THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

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

Joe Burns is a Strategy Lead at Quality Meats Creative in Brooklyn, New York. Previously, he was Head of Strategy at BBH USA and Head of Communications Strategy at Mother. I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. And I haven't really found a better question for sort of starting a conversation out of nowhere. But because it's so big, I kind of over-explain it the way that I'm doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And it is impossible to make a mistake. And the question is: Where do you come from?Oh, that’s a great question. It’s sometimes tricky to explain here in the States, where I’m from, because I think the regionalism in the UK is a lot stronger. You know what I mean?Like, sure, it’s strong here too—there’s pride, people wearing their team kits and all that—but I don’t think Americans quite understand how, in the UK, just traveling 30 minutes in a car can take you into a totally different culture.I’m from the Midlands in the UK. And again, that’s hard for people who aren’t British to really get. You’ve got the North, which is culturally cool—a hotbed of creativity, very working-class, very grounded. Then there’s the South, which has always been the well-heeled, posh part—the Downton Abbey kind of vibe.And then you’ve got the Midlands, right in the middle. And if you look at the kind of characters that come out of the Midlands, they tend to be a little... tapped. A bit offbeat. Like Lemmy from Motörhead, or Ozzy Osbourne from Black Sabbath.It’s kind of where heavy metal was born—guys working in factories. It used to be very industrial, very working-class. That’s where I come from—same place as Ozzy and Lemmy. That earthy, middle-of-the-country kind of place.So yeah, I came from there, then went to university in Wales, and eventually moved down to London—kind of a Dick Whittington story.What is it to be from the Midlands? What does that mean for you? When do you feel most Midlands?When I’m eating Marmite on toast. I’m from the town where they make Marmite, so the whole town smells like it—which is a bit weird. But really, there’s something to it. It’s a bit ineffable, hard to pin down. We’re not as... you know—I’m sorry for all the tangents—but I got really into these old Roman accounts of Britain.When the Romans conquered Britain—defeated Boudicca and all that—it was a time when the “civilized world,” Greece and Rome, thought of Britain as a kind of mythical place. A lot of people didn’t even believe it existed—just this island on the edge of the map with white cliffs.Anyway, when the Romans finally went there, their accounts are hilarious. They describe swamp-dwelling, naked, blue-painted people—total savages—just sitting in bogs with nothing on but a spear or a sword.And honestly, I think there’s a bit of that mythical, swampy energy in the Midlands. I definitely feel like I’m a slice of that. I feel most Midlands when I’m in that kind of mindset—swampy, earthy, a bit wild.And do you have a recollection of when you were a boy—what did you want to be when you grew up?Oh, there were quite a few things I moved through, but it always involved ideas and creativity. At one point, I wanted to be a spin doctor for politics. I thought political PR would be good—like, you could combine storytelling with doing something positive. But maybe that was just youthful idealism.So I wanted to do that for a while. But my dream job—and you probably pick this up a bit in the stuff I post and write—was to write headlines for tabloid newspapers.I always wanted to do that. You get a bit of it here with the New York Post, but in the UK, the tabloids are massive. I had a paper route as a kid, and I’d always see the headlines—so clever, with wordplay and a wink. I thought it was brilliant.That’s something I miss about the UK and British culture. You walk down the street and every pub has a funny, well-written sign. There’s this deep appreciation for language.That was really what I wanted to do. Another dream job? I wanted to be the guy who wrote zingers for Arnold Schwarzenegger—not literally him, but for action movies. I was obsessed with those little one-liners: “Hasta la vista, baby.” I loved the challenge of packing so much meaning, cleverness, and humor into a single sentence.So yeah, that was the dream. Sadly, there aren’t many jobs in zinger-writing or tabloid headline writing these days.And catch us up—where are you now, and what’s the work you’re doing these days?I’m in Brooklyn now, part of the strategy team at Quality Meets Creative. We're remote—or distributed, whatever you want to call it—but basically a creative agency that stretches across the U.S.Everyone works remotely. We're small and lean. If you look at how much we put out compared to how few people are doing it, it's kind of surprising. That’s one of the things I love about working here—we’re all prolific. Everyone just loves getting ideas out the door.We’re also really focused on cutting the fat—hence the butcher metaphor in our name. The company was started by two creatives out of Chicago, and it’s still creatively led and founder-owned. That means a lot to me.And maybe this ties back to being from the Midlands—but I’ve always struggled to respect people who were given a title, rather than built something themselves. My granddad on my mum’s side ran a trucking business, and that left a big impression.So I’ve always seen this clear binary—especially in advertising agencies where everyone has a title like VP, SVP, Head of This or That. The way I see it, you’re either the founder and the boss, or you’re... everyone else.I really like being part of an organization where the founders are actually running it. It reminds me of something Tolkien once said—he described himself as an “anarchic monarchist.” I kind of believe in that too: one person at the top, and everyone else is free to get on with things.That’s basically how we work at Quality Meats. The leaders give a nudge—“do more of that, less of that”—but otherwise leave people alone to get things done. That’s my ideal system, and we’ve got something pretty close to it.When did you first discover that you could do this for a living—that you could actually make a living doing it?I had no idea. This is a funny one, man—I just had no idea how advertising worked. As a kid, I didn’t even realize there were companies that made the ads. I thought they just came with the TV shows, you know what I mean?I remember getting a bit older and starting to figure it out—probably did something at school about it—but honestly, I don’t think I knew I wanted to work in a creative agency until I ended up in one.I started working at a digital agency right in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. Before that, I’d graduated and was doing an internship—kind of a hybrid role, like a digital planner/creative copywriter. Then the recession hit, and the company folded. Everyone stopped getting paid, which didn’t affect me much since I wasn’t getting paid anyway—but no one else got paid that month either.After that, the guy who ran the agency also ran this fashion wholesale/PR/communications boutique. They moved me into that, and I did it for a year. But I really didn’t like the culture. It was very Devil Wears Prada. Even though I was working in menswear, it still had that vibe.I think fashion is one of those industries where the stereotype is actually kind of accurate. It’s a bit of a sycophantic game, and eventually I got tired of it. They paid me next to nothing, so I was couch-surfing—sneaking into the studio to sleep on the floor some nights, staying with friends.One of those friends was like, “Hey, we’re bringing back the grad scheme after a few years. You should apply.” So I did—and I got the job, this time at a media agency. And honestly, it was the best timing I could have asked for.That moment—2008 to 2010—was right when social media, mobile, online video, and the digitization of media were exploding. Especially in London, where the budgets were smaller, it meant more creative thinking was going into these new channels than into traditional TV. I don’t think that really happened in the U.S. until much later.I got a great education. I sat next to the guy who coined the whole “paid and earned” framework. We were doing some of the first interesting work with dynamic creative optimization—not just using it for efficiency, but to actually connect different data stacks. Like, we’d take review database imagery from one place and plug it into campaign assets from another. We were doing stuff that felt cutting edge—maybe even first-of-its-kind.And then one day, I was in a meeting with the creative agency we were working with for HTC—Mother. I impressed them in the meeting, and they said, “Send us your CV, we’ll give you a job.” Six months later, they did. And then I worked at Mother for 10 years.So, to answer your question—when did I know I wanted to work in advertising? I’m not sure I ever really did. Maybe I still don’t. What I do know is that I want to be in a job where I get to come up with ideas that have an impact.And I think creative agencies can do that. That’s also what frustrates me about advertising. People get caught up in the process—like, “We need this many assets and deliverables”—and they lose sight of the actual idea and the outcome we’re trying to create. When it becomes about outputs instead of ideas, it gets really boring. You devalue the work.I want to go back to something you said earlier—you mentioned it was “good for me” to arrive in the industry at a time of transition, from traditional mass media to digital. Can you unpack that? What did that shift do to how you think about creativity or solving problems for clients?Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think we should maybe park this for a second—you can edit it out if you want.But I think those moments of chaos and volatility, when things seem to be unraveling—paradigm shifts, basically—they’re actually fun places to be if you enjoy figuring things out for yourself. And I’ve always liked that: working things out on my own rather than just doing what people used to do, or what the textbook says is the “right” way.I like reading that stuff, engaging with it—but I’ve always been a little insubordinate, you know what I mean? A bit like, well, no, I disagree. I think it works like this.So yeah, it was a really helpful time to come up. And I think it gave me a very specific view on what creativity is really about. Because I think what that transition actually represented—and not everyone’s gotten the memo on this—is a move away from advertising as a kind of cottage industry.What I mean is: a creative agency could come up with an idea, and then spend tons of time, effort, resources, bureaucracy, whatever—refining it into some perfect platonic form. And then they’d stick it into this magical machine called TV. You’d just flip a switch, pour media dollars into the vending machine, and suddenly that perfected little thing reached millions of people—instantly, and with certainty.But that’s not how networked systems work at all. They call TV a “network,” but really it’s like a cloning machine for attention. And in actual networked systems—digital platforms, social media—you’ve got feedback loops, recursion. You can build something fast, put it out there, and either millions of people see it... or nobody does. And it’s all interconnected.So I think I’ve always struggled to think about things in a linear way, because I entered the industry at a time when everything was anti-linear, for lack of a better word. It was like: that old way is done. And yeah, maybe on the media side they over-egged the pudding a bit. I don’t think the creative side fully got it.But it really shaped how I think about creativity—about how it’s done. You’ve got to build things that work in networked systems. If you look at all the successful businesses, they’re the ones that harness network effects—not the ones that just polish one thing endlessly. You know what I mean? Yeah.And what do you love about your work? Where’s the joy in it for you?The real joy of creative work, for me, is examining the mundane—examining the everyday—and thinking about it deeply. Uncovering insights, if you want to call them that, or truths, or whatever. There aren’t many jobs where you get to spend your time thinking about the stuff most people ignore.That’s what I love—finding a new angle on something totally familiar. For me, it’s the opposite of what I think most creatives enjoy. A lot of creatives like novelty—they like making something new. But what excites me isn’t the new thing you make. It’s the old thing you’ve suddenly noticed in a new way.You know what I mean? That’s where the enjoyment is. Like, once you’ve worked on a toothpaste brand, you’ll never look at toothpaste the same way again.Yeah, so how do you go about doing that?Being a good noticer. There are lots of different ways to do it. I think some people are just naturally intuitive—they notice things and think about them without trying.But what I love about it—and this is something QM has kind of codified—is the idea behind one of our mantras: “Dumb in a smart way.” In a way, being good at advertising is about pretending to be a bit dumb on purpose. You know what I mean? It’s about stripping away your assumptions and the stuff you usually overlook, and just observing things with fresh eyes. That’s probably the most effective way to uncover insights.Then there's the other side of it—more relevant when you’re working with data or trends reports—where you have to really put the screws on and ask, What does this actually mean? That kind of rigor is missing in a lot of the industry. People often settle for a superficial read of the numbers.But you can be really good at data analysis just by better understanding what you're actually looking at. Like, if you're a marketer looking at a chart that says:Awareness: 70%. Consideration: 33%. Preference: 12%. Purchase: 5%—if you see that as just a funnel, that’s one read. But if you take a more rigorous, multidimensional view—thinking about the methodology, the exact questions asked, the sample size—you realize how much those details affect what those numbers really mean.To me, that’s crucial: understanding the difference between the map and the territory. Like, we’re looking at a map right now—but that map comes from 2,000 people answering four questions. You’ve got to keep both things in your head: the model and the real world. And maybe be a little skeptical of how well the model represents reality. That’s a hugely important skill when it comes to insights and noticing things.Yeah. How do you do research? Do you have an approach, a methodology, a philosophy? What’s the proper use of qual and quant? How do you begin a process of learning?Usually, I start with whatever I can do quickly. My approach to most things—research included—is based on the mantra: doing stuff beats thinking about stuff.Which is a weird thing for a strategist to say, but I’d rather spend $50 on a quick survey with 75 respondents and three questions, see what it says—then maybe interview three people and record it.I just think iteratively.This is something I think creative agencies still struggle with. When I entered the industry, there was a wave of startups—not just in advertising, but across tech and product. Even at Mother, when I was there, we were investing in a co-working startup space.My manager, the CSO at the time, said, “Joe, I want you to spend one day a week in there with these startups. Hang out, maybe help them.” I think the agency got some equity in return.So I spent a lot of time around startups. And I’ve worked with Facebook, Google, Amazon—all the FANGs except Apple—and until you’ve done it, I don’t think most people understand how much better iterative work is.Bureaucracies and management love to believe they can impose a rational framework on an organization that guarantees great outcomes. But I’m an ultra-fanatic for agile, iterative working. There’s study after study showing how much more effective it is—whether in creative work, knowledge work, whatever.Iterative beats waterfall. Every time.So I bring that to research too. If you’re a client, don’t spend $15,000 on one big study that takes three weeks just to write the brief. Spend $100 testing one thing. Spend $500 testing another.At the end, you’ll have ten times the quality of insight—because you didn’t try to plan your way to a perfect answer, you discovered it through action.Trying stuff. Making stuff. Doing stuff. It’s better than thinking about stuff—even when the goal is better thinking. That’s what blows my mind. Even for thinking, doing wins. So my approach to research is to bake in as much of that as I can. Make it agile. Make it iterative.Yeah. What was your first real interaction with the idea of brand—what it is, what it means?Yeah, that’s… I mean, it’s a tricky one for me because, like I said, I started out in a media agency—not just any media agency, but the global team of one. So I wasn’t even in the part that bought and sold media.When I first joined, I was basically collecting reports and media plans from different countries. Eventually, I moved into the communications strategy team—so more like coms strategy consulting.You know what I mean? Like, how should Nestlé, or Toyota, or L’Oréal—those were all clients I worked on when I was still pretty young—how should they organize their marketing investment?And I’m not just talking about creative assets here. I mean the whole thing. Like when we were launching L’Oréal Men Expert’s Touche Éclat competitor (which I worked on), we weren’t just figuring out where to buy media. We were thinking about shelf placement, what influencer partnerships made sense—all of it.So to me, I’m always a bit baffled when people talk about brand like it’s a TV spot or a logo from a design agency. To me, brand doesn’t exist in objects—it’s the residue of interaction that lives in people’s heads. That’s what a brand is. It’s the sum of everything you’ve done.And the point of brand thinking is really: What are the right touchpoints? Where do they need to be? And what do they need to do to create the kind of residue we want to leave in someone’s mind?What cracks me up is how people talk about TV like it’s inherently powerful. TV is great because of its scale. But on an individual level? If I get a crappy email from a brand with a broken discount code, my perception of that brand drops—more than a thousand TV ads could ever lift it.That’s something creative agencies often miss. TV works because it reaches everyone. But it’s not individually motivating. A bad store experience, a confusing website, a glitchy promo—those things do more damage than TV can fix. And on the flip side, if you walk into a hotel and they hand you cookies at reception? That can build more positive brand equity than a national ad campaign.But agencies and marketers focus so much on TV and paid media because it’s low friction. Everyone knows how to do it. It’s safe. The money goes where there’s the least resistance, not necessarily where the biggest impact is. That’s something we try to challenge at Quality Meats. We always aim to answer briefs in ways that maximize efficacy, not just ease of execution.We’ve done some fame-driving work for Kotex. We’ve done work for Duke Cannon, a men’s grooming brand. And yeah, there are visual assets and video content involved. But the focus is on creating something with real impact—not just something that’s easy to check off a list because it’s familiar.Yeah. What I’m curious about—well, let me ask it this way. You came into the industry during a major shift. And now, maybe we’re in the middle of another big one with AI. I know you’ve written about “the sloppening.” Tell me where you think things are right now—creativity, research, ideas, impact. What are the implications of AI, and how are you thinking about it?I mean, it’s huge. The shift is going to be tectonic. I always think of insights, trends, and forecasting as being a bit like looking at a London Underground map—you’ve got to pay attention to all the different lines and where they intersect. So I’ll give you a few of the big crossover points, the major shifts I see coming.Now, I love a debate—I don’t think I’m right about any of this. This is just what my body is channeling out of me right now.First, I think the economics of content—or, more broadly, the economics of “stuff to see” and “people to see it”—have massively shifted. What’s scarce now is attention. The cost of creating content has dropped dramatically, but the need to cut through and actually capture attention has become much more premium. So: attention has become more scarce, and therefore more valuable.Second, I think we’re going to see massive flattening in some parts of marketing—especially performance marketing. And here’s what’s interesting to me. Let’s say you buy into Zuckerberg’s claim that 95% of what agencies do is irrelevant. I don’t fully agree, but what could happen is that AI completely removes the barrier to entry for performance marketing.So what happens when everyone has access to the same tools and platforms and the playing field is leveled? It means that every other part of the system—especially the parts that have feedback loops or interact with performance—becomes way more valuable.We’ve seen this with a few clients. They’d been doing only performance marketing, but then started layering brand advertising on top. What happened? We saw performance efficiency improve.I remember working on a booze brand a few years ago—we tracked cohorts of people, and when we lifted brand awareness and consideration scores for that group, their performance targeting efficiency went up.So, brand and performance have this interplay. I don’t love the distinction between the two, but it’s a shared language.And when performance becomes cheap and accessible for everyone, the role of brand becomes even more critical. It’s your edge. It’s how you drive down acquisition costs. Brand, in that context, becomes the most important part of your performance marketing mix.That’s a big shift I think we’re going to see.Third, we need to consider what happens when you combine that with network effects—and the “nichification” of everything. In any networked system, you tend to get a “best and the rest” model. One musician dominates Spotify. One movie dominates the box office. You lose the middle tier.I think we’re going to see more of that with content engagement. In the past, everyone might sit down and watch Friends. Then there’d be this healthy middle tier—shows that didn’t dominate, but still reached a decent audience.Now? Maybe people watch one or two big shows from time to time, and the other 80% of their media consumption is fragmented—podcasts like this one, influencer content, niche creators.As a brand, that means you’ve got to be able to operate in that long tail. That’s where people live now. And I think AI is going to accelerate that shift.Let’s use this podcast as an example—what would a really smart brand partnership look like here? Five years ago, sponsoring a niche podcast wouldn’t have even been a realistic consideration for many brands. Now it is. That’s one of the big changes I see AI encouraging: brands playing smart in more fragmented, distributed, and nuanced spaces.But with AI, I think now it is possible. I think brands will be able to produce an audio asset and stick it in front of a podcast for what—$10 a month subscription or something like that? You get what I mean?The media cost will likely be lower too, because the viewership or listenership on that long tail is way lower than on big-budget HBO-type stuff. So there’s this massive widening of accessibility, and AI will teach people how to do it.So yeah, I think we’re going to see this strange “best and the rest” effect really take hold. And I also think that within a couple of years, we’ll start to see ad agencies getting into content production—monetizing that long tail in new ways.Honestly, it blows my mind that we haven’t seen this already. Maybe someone listening to this podcast will reach out and say, “Joe, let’s build this business together.” Who knows?But seriously—look at these agencies with great reputations, like Wieden+Kennedy or BBH (where I used to work). Why wouldn’t they be producing a MasterClass-style series for small business owners—teaching creativity, helping them apply it—now that those owners have tools to execute it themselves?To me, that’s the space ad agencies should be moving into. It’s a scalable solution to the old “cottage industry” problem. Agencies have always been limited by how much a client will pay for a project or retainer. There’s no scale in that. But if you move into content? That changes.I think people are starting to do it. I post a lot on LinkedIn, and I’m seeing CMOs at research firms with podcasts, agency folks building personal brands through content. I think we’re going to see more and more of that. It’s about personalities becoming more prominent—people getting over the cringe of being known on LinkedIn or Slack or wherever.And if BBH or Wieden+Kennedy or Mother or Crispin or whoever doesn’t move into that space—doesn’t offer a distributed, scalable version of what they do to serve the massive long tail of people now creating content—someone else will. And when that happens, they’ll lose out to someone doing something they could’ve done better than anyone else.So yeah, I’d be shocked if we don’t start seeing this emerge—either from agencies or from somewhere else. Maybe even something like this podcast is part of that shift. Do you get what I mean?It’s content that helps marketers—people who want to get better, learn from those with decades of experience. That’s the last big trend I’d call out. To me, it’s the one most people aren’t seeing coming. And agencies aren’t adapting fast enough to meet it.How would you describe what that is—the form you’re outlining here? You’re describing the conditions for a kind of not-yet-realized agency. How do you describe what that is?To me, it’s a mix of content and tutorials—led by recognizable brands or influential people from agencies. It’s educational content. It moves into the realm of learning.Think about it this way: I use a lot of tools—Adobe Suite, for example—to make the stuff I put out now. And I’ve learned a ton just by going to YouTube and watching tutorials.You could also pay to take a MasterClass or a course on someone’s website to learn something like InDesign, right? I’m talking about applying that model to creativity and ideas—aimed at people who could never afford a creative agency retainer, or even a one-off project.But let’s say you’re a small business, and now you’ve got Meta’s new AI ad tool in front of you. Would you pay $100 or $150 a month for something like “Saatchi Lite”—a creative service for small businesses? That might include access to a community forum, weekly video content, trend reports, and brand-building insights.You get what I mean? It’s creativity as a service. And I’m not saying it’s right for every client—but it’s perfect for the long tail. And it’s incredibly scalable. So the agencies that actually do it—and maybe only two or three will do it really well—are going to make bank.I'm curious about your experience with—are they called carousels? That format. I first came across your work through the carousels you've been creating. You’ve been really prolific, and to me, really sharp with all of them. What’s your experience been like? What drove you to start doing it? How has it been received?It’s been received really well—I’ll start at the end there. It’s become pretty popular. It’s been emulated a lot, which I actually kind of like. To be honest, it all started with a few things coming together. One was just putting that “maker mindset” into practice. Practice really is what it’s about.I’m a big believer that until you make something, you don’t really know what you think. You’re just guessing. So for me, it was about turning my thinking into something tangible. You know what I mean? Maybe not something you can pick up and hold, but something that exists—something real.I wanted to write a book. I wanted to produce things that condensed abstract ideas floating around my head into a concrete output. Essays can do that, of course—but they’re not really suited to how people engage with information now, which is mostly on phones. So I asked myself: what’s the equivalent of the essay for a phone?That’s where carousels came in. It was about understanding the channel and the reality of how people use it—which is: they’re just scrolling, diddling around on their phone. So the challenge became: how do I turn an idea into something you can swipe through, that makes you go, "oh yeah, that’s good."That was part of it.The other part was making strategy take its own medicine a little. Like, only a strategist would walk into a room and present 150 dull, dry slides where the big takeaway is: be distinctive, be clear, cut through, engage emotionally.You know what I mean? All the advice we give clients—but somehow forget to apply to ourselves. So this was just me doing that. Saying, okay, I'm not going to prioritize fidelity of thought here. Because essays and books? They’re great for fidelity. They're great for really scrutinizing your thinking and making it rigorous and deep.But with this format, I had to let go of that a bit. Instead, I prioritized distinctiveness. I tried to make the thinking have some snap, some emotional impact.I still like to write. I like talking in conversations like this, or rambling on a podcast. And there’s a place for that. But this is about understanding the medium—how people are engaging—and creating ideas that can live within that.The Achilles heel of the strategist is that we often want to be deeply understood. We want people to get all the nuance.But to succeed on social platforms, you’ve got to be willing to make some sacrifices in terms of fidelity or depth. That doesn’t mean the ideas are shallow. I’m just trying to get to the crisp part—the bit you can actually hold onto. Maybe it’s the tip of the iceberg.Like today, I posted one on Jevons Paradox. I wrote a 2,000-word essay on it. But is anyone going to read a long essay from me on how Jevons Paradox applies to AI and creativity?Unlikely.So I turned it into something they would read—and maybe that opens the door to more. Maybe more people will read it.What’s the paradox?Well, Jevons Paradox—he was the guy who realized that as coal made things more efficient, people didn’t use less of it—they used more.And that’s the link to AI. I think the same thing is coming for creative work. People are panicking about AI reducing the amount of creative work people can do. But if you look at Jevons Paradox, it actually suggests the opposite: AI is going to massively increase the amount of creative work that gets done.It lowers the cost and barrier to entry. Suddenly, you know, John’s Cupcake Store in Brooklyn can produce creative assets and maybe even put $500 a month behind them in marketing. That’s the long tail again—the demand for creativity is going to go up.The need for a big building with 200 people all working on one brand’s campaign—that might fade. But the aggregate demand for creative and strategic thinking? That’s going to skyrocket.Well, isn’t that the same as a concept from traffic engineering? Induced demand?Exactly that.Yeah—most traffic engineers are trained that when traffic is slow, you just add more lanes. But then more lanes create more demand. It’s self-reinforcing.Yeah, that’s exactly it. And the big thing with creativity is, there's potentially infinite demand for it. If you reduce the cost, why wouldn’t you increase supply? There's infinite demand for ideas.But what are the implications on the kind of creativity being demanded? Do you have insights you haven’t already shared?I think it just changes the shape—and the places it shows up. It makes it more worthwhile to think about more touchpoints, in more ways.Like, take my own carousels as an example. With AI, I can now create visual content that lives inside them. It’s not as good as hiring a human to go out and shoot original photos. Not even close. But for something with a 48-hour shelf life? That’s good enough.I’d never go take 15 photos for a post that people will scroll past in two days. But now I can—and I do. That’s what’s coming. Every nook and cranny where creativity can be applied and make something just a little better will start receiving it.And it gets interesting when you imagine the full tech stack getting involved. I use ChatGPT and Midjourney now. They're good—but imagine if one of the big asset management platforms—where brands store all their creative—trained their own AI.You could say: “We’ve booked an Uber for a client arriving from the airport—generate a personalized welcome message from our agency.” That kind of thing. A micro-touchpoint that would’ve been unthinkable before now becomes easy, personalized, scalable.That’s where this is heading.And the big insight I’m working on for a longer piece is this: communications planning becomes one of the most important, if not the most important, parts of what creative companies can offer.It’s always sat between creative agencies, media agencies, strategy groups—everyone has a bit of it. Sometimes it’s called comms planning, sometimes connections planning.But I think it becomes central. Why? Because it’s the one discipline that combines two things. Sophisticated understanding of systems. And the ability—and instinct—to throw a spanner in the system.In a networked world with more systems, and cheaper, faster ways to act in those systems, the comms planning skillset becomes incredibly valuable. It's the ability to say, “How do things work right now?” And “How can we disrupt that in a way that benefits us?”Take an imaginary example. Say you're a company selling stylus pens—the kind you use to draw on tablets. You might say: “People buy this when they start learning graphic design.”But then you realize: no, people buy it when they start any new hobby—music, writing, sketching.So you create a partnership with a music education platform. A creator from that world uses the pen for something unexpected. Suddenly, you’ve found a new user journey. You’ve disrupted the funnel.That kind of thinking—multifaceted, multidimensional, network-aware—is where I see marketing and communications budgets going.And I think the people who are best at that—at spotting systems, finding the leverage points, throwing spanners into the works—are going to be in huge demand. Or… do you say “wrenches” in America?Yeah.I’m just like—spanners. Throw spanners—no wait—throw wrenches into the system. Whatever it is, that’s going to be the skill everyone wants.Beautiful. Well listen, I want to thank you so much. We’ve come to the end of the hour. It’s been a lot of fun. Very nice to meet you. And I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. Thank you.No, it was lovely to chat. It almost felt like therapy in a way.That’s good. I think that’s a sign of success. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Martin Karaffa is a brand strategist based in Munich. He works with The Culture Factor Group since 2018. Before that, he was a Global Planning Director at BBDO and JWT where he worked on Mercedes-Benz, Unilever, and BMW. Martin helps big companies understand how cultural differences affect their brands around the world. He also worked as an Intercultural Communications Training Consultant for the United Nations Office of the Ombudsman.As you may or may not know, I start all these conversations with the same question. I borrow it from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. I haven’t found a better way to start, which is why I keep using it. But because it’s such a big question, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in complete control—you can answer however you want, or not at all. There’s no way to get it wrong. The question is: Where do you come from?I come from a history of tragedy, farce, desperation, and lust.Shall we take those in order?They all sort of mix together. “Where do you come from?”—I could take you on the geographical tour, which is interesting in itself. But if you want to understand where my soul is centered and the journey it’s taken, I think some generational history is important.Three of my four grandparents were immigrants to the United States. The fourth was a Mennonite—Pennsylvania Dutch. The rest came from abroad and endured incredibly difficult experiences. There were many secrets, so much to hide or manage. I imagine there was a lot of heartache.My maternal grandmother, the Mennonite, ran off at fourteen with a dashing Italian stonemason ten years her senior. They crossed the border from Pittsburgh into West Virginia to get married underage—where no one would check too carefully. A few months later, they married again under assumed names. Then, I believe after her fifteenth birthday, they had to return and do it all over again under their real names. I’m still not sure they were completely truthful about the dates.On my father’s side, it’s hard to say exactly where my grandparents were born or who their parents were. We've done all the DNA work, and it’s complicated. There was dysfunction on both sides of the family. I won’t dishonor their memory by going into detail, but the result was that my parents married very late in life.So I’m a boomer—a late boomer. A yuppie boomer, not a hippie boomer. A grid-and-good boomer, not a free-love boomer. And getting married over forty, as they did in the 1950s, was quite unusual at the time. So that means in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh—a real Monongahela Valley mill town, very much Deer Hunter territory. That’s where I was born. And it wasn’t pretty, but, you know, maybe I didn’t know that at the time.What was it like? What was the name of the town?McKeesport. McKeesport. What do I remember about being young in McKeesport? Well, I do remember it. Let’s go back to The Deer Hunter, which took place in Clareton, Pennsylvania. In the Monongahela Valley, there was always a river, a town on the river. On the river was the steel mill, where they could barge in the coal and iron ore and barge out the completed steel. Immediately up from there was the business district. And on the hill—that’s where people lived.The Deer Hunter was set in Clareton, which was two towns down from me. Between Clareton and McKeesport was Duquesne, which was Hungarian. And Glassport—which I’m not totally sure about, but I think it was Ukrainian. And we were Slovak. Far eastern part of Slovakia. Very, very, very tough culture. Absolutely no tolerance of ego. Very much: don’t get too comfortable, don’t rest on your laurels.So growing up there, little did I know what was in store for me in life. But it was a very, very grim place. On the plus side: great education. Strict three R’s, right?I went to a school where the teachers had been there for so long, they’d say to some of my classmates, “Oh yes, I remember your father—he had trouble with his cursive W’s as well.” So it was strict. But in and around Pittsburgh, the industrial wealth created an incredible amount of benevolent money, which fed cultural institutions.When I was a kid, every Saturday I went to an art class called the Tam O’Shanters, which is quite famous now, I’m told. I was never really the same age as the others, but it was filled with all kinds of artists—Duane Michals, Andy Warhol, and just huge numbers of them. Writers like Annie Dillard. And of course, Jeff Goldblum—a famous Pittsburgher—went to this art class. It was run by a very, very gay American sculptor named Joseph Fitzpatrick.And, of course, the two kids chosen from my neighborhood—we were both gay. I mean, God, maybe that’s why we got the incredible privilege to go to that art class. You know, “send the gay ones off,” right?But overall, it wasn’t pleasant. Just a pretty miserable, fairly dirty place. Yeah. And now, you know, it’s heartbreaking in many ways, because if there’s a place where the Rust Belt is crumbling the most, it’s there.Yeah.McKeesport, I think, has the fourth-highest crime rate in the country.Oh my gosh.Yeah. And it’s entirely, 100%, poverty that’s driving it. So that’s kind of heartbreaking. But when I was an early teenager—this is where the story picks up, Peter, you’ll love this.I’m here for the whole story, Martin. I’m curious, though—I’m feeling for young Martin. What did young Martin want to be when he grew up? Do you have a recollection?Oh yeah, yeah. Very solid recollection. Young Marty wanted to be an architect. And part of that came from drawing. One of the things I know now—from, you know, the finest psychological care in my late fifties—is that young Marty was hyperlexical, autistic, on the spectrum. Hyperlexical Asperger’s. One of those kids who swallowed dictionaries. But that Asperger’s side of things was pretty cool. For me, it was pattern recognition. I could do perspective drawing.Wow.Right? And I thought, that’s great. I could draw buildings, draw houses—like the ones my father dreamed of building. If I were a kid now, it would be very obvious. Did you play with Matchbox cars, Peter?I did, yeah. Of course.Did you go zoom, zoom, zoom—they go fast? Or did you line everything up neatly, cars parking, and take a great deal of pleasure in organizing them? Like, “These kinds of cars go over here, and those go there.”If one must make a choice… I’m identifying with B.Yeah. That was totally me. That’s one of the things they use now to help diagnose kids on the spectrum. That was me 100%.What’s the hyperlexical part? I mean, your use of the phrase—one of those people who, what did you say? Swallows dictionaries? Yeah. I identify with that massively. Tell me more—what kind of person is that?Well, I remember I caught s**t in class because I used the word apt. We had this spelling thing, and the theme was space.Of course, I didn’t ingratiate myself with the fifth-grade classmates. The teacher asked, “What kinds of words do you want to spell?” All the kids said rocket and space and things like that. And I said, “Oh, I just read this thing—vertical assembly.”You do know about that, don’t you, Peter? Yeah—that there’s a building called the Vertical Assembly Building, right? What is now Cape—again, Cape Canaveral—where they put the rockets together going up. Right? I thought that would be a fun word. Not too challenging. And boy, did I catch it for that.But it was totally aligned with everybody’s interests! You were connecting to the rocket thing.Yeah! I didn’t know what was wrong with them. Yeah. But that’s the thing. Some of us—and this is something that ended up helping me in my professional life later on, which I’m sure we’ll get to after the interesting bits—it’s all about pattern recognition.As a strategist, or when you're trying to understand how people behave, what you're doing is piecing together patterns. That’s what people like you and me—though I won’t make any assumptions about you—that’s what our particular condition makes us good at. We notice patterns. We can’t help it. So that was kind of what it was like when I was a kid. A bit grim, yeah, to be that way. But there were a lot of things to read. A lot of adult conversations around. A lot of quietness.Except at school—then it was loud. And of course, there was the usual kind of bullying when you’re a gay kid. But I made my peace with that. And then, when I was around thirteen, the family moved to Australia—to the southern suburbs of Adelaide—because my father had a midlife crisis and took early retirement from United States Steel. I can’t tell you how different it was. The light. The sun. The “Yeah, I don’t care if you’re a bit weird—everyone’s a bit weird” kind of vibe.That was the environment I grew up in. And at the time, the southern part of South Australia was actually a pretty good place. They called it the Dunstan era, after a governor who was in office for a long time and was very committed to public education—again, a lot of investment in cultural initiatives, in making the place extraordinary in terms of cultural and educational opportunities. So I had a cool time growing up in South Australia. It was much better than McKeesport.So catch us up—where are you now? And what do you do? How do you spend your days?Well, right now I’m in Munich, where I’ve lived since 2007. There’s a long story behind that, but I’ll go back a bit to my early professional life. I went to university and studied linguistics—remember, I swallowed a dictionary. And because my mother was a lawyer, albeit not a very successful one, I thought, All right, I’ll go to law school. That was disastrous. There was a reason she was a failed lawyer, and whatever that was, I inherited it.So I had to look for a job. I ended up getting one at an ad agency. And that’s where the “word” led me to where I am now. There was a trainee program in Melbourne called the Advertising Federation Trainee. Ten agencies each had one cadet, and we all went through the same program. I did that in 1982. It was called the AFA Traineeship.In 1992, at the same agency—DDB Needham, as it was called then—a certain young woman named Mary did the same trainee program. She’s now the Queen of Denmark. That’s my brush with notoriety.Advertising can equip you for all kinds of careers. But after rotating through different departments, I landed in the creative department—and I stayed. I was pretty good. Managed to win a few awards, did a decent job. But at one stage, I was at JWT. And I kept rejecting briefs. So the managing director came into my office and said, “Well, the planning director has quit.” I was working on the Ford account for Australia and New Zealand. And I said, “Well, yeah, it wasn’t all that good.” And he said, “Well, I suppose you could do better.”I said, “Well, maybe I could.” And that was how I became a planner. An account planner, a strategy planner. And I have to say—it was humbling. I thought, yeah, I can write briefs, right? But no, it’s a different skill. And I had to put in the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell says you need to gain mastery.I put in the hours to do that. And I only started to gain mastery when they said, “Would you like to be posted to Tokyo?”—where I was deputy head of planning for JWT Tokyo, or co-deputy head. It was a fantastic thing. Always an international person partnered with a Japanese professional. And Usami-san—or Sammy, as we called him—splendid guy. Just amazing. Changed my life.Your time in Japan.Yeah. Changed my life. And started to tell me—to give me the hint—that maybe culture is an important part of what we do in strategy, marketing, communications, and things like that. And cultural differences are so frequently underestimated.So after that—five years there—I met my now husband, who is Japanese. And they posted me to New York to be the first of two global planning director positions. A rare bird, that is. And this was in the time of DOMA. So Masa couldn’t follow me on the strength of our relationship.After about three years of doing it long distance—about the longest distance you can make on the planet, I think—we said, this sucks. And started looking for jobs around the world.I was the first one to find a job, here in Munich, working for BBDO as the director of international planning. Effectively global planning director on the Daimler businesses—Mercedes-Benz—which I did for about 12 years. And when that ended—quite naturally, corporate gig ended—I hung up my shingle as an intercultural marketing consultant.How long ago is that?That was 2019.Oh, wow. That's amazing. That’s right around the time we met.Yes, yes. And we could, in the course of our discussion, heap praise and love on the person who introduced us. Which I’m only too happy to do.It’s true. Eliza Yvette Esquivel.But it was interesting, because that was kind of a good time to start a global business that you conducted mainly on Zoom.I want to—for a moment—I want to return to that moment in Japan, when you said you had an awakening, maybe, about the role of culture. And I just wanted to—maybe—is there a story you can tell about that? About what you learned, or how you learned it, or the impact it had on you and your work? Because it’s a through line for everything you do. Would you agree?Oh yes, yes, yes. It certainly is. And it was inspiring. There are so many of those. But the one everyone enjoys hearing is KitKat. See? You’re laughing already. You’re laughing already because everybody knows there’s this big, weird thing going on about KitKat in Japan. And it wasn’t big, and it wasn’t weird, around the turn of the 21st century when JWT won the account.JWT had had KitKat—or did at the time have KitKat—since dinosaurs wandered the Earth. And so the whole business of Have a break, have a KitKat—incredibly powerful branding idea. Award-winning ads. Incredibly successful.In Japan, the large Japanese agencies—JWT was one of the largest foreign agencies, but nothing compared to Dentsu or Hakuhodo. Hakuhodo had the account. And they were saying, “Well, you have to position it because it’s an English chocolate, and you should position it on that. Get the right attractive young woman in a tartan skirt to do a little dance about having a break.”And JWT obtained the account because we were going to have a break—to Japan. So we did some research: what does having a break really mean to Japanese people? Because KitKat—it’s a kind of cookie coated in chocolate—is a perfect thing to have with a coffee break. Japanese workers drink tons of coffee. And it’s all, why couldn’t we do it?So we did some. And it was a very, very interesting thing, because it was my colleagues kind of nudging me in a direction. And they said, “We should do some qualitative research. Give people disposable cameras.”Which—you know, we were foreigners. Phones in Japan had cameras at the turn of the 21st century. We were too stupid to know that. Idiot foreigners. But we gave them disposable cameras, and we said, “Take it for a week. Every time you take a break, take a picture of the break. And note: is it a good break, is it a bad break, is it a kind of so-so break?”So we got them to bring the photos back in. And one of the things we discovered was that culturally, Japanese people hate KitKat breaks. You know, you're working, you have this little break, and something whimsical happens, and then you go back to it, right? That’s the way—the original British branding idea.But Japanese people stay tense in those short breaks. You know, you go and have a cigarette and feed your caffeine addiction and you come back, because, you know, everybody is looking—how are we working together, what are we going to do? So taking a break is kind of like letting the team down.And we got lots and lots of those kinds of bad breaks. A good break—which, you know, we actually had trouble translating it into Japanese—the word was yasumijikan, which means a little vacation, little holiday. And that always happened at the end of the day. So when you kind of got home and you sat down and you said, “Oh, now I can relax at least.” And that was it. That was a break.And, you know, again, go back to the usage and attitude statistics. That’s when most people consumed chocolate in Japan at the time. You know, it wasn’t a little bit of energy, like you’d have your Cocoa Pops at breakfast and it gives you energy to work throughout the day.No, you replenish your energy after the end of the day. And that was also something that—believe it or not—was a key insight in how to market Smirnoff in Japan. Because, you know, do you rest at the end of the day, or do you drink alcohol to rev yourself up to party? That kind of thing.And so that management of energy was very important. So sure enough, what the creative team did—and they were kind of pushing me very hard, and I thought, good, fair, right—was to show lots of times when tension is relieved.And it was often romantic tension, because young women were the chocolate eaters, and boys were their sources of tension. But it really came alive when we noted that young women—particularly teenage girls—one of the things that stressed them out was, of course, the university entrance exams. Because it's kind of brutal.You have to go to cram school—or juku, as they call it. And the jukensei are the young people who study late into the night so they can pass these university entrance exams, which actual school doesn’t prepare you for. Incredibly stressful.And the sales force for Nestlé in Kyushu recognized—well, they lit on the fact that kitto katso kind of sounds in Japanese like “you must win.” Katsu is luck, or fortune, or victory, or whatever. And so they said, you know, have this for your juku study—because you're studying late into the night, right?And that was so successful, we said, could we blow it out? And we did. There was a website called goo.jp—g-o-o.jp—which is where the students went to do their practice exams. And so we did what Australians would call push polling. “Here’s an amusing little survey you can take at the front: What is your favorite good luck charm for your university entrance exams?”And they gave five choices, one of which was Kit Kat. And of course, at the top was an omamori, which are the little good luck or good fortune charms you buy at the shrine or temple.Yeah.And number three was what they called katsudon, which—katsu is also the word for cutlet, borrowed from the French. And katsudon is cutlet on top of rice bowl. And that's supposed to be good luck. But Kit Kat came in second. And that—oh, PR, off to the races after that.Yeah.Right. And particularly our client in Japan—just a human dynamo, who was on every chat show you could imagine. And it just took off from there.Amazing.And that was it. And boy, even though I had to be guided there by my colleagues, boy, did I bask in the glory of that, I have to tell you—professionally. But it is such a dramatic thing.Such a dramatic thing. And, you know, everyone knows about the so-called “crazy flavors” of Kit Kat. And one of the first things that happened after we got the business—there was a change of management at Nestlé—they went to Australia to buy white chocolate technology. Because white chocolate is easier to put all the flavors in than dark chocolate.And so that’s also part of what I do now. There’s a particular aspect of some cultures called long-term orientation—or sometimes we call it optimization—where you’re always wanting to improve and change. It’s not like, “I’ll give you the same chocolate I always have.” And so being able to do that—all the different flavors—Japan scores very highly on that. That particular dimension of cultural difference. Very important that you’re constantly seen to be changing.Yeah. This is where I want to—because your work has been with the Hofstede Insights on cultural difference. My experience is just in the States, and sort of spending time around the country and understanding how Americans experience things. So I’ve never really been in a position of, sort of, a global—looking at things from a global perspective. So just starting at the base level: how do you define culture? And then what’s the framework or the tools that you use to map cultural difference? You were sort of hinting at it just then, because this is the stuff I think is just so fascinating.Well, for one thing, I’ll just start by saying—the definition of the word “culture”—very, very huge variety. My good friend and former colleague, Steve Walls, whom you should interview, by the way—Oh, that’s right.Yeah. Yeah. But Steve says, the way we use the word culture is, “A culture expert is anybody with a cooler Instagram feed than you.”Right.But that’s not the way I see it. Professor Geert Hofstede—the late Professor Geert Hofstede—was an engineer. He worked for Shell, and I think he had something to do with IBM too. But he was posted to Japan, and he looked around. I mean, like—you look around, clearly there’s different stuff going on. And because he was an engineer, he said, “I should measure this.”And the definition of culture that gels with what Professor Hofstede observed is this: any place where people share an arbitrary emotional preference—when enough of them share the same emotional preference—that’s a culture. So for example, I have an emotional preference for quality of life, as opposed to achievement. Neither one is better than the other, right? And most people around the world would say, “Yeah, you can have a bit of both.” But that’s what makes it such a good cultural dimension—because generally, some of us are going to lean to one side, and some of us to the other.Now, Professor Hofstede called that—in a most outdated and politically incorrect way, and I will say that—he called it masculinity and femininity. Because it was the only one of the differences he isolated—this preference for achievement, where you sacrifice quality of life—it’s the only one where, at the top end, where everybody's achievement-focused, you see any difference between the genders.So Japan, for example, is very much what he would’ve called “masculine,” but which we at the Culture Factor—which is the firm I work with—call motivation for achievement and success, right? Japan’s one of the top ones in the world. Everybody drives themselves.You know, Japan is the first place in the world to—well, I mean, there’s the Japanese word karoshi, you might know, which is death by overwork.Oh wow.And by the way, the first legal case for karoshi, brought by survivors against an employer—I believe, or at least rumor has it—happened at Dentsu. So there we go.Oh wow.But don’t quote me on that. Or broadcast it or anything like that. But you know—and that’s the point—men and women are differently predisposed to sacrificing quality of life. Sweden, at the other end of the spectrum—you can do this on a scale of one to 100—Sweden scores five. So it’s a very quality-of-life place. And there’s no difference in that attitude between men and women.Wow. And what—just for comparison’s purpose—what would the U.S. score on that? If Sweden’s a five, what’s the U.S.?Well, this is what I love to say. Because—which Americans are you talking about? This is an interesting one, because people talk about American culture. But I often say, you know, America’s not really a culture—America is a constellation of subcultures. So you would be surprised. America’s supposed to be competitive. But it is surprisingly less so than places like, you know, Germany, for example, which scores higher. There are—because America is on the top end of all of this—it’s not as high as Japan. But you’ll find American men are a bit more competitive.So you take millennials and Generation X men, for example—they're the ones who say, you know, and certainly the “greed is good” boomers, of whom I am an uncomfortable member of that cohort, are the ones who said, yes, you’ve got to give 110% all the time. And, you know, coming second is the first loser. Right? That’s this motivation for achievement and success. Well, haven’t you ever heard that?No, I hadn’t. I hadn’t heard that one.You young fellow, you. But that was a particular cultural bubble. And the emphasis, say, for example, on wellness, mental health, anxiety—among Generation Z—very, very big contrast. Now, that shows up in that work-life balance. People have observed it, and you can see it in the figures.Interestingly, young women are the ones who are keeping the flame of ambition alive, if you want to call it that—particularly millennial. So they’re the ones who do that. And that also means, along with this competitiveness, goes all kinds of other cultural artifacts, like interest in hard luxury.Hard luxury—you know, watches, for example. Watches, couture, right? Not soft luxury, like food, or soft luxury like hospitality, for example—treats, right? But those things—status symbols. And there are money status symbols. And there are what we’ll call—what I call, for want of a better word—status status symbols.What’s a status status symbol?Well, here’s a second dimension of cultural difference, and it’s called power distance. Are you hierarchical or egalitarian? Now, officially, the United States is supposed to be egalitarian. And historically, it always has been. So there's a natural tendency for people to want to display status and power distance in hierarchical cultures.So for example—Russia, China—they're both hierarchical cultures. If you're at the top of the tree, you get certain privileges. And that’s just the way it is. Whereas in the United States—low power distance. Or Australia—very low power distance. If you're at the top of the tree and you take some privileges, you're going to earn that one. Or, more to the point, you're going to pay for it.So, status symbols in the United States are how rich you are. Status symbols in Russia are how important you are. You know, you buy an SUV to drive in the USA. You get driven in one in Russia. Or India, or wherever. So those kinds of things—which are all data-driven—you can measure it. You know, when you ask people a whole lot of odd questions that seem to have nothing to do with whether or not you're likely to buy a watch, for example, it's just incredible to see that.Like, for example, if you sacrifice quality of life for achievement, you want to have something—you know, you can’t show off by going on a holiday and posting your hike on Instagram. You have to show it off with a watch. You have to show it off with an expensive car.What do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in this for you?Well, the joy in this is—I’ll go back to pattern recognition, right? I look around the world, and I’m kind of like, where’s the sense? What’s the sense of the world? You know, I kind of have to figure it out. That’s just me. It’s the way I’m wired. I discovered that late in life.And just the sheer ability—when you get this kind of unlocked thing that you can share with everybody, you know, in these things called people that can be so mysterious, and difficult, and frustrating—when you kind of say, yeah, I figured that out, that’s what... that’s why... that is where I get my professional—my professional, you know, pleasure from. That. Now, I get very enthusiastic about that.Yeah.And, you know, for example, part of my work now is looking at assets—film, often. And there are pre-test results. And clients come to me and say, “Look, we don't know why this ad works in this culture, and this ad doesn’t work in another culture. What’s the big thing?”And using these numbers, you can kind of go, Oh, what's going on here? And that's what I love about it. You know, it took me a long, long time to work out that I actually enjoyed math.Because, you know, when you're at school, and you're a bit of a weird kid whose attention is distracted, and you take an hour to do the 10 math problems the teacher has set for 30 minutes, and things—well, I got the impression I was bad at math. But you know, I actually kind of like it. Numbers—you see a spreadsheet of numbers—there's a pattern in it. Like, numbers tell stories. Incredibly rich.And you can do that. You can see that in the patterns of: Why do some consumers respond to this, and other consumers in other cultures or generations or cohorts or whatever—why do they respond? What's their—what’s the emotional thing, the emotional preference they have in common?How have things changed over the years, in terms of—you know, we talk all the time about culture, subculture, as a way of talking about things now. That wasn’t the case when I started out. How would you describe the way the marketing world gets culture now, versus maybe how they did when you started out? What’s the state, maybe, of cultural understanding these days, from where you sit? Do you feel like we’ve gotten better at it? Do you feel like we know what we’re talking about? I mean, of course, I’m asking you to make broad generalizations. Forgive me.Oh no—broad generalizations, yes. Let me take a little detour into broad generalizations, right?One of the things in the last decade of the 20th century, first decade of the 21st, and thereabouts, was this belief that—you know, you can’t stereotype. That everybody is entitled to be communicated with in the manner that they absolutely choose, and that’s perfect for them. And guess how we're going to figure this out? Not by asking them—but by using an algorithm that observes the behavior, right?And that was kind of... you know, in the name of not stereotyping, it led us down a path that denied our common humanity. There is now a great deal of reaction against that, because the more you personalize a message to its intended recipient, the less effective you become. I mean, this personalization—it really has a... the law of diminishing returns sets in fairly quickly, in all of that.Yes, if you're going to sell a minivan, you're probably not going to talk to people without kids. In spite of the fact there might be some single person who has a surfboard—or several surfboards—and he wants a minivan to sleep in, or whatever. Yeah, that’s great. We should accommodate him, says the politically correct marketing world. But really, marketing is about playing the odds. So you're going to talk to parents. But if you say, okay, for our particular kind of minivan, we want to talk to people who have, you know, between two and four children. And we believe they're going to be more progressive and well-educated. And they're going to prefer loud colors, because they want to make a statement and express themselves. Because just because they have kids doesn't mean they want to show themselves as conservative. And you do all of that, and you say, Are you talking to an audience of three people? Or whatever?No—we have things in common. Because of the generation we’re in, the cohort, the economic circumstances—all that kind of stuff. Or, which is what Professor Hofstede originally said, because of the way we went through our formative experiences.I am, for example, pretty much on the kind of low power distance side of things. Because that was the formative experience. In late 20th century America, when I came of age—yes, you can climb the social ladder if you study hard enough, work hard enough, and things like that.Other people, going through other generations, going through other formative experiences—where it doesn’t look possible that you’re going to have that opportunity for social mobility. Right? So they’re going to carry those values with them—not necessarily for the rest of their lives, because you do change your values as time goes on—but they’re very, very sticky. And the formative experiences are extraordinarily profound for you. And I still have trouble, you know, being guarded around people from a higher status. I’m either afraid of them, or I just say, I’m not going to pay attention to their status.Yeah.Right. I mean, I’m sensing that very, very strong nod from you, Peter—that you’ve kind of painted yourself into the same corner, right?Yep. Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah.But what people understand as culture in marketing nowadays is very difficult, because we tend to be transfixed by the changes in culture, as opposed to what’s profound and deep and important in culture. In culture, you don’t have a culture of one—no such thing. What do we share? Does that make us into a stereotype? Well, it makes us into a type.Yeah.Right? And I’m a type, you’re a type.Yeah.If I’m not a type, then what do I share with other human beings?Yes. I loved your earlier phrase about America. You know, I asked a question about a singular America, and you pushed back with the phrase, a constellation of subcultures. I’d just love to hear you talk more about that, if at all—for that same reason, too. And what you’re just saying reminded me of, I mean, it’s a cliché for anybody in the advertising world, but the idea of fame, which I think is something I learned late—that we benefit... you know what I mean? The value is in the fact that I know that you know, and that everybody else knows the thing, right? That there’s shared value in that—right? That things are famous. That’s culture. What’s that relationship I’m talking about now, would you say?Well, I’m reluctant to venture into the constellation of subcultures, because unless I have three hours to explain it—which I’m happy to devote—but I think that—I know that you are.We’ve already got a tenuous hold on the listeners right now. I’m not sure that we can do that. But thinking about something like criticism: in the United States, there are cultures whose formative experiences have been subjected to more criticism than, say, other Americans. So it might be somebody constantly saying, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough. Yeah, you’ve achieved this, but... you’re still too lazy. There are a number of different groups in the U.S. that are like that.And this dimension of cultural difference that I’ve called long-term optimizers, where you’re constantly told that you have to improve. And if you reach something that’s satisfactory, incrementally, little bit by little bit by little bit, you have to add to it. You can always be better. And you can’t be lazy and rest on your laurels. As opposed to those who say, Yeah, you’re great. You don’t have to change. You’re golden. Love yourself.That’s the two things. Now, I’m not going to go into all of these, but you do get—if you are subject to that kind of criticism in your formative years—then you’re going to be one of these people who says, I always have to improve.And there are two groups I’m going to nominate as that. I’m not going to go into it, but: Asian-Americans and African-Americans. Both, in their very, very different ways, have—on the whole—been told, Yeah, you can never rest. You don’t want people to think, you know, you’re lazy, or you’re not good enough, or something. So you always have to constantly push yourself. And that has so much—you know, again—it has a lot to do with expenditure patterns, for example.Do I say, well, there are some things I’m going to—and this is, you know, it’s crazy that it should be different—there are some things I’m going to invest in, like the watch or the car, whatever it is. But some things? Yeah, they’re not important. I’m just going to let it go. Like—and this is the classic thing—paper towels.Wait, tell me the paper towel story.Well, you know, have you ever heard of a luxury paper towel?No. Have I?There you go. Generic. It'll do. It doesn’t matter if you’re incredibly wealthy. You know, if you’re one of these people who says, I have to be constantly better, you’re not going to be constantly better in everything. You’re going to, you know, buy the cheapo paper towels.Like, Costco is one of the great—what we call—optimizer brands, where, you know, yeah, we’ll scrimp on the necessities, splurge on the luxuries. Buy in bulk versus buy the Rolex. And Costco made a lot of headlines when they started selling Rolexes, right?Yeah.So—quality basics versus those things where the brand really matters. You know, premium spirits, for example. Fashion. Couture. Accessories, right? I'm not going to make generalizations that could be misinterpreted, but there’s a great deal of investment—you know, you're not going to waste your money on unimportant things—but in both African American and Asian American communities, there’s investment in the things that matter. The material goods that matter, that are kind of worth it.As opposed to people who grew up like me—and I’ll talk about myself—who just said, Oh yeah, yeah, Timex watch, that’s better than a gas station digital watch, isn’t it? Which you used to buy for $3.99. But, you know, Rolex? Really? Am I going to spend the money on that? Now I’ll be the one to get the Cadbury chocolate as opposed to the generic house-brand chocolate, for example.I’m always curious to hear people talk about this, but—what’s the role of qualitative? Like, how do you learn? Do you have a point of view on research? And what’s the proper role of different forms of research to sort of understand the role of culture—for a brand, or for a client?Well, Peter, you and I have actually discussed this, I seem to recall, at some length. I sense a leading question. But there are a number of things I think we can observe about qualitative as we move into the second quarter of the 21st century. First of all—qualitative doesn’t get you information. I see you nodding in agreement on that.And it used to be—like when I first started in the industry, you know, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth—clients would come in and say, Oh, let’s do a few quick groups just to get a lay of the land. Just to do a quick thing. And, you know, they would do that. And all of a sudden, it would be... You’d get all kinds of unfortunate things. Because it was done in haste. And it was done superficially.Yes.Now, qualitative, I feel, is on the verge of a rebirth. Because there are some things you can only do with qualitative that you cannot do any other way—that no digital means is going to be able to substitute for. And part of that, even though you might use digital means to gather the input, to conduct it, is that things that ask a human being to use imagination—you can’t do that any other way.And, you know, AI will get very good at that—at creating things—but not imagining things, perhaps. Again, could surprise us. Never say never. So that’s important.So all of those techniques that I know we’ve discussed—like, for example, world-building. Like, for example, imagine you are here... imagine a person who would do X, or consume this brand, or use a library, or whatever. Imagine them. You know, when you have something that says imagine that, or imagine the person who...—anything where you start with the word imagine—that’s, to me, already on the right track for qualitative research.Yes. Can you be—I mean, this is the stuff that we've definitely talked about before, because it's so thrilling—but we share that clarity about that idea: the imagination. Can you say more? What are you thinking about when you think about imagination, or what are you pointing at when you call out the imagination as being within what qualitative does, and what other things don’t do?Well, let me answer that question in a very perverse way. I’ll talk about what it’s not. It’s not words, right? It’s stories. It’s not words. Use three words to describe so-and-so—yeah, I still use that technique on those rare occasions when I do qualitative. But one of the things I think—it’s not just stories—it’s pictures.If qualitative doesn’t involve some kind of visual stimulus and response, I’m kind of suspect of it, in some ways. And it might be where—that’s a challenge, because when you collect data by (and I’ll call it data) insights by digital means, it’s very easy to do it in words. And AI works much, much better with words than with pictures.True.And that’s the thing. And just as a complement to actual qualitative—one of the things I do is, oftentimes clients will have a concept or a word or something like that. And again, I don’t want to talk about any current projects, but if we use a word like, you know, a phrase like gaining recognition, that’s a concept. And you’ve expressed it in words.Translate that phrase into every cultural language you want to explore. Now—and do an image search on it. And, you know, it’s almost so crude that it’s laughable to do that. Because you’re—What’s your favorite research tool? Oh, I don’t know. Google Images? But it works. Absolutely works. Difficult when you get to subcultures, because you can’t necessarily look at lexical proximity—which is the fancy word I use to say what words seem to go along with these pictures, so we can reverse interpret them. It’s so simple, but it’s so powerful to see.When you do that thing called recognition—and I had to do this recently for a client—you see that recognition means thumbs up, if you’re in the United States. Thumbs up, you’re golden, employee of the month, you know—whatever.If you do that in, say, some Asian languages, recognition means—yeah, you pay respect to somebody who’s higher status than you. So it’s not everybody who can be so-called “recognized,” right?You look at recognition in various different languages, and it’s always the king or queen—or the, you know, or the authoritarian, by the way. Whereas in the U.S., recognition is about—yeah, it’s what we give to each other. Now, that’s a cultural difference that follows that power distance.Yeah, that’s amazing.And whenever, you know, a marketer comes to me and says, “We want—this is all about people feeling good about themselves, and this product makes you feel special, that you're being recognized for,” you’ve got to say, Well, hang on—that’s not going to fly in 60% of the world. So that’s a roundabout way of answering the question about qualitative.Yeah. Why so vital now? I mean, I love the idea that we’re maybe approaching a rebirth—I think rebirth is your line, is what you said. Lay that out for me—what’s the argument for the rebirth of Qual in the second quarter of the 21st century?The reason is that it’s the only way to get to emotions. Right?Yes.The imagination is the way to get to emotions. Because what you want to do—and I feel sure you agree with this—is that when we ask people direct answers to direct questions, there are two results.If you do it in our kind of—I’m saying “our,” meaning American, Western European kind of cultures—the only thing you’ll do is engage the frontal lobes of the brain. We’ll be dancing around up in the front, and people will over-rationalize and be logical and things like that.If we do it in what Hofstede called collective cultures, and what American anthropologist Edward T. Hall called high social context cultures—where people are woven into the social fabric—and you ask them a direct question, they’re going to consider, Why are you asking that question? And why are you asking it of me?So, that relationship is going to drive the answer. And what we, in our Western European, North American, first- and second-world cultures, would think of as the truth—it’s a very different thing. Because the truth is—well, Americans often use the phrase read the room. But in collective cultures—you know, the ones where people look first at who’s asking the question—they talk about reading the air.Really?And, you know, having lived in Japan and having a Japanese spouse, you’ll understand how this particular point is of vital importance to those of us with international marriages. In Japan—which is not a particularly collectivist country, particularly nowadays—but there’s a bit of that kind of natural Asian disposition toward it, there is a way to say no.Right.A high-context way of saying no. May I give you a Japanese no? A Japanese no is: “Why, what an excellent proposal you have for supplying our 10,000 widgets. That’s such high-quality merchandise, and such thoughtful execution. But if you think we’re going to pay that, you’re crazy. So, if we can come to an agreement on price, I feel sure we can do business together.” That’s a Japanese way of saying, Get lost. It’s called yes, but if.Oh really?Yeah. Yes, we love that. But are you kidding? If we can do this, then we’re fine.Yeah.But that’s a very high social context. And everyone in Japan knows when you’re being told no. But for many years, overseas businesspeople would go to Japan and say, Yeah, I think we got this deal! And... it’s not the case.So, when you’re using only words—particularly in these collective cultures—what you’re doing is you’re getting a diagnosis of the relationship between the questioner and the respondent.And that was one of the reasons why, of course, going back to the beginning of our chat, why we said, You’ve got to have pictures to show what a break means to Japanese people. Because they didn’t officially say, I expend my energy during the day and then replenish it at night, as opposed to Westerners who say, I get my energy at the beginning of the day, and then I go down at night.And—nobody would actually say that. That’s people like you—and from time to time, me—who are going to have to look at it and say, What are people saying about this? And just, What’s the story?Beautiful. Martin, I want to thank you so much. We could talk for hours. I love listening to you and learning about culture from you. So, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your wisdom with us.Oh, Peter—you know, it is such a pleasure to speak with you, at any time, in any capacity. I really enjoyed your questions. And you didn’t even cut me off, like, you know, like some loquacious people get cut off from time to time.So I think, you know, I’m ahead in this deal, I think.Beautiful. Thank you so much.Thank you, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Peter Trachtenberg is an author of memoirs, essays, and literary nonfiction who lives across the river in Catskill. He has taught writing at Bennington and Pitt, and has a newsletter: Not Dark Yet. His books include 7 Tattoos, The Book of Calamities, Another Insane Devotion, and The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York. I start all these conversations with the same question—one I borrowed from a friend of mine here in Hudson. She helps people tell their stories, and I haven’t found a better question to begin a conversation. So I borrow it. It’s a big question, though, and I tend to over-explain it, just like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer however you want—or not at all. The question is: Where do you come from? Okay. I’ve actually thought about this because I’ve listened to some of your interviews.Nice.I come from what is essentially a vanished world: middle-class New York. I was born in the 1950s and grew up in a neighborhood where almost all the kids went to public schools. My father didn’t own a car until he was probably in his 60s, and he didn’t own property until near the end of his life. That was the norm.It was also Bohemian New York—which still exists, but in a much smaller, vestigial form. People who make art, or whose lives are organized around creative work, can no longer afford to live in many parts of the city.I wanted to ask you about your book, The Twilight of Bohemia. When you say your life is organized around creation, what does that mean to you? I’d love to hear more about that.The popular stereotype of a Bohemian is someone who leads a disorderly life—lots of substance use, romantic and sexual excess, never making the rent, and so on. That image has been reinforced through operas, plays, movies, and television. But the model I look to comes from Tosca, the Puccini opera. There’s an aria called Vissi d’arte, which means “I lived for art.”To me, Bohemians are people whose lives are centered around making art. They might be painters, writers, dancers, performers—whatever the form. Most have had to do other things to earn a living, but art is the central force in their lives.You mentioned coming from a “vanished world.” Can you say more about what you meant by that? What was that world like?Sure. Some people would probably disagree and say there are still middle-class neighborhoods in New York—and there are, particularly in the outer boroughs. But it's not just about material conditions. It’s also about a set of expectations and values.In my case, it was an intellectual world, even though I was the first in my family to attend college. There was tremendous respect for learning. Some of that may have come from Jewish tradition, though neither of my parents were religiously observant.I discovered the arts as a source of excitement very early. I was an only child, and I’d entertain myself by telling elaborate stories. Once I learned how to write, I started putting them on paper. Reading became my main source of entertainment. Then, as a teenager, I found other kids who were similarly interested. My passions expanded to include music—especially jazz and rock and roll—and later, visual art.Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?When I was very young, I wanted to be an anthropologist. I was drawn to the idea of venturing into an unknown, “exotic” world—quote-unquote primitive, as the language went then. And I actually did that, at times, for my first book.What interested me then—and still does—is going somewhere unfamiliar and discovering something new. Sometimes that world is right next to me. In the case of my most recent book, it was a world I lived in but didn’t fully understand. I can explain more about that later.What was your model of an anthropologist? Where did that idea come from?Probably Bomba the Jungle Boy—a guy in a pith helmet making his way through the rainforest. The old colonial image of the anthropologist.Tell me where you are now. What are you up to these days?I live in the Hudson Valley of New York, about two and a half hours north of where I grew up. I write full-time. I still teach privately, but I’ve retired from university positions at the University of Pittsburgh and the Bennington Writing Seminars within the last two years.I just finished a book called The Twilight of Bohemia, which we can talk more about. I’m also returning to a novel called Ruination, which centers on the bankruptcy and death of Ulysses Grant—set around 1874–1875. I also maintain a Substack called Not Dark Yet, where I’m currently working on a long essay titled “Economies of Suffering.”So yes, I’m busy.Let’s talk about the book—The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York. I love that title. It really blows my mind wide open. How did you come up with it? What’s the book about, and where did the story begin for you?The story began when I lived in Westbeth illegally—as an unauthorized subtenant—for about 11 years. I had been spending time in the building since the mid-1970s because my best friend, a guy named Gaye Milius, lived there. When I moved in, I was subletting—illegally—his apartment on the 13th floor.It started as an attempt to make sense of his suicide in 2006. He took his life after the end of his second marriage, under really difficult circumstances. He’d spent a couple of months in jail on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, then moved to Colorado to care for his dying sister. Eventually, he returned to Westbeth. He was broke and deeply traumatized by his time in jail.I think a group of us—his friends—were trying, maybe without fully realizing it, to keep him alive. But it didn’t work. He took his own life.What followed was, in part, absurd—almost comic. In an effort to raise money, Gaye had illegally sold his lease to another friend, who then claimed the apartment. It turned into a kind of slow-motion Keystone Cops routine. This man threatened to sue me if I relinquished the apartment back to the building, which, legally, I was supposed to do.I had written a long essay about it—about the events leading up to Gaye’s death and what came after—but I realized at some point that something essential was missing. The essay was decent, but it lacked context. Specifically, it lacked Gaye’s context.When someone commits suicide, the people around them are devastated—but suicide, unfortunately, is not rare. People die in the most tragic, absurd, and pathetic ways all the time. What gave Gaye’s death a deeper meaning, what made it worth trying to understand, was that he had been an artist. He had pursued the gamble of making art. He had staked everything on it. And when he felt he was losing, he took his life. He felt he had to.To understand that, I realized I needed to write about the building he lived in—Westbeth. Because Westbeth is a building of artists. It's one of only two subsidized housing developments for artists in New York City—possibly in the country. Its 384 apartments, with a few exceptions, are occupied by people who make art in one form or another. That’s how it was designed: as a haven for artists, a place where they could live for a fraction of what the surrounding neighborhood charged. The idea was to give artists a start, help launch their careers, and then—eventually—they’d move out. But the problem was, no one moved out.What was the context that gave birth to Westbeth? How did a place like that come to be?It was a project of the Great Society. The building—or rather, the complex of buildings—was originally constructed between the 1860s and the turn of the 20th century. Eventually, it was consolidated and became the labs and offices of the Bell Telephone Company.Anyone with a background in science or engineering has heard of Bell Labs. This is where the first transatlantic radio broadcast occurred. It’s where the phonograph record and stylus were developed, where radar and a prototype digital computer emerged. Even the first television broadcast happened in those labs.And what’s the relationship between Westbeth and those labs?In the late 1960s, a partnership between the National Foundation for the Arts (which would become the National Endowment for the Arts, or NEA), led by Roger Stevens, and a private foundation—the J.M. Kaplan Fund, led by Joan Davidson—put up the money. I’m not sure if they purchased the building outright, but they had an arrangement with Bell, which had by then moved its headquarters to New Jersey, to repurpose the space as housing.They didn’t have the funds to tear it down and build something new, which would have been the typical approach. So instead, the architect Richard Meier—this was his first major commission, apart from a house he’d designed for his mother—essentially hollowed out the structure. He converted the old labs into 384 apartments, ranging from studios to three-bedroom units. Some of the apartments spanned two floors and were called “triplexes,” though I don’t think any were truly three stories.What was your first experience of Westbeth? When were you living there, and how did you first encounter it?I first encountered Westbeth through my friendship with Gaye, which began in 1976. He came to a New Year’s Eve party that my girlfriend and I were throwing in our tenement apartment on Bleecker Street. He showed up wearing a seersucker suit and a T-shirt he had made himself, appliquéd with two rows of latex dog teats. He was a few years older than me—maybe four or five—and I thought, this is the coolest guy I’ve ever met.Westbeth itself was—and is—a monolith. It occupies an entire square block in the far West Village, what we now call the Meatpacking District. It’s enormous, about three-quarters of a million square feet. The west side of the building faces the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, which at the time had no park. The north side borders Bethune Street, the south side is Bank Street, and the east side is Washington.The hallways were stunningly long and featureless, with doorways facing each other on either side. Each door typically had a black triangle pointing either up or down to indicate the direction of the staircase—important for firefighters, especially in the duplexes. To get to Gaye’s apartment, you’d take an elevator from the ground floor that stopped at floors 3, 6, or 9. Then you’d walk down a long, dizzying hallway to a second bank of elevators that could take you up to the 13th floor. The only way to reach his apartment directly from the street was if you had a key to a side door on West Street.He had a great apartment. He had a commercial lease, which meant he didn’t technically have to be an artist to live there, though he was one. He’d originally moved in as a painter, to a smaller unit. Apartments at Westbeth were assigned based on family size. If you moved in alone, you got a studio—no negotiation. Over time, you might be able to get a slightly larger place, but the only way to qualify for a duplex or triplex—maybe even a three-bedroom—was to have children. Income didn’t help you jump the line. In the early days, there was an income cap; you couldn’t earn more than $11,000 a year. That was in the early ’70s, which made it effectively middle-class housing.In fact, some original residents didn’t want it known they lived at Westbeth, because it was associated with low-income housing. Still, not everyone was poor, but the overall atmosphere was distinctly middle-class. Many people had families. Outside of my own childhood, Westbeth was probably my first real exposure to family life. There were always kids in the courtyard, kids on skateboards—one of the first places I ever saw that. The hallways were perfect for it.I’d always envied Gaye’s apartment. It was about 900 square feet, with 18-foot ceilings. He’d turned it into a triplex of sorts by stacking platforms one on top of the other. It had an incredible view of the Hudson. For a long time, my screensaver was a photo I’d taken from the roof, looking out over the river.Somewhere—maybe in another interview—you said the book was an attempt to pay attention? Can you say more about what that meant?I’d been hanging out at Westbeth throughout the ’70s and ’80s. When Gaye and his first wife traveled—which they did often and for long stretches because she worked in finance and traveled for her job—I would dog-sit.In 1995, after he split from Molly, he married a woman named Karen, and they moved to the Eastern Shore of Virginia. He wanted to keep the apartment, though, and had become a flea market picker—someone who finds things in garages, basements, sheds, and sells them at the 26th Street flea market. He had an amazing eye for that kind of thing—just brilliant.So I sublet from him. I paid him $900 over the rent, which still came out to less than $1,500 a month. The arrangement was that he could come up once or twice a month and stay in the dog room—the small space I’d used when visiting in the past. Every surface in that room was covered in dog hair. You’d have needed two shop vacs to clean it.He was paranoid. He told me not to introduce myself to the neighbors, not to speak to anyone, because, in his mind, everyone hated us. He believed they were jealous of his apartment—which they might have been, had they known about it. So I kept a very low profile.I didn’t recognize most of the artists who lived there as “famous.” They weren’t celebrities in the traditional sense. But within the art world, yes—there were known figures. Hans Haacke, a conceptual artist who I believe is still alive, was there. So was Lorraine O’Grady, the conceptual and performance artist who just passed away in December. Nam June Paik, the video artist and pioneer of using video as a medium, also lived there. I’m not sure how to pronounce his last name, but he was the first to treat video as art.I remember that part of what drew me to this story was the meaning of Westbeth itself. It seems like such a rare, even exotic, thing—a kind of public commitment to making space for artists in a city. That doesn’t feel common anymore. There’s something beautiful in its original promise, and I wonder what you discovered—about art, about the city, about what Westbeth is or was meant to be—as you tried to tell the story of your friend and the building.One of the deepest things I discovered was that Westbeth challenged my notion of what success in art means.Since the 1980s—and I’m speaking across disciplines here: visual art, writing, dance, theater, music—success has largely come to mean celebrity. High profile. Money. The person standing alone in the center of a bright, concentrated beam of achievement.In the '70s and '80s, that might have been someone like Eric Fischl or Julian Schnabel—who, incidentally, has a three- or four-story townhouse just a few blocks from Westbeth that he renovated himself. It might be someone like Pipilotti Rist. Or, among writers, someone like Jay McInerney at the time. I don’t know who the big literary earners are now—maybe Emma Cline, who lives on the West Coast and gets large advances. Or a performer like Mark Morris in dance.The dominant model has been individual recognition—high visibility and financial reward. A naive way to look at Westbeth would be to say, “You’ve never heard of most of these people. Not all the work is good”—and by “good,” I mean work I think is good. But still, those people, that work, are vital to the spirit of the building. And to the spirit of art. Because art isn’t just an individual endeavor. It’s also—and maybe more essentially—a communal one. That’s how it began.If you travel in traditional societies—say, in West Africa or Southeast Asia—you’ll often find that every village has several artists. And when their work is sold, it’s sold together. All the masks are presented side by side. All the bracelets, the cloths, the carvings. It’s not individualized in the way we’ve come to expect. You don’t brand yourself or protect a niche. There’s a gold district. A mask district. A batik district.This ethos aligns more with medieval art than with the art market of today. Think of the cathedrals at Chartres or Reims. No one knows who built them. They were the work of thousands, of generations of architects and artisans. Whole districts participated.So what do we make of that?I’d say there’s an ecosystem for art. And Westbeth is a miniature version of one.First, it’s supported. Residents pay rent that’s a quarter—or even a fifth—of what people pay in the surrounding neighborhood. That alone makes it possible to live there. Most of the residents still have a “B job,” but it can remain secondary to their art. And the building houses a range of people: a few who’ve achieved some degree of recognition—though I wouldn’t say any are wealthy—and many others who aren’t known at all, but who contribute in essential, sometimes mysterious ways to the life of the place.Some contribute materially. Westbeth has committees: a beautification committee that plants flowers along Bethune Street; a visual arts committee that organizes shows of residents’ work and manages the rental of gallery space. There are two large galleries in the building. The Whitney Museum, which is now located just a few blocks away, has even held its annual staff show at Westbeth. So, yes—there’s a whole ecology here. A model of mutual support, collective energy, and shared space. Something beautiful. And rare.It's amazing. One of the people I interviewed was a visual artist, a painter named Jack Dowling, who had essentially stopped painting in the early 70s about the time he moved into the building because his apartment was so small, or at least his first apartment. He became the director of the visual arts committee for 12 years, in which capacity he curated 12 years of art shows.Those art shows are really important in the life of the building, especially the winter holiday show, because it's where these people show who they are to their neighbors. They show their work to their neighbors for the first time. You might invite your neighbor into your studio, but there's no other opportunities for everybody to see what you do.I would say that in a way, West Beth is a compressed version of what the city used to be like, or certain parts of the city. That's what Soho used to be like, for example, in the 1970s.Is this the twilight? When you talk about the last artist, you're talking about a way of being creative or being related to art in the city that's no longer tenable.Exactly. There still are many artists living in the city. They are either very wealthy, they're people who've already been established, or they're people who are living, in their 30s and 40s, they're living with three or four roommates in Ridgewood, in rather remote neighborhoods of Queens and the Bronx or Brooklyn.There's something about this I'm imagining you as an anthropologist in the art culture of New York. What was your experience of researching the book? Is that a fair assessment of what it was like to research this book and to write this book?What was it like?Well, I'm an anthropologist who also has a foothold in that culture. I no longer live in New York. I often had the feeling that I was returning to my roots and looking at an alternate life that I might have led, if I hadn't left the city.As far as I'm concerned, I've always been primarily a creative writer. But I've worked as a teacher, I've worked as a journalist, I've worked as a publishing freelancer. My life has mostly been marginal.Marginal? What do you mean? I mean, financially precarious. I didn't start teaching in a university until I was in my 50s. And I'm actually glad that it worked out that way. But for a long time, I sometimes didn't know if I was going to make my rent. Yeah. I went through periods of my life without insurance, et cetera, et cetera. I was returning to the roots of the art world in the city, but sort of the basement of the art world.You know, the bargain basement, the place where people are not famous.Yeah.Maybe they don't aspire to be famous. Right. Yeah, well, that's what I was curious about. I mean, you paint such a clear... I mean, I love that description that you had a sort of a spotlight of accomplishment on that person, that sort of the individual celebrity as the model of success for the artist.It sort of overwhelms any other picture or any other possibility. It's very much... I mean, it's a model that really... I mean, it's always been around.It's the equivalent of the movie star or the literary star, but it really is a product of the 1980s. It's a product of a time when enormous amounts of money poured into the art world, which is a direct result of the Reagan years and the rearrangement of wealth in the country. Yeah.Some people had huge amounts of money. The critic Donald Cuspitt said it's like that money had to blot something up. Oh, wow.People wanted to do something with it. What they did was buy art. Yeah. Which, you know, catapulted people's reputations, made certain artists collectible, often when they were quite young. You know, traditionally, it took decades to build a reputation as somebody who was a great artist, somebody who people would want to collect. And now this was occurring in a space of years.Right. And it's only accelerated since then.I want to hear you talk about writing. When you think about yourself as a writer or as an artist, what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?The joy is... some of it is because I'm primarily a nonfiction writer. It's always the joy of finding something out, of, you know, and it might be finding out a fact or a story. It might be the joy of discovering the right way to say something. Yeah. You know, and I'm aware that there are all sorts of alternate ways that I could say something.Tell me about the Ulysses Grant book. How did this come to be something that you're that you want to find out about?Well, I've always been interested in him. I mean, it's partly... I'll tell you what interested me about him was that he died broke or thinking that he was broke on the edge of bankruptcy.Wow.Shortly before his death, when he could no longer speak—he had throat cancer, the result of smoking twenty cigars a day for decades—Grant could only communicate by writing notes. One of the last things he wrote to his doctor, and I’ve seen the actual notebook at the Library of Congress, was:“Most men are nouns, but I seem to be a verb.” And then he added: “That is, a word that signifies to be, to do, or to suffer. I signify all three.”My God.I know. One of the great mysteries of Ulysses Grant is that the people around him couldn’t decide if he was deeply profound or deeply oblivious. Not when it came to the conduct of war—there, he was unquestionably sharp—but as president, it was harder to tell.He reminds me of Chauncey Gardiner, in a way.Yes, in some ways, he was like Chauncey Gardiner. Smarter than that, of course, but he had that same enigmatic quality. He was laconic. And I think it was James Garfield—who later became president himself and was assassinated—who made that observation.During Grant’s presidency, he was surrounded by corruption. Yet it seems clear that he himself wasn’t corrupt. He was absolutely straight. But he couldn’t say no to friends. He was overawed by wealth and by wealthy people.It’s amazing. Just free associating a bit—what you said about Grant reminded me of something from my own childhood. I grew up outside Rochester, and George Eastman—of Eastman Kodak—also famously took his own life.Eastman? As in Kodak?Yes, George Eastman of Kodak. Toward the end of his life, he had some sort of spinal fusion. He was in a lot of pain. But he committed suicide. And I’ll never forget his suicide note. You quoting Ulysses Grant brought it back to mind. Eastman’s note said something like, “I have done it all. Why wait?”Wow.Right? I had never encountered that kind of—hubris, maybe? Or just finality. But he was a giant—the Brownie camera, the whole photographic revolution. It left an impression on me. Anyway, I want to come back to The Twilight of Bohemia. You’ve been promoting the book. What has that been like? I think you had a reading at Westbeth itself. What was it like to tell the story there, in that space, to that audience?It was fantastic. Really. The place was packed. And I was reading to the very people I’d written about.I was anxious about it. People generally don’t like being written about. Even when it’s not critical, they often find something to be upset about—something that feels like a betrayal or misrepresentation. I’ve experienced it myself. Every time I read a profile of myself, there’s always at least one thing that feels off. And there’s nothing you can do about that.Surprisingly, the only pushback I received was from someone who asked, “Why didn’t you write more about the vibrant young tenants who’ve moved in recently?” And it’s true—there are younger people living at Westbeth now. But the population is still predominantly folks in their sixties and seventies.Part of that is simply the rate at which apartments turn over. But I had to admit: I began writing this book just before COVID. I signed the contract in 2019. My plan was to come into the city a few times a week, do interviews in shared or semi-public spaces, and hopefully meet people through each other in that way—very organically.Instead, the day I did my first interview, the city went into lockdown. And Westbeth, being home to so many elderly residents, was even stricter than the rest of the city. You couldn’t even deliver food to someone’s door. You had to leave it at the front desk.So the interviews all had to be remote—on Zoom or by phone. Some people didn’t know how to use Zoom. It became a sort of game of telephone. One person would introduce me to another, who’d introduce me to another, and so on. Most of them were older. Not all—but most.What’s the state of Westbeth now? Is it still functioning as a home for artists, or has it become just another apartment building?It’s still a home for artists. You still need to be an artist to get in—unless you’re acquiring a commercial lease, and I’m not sure any new ones are being offered. It’s no longer federally subsidized in the way it once was, though I believe the Kaplan Foundation is still involved.According to the building’s administration, it’s now self-supporting. Though it still receives some assistance. For instance, it gets a tax abatement from the city—because otherwise, the taxes would be astronomical.It also still receives some federal funding. After Hurricane Sandy, the entire basement flooded. And Westbeth got “build-it-back” grants from the Biden administration to help with the repairs.Wow.Yeah.Well, we’ve got just a little bit of time left before we wrap up...It is meaningful to me as a dual phenomenon. First, as a community of artists. It’s not a commune by any means, but those gallery shows really matter—they're enormously important to the spirit and ethos of the building. It’s also an example of middle-class housing. Like the kind I grew up in.And maybe this is just nostalgic or sentimental, but to me, the spirit of New York was always the spirit of a middle-class city. One of the tragedies of New York now is that it’s become a city of the super-rich and, on the other end, a population of people who are marginalized—lower-middle-class, impoverished, or entirely destitute and homeless.And what of Bohemia? How do you think about Bohemia in the Hudson Valley? There’s obviously a relationship.There’s definitely a relationship. Artists here face similar pressures. Not quite as extreme, since housing is still somewhat more affordable—but it’s heading in the same direction.For example, I lived in Tivoli for years. We couldn’t afford to buy a house there. We could’ve continued renting, and maybe that’s what a true Bohemian does—just keeps renting. But my wife and I, now in our sixties, really wanted to own a home. So we moved to Catskill. It’s about ten miles north—maybe half an hour away.And how is it in Catskill?I wouldn’t say I have a real community here. Some of that’s complicated. There’s also just no central gathering place. I mean, there’s Citiot. Which is… okay. I just don’t like the name. Is there a place like that in Hudson? A gathering place where you know you’ll run into people?There are likely several. That’s how I’d put it. There are many places where that might happen, but is there one place that serves that purpose for everyone? Not really. Tivoli was smaller, so there was Tivoli General. For me, back then, it was also our friend John Corcoran’s studio. We’d hang out there, especially when it was still in the garage.Yeah. Or Murray’s, when it was really flourishing.Right. There was definitely a time when I felt like I’d run into everyone from “my” Hudson—though not all of Hudson. You know what I mean? When there were fewer choices.But that was a long time ago. Now there are so many different subcultures. It feels fragmented. If I were going to do another long nonfiction project, I’d consider doing a book about Hudson.Yeah? What’s the appeal? What draws you?Well, I’d organize it around Warren Street and Fairview. Fairview is technically zoned as part of another community, but to me, it’s still Hudson. And it really captures the class divide—the way creativity is tied, or yoked, to class in this town.Can you unpack that a little? What do you mean?Well, for all I know, there may be plenty of artist studios on Fairview or along Columbia or State Street. But the galleries—the ones that are visible, marketable—are all on Warren. That’s upper-middle-class and wealthy Hudson. That’s where the art is seen.Which brings us back to this idea of Bohemia. I loved how you described it earlier—a life organized around art, around making things. What does that mean in 2025?I don’t think we have a complete answer. Unless you’re someone who lightning strikes—someone whose work is recognized and rewarded fairly quickly—it’s harder than ever to cobble together a living as an artist.Yeah. We only have a couple of minutes left, but I want to say—I really feel a connection with your background. You grew up inside the art world, or at least found your way into it early. You dove in, and you found home there.I think about my own suburban childhood—it felt very banal. I loved stories, comic books, sure, but I don’t think I really encountered art. Do you know what I mean? I don’t think I’d ever met someone who truly organized their life around making things. I remember saying this at John’s studio—he was an artist. And it hit me that I hadn’t met many people like that before.Well, for example, what you do—your profession—it’s a kind of anthropology. It involves writing, listening, telling stories. You’re documenting the human world. The closest analog would be a commercial artist. You get paid for it.That’s kind. That’s nice of you to say. I don’t think of myself as someone participating in art.If I were going to make distinctions, I’d call it applied art rather than fine art. Like someone who paints for advertising. I learned that from Milton Glaser, who I once interviewed.Wow—Milton Glaser.Yes. I ❤️ NY—that’s him. A brilliant mind.I once wrote a piece for Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, about people who work in what I called “the desire industry”—advertising, fashion, branding—and how they reconciled that with a more contemplative or spiritual path. They weren’t all practicing Buddhists, but they moved in that sphere.What did you find out from that?One of the most memorable conversations I had was with Robert Thurman. Of course—Uma Thurman’s father. And a major figure in Tibetan Buddhism. His wife had been a fashion model, and he was this towering authority on Tibetan thought. What stuck with me was his clarity around desire. He said, essentially, that desire is everywhere. It animates the world. Our entire economy runs on it—on the exploitation of existing desires and the creation of new ones.But it’s all illusion. And still, people practice. Even under the most hostile circumstances. He talked about the Tibetan people, living under occupation in a country where the dominant regime is actively trying to stamp out Buddhism—and yet, they practice. Either in secret, or in exile. They keep going.That’s beautiful.Yeah.Well—I want to thank you so much. This has been a joy. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and appreciate your time.Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Michelle Mattar is the founder of brand building firm Practice. Prior to founding Practice, she served as Creative Director at Ritual, and worked as a Designer at Red Antler. Her work has been featured in Fast Company's Innovation by Design awards and Monotype's Type Trends.So I start all these conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and I haven't really found a better question to kind of start a conversation sort of out of the blue. But it's a big question, so I over-explain it the way that I'm doing right now. Before I ask, 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? Again, you're in total control.I love this question. Such a good thought starter. I think I might have two answers here.The first is in terms of just background. I come from two really different cultures, a very blended background. My family immigrated to the US, and my mother is Swedish, which is a culture of being quite reserved, very respectful, very organized, a very peaceful country.And my father is Lebanese, which is a chaotic country where they’re very outspoken. They don't necessarily keep opinions to themselves. There's a lot of life and action and disorganization.So I would say I have a very strange background of two very different cultural types of ways of being, which definitely informs my own family's culture and how I grew up.The other thing I would say, which is perhaps a bit less lighthearted, more serious, is that I come from a family that had a big moment of having to survive. And that has definitely informed who I am today.When I was six, my father was diagnosed with cancer. Just out of poor luck, the next year my brother was diagnosed with cancer. Through my whole childhood, we had two very sick people in the household.I think that surviving looks really different to other people through that. For a young child like myself, I found creativity and escapism as a method of survival. And I think that's really, if you ask me where I came from and who I am today from that background, a lot of it came from that experience.Yeah. What was the experience? What was the challenge? Can you tell me a story about being, that word "blended," you know, growing up with two very distinct kinds of cultures?Yeah, I think just in terms of our family, like we were always having these giant get-togethers. We have a huge family. We all love to cook. To me, this is extremely Lebanese, but it's got a lot of rules. It's got a lot of quiet expectations. It's very organized. Everyone silently knows their part. And this is such a Swedish way of being.So I think when I think of our big get-togethers as a family and what that looks like, it feels really unique to me. And I'm actually really proud of it. It's not a negative, but it's certainly a bit unusual when I see it all.And how are your brother and your father doing?My brother survives. My father didn't. He passed away after a struggle of nearly six years, but they thought he was going to last much less than that.I think that's a huge testament to the fact that he really wanted to be there. But my brother is doing great. He has some complications, but he runs a nonprofit that he founded. He was in high school, and it's called Student Movement Against Cancer. I think he's found a lot of personal meaning through that lived experience.Yeah. Do you have a memory of what you, young Michelle, wanted to be when you grew up?Yes. I was maybe seven or eight, and I really wanted to be an animal photographer. My mom would buy me disposable cameras, and they were a mix of stealth shots of squirrels and my dog. She would just get rolls and rolls of the same pictures developed just to allow me to entertain that dream.Yeah. What kind of pictures of squirrels?I would just stealthy-stalk them. Feel like I was out in nature. I was a Nat Geo photographer, but I certainly was an amateur. Definitely a lot in my imagination there, but I knew it was something creative, right? Like I thought photography might be something I wanted to do and something adventurous.And where were you when you were stalking the squirrels? Where did you grow up?We moved to New Jersey, just like 10, 15 minutes outside of Newark.Nice. And where are you now? So to catch us up, where are you now? What are you doing? What's your day to day?Yeah. So I live in Brooklyn. I've been here with one quick West Coast stint since college. I went to Pratt, which is an art school actually in Brooklyn, not even in Manhattan. I run Practice. It's a brand-building firm. We're six people. I started it four years ago in March. Before that, I was an independent doing very similar work.So day to day, I partner with either brand-new ideas, venture funds, or founders and work to bring them to market. If that means research, naming the company, building the brand identity, everything to do with it—the packaging even. Oftentimes we're testing and learning and helping to validate market interest in the product development, and then all the way through to bringing that to launch and marketing.We're doing a lot of this, especially in the last two years, working with established brands that really need to figure out their next chapter, or they're ahead of a big pivot and reentering the market. So major rebrands, even renaming and relaunching of pretty large scale—I would say not massive mega-scale, but maybe 250-plus employee companies.Yeah, well, congratulations on four years and starting your own thing. What's it been like, the first four years of Practice?I would say the first two years felt like getting my sea legs. Like when the boat would rock, I felt it. And the last two years have been really different, and I'm really glad that in those first two years I buckled myself up. I certainly didn't do things perfectly, but I made a point to learn every time because I've really had a lot of fun these last two years.And then in terms of just what it looks like, I guess quantitatively, we were four people steadily. We've grown in the last two years to six. Initially, I just hired two people. So every year, we've kind of stepped change. It is intentional to be small. I don't really want to scale it. I actually have had opportunities to make it bigger and decided to go the opposite way.When did you first discover that you could do this for a living?Kind of accidentally. Well, I guess not really. I went to design school. The whole reason I discovered design as something that I wanted to do was because of what I said earlier about escapism and imagination.We couldn't travel anywhere having two really sick people in the household. So I kind of traveled by going online, and I got into coding at a very young age. I bought my first domain name with my mom's permission and credit card at 11 years old. I was creating WordPress sites all through middle school and high school.What was the domain though? What did you get?I owned Juicebox as my moniker because I wasn't allowed to use my name, which then was purchased. So it was my first investment. Later, I moved on to something—I think it was like Adorkable or something really nerdy and embarrassing, like what your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) screen name would have been. Yeah. And I had a blog. I had design resources. I would publish digital art or drawings I was making.But so you sold the Juicebox? You made money off of that?Yeah, yeah, I did.How long did you have that?I think it was maybe like seven or eight years. And then I got this email to my WHOIS domain information. And I was like, "Mom, what do I do about this?"I wasn't actually using it a ton at the time. I had changed to this new moniker. My mom—she was kind of watching what I was doing and making sure I was being careful. I always knew that she was aware of it. I don't think I knew to the degree that now, as I've gotten older, I realize she read everything I was posting.Which I probably would have too if it was my daughter. But I think I just decided I wanted a different moniker online because I couldn't use my name.Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, was it a... it sounds like a, like a... I mean, not exactly rags to riches, but an 11-year-old domain—you cashed out on an amazing URL.Yeah, I mean, it felt good. I had like a little budget going to college that was meaningful to me at the time. I felt rich at the time.What do you remember about choosing Juicebox? How did Juicebox come to be your first domain?I was making digital art. This is a weird backstory, but I couldn't afford—or at least I hadn't proven to my family that I was going to be good enough at this stuff—to get Adobe products because they were really expensive. So I had this thing called PaintShop Pro, and it was like a much cheaper, free version. It had the pen tool, but the pen tool, when you saved the file, didn’t save as a vector. You would draw as a vector, but it would save at whatever resolution it was.I found out that I was not the only person doing this, and that there was a small community of people making the same art I was making. We called it Vexel art—vector and pixel. I had created a bunch of that art, and one of my favorite pieces I made was this illustration of a lunch box that was a little funky and weird and different colors. I really liked this Juicebox and the label I had made on it. So I took that little icon from it and was like, oh, I'll just use this. I think it just came from a drawing of mine.Yeah, it's amazing.Yeah, very online.What's that?I've said I've been very online my whole life. Yeah. I think that Juicebox came in the middle of answering the story of how you discovered this work. When did you first discover you could make a living, I guess, building brands?Yeah, okay. So I went to college for design and I knew how to code, so I had good internships. By default—not really asking what do I want to do, but rather, what am I capable of—I thought I was going to become a web designer.I applied to an agency, Red Antler, as a web designer, and I got an interview there. The creative director, who’s also one of the co-founders, Simon Andres, looked at my portfolio and told me that I could have a job there, but that he didn't think I was a web designer. He thought I was a brand designer.I had applied for an open role, and I was just given a different job that I had not applied for. And I said yes. I think there was a piece of my portfolio where, for a very long time—six months, I think—I had kept a diary, making a logo a day for each day. I think that was probably why. He saw that project and wanted to see me do more of that and less of the websites.Were those logos—sorry to interrupt you—were those logos for imaginary companies or for companies that already existed? What was that project?It was ways to just describe things that happened in my day. So I kept a diary of what was going on, and I remember one of them that comes to mind was a day I had a final project. I was in college, and it was a bound book. I had spent all day printing and formatting and perfecting these prints, and there were errors, and it took twice as long.So I made this logo that said "print," and it had those sketchy lines that you get when your printer is running out of ink. It was just like whatever memento of the day, and I translated it into a phrase or symbol to create a memory. I made a big poster with a grid of all the logos for the final.And what was your time at Red Antler like? I mean, they seem to... I mean, I know them to be kind of the poster child of a particular moment in brand building and identity design, right?Yeah, it was the best big first job ever. I definitely came in at a time where, when I would say Red Antler, people kind of knew who they were, and by the time I left, it felt like everyone knew who they were.One of the very first projects I was put on and saw launch was the mattress company, Casper. I think there was just a lot of... it was a time where I remember the meetings would be like, "We signed this new client, and it's the Warby Parker of blank."There was so much of this: get things online, get things with money-back guarantees. But I learned a lot because they had a high volume of work in all different categories. So one week you're designing a fashion brand, the next week you're working on a new Silicon Valley bank idea, the next week you're working on the rebrand of—this is a real project—Foursquare.As a designer, I could not use the same devices over and over. It didn't apply. It was like learning a whole new thing each time, and I had to really build a very robust creative palette for myself.Also, it was there where I started writing into my work. When there wasn’t enough copy for something, I would just write it. Leadership there pointed out that I was a really good writer.It was there where I got the inkling that I would be able to do a lot of the work that I'm doing today. I didn't actually do it in my role there; I just got enough feedback where people were like, "Oh, let's use that," or "That's good," or "That's a great idea," to know that I had enough of a baseline skill to really develop it.Yeah. You describe Practice as a brand-building firm. I'm always curious about the language we choose about ourselves. Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to... yeah, came to what Practice is and how you talk about it?Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a great segue. Since I left Red Antler, I was pretty young—I was 23 when I left—and I have been self-employed ever since, which is a decade now. It really has two distinct chapters.The first chapter was just as an independent, working on a freelance basis. The way I was working and how I got my first round of clients was that I didn't have a great network as a designer, but I had a pretty good one when it came to early-stage funding and founders.People were referring me on. I would help people create investor materials with temporary brands at a time when they really needed to convince investors that they could create this glossy millennial brand—that they were going to be able to just "sex up" a category. Creative was a differentiator for a lot of these companies, and they needed someone like me.So I was building these decks while I was figuring out what to do next. Honestly, I was just a bit burnt out. I had a lot going on, but also by fault of myself. I burnt out because I was so young that I just didn't know you could say no. I would just do it all. Everything that came my way—I had no idea it was an option to say, "That's too much."Eventually, I really needed a break. As I was just trying to figure out what that was and get a hold on what my burnout was actually doing to me, those people went out, used those materials, raised funding, and came back. They were like, "We've got investment. We have to build a brand. Do you want to do it?"That's how I landed my first set of clients. It wasn't totally intentional. I never left saying, "I'm going freelance" or "I'm going independent," but that's how that chapter started.For six and a half years, I was like a one-woman show making brands. Every project, I had a different seat at the table that a design background wouldn't have traditionally gotten me because I was so early-stage. I was the only person that was joining after a founder, oftentimes for six months until they made their first hire.I was with them solving all sorts of details. They were delegating things to me that typically weren't delegated. For me to be able to design packaging, we had to figure out the form factor. We had to source the materials. I had to work through the supply chain with them. I had to look at the COGS (cost of goods sold) and the margin.Ultimately, each level that I went more, every brand that I launched, I gained a new skill set, a new understanding, and a fundamental empathy for what it means to build a brand.I stayed in touch with all these people, saw them scale, saw the pain points, and created a full second set of empathy for what it means to run a brand. Through the course of that, I would look at how I was delivering work, and I felt like it was kind of broken.My big, depressing, pessimistic moment in my career was when I realized: I'm a PDF designer. I'm not a brand designer. These things don't actually look like what I'm making or all this stuff. And I thought, well, what if that wasn't the case? How could I fix that? So I developed my brand-building practice—that's what I was calling it when I was independent.As I got more intentional about that and kept doing it, the more successful the brands were getting. Eventually, I had all this new business in my inbox—so much more than a one-woman show could ever execute on. I realized I was saying no to things because I was scared of scaling. Ultimately, I spent, I think, like six or eight months—I can't remember exactly—but I spent a lot of time thinking about, if I started a company, what would it be?To me, it felt like a natural progression. I had built this brand-building practice. I had really kind of created my own recipe for how to build a brand. So calling it Practice felt like a really natural progression.Why it is a brand-building firm is because, in the time when I was iterating and developing how to build brands, I realized that brand identity—which is often what people still come to us for; they recognize that and see value in that—but they need a lot more than that.And I help them identify it. Brand identity is just one Swiss army toolkit part of what it actually takes to build a successful brand. Brand building requires a fundamental amount of research and understanding of the market so that you can successfully position it. You have to be really, really well aware and really, really well informed—not just from a business perspective, but also emotionally.How are you going to resonate with people? Where are they? How do you meet them where they are? It means distilling that into the right message. Then design is a tool that helps communicate that message.It also means making it the right experience. It means considering the big details and the small details and how a brand system can flex from a big brand moment to something transactional, to something more serious, and still have the same DNA—but not feel like step-and-repeat.And it means building more than a brand, more than a product, actually. We expect a lot from brands today—to do more than just be the product they sell. A lot of that shows up in how brands drive community or different conversations.That means having the right values they can show up with. How is the team going to scale with that? How do they know what's on-brand and what's not? What they're working towards? What's their North Star?So brand building to me is a very complex thing that we offer. Brand identity is just one part of it. It wouldn't be right to call ourselves a design studio because design is just one thing we do. It wouldn't be right to call ourselves a strategy studio because we do much more than that.What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?There's a lot. I think for me as a person, it's maybe different from me career-wise or creatively. For me as a person, I love that I get to really make a change and a difference.When we come into these organizations—let's say in a rebrand—we're listening first. Before we ever touch anything, we have this whole audit process where we are interviewing people, doing a lot of research and qualitative work, and making sure we're getting a lot of feedback in so that we're really hearing them.We're designing this next evolution not just to make a brand perform better, but actually inside-out—to make everyone's connection to it and their work involved in it more meaningful. So I feel a lot of purpose in what I'm doing. Part of why Practice is small is because, as someone who makes brands, I don't think the world needs more brands. I think the opposite. We just need brands to do better. So I find purpose in helping brands do better. But, you know, like career-wise or creatively, I love that I get to become like a secondhand expert in a new thing every three to six months. I find it really fun. I have a lot of random knowledge. I don't know what to do with it all the time, but I learn from super smart people.We have a client right now, and they have a chief medical officer, and they have their own facility that cost $5 million to do product development. Just learning from these people who have such rigor for what they do and trying to distill that down to a consumer—I learn so much. So it's always fun. Creativity or inspiration is never lacking when you're challenged with something like that. Every time.Yeah, I want to hear more about—I mean, I love, you said so many things just there that I really want to follow up on. But the first one is this idea that, as somebody who builds brands, I don't think the world needs more brands. We just need brands to do better. Can you tell me more about what that means or what are the implications of that? What does that ask of you?Yeah. Well, certainly something it asks of me is, if someone comes to us and they say, "We need a rebrand," I have this really strong filter of: we are not some blow-up or last-ditch effort. If you are going to really examine your business and rethink what it is and put it back out there, what is that purpose? What's driving that?What I get really inspired by—when we land these projects where we’re totally aligned philosophically—is that oftentimes what's happening is we have an opportunity to challenge a category. That means, by creating a category leader, we're telling all the dinosaurs that are doing a bad job, "You've got to catch up now."We're kind of cleaning up the category by making competition. So I feel like there's definitely a lot that you can do when you thoughtfully put a brand to market that means other people need to follow suit.Yeah, can you—I mean, that's super exciting. I can feel the competitive will in what you've just said. Can you tell me a story about that, about the importance of having a competitive vision like that, and that it is a leadership position to build a brand in a way? Maybe that's what I'm hearing you say, that when you take responsibility for a brand, you're taking responsibility for a category.Yeah, and that's in part because we're filtering for people who have great products that have a great purpose behind what they're doing, right? Like, I wouldn't sign on someone where we have to craft up some fake narrative to help sell something through that's awful.I wish I could talk about this one we have right now in detail, but they are certainly creating a better product, and there's nothing like it on the market. This is a product in the medical and nutrition space.I can't share everything, but they did a study that showed how it impacts people who are really, really sick. This is a product that, yes, you can get it through insurance, but also you can buy it as a consumer.There's a huge change in people's health outcomes with this. And what's happened is a lot of these companies have cut corners. So when people need nutrition the most, they're putting a bunch of junk in it.There's just such an opportunity to make that better. What does it mean if nutrition can be better? What does it mean for healing? What does it mean for how people feel?I think there's definitely a lot of drive to say, why are we doing this? What do we want to accomplish? Yes, there's what the companies that hire us need to accomplish, but then there's also: what is Practice accomplishing?For me, a lot of it is really wanting to create category leaders. I want to create brands that work—not brands that are beautiful, not just nice packaging. If we can do that, then I think, category by category, we can get people to see that you're going to have to have a lot of intent to hold space. Yeah. Yeah, I dug around a little bit in some things that you've written, and you've talked about how sort of modern design is beautifully considered, emotionally aware, but trying very hard, being too effortful. It's an assessment I think you've made about some design. To your point about what you just said, does Practice have a purpose? How do you think about the purpose of Practice?Yeah, we have a pretty robust culture manual. I don't know how many pages it is. I want to say it's like 45 or 50.Our mission is that we build category-defining brands that raise the bar for ethical commerce. Ethical commerce is that filter. I really want to look at who we are bringing on in the first place and whether we think they're ethically selling a product or a service. Whatever they might be, raising the bar is just what I talked about. And category-defining brands is what I do.I love too, you said you enjoyed being a secondhand expert—that was the phrase you used to describe the benefit of the learning curve of diving into a category through a client. I like how secondhand becomes vintage in a way too. It's sort of funny, but for me anyway, because I identify with that experience.And then you talked about listening being the first thing you do. As somebody who's a qualitative researcher, what's the proper role for qualitative and listening in your practice? And how do you go about it?Yeah. I will say we started off doing quite a bit of this, and we are now doing a lot of it. And the reason is because it works—it really genuinely informs the work and builds mutual understanding. It builds really great goals and criteria for success.We have basically two—actually, I would say three—major types of qualitative research that we're doing. The first is when we work on a rebrand, we require this auditing process. That is threefold:One, to robustly onboard us to what this company is across the entire ecosystem: the business goals, the roadmap, how the internal systems work, who the major stakeholders are, what their challenges are, and what they see.Two, to establish what's unsuccessful in the brand and why, and to help lay that out for them and create the goalposts: what has to evolve, why, and what's the evidence we can give to support it so they feel confident in why we need to do it. There is not a quantitative way to measure if a brand is successful. We have to ask a lot of questions and come at it from a few different angles to generate a report that feels really well-informed. One of the best things is to talk to multiple perspectives and put that against what we're seeing as outcomes—and then find the story in between.Three, to identify what is working. We don't want to rebrand something and take out all the equity they've built. So we'll talk to existing customers or future customers and understand what they're taking away from the brand, what they're resonating with, and what's really sticking and working. We're establishing what we need to retain so that we’re not risking anything in the next chapter. That's a big part.Another type of qualitative research we do is for really unique types of projects—typically with venture funds. Venture funds will come to us with an idea of a category they want to pursue. They know they're going to want to build a brand with Practice in this space, but they don't quite have a founder yet. They just see an opportunity.We'll work with them to explore what that opportunity is. Then they will shop a founder back into it—find someone to lead it and join us. So we're already 10% through the process when that person joins.That looks really interesting. One that sticks in my mind was in the sexual health space. We were talking to sex workers, we were talking to consumers, understanding how taboos exist in sex work.We even talked to retailers like Target and Walmart. We asked, "What would it take to have an endcap or a display on a sexual wellness brand?" And we learned there were a lot of challenges— that we wouldn't be able to actually have the same criteria for a brand because of the American mindset around sex.So that's a big one. And then the last is after we launch, we do a lot to inform any big investments. For example, we have a client where—it was nice—they chose the most expensive packaging we proposed. It's eating into their margin, and it was their decision. We evaluated all the criteria, and they said, "No, we want to do this one."Now they're getting some pressure from investors to reconsider that. So we said, "Okay, before you do that, let's talk to the people and understand what's going to be effective if you're going to change the packaging." And that was hard to quantify. We had to really talk to people, get a lot of different types of opinions and perspectives to net out what the best path forward was.Yeah, yeah. How do you articulate the value? On a couple of occasions, you said you can't really quantify—we're talking about things you can't really quantify. You can't quantify the efficacy of a brand. You can't quantify that.What is the value? In qualitative, what do you love about what it delivers? Or what does it deliver that you can't get anywhere else that helps you do what you need to do?I think it's the ultimate brief. There's still so much work to do once you complete that, but it's not just a shot in the dark at what we need to accomplish, or what the criteria for success is, or the things that are going to create successful work, or give us the lens to see something clearly in terms of the goal and the outcome.I think if we were to do a rebrand without one of these audits, I would probably make a few mistakes. I would steer us in the wrong direction because I wasn't informed to understand certain things.One comes to mind—we're actually working on a case study for this, and I'm excited to share it—but we worked on a really big rebrand of a stationery company. They're based in Australia and they had a lot of retail stores.It's just a hard time to be a stationery brand with the iPhone and smartphones. We have so many tools now to replace notebooks, agendas, and calendars. So we had to think about how we evolve them into more of a lifestyle brand through this next chapter.We saw that it was an ultra-feminine brand. We saw that they weren't performing well. They were actually bought out of bankruptcy. We thought that maybe they were too specific and needed to widen up—to be less extremely feminine. Even for myself, I found it too feminine. But then we went and we talked to customers and realized that the feminine identity of the brand was actually one of the main things that was working.I think I would have taken us toward making it slightly more gender-neutral—and that would have been the wrong move. It would have been because that's what we're seeing in culture, that's what we're seeing in design. It wouldn't have been an unresearched opinion by any means—it would have been a very well-informed opinion—but it would not have been correct. And it would have lost them their core customer base.Yeah, that's amazing. Something about that story—the case study about being a stationery company in the age of digital notes—reminded me of an old story. When I started out, the guy I worked for described this phenomenon. He called it unconsumption, I think, or non-consumption. His examples were buying seeds in winter, or he also talked about Old Navy, where the value is in the purchase of the experience, not in the use of the product.I'm looking at... I have all these adorable journals right here, these wonderful notepads that my daughter has gotten me. I don't know that I have enough use for them, but the ownership of them is all the value—having this precious little journal—as opposed to actually having any use. I'll just use my phone to actually keep notes, but it feels good to have a notebook around.That reminds me of that Japanese word—and I might butcher the pronunciation—but I think it's tsundoku, and it's the act of buying books and not reading them. I also have that problem. If we consider that a problem, I have that.Yeah, I mean, we're in such an era of self-actualization and people defining who they are. I think there's a negative side to that, where people are buying things because it helps them cosplay as something, rather than it being an authentic "this is who I am."I look at all the books on my shelves, and they feel like friends, or they keep me company. There's something personal, in the same way a photograph might be. But I think there's probably a good and a bad side to that these days. Yeah, I think that's true.I'm curious. I usually ask these two things together. I'm not sure why, but: do you have mentors or touchstones? Mentors who have played a big part in your coming up? And then touchstones—concepts or ideas that you constantly come back to or return to, to orient yourself in a project or in your work?Yes, mentors. Actively, I speak with a venture capitalist, Lisa Wu. She's out in San Francisco. I admire so much of what she's doing. I talk to her monthly, and we just talk about spaces we're interested in and where we see things going. But she has such a wildly different perspective than me, and she's been really empowering where I might have a little bit of imposter syndrome—as someone who doesn't have a business degree and still feels very much like a creative.She's really been one to have my back and put me in front of the right people, and ultimately tell me, "You could start a brand, you could do all this stuff," and help me see past the wall I built around what designers classify themselves as.We've built multiple successful projects together—Ritual, a vitamin brand, and Remedy, a skincare brand. So it's very meaningful because she's actually seen me in action. She's informed—it's not just a by-the-wayside friend kind of being nice opinion. So that's one person.Simon Andres and I kept in touch after Red Antler. After he left, I asked him for some great advice, and he's been really helpful. And then, as a single... what's the right word for this... like a sole business owner. I don't have partners. I have people that I bring in on a consulting basis to just hash ideas.There's this ops consultant I have, Nicole, who really challenges me in a fun way. For example, we have a bunch of clients that really want us to run their marketing after we launch them. There are these huge contracts on the table—big retainers—and if I wanted, I could take them. But I have no creative interest in doing that. Just as a creative, I'm happy doing what I'm doing. I don't want to do that.And she really came at me when that was happening, to help me really understand what that was and why that was. Ultimately, I still kept the same decision, but she made me do the due diligence and not just go off the gut feeling. Just having people in my corner that challenge me is really important.I have tried, to the very best of my ability, to create a culture at Practice where everyone knows that their feedback is really important, and I take it really seriously—to action it, to document it. We have this giant culture manual that sets a lot of expectations and processes, and there's a whole process for how you can submit a request and change that, how you could bring any changes to the organization forward.I think that culture, to me, of being able to get feedback is so important because ultimately it makes us better. I really don't want a company where everyone just says, "Yeah, okay, we'll do whatever you say." That's not at all what I'm looking to do.Cornerstones—what was that?Touchstones.Touchstones! How would you define that?Well, I was just thinking for myself, I know that part of the real joy I get out of my work is metaphor and language and imagination. I feel like every project I'm spending time with things and ideas that I really love—this idea that the mind thinks in images, and that language is access to an image. That's something I constantly remind myself of and am fascinated by.Yeah. Oh, I could go on forever about these. I think I have so many.I think that's like the creative spirit, also—just going down a rabbit hole and seeing where it takes you. One thing I have that’s just led to so much—and it seems so hard to sort of say that, but looking back—is that I take every conversation that comes into our inbox. And I have, for years and years and years.If someone wants to work with us and I don't think it's the right fit, I still talk to them. I meet with everyone, and I never close the door. Those meetings might be quick, they might be brief, but it's been actually kind of incredible.Some of our biggest projects came from people I spoke to six years previously—people who went and built an awesome career and then came back and said, "Okay, cool, now I can actually work with you."They weren't ready at the time, and they weren't the right fit, but it creates such a more meaningful relationship when you get to catch up and be like, "Oh, wow, you went and did that. You did all of that," right?That philosophy has led to a really incredible, diverse network and has made me more diverse in my thinking. So that's something I always come back to. When I start to feel overwhelmed and have too much in my calendar and I have one of those meetings, I remind myself: no, you have gotten so much out of these random conversations. You've gotten so much from being this open-door policy kind of person. And I think reminding myself of that, and always coming back to what I gleaned from that, has been a big part of how I've operated, who I am, and honestly, my success.Yeah, where did that come from? What did you call it? I love that—you take every conversation that comes to you. Where did that come from?Honestly, this is like a funny answer. I think it might come from being from an immigrant family.Really?I think so. Definitely, we never had some baked-in sense of security. And honestly, being self-employed for six and a half years, you don't either. But I don't think I was raised with a mentality of "you pick what you want" or "you do whatever." It was always like, no, you do what you gotta do, and it's not always going to be fun or whatever it is, but that's how it works.So I think I kind of had a bit of that mentality going in from how my family works. I mean, we moved to the US so that my father, who was in banking, could start a candy factory. He had no prior experience with that or entrepreneurship. And my mom worked for him, and that's what they did.I watched them. I spent a lot of time in the warehouse—it was right outside of Newark in Elizabeth, New Jersey—and I would just play in the office all the time. I watched them take every single call, go to every single fair or expo. That was the culture of how I saw people work before I even started working.Yeah. So we have a little bit of time left, and I think I'm going to step back into a big, big, fat question about brand. You've been... I mean, Ritual was a beautiful brand. You've built very modern brands in a very modern way. And I'm wondering: what is a brand to you? When did you first encounter the idea of brand, and what do you think a brand is? And what makes a good one? That's super big and meaty.Yeah. I think a brand is an expression of an organization. And organizations can be good or bad—like cults are organizations. So we really want to make sure we're expressing an organization, but that what the organization is at its core is very important—that it has a strong set of values and a strong sense of what it can be.Ultimately, I think it's how we perceive what's there, but there are still things that are deeper than brand that are informing what that is. What was your second part of the question? What do we think they should be?I don't remember. I feel like I have so many thoughts. I'm like, oh, where do we even go? I mean, I have it. Sometimes I get excited and I throw eight questions into one—one question comes out of me in eight different ways. But you just said there are things that are deeper than brand that inform the brand. Can you talk about that? What were you pointing at?Yeah, like, we built a brand for ALLKINDS. This was an example of looking at a category and learning all about it. We learned what parents want for their kids' self-care and cosmetic products—like shampoo, not cosmetics, but the products they use. We learned how kids relate to fragrance. We learned what kinds of products they were looking at, what their parents were worried about, and that really informed the values of the brand. But deeper than that are things like: what is in those products, and can they still be effectively formulated with those guardrails?ALLKINDS is based in Australia, and they care about reef safety. They were careful not to include triclosan, a common cosmetic ingredient that harms reefs. They had all of these things they were making sure they could do. Because you could say, "Okay, we're going to be free of it," but that doesn't mean you're going to have a great product. They invested a lot in developing products with this massive list of things they would not include. Me, as a brand builder, I looked at that and thought, oh, this is for kids and tweens. So we made that the "No Gross Stuff" list, and we had to express that.But that was an organizational effort. That was a huge thing with formulators, a huge amount of investment, a lot of people working on it and thinking about it—scientists and labs. And that's not brand. That's really at an organizational level.Yeah, beautiful. Well, listen, I want to thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure. I appreciate you accepting my invitation. And it's been fun talking with you.Yeah, this has been wonderful. I appreciate being on here and just such thoughtful questions—and always love to nerd out. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Chris Lindland is a creative founder and entrepreneur. He built Betabrand, a crowdsourced fashion company that grew to $300M, launching products like Dress Pant Yoga Pants. Now, he leads OWOW.ai, an AI-driven entertainment platform. An Adweek Top 100 Creative, he focuses on technology, storytelling, and social engagement to drive business success​.So, I start all of these conversations the same way, which I also do in my practice. I borrowed this question from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. It’s a beautiful question—big, though—so I tend to over-explain it. But before I ask it, just know you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer however you like, and it’s impossible to make a mistake. The question is: Where do you come from?This is exciting. It's like a game. Where do I come from? I’d say I come from California, from my formative years as a kid. And as an adult, at some point, you just have to own up to where you’re from—and it’s California. What was it like to own up to being from California? What are the challenges associated with that?It was an interesting thing. I lived in San Francisco for about 20 years, and at some point, I became convinced that’s where I’m from—because it was the place I’d spent the most time. It was my entire adult life. I grew up in San Diego, spent childhood around L.A. and the Bay Area, but I ultimately spent the bulk of my adult life in San Francisco.So, in many ways, I think that’s where I’m from. But because I’ve spent time broadly across the state, and I love it so much, that’s where I’m from. I don’t live there now, but that’s still where I’m from.What does it mean to you to be from San Francisco? What happened to you there?There was this gravitational pull in 1995, mostly through friends from high school who had moved there. I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I didn’t feel like my future was in Carolina at age 21. So, I moved to San Francisco, thinking, "Oh, my friends are here, and they’re smart—we’ll figure it out."And I did. I stayed there a long, long time.Growing up in San Diego—what did you want to be when you were a kid?Oh, you know, I never really thought about that. That’s probably part of why it took me a while to figure out what to do in my 20s. I was really interested in my friends, in getting away and doing stuff. I didn’t spend much time imagining what I’d be—I just enjoyed the people I was with.And tell me, where are you now? What are you up to these days? Catch us up on where you are and what you’re doing.Right now, I’m sitting in Chicago visiting my family. But generally, I’ve been living in Europe for the last year and a half—mostly in Paris, which is magnificent.When I first encountered you—I can’t remember how it happened—but I was a huge fan of Cordarounds. Can you tell me the story of Cordarounds and how it came to be?Yes. I was one of those people who, like you—and probably your listeners—had a creative need that needed to be satisfied as an adult. At the time, I was working in a business that felt very much like... a business. I wasn’t being as creative as I wanted to be.So, I invented corduroy pants with horizontal cords, just on a lark. There's a long, complicated backstory I won’t get into, but basically, I knew people who talked a lot about fashion. I thought I’d make a pair for fun. Then I had a pair. Then I found myself single.And women would commonly grab my leg at the bar and go, “Oh! They go in the other direction!” And I thought, this is marketing gold. I just wanted to—because I had done—well, I’d sold a TV show when I was younger…I had co-founded an internet startup. I’d always been doing creative stuff, but I wanted to do something that felt like a great portfolio piece. I expected to use that project to land a job in advertising or marketing. I assumed it wouldn’t go on very long—maybe three to six months. But it did.I made corduroy pants that went in the other direction. I made a few hundred pairs and created a website I thought was funny. It was meant to be a portfolio piece, but that journey ended up lasting about 20 years. Technically, it was 17, but it just became the funny story that never ended. That project got me into the clothing industry for a long time.You mentioned all these various creative projects—I wasn’t aware of the TV show or the startup—but how do you describe what you do? Or even just when you think about yourself, how do you talk about it?I’d say that the thing that defined my career—particularly the clothing company chapter, but really before that as well—is that I was the person who had the big dumb idea, or fun idea, and it would stick in my head long enough that I’d feel impatient to bring it to life. Big or small.When I was running Betabrand, that gave me the perfect outlet to do that on a weekly basis. I love sitting around batting ideas back and forth, then figuring out which one we can actually go make. That’s probably the thing I’m best at. I don’t know if I’m world-class at it, but I’ve spent a lot of cycles doing just that.From Cordarounds—I was really a superfan—they always had entertainment baked in. They were fun, playful, novel, and totally unique. Betabrand ended up being a real pioneer. How do you think about the role Betabrand played? And of course, I want to talk about what you’re doing with AI, because it seems like you're once again at the front edge of tech or media. Is that how you think about it?Let me go back to Cordarounds, because there are some values that came out of that which might help explain how I think or give your listeners some insight. When I started it, my intent was to create a website I knew was funny—mainly for my friends, people I thought were funny, so we could all have a laugh.The site focused on the pseudoscience of horizontal corduroy: how it could improve your aerodynamics, reduce your crotch heat index by lowering leg friction. The motto of the company was, “An evil multinational corporation has to start somewhere. For now, pants.”The whole thing was a joke. It had the attitude of Halliburton while being as small as a mom-and-pop store. The thought was: all these giant companies we see on skylines started small. Why not us?“We” was me and my friend Enrique Landa—an incredible thinker and a blast to work with. He was also on board with the idea of going all-in with bombast and glory, fully expecting it would just be a website nobody visited. That would be that.But because of the intentional stupidity of that site—and this was in 2005, mind you, when there really weren’t any digital-native brands—we were either the first or among the first to create an interesting web experience and sell directly to people. Like a catalog. We’d find people online, they’d shop, and we’d ship.The whole idea was to create stories that lived in the pants. I gave people jokes to tell when someone asked about them. I’d already come up with every dumb line you could say about those pants, so I felt like I was feeding people small talk. That became the core thesis of the company: make products with charm that spark conversation, and give customers a little backstory, some lore, or a silly factoid they could share. It turned out to be a great word-of-mouth marketing strategy. And because we put so much thought into each product, they ended up getting a lot of press.I think you found it because New York Times Sunday Styles did a story on it. Peter, I think it was three months in when we struck PR gold—really quickly. That led to more and more stories.To keep up with that momentum, I kept inventing new products. It proved to be incredibly fortunate—either very lucky or maybe very good—that we kept it going. That eventually grew into the company Betabrand, which became a kind of product-generation experience for people. We were creating and launching new products every day.Unbelievable. Thinking back to that time—just to put it in context—a lot of my listeners or newsletter subscribers work in consumer research. We help companies, big and small, understand what’s happening in culture so they can stay relevant and resonate with people. We think about brands and culture in big, abstract ways. But you were effortlessly creating conversational, culturally relevant products back in 2005. I seem to remember the executive hoodie—wasn’t that one of them? It arrived just as Zuckerberg was getting attention for wearing hoodies. What were some of your other PR hits? How conscious were you of building products for culture, for conversation? Was it intentional? Where did that come from?No, that was the whole point. We would start by figuring out whether there was a hook to a concept. Then we’d build a story around that idea and shape a product to match it. The products themselves were pants, jackets, shirts, sweaters, bags, shoes—ultimately, Betabrand made around 2,000 products. So it ended up being a lot.But in the beginning, it was really about coming up with enough small talk for a product, or creating an experience that could carry a conversation—and then building the product to meet that moment.Here’s an example I think came up when we talked the other day. I figured, if we’re going to have a holiday product, well—there’s a black sheep in every family. So why not make sweaters out of black wool only?We figured out how to source only the black wool from black sheep, so the black sheep in the family could wear sweaters made from black sheep’s wool. It was a perfect gift idea. Everyone either is the black sheep, thinks they are, or knows who it is.At the time, I was running the clothing company out of my basement. But once again, I had come up with a product people loved to write about and share. Amazingly, through Betabrand, I became the largest importer of black sheep’s wool from New Zealand. I was the largest consumer of black sheep wool in the world. That became one of those strange but fun achievements.And again, it worked because there was an elaborate story. If there’s a black sheep in every family, now there’s something tailor-made for them. We repeated that process over and over with many different products. We loved it. We created small cults around each one. We were also very conscious about getting people to participate in the story behind an article of clothing.That brings us back to the Zuckerberg hoodie, which was a good example. I saw that news story coming. I knew Facebook was going to have an IPO, and I figured, if we made a hoodie out of suit cloth and released it at the right time, we could ride the wave. The result was what PR people call newsjacking—inserting yourself into a bigger news story. And we did. We successfully made the official fashion story of the Facebook IPO. Our executive hoodies were covered all over the world leading up to the event.All the venture capitalists who were about to profit immensely from the IPO were banging down our door to get one to give to Mark Zuckerberg. There were something like 30 unique requests to send it to him as a gift. We knew the IPO was going to be a generational event, and we found a way to insert ourselves into it.I got really good at that. We would look ahead, see what news stories were coming, and then shape products around them. At the time, we referred to Betabrand as fashion’s first responder. We’d be the first business to respond to something that had just hit the internet—and we’d make a product around it.Unbelievable. That’s so amazing. When you say “build,” can you say more about building a cult around a product? What lessons did you learn? I guess the underlying question is: does that playbook still resonate? I know you’ve moved on, and we’ll talk about that in a bit, but at what point does this playbook still apply? I mean, the principles seem like they would hold up, but I’m curious what you learned, and how things may have changed—if at all. Well, I remain convinced that it still works. You can see examples of people who’ve done it even better since then.Take Gymshark, for instance. They were incredibly smart. They found Instagram addicts who were also doing what you could call death-defying stunts in gyms. They had those people help define what it meant to be a Gymshark. As a result, the brand became this perfect cult, where the users got to define the rules and shape the identity—and an entire culture formed around that.So yes, absolutely, I’d love the opportunity to find a cult and build something around it again. The way Betabrand worked, we didn’t always know which cults would find their way into our clothing. But we made a point to tell their stories as well as we could when they did. The origins of these ideas are often strange. I’m sure you’ve experienced that, and your listeners too. In one case, my friend Enrique and I went down to L.A. to check out a fabric shop we’d heard was huge.We were just browsing, as usual—we’d often make funny samples for ourselves since we had access to manufacturing and could make custom clothes whenever we wanted. He found this fabric—silver lamé tiles that reflected light like a disco ball.When we brought it back to our shop in San Francisco, it was the end of the day and light was beaming through the windows. They held up the pants made from this fabric, and the light bounced off them just like a disco ball. It cast light all around the sewing shop. It was beautiful.We were laughing out loud when we saw them because we knew he had just created a masterpiece. As he wore the pants around, it had that same effect—people stopping him, saying, “Oh my God, where on earth did you get those? Please, where can I get some?”But the funny part was, we only found about eight yards of the fabric. So we held a little contest. We made a few pairs for people who sent in the best pictures of themselves wearing Cordarounds. Then it got down to just three square feet of that fabric.We treated it like cavemen carrying around an ember—clinging to the hope that one day we’d find more. It took years—three or four—before we finally found a supplier who could reproduce it.When we did, we created the fabric and launched Disco Pants. And what was wonderful about them was that the cults found us. There were groups of people who really claimed those pants as part of their identity. One of them was BASE jumpers. I became, somehow, the Ralph Lauren of the BASE jumping community.These folks were already filming everything with GoPro headsets, so they sent us the most unbelievable action sports footage. We’d cut it all together into these beautiful, crowdsourced videos. That insight—that the product worked because the customers were already filming themselves—was key. We asked ourselves, “Who else wears GoPros?” Then we got the disco fabric on them, too.We found all sorts of lesser-known extreme sports folks—people who would never imagine having a sponsor—and we gave them disco by the thousands. For years, we received this endless stream of incredible footage. Another group that found us was Burning Man. I’ve never been to Burning Man, but every August, people started coming into the Betabrand store in droves as they passed through San Francisco on their way.At one point, my friends started telling me, “You really need to go to Burning Man, Chris—because everywhere you look, people are wearing your clothing.” Thousands of people were incorporating our disco pieces into their costumes. When a cult finds you, that’s the best thing that can happen. Then you can sit back and tell their story.Anyway, long-winded—but I loved that. I really did. Just this week, I found out that one of our BASE jumpers passed away. It hit me. I didn’t know him personally, but I’d seen this video—he says something right before he jumps off a cliff. It became a sort of tagline for the whole group.It was sad, because you admire that kind of bravery. People who throw themselves off cliffs all over the world often form really tight bonds with each other.In a way, I felt grateful that he’d gone this long, continuing in that life. He probably spent 15 years in that sport. The amount of adrenaline he experienced in that time is legendary. That’s amazing. I wasn’t aware of that story.What do you love about that work? Where does the joy come from in all of it?You know, I think I was telling you the other day—early on, when I was running Cordarounds, people would reach out to me. Names I started to recognize. They became repeat customers.To me, that was magic. When we made those first products and I started seeing names on the orders that I didn’t recognize—names that weren’t relatives or old friends—there was this moment. That feeling when your creative experiment connects with people out in the world, with other creative people you’ve never met, it’s just really, really special.I remembered your name. I remembered so many of the names of people who were into it. It was truly exciting. When you’re a creative person and you invent something, and then someone connects with it—it’s a thrill. Suddenly, you’re the kind of person who gets lit up by the idea that people out in the world are into what you make.It’s a really beautiful experience to know that there are talented people out there, and somehow, you’ve made it into their wardrobe, into their imagination. And that feels great—because then you get to meet them, and you get to learn from them.If you’re ever lucky enough to create something that builds a fan base—which you’ve done with your podcast—the reward often feels even bigger for the creator. Because what you launched, you now get to understand more deeply through the eyes of others. Anyway, long-winded.No, not at all. We talked the other day, and I was living in Hudson. It was genuinely thrilling to talk to you, because my relationship with those pants and that sweater—it meant something. I had at least two pairs of Cordarounds, and I loved the black sheep sweater.I didn’t realize there was a family insight built into it, which makes it even richer. But those were the kinds of pieces that hit you—and you just had to have them. What I love is that your product development felt deeply cultural and deeply social. And yet, small talk was like the litmus test. That’s what you used to know whether a product was good. I think that’s unbelievable.It’s just so wonderful. And beyond all that—they made me feel good. I loved walking around in them. I was dying for someone to ask me about my pants, or to tell them it was a black sheep sweater.It was really fun. Everyone in the creative field knows that feeling—when you’ve got a good one on your hands. We’re always trying things, and they don’t always work. But when something resonates, it’s so exciting. Another good example: we made yoga pants that women could wear to the office. When we launched our women’s line, that product took off. We sold millions of pairs.But the idea that really took hold was how we presented it. My concept was that we’d only use models who had PhDs—or were in the process of earning one. That became our thing: the models must have or be pursuing PhDs to appear in our campaigns. It became a global news story. People loved that we were using models who were there for their brains—not just their bodies.It was incredibly fun. The idea that, if you have a product that resonates with the smartest women in America—and those women are obviously smarter than I am—then their word-of-mouth is going to be more interesting, more thoughtful, more powerful. So we started with the word-of-mouth power of a tight, intelligent community. And because of that, it became a great news story.We went on to sell millions of pairs. I mentioned that before, but it became the biggest product we ever released. And what made it even better was that it was rooted in something like intelligence—it just happened to be. That gave it this extra dimension, and I really liked that.What would you say is the legacy of Betabrand? I know you’ve moved on, and we’ll talk about OWOW.ai and your take on generative AI, but how did Betabrand end? Or—did it end? What’s its legacy?No, no—Betabrand lives on.I sold it. It’s kind of a funny story. A long, bloody story. The company had grown to be quite large and was growing at a blinding rate in 2019. But by that point, let’s say our top 30 products were all yoga pants you could wear to the office.And when the world of office workers left the office, well... you can imagine what happened.Yeah.It was like trying to sell surfboards when the ocean had frozen over. Extremely difficult. On top of that, we had a unique warehousing and shipping setup based in Hong Kong, which relied on air travel. And when something like 90% of Cathay Pacific flights were canceled, well—it was a perfect storm of collapsed supply and demand.Eventually, I sold the business. But it still sells dress pant yoga pants by the zillions. That product became so absurdly popular that it overshadowed everything else we made.I imagine people listening to this have experienced something similar—when one product works so well that all the other stuff that connects more to the soul of the company ends up getting pushed aside. At some point, I had to build a whole new brand identity around that single product.So yeah, a lot of the fun, quirky products that brought you there—those had to go. Because when one thing is outselling everything else by a factor of 10,000 to 1, there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance in claiming you’re a freaky, Burning Man–inspired, base-jumper experimental clothing lab… and also the go-to source for professional women's officewear.So we cut that stuff out. And now the company continues as that—the yoga pant company. But what’s sweet is that people still reach out to me—honestly, probably every three weeks—asking if they can get Cordarounds, or Disco Pants, or the Black Sheep Sweater, or one of our old jackets.Part of me wishes I ran it like a weird, once-a-year clothing drop. Just one day a year where people could get their Cordarounds, and that would be it. I wouldn’t be in the daily grind of the clothing business—just one day of joy.Amazing. I mean, in hindsight—and maybe this does it a disservice—but it felt like you were running a public lab. You had all these novel products, smaller hits, and then this one massive hit that just swallowed them all.Yeah, I would say that’s fair. It’s interesting to reflect on this now, 15 years after that original concept was hatched. A lot has happened since then. Some of the claims to fame for Betabrand: Cordarounds was probably the first direct-to-consumer clothing line. Then Betabrand created a huge voting platform. We would post thousands of theoretical clothing designs, and we’d crowdsource the winners. Consumers would vote on which products we should make.It was this wonderful system that gave our fans something to do—daily, even hourly. If you wanted to help us figure out tomorrow’s product line, you could vote, comment, give feedback. It made you part of the process.We were trying to think of ways to make a clothing company into something people could visit daily and be part of. The whole idea was: can you create community through clothing? It really was like running an R&D lab.Another claim to fame—we were the first business to do user-generated content. For years, we encouraged our fans to be the photographers of our clothing. What we did differently was that, instead of just adding customer photos to the bottom of the webpage as a tech add-on, we flipped the script. Customer photos came first.The message was clear: this is about the community. Get involved. Help create things. Be part of the culture. If you’re really into it, you’ll meet people you like. That was the point.Betabrand was meant to be exactly that. The name itself was intentional—it stood for a brand of products and people that are always in development. Where did that idea come from? It was kind of in the air at the time. This was late 2000s, early 2010s. You had Kickstarter starting to take off. Crowdsourced and crowd-oriented platforms were just beginning to gain momentum.Our goal was to become the crowdsourced clothing company—a place where creative people could find an audience and bring their clothing ideas to life. Betabrand would serve as the manufacturer and the storefront.Honestly, I probably took the first 10,000 photos of Cordarounds and Betabrand pieces myself. So I loved when other people started doing it, partly because it meant I didn’t have to anymore—but also because, by then, we had sold hundreds of thousands of articles of clothing.With that many customers, chances are you’ll have some incredibly talented photographers and videographers in the mix. And if they want to put their work up, God bless them. Most of the time, they were better than I was. That became part of the culture: fans turning into creators. That was a real thrill for me. I got to sit back and watch creative people do their thing.Some of our most popular products were invented by customers. Some of the biggest news stories came from ideas that originated with our customers. It was amazing—we let them do the job, and it worked.I want to tell you a story about that—about the power of letting your customers create. One time, I was sitting at Pepsi. They had invited me to give a speech. I was checking my phone, and I got a message: Good Morning America wants the exclusive on the Suitsy.My response was, “What’s the Suitsy?” A very creative guy had submitted a concept to our website—a zip-up onesie version of a suit, which he called the Suitsy. He had actually made a sample himself. It was just a post on our site, but within 24 to 48 hours, it went viral. All of a sudden, someone’s idea—just a photo, not even a manufactured garment—was getting global news coverage.The same thing happened with another concept submitted by a DJ who opens for Paul McCartney. So he knows what it’s like to be famous, right? He wanted to create a retroreflective hoodie using the same kind of material that cyclists wear—fabric that glows brightly in iPhone photos. The idea was that the hoodie would make your face disappear in flash photography, making it perfect for famous people who want to go incognito.He called it the Anti-Paparazzi Hoodie. That idea became such a popular news story, it was even featured as a question on Jeopardy! I loved being able to attract creative people—people far more inventive than I am—and then fan the flames and help promote their ideas. That was really the big idea behind Betabrand: attract brilliant people to the brand, and then give them a place to bring their ideas to life.Amazing. So tell me about OWOW.ai. This is still really new, and I’ve had so much fun with it. What’s the story there—what are you up to?Well, I think we all have our own AI epiphany origin stories at this point. At some moment in the last few years, everyone has created something with AI that made their jaw drop—something that made them go, Oh my God, I need to rewire my brain.For me, after I sold Betabrand, I needed a full unplugging. I just wanted to zone out and stare at the Pacific Ocean for a while. Try to reset. So I went down to Costa Rica. The plan was to relax, surf, and just enjoy the sun for a few months. I figured that, at some point, I’d reemerge with a big new idea. What I didn’t know was that I had timed it perfectly… for the biggest rainy season in decades.I’d been there before during rainy seasons, but this was next-level. Literally from day one, torrential storms hit every afternoon—starting around 11:30 a.m. and lasting until 5:00 p.m.So for four or five days a week, the entire middle of the day was just an absolute deluge. I was stuck inside, which was the last thing I wanted. That was spring 2022—right when Midjourney launched. That’s also when DALL·E came out, and this thing called LION, which I thought was really cool at the time. There was also early stable diffusion stuff starting to emerge.And because I was bored, I decided to take the deep dive. At first, it was just making me laugh. I was generating these crude, ridiculous images. Back then it was like, “Oh my God, this kind of looks like Bigfoot! It has twelve fingers and a cowboy hat!” And that was funny.It only took me a minute to generate it. I was just completely charmed. Over those three months, I watched the tools improve—from day one to day ninety—and it really stuck with me.There was this small, fun community starting to form on Instagram, people posting their creations. I began sharing images with them and learning from their creative process. You could actually see how people were getting better at prompting, how their techniques were evolving.Then Stable Diffusion came out, and it allowed for these elaborate, recipe-like instructions to generate images. I just kept getting more and more interested. Fast forward a year, and suddenly you’re creating photorealistic images. That’s when I got into face-swapping technology and thought—why not create tomorrow’s entertainment starring us?I started sharing the idea with a few friends who are investors. They were excited. They said, “We’d love to invest in you if you want to build this.” So we started working on it last November and created a company called OWOW.ai.The real mission is to explore what’s now possible when you can stitch together all these technologies to let someone experience something that feels completely immersive—like, say, what it’s like to travel to Tuscany, without actually going.You could see a version of yourself in Tuscany, experiencing it as if it were real. And it’s funny, and weird, and kind of inspiring. Commercially, sure—maybe it makes you want to book a flight. But more importantly, it’s about creating unique experiences that people can inhabit and shape with their own personality. Right now, it’s basically fun, highly curated deepfakes. We’ve built vast libraries of visual experiences that people can drop their faces into.But the backend is what’s really exciting. We’ve figured out how to piece these systems together to create live experiences. You can broadcast them onto a wall, a TV, anything—and then let people add their faces, in real time. Suddenly they’re whisked into this imaginative world where they get to see themselves inside the story.And mark my words—whether it’s us or twenty other companies—within a few years, we’re all going to be watching ourselves perform on Netflix. It’ll start with cameos—some charming little novelty. But eventually, it’ll grow into actual entertainment involving us. I’m not saying we’re all going to replace Harrison Ford and play Indiana Jones, but we’ll absolutely be able to be the sidekick—or the comic relief, or the random background character.There’s going to be an entirely new kind of media when you can generate content that fast. And just for context, for people who aren’t deep into diffusion models like I am—that’s about two and a half years away. Once we hit real-time live video generation, we’ll be there. You’ll be able to create stunning, believable video starring yourself, your friends, your family—even your pets. And it will be affordable.For me, I just want to work on this now, because it’s amazing to spend full-time playing with these capabilities and bringing them to life every week. It’s magic. Without a doubt, of all the creative things I’ve done, this is the fastest, most mind-blowing creative experience I’ve ever had.It’s just so much fun. I’ve done a couple of batches myself, and I’m fascinated by the origin story. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but it seems like with Betabrand, the big insight was: we want to talk about the things we wear. If you build community around a product, it means making the product something people want to talk about.There’s something similar going on here with generative AI or deepfakes. Like you said—with real confidence—we’re going to be watching ourselves. So I’m curious: what makes you so sure of that? What’s the insight? How did you arrive at that conclusion?Sure. Well, first off, I can’t tell you the exact size of the audience that’s going to enjoy this. But let’s go back to the technology itself. Right now, we can generate a photorealistic image of you—Peter Spear—once per second. And we can drop that image into any creative environment we can dream up. They look real. They feel real. They’re funny, and meaningful, and emotional, depending on the context.By the end of this year, we’ll be able to generate about three images per second. That’s already happening in labs, and even faster in high-end setups. But for most end-user experiences, it’ll be somewhere between two to five images per second.By the end of next year, we’ll be pushing thirty images per second. Anyone in video knows that thirty frames per second is the standard for smooth, real-time video. So by 2028, we’re going to be looking at real-time, live video generation—fully photorealistic, and affordable.You’ll be able to create a thirty-second video for five cents. Maybe it’s fifteen cents, maybe it’s fifty—but it’ll be cheap. So if all of that is possible—and it is—then I believe we’re going to see some incredibly interesting new forms of media emerge from it.I think it’s going to be interactive. It’s going to involve us. Now, I can’t promise that everyone’s going to prefer seeing themselves in The Godfather over the original actors. But if media can be generated specifically to entertain you—to make you laugh or you buy something based on your interests and identity—that’s going to be a much more compelling experience.Obviously, we’re building a business around this vision, so we’re hoping that this is the future we’re staring at. But the capability is already here. Right now, if we were plugged into Facebook, we could pump out custom static image ads featuring anyone who ever engaged with an ad. That’s already possible. But our approach is to enter this space through entertainment. We want to make stuff that’s truly fun. That’s how we’re finding our way in.We’ve done this at big tech trade shows. We entertain people daily with this kind of stuff—but really, that’s just the first step. The first capability we focused on was simple: can we make Peter laugh at a picture of himself in a scenario we’ve cooked up?For anyone listening, last year that meant three of us generating thousands—probably hundreds of thousands—of images just to find the ones where Peter didn’t have seven fingers. Or where people didn’t have a third arm sticking out of their chest. It was raw. We had to be very selective.But now, the tech has progressed to a point where we can reliably prompt images with a high success rate. We're talking high 90s—in terms of accuracy—for generating an image that includes Peter’s face and looks good. That’s huge. It took just a year to get there.So if you project forward another year, we’ll be generating images that include the exact glasses you’re wearing. You’ll be able to see the pores on your nose. That’s the level of photorealism we’re heading toward.With that capability—and if brands are genuinely interested in creating experiences that people inhabit—then logically, they’ll want people to inhabit their brands using this new technology.And the holy grail of personalization? It’s you.So I do think some percentage of marketing will go in this direction. We’d be a stupendously successful company if just 10% of marketing became this personalized. If we owned even 1% of that space—with experiences that are truly immersive and compelling—we’d have a very strong business.But beyond that, from a creative perspective, this is exactly what I want to be working on right now. The change ahead is going to be bananas, and it’s incredibly fun to be in it.There are a couple of things bouncing around in my brain. You started out talking about people taking pictures of themselves—and it reminded me of something. Years ago, I was traveling abroad, a bit naively, and I visited some major tourist sites. I went to Egypt, saw the pyramids and the Sphinx.I was excited to take a good picture of the monuments—but what I didn’t expect was how overrun it was with tourists. You had to wait in line to take your photo, and people were obsessed with getting a picture of themselves in front of these landmarks.It got me thinking: this need for visual proof that you were there. I ended up taking an entire series of photos of people taking pictures of themselves—because I became fascinated by it. And so hearing what you’re saying, it just resonates. Of course we’d want to see ourselves—especially if given the opportunity to see ourselves in places other than where we are. That instinct is already there.There’s definitely a powerful force of vanity behind it. But what we’ve found is that the most popular use of what we’re doing right now isn’t people making pictures of themselves—it’s making pictures of their friends or family and sending them.Even better: dropping them into group texts. That’s where a lot of the magic happens. It becomes a fun icebreaker. People can be self-critical about how they look in photos, but when the image is being shared among close friends, in a playful way, they’re far less self-conscious. It becomes a shared laugh. It’s light, it’s personal, and it’s fun.There’s definitely been this weird value shift—especially through Instagram—where people must officially see themselves in certain places. They’ll wait in long lines just to do that.And I get it. It’s a moment in your life you want to capture and share. That’s perfectly fine. I don’t look down on people who do it—I just think it’s a fascinating commentary on how visual media works now. What matters most isn't necessarily the masterpiece; it’s the likes you’ll get on a photo of yourself standing 50 feet in front of the clock face. That’s the image that matters.It’s nuts.Yeah, it is nuts. But also amazing. I always like to be careful with this kind of thing. I don’t think it’s “crazy” as in something’s wrong with people. I know some people might see it that way, and they’re entitled to that opinion. But I just find it more amazing than anything else—that there’s this completely different experience that matters a lot to people. And there’s a lot to be learned from that.I really appreciate that corrective, because I’m often that person—marveling at what we do as a species out in the world. My experience in Cairo was a lot like that. I was a solo traveler immersed in group tourist culture. I did a cruise down the Nile, and at every stop, people were lining up, waiting to have their picture taken in front of some ancient relic. Sometimes leaning on it It was such a funny phenomenon. I’m glad to know that even back in the '90s, it was kind of like that. I hitchhiked from Cairo to Germany—that’s a longer story for another time—but down in Luxor, my friend and I were goofing around, and I wrapped him in toilet paper like a mummy.He became the unofficial mascot for about 50 tourists who all wanted photos with “the mummy.” Stuff like that would’ve been Instagram gold today. But back then, it was just 35mm film, shared with a few friends: “Hey, here’s me with a guy dressed as a mummy in Luxor.” Anyway. It would’ve been perfect for the internet—if the internet had worked the way it does now.We’re almost out of time, but I’d love to hear some final thoughts from you. What are your observations or lessons from working with generative AI? You’ve described OWOW.ai as your way into it—maybe not even the final form of what you’ll do. What are you looking forward to?There’s no doubt about it: this is God’s supercomputer, and now we all get to play with it. That’s how I think of it. Some of my thoughts lately come from conversations with close friends I’ve known for years—people who are also entrepreneurs or deeply engaged in creative work.One of my friends is a doctor, and she’s working on a concept around patient education. Each of us is focused really narrowly on the projects we’re building, so we’re becoming experts in specific slices of this world. In my case, it’s face morphing, generative speed, and how to use those tools to help people feel experiences. And that’s wonderful—but it’s limited.There’s kind of a shared consensus among all of us: we should be practicing new skills every single Friday. Period. It’s the only way to even begin to grasp the full scope of what this technology can do. That’s how big of a deal this is.And this isn’t hype. It’s not overblown. It’s real. I mean, if I can make my friends laugh with a high-quality video that would have taken nine months to make just a few years ago—and now I can do it in nine seconds? Come on. That’s not just faster—that’s a fundamentally different way of creating and communicating. Okay, nine seconds is a bit of an exaggeration, but my friend Tyler is a perfect example. He’s a super creative guy, great at video production. Now he makes hilarious AI-generated videos while he’s sitting on the can.And they’re excellent. As a filmmaker in his previous life, he would’ve had to spend a ton of money and time to make those same things. But now we can all create music, videos, whatever—and sure, it might not have the laser focus of a trained artisan, but that’s okay. You might find that your love of music translates into fun little songs that entertain your friends and family. And if that’s what you use it for, you’re not a thief—you’re a creator. You’re just performing for a small audience.I still can’t believe what we can do now. That sense of awe—it gets reinforced for me every week. And I’d really encourage anyone who hasn’t already guzzled the Kool-Aid to consider pouring themselves a little more. Because quarter by quarter, this stuff gets faster, better, cooler, more fun. And it’s going to completely reshape marketing, creativity, and entertainment in a very, very short amount of time.Where would you suggest someone start? Like, I hear you talking about experimenting—but what’s a good first step?Honestly, most people already have access to ChatGPT. I’d say: start there. Begin by uploading a photo of yourself. Start playing around. Ask it to be iterative. “Put a top hat on me.” “Add a parrot to my shoulder.” You’ll be surprised at how responsive it is.Right now, those images take about 10 to 15 seconds to generate. It’s not instant—but just wait. In a couple years, it will be lightning-fast. That’s an easy way in. A fun way in. ChatGPT—especially with image generation—can blow your mind, even as a beginner.And if you don’t know what to ask, there are great videos and forums out there where people share tricks, tips, and cool things you can do. It’s really fun to explore other people’s ideas. You get to see how they think—and how the machine responds. It helps spark your own ideas.It’s one of those classic things: the more you play with it, the more ideas you get when you aren’t using it. Then suddenly, you’re racing back to it with something new to try. I’d just say: make sure you’re playing with it. Because play is absolutely the fastest path to the important insights.Go be immature with it. Go be stupid. Do stuff that makes your friends laugh. That’s how you start to learn how to use it in smart ways.Awesome. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation. It’s been really great to connect with you—and thank you for Cordarounds, the Black Sheep Sweater, everything you created with Betabrand… and now OWOW.ai too. It’s just so great to see someone so clearly having fun while doing fascinating work. For the benefit of the listeners, it’s OWOW.ai—that’s O-W-O-W dot A-I. Go check it out. And if you have any questions, you can reach Chris directly at chris@owow.ai. We work with companies, events, developers—anyone doing creative things. So if it interests you, drop me a line.Beautiful. Thank you so much, Chris.Great talking to you today, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe