THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Reverend Barbara Ann Michaels is a New York-based interfaith minister and performance artist known as the "Jester of the Peace." She combines humor, art, and spirituality in her work as a wedding officiant and event creator. She founded the Humor Arts Museum and House of Holy Humor, using interactive performance to promote wellness and social connection.Barbara, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. It is a pleasure, an honor, and a joy. I start all my conversations with the same question. I borrow it from a friend of mine who lives here in Hudson. She helps people tell their story. I borrow it because it's a big, beautiful question. I over-explain it because it's big. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in absolute control. You can answer or not answer in any way that you want. It's impossible to make a mistake. The question is, where do you come from?That is a beautiful question. It has mystical applications, artistic applications, geographical applications, mystery of life applications. It's very interesting that you asked me that today because the other day, my cousin who lives in Portland, Oregon - and I live in New York City - and we hadn't connected in a couple of years. She messaged me in the middle of the night, asking me about our family heritage.Half my family is from Italy from a bunch of generations ago. She was asking me about our family heritage, saying to me that I had been the keeper of the flame. First of all, I was honored to find out that I was keeper of the flame. Then we ended up having a two-hour conversation in the middle of the night, up until about two in the morning, about our family - why people do what they do and where we come from.Is it even possible to know where we come from? There's only documentation for a couple of generations back from one side of that Italian family and not the other. One of the things I've been thinking about recently is feeling, as an American person with European heritage, that I was dropped from the sky onto New Jersey where I grew up, without a long connection to those many generations of European people.On one side, the Italians; on the other side, the Eastern Europeans. After my grandmother passed away at age 99 and a half, I took the time to go to the one place on earth where I actually know that some family of mine comes from, which is Montesarchio, Italy. It's a hill town of 13,000 people or so in the Benevento region. I went there, and it was the first time that I could imagine relatives of mine walking in a place where I was walking. It was very profound to feel a sense of physical history, because the United States is such a new country, comparatively. It wasn't a feeling that I was used to.I also have had the experience of not feeling fully at home anywhere ever. I do have nomadic tendencies. This conversation with her was very beautiful to me because we were exploring what our family heritage is and can we get Italian citizenship? What would it be like to be Italian-descended people going to live in Italy after a few generations didn't do that? That is only one part of where do I come from.What did it feel like, that moment when you were walking where you could imagine them walking?Although the other night - it was my birthday - I was in Newark, New Jersey, where some of these Italian people came from Italy. I know that my grandparents partly got their start as a couple there. I was imagining, "What was it like? Did they look at this square? Did they see that church? What was still here when they were here? Am I walking on a spot that they would have walked?"Not having that feeling be familiar because I've been super nomadic and lived all over the US for all of my adult life - this is what I did. I don't speak Italian because I come from the generations where it was "don't speak the language of the old country, we're just going to forget that language and be American now." There's definitely a loss there.When I was in college, I took an Italian class and I wrote my grandmother a letter in Italian, and she was so happy. Then I wrote her another letter in Italian and it was beyond what she remembered. She said, "Don't write me any more letters in Italian." I thought that was pretty funny.Going back to Montesarchio, Italy, which is what you actually asked me about - I translated using Google Translate this message that said: "Hi, I'm in your town. I know for sure that I'm related to some people in your town. These are the names of my relatives who lived here 150 years ago. If you can help me find my family, that's great. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be in your town."I would show people this message on my phone in Italian. They would start talking to me in Italian and they would pick up their phone and say "Del Giaco" and "Del Sesto," which are my family names. They were trying to find my family thanks to Google Translate. Nobody found my family, but I know that somebody there is related to me because it just has to be that way.What made that important to do?She had passed away and I had never been there. I actually had never been to Italy. It was the first time I went to Italy. I went to Venice Biennale and had this extraordinary experience in Venice of feeling like I was in a place where life moved at the speed of people, not technology. First of all, I go to Venice and the whole experience of being a human being gets dialed back to pre-technology because you can only get around by boat or feet. There's no cars, not a bicycle, not even a roller skate - at least not that I could find.I watched people in cafes talking to each other and not being on their phones because life was moving at the speed of people. Then I went even further back in history going to Montesarchio, Italy, in this little hill town. I didn't know that on one side of the hill, there's a very smooth road to get to the top of the hill where the little castle is that my great grandfather had some kind of connection to.On the front of the hill, there's all these windy little paths and old stone houses. I walked all the way up through all the little twisty turnies, only to find out that there was a clear road on the other side. One of the funny things when I got to the hill is there was a sign - and for many years, I've been saying to whoever I happened to be in love with at the time, "This is a kissing spot. We should kiss on the kissing spot," just as a fun game over many years.I got to the top of the hill in Montesarchio, Italy, and lo and behold, guess what there was? There was a sign, and it says in Italian, "kissing spot." I felt like, are you serious? I've been carrying around the kissing spot on the top of the hill in Montesarchio, Italy, with me everywhere I go into all the loves that I've had. And I was representing my family's historical kissing spot. It was totally delightful.Did you have an idea growing up of what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yes and no, because my mother took me to a program called Creative Theater Unlimited at McCarter Theater in Princeton. The program would tell us a story - it was a theater program for young people. They would tell us a story and then they would take out all of the details, take out the character names, take out all the lines, take out all the specifics and just leave us with the plot points. Then we would retell the story with our own characters, our own lines, our own details.I thought that was quite brilliant because it teaches you how to have a story structure, but it also teaches you to improvise. I realized decades later that everything I do artistically is an improvisation on the structure, which probably came from that experience that then stayed with me for many years.All of the artwork that I create has very simple structures that are audience participatory, like the Love Letter Lounge Post Office, where people come and write love letters to clear their heart or cheer their heart. "I Vote for You" - the voting booth that I was doing last week because we had an election in the U.S., where people vote themselves to be president of whatever they want: president of peace, president of pretzels, president of prosperity. "Marry Yourself," where you can make a commitment to a part of yourself - marry your creativity, marry success, marry sleep, marry whatever matters.All of those are improvisations on a very simple structure. Plus, I was an improviser and a clown. Did I know that was going to be the trajectory? I realized years, decades probably later, how impactful that theater program had been in setting up my life to be an improvisation on a structure. But everybody's life is an improvisation on a structure.Tell me where you are right now and what you're doing for work.I am physically right now in a storefront called Razor Space BK, which is run by my wonderful friend Rachel McIntosh, who is a multi-artist. I am the artist in residence here to do performances of a town that I have called Humorville. It's fun that we started talking about a town and I've made a town.One of the funny things about my town of Humorville, which is if you put my performances and experiences together, they make a town, is that I did not realize that I was making a town until I'd already made it. I made a post office and a library where people tell stories that were hard then that are funny now. I made a phone company where you call yourself on the phone and tell yourself everything you've been holding back. I made holidays, I made a parade, I made a marriage bureau. But I didn't realize that I was making a town until about 10 years in when I looked at the projects.This weekend I'm going to be doing the Love Letter Lounge post office. People come and write letters - write a letter to anyone or anything. Addressed letters get mailed and unaddressed letters get ritually released, which could mean burn it, shred it, drown it, stomp on it, whatever it is.One of the other hallmarks of those projects is they meet people emotionally wherever they are. An example of that is "I Vote for You" where last week I had one person, this was in the street on election day, vote for herself to be president of Stress Baking Banana Bread, which I thought was a totally delightful presidency and she absolutely had my vote. Then another person got real in a different way and voted to be the president of arts funding.If somebody needs a serious moment, they'll take it. If someone needs a funny moment, they'll take it. I'm there with my structure to improvise with people and help people feel seen, heard, and celebrated.When you're asking me what I do for work - I do that as art, I do it as wellness, I do it as training. One of the things, if there's any other creators listening right now who want to work more, that made a really big difference for me is when I realized I didn't have to call my work art all the time. Is that art? Yes, it's art. Is that team bonding? Yes, it's team bonding. Is that education? Yes, it's education. Is that personal development? Yes, it is.I'll call it whatever it needs to be called for it to show up in someone's familiar language and their budget. I've been able to do a lot more work in a lot more places doing the exact same thing all the time because I've been willing to call it whatever it needs to be called. It's always art to me underneath. But if I had to have it be called art all the time, I would have less of an impact and work less often.When did you first discover that this was a way that you could make a living?That's such a wonderful question. I got into the events industry pretty early on because I was a clown early on in my early twenties. I went to study clown theater, and I had this extraordinary experience of having that change my life.I had always been a smart kid. If you're a smart kid and you have the answer, things go well. And if you don't have the answer, things might not go so well. I went to study mime at this place called Celebration Barn in South Paris, Maine, which was founded by Tony Montanaro. I really liked mime because I'd been a dancer and really enjoyed that. Then the next year I went and studied clown.I was an absolutely terrible, unfunny clown. I had no ability to deal with failure. I was just not funny in the least. I was confused and I didn't have the answer and things were going badly. I basically just collapsed on the floor and sobbed, which was incredibly embarrassing.I couldn't process failure. Then my teacher, whose name was Julie Goell - it was Julie Goell and Bob Nurenberg. Julie's passed away now, so I want to send her some mystical love. She came over and she sat with me and put my little head on her little lap. She was smiling at me and stroking my hair. I was a mess. And she just was totally full of joy because I was that terrible.It was the first time I'd ever been celebrated for failing, which is not the same as "Oh, you got it wrong, you can do it again" or "Just go on to the next one" or "It'll be okay next time." It was full-on celebration of my abject failure as a clown. It changed me because I couldn't process failure before that.As soon as that happened, I devoted the rest of my life to humor. The origin story of making a living as an artist partly comes from that moment because I've worked in a lot of different kinds of contexts, always with humor for wellness, even though I didn't realize that for a long time. Believing deeply that putting humor back in the medicine cabinet and humor as a wellness tool, humor as art, humor as life.I deeply believe that anything that brings energy is life. I will say humor is life because it brings energy to people and brings connection and brings love as long as it's positive humor when we're laughing with things.So I went into the events industry. I was doing parades and events and teaching clown theater and teaching improvisation. I was performing at festivals, then performing at conferences and wellness events. Then I was performing at schools. And I was working on a senior adult therapy platform. It takes a lot of forms. But it being mine to do and having an entrepreneurial spirit, the inclination of "I'm going to work on this for the rest of my life" was born in that moment on the stage with Julie.What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?I can't feel better if the other person can't feel better. Everything I do professionally has to do with bringing more energy, bringing more relief, bringing more positivity. I don't mean that in a fluffy joy bunny fashion, although sometimes I do really silly things. I mean that in a truthful, vital way where if I have more energy today, I'm more available to myself and others and will make better choices for myself and others.I'm actually a really serious artist. I just use humor as a strategy because it's phenomenally faster. If I did my post office and my marriage bureau and my phone booth as a serious project, people hold back and they think and they wonder, "Is it OK to participate in this? What does it mean if I participate in this?" But because it's funny, people just don't think. They say, "Oh, all right. I'll marry my favorite vacation spot. I do love it." And this is why I'm marrying my vacation spot, and this is when I started going there. And actually, let me tell you about my family. It's this door opener for people to really share themselves without thought. If people aren't thinking, it's just a better experience.What is that shift or what's the trick that humor plays? I'm very curious, too, about what it means to be a clown. To study to go to clown school or to explore clown theater, you must learn something. What's the shift that happens when you become a clown, and what is the trick that humor plays for us?Those are two phenomenally deep questions. Clown theater is the art form of taking the ups and downs of life and finding humor. So we can all have a cathartic laugh, put more energy, put some space around that pain and keep going and forgive ourselves and see ourselves in each other.That's different than sometimes when I say clown in the U.S., people immediately think of the birthday party industry and balloon animals and face painting are commonly associated with clowns - those are visual art forms that it takes real skill to do well. The actual study of clown theater and the presentation of clown theater is a theatrical art form that embraces the extremes of life so that we can get a laugh, exhale, see ourselves in each other and be able to look at some of those things that are maybe harder to see because humor makes it possible.There's a reason why some people get their news from nightly comedy shows and not directly because sometimes watching the regular news is hard. But getting it through comedy puts a little space around it, a little space.What's the space you're pointing to? What's that space around pain?First of all, laughter is a physiological and emotional release simultaneously. When I was a pediatric hospital clown, you go in and you play with the things that are hard once you have complicity because you have to have complicity in order to do that. Once you have complicity, then you play with the things that are hard and it gives a relief. It gives an exhale. It's like, "Oh, this thing that is difficult - it's not only serious."It's very serious, and yet I can laugh about this aspect of it. That's what the Circus of the Heart Library is about. It's people telling stories about things that were hard then that are funny now. With the real understanding that many stories in our lives do not find humor in our lifetime, but those that can, we can help other people with them.I call it Circus of the Heart Library because people go to the real circus in order to see people do impossible things. Like Luigi can hang off of this high wire, looking like a garbled up spaghetti. Well, if you can do that, maybe I can swim or whatever - it's like whatever feels impossible. And then the emotional equivalent of that is laughing with what was hard, which is either forgiveness or what was hard - those are the things that feel impossible emotionally.The Circus of the Heart Project is specifically about people laughing about stuff that was challenging, knowing that the original thing isn't funny. I've had people tell me stories about death of parents, brain surgery, almost drowning, drugs, guns, breaking both legs - none of that's funny, but something along the way finds humor and it's vitally important to be able to let humor live because it's part of the human condition for wellness. We are designed to reframe our stories with humor. It's not a trick. It's not something brought in from the outside. It's actually part of the human psyche to be able to do that.I call that moment the first laugh where it's been "too soon, too soon" - the comedy industry term where it's too soon. But then the first laugh happens, which could be so tiny, like the little "hee hee hee." And once that happens, then that's when we put space around the pain. That's when the heart has hope. That's when we know the healing journey is still gonna happen, even if it's gonna be long, but the first laugh happens. So we have hope. And then the story is truly funny and we get energy when we tell the story and we feel better when we tell the story about the aspect of the thing, not the original thing. That's when we help other people. That's what the Circus of the Heart Library of Humorville is about. Right now I have about 30 interviews online about that.I want to go back to when you talked about complicity and playing the hard stuff. Is it possible to do a slow motion replay of what's happening with you when you're interacting with somebody? When you're actually using humor? How do you get complicity?Complicity is when we want to play together. How do I know that? Part of it's training. I have been doing audience interactive theatrics for 30 years in the street, in theaters, at trade shows, on Zooms - it's all the same skills.One of the things I learned as a street artist over all these decades is that there's always four kinds of people in the audience. The first kind is the people who are ready for anything. They really let you know because they're ready for anything. They basically want you to sit on their lap and lick their face. They're ready for anything. And so I don't mean literally lick their face, I mean metaphorically do that. So they're called the lickers.The second group is the watchers. They totally want to watch you lick someone else's face. They just don't want you to lick theirs. But they want to be acknowledged for watching.The third group are the hiders, and they do not want to be seen, but they want to participate. They do not want you to know that they're totally enjoying watching because they don't want any attention, versus the watchers who totally want the attention.And the fourth group does not care. They don't care. They got a bad text. They have something going on in their life. They just don't care right now.So complicity is - and this is what I say to people when we go out and do the community service part of Humorville, which is going into a park and playing with strangers with clown noses on - we have the clown noses on, just to show how easy it is to bring joy to others. You just go out and find the lickers and lick them. Find the lickers and lick them and all will be well because they let it be known. And I do mean that metaphorically, we must understand.Complicity is finding the lickers and licking them because they're like, "Yes, lick me now," but metaphorically. And it's obvious because someone is - I offer my attention and someone returns it. If they returned it, okay; if they didn't return it, obviously they're not my person. But that's part of the craft. The part of the craft is understanding that.The other part of the craft is people change their state. Somebody can be like, "Yes, I want to play," and then the next minute they're like, "Nope, done." And we have to be able to ride the change. Or someone comes out of hiding and is suddenly a watcher, and then they're a licker, but then they disappear and suddenly they don't care. That's where the craft really is - we have to be able to manage people's state changes because nobody's a licker all the time and nobody's a hider all the time.On any given day, I could be like, "Yes, person on the sidewalk asking me if you can stop me for two seconds, I would love to talk to you about that." And another day, "Please no, not today." Complicity is just meeting the energy where the energy is and being willing to be very honest about that and not trying to put energy where it isn't or where I wish it was, which is a wonderful metaphor for every other relationship in life.We have to just be with the energies as they are. If we try to make the energies what they're not, it's gonna be hard. And that is the same in street performing as it is in love, as it is in work, as it is in family. It's all the same. It's one of the things I love the most about clown theater - all of the tools of clown theater apply to every other relationship we have.So the two questions - one was about the clown. What's the shift that happens in you when you become a clown? And then the other one was about humor. What does humor do for us?Humor is life. Humor brings energy, humor helps reframe. However, I need to make a distinction that humor can also be used to hurt people. So there's a distinction between laughing at people and laughing with people. If I say to myself, "Oh, they're laughing at me," it feels hard, it feels separating. If I say, "Oh, they're laughing with me," it's so energizing, it's so beautiful.In general, because sometimes laughing at will serve - it's not a complete 100%. In general, if we trend laughing with each other, then we will create more love. If we trend laughing at each other, we will create more division. That's one of the things that humor does. Humor brings relief because it's physiological. Laughter predates language. Laughter sounds the same in every language. It predates language. We laugh first. Babies laugh before they can talk.Is laughter - what do you know or understand about laughter? I feel like I read somewhere that it's kind of a safety, it's an indication of safety.My personal experience of laughter is there's a form of love when we're laughing with each other versus at. We feel it's - I can exhale. One of the things I know as a public speaker, because I also keynote about humor and wellness, and I train about humor and wellness, and I do programs about humor and wellness - the best time when doing public speaking to say something really serious is right after everybody laughed, because they've just exhaled, they're listening, and their minds are clear.I have a great story about that. I was presenting at a conference called the Creative Problem Solving Institute. My very wonderful colleague, Mark Milhone, who ended up becoming my very dear friend - this is our meeting story, it's very fun. I was teaching a program called Clown Curious, which is the rules of body language and humor for creative facilitators or for a business context. He said, "Well, I really want to come to your workshop, but I have to leave early."I said, "Well, okay, this is a clown workshop, so you can leave early, Mr. Milhone. However, you have to do it as obviously as possible. This is the clown class, okay?" And he, being a good comedian, which he is, said okay.So I'm presenting and it's wonderful, and we're exploring these concepts and it's audience interactive, because it always is. And Mr. Milhone's time for him to leave comes, and so he walks directly in front of me between me and all of the people in the workshop with his roly bag as if I'm not even there. Just no one can concentrate because he's walked right in between us, which is as obviously as possible, and he was such a good friend that he really took it on, but he's also a devotee of comedy and what it can do.This is what happened: Half of the room ran out of the facilitation room, chased him into the elevator, pressed all the elevator buttons so that he would have the most difficult time getting down the stairs, had the time of their lives in a professional setting, ran back, huffing and puffing, smiling, giggling. The whole room is electric. Everyone has exhaled, everyone has laughed.Pause, and I said, "I'd like to remind everyone, this is a professional conference." There's a pause, and then the whole room just cracks up because I said, "What is possible now professionally for us because this has happened? What is possible professionally for us because we've collaborated, because we've been improvisational, because we've taken a risk? What is possible?"Going from the highest height of everyone's joy and mischief to, "Oh, this has some seriously practical implications. Let's really understand what just happened." That is an experience I've had over and over again, because I know to drop the most serious thing that's going on right after the funniest thing that happens. Because that's transformation, that's the high and the low. And I don't mean low being a low feeling, I mean taking people to the highest height and then ground.You use the word mischief. Tell me about mischief. I've read about the trickster. Is there a relationship between the clown and the trickster?Oh, sure. There's clowns and there's the fool and there's the trickster and they're really not the same. The idea that the jester term has to do more with being the trickster and saying the hard thing. The clown has more to do with being a bumbling idiot and representing everybody's trying to pretend everything's okay all the time - which it clearly is not because that's why we need clown theater.Relief can happen in either one of those contexts. What I love the most about this art form is that it's so incredibly honest. If I had a really good clown show, people will laugh and cry and see the human dynamics there in all of our lives.What do clowns make theater about? Power dynamics. Anybody in the world experience power dynamics today? Probably. Pretending everything's okay? Yes, I'm trying to drink this water but it has a hole in it. Is anybody trying to pretend that some situation is not going awry right now? Probably. It's incredibly honest and I'm grateful because I've studied it long enough that I can bring humor to a situation faster or look for it - I look for humor faster.What do you mean? How do you mean that? What does that mean to look faster?When something's going wrong, have the ability to be like, "Okay, what's gonna come out of this that's funny?" I can go there faster. I also do the library project on a senior adult therapy platform and as a wellness activity, even though it was an artwork. One of the women in the workshop said to me, "As I go through my week, I find myself looking for humor faster. I was talking to a really annoying friend and I just took a second rather than get mad at her. I thought, 'Oh, that's funny. She's going off like that.'" And I thought, "Oh yeah, we win."We win if we laugh with each other, we win if we laugh. And with a real understanding that the "too soon" comedy term exists for a reason because things really can be too soon and often are too soon. Whenever I do this as a wellness workshop, I have everyone put their hand on their heart just to acknowledge all those stories that will not find humor in our lifetime.However, you wouldn't think that - I mean, war is terrible all the time in every instance and you wouldn't think anyone would ever find humor in it, but how many funny movies are there about war? There's a lot because people need to process it and process it through humor. It's not that the war is funny because it's not, but something from the journey finds humor or this aspect can be humorous and we need to bring release and relief and know that healing is possible and that's what humor does. Humor helps us, laughing with helps us know that healing is possible because humor is the harbinger of healing and humor is human.I will also say that humor is a spiritual practice, a human right. I'm an interfaith minister too. I'm not a member of any particular religion but I'm a legal clergy person. I also do this as a spiritual service - humor, the library, having the congregation of whatever faith that happens to be tell stories about humor as a spiritual practice. Humor is a human right. Humor is wellness, humor is life.So you're the Jester of the Peace?That is correct. That was given to me by a very dear friend when I first became a wedding officiant, which is the theater job you never age out of - that is the shout out to other theater people who may be listening right now. I did 560 weddings for creative couples.I was the one doing costume weddings and helicopter weddings and weddings in the snow - just whatever people needed to do because some people need to express their tradition and some people need to express their creativity. My friend said, "You're a clown and you're doing weddings. You should be the jester of the peace." And I said, "Oh yes, you're right."I've kept it even though I'm not in that business full time anymore, but it was a wonderful business. I ended up being a wedding officiant right before same-sex marriage passed in New York state. I was able to officiate some of the first same-sex marriages in New York, which was really a tremendous honor and very moving and lots of fun.I keep "jester of the peace" because it means humor for wellness and it means fun for life. I am not - sometimes people think about play and it seems like silly goof-off time. And in reality, it's so important. It's vital to life.Play is not for children, play is human because if we don't play, we're not innovating. If we don't play, we're not releasing our stress. If we don't play, we're stuck in our adult patterns. If we don't play, we're not reaching for the next version of ourselves. If we don't play, we can't exhale.And ultimately, even in a business context, ultimately people want to work with people who feel like friends. And what are the friendship qualities? The friendship qualities are playfulness, humor, sharing joy and sharing real deal stuff. So my projects share real deal stuff through joy. And so I have the friendship factor.I'm curious about the playfulness of course, but you mentioned teaching body language. What do you know? How do you talk about body language?Thank you for that. There's rules, humor has rules. And one of them is the rule of three which is same, same, different. Like frog, frog, intergalactic exploration, whatever. It's same, same, different because it only takes an instance of two to create a pattern. And one of the ways to create humor and create laughter is to do a pattern break in the psyche.And so if I go frog, frog, people are expecting a frog. But if we go frog, frog, intergalactic exploration with donuts - I had to add the donuts too because it wasn't funny enough the first time but I think that the donuts really worked out.Also leading with different parts of the body. When we walk, do we lead with our head and our thoughts? Do we lead with our heart and our feelings? Do we lead with our pelvis and our desires? All of those create characters but they also - if you just do some people watching, you will start to see people leading with their heart, their head and their pelvis and that significantly affects how people receive us and what stories they tell us about what they think we're like.Those are some of the principles but I teach all of that through interactive games. I'm basically an interactive artist and I came to realize after I joined the World Experience Organization earlier this year that I'm also an experience designer and that was very exciting to find out because I didn't know that that existed.Now I'm connected with all these people all over the world who design experiences and I design experiences too. It's fun to be in the interactive and immersive arts long enough that they have new names. Then it's immersive, then it's experiences - great. It's also clown theater improv and performance art but there was a time when the term performance art didn't exist either. And then the performance artists got to say, "Oh, I'm a performance artist." But I can say, "Oh, I'm an experience designer." Eventually it'll be called something else. I call it going from the human condition to the humor condition.What are you most looking forward to or what are you working on next?One of the things I'm working on right now is touring my town. Now that I realized it's a town after I had the aha moment - oh, I made a marriage bureau and a bank. Oh, I didn't make a bank. I was thinking about making a bank of laughter. I was thinking about making a bank where people can send in their favorite friend's laugh or their favorite uncle's laugh or their mom's laugh to have a bank of laughter and how beautiful that would be.To tour it as a pop-up, to do a pop-up in a building, like a house takeover, a hotel takeover. What about a renovated space? So every different part of the space is go in this room and marry yourself. Go across the hall and vote for yourself. Go upstairs and call yourself on the phone and then the parade goes by. Now it's time to celebrate a holiday.I'm looking forward to identifying space partners and I will go anywhere in the world to do that. So if you are listening and you would love to have this in your region, I would be delighted to come to you with it. That's one of the things I'm looking forward to.I'm also looking forward to continuing to ride the different segments of society with the exact same projects because it is health. It's one of my favorite things about humor. It is health, it is love, it is art, it is education. It really is - I'm not massaging it to try to fit in people's categories. It really is all of those things because humor is connection and anywhere people are, connection is necessary. Humor, art and love are the fastest reconnectors of the human spirit that I know.I get to work in all these different kinds of sectors because humor is life and because it's true. I'm looking forward to those things. I invite all of our listeners to go to jesterofthepiece.com which is where my calendar is and where you can communicate with me and talk about projects and share ideas.One of the things I say after the Circus of the Heart Library when I'm doing it as a workshop is I'll say, have people turn to each other, actually give each other a clown nose and say to each other, "May you walk with humor?" And that's what I will say to you, Peter, may you walk with humor? As well as say to all of our listeners, may you all walk with humor and may you walk with humor with each other and do the things and participate in the artworks and practice the practices that have us walk with humor together.Beautiful. I appreciate that very much. And yeah, I'm really glad that you accepted the invitation. So thank you.It's a pleasure. Thank you Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Lyubov Sachkova is the Communication Manager at dating app FEELD. I met Lyubov through the Exposure Therapy community, and was excited to speak with her.I think as you know, I always start with this question, which I borrow from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. I love it so much, but I always end up over-explaining it, because I want you to know that you're in absolute control. You can answer, not answer any way that you want to. And it's impossible to make a mistake. Where do you come from?Yeah, you know, you really get people thinking with that one. And I've been hearing that people do start with the location. So I think that that is indeed very important about where we come from.So I'm originally from Bulgaria, and I grew up my first 19 years. I was there nonstop, and didn't even travel that much abroad. But something that's very important about Bulgaria is like, not a lot of people speak Bulgarian.So you have to learn foreign languages. For me, the first choice was French, then English, and then consequently also German. But that was kind of like my first 19 years, where I focus on basically adapting to other languages and other cultures, even without being part of it.And from there, I've developed to, you know, then go and study in some of these places and really embed myself in the culture. So I think that kind of makes me a bit of a chameleon that can adapt to different places in a way. But I think my journey is also very much about now returning back to the roots and reexamining identity from a place where it's like, you come from somewhere, you've adapted to other cultures, but then you kind of are seeking a return back to the core of where you come from.So I think it's, for me, it's a cyclical experience where I come from.Yeah. And you say roots, have you returned back to where you grew up?Well, I'm very fortunate to work from wherever I want. So I actually do travel back and forth pretty much all of the time, which is like, you know, roots are also something that it's like, do I really have any right now? I don't think I do because I travel all the time.But yeah, I do go back to see my family in Bulgaria very often, and now I extend my stays of like a few months at a time.And do you, when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? Do you remember?Yes. I hear you ask that question to other people. I think I was quite a creative child, which didn't quite translate so well as an adult, or at least it's not capitalized on yet.So I really love to do performances for my family. And I had my cousins and my sister be performers alongside me. So I would organize them.But I think the dream was to be a fashion designer, which is something that I then kind of transformed in my career. I think both the organizational skill and the wanting to be in fashion both kind of found their way into my career later in different forms.And tell me, where are you now and what are you doing for work? What are you up to?Is that where you are now physically?Yeah, exactly. Now we're coming back to Earth.Okay, okay. So currently I'm calling you from Vienna because I'm actually here with family and friends. We're doing a little trip.And yeah, I'm also working on my, you know, as I said, I work remotely. So currently I work for a company called FEELD. It's a dating app for the curious, as we say. And yeah, I'm on the communication side and brand side of things at FEELD.And when did you first discover, get into this kind of work? When did you first get into sort of brand and communications?Yeah, you know, as I said, like the organizational skills and the fashion thing. So I first started in fashion PR actually, it was kind of that was my study. So, you know, I had the, I ended up in the position of being able to actually practice what I learned for, which was very nice.And in an industry that I was really drawn to. So I started in fashion PR. I worked first in Berlin, then I worked in London.And I think kind of what drew me to FEELD was a variety of reasons. But one of them was that as part of my masters, I did write this thesis around how to make sustainable fashion cool. It was kind of like the topic that I explored with my, I think graduate school, you said, in the U.S. Here it's masters. And so I was exploring basically the concept of cool and I applied it to the idea of sustainability because the Berlin showroom I was working for had like all of these amazing brands.But then my boss at the time, who was the founder, had all of these sustainable, amazing, beautiful brands that he was showcasing in the showroom. And I just kind of noticed that none of the magazines would like really want to get samples from us. And I was like, why is that happening?You know, it's beautiful there. There was one designer that had crystals grown on a dress, you know, that's kind of incredible. And she was this amazing, super talented lady.And, you know, we weren't getting many requests. And I really wanted to explore what about the perception of these brands is stopping magazines from wanting them and making them a desirable product for other people to want to purchase. And so I explored that from the lens of like the communications and brand perception and just overall perception of the idea of sustainability and the desirability and what actually makes it cool because ultimately I think who was a big driver of people actually adopting something with virality and, you know, it kind of growing in culture.And through that work, as I was living in London, I met the founders, Anna and Dimo, who, you know, were friends of friends. And Anna kind of, I think, took note of my work and was like, keeping in touch throughout my studies. And I was working simultaneously and still in fashion.But once I finished the study, she was like, are you interested in joining the team? You know, we could really use someone like you. I think back in the day, we were like less than 15 people.Now we're close to a hundred. So we've grown quite a lot internally and externally. But yeah, that's the point of me kind of transitioning into that work and then starting to work at FEELD.Yeah. So we met through Exposure Therapy, right? We're both part of this community. And I was super excited to talk to you just because FEELD has been, you know, just the transformation, the revolution in how people sort of date and relationships and everything is shifting so much. And FEELD has sort of been at the center of that or the forefront of that. So I'm just curious, what has that experience been like?What's it been like to be on what I imagined was kind of a rocket ship, a FEELD, and then to be at the intersection of so much cultural change, too, as a communications person, must be pretty intense. Yeah.I think, you know, thank you for this question and also for acknowledging FEELD's place in culture. I think I still kind of have to pinch myself when people say that, because as you say, I've been in it in this transformation. And to me, it's kind of like the only natural thing to happen.But I do understand that culture could have taken many different terms. And we could also totally not be in this reality and be in a different reality of things. I think people definitely needed a transformation to happen.And I'm going to bring up another taboo topic for everyone now, which is the pandemic. You're like, our collective PTSD doesn't allow us to talk about it much. But I do think it was like such a transformational moment for a lot of us.And a lot of people we've noticed definitely took that as a moment of introspection and a moment where returning to yourself and really re-evaluating everything that you're doing in your life, there was a moment to do so. And it accelerated things that were already in place that were happening at FEELD at the time. For instance, this growth towards relationship styles that exist outside of monogamy.Because I've grown up, and I think a lot of us have grown up in a reality where there's the relationship escalator. You go, you study, you then find your partner, you buy a house, you have kids, you send them to college, you retire, and blah, blah, blah. And right now, I think a lot of people's lives are totally not like that for a myriad of reasons, including the fact that a lot of things in life are completely unaffordable now that used to be very affordable for people.So there's one economic element of everything as well as the fact that our desires have changed. And people no longer want to abide by just one rule that then establishes the entire structure of your life afterwards. One thing that I do is work with this network of researchers from the University of Leeds called the Ethical Dating Online Network.And I work with Dr. Natasha and then Dr. Luke. And I really enjoy working with them. Luke brought up something very recently that is so stuck in my mind about the transformation we've experienced, is that we're actually living the longest lives ever on Earth as humans.So our life span is longer than ever. But with that, also, the duration of the time that we're actually dating is the longest it's ever been. So if it used to be that you date and court people for one to two years before you get married, right now that can actually be one to two decades, which is an extremely long time of our lives.And that's what the role of dating apps is. And that's kind of why we're seeing dating culture have such a profound impact on culture at large. And to me, I see your expression and I'm like, I know, I know, this is crazy.Well, what you just did, and tell me if I'm wrong, because you were using your hands a little bit, but you just pointed out that courtship has expanded from one or two years to a couple of decades. We're in constant courtship, is that what you're saying, in a way?No, I meant more than courtship dating, the process of basically finding your prospects and then becoming engaged or married to them used to be a very short period of time. And now it's a very lengthy period of time of actually finding that person and deciding to settle. If that even ever happens for some people, we've seen the conversations about celibacy and demisexuality where people are like, I just want to settle with people that I really feel comfortable with emotionally before I even give you anything else. Or I choose to just be with myself and have a great time in life.Yeah, I really appreciate how you spoke about, almost with gratitude about culture, that you recognize those things, I feel like sometimes culture, nobody knows what you're talking about when you talk about culture because it's sort of intangible or invisible. But then something shifts and all of a sudden you're in a different reality that wouldn't have been possible before. And I know, I don't know what your experience is, but the most recent election, you know what I mean? On Monday, we're in one world and then on Wednesday, everything's changed, you know what I mean? And that's like a visceral, that's like what culture is for me.Yeah.I love just how sensitive you were to culture. I really appreciate the pandemic taboo. I'm curious, can you tell me more about how you think about the role that the pandemic played in creating the conditions for all of these changes in how people's partnership?Well, I jokingly say taboo because I feel like we all avoid talking about it, you know? Or at least that's what I've noticed. I work in communication, so I do a lot of this, right?It's like I prepare for interviews, I listen to them, I consume media, and it feels like it's kind of like we're existing in the reality pre or after, but not in. And rather dealing with the preconditions or the consequences. But I think the moment that we were all kind of caught in that moment, it's like you couldn't help but have to think like what is my life? Like what am I doing? Where am I heading? What does this mean?Who am I now? Because you can't help but have to look around yourself and there's not much to see or there's a lot to see or you see things you don't like. And then that prompts questions.And I think questions are really important when they stem from the individual. One thing that we found out, and I'm sure we'll get to this later, but we did a rebranded FEELD because we knew that something has changed in culture and with that we also need to reconsider how we present ourselves. And this is the reason why I also ended up in exposure therapy.I had the amazing opportunity to work with Jasmine and Jean-Louis from Concert Bureau and their team. And they helped us do that. But this idea of personal growth and transformation became central to what we do at FEELD.Thanks to the acceleration that COVID, in this moment of stillness, allowed everyone to kind of look inwards, ask themselves questions, and honestly not necessarily even having the answers. It's just like the process of asking questions and examining became really important. And we knew that. And it's now part of our brand.I remember in the pandemic, I mean, there were so many thought pieces and hot takes that were written, but one of them was about the word apocalypse. And it was sort of saying that we were in an apocalypse. And I get, I think the etymology of apocalypse is sort of revealing the cracks.That was the argument that it made. And that was insightful to me. And you reminded me of it when you, what you're pointing at, that the taboo sort of just revealed all these cracks in our expectations of what a relationship is supposed to be and what's possible. Yeah. What do you love about your work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?I thought about that, actually, preparing for this. I think a few months ago, or maybe it was years actually, anyways, a long time, some time ago, I was speaking to this person as part of this kind of me and strangers for lunch kind of thing online. And I didn't really click with him as a person, but he said something that stuck with me so much because it was so unexpected.He was like, it must be so amazing to know that you've actually changed people's lives with what you do and the product that you create and put out in the world. And it must be such a rewarding thing to know and to be able to do every day. And it's true.It kind of struck me as like, well, it is actually true, like identity, sexuality, desire are such important parts of our lives. They're such intimate parts of our lives. It's like the parts that will keep us closest to us, sometimes even, you know, most people sometimes their families don't know what they're going through when they're kind of exploring their own identity, trying to understand what is it that I want?Who am I? What do I desire? Who am I attracted to?I think to have the privilege to be so close to people and to impact their life in this way is something that definitely gives me a lot of, makes me very humble, makes me be very grateful for my job. And it also brings human joy when I do get to hear some people's stories about, you know, how FEELD has changed their lives and how it impacted their experience of who they are in the world around them.And what, tell me a little bit about you, how do you think about the work that you do? Or what's your sort of day to day? Where's your head at when you're working?Day to day is never the same. And I think that's what, that's the answer you get from any communications professional or anyone working in brand or strategy, I guess. I think there's two modes.One is extreme adaptation to your circumstances. The other one is intentional impact. I think extreme adaptation, you know, it's kind of actually part of FEELD values is the constantly evolved part, which is sometimes things move so fast, you have to just react to culture as it's happening to you rather than you trying to shape it.So I think one of the examples I can think of right now is I mentioned celibacy. Earlier this year, obviously, the conversation about celibacy was sparked through billboards from one of our competitors. And then TikTok started having a reaction.And then the whole internet had a reaction to the fact that people felt shamed about the choice of celibacy, which I can see how things could have been perceived that way. And as a team so quickly, we put together a response. We shaped the messaging around it.And we said, like, hey, on FEELD celibacy is cool. You can add it as a desire on the app now, because we've added that for you. We're here. You know, it's like there's nothing shameful about this. And, you know, I think this did several things for us. Basically it normalized something that was at the time perceived as being ostracized in some way.You know, it's like there's a move away from celibacy. It's like this is not a valid choice, essentially. Which then received criticism.Which then we were like, actually, we're an inclusive platform. You can be celibate on the field. You don't need to be searching for that sexual interaction or whatever.This is not what we're for. We're here for everyone to explore and ask the questions that they want to ask about themselves and find the answer with themselves through others, with connections with others. So I think that's one mode of doing the work.I think the other way of doing it is by creating intentional impact. I think that work is obviously the one that you sit and have to think harder about and to form relationships, to form connections with your community, as well as with people that shape the culture that you want to impact. You know, I mentioned working with the researchers that you had called Dating Online Network.I think that connecting with people that are basically thinking on an academic level about the impact of dating and dating apps on culture is the type of work that is really, really important about how do we actually shape this forward? Because for the amount of articles that we get on how FEELD is changing culture and being mainstream, we get that many that criticize the industry or even more that criticize the industry as a whole of like, there's hookup culture and everybody is like, you know, we live in a reality that is not good for people and the apps are bad in design. Like we get that criticism and it's, you know, it is there, it is valid sometimes.And we want to know that we have an impact that shapes this for the better for people. And that's long tail work. I think our rebrand was part of a work that shapes a reality where people are free from these expectations that sometimes transactional relationships that are associated with hookup culture, I think, shape. And we want to create a reality where it's not binary choices that you have to make.I think I'd forgotten that concept Bureau did the rebrand when Tim mentioned it. And with that story you told about being able to respond to celibacy so quickly. What is it about your, what is the role that brand plays in allowing you to move so quickly or so, you know, to mean to respond quickly to culture and how does it, how does, you know, what role does it play internally?Yeah, I think there's so many things that go through my mind by now. I think what we found out in one of the biggest revelations I think from that work was the fact that personal autonomy, the individual autonomy is so important for people when they're And that is their desire of actually forming a relationship because they want to get to know themselves before they actually commit to a relationship with someone else. And that is now a part as valid as if not for our members, even more important than the outcome of finding the one, you know, we have other apps for that.We do not feel this for something else. And I think finding that out helped us to be able to narrow our offering different differentiation so clearly that we know that it's no longer about the relationship. It's about the individual and we're able to respond to culture in ways that kind of reinforce that messaging, reinforce that idea for people in many different shapes and forms.And, you know, our product has a certain set of features. We can play around with them in certain ways. And celibacy is an expression of that.But I think, yes, it's this revelation that people are actually people on FEELD, people that come to us are not so interested in achieving one type of outcome. They're much more interested in the journey and curiosity is, you know, as I said, the dating up for the curious. Curiosity is a driver for them to be on our platform rather than, you know, I want to find the one or I want this outcome instead of that outcome. That's now what interests them so much.Yeah. And how do you learn? How do you keep learning about your customers, your users? What's the role of, I'm thinking sort of FEELD generally, but also you. How do you learn about what's happening out there?Yeah. I think the biggest learning was in my 20s, having been on dating apps. And I think one of the big reasons for me to even have an interest in dating apps was, you know, the fact that I was on them and I was on them with my, with the early experiences of some of the big ones coming to market and still being cool, you know, it's like cool plays a role in my choices of anything.And I think I love the stigma actually. I think, I think playing with the stigma is like really fun when people are not there yet or like the majority is not there yet because you get to behave in ways that you get to have permissions to do things that are not bound with social expectations because overall that area is like, you know, not something that people want to interact with. So I think early dating apps had a little bit more of a fun side to them, which was the reason why I wanted to join FEELD steam because they were very, very early stages when I met them.And I think I just saw the opportunity of keeping that fun element as part of the experience of the app. And yeah, I just really, that kind of really drew me into the industry. Can you remind me of the second half of your question? I feel like I started on a tangent and now I'm lost.No, it's fine. That's how it's supposed to work. That's completely fine. But you mentioned playing with stigma, which is how I'm fascinated by. Can you tell me a story about what that means and what that looks like?Well, I don't know if you've interacted with dating apps, but I think at the beginning, you know, it's like obviously we know it first all started with websites. And I think websites were for people that kind of had a different commitment level to their dating experience. I think with dating apps, the experience was much more mobile.You know, it's like you would pretty much do it and swipe on people anywhere. And it's like the access was completely different. I think for me as someone that in those days of my life, I was moving between countries and cities quite a lot.So I would kind of like to go and live in Munich for a year for my studies. And then I would live in Berlin for two years. And then I moved to London.It's hard to make friends. So I was using the dating apps as a means of getting introduced to people that I really found could be my people. And I think that there's like a language of learning what a profile of your person looks like.So I think I had, you know, it's like one thing I'll say that I think tests well to this day is like always looking at the last picture. Like honestly, the last picture is the most important one of someone's profile. It just tells you so much about that person because first of all, it could be the picture that they paid least attention to when they added it, because they were probably a bit tired of building their profile.So they've either been sloppy or they've revealed something about themselves that they might have not thought about so hard. So you may get to learn more about them from that last picture than from any of the ones before. Yeah, I think it was a way to make friends and find community in places where I knew nobody.And I think that was fun. And the taboo of it was that now a lot of people are doing it. You know, it's, you know, it was a few people that would speak about it out loud. I think a lot of people maybe were doing it, but less were talking about it.Yeah. I mean, how would you describe where the category is now? Like it seems it's evolved, it's matured. Like you say, there's all these questions about, you know, we sort of peak dating apps almost, right? Yeah. What do you think about where you are now? And what do you, yeah, how do you define the challenge moving forward?I think if you look at the financial reports, obviously not having a great time as an industry right now, you know, for those that publicly report on their earnings, you can see that the industry is definitely struggling. But I think that's also an effect of how it skyrocketed during COVID because it was a means for people to stay connected even at a distance physically. So I think we're seeing a return to baseline in a way for the industry in terms of what the value of the industry is.In terms of culture, I think we're about to enter a stage of real reckoning with relationships and what do they mean for each individual? For each individual, what does it mean for me, right? Rather than what do I do that's right by society?I think something that I thought about referencing here for an earlier question, but I didn't get to it, is we did a report recently that I was leading on the comm side of things and it's called The State of Dating and we interviewed over 3,000 people that use Feels from over 70 countries from 18 to, I don't know, the oldest people over 60 that we have on our app, it's like a real good range of all the people that we have on our platform.And we found that the thing that struck me is like I'm a millennial generation from the generational split. So I'm always very fascinated with Gen Z because I think growing up as the millennial, we were the new generation and now Gen Z are like completely blowing everything out of my head and I'm like, oh well, I'm old now. Anyways, so I think what fascinated me from what we found is that for us millennials, we were kind of fighting to get into this state of we have E&M as like an option in our relationships, which is ethical non-monogamy and any form of it could be being in a three-way relationship, being in an open relationship, an open marriage.There's like all these variations of ethical non-monogamous relationships that were getting normalized at the time that FEELD was early stages and our generation kind of getting into a stage of settling and building relationships that are of different style than monogamy, which felt like the only option for a lot of the generations before us like our parents. That we also saw fail from the divorce rates and so on and so forth. So there's like real reckoning of what relationships do we want to have because the relationships we saw failed a lot of the time.And I think for Gen Z, we're going one level up from that. They're so, for them, ethical non-monogamy is the normal option. Monogamy is not the only choice.And they're actually going back on that and saying like, we actually would like to be in monogamous relationships because we're now in those ENMs things. You know, they work, but they fantasize so much about having that option of monogamy. I think that's obviously a result of our culture being around nostalgia.You know, there's like a real turn towards what used to be, how it used to be, the good old order, you know, when nothing was chaos and everything was certain. You know, as humans, our brains were wired to seek certainty. So I think that there's something around that there, but I think our desires are cyclical, but our culture is adaptive.So it goes through cycles, but I think if we see monogamy come back as the default, it will not be the monogamy that our parents and previous generations have experienced. It will be something different, and I think it would look completely different. One hot take I have about the future is that I think we're, you know, and this is probably some distant future and, you know, I'll be happy to hear feedback on my prediction, but I think that we're going to enter a reality at some point in the future where, because of this period of like dating so long in our lives, it's going to be very largely normalized to have different stages of our lives with different people that serve a different purpose for us as individuals, as well as for our development and contribution to the world. So as our life expectancy grows, I think we're going to have a period where we're having kids. Then we have a period where we focus on our career.Then we have a period where we focus on, I don't know, driving social and environmental impact, you know, and that partners for those different stages will be different and will be contributing to our lives in a different way. And I think there won't be this much drama around ending relationships actually, because they will be considered as stages rather than one set choice for our entire life. I think that idea will get challenged more and more, hopefully in a positive way.This is why I think monogamy is going to be, if it comes back in this powerful way that it has ruled our dating and relationship lives, I think it will come back differently. And this is my hot take on how that might happen.Do you have a way of talking within FEELD about what a relationship is? Like, is there a point of view that you guys all kind of share or understand?I think I'll go back to the idea of a relationship being about the person. I think in our culture, currently we see a relationship as, yeah, something that you kind of have to build with someone else. And I think we definitely focus a lot more on, and that's super valid, you know, it's like it's not a copy of them at all.It's just more, we focus on allowing people to build those relationships with themselves so that they can build those connections with others in a real, meaningful way for them. And we try to be as least prescriptive as possible because we do understand that relationships, desires, and identity take so many different shapes and forms. We need to allow people the flexibility, fluidity to basically choose their own adventure.So you mentioned researchers at the University of Leeds, I think. You mentioned the state of dating reports. And I'm curious again, it's sort of about how you learned with the state of dating, what drove that research and how did you do it?And then I'm curious, what's the role of qualitative? Do you do any qualitative research in your, let's just know I'm just meandering away from the question, trailing it off. What's the role of qualitative in the work that you do, if it plays a role at all?Yeah, no. I mean, a hundred percent, I think. So obviously our product team has trust and safety, and have their own forms of learning, which are either through focus groups or doing user testing, gathering feedback, either through our reviews or just directly speaking to members.So there's that whole side of the business that conducts research in a way that serves the purposes of the product and engineering and how we design our platform. That then reaches the marketing creative comps departments, but in a way that's already basically in some shape or form analyzed. I think where we learn and how we do our own research is obviously being immersed in culture, going to the events, meeting our members or just kind of like being in that surrounding community.I think for me personally, the learning comes from sometimes I have to reach out to members because the media wants to speak to a member of our community about their experience on the app. Often it's quite precise. So we reach out to a group of our members, then sometimes when they're up for it, we kind of have a phone call to hear about what they have to say.So I conduct these like once or twice a quarter, for instance, there's been periods where it's more intense. But we do get to meet our members and talk about what happens with your experience on the FEELD when it comes to this and that. And we go into these in-depth conversations about their personal life.And honestly, it's like, so it feels so, you know, you're like, how do I get to hear the story from a person that I don't know and they're so open with me? And I think the catalyst is the fact that they've had such often positive experience with the FEELD, you know, it's or it has contributed to a personal transformation that they're willing to talk about because I think often they probably don't have an example around them of what that could look like, you know, for instance, trying out a threesome for a first time or, you know, diving into a relationship with a person that you never thought you're going to be attracted to.I think a lot of the time people are driven by a personal curiosity that then leads to a transformation. And we get to speak about that with them. And a lot of other things crossed my mind, and then I forgot what I wanted to add here.But, yeah, I think part of the learning and the quality of science is definitely speaking directly to our members.What's that like for you at that moment? To have that interaction with the customer.Yeah, I think it's as you said, you know, I love to go deep on the conversations and people often are like, wow, you both said, why do you think so hard about things? But then try and speak into a FEELD memory, you know, they really go all out so quickly. But I think it's because our platform just welcomes that so much.And obviously the context of my conversations with them requires that. But just the sheer openness, it's humbling. You kind of have to just be there, be an attentive listener, experience, empathize with what they've experienced, and see the value that they've gotten out of this experience and be able to further that impact to other members, essentially.I think that's kind of what we try to extract from these conversations from a professional side. From a personal side, it's just humbling to know that we create a platform that can do that stuff for people. Because as I said, having used apps in the early days and still being a massive kind of supporter of the impact that they can have on a person's life in terms of connecting them with people they might not meet otherwise, I think I just am grateful that I get to be part of the people that drive that impact for others.Yeah. And what does it do? I'm just curious, how does it change how you work, that knowledge, whatever you get from that interaction? I'm just thinking, imagine if you didn't have that access, how would it be different? I'm always, of course, sort of selfishly interested in what happens when you listen to somebody's story, that qualitative really can teach you stuff. I'm just wondering, what do you carry with you from those moments that makes you, I don't know, change how you work?Well, obviously, you asked what drove my curiosity to want to, for instance, work on a project like State of Dating and connect to the researchers. I think it makes me more ambitious in terms of the impact that we want to have. One of the things that our CEO, Ana, often says is, like, we have no choice but to grow because if we don't, someone else will take our place.And I think that I want to explain this because the emphasis is not that we have to grow at all costs. It's quite the opposite. It's more like we feel that we have something of value to offer to the world and we don't want someone else to take that place and then twist the entire space to become this transactional, prescriptive, transactional environment that actually does more harm than good.So I think, for me, when I listen to the stories of people and I know, you know, I work closely with Ana and we discuss these things and we discuss culture and one of the things that come up is, like, we need to keep on doing this because we have impact and we have to protect our community, the values that we stand for, the value that we bring and the culture that we want to share, the future, the vision, you know, and I think this really, this is definitely the outcome of listening to a member's stories because then we find ways, like, okay, so how do we bring that ambition to life?How do we create the best possible reality for the people that we serve? And that means listening to their feedback, means working with the sharpest, brightest minds that shape the thinking about how this culture is going to shift. Then thinking of ways that we can create that impact for FEELD, thinking of items that we can create and put out in the world like the reports that challenge the thinking that we have around the relationships, put out campaigns like celibacy that challenge the thinking around what is dating up for? And just continue to think of more examples to do that.Beautiful. I can't imagine a better way of ending this conversation. I really, this has been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me.No, thank you. This has been so great. I honestly think that some of the questions I didn't have answers prepared, and I loved how it flowed for us and some of the things I even discovered while talking to you, so I appreciate that. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Lucas Krump is the Co-Founder & CEO of EVRYMAN, an organization launched in 2017 that helps men develop emotional skills and deeper connections. Prior to EVRYMAN, he worked in media and technology, launching international editions of Travel + Leisure and Maxim. The founding of EVRYMAN came after feeling disconnected despite his career success.I met Lucas in Hudson, and was excited to learn more about his story. All right, well, Lucas, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. Of course. I start all of the interviews that I do with the same question, which I borrowed from a Hudson neighbor, Suzanne Snyder. She helps people tell their story. And it's a big, beautiful question, which is why I ask it. And because it's so big, I kind of over explain it the way I'm doing now. So before I ask, I want you to know that you're in absolute control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. With the biggest lead up ever, the question is, where do you come from?I come from Kansas. That's where I was born and raised. And as I've gotten older, it's funny, I was just talking about this. I grew up in Kansas. I went to the University of Kansas very shortly after graduating. I left Kansas. I spent 10 years living and working overseas, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, then found my way back to New York City for 10 years and eventually full time in the Hudson Valley. And so I have traveled around and I've called a lot of places home. And one of the observations that I had in New York City is, there's this idea that after you live in New York City for a period of time, seven or 10 years or maybe more, you're from there, right?And I always thought that was funny because we don't get to choose where we're from, but the place where we're born and obviously in our very early years as children, as we grow up, the influences of the place we're born make an imprint on who we are. And for me, I'm very proud of the values that were imprinted on me in a place like Kansas in the Midwest. I will say this, I'm not going to live in Kansas ever again, but I will always and forever be from Kansas.And it's very important to me. And just a bit of a back story. My great great grandparents were homesteaders from during the potato famine. And that's where my grandmother was, and she met my grandfather in Estes Park, and they eventually settled in Kansas. And then my father's side, they were half, part of them were from Sicily, they went to Ellis Island and immigrated and eventually ended up in Kansas. And so there is some history of just my biological roots that have been there for quite some time.Do you have a memory of, I guess my first question is, what does it mean to be from Kansas? What part of you, what part of Kansas do you carry with you? So you're not going to live there, but you're proud of the values you have. What is it, what do you carry with you that you grew up with?I think a real sense of humility. As somebody from the Midwest, we don't, we prefer to let our actions do the talking versus us doing the talking, right? So it's a certain level of humility and a quiet sort of stature, if you will.Do you remember as a kid, what you wanted to be when you grew up?I remember having a moment in high school. I was very fortunate to go to an all boys Jesuit school in Kansas. And part of the curriculum there was that we would go on these annual religious retreats, but there were they were religious in nature, but they were also just opportunities for us as young men to express ourselves and connect with one another in a deeper way. Something that certainly wouldn't happen in a public school. And I always remember that that was a very comfortable space for me. And I can remember my grandfather was a family doctor for 57 years. And I can remember going in once and saying, "Hey, I think I should be a psychologist." And he said, "No, you shouldn't do that. You won't make any money." And so I went on to have a very different career. But ironically, that initial comfort in that space has sort of led me back to what I do now.What was a psychologist for you then? Do you remember what you were wishing for? It's interesting.I thought a psychologist was somebody that - that's an interesting question, because I think in the Midwest, but I would even say 25, 30 years ago, the realm of emotionality was generally confined to a conversation with a psychologist or a psychiatrist.Right.And so because I was given the space to be able to speak about my emotions, I just immediately associated that with this sort of professional field.That's amazing. That's beautiful. So catch us up. Tell me now where you are now and the work that you're doing now.Well, I've lived many lives and had multiple chapters. I lived and worked overseas for 10 years in this sort of media and publishing world. Then I went to business school at UCLA. After that, I moved to New York City and was in the media and technology space, was with a number of companies. And then eventually was an executive at a Fortune 100 company. Throughout that, I've always been an entrepreneur. I started my first company when I was 12 mowing lawns, which I eventually grew into a thriving enterprise before I sold it and ran for greener pastures, so to say. But when I was 36 years old, I was living and working in New York City. And the technology company that I was working for was acquired by a large technology company.And prior to that event, I was working very hard to get towards that event because I was following the script that I thought I should be following as a man. My father, my parents divorced when I was quite young and my father passed away. So for the most part, I've sort of guided myself in my career. And so I did all the things that I thought I was supposed to do that ultimately would deliver me a certain level of fulfillment and happiness and all the other things. And when this company was acquired and I benefited from that, the sense of fulfillment that I thought I was going to have by now for the first time, having a bigger bank account than I'd ever had and sort of take that off the box, it didn't work. And so I was pretty upset.That was when I decided that I needed to figure out what that thing was that was going to bring me a deeper level of purpose, meaning and fulfillment in my life. At the same time, I had a difficult childhood and I sort of moved overseas in order to maybe run away from my childhood. While I was overseas, my grandparents, who were both influential in my life, passed away and my father passed away as well. And all of those things impacted me very deeply, spiritually, mentally, all of those things. And I never really did anything about it. I mean, I did things about it, but I never really explored it on a deeper level.I just got to this point in my life where I was, "OK, I've got to figure this out." And that was when I went on my own sort of exploration. I called my mom when I had that epiphany. And I said, "Mom," who now lives in Arizona, "I'm coming down to Arizona and I really think I need to go see a therapist." Prior to that, I hadn't really had that much experience with a therapist. I've done a lot of retreats and sort of personal development, self-discovery work in various ways and all those things. But she was, "OK."And so I flew down to Arizona for a weekend and my mom said, "Oh, I talked to my friend at the gym and she knows a therapist." And so I got you an appointment with him. And so I went and told the guy my situation. And he said, "Hey, no amount of sort of achievement, no amount of money, no amount of adventure is going to give you the fulfillment that you seek. And you're going to have to figure out a way to find a deeper level of purpose and meaning. And you're going to have to grow yourself up. And because you don't have a dad, you're going to have to be your own dad. And oh, by the way, you should probably get a new group of friends that can help you on this path." And so I was, "Oh, s**t. He's right."And we sort of got there in the first 20 minutes. And he said, "Well, you know, you can leave now because I can't really do anything for you." So I was, "OK." And that was really the start of a deeper personal journey for me. Obviously, I went back to New York City and went back to my corporate job. But shortly after that, we started EVRYMAN and that journey began.And that sort of leads me to where I am today. That being said, I do lots of other things outside of this work. A pretty active entrepreneur in various projects and initiatives and work one on one with founders and helping them to make sense of what it's like growing an early stage company, having been through that myself. But yeah, that's where I am now.It's amazing your story. As you were telling that story, I was reminded of, I think probably something I saw on Instagram Reels, but Matt Damon, there's some of him saying that when he and Ben won the Academy Award, he went home and he was just, "Oh, this is it." And he just feels grateful that he had gotten what he wanted. And it was totally unsatisfying and that he learned that early and that changed everything for him.One of the things that I would say is that the adventure and I think at this stage I've been to 80 plus countries and I've sort of started various types of businesses and went to business school. And then I always wanted to get my name on the door. My last corporate job, I had my name on the door. I had somebody sat outside it and it was, "Wow, I thought that that was what I wanted." And obviously there's compensation that comes along with that.And I always thought I wanted those things. And now that I sort of achieved those things, I would say I would do a different relationship with them. One thing I see in young men is they always say, "Oh, I want to make a lot of money." It's, "OK, well, how much money do you want to make?" OK, well, I don't know if that's going to make you any happier, but I'm probably not going to be able to tell you any different until you actually get there and realize that for yourself. And that's not to say that certainly money doesn't provide a certain level of freedom and joy. But I am fortunate to have done various things in my life that have given me a perspective.I'm curious about EVRYMAN and where that came from, how that came to be and sort of what you've learned in that process. It's such a unique proposition in the space. And in all the conversations we have just around masculinity and about men's mental health. I mean, it just seems such a - I'm just very curious to hear your point of view. So where - when did - out of what did EVRYMAN arise and how did it come to be?It's a great question. Well, 2016, when I was when I had that conversation with my therapist or the therapist, I don't - I didn't ever go back to him. I don't know if he knows how important he has been in my life. But so I was on a personal sort of exploration. I was actually at an event waiting in line to see Esther Perel, who's quite a well-known speaker. And I was in line with a guy. I struck up a conversation with him and he said, "Hey, I'm going to do this retreat and it's going to be in upstate New York." And we were just talking and he was, "Well, you should come to the retreat." And so I came to this retreat in December of 2016.It was the first time him and his name's Dan Doty and Sasha Lewis. And I came as a participant and I very quickly realized that I was very deeply impacted by the experiences of other men at this retreat. But very quickly, I realized how I was impacted by the retreat, but I was also very impacted by the impact that the retreat was having on the other participants. Considering the fact that I had already done a significant amount of individual self-exploration and self-discovery through various retreats and just things that I'd done.And so immediately after that retreat, I said to Dan and Sasha, "I really think that more men need this. So I'd love to figure out a way to collaborate." So they said, "Sure." And we did another retreat and more guys came and we did another retreat and more guys came. Very quickly. That was in 2017.But I guess there were two important insights that I had. One of the things that I was struggling with at 36 was the work that I was doing at the time didn't feel meaningful, right? It felt very purposeless, I guess. And one of the statements that I had coming out of that retreat the first time was purpose and hustle. I've always been a hustler. It's another word for an entrepreneur.And I thought, "Wow, if I could use my entrepreneurial ingenuity and resiliency in a more purposeful way, I might find a deeper level of fulfillment in my life." And so that was my personal mission coming out of that first retreat. And so then I thought, well, we could do more of this.And one of the things that I said early on was that if I think about men and the need for the work that we do, the market is enormous. And so my initial thought was, in order to solve big problems, you actually need the discipline and rigor of a for-profit company, because you have to be able to attract the talent and you have to be able to make the investments and the infrastructure and everything else to be able to make a big impact.And so I said, "I'd love to work together, but I don't - I'd be very interested to start a social enterprise, but not a non-profit, because I think that this problem is so significant that we need to do something big." And they were on board for that. And then very quickly after that, Me Too happened, and we were kind of in the right place at the right time, because journalists and media were looking for good men that were trying to be better in some way, shape or form. And EVRYMAN was right there.And I think within the first year we were on Joe Rogan and CNBC and the New York Times. And it just kind of continued to grow from there. And so very quickly, we'd sort of caught the tiger by the tail. And this became a full-time job for me, while also doing my other full-time job, which I eventually left to work on EVRYMAN full-time.You mentioned there was a moment, an awareness that the problem was so big, so you should go after it in a big way. How do you think about the problem? What is the problem of being a man in America, I guess, right?It's a great question. Well, I think there's a big problem, and then there's lots of little problems inside that big problem. But if you look at the work of Richard Reeves, who I think does an excellent job of speaking to the problem, men have been sold a box that they're allowed to exist in, which provides a very limited scope of who they really are, right?We've followed a path of being a provider, and obviously those things have changed in this day and age. And we certainly are equal in our knowledge and expertise, but at the same time, men and women are physically different from one another. But if I think about it, it's interesting, I'm trying to think of ways to not speak to all the little problems and just speak to the big problem.I think that it is very normal for every man to want to be better in all areas of his life, right? That's kind of what men do. We aspire to improve or be better, right? And one of the biggest areas that we aspire to be better is in our relationships and in our relationships with ourselves. And because if we're not, then we're lonely as men. And we're all mammals, we're hardwired to connect.And so if we don't know how to develop a relationship with ourselves, if we don't know how to be in relation with others, then we're going to be very lonely and isolated. At the same time, if men are not taught to express their emotionality and their vulnerability - if you think about it, a lot of the education that we receive around our emotionality actually comes from women, right? Our mother or our teachers or other sort of figures in our life because our fathers are generally working, right?And so the result of that is that men receive a very sort of feminine education around how to express emotionality. And at the same time, we're told not to express our emotionality, right? Well, if we don't know how to express our vulnerability and our emotionality, and if we don't have the tools to be able to do that, and if we don't know how to do that from a very masculine way, we're going to be very isolated. And that is ultimately going to end up leaving us very lonely. So maybe that's an answer.It's a wonderful answer, and I'm connecting with all of it. I've followed Richard Reeves for a really long time, and the stronger his voice gets, the more powerful it is to see someone making that case in public. There's often this zero-sum assumption that when you talk about men's struggles, you're somehow taking attention and resources away from women's struggles and lack of access. It becomes a complicated, fraught conversation.But I wanted to share something - my dad once told me a joke, which wasn't characteristic of him. He said, "Do you know what the definition of an a*****e is? Someone who, when you ask them how they're doing, actually tells you."Exactly.Isn't that amazing?But it's so true, right? And so as men, we're sort of conditioned very early on to hide behind these throwaway answers of fine and good. And well, you can imagine that if we're not actually given license, nor we're given the nomenclature to express what's actually going on for ourselves, then how can one ever connect with us on a deeper level?I will say one thing that one of the coming back to this problem of - that we were sort of looking at and everything is, I've had a struggle with this idea, there's so many articles and things, it's this men's mental health crisis, right? Mental health is the idea of mental health is a diagnosable mental health issue, something chronic depression, personality disorder, other types of very specific mental health disorders, which are diagnosable and treatable, right? But the experience of being a human, the ups and downs, the joys and the sorrows and the depressions and the anxiety that comes with navigating this world that we're supposed to navigate, that is not a mental health disorder.Yeah.What we've done is we've said, "Oh, there's a mental health crisis." And any man that feels depressed or has anxiety about what his next job will be, or is stressed at home, because he has mouths to feed, he must have a mental health issue, right? Well, the reality is that no, he is experiencing life.That is not to say that people don't, men don't have mental health issues. And that's not to say that any man can go and see a therapist or a counselor, if he thinks that that is a necessary vehicle for his health and wellbeing. But when we take such a heavy word, and we blanket statement it around men, the problem with that is you're now telling men that they have a mental health issue.And the treatment for that is to go see a therapist or a psychologist or a counselor, whatever it may be, which one is very inaccessible, both from a sheer number of therapists and also financially inaccessible for a vast majority of people. And by the way, three out of four therapists are actually women.Yeah.So you're now saying, "Hey, this problem that you have that isn't really a problem. But the only way that you can actually go and fix this problem is to go see this person that actually has a lot of stigma associated with it. And it's very expensive. And oh, by the way, they happen to be a woman." So if you don't feel comfortable talking about the issues that you're dealing with as a man, that might not be the solution for you.And the reality is that I believe fundamentally that as human beings, we actually have the tools and resources and capacity within ourselves to care for each other. Up to a certain level, right? I'm not saying that somebody can care for somebody that has personality disorder, but it's certainly what we do at EVRYMAN, right?We create space and we provide men with the tools and the resources that allows them to support each other. And through that, they actually feel connected, which alleviates this sense of loneliness. They actually feel purposeful because now that the time that they're investing is for another man, they're being of service. I believe that service is the true wealth in our world. You can have all the money in the world and you can give it away and it will never compare to the sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that you have when you're actually of service to another human being, right. With no expectation of return. I think that men have been told that we have this problem that is sort of questionable. The messaging that comes out around that is generally in some form of a PSA announcement, "Oh, men die by suicide." You don't need to tell a man that men die by suicide. We all, every man knows somebody directly or indirectly that has taken their own life. And quite frankly, they don't need to be reminded of it by wearing a mustache or doing something like that because we don't like that.One of the first interviews I did was with anthropologist Grant McCracken, one of my heroes. His observation was that it's the responsibility of culture to grow us up - and a culture that does not grow us up is broken. He was talking about the phenomenon of failure to launch, which we keep seeing as a compounding issue.I'm curious about this, and I love your observation about how the solution is also inaccessible or not fit for purpose. In Richard Reeves' work with the American Institute for Boys and Men, they shared a study of 400 therapists, most of whom described men as "ill-equipped for therapy and not psychologically minded." So there's a therapeutic industry that essentially sees men as bad customers.Yeah, yeah. They're bad customers.And so I guess the question is, and maybe this is, what is masculine emotionality? And what do men need to feel fulfilled?I was interested, I was listening to some commentary around that. And they said men voted, obviously, if you were a Democrat, I guess men voted for their daughters in terms of rights and things like that. And women were voting for their boys in terms of opportunity and sort of upward mobility and the importance of men to be able to have jobs that provide purpose and meaning and allow for them to have dignity in order to provide for their families and themselves, right? And I'm not saying that we're going back to the 1930s.But one of the things that Richard does talk about is how we've over indexed on girls and women in terms of opportunity at the expense of young men. That it has now created a situation where you have a large population of men that feel very disenfranchised and they're not able to access the thing that they need to do to feel purposeful, fulfilled, that brings them dignity, right.And I think there's two things that I would want to say about that. One is men and women are physiologically and biologically different, right. We were - it's just true. There are things that women do that I can't do. And there are things that I can do that women can't do, right. Obviously, generally it comes to reproduction, but I think we've gotten away from that simple truth, right.And really looked at that and "Why is that? Why are we physiologically and biologically different? What are we in this meat suit that we're in, what is it intended to do and how does its intention and what it does actually serve our overall wellbeing?" Right. Men are providers, women are caregivers. They're very good at that. One of the things I saw in the corporate world was when all of a sudden women leaders, many of which I had the good fortune to work for that were very talented, but I always thought it was very unfortunate that now women leaders were having to display very traditionally masculine characteristics. And so it's "Wow, it's another part of the patriarchy."It's "Well, yeah, you're equal, but you're equal if you act like a man and you sort of ignore the very characteristics that are unique to you as a women that should be actually appreciated and valued." Right.Do you have any mentors or touchstones that you keep returning to that have been sort of central to what you've learned and what you guys have built in EVRYMAN?That's a great question. Mentors in terms of individuals or I always think of mentors or touchstones. I think I always returned to - I was just - I always returned to this very simple definition of every man, which is an ordinary or typical human being, right. And what I mean by that is the vast majority of us are ordinary and typical human beings, right?We live our lives. We have families, hobbies, we have communities that we participate in and I think somewhere along the line, we ignored or we sort of diminished the every man, right. And so I think of Every Man, and I always come back to it as the zeitgeist, EVRYMAN, the organization that every man is, but it really is intended to be the zeitgeist of the every man, "Hey, I just want to belong. I want to be part of something. I want to have the ability to show up at a place where I don't have to be anybody who I'm not."And I want to feel connected and supported, right. And that's what everybody wants. Right. That's part of our being, that's part of our DNA. And so I always come back to that. People oftentimes, or we actually did a retreat last weekend and CBS was there interviewing me for a piece and they wanted to talk about loneliness. I don't think we have a loneliness problem. We have a belonging problem because if I belong to something, if I belong to a community or a group, then I don't feel lonely, right. And the reality is that we've had a lot of breakdown in community and groups and the way we gather in the last 30 years, 40 years.What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?The real - we have lots and lots of men that have participated and are part of EVRYMAN. And I love all of them, right. They're all great men. But I, in particular, love just the everyday guys, the guys from Kansas or Nebraska or Louisiana or Pennsylvania. We're at a retreat this last weekend and there was a steel worker from Pennsylvania who was there and had never ever in his life experienced the opportunity for him to be exactly who he was and express who he was and be accepted for his flaws and his ambitions and his weaknesses. And that's what keeps me coming back.Yes, we get all the guys on the coast and we can talk all day about wellness and all this spirituality and blah, blah, blah. But in some ways that industry has looked down upon everyday people. And what I always say is "Who doesn't want to feel better? Who doesn't want to feel well? Why does the wellness industry have to be so bourgeois, I guess."I was curious. I was going to ask you about that because I've done, I have clients in sort of the wellness and self-care. I've explored these behaviors and these brands and these products with people numerous times. It's more often than not, I'm talking with women. And then I was curious if you had any insights or what your observations are on what wellness means for men or are there brands out there that you see doing it in a way that feels both contemporary and meaningful? I feel like the brand landscape around masculinity, I don't know. What's your take on how companies try to connect and try to develop for men?Men don't like to be told or sold anything. They don't like to be told what to do and they don't like to be sold s**t. What I have seen and what I have observed is just tell it like it is, just be honest. I can remember there's these commercials for Procter and Gamble post Me Too, these sort of virtue signaling commercials about men being - it's "Really?" I appreciate the effort, but men see right through that.Are there brands, do you feel like that sort of represent well, seem to sort of understand how to communicate with men?That's a great question. None that I could name off the top of my head. I mean, I have the brands that I personally like, but I think at the core of the brands that do very well with men really are authentic, right. Authenticity is at the core of those brands.What do you make of the election and what that means? I mean, I feel like Trump is nothing if not authentic, and the Dems, the critique is they never really had a vision for men. They weren't really - they don't even have men like Richard Reeves points out, on their platform they don't even really include men in their policies. And everybody's sort of - there's think piece after think piece about what happened. I know Scott Galloway has been very vocal about how the failure to sort of communicate with men is sort of partly responsible. Do you have any thoughts on it?I think that young men as a demographic, in my opinion, were personally sort of looked down upon or disregarded. I can remember this "White guys or dudes for Kamala Harris" or something. And it's "Oh, well, what more polarizing effort could there be?" Right. "Oh, if I'm not a white guy for Kamala Harris, then I'm a bad guy for Donald Trump." Right. "F**k you."And I think that again, I think what I've long said, and I'm an independent is Democrats, we have the very privileged opportunity to vote for our ideology, for the virtues that we believe to be the virtues and the values that we think the world and everybody else should espouse to and adopt, right. But the vast majority of people are worried about the price of groceries and gas and how they're going to put food on the table. And if they're going to have a job, that's not going to be taken by somebody else, right. They're not worried about "Is a girl going to now play on my kids, my boys, softball team" or vice versa.Yeah.And that's not to say that's not allowed, but young men have been very disenfranchised over the last 15 to 20 years, right. We don't necessarily live in a merit-based society. We've over-indexed on women and other groups. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't have done that, but oftentimes the pendulum will swing far too far in the wrong direction.Yeah.I'll never forget the Boy Scouts was allowing girls in the Boy Scouts. I think it now it's called the Scouts. Is it really necessary for us to rip apart the foundation of a hundred year old institution that has actually done incredible things for young men in terms of their ability to feel capable and strong in our world.It's amazing. I hadn't, I guess I'm trying to, I'm just, you're reminding me of my first encounter with Richard Reeves and just how provocative his data is and how overwhelming the case is. And he makes a beautiful case, but it's such a difficult case to raise, because of the climate, because of the zero sum and it's really pretty amazing. And I'm so, I love his work. I mean, I think he's doing amazing stuff.But I think you're very right that Richard and I applaud him because at a time when it was that it is, and still remains to be not necessarily in vogue to talk about young men and the plight of the young white man, he's sort of gone out on a limb and said, "No, this is what's happening."Yeah. And he has the data to show it. I remember with him, he said that coming out of COVID, there was all this data about the impacts of COVID on young boys and young girls in education and the top line, all the news reports were all about the impacts on girls. But he went back into the back of the report and the data on the boys was dramatically worse, but it was not deemed as newsworthy.Right. Right. Or it was not deemed as acceptable or relevant in our day and age. And again, I fundamentally believe that we need to find a balance, right. We need to have equality. We need to have opportunity, but we also have to recognize that biologically we are fundamentally different and we have different needs, right.Yeah.Whoever your creator is, the reality is that we were created different for a reason.I think we've spent a lot of time already together. I really appreciate you accepting my invitation to talk. And this has been really a lot of fun and it's beautiful stuff. And what you've done in Every Man is really amazing. And we share, we haven't talked about Hudson, we're neighbors, right? I was just actually reminded of conversations I've had about our waterfront. There's a couple of places, the powerboat association is down there. The shacks are down there. There are all these places in a generation, they were places where men would go and hang out, probably misbehave, but they were places where men socialized. And those were also all the toxic places, right? That's where we were dumping stuff into the river and that's where men go and socialize with each other. The one guy, he's a member of the powerboat association. And he said, "You know what we've lost? We've lost," he called it "tavern culture." And he was talking about this kind of male sociability, I guess. And it always stuck with me that in a generation, this waterfront, which was a place where men went to be together was also the place where we dumped all of our industrial, it was just industrial waste. And now we've opened it up and now we want to, we want green open space and we're preserving the nature and it's beautiful and all that stuff. But where did the men go to socialize and where did the men go to that tavern culture?Well, and Robert Putnam talks about this in his book, "Bowling Alone," about the breakdown of community, the breakdown of the third space or the social club. And it's unfortunate. I think I was - if you go through the cemetery, you can see the Association of Polar Sportsmen. And I love that people gather there, right? And one of the reasons why I love Hudson is for the simple fact that we do have a smaller community that is more analogous to where, to how communities used to be. And that those sort of spaces and institutions still exist.I mean, it's always funny when you get somebody that comes up from the city and they spend a couple of days here and they say, "Oh, I feel great." And it's "Well, oh yeah, of course, because you're closer to nature. You're not surrounded by concrete and infiltrated every single day by all kinds of madness. It's actually how we're supposed to live our lives." I feel very fortunate to be able to be here. I hope more people get to experience that for themselves.Nice. Well, we will have a coffee and a stroll sometime soon in town. And thank you so much, Lucas, once again.Yeah, we shall. 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Christopher Owens is the Head of Brand Strategy at TRG in Dallas, Texas, where he has worked for almost 25 years. He also leads the Strategic Planning Boot Camp at Miami Ad School and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. He joined The Richards Group (now TRG) in 2000, where he helped reshape the agency into a nonprofit-owned creative collective. His award-winning work spans major brands like Alfa Romeo, Dr Pepper, and The Home Depot. I met Christopher at Stratfest NYC, and was super excited to speak with him and hear more about his story. About halfway through the conversation, I get my facts wrong. I’m so excited to tell the story of the role of planning & qual in the Apple Super Bowl ad, I mess it up. Christopher, saint that he is, does not correct me, but gently directs me to the facts, which Ed Cotton provided: "Account Planning Panel: The Role of Planning Through the Ages.””MT Rainey on the iconic Apple '1984' Super Bowl ad and her career as a master planner.”Christopher, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.Thank you so much for welcoming me onto your podcast. Yeah, so I know that you know this is coming, but I start all my conversations with this question that I borrowed from my friend who helps people tell their story. It's such a big, beautiful question that I use it, but it's so big I over-explain it now. So before I ask it, you are in absolute control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?The Midwest. Both the geography and maybe the, let's call it psychography. It's a state of mind. But I think it put me in a position in my life early on, I'm going to say middle school, so we're going to go back to the mid-80s. It gave me one of those cultural clash moments where I started to realize who I'd like to be. And so when I think of the current state me, I go back to that. And I know that moment wouldn't have happened had it not been the Midwest.So when I was transplanted from Columbus, Ohio, down to Plano, Texas, in the North Texas area during that period of time, my parents being of the, you know, always very trendy, keeping up with things. And there's this thing that was going on in the late 70s and 80s, maybe you heard about it. It's called divorce.It's a very trendy thing. And my parents decided it's another thing to jump onto. And so I ended up my parents separating and my mom getting married to an electrical engineer who got a job opportunity at Texas Instruments down in the North Texas area.And I remember learning that we were moving to a place called Plano, P-L-A-N-O, Texas. And back then it was famous for being on the front cover of Time Magazine for Teenage Suicide Capital of the Year, in addition to Hot Air Balloon Capital of the World. So I don't know if there's causation or correlation between those two things.But I remember at one point reading about this, there was a wonderful little, terribly dark, humorous passage about, listen, if you're a teenager in Plano, everybody's in the garage for probably one of two reasons. You're either in a band looking to be the next greatest, whatever it might be, or you're sitting in your parents' car with the car running and the door shut.Oh my God. This is just Plano humor?This was just sort of outside journalistic humor reflecting on what they probably considered a kind of behind the times version of Plano, but Plano was definitely trying to become something more than it was. And Plano was just blockbuster video stores, soccer fields, and just flat concrete, nothing for kids to do. And me coming down from the Midwest, culture shock of Southern Baptist culture in this suburb of North Texas that was trying to grow into something.And you just had all this pent up youthful energy. This is when I started to kind of see who I probably was and wanted to become given the version of me that was not fitting in to the version of the place that I had just been repopulated to. And I think sometimes for some people, they discovered themselves in moments of collision or clash.And when you feel that division and you feel that otherness, I think it gives you that dynamic range to then experience maybe who you really are and who you really want to hang with and who you would really call your crew. And that was that moment of time. And there's still a version of me today that very closely ties back to that collision.And so none of that would have happened without the Midwesterner in me sort of being conflicted with something going on there in the very starkly Southern Baptist North Texas area.How old were you when you landed in Plano when the clash happened?Yeah. So actually it would have been after London Calling. So if you want to take the clash reference a bit further, this probably would have been actually just post Rock the Casbah days as well.So this probably was about 1985, 86. So straight into the new wave period. And I think if I had to go back to one of those quiet moments that you have in your room and you start to realize the music that you're being turned onto and whatever.And I was always been a big Laurie Anderson fan. So if you're familiar with Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, all the different ways to describe her philosopher and some kind of therapist, was the partner of Lou Reed late into his life. But there is an album.I want to say 86, 87 is a live album called Home of the Brave. There's a film concert film about it as well that I think she even directed. It's amazing. I had that VHS. I had that record there. It was music that just completely enthralled me, the storytelling, the rhythms.And whenever I tried to share this music with anyone new that I was meeting in this part of the world, hit the culture collision. That's what takes me back to confirming that was that period of time.That particular record. In fact, there's a track, on her record, Mr. Heartbreak, she performs it live on this album, but she actually has William S. Burroughs as the voice on this particular track.And then she performs it with this cool vocoder that shapes her voice and in a really digital way, waveforms it into something that actually sounds William S. Burroughs. But there's a phrase where it's "deep in the heart of darkest America."And you go "home of the brave. You already paid for this. Listen to my heartbeat."And then does this thing with this interesting violin she made with tape for the bow and this tape, there was a zero and a one, and she put it over a tape head and just goes. This to me was the fricking coolest thing ever.You're trying to share it in the lyricism and then the performance of the video and the album and William S. Burroughs and discovering all that with these people I'm meeting and nothing is working.And anyway, once you experience that, you start to realize, okay, so I am wired a little bit different way and that's okay. Let's let that street flag fly. And it kind of still guides me.Yeah. Do you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up? In that moment, did you have an idea of what?Yeah, I was asked this recently and it's in this order. First thing I wanted to be was a cartoonist, first grade, talent show project. I had a photo album where with my little Crayola markers drew each of the key Hanna-Barbera characters one after the other, after the other. And kudos to my mom in that she, in some of the instances, to be honest, she penciled them out and I traced over in those areas, but she saw that I wanted to be a cartoonist and really wanted to support that.Then I wanted to be an architect because I got really into mechanical drawing and thought these really cool Stettler German mechanical pencils are very cool to own. And there was tools and kit around it. And then it was music, in some ways from the age of 15 for the rest of my life.Still, it's a big part of my life drummer. And then my goal was to be a jazz studies major. And that's when I went to university, I started off that way.And then I switched to language and communications and that then began this sort of creative misfit lifestyle that I have today that eventually took me in advertising and strategy, et cetera. But in some ways I'm still all those things.I feel brand design brand architecture is about architecture and finding the spatial and mental relationships between things. When it comes to drumming and jazz, I mean, so much of this stuff is very jazz-like to me.I think that's one of the things we talked about when we met at Stratfest two was I'm "wait, you live in Hudson, Hudson Valley, back D Jeanette, that's where Larry Grenadier, a lot of really cool jazz players. Tony Levin, there's a whole group of people that live in that area that just, I always imagined it being an area where a super group could be formed at any moment, any cafe, probably very romantic notion. But in some ways it's all that to me.Still, I think a lot of strategy and a lot of what we do has these sort of jazz-like architectural vibes about it. People on the outside, they think of jazz as just people just making things up. When in fact, what I learned is you know the song so well, you know the chord changes, the key changes, the breaks, the bridge, you know them so well that you can dance over top of them in prop style because you know exactly where it's all going so well.And so it seems someone's making things up, but in fact, no, it's because you just know the composition so well, you can glide over top of it. And I feel those flow moments when you feel you know a category, a consumer and a brand so well, that's when you can get into these interesting kind of creative diversions off of that. So in some way, all those things that I'd wished I could be are all things that I kind of still mash together.Still a clash mash.So tell me, where are you now? And what are you doing for work?I'm one of those rare monogamous agency practitioners that's been an agency for almost 25 years, an agency called TRG. It's an independent agency out of Dallas, Texas, formerly the Richards Group. The agency's been around about 48 years. I've been there for exactly half of it. So next year will be my 25th anniversary. But I've always had side hustles and interests.I've also been a lifelong educator. I'm one of those people that started teaching as early as I possibly could, because I just realized loving to learn and being a lifelong learner was a big part of who I've been. And it's impossible for me to separate the concepts of being a strategist and being a teacher in that they're very similar.You learn into things, you guide people with that learning, you become cognizant of your gaps, and then you learn into those gaps and you keep teaching out and out. And so strategy is very similar to teaching. So I've been teaching strategy at the Miami Ad School Strategy Bootcamp for the past 19 years.And now I'm lead of the program for the past two years. I was alumni of the program back in the late 1900s when it first started. So I got a chance to learn from Jane Newman.You were being cute. And then I'm thinking, wait, no, that's actually, you can say that. That's real.It's very real. But yeah, I got to learn from some great first wave OG planners Jane Newman, Douglas Atkin, a lot of the core people that were trained directly by Stanley Pollitt or Stephen King. And so that was a key part of my upbringing.So yeah, so I'm head of brand strategy at TRG. I'm also a practicing educator at the Miami Ad School.Can you tell me a little about, you just really spoke to coming from a history of practitioners, a craft, right? You're telling me that is it provenance is the word that comes to mind. I always say that I was raised by wolves. I had no idea that I was part of, that this was a practice that had been handed down. You know what I mean? I learned that really late. I'm just curious, what was your experience of finding this work and then maybe realizing that you were part of something bigger?Yeah. It almost kind of, in a way, it feels a continuation of my first answer to your original question, which is, I think, coming out of the Midwest too, someone I felt a little culture-less. I was also someone, I think one of the greatest gifts my parents provided to me is they did not indoctrinate me early on into any kind of organized religions.My mother's point of view was, this is such a personal decision. You should make this decision when you're an adult, because if I guide you now, it's in some ways something you can't get out of your head. And so it set me on this path to where I maybe sometimes felt a little culture-less, particularly kind of thrown into sort of Texanistan in the North there, where things had a very kind of clear organized religion vibe as an undertone to everything.So finding culture and other things and other interests and feeling you're part of something bigger, which I think is this human feature or flaw, something I think we're all susceptible to. But the fact that coming from the Midwest, things can kind of feel kind of bland. It's not there's deep, deep story up there.I mean, there is. But I was not a sports fan until football and the religion that was Ohio State Buckeyes. So having this moment where I get into an advertising agency and only in it because I was essentially a musician who was not irresponsible enough to want to continue the life of a musician.And so I didn't want to live in the back of a white van and I needed insurance. So I sold out and then essentially got into an industry where I saw a lot of my fascinations and fetishes just kind of naturally collide, art, film, music, language, communications, all that kind of stuff. And all of my music friends were designers and copywriters and art directors.So they're "you should get in advertising." And so it's "yeah, this is not going to feel a job." So I'd got a foot in the door position at that sort of a medium-sized agency at that time, right at the dot-com days as an assistant account executive.And three or four years in, just trying to get the lay of the land and just kind of being bored, an executive creative director took me inside and said, "I think you'd make a good planner. I think you'd make a good account planner." And I was "what do you mean by that?"And so he discovered me when I asked, and this guy's name is Don Sedai - which sounds like Jedi, which in some ways is apropos given he helped me find my path. I started to discover it too. I was just being the me I always had been, hanging out with creative people, talking about the stuff I'd always talked about. But he saw someone that those teams would pay attention to, someone who spoke their common language and who they would be open to spending time with. This was different from a classic account person who would always tell you that you didn't have enough budget or crack the whip about timelines. I was more about opening things up, not shutting things down.And so I had a very superficial understanding of the basic rudiments of being a good strategist. But as I started to dig into it, I realized - yeah, this is commercializing a liberal arts degree. This is taking a fascination with interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary learning and mashing it all up and running with it, finding the edges and maybe going past them, getting to understand people. This is about being an interesting person who's interested in other people. At this agency though, I was the only person doing it - the only "planner strategist" in a shop of about 70 people.And so very superficial understanding of the basic rudiments of a good strategist. But as I started to dig into it, I started to see, yeah, this is commercializing a liberal arts degree. This is taking some fascination with interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary learning and mashing it all up and running with it, finding the edges and maybe going past and getting to understand people.This is about being an interesting person interested in other people. And so, but if I was going to do that at this agency, I was the only person doing it in the shop of about 70 people. I was the only quote unquote planner strategist.So me looking for guidance then became the next thing. So what they then do, they bought me a box of VHS tapes from some APG account planning group event that had happened earlier in the nineties. And so my first boss, as I say, is this VHS tape that said Earl Cox on the side of it.Earl Cox was the head of planning at Martin agency for a long time. And another VHS tape that said Douglas Atkin on it. And another VHS tape said Jane Newman on it.And then there were some other ones too. I was learning from these VHS tapes as they talked about the art of planning, bringing it straight from BMP Boase Massimi Pollitt or from JWT. Then I started to feel I was part of something.This was a period in the late nineties where, for a lot of agencies in certain regions of the country, planning had not become a thing yet. Strategy was still something that may have been practiced as a competency across different disciplines, but it really wasn't being championed. It was something that happened at the end of a very long day, after everybody had done all their calendars and budgets. "Okay, now let's actually think about the real human we're trying to connect with" - or just copy and paste from whatever the client said. That's not where good strategy comes from, but for agencies, it was a scarcity and supply-demand issue.And so this thing called the Miami Ad School Account Planning Bootcamp was created by some of these first-wave strategists coming to the US, being brought over on visas. They were trying to hire departments and didn't have enough people to hire, so they coordinated with Ron and Pippa Seichrist down at the original Miami Ad School.And they built this program to start to 'roll our own' in the US. I looked at this direct mail piece - it only happened once - and thought "this is where I need to go." All those people on these VHS tapes that I just knew as Sharpies on a sticker on the spine of a piece of plastic magnetic material - I could go meet the real beings and stand in their presence and ask questions and get to know them and vibe with them. And that's exactly what I did. I picked up all that learning and it really transformed me.I really felt I'd become part of something and that I had a torch to carry. Some of these very same content slides that I got from them, I still teach in the program to this day. You feel you've taken in something, you're on the shoulders of someone and now want to pass it on and help other people know about it. I definitely feel that. I would not call it a burden - I would call it a gift, a happy passenger along with me that you get that inspiration from.So here I was, a cultureless kid from the Midwest, a bit of a blank slate, kind of a square peg in a round hole, finding things where you feel you're part of a legacy. I may have been particularly susceptible to that.How do you articulate what planning is and why it's valuable? Because I feel there's so much confusion about it, even after some time.Yeah, it is kind of the tower of Babel that fell over, and then a million little splintered variations of strategy have gone off into the world. But we lay it out as principles. In the end, it's this goal of just trying to help someone, something, anything find a winning position - and realizing that is a garbage-in-garbage-out process. The quality or the fidelity of this winning position is often only as good as the input coming in.Wow.And then how do you lay out a set of tools in a toolbox that people early on in their career can start to get excited about? Know enough to be dangerous, learn enough to try out, fail with a safety net underneath, work directly with creative teams, work through that - and do that in about 10 weeks. The program used to be longer, used to be an entire semester. Now it's about 10 weeks, but how do you take them through that process with a really strong safety net underneath them?And then just help them understand this diaspora of different strategic forms. They all have a common vibe. So again, almost back to the jazz metaphor, there's a rhythm section that sits underneath that's fairly common. But if you are a brand strategist versus a brand planner versus an account planner versus a digital strategist versus a connection strategist versus a cultural strategist - it goes on and on.And over the course of our industry's birth, agencies get the nomenclature, the taxonomy they bring in to make their products and services sound sometimes more interesting than they actually are, adds to confusion.And so it's something I confront students with, and then try to help them find what the common denominators are. And so in some ways the 10 weeks and then being active with the alumni, it's kind of a support system for a group of practitioners out there for whom what we do is still kind of gelatinous and moving, which I think is a good thing because brand in motion stays in motion, just like a body.And so the more you're questioning what you're doing and whether it's good, right, or relevant, we're constantly having existential crises, every year at a conference, "is planning dead yet" and constantly getting storm of all the different points of view, you just kind of have to bathe in all of it.And so the Bootcamp as well as other programs out there in the world too, I think really, we almost kind of become a support group for helping people kind of find their way particularly earlier in their career, where when I started, it was literally a pamphlet you mailed away from the four A's. And now you've just got a fire hose, this torrent of information across every social platform, every form of media about what strategy is or isn't, or how to do it, or this kind of golden magic wand frameworks that are supposed to solve for the perfect brief and all these crazy kind of witchcraft, some of it. But to be honest, I feel I'm still trying to represent the fundamentals without ignoring where it's going, which is the fun part of strategy anyway. It's all about where things are going. It's knowing about where they've been to know where they're going.What do you love about it? Where's the joy in it for you? And it's just constantly learning it again. I cannot separate the concept of teaching and strategy. They are synonymous in my life. And the thing that gets me most worried about is thinking I've got it all figured out. I think certainty is one of these things that I think we can't get too comfortable with in our industry.I do feel we've entered this kind of golden age of marketing and advertising effectiveness, where we're starting to recognize that there are some law-like patterns and behaviors to how brands grow and things work. But oftentimes a lot of that's just kind of taking care of the plumbing, which then gives you the time to go off and do the things you'd rather do, which is worry about the drapery and the wonderful aesthetic designs of the different forms of creativity that can be wielded.But there are basic things, foundations that need to be set, stages that need to be set for our creative to perform on, to be given a chance to be seen. So we're not just building cathedrals in the desert. And so there's a certainty that's coming into the industry that gives me some confidence. But it also helps me unlearn a lot of maybe some of the wooey stuff that I was perhaps raised on in the beginning that just was part of the oxygen.Very few people in our industry are actually trained or certified. There's a stat, I think it's less than 20 some percent of marketers are trained. And yet if you're an accountant or a lawyer or a medical professional, you're certified, you're trained because lots of time and money can be wasted.I mean, it's not to say that advertising practitioners are going to have loss of life in malpractice, but the amount of money that's being wasted on just advertising that does little to nothing, doesn't form a memory, doesn't last long enough. If you took those dollars being spent on all those wasted energy moments of messaging and took them and spent those on just dealing with the basic things like education and healthcare and things that are in our country, it'd be a different world.So the idea of getting certified and trained and learning about sort of the gravity in our industry. I mean, architects show up to a new client gig. It's not like they have to describe gravity every single time they show up. I think this is a great Jeff Goodby quote I picked up once that he longs for the day when agencies can show up to clients and not have to explain gravity - how advertising works. Like architects and civil engineers don't have to, but we're still in that phase, but now there's some known maps for these territories. And this is something we can build off of.That's amazing. What's the gravity for advertising?I mean, this is where I would fall back on market-based asset theory. So this is where I start to sound like a total nerd from Ehrenberg Bass Institute out of University of South Australia. This is the work of Frank Bass and Andrew Ehrenberg over the past half century that was really popularized by Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk and others from 2010 past and really writing books and just getting out some of the academic understanding of how brands grow. So the concept of availability theory to me, I think makes sense that essentially brand isn't going to grow if it's not known. So tell me a forgotten brand that grows. It just doesn't happen.So this concept of mentally availability overlapping with physical availability, I love the way that James Hurman puts it. He's Kiwi over New Zealand. He's got this great master of advertising effectiveness. If you ever listened to Fergus's pod, you probably have heard his promo a million times. But this idea about making a brand easy to mind and easy to find makes a brand easy to buy. And that's how brands grow.And I think it's a wonderfully simple way to think about the business that we're in, but that certainly brings some foundation that we can build off of as opposed to everybody having some made up kind of folk arty way of thinking about how it all works.You mentioned that maybe there were some ideas that you had to let go of, maybe that you had picked up earlier in your career as the laws sort of came into place. Are there things that you abandoned or were you thinking about anything in particular?It's "no pain, no gain." You have to feel that unlearned burn. There's one I still have separation anxiety with. And so that's the one that's the nerve ending I'll hit here.I guess the first thing is, this coming up in the industry and this really actually got even worse during the 2010s with digital marketing, a lot of performance marketing is that you could grow off of a super micro niche group of people. That if you understood the nichiest of nichiest of nichiest groups, and just targeted them, somehow that's where growth would come from when literally it's by definition quantifiably a small population of people.When you really look at the distribution of usage across any category, and this is where we get into a law-like behavior, it's super nerdy NBD negative binomial distribution by this dude Gillette that came up with this. And again, you can see it across industry.It's the banana chart. The number of people who've never used a brand or not using the category is exponential. And the group of people that use it three, four, five, 10 times, it just swoops all the way down. Hence the banana chart. So in that instance, if you're ever trying to grow a brand based on a teeny little group of people on the right-hand side of that chart, it's just not going to happen.That's where fandom can lie. And there's ways to use that fandom as a way to amplify and to create user imagery and kind of group in and out behavior that some people might be attracted to in certain categories, certain brands. But in order to accomplish that growth, it's always about taking people from the none to one club. I've never used it. And now I've tried it for the first time.And that's where all the emphasis on ad investment should go is on penetration. And so this idea of just chasing niches as a form of growth and using that to spend all your advertising or using advertising to create quote unquote loyalty, there's really no evidence for it. In fact, it's a misuse of ad dollars.Now, the part of it when I told you I have separation anxiety with is when they further lean into this concept that there's no such thing as brand love. And to be what's close to my heart in this is, I mentioned Douglas Atkin, who is head of planning at Merkley Newman Hardy for a while. That was the one agency in the US that actually had Jane Newman's name on the side of that building.And again, I have a lot of love for Jane and there'd be no planners and strategists in the US if it wasn't for Jane. So she's kind of our matriarch and the six or seven wonderful lionesses of the US. They were all women in the beginning. All the original planners were, you know, Lauren Turner, MT Rainey, Robin Hayfits, Merry Baskin. Some of them came over too. These were the people that really birthed the industry.But anyway, Douglas is close to my heart and you can watch on YouTube good old Byron Sharp use, interestingly enough from the Hidden Persuaders documentary, some excerpts of Douglas talking about the concept of brand cults and understanding that brands operate like cults and using that as a means to create and sort of propagate more users.And he stands up there in Adelaide at a TEDx conference around about the time his book came out and plays one of my heroes and then makes fun of them in a group of all these Aussies. And I remember the first time I watched this, I couldn't watch it again. I thought "that motherfucker." And then I started to read and learn more about it. And I sort of put things in context.But what he does, and it comes down to the weakness of words is when you say that someone really loves a brand, let's test this out. And the way he plays it out as the analogy is, let's say you go home to your partner that you love, and they simply aren't available that evening. Do you simply go to your neighbor and say, "we're married this evening"?So he puts it up to the true human test that love is a concept that is experienced through human loyalty. And if you go to your favorite grocery store and you're looking for some bread and they simply don't have your brand, you just walk out with no bread? No, you get the next most mentally available bread that is physically available on the shelf and you roll with it.And so it's really testing the limitations of the language that was being used and then goes to kind of prove how little loyalty brand loyalty there exists across brands that are typically used as the poster child for that - Harley Davidson or Apple and things like this that really don't have that per se.So this concept of brand love for me though, is how I reconcile it is, and this is where people can test me on it, but I do feel that there are some people who actually probably do feel they love brands that brands somehow kind of complete them. It's just that they're never large enough populations in those user bases to provide additional growth.So how you then use them is as a form of fandom, as a form of aspirational imagery that people around them might want to be like them and use that brand too, but that's not happening at the scale in which most commercial outcomes are graded on over time.And so I feel I love some brands. And so this is where I fallback. There's another great thinker, Helen Edwards, who also teaches with Mark Ritson and London School of Business. And she has this APG talk that you can also watch online where she talks about, she takes it head on. She takes Byron Sharp head on with this concept and says, "You know what, love is the wrong term. Let's call it some kind of emotional something."Let's call it some kind of emotional closeness that when all things are at parity, might that emotional closeness give you just enough more positive familiarity for that brand to then be chosen. And so that helps me kind of play both sides in those concepts.And so yes, she agrees that the opportunity through growth is not through more frequency out of a smaller group of users. That's been disproven, debunked, no evidence there, but when someone is making a choice in a buying occasion and they simply have a little bit more emotional something for that brand, might that be the thing that tips them over?So don't completely give up on that, but don't also think that that's where you should be spending all of your money to get everyone to have a monogamous relationship with the brand. We were very promiscuous when it comes to our brand consumption and we purchased based on repertoire. And so I still hang on to that one a bit in my team that I work with knows that I struggle and wrestle with this.I feel I've read the Helen Edwards one. I haven't seen the Douglas Atkin Byron Sharp one, but I'm completely there with you. And for me, it's the word relationship. There's one level of relationship, which of course we don't have relationships with brands, but there's another one where we do have experiences with them over time that sort of accumulate into some kind of familiarity or emotional stuff. It's not a lie to say that we have a relationship with something that we maybe met when we were 15 and continue to encounter when we're 30 or 40. I think there's a big gray area.And you need it together to kind of bridge you in a way that you don't have in other ways, but there's a way in which you are almost just trying to consummate your relationship. It's no different than that middle school, high school moment, when after the concert, you wear your t-shirt the next day into the cafeteria.Oh, hell yeah.People that didn't know, they see that you're wearing that and they're like, "oh, now you've got your scene."Yeah.I think brands provide this kind of social bridging for us and provide the kind of glue that we as humans, the safety in numbers, it was a fitness advantage for us evolving in small groups. So the more we can find ways to kind of bring others to feel they're part of our crew, the safer we feel.And then the irony that I think we feel most individual when we can go find a thousand other people who are equally as individual. And that's what web 2.0 social media has definitely allowed us to do for better or worse. And so all that tribal behavior, our body being optimized for the Serengeti full of all these paleolithic emotions, still just trying to reach out and find other tribes to kind of garner and gather and hunt with. And now brands have become a big part of that wayfinding social wayfinding.This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you so much. I look forward to listening to the next episode. 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

Peter MacLeod is the founder and principal of MASSLBP, and a pioneer in the practice of deliberative democracy. Under his leadership, MASS has completed more than 200 major policy projects for governments and public agencies across Canada, pioneering the use of Civic Lotteries and Citizen Reference Panels and earning international recognition.They have a wonderful set of Nine Ideas. Here is a talk of his “Citizen Assemblies: Democracy’s Second Act” at Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center for Humanities in 2022. All right. Well, Peter, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.Very nice to be able to join you, Peter. So I start all the conversations I have with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian, right? So she helps people tell their story.  And it's a beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it's a big question, which is why I over explain it the way that I am now. So before I ask it, you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? I thought you were going to ask maybe Laurie Anderson's equally momentous question, which she she famously she said, are things getting better or are things getting worse? And maybe that's the question we all need to be asking ourselves. But very basically, you know, I grew up in a town that's about 100 kilometers southwest of Toronto here in Canada. Cambridge, Ontario. Both my parents were public school teachers. And I, you know, I always had a bit of an interest in politics, but I got a very powerful inoculation against partisan politics from a fairly tender age. And it's because here in Canada, each of our provinces have legislatures, much like your states do. And we invite kids to come and deliver notes and cups of water to the politicians. They're called pages. And I'm sure some of your legislatures have a program. Well, I went there when I was in grade seven. And what it did for me was pretty basic. It showed me that nobody had a monopoly on the truth and that there were interesting things to be found on all sides. It was difficult to have to sit there in the legislature day after day, week after week, month after month, listening to the debate and come away thinking, oh, yeah, team red, they got it. No, no, team blue. Yeah, totally.  100 percent. So everything I've been working on since then has really been a product, I think, of two forms of experiences. One, a kind of innate, I guess, just inculcated respect and belief in the power of public institutions like public education and a kind of skepticism about excessive partisanship and the monopoly that any politician has on the truth. Yeah. What was going on in that moment? I mean, I love the call out to excessive partisanship, of course. But what was it about about there? What did you learn there ? It was a very formative age. Right. You know, you're you're probably 13, 14 years old, I guess. And, you know, at the time we had what was called the NDP government was Ontario's first NDP, which is the new Democratic Party and a fairly young premier named named Bob Ray, who's gone on to have a pretty illustrious career in Canadian politics. You know, a sea change had sort of happened and, you know, there was a sense of the province changing its ways moving forward. And I mean, my own personal politics are probably sympathetic to what the NDP was doing. But, you know, at the end of the day, you could see when a minister kind of flubbed a question or just, you know, didn't answer it at all. You could hear when an opposition member was just grandstanding. You know, often politicians will say, oh, I just wish people would would come down and see what we do. All right. Well, you know, to actually see what they do for 45 minutes is one thing to see what they do again, days and days, weeks and weeks. You know, it did a good job, I guess, removing some of the mystique. Yeah. And I'd have to fast forward another decade before the next real layer of all of that would get stripped away. Oh, well, I want to stay in childhood. I always ask, what did you want to be when you grew up? What did young Peter dream of being as an adult? Wow. You know, I'd like to say I wanted to be something super cool, you know, like fighter pilot or firefighter. You know, I was a pretty bookish and kind of nerdy kid. And, you know, one of the things that my dad, who is an English teacher, he and I managed to, I guess, connect around was that every Sunday, he would drive into town because we lived just outside and forested area. We would drive into town to J&B variety and he would buy the Sunday New York Times. And I don't know, it was just like back in the 80s, like it was a massive. Yeah, it was a full day commitment. And, you know, this this gave me kind of access into a bigger world because, you know, there wasn't anything like this going on in Cambridge. There wasn't a whole lot of it even maybe going on in Toronto.  And suddenly, you know, you were seeing all the kind of fashion and culture and the arts and business. There's a long way around. I guess I'm hedging a little bit because I thought from a young age, that'd be really cool to be a consultant of some kind. And it's because really the New York Times, you'd read the business pages or you'd read, you know, current affairs. And there would always be these people. It was kind of a part of the zeitgeist, I guess, in the 80s and 90s, the rise of management consultants. They seem to be able to get their hands into everything. And somebody who's always really just been interested in everything. I'm much more Fox than Hedgehog. I like to learn lots of different things, although obviously the work I've done at Mass for now a very long time has been to advance a singular objective. So make of it what you will. But no, I thought having a kind of varied career where I could try and be helpful in a lot of different contexts. This is a terrible, terrible answer for a kid. For a kid to say, well, I guess the only redeeming thing is I while I'm a consultant today, I've created this organization Mass. I've never become like a bona fide, you know, corporate management consultant. Well, you are not alone. My freshman college roommate, whose name was also Peter, I remember him very explicitly saying that he sort of dreamed of growing up to be the kind of consultant that was quoted in international papers. Wow. That was like never aspire to that. I just thought it seemed like a versatile way to get mixed up in a bunch of things.  And it was kind of funny, you know, to fast forward a little bit, you know, I ended up being really fortunate. I got into student journalism in high school and then in university a little bit. I had the chance to go to Fast Company magazine in some of its earliest days. And, you know, that was such a springboard because, you know, from Fast Company showing up there as an intern, then getting this funny gig of being able to interview some of the top American B school deans. I then, you know, read about this amazing organization in the UK called Demos. And Demos is one of the vanguard think tanks around Tony Blair in the early days of New Labour.  And so I catapulted myself from Canada over to there. And I got a real immersion in a particular way of thinking about public services and government. And that was enough. That was enough because I was able to draw on both of those experiences also in social marketing working one of the and this is closer to your own line of work. I think a great organization when I was in undergrad, Toronto Manifest Communications, a real pioneer around smoking cessation and, you know, bringing some of the the sensibilities of Madison Ave, I guess, to the really vexing social challenges of our day. And so I had in the space of just three years, this kind of incredibly pressed experience in marketing, in business journalism and in public policy.  And none of it was by design. I guess it was some of that same sensibility from when I was younger. I was just really curious about stuff, but I wanted to go to the places that seemed most interesting where they were doing it. Yeah. And tell me now, like where you are now and tell me about MASS LBP and how you how do you talk about the work that you're doing there? Yeah, so I I mean, now it all at all. It only makes sense in retrospect, right? Like at the time, I was just going from thing that was interesting to thing that was interesting.  And any listener might say, well, that seems really premeditated. Not not in the least. I never expected it was not an aspiration to have my own organization.  But there was one other really key formative experience that led to where I am now, which is leading a team of eight people, this bizarrely named organization, Mass LBP. The LBP is just a bit of whimsy. It stands for “Led By People.” And MASS is the idea of the mass public, but also kind of a high minded reference to Thomas Paine, who wrote in On Liberty, “There's a massive sense that lies in a dormant state that government should quietly harness.” And that's really the description of what our organization is about. It's about this belief that in a mass society, there need to be  interlocutors. We need ways to tap that sense and bring it to good effect.  And I'll talk more about how we do that in a moment. But, you know, all of that only makes sense if I just connect those dots between those formative experiences and communications and policy. And then deciding that maybe I should do a doctrine. Now, any of my friends would have told you that, yeah, he's really interested in a bunch of things, but he's not much of a scholar. Nevertheless, my friends were doing it. So I thought while I was in the UK, maybe I should do it too. And and, you know, for the scantest of reasons, the LSE let me in and they gave me enough rope basically to hang myself. So I got it in my head that I was going to come back because I've always had a powerfully anti elitist streak to me. I don't like I've been fortunate to be close to a lot of, you know, I guess fancy institutions, but I don't think of myself as a fancy person. I don't like the limelight or the trappings that come with power and riches. And, you know, I had always studied politics, but also studio art university and I got it in my mind that I wasn't going to go to Ottawa and study like the prime minister's office or how parliament works. I was instead going to look at what had been a totally neglected, slightly maligned and misunderstood part of our entire parliamentary apparatus. And it was our constituency offices, what you'd know as congressional offices. And in Canada, we actually didn't have them until about the 1970s. And to go to a constituent office is to like find a strip mall next to the variety store in the dry cleaner where you are going to find some of the hardest working mostly women who are just trying to make a difference and try and sort stuff out for residents of their community. But, you know, political science had no interest in all of this. So I got in my mind that not only would I come back to Canada, I would take a look at these offices. I would visit almost 100 of them, which was a nice excuse to see the country. I'd get in. I had a Suzuki truck at the time. I'd spend a couple of months.  I'd drive across the country. I'd talk to all these people. Gave me a very different window on the politics. Again, you know, mirroring what I'd seen that decade before in what we call Queen's Park as a page. Now I would like still stay close to the institution, but I didn't talk to any of the electeds. I talked to the folks who were working for them. What was the attraction there? I mean, you talked about you're not a fancy guy. Youdon't think of yourself as fancy. And that seems like a good way of avoiding fancy. But what was the attraction or what were you thinking at that time? I thought it was just very peculiar that Parliament had what is effectively a root system that had been wired up in the 1970s and that nobody had thought to ask, what is this thing? How does it work? And there was obviously a kind of performative aspect, which was like, not only will I visit 10 of them, I will visit them in every corner of the country and I will keep doing this thing. And it's because I think just instinctively I felt as though there was something important and maybe even a little bit, it sounds a bit much, but even a little bit noble about what was going on in this space. Even though, what I appreciated was the contracts between Parliament with its fancy masonry and copper and green velvet and all the trappings. And here is this aesthetically junk space. But this is the thing that is supposed to be brokering the connection to people in the space between elections. And I found that aesthetic contrast really interesting. So I went and nobody talked to these people and they gave me a very different window onto politics. They gave me a different way of thinking about politics, but I was really struck because when I would ask them, okay, that's great. You help people get their passports and their benefit checks and deal with the bureaucracy or their ombudsman or their advocate, you help navigate. These people who you think have terrible jobs, they take such pride in the work they do.  I found that so honest and so cool. I would say, when was the last time you had a town hall meeting? And then the blood would kind of drain from their faces. And one woman in Newfoundland, which any of your listeners might know is one of our more, you know, shoot from the hip parts of the country. She said, “Well, boy, why would we want to do that? You only get out the mad, the bad and the sad anyway.” I thought, wait, wait, wait, wait, what are you talking about? You guys are all like pro public.  You're all like, how can we help people? And in fact, these offices were created by, you know, a female politician who ran on the slogan, keep in touch. The purpose was never service provision. It was to create a conversation and sustain it. They defaulted to being about, you know,passports and benefit checks, which is all really important. But here's the thing they were supposed to do, and they're actually afraid of doing it.  And I thought, well, that's interesting because we're supposed to think about ourselves as a mature democracy, right? But this doesn't feel like surely a mature democracy would know how to bring the community together and have an effective conversation. And in those hundred offices, I found very, very few, like count them on one hand, offices that felt that they knew how to do that well. And so that really stuck with me and I didn't know what to do with that. Again, I didn't have it in mind that I wanted to, you know, reinvent public consultation or think about public deliberation in a different way. And it was only because there was a rip in time.  In 2004 BC, British Columbia had an election. The result was totally disproportionate. And, you know, we don't give enough credit to contingency as a driver of political affairs. But the right people were in the right place and they decided to run this seemingly crazy process, a giant jury called a citizens assembly. And I was moving east to west. I was in BC near the tail end of this process in the great tradition of doctoral students.  I had my blinders up. I paid very little attention to it. I thought it was probably some flaky left coast political gimmick. I didn't want that much to do with it, but it was inescapable. It was literally in the same building where my office was, on the same floor. And I became aware of what was going on, but I kept focused on what I was doing. And I went back to Canada a year later. And funnily enough, Ontario decided to do the exact same thing. It became a bit of a kind of badge of seriousness for politicians wanting to address what we called in the early 2000s, the democratic deficit. And again, you can't plan these things. This incredible professor who'd been my mentor and supervisor when I was doing my master's, he said, Pete, I'm now the academic director of the Ontario citizens assembly. You should come take a look at it. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not interested. He said, I'll buy you a beer. Come and take a look at it.  And I did. And one thing led to the next. And I ended up helping to run the parallel high school students assembly. The province did a grown up assembly and a students assembly. And all of this was about making a recommendation as to whether we've changed the voting system. And here's how I connect the dots to today, Peter.  I went to the adult assembly. I helped run the student assembly. I got to talk to dozens of MPPs about the process of organizing interviews with the members of the students assembly. And then I read what the press was saying. So, you know, the Toronto Sun, which is our -remind me that who which Murdoch owned New York paper, there is …The New York Post.Okay, so our version of the New York Post ran this shitty column, which was like, who are these people who have so little going on in their lives that they give up 18 Saturdays to advise the province on electoral form.  And again, remember what I said about elites and fancy and this like now I'm now I'm starting to feel like this isn't cool. And then we have the Toronto Star now that the Toronto Star is like, it's like our guardian. It's it's it's the kind of center left paper.  It has these beautiful things called the Atkinson Principles, which is like a testament to its kind of pro social sensibilities. And it's just the same damn thing. It says, you know, these are a bunch of nobodies. And I think to myself, now hang on, even my old prophet, U of T, the sort of dean of Ontario politics, says these people are ridiculous. I said, well, wait, you know, we keep lamenting the fact that folks won't vote. They won't turn out to a town hall meeting. And when the government of Ontario sent 100,000 letters to people and said, hey, would you volunteer to give us 18 weekends to study something as fundamental as the electoral system? Almost 10,000 people volunteered. 103 were randomly selected.  Nobody dropped out. They were giving of their time to do important public work. Why the hell were we shitting all over them? And, you know, MASS is the product of that experience because I felt that, you know, we just, you know, democratic innovations don't come along very often. And we needed to put a hurricane glass around this thing. And so mass was going to try and take the principles and the process that had been demonstrated in B.C. and Ontario. And it managed to piss off a good segment of the Canadian political class. Let's be clear. And see if we could keep a good thing going. And my life's work, 17 years of it, at least so far, has been dedicated to trying to build what we now call the deliberative way and has gone further and farther, certainly not just because of my efforts, but because of ways in which other countries have been influenced and the way I was influenced by the Ontario and B.C. process. And I hope because of the more than 50 similar processes we've done since. How do you explain Citizens' Assembly to people? I first encountered you at the Bard Summer School. It was my first experience with Citizens' Assembly and deliberative democracy. My instinct, the way it showed up in my mind after day one, was: 'If this is the circus, I want to run away with it.' Do you know what I mean? I was really attracted to everything I heard about what you were describing.I think I share with you that sort of protective instinct around ordinary people, and I have brought that passion into my own community. When I try to explain Citizens' Assembly, I do my own version, but I don't really know what I'm talking about. So this is why I reached out to you: How do you describe and help people understand what Citizens' Assembly is?There's an asterisk: The second part of this question is, what's that instinct that dismisses 'the sad, the bad, the mad'? I've had that experience too. We don't seem to trust our neighbors. There's an instinct to feel like, 'Well, you can't really just get a bunch of ordinary people together and have them be productive.'"So let's take the second question first, because, you know, I think underlying so much of our political dysfunction across the West right now is the fact that we have taken this incredibly vital force in our society. The thing that democracies should be proudest of, that should be investing everything in, learning from, working with the public, right? And we have come to see this incredible resource as a risk. And we try and manage the risk. So I've got sympathy from my friend in Newfoundland when she said, bad, bad, sad. Because the reality is the folks who are coming out, weren't probably broadly representative of that public.  Now they had problems that they needed to express or whatever else. But for our so called mature democracy, we really don't have good ways of tapping into working with and learning from the public. So the public itself is a very elusive quality, right? Like supposedly I work all the time at the public. I'm not sure if I've ever met it, right? So you could take the largest room in Hudson, New York and say, bring in the public.  You get a stadium in New York City and say, when's it there? No, it's the people who turn out. But we don't have a very sophisticated or routine way of not even bringing the public together, but producing what I think is actually the essence of it. The idea of publicness, public-mindedness, public-spiritedness, it's the quality of the public that we want more than a quantity of the public we want. So how do we create processes in our society that manifest for us that quality and which the rest of us on the outside can look at and say, well, that's legit, right? I might have chosen something else, but I'll defer, I'll respect the conclusion of others because they've definitely given it careful thought. So much of politics right now is just trying to run the room. It's a simplistic kind of majoritarianism. It's like, if I get 50 plus one, I get 100% of the power.  And you can only play that game so much before people tune out, right? Because it's just, it's facade. So that's all that. But what is a citizens assembly? A citizens assembly is like one of our oldest democratic mechanisms. You know it as a jury.  It just happens to be a bigger jury that isn't determining guilt or innocence. It's studying an issue on behalf of a wider community. And like a jury, it's finding consensus.  It's got to keep talking about that verdict until it can speak with one voice and list out a bunch of recommendations. So in this world, we talk about citizens assemblies and deliberation. We talk about sortition and all this fancy stuff. These are just problem solving mechanisms that any public body, a government, an agency, an institution can say, hey, let's get together a group of people that demographically match the community that's going to be impacted. Let's be really clear about defining the problem because we all know if you don't have a clearly defined problem, like forget it. So we're going to, we're going to, we're going to be clear about the problem. We're going to give people the opportunity to hear from lots of different experts, different points of view. And they're going to bring us back to their best advice. That's what a citizens assembly is.  And that's why it has such versatility in addressing such a wide range, whether it's local state level national challenges. Yeah. It's politics without the drama. I love, I remember at the Bard summer school, you described it as the manufacturer of democratic integrity. I don't know if that's a line that you use a bunch, but it stuck with me because I, I guess my experience of living in a small town. I see how fractious everything is. And it seems like the spaces we have for any kind of conversation. They don't hold the kind of conversation or people don't know how to facilitate the right kind of conversation. And I seem to remember you talking to you about how just calling out how twisted public input is in the government's in the civic space that you have to sort of stand up in front of your entire community and sort of cross the, just the, the intimidation, like the, the, the points of interaction between a citizen and their government are fraught and horribly designed. Very well said. I mean, you take the typical town hall meeting and somebody's got a problem. And what do you make them do?  You make them do the exact thing that most like reasonably well adapted people have trouble doing, which is standing in front of a room full of strangers and expressing their concern. What happens is that their heart starts pumping, you know, their, their cortisol levels, the stress response, it starts like surging. And that's why like inevitably people at a microphone, you hear that kind of shaking their voice, you see their hands start to vibrate, they're in a stress response.  And I just think, how crummy is that? Right? Like, here we are again, a mature democracy. Like the only way we get to hear from people is when we put them in like a total fight or flight, you know, mindset. We ought to be able to do, to do better. And I don't think that citizens assemblies are the only way to do things.  We need lots of different routines. But, you know, one of my nerdiest jokes is like, what's the difference between a first term Congressperson and a member of the public? About half a million dollars in human resources. Yeah. Right? Like, so what if we actually put 500 bucks or 5,000 bucks behind a member of the public so that, you know, they have somebody to help them think through the options. They have the opportunity to call some witnesses or get some research done to inform their view. We create such a delta between the capacity of our electeds and the members of the public that, you know, that imbalance is part of what I think is perpetuating some of the antagonism that we see roiling our politics. Yeah. You mentioned the deliberative wave. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what you think is driving it? I mean, that a guy like me encountered deliberative democracy seems sort of strange.  You know what I mean? And I'm just wondering what you've seen. You've been, you've been part of this all the whole time.  How do you feel about where it is now? And why is it growing in the way that it's growing? So I got to go back to my university two weeks ago and give a talk. And I showed this photo that I really, really like. It's a picture from Belgium a couple of years ago in the parliamentary chamber of Ost, Belgium, which is like a region and it has its own parliament. There are only like 18 or 20 members to it. And you see in the photo, all of these people sitting in what looks like a council chamber, very modern, very, very nice, very modern. And then you see another group of people. You only see their backs and it's about 14 people and they're facing these people. And it reminded me of a photograph or not a photograph, of course, but a painting from the kind of mid 18th century in Canada. The first meeting of the elected legislature of Lower Canada. And on one side you have the Legislative Council. These are all the people who've been appointed to govern. Then on the other side, you've got all the people who have just been elected to govern.  And you think about what's like, what must it have been like in that room, right? Well, that's what you're seeing in Belgium today. You're seeing a group of people who've been randomly selected on one side of the picture and a bunch of people who have been elected on the other side of the picture. So where's the deliberative way? It is somewhere in history, right? Because changes to governance unfold over hundreds of years.  And sometimes they rush warrants and sometimes they fall back. You know, in Canada from the time we decided we would start electing people, it took about another 90 years for that to be the norm for how we would govern our provincial affairs. It then took another 110 years to decide everybody who's an adult would get the vote.So that's a 200 year project right there. And so what we're seeing is about 20 years into this deliberative wave right now. And the incredible thing is there have been about a thousand processes around the world, either at the local level or at the national level, where people have been randomly selected and asked to give government their best advice. You know, from Canada, it jumped the pond over to Ireland. They actually managed to secure some really important constitutional reforms. Politicians like Emmanuel Macron used a national assembly on climate change to address the concerns of those yellow vest protests that were rocking the country. And from there, lots of Europeans said, hey, if you can deal with, you know, same sex marriage in a very Catholic country like Ireland, you can deal with climate in France, maybe we got some problems too. What we're seeing now is the wave sweep back into the United States. And I can count about a dozen municipal assemblies that are going to happen in the next year. And I strongly believe that this approach, which is super pragmatic, which isn't about partisanship, which is entirely about how do we solve real problems together, is actually like deeply consistent with the American political psyche. Notwithstanding your incoming president, notwithstanding Red America, Blue America, I'm talking about like Main Street, USA, where there's always been this idea that like regular people can get together, they can talk plainly about things, they can solve problems. So I think when we start to see some of these municipalities deliver, politicians very quickly will say, yeah, we need more of this in our democratic life. Are there any projects in particular that you're thinking of in the states that you're keeping an eye on? In fact, we're advising one of them in Boulder, Colorado. And Boulder is considering, I mean, they're committed to running an assembly, it's going to be about land use planning, which of course is really a challenging topic for a lot of places in the US because of the price of housing, changes to density in more mature neighborhoods, and often the existence of green belts or urban land reserves that are held back. So they're going to be using an assembly to get into all of those contentious issues. Interesting. I have a dream topic, though, for America. Oh, nice. Because a lot of my American compatriots, they say, you know, we need we need to deal with the really tough stuff. We need to deal with Roe v. Wade.  We need to deal with handguns. We need to deal with immigration. And I don't want to make light of any of those topics because they are so critical and they are so painful for so many people.  But I also think that when you bring a new show to town, you have to open off Broadway, right? You never want to take on the biggest stage your first time out. Yes. And that's why I think there should be an American citizens assembly on the future of the penny. The penny has been one of the most absurd facts of American economic life for the better part of 40 years. I understand from a lengthy piece in The New York Times that it costs you something like two and a half cents to manufacture every penny.  And each penny is only used once and then it gets stuck in a giant jar. And people have been lobbying your mint and your treasury for decades to eliminate the penny. And most other countries have eliminated their penny. We've eliminated the penny in Canada. But you won't be surprised to know that there are some powerful interests that are defending the penny. My God. I don't want to prejudge the outcome, but I'm just going to suggest if you were to impanel 50 Americans, one from every state, and they were to hear from different sides of this issue. They could make a recommendation to your secretary of the treasury that decided either you need the penny or maybe it was time to let her go. And that would that would be a good thing, but it would also demonstrate the capacity of Americans to exercise good sense on very practical issues. It's beautiful.  I just lost my question. I was going to ask, oh, well, what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in your work for you? So, you know, I'm a pretty lucky guy. You know, your viewers can't your listeners can't see me, but they can probably guess a guy named Peter McLeod, white guy, straight, married, got a kid, product of two public school teachers. I've had a good life.  And, you know, I was able when I was 13 or 14 to go to the legislature and be a page and have all of these experiences where I never really wanted to be a part of big important institutions, but I never felt estranged from them. Is that we don't care who you are, where you come from. A letter comes through your door. You decide, yeah, I want to be a part of this thing and you volunteer. And then my team, if you're randomly selected, suddenly calls you up and it's like white glove concierge service. We treat you like you have been elected and we support you to bring your best.  And I love being in the room and seeing these people for whom this may be the closest they ever get to government. They've never met a politician. They've never been to the city council or their legislature. Honestly, you know, a lot of people go through life without anybody asking their opinion about anything, whether it's in public life or too much of their private life and certainly their economic life in a workplace. We talk a lot in political science about representation. You know, what is effective representation?   You know, rep by pop. How many politicians should we have per capita? What about the proximity between people and their electives?  What we offer is something different, but is integral to our democratic health. It's recognition. It is the fact that people sometimes close to the first time in their life, they really feel heard and valued because they are.And what excites me about the potential of this work is that we can take all of this stuff that seems so banal, so inconsequential regulations, you know, various kinds of legislation about who gets what and what goes where. That seems like such a chore and we can actually make that the basis of a platform for giving people a sense of their personal and collective efficacy.We can use it to give them an even greater sense of their self worth in our society.  That's magic. And it's something that is in such short supply in our democratic society because all of the status is basically monopolized by 100 or 200 people who sit in our legislatures, our parliaments, our congresses. And we always talk about, oh, they must have such a terrible job, so hard, so hard to be a politician.  Look, they wouldn't keep doing it if it was so miserable. They got to be getting something. And what it is, is status.  We need to democratize that experience of status in our society.Oh, that's beautiful. I think I'll just end there. I want to thank you so much for your time. You were so generous to accept my invitation, and I really appreciate it very much. It's been an absolute treat. Thanks for having me on. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Sam Peskin is the co-founder of the creative research studio Early Studies. Previously, he was founder at Speedboat Partners and a strategy consultant at Highsnobiety. The first I heard of Sam was when they released #Census27, their first Data Drop, which uses Social Circle Surveying (SCS), a method invented by political scientist Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij that asks people not about what they think, but about what other people think. Using this method, the inventor of Social Circle Surveying, , correctly predicted the outcomes of each of the major elections in the past decade.Sam, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.It's my pleasure. It's great to be here.As you might know, I start all of these conversations with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who lives here in Hudson. She's an oral historian and she helps people tell their story. I always over explain it because it's such a big question. 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?It's a great question. It's a great opener. It's a funny one, because it's something that I get asked a lot, actually, in London, because my accent is kind of weird. And I kind of drawl a little bit and some people think I'm Australian or American. I've been asked it a lot in every English speaking place where I go. But there are a lot of ways to answer. I guess the way of answering it that's most true to me is that I grew up Jewish in South London. And if you ask anyone who's Jewish in London what's significant about growing up Jewish in South London, they would tell you that there aren't any Jews in South London. Because the most Jews who live in London are in the north.And so I was a rare breed. But the interesting thing about it, from my experience, I guess, is that I think my grandmother emigrated to the UK from Latvia, during the Second World War. She met my grandfather who had a hat store in East London. And my other grandparents were immigrants from the previous generation. But I tie my identity quite a lot to that experience of being Jewish, but being not just a small minority, but a tiny, tiny minority and always feeling a little bit an outsider.And I think I spent most of my childhood trying to figure out what that meant. And trying to, I think in the end, I came to see having an outsider mentality or feeling like an outsider, looking in as a big advantage. And so I think it's something that I've probably carried through my life and my career, this kind of outsider mentality. It's definitely what drew me and my co-founder, Alfred together. About 15 years ago, when we first met, he's similar, comes from a very, very small town in Sweden. And always felt felt like an outsider. I think it's what really drew us together in the first place.Can you tell me a story about, I mean, maybe discovering that you were an outsider in South London? Or what was it like? How did that show up to be a tiny minority?Well, I think the first thing is, it's kind of something that I guess happens to you from other people's impressions of you and that I don't look English. I don't look like an Anglo Saxon English person. And I don't sound it.So often people would ask me the same question, "Where are you from?" And I'd say, "I'm from London." And they would go, "Where are you from originally?"And the interesting thing, certainly about my family history is that I know some of it, but a lot of it I don't really know. It's kind of Polish, Russian, a bit of Eastern European influence. But I can't trace my family history back from a certain place.And I think that certainly in my experience, it's something that you kind of, being Jewish, you have to figure out what it means to you. And it's something that growing up, eventually, I think, I feel lucky that I made friends around me. I didn't grow up knowing a lot of other Jewish people, but I made friends who had a very positive influence on me and in the way that I kind of discovered what that meant for me.I'm so sensitive to that question, "Where do you come from?" It's a close sibling to "Where are you from?" How did you experience that question in the past? What was it like?I think, good question. I think sometimes when it's asked by someone, it depends who it's coming from, but I think certainly I used to feel that there was an implication that you didn't look like you belonged. But I think it's a great question as an intro to how do you think and how have you ended up here? The question that I ask myself a lot.Do you have recollections of what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did young Sam want to be when he grew up?I think when I was really young, I wanted to be a footballer. I've always been obsessed with football. And then I was decent academically at school, but I really wanted to be an actor or a writer. I used to do a lot of acting at school and university. And then my parents wanted me to be a lawyer, which I was, or they thought that I should try being a lawyer, which I did try and failed miserably. I was not good at the law. I mean, I've always been a bit of a lateral thinker. I try and I've always tried to find more creative ways of solving problems.And so I did law after university. I had a contract with a law firm. I was all ready to go. But again, I really didn't feel I was similar to the other people who were doing it. And in the end I didn't enjoy it, and I wasn't good. So I stopped doing that. And I went into advertising, digital advertising when I was 22, 23, when the idea of digital advertising was very much a thing. And being in the "creative industries," I felt a lot more comfortable. It felt the right kind of thinking for me and the right kind of people.And so I worked at a couple of ad agencies at Brandside and doing digital and social and stuff. And eventually I landed at Vice in London in about 2014. And that was kind of the biggest unlock for me, I guess. It was when I really started to understand who I was and myself and what I was good at and what I wanted to do.So I don't think I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I think I've come to treat work as paid education in the sense that you get to learn all the time about yourself, about your relationship with the world of work and the world of business and the types of people that you get along with and the types of thinking that resonates with you. And so that's kind of always how I've treated it.It's such a phenomenon. What was it like, what was your experience like there and how did it sort of change you or impact you?I arrived in 2013, 2014 at a time when it was just starting to jump off. And I remember coming in and just being, I remember picking up the Vice magazine the first time I saw it. And I was thinking, what is this? And I kind of had a feeling that I wanted in at that point. What were you responding to, do you think?It was just the irreverence of it, I guess, the language. And it was kind of anarchic and filthy in a certain way. And it just felt completely different, but super fresh. And I remember sitting in the lobby of Vice in London and really not knowing where I was or what was about to happen. I didn't really know how this business made money or what it did or what kind of people would be inside the walls.When I eventually got there, I mean, I spent four years there at a time that was incredibly exciting. And talking about feeling like an outsider, I mean, at Vice, I was in a place where everyone felt that way. And it was anarchic and people there were incredibly talented, very ambitious, very smart. But I guess for me, the thing that was really explosive was that there weren't any barriers to you having an idea and getting it made. You could really do anything.And I guess I was 27 when I arrived there. So the timing was good for me. I was super hungry. And I ended up surrounded with a lot of people who felt similarly to the way they wanted to change something in the world. And we were in the best place for it. And it was a place where if you had ambition and you were hungry and you wanted to really push, you could end up in a lot of rooms that you never thought that you would end up in. And it really was a huge unlock for me. I still have a lot of very close friends who I worked with there and mentors. I just came from lunch with the guy who was CEO in London when I was there. We're still all in touch. Amazing place. It was incredible for me for sure.And where are you now? Tell me a little bit about where you are now, what you're doing now, what you're working on.So I now have a creative research studio called Early Studies, which I founded with a longtime friend of mine called Alfred Malmos. We call ourselves a creative research studio because we were both career strategists. Alfred spent 10 years at Google. I was four years at Vice and we both spent time at agencies. And we kind of came to the realization that research should be the most intellectually inspiring and fascinating part of marketing. And often it didn't feel that way.It was a hunch. And it's something that, I mean, research is something that every business needs. But certainly in our experience, we felt there could be more creativity involved in coming to the answers that you need to solve business problems.And so we started to thrash out a new way of doing things based on new methodologies, but based fundamentally on an idea that the answer is better questions, which is a thing that we say a lot. Finding more creative ways to get under the skin of a problem and figure out what's really happening by focusing on the why rather than the what all the time.I think I discovered you through Ed Cotton. I think he shared your, I'm spacing on what you called it though, the drop.The data drop, the census 27.And that was not that long ago. So I guess my question is, I want to hear more about the methodology because I'm fascinated by it, but then also your experience of launching, because you're very new as far as I understand. And I'm curious what the reaction has been.We're very new. We're about a year and a half old and we really started with the idea or the hypothesis that I talked to you about, and we stitched together a methodology that fundamentally is borrowed from political science. So we were trying to find a way to access deeper insights, hidden truths around people and why they make the decisions they do. What really is the intellectual makeup of people and how do we do that at scale?We came across a methodology that was created by a guy who's now a board member to us, a guy called Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij. And the methodology is called Social Circle Surveying. And we discovered this through a conversation with Kristoffer, which was kind of beautiful. We asked him how much he knew about research. He's a professor of philosophy and an academic, and he knew a lot about research, a lot that we didn't know.And he said to us, "The funny thing about research, I just don't understand why we ask people what they think. No one knows what they think. And if they do, they're often reluctant to tell a stranger when you're asking deep questions. Instead of asking people what they think, we should ask people what they think other people think." And we kind of sat there and went, "Hmm, okay, that's kind of interesting."And the reality is that Kristoffer had been testing this in political polling for the past 10 years. And the basis of it is, if you think about in a political setting, if you were to ask instead of calling someone up or knocking on their door and saying, "Are you going to vote red or blue?" You might ask them what proportion of your street do you believe are going to vote Republican? Now, the reality is that we massively overestimate what we know about ourselves, and we massively underestimate what we know about other people. There is a huge hidden well of knowledge based in our instinctive judgments of people or in our understanding of their views or opinions from conversations or from social media.But the real thing is that when you ask someone what they think, you're asking someone and their ego is in the room. And so people tend to manage that or they project and they give you an answer that they might hope to be true about themselves or that gives the best representation of them.And social circle surveying is a way of bypassing that egocentrism. And instead, when you ask people about others, and they reflect on all of their knowledge and understanding about their peer group or their friends or their family, you get to very deep and profound answers about people. And within those questions, people tend to be very expansive talking about other people because we're giving them a safe space to gossip effectively, and human beings are hard-wired to do that.Eventually, within that answer, people will tell you what they really think. But it's a much safer space to reveal your opinion when you're speaking about people in general or speaking about other people specifically. Yeah. And tell me a little bit about the drop. The census is amazing. It's an amazing thing. How did you go about developing it? Choosing the kinds of questions? Tell me a little bit about that.So we've been going for about a year and a half. We have a great base of clients who are partners that have come mostly from our network. But we wanted to get out there. We wanted to release something. And we wanted to do it in an interesting and innovative way. And we thought about that for a long time. We were really exhaustive in what that could be.I think the fundamental thing was that we didn't want to be a research company that publishes hot takes on what's going to happen or what has happened. We wanted to remove as much subjectivity from our perspective as possible. And we talk about that as kind of being the marble in Rome. We want to create data that other people can base opinions on, that we can arm other people with data sets that are interestingly created and interestingly produced, but effectively to give people the ammunition and the raw materials, especially people who are experts in their fields, which we are generalists, I would say. And we try and approach research from as naive a position as possible, really knowing nothing from the outset.And the data drop came from this idea that we wanted to release a huge, almost quite overwhelming amount of data using a methodology that we developed called Five Now Three, or X Now X, because we sometimes change those numbers. But the first iterations we did were Five Now Three. And the basis of that is that we, using social circle surveying, so asking people about their friendship group or asking about others in general, we ask a question about their attitude today.We then ask the same question, but asking about their attitude five years ago. And then we ask them about how they project that attitude might be in three years' time. And what it allows us to do is effectively to draw an eight-year trend line on a whole bunch of different issues on where current attitudes have come from, how they're shifting, and where they might be moving.And with Census 27, we wanted to do this on a really big scale and just release it. And so we did it across six broad lifestyle themes, ranging from politics to consumption to health to work, et cetera. And the way this is a quant methodology, we think of it as HauteQuant, quants that we're coming from with a point of view or something exciting, an interesting way to get to cool granular datasets.What's the qualifier in front of Quant?HauteQuant. It's kind of silly. As in people talk about haute couture.Oh, yeah. Okay.It's kind of self-aggrandizing, but what we did was we were kind of inspired by WikiLeaks. So if you look back at WikiLeaks and the Panama Papers, they developed this huge cache of data. They seeded it with all of the major news publications who had it under embargo for a period of months while their investigative journalists worked on it and figured out the narratives and the storylines and what would eventually be the data that they published.And so using our methodology, we conducted the surveys across five markets: UK, US, the UAE, Singapore and Nigeria to try and get as much coverage as possible without doing something global, which would have taken a very long time and would have been very expensive because we were self-funding it.And I mean, you've seen the data. What we do with it is it comes out in a huge spreadsheet. It was over 22,000 consumer data points. And we seeded those with some thought leaders. Ed Cotton was one of them, a few others across the UK and the US. And we gave them a couple of weeks to come up with their takes to do fun and interesting things with the data and then to publish on the same day.And we really, being acutely conscious that no one knew who we were and that we had no audience, we thought, well, it'd be really cool if we got 10 or 20 people interested in it and 50 or 100. And the response was pretty amazing. We got over a thousand share requests, which was pretty cool. And a lot of people who found the data itself interesting and found the way of getting to the data pretty interesting, too. So it was very fun. And we'll be doing more of them. So it's kind of our way of showing what we do and releasing data that we think is important and interesting, but putting it in the hands of other people, importantly. I had never encountered this idea as a robust methodology. It was so exciting to discover something new . And I'm wondering, did you also experience that thrill? And how have you been met?It's a great question. I think the fundamental thing to understand about social circle, or certainly the way that I felt about it when we started is when you explain to people, it instinctively feels counterintuitive. Because when you think, if you're asking someone something that is personal, then that person is best in charge of their own subjective experience and how the world feels to them or something like that.I think the reality is that that may be true. But there are lots of things that get in the way from a research perspective of people answering accurately. And the reality is that people are fantastically complex and unpredictable.But a lot of the time, from a research perspective, we can be reductive in the way that we go and look for answers. We can start maybe too far down the line to get to the answer that we're trying to get. And so with social circle, I'll give you a couple of examples.If you were to ask me what I think I'm going to have for dinner on Friday night, and you asked me on a Wednesday, I might say, "Well, I'm going to want to spend some time with my wife and my kids. I love cooking. So I'm going to try and come home from work at five o'clock, and I'm going to cook a meal. And we're all going to sit down and have a lovely Friday night dinner."Which is a great ambition. And we all have big ambitions that we try to fulfill. If you asked Alfred, my co-founder and a very good friend of mine, "What do you think Sam is going to have for dinner on Friday?" and you asked him on Wednesday, he will probably say to you, "Well, he's going to be running around like a lunatic all week, super busy. I think he's going to end up on Friday afternoon, absolutely exhausted. I'd say that he's probably going to order UberEats and end up on the sofa watching a movie with his partner Lizzie."Now, which of those is more accurate? You know, my personal ambition, I would say to you today, I'd like to make dinner for my family tomorrow. But the other person's interpretation of what that person is likely to do can often be more accurate than the answer the person is going to give you.Or to give you an example, we work quite a lot with fashion luxury brands and brands in the consumer sector. So a classic example in that is, if you ask people, let's think of an archetypal luxury product, like a Chanel bag or Rolex. You said to someone who owns a Rolex, "Why do you own a Rolex?" They might give you a story about how it's the ultimate luxury product, it's Swiss horology, the craftsmanship is incredible, the brand has such amazing heritage.If you asked someone why people generally own Rolexes, they would say immediately something to do with status. And it's a clearer answer. And it's well proven in research in fashion luxury. I mean, these things are status symbols that enable people to walk into a room and feel they're going to be taken seriously, or it makes them feel confident or good about themselves. That's kind of a real answer.And again, to go back to the political point, I mean, to talk about politics, we know from the outcome this week, that, and this was true of the elections in the past 10 years, that there are secret Republicans or silent Republicans or people who might want to vote Democrat, but don't want to reveal that to their partners. If you ask people from a particular demographic or a particular background about their immediate peer group, generally, you'll get to more accurate answers about the way those people are really feeling.And that's happened, right? Isn't there - didn't your mentor guy get more accurate results for previous elections?Yes. The Trump election in 2016, and Brexit, and he was doing this, I think, mostly for private clients, academic institutions. And so the genesis of Early Studies, when he told us about this, we asked if we could use it in a consumer setting. I don't think, especially given that we are imposters in this space, we're both strategists and not researchers. So we're kind of coming at it from an outsider's perspective.Well, certainly, that was where our previous careers were. You know, to your previous question, we're not coming into research trying to shake things up. I think there are brilliant research methodologies, and there's a place for all of them. What we're trying to do, and what we set out to do was to find a way to access deeper hidden truths about people that can be big competitive advantages for businesses or for anyone that's trying to find new truths or new directions to head in or decisions to make whether they're validating an idea that they want to go forward with or whether they're looking for answers that they really don't have yet. We wanted to find a way that we would want to engage with and interface with if we were on the other side of the table, which we've been on a lot.Yeah.So, I can't remember what the question was. But hopefully, that's answered it.No, it's wonderful. I'm just thinking back, I'm remembering the conversation I had with Phil Barden. And we were talking about the impact of behavioral science, this sort of changing idea of how we think about what it means to be a person, how decisions are made.It's been a real radical shift in that kind of understanding in the past. I don't know where to date it. But I remember him sort of saying there was a point when all the heads of Kantar, all the big research firms basically had been built on a different foundation. And they needed to kind of shift their authority from an old idea of how people make decisions to a new idea. And they kind of did it without really doing it. It was a sleight of hand a little bit, "We're still doing what we've always done."But we're not doing it with a new understanding. And so I wonder, and I feel maybe am I making you uncomfortable by - you're being very diplomatic about not coming at the research, but it's a pretty transformational idea that you can't just ask people. I mean, coming out of this election, it does feel like a house of cards where we keep asking people what they think. People keep fixating on this horse race, these margins that don't even exist, really.Well, speaking post-election, when we've just come out of this cycle, I mean, I woke up yesterday to three different people had sent me the same tweet, people who are close to me who know about Early Studies and what we're doing. And the tweet was a story about a guy who had canvassed in a whole bunch of different states using what he called “The Neighbor Method."And this tweet had, I think yesterday, about two million views, and using the neighbor method whereby he would knock on people's doors and ask them how their neighbors were going to vote. He had developed a thesis on how he thought each of the swing states were going to go. And he went to the bookies with it, and he won 50 million bucks betting on Trump in the swing states.And so there are people who are taking this methodology out there in different ways, I guess. I was surprised to hear about it. But it feels like something that maybe is happening in a certain way already.How to qualify? I mean, you said something interesting about behavioral science. I think that what we miss with research in the way that it's done currently with asking people their opinions, apart from the fact that people are likely to project and manifest and the ego is in the room and gets in the way. A lot of the truth that influences our behaviors and what we do is influenced by the people that we spend time with. So it's culturally and socially influenced. And with Social Circle, you get access to all of that cultural and social influence.It's there. It's there in the genesis of how you're asking the question. And the other thing that's interesting about it or that's really key to us as a business and how we want to operate is that part of why we started was we wanted to find a way with research that was much faster and was more cost effective.And we wanted to find a way that could be engaging, that we could engage with collaborators and partners in the way that we did it. So the cool thing about Social Circle surveying is that you have to ask less people in order to get to a representative sample. And what I mean by that and how does it work? If you're asking someone about other people, they answer on behalf of, on average, 15 to 20 people. Now, when you do that at scale, you filter out anomalies and you get all of the groupings or clusters of where people are at.You get to representativeness much faster, i.e. the points at which the data set doesn't change. We tend to get there by asking, on average, 250 to 350 people. Now, the received wisdom with research is that in order to be representative, you have to ask 2,000 people - seems to become a magic number.And this is something that we know through our work to be true that we get there much faster. We get to that data set quicker and it's because people are talking on average about more people than just themselves. We sometimes get people who disbelieve that or ask for proof. And we often run much bigger sample sizes and often that's for peace of mind or for optics.The reality is that we know that we get there very fast. And the other thing, I guess that I'd say about the way that we work is, I think part of what we felt client side and agency side engaging with research was that it often feels like something that's done at arm's length from you. You brief research company, they go and do their work in focus groups or with Quant or whatever, and it comes back to you and you don't get to engage in that process that much as a client or a collaborator.And as I said at the beginning when we started talking, we really feel that I mean, you're getting to know, trying to understand the way that people think and the why and their motivates and the drivers. This should be the most fascinating part of doing marketing or finding an answer to a business problem.And so what we do is we test and test and test and test on small sample sizes to first understand the vernacular and vocabulary about how people talk about certain subject matter. And we engage with the client or the people who we're working with all the way along that process.And that tends to be, depending on how much involvement they want, a really eye-opening and intellectually engaging process where people are fascinated with the way that the results come back and want to pitch in with questions and ideas and ways that they want to come at it. And it's really the getting to the right questions that is part of the journey of discovery that we find so fun and so interesting. Partners that come along with us on that ride.Yeah. What makes a good question? Because the questions are, I feel going through the census, the questions are beautiful. And they're very sensitively articulated. There's something, they feel real to me. They feel like something I would ask sort of in a conversation. They feel they're really made. Maybe this is the HauteQuant, I'm an American trying to say a French word. Maybe this is what the HauteQuant is. But what has to be true for you to have an effective, what makes a good question for you? When do you know you've found the right question?That's a great question. So I mean, part of it is one of the things we always say is that we look for signals, not truth. And so what we're trying to do when we're trying to work in that, the whole idea of any kind of market prediction, which is kind of what we're doing with Census 27 and Five Now Three is we're trying to pick up signals for how people believe the world might be in three years' time, five years' time.But I think when people think of research, they think about trying to get to some kind of objective or unimpeachable truth that is the answer, that is the one. But with anything, lots of things can be true at the same time. So you're looking for new and interesting truths. We say that looking for signals is better than listening to noise. And both those things are better than thinking that you're going to get to an answer that's the objective truth.Oh, wow. Unpack that for me. That's sort of wonderful. You're saying, yeah, unpack that.So if you think about the idea of looking for signals, if you have a specific answer that you're looking for, whether it's voter intent or do people prefer Coke or Pepsi or, you know, what makes people support a football club, which is something that we've worked on recently.What was the question with the football club?What makes people support a football club?  What makes people want to be a fan? Is it performance? Is it heritage? Is it brand values? Is it blah, blah, blah. In order for something to be true, many things have to be true and validated along that journey. And we like to start from first principles by asking the most naive and broadest questions possible. But also from a perspective, we ask questions that allow people to open up and we see how they talk about it. But then along that road to getting to the end question or the perfect question, it's a process of a lot of it has to do with finding polarity. So how can we identify the different types of people who come to that question with different perspectives? We're trying to tease out different ways of looking at things that come from different motivators that might be synonymous or emblematic with different types of people. And this all sounds very theoretical, so I try and ground it in something. So, for example, we work with a big sports company client and we're trying to figure out, there's been a huge surge in running over the past few years since COVID. I know it was the New York Marathon on the weekend and lots of people say now that a marathon is now like the fashion week for runners. It's like the major event. But one of the things that we've been trying to figure out is, are people running and in exercise generally, do people run for their physical health or has it become more of a mental health exercise? What are the deltas between those two different answers and what types of people might run more for the physical or more for the mental? And one of the ways that we come at that question is that we ask people about their friendship circle. And this is a multiple select question with the quantum methodologies that we use. It's all multiple select. So we'll have eight to 10 answers on something and we'll ask people to select as many as they want. So the data we get back is the amount of answers that have been clicked on by different segments, blah, blah, blah. But the question, one of our best questions within that sector is thinking of your friends, what is their favoured form of non-pill antidepressant? And so we might list alcohol, illegal drugs, going to the gym, exercising, time with friends and family, being out in nature, etc, etc.And so it's a very kind of unobtrusive, non-confrontational way of asking a question, but that gives people a really open slate into how they want to answer. So we're not guiding the witness, but giving people an interesting way to think about something and then a bunch of interesting answers. I think the other thing that we really try and do in our work is we try and create a stimulating conversation with respondents as we can, because we want people who are going to be engaged and feel like they're being answered something that gets them to think. One of the fundamentals with what we do is we want to give people credit for their complexity, give people credit for their ideas and the way they think. And so we really want to approach in that way and ask questions that we might ask, which we often do, that we ask of friends or family or something that's going to open up and spark ideas and spark an interesting conversation. Another example, I think this one was in Census 27, when we're trying to figure out how people spend their disposable income or what luxury is, what people spend money on. You could ask, you know, what are people's favourite luxury products? But then, you know, you might get materialistic things, you're going to kind of cut off experiences, like we try and unpack things that are loaded for people that might get in the way of people thinking expansively about something. We ask thinking of your friends, what do they spend money on where affordable and adequate options exist? And then we might say travel, restaurants, clothes, performance wear, which we see huge rises in at the moment, people thinking of the gear that they exercise in as to the point about marathons being fashion weeks for the running community, pieces that have longevity, that are durable. And yeah, those are two examples. We find interesting ways to new truths, new ways to new truths. And it sounds like you referenced there's sort of a qualitative phase in the beginning to sort of inform the questions that go in. I guess, is that true? And I'm wondering, what is the role of qualitative in the social circle survey? How do you go about that? So, yeah, so in any project, we tend to start with qual because it's going to give us a really good foundation for understanding the thematic makeup of what we're looking at. And then often, you know, we'll move on to a more substantial qual phase before we get to quant. And we treat quant as a validator for all of the findings that we've discovered through qual. Sometimes qual will be open-ended questions on online surveys, if it's a discovery thing to try and get to an end study guide for quant output. But we also do qual with expert essays. So a lot of people do expert interviews, which we've done before. The cool thing about asking people to write is firstly, again, you get rid of the idea of the immediate discomfort of being in a room with someone who's trying to find the most personal truths about you. And the person is allowed to write an essay, and we call it an essay. Well, we will come up with some really interesting questions, and we ask people to write as much as they can.How did you come to that idea? Well, so, I mean, obviously, like the kind of the mainstay of qual is focus groups. And focus groups kind of are the environments in which people are most performative. We often say that the focus groups are kind of like speed dating. Everyone's trying to make themselves as attractive or as high status to the rest of the people in the room as they can. And so, actually, it's where you get the most projection and the most manifestation, especially if you've also, if you're putting a product in front of people, what people automatically do, and what skews a lot of findings with focus group qual is that people will put forward negative criticisms of a product, because if you're able to be negative about something, it gives the impression you come from like a deep base of knowledge about something. And so, you get a lot of negativity about products. So, to get around that, for example, if we're putting a shoe or a new trainer in front of someone, we might ask, what we like to do is ask people to role play. So, the thing with performativity and manifestation and projection is that people sometimes like lose empathy, and they lose an empathic way of thinking about how people are likely to respond to a product or whatever. We will sometimes ask people to role play as the creative director of the product that's been created. How would you bring this to market? What kind of methods would you use? What media?  How would you position it? By doing that, we get people to think in a more expansive way, and we get people to, if you're asking someone to imagine they were a creative director, you automatically ask them to put themselves in the most creative mindset, rather than that critical mindset. So, that's one of the things. These are kind of like, you know, tactical hacks, and we do a lot of these bespoke, just thinking about what we're trying to get to, what the challenge is, and trying to find the most interesting and the most accurate way to get there. The other way is, you know, we have, we do run focus groups sometimes. We tend to prefer the expert essays with qual, but like I said, it is important when you're putting product in front of people, sometimes they can touch and feel it themselves. The other thing, we had a project recently with a consumer goods brand where the target audience was young women between the ages of 15 and 25, and the way that we started was with expert essays of 25 to 35-year-olds talking about the younger generation and how they think culture and the world is different for them, and how they're likely to engage and interact with their world, whether they think it's, you know, what are the challenges, what's difficult for young women at the moment. The next step was what we call the unfocused groups, where we got a group of those young women in that target audience together, but we asked them to reflect on their own social circles, to think of the different types of archetypes that make up thatfriendship group, and whether it's choosing a product that they think would fit with a certain type of person, what would work with someone who's big into raving, going out late at night, what works with the real fashion maven, someone who's always up with the cultural trends, et cetera. But we're always trying to dislocate the question from the ego or the personality and the nexus of projection and manifestation that that person is likely to come from when they answer. So it's always others. That's beautiful. It's wonderful. We're kind of near the end of time. And I mean, you kicked up so much stuff right there, talking about qual. And I feel like when I came up, I haven't done groups in a long time. Online, I feel like groups are kind of a layer of hell. I haven't figured out a way to do that.  I'm so happy about Zoom. But I was taught, we never did introductions in the beginning. We never have, I think it's standard practice in a focus group to have people sort of give their name, like where they come from and all this stuff.  And I was taught, there was these few things I taught, like you never have anybody introduce themselves because it invites a social hierarchy into the room. And we have everybody write down answers so that they commit to their thing. And then the other one, which I always talk about, is like never asking why.  And I feel like everything you're doing, I just have a lot of alignment around. Because it's imagination. It's really valuing the power of our imagination to understand the world and sort of just really just centering it, to use that language, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think you nailed it. And like I said, people are complex and unpredictable. So we have to give reverence to that idea and allow people to be complex and unpredictable. That's like a new move though, in a way. I mean, I feel like isn't the quantitative industry, like your preface, right? That people are complex. So we have to shove them into these boxes and we have to measure them and turn them into numbers. Like that's the usual move, is to do that, right? But what you're doing feels a little bit more, certainly is a hell of a lot more nuanced and more complex than... Well, thank you. I don't know if it's necessarily better. It's just our way. I guess what I'm saying, like when I do... You talk about doing free association and projective techniques with people, and sometimes it makes people uncomfortable. They don't really want to think about it. They don't want to know that there are these factors that shape our behavior. Do people immediately understand the social intelligence that your methodology leverages? Do they get it?  And they go, oh, I will totally make a business decision based on gossip. Yeah. Well, so you're talking about from like a partner or client perspective, will they immediately get it? I guess so, yeah. I mean, the reality is that in a process of a project, we start with being as expansive as we can and discovering and finding out the guardrails for what we're doing. And through a process of testing and iterating to your question about people wanting to do free association or whatever, because we test and iterate so fastidiously, we find out, is this an answer that turns people... Is this a question that turns people off? Is it a question that makes people feel uncomfortable? Oh, you're talking about the research subjects? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking more clients, like when you're sitting in front of them and you're saying, you know what, I'm going to help you make this very significant business decision, and we're going to build it on what you might call gossip, but actually is a sort of a more, it's the infrastructure for decision making. Well, yeah, I think it's a good question. We tend to, I mean, you know, there are always going to be, there's people who buy in and people who don't. We find that when people start working with us, they often really like understand the validity of the process and what we get to. And I think that the important thing to know is that once we get to the end, when we're really trying to get to the point, the sharp end of making a recommendation and getting to the process, we've gone through not just testing, but several points of validation where anything expansive and freely associated and gossipy is then brought into a phase where we can validate per market, per generation, per segment and start and segment and size an audience. So when we get down to the end, it's very scientific, you know? And so, yeah, I think that the gray area becomes much more black and white by the time that we get through the middle and towards the end. And I guess last question, because this feels like something that you really built for yourselves, you know what I mean? You're sort of solving your own problem. What do you love about it?  And what does it do for a strategist, for a team? What does it make possible that wasn't possible before? It's a great question. I think that, again, like the genesis of it for me was when I worked at VICE, the Insights team in the US built a product called VICE Insights, which was like a super scrappy research tool where we could take a brief and we could condense it into five to 10 questions that were fundamental to answering the brief. We would then serve that in a high-performing article because we had a very engaged youth audience. We would get a sample of between 250 to 350 people back within a couple of days. And we started to base all of our responses to briefs on primary data. And really, what I felt at the time was it gave so much integrity to the work that we were doing, but didn't have to go to a third-party source for data that's publicly available that anyone who might be pitching against us could access. And I had the feeling at the time that this is just how marketing should be done, that data shouldn't be gatekept. There should be faster and cheaper ways to generate primary data sets. And we kind of think about what we're trying to do is the primary data revolution, that you should be able to mine and create primary data sets that give you the answers that you're looking for. So that was where it came from for me. And when I left VICE, I really missed working in that way. And I wanted to stitch together a way of doing strategy that way. When we finally did it, I think we came to the realization, OK, we're now a research company, and we're going to do research this way, and our product is research. To answer your question about what I most enjoy about it, I think, firstly, it's hugely validating that in year one, we're managing to bring a lot of really cool businesses and a lot really, really interesting people along with us. But also the process, and we're always very pleasantly surprised when we give a presentation about data, that whether it's the questions that we're asking or our process or how we're getting to them, that we're always surprised by how engaged people are and how many questions people have about it. And people tend to be fascinated by social circle survey and the way that we go about finding these answers. That's incredibly enjoyable. Also, intellectually, like I said, I think that finding out the real drivers and motivators that underpin consumer behavior and finding interesting ways to pick up these signals and figure it out is a hugely rewarding intellectual challenge that I will speak for myself and Alfred, that we find incredibly rewarding and fun and engaging every time we do it still, long may that continue. The great thing is that with the right partners who want to be on that journey too, that when they get involved and we end up solving problems together, and everyone chipping in on what the questions should be, that's probably when it gets its most fun and most rewarding. I guess I think the other point, which is probably a good one to end on, is that we are founded on a genuine belief that if we can become a society that's more geared towards asking more interesting questions of ourselves, of each other, and of the problems that we face, that fundamentally that's a healthier, better functioning society that's better for everyone. We say that the answer is better questions and that's an answer to, I guess, a lot of different things that we're facing. I completely am aligned with you there. I would love to close there, but you mentioned primary data revolution and I can't let that go unquestioned. What are you referring to or what do you mean when you talk about a primary data revolution? When we're talking about primary data sources, we're talking about data that's created specifically for the problem in hand. Rather than third-party data or secondary data or publicly available data, being able to say, okay, this is what we're trying to figure out. This is the business problem that you might get faced as a strategist or as someone who works inside an organization. Here's a bunch of ways or hypotheses that we have about the subject matter. Here's a bunch of assumptions. Once we get those assumptions out, can we find ways to go out into the field, as it were, and find real answers from real people that help us to find the solution to that problem? Again, sometimes it's finding an answer from scratch. Sometimes it's validating an answer that may be right, but being able to come to data sets that allow you to make those decisions with confidence very, very fast and in as creative and an interesting and innovative way as possible. Again, it sounds self-aggrandizing when I hear it coming out of my own mouth, but yeah, the primary data revolution. Yeah. It's good. It's wonderful. I really appreciate it. It was a pleasure talking with you. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation to come here. Yeah, I'm excited to see what you guys are doing. Pleasure was all mine, Peter. Thank you so much for the invitation. It was great to talk to you. All right. Cheers. Have a good one. See ya.  Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille is the CEO and Founder of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide. His work, made famous in the 2007 book The Culture Code, focuses on understanding cultural codes and uncovering deep-rooted human motivations. He has discovered codes for over half of Forbes’ Fortune 100 companies such as Boeing, LG, P&G and many more. He just launched The Rapaille Chahal Quantum Institute with Ashu Chahal where he continues his research on quantum psychology. Dr. Rapaille has a background in psychology and social sciences from the Université Paris-Sorbonne.I start all my conversations with the same question—one I borrowed from a woman I know who teaches oral history and helps people tell their stories. It's a big, beautiful question. I always preface it by saying: you have all the control. You can answer or not answer any way you want to. The question is, where do you come from?I come from the war. I was born during the German occupation of France, and my first imprint of life was that the guy speaking German was in charge, and the ones speaking French were losers. That was my first imprint.As a little boy, a few days after D-Day, I was in the countryside with my mother when suddenly I saw the Germans stealing bicycles, throwing their guns on the side of the road, and running away. I thought, "Wow, the world is different suddenly. This big guy who was in charge, now they're running away. Why? What is happening here?"The next thing I saw was a big monster coming out of the forest—an American tank with a white star. I remember everything: the smell, the noise. That was my first imprint. A guy with a big helmet and flowers in the neck took me, gave me some chocolate and chewing gum, put me on the tank, and they took me for a ride.How can you be that? I said, "Wow, one day I want to be one of these guys." They couldn't stay with me—they had other things to do. But I was waving goodbye saying, "One day I'll be on this tank, one day I will."I think I've been an American before I became an American. This became my passion in life: discovering the first imprint that people have around the world of anything. It becomes unconscious after a while; I forgot about this story.But one day I was playing polo at Will Rogers Polo Club in Los Angeles on Sunset Boulevard. After a match, I was riding my horses back to the stable, and I thought, "Wait a minute, why am I here? I'm in America on my horse riding towards the sunset. I made it. It took me a while, but I made it."I believe we are imprinted at a very early age without being aware of it, and we spend the rest of our life unconsciously trying to accomplish something like that. That became my passion: understanding how people are imprinted in a given culture. What made the Japanese Japanese, what made the Chinese Chinese, what made the American American—this is what really is my passion.My next question usually is "What did you want to be when you grew up?" But I think you've already answered that.Well, I have another answer today: I want to be quantum. I want to be Dr. Quantum. I want to be the one who understands the new perspective that quantum physics gives us to see the world.I believe Western science is like a religion—there's a dogma, and if you disagree, you're excommunicated. The high purpose of Western science seems to be to increase your anxiety. One day they tell you coffee is bad for your health, so you stop drinking it. The next day, research shows six cups a day prevents prostate cancer, so you start drinking it again. They keep changing.That's the reality of modern science—there's always one hypothesis, then another comes along, then another. Today, the latest wave is quantum physics. When you understand what quantum physics is doing to our way of thinking, you realize we have to start thinking quantum.I worked for McKinsey in Europe a long time ago. They say when you give a problem to a quantum computer, it solves it in 10 seconds, while a regular computer would take years. So how do you want to think—like an old computer or like a quantum computer? That's my new direction, my new passion. I want to train people around the world to think quantum.What was your first experience with quantum? When did you first encounter this new way of thinking?Almost all my life, I wasn't satisfied with how people were thinking. I think I've been quantum before knowing I was quantum. For example, I worked with people in mental health hospitals—people who were supposed to be crazy. I think you're crazy as long as people think you're crazy. But one day you might be crazy and become a genius. My first experience was what I call "crazy genius."Quantum physics talks about superposition, one of its core principles. When we apply quantum physics knowledge to human resources and human behavior, we realize we've been wrong for thousands of years. I know I'm going to make enemies, and scientists might want to burn me at the stake, but I can't help it—I believe in it.This is my passion. If we put on quantum glasses and apply that to therapy, for instance—I was trained as a psychoanalyst, went through psychotherapy—they told me you have to fix your past problems, your relationships with your father, mother. But quantum physics tells me the past doesn't exist. It's something you recreate all the time. So let's concentrate on your future. Forget your past, but don't forget your future.Take education—I have two boys who went to university, and people asked them, "What do you want to be? A doctor? An engineer?" They didn't know, and good for them! Because you can be anything you want, and it keeps changing all the time. We can transform education completely by giving people access to their quantum resources, quantum field, quantum possibilities.I believe everybody should have the same access to possibilities and opportunities. Quantum gives you so much more. For me, this is one step further in becoming an American—pushing in this direction. It's a new frontier.The launch of the Rappaile - Chahal Quantum Institute at Delmonico's in the city was wonderful. What's next for the Quantum Institute?The Quantum Institute launch was a big success. People came from everywhere—Brazil, China, Europe, Mexico. It was amazing. I didn't realize all these people were my friends somehow. I was overwhelmed by that.Now that we've had this success, the next step is implementation—putting it into practice. I want to design a program to train people to think quantum. Let me give you an example: In quantum physics, there is no opposition. There are no people fighting against each other. There are only complementarities.If you make a list of all the contradictions in your life—one or two pages in a notebook—and then realize they're not oppositions but complementarities, it opens up new perspectives. For example, "men are from Mars, women are from Venus"—I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Consider yin and yang: the yin designs the yang, and the yang designs the yin. We cannot understand male without understanding female, and vice versa. We are complementary. Even biologically, you need both to create life.Looking at things as oppositions or differences is such a waste of time. Let's be creative. My point is that quantum physics creates quantum creativity, and quantum creativity is looking at problems as complementary.I live in Hudson, New York, just north of RPI in Troy. They have the only IBM quantum system one computer on a university campus. It's in an old church, and it's apparently the coldest place in the world. So tell me, where are you now?When people ask me where I live, my answer—and it's not a joke—is in an airplane. I have clothes everywhere I can. I think it goes back to when I was a little kid during the German occupation in France. My father was a prisoner, my grandfather was a prisoner, and I just wanted to travel around the world. I made a wish that one day I would travel all the time. Almost unfortunately, my wish was granted.I'd love to have one place where I can stay and have my dog and horses, but that's my destiny somehow. I like it because I always learn new things when I travel. I have a place in France where my family comes from—that's where I go when I want to write a book. I like it there because it doesn't change. The French are supposed to be revolutionary, but they don't like change at all. I like going back and finding exactly what I'm used to.But for dynamic power, changes, vibration—there's no place like New York. It's amazing. My wife is American, from New York, and she can't stand staying too long away from it. There's a vibration here. At the same time, when the weather is too hot in Florida, I go back to France, and when it's too cold in France, I go back to Florida. Even with many New Yorkers moving to Florida now, I still like New York.I'm going to hold the first workshop on teaching people to think quantum at the beginning of next year in Southampton. It's at the Southampton Inn—a very nice, simple, convenient, and affordable place. Anyone interested in learning how to think quantum is welcome to come.I first encountered you with "The Culture Code." As someone who explores people's experiences through conversation, I admire your work. Could you talk about how you developed your approach to imprints and codes? Could you explain your methodology as basically as possible?First of all, I believe in first imprints. I was working in Switzerland with autistic children—children who have difficulty speaking or communicate differently from us. I discovered that what was missing for creating an imprint was emotion. Emotion is the energy. For example, how do you learn that glass is breakable? You have to break one. Your mother says, "Don't do it again." But how do you know all glass is breakable? You have to try again, going against your mother. There's always an emotion you have to deal with.Then I was working with children learning French, Italian, and German. There's another language in Switzerland called Romansh, though very few people speak it. I realized that the moment when you learn something—the precise age—varies from one language to another. Take simple things like the moon and the sun. When do you learn about them? Maybe when you get a suntan, but there's more.In French culture, the sun is male. My first professional encounter with this was through Publicis, a big advertising agency. Blanchet was the owner, and I became friends with him. He represented the sun—the male. The moon is female. I know people, especially American women, dislike when I say this, but in this framework, the woman doesn't shine by herself. She receives the sun's light and is active at night.But in German, it's the opposite—maybe that's why the French and Germans never got along! The sun is female. Germans say, "Of course, she's the one that makes things grow. She feeds people. She's warmth. She's life." And the man is the moon. When I was studying philosophy at university, my professor told me, "If you don't speak German, you'll never learn philosophy. You need to understand the German soul."I realized how deep this goes. The Germans are like the moon with its ups and downs. When they're up, they want to be gods. When they're down, damnation is the solution. The Flying Dutchman is a perfect example—eternity and damnation. For Germans, death isn't enough; it must be damnation. When you learn the words "moon" and "sun" in a given culture, you learn all of this. It's a package.This is quantum thinking. I believe we have a fourth brain. We've always talked about the cortex, limbic, and reptilian brains—the classic theory. But I'm adding a fourth: the quantum brain. The quantum brain is around you—the paintings in your room, the furniture—it's all in your brain. We know matter is vibration, so there's a connection.We think we have a very limited way of looking at the world. The world is constantly sending us messages, but nobody ever taught us how to read and decode these messages. That's what I love about quantum—suddenly I'm looking at things in a very different way. I realize how rich and powerful this perspective becomes when you look through quantum glasses.When did you first discover you could make a living finding these codes? How did you develop the approach to discovering them with people?That's a very interesting question. I was lecturing at a university in Switzerland, explaining imprints and how first imprints create mental hardware that you use for the rest of your life. One of my students asked his father to come to my lecture. Afterward, the father said, "I might have a client for you."I assumed he meant an autistic child who didn't speak. But no—it was Nestlé. I had no idea what I could do for Nestlé. They asked if I could help them discover why they couldn't sell coffee in Japan. They'd been trying to get Japanese people to switch from tea to coffee—a big mistake, because tea is sacred there, it's a ritual.It was an offer I couldn't refuse. The opportunity to make a living doing something I really loved was incredible. I went to Japan, started learning Japanese, created a team, and we began studying people's first imprints of tea and coffee.Our conclusion was that Nestlé needed to think long-term. Japanese culture is long-term oriented, while American culture wants everything now. We recommended starting by creating coffee-flavored desserts for children to create an imprint of something nice and rewarding. From there, move to coffee-flavored drinks, still targeting children, and then create coffee time rituals. Today, coffee is big business in Japan.Nestlé liked our work and connected us with L'Oréal. I never went back to working with autistic children. After L'Oréal, I moved into technology, working with IBM. Today, 50 of the Fortune 100 companies are almost permanent clients.The stories about the codes are beautiful and powerful. Your company is Archetype Discoveries Worldwide. Can you tie together archetypes, codes, and brands? What's the relationship between these three ideas?In quantum physics, they say everything is connected. There's an incredible connection between how we use archetypes—structures that are sometimes unconscious but strongly imprinted—and culture codes, because each culture names these differently.For example, a warrior in French culture is a "chevalier" (horseman), while in Japan it's a samurai. Look at "The Magnificent Seven"—it was a Japanese story adapted for Americans. The content is different, but the structure is the same. That's the code. When we discover the code, it's amazing how it varies from culture to culture.Then you arrive at the quantum code, which shows how this connects with so many other things around you. People want to be in contact with these permanent structures that are unconscious to them because they feel comfortable with that.Can you say more about that or give an example?Take food around the world. Americans—and I'm American, I'm not criticizing—we are originally poor immigrants. When we arrived here, we expected abundance. How much food do we want? Everything! "All you can eat for $9.95." The buffet story—people want more and more. This is deeply part of the culture.In Japan, aesthetics are what's important. You have a little piece of sushi, a little ginger, a little wasabi, and the way the master—because he's a sensei, a master—arranges it is an art. Everything is placed in a certain way. It's beautiful. This notion varies dramatically from culture to culture.I used to work for AT&T when they were selling underwater cable to the Japanese. They had detailed specifications for performance and appearance. When they sent the cable to Japan, the Japanese sent it back. This was in Akron, Ohio, if I remember correctly. AT&T asked, "What's wrong? We did exactly what they wanted." The Japanese said, "Ugly." AT&T responded, "But that wasn't part of the requirements!" For the Japanese, it cannot be perfect if it's ugly. It's that simple.I personally study Japanese calligraphy—it's an art. I practice kendo—it's an art. There's this notion of the beauty of gesture and movement. I admire that in Japanese culture. I'll never become Japanese or live in Japan—that's not what I'm saying. But in terms of aesthetics and the power of beauty, they are among the best.You've been at this for so long, and now you're talking about a new era of quantum. When you encounter a team that invites you in, what do you see in terms of how they're currently trying to understand their consumer?The problem I have with many clients is that they don't really try to understand their customers. They think they do, but they don't. One big mistake they make is believing what people say. I don't believe what people say because people try to please you, to look intelligent.In quantum physics, we have what's called the observer effect. If customers perceive you as someone with a political agenda, they'll try to please you. So how can you believe that? I try to go beyond it. You can ask people what they want, but don't believe them.When you have a powerful brand that's really part of a culture, it should own an element of that culture. Take Nike's "Just do it"—that's America. Don't think too much. Just do it. Do what? I don't know what I'm going to do, but do it! Where are you going? I don't know where I'm going, but I'm going! There's this element of challenge, but at the same time, we're still the best country in the world and the most powerful in many ways. There's a reality here.A powerful brand owns an element of culture that can be perceived around the world by people looking for the same thing. When Japanese wear Nike shoes, they don't become American, but they inherit some of the power of the brand—the mystique of the brand. That's what's key here.I remember from "The Culture Code," the code for beer was "gun." Is that correct?Yes—"give me a shot." A shot of beer, a shot of whiskey. There's this notion of scoring and shooting. But the key element of beer for me—and I've worked for almost all the beer brands—is Middle America. When Budweiser started targeting minorities to try to be fashionable, they lost 20% of their market.I worked for them and told them: Americans are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. That's what Churchill said. Go to the ordinary people and treat them as people who will do extraordinary things. Don't try to get them to be "woke"—I'm not against it, I'm just saying this isn't the market. Unfortunately, the brand isn't dominant anymore.As a researcher, I'm fascinated by your methodology. Can you talk about what your interviews are like? What's your approach when a client comes to you?I mentioned that I don't believe what people say. What people say is at the cortex level—they try to be intelligent, logical. It's a bit like artificial intelligence—going very fast nowhere, with no emotion. So I try to turn off this part of the brain.I use relaxation techniques, taking groups of people back into an almost dream state. It's anonymous, with no judgment. For example, I'll take them back to their first imprint of experiencing coffee. Once I discover the code, I can guide my clients to succeed.Take Folgers coffee—if you read the book, you'll remember the first imprint of coffee isn't the taste, it's the aroma. Once you understand that, you can build the strategy around aroma: the packaging, when you open it, the commercials, television ads—everything reinforcing aroma, aroma, aroma.Folgers owned the aroma concept for about 15 years. For 10 years, they were number one in coffee, which is a commodity. Once we get the code and verify it—because the code was there all the time—we can see that successful brands were on code, unsuccessful brands were off code. We can build analysis that confirms everything we say.I've done a lot of work with cars too. I worked for GM when they told me they were going to copy Europeans and make small cars because "people want small cars—they use less gas and are easy to park." I said, "This is America—you don't want anything small. That's a mistake." You might have a small niche market, but no, make it big—bigger is better.The result today? The number-one selling vehicle in America is the four-door pickup truck. And bigger is better. I love cars, and I think this four-door pickup truck is a marketing beauty.When clients come to you, what are they asking? Is there a difference between what they ask you for and what you feel you hear from them?It's always interesting that pain is what makes them act. When they lose clients, they're in pain. I know that when people are in pain, they listen better. "What did we do wrong? How come we lost all our clients?" Take luxury, for example—people aren't spending money on luxury now.Take luxury, especially in China. When they ask me what they can do, I tell them I've discovered the code for luxury—and they're off code. When you offer rebates and special prices, no, no, no. What you want is to be top, top, top.Look at Hermès—the only luxury brand truly successful today when others are down. Their code is "hand, right hand." Everything is made by hand. In their commercials, someone is always sewing something by hand. There's something unique, something very reptilian about this. We know babies don't survive without being touched by hands. To be manipulated—which means "by hand"—is what we need as children. We might not like it as adults, but we want to be manipulated. This reptilian dimension of "done by hand" is absolutely powerful.How has the marketing world changed? Are there things that have changed and things that haven't? What are the implications for codes and imprints in the quantum era?Things are changing, already very fast. The number one big issue is China. China has been the major source of money for many clients worldwide, but now it's shrinking because they're dogmatic—there's a dogma you have to follow.What's next? India. India is the next big market for most of our clients. The problem is they were successful in China, invested heavily there, but they don't understand India. For me, India is already quantum—there is superposition. The big challenge is clients adapting to changes occurring around the world. It's a big mental switch from China to India.When you say it's a superposition, what do you mean?When you toss a coin in the air, while it's airborne, it's both heads and tails simultaneously. That's superposition. This state lasts until the coin hits the ground and the superposition collapses. We're always in superposition, but we're pushed by the environment—our parents, the police, whatever—to collapse, to stop.In quantum physics, you have a particle that's moving—we are particles—and you have a wave. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that when you want to know what a particle is, you have to stop the wave. If you stop the wave, you don't know what the particle is. You cannot know both exactly at the same time. That uncertainty dimension is powerful.We need to create products and brands that are both particles and waves. But clients don't understand the wave. They always focus on the particle: "This is my product, this is how much it costs, what it can do." Today, people don't care about that. They want to know: What is this product becoming? Where are you going? What is this transformation?Take vehicles—they're going through a transformation, a becoming. Will they be electric? People aren't sure yet. I worked for Aptera in San Diego—we created the first solar vehicle. The roof is made of cells; park it outside, even at night, and the next day you have 25 free miles. That's big innovation—using light energy to transform transportation completely.People ask limiting questions: "How long can I drive? Can I drive for two days without recharging?" But remember, when the first automobiles appeared in England, you needed someone with a trumpet and red flag walking in front of the car to cross villages—it was the law! People said, "Cars will never be common." We're in the same situation now with quantum computers.The key point is that things are changing so fast that planning becomes futile. In quantum physics, we say, "When you make plans, God laughs." The only thing you must learn is how to improvise, because things will happen that you cannot anticipate. It's very difficult to predict human activities and interactions.India has this facility to adapt, to improvise—they call it "Jugaad," the art of doing everything with nothing. I'm more concerned about Germans, because I don't see much future for them with their focus on order, order, order, planning, planning. When I organize sessions in Germany, if I say we'll have 25 people and then try to change it to 35 three months later, they refuse—"No, we organized for 25."This rigidity can be good, but in my experience, Germans are very good at planning, organizing, and engineering, but terrible at marketing. Look at MINI—they own MINI, and now they have a big MINI. What? A big MINI? The brand is destroyed. It's like having a small limousine. They don't understand the soul of the brand, you know, the brand itself, the soul, but what people are used to and react to.Some of what you're talking about with countries having codes reminds me of Elias Canetti. Did you ever read "The Crowds in Power"?Maybe, I don't remember, really.It was a long time ago, but he wrote a beautiful book, like a taxonomy of crowds, and gave each country a symbol. I think Germany was the forest, and England was somebody on a ship, like a captain of a ship... I wanted to ask about this idea that clients' mistake is believing what people say. So much research money is spent on self-reporting, and I feel like the research culture is really resistant to psychology, to the kind of depth that you bring. How do you articulate the value of knowing a code over all the other money they spend? Like for a small company that wants to grow—how do you convince them that going deep into a psychological exploration has value in a culture that often discounts it?I might not be the best at selling myself because I connect too many things at the same time—sometimes I confuse people. But my clients are my best sales force. I've done 25 codes just for P&G. When GE heard about that, they said, "Come discover the code for GE." That's how I worked for Jeff Immelt and others.After a while, there's a group of people passionate about what I've done for them, mainly because when I discover a code, I don't discover it alone—we discover it together. Part of the methodology is that we need ownership and alignment of the people I work with. When I'm gone, these people keep pushing and become champions of the code. That's the best motivation, that's my reward—when people use the methodology, apply it, and promote my methodology and ideas with others.How do you know when you've discovered the code? What's the moment like when you realize, "Oh, okay, it's hand" or "it's aroma"?It's a very interesting moment. At a certain time, we—a team including the clients—go into the imprinting stories that people handwrite, and we discover the structure. Then people say, "Wow, oh, I knew it!" I call that the "wow, oh, I knew it." When we discovered that the code for Jeep Wrangler was a horse, people said, "Sure, of course, I knew it!"We know we've got a code when we don't need to convince people anymore because they know it inside—it resonates with them. After that, we can check if people buy it, if it sells, if people agree. Some companies want numbers, so we give them numbers, but there's this aha moment that sounds so familiar. They say, "Yes, I know, I knew it!"How did you come to call it code? Was it obvious you were going to call it that?That was before "The Da Vinci Code," by the way. My insight came from thinking about a door with numbers—you have to put the numbers in a certain order to open it. I discovered that even if you have the numbers but not the right order, it doesn't work.Then I discovered something I call the logic of emotion—it's emotional, but there's a logic in it. For example, I did the code for Chiquita Banana, and mothers would tell me, "This is the best food I can prepare for my child," but then they'd say, "I want my children to grow, and I don't want them to grow."That's already quantum—that's superposition. Mothers want their children to grow, but at the same time, they're so cute when they're little. They want to keep them; they don't like that they're aging so fast and one day will be gone. It's a very interesting tension. There's a code at the intellectual level and a code at the emotional level. If you don't understand these two sides, you make a mistake.Beautiful. Well, listen, I've taken up a ton of your time. I really appreciate your generosity in showing up and accepting my invitation to talk. I really appreciate it.My pleasure, my pleasure. You see, as you know, I'm sure now you're aware that's my passion, and this is it. If you're passionate about something, there are no limits. Thank you so much for having me in this program. 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Mike Lydon is Co-Founder and Principal at Street Plans, leading the firm's New York City office, and is an internationally recognized urban planner, writer, speaker, and advocate for livable cities. As the creator of The Open Streets Project and co-author of the Tactical Urbanism series, Mike is a founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism and serves on Transportation Alternatives’ Executive Committee for the New York City Harbor Ring project. I start all these conversations with a question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She lives here in Hudson, she's an oral historian, and she's got this question that I think is really beautiful, so I stole it from her. 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. The question is, where do you come from?I guess my most immediate response would be I come from Maine.What does it mean to be from Maine?I think it means to be self-reliant, independent, and in some ways, creative. There's an ethic of you do all you can with what you have in Maine. I think that's really important. There's sort of a humbleness there, and there's a really good sense of humor. I feel like all those things in Maine are qualities I don't embody, but I aspire to them.Can you tell me a story about the creativity, or what growing up was about? How did that show up?I think it's creativity in work - getting by and knowing how to maximize what you can do in your job, and to do well by people. What you observe a lot in Maine is people have to get creative around their work schedule. In the summertime, I do this, and in the fall and spring, I do this, in the winter, I do that. There's a flexibility of how you go about work and getting by, using your own creativity and will to do that. It's a long-term ethic that's part of Maine.There's a novelist I know - I love all of his work - David Carkeet is his name, and he wrote a book called "From Away," set in Maine. Is that a Maine expression? [Note: It’s not set in Maine. I was wrong. It’s Vermont.] Yeah, anyone who's not from Maine is "from away." I'll tell you a quick funny story that speaks to that. We were just up visiting my parents with my two sons and my wife, and there's this annual pumpkin festival that started in our town maybe 10 or 15 years ago, long after I moved away to New York City.One of the penultimate events of many over the course of this weekend, which attracts thousands of people now, is they take these big pumpkins and raise them up with a crane, then drop them on my old middle school soccer field. The first one is like a 500-pound pumpkin, and this crane goes up 200 feet, and they drop it. The whole crowd is encircled at a somewhat safe radius from the explosion of the pumpkin. Then they double the size of the pumpkin, and they bring out this beater car and park it in the middle of the soccer field, lining up the crane and the pumpkin to crush this car.The announcer remarks that the car is from Massachusetts, not Maine, and everyone cheers. So there's just this "us and them" mentality, which is not always the most healthy thing, but it's definitely an ongoing kind of running joke about whether you're from here or not.Do you remember as a kid what you wanted to be when you grew up?I wanted to be an NBA point guard, or I wanted to be a city planner. I was pretty good at basketball, but I'm 5'9" - I'm not that good. And I went the other path and became a city planner.How did city planning show up in your life as a kid? What was your experience in rural Maine? How did you know that it existed? I feel like I had a city planner awakening at like 39.Being from small towns in Maine, they have these really lovely main streets where it's the center of life, and you hardly go a day without being in that environment for some period of time. I was just always fascinated by going to town and what town offered. That draw to those types of environments - I couldn't put real language to it at a young age - was a really strong baseline for me on what I enjoyed about public life and places that one inhabits.It was somewhere around fourth or fifth grade where I got access to SimCity, the video game. To this point in my life, I was obsessed with sports. I wanted to play sports outside most of the time. If I had access to a video game on my Tandy 1000 computer, I had sports games, except for SimCity. And I was obsessed with it really quickly.Then I started doing academic project fairs or science fairs in fifth grade, investigating city planning. I read books from the library that talked about Roman cities and how they started and grew and the life that became part of those cities. It was super inspiring to me. I just continued that thread all the way through the end of college when I did a thesis on an urban planning issue in Maine that also was about Native American history, economics, and culture.It just grew with me. And then in college, I did a lot more research on who are my North Stars in this field and what's the kind of work that I want to do. It all just sort of snowballed from there.And tell me where you are now and what your role, what your work, what you're working on these days.I now live in Brooklyn, New York, which I like to say is basically like one big downtown Maine village. The urban form is actually not that much different. If you were in downtown Brooklyn or Manhattan, then yes. But if you're on Fulton Street or DeKalb Avenue, Fort Greene, these places that I inhabit a lot - two, three, four-story buildings, mixed-use commercial apartments above - it's very similar to downtown where I grew up. It's just there's a lot more of it, which is awesome. It just goes on and on.We do consulting work all over the country. Since having kids, I've focused more of my time and energy from DC up to Maine on the East Coast. That's everything from developing active transportation plans for communities to installing street improvements. We do a lot of work where we literally transform environments temporarily to show what's possible and to learn from those changes and how people respond to them, both with their behavior and their support or not.A lot of our focus at the moment is on two things. First is street safety and really helping communities drill down on where they need to spend their limited resources to get the biggest outcomes when it relates to people of any age or ability being able to move around their city safely. Second is public realm activation or enhancement. We've got fascinating projects on the San Francisco waterfront, the Cleveland waterfront, the West Palm Beach waterfront, and 14th Street here in Manhattan, where we're looking at something more permanent than the temporary work we did together in Hudson - something that can last five, 15, 20 years, really be that interim change, but provide immediate spark or improvement to the way people experience streets.How has the field changed since you entered it? You're sort of responsible for tactical urbanism, which is this approach to community engagement that's revolutionary. There was maybe a behavioral revolution in marketing too, where we could learn differently by focusing on how people behave as opposed to what they say they're going to do. But I'm curious, how did tactical urbanism arise for you? And how did that change how urban planning works?I think for me, it was just being an impatient 25-year-old and wanting to see the change in the world happen quickly. I went right from that thesis I wrote in college to one year working for an advocacy organization in Boston around cycling issues to then going to grad school. All the way through that process, I didn't understand the politics. I didn't understand how important moving the needle is of public opinion and being able to cut through some of the debate sphere where we can talk about these things until we're blue in the face. But when you actually do something, you get a result - something you can actually measure and people can experience.You can see behavior change. You can see someone say, "I don't support that," then say, "Actually, that's not so bad." Even if they don't personally like it, they see positive things happening in their neighborhood or community as a result of it.That was really the inspiration - let's see if we can just get things done quickly. There were a number of different initiatives and projects in the mid-aughts that really spoke to that. I was able to be inspired and define what that inspiration was: What are the core principles of this? What's the through line between these disparate initiatives and cities that I'm seeing?Particularly as a response to the Great Recession and very diminished resources at a municipal level, how can we continue to make places more livable quickly and inexpensively? That first booklet we put together was just kind of a thing to share with my friends, my nerdy urbanist friends. Like, "Here, this is what I was talking about. This is the idea. What do you guys think?"This was a time when online tools were starting to proliferate. Social media was starting to proliferate, so things could spread way faster than even a decade prior. You can throw it up online with no expectation, and it was downloaded thousands and thousands of times. Now we have these tools you can track - like, "Wow, 100 downloads in Russia today." That's crazy. People got really excited by it, as I was, but no one had a name or a term for it.It created a virtuous circle where now we call it something. We can learn from each other. People start practicing it, trying it, failing, succeeding. Long story short, it's like the punk rocker's gone mainstream. This stuff is embedded everywhere in cities around the world.The thing that really brought it to a new level was the pandemic. People started to get tactical on these quick projects and initiatives not as being nice to have or doing one here and there, but these became emergency crisis response tools that we knew they could be, but never anticipated would have to be at a global scale.I think that and just over 10 years leading up to the pandemic, sharing a lot of resources, developing things for free and sharing them - that's very much important to me, something I learned from music. I'm not a big Grateful Dead fan, but the way they built their fan base - I'm a Dave Matthews Band fan - the way they built their fan base in the early '90s was trading tapes. Let people just record and take it and run with it and share it. And it grows and grows and grows. That's kind of the idea I brought to the very first publication and publications thereafter - if you put it out there in the world, if it's a good idea, people will just spread it. And that's what happened.What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you? What's the part of all the stuff that you do that you really love more than anything else?I think it's just the realization that people can change their cities positively and quickly. It doesn't have to be this multi-decade slog, although it often is. When you get people who are just waiting by the bus stop, or they're on their way to the grocery store, or they're walking their kids to school, and there's a change that happened effectively overnight, you can really see the joy that people have in seeing something just different and better.When you go to a city council meeting or a public workshop, these debates take up so much oxygen in the room. Yes, they're important conversations to have, but it's usually a very small slice of the community that's participating. You start to understand that real gap between what politicians and leaders think is public sentiment and what is actual public sentiment when you're on the ground doing the work. That's what's exciting to me - showing that support, bringing that support, seeing that immediate transformation. It's like, "Wow, we have this street that's terrible and unsafe, and people are complaining about it, but people can't decide on the change. Let's just do the change, and then we'll talk about the pros and cons thereafter." The power of that is really addicting.Can you tell me more about that gap, the distance between what the leadership believes to be public sentiment versus the sentiment that you get when you're on the ground talking to people?Right now in New York City, we're having this major battle over the "City of Yes," which is just very moderate changes to the zoning code that would allow for more housing to be built in all the neighborhoods. That's sort of a way to allow for, hopefully, the supply to increase so that affordability can also increase.You see the polls on this, and it's like 75%, 82% of people really want to see more affordable housing in New York City. But then if you listen to the city councilors and people who are pushing back on some of the details of that proposal, you would think that it was the other way around, that 80% of the people didn't want to support this initiative.That's just one example, but this happens everywhere on public issues and how we think about how our communities grow and change. It's pernicious because then it becomes self-reinforcing, where you're trying to keep the status quo in place, or you nudge it a little bit here and there. But we need transformative change in our communities. I feel like people are more ready for that and more wanting that once they are allowed to experience and see it.What are the ingredients in a successful transformation? I've followed the work that you guys do, and I've seen this stuff. Is it Jersey City? I feel like you've had some moments that are... I mean, you've had a lot of success across the board, but what are the ingredients in a city or a municipality for making the kind of changes to the streets?It's political will. It's just having leadership. It's leadership from the mayor setting the tone and providing direction to staff and saying, "I'll give you cover," on down to leadership at staff levels, and then partnerships with community leaders, organizations that are on the ground, CBOs, nonprofits, advocacy groups who really care deeply about cities and their issues.I am much better at assessing now when we go into a community whether they have that mix or not. If they have it, then we can really see sustained change relatively quickly. That was 100% the case in Jersey City. You've had great leadership from Mayor Fulop. You had political continuity - in the third term, you have time to scale things that you might get done in the first four years.If you get invited back and invited back again, you really can grow dramatic influence and impact if you are committed to the work and you have the leadership in place that just believes in that every day, is doing that work every day. That adds up very impressively over eight to twelve years.We've walked into communities where there's not even an advocacy sector. There's no one asking for change. And if no one's asking for change from the bottom up, you're certainly not going to necessarily get it from the top down. That's not to say we can't try and do the work. It's just the expectations that I have now personally are different. I don't want to be disappointed that you come in all excited about being able to transform someplace and you realize those ingredients are not there yet.And that's okay. You have to start somewhere to build that in. But it would take time for a lot of communities that we've worked with in the past to sort of get to that level. If you look globally, there's always these leading cities. I'd say London under Sadiq Khan and Paris with Anne Hidalgo - these are visionary people who've been given permission over many terms to make these impacts. And the impacts that they make get bigger and more impressive every year.You go to a city like New York, and under de Blasio, it was kind of carrying the status quo to a degree from the innovative administration before. And then with our current administration - well, you've seen the headlines, it's a disaster. So we don't have that same leadership here. Those ebbs and flows of leadership, aligned with staff leadership and on-the-ground advocacy, is where you get the special sauce.I was struck by your description of Brooklyn as - what did you say? You called it urban villages, is that right?Just like a series of urban villages.So I just wondered, as a city planner, what do you see that a jackass like me doesn't see? When you look at a neighborhood in Brooklyn, as an urbanist, what are the principles that you understand about how that came to be that make it so valuable that Johnny Q Public walking around just sees a sidewalk and a crosswalk and a street where the cars go?It's the level of density - the amount of people that are here always around you. I pulled the census tract that I live in now, and it's like eight or nine blocks by one or two blocks. It's a very small swath in the census tract, and the population is like three times my town in Maine, in a tiny fraction of the land.It's such an efficient use of land that allows for so many types of people and ideas and things to happen in a very limited space. And that to me is the alchemy. There's a muscularity to the city, to Brooklyn. You can go for miles and it feels like it's a sustained level of energy, whereas in the town I grew up, that sustained level of energy is on two or three blocks. So that's sort of the power.Do you have mentors or touchstones that you constantly return to, either just internally, to sort of touch ground on foundational ideas?Over the years, the mentorship has evolved as my career has evolved. There are certainly early urban designers and planners that I look to and was inspired by, and still am inspired by, but in a different way. I was so inspired by the ideas of Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and people who were involved with real reform of sprawl in the '80s and '90s - just totally digging out the principles from the dustbin of history and saying, "This is how we do walkability and we've not been doing it for 40 years. That's the problem. We can start doing it again."Growing up in a small town in Maine, going to college in Maine, in that environment with a little bit of sprawl around you, I had no idea - I had no lived experience in what you see outside of Atlanta, or even outside Boston or other metro areas where it goes on for miles and miles. Knowing that there was an alternative out there, that was something that was possible - at that time, it was very edge. It was like, "Oh, you want to allow mixed-use buildings again? You can't even finance that. It's not legal." Banks wouldn't do it.That's where - banks wouldn't give up. It was very difficult to get financing for a mixed-use building or for walkable projects. That just wasn't what people were looking to do. This whole parallel system had to be rebuilt, and it's still not a level playing field, though it's certainly more so today.Now if I look at some of those early people that inspired me, a lot of them are in their own businesses and had the pains and challenges of running a small business like we do. Now my questions are different. Like, "How did you get over this? How did you grow to that next level? What did you learn when you took on projects that might've been pushing the bounds of what you had skill sets in?" Those kind of more experiential things and not just the ideas that I look for now in terms of mentorship.You talked about sprawl. One of the early projects in my career, I was living in San Francisco with a brand consultancy and we were hired by Chevron to do a brand audit. We went to Atlanta and I did a lot of interviews with people at gas stations and in their homes. I remember being told at the time, this was early nineties, that I think maybe I heard this, that it was sort of the fastest growing human settlement in history, the way that Atlanta was developing its suburbs. Does that resonate with you?Oh yeah, totally. You can fit amazing Italian city cores into a highway interchange in Atlanta. This is a great actual diagram that a colleague put together one time where an amazing small city in Italy was compared to show the use of land. Look how we're using our land - this is insane. We're not making more land. Why are we using it this way?The other thing I remember from that project was an interview I had with a woman who described her relationship with her car. She said, "When my mom died, I left my house and I went and sat in my car and I cried." That's the place she went to feel safe, you know? She was looking for a place to be away from her family, a place where she could let down her guard and really weep. How do you think about the car and car culture in your work? I feel like you must be bumping up against it all the time. How do you think about it and talk about it? Because it is so deep, our relationship with the car, what we expect of it.It's the biggest challenge. Even just peeling off and battling small parts of that culture, it's so ingrained. And by the way, it's a new culture. This is not, in the arc of our country, the arc of human civilization, this is the tiny blip in which people had access to these things and how seductive and quickly we took that up and reordered everything. We reordered all of our cities to accommodate this thing. It's wild.There's a fascination that I have culturally in these moments and what had to happen in the '20s and '30s and '40s and '50s to really ingrain this. That's a masterclass in cultural revolution - not in a good way, in my opinion - but it's a masterclass. How do you influence change industrially at that scale? That's impressive.I don't know if we have it in us to as a culture anymore to do that - from the most moneyed corners of societies to our political leaders, to people falling in line. Like we were put forth this new challenge of climate and resilience. I don't know if we have it in us to be able to take something that massive on to fully reorder society again. I could be wrong. We may be forced to, but it's impressive.It comes down to a clear understanding that people need to travel long distances. And the car is amazing to do that in lots of ways, in lots of environments. In a city, small or large, it is the least efficient and worst way to get around a community. So it's really trying to think about what is the right tool in the places where you are. What do you need to do? And why is it that you think you have to drive three miles to get milk?Is that land use? Yeah, we put the big shopping center a mile out of town on a crappy five-lane road. So you'd be insane to walk that. I understand why people make this choice, but it becomes a choice you make very easily and then you don't question it again. A lot of the things we do in our work is to ask those questions. Like, why are you doing it this way?Usually, towns and villages and cities have this great historic example, which people love. And then they have this other example where people don't love those environments, but they don't question them. They don't question it could be any different. We ask a lot of questions and we try to show people that it could be different. In some ways, quite simply, that's the work we're trying to do. But it is very difficult to just have people reimagine the way things work, the way they move around and inspiring people on an everyday basis to try something new when maybe the environment around them doesn't really support that.I love that idea. I mean, that question I shared - are we capable of a transformation as sweeping as the one that the automobile sort of arrived on us? There's a quote I always love that "the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." Have you ever heard that?No, that's great. It's really great.We talked about cars, I guess maybe community engagement. It feels like there's two things that you're sort of embedded in - rethinking the way cities engage with how they make decisions about how they change. Tactical urbanism is this amazing tool that lets people experience the change in a very sort of scientific way. Are there other things you're seeing out there in terms of how engagement is changing the way cities are approaching change differently? Where in the process is this evolution? What's the state of urbanism and tactical urbanism as you see it? The pandemic created this explosion of opportunity. I mean, we experienced here in Hudson, we had on-street dining, we had shared streets. We had the shared space. We were experiencing the street as a shared resource, probably for the first time. And then the year after the pandemic, it shrunk and then it went away. And now we're back to mainstream American car culture in Hudson.It was both a watershed moment for tactical urbanism, but I think there's a lot more to be learned in the failures of why cities didn't embed this and learn from all the positive things that were happening. How could that be even more positive outside the constraints of a pandemic? If we can pull this off in these conditions right now in this community, imagine if we're all healthy and able to get back to our lives, but still have this and start to double down on it and invest in the things that are working here.I think too many people just thought of it and it was messaged as only a pandemic response. It wasn't about recovery in the future. It was about now. The framing of it allowed a lot of communities to retrench back to the status quo after the most largest threats from the pandemic were mostly behind us, at least at scale.That's been really dispiriting in a lot of ways. I've seen this all over the country where things are sort of "back to normal." I've seen it here in New York, but there are still a lot of things where you've had successes and you've had things go to that next level, become more permanent and are truly inspiring. I think those are things to hold on to always - the inspirational examples and to learn from them.What are you indicating? What are you, when you say it's not all good, what are you...?I think the biggest thing that I think about - I did so many webinars during the depth of the pandemic where we'd been tracking what cities were doing and people were accessing this sort of open spreadsheet we created. We were really trying to get people access to information about who was doing what and where and what the impact was.The lesson I kept sharing in those moments and share today is that we are our biggest barrier. This is not a technical problem. This is not a cost problem. How quick was it for the restaurants to move out onto the street and do what they did? What impact did that really have on safety? People weren't getting run over. Yes, there were fender benders and some of the dining setups got dinged or nicked or they could be rebuilt quickly because they're inexpensive.What was actually the problem? It was our lack of imagination and our ability to move quickly. We could do this everywhere on every urban issue if we wanted to, if there was actually a way to get out of our own way. In the pandemic, it forced us to just literally get out of our own way to respond to something.In New York, it was a very unequal, expensive, challenging outdoor dining license program before the pandemic. Of course, only the wealthier businesses would take you up on that, really only on the sidewalk. Then overnight, it was like, you just need to self-certify that you've met these very basic life safety criteria. And then we might come check on you in months, maybe we don't, but go forth and do your thing. Just don't take up a bus stop, use a certain minimum standard of something that can find that creates a barrier.And oh my God, like 12,000 restaurants within a few months were operating in some shape or form outdoors. And wherever you think about outdoor dining, that's not the point. The point is we can get out of our own way if we just sort of unleash the power of the creativity and the energy that people have to have better cities, better streets.So I think that's the biggest lesson - we could do it. We've proven it, but why does it have to take a global pandemic? I think it's the acute nature of that and the threat that forced us to act. But these more existential crises of climate and things are just slowly degrading our lives. We can't seem to muster the same level of commitment to get out of our own way to start to heal things.You used the word imagination in there. What's the antidote to what you just said? We get in our own way because we don't have the imagination. What is the imagination that would be required to open up to this kind of change?We can imagine that people don't need a car for everything. You can imagine that you don't need to park in front of the business that you're going to as human beings. Yes, people have physical disabilities. Of course, there should be spaces reserved for people to have immediate access to things that they need to access. You can do that. This is not zero sum.It's not all outdoor dining in the curb and zero parking. But what if we just took away 10% of parking in all of our cities overnight? In New York, those 12,000 restaurants operating in the curb lane took up like 2% of parking spaces in the city. If we could just imagine 5% of that space being used for other things, not just dining, but expanded pedestrian space, better bus stops, delivery zones to help exploit some deliveries, not have to double park and clog streets and create honking. Can't we just have an imagination where we think of our streets as being a lot more flexible and human?Yeah, this is the piece I think that was so inspiring to me. I really did have a midlife awakening to the idea of the streets. The streets are like a public space. You used the term public realm. I never really thought about streets as public space. They're so controlled, so regulated. And I know my experience in Hudson, and I guess this is sort of a trope in planning, that the police and fire, they kind of own, they kind of claim ownership for what's appropriate or inappropriate or safe or unsafe within the public realm. And so it's a massive cultural constraint because they're often the big dogs in town. Creating an argument or trying to create space for that kind of creativity can become very difficult. It seems unsafe to be creative like that.Yeah, it's very difficult. That's ingrained. Some of the cultural attachments to large vehicles are most robust in those life safety, emergency response communities. And I get that. You are the one who's dealing with the most extreme things that happen in your community on a daily basis. You have a certain perspective and you have to respect that. If you've responded to a terrible fire, you don't want a speed bump in the road. I understand that.But when you look at the data and the things that can be gained from slowing everything down, you would see a lot less emergency response would be needed. Most fire departments, they're not fighting fires. They're going to car crash scenes. That's what the data says. Fires happen, and it's really essential that we can respond to fires as quickly as possible.Some of the fights in New York, it's like, "Well, the bike lanes, the damn bike lanes mean that the fire trucks can't get there." It's like, no, they're open streets. The bike lanes actually create an emergency access lane for ambulances and fire trucks that helps them bypass all the congestion in the city or in a community. There's ways to actually think about the same amount of space, but using it differently that actually creates an efficiency for response, but also allows for all these other things to proliferate and succeed, like cycling.So it's a really challenging messaging and community support advocacy topic. But at the end of the day, it has to come from the mayor. The mayor has to tell the fire chief or the police chief, "No, this is how we're going to do it." Look, if we have these negative things happening, if people are getting hit in the outdoor dining setups left and right, then you have to be open to changing that and going back to something else or tweaking a program. But if that doesn't happen, let's just imagine that we have a better community for it. Maybe we have a safer community, we have a slower community. We have more extra revenue as a community by leveraging the value of our shared spaces and our streets. It's not just about moving things quickly.Thank you very much. I want to take the next two minutes and indulge myself. I think I might have harassed you with an email about this at some point. You've been very generous always with my emails about issues in Hudson. But we have this main intersection in Hudson in which there's a traffic light hanging from the middle. There's no communication. You can't really see the light from any of the four corners. There's no communication or messaging or signage for any pedestrians whatsoever. I've documented the way that people really, I think, correctly misuse it. They interpret the right of way for them that's not legally there. And there's also a phenomenon that when I'm at that corner, because there's no message designed for me, I sometimes get the signals crossed. I sometimes misread whether it's my right of way or not because I'm reading the green light for them and the red light for them. And then I'll cross against traffic, even though I've done the due diligence of trying to interpret the signs. I'm so attached to this idea as being like a real phenomenon that I feel like it's called eavesdropping. I want to call this experience the problem of eavesdropping and a bad intersection. And it sends me into traffic because they're not being communicated to and they're having to listen in on other conversations. And as a result, misinterpret the rules of the road. How do you feel about that?That's interesting. Eavesdropping is a really interesting term for that. What if the signal went away? There is power and safety in ambiguity in the right places. I wouldn't say it's on a 45-mile-an-hour road, but in the center of Hudson, if the traffic signal went away and there was no clear direction, then that gives the pedestrian a chance to own the intersection because the driver doesn't know what to expect. They have to go slowly because they're oncoming cars. There's a pedestrian, there's a cyclist, there's a dog, there's a little kid.You have to actually take the cues of the environment to inform your behavior rather than be an automaton where it's like, green go, red stop, and use your brain. When you have a slow environment, it allows us to process information much more rapidly and in a way that positively influences people's behavior around you. And as a pedestrian, if you're walking down the middle of the street and you have someone who's actually paying attention to you because they don't feel like they're safe moving through the intersection, that kind of gives you power back. That gives you the ability to take your rightful place in the hierarchy of urban streets and be the primary user in that environment.Thank you so much, Mike. It was good to see you. I appreciate your time. I really appreciate you accepting this invitation.Thanks, Peter. Good to see you. Take care. 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Ben Dietz is the Founder & Chief Strategy Officer of Rangelife, a Superformat Design Group in Brooklyn. Previously, he spent 16 years at VICE, and was a co-founder of VIRTUE, it’s award-winning agency. He sends out an amazing newsletter [SIC]: A Digest of Developments, and is the organizer of Breakfast Club BK an open breakfast on Wednesday mornings in Brooklyn that has spawned a growing network of breakfasts around the world. FYI. I will be launching, with Mark DePace of The Friendly City Creative Club, Breakfast Club HUDSON at Kitty’s by the train station in November. Reach out.I start all of my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She lives up here named Suzanne Snider. She teaches oral history. It's such a beautiful question. I use it all the time, but it's such a big question. I kind of over explain it the way that I'm doing now. Before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want. Now, with that lead up, the question is, where do you come from?Well, I come from Syracuse, New York, which was the family seat for about 150 years. My family company relocated there in the 1840s from New York City. It was a lighting concern and made kerosene lanterns and that sort of thing to light the railroads and streets of a burgeoning America. I grew up in Syracuse. I was there until I was 18 when I moved to Philadelphia to go to college and then to New York. But Syracuse is a real touchstone for me for a variety of different reasons. So when people ask where I'm from, that's it.What does it mean to be from Syracuse? How do you think about what it was like to grow up in Syracuse?There are many places in the world, probably, but in America, certainly, where there's this joke, if you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes, it'll change. But Syracuse truly is like that. I grew up under overcast skies my entire childhood. Partly cloudy was our equivalent of a sunny day. Rain and snow constantly. And I never thought about it as a young person, but I realized as an adult that what it did was it made me adaptable. And it made me love improvisation, not in a UCB way. But living in the moment and trying to make extemporaneous decisions and looking for and relishing serendipity, because you never know what's going to happen in 15 minutes. So you have to be prepared for all of it and you have to relish the changeIs that lake effect weather?It is. Lake effect is commonly attributed to snow in the winter. It's the accumulation of moisture in the clouds over the Great Lakes, which then gets dumped west of Lake Ontario in Syracuse's case. But the lake effect happens all year round. Syracuse is just far enough west, more so than Rochester, more so than Buffalo, that it really gets the brunt of that stuff.What did young Ben in Syracuse want to be when he grew up?I was always a talker. I used to be told when I was a kid that I should be a lawyer, which I always took as a compliment, because I thought lawyers are powerful and high earners and all that stuff. What I have come to realize over the course of time is that they really meant, you talk too much, you should shut up. But it was in my blood.That's a cruel interpretation.I'm a glass half full person in spite of myself. No matter what they intended, the way I took it was as part of the reinforcement. But yeah, I thought I'd be a lawyer. The family company, which had existed for 140 years by the time I became aware of it, was never an interest of mine. I always wanted to get out of Syracuse. I always wanted to experience other things. I always felt like I would move.What was your relationship with that family business? What was it like to know that you were part of a traditional legacy like that?It's important to note that the company was sold when I was 15. So I didn't have time to develop a full relationship to it. But it instilled in me the sense that things are going to be okay, things are durable, the world is ordered and predictable to a degree, so that you don't have to compensate for it, it will sort itself out. That's what informs my general glass half full mentality. But it was a pull, it was a keystone of the community. It was a pull in my life. It was an organizing factor in all of our family gatherings, and all that sort of stuff. It was obviously a point of pride and esteem.Do you have a story about being a kid in the business? Was it a retail business?No, it's a manufacturing business. The Dietz company, R.E. Dietz, made lighting. It began making literally handheld kerosene lanterns, the sort of things that you see nowadays on nostalgic campsites. But in the 20th century it moved into various other kinds of lighting. So it got into construction signals, barricade lights and road signs and that sort of stuff. When I was a kid, you'd frequently drive around and you'd see a Dietz sign on the construction barricade that you were driving past. That was always a fun, that was our version of an I spy kind of thing.That's amazing. Largest manufacturer of lanterns. That's such a beautiful thing to be able to say.Yeah, that moment long predated my life and probably my father's life. That was probably the early 1900s. But after electrification, less need for kerosene lanterns. But yeah, it was a cool thing. I mainly remember going to the factory where my father's corporate offices were. My father would go to his office sometimes on the weekends, my brother and I would just run around the empty factory floors, which smelled of grease and metal and were huge and mysterious and risky. That was a lot of fun.I grew up in Rochester and I had a moment maybe 10 years ago now where I encountered somebody from Buffalo, a fellow Western New Yorker, and I was like, what is it? Every time I meet somebody from Western New York, I click with them in some way that's different than somebody from New England or whatever. And this person said very quickly, oh, well, that's because we're Midwesterners. And something in me clicked. I knew that I wasn't from New York City, even though I was from New York State. I knew that I wasn't from New England, because that was just different and too far east or something. I'm not from Massachusetts. But I didn't really know where I was from. And when that person said, you're from the Midwest, it made sense to me. Do you feel about that?I don't identify with that at all. To me, and this is no disrespect to Midwesterners, but the Midwest is about a certain kind of conservatism and stuckism that relishes the traditions and expectations of the past. What I always felt, and I put it down to the weather, was that we're about the next thing. I don't know that that's a Syracuse thing so much as it's a me thing. But that Midwestern stuckism is very much the opposite of the way I feel about it.And you felt like you were from somewhere in being from Syracuse.Oh, yeah. Syracuse is a lifestyle, it's a mindset. It's funny, I'm a little surprised to hear somebody from Buffalo ascribe Midwesternism to themselves, because I have not spent a lot of time in Buffalo, but it seems like they would be closer. But my friend, William Strobeck, the video director who makes skateboard films and movies for Supreme, the brand, is funny. We grew up skateboarding together in Syracuse, and he is a real diehard believer in bringing the guys that he films skateboarding with to Syracuse, because he feels like there's something about the atmosphere there that requires them to approach their trade in a different way. So I don't know, maybe it's, I wouldn't have heard it described as a spiritual vortex a la Mesa, Arizona or whatever, but maybe there's that too. The salt, the great salt deposits under Onondaga Lake are attracting some kind of magnetism.That's amazing. So tell me a little bit about where you are right now, and the kind of work that you're doing.I'm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for the last 25 years. I say that to people, and they are generally kind of aghast, as if Greenpoint didn't exist 25 years ago. And it kind of didn't, it was really the end of the earth when we moved here by necessity. I act as a consultant and advisor to media companies, brands, and agencies in the advertising and marketing space.It has a lot to do with trying to help them find what I call superformats, which are essentially concepts, intellectual property concepts that emanate from their brand values, and then can be turned into many different expressions at different consumer touchpoints.So for instance, this conversation is a newsletter, right? It could also be released as a podcast, although you don't do it that way, as I understand. It could be a video, it could be a series of quotations, put into a book of aphorisms, it could be recorded in front of a live audience and could be ticketed, or it could be a membership benefit.The smartest thing that you say today could be put on a t-shirt and turned into a piece of merchandise. It's about trying to figure out where companies have those deep and intrinsic levels of value, and then creating strategies to bring them to life and to reap some of that value.Where did this idea of superformat come from? What was the inspiration for that?Well, it's an interesting, the secret of it really is that it's not a new concept at all. It's Walt Disney's ecosystem drawing or whatever that thing is called from 1959. This is what we built in my many years at Vice, taking magazine stories and filming them and then attaching brands to them and that sort of stuff. So the inspiration is just in successful businesses in the past.The thing though that has happened is that attitudes like COPE, C-O-P-E, create once, produce everywhere, which is a truism in media production, has obscured the fact that it is not enough simply to just version everything. You have to be strategic about the ways that you sequence, the way that you deploy, the way that you create. And so what superformat tries to do is just give a new tag to a tried and true practice so that people look at it differently and don't just apply the same playbook again, but rather think strategically about what they're doing.And what do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?To me, it's an endless exercise of, oh, wouldn't it be cool if... That was the thing that I always loved about... I began my career in the music business. I worked then at a company called Heavy doing digital, moving media content. And this is in the early aughts before broadband penetration.And then at Vice, where it's this constant conversation with your friends and like-minded people of, whoa, that thing seen from a 15 degree different angle could be this thing. Wouldn't that be cool? And you start every conversation there. And then, of course, you assess and decide, well, yes, that really would be cool. Or no, actually, that would be not cool. Let's not do that one. But it's a constant process of discovery and creation, which just makes it incredibly fun.When would you say you first sort of encountered this work and discovered it was something you could make a living doing?Well, I think in a lot of respects, it starts very early in absorbing the business philosophies of skateboarding and fashion magazines, which I loved as a kid, where the ads are content and the contents are ads for all intents and purposes. You know what I mean? You're reading about a new release or a new pro skateboarder or whatever. And really what that press copy exists to do is to inform you about consumer choices that you're able to make. But it infused me with the sense that things can be more than one. They can have more than one kind of asset value. And that was, I think, the part of it.I had a real aha moment at VICE in my first year there in 2004. The first thing I ever worked on was the 10-year anniversary party. And at that party, the brand 55DSL, which was the sort of action sports sub-label of Diesel, sponsored the party. And as a deliverable for that sponsorship, we had photographers, Ryan McGinley, Terry Richardson, Tim Barber, you know, all of whom were becoming giants in their field at the time and since went on to both fame and infamy. We had them taking photos of the party. And two weeks after the party, they exhibited their photos from the party at the 55DSL store on Union Square. And we had them come back and take more photos of that party. And then add that second set of photos to the first set. And then all of the photos went to the 55DSL store in London. And the process repeated. And the process repeated again.And I just thought to myself, oh my God, this is an endlessly repeatable format. This is as scalable as you want it to be. The party can be gigantic. It can happen in your store, or it can happen as a magazine, or it can happen in whatever format you want. And from that point, it was just like, okay, how do we take this thing we're creating and make more out of it? Like create more surface area that consumers can attach to, that sponsors can attach to, that we can attach ourselves to and can learn from and build a business out of.You talk about superformat as ownable, modular, and scalable. These are the qualities of a superformat.Yeah, those are exact words that I use. I don't know if you've read me say that somewhere. Although I would say, Peter, if you were just coming up with those words on your own, it would also be proof of concept for the idea. So yes, ownable, modular, and scalable.Coming out of what you just mentioned, it seems like coming up out of skateboard culture and music culture, you just had a totally different relationship with business, I imagine. What was it like coming into the world of business through those avenues?Well, I think it has to do with being really passionate about something and then realizing, oh my God, I can, somebody, whether it's me or not, somebody can make a living at this. You can do this as a job. I like this too much for this to be work. How could it possibly be work? And then having that switch flipped, then going, wait a minute, if I can have this much fun doing work, why would I ever do work that I can't have fun at? So I think that was really the kind of macro lesson from it.Your experience at VICE, I mean, I remember being in meetings with civic innovators and journalism people when you guys were exploding and sort of redefining what journalism was meant to be. What was it like being at Vice during that time? And how do you look back on that period?It was incredibly fun because it was just, we felt like we were making up the rules as we went. And as much as in hindsight, that might seem like a naive thing to say, most of the rules that we made up were, I think, super positive, super additive and helped define an industry that had tremendous promise and still does.But the main thing about it was that I worked with my friends. I worked with really smart people who all could have made more money anywhere else, but who really felt like we're doing a thing that is unique. And so it's worth us being here. And very few of them were trained to begin with. Most people learn on the fly, myself included. And that meant an atmosphere that was really open to possibility because nobody knew the rules and nobody said, well, we have to, we must do it this way because that's the way things are done. It was like, let's see what happens. That was informed by this kind of fearlessness that came from the editorial side of just getting into situations that you didn't know or understand terribly well and making yourself a fly on the wall and reporting on them.I talked recently in my podcast, [SIC] Talks, to Jesse Pearson, who was the editor in chief of Vice Magazine for a long time. And they pioneered a strategy called immersionism, which I give Jesse credit for sort of inventing or at least coining. He demurs because he's conscious of the shoulders of giants that he's standing on. But in any case, that immersionism, I thought, was really powerful. And it became a way for us to explain, for me on the commercial side, a way to explain to our brand partners how they needed to interface with our audience. It was like, if you don't get in and speak the language of the people that you're talking to, in vernacular terms, you will never mean anything to them. And to steal your phrase, that business of meaning is the value.That's beautiful. I had never heard that term, immersionism, and it seems so apt. You were also the co-founder of Virtue, right? How did that come about? And what was Virtue?Virtue started in 2006, much earlier than the widely told narrative, because it was relaunched, or launched properly above the line in 2016. But it started in 2006 out of a totally extemporaneous conversation about a movie. We were approached by Crispin Porter Bogusky and Arnold, who were jointly the AORs for the Truth Campaign, the anti-smoking campaign. They wanted us to do, they liked some early, very early digital video content that Vice had made, and they wanted Vice to make a film about smoking in the States, about the contradictions, fundamental contradictions of the laws around smoking, or the laws in parallel. Like, why can't you buy a gun that is as deadly as a cigarette, when you can just buy cigarettes that are equally deadly?Anyway, we didn't have an entity that could make that movie. And so I just said, why don't we just start an ad agency? We'll just create a separate LLC, and it'll be a services division. And, you know, the executives at Vice at the time were just like, okay, Dietz, whatever, go for it. And so, yeah, myself and a guy named Spencer Baim, who had just joined Vice at the time to help with strategy. Spencer and I kind of kicked it off. Eddy Moretti directed that film, and it became this agency capacity. And what it allowed us to do was to enter into conversations with brands that could never sit in Vice's editorial universe, or next to Vice's editorial universe. You know, people that were too conservative, or people that were just, you know, I'm not talking to Vice's demographic, but wanted to harness our insight about young people and our sort of creative ways of working.And the fact that we were also incredibly cheap compared to the rest of the business, because we had no overhead and fixed costs that most agencies did, allowed us to create this really, really successful offshoot of the company, which towards the end was an equal contributor to its bottom line to advertising and the studio business and everything else.How do you think about brand? And how do you talk about it? And how do you feel like it's changed in terms of how one builds a brand? Is this an annoying question?I am such an intrinsic believer in the power of brand and in the idea that it is the starting point and the center of equity for every great company that I kind of don't know how to address the counterpoint. To me, it's like, if you don't have a brand, what do you have, you have a widget, and that widget is not interesting. Brand is interest, right? Brand makes interest, it makes attachment, it makes emotional connection. And these are the reasons that people participate in a conversation in an economy with commercial concerns.I went to an event last night. It was a taping of On Strategy, the podcast. It was at Wieden in New York. Jonny Bauer, who is the co-founder of FundamentalCo. is a friend, and I was in the building for another event, and I saw Johnny's face on a poster, and so I went to the Wieden thing accidentally, or opportunistically. And there were a couple of panelists who said some very dumb things, like surprisingly dumb for people who are massive leaders in the advertising world. But Johnny said something that I thought was interesting.My friend James Friedman happened to text me. He said, you know, Jonny said brand is a business idea that is far bigger than marketing, and so consequently - this is for agencies - a CMO will always undervalue brand and the strategies to build or grow it. And I thought that was really very much in line with the way I think about it. Like, the brand is the reason to believe, and so that's the ultimate driver of the business.Can you unpack that quote? What are the implications of that?Well, and I think this gets back to superformat a little bit. The way that we think of marketing in a lot of respects is communication of a specific message at a specific time to a specific audience with a specific intention or behavior, right? And what brand ought to do is create a world of possibility that allows you to go beyond all of those overlaps of that particular Venn diagram and create value that is more ephemeral, but also more durable, counterintuitively.I explained this a lot by saying like, what you ought to do as a brand to communicate is think about how you're talking to your consumer, but also how you're talking to your employees, how you're talking to your competitive set, how you're talking to people who don't care particularly about what you're doing, but just are looking for value in the world to hang on to. And so that to me is like, if you're a marketer, and I think this is what Johnny was getting at, if you're a marketer, your KPIs are only based around the moment, the point of transaction, the particular buying audience, and you're missing the opportunity to create value for a much wider set of people and therefore create affinity with them at the point when they are ready to be a part of your consumer set. So that's I think what he's getting at. And look, public companies and quarterly reporting drive that focus on the near term and the very specific moment. I think that's deleterious and I think it's a factor to try to resist. I realize that it's not one that's going to go away, but I think being conscious of it is useful.You mentioned that Superformat goes back a long way, that Disney articulated something similar. To what degree has the way that one builds a brand changed or not changed over time?Well, to me, that's a question of tactic for the moment, right? For instance, there have been all of these stories recently about brands needing to be weird on TikTok and using Nutter Butter, the cookie brand, as an example of a brand that has leaned fully into almost surreal kinds of messaging. To me, that's just the 2024 version of the durable tactic, which is speaking to your audience in the language they speak to each other in, right? In harnessing vernacular. And so I don't know that it's changed all that much over time. At a high level, I think it's more that it's changed at a tactical level and that the tactics change so fast now because we have so many different points of interface that it seems like it's different when in fact it has been pretty consistent throughout.What kind of methods do you use when you're engaged with a client? What is the role of research in your own process, your own work in either developing or working for a brand?It's funny, partially because of the first question that you asked, or maybe the second one about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said, I talked a lot and I still do, but I really like to listen. And what I have come to understand is that listening is my love language in some respects, right? I want to be listened to and I want to listen. And so I try to listen a lot. I don't do a lot of extensive research. I don't really pursue a lot of counterfactuals. I don't really get deep into the library, so to speak. I try to listen to people in conversations and respond to the things that I hear them say or the present concerns.Because my belief is that people are working out their points of view while they talk most of the time. And so it's easier to get them to reveal what is actually at issue by just letting them talk than by asking them to write it in brief or to state the case. And people resort to oversimplification in that case. So I try to listen a lot. And then I try to apply that to what I think the business problem that we're trying to solve is. I think a lot of times we are encouraged to, because of a reliance or over-reliance on brief, we're encouraged to think, what is the near-term solution that we can come up with to package and to sell as the product right this minute? What I'm much more interested in doing is going, how do we create long-term lasting value and then figure out how to package and sell that?Who out there is doing this really well when you think about what's one of the best examples of brands embodying the quote that you mentioned from Johnny and also manifesting the potential of Superformats?I go to IP-driven examples a lot. One of my favorites, and not just because I literally was listening to it before we got on and started having a chat. I think about the podcast How Long Gone. I don't know if you're familiar. So it's a podcast that's between two friends. It's been going since March of 2020. It was started at the very beginning of the pandemic, and it was sort of a joke about how long are we going to be gone from the world? And they have a three times weekly conversation every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it's now coming up on five years. But the thing that they do is they resist the notion that the podcast is a product that needs to be sold, and instead they look at it as a platform for their various pursuits.They say, we are like a musical artist, and so we should have band merch, or we are like a speaker series tour, and so we should have public appearances, or we are like a focus group, and so we should have agency services. And they just sort of start these things up spontaneously throughout. And I think that's a really modern way of doing it, and I think it is indicative of how the creator economy is going to lead us into the entertainment world of the future. Brands are built organically out of a moment of creation. They find an audience. The audience says, hey, wouldn't it be cool if you did this? And the creator brand reacts to it, makes that thing, and then builds organically from that.So I really like them a lot, and I see brands, particularly in the DTC space, who are creative and are sort of like creator-minded and peers, let's call it, of a lot of the digital creators doing the same thing. Vacation, for instance, is a good example of this. Those guys created an online radio station, and then they decided they were going to be a lifestyle brand based on 80s relaxation, and they said, what all goes into 80s relaxation? Well, it's suntan lotion, and it's events, and it's lip balm, and it's apps, and it's partnerships, and it's all of this sort of stuff. And they just build organically, and then they added the services division, which, from my experience at Virtue, I know is a really valuable way to both ensconce and to expand.One of my first conversations was with Grant McCracken. Anyway, I'm a huge fanboy of Grant McCracken, and he talks about how he's been studying consumer culture and brands forever. And in the conversation, [Grant McCracken on Multiplicity & the Future of Culture] he talked about how the new rule is multiplicity, that in the old days, if you were a brand, the instinct was you needed to be very narrow and focused and repeat and kind of never really break the code ever. But now we live in a world where I think the same thing as you're describing is that there's almost a need to be many, many things all at once very differently, but all coming from some same place. How do you manage that?I take issue to some degree with the word need, because I believe regarding it as a need is a path to misery. Regarding it as an opportunity is a path to pleasure and success. To be able to say, I am not limited to being a maker of, in Vacation's case, sunscreen. I can also be a maker of experience. I can also be a maker of merchandise. I can also be a maker of membership. It's incredibly liberating. If you said to somebody, if I said to you, Peter, THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING is now a brand and therefore you have to have a merch line and an experience division and a helicopter maintenance team, you'd go crazy. How am I supposed to build and execute to that? The answer is don't. But know that if you suddenly have proximity to an airfield and a helicopter mechanic, that you can get into helicopter maintenance. Why not?Need was not the right word. I was thinking in part that it's just a tolerance. I was thinking more on the consumer side or the audience side that there's an openness to experiencing the multiple personalities of a brand. A brand doesn't need to be one thing all the time, whereas that was really the guiding logic, at least when I started. You just need it to be one thing all the time forever.Yeah. And look, a lot of respects it comes from the ever deeper parasocial relationship we have with the icons of our lives, right? The entertainers or the politicians or our social graph. The sense that you can see the full breadth and depth of a person's life through their public facing expressions makes you realize that we are all greater than the sum of our parts. And so it is natural to wonder what are the other parts that create this fascinating sum or fascinating whole rather. And you pursue it. And you want that from brands. You want that from other people. You want it from colleagues and coworkers. And I think it's the real modern sort of tension is what, for instance, Chappel Roan is experiencing at the moment where she has become such an obsession and such an icon for people who want to know everything about her. And she's saying, hey, at a certain point, I want to be able to stop this. That to me is a parallel discussion to Superformat in a certain respect. It's about saying at the beginning of the process, what are we willing to do and what are we not willing to do? What are we good at and what are we not good at? And so how do we sequence the things that we want to go forward with as opposed to committing to being everything all the time and just burning ourselves out?So what kind of guidance do you give to Chappel Roan navigating this? What's the lesson? You brought her up and I'm just wondering, what's the lesson or what do you think about when you think about the tension that she's experiencing?I mean, look, I think I would counsel her to be a lot more gnomic, if I think I'm saying that word the right way. She should be more unknowable because I think vulnerability demands more vulnerability. I think in these parasocial relationships, her music makes her so knowable that to then have to ratchet that up in public and in public facing things, it seems unsustainable.And so this is, I think, what we're seeing in her backlash at the moment is the rubber band snapping back the other way. I think there are lots of examples of artists over time who have made themselves mysterious and unknowable, and that makes them incredibly attractive. And I think she probably needs a little more of that and a little less of the open dialogue kind of thing. It's not going to be easy because she's already set a precedent, but it is probably important for her mental health and her continued success.You used a word that I want to hear you talk more about, which is parasocial, which is not a word I think I really encounter. It's recent to me, parasocial. It's been five to 10 years, you know what I mean? But it seems like something that is very... Anyway, what does parasocial mean and what makes it an important concept to know?Well, parasocial is the idea that we have a relationship with people or entities that we don't actually encounter person-to-person or face-to-face or firsthand. Like a podcaster that you listen to religiously whose voice you know and whose daily routines you have familiarity with, but you have never met and that you have never spoken to in person. That's someone you have a parasocial relationship with. And fans of artists have parasocial relationships with those artists. What social media has done over the last 15, close to 20 years now, is given us the opportunity to establish, expand, deepen those kinds of parasocial relationships with the creatives in the world that inspire us. And that then makes us know that we can have similar relationships with other entities and want them and want them to be deeper.Because I think what you want out of any decision that you make, any choice, is that it is a good choice and that it is a valid choice. And so you want the other entity on the other side of that choice to communicate validation and to say, I agree with you or I agree with your action. Deepening these parasocial relationships makes you feel like, all right, I'm doing a thing that Chaperone thinks is cool. Because I've listened to Chaperone enough for her to say, this choice is one that I would make too. So it's a good one.So we've just got a little bit of time left. What are the different Superformats of Ben Dietz?Funny you should say that. A former colleague of mine, I was describing Rangelife, which is the Superformat studio that I operate. And I was describing it to a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago, a former colleague, a guy named Tom Punch. And Tom said, to really make this stick, you've got to demonstrate a successful Superformats yourself, of your own. Which was very apt advice, which I really appreciate. And the two that are most important to me are [SIC], which is a weekly newsletter that I send for free on Thursdays. It takes 100 or so, typically, sources that I've collected over the course of each week. And that I organize in a way that helps me pattern match what is happening in the world. I say euphemistically, it's like scraping the plaque off my brain. But what it also does is it gives me a jumping off point to then have conversations with other people who are similarly engaged in the world. So I can understand where the plaque on their brains is accumulating. That becomes an audio conversation. It becomes a video conversation. It becomes a series of whole quotes. At some point, it will become a standalone newsletter of its own. A [SIC] talk newsletter. And so SIC is a Superformat, this aggregation of inspirations and sources.The other one is Breakfast Club. And Breakfast Club is an accidental community that I started in 2021 just by going to the same restaurant for breakfast every Wednesday and saying, hey, I'm going to be there. You're invited. Come hang out. You don't have to RSVP. You don't have to tell me you're coming. You don't have to buy a ticket. You don't have to show up with a set of opinions or there's no agenda. Just come and eat breakfast and let's hang out. And that has turned into not only this weekly breakfast in Williamsburg where I host, but now in 25 cities around the world, there are people who get together regularly in this open format breakfast kind of thing. And it's a way for them to just be among like minds, right?And of course that leads to networking. It leads to collaborations. It has led to jobs. It's led to relationships. But really what it's meant to do is just kind of be a vibe and have people opt into it. And we can imagine that turning into a conference or turning into, I've been asked about doing merchandise for it. And I've been asked about doing it on behalf of companies and that sort of thing. So it's a Superformat unto itself as well.Nice. The openness about the Breakfast Club seems sort of provocative in how open it is. Do you know what I mean?Yeah, well, sort of. I mean, the thing is, I find because I worked for such a long time on the commercial side of business and in, for all intents and purposes, sales, I'm very sensitive to people who can't not sell. And there are, as I call them, capitalized salespeople who can never turn it off. And what I wanted to make sure of was that if I was going to create a paradigm that anybody could participate in, that capitalized salespeople would show up, start their sales pitch that they can't help but doing, and they immediately feel like they were in the wrong place. And be forced instead to listen. And what happened, because salespeople, when they realize that they don't have an audience, they stop talking because there's nobody to sell.And so what I wanted to do was make sure that if anybody like that ever turned up, that it would be a situation where they were immediately like, I am going to get no benefit from talking anymore. Maybe I should just listen. So yeah, it's sort of weird. I'd never thought about the fact that I designed it that way, but I guess I did. So yeah, that's the idea of the openness. And what it leads to ultimately is like a kid who has just graduated from college will end up sitting down next to a CEO. And neither of them has talked to their opposite in years, or maybe ever. The college kid has probably never talked to a CEO. CEO is not allowed to talk to young people or college kids because they're surrounded by their executive support. And so the two of them have a conversation that is always illuminatory. And so yeah, that's the goal.It's very sweet. And it reminds me of, I think it's called Open Space Technology. I've been sort of curious about facilitating groups and how group dynamics and all that stuff work. Have you ever encountered the idea of open space technology?I haven't. I'm interested.I think you're kind of doing it. And I think it's a principle of organizing meetings. And there's some, it's all the principles are, it's like whoever shows up is who is meant to show up. You start and you finish when you finish. It's almost like a structure of no structure.Lack of intention. Yeah. No, that's interesting. That is very much what we do. It was not under those auspices or with that name in mind, but yeah, that's very much what we do.Cool. Ben, thank you so much. We're at the end of time. This has been a blast. I really appreciate you sharing your time with me.Oh, of course, Peter. Listen, and I would just say that Breakfast Club format for what it's worth is open to anybody. So if you are reading this and you want to start one, you have my blessing, get in touch and I'll give you a few pointers.Beautiful. All right. Thank you, sir.My pleasure, Peter. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe