THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Ed Cotton is a Chief Strategy Officer based in Brooklyn. His newsletter, PROVOKE, is wonderful. He spent 20 years as Chief Strategy Officer at BSSP, an award-winning advertising agency. Previously, he was Head of Strategy at McCann-Erickson in Seattle. Since 2019, Ed has been running his own consultancy, Inverness Consulting LLC. He helps brands, agencies, and marketers with strategy development across various industries, from insurance to luxury travel. Ed's expertise includes new business pitches, brand thinking, and inspiring creativity in strategy teams.Okay. All right. So I think you probably see this coming, but I start all these interviews with the same question, this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine, who's an oral historian. She helps people tell their story and I borrow it because it's such a beautiful question, but I over-explain it because it hits really hard. And so before I ask it, I want you to know you're in total control and you can answer or not answer this question in any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?It's a great question. I've always thought of myself as... first of all, I think you can't escape national identity. Being English, you can't really disguise it. As much as I try to speak American, it doesn't really work. I think people know I don't come from this country.At best, it confuses them and they say you're not really English. You're probably Australian or South African, but we're not really sure. But no one's saying to me, "I'm an American." I've been here over 20 years. So I haven't fooled anyone. Yeah, I think where I come from is quite important to me.And it's a very interesting relationship because I haven't lived in that country for over 20 years. So I'm not a nomad, stateless really. I don't really feel like I'm an American and I certainly don't feel like I'm really truly English because I haven't spent time there. So I'm in this nomad land which we call "caught between two cultures," taking a very literal interpretation of the question.But is it quite an important thing? I think that... it sounds like an uncomfortable place to be, but I think it's actually quite a good place to be because I do think that the outsider perspective is always interesting. I do think you have something, you can see things that others can't 'cause they're too close to it.And when I first came here, you are a tourist for a number of... even though you moved to the U.S. and I talked to people who've recently moved to the U.S., I'm like, you're still a tourist. You're probably going to be a tourist for five years. Everything's going to be new.And then there comes a moment in time where there's a sort of normalization. I remember very clearly the sort of story of, I'm living in Seattle, I've probably been there a week and there's an earthquake. Most of us know that earthquakes... Yeah, they may happen everywhere. We had one in New York the other day, but the major earthquakes like to happen in Seattle. Anyway, the word "earthquake" went through the news organizations. And there was this, I remember this scene that was on the night, it was on the evening news and it was, they were broadcasting live from a grocery store on the outskirts of Seattle, where a newscaster, a news reporter was going through a blow-by-blow account of how a bottle of ketchup may or may not have fallen off the shelf and smashed on the ground, as the only way they could dramatize the earthquake. And it was just like a classic hyperbole that in an American sense that I knew so well from being in the UK. And I've been... it's been mocked and ridiculed and used as cross-satire or I was witnessing it myself.But over time that sort of stuff has become quite normal to me. I don't react the same way that I used to. So yeah, going back to that question, I come from the UK, I think I come from England and actually even deeper than that I'm a Londoner, so I was born in London, which is rare. It's like being born in New York City. And I think that means another thing, that cities are quite important to me. I have lived in San Francisco. Everyone loves this idea of San Francisco that is a world of these two cultures, the yin and yang, the sort of restful, mindful state can exist in the national parks that are on the doorstep. And you can also experience some of the best food in the world in the city. So this is one of the few places where you can experience that dual existence. But I actually, at the end of the day, prefer a true city. And I think New York is a true global city. And that's, again, a big part of my identity. I think that being a citizen in a city sense is really important, and important to me. I value it a lot.Yeah. Do you have memories of what you wanted to be when you grew up? As a child, did you have an idea what you wanted to be when you grew up?When I was in my early teens, 11, 12, I think... yeah, for a lot of my teen years, I was quite interested in animals for some reason, and I don't know why, and I think it came from my dad. My dad spent a lot of time... he's a, he was a horse rider. He owns horses, spends a lot of time in that world. So I did at one point want to be a vet. Only to discover that my math is just terrible. I could do biology. I can do chemistry to a degree, but math, it's just... if you have any desire to pursue anything scientific and you're not good at math, you really have trouble. But I did for some... I did work with racehorses. I worked in a racing stable. I got to know a lot about it. At one point I knew a lot about horse breeding, as in more like the sort of data behind horse breeding. Like, how you could trace lineages. Actually, racehorses can really go back to, there are actually three horses or four horses, Arab horses that every racehorse is descended from. If you are really nerdy, you could actually trace every horse's pedigree back. And so I... I wasn't, I went through a phase a couple of years of just being really obsessed with trying to understand what breeders, how breeders bred horses. Looking at pedigrees, why you, the mare and the stallion, what would they, what could they bring as resources to creating a new resource?I remember I had these huge dossiers and all kinds of stuff. And I went to meet somebody very high up in the bloodstock industry. And they were like, "I can't believe this kind of, this is just unseen, unprecedented nerdism and we want to offer you a job." At 16, I think they were offering me a job to be like an apprentice bloodstock agent. What a bloodstock agent does is they buy and sell horses, mainly buy horses for wealthy owners. So you travel the world and you sit in an auction ring as these young horses, one-year-olds usually, are paraded around and you're putting bids in. It's an incredibly interesting world, incredibly exciting, but at 16, I was just way too young to make a committed decision. I'm like, "This is going to be, I'm going to have to go to college. I'm going to go and train and this would be my life and if it fails, I don't really have a fallback position.What was the nerdism? What was the fascination?I don't know really what, it was... I don't know where it came from really. It was just, there was... I don't, it was like just a phase I went through and it was just this incredibly analytical and really disciplined... You can only go so far. The thing is there are thousands of races every day around the world and there is no way an individual can keep up with all of them. And those races are the data that you use to calculate the value and the worth of a certain horse, certain stallions suddenly start... They start and their children start racing and there's, it's just, it's a whole really complicated world that you could just like a wormhole or rabbit hole. You can just dive into it and get completely lost. And I didn't go as far as I could have done. I've really scratched the surface. And even then, yeah, it was a lot 'cause you're doing it and working out what's going on. I remember I had a file, but it was like the internet wasn't around. So it was all like press cuttings. I'd get the newspapers be like, "Okay, this horse won this race by how many lengths," blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so that was just a phase and then I didn't end up pursuing that and got flipped the other side and got extremely nervous and thought I was going to go and work in a bankTell me now, catch us up. So now you're living in New York. I live in New York. I've been in the States over 20... 24 years. I came here to work at an agency called McCann Erickson. Instead of going to the New York office, as most people do, I went out to the Seattle office which is brilliant. I got to work on a mixture of global accounts like Powerade Globally, Coca-Cola, and local accounts: local banks, local lottery, a local Apple commission, a bunch of local things in a town that I didn't really know much about. I actually don't think America knows much about Seattle, to be honest. A lot of people, I think, probably think it's in Canada. It's a very interesting place. It was a great place to... I'm glad I came, that I went there first rather than being in New York. I think it just gave me a richer understanding of what the breadth of America is about, that you can easily get lost. You can easily just believe that New York is America, which it's completely not. So yeah, I did that. I was there for a couple of years and then I went to work for what, at the time, was a small agency called Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners. And I basically stayed there for a long time, a couple of decades, as the head of strategy, chief strategy officer there. And it was a fascinating journey, but incredible growing an agency from 20 people to at one point about two, close to 200 with a San Francisco, Sausalito office and a New York office and having a big team of people working together on strategy side. Yeah. And then five, five and a bit years ago, I left and set up on my own, do consulting as like everybody who leaves advertising sets up as a consultant. Yeah, that's what I've been doing.Yeah. What do you love about it? Like, where's the joy in the work that you do?I would say working in advertising as a strategist is a pretty privileged position, I think. I did a podcast last week with somebody who was a liberal arts major, a history major. And talking about it's this one thing where a lot of people who just didn't think they could get a job because they didn't have a business degree suddenly find strategy where sort of this intellectual pursuit, you know, "Oh, I like philosophy. I did a, I majored in sociology or anthropology. This is actually a commercial thing I could do. I can use my skills." So I think it attracts, I'm not one of those people. I'm definitely curious. I didn't, I studied business. But I think that's the beauty of it. It's you don't have to slot into a political infrastructure like corporate, most of corporate America does. You have the luxury of solving problems versus a massive to-do list of getting stuff. We're the thinkers. It's very... and I think that's a bit of the problem of the discipline, which is it can be sitting in the clouds a little bit versus people rolling their sleeves up and making things happen.Yeah, I think it's, I think a lot of people are attracted to it. This guy I spoke to was John Steele's book, he just read it and he just couldn't believe that someone had a job doing this stuff and how exciting it was and how fun it was. And I think that's true. It's the things you get to do, the places you, the people you get to meet. The canvas you get to work with. Yeah, it's pretty incredible if you're that type of person. And that's what you enjoy. The idea that someone can throw a problem at you and you've got to solve it. So it's... I've heard it, it's been mentioned a bunch of times, but it's part investigative journalism, it's part detective work, part forensic scientist, part lawyer because all those things and plus it helps to be enthusiastic. It helps to be curious. It helps to have a naive mind and be open to seeing things differently. All those things fall into place and make it a very good vocation for somebody who has those particular traits.What was I going to say? Oh yeah. How do you talk about what you do when you meet a new client? What do you, how do you describe your work and how things are supposed to be done? I appreciate that distinction. I'm... I think you know me well enough. I'm happy to be a thinker in the clouds, making that distinction between sort of indulgent intellectualism and sort of practical marketing and brand building and communications. How do you talk about what you do?Yeah, I think it's... every... what is... I think you look at it as the right, you could look at it like the Russian doll thing. I talked about this sort of Russian doll you keep opening these and there's more stuff that keeps being more. And maybe leaving an agency, the sort of Russian doll set gets even bigger. Because the original doll sets focused on advertising and now you've got an even bigger world to work with because your assignments can really come from everywhere. I've had and sometimes I just... sometimes I dabble in some... I have taken to some intellectual pursuit.So that is... I say it in a very arrogant way, but I spent a bit of time pre-pandemic thinking about what I call the conditions for creativity, and it was based on this idea that if I could start all over again, what do I wish I knew. And I think one of the things is that people who work with creativity and creative people tend to black box it. It's "we can't really tell you what we do. It's a dark art. And if we told you, it would ruin it." And you end up as a strategist, as a planner, you're working with these creative people all the time, but you don't have any sort of... you know all your stuff and what you're supposed to do, but the interaction that's the most important interaction, which is with these people, you're told it's all about relationships.And so you don't get a manual of how to work with creative people, you get thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool and get... they don't like you, tough... you're probably not going to have a good career. So understanding creative people and the creative process. I was, okay, maybe you could actually provide some kind of manual, maybe you could actually look at like how artists work and maybe you actually look at something called neuroscience and how the brain actually works.So I did that. I did my little one-month MBA, wrote a piece, presented it to the... presented to a few agencies as well, quite well. Like they, it was just before COVID struck. And then I actually went into PepsiCo and it became a workshop. And it was interesting because for them, it was a way of reframing, galvanizing their internal agency, because I think they'd started quite small. And a lot of the things I talked about, they'd actually done, but as they forgotten about those things. So it was like a reminder of this... it's actually a discipline, but what tends to happen is it's just a sort of group of people put into a very competitive environment, and there's a leader and there's... You know, it just becomes setting goals and giving your people, giving creative people the best conditions to do the best work.I don't, it's often an afterthought in an ad agency. It's like they have to, it's not like the creative department accommodates and makes this happen for people. Individuals have to make their own worlds. They're not made for them. And they either survive or thrive depending on how good they are at doing that.All right, so I wanted to talk to you about the state of planning. You had this amazing conversation with Steve Walls on the "On Strategy" thing. And there was a moment in there where you both were talking about the shift from traditional planning to digital planning and that a lot of research and cultural insights are happening through a screen, in a way is how I interpret it. And if you're spending time in all these digital spaces and in digital culture, you're doing the work of planning that you and I, at least for me, I grew up assuming had to happen in some sort of conversation or physical space. I just wondered what your thoughts are about how planning has changed and the state of it today. If you're a 28-year-old coming into the planning world, what do you think the job is?Yeah, it's a great question. I think I was talking to somebody the other day, and it's going to be another podcast probably. I don't think we quite... I've been outside the business. I'm definitely working for agencies, but I'm not inside the business in the sense that a full-time CSO or full-time strategist is today in August of 2024. And I don't know if we really appreciate exactly what's going on inside agencies right now. It's the intensity and the pressure and the limited time and resources that everyone gets.We talked earlier about picking up John Steele's book. That seems like a century ago. It is a century ago. But literally the luxury of time that, "Hey, we're going to do a milk deprivation study. It's going to take a few weeks. We're going to put cameras." People just don't have the time to do it. And I think it's riding a bicycle. I think the less you do of this, the more you get into another sort of... you hack your way through to some kind of strategy instead of it being originally a sort of deliberate, methodical discipline process. It becomes whatever you can do, it's a scramble, really.Basically, I do think that we make the mistaken assumption that everyone lives their lives digitally 100 percent of the time. And I think if you're not going to go outside and you aren't going to go and talk to people, then you can easily make that conclusion, and you're going to be missing a lot. And part of it is, yeah, you've grown up digitally, you have a digital life, you have these multiple personas. It's just strategy, as a young strategist, you're experiencing things, you may even be on TikTok, putting TikTok videos, but that's not truly representative of what everyone is necessarily doing. But it is an easier way, it is an important part of the way people live, for sure, but it's not the only way people live.So I love this, the scramble word. And as a hypothetical, let's say you get a brief, you're working with an agency team and you get a brief or an RFP, and it gives you basically five days, seven days to develop a point of view, develop a strategy, develop a brief. How do you spend this time? I'm totally stealing this question from the interview that Fergus did with the Nike guy. Hinsdale, Linsdale, I think is his name. Yeah, but it's very explicit. What do you do now? So this is the new reality. I feel like my instinct is to be a curmudgeon and be, "Oh, we used to do all this other stuff and now it's different." But okay, this is the reality. You got five days to try to deliver, marshal some human understanding, some true insight or truth, into a creative brief. What would you do?Yeah, it's a great question. I think the classic place where people go really is you start off by looking at what's being done. That's easy, right? You can easily look at what, okay, you're pitching pet food. What does the category look like? That's almost the first place you go. The established players like Pedigree, they tend to do, you know, there's stuff like this and then there's these disruptors who don't believe that dog food is real food. They're the real food. They're food for humans, but for dogs. And so that's those guys. And then there's whatever it is. And you work out the space and I think that's where you start. You start looking at what brands are out there. And then you dig deeper based on that. Who are they talking to? Are they talking to the same people? Are they talking to different people? Is there a new breed of dog owner? What is the psychographics of that? And then you may, I feel like I'm repeating something I've almost done. I have a dog in Brooklyn. I can easily go out with my iPhone and I can talk to Gen Z dog owners about what it means to own a pet.So I think what I would say is that where there was much more of a separation of these processes and there was church and state. It's like the planners went off, the strategists went off and did their thing and they had a certain amount of time to do it. It's a scramble because everyone's doing the same thing. In most of these cases, in fact in a five day scenario, you're not being asked to present work. You're being asked to basically tell their client who you are, but also give a point of view. It's a bit of an all hands on deck kind of exercise where everyone's simultaneously looking at things.How do you know when you have a good point of view? What's the, when you say point of view, what's your, do you have a way of thinking about or talking about? Okay, now we're done. The job's done. We have a point of view. What has to be true about something for it to be an effective or compelling point of view in a brief?I don't know what you're talking about. If you're talking about the meeting in five days' time or you're talking about a brief, I think they're two different things. I think to have a meeting, you're looking to have a good conversation. I think that's a success. You've got a five day turnaround. You got a meeting with a prospective client. You want to have enough stimulus in that meeting to create an engaging, interactive conversation. So you want to make sure that you got something to say that's reasonably interesting and that the likelihood is the client's going to be able to respond to it. Now, obviously you want to try and ensure that you're going to tell the client something they haven't heard before, and that's always like the bar. That's always the sort of pushback you get from people. It's "Yeah, but what can we tell them something they haven't heard before?"And you never know. You don't really know until you're in the room, and maybe they have heard it before, but they just like the way you're thinking about it. So yeah, the bar is you want to be bringing fresh stuff in, but the reality is if these people are working in pet food 24/7, they much know it all. So hopefully you can come up with some really interesting and maybe it is a wild card that they didn't see, which is "We saw this brand in Australia that's actually doing X, Y, and Z," and then they might go, "Wow, we never heard about that." And then you could do a whole... so it's really like the scramble is you're scrambling because it's all people together and simultaneously working in parallel.And you also, I think scrambling... I remember talking to this, we like to say there's a sort of you, you go on and you follow a guide and that guide is a journey. And if you follow the journey, you get to a certain point. But I think you've got to, I think that the truth and reality is that is randomness, right? You've got to be open to potentially anything. It could be a random conversation. It could be a trip to a bookstore where you pick up a book. I'm like, "Wow, this guy's been studying the evolution of dog eating habits over time. And he's just published this book." And it's like a consult. You don't know what you're going to stumble across or find. And sometimes these random things can just be such a shortcut. They're a hack to get into something that's interesting. So you can follow a disciplined process and hopefully that can get you somewhere, but you got to do a mixture of both. You got to have some kind of "I'm going to do" approach. And then you've got to open yourself up to some kind of randomness. Yeah, so that's I think that's for the five days to get to a meeting with a prospect.Yeah, that's so interesting. It feels like you would really, it reminds me of what you were, the work you said you had done on the conditions for creativity. Is that, are you referencing that stuff right now? And that I feel like in five days, if you have to operate in that kind of wrap in this crazy time constrained space, what does that mean about the kinds of conditions you need to create for creativity?Yeah, I think there's a lot of parallels. Obviously, you're looking—I just—this is completely random. But I mean, you just—if this—like sort of point is an idea can come from anywhere, right? We've had these—one of the things in that Conditions of Creativity exercise that I did a few years ago was to look for these stories of artistic kind of folklore, the sort of famous anecdotes of how artists—it's the, the Keith Richards, half-awake at three o'clock in the morning, gets his guitar out and plugs his tape recorder in and starts playing his guitar. And it's "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." That's what the riff is—he's half asleep, but he has it in his mind, and then it's an idea in his head, and then he gets it down on paper, so to speak. The Dalí, the famous Dalí story, which I thought was really incredible—oh, Dalí's on like a diet of psychedelics. The guy's harvesting mushrooms. How else would he get to that kind of painting? Actually, when you go back and you research the history, Dalí, being a Spaniard, would have a siesta in the afternoon after lunch. He'd have a big lunch, and then he'd go to sleep, and he'd, and, but he'd sleep in a chair, and he'd had a spoon on his leg, and by his side was a notebook. So when the spoon hit the floor, he'd wake up, and he'd pick the notebook up, and then he'd write whatever was in his head into the notebook. There was usually some kind of dreams that he was having.So he was a—it was a habitual dream recording mechanism. I think this should go way into the sort of power, the gap between—so what's strategy? What's creativity? Really, you could—one hand strategy is a sort of supposed discipline that sits in this neat box. It's got all these tools that's supposed to inform it. And then the creativity sits on the sort of other side. It's more on the Dalí side but somehow it's got to be a sort of a connective. So I think you got, you've got to be thinking of ideas—you've got to be thinking of how can you take what you've learned, and what does that mean as a hypothetical, so I'm not saying we should all be like having siestas, writing down our dreams, but I think you need to be as—I guess the best way of describing it is: You're, what, you're an investigative journalist, but you're also thinking of ideas, right? So while you're going learning, you're still thinking of, okay, what does this mean? What does, where does this look? What does, what's my conclusion here? What's the headline? Where's the story going? What questions haven't I asked? So it's this very organic process. And I think the smartest thing to tell clients is that you have had five days and this is what you've done. And you'd love to have more time and you'd love to do more. And I think that part of that enthusiasm, part of that is enthusiasm and part of it is the client saying, yeah, I respect that you don't have all the data and all the other things. In fact, that's the biggest barrier for a—it's not going to give you a thing. Right.They're not going to give a prospective agency anything until they know they're hired. So you are working with very little, from them. But you're looking to prove to them that you have the ability and the enthusiasm and the passion and the sort of what it—what the, what it takes piece to be able to bring them something new, fresh and original.What's the role of qualitative in your work? I'm an advocate for qual. I'm a researcher, right? So I'm always—in a very self-interested way—curious how other people talk about it. Use it. What's your relationship with qual and—and how do you define its role in all of this and creative and strategy?As you go along, whatever you—as an agency, you're in different stages of a sort of relationship with the client. And I think in the—I think it's very hard in these very initial meetings to do it properly if you don't have—if you don't have—5 days is pretty much what you just do get. And I don't think that's really enough time. It may be. If you have your ideas—if you work really quickly, you may be able to get to something, but usually it happens at the next stage where we've seen 10 agencies and one of the three, and here's a brief. So now you've got—okay, you've got the sort of a better framework. I think you can, and then you probably got a little bit more time. You can go out and do something.Yeah. I am—I'm connecting with yours. The stories you told about Van Gogh and Keith Richards and this idea that the imagination is this really mysterious human thing, right? That's essential to strategy and creative and in my own struggle, like people have asked me to define the value of qualitative in the age of AI, and so I keep trying to articulate the role of qualitative. So I'm always struck by the fact that qualitative sort of—invisible—people talk about data and they're really only talking about quantitative. You know what I mean? So qualitative doesn't even really have a seat at the table in a, in terms of a, a serious business kind of methodology, maybe that's my own insecurity. Do you feel like that's—is what I'm saying true about qualitative?Yeah. Look, 'cause the reality is people have got data at their fingertips—most companies these days have got multitudes of data and it's relatively easy to access. That data and those KPIs inside the organization are somewhat institutionalized and people are, if they don't have literal dashboards, they have mental dashboards. Yeah—and the A/B testing and there's just—there's so many—it's so biased towards data. But what you have is you don't have the whys—you just have a lot of okay, this is better than this. Yeah. But you don't really know why and it's only when, people go out and actually make the effort and what we are seeing right now, it's like this whole idea of unstructured data. What basically people are saying is we've got all this stuff that is actually qualitative insight. It's a comment that someone left in a chatbot that—to this, to that, and they all exist in these different places. And maybe if we could aggregate these things together and analyze them, it's a kind of a good role for AI, then we might actually have some sort of positive insight.Right.So that kind of support the data is. If you think about the interesting thing about AI, for example, is its ability to capture qualitative insight, you know, versus just the analysis of the numbers. It's—if I'm, if my main interface with a brand is a chatbot, and I'm going to have a 15 minute conversation with that chatbot, the potential is amazing. If 80,000 people a week are going and interacting with a bank chatbot, there's a hell of a lot of data in terms of qualitative data that chatbot is collecting. But look, I think the end of the day that the—yeah, there's got to be a motive. These are usually—qualitative is, it's a project. It's an—if you're going to do properly, it's an endeavor and it's a journey. And there's got to have a commit—there's got to be a sort of a commitment behind it. And people have got to be willing to, be patient and partake in a process and—but there's usually got to be some kind of catalyst to why—why are we going to do this? This is—there's something somewhere is going wrong or right, or someone's—there's got to be some catalyst. A new person has come in, a new competitor has come in. The consumers we once had have gone away. I—there's got to be this sort of desire to know why. I'm not saying that people don't go out and test—go and test an ad or do all kinds of things like that. But I think the richer, the deeper, the more interesting qualitative is usually has some kind of big motivational catalyst behind it.Internally?Yeah, internally. And—and maybe the agency convinces the client that it's needed because the client is too close to it and they haven't seen that there's a problem or whatever.Yeah.But yeah, usually I think there's some kind of—maybe it's the—maybe it's the brand wants to embark on a campaign and it's a, it's an area that they really feel like they need to—they haven't been out and talk to people for a long time. And need to go do it.I want to shift gears. And talk about your photography as it relates to planning. I'm a person who grew up with a camera in my house. And so my dad had one—my brother had one. And so I just had a camera and I was always taking pictures. It was always something that I did. And so we have that in common. You've taken it and done some beautiful work. But what's your—when did you start taking pictures? And how do you think about—and you do these—the boot camps right that you've been doing. Is that what you called them? Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about your relationship with photography and then how it overlaps with the sort of the planning discipline.I—it's—they've been separate things. Yeah, I—I guess I've always, I've never really thought much about photography until recently. It's always been there. I've always taken pictures, but I've never really thought deeply about it. A camera, going on vacation, I'll bring a camera with me or I'm going somewhere or there's this thing, I'll bring a camera. But not really purposely, like thinking creatively about photographs. And that was really just because I didn't really have the time—it was a time-intensive activity. So when I left my job, I embarked on what I called an MFA. A self-organized M.F.A. I've been on a ton of workshops with really good photographers all over the world. And—and that—the process was going—being humiliated and going from a sort of a completely naive state to being a little less—a little bit more learned and a little less naive. So yeah, it's been a very—fairly extensive and involved all kinds of things from, different—enabled being different projects as well. Some of them haven't been project-based, some of them just being more literal workshops. I did go to France and spent a lot of time photographing diverse communities in a town and in the South of France. And so I went to Athens and had four days to make photographs of the city. I knew nothing about because it was like a gallery show at the end. And then I did—I did a training at a school with SEVEN, which is a combat photography agency. One of my project was with Black Lives Matter during the protests. It's a pretty fascinating experience.So yeah, so that's when I got into this—okay—each sort of turn I—I've seen, acclaimed photographers, established photographers, just my fellow students use photography in certain ways as an investigative tool as a—a human, humanistic tool—just as a way of getting closer to people—getting close to people, places, all those other things. So it's—what has happened is, as I've got more interested in photography and spent more time outside documenting different things. The strategy—the strategy has become a lot more internally focused and stuck behind a screen. Yeah. Sort of these—these sort of tensions really between, my interests and what's really happening with the discipline. They've met in the middle now.Here's the cleaned and corrected transcript while maintaining 100% accuracy:So yeah, Dino and I have been doing a couple of boot camps, we're going to do something else at the Strategy Festival in October. With just the goal of saying there's a—something, it can be deeply sophisticated and it can be integrated into your strategy practice, or it just can be a personal, meditative exercise. It scales from—actually you learn something about yourself and the world around you if you just maybe had a camera when you went and took your dog to the park—to, could you actually document, use a camera to document a consumer type, a cat—all different ways in which you can actually use it.I think at the end of the day, when you start to, when you start to think about visuals, to me, that's the most, to me, that's the most compelling thought really is—we're so obsessed with like slides with so many words on them and whereas we're always trying to close, close arguments and we use the words and bullet points and narrative stretches to close these arguments. Whereas the visual—I think a visual is very powerful because it's much more open-ended. There's lots of interpretation to it. It has a lot of subjectivity. And then if you're bringing your visual, a visual that you made, that's even more powerful because it's—it's something that no—anyone can swipe an image from the internet, but if it's something you took and you're telling a story, you really are the author, right? If you're taking, if you've got photos of people's dogs in their homes that you took, it works on so many different levels, right? It's one of—you're—you're sharing, I don't want to say—you could make video. It doesn't really matter. But the fact is that you authored something that is original and because it's not just the output, it's what went into the output. That's really important as well. So that puts you, it puts you in a unique position because suddenly is someone going to say, actually, what did you learn from that? I could tell you what I learned. How did I do it?So that's what I, that's what we're trying to teach and get people to experience is that it's a sort of—I don't want to say a secret weapon. It's another string to a bow in, in the sense of—you look at a lot of people's, a lot of agency presentations and you look at a lot of trend reports and they're all saying the same thing. You look, if you're looking for a different take, and your own perspective, I think photography is quite useful.The best photographers are the ones that break—put themselves into their work. It's really a—the reason someone takes a photograph of something is, there's an, there's, unless you really are just purely documenting, there's a motivation, right? There's some psychological motivation as to why that, you might not even know it, it might be so deep in your subconscious that you don't really recognize instantly.But I've seen talks from really famous photographers who've talked a bit about that whole idea. They don't even, they don't even know why in a 200th of a second that they're taking this picture and it takes them a while to actually work out, yeah.And I actually think there's—you're just going, thinking back to, to qualitative for a second. There's just, I think there's also a lot to be learned just from what the work of photographers—doing your own photography. So there's a sort of, there's the practical do your own photography piece, but there's also the art history piece of studying photographers and what they do. And actually they can really inform—there's two in particular. So I'll just give you those examples. Bieke Depoorter, who's a Belgian, I don't even think I pronounced her name right—she did, she went to Egypt in the Arab spring and she's a very, she's like the bravest strategist out there. She's a single woman who's going to Egypt and she's knocking on people's doors saying to people, can I stay with you?And when she stays with them, she documents the family and everything. So it's a very incredibly risky endeavor personally. Putting her own safety at risk. So she goes there in time now to get lots of photographs. And she then—our mind goes—Oh, this is my point of view. It's a person from Belgium going to an Arab country. So she goes back with all these photographs printed out, and then she has people write on them. That becomes a project. I thought it was really interesting and—there's another, Jim Goldberg did this project in San Francisco called Rich and Poor. And it's—he's done a lot of really fantastic work. He's a really interesting photographer. But it's like the book is Rich and Poor, and one, when you turn it around, and you look through it, it's all poor people. And then you flip it back around, it's all rich. But he asks everyone to write a story. So if you think about applying that in qualitative research—you've got an image and then you've got a story.And that's really like freaking amazing—just you've got these two really powerful things that you've got some written words that were written by somebody about themselves. And there's images of—some sort of book like that is incredible. So that's a long-term projects. It's like it could be years to do that type of work.Yeah.I haven't got years. I barely got days.I'm curious. I'm—I want to—I love both those examples. I want—I'm—who do you become when you have your camera with you? I know this is true for me that when I—when I have my camera with me, I'm aware of the world in a way that's different. And I feel—is there something about the mindset or the, what it means to have a camera that changes how you are? Like, yeah, who do you become when you have your camera working on a project?I think like each situation is unique. As I think I have—I really do have different modes. And I, and because I shoot a lot of different things. And that kind of is like almost a filter over the top. I do think like classic street photography, this is, again New York is the place to be a photographer. It's just because—it's the confluence of people in place and people who are pedestrian versus most other cities where everyone's in their car.So this is 57th and 5th Avenue is a sort of a Mecca. I once went, I went, I think it was maybe last summer I went there and there were so many photographers there. I was like, wow, that was crazy. And there were a lot of young kids. And it's just this, it's literally an intersection where you've got these different people. You've got locals, you've got tourists, you've got the really wealthy, you've got the not so wealthy, you've got workers and executives, you've got people with dogs, and you've got people wearing the craziest stuff, and they all congregate.And so you're looking for these incredible images where these, somehow there's, somehow these different pieces connect into some kind of image of, one image, one single image not a film, of, that brings all these different pieces together. And so it's almost—it's almost like a stage. There you're a stage, and you're like looking for these and you've got to have this—you've got to work incredibly, you've got to have eyes in the back of your head. You've got to see, you've got to see where this person is going to be coming, you've got to see where the light is—all these things that you've got to work out and you've got to have patience—you've got to be patient—some people like you've got to stand.This famous, very famous or Henri Cartier-Bresson, the famous artist. The famous French photographer coined the phrase, a decisive moment. And there's just that boy with the wine bottles. He's looking down the staircase and there's a, you see the boy cycling and it's just a frame. It's just so amazingly framed, but you go—how long were you there for? About four, five hours waiting for one. He probably has hundreds of photos that he took. And there's only one that is that magical.I love the—there's some real overlap in the scramble you talked about before and this eyes in the back of your head that we're very much just individuals in a chaotic environment trying as best as possible to just experience it all right—just try to—in, it seems to me just to be very aware and open to everything that's happening around you, but also really connected to your own. I love what you said about the idea. And this is my experience too, that there is something significant about the fact that I took a picture and I'm bringing it in and I'm showing it to you. I'm telling you the story of the picture. And that I always think the mandate to tell stories can be, feel cliche, but the story of a picture, and I've had this experience in my work, the story of a moment in a conversation is powerful, not because, partly because of the information in the story, but it's the story itself, which is the power. It's just, it's unbelievable force that delivers so much more information than just the content of the picture.Yeah, and I think that and I think there's something—look I've got so many photos—looks, I've got so many, each of these. Each of these is incredible. This is—this is called Sea Coal by this English photographer called Chris Killip. These images are just remarkable.Oh, wow.What basically is happening is that this is a very poor community in northeast of England, and they're actually picking coal up off the beaches. So the horse and cart.Yeah.So this is on so many different dimensions. There's like a moment in time where you've got the industrial—these are like relics. These people are still living in a sort of an agrarian—in an industrial and agr—life in an industrial age. Yeah. And they're also an incredibly closed community that took him five years just to get, be allowed to take photos. So yeah, I think there's that kind of—there's a lot of stuff going on. There's a lot of randomness, I think randomness—it's a commonality. I, one of the, one of my teachers Anders Petersen is a very famous Swedish photographer. You're always walking around and he's—I'm walking down the streets of Paris and there are two identical twins, women. In their thirties, beautiful like models, and I—not take a photo.Yeah.And then he takes photo and then he arranges to bring the photo to them. So he has—that becomes a, it's a kind of, it becomes a relationship. Because he's taken a photo and he's—there's a sort of a transaction and then it becomes a conversation. So I, I think the randomness—it's basically a qualitative research. It's—everyone's guarded—anyone—they tell you what they think you want to hear, right? They don't tell you what they really think. They tell you what they think they want you to hear. Or you, they think, you think, they think you want to hear. And it's only when you break that wall, that the interesting stuff comes out.Yeah.When a moderator goes out of the room, something happens. The dynamic of the focus group changes. They seem relaxed. They stop talking amongst themselves. And then the moderator comes back in and there's a different—suddenly feels like the teachers come back into the classroom.Yeah, it reminds me of—I always reference this quote, but that the plural of anecdote is data, which is—the truth, but the more popular version on the internet is—it has more links. Like Freakonomics did a—like a fact check on this, but there's 900 citations of the quote that says the plural of anecdote is not data. And that's the one that's most popular, but the fact of the matter is that the plural of anecdote is data and what we're talking about in a lot of ways, it strikes me that just the ability to gather—notice and gather meaningful anecdotes and make something of them, right? And share them in a way. I was really struck by, because I've never worked in an agency, but that imperative to say something that they've never heard before. That sounds extremely challenging. That seems like a tall order, and that would be very difficult to do, maybe.Yeah. It's—you, I think it happens because you go through this learning curve—the thing about agencies is they don't, you don't have—you do have agency specialists, you do have health care agencies, but generally, most of the 14,000 agencies out there are generalists. They work across a different number of—the one time, one year they're doing insurance, the next day they're doing grocery stores, and then they haven't done insurance—they've either never done something or they haven't done it for a while. And so there's—and there's always a getting up to speed. So it always takes time to orientate yourself around a world. And then the temptation is just to tell people what that world is. If they're living with it 24/7, that's just nothing. So you, how do you take, it's a sort of, you've got to get beyond the learning curve into something fresh. Yeah—that's the challenge is when you're in a short period of time, it's sometimes it's like you want to pat yourself on the back 'cause you just, you managed to understand the category.I find that really funny because yeah, but you've just—you've just arrived.Yeah, you've just got yourself to the bottom rung of the ladder.Here's the cleaned and corrected transcript while maintaining 100% accuracy:**Peter Spear:** Yeah.**Ed Cotton:** Of enlightenment—yeah, so that's the challenge. So yeah, that's why you do have to, you do, there's this kind of classic artistic thing where you, people say that you've got to, if you don't know the fundamentals, like if you don't know how a camera works or you don't know how to paint, Picasso could never have broken the mold of painting if he didn't know how to paint. It's kind of—there's the same sort of thing. You've got to know what it is before you know how to change it.Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you.Yeah. That's good.Yeah.Bit of a ramble, but I hope there's something useful in there.Yeah, I think it's great. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. I first encountered his second book “The Myth of Disechantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences.” The question of this book was, “How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?”His most recent book, and what inspired the invitation, is “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory,” which I understand as a desire to create a more affirmative and constructive way forwards after the devastating deconstruction of the post-modernists. It’s heady, but fun - and I think has implications for how we think about the self, and the future. I start all these interviews with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian, so she helps people tell their story, and I stole this question from her because it's such a big, beautiful question. But because it's such a big, beautiful question, I'll explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in absolute control and you can answer or not answer this question any way that you want to. The question is: Where do you come from?Mm-hmm. Yeah, that question could be located in discourse around identity, or it could be one of geography, or something existential. I'll dip into that with geography and see where we can get from there. Maybe there's some demography. I'll be there. My mother's an immigrant, but I was born in Ohio.I grew up in Ohio and New Mexico. At 16, I won a fellowship to go to England for the first time to study a little bit at Cambridge University. I had enough credits to finish high school early, basically, and took what would have been my senior year of high school to figure out whether I wanted to be a private investigator or a Buddhist monk. I didn't end up on either path.I ended up on an academic trajectory, although I didn't know that. I thought I was gonna be a rock star, but I went to college anyway, and I was very well prepared for the academics because both of my parents are professors and three out of my four grandparents taught college or university. I went to school on the East Coast initially for undergrad and master's program, then I started a PhD program in California and then had a year in the UK and then lived in Japan and went to lectures of various posh people in Paris while I was writing up. So I spent two years in France and a year in Japan and then somehow ended up at a job in a small town in Massachusetts at the tail end of my 20s. In certain respects, I've been here with the odd sabbatical accepted ever since. That's one way to talk about where I'm from.That's maybe a particularly abstract series of movements, basically. But yeah, I was intrigued by a moment in there when you talked about being either a private investigator or a philosopher. Can you tell me a story about that time? What was happening in that moment?Yeah, so when I was finishing up high school or after my junior year of high school, I was very restless. I've always been restless. So I was already taking college classes even in high school, but I wasn't sure if that was even that exciting. I was quite enamored of the genre of private investigation fiction, and I was also into Sherlock Holmes. My father had read Sherlock Holmes to me. One of the figures my father worked on was Charles Sanders Peirce, and there's a way in which Peirce and Holmes have very analogous thinking processes, basically something we could call inference to the best explanation.I thought, with a kind of egotism, that I could perhaps be a Sherlock Holmes-ish figure and contribute. So I went and interned with a private investigator. I picked a private investigation firm because it didn't do domestic stuff; it wasn't a private investigation firm that was mostly about divorces. What it was about was things that were either breaking the law or some other fundamental, more serious issue was at stake.But what I quickly realized was the job of being a private investigator actually was producing paper trails for lawyers. It was much more tedious. It was interesting to interview people from different walks of life, but it didn't turn out to be what I was looking for. So then that led me into some more profound sense of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be.To fast-forward a little bit, by the time I started college, I thought what I wanted to do was combine playwriting with philosophy. I wanted to write like the great philosophical works of classical antiquity; for instance, Plato's works are written in the form of dialogues. I thought this was a way to do new philosophical work and bring it to a broader audience.Then fairly quickly, people told me that didactic preaching philosophy was crappy theater, and what theater departments were interested in was confessional monologues as a model for doing theater. So I moved from theater to film. In philosophy, I grew up with an inherited engagement with Asian philosophy and I wanted to do that, but it turned out that after taking a bunch of courses in a philosophy department, Asian philosophy was basically not taken seriously for Eurocentric reasons. That flipped me into a religion department initially, where Asian philosophy and then continental philosophy (French and German stuff) were taken more seriously. Then all along, I was playing in bands and trying to do other stuff.But yeah, do you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up? So maybe you've answered this a little bit, but young, in New Mexico, what did you want to be when you grew up?I think for a long time, I wanted to be a rock star. I really thought that was what I wanted to do. But I also have always loved writing, so the other thing that I think I also knew from quite early was that I wanted to write. One of my models for the pivot to academia was my grandmother. When I was in New Mexico, I was living with her and she was actually a fairly famous anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman, who in a way people said went "native" insofar as she came to believe in the reality of spirit beings, which I did not. But I found her just amazing.Spending time with her where she would tell stories drawn from her fieldwork among Mayan Indians, or stories of Greek myths, or folk tales from ancient China, was really provocative. She was just an amazing woman, very inspirational, and really convinced me that there was something cool and even fun about academia, or at least a kind of intellectual life. Even though both my parents are academics, I was grappling with them in a different way, let's say. My grandmother was really a hero for me and an inspiration.Yeah, what was heroic about her? I'd love to hear more about her and her work.She came out of an experience of various kinds of trauma connected with the Second World War and immigration and a whole bunch of other things. She had a kind of brave ethnographic ability. She would go into different parts of the world for most of her ethnographic work. She spoke ten languages and had spent a lot of time working in the Yucatan in Mexico. Her technique was to go into different communities and go to the kitchen and hang out with the women. While learning to cook different kinds of things, she'd learn what they were saying in a sort of real way about their communities and their ideas about the future, etc.She also had a kind of rigorous scientific side, had a strong background in linguistics, and was very interested in the phenomenon of glossolalia or speaking in tongues. That's what her early publications were about. Then later, after she retired, she was very brave about what she actually believed, which didn't fit into a lot of people's paradigms because she lived in a world where she thought spirits were real and such things.So all of that was very appealing in a certain way, very heroic.Yeah, what was appealing? I'm just curious, what was the attraction to the stories that she told for you? What did you make of all of this growing up in an environment with... yeah, it was just your grandmother, right?Yeah, this is my grandmother. I think part of what I enjoyed was that there was a kind of poetry to it. There was a mythic quality to it, but also she was very interested in the ways that different cultural logics lead toward different orientations toward the world and the environment. What we might say today are different ontologies, so different ways of being in the world. She would say, and I think this is probably an anthropological truism, that being in one culture is like putting an eyepatch over one eye and you can only see things in a kind of flat way. But being able to experience two cultures gives you a kind of binocular vision where you can see the contingency of different kinds of cultural forms. It even changes your orientation toward your own world, whatever world you choose to inhabit. All of that, I think, I found really wonderful.You know, she was interesting. She was a complicated figure. She would mix blood with cornmeal and throw it out, the blood of chickens, and throw it out to the spirits. She was not sentimental and fuzzy. She was a very charismatic figure. She had a difficult shared relationship with my mother, but she was great to me and my brother.So tell me a little bit about where you are now and the work you're doing, just for people to know what you're up to.Yeah, so I'm a historian philosopher and I tend to do things that alternate between those two modes or in some cases show how you need both. I've done historical work that focused in the first case on either the history of Japan, translucent look at it in transactional history, or on the history of Western Europe. I've also done philosophical work that takes very seriously thinkers in the philosophical canon, trying to work on problems, particularly problems in the question of knowledge, as you might guess, questions of ethics. I'm very fundamentally interested in questions of the social world. What is it that we mean when we're talking about the social world? What is the social world made up of?In this case, this is the language of social ontology. What is it that exists when we're saying that something is money? What are we actually talking about? What does it mean to be money? What gets something in the category money? What are the cases in which you could be wrong about something being money? Or to put it another way that appeals to my students: What is social construction? What does it mean to say that something is socially constructed? I would argue that it isn't to say that something doesn't exist. Often people presume that when someone says something is socially constructed, what they mean is that thing isn't real. So if you say money is socially constructed, you might be saying money isn't real. But that'd be a very strange argument because how else could money have come into existence but through a set of social processes? So then the question is more how is the social constructed. Anyway, I produce a typology in a recent book. Those are some of the things that I've worked on.Yeah. What do you love about your work? Where's the joy in it for you?Part of what I'm interested in is taking things that people have historically presumed to be the case and showing how they're actually obstacles preventing us from doing different kinds of new thinking. I sometimes feel like I'm "Emperor's new clothing" it, to make up a bad expression. But I often want to ask why we presume that certain things are the case. Take a given thing, the presumption for instance that over time humanity is becoming more rational or something. Some people have said that. You might think, why do we assume that's true? Why does anyone assume that's true? What's the evidence for it? What's the evidence against it? Who's argued it when?I also have a love of languages. One of the things I inherited from my grandmother is a lot of languages. I do a lot of my work working back between different kinds of texts and noting that often you get sedimented interpretations of various thinkers or periods because of the way that they've been translated at particular moments. If you go back to the original texts and cultural contexts, you can often find new orientations to certain kinds of problems or presuppositions. That's another way to think about what I'm motivated by.Yeah.I'm also a very restless thinker. I change topics a lot.Yeah, but it strikes me too that there's something a little punk rock or rock and roll about what you're doing when you talk about taking these presumptions and undermining or disrupting them, essentially, right?Yeah, definitely. When I was playing in bands, I was in punk and then goth bands, and that's definitely important to me. I'll only add that as I've gotten a little bit older and since becoming a parent, I've also gotten more reflexive. There was a generation where I was just trying to tear it all down, and now what I think is really important is doing that extra work of building on the other side of that tearing down. Which doesn't mean you stop tearing s**t down, but you also have an ethical obligation to try and figure out what's on the other side. So it's not enough just to say no; we have to say, okay, but what's the alternative? Or how can we reconstruct this thing that we have deconstructed? Or how can we make a kind of hopeful and positive progress on the other side of that?I've been doing more of that positive work, but only recently - more in the last six years or so since becoming a parent. My daughter's almost six. I've been taking on a more positive set of programs. But yeah, I think that's right. It's punk rock; I try to bring punk rock energy to the kind of stuff that I do for sure.Yeah, it feels like a nice transition. I first encountered you, I think, just in my omnivorous reading. I can't remember how or where I might have bumped into your book, but it was your second book, the first book that I encountered by you: "The Myth of Disenchantment," right? In that one, and I'll likely butcher the premise of this book, but I had encountered... I guess my interest in it is that I had been really absorbed in the assumption. Is it Max Weber who's saying that science eliminated, rid the world of magic and belief, and we were now living in a world of pure rationality and everything was all kosher and magic was a thing of the past? And so the title of your book alone was a challenge to me and really attractive. Can you tell me a little bit about that book and, for people who don't know this stuff, set the stage for what you were trying to do and what drew you to that topic?Yeah, what was so attractive about being disenchanted that made it something we wanted to be or that some of us wanted to believe in?I think that there were two sides to it. There was one group of folks, maybe even three groups, for whom the already accomplished rationality of the West was the thing they were most chauvinistic and celebratory about. This was often in the context of colonialism and the domination of the rest of the world. It involved a trajectory that we see echoes of in contemporary writers like Steven Pinker. I've met him, so I can say to his face what I can also say on this podcast: I think there's broadly, in many respects, a kind of artificial chauvinism around the Enlightenment that creates a myth about it. It treats Europe as the font of all true knowledge, and then there are all these things that get weighted into some grand story about the historical specificity of that.On the one hand, you have those folks. On the other hand, you have folks who think disenchantment is a bad thing. Often, the language of disenchantment, even in some theorists, has a kind of melancholy in it. Max Weber, as I discovered, comes to that phrase "die Entzauberung der Welt" (the disenchanting or literally the demagicking of the world) while vacationing at a neo-pagan commune in Ascona, Switzerland. There's a melancholy in Weber's assessment.There's a third group of folks for whom the narrative of disenchantment, the idea that the world is disenchanted, has often historically motivated them to try and resupply the missing magic. One of the biggest groups of people who describe disenchantment are often practicing magicians. I trace that back as a folkloric narrative. Many a book of spells begins with some version of the idea that magic was historically lost and only preserved in this here spell book. We have that in medieval spell books, for instance.It's a trope of European magic itself (I say European meaning that this particular narrative often occurs in spell books associated with largely European traditions, although there are some examples of it in the Arabic-speaking world as well). The idea then, what makes the book seem extra special, is that it preserves a lost Solomonic magic tradition. It has to presume that magic, the world, is generally disenchanted because in this case it is resupplying that missing magic.I think those are some of the many reasons, but there's also one other piece: in some cases, people have argued that their specific environment wasn't sufficiently disenchanted, and they have then actively worked to disenchant it. Modernity being located elsewhere, folks in Kinshasa looking to Paris, or people in Paris looking to London as the site of modernity. There's been this sort of looking to the other, often as part of a campaign toward an attempt to produce disenchantment. Again, this has often proved self-refuting. People who try and do it as a historical description have often failed to successfully fully disabuse others of those beliefs.And how does this relate to the latter part of the subtitle? How do we reconcile all of this in the human sciences? What are the implications?I think they're quite big. As I trace in the book, a lot of the human sciences, by which I mean the humanities and social sciences, were born in a moment where they presumed a notion of rupture that they associated with modernity. I argue that this myth of modernity, which is the idea that modernity represents a pure rupture, was something they were trying to explain. For instance, early anthropologists were often trying to figure out what distinguished "primitive" societies from modern societies, presuming there was a fundamental distinction between the two.We see this, for instance, in works about "how savages think." This heavily loaded notion of "savage mind" was a debate around what was distinctive about contemporary thinking. In retrospect, we might see this as fundamentally problematic and methodologically flawed, not to say there are no differences. But the idea of a rupture between the modern thinker and the primitive thinker is artificial.We might note that sociology was formulated around a problem of industrialized society that presumed some kind of new fragmentation had taken place, producing new forms of social differentiation supposedly unavailable to premodern thinkers. Historians have increasingly pushed back on many of those forms of differentiation. Although there are some new mutations (I'm not saying nothing ever changed - the printing press caused huge shifts), certain things taken as given ruptural moments turn out to be much more complicated and had much longer trajectories than historically thought.Early psychoanalysis formulated around notions of a modern mind or way of thinking that was also supposed to be, in Freud's words, like "savage thinking." But to do so, he still presumes a binary even as he works to eclipse that binary.One of my targets in "The Myth of Disenchantment" book was a ruptural notion of modernity. Again, I'm not denying a range of different changes, but I'm denying the idea of a single rupture, whether located at the Protestant Reformation, the printing press, or the Enlightenment. So even "modernity as rupture" is a myth.Then there's a second myth I'm pushing against: the idea that after modernity, we entered some period called post-modernity where we jettisoned all the great or bad stuff of modernity. That myth is just as much of a mess. There's fundamental confusion; some figures considered high points of modernism were then also thought of as high points of post-modernism. The idea that we entered a fundamentally post-truth world ignores the long history of propaganda. The idea that people suddenly became irrational after a period of being rational is artificial. People are roughly equally rational and irrational; we have different kinds of blind spots and work to educate people in different ways.All that presumes two kinds of ruptures. One of the things I was trying to do was work through and past both of those.Yeah, I want to explore some language a little bit, two of them: myth, then modern. I think I've listened to a different interview you'd done where you talked about the word "modern" and where it comes from, the origins, and the implications it has for how we use it. Can you tell me a little bit about what it means to be modern and where that concept comes from?Yeah, so the word "modern" was first coined... there are debates around it, but one key source is the Roman statesman Cassiodorus. In 580 of the Common Era, he wrote a work called "De orthographia" in which he talked about "modernus" or "modern," which he had coined from the word "hodiernus," meaning "of today." He was writing about it during what was about to be the Middle Ages, 580, so what he's calling modern - "of the now" - literally is what it meant. He was contrasting what he thought of as his modern culture from classical culture.First of all, it precedes the Middle Ages, which is incredibly weird if you're looking historically. Second, the presumption that there was a kind of rupture and change at that historical moment... He didn't actually recognize the things that were in fact changing. He was at the cusp of a transition that he wasn't capable of recognizing and thought he had already traversed. It takes basically about a thousand years for the term to really sink in as a descriptor. But even then, it often has a kind of ruptural sense to it and an artificial one, often located within a particular cultural horizon that left a lot of other people out.The idea of it as a temporality always had an uneven distribution, so there were always some people that were more modern than others. We see this in the legacy of European colonialism, which often seemed to justify itself by saying, "Oh, these so-called unmodern people are the people we need to colonize and help modernize." That's there already in some respects at the beginning of the term. I could go into more detail, but that's a good part of it.Yeah, and then the other one is myth. This one's of particular interest to me because I feel like I'm an amateur. I'm always punching above my weight. But I love Joseph Campbell and I take that word "myth"... kind of have an earnest interpretation of myth. It's a functional term, right? I don't know how you feel about it, but we use it very often... I think Campbell says myth is what we call other people's religion. It's more of a pejorative. We use it that way these days. When you talk about myth, what do you mean? And what are the uses of it or abuses of it?Yeah, so there are different ways that you could define the term myth. It comes from the Greek "mythos," which means actually something quite close to the idea of narrative. In the early Greek materials, what it means to be a myth is to be something that has a kind of narrative structure built into it. In the book, in particular, I'm following thinkers like Hans Blumenberg who described myths as prefabricated tropes that transpose things across different domains. For instance, the repeated phrase "God is dead" does a lot of narrative work in a lot of different contexts and often gets taken for granted by people who mean very different things by it.I'm in dialogue with Blumenberg, but also with one of my favorite French thinkers, Jean-Luc Nancy, who argues that the only true myth is the absence of myth. He's interested in the idea that we have entered a post-narrative age. This relates to Lyotard, who claimed that the defining feature of post-modernity was the end of metanarrative, but it turns out we have plenty of narratives.I think humans tend to think narratively; we tend to think in terms of stories. That seems to be one of our main methods of communicating with each other: to locate them in narrative forms. There's good psychological evidence that we're more likely to remember things when we can chain them together into a narrative framework. In this respect, part of what I wanted to argue in the book is that we, despite Lyotard and company, have never left behind narrative.I also want to suggest that even those people who think of themselves as post-myth have lots of prefabricated tropes, including the trope of disenchantment. Weber's phrase "the disenchantment of the world," as translated and promoted by Talcott Parsons and others, took on a life of its own. People started to ask why the world was disenchanted or presumed that the world was disenchanted based on what I would argue are mythic grounds, by importing this prefabricated trope.That's how I'm using the term specifically, but you could define it in a range of different ways. One of the issues in myth studies, insofar as that represents a small discipline, is that many competing definitions of myth are on offer. What tends to happen is a new thinker just comes up with a new definition, and so instead of resolving any debates, it just continues to denigrate.I wonder how you feel about this. Isn't it less about answering the question, "Is the world actually less enchanted?" And more a question of "How is it that the narrative of disenchantment is so compelling to so many?"It depends, but I think it could be about both. Yeah, so I'm both in the book trying to explain why did we get the... how did anybody get the idea that the world was disenchanted, where did it come from and how did it become a self-descriptor for certain groups of folk? And why does that story get reproduced? Why does that become reproduced?And then in a third case, what is it? We can ask what is it that we actually believe and why if you flip the problem... most of the historical sociological work that I was looking at presumed disenchantment. I was trying to explain why did the world get disenchanted... the story is something to do with science blah blah blah. But instead if we didn't become disenchanted, then that's a totally different problem that we have to solve and I argue that it is a product of a kind of fragmentation of belief. So I'm not denying that globalization hasn't transformed belief and true there compared to, I don't know, let's say the 15th century, Europeans may be less monolithic in their beliefs, but precisely because of that, because of this kind of fragmentation you have more people that believe in more different kinds of things including more things that they're characterizing as other people's enchanted beliefs and you get a kind of belief fragmentation environment and you get the globalization of notions of spirits or globalizations of new counts of magic or what-have-you and what I'm interested in describing is a contemporary moment that is not so much as some theorists had imagined where we are in a dry period of materialism where nobody believes in anything but rather the present moment is perhaps best characterized by fragmentation and one in which and this is perhaps something subtle. But I talked about in the first chapter of the book the way in which because people, let's say 75% of Americans as I noted, have paranormal beliefs, but they don't have the same ones and your belief in one category is more likely to make you skeptical of another so concretely if you... people who think that we believe in demons some to often believe that people reporting UFOs are really having encounters with the demonic or people who believe in spirits might believe that UFOs are really spirits and that people with delusions are the ones that are wrong about their beliefs. I'm not describing a moment of stasis, but I'm trying to describe the kinds of fragmentation of contemporary belief.I want to shift into your most recent book “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.” Yeah, and I was just trying to... I'm so attracted to this stuff. I feel like some of it is really over my head. And I thought I would just express my interest in it and where I think it collides with my own work and then have you introduce the concepts. So as a confession my first encounter with the word modernism was in a Sturgill Simpson album. I fell in love with Sturgill Simpson. I don't know if you're... yeah his music.Yeah for sure. Yeah, and yeah no, yeah a metamodern sounds or whatever.Yeah. His second album has a song about becoming a father which is beautiful, one of my most beautiful favorite songs. Welcome to the world Pollywog. You mentioned becoming a father. Yeah, and I hadn't really and in my work, I think about brand as a myth and as a narrative and companies and products that do the work of developing and sustaining a narrative that inspires people and resonates with people do better than those products or companies that don't invest in helping people make sense of what they do using narrative and myth is a very... and so when we shift all these big ideas modern or postmodern or metamodernism we shift the idea of the self, right? And so I'm interested in... and so in encountering your book, it feels like you're announcing a different... there's been a shift and how we think about the self in a way. Is that accurate?Yes, so I would say two things. In the first case I love your... I didn't know you had that background in advertising in it and one of the things that's... I would say that relates to the myth book and in regard to that is yeah, people are driven by narratives and they're driven by these kind of prepackaged myths and their ways in which one of the things that that folks interested advertising have discovered is how to formulate those in ways that tie products for instance into particular narrative formulations. And you could note that there was an older version of theorists who thought that capitalist modernity the logics of capitalism would make people hyper-rational that the market would be a kind of Smithian exchange of information or Hayekian exchange of information and that's and actually advertising is way more important than that. It's not that's the narratives because we don't escape narratives part of our thinking is actually built into the myths of the narrative. So I totally agree.Yeah, I was just resonating with the logical positivism point. I almost interrupted you because I feel like when Google arrived and we had the search engine, there was this dream of every consumer would have access to perfect information and so they actually wouldn't need... there'd be no need for advertising our brand because we could be just purely explicitly rational creatures making the best possible product decision in every instance.Yeah, and instead what we are is in a world with proliferating phantasmagoric advertising and so where the dreams of the most pessimistic disenchanter... we see more quote-unquote magical imagery on display on a daily basis than you know most folks would have in the past and that commodification of that imagery is something that's interesting. I've also written about a little bit elsewhere, but anyway, yeah. But we and I have a piece on fortune-telling for instance, which are the economics of it, which is in progress but not out yet, but it's about huge industry... are arguably comparable to online dating. And so we're definitely in a world where... but that's a separate question. But so advertising and myths are definitely important. The other... the second piece about what I'm trying to do... announce a new self. So I would say with the language of metamodern.I'm not necessarily argue... so there are a couple of us who are using the term and one of the differences between me and maybe some of the others is that I'm actually to produce a change rather than describe it. In particular when I'm using the expression metamodernism and to be honest I came to a little bit late. The book went out for its first round of peer-review titled... what it was titled "Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory" and then are the future absolute of theory after post-modernism but then people were like... but what are you talking about a positive project? You need a name for your positive project.And then I remembered the work of a Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji who I've gone on to meet and he's a mentor figure but he described the metamodern artist as an artist who is capable of using and transcending both the modern and the postmodern and he had any particular takes on it and I thought that's what I'm trying to do. So I'll use this word metamodernism. There's a hit of a tucking tongue-in-cheek because isms always tend to be almost always pejorative in our contemporary moment. Most things don't call themselves isms. They mostly get used as polemicals for other folk but in part I think it's appropriate because one of the things I'm interested in is a kind of reflexivity and so it's something that turns the techniques we could associate with quote-unquote post-modernism on themselves. But then uses it to work its way out the other side and I can say in more detail about what I'm doing. But the other piece of it is at bottom.It's just even without all the language of jargon and branding it's an attempt to make an argument for a new systematic philosophy that I think would be a benefit to any of us interested in the humanities and social sciences and and it makes the case mostly on its own terms but I then refer to a lot of other figures because that's how you got to do it in order to and because no no person is an island and I'm influenced by a whole range of my kind of similarly omnivorous reading strategies. Yeah.Yeah. Yeah, and what I've listened to a couple interviews with you before. What is the shift that you're attempting to produce and what's the problem in the humanities that you're trying to solve?Yeah, so in part what happened in starting let's say in the Anglosphere in the 1970s late 1970s and early 1980s was the dominance of a new set of a new canon of philosophical works that were mostly being imported from the French, but sometimes German and sometimes they had Anglo American analogues. And these works are being mashed up and blended together into a new hybrid form and they relied which was often called by its critics post-modernism and sometimes was also called such by its proponents. The... these are figures like Foucault and Derrida and perhaps Heidegger and Richard Rorty and what-have-you and what happened was in the blending up of these different figures they... folks drew on their most skeptical arguments and they tended to draw on them in ways that were we might say decontextualizing them from their particular historical milieu. Derrida and his reputation France was very different than Derrida in the United States and Derrida himself would say "Deconstruction is American."That was one of his formulations. But but or is America. It was that one more literal translation but and so what happened was these sort of skepticisms were repackaged together and then they were used either as polemical others against which disciplines sharpened their criticisms or more often than not they became models through which scholars did a kind of second-order reflection on their work. And this is because we as scholars are always encountering issues outside our own discipline that have to do with questions of meaning, they have to do the questions of knowledge of epistemology, they have to do the questions of ethics, they have to do the questions of what we could call social ontology or the thing that we're referring to in the humanities and social sciences and people often went to this canon to answer those questions and that was liberating in its own moment. It was very cool.I imagine some period of around when I was being born, but this stuff has had diminishing returns and what it's ended up doing is producing a situation where the lack of... To disappoint the formulation, a lot of ivory tower scholarship is basically useless because it's grounded in meaning but fundamentally misguided philosophical assumptions. Because of that, it has contributed to the self-martyrdom of an already weakened intellectual class in such a way that folks are mostly... have historically for a long period of time... were mostly agreeing on basically things that were about how dissolving or deconstructing the edifice of the Academy and there was some good reason to deconstruct that to make room for a whole crowd of folks who hadn't normally or previously gotten access to that Academy, folks from minority backgrounds or women, etc. So that early work was important and I mad props to my predecessors of that generation. But it's not what we need to be doing anymore and it's ceased to be productive. There in fact, the very notion of progress is antithetical to the way that this movement instantiates itself. You get the idea for instance that there are only stories and the only thing that we do as academics is tell stories. It turns out we're not very good storytellers. We shouldn't be leaving that often. Novelists and for the advertisers or whatever or you get the idea that knowledge is power, which is not something that Foucault says but people attribute to Foucault and if so you ask them, "Well, do you have knowledge of that claim? Does it make you more empowered? Is power a bad thing?" Like all these other things that we're presuming that are, you know?A mess and I came out of this world. I was a fanboy. Another way to locate myself to your earliest question is I came out of this world. I went to France to be to see the lectures of big shots. I ultimately saw lectures by people like Agamben. I saw people like Derrida and Zizek, etc.And I was really immersed in this stuff and I loved it as a kind of cynical wisdom and a way to talk truth to power but what I think we started doing was we stopped... we questioned other people but we never questioned ourselves and we started calling out power without realizing the power effects that we were having and we started to dissolve institutions for instance at a time when we actually needed institutions and all these other things.There were all these negative effects and basically I want to argue that a lot of the philosophy was misgrounded in one way or another and but that the way to get past it is not a retreat to an older set of philosophical norms as though that skepticism never happened. So some of the people that I hang with or I've chatted with in analytic philosophy departments are like, "Oh you suck because you take these guys seriously."No, they're real theories. There... Foucault was not a b******t artist. He is a very smart and intelligent dude. And if you read him seriously and carefully, there are a lot of... he makes a lot of interesting arguments that we need to address but we don't end with Foucault and we also don't return to some now discredited notion of a kind of... I don't know... whatever decontextualized knowledge valueless pursuit that is anachronistic and misses the effects that our truth claims have for instance. The metamodernism book is an attempt to work through and pass that material to grant the grounds that animated the postmodern and skeptical critique. And but by turning them on themselves to take us into a new moment. So we abandon... we become skeptical of skepticism. The way you defeat for instance a climate change skeptic is not to thump on some notion of fact, right? You don't say "I have the facts and you don't" or... that's not going to persuade anybody. Not only do we need new narratives, but we also need new epistemic tools and part of the... one of the things you can teach people to do is how to be more skeptical and more skeptical of skepticism itself. What is motivating your skepticism? You might ask rather than saying don't be skeptical of climate change, say what is motivating your skepticism, trying to figure out what's motivating their skepticism.Why they're skeptical and then that can help teach them perhaps and hopefully to be skeptical of their own skepticism and by addressing their arguments on their own terrain can lead you out toward a kind of humble knowledge. And so part of the other pieces relates to the way that we communicate our knowledge claims. So there's been a long tradition of in actual scientific praxis holding two things provisionally, but in science communication treating science as a monolithic creator of eternal truths and so science says the virus is spread by droplets and that's the only thing we need to worry about and then science says something different and then people say oh I'm skeptical of science and that's a mistake in communication and it's a mistake in a presupposition about what knowledge is. Knowledge itself needs to be understood in terms of something that has a temporality, a temporal horizon built into it and I don't mean this in any kind of jargonistic or ridiculous way.I mean if I'm gonna make a truth claim, like the population of Williamstown is 4,250 people... so I just made that up and let's just say that would be a truth claim at a particular time and it would be a truth claim of a particular definitionally bounded geographic scope and as the geography changes and as time changes that truth claim would lose or weaken its validity. Similarly the language and vocabulary of our knowledge changes. So the definition of what it is to be a meter has shifted very slightly in the last ensuing years since the French Revolution and for instance and or... and we're constantly revising the things that we know or understand about the world. So instead of thumping on facts as if that's the way to refute skepticism.I want to argue that a kind of skepticism can lead us toward a kind of humble provisional knowledge. And so I can stage this in a couple different ways, but that's one way to do it. Yeah, I love the examples you give because they make it very accessible. You mentioned the climate skeptic and you mentioned the public health, the science communication. That's interesting to me too. But you're describing the before and after a little bit, right? Tell me if I'm wrong, where you're saying in one case, there's the mod and maybe I'm being too literal here but that there's an old way of doing it where the climate skeptic you would just throw facts at them. That's a very postmodernist way of doing it. And then but a metamodernist way of approaching climate skeptic would be to understand them.It's a little bit what I felt like you said. I would say that there... I would go... I would type... I don't love these triads, but I think... But I can play it. If I were gonna play that game, here's how I would say it. Maybe this will sharpen the argument. We might call the modernist response to some facts, right? We might say that we might call the modernistic claim that there's a universal truth and you say to the climate change people, "Here's the truth. It's that no, you're just wrong" or whatever. We might say that the postmodernist is the idea that all truth claims are bad because truth is just a language game. And so therefore you just say, "Your might be"... if we want to look at it concretely you might be fair about it and say, although even he wasn't, but look you might just say, "The climate scientists just have their truth and we have our truth" and then we go along. A metamodernist view might be to in this respect grant the reasons for skepticism but also grant where those skepticisms run aground and work our way through and past them.So by noting to... by historicizing about both the modern and the postmodern moment that lets us out the other side and showing us where what it means to make a true statement about the climate has some qualifications built into it, for instance. And that involved does necessitate a kind of empathy. But it also, which we might be getting from the postmodernists, and it does emphasize... it does, but it also emphasizes the importance of a kind of... of kinds of positively valued knowledge that we might be getting from the modernists even as we no longer hold to universalizing notions. Yeah, and I look at this also in post-colonial theory.One of my biggest influences is Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who describes a cosmopolitan ecology of knowledges where you look at different ways of world-making, different ways of knowing that we might associate with, in his case for instance, indigenous epistemologies, etc. There was an old-fashioned, let's call it modernist tendency to say that stuff was all junk. There was a postmodernist tendency to say all that stuff was equally good and everything is all equally good, even though many postmodernists didn't actually take their children to see New Age doctors; they just went to the same medical establishment as the rest of us. Now today we might say that there is a long legacy of dismissing these knowledge claims. So we have to be very careful when we're talking about indigenous epistemologies to figure out the many things that were good and built into that have been artificially, for reasons of racism, excluded. But on the other hand, we can also begin to compare and work through different kinds of particular epistemological claims, and that's clear because also one of the unities I'm trying to break down is this idea of a single Western worldview that has a certain kind of claims built into it, or even a single scientific worldview, because it turns out that the positivists were wrong. Science is a disunity, not a unity. That doesn't mean that there are not better justified truth claims. Things that we have better evidence for are associated with the sciences, but that doesn't mean that all of the claims associated with the sciences are well justified, and it also doesn't mean that plenty of truth claims not associated with the sciences are not also well justified.So to give you another example, history departments in the English-speaking world, we don't use the word science to cover history, but you do for instance in the German Wissenschaft or the French. But for instance in this case, the historical claim that Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France is a well-justified knowledge claim, but it is not a scientific one in a way that science, if you were going to define science as a unity. But you might instead note that yeah, that's a well-justified truth claim. But in any case, what I want to terminate in is if we hold lightly to our truth claims, even when we have them and hold on to them with a kind of humility. So even though I'm gonna tell you that I think it's quite unlikely that I will revise the truth claim "Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France," there are conditions under which we could learn that that was not actually the case. For instance, we could learn that the coronation ceremony, famously witnessed by several hundred people, maybe a thousand people, was in fact a fabrication of a particular journalist later in Britain. I can come up with some story that would explain it. It's very unlikely though that we would do that, but that orientation toward our knowledge which keeps a kind of humility and in which we keep around other previously discredited epistemic models is also valuable, too.So part of the other point about a cosmopolitan ecology of knowledge is, and this is one of the things that motivated Paul Feyerabend in his critique of the unity of science, is that sometimes we end up figuring out that the old theory we thought we'd got rid of was actually pretty good. Like tectonics, which people were like, "No, that's total junk. How could the plates move around? That's a really naive theory that pretends that the continents are jigsaw puzzles." And lo and behold, actually, we've developed later evidence for it. So I would say string theory is in that respect today. I don't think that there's any good evidence for string theory, but I think we should keep it around in case we develop evidence for string theory later on, for instance. Yes, all that is to say it's a different orientation to knowledge.Yeah Yeah, what what would you guess are the implications of metamodernism for Myth-makers? What does it mean to create a narrative with a sensitivity to these ideas?Yeah. I would say that there are a couple different things that one could take away from this. In the first case, to those who think that scholarship is all stories, I think that's a mistake. But to those who think that narrative itself is something that we should dispense with as a problem, in point of fact, for instance, Hayden White in the history department in the philosophy of history ended up arguing that history tended to be told according to certain narrative tropes. But there's a next step which is to say yes, but there are better or worse reasons for telling particular history according to those tropes, and some of those tropes better or worse fit the evidence. So you can actually make judgments of the narratives on evidential grounds, not just that they're neurodiversity.The idea that what objective knowledge looks like is some kind of people have had like this weird cybernetic model of the mind in which people are Bayesian reasoners based on waiting statistical... Humans don't think that way. That's a product of a Cold War. We can historicize it in a particular moment in the history of cybernetics.So in the first case, to my fellow educators, I would say we both don't have to be anti-narrative and we can recognize that there are better or worse reasons. Some of those reasons are epistemological. Some of those might be ethical. That's okay. We can own our ethics as long as we talk through them.That's part of the argument to those who are in the world of narrativizing. I think we need to be careful. Sometimes people, even on the left-wing politics that I agree with and look at myself in, sometimes get drawn away with telling stories and they don't even necessarily want to connect those stories to any evidential claims. I think that's probably more common on the right than it is on the left. But I do see it on the left when the stakes are high. People don't care whether there's evidence. They say, "This is a story" or something like that. I think that we can hold ourselves as reasoners to better standards than that.We can not say that there is a single truth but rather that there are certain things that we can deploy the kind of evidence that we do or don't have and that represent a kind of humility, which I think is very important. So I think we need to be aware of our own limitations, who we are, where we're located situationally and elsewhere, even as we reach out and engage with other people from different perspectives and vantage points. This is neither the self-complete atomization of a kind of, let's say, postmodern academic model where you are merely your standpoint, but rather one in which we recognize that it isn't precisely our limitations that allow us to reach out and connect with other people. We're all equally all screwed up in some way or another. We're all limited beings. We're all finite.I don't know much more. I think the other kind is the kind of stories that we want to tell. I'm interested in not just stories that tell us how cruddy everything is, but stories that focus on our capacity to imagine better futures. I'm not interested in those positive stories that dismiss the suffering of people in our current moment. I think that would be, again to use the typology that people seem to want me to use a lot, that would be an old modernist kind of model where we're just like, "Everything's gonna be great. It's utopian. Let's ignore the suffering. It's gonna go away. Everything's just making progress." That's a bad idea, but it's also a bad idea to, in a certain respect if you're artists, do whatever, follow your inspiration. But I think I've personally had enough of purely dystopian stories.What I'm interested in are stories or narratives that are capable of seeing the importance of struggling toward a better future, and I think this is also true in terms of a politics. Concretely put, a politics of cynicism, which unfortunately became a dominant politics in many sectors of, again, I'll talk about my own group, the left, for a long time is not a motivating politics. I think we need to recognize the suffering that people are having, and again, I don't want to dismiss that suffering. But I want to say we also need to focus on ways that we're not just attacking the other guy. We're actually trying to build a better world, and I think the degree to which we can do that, we can bring more people on board at the kind of changes that we want to see.Then the other piece finally on the political terrain is I think we can agree to disagree more than we often do. I'm part of the... I'm again...I'm talking to the left. I'm part of the tolerant left in a certain way. I think that we need to be able to disagree. I think that there's a line between agonism and antagonism, and I've had some arguments with colleagues about this, which is lovely because it in a way fits my view. I think arguing is good. Actually, disagreement is completely fine and completely productive, and I actually am happy to refute the right-wing a******s or whatever. Sorry. I'm happy to refute people I disagree with on whatever grounds, and I think that we need to allow forums for those kinds of engagement. But I draw a line at forms of violence and calls for violence. So there's a question there, too. There's a line, but it involves actual violence, not disagreement. And I think we've gotten quite sloppy about where we draw that line.I love everything you've just said. I want to make sure you've got a little... are you okay on time for a little bit more? Yeah, I've got 15 more minutes. Okay, because I want to follow up on this last bit because in listening to one of your earlier... another interview or conversation you had, you really made it explicit, and you're saying it here, too, that we were coming out of a phase and maybe there was something about postmodernism or the academia that found it impossible to be affirmative, like that. It was almost exclusively a deconstructive exercise that had no ability to produce anything good and it wasn't productive. And you've said this even in becoming a dad, you're trying to deconstruct and reconstruct. We have a responsibility. So it sounds like metamodernism is... it's optimistic. It's an attempt... it's future-oriented in a way that things have not been in the past. Does that feel...?Yeah, I don't absolutely love the word optimistic, but I'll say it is future... it's hopeful and it's future-oriented, and it believes that there will be a struggle and that the struggle will take a while. But that we... that struggle is worth it and it's worth directing our energies and efforts toward that struggle, and that struggle can't merely be the negative work of calling out what is bad, although that's an important first step. As I emphasize always to my students and also to my colleagues, that first step is important. You have to recognize what's wrong before you start trying to work together with folks to figure out how to fix it, but you need that second step. And we in the Academy, for a combination of reasons, one of which was the ascent of a kind of postmodern theory...The other was a scent of a certain misinterpreted version of what value neutrality was supposed to look like. We had the idea that positive projects were value laden and that critique was itself didn't have values, and so we just started criticizing each other. Then we got really good at it, or we would make it so far away from values that we were knee-deep in the archives and we were saying, "I don't care if this is relevant to anything. I'm just writing another book on footnotes in Shakespeare," or whatever, you know what I mean?So I think that there is room for an Academy that engages. Partially also, there's a confusion of political elites, economic elites, and cultural elites, and we've let the critique of elitism and the critique of the vast economic inequalities that have defined our society to be a self-humbling critique. That also got us all tangled up in a mess that wasn't able to be what we rather need, which is a fine-grained critique and a kind of openness and humility to folks outside the everyday.I'm not also saying I think that one of the big moves that some of this was postmodernism, which is a good one, which is things like listening to our interlocutors more, taking more seriously excluded voices. All that stuff I totally believe in and think is valuable, but with the next step, which is that we are all working together on a positive project. I want to emphasize those, and we can afford to disagree about many things, even much more than we realize, as long as there's some pieces of that collective struggle that we can agree on together.We don't have to be monolithic about anything, and I think the attempt to be monolithic in our politics or in our economic systems or in our discourses is itself a legacy of an older era modernism, but it's snuck its way back in and it's bad. What we actually need to do is struggle, but that doesn't mean you don't try and persuade people. There's another mistake that people have made, which is they've presumed that persuading people of things based on arguments is a kind of power rather than a kind of empowerment or allowing people to empower themselves.I think it's our duty to argue with folks and argue with each other and persuade people, even about values. I think once we hold our values up, this makes them more rather than less amenable to scrutiny. Ironically, the best way to get value neutrality out of a community is to have individuals in the community be clearly aware what the values of the individuals in that community are. So if I tell you what my politics are, you have a better sense of factoring out what you need to when we're working together.All those things I think give us an opportunity to work together to do something that I think could be really fundamental, which would be to use what we're doing in the human sciences to build or help us struggle together to build a better world. The other piece that I would emphasize is that we have to be careful also to recognize that things take time. If you look at survey data, for instance, people massively underestimate how long it takes to produce productive change.There's been a strong tendency on the left (I don't know what your audience is, but I'm speaking within the left) when we don't see instant change, we give up. Whereas unfortunately the right has often played the long game, and I say this with full apologies and all self-locating here. That has been, to my perspective, incredibly detrimental because the right has gotten a lot of victories in certain sectors in recent years. I think we on the left need to, or we on whatever political spectrum, we as humans living together on a planet, and this is probably even more urgent to me, living together on a planet...That is suffering from anthropogenic climate change. We need to play a long game and need to recognize the importance of working hard for that change and not giving up if it doesn't happen fast. And also recognizing that change is going to be struggle. It is going to mean giving up certain things. But on the other side of that struggle is a better, brighter, more sustainable future.Yeah, I have two things I want to say, and the first is I feel like the way that you're layering this on top of the Left's communication struggles. I'm in full alignment with you on... and is it true? Does it layer on that way where you're, in some respects, the move you're making is a diagnostic of these like... this history of short-term thinking, poor communication, all the everything and a negative... a lack of a firm affirmative future orientation?Yes, for sure, and I... Yeah, and I'm reacting to the mere... I can't help but react to global political trends because I'm experiencing them. And I think I would be disingenuous to deny that. And if you google me, you would probably learn that I have an uncle, for instance, who was a Democratic congressional candidate in the kind of Bernie Sanders wing of the party. He didn't get it. It was in Ohio. He lost. I have critiques of party politics within the Democratic Party too. And but I see myself as emerging from this discourse and in particular... If you time my books to that... for certain political events and imagine that the books are coming out a year after those political events... Yeah, you may begin to notice certain patterns but... but I think also... Yeah, I'll put that... but but I don't also... but to be clear, I think there are some issues that are more important than left and right, and one of those is the issue of the climate.And if you... and I have some hopeful data on this point, which is that even young conservatives in the United States, but even more so globally, recognize climate change as an urgent threat. And I think that's one of the places, for instance, where there's a lot of room, despite all of our other disagreements, for growth, especially if we're willing to put our formulations in arguments that are more congenial to debate and to that level of discourse. So for instance, conservatives, if you talk about the value of hunting in the natural world and conservation... You may have noticed but early American conservation movements were often right-wing movements, not left-wing movements, and you can... we can afford to recover that language and we need to be able to do that because the planet is at stake, right? And so we can and in this way that's one of the places, for instance, where we do really fundamentally need to reach across the aisle and amplify those voices on the other side. We're grappling with the climate catastrophe that we are facing right now.One last question. This is a question I stole from a therapist guy. I think his name is Steve... something like that. It's called the miracle question. And so it goes like this: You and I, we're gonna finish our conversation in about 5-10 minutes. You're gonna go home, you'll finish your day. You'll have dinner, you go to bed. You wake up in the morning, right? Everything that we've talked about this thing... So you've described metamodernism as an act of production. You're not describing something that's out there. You wanna actually try to produce, right? Create this thing. You wake up tomorrow and that miracle has happened, right? So imagine that metamodernism has infiltrated the world. It's being implemented in ways that you would hope. Now, what do you notice? How do you notice that metamodernism has taken a hold?Yeah, great. Let's see. Let me stage it in a series of concentric circles. So in the first case, on the local level, I think... Let's say at an institutional level. I think it leads toward a regenerated sense of the Academy and its broader mission, which I think we've lost sight of and have replaced with anemic versions of critical thinking or preparing people for job markets that don't exist. Instead, a metamodern Academy is an Academy focused on human flourishing and a pluralistic notion of human flourishing and a flourishing of humans as part of a multi-species environment in which we're not the only creatures on the planet and in which we are working together. To take our learning to the streets because part of the things that I'm also arguing for in the book is that one of the things is self-isolation and self-irrelevance of the Academy is one of the things that has crippled us for quite some time.So then concentric circles outward from that, I imagine a national politics that is more hopeful. Maybe we're getting... I've been feeling a little bit of hope this last week, but I don't want to spoil it. But a more hopeful national politics that is able to figure out the ways that we can strategically work together to address urgent concerns, some of which are by people who are disadvantaged for reasons of how they've been racialized or for gender, but also for reasons of class, which I think has unfortunately dropped out of some of the left's conversation. But there are many different kinds of ways of being disadvantaged.Metamodern politics looks at the problems clear in the face and then works on thinking about pragmatic solutions that are not merely gestural, but that then ties those pragmatic solutions to narratives, to stories that help us learn and come together as communities working on hopeful projects. And then taking out from the perspective of U.S. politics, imagine a global politics in which the nation-state is decreasingly important and in which communities are important and in which the globe itself is important and in which we take very seriously both the right of certain communities to autonomously determine themselves and the importance of some global issues that transcend local politics, especially the climate.And then beyond that, I imagine a future where we take to the stars that are not being driven by corporate greed. This is not... I don't know... the billionaire mission to Mars, but a collective effort on the part of humanity to transcend our earthly planet, not leaving it in shambles, but not as a way to flee addressing the climate crisis, but as a way to hopefully look forward to the universe that's out there. Where, if I had to bet on it, I would say I don't know if there's any advanced civilizations. I think probably not anywhere near us, but I do imagine that we will find other forms of life in the next... probably microbial, but in the next decade or two. And I think it's important for us to dream big, to dream to take us into the future.And I think the metamodern future is one in which the utopia is one in which there are... I can come up with concrete political things, but I'll leave those out for today, but I'll say one in which we recognize the importance of collective struggle and also don't imagine the utopia is the end of history.We will never be done struggling. We'll never figure it all out, and eventually as we go far enough, even the metamodern, if I'm successful beyond my wildest dreams, will reach its own horizon of limit finitude. But also I think it's a collective project, and one of the things that I've been delighted by is the way that it mutates. The Spanish translation of the metamodernism book is about to come out this year, and I read a preface written by a Spanish philosopher about the book. I was asked to write my own preface to the translation, and he's picking up on things that, seeing myself through another's eyes, I wouldn't have emphasized, but I can see how important that is to the global conversation in the Spanish-speaking world. I think that's great and fabulous, and I think it'll mutate and things will grow.I'm firmly committed to a kind of humility, and the other piece of it, to bring up the utopia, is sometimes utopian visions have such a fixated idea of where they're going that they can ignore the realities of the present day and think that the ends justify the means in ways that are incredibly detrimental. That is not the utopia I'm aiming for. Maybe for a kind of utopianism that allows pluralization, divergence, and also change, and allows the project continually to be revisited. So we need to continually check in. Jefferson described America as constantly needing revolutions, and I don't know that literal political - depending on how you understand that - that may go too far. But maybe not. There are ways in which at least we need a revolution in our thinking on a regular basis.Which isn't to say... I actually, weirdly enough, among certain sectors of the left, I believe in institutions and the capacity of institutions once they are available to people from a broad spectrum. I think they historically haven't been, but I think as they are increasingly... once we... I believe in the power of institutions as long as those institutions can be encouraged to grow and change, and we have to figure out how to cause them to grow in the right ways. So rather than being anti-institutional, I'm pro-institution, but I think we need to be able to change and transform those institutions that we inhabit. So anyway, that's a little bit. I got a little fuzzy there at the end, but that's where we go Yeah, it's beautiful.I want to thank you so much for your time, and accepting the invitation. And I really love where we ended up and it's been really helpful for me to just to talk to you about it. So thank you so much.Yeah pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Joshua Tanzer wrote the headlines at The New York Post for 20 years. Examples include:“MARTHA STEWART STOCK FALLING LIKE A BAD SOUFFLÉ.”“ADULTS WHO WERE SPANKED OFTEN GET TANKED.” “AIR MORE STINKY, KIDS LESS THINKY.”“RAGING BOEHNER.”He left in 2018 to support Democratic candidates, has recently made his newsletter, The Key, available to the public. Previously only available to candidates, in it he shares simple, accessible insights into voter psychology and creative communications.Pieces referenced in our conversation:“Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising” by Dr Robert Heath & Paul Feldwick.“The Death of ‘Deliverism’” by Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, Harry Hanbury.So, okay. And yeah, so I really appreciate you joining me for this. And I'm excited to talk to you. And I think you, I don't know if you know this or not, but I start all these conversations with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and I love it so much, but it's a big question, so I overexplain it. And so before I ask, I want you to know that you can answer or not answer in any way that you want. You're really in total control. The question is, where do you come from?I think I'm going to answer that all wrong. I don't know. I would say for one thing, there are things that we, ways that we grew up, things that we grew up with, and we don't realize what effect they had on us until later.And one place I come from is Portland, Oregon. I grew up in Portland, Oregon. And until I moved to New York, I didn't realize Portland was special.But Portland, the state of Oregon, in the time that I was growing up, which was like 60s to 70s, it was going a different direction from other places. It was very community conscious, very environment conscious, very supportive of arts and crafts, and just creating a different kind of life from what everybody else was doing. And at that time, if you were running a city or a state, you wanted all the polluting industries to come and create jobs where you were.And Oregon said, no, you know what? We're going to clean up the rivers. We're going to clean up the air.And we're going to have a different kind of life, and we're not going to have all those jobs and things that everybody thinks you're supposed to pursue. And we're going to pursue a good life. And then what happened was the tech world blew up, and Portland, lesser than, but along with Seattle and San Francisco, got that.And people suddenly, people who are in demand wanted to be in a good place. So I've already overexplained this, but the explanation is I come from a place where people want to create a good place to live, and they do that consciously. And I guess the other thing that I could say is I am Jewish.I grew up Jewish. And I've just had this conversation with two people in the past week about how there, I would say there are two kinds of Jews. There's the kind that looks at our people's historic oppression and says, you know what?We have to protect ourselves. We have to create a nation that's just ours. We have to, we're under attack all the time.Everything has to be about the protection of the Jews. And the other kind is we have a special historic understanding of how the world is toward despised minorities. And that gives us a kind of moral obligation in this world, and we have to act a certain way.We have to take on the oppression of kinds of people that aren't us, but that are all kinds of people who are oppressed. And you'll see that, look at human rights lawyers, civil rights leaders, people with all kinds of commitment to social justice, and you'll find Jews there because it's, the way this came up recently with two different conversations is sometimes people ask me because I speak five languages. Sometimes people ask me, what's my favorite word in any language?And I used to say my favorite word was Kvatch, German word Kvatch. It means b******t, but it's not rude. It just means nonsense, but stronger than nonsense. Oh, that's Kvatch. That thing you're saying to me, that's Kvatch. So that's my second favorite word.I've come to think that my favorite word or the most important word in the entire world is mitzvah. And mitzvah is what God tells us we have to do in the Torah. So those are mitzvahs, like keep the Sabbath holy.Okay, that's a mitzvah from God. But we also use it to mean something we do because we have to, and it's a moral obligation. You have to do something because it's a mitzvah.And I don't know if other people have that idea in that succinct form, but the word mitzvah, I can't do any other way because it's a mitzvah. I have to do this. I have to stand up against social injustice, for example, because it's a mitzvah.Yeah.Those are a couple of things that I come from.Yeah. Beautiful. I thank you so much for all of it, everything you brought into the conversation. The last bit about mitzvah reminded me of a quote I heard about freedom is doing what you have to do because you want to. And I feel like there's something that resonated with me about what you just shared, that invitation that a mitzvah is, right?That's something that I think a lot of Jewish people take to heart. That's the core of who we are as, I'm going to say, progressive American, possibly secular Jews, secular or religious. Yeah. Progressive American Jews, which are my people.And we need that model more than ever before.Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious about the Portland of your youth. What do you remember about what it was like to grow up in a special Portland in a special time?I don't know. Do I have an answer to that? You don't know what you're while you're in it. As far as where I come from, I also come from a household of abandonment and abuse. And I think my biggest memories from childhood have to do with that.But I moved to New York and realized so many things about things are not like that here. And then I moved to New Jersey and realized, oh, Oregon is really different from other places. And it was pre discovery of Oregon.So now it's fully discovered and made fun of and et cetera, et cetera. But the things they make fun of have their roots in this kind of authentic culture that was developing there at that time. There's a place called Saturday Market in Portland that started in the 70s.It's under a bridge and it's full of booths of people. Everything has to be handmade by them basically. And that's part of a whole culture of supporting craftsmanship that was growing up around then.And there was an article called Brooklandia like 10 years ago that was really interesting about how Brooklyn is full of people who are making their own artisan pickles or whatever they're doing. And they're doing it because they just arrived here and it's cool. Oh, wow.I can be whatever I want. I can do whatever I want. And Brooklandia being a reference to Portlandia, like Brooklandia is now the East Coast Portland.But Portland actually, this grew from an authentic commitment to people who quit their accounting job because they wanted to make something.I guess when I became a dad in Hudson, I had this kind of urban planning awakening. I just really got really interested in cities and how decisions are made and pedestrian and walkability and all that stuff. And along the way, I discovered that Portland, I think, is the first city in the United States of America to have a pedestrian plan.And it's from early 80s. And I remember being like, what was going on in Portland? That they were planning for pedestrian mobility in the early 80s. And what you just said makes fits with the early arrival of that kind of thing.Yeah. I think there are only two cities in the West where you would not say they had flight out of the cities to the suburbs. And not that it doesn't exist, but there are only two cities in the West that are urban.And those are San Francisco and Portland. And Portland was founded in 18... Oregon was founded in 1859. Portland was settled in 1845. And we know San Francisco was settled about the same time, leaving out that those are the white people arriving. But they are old cities.They're the only old cities in the West. And so they have an urban core. And Los Angeles, where I've just spent a lot of time in the past two years, doesn't have an urban core.It's spread out. People don't even go places because there's going to be too much traffic. And I've spent some time in Phoenix in the last six years.And Phoenix just has no... There's a downtown, but forget it. Things are so spread out that you can't create a walkable Phoenix. Plus it's too hot to walk. But you can't even retrofit a walkable Phoenix. And that's the West.Yeah. I think Salt Lake City is very spread out, but it does have a focus on the center because of the Mormon heritage there. But in general, that's how the Western cities develop because they all develop with cars.Yeah.And Portland didn't, and San Francisco didn't. And I think those are the only two.Yeah. That's beautiful. I didn't know that. Yeah. Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up as a kid? Did you have...Yeah. I was creating my own newspapers from age eight or something for the family. And then I created my own newspaper in my grade school. And then I wrote for the newspaper in high school.And that's what I always wanted to be. Always wanted to be in newspapers. And I did.And I have mixed feelings about that. But it was in... I'll tell you, my mother taught me to read when I was about three and a half, which was pretty amazing.And I couldn't get enough of it. I would read every single thing in front of me. So I remember getting up in the morning when I was four or five years old or something and going into my parents' room and saying, I'm up.And I would wake them up and they would say, go back to bed. And I would say, I can't, I'm up. And they'd go downstairs and read something.So that was my mission. That was my instructions from the earliest possible age, go downstairs and read something. So I remember reading Farewell to Arms and In Cold Blood, the first page of each.It's not like I understood either one, but I also remember... So I learned being up at 5 a.m., 6 a.m., I learned that the newspaper landed with a thunk at the door at whatever time, 6 a.m. or something. And I would reach up above my head and open the door and look out, and there was a newspaper.I would bring it in. I would spread it out on the floor, maybe five years old, and start reading the news. And it was...It's weird to say it today with today's technology, but it was electric, the newspaper. It was amazing that people were out there in Vietnam or in the earthquake in Nicaragua or anywhere in the world, and they were writing this stuff for us to just pick up in the morning and read the next morning. And I found that amazing.I wanted to be part of doing that. And now the industry is in bad decline, and I probably will never do that again, but I spent decades working in newspapers.Yeah. Yeah. And what was your first...How did you get into the newspaper business? That story's so amazing. Just the experience, the arrival of the world and everything at the doorstep.Yeah. The moon landing was happening then, and just so much stuff in the world was happening. It was really exciting.I don't think there's much dramatic about how I got into the business, but I did get in as a copy boy at the Oregonian, my hometown paper in Portland. Then I moved to New York. I got a job with a newspaper in New Jersey, and so I moved over to New Jersey.But I'm just right across the river from New York City. And I was a reporter and copy editor in New Jersey, and then I was a copy editor mainly at the New York Post for 20 years. I don't go around telling people I was a copy editor, because what more boring job is there?But at the New York Post, it means you are a headline writer. You don't just fix language, you write the headlines. And New York Post, if there's one thing people know about the New York Post, I hope, it's that it's the headlines.We were the best. We were the best at headlines. And I loved doing it, and I loved being the guy who does it because there's mystique about it.And I did not love the, which is Rupert Murdoch-owned. It's a little bit of a crazy right-wing paper. It's more that now since the time I left.But it was always a fun job to have in spite of the politics of the paper until November 2016 when Trump won, and then it felt dirty. I did not want to feel dirty like that, and I did not want to work on pro-Trump propaganda for the next four, eight, 12 years. They'll probably be doing pro-Trump propaganda in 2028, 2032, until the man dies.And so I quit there in 2018 and I went to do other things.Yeah. And I want to explore the other things because it's amazing. That's how our paths crossed.But while we're in the sort of the New York Post headline copy editor, I don't know much. I don't even live in New York City, but I know that they're legendary for the headlines. And so I'm just curious, what do you attribute that to?What did they understand that others didn't?I think if you look at the ecosystem of newspapers in New York, which now I think is down to nothing. I don't think people are even buying the New York Post or the Daily News or anything. But historically, let's say you have a job, you live in Queens, you have a job in Manhattan, you get up in the morning, you go down to the subway, you want to read a newspaper on the subway.You have three choices. There's the New York Times. There are a few more choices. There's the New York Times. You can't really unfold it on the subway. It's too big. You can do it. You can naggle it around, but probably you're going to read the Post or the Daily News. And you may or may not have a loyalty to either one.And you probably like at least one of them for their sports coverage. This is the secret of how the New York Post can continue being this right-wing thing in this left-wing city, which is the sports, basically. Everybody likes the sports coverage.But picture yourself arriving at the subway. There's a newsstand right there. There used to be a newsstand right there.And the Post and the Daily News were next to each other. And all you have is the front page to decide which one to buy. So I think that was why the Post actually really valued us.The ownership, I think Rupert Murdoch valued us for our contribution to selling the paper against the Daily News every morning with a better front page. And I think that's why the headlines are highly valued at both the Post and the Daily News. And I think the reality is the Daily News has declined in staff by a lot. They're limping along. And the Post is surviving right now, but partly just because Rupert Murdoch wants it to exist. And they still have a full copy desk.They still have a pretty good staff staff. Just because Murdoch likes having it, I found myself applauding him one time in the office because somebody said he really has a commitment to this newspaper and to keeping newspapers alive. And I said, yeah, he does.I think he's destroying America, but he does believe in newspapers. He loves newspapers. He loves the newspaper business.I'm curious, what did you learn about people's favorite headlines?I have a few. There was a column in Ad Age, I think, like 15 years ago. And he said, or 20 years ago, the guy said, I think the headline was, call me a surrender monkey, but I love the New York Post.And he said, the people at the New York Post, they have a way of telling the story with so much flair in so few words, and you won't find that anywhere else. So I had a story to do the headline for about how children who were exposed to more pollution in the womb, their mother was in the womb, had lower brain function when they were growing up. And a regular newspaper would say air pollution linked to lower brain harm or something.That would be an ordinary headline about it. So my headline, which this guy was praising, was, “Air More Stinky, Kids Less Think.” And that's one of my favorites. And really, how better to tell the story?Can we unpack that a little bit? Just go slow motion. What makes that so powerful?What do you understand about the mechanics as operating in that sentence, in that headline?I've actually given talks and classes in headline writing. I think we're seeing those headlines go out now, much as people love them. You mean go away?Yeah, go away, because there's SEO, search engine optimization. So you have to tell the story as boringly as possible with the actual words from the story so that Google will pick it up.Wow. I'm sorry. That feels like that's a shift of considering the audience to be humans versus considering the audience to be the computer or an algorithm. Was that the search engine?Because nobody looking for that story is going to type in think and stinky. Nobody's going to do that. They'll type in effect of air pollution on fetal development.So the headline has to say something more like that. So there are a bunch of ways in which even the headline writing profession has changed. And that's the biggest thing.But people don't realize when you read an article online, you do not see the actual headline. You are not seeing the headline that was in the paper.I've experienced that where I feel like there's an alt. I feel like I see that in the browser, the language is different or the headlines are different. And I haven't really ever paid attention to that. How has the headline changed? What's the current state of the headline?One of the things that happened in between there was the clickbait headline, like 17 times Taylor Swift was kind to animals, number 12 will make you cry. Yeah. And so we had those, and I think those are still effective or just the, this doesn't need to be a discussion of how to write headlines, but I think leaving something unsaid, actually, this is probably true for any communication.Articles that I'm likely to click on are things with a superlative that they don't tell you what it is. So the most important thing you can do to avoid being poisoned by your refrigerator today. Now I have to know what that is.They didn't tell me what's the most important. They just promised me the most important. So now I have to click through and find out what that is.Yeah. The biggest mistake people do when buying shoes, I don't know, whatever it is, like, yeah, I was going to say that as far as the old-fashioned punny headlines, there's, I've actually taught people to write headlines with puns in them. There's kind of a process you can follow, but then there's also a little extra spark of just creativity that some people had, like we had some brilliant people on our team at the post at doing that.I'll tell you another one that I really liked. Yeah. I wrote, you have to have some historical background, but the headline was, the story was the Obama administration was allowing travel to Cuba.So I think JetBlue scheduled flights direct from New York to Cuba. And so my headline said, JFK to invade Cuba, but with flights. It means you have to know about the, about the big pigs and all that stuff.Like you have to have that historical reference, but I thought it was actually very funny, but only for those who get it.Yeah. What, not that we don't need to go fully into the rabbit hole, but what do you teach about an effective headline?I'll tell you how to write a boring headline.Yeah.Way to write a boring headline is you take the keywords out of the story. The Senate passes a budget of $754 billion or something. So your headline is going to be like the important words are Senate budget, the number, the thing they're spending money on, whatever goes to the house.So your headline is going to be basically like Senate passes $754 billion budget because you took the main words out of it. So writing a funny headline, you do the same thing, but in a different way. So you're pulling out words like air more stinky, kids less stinky.You're pulling out words that have to do with it, but maybe only tangentially everything you think in a freer way about air contaminated, polluted. And I just happened to think of stinky. The air is stinky.And then you take that out. You look for words that rhyme with that. And if you come up with an idea that works, it's easier with another example.I did one that I used to teach in journalism classes where it was about how women's handbags were getting bigger and bigger and heavier. And they had lots of pictures of women with heavy handbags around New York. So what are some words that have to do with handbags or carrying something really heavy?Eventually I came up with lug. Lug, you're lugging something around. And so then you think, what sounds like lug? One thing that sounds like lug is love. What's a phrase with love in it? I love New York. Now word lug into that, and you have I lug New York. And that was my headline. I liked that one.That's a perfect illustration of the step-by-step process that you can do. By doing this, you're thinking of 100 different things until you figure out the one. Yeah. It actually worked. Yeah. That's the lesson.Yeah. But it's such a potent example of creativity in a space where you don't really encounter, like you say, the appropriate behavior of a headline. You're breaking all the rules of a headline in a way.Yeah. Yeah. You're not telling the story. You're supposed to tell the story, but then you're not telling a story. You're telling a different story.Yeah. That's amazing. So 2016 happens, and tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're doing now.Yeah. I stayed there for another year plus, and I quit in 2018. And what I ended up doing was two things. My goal was to help Democrats as much as I could.So one thing I did was I canvassed for candidates that I could reach, districts that I could reach around here, which was several districts in New Jersey and two in Pennsylvania. And so I've done a lot of volunteering. And that's actually really informative because how do you get access to people's way of thinking and people's way of understanding political messages better than knocking on their door and talking to them and asking them things.So that's actually been an amazing experience. And the other thing that I did was I started a newsletter for Democratic campaigns around the country about voter psychology and how it could help them communicate better, think differently about their campaigns. And so that's gone out since 2018, every election since 2018, that's gone out to Democratic campaigns around the country.And this year, I made it public so members of the public also can read it and friends of mine read it and so on. It's called The Key and it's on Substack now and people can go sign up. It's The Key.Cool. Yeah. And I'll include a link in the, when this goes out. How has it been going? What's been, what kind of reception have you gotten from candidates and what kind of reception have you gotten from public?People who get it, love it. And that's always been the case, but it's hard to get it into people's hands because the party will not, the Democratic Party will not cooperate in anything like this. The campaigns themselves, more than half of them make themselves unreachable, which I think is amazing.Like you're running a campaign to the people and you don't have even an email address or a phone number or directions to your campaign headquarters or anything. Like, how are you communicating with people if you are not willing to be contacted by them? It's amazing.So half the campaigns are unreachable and the other half, so every time, every two years I've had to go through a whole process of trying to find phone numbers and email addresses and contact people and just to get their permission to put them on the mailing list. But I think this is, we might get into this later, but I think this is a characteristic of the Democratic Party. It's run by aloof people who may or may not be good at what they're doing.Some of them are bad. Some of them are not bad, but they're a closed circle and they're advised by a closed circle of consultants who tell them what to do, who are hidebound. And people know these problems exist, but they're not going to stop doing them because they have another election to win every two years.And anyway, so the point is, I reach them as best I can and they are hard people to reach.So the newsletter is amazing. I was introduced to you by Antonia Skatner, I think I'm saying her name correctly, who I had found just because in my own work, I was introduced to George Lakoff and the conceptual metaphor and embodied cognition, all these concepts that felt that are really scientific concepts about how people understand the world and understand, communicate, that have huge implications for how anybody communicates.And so I'd reached out to her and then she introduced me to you and your story is so beautiful. So you went to school, is that right, for voter psychology? So when you say voter psychology, what are you pointing at and what are the implications for anybody running, but for the Democrats in particular, who seem to have a communications problem often? I'm by no means an expert in psychology. I'm just a guy who's done a bunch of reading. I've taken a few classes in psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience.And so for one of these classes, we had to do a project on the subject of our choice and my subject was how do people change their minds? And this has been studied and there's an answer and the answer is they don't. We don't change our minds.We hate to. We have all kinds of mental defenses against this terrible thing that is changing your mind. We have all kinds of ways of protecting what we already think and not opening it up to change.But I think the ways that we do this are useful to know about because it tells you how people can change their minds or how you would make appeals to people, make arguments to people that are completely different from what Democrats do. So Democrats have become the more intellectual college educated party now and that comes with some minuses. And one of the minuses is they think the voters are going to respond intellectually.So they think we did a poll, we found out that healthcare is important to people. That's one of their most important issues at least four years ago, eight years ago. And so what we want to do is make the best healthcare plan.We have our best people writing a healthcare plan on paper and if we just stick it in your face and make you read it, then you'll realize we're the good guys and you should vote for us. And voters don't decide that way. Voters decide emotionally.Democrats have never learned to engage with voters emotionally. Who has, who's very good at engaging emotionally? The dumbest man in America, Donald Trump.He knows how to do it. It's everything about his campaign. There's nothing about his campaign that's intellectual. It's the immigrant caravan is coming to murder your children. It's all emotional. It doesn't have to be true. It's all emotional. So Democrats have to realize that they're not in an intellectual campaign. They're in an emotional campaign. And if you look at voters as emotional beings, you will treat them a different way. Yeah. And that's really all what my newsletter is about.Yeah. And just as a, I'm looking at your email now, you have a takeaway tote board. I think each of your emails has this really powerful truth about, this is what I get excited about is that each of them, you're just sharing, I think these foundational truths about people that have implication for communications.And I remember one recently from February was, what does the Democrats hat say? It's the kind of thing that feels like a very naive, it's like silly question from one point of view, from a very serious intellectual point of view. You know what I mean?People treat all of this as very serious business, but it's an amazing, the Republican's philosophy fits on a hat. Democrats don't have one, is your take. Yeah.That's the core of the problem. They don't even think that way. And we're in the middle of this whole collapse of the party because they don't know what they believe.And they never made a case for Biden. We should talk all about Biden, but they never made a case for Biden. And now he's out.I'm just grateful that he's out because we have a chance to start with somebody exciting and do something for the first time. And I always thought Biden should not run and it should be women and it should probably have been Amy Klobuchar and maybe Abigail Spanberger, or there could be others. But Amy Klobuchar would have been ready and would have been a fine choice and would have been acceptable to a lot of people.And we would have been doing this thing for the first time. There would have been excitement. So I actually feel the same excitement right now.Kamala Harris is not my first choice, but I don't care. Let's f*****g elect the first woman president. Let's do it.Yeah. Yeah.I'm seriously... Oh, go ahead. I think about Biden. Yes. And he showed signs of being old over the last year already, not just one time. And they basically kept him under wraps.His handlers kept him under wraps for his entire presidency inside the White House and did not let him do what he's good at, which is being with people. And I think the reason is he was tool. They gave away the game by not letting him out.They gave away the game that he's tool. His image is he's really old. You look at him, you see he's really old. And the reason that everybody thinks that is because it's obvious. It's obvious to all of us. He's really old. He's really slow. But also the only way to get people to not think that first is to create a different image. Did they create a different image? No. Never.Yeah.Yeah. We could be thinking like Joe Biden, like on the simplest level, we could be thinking Joe Biden loves ice cream. That guy sure loves ice cream.And he could be going around the country. I said he should go to every one of the 50 states and Puerto Rico. Yeah. And eat ice cream with people.Yes.And then we'd be talking about that Joe Biden, he's out there every week, nice cream with people. He just loves his ice cream. That would be a different image than just being old, right?Yeah. Keep going. Sorry. I'm really excited about what you're saying and I want to jump in. Keep going.But what they really failed to do is create a narrative of the last four years. And Trump creates a narrative also. We should get back to that.But there should have been a narrative from day one under Trump, the country collapsed in every way. We even had a crime wave. We had people shut in their houses, people unable to go to work, and people getting sick and dying.And Joe Biden and Donald Trump proved himself incompetent. And Joe Biden came in and fixed it step-by-step. Joe Biden is the guy who fixed the disaster that Donald created.They never did that. That should have been the narrative for four years. They did that to Jimmy Carter in the 70s and 80s. They made everything Jimmy Carter's fault. Jimmy Carter was the next or worst president in history, whatever. But we didn't do that with Donald Trump. And he was. He did preside over a disaster. He proved himself incompetent. And America was at its worst under him. Joe Biden came in and fixed it.What do you think is true about the Democrats and the Democratic Party that makes this how it is? This is, it's constitutional, I think, is the right way of saying it. You know what I mean?There's something about either the way it's organized or the way that they operate or the way that they see the world that they just don't think it's their job. And I'm just wondering if you've learned anything over the past few years as to why that might be the case.Um, yeah, that's a good question. I think there are a bunch of things happening and I'm not an insider in this, but I think just from observation, I think they have a terrible class of consultants who tell them what to do and who are like, they're probably 65 years old and just have no like awareness of what's wrong with what they're doing. And they've done the same thing over and over forever with pretty poor results.It's like they want to run the Dukakis campaign every four years. We'll just tell people we're competent. Dukakis' whole appeal was, I'm a competent administrator.You're not going to win with that.Yeah.I'm a competent administrator. Bill Clinton won because he was exciting to some kinds of people. Barack Obama was exciting to a lot of people, including meAnd so they, I think about the, do you know Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series?I know of it.Yeah. I read it in high school. The idea of it is that history is pre-programmed and predictable. History is completely predictable by social scientists. And then somewhere in there, sorry to ruin this for people, but you've had decades to read it. Somewhere in there, I think book three, someone comes along called the mule and the mule is unaccounted for by all the science.And nobody figured that there could be the mule. And he comes in and takes over everything and everything goes off the rails of what people expected and he creates his own reality. And that's what Trump did.But also to some extent, that's what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did. Nobody planned to run a black president. If not for how bad Bush was, we wouldn't have run a black guy for president.We would have run another boring white guy because that was the safe thing to do. And that was the safe thing to do in 2020. That's why we had Biden.People wanted the safest guy and that was it. But you don't win by creating the safest candidate. Yeah.Yeah. What guidance or what would you do if you had Kamala Harris' ear or the Democrats' ear now?Actually, I tried to reach her people over the last couple of weeks. Yeah. It's interesting.I think her way of speaking is what I call planting the flag, which Hillary Clinton did also. And planting the flag is you say something like, we must protect the right to choose. Plant the flag.Everybody in your audience applauds because they all also think we must protect the right to choose. Right. But you are losing the chance to actually reach people in their minds with their own way of thinking.All you're doing is identifying a position and telling everybody to get in line with it. There are a lot of things I think politicians should be thinking about when they make speeches and when they talk to anybody, when they organize their campaign. The first one, which is not communication, but the first one is make a bond with people.That's your only job. Your actual job is to have a bond with people.I want to highlight it because I love your description of a communication style, which is very common, I think, the planting the flag thing, which is a great way of capturing the rational messaging. There's a way of talking about this. There's a paper from the advertising world from the early 2000s.I think it's called the 50 Years of Using the Wrong Model of Advertising. It describes it as the information processing model. It basically says that the mistake that advertising has made in the past is assuming that the only problem is people need more information.This has been a lot of different people. The planting the flag is, you need to know what I believe. I'm going to tell you what I believe.Then I'm going to give you all the rational justifications to explain that belief. That's all that you need. But you're calling out that there's another job.I think you're saying parallel job that needs to be done, which is bond. I love that word bond. That's what you're pointing at with AOC that you can have that you need to do the information processing, but that's almost secondary to something else that needs to be done.Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Is that fair?Yeah, absolutely. There's a guy that I love. My favorite candidate for anything right now is Joe Manchin is retiring in West Virginia.Almost certainly, a Republican will get that seat. But the Democrat running for it is awesome. Conceivably, he could have a chance just because he's so awesome.He's doing the same thing. He is all over West Virginia. People should look him up.His name is Zach Shrewsbury. In terms of image, we know what John Fetterman is. Zach Shrewsbury is just a great guy.I think he's a military veteran. And he goes all over the state and he shows up and he participates in what people are participating in. And his way of campaigning, I don't know if it'll be successful because it's West Virginia, but his way of campaigning is what people should be doing.You should be everywhere. People should know you. People should remember when you showed up for their thing and lifted boxes or whatever it is they were doing.And so that guy is awesome. People should be just like him. Beautiful.So we spent a lot of time together. I want to throw this quote. I pulled a couple of quotes from this one from George Lakoff. Do you have feelings about Lakoff and his work?Yeah. I've read a couple of his books. I think it's good.I think it's just one way of looking at it. In fact, psychology is, he's a linguist technically, but psychology is a way of looking at things that we can never get our hands on, trying to create frameworks that will make sense of them. And our frameworks are inherently flawed.Are we describing something real? Are we just approximating something real? Could we look at it a whole different way?Would we get a different result? And we can never, it's not a science in that way. We can never actually test and prove something.Yeah. And I don't mean to shine too bright a light on him, but he is this quote. He says that all politics are moral politics.“People act in line with their moral identities, not because they agree with a list of policies. If progressives lose the future, it will not be due to a lack of good policy ideas. If we lose the future, ceding democracy to authoritarians or bad corporate actors, it will be due mostly to a stunning failure to communicate with people in simple language that connects them on the level of their moral values.”Yeah. I completely agree with that. And it's the problem with Democrats intellectualizing and looking at politics as transactional.We passed a bill that's good for you. We passed a bill that's improving your infrastructure. The Democrats' previous plan after Trump came into office was called a better deal.We're offering you a deal. We're offering you a deal. No, that's not what people want.There's this you'll hear among pro-choice people, which is like Republicans just want to control women. Maybe there are some who want to control women, but if you listen to them, no, they have a moral conviction and they cannot do... It's their mitzvah.It's a mitzvah for them. They're against abortion because they strongly believe that it's murder, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not because they're anti-feminist, although they may be, it's because they've convinced themselves that they're on a moral crusade and they cannot do otherwise.And we don't talk in moral terms. So when you asked about Kamala Harris communicating in the future, I haven't written about this yet really, but there are things that we should think about, like points that we should hit as communicators. And I don't know if she will do it, but I think she should do it.The first thing is there's a big difference between liberals and conservatives that they found consistently, which is liberals have so-called openness to experience and conservatives have need for closure. And so liberals might say, there are many complicated aspects to this issue and we should discuss all of them and we'll come to a synthesis of the pluses and minuses, whatever. And conservatives believe, oh no, this is my belief, I'm sticking to it.But they also, they would receive that invitation to explore a bunch of unnamed options as scary. You're going to invite it like a dozen different things that I've never encountered before into my consciousness. No, thank you.How about if we go listen to a concert of Tibetan music? F**k no. So look at how conservatives are wedded to their core beliefs.This is why evangelical religion, fundamentalist religion is consistent with conservatism. It's why a certain constitutional vision, the framers said it. And so we have to conduct our country exactly as the framers wanted in 1789.And the military is very consistent with that because you show up, you do what they tell you. Things are absolutes. And so one of the things Democrats need to do is be able to talk, find the thing that's an absolute for you and talk about it as an absolute and talk about it as a moral absolute.Yes.Some other things that should be in politicians rhetoric are nostalgia. We all feel nostalgia. If we're over 40, we feel nostalgia for something.And the right has a corner on nostalgia. We should touch on nostalgia. We should espouse some form of chaos.There should be some issue on which you want to blow it all up. Doesn't mean you're going to blow up Washington, but there's some issue that's so broken you want to blow it all up. Because it also responds to people's way of thinking.And there are successful right-wing candidates who run on that.Right. This seems to me that you're talking about change. Everything's been just embodying the impulse for change and for something different, something new. I love the way you articulate that.And one more thing that I want to hear them say is, this is what I want Democrats to do. I want them to use their intellectual side to create an emotional side, to create an emotional campaign, not create an intellectual campaign. So as an example of that, in college, I wrote a thesis on income inequality and ways of measuring it.And one way of measuring it is borrowed from information theory. And it's mathematical, but the essence of this axiom of information theory is that information is more valuable if it's more surprising. So if I tell you it's going to be hot tomorrow, that's not surprising.If I tell you the leg of locusts is on its way and it's going to be here tomorrow, that's surprising. That's something that you weren't ready for. We actually have a way of habituating ourselves to information we've heard before, and we need to hear information that's new.We crave that. Information that we're habituated to, it's just part of the ambient environment. Right.And we don't think about it. Things you say should be in themselves or in the way you say them different from what you've already heard. It's a pretty simple idea, but we don't do it.We repeat the same things over and over again. So on abortion, what I really want to hear them say is you may want to ban abortion, but you can't ban abortion without creating a police state. There's a lot to talk about there.And in reality, over the past two years, has it been like, I think it was one year since Dobbs or two. No, it had to be before the 2022 election. So over the past few years, one thing that people were experiencing was in the past, it was always fine to just say, I'm pro-life, simple, and never have to deal with the reality of what that is.And so you get a good feeling. I talk about, this is long-winded, but I talk about pro-life as being the Diet Pepsi of morality. You can have a cheeseburger and fries and a milkshake, but if you have a Diet Pepsi, at least, no, you don't have the milkshake.You have a Diet Pepsi instead of the milkshake. At least I had a Diet Pepsi, right? Or at least I had a salad.In addition to all the junk. So pro-life is an easy thing. All you have to do to be pro-life is say I'm pro-life.It doesn't require any personal commitment on anything. So a lot of people's engagement with being pro-life is, that's something I can say that I'm for. And the thing about it is the reason I talk about Diet Pepsi, which this is called moral licensing.The Diet Pepsi is moral licensing. It gives you the ability to have the cheeseburger and fries because you're enabled by having the Diet Pepsi. It makes the rest okay.And I wish they would come out and say, I'm against the death penalty because I'm pro-life. I'm against this because I'm pro-life. I want to control guns because I'm pro-life. I want to save lives.I wanted to share, there's one article, it's called The Death of Deliverism. Have you seen this? No.I don't know what deliverism is. Deliverism is in quotes and it's pretty much everything we've been talking about. It's a very cool argument for, it points out that let's see, 62% of Americans said in a poll from 2023 that Biden had accomplished not very much, little or nothing. But despite all of the rationale of the democratic engine is if you just deliver policy and services, then people will give you credit. They'll understand what's going on and you've earned loyalty.People don't actually know who did what.Yeah. This is the fundamental, this is where I feel like this is what the corporate world understands intuitively, economically, financially, fiscally, that there's a responsibility to let people know who did what. You want to make sure you get the credit for everything that you do.They know if you were on their side. They don't know what you did, but they know if you were on their side or not. Wait, what do you mean?Do they look at you and identify you with being like them or fighting for them? They're not going to follow everything, every legislation you passed, but are going to have a feeling. There's a book by, I don't have the authors in front of me.There's a book that identifies something called automatic hot cognition, which means essentially they have a list of elements of that, but it means essentially the minute I think of you, I know what I think of you. It's automatic because it's right there when I think of you. Before you say any words, I already know what I think of you.It's hot cognition because it's emotional. It's connected to emotion. Let's say Marjorie Taylor Greene gets started on one of her things.I don't even have to hear what she says. I already have a preformed opinion about her. My preformed opinion about her is nuts, but this has to do with image, which we started with.What is the image? It's the preformed opinion that people have of you. The preformed opinion that people have of you should be, she's there for us, for example.I remember when she showed up for us, she did this thing, and I'm just glad that she's there in Washington representing us. All the way up to Kamala Harris, it should be like, she comes from us, which does she? I don't know, but this is image creation that they need to do.She comes from us. She lived with us. We know people just like her.I don't know if any of this is true, but she needs an image. We said Donald Biden. Joe Biden has the image he has of old and tired because he had no other image.They didn't consciously create any other image. One time, just last week, I got a phone call from a candidate raising money. I didn't give her money, but I did keep her on the phone for 12 minutes.I asked her something from another one of my newsletters, which is, given this automatic hot cognition, we have a very quickly produced image of you. If you present yourself as a voice for Southern Missouri, what is that? You've used that opportunity to say nothing.If you say, I'm the rebel rancher, now you gave people an image of yourself. The candidates need to be deciding what that image is. That image is probably a two or three word phrase.Then you decide that's what you are, go and be that. If we think about the people who had a well-defined image, we can think of Bill Clinton, the man from hope. That phrase did more for him than probably anything.The man from hope. George Bush, the compassionate conservative, which might be fake, might not really have been compassionate, but he was trying to create a whole new thing. Sarah Palin, awesome at this.Mama Grizzly and Hockey Mom. Let's say Mama Grizzly. Wow, that's an amazing image.There are some more people who've done a great job. There are people who didn't do a good job, like Al Gore, John Kerry, and the image that stuck to them was boring. Both of them identified as boring.The great thing about image... I actually wrote this down. I'm going to go find what I wrote down.I don't think I got this from anywhere. I think I just said it. Candidates need to start with their own image.An image that works is simple, unique, consistent, and real. In my newsletter, I talked about what each of those means. Basically, if you think about it, Al Gore, once you've identified him as boring, he's going to keep being boring.He's going to keep feeding that image. Joe Biden, once you identify him as old, he's going to keep being old. He can't help being old.He's only going to get older. I think it's amazing that they don't create their own image consciously and be that.Yes. We were in total alignment there. I'm coming at this from totally wildly, not wildly different, but different disciplines and worlds and landing in the exact same spot.You say image, I say brand. I think when we first talked, I talked about this. The first thing I learned about marketing was in a brand consultancy.It was that every marketplace... I'm quoting the guy from 30 years ago. Every marketplace proposition has two parts.It has a brand and a product. The role of the brand is to make a promise. The role of the product is to deliver on the expectations, but also there was this secondary that it's the story that we tell ourselves and others in order to justify the relationship that we want to have with the brand.Yes, totally. We don't have relationships with products. We have relationships with brands. If you invest in that first... Like you just said, everything that John Kerry does will be boring if I'm motivated to have a relationship with him in which he's uninteresting. Yeah, right.All right. We've gone on for a long time. This has been a blast and so much fun. I really appreciate you joining me and sharing with me. Thank you so much for being here.Yeah. Thanks for having me. This has been great.Cool. All right. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Henry Coutinho-Mason is a ‘reluctant futurist’, award-winning social entrepreneur, and author (with Rohit Bhargava) of “The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work and Thrive in the Next Decade.” Previously, he was the Managing Director of Trendwatching. I start all of these conversations with the same question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She lives in Hudson. I just saw her yesterday. She's an oral historian and she uses this question to help people tell their story. But it's such a strong question that I always over-explain it. You know what I mean? And so I want you to know that before I ask it, you can answer or not answer any way that you want. Really, you're in total control. And the question is, where do you come from?Yeah, it is a great question, because of course, there's the superficial geographical answer, which for me is I come from essentially about an hour northeast of London in the countryside very typical, similar to I guess where you are in upstate New York as I understand it, a couple of hours outside of the hub of the US just a little bit outside of London.And then I think in terms of the geography, but also in terms of my family I feel very blessed. As I get a bit older, I realize I just had this kind of very stable upbringing and I don't want to do my parents a disservice because I now realize how special this is, but boring in a great way, right?It was just a kind of very idyllic childhood where everything was pretty stable. I went to school, we had some pretty solid friends. My dad was working in London. My mom was at home a lot when I was younger. And I was thinking I was reading a great piece by Freya India, writing on Jonathan Haidt's blog.And she has this amazing word, which as you don't publish the recording, I've now lost the exact word of it so I can look up. Anemoia, I can't pronounce that, but I'll send it to you, which is nostalgia for a time or place one has never known. And she's talking about how Gen Z are so nostalgic for a pre-smartphone, pre-social media drenched world.Which of course is ironic because they never had that, right? So in some senses I look back on my childhood as having this really fortunate, right? We had my memory, like everyone's childhood, right? Or everyone of a certain age, lots of time, lots of space playing outside in the countryside is great.But then I guess there's also a kind of, And reading a lot of your interviewees, also understanding how that ties to what you're doing now, right? Where are you from? The implication of that is, and how have you got here?And I think, now I'm immersed in this world of futures, future trends, and what's changing. And so when I was preparing for this conversation. I was thinking about this.So often people who kind of embrace uncertainty often come from a place of stability. That's not always the way, but there's often a kind of rejection if you don't know, rejection is maybe too strong a word, but there's a kind of a railing against what you have. It's a universal human truism that no one wants what their parents' music, popular culture.So yeah, as I said now I feel like. Wherever I come from, wherever I ended up is, as I said, in this world of thinking about the future and what's next and constantly, as I said wrestling with uncertainty and I it just struck me when I was, as I said, when I was thinking about this conversation, that probably those foundations or maybe those foundations that I had were quite important in where I've ended up today because, as One of the comments that I often get, I do a lot of speaking and that's my main role is as a keynote speaker and very much one of my positioning is the perpetual optimist, right?Trying to tell the positive side of these stories and people often come up to me afterwards and say wow, it's especially about AI, which is obviously a huge focus at the moment. It's really interesting and refreshing to hear this other side, this more positive side of some of these changes.But the question often people ask is like, how do you do that? Like, how do you know? It's a very, I hadn't realized it, but increasingly I hadn't maybe internalized it, but increasingly I realized that I probably am much more optimistic than most people.And I feel very privileged and I feel that a large part of that probably stems from the stability that I had growing up. And so it's often. Steve Jobs, his favorite famous line, right? You can only join the dots looking back. And so it was a really great question because it got me reflecting on, on, some of these early experiences.Yeah, I watched, as I mentioned, I watched one of your talks and it's one of those things where you feel like, and we'll talk about this more, but where you start talking about change and I go, Oh, of course he's like standing. This is a conversation about just the unbelievable change. And how do you keep your feet underneath you and know what to do when you're just surrounded by change all the time? And that seems, it feels like a little bit what you're talking about now that your boring childhood put you in a pretty good position to feel okay in the midst of a lot of change. Does that feel fair?I think so, yeah. And, it's, I don't know you will have spoken to far more people with a far greater diversity of experience than me, because I'm sure I'm sure you can also make the equal case that if you've grown up in extreme turbulence and constant change, you can equally be very comfortable with that.And we hear so much about immigrant founders being very comfortable with startup life because they've experienced this. And I think that's one of the things that fascinates me about what I do. And it’s one of the reasons why I think we're having this conversation. We both know humans are storytellers and we need stories. We're incredibly adept at crafting stories where stories perhaps don't even exist. Narrative is our superpower, right? So our drug and our superpower. What's fascinating to me though is again the moment that we're in today, a lot of what I do at the moment is questioning both where things are going, but how we will respond. And I think one of the - I posted about this a few weeks ago - we keep on being surprised at the things that we thought were irrevocably human, that computers seem to be able to do. If not to this equivalent level of humans, but in some cases even better and faster, right?And creativity and art and all of these things. And so I just think, we are both obsessed with humanity, right? And how we make meaning. How we exist, how we navigate through the world. And it just feels to me like this is one of the most interesting absolute generational moments in this question.Even more I would say, than the first wave of digital and the internet, which was very much efficiency and doing stuff on a bigger scale, a far more efficient scale, Amazon, right? There's not a lot of humanity in there. In fact, the exact opposite, right? You think of those waves, I suppose social media had an element of it rewiring how we connect with people.We're definitely not starting from zero, but it feels like this is really challenging to us. A lot of those questions and that's the other thing I love about doing what I do. And again, why we're speaking and why I enjoyed our initial conversation so much. This just feels like a great moment to be asking questions and a really challenging moment if you're trying to give concrete answers.Because the truth is no one knows. And I guess the other thing that you flagged in our first conversation is this notion of being a reluctant futurist. And I think that's the kind of position which. Of course, there's a little bit of trying to attract attention or at least curiosity over what does that mean?But I also think it's a mantle that kind of, I feel sits much more comfortably on me than just being claiming I'm a futurist, which I always found very challenging.Yeah, I want to unpack that because I think those are big words like the futurist and trend. I'm sure you must encounter different ideas about what those things mean and the expectations that they generate. I want to talk about those in a bit, but I want to hear more about where you came from as a, in the middle of your boring childhood. Do you have, did you have, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Did you have an idea of what adult Henry would be doing?Yeah this is the fascinating thing because, I always said my my, my career Yeah, I studied politics and international relations at university. So I was figuring out like, I was always fascinated by this question, like, how do things work?Like, how do we work? How do systems work? How does the world work? And then I went to become an economist. Accountant, which is this kind of bizarre, but in the UK, it's less uncommon to go from that kind of social science background into accountancy. I think in the US it's a much, much clearer career path.You study accounting and then you become an accountant. Whereas in the UK, certainly the grad schemes or they did when I was doing them were much more open to people with these unconventional backgrounds, history and politics and English and stuff like that. These useless degrees.We're now finding out they're more useful, right? Because it's critical thinking. And then I ended up really by a complete accident of history working with this Dutch guy, Reinier Evers who was the founder of Trendwatching. And I, it was the great financial crisis and KPMG where I was working at the time, they had a kind of furlough scheme before the furlough scheme existed which was obviously awesome if you're 26 and had zero responsibilities, right?I was like you'll keep my job open and give me three months off, like a sabbatical aged 26. This is incredible. My entire outgoings were a shared room in a shared house in London. So it was very easy. And I ended up, and again, saw this job ad for a senior strategist of this kind of little, Dutch company.It was one of my favorite newsletters. I'd read it all my way through university and I was applying for a job ad for a senior strategist and I had some time. So I did this. What I didn't realize at the time was this ludicrously overblown job application. I basically wrote a mini trend report.It was like five trends with some images and thoughts because I just loved it. And essentially you're not senior and you're not a strategist. You're exactly, you take none of the boxes, but you've clearly put so much time into this job application. I feel guilty. And I feel I should meet you for coffee at the very least so I can dismiss you and without feeling too guilty and and I sweet talked him round and I was setting up a nonprofit at the time as well.When he said, Oh, look, you're not really, you're still not really what I'm looking for, but clearly you're very, you're young, you're enthusiastic, maybe you can do a bit of freelance writing on the side. And I parlayed that slightly incredibly parlayed that into ending up we moved the head office from the Netherlands to London and he was incredibly generous essentially let me take over the company and grow it.And we worked together for 10 years. And it was just the most incredible adventure. And I feel very lucky. But it was only about a few, probably a few years into this role where I had this memory resurface of so I grew up on the Essex, which is kinda like the Jersey Shore of London or New Jersey, so just outside.But I grew up on the border of Essex and Suffolk and just near Ipswich was the headquarters of British Telecom BT at the time. And I had this memory resurface. We had someone come and it was like a local big employer right near, near my school. And so they had this guy come and give a talk of I must've been eight or nine and he was the kind of British Telecom's futurist.I don't remember anything. I just don't remember too much about the talk, but I had this memory resurfaced of me, eight year old me sitting there thinking, This is a pretty cool gig, right? This guy sits there thinking about the future and what might happen and gets to talk to people about it.And this is, I guess in the late eighties, very early nineties he was probably talking about mobile phones or something and I don't remember the details. It wasn't really the technology that captivated me and I'm sure he was an engineer, right? Would have been a very kind of technical futurist, but I was just something.Something resurfaced in me decades later, where I, as I said, resurfaced this memory of maybe there was something innate that I always thought was interesting. And again, it just makes me smile. You never know where you will end up or and I think tightly designed careers.You know you can push out your natural curiosity, right? And that'sYou mentioned that you'd been receiving the you were receiving the trend you were on this you were a subscriber to the trend watching Newsletter well as an accountant or what was the where did the what was your first?Yeah, I was just a student, right? And you remember back in the kind of the early days of blogging it was when you stumbled across these things. I guess like social media today, right? You would find these things and sign up. And it was just very, it was incredibly well written.I always used to laugh at Reinier. He's a Dutch guy who writes in immeasurably better English than 99 percent of English, native English speakers and writers. It was just very interesting. What was, what do you think was going on? What did, what, it just seems so interesting, unique in that you were an accountant at that time?I wasn't, I was studying politics at the time. So I think I can't remember exactly when I signed up, maybe around the time I was transitioning from politics. I get as in studying politics and international relations. To accounting back in the day, this was the time when kind of Ted first started coming onto the scene that was like the early days of the big ideas being examined online, or certainly it was the early days for me, right?When I was coming into this world of being a kind of a prosumer partially it was just consuming it for my own interest. And partially it was like, Where does this sit in, how might this help me? When I was at university, I had a little side business with some friends running club nights, as you do when you're a student.And we, when I was, I remember when I was there, when we started the business, We used to pay people to stand outside the five libraries on campus and to hand out physical flyers, right? And then Facebook launched in the UK kind of at universities, right?In my final year. And I I remember overnight It changed our business model because this was the kind of early self-serve text ads, but it went from us spending whatever it was, a few hundred pounds on giving students who didn't really care and half and would bunk off and go and smoke weed.We used to have to drive around to check they were standing where they said they were standing and hadn't just dumped them all in the bin. And suddenly we were like, wow, here's a platform where like everyone is on this thing. We can target it. Of course, back then it was just only, I don't think you could speak to people from other universities.So it was like ultra targeted. But we would put out an offer to quote this code on the door to get a free drink or whatever it was. And it was like overnight, even in that small moment, it changed completely the way we operated. It was this tiny business. But it was so I guess.You're thinking about being an entrepreneur, even if I wasn't, I'm going to be a student, but then I went to join this grad scheme, you're just aware that it was whatever it was, 2006, 2007, everything a bit like the current moment, right? Everything was in flux and hoovering up information about how is this changing?How might the world change? What are going to be some of the opportunities that to me just feels like a very natural thing to want to do. I'm always amazed when people don't, when people are like, how do you read all this stuff? I'm like, how do you not read this stuff? This is going to affect us.So yeah. So tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're doing now? There was, I want to return to talking about trend watching, but Where are you now? And what are you up to?Yeah. So I left the trend watching business in the pandemic and it's a pretty difficult time for many businesses and it was time for a change there.And I ended up by complete accident writing a book with this amazing guy, Rohit Bhargava who's based in Washington DC. And we'd met at an event in New York in like October, 2019, I think, or October, November, right? So just a few months before the pandemic and after I left, I took some time off.I had a young son and my wife's a doctor. So she was on the frontline of a pandemic. And so I took basically six months, pretty much completely off looking after him the first deep dark lockdown and was coming out of that. And just calling people. People calling people I knew right to catch up like if we'd known I would have given you a call like hey what's happening I've been out the game for a few months like everything's changing and Rohit you know I didn't have a particular plan I don't think but I came off that call with Rohit having agreed to write a book with him he was hey you know I was looking at what to do next he was like you've got a bit of time maybe we can write a book together and so I think we laughed you know so many of the you know just like getting into the trend watching business.It was very opportunistic, right? It was like an opportunity presented itself. Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of it. Yeah, we wrote here, I wrote this book called The Future Normal, How We'll Live, Work and Thrive in the Next Decade? And that was just a really fun exploration of some of it and it's 30 short chapters, each based around a what if question.And each chapter profiles what we call a featured instigator. So it could be a startup or an individual Maverick entrepreneur or a little organization that is doing something today, which feels like it's from a future a little bit but asking the question, what would it look like if this became normal?And we call it. The executive airport book it's not 350 pages exploring a big idea that goes ultra deep into it. The big idea, if you like, is that. These instigators, individual innovations Martin Lindstrom has a great quote about small data, these ideas are very small in terms of numbers qualitative data points can really be powerful signals of future important trends, right?So that's kind of a big idea if you like. But it's. It's not a dense book in that sense. It's an executive airport book because it's just meant to be dipped into and bring things that may be bubbling up on your, the edges of your radar as an executive kind of saying, Oh, okay, now I see how this stuff that's happening over there might be relevant to me.It could impact my business tomorrow. So it was a very fun book to write because we just got to basically hang out with and meet and talk to people building the future, essentially, and hear their views on it. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun.So that was amazing. We launched it on the main stage at South by Southwest last year, that was an incredible experience that felt like really the world is open for business again. I think it was the first year back, but there might've been a slightly smaller one the year before, but we're fully back to it then.And since then I've been doing a lot of speaking, it's been very fortunate and especially. We put the book to bed in December. I think it was literally January the 3rd, 2023. So we basically had about a month after ChatGPT came out to finish the book.So we people always say, did you write the book with the help of AI? And I say, no, actually we'd written 95 percent of it. It was amazing even in its early stage back then it was amazing in helping get feedback and review and stress testing some of the book we fed all the chapters in but even then it was pretty obvious how much this was going to change things.And so obviously as you can imagine since the book came out, there's been a huge focus on thinking about and talking about AI and how it will change things. And somewhat ironically, and we touched on it in the early answers that kind of, I felt like a real imposter when I first started talking. I had a few clients and one of 'em said can you talk about AI? I thought, God, I don't really know anything about AI. How am I gonna do this? And then I realized that we had a model, we had a technological presentation when we were at trend watching merging tech and so we'd rolled crypto, we'd rolled the Metaverse through this Oh, really?Through this model that basically said it was New World, Same Humans was the title of a presentation. And it was let's. Let's not focus too much on the technology because that's still very nascent, and we don't know exactly where it will head. But actually, there's a way of looking at emerging technologies that says, what are the core customer needs and wants of the people that you're interacting with your customers and your employees.And how will this technology change from, right? So we as I said, we'd looked at the metaverse and said, look, really, we don't know where this is going, but it's really, this feels to us like it's really a question about identity and about status and community. So let's look at those if those are important and actually if those human needs are not important to you, then maybe it suggests that the metaverse is not super relevant to you right now.It's only going to be relevant if those are core things that you do for your customers. And so really that's been my kind of judo move with thinking about AI is to say, look I'm not an AI guy, right? I'm not going to stand here and promise to you that I know where the future of AI is going.I don't actually think that even the AI people know where it's going. So it's been quite useful, all the infighting with the AI community because it's allowed me to prove that point, right? Like that even the people closest to it don't know where it's going. Yeah. But as I say to my clients, I don't think that actually matters, right?Because yeah, we can have philosophical conversations about existential risk, right? But very interesting over a glass of wine. But what you need to know as a business leader is how do I prepare my organization for this and how should I be thinking about this? And how should I get my team thinking about this?How do we equip ourselves? And as I said it's on the one hand, it sounds almost so blindingly obvious. But sometimes I think the biggest, best and biggest ideas are common sense, right? And it's to focus on the things that won't change the things that haven't changed in the last 20 years and that probably still won't change in the next 20 years.So if you're a bank you're really in the business of trust, security, and there's going to be some convenience and customer experience. If you're a fashion company, you're in the business of identity and status and community and and so hopefully some sustainability, as well and so there's these. This is quite obvious and well known, hopefully within your organization, things that you should be focusing on and getting alignment on those and then constantly then asking the question, and then it becomes much easier to say, how is AI enabling us to do those better and faster and cheaper and all the things we know.The Future Normal with Henry Coutinho-MasonBut it means you're not sitting there with a blank slate going, how the hell do I keep up with this? And we've all seen those slightly ridiculous examples of in the crypto boom of a Long Island or the long, the iced tea company that renamed itself to a blockchain company did you see that the kind of blockchain iced tea company and suddenly made hundreds of millions on the stock market he's and we laugh about them, but that I think is how businesses approach these emerging technologies. It's wait, or let's just jump on it.And this is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you because this idea of trend can be very malformed. Do you know what I mean? And people can think, oh, if something's happening in a, we like that. That seems so maybe just to get back to first principles.What is a trend for you and how do you, what does it mean to be paying attention to trend and how do you do it for people? I feel like I was always trend adjacent, but I didn't always really understand what people like you would be talking about or how they do it? What do they mean when they say trend? So can you unpack it for me? Cause I love how you talk about it and you make it. And in listening to you, I realized how similar we are. You know what I mean? That you're orienting leadership to needs. You know what I mean? Yeah, but I'd love to hear you just baseline, trend 101. What does it mean?It's so funny because I always used to introduce my talks on as a trend watching by saying it's the best and worst name for a company ever. Because as you said that when you say the word trend, depending on who your audience is. They will have a completely different expectation in their head, right?Because there's, if you're talking to a social media marketer, they're thinking one thing, right? What's trending on TikTok, right? Or what's putting hashtags, if you speak to an economist, they're thinking of something else, right? If you're speaking to a CEO, they might be thinking much more kind of McKinsey global trends, right?So it could be economic, it could be demographic, like it is just a kind of Oh, In a way, a kind of hollow word, right? Not a hollow word, but a word that takes on many meanings And so we used to try and narrow it down by saying consumer trends, but even then is it consumer trends, spending consumer trend music, Hue and Gallup and all of these things an Ipsos, is it market research for us? It was all about as if it's a new way of surfing and existing basic need one or desire, right? That was our kind of our definition. And to your point, About where we overlap. Yeah, it is around uncovering new behaviors and new forms of meaning, right?New expectations is a word that we used to use a lot, right? What do people expect? What will people expect from you tomorrow? That was our way of again, anchoring and embasing basic human needs and wants was our attempt to get it away from fads, right? Which is, which was always the question that we were asked, what's the difference between a trend and a fad?And I get it because I think, even more so today, actually there is definitely a two speed world we live in, right? There's the kind of, as you said, social media trend circus, right? You have to jump on! Can you, are you creating ads that respond in moments to something that's happened, right?And there's a whole strata. And look, it's proven that's true. That is a way to have short term success, right? You can pump out whatever it is, products or campaigns and jump on it. And there's a whole subset of the market who will blow hot to that, right? And then move on to the next thing.There's also the kind of yeah, as I said, the much slower lane. Which is, where things take years, if not decades, to fully manifest themselves. We're still seeing innovative business models coming out of the mobile space so I think trends move faster and slower at the same time.I'm happy. I posted at the end of last year. I've spent nearly 15 years writing an annual trend report, right? It's the kind of, it's the currency du jour, right? It's what we do, right? And I realized there was this, you might've seen it, there's this kind of Google drive that goes around every, for the last couple of years.And these, this group of advertising strategists collect and I think this year it was like 190 trend reports, right? Every automotive company does one, every airline, every agency. see in the world, does it? And I was laughing with Matt Klein, who's the, I think it's the head of trends at Reddit you might've come across him.He's got a great great blog as well. And I was laughing with him cause we both feel like we've done similar stuff this year. I didn't publish one this year cause I was like, it just feels completely meaningless now. And instead I found much more. interest. Maybe I'm just jaded, right? Old and jaded, but as I said there's only so many times you can cut the same cake in different ways.Why is it the same cake?Because it's the big trends he had a piece in his, he does this amazing kind of meta analysis of all the trend reports. And I think one of the things he did was like, I can't remember exactly, but could you tell whether a line is written in 2018 or 2024?And I think I don't know if he did it or if he asked a bunch of people to do it, but basically the answer was like, it was monkeys throwing darts at the dartboard, right? Essentially, you can't, because the big trends, sustainability, mobility, connectivity  - they don't change that quickly, right?If I think about some of the things that we wrote there's always fuel on the fire and they burn brighter in some sectors than others, some categories and others, some parts of the world things move. But, there are different emphases in different years of course. The last few years, especially in the U.S. you've seen the kind of the anti woke, the rise of anti woke politically, of course, there are definite trends. But again, like, when you're looking at emerging signals and looking into niches, as I would say, niches, as you would say there, there were, there was. The same thing was happening in 2018, right? In 2016, it was probably smaller and it was in different pockets. But for people who exist on the margins, we've probably been writing about similar stuff for a long time, right?So for me, the place I'm in at the moment, it's much more interesting to ask questions, right? Because I think, and this gets back also to, taking it full circle, why I call myself often a reluctant futurist because I, part of it is, a fear of making overblown predictions about the future, because I think it's it's everyone's cliche to say there's not one future there's multiple futures, etc. But it's also to try and invoke that question of why you're a reluctant futurist from my clients. And then I can say, because I don't want you to just look to me for the answers, right? Because creating the future is a contact sport, right? And you need to be prepared to get in there and be doing it for yourself.And actually the utility of what I do is if it helps inspire action and again, that's a cliche in our industry but it's like all the best cliches, it's true. Yeah. So the future shouldn't be something that you just read about and think, Oh, that's nice. Then it's a kind of intellectual masturbation. It should be much more active. What do I do with it? If I'm a CPG brand or a finance brand, a healthcare brand, how am I going to change what I'm doing today to take advantage of this trend, this change. And so questions, and especially questions that are sparked by real world initiatives, innovations is why I love what I do. Because, the guys at Ipsos or Kantar and all of these market research firms and Gallup they have they go off and they do huge amounts of data and they're very good at what they do, but we have a different unit of analysis, right? Yours is the conversation, mine is the innovation. But for me, there's something so much more provocative and accessible and interesting about coming with that qualitative insight. If it's data, you always get into conversations about where the data has come from and is it going to scale and yada, yada. Yeah. Whereas if you put someone for you, as I say, with a conversation for me with an innovation, if it's okay here's three things we've seen in the world, maybe from a different part of the world, maybe from a different demographic, maybe from a different industry in the adjacent industry, but now I've shown you that we're having a conversation around, might be AI, might be customer experience, might be around brand but what do you think now?Like, how does this change our expectations and our assumptions? No one, in nearly 15 years, I've never met anyone who doesn't have a point of view. They can be the CFO, they can be the CTO, they can be very technical, they can say they don't know anything about brand, about innovation, about whatever, right? But if you show them real world examples, and say these guys are doing things pretty differently, aren't they? What do you think? Could you do that? Even if it's in the rejection of those, they, everyone always has a point of view, right? And you get a comp you get a conversation or amongst stakeholders, amongst decision makers going in a way that I feel is much richer and is much more.Open minded is much more opportunity focused than if you just bring data. So I think it's fascinating. I really love doing what I'm doing and it's, I feel incredibly lucky.Yeah. I was going to ask you, what is the joy in what you're doing? Like when you, what's the, what's your favorite part? What do you love about what you do?It's when someone comes up and says You've helped me see the world differently. There's, you've helped me crystallize something or you've given me a new way of seeing the world that I'm now going to take back in my day today and feel more confident, more empowered about the future.That's exciting. That's really exciting, right? To have the ability to change people's worldview, especially at the moment. I always say, we feel overwhelmed, we're constantly hit with this kind of truism, which I'm not even sure if it is a truism because there are lots of points in history where you could make the same case. The world's moving faster than ever, right? But this is the sense that we have is we're all slightly drowning. We're all like, how do we keep up? And being able to keep up. Help people go, okay, but that's up there. The river is very frothy, but actually I can stand in the current - if this isn't torturing my analogy, right? I can stand in the river and feel my feet are on slightly more stable ground. And I know what to look for. That's pretty cool. That's a huge privilege, right? And so there's that. And then the other thing I've always loved working in a b2b space. Because, Trendwatching was 30 people. Right now, I'm independent, or I have a couple of collaborators, Rohit and this amazing girl Natalia here in the UK, where we're doing this AI thing. Working in ultra small teams, but I love the B2B space where you work with often huge companies, right? The Unilevers of this world or whoever the Mastercards, right? Who touch literally billions of people every day. And I'm not saying I always see the direct impact, but it's cool and it's very inspiring when you work with people who you know have real power and influence to shape the world that we live in.And I always say that's one of the reasons why I feel so passionately about being optimistic. To take the conversation full circle, we hear so much about the dystopian future that is inevitably around the corner. If Hollywood and the mass media would have anything like the world is going to be a miserable place. I saw a great tweet the other day, “There’s no business book ever where it's, “I woke up, I had an idea, everything was fine.” That's not the way the world works, but it's also not interesting to us. So I get why the kind of dystopian future occupies so much of our mental headspace. And as I say, the media, news media and Hollywood kind of media. But as I say, if that is the only future we imagine, then that's the one we'll create. And that is a crying shame. Of course, I'm not naive. There are like an infinite number of bad use cases and they are bad, shocking, etc. And they're not helpful with us climate wise with a psychologically wise for teens, etc. But there is also, there's always a good use case for these technologies as well, right? A use case that makes the world. fairer, cleaner, healthier. And so I think it's really important that people in positions of power are aware of those positive use cases. And we tell those stories and we celebrate them because we need more of them.Yeah. I have a few questions packed into one. One is what is the proper use of trend in this moment now, the AI. It occurred to me when you mentioned a date, January 2023. You placed ChatGPT on the calendar. I realized that I hadn't done that yet in my own mind. I know now that 2006-7 is when social media arrived, and marked a beginning of an era. So I hadn't put ChatGPT on my calendar yet. One of the things I love about how you talk about trends is that it's the expectation. I'm stealing all your language and playing it back to you. That we live in the expectation economy. Yeah. It's not futurism. It's that futurism, properly applied, is a now-ism, right? So what My fundamental issue with AI has been that there's been no context given to generative AI, right? They just didn't position it in any way. And so the question of expectations has been left untended in a way and this is all the confusion.It's almost the structure of the conversation. Nobody took responsibility for setting any expectations about it. Maybe the people who are responsible don't know what those expectations are. And so how do you make decisions when even the hope of expectation isn't really there in a way I feel like with the internet, maybe.There, there was, there were constraints. You could have a conversation about what it was. Now I'm meandering away. So what's the proper role of trend in this space? And how do you think about expectations when it all feels so confused and unclear?No, I love it. And I think it's a really important point. And I saw your interchange online actually with I forget who it was but I saw your comment about this kind of expectation mismanagement and it was,What do you make of that? Yeah. A hundred percent think, I think you're entirely right. And the chat interface was very confusing to people because it was almost a Google search box. And if you remember like Ask Jeeves, that was almost how search was initially positioned, right? But it wasn't, the technology wasn't there. So then, it then parlayed into this like one shot, right?Like we'll give you 10 blue links because actually we can't quite answer your question. But probably you. We'll get close enough in those 10. And then we got conditioned to just go for the first one. And then we got as you said, it came into GPT. So I think we're still figuring it out.And you're entirely right. I think some of that will be because, and again I'm not an AI person, but my understanding is it's like, there's a whole constituency of them, in the AI community who whether they're Doomerists or doomsday cult or it's going to save the world.They almost don't care because they're looking three steps ahead and they're like, it doesn't matter what the human interface is because very soon we'll overcome Madden. It'll just be like so I do think that is part of it actually. That, that they almost we're just the messy middle that they don't, they want to get past.Yeah. So I think that's possibly part of it. And that's actually one of the things You know, to bring it back to something that I'm working on at the moment. So with this illustrator Natalia, I started working with her about a year ago, cause we were at an event and we were talking about how funny it was that we were both humans, right?We were really very focused on the human side of this. And she was an illustrator and I'm obviously giving presentations and we were just telling him, we were like, so funny, all we're doing is AI stuff, right? So we're doing as outsiders, this is fascinating to us. And then we thought maybe there's an opportunity to collaborate.And we. Try and make this topic much more accessible, because that was our superpowers doing that through word, through drawing, drawing some visuals. And mine was through words and stories. And so we did these little illustrated guides to AI and the innovation opportunities, and that was fun.And then we've, in the last few months. I was having dinner with a guy who I've spoken for in Vegas, right? In the U.S. He runs a U.S. events business and he was talking about posts coming out of a pandemic, all of the clients he was like, I like the content that you've got but what my clients really want is why live and why together this is what we've got to answer for for, At events these days, right?It's not enough to just have something that you could watch as a TED talk, right? That doesn't cut the mustard anymore. And one of the big trends that I've been talking about, and one of the big themes that I'm focused on is what I think is one of the big unexplored implications of AI, which is around how it will unlock what I've been calling crowd powered creativity.And that's not to say. that everyone's going to be a designer and everyone's going to be a musician. And I think, again, this is the big myth when it comes to AI is it takes things from zero to 10 and you just need to press a button and you get this output. I think that's entirely wrong.And I think like many people it's a tool rather than a finished product. So I think professionals using these tools will always outperform people that just come and type in a prompt and take the first thing that they answer. Because it's experts, expertise and taste that's really going to be the differentiator. What we've done is created this little web app that we can use in presentation. I'll present some trends and then say to people, let's actually explore this idea in real time and ask you to visualize the future of your industry, right? Or your category or whatever it is, right? Your job potentially. And let's doodle them and draw them and then we'll use it literally on paper, right? So it's a very analog exercise and give people one minute and they drew stick people, right? And it's super basic. And then we use AI to turn these doodles into professional grade, kind of high quality images, right? And the reason why I digress and talk about this is because when you talk about expectation, this idea that it's an answer machine, which is what so many people have in their head, right? And it's, as you say, the expectation that we transfer from Google, and from computers in general. Excel is an answer machine for numbers, right? You have to program it, but fundamentally it's an answer machine. And I think why we're using that is because it gives people a very visceral experience, but it can also be a creative partner. And I say the reason, one of the reasons why we choose doodles is because everyone thinks they can't draw. Yeah, as I say, most people would say there are fairly bad to moderate visual communicators. Especially in business, right? Of course, if you're a professional artist, but like you ask a room full of business people, Are you a good visual communicator? And most people get a bit embarrassed. And the reason why we use it is because again, it's not that you are pushed out of the process, right? It's not that AI can come up with every idea but it can help you express your ideas in new ways, and help you give you skills that you didn't have yesterday. We were doing a session the other day and someone drew a, we're asking people to draw a job of the future and someone drew a robot stylist. And it instantly made the stylist a woman. Someone else had drawn a coffee shop where they have robot baristas. We were talking about the role of humans in, in customer service. And a sommelier, it went to an old white guy, and it must've been picking up that word. Getting into things visually is, for me, it's more about an exploration and a jumping off point, a creative sparring partner, or however you want to phrase it. For me, that's a very interesting use case around generative AI and how we bring new languages of creativity and new inputs to the table. Whether that's people who felt excluded from the corporate innovation happens in PowerPoint slides today, right? That's a very narrow reductive medium. It could be that some people prefer drawing, but also. When you draw, you share different ideas, right? So it's about increasing the diversity of both people and ideas and creative voices. There was a great quote, and I can't remember who said it. We need to find the use cases where this kind of hallucination is a feature, not a bug. Yeah, and it's those it's going, in a long winded rambling way of going back to your original comment, what are the expectations? And a number of people have observed this, right? AI is bad at all the things we think computers are good at. Yes. Calculation factfulness, right? And good at all the things we think humans are good at kind of creativity and connections, et cetera. So, you're totally right. It is fundamentally. How do we recalibrate a generation of digital expectations is interesting, exciting, but also challenging in equal measures.I guess I'm curious. I always have this narcissistic question, which is what's the role and you mentioned small data. What is the role of qualitative or of small data in your, you use the word signals to talk about how you learn and how you research. I just love to hear you talk about research and how you. You're sitting there. How does one research detect trends? How do you do what you do? Yeah, so for me, it's Five minutes left, please, Henry.No for me, it's very simple, and I'd actually love to flip that question back at you as we get to. This probably came out of writing a newsletter. So we had a daily newsletter that went out depending on which list we were using, but anywhere from 50 to 100,000 people each day, and from globally and different roles. And so the question that I always used to ask You know, the team and the writers of stuff when they were putting stuff forward is could you, okay, maybe we won't hit everyone on that list every single day. But like, when something, when we're going to push something into someone's inbox, could they call their team or their client into a meeting and have a 20 minute discussion about this?That's fundamentally the question that I'm always asking is like, when I've read this, could I'm British, right? Could I sit in the pub with a kind of a friend of mine or a bit of business contact and say, what does this mean? What does this mean for people?What does this mean for society? What does this mean for businesses? What does this mean for organizations? Could be governments, could be nonprofits, right? How are we going to do something differently? tomorrow because of what we've read and thought about and discussed, right? That's essentially the bar, right? Is this enough to spark a conversation? Now, of course and actually, you know what, going back to, that's what I have found ChatGPT incredible for, right? And I was sitting with someone the other day, I'd, I used to love those conversations, right? When we were part of a team, we used to have eight or 10 analysts and it was a couple in New York based in the U.S., a couple in Singapore dotted around Europe, like one in Nigeria for a couple of years.And so we would have a Slack channel where it was that we were literally having that conversation basically every day. And you just get so much out of that. And I was talking to someone, I was like, I don't know if I could have, Stayed independent for as long if ChatGPT hadn't come around, right?For me. It's a relatively new experience. I had 10 years with that team, and that feedback. Because now ChatGPT performs that role for me, so I don't get it to do my writing. But it's a sparring partner and actually going back to Matt Klein he had a great in my like custom instructions, right? You can load the backstory that you want to give it.So I have two, two things. So I created my own little trend analyst GPT bot, right? And I loaded my books in as PDF. And I said this is my body of writing, like use that to help me think about, so I'm going to drop a news story and a press release. And I want you to help me think about this, right?And actually, I almost use it as the anti prompt. So like, when I say what should I think about this new healthcare innovation or whatever, right? The stuff it comes back with first that's the obvious stuff, right? The world's gonna get more personalized technology's gonna be everywhere I know I can't write about that because that's obvious, right?So it almost pushes me, like, how do I go further? And then Matt Klein has a great thing, which is called the overlooked framework, which is like kind of seven or eight questions about what's the dark side of this innovation. What's the unexplored side? And I'll share it with you afterwards, but it's really cool.And again, you can just free load that into ChatGPT and get it to constantly explore that. So it's like the, it's like the team that you never knew you had. It's very cool.Yeah, that's amazing. I love the notion of an overlooked framework. I feel like that really sparked my curiosity. And hearing you talk about your, how you're using ChatGPT is also really inspiring too.I'm a little bit behind you and playing around, but I can see where that would be really powerful. Listen, we're right up at the end of the hour. I So I really, it's been wonderful to connect with you in this sort of the magic of the ether in this world that we live in. So thank you very much.And it's just been a real pleasure listening to you talk about what you do. And yeah, thank you so muchThank you so much. I'm Peter. Honestly, I'm a huge fan of your newsletter. So I love it. So thank you. It's an incredible honor to be talking with you.Bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

John Bowe is a speech and presentation consultant, and author of I Have Something to Say. He specializing in corporate and individual presentations. John contributes regularly to CNBC about public speaking. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, McSweeney’s, This American Life, and is the author of numerous books. His work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and he has appeared on CNN, The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, the BBC, and many others. He lives in New York City.So in this conversation series, I start all my questions, all my interviews with the same question, which I'm excited to ask you. Because I love this question. I borrowed it from a friend of mine. She works up here. She does oral history. I know you have a history with oral history. And it's a big, beautiful question. And so I over-explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. All right. And the question is, where do you come from?So part of me wants to do this in the most literal way possible. Grounded way imaginable, and part of me wants to just go way big. I think I come from the most disastrous, panicked, spiritually aggressive place possible. Which is, we're all doomed, and I have to come in and save everybody and think of some great solution that will save the world. So that's where I come from on one level. On the other level, I come from Wayzata, Minnesota, which is 12 miles west of Minneapolis.And what was it like growing up in Wayzata? Is that how you say that? Wayzata.I heard something that said it was the third richest suburb in America at that time. And that was America's richest time. So I grew up in the heart of white privilege and bloated 70s America at its apotheosis. And it was a disaster. We weren't among the super, super wealthy, but the town that we lived in was not facing a lot of crises. And it was like that documentary, if you've ever seen it, called An American Family about the seventies family that's just falling apart. Everybody's alienated, the parents are getting divorced. One of them might be cheating on the other one. They just have three cars and one of the kids is coming out. Another kid is maybe on drugs. I can't remember. Just everybody's going in their own direction and nobody is pulling together. There's no sense of family unity culture. It's all just that moment when American culture is just falling apart because there's too much excess and nothing sustaining people, no kind of binding myths or anything. And so that's where we came from. Just, there was no - we had all the freedom in the world. We all had our own bedroom and somehow it was a disaster.And that feeling you described that you come from this place of "World's on fire. I need to save it." Is that captured?I know, I just - I'm growing up in like the richest society, the best most materially satisfied demographic in history, in the entire world. And yet, most of the time I thought that life is a problem. Oh my god, I can't believe this. What are we going to do? This is - How can we go on? How can we go on? And so like my family was completely not religious. And yet from a young age, I was almost like some Flannery O'Connor character. I was obsessed by whatever. I could even put a name on it, but it was God and religion and spirituality and something like that. There had to be something. And I guess that was nature, but I kept looking for other names or dimensions to it and there weren't any. We weren't going to Sunday school or anything like that where I could have gotten glimpses into the fact that, oh, people are putting a name on this. People have struggled with these same problems before. You're not weird. You don't have to feel ashamed or weird or isolated. Here's a whole trajectory that you could jump onto that would explain a lot of that or give you options for explaining it in the way that you want.Yeah. Yeah. What kind of child were you? What, how did this express itself? What did it look like? John Bowe in Wayzata?I think it was a bit of a wiseacre. I think it was a total rebel and not an interesting one. I thought I was interesting, but I don't think I was at all. Like our fifth grade teacher said his name was Mr. Haybison and me and my best friend, Mike, who was also a miscreant. We would say, okay, Earl. And then he'd say, write down my name, Mr. Haybison, 200 times. And we'd say, okay, Earl. So that was the level of rebellion that I thought was interesting. Or stealing vegetables from a church vegetable garden. Or dropping rocks off of a railroad bridge onto cars and thinking we were like Julian Assange or something.Do you have recollections of what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yes. I told my mom when I was about five or six years old that I wanted to start a new religion and then retire and be a farmer.Wow. Wow.Isn't that crazy? Isn't that totally? So then when I was about eight, I discovered writing. I was looking at a book that I wouldn't read. It was some book by a Norwegian writer named Piers something called The Dwarf. And it won. It was about a court jester, I think. Anyway, I was looking at the cover, which had this really mean, scary cover, and I said, I'm going to be a writer because writing will solve all the world's problems. And I have, again, no idea where this stuff was coming from other than just probably total desperation.Yeah. What did it mean to you to be a writer?That there was this magical thing you could do that didn't use materials, that you could wave it around like a magic wand and it would solve the world's problems. Or at least theoretically, potentially.Tell me a little bit about where you are like right now and what you're doing now.Short answer is I was a writer and a journalist forever. I did oral histories. I wrote for the New York Times magazine a lot and the New Yorker sometimes, just long nonfiction, high quality journalism. And eventually that led me by accident to discover public speaking and the idea that you can train people to speak in public and that it just unlocks all of these psychological pathways and ways to connect with people. So before that, I was not at all interested in public speaking. I thought it was corny and uncool. And then I realized, Oh God, this is like free or super, super cheap, fast psychiatry sessions and it helps people in the same exact way that I wanted to since I was a kid. Here's a way to use words to help people, but it's not what I thought. It's not me writing. It's me helping other people get access to the skill of expressing themselves. So it's cool. It's weird in that way that you always are wrong. And then you discover really what you were trying to do in a much better way. It's not what I thought at all. It's much cooler and easier than that.Yeah. What is the joy in it for you?Oh God. So imagine when you get a haircut or a new change of clothes and you look at yourself for a second, just that second where you think, Oh my God, I actually look okay. For me, when I can help someone express their ideas better or learn better than just doing it once is I can give them the skill of doing it every time. They become so empowered that they literally become happy. I can say that most of the people I work with become way happier. And this isn't after working for a hundred hours, it's after working for two or five or eight hours. So it's pretty, it's a pretty lucky job. It's a pretty great job.Yeah. And how did you discover it? You're the, as a journalist all that time and I want to go back and ask you about some of that stuff too, but what was your first encounter with public speaking when you discovered that it was something that you could do?In my own history, I was always a pretty mediocre public speaker. I didn't like it. It terrified me. I don't know if I was as terrified as a lot of people, but I was definitely terrified, and I never prepared for it in the right way, and so I was always pretty ineffective at it. And it troubled me a lot, because I couldn't figure out why I was bad at it. I have all the tools to be good at it. I'm expressive, I'm a goofball, I don't care if I look stupid. I know that I'm gonna look stupid sometimes, but I also know that I can be smart sometimes, so I just couldn't figure out why when I talked about a book or something that I had worked on for years, I couldn't speak about it in a very interesting or compelling way.What would happen? I think anyone who heard me would have thought Oh, he seems like an amiable, okay guy. But that's it. Nothing more. You, no one would have walked away with any particularly clear, vivid message about the book or the thing that I had just worked on. And I didn't know this at the time, but I was really passionate about these projects, but I never knew how to talk about my passion. I would have been embarrassed by that idea. I'm passionate? No. I, so I, and I didn't know that when you talk to people, you're supposed to tell them what to think. Here's why I'm talking to you. Here's what I want you to know. Here's what I want you to believe. And so I would talk to people and just on a factual level, like the job of public speaking is for me to take the facts in my little hard drive in my brain and put it in your little brain, and that's it. We're not going to talk to each other like people or like people who have hearts. I'm not going to convey to you any of the moral or emotional reasons for me doing what I do, or any of your own, equal those capacities in you. And so I just thought it was purely intellectual and purely factual, and there's no other element going on when we speak in public. And all of that other stuff besides the intellectual stuff just annoyed me, and I thought I'm a writer, they should just read the damn book. Why am I here on the stage talking to people?Yeah, I love how you described - you said you didn't know that you had to tell people what to think. There's a woman, her name is Fiona McNae, and she runs this, I probably shared this with you, a semiotics agency in the UK, and she has a TED Talk. And I always quote just the title of the TED Talk, because it's about semiotics and communication. But it's "Taking responsibility for being understood."Oh, that's so great. Aristotle would love that. That's, yeah, I didn't know. How would I, how would people know what to think or how would people know why I'm talking unless I do the work of thinking beforehand? What do I want them to know? And I just passively thought that's all supposed to come out naturally and organically. And that's a nice thought, but it's just not true.And you mentioned Aristotle. What - So you discovered public speaking. What did you do about it? Let's go. Let's go back.That was my whole sort of past history with public speaking. I didn't know anything about it other than that it was a pain in the ass and a very uncool thing to learn about and people. I was too cool to learn about it. Maybe there were some uncool people in business who were so shy they had to learn about it, but that wasn't me or any of my supposedly articulate artistic friends. So then fast forward to 2009, I'm doing this oral history about love, and I interview my step cousin in very rural Iowa, Cousin Bill, who was a recluse. He was like a real textbook recluse who lived in his parents' basement. And his main job was to mow the lawn in the town square. He had knee socks, black knee socks, which he wore all year round. He had never kissed anyone, never gone on a date, never had friends, never hung out, never did anything. A totally nice guy, but a bit of a man child. And when he was 59 years old, he got married. And so my family in Minneapolis would always comment on that in sort of snarky ways and just wonder who he married and how in the world that had happened. So then when I became a big boy journalist, I could go approach people and ask them what's your story? What's your deal? So I did that with him. And among the questions, cause I wanted to know for this oral history about love, what is it like to have love if you just never had anything at all? And then you're living with someone and you're married and you're, you are in love. What does that mean? After 59 years of nothing.And during that interview, I asked him, how did you talk to your future wife for the first time? And I assumed that his answer would involve psychiatry or therapy or meds or something, reorganizing the way that he thinks or reorganizing his brain chemicals, whatever. And he shocked me and he said, I joined Toastmasters.So I knew Toastmasters is the world's largest organization devoted to teaching the art of public speaking. And it was started in 1924 by this guy named Ralph C. Smedley, who had worked for the YMCA developing education programs, classes and stuff. And he noticed at that time that millions of people were moving from these rural farm towns into cities because the farm economy was becoming mechanized. And so where that once employed 80 percent of the people in the U.S. suddenly now I think it employs 3 percent or 2%. And so all these people were coming into cities and they were shy. They were country people. They didn't know how to be fast, fast tongued. Lib, whatever. And he realized, Oh my God, these people can't get dates. They can't get promoted. They can't unlock their potential and their intellect and their capacities. So I'm going to teach them how to speak. And he did. And he went back to these Greek people and Roman people who originally taught public speaking and had really great techniques and theories about it. And he modernized it and he turned it into a club where people could go at their own speed and learn the rudiments of public speaking from each other at virtually no cost. So I just thought all of that was cool. It all aligned with everything I thought about, like capitalism and technology and modern society. And we're all falling apart. Everything since I was a kid, we're all doomed. We're all going to hell. And here's this really humanistic, super practical thing that this guy invented, where we can all teach each other how to connect and how to talk and how to function better.What did you sense in it? You're saying it right now, but what was the attraction? You say yeah - what did you sense in Toastmasters that was so attractive?It's not a corporate thing. It's not something anybody owns. It's not something that you have to pay a lot of money for. It's something you show up and here are your fellow citizens, rich, poor, whatever gender, race, whatever creed. And we all teach each other how to belong, how to participate. What's the thing you quoted from the semiotics? Taking responsibility for being understood. It was very much that. It's like a different way of expressing that. You go join, there's no credentialed expert who's teaching it. It's just this curriculum which is self, whatever, self-perpetuating. And it was just cool, you go, and the people there, no one's the boss. It's like AA for shy people. It's a church, but nobody's the president. Nobody's the boss. No one - I guess they can kick you out if you misbehave, but in general it's super democratic. It's everything that was the cool at the heart of the United States, which has become less accessible.I had read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, which charts the decline of participation in groups. And so up until the 60s Americans participated in groups more than any other country, and that meant it could be bridge clubs, or religion, or political groups, or it could be the Ku Klux Klan, it could be the PTA, anything where people get together and share their beliefs, whether they're good or bad. And all of that had declined mostly thanks to TV, like everyone was now at their home watching TV. So this Toastmasters thing just captured my attention in a hundred different ways all at once. So that led me to want to write a book about it. And I traced the ideas from the founder of Toastmasters back to where he got them from ancient Greece and Rome. And I thought that was all really cool too. The Greeks invented democracy. I could put that in quotes because it wasn't really full-fledged democracy at that time. But anyway, once they invented democracy, the world went from a place where you were forbidden to speak to crowds to a place where you were suddenly required to speak to crowds.Whoa, what do you mean? Can you unpack that a little bit?Before the invention of democracy, only muckety-mucks could speak in public. Like big famous generals and stuff like that. Yeah. And the rulers of Greece were these sort of oligarchs who weren't really - their name wasn't public. They weren't like public politicians. You didn't know who they were necessarily. And so the generals were the most popular figures who represented power. But you yourself could not go on a street corner and start proclaiming your beliefs. And then suddenly with the invention of democracy, public participation kind of supplanted violence or whatever was the prime mover of civilization before that. And so almost immediately, whoever was a cool, good public speaker started amassing power. And they would have these forums where should we go invade Sparta? Or not, or should we raise taxes or not? And everyone was encouraged to speak up and contribute. And if you sucked at that, or you were reluctant to do it, people didn't trust you, didn't want to do business with you, didn't want to have you marry into their family. So suddenly it just became imperative to learn it.Yeah, unbelievable. That's like a new technology, right?Yeah. It's like a gold rush. Suddenly all of these philosophers and teachers rush into Athens and it's exactly like the internet and Silicon Valley or something. There are a million different theories for how to do it or techniques for how to do it and they start sort of hacking language. So think about it. If you don't know anything about this stuff, you think that when you talk to people it's almost like your hair growing. Your hair might be different than my hair, but you didn't do anything to make it grow that way. That's just you. So my speech is just - I don't control it. It's just this product that naturally comes out of me.Yes.So this moment where they start looking at speech is the first time where they shake their heads and they say, no, it's not. You can control that just as much as you control how you cook or how you dance. And so they start hacking into everything like introductions or why is a story better when it's broken into three parts or a joke? It's - what does rhythm have to do with logic? What does rhythm have to do with why one person is persuasive and another person seems weird? Why is poetry - if I vary my voice and I, instead of just talking along like this in a monotone, why does that make you trust me and like me and believe me more? And so they start studying this stuff. They start studying why is the past tense gonna - past tense is really good for blaming people. Future tense is really great for forging a solution. Peter, you didn't take out the garbage. You've always been a lazy jerk. You don't do this. You didn't do that. You know for the last three months you haven't done that. And you can just swing it on me and say John, what do you think would be a good way to go forward? John, I understand your concerns. What do you think is a fair way to divide the labor going forward? No, Peter, I'm talking about the last three months where you did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And politicians do this all the time, but in your own life, you're just shifting the tense, just shifting the tense. So you realize there are these really specific language hacks that people kind of use sometimes unconsciously. But if you become conscious of them and you study them and you use them like a - you'll win more arguments and become a more credible, empowered person, but also just, you'll know how to express yourself better. You'll get these tools.And is this rhetoric?So that's rhetoric. The fancier definition of rhetoric is the study of all available means of persuasion and so Aristotle's theories - whenever we talk to each other we're persuading each other of something. It might not be nefarious or whatever, but it's - I want you to listen to me. I don't want you to look at your phone or drift off or walk away from me while I'm talking to you. Or you know I want you to hire me or I want you to buy my product or fund my startup or whatever. And so if I talk like a weirdo, that's less likely to happen. If I talk persuasively in a way that engages you and gets you to buy in, then I'm more likely. So what are the things I can do? The many different levers I can adjust or whatever to make you do that, and what are the things that would stop you from doing that? So it's a study. It's not just like a study of communication or study of words. It's a study of all this kind of psychological, pre-psychological stuff that turns out to be super valuable and interesting.How do you apply the lessons of rhetoric and Toastmasters in your - when people come to you?Okay, so most people who come to me are pretty smart. I have very few dumb clients, and yet they don't talk like they're smart. Their love, their intellect and their sort of knowledge base is at a much higher level than their ability to use that or to present their ideas or get other people to buy into their ideas. And so I teach them these basics of rhetoric, these basics of speech training. The main thing I help people with is people, these days, we're so enamored of data and knowledge and facts that we tend to bombard each other with facts as if facts will win the argument or speak for themselves. And so the main thing I ended up doing for people is getting them to understand there's all the squishy softer connective tissue in communication that you need to get good at and you need to remember to use it. And then people will start listening to you and understanding you much better. You'll feel emotionally more connected and that's nice. You'll feel included, you'll feel respected, but also just people will get what you're talking about. You'll have a better chance of getting promoted at work or getting funded or whatever, selling your product.I feel like this is like the constant battle between - I mean there's so many ways of expressing it, but - Have I shared with you, I'm just gonna - another one of my favorite references is Ursula Le Guin. She has an essay called "Listening is Telling." Do you know this one?I've heard of her, that sounds interesting.Oh, you'll love this. I'll send it to you if I've not shared it with you already. And she's got some diagrams in it in which she - she drew, she draws what you described before that we have this conventional understanding of how communication happens in which communication really is about the transmission of information. And so there's a - she has a diagram of two boxes with a tube connecting them, you know what I mean? And language is these bits of information. I'm the sender and I'm sending bits of information through language. Yeah. You're taking it into your little box and then we'll take - we'll switch positions. You'll be the sender and I'll be the receiver. And she says that's ludicrous. Anybody that's actually been in a conversation knows that it's nothing like that. Conversation is - it's a reciprocal, it's an intersubjective - it's - there's all this crazy stuff happening, you get lost in it. And so a better diagram - she uses the metaphor for amoeba sex. Yeah. Is a better metaphor or analogy for what happens in communication - in conversation is you get lost. I think when amoebas have sex the boundaries - they become one in moments. And so she uses that as this - I think she builds a whole framework about - around feminist communication around it in some of her novels. But in this essay in particular, she uses those diagrams. And I'm wondering, is that - does Aristotle and rhetoric - were they talking about amoeba sex?Totally, absolutely. Totally different terminology, but yeah, totally the same idea. Aristotle has this thing, which is the thing you're going to learn in any public speaking class, or not public speaking, but rhetoric for sure. It's an old canon. First of all, whenever we talk to one another, we're trying to persuade each other of something. And second of all, when we do we use three different main tools. One is facts. The second is emotion, and that's do I get you to laugh, do I get you to cry, do I get you to feel sorry for me, or feel mad about yourself and your own plight. And then you're going to interpret my same set of facts in a very different way, depending on what emotion I arouse. And then the third thing is ethos, they call it, which is character, which has a really wide definition, but basically that means what you know about me on my resume, my education, my background and all that, but it's also how I perform my active communication. Am I together? Am I shy? Am I sexy? Do I have really amazing clothes? Do I talk down to you? Do I talk up to you? Do I talk fast? Am I super organized in my thoughts? Are the examples that I give to you examples that you understand because they're in your wheelhouse? So that's character. It's like the competence with which I explain my ideas. And he said of these three tools, facts, emotions, and character is by far the controlling factor in persuasion. And so I might be right, and I might have some great idea, but if I tell it to you in a way that sucks, or I'm really boring, and I just stick to the fact I'm being dumb because I'm not paying attention to what you - what really moves you.So if I'm talking to you, you might be looking at my clothes, you might be looking at the fact that I've got curry on my shirt, you might be looking at the fact that I told you I'd talk to you for five minutes instead I talked for 40 minutes. You're looking at the whole of me, and I think you're just looking at my fact. Yes, so that's where it comes back to amoeba sex. It's definitely not like those two boxes exchanging messages about the fact. They're checking each other out sexually. They're checking each other on some Freudian level. Do I want to mate with you or kill you? Do I - am I impressed by you? Do I like you? Do I want to follow you? Am I worried about you liking me? All this other emotional stuff is in there besides just the simple factual level.You describe the person coming to you as somebody who's super smart, right? Really competent. They have a professional expertise that's up here, but they have a communications expertise that's way down here. How do you explain the absence of rhetoric or public - what is the role - how do you see public speaking being either taught or the role that it plays? And because I feel like I also - I never - nobody ever named this as something that I should learn or do and I think the only - I have really vivid memories of an art history class, which was an elective in college in which I had to do a presentation and it was the only time I think in my four years of college I had to do - I had to stand up in front of a class and say something and I had a full-fledged panic attack.No, it's insane. It's the - almost every adult professional has to talk all the time, whether it's in meetings, or job interviews, or pitches, or presentations, or technical updates, or sales reports. There aren't that many jobs where you don't have to do this thing, and yet no one has taught in any comprehensive way how to do it, ever, at all. I always, when I do workshops, I show, look how much you know about writing. You know the noun versus the verb versus the participle and the whatever, and capital letters, and periods, grammar, you know when you're looking at a book, the table of contents, and the different chapter headings, and all - all of this visual and theoretical and technical stuff about writing, and you don't know any of it for speaking.So what's weird is that for 2,000 years, all of that was taught. And everybody was taught how to understand speech, both listening and talking, how to organize it better, how to do it better, and then a couple hundred years ago, it became very uncool, and it just fell away, because we all fell in love with science.Is that - I was going to ask what - talk to me about that transition, what happened?From the beginning, when they first invented logic, when they first invented rhetoric, some people hated it. And they said, why would you need people - like, why would you need to teach people how to speak the truth? This just seems fancy, it seems artificial. I'm like yeah, we're artificial. We cook our food instead of eating it just as we found it. We brush our teeth instead of leaving our breath just as we found it. You know what I mean? We do a lot of artificial stuff every day to get through the day. And we're pretty glad that we do. But for some reason, this idea about being - about prepping your speech or grooming it, or like fussing with it or arranging - it seems no. You're going to mess with the authenticity. You're going to ruin it. So even Plato - it wasn't just weirdos - Plato fulminated against rhetoric.Really?This is taking Greek into the gutter - Greek democracy. This is ruinous - people who speak the truth. The truth should be self-evident. We don't need help with this. And Aristotle came along and said, no, that's not true because people are too dumb and demagogues are too crafty. And we need to teach regular good people how to see the wiles of demagogues and bad argument and cheap manipulative arguers. And we also need to arm the regular people, how to speak up and get their point across so they'll be drowned out. But from the very beginning of rhetoric, there was this argument, is rhetoric good or bad? And that really persisted. And when you look at it from a certain slant, it does just look like total b******t. It looks like a false, specious quasi-science or whatever. It's a quasi-art that shouldn't be necessary and -Why not? What do you mean it shouldn't be necessary? What's the - Express the two sides like - so we've been talking about rhetoric and persuasion and you know giving breathing life into the idea that you need to take responsibility for being understood. What's the - what's Plato's view on that? What's the full expression of the opposition to rhetoric?At the time of Plato, there was this group called the Sophists, who were like the David Blaines of rhetoric or whatever. They would come along and do - turn it into a parlor trick, and they would take pleasure - they would do these performance art thingies that, where they would get people - they would - the point of the thing was, I'm gonna show you that good is really bad, and bad is really good. And they would do an hour-long monologue that was full of comedy and full of like fun talking and by the end of it they would have quote-unquote proven to the audience that good is bad and their whole point was words are b******t. You know, it was Pythagoras who was one of the sophists who said man is the measure of all things. And so at the bottom of that is we don't know what objective reality is. The only thing that exists is what you can get people to believe. And we're trapped inside our own bubbles of subjectivity. We'll just never know. We'll just never really know anything. Even science is basically this huge weird construct based upon our irrational subjective insanity. And from a certain point of view, that's true. But from another point of view the NASA scientists who make rockets aren't making the fuel with subjective quantities, like they need - there is a - they're - they're - so those two poles are the two sides of that argument could go to war forever and neither side is right. But I guess Plato was good enough at saying, look. Any supposed art form that allows liars to get away with lying has to be bad, right? And he took it further than that and made a better argument than that. But that was basically the thing. Liars should not be able to get away with lying. Therefore, rhetoric is bad. And we should just let everybody leave this alone and everyone will just be themselves. And we'll trust that the truth will always come out. And that's - I like that. I'm from Minnesota. We - that's how we function. That's how we're born, basically, plain people, and unfortunately, it just doesn't work. And it's not a realistic worldview.And so how did it disappear, this moment you said we discovered science, and rhetoric went awayIt's more than just science. Christianity took over and was the dominant thing, and basically for a long time, learning was confined to Christianity. And in Christianity, they weren't into open conversation about absolutely everything. Conversations became more behind closed doors, and you couldn't just go out into the public square and start shrieking about how you didn't believe in Christianity. You couldn't just say that the church was bad. So that was one factor. Science, like I said, was another thing where just people started getting more obsessed with facts and they were achieving all these miracles with science. And so rhetoric just seemed like this very squishy - what is this? It's not a science. It's not quite an art form. It's almost an art form, but it just seemed like the softest skill of all and therefore useless. John Locke, the philosopher, was really anti-rhetoric. Basically, anytime anybody abused any political system, people would come along and say, See, this is rhetoric's fault. These liars who became tyrants, they all used words in a weird way, and it's rhetoric's fault. Therefore, let's abolish rhetoric. And so eventually, all those forces combined, and it just became uncool. Rhetoric got broken down into a few component parts, which were not very powerful on their own, like philology and even linguistics and you could even say semiotics certainly like enunciation and diction and all of these became things that were taught and none of them were that powerful on their own so we lost this overall study of persuasion.I want to go back a little bit. You told this amazing story about your cousin who found love as a result of Toastmasters, right? So then you discovered Toastmasters and I know, and then, so what happens with you after that? What do you do with this discovery?Once I discovered, I really realized this is - I don't know if I should say the answer to all my dreams, but the capacities, the qualities, whatever, the effect of all of this stuff is the most magical, cool, positive thing I've ever discovered. And I owed Random House a second book for a two-book deal that I had signed a million years before, and they were pissed at me for not delivering. And I had been submitting ideas that were really negative, and they said, no way, that's way too gloomy, we're not interested in that. So for a second, just to get them off my back, I said I could write about this Toastmasters thing and public speaking, and they immediately said yes. And I immediately regretted it, because it was way too positive. And I didn't want to write a how-to book, and I just, I didn't know how to write about this subject. But I did think, this is the most positive, interesting thing I've ever come across. And so very reluctantly, very slowly and clueless, I started writing a book and it took me 10 years to write the damn book. But the book is the prequel. It's not a how-to do public speaking book, but it's a questioning of, holy cow, this is so weird. This used to be the biggest thing in education. It was the cornerstone of all education. And now we don't even know what it is. And it also happens to be the most useful skill for having relationships and doing well at work. And it's pretty weirdly easy to learn. Why don't we learn this anymore? In the book, I make myself be the guinea pig, and I go to Minneapolis, where I'm from, and I join Toastmasters, and I go through their introductory curriculum and learn all this stuff. So I'm the hapless idiot clown going through and not understanding each of these lessons until I finally figure them out and learn them. At the same time, I'm digesting all this Greek and Roman stuff about rhetoric and public speaking. Which merges with Toastmasters instructions in a really cool, good way.Is that right? Yeah. In what way?Toastmasters is not trying to be deep or profound or intellectual at all. They want to keep it simple. It's very much, what does it say, the founder said it's a go at your own pace, it's a learn at your own pace kind of a program, and everything is just do this, think about this a little bit, do this. And then your group gives you feedback. But there's nothing a profound or there's nothing about the theory. They don't talk about verb tenses. They don't think - they don't talk deeply about our isolation or emotional stuff. But the Greeks had all of this really great profound stuff, which in the way that they wrote it was very practical and pragmatic. It wasn't trying to be deep, but it just happens to be deep anyway. If you combine those two things together, yeah, it's gangbusters.Yeah. And what was your experience with Toastmasters? What was that like actually going in, going through?I didn't do it in New York. I did it in Minneapolis because I knew that people would be much worse at connecting. They're just shyer. They're like Nordic, Scandinavian people by and large still, even though the population there has gotten a lot more mixed since when I was a kid, it's still pretty uptight compared to New York where people are more performative and people are more used to difference. Yeah. And so for just testing out my little theories about how do I learn to connect with people and how do other people learn to connect with people? It was a better place to do it, but it was agony because of that. The first, my first three Toastmasters speeches, they were just these very low stakes exercises, but I was shitting in my pants. I was just so - if public speaking normally made me anxious doing it in this very meta way where I'm the reporter and I'm writing a book and my income is dependent on my ability to write a book. But my ability to write the book is dependent on my ability to go to Toastmasters and deliver stupid little icebreaker speech or basic intro exercise. It was just a lot of pressure on going in there. And I was also studying myself to pieces like, really overanalyzing everything. It was like smoking pot and having a bad pot trip or something. I just was so self-conscious about every part of it that I was falling apart. It was very hard to observe myself doing it while also doing it.Is that an exceptional experience? Or is that, cause I also feel like there's this, there's that stat that I always roll out that we don't - aren't there survey after survey that demonstrate that people fear public speaking more than death, like that -All of that is false. All of that is - it's a quasi-scientific - that's a marketing company came up with in the 60s and they like had a control group of 20 people.Oh, no.Think about it. If you put a gun to your head and said, Peter, do you want to pull the trigger or do this next meeting that you have? Of course, you're going to do the meeting. So it's just b******t. But the fact that it resonates does, I think, say a lot. But I think the paralyzing thing for most people is just the number of choices, the bewildering number of choices and that fundamental question of what am I going to say and how am I going to say it? Because when you start thinking about it, you have infinite options. And it's perfect - perfect context for a meltdown. Holy cow, I'm not even real. I'm not even me. It turns out I'm just cheap actor. And the moment you give me some choices about what I'm doing, I don't even know who to be. There's no fixed self here. I'm just this phony who goes through life getting by trying to be pleasant, but I don't even really know why I do any of this the way that it - so you know, of course that's enough to make anybody bat s**t and it should like - you know so somewhere between never thinking about it ever again and studying it and getting conversant with those ideas and figuring it out for yourself, what's right for you, there's an interesting and productive course of action that really will make you happier because you'll be - it's just like you're the person you've quoted Fiona. There's - you do have a responsibility to help people understand you. And so unless you learn some of this stuff, how are you going to do that? You can't just will it and force yourself to do it by beating up on yourself. You have to learn some techniques.You've helped me a ton personally. And and it's been a - it's been transformational, no question. I think about the relationship between public speaking and democracy and this is like a indulgent kind of a side because I think you and I've talked like I'm really into citizen assembly and there's a way in which the way that we - in my small town of Hudson, if you want to participate in a public meeting, you just have to do this thing, which I draw - which you just described as a - It's a horrifying, terrifying experience to stand up in your community of fellows and it's just say - let your hair grow to use your old metaphor, right? Just let it out. And of course, who's going to participate in a public meeting when the stakes are that high and nobody's been any - has done any preparation. And and so I think it's interesting that we've - that it - it showed up as a way that public speaking showed up with democracy and then it went away and now we're - and now we're in all the trouble that we're in.That was absolutely what made me want to write the book and that's absolutely what kept me at it for 10 years is because I thought this stuff is so important. I think I psyched myself out because it was so important to me to get it right. And, but I do think just on the most basic level democracy is about everyone having a voice. And if none of us has a voice because we never learned how to use it because we never learned how to do it in school, how is democracy supposed to work? And I don't think it's a coincidence that we're in the trouble we're in and the fact that we stopped teaching public speaking. So really, up until a couple hundred years ago, everyone with an education learned about this stuff, and now no one does. And you could argue if everyone learned how to speak up and argue better, wouldn't it be even more of a mess than it is now? Cause like in Greece, they had a really rowdy disastrous democracy and they eventually crapped and burned. So you could say, is this stuff bad? But I think in the same way you could say is free market capitalism good or bad? Obviously free market capitalism isn't doing a great job right now of saving the environment and stuff like that. But if you had some kind of free market capitalism that works, that has some guardrails on it and it works for people and for the planet instead of just for corporations, I still believe that seems to have worked better than other systems and so with speech, I have just as an article of faith. I have to believe the same thing. It's better if we can all speak up than if no one can speak up and I might be wrong, but that's really the only thing I'm equipped to believe. And so it may be that when everyone speaks up, we just crash and burn. But I think that now what's going on is where everyone hides behind the internet and very few of us can speak up. It doesn't seem to be working very well. And the Surgeon General came out with a report last year that was like our crisis of disconnection or our crisis of loneliness or something. And so you chart every single measure of civic health - suicide rates, trust in neighbors, amount of time spent with friends, amount of time spent with family, number of acquaintances who are slightly different than you, trust in the courts, in Congress, in your teacher, in your neighbor, all of these things are just going down. And I, again, as an article of faith, believe that if we could all learn to speak up better and be better understood, that would be better than everyone walking around silently being pissed off that the world doesn't understand us.So I think we've run near the end of time. And I guess the end - what do you say to somebody, because I feel like this is something that we don't think about. What do you say to the people who are listening, who wonder about their ability to communicate, their public speaking?When I work with clients, I always run them through the same paces and it doesn't really matter what they're preparing for. But the first step is always think about your audience. Who are you talking to? So I might have 10 gigabytes worth of information in my head. But if I'm talking to this type of person or that type of person, they only need to know a couple of megabytes of that information. So how do I dial down and curate or edit out the 99 percent of the stuff I know that you don't need to know. So if you're Polish or if you're old or you're young or you're this or you're that determines everything about what you need to know from me or what you want to know from me. So if I get rid of that 99 percent of my information before I talk to you, that makes it so much easier for me to talk to you. And it also makes me stop babbling and start talking to you like a person. You're an old Polish conservative who's only interested in blah blah blah. Okay, that's very different than a fourth grader who - you know what? Just yeah instead of me walking around with this huge head of steam. Oh my god I know so much stuff. I've got to tell everybody all of it, right? Here's what you need to know and that keeps me from babbling and it makes it so you get what you need. And then you like me more and we connect more and we walk away you having had a better interaction. So that's the first thing. The second thing is always just figure out what you want people to know or do as a result of what you said. So I want this old Polish conservative person to, I don't know, vote for my environmental policy or come to my hot dog store or whatever. Great. That's why I'm talking. Anything that I'm saying to you that doesn't assist with that aim is not necessary. It's a waste of time. It's going to make that person bored. It's going to give me too much to talk about, too much to think about. And then that will make me nervous and anxious. So those two thingies dial it down to something manageable. And all the work I do with people comes down to that.I feel like that second question is always harder than one might think. Yes, they don't really always have an idea. I don't really - not like I guess it revealed to me the degree to which I'm really only thinking about the things that I want to talk about because I just want to talk about these things. I want to spend time with these ideas. I've any - I've totally forgotten you're there.It's really antisocial. So at first when I heard that was a Toastmasters thing. Actually, what is your purpose? For talking, ask yourself what you want your audience to know or do is - I thought it was Machiavellian and horrible. Like I'm not some Svengali who's trying to get everyone to do what I want them to do. I'm just this cool writer who has information to share. The idea that is totally wrong. And the idea that's even antisocial was profound. How is it antisocial? Because if I think that you're just going to sit there passively for half an hour listening to me talk about my book and there's no social transaction going on between us. I don't want you to believe anything. I just want to share my facts. That's b******t. It's superficial and it's not realistic. I want you to know about my book about slavery so that you vote for some policies that will protect farm workers or you vote for my policy or you go to some website where there's a farm worker labor rights group and you give them money or you buy my book or whatever but I want you to do something. And so once I start to think about what I want you to do, I'm then thinking about you. Oh, Peter doesn't have the money to buy my book, or Peter doesn't have the time to go to the website I want him to go to. Great, I have to think about the reality of your life. Why don't you have the time? How can I get you to understand that it's going to help you to find the time? And so I start thinking about you a lot more, and me and my facts a lot less. And that's the magic of public speaking. That's the way that we connect to people, shockingly, is to start thinking about other people instead of our head full of information. Yeah.I want to talk about my favorite client of all time. This guy came to me. It was very smart. Short foreign guy working for a big huge fortune 50 bank and he was in a very technical part of the operation and he said his boss - everyone liked him but his boss said you talk too much and you're bumming people out because you talk too much and he came to me. He said I know that this is a real thing. Can you help me solve it? And I said I can try, let's see. So we went through those same two paces that we've talked about. Who's your audience and what do you want them to know or do? And just going through that, I - I said, what is your purpose? Because it seemed to me like he was trying to show off. He wanted everyone to think he was smart and that - when I wrote my book, I realized I had a similar thing where I was always pursuing this agenda of wanting everyone to think I was really interesting and original. And once you realize they don't care, they want to know something else, then that puts you on a very different track  for how you're going to talk to them. So with this guy, he realized, yeah, I don't want them to think I'm short or foreign, I just want them to think I'm smart because I am smart. I said there's a better way for you to demonstrate that. And, maybe we worked together for six hours and he totally got over that problem. And then he went to his boss and he said, I got over that problem. Now promote me. Cause I'm a couple levels down lower than I should be. And you guys are always talking about your DEI stuff, promote me. And they started hemming and hawing. And so he said forget you. And he just went and interviewed at some other bank and he got a job there, two levels higher, but all of this was because he didn't know how to talk to people well, and he was actively offending people or distracting them or bumming them out with the way he talked, even though he was a really likable and smart guy.Yeah, I'm remembering too in some of our previous conversations you talk about - there's like a myth of confidence that it's a problem of confidence, right?That's great. Every other public speaking coach out there or trainer or whatever they spent a lot of time talking about anxiety and confidence, and the reason you can't do this is because you're anxious. We'll teach you how to be less anxious and more confident. And the Romans and the Greeks taught all of this stuff for 2,000 years with no mention of that. The anxiety is not the problem, the fact that you don't know how to use words or rhetoric is the problem. Once you know how to use words and rhetoric better, and make your points better, it'll work better. And then you'll have confidence that actually, yes, you do know how to do this. And you don't have some psychological condition that is permanent, that is keeping you from doing it well. You have literally millions of people walking around thinking that they're mentally ill when really they just lacked some basic training in this stuff.Yeah. Yeah. It's remarkable. And I'm complicit in my spreading of that public speaking fear of public speaking more than death. Yeah, I should really think about that. I won't say it ever again because I want you to think I'm smart.And I do.All right. So we've run at the end of time John. Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. I appreciate it.Thank you too Peter. It was super fun. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Joshua Michael Schrei is a writer, teacher, photographer and lifelong student of world mythologies and cosmologies, and the creator of The Emerald podcast. I first met Josh when we were young in San Francisco. He was part of the amazing group of people at The Milarepa Fund who organized the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. I hadn’t spoken to him in years, when people started sending me this episode of his podcast: “So You Want to be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic POwers (The AI Episode).”The podcast is pretty amazing, and is based on a beautiful premise “that the imaginative, poetic, animate heart of human experience — elucidated by so many cultures over so many thousands of years — is missing in modern discourse and is urgently needed at a time when humanity is facing unprecedented problems.”I've just started this conversation series as a way of getting into conversation with people that I'm really curious about. I start all of them with this same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian, and she has this question, which I've totally stolen from her. I tend to over-explain it because it's a big, beautiful question. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer in any way that you want. And the question is, where do you come from?Where do I come from? There are many levels with which one could answer a question such as this. The simple answer is that I guess I come from originally upstate New York. I was born in upstate New York and moved at a pretty young age to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Beyond that, there are layers and layers we could go into.I think I come from a place where storytelling was a really important part of my life and my childhood and shaped a lot of how I see things. I came from a place where my parents were really immersed in spiritual tradition, and that particular spiritual tradition had a lot of story attached to it. Those stories conveyed quite a bit of enchantment about the world and the nature of being and living.I think I come from a place that is infused with that enchantment. As I discovered a world in which not every place and not everyone has such a vision, I think over time, it became clear to me that what I needed to work to do was to help bring a little taste of that enchantment and that spark to our modern lives, which have become, I think, increasingly disenchanted.So that's where I come from.Can you tell me a little bit about what you remember about being a child in Santa Fe?Early childhood was in upstate New York, so zero to ten was at a Zen Buddhist community in upstate New York. Then we moved to Santa Fe when I was ten.It's funny, I like to talk about the subject matter more than about myself, but I can dive into some early memories. I remember in relation to the type of work I do now, this work of re-enchantment that I'm talking about, I remember the big meditation hall temple where everyone used to gather. I remember a childhood filled with ritual and I remember a big drum made of wood that used to be beaten as people were chanting.I remember the stories. A lot of the stories. I remember a story of someone following a bouncing rice ball down into the underworld, and I remember a story of a talking fox, and I remember stories of a selfless parrot that single-handedly tried to put out a forest fire. All of these things, I think, shaped a vision at a very early age.So I think some of my earliest memories are memories of ritual and story, and that doesn't seem out of character.Do you have a memory of maybe what you wanted to be as a kid, like young Josh, either in upstate New York or in Santa Fe? Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up?I went through standard little boy phases like fireman and astronaut and that kind of thing, but I remember, really from very early on, having this kind of vision of the spiritual seeker wanderer traveler type figure, which isn't that great for bringing home the bacon, as they say. It's not an optimal career choice necessarily.But my childhood was filled with stories of seekers. Then we lived in India for a year when I was 13, which really had a very strong impact on me. All through high school, all I wanted to do was return and study and travel and study and travel and study and travel. That really, I think, formed the basis of a lot of exploration.Now, did I put two and two together and think about how that would actually translate into living a life? Probably not so much. But I had visions of Himalayan horizons and hidden monasteries and long time spent in caves and these types of things. And that shaped a lot of my early vision.Can you tell me a story about your parents? What were they about? What were they up to and what kind of life did they model? They seem to have modeled something for you.What they lacked in what you could call real-world pragmatism, they made up for in a sense that this life is to find meaning and this life is to seek greater depths than are on the surface. And that study, spiritual study, is important. They were parents who were children of the sixties and whose lives were in upheaval, as many were in the late sixties, and found spiritual practice, not in the woo hippie sense, but in the sense of actual serious Buddhist practice.When I talk about my parents, I'm talking about my mom and my stepdad because my real dad left the scene pretty early. My mom was 21 when she had me. So looking back now, I'm like, wow, you were a child when you had me as a child, and we grew up together in many ways.They weren't so big on the balancing checkbooks aspect of life; that came much later for them. But they did instill in me a very deep sense of a life in which there is seeking to be done. And there are paths to follow and the importance of ever-expanding horizons and this type of thing.So what was it like to grow up with that seeking? You and I, our paths crossed in the late nineties with the Tibetan freedom concerts and the Milarepa fund. I feel like my experience is very... I had a very mainstream suburban... There was no seeking going on in my childhood. I wonder how you felt met by the culture or by peers with this upbringing. Did you feel like you could find a place for yourself or did you feel like it was a struggle? I think it was both. I think that there were times both before and after you and I crossed paths that it was difficult. In that time that we crossed paths, there was a kind of counterculture container for a lot of the stuff that I'd been exploring and seeking all my life. There were people in the mainstream music world, which I had always been interested in music and played music, who were interested in the depths of ancient traditions and in having a dialogue that's more than just the common rock star pop music dialogue.That time period for me provided, I think, a lot of "Oh, there is a home for the things that I've always felt." It's interesting. I feel like before that, I think I had wandered a bit trying to figure out what exactly my path in this world was. And then after that special time period of those concerts and everything dissolved, I wandered a little bit more. A lot of it for me was about finding a way in which the vision of the world that I had held so dear for so long could reach people in a meaningful way.I remember you and I having talks about this kind of thing in terms of writing because you and I are both writers. I went through a lot of frustrations until I think I finally realized that the stuff I was writing was meant to be spoken aloud. Because I always tended to write in an oral rhythmic way, and I would get feedback like, "Hey, this is too repetitive." And now I'm like, "Not for an ancient bard, it's not."So I think there is probably a very classic artist's struggle or outcast's struggle story that wove its way throughout my life for quite a long time, which was what to do with this spark that I feel, what to do with this wonder, what to do with this vision of ancient traditions and faraway places.I felt so strongly that there's a longing for and a want for something deeper and greater meaning than we've been presented with in the kind of late capitalist model. And for a long time, it was a matter of not really knowing how to bring that forth in the world. It took me a while. It took me a long time. And that journey, I think there's a lot of people who are on that journey now, and I think we can talk about this, but I think there's a massive meaning crisis in the world, and I think that journey is important.The journey of "I could go this route and do this kind of standard thing, or I could go this route and do this standard thing, or even I could make use of all these traditional art forms." Or when I get to the core of it, strip that away. And what really do I have to say? What is it urgent for me to say? What am I longing to say? And how do I say it? And can I say it in a way that does justice to both the inner longings that I feel and the needs of the times, I guess I would say.Tell me a little bit about the mythic body and the emerald and the origin of that. You're talking about it now, but how do you describe what it is that you're doing? And how is it going? It seems like it's beautiful. The stuff you're putting out is amazing. But I'd love to hear you just talk about where it came from and how you talk about it.It came... I can see a few different streams that really led to it. One of them, in a purely reactive sense, was that frustration with the publishing industry. I had tried writing for quite a long time, and the writer's process... The process of sitting alone and composing something and then before the days of Substack, it was like you wait for that thing to either be accepted or rejected by this kind of arbitrary body who you never actually have any direct interaction with, and all the magic of story and direct interchange can get totally lost in that. It's incredibly time-consuming and the reward these days isn't that great.After years of writing stuff that was at that point sitting on the shelf, I was just like, I have to find a way to get these stories out. I have to find a way to... And I knew from teaching yoga, somatic disciplines, and telling mythic stories integrated into the class, that people really resonated with the way I spoke and really resonated with the content that I was bringing. But I also knew I was reaching 30, 40 people at a time in that context, and I knew that there would be more souls out there who would be resonating with the things that I was saying.It just seemed obvious to me after a while. No, this stuff is meant to be shared. It's meant to be out there. It's meant to be spoken aloud. And there's people who are going to resonate with it. And you just need to dust off the old microphone left over from my band and spoken word days and give it a try. And that's really what I did.And then simultaneous with that, the study of myth and story has been something that's been with me for my entire life. And what I really saw culturally is that discourse, especially with the rise of the Internet, was taking on this incredibly abstracted, conceptual, analytical flavor to it. Stories that used to live in a way that they informed actual transformation and culture, stories that were told in initiatory processes, stories that were told in festivals... all of this was being lost, and what was replacing it seemed to me to be a discourse that had gotten really dry.You could say it had been abstracted from its body in a way, and what was happening with the internet discourse and even with these traditions that I love is that people were just blathering on about it on the internet with no real anchor into the felt aspect of it. How does this feel? How does this transmit? How does this open up visionary spaces in you as you listen to it? And that felt to me like something that I needed to try to address and bring some more life to. Because I think, as I'm sure you are aware and follow, the state of discourse these days is troubling, let's just say.And when you create an environment in which basically people live within these kind of conceptual echo chambers and then just throw ideological barbs at each other across digital space with no actual relationality, I think it's profoundly damaging and I think it's leading us in really questionable directions. And the podcast is my whatever small attempt to seek to bring breath and spark and life back to discourse.You mentioned the meaning crisis and the word meaning. I use it. My newsletter is called "That Business of Meaning." And I think I know what I'm talking about when I talk about meaning. But what is... when we say that we're in a meaning crisis, what are we actually talking about? What do you mean when you say meaning?There's that classic question that Wendell Berry asked, which is, "What are people for?" What are people for? What are we here for? What are we here... What is this life about? What are we here to do? And I think that's like the start of that inquiry into meaning. It's really what are we here for? And then there are varying, sometimes overlapping cultural mythologies that have sought to answer that question over time and basically say, "Okay, your purpose on this earth is to be a good subject of the Catholic Church and remove yourself from all sin. And maybe God will favor you when you die" and that kind of thing.That goes out the window somewhat and we get the rise of humanism, and humanism makes some probably very necessary changes. But it also leads us down this road of kind of anthropocentric humans at the center of all narratives. Loss of any depth of spiritual interaction or understanding of the cosmos, and that has now been shown to have some problems to it, too. In other words, just the purely human-centric view, especially when it's also tied in with kind of larger capitalist narratives of "don't worry, the free market's going to take care of everything," which, as back in the late nineties, we were already questioning as kids. "Don't worry. The free market... just be a good kind of worker drone. The free market will take care of everything. And maybe if you're lucky, you'll rise to the top." That narrative is not proving to be so effective either.And so you see... and I remember that late nineties time period. I'm actually going to do an episode on the nineties at some point, just to dig up some old music and walk down memory lane a little bit. But that vision in all the advertising in the nineties, everything, it was all about "this is a globalized world. Look, the internet is opening us up globally. Globalization is everything. It's going to solve all the problems. Can you even imagine living in any other world but this like free border to open market globalized world?" Now, guess what? Now we have the rise of nationalism and we have countries contracting and saying "not so fast. That's not exactly... That wasn't exactly our vision," or maybe the promised globalized world didn't actually work for everyone involved. So what's going to work? What's going to work is seal off the borders and keep all of them out. And let's get back to that original Nordic purity or whatever it is that we used to have.And all of these are mythic narratives, right? Life is governed by mythic narrative. There's always a narrative at play. The United States has a deep narrative to what it is, and that narrative shapes how we think of the world and how we think of our lives. So meaning... the meaning crisis is, I feel, an understanding that increasingly none of these mythic narratives is really doing the trick.And if we dive into what you could call ancient wisdom, which isn't as hokey as it sounds, what it really means is like the way that human beings have understood the meaning of existence for hundreds of thousands of years in varying traditions. There's a lot there that can help. There's a lot there that can help in this age of modern disenfranchisement and alienation and this kind of thing. And what that kind of asks us to do is examine our re-enchantment with the world, examine our state of enchantment with the world around us. Maybe reignite or re-spark a relationship with the living cosmos around us.And understand how... Whether it's ritual structures or some type of... In a way, it's like with the big pendulum swing against religion. It's like we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater, as the expression goes. So yes, there are very clear things to rebel against in traditional religious structures. But now we're floating in what you could call this meaningless chaos, and the narratives that are taking charge aren't really doing it either. So I see the meaning crisis as an invitation to find those deeper truths, those deeper stories, and see if there is a way to reintegrate them in our lives that can shift our fundamental relationship with the planet and with each other.So that we can actually create change in this world from a place of direct felt empathy with the living world around us. So the meaning crisis, I think, is like a collapse of the narratives... all the narratives about what this life is supposed to be about. I think those are collapsing, and the return to meaning, to me, means a return to a living, breathing, felt experience of the cosmos and of each other.I'm a big fan of Joseph Campbell. I don't know if that makes me a rookie or where he fits into your sort of worldview. But I always love that he has a quote that I always return to. In that Bill Moyers thing, he says something like, "People say that they want to know the meaning of life. I don't think that's true. They want to have the experience of being alive." That's a little bit of what you're talking about too, right? That we're getting people into their body. You talked a ton about embodiment and how disembodied everything's become. And you had this AI episode, "So you want to become a sorcerer," which kind of came at me through multiple circles. I don't know if it was something that exploded for you, but it felt... Oh my gosh, you showed up with all of this wisdom at a time when we are just so confused about what's going on. Can you tell me a little bit about your first... how would you describe your relationship with AI and your experience with that episode and what you really wanted to put out there? I feel like a lot of people resonated with how you framed AI and the challenge that it poses to us. And I'd love to hear you talk more about that.Joshua Schrei: First, just quickly on the Joseph Campbell thing. Joseph Campbell is amazing and awesome. There's areas of his work that I feel a little differently than he did about certain things or would explore things a little differently than he did. But you look at the time in which he was operating and what he brought, and it's absolutely vital and incredible. And that Bill Moyer series is fantastic. It shaped me when I was 18 years old when I first encountered it. It definitely had a huge impact on me. And that quote about the feeling of being alive... understanding that there's really a basic fundamental experience to being human and that experience has a lot to do for whatever reason with feeling separate from the world around us.You look at most creatures inhabiting the planet and they probably don't have the same level of existential crises that we have. Humans out of all creatures seem to feel this kind of distance, right? And so humans of all creatures need to have some way of having, of making a journey back, a journey to what you can call a state of remembering or re-putting ourselves back together again. And whether that's done ritually or through story, there's many ways in which that can be done. But understanding that if you want to isolate like a primal human drive, it is the drive for some type of felt reconnection. Some type of remembering. And if we don't have that in our lives, we can find it through trail running. We can find it through artistic flow. We can find it through so many different things. But if we don't have that in our lives, we will probably run around seeking it in not the healthiest ways. And that I think is key in understanding the deep liminal drives that are at play and why human beings do things.So with AI, there are probably incredible benefits that are coming with AI. There's all kinds of interesting things happening. I use AI for auto-generating coloring book images for my kids to color. It's actually probably the best use of AI that anyone's ever come up with.I'm feeling that right now. I'm so excited to try it.Except sometimes the creatures are mutated. That's the... AI still has this kind of strange, like mutant vision of the world. I use it... it's a great synthesizer of information as long as you double-check the information, cause AI will lie. If ChatGPT will deceive you, I don't know if people have noticed this, but it's true. It'll say, "Yeah, that's absolutely it. That's totally it." And I'm like, "Really?" And it's like, "On second thought, no." You got to be careful of it. Like you have to look a little deeper. But so that there's obviously benefits to AI, but in the drive to create AI, these kind of same latent drives that I'm speaking about are very present.Human beings have a fascination with tinkering with that which we shouldn't probably tinker. We have a fascination with, "Oh, let's see what is going to happen if we just kind of mess with this a little bit and mess with that a little bit." There's an overarching death narrative to AI that's been there since the very, very beginning. From the inception of AI, there has also been the parallel narrative of "this is gonna destroy us all" - "this is the thing that's going to save us, and this is the thing that's going to destroy us." This is a narrative that's incredibly influenced by Judeo-Christian apocalyptic vision, and to try to say that it's not and that those drives aren't operating within it is to ignore how mythic narrative works and how it influences culture.So you see people busily working away to achieve this kind of mystical thing called artificial general intelligence with absolutely no understanding of what it is or where it's gonna lead, and combined with this frenetic rush to market. And meanwhile, people are saying, "Yeah. And by the way, it's... There's a chance that it's just gonna kill us all." And you have to ask yourself, like, why are we doing this? And there's no way to explain it other than what you could call like deep catholic drives within the human being. It's not just "Oh, it's profitable, and it's the natural next step of technology. I know if we don't do it, they'll do it." And sure, those are all... those enter into the conversation, but that's not the... that's not the heart of it. The heart of it is a little boy playing with blowing things up. That's the heart of it. The heart of it is the sorcerer's apprentice, which I talk about in that episode. The heart of it is like, "Oop, I got access to the spell book and the master's out of the house and I'm gonna see what I can get away with. I'm gonna see what I can get away with."And that, in traditional cultures, is an impulse that needs to be somewhat curbed. That's where, like when the kind of over-seeking, over-roving adolescent mind that's "Hey, I could be master of the universe," right? When it comes along, that's when they say, "Okay, now it's time for your initiation ritual. Now it's time for you to be brought down to size a little bit. Now it's time for you to be regrown as a member of the community as opposed to just this like roving rogue with visions of world domination."And our culture of modern venture capital and what we reward and all this kind of thing is such that those roving rogue nerds with visions of global domination are now being... Still adolescent visions of global domination still coming from the place of the kid who could never get any girls in class and stuff like this are now being thrown billions of dollars in venture capital and given free rein to do whatever they want. And to me, that's frightening.I share that feeling, but in what you've just described, it really just becomes clear to me... You're in that episode, I recommend everybody listen to that episode. It's amazing the way you point out that these cultures are functioning cultures, right? They create structures around these developing young men to help them learn to wait, right? So they have a functioning culture and I'm reminded of a conversation I've had about this with Grant McCracken, who's an anthropologist that I admire quite a bit. I remember him saying that our culture very clearly is broken. It's not helping us. The role of culture is to help us develop into a functioning member of society, and we just... we're not, it's not working that way anymore. And I feel like only, in part because of what you've shared with this episode on AI, and just generally the state of the world, I feel like we are very much living in a world that's been designed by undeveloped young men. Do you know what I mean? And we're all trapped in this very masculine framework that's not healthy or productive or complete really. It's not even a full vision of what it means to be alive.No, it's a very narrow vision. And one of the first people I spoke about this with was an aboriginal author named Tyson Yunkaporta, who if you want to have a wild conversation, I recommend reaching out to him. I can put you in touch with him if you want. But he wrote a book called Sand Talk which is highly worth reading. It's about kind of indigenous systems thinking and the differences between indigenous systems thinking and modern systems thinking. And he directly says, "Look, we look at modern culture and we see an adolescent culture. We see an adolescent culture." It's like that... That phase of life... What you could call like unchecked capitalism runs on that particular slice of life that is in the roving seeking phase, right? And that roving seeking phase is beautiful and it's important. But there are other phases of life too. There are phases of life that are about much more about relational stability, for example, or how do you take those creative urges and creative drives?What Tyson said in the most recent conversation I had with him is there's always going to be rogues within every system and rogues are great and they refresh the system. And it's important to have that rogue perspective. But if you get into a place where it's all rogues, if you get into a place where the whole... look at the state of Congress right now, if you get into a place where the entire thing is being run by rogue story, then the words he used is "creation can't hold its shape." Which I thought was a really incredible way of talking about it. Basically within this kind of structure of culture, you need the constant refreshment of culture, but you also need the established kind of initiatory processes and the ways of working that keep a culture stable. And if it's all rewarding rogues, if it's all... Each... the political party, the Republican Party now is completely based on this whole "we're rogues. We're outsiders. We're going to tear the system down." And you look at the 24-hour news cycle and how it's "We're the ones who are exposing the hypocrisy on the other side. And we're the ones who are tearing this old narrative down and we're getting..." Yeah. All of it is about glorifying the kind of culture breaker.Right?Like the trickster, as it would be called in the mythic sense. It's like, all of it is about claiming this kind of trickster role and saying "We're the rogues and we're going to tear the system apart," or "I'm the rogue and I'm going to get a billion dollars in venture capital to get over this crazy, like visionary thing that I have." And you want tricksters within your culture. But you also want those tricksters to have healthy expression, but not take over the... You don't want QAnon shamans sitting in the main seat in Congress, right? And that was such an image of "Oh, the trickster has toppled the... the kind of status quo."And understanding how to make space for the creative imaginal, sometimes death-inspired vision of the roving, restless seeker, right? But also understanding that needs to be tempered and held within something. And this is what a Council of Elders is for. This is what... and our culture doesn't value that. It values that roving, seeking energy. And then it's ironic because we get two presidential candidates now who are both like 80 who can't even fulfill the role of being functional elders themselves. And what you're left with is an elderless society.Yeah.A society that doesn't have its systems in place through which the forces that would like erode society are held in check. And then it becomes like a free-for-all, which is where we're at now.What do you... so part of the diagnosis is that this culture... would you talk about the praise of waiting. You mean that in those cultures, when a disciple or a student wants to learn, the first task is just to stay. Just to wait. How do you... how do we do that? Or what do you... what kind of suggestions do you have for us to... how do we act in this environment to good end?I don't have much hope that like culture on mass is going to instantly adopt this kind of accountability of the elders type view and just suddenly be transformed. I think that the best we can do is institute it in our communities and our systems and our families. I think that's where it has to start. I think... I just taught a course on embodied ethics in the age of AI based on that episode. And I had some pretty major folks from the tech world come and take it. And I had a lot of people who are just starting out in the tech world. And to me, have that kind of course and be able to say, "Hey, no. Let's slow down a little bit" and even if you think that the voice that's saying slow down is ridiculous or out of touch or not in line with the AI arms race that's happening in the world, the voice that says slow down is still incredibly important.It's incredibly important to always have that voice to say "Really, what's the rush?" I was just talking with Jamie Wheel. I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work. Recommend checking him out. He's a super interesting guy. And we were talking about this mad techno-utopian vision rush to Mars stuff, right? And it's just really... what's the rush? Like we're living on a planet that has thousands of medicinal species of plants that generate all the food that we need, oceans that give us breathable skies where we can go outside and feel a cool breeze and look up at the moon and... We're talking about madly rushing to get to a place that is minus 40 degrees and you'll never be able to take a breath of fresh air again. Like literally what's the rush. And then you have to start to look at... Oh, the rush is for the rush itself. The anxiety is for the anxiety itself. It is an addictive... it's an addictive impulse. It's the... It's... Yeah, it's the jonesing for the fix, but the fix itself is not really like the thing in question. The thing in question is the addiction to the addiction to the longing.Yeah.And when you see it that way, when you start to see how pathological it is, then it takes you right back to that question of Wendell Berry. It's what are people for? We've got enough resources... Elon Musk... These guys have enough resources to make tremendous changes in how human beings like actually live their lives on this planet. Not to mention live an incredibly abundant life themselves. Why are we possibly rushing into space? Like, and I'm laughing just because... when you break it down, it's just ludicrous. And the only thing you can really conclude from it is that it's for the rush itself. It's for that forward-reaching Promethean anxiousness. And that I think is an area... like if there's one place for people to look... and all of the meditative traditions, all of the spiritual traditions that I've ever encountered will get us to this place where inside ourselves, we have to go into those places that are restlessly urging forward and see if we can bring some space to them and temper them and see if in bringing space to them and tempering them a little bit, that changes how we are with our families. That changes how we are with our communities and then that type of change does spread out into the world.So I don't think it's going to be a top-down thing. I think it's going to be a thing where, and I also think... like the crazier it gets, because it's gotten pretty weird out there since you and I used to hang out together in San Francisco, it's gotten pretty weird out there. The crazier it gets, I think more and more people are going to be simply not buying the program, going along for the ride. I think more and more people are going to be like, "You know what? I don't want to be an anxious, isolated mess who's like slaving away all my life to try to get to some projected future. I'm going to experiment with something different and maybe me and my friends are going to pitch in on some land and we're going to try to work things a different way" or all of that. So I think that the... what I call the somatics of it will eventually be untenable. They'll always find... they'll always find people who are willing to serve as the kind of cogs in that vision, but I think it's going to be less and less appealing and less tenable. And as that happens, I think we might see a big resurgence towards differing models of being.Do you see that anywhere now? Where do you see that happening?The kinds of people who come and take my courses, there's lots of people who are experimenting with alternative modalities of community living and different social modeling and this type of thing. And yeah, there's a lot of it and that's not easy either. Intentional community is not easy. Humans are humans no matter what you do. But I think that there's a lot of it going on and I think there's going to be a lot more of it.Can you tell me a little bit... the embodied ethics in AI in the age of AI? Can you tell me a little bit more about what you're... what you want people to get out of that course?There's some of it that's fairly specific to the tech world in the AI world. I think the foremost thing is understanding that ethics is something that needs to be felt, and it's something that needs to be embodied. It's something that needs to be actually ritualized and put into practice in our lives. In other words, if you have a young AI programmer student who is in an overarching environment in which they're being told... the overarching climate is like "rush forward and get it done. And don't worry about all that regulatory stuff. Just go for..." Like for them to take one little tiny semester course on "Oh, by the way, here's how you have to be ethical"... it doesn't... it doesn't do the job. It doesn't nearly get to the conversations that need to happen. And fundamentally with AI, what we're talking about is potentially world-altering technology, right?And with that world-altering technology, it needs to be held. It needs to be held in something. There will be government regulations that come undoubtedly. But as I see it, that's not enough. Just as with climate, I don't think it's enough to just have laws that restrict carbon emissions. I think it's part of it. It's definitely a key part of it. But ethics... like waking up to one's basic primal relationship with the living world around us. Understanding in the words of Chief Seattle, that what we do to the web of life we do to ourselves, like the most basic ethical understanding, right? What we do to the web of life we do to ourselves. Understanding that we're part of an interconnected web that is... when that understanding becomes so deeply embodied in us, and you see this in animist traditions who see every aspect of their immediate ecology and ecosystem as alive and worthy of respect and worthy of deep levels of relational interaction and reciprocity... when that becomes embodied in the human being, it changes your entire orientation around decision making and how you see the world, right?There needs to be a shift to... and this is why the very first... It was a joy to sit there with all these tech folks and... and the first thing that we did was do like a 30-minute point-by-point gratitude for all of the species and beings in the world around... in the immediate ecology around us, simply to get people into this place of "Oh, yeah, I'm just a part of an overall web, and I have a responsibility to that web..."It's just... what is it about AI that seems to have provoked this awake... awakening, awareness? I encounter the idea of multiple intelligences all the time now. I feel like the more than human world... I'm thinking about David Abram and Becoming Animal. And there's a woman I follow who's all about citizen assembly and deliberative democracy. And she's writing about governance for a more than human world. And what you're talking about... I guess there's an asterisk here. I'm wondering... I'm remembering being young with you and wondering, was the same kind of provocation happening for us then, or is there something unique about AI that invites this kind of... I'm using your language... this threshold for us to be aware, become aware, or whatever. Or beware in a way.I think it's always there. And I think that like when you and I were hanging out, it was like that challenge of something like the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, inviting people to in the height of nineties... kind of grunge cynicism to like care about something and remember that there's deeper things going on and that there's a nonviolent path and a spiritual path that has worked for people in this kind of thing. So I think that... I think the culture is always seeking it in a way.But it's true that the AI discussion has prompted... I would say, greater inquiry into the nature of intelligence and consciousness and being. And in that way, I think it's actually extremely interesting to see what has come from it. And what is going to continue to come from it? Because basically we're not talking about just the latest software upgrade for your Mac. We're talking about primal questions about consciousness, being, intelligence, all of these things. And even about things like privacy. Spirit and what spirit is... like if something replicates all of the thought patterns of Josh and movements of Josh... is it Josh or is it just a reflection? And if it's not Josh, then that suggests that there's some type of vitalizing spirit that is beyond those patterns of networks and things like that.So I think that it naturally leads to discussions that I think are very important. What I talk about in the episode is... for exactly how long were humans willing to live in a deanimated world? In other words, for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years, we saw this world as animate and alive. And then we have this little kind of flirtation with humanism. And then we take all the technologies within that flirtation with humanism... We take all the technologies and start building sentience because we ultimately, I think, understand that sentience is actually the nature of things. Even if we don't want to admit it, I think that's there.And I think that we won't live... we're constantly finding ways to animate what we consider to ostensibly be inanimate. And I think there's something for us to look at there. I think there's something for us to look at in terms of the nature of reality itself. Okay, if we're so determined to find sentience everywhere... could it be that there is sentience everywhere? Something like that. And why are we so determined to tear down gods, but then all of a sudden just build new ones right away within a few years, like really historically what amounts to a few years. It's "Okay, we're tearing down all the gods in favor of science." And now what is the apex project of science? The apex project of science... "We're going to construct... A god." Go figure, right?It shows us something about the human orientation towards the mysterious and the ineffable and towards spirit and sentience. And that's why I say... as much as we can say it's all about wanting more control in the world, it's all about wanting like greater facility to solve problems and all this kind of stuff... I think there's a big part of it that's about wanting to surrender control back to the greater. And I don't think... I don't think humans are fully happy being the ones totally in charge because ultimately we're not... ultimately nature... all of the work, all these systems of control that we're creating are like micro specs in the vastness of the story of nature.So I think that there's a discomfort with the amount of control that we think that we have. And I think that we... we won't get away from primal questions of sentience and agency and forces beyond our control because that's the nature of the place we live.Awesome. I want to thank you so much for... kind of... we're at the end of our time. I feel like we could go on forever. I really... it's wonderful to see you.Yeah, you too, man.I really love what you're doing and this has been a real joy. So thank you so much.Yeah, for sure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Alessia Clusini is a Digital Ethnographer and co-founder of London-based research firm Trybes Agency, where a team of experts with diverse backgrounds, from data science and machine learning to psychology, netnography, social sciences and marketing, pioneered AI-driven research methodologies and coupled them with social sciences to generate Hybrid Intelligence®.Alessia was nominated as one of the 6 scientists under 35 in 2018, one of the 50 most influential women in Italy in 2019 and one of the Data Leaders of the Year in the UK in 2021. In 2023 she was nominated as one of the Top 50 Women Gamechangers in TV, globally. In 2022 and 2024 she was selected as one of the people who are shaping the future of Social Intelligence.I start all these interviews with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine who is an oral historian and helps people tell their story. I use it all the time because it's such a beautiful question, but I always over explain it because it's big. Before I ask it, you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want. The question is, where do you come from?Wow, it's a big question indeed. I would love to turn the question into another question to you and find out what you find in common across all the people that you've interviewed so far. But if you want me to answer that...I'll answer that after you.Okay, cool. Where do I come from? I guess we all come from a lot of places. First, I don't know if you've heard about the concept of specific knowledge. It's not a new idea per se, but something that has been repackaged to say, what is your thing? What is your specific knowledge? The thing that makes you just have fun, go into that flow state, and that other people may find hard to understand. There are different ways to find out, and one of them is to ask people close to you. I've asked my mom, friends, husband, a client, and a close colleague. What is my thing? I tried to create this Venn diagram with many parts coming together.I would start by saying that, across different opinions and experiences in life, I come from a place of deep curiosity. My mom says that I was never looking at myself, but always looking at others. I was always coming back with further questions, and that is my drive to start with. I was born in the land of Renaissance, so I was embedded in this culture of cross-disciplinarity. I love bringing ideas together, bringing people together, being a bridge and cross-pollinator. From my upbringing, I was raised in a very tight community, so I learned very early what it is to belong and come together. It's another big idea that I'm bringing into my work and lifestyle.I carried these elements of curiosity, cross-disciplinarity, and craftsmanship from that land of Renaissance into my life. When I started exploring the world, I found those elements and got influenced by different people, beliefs, and ideas. If that makes sense.Of course, I love the description you shared of your mother of you. Do you remember as a child, what you wanted to be when you grew up?I do. I wanted to be an artist, but my grandpa, I come from a humble family, I remember vividly he wanted to know how I was going to make money. So I guess I picked the second best. I turned this dream of being an artist into something more tangible. I became a fashion designer. I wanted to become a fashion designer and I became a fashion designer.I'm curious too, that word curiosity, we use it a lot, and I just want to explore it a little bit. You said it's like your drive. What does it mean to you to be driven by curiosity?I just got back from a trip, and in the airport and station, I just sit down and look at people. I have books, a mobile, a laptop, so many emails and things to catch up with, but I just sit down and look at people. Sometimes you find these stories, like a couple that checks in and then you see them in different points in the airport, all the way to the flight, maybe to another country. I was obsessed with these people just last week. I don't know them, but I really want to know everything, and there's no way I'm going to know everything. It's a circle. I will never stop.And tell me a little bit about where you are now. We talked about where you come from and what drives you. Where are you at these days and what are you up to?At the moment, I'm physically in London. I share some of the time with Tuscany, Italy. Again, bridging places, ideas, lifestyle, it's in my nature apparently. I am the co-founder of a research firm that is specialized in netnography. For people who don't know about it, it's essentially a branch of digital ethnography. We are observing people just like ethnographers, but in the online world. We are navigating their tribes, communities, subcultures, groups, influencers, fandoms, you name it. And it's very fun. I think I found my thing.That observation never gets old. There are so many niches and emerging cultures that become really big. Let's just think about veganism or healthy living lovers. I'm just thinking of emerging cultures that I studied years ago that are now basically the mainstream.So this is my agency. It's called the Tribes Agency, T-R-Y-B-E-S. We are based in London, but we operate globally. We just closed a project where we were running ethnography from 1.0 (in real life) to netnography (2.0) to 3.0 (Roblox and virtual worlds) in China, Japan, Korea, Dubai, New York, London, Milan. The digital realm allows us to really get everywhere in a shorter time and effort.Yeah. How do you explain netnography to somebody who had never encountered it? And what does it entail?If you think about the job of an ethnographer, which is spending time within a culture, community, and people of interest that we are trying to study, we are pretty much the same, but we're doing this online. We would hang out with them where they spend the most time, whether that's a very niche forum where there are hundreds of people, or a subreddit, or a TikTok subculture, or in the case of 3.0 ethnography, actually getting into virtual worlds and walking with them. That's netnography.In a way, we can democratize ethnography a little bit. By this, I mean that we don't need six months to a year to be in the field. This allows a lot of brands and projects to have the quality of ethnographic research, which is highly observational, not intrusive, with lots of deep insights, but within a time frame and budget that is much smaller. We're talking about a month, two months, even sometimes two weeks for specific goals.You're using 1.0, 2.0. Are you talking about real world, online, and virtual? Are those the three sort of levels you're referring to?Precisely. So in 1.0 of that project, we had to work with the semiotics of the shopping experience, shadowing, mystery shopping. So understanding the ecosystem where people shop that particular brand, hanging out with them, observing them, understanding them, and then opting out. Of course, some in-depth interviews to ask deeper questions, to understand the why. Because I don't know if you agree with me, but I prefer to be agnostic in terms of methodologies. I think we should complete every method we use in research with the best we get. We always complete with in-depth interviews.And then 2.0 is netnography, hanging out with them on TikTok, Instagram, in their words, with their peers and cultural influencers. And then 3.0 is in those virtual worlds where you have legs and arms. Yeah, I know.When did you first encounter research? I know you started in fashion and your journey into the space was a little indirect and zaggy, right? But when did you first encounter netnography or the idea of research for brands? Do you remember your first discovery of, "Oh, wow, I could do this for a living"?Yeah, totally. A little bit by chance, a little bit by, I don't know, maybe it was meant to be. When I was working in fashion, I used to do lots of trend hunting. In fashion, it's not about design as in drawing, but it's about understanding what people want two years in advance. It's about interpreting cultural codes, identity. It's about intercepting those needs of people, more than what people would actually talk about. That's a fashion designer's job.As a fashion designer, as a trend hunter, I was already trying to intercept what was going on with markets and people. But then what happened was, I was working for this brand called Miss 60. It was a big brand. And then Zara and H&M came to the market, sort of the old fast fashion disrupted the category. At the same time, there was the global financial crisis. So I had this call to reinvent myself, and I moved abroad, learned English, started living in a country very far away, didn't have any contacts there. Big change.And I came across this thing of guerrilla marketing. Small budget, big ideas, making something that is fun and creates conversations organically. And that was another pivotal moment because I thought, okay, I can do this. I actually love it. I see that part which is marketing and intercepting needs is more fun for me than the design itself.So I came back to Europe, I was in Australia back then. I came back to Europe and pursued an education in marketing. I practiced a bit. It was the time of social media. I was working in social media, making big numbers, again intercepting those cultures, those trends. I was like, okay, why? Why are these people belonging to these ideas that we're launching? This is the thing. This is the most important deal. This is what's driving success for business, for products, for communication, for everything.I started studying again, and I was really lucky to meet incredible thinkers and doers. I remember the first things that caused it to the person that gave this name to netnography, publishing amazing stuff. Giordano from Italy, with the Istituto di Etnografia Digitale, also a person that taught me a lot, influenced me a lot, starting from these academics slash thinkers. Then I was also traveling and doing my own ethnography, interviewing and living with tribes and communities that had in common some sort of disruption, innovation within a society. And it was fun. It was a full year of learning, doing, getting my feet into something that was, at the time, just academic.And then I came across this word of the transformative festivals, like Burning Man, which is the most famous one. And I thought, why don't I do the first research on Burning Man and transformative festivals ever? I want to decode transformation. I want to decode this sense of coming together to change the world. So I put that in practice, I created this research, and that was my first gig possibly. And it was great. It got me lots of people coming to us and saying, "Oh, this is so cool." So I thought, okay, then I am going to do this. I'm going to find the people, I am going to find the tools, create the tech where I need it. And this is it. I'm going to apply netnography because brands and projects actually need this deep cultural understanding.Yeah. What do you love about the work? Like where's the joy in it for you?The joy is in me sitting in the airport at scale. I am sitting there and all the researchers involved, all the people that we interview, all the people that we observe, they're amazing. And we do the extra step of bringing them to the client. So part of my education back then, when I got into netnography first, it was the old user-generated word. Again, I was in the right moment at the right time in the right place. It was the first wave of social media.So we saw this part, they could change deeply. From television, I remember television, I remember three channels on television and watching television passively. I remember radio, and I saw this change with digital where everybody had a voice and they could co-create meaning with brands and projects. So that was wow. The joy comes from that. Yes, let's have a say. Let's create something together.There is no top-bottom, but bottom-up, if that makes sense.And what does that look like on a project, or what you're describing? Maybe I'm not fully understanding. In what way are you co-creating with people?We started this program a few years ago that is called the Cultural Opinion Leaders. As a byproduct of an ethnography, you identify the cultural leaders of any topic. And they go beyond the influencers' metrics. It's not about having the numbers. It's about entering the cultural fabric, to use a fashion term again. We thought, why don't we bring those cultural opinion leaders to brands and we co-create together?At the same time, I could see that in research, I don't know if you found the same, but in research, especially qual research, it was getting harder and harder to recruit research participants. It was getting really costly, but beyond costly, the quality of the participants that the companies would recruit was sometimes really not that great. And it would just compromise the whole quality of the research, right?So I thought, okay, two birds with one stone. You can enter those cultural fabrics and you can systemize a way to recruit great participants that are not just people, panelists, people paid to answer questions, but they are the forerunners of their communities. If you talk about veganism, those people really care about veganism. If you talk about tech, those people are at the forefront of tech. These are the best people to involve to create your next big thing.Yeah. How has it changed? I'm curious. My experience is, I'm a very traditional, face-to-face, qualitative person. I don't have experience with netnography, but I had this experience where a lot of research went online and it became less qualitative to me. At least, it felt that way. I'm wondering, with all the different methods that you have at your disposal, how does face-to-face qual fit in? How do you think about the different ways of learning, of netnography versus depth interviews? How do you define the proper role for each in a project or in your work?It's a big deal. I think, as I said before, we should be agnostic of methodologies. Let me give you an example. We are embarking on a project where we have to reimagine the death care experience of the future. I want classic ethnography there. I want in real life ethnography. I want possibly my researchers to sit down, have a tea with these people, because these people that we're going to interview just had a loss. We're going to talk about funerals, and the body language, the vibes in the room, the immersive listening that qual researchers are able to create, generate, is priceless.It's really hard, Peter, to define the quality of qual. It is really hard to sell qual research. We always say that among colleagues, because it's not about saving time and money, which are two metrics that we can easily define. It's about getting deeper. It's about getting the right quality of insights. It's about ultimately helping brands and projects to get into the right path. We could talk about this for ages, and I still feel like I'm not going to tackle the right words. I do share that, absolutely.What I love about what I understand about your work is that it has a deeply qualitative spirit in the digital space. And I hadn't really encountered that before. So I'm really interested to hear you talk a little bit more. How do you bridge the depth of quality you get from face-to-face? What happens in that netnography? Your face lit up earlier when you talked about hanging out with them. Just the sentence "hanging out with them in TikTok or in subreddits," what does that look like? Can you tell me a story about what it's like to be a netnographer hanging out with a participant in a subreddit on a project? What happens and what's it like?Let me tell you a story of people that we identified. For another brand, we needed to understand the most loyal consumers. The story of this girl was essentially that the brand, a fashion brand that is probably the most democratic in terms of sizes, shaped her identity. When she encountered the brand and she was able to dress up properly in her opinion, so cool, she was comfortable. She was finding herself within her group, standing out but fitting in at the same time.She fell in love. There is a case of extreme, we call it marketing loyalty, but there's so much more into it. It's about this girl being able to be herself. She could daily create a new version of herself because of a brand. These are the kind of things that you meet with netnography.She was building her audience, being a cultural opinion leader within the brand's realm. And that's why we came across her. Then we hired her to in-depth interview her and then finally to co-create with the brand because we found their point of view extremely insightful, more insightful than anybody we could ever meet. You know what I mean? So that's the kind of thing.Yes, it's amazing. And what, how has...are you...what's the state of netnography now? Do you feel like it's growing and becoming more common or am I just the only one that's out of the loop on netnography? Which is very likely.No, actually it's a good point. It's growing and it's getting more and more scientific. As we speak, there was just the netnographic conference in Milano last week, I think it was, but it's very academic. By academic, I don't mean to say I don't like academic, you see what I mean? But my dream was always to bring it to action and to make it really spread out across brands, across agencies. I think all of us should use much more of it. Not many know actually what netnography is and how to get there.There's also, if we zoom out from netnography, there's the social listening industry or social intelligence industry as Dr. Gillian calls it, which is extremely interesting as well. So there are a lot of companies nowadays that have a department within the company that is dedicated to listening to all conversations around their brand, around trends, topics and so on. I still think that netnography, which is bringing in academics and social scientists to the social listening, is a deeper level of understanding, if you see what I mean.Yeah, I really want to parse that apart because I feel that, and I know that about you, but I'm not...But I want to make that distinction because I also, with your permission, want to be a little provocative. I always struggled when social intelligence, when social media arrived, all of a sudden the corporate world used the word "listening," and they're really just reading social media. So it's got that kind of Orwellian b******t meter on it basically, right? That says that they're listening to people, but they're not actually listening.But what you described with netnography is more aligned with how I think of listening, where you're giving a person your attention. They know you're giving...you're in some dialogue with them and you are listening. So can you help me understand, maybe it's very obvious, but the ways in which netnography is, and digital ethnography is, much more human-centered than social intelligence? Or just how they interact?Yeah, absolutely. I feel for you because, they're like, you believe in listening and seeing listening being exploited in that way, it must feel something. Yes, it's very different. First of all, I want to be really practical about it. I think if you have ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists to analyze what they call data, which is actually, we could open a huge parenthesis on which kind of data we analyze, which is non-numbers based.Thick data is lots of qualitative conversations. It's semiotics, it's what people share about their identity, it's really deep. It's not numbers at all. So to be tangible, to be practical, first of all, if you bring experts like those social scientists to the picture, it's already changing the whole picture because these are people, and I work with them every day, that really deeply care about people. They are the people scientists.There's nothing that a web analyst can do beyond them, it's a different job. So that's the first separation, it's a different job.What is the job? Because I feel like part of what I love about these conversations is making explicit very fundamental things, you know what I mean? And so what is the job of that crew with thick data? And what makes it so valuable?First of all, this is a great question, and we should actually define it, because most of the time I think people don't understand. We know, maybe we're not good at explaining it well yet. The first thing is, these are the people scientists.There are a number of ways you can ask questions, Peter. But the way we ask questions, me, you, and our teams, is a way to allow people to tell us the closest thing to the truth. There's no such thing as the one truth for people, but we know that people hardly remember, hardly are honest about what they feel even with themselves.Therefore, instead of asking, let me give you a practical example, which is a true story, it was asked to me by a client a couple of months ago. They were like, "Why don't you just ask people what are their values?" And I'm like, "No, because people don't define their values. They don't remember their values."But if you walk them through an experience and they have memory of that experience, and you ask the whys in the right moments and you observe where they hesitate, where they light up, what's going on with them, then you might get to the why of things. You might get to the values of things. This is much more what social scientists do.They care so much about what people believe and feel, their attitudes, their true behaviors, their values, that they have ways to get there that are not just filling up a survey, which is definitely not what we're talking about.Yes. I love hearing you talk about this and I really appreciate how you articulated the power of the question. I was, and maybe I'm diverting us, but I remember I was at your website and you talk about how marketers still market according to demographics. And this was another fundamental thing I wanted to ask you about, because it seems like it's a baseline assumption, that's how one goes to market, according to demographics. But what do you suggest to them instead? And in what way is that sort of wrong-headed?When we started, we actually got some...we started challenging the idea of demographics back in the days at the very beginning, simply because you cannot define purchasing behaviors, values, attitudes, anything by saying, "Alessia, 41, Caucasian, born in Tuscany, living in London." People don't know that I'm a huge fan of Billie Eilish, for instance. I'm totally out of my own demographic in so many ways, but I am.And so we, again driven by the interest of getting to deeply understand people, we challenged this concept of demographics and created the first segmentation by interest and we call that topicgraphics. Instead of a demographic, we have a segmentation that is based on topics.We studied all kinds of topicgraphics, from niche to niche. For instance, I remember, I think we mentioned last time we talked about the mermaid fans. One of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the U.S. sells mermaid fins, right? And so the mermaid lovers, I thought it was like small numbers, but it wasn't in the end. Still a niche, right?And that's a topicgraphic. A topicgraphic is also parents, because they have this topic in common, which is how to raise kids, which is really important for them. And it drives their habits, their attitudes, their behaviors. These are the topicgraphics. And I'm super glad that nowadays, five, six years later, it's something that even more established research firms are adopting.Yeah.I guess it's the nature of startups to challenge the established word, to bring on some innovation, isn't it?I feel like in my career, maybe it's just the past bunch of years, but the idea of tribes is very common. Well, not very common, but it's become more popular. We've got this layer of cultural understanding that has become much more accessible to people.So now marketing people talk about subcultures, right? And community. I'm just wondering, what do they struggle with the most in terms of learning or understanding community?I feel the biggest challenge there is to understand that people are not just consumers. People are people and we're complex, we shift. Consumers are what marketers usually are taught in school to create personas out of. So you have the persona, which the word "persona" per se comes from the mask, the ancient time masks. So that says it all. We are not personas. We are not oversimplifications and detailed, weirdly detailed oversimplifications of people. We are people.So there are a lot of things that we decide to do and then afterwards we justify them. And that's why we cannot ask the right questions in so many realms. And that's why we need to observe people. We are in a context of faster-paced changing cultures and subcultures because of tech, AI, social media, you name it.And so it's a very complex reality we're living. And I feel the biggest struggle for marketers is to justify their very simple metrics, the marketing metrics, upon very complex people. It's really hard, as a matter of fact.Yeah. How do you mean, can you tell me more about that?Within this realm of cultural understanding, our bread and butter every day is to understand complexity, while marketing, as a definition, is trying to track trackable metrics. So I feel, to answer your question, what is the biggest challenge for marketers to tackle those big trendy words like communities and tribes, etc., is to address the elephant in the room, which is people are complex. Communities are not.I think for brands, they are a concept of people coming together because they belong together. So if you guys want to tackle that and you're ready to do it, you have to be willing to go into a path of complexity, understanding people, understanding the limits of marketing and stepping back and saying, "Okay, these people belong together. Why do they belong together? I might enter that room as opposed to splashing from the top some marketing strategy."We're near coming near the end of our conversation, our time together. What are you looking forward to? Like the next couple of years, as you look ahead, are there any big changes you're looking forward to or any work or projects that you're interested in and passionate about?So many at the moment. I'm really interested in this relationship between human and AI. Thank you. I feel the biggest deal in AI, the main categories of AI solutions, are these agents, basically assistants, advisors, and companions.And I think it's very interesting. Borderline dangerous. We need to tackle opportunities really well because it's going to change the workforce, it's going to change humankind to have this AI collaborating with us all the time, to be our assistant, our internship person, to be our agent and do all the job for us, to be our coach, our therapist, our nutritionist, and then finally to be our companion, our girlfriend and all the implication of culture, gender, you name it. I think this is the most interesting thing at the moment.So I'm really focusing on that with a couple of projects. I did pioneer back in 2018, thanks to my partner who actually told me the concept of hybrid intelligence. So co-intelligence between human and AI, really stating perhaps the obvious, but it wasn't, which is social scientists and humans have to be in the loop at all times.We can automate and we need to collaborate as opposed to race. And five years, six years later, now this thing is more urgent, it's more dangerous, Peter. So I feel like we need to write the next chapter of that collaboration. And I feel this urge. So I'm beginning this new chapter of human-AI collaboration. Let's see where it takes us. It's exciting, challenging, two sides of the same coin.The hybrid intelligence, can you tell me more about that? I'm super...We're all, I feel like we've all been, we're all in the same ocean, you know what I mean? When it comes to this AI, the way that it was launched out into the world.And I've had my own experience of experiencing it. It seems to be, because it's so transformational, there's no way of encountering it without really just getting really existential. Like it gets to first principles. I just was like, what do I...What is this? This changes...There's no way for me to think about generative AI without ending up at the question of what do I do? What's my work? What, you know what I mean? What's my value?And I saw, so I love...I love the fact that you were here in 2018 and this hybrid intelligence, this idea that we could be in a race or we could collaborate. And so where are you...I'm just...talk to me about where you are right now and what makes hybrid intelligence so necessary.Now it is happening, so I cannot, we cannot deny it. In 2017, 18, it was a thing to say, "I know we are going there. Let's work in a way that is bringing progress and wellness and happiness to humankind."But now it's happening already, and there are people grieving when there's a change of an algorithm, right? And there are people having expectations from humans because they have an expectation from machines and we are essentially living a little bit, allow me this metaphor, a little bit like during the pandemic. We are experiencing a sort of open sky experiment where everybody's in.And if we, the researchers, don't understand what's going on, don't expect the techies to do, because their goal is not that in the first place. Their goal is to make the top performing AI. It is not to make us happier, healthier, and better as humankind. Does that make sense? Sorry for the oversimplification, but I'm concerned about the time.Oh, no, that's magic. No, it's perfect. It's beautiful. And I couldn't agree with you more. And I do want to respect your time. And I'm wondering if there's a...oh, you were excited as I was speaking. I saw you reacting to what I was saying. What were you resonating with?Because people like you make existential questions when they interact with AI. And that's why I bring people like you to the AI. That's exactly it. So we need to revise and augment AI, even just, it's not just about the risk, it's to tackle opportunities, is to go deeper, is to understand the breadth and the depth of what this thing is going to do with us together, working, coaching, helping out, being our girlfriend, it's very important.When you, the way you word it, the way you say that, it said it all. That's the point.Thank you so much. I'm so excited that we got to meet and connect and I really appreciate you accepting my invitation to talk this through. Yeah. I thank you so much.Thank you so much.All right. Bye.Bye. Bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Gunny Scarfo is the co-founder of Nonfiction Research. Previously, he was Head of Strategy at VICE Media's digital agency, and Head of Strategy at Tenthwave, as well as the Inaugural Board President at Brooklyn Poets.He responded to my newsletter one day a few years ago, and we’ve stayed in touch since. I was excited to meet for the first time with this conversation. Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me. Nice to meet you face to face finally.I know. I'm going to intercede your normal first question and ask you what you and I just talked about before we started recording. We're subverting the genre. I was just saying that I've been on a handful of podcasts and not once has anyone talked to me in advance and said, "Hey, here's what I, as an artist, am trying to bring forth in my podcasts. Don't talk so much about yourself, talk about your work," or "Don't talk about your company, talk about yourself. I'm trying to do this podcast to inspire young people coming up," or anything like that. So let me begin your interview by asking you the question: What do you hope to bring out of these conversations with people? Because I'm a fan of yours. I love your work.Yeah, I appreciate it. We've just only met but it makes perfect sense that this is how you would arrive. I appreciate the question, and calling me an artist to describe it is also very flattering. I feel like the answer is that I backed into it, you know what I mean? Like it was a way of not doing something else, and then I realized that I had people receiving the email and saying nice things to me about it. Then I realized, oh wait, I could actually talk to them because I'm a people person. I am curious about people and, as an independent, I'm alone a lot. So it's also this opportunity to connect and hear how other people talk about their work. I think that's what I did - not come in with a structured approach. I invited people into conversation and then I've developed this flow.I think what I want is to get to know people, understand their relationship with work, and then I want them to tell me that qualitative research is important and why. That's my explicit selfish motivation. I'm curious about how research, the work that I do, fits in the world that everybody else inhabits.I love that. You describe yourself as a "brand listener." I've never seen that term before and I love it. I think it's a really bold choice to describe yourself as a listener because everyone else is looking to talk. Everyone else is listening to profess how brilliant they are at this or that, or advance their POV on this or explicate their thought leadership. To describe yourself as a listener, I think, is really bold and fun.I love hearing that. It was very conscious. After years of being a moderator in the corporate market research machine and feeling like an instrument that wasn't really respected, I wanted to celebrate what's happening when you're actually listening to people and trying to understand them and explore their experience.The French have an expression - I can't speak French, so I can't say it, but I think it translates to something like "professional deformation." It's the aspect of your work that deforms who you are as a person, for better or worse. You will meet someone and just immediately look at their shoes. It's the impact that your work has on you. One of the things that I find is after, I don't know, hundreds or thousands of conversations with people where your job is to listen, you develop a different ear for what people say. I'm going to verbosely set up this question to see if you experience this:A normal person will hear a sentence like, "Oh, I went skydiving last week with my brother in Colorado." A normal person will hear that sentence and try to relate to it, like "Oh, my friend is skydiving." But as a listener, as an interviewer, you don't do that. You hear every piece of that sentence as a thread that you could pull to go deeper: "Is this the first time you've gone skydiving? How close are you with your brother? Is he still living in Colorado? Did you grow up in Colorado? Do you normally do daredevil things or is this just a one-off sort of thing?" As a listener, you hear every phrase that a person says within a sentence as a potential thread.Building up to my very leading question, it drives me nuts in casual conversation when I'm in a group of people just socially, and no one is pulling any thread. Someone says something and I'm like, "Wow, there are 14 interesting things I'd love to know," but then people just move on. I'm curious if you have this, because if there's another person on Earth that has this, it might be you. Go ahead and disappoint me, but do you experience this as well?Oh, my God. Absolutely. I really couldn't say it any better. I often thank my first job - I thought it was an ad agency, but it wasn't, it was a brand consultancy. They said, "Go talk to people," and then they made it my job to ask questions and pretend like I was listening. At that point, I don't know if I was seeing threads, but I knew that I had to ask questions. Yeah, I feel that's made me sensitive to all the threads. You become thread fluent in a way, or literate maybe, in a way that some people don't have.It reminds me of a guy - I think his name is Georg Kuhlwind, my therapist recommended this guy. He wrote a book called "From Normal to Healthy." Somewhere in the beginning, he says, "We don't know what a person is and we don't know what words are." I think it speaks to what you're talking about. We have an idea of what a word is, like "Oh, that just means that thing," but no, the word is just the beginning. It's endless. You can follow it forever. So anyway, yeah.I will seed the microphone and let you ask questions, but I can't stop. I just want to point out that one of the things I think makes your conversations different than most podcasts that I listen to - I feel like calling your conversations a podcast is almost an insult. But I think your conversations are different because you pull threads, you ask follow-up questions. I think oftentimes, especially in business-related podcasts, there's a set of questions that you hear the interviewer ask. Then somebody says something, but the interviewer doesn't pull the thread, and you're like, "Goddammit, pull the thread, man!" The conversations end up being almost this litany of disappointments, like I just collect things that could have been explored. But I find that your conversations with people tend to be more organic, free-flowing, and all that.Nice. I really appreciate the fact that you're listening. I appreciate the hesitancy around the word "podcast." I also try to talk about it as a "conversation series," but it's very clunky. All right. So I want to begin the way that I always begin with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine, and you're in absolute control. You can answer it any way or not answer it any way that you want. The question is: Where do you come from?First of all, I want to tell you that I've heard you ask this question to a couple of people and you've described it as a very powerful question, which I think it is. But I think the most powerful thing is that you start with it. It grounds the conversation in such a way that everything that follows is shaped by it. So whatever a person's grounding story is gives shape to everything that comes after. I think that's the real genius of it.I want to answer this question by talking about something that I've wanted to talk about publicly but haven't had a venue for. I would say that I am born from the tension that comes from living a dual life as a kid - living simultaneously in two different worlds.On the one hand was my school life growing up, which was very much grounded in the everyday struggles of everyday people trying to defy the odds to get by. I went to school in a city called Coatesville, Pennsylvania. It's a city outside of Philadelphia that has endured more struggles than any city ought to have to endure. It doesn't get a lot of national recognition except in messed-up situations. Some major news organization described the city as "two square miles of ghetto," not what you want as your brand. And Sports Illustrated once wrote about our humble home that "the only thriving retail trade downtown is crack." So that's the reputation of it, and in some ways it's true. 99% of students that I went to middle school with were low-income, 92% below grade level in math, 70% below grade level in reading. There were a lot of drugs and violence in middle school, 9th grade, and 10th grade.But I was surrounded by other kids who were defying odds to just do amazing everyday things. You knew you weren't fancy when you went to Coatesville schools. You did not delude yourself into thinking that you were fancy or destined for greatness or something like that. So that was one half, and I would not trade even the difficult parts of that experience for anything. I loved it. I identified with it, even the difficulties.On the other hand was my home life. In my home life, I was surrounded by expectations of achievement. I was going to take college classes in the summer as a 13-year-old, going to leadership seminars. I would go to all these places away from there and I was surrounded by private school kids and kids who came from a whole other thing. So I was caught in between three things: school life, home life (I did not live inside the boundaries of Coatesville, I lived in the middle of the woods in a house built in the 1700s, it was like my own little Walden Pond world), and then I was going to these leadership seminars and nerd camps with private school kids who had these lives and futures that I aspired to.There was a tension in that situation, between the lives of the kids that I went to school with and the lives of the kids that I went to these camps and seminars with. I identified with both of those. I wanted to go to a fancy school someday, but I did not want to leave Coatesville to go to any other high school. I knew that the kids that I went to school with were just as talented and capable as the kids that I went to summer stuff with. And I knew that those private school and nerd kids were destined to go on to become leaders. It was really clear at 14 years old, it was obvious.I knew that they didn't know anything about our life in Coatesville. There was no sense whatsoever that anybody in the world of business, entertainment, or political leadership had any clue about our lives, feelings, or experiences in that school or in the lives around that school. So I think, for reasons that might sound noble now but really are just about the drives and pathologies of being a teenage kid trapped between two worlds, I wanted to resolve those two. I wanted to find a way to, for the good of everyone, bring the street into the conference room.That was the tension that drove me as a teenager. I don't think I realized the extent to which it still drives the work that I do today until, when Ben Zeidler and I started Nonfiction in 2018, we had a conversation with our logo designer, the young woman who was creating our brand identity. She was amazing and she did one of those interviews that designers do, where she asks, "Okay, if you were a car, what car would you be?" At first I cringed because I was like, "Oh God, not one of these." But as she went on, I started thinking about growing up in Coatesville and wanting to be true to that life, but also wanting to drag it into the world of these leaders and business culture and everything in the future. I think in that weird logo call, I ended up discovering where I'm from, to answer your question.Yeah, it's beautiful. Can you tell me more about that experience of the projective technique, the imagery questions? What did you discover in that process that surprised you?I think it's easy to miss things that are obvious in your life. You know this from a life of studying others, as I do, but I don't always apply it to myself the way I wish I could. As you get older, you make so many rational decisions as you go: Should I take this job? Should I be a freelancer? Should I continue dating this person? Should I change the way I eat? These are all things that, in the moment, you're trying to do your best to make decisions that are good for you and that correspond to your values. But you probably don't take each one of those decisions as an archaeological project into your own source of identity. If you do, you're probably living a life that is both more enlightened and more maddening than most people.You start to lose some of the source drives in you, even when you're aware of them. I don't think I realized - I had not gone back and reconnected the mission of what we do at Nonfiction, which Ben and I had tried to do for years even before we became Nonfiction, to my own middle school trauma, basically. But yeah, it's there. The link is embarrassingly direct.Yeah. And I love that you had the experience of it for yourself, that you had this design, this creative task, that opened this opportunity to connect at a meaningful level like that. I think it's beautiful that you had that experience. I love it.So do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid? Did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up?I did. When I was a kid, I was like a lot of overachieving dickheads - I wanted to be president. But over time, that became a lot less appealing. What did appeal to me was the role of a communications specialist for a leader, for a president. I'll give you my embarrassing example in a moment.I was always struck by how I thought politicians, leaders, companies could communicate better. I always saw this gap in how they actually communicated with everyday people versus the way that I thought they should. The year was, I think it was '92 - Bill Clinton was running for president and he had this young communications advisor on his campaign and subsequently his White House named George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos at the time was, I think, under 35, so he was super young for that world. He wore jeans everywhere, which at the time was super edgy. To wear jeans in the White House was like, "Holy s**t, who is this guy who's so brilliant and so valuable to the president that he can just wear jeans in the White House?" That's crazy. I really looked up to Stephanopoulos.When I went to school at Columbia, where Stephanopoulos taught at that time, I took his class on presidential communications. It was amazing, but I was so intimidated by the idea of being in a room with this guy that I'd looked up to that I actually skipped probably 75% of the classes. I'm lucky that I got by on whatever grade I got. I have a couple of amazing moments from that class where I learned a lot that I could tell as a story, but the truth is I was so intimidated by it that I just skipped out on it, which is crazy.Later in my life, I think what I wanted to be when I grew up was somebody who helped other people communicate better. At some point, I dropped the politics part - that felt like a hamster wheel for me personally. I felt like business had a lot more power to influence people's lives. Maybe that was a more fashionable opinion back then.What was going on? What was intimidating about it?I think that when you come face to face with the embodiment of what you have projected onto a person as being the embodiment of your discipline, the thing that you want to be most, when you want to be that thing so hard that if you aren't that thing, it could maybe annihilate your sense of identity... it's simultaneously alluring but also catastrophic.I think when you get older, not every interaction, not every situation holds your entire self-worth within it. But at that time, especially in my first year at Columbia, I was intimidated by Columbia. I didn't really think I belonged. I didn't know that I belonged coming from Coatesville. That was part of it too.Tell me, where are you now? And what are you doing? You mentioned Nonfiction. How do you describe your work and what you're doing?Okay, so this is supposed to be the softball question that you get. And I always think, "How do we do it?" We've had conversations within Nonfiction about how we're supposed to explain what we do to our grandmother when they ask.The easy way to say it is that we really only do one thing. And that one thing is that we study people. Specifically, we try to study the parts of their lives that are underneath what they normally share with researchers. We try to live in that space between what people feel deeply and what they normally talk about to others.Financial struggles are something we love to explore. Our first public report was called "The Secret Financial Lives of Americans." We've spent a lot of time with people in their most private moments, whether it's moneyor pregnancy or intimate relationships or family dinner times. We've been unchaperoned inside of prisons. We've sat with people in their health care appointments while they're receiving health news. We've spent time with people as they've wrestled with addiction. We study those parts of people's lives - not always that deep and intimate, but the parts of people's lives that tend not to show up in conference rooms. And then we take those findings and we drive them into the heart of conference rooms of organizations. Then we hope and pray that people do something with them. We don't do strategy or comms planning. We're not a consultancy. We just study people and we try to study the parts that don't normally show up. And then we hope good things happen. We've been fortunate - good things have happened. We can try to impress people by saying that our research has inspired Super Bowl commercials, new public service campaigns, a new division at Disney, new flavors of Doritos coming out next year, and stuff like that. So it runs the gamut. But the way that we've set up Nonfiction is that we only do the studying people part. It's a life dedicated to putting yourself aside and listening, as you would know better than anyone. And then trying to figure out which of these things that we've heard from people are things that could drive change, and I mean that in both the highfalutin sense and the "they want a new Dorito" sense, that helps them and helps an organization or a company.Yeah. What's the joy in it for you? What do you love about your work and what you're doing?I've got two joys. I'm at a stage in my career where I have the luxury of two joys. I'm a two-joy career, Peter. The first joy is the work itself. Spending your life just trying to understand other people is a blessing. The things that people share with us - and I mean us, you and I, as well as everyone in the industry - when you spend your life listening to people's innermost thoughts and feelings and desires for new stuff, you are privileged. It's almost as if you're traveling to a place that no one else has seen. It shapes you as a person, mostly for the better, in that it deepens your heart. It allows you to, in everyday life, when someone cuts you off on the road, start questioning, "I wonder what they're going through right now. Was that malice? Was that incompetence? Did they not know? Are they in a hurry? Do they have a job interview?" You start to have this deeper level of empathy that most of the time is an asset, sometimes a liability. But that's the first joy.The second joy is watching other people do it. We now have 13 people at Nonfiction. And now I get to watch other people have those discoveries and I get to benefit from hearing them come back from a tear-filled conversation with someone where that person worked through things that they had never thought about before. I get to see other people make non-fictiony work. What a joy that is, to see the people in our company just do incredible things.Nonfiction is so distinct and it's - I just love everything that you guys have put out, the public reports, your point of view, the attitude that you guys bring to telling these stories and gathering these stories is really beautiful. What's the, maybe you've told me a little bit about it, but what was the germ? What's the origin story for this "studying people, all we do is study people underneath"? Where did that all come from? Because you, I was looking at your LinkedIn, you weren't always in this space. So how did you, yeah, what was the origin story of this kind of "studying people" focus and attitude?I think it came from being bad at my job in a way. I think many of our lives are like concentric circles of trying to get closer and closer to the thing that feels like us. And maybe you start as, I don't know, a window washer or something because that's the job you could get. But after washing windows, you start caring more about windows. Now you get into window sales, but in order to sell windows, you have to understand windows. So then you get into window manufacturing and you're one of the top three window manufacturers in the state. And then you break off and you start your own business making the world's best windows, and they're only made for certain situations.I think a lot of people's lives, despite that preposterous example, look like that. You start doing this thing and you start getting closer. You can only learn over time what you really want to be doing, or you don't even know that job exists.But the more recent version of it is that Ben and I worked together at a company that kept getting acquired. It got acquired like three or four times. So we worked for the same company the whole time, but the names kept changing. Now it's Accenture Interactive, the world's largest digital agency. But when we started, it was like 25 people on a concrete floor.We worked together starting in 2011 or 2012. Ben had come from the world of real research and I had come from digital advertising, digital marketing kind of stuff. We collided in this digital agency. We were both relatively junior folks in the company, I'd say. Through a whole bunch of ups and downs, we started working together. Ben wanted to start a research department in the company and nobody wanted a research department in the agency. The leader of the agency, who became a mentor to both of us, Drew Raymond, just an incredible human being, basically decided to give Ben a chance. He said, "I'm going to let you start a research department, but you have to continue working your existing job and do the research department. And if you mess it up, I'm going to fire you." And he said that in front of everybody, which is a pretty good motivator to succeed in a department.Drew had a very bold style of leadership that Ben and I both really responded to. He continues to be a mentor to this day. Ben started a research company, a research department within the company. Over the years, I became head of strategy, he became head of research automatically upon starting the department, and then grew out his team. Together we would get research for projects from the companies that you've heard of a million times. A client would pass us research that they had done internally. And we would just look at the research and be like, "What the hell are we supposed to do with this?" It just didn't feel like it captured the thing that we needed to know about human beings so that we could go make marketing that would deeply resonate with people's souls.So we just started doing it on our own. We didn't - we just did it out of dissatisfaction with everything else. I think maybe there's still a tinge of that in us. It was deeply unpopular what we were doing within the company. People were like, "Hey, why don't you get back to your desk?" They didn't think we were working. We would go out to talk to people or to observe people or to immerse ourselves in situations. They just didn't think we were working. So there were debates about whether we could get - whether it had to be PTO or whatever. But we had some early successes, which built the appetite for the insights that came out of it. And then it became a crucial part of the agency, to the agency's credit.I don't know, I think to this day, if Drew would not have thought that work was important and given us a wide leash and some provocations, I don't think we'd be where we are today. Good looking out. Thanks for that, Drew Raymond. But that's where it started. I was a strategist - I was supposed to do strategy, but I just didn't want to do strategy based off of, I don't know, garbage insights that I thought I was getting. And we each had one job after that in between starting Nonfiction. Ben went to L2 with Scott Galloway, which got bought by Gartner while he was there. I went to Vice Media and I was head of strategy at Vice Media's digital agency. I think I was below average at my job probably, because I cared about this one part, which was, "Hey, let's dive in and immerse and understand people." And I was not good at the part where you turn things into these abstract diagrams, and then you have to do comms planning where it's "How are we going to bring this message to life on Snapchat?" And I was like, "I could give three s***s how we bring the message to life on Snapchat," which legitimately made me not great at my job. But it was also during the time that I was at Vice that I realized, "Oh, okay. I'm not actually - I don't actually care deeply about strategy as a whole. I only really care about this one part." When Ben and I decided to create Nonfiction, we had discussed this kind of a thing for years, including one time where we took Drew out to breakfast in a Breather room and we tried to convince him to let us spin the strategy and research departments off of our agency, which Drew shut down immediately. God bless him for listening to that.So anyway, when we started Nonfiction, we were just like, "Yeah, what if we created a company where we only did the parts that we actually like doing and just tried to be the best in the world at bringing the stuff that's beneath the surface to the surface?" And I'm glad we did. Although every consultant we've ever hired has just told us, "Oh, you guys should really look into becoming a consultancy" or "What if you offer strategy services?" And it's no. That's not in the cards.How has it changed and what's your take on the sort of - I'm really just curious about how you articulate the value of what you do to clients. What do clients come to you asking for and yeah, what's - maybe that's the question. I love the idea that you came out of a defiant moment. And then also that when you went to do the work - cause this is something I experienced too - that this kind of work is invisible. It just looks like people being who they are in the world. You know what I mean? Like my research looks like me having conversation with someone else. And so people are like, "That's not..." And so there's - it's invisible in a very meaningful way. And you had that experience, which I think is fantastic. So how do you - how do you articulate the - how do you make the value visible for people? I think - and then how has - how, what makes that important today or how has it changed in terms of the clients and the kinds of challenges you think they're facing?On one hand, we spend 0% of our time trying to convince anyone that this work is valuable. And I think that's a very important part of what we do. We have spent 0 seconds, 0 minutes, 0 days in the last 6 years trying to convince anyone that research is something that they ought to do.Don Draper has some line in Mad Men where he says, "Jesus lives in your heart or he doesn't" or something like that. And I relate to that because this is not a recommendation for anybody - I think a normal company that wants to stay in business should probably be trying to proactively sell research to people. And there's no doubt that we have taken a financial hit for not trying to do that.However, the good news is we get to spend 100% of our time talking to people who already feel like they need to understand something that they don't know. Being able to start from that position where you, the client, already know, already believe, already have Jesus in your heart - you already believe that there is something that you need to know about your customer that you don't already know - that is a tremendous advantage. And I mean that in every way. It makes the work better. And it is part of what differentiates how our work, I think, maybe feels when it's in public, because we get to start from that place.So in that way, I don't think that we actually do try to convince anyone of value. However, the real value in Nonfiction's work - but we should say all work in this space, I'll stick to us - the value in our work, I believe, only comes, and this is a high bar to set for yourself, it's insane, but it only comes when we can uncover something that wasn't previously known or wasn't previously recognized to be important, even if it was known. That's where I think listening matters.And so there is listening that is inherently valuable on a human level, but what we do is something which is that plus something else. Because we charge companies money to fund the studies that help them, we also have a responsibility - we have a responsibility to the people that we're studying first, to bring their voices to the table. But we have a responsibility to the client who's creating this work and funding this work to bring them something that they can do something with.For us - I know people get icky about working for companies these days, I feel like, or I feel like if money is involved, then it can't be good for the world or something. And there's validity to that perspective, but we are on the hunt for the things that we can find in people's lives that we can help them with. And in order to help them, we need to be able to bring back something to the company that they can do something with.If all we bring back to the client is a bunch of stuff that they've heard before or a bunch of stuff that is intellectually interesting in the abstract - it would have made a fascinating article in some literary magazine from 20 years ago - it's not good enough. It's not good enough. And I think if you were to ask people at Nonfiction, "What's the worst thing about working at Nonfiction?", my guess is that they would say the pressure on every single project to deliver something that the client has never heard before or has not valued before. And in that sense, the value that you asked about, of qualitative research, or in our case bridging qual and quant and all sorts of crazy s**t, is that we are going to bring you something that you can do something with. It's going to help your customer and it's going to help you. Finding that is a tiny Venn diagram. But we're small and we can take on projects where we believe we can do it. Yeah, in one sense, we never argue for the value. And in another sense, the value is built in because if we don't find you something juicy, we have failed.Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about how - your approach? I've read a little bit about it, but how do you - a client comes to you, you have this objective to find something that they'd never heard before or didn't value before. How do you think about learning and discovering that stuff?The first thing that we do is we formulate the whole study into a single simple question called "the burning question." We make sure that the client and everyone involved in the agency, if there's an agency involved, we make sure that everyone agrees that they do not already know the answer to this question and that were we to find an answer to this question, it would change something for them - potentially change the marketing, the brand, the product, the new product that they could develop, the way that they talk to customers, whatever it might be.So we start every project that way and we're religious about it. That's the first thing. And that's pre-Statement of Work. That's "Are we going to do this thing or not?"Then once we begin the work, the first thing that we do is a stage that we call "edge finding," which is where we try to find the edge of what is currently known and understood. We spend a week, maybe two weeks on that. At the end of that, the person leading the research, their responsibility is to know everything of what is known - the academic studies, the book that was written in the '70s about it, that documentary that was released four years ago on Netflix but wasn't that watched - everything that's been talked about on social media. We have a team of people who go nuts for a week to two weeks covering all of that ground to understand all of that. And then research can begin.I have found in my own life, some of the biggest failures in my own work have been times where I didn't do edge finding well enough. During an interview or during some other technique, I glommed onto some insight that I thought was great. But it turns out, it was not great. It was within the edge of what was already known, but I didn't know that at that time. And I went and I presented it to a client and they said, "Nah, I already knew it." And then I died inside and I swore that I would never do that again. Even these days, I feel like it's a risk.So when we started Nonfiction, we were hardcore about edge finding because, done well, it's a guarantee that you are insulating yourself from that horrific situation at the end of a project. You know what's known and what's not known.If I can drone on for another moment about this, because I think it's actually maybe the most important thing I can say to anyone who's listening to this - qualitative research is about developing an ear for what is important. You as a qualitative researcher, you are inundated with data. You're talking to people for hours at a time and then you're going and you're immersing in people's worlds. There's no shortage of stuff to take in. Anyone can do that work. That is not difficult. And that is not masterful.It is developing an ear for what is new and important and potentially revolutionary that is what great qualitative research is. But you cannot have that ear within the project unless you've done your edge finding and you know what is not new, what is not important. So in order to have that moment of eureka halfway through a research project, you have to earn it in the first couple of weeks where you are swallowing everything that the world has ever thought or known or talked about around this issue.It's wonderful. We only have a few minutes left and there's so much more I want to ask you about, but the burning question - can you - what can you tell me about how you get there and what makes it an effective burning question? Because that also - it's just a beautiful thing that you begin in this shared understanding of an unanswered question.I stole that from two places. I think I stole it from Hagerty's book on creativity and there was also a book years ago by Mario Pricken called "Creative Advertising" that was just showing different ads. Then at the end of the book, it gives some advice on how to run brainstorms essentially. One of his pieces of advice, in a book I read in I don't know, 2004 or something, is that you should always in a brainstorm phrase the prompt as a question. That blew me away when he said it because it forces you to really hone things into something manageable. I'll give you an example of this. Years ago, Sean Brown at Disney approached us. Disney has a wing of their business that manages educational trips to Disney. So teachers bring their kids on a field trip to Disney, and then they go through this program that provides an educational experience. They take them behind the scenes at Space Mountain and turn on the lights and they study physics and all sorts of stuff.Sean Brown was leading marketing for that. And Sean, to his credit, realized a challenge that they had, which is that many of the teachers who had year after year brought their students to Disney for this educational trip were getting up into their fifties and they're going to retire at some point. If you look at the shape of the distribution of teachers, it's a bit U-shaped. You have a bunch of young, like 20-something teachers and you have a bunch of older teachers. He realized Disney had many digits of millions of dollars predicated upon the implicit assumption that 20-year-old teachers were going to want the same things out of a Disney field trip that these 55-year-old teachers wanted. Sean saw that and recognized that they needed to understand younger teachers and then be able to work backwards to pioneer things that Disney could compete with.So the burning question for that project was "What do 20-something-year-old teachers truly want out of field trips and how could Disney provide something that no one else could?" Bang.Bang, that's right. That's wonderful.Great burning question. Now we can go drive around the back roads of Georgia and Florida to spend time in teacher lunchrooms. We can find the forms that teachers use to request field trips from principals. We can interview kids, parents, chaperones. We went to these sessions that private parochial schools used to talk about their school to basically sell parents on the school. We saw how field trips were used in those presentations sometimes. And we ended up coming back with some counterintuitive findings that Sean, who is amazing at starting research and turning research into insights that change a business, transformed into something that today is called Disney Imagination Campus and has a gazillion kids go through every year, learning STEM, leadership, incredible stuff that is super relevant to the teachers, young and old, that want to bring their kids to Disney.Beautiful. That's an amazing story. And I want to - it's the end of the hour. And I just want to say thank you. It was nice to meet you. We've emailed for years, and you're an early supporter of the newsletter. So it's nice to meet face to face. And I just really enjoyed the conversation, even though you turned the tables on me, which is fine. Of course. Thank you so much.Yeah, I know people say nice things at the end of these conversations, but genuinely, please keep up the good work. These conversations are amazing. And as I said to you before we started recording, your Friday email is the one email that I skip to open. I skip over to my computer to open it every Friday morning. In fact, I think I'm going to go do that now.Thank you for that image. And thank you so much. And yeah. Thanks, Gunny.All right. Thanks. Bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

I first met Eliza Yvette Esquivel at lunch in Hudson, New York. She was visiting a mutual friend. We stayed in touch over the years and grew close over the pandemic when myself, Eliza and Martin Karaffa would meet for regular calls. She has a long, storied career in brand strategy. She was Chief Strategy Officer at Barbarian, Senior Director, Global Brand Strategy, Management, Naming and Partnerships at Microsoft, and before that VP Global Brand Strategy at Mondelez. She is redefining the future of leadership towards a Protopian tomorrow, with Love & Order, and helping professionals grow through sabbatical planning, career break consulting with, Radical Sabbatical Consulting using meditation and mindfulness coaching for deep self-discovery and significant change.Check out her series on Cyberpunk, and The Blue Economy. All right. So I am not sure if you know this or not, but I start all of these interviews and conversations with the same question, which is a question that I've borrowed from a friend of mine, this woman, Suzanne Snider, who lives in Hudson and teaches oral history. And I love the question so much because it's a big, beautiful question, but because it's so big, I couldn't over explain it. So before I ask, I want you to know that you can answer any way that you want. We're not, sir. You are in total control. Where do you come from?Ooh, where do I come from? Yeah, that's actually a really good one. Europeans always judge Americans for focusing on "What do you do?" and they actually often say, "Where do you come from?" I like to ask "What are you up to these days?" because it leaves it open. You know what I mean? It doesn't have to be about work or place or whatever. Where do I come from? I come from Texas. I come from a place. I come from Laredo, Texas. That's where I was born. It's right on the border to Mexico. When I was born, it must have been like, 99 percent Hispanic but in the United States. I think now the numbers drop to maybe 97 percent Hispanic. It was a very specific place and all of my parents' family live there - their brothers and sisters, cousins, et cetera. Very integrated into the community. Kind of pillars of the community. My parents left when I was three, but all of my extended family remains there. A couple of my aunts have PhDs in education. So they're educators. And then one of my cousins is an architect and one of them owns a cafe. So it's this whole sort of thing about being from a very specific place.I think a lot of people don't know that about me. I don't really carry my, I don't believe in identity politics. I'm like, "Oh I just don't think it, I'm a human being. I'm not a Mexican. I'm not a woman." You know what I mean? So I don't subscribe to those things. So I don't really talk about that origin story of where I'm from. But since you asked, you can say it that way.What was childhood like in Laredo, Texas? I only lived there until I was three, so I have zero idea. My parents moved to Fort Worth, which is also a very interesting place. I don't know if you know the story about Fort Worth, but in the days before any of these places were developed in Texas, there were cattle trails that ran along the semi western border north to south of the United States, go up to Utah, come through the Rockies and all the way down to Texas, and I think even into Mexico. The cowboys would run cattle up and down and stop at these little towns along the way. Some of them would be forts, some of them would be shanty towns to rest and then continue the journey. There was a fort that they all stopped at, which was called Fort Worth in Texas. But it was a dry fort. It was very Christian and they didn't have alcohol. So the cowboys would stop there and rest, but to go get their joy on, they would go across the river to this shantytown where there was booze and women and whatever. That shantytown is Dallas. And Fort Worth is where I grew up. Isn't that charming?Oh my God. You've really just exploded my understanding of so much. Certainly. Yeah. I worked at the Texas State Historical Association in a gap year in university. I was really into Texas history and making sure that everything is recorded. During the time that I was working there, they were digitizing the encyclopedia, taking it from volumes of books and digitizing it. So all of this fascinating history of Texas is available.How does it feel? What does it mean to be from Texas?I joke that I'm from "Tex-ass". That's a good joke. Because I did leave. I think Texas is an interesting place because it used to be Mexico, and it was colonized. There's a whole history there that I think most Americans don't know about - why Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California became the United States when they used to be Mexico and what that land grab and power grab was about. A lot of it had to do with slavery, and Mexico was not into slavery. There were a lot of natural resources that were attractive. People could look it up and be like, "Oh, what happened there," and get into it. Growing up in a place where my parents didn't come to the United States - the United States came to us - and yet I was made to feel other or less than or a foreigner in my own home.I remember playing soccer in Texas as a very athletic young lady. After our soccer game, there was a water fountain in the park. I went to go drink water and there was a girl behind me. She stopped and then started walking away. I was like, "Oh, you don't want any water?" She said, "Oh, I can't drink after you." Because...Those are just little stories. I've had many experiences in Texas that were, shall I say, unwelcoming. It's a complicated place. It really is a complicated place, with where it sits on the border and what drives the oil that drives its economy and the culture that is attracted to that.Living in Austin for 10 years was really cool though, because it was like a liberal oasis and almost the antithesis of much of what I experienced growing up. But yeah, that's what it's like to be from Texas. It's complicated. And you're glad that you're not there anymore.Do you have, what did you want to be when like young Eliza in Texas, did you have ideas about what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah, actually I wanted to be a poet and a literary critic. That was horrifying to my super right wing conservative father, which is why I had to take a gap year, because he cut me off of university, because I was actually succeeding at those things at university, and he was like, "That will not stand."Where'd that begin? Where did poetry, how did poetry become a North Star like that?I don't know. I always just thought everybody wrote poetry when they were 12. I was just like, "Isn't this what we're all doing?" Our ideas. It just, I don't know. It's just something that bubbled out of me. I later learned, and I didn't grow up knowing this, but as a young adult I learned that I was named after my great grandmother, whose name was Elvira Yanez de Escutia, and she was a poet and a playwright. I had no idea, but I was just this person who was really into that stuff, really into literature, really into creativity, the imagination, but through the word in particular. My mother had been an artist. She was a photographer and she did stained glass. So I was around that world of art and the imagination while she was in university when I was like six, seven, eight, nine. I would go to the university to watch the art classes or go to the art openings and the gallery. But for me, it was really about the word.And tell me now, where are you now, what you're up to, what are you up to and where are you now?Yeah. I made a big pivot to walk away from working for other people for as long as I possibly can. And I've also stepped away from being in the business of helping corporations build wealth and being in the business of advertising or brand or any of that.I don't know that I'm completely removed from it, but I'm just taking a pause to really invest in my worldview and focus on my own creativity. And so that is why I've started these two ventures: Love and Order and Radical Sabbatical Consulting. Love and Order is very much focused on future forecasting for leaders and leadership teams, but a very specific point of view on the future, which is the protopian view. And it's really because I feel like we are, as a humanity, at a really critical inflection point where we really need to take the reins of what's happening in the world and not let it happen to us. I have some very strong points of view on that, which we can talk about.And then Radical Sabbatical Consulting is really born out of the two year sabbatical that I took after I left Microsoft and really spent time taking my hands off the steering wheel of careering and achieving and doing all that stuff. Instead, I went back almost to relive a portion of my 20s where I was just exploring what interested me and getting back into meditation and really going within and living more of an inner-directed life.I walked out of that two year period empowered in a way that I had not been my whole life. And so I'd like to package that up for people so that they can have similar experiences.It's been really beautiful to watch and to see you launch this stuff into the world. I'm curious, could you tell a little bit about before and after, you know what I mean? Can you just paint a picture of what was going on with you before you made this pivot or this transition or what made it necessary for you to pivot away from all that stuff and to chart this new path forward?Yeah. I think I was having a series of unpleasant experiences for years in my career life. I drank the Kool-Aid that a lot of us drink of, "Oh you have to move up in your career and you have to pursue positions of leadership and you have to always be getting promoted or getting that next job." And also I felt a sense of responsibility and duty as a woman of color of, "I want to go as far as I possibly can so that other people behind me will have paved some sort of trail that people could go behind." I spent a lot of time mentoring and trying to help other not just women, but just other people who were trying to make their way in advertising and marketing and strategy get there.But the way that I was being treated was interestingly very mirroring my childhood trauma playing out on the corporate stage - being treated a certain way in the corporate world and the business world. And I think for me also, I'm not to be trifled with.Yes, I know that about you.Don't mess with Texas. So I think that when those things would happen, there would be a different sort of energy around them where I would really stand up for what was right and like really make it known that these things were unacceptable. I do think that it had a positive effect on the organizations around me and everybody was forced to look at the way that they were behaving or what was happening, but it took a personal toll on me energetically.I found that over the years what was happening was my creative life force was being eked out of my body and I was assigning all of my energy to this sort of forward trajectory and to the missions of organizations or to solving these problems, and less and less of it was going to my own creativity, to my own personal flourishing.So really that's hopefully a broad way of saying that's what was happening. That's what was going on. It took me a long time to admit that I needed to just completely not do that anymore. I kept trying to take a break and then go play smaller, which you can see in some of the things that I did in my career after I left Microsoft. I was like, "I'll take this little job over here, I'll go do this thing that I did 12 years ago, so that I can only work nine to five and still have my life," but at the end of the day, it just wasn't working. And I think the truth of the matter is that probably I'm meant to do something else in the world. I have talents and ideas and creativity and agency and a worldview that is probably needed right now, and so I just needed to make a switch.Yeah. And I laugh not because I know that you're somebody not to be trifled with, but I feel like I've always gotten the feeling that you're really connected to something strong. You know what I mean? I've always appreciated your sort of openness and your seeking. So it was clear to me that you would be doing good things. So tell me about Love and Order and Protopia. What order do you tell this story about what you're doing?I'm trying to find a way to make the story simple, and I think that's part of what a solopreneur and entrepreneur goes through - feeling their way through how to talk about what they're doing.Protopia is a term that was defined by Kevin Kelly, who was the founder of Wired Magazine, some time ago to point at making a stark contrast to the dystopian trend that we were moving toward in terms of our view of the future. And then in 2021, a woman by the name of Monica Bill Skyte (I hope I'm saying her last name correctly) advanced the definition of what it means to have this protopian view on the future. I really love the way that she advanced it because she brought in two things that are near and dear to my heart, which are creativity and spirituality. The protopian view of the future in short is just an incrementally more positive view of the future, not imagining this utopian world that we'll never be able to reach, but really using your imagination to think about how we as a human civilization, as communities, can thrive and really flourish, and doing it in ways that we can actually make a roadmap and move toward and really keeping your eye on that prize. Also having the high level of awareness to strip out from your consciousness any of the false programming around the future that we've been fed historically, particularly by science fiction that originated in the 60s and then got picked up again in the 80s with cyberpunk, which I started writing a series about.Does that make sense? Or is it still really complicated?No, it's beautiful. It's just like most of the stuff, I feel like you've always been able to make these very intellectual ideas very relevant and connect them to culture.And some of that stuff is just landing, just layering right on top of my own sort of feelings about how things are, certainly that science fiction. I think Neil Stephenson came out at one point and was chastising the science fiction community that there was no real protopian science fiction. As we, nobody has done the work of illustrating an optimistic or hopeful view of the future. Number one. And then number two, this just came to me. I was in this community and there was a performance coach there and he was saying that, oh gosh, I'm going to, there's two stats that like 80 percent of our thinking is negative and 95 percent of them are repetitive.And so we have an innate kind of almost a cognitive pessimism or something in the way that we think. And I wonder, how does that factor into creating what you're doing?Yeah. I think what's really interesting is that I didn't want to just do future forecasting, but I wanted to do future forecasting for leaders and leadership teams because I feel like it's not enough for us to yes, we are having a crisis of the imagination and yes, we need to invest in imagining these futures and working toward them, but we need leaders to do that. And the thing about getting into that space and really thinking through what does it take for a leader to really do that got me into looking at conscious leadership and positive intelligence and all of these sort of leadership approaches because at the end of the day, what leaders have to do in order to enact a protopian future is what each and every one of us has to do. And that is, we have to do the inner work.That's how Radical Sabbatical Consulting is connected to Love and Order. If we are not looking within, if we are not in total awareness of the habituation of our mindset, of the sort of the tapes that play inside of our heads, but also if we're not in touch with our own sort of heart and not emotional heart, but I'm saying spiritual heart, where we really care about the future of humanity, where we really care about humanity, where we care about our own well being, or we can actually care about seven generations ahead, like, why? And also to be honest with ourselves and be like, I don't care. Why are you dead inside? That's, it's seriously a joke. But I think that what you're bringing up about these habituations and how this negativity connects with what I'm doing is, when I came up with Radical Sabbatical Consulting and Love and Order, I was just like, what do I love doing? What do I want to do? I wasn't really thinking, oh, these lock together. But then as I've been working through what this is and talking about it more now, I really realized that they are two sides of the same coin. We as a civilization, unless we do this consciousness work, unless we raise our awareness, unless we can honestly move toward a culture of caring, all of these other ideas about solving global warming or facing any of our impending issues, it's not going to land because we're just going to replicate, we're going to replicate a mechanistic, patriarchal, uncaring modality as we're trying to solve the problem.So it really is about a big wake up call on many levels.You used the phrase, the crisis of imagination. Can you tell me a little bit more about its particular role? You know me, I'm fascinated with the idea of the imagination and I'm just curious the role it plays and how you think about where we're at.Yeah, so I lifted that from Monica Bilskyte. She uses that language and it just really set home with me because during COVID, when we were all going in and doing different things than we normally were doing, that's when I was first starting to think about the future. And the question that I was asking myself was like, why are we caught in a loop? Why do we seem to be like in society just living this loop and not really moving forward?So I started looking into speculative fiction and science fiction writing and all this stuff. And I realized, all of these stories are written by white men. And then I started understanding, oh, actually in the sixties there was Afrofuturism, there was Chicano Futurism, and then I was like, what about globally? What about Asian literature, Latin American literature? Are there futurists, is there a wider lens? Lo and behold, yes, there is. But in the United States, because of Hollywood and because of what's gone on, there is a very specific dystopian view of the future that we just keep recycling over and over again that assumes humanity won't evolve, that is overly focused on technology, that assumes a patriarchally driven top-down organizational structure and society.So there are all of these systemic ideas that are baked into these things that we all grew up watching that we've all almost turned into like future porn. Blade Runner is beautiful, don't get me wrong, it is a beautiful film. But we don't want that future.So the crisis of the imagination is recognizing, hey wakey wakey, we've been eating all of this stuff up. And when we try to imagine a better future, there's no gas in that tank. It's even hard for us to imagine what a beautiful future would look like. So for me, talking about the crisis of the imagination is the beginning - to basically say, we need to cut the cord to this storytelling that's not serving us. And we need to go within and get into our caring space, raise our consciousness. And from a higher elevated perspective, start to imagine and start to dream together and tell stories together and put those forward so that we have something to look at as a possibility instead of always looking at the problems or living in the worst thing that could happen.Yeah. How have you been met? How is Love and Order? It's been, how long has it been? What's it been like having this out in the world? And what kinds of questions are people attracted to in what you're putting out?I think I've been meeting a lot of like minds. There's a lot of people in the design community, systems designers, there's a lot of people in the social impact space who are really turned on by this.I've had people reach out who are coming at it more from the spiritual point of view, where they've also been going through a similar crisis of feeling like "I just don't want to give my energy to this career trajectory anymore. And I'm feeling all the things that you're talking about and I'm trying to figure out what to do next." So I think there's been a lot of positive response of like minds. There's a lot of people out there who haven't had it packaged together in this way, but for them, it just really brings it together.But many of them are like, "But we don't know how to earn a living." And I think there's that. So right now, everybody's forming ideologies, forming community, and really I am not worried because the other thing that we have to recognize is that we are literally creating the future now.And by that, we're walking into the unknown. Those of us who want to have a protopian view, those of us who want to see humanity flourish, want to survive the ecological train wreck that we're headed toward, want to see a new system of inclusion - because the inclusion piece is really important - a system of inclusion to allow us to have a more human-centric approach to how we build tomorrow. All of that is, those are nascent ideas to be entering into the existing paradigm. Those things that I'm talking about are like, "Oh yeah, those design people can talk about being human-centric. We're going to put them over there, in their little department. And then when the budgets get tight, we're just going to cut them." It's like those things have been considered electives, auxiliary, and to bring that kind of thinking into the center stage is a new thing. And making it matter.I really don't think that I'm going to have to make it matter. I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a huge natural disaster. There's going to be some major ecological crisis. And people, it's like, how many do we need to have? But there's going to be something. I'm not here for the wake up call. Nor am I here for cleanup on aisle nine. I am here knowing that there will be a wake up call, there will be cleanup on aisle nine. And I'm wanting to be in the community of people who are like, "Yeah, we know that's going to happen. And we're here to build the future that we want to live in," knowing that all of these things need to change and we're starting to meet and we're starting to connect and we're starting to figure out how we're going to do that. I think that's how it's been met. And even one of the exercises that I'm going to force myself to go through is to go on LinkedIn and try and pick 200 people that are working in companies that could actually pay for the services. And I'll tell you that it's hard going because you have to find people...it's not just, "Oh, this company has the potential to be protopian," but "This company isn't built on the old model where it's all that Silicon Valley bro funding and it's a bro culture."So even the companies that look on their face value like they're protopian, you just dig a little and you're like, "Oh, we're in trouble." So then you have to go looking for who are the more progressive people within these companies that are the ones who are going to be brave enough to step forward and set a new agenda.And really that's what it is - it's about bravery and the people who have that kind of bravery are the ones who have already succeeded in their career and they have some political chips to play. And they want to play their political chips in the service of humanity and in the service of a brighter future.Finding those people is what is on my next to-do list and then talking to them and getting their feedback on what I'm doing and how it can be made more accessible and more palatable.Yeah. I'm curious again about this word, protopia, what are the particular qualities? You mentioned widening the lens away from the sort of the patriarchal science fiction dystopian prison that we're living in. What makes something protopian or how do you craft something that's protopian?There are 10 sort of principles that I'll rattle off that are the protopian principles that I've identified:It's human-centric, ethical, sustainable, inclusive, visionary, adaptive, transparent, collaborative, innovative and resilient. Those are the 10 sort of principles. Now, what I've really been thinking about is if I whittle it down to make it more essential, I think that it's about community - being community-oriented, seeing humanity as a community, like if we're a series of communities of varying sizes and affinities, how do we care for the wellbeing of community. And then also I'm thinking about the word longevity, because it's another way of talking about sustainability, but making it more human and also recognizing that we want to build things, not just for our generation or for our times, but for future generations. So really that longevity is taking that long view.I think corporate America and the stock market and everything keeps us in this short-termism. Media keeps us distracted, so we've got a lot of things working against us, which is why we raise our awareness and our consciousness.But if we do, we get really focused on this is about caring about human beings in community, thinking about human civilization as a series of interlocking communities. This is about the long game. This is about longevity. We're going to be living longer, you know what I mean?But we also want to create things that endure for generations. So we're not creating a world that the next generation has to clean up. And the next generation has to clean up, which is what we're doing now. So I would say those two, there's a third piece, which is the sort of the consciousness piece. The consciousness piece is really very important because if we are not, if our consciousness doesn't evolve...it's like, how can we make progress as human beings if our consciousness doesn't evolve? It just sounds so basic, and you're looking at me like, and it's literally, if we don't elevate our consciousness, then our world isn't going to be elevated. The consciousness piece is really important. And I think it gets left to the side.So much of what I'm talking about is considered woo peripheral, but particularly the consciousness piece gets left to the side. And for me, that's the thing that I've, I'm putting more front and center. It's like the number one thing is anybody that we're going to entrust to be building our future better be somebody who's like really an awake individual.Why would we hand that job over to somebody who is not? Think about it that way.Yeah. Who out there, do you see anybody out there doing this? Is there anybody out there already charting a protopian path or embodying the kind of conscious leadership that you want to create?Yes, and actually I am going to promote this a little bit because I think everyone should watch it. But PBS just came out with a documentary called "History of Future". And there's a guy named Ari Wallach, who is the moderator of the documentary. He's not necessarily coming out on a protopian platform, but he talks about a lot of some of these similar issues and identifies lots of individuals out there who are doing this work.But the interesting thing is that it's happening not in a holistic way. It's happening in very niche things. So you've got regenerative ocean farmers over here. Or you have Native American wisdom keepers over there. Or you have people who are looking at the behavioral issues that we have around the way that we have a limited view of time. And so that's why we can't think about the long-term.So you've got these individuals doing very specific things in their specific lanes. But then you have somebody like Monica Billskyte who is coming out on a platform of "We need to look at the whole picture together."And there's actually, if I can find it quickly, there's actually an annual event that they have that I maybe, I don't know if I can tag it like after on the podcast, can I, the notes? Yeah. They just had it in Lisbon where it's like more of these design-led people who have this protopian view are coming together in annual conferences.So I think admittedly it's nascent. There are individual themes like I'm writing about the blue economy because I'm huge on that. Like 78 percent of the planet is water. And when we think about sustainability, we are only thinking about land. What is wrong with us? But also it's like a huge economy waiting to happen, you know what I mean? And an economy that could be driven by sustainability. So I think that there are a lot of little things happening to the left and to the right, but part of what I'm spending this month doing is doing the research, gathering all of the information and then figuring out how am I going to pull this together in a platform? What's the best way to share this out because it is so disparate and that's the problem. What needs to happen is that all these things need to be networked and to realize that they're part of one worldview and start working together. And right now it's not totally happening.Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about the blue economy? That's the first time I've heard that.Of course. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Let me just, so the blue economy is basically anything to do with the ocean - sustainability and regenerative energy sources that come from the ocean, but also ocean exploration and technology born out of ocean exploration. That's the broad definition and it has a huge economic scope in terms of its potential.And I'm just quickly opening cause Charles Gadsden, who founded Born Slippy and I are going to release this article in honor of Ocean Day, which is on June 8th, so we just wrote it, but I'll just read an excerpt here:"The blue economy encompasses all economic activities related to oceans, seas, and coastal areas, generating trillions of dollars globally. In countries like Nigeria, the untapped blue economy potential is valued at 296 billion, focusing on fisheries, renewable energy, and port infrastructures. Investment areas include offshore wind, which provides a renewable energy source, sustainable fisheries that help maintain fish populations, marine biotechnology that explores biological compounds for pharmaceuticals, and maritime transport, which is crucial for global trade.The OECD projects that by 2030, the global added value in the ocean economy will grow to more than 3 trillion, which is approximately 60 percent of Germany's current GDP. By 2030, more than half of the ocean-based industries are projected to see their value rise more quickly than that of the global economy.Almost all of these industries would see employment growth outpace that in the world economy as a whole." So to me, the blue economy is like, this is a protopian idea. This is an idea that is about communities, it's about the long-term, it's regenerative, it's innovative, it's visionary, it's a wide open space, it's a way we can create an economy while serving the planet and each other, like what?And why people aren't more excited about this is really beyond me. If I do anything, I will make sure that people know about it.And what is the opportunity there? What are you really fired up about when it comes to this protopian blue economy?You know what? I don't know why. I really don't know why. I get like little bees in my bonnet. There's so many things to be excited about but the one in particular is kelp. There is this, I'm trying to find, there's like a kelp farmer that is actually covered in the documentary that I mentioned. And I think it's called, no, that's the ocean cleanup. But basically regenerative farming with kelp. It is really cool. Yeah, it's this guy named Bren Smith. He's an ocean farmer and his company is called the Green Wave. And basically kelp is this micronutrient, but also it can be used to generate energy and these kelp farms can be built off the ocean. You can also use the materials to create bioecological sustainable materials in place of plastic. To me, something like one simple thing that the planet already provides us, that if we invest in and use in really innovative ways, to me, something like that that's really simple and it's right here off the coast of Connecticut, it's really nearby and also the guy who, this guy, Brent Smith is a white collar fisherman. These are not Silicon Valley "I went to Stanford" exclusive industries. These are industries that are super attainable for the disappearing middle class. So something like that really gets me psyched.Yeah, it's really beautiful. It reminds, it makes it occurred to me as you were describing the blue economy that I think I'm peritopian, and I'm too exact, I wanna, tell me what they are. I will. I get these in my vomit about I guess social, about our culture, about how polarized everything is, especially in my experience of living in a small town, it can be very challenging, and I have a psychology that really wants people to get along. And there's this organization called More in Common. And they are a totally unique sort of polling organization. And all they do is they make the things that we agree with visible. You know what I mean? They're really working against this current system that basically just exaggerates the partisanship and all this toxicity. But they really go out of their way to create a protopian vision of, "Oh, look, we actually were more in agreement than you might think."That's one example. And then maybe that's protopian, maybe not. But then the other one is I'm really fired up about citizen assembly, which is deliberative democracy. Which was introduced to me in this way, and it's all about that word pro, is that we live in an anti-social culture where all of our interactions are anti-social, but who out there is actually creating pro-social opportunities for interaction?So the challenge really is for us to, we have to create new opportunities for protopian experiences, right? Because they're not going to come. We have a momentum behind us that's anti-social, right? Yeah. Anti-humanity maybe and we need to go way out of our way to create opportunities that bring us together.How does that all sound? Does that land?Yeah, that lands. That's, yeah, that's all the only, so you would just be like, "I'm doing this because it's laddering up to this bigger picture that I believe in" is how you would become a protopian advocate. It's "Hey I do these, I value these things because I know they're going to lead to this larger future that is inclusive."And then the only other thing that I would say, and I feel like a broken record and sometimes it makes me sad to say this over and over again, but for those of you who are listening and for you, Peter, whatever you're doing that you feel passionate about where you feel like it's making a positive difference, please just make sure that in those organizations that there are women in positions of leadership, and that there are people of color. It's not just a bunch of, because like minds can tend to be hegemonic. And just really making sure that you are pushing toward that inclusion because it's really important. Because we're not going to go if we don't all go together. And that means that we need that thinking at the very tip end of the spear.Yeah. I very much appreciate that. I have one last question.Sure.How, it's about the future. You talked about, you used that title of the show, "The History of the Future". And it occurs to me, how has your relationship with the future changed in this shift from brand strategists, marketers, marketing? And how is the future treated and talked about and handled and managed in that world versus how you really want to be thinking about the future now?Yeah. Okay. Some big changes. Really big changes. One is that so much of the future forecasting in the brand strategy marketing world overemphasizes technology as this essential driving force of the future. Secondarily, it assumes a consumer-driven society. And so everything is about that and we know how problematic that is. Thirdly it lacks inclusion. There are very few futurists out there who are not the usual suspects and coming from that sort of very exclusionary, male-dominated patriarchal culture view. So I think those three things have changed radically. And then I think most importantly on the consciousness front, I am coming from a very different place of self-empowerment rather than relegating power and authority outside of myself.And what I mean by that is when you raise your, when you meditate enough and when you raise your consciousness and you start understanding physics and quantum physics and the quantum realm and the field and all of these things, you actually realize that we live in a holographic universe and we are creating our reality by what we are focusing on.And I come from now a very empowered point of view about the future where it's no, the future is not going to happen to us. We are going to be creating the future in the quantum field by what we choose to focus on. And if we choose to focus on protopian principles and protopian ideals, then that's the future we will get. As opposed to this kind of unempowered point of view that I think goes on a lot in the strategy and marketing world where it's somebody's going to come in and tell me what is going to happen. No. You need to get the people together who are making things happen and get them to get on the right page with the right point of view and get them to actually create that future, not have somebody tell them what the future is going to be.So those are some, I'm glad you asked the question because those are some really big issues.Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we could talk for an hour about each of them, like all the assumptions about technology and what consumerism and all that stuff. It's beautiful. So we're at time. What so for anybody that was really fired up about what you shared, what's the best way to get in touch with people?Yeah check me out on LinkedIn. There's a link to my website that will take you to either the Love and Order website or the Radical Sabbatical website. Say hi, DM me and I'd love to talk if you're into this stuff.And yeah, if you go to my Love and Order website, there's a free report that you can get on pioneering protopia. If you check out my business page on LinkedIn, there's a series on cyberpunk fiction that I've been writing, which is very entertaining. And also as I said Charles Gadsden and I are going to come out with the Blue Economy series starting on June 8th. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time and I'm really inspired and excited by what you're doing. So thank you for sharing.Thank you, Peter. It's always a wonderful time to talk to you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Noah Brier is the founder of BrXnD.ai which he describes as ‘an organization at the intersection of marketing and AI.’ Mostly, I think it has been relatively small events where super smart marketing folks experiment about the impact of AI on marketing. Definitely take a look at CollXbs - a brand collaboration engine. And here’s a recap of the BrXnD NYC 2024 Event. I first encountered Noah way back in 2008 when he launched Brand Tags which was like a free association tool for brands. Before that, he was the Co-Founder and CEO of Percolate, and the Head of Planning and Strategy at Barbarian Group.AI Summary. I start all these interviews with the same question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian; she helps people tell their story. I love the question, but it's a big question. So I always over explain it. And so to say, before I ask it, you're in absolute control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? Where do I come from? Yeah, I'll give the sort of biographical details and then I will give the sort of real answer because I was actually at a conference, a small conference a friend of mine puts on a few years ago. And a CMO was having a conversation. He was saying that one of the things he's come to realize is that like when he's doing interviews, he is not particularly interested in sort of people giving their, he asked what's your story, right? Like the typical sort of interview question. People are, they go through and they're like, they graduated high school and they studied this in college and they went through often he's interviewing people who have just graduated college and they don't have much of a story. And he's much more interested in the story of how they are, who they are. So the very fast biographical version of it is that I started my career actually very beginning as a journalist. I moved into the advertising industry, taught myself to write code. I started Percolate, my first software company in 2011. And I am currently doing this thing called brand, which I still have not figured out the perfect way to describe, but it is a, I call it an organization at the intersection of marketing and AI, and it is a house for all of the different activities that I have going on at the moment. At that intersection, whether it's a conference or consulting or building things or doing whatever I think probably the more interesting version of the answer is I am a curious person and a researcher. There is a story from when I was in 7th grade, I think it was 7th grade, might have been 8th grade, I think it was 7th though where every December, my history teacher would give the entire class a question to answer over Christmas break. And if you could come back with the answer and the source material where you found it, then you would get an automatic A for the next quarter. You didn't have to take a test. You didn't have to do anything. So obviously when you're 12, that's pretty appealing concept. So I went straight to work and I started doing all this research and I had my parents take me, I grew up in Connecticut. They took me to these libraries all over the state where I could find different things. And the question was about this diplomatic situation that happened between the U.S. and France called the XYZ affair, which was an attempt to, if I remember my history correctly, the U.S. was upset with the French or the French were upset with the U.S. over something around the American Revolution and having to do with the sort of relationship with the British. And the French were I think sinking U.S. ships somewhere, merchant ships. And I might be totally wrong about history, but this is not the important part. So anyway, U.S. sent a sort of a group of folks to go negotiate with the French and the French sent some sort of emissaries who came to go by X, Y, and Z. And they went by X, Y, and Z because they ended up offering bribes. Or they ended up requesting bribes basically. And so the question was famously it's called the XYZ affair, and it was three men, X, Y, and Z, and the question was, who was the woman that accompanied the three men for this negotiation? And you had to go find it in this history books. And so after a few days of research, I found it. I found the answer. And I found the source. And then for some reason, along the way, I was like, it's really weird. I found sort of two references to her, but then every book published after 1983 didn't have any reference to this woman. And I was like, that's strange. And I don't really understand why that would be. That doesn't make a lot of sense. And I don't know. I just had a weird feeling about it. And you're a researcher about that sort of weird feeling where you're like, there's something that like, doesn't fit quite right here. And actually that's like the best feeling when you're like, I think I found something right. And so for some reason, which I still don't remember, I decided that I was going to reach out to the author of this book. That was the turning point where after he published his book, it was no longer mentioned that she was there. And I was like I'm 12. And so I'm like, I'm going to call his office. He was a professor at Syracuse University. His name was William Stinchcomb, I believe. And I was like, I'll call, but then I'll just leave a message and I'll ask him to email me the answer. And I call and I get somebody else answers the phone. I asked to be connected to his voicemail and they just connect me to him. And so here I am, I'm 12, I'm connected to this professor. And I stumbled my way through the story of my teacher and asking this question. He was like, you've asked the right person because I'm the preeminent scholar on the XYZ affair. And you're correct that my book does not mention that woman because I am the person who proved that she was not there. That there, this was a mistake. And your teacher is wrong. He had been asking this question for 15 years. He's been wrong the entire time he's been asking that question. That sort of information is out of date. And here's where you can find it. And in fact, the Yale library should have the copy of the Marshall papers that you'll be able to find this sort of reference in. And then I was like, can you also send me an email that says all this so I could show it to my teacher because he's never going to believe this happened. And he was like, sure. So I got this email. And I walked in and my parents took me to the Yale library and I found the Marshall papers that he referenced. And I walked into my teacher and there was one person in front of me. So the rule was whoever got there first, got the A, and the woman in front of me or then 12-year-old in front of me had the answer. This woman, her name was Madam de Villette. And so that was it. It seemed like it was over. And I was like I actually have a different answer to this question. And so then I presented my research and it turned out and he took it well. I got my A. So did she, actually got her A too. I didn't have to do any work and then he retired the question. But to me, to answer the question you originally asked, how did I get here? I think that I'm just an addict for that feeling where you have these things and you want to find the way they uniquely connect. And that is probably my favorite thing to do in the whole world. And I think a part of it is that I sort of came early to that particular feeling.You tell that story. So you were 12, then what, do you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Did you know, or have an idea?No, not really. I didn't, I may have, I'm sure I had some sense of something, but to be honest, I'm still not totally sure what I want to do or be. I think I've been pretty lucky throughout my whole life and both educationally and professionally to be able to just follow my nose. I even went to NYU, but I was in a college at NYU called Gallatin, and at Gallatin, you got to rewrite your major every semester. And so that's just been my way of being, is do whatever is interesting, and taught myself to write code, and then I started a software company, and now I'm playing with AI and I've started this AI-ish thing. So no, I doubt I knew and I still am not totally sure I do. But at the moment I'm lucky enough to be at a point in my career where I can optimize for having a good time and still make enough money to support myself and my family. So it's a good situation.What do you love about what you're doing right now? Like where's the joy in what you have going on?Yeah, I think it's a couple things. For one, I spent almost a decade running a software company. And that was an amazing experience. I built the first version of Percolate, the product. And I was the CEO, but at some point that got to be so big that if you're asking any sort of CEO of a, even small company, you spend less and less time doing the fun, interesting things, and you spend more and more time dealing with interpersonal issues between people and figuring out which health insurance plan the company is going to be on next year. And so part of the joy in what I'm doing is that I get to make stuff all the time. And that is probably the thing that I enjoy most, whether it's writing or putting on a conference or writing code and just like seeing ideas come into the world is something I really enjoy. And I do think it fits into that story. I like to fill those gaps. I like to have that feeling that you've identified somewhere in the middle and then to actually make it happen. I think that's a big piece of it. I'd say the AI piece specifically is just, this is the most amazing technology I've personally ever experienced. I remember getting my first computer, but I was not someone who was super aware of what life was like before computers. I didn't live in a world before computers, but it wasn't something that was super apparent to me. And I remember getting on the internet and I was building websites early, but even then I'm still relatively young and it seemed like that's just how the world worked a little bit. And this is just the most magical, strange piece of tech that I've ever used. I feel like I'm living through something that is just amazing. And I think a lot of people feel very uncomfortable in those situations. And I think it is uncomfortable. It brings into question lots of really fundamental stuff about what makes us human and what creativity is and all of these pieces. But it's also just really cool. I don't know, every day there's a world of things I can do today that I couldn't do two years ago. And that's just an amazing feeling if what you like to do most is make stuff.My first interaction with you was Brand Tags. And then Percolate, and now BrXnD. You show up, it seems to me, in service of brand at these technological shifts. And I just wonder, when did you first encounter brand and what made it so interesting to you?My first job out of college, I wrote for a magazine called American Demographics. It was a trade publication. Not a particularly successful one because to be a successful trade publication, you need to be laser focused on a single audience. And this one was focused across marketers and demographers and a couple other groups of people. But I got this really amazing opportunity there where I met the editor and I pitched him a story while I was still in my senior year about Shepard Fairey and Obey Giant as a sort of interesting lens into brand building. And I was a big fan of graffiti and had been for a long time and I've been tracking Shepard Fairey and this was 2003. So I pitched it and he basically said, okay, if you write it, and it's good enough, I'll give you a job. And so I took a shot at it and it was an amazing thing to me. I'm sitting in my dorm room and I'm on the phone with Shepard Fairey and I'm on the phone with the artist and like all of these people who I had grown up just idolizing. I still think graffiti as a sort of art form is absolutely amazing. And I wrote this story about the idea of building this sort of guerrilla approach to brand building. And I think part of where that connection came from was in college, I ended up studying media technology and culture. And I was very focused on, I'm a big Marshall McLuhan fan. And so I think the sort of brand side of things came naturally. I was interested in this idea of these things that are such kind of strange cultural artifacts. They don't really exist, but they exist in our heads and they live with these visual representations, but the visual representations are just a sort of tiny piece of this much larger puzzle about what they are. And so I pitched that story and he took it and I got a job and that was my first job. And from there I ended up because the magazine was focused around marketing and technology. I ended up talking to a lot of folks at that intersection. And when the magazine went out of business fairly soon after I got hired, because like I said, it was not a particularly successful magazine and I needed to get a new job because we all got laid off, I reached out to honestly, just a bunch of the folks who I had interviewed for these various stories and those tended to be either from marketing or tech. And so I ended up as a copywriter at an agency. Yeah, so I think it just came naturally. And then all these other things, I think I've just continued to be fascinated by brands and how they work and what they are. And they're very strange and unique nature. And the fact that brand tags, which you mentioned, I did in 2008, I think. And it was this sort of experiment to understand what a brand was. And it was inspired by this article my friend Martin Bihl had written that basically argued that brands live in people's heads. And I thought that was a really interesting way to think about it that I had not thought before. And I made this thing that flashed up a logo and people typed in the first thing that popped into their head and made a tag cloud out of the results. And so it was a way to capture that perception in people's heads. And I think I've been just hooked on those ideas since then. And I honestly, I learned to write code in 2010 to build that thing. I learned to write code to build brand tags. I had the idea and then I was like, I got to figure out how to do this. And so it was in service of this stuff. And then I think I've just naturally kept going with it. And then at some point in your career, you settle into this area where you're surrounded by people who are thinking about these kinds of things. But I also think it's more broad. I just think brands are these very important, unique things in this kind of strange ecosystem of commerce and culture and I continue to find them interesting all these years later.The second BrXnD conference was just last week. Congratulations. And thank you. And congratulations. How are you feeling about the conference last week?It was great. I thought I was on stage, so I'd be more interested to hear how you thought of it from the audience. Hopefully the chairs were more comfortable than they were last year. No, I thought it went excellent. It was fun to revisit everything a year later. It was really fun to have an audience of so many people who were returning. I thought that was really cool and unique. And I think that as much as things have changed over the last 12 months in this world of AI, we haven't progressed all that much. I think we're still in such early phases of this technology, even though it's quite old in theory. Neural networks have been around for a really long time, transformers have been around for, I don't know, six or seven years now. But we're just at the beginning of its impact on the world. And I think part of what I was hoping to do with the day last year was just demystify it. And I think this year, it's continuing that and pushing people away from feeling too certain that they are ready to declare mission accomplished. We know what it is. It's done. And I just think we aren't going to possibly be able to see all of the downstream impacts of this thing for many years to come. The talk I gave to open the day I drew this analogy between bicycles, which was multi-layered. I first started using the bicycle analogy last year as a way to say AI is like a bicycle in that you have to get on it to learn it. You can't read about it. Bicycles have this sort of incredibly counterintuitive physics where you need to turn right in order to turn left and turn left in order to turn right. And that's the reason that we have to put a six-year-old on a bicycle and run alongside them, not read them a book about the physics of bicycles and then have them get going. And I think AI works very similarly. It's just a little bit too weird and counterintuitive for us to read about and understand. And so all we're left with is to play and tinker and explore. But then as you look deeper at the bicycle analogy, which is something I started to do, there are all these other sort of very interesting layers, right? The bicycle was invented in the early 1800s, but it wasn't until the introduction of the safety bicycle, which gave bicycles two equal size wheels, that it became popular. And then you had this bicycle craze and people were very worried about it and what it was going to do to culture and what was going to happen. Interestingly, people were particularly worried about women and their ability to now move freely about what would that do to culture? And then if you want to continue to extend the analogy, which is something that I did in the talk, you can look at all these sort of second and third order effects. One of them is that it did give women far more freedom and independence. Another is that it has this linkage between airplanes. The Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics and bike builders before, and learned to use high strength, low weight materials, because they were bike builders. And it has this linkage to cars because it gave us this view into what was possible with independent transportation. We had the steam railroad, but bicycles inspired people to use the roads in new ways and to push towards self-propelling technology. And then the last sort of interesting analogy is that Steve Jobs read this article in the early seventies from Scientific American about how amazing bicycle technology was and all these linkages, and it inspired him to call the first PC a bicycle of the mind and talk of people as tool builders. And so I just think it's like, if you would ask somebody in 1869, when the New York Times was writing about the bicycle craze, what was to come from bicycles? They probably would have given you this very sort of linear story when you zoom out enough, what is airplanes and cars and computers and all sorts of crazy stuff that would have been not just impossible to imagine at that time, but silly to even project.Yeah, I really enjoyed the events. I've just really appreciated how you contextualize all of it in a way that makes it very accessible. The idea of the deeply counterintuitive way that generative AI has shown up in our world. You guys talked about it and I can't tell if I'm making too big a deal of it, but thinking about how they launched generative AI. I rode the train down with a guy I know. Our children are friends and he was telling me a story about his experience with generative AI basically as a search engine - as a search engine that doesn't work, because that was the expectation he was given. You’ve said, I think, this is one of the worst branding example ever. Launching generative AI into the world in the context of search, which sets up the sort of information retrieval expectations. And Tim Hwang, last year, points out that it's a Concept Retrieval System, not an Information Retrieval System. But it was introduced into the world as an information retrieval system. And so how many people are using it with the wrong expectations and are just... I saw last week OpenAI is launching a search engine, and it felt like an Onion headline, honestly. So I wonder, what do you think the actual consequences have been for generative AI that nobody took responsibility for setting the appropriate expectations?First off, I will say that OpenAI introduction is in two and a half hours from now. We'll see exactly what it is. And Sam Altman has denied that it's a search engine.Wow.But yeah, I'm not sure that it's, I think this is the way technology cycles through, particularly when it's weird. I think it was a strange decision on the part of the technology companies to decide to apply it first to search, because it is a place where you are looking for a very specific answer. And this is not the thing it's best at. One of the things that I've come to see and talk about with folks over the last 12 months is this idea that hallucinations are a feature of these things, not just a feature, they're fundamental. There is no model without hallucinations. That's all they do. The fact that they're right so often is what should surprise us, not the fact that they're wrong, right? Because there is no sort of information retrieval, as Tim said, it's all sort of concept retrieval. And so the fact that they pack so many concepts in there and that they so often are correct, like technically correct, is a kind of amazing thing. Much more amazing than when they're not correct. But naturally, I think the easiest places to apply it are places where you can lean into that, not away from it. Where the goal is to lean into the fact that it's all a hallucination, not to try to fix it at all costs. And I think that's why creative projects are the most interesting. I don't know if you've seen this thing called WebSim, which is the most interesting and amazing thing I've seen from somebody over the last few months. Somebody built basically a browser. It's a fake browser and all it is just an AI imagined site. So you prompt it and it sends you to this fake website that the AI has imagined. And it's wild. It's insane. It's amazing. And that is magic, right? That's the magic of this thing. And when you lean into it fully, you get these amazing results. And when you try to fix it, but I guess if I zoomed out a little more, I'd say the technology companies are just making the same mistake that humans are in that, like, when you see something that looks like a computer, I made a joke at the conference that AI doesn't pass the duck test. The duck test is if it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it flies like a duck, then it's probably a duck, right? And so AI looks like a computer. It talks like a computer. It is shaped like a computer. In fact, we experience it through a computer, right? We experience it through software, like deterministic software, deterministically written software. And so I think it's not a huge surprise that we're a little bit confused about what it is and that we ask it to do math, for instance, right? Because every computer can do math easily and they can multiply five times six numbers because it's a deterministic process and it's core to how it works. And not literally, but I think what we're seeing is a lot of people going to ChatGPT and figuratively asking it to do math, which could also be fact retrieval or any of these other things that we're very used to a computer being able to do perfectly. And then it can't do it and they're like, this computer is broken. And they're not wrong. The flip side is if five years ago, I was like, hey, Peter, can you write me a, have your computer write me a sonnet? You'd just look at me cross eyed. That's a silly idea. It's not even something that your computer can't do, it's something that you'd look at me and think I think maybe this person needs to be institutionalized or something. I don't, what is he talking about? Asking me to have my computer write a sonnet. And I think that's what we're all doing. We're all groping and grasping for whatever we can here. And we're trying to figure it out. And I do think it's strange that they've all chosen to start with search engines. And I don't think the search engine results are particularly good. And I've tried to use these AI search engines, like Perplexity. And I have to say I don't think they're great. I'm into just playing with stuff and trying it out and seeing what works. But I do think if you said to me, which is the more interesting project, like an AI search engine or this WebSim thing where people are imagining a whole world of stuff that's never existed before and will never exist, it's absolutely the WebSim stuff. Because we're doing something with this technology that we couldn't do before.What was your first experience with generative AI that kind of made you, what's the right word, take stock, where you really felt like you had encountered something totally new?I had been using GitHub Copilot for a while, which I think was probably my first sort of deep experience with it. If I rewind all the way, Andrej Karpathy wrote a post in, I don't know, 2011 or 12 called the, maybe it was a little later, called the unreasonable effectiveness of RNNs, recurrent neural networks. And in it, he had instructions on how to train your own RNN. And I had done that, whatever, in 2012 or 13 and just played with it. And it was crappy. And I tried to make a thing that could talk like McLuhan. And I had some fun ideas. In fact, the idea I wanted to build out of that, because those RNNs were not very good and you needed to train them on a huge corpus of materials in order to make them work. But one of the interesting things that kept coming out of it was these misspellings and these funny, close, but not quite right words. And I wanted to make a dictionary of impossible words. For me, that was my idea back then. And so that was my first experience really playing with it. And then GitHub Copilot was probably my first regular thing. I was building a lot. And what I found particularly interesting about that is I was writing a lot of tests for product that I was working on. And what was amazing is that once you had enough of these tests in your code base, basically I could just write the name of a new test and it would just pop the test out. And I thought, huh, that's really interesting. But then the first sort of real thing was I discovered that this was GPT-3, and I discovered that you could give it a data structure that you wanted data returned in, and it could return structured data from unstructured data. And that was the first thing where I was like, wow, I am never going to do this any other way ever again. This is so far superior. I'd done a lot of web scraping in my life and web scraping is this terrible process where you write this very brittle code that says here's the title tag and here's the H1 tag and here's the paragraph and go grab those pieces. And if one tiny little thing changes on the site, everything breaks. And here with AI, I could just grab the text, give it to the AI along with a structure and say, hey, parse out all the pricing information and give me a CSV with each row as a plan and the plan has a name and a description and a price and the prices per whatever. And here are the features. And that was mind blowing because it was like, I think those moments where you realize, oh, I'm never going to do this any other way ever again. And I wouldn't say actually I have had a ton of other, that is still the number one thing I will never do any other way is structured unstructured data. But that is a continually useful thing that I need almost every day in everything I do. That is probably my number one use case at its broadest.I think the first thing you did, I'm not sure the chronology, but you did the BrXnD COLLXB, right? And so you had an AI create these collaborations between brands. And one of the lessons or findings was that when you asked it to make a sneaker, it put a Nike logo on it, right? And it was almost like the evidence of brand in LLMs. I'm not even sure how to talk about it. The evidence of brand equity in LLMs. Is that, was that the right way of saying it?Yeah, I think that's reasonable. Yeah, so I built this thing. You could smash any two brands together. It's still available at brand.ai, B R X N D.ai. And one of the things I kept seeing is that if you ask for different brand sneakers, collabs, even if it wasn't a Nike, it would often come out with a swoosh on it. And what I thought was interesting about that was that's technically a hallucination, right? It's technically incorrect. But my argument was that it's perceptually correct, right? That is the way people think about sneakers. If we went and surveyed a thousand people and we said what logo goes on a sneaker, a huge portion of those would say, if you asked them to draw it, a huge portion would put a swoosh on it, right? Because to many people, that's just a sneaker. It's not a Nike, it's not a brand even, right? It's transcendent. And I would say that lesson actually has continually repeated itself. I'm working on a project now with a large radio company, I'll say. And one of the things that we've been going through is, the real challenge is getting these things to be less technically correct, like it comes back to that hallucination thing. In my day to day work, I generally don't find that the challenge is that these things hallucinate too much. It's that they are too specifically correct. I sometimes equate it to it's like working with the most junior employee who does exactly the thing you said. And you're like, but that's not really what I meant. I expected that you would interpret that I need you to spend five more minutes on that. And they come back after five more minutes and you're like, no, I meant I needed it to be better. That's what the AI does. It takes you literally, but not always correctly. And so it's again, in this sort of world where everybody's so focused on hallucinations are bad. Again, it's just not, it's not really a big part of my experience. I find it to be the opposite. I find that again, it's like working with those junior employees where the frustrating part is not that they don't listen to you. It's that they don't listen to themselves, that they don't have that experience and internal understanding. And so they take you too literally and you think in your mind, it was obvious that you were looking for, hey, I just need this better. I have a ongoing joke about the number of times that a CMO or some other leader says, hey, have you thought of putting that in red? And then everything comes back red from the agency. And they're like, no guys, I was literally asking you, did you think about that? Like you could have said no, and that would have been fine. I was not telling you to bring it back in red. So I feel like that's a constant source.You mentioned consulting and stuff. I'm just curious, what kind of questions are people coming to you to answer? And what is brand management and brand building mean in this new era?I'm getting asked a couple of different classes of questions, I'd say. One of them is just at a high level. Like, how do we adopt and integrate this technology into our organization? I'd say that's probably the most common one. We don't know exactly what we want to do with it, but we know that we should learn more about it and we should have a point of view on where it belongs. And how do we develop that point of view? And then there's more specific ones, which are like, hey, we have some ideas. We need some help on figuring out how to make it happen, whether that's help with prompting or building specific things. And then once in a while, I do a specific kind of build or project. I tend not to build a lot for other people, to be honest, just cause it's not really the thing that I think I'm best suited to do. My skill is I think as a prototyper, not as a sort of production level software developer. I would take my ability to sit inside an organization and build a prototype of something against almost anyone's. I know my own limitations well enough to know that I'm not the person who should be putting this stuff into production and making sure it's got all of the security and all the different pieces that it needs. That's throughout my career, that's where I've hired much more talented software developers than myself to do that job.I know you just coming off the second of the conferences, but what's next for BrXnD.AI? And what are you most excited about?I've got lots of stuff going on. So I have a whole bunch of clients that I work with on an ongoing basis on these kinds of questions. How do I adopt and integrate AI? I've got to turn around and be on the road in two weeks with 30 execs to put on a four hour version of the conference. So that's one thing. And I've got ongoing bits and pieces there. I have some ideas about doing more verticalized versions of the conference. I think there's some specific areas I'd like to dig in on more, legal is one of them. I think potentially there's some interesting things to do with creative. So that's one approach. I think I'm personally struggling with this question of I love this 200 person conference, it feels intimate enough that you can really do fun things. And I don't want to break it. I think I want to keep it that size, but I also have a bunch of other people and ideas who would like to come. So I think that might be one approach is to make it much more specific. And then I just have a never ending supply of bits and pieces and little projects and things that I'm working on, I have an ever-expanding personal assistant project that I've been building that has AI components, just this kind of amorphous code base I've been building that can do all this stuff for me whenever I need it. And that's been fun whenever I think of something, I send it that way.How is that going?It's good. I don't know, whatever I use it. Some of, a lot of this stuff is not particularly complicated or even particularly AI-ish.And to be clear, you're building an assistant for yourself, is that what you're saying?For myself, yeah. So I can email it or text it or do a bunch of other things and it's not a super smart agent or anything that can do a kind of endless supply of things, but it's something where I keep layering on these specific tasks that it can complete. Again, it's a mix of AI stuff and non AI stuff. But it's a fun ongoing project and every time I think of something that I'm like, I wish that I had this thing, I just do it and whether it's one of the functions is it takes my receipts and pulls out everything and files it away for me or another one is that when I have a link that needs to go somewhere it'll go scrape it and summarize it and do all these things. So I have this set of functions. So that's a project I'm always working on a little bit. I'm pretty interested in finding a good approach to building a retrieval-augmented generation app for myself. Maybe that's something I'll integrate into that assistant. But I want somewhere where all of my writing is and I can access it and use it for various purposes. So just fun, weird projects.Nice. I really appreciate you taking the time and yeah, I enjoyed the conferences. It's been fun talking to you. So thank you very much.Yeah. Thanks, man. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe