THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Max Kabat is the co-founder of goodDog, a brand consultancy. I first met Max and his partner Lisa Hyman way back in 2013, when they first hired me to partner on brand discovery for their client, Leesa Sleep. Since then, we have partnered many, many times, and I was excited to hear more about him, Marfa and his story. Max is also the publisher of the West Texas newspaper The Big Bend Sentinel and owner of The Sentinel, a community gathering space in Marfa, Texas. Max, very good to see you. Thank you so much for agreeing to be a part of this.Yeah, happy to be a part of this, Peter. Always nice chatting with you, my friend.Nice. So I start all these conversations in the same way, with the question that I borrowed slash stole from a neighbor here in Hudson. She teaches oral history. Her name is Suzanne Snyder. And I love the question so much, but it's so beautiful, I kind of overexplain it. I caveat it up front. So before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?Yeah, I come from New York. I'm a New Yorker. I spent the first 30 something years of my life, mostly in the Northeast. I went to college in rural Pennsylvania. And yeah, that was where I sort of was born and bred and raised. And then I married, I met a cattle rancher's daughter from South Texas. And I moved to Texas in 2016, about eight years ago.And you're from New York. So where did you grow up? Where were you?Yeah, my parents are products of immigration of some sort. And they were both born and raised in and around New York City. I was born in New York City, in Manhattan, and then my parents moved up the Hudson River to Briarcliff Ossining when I was a two-year-old kid, and that's where I was sort of raised.Yeah. And what do you have memories of, as a kid, what you wanted to be when you grew up?Oh, I don't know, probably any kid during that era, I probably wanted to be a professional athlete. I think that all died quite quickly. I am athletic, but I am not very large and not very strong. And so yeah, that probably died pretty quickly.Yeah. And what was life? What was it like growing up? And what do you say Briarcliff Ossining? Is that one of those adjacent?Those are two towns. Yeah. But some people don't know Briarcliff Manor. It's now probably most known because Donald Trump bought the rinky-dinky golf course that was there and turned it into Trump National, probably in the last 20 plus years. Or it's also in Mad Men.Oh, wow.Oh, yeah. The main character, I can't remember his name at the moment travels up the Hudson. Don Draper goes to Briarcliff. That's where he lives. He commutes up to.Oh, wow. What was it like growing up there? What was your.Yeah. Suburban, you know, New York City, growing up this Westchester County, all the other, I think, counties that surround New York City in the Tri-State area. You know, people commute. A lot of people commute. A lot of people are involved in business and supporting business and all those kinds of things. And my parents didn't commute. They worked locally. But yeah, that was sort of the town I grew up in.Yeah. Did you have a relationship with New York City? Did you identify as a New York? 100 percent. Yeah, 100 percent. I always said New York if I was in and around somewhere else, if somebody asked me where I was from, I would sort of start pointing towards the place, you know, and then or I was it's funny, I was growing up as a kid or even as a young adult living in New York City after college, I always took offense. Oh, you're from upstate. No, no, no, no. I'm not from upstate. Whereas now I live in literally in one of the most desolate places in the country. And, you know, rural America has a very soft spot in my heart. And I probably should have worn that more proudly as sure, I am from upstate technically north of the city would be up.Yeah. Tell me about where you are now. I'm in Marfa, Texas. It's in Big Bend country, the Big Bend region of far west Texas. I'm on the border. My closest city is El Paso, about 180 miles away. Or I live right in the middle of town. It's about 60 miles from the county that I'm in Presidio County borders as a port city. Ojinaga is the Mexico side. And Presidio is the U.S. side. And we're in a set of grasslands between two mountain ranges. Bottom of the Rockies. If you look at a map, the bottom of Rockies sort of spills out and goes actually all the way into Mexico. But we're at the bottom of the Rockies. So we're nine-tenths of a mile high in the high desert.Yeah. And how do you describe Marfa to somebody who's not encountered it?I think it's sort of an anomaly of a place. It's an island in the middle of the desert, as people call it. It's really hard to get to. It takes intestinal fortitude. It takes effort to get here, not just to live here. It takes an effort to get here. And so it's sort of a self-selecting kind of idea. And yeah, people. It's had a lot of change over the last bunch of years, the last hundred years, we should call it. You know, there were World War bases that were out here. There were POW camps. This was the film Giant. Have you ever seen Giant was filmed out here. So this was sort of that at one point in time, even before that, it was Mexico? Was it the U.S.? Some people sort of made a border. And lo and behold, this was on the U.S. side. So, you know, it's part of the Chihuahuan Desert. The Chihuahuan Desert reaches starts in the state of Chihuahua, a little bit south of that in Mexico and comes up through West Texas, a little bit into Mexico, a little bit into Arizona. So what is it? It's a place. It's an ecosystem. It has a border, but it doesn't. It was really great grazing and cattle country. And until it wasn't until it was overgrazed, it was the far reaches of desolation. It's known for really high-end art and sort of the father of minimalist art, Donald Judd came here in the 70s and sort of established himself and established the place. And so it's a lot of different things. An enigma, I don't know, might be a one-word answer, but a complicated but easy way to sort of explain that it's everything and nothing all at the same time.Yeah. What do you think people get wrong about Marfa? There's an idea of what Marfa is, but people haven't really experienced it or known. But what do people not understand or get about it?I think that it's interesting the last number of years, if anything changed in the pandemic, I think all the quote-unquote special places sort of got a lot more attention in the pandemic, especially if they were not in the middle of a city. People started exploring what it might look like to live somewhere else. And those places, everything drastically changed. I think it was sort of a lot of things went into turbo into overdrive. But. I'm sorry, your question again was I lost my train of thought.What do people get wrong about Marfa?There's probably an impression. Yeah, sorry. I remember where I was going with this. Thank you. I think people get wrong at everything about a place that they have expectations about what it's supposed to be. And they go in with these preconceived notions instead of just experiencing. And I think it's. That's what I would sort of hope people would be able to do as a visitor of a place, sort of experience what it is, take it for what it's worth. You know, if you go in with certain expectations, I think that sort of clouds your judgment. Not to say that that's not who we are as humans. We at our core. But when you go to a place and you have a preconceived notion of what it's supposed to be and the way it's supposed to be, you're probably stuck in a situation where it's not going to meet or maybe exceeds or. But I think it just sort of clouds the whole experience.So I of course, we met through your work at Good Dog as a co-founder, brand strategy and growth strategy. You also have you're the publisher of the Big Bend Sentinel and the owner of the Cisco, which is a gathering space. How did let's start with the with Good Dog. How did you get into brand that kind of brand strategy work? When did you first sort of encounter the idea of brand and that you could make a living doing that kind of work?Yeah. I had spent some time after college to go back to your early question. What did I want to be when I was brought up? I won't be an athlete. I really wanted to be in sports marketing. And that's what I thought I was going to do after college. And then two guys I used to caddy for in the summers offered me a job to go work on Wall Street. So my first three years on were working on Wall Street at a broker-dealer firm and then at a hedge fund that was a client of the broker-dealer in trading equities, options, swaps, that kind of stuff. I didn't get an MBA, but I like to say that that sort of gave me an understanding of the way in which the business world works through a particular lens. But it just gave me a sort of a good understanding about business. I didn't like where that was leading or what that was, what my life was like there. And I ended up spending a bunch of years at a media company that sold space, sold media to advertisers. They had an outdoor advertising business and a sports marketing signage and sponsorship business. And it was sort of there, I like to say, that my education of the United States was I was spending a lot of time trying to ingratiate myself into the NASCAR community and sort of traveled around the country, not the coasts, the middle of the country and sort of realized very quickly that, oh, I am not from America. I might think that New York City is the center of the world and I might have all these ideas and ideals. But there's this whole other place called America that I don't know a lot about. And it made me sort of start to question a lot.It was also after the 2008 crash, I was in college in 2001. So I think I was sort of already into this mindset of sort of questioning and thinking and realizing that we're, you know, the experience is short and we're all intertwined. And how do you leave the place better than when you started? And I realized that I think, you know, through that media sales, the company was called Van Wagner. I realized that marketing had this awesome ability and advertising, this awesome ability to influence people and affect change. I was just sort of a cog in the wheel. I was part of the system. What happens if I could use the system to sort of do something different to start to sort of shift consciousness to a more conscious place? So that didn't work there at that media company. I had tried to rally support from senior leadership to say, hey, what would happen if I could do this, but stay here? And they weren't really into that. So I ended up going to work for an integrated marketing agency where I met Lisa, my business partner, good dog. She was my boss. And she had built this thing that was called Green Dog, Good Dog. It was, you know, sort of using integrated marketing's ability to influence people and affect change, but do it for good, for good brands and all these sort of this is 15 years ago, let's say. So, you know, one of the only ways in which you could vote with your dollar was to do it via food and beverage. That was sort of the closest tie to there's a you can eat organic, you can farm a certain way, you can support a certain kind of lifestyle. And it's also healthy for it's, you know, it's good for you and good for the planet kind of idea. And so those were sort of the first products and services. And so I participated in that rode that wave. And Lisa and I eventually spun out of the larger integrated shop that was like 250 people when we left. And it's and it's a two-person Good Dog is now like a two-person, high-level thinking, high-level doing shop where we work with founder-built brands and mostly in the twenty-five to three hundred million dollar run rate work through growth plateaus as they scale.Yeah. Can you tell I love can you tell me a story about that moment where you encountered America, as you said, at the NASCAR? You know, I'm I don't I think you said you're you won't be able to see me, but I'm a if you're from New York, I'm a curly-haired New York Jew. That's what I look like. Right. And so I talked a different way. I looked a little bit different. I acted a little bit different. I dressed a little bit different. And here I was trying to figure out how to get on the inside of a community that I didn't know a ton about. I didn't grow up watching NASCAR, but I quickly realized that the fandom was incredibly palpable and super powerful and brands were spending oodles of dollars to try to ingratiate themselves into that community and at the same time sort of create these kinds of experiences. And those were things that the company I worked at was really good at. And also, yeah, I just was trying to figure out where was there a place for me in business? And I did it for a bunch of years and became a part of sort of the business community in some sense. I would travel from race to race. I would hang out in the pits. I met some really fantastic people. It was a really amazing experience. And, you know, there's nothing like standing on the track and feeling the actual weight of cars racing around the track and how it shakes you to your core and wearing headphones. And it's a pretty event. People in the states. It's the whole thing is a spectacle. It's an amazing, amazing experience that travels week after week after week. But yeah, I think that sort of gave me a better idea of, wow, I'm such a pompous idiot, I'm totally not from there's this whole other place called America. I want to learn about this. Yeah, that's how I think I experienced that.What do you love about the work that you do? A good dog. What's the joy in it for you?Yeah, it's a good question. I think that, you know, the joy is I didn't know this at the time, but I guess I always had somewhat of an entrepreneurial spirit, right? Having your own consultancy can be a whole other conversation. Consultancy agency. We're using the word fixer because that's what Lisa and I really do. We're sort of we're brand fixers. But you're an entrepreneur in and of itself, you're running your own business and you're entrepreneurial. But I think until my wife and I sort of started Macy, not Lisa, my business partner, Macy, my wife, when we started this project in Marfa. I think I realized that I always had this want to help people make their idea sort of flourish. And when there's too many people and too many cogs in the wheel and too much distance between the big idea or sort of the heartbeat of the business that's driving it forward and sort of the people that are helping it flourish and they're looked at as more of minions rather than part of a team. I didn't like that whole idea. I sort of wanted to exist in sort of this is a capitalistic society. I was more interested in existing in sort of things that were more tangible and tactile. And you could you felt like you were really your ideas and your influence on helping somebody make their business better was actually making a difference rather than was just sort of part of the system.Yeah. You said that you're calling yourselves fixers. When people ask you about what you do, how do you how are you talking about it? What do you what do you say when people ask you what you do?Yeah. Lisa and I've been at this really long time. And I think that, you know, the thing we've baked a lot of cakes, as I like to say. We've helped people grow their business top line. We've helped them participate in equity events, pre post, raise money, exit a business. We've been at this for a while. And so there's a lot of people, I think the market that exists now from a consultant standpoint, there's a lot of people that are free agents. But what do they actually do? What is their experience? What have they actually built? How have they actually helped somebody sort of grow their business? And so yeah, I think Lisa and I are, we're always helping somebody sort of differentiate themselves. That's what we're helping a business do. And so if you can't differentiate yourself, that's as a consultant, I think that there's an inherent problem there. So everybody is a consultant, everybody's an agency, the barrier to entry to stand up your own thing, takes little effort and some words on a LinkedIn profile, and ta-da, you've hung a new shingle. So we're sort of in this moment of everybody's consultant, everybody's an agency, everybody says they can do something, what can they actually do? We're a fixer. We help you fix your business. We've seen a lot of these situations. And we've been on the inside a ton. And so how do we pull on that experience to help you sort of turn your challenge into a solution?Yeah. I mean, I've had a one sort of angle on your work and seen you get amazing clients. The relationships I think I see you having with them are really strong and very honest and direct. And I was curious about how you get, if there's something about the moments that you engage with clients or the moments they come to you, it seems like you're really alive in these very transitional moments with clients and you really are helping them. And I just wondered how you how you think about the client and how you what those kind of conversations are like when you when a client reaches out to you and they're in a transitional moment. How do you help them understand what's needed to to move forward?Yeah, I think that in transition, thank you for using the word in transition. Those are our favorite opportunities. And that's really when we're at our best. If everything's really great, probably don't call us. There's a lot of really great people that can make really lovely creative that looks a certain way and is creative for creative sake. Or you can have really lovely packaging that doesn't necessarily say anything. But if you're in this moment where you're trying to go from one place to another, where what got you here isn't going to get you to that next stage of growth, if you created a category and the world sort of collapsed around you and you can't remember who you are, what you are and what your special sauce is, if you have a ton of innovation coming out, if you're in transition - those are really big, juicy problems that we love to unpack and help you figure out how to move the business forward. Those are actually the best times to bring you in. You know, that's how we've really gotten to know each other over the last bunch of years. Because a key component of that is, for whom are you for? Really knowing, not just your current consumer, but your growth consumer, and getting to the nitty-gritty. These amazing insights is some of the favorite work that that we get to do with you. That's the best stuff and really helps drive our work forward. And then building a story around that. And then once you sort of have that story, that unique, authentic, culturally relevant, resonant story, that's differentiated for the business built on the insights, then you're able to sort of pull that through. And that last part is obviously super important. And what does that look like from a, you know, if it's a CPG business, what does that look like from a sales and category management story? What does that look like from an innovation story? How does that work? How is your founder story told within the context of this? What's your do you have a thought leadership position or not? What does the creative look like on pack on your, you know, paid or known assets? And, you know, how are you doing business with whom are you doing business with? And so, you know, if you sort of we've, we've, as I said, baked a lot of cakes and pull that through. So that's why we look at Yes, we do that. That very first part, that's sort of our special sauce of you need to, we believe you have to have a really good story, then you have to have a really good plan of how to activate that really good story. And then you have to have, you know, a really, really good creative, a really good way to sort of have that live in the world. And those are the sort of three markers that we believe super strongly about. And that's where we focus our time and effort. Yeah.And I mean, I've, it's, we've, it's been over 10 years, I think, I think 2013 might have been the first the first time that we worked on Lisa sleep. But I remember I had an amazing client who one time I remember I, she always left me, she kind of left me alone, she sort of took my guidance, and she'd had very little feedback very often. And I asked her what that was about, because it was such a pleasure to work with her, you know, and she said, Well, I thought that the first sign of a professional is they let other professionals do their job. And I feel like that's the relationship that we've gotten into where you really do allow me to do my own approach. And I remember the first thing, Lisa, we showed up at the we didn't even interact until the presentation day, in which you guys were presenting your work, and I was presenting my work at the same time. And it was really a beautiful experience. And so I just say that, but I was curious about the role of qual when you're when you're talking to a client, when do you feel like you need qual? And when do you not need qualitative? What's the question for you when you when you want to make that kind of suggestion?Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is sort of arts and science, right. And I think it's really interesting. We're working on a new piece of work, and this business, you know, it's less than $100 million. And they are so they are armed with so much data, and it's such good stuff. But I think that what we're realizing is that they're they're missing a little bit of the softer side of things. And, you know, data definitely tells a story. From a quantitative perspective, it's super helpful. They have a new they have segmentation, they have data back from retail partners, they have data back from their own channels. And we just sort of looked at all this stuff and started talking to this particular client. And, you know, the place that they were hoping to that they want to hang their hat on from a messaging standpoint, we felt could it could be deeper, it could be more intentional. And so that's a really great place for a qual to sort of tie there's, we all have our assumptions, we're all humans, we all go to retreat to our certain corners and have our ideas. But I think that from a qualitative perspective, that sort of insight that you're that you're able to drive in our work, it really helps us. It really helps us drive the whole idea forward. You know, it's great.Yeah, I love that word intentional. When you say that you felt like there's a need to be more intentional on the client side.Yeah, I think, you know, when you're talking about founder-built brands, when you're talking about sort of middle-stage brands, everybody's doing everything. It's all hands on deck all the time, it sort of feels like and, you know, building relationships with CEOs or C level, the C suite and boards, that's that's where a lot of our all of our work sort of starts. I think you need to be super intentional, and they're coming to you for expertise and understanding they know you've, they've done a lot of reps and so have you and so how are you going to sort of make sure that the recommendations that you're providing are intentional? It's not we're not saying, you know, tactical marketing for the sake of tactical marketing, but none of this is everything has to be intentional. We're not talking about Verizon budgets. We're not talking about, you know, everything has to be about ego or it has it has to be about driving the business forward. So everything has to be intentional.Yeah. It also feels like on a number of these experiences I've had, it might be the first time they've really done qual or they've really you've led them into an experience that they haven't really had before. And I'm really curious about that, like what that conversation is like, and how that works.I think that there are a lot of people do quote-unquote brand strategy or messaging or positioning. I don't know what you want to call it. A lot of people are consultants. I think the situations where we find ourselves in sort of the in the dating phase that first sort of feeling each other out, are we going to be right for each other phase is if people want to do the work. If they want to do the hard work about questioning what exists. If they've recognized that everything isn't so rosy. Because nothing is ever rosy. We as humans know that nothing is ever 100% amazing. If they want to lean into that, then they are the kind of person that wants to understand in a different kind of way. They want to make decisions based on something that might feel a little bit intangible to somebody else. That’s why I think our work together has been has been so fruitful for the both of us. Because those people are sort of attracted to us, right? They're attracted to Lisa and myself and our line of thinking and our experience. And so, when we say, hey, we want to learn more about this thing, we're sort of leading the horse to water of they're they're trusting in us. And we're bringing them a solution that we think is going to make the work product better. And yeah, I don't, that's, that's how I think we get there so easily.Yeah, yeah, it's really wonderful. It's wonderful, creates wonderful experiences. I had another question. I wasn't sure how. I have had experience in sort of not for profit space journalist space, which I kind of, I guess I'm laying on top of a B Corp mission-driven kind of culture, like that there's a cultural maybe skepticism about brand marketing, because it's attached to sort of corporate marketing strategy stuff. And I just wondered if that's something that you encounter or no.I think 15 years ago, that was totally the situation. I think, you know, when Lisa and my early work together, you know, one of the biggest pieces of work we worked on when we first started was with the Nature Conservancy, one of the largest, oldest environmental organizations in the world. And we were trying to get them to answer really hard questions. And even then, there was too much bureaucracy. There are too many layers. And they didn't, they didn't want to necessarily do it. They were sort of just like, where's the stuff? Where's the where's the creative? Where's the thing that we're putting into market? And we're like, you are not answering actually the first questions, like, why does somebody give a s**t about nature? Right? You got to answer that question. You can't just make somebody care. Because it's not a good hook. No one, no one is going to give a s**t about if you don't know how to tell somebody or talk to somebody or engage somebody about giving a s**t about nature, why is somebody actually going to care. And so I think all organizations and all that kind of stuff has sort of evolved over the years. But I don't know, I mean, I think I got to a point where in my career, you know, I'm married to a Macy's award-winning photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, her most recent film, Zorowski v Texas just premiered at Telluride a couple weeks ago, to rave reviews. She's really good at what she does. And so when we were living out here in the middle of nowhere, in Marfa, we got to know the folks that owned the paper, it's almost good. It's gonna be 100 years old. And in 2026, they were running it for 30 years, and they wanted to retire. And they sort of asked, they propositioned Macy and I do you want to take it over? You're a marketing brand person, advertising person, and you're a journalist. We've been living out here for a couple years. You know, and we said yes. I think the main reason we said yes, was because I was helping businesses influence people and make change using capitalism and wanted to take that idea and apply it myself. And we also looked at the at the stats, the dew and gloom, the demise of our democracy is contributed by the fact of that local and regional voices are fading with local journalism sort of struggling to find a sustainable business model. And so why am I telling you this story? Because what we did was we sort of leaned into this concept of community, we thought that newspapers have always owned through a macro, through a macro lens, they've always owned this concept of community, but they've just sort of manifested itself through news and information and print and digital. What would happen if we sort of went backwards to go forwards? What would happen if we created a physical space where people could interact and exchange information and participate in capitalism and commerce in the name of getting provided more information? We thought it was ownable because it wasn't, you know, the local newspapers and local journalism writ large is not going to do any good job of fighting the digital fight in comparison to everyone else that doesn't have the capital and the know-how and, but something that we did think we had was sort of leaning into this concept of community. So we did the work, what was, you know, what was the product market fit? What did the community need? And how would we sort of fill that need and sort of thread the needle? And, and for us, it was providing a third space for people that live here and visitors to interact with and serve them coffee and food. And we have a retail shop and it's event space. We do anything from the prom to a hoity-toity wedding that blows through town. And so all of that is to say, we took journalism something that, that I think really struggled to figure out it's over the last 25 years, it's, it's just been a battle and hasn't really done a good job leaning into the concept of brand. And we just, we just owned that idea. We just sort of took unlocked value out of what existed iconography that's been around for, you know, almost a hundred years. It's almost the oldest business in town and in the region. And, and yeah, that was, so to get to your, back to your earlier question, I don't know that everybody has necessarily done it incredibly well, but we happened upon a place that no one was playing, doing the brand play. And we sweat, we, you know, we went headfirst firmly into that and sort of have found a lot of success and a sustainable business model and a better, a better news product by doing so.How are things at the Sentinel? How long has it been now?It's been five years. Yeah. We, we, we opened our doors July 4th, 2019 and published our first newspapers. There's a bilingual paper called El Internacional that's Presidio, the port city, as I said earlier, and the border paper. And yeah, we published our first two papers on July 4th, 2019. Got a really good headstart of nine months before the pandemic hit. But, but yeah, five years later, it's, we've grown top of line revenues, you know, 500%. We have almost, from a couple of people, we've employed 20 people full-time, part-time between the cafe, retail, restaurant, and newspaper. We have more journalism. We're paying people a higher wage in a small town. I know 20 people doesn't sound like a lot, but when your population is less than 2,000, it makes you a decent-sized employer pretty quickly.Yeah. And you used that phrase, third space, right? And I feel like more people are talking about third space all the time now, right? And what have you learned about what that means? You know what I mean?Yeah. Yeah, totally. You know, I think that, I think going back to that, that, that part, I was just saying that, that as the world becomes more digital, it's, it's like, it's a freight train, right? We're not stopping that. And we all participate in it and it's making our lives better. It's making us more connected in some capacity. But I also, I also think maybe this was just a Luddite in me, but I always felt that it was making us more disconnected. And, you know, you look at the rise of experiential marketing over the last X amount of years like that's because creating sort of a physical experience that can be shared somewhat on social a hundred percent, but like creating that physical experience, that's, that's like a memory. That's something that sort of happens in a different kind of world versus the doom scrolling or the, you know, the flash in the pan of reading a something or something that happens online. It's, it's just, it's different. Something I have been thinking about is there's a very large difference in my opinion, between audience and community. And I think we've, we've sort of conflated the two. Community is about a place and its people. Audience is about not, it doesn't have to be sort of place and people specific. And local journalism is about recording the history and telling the stories of a place and its people. If it's, that's, you know, monetize, when you say monetizing audience, you don't talk about monetizing a community. Yes. The Sentinel has done that. We've monetized, you know, figured out a way how to monetize all that stuff. Cause the reality of the situation is news and information is free as, as humans are considered and people don't want to pay for it. And so we're, but people want to pay for experiences and $7 matcha lattes and, you know, all that kind of stuff and being together with people. And so that's sort of, I think that's a big difference for me is that audience is like, you use your users, you're monetizing them. It's, it's, it's not a two-way conversation. It's a one-way conversation. Whereas community is about sort of building and interacting. It's, it's a different kind of thing.Yeah. And I feel like you and I have had exchanges about how that word community has been really, you know, co-opted or, I mean, marketing we're in sort of a community era where brands are building community. You're talking about community. How do you, what are your, how do you think about community in the, in the, in those two worlds that you occupy? You've got people in the brand space probably asking you about community and you're actually building a, be in place.Yeah. I mean, I think I have a very adverse reaction to when people in the brand community are like, it's my community. It's like, No! I'll show you community……We've had such a conversation about digital isn't what it used to be, you know, Facebook, Instagram, all these sort of community aspects. They don't work like they used to. And people are looking for differentiation. People are looking for, you know, a deeper connection. In the last couple of weeks, Columbia, we have some gentlemen from some, some folks over at Columbia that are professors published a paper about, about third space and you know, what building a third space has done for, for places economically and the, the benefits and what that sort of spurns off up from an entrepreneurialist thought, which is really interesting, you know, and then you have brands like I saw Faraday, which is like a men's clothing line. The people that started it, two brothers from the Jersey shore went and took over an old post office and built this third space and are serving coffee and food and home goods and all that kind of stuff, sort of looking for a place to sort of like for people to interact. And I think it's a really interesting place for brands to play. I just wonder, my question that I'm sort of grappling with is like, to what end and like, and for what, right? Like, were this, this business, this idea that we happened into is about, about a place and its people. It's about journalism. It's about providing, you know, some, what some people call a public good for the community and sort of a symbiotic relationship. If you support us, we're going to support you kind of deal. I don't know how it plays out with, with other brands that are like not a coffee shop or not like an actual third space business that are trying to play into it. It feels more pop-uppy and feels not as more like more audience, an idea more about audience rather than community. That isn't to say like the people from Faraday might be like, we want to do something special for the place that we're from. And now we have the capacity and the monetary wealth to do it. Like, I think that's really awesome and great. But I don't know. I'm sort of, I'm trying to figure out like what this moment we're in, what exactly is it?Yeah. So we're kind of near the end of time. What's next for the Sentinel and the other paper?Yeah. So, you know, the first five years have been about building and, and establishing the foundation and, you know, iterating and iterating, you never stop iterating, but iterating to a place of like, we know we have a really good business model. We know what works. We've, we figured out a way how to, how to really make it sing. But there's a ton of value for us to, to really unlock out of the brand and the business moving forward. And we haven't gotten to everything. You know, we're still sitting on a hundred years of archives of Far West, Texas, Pancho Villa, you know, came through this area. There's like, there's some really amazing, awesome stuff that's happened through here. We've, you know, we haven't published, we were a content engine, but we haven't gotten into the game of sort of publishing and, and creating experiences besides obviously like the daily coffee shop for a weekly newspaper, the daily and sort of the weekly things that sort of have a bit more reoccurring revenue. Yeah. So there's a lot of ideas. It's the great part is, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And yeah. And I'll at the same time, a lot of conversations about when you do something in a, in an industry that is not so into change and doing things differently, such as journalism, even though they report on change all the time, how has that happened? You know, when I think we started, people were like, those guys are crazy. There's been many moments through local journalism's last 20 years where people have said like, wow, that's a stupid idea. And that's crazy. But I think people looked at us as sort of crazy and insane. And, and five years later, it's like, well, we did it, you know? And so how do we use the, the insights and understanding and, and learnings to help other folks do what we've done? There's a lot of conversation going on about that too.Yeah. How has the journalism world responded to you guys?Yeah. I think now they're, they're like, they're pretty excited about it. You know, we still don't fit the mold. I'm not a journalist. I'm like a still, I've been doing this for five years as like a quote-unquote publisher, you know? So yeah, it's still, it's still, we're looked at as sort of outsiders to a degree, but that makes sense, right? All entrepreneurial thought is really looked at as, as outside the comfort zone. I like to say that like the journalism world isn't necessarily comfortable with being uncomfortable yet. And that's, that takes time and hopefully it'll happen sooner rather than later.Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time, Max. It was a pleasure speaking with you.Yeah. Nice to chat with you too, Peter, as always. And nice to chat about something besides, besides the working on a piece of business. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Lipson, PhD is a clinical psychologist, author and translator living in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is the author of, most recently, Be: An Alphabet of Astonishment, Stairway of Surprise: Six Steps to a Creative Life, and Group Meditation. Michael, thank you very much for accepting my invitation to this interview.Thank you for inviting me. It's a luxury to be invited.So I start, I don't think you know this, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who lives in Hudson. She's an oral historian. She helps people tell their story. It's a big, beautiful question, which is why I steal it, but I also overexplain it because it's so big. 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. And the question is, where do you come from?Absolute control, what would I do with that? Go ahead, what's your question?The question is, where do you come from?Ah, well, that's a very Zen master kind of question. They often said that, trying to plumb the depths of where the other monk, for instance, was coming from, not geographically or biographically, but sort of from their spiritual source. I don't know if you ever read "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler." Well, of course I did. And in there, there's a little boy who's hiding in the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan from the guards and the boy and a girl. And at one point, the boy is hiding. He's standing, I think, on a closed toilet. But the guard opens the stall and sees him and says, "Where did you come from?" And he says, "My mommy always says I come from heaven." And then he runs away. So I guess that's where I come from, just like you and everybody else.Where do I come from? Sure, I could just answer that in so many ways. To be more down to earth, I was born towards the end of the 50s, a baby boomer in New Haven, Connecticut. My father was a professor at Yale, which certainly had a big effect on me, not only because my mother also was a professor more briefly. And at UConn, she got her doctorate in American history. My father's field was law, in particular, international and Soviet law.It had a big effect on me because of a kind of a reading, academic orientation, fundamentally, and the people we knew and so forth. But also because though I was Jewish and raised in an agnostic background, my dad, to a lesser extent, my mom, but definitely my dad had an early interest in Zen Buddhism. That was like an academic, fashionable, almost intellectual thing. Back in the day, he wasn't a sitter in meditation or an attender of workshops and so forth, but he was a reader and thinker. So, I grew up hearing stories of the Zen masters and the wonderful old Hasidic rabbis, sort of as if they were all one group of fascinating people. And I think that had an effect on my siblings too, but it took a little more in me.So, I think that early wondering about the nature of the mind, the nature of our project of being here, what this is, the Zen people talk about the great matter of life and death. I would say also the fact it's a spiritual kind of a background or, I don't know, psychological background that's very fundamental is that my parents' first child died when he was just three months old in a car crash. And so, my parents were driving. My mother was holding the baby on her lap. This was before car seats. And my dad swerved to avoid a dog in the road. The car hit a soft shoulder, flipped over. My mother fell on her firstborn child and killed it, as she said, with her weight. So, that was a kind of untalkable about thing, you know, and a grief that I think pervaded my family when I was growing up. And one of those things that's an open secret, where to some degree people know about it, but it can't be talked about. And I think that had an effect on all of us, sort of making us have some kind of relationship, mostly not a cheerful relationship, to the great matter of life and death. All those are ways I could answer the question, where do I come from?Yeah. You said that it kind of, the Zen, the masters took with you, more so with your siblings. Can you tell me a story about that? Well, like the kinds of stories I would hear from my dad? Or what makes you say that? Is there a moment where you realized that it had took, I guess I love that word, that it struck you differently than your siblings?Well, not a moment, but for instance, I doubt my brother and sister did what I did when I was seven. I remember sitting on the stairs in my home, in our house, and really trying to penetrate the question of mu, which is a Zen koan, a kind of early koan in a series of koans. And it just means nothing in Japanese. And I remember thinking, how can I have it in my mind? How can I focus on it if it's nothing? If it's nothing, there can't be anything to get about it. So I just had an affinity for these kind of puzzles.And do you have a recollection of knowing what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did you want to be?Oh, sure. I wanted to be lots of things. But they weren't a psychologist who writes books on spirituality. They were, I wanted to be, gosh, well, I wanted to be Sir Galahad who occupies the perilous, you know, around the round table in the Arthurian legends. And I wanted to be a cowboy. And what else did I want to be growing up? I wanted to be a poet from very early on. And I wrote poetry into my 20s. Byron said, to be 20 and a poet is to be 20. To be 40 and a poet is to be a poet. By the time I was 40, I was no longer a poet. So he was right about me, he nailed me hundreds of years before I was born.You described yourself as a boomer. Does that word or idea mean anything to you?Yeah. Well, sure. I mean, it's got a pejorative slant since people started saying, "Okay, boomer." But it was, sure, it's, I recognize as a grown up, how insanely privileged we were, growing in a time after the Second World War, where America was increasingly wealthy, increasingly, you know, hugely respected. And it was, you know, as a white, upper middle class American, I was just in an incredibly privileged position, male, which I certainly didn't appreciate at the time. But now I see sort of what this amazing, you know, kind of bolus of a generation, enjoying an unprecedented, and probably never to be repeated standard of living was. So, and then, you know, realizing my cohort is aging and dying, that's, now that certainly is something. And feeling that we were sort of central to the universe, and now no longer. So, that's an interesting trajectory that a lot of people in that cohort are going through.Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you do now?Sure. Yeah, I live in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I've been here many years now. And in full time private practice. Since COVID, a little bit before COVID, I no longer see clients in my office sitting down. I much prefer and insist on seeing them walking in mostly in the woods or talking on the phone while I'm walking. So, all seasons, all weathers, some people want to accompany me, about half my clientele accompanies me, and the others, it's phone or Zoom, but I don't like Zoom. It's better for me to stay awake, to walk in the woods. It's better for my, I have, you know, spinal issues. But also, it's a big revolution in how it feels to be with people.I guess I've always had a kind of democratic, small D and big D tendency. So, there's something very equalizing about negotiating the same fallen log together, or the rain together, helping each other out through going through a puddle or dealing with bug spray and ticks and mosquitoes. You know, you just, it has an equalizing, democratizing quality. And then, too, there's a kind of third interlocutor, which is the surround. Coming up through a psychoanalytic and also, to some degree, family therapy and cognitive behavioral graduate program, nobody ever mentioned the physical surround. It just wasn't, it was just all about people's habits and thoughts and feelings and history. But it wasn't. You're actually somewhere on a planet, in a man-made surround, or out in the woods, as I am now.And to actually realize that there's no such thing as a human just floating in space. There's a human with, of course, a history, that's a kind of a surround or environment, and a human kind of biosphere, the people you're connected to professionally or through family or friends and lovers and so forth. But there's also the material world that we're part of and embedded in and surrounded by, whether you think of that as an animal world or a biosphere altogether, or everything else, the mineral world, world of air and earth and water. And of course, our so-called man-made surround, if we're in a building, there's wood and metal and plastic and paint, all those things are also nature, just transformed by us. It's almost as if we see them as something utterly different from a tree or a rock or a river or a donkey. Well, they're very different, and we've transformed them and denatured them to hugely, so they're not recognizable, but we got it all from the earth. It's all earth.If you look at a, I don't know, a computer, every single thing is mined from the earth and then hugely transformed by human intervention, but it's all earth and we can have a relationship to it. That relationship is psychological, but also energetic. Now we're getting into a more mystical or magical or wondrous thing, but one of my many trainings was in kind of energy medicine or energy relationships. That's a California thing from back in the 80s. But that's a very real part of my life and I think everyone's life and part of our connectedness with the world.You mentioned that it was COVID that sort of shifted the way you are with your clients. I just had a conversation with somebody who was talking about their experience in psychoanalysis, sitting on the couch, lying on the couch with the therapist behind them, like a New Yorker cartoon. It's not something I've ever experienced. I didn't know that it was still going on. But how big a shift is it, what you're doing, and how did COVID bring it about?Well, it's a huge shift that does exist, but it's not very common. The old style New Yorker cartoon set up, which was Freud's set up, which by the way, comes from Anton Mesmer. Mesmer had people lying down, hypnotism, hypnos, that's sleep. Hypnotism was thought of, mesmerism, hypnotism was thought of as a kind of sleep. So you would lie down and then you would get suggestions. Actually, Freud was no good as a hypnotist, which it's very well known, it's part of the literature. He was bad at hypnotism, and he ended up inventing psychoanalysis, or actually a patient of his, Anna von Oh, who we now know was, that was her, the name he gave her for confidentiality's sake. Actually, we now know it was Bertha von Pappenheim, who turned out to be a brilliant woman and is really the founder of modern social work.And she said to, actually, she was a patient of both Breuer and Freud's studies in hysteria, 1899. Joseph Breuer was a colleague, another neurologist and colleague of Freud's, and she was his patient originally. She told him, please shut up and listen. He was telling her what to do, telling her what she thought, telling her what the source was. She had some very odd kind of symptoms. And she said, you know, I think it would go better if you just shut up and let me talk, I mean, in the language of the day. And he was wise enough to do that. And then she started talking and things started to go better. So the whole idea of the blank screen analyst and so forth, comes from a woman. Now I mentioned that because, and then credit went to Freud and Breuer.But I mentioned that because actually, it was many years before COVID. I had a patient and a middle aged woman who, I don't think it's right for me to say her name, even though she's long dead. And she had terminal ovarian cancer. But she was told by her doctor, you've got three months to live. And she said to me, "Michael, I'll pay you for your whole morning. I want to climb Monument Mountain, largest mountain in Great Barrington." It's only, I don't know, 2000 feet high. And she said, "I want to climb Mountain with you. This is before cell phones. And when we get back down, I want you to call Dr. Johnson and tell him she's not dead yet. She doesn't look like she's about to die," which I did. And she was very happy with that. It took us a long time to climb because she was already in pain and not doing well. But she ended up living another five years. So she was quite right.Anyway, that got me out of the office, if you see what I mean. And I had one other episode like that long before COVID, where I saw a little boy in therapy. And it was a terrible first session, really. After the session, his mother said to me, "How did that go?" I said, "Well, it wasn't very forthcoming." And she said, "You know, if you walked in the woods with him, I bet he'd be more voluble." So the clinic that I was in then was right, there were some woods right behind it. There was a little river, a little stream with rocks in it. So next time he came, he and I crossed the stepping stones across this stream. And we went into the woods where no path, we just went into the woods behind it. You'd never do that now without permissions and so forth. And as soon as we crossed the stream, and we're in the uncharted woods, his gait changed, his kind of face changed, and he started talking about all kinds of things. So she was right, the mother.But that also got me out of the office. So then when COVID came, and we had to have, you know, six feet or more distance, and you're supposed to be outside, or many of us bought special air purifiers for our offices, which I still have also. But then I arranged with some people to go outdoors and meet them. Even then, I remember being anxious and wanting to walk sort of at a distance from people. That was before the vaccine and everything. So then I felt like, oh, this is kind of great. This has a lot of different qualities, this walking, sometimes on city streets, but mostly in the woods, with patients. And so then I gradually decided this should be a full time thing. And I'm sick of sitting in the office, which I did for 30 years before that. So it's okay to go through a change.How did you get into the work that you're doing? When did you realize that you would make a living doing this kind of work?Oh, well, it was a tortuous long process. So I have a lot of sympathy for young people who go through a lot of torture finding their way in life. Let me see. Well, as I said, I was raised in an academic family, and I was good at things like analysis of literature. And in the fullness of time, actually my undergraduate major was German literature. And I read German literature, because I was interested in the poet Rilke and in the works of Rudolf Steiner, who I'd run into also. I wanted to read Steiner in the original and Rilke's way better in the original. So and then I eventually, in the fullness of time, was at Yale in a doctoral program in comparative literature, with German, French and English being my languages.But, you know, things I had seen before, like working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, it was just so dusty and empty to be in these theories. It just didn't cut it for me anymore. And I'd grown up with it. It was really like I'd already done it. It wasn't news to me. And I felt dead. And I had some prophetic dreams or suggestive dreams and so forth. And it was really hard to leave because being at Yale incomplete, my whole academic career was assured, you know, and it was very hard for me to leave. But I was in my late 20s at that point. And I, but I quit after a year and floundered for a while. I didn't know what kind of, I wanted to do something helpful to the world. So eventually I got a doctorate in clinical psych.But I think that one thing that made it impossible for me to stay as an academic was my time in Calcutta, although it was brief. But after graduating from college, I got a fellowship, the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard. And they, my project was to go live with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, which I did. Not with her because it's a very, it's a very gender segregated organization, still very traditional. So I lived in a novitiate house with some brothers, some of the missionary brothers of charity, and worked in Kalighat, the home for dying destitutes. So we scraped up these dying people from the streets and I turned TB positive there and was exposed to a whole bunch of diseases and got very, very sick with dysentery. But of course, none of that was really anything compared with the incredible depths of disease, poverty, suffering, abuse that you see there. I won't go into that in detail, but you see a lot of distressing things there. I was also somewhat distressed and confused by the whole way the Catholic church and Mother Teresa had of treating people or ministering to people. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic experience, a big education for a white kid from America.I mean, to the best of your ability, what was that experience like? I mean, my first, I've been to India and my first experience was on the streets of Calcutta. Nothing like what you're talking about, but just the mere exposure to the streets of Calcutta was enough to just blow my mind really wide open as to just how different life is out there in the world. I don't even know how to talk about it really, but what was your experience? How did you come back changed from that time?Well, I just felt the absurd luxury of our world here. That changed me. But also I'd been kind of blasted open by the amount of love and compassion that was there in the missionaries of charity sort of in spite of everything. It's not like I believed in the Catholic doctrine, but they were doing something just amazing and trying to help people in their way. And, oh gosh, I remember one of my first days there, there was a guy coughing into a little clay cup. He had tuberculosis and he's spitting blood and he was gesturing, of course, I didn't speak any Bengali. He's gesturing to me. He wanted to be shaved. Now he was kachaksek, emaciated, covered with sores, dying of tuberculosis, but he wanted to be shaved.So they gave me a straight, I mean, not a straight razor, an old fashioned safety razor, which as you know, isn't very safe. And there was no shaving cream or soap. They gave me a little thing of water and this terribly dangerous, dull, safe, quote unquote, safety razor. And I had a little shard of mirror. There was just a broken shard of mirror. And I shaved him and with every stroke, the blood would come because his skin was just paper thin. But I showed him as I was going, both the blood and the fact that some of the beard had come off and he was so delighted and was going, come on, keep going, keep going. So I shaved him in this frightening way. And then he died that night. Next day when I was there, he was dead. He was gone.So those kinds of experiences, seeing people with, you know, missing limbs and I went to a clinic for people with leprosy and just alarming things. So it changes your sense of what is this world that is presented to us in such a sanitized way through our media and our direct experience here. A lot of white, relatively well-off people, well, a lot of people of all colors and genders and nationalities, but people who are relatively well-off in America never experienced the pervasive poverty, disease and so forth that you see in other countries. At the same time, I have to say there's a level of connection among people that far exceeds our loneliness. So those kind of cross-cultural, what we now, people are familiar, I suppose, with that idea. I certainly confirmed that.Which idea?The idea that we have no idea how privileged we are. And that can be told you. I grew up hearing about the starving kids in Africa, so we should finish our food. But you can be told you, but of course, going and experiencing anything makes a world of difference. Same with spiritual practices and realities. You can hear about them, you go, oh, this sounds pretty, or this is nice, or whatever, nice theory. But when you experience anything, it changes you.Yeah. I feel like I remember a conversation with you where we shared this song, "Do You Realize?" Is it The Flaming Lips?Yeah. The Flaming Lips, yes. It's wonderful.This amazing song because it captures this kind of feeling. You've got two books, right? One is "Stairway of Surprise." And the other one is this "Alphabet of Astonishment." And I guess I wanted to ask you about what makes those things so important, surprise and astonishment and realization, I guess. What's your attraction to those ideas? And what have you learned about them?Yeah, thank you for pointing out. The "Stairway of Surprise," and it's actually called "BE," B-E colon, "An Alphabet of Astonishment." But yeah, surprise and astonishment are in both those titles. I do have a third, "Group Meditation" about a kind of a technology of spiritual experience in a group. But what's so important about surprise or astonishment, or I could mention a bunch of other things that are kind of in the same family, like curiosity, or wonder, or gratitude. These are all qualities that open your mind, that soften the edges of what you think you know, that make you available to new understanding.The Zen, the Korean Zen master, Seung Sahn, who died, I don't know, 10 years ago or so. He had a lifetime slogan, "Only don't know." He didn't really quite mean only don't know. He meant don't know the way you already know. Don't know. Drop everything you think you know to, of course, have new kinds of experience that don't necessarily grasp anything. It's the difference between, if I reach into a river, let's say I want to get some of the water in the river, I want to know what the river's about. If I reach into the river and grasp with my hand and pull away, I have very little water in my hand. But if I reach my hand in and leave it in the river, I have the whole river.Qualities like astonishment, wonder, surprise, curiosity, gratitude, you can wash yourself through with the quality of innocence. Not that you've never done anything wrong, but it's a state or quality of mind, of innocence. Those things open us. They're like, another Zen teacher refers to opening the palm of the mind. Opening the palm of the mind instead of grasping and quote unquote, having some understanding or some knowledge. Opening the palm of the mind.These are all ways, these words are just cues to the tip of the iceberg of various practices that return us to a state of cognitive non-grasping by which all kinds of interesting things come your way. William Blake, the 19th century, well, late 18th and early 19th century English poet has a phrase, "He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise."So no binding to yourself, but kissing or appreciating it, gratitude, wonder, awe as it goes past. So flying or flowing, either way, not something to hold. So we need to train our minds away from getting the right answer, having the right doctrine, thinking we understand, train our minds to an openness that can bring us into greater intimacy with the universe. That takes various kinds of spiritual practice. So meditation, that there are many, many kinds of meditation, but there are many other things of the spiritual practices that don't quite, aren't meditation, but they're also restructuring how we know, how we live, opening our hearts to compassion for other people.I think the time in Calcutta, which probably I was oriented that way because of my family's deep history with a death that couldn't be faced. I think it furthered my amazement at the fact that we do exist and we are alive for a while. And sharpen the question, what do you want to do? As Mary Oliver says, what do you want to do with your one wild and precious life? Sharpen that question. So it winkled me out of the academic career and into a career of helping people. You can't do that as an academic. I think I could have stayed. It would have been fine. There are plenty of wonderful professors who do wonderful, amazing things for people. So I'm not saying it was necessary.I'm curious about the role of literature. You're always, you always have a quote. You always ground everything in language or literature or poetry. It's always really amazing. You say you started with Rilke. I have this real attraction to sort of the German idealism and Goethe. What is it about Rilke and Steiner and the German imagination that's so powerful? They're all unique. I'm not sure I've ever grouped it really into thinking, I don't know, the German mind or something is so wonderful. But it's true that idealism and a lot of important authors came about and the romanticism really started in Germany and so on. I'm not sure why that would be Rilke. You're a romantic or an idealist?I think they were onto important things. People like Novalis, also Friedrich von Hardenberg, younger contemporary of Goethe's. Of course, Heidegger has the kind of flowering of the German Seinsphilosophie, or being philosophy. I'm not quite sure how I got led there originally, as I think about it. How did I first hear about Rilke? Or why did I decide to major in German? There were a lot of factors behind it. My dad, again, was a big lodestar for me. He was a huge quoter of poetry. He knew French, Italian, German, Russian very fluently. And so I started memorizing poetry when I was very young. Poetry and to some degree, passages like speeches like the Gettysburg Address or things like that. I enjoyed memorizing.And I think memorization for me as a kid, and even today, it's kind of taking a break from your own mind. It's like I have this, the repetitive worries, or just repetition altogether of your own thoughts, isn't as interesting as repeating very beautiful, elevating, suggestive, intriguing, challenging thoughts of others. So hopping out of my own mind into the minds of others. And then I guess, yeah, it really has to do with the beauty of the language, whether it's Rilke's writing or English-American poetry.What do you love about Rilke?Oh, sorry. Well, Rilke knew everything. He just knew everything. Now, Rilke, mind you, I read a wonderful takedown biography of Rilke and what an a*****e he was in interpersonal. I'm not sure he's my favorite person, but in terms of his poetry, he got himself into a good state to write his poetry. And he understood, you feel that he understands the inside of the world. It's like this whole world, our thoughts, our feelings, the physical world we see is kind of like a result, a clunky result. It's like the ice cube that forms, but the fluid river that coalesced into these fixed forms of thought, feeling, perception, memory, everything. You feel that Rilke's in the living stream before it coalesces and dies into the everyday world. And his poetry kind of teases you backward and upward, which, by the way, is a famous trope inside of Zen also, is to take what they call the backward step.That's why that question, where do you come from, your first question, where did this thought come from? It doesn't belong to any particular person. I remember there's a Quaker story that some early Quakers were sitting with their Native American friends. They invited a Native American elder from somewhere around here, the Mashapauga, one of the East Coast tribes. And after a silent hour, the elders, the tribal elders said to the Quaker elder, it's so good to spend some time in the place where words come from. So one feels that Rilke and the great poets altogether are teasing us back to the sources which are actually livelier than the results, the processes livelier than the results. We're familiar with that idea.Yeah. So I shared with you just a little while ago, because it crossed my path that Pope Francis had written this thing about the role of literature and formation. And I just wondered if you had a chance to think about it, what your thoughts might be. He wrote this, I mean, I guess he writes these papal letters all the time, but I don't, of course, I'm not always paying attention to them, but this one crossed my path through the Chronicle of Higher Education, because they were saying, can the Pope save the humanities? Because he'd written this letter about the benefits of literature and formation, which I think is the technical term for the development of a person in the church. But he says in the first paragraph, this is open for everybody. And one of the first benefits he sort of points out of literature is just this idea of empathy. And I guess I'm curious to hear you talk about, we talked about wonder and all that other stuff, but empathy, and you spent all this time listening and being with people. Maybe you're not listening. I don't know how you describe what you do when you're with patients, but how do you think about empathy and what's happening when one does empathize with another person?Yeah, I think literature opens our minds and our hearts to not just the human condition or our own condition, but other people's conditions. And one of the key things for meaningful empathy, compassion, treatment, etc., is to let the other person be other. That is not to assume that what they feel, what they suffer is just what you feel. So you can empathize, you can sympathize. I think literature, biography too, certainly helps us to imagine minds and lives and sufferings and joys for that matter, other than the ones we already know.Montaigne had a slogan, that he had written over one of the beams in his office, Michel de Montaigne, meaning nothing human is alien to me. So he too was interested. He would read about cannibals, you know, was a new thing in the 17th century, learning about cannibals in remote areas in South America. And he wanted to feel, you know, I can imagine that. So he wasn't pretending he was that, or he already had done that. He was interested precisely in the new and yet feeling, even though it's alien, it's not alien, even anything human, I can somehow embrace, have empathy for. Let it be other and then let it not be other. That's empathy.Simone Weil, W-E-I-L, who I mentioned extensively in the book, "Be an Alphabet of Astonishment," she died in 1943, a brilliant student at the Sorbonne. She wrote a wonderful little essay, a classic of 20th century spirituality called "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God." So that may be whispering in the Pope's ear still, but the right use of school studies with a view to the love of God and what she says. And by the way, she ends the essay on the topic of compassion, because she says the real reason we learn things in school is not to have the content, but to learn to pay attention. And that comes to its highest form in prayer and in empathy, compassion for other people.So only someone capable of attention, she says, is capable of really helping another, being oriented towards another. So there we have prayer and meditation, how properly they develop a meaningful kind of selflessness, not as a mask or a principle, but as an actual orientation of the mind that can empty itself of itself and be open to the other. School studies, literature, imagination can be helps towards that end.I'm curious about your take on sort of the current state of things, I guess, you know what I mean? That we've only got a couple of minutes left, right? But you spent a lot of time with people. You're talking about attention. My mentor would say that we consume the thing that we're afraid we're losing. And that I feel like everywhere I go, people are talking about mindfulness or the attention economy that we're very, very focused on our attention right now. How do you think about what it means to try to be astonished or surprised or curious or open in 2025 when our attention is so occupied?Well, yeah, attention, like every other word can mean, can be a slogan that means so many different things. But what's rarely talked about is the deepening or the intensification of any of these capacities. They can all be infinitely deepened. So the attention economy and so forth, that has to do with an attention deficit disorder. That has to do with our attention being ripped around by a million things, social media and everything. And people are coming through that to realize the importance of where we put our minds intentionally or unintentionally.But rarely is it spoken about that the attention can be deepened, the consciousness can be deepened, intensified intentionally. There is a, in the Frick Museum in New York City, there's a picture, I don't know who it's by, a medieval picture of Saint Jerome. And the title is "Saint Jerome Reading." So he's obviously reading the Bible or some holy scripture. And so the book is in his hand, he's holding the book, but he's looking up in a way and says he's reading. He's not looking at the book because what he's doing is he's taken something from the book, he's read a passage or a sentence, and now he's letting it sink in deeper.Now he's working with it before he goes on rushing through to finish or jumping up to do something else or checking his iPhone. He's staying with what he's already read and deepening his sense of its validity, its reach, its life. So our staying with things and our letting the world and our own minds grow in intimacy and significance, that's more rarely talked about. That's not what we mostly mean when we talk about attentional problems or the attention economy or thieves of our attention these days. It's related, but it's only at one level.Beautiful. Michael, thank you so much. We're kind of at the end of time, but I really appreciate you joining me. Thank you.Thank you. I really appreciate your questioning and your receptive silence that invited me in. All right, take care. Be well. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Kate Sieck, PhD is Director of the Human Centered AI at the Toyota Research Institute, where she leads the Harmonious Communities Department whose task is “developing technology that integrates AI in furtherance of Toyota's global mission of happiness for all and collective well-being.”I met Kate through this newsletter. We spoke for the first time a couple months ago, and it was so much fun, I was excited to invite her into a conversation here. We spoke for almost an hour and half. The work she has done is amazing, and her enthusiasm is truly inspiring. Mentioned in our talk is this paper on ritual-based research, “Move Me: On stories, rituals, and building brand communities.”All right, beautiful. Kate, thank you so much for agreeing to sort of be a part of this. I think as you know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I always want to give credit to Suzanne Snyder, who's a neighbor. She teaches this oral history summer school which is really amazing, and it's such a big beautiful question I have to use it. But because it's so big, I always feel like I want to caveat it and make sure you know that you can answer or not answer any way that you want. The question is: where do you come from?So I'm going to answer that in two ways, and I'm so glad I've listened to all the other episodes to hear how everybody else is answering this. First, geographically, I grew up in the Midwest. Born in Wisconsin when my dad was in grad school, and then we spent most of my childhood in a Chicago suburb called Oak Park, which was this sort of—at both the time and the place—it was this sort of idyllic bubble of what's possible.Oak Park had watched what was happening with all the blockbusting on the west side of Chicago and had really put a hard line on maintaining economic, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity within the community. So they changed a lot of how houses were sold and how neighborhoods were built. Well, it wasn't perfect. Let me be clear about that. As a kid, I had friends from every possible background you could think of, and the schools were one of the first to sort of integrate kids with physical or intellectual disabilities into the classroom. So we were all together, and you really saw, sort of in the truest sense of public, accommodating everyone.That was really the foundation for where I grew up. You know, that's kind of through the eyes of a young kid. I'm sure there were a lot of other challenges that weren't on my radar at that time, but from my perspective, it really was an indicator of what was possible if we all kind of worked and lived together.From a sort of more conceptual and emotional standpoint, and part of why we ended up in that neighborhood, is that I grew up in a household where three things were kind of paramount: gratitude, action, and community. So my parents very deliberately chose to live in Oak Park because they wanted us in a place where we were not the highest, we weren't the lowest, but we understood that it took everybody to make a community work. Every day we should approach the day from a place of gratitude for all that we had and how can we use that and share that to build and bolster our community. Not just like cheer it on from the sidelines, but what is our role, what is our action, what is our behavior in fostering all of that goodness that can come when you all kind of come together and work together. So I'll leave it at that.It's beautiful. Can you tell me a story? I mean, I love how you highlight the word "public" right in the biggest sense of the word public. Is there a story that comes to mind that sort of captures what it was like to grow up in that place with all those values?I think what I just remember was being in kindergarten and first grade and living on the block where we did. We were right off the train, so it wasn't—you know, right off the L trains into Chicago—and there were apartments on our block and there were really lovely homes on our block. There were probably, I don't know, 30 kids, which—it was the '70s, like we still had some big families. I just remember our neighbors were like these vegetarian hippies, and then there was another block, another house where one of the kids had—like, we would all just get together and run around and be crazy kids all afternoon and on the weekends.It was just—there was no "you can't play with us." Like, everybody kind of fit, and we had, you know, kids from the apartments, kids from the homes. Like, everybody was just welcome to the crowd. I just remember I was one of the only girls on the block. I remember that, but even at that, it wasn't like, "You're not allowed to play with us, go play with your dolls." Like, it was as rough and tumble and bikes and soccer and tag and everything because that was what was expected. The parents kind of enforced that. It's like everybody was kicked out of the house after school and you were made to play together, and you had to figure out how to do it.A lot of my work now looks at the very shrinking space of what are those truly public opportunities. Like, even back then, the pool—you know, the community pool—I think you got a free pass if you lived in the town, and if you didn't, it was like a quarter or something to get in. Now it's like 12 bucks, and there are so many ways in which public is actually no longer really available. So I look back on that moment and think about all of the lessons I learned and were afforded to me because I had to—had to and could, you know—interact with all these kids who were not me. So it's just like, that's where my head spins a lot.I'm excited to hear about that work. What—before—while we're still in your childhood, did you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah, I totally wanted to be a forest ranger. So I'm about as far from that as you could be. I still love hiking. I'm not as—much sure I love tent camping as I get up in the decades, but I'm still trying. I really loved the idea of being outdoors, of the expansiveness that you feel when you're among trees that are, you know, hundreds of feet taller, when you're on the edge of a lake or an ocean or something and you just know that the world is so much bigger than you.Then as I got into high school, I decided I wanted to run the World Bank, which was, you know—It's a hard turn from—Well, yes and no. All right, so I was—high school was during—I think high school kicked off with the Live Aid concert for me. So the whole crisis in Ethiopia and the famine in Ethiopia, and I remember writing a paper about the policy. That's—my sophomore year in high school, this is how geeky and nerdy I was. I wrote a policy paper about why—why just dropping aid was probably not going to solve the problem. Like, this was a political famine, and in order to solve a political famine, you had to address the roots of what was going on. I think my high school, like, sophomore English teacher was like, "Holy cow." Who is this weirdo? Yeah. So when did you discover that you could make a living doing anthropology?Way too late in my career, as I'm still paying off student loans from grad school. But it was 2010, and I had been out of grad school for eight years at that point. Largely, I had two kids. We—I had two kids right at the end of grad school, and my husband at the time was also a professor. So I was doing—I was on more of like a lecturer track because we couldn't afford child care even if both of us were faculty, which is a whole other conversation we can have.But we had moved to Minnesota. I had spent a year teaching five classes, usually with 60 students, and—sorry, let me close this so it's a little quieter—and made less than I made my first year out of college. I was like, this is an unsustainable career path. One of my students had come into office hours and had found this job in marketing, working for a marketing firm, but they wanted somebody with an advanced degree and she was just finishing undergrad. So I always tell people I did not steal a job from a student, but she shared it with me.I think at that point I'd been, you know, on this kind of lecture path for eight years and was a little bit jaded and definitely broke. I was like, "Oh, they need somebody who knows American culture. I know—you like, my dissertation work had been in the U.S. I was like, I could—I could do this. I've taught methods classes, I—you know, I can probably handle this." So I put my hat in the ring, got the job, and I finished teaching on a Friday and started in that group on a Monday.Very quickly realized I had no idea what I was doing. It was a very hard toggle for me. I was a very traditional academic, you know. My fieldwork was two and a half years on site. You know, I—you know, I went to and then went to be a professor. So a lot of it is like deep ethnography and how do you do research and all of this stuff. Now here I was and they're like, "All right, we got like a week to figure this out. What are you doing?" Yeah, and so the pace was just a massive shift.I still remember the first week I was there, I was put on a new business pitch and at that—they were like, "So where are your slides for the deck?" And I was like—or "Where's your stuff for the deck?" And I looked at them. I'm like, "What's a deck?" And that's when we all realized something was definitely—definitely not aligned here.So it was—I am ever so grateful to the team I got to work with that first year who really brought me up to speed and were so very patient—patient with me. It also gave me—a lot of it was probably one of the biggest professional challenges of how do you do anthropology when it's not going to look like what you did?Yeah, so—and what have you discovered? I mean, what was that transition like? I can imagine that being extremely difficult, right? To—to believe—I mean, I'm just putting myself in that situation. I would be very skeptical that you could do anything. Right? You must—must—well, you did it.So well, I feel like I—I feel like I came up the commercial—the commercial way as a market researcher with people who were really smart and—but doing it. And then I discovered that there's this giant world of anthropology out there that I was not aware of. And now this is where I have this—I have a whole imposter syndrome around this now and why I talk—talk to people like you. But to be an academic anthropologist and—and then try to fit that into the commercial context seems like that would be really hard. I'd love to hear—but you've ended up in a place where it's—it's—it works, right? And it's valid. So—so there are a couple things. I mean—Like, there's the hilarity of like, how do I even dress for work? And, you know, like, "Oh, I can't wear Birkenstocks and I can't do this." You know, I like—actually need clothes that match and maybe some jewelry too. So there were some little funny moments with that.But in terms of the work itself, I think there were two big lessons. You—you will never have the time to do the studies that you want to do. That said, I firmly believe that most things that we see in the world come down to probably a handful of human questions, right? And so if you can think about where in the literature you can find those questions, you can actually tap into the wisdom and depth of somebody else's experience to give you at least a framework or a pathway to explore what it is you want to explore.So it—you—and this has actually been one of the—how do I say—how do—I'm going to just sound like a horrible person when I say this, and I thoroughly agree—one of the disappointing things for me about how anthropology has often translated into industry is that it's—it's been reduced to qualitative methods. Like, "Oh, I just need to do interviews and I need to go watch some people." And I'm like, those are great, but if you don't know what you're looking for, if you don't know what you're thinking about, if you don't know what others have done, you're still not necessarily cognizant of what you're processing. And—and I've seen a lot of stuff come back and I'm like, "That's great." And—so to me, I always actually started with, "What do we know already from theory?" And what do we—in theory with like both a big T, like what do we know from Marxism or from structural functionalism, but theory with a little t too. Like, who's written a cool ethnography or paper or talk or something about this that can at least start to give me a framework?So I spent a lot of time digging through every annual review article I could find that was like an overview of whatever I needed to do. So very quick example: we were working on a pitch for a cosmetics company. We literally had like two days to come up with a framework. And you know, everybody does the—"Oh, what's been done before?" But that doesn't necessarily tell you where an interesting white space is. So what I did was really look at, "Why do people disguise themselves? Why do people do anything that changes their appearance?" And then you can come up with like, "Oh well, there's like battle and then there's, you know, this deception and then there's these other categories." And then you can start to come up with a really interesting way of looking at how, you know, how other companies kind of fall. But it's falling within a framework that's coming out of this sort of rich world of—of work.We did a very similar thing with—we were the agency of record for the country of Belize. Like, how do we grow tourism for the country of Belize? And you're—you're like, "All right, it's tropical country. Like, why do people go?" But then we really started to look at, well, why do people move? Like, why would you go from one place to another? And then we got into the idea of pilgrimage as this sort of exploratory space, which was something that was really not well explored but fit the context really well.So a lot of my work was trying to see where this business question—like, what's the human dynamic that underlies this business question? And where can we find parallels of that in the literature so that I can come up with something that's a much more interesting framework for what's happening?No, it's—it's wonderful. It's wonderful. And so how—what's happening in that first phase when you're developing the—that question, that human question for you?I'm laughing because my dissertation advisor always looked at me. He's like, "I see where you are and I know it's the right place, and I have no idea how you got there." And so there are times I'm like, "I don't know how we got there." But I think that—I think it's really just pausing to—to think about a business problem not as a business problem but as a—as a person question. Like, the—the tourism problem isn't one about tourism. It's about what motivates people to—to move, right?We had another one with a bank during, you know, right after the financial crisis, and it's like, "How do we—how do we get customers?" And it's like, that's not really the problem. Like, why do—what does trust look like after you've broken a relationship, right? And how do you—how do you start to reflect on that?What do you love about this work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?Oh my gosh, where is the joy in it? I think I—to me, the joy was partly at a very selfish level. It was the discovery, right? Of, "Oh, can we think about this really staid terrain in a radically different way?" That uses a discipline that I love and cherish in—in a way that you like—well, I got—I—the ritual. And so you talked about the ritual paper when we were chatting before this. That used Victor Turner in a way that Victor Turner would probably never have thought about. And then somebody told me like, "He'd probably be rolling in his grave to know that you used his framework to facilitate capitalism." And I was like, "Yeah, probably. I hear you on that, but I did it anyway, and it was super smart."But—but to me, there was this joy of like, "How can I—can I leverage this like 100 years of really interesting creative thinking and bring it to an audience it's totally different?" So that was a selfish thing.The second thing that I loved was working with people who were so radically different from me. Like, I remember going in and working with creative teams and particularly designers, and oh my god, you give them like a four-page brief and they just like—they flip it over. You give them a two-page brief and they still flip it over. So they're not going to read something like that. So it really forced me from a methods perspective to think about how do I communicate in non-written ways? And how can I tap their expert—more importantly, how can I tap their visual, their tactile, their sensory knowledge and their expertise there to make this thing come to life in a way that—that we know we do in fieldwork, but that we often don't do in—in how we communicate our results. So there was some really fun and close partnerships with creative teams that—that were fun for me.So a quick side diversion into my fieldwork: I worked with teenagers who were in foster care and who were in a group home facility in Atlanta. Teenagers do a lot of their thinking through music, through art, and through non-verbal mediums. So a lot of my dissertation data was things like song lists and, you know, artists. And I gave them all cameras multiple times, so I had a lot of that. We had like big art projects that we built together. So it's very non-verbal data. And so to be able to dig back into that was super fun.Can you—you said that the teenagers do thinking with music. Can you—that's a beautiful expression. Can you just explain what you mean when you say that somebody's thinking with music?Sure, and I actually wouldn't necessarily restrict it to just teenagers. Or maybe I just have failed to grow up myself, which isn't entirely possible. But I think oftentimes, especially for teenagers, our emotional landscape can be quite complicated and very difficult to dissect. And what music enables is somebody—somebody else is giving shape to an experience that is potentially so new to us that we don't really know how to articulate it. And they are able to articulate it either with the sound structure, and suddenly it like literally resonates with you, or with the lyrics that, you know, you're like, "Oh my god, that's it. That's the thing that's the—that's the—that they've said the thing that I've always been trying to say." Or with the tone structure, right? So there's a big difference between, you know, jazz and punk and country in terms of often the tone of it.And so to be able to have something that—that gives form to elements of our life where we are often struggling to do that—that's why it's so common in ritual, right? Like and especially rites of passage, like a lot of them use music and rhythm to bring that sort of visceral component to shape the sense of what you're—what's happening. And to me, it just made a ton of sense. Like, here you are in this moment of your life that's not making any sense at all, and other people who are further down that journey are giving you a way to structure it. And I loved that. And there are still moments, you know—I think in any moment of transition in our lives, music can be that.So what was the role or how did—how did the—what was the role that that music played in that in the project you were talking about with the—the kids?So if you look at my dissertation, it actually has a playlist to it. And so in a classic dissertation, you know, most of the chapters and sections of chapters open with like quotes from theory and, you know, quotes from the literature. Mine all open with song lyrics that the kids—so one of the things I did was I had all the kids make song lists for me, playlists, and then talk me through like, "Why this song? Why that song? You know, what do you like about this?" And so I understood sort of the emotional resonance that they were trying to add to at that moment. And so as the, you know, throughout the dissertation, each of the chapters can, you know, tries to bring that voice of the kids to life in a much more serious way. Like, this is actually about the same thing. And so it was my way of sort of honoring something that was such a deep and rich part of their world.Yeah. Are there—you mentioned, you know, the—the centrality of theory and making the people—making it a people question up front. Are there touchstones that you keep returning to? Like when you—when a new challenge sits in front of you or if you have a different problem that arises, are there touchstones that you keep returning to to sort of frame your work?So there are—simply because I—what I notice is that thing that we all notice with your professors like, they're kind of thinking often stops at the time that they stopped. And so I now see that in myself. A lot of my—a lot of the evolution in the theory that I cling to is the stuff that I covered both between my time as a—as a student but also my time as a faculty member. And so my familiarity with the literature post-2010 is much more tenuous—really post-2015 when I left the—the sort of marketing world. And I own that, and that's also why I was like, "Oh, I should be careful how I talk and think."Jerome Bruner, I think, is probably one of the key thinkers who you'll see show up in a lot of my work. He's actually, I think, a legal scholar, but he has this brilliant book called "Acts of Meaning," really looking at how do—how do our behaviors create and meaning in our world and where do they come from. And so to me, it's this—one I always—I have a whole paper on this at EPIC, but essentially for—at a very simple level, one of the things that I—that he argues is that people align behaviors to values, right? So whatever your core values are, you can align any range of behaviors under that value if you think that it is aligned to that value, which is why, for example, in parts of the country, we can see freedom expressed by book banning, right? And we can see freedom expressed by—and, you know, it's like the devolution of rights to different—different controlling bodies.So because it's all—once you know what that core value is, you can wrap a narrative that links any set of behaviors to that value. The good thing is that that's also how we change our behavior, right? You don't—you very rarely change what is deeply meaningful to you, but you can change how that looks. And that's that fuzziness that's often around—around—and that's how cultures evolve, right? It's the fact that those things are really fuzzy, that you can move it forward.To me, Bruner links really closely with people like Victor Turner, who talk about this sort of fuzzy interplay between the poles that diametrically opposed poles within cultures and that it's in that interplay that things live. But as those move, those pools can also shift a little bit, or where we are shifts. And so to me, that's also where it's like, "Oh, this is really like"—you start to put some of these frameworks together.My committee was deeply informed with cultural models. So Brad Shore was my chair, and his book "Culture in Mind," I think, has obviously been a big influence to me. I had a linguist on my committee, Deborah Spitalnik. She really introduced me to a lot of the Russian sociolinguists, so Bakhtin and Voloshinov, and a lot of their writing is really about what I say is not what you hear, what you read is not what I intend. And so really that, you know, kind of always getting back to that fuzziness and challenge of communication for how we all deal with each other.You see the same with people like Brent Berlin, who were really early cognitive anthropologists. Like, what is the color red? What is a bird? Like, when we all look at a bird, it doesn't mean the same thing. And so really looking at that dialect, that negotiating process of how we create culture together.So when I look back at my dissertation, there are a thousand—you know, for any of us, there's a thousand ways to spend what your dissertation was. But one of the things I was really looking at is how do we collectively talk about what is a successful life for young people, and how that path gets laid out for them, and how is it that we can all think we're on the same page and actually be in very different places? And what are the consequences for the people then—like the teenagers who have to walk this life knowing that they are being judged from two very diametrically opposed perspectives, and they will either lose or win. Like, there's no winning ultimately when you're stuck in the middle. So a lot of my work has centered in that—that space of fuzziness where we have to figure out what is—how are we working through this together?Yeah. How do you talk about what you do? I mean, I feel like you're—I mean, you know, I'm always sort of fixated on the role of, you know, qualitative and anthropology and sort of business decision making and corporate decision making and all that stuff. And oftentimes I can feel kind of doomsday a little bit as the world becomes more—I always—I feel like I—there's—I don't know where I picked it up, but the idea that the corporation or the organization kind of wants to be a machine when it grows up. I have this feeling. Do you know what I mean? How do you describe—how do you talk about what you do?At this point, I actually don't really—you know, at this point, I just—I manage a team and my whole goal is where are we going and how are we going to get there? And so I cheer really for some really brilliant people that I have the privilege of working with.Yeah. Tell me where you are and what you're doing too, because we haven't really—so how did I do it when I was—Really more on the research side? Metrics are—so I—so I can talk about like, there's the—there's the how do we measure like the success of a campaign part, but then there's also how do we think about being an anthropologist within an organization, which I think is a little bit of a different conversation. And it was one that actually took me a long time to figure out. And—and I wasn't like—so I'll kind of parse those two conversations.When it comes to metrics, one of the things that I really tried to push hard on was, "What are we really measuring?" Right? So let's go back to, you know, it's like a business problem is actually a people problem. So do you understand what the people problem is? Right? And we're dealing—or we're working on a project about this right now with like morale and attrition. Right? So morale and attrition aren't actually your problem. Those are the first words—sorry. Morale and attrition are indicators of something else. And if we can actually understand what those other things are, then you have the ability to address the right problem because you're really focusing in on the right space.So what we can see with metrics is usually a later stage thing, and so I've always tried to talk about it that way. When I worked in marketing, one of the things that that—I'm not a big fan and everybody knows I hate personas, and I'm not a big fan of demographics. I think that there's a wonderfully weird variety of people and they can all look the same on paper. And so what we tried to do was design a quantitative system that was actually built on social theory principles. Right? So when we like—what is people's preference for ritual and structure in their daily lives, and how can we—how can that actually be something that's an indicator, like a differentiator between people? How much do people use symbols of status in their daily life, and—and how—how is that actually a way of parsing people? What are people's perceptions of the threats that they're up against? How do people shop differently? Like online, in-store, do they want customer contact? Like, what is their preference for those kinds of relationships?So we built this whole framework and then used the MRI—it was a survey of the American consumer—and structured all of the questions into these sort of sociological anthropological categories and then use that as a way to look at people rather than like, "Oh, women 25 to 50." And like, all shopping devolves to women who are 40 years old. And that's a really non-indicator of anything unless it's a Porsche, in which case you've got men who are 40 years old, right? And—and like, it doesn't tell you anything about why they bought a Porsche versus why they bought a Lamborghini, right? So it's still a ridiculous way to think about things.What do you call the output of those—that framework sounds so beautiful. What's—what do you—what is—what's the—if it's not a—persona? What do you call that? We just really started to look at it as is more indicators of why things are happening. And it was never like—first of all, never, you know—so we did it against the question. So then you could run any brand against it, right? But it always looked different. Right? So and it was never really just one thing. It was like, there's this cluster of these three things that we're seeing that we think tell a story about your people versus when we look at your competitors where they're different on these other elements. So it was more just to kind of understand the landscape differently and in a more theory—but what it also allowed, actually getting back to the very original thing, is I didn't have time for qual, right?So I don't have time to interview everybody who, you know, uses Schwab versus, you know, some—some other investment firm. Right? So we were able to get it—get it—some of the things that you would look at in—in a richer qualitative study from a much more quantitative perspective.Yeah, because it's focused on what—it's focused more on the driver, what I would consider the drivers of behavior.Yeah, right. So, you know, and because then it's also category agnostic, right? So a lot of how personas are developed in marketing is like, "Oh, we're a food company, so we're going to look at how people shop for food." And then we're going to maybe add in like spending or maybe a couple of questions on well-being. And then, you know, "Are they busy?" Right? But you've artificially constrained what you get to look at by your own assumptions rather than thinking how I shop for groceries might have everything to do with my perspectives on, you know, the environment or like how I think about credit cards. Or like—like the—like anyone who's done long-term ethnographic work knows that those things are often all driven by something similar, which is where we get back to Bruner, right? Like those core values can shape a ton of behaviors, and we'll all rationalize our behavior according to those values.Right? So you can start to understand how those values play out. You get a much richer sense of why people are doing what they're doing, not just what are they doing and when are they doing where they're doing it. So that's what we're really trying to do is take some of these big theories about why people do what they do and see if we could see that in data patterns.So how would you describe your relationship with AI in turn? I mean, it's so new and unformed and amorphous and it's all very sort of bewildering, honestly. But how do you think about it? How do you—what's your relationship—That's kind of funny because I lead an AI team and I'm still like desperately learning how to do this. And again, I always find myself in environments where I am ever so grateful that there are people who have tremendous expertise and they teach me. And together we bring these sort of multiple—multiple pathways forward.Where is AI? First of all, I think a lot of machine learning has actually a pretty rich history. And again, going back to where did it start and how did it work and when did it, you know, when did—where did it come from? I think if we assume that it's just this like blip that happened last, you know, the last year with LLMs, we've missed a lot of what brought it forward. All of that said, I think that a lot of the—what we're seeing with the neural nets and, you know, the diffusion policy—diffusion models and all of those things is a little bit different.Where do I live with it? My goal is partly like, what's actually in some of these, you know—so we do talk as a team about which data sets, why, how are we thinking about them, how is the data aggregated. Do we want to use somewhere where, you know, they have like pretty abusive policies about how people are coding this data? Can we think about other data sets? We've built several of our own because of some of that. So we do try to kind of think about the ethics of what's going on and how this data is formed.The second thing that we really try to do is—as a team, our goal is where can AI complement and supplement the things that that humans may not be good at and get us to a place that's a little bit where we can bring our own skills to the table. So that comes up in two ways for my team.At one level, when you're looking—you're using it to like summarize or categorize notes, AI is really good. LLMs and stuff like that are really good at pattern recognition. What they're not good at is outlier recognition, right? And so when we think about the richness of anthropology, where the fun typically happens is actually in the outlier space. So if you're using it to summarize your notes, it'll be great, but then you need to keep your brain attuned to what's not—what is it missing that I remember, or what's not getting covered? Or this is great, but what in the data pattern is maybe on the fringes of it?And so I would strongly encourage all anthropologists who feel like they are getting replaced to remember it's actually doing the thing that's kind of like the—like the—the grunt part of the work, which is the categorizing. So think about that.The second thing that we try to do is think about how can we use some of these platforms like I said to supplement where we're bad. Like, I am a horrible designer, can't draw my way out of a paper bag. It is hilarious. My dad is this amazing person, you know, amazing designer. I live in my—entire family have these incredible design skills—my kids, my husband—and literally like, I can barely draw a straight line.And going back to kind of Bakhtin and—and some of the early work, what I say isn't what you hear, what you hear isn't what I say. Can we design systems—can we use AI to help people better communicate when they're—they think that they disagree about something and use the sort of generative capability of AI to create a shared language? So if I say on this empty lot, I want to put in, you know, some affordable housing, and I'm thinking like cute cottages that have little gardens and there's a space and blah blah. And you're thinking cinder block tower with guard posts. We're not talking the same language, and we might end up in—in quite a—quite some disarray around that.So can—can some of the generative capabilities of AI allow us to express those concepts more richly in a visual format so then we can both go, "Oh, like we're kind of actually on the same page." And I'm—you thought that, but this is what I was thinking. And is there a shared space for us to move forward? So that's one way that we start to think about it.And—but our team—Toyota in particular is adamant that AI should never replace. It should supplement and complement either the hard parts or the—the tedious parts where people tend to—you know, when things are—people actually stop paying attention and then your notes might not be accurate anyway. So that's really where we really focus a lot of our work.Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about what—where you are now and the work you're doing at Toyota—the Toyota Research Institute?So I am a director of a team called the Harmonious Communities Department at Toyota Research Institute. We were stood up about two and a half years ago. Toyota's overall corporate mission often is translated as "happiness for all," but it's really this deep concern for the well-being and welfare not just of the people who use our products, but the people who build and—and work on, you know, work in and through Toyota, but also the communities where we are based.So when you think that we are one of the largest global corporations and we are almost 400,000 people, like that's a pretty big network of people. And they are committed to thinking about technology and products and problems that really—or technology and products that really address this comprehensive range of challenges that people face.And so one of the things that that we were tasked with doing was how do we really help people live together in a more harmonious way? Like harmony implies difference. We don't all have to be the same, right? So how do we live together amidst our differences, and how can community—this gets me back to my childhood, right—how can community be a celebration of difference and not like, "Oh, I finally feel like I belong because everyone is exactly like me?" And—and really, what can we learn and foster in that difference?In many ways, it is the perfect dream job for me. Like, it's even better than the World Bank because I don't have to do econ. And I get to work with this unbelievably talented team of researchers where collectively we are tasked with high risk, high reward projects. So if it sounds—if we have an easy solution to it, we are not thinking big enough.We're working on something right now that the entire team is like, "Man, if we could do this, this would be super cool," but nobody's really sure how we're gonna do it or if it's even possible. So I take a lot of joy and gratitude and pride in being in an organization that is pushing the boundaries of what's possible to solve the challenges that we have to solve.[Speaker 2]Yeah, I'm so connected with the beginning of the—well, yeah, you talked about—so in my own experience, I live in a small town in Hudson, a small town Hudson, and have experienced, you know, a whole variety of divisions and divisiveness and like the lack of shared space, the lack of this idea of something that's called public, that there aren't very many places where we gather or mix naturally. And the places where we do, more and more they're sort of private. And so I think about this idea of civic design. Have you encountered that? Right? And exactly—this guy James Howard Kunstler, do you know him? He wrote "Geography of Nowhere."Yes.So he wrote a book and he and an architect who lives in Hudson is friends with him. And so we organized—he gave a talk at the library and was it was called "The American Small Town Is Where It's At, Don't Don't Screw It Up" or something like that. But I asked him, I'm like, "What do you mean by civic design? What does that mean?" And he said, "It's the relationships between all the buildings." And I just thought it was the most beautiful thing. And I feel like I didn't know this coming into this conversation that this is very much where your work seems to be focusing, that this idea of public—The dwindling public is that what you said?Yeah. So I think that—I mean, when you look at public schools, right? So they're increasingly under fire in terms of like who gets to be there and the in and who's in charge. Like, are parents in charge? Are teachers in charge? Are educators in charge? Is a school board in charge? And who gets the right to say what's there?We're increasingly diverting funds for public schools into private schools, right? Where—where people can can say, you know, "This is what I want and I'm going to take tax dollars to go there." Libraries have long been one of the last bastions of the public, and they are under massive attack in terms of what's acceptable and not and who gets to decide whose stories are represented and included in a library.We also see this in parks, right? Like no kids, you know, no adults over here and no kids over there, and nobody after this time and nobody before this time. And we look at the—I live in Los Angeles, and we see all of these public benches popping up that are deliberately designed to be uncomfortable and, you know, uninviting because they don't want people staying there.And probably like it's—we're just seeing the—the like massive—and even a lot of communities now are run by HOAs, right? So you have to have—I think that there's some huge number, some significant percentage of just neighborhoods that have HOA fees, which means they also have rules about what you can put in your front yard and how your landscaping can be and what color—You get to paint your house and like—There's a whole genre of TikTok videos of HOA people harassing members at their door. And it's just like, you know, like who decides? When we moved here, we, you know, our neighbors were like, "You can—we're so excited, but you can't build this kind of house." And we're like, "Okay, are you paying our taxes? Like, are you buying the house for us?" You know? And—and just this idea of who owns what and where are the limits of what our voice gets to be.And I remember thinking when the—with the rise of—of like targeted marketing through social media, I was like, "Oh, in some ways it's brilliant because there are so many people who really did feel alone." In social media and allowed them to know you are not alone. There is this world of people who are just like you, and they have all found ways of building rich and good lives going forward.At the same time, we—so we increasingly see everything devolving to the worlds that are just like me. And when you look at the voting map in a lot of states, it's not 50-50. It is 90-10 in almost all the counties, or 80-20 in most counties. And when I lived in Georgia, there are like 150-some counties in Georgia. It is entirely possible to live in a county where you are surrounded by 10 other counties where you don't know anybody who actually voted for Biden.So it's entirely possible to think, "Yes, of course the election was stolen because there's nobody in my universe who would have ever voted for him." So how is it that this matter—like how does this make sense? And that to me is the really, really worrisome part of what's happening in—in a world where we fail to recognize the humanity, dignity, and respect that is due to—Everybody. So back to my childhood.Yeah. So—so what's the role of social science or research, qualitative research in this—in this project of harmonious communities?So there's a bunch. Part of it is all of our technology is always developed in—in collaboration with who is it that we're working with. And so there remains this kind of always give and take and—and, you know, participatory design. A lot of our work grows from—from—from theory. Like, what's out there? What do we know? What's been tried? What's working? And can we take a nugget of something that's working and then do it differently or apply it differently?Like we know immersive technologies help people feel and greater empathy towards others, right? Can we do that at scale, and can we use AI to back-end it so that it's not just immersive, but you actually have the ability to—to redesign and change it so that somebody feels like they're listened to, like they're respected, like they're included?Those are the kinds of things that my team—we don't start a single thing without really looking at like, what is the space where we need to be? And Toyota Research really focuses on what we call use-inspired research. So we ladder—we leverage everything that's happening in the academic world on all of our topics and then think about, you know, what are the challenges out in the real world? And can we start to create these like pilot things? Like, I call them my ugly beta babies that—that start to move us toward something. And if it works, then it goes to Toyota big Toyota where they make it into like products or put it into their technology or something along those lines.What's an example of an ugly beta baby?So they'll—my team actually—I'll talk about the one thing that my team's been publishing on lately, which is this tool that we call Envision, which is actually like when you have—when you have a community conflict about what should happen in a space, can we use generative AI to help where you listen to—you read stories and see what matters to other people who are really different from you? And then you are tasked with changing the thing that you most love to accommodate somebody else. And generative AI helps you to redesign the images and areas that you love the most to really think deeply about how to include somebody else and see that like the changes might not be as horrible or radical as you're afraid of.What's an example? Can you give me an—Is that—I mean, I feel like you're talking about housing, but—Yeah, so it actually started because—so I work up in Silicon Valley, and we see this all over California, though, is fights about affordable housing. Yeah, there's a new affordable housing unit or affordable housing complex that was going in, and the neighbors were really angry. The homeowner neighbors—Yeah.And this is so—right? So these are expensive neighborhoods—were really angry because there were going to be windows on the side, and they were afraid people would look into their backyard. And you know, and I'm like, first of all, what are you doing in your backyard that you're like that worried about? But the—the solution was that they took away the windows. And I'm like, why is it that we keep punishing people? Like, windows are not a luxury, right? In housing, we know light and—and all of those things make our lives better and calmer and—and—and happier. So why would you do that? And why would you demand that? Like, what gives you the right to think—right?—can demand that somebody doesn't have a window?And so we feel like there's—had to be 10,000 other ways to think about how to do that where you could have included, right, and seen how it would look without just wiping, you know, like putting up a brick wall. Yeah, so that's where it started—was—was around housing. But we see it—like I live near Venice Beach, Venice, California, and a lot of the—like what do we do about RVs parking on the neighborhood? And so they just keep putting up parking restrictions, and then the RVs just move to new neighborhoods rather than thinking about why are they here? What would be a better solution? If we ask them, what would they prefer? Could we actually start to co-design things that are—that are better?Like, we literally have thousands of parking spots right along the beach. How could we think about something differently? And—and I feel like we just get stuck in our little worlds and don't think about how we could—how we could collaborate towards, you know, better solutions for everyone. So that's really what drove it.Wow. So exciting. I mean, I have—I mean, I've had exactly—just had that same experience here in Hudson where the local housing authority, you know, was proposing a giant housing development. They released a very sort of rudimentary watercolor, you know what I mean? And—and—and as far as I'm—there wasn't enough space given for anybody to process what might have been happening. So people have reactions, and then you end up in the—with this whole—this really limited set of options which are horrible, right? Like, oh, you're just gonna—it's like—like it's like a binary. You just like—oh, you don't—Let us know—we can come to Hudson.All right. Please do. I might—I might actually invite you. There was another one here in Santa Monica. They were like—the high school, they were wanting to replace one of the buildings, and people were like, "Oh, it's historic and we went there and it was beautiful." And I'm like, "You went there 50 years ago, and there's no AC, and it's crumbling, and my kids are really uncomfortable. Maybe we could actually have the current students and you who want this preserved like work together and talk about what's actually going on with this." So—so there we go. So that's our goal.It's beautiful. I mean, I really—it's so exciting. I—before we end, I mean, I guess there's two things that I wanted to make sure I talked to you about. One is the ritual-based research, and then the other one is just to hear you—because I want to get the first principles in these conversations with professionals like you about why is qualitative important? What is it—what is its value? Like, how do you make the case for it? I always feel like it's existential for me, but—so how do you make the case for qualitative? What's the proper role and the value of it? And then I'd love to hear you talk about the ritual-based research.Sure. So I think to me, qualitative is one other methodology that you have to have in a range of things. Like I said, we always start with lit reviews. We do tons of quant. I have a lot of people who are anthropologists who apply for my team, and they have like no quant backup. And I'm like, "Oh, I'd so love to hire you. Can you—can you just learn some R?"And—and then qualitative—but what qualitative brings is—and I think it also depends on where you use it in a project, right? So a lot of our work starts with that moment of going, "Huh, like this is an unusual thing that I'm seeing. How do I start to understand why this is happening?" Right? So to me, qualitative tees up the—the spaces where we should be moving.Right? So when you see somebody like—we worked on a project for McDonald's, and there's all these like Whole Foods, like granola-y parents who still go to McDonald's. Yeah, but I was like, "When?" Because it's not every—it's road trips or it's divorced families finding a shared space where they can meet and hand off kids, right? And I was like, "Oh, that's what you get." And qualitative is a little bit of like, "Huh, what's happening here?"And it should always be the starting ground, and every brand should do this of like, who's using your brand? Who's doing it in a different way? What are the unique and weird things they're doing? Where's it going actually in ways that you don't want it to go? And how do you celebrate some of what you're seeing? And also who's on the fringes of where you think—who's kind of coming up, right? And some of that is just like basic out and about having a real life. Right? So you should always be attending to some of that.And the second place where I think qualitative really comes in is understanding why, right? So qualitative will never give you—in—sorry, let me slow down. Qualitative should always help you understand why, how—like some of the nuances of all of this. If you have done your quantitative data properly, you should know kind of the breadth of what it is you're trying to do. And so you can recruit against that breadth of, "I need some people who are—who do this, who do that, who do these other things."And like, we did a project for Reynolds Wrap. We needed some people who had, you know, kids at home, who did a lot of entertaining. We knew that like the roommate scenario was a whole other thing we wanted to try. And so we recruited against—and then people who were like really serious cooks and foodies. So we recruited against that rather than just being like, "I just need 20 people," right? So thinking about how your quantitative can help you start to dig into like, "This is an interesting place that I want to explore. This is an interesting use scenario that seems to be showing up. What's going on with that?" That's also why when you do your quantitative differently, it gives you some more of that.Yeah, to think—Yeah. And then qualitative can come through whether it's design or whether it's data analysis. Like, is—are we on the right path? Is this the right way of thinking about something? It becomes this way of validating or sort of co-collaboration at the end. Or, you know, at the start as you may think about it that way. Is this resonating? Does—you—and not so much as like—I know a lot of companies use it as a thumbs up, thumbs down for product launches or, right, campaign launches. I wouldn't necessarily do that. But—but how is it that we either miss something or where is it going?But I think that those are probably some of the ways that you use it. But to me, data—data is—data by default is always partial, whether it's quantitative or qualitative or anything else. It is always partial. And what you get when you parallel and mix all of these is you're trying to offset where things are partial. Quantitative data can give you a good picture of a lot of things, but it doesn't necessarily tell you anything else. Or it doesn't tell you the experience, doesn't tell you the why, like all of that stuff. What do you make of—I mean, I feel like I—I bump into people using the word data to be synonymous or quantitative, and qualitative is this sort of—you know, nobody really takes it seriously and they don't—you know, I always tell this story. There's a—the—there's some quote that's that—that Freakonomics looked into that "The plural of anecdote is not data." And that quote is more popular in Google even though it's wrong, and they find it's because the plural of anecdote is data according to the—I guess where do you fall out on this? Is it that business culture just chooses not to see the value in qualitative data? How do you make sense of this?That's why I get so frustrated with like AI and LLMs. Is like, do you know what you gathered? Any idea what's in your data? Yes. Ovetta Sampson posted something on LinkedIn the other day of like, "Quantitative data is just a lot of opinions, but it's still opinion, you just have more of them. But this is such an interesting anthropological question, isn't it too? This is where I think I'm gonna go back to—to a point I made earlier. If you don't know what you're doing as a qualitative researcher, if you don't have some framework, if you don't have some idea of theory, if you don't know why you are looking at something, your qualitative data will suck. Very frankly, it's not going to be good. But the same is true of quantitative data. If you don't know why you are asking questions, if you don't know why you are polling a certain group of people, if you don't have a theory about why it should look certain ways or not, and you just somehow expect it to show you the truth, right, it's also going to be crap.And so that to me is where—we're in a rush to bring richness to the—the industry world. I think we often missed what it was about a lot of the early qualitative researchers who were in industry. What they brought was that like huge background in theory, in ethnography, and like not just, "Oh, I'm gonna go look," but you know, like "I'm looking in a certain way for certain kinds of things at certain types of behaviors," and that's what matters. And we haven't held that level of rigor.I—let me be clear—lots of people do this and they do it incredibly well, and I want to be really mindful that I'm not like painting a wide brush. Yes, but we're—when it has failed, to me it has largely failed because it's just like, "Oh, I interviewed 15 people and I learned this," right? And why does that matter? And how does that connect? And where does it link? And what else—[Speaker 2]Does that show you? Yeah, that's where I think we have failed. Yeah. No, what do you mean—what are you—like, I just feel like I—like this is definitely a passion point for me because it was—sad when anthropology and—and ethnography started to lose value. When did that happen? What are you pointing—[Speaker 1]I feel like when data sciences really started to come forward, kind of the late 2010s, everyone's like, "Oh, we don't need ethnography anymore. We can just like run it and big data." And then certainly with—with the LLMs, people like, "Yeah, I can just ask the LLM to—what would a woman who's 40 in—"[Speaker 2]Michigan think about this? Right, yeah. Yeah. So it's just sad. So—do you feel like qualitative research is undervalued, ethnography is undervalued, that it's not really considered real data by—by many? Is there a need to sort of to champion this role?[Speaker 1]Yeah, I do feel like it's probably undervalued. And yet at the same time, I can't tell you the number of business meetings I sit in where people—like senior leaders will essentially offer what I call anecdata. Oh yeah, oh that's—that's qualitative. And—and helping them understand where they're doing it themselves.Yeah, I think it's actually kind of a—one of the—the more joyful parts of my current role since I don't do like outward-facing research so much anymore. And then can you tell—I want to talk about the ritual-based research. I mean, this is a few—while—a while ago, this paper, but it's so interesting and wonderful. Can you tell me a little bit about the origins?So it basically started from a kind of conflict we were having about qualitative versus quantitative data. And this other thing like—marketing is fundamentally a discipline that we want people to do something different from what they're doing, right? Like, I need you to buy more of this. I need you to tell your friends about buying this. I need you to—switch brands and buy more of mine and less of theirs. So it's fundamentally a behavior change discipline. Policy is fundamentally a behavior change discipline.And so I started to think about, all right, well, how do cultures change behavior? Right? So back to my like, I don't have time for this. Like, I gotta figure this out quickly. And cultures change behavior in two typical ways. The first is like the slow enculturation of how you like raise a child and the steady, you know, "Let's do that. Let's do this other thing. Like, let's not do this third thing."But the other big way they do it is actually through rituals, right? So you have—we all can think about like graduations or weddings as you are literally changing the status of somebody in those moments from student to graduate and from single to coupled. And there are whole categories—there are whole categories of rituals that are around behavior change.So even if you think about anniversaries or birthdays or—anniversaries in particular, those are moments that are really intended to kind of bring you right back to what was the commitment you made? What was the promise? Are you living up to that? Are you in that same space? And if not, how do you re—how do you re-get—how do you get yourself back there?And so I was like, well, if rituals are designed to change behavior, maybe we could think about how rituals align to certain types of behavior change. And then can we ladder different business and product challenges against those types of behaviors so that we can not just do like qualitative research, but do research that's actually trying to get people to do the thing that we want them to do anyway?And so the way that we thought about it was like—graduations, weddings, things like that are—are status change, right? So this is where you're welcoming somebody new, welcoming somebody into a new community. So I need you to not buy that and I need you to buy this. So how do we think about, "Oh wow, what does it take to welcome somebody into a new product community? And what do they want to feel? How do you want them to belong? What do you want to celebrate about who you are? How do you—how do you also tell them like what the rules are and what the expectations are and where we go, where we don't go?"At the same time, like I said, anniversaries are rituals of remembrance, right, where you remember why you made a commitment to something. So how is it that we can structure something where—where you remember why it is you are part of this thing that you are doing?So we use that for Saucony. We worked on the—all the brand work for—elite runners have a very difficult time talking about why they run. They're like, "I—I just do it. Like, I—my shoes are there and I do it and I just—I have to do this. It's like who I am." But if you get them talking, they all have—they all save race bibs and medals and stuff like that. If you get them talking about specific races, they talk about—you get these really rich, fun narratives about, you know, the challenges and the hilarious moments in the community and that other stuff.And those become moments of remembrance about why they do what they do. And so we had a whole campaign that was really around like the hilarious moments that happen in racing and running that—that were kind of like insider jokes to the running community to celebrate why we all get up at four in the morning and put on shoes and ache all day long.So—so and then—so there were a whole bunch of ways that we tried to do it. But it was kind of back to that bigger point like, what's the theory? What's the human question I'm trying to get at? And how can I think about not just like, "Oh, we'll do a deprivation study." Or like—well, why do you want to do a deprivation study? Is that the right study? Is that a right approach? Is that to get you the challenge that your customer—like your—your people actually have to make? So that's where it all started. And it was—it turned out to be super fun and actually worked, which was kind of surprising.[Speaker 2]Really? Because a lot of my stuff, I'm like, "It should work—"[Speaker 1]Should work in theory. I can see this.[Speaker 2]Yeah, it's amazing. So it was really fun. One final question because we've talked for a while and I could keep talking, but I'm—I have this—the Jerome Bruner book. I have not read it, but he uses the word meaning. I use the word meaning in this—that business of meaning. I pretend I know what I'm talking about, but it's a big mushy thing. What are we talking about when we talk about meaning?I don't know. It's a big mushy word, right? And I'm gonna go like, words can mean a lot of things, right?Yeah.What does meaning mean? I think at one level, it's—it literally is how we organize and make sense of what we do and the world around us. And it shapes that—that's kind of glib.I think at another level, it shapes the way that we engage with the world and the kinds of choices we make, which then kind of create the world that we're in, right? So I think it works at two levels. Or it's kind of that—that sort of pre-conscious—this is what I should do because this is what I've always been raised and taught. Like—like I was saying, the uncultivated consequences of—Yeah, like this is—this is what is—makes it—matters.It's then also how we go back and re-narrativize what's happened in our world to make sense of the choices we made and to leave things out. But the thing that's really interesting for me about meaning, and this ties a bit to some of my worries with AI—meaning—a lot of stuff that's meaningful, we—we take for granted because it's sort of the backdrop of our everyday, right? It's the—it's—and things stand out because they are different or unexpected or unique or unusual. And—and we pay attention to those. Sometimes they're good, like that's—it's an unexpectedly good moment. And sometimes they're outlier, like they're not.But we find ways to craft narratives that kind of weave those back through. And my goal with a lot of qualitative research is how do we keep bringing more of that surprise, more of that unexpected? Because that's where—and how do we focus on that unexpected? Because that's where people have to articulate why is it unexpected, right? And how do I make sense of this thing that I didn't know was going to happen?That's really the brilliance of long-term fieldwork is you get to ask people like, "Oh, why did you do that?" And it's the everyday of their world, and they look at you like, "Well, because we always do that." But then you push and you get the underlying why. I think those whys change over time. Let me also be clear. But—but I think to me, that's what meaning is. It's the frameworks that start to pattern and organize our lives, but it's also those frameworks that pull in the stuff that's unexpected.And I—I also think that sometimes those—sorry, I'm gonna go one more step further. When something is so far askew and we can't process it, we just like—yes, that thing never happened. And we don't have any way—like—like the—the framework breaks if we pull it in. And I think that when I look at politics and some of the social divides that we're now seeing, I think that that's part of why I'm really afraid about—I'm not afraid, but—I think that that's the big challenge when something's so different that we—that we have to like other it. And can't create a narrative in which that makes sense.What's the opposite of othering? Is it belonging, isn't it? It's a—okay, Tom—Thomas Tornish was one of my favorite phenomenologists who said self and other always existed the same boundary, right? You define yourself by defining what is other. So if the opposite of othering, it's selfing, right? How is—how am I like this thing? Yes, that—how is this thing like me? Where did it—A totally made-up word on the moment. I think the—yeah, I think the opposite is selfing.Oh, it's beautiful. Awesome. Well, what a beautiful—what a wonderful way to end. This has been such a joy. I—I really am really grateful that you—you—you agreed to speak with me, and this has been a real pleasure. So thank you so much.Thank you. I always learn so much more about myself and about my discipline when I have these conversations. So absolutely love what you do. Please keep it up. I—and it makes my Friday every day. I'm excited to now finish this and go read your newsletter for today. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Phil Adams is a brand consultant based in Edinburgh, Scotland, practicing what he calls Lowfalutin Strategy. He has over 20 years experience as an account manager, planner, and managing director in the advertising business. He was Planning Director at digital agency Blonde, and then Managing Director at The Leith Agency. He has a wonderful newsletter here. I reached out to him because of this: “Mixtaping my metaphors.”---Beautiful. So, Phil, thank you for coming and being a part of this with me. I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I tend to overexplain. I borrowed it from a friend of mine, who’s an oral historian. She helps people tell their stories. It’s a big, beautiful question, but because it’s so big, you can answer it any way you want. The question is, where do you come from?Yes, well, thank you for that. Forewarned is forearmed, because I knew it was coming, so I had a chance to think about this. Rather than giving you a standard personal life story, I think the best answer is that I come from two places: one called mischief and the other one called creativity. Looking back now, with hindsight, I think those are the places I came from.Tell me a little bit about mischief.Okay, well, something that stuck with me from an early age, and I try to stay true to this, is what my maternal grandfather once said: "The thing about Phil is he always has a twinkle in his eye." He meant that I’m always on the lookout for fun and mischief. I’ve never forgotten him saying that, and I try to live by that ethos—having a twinkle in my eye. I think that’s probably why, despite studying engineering at university, I made a sudden turn into advertising. It suited me more as an environment—a sparky, fun environment. That was the idea. I didn’t know much about it going in, but it turned out to be exactly that.So was creativity the other place you came from?Yeah, again with hindsight. Looking back on my childhood, there was a lot of creative mischief. For example, I used to play with Scalextric racing cars. I stripped the wires from the transformer and used it to run science experiments, like copper plating things. My mum freaked out once when she found out I was running experiments, like putting a lit candle in my cupboard and timing how long it would take to burn all the oxygen and go out. So, with hindsight, a lot of my play was mischievous but also quite creative.Did you ever have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up?Not really, no. It was all quite predictable, I think. I was a pretty good student across most subjects, with a slight bias toward the sciences. My dad’s a scientist, so with his encouragement, I narrowed down my subjects to maths, physics, and chemistry at 16. Not surprisingly, I ended up in an engineering degree, but not with any strong vocational drive to be an engineer. I’ve always liked understanding how things work, and that’s served me well in advertising as well. But I didn’t have a vocational drive until university, when I suddenly decided that advertising was what I wanted to do. That was at age 21.What happened at 21?I was in the changing rooms after a soccer game, and one of my teammates, who was studying chemistry or geology, decided he wanted to be an advertising copywriter. He was putting together a portfolio of ideas to show, and it looked really interesting. I’d always had a fascination with ads—my sister and I used to play a game where we’d guess the brand behind the ad quickest. So when I saw his book and Campaign magazine, it all looked really glamorous, and something about it appealed to me. I decided I wanted to go into advertising, not as a copywriter, but just in the industry. I had to re-engineer my CV, managed to get on a Procter and Gamble marketing course during an Easter holiday, and then worked for nothing in a small agency over the summer. By the time of my final year at university, I could demonstrate some enthusiasm for advertising. I applied to all the top agencies in London, got maybe five first interviews, and one job offer, which happened to be at BBH. So I landed on my feet, and my football teammate went on to a glittering career as a creative, including being executive creative director at BBH in the end as well.Oh, wow. Were you together at BBH?No, he was there after I was.And where are you now? What’s the work you’re doing now?OK, so I worked in advertising for about 18 years. I went through account management, account director, head of client services, and ended up as the managing director of an agency. In 2006-2007, I helped co-found our sister digital agency. I liked the guy we’d hired to run it so much that I jumped ship and joined the digital agency, effectively recruiting my own boss and reinventing myself as a strategy person. Most digital agencies then were run by technical people, so it was quite unusual to have a brand person in a digital agency. I did strategy in a digital agency until 2020, then jumped ship again to go freelance as an independent brand strategy consultant. Now, I work mostly with B2B and service organizations.What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?The joy in the work is that it’s both an intellectual and a creative discipline. You kind of jump from one to the other, almost seamlessly, when you’re working on a problem. That suits me. The work I do now involves that constant combination of logical and creative thinking, one informing the other. That’s the joy that sustains my interest. People keep asking me, "When are you going to retire?" I have no desire to retire because I’m enjoying the work. Working for myself now, I can pick and choose who I work with, so I keep the joy of the work and lose some of the negatives that come with working in an agency. It’s great. And actually, the joy also comes from the fact that I feel I’m doing the best work of my career now, at age 58—work I couldn’t have done even when I was 50. I don’t want to sound overconfident, but I do think there’s been a blossoming in my late career. There’s joy in that as well.Yeah, and how do you mean? In what way are you doing things that you couldn’t have done before?I think it’s a new level of confidence. Not overconfidence—I hope I approach my work with humility—but I feel comfortable having conversations with founders and CEOs, having the confidence to price according to my ability, and to decline pitches where I’d have to give away intellectual property for nothing. I’ve either learned these things in the last five years or just reached an age where I’ve had to. I feel quite different from how I felt even five or six years ago.The name of your company is fantastic, and it feels like it has a "lowfalutin" strategy. Is that right?Yeah, that’s not the name of the company. It took me four and a half years of consultancy work to finally figure out who I am as a consultant and what my style is. I think I’m good at keeping things simple, pragmatic, and unpretentious. "Lowfalutin" was just an idea I had to describe that style, rather than being another consultant who talks about pragmatic solutions. It’s a slightly pretentious way of saying unpretentious, and I like it for that. It’s not the name of the company, but I did trademark it as my signature style. It’s wonderful. It’s a good filter because you have to know what "highfalutin" means to get it. And I guess I don’t want to work with people who don’t know what "highfalutin" is.Well, I don’t know when I signed up for your newsletter or when I started seeing your stuff on LinkedIn, but you had this amazing post you called a "mixtape of metaphor." You really went deep and gathered all of these beautiful nuggets about metaphor into one post. That’s what inspired me to reach out and invite you here. So, talk to me about metaphor. Why create a mixtape of metaphor, and what’s the role of metaphor in your work?Well, I’ve been collecting them for quite a while. I don’t know why I’m interested, but I do a lot of writing. I get great joy from writing, though I wouldn’t say I’m brilliant at it. But I’m interested in communication, professionally, and metaphor is a powerful tool. When you subconsciously read or watch something, you’re not aware of how prevalent metaphor is in our language. It was only after I wrote that post about metaphor that I realized I was unconsciously using other metaphors to write about the ones I was consciously using. They’re a prevalent form of communication because they’re so powerful. I’ve always had a fascination with them. I have an online repository of stuff I find interesting, and I’ve had a section called "Metaphor" where I’ve been collecting them over the years. It was only recently that I decided to pull some of those greatest hits out and put them together into a single article called "Mixtape," which itself is a metaphor.Metaphor all the way down.Yeah, exactly. And in terms of using metaphor professionally, quite often a creative idea, an advertising idea, can be a metaphor. Another example is that if you want to use a celebrity as a spokesperson for your brand, it works best when the thing for which that celebrity is best known is a metaphor for what your brand stands for. That works really well. So, metaphors are a frequently used and powerful tool, not just in language generally, but specifically in commercial creativity.I want to return to the idea that you’re a simple and pragmatic communicator. What are the challenges when working with clients to make things simple? How do you do that?I think it’s an attitude, and I do think it’s one of the few benefits of getting older. Learning to keep things simple, not being afraid to keep things simple, and knowing how to keep things simple are skills that get better with age. I don’t have a fixed brand framework—no brand house, brand key, or brand pyramid. That just gives you boxes to fill in every time, most of which are superfluous for a given client. It makes more work for me because I do a bespoke thing for each client. But the philosophy I bring to every gig is that the strategy will have the best chance of working if it has as few moving parts as possible. So, I don’t have a set framework, but I do have a philosophy of keeping the number of components in a brand strategy to a bare minimum to do the job. That helps, although it does create more work each time.Yeah, that’s wonderful. I’m curious about your shift from account management to strategy and then doing strategy in digital. How has the strategy changed? How has the advertising challenge changed? How would you describe how things have changed?I think, can I start by saying what hasn’t changed? My favorite advertising maxim is McCann Erickson’s idea of "Truth Well Told," which goes back to 1912. I still think that’s as good a definition of advertising or commercial communication as you’re going to get. It’s deceptively simple because you have to identify what that truth is from many options, and then you have to decide the best way of telling that truth. So, it’s simple, but it’s not easy. That fundamentally is still the same. The things that change are more surface-level, like delivery mechanisms. The advent of the internet and social media was a radical change in how commercial messages are delivered, but they’re still doing fundamentally the same job—telling the truth in the best way possible. Some people get fixated on surface changes at the expense of the core discipline. The fragmentation of media channels, both online and offline, presents new challenges. It’s harder to achieve reach, which is important for building a brand over the long term. That’s more of a challenge and may have contributed to the discipline of advertising feeling a little less important than it did when I was working in it. But that’s easy for me to say from the outside looking in now.What’s the role of research in your process? I’m a qualitative researcher, so I’m always interested to hear how people value it and use it.It’s fundamental. One of the values I apply to my consultancy work is what I call "dealing directly," but access is a shorthand. One part of that is having access to my clients’ clients or customers to do primary research. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll take a project on unless I can talk directly to their customers. One of the reasons I specialize in B2B and service businesses is that they both involve deep, ongoing relationships with my clients, and the relationship matters. They know about my clients and care about my client doing a good job for them. As well as buying the product or service, they’re also buying into my client’s culture. Part of my job is to understand the culture behind the brand, and I’m quite good at that because I’m really interested in it. Also, because my clients’ clients or customers know my clients really well, they’re often going to give me the answer I need. It happens so often that what my client thinks they’re selling is not the same as what their customers are buying. Somewhere in that tension is the answer to the brand strategy problem they’ve set me. I couldn’t do the work without doing the primary research with those clients or customers, to the point where I won’t take the work on. It’s absolutely essential to the work I do.Was this something you learned coming up, or how did you develop as an interviewer, a researcher, someone who asks questions?I’m not someone who feels the need to impress with what I’m saying. I much prefer to listen, think, and then speak. That natural inclination to let others talk and not try to impress them with what I think is a solid foundation. I’ve always had that. The more you do it, the better you get at asking good questions. I’ve always been pretty good at listening, and as you know, you don’t just listen with your ears—body language is a huge part of it. It’s not just what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it. Being receptive to when there might be something else they could say if I just leave a pregnant pause for them to fill often leads to the most interesting insights. I enjoy the back-and-forth of those conversations. Usually, I’m talking to people who want to say nice things, who want to be helpful, so that helps too.You mentioned learning how to ask questions. What have you learned about what makes a good question?I guess keeping it open-ended is important—inviting someone to share their opinion. It’s a difficult one to answer because I do this naturally now. When you’re writing a discussion guide, the first pass might not be that great. What I do is, and I do this for meetings as well as for qualitative research interviews, I don’t just write the discussion guide—I imagine myself having the conversation. When you do that, you can imagine how it will go and whether they’ll open up or if the question will shut them down. That’s a good discipline, not just for qualitative research but for preparing for any meeting. I’ll Google the people I’m going to talk to, watch videos of them presenting, and get a sense of who they are. Then I imagine the conversation and whether a particular question will work or if it needs rephrasing. So, that imaginative approach would be my overall method.Yeah, it’s awesome. I think about this stuff way too much, of course, but there’s this amazing quote I always return to. A woman named Harleen Anderson, a therapist, said, "How could you possibly know what questions to ask somebody until they’ve said something for you to be curious about?"That’s useful, yeah.Isn’t that nice? I felt like I saw that in you too.Yeah, totally. You reminded me that part of my opening spiel when I first meet someone to interview is that I’ll say, "My discussion guide is over here on this screen, so I’m not checking email. I’m just seeing where we are. But I’d be delighted if this conversation very quickly goes off-piste, depending on how you lead it." I know the outcome I need from the conversation, but I don’t need to slavishly follow the questions to get it if they lead me in a more interesting direction. Having the experience and confidence to go with the flow and not be tied down by set questions is important.Yeah. How do you know when you’ve gotten to the strategy? You’ve talked about getting to the strategy with as few parts as possible. How do you know when you’ve arrived?It goes back to the idea of "truth well told." Most of the projects I work on are for clients who don’t think they’ve ever found that truth, or they had it but lost their way. They haven’t got their story straight anymore. Most of the projects I work on are some version of finding that truth, working out how to tell it, and giving them a blueprint they can work with. As I talk to them, I get a sense of who they are, what their values are, what their culture is. Then I go and talk to their customers, maybe creating some stimulus material from the conversations with my client. I get a sense of what that truth might be. Once I know what the answer is, I think about the most appropriate way to structure it so it becomes easily digestible and pragmatic. I don’t like strategy as an intellectual exercise—it’s a means to an end. Someone has to execute the strategy, so I have to leave it in a place where it’s easy to follow. And if they give it to a creative person, it has to be a joy for that creative person to work with. So, it’s got to be precise, accurate, and inspirational.To the degree you’re comfortable, can you give me an example or tell me a story about what that looks like? Is there a form that your strategy usually takes?I don’t have a set form, but there’s an end result I always aim for, which is the client saying, "Oh my God, that’s us." That’s us in terms of what we’re saying, and that’s us in terms of how it’s being said. And because of the way I’ve done the work, it’s "that’s us" in a way that’s going to press the right buttons with the kind of clients or customers they’re trying to attract because it’s been informed by them in the process. That’s the outcome I’m always looking for. I’m so pleased when I occasionally get that verbatim, "that’s us," which is a deep joy. Often a client will say, "Thank you very much, you really got us," which is another way of saying the same thing. But that’s what I want—for them to see themselves expressed in a way that was missing before, in a way that’s going to attract the kind of clients they want. Does that answer your question?Absolutely. There’s no such thing as a wrong answer. I totally connect with the victory of them seeing themselves in the work. It’s powerful and beautiful. I appreciate the lack of dogma in your approach.Thank you. I’m happy with that. One common problem I encounter with service businesses, especially marketing services businesses, is that when you get down into messaging, you have to do three jobs: inform, enthuse, and reassure. Marketing services businesses, in particular, forget to do the "inform" bit and are all about trying to enthuse. You’ll see ad agency websites that say things like, "We connect clients with culture," and yet you wonder, "Do you do ads?" They forget that fundamental first line of the elevator pitch—what kind of company are you?There was an amazing quote from James Bridle about AI in the metaphor mixtape. I wanted to ask, how would you describe your relationship with generative AI?I don’t have one. Back in 2007, when social media exploded, I was advising my clients on whether and how they should use it, so I had to dive in and immerse myself in social media. Right now, I’m advising my clients on brand strategy, not on AI technology, so I don’t feel the need to dive into AI. Also, it’s moving so fast, changing so quickly, that I’m letting others make mistakes and learn for me. I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not making my own mistakes. For example, prompt engineering sounds like bad UX to me—it’ll get sorted out eventually, where I won’t need to be a prompt engineer to use this stuff. So, I’m not wasting my time on that. I also don’t want to outsource the hard work of wrestling with a problem. I don’t want to take shortcuts because my ability to know when something’s right and to talk it through with a client depends on me having done that hard work. I’m deeply skeptical of AI and don’t think I need it. The kind of work I do—talking one-on-one with human beings—if that ever becomes replaceable by AI, it will be one of the last things to go. I’m listening with my ears, eyes, gut, and a sixth sense, and I just don’t see how AI can replicate that. I’m skeptical and less inclined to dive in than others. I don’t think I need to.You were part of the internet’s arrival, which was our most recent transformation. What was that experience like, and what did you learn that you’re applying here?I worked with people who’d been on the internet from day one, so 2006-2007 was a long way after day one, but it was kind of the wild west when marketing people and brands suddenly realized they might have to think seriously about it. It was exciting. I learned a lot from diving in early to social media. I made a lot of friends and connections, which made going freelance in 2020 much easier. It’s been a huge professional boon to me, both in terms of meeting people and learning from them. But it also informs how I feel about generative AI now. Social media started as a beautiful, generous, open thing, but now we realize it can be a threat to democracy, exacerbates polarization, and has negative impacts on mental health, especially among younger people. None of that was foreseen back in 2007. So, I assume despite all the amazing use cases for generative AI now, we’re going to see similar negative impacts down the line. That’s my assumption—I don’t know what they will be, but I’m cautious.That’s a good place to end our conversation. Thank you so much. I really appreciated speaking with you and enjoyed it. I appreciate you accepting my invitation.Thank you so much for being interested. I’m deeply flattered, especially given some of the people who’ve gone before on this podcast—people I admire from afar. I was honored to be asked. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Jakob Voldum is Director, Insights and Strategy at Designit in Copenhagen. Prior to that he was a Senior Consultant at ReD Associates, having joined the company at the beginning as an intern. At Designit, he is co-hosting the event “Beyond the Lens: How ai is changing creative workflows" with the hybrid image agency Scenes. Thank you for agreeing to do this. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend who teaches oral history. Because it's a beautiful question, I over-explain it. Before I ask, you should know that you're in total control. You can answer any way that you want or not answer. The question is, where do you come from?That's an interesting question, one that I could potentially answer in many different ways. Maybe I could start from the top, or from one perspective - the overarching, big picture perspective. I come from Denmark, a small country in northern Europe. It's known for its pretty and windy coastlines, for smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches), very delicious. But probably what I'm most proud of is the extensive welfare society.We might have one of the highest tax rates in the world. But on the other hand, healthcare and education are mostly free. I can try to zoom in further. Denmark is a small country, but there are quite a few people here. I come from the capital, Copenhagen. It's a highly livable city, optimized for bikes. We've got bike lanes all over, so someone like you who enjoys biking might appreciate that.Zooming in further, I'm from a first-row suburb of Copenhagen. I grew up in a large two-family house with loving parents and a sister. My parents - one is a teacher, the other is a lithographer; she used to work with retouching images for magazines. It was a sort of liberal, left-wing household with strong family values. I think I was always encouraged to follow my passions. I was told that should be the most important selection criteria for what I should choose to spend my time on.This two-family household was also quite unique because we grew up with two families under one roof, two separate apartments, but with a lot of companionship and community within the household, sharing dinners. We were four kids together, more or less similar ages, so we could play together and explore the neighborhoods.To this day, I'm quite fortunate to have most of my family and friends around Copenhagen. Interestingly, I've actually gone full circle. When I came of age and moved out of the house, I lived in the city for a while and traveled the world. But now I've moved back into my home. My parents are a little bit older now. I bought half the house and I'm living with my parents. So we're kind of like a multigenerational household now, which is great.How's it been? What's that like?It's been really good. It wasn't a decision that happened quite quickly because we had a great apartment somewhere else in Copenhagen. But all of a sudden, this apartment became available. My mom called me and said this could happen. We have to make a decision now. I think she hit us at the right moment. We were just about to have our second kid. I thought it might be nice to have some extra hands around to help raise the kids.They're both retired now, so I think it works pretty well. It's nice to be close to parents. It's nice to be close to someone who loves you almost unconditionally and to see my kids actually build a strong bond with them as well. Of course, there are issues, but nothing that we haven't been able to solve so far. So I think it's nice.You were encouraged to follow your passions. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?The first thing I wanted to be was a zoologist. I was always super interested in insects and animals. I had this friend in kindergarten whose father was a zoologist. He was always telling these tales of fieldwork in remote parts of Africa, coming home with super interesting stories of looking for new species. I thought that was really cool and interesting.But I didn't end up choosing zoology. I ended up choosing something that would feed my need for curiosity and exploration of other places and cultures. I chose a field called ethnology, which is in the social sciences. It's a unique Northern European or European phenomenon. Ethnos means people or nation, and the logic part is the teaching of them. So it's understanding people, closely related to anthropology and sociology.I remember when I was trying to figure out what to study, I was looking at this leaflet from the University of Copenhagen. I was always very interested in history and anthropology. I thought it was fascinating to go out and try to understand cultures and meet people, to be bombarded with new experiences like that. I was also interested in philosophy and sociology. When I read the description of ethnology, it seemed like I'd be getting this full package of all these things combined in one.What's unique about ethnology is that while it has the whole methodology of anthropologists - learning to do participant observation and the whole qualitative toolbox - it also uses history to teach you something about change. It encourages you to look at both the past and the present and combine those two views, which I think was super interesting. A guy I look up to when I read his books is Noah Yuval Harari. He has this notion that history is not just the study of the past, it's a study of change. I try to carry that with me as well. It's kind of supposed to be sense-making to practically make sense of where we're going and why.When did you discover that you could make a living doing this, studying people?That happened by chance. As I was studying, I was preparing for the graduate program. In the university system, there's an opportunity to do an internship as part of your master's program. I saw an ad for an intern for a famous design agency here in Copenhagen. I went to the interviews and got the internship.But when I was supposed to start this internship, some of the partners in this design agency had broken out and started their own thing. That became a company which has become quite well known within social science-driven consulting, human-centric innovations. It's called Red Associates, with offices in Copenhagen, New York, and elsewhere.I ended up being one of the first employees at Red Associates. I think we were six or seven people at the time when I started back in 2005. By this time, I hadn't even finished my studies yet. I was lucky to enter the world of applied anthropology, applied social science with a really interesting group of people who would quickly send me around the world on fieldwork for global companies and even for some of the ministries here in Denmark. I couldn't have wished for a more exciting beginning to my career, getting access to all these interesting questions, domains, and contexts.What do you love about the work? What's the joy in it for you?If anything, I think curiosity is my superpower. I do a lot more than anthropology these days, but that was the bulk of what I did for a long time - go out into the world, understand something, and be driven by my curiosity. I think it's very difficult to be curious without also having some sort of foundational empathy. So I think those two have been my key drivers in terms of having done what I do, and having done it successfully - curiosity and empathy, and just wanting to understand what's going on.That's still what I try to do. These days, it might be some of my team members who end up doing the fieldwork, but I simply can't help being involved to some extent because I want to understand how things work, how the world is changing, and how we can create change. I think today, in this day and age, there are so many big, hairy problems that we need to solve. We sometimes get the opportunity to make our best shot at solving them for some of our clients.One of the moments I really love is the eureka moment, the aha moment. The first time I had that, I remember, was in university when I was introduced to some of the theories around anthropology. Is that really how the world works? Wow, is that how a nation is constructed? Is that really something that you can actually construct? As you educate yourself and read books by smart people, you start to understand a bit more of how the world really works.Anthropology is a great facilitator of these aha moments. Sometimes it's a minuscule thing, just understanding what really motivates someone. But sometimes you can connect the dots and come up with grander visions or understandings of why a certain market works the way it does, or why a certain culture in a given company is dysfunctional. That feels so rewarding for me - to understand something and be able to convey that so you might actually inspire some sort of change.So beautiful. You mentioned that with ReD Associates, the business world runs on numbers, and they were coming at it from a very different point of view. I'm wondering, what kind of conversations do you have with clients around the role of qualitative? I mean, I imagine people self-select, right? They're going to come, they want that kind of work. But for you, what's the argument that you make for qualitative? I can often feel kind of doomsday about things becoming less and less human, and it becoming much easier to avoid the work of qualitative. But I'd love to hear you just talk about the proper role of qualitative. And how do you pitch it to the C-suite, if it were?There are multiple different insights into this, but also multiple trend lines. First of all, it's really about getting to the why. We might have all these numbers about the way things worked in the past, and we've been trying to project that and say, well, then it'll probably work like this in the future. But we can't say that with certainty. No one can predict the future, not even the most expansive data sets.If you want to understand why something is happening, you need to understand the people who have a stake in it, whether it's the consumer, the employees, or whoever else it might be. Every company is part of an ecosystem populated by people. Those people make decisions and are driven by certain things. You need to understand why they do what they do, and for that, you're going to need the whole qualitative apparatus.There are two big groups of clients. There are the very mature clients who are used to working with design tools and qualitative research. For them, it's more about how much, where, timelines - more practical aspects, because they respect it and have it embedded in the way they think. Then there are the more immature clients that don't necessarily see the value of it or have a very instrumental way of proceeding. That's a completely different ballgame. You need to start from scratch, educate them, show the work that you've done, the difference that work has made, and tailor that to whatever problem they're sitting with.Right now, we're being hit by all these LLMs and synthetic research. You look at the entire design process, and there are new tools emerging every week trying to automate some parts of it. I still think it's going to take a while before we actually figure out the use cases. Of course, we're experimenting with it, but at the end of the line, for things that really matter, we're going to need to have someone in the loop - someone who really understands and has an intention and understands the priorities. For that person, the qualitative knowledge of how people act, how they understand the world, what motivates them, what drives them is just super crucial.I don't see a future where we can just automate this. Yes, for some aspects, probably some of the more tactical stuff like testing a new digital flow, parts of that can be automated. But for the big, fundamental things of really trying to understand what's at stake, I don't see us automating research anytime soon.So how do you see that practice changing? Let's say we're in the future, and a lot of parts have been automated. But it leaves this space for the big qualitative. How do you see that practice changing? Is it just more of the same, just sort of goes untouched? Or do you see it operating differently?I do see it operating differently. For myself, experimenting with AI tools, both in research and in concept development and design process, has been really rewarding so far. I'm curious by nature, so I like to think I'm trying to understand how things work and how I might benefit from it.What's been beautiful about it so far is that we've been able to automate some of the parts that are not necessarily the most interesting parts of it. The actual interaction and relationship between people, establishing that rapport, establishing an empathetic relationship with someone to understand a given context - I don't see how you can automate that. But maybe some of the planning, some of the thinking about how to structure the fieldwork, field guide, observation guide - stuff like that, you can very well use LLMs for, not completely automating, but at least using it and then editing with a human in the loop afterwards. For those aspects, just like any writing tasks these days, there are some obvious use cases.When you move to the analysis as well, I think every anthropologist or social scientist who's done large-scale fieldwork will respect that it's a big task to come home, sift through all the research, do all the documentation in the right way, in a structured way, and then actually synthesize all that information before you can start to distill what everything actually means and how to enable your strategy or your concept. For some of those tasks as well, if you upload all your field notes into an LLM that you've trained, and that's secure and all that stuff, of course, it can do a great job of actually helping enable analysis in a quicker way.I think we'll be able to do things much more efficiently. But I like to be an optimist and say we're going to choose the ways where we can actually see a gain. But for the human connections and for the all-important sense-making in the end, it's still going to be us who's doing it.That's amazing. Tell me a little bit about your current position and company and the other things that you're working on.After I left ReD Associates, I needed a change. I think that's probably natural after you've been in a company for many years. This was my first job, so I needed to travel a bit and try to figure out what to do. But then I figured out that there was a need for someone like me. So I actually ended up freelancing for a few years, self-employed, working with different companies.You said, “a person like me.” How do you think about yourself? How do you talk about your particular skill set?I think it's evolved a bit. But I thought of myself as a business development consultant using ethnography tools primarily. My skill set is primarily around research, but of course, also making sense of that research and using that to strategize and to develop concepts creatively, grounded in my expertise within research and social science.That's what I did for a few years. Then a design agency, the same agency I'm in right now called Design-it, came knocking and offered me a position. At the time, they were growing quite rapidly and could see a need in the market for someone like me. So I came on board and quickly got the opportunity to build a team around what we call Insights and Strategy.Basically, I built a team with the capabilities of handling everything in the front end of the design process. From engaging with the clients to understand their need in depth - for me, that's also a big part of the capabilities of an anthropologist, to empathize with your clients, to understand where they're coming from and what they really need, and be able to challenge them in the right way and actually meet their need with a precise brief and process.But then, of course, the whole front end of the design process, from understanding the client's need to figuring out what we should do, what kind of research we should be doing, who we should be talking to, what kind of new methods might be cool to start working with, how the design field is evolving. So basically building out a team that could tackle the entire front end of the design process up until you start developing concepts, to start bringing in more visual designers to bring things to life, whether it's a digital product or a physical product.I did that for a few years and I'm still here. I'm still a design director. I'm not leading the Insights and Strategy team anymore, but have a little bit more of a thought leadership role slash commercial role. Of course, owning the pipeline together with one of my really good colleagues and driving new bids and rebids and trying to figure out where to take our different clients. But then also trying to have an opinion about important topics of our time.I appreciate that. You guys have really taken a point of view on AI, which you've already talked about a bit. What are the positions that you guys are taking? Was it Beyond the Lens? Is that what it was?Yeah, that's exactly right. The event was called Beyond the Lens. We had it back in April, and we actually have another event coming up in the second-largest city in Denmark called Aarhus because we also have a satellite office over there. We thought we'd take it there after it had pretty nice attendance here in Copenhagen.Essentially, it's a two-part event. It's an after-work thing for people within the design community, but also for clients of ours. We know everyone's talking about AI these days, trying to identify the use cases. So the purpose of that talk was really to discuss how generative AI is changing design and creativity. That's kind of the first bit, a bit of a tour in the helicopter, but also looking back and saying, how did we get here? What's going on? What are the use cases that are emerging? What might we need to be aware of at this stage?Then the second part - an old colleague of mine started a new creative agency. He has a long career within branding, and he's teamed up with a friend of his who's a professional photographer. They're basically doing commercial photography, hybrid photography, merging real photography with AI and applying that for brand development purposes of all sorts, campaign work and so on.The idea with the event was really to say, okay, there's kind of a more philosophical track. Let's try to make sense of this together. And the other part is really about actually showcasing a unique emerging use case, which is that now we can do these amazing images using AI tools, or at least combining real photography with AI tools.How would you describe your relationship with generative AI right now?It's complicated, I would say. Part of me is quite excited. I've gotten a lot of fuel for my curiosity. I think it's really interesting to follow how this is evolving. And I think it's interesting exploring in the context of my work. I think it's interesting to figure out some of these use cases that really make my work more enjoyable.That's the professional, personal angle. But in the bigger picture, I'm also really concerned, to be honest. I think it's going super fast. I think there are some things that just don't really add up. All the tech giants are investing billions of dollars into chipsets. A company like OpenAI was positioned as the pioneer. But people are leaving the company. There are all these speculations about the billions of dollars that they're burning through to get to AGI. And can they really get there and all that.I think there's no doubting that we're in the middle of a huge hype cycle. Whether it's a bubble or not, I don't have the insight to really offer you a perspective there. But I think something is definitely going on. I think a lot of the tech giants were in need of a new story in the wake of the pandemic. And I think AI fit the bill.I'm not neglecting that this is a revolutionary set of tools and I'm experiencing that myself. But I don't think it's society-altering or revolutionizing to the extent that some are trying to make it. So I think it's about stepping back and asking, where are the adults in the room?Can you tell me a story about your ideal experience with generative AI? You said you've had moments where you've been tinkering and enjoying it. What are you using it for?I think I talked about this a little bit earlier. Let's say you're doing qualitative research - there are some obvious low-hanging fruits of how you can ally yourself with ChatGPT or whatever large language model you're using. You can train it on a particular problem you're working on, and then you can actually have it generate a question guide, for example. That's a low-hanging fruit.It becomes like a writing companion, and you become the editor. You're not just outsourcing, but you have someone to do the bread-and-butter writing, and then you can actually edit and improve it.I think that's a very common use case. Most people will probably recognize that. But then we think about design - you might be familiar with the double diamond method, it's about diverging and converging.First, you try to figure out what problem to solve. You explore that problem broadly, and then you figure out which part of the problem you can most ideally solve and which might make most sense to invest the most resources in. Then you get to ideation, trying to ideate potential ideas to solve the problem you've identified. Ideation is a bit of a volume-dependent activity.You need creative people in the room. We can probably all agree that there are principles that make for a good ideation session - having people with diverse perspectives, different backgrounds and age groups, people who come at the problem from different angles. But at the end of the day, you want to be able to generate a lot of ideas.If you actually prep a lot of language models, you can get them to output a lot of ideas quickly. So ideation being a volume-dependent activity, I think it works really well to give you some of that volume. I'm not saying you're outsourcing the ideation or the solution to a large language model, but you're using it as a contributor to an ideation session.Similarly, once you get to a prototyping stage, because you can use these tools, you can actually develop more prototypes simultaneously. So I think everything that's volume-dependent within the design process, it makes a lot of sense to figure out how to use large language models for parts of it.One thing on my to-do list is to explore some really sophisticated, smaller large language models where you're basically building a project repository in a cloud. While you're doing that, you're also training a large language model. So you start to be able to interact with all your data from the original brief and proposal, whatever field guides you might've been using, all the field notes and so on. You start to have it all in one central place.Because you've trained a large language model, you're actually interacting with all that material. The large language model essentially becomes a version of your project that you can have a dialogue with. I think that's really interesting.That's something we're looking to experiment with. And then there's knowledge management. I think there's an obvious use case there.A lot of companies have gone down this route by now. I know no clients who've done it, but imagine if you have - so we have 15 offices around the world, 700 employees, and they're all unique in their own ways. They're all producing knowledge of some sort every day. While we're pretty good at maintaining our staff, people eventually go on to pursue other dreams and careers. When they leave, some of that knowledge leaves.Yes, you might get access to your employees' files and folders, but are you ever going to get through that? Not really. So a lot of stuff gets lost in translation.Imagine if you could actually interact with the entire knowledge repository of your company in a large language model. Show me the three best cases within this industry, the most recent cases. Have it actually summarize the key insights, and so on.I think some of those are the big use cases that we really want to pursue at a company level going forward.What's it been like? How have you responded? I've had some interactions with clients where it feels like the house is on fire. Do you know what I mean? It was like, "Oh God, we got to figure this out." And then other people are very cautious and they're just not even really paying attention. But what's it been like being on the inside, trying to orient Design-it for this moment?I think it's actually been quite easy because most designers, most of our employees are curious, explorative, experimenting by nature.So valuable. You keep coming back to that. Tell me more about why that's so vital right now.In most big companies, things happen top-down, and you don't feel like you have the mandate to do something unless it's been mandated by management and it's within official policy or priorities. So when I go down to, let's say, one of our digital designers, I can be sure that he's already looked at all the different tools that are coming out. He's already tried to make images using Midjourney when it was still in beta mode because, oh, this is interesting. I need to understand that.So I think a lot of what is happening is very organic. For us, it's more about making sure that we don't compromise our clients, that we are respecting all the boundaries and that we have the right guardrails in place. That's definitely difficult, and I do not have all the right answers to that. But I think a lot of the methods or tools are being explored naturally.We are owned by a large technology company called Wipro. It's headquartered in India. They have 250,000 employees. They're obviously also investing heavily in AI. I think they've earmarked north of a billion US dollars for AI initiatives across the company. So of course, they're also supportive of it.What impact has it had on client relationships? Has it changed that in any way?To be honest, not so much yet. We are having dialogues around sense-making around AI. We might have a client who is interested or intrigued about potentially understanding how we might use some of these tools for brand work or for imagery, image creation, maybe for concept development.There are some dialogues around creating AI-enabled sprints. We've also hosted a few events where we have actually done quick and dirty design sprints leading into AI tools. One of the cool things, because we were able to prep in advance, we could actually prototype some of the best ideas that were produced in the sessions.We had basically created a series of prompts where we could then quickly try the right brand colors and create tangible experiences. That was really cool because it made the participants, who were not necessarily designers and not necessarily capable of creating great illustrations, able to quickly sketch up something that looked like their actual idea, but also felt like an actual product or experience that they could put into the world. So I think it's still emerging.Some clients are very much on top of it and some clients are still trying to make sense, for sure. But definitely more and more dialogues, and a lot of them, of course, related to some of the more or less proven use cases around imagery and basic design stuff.How different are the worlds of LLMs and visual AI like Midjourney in our conversation? Have you been talking about both or have you been talking exclusively more about the design side?I've been talking about both. The main applications we're using, of course, we've talked about OpenAI, Claude, as you mentioned yourself, the big ones. But apart from that, there's also GitHub Copilot, and then Midjourney and a few other image generators.Those are the primary ones. But then there are also some more niche ones that are emerging, specifically within UX design, for example, or specifically within logo design. I can't remember all the names, but there's so much coming out.It's really about understanding that the hype cycle is on fully. So you need to be careful not to end up wasting your time. But Midjourney and ChatGPT are two very different things.Obviously, Midjourney is text-to-image, which OpenAI can also do, but I think the general opinion is that Midjourney is quite far ahead in terms of being able to prompt an image that resembles your intention. You can actually start to have some sort of consistency, you can create commercial-grade photography and so on.And then there's all the combining workflows. We're starting to see workflows where people start in OpenAI to describe the type of image they want to generate, then take that prompt into Midjourney and go back and refine. So there's using these different tools on each other in different ways. It's interesting and inspiring as well.I'm curious about synthetic research. Have you had any interactions with it? What are your impressions?I've come across some of these companies, there's one called Synthetic Users, I think. I haven't used it personally. I've experimented with the workflows using it. Let's say, okay, now I'm trying to understand the world from the perspective of this particular user who is 50 years old, lives there.For that, it works well. It's quick at least. It's quick to build a persona for whatever purpose you're doing. I wouldn't necessarily say that it completely replaces personas built on actual data, but the times I've tried it, it's worked pretty well.Can you give me an example? When you say it's worked pretty well, just walk me through what that looks like. I'm very naive.Sure. One example could be that we're working within the obesity space. You might be aware of the new medications within obesity. We're working quite a lot with that recently. As we've been working with our clients, we've also been trying to, when we've conceptualized experiences, tailor those experiences to a persona. We basically describe the persona and then try to say, okay, if this is the persona, how might that implicate the ideal experience?So we're describing the persona in detail, maybe using the LLM to refine that persona and then maybe defining an experience across a number of steps. I can say, okay, if we were to appeal to this persona, what would then have to change in the different steps? That could be one way of thinking about it.So again, mostly it's creatively trying to make sense of something and then saying, okay, can I use these large language models to help me actually get ahead or get a jumpstart on thinking about something in a particular way? That's kind of the gist of it.How do you think about generative AI? What's the metaphor or analogy that you use? What's the best analogy for how you interact with it?I think for me, it feels mostly like having a PhD intern of sorts. It's a very smart and very efficient intern. You can ask them everything and they will respond promptly. Sometimes you need to go back to them and say, well, that's not exactly what I was looking for. Could you try again?For orienting yourself in a particular domain, prepping yourself for a meeting, as a writing assistant and so on, I also like to think about how the role of the designer is changing. Maybe someone who's actually doing something hands-on - you can imagine us becoming more like curators or editors.We're still there with our intention, our craft, and our wisdom. But we are actually getting help from these systems to do parts of our work. So I like to think that we're becoming curators and editors of sorts.And again, you can't really be a very good curator and editor without actually having deep knowledge and experience of your craft. A while back, actually way before the whole AI hype cycle started, we had this futurist team. It was mandated to explore the future, apply foresight methodology, say what's happening, what's changing, what do we need to make sense of?I think it was back in 2019 or maybe even 2020, we did this huge global research with experts, thought leaders, and creatives all around the globe and tried to say what's happening. What are some of the big themes that we as designers need to tackle? The big thing that emerged from that was actually artificial intelligence, but then artificial intelligence broken down into some sub-themes.The first thing, which I thought was really interesting and still is super relevant, was around trusting invisibility. How many of us are actually capable of describing what's going on inside a large language model? None of us. Well, it's something about it consuming all this data and spitting out these amazing answers. It can understand what you're saying and sometimes also where you're trying to go. But other than that, it's a crazy complex system. It takes a lot of experts to build and train those.It's an effective yet invisible system. So this will be a key challenge for us going forward. How can we trust these invisible systems and what do the tech companies need to do to gain our trust? I think that's hugely relevant as we start to embed these technologies, not just AI, but any digital technologies into our workflows, our everyday lives, from our daily workflow to smart cities and stuff like that.A second finding was this notion of playful unlearning. When we start to embrace these new technologies, there's going to be a need for us to unlearn some of the stuff that we've actually spent years honing and learning. Like we talked about before, if you're an anthropologist, you're going to need to figure out how you can lean into these technologies and optimize the way you think and learn based on those, and then adapt your workflows based on that.Big organizations face these challenges on a much larger scale than you and I. So how can you do that? I think this notion of it has to be playful - it's not just the whip and the stick. It has to be about trying to figure out how you can actually bring people along in a way that becomes meaningful and value-creating, not just commercially, but actually also on a human level.And then the third one, I think, is maybe the one that's being talked about most these days, which is this notion of enhancing humanity. How can we ensure that these technologies are not used to develop weapons of mass destruction and scam schemes and deep fakes and all that stuff? Unfortunately, that's already happening in my opinion - like Facebook is imploding with artificial content that's just disrupting and destroying the experience, to be honest.But this is an opportunity for us to enhance not just humans, but humanity. Sam Altman and some of the other gurus like to talk about that. I like to think that there is some truth to what they're saying, that it's not all just a ploy to increase valuations and so on, but that this is actually a force, potentially a force for good. And I think it's a sign that we're quite good at being optimistic and taking something new and trying to figure out how we can actually use this in a deeply meaningful way. I'd love to see more of that happening, more experiments.Beautiful. It's a wonderful moment to stop the conversation. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. I learned a ton and I really enjoyed talking to you. Thanks so much for sharing your time and your point of view.No problem. I enjoyed it as well. Thanks for inviting me.Yeah. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

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