THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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

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

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

Lindsey Wehking is the Chief Investigative Strategy Officer (CSO) at Nonfiction Research in Brooklyn. If I remember correctly, I first met Lindsey in 2021 in Brooklyn, when I reached out to Nonfiction in a fanboy kind of way. I ran into Lindsey at the 4As Stratfest in New York City, where she presented (with Jim Stengel!) “Why taking your clients into nightclubs is the future of insights.” I was excited to talk to her about her path to this work, and how they work at Nonfiction.I think you may know this, but I say it anyway, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a neighbor of mine who helps people tell their story. And I stole it because it's a big, beautiful question, but because it's a big, beautiful question, I over-explain it, like I'm doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know you're in absolute control.You can answer and not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?I knew this question was coming, and I purposely had to resist the urge to over-engineer. I feel like it's a beautiful question, but it's also the kind of question people over-engineer their answers to. And so it's funny, I just closed my eyes and tried to figure out what visual came to mind.And the image that kept coming to mind was of me when I was about eight years old, sitting in my dad's burgundy Ford Ranger, a 92 Ford Ranger, in our driveway with him, listening to NPR. My parents were notoriously defects from the Catholic church, and so I feel like NPR sort of became our religion. And my dad and I, he would pick me up from school when I was a kid, and my dad loved the heat, so he loved to sit in a hot car and bake like a poor man's sauna after work.And I loved it too, so we would just sit in his hot car, sauna-ing, listening to very in-depth reporting on some anthropologist talking about the history of sex in human society, or what the Tootsies were up to. And I don't know why, but I feel like something about my personality is just forever ingrained in a shitty Ford Ranger listening to NPR with my dad.And where were you? Where did you grow up?Right outside of St. Louis, Missouri, on the east side of the river, so Illinois, so we were kind of edging the great western gateway.Yeah. And you said they're sort of notoriously, I can't remember how you said it, but they left the Catholic church. What made that significant?Both my parents came from, my dad came from a large Catholic family, and my mom came from a smaller Catholic family. But I feel like they in the era of scandal in the Catholic church, all of the priest abuse. I feel like at that time, every week a new leader of the Catholic church you found out was gambling away everyone's donations.And so that had a big, especially my dad, that had a really profound impact on him because I think he yearned so much to believe and part of believing, especially believing in the Catholic doctrine was such a big part of belonging in his family. And yet he just couldn't stomach what he felt like was a lot of the hypocrisy and the contradiction. And because of that, he was such a seeker.I think that's why the church of NPR, I joke, kind of was the church of our family because without the church, I think he was looking for other ways to seek connection and wisdom and knowing and not being able to put a God up there. I think we just all put, I don't know, nerd stuff, which may not be the best God, but it's not a terrible substitute.And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?When I, God, I was probably in like kindergarten or first grade and my dad took me to work and my dad was a, he was like a network architect. He was an IT at, at Edward Jones, which is like a very old school financial institution that's headquartered in St. Louis. And, and I remember walking in and seeing all of these cubicle people and up here, I found cubicle people fascinating.I was like, just like, there was all this like drama. Like he would tell me about how like, like lunches would go missing in the office fridge. And there would be like, like there'd be all this, like, like my dad was like a little bit of like a armchair anthropologist.And so he loved describing the, like the politics that would happen in meetings and the way certain people would like, you know, kind of peacock for attention or the way certain people wouldn't speak their mind. And, and his way of like viewing the corporate world, I just like fell in love with. And I think at some point I like wanted to grow up to study cubicle people.I was like, this is, this is my purpose. I will study cubicle, which is honestly not far off from what I think I do now.What, yeah, you mentioned the anthropology even in the NPR segment and your driveway moment with your dad. Was there sort of anthropology or culture in your, in your childhood or?We were so f*****g white. Like we were so white and without like much, much traditional lineage, I think because of all, like all, you know, we were German, German Catholic and German Protestant. And so because so much of our probably like ancestral ethnic lineage was so tied up in religion.When we left religion, we kind of were lost of all that. And I think like, I haven't looked into this, but I, I presume there is a whole cohort of white people who feel this way of like, you know, they at one point or another, there was some break from religion in their family. And then you're kind of like left without any tradition or without any real anchor or sense of self.And like, I don't, you know, honestly connect to like my German-ness or my English-ness. And so as a, yeah, maybe that, maybe that void is part of what made me want to know so much about how other people lived and prayed and loved. I don't know.Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Do you, do you have, can you tell me a story about that void? I'm, I'm identifying a lot with what you've just described and I'm just wondering if, because I know you went, you studied anthropology in college, so there must've been some sort of appetite for that at a relatively young age. I wonder, do you remember what it was like to sort of be in that void?Oh, I feel like I'm still in the void. I don't know. Maybe we never leave the void.Yeah. I, I mean, I, you know, I think for the, the first few decades of like trying to figure out who I was, was defined mostly by this insatiable appetite to understand others that like, in some ways I almost didn't have a sense of self. Like it was, it was so, it was so outward looking, but in, in pursuit of, of just like wanting to know how other people lived and found happiness and found safety.And, and, and I was always very like fascinated with communities that were kind of on the margins. And one of the biggest, one of the first like big ethnographies I did when I was in college was on a, a subculture called Juggalos. I don't know if you're familiar with Insane Clown Posse.I have a note, I have a note here to ask you about that.Did you, like, have you, have you ever listened to their music?I haven't listened. I don't think I've listened to the music.Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.I mean, it was very like, I mean, you know, for, for people who don't know, like Juggalos was what they call like a horror, I think this, the genre is actually called horror rap. And so they were two white guys out of Detroit who started in hip hop and rap in, I think they were coming up in kind of the nineties, but by the early two thousands, mid two thousands, they had really cultivated this like insane fan base. And they, you know, were one of like, I think we're kind of seeing a resurgence now in like pop music that has like true ritual.And like, you get dressed up, you paint your face, you have singalongs, like it's, it's becoming like, there was a time where pop, you didn't like, didn't have fandom that way. But, but Juggalo culture was like true intense fandom. And it was like, it was a very true music subculture.Like it, you know, existed in the lineage of like other cult music fandoms, like Deadheads and Fish Fans and, and, you know, Kiss. But, you know, it was specifically kind of speaking to, you know, they grew up in a pretty poor area of like white Detroit. And, and so a lot of the like, the culture that they grew up in was in the music and in the performance.And so they would wear face paint. And so they would dress like clowns, but they were called serial killer clowns. And, and so they played with both like, these like dark circus themes.And, and, you know, a lot of like themes around like serial killers and violence, but, and then they would, they would dress up as like dark, kind of like they throw these dark carnival shows where Juggalos would have like clown face paint, they would have these little like this little hatchet man was their logo. They would like spray the audience with Faygo, just like a cheap, like really cheap generic brand of soda that you could find in and around. I mean, you could find a lot of places now, but it was especially in and around Detroit at the time.And but, but these, you know, people considered themselves family, and they would travel all over the country to go to these shows. And they would spend days and weeks and everyone would like party in the parking lot for hours before the show. And one of the reasons why I was so interested in them at the time, the FBI just classified them as like a gang.And there was like a lot of fear around Juggalos, because, you know, it's a lot of young white men who appear to be very angry and are wearing like killer clown face paint. Like, you know, you can imagine how that would like scare the mothers anytime they came to town. But one thing that I was really interested in is like, what's really, what's really the pull here?Like, because I think it's, you know, it's part of that era where we were just like, very dismissive of hip hop and rap as just being like, about violence and mistreatment of women. And, you know, there was definitely like, if you just consumed the stuff at the surface, you definitely got a lot of that. And there's definitely themes within that music that like, can be degrading towards women and does have violence in it.But I think one of the most interesting things is that when you, when you talk to a lot of Insane Clown Posse super fans, there is, there's a lot of history of personal violence, of abuse in their family, of sexual abuse. And a lot of the violence in the music, not all of it, but a lot of it is actually towards predators. So when you actually listen to a lot of the music, it's, it's revenge against predators and abusers.And so that was when I started to realize, oh, this is like a, this is like a, this is a trauma outlet, you know, like people are trying to kind of process their, their trauma, and their abuse through this like dark carnival. And there's actually like a great history of dark carnivals in human history, like even going back to medieval ages, like the dark carnival, and carnivals in medieval culture were a place in which you could, they call it turning the world upside down, that you would invert the social norms of a society for a day, as a way of kind of purging a lot of feelings of pain and oppression and injustice. And they sort of did that with the music, like for, for this one night, you were connected to everyone in the crowd.And like, yeah, you were like screaming curse words, and like wearing fucked up paint. And there's a little like hatchet man running around stage. But it's also fun.Like, it's very fun. There's like a lightness, even in all the darkness. And I don't know, no matter what you think about the music for the people, like, I just, I thought there was something very beautiful and in that.Yeah, it's wonderful. It's really beautiful. I had not paid nearly enough attention to sort of understand everything that was happening there.And so this was, this was an ethnography that you did while you were in college. Is that right?Yeah, yeah, it was like a, it was like an Anthro 101 class, like everyone picked something very simple. And I picked, we had to like, I dragged my best friend, we had to drive to Des Moines, Iowa, we were in Missouri, eight hours one evening to like go to a concert. So I could we could get like a concert experience before we finished writing the paper.And it was the night before like our major journalism exam, like this is the exam that like makes or breaks you if you fail it, you can no longer continue your career in journalism school. And we were like, it was like 1am we were like in Des Moines, Iowa, just like covered in Faygo and like confetti. And we were like, f**k, we have we have seven hours to get to class to take this exam, or our career in journalism is over.But we made it and we passed the test.So catch me up. Where are you right now? And what are you doing for work?I'm in Crown Heights, Brooklyn now. And I work for a company called nonfiction research. So we are a, you know, we always say we only do one thing well at nonfiction.And it's deep studies on particular audiences or subcultures or occasions. And we do both qual and quant, but we also do conventional and more unconventional techniques. So I think a lot of the like, actually that, that that story about the about the insane clown posse ethnography is kind of how I got the job.It was like in, in the most unhinged email that I wrote our co founders, the day I found nonfiction. And so we use a host of conventional and kind of unconventional techniques to do those studies. And so that sometimes that is a quantitative study on American sexuality.Sometimes that's we've been on chaperoned into prisons to study the inmate experience. We have been rollerblading with Atlanta rappers to study Atlanta hip hop. We've sat with teachers in lunch rooms, gossiping to kind of understand how they make decisions on field trips.And so that like deeply immersive approach to try to get to the life underneath what, okay, we believe most people are sharing with market researchers is, is basically like what we do now as a company. But when I, you know, when I look back, it was, it was what I was probably trying to do in, in Iowa when I was studying juggalos too.Yeah. When did you discover you could make a living doing what you do?Well, I mean, when I was in college, I was like, it was kind of a, I feel like it was the beginning of anthropology starting to sort of like bleed into the world of brand and marketing. Like there'd obviously been like anthropologist consultants working for brands, but it never really like, I don't know, like you'd never really seen like a shop. I'd never seen a shop really dedicated to it.There were like some like anthropologists doing consulting work that I was like blind emailing at the time, but I just could not, couldn't get any traction with that. And so I, I kind of stumbled into strategy as like a consolation prize to that. And worked in strategy departments and I worked for a big PR firm out of school.And that was during the era where all PR firms were trying to like import strategy into the agency and import creative into the agency. So it was like a, it was a cool time because, you know, I was trying to learn the discipline at the same time that organization was trying to kind of sell the discipline in to the industry of PR. And so they, you know, that came with a lot of, it gave me a lot of opportunity I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.But ultimately I like burned out and was just, I was just tired of not doing anything that felt real. You know, there's so many late nights and long hours and brief writing and nothing ever seemed to come to fruition. And so I was kind of had like a existential crisis as one does in their mid twenties.And yeah, I was thinking about going back to grad school or becoming a bartender or I don't really know. And then I happened to be on LinkedIn one day during that existential crisis. And I saw a job posting that felt like a letter to my soul and I dropped everything I was doing.And I wrote the most unhinged and unprofessional email of my life. And that's how I ended up with Ben and Gunny at Nonfiction.Yeah. What do you remember about your unhinged email?I think the title, the subject line was like dumb strategist for hire. And the, I think I meant, I mean, I mentioned juggalos and drag queens within the body copy. And I mean, it was just like, I just told, I told the stories of kind of everything that I had been doing in my life to in, in search of, in search of, I think, something real about people.And yeah, but I cursed and I told inappropriate stories. And I was like, it's either gonna work or it's gonna fail miserably. But it worked.Yeah. What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?I love, people are so weird and delight. I just love strangers. Like, in some ways, strangers are probably easier for me to relate to than sometimes the people I'm closest to.There's something so beautiful about the container of meeting a stranger and the joy of just being able to watch this person open up to you. I think it's much easier for us to expose ourselves to strangers than to people who depend on us or people we're married to. It just comes with fewer trappings. An interview with a stranger is like the purest expression, I think, sometimes of who we are.And I love it. I just love that you never fully know what they're gonna do. People always surprise you. Trying to find that take or understanding on why someone's doing something or what they want—that other people are dismissing or not paying attention to—that's my f*****g drug. I love that. Because I think we're so quick to form narratives around each other and ourselves. And those stories shape how we perceive each other and perceive ourselves. But that story isn't the only one; there are often many stories happening around us at once. It's about deciding which one to pick up and which one to put down. Can you find a new story about someone that will change how they do something or how they think about something?Like, I don't know, to me, that's just, it's such a joy. Yeah, how about you? Why do you like?Oh, I mean, I'm with you 100%. I mean, yeah, the thrill of people, I feel like I learned kind of late that I'm a people person, you know what I mean? Like, I'm amazed, you know what I mean? I can get really long with people very quickly.Did you think of yourself as, like, what did you think of yourself before?I mean, I guess I knew I was social or something, you know what I mean? Like, but, yeah, but I didn't realize the degree, not the degree, exactly. But it's, well, actually, you know, what I'm thinking about is the science that indicates that sort of a masculine is more, boys are orient more towards objects and girls and the feminine orient more towards people.And so when I say I felt like I discovered I was a people person, I really feel like I discovered, it clicked for me that I have no f*****g interest in breaking something and putting it back together again. My brother, my brother can tell me the technical specifications for every piece of technology in his house. That information glides right off of me.You know what I mean? Yeah. But I'll remember a story or a gesture or, you know, turn afraid or a person.Yeah, that's beautiful. I totally, I totally get that. I totally get that. It's funny because you're in some ways you're still a technician. You're just like a technician of people. You know, there's a similar like, but yeah.So when you, when a client comes to you, when you get a project, what are the first kinds of things that you think about when you're trying to wrap your head around what you want to do and how you want to approach it?I think that question, 'What are we really trying to do here?' haunts me, because people come to research from a lot of different angles. Sometimes they come because someone just told them they needed to do research. So they're just like, 'We need research.' And you're like, 'Oh, for what? And to what end?'Sometimes people come and they've got a really specific business problem. I think maybe an invisible part, the invisible 80% before you even begin a project is just: What are we really trying to find out? And how do you narrow the scope of that? Because often bad research is just because you were trying to go too broad and too big and too wide. It's really hard to get people to narrow on what they really want to learn and what they really want to find out.As a strategist, often when you start asking those questions, you end up climbing up the ladder because you've got to figure out what business problem we're really trying to solve. And then what does that mean for what audience problem? And then what does that mean for what we can actually go and find in the hearts and minds of people?There are a lot of questions you can ask that you can't ask people directly. I think a lot of times in our industry, we try to ask questions of people that they can't really answer. We begin projects with like, 'What's the future of financial services?' not 'How do people feel about money?' But when you're starting with people, you have to begin on their terms and in their language, and in how they think about the world, which is much different than how brand strategists or business people often think about the world.So I think step one is always like, okay, translating all of that - all the brand and the business needs - to what we can actually find out from people. And then from there, I tend to be, we are as a company, just very obsessive about a process we call edge finding. There's so much that is known already, and we're constantly haunted by the idea that we're just going to find something that someone else has already known, and it would be a waste of everyone's time and money. So how do you as fast as possible get to the edge of a domain and understand: What are the seven schools of thought around this problem so far? How have every major brand or person tried to crack this problem? What are the top five solutions? What are the top five ways to think about the problem?What has all been done in this field so far? And once you have that base, it's much easier. Then when you're talking to someone, you can pattern match. You can be like, what am I hearing? And how does that compare to what has been said about this problem or how people feel about it in the past? And I think that's really the superpower in doing great research quickly - really knowing your canon so that you can figure out what's really going past the edge or what's contradicting a previous orthodoxy of how something is thought about.Yeah. How do you feel about how most marketing organizations go about trying to learn?There's a lot of pressure to have answers and knowledge very quickly. Most organizations are flooded with information. They have subscriptions to seven services and they have trend reports and they have research they commission every year.The problem is not a lack of information. Everyone has too much information. But you could have all that information, still have no f*****g idea where to move or how to go.I'm a big believer that often you have to see it and experience it to know what is real. It's really hard to figure out what is real in this world. There's a very famous war correspondent, Maria Colvin. She's amazing. She has an eye patch. She was a war reporter, had so much style. Her reporting evolved over the course of the Internet Revolution. She was doing war reporting way before the Internet.Then she was doing a lot of reporting during the Arab Spring, once we started to have Twitter and all these social media platforms. One of the things that she talked about a lot is just how rapid misinformation happened. The fog of war is already so confusing.But to be trying to rely on social media to have any understanding of what's going wrong, it just so quickly skews the picture of what's happening. I think that's true with everything. We have so many think pieces and Atlantic articles and all this other crap. And some of those Atlantic articles are really good.But you don't often have a strong feeling of, is that real? Is that really what's going on, on the ground or in people's real lives? Or is that just whatever narrative got picked up that day?That lack of being able to feel what's true is a big problem. Because ultimately, that's what makes you feel confident and have the conviction to push things through: when you've had your own emotional experience with a topic, when you've seen it in real life, or you've watched something that was deeply moving, or you've heard it for yourself, and something inside of you has changed and clicked. Decisions become much easier and action becomes much easier.We know that in our personal lives, when people have a really transformative moment in their own life—they have a near death experience, or they watch their child go through something difficult—that experience is so real and tangible. It's not abstract, it's not intellectual, it's not something they read in a book, it's real. And because it's real, all of a sudden, they can change their life. I think organizations are the same way. They're relying on essentially what is equivalent to reading a self-help book, relying on secondary information and arms-reach information so much, that no one's having the transformative experience inside of themselves. The experience that's gonna say, "Okay, I believe this insight or idea enough that I'm going to commit the next two years of my life to the very difficult challenge of trying to get an organization to operate around that thing."I think that's what we try to do. Even if we can't bring people into the field all the time, I think we're trying to bring them something that will move them so that it's not just information on a page or another 200-page PDF. Instead, it's an emotional experience with their audience or their problem that will get inside of them and change them. And then that transformation will help them.Hopefully, my hope is to help them carry that through into action within the organization.That's amazing. The, the analogy of self-help books is sort of, you're characterizing how organizations currently use data, right? Secondary, secondary data as self, self-help books to guide strategy.That seems totally apt to me. What, can you tell a story about the kind of thing that you deliver? I mean, I know you guys are so, what's the right word? Disciplined in really putting that kind of emotion, emotional truth forward. But how do you know when you've landed on something like, ah, here's the thing that we were going to the boardroom with?So I think there's always two, I'll tell you like an example of this, but to abstract it first, because that's what we do as strategists.I mean, I think one thing that I tell my strategists a lot and I try to practice is like, do you feel like, does it hit, does it really hit you? Like being able to be sensitive enough to be moved will tell you like, is this thing inspiring or moving enough? Which is like part one, but that's not the whole picture.Things can be moving and inspiring and they can kind of be still useless to whatever you're trying to do. And so it still has to be useful and potentially something that either hasn't been done before or has been overlooked, or, you know, in some way it helps you to shift what you're doing. And so I think that like something that is both deeply emotional, but then something you have put through the ringer of, you know, debate almost, you know, we like, we debate the f**k out of our ideas.Like we have this concept we call the Thunderdome, which is like, where you just let ideas crash into each other. And so like, we're constantly trying to toggle between like these deep feeling moody artists, people who are like, just inspired and felt. And then like, you know, kind of ruthless debate practitioners who are willing to kind of like separate yourself from the idea and then beat it up based off of what you know about the business and the client landscape.And so maybe the best story, maybe the most recent is, we were doing a piece of research with twill, a mental health app on pregnancy in America a couple of years ago. And Gareth, who, I'm sure, you know, Gareth Kaye, like legend strategist, and he had just become their CMO. And he'd come to us initially with this ask to create a piece of research that they were trying to make a new product specifically for pregnancy.So it was like a mental health product to address issues in pregnancy. And he felt like he really wanted to create something that would help his team empathize with the experience of pregnancy more. And so he wanted to create what's the most like realistic portrait of pregnancy.And obviously pregnant, there's been so much done on pregnancy. And there are so many kind of cliches and tropes about the experience. And so we did a very large edge finding process to kind of identify like, what are the major tropes about pregnancy and the culture and in brand worlds too, like, what are the images we are most fed about pregnancy?There's a lot of them, you know, there's like, there's a segment of Instagram that pregnancy is the most empowering moment of a woman's life. And you're like beautiful and your skin is like better than ever. And you're like glowing and it's like amazing.And it was like the opposite where there's like pregnancy trauma, where there's just like, you know, a lot of, you know, they call it trauma porn where it's a lot of really difficult stories about like things going very wrong in pregnancy and childbirth. And then there was like kind of the, you know, there's been more conversation around things like postpartum, but they were kind of flattened to this idea of like, even when we call them, we call it baby blues, right? Like a very like cheeky kind of expression of maybe like some of the sadness or depression that can happen.And so when we got in there, we were having all of these conversations with women and a lot of them were so moving, but I remember like, I remember the interview, and it was with a woman who, her, we call her M and I was asking her about her most difficult moment of pregnancy. And she begins to tell me a story about, you know, getting pregnant with her, her then partner and, you know, they didn't have a lot of money at the time. And so they were going to like, Wendy's a lot, they would get the four by four, the dollar, the dollar deal.And, you know, she had felt really bad about kind of having to eat fast food during pregnancy that like, that's not how she wanted to be eating, but they just didn't really have the money or the support system. And she was going through a lot of like body change and body image issues with her body changing. That, that was really hard on her.But then she started talking about these dreams she was having where she would go to bed and she would have these dreams where she was killing her unborn child and she would wake up and like, not even know what to do with that, you know, like, and it was this experience that started to like haunt her. And in the interview, I'm going to say something, I'm going to say something difficult. So, if anyone who listens to this struggles with mental health or suicidal ideation, I just want to give you a heads up.But she did like the depression and the difficulty that was opening the darkness that was opening during her pregnancy eventually escalated to her trying to take her own life. And thank God her husband found her and then like, didn't leave her side for the next like six months of the pregnancy. But, but I remember afterwards she was like, why did no one tell me this could happen?Like afterwards she like, you know, she got into psychotherapy. She never even had to go on medication, just like a little bit of talk therapy helps pull her out of it. And through that process, she learned it's actually exceptionally common for women to feel suicidal during pregnancy.It's exceptionally common to have really crazy fucked up dreams about your unborn child. Like, you know, women would have all sorts of wild, like the dream landscape of pregnant women is fascinating. And there were all these other fears and anxieties that opened up, but women often didn't have any context to make sense of them.And no one really told like, we talk a lot about postpartum, but no one really talked about any of this happening during pregnancy. And that interview, I was just like, why did no one tell? Cause if she would have known that this was an experience that is common, she would have had context for it.And I think having that context for it, even if you don't have any mental health resources can help you survive an experience. Like they say, there's been some research that has said that when they tested parents who essentially like what are their beliefs going into parenthood? And then how does that compare to their like feelings of resilience and satisfaction after becoming a parent and parents who expected parenthood to be really f*****g hard, had a much easier time.And so there was something just about that expectation setting. That was such a powerful antidote to some of the difficulty that arises. And so after that interview, I started diving into some of the literature and one of the like fascinating things I found is that, in the 1960s, there was an anthropologist who coined this term called matresence.And part of what she was doing is she went out and she started studying indigenous communities and looking for models of models of making sense of the transition to motherhood and how have other societies and particularly more indigenous societies helped women make that transition into motherhood. And one of the things that she noticed is that, you know, in the West we have, we have a concept for that transition, in your teenage years, it's called adolescence and adolescence is a term that marks the transition from being a child to becoming an adult. And we have a lot of research on like the developmental arc of adolescence.And we also have a lot of like just cultural wisdom that like, guess what? Teens get really depressed and really anxious. Like we know that we know rates of suicide spike when you are when you're in your teenage years, like we have a lot of understanding of that, that kind of developmental period.And then we've been using that information to help people through that period. Motherhood was not the same. There was no word to describe that transition.And what she argued was that, you know, right now, even we only have very clinical terms to understand pain. You know, we tend to like, we have kind of over, not say over, there's value in certain clinical terminology, but, you know, we've got words like depression and anxiety and, you know, BPD and all these other like DSM five terms to describe pain and suffering. But what she was, she was sort of arguing, it was that like, of course, this period is going to come with so much suffering.Like your entire identity is being like reduced to the rubble and then being rebuilt over a period of nine months. Like your body's going crazy. You've got all these, you're making life like, there is a natural sort of darkness that comes with that, that we have not helped pregnant Americans like learn to expect or manage.And then if it does reach a certain point to tip over into like, you know, proper clinical care, but there's even a big like section of those experiences that would never escalate to psychosis or postpartum depression. If women or pregnant Americans had the support, and even understanding of what was happening inside of themselves during pregnancy. And so that's, this is a very long-winded story, but that moment was like the emotional moment.And then I think we looked back over the course of like human history and then looked at the healthcare system today and you're like, okay, this isn't like, like, yes, there are a lot of really systemic issues in healthcare, like massive mental health practitioner shortage. Like a lot of women, especially in rural areas, and who are, you know, don't make much money, like don't have access to a lot of these resources. You know, even rates of OBGYNs are low.However, even with all of that, there are very simple things you can be doing by just telling people, this is something that might happen to you. And when it does, like, here's, what's in the normal range. Here's when you should call for help.Like, it doesn't mean you're a bad mother. Like just because you have these dreams or you have like, OCD is a really big thing in pregnancy too. Like women get forms of OCD and intrusive thoughts that can be like intrusive thoughts of harm towards a child.It's not really like, it doesn't mean you actually won't harm your child. It's just, it's your brain going haywire and like, it's fine, but there's just, just no one was talking about it, in a way that was actually helpful. And I remember I went to my OB during this time just to get like a routine pap smear.She's like in the middle of the pap smear. I was like, Hey, so I'm doing this study. And like, I'm just curious, like, why don't you ask?Like, it seems like from a lot of the conversations I've had, one of the biggest problems is that women just don't know this is something that could happen. Why don't you ask, why don't you ask how, how you're really doing? Cause even the conversations in the OB office would often just be very like, how's mama?You know, there would be this like, and I remember my OB being, being like, she was like, I don't ask cause I don't have anywhere to send them. And I don't, it's too difficult for me to know if like, if I don't have a way to resolve the problem. And I was just like, what?Like what? We've got like a don't ask, don't tell policy of like mental health and pregnancy among OBs. Like that's crazy.It's crazy.So yeah, I, that was a very, I don't even remember your original question.Well, I mean, I got exactly what I asked for, which was, you know, like, what's an example of the kind of the truth, the reality that you guys deliver and how do you make sure that, you know, how do you, how do you, um, know that you've got one? And it occurred to me just listening to that thing that the, the, the power of this kind of research is that it becomes a story that you tell about your experience of this person. And then it's sort of, it's smuggles in all this stuff, right? Like just because you're telling the story of an interview, it's just compounds just the whole thing into this form. That's like a, it's like a, it's pure, pure magic. Do you know what I mean? Am I making any sense?No. Yeah. I mean, it's beautifully said. I don't, I don't think I actually thought about, um, thought about it that way, but, um, but you're right that like so much of research is about aggregating experience into like a collective and, and then it, which is important because you have to know, is this just Miranda or is it 25,000, 25,000 Miranda's out there? But it often comes at the cost of like also finding like, what's the, what's the story that encapsulates the experience that you found that is moving enough to kind of be passed along and shared and retold, you know, a thousand times.Yeah. That's my experience too, that it'll be one moment, you know what I mean? In a, in a, in a, in many, many interviews where something I'm moved, like you said, and that becomes kind of the, the, the foundation of something. And it, you, you seem to say the same thing that there was a, there's that moment with Em kind of opened you to the reality.Yeah. Yeah. What was the last time you were moved?I mean, I, you know, I have, I mean, you probably have this experience too. I mean, I had a successful project a little while ago, so I keep telling that story. I think I told it to Gunny. I told it to Gunny. Not in the interview, but yeah. I mean, for me, it's like free association. It's the imagination. And it was a project for Lundberg. I guess I'm going to tell this story. Lundberg's Family Farms.Oh, fun.Yeah. It was about rice. And you know me, I do the free association stuff.I love that stuff. You work a lot with the unconscious.I love it. And so I did, I was doing this, the battery of free association exercises around rice to understand and premium rice because premium rice isn't selling.What comes up in people's subconscious associations with rice?So many things, but there was one guy that I just, he totally nailed it for me. He was the new dad. And so he was sort of overtired and his animal, I would ask like, is it an, if it were an animal, if it were a day of the week, if it were an article of clothing, this whole bunch of questions, and they're writing it all down.But his animal was a zebra. And I was like, well, tell me about a zebra, right? He said, well, I was told that there were two types of zebra.There's black zebras with white stripes and there's white zebras with black stripes. And I thought he was screwing with me, but he really wasn't. He was, I say there was this bewildered pause and it was that, that bewilderment was sort of the center of the insight, which was that most Americans have no idea how rice is grown or what it looks like.We have no mental model of what rice is or how it's grown. Whereas if I said corn, you know what I mean? The whole family pops up in the house and cornfields.So anyway, so that, that confusion was, I was just amazed at his bewilderment. And then I realized, I realized what was going on. But it's too obvious to say, which is the other thing. It felt almost like crazy to say.It's beautiful because it's also like one of those insights that's almost found in the negative, not the positive. Like it's found in the absence of something rather than the presence of something. And yeah, it's so, it's so true.It's so true. I love that.Thank you for listening and turning the tables on me. I have one final curiosity I want to talk to you about with the remaining time we have because I, so we ran into each other at StratFest. You're telling the story of this crazy Frito-Lay project, which sounds amazing. And there's two things I think I want to ask about. One is the difference between, I guess what we're telling a story to a client, right? Going and doing your own research and then, and then coming and telling the story to the client versus taking the client out on an immersion like you did with Mega Flavors.And then an asterisk question around that is, because that was a subculture exploration. And of course, when I was coming up, nobody really talked about subculture, but that word subculture seems to dominate marketing conversation today. And I'm just curious, what do you mean when you say subculture?How do you think about subculture? So do you know what I'm after?Yeah. Wait, on the first one, do you want to know like the diff, like what, like, what do you want to know about the two?I guess I'm curious about how you, how you feel your role is different. How is it different for you as a, as a researcher to be immersing a client versus immersing yourself?Yeah. So we, you know, we used to never take clients into the field. And there was a reason for that other than being a dick.And it was that it's really hard to cultivate intimacy and trust with people. And it takes a lot of work. And the minute you've got the feeling of an audience, people tend to go into performance mode.And so we've, you know, we've always been really diligent about trying to protect the intimacy. Like we have one researcher almost on everything. We don't have people listening to calls.We don't do group interviews. Like, um, and, and so that was kind of how we operated for a long time. But with this project, um, you know, our client made the case to us that she wanted her whole team, everyone who's part of the process, innovation, marketing, um, brands to feel what we felt because she thought there would be a better chance that that would stay alive in the innovation process.Also, we were working on food innovation. So like tasting the actual food is kind of helpful. Um, but I think like to your point, like when you're, when you're the researcher, you're in this mode of like the seeker and you're trying to find the truth.And I feel like you're like, I always imagine like you're, I've just got, you've got like laser beam focus. Like it's you and whoever you're with or whoever you're studying. And that's like the only, it was like a, it was like a laser beam that goes from year to them.And that's the only connection that matters. And you are just turning over rocks and exploring different things and trying to collect as much as possible. When you bring a client into a space, you're no longer the investigator. You are like the camp counselor, you know, you are facilitating an experience with people. And so a lot of times what we talk about is like you, the researcher can't do research in that moment. You are producing, not producing is not the right word. You're facilitating.And so the research needs to be done beforehand. So if you're trying to, there's different ways to, I think, bring a client in the field. You can do it in a way that helps them see insights you've already found in real life, which means you have had to have done that research already. And for that project we did, like we would get on the ground a week before clients came and we'd already done significant research on the subculture. And then we would immerse ourselves and we would deepen the connections with the community.And we would build trust because they have to trust us deeply to then bring in another stranger. And so we spent a week, a week and a half, sometimes building trust in those communities before we brought the clients in. And so by that point we had our findings, we had the, like, it was all done. We were just trying to give the client an experience that was an expression of what we had already found.And then there's like a more free form version of that, which is, you don't necessarily need hard findings. You're just trying to give them an experience of a culture that might inspire them. Because that in culture is important. And so in that case, we essentially take our researcher hat off and we're like, we are going to facilitate your experience, but you're the researchers. And so you take the notes, you look for the details, you ask the questions, like, we are just going to hold the container for this and the client becomes the researcher.Um, and so in that case, like there's still a lot of trust building that has to be done ahead of time and networking within those communities. Um, but we kind of, we kind of take a backseat on the role as researcher and we make, we make our clients, the researchers. Um, so is that, does that make sense?Um, and wait, what was your second question?Subculture.Subculture. Yeah. I know it's such a funny, it's been so funny to watch the industry change on this. Cause I guess, cause I grew up sort of being obsessed with anthropology and anthropology is all about stuff. Like that's the entirety of anthropology is about subculture.And so I'm like, I don't have like a tight quippy, you know, even in anthropology, people debate the definition of subculture, like ad nauseum. So I don't necessarily have, we don't have like a quippy definition of it. But for me, it is people who share a worldview, and a sense of taste or style.So like you both have to, I think, share some way of viewing the world and that can come in at different levels. You know, like some people share a religion. Some people share an ideology. Some people share just an expression of an idea. So you have to share some kind of belief or worldview, and then you also have to have a shared form of expression. And so I think that expression can be music. It can be clothing. It can be symbols. It can be tattoos.It can be, but there has to be some both belief and then some outward expression that is connected to that. And it's not like, it's not easy to be like, this is definitely a subculture. This is not a subculture because subcultures are like anything. They're these moving organisms.And you know, I think in the age of the internet, it's been a really interesting transformation of subcultures. Cause I think before the internet, you would, subcultures tended to anchor geographically and they tended to be like, you know, you had either like religions or you had scenes. So like art movements would birth subcultures, but the boundaries of that subculture were more easy to define because there was often a geography and a set collection of like influences, you know? And so you'd, you know, you'd have all these, you have, you know, Atlanta hip hop, that's an easy subculture because it's anchored to a geography.It's also around a music and there is a hundred percent, like a shared experience, but there's often, there's also different expressions and it's also evolved, you know, like you now have sub subcultures. So ATL hip hop might be the large subculture, but then you've got something like trap music, which is an evolution of Atlanta hip hop that has its own distinct expression and the symbols change and the themes change. And so it's all very fluid.And you know, I think a lot of people like, spent a lot of time debating like, what is a subculture on the internet? And it can be tough cause I think there's a lot of things that are like groupings of people or ideas on the internet, but they're so shallow that there's not often enough there, there, I think to like, call it a subculture. And so we've kind of like, we've abandoned trying to like define so hard what a subculture is.I tend to think about it in terms of like, whatever you're trying to do, like with Frito-Lay, we knew that we wanted to draw inspiration for new flavors from groups of people who were a little bit on the edges of culture. And so because of that, we knew, you know, we wanted people who had a story and expression that maybe wasn't as, hadn't like broken through the mainstream as much. But because we were also trying to invent a they needed to have a shared palette.And so there's a lot of subcultures that are cool, but there's no like cuisine associated with them. There's no like lineage from like a palette perspective. And so that definitely kind of shaped the types of subcultures that we paid more attention to.And so I think like, depending on what you're trying to do, like maybe, maybe cottage core, or like, you know, like coven culture, like witch culture, like there's so many different expressions of that. And maybe that's enough to think about as a subculture depending on what you're doing. But, you know, if you're trying to like invent a certain kind of thing, it may not, it may not be enough.So, yeah, no, no. What's your take on the like explosion of that concept in our industry?Oh man. I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's an indication of, yeah, the influence of anthropology and business, I guess. And yeah, the role that culture plays this sort of just naming culture.Yeah.That was sort of a, that wasn't happening when I started out, you know, so like, uh, you know, you said that you observed that change too. So yeah, but it does sort of flatten out into, it just becomes like this crazy mapping of course.It's just like, and you're like, I said, I was like, I'm like, is it like, just because you wear fringe and wear like a white frilly dresses and you read Harlequin romance novels, like, is that enough? You know, do you actually have a, I think it's like, do you have a shared worldview? Like, is that, is that enough or is that just an interest?Right. Or, um, I saw this guy, um, Eugene is a, he does TikTok brand strategy, brand strategy. He says, it's all he, I think he says subcultures are over. It's all cosplay.Well, I mean, that's like a deep cut take. Cause doesn't like, um, God, who was the philosopher who was it? It wasn't Foucault. It was, who's the guy who was really obsessed with studying our, um, I've got his book.I'm going to forget it now. I'll remember and I'll send it to you. But this idea that like, everything has just become a simulation of everything that like, um, has, has been around since like the sixties, I think that like, we are now in an age of human behavior where we are all just signaling.It's like the idea that like something is a, like, think about like a straight out of Compton, like at some point straight out of Compton as a phrase meant something very real. It had a very real basis of like a group of people's experience, but then it became a slogan that signaled a certain aesthetic and lifestyle and worldview.And what, what this guy was arguing is that almost everything has just become that, that like, there is almost nothing real anymore. We've all, um, just, we just signal we use, we use different identity markers to signal, which is kind of different. I don't actually, I haven't fully, I've been thinking about this idea for years and I have not fully reckoned with, um, with what I, cause I, I think it's true on the internet and I think it's true in social performances.Um, but it's, it's curious to me about how we do reclaim, reclaim things that feel real and we don't all just become like a performance of identity signals.Yeah. Well, it feels like that's very apt right now. I mean, um, that, uh, I mean, the guy that I worked for started out, he had this way of talking in koans. He would say that we consume what we're afraid we're losing. One of his little aphorisms.Oh my God. That's kind of, I gotta sit with that for a minute.I feel like, I feel like right now everybody wants to be in real life. Like we're hungry for the thing that we've, we were pretty sure we lost, which is connect human connection and presence and reality.Do you think we will, do you think we will like reclaim that? Like with all the, it is curious, all the fear around AI replacing people is also made me wonder, like, will it force us as a species to like double down on the stuff that they're not like, and right now AI can't regulate co-regulate your nervous system. You know, it can't, um, it can give you some expression of intimacy, but I think there's probably even in the best form, something that would feel gone or off. And so does it actually like almost like forces as a species to become more competitive by doubling down on those things.I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think it, it makes them, it asks us to name them in a way that we would never really have to name them before because there's no alternative. You know what I mean? Like, I think about this a lot with qualitative because this guy, John Dutton asked me, he says, what do you say to a CMO to invest in qualitative in an age of, um, you know, synthetic users and LLMs. You realize that on some level, those things kind of do replicate, they do something close and it's close enough that you kind of wonder, whoa, f**k, what is it exactly? What is it?Yeah. Yeah. And like the other thing I've also wondered about those kinds of things is, um, is does it ever create a feedback loop that actually starts to influence real people, you know, like the simulation of people.Cause like when we were doing the journalism work, one of the things that haunted me is just how flexible we are. Like, um, you know, at the time, like I was looking at the way people express themselves and their political beliefs in social media. And like, you know, at that time, like everyone was like the idea of being extreme online.Like, it was just like the, it was the, the bastion of the era of being hyper extreme online. But when you would get, you would talk to people in real life and you would set a different, um, a different value system of that interaction. If you would be like, Hey, like, we're here to talk like the truth.Like, I want to know, like, do you actually believe these things? Like, is this too? And like, when you set the rules of an interaction of nuance and when you set the rules of an interaction of gray area, people became more nuanced and more gray area and more uncertain.And they admitted their uncertainty. And that's the exact same person who like, I would talk to people and then I would have them send me s**t. They have posted on the internet and the person on the internet was like, like, you know, an extremist and so certain and like very hard line.And then the person in front of me was like, well, you know, I don't really know. And like, I've really wrestled with this. And you're like, these are the same people.They're just a different part of themselves is expressing based on the environment and the rules of that environment. And, and I just was like, Oh my God, we're so much more, we perceive each other as so fixed, but we're actually so flexible. And that's beautiful, but it also makes us fragile and like these feedback loops, like the internet and like algorithms.But I'm also like curious, like when we have AI telling us about ourselves and like telling us what people think, do you see people begin to become that image? You know, like I think we, and how do we, how do we fight the flattening of, of who we are? Yeah. Yeah. It's horrifying.Really. I mean, it's so alienating. It seems to me, I mean, the, the momentum that these generative AI things have.Um, but anyway, we've, we've wandered way off, way off the path and thank you so much. I really appreciate you. Yeah. It was nice to see you at Stratfest, um, in presenting amazing work. And, um, I really appreciate you, um, coming and spending time with me.Yeah, this was great. Thank you, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Karen Faith is the CEO of Others Unlimited, an empathy training company she founded in 2021. Karen lives a country mile south of me in Tivoli, and that’s where we first met as neighbors. Her TEDx Talk “How to talk to the worst parts of yourself” has racked up nearly 2M views. Previously an ethnographer and strategist, I was excited to talk to her about what her path to ethnography, and then to empathy training, and what happens between people. I start all of my interviews with the same question, which I borrow from Suzanne Snider, who teaches oral history in Hudson. It's a big, beautiful question, but because of that I over-explain it. Before I ask, I want you to know that you're in absolute control and you can answer or not answer in any way that you want. The question is: Where do you come from?It is a big, beautiful question. I feel like I should have prepared for that one.You have, you've been preparing all your life.In a way, I suppose I have. Oh goodness, Peter, how could you stump me immediately? Well, I'm going to go ahead and just go with my first couple of thoughts.I come from Mississippi, which is a geographical place. I don't know that I'd give that answer if I were to think about the other kinds of ways I might be from, but Mississippi is already a loaded answer because Mississippi is a very unique, rich, deep, complex place. And that might be the other answer.I feel like I come from a very rich, complex place. I grew up in a very religious and also volatile and violent home, which is a common experience for people like me, which I know can mean a lot of things. But I think that the reason why I would say that I come from that is because I believe that my work is really grounded in the experiences that those things birthed.So the experience of being a part of a very intense religious community, being a part of a very dysfunctional family, and being from the Deep South are all things which sparked areas of curiosity in my life that are absolutely the roots of the work that I do now. I think I can draw those lines very clearly, but I admit it makes me happy when other people are surprised.How do you mean?Well, I mean, I don't want the first impression to be that I am maybe born of brokenness, but I am.Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yes, I remember. Specifically, I was in third grade when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. At that time, my family was living in Melbourne, Florida. My stepfather actually worked at the space center, and we saw that happen with our eyes, not on TV. Krista McAuliffe, who was the teacher on the shuttle, was actually in our school district. So because of that, there was this big push for everyone. It was like a "reach for the stars" thing, you know, because of the fun of it, where we were all writing essays about what we wanted to be, our aspirations. And because I have that piece of paper that I wrote, I actually know exactly what I wanted back then. But I do remember dreaming about it as a kid.I had just started learning to play the violin, and I wanted to play in an orchestra. I wanted to be a teacher. And I just started getting interested in poetry. I wanted to be a writer. But also one thing that's really funny is that I remember as a kid, when I imagined myself as an adult, I always imagined myself being 25, which is hilarious to me now. You know, I was like, yeah, when I'm 25, and I think maybe because my parents were quite young. So I think 25 was about how old they were when I started having those thoughts. So yeah, I was like, when I'm 25, I will play in an orchestra, and I'll be a poet and a teacher. And when I was 25, I was. I played in an orchestra, and I was a teacher and a poet. So, you know, I kind of like dream accomplished. And then there was this moment of like, oh, what's the next one then, you know?One of my favorite parts of Dune, the David Lynch movie, is when after Paul Atreides is sort of in the desert, having all these prophecies come true, these dreams, these prophecies come true. And he gets to this place where they'd all come true. And he feels lost. And he's like, all the visions of my future have already manifested, like, what is next for me? And I think that that really was a moment, you know, when I was mid-20s. And I was like, well, I did the thing I wanted to do. Now, what are we going to do?Where were you at that time?When I was 25, I had actually just stopped playing. I played in the symphony for seven years, and I just stopped doing that and moved to Chicago to go to the School of the Art Institute. So I had already changed the vision, but I wanted to. Then I was going into performance art.[I'm curious, will you tell me a little bit about what it means to be from the Deep South? I mean, you have these three territories, like the church, the family, and then Deep South. I'm just curious, what does it mean to be? I mean, I've met you in Tivoli, New York, upstate New York. What does it mean to be from the Deep South?Well, something that might be revealing to say is that it's hard for me to talk about it, and it's important for me to talk about it with respect to the people who I really love who are there. I found since I left Mississippi that everywhere else I've been in the United States finds it easy and fun to ridicule Mississippi for a couple of reasons that have factual basis. Mississippi has for many years been close to the bottom of the list for education and close to the top of the list for poverty and obesity and other kinds of systemic problems that are very interrelated and correlate.That is not at all what Mississippi means to me. For me, the things that I've carried with me and the things that I really feel, the kind of stereotype of Southern hospitality is 100% true. There is a very urgent sense of responsibility to welcome a visitor, which directly and immediately opposes the idea that Southerners don't like outsiders. I'm not saying that that doesn't exist too. That's in there somewhere too. But the immediate thing is, come on in, let me make you a cup of coffee.I also carry this very deep sense of hospitality. I love hosting in a very literal way, but I also bring that to the work in a lot of ways too. For me, the experience of facilitating groups of people, which is largely what I do, is a lot about making sure that every person present feels welcome to be present exactly as they are. That takes some doing. That's not easy. It's also, veering into another topic a little bit, it's also not possible for me to carry that responsibility entirely. I cannot make anyone feel any particular way. I can only provide an atmosphere. That's important to me.Being from the Deep South is also a place where there are cultural values that are so deeply ingrained. Family is one of them, for sure, which is so difficult because of the situation of the religious background, also because of the situation of being in a rural area where people are relatively spread apart. I wouldn't even call it privacy, I would call it isolation. There's an isolation that happens that makes the family dynamic very intense, because it's just you and your people. You don't necessarily see much else. Even growing up the way that I did, many aspects of my childhood and my family life that were untenable and harmful were not things that I recognized because I didn't know that it was uncommon. I didn't know that it was wrong. I didn't know that it was harmful until later. That's a part of it.That's the part that I would relate to being from the Deep South, is that there's a very intense cognitive dissonance between the values of family is first, honor family, family is the most important thing, and also, wait a minute, this is the most harmful, most scary, most destructive, terrorizing aspect of my life. Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure this is where my loyalty belongs? For many people, the answer continues to be yes. I've often felt a kinship when I watch mafia movies, because of the to-the-death loyalty, which no matter how ugly it gets, no matter how scary it gets, it's like the family's the family, and you're either with us or we'll kill you, which is just a kind of like, but there's something about the power of it.It is sort of seductive is not the right word, but it's like there's an attraction to the safety, or at least the story of safety. It's like, oh, you mean, will you fight to the death for me then too? The answer should be yes. In my family, it was not yes, it was no. And so, in my particular family, loyalty to the family meant loyalty to the secret. And when I wasn't able to keep that, then I was out.Is this where you wanted to go? I feel like we're going to a really, really intense place right now.Yeah, wherever we go is fine. I mean, it's all up to you, really, whatever you're comfortable sharing. But yeah, no, I mean, that's definitely, getting to know you better is why I'm here.So, tell me how you got to where you, tell me where you are now and what you're up to from there. Now you're in Tivoli, and how do you talk about what you're doing these days?That's a hard shift. Well, I do live in Tivoli. It's a really tiny little 800-person village in upstate New York. It's absolutely beautiful and idyllic. And it's on the Hudson River, looking at the Catskill Mountains. This morning, I took a walk at sunrise and watched the deer and turkeys scouting around. And it's absolutely darling and beautiful and reminds me of the first half of a horror movie, where everything is just so perfect, you can't imagine anything bad could ever happen. And it turns out that this village is made of human beings. So yeah, it has its shadowy parts.But for the most part, my life is very, very lovely. And I'm very close with my neighbors, and we all have little dinners together. And it's a life that I didn't imagine I would be living. And in every way, I'm a homeowner now, I'm a business owner now. I never in my life wanted to own a home or a business or live in the country. And I spent most of my adult life in Chicago, and then I moved to New York City. And I always imagined that's what my life would be. And I came up here through a series of kind of uncommon circumstances during 2020, as many of our lives were turned upside down and like shaken loose. And I didn't design the plan, but it just sort of happened that way.And today, I'm grateful that it did. But it would be yeah, I guess I have a sweet contemplative life where I get to write and speak and work with people about some of the things that matter to me the most, which, you know, kind of what we were touching on before is, you know, a lot of my work as an empathy trainer, opens the doors to conversations about emotional intelligence, but all of those things are informed by this interior side of ourselves that a lot of people either don't necessarily dig into, or don't feel allowed to dig into, or don't feel or they do it, but they don't feel allowed to share.And so there's a special thing that happens, you know, that I really love in my work, where I create spaces, emotional energetic spaces for folks to be able to do that exploration in a way that is both deep and cavernous, and also protected and safe and boundaried. And that is a you know, that's also a that's a balance. And it's it's fun. So, you know, I in general feel very, very lucky that I have managed to create a work product out of my life product, which has been an exploration of what it means to be a person and how to handle having this mind and heart and body in this little short time on the planet.When did you discover you could do this kind of thing, you could make a living doing this?I don't know that I do make a living. I'm kidding. I sort of.I completely identify with you.I am grateful for what I have, and I am not in a desperate situation. However, as many business owners in the beginning experience, my income is extraordinarily unstable. It is absolutely like, you know, feast or famine over here. And that's because I'm not a good business person, honestly. And I even though I know I want to be responsible and be better at it, I also don't. I think that I believe in leaning into my strengths and then finding other people or that to help me. And and I am looking for them. So that's good. But I, I am at least a little bit proud of not being good at business because I think it's the result of being, you know, at the risk of alienating some listeners, perhaps.I believe that what I'm doing is is a spiritual practice. And it's very much, um, you know, I'm not a public servant. I do it for money. But what I'm doing is for me, the purpose of what I'm doing is to open really expansive spaces for folks to deal with their humanity in a way that also transcends their humanity.Yeah. And I mean, I understand enough about your story. You kind of came in into this through ethnography. And I feel like I connect with you as a as somebody who, you know, has that practice. And so how do you how did how did ethnography lead you into this space of to where you are now? How do you what was the transition like? Or how did it how did empathy training evolve out of your experience as an ethnographer? And I don't want to ask. Yeah, that's it there.There's an answer I would give you, Peter, which is different from the answer that I would giveThere's an answer I would give you, Peter, which is different from the answer that I would give whoever might be listening. The answer I would give you, Peter, is this: When you're sitting with someone and practicing presence, practicing just being with this person, the practice of ethnography is one where I don't erase myself, but I resist myself to allow the other person to take up as much space as they can or want to. That practice of being entirely present, while being contained enough to let someone else be open, has consistently provided me with mind-bending experiences of transcendence.I said once to an intern that if you don't fall in love with every research subject, you're not doing it right. Of course, we have to contain that and be boundaried. But when I'm really present with someone, when I'm really seeing them, when I'm allowing them to be seen, and they're allowing themselves to be seen, I haven't had a research subject that I didn't love in a way that felt so infinite, it felt like it destroyed me. Maybe that might be a diagnosis I haven't gotten into yet.But for me, it has always felt like it feeds me, it nourishes me. It's something that made me want to go, "Oh, what the hell is that?" I need to know what that is and why it happens. I believe it happens for a very deep and beautiful reason, which is that the part of us which can be present, whatever consciousness is, is infinite, and may even be identical. The part of me that can get there and the part of you that I'd like to get to is actually made of the same thing. I don't teach that, but that's kind of scooting over into the spiritual aspect of the practice.The reason why I got into this work is because I kept finding that it was touching something that was so much bigger than me and bigger than work and bigger than a brand or a mission. For me, it's kind of an everything practice. The way that ethnography turned into empathy training is a story I love.It happened because I was training an intern how to do it, and accidentally developed an empathy training curriculum. I had been giving portfolio reviews at a college in Chicago. This sophomore industrial design student got really excited about ethnography. He said he wanted to learn this from me. Because of where I was in my life and my career, I didn't have the confidence to be like, "Oh, come, let me teach you."So I said, "Oh, we don't really have an internship." But he was persistent. He kept emailing me, asking if he could come to the studio, sit in on a thing, watch. He was really curious and persistent. I was a little annoyed by him, but I was also intrigued. I wondered, what does he see in me that I'm not seeing?I asked my mentor at the time about it. She said, more or less, that the credential you need to teach is to be asked to teach. You don't need to have whatever degree; he's asked you. He's given you the credential that it takes to teach him. I'm actually writing a talk about that right now, because I think it's such a profound and beautiful way of going about it - just to be what it means to be asked.Because he asked me, I quickly pulled together an eight-week curriculum. I decided if I were to teach this kid everything I know, what would that look like? He was living in Illinois, in Wheaton, I think, and would take the train into Chicago once a week. This kid had just the most irritating case of ADHD. He was so annoying, with no attention span.I was young and easily irritated. I realized I needed to teach him how to sit still, how to shut up. I thought I was going to teach him about how to design research approaches to address particular design problems. But I realized, "Oh, I need to teach him how to just sit and listen to somebody." So we went all the way back to basics, even to the level of "Take a breath, watch the inhale, watch the exhale, and then see who's watching it. What happens when you don't watch it?" Really basic mindfulness practice. It was a beautiful summer.Darren and I are still really close friends. I officiated his wedding recently. He's just so dear to me. Because of his persistence, and because of all of the trouble that he gave me as a student, what we did is the foundation of what I do now. Others Unlimited is based on an empathy training curriculum that I built for Darren. whoever might be listening. It's just you the answer I would give you, Peter is, you know, like, you know, you know, how, when you're sitting with someone and practicing presence, practicing just being with this person, the practice of ethnography, being one where I I don't erase myself, but I resist myself to allow the other person to take up as much space as they can or want to. And that practice of being entirely present, while being contained enough to let someone else be, like open, is, has, has consistently provided me with mind bending experiences of transcendence, like just, I mean, I have, I said once to an intern that if you don't fall in love with every research subject, you're not doing it right.You know, it's really, and of course, we have to contain that and be boundaried. But but when I when I'm really present with someone, when I'm really seeing them, when I'm allowing them to be when they're allowing themselves to be seen, and I'm really seeing them, I haven't, I have not had a research subject that I didn't love in an in a way that felt so infinite, it felt like it destroyed me. And, you know, and maybe I don't know, that might be a diagnosis I haven't gotten into yet.But, but I but for me, it has always felt like it feeds me, it nourishes me. It's like, it's something that made me want to go, Oh, what the hell is that? You know, I need to know what that is. And why it is, why does that happen? And I believe it happens for a very, very deep and beautiful reason, which is that the part of us which can be present the part of us that that part, whatever consciousness is, is infinite, and, and may even be identical. Like the part of me that can get there. And the part of you that I'd like to get to is actually made of the same thing. And this is sort of, I don't teach that. But, but that's like, that's kind of scooting over into the spiritual aspect of the practice.You know, the reason why I got into this work is because I kept finding that it was touching something that was so much bigger than, than me and bigger than, than work and bigger than, you know, a brand or a mission. For me, it's kind of it's an everything practice. The way that it turned the way that ethnography turned into empathy training is that God, and I love this story.I, it happened because I was training an intern how to do it, and accidentally developed an empathy training curriculum. But the story of how that happened, I had been giving portfolio reviews at a college in when I was in Chicago. And this little sophomore industrial design student got really excited about ethnography. And he said, you know, I want to learn this from you. And I didn't, because of where I was in my life. And in my career, like, I didn't have the confidence to be like, Oh, come, you know, let me teach you.And, and so I was like, Oh, we don't really have an internship. And, and he was persistent. And he kept, he kept emailing me, I was like, Well, can I just come to the studio and can I sit in on a thing? Can I watch? He was really curious. He was really persistent. And, and I was I was a little annoyed by him. But also, I was really annoyed by him. But I also was intrigued, like, what does he see in me that I'm not seeing, you know?And I asked my mentor at the time, I told her about it. And she said, in in more or less, she said, the, the credential that you need to teach is to be asked to teach. You don't need toHere's the continuation of the cleaned-up transcript:And I asked my mentor at the time, I told her about it. And she said, in more or less, she said, the credential that you need to teach is to be asked to teach. You don't need to have whatever degree he's asked to you. He's given you the credential that it takes to teach him. And so, which honestly, I'm actually writing a talk about that right now, because I think it's such a profound and beautiful kind of way of going about it, you know, just to be what it means to be asked.And so, because he asked me, I, you know, just real quick pulled right out of myself an eight-week curriculum, I decided if I were to teach this kid everything I know, what does that look like? And I put together an eight-week curriculum teaching him. And he, you know, he was living in Illinois, in Wheaton, I think, and would take the train into Chicago once a week. And this kid had just the most irritating case of ADHD. I mean, absolutely. He was so annoying. No attention span.And he was just, it was and I was, you know, I was also young and easily irritated. And I realized I needed to teach him how to sit still. I needed to teach him how to shut up. I needed like, I was just like, Darren, listen to me. And because of that, I thought I was going to teach him about how to design research approaches in order to address particular design problems. And I was like, Oh, I need to teach him how to just sit and listen to somebody, you know, and so we went all the way back like to basic, basic, basic, and even to the level of take a breath, watch the inhale, watch the exhale, what and then see who's watching it. What happens when you don't watch it? Like really basic mindfulness practice. And it was a beautiful summer.Darren and I are still really close friends. I officiated his wedding recently. And we're he's just so dear to me. Like, he, he because of his persistence, and because of all of the trouble that he gave me as a student, what we did is the foundation of what I do now. Others Unlimited is based on an empathy training curriculum that I built for Darren.Yeah.And I'm, you know, I'm so grateful to him, you know, we've given each other a lot. So that is the behind the scenes answer to how it happened.Yeah. And how do you think about empathy? How do you talk about empathy? I mean, this is an annoying definitional question. But I'm just curious how you talk about it.I usually talk about it in a way that starts with, you're probably thinking of it wrong. I mean, I don't say those words. But most people when they're talking about empathy, they're actually talking about compassion. And I'm not talking about that. So compassion is really compassion is a is a byproduct of empathy practice. And it's a cool thing. I'm not against compassion. But I don't teach compassion for a couple of reasons.Number one, compassion is almost always offered and inspired by suffering. And practicing empathy can be done with anyone, whether or not they are suffering. Compassion is primarily directed toward pain. Empathy doesn't require anyone to be hurt, which is great. The other thing is that compassion is often an emotional experience. And many people that I teach, for all kinds of reasons, including neurodiversity, do not necessarily feel that that is the easiest door to walk through. And so, for people who don't feel warm and fuzzy, or for people who don't feel or for people who don't even understand what you mean by feel, it's more accessible to teach it as a cognitive practice.The other reason I don't teach compassion is because it can have moral implications, which, which then get into who deserves my compassion? Where should my compassion be directed? And frankly, f**k that. So I teach cognitive empathy practice, which is simply the practice of non-judgmental curiosity. This is and this is what ethnographic research is, non-judgmental curiosity and perspective taking. And those cognitive practices can be entered into by any person with any kind of mind.They can also be offered to any person with any kind of mind. They don't require agreement with someone, I don't have to like you, I don't have to, I don't even have to wish you out of pain. I don't have to agree with you or even want to agree with you. But if I practice non-judgmental curious perspective taking, then I can at least understand you better, which may actually empower me to influence you, negotiate with you, manipulate you. Empathy practice as I teach it can be used for evil if you wish. It is, it is entirely amoral.And most people that I speak to and most writing and speaking that I see about empathy does not approach it that way.It approaches it more as compassion is what you're saying.Yes. And what, I mean, that's so much you said that I'm interested in following up on. I'm gonna, the first thing that comes to mind is that perspective taking, which reminded me of a paper I think I read by Nicholas Epley about perspective mistaking, you know, and he was making the case for getting perspective, right? As opposed to the practice, because I feel like, I guess I'm wondering the degree, like when people reach out to you, what are they asking? What problem are they asking you to solve? Like who comes to you and who do you want to help? And just in his, his, he was studying the difference, I guess, in a lot of organizations, I'm talking about the use of personas and I've heard for empathy, the empathy I've heard and read about empathy as being something one can do alone in thinking about somebody else. So you can have a persona, right? And you can just sort of imagine the experience of another person versus I think he goes, he, I think he called it perspective getting, you know what I mean? It was like, go ask them. You're going to be, you're going to get better. You're going to get better input if you ask the person as opposed to use this, this, this idea that empathy is, is imaginative and can be done all alone. And so I guess my question now that I've discovered what it actually is, is, is empathy something that one can do alone? And, or what do we call that? What is empathy in when you're actually interacting with another person?Yeah. I just had to take a couple notes while you're talking. Cause you said like 15 trigger words to me, but I, I want to I think perspective getting is a really great reframe because it's active.Yeah.Perspective taking. Yeah. It, it, it, yeah. It's just, it's such a shuttle subtle shift, but it's really, that's really, really good. I love perspective getting and I like perspective of mistaking. So one of my, one of my little pet peeves is the concept of the empath, which is typically understood as a person with some kind of innate ability to perceive the feelings of other people, which is b******t. You can bleed that if you need to bleed that. It's, I understand the concept of someone who is energetically sensitive. I am energetically sensitive myself, but when the moment that I decide or believe that what I'm feeling is what you're feeling, I have completely erased you. I'm defining you in terms of me and I'm, I'm shutting down curiosity. And this is why, you know, a lot of us, the very common common attempt to empathize is that feeling when in a story, someone tells you something that you recognize and you say, me too, me too. Like I've had the same experience and, and, and, and that's also criticized highly. And I'm saying there's nothing wrong with doing that. But my thing that I say is if you think, you know, ask more questions till you don't just keep asking until you find how it's different. You're like, Oh yeah, your father died and you felt this way. My father died and I felt that way. Okay. Don't go. Yes, I know. And then stop, ask more questions until you find out how it's different. How is their experience unique from yours? That's what, that's what real perspective getting is when you, when you can acknowledge other other person's singularity, because it's not, yes, we have shared things and it's nice to share things, but when we just assume what I feel is what you feel, there's no curiosity and there's no real understanding.Yeah. My, uh, I did, I interviewed this guy, Michael Lipson. And I remember he described that phenomenon as collapsing into oneself and that thing where you just sort of, and it's a closing. I really, really connect with your description of that. I am curious about what were the trigger words? What trigger words did I use then?Oh, personas was a big one.Yeah. Yeah. Talk, tell me about personas.Oh, but also I wanted to get back to like, who comes to me and why they come to me because that's, well, that's related to personas actually. So can I start there?Wherever you want to be.Um, a lot of different kinds of people come to me. Uh, and so the answer to who comes to me and the answer to who I want to come to me are different, but, um, when let's, let's go ahead and start with like when an ideal client comes to me, that person is usually there, there are basically two different tracks of work that I do. One is on understanding customers, how, how a brand or a business can understand their audience. The other is internal. So how can our team collaborate, communicate better? So there's an external focused empathy and there's an internal focused empathy for a company.And I can, um, I like to work in both ways. The, you know, secret spoilers that it's the exact same skillset. It's just like applied differently, but, um, and you can do one thing and actually get the side benefit of getting more, getting better at the other. So you can go in through either door and it kind of, they influence each other. It's really great. Uh, the, the truer, more honest and funny answer is that usually when someone comes to me, it's because a specific person in their company is, um, shitty and they're like, can you fix this person? And the answer is always no.So someone comes to me because they're like, we have someone on our team who has the way that they say it is has no empathy. And, and I also don't like that. This is another trigger word for me is has no empathy. Like empathy is an object, like a noun that you have, or you don't have. And I, I insist that it's a, that a practice, that it's an active thing. It's something that you do or don't do. It's not something that you have or don't have. And when people say there's someone on our team or whatever that has no empathy. So we want you to come and fix it.And, uh, and when I, when I'm feeling, you know, cheeky and confident, I usually kind of spend some time with that person to get them to realize that, um, if you think that someone refuses to empathize with you, you probably are also refusing to empathize with them. Probably because it's, if you did, if you were really practicing that you wouldn't, first of all, be as irritated by it because you'd understand more about what that person, why that person is behaving in the way that they're behaving. But the other thing is that, I mean, there's just very, this like really universal, universal to the degree of being cliche truth that you can't change anybody else. The only person that you can change is yourself. The only person who can practice is yourself.I can't make anyone practice. And I, and I do say in the workshop too, that, you know, when we start to talk about the practice and I ask people to, to imagine, you know, if there, if there is, is there somebody in the room who you kind of hope is really paying attention right now? Because that person probably hopes you're paying attention. It's so real. It's like, you know, it's why AA and Al-Anon are almost the same program, you know, because the person who wants the person to change needs to do the same work.I'm curious about how I feel like what you're doing is really making the invisible visible. And I guess you've talked about this in a way, like my experience is that when, at least I feel like that when it's done well, right, it becomes invisible, right? So I feel like clients have seen me work and they just think I'm super nice. You know what I mean? It just becomes like, I'm just a good guy who lets people talk about themselves. And so any kind of, any kind of skill set kind of just disappears and it becomes, gosh, that Peter, he's just an empathetic guy. He's got, he's so empathetic. You know what I mean? And so, but I feel like that causes real problems for organizations that want to learn because it's not something that seems real or that you can teach or that you can train or that you can turn into sort of a formal practice. And so I guess, how do you feel about, about that?Yeah, there is the thing of, I think about that, that phrase, good design is invisible. It's like when it's done really well, it's, you know, when it's really frictionless, you don't notice it. And I think that sounds like a lot of what you're experiencing when, when you're doing the work, people just kind of assume that you're a wonderful person. Though, I will tell you that I did get a little gender bias resentment because I'm like, oh yeah, men always get praised when they don't act like total dicks. They're like, oh, you must be enlightened or amazing or really, really kind. Where no one says that about me. They just assume I'm a woman.It's true. I benefit from a low bar.Yeah, that's correct. But wait, what was the question?I guess I was asking if you feel how, to what degree does the organization value empathy as a practice? And do you, is it difficult to make this kind of thing visible as a practice?How do it's it's awkward, like making it visible has the clunkiness of, you know, frameworks with names and, and diagrams. And like, this is what that is called and we're doing this now. And even though that all those words are unnecessary constructs, they help a team to have a shared vocabulary for like, oh, I know what we're doing now because Karen taught us this tool. And that's what this is. That's what we're doing. And so giving the, giving the practice names and frameworks and, and, and that stuff is the way that it sort of makes it a little more concrete.However, you know, for some, and I've gotten the comment a lot like, well, yeah, we can practice this right now. But in real life, you know, when we really have these conflicts or when, when the, when the real argument happens, that's not how it goes. And, or just because like, I'm practicing, but that person isn't responding the way that you, that you taught us to respond. So like, what do I, and, and so, you know, what I say about that is you don't practice like you play. And in the same way that a, that an athlete trains with all these other, other machinery and different, you know, different resistance bands and weights and like all the kinds of stuff that, that that's not on the field, you know, that's not in the game that we practice with very clunky tools.And we're like, yeah, we're going to do it in an awkward way first, where we're going to go through step by step and do this in a, in a kind of way that feels unnatural and that feels, you know, inauthentic, but it's a practice. So we're going to practice through it. But then when you're in the game, who knows what's going to happen? You know, that someone could fly off the handle, someone could break down into tears. That's not a, you know, we didn't write that in the script. And so it's like, how do you handle this? And it's just the more practice you have, the more ability you, you gain to be able to improvise those tough moments.Yeah. And what, what is happening? What, how do you know when your work is done? That's sort of a, sort of a two grand construction.It is not done. It is never done.Right.I mean, that's bad news.So, and I guess I'm, I'm selfishly laying on top of this conversation and your work, some of my own sort of questions about what is the actual value of qualitative? You know what I mean? Like the kinds of learned, what?How dare you?I know I'm, I'm just, I'm self-interested, but I'm, I'm curious, like what, how do you think about the value that you bring to an organization? I mean, this is in the context of, you know, big data, you know what I mean? LLMs, like everybody's just, they're just drink, they're drinking at the fire hose of quant data, right? And there's no, there isn't a framework for, for valuing, generally speaking, qualitative research or the kinds of understanding that it brings. And so I wonder how do you, what would you say? What's your sense of the difference between the kind of team or understanding that gets created when a team is, has empathy or has a practice of empathy versus a team that doesn't have a practice of empathy, that hasn't gone through a process of trying to learn how to understand or communicate with each other better?This question really illuminates my, the conflict I have around being a business person with a, with a spiritual practice, because while I wouldn't really want my clients to hear me say this, I don't care what the value is monetarily. I know they do, and I can measure it for them sometimes. You know, I can tell you that if, if only one of your employees doesn't quit this year because of cultural problems or conflict, you will save probably $160,000 to $180,000, which is more than I charge. So, you know, so I'm like, I can tell you for the culture, just the attrition management benefit is very valuable.For the, for the, for the product or the service or the brand or whatever it, whatever it is that you need to connect with your customer about, those benefits are so extremely valued, valuable, they're very difficult to measure because we're talking about developing brand loyalty or a customer really actually feeling cared about or caring about a brand in a way that is very, very difficult to measure over time. But some people do measure it. I just, I truly don't care enough, but there's a, but there's, you know, the other thing of just connecting deeper means making better products and also solving problems from a point of view of in a more integral way.I give an example a lot. I use this contact lens solution called Clear Care, and it's the best one. If you wear contacts, it's the only contact lens solution that's worth a s**t. It cleans your contacts so well that you can keep the disposables for like six times as long as you're supposed to, because it really gets everything off of them. It does that because it has peroxide in it. You've got to leave it in the solution for six whole hours before you put them back in, or you'll burn the living s**t out of your eyes.Now, I know this because I have done this. There are other rules too. Like if the case tips over or if something... There are so many different ways that you can make a mistake and burn your eyes very badly. I have done it so many times. I know I'm not the only one because every couple of years, they put another warning label on the bottle or on the box. This box and this bottle are just covered in red warning labels everywhere. The cap is red and everything's red. It's all just like, "This is so dangerous."It's not working. Now, why is it not working? Well, this is a problem that is multifaceted. Number one, why are you sending this problem to graphic design when contact lens users definitively do not see well without their contacts? That's one thing. The other thing is, when am I doing this? Late at night when I'm really tired. This bottle is shaped exactly like, feels exactly like a bottle of saline, which is perfectly safe to pour directly into your eye.There are so many design flaws with this solution, and so I ask, when I use this example when I'm teaching, I ask people, "What does this solution tell you about Clear Care's values?" Everyone knows immediately, they're only caring about protecting themselves from liability. They don't give a s**t if I hurt my eyes. They don't care. They just want to make sure that their ass is covered. So I tell people, your customer knows. Your design will rat you out. Your customer knows whether you care about them or whether you even know them.Clear Care either doesn't know or doesn't care, but I know they know it's still happening because they keep making that bottle more red. For me, knowing your customer, learning about your customer, connecting with your customer, understanding why my customer is even my customer, what they care about, what they value, what they're afraid of, what matters to them, will change - should change - the way you do business, the way you solve problems, the way you market, the way you build solutions.If and when you do that, the rewards, the loyalty from that, and the greater good of that are absolutely immeasurable. If you don't care about that, then honestly, I don't want to work with you anyway. I'm not here to measure that stuff. My clients are people that already know that it matters. For me, the value is not monetary. The value is unnameable, unutterable. That's why it scoots into the spiritual lane for me, because I do feel that what I'm teaching, practicing, and trying to share is truly unconditional love. I never say that to a client because usually it makes them sweaty. But that's what it is.In what way is it unconditional love?Well, I think that's what... They say that, what is it, 78% of atoms are space, right? It's like mostly space. We're mostly made of things that are mostly space. What's in that space? What's in there? I think it is the energy that makes things alive. And I think the energy that makes things alive is love. I do not believe that love is necessarily good or soft. I think that love can be quite harsh and brutal, like nature requires some violence, requires some decay. But for me, the life force and the love force are the same force.And that force is, I think, what I feel kind of surge through me when I'm just in presence with someone. And that force is very powerful and very creative. And when you allow that force to come through, what you get is creative power. That's good for business. You know what I mean? And so, I know that when I speak about this, and I'm only speaking about this with you because you're you. And I might even, when you share this with people, I might get crossed off some lists, but I have to be honest about where I'm coming from.I mean, some people want to solve symptoms. I want to go all the way. Some people want to build better products or make money better. I want to go all the way. I'm not interested in surface symptoms. I'm interested in what I do taps into an infinite source of power and creativity. And if you're interested in that, come on over. If not, do whatever f*****g s**t you're doing. I don't care.This is like a hundred percent the reason why I wanted to talk to you. And I mean, I love that. I mean, that's just beautiful. And I agree and, and co-sign a hundred and a hundred percent on the idea and everything you've just said in particular, the idea of, I mean, creative power is really, really staggering. I mean, so much of this conversation series for me is, you know, trying to have other people tell me why, what I do is, is useful. Do you know what I mean? And because it is such a strange time and there are so many other easier ways that organizations can go about trying to get creative or be creative or learn or understand. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's a beautiful articulation and I totally agree. It's wonderful.Thanks. I wish I had the, I remember long ago, like hearing some kind of, I don't even know if it's true, but some like kind of business lore stories about people kind of offering their services for free and just being like, you know what, in a year pay me what it was worth to you.Right.And, and I, you know, the story, the legends that I hear are like, oh, and then it was worth $5 million or whatever. And I would love to have the confidence and financial flexibility to be able to do that. And maybe one day I will, but I would love to just tell a client, let me do what I do. And then, then you tell me because I promise you it won't be unnoticeable.Yeah. That's interesting.But I don't, I don't like math a lot, so.I mean, I think we both sort of got lost in the pause of the, of the, the non-mathematic trying to imagine a contract that would make that real. I'm trying to think what else I want to talk to you about. What do you love about the work? I feel like it's all you've been talking about, but where's the joy in it for you?Where isn't it? I mean, the joy is my kind of standard Empathy 101 workshop that I start everybody with. It involves putting people in pairs and giving them some techniques to sort of interview one another. It's not the right word, but it's a little bit shorthand. And when they practice this with each other, I ring the little bell when it's time to stop and they look back at me and their faces are open and bright. Some of them have tears in their eyes and some of them are grinning and some of them are laughing and some of them are just stunned and that's it.When I'm like, "Oh, they did it," that's what it looks like when you look someone in the eye and you connect with them. And it's not, I don't do it in a weird, spooky way where there's forced eye contact. It's not that. I just have them listen to each other. Just pay attention, pay attention to someone for a few minutes without interjecting yourself and really just open yourself to receiving whatever they might have to offer. And then also reverse that and get the experience of that happening.And then they look back at me and it's even more profound when I do it on Zoom. Because we come back out of the breakout rooms and I have a whole screen full of faces that are all just like, "Oh, it just happened." And I'm like, "Yeah." I'm not allowed to say so in my professional life, but that's love. They just experienced love. And for me, that's what it is.And unconditional love is really cool because so many people celebrate romantic love, which is honestly the shittiest kind. It's super conditional. Unconditional is so great because it's limitless and able to exchange with anyone, and so surprising. Everyone's always stunned because they're like, "I don't even, I'm not attracted to this person. I don't like this person. I have nothing to gain from this person. And I kind of would die for them right now." You know, it's just like, "What?" It's like, "Yeah, that's what it is. That's what it is."Cool. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. And, uh, I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It's been a lot of fun. So thank you. Yeah.Thanks for being willing to hear all of this.Oh, absolutely. Oh my gosh. It's great. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel is the Senior Lead of Global Insights at Reddit, and a cultural theorist, writer, and strategist specializing in inclusivity within marketing, media, and tech. With a PhD from Duke University, she's a senior insights lead at Reddit and has advised global brands like Nike and Disney. Her book, "Cultural Intelligence for Marketers: Building an Inclusive Marketing Strategy," offers a practical guide to navigating the intersection of cultural shifts and commercial purpose. I start all these interviews with the same question. I use this in my work actually, too, with a question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian and she helps people tell their story. I steal it because it's such a beautiful question. But because it's such a beautiful question, I kind of over-explain it. So before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. All right. And so the question is, where do you come from?What a question. A beautiful question, indeed. And a complicated one. My mind goes to thinking about my immigrant story and how the question of where do you come from can be complicated and at times painful. And I suppose painful, not in a kind of cringy way, but in a beautiful way, because it points to the complexity of human experience.It's a complicated question for me primarily because I'm not only an immigrant, but I'm somebody who left home by myself when I was still a minor. I had just turned 16 when I left my family and my home behind. And what one would refer to as where I come from.So there is no straightforward answer to that question, because where I come from is both there and here and in other places as somebody who has crossed borders from a rather young age. But from a genealogical point of view, I come from Eastern Europe. And I suppose I like to think about the genealogies of struggle that I come from.And that's something that I speak and write about quite a bit. And I like the word struggle because it can be taken up as something to describe adversity or difficulty or struggling to endure certain conditions. And I come from genealogies of people who struggled and survived under occupation and war and living decades under authoritarian rule.So where I come from is defined by those repressive histories and being born into a repressed society. But I also think about where I come from from my experience of being in struggle. And so when I answer that question, I would always say, well, I come from Eastern Europe, but I also come from the US South and Durham, North Carolina, which is where I was part of a lot of political and social movements that have been my political home that are not genealogically where I come from, but politically and in terms of my values are a home that raised me and that shaped me into who I am. So this is my way of answering that question, I suppose.Yeah, it's beautiful. Do you have a memory of being a child and like what you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you have a recollection of what you kind of wanted to be?Yeah, so interesting to say that out loud, given the current political environment we're in and the electoral politics in the United States. When I was growing up, I was convinced I would be the president of Latvia, which is—I'm not sure if I actually mentioned. I said maybe Eastern Europe, but I grew up in Latvia.And I was growing up when the first female president of Latvia was in office in the late 90s. And that was my vision for myself and something that I was completely convinced of. And it was an interesting contradiction of living in a cultural and social environment where no one had ever told me that I couldn't.But there were also a lot of different repressive ideas around what it means to be a girl and who you're supposed to become. So I had a grand dream of being the president of my country. And that was that was my first aspiration.And I have since admittedly become a little bit more skeptical of electoral politics.What was the impact of that, just the impact of seeing a woman as the leader of your country? Do you remember how significant that was or what it felt like?I think on some subconscious level, and I should clarify, I was like six or eight years old. So on a subconscious level, it did open up possibilities for me of what was possible. It was never necessarily positioned to me that a girl is not supposed to be a leader.However, a contradiction exists when you exhibit leadership qualities as a girl in post-Soviet Latvia in Eastern Europe. It becomes more of a problem that you realize. But growing up, it did, I suppose, give me an idea that I could be anybody and I could achieve whatever I wanted to.No one ever told me that that was an unattainable position. So I suppose it impacted me even at a very young age and subconscious level of seeing somebody that I saw as my role model and how that has influenced me and shaped me and my passion for women's empowerment.Yeah. So where are you now? Tell me a little bit about where you're located and what you are up to these days.I am located in Birmingham, Alabama, in the south of the United States. And as I said, home is here and there and everywhere. So where you come from is a complicated question.But this has been my new home for the last almost three years now, going on third year. I'm here because my spouse also has an immigrant story. He is a son of Haitian immigrants who is pursuing his neurosurgical career here in Birmingham, Alabama.So I'm here supporting his immigrant dreams. And meanwhile, I continue my work primarily in brand research and cultural strategy. I work within or I have been working within the space since leaving the academy, which was another home of mine for many, many years.Yeah. When did you first encounter the idea that you could make a living doing this thing called brand consulting or brand strategy?Very late into the beginning of my career. In fact, it was not only not on the horizon, it was not within the realm of my consciousness, in the least for most of my academic slash activist career. As I alluded to, I've been part of a lot of social movements and political causes.And for the longest time, I was on the opposite end of the spectrum. And in fact, I would probably be the person to critique and boycott brands and in other ways, challenge what brands were doing, which I'd like to hope now makes me a better strategist and a better marketer. Just understanding the spectrum of how people see brands.And it first occurred to me at the end of my doctoral training in 2019, when I started exploring career paths outside of academia, I trained in cultural studies and specifically in Black Studies and Feminist Studies. And I joined a brand-a-thon at the beginning of the pandemic that was focused on creating ideas and coming up with creative campaigns to encourage mask wearing, specifically in predominantly conservative states. And so that was my first exposure, real hands-on exposure, besides thinking about media studies and brands and advertising as part of cultural production and pop culture.It was the first time I became aware of the role that I can play in shaping behavioral adoption and driving cultural ideas. And so from there on after, it was a straight line for me or a straight journey into cultural research and strategy.Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of clients you work for and the kind of questions that come to you with? Yeah, what kind of work are you doing?Currently, my work has shifted because I went in-house and I'm currently an insights lead at Reddit. And so a lot of my work is actually more so in the realm of what I would call digital topology, studying online communities and essentially supporting Reddit's ad business and supporting our clients across a variety of verticals from financial services to travel to CPG to tech and in identifying communities online that align with their needs as a business, right? And reaching those communities and engaging them.Prior to Reddit though, I was a consultant and I worked in cultural research and innovation strategy. So a lot of my work involved applying semiotics, cultural analysis and media studies to help brands understand and uncover areas of opportunity, reposition their brands in line with emergent trends as well as identify insight related to overlooked audiences. So much of what I focused on was drawing on my black feminist studies training, gender sexuality studies training and critical race studies training to help brand clients like Nike, Hinge, Amex, Disney, etc. activate with consumer segments that they might have overlooked in the past.What do you love about the work? Like where's the joy in it for you?The joy is truly in understanding the power of culture and more specifically the power of brands and culture and the kind of influence that brands as producers of media have in the world. I find that in marketing and in brand strategy specifically, we talk quite frequently about trends and what trends can do for brands and what culture can do for brands. But I find that the conversation about what brands can do for culture is there but comparatively not as explored or not as rigorous and top of mind for us.And so I find joy in really bringing that to the forefront both as a practitioner now but also as an academic and somebody who passionately believes in the role of public intellectual work and thought leadership to change the discourse to shift and advance standards in the industry and in a profession. And my joy and my mission is really to bring to the forefront the kind of impact and influence that marketing has in culture, the kind of influence that brands have on shaping consumers behaviors and practices, norms and values, stereotypes, narratives that we see, and so on and so forth.I really resonate with everything you just said. And I remember, it just occurred to me, I remember feeling like brand was the idea I always had in my head. It was like a Trojan horse that you could just smuggle in all these big beautiful ideas into the corporate sphere because brand is this sort of shared entity, right?And I don't know if I'm not, I mean, that's what came to my mind. I don't mean to impose that on you. But I thought, I love how you said, we don't often really talk about what brands do for culture.So I wanted to just sort of start at first principles because you also point out that maybe even the advertising and marketing world doesn't really talk insistently about what culture is. So what is, how do you define culture and what do brands do in culture?I think of culture as an organizing system of beliefs, values, norms, expectations that we have or ourselves and each other. And the kind of meaning making that we are engaged in every day to make sense of the world, to understand it, to interact with it and to establish what is normal, what is valued, what is holy, what is forbidden, what is acceptable, what is celebrated, what is excluded and so on. And so it is an ecosystem of practices and behaviors that we have taken for granted and we have inherited.And one way I think about it is the moment we are born, there's so much that goes even to the words, it's a boy or it's a girl. From the moment we come into this world, we are inundated with these sets of ideas, expectations around who we are, what we might be interested in. Thankfully, that's changing because culture is ever evolving.But those kind of cultural scripts or rules are something that we inherit, adopt and then perpetuate from the time we are born. And to me, that's so powerful. And that's also so overwhelming in a sense, because everything around us is culture, which is why it's so hard to define it.And when I think of brands' involvement in that, it seems to me pretty obvious because brands do use storytelling and representation to appeal to what we care about, what we desire, what we aspire to. I was just getting ads for cars and different kind of new models, right? Even the stories and narrative aspiration of what we want is embedded in those kind of stories that we are consuming through mass media, including advertising.And so then there is such an undeniable symbiotic relationship between mass media, including advertising, that draws on culture as a material for inspiration and also for behavioral manipulation, right? In convincing people to behave in certain ways, to buy, etc. So I know I answered a little bit more than you asked, but that is why I think culture is so relevant to what we do.I mean, this seems particularly challenging as change is happening so quickly, right? And the responsibility for brands to sort of participate in a meaningful way is, you know, the last 10 years has been this really challenging time for brands who are accustomed to maybe not assuming that kind of responsibility for meaning and for culture. Who gets it well and who doesn't get it well? I mean, you've written this book, Cultural Intelligence, right? To give people a guide. I mean, what kind of guidance do you give to brands on how to decide the role they play in culture?I'm not sure that there is a brand that I think does it perfectly or I think is a brand that gets it all the way right. And I think part of that, now that I have transitioned from academia into commercial world with both my feet, I realize part of what we as marketers and people of conscience, people who want to do commercially viable but also responsible work are dealing with is constraints of the system, right? And we're talking about brands that are part of businesses that are looking to not make social impact per se in their work, but to make commercial impact.And so when I think about what brands could be doing better or what brands in my view should be doing or rather marketers and brand leaders who are in charge of these brands is to actually reckon with the history of advertising. And I'm going to pivot a little bit the question or my answer to the question because that's something that I really want to talk about and what I described in the book, which is the long history of the relationship between representation, inclusion, social responsibility and brands that actually started way, way, way before than 10 years ago or 15 years ago when so-called brand purpose or social purpose entered the marketing arena. And currently I am on the hunt for this letter that one of the civil rights leaders actually sent to the CEO of Coca-Cola in the mid sixties demanding better representation for black Americans and threatening boycotts.So on the contrary, now we have in the last year or so a lot of research coming out about boycotts, about brands facing pressures from consumers to do better, to be more inclusive, to be more socially responsible. Well, those calls have been coming from the margins all along. And the difference was that in the sixties, those consumers segments were not seen as influential.We're not seen as worthy of listening to. And what we're now seeing is that people who care about these values and care about engaging in culture and with culture in a matter that's conscious and responsible have the power of the dollar behind them. So I think to be a conscious marketer and a brand leader, one has to really reckon with the history that has been erased and that has been sidelined and has been overlooked in marketing and advertising so much so that if you talk to an average marketer in our industry, they likely wouldn't even know that there's a long history of brands being implicated in the civil rights struggle in this country where there has been so much struggle to my earlier point about the word struggle in regards to demanding that brands act more responsible.I probably didn't answer your question, but I found that important to mention because I do get a lot of questions around which brands are doing it well. And I guess my answer just to summarize is that I don't know if as an industry we're doing good enough.Yeah, yeah. There's a therapist I quote often, Harlene Anderson. She is instructing her students on becoming therapists, and describes questions as conversational and not to be asked to get an answer, but to be asked as a way of participating in a conversation. So I have no expectation of getting any answers. I'm really just here to see what happens when I ask a question. I love it. I wanna, you came back to that idea of struggle and I just, I would love, are there examples or stories that you have about the struggle? What am I asking? Cause I think this is like to the point, like I came into this work with this really ideal about the Trojan horse, that there was a way in which some sort of understanding of the people on the other side of the transaction would transform the way brands operate in culture and in the world. They would sort of assume responsibility for being better. Are there any examples of brands doing this well or at least leaning in the right direction or what, yeah, what do you tell a brand leader who wants to guide their brand in this direction? What kinds of activities can they do to try to steer their brand in the right direction?There are certainly examples of brands that I talk about often. In the book, I talk about Billie, which is a razor brand. So they started as a startup around 2018, around that time, if I'm not mistaken.And they are one of the brands that I mention nearly in every interview that I do because I think they are a prime example of what it means for a brand to transform culture or to participate in culture in a way that carves out commercial advantage while also responding to the cultural movement and, in fact, leading the cultural conversation.So for those who might not be familiar with Billie, Billie is a brand that was one of the first to put out campaigns around their direct-to-consumer, at that time, direct-to-consumer razor products and show women and their natural body hair in depictions of women using razor blades, right? Razor products.And if you go back to the archives, so to say, of the 2018, 2019 culture conversation, it was seen as offensive, as rather outrageous, and certainly as groundbreaking. And they really left a mark on the category and they really broke into the category with something that wasn't yet normal and normalized in the way that it is now. Now that body positivity and body acceptance, size inclusivity, all ofthese things are being taken up by brands widely, but they saw that opportunity.They identified what their consumers were yearning for that was missing from the category. They pinpointed where the culture was headed and they showed up with a product and a narrative around that product that really registered emotionally with women who have never seen their own body hair on the screen or in an ad. So that is an example, I think, of a brand that combined commercial opportunity with a cultural opportunity and leveraged it for the benefit of the business.Now you can see Billie in Target. And if you go to the razor aisle, you'll see a bunch of other brands who look like Billie and try to emulate Billie, and have come after Billie. And so they have done that for commercial advantage, but also they shifted cultural conversation in a way that is really meaningful, but also really positive for representation that women and particularly young girls are now consuming when they are exposed to mass media, including marketing and advertising as they're coming of age.Yeah. I wanna get to, because my newsletter is called THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING and you've used the word meaning in meaning making, what does meaning mean? When you use that word, what are we actually talking about when we talk about meaning? What does that word meaning mean for you?What does the word meaning mean to me? To me, it immediately evokes this notion of ideology, which I'm very attached to as a classically trained cultural theorist, as somebody who finds value in semiotics, not only for academic inquiry, but also for business and commercial innovation. And meaning is truly how we make sense of the world.It's how we assign value to things around us and how we make sense and define things. If I mentioned the word red, it evokes so many things. And if you ask me, if you give your answer, and if we ask a bunch of other people what they associate with the color red, we're likely to get somewhat similar responses.Red, the color of passion and love. Red as in stop, right? Red as in tomato, right? If I wear a red lipstick, that projects a certain image. So in that small example, I think meaning is all about how we make sense of things. But most importantly, meaning is shared.And in that sense, meaning is a shared system of what we might call representation. Because when you and I look at the red stop sign, we interpret it in the same way. And when we look at the red rose, we also are likely going to interpret it in the same way.So all that is to say that meaning is shared. And meaning is the kind of web of signs and symbols that we all require to make sense of our condition, of our interactions, and move through the world.Yeah. Do you have, what's your sort of methodology in terms of research? How do you get smart about the meaning of a brand or, yeah, the state of a category? What's your sort of preferred methodologies? And of course, I'm totally self-interested and will eventually ask you about the role of qualitative and ethnography and all that stuff.The approach that I like to take is very interdisciplinary. So a lot of what I rely on is semiotics as a tool for understanding how culture is manifested, how is it shifting through the collection of signals and analysis of visual and verbal cues. And that might mean desk research, which I know a lot of times can get bad rep in marketing and strategy circles, specifically when we're pressed for time and we are looking for that stat to put in a pitch deck or something like that.But I'm really thinking of desk research in terms of media and cultural analysis, gathering materials from social media, from pop culture, from politics, and really creating a mosaic of cultural artifacts and then looking for patterns that evolve in that picture of what is transpiring within culture or category. And specifically in category and brand analysis, I rely a lot on visual analysis of cues and signs and symbols that show up in everything from ad campaigns and ad narratives to product packaging and visual cues used by the brands. So that's kind of one way of approaching it.And then additionally, I do discourse analysis. So as I mentioned, currently I work for a social media company. So a lot of that has to do with understanding online conversations, what is happening, conducting social listening.And that's where we see some of the quant tools enter where we are not only trying to analyze the conversation by reading, analyzing the themes, narratives that emerge, but also the quantitative element of mentions, conversation volume, growth of certain communities, etc. So those are some of the methods that come to mind. And I do also have some experience in ethnographic research and direct consumer research, which I do less of now that I am with an online social media platform, but have done extensively in the past and find it so important, particularly when it comes to uncovering insights from people and groups of consumers that have been historically overlooked in advertising and marketing.What's your sense of the difference between the kind of learning or the kind of understanding you get from a semiotic analysis or discourse analysis and what you get from a conversation or an ethnographic interview?Such a good question. I write about that a little bit in the book. I find that the challenge that strategists, marketers, researchers face within the commercial context is that oftentimes, in my experience, working in various contexts, we expect people to give us the analysis of culture or the analysis of a category. The worth, the value of qualitative research is to hear people's stories and how they themselves make sense of their condition, of their lived experiences, of their reasoning, of their interactions. Which I think is very useful for finding that special insight that might be bubbling under the surface. It's not very obvious.And understand how people think about their experiences. Because at the end of the day, to me, if I am interviewing somebody, if I am talking to them about their experience, whether with a product or a category or a cultural topic, it's really understanding their experience of it, their subjectivity, their way of seeing the world.When I think about semiotics as a tool, I'm thinking more of a systematic analysis of what is being represented in media. And in part, what that person that I'm talking to is consuming, what is shaping their perceptions, what is shaping the kind of narratives that they are exposed to through media, through politics, through conversations online, through mass marketing, et cetera. The visuals that they receive. So in some ways, perhaps we can think about, or I think about, the qualitative ethnographic approach as bottom up and then semiotic approach as more of a top down where we are more focused on these kind of macro narratives that are shaping the cultural discourse.Yeah, that's beautiful. Can you tell me just a little bit about semiotics? Not everybody really knows what that is. I think it's sort of a, like everybody in the UK knows what it is and practices it. But in the States, it's not something you kind of bump into all that often. I mean, more and more, it's true.Well, funny enough, when I was consulting, I worked primarily with UK agencies, which is a great pain point for me because I do believe that semiotics has immense commercial value and is absolutely underappreciated in the US marketing circles, primarily because I suppose it's not as scientific, even though semiotics is an art and a science. And the way to understand semiotics is to think of it as a study of representation. So semiotics really is concerned with analyzing signs and symbols that we see around us.And it could be something as simple as a milk packaging, milk package, milk packet, or something as grand and macro as a presidential ad campaign, right? So we are looking at the way things are represented and the way that meaning is encoded in those forms of representation. So other ways to think about it is to ask, how is meaning, or in other words, messaging, to use more simple language, communicated in direct and indirect ways?How is meaning communicated through explicit language and implicit language, meaning symbols, colors, signs, things that are beyond spoken language, but that we all register and understand on a subconscious level. That's the way that I would describe it.Yeah, it's wonderful. I'm curious about the value of semiotics is it is, is it theory? Is that an accurate term? I'm reminded of a conversation, one of these conversations I did with Kate Sieck, who's an anthropologist working in the business world. And she advocates really strongly for that theory, academic theory, when applied to method, it makes method super strong. It's a way of strengthening qualitative if you've got theory to back it up.You come from academic world and are operating in the commercial space. Is semiotics a kind of sort of framework or theory that makes a strategist stronger or more effective in that way? And then follow up sort of what's it been like? What's the biggest, what's the most biggest challenge of coming from academia into commercial wackiness?Absolutely. I mean, my whole mission, I suppose in the commercial world is to bridge the gap between academic theory and commercial practice. And one of the reasons for that is that shortly after I came on the scene in the commercial world, after 2020, I found that brands were asking questions that academic theory has answered long time ago.And that's how my book came to be. It's an answer to a lot of the questions that marketers have asked about brands, identity, representation, inclusion, that coming from the disciplines of black studies, gender sexuality studies, critical race theory, decolonial theory. I found a lot of the answers already existed.And so I wanted to bring some of those concepts and framework into the practice of marketing because I do believe that it can be useful and effective and very beneficial in the marketing practice. And so to that end, semiotics is an academic theory and semiotics or semiology is really originating in the disciplines of linguistics and understanding how language is formed. So to my earlier point, language can be written and spoken and language can be unspoken.And so in that sense, semiotics is a rather complex theory that I would not even argue that I am fully reversed in terms of academic specialization. But all that is to say, I am absolutely convinced that marketers can only be more efficient and more successful when we look to other forms of knowledge that exist outside of business, precisely because as marketers, we deal so much, even though if we don't talk about it that way, with psychology, sociology, behavioral science, narrative, discourse, identity, representation, all of these things have been taken up by researchers, thinkers, artists, intellectual activists outside of the confines of business and somebody who came in to this work as an idealist as well, my growing concern is that there is a kind of, I might not want to call it anti-intellectualism, but suspicion of academic knowledge and I'm really committed to working against that.What is the, I'm just thinking about your inner idealist and your mission, what's your touchstone? Do you have a theoretical touchstone or a mentor or like a hero that you keep returning to to inform your mission and your work to sort of awaken the marketing world to the intelligence of academic knowledge?Absolutely. Well, funny, anyone who knows me knows that I am obsessed with Stuart Hall, who is a cultural theorist, that's on the academic side of things. And so it's rather funny because anytime we do any kind of icebreakers in my team meetings, and you have to talk about the last book you read or something that inspired you, I always talk about Stuart Hall.His work informs so much of my own thinking. And so I always, always, always return to his written work and the way that the British School of Cultural Studies has reformed our understanding of culture as a system of ideologies. So that's my inspiration from the academic world.But as I mentioned, I'm always looking to bridge the gap between academia and business. And in business, this is absolutely easy question to answer. I look up to my friend, mentor, colleague, Dr. Marcus Collins, who wrote the foreword to my book, for which I'm very grateful, and has his own bestselling book for the culture. And Dr. Collins is an experienced advertising executive, but also a professor at University of Michigan School of Business. And he's one of the people who I think is paving the way in the industry and inspiring these new ways of combining academic knowledge, infusing theory with practice. So he's somebody that I'm constantly studying and taking inspiration from and seeking guidance from in how he moves through the industry, precisely because he's just so fantastic and brilliant at bringing academic ideas into the business world and making them accessible, which is certainly something that I'm working on as somebody who started in academia rather than started in business and then went into academia. So it's something that I'm always inspired by.Yeah. I would love to hear a little more, Stuart Hall, can you tell me a little bit more about what you love about his work?Oh, absolutely. I love that anybody asks me about Stuart Hall and I don't get that question a lot. Stuart Hall was a renowned British Jamaican cultural theorist who was one of the founders of British Cultural Studies or School of Thought that we know as British Cultural Studies.And Stuart Hall's work really focuses on the idea of culture as a system of representation, as a collection of ideologies that are in constant tension with each other. And so, beyond Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies, we talk about following Raymond Williams, the residual, the dominant and the emergent cultural forces. So really the work of Stuart Hall and the work of Cultural Studies as a discipline is to understand culture as a push and pull between more dominant cultural ideas and emergent cultural ideas that are rising on the margins, that are rising in subcultures, they are rising in social movements.And one of the biggest contributions that Stuart Hall has made to the disciplines of Cultural Media Studies is to say that people, that audiences are not passive consumers of culture, that people who consume mass media, be popular culture or marketing or advertising, are always reinterpreting messaging and applying their own meaning to it. They're negotiating it. And that's actually one of the examples of academic theories that I use in my book to show to marketers how they can draw on the basics of audience theory, excuse me, reception theory per Stuart Hall, in which he talks about how when audiences receive messaging from media, they might accept it, they might challenge it, they might renegotiate it.And so it basically drives home the point that when you're sending out your messaging and narratives in the form of marketing to audiences, it is expected that certain segments of your audience might react differently to the messaging that was in front of them because they're actively engaged in the process of meaning making. And so that's the theory I use to explain the backlash that brands have received in the past for putting out messaging that is either insensitive, not inclusive or outright offensive. It is because marketers have not anticipated the reception of their messaging precisely because they did not account for other forms of interpretation that overlooked groups of people might have in response to their marketing messaging.So that is a little bit about Stuart Hall and also a little bit about how an academic theory, like the work of Stuart Hall, can be adopted in marketing to make sense of some of the challenges and potential solutions.Yeah. And so what does Stuart Hall, what are the implications of this for a marketer? I mean, it seems like, I mean, yeah, what are the implications for the marketer? Maybe we've already talked about this and this is a very naive, redundant question, but- Not at all. I love everything you've said about, everything you've just said, I have a lot of connection to, so I'm just curious. Yeah, what are the implications? When you know this, what do you do differently?When you know this, you understand that as a marketer that is producing media, you are imbuing the media you produce with your own assumptions, your own biases, your own subjectivities and your own ways of seeing the world. Hence, meaning making, right? We all make meaning in our own ways based on the conditions with which, where we come from, the experience that we've had.And that is precisely what has happened in marketing and advertising for so long. To pick a very tangible example, that is precisely why people, and specifically women with darker skin tones, for decades could not find a product that matched their skin because people who were producing marketing campaigns and products were operating within their own meaning-making system, so to say, within their own worldview and completely ignoring the fact that there are groups of people that have different lived experiences and will have different interpretation response to their message. So once you realize that and you realize that you are inserting meaning into whatever you produce, and that meaning is going to be disseminated to people who are going to perceive it through their own lenses, for their own worldviews, as a marketer, you can start being more self-aware and self-critical of the importance of what I call social consciousness, somebody might call attention to bias, or other ways of being more inclusive, more expansive in, A, how we do research, how we arrive at an insight, who we cast, whether in our research studies or in actual campaigns, how we send out the work into the world, and whether we ask this one question, which I find very useful in my work, what is missing? What am I missing?Who is missing here? What is being overlooked? What is unspoken? What is being silenced? What is something that we might be missing here? And I find, once we start asking that, we find things that have previously been overlooked and now can make our work only more effective and stronger.Yeah. How would you characterize the way that the marketing, the commercial world has tried to pick these ideas up or address what's missing, the blind spots, the biases that you're talking about?I am conflicted on this question because I definitely do find that I meet a lot of brand leaders and marketers who genuinely want to adopt these ideas and put theminto practice. At the same time, as an activist and somebody who has been in various social struggles for a long time, I also know it's just a condition of what it means to advocate for new ideas, that they are going to be constrained by systemic factors. And what we see throughout the history of social movements and social struggles, and I don't think that the question of inclusion and social responsibility is marketing in any exception, is that there's always going to be a push and pull between the dominant forces that have always defined, here's how we do things and here's how things run and here's what we value versus how we want things to be.And these days, I find that there's more so creative energy in that. I used to speak a lot about co-optation, about appropriation, about the ways that brands can be performative and can co-opt social struggles or even these kind of movements for greater inclusivity, which I think always is going to be the case. But there's also some creative energy that I am trying to find inspiration from in that soul impulse saying, this is how things have always been, but this is not how things should be.And asking who taught us that profit should come at the expense of ethics or who has normalized and made it widely accepted of an idea, a concept, a framework, a mindset that there is a distinction between profit and purpose, between being commercially successful and being ethically responsible. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, but it sounds like you're okay with me taking whatever I want to take in. That's where I feel most passionate about is that we have erected these binaries in how we think and inevitably what brands do and how brands respond to this recent or not so recent attention to inclusivity and representation and social responsibility and social consciousness is ultimately going to be limited by these frameworks that have defined how we do things.But there's something creative and generative in trying to break them apart and challenge them and ask who said that it has to be so.Yeah, that divide is so deep and strong on both sides. I feel like I know, and I say this a lot too, because I spent some time working with sort of not-for-profits and I would put them on sort of the culture side where they value culture, right? But they don't want to participate in commerce because they feel like that's for the marketing people who are really interested in persuading and being bad actors. And then it's also, there's this question of brands on the commercial side who probably are reluctant or terrified or just clueless about the opportunity they have to participate in culture.Right, which often really baffles me because when I think about, you know, commerce and success, commercial success, a lot of it comes from innovation and innovation is ultimately change. It's progress. You can't innovate if you are stagnant.You can't innovate if you just accept culture as is, or if you try to play it within, you know, what I would call a dominant narrative. Innovation by itself, any innovation that has happened, whether it's by engineers or activists or artists, has happened because it leaned into that area of the unexplored, of the unknown, of what's coming, of what's emergent. So certainly the dogma or the way of thinking in the world of commerce is to follow the playbook and to focus on profits and to do what has worked.But I'm always very curious about folks in commerce who are a bit fearful or antagonistic towards the ideas of cultural change and kind of that creative innovation because culture is evolving and headed forward whether we want it or not. And so if we want to harness it and want to leverage it for commercial advantage, for cultural impact, you name it, it seems like it's inevitable that we have to look to the horizon and at least lean into what's possible just a little bit.Yeah. Oh, I love everything you just said. It occurred to me too because you used the dominant and the emergent, right? Is that from semiotics, that framework?That is from one of the essays by cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who's also one of the founding fathers, so to say, of British cultural studies. And that's one way in which he described culture. And that's actually one of the main frameworks since we're talking about academic frameworks that can be adopted in business and in commerce.So the RDE framework, as we call it in semiotics and in cultural analysis, is one of the ways that a lot of the consultants and cultural analysts working with brands and innovation teams will categorize signals and rather codes that they have identified, right? So if we're working on identifying innovative areas in a category, in culture, et cetera, we would think about them through the codes that are dominant versus the codes that are emergent.And is there an R in there too?Yes, residual. So residual is the, no, no, no, totally fair question. Residual is what's receding, what we might be seeing, but it's kind of less often, you know, is part of the conversation.And one visual example, I'm a very visual person that I've seen in one of the workshops or talks that I've attended that really captures it for me. It was visualized as a platform at a train station. And the residual is a train that's in the distance, you know, headed to the distant direction.You barely see it. You are aware of its presence, but it's receding. And then the dominant essentially is the train that is at the station, right? And the emergent is a train that's approaching the station. So that's one of the more simple ways of thinking about the residual, dominant, emergent framework.Yeah, yeah. And is it fair to say that you try to help people discover the emergent narrative? Is that, or is that over simple? Is that reductive?No, I think that's absolutely fair as much as that sounds specific or simple. I'm not sure which one, but that's exactly it with brands that want to be a challenger or brands that want to prepare for the future, right? You can be a brand that is seeking the emergent category in order to break into it here and right now and be one of the first to do so.I talked about Billie. Billie identified the emergent narrative of body acceptance, body positivity when it was not dominant yet. They really dove deep in there and claimed that territory for themselves.So that's one example. But you can also be a brand that knows that in order to thrive and in order to survive as a business, you have to prepare for the future. And so that's where that kind of work intersects with futures thinking and futures research, which I've also done in the past, where we are really looking towards the future and mapping what's to come.And perhaps as a brand or in business in that specific context, you might not want to break into that particular emergent territory or category, but you certainly know that your business will be affected by it. And so in that kind of work where it's really about expansive understanding of the future that's to come, we would look at everything from politics, technology, governance to business and society to really understand what's emerging on the horizon. And brands that are here to stay for tomorrow invest in that kind of future forward work.Beautiful. So we're at the end of time, but I sort of hadn't asked you about Reddit. And I just wondered if there's a... How has it been working at Reddit? Reddit is such a phenomenon. It's such a unique community and collection of communities and subcultures and stuff. What's it like working there?I've always sworn that I would never go in-house. When I left academia, I was cozy in my consulting lifestyle where I would still select the projects that I work on and have the freedom to have my own schedule. So Reddit was an opportunity that I couldn't refuse despite the vow of solitude and independence that I made when entering the world of commerce.And it is because Reddit is an archive of human data. It is a repository in human behavior. And if you are somebody who's an anthropologist or somebody who's just simply interested in how people think or what people say when no one is around, it's just a massive resource of information.And what's particularly exciting to me and I find exciting for a lot of marketers and brand leaders is that it's a forum that's open to anybody. And I talked to quite a bit of researchers who have experience doing focus groups or doing ethnographic research and for which we still have to navigate to that distinction between the interviewer and the person who gets interviewed, right? And the scenario where you are extracting information from, so to say, the subjects of research, right?And the power dynamics and that, et cetera. Reddit provides a unique, I think, opportunity to do social listening of the kinds of conversations that happen between people in online communities where there's no researcher present, there is no one observing them. And so when coupled with other research tools, I find it to be a really fascinating archive of human data, as I already said.And so for that reason, going in-house at Reddit was an easy choice because having access to all that information on the backend is something that makes my job really, really fun every day.Cool, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation and I appreciate you, yeah, joining me.Likewise, Peter. This was a blast. I loved it. Thank you for having me. And I so appreciated the opportunity to share some of my thoughts. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Sam Ladner is a sociologist, researcher, and student of productivity studying the future of work.Sam is best known for her book Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector. It is used regularly in design, research, user experience, business and social science graduate-level classes. Her most recent book, Mixed Methods, is a companion to her popular course Ethnographic Research Design and Innovation available through EPIC. So, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people. She's an oral historian. She helps people tell their story. Oh, cool. It's an awesome question, which is why I use it, but it's so big sometimes I over-explain it. So, before I ask it, I kind of want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to.The question is, where do you come from?Oh, what a great question. Well, okay, you want to know, I've got a very big answer, probably bigger than most people. So, first of all, I'm adopted. So, I don't know where I come from. The short answer would be, I don't know.Yeah.I was born in Vancouver and I was raised in British Columbia. I went to University of British Columbia. I moved to Toronto in my early-ish adulthood, lived in Toronto for a long time, moved back to the West coast to Seattle. And that felt very much like home. And then moved down here to San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Area. So, every place I've lived is part of me, every single place. I lived in Halifax for a year also, right? So, every place is a part of me. And if you ask me where I'm from, I don't know. I don't have a place where I'm from. It's weird.Yeah. What is that like? I mean, can you tell me?Terrible. I don't like it.Is it terrible?Well, I mean, I'm learning to appreciate its gifts, but it is very discombobulating. I don't feel at home anywhere, but I feel at home everywhere, if that makes any sense. When we talk, my husband and I talk about, "Oh, we could go to such and such, and we can move to so-and-so." I'm like, "Anywhere you want, man. I can live anywhere. It doesn't matter." He's less like that than I am, right?What do you observe in him that he knows where he came from?Oh, it's interesting. And the irony in his case, he's from Toronto, born and raised, lived there his whole life until we moved to Seattle. He'd never set foot in Seattle before. And to his credit, he was like, "Oh, sure, let's go for it." Ironically, he loves the West Coast more than I do, even though I'm from here, right? And he loves California. I love California too. California is great. But he's in love with it. He thinks it's amazing. And so he has a deep attachment to Toronto that I don't have, but he also has this kind of like, "I need to run away. This is running away. I get to run away if I come here." And for me, I'm like, I don't have anywhere to run away from. I'm from everywhere, so it doesn't make any difference, right? It doesn't feel as like an escapist for me.Yeah. Do you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up, like as a child?Oh, well, my cousin once told me that I told her that I wanted to do my PhD, and I didn't remember saying that. I was like, "Really? Did I say that?" And she's like, "Oh, yeah." I said, "How old was I?" She goes, "I don't know. Six." And I was like, "Wow, really?" So I don't remember that. I don't remember really knowing what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn't want to do.Which was what?I did not want to be in sales. I didn't want to do that. Found that gross. Wasn't interested.How did you know?How did I know? That's a good question. How indeed? I must have picked it up from my family. I know that in my family's case, professional jobs were considered to be good, right? So like, lawyer, doctor, journalist, priest, you know, things like that were okay. Chiropractor? No. Like, nice try, but no. Why don't you just go be a real doctor, you know? Professor, those are all okay. Business person? I mean, somebody has to do it, but why you, you know?I think that's kind of where I picked it up. So professionalism, professionals was okay. Engineering wasn't really included, but it would have been acceptable. You know, because technically it's a, you know, profession. So I don't know. I don't think I had a picture. I mean, I went through phases of things that I really enjoy doing. Like, I loved chemistry when I was in school. I found that really interesting. I was very interested in photography and journalism, and I was a journalist, but I found journalism to be rather superficial, you know? So in order to do the kind of journalism, I think that would have been satisfying for me, I would have had to have moved to the United States, you know? And I didn't think that was possible. I didn't think that was something I could do. It wasn't until much later in my life that it was possible to move to the United States.I had a PhD. I could qualify for a visa, you know? I got a job offer from Microsoft. They had the resources to make it happen. But when I was younger, I was like, I don't think I can do this. I don't think I can move to the U.S., and so I'm not going to be like this big shot journalist. I'm going to be like, you know, I'm going to be doing the daily deadline. And I'm like, this is boring, you know? It's stressful and boring. So why would I do it? So I ended up going to grad school because I wanted to do more in-depth research. And I said to myself, if you don't like it, you can quit, you know? But I loved it. So I didn't. I kept going.Yeah. And so there was a shift from journalism into research? What was the attraction? How did you make that leap?Well, the reason I was a tech journalist, and so I love technology and I love how people use technology, but I wasn't going deep enough on that daily deadline kind of treadmill that I was on. And I didn't see a way to go deeper in journalism. I just didn't see how that was possible. So I thought, if I go to grad school and I study technology, maybe I can understand it a little bit more and maybe that can lead to professorship. And so I did my master's and I enjoyed it and I started my PhD and I did the analysis. And I remember I was like, oh, demographics are on my side. There's so many academic jobs opening up in the next 20 years. Wrong. Wrong.I mean, the math was right. I knew that there was going to be a lot of retirements. First of all, there weren't as many retirements as I was expecting. And secondly, they weren't replacing people. So academic job market, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, the academic job market's terrible. It's just awful. So I had to come up with a plan B once I was finishing my PhD and plan B was to do applied research. So still got to do more in-depth stuff, more than I would say the daily deadline, more theory driven too, even in applied settings, even in industry. I don't think journalism really has a lot of theoretical canon.It's so interesting. You do find it from time to time. Individual journalists are kind of erudite and they might have followed a thread or a theme or whatever, but it's not the same as becoming an expert in a particular area. And I think that's really what I wanted to do because I wanted to understand. I want to look at technology and I want to be able to understand how it's being used pretty quickly. I want to do it empirically, but I also want to do it theoretically. And how do I do that? Well, you can't really do that as a journalist, I think. So I don't think I had these articulated back when I was making that choice. I was just gravitating.Yeah. And so catch me up now. Tell me a little bit about where you are now. I know you're semi-retired. You've had a long career. Tell us sort of where you are now and what you're working onWell, right now, I just started, I think, as I mentioned, I just put together a proposal for my next book. So that's probably going to keep me occupied. If it gets accepted, it's going to keep me occupied. I'm doing a little bit of consulting work. Like yesterday, for example, I was at a tech company in San Jose and I did a workshop for their research team, helping them understand strategy and strategic foresight. And that was actually, that was great. It went really well. And so I've been doing a little bit of that. I'd like to do more of that because I find that the researchers that I know are stuck. They don't know how to grow. Training opportunities are limited. Mentorship opportunities are limited.So I've done a lot of teaching through universities, but also through EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference). And that's good, but I'd like to do more of that. So I'm setting myself up to kind of do that. I started a newsletter. I've been doing a lot of like one-on-one conversations with people.Oh, beautiful.Yeah.Oh, nice. So I'm curious, when did you first discover or realize that you could make a living doing ethnography and studying people's behavior with technology? Did you know that that was out there and you went after it or do you sort of?Well, I didn't actually. I wasn't sure I could make a living at it. I knew I enjoyed doing it. So I thought I would try to do more of it. I was working during my PhD at a design agency and doing research for clients. So we designed websites and apps and we had clients. And so in order to make those things, you needed to do some research. And so I was a director of research and we did like surveys and interviews. And I always was pushing for field work, always pushing for field work, which worked sometimes. Sometimes it didn't. The budget wasn't there. Timelines weren't there, blah, blah, blah. So I was like, okay, maybe I can do this. When I finished my PhD, I went onto the academic job market, but I wasn't getting much in that way. So I also started my own company and I started doing basically ethnography.Basically, that was it. I did other things too, a few other things like interviewing and stuff like that. But I made a living doing it. It was tough. It was really tough because I had to pitch it every time. But I started getting repeat customers and it was good. The problem was I wasn't doing enough tech work. And it was partly because I was in Toronto, I think. And the tech scene in Toronto is not that big and certainly not that adventurous. So I was like, okay, I want to do more tech work. How am I going to do this? I thought, should I open an office in Chicago or something?I had clients in San Francisco, but I wasn't getting enough technology work. It was mostly communications and marketing and things like that. And I was like, oh, that's fine. I did some CPG work, which was okay, but I wanted tech. So then I got an offer to work at Microsoft and I was like, I'm gone, 100%, let's do this. So we moved to Seattle and my job there was ethnographic work, more or less. And so Microsoft has deep pockets, they can afford to do stuff like that. Even there, it was tenuous though, I have to admit. I did a lot of different kinds of work. If I didn't know how to write a survey, that would have been a problem. Interviewing, of course, always doing interviews and things like that. But ethnography was kind of the expensive option.How do you describe ethnography to somebody that doesn't know what it is?Well, I often start by just, I talk about the ethno and the graphy, writing about folk. That's kind of what it is. It's writing about folks. And they go, "Oh, okay. So you're writing about people, you're talking about people." Yeah. And the key difference, of course, is between that and just plain interviewing, not to mention surveys or focus groups or what have you, is the observational aspect, right? Being embedded, going to, being part of, deep hanging out, being there. The being there part is so important.I mean, in journalism, they used to have this thing, go, don't phone, which I completely agreed with at the time. And now I understand more deeply why that works, especially if you've got a trained eye for observation. You can see, and a lot of people like to simplify this quite simplistically, in my opinion, but they'll say like, "Oh, what people say and what they do are different things," which is not false. That's not false. But it doesn't tell you the whole picture.What is missed with that?I think that opens the door, that statement opens the door a little bit to this problematic assertion that people lie. And your job is to find out the lies. Your job is not to find, people are not lying. They are genuinely unaware of the differences between their perceptions and their activities. And sometimes to their own personal detriment, story of all of our lives, right? People can see us doing things all the time that we don't ourselves even know we're doing.So when it comes to ethnographic work, what you're hoping to understand is that contradiction. And what are the contextual factors that lead to such contradictions? What are the perception gaps that people have about their own lives? And you need to know what those things are. If you're going to be doing applied ethnography for the purposes of business, you need to know what these differences are. And it's not people are lying. I hate that. I hate that belief. People simplify it that way. And I understand why they're doing it, because it is true. People oftentimes say they do things that they don't at all do. And you need to understand why that is, what's going on there. And to their best intentions, they want to do certain things.Yeah. But it also feels like I totally connect with you on that. And I feel like over the past several, I mean, decades, I mean, at least in my career, that this sort of behaviorism has taken over based on that idea that if you can't trust what people are going to tell you, then you should not talk to them at all.Yeah, completely. And I can see why people have that belief. It's frustrating for me to hear it. Because I think it isn't just innocuously incorrect. It's pernicious. It creates a sense of distance between you and that person, your customer, or your stakeholder, or whatever you want to call this person. There's a psychological distance that you're creating. It lacks empathy. It's a power move. We don't care what you're saying, but we have good reason to not care what you're saying. Ooh, isn't that convenient that you don't have to listen anymore? Convenient, right?Yeah. You get to be correct and completely self-absorbed at the same time.Exactly. Anytime that those two things come together, you have to ask yourself, is this a little too convenient?I was so excited to talk to you because not only, I mean, clearly you're sharing so much of your thinking out there, but I feel like you also advocate for qualitative in ways that is so, it feels a little rare, oddly. I mean, just to say that. Maybe, I don't know why that came out of me, but it's just exciting to me because I often feel maybe as an independent, it always feels existential.Oh, I completely understand thatSo I'm always wondering, is there value in this thing? And you make a beautiful case for it over and over and over again. How do you feel about the state of ethnographic and qualitative research today and the bias against it?It's a very interesting question because I see this coming in waves, right? I see the difference coming in waves. There's the hot new feature or the hot new this or that comes out and people gravitate toward that. It's the same with research methods. There's a hot new thing and people gravitate toward that. I think in the case of, I mean, I'm embedded in Silicon Valley, right? So I'm surrounded by tech bros all the time. And the kinds of things that I hear are hilarious. I'm like, wow, this feels like I've had this cycle many times before. And you think this is the first time this has ever happened. How did that happen? So the quantitative bias, as you say, the bias against qual isn't, I think, a bias against qual per se. I don't know if I would have said this in years past, but now I believe this. I don't think it's a bias against qual per se. I think it is a Cartesian curse, separation, mind and body.And there's a belief that there's a perfection that we can achieve if we are to banish all the things that make us most human. And so we're going to get behaviorist and we're going to get, I mean, Skinner was like, that's one phase, Skinnerian psychology, one phase of this. And you're seeing it coming again with, oh, test and learn and AB testing and analytics and objective truth. And I just laugh because it seems so childish. You clearly are not well-rounded if you think that that's what all this is, right? So the bias against qual in general, I think, is a bias against all that is messy, all that is unstructured, all that reminds us of our own ambiguity as humans.So I do take it seriously that I need to defend qual and I want people to understand that there's value there. So I work hard at articulating it. And like you, I've had to articulate it over and over and over again so that people understand. But what I see happening right now with this quant bias is it's almost manic and frenetic right now. And I think it's probably because people are really working hard to say AI is going to solve everything again. And we all know it's not. It's all so obvious, right? It's so obvious.What is so obvious?Uh, well, it's a joke. It's a punchline now. Like, "Oh, well, just AI that," you know. And it's like, no, we all know. We all know that the ability to AI a solution is limited. We all know that. And we're pretending that we don't have to do the hard work. We're pretending that we don't have to understand nuance. We're pretending that we don't have to. And I'm just waiting for everybody to get so horribly disappointed. You're already seeing it, right? Actually, it's coming faster than I thought. I thought it was going to take a little bit longer, but we're already seeing like chat GPT just blew everyone out of the water. But then they're like, "Oh, it doesn't do all these things." So now there's like, I can't remember what it's called. They've got a new model that's got like a reasoning aspect to it. And they're like, "Look at how it reasons." And it's like, okay, you use like a GMAT equivalent. Like you use a standardized test. Of course, it's going to reason in situations like this. You're not getting rid of the humans. You're just not.But it is on the same continuum as the bias against qual as you're articulating.Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think that it's kind of manic, like the, "Oh, people lie and we have to watch what they do." And, you know, also, you know, "That's messy and it's not objective" and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, methinks you doth protest too much tech, bro. You know, I'll just wait. I'll wait. You'll figure it out. You know?So what's my next question? I'm curious about. Well, yeah. How does it? I mean, I agree with you. And I feel like I have a very I remember I had a conversation with somebody and I think they said it, but they said that the Western world kind of wants to be a machine when it grows up. Like something.YeahI think it resonates with what you said that there's aspirational about the abandonment of the fearful.Yeah. You know, I mean, that's Descartes. It's Frederick Winslow Taylor. Like I have to eliminate all of this weakness, this messiness. I have to eliminate it, because if I do, then I'm going to be perfect.Right.It's so transparent to me. Psychologically, it's so transparent. It's here. You know?Yeah. So how do you make space for the work that you do? And you're an island of messiness in an ocean of tech bros.Imperfectly, I would say I make room for it. I mean, this is part of the reason why I decided it was time to leave full time, big tech, because it was a struggle every day. And the benefit that I was getting was it was declining. And I knew it would write it had declined zero, but it was declining. What was the benefit that I was getting out of doing the fighting the good fight because I was fighting the good fight and fighting the good fight is a heroic and it's good and it gives you purpose and makes you more well rounded. And I felt like I had achieved like I kind of it's a forcing function to take on individual fights to take on positions so that you can formulate a coherent worldview and that you can you can formulate a good argument.Yeah.And being embedded, you know, at Microsoft and Amazon at Workday. I was able to do that every single day. Every single day I was putting myself on the spot to develop a good, coherent argument to, you know, work around the edge cases to warm my way into the mainstream of the organization. Good practice, good benefit, good skills, well roundedness, psychological benefits. But those were waning because I was had now is starting to have the same arguments every single time, the same arguments, and they weren't differing significantly. I'd seen so many.But the classic, of course, is the "How many people did you talk to?" question, you know, okay, well, first of all, you're challenging my research findings of which you have none. I have them all, right? Okay. You also have never studied research methodology, clearly, because you don't even understand the difference between probability and non-probability sampling. But let me school you for a few minutes, my son, I will help you.I had that question. The first few times I had that questions quite early on in my career, it was kind of terrifying. I remember actually having one one time with the CEO of my agency happened to be there. And she sat in on this call with the client who was like this big bank. And they were asking this question. And I answered the question. And I was like, because I didn't know the CEO was going to be there. And I like I was like, "Oh, my God, this is like intense," right? That was like the hardest client was like, "Thank you. I felt like I went back to school. This is great," blah, blah, blah. And the CEO was like, "Good job." And I was like, "Oh, God, did I answer the question?" So then I got used to answering that question. That question is really old now.And there were a bunch of other questions like, "Well, it's all nice and good. But how much time do we have?" And like, "What benefit does it give?" And you know, you name it all the objections. I got them over and over and over and over again. You could say I hit saturation.Yeah, that's right.I knew exactly what the question was going to be. I knew exactly three, four different answers to the question. I would eliminate two of them immediately. I choose one sometimes I would intentionally choose something crazy and say, "I don't know how this is gonna be a flyer. Let's see how this goes."So I felt like I had gotten the growth for myself of being the underdog on a regular basis. So the benefit was tapering off. But even more so than I had to assess the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of continuing to be embedded in an organization that is not a native land, shall we say? I mean, there's benefit to it, but there's also cost to it. And I felt like I was starting to kind of lose my sense of I want to say self that's overstated it. I was starting to lose a sense of like, terra firma. Like everything was becoming relative, and relativism. There's no, oh, I can justify anything. Oh, I can do anything. And I was like, I'm feeling too embedded. I've lost my sense of professional strangeness.Yeah.And I don't really like that. So let's see how this goes. And I kind of like sat on it for a while to see how I was going. Benefits were not growing. Sense of floating away kind of increased. And I was like, you know what? I don't need to do this anymore. So thanks, guys. Best of luck. I left on very good terms. And my boss, I explained it quite clearly to her. I was like, "It's just time for me to go." Yeah. And she's like, "Oh, okay. Okay, I get it." And she did not notably, she did not say, "Is there anything we can do?" She didn't say that because she knew, right? She knew it was like time for me to go. So I mean, I was happy to be there. And I'm happy to leave.Yeah. How would you describe the state of sort of qual now as compared to when you started?Well, I mean, the familiarity is much bigger than it was, I would say, which is good. We haven't talked about COVID and ethnography and how that's affected ethnography. And it really has. And I'm sure that has something to do with my sense of like, exhaustion, I think. Because doing fieldwork is transformative. And like, nobody wants to do it anymore, because they think they can't, or don't need to. And again, you have to ask yourself, oh, this is a very convenient choice. Because it's hard, right? So I would say that it's good. It's on the cusp of having, it has to get more forcefully out there, not just qualitative in-depth interviewing, but like, really emic positioned qualitative research, which may involve fieldwork. But you can't fool yourself into thinking that just doing, you know, Zoom-based interviews all the time is going to give you everything, you know, that everything you want. And I so I say good things, it's the familiarity is much larger, people accept it, they know it's important, etc.But they're not taking full advantage of the qual, they're trying to be quantified qual a lot of times, you know, which is like a total waste, right? I had a, an interaction with a VP at my old company, I had done some research with him and his team. And I, qualitative Zoom interviews, right? And I mean, I'm a veteran practitioner. So I was able to get good stuff out of these interviews. And I gave him a memo. And he's like, "Great." So he went to the C-suite for something for this proposal he was going to make based on the research that I had done and some other research that that he had done, like, you know, competitive analysis, things like that. And he didn't tell me he was going when he was going to the C-suite, he didn't offer me a look at his presentation. I didn't take it personally, but he shared it with me after. And I looked at it and I was like, "Oh," and I ran into him in the coffee area. And I was like, "Oh, thanks for sharing the slides." He goes, "Yeah, what did you think?" And I was like, "Well, a few things were wrong." And he's like, "Oh, what parts?" And I was like, "Pretty much all of it."Oh, wow.And he's like, "Oh, really?" And I was like, "Yeah," I said, "You know, we had a conversation about qual and the power of qual, right?" I said, "You know, everybody, we all know we need quant and qual, right?" He's like, "Yeah, absolutely. You need to know the how and you need to know the how many." And I was like, "Exactly. You need to have both of those things." I said, "You took the qual stuff and you turned it into quant, which sucked it dry." I said, "If you had asked me before you went in, I would have coached you a little bit on how to present the qual in a way that is powerful and differentiating." And you kind of like lost some of the value. So I see that trend.Yeah.Which is a problem.Yes. How do you, you write a lot about this. How do you elevate qual in the organization?It's funny because I think a lot of times as researchers, what we do is we try, we privilege the methodological, you know, aspects of what we're doing. And if you take, in a meta point here, the emic position of your stakeholders, they don't care about that. This isn't religion for them, you know, where it is for us, right? It's not something that they're super, you know, steadfast. So the etic position would be like the researcher defines the unit of analysis and the categories and the areas of interest and you fit yourself into it. A survey that asks you something that gives you a set of answers and you don't fit into those answers. That is etic right there.Right.You know, like how often do you drive your car? And it doesn't ask you if you don't even own a car, right? Like, you know, like, uh, other, you know, um, that's the etic position. The emic position is I'm going to start with you. You're going to tell me what's important.Oh, I see.You're going to be the person who is guiding the direction of what's interesting here. You're going to give me the area of, of importance, right? So if we as researchers take that meta point and say, our stakeholders are going to tell us what's important.Yes.As much as we love methodological discussions, they do not. So, uh, one way that I have encouraged people very strongly to elevate the power of qual is to not really treat it as the power of qual, um, is instead to think about it as the inputs to strategy. Strategy is not, uh, good strategy is not a quantitative thing. It is a qualitative thing because it's basically unique value. How do you give a customer unique value? You can't find that out from a frigging survey or analytics. You have no idea what they find valuable. Even if you see their behaviors, you don't know what's value here. You don't even understand anything. You're just a dummy. You're looking at patterns and it's a, you know, lagging indicator. So much better to position yourself as like, listen, I'm going to find out exactly what's valuable, why it's valuable so that we can take advantage of that unmet need. And I can't do that quantitatively.Yeah.It's impossible.Yes. That's beautiful. I feel like, um, I, uh, I identify with that a lot. I feel like I'm a research person who likes talking about research. I identify as a research person. Um, but it totally, um, makes it difficult. But if I were to position myself as a strategist and talk strategy, it would be a whole nother ballgame. And it's a simple positioning exercise really.Yeah.It is shift to just be like, stop talking about the research.Yeah. As much as you love it. I mean, I mean, we do love it and we can have those conversations with people who are interested. Um, but I think, I think a lot of people who do research are typically trained in social science and they don't really want to call themselves quote unquote, strategists because that feels like something we're not, you know, like, "Oh, that's a highfalutin name. And I have to be anointed with that. And I don't have an MBA. So how could I be that," you know? Um, and I, I think you can dispense with that because strategy is not something that you have to, you can easily study it, you know, easily on your own.There was, um, what you had, there was a post you shared too about, um, somebody posted about that. Apple never did any research.Oh, right. Yes.Do you remember this assumption? And you had a beautiful quote about, um, the difference not between no research versus research. And you taught, you said the, it's the result of extensive experience driven intuition. And I've become sort of fixated on this idea of the intuition as being where, what qualitative feeds. Right.And yes, I would agree with that.So I just wanted to hear you talk about the role of intuition and qualitative, especially given what you just said, like, I feel like I'm going to ramble a little bit here because it's interesting to me, but that the business world talks about data as the only sort of valid input to any sort of significant kind of decision-making.Right.And so, and when we say data, we basically mean quant.Yeah. Often.And then all qualitative input happens informally and nobody talks about it. There's no, there's no language. It's like a social silence, right? That there's no talks about this informal input of the intuition into all decision-making because they just weren't trained on it or they don't know that it's there or they just don't have the words for it.I think you're right. They weren't trained on it. I think that's it. You know I actually have a friend of mine that I used to work with who's an engineer. He's a software engineer. And I remember he told me before he worked with me that he would every single day, you know, sitting in front of his keyboard coding would be faced with instances where he had to make decisions that had direct impact on what the user was going to experience. Right. And he knows this, like he knows that there's going to be an impact on it. Is this red or is this blue? Is this fast or this slow? Whatever, you know. And he had to make decisions all the time. And he said he used to make it with what he called developer whim. What do I think? I don't know. Blah, blah, blah. Right?And he would just hard code his whim into the feature and into the software. After he worked with me, he said he developed what he called developer intuition, which is different than whim. Now was it perfect, predictive, correct? No. And he acknowledged that. But what I gave him was enough contextual understanding of the user, who they are, what they value, what's important, what's terrible. I gave him these things in these little baby bird ways. Right. Often saying things like, "Oh, this is just a lunch and learn" or "This is just some fun content" or, "Oh, let's have a conversation." You know, never telling people directly that actually this is the research readout. You need to know this. I wouldn't do that because they would start talking about how many people did you talk to and all this stuff.Right.So I would give them contextual insight into who the user is and what they really value. So when he would be sitting back at his keyboard, he now actually could make an intuitive judgment. "Oh, you know what? I don't have the exact answer for this particular question, but I have enough intuition that I feel like this could be the right answer. And it feels much better than the whim answer that I would have inputted before." Right. And I think the really great product leaders in technology, CPG, financial services, they have this intuition and they also have the humility to know that it's not always perfect. What they don't maybe realize is that intuition was probably in fact structured by a researcher who had a rigorous methodological approach to gathering the insight they needed. So they weren't just like randomly picking up bits and pieces, you know, and throwing it together. Right. Like they actually had somebody structuring the qual intuition that they were developing. And, you know, Jeff Bezos even has a quote about this. He talks about this, and I hate the word that he uses, anecdotes, and it drives me crazy. But he talked about the best product owners have a fine honed intuition based on many anecdotes, which is the closest we're going to get for him saying qual data.Yeah.Anecdote is not the same as qual data, but even Jeff Bezos understood that there was a structuring that came to qualitative research that was good. And he could call out, he could discern quickly from product managers that had just like randomly done things with no decision making whatsoever and picked up tidbits, actual anecdotes, as opposed to data, qual data, but he doesn't use the word qual data, which annoys me. But then he says, you can't get that from the averages of surveys. It's not there. So fine.Why isn't it there?Well, because it's in methodologically, it's impossible to get it from there. You can get a lay of the land from descriptive statistics. And it will tell you things that are describing the people. They have these demographic characteristics, they have these levels of education, they have, you know, these geographic locations, but that doesn't tell you anything about who they actually are, you're going to make inferences based on that. And sometimes those inferences are well founded. So for example, if I tell you that the average education level of your customer base is, you know, professional degree and graduate degree, we can make some really great assumptions about their health outcomes, about their income, about their divorce rates. These are proven, we know these things, right? But you're not going to be able to learn anything about their preferences, uh, their stylistic choices, their aesthetic profile, uh, their everyday behaviors. No, you won't know anything about those things.There are some things you will know a lot about. I mean, I could probably tell you whether or not you're going to be divorced with three questions, right? Because the research has been done, but your product in that product area, nobody did that research because that's not general research. That's for you. You have to do that research.Yeah. You have to create the structure where that develops intuition.That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So I think it is a language issue. Like they just don't have the education about qual as a method. Like qualitative methods isn't something that most people realize is a thing. All they know is the scientific method. You know, they don't realize there's a whole other, you know, area of research. They don't get it.Yeah. I'm curious about the distinction you're making between anecdote and qual data. I'm, I get excited to refer. There's a freakonomics piece about a quote that the plural of anecdote is not data. And it's, it's a popular quote and they demonstrate that there's more citations, like, you know, like a hundred times more citations for the quote, the plural of anecdotes is not data. And they kind of fact-checked it and caught and took it back to its source to a Stanford professor who was misquoted it as having said the plural of anecdote is data because what else, what else would it be?Isn't that funny? Oh, that's funny. Well, I mean, anecdote, anecdote to me is, I mean, I, and I try to tell people this whenever they use the word anecdote interchangeably with qual data. Anecdote is qualitative insight that's gathered without regard for comprehensiveness, theoretical understanding, representation, ethical positioning, subject matter, expert. There's no filtering on how you get an anecdote. You get an anecdote at the gym, you get it at the grocery store, you get it from the coffee station, you get it from lots of places, but you don't, you can't tell me the difference between the anecdote you heard at the coffee station and the likelihood of you having heard something different.Like you can't give me anything like that. You said, "Oh, well, the reason we went to the coffee station is because we actually study coffee. And, you know, I could have gone to the gym to do this, but nobody at the gym has opinions about coffee. And we wanted to know people who had informed opinions about coffee." That is not what people talk about when they talk about anecdotes. They just randomly throw things in that they have no systematic method to selecting how they find that data. They have no systematic method for excluding certain kinds of data. They can't tell you why they've made any particular decision to include this or exclude this. Qualitative data, on the other hand, can very clearly tell you what is included and what is excluded and why, right?We included young people between the ages of 19 and 24, and they had to be not enrolled in any kind of schooling. They had to have a part-time or full-time job. And we did that on purpose because we wanted people to have, you know, blah, blah, blah. So the reason I think I can say this about young people's attitude towards paid work is because we had this systematic investigation. Like we went from here down to here, and this is what the outcome is. And then I'm going to do a comparative analysis maybe with the opposite, right?Yeah.I don't think people realize that you can structure qualitative inquiry rigorously. They think rigor is sheer numbers, you know?Yes.It's not. It's procedure. It's procedure. Do you have a procedure? And if you went to the gym and collected this, and then maybe you went to the grocery store and you heard it later there, what was your procedure? There was no procedure.Yeah. What is the value, in your definition, what is the value of an anecdote?Like an anecdote that I got at the gym or I got at the grocery store?Yeah.I don't think there's a lot of value.Yeah.I don't think there's a lot of value. I can't compare it. I can't compare it to anything. I can't say the gym and the grocery store, you know, opinions about such and such are different because of X. Like I can't tell you that. So like what's the value of it?Yeah.The only common denominator is me wandering around in the world and randomly bumping my head into conversations. So this is just my bias. It's not real, you know?I'm curious about this question of there's nobody has any language for qual and how do you communicate the value of qual? I mean, what would you do if you had to sort of rebrand qualitative? It's sort of a tacky question.I know. I hear you. Do you know what I mean?Yeah. I do know what you mean. It's difficult because I'm a bit of a wonky person and I know not everybody is, right? Like, you know, people don't want to hear, well, you need to read X, Y, and Z and, you know, all of these books are important, right? The rebranding is different than developing familiarity. For researchers specifically, I often say if you can't articulate these things in a way that you feel comfortable doing on a regular basis, you need to kind of do some reading and get some language. You need to understand, you know, because people, you know, the leaders in the qualitative research field, methodologists have articulated these differences and they have clearly spelled out, you know, why qual is different, how it's different, how you should talk about it to other academics, granted. But if you don't have that, you should do that as researchers. But for non-researchers who are consumers of this and, like, this is the rebranding question, like I said, don't get hung up on the religion of the methodological differences.Instead, talk about the very real awareness people have of where things have fallen for them in the past. Like, "We tried this survey and it told us we should do this and everybody said that they liked it, but we completely missed the mark." And it's like, okay, well, do you know why you missed the mark? I think it's because you didn't have enough contextual understanding. You didn't have a why. You didn't start with a why. And it's messy and annoying, but we need to start with the why. What is value? You cannot discover value from a quantitative survey because it's etic, right? The emic position, you know, value is an emic. It's emically defined. What's valuable to you is valuable to you. So I need to find out what you think is valuable. How am I going to do that from a survey? I can't. I'm going to make all sorts of assumptions. I'm going to put you in little boxes and you're going to go, "Well, it's not really that, but you don't give me a choice, so I'll stick it in there," you know?Yeah. That's beautiful. Do you want to talk a little bit about either your book or strategic foresight, like just sort of what your own practice?Sure. I'll tell you a little bit about the book. The book is about strategic foresight and how to practice it in the organizational context.Nice.So there's a lot of books on strategic foresight that talk about like how to do it. And some are, you know, on the spectrum of very academic to very practical. So there's sources out there that help people. What I think is missing is doing that kind of work inside an organization, inside a particular organizational culture always proves to be so much more difficult. And people aren't telling practitioners or want to, you know, want to be practitioners. They're not giving them the tools to understand why it's so difficult.So that's kind of the extra wrapping I'm going to put around the practice. How to do it, definitely. How to do it effectively with current technology and tools that you can use that, you know, increase your productivity significantly. But when push comes to shove, you're going to be facing allergic reactions from your organization. And you need to understand why and what they really indicate. They don't mean your work is not valuable. They do mean that individuals have anxieties and individuals aggregated up to organizational culture equals obstacles, organizational traps. So what are those traps? How do they function?And a lot of it has to do with temporal bias. A lot of it has to do with our ability and inability. Yeah. We, the further out something is psychologically from us, the harder it is for us to understand it and the more abstract we talk about it. So that is both in psychological distance, but also temporal distance. So the further out we go in time, the less tangible and concrete the thing is to us and the way we can describe it. This is a known problem. Like this is a psychological issue that our puny little human brains struggle with. Multiply that by, you know, 5,000, 10,000, however many people work in your organization, you're going to see that it's almost impossible to move that.Most of these foresight books don't talk about that. They don't talk about the organizational challenges. So if you don't understand the organizational challenges, and you're going to follow the foresight, you know, the generic foresight process, um, it probably won't work. And you're going to say, "Well, it's because I wasn't rigorous enough, or I wasn't fast enough, or whatever it was." And no, that's not it at all. There's other reasons. So the wrapping of the organizational context is where my book is going to give something unique.Wow. Beautiful. Sounds amazing.Well, I have to write it. I haven't written it yet.And then do you want to give a shout out about your newsletter and what you're doing there?Sure. Uh, the newsletter, uh, comes out every Tuesday, except for not next Tuesday, because I will be on vacation in the Hudson Valley. Um, I write about foresight and strategic foresight and how to do it. It's a very short, I try, I'm trying to be ruthless about how short it is.So good.Uh, are you reading it? Great.Yeah. And there's stints with links. I mean, not to sort of stomp all over your description of your own work, but yeah, I think they're great.Awesome. That's great. I try to make it ruthlessly short. I'm also editing, editing, editing, self-editing all the time. So what I'm trying to do is also that organizational context wrapper around the practice. I'm trying to give that subtly each time and giving people really practical things that they can try, you know, uh, they may not be able to solve all the problems by trying one of those things, but, uh, little, little approachable bites toward bigger problems. That's what it's designed to do.I guess I have one last final big question, which is about AI and synthetic users. And I feel like all the arrival of this stuff is existential in a way. And it seems to really call out for, um, you know, the, the making the case for, for qualitative, like what the value actually is. Do you feel that as well?I do. Yeah, I do.What's your forecast? When you look ahead and you think about, I mean, your point about synthetic users is fantastic. That's exactly what the machine wants, right? So I don't have to talk to people.Yeah. Problem solved. Problem solved. Um, I'm actually quite optimistic. Like I said earlier, uh, I've been expecting the, the, the fifth AI winter to arrive. And I think it's arriving right now, which I was surprised. I thought it would take a little bit longer. Um, you're gonna, you're already seeing it in stock prices and certain stock prices, which is a way of looking at prediction markets. So people are recognizing that the hype is overwrought. Um, so I am actually quite optimistic.What I don't want to see is I don't want individual qualitative researchers to throw up their hands and say, "There's nothing I can do. I'm being replaced." I have have a little more faith in yourself, you know, uh, that work with the context, right. Be curious about what's going on. Um, and you, you'd be surprised if you were not part of the hype cycle, but you're curious about the actual potential embedded in what's going on. You're going to be, it'll take, you'll be early. People won't see what you see right away, but you know, they'll eventually see it because the hype cycle is going to crash and it's already started. So don't, don't, don't count yourself out.I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. And this was, I just had a lot of fun with this conversation. So thank you so much.Oh, it's nice to spend time with you.Nice. Enjoy the Hudson Valley.Thank you. You too.Bye. 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Phil Barden is the Managing Director of DECODE and the author of “Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy” which is a classic text about the behavioral science of marketing. Before going out on his own, he held leadership roles at T-Mobile, First Choice Holidays, Diageo and Unilever. As his profile says, “25 years client-side marketing + 10 years decision science = ‘Decoded.”Okey-dokey. All right. Well, Phil, again, I really appreciate you accepting my invitation to come on here and talk to me. I'm not sure if you know this, but I start all of my conversations and even my interviews at work, actually, with a question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian, and she helps people tell their stories. And she's got this beautiful question that I stole because it's really big and beautiful.But because it's so big and beautiful, I kind of over-explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: where do you come from?Oh, wow. This sounds like I'm on a therapist’s couch. Where do I come from? You mean sort of literally or metaphorically?However you want to take it.OK. OK. So, where do I come from? The origin story. Very, very interesting. So, literally, I'm from the UK, born and brought up in the south of England. My parents were both teachers, and my mother exposed me to creativity. She was a music teacher, and I think that probably stood me in good stead for wanting to get into marketing. My father was a science teacher, which is where my worlds have collided in my most recent career. So I think that's probably where I come from.Yeah, that's quite remarkable to have the science and the creativity. Can you tell me a story about the creativity? I listened to another interview where you talked about the role of creativity growing up. What was it like?Hmm. Yeah, well, my mother insisted that all her children learn a musical instrument, and she exposed us to many various types and genres of music. She had a very eclectic taste, which I think is admirable because we were brought up not only with classical music, opera, and ballet, but also musical theatre, pop, and rock bands.She was a huge Queen fan, for example. So she would listen to the entire album of *A Night at the Opera*, and then right after that, she'd put on the *Peer Gynt Suite* or some Rachmaninoff or something. So we were all taken from quite an early age to operas, to ballet, to the Proms, classical music performances, and also musical theatre.So, Gilbert and Sullivan, a sort of light opera, and then into rock opera even. She loved Andrew Lloyd Webber's work—*Jesus Christ Superstar* and *Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat*. She was the musical director for all the musical productions at her school.And I grew up learning the flute, my brother learned the violin, and my sister learned the piano. So we all were instilled with a love of music from an early age. And I think that exposure to the arts in general, because I then joined a youth theatre group as well, and school friends who participated in that—we played in a band together.So we were always into the creative side of making music. And one of the guys from school, who I'm still friends with, said, when we were at school, "I'm going to go into advertising," because he and I used to write stuff for a school magazine and sketches for a school revue show and things like that. So the creative process really appealed to me.And when I first learned about marketing, and that was through the husband of a babysitter actually, who worked for a marketing company, I had no idea what it was. But when I learned that it meant that he got involved in creating advertisements and packaging designs and promotional materials, I thought, "This sounds amazing," because it was very tangible. And I liked the idea of creating something tangible, but it also spoke to that creativity, that spark and inventiveness that I found so exciting.Yeah. And did you—I mean, how old were you when you discovered advertising? Was that—were you that young when the idea of working in advertising arrived?Yeah, at school, teenage years. So this friend and I used to buy *Campaign* magazine and devour it and learn about all the greats of the advertising world, not just in London but worldwide, and the big agencies. He also had a friend of a friend who was a copywriter.So we got to hang out with him a bit, and it seemed like a very glamorous lifestyle. So when I did my degree course, it was what was called a "thin sandwich" course. You spent six months at college and then six months working to get practical experience.And you had to be sponsored by a business to do this course. So I got sponsored by a company called United Biscuits, which is now Pladis, a global company. And my placements with them included manufacturing and then the sales force.And then the last placement was in the marketing department. And for me, this was like a dream come true. Because I'd heard about all this stuff, I'd been on the periphery of it.But then to be in a marketing department, and actively involved in doing some of this stuff, talking about packaging and promotions and pricing and product changes and innovation—that was wonderful. So I knew that really cemented for me that I wanted a career in marketing.Yeah. When did you first encounter the idea of the brand or the concept of the brand as an asset, or something to be managed or built or created?I think it was after that placement when I joined Unilever. And I think it was the schooling and upbringing that I got there—that brands are the lifeblood of a business, that they create current and future revenues. And it was always this idea of brands having an intangible nature. A brand was a feeling, a brand was something in your head.It was more than just the physical product and what it did, and the way it performed. It had some other essence to it that was always quite mysterious, but very exciting and intoxicating. So I think it was—I mean, obviously, we're all exposed to brands as we grow up, right, and adverts, etc., etc.And, you know, kids from quite an early age become brand-conscious and brand-aware and very quickly decide that some clothing brands are cool and others aren't. And they wouldn't be seen dead in certain clothes, you know, from quite an early age, which is interesting. But then actually working with brands and having to make decisions that were not just in isolation, like, if we change the price of this, there's a financial calculation.But over and above that, what does that do to the perception of the brand? Or if we change the packaging design or the materials used in packaging, we change the feel of it, the texture of it, what does that say? What meaning does that give?So the idea that the brand was not just the physical components, but there was something else around it, this intangible equity, was something that was certainly cemented during my industrial placements.Yeah. And you spent a long time managing brands, right? I mean, at high levels before, excuse me, the sort of the arrival of—you use the phrase "decision science." So I'm wondering, when did you first encounter decision science? And what did that do? How did that change the way that you operated?Yeah, I guess that's the question.Yeah. Well, I spent over 16 years at Unilever. And then I went to Diageo, which was also a real brand-centric company. And then I moved to T-Mobile. So I was invited by a former Unilever colleague. And it was a very exciting invitation because he said to me, "Listen, you and I know that businesses have to be based on consumer demand.And we have brands that are running through our veins. We take them for granted. But I've joined a business which is technology-led, it's supply-led. And the role of marketing is very different."It's about sort of chucking stuff out there and seeing what sticks. But the problem is that all competitors in this market operate on pretty much a level playing field. There's one technological advance, and then very quickly thereafter, everyone has the same thing.Everyone has the same handsets. So it's not just a question of who gets 4G or 5G first or who's got the fastest mobile internet or who's got the latest iPhone. Everybody does something very similar. So the only way to differentiate is through the brand.So that's what I joined my former Unilever colleague to do. And slowly but surely, we managed to turn this ship. And it was when I was at T-Mobile that I first got exposed to decision science.And decision science is a catch-all phrase that we use deliberately to include different fields of academic study and science. So a wide range—from neuroscience through the different flavors of psychology, cognitive, social, evolutionary, but also semiotics and cultural anthropology, and then more recently, what's become popularly known as behavioral economics. And I was exposed to this because I faced a dilemma. I commissioned a very expensive piece of research in 12 European countries.And it was research with which I was familiar from Unilever and Diageo. But the data we were getting back just didn’t seem to make sense. And I didn’t, honestly, I didn’t know what to do.It was a huge personal risk because I’d convinced the business to spend a lot of money—I mean, a high six-figure sum—on this research. And yeah, my own personal brand was in grave danger at this point. And someone said, “You should have a talk with these guys from Decode.They’ve got a very interesting perspective on what we do.” And I met them, and the two founders—one of them is a neuroscientist and the other is a psychologist. And I showed them the data, and I showed them the methodology that had led to and created the data.And they immediately critiqued it, using frameworks and language and views that I’d never heard before. But what they said and the questions they asked seemed to make intuitive sense. And I commissioned them on a small piece of research to kind of replicate the approach but using their approach in one of the countries.And it came back with far more useful data that intuitively made sense. So I took a very bold decision to cancel the original research and to commission Decode to run their approach, which was an interesting and novel one for me. I’d never heard of this implicit testing.I’d never heard of so-called System One and System Two at the time. It turns out, actually, some of the guys I now work with were at Unilever at the same time as me, and they were using implicit testing in their product testing and sensory testing because they had PhDs in psychology. And it was obvious to them that you had to use this particular method if you wanted to validly measure certain aspects of brand performance.And implicit testing grew out of social psychology because the psychologists knew there’s this big thing called a say-do gap. You know, what people say is not necessarily what they do. And particularly when you are asking for information about which people cannot say anything or will not say anything.So, you know, racial, gender, stereotyping, and biases are where all this started. But now applying it to brands and understanding what brands meant at an implicit level, how communication works at an implicit level, this was a complete revelation to me. And the upshot of it was that we commissioned this research through Decode.We used their approach and their model to create a new brand proposition and brief an agency. And the first manifestation of the brand relaunch in the UK was so successful. It grew sales by nearly 50%.It actually doubled footfall into retail stores within 48 hours. I mean, I’ve never seen such a dramatic cause and effect before. And it’s got 40 million YouTube views or so, which is still pretty famous.We didn’t have Instagram or TikTok in those days. It was Facebook and YouTube. So, it had 72 Facebook groups set up on the back of it.And it was this unique idea of a flash mob, and that was the creative leap that brought what we wanted to bring to life. And it was so successful. I went back to the founders at Decode and said, “Nobody can believe this.This is incredible. The company’s never seen results like this.” And these guys kind of shrugged and said, “Why are you surprised?Because you know what we’ve encoded in that ad are motivators of behavior. So why are you surprised that it works?” And that for me was just like a huge lightbulb moment when I realized the sheer power of leveraging what these guys knew.Because they were working with 150 years worth of scientific and academic study into human behavior. And ultimately, marketing is about behavior change. We want people to buy our brand, talk about our brand, share stuff, buy more, switch, whatever it might be.It’s behavior and behavior change. And learning, as I did through this experience, that leveraging what the different fields of science know about behavior change has dramatic and direct commercial impact. And that’s what got me into decision science.It was so exciting and so fundamental to marketing that I ended up deciding to quit my 25-year client-side career and join these guys because I just really wanted to be part of bringing decision science to marketing.Yeah, what an amazing story. It's so clear that you’re right there on the front edge of this paradigm shift, right? I mean, does it feel that way, that there was a before and an after, clearly, in your story? But how would you describe the way marketing worked before? What’s the understanding that’s out there for people who don’t understand what decision science is?Yeah, it worked. It worked. And it probably still does to some models and approaches that have evolved over many years that are simply either wrong or incomplete.For example, I was schooled that to get behavior change, you need to change someone’s attitude—that people behave in a certain way because they hold certain attitudes. So what you needed to do was create an intervention, which typically was an advertising campaign that would get people to change their attitudes. And as a direct result of that, they would then change their behavior.And what decision science tells us is that’s not the case, or it is the case, but in very few examples. What normally happens is that attitudes form following the behavior. It’s like a post hoc rationalization because we need to, in order to stay sane, we need our attitudes to conform to our behavior. So the relationship is not causal in one direction—it actually happens more post hoc.So that was one example that, you know, we shouldn’t just go chasing attitudinal change and measuring attitudes as the be-all and end-all. And the other was the so-called AIDA model—the Attention, Interest, Desire, Action—as a sequence of events, and that you needed to get each one nailed in turn. And then, learning from behavioral science that it doesn’t work in a sequence like that, that actually, you can get attention because people are interested, rather than having to get attention first in order to create desire and interest.And so understanding more about the mental processes that exist in the brain was fundamental to me but also very challenging. And being honest, very uncomfortable because, having grown up with certain paradigms, it’s hard to shape them. And it hurts. It’s effortful to change, change our minds.And that even is described in behavioral science, it’s the so-called Semmelweis reflex, because change is inherently risky. And that’s why we have a bias towards a status quo. It’s why change management, per se, is very difficult in any business because we stick to what we know, because it’s comforting, it’s familiar, and it’s safe.And once you rock that boat, it takes effort to change, to rethink or reconfigure your mental model of how the world works. And I think it was only because I had that personal experience of living through the T-Mobile relaunch and seeing the impact that helped me reshape my mental models. But it’s no surprise that, you know, when I first set up business in the UK with no clients but with this utter conviction that this was a very powerful tool, and I went to see my former colleagues from Unilever, and I would tell them about decision science and tell them the T-Mobile story.And they were fascinated, absolutely fascinated. But they kind of gazed blankly at me and said, "Well, that’s amazing. But anyway, back to the day job," because it was too challenging.It really, really hurts when you’re told that what you’ve been doing for years might not be the best way of doing something.Yeah. Yeah. What are the implications? I mean, I’m a researcher, right, and a brand person, but what are the implications for how a team learns? You know, if you really digest the implications of this, what does it do methodologically in terms of how you go about building a brand or just understanding what’s motivating your customers?I think you need to have a model that is rooted in how the brain works. And that’s what first attracted me to the Decode approach because what they said to me was, "Look, people buy brands, whether they’re physical products or services, to meet a job to be done," as we’ve come to know it popularly. And those jobs to be done are a mixture of things like functionality.So, you know, I’m thirsty, I need refreshment, or I want broadband, I want fast connectivity. So it’s very, very important that you deliver those. But that’s not enough in a competitive world because there are many brands and choices that could satisfy that functional job to be done.And that’s where there’s this other level, which is a more implicit level of social, emotional, psychological goals that people seek to achieve by using a product or service. And it’s the expected fit between a choice and its ability, its instrumentality, to meet a goal that drives valuation in the brain. Because if we’re faced with many choices, you know, going to a supermarket, and there are many brands that could meet your particular functional needs, but how do we actually make a choice?That valuation is driven by the expectation of best fit. And that expectation itself is driven by the associations that we learn that the brand has. And that can be through personal experience.But it can also be expectations and associations that are built through things like advertising, or word of mouth, or the signals that a brand sends through its packaging or its other activities and touchpoints. So they are all forming associations in the brain and the so-called System One associative network. And it’s those associations that we use to assess instrumentality when we’re faced with a choice.So once you understand that is how human beings make decisions, then the question is, how do we measure associations, both at a category level and a brand level? And how do we, if our brand is deficient in associations versus what it needs to be, how do we strengthen them? Or maybe how do we weaken some associations if they’re kind of not helping the cause as well?But once you understand that and it all fits together, you strengthen association, you get a better-perceived fit with the goal or job to be done, then you’re going to get higher valuation in the brain. That also leads to higher mental availability. So when that job to be done exists, which can be driven by occasion or context, situation, then which brand comes to mind first?So it all loops back together, it all fits congruently as a model and as an approach. And then the choice of research method falls out of that. What construct are we trying to measure? Is it a System One response, or is it a System Two reflection or evaluation? You know, that’s why people, I think, often get confused and conflate concepts of emotion, for example, because it’s perfectly valid to ask people about, how did you feel about this ad you’ve just watched? What were your likes and your dislikes?Those are emotion for sure, but the method you use elicits and evokes reflective mental processes, which is System Two. Right. So it’s perfectly valid to ask explicit questions or give people a like-at-scale or a rating scale for that type of thing.But on the other hand, if you are trying to measure automatic associations or automatic emotional response, then you need a different method. You need an implicit method of some sort, whether that’s a biometric method to measure a physiological response or whether it’s an implicit testing method to measure associations. It all depends on the construct you want to measure.Yeah. And I reached out to you because there was a post on LinkedIn in which you really drew this distinction between emotion and motivation, which feels like it’s really blurry. Those words are used kind of interchangeably in a lot of situations, but I loved how you pulled them apart. What is the difference, the functional difference? What is the distinction between emotion and motivations?Yeah. It’s a confusing one for marketers. And the reason is, I think, because it goes back to this dichotomous view that we’ve had for many, many years in marketing and advertising, a split between emotional and rational.And that has been conflated with System One and System Two. So people think now that emotion is System One and rational is System Two. There are a couple of things we need to tease apart here.And we’ll come back to motivation in a moment. The brain doesn’t work on a basis of emotional versus rational. It works with automatic processes and reflective processes. And System One are automatic processes and System Two are reflective. So when we learn something, like I mentioned earlier about my mother insisting we learn musical instruments, you know, when you start learning a musical instrument or language or to walk or to drive, it’s really difficult. Lots of cognitive effort going into that.And that’s a System Two task to learn those things. As they become automated and implicit, they pass into System One. So we no longer have to think about walking or driving. They are System One, but they’re not emotional. Walking is not emotional. So you can’t just pigeonhole System One as emotion and System Two as rational.So that’s one thing that needs clarifying. The other thing is emotion and motivation, because people’s popular view is that emotion drives action. There was a very interesting meta-study by Professor Roy Baumeister at Florida State University. Baumeister and his colleagues examined over 4,000 published papers that purported to show a link between emotion and action—specifically, that emotions drove action. And their review of 4,000 papers found, in fact, about 1% of those studies—about 40 papers—actually did show a link, a causal link with emotion driving action. And the vast majority of those were what Baumeister classified as extreme cases.And what he meant by that was someone gets in your face and is really threatening and angry, and you hit them, right? You get fear and anger building up in you. And as a result, you hit them, or someone cuts you off in traffic and in frustration, you honk your horn at them. That’s an extreme case. But if emotion drove action, our visits to the supermarket would just be a rollercoaster of emotions. And they’re not, of course, they’re not, right?So what actually does happen? And this is where, again, when we come back to science and examine what’s been studied, what drives motivation is so-called goal achievement. And one of the very senior neuroscientists at Stanford actually said, "Goals are the system units of human functioning, whether we’re aware of it or not."Achieving a goal is what triggers motivation. And a goal, as I mentioned before, like a job to be done, can be functional, right? My body is, I’m thirsty, I’m in need of liquid refreshment.So I drink something—that is a goal that I have. Or I need comforting, or I want to do something different, something adrenaline-filled, a bit rebellious, a bit risky. Or I want actually to—I have a goal that is about displaying self-esteem and superiority and whatever.So the choices that I make to meet those goals will be very different. Motivation and emotion—because everyone says, "Oh, they share the same Latin roots." Well, yes and no. Motivation comes from the Latin verb "movere," which means to move. And emotion comes from "emovere," which means to excite. The "e" bit comes from, is similar to the concept of "out."So it’s like moving out, so exciting. So they share some roots, but there is an important distinction between them. And when you talk to the scientists and academics about the role of emotion, they’re very clear.I mean, Carver and Scheier, who are world-renowned psychologists, say we experience emotions whenever the likelihood of achieving a goal changes. And to give you an example, so if I’m playing tennis competitively, and so my goal is to win, and I am winning, I feel good. I feel powerful. I feel proud. But if I’m playing to win and I’m losing, I feel angry or frustrated or sad. So we experience them when the likelihood of achieving the goal changes.They also act, and this is what Baumeister says as well, they also act as feedback to us, as a gauge of the extent to which we’re achieving our goals. And they then get linked with goal achievement to help us learn for the future. So imagine, for example, your friends say, you know, you’re going to meet a bunch of friends at the weekend and all go out for dinner.And the task of choosing the restaurant falls to you. And you want to feel good about your choice. And you want to maybe exhibit your knowledge or your connoisseurship. So you choose a certain restaurant. Now, if you have a great time there and a great meal, and it’s good food and good wine, a good ambiance, you’ve achieved your goal. And your friends will maybe congratulate you."Oh, great. You know, thanks for choosing this. It’s really, really nice."If you have a poor experience, then you miss your goal, right? And you feel frustrated and not good about yourself because you’ve let your friends down and it reflects badly on you as well as an individual. So that emotional feedback helps us learn for the future.We will choose restaurant A and not restaurant B in the future. Or, to win the game of tennis, we do this particular tactic and not that one. So that’s how emotions work—entwined with motivation as a gauge and as a feedback mechanism. But the underlying motivation is driven by this goal achievement.What’s my current state now? You know, am I thirsty? Therefore, a goal is triggered to quench my thirst. Or I’m going to choose a friend to go out with for an evening, and I want to have a great time.So my choice of friend would be different to if I’ve got a problem that needs to be shared and solved. I might choose a different friend who’s a good listener and someone who’s great with advice, but they’re not necessarily the life and soul of the party. It’s a bit like, which brand do I choose depending on the job to be done, and hence, what my motivation is going to be.Is it fair to say that goals and goal—the language of goals, motivations, jobs to be done—that’s all the same territory? That’s sort of the beating heart of a brand, basically?Yeah, yeah, I think so. And the other aspect of goals and jobs to be done, which are core—they’re central. But the thing to remember, because human behavior is dynamic, is that the goal or the job to be done can change depending on context.So when I first started working with the guys from DECODE, they said to me, there’s a very simple equation in psychology: behavior is the product of the person times the situation. And I didn’t quite understand it at the time. But then they said, well, imagine you’re choosing an alcoholic beverage to drink, and you’re on your own at home, and you’re sitting down to watch a movie.Yeah, you choose a certain beverage. But imagine now you’re on holiday with your friends or family, or imagine the temperature’s high or low, you’re in a work situation, you’re with colleagues or clients or whatever it might be. You change any one of those contextual variables, and it can directly influence your choice of beverage. The one constant in that is you as an individual—you don’t change. But because the situation changes, then our behavior changes.And that’s the dynamism of human behavior and how jobs to be done have to be looked at in the context of occasion as well.So this also is the foundation of that idea. I think this is you quoting that people buy categories first. This is to the degree that categories are defined by goals.Yeah, yes, absolutely. And this—because if, like, going back to my example about I’m thirsty, I need something to refresh me, I need liquid—that’s a category decision. Or I need broadband, or I need car insurance—that’s a category decision.So what motivates us at the category level is very important to understand first, because that then creates the context in which the brands operate. And this is all quantifiable as well. This is foundational research that we’ve been doing for many, many years, because once you have quantified those drivers at a category level, you can then profile the brands in the category.And that enables you to determine and define relevance. So which of the category drivers does your brand own? And also distinctiveness—the degree to which your brand owns the drivers uniquely, or it may share the drivers with competitors as well.And those are definable, and they are quantifiable as well, which is what makes it very exciting. And that’s exactly the same research Decode did with me as their client on the T-Mobile brand. But understanding the category is important because you can measure brand associations, and you can say, well, these are strong, and these are weak.Yeah, and is that good? Is that bad? Is that relevant or not?I don’t know, unless I’ve got a context against which to judge it.How has this territory, the landscape of decision science, changed? I mean, I think the book was 2013. It’s been a long time. What’s the state of things now?And of decision science or behavioral science per se? I mean, what I observe now from when, you know, Decode started 17 years ago, and I think at the time probably was unique in its offering. Now, there are many more vendors around.There are many more undergraduate and postgraduate courses available around the world in decision science and its various component fields. And I see even client-side, you know, there are chief behavioral officers, even there are new roles springing up. And certainly, you know, what I observe on LinkedIn and through marketing and advertising media, the language that’s being used now is much more embracing of behavioral science.And there have been some great proponents of it. I mean, people like Rory Sutherland at Ogilvy, you know, he has set up the Ogilvy behavioral science practice. He’s authored a book, *Alchemy*, and he has really led a fabulous charge for the whole industry worldwide, on why it makes sense to look at so-called irrational behavior.So yeah, I think it’s generally more accepted. I wouldn’t say it’s mainstream yet. In some businesses more so than others, some have embraced it for quite a long time, but others are still like, "Well, we’ll stick to what we’ve always been doing."So yeah, we’re still—I think it’s still on a journey.Yeah, I had a flashback. So in the late 90s, I got my first job at a brand consultancy, and we would do groups with deep projective exercises and free association. I had never experienced any of this stuff before.Our client was Clorox, which was like the only bleach brand out there. And in the exercises, these sort of heavy bleach users would—they kept generating, you know, we would ask if it were an animal, if it were a day of the week, and stuff like this. And the imagery was so amazing.And it was like a doorway, right, to goals, the way you’re talking. Like I remember the first woman in one of the groups said she saw a snow leopard. And the snow leopard was—she imagined a beautiful snow leopard with some cubs, like this very maternal thing.But if she went anywhere near it, it would rip her face off, is what she said. And it was just amazing, that little image that told so much, at least to me, and to us, to the goals, the motivations, right, of bleach, the role that played for her as a mother in a house. And also how, because she kept bleach in the garage, you know what I mean?She didn’t get anywhere in the house. And so I wonder, I feel like we’ve come at this truth of human goals and how it motivates behavior, drives behavior. But I came at it through this qualitative imaginative exercise.And you came at it the way you came at it. And I’m just wondering, how do you feel about free association, qualitative? And also as an addendum here, because I became a qualitative geek, I don’t—did you know Roy Langmaid?Yes.So I became like a total fan of his. I actually had a phone call with him in the pandemic. And I remember he wrote very critically of behavioral science. He says, no matter—there’s some quote, he said, read all you want about behavioral economics, you will not find people there.Oh, interesting. Oh, that is interesting.Yes. And so I wonder—that’s my thought. And I guess my question is, with the frameworks, and with the implicit association tests, which seem very dehumanizing in a way, but maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. But what’s the role of qualitative in understanding the goals of your customer?Absolutely. Well, when I—again, when I first started with DECODE, I was asking them about the implicit quant methods because I’d never come across them before. I was only familiar with qual or more traditional quant, shall we call it.And they said, well, look, there are two ways to access the implicit mind and system one. You can do the projective stuff. You can do it on a therapist’s couch, you need to have real skilled operators doing that.But it can be done. But the trick is to distract or exhaust system two, because otherwise it will get in the way, right? It acts like the policeman or the gatekeeper on what we self-report.So you need a skilled moderator to be able to do that. But you can do it. The only issue then is it’s not scalable.It’s not quantifiable, which is where the implicit quant testing comes into its own, I think. But you mentioned, I mean, the behavioral economics thing from Roy’s is interesting because I always like to say that economics lacked the person, because economics itself was just the pure theory and lacked the reality of human behavior. And that’s where the human came in.But coming back to your thing about the snow leopard, it reminded me of our previous conversation about emotional and rational, because people often say, well, bleach, it’s functional, right? It cleans, it kills germs. That’s what it does.But when you listen to somebody with this metaphor about the snow leopard, and it’s the same that we’ve done it with cleaning products, you get really rich, evocative imagery about protection, and caring for other people, and reassurance, even pride, and a sense of efficiency and expertise and control. Those are amazingly powerful emotional responses to something that otherwise might be dismissed as a purely functional product with rational messaging. And that’s why this emotional-rational dichotomy is just completely false.And it’s also very unhelpful because there’s nothing that’s not emotional, you know, and the Clorox is a great example of that.There’s a few different ways I wanted to go at this point. Well, I know George Lakoff—I don’t know if you’ve ever read him—he always—I can never find the quote, but he calls reason imaginative. He has a way of saying imaginative reason, which I feel like bridges the gap between the—allows all of us into that idea about how we’re thinking.The way that you describe the relationship between system two and system one, between, what is it, reasoned or reflective?Reflective, yeah.It struck me maybe just because of the use of the word automated, that sort of AI is kind of a next level of—it’s almost a linear progression, these things that we’re learning. And we said when we outsource something to generative AI, we’re sort of automating something. It’s like a further refinement of automation.But I thought because you were there when decision science and behavioral psychology and behavioral economics kind of arrived, we’re now at a point where generative AI is probably putting—what was the—it’s making people feel really uncomfortable probably about how things were and how they’re going to be. What is your thinking on the value of it and the implications of AI on marketing?Well, I mean, I confess that with Decode, we’re spoiled because one of the co-founders actually did a double PhD at Caltech. So Caltech, the number one academic institution worldwide, right? So he did one PhD in neuroscience. Concurrently, he did a second PhD in AI, and he co-authored a book called *Understanding Intelligence*, which is still a reference work in academia. And 20 years ago, he was teaching robots to learn. So he then kind of parked it and said, "I’m going to focus on Decode and the whole decision science bit, but I have a vision for AI."But computing power doesn’t allow it yet. But now it does. Especially the last few years with the development of processing power in the chips, it’s enabled his vision. So we have actually set up a sister company three years ago, which has built a suite of apps that predict and optimize creative effectiveness. Now, this is based on—this is predictive AI, it’s not generative AI. But what he’s done is to take everything we know about mental processing—so attention, through perception, through memory, emotional response, semantics and semiotic associations.And he’s trained these—our AI tools with human data. So we’ve got, for example, 15,000 hours of eye-tracking data, 5 million eye-tracking, static images, 450 million images, and the corresponding human tagging with words. So if I showed you a sunflower, you’d tell me, well, it’s yellow, it’s a sunflower, it’s got seeds, you make oil, blah, blah.But then at a more semantic, conceptual level, you would say, well, it’s outdoors, it’s the sun, it’s warmth, it’s nature, it’s positivity, it’s uplifting, things like that. So we’ve trained the AI with that. So now if you showed it an image of a sunflower, it would learn, it has learned what humans associate with it.So we’ve got this suite of tools now that mirror—they’re like a digital brain. They mirror all of these processes. So we can now upload a static or a video piece of creative, whether it’s a bit of point-of-sale material or a pack design or a YouTube ad or whatever it might be.And the AI will give us some metrics that predict its creative effectiveness. And we’ve got principles behind it that help—if you’re not getting the metrics you need, how you optimize. So then, because of the nature of the AI, of course, you can then iterate.So you can chuck 100 ads at it and pick the best three, and then do some evolution of those, and then test them again. And it’s done in minutes. And it costs pennies.It’s ridiculous how effective it is. And this is being used globally now by about 500 brands in about 25 languages. And our biggest client is using it to test every one of their social media videos now.So that, I think, is a beautiful marriage of the behavioral science, decision science principles, and understanding of human behavior and then using AI deep learning models to then predict how a human would respond.Yeah, that’s amazing. Have you had any interactions with the synthetic users that kind of—that approach?No, no, I haven’t. No, we’re not using synthetic data at all. I’m not sure if this guy, Chris, our co-founder, has examined it at all.I know he’s starting to think now about the relationship and the loop between predictive AI and then generative AI, because in theory, that could be very interesting. You know, you could generate and then predict. And if it’s not optimized, then regenerate and predict, etc.He’s very—Chris is always very clear to say, you know, this doesn’t replace humans. You still need the human to write the right prompts, for example, for the generative AI. And we always talk about it as augmented intelligence rather than artificial.So it’s got, you know, it sits alongside. We’ve had examples where clients have—and to give you, this is a real example, and I think it’s very helpful. A client has an internal design team that produces all of the visuals for all of their brand comms, and they’re doing, they’re producing lots every day.They had a change in their brand positioning, and their CEO said, "Guys, I’m not seeing a lot of difference in comms now, even though we’ve changed the brand positioning." So they asked us in to talk to them, and we sat the design team down, and we said, "What we really need to do first is to define what is on brand, what sort of visuals are on brand and what sort of visuals are off brand." Because only by juxtaposing those will we really be able to tease out this difference.And what it led to was a really deep, sometimes heated, but very useful debate amongst the design team to really distill the essence of what they meant as on brand. Then once we’d got that, we were then able to select about 100—no, I think it was about 200 or 300—visuals that reflected it and train the AI. So the AI was trained with what equals on brand, and similarly, what equals off brand.So the next time they got a visual, they just stick it through the AI and it gives them a traffic light. Is it on or off brand? If it’s neither, if it’s an amber score, go back to the team to debate.But the team actually then upskilled. So by having the AI alongside them, they were then able to have much more useful and efficient conversations about the choice of visuals. And it cut—it sped up decision-making by a factor of about 10 inside that business.So I think that’s a nice example of where the AI sits like an assistant, you know, it is augmenting human intelligence, not replacing it.Yeah. Well, I want to thank you so much. I mean, it was a very kind and generous thing for you to do, to accept this invitation. I really enjoyed the conversation. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it.Likewise. It’s a pleasure. Thanks, Peter. 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