THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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