THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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

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

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

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

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