best possible way.We also have the tools to ensure that we use these insights to create something that will help stakeholders understand what it is—the human truth—we're trying to make visible. So that's what we do as a company.Within that, my personal role involves a lot of work on technology projects, because I would say about 75% of our clients are technology companies. That means a lot of projects for Google, Meta, Spotify. In the last couple of years, much of that has focused on AI.Some of the projects that I found particularly interesting have been about understanding how people engage differently with AI solutions in different markets. It’s fascinating, because there are so many layers of complexity to unpack.First, the solutions themselves are difficult to understand—even for the people who design and build them. They're the first digital tools that are probabilistic, not deterministic. So that’s one layer of uncertainty.The second layer is that their behavior depends on the users themselves. Different users can interact with the same AI solution, and it will behave differently for each of them—and even differently for the same user over time. There's this almost dialectical path between the AI and the user, which is hard to understand at scale because it’s so context-dependent.The third layer is how users make sense of these experiences. That interpretation is shaped by cultural beliefs and narratives. As we've seen in our projects, this is deeply local. Someone in Germany, someone in India, someone in Brazil—they’ll interpret the same interaction differently because they come with different expectations.So, long answer, but that’s the AI work: a lot of global-scale AI deployment projects.The other major area I’ve been focused on is healthcare, which I’m helping to develop at Stripe Partners. We’ve done—and I’ve done—a lot of projects aimed at understanding what we call disease areas or therapeutic areas.These projects are especially interesting because they require understanding multiple layers: the biology of the disease, how particular drugs work, how people experience and make sense of their conditions, how they interpret treatment, and how it all fits into their lived experience. And then, you add the complexity of the healthcare system itself, which differs dramatically between the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere.Some of the areas I’ve worked on recently include Alzheimer’s disease and dementia—which is absolutely fascinating. Also haemophilia, which is more niche but still quite complex. And we’ve been doing a lot in obesity and weight management—trying to understand how that space is shifting culturally.One of our clients there—this is public—is Novo Nordisk. We help them make sense of the cultural shift happening now around weight loss and weight management, which feels quite unprecedented—maybe even historic.Amazing. I'm just going to ask the question: what is Stripe Partners?Yeah, it’s a good question. That's perhaps the hardest question so far.I was going to preface it, but I figured I'd just go right at it.No, for sure. So Stripe Partners is what I would call a strategic consultancy, which really is focused—laser focused—on one thing, which is developing robust, robust, robust understanding of human behaviors, again, like through as much as a variety of lenses and methods that we can. And then like what we do is we take this hopefully novel insights, new way to understand humans, and we link that with the business strategy side of one of our clients.So let's say that it's—I'm going to take an example here—let's say that we work for Google, for example. We do a lot of work with them in different markets—so in India, in Brazil, in Japan, right?As any of those tech companies, they have a really good, usually, understanding of U.S. users. They understand quite well—well, because it's their first, their largest market, it's their oldest market, it's the market that individually has people they're the closest to—but they usually have like a very poor understanding of anything else. So they have a poor understanding of Europe, they have a poor understanding of India, of Brazil.And typically what would we help them try to understand? We might try to help them understand how users—people—want to interact with and what they're looking for, what are like the mental models that are behind any form of trying to plan for entertainment in general, right? So that's like from going to the cinema, to the restaurant, to travel—and this again is really culturally rooted.I'm just going to take one example, which is really quite simple to express and transmit. We've done this project in Japan, in India, in Brazil—same project, same research question—really trying to understand these behaviors linked with entertainment and, in this case, going out for dinner.In Japan, going out for dinner alone is something that is absolutely common and that people of all, you know, walks of life do very commonly. And the reason they do it—there's many reasons, right? But it might be because they want to create that liminal space between the office and a very cramped house, right? For example, it might be because the experience of food is for them something that is quite unique and that is best experienced, if you will, alone, right?So you need to try to understand all of this and see what are the motivations, the cultural models behind it. But that's only one part of what we need to try to do. Then what we need to try to do is—we need to try to understand what are the implications for Google from a business perspective. And here, what do you need to understand?Well, you need to understand that in Japan, the whole system of the digital journey—at the center of which you have eating out—is incredibly distinct from the one that you have in the U.S. It starts from this very odd-for-us system of booking restaurants with points that are really quite odd, where you need a lot of precise information in order to go and book. And then you have the whole payment system, which is completely distinct again.It's not like in the U.S., where you basically have your credit card and you pay. There, you have this points system—again, very intricate. You need to go to Japan and really spend a lot of time to try to understand that stack. And you need to, as well, then understand that side of things to then put the two things together and say, okay, so what happens here at Google is that first, you have these different behaviors, and second, you have these different tech ecosystems.The business opportunities are here, here, and here. And in order to leverage them, you can try to develop this particular UI, this particular user experience that will be better suited for this local usage of, for example, eating alone. But just understanding the user need is not enough. You need to then be able to understand the business side of things. How does that translate operationally?Very quickly, we usually have two main types of stakeholders. You have the UXR—so UX researcher—within the companies we work with. Their main role is to understand the needs of the users, this cultural thing. They're usually very passionate about that. And then they have a different stakeholder themselves, who we often interact with—who's like the PM, that we call the PM in the tech companies—and it's someone who's in charge of the business product decisions.You need to understand those two in order to then provide recommendations that make sense both from a user side and from a business side.That's basically a very long answer to say that the heart of what Stripe Partners is, is bridging the gap between these two needs—these two stakeholders that speak usually a different language, that have slightly different needs. What we do is we try to create an alignment between the two and provide value to both.It's amazing. What do you love about it? Where's the joy in your work for you?That's a good question. It is not in making PowerPoint slides. Some of my colleagues would say that it is, and I could say it, but then I would lie—which I think would not be very useful.What did you say? It's not in what?It's not in making PowerPoints. It's not PowerPoints. It's not Google Slides. No, I think for me—and that's probably something that you hear a lot in those conversations—it's just like being able to go to these places that I would never have otherwise. Some of them are in countries and places that look amazing on paper. I was in Tokyo last December for Google, but a couple of months ago, I was in Cincinnati, in Ohio, which is a place that I don't think many people go to for tourism. But it was unbelievably interesting to be there, spend a week there, see a place that I would never have gotten to see otherwise.What's really interesting to me—I'm going to take an analogy here, which I think is quite funny. I don't know if you ever played video games. I used to play video games when I was a kid. I played this video game called Warcraft and Starcraft. The way it works—and lots of video games are like that—you have a map, and this map is all dark at first. You don't know anything, and then you drop somewhere and you start to see something.Based on that information, you infer a model of that world. You say, okay, so there's trees here. It's probably a place with a lot of trees. Then as you walk, what's dark becomes light. You have these pockets of knowledge that you develop. You see, well, actually, that's really not a place with a lot of trees. There's trees, but there's also some lakes and also some other things.The way I see it is you can look at anything, at any layer of complexity. What we do is always—we move from not knowing anything to knowing more things. As you learn more things, you can reframe, re-evaluate your understanding of the whole thing.For example, I've been to the U.S. many, many times. I've been a lot of time to Chicago, to the coast, whatever. I've never been to Cincinnati. Now that I've been to Cincinnati—I spent a week there—that's a thing that used to be dark, unknown, that now I know. That reshapes my whole understanding of what the United States is.That's what I'm passionate about. That's what I want to do more and more in my work.I think that as researchers, what happens is we are incredibly lucky to be in situations where there is a common understanding between the people you're going to go to and talk to. We do a lot of ethnographic research. I would go to this suburban place in Cincinnati, and here there's a family of a guy I would never have even interacted with in my whole life.Then I spent three hours at that guy's place. Five minutes into the conversation, we're talking about the most intimate things in his life—his health. He's opening up because there is this shared understanding that this is a researcher that comes in. There is this exchange, this unspoken agreement that I'm never going to see this guy ever in my life. I'm going to tell things to him that I don't even tell to my wife. That's a true story.For example, for some of these weight management projects, we had a discussion about weight with someone who was obviously a little bit overweight. She was like, "I have never told my weight of when I was really overweight to anyone. You're the first people I tell it to. Even my husband—I never told it to."That's because you created that space where she feels safe. That's largely a function of the process, not of anything we do. I think that's what's unique about our jobs.What you've described—I couldn't agree more. It's thrilling to be in that space. The questions that come for me here are: What's the value of that? How do you articulate the value of that to your client? How do you create the space for that kind of exploration? That's the thing. What makes that so vital? How do we talk about what makes that vital? Then what's your experience? You clearly have success in creating the permission to make that space. I'm always wondering—how does that become possible? Creating that possibility—that's the whole thing.Yes. Those are hard questions.The first one is about the clients. Here, very practically, we have two types of clients—clients who are usually from large tech companies and clients who are not from large tech companies. The way to talk to them and to ensure that they see the value of this type of deep, usually slow, ethnographic research process is distinct.When it's the tech company, a lot of the time, our clients there are themselves people who come from a background of social science in academia. They already know the value of that. Then they make trade-offs between how complex or foundational is the question I want to answer versus how tactical it is.You don't need to walk them through what the process is, what the benefits are. They're seasoned researchers. They've done that a number of times.That is, I think, very unique to these very large tech companies. That's Meta, that's Spotify, that's Google. There's probably 20 companies in the world that have that level of maturity and which, for better or worse, have understood—I think very early on—that their business model is predicated on them being able to understand people.That's what they probably do too well already. They're willing to invest in that in many different ways. That's why a lot of those projects also have a data science component to it.Really, they know that the foundation of a successful product that they can then monetize is a very, very fine understanding of human behavior. That's for these types of clients.Then you have the other type of client, which is 25% of our revenues. That's going to be legacy companies. That's going to be a telco company. That's going to be an FMCG company.That's going to be, for example, in my case, a healthcare company. Here, you usually have more of a job, which is a job of bringing the stakeholder and the client with you on that journey of understanding—first, what are the different methodologies that exist; two, what is each of these methodologies best for in terms of what type of research question you will tend to try to get an answer for with this method; and three, how they can then translate that into business decisions.Those processes are usually longer. The sales cycle, to be very precise and very concrete, is longer. What you need to try to do here, in a sense, is really go at length to help them see and give concrete examples of what is a type of insight that can only be surfaced with these slow ethnographic methodologies and how that can unlock business value.It's in this showing of the actual outcome that you get, usually, the best response. I would say—to summarize—really two distinct situations: you need to really adapt to who the buyer is.You've been at this a while. How would you describe how it's changed—the openness to this approach or the fluency in these methods?That's also a good question. I think that for me, I'm always... Let's take the tech world first, which is the one that I've been immersed in a bit more over the last five years.Here, I think even five years ago, the level of sophistication and understanding of the stakeholders was already very high, but they were more open to do what we call foundational work. They were more open to fund a three- or four-month study where you would try to go into different markets and understand—for example, I'm going to take a concrete example—how music in general can be used by people to create meaningful connections.That is a question that is a very difficult question—a question where you don't really instinctively at first see what are the business implications of that. You need to really invest in order to develop that understanding, particularly if it's in distinct markets.Those foundational projects—I think they were more common five years ago with the tech companies—because the tech companies were, to a degree, still in a phase of real growth, and their product was changing quite fast. This particular example I took is from Spotify.If you go back in time and you think of Spotify five years ago, they were still tweaking their product. It was still what we call a growth-phase company. Because of that, they needed to understand the unknown unknowns.You move five years forward into the future—to today. Basically, what happens is that all of these tech companies—and now we're going to talk about AI on the side, because that's a different thing—but right up to, let's say, one year ago, when AI was still not as central as now, all of their products were basically very mature products.If you think of Spotify, it hasn't changed much in the last two or three years. Even a more telling example—I do a lot of projects for Instagram. Five years ago, Instagram was still something that was changing fast. It was still adding users.Now, Instagram doesn't add any more users. If anything, in Western markets, it is losing users. Instagram is a product that is incredibly mature.There's so many features on Instagram. If you try to think meaningfully about how Instagram has changed in the last two or three years, you can't think of anything. Basically, there's so many layers of complexity and features, and so many teams that are, to a degree, competing—but also trying to obviously collaborate—that it has become such a very large thing that any meaningful change has so many second- and third-order consequences that it's actually not implemented.The research that these large companies tend to commission is much more tactical—even if they have the understanding and the sophistication internally to commission foundational work.The foundational work that is still commissioned now, from what I see, is about 90% in the space of AI—because AI is the big unknown. Who says “big unknown” says it's okay to spend money to try to understand what we don't know—to try to understand the unknown unknowns.That's a great thing, I think, for foundational and strategic research companies like us, because as we've seen the share of foundational strategic projects going down for anything that is not AI, what is now going up is anything that is AI.That's where you really need to position yourself, I think, if you're an agency that wants to do strategic work with tech companies.I hear in the background—tell me if I'm right or wrong— this quote I always attribute it to Donald Rumsfeld, the kind of the known knowns and the unknown unknowns. Is that true? Is that correct?I mean, that's where I've heard it. It's the name of the documentary, right? I think it's the guy that did The Thin Blue Line, I think.That's right, it was Errol Morris.Yeah, Errol Morris, exactly. He did a fascinating one. Well, he did like one on McNamara, which was incredible. That's The Fog of War.Ah, yes, of course.Fascinating, fascinating. And then like later he did that one on Rumsfeld. I think the documentary itself, it might be called The Unknown Unknowns, which is this quote of one of the briefings that he gave, shows that it's okay to even be curious about the very evil people. And, you know, we don't need to agree with them to steal some of their thoughts.Yeah. So I want to—you've written wonderful pieces, and the Frame newsletter that you guys put out is pretty amazing, just sharing the theories and the concepts. But you've written a few, and you talked a little bit about AI already. But I'm curious—the one you talked about metaphors and AI and the role of metaphors and how we think about AI—and I would just love to hear you talk about, I mean, you know, metaphors maybe to begin, and then how do they help us or hurt us as we try to figure out what's going on and what AI is and could be?Yeah, no, that's a very good—that's, I think, an important thing to try to understand. I wrote this one like a few months ago. But I think what was the starting point here is, it was like the beginning of the Gen AI explosion, right?So you had the first LLMs that were getting more and more used—I think GPT-2 or 3. And a lot of the discussion was around trying to understand what was the best way to make sense of what it was that they were doing with knowledge, right? I think everyone instinctively understood that it had to do with knowledge—it had to do with processing knowledge in some way.And the debates, right, like the tension really was in trying to see how much of it was a—how much new knowledge was it creating as it processed all of the knowledge that already existed, right? And one way to understand that is the technical way. The sad reality is that there's maybe one person out of 10,000 that actually can have a decent understanding of, this is—technically speaking—what is happening here, right?And I think, obviously, us as—you know, working in that space—we try as much as possible to get to some level of that technical understanding. But here again, like the unknown unknowns are just like extremely vast.And so what helped me to make sense of that is to try to latch on and to understand some of the metaphors that some, you know, smarter people than—people smarter than me—were using to make sense of them. And I remember one, which I think probably had a lot of impact on anyone who's read that piece in The New Yorker—I think it's Ted Chiang who used that metaphor—of it's like a photocopier.Like in a sense, these LLMs—what they do is that they are a way to process information where you never see what wasn't there in the first place, right? So what's a photocopier—like what does it do? Well, it's in a sense something that takes a certain amount of information. And then like that information is processed, and what you get out is something that is always a little less than what was before, right?So there is always like some level of information loss in that process. And to a degree, I think that that's one way of understanding these LLMs and Gen AI.And what metaphors do is that—I think none of them, by definition, will be able to show you the whole truth. Because, you know, obviously that would be like a one-to-one analogy. And here, like without getting into the details—because I can't even remember myself—but there's like some very good writing of Douglas Hofstadter. I can't even remember, like how—I don't, I never know how to pronounce his name.But he—yeah, he wrote like Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is a very good book. And then he did a lot on trying to understand analogies. And when does it make sense to use an analogy and when it doesn't, right?By definition, an analogy is always something that isn't a complete one-on-one mapping with what you're trying to understand—because otherwise it's not an analogy, it's just a copy.So what it does, obviously, is that it sheds light on one of the properties—one of the dimensions—of the thing that you're trying to understand. And the way it does it is that it links it to something that you know from the past, right?And so metaphors are basically a way—I think a very useful way—to leverage what people already know in order for them to understand something that is new to them.Now, it is only useful insofar as you're grounding them on some understanding—some cultural understanding—that is shared within a certain population, right? Because you use the metaphor so that we are better able to talk about the new thing—in this case, the LLMs and the Gen AI solutions. If you don't have the same cultural knowledge that I have, then the metaphor becomes a little bit more—it’s less useful, because we basically cannot ground it in that same cultural context.And so that is, at the same time, the usefulness and the limits of these metaphors. They help to simplify by leveraging common cultural knowledge, but they also limit people—and I don't want to say jail people—but they limit people within the scope of people who have the same cultural context as they have. And so that's why they need to be used with caution, if you will.And so, yeah, the idea was to really try to understand what were the different metaphors that people used to make sense of these LLMs—these AI solutions. One, in the cultural discourse—so that's straightly what the Ted Chiang metaphor was. Two, and perhaps more importantly for us who work with these companies—the people who are designing these solutions also have their own metaphors that they draw on, but that are not explicit.So that leads them to make some design choices, some strategic choices that often they're not aware of. So I think that what we wanted to show in the piece is that a process of helping these people and these organizations surface what these metaphors are and interrogate what these assumptions or orthodoxies, if you will, are when you're designing these products could be really useful for a number of ways.But one way it could be useful is, if you think about it now—it's probably like a year since I wrote that piece—and there are many more AI solutions. They all have developed in some way, but they're all very much the same. If you think of it, someone might prefer Claude and someone might prefer ChatGPT and someone might prefer Gemini. And if you are in the same circle as I am—which I'm sure you are—then you have these discussions about, "No, but Claude is better because of this and that," and "Gemini is better because of this and that."I mean, this is like really 2% of a difference, but 98% is exactly the same. The way that they interact with you is through exactly the same type of interface, which is a chat-based interface. The way that they infer words is exactly the same. The way that you're able to fine-tune and control how they actually process the information that you give them is exactly the same.And so why is that the case? It's obviously not by chance. It is the case because all of the people who are designing these solutions come from pretty much like the same square mile in Palo Alto somewhere, and they all have the same assumptions and methodologies.And so I think that this is what we've been trying to engage these companies with: all right, even for your own business purposes, if you want to create a solution that will be distinct from the others—and hence you will have more market share, hence you will not be commoditized—the only and first thing that you need to try to do is, instead of spending just like billions and billions and billions in making the model a little bit better in performance with these benchmarks that no one cares about anyways, like the F1 score or whatever, it's like 5% better at this and that, spend just like a thousandth of that money to challenge your own orthodoxies and to try to see what could be.To retake—just like one last time—the Rumsfeld metaphor: the unknown unknowns. Try to see, is it really the case that all of the assumptions that you're making when designing these solutions are the right ones?And what we've seen already is, when we do this project—when we help these companies deploy these solutions throughout the world—we see that where the true innovation comes is the global south, right? It's like the edge cases of these AI solutions are in rural India. They're not actually in Silicon Valley.And why is that the case? It's because in rural India, people who are using AI do so because they have no other choice. And because they have like so many real problems to solve, they need to use it in whatever way works, right?And this is what we're seeing: unexpected ways to understand and to interact with and to use these solutions. And so what we're trying to now tell our clients in Silicon Valley is: let's leverage that knowledge. So then you can start to challenge your own orthodoxies and design solutions that will be like a little bit different from anyone else's.Yeah. How has the time you've spent exploring AI—how has it changed your idea of what AI is? What are you carrying around in you that the rest of us don't? What do you see that we maybe don't see—that we've been out there watching how people use it?I think that just one thing is—I think it's one of those objects that, for whatever reason—and I think those reasons actually are very understandable—is very sensitive to people. I think it touches something about people's identities. And the perspective that people usually have on AI is quite loaded.It's a strong perspective. Some people will tell you, "These things are just like... it's the stochastic parrot and it's never going to do as much as you think it is. And it's all like smoke and mirror anyways."And some people are like true believers, and they tell you, "Wow, I mean, you actually were underestimating how much they will change, and you will have like AGI very soon." And it's like you're either a believer or a detractor.And what I would say, by having engaged with them and trying to see how we can try to make them more useful to people, is that—quite obviously—the reality is in the middle. And I think that the way to see them is that they can be quite good at quite some specific things and not so good at a lot of other things.And so what I would say is—it's important to... but things are changing very fast, right? Like, the models are indeed improving quite fast. Without getting technical, there's like nothing almost that you...Basically, the last model that you can use now—like, if you use the paid version of ChatGPT, which is, I think it's like O4—and what O4 has, it's a completely different thing to the previous one, which is like 4.0, whatever. Like, they have like huge problems with naming anyway.But what the previous model was really bad at doing, the new model can be actually quite decent at doing. But you need to really try to understand specifically what is that thing that you're trying to accomplish.And I do think that it is important for people in our industry to try to engage with them and see what works and what doesn't work, and keep an open mind about what they are, what they can do, while still having in mind the basics, which is: they can only know about what is already knowable, right?So what they do is they do inference based on data that is already existing somewhere digitally, right? And that's a good lens to try to see—that there are some things that, within this paradigm, they will never be good at doing, right? But there's a lot of things that, staying within that paradigm, you know, they can be quite good at doing.So very, very concretely, I think they're much better at doing business and market analysis than they are at doing human understanding or human research analysis.And why is that the case? It's because there's already like so much data that exists about, you know, the financials about a particular company, how that particular company is represented in a market, what are like all of the different products that are competing against that market. So this is data that already exists.Then the value from that data—when you ask, like, no financial analyst is—well, they need to make sense of it with Excel and with processing and with understanding that data. The LLMs can do that very well, right?Now, if you're trying to surface human truth about how a particular person is thinking, right—like, why is it that they're doing something—still the best way to do that is to ask the person, right? You can try to infer it from whatever comments they've put online and you're going to get somewhere, but the main choke point here is to actually get more data that is more directly answering your question, not doing better analysis on data that already exists, right?So that's a bit like the easy heuristic way to see: what are LLM and AI solutions good for? Well, they're good for doing analysis on data that already exists, right? They're not so good at inferring stuff from data that doesn't exist.With a little bit of time we have left—because you have, I think this just came out, or no, last month—about place. This was your idea, yes? I would love to hear you sort of articulate the "splintered world" hypothesis—is sort of the return of place the proposition you're making?Yes, yes, yes. Thanks for asking that one. So that one is more recent—something we put out, I think, about like a few weeks ago, right? And here I think that the logic is the following: it is very clear, if you look at geopolitics, economics, politics, that we are entering into a new era, which is an era where you have more boundaries, more barriers, more frontiers in different domains.So obviously, it can be the economic domain, it can be the political domain, but it can also be like the technological domain, right? And the cultural domain. And this is something that lots of people would say is inherent or started with the Trump administration, but that's actually not the case. It actually started before.I think it started—like, I would personally say—after COVID. And if you think of the Biden administration, they did a lot to re-industrialize the U.S. as well. Like, there was the CHIPS Act, U.S. CHIPS Act, and so on.And so I think that tells us that this is a longer, more significant trend. It's not something that is linked with just the Trump administration and will go away. I think I'm pretty convinced it's something that is a new era and not a new moment, if you will.And the reason for that is also because, obviously, when you start to have that change at the political level, that creates second-order consequences. And so now we're having second-order consequences, which is: the European Union, for example, is waking up and they're trying to be a bit more like self-sustainable and their own tech ecosystem and so on and so forth.So place—which I think is something that we tended to forget in the '90s. And we saw everything from afar, and you had all these companies that were really seeing the world as their playing field. And they had little interest in trying to understand the specifics of a place—culturally, in terms of regulations, geographically as well.I think that era is—we might have thought for a minute that that was the new normal—but that's not the case. And now we're moving, to a degree, back to a world, a paradigm, where place does matter. But with one difference: the pace of change is a lot faster than it used to be, in terms of the technological advances. As we've seen—you think of the innovation cycles of all these AI companies….What was true two years ago, one year ago, six months ago, isn't true now. And so you have this confluence of these two factors, which is: one, things are changing increasingly fast. So technology really is an accelerator of change.But for the first time, change is not converging toward a similar place as it used to in the '90s. Again, when you had more globalization, the end goal—culturally, technologically, and economically, if you will—was more coherent, and it was more around fewer regional differences.Now it's the exact opposite. You have, I think, these poles—regional poles—culturally, economically, and technologically, that are increasingly distinct. And technology will just increase the pace at which these realities start to differ.And here, one thing that is quite dangerous to think about is: as people see reality through the prism of technology more and more, I think it will be the case that people from these different regional areas—so in the article, we say, you know, someone in Beijing, someone in Russia and Moscow, and someone in the U.S.—their actual belief around what reality is will be increasingly distinct. Because it will be mediated by, to take like a concrete example, these AIs—these LLMs—which, as we know, are machines, to go back to the analogy of the photocopier, to process reality and shape it around a particular narrative, right?That's what they do. And it would be insane to think that the process through which they shape and they form that narrative—so how they transform data into stories—will not be culturally rooted and will not be influenced by geopolitical and economic imperatives. And I think that's the world we move in. And it's going to be quite all right.Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Well, it seems an ominous place to end our conversation.This piece in particular—I found really powerful. I'm so glad that you, that I had a chance to meet you. And I really appreciate you sharing your time and your expertise. So thank you so much.No, thank you so much, Peter. It's been like a real pleasure. 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Arielle Jackson is the Marketing Expert in Residence at First Round Capital, where she advises early-stage startups on brand and positioning. She previously led product marketing at Google, launched hardware at Square, and headed marketing and communications at Cover, a mobile startup acquired by Twitter.I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it's such a big question. I use it, but because it's so big, I kind of overexplain it—the way that I'm doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. It's impossible to make a mistake. The question is: Where do you come from?All right, well, I come from LA. I was born and raised here. I'm back here now. So, it's kind of this full-circle thing. I grew up in a pretty normal, loving household in a very normal neighborhood in LA. I grew up in Palms.My mom and dad are both Jewish people from New York who kind of did better than their parents did—they went to graduate school and, I think, surpassed the expectations of their parents, who had surpassed the expectations of theirs.So, I grew up with a pediatrician dad and a therapist mom, which made for really interesting dinner conversations and a strong focus on education. We were doing fine by American standards. I’d call it middle-class, upper-middle-class. But I went to a very fancy, progressive private school. That was really important to my parents—they made a lot of life choices to send me and my sister there. It was really instrumental in my upbringing.One of the reasons I moved back to LA about six years ago was to send my kids to that school.Oh, how sweet.Yeah, so my kids now go to that school. I have so much to say about that. One thread is my parents—Jewish New Yorkers who came to LA in the late '70s for my dad's residency at Children's Hospital LA and never left.We have a loud, loving family that's all up in each other's business. Very classic New York, I think. And that felt really normal to me. I loved learning. I loved school. I kind of did a lot of everything.Yeah.There's so much to say about this whole upbringing thing.I know, it's hard. There's a lot there, of course.Yeah, and then I think the other part that I would just pull on is I also come from kind of a weird insider-outsider relationship to the tech world. I've worked in marketing and tech my whole career. I thought I was going to be a psychologist. I did a master's in psychology but decided research wasn’t at the pace I wanted to move. Seven years of researching something that four people in the world cared about didn’t seem appealing.So, I stopped after my master’s, didn’t do a PhD, and went to Google of all places—kind of did a hard pivot from psychology to Google in 2003. Cool. Well, I want to stay back in LA. As a young girl, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yes, I wanted to be an artist. I was always drawing, painting, and making books. My mom saved a lot of this stuff. I have books and books that I wrote and illustrated when I was little. I also loved to read and write. At some point, I became kind of argumentative. People would say I should be a lawyer, but I didn’t want to be a lawyer.Yeah. And I’m curious about the school—you moved back for the school that you went to as a child. What was it like to encounter it as a parent?Yeah, it's really interesting to come back to something where you’ve changed, but it's mostly still the same. It changed a little, of course—it’s bigger, has a nicer campus.It's great. I love it there. I’m trying to find words to describe it really succinctly. It’s a place that’s really full of joy.The way I experienced going to school—I still remember every teacher I had. Some of them are still there and remember me. Now they’re teaching my children.Wow.So, it’s pretty special.I'm curious, because I grew up in the burbs in Western New York, and Los Angeles is always at least partially mythic. Do you know what I mean? So, what does it mean to you to be from LA? What is that like?LA is such a big place. I spent 18 years here, then 18 years in San Francisco, and now I’m back in LA for a while. It’s so big that saying you’re from LA doesn’t really mean that much. If you grew up in the Valley or near the beach or somewhere else, you’d have a very different experience.LA has a million tropes—it’s the butt of a lot of jokes, and all those things are somewhat true. But LA is just so big. There’s so much sprawl, so much culture, so much of everything. Probably the way New York City is, although more compact.You can choose your own adventure and make it what you want. I live in Santa Monica now and don’t really leave Santa Monica very much. You have a very different experience if you’re in this little bubble of the world. The traffic’s so bad that I could either go to the East Side to visit a friend or make it to San Francisco in the same amount of time.Yeah. So, catch us up—tell me, where are you now? What are you doing for work? What are your days like?Yeah, so now I work as the—it's a really silly title—but the marketing expert in residence at First Round Capital, which is a seed-stage venture fund that invests in founders often when all they have is an idea.We like to think of it as the "imagine if" stage of company building. My job is to help founders—usually pre-product and pre-launch—figure out how to talk about what they're doing in a way that resonates with customers.Larger brands spend a lot of time on that. We try to do a quick-and-dirty version that fits where these founders are, so they’re set up to find product-market fit faster—or pivot, if it’s not the right thing.Yeah. I’m curious—you pointed at the title. You seem to have a conflicted relationship with it. I quite like it. Can you tell me more about it? Maybe the story of why you feel the way you do about it?Yeah. So, First Round—I’ve been working there for over 10 years. When I first started, it was an experiment. I had been the marketing person at a company that had been funded by First Round. That company was acquired by Twitter. I decided not to go to Twitter with the rest of the team and started emailing people I’d worked with at Square, Google, and other places, saying, “Hey, I didn’t go to Twitter. I’m ready to help you. If you need marketing help, let me know.”That was my foray into freelance world. It just so happened that First Round didn’t have a platform team—kind of the people who help post-investment with companies. They were just starting to think about that. Long story short, I did this experiment where, for three months, they were one of my clients. I spent one day a week in their office, helping their founders and seeing if I could do some of the work I used to do as an in-house marketer—but in a more consultative way.I think that's where the title comes in and why I find it kind of weird. It sounds very transient to me. "In residence" usually implies you’re doing something for a year while figuring out your next full-time move—like starting a company, joining a company, or becoming an investor. Ten years in, I’m still “in residence,” and that just seems funny. And also, the word "expert" is weird. Are there really experts anymore? It feels strange to call yourself that.How would you describe the relationship between—well, there’s a lot packed in here—technology and marketing, the culture of tech businesses and their relationship with marketing, and then how venture capital views it. The name of your role seems to reflect a bit of that tension, or confusion, maybe. Or maybe I’m projecting.Never thought about it like that.Maybe I’m making that up. Okay. I think there are three questions in there: technology and marketing, venture capital and marketing, and then maybe the intersection of the two. Is that fair?It comes from this place of—well, I invited you here because you had highlighted Jesse Caesar’s work in qualitative research. You’re someone I see as an advocate for principles I align with. And you’re operating in environments that, while not hostile to those principles, don’t exactly feel native to them. So I wonder what it's like for you—being a marketer inside a venture fund, in tech culture. And maybe I’m just exposing all my prejudices.No, I think a lot of those prejudices are right.Technology—this comes from so many tech people believing that if you build a good product, people will come. We don’t need to do marketing. If we just build something great, people will want it. That’s the marketing—the product is the marketing.I started my career at Google, and that was kind of the ethos. But what they really meant was advertising. As in, "We don’t advertise." But marketing isn’t just advertising. Marketing is figuring out what to build, how to talk about it, making sure the right people hear about it, and ensuring it solves a problem and means something to them.I think the allergy that the tech industry has to marketing is more about not wanting to advertise. You’ll hear founders in interviews say things like, "We did no marketing and grew by X." But when you look into it, they did so much marketing. It's just this kind of posturing—especially from people with engineering or product backgrounds—where they say marketing doesn’t matter. But it actually matters quite a bit.With the founders I work with, they often equate marketing with advertising, and they don’t want to do that yet. So we focus on all the other things that will help them reach the people who have a need that their product can meet.Yeah. How—oh, go ahead.No, you go.No, you had more to say.Oh, I was just going to say: in some ways, I feel like an advocate for really fundamental, basic stuff. The kind of thing anyone who works in qualitative research, brand strategy, or communications takes for granted. It's like the air we breathe—but not for everyone.Yeah.So things like: when you say everything, it’s not clear what you’re saying. What are you saying first? What are you saying second? That’s part of marketing. Or understanding the competing alternative you’re up against—who can be your "bad guy" when you're storytelling. Those things feel basic to us, but if you grew up learning to write code or build product, they’re not so obvious.How would you say that’s changed—the role of marketing or fluency with these concepts—during your time?Honestly, I don’t think it’s changed as much as the rest of technology has. The fundamentals of marketing—understanding your user, understanding the magic of what you’re bringing into the world, and connecting the two—have always been what it’s about. That’s the part of marketing that excites me.What has changed, especially in the last two years, are all the AI tools. Everyone thinks they’ll change how the work is done and who can do it. And there are real changes happening, but they’re recent. I think the fundamentals still apply, no matter what.That’s what gets me excited—understanding what makes people tick, understanding the real magic of a product, who it’s for, why they should care—and making that so clear that what makes it unique truly stands out.Yeah. What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?I think it's twofold. One is connecting the magic. Early in my career, someone taught me about positioning—about understanding the essence of something and then finding the language to describe it so that it resonates with the right people. That often starts with understanding the people first, building something that meets their needs, and then describing the magic to them.Some of it is that process, which is a mix of sleuthing, uncovering, talking to people, and figuring out what makes something different. And then it’s almost like an act of sacrifice: what can we let go of—the things we don’t need to say, the table stakes, the things users don’t care about, or the things everyone says—so we can focus on the one thing that is the magic. I get really excited when we figure that out. It feels like a light bulb moment.I also get excited about the people aspect of this job. Some part of me finds it a little therapeutic. I do a lot of one-on-one meetings and conversations like this—talking with founders, getting into their motivations, their origin stories. You start to pull out their passion. I’ve had people cry. It feels really human.So, the combination of the aha moments, the human connection, and the variety. I usually work with about eight companies at a time—everything from vertical AI to skincare, to consumer hardware, to healthcare. It’s all over the place. It’s fun to know a little bit about a lot of things.Yeah. I’m curious—I’ve got two questions, which is always dangerous. First: when do they call you? I imagine a red phone at First Round. When do they pick it up?Yeah. So, who is “they”?Right—good question.There are two answers. Let me tell you the most common, and then the occasional. Most of the time, it's right after we invest in a company. We’re often the first money in—usually between one and ten million dollars. That’s the first big check these founders are getting to start and grow their business.As part of that, there’s been a lot of diligence and getting-to-know-you between the partner leading the investment and the founder. So, when they onboard to First Round, we usually already know, “Okay, these folks are going to need help with positioning. They’re going to need a new name. They want to launch soon.”We’ll have an onboarding call and figure out what to help them with first. So it's usually very early—day two kind of thing. Sometimes, I’ll even talk to them before the check closes, just to get started.Sometimes, the help we provide—not just marketing, but support from our other experts—is one of the reasons people choose First Round. It’s not the reason, but one of them.One of my side projects has been figuring out how to tell First Round’s story. I recently redid the entire First Round website. Venture capital is such a commodity, so figuring out what really makes us different was fun and interesting. We hadn’t done it in ten years. It was a big refresh and a collaborative effort.But the idea is: one of the things that makes First Round different is we do the work with you. It’s not just, “Here’s someone who can help,” or, “You’ll be fine,” or, “Here’s some advice.” It’s not armchair quarterbacking.We get in there. We’re in the Google Doc with you. We’re on the customer calls with you. We’re really in it with the founders—almost like an extension of their team until they build their own. Eventually, hopefully, they hire a marketer. I’ll help interview them, and then I’ll work myself out of a job.Yeah. I’m just curious—when you sit down for that first meeting, maybe even before the check is closed—what are you thinking about? How do you approach that conversation? What are you looking for? What kinds of questions do you ask? I’m just so interested in how you engage in that first moment, how you create a conversation.Yeah. So, I start by trying to get a little educated about the company so I’m not going in totally cold. I’ll read their investor deck, their website—if they have one. Just a very cursory look. Often, there isn’t much yet.If it’s an industry I’ve worked in before—like all humans—I relate the unknown to what I already know, and try to fill in the gaps from there. If it’s something I know nothing about—like this week, I’m working with a company in the freight trucking space—there’s a lot of lingo, and I have no background in it. But I’ve worked on other marketplaces, so I’ll bring in what I know and get up to speed quickly. That first conversation is very diagnostic.It's like, where are you? What do you need help with? Is this even the right time for me to help you? What do you know? What do you not know? Then I walk them through a menu of things I could help with.The repeatable pattern I see with almost all founders is they need help with positioning, messaging, brand identity, a website, and eventually a launch. Those things don't always start right after that first meeting, but that's the usual sequence.Yeah. And how do you talk about positioning with them? I'm always fascinated by how people communicate, especially around first principles. I'm curious—do you have ways of explaining it that help people with no experience in this world? How do you help them understand why this stuff matters?Yeah. Often, the first meeting is them talking at me for 30 minutes, telling me about their business—what they do today, and where they're going. And then I say, "Cool, so if you had to give me the 30-second version of that, what would you say?" They usually stumble. And that’s when I explain, “That’s what we’re going to work on.”Oh, wow.They know their business; they just don’t have a succinct way of describing it. So our work becomes that process of excavation and sacrifice to get them to a place where I can say: “Company X is a Y that does Z for [customer segment].” Make it the truth, but make it the truth that sounds good.Yeah. I love that you give them the experience of trying—and failing—so they feel the gap. I believe in that a lot. I also have some worksheets I give them. If I sense they need help distilling their message after that first conversation, I send them an article and a worksheet.The worksheet is really simple: Who’s your target customer? What’s their problem? What are they doing today to solve that problem? How do they feel about that? Just basic questions.I always ask them to take a first pass on it on their own—homework before we engage. Then I have something to work from, and I can gauge whether this needs 10% refinement or if we really need to go talk to some customers.I believe in having them do it once themselves. That way they can see the difference: “I was here, and then we did three or four or five workshops, and now I’m here.” They feel better. They can see how their website will come to life.Yeah. You were at Google for a while. Do you have other stories from those experiences—working with these giants—that you still carry with you? I feel like you were involved in some monumental projects and product launches. What did you learn through those?Yeah, that’s a big question. When I joined Google, there were just over a thousand people. So it was already big, but it felt small.Part of that was because there were maybe eight or ten people in marketing—maybe twelve. It was small. I learned so much. Google from 2003 to 2010 was awesome. When you ask where I come from, a lot of what I learned there I thought was normal, but it was actually just company excellence.I didn’t know any different—that was my first real job. I’d worked since I was 15, but that was my first job at a company. Google did a lot of things right. Some of them I think they still do right. I left in 2011, so my experience is a bit outdated, but it was a rocket ship.You got to be a smart, young person with potential, and you were given great managers, mentors, and responsibilities—probably more than you should have had. You just kept proving yourself and getting more.The people and the early culture were really excellent. And it came from things I took for granted at the time but now realize were special—like having a purpose statement you knew before you even started.Everyone could recite: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” You understood the work you were doing and how it connected to that purpose. That’s rare. It seems so obvious—why don’t more companies do that?Yeah, that’s beautiful. I’m curious—you mentioned you just refreshed First Round’s messaging. Is that the right way to put it?Yes. We refreshed our messaging.Refreshed your messaging. What did you learn about venture capital? What's the state of the category that you addressed? I'm curious about that experience and what you learned.I mean, you're constantly addressing where you fall within a category when you offer a product in that category. First Round, twenty years ago, was really the first seed-stage investor that focused on companies at a very early stage. But over the last twenty years, the category has grown significantly.Now there are angels, pre-seed investors—it's gone even earlier than seed. There are so many general partners a founder could raise money from: individuals writing checks, semi-angel funds, pre-seed funds, seed-stage funds, multi-stage funds. Even the big multi-stage investors are writing seed checks now. You can raise a seed round from a firm that also writes Series C or growth-stage checks.What’s unique about First Round is that we’ve always focused solely on the seed stage. That’s all we do. So when we talk about sacrifice—it means we’ve chosen to only support this phase of company building, from the very beginning through the first two years.First Round has done that across a huge variety of industries—consumer, B2B, healthcare, AI—but it’s always that early stage. And it’s rare to find that combination: deep focus and a full set of services tailored to help founders at that moment.You can get money from firms that focus on seed but don’t offer much support, or from firms that invest across stages but don’t really care about the seed phase. They treat it more like an option: “If I invest $5 million now, maybe I’ll invest $100 million later.” But you're not important to them until you're big.Yeah.So part of our job in this messaging refresh was communicating that, and also this idea that we do the work with you. We used to say, “We’re called First Round for a reason”—that was the line on our website.We changed it through this process of talking to lots of people: founders, employees, people who took our money, people who didn’t, those who worked closely with us and those who didn’t. We came up with the new line: Where imagine if gets to work.That’s now the core of the website. We take your “imagine if”—and we wrote an "imagine if" statement for every company we've invested in. If you go to the site, the companies page is made up of those statements.I actually tried to use AI to write those, with my colleague Jesse—not Jesse Caesar, a different Jesse who works at First Round. Unfortunately, that didn’t work very well. So, we wrote them all by hand—for hundreds of companies.But the idea is: you have this “imagine if,” but it's only as good as what you do with it. And we’ll fill in for you—support you—until you’ve built the team to carry that forward.Wow. What is the role of research—qualitative or otherwise? How do you go about learning? When does research show up in your work?A lot of the work I do with First Round founders involves secondhand research—meaning, the founder is doing the actual research. We believe the founder should be the one talking to potential customers—doing the calls, the interviews, gathering insights from their target audience to understand what people need.We have a program called PMF Method—Product Market Fit Method—where we teach founders how to do high-quality customer discovery, especially with a focus on revenue. We call it dollar-driven discovery: will people actually pay for this? That’s especially important in B2B.My ability to do my job—especially positioning—depends on the founder’s understanding of their customer. If they don’t understand their customer and can’t communicate that to me, then I can’t do my part. In those cases, we go out and talk to customers ourselves before we can do any real positioning work.That said, I usually rely on founders to do this work just because of the volume—I'm working with eight companies at a time, and they’re rotating every six weeks. I can’t do the research justice in that format.Outside of First Round, when I do consulting, I get more involved in primary research. I often include qualitative work—sometimes I do it myself, sometimes I bring someone in. But the principle is the same: start with the customer. What’s working? What’s not? How do customers understand you—or not? How do non-customers perceive you? That’s always the foundation of good messaging.Yeah. Again, I'm curious. Oh my God, the question just vacated my mind. Oh—the product-market fit method. What can you share about how that informs the qualitative side of things?So that program is for founders who are even earlier than the ones we typically write seed-stage checks for. Often, they don’t even have a clear “imagine if”—they're still just thinking through an idea.The first step when you don’t have a solid hypothesis is to make one—and then go test it. A lot of that program is about validating that a real problem exists, validating that there's a specific persona who has that problem, and validating that you have a promise which, if fulfilled in your chosen market, could support a venture-scale business.Sometimes it starts with a founder saying, “I have this unique insight into the world,” either from a past experience or from going unreasonably deep to learn something.It could be, “Oh, there’s this security gap—I used to work at a security company, and I see a new way to solve it.” Then it’s like: Who is it for? What’s their problem? What’s the promise you can make to them? And is the market big enough to support a venture-backed business?There are steps for all of that, and we think of it in levels. The first major milestone is: can you get five really, really happy customers? Build something and get five truly happy users. That’s a big step. If you can’t get five people who are thrilled, then one of the elements—product, promise, persona, or problem—is off. From there, you adjust.What kinds of conversations do you have with founders around their understanding of customers? How open are they to the idea of research?They’re generally very open. Sometimes they just need help structuring how to do it. Founders need this skill—they need to be able to talk to people and understand their problems. If they don’t have that skill, we help them build it. And in some cases, we’ll do it for them—we’ll go talk to ten potential customers and come back with insights.What is the skill? How would you describe it?It’s the basic stuff of qualitative research: asking non-leading questions, digging into “why” without using the word why, finding the thought behind the thought. If someone’s unclear, you reframe the question until it lands. It’s basic—but foundational. Stuff that, for you, is like air and water.Yeah. But I love making that explicit. The way you casually listed those principles—that’s so cool. I don’t think enough people ever encounter them laid out like that. Well, tell me what you think about this—and I’m interrupting your response, sorry—but I often feel that qualitative research is invisible when done well. You can watch someone doing an incredible job applying all those principles and not even realize they’re doing anything beyond being friendly. That’s why I loved how casually you laid those ideas out.Yeah. I mean, that’s mastery. I don’t know that any of our founders get to that level of proficiency.What comes to mind is the founder who thinks they’ve done customer discovery because they pitched their product to ten people and asked what they thought. And those ten people said, “Yeah, seems pretty good. Come back when you have something.”Then the founder walks away thinking, There’s something here, I should build this. But “Come back when you have a product” isn’t a strong signal. The response you actually want is, “Oh my gosh, when can I sign up? This is amazing.”A lot of it is shifting from pitch mode into discovery mode—uncovering problems, understanding how people have tried to solve them, learning where the budget lives, and getting smarter so you can build something better. Then, when you return with that better product, people say, “Oh my God, it does that? When can I sign up?” That’s the reaction you’re aiming for.I remember early in my career, I did a lot of validation work—lots of different types of projects with Unilever. One of them was for Lipton Cup of Soup. I think they were re-engineering it somehow. The line that stuck from that project was, “It would be great for camping.” How do you feel about the new Lipton Cup of Soup? “It would be great for camping.”Like—no thank you, kind of, right? Yeah. When you asked, "Where do I come from?" I didn’t mention this, but I’ve pretty much always been in tech in various ways.One of the reasons I still sing Google's praises from the early days is that while I was there, I did an exchange program with Procter & Gamble to go through their Associate Brand Manager training. That was so awesome—an amazing experience.I relate it to Paul and my experience there. At Google, a lot of our research was user testing: you’d have people click around while you sat behind the glass. You could test messaging that way too, but it was mostly UX.At Procter & Gamble, it was so different—and so cool. I got to do a Febreze shop-along. And I learned from the guy who did the Old Spice campaign that blew up in 2007. He had also been the brand manager for Tampax, and we talked about Tampax Pearl.It was such a great crash course in excellent qualitative research and in brands built entirely on customer insight. In those cases, there's some product differentiation, sure—but the brand is 90% of it. In tech, I think that ratio is flipped. The product is a much bigger part of the value, and brand is more like the icing on the cake. But it’s not just icing on the cake. Yes. I feel so vindicated that we’ve uncovered this P&G moment. I was always curious—do you feel like you carry what you learned at P&G with you? Does it help in the work you do now? I think that’s really amazing. How impactful would you say that was on how you think about marketing and your work now?I think that organization is run by marketers in a way most tech companies are not. A tech company is usually run by an engineer or a product person. I had this friend I worked with—he was the product manager for Gmail when I was the marketing manager. His name’s Keith Coleman. He now runs Twitter’s Community Notes feature.Oh wow, wow.Anyway, he used to say: “Product’s job is to make the boat. Your job is to paint the boat yellow and let it sail.” That’s how he saw it. And there was a fun tension in that. In some ways, it was like, yeah—tell me what the product does and let me paint the boat yellow.We had a lot of fun painting different parts of Gmail yellow and letting it fly. We got to do cool stuff with Gmail’s marketing early on that now sounds kind of blasé, but at the time it was amazing—collaborative YouTube videos, stuff like that.I’m talking 2007, 2008, 2009. We did all kinds of crazy stuff. We made keyboard shortcut stickers for our biggest users and mailed them out. You had to send us a self-addressed stamped envelope to get them. It was very community marketing—before that was even a thing.So we had a lot of fun painting the boat yellow, but my experience at P&G taught me that it’s not just about painting the boat yellow. It’s about figuring out how to build the boat in the first place. And that’s how P&G does it.Yeah. I’m so excited we uncovered that. I feel like I sensed some unnatural wisdom in you—especially for someone operating in tech. But again, that’s my own bias. I feel like in the tech world, especially with lean startup culture, qualitative research is often treated in a very mechanical way. It has different objectives and feels like it approaches the experience so differently from how I learned. Does that resonate with you? I mean, I’m letting my bias show.Well, I think there is an ethos in tech—it’s very much the “users don’t know what they want” thing. Don’t ask them. They’ll ask for a faster horse. Build it and they’ll come. Move fast and break things. Throw spaghetti at the wall.That’s a big part of the tech mindset. And yeah, some of it is true. But there are also people who build products really thoughtfully and have a natural tendency to bring in the customer voice early. It’s just the exception—not the rule. At a place like Procter & Gamble, it’s the rule. It’s codified. It’s what you do.Yeah, yeah. And I think for me, my experience was mostly just feeling left out of these organizations that were being built a different way—these brands that were being built a different way. You know what I mean?I don't think it's wrong, though, in a lot of ways. If you think about a product like air freshener—which was my follow-me-home, shop-along project for Febreze, some kind of new form factor—I don’t remember the exact details, but that’s a commodity product, right?The insight that brand was built on, and I remember this really clearly, was that people didn’t use Febreze to mask bad smells. They used it to signify that their home had been cleaned and was ready. That was the insight: "I just finished deep cleaning, and now I’ll spray Febreze as a sign that my home is clean." It wasn’t about spraying to fix something that smelled bad—it was a signal.That was a deep insight. They had whole campaigns—probably even Super Bowl ads—based on that. And it was really cool, but they needed that kind of insight because the product itself, in isolation, was just a nice-smelling spray.Whereas in tech, sometimes the product is so fundamentally different—something you couldn’t have done before—that marketing’s job is just to clearly explain what it does. You don’t necessarily need a super deep insight if the product is already mind-blowing. It's just, “Wow, you couldn’t do this before. Now you can.”Yeah. I remember—maybe this was a colleague of yours—I always reference an article about Gmail positioning, this idea of “discoverable benefits,” like “come for X, stay for Y.” Does that ring a bell?Yeah, that vaguely rings a bell. The Gmail positioning story is kind of interesting because it launched publicly on April 1st—April Fool’s Day—and we said, “We’re giving everyone a gig of storage,” and people thought it was a joke.Oh, wow. Really?Yeah. It sounded too good to be true. A gig of storage at the time was insane.Yeah. That was probably a whole new metric, right? Had anyone had a gig of anything?Yeah, exactly. The idea that you got a gig was mind-blowing—and it was a message that could spread. People were saying, “Did you hear Gmail gives you a gig of storage?” People were buying invites on eBay. It became this whole thing once people realized it was real.All the messaging was about: “You can search your email because you have a gig, and we’re Google, and we’re good at search. You never have to delete a message again.” That was the primary hook. Then there were sub-messages: “It’s fast,” “There’s no spam,” and so on. But those weren’t why you came. They were why you stayed.And I think a lot of products are like that. What’s the hook? Especially in tech, where it’s so easy to try something—and just as easy to abandon it. What’s the thing that makes someone try it? What’s the thing that makes them stick? The marketable benefit is usually the differentiator—the “wow” thing that makes you tell your friends. The retention benefit is what keeps you coming back.Yeah. Yeah, it’s awesome. I totally agree—there’s no right or wrong. I think I was just being territorial and prideful about my consumer qualitative background. How would you say the role of research has changed over the time you’ve been working? Has it changed at all?I think it’s similar to what we were saying about how marketing has changed. The fundamentals haven’t really changed. The tools might have.For example, it used to be hard to go find the user persona you needed—say, people who run hedge funds, or women looking for fertility services. Conducting those interviews used to be really hard. But now, with Zoom, it’s so much easier to recruit and run them. There’s less excuse not to do it.More recently, there’s been interest in things like synthetic users, which I haven’t fully bought into yet. But they can give you a good first pass.I was working on something recently where I needed to understand a “day in the life” of a veterinarian. I just needed to know: What do they do? How much money do they make? What are they worried about? Who employs them? What are their incentives? What's the business model?AI made it really easy to get that basic, high-level understanding. But I still believe that real, face-to-face conversations give you a much deeper understanding—just like they did 20 years ago.Yeah, that’s funny. This is a bit of a tangent, but I’ve had conversations with people in the political world who are questioning how they’ve been learning. They’re so tied to polling and surveys and are starting to open up to richer, deeper qualitative methods—like ethnography—which we would take for granted.Have you seen a shift toward ethnography or deeper qual approaches? You mentioned changes in tools—has there been a shift in the types of tools people are choosing? And I definitely want to talk more about synthetic users because I find that fascinating.Yeah, I don’t think there’s a ton of ethnography happening with the founders I work with. I think there's some good one-on-one qual being done. Sometimes it's basic, but sufficient. And then there are times where it's very basic and not sufficient at all.Part of my job is to say, “I don’t think you understand this user well enough.” I’ll give you an example. I’m working with a very early-stage founder who is trying to be everything for everyone—hasn’t really chosen a clear direction. The mindset is, “Anyone who does this can use it.”But the reality is there are ten other companies going after that same broad market. One way to win is to lean into the features and benefits that apply to a subset of that market—where you’re uniquely strong. So, we’re pushing this founder to niche down, to narrow the audience. That way, the things they’ve built will really shine.It’s hard for her, because she’s essentially saying, “I’m going to sacrifice some of my current users.” She’ll still keep them, but she won’t go after more of them. She’s shifting to fewer, higher-value deals, where her product will be stickier.That’s a tough move—but when she went back and talked to those customers, she realized, “Wow, these people see me as the best-fit product.” For everyone else, there are lots of other tools that could meet their needs. That understanding came from those customer conversations. She had that experience. As you were talking, it reminded me of my own—taking out new concepts and products. You know very clearly when something clicks with someone—or doesn’t. When it doesn’t, you struggle. But then you find that one person who gets it, and it’s like, “Oh my God, here we go.” The sun is shining, the sky opens up—it’s a real moment.Yeah. I mean, we’re still in process with that founder, but she’s definitely had glimpses of that experience. And like we were saying earlier—you can’t always ask, “Why do you do that?” But you can get to the why behind the why.My own career went from Google to Square to a very tiny startup. I kept going smaller and smaller. The last company I worked at had seven people. It was a seed-stage company building an Android app. This was around 2012–2013.At the time, Android was totally underserved. This was before usertesting.com and tools like that. So, the research we did was: we posted an ad on Craigslist—I'm sure you’ve done this too—saying, “Do you have an Android phone? Meet us at a Starbucks and talk to us for 10 minutes. We’ll give you a $20 gift card.” We did this all around the Bay Area—Oakland, Palo Alto, San Francisco. That research made the company, I have to say. The first part of the interview was just: “Show me your phone. What apps do you use? Where did you get that phone? How did you choose it?” The second part was mockups—getting them to react to prompts and possible app store designs.The insight we got was powerful. It wasn’t just about how to position the product. What we learned—though no one ever said it explicitly—was that people felt kind of ashamed of their Android phones.They’d say things like, “Yeah, it kind of sucks,” or “I got it because it was cheaper,” or “Yeah, I know it’s not great.” You could sense the shame. So, we leaned into that. We positioned ourselves as an Android-only company: “We’re building an app you can only get on Android, because iPhone doesn’t let you do this. But Android does.”That shift—owning the platform and making users feel proud of it—was a game-changer. All of a sudden, they were like, “I’m not ashamed of my phone anymore. My phone’s cool. It can do cool stuff.” And tapping into that emotional ethos—that’s when the product really took off.Wow.That whole experience of sitting in those Starbucks—again, it wasn’t perfect research. We only did it in the Bay Area. There were a lot of flaws. But it was enough.Yeah. How do you describe what happened? What did that kind of face-to-face qual actually do for you—what only that kind of interaction can do for a team?It gave us real confidence in how to talk about the product—both from a features and benefits perspective, and from the “your iPhone can’t do this” angle.It validated assumptions we had, and it just felt like, “Yeah, I’ve talked to 20 people—and if 20 people all tell you the same thing, you don’t need to talk to 20 more.” You know what I mean? Like—we’re good. Yeah, we’re good.Beautiful. Well, listen, I want to thank you so much. This hour has flown by. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation and sharing your experience. It was really great.Thank you so much. Thanks—I feel like we could keep talking for another hour. I looked up and thought, “Wow, it’s already been an hour.”I know, it’s true. I’ve got a bunch more questions, but I just checked and we are at time. So—maybe another time.Lovely. Thank you, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

George Nguyen is the founder of Untapped, a youth culture research and brand consultancy in Brooklyn. Through participatory research he has helped companies like McDonald’s, Nike, Jordan Brand, Gatorade, and HBO uncover insights from Gen Z consumers. Early in his career he held senior strategy roles at R/GA, Translation, and Saatchi & Saatchi.So I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It’s a big question, which is why I use it, but I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now, because it is big. Before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer however you want. It’s impossible to make a mistake. The question is: Where do you come from?Yeah. I was reading a couple of the other responses, and funny enough, this is probably the question that makes me the most nervous. Mostly because I don't have a clean answer. But in some ways, that’s the foundation of who I am. My parents came here in 1975 as refugees from Vietnam. Looking back, I now understand how unsettled they felt.I was born in Colorado. I’ve lived in California, Oregon, did high school in Seattle, some university in Boston, then New York, Southeast Asia, Toronto. I don't think I went to the same school for more than two years at a time until university. So to that end, it's funny—I had a friend once say to me, "You can't cheer for every baseball team, George." And I said, "I don't. I cheer for all the teams in the places I've lived."That was part of what made this question tough. I don’t have a clean hometown answer. But that instability made me comfortable with chaos. It shaped how I work now—especially as a microagency founder, constantly doing business development, always looking for the next project. That feeling of being prepared for instability comes directly from never knowing where I’d be going next. It’s touched so many parts of my life. So the cleanest answer I have for “Where do you come from?” is everywhere and nowhere.You said you now understand how unsettled your parents felt. What were you thinking about when you said that?As an adult, and now as a parent, I have much more sympathy for them. As a kid, I kept wondering, “Why do we have to move again? Why do I have to go to another new school?”I got really good at introducing myself and standing in front of the class every couple of years, all through grade school—something I wouldn’t wish on any child. And like any child, I blamed my parents. But in hindsight, I understand they’d been ripped out of their country. They were trying to figure out where to settle.Now I realize they were looking for the same things I was—and probably felt even more lost than I did as a kid. I had them. They didn’t have anyone. In 1999, after I graduated from university, I went with my mom to Vietnam. The country had only opened up in the mid-80s. We saw where she went to high school, her childhood home—now occupied by other people.She went up to a random house and rang the bell. She told me, “My best friend lived here.” She didn’t know if the friend was still alive or had escaped Vietnam. The door opened, and they recognized each other. They hadn’t seen each other in 25 years.There wasn’t a going-away party back then. It was: “Tanks are rolling through the cities—get out.” That moment gave me perspective. Everyone is just doing the best they can. As a kid, I thought, “Why did you do this to me?” As an adult, I see they were trying to put down roots in a world that had been pulled out from under them.My dad eventually settled in Orange County, where there’s a large Vietnamese population. He tried to recreate something familiar. My mom kept moving and didn’t settle until much later. She was consistently searching for something—some place that felt like home.Yeah. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up—like young George as a kid?I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a copywriter. I really loved commercials. I’m that odd person who went into marketing and advertising having actually graduated with a degree in advertising—and with ambitions to go into it. Strategy and planning was unexpected. That path came more from laziness, frankly—luck, circumstance, and laziness.Tell me about the laziness. What do you mean? How did you end up in strategy and planning because you were lazy?Pretty much. I got out of school, and my mom said, “You have to get a job. You can’t just hang out at home.” My plan had been to hang out at home for the summer, look at grad schools, and figure out the next step. But I had no idea what I really wanted to do. I'll be the first to admit I felt woefully unprepared for the world after university—especially with a liberal arts degree. I’d been trained to think critically, but I didn’t walk out with a practical, applicable skill set.If I’d studied a skilled trade—where you learn how to physically do things, like plug A into B or turn the right bolt—I might’ve felt more ready. Instead, I graduated without a clear sense of what I could actually do.Is there anything you feel you missed the most? If you could time-machine back and plug something into that education, what would it be?A roadmap. That’s something I’m still seeing today in my work with young people: there’s a lack of clarity, of a consistent and understandable, measurable roadmap. No one gives you KPIs for a liberal arts degree. There are no defined success metrics, let alone a clear career path.And then, coming from a traditional Asian family, there’s that extra layer. Those jokes about becoming a doctor, lawyer, or engineer? They’re rooted in something real—those are practical, comprehensible careers. The idea of a degree, let alone a career, in the creative fields was completely foreign.My university had two major schools: agriculture and communications. I wasn’t going to be a farmer, so I went into communications. Like I said, I had aspirations of being a writer, maybe even a copywriter, and ended up in the advertising school.But I graduated unsure of what to do. So I came home, planning to hang out and figure things out. My mom wasn’t having it. She said, “You can’t just hang out on boats and go swimming all summer,” which, to be fair, was great when I was 16. Honestly, even now in my 40s, I think we should be allowed summers where all we do is go swimming.You mentioned being drawn to advertising and commercials early on. What role did ads or TV play in your childhood? I had a similar experience—I just loved ads and TV. Why do you think that was the case for you?It modeled what I thought life in America was supposed to be like. My parents had no idea. And even though I was born in this country, you'll hear a lot of first-generation and second-generation kids say the same thing—our home life didn’t reflect what we thought life in America was going to be.Every child or teenager probably thinks their family is the weird one. But when you add in cultural differences—like bringing food to school and other kids saying, “What’s that? What’s that smell?”—it’s even more pronounced.At home, I’d be like, “Can I have a corndog?” And my mom would go, “A corndog? No, we don’t eat dog.” And I’d be like, “No, no, it’s a hot dog wrapped in a pancake.” And she’d say, “Why would you do that?”So advertising, in its 30-second snippets, became my window into what I imagined as iconic, idealistic American life. You're too young to watch late-night television, so you get bits and pieces—but ads are everywhere. They're intrusive, unavoidable, and always full of joy.They're designed to make you want something. And as a kid, I didn’t just want the product. I wanted the entire lifestyle they were selling. Then I realized—oh, you can actually sit around and make these things and have fun doing it.All right, so catch us up. Where are you now and what are you up to?I ended up going into advertising. So that first summer—when I talk about laziness—my mom said, “You’ve got to get a job.”I was sitting with some friends at the time and said, “I need to find something.” One of them, Colleen, said, “I just got an internship at DDB. They’re looking for more interns—want one?” I said, “Yeah, I’ll go meet them.”I got an internship in the media department. Thirty days in, they offered me a job in the strategy group. I said, “Sure, why not? I’ll check it out. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s just an internship.”I got hired out of that internship, and one thing led to another. Fifteen years later, after working in agencies around the world, rising through the strategy ranks, and even opening and running offices overseas for the TBWA network, I came back to the States. About ten years ago, I decided to strike out on my own.We saw a gap that existed right between the personal and the professional for me—helping young people as they leave school and figure out their next steps in life, and, at the same time, improving youth market research and trend work.So we created Untapped as an approach to youth market research. But instead of using young people as traditional respondents—where you put them on a panel, ask questions, and pay them for answers—we built infrastructure that empowers them.We hire young people to be our cultural reporters—photographers, videographers, storytellers. They go out, conduct research, and bring back insights. Then we work with them to interpret that research and shape it into brand strategy. It closes the gap between brands and the audiences they’re trying to reach.Over the last ten years, we’ve done everything from conventional market research to ethnographies—often using innovative ways to enter people’s homes and lives. We’ve co-created new product ideas for Nike, helped Google understand why young people prefer social media scrolls over search bars, and worked on UX and UI projects.What we’ve found is that this methodology gives us a uniquely deep perspective. It cuts through traditional assumptions and helps uncover insights that lead to more interesting and effective brand solutions.Can you tell me a bit more about how you work with these reporters? What does that process look like?The process itself is actually quite conventional. What makes it different is who we work with, not how we do it. When a project comes in, we review the subject matter and look within our network—which was built through partnerships with NGOs—spanning across the country. We identify the right group for the project, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative, and then we give them a brief.We think of this more like casting than simply selecting respondents. We ask: “What kind of personality are we looking for?” And usually, someone will say, “Oh, I know someone just like that.”This diverges from the traditional approach where a CMO might say, “Well, I talked to my neighbor’s niece, and she says all the kids are into Skibidi Toilet. So let’s build a brand strategy around that.” That introduces bias.Our approach is grounded in an academic framework called community-based participatory research. Unlike traditional ethnography, which is mostly observational, this model involves entering communities and collaborating with them rather than simply studying about them.The difference in our approach is that we hire a young person as a cultural reporter to go interview their friends, their parents, their family—to really understand something from the inside. What they bring back is a much richer perspective.One of my favorite scenes was from a project we did for e.l.f. Beauty. One of our reporters, Zoe—she was 13 at the time—had filmed this incredible moment. I’m watching the footage, and she’s berating her friend, saying, “Look, I know you have a TikTok. I know you tell your mom you don’t, but I know you do. Just tell me what it is and how you use it.” She was getting right to the heart of it.And what we learned from that project was really eye-opening. The numbers on platform usage weren’t telling the whole story. The kids were watching TikTok content on Pinterest. So Pinterest’s engagement numbers were inflated, while TikTok’s were deflated. They were using Pinterest as a workaround during school hours—still accessing the content, just hacking the system.I want to go back. When did you first discover you could actually do this kind of thing for a living? We’ve been doing this for ten years now. I wouldn’t say it was a single discovery—it was more of a realization.When I was with TBWA, I got sent to Vietnam after they opened a new office there. They asked, “Who wants to go?” and I jumped at the chance. I didn’t want to go to a traditional market like Europe, Hong Kong, or Singapore. I wanted something more raw—Shanghai, Jakarta, or, ideally, Vietnam. I wanted to connect with my roots, not as a tourist but by actually living and working there.And what I realized—something I think I always knew but had to confront fully—was that everyone is talented if you give them the right opportunity and the right environment. The key is letting go of rigid expectations about what the output should look like.After Vietnam, I moved to Canada to run TBWA Toronto. I expected a leap in the quality of work because I had come from New York. But that leap didn’t exist. The thinking, the creativity—it was all on par. Maybe the polish or “fit and finish” differed, but the raw creativity was just as strong. And now with AI, even those craft differences are being flattened.That was the realization: talent is everywhere; the barriers are what hold people back. My co-founder in Untapped—who’s since returned to leading Stoked Mentoring—shared the same conviction. We’d sit around asking: how do we help kids who’ve aged out of structured NGO programs or school systems?When these kids graduate, the infrastructure disappears. Some thrive. Others don’t. And often the difference isn’t the kid—it’s the tools they were given. If a kid succeeds in college, it’s likely because someone at home emphasized education from day one.I’m a good example. I always knew I was going to university. That expectation was clear from the beginning, reinforced by a family that deeply valued education. So I had structure, support, and tools.But many of these kids didn’t. So the idea behind Untapped was: How can we artificially create that kind of infrastructure for them? How do we give them the tools they need to succeed?And what’s the one job where a young person can outperform any adult? Being a youth market expert. What kind of training do you need to describe life as a 16-year-old? You are the expert.As for me, the older I get, the less qualified I am to speak to youth culture. My job is to facilitate and support. Steve Stoute used to say, “Look for the guy in the leather jacket at the party—that’s your guy.” Mine is: look for the guy in the khakis with the tucked-in shirt.That’s the person who recognizes, I’m different from the audience I’m trying to reach. I’m not pretending to be young and cool. I’m here to build the bridge. So, to your question—how did we know this could be something real? It was the realization that youth don’t need intermediaries to speak for them. They need platforms and tools to speak for themselves.Before we even started, we knew this could be a viable business model. The talent was out there—young people who were hungry for opportunities. And brands were desperate for authentic, real-time feedback that helped them understand what their audiences actually wanted.How many times have you and I sat in a meeting where someone confidently says, “This is what the audience wants,” and then you go out into the world and think, You were so off base. Did you actually talk to anyone? And more importantly, did you listen when you talked to them?Going back 10 years, thinking about the kinds of clients you dealt with and the research they relied on, how would you describe the conventional approach you were walking away from with Untapped?It was box-ticking. That’s really what it was. The core issue we were trying to solve was that young people weren’t invested in the responses they were giving. They’d say whatever they needed to get the $100 or the gift card.“Oh, these people are here from Pepsi? I love Pepsi.”“These people are from McDonald’s? Big Macs are my favorite.”Just tell them what they want to hear, grab the money, and move on. It became a game.Ask them if they’ve participated in research recently, and they’ll say, “Of course not.” But meanwhile, they’ve already done five studies that month. And if you’re a parent who hasn’t been scammed by your kid—let alone by a recruiter working a phone bank—you’re the exception.Everyone’s just trying to fill quotas, hit the number of interviews, tick the boxes. And the kids are looking at each other going, “Here’s another $100.”So we flipped the model. We said, “We’re going to pay you a living wage for this.”One of our points of pride is that we pay our reporters more than the New York Times pays for freelance articles. When I found out what the Times was paying, I thought, Okay, how do I beat that and pay a fair, decent wage?And beyond just compensation, these young people know their work is being taken seriously. They've worked with major brands. They get excited—and they start holding their peers accountable. They know they’re going to be in a conversation where someone from the brand is actually going to listen. So they don’t pull any punches.One of my favorites was sitting in a session with McDonald’s. One kid said, “I hate this stuff. It’s garbage. I’m not eating that.” And his friend shot back, “Really? Because at 4 a.m., you seem to like it a lot.” It completely changed the tone of the conversation.So, how is your approach different?The methodology isn’t new. We’ve always done dyads, triads, friendship groups. What changed was how we shifted the input—and how we engaged with the sources of information.You call them “reporters.” How strategic was that label? And this idea—community-based participatory research—is that what you called it?Actually, I was sharing the idea with a friend, and his wife—Dr. Kenwell Kaleem, an academic—overheard us. She walked in and said, “That’s a great idea. There’s already a term for it.” Then she sat down and schooled me on it.She explained this academic framework—community-based participatory research. It's not just observing; it’s co-creating with someone from within the community. You're not studying them; you’re working with them. You’re in the tribe.I had always struggled with how marketing latches onto academic terms. Like “ethnography”—which is technically observational. But when have we ever stopped at just observing? So no, none of it was strategic. The only intentional decision we made was: they’re not respondents. They’re associates. They’re partners. They’re co-creators.And one of the first things young people ask us is, “Can I put this on LinkedIn?” Absolutely. You should put this on LinkedIn. You should put this on your résumé. You’ve done market research for major brands—e.l.f. Beauty, for example. The work you’re doing is no different from what I was doing as a junior planner when I was 25. Why shouldn’t you get credit for that?We actually stumbled onto the term “reporters” because one of our first big, ongoing clients was Nike. We started working with them through a trend newsletter, and that’s when the idea of cultural reporters really clicked.Interestingly, it was essentially ongoing qualitative research—but disguised as a newsletter. We’d send it to them, and they would circulate it widely within Nike. Our day-to-day client would always follow up with an hour-long session, sitting down with four or five of our reporters to talk about the articles they wrote and why they wrote them. That monthly check-in turned into a kind of panel—a recurring touchpoint. It became his secret weapon.What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?I feel good about it. That’s the simplest way to put it. Over the past 10 years, the most powerful, most memorable projects are the ones I feel good about. I didn’t always feel that way. I mean, I’ve stood in plenty of rooms pitching fabric softener. Sure, I could sell it—I think any of us could in a pitch—but it didn’t feel meaningful.This does. This is authentic to me. I’m trying to create opportunities for people. I don’t mind asking for projects or asking for funding because I know where that money is going. Someone said something to me recently that really stuck—it was probably the biggest compliment I’ve ever received. They said, “Your superpower is that you genuinely want other people to succeed.”That summed it up. It’s not self-interest. The entire business model, our whole approach, is built around creating opportunity.Yes, it's a business. It’s put food on the table for my family. But it also builds something real. It creates long-term relationships with people who may not be “young” anymore, but who started with us years ago—and who still reach out. I’ve written graduate school recommendation letters for a few of them. That’s what makes it special.When people come to Untapped, what are they really looking for? What’s the core question they need answered?The questions vary. But what they really need—what they’re looking for—is access. For example, with e.l.f. Beauty, they wanted to understand young people’s first experiences with makeup and skincare—those early rituals and how they differ across audiences.We’ve worked on a wide range of questions. One of my favorites was with Google. They wanted to understand why they were losing young people to social media platforms.For a long time, the assumption—especially from developers and engineers—was that it was just about frictionless access. Their thinking was, “Well, they’re already on TikTok or Instagram, so of course they’re searching there. It’s not a better product; it’s just convenience.”That made logical sense—if you’re spending 12 hours a day on TikTok, you’re naturally going to start using it to search. Same with Amazon. But our research revealed something deeper. And now that enough time has passed, I feel comfortable talking about it publicly.It wasn’t just about convenience. It was about trust. That insight came into focus when we talked to people with accessibility needs. One person said, “Sure, you can list something on Yelp or Google Reviews. But I don’t believe you. When I watch a TikTok video, I can see whether there are stairs in the back. I don’t have to guess whether it’s truly accessible.”Or they’d say, “You tell me this place has a vibe. But when I look at the people in the video, I know if it’s my vibe or not.” It wasn’t about search efficiency. It was about seeing it for yourself. That changed everything.And so that’s no different from how we looked at things 40 years ago, right? You want to see for yourself, but the mechanism has changed. I think that level of candor and perspective is what we’re able to unlock, and that comes from a different kind of access—a real, open relationship with the young people we work with.I was struck by the word access. Can you tell me more? You said the clients need access. Tell me more about what you mean when you say access, and why that’s important.There are some places—some circles—where it’s just not our place. Whether it’s physical or social access, guards go up, doors get locked down.I’ll give you an anecdote. One of the young people we worked with—he’s grown up now—one of his hustles today is hosting BDSM parties. He invited me to one. I wanted to be supportive and check it out.I went, and they gave me a very cute T-shirt that said something like “Punished for Dress Code” because I didn’t have the right attire—making it very clear I was a guest in their world.And it’s funny. I walked into this party that night and realized I was the wet blanket. I thought I’d be the one to walk into a warehouse full of S&M and BDSM and feel awkward. What I realized was, I made everyone else feel awkward. I had invaded their safe space. So everyone’s guard went up. I did not have access to understand that world.I’d love to hear you talk about how your approach creates access—or gains access.I don’t think we gain it. I think they give us permission. They take us in. They interpret their world for us. And they give us that permission in very conventional places.I remember, in our early days, we were doing research with kids. We were on interviews and getting tours of their neighborhoods. We walked into one home, and the grandmother came out and asked, “What are you doing here?” She asked our associate, the one who was taking us around and introducing us to young basketball players. The project was about identifying who might be the next great player.As soon as he explained, “This is my job. I work with this company,” everything changed. The tone, the energy, the conversation—all of it opened up. There was trust. They gave us a pass. He literally said, “I’m going to take you into my world.”And I think that’s what access means. Conventional qualitative or quantitative research tries to bring people into focus group facilities—we’re already taking them out of their environments. Nothing about it feels natural. And then we expect people to be authentic in the most inauthentic situation.You’ve been at this a while. How are things different now? What’s changed in your career—in what clients need, or in how people move? I love that insight about trust. That TikTok gives everyone visible evidence, so the standard has changed.I think there’s more accessibility for everyone now, across the board. There’s been a democratization of everything—access to young people, for example—and much more competition. We go up for projects and clients say, “Well, we used YouGov,” or “We went to Suzy,” or “We used a digital tool,” or “We did a social scrape to listen for sentiment.”I have competitors now who are using our same business model. That’s how the landscape has changed. But what’s also changed is the applications. People now understand what research, information, and insight can actually do.When we started, our work was very much geared toward advertising—that was the world I came from. A lot of our early jobs were new business pitches. They needed fast turnaround and real quotes, real insights, to bring into creative development. Today, we’re doing everything from new product development to trend hunting to conventional research.That’s interesting. Do you think that’s the case across the board? What you just said makes me think—this has been my experience too—that the need for human understanding first came through creative development and advertising… and then somehow spread through the rest of the organization. Does that seem fair?I might say unlocked rather than infected—only because I think there were people always doing this kind of work in different ways; we just didn’t have visibility into it.People working in innovation started saying, “Hey, this tool you're using is actually a really good one—let us talk to those people too.” We've done work for private equity firms trying to decide whether or not to make an acquisition. And I think that's part of the growing awareness of these tools.That’s the note about democratization. Now, it’s just a quick search. You might’ve seen an interview or caught me on a podcast, or someone forwarded something. Ten years ago, if you worked in private equity, you probably wouldn’t have even heard of us. Now, it’s easy—and people are quick to say, “I see how this could help my business.”I always want to talk about qualitative. What you do is qualitative, but you have a particular approach. What's the benefit of qual? I mean, you’re competing with non-qualitative solutions. How do you advocate for qualitative? What's the magic of it? How do you articulate its value?Perspective. We turn down a lot of projects where someone is looking for validation—statistically valid data. That’s not us. We’re your people if you’re looking for insight, if you’re trying to get ahead of the curve. If you're looking for a shift in perspective. We resonate with clients who are open to seeing what else is out there. That’s what it boils down to.And because we’re a different model—validated but not widely adopted—many still rely on quantitative data. Their decision-making is often based on what’s safe. And you can’t blame them, especially in this climate.But there are always those few who are open to trying something new, who want to understand things differently. Their decision-making process is built around what they want to accomplish with the information—not just defend a decision.How do you think about the work you do for clients? What would you say you do for them?I want to give a thoughtful answer. I think we shine light. We shine light into areas they haven’t explored. That’s the hope. It doesn’t always happen—sometimes the light lands in a brightly lit corner, and they say, “Well, at least we validated it.”But most of the time, our clients come with no expectations. They’ve hit a wall. They’re not getting the answers they want, and the answers they have don’t make sense. So they’re ready to try something different.Over time, we've built a client base that comes to us saying, “We think there’s something going on here, but we don’t know how to frame it or understand it.” Topics range from employment, to sex, to money. What’s different about kids?One of my favorite examples is from working with folks in finance and banking. They kept asking, “Why can’t we get young people to understand that if you open a bank account, you’ll save money on fees? It’s a no-brainer!”I thought the same thing—until we talked to the kids. Their answer made total sense: It’s a business decision. When you don’t have consistent income, you can’t maintain minimum balances. That means you’re hit with recurring fees. So they did the math: “I’d rather pay one bigger fee than constant smaller ones over six months—and at least with a check-cashing place, once the money’s gone, it’s gone. They can’t get back into my wallet.” Banks can. So they chose what gave them control.We’ve got a little time left. Looking ahead, what do you see? You mentioned AI earlier—do you encounter synthetic data? Any thoughts on the impact of AI on your work—on shining light?I think the impact of AI is different in my case because it’s not necessarily a competitor—it’s more about how it’s changed the landscape. Broadly, technology has impacted young people—and our generation as well—in that there’s no clear roadmap anymore.In an environment that lacks clarity about where to go and how to get there, insight and direction become so much more valuable. Take trends, for example. You can sit and talk with someone in a marketing department, and they can spend hours on Google and find trends of all kinds. But eventually, if you keep looking, you’ll find someone who says X, Y, and Z are great. So, how do you know what to listen to? How’s it being curated?That’s the shift. As technology opens up everything, we’re more and more in need of someone to curate the information and give us confidence that it’s coming from the right place—that it’s actually valuable and creates genuine connection with our audiences.Yeah. Beautiful. Well, listen, this has been a blast. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It was great to hear you talk more about your story and the work at Untapped. It sounds amazing. Well, I appreciate the invitation. I mean, I’m curious—I’ve got the same question. AI is affecting our industry so much. What are you seeing? How’s it affecting your work.Yeah, I don’t know. I never feel like I’m the kind of guy who knows how to talk about this kind of stuff—speculating about business and industry. But with synthetic users, I kind of had an existential crisis when I encountered the concept. There are huge chunks of work that are definitely going to meet clients where they want to be met—with synthetic personas or ridiculous oversimplifications.To your point, you talked about how a lot of the industry already treats people like answer-generating machines. So maybe it’s good riddance that some of that gets commodified into synthetic data.But, also, to your point—curation becomes more important. And I think all the interesting stuff is going to live on the fringe. I choose to think of it as an opportunity—a kind of permission to get wilder, more imaginative, more interesting, and honestly, more human. That last sentence maybe ended with less drama than I intended, but… you know what I mean? The synthetic stuff captures the big, fat middle. There will be so much agreement on so many things, I imagine.I don’t think that’s bland at all. I think it’s at the heart of everything we’re feeling right now—people are craving that connection.There was an article in The New York Times this morning about how young people feel like they’re the most rejected generation. Statistically, it’s true. Just look at the scale of things—you’ve got more university applicants, more job applicants. I think it’s something like 160 applications to get a job now. It’s become a volume game.So when they say they feel rejected, on one hand, it’s backed by data. But on the other hand, there’s the emotional side of it. When you say be more human, I think that’s the real opportunity for brands—to connect.I think about when we were young. McDonald’s wasn’t just fast food. It was your first job. It was someone from the neighborhood saying, “Hey George, look at you—you’re growing up. You’ve got a job.”There were layers of humanity in that. And I think the marketing, the communications, the products that have always resonated—historically—had that human layer. We've lost that.A lot of what I’m seeing from young people today is not just feeling lost—it's feeling overwhelmed. That’s the difference between a “lost” generation and today’s generation. There’s so much information, so much access. People look at them and say, “It’s never been easier to apply for a job. Why aren’t you applying?”But yeah—it’s easier. Which means everyone’s applying. They’re saying, “Let me talk to a person. Let me get a real interview.” And I think you’re landing on a much bigger issue. One we could unpack for days.It’s true. Well again, I really appreciate this.It’s good to see you. It was fun talking with you. Thank you so much.Yeah, let’s do it again soon. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe