THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Dr. Niobe Way is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity, co-founder of agapi.teens, and the principal investigator on the Listening with Curiosity Project. She is a leading researcher on adolescent development, with a particular focus on boys' social and emotional lives. Her groundbreaking books include "Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection" (2011), which inspired the Oscar-nominated film "Close," “The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences & Solutions,” and "Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture" (2024).I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. It's a beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it's pretty big, so I tend to over-explain it—like I'm doing right now. Before I ask it, I want you to know you're in total control and can answer however you want.You're doing what a good interviewer does.Nice. So, the question is: Where do you come from? Again, you’re in total control.I love questions like that. It’s what I spend my life asking other people, but I rarely get asked myself. Where do I come from? Okay, I have lots of things to say, but I need to figure out how to tell the story.I would say an important part of me is that I was born in Paris, France, to hippie parents. My parents had my older sister and me when they were teenagers. My mother came from a very fancy family in Greenwich, Connecticut, and my dad was from the wrong side of the tracks. They got pregnant with my sister the first time they had sex, at seventeen. Then they escaped—he went to Oberlin College, she followed him with my sister, and then they traveled to Greece for a year, then Paris for a year, and that's where they had me.They worked at an American diner in Paris. That’s how my life began—with parents who lived outside the box. My mother is a modern dance choreographer and runs ODC San Francisco, a world-renowned dance company. My dad was a classics professor who specialized in Eastern and Western traditions. He lived in China for ten years, and I lived with him there for part of the 1980s.My life started in Paris. Then we moved to Oberlin, Ohio; then to New York; and then back to Oberlin. Oberlin is where I really feel my roots are.If I had to sum it up. I wasn’t born in the U.S. I grew up with creative, unconventional parents. I came of age in Oberlin, Ohio, during the 1970s. It's important to say: I was born in 1963. That means my adolescence was very much shaped by the 1970s—a distinctive period. I don't know how old you are, Peter, but the 1970s were very particular. And then I went to college in the 1980s.I noticed you used the word escape at least twice to describe your parents going to Paris. What were they escaping?They were escaping very oppressive family situations, especially on my mother’s side.My grandfather was the vice president of Tampax Corporation. They came from a very wealthy, exclusive community in Greenwich, Connecticut—part of a country club that didn’t allow Black or Jewish members.My mom married someone from a working- to middle-class background, which was scandalous to her family. When she got pregnant at 17, they wanted her to go to Mexico for an abortion. She refused.So, when she and my dad moved to Oberlin, she was essentially cut off from her family.Oberlin College had never had a married couple with a child before. They didn’t know what to do with them, so they gave them a house because they couldn’t put them in a dorm. I’ve seen a photo of them: two teenage kids, standing in front of a house, holding a baby. It's so surreal.They left Oberlin because it was too hard for my dad to be a student and raise a family at the same time. That’s when they decided to escape again, this time to Europe.My dad was studying the classics and felt this romantic pull to go live in Greece, the birthplace of so much of that tradition.They tried to live "off the land"—though I think, in reality, it meant my mom was trying to make a living while my dad read a lot of books. They lived for a while on a Greek island called Skiathos, and when they couldn’t find enough work there, they moved to Paris and became managers of an American diner. That’s how I came into the world: the child of two people who chose a life of creativity, defiance, and independence. And then my mom got pregnant with me. About a year after I was born, they moved back to New York because, you know, now they had two kids and they were just 20 years old. So, they returned to Oberlin. My dad graduated, and my mom started dancing. Eventually, she became a professor of dance at Oberlin College—one of the first women faculty members there. I mean, there were a bunch of women, but still.All of that is part of who I am. I was born in the sixties, and I definitely situate myself in that time—with hippie parents, always having a very global perspective. I come from multiple cultures. I’ve lived in China; I’ve lived all over the world. It definitely shapes how I do my work, how I think, how I take on the world, and how I see the world.This is my biggest superpower, I would say. I love this phrase now—I used to hate it. My biggest superpower is that I am very good at what we call in developmental psychology theory of mind: I can take other people's perspectives very easily.And the reason I think I can is because I’ve lived in different places, outside of my own culture. I’ve been an outsider many, many times in my life—not part of the mainstream at all, even in the American context, because my parents were serious hippies.I mean, my mother wore mini skirts and all kinds of crazy stuff that embarrassed me. She was gorgeous—still is gorgeous—but it was hard having a mom wearing mini-mini hot skirts over in Ohio, you know what I mean?I do. I mean, I love the idea of a serious hippie, number one. And number two: what about moving around, about being an outsider, develops theory of mind?Oh, Peter, this is such a great interview. Thank you. It’s a gift for me to be interviewed in the way I try to interview other people. I would say that when you're an outsider—racially, ethnically, class-wise, culturally, in any way—it forces you to take the other person's perspective because you're out, right? You're in the minority.And to me, what's interesting about women and people of color in this country—and men too, especially working-class men—is that when you're not at the top of the heap, you're forced to take other people's perspectives, whether you like it or not. In fact, women have said this to me, and people of color too, across all ethnicities and races: You have to, because if you don't, you won't get your foot in the door. So you learn to take the other person's perspective literally as a way to survive.Yeah.Literally, to get into the house, you have to take another person's perspective. So you learn. I think that's partly why—I'm going to make a gross generalization, but I think it's true—people on the fringes of power tend to have better theory of mind. Of course, there's variation among all groups. Some people might be a person of color or a woman and still not have great theory of mind. So I'm not generalizing completely.But generally, I do think people on the margins are more likely to develop it, because when you're in the center of power, it's not demanded of you. You assume everyone will think like you—because why wouldn't they? It could also be a religious identity—Jewish, Muslim, Hindu. I'm not trying to limit it to non-religious differences; I'm just very American in that way. But being an outsider in any form helps develop that skill.And I do think it’s a positive skill.I have to share a story because it was really interesting to me. In 2007, after getting divorced from my husband of 20 years, I wanted to do something adventurous. So I moved with my two young kids to Shanghai to teach at NYU Shanghai. They were three and five at the time. We all learned Chinese—we went to Saturday school to study before moving—and I enrolled them in local Chinese schools.I was terrified to bring my little kids alone, but we didn't live in an expat neighborhood. I wanted to live among local families, not foreigners. We lived in a Chinese alley, where at that time (this was 2007), there were still joint kitchens and bathrooms. Our home was a bit unusual—it was built during the 1920s French concession, so we had our own bathroom and kitchen—but most families in our alley shared. Because of that, and because we were foreigners, we stood out a lot. We were definitely seen as more "upper class" in the neighborhood. I remember taking my daughter to school. Her best friend in New York had been Mei Mei, which means "little sister" in Chinese. After her first day, she came home—she was just three—and said, "Mommy, they all look like Mei Mei!"At first, I did this sort of white liberal thing—I got nervous and corrected her, saying, "No, no, they’re not all Mei Mei. They're just Chinese. They don't all look the same. But she insisted, "No, no, Mommy, they do look like Mei Mei!" I eventually realized: she's three. I let it go.Then something beautiful happened. About a month later, she came home and said, "Mommy, I want black hair. Black hair is the most beautiful hair in the whole world. I don’t like my hair." At the time, she had long, blondish hair. I told her, "Yes, black hair is really beautiful," and I also affirmed that her hair was beautiful too.But it was a gorgeous realization: when you’re the minority, your perspective shifts fast. At first, she was simply seeing the world through her own lens. But after a month of being the only one different, she began to value what the majority in her class valued—long black hair.And so I just thought that was really deep and profound for me. Because that is why you want to raise your children where they're not always in the majority.You put your child in a safe space, in a supportive space, in a loving space—I'm not saying put them in toxic places—but I'm saying, where you're not in the majority.I think when you're always in the majority, you suffer in terms of your ability to take another person's perspective.That's beautiful. I want to return—when you were young in Oberlin, what did you want to be when you grew up? Do you have a recollection?Yeah. Oh God, are you kidding me? I had lots of things. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was ten because I thought the most— I still think this actually—I would still love to be an astronaut. To go out, outside of the earth. I've always been super curious, Peter, just like you. I've always been super curious about it. And then somehow the magic of going outside of the earth and looking back and stuff. So I wanted to be an astronaut.Then I think I ended up being interested in theater. I was a theater major in the first two years of college, but I think it was really because I was surrounded by the arts. My mom was a modern dance choreographer. She started a modern dance company. We traveled across the country on a yellow school bus with her Oberlin students to start ODC San Francisco in 1975. We were a bus of ten Oberlin students moving from Oberlin to San Francisco to start a modern dance company with my mother. My brother, sister, and I were all on this bus, traveling for two weeks across the country on a yellow school bus. I mean, Peter, I meant it when I said we were serious hippies.Yeah, I mean, it's all right there.You can't get more hippie than that. There's pictures of me on the bus—I'm ten—and I just looked like a total hippie child. I'm wearing this star shirt, and my hair is kind of—well, my mother always cut my hair. She would actually cut it very coiffed. But I'm just such a hippie child.I think when I was surrounded by so many dancers and artists— Bill Irwin, do you know Bill Irwin?Yeah.He was a part of that clan.Oh, wow.His wife, Kimi Okada, at the time—Kimi Okada was one of the founders of my mom’s dance company. She was a student of my mother's. So Bill Irwin was a babysitter. He babysat me.Wow.Yeah. It was a bunch of really amazing 1970s artists. If I probably named a bunch of other names, you would know who they are. Many of them became very successful, along with my mom and her company.Because I grew up in that climate, I thought arts and theater would be really interesting. But then I went to college, and I realized it wasn't interesting enough for me to turn into characters and act out plays.I wanted to do something. I had, in some ways, bigger ambitions—to make the world a more caring place. And I thought I wouldn't be able to do that as an actor. So I switched majors into psychology.But psychology in college, including at Berkeley where I was, is taught in a very boring way. It's often taught through textbooks, in big classes. You have to memorize stuff. It’s the most boring form of psychology.So I was bored with it. I majored in it, but I was bored with it.Then I got a great job after college working with teenage drug abusers in a family therapy clinic, and I became fascinated by family therapy and by the notion of working with teenagers.After that, I ended up getting my doctorate at Harvard, initially in counseling psychology. Then I switched from counseling to human development because—and this relates to my work right now—I realized I wasn't interested in helping individuals. I was interested in changing the story, right? I was interested in changing the story of how we understood ourselves, and adolescents in particular.That's what I've literally been doing since 1988: trying to change how we understand what it means to be a teenager.And in the last ten years, what it means to be a boy and a young man—and even more broadly, what it means to be human, and what's getting in the way of our capacity to act like human beings.But it really came from seeing the larger picture. I would say, Peter, it goes back to my background. The larger picture came from being exposed to all sorts of cultures.My dad lived in China in the 1980s, when there were virtually no foreigners in Nanjing.And he was apparently there at the same time Kanye West and his mom were there, which is really funny.Oh, wow.Isn't that funny? But there were no foreigners there when I was a teenager and living in Nanjing. Anyway, I think that sort of big-picture thinking came from that experience—having to, as I say in my classes, pull the microscope in to see a person, and pull it out to see them in context. I started doing it with myself—seeing myself in the particulars, then pulling back to see the larger context. And that, to me, is my biggest skill as a researcher. I'm constantly pulling the microscope in and pulling it out: to understand the individual, but also to understand the individual within a cultural context.How do you introduce yourself now? Sort of catch us up. We've gotten your life story from the beginning—where are you now? What's the work you're doing?Yeah, thank you. No, Peter, I just have to say: this is such a gorgeous way of being interviewed. I've never been interviewed like this. It's such a pleasure. It really is such a pleasure. And I have always believed that who I am is part of what I do. So if you don't know who I am, you can't really understand what I do. Thank you for that gift. It really is a gift.So—I am a professor of developmental psychology at NYU. I've been there since 1995. And I have been focused, since 1987 when I started my doctoral program at Harvard, on understanding adolescent development, particularly the social and emotional aspects of development. By that, I mean relationships, identities—all sorts of things.My question, even back in the '80s, was: What shifts during adolescence? Because what I started to hear was a story we weren't telling—and honestly, we're still not telling it. In the late '80s, I started hearing from boys and young men about their desire for friendships and for close, emotionally intimate friendships. This came out during sessions I was doing while informally counseling at a high school. It kept surfacing as a major theme.Since then, I have spent my career doing large-scale studies of teenagers of all identities—following them over time. That's the biggest skill I'm most proud of, because that's how you hear the real story. You follow the same kids—starting from when they're 12 or 13 years old—all the way until they're 17 or 18.And because I follow kids longitudinally, using mixed methods—qualitative and quantitative: surveys, observation, interviews—with huge samples, I’m able to capture that shifting story over time.So hundreds of kids that we follow over time with a large research team—you start to hear a pattern of what it means to grow up in the United States. And now we're doing work in China. We've been doing a 20-year study of Chinese families. We're just about to do the 20-year follow-up of 1,200 Chinese families—1,200 Chinese families. And we ask the same question. The kids in our sample in China were born in 2005.So anyway, you start to hear this change. And this is the big finding. The big finding is that there are four themes that the boys have revealed in their data. And the reason I pick on the boys is not because they're more interesting—as I was challenged by my daughter (I have a daughter and a son, by the way)— it's because they tell a story that we're not listening to, Peter.They just are telling us a story—and not just about them. That's the part we're not listening to. They're not just telling a story about themselves; they're telling a story about us and what's getting in the way, and how we can solve our own problems.So this is what they teach us. And this is what they've been teaching us since 1987 when I started listening. And now it's thousands of boys and kids and girls and non-gender-conforming kids. But again, I think it's important to understand why I pick on the boys and young men—because that's a particular story.So, the story we learn is: First, boys—like all humans, like all girls, like everybody—want emotionally intimate friendships with other guys. They want that. And we've found that around the world. There really is no gender difference in the desire for emotionally intimate friendships.And for boys, for many boys, that means: Not being laughed at when they feel vulnerable. Not making everything into a joke. Being able to talk about things called "deep secrets" (which are almost always family-related issues). Wanting someone to process it with. Wanting someone to recognize their pain if their parents are going through a divorce, for example.They very much want those friendships. Do all boys want the same thing? No, there's obviously variation. But definitely over half of the boys in our studies have expressed that desire. And that's now true in China and in all the different countries where we've done this work.The second part—or rather, a nuance to the first finding—and this is the part we're really not listening to: they have the same relational and emotional skills needed to have those friendships.This whole notion that somehow boys don't have the skills to have the relationships that they want—that's all just garbage. Because if you listen to 12, 13, 14, 15-year-olds, their relational and emotional intelligence is extraordinary.You can see it in my book, Rebels with a Cause. You can see it in my previous book, Deep Secrets—which was made into an Oscar-nominated movie, a feature film, Oscar-nominated in 2023. And you hear the narratives of the boys—hundreds of boys at this point—saying the same thing: this desire for close, connected relationships, particularly same-sex friendships.And then you see their amazing emotional nuance—their ability to understand relational nuance. Knowing about covering over feelings. Knowing what happens when you cover over your feelings. Knowing how much damage it does internally. This is what 13-year-old boys will talk about.And no, they won't necessarily talk about it with their parents. If you're thinking, "Well, they never say that to me"— they don't want to talk about it with their parents.No, no, I'm serious. I want parents to stop wanting their kids to speak intimately with them.For the most part, they don't want to do that, especially many boys. It's not a problem. As long as they have the skills and confidence to do it with friends when they want to—that's what matters, for kids of all genders.And so I want us to get off this ego-focused idea: "I want them to share it with me." Because it's getting in the way. Why should they share it with you? You're their parent—and you're likely going to judge them anyway.And besides, often they want to talk about what's happening at home—not necessarily to you. So the whole point is: They want emotionally intimate friendships, and they have the skills to have them.That's theme number one. Theme number two, which we find very clearly in early adolescence and middle adolescence, is this. This is my biggest finding and nobody's listened to this - I finally got some traction in California where the governor's starting to listen. I'll tell you why at the end of the conversation.Boys' linking of social health is a predictor of mental health. They'd say things like, "If I didn't have a friend, if I didn't have someone to talk to, I would want to commit suicide. I would die by suicide. I'd want to kill myself. I'd be all alone."I mean, they say that. This is before they actually feel that way. They say, "I need friends to basically function in the world. I need close, intimate friendships." They say that directly. "And if I don't have them, I will want to kill myself. I will feel all alone."Then, as they go into middle adolescence—remember, it's longitudinal studies—as they go into middle and late adolescence, they start to what I call "go underground" with their feelings. They start to say things that sound like stereotypes:"It's all good." "I don't have any friends; I've given up on my search, but it's all good. It's all good."You know, that repeated, sort of obsessive "It's all good," which is definitely covering over a sense of frustration and sadness—and at times, anger too—in their narratives.The frustration of finding someone you can trust. The frustration—or just totally checking out, the what I call the "whatever" response."Whatever, whatever.""Do you have any close friends this year?""No. Whatever."You know, just that defensive thing. So that's what I call the social health linking to the mental health. The third finding is what I just said: the crisis of connection that boys and young men go through as they feel pressures to "man up." I'll get to that theme—why they have a crisis of connection—in a second.They experience a crisis of connection where they start to disconnect from themselves and from each other. Because it's—well, I'll tell you why. Just give me a second. What we know—hold on, I'm jumping because I don't want to jump. What we understand—I want your audience to understand this because I'm being misinterpreted constantly— I'm not saying only boys and young men experience a crisis of connection.I am saying, we actually learned first about the crisis of connection from girls and young women. As they reach adolescence, they start to go underground with what they know.So girls start to go underground with what they know and claim they don't know things: "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." And boys start to go underground with what they feel, right? And say, "I don't care," "I don't feel," etc., etc.So girls start to go underground with thinking, and boys start to go underground with feeling. So what does that suggest about the reasons for the crisis of connection? It suggests a cultural ideology, right? Here it comes: A cultural ideology that has masculinized thinking and feminized feeling.And Peter, if you want the blunt answer of why we have Trump and why we're in hell right now, it's because we have given a gender identity to thinking and feeling. We have literally made it—given it—a gender identity.Thinking and feeling. It's like if a sister came from another planet and said, "Wait a minute, you gave a gender identity to thinking and feeling?" Like, what? That is at the root of our—no, seriously, it's at the root of our hell. Not only do we give it a gender identity, but we privilege everything we've deemed masculine, and we demean and mock everything we deem feminine.So it's not just that we give it a gender identity, but that we actually privilege what we consider masculine. It's not masculine—it's human. And we demean and mock what is so-called feminine. It's not feminine—it's just human. And what boys reveal—they reveal this hierarchy of human qualities in humans: male over female, masculine over feminine. Because they literally say things.This is how they reveal the cultural ideology, which is the fourth theme—the fourth and final theme—which is the cultural ideology of masculinity. The cultural ideology of how we define maturity, which is about self-sufficiency, not having close, healthy relationships. That should be a core part of all definitions of maturity.It's only about self-sufficiency and independence. So our privileging of the so-called masculine over the so-called feminine is privileging thinking over feeling, the me over the we, autonomy over connectedness, stoicism over vulnerability.And what boys reveal—and I'm going to say this slowly so your listeners can really hear this— what boys reveal is not that they somehow have the soft over the hard, or the hard over the soft. They are equally both. They think and they feel. They want autonomy and they want connection. They are able to be stoic and they're able to be vulnerable.And boys have been shouting that to us for decades, Peter. "Stop making me half-human by assuming that I am only capable of doing one thing and not the other."And girls—if they had more power in the world—would be doing the same thing:"Stop making me just a feeler and not a thinker." That's why I think a lot of girls are attracted to STEM, by the way—because it's their way to prove that they are thinkers too, not just feelers. And the idea is that if we actually recognized humans in a yin-yang way—right?—we would value both our masculine and our feminine sides as simply what makes us human. All of us. I'm going to be very dramatic because I've been doing this for 40 years. If we actually recognized that we have two sides to our humanity—a so-called hard and a so-called soft—and that both are equally important for survival,we wouldn't be experiencing what we're experiencing now.If we actually valued what we deem masculine and what we deem feminine—both—not feminine more than masculine, not masculine more than feminine—both,and recognized that it's simply part of what it means to be human...It’s part of the human condition that we have the capacity to think and feel. And we don't do it separately. I don't think, and then feel. I'm doing it right now. I'm thinking and feeling at the same time. And so the idea is if we actually raised our children starting from a place—what I would call an Eastern philosophical perspective—that comes from my experience in China, an Eastern philosophical perspective: the yin-yang perspective. I wear a yin-yang on my wrist—I can't show it because it's an audio show.But the idea is: the opposites are always in. If you look at a yin-yang symbol, you see the half white, half black—and the opposites are inside each side.You always have feeling and thinking, and thinking and feeling. You always have—you can't have connection without autonomy. You can't have autonomy without connection. It doesn't exist. Developmental psychologists show you that too. In order to explore the environment, you need to have the confidence of connection. So yeah, go ahead.Can you help me understand? Because I love everything you're saying and it resonates with my own experience. And I'm wondering: when you say that they've been telling the story but nobody's listening—what would it mean if we listened? What would it look like? What does hearing the story ask of us?Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to have me hooked as an interviewee. I'm going to have to interview you! This is how I feel—that we're not listening because we keep on blaming the other group. We keep on not seeing ourselves. We keep on not seeing it. What I say very bluntly: we are experiencing a culture and nature clash. We're naturally social, emotional, relational. That's natural. We're born that way—you see that in the early childhood studies. We naturally are curious about each other.But we grow up in an antisocial culture, right? We're naturally social, but we grow up in an antisocial culture that doesn't value actually thinking about another person's thoughts and feelings—or even tells children, "Don't worry about what other people's thoughts and feelings are."A fifth grader—just the other day, on the street, who I randomly ran into (because I always ask questions of everybody)— I asked her about her school, and the first thing she said, fifth grader, she said, "My teacher teaches me how to be selfish and not care about other people." That's literally the first thing she said. And so, my point is we are raising our children in an antisocial culture.And so, we should not be surprised—if we are social animals and we are being raised in an antisocial culture, right? Money over people, money over people, Peter—that we're going to have massive psychological, behavioral, everything problems.And so, to me, how I know they're not listening is, we have Trump. That's how I know. We have an administration that is probably the most brutal in my generation—born in 1963—probably the most brutal administration we've ever had. And it just feels like, as everybody's talked about, like 1930s Germany.And I think the real reason is because—and I'll tell you why. One of the things mass shooters teach us (I didn't get to this, but I want to mention it)—mass shooters teach us. Don't flip the hierarchy. Don't take the group that you hate and put it on the bottom.Because if you do—and we have access to weapons—we may try to kill you. Because nobody wants to be on the bottom of a hierarchy of humanness. And that's exactly what the left has done and exactly what the right has done. I'm not going to—neither party gets a pass on this. We flip the hierarchy. Men and women are doing it with each other. Even though I'm definitely a hardcore feminist. Yeah, my feminism is not rooted in putting men on the bottom. Because quite frankly, even if I can get mad at men—my sister was raped, I have lots of negative stories about men—I know it's not going to solve the problem.Nobody wants to be on the bottom. So you put men on the bottom, then they get angry, then they hate women. Then they try to put women even more on the bottom.We have to stop the madness. And to me, the voices of young people—if we were listening—we would understand that our culture is embedded in a hierarchy of humanness, where we think some people are more human and deserving of healthcare and food and housing than others, right? That's an antisocial culture: if we think some humans are more valuable than other humans.And then, a culture that values only one half of our humanity over the other—masculine over the feminine. So if we live in such a culture—which the boys expose—that culture, mass shooters literally say, Peter, it's stunning, "I don't want to be on the bottom of the hierarchy."They say the word hierarchy. It's not like an academic term. They say it. They don't want to be. So if we flip it, and we try to put them on the bottom—which is what we've done—and now I'm speaking as a Democrat— what many Democrats have done is put the needs of the white working class, poor working class people, on the bottom.Of course they're angry. Are they saying racist, horrible, horrible things? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm not forgiving it. And I'm not saying it's okay. It's hateful. It's like 1930s Germany, right? But the idea is—the solution can't be "Let's put them on the bottom and say you're s**t, and I don't give a s**t about you because you're racist and sexist and all that kind of thing."Because I get the anger of— if you felt like you were put on the bottom, and someone said, "Well, we're going to continue to put you on the bottom because you say ugly things about us."You know, just the—I get the anger. Even though what Trump and his colleagues are doing with our country is so revolting I can barely stand it, I get the anger of those who voted for Trump. I get it.So to me, the boys and young men—even though I'm mostly talking in my samples about boys of color from working class communities—they get it too. They get it too. They don't say directly what I'm saying, but they say, "Hey, I have a hard and a soft side. My story should be as important as your story. Listen to what we have to say, because if you don't listen, we get angry. We get angry."And so to me, what it would look like if we were listening to young people— and the other thing is—one thing, since my book has come out since July, Peter... I mean, I've had some good interviews, so I don't want to critique people who have interviewed me, for the most part. But I'm amazed at how much I will tell the story, Peter, and then the summary of it will be "Boys have a crisis of connection and we need to be nicer to boys."YeahAnd I'll be like, oh, you know—and then it looks like I'm flipping the hierarchy and putting girls on the bottom. You know what I mean? It looks like I'm only valuing boys and I'm not caring about girls. And so—and I'm like—I will even say to interviewers, "Don't do that."Yeah, yeah.Don't say that my work is about boys. It's what boys teach us about us and how to solve our own problems—not just about boys. Although my Deep Secrets previous book was just about boys. But the point is that people are only hearing what they want to hear, Peter. They're only hearing what confirms their assumption of what I'm going to say.Yeah.And so, to me, if they listened—to finally answer your question after 10 minutes— it would be to create, honestly, a politics, a creative politics, and homes and schools that made, as their starting point, that all humans are equally human.And I know that sounds like lefty kind of garbage. It's not. Just: all human lives are equally valuable. And so whether you're poor white working class—you know, white, let's even put them in the, you know, racist category—or you're a lefty person... Actually, I'm going to make this extreme to make a point. A rich white guy living in Beverly Hills or wherever—that both lives are equally valuable.Yeah.Both lives are equally valuable. And by the way, equal also means the rich guy too. Not just saying that the poor guy matters and the rich guy doesn't matter because he's rich. We have to understand that Donald Trump is making us suffer—meaning, it's the rich guys that are making us suffer. So we can't ignore the rich guys.Right.You know what I'm saying?Yes, I do.They're a reflection of their own suffering. I mean, what I want to say to Trump—and it doesn't sound aggressive enough, so, you know, whatever—but I do want to say: "I'm sorry that you're so lonely."Yeah.You know, because at some level, I truly believe—listening to boys my whole career—that his anger comes from a deep, deep and profound loneliness, right? Where he's trying to get people to like him. He's constantly trying to get people to like him because he feels empty. And I would never say that publicly, but I'll say it in your interview because you understand the context in which I'm saying that.Yeah, yeah.You know what I mean? So we have to care about everybody—not just our group.Yes. I want to get to the idea because I feel very—I always tell the story—I feel very lucky. I applied to what I thought was an ad agency, and it turned into, like, a research firm. So I didn't look to become a researcher, but they kind of put me in front of people and told me to ask them questions. You know what I mean? And I really feel grateful that I became—you know what I mean? You've been complimenting my questions and my interview.Yeah.I feel so lucky that I was given that opportunity to become an interviewer. And I'm just—everything—and so you and I, I think, are alike in that we talk to people, we listen to people, we ask questions in order to occupy their perspective for moments.Exactly.Can you tell me more about, I guess, a little bit about your methodology? About how do you listen to young people, and what does it mean to listen to people? Because so much—I agree with you—so much of, I mean, maybe this is just what it's like to be a researcher in a very divided—No, no, no.Environment, you know?Yeah, yeah. No, basically, because I'm not just a researcher—that's the answer.Yeah.So about 10 years ago, I started to do a project called the Listening with Curiosity Project in public schools. We now have been in public schools across New York City, and also I've taught it at university—at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU New York. And we created basically a framework and a method of teaching this—our practices. There are nine practices of listening with curiosity. I write about it in my Rebels with a Cause book.And we've integrated it into a curriculum where the framework is that we are experiencing a crisis of connection due to our cultural-nature clash. A cultural-nature clash leads us to disconnect from ourselves and each other, right?So I want people to understand that. Living, growing up, being social animals, growing up in an antisocial culture makes you disconnect from your own self, what you know about yourself, and what you know about others, what you know about your own humanity and other people's humanity.So the crisis of connection is the outcome of the cultural-nature clash. And the consequences of the crisis of connection are depression, anxiety, suicide, violence, domestic violence, mass shooters, drug abuse, right?Because once you disconnect from yourself, guess what happens? You disconnect from others. And once you can't see somebody else's humanity—that's it. You can't see your own, you can't see others. And the solution is—right?—so it's the cultural-nature clash leading to the crisis of connection. The solution is to go back to the first part of the story: our natural social selves.So the Listening with Curiosity practice is really fundamentally to tap into our five-year-old sense of wonder with each other. And I've been spending the last semester hanging out in a pre-K classroom of three-year-olds, four-year-olds. And Peter, I just have to say this because it's been so shocking to me:You go into a four-year-old classroom—it is bubbling not only with questions about each other. I get questions—when I first walked in, the questions were:"What's your mother's first name?""Why am I wearing this necklace?""Why do I seem to like the necklace?"—because it was the second day I'd been watching them. A million questions—they're asking each other questions. "Where is Harrison?"—because Harrison's supposed to be in the class—and "Is he sick?" I mean, basically all these questions about each other—interpersonal curiosity. We don't even study that topic in developmental psychology, Peter. It's not even a topic we investigate—interpersonal curiosity.What?We don't even study it. We don't think it's a thing—because we feminized it. We feminized it. And thus, we don't think it's a real thing. We study intellectual curiosity—curiosity about the world—but not the natural curiosity of each other. If you want to know the answer to why we're having a crisis of connection, it's that. It's that we don't nurture our natural interpersonal curiosity in other people's thoughts and feelings. It's all about me. What can I tell you about me? It's not about, actually, what can I learn from you?So what children are doing—showing—four-year-olds are showing that if you don't have that, if you're not nurturing that sense of "Who are you?" and "What can I learn about you?"—and then ideally, it goes both ways—that's what creates connection. That's what creates connection.So not only are they engaging with questions, but it is the most social, moral context I have ever been in, in my last 20 years. They are taking care of each other—even when they fight, because there's obviously some bad behavior going on (they're four years old).But even when they fight, it's hilarious. I mean, it's funny, almost—because they will start to hit, and then you'll come over, and one kid will be mad at the other kid, and he's sort of hitting him on the arm. And you'll say, "Oh, come on, you can't do that. You can't hit." And then you'll walk away, and you'll see him sort of do it again, and then the other kid will sort of do it again.And before you know it—I promise you, it's happened many times—there's a group hug going on. A group hug. Like, the two boys will start hugging, and then all the other boys will jump in, they'll start hugging each other, and then they're starting to laugh. I mean, it's just amazing.Yes, do some kids act out and act poorly? Sure, of course. But what's amazing to me is how social and moral it is. They're paying attention.We had a little story—I have two quick stories to tell you, because I'll tell you why I'm telling the story: because it's directly answering your question—How do we fix it?We fix it through remembering that we were naturally like this. So they're reading a book about a boy who wants to step on an ant. It's a fantastic children's story—I don't remember the name of it—but it's fantastic. And so the teacher turned it into a discussion about whether the boy should step on the ant or not. And it was amazing to hear the kids arguing about why the boy should not step on the ant. And it did not feel like it was just, "Oh, that comes from the parents," you know what I mean? It came from them. They were like, "The ant has a family, and he would lose his family, and his family would be very sad." You know, all the kids—all the kids.And one kid—which I loved, one of the most delicious young kids in the classroom—he said, "Well, I think the boy should step on the ant."And I said, "Why do you think that? Why do you think that?"And he goes, "Because it's a little bit fun."And I just loved it—you know, that's a four-year-old—the honesty, the honesty.He wasn't just saying what he thought he was supposed to say. He looked at me with this lovely devious smile and said, "But it's a little bit fun."And so, anyway. Then the other thing. One little boy showed a video of the way he gets to work—well, school—to school. And the teacher then opens this up and says, "What questions do you have for him about the video?" It’s a two-minute video. All of them raised their hands—all of them. And they asked real questions.It's not just raising their hand to raise their hand. They're asking questions like:"Who videotaped it?""Where was your dad?""We could hear your dad's voice—what was he doing?""Where are you?""Why are you scrooching down on your video?"I'm just saying—you get what I'm saying. And in my NYU classroom or my Yale classroom—or wherever I've taught (I've taught in lots of places around the world)—you ask a question or you ask what their questions are:Nothing.Nothing.Nothing.I want to slow-motion this idea that there's no study of interpersonal curiosity.Can you please just sort of—Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.I don't quite believe it.Yeah, I know, I know. Okay, so first of all—I'm exaggerating a little bit. There are a couple studies. There's a beautiful book called Hungry Minds that came out a couple of years ago, and she talks about social curiosity. She—and probably, I would say, maybe four or five other people in the history of developmental psychology that I am aware of—have looked at social curiosity. So it's definitely been looked at in a sort of small group of studies that you can find. And everybody cites the same person. The person who wrote Hungry Minds is Susan Engel. Everybody cites her because she's the one that actually looked at what's called social curiosity.However—right—so that's... but it's still a tiny group. It's a tiny group compared to looking at intellectual curiosity, or self-regulation, or all the other things we look at in childhood.But what has not been done—we're hoping to do the first study ever—is a developmental study where you look at how interpersonal curiosity changes over time and how that is shaped by the context. That's never been done. And I'm just saying that because in developmental psychology, that's what we do. We look at things over time. We don't look at one-shot deals.And so the whole point is: there's probably, out there—because you never say never in anything—there's probably a study out there that's done it over a few years that I've never heard of. But the point is: given the importance of human connection to interpersonal curiosity, it is stunning to me that we don't have decades and decades of developmental research over time, looking at the development of that sense of wonder in each other.How the context matters—because you know context matters. The home context, the school context, the peer context. If it's not happening with your peers or at your home, it's not going to be happening. It's going to be diminishing. And then—why is it that we start off at four or five—this is the big question, Peter—this is what I want to ask your audience. Why at four and five is everybody raising their hand to ask questions of the little boy about how he got to school—meaning not about the moon, not about the stars, not about anything abstract—but just how that boy got to school, you know, in his little video?And then you ask a question—or you ask if they have questions—very simple questions, not testing questions, very simple questions or asking for their questions about very fundamental issues... And nobody raises their hand, except the three students who always raise their hand, right? And you end up calling on them. And when I told that to my kids, who are 22 and 24, they said, "Well, because everybody's afraid." And I said, exactly—that's my point. I don't think that my students are idiots—obviously not. I know that they have that five-year-old in them. But they become afraid.What's made them so afraid? It's the anti-social culture that basically judges your curiosity. It makes a judgment about whether your curiosity is sophisticated, whether it reflects intelligence. And they think that asking, "What's your mother's name?" is a stupid question. It's not a stupid question—because actually, your mother's name— I love that the child asked it.You know what my daughter said? This was so interesting. She's 22, and I was telling her about that story. And I was sort of thinking it was so sweet that the little girl wanted to know my mother's name.And she said, "Well, Mom, you know why?"And I was like, "No, I don't know why."And she goes, "She's probably just realizing that her mom has a name.You know, it's not just 'Mom.' And so because she is just recognizing that her mom has a name, she realizes that you probably have a mom with a name.And so she wants to know what that name is." And I said, "Chiara"—that's my daughter’s name—"Chiara, that is just so effing great." I said, "I think you got it spot on."And I said, "You got it." And I would have never thought of that, because I still have an adult head. I was thinking it was like a way to connect to me—I mean, you know, whatever.I wasn't thinking what she was thinking about it—worse from the four-year-old perspective. She was channeling the four-year-old and saying, "You just learned that 'Mom' is not a name." And so—don't you love that response? I mean, it's beautiful. But I'm just saying—what happens to us? I think—honestly—I think we get traumatized by the culture. I think we're traumatized. We're fearful, we're traumatized. We don't want to ask questions. We're afraid of being judged. We don't share with our parents because we're afraid of being judged. We don't share anything because we're afraid of being judged in an anti-social culture that hates people. No, no, I'm serious.I mean, you know.I know, I know, I know. Think about how much we hate people.Well, I'm also thinking—to the degree to which you have access to these insights into boys and into us—because you're having the conversations. But where are those conversations happening, in the absence of the research that gets done to create the conditions for it?Yeah, on this podcast. I'm just saying—it doesn't happen. And that's the other thing we get from young people. I get this all the time—you must get this all the time. People get teary-eyed after I interview them. People get emotional. And so—I mean, I get it from little kids, from teenagers, from young adults, from grownups. I even asked—I remember asking an African-American man, probably in his late 40s—what he wants in his life most, and why. And he got all teary-eyed.He said, "Nobody asks Black men that." He said, "Nobody. I've never been asked that in my entire life—what do I want, and why?" He said, "I've never been asked that." And he started to get all teary-eyed.And I thought, that's the tragedy of an antisocial culture. We don't think what you want is relevant. We don't think what you want is relevant unless it's about money and unless it's helping us get what we want.There's so much. I mean, I feel like the gendered aspect of questions and listening—So I've been a researcher and I've operated in the commercial sphere. And very often I'm interacting with what feels like sort of the feminine part of a corporation—the part that does research and listens to people. Somebody called me—they described me as the most masculine researcher they'd met. And I found it so—it's like, it gives me vertigo. I don't know what to do with that description because it sort of turns expectations. What does that mean exactly? I don't quite understand it.Yeah, yeah, neither do I.But there was another thought that I had about—oh, that answers—we prioritize answers. The hierarchy, right?Oh, totally.To have a question is a complete weakness. It's a complete failure.I'm going to make it more blunt. We privilege knowing over not knowing. And so ultimately, that is our ultimate hierarchy. That—what you know. What do you know. And not, "What do you not know?""What are your questions?" And I want to create a revolution. I really—I'm serious about this. I want to—we've been trying to do this in middle and high schools for the last decade. I want to create a revolution to celebrate our capacity to not know, and to know what we don't know, and to ask questions. Right? And I just—I remember, that's so obvious to me. It hit me about two years ago. That's what it is. We privilege knowing over not knowing.And so everybody wants to share what they know, rather than—"What's your question? What's your question?" And they're like, "Well, I don't have any questions." Like—how can you have no questions? You know? Yeah, well—yeah, we are. We're traumatized.Like you say—you can't generate a question when you're terrified.Exactly. I literally think we are traumatized. There's a beautiful concept—which we don't have time to talk about—but at some point, I want to recommend a book, Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, talks about a concept called moral injury.And he talks about essentially living—he's talking about the military—but it's applied to our culture. When people in authority do things that you know is not right, but you are forced to do it anyway. And I think we are all experiencing moral injury, right?We know this anti-social culture is toxic.Right. We know it. We know it in our bodies. And yet we produce it. We continually produce it. And I think it's causing a serious trauma—more trauma for certain people than other people. But the point is—that's why we're getting the mass shooters, the rising suicides. I mean, it's causing serious, serious problems.And I do have to say—because people forget—it's not natural to kill ourselves and to kill each other. That's not a natural thing. We may have done it throughout our history, but I'm just saying—it's not natural to our species. It's just something that happens. Why does it happen so much? Why is it happening more in terms of suicide? (Not in terms of homicide, but in terms of suicide.)Anyway.Last question. What do you love about your work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?You know what? To live a life—you’re going to relate to this— to live a life where I get to have questions and then pursue the answers to them— you can't get better than that.I mean, I live a life of purpose, of passion, of asking my own questions, and then going out into the world and trying to answer it sitting in pre-K classrooms, interviewing teenagers, doing studies with amazing college students, teaching classes on topics that I love.I mean, I am the most lucky person in the whole world. I'm the most lucky person in the whole world. I mean, think about it. You must feel the same way. That's what I do. That's what I do for a living. I get paid for it. I get paid.I'm right there with you. I feel like it's amazing. To be given the permission to ask questions and then listen and explore is just an unbelievable gift.Exactly. And we need to use a beautiful phrase—which I'm going to repeat back because it's important. I think it's important for the two of us also to really encourage that: giving permission to ask. You know, like creating structures—I try to do it in my classrooms—giving the permission to ask.Yes.Oftentimes people think asking is rude—and it's the opposite of rude.Well, I'm really landing in this. It feels a little bit too academic or too explicit for some reason, but you've used this term over and over again. that if we are in agreement that we live in an anti-social culture, then we need to create pro-social— A pro-social culture.Yeah.And that is in the book I'm working on now for Harvard, called Our Social Nature in an Anti-Social Culture: A Five-Part Story. And the last chapter is all about how to create a pro-social culture. And what I'm arguing here is the importance of interpersonal curiosity.Yeah, it's amazing. Why is that word—I feel like this is a phrase, pro-social, that I hadn't really—I've only encountered it in the last, I don't know, couple of years. I heard it once three years ago, and it was around deliberative democracy and a wonkish kind of way of bringing people together and community engagement and civic engagement.And it was like—if we're fragmenting in all these different ways, and all of our spaces that we have for coming together around community decisions or interpersonal decisions aren't working—then what do we do? We have to model new forms of behavior, right? And this idea of pro-social is all over for me now.Yeah, no, but also—I would just want to remind you as a developmental psychologist—because there's not enough developmental psychologists in these conversations, by the way. They always get social psychologists. It's like—social psychologists don't listen to children.Developmental psychology—no, I'm serious. I mean, if we listened to children, we wouldn't be so obsessed with social psychology. So developmentals remind us that we already have the skills within us. We're born with it. It's natural. It's not—we don't have to teach it. We don't have to, right? We just have to nurture it.And so to me, that's the radical optimistic message I'm saying. I'm deeply optimistic because we are born with these skills. Young people reveal them all the time. It's just a matter of nurturing them rather than shutting them down. So the solution is not to teach it. The solution is to nurture it. That's a much easier thing to do, right?And so the idea is that if we listened to young people—which nobody's doing—and nobody's listening to developmental psychologists—we would understand. See, we don't think we can learn something from young people, Peter. We really don't.We think we know, and they don't know. And we don't value not knowing.So they're not going to teach us anything. We have to reverse that whole hierarchy of adults over children. We actually should see them equally. We all have—I always say this—we all have something to teach and something to learn. Everybody, regardless of your age. You have something to teach and something to learn.If we understood that naturally—and we understood we have the capacity to answer our own questions, right, through investigating it with other people—we would just be inherently a pro-social culture.Because it's about looking at you, Peter, and saying, What can I learn from you, not just about you, but about me, through you, right? And then once that happens—Toni Morrison talks about that—once that happens, that's when a connection happens. When we do it both ways. That we see ourselves in the other, and then we're connected.I feel like we're slipping into the geeking out phase, which I'm enjoying very much. One last thought. Did you ever encounter Ursula Le Guin's Listening and Telling?Do you know that essay?I think I do, because the name is super familiar.But she describes—she uses these analogies for communication. The conventional idea is like boxes transmitting units of information through a tube, but anybody who has actually had a conversation knows that's not true. And she uses the analogy of amoeba sex as being the metaphor for communication—because it's intersubjective and it's reciprocal, and they become one. They come together in conversation.Yeah, but it has to have curiosity in it. Because what I would say—in a neoliberal, crazy environment—where our conversation is just parallel play, it's actually not doing that, because there's no curiosity in it. So it's just parallel play, where each person is talking but nobody's listening.I love it.And so to me, you have to have the curiosity in there, right? To be like an amoeba, right? I mean, it has to—Yeah, you have to want, right?You have to want it. You have to be curious. You have to wonder about the other person. And if you don't have that, you get this isolating, horrible parallel play—where we think just by revealing my private information, we're going to create a relationship. And that doesn't create a relationship—to just reveal vulnerable stuff.I know we're over time, but I'm amazed at how many people will think that the key to closeness is being vulnerable. Right. Like, no, no, no, no, no. The key to closeness is curiosity.Yeah.You know—be curious about the person you're talking to. Who are they?You have to be curious. The vulnerability is so overrated to me.Yeah. I remember somebody saying that the key to a good interview is love.What do you make of that?I mean, if love is curiosity. But I would say again—it's like, if you're not curious—as so many people know, especially when it goes one way, you're curious about the person and they're not curious about you, it leads to deep alienation when someone's not curious about you. You know, when you're talking and they're blabbing on and blabbing on and blabbing on—and then, you know, for a lot of people, it leads to real anger. You know—how can you not be curious in me, and I'm curious in you?We have come to the end of our time. Thank you so much!Thank you, thank you.All right.Take care.Bye-bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Russell Davies is a writer and strategist. He's worked on communications and digital strategies for organizations like Honda, Nike, Microsoft, Apple, the Government Digital Service and the Co-op. He's currently Marketing and Product Director for The Modern House. He is the author of Everything I Know About Life I Learned From Powerpoint, DO Interestingness, among others. All right, Russell, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend who helps people tell their stories. It’s a big question, which is why I love it—but because it’s so big, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in total control. You can answer however you want—or not at all. The question is: Where do you come from? Oh, you made me nervous then. I come from a small city in the East Midlands of England called Derby.And what was it like growing up in Derby?It was fine.Do you have any recollections? What did you want to be when you grew up—young Russell in Derby?I wanted to be a musician, but not enough to actually become one. I also wanted to be Clive James, the Australian critic—a very clever man who was one of the first people to take television seriously in writing. He wrote a funny and clever column about popular TV as if it were art. That seemed like the best job there could be.Do you remember what kind of television he was writing about that made you feel that way?Everything—arts, news, sitcoms. At the time, he wrote a lot about shows like Dallas and Dynasty. He was a critic but also a poet. He could really write. He was part of that generation of Australians who came to the UK in the ’50s and ’60s and saw Britain with an outsider’s eye—but sometimes they were more inside than the British themselves because of the colonial relationship. I thought, what a great way to make a living.Where are you now, and what do you do? What’s keeping you busy these days?I'm not Clive James, sadly. I now live in London, and I work in marketing.What does it mean to be from the Midlands? I lived in San Francisco for a while and played soccer for a pub team run by a guy from Birmingham. That’s Midlands, right? Yes—West Midlands.Okay, so what’s the important distinction? I might fumble here—it’s delicate territory.It’s like being from the North but without any of the advantages. Only people from the Midlands think the Midlands exists. People from the South just think in terms of North and South. Same with people from the North. I’m not a fan of geographical specialness. Every country thinks it has a unique sense of humor or music culture—but usually, they don’t. The Midlands is like everywhere else. Actually, the East Midlands is special in that it doesn’t think it’s special.Beautiful. I seem to remember—and correct me if I’m wrong—that you had a slogan or motto on one of your blogs: "I’m as disappointed as you are." Does that ring a bell?Yeah, yeah, yeah. That probably used to be on the blog. Maybe it’s not anymore.Where did that come from?That came from when I was working at Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, on the Microsoft business. At the time, Wieden had two big accounts: Nike and Microsoft. All the cool kids worked on Nike. The nerdy kids, like me, worked on Microsoft. They did great ads—we didn’t. Microsoft was clearly unhappy with us. We kept trying to make good ads, and they kept saying, "We don’t need these."Then Microsoft got sued by the Department of Justice in the late ’90s. They were lining up to fire us, but firing your agency during an antitrust suit looks bad. So they kept paying us—$20 million a year—even though we weren’t doing much.There were basically two of us on the account: me and the account director, a fantastic woman named Trish. We’d fly to Seattle every week just to hold meetings because they were paying us. At one point, Bob Herbold, then CEO of Microsoft and famously the highest-salaried person in America, decided he wanted a new tagline.We had previously come up with "Where do you want to go today?"—Jim Riswold wrote that, arguably one of the best taglines ever, after "Just Do It." But no one was working on it anymore. It was just Trish and me. We’d brainstorm taglines on the plane to Seattle. One day, we realized the perfect tagline was: "We’re as disappointed as you are." And yeah, it stuck. It stuck with me. I felt a strong connection to it.Imagine how brilliant that company would be if they’d actually used it.So, your answer earlier about what you’re doing now was a bit reluctant—an ambivalent “marketing.” When did you first realize you could make a living doing... whatever this is that you do?When I was forced to, I suppose. I left Derby for university and, of course, couldn’t go back. So I moved to London and needed a job. This was the late ’80s. If you wanted to do something vaguely creative and make a decent living—and your parents weren’t already in the industry—you went into advertising or design. It was a way into creative work. My view of advertising came from watching Bewitched and Thirtysomething. I thought, "That looks good—I’ll do that."Wait—Bewitched? I didn’t realize that was what he did.Yeah. Darren, Samantha’s husband—he was in advertising. He was constantly trying to come up with slogans and would write them on an easel.Oh, amazing.Yeah. That’s what I thought advertising was: the client comes in with a bottle of something and says, “I need a slogan,” and you come up with one.What do you love about the work? You’ve done so many different things—where’s the joy in it, if any?If any. I mean, I wouldn’t do it if they didn’t pay me.So, not exactly joyful?Well, yeah. I think enjoy is different from joy. There are aspects that are interesting, even satisfying. But I think it can be dangerous to talk about work using words like joy, love, and passion. It sets unrealistic expectations—like Instagram. You're only seeing the highlights. So yes, it can be fascinating and engaging, and it’s definitely better than many other jobs. But at the end of the day, it’s still a job. Mostly, it’s about passing the time.I’m curious—what are you enjoying these days? You mentioned something about semi-retirement. Is that actually the case?Oh, that was a joke. It’s just been the header on my blog for probably ten years. But people see it and assume I’ve retired. I haven’t.What I am doing now is getting more comfortable with being older. You know, the happiness researchers say that happiness declines from your mid-30s to your mid-50s, and then starts rising again—basically when you realize you’re never going to achieve what you thought you were, and you get comfortable with that. I’m enjoying being in that phase. I’m very lucky in a lot of ways.Over the past 10 to 15 years, I’ve mostly worked with people who are much younger than me. I find that really rewarding. It’s energizing—not in the creepy, "youth is energy" way—but because it clarifies what I’m there to do, and what I’m not there to do. I’m there to offer pattern recognition and experience—not energy and ideas. And I quite like that. I enjoy it.Tell me more—when you say pattern recognition, what does that look like?Well, when you’ve been doing this work long enough, you realize there are no new problems. You’ve seen the same challenges dozens of times. So someone comes to you and says, “Should we do A or B?” And you just say, “Do A.”And they ask, “How do you know?” And you say, “Because I’ve seen this before.” Sometimes, that makes you stop and reflect—why do I think A is better than B? That’s interesting to unpack. But most of the time, you’re just helping people resolve Friedkin’s Paradox.Friedkin’s Paradox?It goes something like: If you're choosing between two equally attractive options, it’s a very difficult decision—because they’re equally attractive. The paradox is that it doesn’t matter which you choose.Most branding, marketing, advertising, and communications decisions are like that. You’re rarely in a room with a brilliant idea and a terrible idea. You’re almost always deciding between a few pretty good ones.And yet, companies will spend six months agonizing over which to choose—when it really doesn’t matter. Having an old guy in the room who can say, “Just do that one,” saves everyone a lot of time.Deeply liberating, it seems.Yeah. I once spent about six months working with Coca-Cola in Atlanta, helping them decide whether the fifth brand value for Diet Coke should be fun or funny. And it didn’t matter.Did you know that at the time?Yeah. I knew. Partly because this was going on a creative brief, and I knew, A. the creatives wouldn’t read it. B, it wouldn’t change anything anyone did, and C, when it came time to evaluate the work against the brief, we’d spend another six months asking, “Is that fun? Or is that funny?”But we’ve built an industry and a profession where people are really well-equipped to argue about whether something is fun or funny. We hire people with English degrees—people who understand semantics and who can debate trivial, pointless minutiae for months. And it feels like work.And honestly, it’s quite fun work. I talk about this in presentations sometimes. I’ll ask, “Who thinks it should be fun? Who thinks it should be funny?” Then I give people a few minutes to think it through, and they come up with very committed points of view.They’re determined. They’ll say, “It should definitely be fun,” and then give me their rationale. And it still doesn’t matter. So being in rooms and helping people navigate that—that’s valuable. The organizational version of that is called bike shedding. Are you familiar with it?I think I came across it via Farnam Street—Shane Parrish’s work. It feels like a British expression.It kind of is. The original idea came from a British columnist named C. Northcote Parkinson in the 1930s. He wrote for the Straits Times, a paper in Hong Kong, and his columns were often humorous.He coined Parkinson’s Law—“Work expands to fill the time available.” But he also introduced something now called the law of triviality, which became known as bike shedding. He tells the story of a planning committee reviewing whether to build a nuclear power station. They spend about 20 minutes on the nuclear plans—because none of them really understand nuclear energy—so they just say, “Sure, that seems fine.”Then, the next agenda item is: What color should the bike shed be next to the nuclear plant? They spend six hours debating it—because everyone has an opinion on colors, and everyone has seen a bike shed.Originally, it was just a little joke column. But sometime in the ’70s or ’80s, maybe later, the idea was picked up in the software development world—because it’s a very common issue in programming and tech.I first encountered it when I was working at the Government Digital Service. I was in a meeting—and the meeting descended into talking about trivial stuff. But I felt completely comfortable—like, this is what I’ve been doing my whole life. I can talk about trivial stuff for days. I’m good at this. It’s basically what I get paid to do. Then someone said, “Oh, we’re bike shedding.” And everyone else went, “Oh, yes, you’re right. Let’s stop.” And they just moved on.It was amazing. A tremendous organizational hack. Just by naming the phenomenon, everyone recognized it. “Yes, we are talking about something trivial. Let’s move on.” It was genius. And now, I think that’s one of the things I do—I help people recognize when they’re bike shedding. Like we are now.When people reach out to you, what kind of questions do they ask? What kinds of projects do you like to take on?I do a fair bit of traditional brand consultancy work. I also ghostwrite a lot of presentations. People often come to me because they’re trying to express something, and they just can’t quite figure out how to say it. It’s less about consumer-level messaging these days, and more at the organizational level.Most of what I do is just take what they have and make it shorter. That’s really it—I delete stuff. Because people find that impossible. For whatever reason, people just cannot delete things. So they come to me with all this material and say, “Can you clean this up?” And I do. And I enjoy it. It’s fun. I’ve developed this instinct—whatever I’m looking at, I’m immediately thinking, How can we make this shorter?My team at the Government Digital Service once joked that I could be replaced by a Slack bot with three automated responses: No, Tea? and Make it shorter.I wanted to ask you about the Government Digital Service. I know the bike shedding idea from attending small-town planning meetings, but I didn’t realize it could be applied as a kind of corrective—as a hack. I feel like I’ve got a whole new purpose in life now—like bike shedding as a form of intervention. That’s amazing.How did the Government Digital Service come about for you? The design principles are kind of legendary. I’ve spent time with civic innovators here in the U.S. who are trying to replicate some of that. It’s such a beautiful story, and what you did was so impressive. How did you end up being part of it?I was very lucky. This would have been around 2011 or 2012. At the time, I was doing a terrible job in some vague strategic planning role—something like “EMEA Strategy Director” at R/GA. We were still feeling the effects of the financial crash, and a lot of the interesting, independent digital businesses in the UK were struggling or shutting down.We had a coalition government, which is quite rare in the UK, and there had just been a massive IT scandal involving the NHS. They had wasted an enormous amount of money. For the previous 10 or 15 years, a small group of people had been lobbying government—saying, “We should do the internet better. We can do this better.”Eventually, all these forces aligned. The government needed a project that was non-controversial—because of the coalition—and they needed to save a lot of money. At the same time, this group of smart people, both inside and outside government, suddenly had influence. And that led to the creation of the Government Digital Service (GDS), which was positioned at the center of government and given a rare amount of authority over digital work.It was a fragmented system. Every department had its own website, its own vendors, its own way of doing things. Everything was outsourced, expensive, and broken. I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was completely oblivious.Then a friend of mine, Ben Terrett—a designer and frequent blogger—was approached to become Head of Design at GDS. Back then, the blogging community was pretty small, and people across design, tech, and comms kind of knew each other.We met for breakfast, and he said, “I’ve been offered this job. It sounds terrible. Why would I do this?” Designing government websites wasn’t anyone’s dream gig.But we talked about it and realized, actually, this was a really interesting problem. It might be the last great web problem. We’d missed out on Web 2.0 and the startup boom. But digital transformation in government? That felt like one of the big things. So Ben took the job.And I did something I’ve probably never done before or since—I went and asked, “Can I have a job too, please?” I said, “I don’t know exactly what I can do for you, but this seems really interesting. I’d love to be part of it.”They basically made a role for me. It was essentially Head of PowerPoint. The idea was, “We’re going to need someone to explain what we’re doing—to the rest of government and to the world.” So I handled presentations and blogging.Ben and I ended up being, in a way, creative directors for GDS. He led design; I led communication and storytelling. I had a small team focused on explanation—making sense of what we were doing.And that’s when I realized that being in charge of presentations is, in part, being in charge of strategy. You back your way into figuring out what to say by figuring out how to say it.Can you say more about that?Sure. It ties into what I was saying earlier about the kind of work I do now. There’s that truism: writing is thinking. To write well, you have to think clearly. And I’d extend that—writing presentations is deciding. To make a good presentation, you have to make choices. You have to say, “I’m going to include this and not that.” You have to commit.When I was creating presentations at the Government Digital Service, I made up some rules—like, don’t use too many words, make the type big, that kind of thing. And that forced clarity. You had to actually decide what you were going to say. A lot of presentations—especially in government—are filled with hedging and ambiguity. You can tell no one has really committed to a point of view, so the presentation becomes this vague, shapeless thing.A good example: one of our jobs was to tell government departments they were no longer going to have their own websites. Someone drafted a presentation slide that said something like, “Department websites under review,” or “Ongoing consultation process.” I asked, “Are we saying we’re going to close their websites?” They said yes.So I said, “Well, we should put that on the slide, then.”And there’d be pushback—“We can’t say that,” or “It’s too blunt.” But we’d debate it and, ultimately, agree: if that’s what we mean, that’s what we need to say. It forced the team to clarify the message before going into the room, instead of presenting a vague message and being unsure how to respond when someone asks, “What exactly are you saying?” So yeah, in a way, 30-point type became a tool for strategic clarity.Is that where your PowerPoint book came from?Yeah. That was the origin. But also, the book came about halfway through my lifelong relationship with PowerPoint. Again, I was just very lucky. I started using it right around the time it was becoming the standard presentation tool. And it just... suited me.In what way?Partly just circumstance. For a long time, my career—such as it was—succeeded because I knew how to put images into PowerPoint before most other people did.Seriously?Yeah. At the time, it was surprisingly hard. No one knew how to do it. I’d be a junior planner giving a client presentation, and afterward they’d say, “Yeah, that was good... but how did you get the images in there?”That one skill made me employable. And it’s not much of a stretch to say that’s how I ended up getting the job at Wieden+Kennedy. But also, there’s just something satisfying to me about the combination of words and images and talking. I almost want to say storytelling—though not in the grand, sweeping sense. More like: words, in a linear order, paired with visuals. That process—constructing a narrative slide by slide—is something I genuinely enjoy. Yeah. You know, I like it.Yeah.But it’s increasingly irrelevant.How do you mean?Well, that kind of work—the set-piece moment—it just doesn’t happen as much anymore in hybrid environments. The pitch, or even the small, micro-pitches throughout the week—presenting work, sharing a plan—that kind of formal moment is becoming rarer.And PowerPoint, as a tool, is used less and less. It feels a bit like the harpsichord being replaced by the piano. I struggled with that a bit during the pandemic.People started using Miro—a lot. And I’d be working with someone and say, “Can you show me the strategy stuff?” And they’d share a board. And I’d look at it and say, “OK, I can see you’ve got all the pieces—but what’s the order? Which bit is first? Which is most important?”And that’s the thing about PowerPoint, whatever else you say about it: it forces you to decide what order things go in. That’s actually quite a big deal. If you’re just presenting a cluster of ideas, that’s a different kind of value. It’s still valuable—but it’s different. It doesn’t force that same kind of decision-making.Yeah. I want to follow a thread here—maybe circle around it a bit before going right at it. I’m thinking about research. I mean, the GDS design principles famously start with “Start with user needs.” We’ve talked about bike shedding, decision-making, communication. So, how do you feel about research—about user needs—and the role that plays either in your own work or in good brand work more broadly?There are a few ways to come at that question. What we meant by “user needs” at that moment in time—and in that environment—was actually quite radical. In those early days of web services, for the first time at scale, you could watch what people did rather than ask them what they thought.After spending 10 or 15 years with both qualitative and quantitative research—and often finding very little value in either—it was revelatory to simply observe behavior. You could say, “OK, people are doing this thing—let’s make it easier for them to do it.” Then you’d move a button slightly to the left, and more people would click it. That kind of feedback loop was powerful.Now, of course, that approach has since been weaponized in all kinds of problematic ways. But if your goal is to help someone renew a driving license or apply for benefits, it’s an incredible tool.And at the time, it was also a reaction against how digital services—especially within organizations and government—had been built. They were almost always designed to serve the needs of the organization, not the user.Take the driving license example. I think it was that. Basically, the transaction required you to answer about five essential questions. But the form had ballooned to 60 questions, because people in government realized that everyone needed a driving license—and that made it a convenient opportunity to ask for all sorts of other information.So they’d say, “Can we just add this question?” or “Let’s collect data for this department, too.” Over time, the service became more about internal convenience than user need. That happens everywhere. It’s not unique to government.So being in a position where we had the authority to say, “No, we’re building this for the users,” was meaningful. And, like I said, after spending 20 years fighting against bad market research, it was refreshing to say, “I don’t care what they say—I can see what they’re doing.”Yeah. And I’d forgotten the context—this was 2011. That kind of behavioral data at scale wasn’t widely accessible yet.Exactly. Not unheard of, but within the context we were in—government, public service—it was still pretty new. And it was a big part of the shift. So how did the design principles come to exist? I’m thinking about how I first encountered them—it’s kind of amazing that I ever did. It feels unlikely. Had anyone really articulated what you guys were trying to say before? Or was it new?It all happened kind of accidentally. The product manager—I think it was him—mentioned something like, "They’ve asked us for a roadmap." Or maybe it was more like, "They’ve asked us for something." We were, in a sense, a substitute for something else that was supposed to happen. It was one of those, “We need a big, long something-or-other,” situations. But there wasn’t time. So the question became: can we just do something?A group of us started writing. And what we ended up doing—and this has become a key lesson for me—was simply to listen to what people were already saying. We’d hear something good, something interesting, and we’d say, “Yes, let’s use that.” Maybe tidy it up a bit, but essentially we just appropriated the language that was already circulating. It felt new and interesting. No one had really done design principles in that way before. People had written manifestos and so on, but not quite this.It wasn’t even my idea—someone else suggested we call them "principles." More specifically, “design principles.” And just like the concept of the "bikeshed" as a framing tool, naming them that way gave them weight. It made them feel more concrete, which was especially powerful in an organization that respected things that seemed solid. That gave them real power.I think the tenth principle was: Make things open; it makes them better. We’d just refer to it as “the tenth principle,” and people would say, “Right, we should share this.” That kind of framing gave it momentum. Looking back, they seem a bit banal now—somewhat self-serving and very much a product of their time. Back then, we thought we were cool and revolutionary… but we weren’t, really.Still, when I first encountered them, they felt incredibly powerful. And I think part of that power came from who was saying it. This was the British government, after all. It was surprising to hear them talk about openness and agile practices. If Nike had said it, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed. But coming from government? That was exciting.And honestly, a lot of what I did back then was just cover—creating space while others got on with the real work. Once that work started to take shape—like when we could say, “Look, you can now order your driving license in three minutes instead of thirty”—they didn’t need me anymore. But it was fun. Almost joyful, really.How have things changed in your industry since you started—whether in advertising, marketing, or branding? You mentioned working with a lot of young people now and being a kind of pattern recognizer. What do you notice is different for them? What do you learn about the field through their eyes?I think young people have it a lot harder than I did. I came into the industry with a huge amount of privilege. I’m a tall-ish, white, straight man. I had a solid education, fully funded by the state. And I entered advertising at a time when the industry was fat, wealthy, happy—even indulgent. It could afford to let someone like me spend five years figuring out how to be useful.Then I got very lucky. I spent ten years at Wieden+Kennedy, and they basically wanted exactly what I had to offer. In a 30-year career, I’d say ten of those years were genuinely good and successful—which, honestly, are pretty decent odds. But the landscape has changed. It’s just tougher now. The industry is more fragmented, there's less money, and it doesn’t feel as special.What do you mean by “less special”?I mean it’s less good—because it doesn’t need to be. When I was starting out, advertising was a compelling field. It was one of the most creative corners of commercial life. It stood shoulder to shoulder with film, design, and music. That’s not the case anymore.And I think, on some level, that’s actually a good thing for society. The kind of people who might’ve gone into advertising 20 years ago? They're YouTubers now. They’re creating independently. They don’t need advertising anymore.In the UK especially—though I think to some extent this is true in the US too—advertising was once where bright, creative, working-class people ended up. They couldn’t get into publishing, museums, or journalism because of structural barriers like the Oxbridge system. So instead, they funneled their creativity into commercial industries like advertising, music, and design. That led to a real flourishing of talent—people like Tony and Ridley Scott, or the Hegartys and Saatchis.But now, if you’re one of those people, and you can break into the creative industries (which is harder than ever), you’re not going to choose a network ad agency. You’re going to do it on your own terms—on TikTok, YouTube, or wherever you can build your own audience and your own life. So maybe it’s not harder—it’s just different now. And I know you mentioned offering advice about how to run a meeting, but not so much about how to get a job.Exactly. I have no idea how someone gets a job now. It’s very different. I’m happy to give advice on things like how to run a good meeting, but career paths today feel unrecognizable to me.And in some ways, things are better now. I remember someone once saying that in the 1960s, British culture was essentially run by ten white men: the heads of the two TV stations, editors of five national newspapers, the directors of the British Museum and Library, and maybe Charles Saatchi. The accepted mainstream culture was this very singular, mono-everything structure. That’s no longer the case—and that’s undoubtedly a good thing. It’s different now. But different isn’t always worse.You mentioned having ten “good” years out of a 30-year career. Were there mentors who made a big impact on you? Or certain lessons or touchstones you come back to in your work?I don’t have an immediate answer to that—which probably means... no, not really. I’ve become more and more aware of just how lucky and privileged I’ve been. So when I talk about mentors or guiding principles, it starts to sound like I had agency in my career, like I planned it all. But honestly, I didn’t. I made a lot of bad decisions and a few good ones.And the strange thing about history—or about telling your story in hindsight—is that people only talk about the things you did well. So the narrative becomes, “Oh, you did this, and then you did that, and then you did this other brilliant thing.” And I’m sitting there thinking, “Yeah, but I also spent five years doing something that went nowhere and made me miserable.”That said, while I might not have had formal mentors, I did make a lot of really good friends. And I’ve always wanted to impress them. A lot of the things I’ve done were motivated by admiration—by trying to do something smart enough, good enough, or interesting enough that it would earn their respect. And I think that’s made me better. I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by wise people, and even luckier to be motivated by wanting to impress them.In the early days of blogging, there was this guy—Chris Heathcote—who ran a blog called Anti Mega. He’s a friend now, I think. If you asked him, I hope he’d say he’s one of my friends. But back then, he was someone I admired from afar.His blog was intimidating in that very particular way blogs could be—written by someone you’d never met, but who clearly knew everything. Chris wrote about design, food, molecular gastronomy, museums. He worked at Nokia when Nokia was the coolest company on earth. I was completely in awe. I just wanted Chris to like me. I’d write blog posts like, “Chris said this clever thing,” and then riff off it. He was a touchstone, even if he didn’t know it.Eventually, I wanted to ask him to speak at my own conference. At the time, I was working at Nike, and they paid for me to attend TED in 2005. This was before TED talks were everywhere online—you had to be there. And the talks were amazing. It was the first time I’d seen the 20-minute talk as a kind of performance art. But I hated the networking bits—the mingling before and after. The talks, though, were electric.After I left Nike and started freelancing, I realized I had saved enough to attend TED again. But then it occurred to me: what if, instead of flying to Monterey and spending all that money on TED, I used that budget to put on my own conference? So I did. I created a small event called Interesting. And, yes—part of the reason was so I could ask Chris to speak. He said yes. He spoke. I met him. And he turned out to be a lovely, generous man. Not intimidating at all.That moment captures a lot of how I’ve moved through the industry. Back when I was working in advertising, I often felt envious of the early digital crowd—the Web 2.0 people. I admired them immensely, but they were suspicious of me. I worked in advertising, and that made me... suspect.Brian Eno talks about scenius instead of genius—the idea that it’s not about the lone brilliant mind, but about a whole scene of people elevating one another. That’s what that blogging era felt like. If I had mentors, they came from that community—this loosely connected, mostly white, mostly male group in London, San Francisco, and New York who found each other through blogging. It had its flaws—self-satisfaction, insularity—but it was also generous and creatively nourishing. I was lucky to be a part of it.How would you describe scenius?Eno probably has a better definition than I could offer, but I always come back to two models—two kinds of groups that really work, whether for organizations or communities.One is like The Magnificent Seven—a group of experts, each with their own skill, coming together with a clear mission. The other is like The Scooby Gang—a group of friends going on an adventure. For me, it’s always been the second. I prefer a group of friends figuring it out together.You’ve spent a lot of time with the word interesting—naming events around it, exploring it. What does that word mean to you? What is interestingness?It really began during the Wieden+Kennedy and Microsoft days. There were two of us—myself and a planner named Jeffrey Jackson—working closely on the Microsoft account. He had previously worked at Goodby Silverstein in San Francisco and introduced me to the work of Howard Gossage, a 1960s ad man who once said something like, “People don’t read advertising. People read what’s interesting. Sometimes that’s advertising.”That stuck with us. At the time, we were trying to decode what the Nike team at Wieden was doing. They had this intuitive, almost instinctive creative process. For years, there wasn’t much formal strategy or planning on Nike. It was just, well, Just Do It. And our job was to take that unspoken brilliance and somehow translate it into something Microsoft could use. And we kept coming back to one simple thing: just make stuff that’s interesting.We started asking ourselves that all the time: What’s interesting to us? How do you do interesting? Around that time, there was also this idea floating around the web—Flickr had an “interestingness” algorithm. There was this early, geeky optimism that maybe interestingness could be quantified, maybe even engineered. Of course, now TikTok has turned that idea into a global business. But back then, it was a kind of curiosity we kept returning to.So when I decided to put on a conference, I needed a name—and I called it Interesting. I ran it for a few years. It was a chance to gather people together and simply share things they found compelling.Eventually, I had to stop. It started to feel like a thing, and I didn’t want to scale it. And then this group—New—picked up the idea and launched their own event called Boring, which was a brilliant name, actually. It had that ironic twist: these are things you think are boring but are actually fascinating. It was clever. But what I loved about Interesting was its sincerity. There was no irony in it. We just earnestly wanted to share things that sparked wonder.It wasn’t geeky or meta or trying to be clever. It was pure. Just people talking about stuff they cared about. And, oddly enough, Interesting became part of my identity. I even owned the @interesting handle on Twitter for a while. For a brief moment in time, that was actually worth something—and of course, I didn’t sell it when I should have.Earlier you mentioned scenius. Do you think the community you were part of was a kind of scenius?Yeah, I think scenius was exactly what it was—people loosely gathered around a shared idea, or a set of values, or just a common curiosity. You know, Brian Eno and Steven Johnson write about these cultural clusters: the Enlightenment salons, Paris cafés, London coffee shops, San Francisco in the ’60s, New York in the ’80s. We were none of those. But there was a small group in London in the early 2000s—connected to similar groups in New York and San Francisco—who were doing interesting work and sharing ideas online.I made a lot of very close friends in that world—many of whom I’ve never met in person. But they shaped me. I’ve always liked that Eno distinction between genius and scenius. My mentors weren’t singular figures. It was the community. And it wasn’t always perfect—mostly white, mostly male, and often very self-satisfied. But it was also generous and nourishing.Do you have a metaphor for what those communities are like?Yeah, I’ve always said there are two good models for how groups or organizations work. There’s The Magnificent Seven model: a team of experts, each with a specialty, coming together for a mission. And then there’s The Scooby Gang model: a group of friends going on an adventure. I’ve always preferred the Scooby Gang.I think scenius is a version of that idea—a collective intelligence that forms around a shared curiosity or vision. You know, people like Steven Johnson and Brian Eno talk about the Enlightenment, or the cafés of Paris, the coffee shops of 18th-century London, San Francisco in the ’60s, or New York in the ’80s. We weren’t that. But in the early 2000s, there was a small group of us in London doing interesting work—connected, in loose but meaningful ways, to people in New York and San Francisco.And I made a lot of very close friends—many of whom I’ve never actually met.Q: That’s beautiful. I want to ask about the word interesting itself. You’ve clearly spent a lot of time with it—hosting events, building around it. What does interestingness mean to you?It really started during my time at Wieden+Kennedy, working on the Microsoft account. There were two of us—me and a planner named Jeffrey Jackson. Jeffrey had worked at Goodby Silverstein in San Francisco and knew the work of Howard Gossage, a brilliant ad guy from the ’60s. At one point, Gossage said something like, “People don’t read advertising. People read what’s interesting. Sometimes that’s advertising.”That quote stayed with us. At the time, our job was to try to decode what made the Nike work so special and translate it into something Microsoft could understand. The Nike team operated largely on instinct. For a long time, there weren’t planners on that account. No formal strategy—just this intuitive, creative brilliance. Just do it, literally and figuratively.So Jeffrey and I kept asking ourselves: What are they doing that works? What’s the principle underneath? And we kept landing on one idea: just make things that are interesting.It became a guiding principle. We’d ask it constantly: What’s interesting? What’s interesting to us? How do you do interesting? Around that time, even Flickr had an “interestingness” algorithm. There was this early sense that maybe interestingness could be quantified or engineered—something TikTok has now taken to a global scale.Later, when I decided to put on a conference, I needed a name. And so I called it Interesting. I ran it for a few years. But eventually, it started feeling like too much of a “thing,” and I stepped away.A group called New picked it up and started their own event, which they called Boring. Which—honestly—is a much better name. It’s catchier. More intriguing. Their framing was clever: “These are things you think are boring but are actually interesting.” And I loved that.But for me, there was something about the purity of Interesting. There was no irony to it. No wink. We were sincerely trying to share things people found compelling. Not framed in geeky irony—just real enthusiasm. It became a kind of personal anchor. For a while, I even owned @interesting on Twitter. And for a brief period, that was actually worth something. Of course, I didn’t sell it when I could’ve But yeah. Interesting has stuck with me—not as a brand or a tagline, but as a value. Something to aim for. Something to notice and chase.And so “interestingness” became a thing that found its way to me as well. I looked into it, and then I wrote a little book about it. The publishers wanted to call it How to Be Interesting, which I thought wasn’t quite right. It was more intended to be how to make the world more interesting to you. So yeah, it’s just one of those words now that’s in my life, you know?Yeah. Well, it also feels like—I feel like I’ve followed your work. I feel like I’ve been a subscriber for a very long time to your various newsletters, and I’m inescapable! Yeah. But you’re also very—I don’t know what the right word is. It all feels a little arbitrary and very sincere. Right? Doesn’t it? I mean, I feel like—I’ll be like, “Oh, here’s an email from Russell.” I can’t remember the last time it came, but look—this is what he’s stumbled upon. It’s sort of beautiful. It’s sort of wonderful in that way. Does that not sound familiar?Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. “Arbitrary” would be a much better name for a conference. That would be very good. Yeah. Someone asked me the other day, “How do you do all these different things?” And I realized, thinking about it, that a lot of it is—I’m willing to abandon stuff. I’m not a completer-finisher, and I know that. I’m just very happy to go, “Yeah, I’m going to try this,” and if it doesn’t work, I’ll stop. I won’t beat myself up about it. And I’ve gotten good at framing things so I’m not overpromising. Interesting, for instance, is really cheap—because I’d rather not make money and also not stress about whether people thought it was worth it.Yeah. At the end of every Interesting, I always say, “I’m not interested in your feedback. It’s only 30 quid.”You said earlier that your skill is in letting things go—whereas other people can’t. They won’t cut words, they can’t let go of words. There's this theme you’re expressing, that you’re sort of like a ninja at letting go. What is it about you that’s made that your superpower?Yeah. Don’t ask my wife. I’m clearly against commitment. I mean, I have been married a long time—but yeah, I think you can’t keep adding things if you’re not willing to lose some.Yeah.I’ve given up on a lot of things.Yeah, beautiful. Well, listen—I kind of came out of the blue and invited you into this conversation, so I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.Yeah, that was great. Those were really great questions.Oh, nice. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Carina Bhavnani is a brand strategist and marketing leader, currently Director of Brand & Marketing at Sonder Inc. She previously held roles at Uber, TripActions, and Exposure Therapy. With expertise in brand, strategy, and operations, she holds a finance and accounting degree from Western University.So I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrow steal stole from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It's a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it's big, I kind of over explain it like I'm doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer and not answer any way that you want to. It is impossible to make a mistake. It's the biggest lead up ever. But the question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in total control.So the question where are you from is one of the most stressful and triggering questions that anyone can ever ask me. Just as a precursor.Yeah.I think the reason is because I'm always trying to understand what the question is actually asking me, where am I from physically? Where is my family from? Where did I grow up?Where do I live? And then I get in my head and I go down some rabbit holes. So where do I come from?Yeah.I mean, where does anyone come from?It's true. It's true. It's impossible to make a mistake and you can answer.It's impossible. You're right. I grew up in Australia and that's where I was born. My family is from India. I live in Canada. I used to live and work in the United States. I did a stint in Singapore for a while. So I'm I'm from everywhere. I think if you come from everywhere, you can simultaneously belong everywhere and nowhere all the time. And that's kind of nice.Yeah. What was it like growing up in Australia? What does it mean to be kind of from Australia?It means we have a better sense of humor than everyone else. Strong, very funny people. Growing up in Australia is a very interesting was a very interesting experience, I think, because you grow up literally and figuratively on an island.And in so it's a Western democracy, you know, in so many people's heads, it's the same as everywhere else. But the isolation has forced the country and culture to evolve in a pretty unique way. And I'm glad I got not just a two week vacation there, but like a 16 year upbringing and got to go deep.So now it's definitely part of my my background story in that sense.Yes. When do you feel particularly Australian?When I'm drinking.Really?Sure. Yeah, I would say that my love of drinking probably comes from my cultural heritage there. But I also think that like Australians are very straightforward. They're like very direct people, especially in the workplace. And as someone who's worked in multiple countries, I find that Americans can some Canadians especially can sometimes be a little bit. They find it very jarring, the directness of Australians and Australians are frustrated with how soft and gentle Americans can try and be. So that's that's that's been an interesting part, I think. Yeah, my work life.And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?I want to be a flight attendant. I think I always just wanted to get out and on a plane and go somewhere.Right.And I love to travel the the walkway from the terminal to the airplane was like a highlight of my life as a child.Can you tell me more about that?You know that like I forget what they're called. They're like the funny moving gates and they connected and they're full of ads. And they usually like HSBC and like global companies that want to show you the world and how you're connected to everything.And my little six year old seven year old brain like really dialed into those moments. And it was always like you were going somewhere exciting.Yeah. Nice.Yeah.And where are you now? And what keeps you busy?Well, I work in travel. So that that worked out for me. I now I live in Toronto. So I have moved to the other side of the world and work for a company called Sonder. And I run our brand and marketing practice for all things related to brand and marketing, which has been fun for me and a new adventure because not my not my technical expertise or background, but something I found myself to in the last few years.Yeah. And tell me about Toronto. What do you love about where you are?I love the seasons. I think I really like change. I think that is a common theme in my life. I like novelty. I like change. I don't like things get too static. And everyone complains about winter. But I'll tell you, having lived in so many places, there's a sucky season no matter where you go. Like it's too hot or it's too rainy. So here it's cold. And I don't mind it. But it's a really ugly city.Like, yeah, it's it's pretty hideous. But when you it's one of those cities where there isn't a lot to see necessarily. It's not like New York or London or anything like that. But it's very dynamic, very international. And I would say has one of the best food scenes in the world. And that is a good reason to be here.All right. And tell me a little bit about what you love about the work you're doing? Where's the joy in it for you?Um, where's the joy? The joy comes from building something new. I think I joined the brand and marketing function before it was called brand and marketing was called design and experience. And it was we know we had this opportunity to rebuild the brand from scratch. And I'd never ever done a project like that. I'd never built a brand. I didn't understand what went into it. I could hardly explain the difference between brand and marketing at the time. And so it was just it was a whole new adventure. What I love about it is it's strategic and based in research and insight and science. But there's a huge creative layer. And it's it's one of the only disciplines that I've worked in where there is such an equal role for creative and quantitative or scientific. And I really like the interplay that that offers.Yeah. I want to follow up on that, that the balance you're saying between sort of the qualitative and the quantitative. But maybe first, can you tell me a little bit about Sonder and like how you how did you get just what is Sonder? What do you what is it about?Sonder is a hotel brand that offers both apartments and boutique hotels in 40 cities around the world. We traded more traditional high touch formal hospitality services for an app so you can request housekeeping or items that you forgot or look up a neighborhood guide all through the Sonder app. And it has a digital concierge built in. So 24 seven anything you need. Sonder is there for you. And it's really cool. It's a we focus on urban environments. We put you in locations you wouldn't normally get to be in. Our model lets us build smaller hotels in networks. So lots of tiny neighborhood spots, but always where you want to stay.Yeah. I've had great experiences with Sonder. What's it been like working? I mean, where was the brand when you joined and what's it been like being part of something new?I joined a really interesting time. I joined. We just we infused ourselves with funding. We're like heading towards that unicorn mark that we all used to chase. I would say back in day and then COVID hit and suddenly no one was traveling and no one was going anywhere. And we had this massive real estate portfolio. We're like, how are we going to generate demand for something like this? And so it was a lot of quick pivots to find new audiences. And new ways to basically help people travel and stay safe.And then as sort of that dissipated, we were able to move back into growth mode. And it's really been trying to be one part tech company and build our whole in-house stack. And then also abit of a real estate company and trying to get these like great real estate deals and also be a guest facing company. And offer services that feel like someone is taking care of you digitally has been a really interesting and very different from my previous work. I started my career as like a CPA working at Deloitte, like super, super different. And then I spent a long time at Uber scaling up business. So it was just new challenge. And I love to travel. So it was something I could really like evangelize and get behind.And what would you say? When did you first sort of discover the sort of the concept of brand? I mean, what brand is and all that stuff? It's a giant mushy world.It’s a giant, mushy world, and I didn’t know what it was. You know, like, brand people always seemed like cool people in my head. When someone said, "I work in brand," I thought, "Oh, you must know everything about culture and have your pulse on everything." It sounded so cool and felt so out of reach for my own background and experience.I got really lucky with the role I was in at Sonder. They brought in a new person to manage a new team, and he just needed someone who already knew the business. So, I got matched with this exec and landed on a brand project. That’s when I really started to learn—by watching someone who built their career in brand—what it could be, what it should be, and what it has the power to do for a business.I think brand is very soft and squishy and often poorly understood, but there is a way to think about brand as the backbone of everything a business does. When you do that, it can really supercharge the business over the long term.Can you tell me a story about that? I mean, that sounds like an awakening of sorts, if I may be so bold.Yeah.You described being a CPA at Deloitte, and then discovering the "squishy magic" of brand as the backbone of a business. Was there a particular moment when you recognized what was going on, or something that stood out to you?I think it was when we were working on the brand DNA—the values, the mission statement, and all those components that everyone hears about as the building blocks of brand. We went through a ton of interviews with other execs, working with an agency that was brilliant. It was like a little door opened, and I thought, "Oh, what happens in these rooms? What happens in these conversations?"I discovered the power of copy and the weight of every word you put down on paper. When a brand pitch becomes a three-minute film—or even a two-minute film—you realize how few words you actually have to tell a cohesive, coherent story that also has ambition, is future-proof, and is inspiring. You put so much weight on this tiny bit of content, and you start to appreciate what each word, letter, and punctuation mark can do. You start to see what each image does.That completely sold me. I thought, "Wow, you can get so dialed into something that seems so... optional." There's this sense that brand can be seen as optional, just a piece of pretty creative work. But it has the power to change minds. It has the power to change behavior. It has the power to inspire. And you know what it is? I like power. I saw brand as being incredibly powerful, and I thought, "I want that."Oh yeah. What is that power?It’s the power to influence. It’s the power to take culture to a tipping point and push it over the edge. You can take any idea and, if you’re good at what you do, you can make it mainstream. You can change the world.Is there a brand in particular that embodies that, someone you think is doing it really well?I think there are lots of brands, but often it’s brands with strong agendas. Patagonia is an easy example because of how well they've dialed in their brand. But getting to the platform that Patagonia now has—that’s the interesting part. Disney can do things. Nike can do things. Apple can do things. But I don’t know who the next generation of those companies is right now. It's hard to say.Yes, true. What I'm trying to think. Do you have any mentors or touchstones that you other mentors that really sort of brought you up in that way and then or touchstones ideas that you return to over and over again in your work?Yeah, I would say the exec I worked with was a guy named Matt Judge, who’s now at Airbnb. He was definitely instrumental in my discovery of brand. I’d also say Jasmine Bina and the Exposure Therapy crew played a huge role. Once I discovered that brand was something I wanted to do, I just wanted to learn as much as I could. I was very fortunate to stumble across Jasmine’s writing through Concept Bureau, and then I joined Exposure Therapy as one of the original members—along with you—and I’ve never looked back.Yeah. How’s that been for you? How do you describe the Exposure Therapy experience?I think I’ve always struggled to explain what it is to my friends. Every time I’ve tried, it ends with them telling me I’ve basically joined a cult—which, honestly, feels very on-brand for me. They're happy for me, but it’s funny. I think we even studied cults at one point last year, and one thing we learned is that a cult is a community where there's a very high emotional cost to leaving. The more time I spend with you all at Exposure Therapy, the more I realize that emotional cost is definitely going up. So yeah, maybe this is a cult.That's awesome. I'm curious about your work at Sonder. What role, if any, does research play in your work there?You know, Sonder is an atypical company—or maybe it's typical? I don’t really know, because I’ve never worked in brand at a different company before, so it’s hard to say. But we are a scale-up. We’re rapidly expanding what we do and how we do it. It's very much "building the airplane while flying it."There’s very little bandwidth for long-term thinking or strategizing. We don’t always have the gift of time. One thing I’ve learned about brand is that you are the team thinking 20 years out while everyone else is thinking 20 days out. You’re constantly traversing the gap between immediate problems—like emails that have to go live and social media posts—and the longer-term vision for the business.You’re operating in a very 24-hour content cycle, but your job is to make sure you’re steering the business toward something people are going to care about—and that will still be relevant—in the future. That kind of oscillation is one of the biggest challenges of brand work, but it’s also what makes it so interesting.Yeah. So how do you manage that?Sometimes you don’t manage. You just rush. But really, it’s about time management. When you’re working on two different timelines, it’s about carving out space to think longer-term, and sometimes negotiating with leadership—because they’re so caught up in near-term problems.You mentioned earlier that brand work is both qualitative and quantitative. Can you say more about that?Yeah. Some people say brand is a vibe, and vibes are hard to quantify—which is true. Brand isn't just data. Sometimes it’s just goosebumps or a feeling you get from a piece of creative or copy.But when you look closer—and especially because the media landscape is changing—there are more and more quantitative data points available. You can quick-test things. You can build in marketing tie-ins. You can start measuring brand equity and brand momentum.There are ways to put numbers and dollars behind brand work, especially longer-term work, to get leadership's attention when you’re advocating for the future instead of just the next 24 hours. For me, it’s about learning how to quantify and translate the power of brand into near-term, concrete things that demand attention.Can you tell me a story about that? (I know that’s a hard ask.)I’m trying to think of a successful story... I can definitely tell you failed ones.There were lots of swings at bat. Lots of swings—and misses.What’s the struggle of being the brand person in an organization with all these constraints and pressures?I think the biggest struggle is that sometimes you’ll be in a meeting, and someone will say, "I love your meetings because you get to pick out colors!"And you're like, "Yes, I get that your brain thinks the purpose of our team is to pick out logos, colors, and clever words."But there’s sometimes a real disconnect—a lack of understanding—about the staying power of those logos, colors, and words. I once tried to explain it like this: brand teams make a dollar-a-day deposit into the account that is the brand.Every day, we’re trying to make a small, incremental improvement, because one day the brand is going to mess up. We're going to have a misstep. And when that happens, we’ll need to draw down on that capital. That’s what we’re building—a reserve—so that we don't go bankrupt with our audience or our community.Sometimes, when you're only making dollar deposits, people don’t realize they add up to something. They look at other teams who are putting in a million dollars at a time and think, "That’s where the action is."But I'm just over here in the background, doing my thing. Because one day, they’ll see what I see.Yeah, that's beautiful. I was taught that the metaphor that was given to me is that the brands are like buckets and they're meant to capture, you know, accumulate sort of credit and blame, you know what I mean? And brands, a well-constructed brand actually collects it. A poor, constructed brand has like a leaky bucket. No credit accumulates. You know what I mean? The dollar just falls right through the bottle.They just fall right through. Yeah. It's like having pockets of holes in them.Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. I'm trying to think what else I want to ask you about. Tell me more about exposure therapy and your experience there.Exposure therapy was like meeting a hundred people I wanted to be best friends with all at once. It was very overwhelming. I think curating communities is so, so hard to do well.Yeah.It's, you know, we're at a point in culture when it's something everybody wants no matter what stage of life they're in. People want more friends. People want to feel more connected to things.And we're all trying. We're all, you know, joining run clubs. I'm not joining a run club.People are joining run clubs. People are on apps. People are, you know, in co-working spaces in the hopes that they are connecting with people, you know, personally and professionally.And so when exposure therapy came along, I was like, oh, it's like a, it's a Slack community. I don't know what, I had low expectations, you know? I was like, I'll try it.Whatever. I have never met so many curious people who are so generous with their brains and like the same things I like. And it's, it's, it's every week is so stressful because the number of unreads goes up and I don't want to close any of them because the next best idea I might have might be buried in there somewhere. And so it's just a massive influx of great minds, great thinking and just wonderful human beings.Yeah, it's true. It's true. Yeah, I had low expectations and I was, you know, in a sort of a grumpy way, reluctant to join a Slack community.Yeah.But yeah, it's really great.What's been your favorite part about it?Oh, I mean, like you say, like the, there's so much effort put into, there's just always something going on. There's always an idea or a thought or a point of view that's worthwhile that's there. So it's like, it's just the potential of a new idea, really. But it's, they're so smart and the conversations are so structured at least that there's, it's always shifting. And yeah, so it's sort of constantly changing. And I think to your point about just like the potential, like new ideas, the other beautiful thing that they've done with the community is that there are opposing ideas in there and there are things. There are things that I wouldn't necessarily gravitate towards on my own or found on my own, but they've gone out of their way to put these ideas in front of us that they know won't naturally resonate or we won't naturally agree with. And that's the most expansive part. And I think it's really hard today to find ways to introduce ideas that are not part of your algorithm. I mean, we've just, we just kind of have given the wheel to these platforms, been like, you just tell me what I like.Yeah, I'm fine. That's fine.Yeah, exactly. I'll just agree.So I want to go back to the, to the, maybe is it, how do you apply this stuff to your own work? I mean, the observation you just made about this hunger we have for connection and, you know, the sea of sameness that's out in culture. How do you, how does that inform the work you do at Sonder? How does a hospitality brand like Sonder respond or behave differently based on this stuff, if at all?I'm not sure that I can, I don't know that I've, there's been anything that has truly made me set the brand on a different course, but what it has helped me do is re-examine the way I manage the team. So we have like an eight person org, and it's been interesting to see what kind of ideas I can put in front of them that are different or a new way of thinking or, and try and make them sort of think slightly differently, approach problems with different ways, share frameworks that I've learned, because really what you want to do is you want to raise the bar on the whole team. And then as individuals, they will bring in their own lens and their own ideas and help to drive everything forward. The heart of the Sonder brand is this really beautiful idea of like, we just want to be better. Every day we want to do a little bit better. We never want to be the best. We never want to say we're done. And so that's what we try and, that's how we try and act and think as a team, which is like, is it slightly better and incrementally better than the last thing we did? Great. It's a step forward. It never has to be perfect.It's amazing. And how long have you been with Sonder?Almost six years.And how has it changed? How has the business changed or the industry changed?I would say we've been very lucky that we've outlived a lot of our competitors in the alternative accommodations phase. When COVID hit the market, it destroyed a lot of young brands because they just didn't, they didn't have the capital and resources to survive what was an incredibly challenging period in a low margin business. And now I think alternative accommodations are some of the hottest products in travel.So you've got the Airbnb, which I think people are starting to be a bit more polarized on. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Some people love it, some people hate it. But you've also got like tiny cabins and you've got a lot more apartment brands and you've got glamping and air streams and it's become such a huge part of the hospitality and accommodation space that we've seen changes on major player platforms. So Booking.com, Expedia.com, they've gone from being hotels only to expanding the products that they make available, changing the filters that they offer people because they know this is where people are coming in. And then on the flip side, you've got major brands like families like the Maria Bonvoy family and the Hilton's and the Hyatt's trying to snap up alternative accommodation brands so that they can also be players.And instead of it being like, oh, it's a hotel or an Airbnb, we're seeing this spectrum of options, which is, I don't wanna say leveling the playing field, but expanding the field. Pretty dramatically, and that's been fun to watch.Yeah. And presumably that's very good for Sonder. How does Sonder fall out in that mix?I think we're in a really good space. I think this is something that we had hoped to see when we were very young. We wanted to offer more different types of spaces, but still with hotel level services. So we wanted first brands to bring that sort of apartment style accommodation, but with housekeeping attached to it, with onsite staff attached, all the amenities. You don't just get the space with us, you get the whole experience. And that was a good bet to make. And now everyone's trying to play catch up. And of course, you're constantly iterating with the technology and the real estate, but it set us up for a longer term success. Yeah, it's cool. And I feel like I was one of those people who Airbnb is sort of a novelty and it's sort of fun every once in a while, but I really have kind of a hotel set of expectations and I'm uncomfortable in other people's spaces. Sonder is sort of the nice balance between those two things, right? Yeah, it's really, Airbnb is, when you think about it, it's wild how they made us so comfortable staying in strangers' homes. These weren't professionally managed races, they were other people's homes. And it's one thing to get into someone else's car for an Uber X ride. It's another thing to bet your whole expensive vacation on this random person.Yeah.And they did it. And now we all do it.It's true. It's true. It's true.Yeah, it makes me wonder when we think about, everyone talks about AI all day, every day, but what are these major behavioral shifts that this is going to trigger for us and how's that going to change our lives? What seems insane today that will become commonplace five years from now? Will we all just have best friends?Yeah, probably.Or digital?Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I feel like this isn't the way that I generally think about things, but certainly when approached with the question, it does feel like, well, I was taught that we consume what we're afraid we're losing. And so if we can agree that we're kind of losing connection, then we're going to definitely, we're going to create connection with AI. And we're going to further isolate ourselves from each other.And they're making it easier, whether that's their intention or not, like it's getting better.I always think of this as a little bit of a, it's like a, I don't know that this was the moral of the story, but it always strikes me as like an Edward Scissorhands phenomenon where I like that character. Do you remember Edward Scissorhands? You've never seen it. All right. You went quiet there, so I figured that was the case. So anyway, it's Tim Burton movie. Johnny Depp plays, I guess he's a little bit like a toy, like a To Frankenstein toy, like he's made up and he comes to life, but he's got like scissors for fingers. His fingers are blades. And so of course he's this creature that just wants love and affection, but his hands are knives. So I always think about that as this, this paradox, right? So, and I feel like AI is a little bit like that too, like, oh, we just, I don't need people. This AI, it converses just as good as a human person that likes me. And that makes me feel the same. So, so much better, easier.And I think it's, I think it's what it makes us feel. Like if two humans talking to each other feels one way and then you talking to an AI feels the same way, what's different?It's true. And it's just a continuation too. I'm just thinking about how, I mean, I grew up playing video games and the world of video games is so much easier than the real world, just for all the, just because it's orderly and it has rules. And if something goes bad, you just start over and the graphics have gotten, I mean, there's no wonder. I mean, so many people spend so much time within these worlds. It's so much easier than real life.We talk about it as escapism. Oh my God, I was thinking about this last night. We call it escapism, but often we’re escaping into much more violent and crazy places. Still, those places feel more soothing than our actual reality—because reality has become so unpredictable.Yes. And confusing. Messy.And hard. I think the more alone people feel—and the harder life gets—the more those effects compound. You just want to remove yourself from it.Yeah. Yeah. Following this thread... These are old ideas, but they're connected. I know I've probably shared this before: Peter Kahn studies human-nature interaction, and he talks about something called "generational environmental amnesia."He tells a story to illustrate it: imagine three generations at a playground—a child, their father, and their grandfather. The child points to the woods next to the playground and asks, "Is that the forest?"The father says, "Yes, but when I was a kid, this playground wasn’t here. It was all forest." The grandfather adds, "When I was young, there weren’t any developments at all—there was forest for miles."Each generation is born into a more degraded version of nature and accepts it as normal. It’s like one step forward, three steps back. And socially, I think it’s happening too. Young people spend more time in digital spaces, and...No, you’re right.It’s like if a child pointed to a chatbot and said, "Is this my friend?" and the dad said, "Yes, back in my day, my friends were real people, but we still chatted on AOL."And the grandmother would say, "Back in my day, if you wanted to talk to someone, you had to see them face-to-face."Yeah, and my phone was connected to the wall! You had to dial like this.Exactly. It’s a constant evolution toward a degraded normal.Joyful stuff for a Monday!Perfect Monday conversation. Okay, let's take a break from the bleak talk.What’s been exciting you lately? Any rabbit holes you’re diving into? I’m really into history. I love diving deep into different periods. I recently got into a podcast called Empire. Each season focuses on a different historical empire. They’re flexible in how they define it—not just the Roman Empire.One season was about powerful women who had emperor-like powers. One fascinating thing I learned is that historians can measure how much power a woman had based on whether her image was stamped on currency.Usually, only male leaders were stamped on coins, so finding a woman on currency was a sign she had risen above and beyond. And it’s crazy to think about because nowadays, like in the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth was on all the currency. That’s a big deal.That’s amazing.Yeah.I'm picking up a theme here, Carina...Power. Girl power.Definitely girl power.I’m also on the "Romantasy" train. If you’ve heard about that.What’s the state of Romantasy right now?There are lots of names for the genre, but basically, it’s another form of escapism.You escape into these stories—often violent, but still more orderly than real life—and you always know you’ll get closure. No matter how crazy the heroine’s journey, it will end well. She'll get what she wants. There’s something really comforting about that. You get to go on a wild ride but still find resolution, which might not happen day-to-day.It sounds like the heroine’s journey.Very much. There’s a lot going on in these books, but at their core, they’re about women finding their power. And everything gets resolved. That’s very attractive right now.You said that in a particular way. What were you thinking about?I think it gives you hope. You read a story that ends well, and you think, "Maybe my story will end well, too." Maybe the thing you're worried about will work out.There’s a book called The Storytelling Animal—I can't remember the author’s name—but he talks about how stories allow us to rehearse life experiences without actually living them. Exactly. That’s what myths and folktales were for: learning lessons without having to live through harrowing journeys yourself.You mentioned Jasmine might have more thoughts on why this genre is having a moment. What were you thinking about?Another narrative I've been thinking about lately is how our modern world wasn’t designed for women—or at least not with women at the center of it. For example, in women's health, there's a lot of talk about how women were excluded from clinical studies because our biology is less "consistent." It made the studies simpler to focus on men. No shade, but it left us with a culture—and a world—not designed for women. Now, products and ideas are emerging that are made for women, by women. Whether it’s femtech or Romantasy books, these things center women’s needs and experiences. And I think there’s a gravitational pull toward that. Toward spaces where women feel like something was actually made for them.It’s shocking, really—the decisions men made. I remember learning that most medical knowledge is based on male biology because it was "inconvenient" to study female bodies.Yeah, and there's also the fact that women are the only species, basically, to outlive reproductive years. There’s something called the "grandmother hypothesis"—the idea that humans survive longer and better because older generations of women help care for the younger ones. That shared workload and wisdom is a unique evolutionary advantage. It’s amazing. And it begs the question: what can we do to supercharge that?That’s so cool. And it reminds me of Chip Conley’s work—he had an elder program at Airbnb, focused on preserving and transferring generational wisdom.Exactly. One thing we’ve lost—because of remote work and other things—is multigenerational relationships. We’re so stuck within our own age groups now, but there's so much value in friendships that span generations. And as people live longer, you’re seeing figures like Martha Stewart, who’s 83, still crushing it—being influential, staying connected across generations. If we can foster that, it’s going to make us all stronger.Totally. I was reading that because of the affordability crisis, we’re seeing a rise in intergenerational roommates.It makes so much sense. You’re seeing it in the travel industry, too: multi-generational trips—grandparents, parents, grandkids traveling together. It's interesting.One last thought. A friend of mine, Dawn Breeze, once suggested starting an "intergenerational detective agency" in Hudson. Isn’t that a beautiful idea?Let’s do that.Right? It’s so good.I love that.Carina, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. This has been so much fun.Always a pleasure. It’s always good to hang with you, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Jesse Caesar is a qualitative market research expert and brand strategist in Brooklyn. He previously worked at Open Mind Strategy, Firefly Millward Brown, and boutique branding agencies. With a psychology and anthropology background from UC Berkeley, his approach emphasizes storytelling, empathy, and creativity to uncover consumer motivations.I first discovered Jesse through this great article, “Why Qualitative Market Research Belongs in Your Startup Toolkit — and How to Wield it Effectively.”I start all my conversations with the same question—one I borrowed from a friend who helps people tell their stories. It’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it’s so big, I tend to over-explain it—like I’m doing right now. Before I ask it, I just want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer in any way you want—or not at all. The question is: Where do you come from?I’d be remiss as a researcher if I hadn’t listened to some of your previous podcasts before asking that. I like the question, and I’m going to answer it in a few different ways. I come from good people. I was raised in a very loving home—encouraged, supported. There were big expectations, but always a lot of love. And I think that foundation was a great springboard for me to explore the world, figure out who I was, and how I fit into it. The journey continues.I come from L.A. Born and raised an Angeleno, but I probably identify more as a New Yorker now. I’ve been here for quite some time. And I come from a place of fun. I’m a real fun seeker. Part of that is creativity, part of it is curiosity, part of it is just a need for variety. I like bursting bubbles—especially my own.What do you mean by ‘bursting bubbles’?It’s about stepping out of the zone. Whether that’s going too deep into industry webinars and project work and needing to snap out of it—or just getting outside, interacting with people, going to MoMA, watching a movie, reading a book. I like to change things up. It’s not always just nonfiction, either. Fiction is important—a little sorbet, a palate cleanser in between. I’m constantly looking for ways to shake things up.Do you remember, as a kid, what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah. My eighth birthday was actually at a focus facility. I had no idea at the time how fitting that would turn out to be. My career path has definitely been a zigzag—a circuitous route. But I think what’s been constant is this desire to perform, to entertain, to make sense of things, and to have fun.I still think that someday I’ll be an artist. Someday I’ll be a writer. I came to New York with dreams of being an ad man.Oh, is that right?Yeah. I don’t know if it was a lack of gumption or grit to pursue being a proper artist or writer, but I felt like I could do copywriting. Maybe art direction would be my thing. So I started out as a media planner at MediaCom, which was part of the same agency network as Grey Advertising. My plan was to work my way laterally—build up my portfolio, learn the ropes from the media planning side, and eventually shift into creative.That makes sense. So then, catch me up—what do you do now? And when did you first discover qualitative research?Yeah, no, qualitative wasn’t even on my radar until years later. I was working at MediaCom in my early New York days, having a lot of fun outside of work—but doing a job that wasn’t fun. Being in that big corporate agency world, I fell out of love with advertising. It felt disconnected. I kept seeing the same formula applied, quarter after quarter. Then the client would do a review, fire the whole team, retool the formula, rinse and repeat. There was a disconnect from the work itself, from the brand, and from the consumer we were supposed to be reaching.From there, I moved to a very boutique branding shop. And when I say boutique, I mean three of us were full-time staff. But what drew me to it was the chance to work with brands when the clay was still wet—when things were still just the seed of an idea. Some were new brands getting off the ground, others were more established but looking to solve a problem or do something different. I got to wear a lot of hats there, and one of them was research.It wasn’t a formal introduction to research, but it was eye-opening. I had come from ad land with this attitude that market research was just a way to water down great creative thinking. But being exposed to research in a branding context changed that for me. From there, I went to what was then Greenfield Consulting Group, which later became Firefly and Millward Brown. That was the first time I ever felt at home. Even in the interview process, I remember meeting all these moderators—fun personalities, super sharp, deeply curious people. And I thought, These could be my mentors. I could see myself doing this. I like this vibe.What was the attraction? You said you moved to New York to be an ad man—what did that mean to you then? What drew you to it?I think part of it came from where I saw my strengths in creative work. But part of it was definitely influenced by movies and TV. This was before Mad Men, but even then, advertising still had this sheen of glamour. I don’t think that’s quite the case anymore, but at the time, it seemed like an exciting, dynamic lifestyle.Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure. Even back in school, I was figuring things out as I went. I remember being pulled into an advisor’s office my junior year and being told I had to declare a major. That’s how I started as an anthropology major—then I took enough psych classes to make psychology my primary major.It was all a bit of experimentation, a lot of playing around, seeing what worked and what didn’t. I came to New York without a clear vision of exactly what I was going to do—just that it would be something very different.My whole family is from New York, but my only real experience with the city had been visiting relatives. It was intimidating—fast, loud, crowded. I wasn’t used to all that. It felt overwhelming.But the summer before I graduated, I came to New York for an editorial internship at Mad Magazine. At the time, I was still very much a California boy—I had been at Berkeley, soaking in that West Coast mentality. But that summer in New York was a watershed moment for me. Just a few months of living here made me realize I needed a place that was going to kick me in the ass a little. And New York was a good fit for that.Tell me a little about the work you do now. How do you describe what you do? And you also mentioned performance as part of what drew you in—how does that connect?Yeah, I’ll start with the performance side and how it ties back. I grew up in LA, where the siren call of Hollywood was never far away. I did act as a kid—the way most kids do, meaning I went on a lot of auditions and didn’t book much. But I did get one role. Ironically, that was the end of my acting career. I landed a featured role in a movie, and my parents just said, Nah, we don’t want you missingWhat was the movie?Camp Nowhere.Did this movie actually happen?It happened.Do you want to talk about it?It’s too painful. No, I just… I’ve never really watched it. It was a Christopher Lloyd movie—seemed like a gas. But yeah, I probably should watch it at some point.Oh my God.What trajectory my life could have taken…I’m feeling a lot of pain for young Jesse. Maybe because I shared that—I was also glued to TV and movies, wanting to be in that space.Oh yeah.So the idea that you had the opportunity to be there, and it went away—that would be a big deal. How old were you?Twelve. That was another factor—hitting that wall. Every weekend was a bar mitzvah, and I was starting to study for my own. So there was no more time for acting class. Between school, extracurriculars, and everything else, it just became impossible to go to auditions. That was kind of the end of it.So now, tell me about the work you do. And what’s the connection to performance?One of the things I love about moderating is that I do get to flex that muscle a bit. There’s an element of commanding a room, putting your energy out there, keeping the momentum up, and presenting ideas in a way that engages people.And then, of course, there’s listening—not just hearing, but really being present, aware, responsive. Actors talk about being in the moment, responding authentically. Moderating has some of that, too. You have to be able to shift modes quickly—moving from interviewing participants to debriefing with clients, to synthesizing all those insights into a compelling story.And that storytelling piece is crucial. Even if the final deliverable is just a PowerPoint, how do you infuse it with a sense of drama? How do you pull people in from the start? I like that part—taking all the pieces, making connections, and bringing it to life.You know, as you’ve probably felt, things flipped during COVID. What was maybe 40% of our interviews happening remotely suddenly became 80% or more. And that shift has largely stuck.It’s tough not to be sharing air. I find I have to work harder in this little square. I can’t take up space in the same way. I don’t have all those nonverbal cues or the full context of a room—just whatever I can see over your shoulder. Earlier, you asked how I describe what I do. And I think that’s part of it—performance, presence. But ultimately, it’s about solving problems.If I had to give it a logline—back to Hollywood—I’d say: I solve problems for companies by talking to their customers.I could keep spinning on this, but at its core, it’s about forming connections. It’s about me connecting deeply with another person so that I can help my clients connect with them too.Yeah. I mean, the first time I ever came across you was through that piece in First Round. It was such a beautifully articulated argument for the benefits of qualitative research—especially for an audience that so often just doesn’t get it. As a researcher, I’ve definitely hit that wall of miscomprehension before. And I remember reading that and thinking, I need to talk to this guy. This is fantastic. So I’m curious—how do you think about the proper role of qualitative? How do you make the case for it to someone who just doesn’t see the value? If a client calls and says, Hey, I hear you’re great—tell me what you do and why talking to people matters at all—what do you say?Yeah, first, I just want to correct the record—I didn’t write that piece for First Round. Their editorial team did an excellent job profiling me, but it wasn’t my byline. That said, a lot of my thinking was in there. And I really appreciate the work you’re doing in this space—advocating for qualitative, pushing for it in ways I haven’t been as active about lately. A rising tide lifts all boats, and I think that’s especially true in this field.As for making the case for qual? Sometimes I start with truth. That truth shows up in the first conversation with a client—or a prospective client—and sometimes it leads me to saying, Qual isn’t the right approach for you here. Either because it’s not the right solution for the problem they’re trying to solve, or because they don’t have the time and resources to do it well. And if you can’t do it well, don’t do it poorly—because this is a directional science.But broadly, making the case for qual comes down to this: Most people today accept the reality that we are not fully rational creatures. We need narrative, we need storytelling, we need emotional appeal. That’s what motivates a lot of our behavior—including consumption.And you can’t unearth those deeper motivations without qualitative research. You need dialogue. A survey won’t give you that, because a survey starts with built-in assumptions: These are the metrics that matter. This is how people talk about them. And when you structure research that way, so much gets lost.So much is missed when you can’t follow up on someone’s first response. One of my first real mentors in moderating, Andy Greenfield, talked about triangulating on the truth—asking questions in different ways to get at the deeper answer. That means using different approaches—not just qual, but maybe layering in quant, observation, interrogation. Even within a discussion guide, you build in exercises that help uncover what’s really driving behavior. All of that—those layered, human-centered methods—that’s how we surface the most meaningful insights for our clients.It’s tough to make the case for qual because it’s squishy—it’s hard to point to ROI, especially for the kind of research I love, which is much more foundational and brand-driven rather than tactical UX questions like “A or B?” So I try to establish trust early on. I use my skills as a moderator in those initial client conversations—really listening, understanding their problem, and figuring out whether I am actually the right solution.And then, the work itself has to prove its value. When I’m in the field, I like to bring my clients along as much as possible. I want the process to be collaborative, for them to have ownership of the work. That way, they feel confident socializing it within their own teams—they aren’t just passively receiving insights; they understand them, they believe in them.I also lean into being a proud generalist. I need my clients to be my insiders—to give me the context, the “inside baseball,” whether it’s industry-specific or just company culture. That helps me make sharper, more relevant leaps in my implications. And then, doing the work itself—after the first few interviews, I always build in a debrief. We talk about what we’re hearing, make adjustments, focus on what’s actually yielding depth, and move away from areas where we’re hitting diminishing returns. It’s an iterative process.At the end of the day, it’s about meaning. You put all these conversations together, extract the insights, and ask: What does this mean for you? Does it solve the problem? That’s the real proof point.What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?I love the exploration. Even in a sector like HVAC, there’s fun to be had. There are cool things to discover, and creative ways to get at those discoveries. I love using both sides of my brain—being creative in methodology and presentation, but also analytical in identifying patterns and drawing connections to implications. It’s fulfilling to be engaged that way. It’s exciting. Even just designing the right methodology gets me worked up in a positive way.For people who might not have experience in research—can you tell a story? How do you approach something like HVAC? How do you make it exciting? I completely agree—anything is interesting if you approach it with curiosity, dig in creatively, and make the right connections. So with HVAC—what’s the thrill?I mean, everybody has their treasure.There’s no such thing as a bad respondent. Sure, you need to screen for relevance—make sure they’re the right person for the conversation—but everyone has something to express, an experience to share. Sometimes, people struggle to write it out. Sometimes, they struggle to talk it out. That’s when you need to shift methods—maybe a little show-and-tell, maybe something more interactive. That’s why I love ethnographic methodologies.Take HVAC, for example. Go on a ride-along. Watch an install. See if you can get on your belly and crawl into those crazy tight spaces. Because for a lot of these guys, their scars are badges of honor—proof of how hard they’ve worked to get into those impossible spaces, to install and maintain equipment. There’s no one-size-fits-all method for getting insights. Ideally, you’re triangulating—layering multiple approaches together.Some people love to poo-poo focus groups, but I think they’re an incredible tool. When a group of people comes together and starts sharing, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. You can feel the insights laddering up in real-time. There’s something almost therapeutic about it. Honestly, one of the hardest parts of this work? Getting people to leave at the end of an interview. Because when do you ever have someone listening to you that intently? Actively, curiously? Outside of therapy—or maybe when you’re buying drinks from a bartender?You mentioned one already, but I’m curious—who were your mentors? And beyond people, are there any ideas or concepts you consistently return to?That’s an interesting question. The other side of bursting bubbles is—what are the foundations I hold dear? For me, I always come back to the fundamentals I learned as a baby mod—the core skills I had to develop when I was starting out.What were those fundamentals for you?It’s the basics, really—how to ask questions. And there is a right and wrong way to do that. Some of it’s been debated endlessly—like don’t ask why. And sure, qual is ultimately about the why—but “why?” isn’t actually a great way to get there.Let’s stay with that—because it makes intuitive sense to people to just ask “why?” So how do you explain the danger of it?“Why?” puts people on the defensive. It tightens the butthole a bit. It demands a rationale. And as we’ve touched on before, people aren’t driven by rationale. We construct rationales after the fact to explain our behavior, but the real drivers come from deeper places. Asking “why?” too early cuts you off from those depths. It forces people to plant a flag—“this is why I do this”—and suddenly, the conversation narrows. It becomes rigid, harder to explore, harder to go deeper. It’s boring.It’s also lazy. It’s not fun. And look—even if you’re talking to someone about antiemetic medication for cancer treatment, even in serious conversations, there’s no reason why the discussion itself can’t be engaging. You can uncover real trauma, real depth, and still make it approachable. That’s part of what makes a great conversation—keeping it from feeling transactional. It’s not Give me an answer to this question. It’s Let’s explore this together. So yeah, fundamentally—it’s got to be fun.There’s this one clip I always go back to—it’s a therapist, oh my god, I’m totally spacing on her name—but she talks about a therapeutic practice she calls conversational questions. You just reminded me of it, because she says that why questions are transactional. They create distance between you and the person you’re asking, and they actually cut off the relationship. Instead, she describes these conversational questions as a way of participating in a conversation, rather than just trying to extract an answer. And that always stuck with me.I think that’s part of what I hear in what I do—what I identify with. It’s about asking questions that keep things alive, that keep things moving rather than shutting them down. “Why” is a shut down question. Like you said, it forces people to plant a flag and stops exploration.And honestly, it’s just nice talking to a fellow researcher who gets it—who experiences the terrain in the same way. But yeah, I love the way she framed it—that questions are ways of participating in a conversation, rather than just seeking answers. And I wonder—what does that spark in you?Because so much of research today feels so answer-seeking. It turns people into answer-generating machines, and then we take those answers at face value. I think there’s an overconfidence in what gets produced when you approach a person that way.Yeah, I think that’s spot on—the idea that conversation is about showing you’re listening. If people don’t feel that, if they don’t trust that you’re engaged, they check out. They go into auto-pilot mode—just trying to get through the transaction. And the moment it stops being a conversation, you lose the chance to get anything real.The challenge, of course, is not leading them too much. There’s a balance. I think it’s good to recap what you’ve covered, put a bow on it, and offer it back: Did I hear that right? Does that feel accurate? That way, I’m not telling their story in a way that doesn’t fit.But it’s also about pushing deeper. And you can only do that if you’re willing to wander a little. Not aimlessly—you still have your objectives, your discussion guide—but you have to be willing to let go of your agenda to get something richer in return.And honestly? If you’ve done a good job of building trust—if you’re likable, easy to talk to—you also earn the permission to wrestle with them a little. To call them out on contradictions, push them where it makes sense. It’s not about judgment. The space has to feel safe. But when you lean into friction, that’s often where the real insights are hiding.You talked about not leading—what are some of the other fundamental things you’ve learned?Because in a lot of ways, what we do is invisible. It just looks like a natural, interesting conversation. But in the background, there’s a lot happening.When you say you don’t want to ask leading questions, how do you actually do that? What’s going through your mind?Sometimes, it’s not about asking a question directly—it’s about giving the person something to do that helps them answer it. I want my questions to feel natural—relevant to the conversation we’ve been having. But I never want to impose my own values or assumptions. As a generalist, I feel like I have an advantage when stepping into a new space. I don’t carry the same sacred cows that might weigh on others in that industry. That gives me the ability to leave room—to let the other person fill in the blanks. Sometimes, I’ll frame a question as a straw man argument—like, I’ve heard other people say this. What do you think is going on there? What are they missing? But as much as possible, I want to create space for them to do the talking. Yes, it should feel like a conversation. But they should be talking more than I am.Are there any other mentors or touchstones that come to mind?Yeah, well, I mentioned Andy Greenfield and some of my fellow moderators from those early days. There wasn’t a formal program for someone who didn’t come from the moderating world or from the other side of the glass, so my early days were a lot of shadowing. I spent a lot of time observing moderators I thought were best in class. That school—those people—I’m still close with, like Olumobile Ade. I think she’s brilliant.I also find a lot of inspiration—not necessarily mentorship—from other places, parallel industries, and even through art. For me, it’s about bringing that generalist mindset to the wider world, being a sponge, and taking in influences from all different places.How have things changed for you? How has your method, your practice, or what you do evolved as we’ve shifted more into remote work? And how do you think about remote versus in-person? I don’t know why I’m labeling it that way in this conversation, but how do you operate now, and how is it different from before? Because we were in a “before,” and now we’re in an “after.”Honestly, the “after” was actually a boom to my bottom line. I was able to do a lot more fieldwork than I had before because, yeah, you don’t have to factor in travel time. It’s a lot more efficient. But, as with many efficiencies, you lose some quality.I try to avoid online groups—certainly anything more than four people at a time. Once you go full Brady Bunch mode, it just doesn’t work.Talk to me about that experience, because I feel the same way. Groups online are extremely challenging and best avoided. But what’s the rationale? What makes it difficult or not worth doing?Without that immediacy, I think you lose accountability. It’s easy for people to shrink away from the conversation, and there are a lot more distractions—people checking their phones or even answering emails right in front of you. You can see it happening. I don’t like being the kind of moderator who calls people out by name. I want everyone participating because they’re engaged, because the conversation is fun, because I’ve made them feel empowered to share their perspective. But it’s tough without that shared air.I can’t just lean in, make eye contact, or hold up a hand to subtly steer the conversation. It loses a lot of that natural energy. I miss in-person work, and it’s starting to come back. I don’t know what your experience has been recently. You reached out looking for a creative loft space—did that end up going through?More and more, I’m looking for opportunities to do in-person work. And for me, it’s also about ethnographic research—those in-situ interviews. You just can’t replicate that on a screen. You can’t do a shop-along or step into someone’s home. I love going into people’s homes because that’s where their freak flag flies—where you really see how they organize their lives, what they value. It’s all being expressed around them before you even start the conversation. That rich context is invaluable. And then, of course, the other big industry shift happening right now is AI. I’ve even done some work advising an AI company that was developing an AI-moderated conversation tool. It’s exciting.It’s exciting, but of course, all that excitement comes with a little bit of terror. Ultimately, though, it’s been clarifying for me. AI is probably going to take some of the bread out of my mouth, but mostly for the kinds of projects I don’t really want to be doing anyway.I want to focus on projects that are more foundational, more strategic, more exploratory—the kinds of work that fit a more ethnographic approach. And until they upload an AI into a body that’s born, feels things, and dies, I think I’ve still got an advantage.I want to hear more about that. I feel like some of this conversation starts out very simply but gets complicated quickly. How do you imagine AI impacting the kinds of projects or research where someone like you is still needed?Yeah, I think AI is going to be used in ways it probably shouldn’t and provide answers that aren’t complete. That’s part of our job as champions of qualitative research—not just to advocate for qual but to also help define AI’s role. It’s not helpful to dismiss it entirely. It’s just another tool in the toolkit, right? Just like Zoom.There’s probably a good place for AI in UX research—things like button placement and basic interface testing. You don’t need deep human insight for that. AI can also make survey research more meaningful, adding a qualitative layer where none might exist otherwise. Instead of relying solely on open-ended survey responses, you could create a kind of dialogue—even if it’s with artificial intelligence.And then, even in our own workflows, I can see AI being useful—like uploading transcripts to surface insights we might have missed. But the role of the qualitative market researcher is safe, at least for now. Because what we do is human. What we do demands empathy. And you can’t get that from a robot.Yeah Is that true though?I think you can have something that approximates empathy—something that looks like it—but a machine can’t truly understand it. And if there’s no real understanding, then there’s no real insight.If AI can’t break down human experiences in a meaningful way, then how can it translate them into something useful? It might collect the data, but it can’t fully grasp its implications or draw the kinds of connections that help a client understand what it means. That’s a fundamental limitation.These machines are going to get smarter. They’ll get better at pattern recognition, at drawing certain kinds of connections. But at the end of the day, they aren’t human—so they can’t understand human. They can analyze, process, and categorize, but there’s still that deeper why—the underlying human motivation—that remains elusive for AI.And right now, the technology as it exists—these AI chat models—they don’t ask questions very well. That’s a limitation of LLMs at this stage. But we’ll see.Have you had any experience with them?Yeah, I mean, I’ve been experimenting as much as possible. I’ve definitely benefited from uploading transcripts, interrogating the data, and playing around with different ways of extracting insights. That’s been useful. I’ve also explored synthetic users—interviewing AI-generated personas just to see what that looks like. I’ve tried to stay open and experimental in every way.But at the same time, I’ve had moments where it triggered a kind of existential crisis. Maybe clarifying, maybe not. It’s strange. It’s just… strange, you know? I think we’re all still trying to wrap our heads around it.Convince me—why should I consider synthetic respondents? Because that’s one area where I just can’t see myself being open to it.Oh yeah, I mean, I was just curious. It ties back to that bigger question: What do we actually do? What do I actually deliver to my client? If it’s just answers—data presented in a way that gives it context—then sure, a machine-learning rationale might make it seem valid. And some clients, honestly, they just want answers. They don’t care where they come from. I don’t see AI going away. It’s here, and we have to figure out how to engage with it. But in my experience, I haven’t had that wow moment where I thought, This changes everything. It’s more like, Holy s**t, this is weird. I’ve run tests, and I think this is what you were talking about—when I read AI-generated responses, they never felt real. They weren’t wrong necessarily, but they lacked something. It was deeply subjective, but I just kept thinking, This isn’t actually qualitative data. It’s… something else. I don’t know what this is. This is synthetic. It’s a different form of data. We need a whole new set of expectations: What is it? What can it do? What can it not do? It looks like real human qualitative data, but it’s not. It’s something else entirely. That’s the uncanny valley of it—it’s totally passable, yet it lacks any of the vitality or humanity that we, as researchers, traffic in. The squishiest of squish…Emotions, memories, lived experiences, real-world touchpoints. Now, I could see a future where we’re interviewing AI agents designed for specific consumers—because in some cases, they are going to be the binary consumer. But yeah—sorry, go ahead.Oh, no, that’s fine. I feel like I’m getting lost in my own thoughts. This stuff just…And, you know, I keep thinking about the typical PowerPoint deliverable. That’s actually an exciting space for AI—the ability for deliverables to become more of a living product. Imagine feeding in all your insights, uploading the transcript, and then letting any stakeholder interrogate the research—talk to a bot about it in real time. That’s cool.Jesse, we’re out of time, but I just want to say thank you. This has been such a fun conversation with a fellow researcher, and I really appreciate you sharing your time and experience.Peter, my brother-in-arms. Thank you—I appreciate this time. Yeah, let’s team up sometime soon. Let’s double-mod.That’d be great.Take care.Bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Sam McNerney is a survey designer and researcher in Brooklyn. We met ages ago because, to me, he was an odd quant guy with a qualitative soul. (And, it turns out, he’d written some articles I’d referred to over and over about embodied cognition.) He’s designed surveys for Fortune 500 companies like Walmart, P&G, and Citibank, conducted over 400 studies with 100k+ respondents, published in Scientific American and TechCrunch, and teaches consumer behavior at CUNY’s BIC program.Sam’s WritingsA Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your BrainThe Science of Asking What People WantBias the Participant: Designing Surveys That Elicit a Deeper Emotional ResponseI’m not sure if you know this, but I start all of my conversations with the same question. I borrowed it from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. I use it because it's a big, beautiful question—but because it's so big and beautiful, 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, and you can answer—or not answer—in any way you want. The question is: Where do you come from?I was expecting something like that. It's a good, full-circle kind of question. It reminds me of a distinction I picked up early on when I started learning how to do market research—the difference between "Where are you from?" and "Where do you currently reside?" Or "Where's home?" versus "What's your address?" One is about things that can be tracked or scraped, and the other isn’t.So, let me take a shot at answering in a way that captures the stuff that can’t really be tracked. I was essentially born and raised outside of Minneapolis. Born just north of Chicago, but I’m from Minnesota.My mind always defaults to that when people ask a question like this. I live in Brooklyn now, as you know, so mentioning Minnesota feels even more important—as if to signal, “Hey, I’m not one of these freak New Yorkers. I’m from over there.” That’s probably the pithiest way to answer such a meaty question.What was it like growing up in Minneapolis? What do I remember? It was a really great place to grow up. A quintessential suburban upbringing, but with the twist that Minnesota winters are long, cold, and snowy. Unlike the East Coast—especially upstate New York or Buffalo—the winters in Minnesota are sunnier, or at least they feel sunnier. I went to school in upstate New York, so I’ve kind of run the A/B test on winters.Yeah, it only took one iteration to wrap up the experiment. There are a lot of outdoor activities: cross-country skiing, skating, ice fishing. A lot of people spend time outside—that’s the big difference. We were lucky. We had a pond in our backyard that froze over in the winter, so we spent a lot of time skating. I was outside a lot, which was just really good.Another thing worth mentioning: I have three older brothers. They were quite a bit older than me—the oldest is about 12 or 13 years older. So, unlike a lot of my friends, I feel like I had a firmer grasp on where all of this was headed.And by “all of this,” I mean life itself. Like, oh yeah—you go to college, then you move to a city, and you get a job. But yeah, Minnesota—I’m a huge homer. I cheer for all the sports teams. I loved it. And I miss it. You don’t move to Brooklyn for the environment or the outdoors.Why do you move to Brooklyn?I think—this might be romanticizing a bit—but it’s kind of like what JFK said about going to the moon: you do it because it's hard. That strikes me. I'm married and have two kids, five and two, so it's definitely difficult. The amount of space you get per dollar is terrible. And then there are just all the annoying things about living in a city. I'm fairly neurotic—I get annoyed by small noises and things like that pretty easily.But there's an upside to all of that annoying stuff. You can't be passive or settle in or get too comfortable. You have to stay creative, stay productive. You're forced to come up with good ideas in a way you wouldn't be if you were in the suburbs, where your money goes further and life might be more comfortable.That’s the romantic answer. The short answer is I graduated college, followed a girl—now my wife. All my friends moved to New York, so socially, it just felt like the natural thing to do.I want to go back—when you were a kid, do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?For sure. From about age four or five through twelve or thirteen, I really liked sports. I grew up playing hockey. I was always curious about the world, so while I don’t think I ever said I wanted to be a scientist, I loved learning about cool stuff—about Earth, nature, that kind of thing.Then, around age fourteen or fifteen, I became a little more inward. I liked reading a lot more. I ended up majoring in philosophy. I loved learning about the history of science, the history of ideas. That interest gradually pushed me into the work I do now. So to me, there's a kind of fault line—obviously marked by biological changes—around twelve or thirteen. Nothing too interesting before that, but things started taking shape after.You're in Brooklyn now—tell me a bit about the work you do. What keeps you busy these days?To riff off the last part, when I got into philosophy, I also got really into the behavioral sciences. Not in an academic sense—I didn’t go to grad school—but I just enjoyed learning about judgment and decision-making. My timing was lucky, because the field was really starting to be popularized in a way that even people outside the space were noticing.I’m talking about books like Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and others. That interest pushed me into advertising, but specifically into roles that focused on research and insights. I ended up spending five or six years at Publicis in that kind of capacity.Something interesting happened during that time. I entered the field with a strong behavioral science worldview—this idea that people don’t have fixed preferences, that they’re prone to decision-making errors they’re not even aware of. You’re not supposed to ask people what they like, because they don’t really know. The metaphor I liked was that the mind is like a press secretary, and the brain is the Oval Office—what the press secretary says isn’t necessarily trustworthy.But then, ironically, I taught myself how to do surveys—to add value to existing clients and help with new business. Which, according to that worldview, was kind of a sin, since surveys usually involve asking people what they like. What I found, though, was that the behavioral science perspective was a bit exaggerated. And the so-called replication crisis kind of confirmed that.You may not be attuned to this, but over the years, a lot of the major findings in judgment and decision-making—and in other parts of cognitive psychology and moral psychology—haven’t been replicable. Researchers haven’t been able to replicate them. In hindsight, it’s sort of obvious why: the incentive was to land a big TED Talk or a book deal. So the incentive was to spin these so-called counterintuitive narratives that were interesting and surprising to readers or audience members.But what I’ve found is that people will share the information you’re seeking through a survey—if you ask a good question. And by the way, we can get into what that means. I don’t mean a philosophically deep question, like something out of the Platonic dialogues. I just mean a clear question, without jargon, that’s easy to read. Your opening actually illustrated this nicely.I want to return to your reaction to my opening question—and the way it resonated with something you’ve learned about survey design or behavioral psychology. Is that what you're saying?Yeah. What I’m saying is that I discovered people do have access to their preferences. They have concrete opinions they can share, but it’s up to the surveyor to extract those responses by asking simple, clear, pithy questions.So an example—I think I might’ve shared this with you—I was helping a client, a brand, with their post-purchase surveys. These are the surveys you get after you buy something. And one of the questions was phrased as: “What were the primary benefits you were seeking with your purchase?”An easy edit is to just change that to: “Why’d you buy?” There are two reasons to make that change. One, it's easier for people to read, so they’re less likely to skip it and more likely to stick with the survey. Two, you’ll get better data. “Primary benefits” is already a mouthful, and typically, people just have one reason they buy something—the reason they bought it.So when you ask a question like that, you’re expecting people to do all this mental work—as if they’re supposed to distinguish between primary and secondary reasons, retrieve them, and then match them to your list of response options. But if you ask, “Why’d you buy?”—everyone gets that.What makes that more effective? I feel like there’s so much baked into the story you just told between those two questions. It’s really about what makes a good question.But part of me wants to go back to the replication crisis and this idea of how well people can answer questions to begin with. There was a moment when we were all kind of in love with the idea that you shouldn’t ever talk to your customers. I can’t tell you how many stupid think pieces I had to read with headlines telling people not to ask or listen to their customers—giving tons of reasons not to engage in meaningful conversations. But you’re saying you learned something different.And it’s funny—I’m rambling at this point—but it occurred to me, as I was prepping for this and digging through old links, that I don’t know if you and I ever talked about this: you wrote something for Scientific American on embodied cognition. I remember what you wrote. I bookmarked it and kept it. You were an early source for me on that topic, especially as I was figuring out—almost post-rationally—why I was so drawn to free association and projective techniques. Why I felt like I had found a more imaginative way to access good data from people—because it was kind of doing an end run around the press secretary. Do you know what I mean? So I thought it was funny that you had written about that.So I guess what I’m asking is: where are we now? Where are you now in terms of how you think about what people can answer? And why is a shift into something like “Why did you buy that?” valid and more effective when we’ve all been told that surveys should have a form—that you’re supposed to ask clear, rational, formal questions?Yeah. So the short answer is—well, actually, let me go back to the embodied cognition piece. I didn’t know you’d read that, by the way. It’s been years since I’ve thought about it.The short answer is: when people have a concrete, accessible preference, just ask about that. There are certainly times when you shouldn’t trust what people say—and that’s when they don’t care about the topic you’re asking about. In that case, you shouldn’t trust their feedback.As for embodied cognition—I haven’t thought about that in years—but let me try to steelman that worldview. And by the way, if anyone listening is interested, Jesse Singal has a really great book on this called The Quick Fix. He does a great job explaining what happened—the incentives, the oversimplifications, all of it. The embodied cognition stuff is really interesting. One thing I remember from an experiment—and I might get the details wrong—but the insight, I think, was that they had two groups of people evaluate the importance of something.The manipulation was that the clipboard used to fill out the questionnaire, for one of the groups, was a lot heavier. And they found that people in that group evaluated the item—which I can’t remember—as being more important. The conclusion was that the weight of the clipboard was used to infer importance.You see examples of this in the real world, like how the really premium American Express cards are heavier. That metaphor is very real. Like in Back to the Future, when Marty McFly would always describe things as being “heavy”—like, “Oh, this is so heavy.” And Doc Brown would say, “Is there something wrong with gravity in the future? Why do you keep saying that?” He didn’t get the metaphor.The insights into metaphors are really interesting, too. There's a famous book called Metaphors We Live By—lots of great insights in there. But the point is, when you read about all these results from the embodied cognition literature, you get the idea that we're just not in control—that we’re strangers to ourselves. That we're being manipulated by the environment, not necessarily in a way that hurts us, but in a way that's outside our awareness. The embodiment stuff is especially interesting because it challenges the idea that you are your brain and that the brain is separate from the world.Like I said, the full story is told in Jesse Singal's book The Quick Fix. A lot of these insights weren’t replicated—across embodied cognition, judgment and decision-making, moral psychology, and so on. So around the same time, this shift happened. You asked about this shift. What I realized is that it doesn’t make sense to say surveys are unhelpful or unreliable. That’s like saying pencils are unhelpful or unreliable, or blaming a bad novel on the pencil instead of the writer.In other words, you have to learn how to use the tool—use it in a way that works with our nature, or the nature of the mind. That’s a little grandiose, but you get the idea. Obviously, people are going to b******t if you ask them a question about shampoo or soap. Sure, there are some people who really care about that stuff, but most people don’t. So what do you expect?You have to focus on asking about things that are real to people. And by real, I mean things they can easily reflect on, draw from, and share—whatever is in the contents of their consciousness. A big part of enabling that is just removing jargon. Being clear and pithy.Now, I can pause here, but another direction this goes is that a lot of the quantitative market research world almost takes pride in adding jargon. They sort of disguise that in the form of good methodological practices—being rigorous in question design—and sure, there’s value in that. But you can still ask methodologically sound questions—no double-barreled questions or whatever—without all the jargon and b******t.There are two villains in this story: behavioral science and the quant establishment. Both, I think, miss the obvious model for doing surveys and market research, which is just to be pithy, clear, and ask questions people can actually answer.How would you describe the best practices of the quantitative research field?Another good thing to read on this, if people are interested, is the origin of surveys and polls—namely, what George Gallup did in the 1930s. He became famous for correctly forecasting the 1936 U.S. presidential election, much like Nate Silver in 2008 and the years after. And he did it by applying what was then a relatively new science: sampling—specifically, quota-based sampling.He figured out that you can’t just ask newspaper or magazine subscribers who they’re going to vote for. You have to get a sample that matches the base population—the actual population of voters.That’s how he got famous, but he spent much of his career in market research. He was actually partners with David Ogilvy. When Ogilvy came over from England, one of his first jobs was with Gallup as a researcher. Ogilvy has a few lines about this—something like, “I’m a researcher first and a copywriter second,” or “A good copywriter should be a researcher.” When I learned about that, I realized he was drawing on his own experience there.The point is, Gallup was very, very thorough. He would test questions for months to make sure people understood what was being asked. He’d get real detailed—like trying to figure out if “Prohibited” versus “Not Allowed” made a difference. He essentially birthed what we now call the quantitative market research world.He was meticulous in the way that Gordon Ramsay is meticulous—or David Blaine. He wasn’t just following a handbook. He was trying to optimize the consumer experience, so to speak. It really was about the person being interviewed—their experience. Yes, accuracy was a big part of it, but he’s got this great line where he says something like, “I care less about whether a question is leading or advising someone than whether it's intelligible.”So there's a real craft to this. And I mean craft in the sense that a chef or a magician has a craft.Over the years, with the arrival of the telephone—and then the internet—designing surveys got really cheap. Now you can go on SurveyMonkey, whip together a survey, and use a vendor to buy a panel of 200 people to answer it. So the cost of screwing things up is a lot lower.But what happens is there's now a flood of just... crap. Questionnaires and surveys everywhere. People pay lip service to the rules Gallup and his contemporaries developed, but I don’t think they understand what those people really did—which was to become masters of their craft.So that’s kind of how I would describe the quant world now.And now, it’s a lot more about whether you’ve got experience using Excel or R or another data analysis platform. There’s a kind of filtering mechanism where, if you’re someone from the humanities or see yourself as a creative person, you’re less likely to use those tools. And then you’re less likely to think of yourself as a “quant.” And so, you don’t get hired into those roles. So over time, that world—the quant world—sort of filtered out people like Gallup, ironically.And you're describing Gallup as a humanities guy—not belaboring things, but focused on the craft of questions.Yeah. I mean, to be clear, what he did for the science of polling—I wouldn’t put that in the humanities category at all. But I don’t think that’s the reason we still know him. It is a big part of it—he was on the cover of Time magazine in the ’30s for forecasting that election. But his influence, I think, came from the extent to which he turned surveying into a craft.In what way did he do that? I mean, his legacy is all about the polling side, which makes him sound like a quantitative genius. But what was it in particular that he brought? How did his creativity—or his qualitative instincts, his attention to intelligibility—show up?He put a huge premium on the user experience—what we would now call user experience. And this was no joke. He would hire hundreds of people to go out into the streets of America with clipboards, find people in specific demographics, and ask them to answer questions.It was painstaking work. And he would always pretest all his surveys. So, for the first few batches of any survey, the interviewer was trained to notice if people looked confused or seemed to struggle with a question. He would literally spend months making sure each question was clear and intelligible—his word.Now, jumping to today—another source of inspiration for me is Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. You're probably familiar with his basic thesis, which is that objects afford certain actions. A monkey bar affords being gripped and hung from. A bar on a door affords being pushed.It’s up to the designer to make interactions with objects intuitive and easy—by using what he calls “signifiers” or “signals” that help people know what to do. That idea had a strong influence on the field of user experience—like how digital forms are designed, how people check out on Amazon, or register for something online. And obviously, in product design too—like your iPhone.The reason it was inspiring to me was really about the extent to which it encouraged people to think about making online forms intuitive and easy. A survey is an online form. I’m not going around the country with clipboards asking people questions. So, yeah—in other words, to optimize for ease and make a survey intuitive is to optimize for better insights.And it also just saves you time and money, because your survey will be shorter and more to the point. That’s another big piece of this—worth mentioning aside from just approaching it as a craft, not merely a hard science.What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?Getting things right. When I’m designing a survey for a client, I’ll field a draft to, say, 20 people. Then I look at the results—you can kind of tell what’s working and what’s not. I’ll also just take the survey myself several times to spot what’s confusing. I’ll go through those early drafts six, seven, eight, nine times. And usually, if things go well, you land on something better. It just works.It’s similar to what a good user experience person does. They start with an early version of a digital interface—a form or a checkout page—and realize people aren’t completing it. Drop-off rates are high. So they make a series of changes, and eventually the drop-off rates go down to zero. And they know: “Okay, we fixed this interface.” That feeling—getting it right—is rewarding.There are other parts too. Once you have the data, there’s the analysis, creating a narrative from it—or often, in my case, helping a client support their narrative. We can definitely talk about that. But yeah, optimizing a survey for ease and intuitiveness is deeply satisfying.Let’s talk about questions. You’ve clearly thought a lot about this. I mean, I think we met years ago—probably through LinkedIn—and I remember having coffee with you. I connected with you as, in my mind, a very qualitative person working in quantitative surveys. That’s a reductive way of saying it, but I’m a qualitative person too, and everything you’ve described points to that sensibility. As a qualitative researcher, I probably think more than the average bear about the words I use in a question. And you clearly do too. So, what is a good question?I hope this resonates with you—but to me, a good question is a spotlight, not a floodlight.A floodlight question is like: “What’s your favorite toothpaste?” or “What do you think of the United States’ position on tariffs and foreign alliances?” Or even, “How would you evaluate the last six months of your life?” It’s like... I don’t know! I’m just trying to get through the end of the day.So, another example—I was thinking about this for my newsletter this week. Imagine you’re doing a survey for a cold and flu over-the-counter brand. I riffed on something similar about a year ago.You could ask: “Have you experienced any sleep disruptions that you would attribute to a respiratory tract infection?” Or you could just ask: “Did a cold or flu keep you up last night?”That second one—that’s the spotlight. It points to a very specific thing: a time, a place, a situation. Last night. Cold or flu. Did it keep you up? Yes or no. The phrase “Did you experience any sleep disruptions…” is just—it’s vague, abstract, clinical. It doesn’t land. Those words are like... what even is that?What is one trying to achieve with that kind of language? There’s something happening there, right? The first question in your example—the more jargon-heavy one. What is that jargon meant to accomplish? People use it because they love it or because they feel like they’re doing the right thing. It’s meant to do something. What does it do?Yeah, absolutely. And it speaks to the example you gave. I mean, the formal question—and I totally appreciate this—the primary purpose, or one of the primary purposes, of that kind of language is to signal credibility to coworkers or within the organization. You're performing as a “professional” person.And I think there’s another layer to it. I always think about when I started as a qualitative researcher—in the focus group setting, you’re called the moderator, and there’s this weird expectation of objectivity and distance. There's this “view from nowhere” that's associated with science—like you’re suddenly more scientific if you’ve extracted any kind of humanity from the process. That kind of language is intentionally neutral or “objective,” but in a way that just makes it... I mean, I guess it’s also speaking to the idea of the mask—but not the consumer’s mask.It invites the consumer to wear one. Like, “Oh, I know what I’m supposed to do here. I’m supposed to follow this script. This is the dance we do in surveys. We pretend we’re all very, very rational all the time about everything we do. And these are the words I’m supposed to use to describe my body and my experience.” It’s so alienated from actual experience. It’s amazing.And this is why I’ve always been intrigued by your work. I think of you as being a bit outside that world. But do you feel at home in the survey world? Do you feel welcomed by it? Or have things changed? Or am I exaggerating the extent to which quant is kind of inhuman?I don’t think you’re exaggerating—not just because of the historical context I mentioned earlier. In the quant world, there’s really very little middle ground between standardized questions that scale and what you might call “custom” questions.What I mean by questions that scale are the ones like, “Would you recommend our product or service to a friend or family member?” “Do you recognize this brand?” “How satisfied are you?” You can apply those anywhere. The problem is, they aren’t intuitive. But the upside is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.A custom question—by which I mean what I’ve been talking about: something intuitive, specific, pithy, tailored to what the client actually wants to learn—that takes a lot more work. So I think it’s always going to be this way. There’s a trade-off between those two approaches.I feel most at home, I think, in advertising. That’s kind of where I came up. When I was at Publicis, I spent almost all my time with strategists and planners, and I learned a lot from them. I was always trying to impress them—and the copywriters.Ideally, I’d deliver research results, and they’d take one of my survey questions and use it as a headline in their deck. Or a copywriter would say, “Oh, we don’t actually need to do any work—that question is the copy.” And they wouldn’t even need to see the results—they’d just get it.So I think I feel closest to that world—creatives and strategists within agencies. That’s mostly who I work with these days. But yeah, I always feel a little bit like a fish out of water.Yeah. And I’m exaggerating a bit for effect, just so everybody knows I’m not totally ignorant to the value of quant. I do get excited about quant. I hype it up over qual sometimes—but I know they’re both valuable. That’s my diplomatic caveat.Are there other practices that bother you, or that you’ve made a point to address in your work? Like, how do you talk about what you do? You've told me before, but when someone asks, “Sam, what do you do?”—what do you say?A lot of my clients are agencies—mid-sized ones. The people I work with are usually heads of planning, heads of strategy, CMOs, CSOs. One of the things that really annoys them, in terms of quant solutions—and it annoys me too—is when they hire a vendor, get the results back, and it’s in 30 slides that are totally unusable.So they have to redesign all the slides and force-fit them into their deck. It takes a ton of time.They also have access to all these social listening tools, subscriptions, big databases—which can be helpful—but they don’t really help you understand the shopper, or what that experience is actually like.That’s the world I feel most comfortable in. And that’s how I describe what I do: I provide quant solutions to mid-sized agencies. But the difference is, I try to correct for all those annoying things they’ve come to expect from quant vendors and subscriptions.And not just remove the pain points—but make the work more fun. More interesting. As I said before, when you really get a survey right, it feels good. Because it’s not just that you’ve optimized it for the respondent—you’ve also gotten the strategy and thinking right.I think it signals thoroughness—internally, within an organization, or to another employee. It’s certainly not optimized for the person answering the question. But I don’t think you’d ever get fired for asking something like, “Did you experience any sleep disruptions that you would attribute to a respiratory tract infection?”Right. It’s like—look how thorough I am. Look at all these long words.Exactly. And yeah, there are some pockets where this isn’t acceptable, but for the most part, it’s totally fine. I mean, just go look at SurveyMonkey’s templates, or Typeform, or any of those platforms. What will you find? You’ll find language that you won’t hear anywhere else except in a corporate survey. I mean, the question “Would you recommend this to a friend or family member?”—it’s a fine question. It has value.But it’s also a bit of a floodlight question. People don’t often recommend things to friends and family. One way I’ve tried to improve that is by asking: “If a friend or family member mentioned this in conversation, would you recommend our service or product?”And another thing that could be improved is the response options. Usually, it’s just 0 through 10. I prefer three options:* Yes, I’d recommend.* No, I wouldn’t recommend.* Yes, I’d recommend, but I’d mention a few things I don’t like or that are annoying.And the times I’ve used that, most people select the third one. There’s something psychological going on there. It gives people space to say, “Hey, I like you... but.” It’s like arguing with a friend or a spouse: “Okay, I like you—but...”So again, that model I rely on: is this a flashlight? Meaning—are you asking about something specific that people can easily grasp? “Oh yeah, I know what you’re asking.” If you can do that, their answer comes easily. They don’t have to think. They just answer.How do you mean?What I mean is: I’m not trying to get at hidden motives or deep-seated unconscious sentiments. I’m not interested in getting psychological in that way. That strikes me as really hard—and not that valuable. What I want to know is what’s on the surface—but still concealed. Another model for this—and I was just watching Squid Game—there’s a scene that kind of hit me as a good metaphor. There’s a young woman working at a carnival, wearing this giant cartoon costume—like a huge Mickey Mouse-style character. Then you follow her into the break room, and she takes off the headpiece, and she’s drenched in sweat. Earlier, there had been a scene with all these happy kids. So as a parent, I thought—great scene. Like, I have to put on a smile every day, and underneath, I’m drenched.But as a researcher, I saw something else—it captured the fundamental difference between the public and private self. And by private, I don’t mean your id or subconscious. I just mean things you carry with you all the time—but don’t show. So to ask the person under the mask, so to speak—to get an answer from the actual person—you simply need to speak to that person. And they will respond if they feel spoken to.Again, take the question: “Did you experience any sleep disruptions that you would attribute to a respiratory tract infection?” vs. “Did a cold or flu keep you up last night?” The latter speaks more directly to the person under the mask. And it’s not psychologically deep or philosophical in a Platonic dialogue sense. It’s just a simple, clear question that speaks to them.And from there, it’s easier to ask a good follow-up. Like: “What did you do about it?”Because in this case, if you’re the brand, you don’t want to just treat the symptom—you want to understand what the person is going through. So yeah, the mask—that scene was a decent model. I know the image of the mask has been used in literature and film a million times, so I’m not pretending it’s original. But it is useful.Yeah, absolutely. And it speaks to the example you gave. I mean, the formal question—and I totally appreciate this—the primary purpose, or one of the primary purposes, of that kind of language is to signal credibility to coworkers or within the organization. You're performing as a “professional” person.And I think there’s another layer to it. I always think about when I started as a qualitative researcher—in the focus group setting, you’re called the moderator, and there’s this weird expectation of objectivity and distance. There's this “view from nowhere” that's associated with science—like you’re suddenly more scientific if you’ve extracted any kind of humanity from the process. That kind of language is intentionally neutral or “objective,” but in a way that just makes it... I mean, I guess it’s also speaking to the idea of the mask—but not the consumer’s mask.It invites the consumer to wear one. Like, “Oh, I know what I’m supposed to do here. I’m supposed to follow this script. This is the dance we do in surveys. We pretend we’re all very, very rational all the time about everything we do. And these are the words I’m supposed to use to describe my body and my experience.” It’s so alienated from actual experience. It’s amazing.And this is why I’ve always been intrigued by your work. I think of you as being a bit outside that world. But do you feel at home in the survey world? Do you feel welcomed by it? Or have things changed? Or am I exaggerating the extent to which quant is kind of inhuman?I don’t think you’re exaggerating—not just because of the historical context I mentioned earlier. In the quant world, there’s really very little middle ground between standardized questions that scale and what you might call “custom” questions.What I mean by questions that scale are the ones like, “Would you recommend our product or service to a friend or family member?” “Do you recognize this brand?” “How satisfied are you?” You can apply those anywhere. The problem is, they aren’t intuitive. But the upside is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.A custom question—by which I mean what I’ve been talking about: something intuitive, specific, pithy, tailored to what the client actually wants to learn—that takes a lot more work. So I think it’s always going to be this way. There’s a trade-off between those two approaches.I feel most at home, I think, in advertising. That’s kind of where I came up. When I was at Publicis, I spent almost all my time with strategists and planners, and I learned a lot from them. I was always trying to impress them—and the copywriters.Ideally, I’d deliver research results, and they’d take one of my survey questions and use it as a headline in their deck. Or a copywriter would say, “Oh, we don’t actually need to do any work—that question is the copy.” And they wouldn’t even need to see the results—they’d just get it.So I think I feel closest to that world—creatives and strategists within agencies. That’s mostly who I work with these days. But yeah, I always feel a little bit like a fish out of water.Yeah. And I’m exaggerating a bit for effect, just so everybody knows I’m not totally ignorant to the value of quant. I do get excited about quant. I hype it up over qual sometimes—but I know they’re both valuable. That’s my diplomatic caveat. Are there other practices that bother you, or that you’ve made a point to address in your work? Like, how do you talk about what you do? You've told me before, but when someone asks, “Sam, what do you do?”—what do you say?A lot of my clients are agencies—mid-sized ones. The people I work with are usually heads of planning, heads of strategy, CMOs, CSOs. One of the things that really annoys them, in terms of quant solutions—and it annoys me too—is when they hire a vendor, get the results back, and it’s in 30 slides that are totally unusable. So they have to redesign all the slides and force-fit them into their deck. It takes a ton of time.They also have access to all these social listening tools, subscriptions, big databases—which can be helpful—but they don’t really help you understand the shopper, or what that experience is actually like.That’s the world I feel most comfortable in. And that’s how I describe what I do: I provide quant solutions to mid-sized agencies. But the difference is, I try to correct for all those annoying things they’ve come to expect from quant vendors and subscriptions. And not just remove the pain points—but make the work more fun. More interesting. As I said before, when you really get a survey right, it feels good. Because it’s not just that you’ve optimized it for the respondent—you’ve also gotten the strategy and thinking right.So yeah, I probably could’ve answered that in a more to-the-point, sales-letter-y kind of way.Well, let’s try it again. I’m curious—because I feel like we’ve had this conversation before—how do you describe it? What’s the version?Yeah. The short version is, I’d say: I provide quant solutions to agencies. A lot of these agencies—another pain point or annoying thing for them—is that they need, and often benefit from, quant solutions. But they don’t want to hire a full-time employee. And they definitely don’t need a whole department of insights people.So it’s a good fit. A good market-service fit. I don’t need to be hired full-time. The projects themselves are usually short. If I’m helping with a new business pitch, that might be just a few days. If it’s part of a larger initiative, it might last a month or two, maybe more. But yeah—I’d just say I provide quant solutions to agencies and brands, mostly agencies.What I was fishing for, I think, is the survey design part of it. You bring a level of creativity—and you’ve done work for me—creativity to the design of the survey experience that transforms it. It still gives a quantitative output, sure, but it’s a very different kind of survey.Yeah. So when I’m establishing relationships with these people, I don’t talk about any of this—the details or the theory—like we’re getting into here. I like this stuff, but most people don’t care. And they shouldn’t. They’re just trying to add value for their clients or win new business.So the thing I talk about is what I just mentioned: I can provide quant solutions that aren’t annoying. You don’t have to deal with templated surveys that aren’t insightful, or expensive subscriptions. You don’t need to hire me full time. I won’t be on your payroll. You’ll get the insights you need.And then—if people are interested (and some of them really are—there are a lot of interesting people out there)—then we can have a conversation about survey design, strategy, consumers, shoppers, all of it. But Lord, I would never lead with theory or my personal philosophy of survey design when I’m just starting a relationship. My assumption is always that they wouldn’t care.That’s probably right.Awesome.Well, Sam, thank you so much. I appreciate you sharing your time with me.Yeah—great questions. And again, the way you opened this was great. Short questions that are easy for people to grab onto are almost always better than long ones that are hard to hold. And off we went. So yeah—thanks for the good questions. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Angie Meltsner is a mixed methods researcher and founder of Tomato Baby, where she helps brands decode shifting cultural narratives and consumer behaviors. She has held roles at Blink UX, DraftKings, The Wall Street Journal, Digitas, and Comscore, blending qualitative and quantitative methods to uncover strategic insights.I feel like I’ve been doing this long enough that people might anticipate this question, but I always start my conversations with the same one. It’s a big question that I borrowed from a friend who helps people tell their stories. Because it’s so big, I tend to over-explain it, but just know that you’re in complete control of your answer. The question is: Where do you come from?I listen to a lot of these conversations, and I’ve always wondered how I would answer this if it ever came up. I come from the Midwest, and I’ve noticed that a lot of your recent guests also have roots in the Midwest. I wonder if there’s something there.I was born and raised in Michigan, in a northern suburb of Detroit. My family is very Midwestern—both of my parents were raised in Michigan. My grandparents came from different places, but my grandmother was from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, so my roots run deep there. I went to college at Michigan State, but I’ve lived in Boston for most of the past 15 years. Still, I definitely identify as a Midwesterner at heart.When do you feel most Midwestern, or what does it mean to be from the Midwest?I feel it in two ways. When I’m in Boston, people sometimes notice my accent, which I don’t even realize I have until I say certain words with long “A’s.” But when I go back to Michigan after a long time away, that’s when I really feel it—I slip right back into that Midwestern mindset.When my family visits me in Boston, I have to remind my mom that she can’t just talk to everybody here. In Michigan, people are naturally chatty; we’ll strike up conversations with anyone. In Boston, it’s different—you keep to yourself more. That difference always makes me feel distinctly Midwestern.I have this image of your mother just saying hello to strangers in Boston. How do New Englanders react to that?They’ll say hello back, but you usually have to be the one to start the conversation. In my early career, I worked on national projects and got to see how distinct regional cultures are—the Midwest, New England, and the West Coast all have their own particular social norms. Boston has much less small talk than Michigan, but most of my friends here are transplants, too. It makes me wonder if that changes my experience of the city.I think you have to do the talking first—you need to be the one to jump in.Early in my career, we worked on national projects, but we also did regional explorations. You really get a sense of how distinct the cultures are in different parts of the country—New England, the Midwest, the West Coast. Each region has its own particular character.Yeah, definitely.I remember doing free association exercises in Boston, and people were just very reluctant to participate.Yeah, there's a lot less small talk. But a lot of my friends aren’t actually from Boston. In fact, I don’t think I have that many friends who are even from Massachusetts. Most of us are transplants—many from New Hampshire or Maine. My husband’s from New Jersey. So my network here is mostly made up of people who moved to the area. I wonder if that makes a difference.What was it like growing up in Michigan? Do you remember what you wanted to be when you were a kid?I really enjoyed growing up in Michigan. It was all I knew because my grandparents lived there—some in the Upper Peninsula, some in Central Michigan, in the Lower Peninsula. But even as a kid, I knew I didn’t want to stay in Michigan. I wanted to live in a city.I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I was drawn to cities, probably because I grew up in a very stereotypical suburb. Detroit wasn’t a place my parents were comfortable letting me explore on my own, and there wasn’t really public transportation in Michigan—largely because of the auto industry’s influence. So I just dreamed of living in a city, and that became my goal. I think that’s ultimately what led me to where I am now.So how did you make that dream happen?Well, in high school, we had an elective marketing class. If you took the first year and got selected for the second year, you had the chance to go on a class trip to New York City. That’s honestly the only reason I signed up for marketing—I wanted the opportunity to go to New York because I had never been before.And did you get to go?Yeah! I made it into the second-year class and got to go to New York. That experience really stuck with me. My dad, who had a business degree, encouraged me to go into business, so I ended up at Michigan State. I think one of your recent guests—Maggie, maybe?—had a similar experience. She went into a business program right from the start of college. For me, marketing started as just a way to get to New York, but I stuck with it because it seemed like a practical choice. My parents supported it, and it made good business sense as a career path.And I felt like it was business, but creative at the same time. I was really into art and creativity when I was younger—media, design, all of that. Marketing felt like a way to bring those interests together while still feeling responsible and practical. Liberal arts wasn’t really a thing in my family when it came to education, so this path just seemed to make the most sense.Nice. And now you’re in Boston—tell me a little bit about what you’re doing now.Yeah. So I’ve been working for myself for the past two and a half years. But when I first moved here, I didn’t have a job. I just kind of took the leap, moved, and figured it out. I worked as a hostess at a seafood restaurant and at Anthropologie for a while. After that, I started working in ad agencies, moving around a bit to figure out what I actually liked about work. That eventually led me to research—consumer insights, cultural insights. I moved around a bit within that field too, and now I have my own one-person practice. I work with agencies, brands, and all kinds of research projects.What’s the name of your company?It’s called Tomato Baby.What’s the story behind that name?When I decided to go out on my own, I knew I didn’t want to use my own name. I’ve spent my whole life with people mispronouncing or misspelling it, so I didn’t want to make that part of my business. I wanted something fun, creative, and memorable—something that felt like a personal project. I also really love the red and pink color combination, so I was trying to think of something that could incorporate that. Then I remembered this little figurine I have—a Sunny Angel doll. Do you know what those are? They’re these tiny, winged, naked baby dolls, and each one has a different head.I got one a few years ago with a skincare order from an Asian beauty store in New York. I just added it on as a little extra, and the one I got had a tomato head. It’s been sitting around our house ever since, and we always called it the "Tomato Baby." One day, I saw it, and I thought, "Well, it’s red, it’s fun, it’s easy to say and spell—why not?" And that’s how Tomato Baby was born.What’s your relationship with the name now? Did you second-guess it at any point? Because it’s definitely a bold name.Oh, for sure. And honestly, I still do sometimes. In the beginning, I worried—was I going to feel embarrassed saying this out loud when people asked me about my business? But it’s turned out to be super memorable. I once met someone who couldn’t remember my actual name, but they remembered "Tomato Baby"—and that’s all that really matters! If we’re going to work together, that’s what they need to know.I have had people say it doesn’t sound "serious" for a research business, but that’s kind of the point. Research doesn’t have to be dry and boring, even quantitative research, which I do a lot of. Most people love the name, or at least they get it. And if they want to work with me, it gives them an immediate sense of who I am.I think it’s fantastic. It’s such a great name.Thanks!I'm curious about your experience with people misspelling your name. What kinds of mistakes do they make?Yeah, I think it’s because there are four consonants right in the middle—Meltsner, M-E-L-T-S-N-E-R. That combination of L-T-S-N really seems to trip people up. A lot of times, they’ll replace the S with a Z, or they’ll drop one of the consonants. I get Meltzer a lot. It’s been like that my whole life. I’m really proud of my last name—I didn’t change it when I got married because it’s part of who I am. But I also know it’s not the easiest for people to spell or pronounce.That must be frustrating. My last name is unbelievably simple—Spear, like the weapon. My dad used to joke, "Spear as in javelin," and that was enough for people to get it right. I’ve never had to deal with people constantly messing it up. I imagine that would be aggravating.Honestly, it doesn’t really bother me. Well, sometimes—especially when my name is clearly written in front of them and they still get it wrong. But it’s funny, my mom actually changed her last name to Meltsner when she got married, and her maiden name was way more complicated. I won’t share it—for security reasons—but it was long and kind of ridiculous.And then my brother’s wife also changed her last name to Meltsner, and her original last name was this massive 15-letter German name. When they got married, my dad joked that the only people choosing to take on Meltsner were coming from even more complicated names.At this point, I’ve just adapted. I got really good at spelling it out: "M as in Mary, E-L-T as in Tom, S as in Sam, N as in Nancy, E-R." I literally had to do this earlier today. It’s just part of life. My husband, on the other hand, has a super simple last name, and we gave that to our daughter to make things easier for her. But I’m sticking with Meltsner.And how do you help people spell it correctly?I just go into autopilot: "M as in Mary, E-L-T as in Tom, S as in Sam, N as in Nancy, E-R." Works every time.That’s amazing. So, tell me about your work. How do you describe what you do, and what do you love about it?I do all kinds of research, mostly related to consumer insights and cultural insights. And honestly, I’m just so naturally nosy that I can’t believe being nosy is my actual job. That’s how I realized that all these little superpowers and interests I had could be a career.I do a lot of quantitative research—I have a background in survey research—so I make sure that if a survey is being conducted, it’s done properly and for the right reasons. I care a lot about methodology and making sure the approach is actually useful. But I also do qualitative research, especially interviews. And then there’s my semiotics work, which is more about cultural insight and semiotic analysis.That’s actually been the biggest focus of my work since going independent, which I never would have expected when I first struck out on my own. But I love it—I love learning about anything and everything, especially people.Where’s the joy in it for you?Definitely going down rabbit holes. That’s something I’ve done since I was a kid. I grew up with the internet—we got it at my house when I was about 12 or 13—and I spent so much time exploring online subcultures, LiveJournal, weird internet communities. Now, I get paid to do that, which feels kind of unbelievable.And beyond that, I love that I actually get to apply what I learn in my personal life. I used to work a lot with personal finance and financial services clients, and through that, I picked up so much useful knowledge about investing and managing money. It’s like every project expands my perspective in ways I never expected.When did you first realize that this was something you could actually make a living doing? You were in marketing and business—when did research become a real career option?Even in high school, my marketing class included research as part of the curriculum. In college, I took market research and stats-based classes, and I did a lot of quantitative work using statistics. But the class that really stuck with me was consumer behavior. One of the projects involved going into a store, talking to people, and observing them in the space. It wasn’t the main focus of the course, but it planted a seed.Still, when I was looking for my first professional job, I wasn’t specifically thinking about research. I knew I liked it, but at that point, I just needed a job. I ended up at a media buying agency as a receptionist, then moved into media strategy. As I advanced, I realized that the part of my job I loved most was the research aspect.The higher I moved up, the more I was losing that hands-on research work, and that’s when I knew I wanted to pivot. At the time, I was living overseas in London. I made the decision to move back to Boston and focus on finding a research job—something that would let me really dig into the kind of work I knew I loved.What was your first job in research?My first job strictly focused on research was at Comscore, which is a syndicated data company. Before that, I had used Comscore in media strategy as a media measurement tool—it helped with planning media campaigns and assessing audience size and demographics for publishers.At Comscore, I worked on a custom research team. The Boston office came from an acquisition, so it operated a little differently from the rest of the company. Instead of working on their syndicated products, our team focused entirely on custom research. They took a chance on me because of my media experience and the range of clients I had worked with. Once I got into it, I knew—this is where I was supposed to be.And tell me about semiotics. When did you first come across it?At some point in my second career in research, I stumbled upon EPIC. Do you know it?Yeah.Someone had mentioned EPIC to me, and when I checked it out, I found a semiotics course taught by Cato Hunt from Space Doctors. I had probably heard the word "semiotics" before, but it had never really stuck with me. And honestly, I think it’s a shame that I never encountered it in my formal education. Maybe that’s because I was on a business track rather than a communications or humanities track.But when I read that course description, I had this moment of recognition—like, "Oh my gosh, I already think this way. I just need to learn how to do it professionally, with structure." At first, I tried to self-teach. I bought some books and dove in, but I got lost trying to piece it all together on my own. Then I found Chris Arnig’s course, How to Do Semiotics in Seven Weeks, and signed up. The course was designed for UK time zones, and even though they didn’t offer a US-friendly version, I woke up at 3 AM once a week just to take it. That’s how badly I wanted that structured learning. Then, when I went freelance, I happened to meet someone who recognized my interests and potential and started hiring me for semiotics-related projects. From there, it just took off. In fact, for 2024, almost all of my work has been in semiotics or cultural insight.When a client comes to you for semiotics, what kinds of questions are they asking? And how do you explain semiotics to someone who’s unfamiliar with it?A lot of people don’t know exactly what semiotics is or how to explain it, and I’m probably not the best at it either! But at its core, it’s about analyzing the signs, symbols, visual cues, and verbal cues in culture—decoding the layers of meaning that people might not consciously articulate but that still shape their perceptions.A great example: My husband was watching The Founder, the movie about McDonald's and Ray Kroc. There’s a scene where Kroc says something like, "Don’t you understand these golden arches? It’s not just McDonald’s—it’s America. It’s family. It’s tradition." And I turned to my husband and said, "That’s basically what I do."It’s about understanding what these cultural elements mean on a deeper level—beyond just their functional or surface-level associations. A lot of my semiotics work comes through agencies. Their clients have already bought into the idea of semiotics, so I don’t always have to sell them on it directly. But I think that’s one of the biggest challenges—getting companies to understand the value of semiotics in the first place. It’s often seen as a “nice to have” rather than a core research approach, which makes it an easy thing to cut from a larger study if budget pressures come into play. But for the people who get it, it’s incredibly powerful.When I do semiotics work, I typically collaborate with agencies that already have buy-in for the methodology. My role is often to examine how certain cultural questions play out specifically in the U.S. market. It’s so important to understand the cultural context of the market you’re working in.A lot of times, I’ll be representing the U.S. perspective while working alongside colleagues who specialize in markets like China, Italy, Mexico, or India. Together, we analyze advertisements, packaging, retail environments, media, and pop culture—anything from news articles to TV shows and movies. The goal is to spot patterns in the visuals and language being used and understand what deeper meanings they carry.For example, going back to that McDonald’s reference—if we were analyzing a McDonald's ad, we’d ask: What are the visual and verbal codes that represent American culture? How is the "American Dream" being portrayed? We’d gather multiple examples of this idea—maybe ten different representations of the American Dream—and then assess: Which ones are outdated and no longer resonate? Which ones are dominant in culture right now? Which emerging ideas are likely to become dominant in the next few years?By mapping this cultural trajectory, we help clients make strategic decisions about branding, packaging, messaging, and overall brand identity. If they’re rebranding or launching something new, they can align with the most relevant and meaningful cultural cues—or even tap into where culture is headed next.That sounds like a lot of fun.It is! I feel so lucky to do this work. It’s incredibly rewarding.What’s your process like? How do you actually go about doing this?Honestly, it can feel a little chaotic at the start. The first phase is all about collecting. I have a habit of saving things constantly—on Pinterest, in Notion, in random folders. I probably need a better system to centralize everything, but for now, it works.Whenever I see an interesting package, I take a picture. My phone is full of random product photos. I also tag and categorize them, especially in my main focus areas—beauty, personal care, skincare, food, and beverage—since those are the categories I naturally pay the most attention to.When I start a project, I first look at what I already have. Then, I start a deeper dive. I have a huge media list—I subscribe to so many Substacks, though I don’t get any in my inbox. Instead, I keep a list of what I follow and what type of content they cover. If I’m researching food trends, for example, I’ll check Snack Shot to see what Andrea Hernandez has written.I also dig into mainstream media—The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times. At any given time, I have a subscription to at least one of them. I use Feedly to track publications and search by keyword to see what’s come up across multiple sources.Once I have a wide range of material, I start looking for patterns. The first few days are intense—it’s exhausting and feels messy. I hate sharing my work at this stage because it looks so scattered and chaotic. But then, things start clicking. Patterns emerge, themes become clear, and I can start clustering insights together. And over time, across multiple projects, you develop a sense of where things are going next.Are there broad cultural observations you can make? Since you're working across so many categories, do you see larger patterns—dominant, emergent, or recessive cultural codes?Yeah, definitely. Sometimes that’s actually part of the work—starting with category-specific codes, then zooming out to see the bigger cultural shifts. It’s about identifying what’s residual (fading but still present), what’s dominant (shaping culture right now), and what’s emergent (early signals of where things are headed). From there, we can piece together how these shifts inform the broader cultural landscape.Are there any observations you could share?Oh yeah, for sure. Though I don’t always know what would be surprising or new to people. It probably depends on what else someone is reading. I don’t publish much of my own thinking outside of client work—I have a Substack, but I barely use it.One clear shift I’ve noticed, which others have written about really well, is the broader political realignment happening across culture. Someone I really like is Anu—her Substack, What’s Anu, is excellent. She articulates a lot of these shifts in ways that resonate with what I’ve seen in my own work.Another big theme I keep coming back to is food as a status signifier. Snacks, protein, functional foods, and even things like Zyn and nicotine consumption—all these choices communicate identity, status, and values in ways that feel really interesting. There’s also a growing blur between food and personal care, which keeps showing up in my work.But I totally get what you mean about feeling paralyzed when asked to just share an observation on the spot. It’s like, when you’re deep in it all the time, it can be hard to zoom out and pick the one thing that stands out.I’m curious—how has Zyn specifically shown up in your work?Zyn is fascinating because it’s emerged as a marker of masculinity, but in a really specific way. It’s often seen as a replacement for smoking, but I think it’s more than that—it’s a new way of engaging with nicotine that attracts people who may never have smoked in the first place.What’s interesting is that Zyn actually started in Sweden, where it was initially more popular with women. But in the U.S., it’s overwhelmingly masculine. And not just in the stereotypical “Tucker Carlson/tech bro” way—it’s also really prevalent among firefighters, police officers, and other blue-collar workers.It’s one of those things where, if you track its usage across different groups, you start to see how something as small as a nicotine pouch can become a cultural marker, carrying all these different layers of meaning depending on the context.I remember reading a list of donation requests during the LA fires, and one of the things firefighters specifically asked for was Zyn. That really stuck with me. It’s fascinating to see who’s actually using it—it’s not just the stereotype we often hear in media, the young, right-wing tech guy.Yeah, that’s so interesting. What do you make of that? Why do you think Zyn is showing up this way? Is it about nicotine itself? A replacement for smoking?I think it’s about the nicotine buzz as a substitute for something like Adderall. For people who don’t have access to prescription stimulants, or just don’t want to go through the process of getting them, nicotine offers a similar focus-enhancing effect. It’s accessible, and maybe it feels like a “healthier” alternative to smoking—though I don’t know how much that perception holds up. I’ve never been a smoker and don’t use nicotine products, so I can’t speak from personal experience, but I think accessibility is a big part of it. I have no idea how much it costs, but I imagine that plays a role too.Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve read enough to be dangerous about masculinity and risk, and nicotine carries an inherent sense of risk—or at least, that’s my association. But what about the political shifts you mentioned? Obviously, we’ve all felt this massive change—how has it shown up in your work? Yeah. And just to say—when I talk about “politics,” we’re also talking about something much bigger. I think a lot of people struggle with the word “culture” because it can feel abstract, but I always say this: the Wednesday after an election, the air feels different. That’s culture. It’s something you can’t quite articulate, but you feel it all around you. So when I say politics, I really mean these larger cultural undercurrents. Over the past year, I’ve seen it emerge in so many different ways—things like the rise of trad wives, the resurgence of full-fat or raw milk, all these small choices that, when you put them together, signal something bigger. Is it just a passing trend? Or does it reflect a deeper, more structural shift?I’d love to not talk about politics so much, but it’s impossible to ignore. Anu from What’s Anu wrote a great piece recently on regressive nostalgia, which captures a lot of what I’ve been seeing. I highly recommend her writing—she articulates these shifts so well.Tell me a little about your approach to qualitative research. You’re a triple threat—semiotics, quant, and qual. How do you think about qual?I love being called a triple threat—it’s as close as I’ll get to being Beyoncé!For me, there’s no substitute for understanding the why behind things. A few years ago, I spoke at a conference about mixed-methods research—how using multiple approaches leads to richer, more meaningful insights. Someone in the audience asked me about big data, since a lot of the talks that day had been about machine learning and large-scale analytics.And I said, look, you can infer and assume all you want from data models, but you’ll never really know why something is happening unless you hear people talk about it in their own words. The language they use, the stories they tell—those are the pieces that give meaning to the numbers.That’s what I love about qualitative research. It’s an honor to sit across from someone and hear them talk about their lives—whether it’s something as simple as what they eat, what they drink, what makeup they use, or something as complex as how they run their business. Everything has a story, a reason behind it. And you just can’t get that by looking at numbers alone.I was talking to a college student recently, and she mentioned a class she’s taking on historical imagination. She said they’ve been learning about something called micro-histories, which I think is such a great term. It really just means anecdotes—small, individual stories that tell us something larger about the world.That’s so cool.Right? I love that framing. It’s basically what qualitative research is—micro-histories that help us understand the bigger picture. I’m curious about mixed methods. I always feel like a fraud because I never formally trained in research—I never went to school for it. But “mixed methods” is a real term, right? It’s not just a common noun—it’s more like a proper noun?Yeah, I guess so. To me, it just means using more than one research method in a study. Most people think of it as using both quantitative and qualitative methods, but technically, any combination of methods counts. If you’re doing a diary study followed by in-depth interviews, for example, that’s a mixed-methods approach.In most of my work, a mixed-methods study usually means combining qualitative research with a survey. Sometimes we start with qualitative and then run a survey to quantify the findings, making sure we understand how widespread certain insights are. Other times, we start with a survey, identify surprising or interesting data points, and then use qualitative research to dig deeper. It’s about layering different approaches to get a fuller picture.Do you have any mentors?Yeah, I do.What mentors have you had, if any?My very first boss comes to mind. When I was a receptionist at a media agency, I eventually moved over to the account team, where I first started doing some research using syndicated tools for media strategy. My boss there, Mary McCarthy, really shaped my career early on. I’m still in touch with her, and that job was 15 years ago. She runs her own media planning business now—if anyone needs media work done, she’s amazing.She gave me a lot of independence, a lot of great advice. I still remember word for word some of the conversations we had. She’s the first person I think of when I think of a mentor. But beyond that, I’ve had so many people in my professional circles that I can turn to, and I’m really grateful for that—especially as an independent researcher.I’m sure you feel the same way. When you don’t have colleagues in the traditional sense, you have to actively seek out other people and develop those relationships. That’s been huge for me—not just for my success, but for my sanity.And the second part of this question, which I don’t know why it feels connected, is about touchstones. Are there concepts or ideas you return to again and again?Yeah… well, what do you mean exactly?I guess I think of it like a security blanket. There are times when I get into a project and feel lost or disconnected from my work, and I need something to anchor me. So I go back to certain ideas—maybe metaphor, or motivation theory, or even just re-examining what a brand actually means. Something that reorients me.That’s really interesting. I wouldn’t say I have a theoretical touchstone in that way, but for me, getting out of the house is the thing that resets me. Walking, going to the grocery store, going to the movies—being out in the world. That’s when I think most clearly.I send a lot of voice notes to myself or to people I’m working with while I’m walking. It’s like my brain switches on the moment I step outside. If I try to capture those thoughts in a text, it’s too much—I’d be typing forever—so I just record voice memos. I have tons of them.I love that. I feel like there are all these rabbit holes around the connection between walking and thinking. There’s so much historical precedent for it—monasteries have walking paths for contemplation, and perambulation has always been linked to intellectual exploration.I remember reading a list of requested donations during the LA fires, and one of the things firefighters specifically asked for was Zyn. That really stuck with me. It’s fascinating to see who’s actually using it—not just the stereotype of the young, right-wing tech guy that the media tends to focus on.Yeah, that’s so interesting. What do you make of that? Why do you think Zyn is showing up this way? Is it about nicotine itself? A replacement for smoking?I think it’s about the nicotine buzz as a substitute for something like Adderall. For people who don’t have access to prescription stimulants, or just don’t want to go through the process of getting them, nicotine offers a similar focus-enhancing effect. It’s accessible, and maybe it feels like a “healthier” alternative to smoking—though I don’t know how much that perception holds up. I’ve never been a smoker and don’t use nicotine products, so I can’t speak from personal experience, but I think accessibility is a big part of it. I have no idea how much it costs, but I imagine that plays a role too.Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve read enough to be dangerous about masculinity and risk, and nicotine carries an inherent sense of risk—or at least, that’s my association. But what about the political shifts you mentioned? Obviously, we’ve all felt this massive change—how has it shown up in your work? Did you see it coming?Yeah. And just to say—when we talk about “politics,” we’re also talking about something much bigger. I think a lot of people struggle with the word “culture” because it can feel abstract, but I always say this: the Wednesday after an election, the air feels different. That’s culture. It’s something you can’t quite articulate, but you feel it all around you.So when I say politics, I really mean these larger cultural undercurrents. Over the past year, I’ve seen it emerge in so many different ways—things like the rise of trad wives, the resurgence of full-fat or raw milk, all these small choices that, when you put them together, signal something bigger. Is it just a passing trend? Or does it reflect a deeper, more structural shift?I’d love to not talk about politics so much, but it’s impossible to ignore. Anu from What’s Anu wrote a great piece recently on regressive nostalgia, which captures a lot of what I’ve been seeing. I highly recommend her writing—she articulates these shifts so well.Tell me a little about your approach to qualitative research. You’re a triple threat—semiotics, quant, and qual. How do you think about qual?I love being called a triple threat—it’s as close as I’ll get to being Beyoncé!For me, there’s no substitute for understanding the why behind things. A few years ago, I spoke at a conference about mixed-methods research—how using multiple approaches leads to richer, more meaningful insights. Someone in the audience asked me about big data, since a lot of the talks that day had been about machine learning and large-scale analytics.And I said, look, you can infer and assume all you want from data models, but you’ll never really know why something is happening unless you hear people talk about it in their own words. The language they use, the stories they tell—those are the pieces that give meaning to the numbers.That’s what I love about qualitative research. It’s an honor to sit across from someone and hear them talk about their lives—whether it’s something as simple as what they eat, what they drink, what makeup they use, or something as complex as how they run their business. Everything has a story, a reason behind it. And you just can’t get that by looking at numbers alone.I was talking to a college student recently, and she mentioned a class she’s taking on historical imagination. She said they’ve been learning about something called micro-histories, which I think is such a great term. It really just means anecdotes—small, individual stories that tell us something larger about the world.That’s so cool.Right? I love that framing. It’s basically what qualitative research is—micro-histories that help us understand the bigger picture.Yeah, totally. There’s something about the rhythm of walking that makes ideas flow.And it reminds me of this weird fact about English gardens—some of those labyrinths they designed were actually a form of entertainment. They would include “whoopsies,” which were little bumps meant to trip you up, keeping you alert as you navigated the space.That’s fascinating. I’d love to dig into the history of the garden labyrinth. I actually came across a book recently called Walking as a Form of Research. I haven’t read it yet, but I was immediately like, yes, that makes total sense. Walking is such a big part of my research process. I see things when I’m out in the world that spark connections to whatever project I’m working on. And if I ever feel stuck—or even when I don’t—I try to make time to step outside.Where do you go? Can you walk right out of your house?Yeah, I live in a city—technically Somerville, which isn’t municipally part of Boston, but it’s right next to it. It’s small, just four square miles, and I don’t have a car, so I’m always either walking, taking the bus, or hopping on the T.When my daughter was in preschool, I had a routine where I’d take the bus with her across town and then walk back—a 45-minute walk. If I picked her up, I’d walk one way and we’d take public transit home together. Now we have a much shorter commute, but my general rule is: if it’s under an hour and the weather isn’t awful, I walk.I’ve lived in the same two-square-mile town for over 20 years, and I never tire of walking the alleys and streets. It blows my mind that it still feels fresh.Yeah, I relate to that. Growing up in the suburbs of Michigan, there wasn’t much to walk to. The big destinations were the video store, an ice cream shop, and—if I was up for a long walk—the public library. But most places required a car.Now, living somewhere walkable, I don’t take it for granted. I can walk or take the T anywhere—to Fenway Park, to amazing museums, shops, parks. It’s not as cool as New York, but it has a lot going for it. And being able to walk home from a baseball game? That’s pretty special.I love that. Before we wrap up, I’m curious about your approach to interviewing. How did you learn to do it? What do you enjoy about it?I started in quantitative research, but I knew I needed to incorporate qualitative—it just fits my nature.Why do you think that is?Maybe it’s the Midwesterner in me—wanting to talk to people. There’s no substitute for that kind of connection. And maybe living in Boston for so long, I started to miss it! So I started adding qual to my research work, reading everything I could find. Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users is a great book. I also listen to a lot of podcasts and just tried to absorb as much as possible while working on lower-stakes qualitative projects. Then, at my last job before I went independent, I took on a project that involved 30 interviews. I had a partner, so I didn’t do them all, but I did about 20—and that was the moment where I was like, okay, this is it.You learn so much just by doing it. I also make a habit of listening back to my interviews. It’s cringey, but it helps me notice things—like how often I say, Oh, that’s so cool, or, Awesome, thanks! You don’t want to insert too much leading feedback, so I try to be more conscious of that.One of my favorite resources is The Turnaround podcast with Jesse Thorne. It’s all about how great interviewers approach their craft. He interviews Larry King, Jerry Springer, Werner Herzog—just incredible people. Highly recommend it.That sounds amazing.Yeah, it’s so good.Well, this has been a blast. I really appreciate your time.Thank you, Peter. It was a pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College, and the author of “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.” This is the first time I’ve done a second interview - and it is because I want desperately to understand what he means when he say Metamodern. All right, Jason, thank you so much for accepting my invitation to come back and talk about metamodernism.Yeah, it’s an honor to not only be on your program once, but twice.It’s true. Just to catch people up, I first encountered you through your book The Myth of Disenchantment—which I really enjoyed. Then I discovered you had written a book on metamodernism, a concept that pops up here and there in my world of brand and cultural strategy. I was really keen to talk to you about it last time, and I’m excited to dive deeper today. The idea keeps resurfacing, and I find myself wanting to better understand it. So, let’s start at the beginning. When did you first encounter the term "metamodernism"? And what did it seem to mean to you at that time?Sure. In a way, despite the title of my book, I actually came to the term “metamodernism” fairly late. The manuscript initially went out for peer review under the title Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory After Postmodernism.That was the original full title. And the peer reviewers kept saying, “Okay, we get that you're critiquing postmodernism—but what is the name of your positive project?” They wanted something I could identify with, or at least a shorthand for it.I realized that made sense. I also wanted to avoid any egotism, like having it referred to as “Storm’s theory” or something. So I started looking at other movements and thinkers who were also trying to move beyond postmodernism.And for me, when I was brainstorming during the revision process—thinking through what to focus on—I was reminded of some work I’d read decades earlier by the Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji. He wrote an essay in a book about diasporic art, specifically focusing on both African and Jewish diasporas. I had picked it up while preparing to teach a course on diaspora, which, in the end, never got greenlit.In that piece, Okediji used the term metamodern to describe certain artists he saw as working through—not just past—modernism and postmodernism. He used some really evocative imagery, talking about processes like fracturing and reappropriating elements of both the modern and the postmodern. And I remember thinking, that’s kind of what I’m trying to do.With that in mind, I started looking around to see how else the term had been used. There were scattered instances—a volume here, a mention there—but overall, I wasn’t aiming to describe a fully established movement called metamodernism. I was more interested in trying to intervene in the current moment.What I noticed among others using the term—and I’ve mentioned this before—is a shared sense that postmodernism needs to be worked through in order to be transcended. Where I diverge from most of the prior work on metamodernism is in the approach: a lot of people were focused on categorizing cultural works as modern, postmodern, or metamodern.That’s not a game I’m against, but it’s not really the game I’m playing. I think there’s room for debate about how useful that kind of cataloging is, but it wasn’t my primary aim. I wasn’t trying to describe a shift—I was trying to trigger one.And since the book came out, I’ve been really pleased to connect with others in the broader metamodernism space—people like Brendan Dempsey and others who are exploring the philosophical, political, and cultural shifts happening right now. What we all seem to share is this belief that postmodernism—however we each define it, and I do offer a specific definition in my book—is no longer the dominant framework. And that what’s needed isn’t a return to what came before, but the creation of a new mode entirely.There’s definitely been a lot of conservative backlash against postmodernism. But what’s striking to me is that these metamodern movements aren’t part of that reactionary trend. Instead, they’re trying to forge a different—and often more optimistic—path forward. I can go into more or less specificity, but that’s the broad picture.Yeah, yeah. That’s wonderful. I’m curious about drawing a distinction that I think is where you and I connect—the difference between describing a paradigm shift and triggering one. What’s your sense of the people who are trying to describe metamodernism as a paradigm shift? What does that look like to you? And then, what do you mean when you say you’re trying to trigger one? That feels bold and ambitious.Yeah—yes, to both of those things.So, on the first point: there are folks out there trying to describe this shift. One key figure is Timothy Vermeulen. I’ve met him briefly—he seems like an interesting guy. He and a group of colleagues contributed to an edited volume where they tried to understand why contemporary art movements feel so different now compared to the height of postmodernism in art and literature.They landed on two main insights. One, which I think is genuinely useful, is that there’s been a kind of retreat or backlash against the cynical, ironic distance typically associated with postmodernism. I think that’s a valid observation.Where I find their approach less helpful is in their definition of metamodern art as a kind of oscillation between modern and postmodern sensibilities. That framing is really hard to falsify. Once you define something as an oscillation, you can essentially include anything—because nearly anything can be read as oscillating between sincerity and irony, or whatever poles you’re working with. It becomes too inclusive to be analytically useful.That said, I do think they were onto something in noting a tonal shift. I just interpret it differently. I don’t subscribe to the idea of a singular zeitgeist in the way some of them do. I think the picture is more complex than that.I don’t believe we’ve moved neatly from modernity to postmodernity and now into metamodernity. That linear framing doesn’t really hold up for me. But I do think there were dominant, idealized artistic and academic models that gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s—models often labeled as postmodern—and those are no longer driving the conversation today.For example, much of the discourse around postmodern literature focused on figures like Alain Robbe-Grillet, who essentially no one reads anymore. It would’ve been a mistake to assume, as some did back then, that that was the future direction of literature.Similarly, when thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard were arguing that there were “no more grand narratives,” that may have described a narrow slice of cultural production at the time—especially in certain philosophical and literary circles—but it absolutely doesn’t apply today. In our current moment, we are awash in grand narratives. They’re everywhere, in all sorts of competing and overlapping forms.So, while I may be critical of some efforts to define metamodernism as a kind of fixed era, I do think those thinkers accurately captured a tonal shift—a change in what Raymond Williams might call the “structure of feeling.” And I don’t want to downplay that. I think they were right to notice that something had changed.Yeah. How would you describe that tonal shift? What do you mean by “structure of feeling”? What does that look like to you?In the realm of art, I think we saw a kind of clutch—a moment of holding on, maybe even a panic—when postmodernism had reached a kind of saturation point. And to me, the most perceptive analyst of that moment is the late literary historian Fredric Jameson.In his influential book on postmodernism, Jameson described it as a kind of cultural consciousness that emerged out of late-stage capitalism—one that had effectively flattened depth. He focused on figures like Robbe-Grillet, but also artists like Andy Warhol, who exemplified a kind of ironic collapse between high and low culture.It was pop culture masquerading as high art, or maybe high art cloaked in pop aesthetics. Either way, the distinction between the two began to blur. You had this ironic detachment, a lack of affect, and a celebration of surface over substance—that was central to what postmodernism felt like at the time.Against Jameson, thinkers like Cornel West rightly pointed out that he was only capturing a thin veneer of what was actually happening in the arts and culture at that moment. His analysis often excluded the experiences of artists from marginalized communities and overlooked working-class or everyday forms of artistic expression, which were just as vital, even then. He was focusing on a very elite stratum—arguably even within that historical moment.Moreover, the economic conditions Jameson associated with late-stage capitalism were very specific to the 1970s and ’80s. He was interested, for example, in television as a dominant cultural force that shaped a unified sense of value, and in people being trapped in jobs they didn’t love but felt stuck in. But that’s not our world anymore.Today, we live in a much more precarious economic moment. Employment is often unstable or gig-based. Television is no longer the dominant medium—social media and the internet have taken its place, fragmenting cultural consumption and identity in new ways.Even Jameson’s analysis of the aesthetic collapse between pop and high art—what was considered “cool” at the time—is no longer applicable. What counted as cool in 1980s fine art or pop culture is very different from what’s happening now in either space.There was a specific cultural moment at the start of the 1980s when things got dark and gritty—ironic, bleak, and self-aware. You could see it in Frank Miller’s superhero comics, or in films like Sin City.Exactly—that’s what I was thinking. Exactly. Good. We have similar cultural touchstones, but that's not what's happening now. So the next question becomes: what is happening now?One thing to emphasize is that we’ve always lived in a more pluralistic cultural landscape than early critics of postmodernism acknowledged. There was never just one single postmodernism. Some cultural forms have remained consistent for decades, largely untouched by these sweeping theoretical frameworks.Take mystery fiction, for example—one of the two biggest literary genres in the world. While there have been subtle shifts since the ’80s and ’90s, the genre’s core structure remains intact. Agatha Christie and Louise Penny might be separated by generations, but their narrative frameworks are strikingly similar. Some traditions simply persist.I mean, they’ve diversified slightly, but not by much. The shifts are there, but they tend to be minor. So certain forms—like mystery fiction, for example—never fit neatly into postmodernism, and they don’t necessarily fit cleanly into whatever this new mode is either.We can also see, in the aesthetic realm, a kind of backlash against some of the darker, grittier versions of pop culture. There have been tentative efforts to explore more emotively sincere, less ironic, and sometimes less dark forms of popular storytelling. Think of shows like For All Mankind or Ted Lasso—these don't align with the high-postmodern sensibility.And we could dig further into the economic backdrop here. It seems likely that in an age of precarity, we’re craving more aesthetic reassurance than in previous eras. Television, too, is less dominant now—partly due to the pluralization and fracturing of the collective conversation, a trend that’s only been intensified by the siloed nature of social media.All that to say: yes, I do see significant shifts over the past 20 years. I’m not claiming that things don’t change. But I do want us to be more precise in how we identify those changes—and also to recognize that cultural eras were never monolithic. Modernity didn’t apply evenly across the globe. Postmodernism didn’t dominate all artistic forms. And metamodernism, I don’t think, defines all art being made today.Still, I do believe it’s useful to talk about particular developments in art, popular culture, and other cultural expressions through that lens.And in terms of my own project—sorry, you were going to jump in.Yeah, I was going to ask, because I think this is where I’m really curious—at a broad level, what are we actually talking about when we say paradigm versus zeitgeist? I feel you pushing back on the idea of a zeitgeist, but at the same time acknowledging that there are real shifts happening. You’re rubbing away a lot of boundaries, but also marking a few clearly. So, in your view, what’s the right way to talk about change? How do you approach it?So, I do think in terms of paradigms—but I think of them in a much more Kuhnian sense, and even more so through the lens of Larry Laudan, a later interpreter of Kuhn. That is, I see paradigms as concrete models.People may or may not be familiar with Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a groundbreaking text. Even those who’ve read it might not realize that the word paradigm was already in circulation before Kuhn used it. The term originally came from linguistics and pedagogy—a paradigm was a set of rote conjugations you memorized. Like: Ich bin, du bist, er/sie/es ist, and so on.What Kuhn was interested in was how certain scientific works—including, notably, textbooks—came to function as paradigmatic frameworks that helped disciplines organize themselves. These texts provided a shared language, reference points, and a way of seeing the field.One of the things people often underappreciate, which Kuhn says quite explicitly, is that it’s usually textbooks, not the original thinkers, that solidify a paradigm. For instance, Newtonianism as we know it lives on in a condensed, second-order way that goes beyond—and in some ways diminishes—Isaac Newton’s actual writings. It was later figures like Euler who helped codify Newton’s math, and much of Newton’s broader work—like his alchemical writings—was ignored. So what persists is a particular Newtonianism, which functions as a paradigm even after Newton himself.Now, here’s where I diverge from Kuhn. He tended to treat scientific fields as if there were always a single, dominant paradigm at any given time. But thinkers like Larry Laudan have pointed out that fields often contain competing paradigms. You can have, for example, Lamarckian evolution, Darwinian evolution, and anti-evolutionist perspectives all in play within biology at the same historical moment.Paradigms can be fuzzy around the edges, and sometimes fluid—but even so, certain models do come to predominate. They shape the terms of debate and the way people structure knowledge.When I talk about postmodernism as an academic paradigm, what I’m really interested in is the process of anthologization—how certain kinds of textbooks and readers, like Postmodernism: A Reader or Postmodern History: The Reader, excerpted works from a range of thinkers and packaged them together as if they represented a single, unified movement.These anthologies were almost always translated into English, primarily for a U.S. context. And yet, the U.S.—along with the broader Anglophone world, particularly Britain—had an outsized influence on shaping the very notion of postmodernism, despite the fact that most of the intellectual material was being imported from France, Germany, and elsewhere.What also happened in this process was the extraction of select pieces of work from thinkers who were often in tension with one another, or even directly hostile to each other’s ideas—and who came from different disciplines entirely. Take, for example, Foucault and Derrida: for much of their professional lives, they didn’t get along, didn’t see themselves as part of the same intellectual project, and neither embraced the label of postmodernism. And yet, you open up a postmodernism anthology, and there they are—side by side. You get a snippet of Derrida, a snippet of Foucault, often stripped of the context or the parts of their thought that didn’t neatly fit the postmodern paradigm.In this way, those anthologies created an illusion of coherence that didn’t really exist. The result was a version of “postmodernism” that looked far more unified—especially in the Anglophone academy—than it ever was in France or elsewhere.In my book, I identify five key philosophical features that defined that postmodern paradigm. We can go into that if you want, depending on how granular we want to get. But the main point is that this was a paradigm—one that was actively taught, often across multiple humanistic and social science disciplines. That said, it wasn’t all-encompassing. There were fields where other paradigms prevailed.Take economics, for instance. I’m literally looking out the window at the economics department right now, and it’s safe to say postmodernism never really reached those offices. Neoclassical economics, in many ways, was the furthest thing from postmodernism—or at least that’s one common reading. It came from a very different intellectual lineage, with its own blind spots and issues.So, stepping back to your broader question about how we talk about change: I’m more than willing to grant that there have been large-scale shifts—concrete, structural shifts—whether in the dominant modes of capitalist production, or in social transformations like industrialization, urbanization, rising literacy, or the emergence of the internet. All of these have had clear, demonstrable impacts on both local and global forms of cultural and intellectual production.But even so, those shifts don’t cleanly map onto something like a zeitgeist. They’re messier, more underdetermined. And what they tend to produce is not a singular mode of thought or feeling, but rather a pluralization—a diversification—of modes.And so, the key point in my reading of paradigms—what sets it apart from the standard Kuhnian formulation—is that I think paradigms often generate multiple and sometimes competing models. We can still call them paradigms, or if we want to step outside of strictly academic language, we could think of them as exemplars, genres, or clusters of works that serve as reference points.One more point I’ll add—mainly for the extra geeky readers—is another area where I depart from Kuhn, something I also argue in the Metamodernism book. Kuhn believed that you couldn’t translate between paradigms. He argued for what he called their “incommensurability”—that the terms and assumptions of one paradigm couldn’t be directly translated into those of another.But here’s the thing: Kuhn made that case by comparing paradigms—by showing us how they differed—which means he was, in practice, rendering them commensurable. He was creating a framework to compare things he claimed were incomparable.Now, that’s not to say there aren’t mistranslations, gaps, or aspects that get lost in the shift from one paradigm to another. Kuhn’s famous example was how the meaning of “motion” changes from Aristotle to Newton. And yes, that shift is significant. But even so, you can compare them. You can encapsulate the ideas of one paradigm within another.It’s not that there’s ever a truly neutral vantage point where you’re totally paradigm-free. But we can say that Newtonian physics still works perfectly well within an Einsteinian world—as long as you stay within a certain scale. That’s important. The paradigms can overlap functionally, even if their foundational assumptions differ.Yeah, that’s amazing. There’s so much in what you’ve just said. I love the idea that the term paradigm itself began as a metaphor—pulled from grammar, of all places. Kuhn used grammar to describe the evolution of thought in science.Exactly—grammatical patterns.And teaching. He was deeply interested in how language shapes thought. He was part of that broader intellectual moment we associate with the linguistic turn. Kuhn really saw scientific language as a language in its own right. That comes through not just in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but in his later essays as well. When he revisited the topic, he consistently returned to the role of language.So cool. And something else came to mind as you were talking—it might be a bit of a tangent, but I’m thinking about the idea of simultaneity in paradigms. Are you familiar with semiotics?Yeah, of course.Studying the dominant, recessive, and emerging—that whole framework—is a useful way to identify different layers of meaning or significance that are unfolding within a culture or category.Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that framework can be helpful when we’re talking about paradigms, too. I’d agree with you there.Is that right? I wasn’t sure—does that feel like a fair overlap?I think so. Yeah, I think it's fair—at least at a certain level of generalization. Totally.And so, just to circle back—because you asked earlier, and I want to make sure I return to it—what I was trying to do in my book Metamodernism: The Future of Theory was to take the paradigm of postmodernism that had been taught to a certain generation of us and work through it.I learned that paradigm in grad school, and I went out of my way—made pilgrimages to Palo Alto, to Paris, and other places—places where people like Rorty and Derrida were active and doing their thing. I tried to absorb as much as I could.And let me just check—can I cuss on your show, or should I avoid that?Go for it.Okay, cool. So, I don’t think postmodernism was b******t. I don’t think it was junk. I think it was valuable. But I also think that by the time I encountered it, it was delivering diminishing returns.And what I wanted to do—really, as a way of working through my own intellectual heritage and training—was to figure out what parts of it were worth holding on to, what parts needed to be left behind or radically reworked, and how to grapple with a set of fundamental philosophical problems. Because postmodernism did help surface those problems, but it didn’t invent them—and often didn’t resolve them either.So in the Metamodernism book, I took the postmodern paradigm as a kind of springboard—not as proof of my conclusions—and tried to work through what I see as five core areas. I think any serious scholar, or really any deeply engaged thinker, has to confront those areas and come up with their own responses.And I should add: I believe in doing a kind of no-b******t philosophy. A lot of what gets called “theory”—especially in the hands of second-order thinkers, not necessarily people like Derrida or Foucault, who had deep commitments—is just rhetorical sleight of hand. It's people saying things that sound cool, without really caring whether it makes sense or leads anywhere.A lot of that work felt indifferent to actual clarity or substance—just buzzwords stacked on buzzwords. Someone might invent a phrase like “epistemological ontotheogenesis,” drop it into a chapter, and wrap it in some grandiose language. But when you try to unpack what it actually means, there’s not much there.And then, if you pushed some of those thinkers on their claims, the ideas would often just evaporate. They’d either turn out to be truisms or vague, messy assertions that didn’t really hold up under scrutiny.In The Metamodernism book, I’m committed to doing what I call a no-b******t philosophy. That means making my arguments clear. It’s a deliberate break from the stylistic aesthetics of postmodernism. Again, I don’t think people like Derrida or Foucault were trying to b******t anyone—but they were doing a lot of play. And Derrida especially, as time went on, kind of leaned too far into the free jazz of his own language. He started riffing in ways that, to me, became less helpful for doing actual philosophical work.Maybe I’m just less of a poet than some of those guys—but what I want is for readers to be able to actually see what I’m arguing. I want my positions to be intelligible and, importantly, contestable. If I’m wrong, I want someone to be able to show that I’m wrong. There’s no value in producing a formulation that’s unfalsifiable, especially if it’s not helping us think better or more clearly.Take Derrida’s point, for example, about writing preceding speech. That’s interesting—until he redefines “writing” so broadly that it includes any trace or mark on the world. At that point, the claim becomes either trivial or obscured. There is insight in there, I think—but it gets buried beneath the rhetorical flourish.I also don’t think we should base arguments solely on authority. And ironically, many so-called postmodern theorists who were vocally anti-canon just went ahead and canonized a different set of dudes. Then they treated those figures as if they had privileged access to meaning or truth. If you wanted to understand how meaning works, they’d quote a line from Derrida instead of consulting linguistics or asking a diagnostic question about whether Derrida’s framework actually holds up.It reminds me a bit of the medieval scholastics—at least, the way we’re taught to think about them. When they wanted to know how many teeth a horse had, the story goes, they’d check the Bible, then Aristotle, and only then would they consider looking at a horse.Some scholars got caught in a similar trap—where philosophy became an exercise in commentary and interpretation rather than inquiry. It turned into an interpretive game around a newly canonized set of thinkers. I’m not saying everyone did that—props to those who didn’t—but it became a real institutional pattern. And in some ways, it still is.You see it, for instance, when someone dares to critique Foucault. A Foucault scholar might respond not by engaging the critique, but by saying, “Well, if you’re criticizing Foucault, you must not understand him.” The idea that disagreement implies ignorance—that's a problem.But I’m like—no, no—I respect Foucault. He’s one of the thinkers who’s had the biggest influence on my own thought. But he was wrong about certain things. And that’s okay. We can provide evidence for that. We can say, “Here’s some independent data. Here’s why this particular claim doesn’t hold up.” That doesn’t mean we throw him out completely—it means we acknowledge that he was a fallible person, like all of us.And for me, that sense of fallibility is built into what I call metamodernism. I recognize that I’m going to make mistakes too. I think it’s crucial to admit that, to avoid some of the intellectual sins that led to the turn toward postmodernism in the first place—things like the universalizing tendencies of certain strands of Enlightenment thought, where a small subset of thinkers were treated as if they had infallible authority.So all of this is to say: yes, I’m trying to recognize my own limits. But that said, I also set out to change scholarship by offering a concrete, no-b******t model for how we might do things better. I wanted to provide a set of practical, usable tools that could help us move forward—across epistemology, theories of meaning, and ethics.That’s what I was trying to do in the Metamodernism book.And honestly, I’ve been really delighted by the response. I think people recognized the need. There was enough of a zeitgeist shift that folks were ready for something that wasn’t just reheated postmodernism—or works that were supposedly critical of postmodernism but ended up replicating it in slightly different language, without really grappling with its problems.Take something like new materialism. I found that school of thought inspiring for a time—but eventually I came to see that, in many cases, it was just transposing everything postmodernism had said about literature onto the physical world. So it felt like more of the same, dressed up differently. I’ll bracket that for now, but that’s part of the broader issue.Anyway, the book came out, and it won a major book award—which was a really lovely surprise. It’s just been translated into Spanish, and a contemporary Spanish philosopher even described it as the most important philosophical work of the last decade, which is incredibly humbling.I’ve also got Turkish, Vietnamese, and Chinese translations in the works. Though we’ll see if the Chinese edition makes it through—I have a footnote to the Dalai Lama, and that alone might be enough to sink it once they notice.So what’s the footnote? How does the Dalai Lama figure into metamodernism?Well, I have a long section in the book on ethics, and part of what I’m doing there is grappling with something I see as one of the enduring puzzles of postmodernism—specifically, postmodernism as a scholarly paradigm, not the artistic movement. Let’s bracket off all the art and focus strictly on postmodernism in the academic sense.One of the things that seemed puzzling about it—at least to many observers—was the way postmodernist scholars often held, on one hand, to a stance of value neutrality or value relativism (sometimes labeled “cultural relativism”), and on the other hand, spent a lot of time calling out things like racism, sexism, and colonialism.That struck many as a contradiction—but within the paradigm, it wasn’t necessarily seen that way. The prevailing logic was that criticism or deconstruction of values wasn’t the same as proposing values. You could call things out—expose the ideological, colonial, patriarchal underpinnings of a text or institution—while still claiming to be value-neutral, because you weren’t offering a positive normative project.I think that was a mistake.But this was the rationale: being a critic was seen as a kind of safeguard against complicity. If you didn’t commit to values, you couldn’t be co-opted. And so what emerged was a scholarly culture that became incredibly skilled at critique—we got very good at tearing things down, exposing power structures, identifying implicit biases, and so on.Now, just to be clear, I do think that work is important. I’m not at all opposed to calling out racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, and the rest. But I also want to suggest that this is not a value-neutral activity. It’s a value-laden one. And failing to acknowledge that made it harder for people to feel like they could take a stand for something. We stopped proposing solutions because we were trained to believe that any kind of proposal was inherently suspect.And that’s what I push back on in the ethics chapter of the book. I argue that we need to reclaim the ability to build positive projects—that there are legitimate, philosophically rigorous ways to bridge fact and value. I try to offer some concrete thinking about that, including how values don’t necessarily contaminate scholarship if we’re explicit about them, and if we embrace a more modest, pluralistic understanding of academic inquiry.I'm part of what you might call the tolerant left. I believe in allowing opponents into the conversation—because I think good arguments are stronger than bad ones. And when we try to silence dissenting views instead of engaging them, we often end up giving those views a kind of rebellious credibility they don’t deserve.Now, how does the Dalai Lama figure into this? Well, I cite him briefly in a footnote as an example of someone who’s tried to articulate a kind of secular ethics—an ethics not rooted in religious doctrine but in shared human values. That idea was part of a broader point I was making about the possibility of articulating a value system that isn't absolutist, but still meaningful. And that, apparently, might be enough to raise a red flag in China.Let me just say, for the record: I’m not saying we should be letting actual Nazis into the conversation. We may have to draw a hard line there. But bracketing that out for a moment, I do think we can—and should—argue about values. The idea that values are somehow untouchable or entirely extrinsic to the domain of scholarship is, I think, a mistake.In reality, values are often deeply entangled with factual claims. Or to put it more strongly: values often depend on factual claims. Questions like, “How many children are being fed by USAID?” or “Is global warming actually a human-made phenomenon?”—these are factual inquiries that shape our moral stances. Our values emerge from our understanding of the evidence. So scholarship can’t pretend to be value-free if it’s engaging with real-world consequences.That said, I want to reaffirm the importance of calling out harmful structures—racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism. That work matters. But if that’s all we do—if critique is the endpoint—we risk building a culture of pessimism, one where problems are seen as intractable, and solutions are never imagined.So the question becomes: what is the positive flip side of critique? What’s the mirror image of that critical impulse?In the book, I talk about this in terms of what I call revolutionary happiness. And here, I’m drawing from two pre-existing philosophical traditions. In some ways, this might be the least “original” part of the book—but I’m completely fine with that, because what I think is fresh is how I bring these traditions together.On one side, I draw from critical theory—that is, the tradition of scholarship devoted to diagnosing structures of domination, oppression, and victimization. I’m thinking here of the Frankfurt School, but also of more contemporary forms like critical race theory, gender theory, and related work. That tradition is essential.But I want to flip it. I want to ask: what would a reconstructive version of that look like? What would it mean not only to critique racism, for example, but to seriously imagine what a post-racist society might be? I’m not saying we’re already there, far from it—but I think it’s vital to hold onto the idea that racism is a hard but solvable problem. And that opens space to ask: what concrete steps can we take toward being better anti-racist actors? What would a just society actually look like?That’s one part of it.The second part draws on a different tradition—perhaps more surprising: virtue ethics. The name is a little misleading, but what I’m talking about goes all the way back to the origins of the academic project itself—ancient Greece—where one of philosophy’s core purposes was to help people figure out how to live a good life.And it turns out that this is actually a fundamental and important thing. When I talk to my students, for example, many of them don’t really know why they’re in school—other than some vague sense that it might lead to a job someday. Whether those jobs will exist or not is anyone’s guess.But what I do think we can offer—whether our students end up wealthy or struggling—is a space to reflect on what it means to live a life worth having lived. What does it mean to live a good life?That’s where I start connecting things to an Aristotelian discourse—specifically, Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, which can be translated variously as “well-souledness,” “well-spiritedness,” or more accessibly, as flourishing. What does it mean to flourish?And from there, I want to explore what happens when we bring together critical theory and virtue ethics. For example: What does a flourishing, post-racial society look like?Now, I should note that I want to revise virtue ethics a bit. It’s often presented as a highly individualistic project—about cultivating one’s own inner virtues in isolation. But that’s not how Aristotle originally envisioned it, and I don’t think that’s how it should function today. Because if you’re living in an unjust society, then flourishing can’t just be a private achievement. People need to be able to make demands on the social order—to call for real, systemic change.That’s crucial. Another important distinction I make in the book is between what Aristotle called eudaimonia and what he called euphoria. I translate that distinction into what I call lowercase “h” happiness and capital “H” Happiness. Lowercase happiness is passing, surface-level—it’s the feeling you get from eating a great bag of chips or having a nice bike ride. And that’s fine! But what I’m calling for is something deeper: capital H Happiness. A kind of foundational flourishing.This lets me connect to other thinkers too—people like Hannah Arendt, who wrote about the relationship between happiness and political freedom. And it lets us revisit values that still matter, even if they’ve been misused or hollowed out—like the revolutionary American ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” If we interpret that last one as capital H Happiness, I think we can recover something genuinely meaningful—without needing to idealize the Founders or slip into nostalgia.All of this is to say: I want to call for a kind of revolutionary human flourishing. And this is where I depart from many others—finally—and where the Dalai Lama comes into the picture.I don’t see virtue ethics or the question of the good life as something that only happened in ancient Greece. That conversation took place in other parts of the world as well. In early Confucian thought, for instance, there was a serious inquiry into what flourishing means. Similarly, in early Indian Buddhist contexts, there was deep reflection on what it means to live well, to live ethically, and to live meaningfully.And here’s where I try to tie the pieces together: what I take from figures like the Dalai Lama—especially in his commentary on the Indian thinker Shantideva, which I cite in the book—is the idea that compassion is central to what it means to live a happy life. So if there’s one virtue I’m really standing up for in the book, it’s that: compassion.That’s because we’re not atomized individuals, despite what some philosophical or economic models might suggest. We’re not isolated units floating through the world on our own. That was one of the central errors, I think, of neoclassical economics and of methodological individualism more broadly—both of which I critique elsewhere in the book. In truth, we’re entangled. We’re enmeshed in each other’s lives.And that means my flourishing is inevitably tied to the flourishing of the people around me—of the community I’m a part of. That community might be as small as your family or your neighborhood, or it might scale up to larger networks or even the global context. There are pros and cons to widening that scope, of course. But whatever scale you're working at, the core insight holds: flourishing is relational.And there's good evidence for this in contemporary psychology and in what’s sometimes called “happiness studies.” That research consistently shows that people report greater happiness and life satisfaction when they dedicate part of their lives to helping others. You can see this play out in simple, tangible ways. If I eat a bag of chips, there’s only so much joy I get from that. But if I give that bag of chips to someone who’s hungry—say, a homeless person who might be starving—I feel a deeper and longer-lasting sense of satisfaction.Now, of course, we need to be careful. This isn’t a call for self-martyrdom. We need to understand boundaries and avoid turning compassion into self-erasure. But I do think there’s a lot we can tease out and develop to deepen our understanding of what compassion really means—and why it matters so much.And I try to do more work than some other thinkers in terms of figuring out the texture of that compassion—what it looks like, how it operates, what it actually feels like in human terms. But anyway, that’s where the gesture to the Dalai Lama’s interpretation of Shantideva comes in, and his argument that compassion is central to human happiness. That’s the footnote—the one that might cause issues with the Chinese translation.Right. Yeah. They don’t exactly love the Dalai Lama.No, they really don’t. And if that footnote does anything, it gets us right to the heart of what excites me about metamodernism—both in its diagnosis of postmodernism and in its reconstruction of something beyond it.I mean, I’ve been thinking about this for years. I went to a liberal arts school and took a literary criticism class, and I remember learning what it meant to be a critic. It was powerful. Seductive, even. There was something thrilling about being able to pull things apart like that.But until hearing you frame it the way you do, I hadn’t really thought about it as being grounded in a kind of value neutrality—this sense that I wasn’t making claims or proposing anything, I was just revealing truths. Just being an agent of destruction, as you put it.And it does feel like we’re at the end of a long era where that mode of critique shaped so much—our social life, our cultural habits, even our politics. Maybe I’m being melodramatic, but I also feel like something is shifting. And the way you describe it—especially the emphasis on flourishing and compassion—it resonates deeply.I remember, last time we talked, you mentioned becoming a father. And you spoke about how the absence of any constructive instinct in the work that came before really hit you, and how that helped drive some of your thinking around metamodernism and flourishing. So I guess I’d love to hear you respond to any of this—but also speak to the practicality of it. I’m a father too, in a small town. I feel this drive to help my community have the kinds of conversations we just don’t seem capable of having. And to go back to grammar for a moment—maybe we don’t even know how to be constructive anymore. Maybe we’ve forgotten how to disagree productively. Is that part of the same thread for you?Yeah. Let me underscore three things you just said, because I fully agree with you. First, this idea of critique run amok—criticism that becomes oddly dogmatic, and often incapable of turning its lens on itself—has absolutely taken root, both in intellectual circles and in broader public discourse.And it’s had a corrosive effect. I think it’s contributed to a kind of cultural and political exhaustion. I say this as someone on the left—I identify as a leftist—but I also believe that, in recent decades, much of the left has focused almost exclusively on calling out the negative, without articulating a positive vision to work toward.That imbalance breeds cynicism. It leaves people disempowered, feeling like nothing can be done. If the only narrative around climate change, for example, is one of inevitable extinction—no escape, no alternatives—then of course people are going to feel helpless. But in doing that, we overlook the things that can be done to improve our lived environment.That kind of fatalism drives disengagement. It lowers voter turnout, suppresses civic participation, and feeds a sense of collective paralysis.Second point: I do believe in critique. Deeply. It has its place, and it matters. But I see it as the first step, not the last. We should absolutely begin with a rigorous, even relentless critique of what exists. But after that comes the harder, more vulnerable work: sticking up for something. Saying, “Here’s what we believe in,” and then doing the work to imagine and articulate a better world.That’s where I differ slightly from the “post-critique” crowd. I’m a fellow traveler, but I don’t think we’ll ever be done with critique. I just think we can’t end there.And this connects directly to what you said about learning to have hard conversations. We need to recover the ability to engage disagreement—not just to point out what's wrong, but to do so with the goal of building something better. The weight, the responsibility, lies in taking that next step. Even if it's a long, difficult road, the work is to imagine and work toward a better future.And finally, yes—this perspective came into sharper focus for me through parenthood. I was writing the Metamodernism book during the process of becoming a father. My daughter’s six now—it’s wild how quickly time passes—but that transition really clarified something for me.I realized that the postmodern, deconstructive approach often terminates in a kind of cynical nihilism. And that ends up disempowering both individuals and communities. So I started asking: how do we move forward, without pretending the world isn't complex or difficult? How do we struggle—positively, and with clarity—to make it better?That’s what I wanted to figure out. Not as a naive gesture, but as an honest and hopeful one.With metamodernism, I’ve tried to offer some resources for moving forward—not just within philosophy, epistemology, ethics, language, and the social sciences, but also in terms of how we might rethink political engagement and our relationships with those around us.We need positive projects. But we also need to be mindful of the traps we can fall into while pursuing them. One trap is ignoring suffering—turning away from injustice or pain for the sake of optimism. That’s not what I’m advocating. Another trap is trying to produce an overly homogenous vision of the future, where everyone’s supposed to think or feel the same. I’m deeply committed to pluralism, and to preserving space for difference.That said, I also believe that working together—across those differences—is one of the most powerful ways to transcend the very divisions that challenge us.Let me give you something concrete. In the sociological literature, there’s compelling evidence about how to meaningfully fight racism. As someone who considers himself an anti-racist activist—and that goes back into my personal history, which I’ll bracket for now—I want to be honest about what’s effective.Calling people out for racism is sometimes necessary. But it often puts people on the defensive. Nudging, or gently challenging, can work—but the most powerful tool seems to be collaborative engagement. When people from different backgrounds work together on a shared project—especially something that matters to their local community—it opens up space for transformation.There’s a great example involving community playgrounds. You have folks who may hold racist views, but when they join a project to build a playground alongside people from different racial or ethnic groups, those day-to-day interactions, that shared investment, begin to chip away at prejudice. That’s far more effective than confrontation alone.And beyond just addressing bias, having a shared positive project helps knit communities together. It gives people ways to interact, to iterate together, and to develop mutual trust.Now, that doesn’t mean everything’s always harmonious. I come from a family that loves to argue—it’s part of my heritage. But we argue with love. And that’s key. There’s a difference between agonism and antagonism. Agonism is a kind of productive disagreement, a passionate engagement rooted in mutual respect. You see this all the time in small-town town halls—especially in New England—where people stand up, argue loudly, and disagree fiercely. But they’re still participating in a shared civic life. That’s the kind of engagement I want to support—one that makes space for difference, disagreement, and collective striving toward something better.But we don’t pick up guns and shoot each other over it—and that’s a very fundamental line. That line matters.All of this is to say: there are different ways we can work to improve relations across boundaries and divisions. And one of the most effective ways is through shared, collective projects. Unfortunately, the left—where I see myself—has often struggled to articulate positive projects. There have been exceptions, and some of them have been powerful and inspiring. But in a lot of the dominant discourse space, we’ve defaulted to the negative. We just call people out. We identify what's wrong, and then we stop there.Not only that, but we’ve developed a habit of calling out rather than calling in. I’m borrowing that language from some feminist activists, who’ve articulated this beautifully. Too often, the left operates as an exclusionary force. We identify a problem with someone—a thinker, a writer, an activist—and then we kick them out of the fold.Now, I’ll be clear: sometimes that’s warranted. Again, say no to Nazis. There are lines. But if we’re genuinely committed to values like restorative justice or reparative justice—and I am—then we need to think seriously about what it looks like to provide people a way back in.If someone says something harmful or offensive—especially to a particular community—then yes, we should name that. But then we need to have mechanisms through which they can engage in a process of reflection, repair, and maybe even reconciliation. It can’t just end in exile. There should be a path forward.Of course, that process has to be led and shaped by the communities affected. I can only speak to the groups and identities I’m personally located in, and even then, I don’t speak for them. But the fact that we rarely even have conversations about what reentry might look like—that’s a real problem. It’s contributed to declining margins in voting, lower engagement, and less ability to build coalitions.We’re fast to boot people out. And while I’m not saying we should make excuses for bad behavior, I am saying we need to distinguish between behavior and the human being. We can call out the bad behavior and still ask what it would take to invite that person back in.The lack of that kind of thinking—of that kind of structure—has led to a version of left discourse that, at times, becomes counterproductive. We’ve seen that in some of the slogans we’ve embraced. My fellow lefties… we’re not always great at slogans. And sometimes, our slogans end up doing real damage.Take Defund the Police, for example. It was a deeply unpopular slogan. And I say that as someone who was involved in justice reform circles. I know what we meant—or at least what I thought we meant—but that wasn’t what most people heard.I think what we really wanted—and what many of us were actually calling for—was more social workers, a demilitarized police force, and stronger, more trusting relationships between law enforcement and the communities they serve. Often, that meant recruiting more officers from within Black communities, for example. It meant reducing the disproportionate violence against people of color.We didn’t need to defund the police. That slogan, unfortunately, discredited much of the justice reform work we were deeply committed to. So we have to be careful with the language we use. Words matter. Slogans can either open doors or slam them shut.And beyond that, we often fail to offer pathways out—especially to those we’ve positioned as ideological or political enemies. That’s a missed opportunity.Right now, I believe we’re headed toward an economic crash. There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting we’re not far from serious financial disruption. When that happens, many of the people who voted for Trump—especially those in economically vulnerable regions—are going to see their livelihoods collapse.And here’s the thing: we need to figure out, without condoning racism, homophobia, transphobia, or other forms of bigotry, how to bring people back in. That doesn’t mean there’s no need for change. People will need to reflect and grow. But we also need a discourse—especially on the left—about how to build bridges again. How to create collective projects that aren't only for "our side."And maybe it’s not even about bringing people into the left. Maybe what we need are new, shared efforts that cut across traditional political lines—projects rooted in common concerns, not filtered through the endless polarization that defines so much of American politics today.That doesn't mean embracing triangulated centrism. There was this old idea—especially during the Clinton years—that if you just split the difference between left and right, you’d reach some stable middle ground. I think the Harris campaign, to some extent, inherited that logic. But I don’t think it works.People don’t make political decisions that way. They’re not parsing out policy positions on a neat ideological spectrum. People are moved by stories. They’re dissuaded by anecdotes. They’re persuaded by a vision—by a call to build something better, something they can believe in.And you can make compelling cases for justice and equity without leaning on polarizing buzzwords. If you approach people with care and clarity, you can build coalitions that create the conditions for different kinds of politics to emerge—politics that aren’t stuck in the same old binaries.The assumption on the left that “demography is destiny”—that demographic shifts alone would inevitably deliver progressive victories—has turned out to be wrong. And we’ve seen the cost of that miscalculation in recent national elections.I think that regardless of whether we identify as left, right, or somewhere else on the political spectrum, we need to start identifying issues of shared, common concern. And I genuinely believe that a lot of people—not just in the U.S., but around the world—are persuadable. They’re open to investing in projects that strengthen communities, protect public health, and clean up our air and water.Take something like toxic sludge being dumped into rivers. Sure, there may be members of Republican leadership who’ve supported deregulation measures that allow for that—but most everyday Republicans don’t want that either. Environmental stewardship used to be a conservative issue, after all. It wasn’t always the domain of the political left. There's no reason we can't build local initiatives in a way that invites broader buy-in across political lines.Personally, I believe the climate crisis is one of the defining challenges of our global society. And I also believe that dreaming big—hoping, working toward ambitious goals—is a far more effective path to change than defaulting to cynicism. Yes, it's a struggle. And yes, political change is often frustratingly slow. But if we commit to it—patiently, deliberately—I think we can create real transformation.One of the mistakes I think we on the left have made is not having a strong long game. The right has been playing that game for decades. Institutions like the Heritage Foundation have spent years building infrastructure, shaping narratives, and strategically working to reach this current political moment.Meanwhile, on the left, there’s sometimes this sense—especially in popular discourse—that if racism wasn’t solved by electing Obama, then it’s simply unsolvable. Of course, many activists know that’s not true. But in wider public sentiment, there’s often a feeling of discouragement: If it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to happen.That kind of disillusionment is dangerous. We can’t afford it—especially on issues like climate justice and racial justice, which are deeply interwoven. We need to embrace the idea of long-term struggle. That means investing in community-building. It means shifting focus away from the obsession with top-of-the-ticket races—because while presidential elections matter, they’re not the only space where change happens. And yes, it’s troubling how much power has been consolidated in the presidency, especially with recent Supreme Court rulings. But we can’t let that distract us from the real power that exists at the local level. There is so much we can do through grassroots organizing. And I, for one, am a big advocate of starting there.Yeah, it’s beautiful. And we’ve run out of time, but we’ve ended right where I was hoping we would. I’m curious what you’d want to leave people with—something about metamodernism as a way of being in the world. How do we move through the day with this idea of revolutionary happiness? Maybe you’ve already said it, but as a final thought: what does it mean to live in this new paradigm?Yeah. So first, I’d say this: we need to resist the imposition of what economists and political theorists have called homo economicus—the idea that human beings are primarily motivated by self-interest, especially economic self-interest.That idea is not only flawed—it’s harmful. When people internalize it, when they start to see themselves through that lens, they end up miserable. Just look at some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world today. Many are deeply unhappy, emotionally stunted, even destructive. The model doesn’t work—not for them, and not for the rest of us.So instead of chasing that vision, we need to start asking: What are the real conditions for human flourishing?Of course, that can include economic stability. Absolute poverty is devastating, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But wealth alone isn’t enough. Flourishing isn’t just about security—it’s about meaning. It’s about living a life worth having lived.And in politics, we often fall into the trap of appealing only to economic self-interest. We try to persuade people with numbers: "Here’s a policy that will save you 2% on taxes," or, "This reform will slightly reduce inflation." Those things matter, but they rarely inspire. They’re not the language of purpose.What people really want—across the political spectrum—is to feel like their life means something. Many want to live ethically. They want to be part of something larger. The language of solidarity, of collective action, of shared moral striving—we can reclaim that. We need to reclaim that. It’s part of what I mean by revolutionary happiness.And here’s another key point. We are living through dark times. And dark times don’t make utopian visions irrelevant—they make them essential.There’s been a strong critique, especially in the wake of postmodernism, of utopian thinking—a suspicion that it’s naive, dangerous, even totalitarian. And there’s some truth in that critique: utopias can become authoritarian when they’re treated as blueprints. But that’s not the kind of utopianism I’m advocating.What I’m calling for is something open, something aspirational—a vision of the future that we move toward together, knowing we may never fully reach it. But the point isn’t perfection. The point is to orient ourselves toward something better. To cultivate a politics—and a daily practice—of hope, of ethics, of compassion, and of shared flourishing.That’s what metamodernism is about. It’s not a finished doctrine. It’s an invitation.Marx critiqued the utopian socialists, and figures like Margaret Thatcher famously dismissed alternative futures altogether—claiming “there is no alternative.” The word utopian often gets used as a slur, as if imagining a better world is naïve or dangerous.But bracketing out utopian or better-world thinking only traps us in a kind of hopeless present—a morass that feels inescapable. And I think we need to imagine our way out of that.I'm a bit of a sci-fi geek, so I say this with love: we need to think science fictionally about possible futures. We need to embrace utopian thinking—not as a rigid blueprint, but as an open invitation to imagine a good future. In fact, we could even play with the spelling—e-utopia, as in eu (good) from eudaimonia, meaning flourishing. A good place.Now, to be clear, I’m fudging the spelling a bit. Traditionally, utopia comes from the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place.” But I'm intentionally reframing it: eu-topia, a “good place.” Though I admit, if I say the good place, people might just think of the TV show—where, spoiler alert, the good place isn't actually that good.But you get the idea. We need visions to struggle toward. Future dreaming isn’t a luxury—it’s a political necessity. And yes, I have very specific ideas about democratic reforms and concrete policy strategies, but we probably don’t have time to dive into all that here. What I can say is that acting locally is a powerful and essential first step.I wish we had more time—I’ve got another twenty minutes, but I know you need to run.Yeah, I do. I’m sorry to say. But I could keep talking to you for hours. If you’re open to it, I’d love to do a follow-up sometime—especially to dig into governance and policy. That part’s fascinating too. Connecting the philosophical dots to real-world structure—that’s where it all comes alive.Absolutely. Always happy to talk, and always happy to try. So, to tie it back to metamodernism as a final thought: there are a lot of us out here—friends, allies, thinkers, artists, organizers—struggling together to figure out what tools we need to meet this moment. For those in the academy, I’ve tried to offer some philosophical resources. Others are working on concrete political strategies, artistic expressions, or interventions at the level of culture and zeitgeist. We’re still figuring it out. We haven’t gotten all the way there yet. But we’re trying.Postmodernism gave us some valuable insights—but it didn’t get us far enough. We still have a long way to go. And as we work through that journey, especially in times that feel dark or uncertain, we need to lean on community. On solidarity. On mutual aid in all its forms.Because when we do that, we can begin to build better and brighter futures.That's beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation—and especially the reminder that utopian ideas aren’t outdated. They’re essential, especially in dark times. I take that to heart.Thank you. It’s always a pleasure to chat.Bye, Jason.Bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Zach Lamb is a Principal Brand Strategist at Concept Bureau, with previous roles at Martin Williams, and Colle McVoy. He holds an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and B.A. degrees in Economics and Anthropology from St. Cloud State University. He lives in Minneapolis, and is wintering in Florida. So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine and a neighbor who helps people tell their story. And I love it so much because it's a big question and it's a beautiful question. But because it's so big and beautiful, I tend to over explain it before I ask. So before I ask, I want you to know that you are in complete control. You can answer any way that you want to, and it is impossible to make a mistake. The question is, where do you come from?At the highest level, I wish I had the answer to that question. But I think I got to take you at face value. I come from Spring Valley, Wisconsin, a tiny farming town of about a thousand people.I have to answer that way because both of my grandparents were high school sweethearts. Both sets were high school sweethearts in the same graduating class of 1940 from Spring Valley. And then they had their families and included my parents who were high school sweethearts in Spring Valley in the graduating class of 1978. And my grandpa started a farm supply store that became like a hub of that community that I worked at growing up. So yeah, it's just deep roots in rural farming, Wisconsin. And I bucked the trend. I didn't meet my high school. I didn't marry my high school sweetheart from the class of 2005. But both sets of grandparents and parents did that.And I hated it at the time, being like a budding intellectual, wanting to get out of rural life. But now I just cherish it. It's given me such a more sensitive, I think, human perspective than if I hadn't seen all of the poverty around me, all of the farming culture and rural lifestyle. So now I'm actually really grateful for it in my work as a strategist and social thinker. I feel like I wouldn't be me without that. So long way of answering, I come from farmland of Wisconsin.What was Spring Valley like? What was it like growing up there?My graduating class was 50. So you knew everybody, the whole town. I got Robert Putnam's bowling alone. There were bowling leagues. There were the Lions Club. There was a civic feeling. And my mom would drop me off downtown and I would ride my bike around all day. And that was daycare. It really felt like I was the last boat out of NAM before the world got real scary, before we had to stop hanging out. So there was a civic life to it.What do you carry with you from that? You said that you've got a new, I don't know, a new gratitude of some sort. But what do you carry with you from that?I think just a sensitivity for the aching people's hearts, the desire to make something of yourself and maybe not be able to do it. And then making yourself okay with that. And just humility, just seeing humble people and seeing the goodness and the virtue of that kind of work and that kind of discipline. And just like how you make meaning out of a life that is more grounded in a community and in connection with others versus such a maybe striving, you know, like a material acquisitive form of meaning making.And yeah, I just I just it's influenced the writers I like. And, you know, I looked around one day and I realized all of my friends, you know, you all fit the same pattern. You're all kind of like rural kids made good, you know, you're all you're all rural kids that have left the city, or I mean, left the left the country and moved to the city and it was kind of like a realization that it's like, ah, this is somehow something I'm selecting for and the people around me now.Yeah, that's amazing. What was young Zach like? What did you want to be when you grew up?I remember getting that question from the guidance counselor and thinking it was the most absurd question. What do you mean? I don't want to be anything. Yeah, I don't want to do anything like just like the fact of doing anything seems preposterous, like, why would we do that, you know, and then of course I went carrying that in, you know, I went through a phase of like what's bumming you out this week. I don't know the fact that I have to work 40 hours on this planet that I didn't choose to be born on in the first place, just to pay bills, you know, so that that was kind of my 20s. But, you know, young me I think I just always liked ideas and I was always just a question like, why do we do the things that we do, you know, that was like my overarching question and so once I got to college and found social science, it was a pretty natural fit.Yeah, yeah, can you tell me a little bit about that when you discovered that question, I guess, or when you recognize that was something that drove you.Yeah, I think, you know, it's kind of connected to the small town thing I'm going to pick on religion here and I don't mean to because I you know I've now become a more spiritual person but you know when I'm in middle school and all my friends are going to like catechism and, you know, Jesus and religion was such a part of like their lives. Coming from their parents, of course, but then I'm just like, why I remember thinking like why are we, why are we not questioning this why why is why are you doing this, you know, like, why is this so appealing to so many people, because it's like, not for me, you know, I just, you know, my mom always said you don't have to be, you don't have to go to church to be a good person I wasn't ever baptized I was kind of just raised, you know, independently and it was that confrontation with the religiosity of my peers, I think really started, you know, tuning my eye to social construction of reality and social norms and how culture ultimately works and how this whole this damn thing is all knitted together, you know.So catch us up. Tell us, tell me, where are you now and what do you do.So right now, I'm the principal strategist at Concept Bureau. Awesome, awesome place I'm so thrilled to be there we have a community called Exposure Therapy which I'm so grateful that you are a member of. And, yeah, I had been in a PhD program, I was going to be an academic and sociology, and then started to get a little disenchanted with that, and realize I didn't want to spend the next 10 years of my life, hopefully finishing this PhD, it's kind of like all of the men that entered this class they all dropped out to pursue other things you know, funny how that broke down on gender lines and checked out.But the two that made it the two that made it all the way through were women?Correct. Yes. And so anyway, and so then I did a year of that and I was like, you know what, I don't think I can finish this I don't think I want to finish this and read about that time a friend of mine was dating a girl and he's like, she's got a job that I think that you would really like you should get a coffee with her and it turned out that job is brand strategy.And so from then it was like Yep, all right, this is my path I can do sociology, and I can do it faster and I get all the same skills and I was kind of off and running and so then I kind of bided my time in Minneapolis, doing the ad circle there's a lot of advertising agencies in Minneapolis and so you can make a career there pretty easily. I was getting jaded with that too, you know, maybe commitment issues, I guess, after about six, seven years.I was like, I don't want to keep going to work every day, like in an office and it was like, you know, just, this is right before coven and I started to decide I wanted to be a couples therapist. So I made that, you know what, I'm going to change my career, it's not too late, I'm only about 30. And so then I enrolled in a program I was taking classes at night coven hit, lost a job kept taking classes and then Concept Bureau called an email showed up in my in my inbox and I'd always wanted to be at a think tank, you know, I'd always wanted to be at a consultancy, not making ads getting bigger like what does this brand mean? How should we be in the world, you know, just some of the like it's a it's a more existential way of like building brands and a more philosophical way and I just had never been able to hit that level because we were trapped in this world of COVID where you had to physically go to work and there were just no consultancies in Minneapolis. So then I'm like, you know what, I can always come back to being a couples therapist. I just love this right now. So, you know, the greatest decision I've made career-wise for sure.Well, tell me about what was the couples therapy? Where did that come from? And what did you learn in that brief exploration?Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think—maybe I’m hoping—I’m laying down the theme and doing myself justice, just in terms of the sensitivity in my heart, you know? I just wanted to help people. I wanted to... you know, I understand—we started this conversation talking about coming from a rural area, and what it feels like to watch someone not make it, despite trying their best, or getting in their own way.And there's just a part of me that can't help but help. I do strategy from a perspective of inside out, you know—psychology out. I’m always asking, “What does it feel like to be you?” That’s how I make decisions about what strategy we should recommend.So when I’m doing qualitative work—interviews, not with clients, but with people—I’m asking things like, “What doesn’t the world understand about you?” I’m trying to understand how people tell stories about themselves to themselves, to make sense of their place in the world. What is the story they’re telling?I’m just really sensitive to that kind of thing. So when I hit a bit of an existential crisis around 30—you know, that moment when you realize life always has a next step, and suddenly you’ve done all the steps—you start to wonder, “Now what?” That’s a common moment, I think. I started asking, “Do I really like advertising?” And I thought, “I don’t think I do.” It was starting to feel kind of soulless. So I decided to try something else.I spent about a year and a half in grad school, in an LPCC program for therapy, and that definitely made me a more sensitive strategist. I engaged with Carl Rogers. I’d read Freud before, but this time I really read Freud. Not that he’s the most sensitive thinker, but still—there were a lot of frameworks I hadn’t had before. Things like internal family systems. I already had anthropology, economics, sociology, and a bit of armchair philosophy from podcasts—but not this.And I think that was the missing piece. Now I can trace a through-line—from structures and culture, all the way into someone’s head, into their feelings and emotions. It’s all connected.What do you what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?I think the joy—I love the puzzle of the work. And, you know, because it is creative. It’s a creative act. A strategist who tells you it’s science—it's b******t. It’s not science. You use inputs from science, sure, but ultimately, you’re going with your gut. Five strategists can be given the same problem, and they’re going to come up with five different answers. You put yourself into this work.One of our values at Concept, which I really like, is that you let the work change you. You're changed by what you learn. So it’s this dance, approaching the horizon of the unknown, solving a problem—between you and the work. You get to put yourself in it. Like I said, it’s a creative act.And so, solving that puzzle, and trying to do right by the people—that’s the part I love. Clients can very easily check their humanity at the door and recommend things, and I’m like, “Would you be moved by that? If you saw that, would you do it?” No, right? So the other part I love is being able to advocate for what I think are real people with real human emotions.Yeah. Where did your relationship with qualitative begin? And how do you what's the role of fall and how you learn how you work?Well, I think it is—you know, I suck at math. So, I mean, it started there—not really liking quants. But as I’ve gotten deeper into the business, I think qual is the only thing that feels real.I’d be way more comfortable making a brand recommendation based on ten one-on-one, hour-long in-depth interviews than on a 300-person quant study. Like, that’s just where all my druthers are. And I know you’ve talked about this with others on the podcast, so we don’t have to go too deep into it—but I want to hear your view.Why? Why is it? Why is it more real? That's a confrontational question in me that in my world to ask you why, Zach, but why you say it's more real, you'd rather make a decision based on 10 interviews or 300 survey. Well, what's that about?Now I back myself into a corner. Yeah, I just I just think because again, I trust my it's not all comes back to like I do believe it's an art and it's not a science and like I trust my ability to pick up on nonverbal cues to pick up on what's being communicated without being communicated, you know, to read between the lines and to get to get for lack of a better word alive and to really like sit with a person and understand them from the inside out.And to the best that you possibly can in an hour long interview over Zoom. But that's just going to give you so much more information than a quant survey. And who are these people like there's all kinds of sampling biases, who's going to give their time up to like fill out a survey right there, you're biasing something, you know, and so yeah, and I came up like my undergrad was anthropology.So we didn't do any quantum it like it was all ethnography I was going out in the field and so just just died in the wool I guess of that approach and took the GRE and I got a high score and verbal and like a 15 percentile in math. So it's like, yep, what's, you're going to be a cool guy. Yeah, we have we have much in common.When it comes to math and numbers, it reminded me of something I’ve shared before about Freakonomics. Someone had asked about a quote that was going around in engineering and development circles. It said, “The plural of anecdote is not data,” and it was often used to advocate for quantitative research while dismissing any value in qualitative interactions.We have this bias that’s really shocking—against actual human interaction. We call it “anecdotal” as a way of dismissing it. But Freakonomics did a kind of Snopes-style investigation into the origin of that quote and found that it had been misattributed. The original version actually came from an economics class at Stanford, where the professor said, “Of course the plural of anecdote is data. What else could it be?”It really highlights how blind we can be to the value of qualitative work. And I’m always looking to celebrate it.You mentioned two things earlier—that you studied anthropology, and that you tend to work from the inside out. So I’m curious: how do you think about brand? When did you first encounter the idea of “brand” as a big concept? I know you talked about being in Minneapolis, in that advertising-adjacent world, dreaming of a think tank or consultancy. But when did the idea of brand as a “big idea” click for you?I was kind of a weird kid in the sociology PhD program because I wanted to study what we buy—how we use purchases to communicate, to tell stories about ourselves. I was fascinated by the daydreaming we do inside our own heads, and how that links to identity. How we carry that into the world for status, for social signaling—for what we’d now call personal brand-building, even though that term wasn’t really in use at the time.Everyone else in the program was focused on race, class, and gender—not that those aren’t valuable topics—but I was always drawn to questions about identity crafting through consumption. I think because I felt it. I’d done that myself. I always reasoned from the inside out: how do I feel, and then, are those inner feelings shared by others? And if not, what explains the difference?That’s my process. I think it’s everybody’s process, whether they admit it or not—starting from themselves and reasoning outward.So once I got into advertising, I was immediately drawn to semiotics. It’s right in that space: what is the sign value of a commodity? Not just the economic value—what I pay for it—or the use value—what I do with it—but the symbolic value, which in our society is often the most powerful.That was the kind of question I really wanted to dig into. I had some background in semiotics through anthropology, and it just clicked. That lens on brand—the symbolic dimension—has always fascinated me.I truly believe brands do own themselves, but not really. They’re owned by people. A brand is only as meaningful as the meaning I assign to it in my own head. So while companies are constantly trying to steward a brand image, they’re only one half of the conversation. The real work happens in people’s minds and hearts, in the way they experience life and make meaning of the world around them.That’s where brand lives: in the heads, hearts, and souls of the people. And that realization—that brands live in people—has really shaped everything for me.What do we mean when we say “meaning”? Or maybe more specifically, what do you mean when you say it?The word of the young decade, I think.Do you think that’s true?I really do. Yeah. I mean, when we say “meaning”—or “meaning orientation”—what we’re really talking about is a reading of the world that makes sense. Like: I know who I am. I know what’s going on here. I understand the rules people are playing by. I have a sense of what’s likely to happen if I do X. That’s the foundation. So, my first take at defining “meaning” would be simply: orientation. And from there, it moves into purpose—what is my role within this system that I now understand? Where do I fit?And the reason I say it’s the word of the decade is because I think we’re in a meaning crisis. Hopefully we can dig into that…Let’s do it now.Okay, yeah. Where do you want to take it? It's an easy rabbit hole to fall into.What do you mean when you say “meaning crisis”?I’ll give you a theoretical answer first, then a practical one. But to get to the practical, I kind of have to start with the theoretical.I always start this conversation with my guy, Nietzsche: “God is dead, and we have killed him.” That one short aphorism really captures the shift. For most of human history—up until the last 150 years or so—people didn’t have to think deeply about who they were, how they ought to live, or what they were supposed to do. You were born into a place, likely died in that same place, and probably lived just like your parents did. Life was short, and all the big questions had answers already mapped out for you.There was structure. There was orientation. And a lot of that came from an abiding belief in a divine force—Christianity, or earlier, animism or other religious systems. But over time, we secularized. Nietzsche saw that coming. He predicted the consequences: nihilism, existential boredom, the unraveling of shared meaning. He saw it all coming in the 1880s.Then came the existentialists—Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir—who picked up where Nietzsche left off. They said, “We’re free now. We get to create ourselves.” But wow—what an obligation that is. It’s not just a gift, it’s a burden. Suddenly, it’s up to us to define who we are, how we live, what we stand for.That’s where Sartre’s quote comes in—possibly borrowed from Kierkegaard—“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” And that’s it. Freedom sounds amazing. Who would say no to it? But the flipside is: there’s no map. You have to draw your own. And that can be terrifying.From a sociology perspective, the thinker closest to my heart is Émile Durkheim, the founder of the field. One of his landmark studies was on suicide. His big idea was that suicide isn’t just an individual act—it’s socially patterned and measurable. He defined four types of suicide, and one of them was anomic suicide, which comes from his concept of anomie, or normlessness.Durkheim argued that during times of rapid social change—when norms dissolve—suicide rates go up. That lack of orientation is deeply destabilizing. And he was right. Later sociologists built on this, like when the Soviet Union collapsed and countries had to transition into capitalist economies. Suicide rates spiked. Why? Because the map disappeared. The rules changed. People were thrown into the dizziness of freedom. And that’s hard for humans. We don’t like that. We crave structure, clarity, meaning.So how do you articulate what drives someone to suicide in those moments? Is it the dizziness of freedom? Is that what you’re saying?Yes. Exactly. It’s just—people can’t handle the change. It’s ironic, because the Buddhists are right: life is nothing but ceaseless change. But we aren’t built for it, not really. We crave structure and order and norms.For a long time, we had that in society. And now, we don’t. So we’re left to figure it out alone. And that’s a huge part of the meaning crisis.There’s also an economic piece. De-industrialization was brutal. You used to be able to support a family of four without a college degree—just by walking down the street to a decent job. And yeah, gender roles were repressive—but there was stability in that. It came with orientation.I have a low-key theory that the meaning crisis is, in many ways, a very masculine crisis. I don’t think women spend nearly as much energy writing or talking about it.And to get really practical: I’m from Wisconsin. I was once at this dive bar in a rural town, and there was a guy there with his wife. I didn’t know them, but I guess he had a habit of getting too drunk and locking himself in the bathroom. Sure enough, he did it that night.Eventually, some guy goes out to his truck, grabs his tools, and pops the door open in two minutes. And he was so proud. For the rest of the night, he was telling everyone about how he opened that door. He puffed his chest out. And I remember thinking: guys just need to be needed. That’s it. They need a role.So yeah, in addition to the breakdown of the big, guiding stories and narratives, there’s also economic breakdown. And a lot of men don’t feel needed anymore. They’re not helping themselves much either. It’s just kind of a mess.That’s really interesting—framing the meaning crisis as, at least in part, a crisis of masculinity. I also loved your earlier point about orientation. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it described that way before. Can you say more about what you mean by that?Yeah. I mean, think about how many choices you have to make now—every single day. Every single moment. My co-founder at John the Lead likes to say we’re living at peak complexity when it comes to decision-making.There’s an overwhelming number of decisions, not just day-to-day ones, but also big ones about who you want to be, how you want to live. That wasn’t always the case.Like, Sartre—he used the example of being a waiter. I don’t know why, maybe because it’s a very French thing. He said, “My dad was a waiter, my grandfather was a waiter, so I’ll be a waiter.” That’s how it worked for so long. You didn’t have to choose your path—it was chosen for you.But now? That entire system is blown up. We all have to make a million choices, and we’re responsible for them. It’s incredibly anxiety-producing.So now, anything that can give us orientation—a narrative, a system, a structure—we run toward it. And that’s where brands come in. They’re not just products anymore. They’re part of a marketplace of meaning systems.Have you seen The Leftovers on HBO...?Oh, yeah. Yeah.It’s my all-time favorite show because it’s a parallel for exactly what we’re talking about. Suddenly, nothing makes sense anymore. In The Leftovers, 2% of the world’s population vanishes—poof. But the story’s not about where they went. It’s about how everyone left behind tries to reorient themselves in the wake of sudden chaos.That’s the exact parallel to where we are now. We’re living in chaos. And everything that happens in The Leftovers—the mystics, the soothsayers, the prophets, the rise of religiosity, the pull toward nihilism—you name it, we’re seeing it now. It’s all a response to the bomb dropping, to that 2% disappearing—whatever you want to call that moment where meaninglessness arrives and orientation disappears.And now we’re all scrambling to find something to hold onto, however we can. Brands are doing it. Influencers are doing it. That’s what post-reality is to me: it’s a marketplace for meaning. A marketplace for orientation. Something to solve the cognitive burden of too many choices. Just—let me be a person, right?That’s also the appeal of a cult. Joining a cult is like being a child again. You don’t have to make choices. Everything’s decided for you. And I don’t mean to belittle that—I worry maybe I sound like I am—but honestly, it speaks to a deep human need for order and meaning. I don’t blame anyone for the way they try to solve the meaning crisis.Yeah, 100%. I remember, as a young man, bristling at the idea of being a self-made man. I mean, it was romantic, sure—but it also felt like too much. Too much work. Too much pressure. The responsibility was overwhelming.Right. And that’s the thing—this meaning crisis is also a culture crisis. It’s a breakdown of what culture is supposed to do. I remember talking with Grant McCracken and he said it explicitly: our culture doesn’t play the role of culture anymore.And if you look at someone like Joseph Campbell, he’d say that the role of mythology—of culture—is to help us transition from childhood into responsible adulthood. To help us understand how to be a person. And we’ve lost that. Culture doesn’t do that now.There’s so much evidence for that—especially when it comes to men. That’s part of why I’ve paid attention to the conversation around masculinity for a while, even when it felt like something you weren’t allowed to talk about. Because it was seen as zero-sum: if we talk about men’s struggles, does that take away from gender equality?But more and more, I think we’re seeing that it’s not either/or. It’s a huge, complex shift. And we’ve just been through a period of uninstalling one dominant cultural system—a more feminine-coded system, if we’re thinking in binaries—and now we’re installing a new one. And it feels deeply masculine.Yeah. How does that feel to you? What do you make of that?I agree. I think society is in its Übermensch era—the age of the hyper-individualist. The aggressive, self-authoring individual. And it makes total sense as a backdrop to the meaning crisis.Because when there’s no script anymore, when institutions break down, you’ve basically got two options: you either sink into nihilism, debauchery, the Dionysian—carnal, chaotic energy (and trust me, I’ve been there)—or you flip into the opposite: “F**k it, let’s go.” You try to make something. Be a creator. Be an agent of chaos. You say, “There are no rules—so I’ll make my own.” That’s the Übermensch impulse.And, of course, Trump fueled a lot of that institutional breakage. That’s a whole other conversation. But what he did—intentionally or not—was break open the sense that anything was real or trustworthy. And that fed right into this moment we’re in.So those are two very common reactions to this cultural void: one is collapse, the other is assertion. And then there’s another group, too—those who just... don’t make it. People who feel like they’re not even in the game. The incel archetype, for example. Where nothing’s happening in your life. You’re just stuck. And that’s where I worry most. Remind me what the original question was again?I was just asking for your just thoughts on the vibe shift. You know what I mean? We were talking about Zuckerberg—you know, how he’s sort of remade himself—and Elon, and all the behaviors and shifts that have happened. I’ve often said that people like you and me, we know what we’re talking about when we talk about culture and meaning. But when I talk to someone outside our field and use the word culture, they usually have no idea what I mean.But I remember—on the Wednesday after the election, I forget the exact date—it felt like everyone in America, maybe even the world, felt something shift in the air. Do you know what I mean? That was culture. It was palpable.Yeah. For me, that moment—well, I think for a lot of people—it was after the assassination attempt. You could feel something start to shift. That was the first real clarion call that the way we’ve been doing things needed to end. I’m not a Trump supporter, but obviously—thank God he didn’t die. You could just feel that things were about to change. And certainly, that feeling intensified after the inauguration.Yeah. I feel like, for all its best intentions, the last 10 years of left politics have left a lot to be desired. It tried to put its best foot forward, but ultimately, I don’t think it served the people it was supposed to be serving. Sorry—I’m kind of losing my train of thought on this one.No apology necessary. We’re pulling on a lot of threads here. One of the conversations you and I had—and I’m just going to indulge myself a little bit—was about that moment when Elon did the salute. I’m not sure if “salute” is the right word; there’s a specific name for that gesture.Well, it depends on who you ask.Right, that’s true. But through the lens of everything we’ve just talked about—the cultural shift—I kept coming back to Elon as a father. His son—well, I don’t want to say “got caught up,” that’s unfair and I’ll probably bumble through this—but his child transitioned. And that experience seems to have been an inciting incident for him. So I interpreted that gesture—at the inauguration or whatever event it was—as vice signaling. That was the phrase I landed on. It felt like a mirror to all the virtue signaling that’s been the dominant cultural expression over the past several years. What do you make of that? I’ll admit—I’m a little too fond of that phrase, which is why I’m asking.I love it. I absolutely love it. As soon as you put that into the community, I was like, yes, that’s it. It tracks perfectly with this broader shift others have described—from light to dark, from Apollonian to Dionysian.Earlier this summer, I went to a Zach Bryan concert—big country musician—and it was the first time in a long time that I was around a crowd that was probably center, center-right, to far-right. Sixty thousand people. And being there, I started paying attention to the culture around it—how much energy is behind things like the internet’s young right, and this rightward shift among younger people.And I was like, well, duh. Especially after going to that show—it’s just more fun. It’s a much easier glass of water to drink. It doesn’t demand as much of you. It doesn’t require constant self-questioning and work. And I think that’s what I was trying to get at with wokeism: even at its best, with the best intentions, it prescribed a tremendous amount of labor—emotional, moral, intellectual. It was all about deconstructing.And a lot of the time, it felt like we were trying to convince ourselves that very real aspects of life—especially gender differences—didn’t exist. And of course, well-meaning people like you and me went along with it, because of course we’re not bad people. But there were always some clear-headed voices—I always appreciated Sam Harris for this—saying, “Hey, we can still be liberal, but what is happening here?”So that brings me back to the Trump assassination attempt—it felt like the first big signal flare. Like, we have to stop. This has gone too far. And sure, the right has gone too far too. But right now, they’re offering a simpler form of orientation—something the left is not doing, particularly in addressing the masculine meaning crisis.And there are figures on the right offering real prescriptions for how to live—ones that actually make people feel good. Like, yes, you should work out. I wish I did it more. Yes, you should exercise. It’s good to have a role. It’s good to provide for others. These are things that were once vilified but are, at their core, good.I’ve got to credit my wife here—she’s going to listen to this—because she talks about the overcorrection theory of culture and personal growth. The idea is, when you notice something in yourself that needs to change, you often overcorrect. But eventually, you pull back to the right middle point—and in doing that, you’ve solved the problem. I think culture works the same way.So when people on the left bristle at what Meta or Zuckerberg are doing, or the more masculine posturing we’re seeing—I’m leaving aside the potential Nazi signaling from Elon for now—it looks like overcorrection. And maybe it is.I actually wrote a piece a while back and called it Conspicuous Commitment. Because I started noticing a pattern online—especially among men. You started seeing these videos: guys alone, often no one else in the frame, going through intense morning routines—supplements, red light therapy, cold plunges, weightlifting. No people. Just them. It was like, “I’m exiting society. I’ve already exited society.”Self-care became the perfect accompaniment to our era of solitude. Against the backdrop of nihilism—where it’s hard to believe in anything, hard to find orientation—these routines were a way to signal: I’m committed to something. I’m doing something.And often, it included aesthetic self-denial. We were inventing structure where there was none, just to feel okay. And it reminded me: it’s a luxury to have hope. To have commitment. To be able to say you believe in something.And for a lot of men, those commitments have taken the form of martial arts, weightlifting, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Theo Von.And like, I’m fascinated by the comedian—the rightward embrace of comedians. I don’t think that’s because they’re necessarily on the right. It’s because they’ve always challenged structures. And suddenly—like a frog in boiling water—the left, which started off with good intentions, became the man. With its growing inability to tolerate dissent, with the thought-policing that started happening, comedians were vilified. So naturally, they moved into opposition. There was this shift, this clustering around all of that.And then, of course, Trump won. And Trump does what he does—he floods the zone. You know, issuing a million actions so no one can keep up. Most of it’s not true, or it’s not really going to happen, but he creates the perception that it is. He crafts the narrative. And honestly, Trump is great at reality crafting. He just is. You’ve got to give the man his credit. It all just feels like the last... I don’t know, this has all happened really fast. I love the auto-correction—or overcorrection—theory.And I’m thinking back—you mentioned deconstruction—and in one of these conversations, I spoke with Jason Josephson Storm, who wrote a book called Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. I’m going to speak with him again, but I’m so drawn to metamodernism as a framework because it helps explain where we are now.In talking to him, the core idea is this: and I remember David Graeber had an amazing piece in Harper’s called “Army of Altruists,” where he pointed out how many people on the left got highly educated and went into academia. You can see a lot of progressive social movements as an expression of a generation inspired by the ’60s countercultural revolution—people who picked up the tool of deconstruction and just started tearing everything apart.But with no constructive impulse. No capacity for building anything meaningful. It became, really, a weaponization of critical intellect. I remember taking a literary criticism course in college and how powerful it felt—how comfortable it was—to deconstruct a text. It was easy. You could take anything, tear it apart, and rebuild a whole alternate reading of the world around it.So I guess I’m indulging myself here, but I wonder: what’s your awareness of metamodernism? Jason talks about it as a corrective—an opportunity to reintroduce a constructive, creative, relational, productive way of being. Someone else described it as “maximum irony and maximum sincerity”—this idea that we can be naive again, believe in something, be idealistic, and try to build something real in the world. Because it’s like we’ve been in a desert for 10 years just breaking rocks.Yes. So well said. I feel that completely. And I think the culture of the left that we’re now trying to move beyond was, in many ways, the last gasp of the postmodern impulse—to deconstruct everything, to tear everything down. And that’s an incredibly important energy. But it can’t be the only energy. Because there’s no creative force in it. It’s entirely destructive.And after you’ve destroyed everything, what’s left? You’ve got the leftovers, right? I’m not saying that postmodernism alone is to blame, but it played a big part.And yeah—I love that. I’m a huge David Foster Wallace fan, and I love that he’s getting his due in these metamodern conversations. Because even in the ’90s, he was already critiquing postmodernism. He quit drinking, and while he wasn’t a teetotaler, he started trying to live his life grounded in sincerity. That was his whole thing. And what he saw around him was a culture that had become allergic to sincerity.It took a while, but now it seems like we’re coming back to that. His politics were often kind of oblique—you weren’t always sure where he stood—but what was always front and center was this call for, and belief in, the importance of sincerity. Sincerity as a kind of salvation.So it’s encouraging to see that come back through metamodernism. I think it was Paul Anleitner where I first heard that phrase—maximum irony and maximum sincerity. That’s it. That’s the kind of fiction I like, the kind of storytelling that feels most alive now. I think maybe that’s always been true—we just over-indexed for too long on critique. And if I borrow my wife’s overcorrection theory, it’s hard to imagine us overcorrecting into sincerity right now.It's funny—this has been so much fun. The last interview I did was with Michael Erard, a linguist who wrote a book exploring what he discovered about ritual through people’s last words and babies’ first words. He developed this framework of ritual that had sincerity as a fundamental principle. That word hadn’t really landed for me like that before. And now here we are, ending up talking about it again.So I want to dig deeper into what we even mean when we say “sincerity.” He mentioned the Quakers—how they may choose not to say anything unless it feels sincere. That it’s important to mean what you say, to speak with authenticity and truth.Yeah. I don't think that’s the case anymore.No, it’s true. Or—it’s hopeful, maybe.Maybe. I have one closing question for you, since you just mentioned your last interview. That one sounds fascinating. But what do you get out of this podcast? What have you learned? How has it changed you?I mean... you shared earlier that idea—that principle from Concept Bureau—that you have to let the work change you. And I think I discovered, probably too late, that I learn through people. You know what I mean?So I carry something from every conversation. Some part of what gets shared stays with me. I’ve become really wealthy in different perspectives. And I do—I feel changed by this conversation. I’m really grateful for it.Love it. That’s a very sincere answer.Yeah, it’s true.It’s true. Nice. Well, listen—enjoy your snowbirding.Will do. And thank you so very much.Thank you so much, Peter.Talk to you later.Bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Jean-Louis Rawlence is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Concept Bureau, a brand strategy agency, and co-founder of Exposure Therapy, a community platform for strategists. He also co-hosts Hopepunk - the podcast about informed optimism. I met Jean-Louis many years ago, and we have stayed in touch over the years. I have enjoyed being a part of the growing community he and Jasmine have been building. So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. And it's such a beautiful question is why I use it, but it's such a big question. So I over explain it the way that I am doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you 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. It's the biggest lead into a question that happens anywhere in the world. So the question is, where do you come from?Yeah, I like that. There's so many ways that you could answer that, right? That's fantastic.I mean, so I mean, geographically, I'm from the UK, from a small town called Melton Keynes, which fun fact about that, it was the first properly planned town in the UK. So everything is built around a grid system. And so it's kind of interesting in that because the infrastructure is so new, it's like it's like 45 years old, the whole the whole sort of town slash city that they pilot a lot of new technology there. So they had like self-driving cars. That was the first place I think in the UK to have them and a lot of new infrastructure. So it's it was an interesting place to grow up. It wasn't too far from London. And then, you know, as I kind of grew up, I moved to London and things. So geographically, I'm from there professionally. You could say that I'm from the domain of engineering. So, you know, when I was a kid, I think I was always really interested in the future. And so there was this TV show in the UK called Tomorrow's World.And I absolutely loved that show. It was all about like the new technology things that were, you know, coming over the horizon. And so I was just fascinated by where the future is going in sci fi. I was a huge, huge fan of sci-fi. My my mom was a big fan of sci-fi. And we'd we'd always watch sci-fi shows together like Star Trek, The Next Generation and Stargate and all of those kind of things growing up together.A lot of fond memories. And so that kind of led me to wanting to study aerospace engineering. And so, you know, at least in terms of like intellectually, you could say that I'm from that domain. What I found out later is that aerospace, it's one of the most underemployed disciplines, which is kind of surprising. So not unemployed, but underemployed. And that there's a lot of skills that you learn that you then don't go on to apply because it's such a narrow field.That a lot of people move into like an adjacent domain. And so you end up with kind of a bucket of skills that you don't touch very often. But I guess to tee up this conversation, what has stuck with me that I think has been tremendously valuable is the kind of the engineer's mindset of like thinking with first principles and kind of it's almost every language has a way of thought. And math in that view is very much a language of thought. And so, you know, in the work that I do, you know, you could say that like that's that's where I'm from. And I think that colors a lot of how I do things that approach things.What what was it like growing up? Milton Keynes, isn't that a name? Isn't that a person's name or am I complaining something?Yeah, Milton and Keynes, I think they've opened the domain of psychology and things. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that was a small town, a very old town. Well, actually, I have a fun little story about that. And when I was in school, I, you know, we did what is it and work experience. So you do two weeks working at a job. So I had something lined up and then I broke my ankle just before it happened. And so that I couldn't do that. So anyway, there was like all the other stuff had been picked. And there was a obscure thing with an archeology department that I ended up doing a two week stint helping them. And so I go around to these sites and then we do surveys and then we come back. And I remember I was cleaning human bones from the Middle Ages and just like, yeah, just take the mud off and then put them over there. And it was just but there was this small town, Milton Keynes, where where where the name of the town had come from. And there were jars where they had buried their dogs in these large jars like deep underground anyway.So they were like excavating that site. It's a very obscure memory. But anyway, that's my anchor to the name of like I went to some medieval ruins and helped them clean some some remains there.So there you go.I'm fascinated by the grid that you come out of the gate with defining Milton Keynes as the plan and with the grid. Can you just tell me more about the significance of that and how that is? Because I have my own story that I want to share after about the grid.Sure. Yeah. The state is kind of boxed in and it's a rectangle. And so there's this grid system that allows you to go really fast between the different things. So it's kind of like you've got all the capillaries and you've got the arteries where you can kind of cut through the city a lot faster. And so that just kind of lets a lot of throughput. It's also known as the roundabout capital of the UK. So it's full of roundabouts, which is actually it's a more efficient system, although I think it's less people don't like it as much. But it does. It is more effective. So it's also well known for that.People have strong feelings about the roundabout. So is it walkable grid or is it a car grid?So it's a car grid. But then they also have what they call redways where you can get around the city by bike and other things very effectively where you're not on the side of the road. It's a different system. So I grew up doing a lot of cycling. You know, that was always kind of nice. And as a kid without a car, it was it was super accessible to me.That's interesting. They totally separated those forms of transportation from. Yeah.Yeah.I geek out on this. I mean, I live in Hudson, New York, and I just discovered I didn't just discover, but I was just talking with people about the fact that when the proprietors came to Hudson many, many years ago, they laid out the city in a grid, which at the time, sort of novel. And it creates such a beautiful experience of the city is totally unique. And somebody also told me that maybe in hieroglyphics or Egyptian, that the sign, the symbol for a city is a grid. I didn't know that. Yeah. Anyway, I, what's the right word? I meander. I wander away from the path. So do you have a recollection of when you were young of what you wanted to be when you grew up?I think I think I do. I mean, I remember there was one kind of pivotal experience that really cemented things for me. So I was a kid and there was there was a science competition.And so I think I was 13 at the time. And, you know, I was always interested in space and things like that. Anyway, so we so we entered this science competition. And my wife doesn't let me let this down because I I tell this story about this competition we won. And I guess I neglected to mention that my brother was also on the team that won. So I made it sound like it was all me.But that was four of us. My brother was one of them. We we entered this competition. And long story short, we won. So each region of the U.K. one team one. And we got to go visit NASA and all their facilities in the U.S. And it was quite it was quite an experience. You know, we saw the space shuttle land from like right by the landing pad. And then we had dinner with the astronaut who landed it the next day. And a chief engineer of the shuttle, which was incredibly inspiring and incredibly I think it was 13 or 14.Yeah. And so to be around that and just to you know, there's a very specific mindset that it's like, hey, here's the only deal in things that haven't been done before. Which when you think about that, it's a very uncommon thing in the business world of like, well, let's just copy what the best that anyone's done. And so it's a completely different mindset. And that was very infectious. And so that kind of led me to wanting to get into aerospace engineering. I was like, I've got to do this. You know, and I think it was quite good at it, too. But the problem is that it was kind of I think one of the biggest existential bombers I've ever had, which is I really wanted to get into it.And two things happened. One, I also wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I realized at least in the U.K., being an entrepreneur and being in that industry are mutually exclusive things. You know, there's capital in the U.S. But, you know, I live here now, but you can't work in that industry unless you're a citizen because, you know, it's related to defense and things like that. So there's no way of kind of migrating professionally over. And then the other side is that, you know, for me, the mindset was this is one of the most existentially important things we can do as a species.But after kind of looking into it a lot more, it turns out that like it's way harder, it's way further away than we thought. And you kind of realize that, like, you know, maybe we can build a colony on Mars, although there's a lot of very large, possibly insurmountable problems to that. But we're not going to become an intergalactic species until, you know, in some ways, like what I thought at the time is until we digitize our consciousness.Like humans are just not we're not designed for space travelers, surprisingly. And so, you know, something much deeper needs to change. And so it could be that, you know, A.I. is the thing that colonizes the universe. But it led me to kind of lean into business much more when I realized that, like, existentially, while it's incredibly exciting, it's, I think, further out of reach than I had initially thought.How do you mean?So, I mean, so, OK, there was there was a recent finding, for example, that the space radiation affects the human kidney much more severely than we anticipated. And so now this is this is new as of, like, I think last year that, like, oh, so when we go to Mars, we need to have far greater radiation shielding on the way, which is going to increase the mass, which is going to make it more challenging. And on Mars, even if you could make the air breathable, the pressure is one percent of the pressure of Earth.And so to, you know, so even if it was breathable, the pressure is nowhere near enough to actually breathe, you know, even if the composition was correct. And so terraforming could take an incredible amount of time to actually make a change then. And then there's the more severe thing, which is that we don't know if it's even possible to reproduce on one third of gravity.Like, it could be the case. And we really don't know that if you tried to have a child on a colony on Mars, it just wouldn't work. Like, it just it would be the adverse health consequences would be so bad that it's just not feasible.And so, you know, so we don't actually know if it's possible to have a sustaining presence in that way on Mars. So there's a lot of uncertainties that are far deeper than it's like, oh, we'll just put people there and it's like, well, hang on a minute. You know, there's there's some really tough things to figure out. So, you know, those are the kind of questions that I think in terms of expected value of my career kind of pivoted me towards more. OK, let's get into entrepreneurship.And you talked earlier about mindset. How would you describe the mindset that you're in when you're fact you're considering all this stuff about getting to Mars? What are you what's going on with you?What do you love about about that?Yeah, I mean, it's really I mean, listening to you and getting to know you over the past year and a half, there's definitely that sensation that you I'm with you up to a certain point. And then you just keep going where I don't feel like there's any anything underneath you. But clearly there is. And it's likely math.No, I think it s. I think I think it's such an underrated and powerful language at understanding things like just and math in the sense of just the mental logic, not even necessarily getting to the level of an equation, but just the process through which you reason in math.And so you could argue that there are certain ideas that have had far more impact than any like physical, hard technology. And if you look at the arc of how history changes, it's mostly the story of these ideas, not the actual physical engineering technologies that have truly changed things, if you really look into it. And so in building this agency, kind of it's pushed us down this path of more cultural futurism, studying culture and to study culture, you kind of have to study history a bit.So I find myself, you know, kind of, I never thought I'd be there, but I'm really enjoying learning a lot more about history because, you know, they say history, you know, it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And so to understand where things are going, sometimes you can find phenomenal precedent in where things, you know, where we've come from. And so long story short, we built out that business and in doing that, we, you know, we publish a lot of thought leadership and we have, you know, a decent following of people who are really engaged in the type of thinking that we do.And so, you know, not everyone, the challenge with strategy is it's a very timely thing. A lot of people, you know, really value strategic thinking, that kind of content, looking at culture, but you only need a new strategy, maybe every three to five years for business. And so even if you're super motivated, you want to work with us, most of the time, there's no need.And so, you know, we had this audience. And so that's where we felt it was, it made just a ton of sense. So Concept Bureau is the consulting side of things. Exposure Therapy is a community for professionals. And, you know, it started off just people in brand strategy, but I think now it's just the criteria is anyone who is culturally curious where your success hinges on being curious.I think that's broadly who we're for. And so, you know, as you know, you know, every month we publish original thinking around, you know, either it's like more strategy related topics or it's more culture. But I find myself moving, you know, going from futurism and engineering to almost like a little bit of philosophy now, which I'm really enjoying.Yeah, yeah, it's wonderful. I mean, the work that you guys have done, the work that I'm aware that the concept bureau has done has always been so great. And then my experience of exposure therapy has just been so rewarding and so good. It's really beautiful what you guys have built. How do you, you know, I think every company kind of attracts its own customers in a way. Like, what do you find when people come to you, what are they asking you to do? What kind of questions do they, what do you find people come to you for?So that's a great question. I think what's interesting is that brand is such a nebulous term. Like, it's kind of unfortunate in that it has so many meanings. I mean, sometimes you talk about brand and someone's like, you mean colors, right? You know, and on the other hand, you know, it's a whole mythology, it's a whole story, you know, it's, you know, it's the whole thought leadership and conceptual package behind a business. And so the challenge that we often find is that people come to us when usually there's some kind of specific impetus, they've raised money, they're, you know, looking for an acquisition, they've just been acquired, they're launching a new product.There's some like fundamental change that requires a rethinking of like a recontextualization of their offering. You know, so often, like, if you're launching a new line of products, you branded yourself around this one offering, and now you're launching a second offering. Well, you know, there's an existential reckoning happening there a little bit in terms of, well, who are we now?And by the way, that's all these other things that you need. And so, you know, that's kind of the the broader story. I think a lot of the time people come thinking it's a story, but realizing it's such a it's a much more it's like a new mental model on your business.It's a new way of thinking, a new way of approaching and solving problems. And so a lot of it is it comes down to how you how you think about your business, you know, and that kind of becomes the structure through which the filter through which you solve problems. And so what we say often is that really, if you if you do brand strategy, well, your brand strategy should sit on top of your business strategy.And in doing that, what are you not paying attention to, right? It's just simply here is a great thing we've made like so many times, you know, people do phenomenal things in business, incredible innovations, but they forget to tell anyone. So it's like they have the by far and away the best product, but no one knows. And no one knows to care. And so that's kind of often like when you have you realize that brand is sitting on so much equity. So many people think so highly of the business, but they haven't told anyone because they don't know they should tell anyone.And so a lot of it is just do you understand the value you create, which is a it's a psychological thing. It's a cultural thing. There's many layers to that. And then are you directing their attention at a basic level? And so if you understand that, then that should dictate then your business decisions. How do you hire?And I've been lucky enough to talk to people about everything from from from death, you know, working in hospice to consensual non-monogamy, working in interesting dating apps to health and athleticism and just everything in between your money and parenting, whatever it is. It's just you get to talk to people and go really deep. You know, often like we say, the gold standard for our research process is that someone in one of the interviews tells us that this feels like therapy.That's when we know we're kind of hitting the mark. You know, and that's the job of understanding the value that you provide. Right. And so I think I've lost track of the exact question. But the point is just that like it's there is value you're providing to to be a successful business, to make at the very least, to be in the business, making, you know, tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. You have to be doing something.A lot of the time, not always, but a lot of the time, you know, we do quantitative and qualitative research. And we'll tell people stories that really affect people, you know, that really kind of they understand, you know, like the human impact of the problems that they're solving. But then they won't trust it until there's a number behind it.Right. And so, like, do we quantify this story? Do we quantify the pain? And the when you felt what that felt like for him, and you get that intuitive sense, you understand like the imperative of helping those kind of people, you understand what it like the what that is to help them. And the kind of value you're providing, which is so much more finances like the bottom of the thing in terms of like how the kind of value you're providing to them from a meaning point of view from a safety from a psychological point of view. And so, you know, it's that kind of intuitive knowledge when you understand that it makes decision making so much easier, because now you know you have that intuitive knowledge. And so I think that that's something that businesses, most businesses are not doing enough to build intuitive knowledge in their leadership.Yeah, so that there's a I mean, I think it's overused at this point, but it's overused for good reason. It's one of my favorite quotes in business, which is from James clear from atomic habits, you don't rise to your goals, you fall to your system. So the analogy is that everyone at the start line of a marathon has the same goal, right?They all it's not for lack of goals that, you know, who's going to win or lose. It's the systems. And I think we often forget that it's like, if we just had better goals would be fine. It's like, no, no, no, it's got nothing to do with that. And so it's accountability. Ultimately, it's like, how do you make sure that you do this consistently, right?And so that is really fulfilling, I think, to study meaning, to understand the nuts and bolts of meaning, the psycho technology that allows us to have meaning or the the market conditioning that gets in the way of us arriving at meaning. And so you kind of, that's what you end up having to study, if you keep going down that rabbit hole. And that, to me, is like, it's personally fulfilling, and it's very intellectually satisfying, too.What do you mean when you say meaning? When we're, you know, what are you, what are we talking about when we're talking about meaning?You know, your brain is like, you know, you rub your hands together, intellectually, you're just like, here we go, there's some great stuff. And he brought up this point that I think about so much. And it's incredibly relevant now and in a way that you wouldn't think so.In the time of the Egyptians, they had certain mythologies around the way that the world that life unfolds, right? And their belief is that life is circular. Nothing really changes, right?You can't let the whole hero's journey is predicated on the idea that the future is different than the past, right? And so Egyptian mythology doesn't include that. And so when you think about what are all the stories that we tell, so like Christopher Nolan right now is making a movie, a movie on the Odyssey, right? And that's Greek mythology. We don't tell stories of Egyptian mythology because we find them unrelatable because none of them contain progress. You can't fit a hero's journey into a mythology that's circular, that doesn't change because, you know, the hero hasn't succeeded if he hasn't changed the world. And so it is unavailable to us to find meaning in those stories. And so that's fascinating. But it relates to today in a really interesting way.So Nick Bostrom wrote this book, Deep Utopia, which is exploring, you know, everyone's talking about the worst cases of AI. And, you know, there's very good reason to understand that. He's looking at, well, what if it works? What if it really works? What happens? Like what? Like if we arrive at utopia, what are the problems with utopia? And there's a really interesting notion here, which is there is a feasible scenario in which AI is so good at what it does that we don't get to contribute to the progress of humanity in the way that we used to.You've got all these instruments from, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the wartime that these are like the marching band. This is, you know, part of that. You've got a huge population of what are now no longer slaves. And there, you know, you've got this cultural mismatch. You've got African rhythms. You've got a lot of, you know, like interesting culture there. But then you're also trying to integrate that into society. And so you've got so much going on. And so that's where jazz comes from.And it makes sense of so many different things. In Brazil, there's a similar thing. You have a large, you've got a Latin population, you've got like a Latin population, you've got a tribal population, you've got a Catholic population. And there's a festival. I can't remember what it is. But somehow, everything blends together, all the music, the dance, all the practices.And that's a lot of kind of what coming back to brand, that's the role that brands have to, if they choose to, that's a huge source of value that you can provide people, which is just how do we navigate so much chaos? And that's what sense making is in many ways. And that's what we're trying to do. And so you can see pockets of that. And as it emerges, and where it emerges, and, you know, you can look at that and see so much opportunity for greater value. But yeah, ultimately, like, sense making is a big thing of how do you get to meaning?How would you say, you said it's been 10 years since you guys opened the concert. How has, how has it changed? How has the obligations or the opportunities for brand, how has that changed in 10 years, if at all?And it completely changed my concept on pricing, you know, as far as, you know, like, if, if you spend little money, then you don't have to take it seriously. But if you spend enough money that you can't buy it twice, then you have to take it seriously. And I think that, like, and it's not to say that you don't provide a lot of value, but it's understanding the level of value you provide.And, you know, so early days, it was much smaller, much more narrow engagements. And as we've grown, our engagements have kind of they've grown in size. Perhaps they're even too large now, you know, like our engagement sometimes like five, six months of heavy research and insight.And then, you know, we'll support clients for a long time after that executing on it. So I think it's the level of depth of realizing that, like, there is so much value, you have to make sure that they understand how to use it. And so that's kind of one of the challenges is that you can provide them the most ingenious strategy ever.But then if they don't execute it and if it's not the right strategy for them to be able to execute, then it's also not valuable. And so it's understanding that middle ground of like, oh, there's something crazy they could do. But that's not right for them.You know, so there's that piece of it. I think the other thing is we're always iterating our process, you know, always like refining. It's that engineers think of how do we turn branding, which is a very artistic endeavor into, you know, and my way to put it was about hyperbolic is how do you turn that into an engineering problem?How do you turn it into a math equation where you can figure out what are the inputs and what are the outputs? And that's kind of what we've tried to do. So our process doesn't really change clients to client.Absolutely. I remember two things come to mind on the topic of just confidently asking for the right price. I think the neuroscience says that we experience spending money as pain, sort of the brain, the brain registers spending as a form of pain. And so, yeah, you have people need to hurt a little bit in order for them to listen. You know what I mean? They're going to be more likely to listen if it hurts. And that's one anecdote on that. And then I want to hear it. And then I just got an email from I spoke to Clotere Rapay, who's a, you know, legend. Right. And he offers a service of devising discovering your code. And I think it's 10 sessions, thirty five thousand dollars a session. Wow. I was like, oh, yeah, well, that's I see what he's doing there.Well, you know, I think what it is in business is that people often don't appreciate the notion of leverage in the way that they should. Like if it's just you can do so. So the analogy that I think is really helpful, again, just borrowing from engineering unbiased is the difference between speed and velocity.And that's kind of what it is. Like, I always another way of, you know, another kind of mental model that I come back to a lot is just, I don't know if I have a clear phrase for it, but it's kind of just like cracking ideas over the anvil. You're trying to break an idea. You're really trying to break it. And if you can succeed, then there was something wrong with it. And actually, this does it.There's a fun story here. So many years ago, when I was living in London, I'm in LA now, obviously. But in London, I helped run the Google Startup Accelerator Program. And so this was like it was a bit different than earlier stage startups. It was a week long intensive that we'd run with a whole batch of startups. And in doing a few iterations of that, we realized that the best way to run that program is in a week, can we break your business?We would just be as aggressive as possible. Every day was a different part of the business. We just try and break it. We'd say like, okay, let's prove it wrong. Let's prove you in the harshest way possible that that's not going to work. The marketing isn't going to work.The product isn't going to work. The engineering, the team isn't going to work. Whatever it is, we would just try and break it over the anvil. And sometimes we would. And that really reveals something interesting. So there's one story I love to tell. There was a company that they'd run a pretty successful Kickstarter. They had a product. They've been churning away it for two years. It was a connected dog collar. It's that you're at work. You're anxious about how your dog feels. Home alone. You want to check in on them. You want to make sure they're all right.And so sometimes, violence is the best answer, for want of a better way to put it. But it is that just trying to be really aggressive and that if you can prove it doesn't work, then there's a problem. And so you get to be, you really can't be precious with your ideas. And you have to absolutely just like, propose them and then try and destroy them. And that process is how I think you get to a really strong position. Beautiful.Well, listen, that's all the time that we have. I want to thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun.Thank you, Peter Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Eliot Aronow is a former GQ columnist, fashion editor, and music industry innovator, he is the world’s first Spiritual Creative Director™ and founder of minor genius, blending creative vision, spiritual leadership, and business strategy. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation. Happy to be here. So I start all of my conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrow from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it's a beautiful question, which is why I borrow it. But it's a big question. So I kind of over explain it the way that I'm doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And it is impossible to make a mistake.Sounds good.The question is, where do you come from?I come from spirit. I have incarnated here as Eliot. And in a more mundane sense, I come from the cultural mecca known as Staten Island, specifically in the early 1980s, the son of two English teachers.What was it like growing up in Staten Island?I loved it. I mean, I always say kind of half jokingly, I think the great tragedy of my youth was moving to New Jersey in 1991. I felt very in tune with Staten Island as a kid. You know, I've always been really interested in style and fashion. And I guess as compared to New Jersey, it just seemed like people had more of a sense of being put together or more sophisticated. Perhaps that's due to the proximity to what we all call the city.I don't know if that applies to people that are not from New York, but anyone who's from New York just always calls it the city. We never call it New York or Manhattan. But yeah, I would say all around. I really enjoyed it. You know, I think like a lot of folks that were living there at the time, you know, my parents have been Brooklynites and raising a child. Staten Island was like the closest thing to the suburbs. And so a lot of people left the city and Brooklyn and Queens and moved there in the early 80s because, you know, you could be an English teacher and buy a condo.Do you have recollections of what young Elliot wanted to be when he grew up?Yeah, I would say I think I always saw myself as an entertainer of sorts. You know, I think ever since I was little, I was always drawn to the aesthetic realm and sort of the arts. You know, my father taught theater appreciation at John Dewey High School, which is a bit of a famous high school in the New York public school system.It's a lot different now, but back in the day, it was kind of like a hippie magnet school. Spike Lee went there and Larry Charles, who is the co-creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm, or I think it was Seinfeld. Anyways, the guy that was the other Larry that wasn't Larry David went there.Foxy Brown, the rapper. And so for me, like that was just kind of always in the air as a young kid was being interested in aesthetics and colors, music, all those sorts of things.Yeah. Was there an entertainer that you looked up to? Like what was an entertainer to young Elliot?That's a great question. I think at the time, I didn't really understand entertainers as maybe performing. Like I thought that they were just like that permanently.But you know, again, I'm a child of the 80s. So for me, I think a lot of it comes down to like, you know, Michael Jackson, Prince. I remember the first cassette that I bought was like, Huey Lewis in the News 4.So, you know, I didn't quite understand that there was a difference between like the entertainment industry in real life. I just thought that like, yeah, those were who those people were like all day. You know, although if I'm keeping that a buck here, I would say that, you know, the 90s when I was a teenager, of course, had a much more powerful impact on the way that I saw entertainment and specifically like music and fashion. You know, I think like most middle class Jewish kids, like I wanted to be a Beastie boy more than anything. And I think as a 44 year old man, I'm still kind of on that vision quest.Yeah. What does it mean to be a Beastie boy?At that time, I remember that moment. I really saw it as successful weirdos. It's the best way to describe it. It was like, I was never really drawn to things that are too, you know, mainstream. And so I think like, again, growing up in the 90s, you had such an interesting cultural moment where things that were weird and things that were popular live together in the same cultural conversations. I mean, like I'm kind of dating myself here, but like Primus. In what world are Primus like a successful band that has like top 10 albums? You know, these guys have like a lead bass player, like it's crazy, you know? And so I think that cosmology that you could be weird and outsider, but also in mainstream culture just had a really profound impact on my psyche and really my professional ambitions.Like, where do you, where are you now? And what do you do? Sure.Well, I'm the world's first spiritual creative director. And what I do is I help people get paid to be themselves.And how does that work?It's a great question. Well, in order to do that, a couple of things need to happen, right? First, you have to uncover who the yourself part is. So in my framework, that's a spiritual transformation. Then once that has been kind of unfrozen and you get a sense of like, oh yeah, like I've actually been masking for my entire adult life. Then that informs the second aspect, which is creative.So I partner with people to make stuff. So I've helped people make short films, magazines, brands, websites, fashion companies, really anything that would fall under the traditional reins of a creative director. I partner with them to create a project and get it out into the world.And then the third component is entrepreneurial, which is once you've become the new person and you've made the new thing, you have to package it up such in a way that people want it.Yeah. And how long have you been doing this? When did you first discover that you could be a spiritual creative director?Well, the creative bona fides have really been there since my early twenties. You know, I came up, my first job was working at the Fader magazine and I had a music startup called record label, which was one of the kind of medium to bigger size music blogs back in the indie sleaze era. I had hosted a television show of my own called our show, which was kind of like my homage to Glen O'Brien's TV party, which had like LCD sound system and the yeah, yeah, yeah. And DAS racist and pretty much all the, you know, kind of indie heartthrobs of the time.So in terms of the creative stuff, like that was always kind of second nature to me. I think the spiritual part was a lot harder earned, which was that basically like in my thirties, like none of my dreams came true. And I felt very lost and washed for many, many years. I had different entrepreneurial ventures. I had a tie company and I had a creative consulting agency. Neither of, I mean, the Thai company did a lot better. Like we had a collaboration with the strokes and we're sold at some of the more Shishi stores in NYC. For those who remember Odin, we were sold there and like The Standard Hotel.The creative agency maybe had less of a success ratio, probably because I didn't really know like how to sell anything. Like I think I understood the contours of like how to make things cool, which is very different from like learning how to sell things. So anyways, I'll try to get through this with as much alacrity. Did I use the right word there? I'm not sure if that's, is that it?Yeah, that sounds right to me.Yeah, okay. It's always funny when you use a fancy word, but you yourself, I mean, yeah, it's a weird, weird thing to use a fancy word and not even be sure if it's the right one. Anyways, I'll try to get through this a little succinctly. Um, you know, uh, at the time I didn't really know what it was, but looking back, I can say that I had a very profound ego death in my early thirties and it really rocked me to my core. And this kind of foundation that I had built, part of which was my public persona of like fashionable cool guy wearing suits, music, dude, Glen O'Brien protege. Um, that kind of all got burned down.And so I had to figure out, well, who am I without really any money, any success, any of the social clout that I had. And so having rebuilt myself from that hole or that, uh, dark place. Uh, I feel like I'm really able to work with people on both sides of the equation. Like I understand what it's like to be in the game and be working with people at the height of their creative powers. And I also know what it's like to be so depressed that you don't brush your teeth until three o'clock and you have $20 in your bank account. So mountains and valleys, mountains and valleys.And when people, what's an example of, uh, of an engagement, like in terms of how does it start when people call you? What's the, why are they coming to you and what kind of conversation do you have with them about?Yeah. Um, there's usually two really distinctive profiles when people enter my world. Um, one segment is people that are making a lot of money, a lot of money, but not to be themselves.So in other words, you know, they're your classic, like successful, but miserable person who's at a big brand. They're a CMO, they're the head of a startup, but they sort of feel like, again, you know, this isn't it for them.They know that there's something that's a lot more expressive and creative than what they're currently doing. And the other side is people that are just not getting paid at all and say, Hey, like, I really actually have no idea how to sell myself. Can you help me in that process? So those are usually the two main archetypes. You're either getting paid a lot to not be yourself or you're just not getting paid at all.Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?You know, I think that when people can have a good humor about their shadows and failures and resentments, um, you really see them come alive and realize how much potential and creativity they really have. You know, I think that in our culture, we of course tend to hyper optimize for impressiveness and efficiency. And you know, all of us in one way or another sort of buy into the cultural myth that, as long as we're rich or cool or impressive enough, nothing bad will ever come.Right? Like we can insulate ourselves from the vicissitudes of life by just being powerful and accomplished. And I think that once that lie has been uncovered, and then you're forced to deal with your core material, of course, in the short term, it can be a little ouchie, right?There's some, there's some cosmic booboos that you got to work through. But I think on the other side of it, people are just like, man, I didn't realize how dope I am. Like, I didn't know that I could take this idea for a really fringe brand, and I could actualize it. And now it's out in the world. And now I'm making friends. And my wife looks at me differently. And my kids see that I'm, you know, I'm lit up, I'm engaged. I'm not just like this broken, resentful, jealous person. So for me, that's really the miracle of the before and after is you sort of come in like cold, and like hunched over and like sort of broken. And you leave feeling hopefully invigorated. And with a little light in the door, from what used to be a pretty dark place.Yeah. I love the way you described earlier, the possibilities of the I guess the 90s, when Primus could be popular, I want to return to that notion, what was it about the 90s that made that kind of thing possible? And how do you think about where we are now?Great question. Honestly, I think what made that moment possible is it was the last time that corporations didn't really understand how to market to kids. Like, they still had to use music as the driving force through which they could kind of see their messages.So basically, what I'm trying to say here is that lifestyle marketing of which I was a participant in in the 2000s, was basically the filleting of subculture from aesthetics. This is like what Fader and Weiss and all those companies did is like, you could dress like a mod or a punk or a hip hop person, but there was none of the friction of actually thinking or being different. You could just get the look of it without any of the messy parts.But in the early 90s, you still had to deal with messy parts. Right? You had Kurt Cobain very famously like in the liner notes of Incesticide. Right? If you're racist or homophobic or don't like women, don't come to our shows. We don't want your money. Or even hip hop having a very articulated anti-establishment point of view. So companies still had to deal with all that stuff if they wanted to make money and sort of attach their brands to it. Right? So you got this really interesting alchemy of like very kind of subversive, sexy, weird fringe stuff being bankrolled by all these enormous companies because they saw that there was an appetite for it.Whereas now, you know, subculture and the aesthetics of subculture have been disembodied from one another. And so now you just have the, you know, this kind of, you see this on TikTok, where it's like the dark academia look, or, you know, the punk look. It's kind of just like a thing for people to cycle through as opposed to something that your whole life is filtered through. Right? Again, in the 90s, I think, again, that was the last decade when music was, is the last time that music was the main driver of culture, you know?When I was growing up, especially in the hardcore scene, what you wore, the kind of people you dated, what you did every weekend, obviously the music you listen to, your entire social network, your entire social world was determined by music, you know? And that's not really the case anymore. You know, now it's kind of like, I was talking to my friend yesterday, I was like, what? It's kind of like the internet. It's like the internet is what determines what you wear and what you eat. I don't know. Like I don't really have a good answer for what has replaced music and fashion as the main drivers of my world, you know? Yeah, it's interesting. I was going to ask that. And you mentioned Primus, you had Kurt Cobain, Nirvana.What other things from the 90s are examples of this, what you're describing?Yeah, well, I got really, really deep into hardcore when I was 15 and a half, so 1995. And at the time, you know, hardcore was still a very fringe, underground culture. Like people felt bad for you if you were a punk rocker. It's not like today where like, cool, Machine Gun Kelly, or like, oh, yeah, man, I'm punk. People were like, yeah, cool. Like you wear hoodies and go and slam dance on the weekend, like get away from me.You know what I mean? But in that moment, everything that I learned about being an entrepreneur, being a creative person comes from that scene, which is like, do it yourself. You know, by the time I was 17, I had booked like 10 underground shows. I had released like four fanzines. My friend and I had to put out a record together. I mean, I went on tour with underground bands from all over the country.And pre, I mean, it's funny when you say like pre-internet, I mean, obviously the 90s weren't like pre-internet, but it was like the stone age of the internet. And so that for me was just a, you know, a magical, magical time that I think has never left my philosophical or creative world. You know, like there's two things about it that I really liked that I still seek out now in my grown up life, which is number one, like a self selecting community.So in other words, it's so strange or off putting to other people that you're only there because you want to be like there's no, there's no reason to. I found this in jujitsu. You know, like I'm a middle aged person performing like a very violent ego destroying sport, and everyone else in the room, it's like, you don't do this because it's easy, or because you know, your wife thinks it's cool, you do it because you want to be there. So hardcore kind of instilled in me the values of being part of a self selecting community. And then too, you know, I've always considered myself to be an outsider. The people that my work resonates with also consider themselves outsiders. And all my creative heroes have been outsiders.So, you know, like, when Poptimism took over, you know, you know, when everyone was trying to be like, Poptimism was like, you know, a sort of movement in music journalism away from the traditionally like white male raucous point of view and being like, Oh, like, there's real value in Taylor Swift, like, there's real value in, I don't know, insert pop person here. And while I respect that, and I think it, you know, had its time in its place, I just have never been like a mainstream person like I'm not, I don't know any celebrities like if the most famous people walk by me on the street, like I would have no idea who they were. And I think coming up in hardcore, you kind of have more appreciation for like, the people that you can touch the people that you can like talk to at a show, rather than people that seem like they're out there like a million miles away.This conversation about being an outsider and the strangeness of the 90s being able to be weird and popular at the same time is so interesting to me. I was on the street corner in Hudson with some friends, just talking s**t. I guess David Lynch had just passed and they were, they were basically saying, and maybe so my two, two friends are saying, David Lynch is very mainstream. And I was like, no way, there's no way you can consider David Lynch mainstream. It's certainly not very mainstream or extremely mainstream. And we never really resolved this question, but it seemed to be about the same thing that you and I are talking about. Do you, what, how do you respond to the notion of David Lynch? Not that I need you to affirm my position, but do you see how that conversation fits into this question of being an outsider and the mainstream?Well, it's interesting to me that people would consider him mainstream in that his body of work, I think overall is pretty challenging, strange. Some might say Lynchian, right? But I think maybe what the, what the shock is, is like, I can't believe this actually got popular or maybe it'd be a little bit more crass. I can't believe other people thought that this s**t would make them money, which kind of goes back to like our nineties Nirvana conversation, right? Is that the reason that all those weird bands were given record deals and MTV coverage and all that is because post Nirvana, people were like, yeah, we can make money on this strange, strange stuff. And that vibe of weird and profitable are not at odds with each other.In fact, they might be combined to create a third way. You know, to me, like Nirvana and the Beastie Boys and even like, you know, reservoir dogs, they're all kind of like third paths, you know, they're not totally insane. It's not like just completely unwatchable or unlistenable, but they're far enough away from mainstream where there's like a new idea or a new thread that people can kind of catch on to, you know?Yeah. I always think about it probably and it's probably too simple, but I always feel like that there was, and I want to hear your thoughts. Like how do you, so I, my feeling on one level is that in the past there kind of was a mainstream and there was a mass culture. And then so you could have a, you could have a counterculture. And so you could be outside of something. There was something to be outside of or against, but so you could be a sellout. So there was a lot of conflict around the idea of making money as a badass musician or something. But all of that stuff has been rubbed clean. And it's kind of, we went from a counterculture being interesting to just being, it's almost like it's subculture all the way down. Do you know what I mean? And there's no friction anywhere. You just need to be kind of the most interesting embodiment of whatever subculture. You used the word filet earlier. Is that what you're describing?Can you ask the question in a different way? I just want to make sure I get the spirit of your inquiry.Yeah. I guess I'm, I'm sort of wondering if my, if, if the way I describe the evolution of culture and the role of the outsider resonates with you and the idea that there used to be a counterculture and it maybe was easier to be an outsider and that now we're in this position where it's, there isn't a mainstream to be against. So it's sort of all subcultures all over the place. And the question isn't kind of what you are for or against. It's kind of, are you the best or most interesting embodiment of any particular subculture? And then you had used the word filet for that period of time that those fades, the music scene, they had filtered the subculture from the messy, from the messiness. So I suppose I'm just laying that in front of you and wondering what it makes you think of?Yeah. You know, having been on a bit of a spirit quest the last 15 years, I actually think that the mind and the spirit is kind of the new realm of subculture. And what I mean by that is when you can really anchor into your truth, your divine mission, to me that seems to be like what punk used to be. Not to say that like this culture, like I'm not like some guy in his mid 40s being like punk isn't valid anymore, like having a spiritual awakening, you know. But I think for me, like the edge or perhaps the territory in which the road seems the most unpaved for me over the last few years has been in the spiritual realm. Because I think that it kind of goes against everything that you're taught in the social media world, which again is like, be cool, perform, number go up equals you're awesome.The best thing in the world is to be famous. And again, when I look at my heroes, Glenn O'Brien kind of comes to mind. For those who don't know who Glenn O'Brien was, he was a downtown New York fixture, responsible for the style guy in GQ, as well as a TV show called TV Party. And he was sort of like a man about town for the better part of four decades in downtown New York and was kind of a mentor figure to me. Anyways, I think that someone like Glenn represented a person who had work for the rest of their life, but wasn't famous, per se. And I think that's more what I'm interested in pursuing.And I think that the kind of spiritual component to that to make a sort of sloppy thought jump here is that once you can separate yourself from the constant need for like a big audience or a lot of cultural influence or a ton of money and figure out who you are outside of those things, to me that seems very subversive and sexy and exciting because when you're not ensnared by those distortions, you don't have to do the thing that I think so many of us have been conditioned to do, which is like trade your authenticity for the illusion of acceptance.Yeah.Lots to unpack there.Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's funny, I was just... Well, tell me, I was going to ask you about mentors and touchstones. I have a question. Are there things that you return to quite a bit? And you talked about Glenn O'Brien. How would you describe, I guess, maybe his impact or influence on you and your work?Yeah. Well, you know, I came up at a time when I think towards the end of the 2000s, just the idea of masculinity was coming up for debate, I think post-great recession. And the thing that I had found is that in the culture, there weren't really many men who were offering a vision of masculinity that resonated with me.Our viewers can't see me, but if they could, they would see they're like, I'm five foot five and 135 pounds. And so let's just say, I wasn't picked first for the football team. And my way of asserting myself in a group was not to be the most physically dominant, but rather to be cool.So as a teenager, the way that I survived was by being really cool. I would tell people, oh, yeah, you got to get the Agassi Nikes. Don't buy Adidas. These are whack. I wouldn't wear those pants with this shirt. You should wear that instead. Don't listen to the Rollins band. You want to check out Black Flag. That's the real s**t.And so I think that Glenn was a person who said, hey, you know what? You can be a guy who's into clothing and art and it's okay. You're not soft. There's nothing to be ashamed of. And in fact, you are a higher octave of man when you can be in touch with the fineries of life. And I think that an underappreciated aspect of Glenn is that I think he was very forward in his opinions, like without being a jerk.And I think that that's a really hard mix to get today when social media, of course, is wired towards outrage and just people saying the most ridiculous things to rile people up. Like I always got the sense that Glenn was shooting from the hip, but he wasn't so attached to it or so obsessed with his own point of view that he couldn't understand other people's positions either. And I think that that made a really big impact upon me as a kind of a young magazine editor, a young writer, a young guy in the scene.Yeah. Yeah. What was it like? I mean, you've had so many, you've worn so many hats. You know what I mean? What was that period of time like being, you were at GQ for a while, you were in the magazine space, you were in the music space. What did you do, what do you enjoy about that time and that work?I enjoyed the sense of possibility that came every day. You know, like there was just such a vibe in the air that like anything could happen. And because I had a mixture of a really supportive community around me, as well as the economic means to go and enjoy myself, like the overlap of two things led to a really exciting life for me.You know, my only job was working at the fader and I got fired on a really strange, technical difficulty, I suppose. And so I've always been an entrepreneur and I was always kind of reinventing myself. And it seemed at the time that whether it was like a new kind of music company or my opinions on fashion or my television show, it just felt like there was a kind of appetite for what I was interested in exploring in the culture.And thankfully, there were a lot of other people around me that were creating at a really high level to kind of create that Scenius, right? Shout out to Brian Eno -Can you talk about Scenius for those who may not be aware.Yeah, I'm not doing the best job of explaining it because I've been asked this a couple of times, but I think the main idea is that instead of like genius being the product of one solitary special person, it's the collective vibe, the collective intelligence of many artists working together within a shared space.It's funny there. Oh, keep going. And you were, I think.Well, I was going to get into the shadow aspect of all this time in my life, because it took me a better part of 15 years to understand what it was. And for me personally, I was in a tremendous amount of pain being in the entourage as opposed to being the kind of main person myself. Right.And what I mean by that is, you know, I was always like, sure, I was like hanging out with the James Murphy's and the Mark Ronson's and the, you know, strokes and all those people, but I hadn't really found my medium for being a visible creator myself. And so on one level, like my life was very sexy and cool. And when I look back on the stuff that I did, I think it's amazing, you know, it's like winning some kind of a lottery ticket.I was just some schmuck from New Jersey who went to Rutgers. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't it wasn't like I had any kind of family connection that propelled me into this lifestyle. And so in that regard, I feel very fortunate that I was able to completely invent myself from basically nothing. But on the other side of that, you know, there was a tremendous amount of shame and pain and resentment that I had basically allowed all these people to become my avatars for the s**t that I wanted to do, but just hadn't found the way to do it yet. And so a lot of my work as a grown up now is, A, helping people correct those distortions within themselves, but also me doing it myself in my own work, you know?Yeah, it's funny just to, on the topic of Scenius, Ian Leslie had just had a post a couple weeks ago about the death of seniors such as and worth a link to it. But this, again, it's sort of a shift. I mean, his hypothesis is that, yeah, the conditions for that kind of social scene have gone away for a variety of reasons.I would agree.Are there any projects? Is there any dream clients or fantasy projects that you would love to work on?Yeah. So, you know, parallel to my one-on-one work, for the last year and a half, I'm building out Minor Genius as a Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart style lifestyle brand.Oh, nice.Because, yeah, my dream in life has always been somewhere along the lines of, you know, just being a person who could communicate from one to many. And so I just hired an editor to work with me on a series of short form Instagram videos. We obviously know each other through LinkedIn. So that's been a big part of my life is getting out there and contenting and sharing and creating. I'm doing a print minor genius zine, which is going to come out hopefully around Valentine's Day and a larger format kind of fancier, sexier, full-size magazine, hopefully by April, April, June or so. But yeah, that's kind of the dream is to take what I've been doing one-on-one institutionally.Talk to me about minor genius, that name, and what does that mean?Yeah, so a minor genius is someone who gets paid to be themselves. So rather than living in a world in which only full-fledged geniuses are entitled to prosperity and to go live the life of their dreams, I think that I want to live in a world where like, you don't have to be Picasso to earn the right to create something. And so again, it's kind of this idea of, you know, rather than frittering away your days working on your magnum opus by yourself, why not be a minor genius and publish your first fanzine or your first three videos on YouTube or the first three t-shirts of your burgeoning fashion empire.What have you learned about creativity in this work? Like, what do we get wrong about it?Yeah, so what we get wrong, there's a few things, but A, what we get wrong about creativity is that it can be strategized and productized and controlled. And this to me is the dilemma of every kind of unhappy, overpaid, creative director in the world is that, you know, they're tasked with basically being an idea cow, right? But the truth is, they're not really encouraged to create anything because all of the main assets and so forth have already been predetermined by their clients or overlords.And so for me, you know, I think that creativity needs to come from you from a very feral, wild, you know, uncharted place. And I found in working with people one-on-one that when they have a collaborator to bring that out of them, they really see how alive they are and how creative they really are. Because, you know, again, I think there's a certain, it's almost like sort of Dante-ish, it's a certain ring of hell to have a job that's close to being creative, but, you know, deep down is actually not creative at all.And I think that's the dilemma that a lot of folks in our age bracket are facing, because, you know, we're at the age where we're now becoming more like managers, overseers, bureaucrats. We're not really in there like getting our hands dirty and like making the wild stuff anymore. So, yeah, I think that creativity needs to come from a very wild and feral place inside of you.And then secondly, to kind of touch on the spiritual aspect, you know, I, having been there myself, like I, I don't shame someone when they say that they just don't make stuff anymore, because when it comes to our physiology, creativity is kind of a nice afterthought of feeling safe, right?When you're in survival mode, when you're living paycheck to paycheck or just under a tremendous amount of financial or physical or spiritual stress, art making is not at the top of your list, you know, paying your rent or getting your kids into private school is. And so I think it's just important for you to understand that if you're in a time when you're feeling cold and just not in the mood to create, it's not a personal shortcoming, you know, it's not laziness. It's not that there's anything wrong with you. It's not a character flaw. It's more likely that you're in an environment where your nervous system is so taxed that it just can't get to that next octave of living.How do you help people get into that wild uncharted space to the degree that you can share? I'm just curious about what the work looks like when to get there or help people get there.Yeah, so I use a variety of diagnostics when people first enter into my programs, and some of them are a bit more material, but a lot of them fall into the esoteric or spiritual side of things. And so once people kind of understand why they've incarnated here and what their divine gifts are and what their intrinsic shadows are, it makes it much easier for them to have permission to create because they're creating in accordance with their own rhythms and their own style. You know, like one of the things that really sucks about corporatism is that it tells everyone this is the way.And if you do not follow our scriptures, we will punish you, right, and take away your means of living if you do not do what we say, right? And so people need to be unwired from that and invitation into a space where it's like, hey, all right, cool. Based on these things, you're really good at being a supporter of performers.Let’s figure out how that looks for you. Or in the case of a lot of my clients, like, your wealth paradigm is actually for you to be the main character, right? The way that you're going to have the most fun is not to work at an agency, you know, being a deck monkey, it's for you to get in front of the camera and share your opinions with the world, right?You need to be a private, a public speaker, not a private sector employee. So that's usually the first step is like, helping people see who they're not. And then once we've chiseled away enough of that distortion, who they are comes through almost instantly. You know, it's a very like, kind of a thing.Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what have you learned about the people you work with or the state of creativity? I'm just like, how are they, how is everybody doing? How is everybody managing with the state of work today? Do you have a feeling about that?I do. Yeah, it's a great question. I think that the central dilemma that all humans, much less creatives, but that all humans are going through right now is we're in a crucible as a society, as a collective, as a consciousness. And there's a lot of pressure to kind of shrink yourself back into the old world that's dying or kind of jumping into the unknown and deciding that at the end of the day, you know, it's probably the best bet to bet on yourself. Right.So again, if we look at the main promise to me of corporate advertising and technology for the last, I don't know, 50 years was basically like, okay, listen, buddy, you're not going to be a painter or like a director or like a rock star, but like you can come work here. You can do something vaguely creative and exchange for kind of compromising dream in life. We're going to give you a 401k and a paycheck and you can move to the suburbs and put your kids through college. Right.And now that that bargain has completely been immolated, right? Like there's no job security. There's no sense that the man is going to take care of you. The state of creativity is like, all right, F it like these big brands don't give a s**t about me. They never have. Right.At the end of the day, like I'm just a number on a spreadsheet to some person that I've never met. And the moment that they think that they're better without me, they're going to take me in the alley and shoot me in the head. And that's what we've seen in the last 10 years. Right. These places that used to be sanctuaries for successful weirdos have become hostile environments, right? With a ton of turnover, very toxic work cultures. And so the state of creativity, I think, is people saying, you know what? I'm going to do me. I don't know exactly how it's going to work out, but I know that I have enough of a skill set and network that I'm going to go and try and figure out what it looks like on the other side.Elliot, I want to thank you so much. This has been so fun talking to you. I appreciate you sharing your time and all your wisdom, your outsider wisdom. That's a tactical way of saying it though, but it's been fun.Has this historically been the first pod that you've done that mentions Primus?Yes, without question.Excellent. Well, I've loved following your work online, and I'm glad that we've struck up a friendship, man.Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. All right.Peace and love. Be well. All right. 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