THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Beth Bentley is a brand strategist with 20 years' experience advising major brands. She founded Tomorrowism consultancy after serving as Chief Strategy Officer at Portas, SVP Strategy at VICE Media's VIRTUE, and Executive Head of Strategy at Wieden + Kennedy, where she led work for Nike and Honda. Her Substack Pattern Recognition is amazing.So I have a question. I start all of my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. And it's a big question, which is why I use it. But it's because it's big. I tend to over explain it like I'm doing now. And the question is, and you can answer any way, answer or not answer in any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?It's just a good question. Well, I on a very simple level, I come from Wales. I'm from a tiny town near the Welsh coast that no one's ever heard of. And I'm from a family of obviously Welsh descent, but also Irish descent. Many people from my part of Wales originated in Ireland.So, yeah, very Celtic, I suppose, is my background. Certainly not a metropolitan city, living sort of childhood in any way. In terms of the family that I come from, it's a very book-loving family culture.It's not really the best way of thinking, in that there were books everywhere for me growing up. I remember being little and looking up, you know, and you look up at bookshelves, like in a bookstore in someone's house or in a library and thinking how massive the bookshelves were and how huge the books and how would I ever be good enough at reading to read them all and what were they all about? And I've always just, you know, found myself surrounded by words. My parents' walls were always lined with books.They still are, actually. They stayed with me last week because it was half-term holidays in the UK. And I have two little girls, so they came to look after them for me while I was busy working. And they still, it's so cute, they start every day with a few rounds of Scrabble. Every single day, they can't not. They are so into it, into like linguistics and words and everything.My mum was a journalist, so it obviously comes from there. And so am I, actually, by trade, as it were, back in the very beginning of my career. And actually, the first time I ever went anywhere unaccompanied by my parents was to the library. I remember my mum, my brother, who's a year old, and my mum gave us the library tickets, the old school pieces of paper. And we walked hand in hand to the library, which was one street away from our house, thinking about it. Maybe that's why they bought the house there in the first place.But that was my first sense of freedom, you know, that was the thing that was worthy of my mum, like, you know, white knuckling of being scared that her two babies were being left, but she let us go to the library. So, yeah, that's my family background in my world.But I suppose where I'm from in my life now, like in the industry, I'll tell you where I'm not from. You know, I'm not from, as I say, this kind of London creative industries culture. I had no connections at all to any of it. I didn't literally didn't speak the language of ad agencies, creative agencies, creative industries, brands at all.And growing up as a young planner, I was a strategist forever in agencies. I was always quite conscious that I didn't look or sound like a lot of the other planners. In my day, it was very male.It's quite a boys club, maybe a lot of the guys were older than me. I didn't speak or look in any way like they did. You know, I probably ruffled a few feathers, I'm sure. But I had amazing mentors, great bosses, and I learned from the best. So I suppose if you ask me where I come from professionally, I would probably say I grew up at Weiden & Kennedy. Like I am very much of the diaspora of the people who've passed through the doors of that place, you know.But I spent time at Adam & Eve DDB, VICE, Portas. I spent a couple of days in Whitehall as a strategist. So I've had a bit of an unconventional journey. But yeah, my, I was very lucky to have formative years on and off for 11 years actually at Weiden & Kennedy London as a baby grad and then growing all the way up into an agency leadership team member. So that's where I'm from professionally, I would say, as a practitioner. Yeah.What does it mean to be from Wales?To not be centered, literally. I mean, our country is so little, but we don't have really any major commercial centers. We don't have any great commercial, sorry, cultural hubs, really, in terms of creative industries or film or music and that kind of thing.Of course, there are umpteen creative individuals from Wales and the rest have been. But we don't have a focal point commercially or culturally, I would say. It's very dispersed. It's rural. It's beautiful. Some parts are very old fashioned and disconnected from the fast moving consumer culture that I live in now. But yeah, you're not from the center. You are literally from elsewhere. You're not from the margins, I would say, culturally in the UK.Are there moments where you feel particularly Welsh? What your Welshness appears to you? Do you know what I mean?Yeah. Well, my accent will go more Welsh when I'm hanging out with my dad or other people. I will do that in the family. But my husband and I, we have a camper van that he renovated. It was a film production van that he turned into a sleeping thing, an old sort of black VW thing. And I feel very Welsh when we go out in that. And we go all around the coast. We take the surfboards on the roof. We pop the top. Our kids go out in the waves, in the wetsuits. We cook on campfire. We like going mostly to South Wales, actually, and Cornwall and Devon and all those places that maybe some people might have heard about in the UK.And do you remember as a girl what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah, I think I wanted, I was so intrigued by the books and the writing. And I so, my mum and dad were very young when they had us. They met when they were 17 and 19 and then got married when my mum was 21, my dad was 23.And then we came along very quickly, my brother and I. And so my mum was still quite young in her career when she was, when I was conscious and cognisant of what she was doing. So I would be being shushed in the other room while she was interviewing somebody on the old school phone and like taking notes in shorthand and transcribing quickly. And then filing her copy over the phone.I would see that stuff happening. So I mean, she was still is. They both are my heroes. And I wanted to write like her and I wanted to write a book and I wanted to deal with words and be paid for my opinion and my ability to write and stuff. And so that was what I double down on. I've got double English lit English language degree.I'm obsessed with this stuff. You know, you can tell from, you know, my living environments, my office, you know, I very much kind of got that gene. So I think when I was a little girl, I didn't know what it meant, but I wanted to write somehow for a living, I think.Yeah. What when you say that you're obsessed with words, what do you what do you find? What do you find there? Like what I mean, I share this obsession with words. I remember there was a moment in a dark moment in my life, I found some weird comfort in a dictionary. Do you know what I mean? Like I enjoy words in a way that seems a little abnormal. When you're when you say that you're obsessed with words, what are you pointing at?I don't know. I think it's my way of understanding the world. I think being from somewhere that's so rural and so perhaps in some ways disconnected culturally from kind of the center of things and the center of the action. Growing up in the 80s and 90s in the UK, at least, I think that reading there's that phrase is now I'll probably butcher it, but that you can experience a thousand lifetimes through reading and actually understanding other people's experiences. Helps you to understand the world. And so I think I was just reading the world from the kitchen table in Wales in the middle of nowhere, I suppose. As I grow older and I did which university did my English language and so on, everything that we learned was about that piece of writing, whether it was the poem or the book or the play or whatever it might be. It's a cultural artifact.It could not have been written by that writer in any other way than it could have been in the cultural context that they're writing in. And this, for example, in post-colonial literature, this thought about writing back to the center and being in the margin, you know, like there was there was a way of thinking that informs a way of writing. And so now obviously that's in on a whole life of its own and into my sociological rabbit holes that I go down, of course. But yeah, I think it was about trying to make sense of the world through how other people made sense of their worlds, I think. And sort of catch us up. Where are you now right now? Where are you and what are you doing? What keeps you busy? Well, now I have stepped away from the agency, well, the kind of corporate, like I think we would say in the States, and I'm now an independent.So I think it was maybe three, three and a half years ago, I stepped out of a chief strategy officer role and set up my own practice, my own strategic consultancy, which is called Tomorrowism. It's now evolved into a brand strategy and brand design consultancy. And we, there's three of us, partners and sort of an atomized network of others, as many people do these days.It's sort of Web3, deconstructed agency. But we serve a big mix of established bigger brands and younger disruptors in and around the global fashion system. And of course, its many related worlds, you know, beauty, home, luxury, anything, aspiration-fueled spaces, I would say, based in London, work everywhere.And also I write, I have a Substack newsletter, and I reach maybe 30,000 or so interesting, very intelligent people, the most interesting people actually, by the way, on that platform, you know all about it, I know. And I write about the kind of sociological side of consumer culture. So lots of references, lots of quoting from, you know, big thinkers or looking back in time in order to help us look forwards or deconstructing not just what's going on right now, but why perhaps and therefore what might happen next.When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of thing?I think there was a sense of blind faith to begin with, because really what I did at the time was it was kind of about unplugging the strategy department, the planning department, as we would say in London, from the full service agency model and plugging it directly into the client side organization, a little bit maybe further upstream or before the actual creative brief was formed, frankly before any of the diagnosis of the problem often is formed. You know, we are brief makers, not brief takers, for sure, in the work that we do now. But I suppose it was, there was a bit of consternation actually, I took lots of advice at the time, you know, I spoke to 50 CMOs about what they actually value and what they actually need and how they use and how they speak about brand strategy.It's such a fat word that means so many things. And I spoke to loads of other agency founders and industry body people and journals and just like, I feel like there's a thing to be done here, but what do you think? Like, how would you frame it? What would you call it? Like, how would you describe it? How would you productize it? How do you get paid for this stuff, you know? Because I was a planner, I wasn't running the agency. Of course, I had a conception of how it worked, but I was not that brave, you know, that wasn't me, I was the sort of vertical practitioner.So there was a lot of confusion and a bit of like, God, I don't know if this is a thing and surely you need a delivery arm and you can't just sell your thinking and don't, agencies lost lead on strategy and all of the things that actually aren't true. But yeah, I don't know, we ended up in a very interesting place, taking a big strategic decision to focus on a sector in an industry that's wildly underserved for proper big brand building thinking, which is the fashion system, fashion industry. You know, enormous $2 trillion rev industry, huge, complicated interconnected system of industries actually, providing millions of people with livelihoods.So interesting, so fast moving, so indicative to so many other sectors in industries, but facing complex challenges right now, of course, like many industries are, but very underserved. You know, lots of the world class agencies don't lean into fashion, retailers, fashion houses, luxury, they just don't. I never quite understood what the disconnect was. Other sorts of agencies would serve the fashion industry, but very little really, actually, in my world of kind of the full service agencies.So there's a bit of strategic jiggery pokery, lots of come to Jesus conversations, lots of client advice, actually, like off the record chats, but ended up positioning it in a really interesting way. And we are kind of punching above our weight in terms of the kind of clients that will trust us, because we're sort of described by many of them as a category of one, there's no one really doing what we do, you're not in London anyway.How are you, how do you talk about the category that you're, you're either creating or what did you learn in those conversations that are really driving you forward.I think there's a real sense of pragmatism of, yes, strategic people, strategic thinking, strategic products, whatever we call them, you know, the things that we actually produce are of great value and are worth investing in, particularly in these times of great volatility and challenge and headwinds, you know, and there is a, there was an agreement from all of the clients pretty much I spoke to that yeah there actually is a gap here we could do with some more of this right whatever we call it and wherever we put it and how much of a budget maybe it comes from, but also great strong advice about don't stop with the thinking, you know, you have to find ways to apply it, so embed it with the people don't just launch and leave us with a deck because it will just live on the server, right as interesting as it is it has to be embedded within our people it has to be embedded into the body language of the organization, and also visualize it to make it make sense which is where the brand design arm of the consultancy came in, in terms of developing physical, you know, building the brand world rebuilding the tone of voice like thinking about the big picture behaviors, the marketing mix modeling like the strategic sort of ingredients really you know the audience mapping and sizing econometrics like the actual kind of jigsaw puzzle that you would then click together in terms of changing and switching up and leveling up how you invest your marketing pounds or dollars. So we kind of stop there most of the time we don't get into practicing but because all of us have had 20 years of deep practitioner experience at the probably largely the highest level you know Olympics activation briefs, John Lewis Christmas ads, you know fashion week activations like the big picture stuff and for me also the measurement of that stuff.I think it allows us to empathize with the people who are going to pick that stuff up and then activate it, perhaps an in-house agency or a full service creative agency or whoever it might be in the future. So we can understand it and we can go. We can know what our work will be used for in a way that perhaps other consultancies or strategic brains, maybe haven't had their hands dirty within, you know, but we have the joy of that in our earlier careers.You, you use the phrase body language to describe sort of maybe the brand or getting into the bottom of the body language of the brand can you tell me more about what you're, you're talking about when you're talking about the body language of a brand.Yeah, for sure. So I think, you know, people talk about internal culture and employer brand or internal brand and those kinds of things and they're all great expressions. But I do think when we're thinking about brand strategy and the development of greater cultural heat weight capital in order to drive commercial capital, I think we have to look inside as well as from, you know, from the inside out rather as well as the outside in. It's all very well positioning the brand very intelligently in the culture and thinking about how it shows up and where it shows up and what its role in the world is. It's all what it promises itself, whatever else, but also internally like iconic brands are built from within.Like anyone who's been to a Nike HQ, anyone who's hung out with a Googler, you know, anyone who's walked past a Mac counter or stepped into a Gap store of the year, you know, in the 90s or 2000s. You know, it's clear. You need to understand that there's a canvas that you can paint your brand strategy on before you even reach for anything in terms of a marketing brief, you know, get it right internally, help people to become excited and unlock new hope and be aligned and develop, as they say, the shared body language way of thinking, speaking, interacting, attitude to risk, you know, holding hands, saying stupid things and it's okay and rewarding the right stuff inside the organization, progressing people for the right reasons, you know, hiring the right brains and propagating a culture of curiosity and risk taking and creativity more than risk aversion and short-termism.What do you what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?I think it's untangling of knots, I suppose, you know, tidying bedrooms, making order out of chaos. Being, I don't know, that kind of the top down like thousand foot or 10,000 foot view, I think starting then and then like progressively getting closer and closer to the ground and turning the rocks over and finding the messy stuff and having the awkward conversations and I love that, you know, I probably say so I shouldn't. I just think it's such a rewarding and like psychologically revealing and interesting thing to do what we do, you know, sort of therapy sometimes when you're hanging out with your clients. Yeah, that's great. And I watch about myself, I'm sure maybe the brand does through every project. So yeah, it's a sort of process of deduction, I guess that's just interesting.You one of my favorite words in the in the world is awkward and you mentioned sort of enjoying the awkward conversations. Can you tell me more like what role do awkward conversations play in the work that you do?Well, I think, yeah, it's like other ways of expressing inconvenient truths, maybe is another way of, you know, grasping the nettle like having the awkward conversation like saying the thing that no one will say in the room. And yeah, I mean, I'm certainly in no way alone in that, like every great agency practitioner loves that thrives on that stuff, you know, and it does take a lot of emotional intelligence and, you know, being able to read the room so that you don't upset or setback or create some more problems than you're solving sometimes.So I'm sure I've probably got it wrong, as I say many times in the past, but maybe that is a bit of that imprint of the Weiden & Kennedy culture or the early days of the Adam & Eve kind of scrappy start up or disruptor that actually identify the roadblocks like there's a there are reasons why this organization's brand isn't where it wants to be. Yes, it might be about budget. Yes, it might be about competitive threats. Yes, it might be that the product pipe's not where it needs to be or a million reasons.But all these people kind of being their own worst enemy, not in a pejorative way, but when they come together, is there a cultural roadblock here that's actually stopping them from being and doing the things that they want to do. And as an outsider, you can maybe see it or say it in a way that feels safer than them saying it themselves.m, I don't know, I think it's untangling of knots, I suppose, you know, tidying bedrooms, making order and chaos. Being, I don't know, that kind of the top down like thousand foot or 10,000 foot view, I think starting then and then like progressively getting closer and closer closer to the ground and turning the rocks over and finding the messy stuff and having the awkward conversations and I love that, you know, I probably say so I shouldn't. I just think it's such a rewarding and like psychologically revealing an interesting thing to do what we do, you know, sort of therapy sometimes when you same again, I'm sure when you're hanging out with your clients. Yeah, that's great. And I watch about myself, I'm sure maybe the brand does through every project. So yeah, it's a sort of process of deduction, I guess that's just interesting.You one of my favorite words in the in the world is awkward and you mentioned sort of enjoying the awkward conversations. Can you tell me more like what role to awkward conversations play in the work that you do?Well, I think, yeah, it's like other ways of expressing inconvenient truths, maybe is another way of, you know, grasping the nettle like having the awkward conversation like saying the thing that no one will say in the room. And yeah, I mean, I'm certainly in no way alone in that, like every great agency practitioner loves that thrives on that stuff, you know, and it does take a lot of emotional intelligence and, you know, being able to read the room so that you don't upset or setback or create some more problems than you're solving sometimes.So I'm sure I've probably got it wrong, as I say many times in the past, but maybe that is a bit of that imprint of the Weiden & Kennedy culture or the early days of the Adam & Eve kind of scrappy start up a disruptor that actually identify the roadblocks like there's a there are reasons why this organization's brand isn't where it wants to be. Yes, it might be about budget. Yes, it might be about competitive threats. Yes, it might be that the product pipes not where it needs to be or a million reasons.But all these people kind of being their own worst enemy, not in a pejorative way, but when they come together, is there a cultural roadblock here that's actually stopping them to being and doing the things that they want to do. And as an outsider, you can maybe see it or say it in a way that feels safer than them saying themselves.Are there are there any mentors that were particularly important to you, or also like touchstones other ideas or concepts that you kind of return to often.Yeah, I mean, you probably won't be surprised to hear me say there are some books that I read a lot and like keep around the place, dog ears, you know, post it notes and stuff all over. And it would, I mean, probably for me, I guess, be the Holy Trinity, maybe the Marshall McLuhan world. Pretty much everything that blog has ever written. And Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, like, whatever that guy says, whatever he was on or drinking, you could be some of that. And then Mark Fisher, a Brit, like, certainly no longer with us, but an incredible, brave, provocative media analyst, university lecturer, writer, delver of digging into culture, speaking truth to power, like those three people are all men, they're all white, all middle class. One of them is, well, all three of them are no longer with us now, unfortunately.So yeah, old and new, informing each other. But those three, in terms of, they're not mentors, but then in terms of guiding me and being touchstones, that is, they are people that I wish I could have a dinner party, a dream dinner party, that thing, like if I could put me in real life. But in real life, yeah, loads of people, so many, I've been so lucky to be exposed to such incredible, again, maybe this is the thing, but like brave thinkers, people who will say the thing, and, you know, grasp the nettle, as it were.One particular person, a lady called Pamela, I spent a couple of years, as I say, in between all these agency roles as a strategy advisor inside Whitehall, which is the UK central government, you know, Westminster, working as a strategic advisor comms strategy, you know, activation of government communication budgets, that sort of advisor, to the Secretary of State for youth or children, schools and families. So it was youth issues. So for example, things like government intervening and spending public funds on interventions that stop truancy or gang knife crime or affect the teen pregnancy stats or those kinds of things, you know, that elongates your timeline, we talk about thinking longer term and not being trapped in short termism like that, wow, that really opened my eyes.But Pamela, my boss, she, she, oh my god, she's just the most incredible person, she wasn't of the world that I was from in any way. But, you know, more from the policy side of things. But honestly, like, one of the most inspiring, intelligent, funny, she said to me, Yes, this is like, with this, we're in the corridors of power, like now this is like Whitehall, this is where we run the country.Please don't ever ask me where the switch is, that won't be a funny joke, like I've heard it all before. And she said, then if you're ever in a meeting and you suddenly find yourself daydreaming, is this really how we run the country? Is this really where my tax money goes? She's like, don't ever ask me that either, because I will just roll my eyes at you and refer you to this conversation that we had. She gave me George Orwell, while we write my first day about the dangers of opacity and political language and saying what we mean.Honestly, just an incredible woman who's still in central government right now. And then during that period of my time, actually, I met and was taken under the wing somewhat by Rory Sutherland. It was the year, the eras of the era of behavioral science, behavioral economics being adopted into central government and behavior change.For example, one of the summers that I worked there during the summer recess, all of the ministers had to read Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, you know, like the nudge theory. It was on everyone's lips and Rory came in and did a huge kind of great big symposia and training sessions and encouraged everyone to understand it and grounded it, Kate Waters as well, like huge big planning brain. And so yeah, in terms of mentorship, those people, those brains helped me and made me, I've still got the notes from those sessions, you know, I keep them in my office drawer.And then obviously through the agencies, I was with Dave Golding and James Murphy during their big years of growing Adam & Eve and at the Weiden years, Tony and Kim, the huge, bold, brave, creative people that just, you know, didn't think like other people. And it just inspires you to think, okay, well, maybe there's a way of being weird and saying things differently. Perhaps they're not toeing the line always.I've forgotten loads of people, of course, obviously.That's amazing. Unbelievable. Where would you say we are now? I mean, the history you just told about, well, I was curious about a couple things. Number one is sort of being a brand strategist in the sort of the public space and what transfers over and what doesn't transfer over? Are there different? Is it different when you're sort of in Whitehall and trying to apply the wisdom of brand strategy to those kind of problems? And then the idea that, I mean, behavioral sort of science and economics sort of blew up all over the place. There was, it felt like there was a moment when we were all nudging. And it feels like that's a little bit in the past. I guess I'm curious, where do you, where would you say we are now in terms of how we think about the proper role of communications or the way that we think about how organizations are meant to be in the world? Is that a clear question or is that obtuse?Yeah, that's a great question and I don't know the answer, but I will try. I think, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because that really was a moment in time where everybody was talking about behavior change and behavior change communications. And, you know, I remember all the awards shows, we'd be talking of like all of the papers that if you were sitting on judging panels, it would all have like the behavioral shift and here's the science bit. And it suddenly like really entered the lexicon of the creative industries at that time. And that was great because what it did, I suppose, was it opened up a level of rigor and a sort of a closer, tighter relationship between the world of academia and the world of communications or marketing.And I think that can only really be a good thing. And that I think has left an imprint, even if perhaps the behavioral science side of things perhaps isn't quite so loud anymore. It's not quite so trendy maybe anymore. But I do think, you know, Malcolm Gladwell has been debunked and whatever, like no disrespect to any of them, of course. But there was that era of like the Steven Pinker era and this huge, like massive, you know, Dan Airely and all of these really interesting, quite thought provoking ways of thinking about not marketing as such, but decision making, like why we decide and why we do certain things. And how, you know, like choice architecture and decision fatigue.And I think it left an imprint of rigor and to sit alongside the marketing science that we had, which was all about effectiveness and being very, very tight on the sort of return. And it was almost like a different layer or an additional plank of that, which was great. I think now maybe it's evolved into less the paper, the economics fields and more sociological understanding, perhaps more broadly, more generally.Maybe, you know, the psychology, the sociology, the anthropology, the connection between everything is political and fashion is political and, you know, slightly more broad church maybe than just those particular thinkers. So people are dredging up incredible old philosophers or ways of thinking about consumer culture or from the industrial revolution and where did it all start and post capitalism and things like that, which is great. But yeah, I don't know.I think maybe we've just evolved from like V1 to V2 maybe of that space. Maybe that's just my echo chamber, to be honest, Peter, I might just be, you know, conflating there.Well, to that point, how do you research? What's the role? I mean, I'm a qualitative researcher. I'm sort of always interested in, of course, talking about myself and what I do. And I'm just wondering what the role of qualitative is in your practice, the role of research and how maybe that shift or how you use it to learn.Lots, lots and lots. So I think that, yes, the culture and the ability, the budgets, the timing somewhat, and maybe have changed on projects, big meeting brand strategy projects from perhaps 10 or 15 years ago and before to where we are now. But I will always strongly believe in the power of not just, you know, going out and developing a research-led point of view, but the actual genesis of primary research. So obviously going up in the kind of agencies that I did, that was the edge, that was the selling point of those organizations and then spending time with Vice, sitting on their leadership team. And then you are basically, you're sitting, it's a creative organization sitting on such a wealth of data. So I think I've always been drawn to organizations that practice what they preach. And I don't like this surface skimming, assumption-led, big picture, sweeping statement stuff. No one does, obviously. Clients certainly don't, thankfully. But I do think that, yes, it's incredibly important to back up your assumptions and to prove it.It's incredibly difficult, but at the same time, there are so many levers that we can pull. You know, from my era of growing up, we were encouraged to and allowed to develop our own methodologies, like different sorts of digital ethnography, overlapping this, you know, qual study with this digital diary of what was, I don't know, eaten and what was worn. And, you know, all these kind of really interesting stuff that led to things that we never would have got to, like this thing, small example, but this thing about we were working on women's and sports bras.We developed this thought about Run Club to the Club Club, and it was about women wearing sports bras to the club and the connection between the womanhood and the togetherness of the run club and the womanhood and the togetherness of the dance floor. And you're like, we would never have got to that. That would have just been a hunch that someone crazy said in the corner. If we hadn't been able to overlay, for example, her responded to Instagram feed with the qual group that we did with the ethno study that we doubled down on with, I don't know, this social listening project that we did. If you layer things up, all of a sudden you have a different lens. So anyway, all of which is to say, in a world of fast moving, low budget, I need it yesterday, thinking and AI and machine learning. I just think it's just a different palette of tools that we have, but certainly in anything that I work on through Tomorrowism, I can't just talk about what's happening. I have to explain to the client why it's just part of what we do. I can't, I don't know any of the way really, I think.You have a preferred way in this, where there's all these, all the things you just mentioned, I mean, the increased pressure, the short timelines, these easy tools with answers all over the place. What is the role that you have found for qual to get to the why?Well, I think it can be, you don't need, sometimes you don't need very much of it, and sometimes you can go in with a strong hunch already, and sometimes you can corral a very interesting conversation with a small number of people very quickly if you think about it really carefully beforehand. Sometimes we use it to unpick or, not, this sounds negative, but debunk, push back on maybe a organizational POV or attitude to go actually no, or maybe not just that, maybe it's this thing as well.So sometimes it's used not for blank piece of paper, what should we go and find, sometimes it's used very strategically to kind of go, look, these guys are hung up on something here and I think it's become a roadblock for them. How can we help them to see this from a different angle? How can we say this is true, but also this might be true as well. And then let's go and develop some thinking from there, you know.So, yeah, I mean, always, always not, I mean, old school in some ways, but there's nothing better than talking to people and asking and listening, you know, the two ears, one mouth thing, you know, that we've all been taught since the beginning. But actually, there's a lot of wisdom and there's a lot of shortcuts, actually, because of a lot of time, I mean, if you just go and speak to people and ask smart questions and they shut up and listen, you know. Yeah. But you guys are the heroes in that, you know, it's what you do so well.Well, tell me about the Substack. How did you choose to do it? Pattern recognition, it's really amazing what you've been writing. Yeah, how did you, what made it the thing you wanted to do?It's funny, isn't it? I mean, I have to say I always wanted to write and write more, and it's very easy for that to fall by the wayside, I think you have to be very disciplined. I think when you do jobs that all of us do, where it's, you know, project based and lots of new things and new business pipe and those are distractions and stuff. I think for years I sort of made excuses, I think, a bit.But I don't know, I think that I'm in a situation where I, my business model, it doesn't allow me to create, very often anyway, proper systematic entry level roles. I can't, all mentorship, really, very often. So I, as you asked before, all of us have got mentor stories of people who helped us and people we learned from in this atomized way of working, of which I'm a culprit.My business is all over the show. Yes, there's an office, but it's not very big and we're not all there all the time. Like, how do you, how do you, not just help less experienced people to learn about, how do you learn from those people if they're not there? And how do you develop that sort of kind of idea exchange in a world where we're all just on Zoom the whole time? Yeah, of course we can do it.But anyway, I suppose the Substack thing was about sort of a commitment to building in public and sharing thoughts before they're probably fully formed and lifting the curtain, NDAs not aside, on the kind of way of thinking that we have the sort of stuff we're bringing to our own clients' attention, the kind of phraseology, the thoughts, the concepts, this divergent s**t that we're putting in front of our own clients and unlocking their problems. Things like status sentience or cultural omnivores or meh-ification or those kinds of things. There's stuff that came out of boardrooms really, you know, it was like shoving it on slides full bleed.And then we go ahead and write a bit more about it. So, and then people will come in and it gets better and you can write more about it and you dig in and whatever, you know. But also this thought of having a model where I don't have an opportunity to help people to develop and grow.My only way of really doing that is to write stuff and share it. I don't know any other way. Yeah, I can mentor. That might be one person. You know, I want a two way conversation with people that are coming from a very different angle than I am on stuff. And that's why I find all the time on Substack is people who are so much more than me or in a different world or a different continent. And I love that challenge. I used to have that all the time every day at work and I don't anymore. So I think that's kind of why I did it.Yeah. And how I do not use the Substack, the chat function. Are you chatting all that? Do you have the chat function? Do you have sort of community and interaction going on around the pieces that you're writing or no? This is like a question.Yeah. So yes, I do. And there are two forms of that. One is that it's called notes, which is basically what Twitter used to be. So that is like, again, building in public where you are. You just, yeah, people like go, oh, I've just posted a new piece. And here it is. Or like someone will quote something from someone else's, oh, that's really interesting. But sometimes it's just like, here's an interesting flower.Like, it's nice that it's spring, you know, it's my stuff as well. So there's a lot of that. And like just weak ties turning into stronger ties through just silly little interactions, I suppose aren't silly.But then there's also, as you say, this sort of the chat functions and the DM functions where, yeah, you can start really interesting conversations with some or all of your subscribers, whether they're the paid ones behind the wall or whether they're just the more general people that follow. And then in the DMS, which is like the even smaller, like BAW last week, I had two new business inquiries, directly one from an investment group incubator and one from a CMO. I'm like, I didn't I've never met either of you. I'm not connected to your LinkedIn or any other platform. This is and that's not why I ever thought this would be not that it's not the pipe. There's other stuff that does that.But it's a way now there's communication levels within that platform where inbound, you know, maybe you don't do this, but we kind of need a bit of help with this. Or would you do you know anything about what you know, someone else, you know, that sort of stuff is happening all the time now. So the world's colliding, I think, Peter, for me.And those worlds are?The agency world of practicing and filling your pipe and productizing your thing. And the sort of more fun downtime, obvious stuff of like, you know, let your brain do its thing and write some interesting, weird, provocative stuff and see what people think and get into a chat with them. And suddenly someone's watching that who's got a brand strategy problem and go, Oh, cool. Okay. Like, this is nothing like my problem, but I like the way that you guys are thinking on this stuff. So cool. And you're like, Oh, okay.So yeah, small examples. But, you know, it's it's new early days for everybody on sub stack, isn't it? I mean, it's obviously enormous, but the ceiling's so high, I think that it's doing new things all the time.Yeah. How does that feel that those walls are colliding? The worlds are colliding. I don't know why I shifted metaphors, walls crumbling between the worlds. How does that feel?Well, it's good, I suppose. I mean, you I just, yeah, I just want to do interesting people, interesting work with interesting people and interesting brands that hopefully, you know, makes the world in any way a slightly better or less s**t place. So if I could turn a slightly sort of hobbyist, I like chatting, I like reading, I like writing, hey, read this, quote this, look what your postman said about this, look what happened over here. You know, if I can turn that into something that might become an interesting project to work on in a few weeks, months or years from now, then happy days, like that's that's the flywheel. So for anybody that maybe didn't run into the stuff that you've been writing, how would you how do you explain your observation about the meh-ification? I hadn't tried to say that out loud before. The meh-ification culture of brands.Yeah, um, yeah, I talked about the meh, meh, like meh, as in the British, it's a bit meh, it's a bit s**t, it's a bit mid, you know, like the sort of homogenization, the drift to the middle, the life under the algorithm, basically, everybody's very well aware of this, I'm sure right now. But this thought of, like, meh-ification and this being the meh-cage of the 2020s and the meh-ocene as opposed to anthropocene or, you know, just playing with words, have fun. But yeah, I mean, that came about from watching live practitioner issues occurring about clients' levels of attitudes to risk and what they think good looks like. And this short-termist, let's not rock the boat, this worked last time, or this works in our space, this works in our industry, let's do a version of this.They're incredibly intelligent, brilliant, creative people, I'm certainly not criticising, but just an organizational air that's being breathed right now, that is contributing to this drift to sameness and averageness and everybody knows it. Matt Klein’s Zine, basically, he's like the text of this stuff, he's all over it, he's so intelligent, he's, you know, the one who's kind of brought this to everybody's attention. You talked about the creative paradox three years ago, I think now.There's lots of stuff like Filterworld by Kyle Chayka, there's a ton of stuff that's been formalized in this space now. But really, from my point of view, it's more from a brand building side of things that actually are the leaders of our brands in aspiration-led categories, the need to understand this stuff because it's affecting their decision making and it's affecting the way that they are being managed even by their investors and their CEO. It's so big that it's become invisible, I think, in corporate culture, for me. But yeah, that's one thing I write about. Basically, it's about the stuff we should say, but often don't, about what's really going on in consumer culture, I suppose. It's my stick to support.Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what do you, how do you, what's the question? Well, you've mentioned the word risk a bunch, you're very explicit that sort of the approach to risk is sort of part of the issue. So what do you mean when you, how do you work with your client's relationship with the risk? It sounds like that's what you do, or that's how you think about it.Yeah, I mean, yeah, totally. Yeah, it's a big part of things, I think, being that to, we help our, try to help our client brands to develop greater cultural authority, you know, so this point of view that cultural heat or capital or weight meaning leads to, again, leads to commercial growth, commercial heat, commercial meaning, commercial capital, right? In aspiration led post-cap, stage capitalist, you know, culture, meaning more, can mean growing more. Like, look at the D2C's, look at the luxury fashion houses, you know, we're not paying for the cost of the fabric, we're paying for the value of the brand, right? Like, look at luxury cars, look at luxury makeup and the dupe culture of products that work almost as well, but are a quarter of the price, but we still want that one because it's that one.So we know all about this stuff, but really, if you're trying to develop cultural authority, cultural meaning, cultural weight, then you have to be okay with taking risks and thinking differently and divergently and moving through culture and taking up space and not being of the mindset that, oh, we mustn't alienate the core, or that's the way we do things around here, or this worked in the past, or this is what our competitors and peers do, or this is what I like doing. It's cool, but like, we have to build on top of that, or at least have to consider different ways of coming at this and developing authenticity and trust. And this whole thing about this drift to algorithmic sameness, the meh-ification thing, it's just making it even, it's turning up to 11, it's making it even more important that a brand that wants to have any sort of cultural leadership, cultural authority, category leadership, category authority.You cannot do that by playing within the bounds of the playbook anymore in my view. So why is the playbook like it is? Why do we think it's going to work that way? Let's just start there. And as we say, having the weird and awkward conversations about why we are institutionalized in this way, why do we think we're right? Because we might be, but we might not always be.I have to ask the self-indulgent question, which is, you know, this is my newsletter, it's called that business of meaning. You talked about, you just mentioned cultural meaning. What do you mean when you say meaning?I think probably when I say meaning, I'm probably talking about status, I think, in that obviously when I talk about, you know, brands growing in authority or growing in relevance or growing in stature or growing in cultural capital and meaning, as you say, it's basically becoming a higher status organization that people, that status is both given and received, that people think that they will derive status from wearing your X or using your Y or driving your Z, whatever, drinking your whatever. Like you are imprinting status, higher status onto the individual. That's what they're paying for. That's the differential. So I suppose when I say meaning, I probably mean status, to be honest, I think. What's the relationship between risk and meaning, would you say? Maybe you just already answered this question. I think you probably can't have the latter without the former anymore, if you ever could. I mean, I grew up working in around Nike, and that is the home of risk. It was a really interesting way of thinking, and obviously everything else that, you know, the Honda stuff, the client literally, he said, I'm only interested in ideas that frighten me, so scare the Jesus out of me. You know, it was, it was said in jest, but there was a real strong message to the agency there. And that's where Honda “The Cog” and "Hate Something, Change Something" - Those big pieces of work came out of a client's attitude to risk and willingness to think way beyond the confines of the category playbook. You know, all of the stuff that happened at that time, three, the three pony. I mean, there were millions of examples that, you know, the Old Spice guy. Thank you, mom. Like, I was in that was my era where I was just like, oh, God, okay. There's a, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, maybe, you know, and I didn't work all of that stuff, of course, but that that's the world that I grew up in, as they say. So I just don't think that ever leaves you.So what I'm trying to do now is not be cavalier and being very cognizant and empathetic that these leaders I work with are in a very specific space and a very specific mindset and under real, you know, constraints and pressure. But still just trying to sow that seed always. And this algorithmic sameness is really helping me with that, to be honest. It’s our job as brands, our job maybe as brand leaders, to help people to become more interesting, bigger, better, more inspired, more curious, more high-octane, more enlivened versions of themselves. So we have to challenge people. We cannot just give them the same of what, you know, more of what they're already into.We have to help people to understand not just what they currently like, but what they might like in the future. And that's why I like looking backwards so far into the history of marketing to go, that's what has always, that's the red thread, actually, if you look at old work or Apple 1984, you know, that was a strong, really strong point of view about a better way of thinking, a better way of living. And I feel like maybe that's got obscured in the last few years of short-termism and sort of risk tolerance, perhaps.Yeah. What's your hope looking forward? I mean, if there, if we're coming out of this sort of sea of sameness and manifestation, and we want to break with that, do you have a feeling that things that so much of that feels like that was just we were frozen in sort of a cultural place. You're, you're calling it short-termism, but I feel like there's so much other sort of factors kind of maybe making people less risk open than they could be.What do you see coming next? Are we entering a new sort of way of expressing, I guess, a new tolerance for it? I mean, I would love that to be the case, but I think with everything that's going on politically, socio-politically, economically right now. No, unfortunately, we're right. We're ready for it.I think whether we call it post-capitalism or post-meification or I don't know, this explosion of innovative new dazzling creative production that we should be seeing because we've all got cameras and video and editing skills and AI in our pockets now. And we're not seeing, you know, and back to the Matt Klein cultural paradox stuff that actually we're seeing sequels. We're seeing cinematic world expansions.We're seeing, you know, the top authors in the top tech bestseller lists again and again and again and again, and it's hard to break through with anything new, right? All of that. Yes, it feels like the dam should probably be bursting and that we can suddenly free ourselves and think in a different way. That would be the dream, of course, not just for me, but everybody, for my kids, frankly.But I think that we've got a huge spectre, a big barrier, a big and very real set of problems coming at us now all over the world, frankly, and it's making people fearful in a whole different way. We were maybe scared for our jobs or we were scared about not hitting the numbers or I don't know, not getting the investment round and whatever it might have been. And, you know, I'm not a bit simplifying grossly.Now we're worried about a whole different set of things for ourselves and our families and our kids and our communities. So I don't know. I mean, it's pretty, I don't want to be negative, but it's not, it's not a particularly optimistic era, is it really? No, not at all.It's a naive question, honestly, and I appreciate you.No, it was a good one.Well, I want to thank you so much for your time. This has been a lot of fun and I really appreciate you sharing everything that you've shared in your time and everything else.Well, that's so kind of you, Peter. I've loved it. I just love, you know, I'm, Peter is the best curator on the internet, in my opinion, everybody. And you all know this because you're listening, but you and your I, I'm such a huge fan and I love your podcast.So it's a great honor to be involved. So thank you. Nice.Thank you so much. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Alkisit Stolp is the cofounder & Chief Brand Officer of twentyrising in Berlin. Previously she held senior roles at Wunderman Thompson, Media.Monks, and VML. We first connected when they just opened their doors, through this newsletter, so I was excited catch up. Nice. So I start all these conversations the same way with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's a neighbor. She helps people tell their stories. And I stole the question because it's big and beautiful. But because it's big and beautiful, I kind of over explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?Wow. Well, I love it because let me say this before I answer. You know, when you grow older, all of a sudden, everything is way more transactional and operational. So you know, when you're in your 20s, and you know, you want to know the world and people want to know you, you get these questions, and then you're so excited to give answers. And then it's all about, okay, what do you do for a living? So it's very, very different.Yeah, but I come from a city in the south of Athens, Greece, and its name literally translates to Sun City. And it's a place where, you know, you walk on the streets, and you smell the scent of wild citrus, and you see the sea. And I guess having grown up in such a scenery where every morning and every night, the first thing I would see was the horizon, all the way to the sea. I think this made me quite open and curious. And fast forward 30 something years, I made it to Berlin. After some stops in between.What do you remember as a girl, like what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah, of course I do. First, I wanted to be a volcano expert.A volcano expert?A volcano expert. I remember being, you know, a little girl, probably watching some documentary or reading a book. And this is what I decided because I loved how lava looked. And then some senses came into my head. And I decided I wanted to become a journalist, mostly because I think this curiosity of exploring, as well as the beauty of storytelling, because I was reading since very young, many, many books, I love reading. And yeah, then I wanted to become a journalist.But I didn't. I think I explored many different things before landing into advertising. And this has only been to my benefit. So I wanted to become a journalist. I tried to do so. I didn't make it to the school that I wanted. And then because I was very proud and stubborn, I said, fine, I'll study marketing.But it was an act of rebellion?Exactly. Like becoming a technocrat was an act of rebellion. Exactly. And this is how I ended up going to the north of the UK to study marketing. And then I started working in the HR department of a hospital. And then I did a master's in in fashion, because someone said, fashion marketing is the next big thing. So I did my MA there. But I guess I wasn't creative enough. You know, I was in the verge of potentially becoming a creative person, but no. So I started working in magazines, in publications. And yeah.Where are you at that time? What city are you in?That time I'm in London. You're in London? I'm in London. And they have a fashion school. And it's exhilarating. And then I'm working in these niche magazines where it's a little bit of culture, it's a little bit of fashion. And I do everything. I do the advertorials, I do the photographer's assistant. I do a little bit of, you know, invoicing. And it's amazing. And it's exhilarating. And then I decided to go back to Athens and open my own magazine, which I did. That seems like that was a particular, what years are we talking about in my mind, but it feels like that was a particular moment, probably in magazines and magazine culture.Yeah, yeah. I think it was, it was still the early 2000s. And back then Athens, which I know now, comparing it to New York is silly, but I think they were following the steps of the village voice. So it was very popular too. We had a magazine called Athens voice, actually. Copying it completely, which was, you know, this kind of old school, cool version of timeout, I guess, with a little bit of, you know, profiling and interviews of cool people, artists and writers and journalists. And it was a moment, you know, living within the pop culture and shaping the pop culture. It was great. And then it was also the time where, you know, Facebook, for example, would start launching their pages.So I was lucky enough to be a native digital marketeer, if you wish, or a native digital, yeah, account manager, because we were all exploring at that point, if and how we could utilize all of this for our collaborations with brands and obviously with how could we push the content and so on. And then, funnily enough, a couple of years later, it was the financial crisis, then the publisher that I was having the magazine.What was the name of the magazine?It was called PLAS. I don't know why. Yeah, PLAS. And it had the sign of the PLAS. So it wasn't in letters. But think a little bit like a supreme kind of logo, but 20 years ago, right?Not today. And I was actually collaborating with the photographer and the former at the time, editor in chief of VICE, because I had also worked with VICE in Athens. We had launched the magazine in the Balkans together.What was the influence of VICE? I feel like I run into VICE all over the place without really intending to, but its influence was so far spread. What was it like for you to encounter VICE out in the world?I think what drew me was, you know, when they were pitching or they were not pitching it to me, obviously, but, you know, the pitch for entering the market was investigative journalism, but from a cultural perspective. So really discovering the subcultures of a city, finding truly interesting stories with extensions towards maybe politics, maybe society, maybe economy, but maybe also nothing's just an interesting story to tell. And quite edgy photography, I would say for the time, right?I will use the name Terry Richardson. I know it's not the same anymore, but please, you know, go back 25 years ago, 20 years ago, that was a different time. So really, you know, flash, very sharp photos. And yeah, they had, or we had, again, as an entity, they had the talent to discover these stories or make something out of these stories. And I think this is what was fresh and new and innovative. Like social media was not such a big thing back then. We didn't know how to navigate these platforms and still stories could find a space to exist for the wider audience through magazine.So that was amazing. I really, really loved VICE. And I think naturally I tried to, in a way, mimic it. So that was the little magazine that was happening in Athens. And then exactly because of all this, because obviously one wants to make money and, you know, have a decent life. I think all this digital nativeness, right, through especially social media helped me take the next steps. So in today's terms, I would say that I became a social media manager or a content creator for brands and for agencies. And then very randomly, I started working for an American agency. It was part of the Hearst Corporation called iCrossing. And they were running the whole content for social media for BMW and MINI in Europe. So I jumped into that wagon and then they invited me to do a tenure in Munich. That was my first official interaction with Germany. And this is when I also met my now husband. So I did that thing in Munich. I didn't like it. I didn't want to stay. It was different.I went back to Athens. I did game tech for three years. And then Robin, my husband, said, come on, enough with the long distance. What do we do? And I said, fine, I'm going to come to Hamburg. So I moved to Germany and I think this is where I decided, you know what, you try different things. You have always been involved in storytelling in a way, right? Now is the moment that you need to focus. And I decided that the focus would make sense for me to be in the advertising world, right? Putting all my diverse experience still nurturing my curiosity and working for amazing brands. And this is what happened. .Tell me about where you are now and what you're working on now, TWENTYRISING?Yes, yes. TWENTYRISING. So Hamburg happened and then I think it makes sense to to connect the dots here. And then I got a call to move to Berlin and be at the newly set up media amongst agencies or another big thing happening. And I said yes. And this is where I met the team and my co-founders where we are now. So at some point after working greatly together, we realized that it was the work we were doing was moving towards the direction that we didn't necessarily believe it was the right one. And this has nothing to do with, I don't know, media monks.I think it was more of an industry momentum where also we were finishing an era of very highly data driven data, harnessed performance, marketing, communication. So everything was data points. And all of a sudden we were missing a lot, you know, the storytelling, the big idea. And you could see already glimpses of that also in our big advertising, you know, network events can lions and work. We started talking again. Big CMOs were touching upon the importance of the narrative of the brand. Right. Because at the end of the day, what is it? It is all about communication between humans and finding that single truth that resonates with humans and make this truth famous in a way. And this is why we decided to leave our C-level careers in our very comfortable seats in the big networks and found 20 Rising. And we wanted to do that because, you know, we really love what we do and we want to make it even special.What do you love about it? What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?The joy is that, you know, when you are a communications expert, especially in the creative field. Right. You have this privilege of unapologetically speak your truth and speak your mind, obviously, in a structured manner or coming through research and insights. But this is the amazing thing. And then how can you take this truth and put it into a craft and give it bones and flesh and make it tangible and then send it off to the world? And I think this is what I love most experiencing by proxy and in every agency and mostly in my agency, having this ambition to, as we say at TWENTYRISING, to rise to the moment and the point where we believe a brand can make it and then think about it. So speak our minds, find the truth and then make something out of it.Yeah. Do you remember what was your first encounter with the idea of brand, like the concept of brand or the potential of brand? Do you remember? I mean, you told your story, you know, in a way. But at what point did you realize a brand is the thing that I want to build or or interact with or?I think from a very young age, because even though I work in this industry, I'm a marketeers textbook, I fall for everything, at least my initial reaction. So that sense of brand creating a culture or brand being the emblem of a culture for me has been very, very strong from, you know, the Nike shoes we were wearing where we're going to school that then turned into this super uncomfortable Timberland boat shoes, as an example. Right.And this was a cultural signifier happening through a brand emblem. Either that was the logo or the product itself. And I think for good or for bad, this is part of our society, right?This is what has been happening in our modern world for quite some time now. So being able to be part of this whole storytelling crafting, this is what intrigues me continuously, I would say.Yeah. And how are things going? Like when people come to TWENTYRISING, what are they coming to you for? What do they ask? And what do you feel like they're struggling with the most these days?Yeah, I think I think, come on, it's it is. The necessity and the desire for differentiation. I was watching because last year we did not TVC for the Super Bowl, but an activation. So I was looking into the campaigns or the great work as well. But I don't know how you think about it. It's very often that you fall in the sea of sameness. Right. And you see it not just in advertising, you see it all over. So I think what we want to be doing in a more special way is exactly this, to identify this truth that differentiates the brand. So they come to us for their overall campaigns and their overall 360 communication. And usually it's repositioning the brand or shifting, refreshing the brand, giving it a little bit of a wink and a twist. And I think this is where we're good at.So, for example, what we did with Netflix, and I'm really proud about this case, is that they came with a Christmas brief. Right. Globally, but also in the dark region where we are in Europe, Netflix communicates only their content. And this time they wanted to do a Christmas campaign. And of course, you know, someone, when they read a brief of a Christmas campaign, they think a little bit of a tear and a little bit of joy and a little bit of a family moment. And we said, no, we're actually going to make your [gift card] the epicenter of the campaign. Like what? Who cares about the Netflix [gift card] of, you know, $10 or whatnot. But in Germany, I'm not sure if this is how it is in the US, you can buy this gift card, basically the Netflix gift card for in the train station, in the kiosk next door. So it could be a last minute gift.And the insight, obviously, was that there is this generation in their 50s to 60s, that they are in the rural areas, they're not using so much Netflix, because obviously, they're not familiar with the technology, they don't know how to do it. They can't be bothered because they're used to linear TV. So basically, what we said is, okay, we're gonna target and the communication will be for the children that drive home or go to the parents. And instead of making it a, let me show you step by step how you log into Netflix. Here's a gift. Here's the card.And obviously, the payoff for the children for the target audience was now you can have interesting conversations with your parents and avoid the awkward moments of when are you getting married? How was university? And you know, why are you still with that boyfriend or girlfriend of yours? And so and I think it was interesting, because, again, we tried to do it special, we brought the product into the brand communication. So it wasn't the intention to increase sales. No, it was a Christmas brand campaign.But we managed to also do that. And of course, the guy who was responsible for the dark region for the vouchers was very happy with that, because they saw an uplift of I think, approximately 20% unofficial number. And obviously, it was a great story to tell. And on top of that, we also managed to have many Easter eggs in the actual TVC of, you know, the very famous content series and productions that they do. So it was a very nice combination of everything.Yeah. What is the role that you mentioned? What's the role of research in your practice, if you can speak to that in the Netflix case in particular, and of course, I'm always interested in hearing in qual and how you? Yeah, how you research helps you?Yeah, absolutely. And so obviously, it's funny, because, you know, one expects that a streaming provider will have data. And of course, they do, but not so much that on their own, they could build a case. So basically, what we tried, again, to look into was the cultural landscape, and find there the simple truths that could make the difference. And for example, we have the tendency of young adults traveling within the country more often during the Christmas holiday. So that was not necessarily part of the result, but it was part of the process that sparked the idea to us.So what is happening when you go when you leave the big city, and you have to travel home, and you do it last minute, and you didn't have time to buy gifts? And how do you make it to your home? And what you're you're sitting on the train thinking, what are you going to talk about with your parents?And, you know, in, in Europe, or in the region, you always have this, again, this element of estrangement between generations. So that was, for example, another element that was important and helpful as an insight to, to make us come up with the idea. And I guess, for us, strategy, and here are my strategy colleagues, is strategy is very important.This is how we start any assignment, we want to create the framework, where, you know, our playground is within. And obviously, we use tools, research tools, but it's also I think, to live and breathe and how do you combine your personal understanding of the world with some data or some proof points that basically confirm your thinking?Yeah. Yeah. How did you make the case for that shift? I mean, I imagine that being, I mean, they came to you wanting one thing, you talk them out of it. How did you talk them out of their own idea?Yeah, I think this is a very good question. And first and foremost, I think that the other side should be willing to listen, right? And this is something that we tell to our partners, not because we want to show off, but exactly to set the scene straight, that if you're coming to us, you're looking for something that you cannot find within your own ranks within your own setup.So let's talk about it. And let's be open to a dialogue and a conversation that really will help make the breakthrough. And in the case of Netflix, this is what happened. But I can give you a quickly another example of, I would say, an even more interesting case. We are working with a German bank, one very traditional financial union type of institution. And so you can imagine that their profile is quite conservative. And they wanted to do a B2B communication. So someone could argue, okay, a little bit dull, maybe not that exciting. And out of that, basically, we turned this into an elevator pitch communication.So the brief required that we have to obviously address all the benefits and all the points of why a small, medium sized business would go to that institution to this bank. And we could do just leaflets and pamphlets and I don't know, banners for the website. No, we created on the contrary, a whole social media series, as well as a TVC that basically set the pace as it would happen on an elevator pitch. So very fast, very modern, very quick, very entertaining in a way, because we think also that entertainment and bringing this sense of joy and a smile is also important. Yeah.I love how you talked, I felt like what I heard you say to the previous question was that anytime a client comes to you, there's the truth is they need something that they don't have themselves. So no matter what they're saying to you, you can always kind of speak to that. Is that what you're saying? And how does that change how you engage with them? Does that make sense?Yeah, I think, you know, the mistake, the natural mistake that we as advertising agencies tend to do is because we're thinking we're selling services, that makes us, in a way, you know, servants. But, and also our business models and our commercial and pricing and remuneration models have sometimes this mantra, but I don't want to change the subject.So however, how we approach this is, yes, of course, it's a service, but, you know, our thinking is a service. And it doesn't mean that we're necessarily smarter than our clients. We come from a different angle. We come with a different process and a different perspective. And this is why they need us. They need us to, to listen to them and come up with an approach and a big idea that can be then crafted and developed across the different communication points.So, and this is a collaboration, but they, in an ideal world, they listen and they understand. And of course, it's on us to convince them. And of course, it's on us to prove in a way that what we're saying makes sense. But we see it. I just, just before this call, we, the team was presenting to a telecommunications provider and the idea won because it was again, another case of, all right, you want us to work together. You also need to come with an open mind.Often in these conversations, I'm trying to get into a place where we're talking about how brands listen to their customers and listen to people. But here, I feel like we're really talking about how you listen to the client and how the client listens to you. Is there any, how do you approach that process? Do you have a way of thinking about how you listen or how to create opportunities for listening to your client or to brands?Yeah, we do have a structure and our Rise, Think, Create model also applies obviously to an internal process. So it mirrors this. I think this has helped us a lot. So first and foremost, obviously it is all about getting to know the brand, getting to know the challenge, getting to know the opportunity. So we need the data, we need the information, we have the kickoff sessions. And then what we do, so we look inwards, right?And then the next step is to look outwards because another, I think, common mistake is that brands tend to, when they identify the target audience, they tend to think what they believe that their target audience thinks for the brand. But that doesn't mean that the audience has the conversations about the brand. It can also be that they don't, they just don't.So our next step internally is that we start looking outwards, what is happening in the universe that the brand wishes to be, and then where the brands at the end is. And this is what we present, trying to suggest how we close that gap. Because usually we see that there is a gap between what the brand perceives the audience is talking about and what really the audience is talking about.So once we have set up that framework, then basically we have the creative brief at hand. And then this is where the creative team jumps in, creates essentially the strategic thinking into, formulates it into the idea. And then it is all about obviously how do we want to craft. And there are many times that we are trying also to influence the media budget, for example, because obviously when the perception of the brand is different to what the audience wants or talks about, then the media plan can also not be the right thing. So this is where also we bring the third parties in and we have a conversation around redesigning if needed. And then we go into creating, so crafting.And at what point for you, how do you learn? Like how do you learn about the customer? How do you learn about how the brand is perceived? What are your sort of preferred methods?What we like to do is, we call it internally 20 interning. I know it's like another word, but what we try to do is basically spend time next to the client. This can be, depending on the nature of the project and the relationship, this can be a few hours or half a day where we basically sit next to them at their premises and at their office.Or it can even be a very, very short tenure of two days or one day or in the course of three weeks, three days, where we really sit next to them and understand how they're working, because it is also obviously important to understand how the company works internally. The second thing we do is called 20 interviewing. And we always do interviews not only with the marketing team, but also with, if we're talking about a company that produces goods with the production facility manager, the supply chain manager. If we're talking about an app, we talk to the channel owners. So, we really spend time beyond the brief, beyond the task at hand to understand how the company operates, because this is also an integral part of how we do the work.And do you have any mentors or touchstones that you return to? This is a question I like to ask. Are there ideas or concepts that you kind of keep returning to in your work that sort of shape how you approach things or think about things?Not probably in the way that you have it in mind, because for us, every time a new task, a new project is fresh from the get go. So, we approach it very open minded. And yes, I'm not against or we are not against reappropriation, but this doesn't really work for us. And even if naturally we would return into a similar idea that we would have had in the past, that would happen by coincidence and not by purpose. What we do though, because you use the word mentor, is even though when we opened up shop, I think we were naive enough to do it. What we definitely wanted to do is use the same words and understand the same thing and give them the same meaning. So, we do have a mentor who introduced us to the learning organizational principles. So, this is basically a systematic behavioral approach. It's not about becoming an academic institution, obviously. And that helped a lot to organize ourselves internally and set rules of how we work and be able to give the independence to the teams to work on their own. So, not doing all this micromanagement thing that we see very often. So, I think these principles, even though not directly connected to our product, but more to our ways of working with each other have really helped us accelerate our processes.Is that Peter Senge? Is that what that is? The learning organization?Yes. Yes. Yes.Go ahead.No, I was going to say, we obviously had quite a scholar doing this with us in Germany.Wow, that's beautiful.And how big is TWENTYRISING now?TWENTYRISING is now almost 18 people. I say almost because in Germany we have all these long waiting periods. So, we have people signing contracts with that, but they're not yet with us. We're 18 and I think we will grow more in the coming months. So, it's been a two and a half year journey of crazy ups and downs, but resilience and, as I said, naivete helped push forward this, obviously, with the combination of the great work that we do.Yes. How are things in Germany?We have the elections in a couple of weeks or in a week. I would say that it has become a way tougher game field for our industry. So, budget distribution and market share are not that easy to grab anymore because the market is not really moving forward. However, I wouldn't say that there is necessarily a big shortage of money that would explain that. I think it's way more cautious steps and cautious moves. And this is why I think we, being nimble, quick, inventive, allows us to grab these opportunities in comparison to the bigger shops.I think Europe is in an interesting moment also, economically or historically even. And I think the elections in Germany will shape the coming months, definitely, also for our industry.Before we go, I wanted to return to sort of a first, I didn't ask the question up front, but what is it like being from Athens?And living in Berlin.Or just in general, what does it mean to be from Athens? I mean, I feel like I've, yeah, I'm just curious. When you're out in the world and you're from Athens, what is it like?I think, so contrary to, I think, the popular opinion, I would say that Athens is more of a Middle Eastern city than a Western city. And at least in terms of people behavior. And I think that this gives me an amazing advantage because I am more fluid in a way, therefore, more adaptable, therefore, more inventive. And this is really living in the heart of the Western world, or at least in Europe. This really gives me flexibility and in that sense an advantage. I had to learn to hold myself back a little bit, because, you know, we are very, very open. We move a lot, we touch a lot, we kiss even strangers. So I had to learn to be a little bit held back.And what is that like?Being held back? I love Germany for many reasons. One of them is that it has brought a little bit of regulation to my chaos. And I really appreciate that. So I can experience the best of both worlds. I can still be myself because I decided when my Munich manager told me, no, you have to have a poker face and you shouldn't show emotions. I said, sorry, no, I will. I will. I will not going to hide this. But at the same time, this methodical way of doing things in this structure that sometimes, sometimes holds back. Personally, it really helps me.Beautiful. Well, I want to thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I really appreciate it. It's been fun talking with you.Absolutely, Peter. Thank you for suggesting that. I hope it was interesting. I loved it. And I'm really looking forward to making it to New York to your Breakfast Club soon.Yeah, we would love to have you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Reid Litman is a consultant, writer, & researcher and Global Consulting Director at Ogilvy in New York City. He has led transformative projects for global brands like Google, Nike, and Coca-Cola.So, you might know this, I'm not sure, but I always start every conversation with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their stories and I borrow it because it's really sort of big, beautiful way to start a conversation, but it's big, so I over-explain it. So before I ask, I want you to know that you are in complete control and you can answer any which way you like. And the question is, where do you come from?I love it. Starting strong, Happy Friday. You know, I think I'm still at an age and a place, you know, in life where my story is really anchored in where I'm from and who my parents are in terms of answering the question, you know, who are you and where do you come from?So I'm from the Midwest of the U.S. Minnesota. And, you know, I always like to say my dad is, he's a structural engineer. He's sort of my logical brain and my quantitative side.And my mom is a public school social worker. She's very much my qualitative and emotional side. And I think those two things play together really, really well.You know, and together plus coming from the Midwest and now living in New York, I feel like both of them really taught me not to be beholden to, you know, how things have always been done. And that continues today to be a big part of the big part of who I am. So I think. Oh, good.I've told this story a couple of times for people who have listened already, but I grew up in Rochester, New York and Western New York. And I remember when I would meet people from Western New York, I would always click with them kind of in a way that I didn't with people from maybe New York or New England. And I met this person from Buffalo and I asked her, I was like, what is going on? Why do I click so well from people from Western New York? She said, well, we're from the Midwest. She kind of blew my mind. I don't know what you make of that. But what does it mean to be from the Midwest for you? What do you carry with you?Yeah, no, good question. I think sometimes the Midwest gets a bad rap, right? It's middle America or it's the flyover states, whatever it might be. But I love being from the Midwest. I think, you know, for me, it's a superpower, especially now after, you know, spending the last five years or so in New York City and kind of combining the best of those two worlds. And maybe what's different or interesting or unique to me about the Midwest is that especially coming from like the, you know, the brand or marketing perspective, which I do is sometimes people in the Midwest are tough customers.Like there's, there's less of a constant need for consumerism and status. People seem to feel a bit more comfortable with who they are and kind of what they want out of life. The pace is slower and, you know, so is the need for change. And sometimes people on the coasts or wherever confuse that with a lack of intelligence. But I don't know. I think that's a mess. I think there's something interesting about middle America.Yeah, I love that the Midwest is there's a superpower. It's your superpower. In what way? In what way is it a superpower for you?I think just going back to recognizing those differences in seeing that, you know, people from the Midwest just seem to be a bit more comfortable with who they are. And the pace just sometimes is slower, like the need for change, the need for evolution, the need for self actualization is just a little bit different. And I think that's taught me a lot about both myself and how I approach branded marketing as well.Do you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up as a kid?You know, I think the first thing I've ever truly as a specific job, remember wanting to be was it's so specific. It's L’il Waynes manager. I wanted to be involved with music and in sort of brand and artist management so badly when I was younger.You know, before I even knew what like brand strategy or consulting or even design was, I knew really early that I wanted to work in culture. And I feel like music was just the most tangible expression of culture as a kid. Like it was, it was the thing that I could just, you know, see first, it was the furthest edge out for me. And so it was just what I grabbed on to really early.And what did you think? What did young Reid think that job was?I just thought it was fun to be a part of someone's world who was kind of shaking things up and impacting culture, but not, you know, beholden to the basic or ground rules that everyone else seems to have to live by.And sort of catch us up. Where are you now? And what are you working on?Yeah, so these days I'm in New York City. I work at Ogilvy, which is a, you know, kind of one of the larger older advertising agencies. But specifically, I work within a cool group called Ogilvy Consulting, which is Ogilvy's brand strategy and really business kind of transformation division. So I don't know, you could think about it maybe like a McKinsey or BCG meets ad agency, kind of the collision of creative and a bit more of the rigor around a traditional management consultant.And what do you love about it? Where's the joy and the work for you?For me, it's really the collision of two worlds that I really love. It's the creativity and kind of the edginess and the provocation of advertising and creativity and sort of pushing the Browns on what brands can do and what they can stand for and what they can mean to people. But also with the accountability and really the structure of more of a business consultant. So I just love the ability to, you know, really push and change brands while also being accountable for, you know, growth year over year and actually ensuring that what we're doingWhen did you discover that you could make a living kind of doing this kind of thing? I mean, there's this gap between your little Wayne dreams and where you are now. When did you discover brand or brand consulting?Yeah, no, I mean, for me, it's all still so connected and part of the same kind of ecosystem. It's just different, you know, expressions or different connections to culture. But I feel like I didn't know about brand marketing or even ad agencies until a little bit later in life, I would say like university age.I wasn't one of those people who had a ton of friends or family in the creative industries in that sense. And so I was exposed to all of this a little bit later. But I think, you know, at least since around age 19, 20, 21, I've been pretty familiar with kind of the marketing industry ecosystem and really sought out Ogilvy as, you know, a teaching hospital and an awesome place to just meet really, really smart people doing cool work.What was the attraction? Do you remember? You know, I think there's so much happening in the marketing industry between agencies and consultancies and new creative networks or independent shops, whatever it might be. And I don't know, Ogilvy, it's bright red or the history and sort of way that people spoke about their time there always really stood out to me. You know, and I feel like no matter what, if you could get to spend every day around people who are a lot smarter than you and a lot more interesting than you, it's hard to look back and say, you know, that time was misspent. And so it just really keeps me there and I'm really proud of that.What kind of work do you enjoy doing or what kind of when clients come to you, what kind of questions are they asking?Yeah, you know, I've kind of spanned across several industries and types of work over the last five years or so, but especially over the last couple of years, I've really kind of dug my heels into youth culture branding and community building. And I think when brands come to me today, the biggest question is how do we either pivot, change, or for the first time, set up systems to really connect and resonate with youth culture. You know, how do we win with that next generation of consumers?Today, that means Gen Z. And I think, you know, so much has been said about the business opportunity in the size of Gen Z. So maybe I don't need to go there. But what's important to me is that brands and brand leaders, you know, think of me as someone that they can come to when it's imperative to succeed with the next generation of young users and all the things that come with that.And how do you help them? What's your, I mean, I'm sure that's custom in that way, but what do you, what do you find they really need and where do they need help?Yeah, I mean, some projects come to life through, you know, new products or the recasting of old products and some come to life through new brands or an adjustment of what the brand stands for in the world. But I think what all projects have in common is that my sort of ethos or my approach to this work is really to ensure that there's a very diverse range of young, interesting voices at the table. And so I talk a lot about co-creation and just ensuring that the brands that we're creating are built, you know, with Gen Z rather than for them.And that can come to life through research methods, you know, as you know very well, which could be just anything from ethnography to focus groups to panels that actually invite Gen Z to the table, not just, you know, to do things like vote on a flavor, but really to impact and discuss and understand the business at all levels. You know, it varies from the brand's purpose and what it stands for in the world, all the way down to how it thinks about and executes on customer service.Can you tell me a story about, yeah, I guess I love the concept of co-creation and how co-creation kind of works?Yeah, I mean, there's so many examples out there of times where we've brought people in. I'm trying to not say any specific client names, but one of the things that we so often do is invite influencers who the industry would think of as influencers, right? Young Gen Z creators with a big following on social media, but we use them in a really different way.Instead of handing them scripts to kind of megaphone out in hopes that their voice will make the brand interesting to the followers, what we do is, we work with the influencers on work and strategy that will never be seen explicitly by the outside world. So we really use their knowledge of their audience, their knowledge of the industry or adjacent topics to bring them in and help have conversations around, you know, what the future of this space or this industry or this offering could look like, and impact change on just a bit more of that behind the scenes level.And I think that's been a superpower for us, you know, influencers and creatives and young, bright people as partners and explorers and, for example, what the future of wellness or what the future of food and beverage is, as opposed to just using a foodie influencer to megaphone the brand that we're hoping to make resonate with young people.And what's the role of research or qualitative in research generally in qualitative in particular in the work that you do?Yeah, I think so much of it is research and spending time, you know, with the target and just being among the target and ensuring that voices are always included. And so it can take, you know, really basic shape, like the classic survey, which is always tried and true, or it can be video interviews and video panels. Oftentimes we host kind of almost like get togethers or parties where we just get a bunch of people in a room and talk about the thing.And so whatever we need to do to get close to that subject and hear it from the people who live it every day is what we do. So I've been in everything from, you know, rooms with alcohol brands where we're literally just discussing the state of what it means to consume alcohol, where we're consuming, why we don't want to feel maybe drunk or whatever in the same way as previous generations, to being in wellness spas, talking about why these environments no longer fit the Gen Z narrative or the youth culture narrative of what it means to be, you know, healthy and balanced. So it's so random, but in the best way of just getting with the people who are living it every day.What are some of the biggest sort of shifts among Gen Z that brands are having to grapple with when it comes to innovating or communicating differently?Yeah, I think, you know, at the most basic level, this idea of co-creation, participatory brands, I've heard it called, you know, multiplayer brands, is one of the most fundamental and interesting shifts. I think what, for all the contradictions or nuances or differences within Gen Z, one thing that really seems to remain tried and true and unify them is their desire for creative expression and sort of, you know, individualism. And so no matter what, when we're working with brands, we build mechanisms that allow youth to participate and help shape the direction of the business and the brand.So whether that comes to life through, you know, today it might be fandom or even partial ownership to, you know, any mechanism that allows people to feel more included, more like they're shaping the direction or even the topics that the brand might be talking about or impacting is so, so critical. And then there's, you know, several other things that are happening right now in the start of 2025 that I think are really important to how we'll view brands in the future. One of them is, you know, for example, just around technology, whether it be, you know, Gen AI or this kind of dupe culture that we're feeling right now.But it's just around realism and in a world where 90 percent or whatnot of the content that we see is generated by AI or that, you know, Gen Alpha is very much born with, you know, Gen AI in their pockets. Like, what does real mean? What does authentic mean?Which was kind of like the ultimate buzzword for Gen Z and how are we going to shape what meaningful, true experiences look like, you know, in a world where we spend X amount of time on our screens. And we might even have, you know, trips and travel and food tastings in a purely digital space. So I think it's just really challenging what the frames of traditional brands are and how, when and where they can be experienced.Yeah. I love what you just said that the traditional frames of what a brand, what brands are, is that what you said? Are brands having to rethink that question?Yeah. I mean, I think it used to be so much more one or two dimensional. A brand, it really existed through, you know, the TV industrial complex, sometimes on shelves or at the store. And then, you know, in one or two sponsorships across, you know, whatever it might have been, an IRL sports field or a magazine. And now it's the brand sort of exists in between all of those spaces. It exists, of course, in the minds of people, but also in these kinds of strange digital and physical corners and everywhere in between. So the job of market or the role of the brand is just a lot more intimate, a lot more dispersed among so many different touch points, opinions and channels. So it's just a fun time.Yeah. Use the word intimate. I'm curious what you're pointing at when you say that it's more intimate now than maybe it has been in the past.Yeah. I mean, I think especially as it relates to marketing in youth culture, we see people connect themselves or associate themselves with a brand as a way to help show off who they are, to show where their, you know, where their edges are in life and what they value. And so brands then, you know, have such a deeper, not only responsibility, but just set of tasks to try to execute at a time when, you know, we're seeing traditional institutions and governments, et cetera, trusted less and less in brands and sort of these entities as community builders trusted more and more. So there's just an emotional and sort of lifestyle component that naturally arises in the brand world that maybe wasn't there before. Brands are part of social conversations. Brands are part of pop culture, really, in every single way.Is it fair to call it kind of a flattening a little bit like that? I mean, so I'm thinking about experiences I've had in my research where, you know, in the past to ask somebody who they look up to or who they admire was a way of understanding a kind of aspiration. And I feel like in more recent years when I asked young people that question, they kind of refused to participate. You know what I mean? They kind of like, I don't really look up to people, you know what I mean? I'm not playing this game or I'm going to tell you that I admire this brand or that brand or this celebrity or this celebrity. And I wonder if that resonates with you and if it's connected at all to this sort of, I mean, I'm using that term flattening. I don't know if that's accurate, but that's what I hear you kind of describe it.Yeah, I mean, one thing we sometimes say in talking in a different context, talking about sort of Gen Z career or life aspirations, is that more and more Gen Z wants to move on rather than move up. So to your point, that kind of that ladder in life, that ascendancy where you might see someone at the top and want to aspire to be that feels like it's sort of dissolved a bit. I think another thing is, you know, in a world where everything is so much more transparent and we're kind of fully aware of people's accomplishments, but also their flaws behind the scenes.It's harder to say or associate your, you know, your ambition with one specific person because you can always be worried that maybe they've done something that you don't agree with or maybe explicitly, you know, they've done something that you don't agree with. So the fact that we know more about these, quote unquote, celebrities makes it, I think, harder to root your identity and wanting to be just like them.Both those things seem to have kind of a little dark edge to them a little bit. Well, how would you describe, I mean, you know, not to be a nostalgic old man guy, but, you know, Gen X, when I was coming up, we were the slackers, you know what I mean? What do people get wrong about Gen Z and what's distinctive about them?Yeah, you know, I think it's funny and I feel like more and more generational research, which I love the subject. I think more and more over the past couple of years, it's been, you know, scrutinized or, you know, people say something to the effect of, but everyone's an individual, you know, everyone's so different. The generation is so large, therefore, you know, categorizing or the device of generations or Gen Z is meaningless or it's futile in marketing because, you know, the range or the spectrum of who's in there is so large.And I think there's a couple of ways to kind of respond to that. The first is, you know, yes, the generation is large, but the reason we use these devices is because it remains helpful as a way to understand how different groups at different times are experiencing life speed and technology. The other thing that people say a lot is, or a parent might say, well, like, you know, my daughter, she rarely ever uses her cell phone.So therefore, like the trope that Gen Z is always on their phone is wrong. And I think the answer there is simply, you know, no single anecdote just proves the average. The metric is there because on average, young people spend more time on screens than people of older ages.So, you know, as in any statistical group, it doesn't really matter what your daughter does. It matters what, on average, this age group is doing. And so these conversations persist because they're useful and because they're things that we can point to directionally for what different groups and what different communities are doing.That being said, of course, the more that you drill down and the more specific that you get with the group, the more rich the findings will be. I mean, especially what we're seeing with Gen Z is that there's so many, you know, sort of fragmented or fractured communities, whether it be basic things like a divide in politics among gender or, you know, really specific sort of approaches to sustainability among, you know, European Gen Z. So I guess all of that to say, I believe in the power of generational research to understand what's happening with the emerging kind of cohort of the world, while also, of course, acknowledging that the further you zoom in, the more rich insights you'll find. And I think both things are true and important to continue looking at.Yeah. Do you have any mentors that you really kind of turn to often or touchstones, you know, whether it's an idea or a concept that you return to quite a bit?Yeah, I mean, there's definitely people who I look to as anchors in certain spaces. I mean, I was just talking a bit about the debate around generational research and its value. And there's a woman, Jean Twenge, who is an author and sort of research scientist in the field who I really respect and who I feel like has kind of the best handle on the ability to articulate why it's valuable and what continues to be the most interesting differences between generations. In fact, she has a book called Generations, which I would definitely recommend to anyone out there.It's very popular for people just to get very excited about debunking generational research as being hoo-ha, pseudo-sci.I mean, and I understand the critiques, but I think it's more popular to critique and to attack, especially on platforms like LinkedIn than it is to actually create or generate something new. And so if someone wants to spend their time that way in interrogating something as opposed to looking for the value, I think that's up to them.My mentor had a, you know, in our research, he would always say in talking to the client, he would say, he would coach them that we're all so trained to be critical that we have to actively create the conditions for sort of positive response. And so all of the questioning that we do and that I learned to do was always really affirmative and appreciative and really encouraging people into positive descriptions because the default is deeply critical.Yeah, no, I love that. I really resonate with that. I think the world has, you know, sort of enough critics and not enough creators. And so that's something I try to emulate, even in little things like whenever I'm doing a brand report or a brand study, I try really hard to use only positive examples to affirm what I believe is working well as opposed to, you know, dunking on brands who might have had a misstep or an error. And I just think it's important. Where does that come from, do you think? Is that something you learned? I don't know. It just seems, you know, I think I probably hear my mom's voice in the back of my head saying like, you know, don't step on anyone when they're down. But I think also just in terms of productivity and really for the audience or brand out there reading it, it's a lot more helpful to make a recommendation and then show examples or creative ways that brands are starting to execute on it, as opposed to show an example. Or give a recommendation and then show an example of someone who did something horribly, which, you know, just instills fear and reservation, which is not the goal of the Gen Z brand consultants. Yeah.You've done, what have you been working on lately? Any themes that you've been exploring in particular and any learnings that you find particularly interesting?Yeah, one thing I've been digging really deeply into lately is sort of this, and it's been happening for a while, but it feels especially resonant right now is sort of the idea of this changing economic and educational paradigm for young people. So, you know, in a world where less and less students are going to traditional universities or more and more employers are feeling like Gen Z don't have the right attitude, skills or socialization to be successful. You know, what does the future of that career ladder look like?And we're also seeing, you know, things like by 2027 almost half of the world's workforce will be part of the gig economy, right? So it's just also a time when that 40 years at the same company, nine to five, is just eroding. So it's a really interesting moment in the career world, the education, the upskilling world for young people.Oh my God. Did you say 2027? It'll be a 50% gig economy?I think you can look at it as either the skills gap is either, you know, this big problem, or you can look at it sort of as an opportunity. And it feels like traditional education as it becomes more expensive and more inaccessible, and also just as its syllabus becomes more futile in the face of rapid innovation. There's actually a really cool opportunity for brands to step in and become more of these lifelong educational part and upskilling partners for this emerging kind of independent Gen Z workforce.You know, so I sort of imagine a future where education won't be, you know, a four year period in your life or end with a degree, but you'll almost have a, I don't know, like a booklet of Boy Scout badges that continuously get stamped and added to as you go through life, upskilling and sort of learning new things continuously. And brands can be one of the most interesting providers for those upskilling and, you know, career learning or resourcing moments.What examples are out there of brands in that space that seem to be doing it well or sort of, you know, embodying this new way of developing?Yeah, I mean, I think a real basic example is we're seeing tons of tech companies and really actually even financial services companies and into all industries drop their degree requirements. You know, which is a big change. For so long it mattered deeply what, you know, what certification or what degree you had and what school it came from.Now we're seeing more and more in this kind of creator economy world that your portfolio, the people that you know, the executions or projects that you've been a part of is really the driving force behind that initial stage of employment. Another cool thing that we're seeing is brands like Google offer these sort of micro certifications or, you know, many degrees. And it's so rather than, you know, paying one hundred thousand for a degree that includes all sorts of classes or coursework that, you know, might not be interesting or relevant to you.You sort of pick and choose the two or three certifications you want from Google and you earn a degree that way in a more specialized sense that begins to instantly onboard you more to the industry and the people and the companies that are, you know, of interest to your career. And Google's quite cool with it. They do it both externally, but also internally for their workforce, all sorts of different micro certifications and almost little degrees that allow you to move between functions and specialties within the company.We were talking about mentors and touchstones and you mentioned Jean Twenge. Are there others that you return to ideas or concepts?Yeah, there's another one that's fresh on my mind because it's been released. This year's version has been released in the last week or so. But every year, Matt Klein does his meta-trend report, which is something that I sort of look to as a, I don't know, a lightning rod of annual thinking because of the way that it synthesizes and comprises all of the year's trend reports into a single report of basically what's trending amongst the trends.So anyone who works in the marketing or brand world will know that there's no shortage of PDF files of the future of this or the 2024 things to know or the future of travel, the future of wellness, the 10 things to know about brands in automotive. And he basically takes all of those and with his own mind, synthesizes them down into 15 meta-trends. And so there's a whole kind of body of research and lore behind it.So people should check it out, but it's a really, really great way to sort of summarize and understand the year and where culture is going, the edges of culture. Yeah, I think I use it in two ways. One is more of a, in a meta way to sort of look at what has happened and step back and evaluate what it means for my own processes or my own ways of approaching things. I'll give you an example.So one of the things that he talked about in the report this year is that one of the unexpected findings was that 90% of the world's trends reports all published global trends. Trends reports come from the same nine cities. And that's really interesting if you think about it because it sort of shows how much of the industry, the industry of trend reports is an echo chamber, is using language that is either reductive or has already been said before.When in reality, probably the most interesting in emerging trends, especially for someone like me who's interested in youth culture, come not from the same nine cities that they've always come from, you know, the London's, the New York's, etc. But probably from countries that have the massive populations of young people like Indonesia and Nigeria, you know, where almost no trends reports are coming from. And so I think in a meta sense, it's just a good reminder that market research and especially this kind of exploding industry of trend reports are often missing the most interesting parts of culture.And, you know, I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday and we sort of joked that only a country that has plateaued would spend time creating trend reports, whereas the fast growing sort of emerging fun spaces of the world are just living it. They're just doing it, right? They're not reflecting on the year's trends.And so we were joking, but I think the point stands that there are so many fun, emerging and interesting trends and sort of happenings in culture that aren't covered in trend reports simply because they might not be happening in the 10 cities that they most often are published in. That’s beautiful. I mean, I love where we are in this conversation too, because there's a couple layers there too. There's the sort of the monoculture of those big cities, right? But there's also, I guess I'm curious, to what degree is there sort of a monoculture and sort of digital culture or sort of social media culture? And how do you avoid, and then even AI, you know what I mean? Like as a researcher and you're trying to understand culture, there's lots of ways in which access to culture is very, very easy. And you can feel like you can interact with people all over the world engaging in behaviors at a digital level.But how do you balance sort of, how do you access the fringe or the emerging parts of culture and avoid getting sucked into, I guess, a very dramatic image coming into my head, some whirlpool of sort of commodified generic kind of insights?Yeah, I think that's something I'm wrestling with a lot right now. I mean, to your point, there's more access than we've ever had as humans to dive into super fandoms, worlds away from us or specific communities of fishermen. You know, 4,000 miles away.And to actually just see and hear their conversations on an intimate level, it's really awesome. And the access that we have or the ability to sort of digitally travel across to see different and hear from different people is greater than it's ever been. But at the same time, when we step back and start to roll up those findings, those trends, those learnings, it does seem like we continue to put our own lens on it and arrive back at the same space.So I think for me, the issue is not or the thing I'm trying to tackle, you know, let's say this year is not access to different interesting communities because the world has no shortage of them. But it's once we zoom back out and start to create recommendations or codify trends, how to not lose that richness, how to not just return to, you know, a trend that has been phrased that way several times before.Yeah. Can you tell me a story about this?Yeah, I mean, one thing that comes to mind right away is this idea of within Gen Z, there's this kind of this constant tension between individuality, which I talked about before, their deep desire for sort of creativity and self-expression in standing out with collective belonging, which is the idea that everyone's heard, you know, so many times of Gen Z and the loneliness epidemic, Gen Z and their isolation, Gen Z doesn't date, they don't have enough friends. And so there's this really interesting tension, and I'm certainly not the first to talk about it between Gen Z wanting to stand out and be noticed and sort of a platform to write their personal brands with Gen Z wanting to find a community that they fit into.And so I'm trying to find literally today, this week, this year, a way to solve for this or add a new, add the freshest layer onto this paradox that we're seeing in culture. So not just to simply say that we're recognizing this duality or this kind of contradiction, but to show or find communities who are starting to act on it well. So where are spaces where young people are bringing other young people together, both giving them a sense of community and the ability to sort of stand out and kind of let their light shine. And so, you know, that's an area of research or an opportunity for brands that I think I'm very much still unpacking.What do you feel like you might do? Yeah, I mean, I want to spend time understanding and just within both physical, really, and digital spaces, you know, at the points or the intersections where I feel like people are both feeling a deep sense of belonging and really prideful about the personal brands or the influence that they're creating in those spaces. And it's funny because I think, you know, right now we're seeing the reemergence of so many like IRL hangouts, you know, in real life moments and get together.It's like for almost all of 24, like those run clubs or picnics have been trending, which just sounds silly, maybe to older folks, but just getting Gen Z out back into the world physically with people. And there's been so many clubs and sort of gatherings like that that have been emerging. And then, of course, everyone's super familiar by now with all the different digital spaces, whether it be, you know, the Roblox fashion competitions or whatever, where there's an opportunity to both socialize and relax setting, but also to show off a little bit of your creative flair and just have fun with it.I love what you just said. I appreciate that you felt the need to caveat picnic is being silly for older people. What can you help me understand? Tell me a little bit more about the reality of why it is meaningful and why you think maybe somebody older doesn't maybe just really doesn't understand what it's about. There isn't. It's this need to have to feel neat, the same need.Yeah, I mean, we touched on it a little bit earlier when we were talking about the rise of these really micro niche sort of communities that the Internet has allowed for. Right. There's no shortage of various online communities. And we especially saw that explosion or peak or maybe even just really get started during it during Covid. And then one of the things we saw coming out of Covid and still to this day over the last year or so is how those individual micro communities began to migrate from the Internet into physical spaces. You know, and so, for example, there was a funny one in California called the Diplo Run Club. So it's people who are fans of Diplo's music plus love running. Right. And so it's just like these funny combinations of niche interests that are manifesting originally online, but then really coming to life and sort of growing in physical spaces.And so whether there be, you know, I don't know, there's other ones like Seattle or Chicago Swim Club, which was just a bunch of people who would go jump in, jump in the water early on every Friday morning or the picnics or the show and tells. So they're just fun ways that groups of sort of isolated people who found connections online in digital spaces among niche interests are now coming to life and exploring sort of the world together. And I still think, actually, and I've mentioned this to several clients, I don't know if it's ever caught on, but I still think there's massive opportunity for the brand that becomes known for helping Discord or other similar groups come together and meet and activate for the first time in real life. There's so many online communities forums, like let's say XYZ Discord channel, who are yearning for the space and ability to get together in real life, but maybe just lack the resources or just the organizational capability to do it. And I think it's such a massive opportunity for brands to help people get together.You know, another example that people might be familiar with is Hinge. So Hinge has the One More Hour initiative, which is a fund that it's created. And this also ties back to the points around Gen Z co-creation, a fund that it's created for different social clubs, Gen Z based social clubs to get to help get more people together in real life, spending time together physically. So any sort of Gen Z owned and organized group can apply to receive funding from the Hinge One More Hour fund and then use that money to really help facilitate a get together for people in real life. And it's sort of solving on that need.Yeah, that's amazing.Putting Hinge kind of at the middle of the conversation of how do we help more people get together? How do we reduce that isolation and loneliness? Yeah.What are the implications? I mean, it's so exciting to, like, I hear you on the hunger for IRL experiences, right, and physical connection and belonging. What are the implications on sort of digital spaces? Is there a similar sort of evolution in terms of where and how people want to gather or interact in the digital spaces and the platforms, or is it sort of more the same? Is that too broad a question? It's a hard one because I think we see the pendulum sort of constantly swing back and forth. You know, I'm imagining the massive, you know, concerts in Fortnite or all the hype around the metaverse from years past. And then I'm also imagining, you know, the touch grass memes and all of the people who are using flip phones rather than smartphones, just as both a literal way to sort of unplug, but also just a way to show the people around them that they're doing something a bit different and that they want to be less attached. That being said, I think digital environments and digital connection is sort of more important than ever, you know, but we just might be doing it in more of a balanced way where it's using the tools to connect with people based on interest and leveraging the algorithms to find the content that's most relevant to us so that we can be more efficient with how we're spending our time. So we might reach sort of an interesting equilibrium where hopefully the tech allows us to surface opportunities for IRL experiences and connections faster as opposed to the tech swallowing us up in the constant need for scrolling or, you know, experiences that exist purely online and therefore not allowing us out into the world.I have two questions before we end. And the first is, I guess, well, just to share, there's an organization, they're called New Public, and I'm not going to do a good job of defining what they do, but I think what they're all really about is creating digital public spaces. And there's something interesting in that concept. I mean, I live in a small town and lots of very real local community conversations are happening on Facebook, like in a group, which is a giant private platform, of course. So I think they're asking for advocating for sort of new ways of, I guess, local is a form of analog, right? Isn't that sort of a proxy for the kind of belonging that we're talking about? So local digital seemed to be a cool concept and novel in a way that I hadn't really encountered before.I love that. And that reminds me, a friend of mine, Brandon, was what we were talking about, what we thought would be, you know, some of the interesting things manifesting online in 2025. And he talked a lot about how we're going to go, and this was kind of his hot take, how we're going to go from community to neighbors, because we've so much lost the idea of neighbors over the past several years, right?Like even just in general. And I thought that was a really, you know, fun and interesting way to think about it. Not that community or the idea of belonging is going anywhere, but more so that the emphasis might shift back to this idea of neighbor, which I think requires more effort on both people's parts. And so I thought that was really interesting.Yeah, I think a community is sometimes today used too loosely, you know, so it might be people who share the same interest or who support the same person but don't necessarily know each other or show up for each other or sacrifice something to help one another. Whereas I think neighbor comes with a bit more responsibility, a bit more work in that, you know, it requires a mutual investment on both sides in a way that, you know, some people might say they're a part of X community or, you know, thank you to everyone in the community. But really those people aren't connected or working, you know, for each other in a way that, or sacrificing for each other in a way that, you know, sometimes neighbors have to.I remember this was a long time ago, maybe eight years ago, 10 years ago, it was a while ago doing groups for a client. And I have a projective exercise where I have people imagine the competitive set as members of the same family. And I remember this person saying, just describing one of the brands in the category as, as a neighbor, and I was like, well, what do you mean a neighbor? She's like, neighbor, like, I don't really know him. I don't know anything about him. And I was just, it was shocking to me because when I grew up, a neighbor had a different, like, you knew your neighbors, but it was so stark that the neighbor had become somebody that you didn't know, which is just sort of shocking.Yeah. I mean, I think today, you know, especially in a world where, where, where younger people sort of associate or identify less with their physical geography and more based on their interest points. Right. So I might not be Reid the Minnesota and I might be Reid the guy who likes XYZ artists and XYZ, you know, fashion. And that's more important to tell the world about me than the city that I'm from. Neighbor just means less.But I think when, you know, my friend Brandon Hurd was talking about it, he meant it in the same way that you're thinking about it. Neighbor in the traditional connected sense, not neighbor in the, we don't really even know who lives next to us anymore because it switches every year.Yeah. One last thought, because this is close to my heart. I have an eight year old daughter, we walk around and I address kind of everybody who lives in my town as a neighbor. And I'll say, and she'll say, why do you say hello to that person? I'm like, oh, well, they're a neighbor. And she refuses to admit that the neighbor is anybody other than her definition of neighbor is they have to live next door. You got it. I keep, I keep expanding, trying to expand her definition to include people beyond the next door name.No, I love that. And I think that actually gets to the heart of, kind of the difference I was making or the distinction I was making between what a community is and what a neighbor is. And I guess the ideal state was that we would have communities, you know, each of which member we treated like neighbors. And so that, that would be the most powerful version of a, of an actual scale and community.That's beautiful. Reid, this was so much fun. I really appreciate you sharing your time. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Philip Lindsay is the Democracy Innovations Program Manager at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. At the Hannah Arendt Center, Lindsay leads the Democracy Innovation Hub, where he conducts workshops for public servants and educators. He has been involved in initiatives like citizens’ assemblies, which aim to foster collaborative democracy by involving everyday people in governance through random selection and deliberation.RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED:More in Common A non partisan research groups studying drivers of polarization, and producing reports that build social cohesion. Braver Angels An organization that brings conservatives and liberals together for structured conversations.Ground News A news service that shows how left, center, and right media cover different stories.Alright, here we are. Philip, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. So I don't really know this, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She teaches oral history down the street. And I stole it because it's a beautiful question, but it's really big, so I over explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?That feels like a very easy question to me. It's where I'm currently visiting - 10th and Carpenter in Philadelphia. I grew up in what I think is one of the most dynamic, rich neighborhoods in Philadelphia and in the United States. And I mean, rich in the sense of not monetarily, though it's not a poor neighborhood. The Italians in South Philly called it the longest living or still open-air market in the country. So you can still go six days a week. And most of the day, people are selling fruits and veggies and all kinds of foods outside under, you know, awnings. You've seen Rocky, it's where he's running through the time market and the barrels are on fire.So I grew up a block away from that. And there's just a rich history, both connected to the market and various waves of immigration. And we're 15 blocks south of Independence Hall where the Constitution was written. And that's where I grew up. And it's a dense urban area that you can, you know, is a colonial America where you can walk anywhere. And that's where I grew up. And that influenced the social and political and economic dynamics of this neighborhood has greatly shaped me and exposed me to all kinds of things.What does it mean to be from Philly when you're out in the world? Or what does it mean to you?I think those connotations, like anything, it's, you know, one defines that word, the city, but the connotations of Philly are usually that it's working class and a little more humble. You know, it's always a comparison to a place like New York. But, you know, Philly usually doesn't, you don't think of glitzy, you don't think of, it's a little more rough around the edges.And, but yeah, what does it mean to be from Philly? I don't think in general there's any defined meaning, but for me it's relating to the market, honestly. The market is that much of an influence and just a place of dynamism in exchange. Obviously, there's the history of American democracy that can be traced back to Philly.And I would say, you know, I would say a few things. There's a Quaker tradition that I was exposed at an early age that's part of the state's history. You know, it's, of course, a majority black city and a big sports city.But I mean, one thing that I always find interesting I tell people about Philly is that the city was losing population. I mean, this is true for many industrial centers in the United States, but after World War Two, every census showed population decline. So Philly still has less people than it did in 1950.There were over two million people at that time. And now it's been creeping back up since the 2010 census. That was the first census since World War Two when the population actually increased. And it's still 1.6 something, I believe. So you've got a ton of housing stock, which means you have a ton of space. You've got a lot of community gardens. They get lots. You've just got more space. And that has kept prices down.Again, a little more rough around the edges. But it's allowed for, you know, you still have a thriving art and cultural community that can afford to live here and experiment and do fun, do interesting community oriented stuff.Do you have a memory of what you wanted to be as a kid, like what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yes, I was obsessed with baseball until I was like 12 years old and absolutely just wanted to play major league baseball. I also wanted to own my own pizza place. Again, I kind of owed to the market, like the local pizza place that I would go to. And I remember telling my sister, like, I'm going to own a pizza place. And she just looked at me and she was like, you're better than that. Like she was so elitist about it. She was so elitist about it. But that's, yeah, pizza and baseball, essentially.What was the magic of the market? What's the story?Oh, you've got to come down and see it. It's still magic. It's it's and it's become more dynamic. I mean, you have it originates, you know, I'm not an expert on the history of the market, but you've got in the late 1800s, you've got the Italian population, you've got a Jewish population. I think you've got an Albanian population.You've got a kind of maybe not Albanian. You've got a mixture of all immigrants, but it's more dominated. It wasn't always Italian. It's called the Italian market. It used to be called the Italian market. It was never always Italian, but it was a predominantly Italian neighborhood.And so it was an open market modeled on, I guess, what was what was the old, you know, the 18th, 19th century open air markets. And, you know, just the efficiency of getting all the food to one place and having folks come to one place like before we had supermarkets, XYZ.And, you know, this is like three story buildings down one long street, nine street.So, I mean, it started off mostly Italian. And then of course, the 20th century has had successive waves of different immigrants who tend to bring their foodways, the Vietnamese, the Mexican, the Central Americans who have reinvigorated the market with their fresh culinary traditions, their small businesses, you know, their entrepreneurial spirit. And you've got that.And then you've got the fact that it's just a place where people outside in the open talking to each other, bumping into each other. Even in the winter, they have a big fire, the big barrels that keep the outdoor market warm with these big barrels, metal barrels that they fill with wood. And so, I mean, it's just intimate and special and cozy and rough and in.Yeah, if you watch, there's a hilarious Always Sunny and Philly episode where they go to Italian markets to barter. And that's a that's a. Yeah. So it's just dense and alive. You know, it's not no screens, no, you know, no electronics. So you're outside and asking people how much stuff costs. And it's still like that. So it's special.Tell me a little bit about - I know you're visiting you’re back home for the holidays. But tell me a little bit about your work or what you're up to, where you're working and what your role is.So I work at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. And my role for the past several years has been both on the communication side of the center, helping with our annual conferences that we put on that people should check out that are about different political and social themes every year. Always bring a mixture of interesting journalists and local activists and international experts and authors and poets there.And that's open to the public. But since I started the Arendt Center, I've really been passionate about Citizens Assemblies, which is how I first heard about the Arendt Center. The Arendt Center put on one of the first academic or more academic conferences about Citizens Assemblies three years ago.And I registered to attend and then became just very fascinated by this concept of bringing everyday people together across party lines and from a more citizen power perspective to make political decisions and make judgments about the world together. And I came to that conference three and a half years ago and ever since I've been working on this concept of Citizens Assemblies trying to reach out to folks who know way more about the topic than I do, learn from them, visit processes that are happening in other places, connect with politicians who are interested in running assemblies, connect with activists who are interested in convening them.And so what we do at the Democracy Innovation Hub is we convene and connect with the various different folks who are facilitating assemblies, practitioner organizations, elected officials and public servants who are interested in deepening public participation in political decisions in their localities or at the state level, at the national level, and trying to catalyze processes of high quality in places like New York State, but also generally on the East Coast in our general vicinity. So I run that, I'm the program manager of the Democracy Innovation Hub. And what was your attraction? What were you up to at the time of the Citizen Assembly, that event was on your radar and you were so excited about it? I mean, climate and energy, common sense in terms of making sense of the world together in a world of AI and competing facts or, you know, the alternative facts as they've often called. It seems to me before I learned about assemblies that democracy itself couldn't move forward with just two major parties that sort of were increasingly living in different worlds. And I didn't see a path forward in terms of an institution that could create sustainable involvement of everyday people. I mean, I specifically have worked on campaigns before and I've been in certain moments of my life burnt out from a campaign, whether it's electoral or another campaign's winner-take-all or black or white outcome where you either win or you lose. And I think, essentially, if you're trying to get young people involved in democracy, simply having them fight for their candidate or fight for their cause can lead to a lot of false binaries between like, if you lose this campaign, there's nothing more for you to do. Whereas if you have a different institution that is about bringing people together and having them experience each other's perspectives and then come up with solutions together, you can have a different, you can kind of disrupt that sort of burnout culture and campaign culture, which is all about, you know, we will win. We will make it to the promised land if we just pass our bill. The reality is like, no matter who passes their bill, there's like, politics doesn't end, right? There's never an end to that and it's more sustainable.When I found out about Citizen Assemblies, I was fascinated, first of all, by this concept that random selection was an alternative form of, or was the original form of democratic process, which just isn't plot. Like, I just didn't know about that. Yeah.Yeah, I want to, I want to spend time peeling the two things apart because they like the two. I mean, it's a horrible word, but these paradigms are right that the way that we do things now is that the winner takes all zero sum, the way you participate is this competitive, you just sort of fight for yours. And if you win, you win, if you don't, you lose. And we, I think there's, you know, I talked to people around town, that's, that's democratic, that's democracy, so you can't really get it. And so it's hard sometimes to communicate, what's the benefit of doing it a different way? Deliberation has benefits that make it very different, right? Because, and I'm just kidding, you were just speaking to it, what does, why do something in a deliberative way when you put in this winner takes all democratic way? Do you know what I mean?Yeah, I think there's a couple ways to think about it. One is certain this, I mean, if you would just think about it from a chessboard sort of like zero sum game, even if even if you're thinking about what does it mean to build a bigger coalition, one can argue, thinking through and deliberating under amongst the merit, the various folks that make up your coalition or the various folks who you see on your side, right, that that hasn't added added added value, even if, even if you're within the winner take all mindset. But I think beyond that, so yeah, so I, the first point I want to kind of dig a double click on at once, which is, you know, groups that cooperate better can compete better against other groups, right?So if you've got bad dysfunctional team dynamics, you're not going to compete against other groups better. So is that and then the second point would be, if you can create an institution that actually breaks up some of the cognitive biases and just like, I'm always, I'm very interested in, well, I'll give a very specific example. There's an organization called ground news that I recommend everybody check out, which provides you pretty direct information about your own cognitive biases by giving you a perspective on how often an issue is reported in the left on the left on the right and in the center.So it will give you a headline about some topic, you know, wild files in California or XYZ, the Supreme Court just did this, right? And then it will say like the percentage of news outlets reporting on this from the left versus the center versus on the right. And it will immediately show you whether you're maybe on the right and you're blind spot because you had not even heard this headline, right?There's an aspect to the deliberative institution that tries to draw upon the cognitive and viewpoint diversity of a community. And I think the added value of that type of institution on this second point, this idea of, hey, a lot of times we're wrong and we don't know we're wrong. And most of the time we're wrong. I think that that's the reality is that the sort of cognitive biases that we all have about the way the world works. And especially they've done a lot of research.There's a group called More In Common that has done a lot of research on the ways we view the other side and what we think they think about the world. And I'm often impressed by the way members of my family or friends of mine just don't really interact with people so often who at least, you know, in person, maybe they interact with people on TV or they watch that. They just don't actually understand the internal worlds of other people.And they're not, they're not incentivized to try to understand those internal worlds. So there's actually just a reality in which most of the time everybody can't see the whole picture. And so I'm really curious about these deliberative institutions, citizen assemblies included, as places where you start to see the whole picture in one room.And it's not a silver bullet, but you start to see what it would look like if people's political imagination, their cognitive biases were broken down, even if for a couple weekends.How do you explain what a citizen assembly is to people? Where do you start, you know, when you're in a cocktail party conversation? What's the best way you found to help people understand what the citizen assembly is and why it seems so important?Yeah, I think I try to be more intuitive about this in terms of who I'm speaking to. For instance, some people liken the assembly model to a jury, right? And then one event I was at recently I asked, you know, I asked the room if anyone had been on a jury before, right? And then you're going to get certain people who have had specific relationships with a jury and good or bad.So sometimes I bring up the jury, but actually more often I think about, I talk about it as like a different way of doing democracy. I mean, I've changed the way I talk about this depending at different times. But I think, you know, the ways that our field has increasingly communicated about this and that I think is useful is like you talk about two things, you just simplify it, right? There's two things.It's like who's in a room and what they're doing in the room. And the who's in a room is different from other processes because it uses this civic lottery, which means everyone has an equal chance of being selected. And that the group in the first part who's in the room, the group in the room is going to be as diverse as possible from a cognitive point of view, from a geographic point of view, from an ethnic point of view.And those questions are political, right? So one, Who's in the room? Civic lottery. Two, What they're doing in the room, we're not talking about a couple hours, we're talking about multiple weekends. So like the amount of time.Most people, when you talk to them about this, they think about some process they were at that lasted a couple of hours. Because most of us have not had the chance to serve as an elected representative or in a deliberative body. Most people are not on a committee, most people are not on a some sort of governing body.They don't have the chance to experience governance. So the second part is you're spending a lot of time with these other people, really getting to know them, learning about an issue and deliberating, which means thinking through the pros and cons of taking different decision making. So it's really about responsibility.So I try to break down just those two things, like who's in the room and how long, and then if there's a longer conversation, go into the political dynamics. But I think it so depends on who you're talking to, right? Like if someone has no, I mean, America is such an apolitical culture that a lot of people have no interaction with the government. Yeah, yeah, the expectations of what it might be like.I mean, I'll say that word and they just assume, like you say, just it's like a town hall, just another word for a town hall or something. Right. How would you break that? Can you be explicit about what, how does it work? To the degree, like you've talked about it a little bit, you know what I mean? That they're meeting over multiple weekends. What's happening in that room? And to the degree that you're familiar with the process that the members of the Assembly go through. Like that's another part. I think nobody really gets the idea that it's facilitated. They just sort of think the facilitation feels really powerful and it's sort of invisible. I think I know when I talk to people about it, just think, oh wait, you're putting a bunch of people in a room and they're just going to argue the way that everybody argues all the time. But yeah, this is a really structured space.Exactly. So the space is a good point. So I try to, and this is actually one thing I've been relying on more and more if I'm not, if I don't have access to a video or I can't show them a case study. It's, you know, think of a large room that can hold between 50 and 100 people that you can move between a large group discussion, plenary discussion, and small table discussion without changing rooms. And there's a front area for testimony stakeholders to come up to the front, be on stage or on the floor, and present from different perspectives about a specific topic. Right.So let's say we're thinking about some land use change to the city, right? Or some big investment decision that needs to be made around a new wastewater facility. Okay. Should we go in this direction or that direction with the investment? Folks from all sides of the issue, the private businesses involved, the local urban planners that know a ton about this topic, outside experts are presenting, they're chosen by a group that's convening the assembly to present to this larger citizen body.And again, we're talking anywhere between 36 and a couple hundred people, but let's imagine a group of about 75 in a room. That group of 75 is sitting at small tables of six to 10 people at every small table, and every small table has a facilitator. So you're learning about the issue, and then you're discussing it in your small groups.And you can rotate from table to table, but importantly, this facilitator at each table is ensuring that people are speaking the same amount of time, that people who are staying quiet are encouraged to speak up, right? So the structure is unlike most public meetings, which most of us are accustomed to. And what is the role? I mean, I remember my experience was at the summer workshop, where I feel like I just feel so grateful I was there to hear all these practitioners talk about it. And I'll share a link in the interview to the Wind Citizens' Assembly, hearing people talk about their experience in Ireland, making gay marriage and abortion legal.I was also struck by how they talked about it. Somebody described it as it's not public opinion, it's public judgment. Because all those members of the Assembly are being educated, they're really being made experts in a way on an issue, and given the responsibility of sort of talking it out and coming to consensus. I guess my question is, why is it showing up now? Like there's this thing called the deliberative wave. What do you think is driving its popularity? Why are people like me excited by what the Citizen Assembly offers? Do you have an idea?I mean, one of my favorite songs, the lyrics is, there's always a good solution on the verge of some revolution. So I think systemic breakdown of the democratic republics or the democracies around the world is sort of the blockage that happens when you have a systems design that doesn't include people and make them responsible fortheir own destiny. And instead has a system of policy, that's the politician's job, that's the lawyer's job, that's the expert's job.And voting is something that we should be proud of, we should conserve, we should defend the right to vote. But if the system is about me voting so that someone else can take care of the trash always, I think that system will tend towards dissolution in some way. You need a way of the system reproducing itself in terms of self-governance.And we're talking about self-government, and we don't have some institution, whether it's educational institution or deliberative institution, that is bringing people into the world. And Hannah Arendt, I mean, if you listen to Roger's podcast on Hannah Arendt, the recent ones, he's talking about education and Hannah Arendt's theory of education. And she talks about education as bringing the new people into the world and leading them into the, giving them the space to create the new world.If voting is about delegating responsibility, and increasingly it's not even about that, it's negative partisanship, it's sort of like, I just don't want those guys in power, as it increasingly just becomes a big middle finger to the system. And if that's the main way the majority of people interact with the system, the system will break down and it will trend towards, actually, maybe we should just have one guy or one lady leading the whole thing. It tends to be one guy, I guess.And if we're committed to a society without a boss, then we need an institution that brings people into the habit of governing a public judgment that you said. So I think the reason why we're all so fascinated by this is because it offers a different type of institution. One, that if you're sick of everybody just trying to tear down stuff and raise the middle finger at those things and blame some other, something else, this actually offers us a moment to say, what if we built this together? What if we actually built a different system of public participation together? It gives us a shared project to also work on, which is also really compelling.One more thing, actually, on that. The two-party system is so divisive at this point that so many people are exhausted by that process. They're exhausted by - I mean, if you watch debates, it's a joke. It's not impressive. It's not compelling.And I think it was, I'm going to get his name right. Is it Van Reybrouck? Is that the author of Against Elections? Yeah. At the beginning, he said, you know, I'm a marketing guy. So I'm, you know, he was talking in my language. I had been bored by this kind of language for years. He's like, we've been innovating or democratizing everything for like a decade, right? Except democracy. And that really calls attention to the fact that all that's really asked of us most of the time is, like you say, just to flip a switch. And so we're caught in this outrage machine. And my attraction to it was just feeling like, you know, that I had watched Hudson in my small town. We just didn't know how to have a conversation with each other. And we didn't really trust each other that much. And it just felt like nobody was in the same conversation ever. And so it seemed like this powerful way of helping us have a conversation with each other. And I'm curious about the mechanics a little bit. You pointed at the sortition, right? Like the lottery system. What is the significance of sortition? I mean, you talk about history, because that's the other thing people don't really quite get. Like it's facilitated over a long period of time. And then what is the significance of a randomly selected representative group? Why is that important?Well, I mentioned cognitive diversity. You know, a lot of people have different definitions of diversity, but it's rare that you can get a group of people in the room that come from very different backgrounds, but also very different political or social approaches to a problem, right? We're so, we're increasingly in our own bubbles from an informational standpoint.We have our own streams, our own feeds. We are segregated in terms of what schools we went to, public or private, what part of the city we grew up in. Those dividing lines have increasingly made it hard for us to even just make sense of, we trust each other a lot less.And this is a really dangerous tipping point, when you get to the point where you can't even trust other people. That's when the idea of a democracy really breaks down and people will really say, you know what, I would trust just having a boss. We just need a strong man, because I don't trust the majority of people.And if we're in that place, we desperately need to get together in public and have facilitated conversations, because at that point, people can exploit that situation and do a lot of harm. And so when you think through, if you think through, how do you get a bunch of people in the room who disagree together? Well, there's a couple of aspects of this. You either have a group of folks who are talking to each other and can get those different people in the room, right? Like, if you think of the way peace treaties are signed or the ways that gang members get together to work something out.It's like there's got to be a couple of people on the inside on both sides that are trusted by both sides that you can get those groups in, right? But even if you have those trusted individuals, you've got to have some method of selecting the rest of the group in a way that's fair. And one of the simplest ways is by a specific lottery, in the sense of if you're trying to build trust and trying to have a fair transparent process that says this was not corruption. And thisgoes back, you mentioned David Raybrook book, he mentions the history of the use of sortition as a tool of anti-corruption.Essentially, it's the kind of, if you think about the intuitive way we draw sticks, if we're on a, you know, who's going to go collect firewood or who's going to do XYZ or who's going to, you know, the lottery sort of like. We're familiar with a basic egalitarian way to select for a specific position. The important thing here is that we're not like randomly selecting the president, right? Like we're using this as an intentional tool to create what you mentioned was a demographically representative sample of the larger community.And so the importance there is if you're asking the question, how can we talk to each other across these divided lines? How can we get people in a room who are normally not in a room together? I think it's a combination of these two things. One, finding the trusted messengers that can speak across the lines, like that we need, right? For instance, the facilitators. You can get this civically, you can get a randomly selected group in a room together.If you don't have facilitators that really can speak plain language across these different communities, you're going to hit the same wall, right? So the civic lottery is not a silver bullet. You need groups of facilitators and cadres of people that are committed to this kind of institution to hold up the legitimacy of a process like this. And anyway, I hope I'm not going off too often in that direction.Yeah, so I would think of any trusted messengers, people that are willing to – often the people that can talk across these divides are people who have those divides within their own families. Yeah. No, I was completely with you, and I guess I was thinking about – oh, good Lord, I just lost my train of thought.Oh, that – oh, well, I always love Peter McLeod. He's talked about how citizen assemblies are the manufacturer of democratic integrity, that there's something trustworthy about them, and that because people are coming together, it's more trustworthy. You're actually building trust and integrity in a process by making it in the way. There's this combative winner-takes-all way of making decisions, right? Which just kicks up so much dust and conflict and division and, like you say, like disappointment. I mean, if you lose and your heart and your crest fall, what are you going to do after that? It's just – it's not resource efficient, but this is sort of regenerative in a way. It's sort of – you've used the word sustainable. So I feel like we've covered on sortition, right, like that that's connected to – and we've covered on facilitation that it happens over time and that it's deliberative.I'm curious about the types of questions. You know, we're sort of – this isn't just bringing people together to get along, you know what I mean? They're there to come to consensus and particularly good, it seems to me, what I've heard for very, very difficult, intractable problems or questions. How do you talk about the kinds of things one can address in the citizen assembly? And I also wonder how it is framed? You know what I mean? It's not really operating in terms of content in the ways that other things do.Yeah, so I was really excited and privileged to have gone to the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly that Peter was involved in. And that assembly was on electoral reform and thinking through the future of the way that British Columbia did its elections, right? First pass the post, winner takes all, proportional representation. They basically had 100 everyday people 20 years ago think through the future of the electoral system.So a lot of times when we talk about citizens, I'm just like, oh, are we going to do it on a specific topic? What's the specific thematic topic? And certainly like in New York City, for instance, that's what we're doing with our working group in New York. We're trying to figure out what are the right topics for this. But I do think that we would be missing the best opportunities if we just focused on the sort of the framing of specific issues that are like one time decisions. We'd be missing the bigger promise of this as an institution. And that's where I think it's funny. People point to the BC assembly still. It is part of what created this deliberative wave. And Peter tells this story really well. He was there and he's been leading the charge in Canada ever since. That assembly produced recommendations that went to a referendum. And I think this combination of an assembly about some big issue combined with a referendum is really fascinating and points to a different type of institution in terms of how to bring forward the public will when the people are thinking together. I don't know if you've checked out Fishkin'sbook from Stanford Democracy when the people are thinking that's really a good resource here.But constitutionally to pass the referendum you needed above 60 or to specifically change the process. But people are still talking about that assembly 20 years later and it created a wave of interest because it was such a big structural question at the heart of the future of British Columbia democracy. And I think the political awakening of people's political imagination around that as a different type of institution or decision making mechanism.That's the bigger question. It's not. Hey, is there a specific like to build or not to build a dam in this area that we should find. Like, I think that would be great if we can. There are issues that are right for that. But I think there are so many kinds of structural questions about the future of American democracy that we should be thinking a lot bigger and we should be more ambitious because we don't have the time to sit around and wait if we're like you know. So that's my my my desires that we start to think about this as an educating folks about to awaken folks political imagination around the possibility. I want to hear more about that because I feel like I learned that I walked away from that summer workshop with that distinction that it's very easy to see this as just sort of an engagement tool that you can kind of pull out of your toolkit every once in a while and apply to a problem. But there's a very different way you use the word institution.What examples, what is the argument to make this a permanent form in the marketing space? If you're a company and you've got a service or a product out there, you have to create new ways for people to interact with you. There's no new forms of participation other than I mean this deliberative democracy, right? It's a new way of interacting with our government. It's a new behavior in a way. Yes. Or am I overstating the case?No, I think it definitely is a different way of interacting.If I'm 18 years old and I've just become able to vote and exactly it's let's say it's 2035 and I turned 18 and my community has an assembly that happens every year as part of the it's just the pattern of civic participation in terms of how it governs. I'm going to have a wildly different idea of who I am in my community and what my relationship and responsibility is with everything else around. At the moment, all that's expected of me is to show up every couple of years and tick a box and get into arguments with people pretty much.Well, you answered the question better than I could. That's exactly the way, when we had a class about this at Bard, I asked them that the framing question is like what kind of system do you get when your primary method of engagement is by, you know, ticking a box every couple of years versus what would it look like if you as a young person were expected to serve on an assembly about a specific topic. And that you would actually be, you know, why not even start that in schools? And I think if we think about the way our student government works and we can imagine a system in which instead of learning about government, you were actually required to serve on a student council as part of your graduation requirements. And you maybe it was randomly selected, maybe it was you got to choose the year XYZ, but the concept of rotation and governing to be governed. And I mean, it would break down even this concept of politician and political class that we have. SoI liked exactly the way you framed it.Oh, and I still feel like I maybe heard an argument coming back to me from deep in my own imagination that well, nobody wants to serve on this. Nobody wants to do this anymore. But people don't participate anyway. But I feel like we somehow got into this place of apathy by not giving any, not investing any faith in anybody to begin with. You know what I mean?So we need institutions that that and systems that maintain that the commons that keep us, you know, keep us in contact with each other that break our cognitive bubbles that that are not like we're not mandating you become friends with people on the opposite side of the aisle. But it's also I mean, the way I think it's a lot less boring of a system if we were to have people rotating in and out of these assemblies. I think you'd get a lot more creativity.You'd get more. I think you'd get more creativity in companies. You'd get more creativity in social settings. You'd get more interesting art theater. I mean, I think there's something there that's way beyond just sort of governance. This is about one of the things I become fascinated with that it would be silly if I didn't share this is the original reforms.You know, I don't think we should idealize what ancient Greece was or where these practices of random selection come from. But we are living in such a tribal society right now in terms of our politics and the original reforms that instituted the random selection in ancient Greece were deliberately attempting to break up the old tribes that were based on class and privilege. And I've been fascinated with this idea of thinking about the mixing together that assemblies provide and how cool and how a lot of my favorite other experiences in life have come when I have been with a group of people that are very different from me doing some task that we're working on together.And so whether it's in its partition and random selection for an assemblies or things things like the idea of of national service around volunteer, you know, volunteering or there's many ways to think about this this intentional mixing as something that just brings a vitality and a newness and an inspiration and surprises to life, right? And we're increasingly living in this life. This life is just increasingly, you know, you know, shut yourself in and watch TV and we need to give young people something that's way more exciting than that. Yeah, that, you know, this it's not just citizens assemblies, but it is, it is getting outside in nature with people who you normally don't, you know, meet with them. And some of that can be bottom up and some of it needs to be experimented with, you know, across organizations and now I'm going off on another tangent here butOh, no, no, it's good. I'm right there with you. I mean, again, I mean, I just feel again, I mean, I was cool. But I remember him talking about how I mean, you're just diagnosing the thing that we're all talking about, that we kind of everything our world is so antisocial. You know what I mean? Like that was so many of the things that so much of how we're organized today keeps us apart. And if we can recognize that that's the issue, then we need to. I've never heard this word before, but we need to develop pro social behaviors. So if we're not actively creating pro social behaviors to address antisocial problems, then what are we doing? Right. And I thought that was so powerful because this really is a new way for people to interact with each other and to trust each other, which is so promising. So I don't know if there's anything else that you want to address. I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing. I think it's so awesome. And I'm so excited to just be sharing these ideas with people. So thank you so much.Yeah, absolutely. I would like to share with people these two resources that I think are really powerful. One is ground news that people should, you know, catch their own kind of political and news newsfeed bias with ground news. And the other is Brave Angels. Brave Angels is an organization trying to get people in the room across the red, blue political divide. And I've been really inspired by those two models of trying to get people exposed to folks who they're not normally not listening to or in the same rooms with.Yeah. Can you tell me a story about Brave Angels? I've been following them on Instagram for a long time. I haven't done anything to sort of implement it in my community, but it's reallybeautiful. And I admire what they're doing.And so the way we interact with politics is usually just through voting, but we're not socially engaged in one of the parties or our local system of governance. And why I'm starting here is that I went to Brave Angels. So Brave Angels is an organization that brings people together across the red, blue, conservative, liberal, generally political divide.And any of their events has to be co-chaired by one person who leans red, one person who leans blue. And I went to their convention out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, this summer. And I was just so impressed with the way they organized themselves and the fluidity, the integrity, the vitality and the social spirit of this massive gathering.Hundreds, if not over a thousand people meeting over multiple days to think about how to grow the organization, which is chapter based and has local chapters around the country and is a membership organization. And it felt like an anti-political political party in some ways. And it was such a dynamic space with some I mean, there were socialists in the room.There were MAGA hat wearing folks in the room. There were environmentalists. There were, you know, just such a politically diverse space that my head was exploding.And it was so fascinating. I said, even just the kind of experience of being in the room with this many different types of people who believe so many different things. And seeing them run workshops together, think about new things together for my youth, you know, a young Braver Angels group, which was hilarious.Like the Braver Angels youth group was running this facilitated sort of mock debate. And it was one of the funniest things I've been at. And so to just be in a space where instead of there was so much, there was so dynamic and you didn't know what was going to happen next.And I think that group is going to rapidly grow as people need as people search out alternatives. So that's why I share that and ground news as two resources. And I'm sure there's a Braver Angels group somewhere in the Hudson Valley that folks can reach out to.Yeah, I'll share links to all the stuff that you share. Thank you so much.My pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Erard is a linguist and author based in the Netherlands. His book “Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words” is out now. He served as writer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and worked as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute. His books "Babel No More" and "Um..." explore language learning and verbal mistakes.So I have a question, I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine who, she's an oral historian and she helps people tell their story. And I borrow it because it's a beautiful question, but I over explain it like I'm doing now because it's sort of a big question. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from?Where do you come from? Yeah, I mean, I feel like I've been writing about that for a long time, that question, you know? I kind of come from a migrant people in the middle of, the American continent and, you know, I have kept moving myself.So that where am I from is, you know, it's from, I'm from the places I remember and I'm from the places that I write about, you know, very much, I think in between things too. For some time living between Texas and Maine and going back and forth and now between America and the Netherlands and professionally I've always been situated kind of between academia and non academia. So academia and journalism, academia and strategic communications, academia and writing.And I feel like, you know, for all of that in between this, there's a real kind of productive tension there. When you're in Maine and you come from somewhere else, people say that you're from away and it doesn't matter where you're from, right? I mean, it could be a hundred miles up the road, it could be Saudi Arabia, but you are from away.And I'm married to someone who is a 10th generation Texan. So she's very much from, and we say that I'm the away part. I'm always looking for the next place to be, the next horizon, you know?So, you know, that question, where am I from? It's kind of like, where am I not away?Oh my gosh.To bend that around, yeah.Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid when you grew up?I think I cycled through all kinds of things. I wanted to be a cowboy. I actually knew real working cowboys. I grew up in Colorado as a little kid and knew these old, old guys who smelled like chewing tobacco and coal smoke and menthol, some sort of menthol joint rub. So that was part of it. And then when I was a little older, I kind of wanted to become a child saint. I grew up in a very Catholic kind of setting. And so, you know, of all of the people that were sort of shown to me as models, like dying as a child saint of some terrible unknown illness, blessing everyone for their sins. That seemed like a good career as any other ones.What's an example of a child saint? That's not something that is part of my experience. What would you have encountered? What would you have been like, oh, that looks like a good gig?You know, it was the idea of kind of like being a part but being exalted at the same time, you know, and going through these hardships, but always sort of being told, look, your hardships will add up to something that it will be for this sort of greater good or this greater power. But you will not have to endure it for too long because, you know, God is going to take you away before you reach adulthood. Now, looking back, I mean, I think that some of those stories and maybe even my own wish for that was really sort of a fear of losing childhood or a fear of what was going to come next in terms of, you know, puberty and adolescence. And so wanting to kind of arrest it and just skip the rest of it and go straight to heaven.I identify with that.Oh, yeah.Tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you do.So I'm located in Maastricht in the South of the Netherlands, Equatorial Netherlands, as they might call it, where it's so far South, it's not really even culturally Dutch anymore. You know, we're five miles from Belgium on one side and 15 miles from Germany on the other side. And people really have their own kind of thing going on here.We moved here in 2019, me and my wife and my two boys. We had spent a year here, a year previously, not here, but in another part of the Netherlands where I spent 12 months as a writer in residence at a language research institute called the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. And we ended up liking Europe and liking the Netherlands so much that we decided to stay.And then there was a job that came up here at Maastricht University in 2019. So I'm now a funding strategist and funding advisor for the faculty of law at the university, but that's really my kind of day job while I was working on a book about language across the lifespan or really these two storied moments that are sort of shrouded in mystery and ritual and expectation or nothing at all, which is the first words of babies and the last words of the dying.This book has just come out. It looks amazing, right?It's gonna be out in like two and a half weeks.Before we get into the book, I'm just curious about the places you've mentioned. What do you sort of love about where you are? What do you enjoy about that part of Netherlands?The language aspect of it, having to be in the face of not just Dutch but having to encounter my own kind of limits as a multilingual person, that's frustrating, but I also love it. And it's also a place where there's a local language that's not Dutch at all called Limburgish, which has different varieties spoken in different places. It's really not a standardized form of it.And people are very proud of it. And people are very, they sort of wave it around as something that they do and that nobody else does at the same time that they kind of don't want you to have it either. They sort of reserve it for themselves. So I really like that sort of feeling around language and being around multilingual people. The food is really interesting. The landscape is gorgeous. And I like the access to all of these other countries.When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of linguistics thing?I'm still waiting to discover that, I think.No, really?Yeah, I mean, I finished my PhD in 2000, but very quickly discovered that I didn't wanna be an academic, that I wanted to be a writer. And there was this, it was clear, there were a lot of stories to tell. There were a lot of outlets for telling them. And it looked like it would be possible to just be like a magazine writer, right? I mean, and in 1999, of course, everything was gonna be possible, right? So I lived that life for a while, and then I finished, and then kind of promptly almost starved to death.And the friend that I was telling you about before, he was one of these people who was also riding that wave. And he was kind of on my shoulder going, hey, man, you have so much stuff already, because I'd published in a couple of magazines and some national outlets. He said, with all the stuff you have, you don't need to be cooped up in a university, trying to get tenure, you can do whatever you want.And I felt very much inspired by that and went running. But the big discovery for me as a humanities person was like the business side of things, and to go, oh, I need a business model. And it was actually some artist friends in Austin who taught me that, like you may believe that you are, that it's no knock on your creative practice or your art to put food on your table.And so you need to figure out a business model that's also a sort of temporal model, something that gives you an amount of income that you need every month, and then lots of other time and psychic energy to do the work that you're here to do. So probably for 24 years, I've been creating that model, trying to keep it together, trying to put it back together when it falls apart, and so forth. So all in service of, I think, writing the things that I wanna write and going to places with linguistic topics that the discipline of linguistics doesn't typically go.So my second book was about people who are able to speak a lot of languages or who claim to be able to do that. And there are people who are on a daily basis, very multilingual, speaking five, six, seven, eight languages, but there are people who claim to have two dozen and there are historical figures who claim to have many more. So like, what is that phenomenon?And it was something that linguists never took seriously, even though there were many linguists who themselves were these kind of famed language learners, guys who would get on the plane with a guidebook, with a language book, and land in Finland, speaking Finnish or something like that. And so I found that super fascinating and kind of dug into that. And then the new book, which is about language at the beginning of life, which linguists are oriented towards naturally, but also language at the end of life, which no one has ever treated at all in any kind of systematic way. So I'm the first to take that up as well and kind of inventing a linguistics of the end of life.What, where did you begin that process? Like, how did you go about, what was the research experience for this book?Well, I mean, one joke is I had to kill a lot of people. No, there were no people that were harmed in the process of doing this. I mean, and you would maybe expect a book like this to be written by someone who has a lot of experience in hospices or palliative care or as a chaplain or something like that.And there are some very beautiful things that are written sort of from that experience and from that perspective, but I didn't have that luxury. And also I think wanted to benefit from a different kind of experience and from a little more distance, I think. And so for the end of life stuff, what I did was I locked into a historical dataset from the very first clinical study of the dying process that was ever done by this really interesting and very famous Canadian, who spent a time at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the late 19th century into the early 20th century.And he was interested in whether or not when people died, whether they experienced any discomfort, physical discomfort, psychological discomfort, spiritual discomfort. And he had an idea that they just sort of slipped away peacefully, but he felt the need for some evidence for this. And so he directed doctors and nurses to be observing people's deaths in these wards and over four years collected observations on nearly 500 deaths and wrote out very sort of, very plainly some sort of checked some boxes on these note cards that he had, which are in an Osler archive at McGill University.And it was pointed in the direction of these by a medical historian named Tom Lequeur. I met him at a conference and I was describing to him what I was interested in and saying, it's really hard to get data about. It's not like there's reliable stuff about this.If you ask people to remember things, it's very biased. If you just wanna know what happens normally, you know, particularly not just what people say, but how they use other parts of their bodies to communicate, you know, which we do during the rest of our lives. People don't like stop being, you know, language users that they're socialized to be just because they're dying, right? But their function changes and their ability to use these different modes changes and starts to degrade.I follow that. Can you help me understand what are you talking about when you talk about the use of the body changing at the end there?Well, I mean, nobody can see this, right? I mean, we're talking, we're using our voices. Nobody can see this, but I'm also like using my hands and you're nodding your head, which is sort of encouraging me to keep going in a particular way. And so when you talk to people about their experiences at the deathbed, you hear all of these other kinds of experiences with, you know, what someone does with their eyes or a facial expression or what someone does with their hands, you know, being able to touch someone, squeeze hands and how that changes, you know, over time. And even how people don't communicate anything, how there's silence, right? And not the silence that comes from a lack of presence or a lack of awareness, but it's silence that is intentionally communicative, right?Like, I'm not available for that question. I'm not gonna answer that and so forth. And then all of the experiences where people are trying to produce some sort of language and can't, which puts people who are with them in the position of then, you know, wishing that they had, you know, gotten, you know, what was exactly going on. And also put in the position of having to interpret things that aren't exactly clear, they're fuzzy, they're not articulated or they might be delirious as well. So they're not sensical, you know, they're not part of an interaction that seems to be about this world and the things that we know of this world. So if you ask people, you know, about an experience at the deathbed, sometimes they'll talk about, you know, what someone said, you know, what they vocalized.But they won't, and maybe they'll talk about other sorts of gestures, but they won't necessarily link those in time and talk about how far that was from someone's actual passing or how close that was to say when they came to hospice or something like that. So if you're, it kind of creates a, there's a shapelessness that sort of results from that. And an inability to really understand what is normal about that experience.And I really felt for myself that the kind of cultural models that I had about what happens at the end of life, as far as language goes, were just really uninformed. I'm a modern person in the sense that I really haven't experienced very much death and dying, not up close, right? It was always something that was sort of reserved for other people.You know, it was someone else's job to do. And, you know, I was on the outside. And I think even if you sort of have some experience, there's a much broader range of things that can happen that don't necessarily get described. They don't get described in terms of the broad range of what's possible there. And so the book was partly about wanting to, I mean, you can't say a menu because you can't choose it, but sort of a cataloging of all of the different phenomena that might show up. So in this historical dataset, there were doctors and nurses who just as a, you know, sort of bycatch of their main research project were writing down things that people said or other kinds of behaviors that they noticed that were about interaction or that were about communication.So I use that as the basic dataset, not in terms of talking about frequencies of, you know, certain kinds of phenomena, but all of the phenomena that do exist, right? That do occur. Like, let's talk about each of those things. And the phenomena that I went into it expecting to find a lot of was talking, but there in fact, wasn't very much of that. Yeah, there were something like four speakers who were quoted directly and another 12, whose, you know, speech was noted as having existed at all. And, but the larger, the largest sort of descriptions, there were people who were described as, you know, delirious or irrational or raging, you know, or things like that.The greatest number, the most frequent description was that deaths were quiet, which is really interesting. Both of those things, the delirium and the silence are really hard to write about. Or, I mean, you could almost write a whole book about, you know, each one of those because the question, a number of questions arise. Is it intentional? What is the level of intentionality that goes into the production of these? Where is the person, you know, in this, in these phenomena?And what are the people who are interacting with them to do with what they're interpreting? And, you know, to what degree is it consistent with the way that they've understood the person previously, if they knew the person sort of, if they knew them well, and so forth. So that's, that kind of, that dataset kind of formed the core of that part of the book.And then it was going out and talking to chaplains, chaplains, end of life doulas, medical interpreters, and other people about things that they had seen and how they dealt with certain kinds of situations. And then, you know, as soon as I say, I would just randomly tell people, this is the book that I'm working on. There were always, there were stories that would come. I would never ask someone for a story of a last word and would only ever kind of deal with it if it was offered to me.How did you describe the book to them in that moment? How did you introduce your project to them?I mean, it was really, you know, it's a book about the first words of babies and last words of the dying and how different cultures and different historical periods have attached meaning to those moments of language. And they are hugely different across cultures or they can be, and sometimes not even important at all. I think that's the thing that is shocking.I think the one thing that typically that shocks people the most when I tell them about the book is the idea that there are some communities that do not actually pay attention to the first words of a baby. That surely they must happen, right? But if anybody sort of notices them, it's like, ah, it's not a milestone.It's not an event. It's not a moment at all, right? And they're certainly not paying attention to the child in a way that suggests they're expecting that thing to happen, right? And yeah, so- What do you make of that? What do I make of that not happening or people being surprised?I guess, what is a culture like that isn't looking out for the first word?I mean, so those kids, it's a culture that knows that those kids are gonna grow up to be users of the language and to whatever degree they need to, right? They don't have any anxiety about that. So I think that's one broad thing. Another thing is that there are other milestones. There are other developmental milestones that matter to them. So for instance, there's a really lovely kid's book about the Diné group in the US, the Navajo, for whom the first laugh is actually really important.And the person who kind of provokes the first laugh from the baby is said to have a kind of spiritual connection with them and throws a party for the community in order to mark that moment, which is something that first words don't really even get. I mean, they get what, a Facebook post or something like that. But you can imagine that a group that's oriented around trying to make babies laugh means there's a lot of interaction and a lot of people, a lot of grown people doing funny things in front of a baby is trying to make them, to try to delight them, right?So there's that. And a lot of the communities are, it sounds like they're agricultural. So there's just not a lot of time.If there's a baby, the baby, they put them on their back or they hang them up somewhere. There's someone watching them, but they're not getting the kind of face-to-face child-directed speech and interaction that people like me think is normal.Yeah. Yeah, how did the research change you in a way? What did you, how did it shift the way you think about, I mean, you're, yeah, did it provide you insight into what it means to be American or?One of the biggest ways that it changed me was a kind of shift from apprising the individual thing and the individual's production to appreciating the ritual. So I kind of started out with this notion that when people, particularly parents, say, oh, my baby's first word was mama, that those people need to understand that they are projecting their own kind of expectations onto the baby's babble and extracting that out. And the first word as a moment lies somewhere else, right?And then it was actually when I was looking at the last words stuff that this all changed. So most of the literature that we've had about language at the end of life has been in this mode of like the famous last words that someone, that a famous person says. The witty thing, the eloquent thing, the sudden thing, the idiosyncratic production that marks the passing of an individual person in their time, you know, and that kind of honors their mortality in a way.But I went, but that's not the only thing that happens because I know there are traditions where you're supposed to say the same, you're supposed to say something, right? You're supposed to say the name of a God, right? Or you're supposed to say a prayer or a confession of faith or something like that.Christians have it, different denominations of Christianity have it, Muslims have it, Jews have it to varying degrees, Hindus have it, Buddhists have it, and all of this is very historically determined and very geographically varied as well. So it's not like, you know, Christians have been doing this same thing for 2000 years or something like that, or that Muslims have been doing this all over the place or whatever. So there's a lot of variation.So you can't kind of say that this is essential to the practice, but it's important for a lot of people, maybe even more people than for whom it's important to hear that individual special idiosyncratic thing. And I went, wow, I think I need a way of talking about this because it was entirely upending my sense of the individual production versus the thing that everybody did.I found a really great framework by a group of scholars who wrote about ritual and the nature of ritual, who have a kind of framework for talking about the as is, so the way that things actually are, what they also call sincerity, which requires a certain kind of bravery and courage, and it's this imperative of modernity to see things as is, like as they really are, which also has a critique of ritual as being empty and hollow and robotic and repetitive and therefore meaningless, right? But they reconceptualize ritual as the construction of subjunctive worlds.So the as if, right? And this is not just the realm of religious ceremonies and things like that. Many aspects of our everyday lives have this kind of quality. So I greet someone at the door and say, please come in, I'm so happy that you're here. I say that even though, as if I am actually really happy to see them, but nobody calls me out on that and says, no, no, no, you don't really mean that, right? And I don't in the back of my mind say, well, I wish I didn't have to be lying there, right?So our days are shot through with this as if, with this creation of these worlds in which things are as if, and that that is not actually hollow and robotic, but that it is a way of maintaining order in an otherwise chaotic world.Well, I'm so deeply excited about everything you're saying right now. And I wanna know more about who this group you're referencing with this framework, and then also to confirm that they call as is sincerity. Can you tell me more? That seems like such a striking description of that, of as is.So I can't name all of their names, but one of them is named Adam Seligman, who was a sort of anthropologist of ritual, but there was a psychiatrist, there was a Chinese, a sort of Asian studies scholar and somebody else. And I can't remember their names. And then I'm sure that you're asking about sincerity. I'm sure that they have some discussion of kind of the etymology and why they link that to the as is, but I can't get that right now off the top of my head. Yeah, but so they sort of, why does the sincerity part of it strike you?Why? Yeah. It seems, yeah, why does it? As is, sincere. Yeah, I guess maybe it doesn't, but it seems incongruous in a way. It felt very innocent or delicate or sensitive in a way that I didn't expect for, you were describing it as kind of a realism that felt maybe harder.Yeah, maybe we don't think of sincerity as having a sharp edge, right? In the way that the as iscertainly must.That's nice though, that sincerity, to give sincerity kind of a sharp edge, as you say, or a force that I don't usually associate with it is really, it's powerful.Yeah, yeah. And probably in the history of that word, it does have these connections to something that is more kind of demanding of actuality and therefore has a sharp edge. So one group of people who were, and I was one group of people who were kind of famous for being radically sincere were the Quakers. So the radical Protestant group who would not greet someone on the street because why should they wish someone good day if they didn't know that person and didn't actually want to wish them good day, that it would be a lie for them to say something that they didn't know when they didn't know the person. And they also wouldn't make oaths to kings and things like that because, so you couldn't, there was no as if world, there was no as if world that you could create in that worldview.So what is, if as is is sincerity and there's a boundary to that for the Quakers, what the as if, what's the word for as if?That's a ritual.Oh, yeah. So this, I have to bring this up because often as a researcher, and I think you know this cause you've practiced, right? That often people want to talk about empathy, but when I'm asked about empathy, I always talk about awkwardness, that the space between people, when the script kind of falls away, where you were describing it before, right? We act as if, when we don't know how to act is when things get really awkward, right? And that space. So what you're describing is there's just an overlap and I just wanted to get your, how do you feel about the word awkwardness and the idea that awkwardness happens when, I always looked at the etymology that awkward means really sort of turned the wrong way around. You're kind of going in the wrong direction and we don't know how to, there's no script. We don't know how to act as if in any given moment. So we kind of have a little bit of a panic attack. I always think about awkwardness as like a mini panic attack because there's no script. We don't know how to act as if. And maybe we don't feel sincere or we don't know what is.But I would think, I mean, as a writer, the times that have been awkward, where I've been awkward, but where someone else has been awkward have been moments of truth, right? Because what then happens is you see, well, are people going to admit the awkwardness and sort of say it as it is? Or are they gonna scramble around for some kind of script, for some sort of other thing to inhabit that feels more comfortable? And when they do, what do they reach for? So putting people in, like pushing them to the awkwardness is to where their own automaticity breaks down, that that's when you're getting to something that's usable.Yes. Is that how you- 100%, yes, yes, much more clearly put. But yes, that you do, it produces the opportunity for, I don't know if it's exactly right, but sincerity or something realer, something meaningful.Yeah, so I don't know where I'd have to think about how as is and as if kind of would come together in a discussion about authenticity and like authentic presentations of self and all of that. But you were asking me about how writing the book, how I changed through that. And I think that I came to a much deeper appreciation for the as if and the construction of the as if.And I learned to not be dismissive of it and to also understand how my own personal history had kind of put me on a path towards embracing the as is to the exclusion of the as if, and that there were limits to sincerity, that there were things, there are things that happen that require the creation of a subjunctive world where I can, and that that becomes the most productive place for some sense-making.What does it mean to live more in a subjunctive world when you're to embrace that more? What are the implications of that?I mean, I think part of the implications is that you kind of, you start to think about the way that I do it is to think about cyclicity, and to try to mark some of the regular patterns and passings of time and activity. So, it's only in the last couple of years that the family has said a blessing to start dinner and that that kind of marks a way of this was then, now is now, we're here together. And I mean, there's still kids at the table, so there's still like orcs flying through the air, but there's a kind of boundedness to it that it didn't have before.So, I appreciate that quite a lot. And I'm fascinated by the ritual last words and how people navigate and negotiate the fact that on one hand, you have an ideal that you're supposed to perform, or that provides a model for what you're supposed to be shooting for anyway. And on the other hand, that physiologically, you may not be able to do that thing.So, how do you, as the person who's supposed to be saying the name of God, but can't do it, and other people who are expecting you to say that because they wanna know that your soul is gonna go to heaven and not to hell in circumstances where you can't meet the ideal or you can't meet all of the ideal or what's the negotiation there between those things?And I think I've been, so you asked about the change, I think in the family, been much more, okay, how are we gonna integrate these different aspects of our training and our lives? We're secular people, we're not particularly religious, but we do things in a particular way for a particular reason in order to mark seasons and in order to mark like the solstice say, we've adopted for the past many, many years, we've had a ceremony marking the 12 days before solstice, not in any like overtly like pagan way or non-Christian way or anything like that, but just to kind of come together and reflect on this time and it's become a really, really special time so that the kids are even like, hey, are we gonna do that again tonight? Are we gonna do that thing? So that's been a big change.We have a little bit of time left and I wanna shift gears a little bit. I wanna talk about metaphor. Well, I guess I have one big question just as a linguist, what do you feel like you carry with you or what are you sensitive to that sort of non-linguist people, do you know what I mean? What insight do you have or carry with you that other people don't? And then I'd love to hear you talk about metaphor.I mean, so I think one thing that I have that other linguists don't necessarily share, like other linguists wanna make everybody a linguist because they think the world would just operate much better if everybody understood how language actually works.That's so interesting.I mean, it would indeed solve some problems but there would still be some on the table. But I think in language, what I hear is people trying to, I mean, again, people struggling with their own ideals. You know, their own ideal linguistic productions. Like I work in an international setting with people whose native language is not English and people are, you know, the Dutch have beautiful English, like fantastic English, but everyone's always apologizing. Like, oh, my English is not good enough, you know? And so that's very interesting to me or the kinds of disfluencies that people use, the ahs and the ums that you get into these corporate settings or business settings.You're probably familiar with lots of how to speak, how to, you know, how to communicate, kinds of guidance which says, well, you shouldn't have these things in your speaking without understanding why are they there and what do we need them for? You know, like they're there for a reason and we notice them, count them and dislike them for other reasons, right? The reason that they're there has something to do with the language system and the way that our processing and perceptual systems and our production systems are built, right?So it's the culmination of a long evolutionary process. Our preference for speaking that doesn't have disfluencies in it, that's entirely historical and social. That's an aesthetic sort of choice. There's no like natural preference for those kinds of things. So that's one thing that I wish that non-linguists would understand about the way that people talk. Yeah.And metaphor, really hitting on all of the, yeah, metaphor. So in some ways, the book about first words and last words, it's just a giant metaphor. It's taking two things and saying, look, how can you take aspects of one thing and kind of map them onto the other, see this other phenomena through this one particular lens or this one particular window and then flip it around and look the other way.Beautiful. Well, I wanna thank you very much. This has been like a lot of fun. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation and sharing the story about this book and I'm excited to read the book.Yeah, thanks so much for the invitation. It was fun to talk about the book. This is actually the first real occasion that I've had to talk about the book with somebody and I appreciate getting to talk about aspects of it at length with you and have it tied to some of the other things that I've written about.Yeah, beautiful. Awesome, thank you so much.Yeah, thanks Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Jay Hasbrouck is a senior staff researcher on the ads team at Google, previously holding Pathfinder roles at both Google and Meta. He's the author of "Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset.” He specializes in applying ethnographic methods to drive innovation and strategic direction for companies, non-profits, and government agencies. His work bridges academic anthropology with practical business applications. He writes wonderful essays you can find at his newsletter Ethnographic Mind, including this on ethnography and collaboration, “High Intensity.”Yeah, definitely. I think you may know this, but I start all these conversations with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And I love it so much because it's so big, but because it's so big, I kind of over explain it. So before I ask, you're in absolute control and you can answer and not answer any way that you want to. Where do you come from?Yeah, I love the question. And I think it's definitely, you know, a true researcher's question, you know, I think in a lot of ways. And I think for me, I think probably one of my most, you know, the biggest influences I want to say from being, you know, not just geographically, but as a person.But anyway, I'll start with geography. For me, I grew up in Florida and very much a child of the 70s, I think, in a lot of ways. And I look back and only in hindsight have realized that I was definitely part of a few experimental education initiatives when I was a kid.One of them called High Intensity, which was just like throwing a bunch of kids together to do creative things and come up with different experiments and execute on them and then think about what you did. And a lot of other programs like that. And I actually kind of admire what they were trying to do there in hindsight.And I think from that, combined with my parents in a lot of ways were very free thinking and really encouraged me to think through things and pursue my own interests shaped a lot of how I approach what I do today. So I'm super grateful for both those things. And I think it's both a sort of a blessing and a curse in some ways, because it's sort of like, you know, I tend to run toward open-ended thinking.And so sometimes it takes a little bit of effort to bring myself back, to reel myself back in from time to time. But anyway, I think that definitely shape a lot of who I am today based somewhere.Yeah, you mentioned being a child of the 70s. What does that mean for you to be a child of the 70s?I think it's a pretty unique time. It's like, you know, post 1968, and I think there was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of rethinking of what norms meant in the United States. And we were definitely part of a generation that was free range, for sure, like, so we were just out and about doing our own thing with not only, I mean, with, I would say, loose boundaries.Like, the program that I mentioned, actually, the High Intensity Program is a great example, because there's a bunch of kids put together, given very loose assignments, and then we literally would scatter across the campus of the school and just go investigate or find out or make a little movie or record a video, record a video show or something like this. And it was pretty, I think, pretty exemplary of what was going on at the time. It's like, you know, like a free range, I think, in a lot of ways, a lot of rethinking and pretty open mindset, I would say.Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be, a young Jay, what you wanted to be when you grew up?I don't really know. I mean, like, I think, I know that once I got to high school, I started testing, you know, you do all those evaluations. And I always scored highly on, like, analytics, right?So I knew I'd probably do something around analysis, something that involved analysis, but I don't know that I would ever have identified anthropologists, right? I probably knew very little. I know I knew very little in high school about anthropology, which is a shame, actually. I think that should change.Tell me a little bit about where you are now and the work that you do.Sure. Yeah. Now I'm at Google. I've been here for over two years now and focus it primarily. I sit currently within the ads or primarily focused on the web. And thinking about what is the future of the web. And Google cares about this because they care about publishers, people who actually create content for the web, because that's where ads end up, right? But we're really seeing a lot of change. It's a very, very dynamic space right now.And I'm sure you know this, Peter, just from your own experience. But there's a lot of changing. AI is just one piece of what's happening in this landscape where publishers are tending to use tools to think differently about their audiences.It isn't all just about replacing writing, right? There are a lot of different backing tools that are making a difference in the lives of publishers. And in addition to that, the landscape is changing just in terms of what does media mean, right?We're seeing a lot of shift in terms of how people are defining what does mainstream media mean versus what does alternative media mean. All of that's shifting. And so we're trying to get our heads around what does that mean for Google and how it is that we can encourage a high quality experience for users so that it doesn't become littered with poor experiences. And people are getting the kind of content that they want, that they're seeking.What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?I really love the, I mean, I've been reading a lot lately about trying to get at least more experience and more knowledge around complex systems and different models that people have used. I mean, a lot of that is, you know, early, early days, it's like things like cybernetics, Gregory Bateson, and those folks that were thinking about, you know, early on, what do systems mean? And they were using ecology largely as a model.But trying to get my head around that is really exciting to me and thinking about, you know, interdependencies of these different systems that are in play. You know, the open web is a really complex set of different players and different systems and people. So that is very exciting to me, making sense of that and figuring out, you know, where to play in that space.And also, I've been doing a lot more foresight's work, thinking about what are the trajectories that we see in this space and where do we think there are, you know, what's the range of probable, possible, implausible? And where should we be among those three? Where do we want to be?When did you discover you could make a living? You're an anthropologist, yes? Like, when did you discover you could make a living? When did you discover anthropology as a path or something you might make a living in? I was drawn to anthropology just as a passion, really. Like, I had a great undergraduate professor, her name was Judith Modell, at Carnegie Mellon as an undergrad. And she was awesome.And I took a number of classes with her, starting out with visual anthropology and then moving on to cultural anthropology. And I was really inspired a lot by how she shaped, you know, how anthropology shaped how you think about the world. But then I was sort of like, well, I mean, there was no major at the time in anthropology at CMU.So I ended up making, yeah, not for undergrads. So then I moved on a little bit, did some work for a while in D.C. in environmental policy, and then decided that, like, I was still drawing anthropology at CMU. So I went back to grad school just because, like, I knew that's the thing that really moved me and, like, engaged me.So I had no idea what I was going to do with it. And then that turned into 10 years of undergrad, which is actually average for a PhD in anthropology, about 10 years. Is that right?Yeah. And then I wasn't sure. I didn't go right into the applied setting right away. I did some teaching at CalArts for a while, which I loved, actually. It was a good experience. And then found out just by accident about a position at Intel. And they were looking for, they already had anthropologists that were on board there. And they were looking for someone to join the team. And I was like, wow, I had no idea that they would even care about anthropology.So I joined Genevieve Bell's team there on the Digital Home Group. And that was a fantastic experience. And it was, like, I learned a lot about, you know, what are the insights that translate well in the applied setting?Where do we get traction? Also, how to make use of theory in a way that doesn't feel alienating to your peers, right? So a lot of what anthropology has to say comes out of theory and comes out of a well-informed perspective of that. But it needs to be framed in a way that doesn't sound esoteric.You write a lot about, I think, the politics, I guess, about making ideas and insights accessible, right? I feel like that's a thread that I see in your writing.For sure. Yeah, I think one of the things that I like to carry with me that tends to work is, like, as you, first of all, as you walk into any room in an applied research setting, you know, the first time in that day they're going to think about research, and maybe the last time in that day. So, you know, that's not part of their daily routine.And so often I'm thinking through, like, what is the question, the primary question that's sort of floating over the head of each person in that room, right? So often with an engineer, it's like, what are we going to make? You know, like, so they are thinking through everything you're saying with that lens.You know, oftentimes a product manager will be thinking about when. When is this going to get done, and what is the timeline, and how can we push it forward, and things like that. And, you know, we as researchers, we're thinking why often.Why are these behaviors happening, and, you know, what is the significance of designers, you know? So anyway, each of these designers are, I think, offering thinking, who are we designing for?Oh, yeah.So I think that goes a long way to just, you know, get myself, and I think for other researchers, too, to get ourselves out of that sort of like assumption that everyone is seeing it the same way, because they're often not.In the role of the researcher, I mean, I feel like you, I mean, how would you describe how that has changed? The role of the researcher in an organization - how do you think about where the researcher sits and how the rest of the organization understands them? Yeah, totally. I think that it's changed actually quite recently. Over the past five years, I've seen quite a big change. I think initially, you know, there were sort of two tracks primarily within large organizations, and I'm talking about the private sector here. One of them being primarily sort of like validation and disproving hypotheses or proving hypotheses, sort of playing out what's already been and what's already in the making. And the other being the broader lens, sort of like, you know, what is, you know, how can we understand this market better? How do we understand how behaviors and attitudinal changes are shifting so that we can put our product in the right place? And you come and the researcher goes out, finds these things, comes back and reports what they found, right? We were, I think in many ways, just the source of the answer. And I think in a lot of ways, what we're seeing is some change there. And part of that change is, in perhaps some ways, AI related as well. But part of that change is that in order for us to be truly collaborative, I think in many ways, it's helpful for us to think in terms of systems.So it's not just us going out and coming back with answers, it's often how it is that we can be useful to frame questions for an organization. How we can tee up different lines of inquiry and how we can also take in the information that's coming from within the institution itself and the people and the knowledge they have and folding that into how we move forward with an initiative of any kind. So we've become the holding body and in many cases, we're defining the playing field, I think, much more often than we used to be. It's sort of like, help us find the right questions rather than help us find the answers.Where have you seen that or what makes, where does that observation come from? It sounds beautiful.I see it a lot in my daily work and I've seen it increasingly that the teams are, I think often in the past, maybe we're maturing as a discipline, I hope so. But I think a lot in the past, teams would get questions from different players, different stakeholders on their team. And you either, they were sort of thinking their only response was either answer the question or kick it to the curb because it doesn't make sense, right?And I think it's a much more productive and I've seen increasingly researchers come to the table with like, well, yes, that makes sense. Let's put it in this context. Like the question you're asking is actually quite specific.If we ask something one level up, we can answer five of these questions, right? If we use this method rather than a survey, if we use a panel for an expert panel, for example, just throwing that out, we might be actually, we might be able to answer much more and also expose new opportunities in the process. And so I think shaping some of that is, I think, much more valuable in terms of that conversation than being only reactive or off on our own in a bubble.You, your book, Ethnographic Thinking, right, is second printing and is a beautiful piece. I'm just curious, tell me what inspired the writing of that book and how has it been received?I think initially the first edition was really basically a work of passion. I was like, I feel like no one's saying this and I think I should say it, you know, like, and one of the things that really kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier about what drew me to anthropology. And one of the things that did draw me is the way it changes how you think about the world.So it's not really just like this method that, you know, it just gets leveraged and then spits out these results. It's really a change of disposition, I think, in a lot of ways and an increased appreciation for different ways of thinking and being in the world. And I think that's valuable beyond just being a toolset.It's also valuable for helping an organization think about how it thinks about itself, right, or how it relates to the marketplace, its offerings relates to the marketplace. So it's very much a helpful vehicle for strategy. But no one was saying this at the time, right?And so I think it was really just considered at the time when I wrote the first edition, the way that most people had intersected ethnography was as a tool for design. It was under design, right? Sort of like, okay, go out, find out what the users want, and then we'll make a thing.And I really wanted to expand the conversation. So I put together an outline, you know, tossed it out there in the world and then got some interest. And lately, more recently rather, Rutledge was like, we'd like a second edition.So I went back and tightened it up a little bit and added some more recent examples. I think it's doing well. I mean, people find it to be a nice – I think the intent was actually – the initial aim was to get folks to see ethnography in a broader way, right, in terms of its strategic value. But it also has turned out to be a good sort of primer for people who aren't familiar at all with ethnography just to get a sense of what it's about. I'm trying to think. I have – so I came up in this weird brand consulting world where it was sort of ethnographic. Like, I don't – sometimes I very much feel like a fraud that I'm not academically trained as an anthropologist. I was learning doing brand audits and focus groups. And we did a lot of in-home contextual stuff. And I think I grew into ethnography professionally, just, you know, accidentally. And I'm just curious how you see traditional research, like how corporations sort of conventionally learn. I feel like it's just been upside down compared to how when I – you know, the world I came into was like they would – they'd do tons of validation. There's almost no cultural fluency. And there certainly aren't any anthropologists hanging around, at least in a lot of the client spaces that I started out in. But now it's wildly different. And I'm just curious how you think about traditional market research as usually performed by the corporation in America. And do you ever bump into it?Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's complementary in a lot of ways. I mean, as you know, like, in many ways, ethnography is a great starting point for understanding context and understanding – you know, getting that spark and understanding sort of where do we see – where do we see movement, where do we see new ideas. But also, there's a role for validation there as well.But ultimately, if you want to talk scale, we need to come back to some of the quant that market researchers do and other folks too, psychologists, others that are out there really trying to say, you know, like, okay, so is what we're seeing here mapping to a broader trend? So I see them as complementary. I don't – I mean, I think at Google we have the market strategist. I think it's the role that would be that. And we work hand in hand with them, you know, to think about what's scaling, what's not. So, yeah, I don't see them as – but you're right. I think originally it was only that.Yeah, yeah. And so I'm curious. I want to return – the stuff you're working on now sort of just dumbfounded me, honestly. You know what I mean? So the – what is – how do you explore or try to discover the future of the web is what you said, yes. So what kinds of – how do you get to work and explore that? Yeah, yeah, we do. It's a combination of methods. A lot of what we do involves signal scanning, which is really just getting out there and into the world and seeing what's happening.So that involves conferences, you know, who are the thought leaders in this space? Who are people who have – we think have vision? So it's attending conferences or, you know, looking at conference proceedings. Sometimes it's looking at patent filings. Like, what do we see growing as an interest area for people who are true inventors? You know, like, what do we – do we see a pattern there?You know, sometimes it really comes down to, like, you know, trying to understand what's happening in, like, deep into, like, Reddit groups. You know, like, okay, what are they talking about? And then this is, I think, where the complex system stuff comes back into play. It's, like, making sense of all that. They're very – and this is not new to anybody who's done ethnography or anthropology. It's, like, really, really disparate sets of data, right? It could be visuals. It could be interviews. But it could also be artifacts.And it could be, you know, patent documents, right? So any of this is, like, valid in identifying the patterns across them. So that's a lot of what happens at that sort of – on the foresight side of what I've been doing, trying to understand, you know, where do we think we start to see – we're starting to see what I call trajectories or movements in a direction that show distinct patterns.Yeah. You had – you were at IDEO for a little bit. You were – just to return to the ethnographic thinking book, like, that for a long time ethnography really was sort of trapped in the design world as a tool. And I guess we've covered that a little bit already. But I'm just curious more about how you – where you'd say we are now. Well, I do think that that has changed quite a bit. I mean, when I think about just sort of UX, if you take the subfield of UX, I think there's increased appreciation for the dynamic between design and research, right? And so it doesn't feel like – I think you're right. Originally it was – research was subsumed under design. It was like a tool within sort of in that – and the sort of supposition was like, you know, design thinking solves it all, right? It wasn't – it's like anything can get solved with design thinking, which is not what I'm saying with ethnographic thinking at all.But I think that because of that was seen as – for a long time seen as the umbrella under which anything could get solved or addressed, there was a tension there for sure. Now I don't see as much of that, definitely. I think there's an increased understanding that, you know, like – and in fact, I see a lot more designers thinking in a research way and a lot of researchers thinking in a designing way. So it's like – I think the blurring between the two is pretty common now.Yeah, that's interesting because I feel like there was a moment where it was like lean startup. It was just like everything was a prototype and it was all very – it felt very behaviorist in a way. And it seemed like it had scraped off all the interesting stuff off the top and kind of made everything into this exercise in behaviorism.Yeah.Well, I mean – You were – I was sort of frustrated. It felt like – yeah, but it's – I'm happy that we're not there anymore. But I guess where are we now in the – like, what's the best – how do you – is there an ideological difference? Like, how do you approach learning effectively?Yeah, I think there's more of a conversation now. I mean, with Lean and Agile both – which both make me gag. Is that right? I'm not alone then. I've never encountered them in person. I just – I've read about them and I don't quite understand them. I feel – it doesn't really make any sense to me.Well, I mean, it's really about privileging the system itself, right? And there's very little room for conversation and for – and, like, as I was saying earlier, I think some of the value that we bring to the table now often is centered around framing questions, you know, like helping the whole group understand sort of what it is that – where do we – what do we want to learn? What are our learning priorities, right? And that's something that many organizations didn't – wasn't even – wouldn't even cross their minds, right? It was much more cut and dry. And I think with Lean and Agile, there's no room for that. It's the – you follow the steps, you know, like – so I'm seeing a lot more room for people in the research space, particularly, to really get – you know, to take on that role and to help teams have these conversations around, like, is this a question that we need to understand where we need to – an issue we need to understand where we need to open up and think about broad questions? Or are we at a point where we're in the process where we need to drill down? And all of that shapes the kinds of methods that we would use and the kinds of – and the lines of inquiry that we would engage So I think that I see that becoming much more collaborative. And maybe that has something to do with, you know, like, I do think in a lot of really big organizations that design thinking was like a really big trend. And then everyone was like, wait a second. This isn't solving everything. It may not be the right tool. So I think there's a little bit of a backing up going on in a lot of big companies.Do you have feelings about MVP? And it's the – there was a post recently of sort of this tension between generative research and the beginning of a start-up versus sort of MVP and sort of MVPs being the sort of the – I mean, it's the same conversation, I think. But do you have an opinion on the appropriate use of prototyping versus generative research?Yeah, I mean, when I was at Meta, the last team I was on there was called New Product Experimentation. It was really cool, basically like an incubator that sat within Meta. And there were, I think, 14 teams within the group.And they would – they each basically were a mini start-up. And they would – they were getting out there in the world and trying to develop some new – usually they were apps. Apps that help people come together around community or apps that help people build relationships.Or usually they had something – they were related in some way to social media, but not always. And one of the things that they were doing was experimenting. And I sat on the central team, which was to help accelerate in whatever way possible with greater understanding for the kinds of things they were trying to build. So I would help them understand things like collective achievement as a concept. What does that mean? How can I help them build on those kinds of behaviors?Another one was authentic expression. How can they help facilitate users who can – activities where they could express themselves authentically? And so while they were building those MVPs, they were also – they had the advantage of getting some of this insight about human behavior.But then also each of them often would get a researcher on their team as well to sort of connect those dots, right? Like are we seeing people come together to achieve goals, you know, like with your version of that in your app, you know? So I think there's still – I think there is quite a bit of value within it – value for an MVP.But I think it's – it isn't as sort of like Wild West as people, I think, assume. Like, you know, throw five things out there and just like – because I think the risk there is that if you adapt too radically, you overcorrect in another direction because something's not working, or you kill five features where there could have been two things in there that were actually quite useful. They just hadn't matured.So we were in a good position there to help inform that, you know, to inform the process and help build from, you know, back to what I was saying earlier, sort of leverage some of the theory in a lot of ways around – that comes from social science. So I'd say it's a mix. Yeah.I have sort of deep – I think it's theory envy or academic envy, having not gone to – not having studied it. But how do you tell me – can you just tell me a little bit more about how you incorporate the theory into the work? And if there's a practice around that, or is it just because you've studied it, it's in your – you carry it with you. And so it gets applied, just to be as explicit as possible about this because I want to copy it.I think – well, I mean, maybe, you know, I might be at a slight advantage just because I've – you know, like, I was put through the ringer in grad school, but it's not something that PhDs alone do. You know, I think that a lot of people are doing this, and there's certainly no reason to not do it. One example.In that same group, in New Product Experimentation, one of the things that we were really interested in learning more about is, like, how does a community come together? What forms deep bonds between people? And so what I – and I just, you know, sort of referred back to what I knew about how it is that people come together.And a lot – and some of that in anthropology focuses on what we call rites of passage, which is – I mean, a lot of people know about what rites of passage is. It's from an anthropologist's fang in death. And one of the things that he forwards is this theory of how it is that people form deep bonds, and it comes from a serious – this sort of cycle of separation and then sort of meeting some challenges, overcoming those challenges together, and then coming out of that experience with a new layer of identity.So that's a really big oversimplification of what it is that he is not invited to rites of passage. But so what I did is I took that model and I helped simplify it and also translate it to the tech setting, right, in terms of apps and people interacting with one another there, and help them use that almost like a checklist. Like, are we helping people – you know, are we helping people feel like they're part of a special club or whatever?The separation part, right? Are we helping them overcome an obstacle in some way, right, in their lives that they can actually feel like they formed a bond together? They suffered together and now they're coming out the other side, right? And then are we helping them express this new connection in some way? Are we helping them form a new layer of identity on the back end of this cycle? And really just sort of walk through that with the team so that they can think about not only just the features in their product, but also the order in which they occur and, you know, how it is that people are invited in and ushered through the experiences that they have there. So I think that's one example where it's a theory, but it's not – you don't go to the team saying, I've got a theory for you.Yeah, I'm curious. Are there particular touchstones that you keep returning to from the universe of theory?A good example to your point, Peter, about – I mean, that was tapping anthropology specifically, right? So something that I did learn in grad school. But another project that I worked on focused specifically around storytelling.And that was something that I – you know, storytelling is certainly part of anthropology. It's part of how we learn as anthropologists and also in many ways how we convey our insights through stories. And Margaret Mead has this great quote that we learned through metaphor, that we learned through stories and shared through metaphor. And I think it's very true, but I did not have any sort of formal training in storytelling. And it's a practice that's – you know, there's a long tradition in that practice. And I think maybe if you were an English lit major, you might have received some of this in your training, but I didn't.And so I did a lot of secondary research around storytelling and borrowed a lot from human development studies, which was how do kids learn to tell stories? So there's a very well documented process that takes place where kids start out with just sort of fragments of ideas that they pull together. And then they – and I'm forgetting the terminology, but they slowly build up to an actual narrative, what they call primitive narrative, which is like there's probably no ending that makes sense out on its own.But if you knew the context, you could string it together yourself as a listener and then write on up into a full actual story, right? With beginning, middle, end, a central character and all that. And I use that a lot because it was really useful to think through, like, all of us has this embedded, these different stages embedded within us.Like, we're also – and sometimes with your friends, you might tell a primitive narrative because you know they're going to get the Ponsulani you don't have to see. You don't have to say it, right? And they're – sometimes we're just making associations between ideas, for example.And it's not even – I'll have to think about what the terminology – the term is for that. But in any case, each of these could have and could have corresponding uses in terms of enabling people to tell stories, right? So maybe not everybody wants to tell a full story.Let's say on social media, for example, you may not want to tell a full story. You might just want to share the basics with your friend's circle. And that's enough. It's enough to connect with people around a few ideas. And that's your – that was your objective anyway. So it's not, you know, it's not a full – you're not writing a movie or a script or something, but you are trying to – you're trying to share and connect.That's beautiful. And so those tools, yeah, exactly. So we've all got these little pieces of how it is to tell a story. We tap on different stages of them for – in our lives.I feel like I learned way too late in life as a researcher that I think in early career I felt like I was supposed to go out, find something, and then report it. And they would just take it – it was just information, really. And then maybe maturity taught me that I was most compelling when I was just telling a story about the research in a way. And then smuggling in all this insight that I didn't even know that – but I learned that really late. Even after years of, I think, industry people saying, storytelling is a skill. Storytelling is a skill. I didn't really know what they were talking about. And so, yeah, it just – I just watched one time telling a client a story. And I just saw, like, a whole giant light bulb go on and realize that that's what's happening.There's a ton of cool research in neuroscience as well around emotional connection with stories and the ways in which, as you tell a story, and you start to convey different senses, like sense of smell or sense of sight or sense of taste, et cetera, that it actually fires up some of the same neurons in the listener's mind. So there's a lot of different tools like that in storytelling that go a long way. And people connect on the emotional level first, right?Yes. Do you have a preferred way of – like, how do you learn? I mean, just listening to you talk right now, I realize I've – you know, I learn through people really well. Like, I'm a good – I like talking to people. I like getting into conversations. Do you have a particular way of learning that you've learned or that you prefer?Yeah, I think I learn visually, really. That's appealing to me. But also, obviously, through conversation as well and through storytelling, for sure. Actually, I think I learn a lot. And I think what really stimulates a lot of my thinking is things like movies and actual narratives that really start to trigger questions, I think, in a lot of ways, about what are the tropes we're all sharing and why are we sharing them and what – you know, science fiction is a great example. The stories we're telling ourselves, I should say, are a great way for me to learn.But I think all of the above in that sense. And, you know, I think, for me, reading, for sure, but it needs to be, like, pretty purposeful. So it's like, yeah, I'm very intentional about what I'm reading. But I actually wanted to share with you this book that I have sitting on my desk by chance. It's called Do Story by Bobette Buster. It's a really short read, but she goes through some different, I think, principles for storytelling that I think a lot of people would find useful as researchers, but just anyone. I highly recommend that.Cool. Thank you for that. So you've worked in so many different contexts. Is there anything that you haven't studied that you sort of would really love to explore?I don't know. I mean, I think I haven't done a ton of hardware work, which I think would be interesting. I mean, at Intel, we did the guts for the hardware. But I think that the timelines are different in that industry. So I think that would be an interesting place to play. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in transportation and mobility right now.I mean, obviously with automated driving, it's a crazy field right now. So that would be interesting. There's no time to do it all. But I mean, those things, in terms of what I read in the news, if I see something around that, I am drawn toward it. I'm also, I really find fascinating what's happening in sort of the space industry. What edges are we pushing there?You think about just the industry itself and how fast it's growing and how much more capable we are. I mean, I think just satellites alone are going to change our lives a lot within the next five years, just the capabilities and the scale.What are you thinking about? This is news to me.Well, I mean, one example, of course, is SpaceX. Elon Musk's effort there where he's trying to, well, he is in many ways, launching satellite internet access. But you can imagine, well, that alone is huge, right?If the globe suddenly has access without being wired to the internet, that changes a lot. It changes a lot for a lot of people. But beyond that, I think it's also thinking about what is the, how does it change our perspective?What more might we do with a lot of things orbiting this earth? And if it becomes less and less expensive, just in terms of seeing what the planet is doing, thinking about that pair of AI, thinking about how it might impact the way we see weather patterns, the way we could actually become much better systems thinkers with this greater ability to see the world differently. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there that is just starting.You mentioned a few times the systems thinking. I haven't spent a lot of time studying it, but you mentioned cybernetics. And also, being a child of the 70s, I feel like the cybernetics was very much a 70s.In my mind, anyway, it feels like a 70s idea. You mentioned Bateson, right? Can you tell me a little bit about the influence of systems thinking? What does it mean to you to be thinking at that level?I think one of the cool things about cybernetics and some of that early thinking was this ability to start mapping concepts from different disciplines and thinking about how we can learn from that. So thinking about the way that we produce technology or anything in our lives as humans in ecological terms, right? So thinking about interdependencies, thinking about the impacts and externalities of different actions, all of that was pretty new at the time.And so it's really helpful for us to start thinking not just in linear terms, but in terms of consequences and in terms of how these systems interrelate. I'm just scratching the surface. There's a whole field of complexity studies that I'm just starting to, you know, I've got a stack of books that I need to dig into.But there's... What's the attraction? What are you doing when you're diving into complexity science?I think for me, I definitely am a puzzle solver as a person. I think it feels like a puzzle to me in a lot of ways, and I really like... I just bought a model of the Roman Colosseum, and I'm putting that together now because I just like to do that Oh, that's awesome. But I think for me, it's very much that, like, how are the pieces coming together? If I pull this, what happens over there? Or what multiple things happen as a result of this one change? And that's, you know, it fits well, I think, to the world of technology in a lot of ways, too. I mean, understanding those complex systems and the relationships between humans and technology. So I think, yeah, there's a lot that I still need to learn in that space, but that's the draw, primarily. Yeah.I'm curious, like, we've got a little bit of time left, but you've spent so much time at that space where, you know, humans and technology meet. Like, what have you learned in that space? Like, I spent a lot of time talking to people about, you know, consumer goods, you know what I mean?Like, rice and tea, and you talked about hard versus soft earlier, hardware. And I'm just curious, what have you... What do you understand or sense, having spent that much time talking to people or understanding that relationship that somebody that hasn't doesn't?Yeah. That's a good question. I think there's a long tradition, certainly, in the sort of Western larger narrative around this tension between fear of technology and technology as a, you know, liberating tool, right? And they're both sort of always there. And it's interesting that the way we bounce back and forth between them, I think I've learned that quite a bit. I mean, when I was at Intel, we occasionally used to get invited to these, like, future of, you know, like, initiatives. So we'd go to, like, the kitchen of the future, right, that some other company would... And so we'd have to go do this. It was interesting in a lot of ways, but it was so far removed from people's daily lives, right?Which makes sense because it was imagining in reality, but it was definitely not the way people... It didn't reflect the priorities that we saw in the field in terms of how people manage a kitchen, for example, right? Like, how many people need, you know, a computer and their refrigerator?Probably none. So I think there's, you know, a lot of that made me, you know, sort of think about, you know, what's necessary, of course, but also this tension between some of the fear and some of the more utopian approaches. So the Silicon Valley is filled with, like, lots of techno utopian, speaking of the 70s, right?It's like, techno utopian, like, it will solve it all. We'll get there through technology. And you see, in many cases, you know, the public, they're not riding that same train.And so we really think carefully about what does that tension look like there. You know, another example there is one of the projects we worked on focusing on green home, green technology, basically. Thinking about how to help people better manage energy and different resources within the home.And the original sort of original drafts of some of this thinking with our chip architects and our engineers was, oh, every house needs a mainframe. They need a server in their house that will track all of the things and all of the electricity usage and everything. In the future, everyone will just have, like, a computer that is, like, the brain of their house.So we went out and we were like, okay, well, who are the people we need to talk to that are at the edge here? Who are people who are already thinking a lot about technology in the home and they're ahead of the game, right? And we spent months talking to people in different climates and everything.And one of the primary learnings that we had was they don't want the server and that they don't need to centralize anything. And in fact, what they're much more drawn to is sort of disparate systems that they put together themselves in different ways. One was for just controlling temperature and they're fine with that.And one was for understanding water consumption and how much water they're saving with their water reclamation system. And because they want to make sure they know they're updating as needed and using when needed. And I think in large part that came to fruition.Like, you don't really see people with servers in their homes. You see them with Nest thermostats. You see them with their phone. You see them with Siri, all these different subsystems that they're using to manage how they're living. So I think the Utopian vision, it's easy for like technologists to get carried away with it, but I think often how it plays out in the real world is like in smaller scale, incremental ways where people find the right tool for the right place in the right time.I remember, I never know how to attribute it, but I feel like some, I feel like a quote, and I'm just going to say it and you can respond to it. But it was the effect that the first casualty of technology is ritual.Is that I have not heard that, but I think maybe. Yeah, I mean, you could also imagine rituals coming out of technology to new rituals emerging from technology. That's what I was thinking of in that story. You told that people were somehow they were preserving all these little rituals, perhaps, or these opportunities of anyway.One of the metaphors that one of the participants offered in that study was like they said, like living on a ship, and that's how they thought about their house, like different gauges and different tools that were used for navigating or for protecting themselves. I thought that was a great way to put it.How do you use metaphors in your work? I mean, I use them all the time. Any chance I get, actually, I'm using a metaphor. Let's see, I mean, for the current work that I'm doing, one of the things we're trying to convey and also share is some of the shifts that are happening in the web and trying to share the disposition of publishers out there in the world.So really trying to think through what's the mindset of a web publisher who's facing all of this. So in that case, I don't know that I have a solid, I'm still in the mid project here on this one, but definitely a better example is probably the one I just shared, like living on a ship, things like that, where you've got folks where you're trying to help share not just what they're doing, but what is the approach they're taking? What are some of the rationale?What is the larger view of the world that's embedded into the systems that they make? I think with publishers, we're still trying to iron that out. I mean, with web publishers, because it's really, really changing a lot every day. So maybe struggle is at the center of that metaphor.Cool. Well, listen, Jay, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to finally connect face-to-face after sort of interacting and knowing each other in that LinkedIn way for many, many years.Likewise. Likewise. It was a pleasure to chat and get to know you better as well. And I look forward to connecting in the future.Yeah, cool. Awesome. 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In my town of Hudson, I have been advocating for new forms of civic engagement for a while. It’s a long story, but the short version is this : our small city struggles to do what it needs to do, and the spaces we have for having conversations about what to do next weren’t built for the social media age. It was clear to me, early, that we would need new spaces custom built and strong enough to hold the conversations we need to have. This led me to the concept of a citizens assembly - and to the world of civic engagement. A few interviews follow this thread of civic design and engagement and offer a diversion from the world of ethnography, brand marketing and cultural strategy.This conversation is one of those, with leaders in this space, working to innovate democratic participation at one of our nation’s oldest organizations. Nick Vlahos is Deputy Director at National Civic League's Center for Democracy Innovation. He holds a PhD in political science, authored a book on British devolution, and previously worked on civic engagement initiatives in Canada and Australia.Derek Okubo, is Director of Civic Assistance at National Civic League, and led Denver's Human Rights agency from 2011-2023. Previously, he worked for Big Brothers, Governor Romer's office, and the National Civic League, where he facilitated nationwide planning efforts. He serves on several Japanese-American organization boards.The TIME magazine article, “What Jimmy Carter Taught us About Civic Populism”So, Nick and Derek, thank you both for accepting my invitation. I start these conversations with a question borrowed from a friend who helps people tell their stories. It's a big question, and you're in complete control of how you answer it. The question is: Where do you come from? Either of you can go first.Nick Vlahos : I guess the first thing that I would say is, where I come from is a small ish prairie town in the center of Canada, Winnipeg Manitoba. And, you know, I currently live in Toronto for the past 15 years. So, I'm Canadian by birth, I work for the National Civic League, I worked for the Center for Delivered Democracy and Global Innovation in, in, in Canberra Australia so I'm just really, you know, I'm globally focused on my, you know, you know, thinking about democracy innovation in a variety of different contexts. And so you know my background really is really interested in participatory deliberative democracy, community development, and any form of public decision making that can really elevate people's quality of lives to better forms of decision making processes. Beautiful.Derek Okubo: I’m glad you took it first. I come from a Japanese American family. I’m a fourth generation in this country of my family. I come from a history of where my family experienced. Very unconstitutional acts in this country where they were imprisoned during World War Two lost everything from their business to their businesses to their house to their feeling of security, and then restarted all over again after the released from the camps, and, and which probably played a big role, as far as that history in my own work that I've done in community as far as civil rights, as far as advocating for the underrepresented in this country in our communities. I worked with the National Civic League for 20 years, and then received an appointment from one of my former staff members who was elected mayor of the city and county of Denver, and he appointed me to be his executive director of the Agency for Human Rights and Community Partnerships. So I did that for 12 years.And then we turned out in July of 2023. I started my own little gig and have been working since I came back to the National Civic League halftime to help with specific projects around the country, again. But yeah, for 20 years with the Civic League, I did a lot of work around the country in communities, whether it was strategic planning or dealing with specific issues.Yeah, I'm so honored to be speaking with both of you. I really do appreciate you being here with me. And before we get into sort of the nuts and bolts of the National Civic League and charter reform and all that. I was curious, what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in this for each of you?Nick Vlahos: Yeah, I mean, the real joy for me is working with people. I mean, I started I cut my teeth in community development and social housing communities working with underrepresented groups, specifically on community economic development and different forms of participatory decision making related to how to, you know, how to establish, you know, positions and roles and jobs for for the youth in specific communities.And so it really is on the ground, speaking to people and seeing the fruits of, you know, the good processes that bring people to have conversations together. And I think part of that is also, you know, learning over the years and being present over the years in some spaces where or public for where there really isn't civil discourse or dialogue or structured conversation and things like that. And so the real joy for me is seeing collaborative efforts come to fruition and people problem solve because I think naturally we are problem solvers and we give people a task to solve a problem collectively, then they come together with a shared vision for that.Derek Okubo: Just to kick back off of what Nick said, I learned very early that this work awakens a belief in the people. And just like what Nick said, I mean, I'm in the work I've done around the country and in my own communities. When people come together with a wide ranging perspective and they come in, we share the good information, we develop the vision. And I mean, I've seen where people have thought things were impossible to accomplish where they actually did across a wide range of perspectives. And so it really has just left me with a belief in people.Beautiful. So I wanted to start maybe just could you tell, I mean, so I only encountered National Civic League, I think within the past few years in my own efforts, you know, I live in a small town and there's conversation about charter reform and I bump into the National Civic League, but I don't know that I had really been aware before. So what do people need to know about the National Civic League, its history and what it's doing?Nick Vlahos Let you take that one, Derek.Derek Okubo: Well, yeah, I'll just start with the nation's oldest good government organization founded in 1894 by a bunch of young civic rebel rousers of that time period. I mean, we're talking about a young Theodore Roosevelt, young Louis Brandeis, a young Marshall Fields, just that came together that we're really concerned about how local government was working at the time. It was very dysfunctional, highly corrupt, and they came together to address that issue. And about six years later, came up with the first model city charter to address how local government can be run more effectively.And as you know, a lot of those folks became the reformers of this country. And so since that time, they've kind of laid the groundwork, developed the DNA of our organization as far as participatory local government, collaborative decision making, working together across perspectives across all sectors to address local issues. And that's something that we do on a daily basis. Nick, do you have something to add?Nick Vlahos: Yeah, I just think that it's interesting. I mean, I've been with the organization for two years now, you know, our in-house National Civic Review is over 100 years old. We've been celebrating communities through their local civic action and innovation for 75 years through the All American City Awards.We've been advocating for, you know, structural forms of city government, which have ranged and have different over time. Initially, you know, I think that city manager form of government is one in our model city charter, but also electoral reform. And so thinking about this in terms of, you know, celebrating community and civic culture and also democracy innovations is something that that sort of thread that persists all the way today.And so we have two programs within the National Civic League. One is the Center for Democracy Innovation. And I'm part of that with the director Matt Linegar and we really focus on multi channel opportunities, digital in person facilitated conversations. And then we have Civic Genius, which recently joined under our umbrella and they focus on deliberate forms of engagement like citizens assemblies and you know a program they have called It's Your America. So we're really thinking about democracy innovation for the 21st century in different ways that we might want to innovate those processes within the formal structures of government within communities and more broadly. And so that sort of brings us to, you know, eventually what we'll talk about, which is city charters.Derek Okubo: And I'll just add, you know, the All America City Award that has been around for many years, and it started by George Gallup when he was our board chair. And if you look back at Look magazine, they would publish the All America football team, you know, every year and he had a proposal. We have an All America City Award. And again, the concept is the same type of thing. It's when a community comes together as a team to address challenging issues and show results. They should be recognized for that teamwork. And so that's where the All America City Award came from way back when, from.There's a sign that I think Albany was in All America City and I'd seen that in that sort of the green New York State Thruway signage for a very long time and not knowing where it came from. So that's pretty awesome.Nick Vlahos Yeah, I do want to jump on that, you know, there's different ways of celebrating community as well that we do and, you know, the All America City more really the flagship program. But we just recently launched a healthy democracy map, you know, near 10,000 organizations from across the country. So we're really trying to visualize geographically the different types of networks and organizations that exist. So there really is a plethora of different ways that we want to enhance and support, you know, civic engagement at a variety of different levels.I'm curious how you would describe the current state of civic engagement. As someone living in a small town, I feel like the spaces we’ve traditionally used for important conversations aren’t holding together the way they were meant to in the past. Social media has made things more complicated and divisive, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. How would you describe the state of civic engagement today? Also, the idea of innovating democracy feels strange to a lot of people. When I talk about it, some don’t really know how to wrap their heads around the concept of innovating something so foundational. I’d love to hear whichever one of you wants to tackle this.Nick Vlahos: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I guess there's maybe sort of two parallel things that I would think about this is one that you know there really is a lot of interesting research that tracks public attitudes towards government. There really is a challenge that governments are facing and elected officials are facing in terms of the apathy towards specific political institutions, maybe not necessarily democracy but at least foundational or or specific types of institutions. So that really is a significant challenge that we have to look at so the state of where we're at is, you know, one is that public attitudes are changing.Simultaneously you have, you know, specific actors, in some cases they're bad actors, which really are trying to, you know, take away democratic rights in specific contexts and so we see at least globally at a global level, there has been a decline of democracy in some instances. And then the other parallel that I come from and let's just think of this maybe more at a local or a neighborhood or a community level and take away the noise that happens at the national level through national media.There's just so much work that's happening on the ground in communities that is trying to elevate people's quality of life and create the sort of sinews that build a civic infrastructure locally. Sometimes it's more happening desperately in different geographies and places but on the ground, you can see just a lot of work like we have thousands of organizations in our healthy democracy map. There are other maps like the SNF Agora, John Hawkins, who's charted something like 500,000 orgs, but they include a lot larger, you know, faith-based institutions and the like, you know, Boys and Girls Clubs.So there's so many different ways we want to think about democracy and it's not simply at the national level through the national media and, you know, completely, you know, thinking about democracy is declining and in peril and that's probably a strong case. But what else is happening and how do we elevate and support these groups that are actually trying to do the good work in their communities to save and, you know, democracy or even just promote, you know, being a good neighbor.Derek Okubo: Yeah, and I remember, Peter, way back when I started with the Civic League in 1992, that we were having to make a case for collaborative decision making, you know, to teach local government leaders the art of convening. And I think that was the main focus of the work that I did when I was there for the 20 years was that capacity building the art of convening, facilitating, bringing the different But knowing how to identify the different perspectives and then working them through a process in which they can, these diverse views can come together and find the things that they do agree on and develop solutions and strategies to address the issues.I think that when I left the Civic League, you know, and so what had happened, we had built and nationally there are other organizations who had built a lot of leadership that understood it and got it and we're doing it on a regular basis. I remember after I left the Civic League, the International City County Management Association, the executive director asked me to come and do a workshop for their annual conference and I had 250 people in this workshop and I asked how many of you have ever done a citizen based strategic plan. And two of the 250 raised their hands.And what that told me is that, you know, a lot of the folks that we have worked with, they had retired, you know, and they had left and we're having to start another cycle, as far as the art of convening, the art of doing meetings in a different way. And so I think that that is something that we're doing again, you know, as far as teaching localities, how to convene, how to run meetings in a more effective way in a different way. And it's just something that I've learned, even in the work that I did within the local government as executive director of a department, we go through cycles and we're going through another cycle.Nick Vlahos: Yeah, I also want to pick up on your last point, Peter, where, you know, like how we even think about democracy innovation which views are kind of strange and thinking about this sort of context. And I just want to point out, like, I mean, I guess I have sort of an academic approach to this where I don't read history sort of backward, and I start at democracy as, as, you know, a God given right. It's a process. It's a struggle. It's a relationship. It's not finite. It's not completely entrenched. It needs to be reworked over time, and it needs to be fought for. And so when you think about that historically the different variations of institutional reforms that come and go.We're at that moment where we need to innovate things. There're so many institutions that are foundational to a democracy that just aren't serving the people and the public in the way that they should. And, and we're right for different forms of innovations that give the public a lot more voice than they're given.In Hudson, there’s been ongoing conversation about potential improvements through charter reform. Right now, there’s a petition circulating for charter revisions, including a shift from a strong mayor system to a city manager system, along with other proposed changes. The reason I wanted to have this conversation is to get a solid understanding of charter reform—kind of a Charter Reform 101. For people in Hudson who may be listening, what do they need to know? What is the city charter, what is reform about, and why do communities pursue it? I was surprised to learn there’s a model city charter—a kind of template that a community like Hudson can use as a starting point. So, I’m curious: how do you guide communities that want to go through a charter reform process?Derek Okubo: Well, you know, one of the first things I always check out is why do they want to do a charter revision. Because just revising the charter itself is not a solution. I mean, sometimes it's a leadership issue, it's not by the leadership so you want to be clear as far as what is the issue.The, as far as the charter itself, you know, what it is is that it's the local constitution, you know, it has the different articles that outline the structure of government, the roles and responsibilities. And some of the procedures that the local government would have to go through. It is not one that gets real specific, it's more of an overarching document if you get into the weeds.Things that a lot of times are better addressed and the charter should be something that won't change a lot over time, you know, gives that framework that is going to be sturdy. But as far as the process to do it, again, you know, looking at why, and then going through the process, identifying what within it needs to be updated and revised, and then determining what the desired outcome is and putting together that language in there. But I don't know, Nick, do you have something to add?Nick Vlahos: I just think it's, I mean, like you said, Peter, we have a model city charter that goes back literally over 100 years to help support communities so this is, this is something that's been happening for a long time and I, you know, and I can't be more excited about this and maybe this is sort of the democracy that I'm seeing here to me but how often do you have a chance to work on a constitution, you know what I mean and how do you get the public really involved and interested in this. And, and the history of this is that there is over 100 years of direct plebiscitary public engagement like the opportunity to participate in this and have the final vote, because much of these go to referenda.It's a really interesting dynamic of thinking about the structure of government and how it connects to community. And, you know, that sort of interplay and and it's, we're at that moment in time where our institutions need to evolve, and this is one of those opportunities. You know, a national constitution doesn't change but a local one does. And, and how cool is that that you can think about a new way to engage people to get them confident in government, but also think about what you might want to put into it, you know, and that's sort of what excites me and there's really, you know, there's a lot of opportunity, at least in the next Yeah, in our model city charter, we're in our addition of it.Derek Okubo: So it's gone through nine transformations over 100 years. And, and it's just, we will update that probably every 10 to 20 years as well because times and circumstances change, we have to evolve as well.So, the process in Hudson has been, I believe that they took the current city charter and did they just really just did revisions within the document. And in order to make these shifts. What's the, how is it different to start with a model city charter versus starting with our current city charter to make the kind of revisions that you would want to make.Derek Okubo: Well, you know, and I'm not familiar with the Hudson city charter. So, is your city charter. Currently, well he said you're currently a strong mayor and you're considering changing to a more of a manager council manager form.I guess the question is what's the benefit of the Model City Charter versus starting with whatever we have sort of an old what I assume is sort of an old charter.Derek Okubo: Well, our model city charter really gives the framework for a certain form, a specific form which is the council manager form. And it very clearly articulates how that structure is put together, the roles and responsibilities of the different folks that are part of that structure, and what they're supposed to be doing. And then it goes into the other things like elections and budgeting and finance and things like that, but it just very clearly articulates the different roles and responsibilities of that council manager form.Nick Vlahos: Just to jump in and build on that. I mean, I think, you know, to your point, Peter, like what's the benefit of the model city charter. I mean, two things is that sometimes these charters haven't been touched in decades. Where do you, where do you go to sort of learn about and you know are you know the model city charter which has a long history of, you know, the going back and being updated through legal experts and a lot of collaborators collaborators and civil society to develop sort of a framework to help support groups that might be a starting from scratch or me wanting to think about how you scope your existing charter and the other one is is like you know a lot of these, you know, going to the commission, generally speaking, a charter review commission is our our citizens. And they're not familiar with this and so we have an opportunity to provide you know what is that you know we have a guide to city charter, which is, you know, it's a little bit more of an older document, maybe 10 or 10 or so 10 or so years old but how do you run a charter process and then here's a template for the things that you might want to look at and and compare that to what's your existing charter. And then of course here from the public and the community what you would like to see.Yeah, I have a very naive analogy in my mind that I'm, it's not that I'm good with cars but I just think about the charter or the government is the engine of a car or something and there's this opportunity to lift the hood and get in and just sort of tune everything is that is that is that helpful or accurate in any way.Nick Vlahos: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think, you know, this is the thing that that we we tread with a model is that you know we do, while we do advocate for a city manager form of government, it is also stated within there that we recognize that all governments are they have strong principles of the process and one of the new the newest and latest ones in the ninth edition is that we were trying to focus on on language around equity and civic engagement and thinking about inserting these these processes as well. So, there's a, you know, a lot of different things to think about and it's one, it's one way that you might want to at least start with with your process. Yeah.Derek, you mentioned earlier that we might be in a new era of reform, and I’m curious about that. Where are we in terms of the role of mayor versus city manager? It seems like there’s been a move toward the council-manager system. How do you talk about this shift? Historically, where do these two systems fit? I understand that each locality or community will make its own decision, but what’s the case for the council-manager system? Where does the strong mayor system come from, and how should I understand what the strong mayor system means for my small town in 2025?Derek Okubo: Yeah, well the reason why the back in the start of the national back end was the National Municipal League, but as far as the idea of a model city charter was because the local governments were being so ineffective and inefficient and governing and addressing local issues. So there needed to be, while you had a council and a mayor that were out there leading they were also involved in the management of the local government and that's where a lot of the corruption and a lot of the inefficiencies were happening.So the concept was that you had your elected body, you wanted them to lead, and then you needed a professional manager to keep house, you know, and that was the concept, you know, the separation of the powers. And so you had a professional that would manage the local government, the departments at the direction of the leadership, the elected leadership. And so that was the concept of trying to make local government more effective and more efficient. Now, today, you know the Council Manager form, I believe is still the largest, the most used forum in the world, as far as the structure of government.The, and it's more, you'll see it more common in mid-sized communities to smaller communities when you're talking about bigger cities, you'll see more of a strong mayor type of a system, at least from my perspective. That's what I've seen. But the whole purpose is really to have the local government be as effective and efficient as possible. And by having that one who just really focuses on keeping house, you know that that's what, where a lot of the benefits come from, if that makes sense.What about the process? I know it varies from state to state, but what kind of guidance do you give communities on how to initiate this kind of change? What are the best practices for starting a process like this? And what are the different ways communities can go about making these kinds of changes?Derek Okubo: Well, a lot of it is driven by state law. The state, each state, what I found out is, and learned is that each state has different requirements, as far as charter change and charter revision. Some states, and I'm not sure how New York works, but some states don't require, or require state approval, you know, as far as charter changes or city charters being established. Or they require certain processes that locales have to go through with charter revisions or charter updates or creating their own city charter. So that's one of the first things is you would want to know what your state law requires.Then as far as the locality, we have always advocated with citizen participation, charter commissions come in, made up of residents who participate and review the charter. Also, citizen engagement, whether it's public meetings or public forums, to get input on what they think needs to be looked at and reviewed. But through the Charter Commission, for instance, I just am finishing one up in South Dakota, the Charter Commission revised their city charter, updated it. They are now required to go to city council for approval of those changes, and then they have to put it out to ballot for the residents to vote on those changes and to approve them. And if they're approved within 30 days, they go into effect, but each state might do things a little bit different.Nick Valhos: Yeah, I just want to, I mean, there's a few things I want to build on apologies if I repeat what you're saying, Derek, but to build on the initial point, I mean, you have the variation is going to start initially with the state law, but also home rule. So these are two different ways that you're going to see the ability for it to be convened and initiated and how it's going to take place on the one hand. So I have, I don't know if you have a second, but I have a forthcoming article coming out with David Schechter and Lynn Davis and we sort of outline this as the initiation, the form and the ratification. So, you know, building on what Derek said, I mean, really here, you know, legislation requires the view of the Charter, so that might happen, or a legislative body convenes the Charter or citizens trigger a Charter review process through initiative.The forms that it can take is, you know, citizens can do this, you know, on their own, a mayor can select or a council can select commissioners or some type of democracy innovation like a citizens assembly can be used. And then the ratification process really is just like the commissioners propose changes, go directly to referendum, the Commission submits its proposals to a local council, and then that might have to go to a referendum or the Commission submits proposals to a local council, and that has to be supported through some form of special act that goes to the state legislature. So there really is a variety of different ways that involve how it's convened, what it looks like and how it turns out.Derek OkuboYeah, sometimes city councils, I put together some type of ordinance that then is for a Charter change that then goes to ballot, and then they approve it. I know that in Denver, that's what often happened when there was a Charter update, it would go through council, not through a Charter Commission. So yeah, there's a variety, entirely correct, there's a variety of ways in which this can happen.PeterI want to tell you my understanding of what's happening in Hudson, and then get you guys to sort of just respond and help me understand how it fits into the way that it's done. But before I want to return to Derek something you talked about before about Charter reform or the question of why. I guess maybe that's sort of the first question: why, you know, people, why do communities do this?What is it really about? Because it's such a way, I mean, you know, for people that aren't paying attention, there's a whole bunch of new language that doesn't really make a lot of sense. So why do municipalities engage in this kind of reform?Derek Okubo: Yeah, you know, and one of the things I remember back when I was with the Civic League before in my first go round, our president at that time say, well, you know, structure, it doesn't matter what structure you have, if the leadership is really not being effective in running, you know, the government. So that's why, you know, that first question would always come up. Now, what is the issue, you know, as far as, is it the structure or is it the leadership or, you know, what is the issue?And so with the structure, it's just the way in which things are done. And I think that's what the Model City Charters focus and purpose is to help that clarity be in place so that people know what each other's roles are doing and how things should work at its optimal level in order to be effective. And you could have a council manager, a great structure and very poor leadership and it still won't work.Nick Vlahos: I mean, Derek is right that it might very well be that it's an issue or there's conflict or something happening in the community that requires revising it. It just might also be that it's within the charter itself that it has to be revisited every five to 10 years or whatever it is. So there's a few different reasons for why it might happen.So in Hudson, a group of residents have made charter revisions and in New York, it happens that, you know, you need some percentage of the number of voters from the last gubernatorial campaign. You need that number of signatures to present it to the council. If the council doesn't act on it, you need an additional percentage of new signatures to then put it on the ballot or referendum. And that's what's happened in Hudson.There are these charter revisions that will be on the ballot in November through that process. There was no formal sort of commission at all, but they're, you know, they're doing public input. They're starting a public input process, but they're starting to have their convenings around the revisions. I mean, all the signatures have been signed and the changes that they're proposing are from a mayor to city manager, reducing the number of council members from 11 to five and changing term limits. And there might be one other one, but I think those are the fundamental changes that they're making.And it’s sort of an inherently divisive move to go this way. And so we're all kind of trying to, we're all trying to figure out how to go about it. So I'm just going to stop talking now and just see what you make of that effort and what I've described and how does it fit into the way that this is done. It's also, I was really tuned into the idea that the National Civic League came out of rabble rousers, you know what I mean? And there's a piece of this, these guys feel like they're kind of being rabble rousers, so there's something about what they're doing that's very much in the spirit of reform and the National Civic League, which I honestly, it wasn't my experience of what they're doing, but I'm just curious to hear you react to what I've described.Derek Okubo: Yeah, it's, are currently the 11 council members, is that all at large?No, it's five wards, so two per ward. And the population has shifted, so there's an argument that we just don't need that many.Derek Okubo Yeah, well, and I can't, I'm struggling a little bit Peter, because I don't really know Hudson. PeterYeah, I don't mean to put you on the spot at all. No, I didn't mean to do that at all. It just was, you know, an opportunity to sort of tell this story in front of people who do this for a living, which seemed worthwhile.Nick Vlahos: I mean, I guess the way that I would think about this first, I mean, just to back to your point, Peter, that there is this long history of, like you said, rabble rousers, but I'll put it as, there's a long history of recall initiative and referendum in the United States. And, you know, at least from a normative or theoretical point of view, this is direct democracy, you actually get an opportunity to influence the outcome directly through a public vote.I think, in principle, I'm a strong supporter of that. In practice, there's a lot more nuance around just simply throwing out a referenda. There are the campaign and lobby efforts and the amount of money that's put into these and whether or not there's fairness in the way that the campaigns happen, that way that the questions are politically loaded. Whether or not there was any form of public consultation and input into this process, whether or not.And there's a few other things that are slipping my mind, but all to say that there are better, there are good ways to run a referenda and there are bad ways and unsuccessful ways to do that. And so we might want, and while I can't touch on the specifics here, we might want to think about whether or not the community has had the opportunity and the buy in and the say in such a process. Because this might not go the way of the people that they want as well.You know what I mean? And so this comes back to this efficiency of a public engagement process where we might just do something, rubber stamp it and expect the public to be all for it and then have to redo that process again and waste a lot of resources and time in order to do it right the first time. And so that's really what I would have to say is it's fascinating to me and I had never learned about such a situation where the citizens can directly go to a vote.Like, I mean, just theoretically, just fascinates me that you can actually just get enough signatures to initiate a charter review process. But I mean, my inclination from a participatory democracy point of view is we want to expand the voices in the charter review process and we want to expand how people can participate within a charter, you know, naturally within a charter as well and what ends up on it.Derek Okubo: If there is, if the topic is highly divisive in Hudson, it tells me that there's a few dynamics going on. One is how fully do people understand what's behind the proposed change. And like Nick said, how much buy-in is there? Obviously, that's really... There's not a lot of buy-in. And the way in which to address those dynamics, of course, is by kind of going slow to go fast, you know, it's convening the folks together from different perspectives.Getting the input through the course of defining what the situation is, what the ideal situation would be, what the solutions would be. By having everybody together and going through that process together, I think that's where you develop the understanding, the clarity as far as what this is about. And then also, as far as creating the buy-in, as far as whether to support or not support. I think that by having that type of process earlier, it would probably be in a little bit different place had there been that type of convening early in the community.I love what you said about going slow to go fast. You've captured a sort of tension or a paradox or some kind of contradiction. I feel like I encounter when I talk to people and connect with really the need for action and the fatigue with process. The idea of convening feels inactive and it feels like the exact opposite of what you really want to do. Do you have any wisdom on making that phrase alone and stealing? How do you make the case for convening when there's such an urgency?Derek Okubo: Yeah, and I would say that, well, first of all, when we have that sense of urgency, the urge is to go fast. And we end up going slow in the long run because it gets messed up or it doesn't go at all. It started all over again. And so that's what we mean by even if there is that sense of urgency, it's still taking the time necessary. Otherwise, it's going to be for not oftentimes, but especially in a situation like this.So when you're talking about the structure of your government, I mean, you need to take the time necessary to put the thought into it and get the different perspectives together to do it. I mean, it's not something that is going to change overnight anyway. I mean, you might as well take the time necessary to do it right from the beginning is my own perspective.Yeah, that's wonderful. I had done some convenings a few years ago and was very fortunate that a neighbor in Hudson was friends with James Howard Kunstler. And he came and gave a talk and he had written Geography of Nowhere. And I asked him a question because I'm new to all this. I was like, what do you mean? Like, what is civic design? Like, what does that mean to you? And his answer, I keep with me because he said, it's the relationships between all the buildings. And I've always really loved that answer. And so I guess my next question is sort of about I think you guys were featured in the Time Magazine article about Jimmy Carter's brand of populism being sort of civic populism. And I just wanted to maybe give you guys a chance to talk about that work and maybe that idea of civic populism as being a kind of form of populism that maybe we're not aware of or how it's different from how we usually think about populism.Derek Okubo: Nick, I'll let you—this is your area where you excel.Nick Vlahos: Yeah, I mean, the article, it was an excellent article. I mean, Harry Boyd, I believe, wrote that and co-authored, you know, really, you know, has really captured over time the sort of spaces of social capital and the different sets of community networks and the people within communities. And I think we get sort of wound up within a specific narrative in effect of polarization, you know, the political right versus the political left or the center and whatnot. Where if we start to look at the actual history of the way that civic engagement, the fight for civil rights, suffrage, everything like of the sort is and the way that it fought against the status quo and entrenched power. There really is a different dynamic that comes from the reform era. And, you know, there's some interesting work that charts that across, you know, Western democracies.And so it does, you know, think, you know, allows us to sort of maybe reclaim the narrative back and rethink about what that means and what positive forms of populism are because there are and, you know, the roots of it, the Vox Populi, that there is a potential there to achieve something that's a little bit more positive, but we just need to think a little bit more about what to what end is this directed towards. And how, you know, what are the root causes that are causing this sort of disaffection, institutional, economic, familial, whatever it is, and think about the different ways, you know, we as a community, as people can come together.We've got maybe just under 10 minutes left and I think I wanted to return. Well, I want to get into Citizens Assembly, you know, I just, I first encountered it through the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and just fell in love with the idea and its possibilities. And I have a proposal with healthy democracy for the city to do charter reform through it, but it's not, you know, sort of haven't gotten it on the ballot. And it's, but it's floating around and I'm making a case for it in Hudson. And I guess I wanted to position it in this conversation of this charter revision group has there, it's sort of a form of direct democracy. Citizens Assembly is this, you've used the word participatory, Citizens Assembly is deliberative.Nick Vlahos: I mean, these are somewhat analytic distinctions, but I mean, they do, they do play out in practice, you know, the ability to aggregate a vote and directly influence the outcome is more of a direct form. Participatory tends to be more on a broad mass scale, and then more deliberative tends to be, you know, just by nature because it is going slow to go fast, you, it's more smaller group. I mean, so at the end of the day, a more deliberative democracy is one that is about reason giving and sharing and learning about subjects so that you can produce, you know, measured outcomes for some sort of end.And so the purpose of having something like, I mean, I see a world where all of these overlap multi level channels of engagement that are direct participatory mass deliberative small groups. What are the different ways that we can civic design and integrate these so that the pros and cons of each can actually benefit the people as a whole. And so Citizens Assembly isn't one interesting model now to utilize because it is meant to take a measured approach to thinking about something as important as a charter review.Right. And so this is an opportunity for us to think about the design of how do we select the participants, rather than, for example, using mayor selection and partisan appointment, random civic lottery or sort of Titian stratify that based on demographic groups, gender identity, etc. Think about the different phases of public engagement into this process and howyou make recommendations coming back to the community with your full proposals, then going to a referendum.You know, and then another one is the citizen initiative review that happens in Oregon, you know, where the fascinating thing is that they create a citizen statement about this so that they can say, hey, we've weighed the pros and cons. Here's the statement for the referenda so that you can show that we're behind this, you know, so I just think that we, we want to, we, we want to include people and more people and not just have the usual suspects. We want broad demographics within the community to participate.We want to offer digital ways of participating. And then a citizens’ assembly is another one, not all communities are going to use a citizens assembly. I do think that we should have them. That's part of the article that I'm proposing, but in those instances, they don't. How do we augment the way that they participate through some form of civic engagement scorecard that we offer or a, a, you know, online digital platform to propose and generate ideas. How do we help to outreach the communities to community campaigns and things like this is I think a better way to think of it and not just as this that or the other but like how do we make these work together in unison.Derek Okubo: Yeah, and just to build off of what Nick said, I mean, our goal is to create a safe space for hard discussions on tough issues, you know, and by convening these different views and perspectives together in the safe space with good information. And deliberate talking about the issue. I mean, talking about what our ideal outcome would be talking about the defining getting a shared definition of what the issue is. And then coming up with the strategies to address it. I mean, that's in having the space in which to do that. I think that's what we're talking about here. And Nick is entirely right, trying to find ways to integrate these different pieces together.Nick Vlahos: And, and I want to take this a step further, you know, not just simply the process, how do we make a better process, what do we put in through an actual charter, you know, so we have article seven, you know, it's, and I think it's interesting because you know it. I think it's the first time in our history where we've actually included something like this, but I'll just note that, I mean, basically it states in the charter, the city shall treat public engagement as integral to governance to include multi-channels in person in digital ways. Institutional structures will support and coordinate engagement, such as council committees, departments, commissions and advisory boards.So we also want to think about the end game of, you know, getting to a process where we have a better civic infrastructure, where those relationships between the buildings are more fully spelled out, and they're included in the foundation of our sort of civic design. And there's a lot of interesting ways that we might want to do that renovating existing infrastructure creating new parallel institutions, whatever it is, the specificity of that is going to be community specific but process and outcome. How do we, how do we make it more civically minded.That's amazing. I love what you just said and that is that you are pointing at what's in the model city charter that it actually sort of embeds more robust forms of civic engagement as an obligation at a broad level.Nick Vlahos: Right. I mean, you know, I think it's absolutely necessary and vital to have at least some level of a broad statement in there to guide cities that are doing this brand, you know, and they should consider that. But you can take this to another level and actually be specific and maybe that broadness is too esoteric. We need to specify things so in Cambridge, their charter commission proposed having regularly curling citizens assemblies. I mean, we can think about the gamut of ways to make civic engagement a lot better and think about how the community might embed that within their charter. And you know the limit there really, but then of course you know it has to pass a referendum and get through all the different layers of political governance that you have to think about. But you know there's there's in, you know, there really is space to think creatively.I find that stuff so exciting.Derek Okubo: That one article on public engagement is going to be exciting to watch because I think that's going to really evolve over the years.Well, this is what I think came out, what has drawn me to this, just to begin with this experience of living in a small town and seeing what feels like, you know, the biggest problem is that we just don't even have a shared understanding. We're not even in the same conversation at all, really. And if there's no mechanisms in place for us to get to a shared understanding. But it's also the case that nobody's really paying attention to creating that civic infrastructure, basically, right? I mean, is that what we're talking about? Is this a new idea? Is this a new need that we have?Derek Okubo: No, I think it's just a key thing is having leadership across different sectors, you know, as far as whether it's the business and government and nonprofit and community. I mean, as far as just knowing that a certain group alone won't have the answers, we have to come together. We might know the questions, but to create the answers, we need to bring everybody together. And I think that having the leadership who understands the art of convening is so crucial to the health of any community's civic infrastructure.Thank you so much. I really am so appreciative of your time and your expertise. I really just thank you so much for sharing all your time and your wisdom with us.Nick Vlahos: Thank you, Peter.Derek Okubo: My pleasure. Yeah, absolutely. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Maggie Garner is the co-founder of Waterson Garner. She started her career at P&G in what she called the golden years where the consumer was boss, and qualitative was well-resourced. I met her through the Exposure Therapy community, where she shared her approach to radical listening.Yeah, so I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine. She teaches oral history, and it's a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it's big and beautiful, I kind of over explain it the way I'm doing it right now. So before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer and not answer any way that you want to, and it's impossible to make a mistake. The question is, where do you come from?Well, I love this question, as for many reasons I'm sure you know, but I love hearing about where people come from. But I come from Urbana, Illinois, Central Illinois. It's a university town where the University of Illinois is and is otherwise surrounded by soybeans and corn.So it's kind of in this very agricultural zone of the state, but is this, you know, vibrant university community that is, I think, was huge in terms of what I grew up valuing, being exposed to, versus if I had just lived a couple towns over, it would have been a really different experience for me.Yeah, what was it like? I mean, that would be the Midwest, yes? Is that what we're talking about?Yeah, well, it is totally Midwest still, in terms of my experience. So growing up with all of the Midwest cliches and, you know, having lived in other places now, it definitely has made me realize how fundamentally Midwestern I am. But growing up in this university community, it was a really creative community. I was exposed to a lot of art, and the music scene was vibrant. A lot of the kids I grew up with were in bands. A lot of the kids I grew up with had really brilliant parents who were professors at the university.And so going over to their house, you would get into big conversations. But also, I grew up with kids that had farmland around town. So it was a really rich experience. I think I grew up kind of being exposed to a lot of big ideas. We got to take classes at the university sometimes. So it kind of got into that kind of passion for learning, and I guess very young without even realizing that I was.Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?Well, it's funny you asked that because about, I guess, eight years ago now, we moved my parents out of my childhood home and I was going through boxes of stuff in the basement as one does when you help your parents move. And I found a newspaper from my senior year where every student proclaimed what they thought they would be doing in 10 years. And I actually said I would be in advertising. And so I must have known. I don't even really remember that, but I must have known that that's what I wanted to do. And I kind of remember that was around.This is a little bit cringy, but that was around the time that the Mel Gibson movie came out of What a Woman Wants. I don't know if you remember that movie.Yeah, of course.And I think that planted a pretty big seed in my head of what advertising and brand building could be or what it could be about.Yeah. And what was the allure of that story? What do you recall?I think it was the first time that I had connected the dots that a brand could connect into something really deep and meaningful from a human level. Now, going back to that movie, I have no idea if it aged well. I haven't watched it in a really long time, but I do remember it was at least attempting to kind of build empathy and understanding of what it was like to be a woman in the professional realm.And I think it was Nike was their client was trying to tap into sort of some of the tensions around that. I think that was a pretty cool concept for me at the time that that was something that could happen in advertising.Yeah, that's beautiful. So catch me up now. Now, where are you and what do you do for work?Well, I ended up, I guess, with that level of clarity in high school, I ended up going to Indiana University to the Kelly School of Business. So I went directly into the business school there.But also, you mean directly into the business school?Well, as a freshman, like I declared myself a marketing major as a freshman. So I was very focused. I was crystal clear. That's what I wanted to do even, I guess, before I even took a marketing class, I had already declared that. And that just set me on this path. So I graduated from Indiana and got a job immediately at Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati in their consumer and market knowledge group, which was what the insights group was called back in the day.And 24 years later, I'm still doing consumer and market knowledge and insights work. So my career at P&G took me into an opportunity to establish my own practice with my co-founder Katie Waterson. And we now have an insights and brand strategy and innovation firm called Waterson Garner. And we are doing, I guess, what I saw Mel Gibson do back in the day. It's come full circle, where we're helping brands understand people and how they can build more relevant stories and products and services for them.And did you just celebrate 10 years?Yes, we just celebrated 10 years at Watterson Garner. Yeah. Thank you.What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?Well, I think a lot of this has been good timing and amazing luck. So when I started at P&G, it was really the golden era of consumer insights at the company from then to now. A.G. Laffley was the CEO, and he really operated with the mantra of consumer as boss. And so the insights function was really empowered. There was huge investment in consumer research at the time, a lot of innovation, a lot of kind of mixed method integration. Market mixed modeling was kind of being born, and segmentation was being advanced with new statistical methods. And quality was also really a huge investment. This is when the transfer of ethnography into in-home research was huge, and everyone was doing that. And so I walked into that world of highly resourced, really kind of having a real powerful voice at the table and marketing as an insights person.And that sets the tone, I think, for what I know to be possible, for what happens when you have the right insight to work. And so that got me, I think, into this world of really understanding the power of what I call radical listening. You've heard me use that term before. And I was actually working in the pharmaceuticals division at P&G, which they no longer have. But I was working in the women's health space, particularly on a brand that never made it to market, but it was a testosterone patch for low sexual desire in post-menopausal women. And so as a young 20-something, I was in interviews with women and their spouses, their partners, diving deep into what it's like to have lost and then rekindle a sexual connection in the relationship.And so that really set the bar for the kind of intimacy and vulnerability and power that comes from really personal consumer research, but also what's powerful and possible when you take that and honor that and lead it into a brand strategy and innovation strategy so that you're really delivering against what's really going on in those people's lives. And so it set a pretty high bar for me from the get-go of what research can be like and what it can do and unlock. And I've never really let the bar lower for myself as I've gone through different roles and worked across all different kinds of brands and industries. I still think that's the kind of conversation that you can have about almost anything if you know how.Yeah. How were you supported? What was it like to be a researcher? What did you learn? I've never worked with P&G, but everybody, you know, it's such a powerhouse, you know what I mean? And so what was the culture? How did you learn to be in that space with those people? What kind of training did they give you or how did they structure that for you?It was kind of an amazing thing and something that I think has really shifted in the industry. So back then, we were brought in and kind of went through what they called a new hire college experience. And so we were in deep training workshops for weeks for our first year together, learning about all kinds of methods.But of course, the most important learning ground for me was in the field. So working with really experienced researchers and moderators who knew how to have these kinds of intimate conversations, it was, you know, watching them navigate and really carefully honor that experience was key. But then I think, you know, coming back and learning how to translate anything that we learned into actual grand strategy, that is one of the things that P&G does better than many companies, is that they don't just leave it at an insight. It always is pushed into a competitive advantage, right? So what did we learn about our consumers that no one else knows? And what are we going to do with that?That was really kind of the rubber meets road training that I got an expectation that I think helped me really develop a philosophy of how important it is to make everything we learn immediately actionable, even if it's a big idea, even if it's a big concept, even if it's really intimate. And so I think that's the balance that I think I learned early on there.The power in these interviews, I keep hearing people talk about the value of finding something that nobody else knows. Can you tell me more about that? Is that still part of your process? And how do you do that?Well, that's sometimes hard to pre-orchestrate. One of the things that I think is tricky about research in today's get it done now economy is that building trust and intimacy and depth takes time. And so thinking about research as a way to get answers to questions is a sure way of getting shallow responses and really getting the same answers that all of your competitors already know as well.So creating a layered contextual and trust building method has helped us go deeper into conversations where maybe we're connecting dots on things that are not obvious at first. So if you know what's happening culturally, what's happening in their personal lives, what's happening in terms of aspirations and what's getting in the way of all that and a lot of the magic happens also on the back end when it comes to sense making. And so we're gathering all this rich contextual layered learning, but then the hard part is now what does it all mean? And we call that sense making. There's a lot of words for it, synthesis, sense making. But that's where kind of the art and science of insight distillation comes in, right?Where you're acting more like an editor in a lot of ways, kind of connecting the story, finding the story, deciding what's interesting but not really part of the story that can be left on the editing floor. And then creating this kind of rich narrative around the insights that really unlocks kind of a whole new way of looking at the world. And that's what we tried to do even on projects that are, you know, for things like cheese or beer or house exterior siding like these are all things that actually do have a lot of depth to them. If you allow the time to get into it.Why are we so surprised that there's depth there? Can you tell I'm curious about telling you more? Maybe there's a banal experience you've had.Well, I think one of the things that although I knew from the get go that I wanted to be a marketer, every chance I got in school to take a class in the social science realm, I did. So I love taking classes on gender studies and psychology and music history and whatever else I could find that I think helped me also just put everything I was learning about brands in context of the world. And so I think you either see brands as a thing that sort of exists in consumers lives, or you see it as part of a broader society and system. And I really see every brand as a part of the broader systems in which we live. There's a thing called systems thinking, which is a way to sort of see the bigger sociological, economic, cultural forces that really kind of create the context for any decision to be made. And so if you see brands in that way, you can kind of zoom out in the conversations. You can see how, you know, different dynamics around social class and identity economics, whether it's micro or macro cultural norms and rituals and institutions, how all of these actually are at play in the relationship between a consumer and a brand. And that macro view is where you can start to see interesting connections that maybe the consumer can't really articulate necessarily, but they can kind of help you see maybe where there's an intersection point that's worth digging into or thinking about more.And so, in that system's thinking method, you can kind of get to some pretty interesting and rich dynamics about any topic, whether that's, you know, like we're talking about beer, dairy, whatever it is. For example, in that home siding project I talked about, the shift of the role of women in home buying and home investment decisions has fundamentally completely changed how exterior home projects are happening, and the psychology and kind of path to purchase looks really, really different than it used to maybe 20 years ago. And so that's a big conversation about the role of women in the home, in the home buying market, in the renovations market, who they look to for advice, how they're treated in that process.Like there's just so much going on there that it was an incredibly rich project that ultimately was really just about, you know, how they wanted their homes to look and how it matched up to what they wanted their home experience to be.That's awesome. So, you talked a little bit about the constraints today. I mean, I love how you call out it takes time, you know what I mean, like qualitative in particular, any kind of research like the sort of the human the relational part of that process isn't something that really can be rushed. Yes, we are constantly forced to kind of rush it. So I wonder if you might talk a little bit about how you negotiate space for that kind of work.Yeah, this is actually this, this rub that you're talking about right now is the basis for a program that we developed, probably five or six years ago now called Human Fluent. Because we keep getting this question from our clients. So we'll do a project with them. They'll see the power of this transformational experience of radical listening by diving deep into this layered system around their brand and their consumer and they'll say, how do we do that? Like, what, how do we teach our people to do that? We don't do this. What does it take? And so we developed a program called human fluent that ultimately is a rebranding of the qualitative process. So we really want to kind of step out of what you might think you think qualitative is. There's a lot of, you know, old associations with qualitative research with focus groups. Eating M&Ms behind the mirror, things like that, and kind of flip charts and a two page summary and that's qualitative research.And so we're, we want to rebrand qualitative research as something that's way more about getting to understand humans and opening up the aperture of what it can be to learn about people. And so we developed this program and we walked through exactly what you're talking about. One, what is the sort of mindset that it takes to even be ready to develop human fluency.And a lot of that is working through your own biases about your brand, your consumer, your market, managing those, being aware of those, using those as a way to open up new and deeper and bigger questions. And then it comes down to the investment it takes to do this work well. And so there's some simple things of just, you know, how to design good research.But ultimately the hardest part that we hear from people is not so much that the research takes time, but it's that the sense making takes time. And so I think in this kind of automated world where answers are available so quickly, it seems, creating the space to actually analyze, find patterns, connect dots. That's actually where it seems like the biggest issue is on time. Not so much the research. You can kind of get people to commit a week to learning about people, maybe having multiple interactions with them. It's really on the back end of, okay, so now we have a lot of really rich but unstructured data that we have to organize, analyze, and make sense of.That is a skill and a discipline and a time commitment that I just don't think people have a lot of experience with anymore, period, let alone in marketing. And so that's really the biggest challenge that we find trying to kind of develop and scale and roll out these programs to our clients.Yeah, that's so interesting. That is sort of surprising. So what do you, what do you do with that? Or are you just, how do you manage that?Well, sense making, there's definitely some, some...Well I guess too that you're, are you treating them? Sorry to interrupt you, because there was a piece of, part of this feels like you're really coaching them. Is that correct?Yeah, so we have, we have training and capability programs that we deliver for clients that are going through the human fluent program. But the sense making part is one that is, you can teach to a point, and a lot of it is the muscles that you have to build through repetition, through practice, through kind of the, just the lived experience of working through sense making. And so in some organizations, they can kind of build the space and the skill set and the team and the leadership to support that kind of work.And in others, I, you know, I do feel like that is where sometimes the promise of the sort of depth of the research falls down. And so it's a real challenge. I think it's a real challenge in this kind of, especially in the world of AI where synthesis seems like you should be able to put all that data into a query and then get a report and get the insight out of it. But that's just not really how it works. That's not really how big insight, distillation and sense making works. It's a hands on discipline, and it's a muscle you have to build.Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, I have to keep thinking about that somehow. There's two things I want to return to you. One is the joy. You told this amazing story but I wanted to, you answered the question about where the joy is for you and what you love about it.Well, the conversations that I've been able to have over 24 years with, I mean, gosh, I don't know, thousands of people I don't even, I can't even imagine how many people I've interviewed at this point, but those. Those are some of the most enriching conversations I have. These are people that I would never meet outside of my bubble.These are people that teach me things about how they see the world and how they experience the world that I will never personally be able to experience in my life because we, we come from different places we are different people we are in different systems of society and industry and economics. And so, it feels like continuous learning to me. It feels like I'm constantly being exposed to new ideas. And it's really humbling.It's really humbling work, because you realize there is still so much to learn. I've been doing this for 24 years. I've done research on so many categories so many brands and still every project I get there's something interesting and new and different that I get to hear about in these interviews and so it to me it's just food, it's like food for my brain, and I love it and I don't get sick of it.You had mentioned that you knew you wanted to go into marketing, but what was your first experience with the research and qualitative and how did it was it a surprise to you I guess. And how do you - you’re celebrating it now but what do you really attribute to. How has it changed you I think is the question.Yeah. Well, I mean, the sort of role that I had in that women's health division was. I mean we did not waste any time on small talk in those interviews when you're talking to people, women who have had chronic life altering health changes. It's the tone and the potential of the conversation is just powerful from the get go, you know, so I remember when I first started at P&G I kind of, I was jealous of my friends that were working on the big brands like Tide and Crest and Pantene and these really cool sexy brands that I thought that.Well, that was, that was why you went to P&G and then I was like what am I working on an osteoporosis medication. But I remember kind of hitting me several months into that whole experience of like the conversations I was having were so real, you know, getting an osteoporosis diagnosis is a complete confrontation with the inevitable inevitabilities of aging for women.It's like a complete undeniable of the aging experience and that was a really rich, powerful conversation, maybe a little bit more rich than the challenges of stain removal on a shirt right and ketchup and mustard and whatnot. And so I think that sort of experience like just completely set the tone for what research can be for me. And so that's, you know, I've really carried that forward into all of the work that I do and I look for projects and maybe seek out projects that just set up that level of richness. Even though we do projects that maybe aren't as rich as well but we can find it, we can find the human experience in any topic.Yeah. And tell me about radical listening.Well, one of the projects that I know you've heard me talk about before is a project that we did exploring rural and urban identity. And this was back in 2016 when the first Trump election had really shaken up a lot of preconceived notions about American demographics and identities and voting groups and the really sharp difference between urban and rural voting patterns became very clear. And so the project that we were doing was in service of a beverage company who wanted to make sure that their marketing practices were relevant across groups, but it was fundamentally a much bigger project than that.And going into communities of different types in rural settings across the country, in urban settings across the country was an exercise in radical listening. So we went in, not with a really tight discussion guide, but rather we recruited what we called local storytellers. So these were people in their communities that really were the heartbeat of that city or that town could introduce us to other people that could really explain what it's like to live their past, present, and future, help us get into kind of the soul of the community and what it's all about. And that wasn't really like a classic interview experience. That was more of a conversation, and it required us to really put all of our biases aside and use radical listening. And so it's an exercise in really managing bias, designing research to overcome a lot of the biases that we might not even be aware that we're bringing into it.And listening truly to listen, not to get an answer to a question, but to allow kind of for the exchange and space to happen where when I hear about why kind of a political view comes up,Instead of reacting to that, I'm trying to really listen to where that's coming from, what's behind it, what's the human experience that's really shaped that need or that belief system. And it was a life changing project. And I wish that more people got a chance to radically listen to people from other communities and other walks of life today.Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about, because we've talked about this before, but the methods you talk, you talk about sort of managing biases, a little bit about how you do that in order to be receptive and sort of able to listen in moments when Yeah, it might be, it might conflict with your own sort of reaction.Yeah, yeah. So some of it's just the practice of being a really good researcher right and that takes years and years and years, and then some of it are active exercises of self awareness. And so we actually have a session we do before we go out into the field and sometimes even as we're kicking projects off.Before we even necessarily set the focal question for the project because oftentimes we're getting a project that's framed in such a way that there's bias built into the frame from the get go, and it's limiting how we see the possibilities for that brand how we see the possibilities for And so we have a method that we call power framing that is designed to one, make sure everyone knows that biases is natural, that we all have it. That just because you have it doesn't mean you're a bad person doesn't mean you have any kind of lack of intelligence but rather, it's a survival instinct right this is a system one system to tool developed over time so that we can, you know, think fast.And survive and thrive. And so it takes work to kind of actively overcome that biological instinct. And so we work through different ways of sort of naming and recognizing bias when it comes up, but also changing it into a mindset of curiosity.And so the number one anecdote bias is curiosity. And so we embody kind of different characters that are really naturally curious and practice playing different characters that have a have a natural ability to kind of ask questions that are not loaded but are truly kind of coming from a place of curiosity and and practicing that before we go in the field before we go into research helps a lot.That's beautiful. The conditions around that report around around that work, I guess, what are the ideal what are the conditions for that kind of radical listening, you know, I mean, and how is it like maybe this is a, this is a way of pointing at how you came in, you're very clear that you came in, in a beautiful moment in time, really well supported in an organization that just loved qualitative and was really organized around what do you say the consumer is boss.Yes.So what are the conditions for kind of radical listening and how would you describe the state of, of, of listening today.Yeah, I mean the, the kind of blessing and curse of the pandemic is that we had to completely reimagine the way research happens. Some things that came from that are awesome, kind of the reach and the speed at which we can conduct research and the ability to record and have instant transcripts and all the things and people watching from all over the place at any time. All of that I think has so much power and has elevated a lot of aspects of research.However, it's really hard to be an active listener to virtual research. I think it's asking a lot of our clients to sit in on hours and hours of conversations holding their attention and focus. There's, you know, it's during work time so they're multitasking the whole time that I think has hurt the quality of research. When you have the ability to get out of the office and physically insert yourself into an environment that's already sparking your curiosity, where you're in front of someone having a conversation with them versus behind the screen watching them have a conversation.All of the kind of power of in person research definitely helps with radical listening. It's so hard to, I think have the stamina to hang with that many hours of research when it's virtual and so we do a ton of virtual research. In fact, that's still mostly what we've been doing post pandemic.But, wow, we get teams into the field and we're able to kind of do a much more in context ethnographic style of research. It's just transformative for the team, they feel like they know the stories, they feel like they know the people they can come back and speak with authority to their business partners about what they learned because they were there. It's really, really different.And so we're still wrestling with how to support our clients, so that they can have that kind of transformative learning experience when it's virtual. And when we can get them into the field. When we can get them to touch and feel and, and, and kind of get into the context of the business challenge resolving it's just so different.So different.What's your North Star in terms of what do you think about what your job is like for your client, you know what I mean like what are you actually trying to do for them. I mean, I'm sure it varies according to the project and stuff like that but I'm just wondering how you come to define what you're doing for them for yourself.Ultimately, everything we do results in what we call kind of writing a brand's next chapter and so the work that we're doing is kind of deep and wide brand strategy work we're not working on next month's promotional tagline. We're working on what, where is this brand going to go in the next one to three years, sometimes longer right if it's if it's kind of a long terminnovation project or really upstream innovation. And so we take everything we're learning and translate that into a foundational insight that fundamentally re orients the way the brand sees its role in the world and gives the brand a really clear North Star so our North Star is that the brand sees its North Star, and it's in context of today's culture it's in context of today's commercial realities and competitive dynamics which have never been more, you know, open in terms of the competitive landscape. And so we really see our role is in kind of helping our clients write that next chapter for their brand. Who are they, where are they playing, how are they going to win, who are they competing with, what's the desired experience that they fulfill.And then ultimately the kind of concepts and products and services that that deliver against that.How would you say your idea of what a brand is or the job a brand does for people has evolved over time. Yeah, because when you walked in a PNG, or.I think it's, I think that is shifting. So, I think there's kind of two camps in marketing right now. I think going back to this idea, is the brand part of a bigger human system. We say yes like we say that the brand is part of the human experience and the brand has had the potential and the power to advance the human experience to allow people to access experiences that they couldn't without the brand. And so you have to have a really clear view on what experience is, that is that you want to advance and create for people and why it matters and why it's important. I think there's another camp that says actually the brand can just kind of optimize or kind of manipulate the human experience, not necessarily in a negative way, but it's a little bit more mechanical right it's a little bit more about performance.This is kind of a little bit more in that performance marketing world where we can just sort of a B test our way to the right message to the right time to the right place to create a transactional decision that benefits us. And I just, I will never be in that camp. I just fundamentally don't see brands in that way. I see them as part of the human experience. I think the brands in your life that you love. Have allowed you to access something that you couldn't without that brand, and that's that isn't transactional, that's a relationship.Yeah. And we've talked before about sort of the qualitative and how vital it is you already talked about so about that of course, but also how sort of misunderstood it is and maybe undefended or unchampioned. Yeah, I'm just curious, how would you describe the sort of the state of equality and think it struggles so much.I know I wish there was like a council of the kind of qualitative lords right where we could all get together and and work on a rebrand for qualitative research because I think in a, in an era where analytics has has increased and sort of the cache and the power and the value that it holds you look at just even the semiotics around analytics right now, artificial intelligence. Intelligence is powerful intelligence is an elevated, you know, product. Right.It's not just saying here's your, here's your smarter, better faster computation. That's not what they're offering, it's artificial intelligence. What's the equivalent in qualitative right? where are we capturing the value equation of qualitative a way that matches intelligence. Is it really a shift to society? This is social science. Maybe that's a way to think about qualitative that really honors the value and the role it plays.But I do think there's just a lot of it because of sort of, you know, things like even base sizes, I'll still get pushback in meetings on sample sizes of qualitative and that just fundamentally shows to me that we're talking about it the wrong way. If we're not open to hearing what sort of that radical listening exercise unveiled and how we see it in this kind of broader system of the human experience and we're really hyper focused on sample size then we're just fundamentally not positioning qualitative In the way that it should be positioned. And so I'm, I'm, I'm all about a rebrand of qualitative research. I don't know who's in charge of that, but I would love to help whoever's in charge of the rebrand. Well, I love that you did it for yourself and that included it assumes responsibility for some training to write because just because I've got so many things going around in my brain right now, but Well, how would you answer that question of what's the elevated state of qualitative. I feel like I have a hypothesis, but I don't know.I would love to hear your hypothesis. I think this is a question that I've been thinking about for a really, really long time. And I don't know that I have a single Rebrand of it that that quite makes sense. I think it's something that we need. Honestly, I think it's an industry challenge that I'd love to see people come together on and kind of take a stab at I do think there's like I said some there's potential and thinking about this as the role of social science and marketing and brand building. I think there's power in the idea of sense making, and kind of the connecting of dots that really is not only kind of an analytical process but is also a creative process And it requires imagination. It requires openness. It requires a kind of being able to see things and in new ways that is not, you know, something that a Computer or ChatGPT can ever be able to do because of the way that pattern recognition is done through that method. So I think there's routes like that.But I'm curious what you think and what your hypothesis is.What is my hypothesis? I think what I think is funny. I'm recognizing that there's been maybe a little narcissism and some of my line of questioning where I've been trying to sort of have you, you know, that thing where you ask people questions because you want them to say what you're thinking.Yes, we would help you with that Peter in our training.I love it. Yeah, so for me, I feel like for a long time I felt like it was my job as sort of a heroic figure to go out into the world and get things and then deliver them to the client and then the client would just they would The value and the implications would be self evident and my job would be done. So I brought the treasure. But then I realized, you know, just maybe just for growing old and having more experiences that what I really want to do or when I do my job best. It's when somehow they've I've awakened something in my client that's new to them and they've almost I'm unnecessary really like ideally they would have their own experience of something and it would it would change them in a way that's not and I always end up thinking about intuition. Like it's not rational. It doesn't really make any sense, but they just have a moment when they're there, that part of us that's intuitive and imaginative and creative lets something in and then it shifts in a way. So I always think about quantitative as an analytical understanding that we currently frame qualitative as a lesser form of right. That's why we dare ask about sample size for qualitative. But if qualitative were to articulate its own value, it would have to create the framework for valuing intuition and imagination and that and all of that stuff is functioning now. It's just not formalized. Yeah, everybody's decisions depend on their intuition and their anecdotes, but they don't know that it's a real thing that they could develop. It's like an invisible muscle.Yeah, I love what you're saying because of what we hear from our clients and it's both incredibly rewarding but also a little heartbreaking for me when we hear that. That project we did together was like the best project I've done in five years. And what I think has happened unfortunately in the world of marketing is a lot of people do get into marketing because they're curious because they like understanding why people do things and they do see brands as the sort of powerful kind of vessel for change or innovation or experience.And then we get into the trackers and the spreadsheets and the timelines and so many marketers that I work with today are not really doing marketing, as you and I understand it, they're they're managing processes, they're answering urgent questions that require a number to be satisfied. And when they have a chance to sort of reconnect with their consumers in a way that feels really real. It's not only like super rewarding and inspiring work for them, but it sort of reminds them of why they even got into marketing in the first place.And I think there's power in that. I think there's power in reframing qualitative research as really the life force of marketing as the juice as the blood that can pump through the veins that can inspire creativity that can remind us and motivate us and fuel the work that we're doing that can help us sort of see the world, not only in a powerful way for our brands, but in a powerful way for ourselves. There's really no there's no way if you attend quality research that you're not going to come out of it, understanding the world better at a personal level, like that's just that's just what happens. And so I think if we can reframe qualitative against really what is behind why we all got into marketing in the first place, there's real power in that.Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. I love it. The juice is totally the truth. I had just encountered something on LinkedIn. I guess it's the future of strategy report that said that face to face qualitative is the least utilized tool of all the, you know, these are these are advertising strategy planners across the world. Yeah, less than 21% I think was the number I'll double check but was sort of shocking to me how far away we are decision makers are from the customers.Yeah, it reminds it's kind of like everything else that we know is good for us right like we, we know that it's good for us as marketers we kind of know that. But we don't always do it right we don't always eat the vegetables we don't always exercise but every time you do you're like wow I feel great.Yeah, what about the counterpoint like sometimes I get into this conversation that culture is online culture. Now we're just right so that that when we came in it was like culture was real world culture and so I sort of prioritize real world face to face stuff. Yeah, a legitimate argument to be made that so much of our life is lived online that you, you're presumably you're, you are being ethnographic from your desk.Yes, I think digital ethnography is real. It's a thing. I start almost every project in my early kind of info gathering stage on Reddit, the quality of dialogue on Reddit. Now of course you can find terrible dialogue on Reddit but the quality of dialogue for topics that I'm looking for is incredible is an amazing starting point. We always look at what the sort of cultural codes reference points conversation is for any category or brand or topic we're looking at. That cultural layer that's really just front and center in our social digital lives is invaluable. However, it's not necessarily the same thing, it's what's happening in real life and I think we all experience that in our personal lives. What you post is not always what's happening. What you post is not always what you're feeling. And so you have to balance that with reality. You have to balance that with context and real decisions, real pressure points, real tensions that may not really be post worthy, but are very real for the decisions that the consumers are making about your category and your brand.We have a little bit of a few minutes left, and I wanted to maybe return to the rural urban moment right that moment with 2016 created this little window where everybody was like wait we're really out of touch let's go and let's do radical listening. 20 24 and we're kind of back almost in the same position in a way where we're shocked at how little we knew about what was coming. I don't know what your thoughts are on where we are now and how things we might do things differently or yeah.Yeah, I mean I think you know there's of course this flurry of post election analysis of what went wrong or what didn't we know and clearly there are some really interesting shifts in how identity is predictive or not on voting. And so I think we have to kind of fundamentally back out and go back to these macro systems that are how I like to think aboutthings and think about what's influencing behavior in the world. So what are the sort of broader systems that are shifting identities and identity groups and what are these groups really needing from the government right now.And I think there's probably just a pretty big gap in what we think we know and what's real right now on that topic. And so I hope, and I would love to help with any effort there is to to really just kind of blank paper what we think we know about these key voter groups and go into an exercise of radical listening go into an immersive experience with these groups. I did another project about the shifting dynamics of youth power, where the team I was working with was a very progressive urban team who definitely thought that they understood how you thought power would manifest but truly from it was from a worldview of a progressive future.And we actually immersed ourselves with conservative college students who were leading turning point rallies. I don't know if you've ever heard of the turning point group. It was kind of an interesting foreshadowing in a lot of ways of a young, higher educated cohort who was pushing for conservative values and was very pro-Trump at the time.And that was an eye-opening experience for them. I don't think we should assume that young people today are kind of going to follow a lot of the kind of progressive trajectories that we've seen in the past and I think we have to understand why. So I would start with an exercise in radical listening and I think it would be wildly illuminating and potentially change a lot of strategies and tactics.Thank you so much. This has been just a lot of fun and I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and thank you so much.Thank you, Peter, and thank you for being one of the lords of qualitative that will help rebrand our craft. So thank you for having me. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Eugene Healey is a brand strategy consultant and educator in Melbourne, Australia. Previously, he worked as an Associate Strategy Director at The Contenders and Head of Growth at Lively. He kind of exploded into my line of sight with super smart TikToks, so I was excited to talk to him. Check out “The End of the Hollywood Celebrity,” “Identity Marketing is (sometimes) Overrated,” “The Power of Framing,” and “Why Millennials Are So…Uncool?” Sign up for his newsletter, Considered Chaos.All right, Eugene, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.So I start all the conversations that I do with the same question which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She is a neighbor. She helps people tell their story. She has this beautiful question which I love but it's a big question so I kind of over explain it before I ask it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?Where do I come from? I come from New Zealand, although I live in Australia. I don't really consider myself Kiwi or Australian, although I don't also really consider myself half Malaysian Chinese either.I consider myself, where do I come from? I would consider myself a person who lives in Melbourne. I would say I'm a Melbourneian. I guess now we're talking about place but also identity. I guess I would consider myself as someone who has come from in between places.That's kind of how I felt my whole life about things.I think it's reflected in my work as well. I've always felt like I've lived in between things, in between identities. Never quite being fully enveloped in any one place, one identity, one perspective, which I'm really grateful for, I think is a privilege. Yeah, that's almost how I would answer that question, I think. Yeah, I'm from the in-between.Yeah, you say you're grateful to have come from that place and it's still something that sort of shows up in your work. What do you appreciate about it?I think it was something I struggled a lot more with when I was younger. That feeling of always, never quite, the feeling of every room I enter felt slightly outside of which I, yeah, I struggled with that a lot when I was younger because it felt like I was never able to quite blend in in any environment. But I think now having that slight outsider's view is something that I really enjoy.I think it allows me to see things about culture in particular that other people might gloss over. I think it's kind of like I'm always in a state of a little bit of culture shock wherever I go. And so it makes it easier for me to sort of, makes it easier to sort of see or comment on that, but those particular parts of culture.But I'm also actually quite, I'm also quite extroverted. So I find that that's sort of where my perspective comes through is like, while I find myself on the outside of things, like I'm still really interested in engaging with them. So that has developed into, I think, this interesting mix of observer participant.So, you know, in my work, while I'm providing a lot of commentary on culture, I'm also participating in it at the same time. And I think that that feeling of being slightly outside, I think that you're also moving alongside with is something that that that really does show, particularly I would say in the content that I create, which is about which is cultural commentary. I think being able to sort of someone, someone said to me that it's not that what I'm creating is anything new. It's just that there's particles in the air that feel more disparate. And I'm making connections between all of those things.I love the idea of a perpetual culture shock that you sort of you presented that that's somewhat familiar. Do you have a recollection of when you were young, what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yes, I do. And it's not going to be the answer that I think anyone suspects. I wanted to be an investment banker.Oh, wow.Yeah, I wanted to be. And when I'm talking young, I'm talking like seven years old.Like I had, I just had to be different. We had a neighbor who I was obsessed with money with when I was younger and we had a neighbor that told me about an investment banker and what investment bankers did. And I was there with my mom. I was like, Mom, I want to be an investment banker. And that was what I wanted to be like until I was like 15 or 16.And then and then I had the like, you know, regular teenage crisis of confidence where you're just like, what on earth? I'm 15 years old. How am I supposed to pick a career path now? You know, because you're not picking a career path, but you are picking subjects. And the subjects determine what you're going to be able to study at university. So at that point, it was looking like I was going to be an engineer because I was picking one of the all approved Asian pathways. And then I ended up picking a business subject, which I nearly failed physics, but I got my end of year for business. I got 100 percent. So I was like, maybe I should try something else. And that sort of is in one way or another. What what put me on the path to where I am today?What what do you recall? What was an investment banker to your six year old seven year old self? What was an investment banker?I think he would have just said something along the lines of they do. If you like money, they deal with a lot of money. They move around very large sums of money. And I think probably he would have had something to say about them. They also control the way that the world works. Those are two very compelling, compelling. Yeah, exactly. Everything your precocious megalomaniacal child needs to aspire to.Tell me a little bit about where you are right now and the work that you're doing these days.Yeah, so I've actually just started my own consulting outfit a couple of months ago, but now I'm doing that full time, which is providing brand strategy, consult consultation services. And I'm still working out exactly what to call it, but I'm thinking I'm calling it brand training. Basically, I think I've worked in brand strategy for about eight years. I've also worked in teaching for around 2024 for around nine years as well as a lecturer.So I started as a tutor at the University of Melbourne. I also lectured at the University of Melbourne. I'm often lecturing come semester one next year as well because the subject that I teach branding only runs in semester one. And I've kind of been in what I'm doing now. I'm starting to bring those two things together because what I love is not just giving people things, but I love helping them to learn. So in terms of the brand strategy that I run, I don't actually write brand strategies anymore, so I wouldn't consider myself a traditional brand strategist.I work with founders and exec teams to understand the role of brand strategy, what it is actually supposed to help you do. And I help them to create, you know, I almost treat myself more as a facilitator. That helps them to understand and create the brand strategy itself.I mean, that's driven from an insight that basically a strategy is not an output. You know, you may call it a roadmap, you may call it a framework for action, but there's no actual deliverable in the same way. So the success of a strategy is defined by the people who have resources in your organisation, their belief in it and their willingness to commit resources to it.So I've kind of separated all the copywriting element of brand strategy out there now. And I say, OK, in these sessions that we run together, we're just going to get you to commit to a position that you are willing to put resources behind. And I found that's been really effective for the clients that I've worked with so far. And so I always have a sponsor in the exec team, preferably the CEO for those projects. And then the other part of the business that I run is this brand training, which are basically workshops and seminars with brand and marketing teams, traditionally of enterprise level organisations, which is basically like in many ways is a distillation of my content. But they are sessions that run anywhere between 60 minutes and three hours ofWhat do the modern methods of brand building look like? How are they different to the methods of brand building that you may be traditionally familiar with? And then how do you need to operationalise your organisation to deliver on this new way of brand building? And again, you can kind of see that that's pulling through a lot more of my lecture, a lot more of my lecturing practice in that it's really designing an education session and helping people to learn and learn something that I hope is delivered in aninteresting way.Yeah. I am excited to get into all of that because I discovered you through your I guess I don't I think it must have been on LinkedIn because I'm an old man. Oh, and then Instagram, too.And the content you create around the brand is so beautiful and I hadn't really encountered anybody doing it. But before we get into that, I was curious. When did you first discover, you know, the concept of brand or the idea that you could make a living kind of talking about these kinds of concepts?I discovered the concept of brand as an interest about a year and a half, two years before I discovered that I could make a living working in a brand. So when I was doing my master's, I met a group of people who are to date a cohort of people who are still my really, really close friends. And we were doing our master's in what we were sprinkled across some management and marketing subjects.But we were brought together, I would say, among other things. But we discovered that we really loved brands. I wasn't quite. I'm just trying to cast my mind back to what specifically the brand that we actually love, the brand that we loved more than anything else was KFC.We loved KFC. And it was not just that we thought the product was excellent. In Australia, the quality of fried chicken options is not as high as it is in the US. So KFC is actually one of the best here. And we would spend a lot of time at KFC. And we would think about it wasn't just the product that we loved, although we dearly loved the product.We loved everything about it. I think it was like not just the brand narrative, but it was also the brand codes, the way that the brand identity was executed. We looked at it like the red, the white, the bucket, the kernel and then the brand universe they created. So that was a like peak widen era KFC.So that was when they were doing really, really crazy and strange things with the kernel, when they were playing around with the brand codes, where they were building this brand universe like they did the KFC gaming console that was shaped like a bucket. They did the KFC prom corsage. They tried to get a KFC ice skating musical off the ground.They did like five different iterations of the kernel. They did like KFC ASMR. They created some KFC video games as well. They created a KFC meditation app and what we thought was really interesting was watching how you can see this entity that sells this thing and then you have the universe that that thing inhabits and they're not actually the same thing.So the brand is about so much more than the product. The brand is about if you like, it was almost this culture that surrounds the product. And I think all of us, we just found that concept.So it's so interesting and it tied in, you know, it tied into some of the work that we were doing in our masters as well about this idea of like, you know, we were learning about brand tribes and we were learning about semiotics. We were learning about all of these things that that we were finding. We were starting to find references in reality.And that was really exciting for us. It wasn't until a year and a half later after I had just thought about what like after I'd finished my master's, I was like, what am I actually going to do with my life that I discovered that brand strategy was a career. And I was very lucky that, you know, people get into brand strategy in all different directions.I was lucky that I didn't have to go in through the planning function, you know, at an ad agency where depending on where you work, the strategist and not the most appreciated people in their business, I went to a brand strategy agency and I started as a brand strategy intern. So I didn't I also didn't start in account management. So I really just got to go straight into the strategy function.And it was, you know, I've I've left strategy and I came back because I thought surely my first career, the first thing that I pick is not going to be the thing that I actually want to do. Actually, it was. So, yeah, like I've ever ever since then I've worked. I've worked in the strategy function here or there. And now I'm here. Now I'm actually starting my own business in it.Yeah. What do you love about it? Like, what's the joy?You said you left it and came back. Where is the joy in it for you?Yeah, so I mean, the things that I left were the kind of inverse of the things that I love it for. My, you know, the owner of the most recent agency that I worked at articulated it in a really interesting way, where he said it's one of the only jobs in the world where your role is to create intangible value. So we know that brands have value, but they are not tangible.They're not something that you can touch or feel. You know, it's a job that's very, very difficult to explain to your parents. You're transacting on ideas. So what you create is value in the form of an idea, and it's purely conceptual. And I think that's the thing with brand strategy that I find interesting. And it's the perspective on strategy that I will hold for the rest of my life because I never worked at an ad agency, per se, where things are geared towards the execution or the expression brand strategy.I like brand strategy. It is very pure in a way, because it's just what is the idea? What's the thing that we want to communicate? No, no, no, no, not the ad. You know, there's a lot of no, not the design, not the brand mark. Those are expressions of the idea. What's the idea itself? And I think working with people to understand what that is and to commit to that thing and to commit resources to it and to build belief behind it. And then and then to start on the expression of the idea. But then also not just the expression from a comes perspective, but the operationalization of that idea.I think that's very gratifying. You know, it's the inverse is that some days you feel very alienated from your labor because the thing, the work that you do is so unmoored. Sometimes it feels from reality.And, you know, I imagine it's actually like I have the conversation with friends of mine that work at McKinsey or consulting firms is you're so far up the value chain that you are very alienated from the outcomes of your actions. So that's why I like to, you know, in my in my own business now, that's why I like to get much more hands on with training because I've I found a way to reconcile that through education. You know, which if you educate someone, if you help them to learn something, that is its own reward. And that that was certainly what I learned from from being a lecturer. So now I've started to try and bridge the gap between those two things into something that I really enjoy doing.You talked about, you know, that things have changed in some ways. Some things have changed and some things have not changed. But I think one of your recent pieces of content was around brand building today, you know, in the age of influencers. And I'm just curious, how would you describe the state of brand building today and maybe also the state of comprehension around brand building among marketers? What do people in this figure not understand about how it works?I think in London, they do. I think in London, I think in London, that's where it's very clear. Like I took a trip to to the the UK and Europe last year and just observing the the like the ads, the the out of home that when I was walking around in London, I was like, wow, like you can see strategy in this copy. I've actually also never seen that much copy on bus shelters before. Like they really expect a lot of their viewer to say, you're actually going to read this like a paragraph. It's almost it almost feels like the old the old style of advertising, you know, when they had a lot of copy and errant.I still do think that there is I think there is a struggle for comprehension about brand strategy more broadly. But that's what there's a minute because there's a million different people who say what brand strategy is. It's not that there's one clearly defined perspective on what it is. I still believe there's that challenge of the idea is not the expression of the idea. You need to understand the idea. You need to understand the idea first.When we talk about comprehension, you know, I I mentioned it in that in that podcast that I spoke to Eric about when I was on the DTC podcast that I think brands themselves brand, I think agencies, maybe, you know, some of them do understand the concept of brand strategy as separate from the expression of that brand strategy. I think that a lot of businesses don't and they lean on their agencies to be able to create those brand strategies. But then they only look at those brand strategies within the comms realm.So I think particularly there is a pipeline of we're going to get our add our big full service ad agency to create the brand strategy using a brief that we've given them. And then the ad agency is going to create an ad from that. And that's going to be that's the brand campaign.That's the brand ad. And then a lot of people focus on that particular comms element and go, OK, that's the brand strategy there because those two things are too close together. And then that ad and then that ad gets fragmented through all the different channels, exactly.So it goes from the top of the pyramid and then it sprinkles all the way down. That's kind of that's that's what I would say. A lot of brands seem to understand brands as and I would say to that, I would say. That that era of brand building through that style of farming out those competencies to your agencies is coming to a close because the media landscape is too fragmented now. So relying on your ad and it's too and it takes too long from inception all the way to completion as well. You know, we're talking about depending on the size of your organization, like six to eight months to getting that ad campaign out.I think what you know, when I think about the kind of things that I teach now is flipping that from the top down to actually looking at it from the bottom up. So, you know, and I've talked about this before. Brands are now built boots on ground through armies of influencers, curators, gatekeepers.It's basically your brand that is mediated through this force of all of these different people. And so, again, you actually have to go back to that point of what is the idea as separate from the expression of the idea? Because if you've got 50 different content creators, curators, gatekeepers, et cetera, that are creating all of these little fragments of your brand, you can't give them the expression of the idea.They're going to express the idea. And in fact, they're going to express the idea quite differently because I think this is particularly what what's going to change is that tone of voice is going to become more and more inconsistent because every single one of these messages is going to be delivered in the tone of voice of the creator. But the strategy has to be even more consistent because how inconsistent the tone of voices.So that's what I try to explain to them is, OK, you use your strategy needs to be simple, clear and actionable, and then understand that all of this stuff is going to flex. But you're still trying to get them to ladder back to consistent, favorable associations in one way or the other. So and then, yeah, and then there is almost there's an inductive thing of you can also use these people to test messages and the messages that flow through.You can start to actually build inductively into a brand platform.Yeah. How do you manage that tension? I mean, I feel like one of the first interviews I did here conversations I did was with Grant McCracken. And he talked about how, you know, when I was coming up, you know, the goal was this old idea that you just got one idea and you have to keep saying it consistency, you know what I mean? And you need to really keep it clear and consistent. He articulated something very similar to what you're saying, that he said what he says in the old days that you couldn't be too complicated because you didn't want to scare the horses. Like you just had to be one thing all the time. There was this really silly idea about the consumer. But then he said now it's like multiplicity is what he was talking about. So there's some tension between the permission to be a bunch of different things and a bunch of different contexts, right? But there is also a need to be something to be, like you said, a man of the kind of associations. How do you manage that tension or how do you communicate that that tension with the people that you work with?I think, yeah, look, I think that consistency is still underrated in the marketing function. So when I when I answered this question, I'm I'm trying to be a little bit careful because I think there is a role for flex. But I think that there's already too much flex in most brands through inconsistency. So I think like then there's a you know, there's this guy Andrew Tyndall in the UK that you may be familiar with who runs system one, which is it tests ad effectiveness. And, you know, they've released a bunch of reports about how how much inconsistency is costing brands. Let's just wait a way, right?Yeah, exactly. Inconsistent, like spurious campaigns and creative created that like that don't have consistency, I would say like consistency, particularly an application of not just brand message, but also application of brand codes. But it's basically, you know, like I do really subscribe to the principle that like just as you are starting to as the brand team are starting to get so absolutely sick of this particular brand or campaign or whatever, that you can't stand the side of it.The customers are just starting to form an understanding of what it is and what it means. So, you know, I still think that the premise is the strategy is what should remain consistent in that. OK, yes, again, what is the idea? What's that piece of mental real estate that we want consumers to understand when they hear our name?And I think probably like and I'm going to draw on stuff that Mark Ritson talks about here when he talks about KitKat. He's like, that's a great brand strategy with a great set of brand codes that is very consistently understood within the minds of its consumers. It's about, you know, having a break, basically. It's generally about snacking as well. That association needs to be consistent, but the way that those messages can be communicated through all of the different channels can be very different.So you can brief, lets say you're doing this kind of influencer campaign. You've got 50 different people. You need to be able to explain to them that this brand is about taking a break, that this brand is about taking a moment out. That stays consistent. The way that that message flows through all of these different 50 different people is very different. It's accomplished in 50 different tones of voice.It's like it's fragmented across all of these different channels and all of these different forms of messaging. But it ladders back to something consistent in the aggregate. That's kind of like I basically the metaphor that I've been using here is this is brand as mosaic. So the idea is that the the media landscape has gotten so fragmented. There's no single point of origin for a place that a brand is experienced anymore.So I think that's that. That's the shift is you can't rely on your audience to see the TV campaign first. So that old model of ad agency driven brand building is not effective.There it's experienced in this sort of cultural milieu among a sea of other things. Images, art, news, entertainment, memes, scientific breakthroughs, whatever. And all of these there are all these different disparate fragments in which the brand is experienced.So there has to be some sort of consistent line, but they all have to function independently. So they have to function as independent little moments that ladder up to something in the in the aggregate, which is which is the mosaic, which is is basically what what your brand is and what it stands for.Yeah, it's and you make this point that it puts an extraordinary amount of pressure on the positioning itself that you can hand it off to so many different people and trust in some way that they're going to be it's going to be accumulative, right?Yeah, because and that's almost that's the almost the insight from what I saw working in brand agencies. I would create or we would create these. I would consider them what I liked about brand strategy originally. I think that had a beauty and purity to it. This I this idea like succinctly articulated of this concept. But what I would find is that there would be let's call it a hum.There will be meaning loss between each stage of handover. So there's meaning loss between yourself and the design function, although they're they're probably the best at interpreting it. There's meaning loss between you and the client. When you hand it over to them, they don't grasp the full nuance of the idea. There's more meaning loss when that goes over to the ad agency to create the campaign. And then there's a significant degree of meaning loss between every other stakeholder that has to interact with the brand strategy that wasn't involved with the project.So you're basically you create this idea that is very beautiful, very nuanced. But then people are not able to grasp the complexity of that nuance. And so the brand ends up being really highly watered down. And that just kind of made me realize like it's almost it's almost impossible to create a really complex brand strategy. And in many ways, it's probably not and not not only is it complex, like a strategy should be simple, a strategy should be clear. You should be able to read it and understand how to drive action from it.And other people who haven't been involved in the creation of that should also be able to understand and interpret what this thing is about and how they're going to deliver to it. So that's, again, has kind of been the step change for me in creating brand strategies is rather than write something that's very beautiful, but leaves room for interpretation or miscommunication. It's just get the people who have resources in this organization to understand what they're committing to and commit resources to it.And then however that thing is written in many ways, it doesn't actually matter because you've basically achieved consensus. If once you've achieved consensus for the exec, I think on a position like you have got yourself 80 to 90 percent of the way there. And then the and then the marketing team or the function know that they have license to basically pursue stuff in line with that. And then they can they can ladder back to that conversation. So actually, you know, what it allows them to do is it allows them to become more consistent in the way that they work.Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about process. I mean, I'm a I'm a researcher and consultant and, you know, I believe deeply and qualitative and face to face. And I realize everybody has their own way of learning and discovering what they need to discover in order to develop a strategy or a position.I'm just curious, what did what did you learn coming up about the role of research? How do you discover what you feel like you need to know to help people develop a strong, clear position? Hmm.So I've come from my background is quite heavy. Again, it's heavy duty strategy. So, you know, I've worked in places where strategy is the only output. No design, no ad, anything. It's almost, you know, it almost goes across almost into commercial strategy or customer strategy in that way. I've worked with lots of different processes in the past.So I've worked on brands that have got, you know, three to six month lead times from inception through to strategy. I don't want to really do that anymore. I think that what I learned through that is.Brand is politics. Brand is a brand is a political process. So is it like I've got a couple of really key, key memories from early to mid in my career? If you, the marketing team, walked into the CFO's office and you said, I'd like to have input on the financial planning for the year forward, I would like to provide my perspective, the CFO would say,”Get the f**k out of my office.”But if the CFO walks in on a brand planning meeting and says, I want to provide my input on where I believe this brand should go, they get to have input, As does everyone else in the organization. So for some for some reason, not for some reason, brand is a permeable function that everyone in the organization believes that they have a role in because everyone believes that they're represented by a brand.So I work at I work at so and so company. That means that I get to have an input on how that thing is communicated and expressed in the market. So when I see a big when I see a big strategy project, what I'm seeing is it's a it's a very highly it's a politically complex project and you need to arm yourself accordingly with the with the creation of that strategy becauseeveryone gets to have gets to have an input on it.So, I mean, I think that that really shaped my perspective on things where. When when it comes to process for me, there is a very strongly political element to that process. But I look at it from the lens of how am I going to get people to understand what a brand strategy is?So for that, that may include that, you know, you know, it's almost like I'm thinking about how am I going to get the strategy approved and committed to rather than and I actually think in many ways that secondary thing is as important, even more important than OK, but what is the idea? Because the because, you know, if we consider what is the main challenge with brand strategy? It's consistent application and execution of it.So then all of a sudden, actually, what you're saying is not as important as your ability to get people to commit to saying the thing. And that's what that's basically what my whole process is built around when it comes to brand strategy. So, yes, there is definitely like a I'll work like I'll work with researchers.My methodology is short, sharp, high value. It you know, there are interviews with the exec that I run beforehand that are basically, you know, asking them questions that get them to understand brand is not just comms. So I asked them basically about how does this business make money? What are the things that you are focusing on strategically? And then I kind of and then I'll work through all of that stuff. That kind of primes them to understand that we're not just having a comms conversation.I'll bring in where relevant, like a market researcher, if they want to do something like customer research or stakeholder research. And then the process itself coalesces around one three hour workshop with the exec generally where I say, OK, here's what I've found now. Now, with that primed, we're going to work out what is this actual strategy going to be?What's it going to be about? And that's that's the process. So it is really about getting buy in and commitment to whatever the thing is.It's not about what I do, because it's written out in bullet points, because it's not fully formed, I find when people look at a strategy that's fully formed, they start to read it as if it's a piece of communications and then they start to pick apart. Is it this word or is that word correct? And they end up being a semantic conversation.Whereas if I deliver it to them in a more raw form, that's more like bullet points, then they then that mindset breaks and they start to think of it as, OK, no. What is what is the strategy? What's the thing that we're committing to? And I found that has been a really, really effective process for getting people who have absolutely zero understanding of brand strategy to say, OK, this is actually a tool for action. This is a tool for decision making and tradeoffs. And that's yeah, that's basically my process.And then then we have another three hour workshop the day afterwards to actually say, OK, if we create this strategy, then what are the implications for the strategy in terms of what we're actually going to do? Yeah.And what do you find? I'm curious about the people that are coming to you. You've been on your own. How long have you been out on your own? It's relatively recent, right?It's been it's been about it's been about three months, but it's been full time. It's been full time just under two months.What's that been like? I mean, what's your experience been of what was what drove the choice and then how's it been?What drove the choice was sort of a recognition about the way. You know, it was more internal than external. There's a recognition of the way that I wanted my own career to proceed. I wanted to incorporate more education into the offer. And yeah, my previous agency has been fully supportive of this. We don't like we don't get the same types of clients and we don't do the same type of work.So, you know, they sort of helped. They sort of gently helped me out the door as well. And that was kind of the main thing. And I was also having a lot of through creating the content. I was having a lot of people approach me and say, hey, I'd like to work with you, but I don't quite know how we can work together. And so in many ways, I also inductively developed that offer as well through those conversations with people.And it's been like the things are starting to settle into a rhythm that I would consider a little bit more sustainable. Now, I've got I've got a workflow that I actually can replicate in a way that allows me to run things. competently and efficiently.But yes, the transition to business owner has been a very challenging one. And I've learned a lot of things very quickly. You know, that's everything from, you know, your finance and invoicing to how to manage your time more effectively to knowing basically what kind of conversations and meetings are going to lead to things versus things that are going to be a little bit of a waste of your time.Like that's that's been like I had. Yeah, one of my tech talks, which is the channel that really is how all of this got started. One of my tech talks is sitting at one point three million views. And another one is sitting at one point two million views. And from those tech talks, I reckon each of them would have led to 20 people reaching out and wanting to do something together. And so learning to triage all of that into OK, but what operationally what is actually going to work, what is an opportunity that is worth dedicating resources to because it is it's just me and they want to work with me. So it's not it's not a thing that is set up to scale in the same way. That that has been a really steep learning curve for one that I'm starting to really get ahold of on now.How did the content creation, the TikTok stuff, how did that begin? It seems I mean, my experience and I don't I honestly don't know how long you've been doing it. But I mean, you sort of just showed up out of nowhere in my experience and maybe it was just like, holy s**t, there's a guy on TikTok who's like super smart about brand and culture. And I'm not a TikTok person, you know what I mean? But you in the so I'm just curious, how did you how did that begin?I got to a point in my career earlier in the year where it was a kind of it was a real question of where to next. What's the next thing that I want to accomplish? And I've always been a person that's had a destination in mind. And ironically, when I started creating this content, it was the first time that I proceeded with a direction, but not a destination. So I knew what I wanted to do was find more people in my field that I would be able to connect and collaborate with. I knew that I wanted to hone my own perspective further on strategy.I felt like I was forming something, but it was still tied into the, if you like, the ontology of the agency. And I wanted to be able to create my own perspective. And so I think I was like, I need to do something that is separate to the work that that the work that I'm doing.And I need to I want to understand what it is that I want to talk about as well. So if you go back to my early videos, there's kind of many different things that I'm talking about here and there. You know, I'm talking about what does good brand strategy look like? How do you write a good brand strategy? I'm making commentary on rebrands here and there. Like I'm doing all of this stuff.And then at one point, it sort of clicked what I wanted to talk about and what the audience wanted to hear most was culture analyzed through the lens of brand. So providing cultural commentary about, I would say, why do people feel the way that they feel and why do they feel the way that they feel now? And what is the effect, I would say, of let's call it social media, but even more broadly, the Internet.I'd say the Internet interests me not as a platform, but as a mediating force something that shapes how we actually understand ourselves and understand one another. And and through creating content, I realized that that was actually what I wanted to talk about. And that that's how things have have gone since then.So I will I learn most of what I want to talk about through intuition, through conversations that I have with people at bars or, you know, just like at a gallery or whatever. Like when I'm when I'm talking to someone, what I find is ideas naturally pop up and then I think, oh, I can make a video of that. And then I just need to be able to connect the connect the brand lens into it. But it's really more. Yeah, I like it. It's what am I seeing out in the world defines what I actually want to talk about.I feel like that was my first encounter with you. That resonates with what you just described. Are you working on anything now?Are you in the middle of a particular observation or communicating a particular point of view?There's a few that there's a few things that I've got going, like content is also it's a runway to the conversation we were having beforehand where it's a it's a never ending runway that you're always having to find new ideas for. Fortunately, I've got two dozen ideas in a in a notion doc. But the thing that I've probably do, I was going to release it now, but I'm going to release it at the start of next year is I'm going to do a six part series on host luxury status symbols.So what, you know, and I did a video about the the death of luxury as a status symbol a couple of weeks ago where I talked about how the luxury industry abandoned craft over the past 15 years and they sort of eroded their own status as a status symbol and other things have started to take their place. So I'm just going to go through, you know, I'm going to lay out a thesis for why, again, like why luxury and even the beauty industry have also started to lose their position as the as the core status symbol and what some areas like almost some cultures, some some behaviors or activities, why they're the new source of status. That's that's like a six part series that I'm going to be doing in the start of next year.That's like the most significant one, I would say.Well, can we talk about that? Can we slow can we sort of break that down? What's the what is the how would you describe the state of luxury and status today?Yeah, so, I mean, that that video that I made was basically saying that luxury industries were originally defined by human craft and detailing and scarcity. And that was where the, you know, the intersection of those things was where luxury brands or all the major luxury brands and fashion houses built their brand equity. But in the late 20th century, in the early, early 21st century with the advent of things like licensing, but also just the access to a greater and greater portion of the market, they sort of realized we've got all this brand equity.We can exploit that brand equity to serve greater and greater proportions of the market. So what we've done, let's say this is not just fashion. I use BMW as an example. BMW used to have three series of cards. Now it has what, seven or eight? And how many of them are truly luxury? How many of them are truly scarce? So, you know, the one series, the two series, a bunch of the three series as well.They're not about human craft anymore. They are effectively all the middle class. Or the slightly aspirational middle class. And, you know, you may say the same with LV or brands like Gucci, where they tried to where they basically created all of these new products that had absolutely nothing to do with craft. Craft wasn't in the narrative as well. The brand world was far beyond that story.In addition to that, what has what social media done effectively? Like what the effect of social media has been to feel a cultural oversaturation of brands and products. So even if something, let's say Hermes, even if something is scarce, it is defined by craft. When you can type in Hermes Birkin on Instagram and you can see thousands of Birkin bags and people posting their Birkin bags, it loses its it loses its supposed mythical status. It becomes just another common object in a way.There's a difference between physical scarcity. It doesn't guarantee digital scarcity in a way.Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, and then you see the true volume of these bags. You see the true volume of of people that have the bags as well. And the way that the bags areshot in that user generated content is obviously a lot less aspirational, too. So the brand loses the halo or the mystique as part of that.And so, you know, so I'm kind of in this video that's not come out yet. And I'm talking about how what's actually happened was that the beauty industry has actually taken over as the real luxury industry of the last 10 years. It's all been about your skin, your hair, your teeth, et cetera.But I'm going to lay forward a thesis that with the rise of Osempic, with the mainstreaming of cosmetic procedures and with cosmetic surgeries getting better and better, even that is becoming really accessible as well. Like that's not going to be as scarce. And so it will it too will lose its status as a status symbol or as the status symbol.And so in this video, I'm going to lay out a thesis for why I believe the next the next era of status symbols are things that can't be exclusively compressed into the physical realm. They're going to be status symbols that are behavioral status symbols. So things that can't exactly be captured on camera, things that are more demonstration of the way that you live.And I've got kind of like sex. I've got one like, for instance, like privacy is the first one that I'm going to do. So I'm going to talk about the idea of not having a digital footprint, the idea of not being online, the idea of still knowing where to go and what's cool and what's in while not having your own digital footprint.Like that ability to retain that ability to retain a position within a cultural hierarchy without having the mechanisms that allow most people to actually understand what that hierarchy is. That's a new status symbol. Yeah.This sounds so fascinating. I've got two things that are bouncing around in my head. The one is I started out of the brand Consultancy in San Francisco and the guy was kind of a guru, super sort of smart. And and he had this way of speaking in koans. And one of the things that he would say is that we consume what we're afraid we're losing. Hmm. Complicated way of expressing maybe scarcity and status. And then I guess so. Then my question is, are you aware of there's a paper by a woman, Sylvia Bellezza, you heard of the distance and alternative signals of status? She's got a hypothesis that I think is it shares your diagnosis that in the past status was about scarcity was sort of an up down. You know what I mean? And then there was this period of highbrow, lowbrow. So that that's not being negotiated on this vertical axis. But now, because of everything you've described, it's really the true signifier is just your distance from the mainstream. So in any direction are away from whatever is conventional. And she's got these six characteristics, but I can't do justice to the whole idea, but I'll share it with you.Send it to me. That's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting, the highbrow, lowbrow, because that was obviously the last 10 years with like Balenciaga, for instance, like that was the remix of highbrow and lowbrow. Such that middle class consumers would not be able to participate because middle class people were too close to the lowbrow.So they would not be willing to engage in those forms of remixing because it was too close to their everyday realities, whereas high status, high class people were able to because they were confidently highbrow. They were able to remix some of those lower, lower tier status symbols through high materiality and production, et cetera. That's really what it was. It was about not distancing you from poverty, but distancing you from middle class aspirational wealth and status.Yes. Yes. I think she talks about this idea of signaling costs, too, that like you can you risk being in an environment where nobody where people don't really know what you're doing, you know what I mean? And you're wearing something ridiculous and nobody at least sees you for doing the status seeking thing that you're doing. But I want to talk about because through all your observations, because I was looking at watching your TikTok, you talk a lot about the collapse of meaning. It's sort of it's like a thread between the from the death of the woke rebrand, the chaos packaging, the aesthetics of rebellion for the last few that you've done.I guess maybe there's an overarching question about just meaning management and in the state of now. And in any one of those TikToks that you want to talk about, the rebellion or the chaos packaging for the woke rebrand, because you're very yeah, I mean, I guess it's that the meaning we're just we're we're really it's all collapsing around us in a way.Yeah, so I mean, I'm not going to do any of this justice. So I'm not I'm like I'm not even going to attempt to in some ways. But like a lot of my work is like I would say the through line through my work is probably the theories of people like Mark Fisher and Guy Dubois, like Society of the Spectacle and maybe like a little bit of Applied Baudrillard as well, although like I'm not going to profess to actually be able to that I actually understood any of the books of his that I've read. But that there is to me that I like feeling of.What when I talk about the collapse of meaning, what I'm really thinking about is like, through all of my content, why are people feeling the way that they feel? And right now, particularly not just young people, but particularly young people, what is the effect of the society we live in and, you know, through the lens of like the cultural, psychological, technological pressures as well that like. And then I talk and then in a lot of the way, what I'm talking about is the Internet as a as a mediating force that sort of shapes the way that we understand ourselves and one another. And so all of these different things, like all of these different videos that I create often have that as a as a through line.And then obviously the thing that wraps it all together is what's the role of brand in it? So, you know, what I'm talking about, what I'm using is brand is the lens through which I analyze culture, because that's what I mean, I understand brand and it's kind of like it's two ways. Sometimes it's how is culture influencing the way that we brand?And sometimes it's how is the way that we brand reflects our influence in culture? So when I was talking about that, the death of the work rebrand thing, that was really that video was really about how we get here? How did a word that was originally, you know, originally termed, obviously, by a different community, but co-opted by a right wing reactionary extremist section of the Internet? How did that get mainstreamed? How did those ideas start to filter into not only the political discourse, but I would say mainstream conversations? And what was the role of brands in actually helping to mainstream that conversation?And so that that video was very much about that brand purpose era where we took the aesthetics of progress and the communications of progress, but not the but we didn't do the work. How has that actually done damage? And how is that how is that actually opened the door for a lot of people to become really disenfranchised with the idea of progress?That was what that video was about. Chaos packaging, which was was a video which was about the chaos packaging movement. Now, someone like at Labor Labor to say, I didn't invent the term chaos packaging. That was a person called Michael J Miraflor.OK, how is culture influencing brand? So we're experiencing a sort of semiotic breakdown now where images and information are delivered to us at such a volume and density that they exceed our ability to consciously process it. And, you know, that and that blends into the worlds of semiotics, where it's the ideas that are communicated through those images. So the, you know, the sign and it's referred to the thing that it refers to, the signifier and the signified like there's a semiotic breakdown there. These things don't necessarily need to correlate to one another anymore.What we actually what we need is the prior of the priority is to get attention. Maybe what we want to do is actually create dissonance rather than create harmony. So rather than creating some sort of harmonic semiotic code, you know, it's green, it's wholesome, it's healthy.It's, you know, it looks like gin. No, why don't we actually make something that doesn't look like a gin? Why don't we make something that actually looks like motor oil and then sell sell it as gin? And that is dissonance. That requires a high level of engagement from the consumer and that pulls them in. So it's yeah. So that was a conversation more around the idea of what it take to get attention now.Yeah, I love the cam and I really enjoy all of them. And I want to linger maybe on the chaos packaging one there, because I mean, I feel like one of the principles of brand is that in some level, you're sort of responsible for the structure of the category, right? That the brands are kind of shorthand for a category. So what do you do as a brand manager or a strategist? How do you manage that tension between just violating all the I mean, this is an Ehrenberg bass that talks about category entry points and all that stuff, all this distinctive assets. We maybe we talked about this last time, too. There's always this tension between conforming and and what's the opposite of conformity and rebelling?Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you know, the insight that I had from that was basically it's game theory. So not everyone in there's a few people in the category can benefit from.Let's call it semiotic confusion. But if everyone participates in semiotic confusion, then the sign itself starts to break down and the category becomes impossible to shop. One thing that I also spoke about is for a brand manager, if you want to pursue this strategy, recognizing that it is, I think that's what's interesting is it is a it's a rebel strategy.So it's a it's a challenge, a brand archetype in many ways. But the packaging is only one overall part is one touchpoint of the overall brand experience. So what is the brand world, the DNA and the codes that you're building around that packaging to actually make it makes if it doesn't make sense in one context, it actually makes sense in another one.So the online context, like the example was Vacation SPF. So they've made it look you know, the product looks like Cool Whip, basically, or it looks like shaving cream. But the brand world is this kind of like Miami 80s, you know, sun drenched days by the pool, like, and it's like it really makes sense within that context. And that brand world is really beautiful and evocative. And that's what they're selling. Like they're selling.It's like it's a nostalgia brand, effectively. It's a well, you may say it's like a it's a post-algebra brand because most of the people that consume this product never lived through the 80s. But they're living through an idea of the 80s through Vacation SPF. But that like, that's what the that's the real project. Like the real project is where in what context do the semiotics that you're building actually make sense?Yes. And I mean, are you making the case that that does make sense? That's an example of a brand operating on sort of a multidimensional challenger strategy.[Speaker 1]Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think that the packaging is probably the most important touchpoint in terms of grabbing immediate attention. But then the brand world is what reconciles that dissonance and makes it, you know, an evocative and interesting narrative for you to want to be a part of. Like Vacation, like that's really to me, that's a really interesting brand where they're like, OK, they took something that could have been just a gimmick and then they made something really interesting around it.Like a lot of people talk about Liquid Death as well. Like in many ways, Liquid Death was the first chaos packaging brand where they took the semiotic codes some people say they took the semiotic codes of alcohol. I think they actually took the semiotic codes of like rock and they put it into water, which is, you know, the least edgy thing that you can consume. Right. So that that to me, that sort of that semiotic dissonance there, that tension of something that's really hardcore with something that's really straight edge.That's where the brand of liquid death is formed. And then that's where you see all of their comms, like all of their comms are playing on this idea of being ironically hard. We're not we're not actually a heart. It's just water. But Ira, but ironically, it's a really hardcore. It's really gothic. Would you know, we do brand activations with Yeti where we make Yeti coffins? Like the humor really comes through really strongly in that brand. Yeah.Yeah, it's amazing. The more recent one you did was the the death of the woke rebrand, which touches on brand purpose. I'm wondering if that's what I want to ask you about.I'm so so I have spent a little bit of time in the sort of the drinks space, like sort of the spin drift, like this idea of a collapse of meaning that where category lines really get blurred seems to be something that I'm running into as an old person looking for category boundaries. Right. And they don't seem to play the same role as they played in the past.Well, you've just described vacation seems it almost feels like there's like an extra dimension to sort of the brand management or something. And I'm curious if number one is what I'm saying makes sense to you. You know, I mean, I feel like I'm asking that it does seem like there's sort of a multidimensionality to the way a lot of these propositions are racing the boundaries around Dota and seltzer and juice. You know what I mean? This is a very banal example. But is it this the tick-tokification of brand where you just have to kind of resist in multiple dimensions at once? Or you you're not as beholden to sort of the category from which you come because the media appetite is so intense that it sort of eliminates the need to really be a category player. You need to be a media player first.Yeah, I mean, that I think is true in that, you know, if we go back to the conversation that I had, if you're a brand now, you're a content creator like a well, so it's not not all brands. You know, if you're a bottle recycling business where you make like, you know, you make waste into tarmac or whatever, then you're not. But if you're a consumer brand, then you are a content creator effectively.Why is so like just what's the what's the first principle of that?Well, I mean, it's how are you, how are you? It's marketing, right? How are you getting in front of people and how are you drawing attention to your brand? And, you know, like there are of this, of course, there's there's all the four the four pays and whatever. And like, that's not to say, you know, you are as a marketer, you are thinking about pricing. You're thinking about how you're going to distribute.You think about all of these things. But the the content pace, like the volume of content that you can produce and the ease of which you can get in front of an audience from that, like at the cost that you can produce it as well. Like, this is something that I talk about with a lot of brands is on social creativity is more important than budget.So if you go on to TikTok or Instagram reels, but particularly TikTok, the videos that get the most significant distribution are not the ones that took the most time and effort and resources to produce, they're just the ones that have the most novel ideas and they can be produced incredibly cheaply. And so I think, you know, we can talk about the effect of TikTok and brain rotting our children, whatever. But I think effectively, like what we have is a media platform that has completely flattened the cost of entry.So you can be anyone and you can sell anything. And as long as you can make a culture of entertainment around your product or a culture of education around your product, you can build an audience for that. Like, I mean, that's like that's me. You know, I'm just talking about some niche. I'm talking about culture through the lens of brand. And I managed to build an audience for that as well.You know, so it doesn't matter if you're like what particular good or product, whatever you're selling like that, the category matters less. And by the way, we're talking specifically through the lens of online social media and entertainment. The categories matter less than your ability to build the like the brand world.Like, that's almost what your anchor point ends up being. Like, what is it? What's the thing that we're actually going to the thing that we're actually going to create in terms of a brand universe? And then we'll work out what we're selling as well as part like as a way of executing on that brand universe.Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.It's beautiful. Awesome. Is there anything else you want to talk about?I feel like this is perfect. This has been a great conversation and I can build to this and what we did before.It's been an interesting conversation. I don't sometimes I don't get the opportunity to actually stop and think about this through line with all of my content.I'm kind of what I'm trying to express. I'm kind of caught up in the micro thing. It's rather than the macro. So it's been good to have this conversation.But good. I'm glad I'm glad that's the case because your stuff is really provocative and I feel like there are dimensions at work that are. Yeah, like I said, there's just a different way of being. That makes sense, right? I mean, if you're going to build it, you know, if you're living in a different media environment or experiencing things in a different media environment, the brands that you build in there are going to be wildly different.Yeah, like I'm about to do an interview in a little bit as well. Someone's asking me more specifically about how have we shifted in the errors of branding and they say, yeah, you know, with the new Gen Z customer coming in and all I'm like, OK, yes, the demographics are a part of it. But it's actually the cultural and media environment that Gen Z just so happened to be the faces of.But TikTok exists regardless of whether it's Gen Z or not, like the cultural and political situation is what it is. They're just the ones that are the most, you know, they're the figureheads of the movement like they they represent that particular movement because they're the young people in youth culture as well as something that a lot of brands really went to appropriate. So but, you know, I'm saying basically like I've been I'm going to talk to them about the end of the millennial brand era, which was the seat like that, like 2012 to 2018, generally like venture capital backed brands like Harry's and Hymns and Casper, etc.That were all that disrupting existing categories with something that was much more, quote unquote, authentic. That was a little bit more about the story. The like the the purity of the product as well. The no BS, the cutting out the middleman. I'm talking about Everlane as well. And it's not that those brands are brand narratives are ineffective because they're not effective for Gen Z.It's because those brand narratives are no longer effective for the media environment that we find ourselves in that the way that those packaging stories are told isn't effective for the ferocity of the competition of getting attention. And so if you're, you know, running off seasonal brand campaigns and this particular type of brand shoot and a really static content and focused on aesthetics over all else, nobody has time for you anymore to ingest that message. You need to be much more aggressive and dynamic.I would say in your entire content and and brand approach.I was listening to an interview in a totally different context with people both of whom were really smart both of whom have written books about social like society and they were making the observation that when they were writing the book, they couldn't get it sold because it was so provocative. But then somebody, you know, took a risk on it, published it. But by the time it got into print, the idea was sort of it would already been normalized and was sort of eddy. And the the hypothesis was I think about it like a metabolism right that culture is moving so fast. It's sort of digesting things so quickly that you need to be producing something that's what's the what's to push the metaphor your your brand needs to be something that's hard to metabolize or something.Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because it's like we have cultural acceleration on some dimensions and then we have cultural stagnation on others. So this goes into Mark Fisher's thinking of like we've got technology advancing at a really rapid rate, even with the advent of AI like technology is advancing at a faster rate than it has been over the past couple of decades, but that technology doesn't seem to bring with it the hope for new possibilities. In fact, that technology seems subordinated to the refurbishment of established cultural forms.So while our technological environment is changing and while there may be changes in packaging or whatever, etc., the media that we consume in terms of like the ideas underneath like almost the ontological stuff feels like the same things that we've been consuming for the last 20 or 30 years. So some stuff is stuck in place while others like some that you know, the important things are stagnating while all this other stuff is accelerating and that I think that's one of the things that makes it really difficult to live these days. It's this feeling of like how is it that there's all this new stuff and yet none of it feels new?Yeah. Yeah. How can there be so much change and so little change at the same time?Exactly.And yeah, I wish you just a ton of luck and I appreciate you sharing your time with me.Yeah, I really appreciate you reaching out. I think, you know, of all the things that we talked about today, you know, the reason that I am forming clarity on what I am, what I do and what this whole platform is about comes through conversation. I'm not the type of person that can think on things on my own. My thinking all happens out loud. Just ask my housemate. Basically, they find me talking to myself all day because if I don't have someone in front of me, I have to talk to myself.Good. Well, I'm glad that I was in front of you for this past hour. And likewise. Yeah. Nice. Thanks so much.Thank you, Peter. Have a good day. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

This is the first Encore Presentation of THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING. This serves a couple functions. It gives me a break, and a chance to highlight conversations I think are wonderful. Of course, I begin with Grant McCracken.See you in the New Year. Grant McCracken is the first anthropologist I encountered. No one had ever talked about the world I grew up in the way he did. I was a fan from the start, and followed him ever since. I even got to host him here in Hudson, New York as part of his research into artisanal economies. (My appearance in the book is a career highlight.) When I thought to do interviews, he was the first person to come to mind. Everything he does is worth paying attention to, but please check out The Gravity Well Effect and The Return of the Artisan: How America Went from Industrial to Handmade.I start all interviews with the same question. Where do you come from? What a great question. No, it's so complicated. I live, I'm a simple man who lives a simple life, but it's still a very complicated question. I guess I come mostly from anthropology. I guess that just really shaped me. I think we share a curiosity about the world. And for me, anthropology ended up giving me a way to give that a kind of form and momentum. Anthropology would be my answer. Yeah. Do you have a recollection of when you first encountered anthropology? Or discovered it was possible? What comes to mind when you say that is I went to the University of Chicago, all the first year students went in to listen to Marshall Sahlins give the first lecture of their first year. And as we walked towards the lecture hall, somebody raised the question of whether we were going to buy the books for the course. And, everyone made this show of how casual they were, and maybe they'd buy a few books and was it necessary would we read everything? Maybe we wouldn't.Then we all sat and listened to Sahlin's talk for an hour or so. And you could see people coming out of the lecture hall. It was clear they had understood next to nothing, and they had this look of pure panic in their eyes. So what they were doing now was trying to walk to the bookstore where they intended to buy every single book that had been mentioned for the course with as much dignity as they could muster. And it wasn't going very well. They're very close to tears. And running. Actually running. So that's what I remember. Now I can't remember the question, but I remember that I remember that experience vividly. Do you have a workshop coming up? I have a FUTURE CAMP coming up in March 2024 in New York City. That should be really fun because I find myself shifting from a focus on culture - I continue to care about culture-to  what's happening in the future of culture. Culture is so much, so rapidly, so ferociously a thing in progress that unless you think about it out into the future, it's all catch up. Which is to say the new culture camp will also be a future camp. Yeah.You have called culture the dark matter of capitalism. Why is that the corporation struggles with culture? Yeah, that's, and I'm sure we share this. I'd be grateful for your thoughts. But it really is very often the problem that they give us going in is a cultural problem that you can see that the way to solve this problem is to come up with a cultural solution. And, but what you also know is that most of the people with whom we work in the corporation, unless they are designers or planners or strategists, are not comfortable with the term.I think the trick has always been to use metaphor - Oh, I love the work you did on metaphor and it comes up here. Sometimes, the work of cultural exposition can be accomplished with a really great metaphor. I did something for Netflix, and they said why are you looking at, or what, how should we be solving the binging problem? And I said there's a long and complicated answer to that question, but the simple answer was. was the kind of metaphorical one. I said, look, they're not binging, they're feasting. And that gave them a chance to go, Oh, okay, we got it wrong. We saw this from one cultural lens, and you're suggesting we should see it from another cultural lens that's helpful.So anyhow, to answer your question, Yeah, I think the trick is, people bring us in, I think, because they know of culture. That's why I ended up teaching at the Harvard Business School. They knew as they put it, “20 percent of the time, we really screw things up when it comes to doing the analysis of the problem at hand.And typically, the problem is that we're looking at a cultural problem, we don't know how to think about culture. So please, can you join the faculty and help us think about culture?”That's more easily said than done. And so I ended up with colleagues for whom people trained in engineering and high energy physics and God knows where they came from. But for them, culture was just like, Oh, I have no idea what you're talking about. And I would prefer that you didn't use exotic languages and concepts. Like physics isn't filled with exotic languages and concepts. So that's a real problem for us, culture as dark matter.I think another way we solve the problem is, if we go in and do our ethnography, with a broad sense of culture, and do an exquisitely calculated ethnography. We are really listening and we're really paying attention. And, we come up with, this is your moment, and this is your consumer, and this is your problem at the moment we don't need to sell the larger picture. We don't need to persuade them about American culture, the bigger picture. We just deliver that one beautiful metaphor and that one beautiful solution, and it's current and exact enough. It gets the job done. We’re not leaving them with what they should be hiring us for, which is this body of ideas and this larger concept that will serve them over the next six months or two years. Because, as long as they think of culture as dark matter, we can't communicate that. But if we do really beautifully exquisite solutions to pressing problems, I think we will get the job done. What kinds of problems are clients facing that they weren’t 10 or 15 years ago? We are all suffering this problem. This is that change has changed. There's more change and it's more ferocious change and it's more inscrutable change. So everybody's just, every day they come to work and they step into the wind tunnel, right?Sometimes just for purposes of comparison like to begin with what life was like after World War Two for people who do planning and design and consulting and strategy. I think the world looked like standing on the beach at Waikiki. You see these beautiful rollers coming into shore. And that was what change looked like in the 1950s. You could say, oh, look, there's a change coming way off in the distance. We've got six months, or we've got some time, to get ready for it. Now the world is that change is no longer an orderly thing. It is a  deeply chaotic thing. In the Waikiki model, big fat rollers coming into shore have been replaced by, if you think about a pond in a rainstorm where you've got all of these moments of impact as the rain hits the surface, and nothing scales up, right? It's these little, all of these little, moments of impact canceling one another out. What was the last decade where we had real order? It might've been the nineties and alternative music. There's that wonderful chart, forget the name of the guy who does it. And he just shows all of the genres. of popular music. Now, have you seen that? And it's like literally hundreds upon hundreds of genres. That's the world. So some of that change and some of that ferocity of change, I think, is coming from culture.And that's a notion that I find really helpful, and it struck me like a thunderbolt. I got it from a guy called Kieran Healy, who's a Duke sociologist. He put a PDF online, and then it disappeared. But it's a very useful document, because he says change used to be the thing from which ballast or order came in our culture. And now it's the thing from which chaos comes. We talk about certain politicians as being chaos agents. Culture is now a chaos agent. And that's good for us. People who care about culture are actually in a position to figure out the disorder that comes from culture. That's something our clients especially need but it's a much tougher kind of intellectual undertaking because it just is so disorderly. Just to take one example, do you know Marcus Collins? But he's written a book called For The Culture, I think it's called and It's about several things including just the sheer explosive presence of subcultures now that just multiply with this ferocity.What does it mean that culture is now a source of chaos, not order? Yeah, if you think about culture as a set of categories into which we divide the world so that it makes sense and divide people into a set of categories and communities into a set of categories or music or whatever.  So culture supplied all of these assumptions that we would use invisibly to think about the world.There's that wonderful book about scientists, by Polanyi, who was a scientist. He decided to investigate what scientists knew about science. And he said, you know what, they make so many assumptions, there's a whole body of what they know about science that they can never tell you, because they assume them. And I think that same thing is true of culture, right? Traditionally, culture has given us a whole set of assumptions about how the world should be constituted. And the trick is that in the old days, by which I mean six years ago, culture did that work for us, so it was the lens through which we saw the world. And then, in the last six years let’s say it became the source of a whole set of new understandings about the world. And this is not a, “Here are the categories and here are the rules of your culture,” but, “We're changing all the rules.”We're changing how we think about how we define people and how we define the world of work is a great example, right? Where we had rules and regs for the corporation, in the last, let's say 12 years, the corporation has struggled to become as dynamic and various as the world in which it must succeed. As a result of which it's flying by the seat of its pants and trying to make itself up as it goes along. So, I think you get a new order of chaos there.And we have been rethinking gender for the whole of the 20th century. Feminism systematically went at that issue, and it's done some pretty magnificent work. So, now we have a new set of gender cultural categories.We also have a group of people who are just going, “Huh? What? What?”  And you think about the problem of the failure to launch kids. Who get to the edge of adulthood and go, “This is so complicated. I have no idea what it is you expect of me.” There's one interview I did with a kid. He said, “Look, I feel like I got the memo that the rules of gender have changed. I'm waiting for the next memo that tells me what they are and how I learn them and how that then defines who I am as an adult in the world.” So that would be a good example. Is the implication of the Kieron Healy observation that culture is not helping us develop in a way? That these categories have been fragmented and multiplied in so many different ways that we're really struggling. That it's a problem?I think this is one of the problems we haven't taken up. And that is, “How do you become as fluid as the world in which you live?”  And some people take to that fluidity effortlessly. They just, they're good at creating a crowded house of possibilities. They are many people. They are good at shifting back and forth between those selfhoods. They're good at navigating the world in all of its complexity using this complicated set of selfhoods. And other people just aren't. And we've said . . . it's like we haven't gone back to talk to the people who are left out, who just don't get how you do that. Something that I've talked about in the Culture Camp is the new set of properties that really seem to define everyone, everyone, people and organizations both. that are good at responding. They are open, they're diverse, they're inclusive, they're transformational, they're capacious, they're exploratory, they're dynamic, they're performative. All of those things, I think, you can say are structural properties that help somebody make their way in the world. But God spare us. We've got some people who still think that selfhood is best defined by being the same person for all purposes. Effectively, they're using Victorian rules to define how to live. And that seems to me just asking for trouble. Yeah, we've changed the rules, but not everyone's got the memo. What are the implications for a brand? How do you think about brand today versus maybe how you did before when it was Waikiki? I think it's all about the multiplicity. I think about how often I have been part of some strategic team and the point of the exercise used to be, okay, let's keep it simple. Let's be very clear the point of this exercise is to create a brand of such sterling clarity. That no one in the world can have any doubt about what the proposition is. The value proposition is what the cultural proposition is. That's what we're here to do. And now it seems to me, wow, we want to construct brands that are good at multiplicity. Brands that have some of the varieties of selfhood that individuals have. Where we're good at building portfolios of complexity, where the brand is really three or four. You think about it, right? How many different kinds of consumers there are? You think about all of the subcultures they belong to. They're fantastically various creatures, but the happiest of them slip effortlessly between these different subcultures and cell phones.We do not have to worry about terrifying the horses.  Which I think was once the big concern. Oh, look, if you say that you're going to confuse them, and they're not going to know what you mean. And the whole thing comes apart. But now, of course, they can. You think about all of the fabulously interesting decoding that goes on. When I did the Netflix work, I had a chance to renew my acquaintance with this. So you talk to kids who are watching or taking Taylor Swift albums or single songs and just decoding them with Talmudic kind of sophistication, right? They are examining every possibility. They are mapping this thing to within an inch of its life. And some people in the marketing community are still doing that mass marketing of, keep it simple don't terrify them. They're ready to be terrified. They are eager to be engaged by a brand with these kinds of complexities built in. I think that's if we want their attention, we have to earn their attention. Yeah. By giving them something that's really rich and complicated. If the past was about not scaring the horses, what is the contemporary relationship with the horse? Yeah, I don't know if I can preserve the metaphorm so forgive me. We're talking about people with fantastic interpretive gifts. And I keep thinking about them as angels for some reason. I'm not sure why, but it's engaging these angels. They are ready for not just one series of interesting, complicated ideas, but a series of interesting, complicated ideas. And they're happy to be asked to move effortlessly back and forth between these versions of the brand. Yeah, I remember you did a piece of work about the relationship of mothers and daughters during the pandemic. I wanted to hear a little bit about that, and also what do you make of the impact of the pandemic on how we're living our lives, or how, what impact has it had on culture?Yeah, I did ethnography. I thought, I've been studying the American home, and I know about American families, and I thought, COVID, this will be interesting. Stuff will have to happen.And sure enough, the first thing you noticed when you went into COVID homes was the sense that mothers and daughters had found one another. That, as one mother said, “My girls have come back to me.” And their notion was that girls had come home from college, they'd come back from high school, they'd come back from grad school. You had the family living in the home, and mothers and daughters were building connections that they didn't necessarily have, so that was absolutely fascinating.There was also some feeling, and this has probably gone away, but I've talked to a lot of mothers who are really tested by the extent to which they're obliged to accommodate the great heterogeneity of our culture. Which, for instance, means everybody has a different food allergy, everybody has a different palate. And every so often there's this sense of, ‘Oh my god, I have to prepare four or five different meals. I put them on the counter, and everyone eats separately. My home no longer has a kind of ceremonial center called the dinner table.’ And mothers who were having this chance to build new relationships were also saying, look, it's back to one table, one conversation, one meal. And, I'm in charge.  Which I thought was fascinating, right? These are women, chiefly women, not only, who had said, I accommodate the sheer difference in heterogeneity of this family. That's my job. And they were saying, actually, in this case, I wish to insist on a new centrality and clarity. Who knows if that's continued. The other thing is we got people moving out of cities into the countryside, into small towns that already had a kind of artisanal economy in place. But when people came out of the cities, they brought their big city incomes with them. And they brought a new set of tastes. And local suppliers of cheese and coffee and all of those people now had deeper pockets on which to draw. Sometimes a new order of sophistication was happening there at the table, which was tremendous for these small towns. I don't know if anyone knows of somebody who's doing the work here. I would love to hear about it. But, potentially we're looking at a decentralization of the American urban world. You think about the number of people who are working, if they're working in New York City and used to work five days a week, now it's two, two days a week or something. And so they are in place now five days in their local communities, and that's where they live. They're just they're they're flying in to earn their income for two or three days and in New York City and then and getting the hell out.I wrote a book called Return of the Artisan…and I was talking to people who were saying, “We are a world unto ourselves.” And one of the phrases I liked was, “We're doing capitalism without cruelty.” That's our model for these small towns. And it means we change the way we interact and what the economy is and what the culture is. And so some great experiments are taking place there. And whether those will, that may have been one of the things we were gifted by COVID and whether it will persevere, I don't know.How has your process changed or evolved? It's changed a lot, not least because there are so many moving parts now to keep an eye on. So I use a program called Tana. Or HEPTA. They're the new personal knowledge databases that are out and available and very helpful. And they allow you to capture vast amounts of information before you're absolutely sure which silo you want to put it in. You just tag it and leave it in place and then pull it up, pull on it when you need it. I have a big board and it has roughly 260 things. I think it could be something on or what I've been keeping it for so long. Now I've watched some of those possibilities become probabilities.And we've been using AI to create scenarios, and that's really just mind bendingly fun. Oh my gosh. If you have a chance, ask ChatGPT if it would tell you about the healthcare industry as if it were an educational institution.  How many times we have spent like days, sometimes weeks, in a room with those little yellow post-its and boards. This machinery is capable of just rolling out these beautiful ideas effortlessly. And it takes like 15 seconds to do the work that used to take a couple of days.So that's pretty interesting. Then there's working with a method called uncontrolled comparison. So if you take 200, you've got 250 possibilities. And you take them at random. You take two of these and you just snap them together. And you see what happens. And you, and it just goes. And it's, the two start speaking to one another in this weird way, like they try to find one another.They look for a way to make themselves mutually sensible. So that's really fun. Often nothing comes to, but other times you go, Oh my God, that's a new idea. So that's really fun. What else? There's just a lot of stuff. Thank God that the technology is making life easier because to get from faint signals through to ideas as they're just about to break is, I think, some part of the work of studying culture now.Is there anything that you're, is there an example of something that you're, on your board that's moved from possibility to probability that you'd be willing to share?Yes, I think you could say and I was trying to pitch somebody in the investment world on this idea and they weren't buying it. So you tell me what's wrong with the argument. For some time now, we have been a celebrity culture. And that means to some extent that we have become more and more interested in performance, not as something that happens on a stage or on a screen, but as something that we embrace for our own purposes, something we do in, in daily life. I'm astounded by the number of times in a public place, I will see people engaged in a conversation and I'll see somebody just having an ordinary conversation, and then they suddenly animate, and they fluoresce, and they do a tiny little performance, and it only lasts for five or ten seconds, but that's clearly what has happened, is that they have done a performance.And then they rock, get off the stage as it were, and they leave the performance. Opportunity goes to somebody else who is party to the conversation. And sure enough, at some point, they will do one of these beautiful little performances. So I think that's what it is to live in a celebrity culture. You become a celebrity of a kind, or you come to possess the performative abilities that we spend so much time admiring, and I think that's one of the things that's driven Facebook. I think Chris Hughes was the guy at Facebook who said, No, we are thinking about social media entirely wrong. And here's the deal. We have to use photographs. We have to let people post. Photographs on Facebook. That's the secret and that's because they are performing for the camera and they are using photographs of themselves to build their networks. They're building networks with performances via these photographs via Facebook. So make that possible. And, when people realized they could put photos on Facebook, they began to do so by Millions a year. People Just had an inexhaustible interest in posting photos. So anyhow, you get Facebook, then you get Instagram. Facebook so little understood the nature of their value proposition they didn't see the threat that Instagram represented, and it took them an extra year to buy them, which means it cost them something like an additional 8 billion to buy them because they didn't get why this was why Instagram was doing photos better than Facebook had done photos and performances.And now we move forward to TikTok, and that's all about performances, right? That's all. And some of it's being turned into a creator economy, which I think is terrific for some purposes and horrifying for other purposes, like some influencers are just Right? And they Talk about how miserable they are, having to just churn out this content.And the content doesn't have anything to do with their creative vision. It's really, they are just skills of a new fashion kind. So that can be grim. But the creator economy, as it comes from, people creating and making music, or doing fanfic, or all of that stuff, is quite glorious, because it means that people who previously never had an opportunity to take their creativity to a public stage now do, and hallelujah, they can make some money in the process, which means, as one of my respondents put it to me, she said I would rather not work at McDonald's this summer if I don't have to.That creator economy took so long and it just limped over the finish line. And, but now it's happening. …So there you see the celebrity culture out of which comes a performance preoccupation that turns into an economy that becomes, first of all, something that people use for the purposes of expressive individualism, and then they begin to use it more and more for commercial individualism.What is at stake for the corporation that isn't listening or paying attention or trying to embrace culture, as you say? What's at stake?The brand that worked to perfection 20 years ago is now just an exercise in tedium. So any company that's using all of the old, the standard model of marketing and meaning making and meaning manufacture to craft the brand is actually engaged in the construction of something that cannot matter. And if it does matter, it is an exercise in antagonism. It's just pissing people off. They just see the ads or the content. And go, Oh, please. So that, that's what I think is at stake is that notion of being, if not irrelevant, then deeply irritating. Beautiful. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much.My pleasure. Thank you, Peter. Great to have a chat.Grant McCracken is a cultural anthropologist with a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. McCracken has studied American culture for more than 35 years and is considered a leader in the theory and practice of anthropological theory and ethnographic research. Grant’s work has helped Fortune 500 companies uncover insights that help them innovate, position and communicate a dynamic and constrantly disrupted marketplace. His clients include LEGO, Ford Foundation, Ford Motor Company, Google, Netflix, Boston Book Festival, Timberland, Sony, Diageo, Toronto Dominion Bank, Goldman Sachs, Siemens, NBC, IBM, Simon & Schuster, Nike and the White House. He has funded his own research, escaping some of from the intellectual and ideological orthodoxies of the contemporary university. From this vantage point, he has invented a number of useful concepts (e.g., Diderot effect, dark value, gravity wells for culture, Tailwind Radar.) He has participated on advisory boards for IBM and Sam Adams. He has written 14 books and taught at the Harvard Business School and MIT. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe