THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

Colleen Hagerty is a California-based journalist who has been on the disaster beat since covering Hurricane Sandy in New York as a local reporter. Her newsletter about disasters, My World’s on Fire, was shortlisted for a 2022 Covering Climate Now award. You can find her work across BBC News and PBS outputs, as well as in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, Popular Science, Rolling Stone, and High Country News, among other outlets. I met Colleen in the Exposure Therapy community. She had just published “The Government Set a Fire in New Mexico. It Burned 341 ,735 Acres” in Rolling Stone, and mentioned she was a 2023 Complicating the Narratives fellow with the Solutions Journalism Network I leapt at the chance to speak with her. I had been fascinated by Solutions Journalism since 2018 when Amanda Ripley published, “Complicating the Narratives,” that asked “ What if journalists covered controversial issues differently — based on how humans actually behave when they are polarized and suspicious?”AI Summary. Colleen Hagerty, a freelance journalist, discusses her journey from fiction to journalism, the impact of covering Hurricane Sandy, and her current focus on disaster reporting. She explores the role of solutions journalism in providing a more complete, human-centered narrative and the importance of shifting perspectives when approaching complex stories.I start all these interviews with the question I borrowed from a friend of mine and I love it, and I always over explain it because it hits really hard that you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from?Yeah, it's funny because like I said, I've listened to a few of these and I know a lot of people talked about the physical places that they come from. But when I heard the question for the first time, for me it was really more the state of mind that I think I approach people from that was my gut reaction. So I'm going with that and I'm going to say I come from a place of curiosity. I have always just been endlessly fascinated by the world around me and people around me, in particular. But when I was younger, I was very shy. So I was not like the stereotypical toddler asking a million questions. A lot of those questions stayed in my head. And I was a big reader. I still am. But now I think I get to make up for lost time with the work I do as a journalist, that I get to actually ask those questions that I've always had.Do you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah, it's boring because it hasn't changed that much. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to do more fiction when I was younger. I always would go to the library and just look at the shelves and want to see my name up there. And again, I think because I found so much excitement and wonder and safety in books when I was younger. I wanted to create that experience for other people. I wanted to give them the same portal that I felt like I had found to peek into other people's lives and the world around me. So it's evolved a bit over time to end up as journalist. But yeah, the writing has always been a part of it.Do you remember, was there a book that you fell in love with as a kid that you remember? What did it look like as a child to be a fiction writer?Yeah, I don't think it was one in particular. I would go through phases in different genres. So I remember having a big historical fiction phase. I remember reading a lot of biographies and autobiographies at one point and then dipping a toe into kind of like the classics. I did it. There was a point when I was like maybe 11 or 12 that I realized maybe I was like punching above my weight class because I had read one of Joan Didion's books on grief and I was not mentally prepared to take those themes in at that time. So I actually, as fantastic as a writer she is, and I know she's inspired so many journalists, like I took a hard break from that. Those were big thoughts for my brain at the time. And I was a bit daunted.And where did you grow up? Where was your childhood? I grew up in New Jersey. So in the suburbs of New Jersey and just about two train rides and an hour and change from New York city. So that was always the dream for me. Both of my parents had lived in New York city before they moved out to New Jersey. So I would hear their stories about living there. My dad spent a large portion of his childhood in Greenwich village and it just was very romanticized in my head. So that was always where I wanted to go and having it so close was amazing, but also taunting that this dream destination and this world that was so different to me than the suburbs I was growing up in was so close, but so far. And where are you now? So I live in Los Angeles. I'm actually on the East coast now visiting family. So you're catching me out of my normal comfort zone. But yeah I try to make it back here still fairly regularly cause all of my family is still on the East coast.And how did you end up in LA?Through work. I was living in New York for a while at the start of my career. I moved down to Washington, D.C. for a bit, and then I got transferred out to Los Angeles. I was working for BBC News at the time, and they had a small team out there but were looking to ramp up their coverage a bit. So I was able to do just some really amazing work within my first year of being there. I had been up in Yosemite, I had traveled across the border in Mexico a few times, just really made my way around and it was a great way to start exploring California and the West in general.When did you know that you could make a living doing what you do, doing journalism?It's a good question because journalism is notoriously underpaid. So even as I started doing it as a job, I wasn't sure I was going to make a living on it. But yeah, it was always what - not always because clearly I had those early dreams of fiction - but once I was in high school, I knew that I wanted to do it. I wasn't sure exactly what form, so I actually started my career more in television. So I was working for a local news station there right out of college and I'd done some internships before that. So I had a bit of grounding. But I still remember the first day that I was sent out with a camera and like I had to do it and I was alone. And it was incredibly daunting. It took a while for me to feel like, not even that I was good at it, but that I knew what I was doing. Like I had some serious imposter syndrome. But I think during that job, it really was working in local news, the scope of what you do is incredible. You could go from a crime scene to - working in New York, I would go from a crime scene to fashion week to having all sorts of political figures in town. So I learned so much and I was exposed to so many different types of news. And just doing that, working the long hours it took, and again, doing so much of it being out on my own, I think within a few months I was okay, I can do this, and if I can do this, in this city, in this role, I think I can stick with it. It was really a dream job for me to have out of college. So I'm very grateful for my time there.What do you feel like you learned in that phase? I just had this picture of you going out there, being terrified, identifying with that, but then figuring things out. What do you figure out as a young journalist in the big city?That's a good question. I think the very basic of it was I was terrified just to drive in New York City. So I was driving all over the city. I was specifically covering two boroughs - I was in Queens and Staten Island. So it was two boroughs that I hadn't spent very much time in before in the first place. So I realized first that I'd been living in New York as a college student, but I quickly realized I knew nothing about the city really as it was. So that was a part of it, finding the confidence to get on the road next to taxi cabs was part of it. I think confidence overall was a large part of it, because it was, I was feeling like I could step into all of these different spaces and have the ability to ask questions, ask hard questions sometimes. We did man on the street interviews a lot, which is when you stop people and just get their reactions to something that's going on. Those were so much fun. It was so difficult for me in the beginning because the idea of stopping a New Yorker like on their commute to ask them a question, that was terrifying. And I still remember some of the very brutal rejections that I got doing that. So you have to find that within yourself to say, okay, I deserve to be in these spaces. I can be in these spaces. I can ask these questions. And it was very fast paced too. So I would have to really be able to take in a lot of information quickly to have some understanding of the situations I was walking into.I think the most formative story for me that I covered in that role was Hurricane Sandy, when that hit the city. I was wildly unprepared, as I think many of us were, because we just didn't know something like that could happen in New York, or it hadn't really reached cultural consciousness that something like that could happen. And that experience really had stayed with me throughout my career, and certainly today where I focus more on disasters as my beat. So much of the way I approach stories comes from the amount of time I got to spend as a local journalist really sticking with these stories. Can you tell me a story of being a journalist, of your experience of Sandy as a journalist? I'm just curious, what was that like?Yes. So I remember in the days leading up to it, we had some newsroom meetings and there was the understanding that this was going to be a bigger storm, a bigger weather event. And while I'd been there, I think we'd had some heat waves and some very actually not even cold days. I hadn't been there very long when it happened. So I'd really only been there for the summer and then that would have been in the fall. So we had a newsroom wide meeting, and I had the understanding that I was going to be stationed on Staten Island. I was going to stay overnight and it was just like we had shifts built in. So I was working with an on air reporter and a camera person, and then I was the other camera person who was going to, he had the really big one to do the live shots, and then I was going to run around, talk to people, grab politicians, just be like the third hand in all of this.My shift started, I remember waking up around two in the morning or something. I was the early morning and then it was I think about 12 hours. I went until two in the afternoon. So I was there before the worst of the storm hit because it was particularly bad overnight. And I remember we were standing on the boardwalk. That's where we did our live shots that day. And just like the wind picking up and you like see the signs of things, but it's also, I am not a meteorologist, like it was like, it seemed bad, but I didn't know what that meant exactly. I knew it was difficult at a certain point to like really stand up straight, especially with a camera. And especially how big the cameras were even like 10 years ago compared to what we have today. But I still didn't have that understanding of where things could go. But when I, my shift ended and I left, the journalist who came and did my role after me, she parked in the same parking spot that I had been in, and we would drive these little white Ford Focuses around, they were super old, but her car ended up washing away because of the storm surge that came. And it took a week, I think, for them to even find it. So that just speaks to how it progressed over the course of those hours. And I remember sitting in my hotel room and just like hearing everything happening outside and just being really scared. Like, when I woke up, there was no power and I was driving, and everything was dark, and like I said, it was maybe early, early morning hours, and there were branches and trees that were uprooted along the road. I couldn't really see houses but it was just like, you could tell that there had just been such a monumental change. And when I went to relieve the girl who had been doing my role she just had seen some really horrifying things, and they had such a difficult time, and it was, yeah, there were a few days later when I finally left because I ended up staying much longer than just one night, I remember finally like pulling over my car and just realizing I thought I was going there to cover this storm. So that was it, that was the event. But what I realized was like, this was just the beginning of something that had happened, that this wasn't, I went, I filed my story, and it was the end of the day, and I was done. This was something that was going to be unfolding for so long. And again, I lived in New York, so it also hit close to home. My own apartment didn't have power when I got back to it. My family living on the East Coast was, they were dealing with their own impacts from it. Yeah, it was just a very formative experience for me as a journalist.What's, I'm curious about that distinction you're making at the end, like that the expectation is that it's this discrete event. I'm going to do the storm and then after the storm is something else, but you experience it as something totally different. What's the distinction you're making between what you thought it was going to be and what it ended up being?I think most people, I had seen major storms or even wildfires on the news, and you really just see that moment of impact. And that's what I thought about when I was going to do this coverage. I was like, okay, so we're going to go and we're going to be those journalists standing outside in the rain, getting hit by water, that's what we're going to do. And of course, that's part of it and an important part of it because you want people to understand what is happening, but I hadn't really thought too much at that point about what the recovery looks like beyond like anniversary stories on a one year anniversary or maybe stories about nonprofits or communities coming together to do some rebuilding, but I just hadn't realized what kind of like a chapter closed. A disaster can be and how quickly it happens, right? Like I was parked in that spot and then a few hours later that car was gone. It's like these life changing events happen and it really does shift everything for some people, and while that's more obvious maybe for people who lose their homes or even loved ones, it's, the whole community was in a new place now, this was something that they were going to have to contend with, and in the case of Hurricane Sandy people are still contending with it today, there is, the legacy of it is so long. And I just don't think I had that understanding of what a recovery process really looks like.And that evolved for me as I continued covering it. And again, certainly shapes the way that I approach stories today. And I think working in local news, especially, you get to see that kind of like really those incremental steps. Because now that I've been on the national side, you just aren't able to pay the same attention to communities because there were so many stories you have to cover. So it's just a very different approach to that story. So I'm, again, grateful to have had that experience. But yeah it was really difficult. And I have a lot of respect for local journalists who are in areas that continued to have events like this regularly.And tell me a little bit about what you're doing now, like that was a word in the past a little bit, but what's your current disaster is your beat, but what's your current role and what are you working on?Sure, so I'm a freelance journalist now. I focus a bit more on writing these days. Then, like I said, I started in television. I've tried all sorts of different formats. But I realized in 2019 that I just really wanted to dig into stories more relating to disasters. And that was again, coming off of covering a specific one that was the 2018 campfire in Northern California.So I went up there for my role with BBC and it was just it was such a different disaster than the one I had experienced with Hurricane Sandy, but then as I was speaking with people, you noticed some of these similarities in terms of dealing with the systems in place to help disaster survivors. And just that, that sort of like new chapter moment, and I realized I had so many questions about what that looked like from a wildfire. And I wasn't able to answer them in the role I was in then, and I had, didn't feel like I was really seeing the answers to them. I feel like that's evolved in the years since, as we've had more extreme weather events where a lot of outlets are putting significantly more resources into fuller coverage of disasters. But it was just a space where I felt like there was so much more could be said, and that the people in these situations deserve to have more of a voice throughout the process, and that hearing those voices would be helpful for the rest of us if we ever encounter similar situations. So I went into a freelance role. I have been writing for a bunch of different outlets since, of course, choosing to make that jump in 2019. I did not know what was ahead of all of us the next year and how the definition of disaster would change, how some of these agencies that we've looked at, like FEMA, in terms of coming in after hurricanes or wildfires, now they were leading some of that pandemic response.So it was a lot to take all of that in and then try to understand what role I could play in covering this situation. And that's what I've been trying to figure out ever since.What do you love about it? Where's the joy for you and what you do?The joy for me is the reporting process. And I think that's why I've been able to jump around through different mediums, because at the end of the day, just that process is fairly similar. And I just love getting to meet with all sorts of different people, to get to see all sorts of different ways of living, to have all these different experiences, to see so many different places. Like it's wild sometimes, as I am planning a reporting trip that I'll look at what I'm writing down and it's okay, so you're going up here, renting a car, driving into the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere, going to this guy's house, talking to him. It's just, it feels crazy to me sometimes that is a job that I get to do because, like I said, I've always had that curiosity and it feels like a kind of hack to get to ask those questions to so many different people as a job. So that's always it for me. I think like the putting it together process is by far the hardest whether it is editing or writing because you take so much in and then trying to condense that and compress it into something. It's just like always a challenge for me and you want to be able to take the experience you had and share it with other people and there's when you go somewhere it's a sensory experience and that has to be flattened in some way so it's always trying to find a way to bring that in for people through words or through images. And that's always the hardest part for me.How do you prepare for an interview? You just described driving into the forest to meet some guy, meet some person. And I'm just wondering how you ask questions. What does it mean for you to ask a question? How do you think about what a question is and what it does as a journalist in your work?It depends for me who I'm talking to at the time. So if it is between Hurricane Sandy and the work I did today, I did some political reporting. So in those cases it was really studying up on the politician maybe I was going to be interviewing, or if I was doing election coverage getting that grounding of, okay, what state am I going to, and what are voters here looking for, what can I talk about that is going to be interesting for this demographic.Today if I'm interviewing someone in an area who is impacted by a disaster, my approach has certainly shifted in that I try to be very trauma informed. So I don't want to put someone in a position where, especially in the early days after a disaster, a lot of people are in a place of shock. And what they share with you in that moment might not be something that they actually want to stay on the internet forever. So I try to really go at those conversations in a way that people can be really aware of where's the story going to live, of the fact that it is going to probably live on the internet forever to give people space to respond to those questions. And really approach it with some of that sensitivity of understanding where they're coming from at that moment.I also, I always like to prepare ahead of time of course, and have that understanding, but I think there's something to not being entirely planned. I'll have questions in mind and subjects that I certainly want to touch on. But if someone throws me a curveball, like I want to catch it. I don't want to ignore that. So I really try to be very present in interviews and understand what is important to that person and make sure that I'm not projecting my own wants as a journalist or biases on what they're saying. If this is where they want to go and they're going this way, I want to go there with them. I don't want to drag them with me.I appreciate that description. I feel that myself. I'm curious, trauma informed, are there other ways that you, what does it mean to interview somebody in a way that's trauma informed?Yeah, I have covered along with disasters, I've covered mass shootings as part of my career and these other events where you can see for people how raw the situation is and how unprocessed it is for them. And again, the last thing I want to do is have talking to me become a part of that larger trauma that they're experiencing.I think a lot of it is approaching people as a human, like not shoving a microphone in someone's face as they are leaving a very difficult situation. Even when I was working in television or in digital video I would try to talk to people, and again different for a politician or something, necessarily, but I would try to talk to people before I put a camera on them, not just rush up to them as maybe they're leaving a hospital or away from their burning home and say tell me how you feel about this. So it's, I think, taking that beat to establish that human connection, making sure they understand who I am, where I'm coming from, what the story is that I'm working on and taking it from there. It's an ongoing process. I don't know if I always do it perfectly, but I just always try to bring that with me when I'm doing those stories nowadays.But yeah it's been a process of figuring out what that looks like for me and how I'm comfortable approaching people in those moments.And I'm curious, you mentioned earlier that maybe disaster has changed, we had a pandemic. And disaster is your beat. I guess I am curious, what does it mean to cover a disaster and how has it changed or what does it mean to cover a disaster?That's something that has really changed for me as I stay on this beat. I think from the story I was telling about Hurricane Sandy and having that realization that a disaster wasn't this neat tidy event that had a beginning and an end to the work I do today and having had the ability to speak with so many people who research disasters and really have this deeper understanding of what the impacts of a hazard can be on a community and also the fact that disasters don't happen out of nowhere. There are so many physical and social factors that can prime an area to have a disaster. So that has been a huge learning for me, that disasters don't happen out of nowhere. If you go to an area, you can look back and see, okay had they had fires before? What sort of zoning and building codes exist here?There's this whole history written in an area before the disaster, and then a whole new story that comes after in terms of what do you do from here? Are you going to build back what you had before? Are you going to pay attention to some of these factors and try to address them? Going back to the campfire that I spoke about, I was just speaking with one of my sources this week, and she was talking about an art show that she's putting on, and it's about mental health, and she said part of what she wanted to show through it was not only the mental health journey of living through the wildfire, of living through the pandemic, but the mental health issues that existed in this area before that. It's an area that has had different rates of poverty and homelessness, and so there were these problems that existed before the fire. They were certainly exacerbated by it, but having that understanding that it's not like everything occurred because this one fire came through, that these were all sort of ingredients that created the situation that people are dealing with today. I think having that more holistic view has been really important to me in terms of how I approach my reporting and trying to tell a story that really gets to the root of some of these issues.I read the piece on the fire in New Mexico, which was an amazing piece. And digging around on the stuff that you had sent me, I was reminded, I guess you referenced this Disasters by Design book, right? Yes.This idea that the conditions for the disaster are in place and they're man made, at least in some way. I had a similar experience here in Hudson as a cliche dad worried about pedestrian safety. It reminds me of Jessie Singer. Do you know her book? “There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster.” I guess I'm getting to a question about language because we call disasters a "natural disaster," but maybe it's not actually natural. And we call car crashes that kill people, we call them "accidents," but maybe they're not actually accidents. So I'm just curious if you run into that problem of language in telling the story of a "natural" disaster.Yes, I have shifted in my work that I don't like to use the word "natural disaster." It still pops up sometimes because I do work with so many different outlets that some of them have "natural disaster" categories on their site. So my work will end up in there. But personally, for those reasons, it just doesn't feel correct to me to say "natural disaster." So I will use "natural hazard" and certainly the terminology of "wildfires" or "hurricanes," but I don't use "natural disaster" anymore just because it feels like it strips away some of the agency.I think that's important journalistically for a few reasons, first being that, part of the work as a journalist is you want to look at what policies are in place and to hold people accountable who are in positions of power. So calling something a "natural disaster" sometimes can strip away the fact that maybe there were decisions made that contributed to loss of life or loss of property. I think it's also in understanding that there is a role we can play in shaping the way that these events happen, and I think that is both daunting but also can be hopeful because it's recognizing that - I think earthquakes are a great example. We've seen some really significant earthquakes this year in Japan and Taiwan, and unfortunately, there has been damage from those and there has been loss of life. But when you look at the size of the earthquakes and the way that some of the infrastructure was able to withstand that shaking, that's so different than it was decades ago and that comes from looking at previous earthquakes, learning from them and then instituting different types of building codes.Also having the social understanding of if the shaking begins, people can take certain actions to make themselves safer. Teaching people what to do when an earthquake happens, where to go if there's a tsunami risk - there are significant differences that we do see when we take those steps.So I think again, calling something a "natural disaster" kind of strips away the fact that we do have some ability to respond to it. And it's not to say the hubris of us being gods who can overcome all wildfires or earthquakes, but just that is a reality and that's part of that full story. It's funny that you talk about the hubris and the god, that story in New Mexico is very much, it feels like a little bit like hubris anyway, that we can control fire, that sort of prescribed fire and all that stuff is really, it's very - it's an amazing story and terrifying.Yeah, it's - I've been working on a grant over the past year through the Solutions Journalism Network to cover prescribed fire, and that was certainly the first story I wanted to report on with that grant, and it is about the 2022 Calf Canyon Hermits Peak fire in New Mexico, which started from purposely set ignitions by the Forest Service that were in hopes of actually reducing fire risk.But the conditions on the ground when it happened, and there have been a lot of reviews looking back on it, it ended up turning into a wildfire that destroyed a number of historic communities and I - the biggest wildfire in New Mexico's history. And I was looking really at where those communities stand today and the relationship that now exists between the federal government and those communities.And it's another example of what I was saying before about the need to look back on history because part of this is these were some of the oldest settlements in the state, and there was long standing tensions between a lot of these families historically and the Forest Service.So when this happened today, it wasn't just a unique event. It built on that, and there's this history of the agency and the residents not being able to see eye to eye. And it's really - it was a really interesting experience to have conversations with both parties, and then try to put that all together in an article.And a part of the fellowship I'm on, it's called the Complicating the Narratives Fellowship, and it uses these ideals of conflict negotiation and mediation to try to help really entrench - to help journalists cover very entrenched topics. It was a fantastic exercise in using those tools for me because it was really trying to understand where that miscommunication existed and see if there is a potential for reconciliation down the road. It was very fascinating to report.That's amazing. I want to talk about solutions journalism, which was the thing that really jumped out at me because I had encountered it in 2018, when Amanda Ripley wrote , “Complicating the Narrative.” And, I saw it as this way of - I live in a small town. We have no local news, really, and I experienced all the division that we've all experienced in our communities. And I saw solutions journalism as this really beautiful idea to - and I'm going to butcher the concept first, and then you can correct it for me. But as a marketing person, I was often in the room with journalists and a marketer and a journalist have a very different idea about the person that they're communicating with. And it felt like solutions journalism was embracing a different way of communicating that might invite us into more of a shared understanding of the world. There's a lot of evidence that journalism, as practiced, it's not always as productive as we might want it to be in helping us come together around a shared understanding.So with that, probably wildly polluted definition of solutions journalism and the work that you do, when did you first encounter it? And what is it? How do you explain it to people?It's so interesting because, of course, I've talked about it mostly to other journalists, so it's very cool to hear how someone else has encountered it and that experience of it. How far off am I?I don't think you're far off. I think it's a bit interpretive to how you approach it. My understanding of it was I learned about it through another journalist and it was about 2019, I think, when I was introduced to the concept of it. And the idea is - I think the name, people can hear it and say oh, so you are only talking about good things. And it's not necessarily that as much as it's looking, if you're looking at a situation overall, there's going to be good and there's going to be bad. That is the human condition. So it's maybe looking more at the good to start with, but then having the journalistic rigor of interrogating that deeply and saying okay, so if this feels like it is promising, let's make sure that we are talking to the people who are actually impacted by this thing or dealing with this thing. Let's try to understand what conditions are around it that make it successful. Is there something that can be replicated somewhere else? Should it be replicated somewhere else? So it's still taking those steps to report deeply on something. But again, instead of just going somewhere and saying, okay, so here's what's wrong, let's get into it, saying if this is right, let's also get into that. So trying to just, again, tell that more complete story of things. And I think for me in 2020, trying to navigate the journalism space during a pandemic as a new freelancer, it was very daunting. And I had come into it saying okay I'm going to report on disasters, but now it's like we had this baseline disaster that we were all living in. And while it was still very important to do that work of talking about - we had some really terrible wildfires that year, like every, that was all still happening, but I think it was also really difficult for people to check the news. It just felt like such a tough - it was difficult for me to check the news, right? It was not positive what we were usually seeing at that point, so I wanted to keep covering these stories about natural hazards because I thought that was important especially as it was a compounding disaster often at that times, but I also realized maybe I needed a different approach to it to make sure that it was something that people felt like they could read at that moment. That's when I really got interested in it. And, yeah, it's, I've taken that approach now to wildfires in particular, because there's so much work going on these days to try to mitigate the risk and to take really scientific practices and practices that have existed since time immemorial from indigenous communities and to implement those in areas with high wildfire risk. I think, as we saw in New Mexico, it is not perfect by any means. But I think it's important for those stories to be told too because - what can we do then in those situations? How should we be responding to that if we are going to be doing something like prescribed fire? What should exist around it to make sure that we are doing it in a way that is safer if possible, in a way that communities feel like they understand what's going on and they have a say in what's going on. So that's a lot of the work I've been doing for the past year on that fellowship.And tell me a little bit about what - how would you help me understand how you practice the - how you practice journalism differently when you have a solutions journalism hat on? Like, how would you have covered that prescribed fire if you weren't doing solution journalism? I'm just wondering, how does it look different for you? Or what does it ask of you as a journalist to do that you wouldn't have done without this solutions journalism approach?That's a good question. I think practicing solutions journalism and the complicating the narratives techniques has changed my overall approach to journalism, even if I'm still looking at something through the lens of an issue or a challenge, I still employ a lot of those same techniques just because I think they're a really successful way to do my job. A huge component of it is just deep listening. And that's the point I made earlier of following people in the conversation, not just imposing what I think they should be saying or what would work best with my article, but saying okay, if this is going to be more complex, it's more complex, and we gotta go with it, and maybe it doesn't have that satisfying drama that we sometimes want,of they're on this side, and they're on this side, and what's going to happen next? But it's okay maybe if they're on this side, but they do agree on this point, and then this person's over here, but they are willing to make a concession. Does that result in anything? And it's murkier but it also feels more true in a lot of situations that it's not black and white.And a lot of things can be tough, but maybe there is a silver lining to a situation. So I think it has overall made me more tuned to looking for those silver linings and making sure that I'm not dismissing them if they do pop up along the way.What is the role of silver linings in journalism?I think it's all just in service of telling the real story, and the real story being one that's complex. I think there also is - it's often a tendency to look more at what is going wrong. It's certainly when I get tips sent to me, it's rarely "Hey, this really great thing is happening. You should report on it." So it's, it happens often as a job where people say, "Hey, I have this going on. Can you look into that?" And that's across beats. It's of course not just disasters. That's so much of journalism is having whistleblowers or people on a neighborhood scale who are willing to speak up. And that's important, but it's also making sure that the people who have maybe stumbled on something that's working, that their voices are also heard.What's the problem that it's trying to solve? Do you have a feeling about it or is it more subtle than that? You know what I mean?Yeah, I know the Solutions Journalism Network - part of the problem they're trying to solve is the challenge that a lot of people are disenchanted with media. And maybe that's even putting it nicely to say disenchanted. Whether it's they're tired of it or - we live in such a different media environment than even when I started off and that was, you - I mean, it was a while ago, but it wasn't that long ago. So it's, I think it's just trying to make sure that this is - it's a different way of trying to reach audiences and also there's studies that I know the network sites where people are more open to reading stories that at least consider some more positive news. So I think we've seen a lot of news outlets shift to including more of that coverage, because it is, again, just part of the whole story. There's always going to be something that we can look at from a more positive angle than all negative. And maybe in the case of disasters, it's not related to the disaster itself, but to how people are responding to it. It's can be tricky to find, but I think those silver linings do tend to exist.How does it feel for you? How do you, as a - how do you feel practicing solutions journalism versus another way?It's definitely been a positive force for me. It almost feels - especially reporting on the subject that I do, it's still difficult reporting. Like the story I did in New Mexico was certainly one of the most challenging stories I've ever reported just because there is so much history there, it is such a specific community that was impacted and there's so much tension. So that, that was hard, but at the same time some of the feedback I've received from people in the community - I spoke with one of my sources after the piece was published, and he said "We - I talked so much with my neighbors about the challenges that we're dealing with and the issues that we're dealing with as they continue to try to get aid from the federal government and recover their lands and the economy was certainly impacted by this." There's just so many - you could keep talking about that.But he said in your piece, I talked about one positive interaction he had with a government official and how they listened to what he said and ended up changing some of the plans that they had in place for the way that they were going to do some flood mitigation. And he was like, "My neighbors didn't know that. I guess I hadn't talked to them about that." And it was - he said they felt hopeful because it was an example that this can happen. And maybe it's not - he's still dealing with his FEMA paperwork, right? It's not like he fixed the issue that people have with the federal government, but he was listened to and he was listened to and respected and a change happened because of the conversation he had and that just was something that he said he hadn't realized he didn't talk to people about but hadn't been a part of the conversation there.So I think that for me was just really an example of how this can be transformative in its own right because maybe now more people will speak up, more people will feel like they have the ability to make those statements and that can shape the way the community recovers.Beautiful. So I have one random tangential anecdote. Have you ever heard of - so I always, I love this story, but there's a - what is it? It's an organizational transformation. There's an approach to transformation of organizations called appreciative inquiry, and it came out of - have you ever heard of this?No.There's something similar with solutions journalism and it was - the short version is that the guy, David Cooperrider who has a quote that says, "We live in the world our questions create." Isn't that beautiful?Oh, that's great. I love that.And he said most when organizations try to change, they use a problem-solution mindset. They find a problem and then they solve it. But what that has the tendency to do is just move the problem around. So you just end up putting - it's a fire analogy, my apologies, but you end up putting out fires. And it says appreciative inquiry is we identify the peak experience and then try to recreate the conditions of the peak experience. So that it's a positive, so it's almost a totally affirmative kind of inquiry into a positive frame of an experience or organization. That's so interesting. Does that connect at all, or does that sound like gobbledygook?No, I think it's - yeah, I think it's really incredible how different, just changing your perspective can make a situation. There's certainly so much power in that, and yeah, I - in the landscape of media today, where there's so many questions about bias, one thing that has been important for me to recognize is we all come at situations through our own perspective, right?I think having the ability to shift perspective in that way, whether it's in an office or in journalism, and also just recognize that your perspective has an influence on what you do. That the questions you're asking can create the story. I think that's really important because I think when you look at it that way, it's - I try to always be aware of that and be aware of where I'm coming from. Because it's, we, I think just the word "unbiased," that's not something that's necessarily possible to do as a person. We are choosing the stories as journalists that are put out in the world, and that in itself is a challenge - a choice.Awesome. I want to thank you so much. This is a lovely moment to end the conversation. We've very quickly filled up our time.Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the chance to get to know you a little bit and learn more about your work. Thank you so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it. You got me thinking a lot. So you gave me a good quote there at the end to think about.Oh, nice. And also, I'm curious. How did you end up in the Exposure Therapy community?Yes. So I have known Jasmine since 2020. I was on her podcast. She'd reached out to me about an article I wrote about disaster kits and how they'd been like rebranded for the Instagram age.And that was actually pre-pandemic that I wrote that. It came out in February of 2020.There was one brand that had a great-Yes. It was Judy. And it was like on the Kardashians' Instagram and it was just - I was doing disaster reporting and to suddenly see these huge celebrities talking disaster kits was such a bizarre experience.So I had written about that for Vox, and Jasmine reached out to me, and we've just stayed in touch in the years since. So very grateful to her for inviting me into this community. I, like I said, I am endlessly curious. So being in a space with people who have so many questions and so many unique ways of approaching the world we live in, I've found it fascinating.So cool. Anyway, I could keep yakking forever. I want to thank you so much. Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much again for reaching out and yeah, we'll have to continue our conversations at Exposure Therapy.Yeah, definitely. Bye Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Helen & Dave Edwards are a husband-and-wife team of ‘analysts, artificial philosophers, and meta-researchers.’ Artificiality is a research & education company that helps people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. They have a long history in AI, and I consider them scouts to this new world. Sign up for their newsletter here. Helen was CIO of Transpower, New Zealand’s national grid, and head of emerging products at Pacific Gas and Electric. Dave was head of software application marketing at Apple, head of consumer strategy at SunPower and a lead technology research analyst at Morgan Stanley.I was excited to speak with them, and get their take on where we are right now in adapting to the arrival of artificial intelligence.AI Summary. In this thought-provoking discussion, Dave and Helen Edwards from Artificiality explore the complex landscape of AI. They delve into the challenges posed by this rapidly evolving technology, including the need for responsible development, the impact on jobs and education, and the potential for exacerbating inequality. They emphasize the importance of embracing complexity thinking and allowing people to express their anxieties about AI. Despite the concerns, they remain optimistic about the possibilities of AI when approached with care and consideration for human values. Ultimately, they believe in the enduring power of human connection and creativity in an increasingly AI-driven world.All right. I have never interviewed two people as part of this thing. So I thought I'll just take turns. But I start all of them with the same question. So I guess I'll start with you, Helen, but then David, it'll be your turn. I always start this conversation with the same question. I borrowed it from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian. She helps people tell their story. You can answer or not answer any way that you want. And the question is, where do you come from? Helen: You are absolutely... That's a question. Where do I come from? I come from a place that fundamentally believes that we are animals. We're not... You know, there's no... That's where I come from. In my bones I feel that there is no higher meaning to our lives other than the people that we spend it with and the knowledge that we gain. I'm a committed atheist. There's another way of saying that. It's beautiful. Dave, how would you answer the question? Where are you from?Helen: He's a royal b*****d.Dave: It is actually true. I am a member of the Society of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings and Queens of England.I don't even know what that means. What does that mean? Dave: Means that somehow I descended from somebody who was a b*****d. I think of King Edward II or something who apparently had a bunch of kids out of wedlock. Oh, wow.Dave: And I'm member number 200 something or 400 something because my grandfather was a great genealogist and he thought it was really funny. He had an unbelievable sense of humor. And he became a great genealogist after he was forced into retirement at age 60, after spending his career as an analyst at the CIA. And he was like, "Oh, I'm going to go figure out the rest of my family." Yeah. Oh, b*****d. Where am I from? What a great answer to that. What a great question. I come from a place of this desire of deep human experience. And that's why I'm trying to find the unification of it all. I grew up in a very creative family that was always trying to passionately feel things, whether it was music or dance or theater. I spent my summers in Maine trying to understand what it meant to live in the woods and fell in love with this great Sanskrit poem that was always about looking to this day. It's called "Look to This Day." It's about getting the most out of every single moment in every life. And so I have this sort of insatiable desire to experience every day a little bit more deeply. And that can be enriching and it can also probably be irritating to people around me. But it is what it is. Do you have a recollection of being a child and what you wanted to be when you grew up?Dave: I wanted to be a performer. Is that right?Dave: Oh yeah. Cause I started dancing at age six and singing at age nine. And my dream was always to perform. I love creative expression. And so that drove me intensely, my whole childhood and adolescence and into early adulthood.Helen: I have a recollection until I was 17... My recollection just full stop really was I wonder if I'll ever figure out what it is I want to be when I grow up.You remember that you have a recollection of wondering.Helen: I have a recollection of wondering. And then the process of having to make a decision about what to study in college cemented a path that took away that wondering, but that wondering came back in full force in my early 40s.In what way? Tell me that story. What happened in your early 40s? Where are you now? What are you guys up to? How do you explain what you guys are doing now?Helen: I'll explain it from the wondering and where I came from perspective. I find that the more I learn about artificial intelligence, the more interested I am in biological and living intelligence and what that means. And that's what I want to be when I grow up, someone who actually understands this and is able to speak on many levels to many different people from many different angles and synthesize what it means to be building intelligence in a non-biological substrate, building artificial intelligence. And that came from that place of respect for the natural world and wonder for the natural world. Dave: He grew up performing. I grew up walking around, digging holes, looking at soil and picking up rocks and studying plants and birds.I think the best description of what we do that resonates the most for me right now is that we attempt to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. And I think I've found over the now many years that we've been studying artificial intelligence that has followed along on a career of mine of at least on and off building technologies is that I find myself gravitating much more to the philosophical questions. I'm much more interested in who we are and what it means to be who we are in relationship to all of these technologies around us. And what I like most about what we do is combining those deep questions with all of the deep scientific knowledge and thought that I can pick up from Helen. And then figuring out how to communicate that and tell that through stories to people that inspire them to question the world and question the technology that is rapidly embracing us. So how do you describe what you guys do? What is Artificiality to somebody who's never encountered it before?Dave: We're a research and services company. So everything we do is ground in research, whether that be scientific research or humanities research. We like to dig deep and understand the relationship between humans and machines. And we deliver what we've discovered through publications and through services. Publications, a weekly publication. It's written, we do podcasts, we have videos. And our services are larger organizations usually, sometimes corporates, sometimes universities, colleges. We help them figure out how to make sense of this whole AI craze, how to think about a strategy for what they might do and help them figure out what it means to build a team and build the capabilities that allow them to go pursue whatever change is important for them.What do you guys love about the work? I sense it... We've talked one time before and I've followed your stuff and I feel how much you care about it and how much you love about it. But what's the joy in it for each of you?Dave: I think for me I have always loved the next thing. And that has taken me to some really interesting parts of my career. It's also probably had me jump around a bit too much here and there. But I love uncovering what's next. And this is, I think will prove to be, the largest next that I've ever seen, ever witnessed. The biggest change. Because it's not just a new form of technology. It's not a change in the scale of hardware that you can interact. It's not some new leap in the capabilities of software. It's creating an entirely new relationship with machines because these machines are now emerging as some form of intelligence. And that completely changes how we interact with them. And I find it to be fascinating because it has such a profound impact on an individual, on an organization or on society. And it's an amazing field for the two of us to combine our sort of quirky different ways of looking at the world and put those together in a way that creates something that's much bigger and more interesting than either one of us could have done on our own.Helen: The joy in it for me is wherever you look, there's just this always constant frontier of paradoxes and tensions that get exposed. Because we're trying to build ourselves slash something bigger or different than ourselves, that is thinking and reasoning and planning and action. So you've got everything from the... There's paradoxes about how these things predict us better than, and know us better than, we know ourselves, and yet how do we still, so how do we still be ourselves if we accept the predictions from AI? There's that sort of level. Then there's the next level, which is what does it mean to know something if it's known by a machine, but you can't access that knowledge, but you can use that knowledge. Is that different than if the knowledge was in a community of humans? Why? There's all of these new questions that get raised and it's now got some sort of predictive oomph, for lack of a better word, to it now.A few years ago, we were talking to an AI designer about AI ethics, and he said Silicon Valley destroys words. So just wait to see what they do when they destroy the word "ethics." Now that came to pass. No question. There is really, and we don't even... "Ethics" is now a muddied, difficult word compared to the simple kind of glossy word that it was before, even though the hardest place was medical ethics, for example. But now you look at it and go, okay, so Silicon Valley's picked up the pin on intelligence and now defining intelligence. That word is dematerialized. What's intelligent? I wrote a piece over the weekend about the next one for this is agency. The word "agency" is just going to be the next one tackled. Then it's probably going to be learning; that's already in the process of... So I think it's really, and that says something, it says that our original definitions shaped by the way we use language and philosophy and science of the past, those original definitions have fallen short for what we think it really means. Because when it's in a machine and we call it that in a machine, suddenly it's not what we thought it was in ourselves. And it makes us all step back. So I love this constant cognitive dissonance that's happening. And this constant sense of a frontier of meaning even in language and experience. What is this barrier of meaning that's being talked about? So I just find that endlessly fascinating. I feel like I completely tracked with you, Helen, what you were describing. Somebody asked me to, they thought it was a very innocent request to share my thoughts on the difference between sort of face-to-face qualitative research and synthetic user research, which is out there, of course. And I found myself, just like you said, in this weird hall of mirrors where all these words that I felt were very distinct just collapsed. You know what I mean? Anything I could say about myself, I could say about this artificial intelligence. And it got very disorienting. I found it really disorienting. I have yet to complete this essay that started as a very simple request and turned into kind of a real existential crisis. Helen: That is why we talk about an artificiality, our artificial philosophy. Is at the level of the individual, the organization and the society. And you can never disentangle, you can never untangle them. Even at the... There's a lesson at every single level. So that's how we've come to think about it. But it is just, it's just endlessly fascinating. There's some really bad ideas out there. There's some really poor reasoning in the space, some really smart people with some really poor reasoning. It's also fun to pick up on some of the hyperbole and try and break it and crack it down a little bit. That's a good intellectual challenge. So I think there are very few places in my career where it's been so intellectually challenging and rewarding as being in this space right now. Yeah. And when you're working with clients or teams, what kinds of things do they come at you with and where do you start a conversation on this with them?Helen: One of the places that we like to start, and we stumbled onto this as a bit of learning by experience ourselves, as we start with getting people to articulate their excitement to fear ratio and recognizing that here's the tension: AI could be good, AI could be bad. So getting them to say it is it 50/50, is it 70/30, is it 90/10, is it 10/90? That initial anchoring is really important for the conversation because it allows you to start asking that next question. The first one is why, but getting that richer elucidation. So we like to start there. The thing we stumbled into that we've become quite sensitive to is if you don't allow people to say right up front, particularly what they're anxious about... Excited, sure, it's easier to handle excitement. If you don't allow people to express that anxiety there's no real authenticity in the conversation moving forward. Because if you are thinking about these topics deeply, and you tend to, when you're more on the anxiety side of the ledger, if you don't allow someone to really express those and to vocalize them and to normalize them and to say, "I get it, I'm with you, you're not imagining things, this is..." There is a definite downside here. Then the rest of the conversation, they're just told to believe a certain narrative about how good technology is, and they don't really ever... It's saying "I do" but having your fingers crossed behind your back, right? It's, you're not really all in. So we like to start with that.Yeah. It's so interesting you bring up the idea of how do you communicate honestly about something that's changing so much, and that's so intimidating with people. What is the state of AI? I was looking at your, you produce these beautiful reports, the State of AI. But what, where are we now in terms of what's going on? It's a very broad question.Dave: We're in a really messy phase. AI has changed dramatically. AI has been a thing for almost 70 years, or at least the idea, the academic pursuit, and even some of the core concepts that we're dealing with today have been around for a very long time, but the change in just the last couple of years, shifting to generative AI and these tools that go off and create new things, is a dramatic shift. And it has created again quite a lot of excitement, for sure, but coupled with that, quite a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of confusion. The promise that's being fed to us by the vendors is optimistic to the point of being unrealistic and potentially irresponsible in terms of what they're trying to get people to think these tools can actually do.What's an example of the oversell?Dave: One of the things that came up recently was they're seeing some startups... I haven't seen it from the large companies as of yet, but startups that are marketing that they have a method for zero hallucination from their tools. And that's, as far as we've been able to see, that it's actually not possible. These are probabilistic systems. There is always some probability, right? That's actually just the reality. That's the way these entire systems operate. So there is, there will always be some level of... And hallucination's another word where it's an odd word to use and it's not very well defined. So saying you have nothing of something that's not very well defined is a little bit of cheat anyway, but they're implying that they've figured out a way to make sure that the models are always accurate. And that's just irresponsible. It's not true, but it's also not something that we should be aspiring for these tools to be... That's not the, that shouldn't be the goal of these tools, right? Just like we know that no one that we work with individually as a human is ever always accurate, right? None of us are perfectly accurate. All of our memories are flawed. Even the two of us who we work together, we spend 24/7 together. We'll have different memories of the same thing that we shared, just the two of us. Our memories are... Humans are flawed and that's okay. We've figured out how to work with each other. These new systems fundamentally change our interaction with technology though. Prior to generative AI, a computer did what it was told to do. And if it didn't, or it was some form of inaccuracy, it was described as a bug, and you'd send it back to engineering to fix it so that it would actually do what it was supposed to do. So we built this trust of these computers as we built for mechanical machines, right? Mechanical machines, if you've got a tractor, it better keep working. And if it doesn't, you have to go fix it. Same with a computer, a spreadsheet. It has to do exactly what you want it to do. These tools are designed to be unpredictable, to be creative, to come up with new ideas that sometimes are good and sometimes are harebrained. That's what they're supposed to do. And so I think it's irresponsible for people to say that they're going to create something like this that's never going to make an error. Because when you're asking it to do something that's speculative, or out there and creative, right and wrong is almost the wrong question, right? It's that there is no... If you ask it to break down a problem, "I got to get something done by next week. Help me break down the problem so I know what I need to get done." There's no right or wrong answer to that. There's a lot of different answers. That's where the value of some of the core value in these tools exists. If you ask it to explain a concept to you, okay, it could stay within the boundaries of accuracy, but is there a right or a wrong way to explain quantum physics?Helen: There's more wrong ways than right ways. Yeah, it's, that's messy.It's almost like there isn't really even the right word in the English language to describe the kind of current state of AI right now. Because what it's doing is quite conveniently breaking things that have actually been accepted truths about how we do things. Whether it's at the business model level... You search the internet, it's powered by ads. If you search the internet with your own personal search assistant, what kind of ads? So there's that level. It's really challenging the social contracts we have, irrespective of competition law, but the social contracts we have about what's fair in terms of what's fair use of other people's creative work. What's fair in terms of how much should one company be able to do things, know things, run things, make money when there's a tiny number of people that are part of that, flipping this whole labor capital thing around. It's challenging the ideas that we had about what AI would be good at versus what humans would keep as uniquely for them. Generative AI has lobbed a bomb into that. Not because we actually think that generative AI is truly creative like a human or deeply empathetic or any of these things that we like to say that are uniquely human, but because they're doing things that take out a lot of the almost sort of the baseline mechanisms of things like creativity and empathy. So there's this question mark. Will they get better and go up the stack and just replace humans? Or will they go somewhere else? Or will it be a different combination? I think that's very anxiety provoking. And there isn't, you have to be in a... And there's only a few fields at the moment where you could look at these tools and say "I can use these to enhance my personal creativity." You have to have access to your own ways of leveraging big data and putting them into these tools so that you can advance your own, say, scientific creativity or other forms of creativity. Right now we're in a moment where it's really easy to see what we might lose. It's harder to see what we might gain. How do you mean? Helen: It's really easy to see, for example, if you take photos for stock, that's the end of your job. If you're a Google, if you translate languages, that's the end of your... It's really easy to see those things. It's harder to see what new things would come along that are... I'm not saying that those people would move to that job, but what new things are going to emerge. You can't see. So I think in many respects, the state of AI, the way that we think about it, is that it breaks linear thinking. We have to move to complexity thinking. And it's always been better to have a good complexity mindset. I think it makes you a more flexible, agile and just makes you smarter. You make decisions better when you understand what it means to live in a complex world. But now this breaks it. You've actually got to move to a complexity mindset. You've got to be thinking in terms of adaptation and feedback and self-organizing and emergent phenomena. If you're not caught up on that way of thinking, and you don't have a discipline around that, and you don't have a practice around that, you're DOA because you can't see past this rhetoric that's coming at us that is complicated, but agenda driven as well.Dave: I was gonna say that I think that part of the status that we're living in right now of AI is that in some ways we've now plopped hundreds of millions or billions of people into the greatest Petri dish we've ever created. My history with software goes back 30 years. In the past we did, we'd think very carefully about what it was designed. We'd craft it quite well. You'd QA everything cause you'd put it on a floppy disk, was my original, in a box and you'd shrink wrap it, and then you'd put it on a store shelf and someone would buy it and take it home. And there wasn't any chance for an update unless you had something that you could send out, another floppy and eventually CD-ROM. But that whole world was very much about thinking very carefully about exactly how this was going to work for the people that you were trying to serve and making sure that it was perfect as possible before you sent it out. The world has changed so much over that time because we've embraced, whether it's "move fast and break things" or MVP mindsets or Agile. And that is okay when you're saying, "Oh, I've got a new CRM system for small business. I'm going to stand it up because it's got just enough features, that MVP, and we'll see how people use it. And then we'll fix it and we'll change it around to make sure that it works well," just as an example. This is different. We're experimenting on the entire population by putting out tools that are unpredictable, that we don't understand how they're going to use. We don't know what their impact is. There are true, justifiable existential questions about whether we will all still have jobs, because the return on the investment in these tools is basically to replace labor.So you've put out these tools where there is this grand social experiment, and we are in the Petri dish with it. And I think that is the fundamental dynamic that drives so much confusion, because we don't really know what's going around.Helen: By the way, you just described a complex system.Dave: Yes. We're all looking around at the Petri dish, trying to figure out what everybody else is doing and seeing what else is going to get thrown at us and what the dropper is going to drop of some new compound that's going to make us all do something different. And we have no idea what's going on, and it makes us really anxious and concerned because we don't know whether we're going to get out of this okay. And at the same time, the people who are making it all say, "Oh, it's going to be great. You're all going to love it. And you're all going to sit on the beach and worship the God that we've created."Helen: Yeah, that's just b******t. But the AI leaders need to get a lot better at having realistic positive stories here. It's just... I wrote about it in a slightly scathing way, but it's ridiculous to be talking about how AI is going to run off and cure cancer and solve poverty and self-care. It's just ridiculous. It's one, it's just flat out not true, not possible. It only takes a little bit of good reasoning to see why that is just...Dave: So I, you're left as a lay person going, "Why would they say that?" And I think that there are really positive implications of AI. No question. I think it's really going to advance us. Helen: But stop, but stepping in saying it's going to solve climate change. It's ridiculous. We know how to solve climate change. We don't know how to get the world of people to collectively move as a system towards solving climate change. Dave: The how do we reduce the amount of carbon? We understand that. It's the promise that we can't get the 7 billion people on the planet to make a collective decision. And AI isn't going to do that unless it is so manipulative that it manipulates all of us into that.Helen: Or it's an autocrat. Dave: Yeah, that we or it's a god and we all worship it so much that we'll do what it tells us to. I'm curious about, cause I feel like what you, how you helped me is the frameworks that you build around this stuff. You know what I mean? Like the complexity science you talking about the intelligence staircase. I guess my question really is what are the best metaphors for thinking about what's going on or what this is, or where we, this Petri dish that we're in.Helen: That's a good question. There are probably multiple. I talk about Silicon Valley holding, taking the pen and defining some of these things. So just the idea that technologists are now defining in code things that we barely understand ourselves.Dave: Yeah. One of our core concepts is more aspirational. And it's a design philosophy for what we would like AI to be. And we call that "a mind for our minds." And we risk anthropomorphizing intentionally to get people to think about it. The phrase is a riff on something Steve Jobs used to say. He was inspired by a, it was a 1973 Scientific American article about bicycles. And in it they compared efficiency of species, and a human by itself is this middling contender. But a human on a bicycle is about as efficient as you can be in terms of the efficiency of movement. And he grabbed onto this and somewhere in the late '70s or 1980 coined the phrase by saying that he thought the computer was going to be the greatest invention ever created because it would be a bicycle for our minds. So the greatest, this huge efficiency enhancement for our minds. And I think he's been right. 40 years, definitely true. These machines are great, improves all kinds of things that we can do with our minds, but for us, these tools have changed. And they're not the same kind of bicycle kind of tool that you steer and speed up or slow down and you direct it very specifically and it does exactly what you wanted to do. Or if the chain breaks, you have to go fix it. Like it's a truly mechanical tool. These things are designed to be able to be creative and increasingly be able to perceive the world on their own and reason and make decisions and take actions for us. So they are becoming a metaphorical mind, at least. And so we think about it as being a mind for our minds. And the important part is actually the two little words in the middle. When we're thinking about all this problem with big tech and how it works is that the mind has to be for us, as opposed to what's happened with the Internet is it's become a thing where we're really doing it for them. Yes, we're getting content and da, but we're the feedstock for those behavior systems. And for our minds, so all of us. And equality and inclusiveness is actually really quite important to us and concerning with these systems. We have two different worlds of outcomes. One is that the world continues to work because our interactions are monetized by companies using advertising. That's how we do it today. Since the beginning of the Internet, you click on something, go through a scroll through feed, you watch the next YouTube video. It's all supported by ads based on what we pay attention to. So we're paying with that attention. With generative AI that we've got this level of intimacy that they'll understand about us, when you think about can YouTube get me to watch the next video based on what I've watched, that's one level, but when it's been monitoring every conversation I've had, where does that, what, where, how does that change? What line you find is acceptable about how they're going to manipulate us for some sort of commerce? The other way is that they continue to charge us for these tools on a subscription. And for a good number of people involved in the tech industry, $20 a month doesn't seem a lot. Even doing $20 a month times a few tools doesn't seem a lot. But I recently did, found an interesting comparison. We're looking about the history of tools, technology, and education. And early on with the calculator, as it started to become a pocket calculator thing, they were embraced in the education market. And then a few years later, they actually got pulled from one of the major states, I think it was California, and actually they said they couldn't use it anymore. And the rationale for it was that they were worried that the cost of a pocket calculator was going to be prohibitive for a certain number of students. At the time, that pocket calculator was $20.I think what's important is that the decision makers in the industry can really overlook what true equality is. And it bothers me when people talk about these tools as being able to democratize everything. Democracy is something that you have the ability to participate in by being part of a society. We banned poll taxes a long time ago, right? Because poll taxes were discriminatory. It's not democratizing anything if you've got to pay for it. Helen: So I'm struggling with the mindset of the extraordinarily wealthy class in the tech industry that have just lost touch that 20 bucks a month, maybe I don't know what level of affordability, but some people may choose that 20 bucks a month is better spent on food. In which case we have another profound digital divide that's underway.Dave: It's bigger than, and this is the place where the digital divide becomes such a significant cultural divide that if you run this forward into where the AI technologies are heading, which is more embedded, more spatial, more potentially connected to our biology itself, implants in your brain and what have you, if you run it forward and you say that, and you accept the current state of the science that cultural evolution in humans is moving faster than genetic evolution, suddenly we see this potential for quite a significant co-evolution event where you have access to these tools, you're really going to be in a profoundly different cognitive space and cognitive level than if you don't. And that's different than who got to use Google and who didn't. Which is just accessing information. This is about accessing extended cognition. And playing that forward, and it's really not science fiction, you start looking into where the brain privacy folks, mostly lawyers and ethical people, are starting to understand what it means to have the right to our private thoughts, that we don't need to all be connected up into some great human internet. And that this, it's all this early workplace surveillance that's starting to expose this. So we're really entering quite a different place now. It's not exaggerating it to say as humans it is a quite different place. There is no precedent for it.What you mentioned a little bit... Can you paint a picture of what's coming? What's your sort of aspirational vision of, you mentioned a few categories, spatial, I can't remember, embedded, what's coming? How is it going to change in the next... And how fast is this stuff happening?Dave: I spent a good portion of my career trying to predict what's next. And you sometimes get some stuff right. Most of it, you get wrong because predicting the future is really hard. This is the segment that I find to be the most difficult I've ever touched. In terms of the technology side, what we're watching, which should probably tell you a little bit about what we think might happen... The first one is AI agents or agentic AI. This idea that AI can have, actually we can give it agency to go perform an action. And what's intriguing about that is that you can, it can have some level of reasoning and decision making and then taking action on your behalf. You can also string these things together to be able to create a team to go accomplish something. For instance, there's a system we were looking at that allows that has one agent that goes off and looks at the news of the day and another one that evaluates those news and writes a story pitch. Another one takes those story pitches and writes stories about it and makes it into a podcast script and then another one translates that into audio and then publishes it. And this is a completely automated system that spits out news stories that has dialogues between two hosts about stories of the day based on different topics. That's going to go through some level of explosion sort of soonish. The other one that I think is quite interesting and quite important is this idea of spatial computing, spatial intelligence generally in the world of sensing the world. Today these generative AI, these large language models are mostly trained on text. There is some image and some video content that's come in. They're able to create some level of image and video, but they don't have an understanding of space the way that we do. One of the challenges here is that we don't truly understand how we understand space. Our understanding of space is a mystery and it's very individual, right? I'm sure there's true neurological understanding of things. But when we start to think about what is that close or is that far, those kinds of things, our understanding and experience of space is much more of an intuitive lens through which we see the world. There is progress on that. There's both if you look at what Apple's been doing with Vision Pro. We have friends at Soul Machines in New Zealand that have avatars that can see through your camera at you once you allow them to, and they're starting to try and figure out that "oh there's an apple on the shelf behind me" or other things where people, where companies are starting to get some understanding of space. That will be greatly enhancing to these tools because we don't, in order to be truly useful, they can't just learn from the records that we've published and that have been absorbed. They have to start to be able to participate in the world around us. The other lens I'd say in terms of where it's coming is the sort of social dynamic. The first one is truly in, is in education. It's a huge challenge to figure out what it means to learn with these tools, what you need to learn, what it means to teach. The field of education is going to go through quite a lot of upheaval. And we love working with people in higher ed and feel for them deeply, that this is really a very difficult and challenging topic. I think following that, if I was to predict an order of things, will be some level of mass anxiety through to potential hysteria about jobs and about employment. It depends on how quickly these changes happen, how much displacement. How many companies look at these as revenue enhancers to enable their people to move ahead and be more happy in their jobs versus these tools as things that allow them to fire a whole bunch of people. And you get a next generation that's coming out of college and they're early in their careers and they already feel like the world's been pretty upside down for them. And suddenly these tools are going to show up and make it really difficult for them to figure out what their future place is. And that could be very difficult and disruptive. And we see today that Gen Z has an attitude and they express it and they're out there right now making a whole bunch of noise over something that matters to them. Imagine what that would be like if it was about the fact that none of them can get a job because of AI, because a good number of companies say that they don't need to hire, they don't need to hire interns. And there was some research that we put out, I can't remember the number off my head, in last week's email that was about the number of companies that are gonna reduce the number of recent college graduate hires. If that actually happens and Gen Z takes hold and Gen Z wants to get angry about it, we're gonna hear about it. Helen: Yeah. And the parents too. But I'm just saying this is a... It's just... I'd be angry too because...Dave: Yeah. It will be, but this is an organized, motivated generation that knows how to communicate and get their point across. Helen: Yeah. And I think that's why I think that, and I probably chose the wrong word by saying, I probably should have said something other than "hysteria."Dave: That's right. That sounds, that maybe not the right word. Helen: Because it's pretty loaded. Because it implies or it can be heard with some level of irrationality. And I don't mean it to be irrational at all. I think that there's actually very credible mass concern. Dave: Yeah.Helen: And I think if you go back to the sort of the predetermined versus truly uncertain, one of the things that we know about what's happened in jobs in the last 20 to 40 years with these sorts of disruptions, is that it's not that the jobs per se go away, they get shittier. And they get shittier because a couple of reasons. One is that there's pressure on moving jobs to places where people are going to be more fractured and put into buckets and surveilled. But there's also what Acemoglu talks about in terms of the so-so automation. That when the automation isn't good enough to truly replace the human, and that happens because we still don't really know what the human does and we over promise on automation or we don't really understand what we don't know, but that so-so automation gets put in and it makes... It doesn't... It's not enough to replace the human but that ends up with the human sort of having a bit of a shitty job and not having enough time and bandwidth and mental space to go and do that true thing that the original promise was about. The promise was about "we're going to release you for more creative work" and all this kind of stuff. And I think we're seeing early signs of this and a lot of people aren't talking about it enough. They're talking about the cherry picking the research. There's a couple of very high profile commentators out there who conveniently ignore that the very, that they're talking about, "This is a great proficiency gap closer for unskilled people. Yay!" And they're conveniently ignoring the actual core of the research which says those people make more mistakes. Those mistakes have flow on effects, whether it's technical debt, or whether it's making the job of their boss more difficult, whether it's errors with consumers, whatever it is. People are still washing away this what I would put in the bucket of the so-so automation problem where it's not all rainbows and unicorns about productivity increases because there's... It's more complicated story about where the productivity losses are happening.And gosh, this whole hour makes us sound a bit like Debbie Downers, but...Is there a rosy picture that can be painted about the work that you're doing and the teams that you're working with and how people are trying to adapt? Dave: One of the reasons we have "Mind for Our Minds," and it's certainly how we think about working with our clients for adoption, because it's like it's a little bit like saying we're building... We've got this... Yeah, you can't go very fast if you don't have a car with brakes on, so we spend a bit of time putting the brakes on first and then go fast. Helen: Yeah, I think that the rosy picture is a counterbalance to what's now being described as the shitification of the Internet, everything getting flooded with all this machine generated nonsense, is those things that are created by humans are becoming more precious. So the most valuable thing is that people know that what we write is what we wrote. And that our, when we go and give talks and run workshops and we're working on new events, it's about personal connections and people. And I would say that the same thing for you. The newsletter that you sent out is a human curating some content from other people. And I think that there will be... It may not be the overall world and everything, but there will be a portion of society that's going to say, "I really want to live in that world." And it's a more active, thoughtful, considered approach. These machines are extraordinarily powerful and we are very excited about the possibility. We use them all the time, but the magical times of life is not the back and forth with the machine. That's what you're getting stuff done. The magical time is the time we spend with each other.Dave: I want to thank you so much for your time. This has been really amazing and fun. And I really love the work that you're doing. And yeah, I really appreciate your time. Helen: Thanks, Peter Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

AI Summary. In this conversation, Peter Spear interviews Farrah Bostic, founder of the Difference Engine, about her background and the value of qualitative research. Bostic shares her journey from copywriting to strategy and research, emphasizing the importance of understanding customers' real stories and experiences. She argues that qualitative research is essential for businesses to make informed decisions, adapt to change, and maintain integrity in an increasingly complex world, despite the challenges of convincing clients of its worth.Farrah Bostic is the founder of The Difference Engine and the creator of CrossTabs “the newsletter for the podcast that will try to explain how polls are designed and conducted, how to understand what they say, how to discern what they don't say.”Prior to founding The Difference Engine, Farrah had served in various research and strategy roles including as VP, Group Planning Director at Digitas; SVP Consumer Immersion at Ipsos/OTX; and Partner/Head of Innovation at Hall & Partners.I have followed her for a long time, always appreciating her advocacy for research. I invited you because I've followed you for a long time. I've loved your newsletter. You've been really vocal about research and arguing for research in beautiful ways. I was excited to have a chance to sit down with you and just talk as part of this weird little conversation series I'm doing. Thank you for accepting my invitation.Thank you for inviting me. I don't know if you know this, but I start all my interviews with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian, so she helps people tell their stories. I've hijacked this question for my own method. I over-explain it because it's a beautiful question, but it's very powerful. I want you to know you're in absolute control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from? I think I understand the ways that people approach answering this question. I'll start with the literal. I'm from Portland, Oregon, originally. I was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Portland. My mom's from Oregon also, and her dad's from Oregon, which is surprising. There are not many multi-generation Oregonians. Before that, mostly Kansas, Missouri. We are white Americans from way back.My dad was from West Virginia originally, but his parents, for reasons we can only speculate upon, decided to move from West Virginia to Southern California. He went to high school with Steve Martin at Garden Grove High School. He then got into - and I think this starts to get at the other part of where I'm from - he was almost a PhD in the philosophy of science at Duke.My mother is a pragmatist who studied political science at the University of Oregon. She was an educated woman at a bad time, when you couldn't get a credit card without your father's or husband's help, and you couldn't get certain kinds of jobs. It was not an easy thing to transition from university into the workforce. She wanted to go to law school, but her mother put a stop to that by refusing to help her pay for it. So she temped, and she had a story that changed as time went by. When I was a teenager, she used to tell me she would temp during most of the year and then ski in the winters. That was how she met my dad. He was managing a company that expedited shipping invoices, which is what he did with his almost-PhD.I think one of the things people do is talk about generational narratives. One of the things that is another answer to "where do I come from" is I'm really interested in people's actual stories and experiences, not broad stroke generalizations about people. My dad was an aspiring draft dodger, but he had a really high draft number, flat feet, and bad eyesight, so he was never going to go into infantry. That was never going to happen. My mom voted for Nixon, and yet was at University of Oregon from '68 to '72. You'd think there would be some revolutionary fervor there for her, but no, it was more present for my dad at Duke. There are just some of those things.That's who they more or less are. My dad became a teacher temporarily. He taught at Bemidji and then at Lewis & Clark College, which is where he did his undergrad. Then he went into product marketing after doing other things. They had an insurance business when I was about four and a half, five years old. They had to declare business and personal bankruptcy, sell their house, and become renters in the suburbs, which is probably where I discovered that the suburbs are not for me.How old were you when you discovered the suburbs weren't for you?I think I said to my parents when I was five or so, as we were moving out of the house that they had built in the West Hills in Portland, that my life was over. Very dramatic. I also was five when I told them I wanted to be Debbie Harry. There were lots of things going on with five-year-old me - a real flair for drama.We did that - on paper, we should be doing pretty well, middle-class white people. But in fact, not doing great financially. Having to live in that in-between phase where we're living in reasonably affluent neighborhoods, but we're renters in that neighborhood. I think that's part of the "there's always a story" orientation that I have.From being a little kid, the other thing that I was always oriented to was writing, even a mimicry of writing. My mother has memories of me pretending to be local NBC affiliate news anchor Kathy Smith, but writing my news copy before I knew how to read or write. I'd get a paper and pen and pretend to write, then I'd sit on these open stairs like they were a desk and read the news.There are those things, and then living in okay suburbia that's mostly white, mostly pretty affluent, and tries to ignore the parts where it's not that affluent. The in-group/out-group things feel extremely tenuous because there's no obvious reason why you would be in an out-group. You have to know some things about people in order to reject them. You can't just do it on the surface.I think that probably taught me that, in my parents' constant admonition every time I had a question to "look it up," the other place I think I come from is a kind of default setting of skepticism - a strong belief that people tend to be lazy truth tellers. You can ask them all sorts of questions; you don't even have to ask them questions. I seem to have a face for confession. People tell me all sorts of things unsolicited. Then a kind of skepticism about constructed narratives. I don't know if that answers your question.Yes, absolutely. You also answered my second question. Often it's "What did you want to be when you grew up as a kid?" But you've shared a few already - Debbie Harry, your local broadcaster. Do you have other recollections of what you wanted to be when you grew up as a kid?At the point in time that I remember adults asking me that question, I didn't know the answer. I tended to have a real freeze response to these types of questions as a kid. "What's your favorite color?" No idea.There was a period of time where I felt like my grandparents, my mom's parents, every time they got me something for my birthday or Christmas, which is very close together, it was purple. It was like a purple bike once, a terrible dusty mauve puffer coat, but it was purplish. "If it's purple, then Farrah probably wants it" was the assumption. I like purple fine, but I like all the other colors too. Those kinds of questions tended to leave me frozen.Tell me a little bit about where you are right now. We talked about it a little bit before, but you grew up in Oregon. Where are you now? And what are you doing with yourself? Right now I am in the attic all-purpose room. It is my office. There is a bed on the other side of this desk, a Peloton over there, a sofa and a PlayStation over there, a yoga mat over here. And thankfully there's also a bathroom, so I never have to leave this room. It is in Springs in the town of East Hampton, about as far east as you can get on the contiguous 50 states. It is partly by choice and partly by COVID that we live here.I have worked for myself now for 12 or 13 years. I have gone through multiple iterations of what that business looks like, but fundamentally it's always been an insights-driven strategy consultancy or insights-driven research. That's funny.I think over time, what I returned to in some ways is - because I didn't start out as a researcher. I started out actually as a copywriter. I worked in advertising - never a good time to be a junior copywriter. I think in the late '90s, early aughts, I don't know if it's better now. I was about to say it was worse. I don't think there's ever a good time to be a junior creative in advertising, but I also think it's tricky to be a junior copywriter who is a woman because there is still this belief that women aren't funny and that good copywriters are funny.I think I'm pretty funny, but I didn't have Tina Fey's "Bossypants" around yet. I got a lot of really weird feedback early on as I was shopping my portfolio around and looking for work. The weird bait-and-switch would be I'd get Court Crandall at Ground Zero who liked my book and would have me come in, but inevitably he'd be out on a shoot, so I'd meet with someone on his team.I remember one time I interviewed there twice. Both times Court wanted me to come in, both times Court wasn't there. The first guy I talked to is flicking through my book and he says, "You can really tell that this book was written by a woman. There are no women on our creative team." I just looked at him like, "What's that mean?" It probably wasn't until I was in my early 30s that I put it all together. Oh, he was saying they don't hire women. He just didn't actually say they don't hire women.I attempted that for a while. Then I had a friend of a friend walk my resume into Chiat Day. I was living in LA. I interviewed with a guy named Sean, who was at the time the head of the Apple account. He said, "I have a job. It's not the job you should have, but you should work here. I want to give you this job, and then I want you to keep working on your portfolio and pester the hell out of the creative directors until they give you a job. I'll throw you little creative assignments nobody wants, if you're up for it." Sean is a great guy.I took that job and shortly after, they restructured the account slightly. They had someone running the international side of the business and Sean was running U.S. The woman I worked for was Nina Lalic. I don't know if you've ever heard her name or come across her. She was a planner at FCB before she came to Chiat Day. Then I think she went and started her own business - Serbian, glamorous, brilliant. I learned planning working for her because she'd not been an account person. She had always been a strategist.I started out as a copywriter. I became a strategist more or less working for Nina. I learned a little bit about how to do research because we would do quick and dirty, guerrilla-style research from time to time. It has always amused me, the narrative that Apple does not do research, because Apple very much does do research and Apple's agencies very much do research. They don't do a lot of ad testing, but they do a lot of lifestyle research, use case research, ethnographic stuff. They do a lot of research - the really useful stuff.Then it was the 2000, 2001 dot-com bust. Accounts were fleeing Chiat left and right. I kept surviving every cut. I got to a point where I didn't like the guy who was now the head of the account. I didn't want to stay in LA, I didn't want to stay with my boyfriend. LA was always temporary for me. I love LA, it's not for me.I just, all in one fell swoop, broke up with the boyfriend, quit the job, moved home for a summer, and then went to New York to go to law school. The law school move was for two or three reasons. One is, I'd had my wisdom teeth pulled out and was stuck at home for a few days watching West Wing reruns. I was like, "All these people are lawyers. Maybe it's finally time for me to acquiesce to what all these adults have been telling me for years and just go be a lawyer."The other thought I had was, "If I go get a graduate degree, maybe I can buy myself some credibility. Maybe people will listen to me if I have this degree." Turns out this is a very common reason that people go back to school to get graduate degrees - to be taken seriously by their peers. I was not alone in that. I found that out more recently because we do a lot of work in higher ed now.Is there a name for that phenomenon, or how do you talk about it? It's like social proof in a way. Do you have a name for that phenomenon?We have described in research, we've described them as status seekers, but in a very specific way. The status they're looking for is credibility. What you see, particularly in returning adult higher ed - not people who went all the way through from undergrad to graduate school - is, in particular, a lot of women of color seeking master's degrees and PhDs because they have to dot every i and cross every t in order to be taken seriously.I'd started to see a glimmer of this. I briefly tried to do a project where I wanted to talk to people who were not stereotypical ad agency people, but had built careers in advertising, and just interview them about how they built their careers. It was not meant to be, "Hi, I'm a white woman. I'll stand on one foot and you explain what it's like to be black in advertising." It was more like, "How did you actually build your career?"The thing that emerged after four or five of these interviews was, "Oh, I thought everybody did either one of two routes. You got like an English degree from a really good small liberal arts college and your dad knew somebody, your cousin worked at JWT, and you got a job there. Or you did this 'backed into advertising' thing where you're an aspiring playwright, you had a summer job, you were working in the mail room, blah blah blah." It's one of those "I accidentally fell into a job as a creative director" stories that I used to hear a lot on informational interviews.It was like, this doesn't make sense to me, especially because I'd gone to U of O for my undergraduate, did an advertising specialty, interned at Wieden+Kennedy, did all of the things, and still had to back my way in by going and doing other things.You knew early that you wanted to be in this world. My dad had been laid off from a job at a company called InFocus Systems. They made LCD displays and overhead projectors. He started his own company installing local area networks, wide area networks, LAN and WAN installations for companies around Portland. One of his clients was Wieden+Kennedy.He installed their LAN system and he was there all the time fixing stuff. He was in Dan Wieden's office one day and some female creative director came into Dan's office, flopped down on the sofa and just went, "F**k." My dad came home with some flyer he'd found near the copy machine or something that was made by somebody in the agency advertising how they like to go to a place called the Rialto to shoot pool. It was a funny ad someone had written just for their colleagues to get them to come to the bar across the street.He brought that home and he said, "I think you should work here." That was my dad spotting it, because I had no idea. I think there's probably also a moment in high school where I would have become a computer graphics artist if someone had told me that was a job and you could go to school for it. I was super into animation and special effects. Any project I could do that involved video, I would do that. But that was the first time I thought about, "Oh, there are people who make ads. They don't just happen on television." That's how that happened.But every step has been this, "How do I move upstream? How do I get closer to where the actual problem is?" After a while, both struggling to get a real job as a copywriter and then even as a planner, I was probably more interested in - I think this is also where some of the skepticism revealed that just being a planner wasn't going to work for me.Clients would deliver you data or information or their own strategy. And you'd go, "Does that make sense though? Is that really - how does this business model work?" I would get looked at like, "What's it to you? We just need to make the ads."I also remember trend report, youth trend report people coming to the agency to present to us and just being like, "Nuh-uh, that's not true. Maybe it's true for four blocks around FIT in the city, but no one in LA is doing this. I don't know what you're talking about." That made me want to get closer to where the insights came from. I think that's ultimately how I found my way into research.Tell me a little bit about The Difference Engine. What's the work you do now and how do you talk about what you do? I think over - when I first started it, I think I was trying to solve a problem that I later discovered wasn't really the problem. The feedback you got, particularly for qualitative researchers, which by this point in time is what I'd spent several years doing, and I had been hired into research companies as a strategist and then knew how to do qualitative research, knew how to interview people, whatever, but got better at that.The feedback you always get is, "It takes too long, it costs too much money." I'm sure you had some of this conversation with Hugo with synthetic users. My sort of feeling about that was, sure, there are lots of ways we could make this less expensive. There are lots of ways that we could make it faster. I spent the first probably three, four years of the business just showing how quickly and inexpensively qualitative research could be done, using any kind of tool in order to recruit that wasn't Schlesinger and Associates, which is now Sago, because it's all the little middlemen along the way creating the delays and the added expense. Everybody's got to take their cut along the way.But the other thing I discovered over time is two things. One is the only way to actually pull that off is to be as senior and experienced as I was. It's very hard to train up other people to do it. I tried and I just wound up stressing people out because they were too junior to be able to flex and bend with the kind of iterative approach to doing qualitative research. They needed to learn the rigor first before they could learn how to figure out which parts to cut.The other thing I discovered is that's not the problem. I should have known this because I've told clients forever that when customers or consumers say it's too expensive or "I don't have the time," they usually mean that thing is not valuable enough to them. It's not really about the money. If it was valuable enough, they'd spend the money. If it was valuable enough, they'd invest the time. But if they look at it and go "it's not worth it," that's what they mean - "It's not important enough to me to part ways with my money or my time or my effort."What I discovered in testing the limits of how quickly or inexpensively you could do qual is the fundamental issue is, do you think it's worth it to talk to your customers? That made me have to pivot my business, because I was like, "All right, the answer is not faster and lighter. The answer is do it properly and do it well."From there, it was coming back to first principles. The metaphor is frequently "No one wants a drill, they want a hole." No one wants to buy research, really. They want to get advice. They want to know what to do. They want help making a decision.In my early research career at Hall & Partners, we would frequently say to clients, "We're not here to pick a winner. It's not a beauty contest, not a bake-off, whatever." Most clients were fine with that. Some clients, though, would say, "I need to know which campaign to run" or "I need to know which positioning to pick. They can't all be beautiful babies. Some of these babies got to be ugly and some of these babies got to be the ones that I'm taking to the pageant. So which one is it?"At a certain point that was just like, "Of course, why would you spend this money and not want a decision at the end of it?" Obviously I'm not going to make your decision for you, but I can advise you on what I think is the best decision to make, understanding what your goals are.Over time, I think that's also evolved for me. I don't think it can be solely about your goals, because I think people can do a lot of sort of selective fitting of the facts. They think if they assemble them in this way, they will get the result that they want. It means that they make bad decisions. But their decisions are oriented towards the intended outcome, as opposed to "What do we believe in? What are we really good at? What would be a sound set of decisions that we can defend to our shareholders and stakeholders, even if the bet doesn't pay out?" There are good ways to bet and bad ways to bet.That has also become an evolution in all of this. The way I talk about it now is we help business leaders make big decisions. We do that with the assistance of research and we do that through a kind of strategic lens.I think over the last several years, with all the turmoil in the world, broadly speaking, it's become incredibly clear that not only do businesses need help making decisions, understanding their customers, getting out of the building, or "touching grass," whatever phrase you want to use. They also are struggling to figure out how to make decisions in a world where accountability comes whether you want it or not. Either the EU or the state of California is going to regulate you. Congress is going to investigate you. They're going to pass a bill to ban you. Regulation is coming for a whole lot of the industries that we work in. Even if regulation isn't, other forms of public accountability are. Reputational risk is a big problem across almost every category we work in.One of the questions becomes, can you, with a straight face, say to the regulator, say to the lawyer from the SEC, say to the person suing you and their lawyer, that you did the best you could with the information you had at the time, and you acted in good faith?That has become, in this era of talking to clients about using AI or developing more algorithmic or automated products and services, all the more important. Then you layer on the kind of questions of algorithmic bias and bias in general, and DEI, and other forms of equity, and ESG. All of these things are influencing the clients we work with.It's become more important, I think, to help clients understand that the world is constantly changing, so they have to be flexible. But one of the ways to be flexible is to understand what your real mission and purpose is as a business. I don't mean that in the inspirational poster sort of way, but literally what are you in business to do? Who is it that you serve? How will you know if you got a good outcome or not? And then how do you order your decision-making to serve that, instead of just serving "We think we'll get a point bump in our sales this quarter, so we'll do whatever it takes to get it."What's the first conversation you have with a client? Where do you like to start your engagement with a client?I have a set of questions I received from a boss a long time ago. They usually just start with a question, your second question, "Where are you now?" Where are you in the process of whatever it is you're trying to do? What have you done to get you to this point? Why do you feel that you need this kind of help? Typically, they are coming to us for research. Why do you think you need research?Then there are questions about, "What decisions will this help you make? Who's going to be involved in that decision-making process? What will be a good outcome for you if we do this?" Then we have typical questions about timing and budget and all that stuff.But first we start with getting ourselves oriented. Where are you now? And what are you trying to accomplish? I think a lot of times, for good or ill, that conversation reveals that they're not ready to do research.We had a new business call about a month and a half ago with an organization that wanted to understand a particular form of discrimination, let's say, that was present in the culture and that they were getting some anecdotal reports was on the rise. They wanted to do some research for that.The thing about it was, they hadn't really done the legwork yet to figure out - I think there were two things. One is they wanted to launch in the fall with a campaign. First of all, is a campaign the answer? You've already decided what the outcome ought to be, but is that the outcome? That's an open question.The other thing is, you're talking to me in the middle of March to launch a campaign in November, October, November. I've worked in agencies long enough to go, "That's not how that works. If you wanted to have this conversation, we needed to be talking last fall."It did lead me to say, "Given what you want to do, there is research that could help you, but it's not the research you're asking for. Also, you're asking for something that academics have done a lot of work on. We could start with reading the relevant literature. Either I can do that for you, or you can do that. But you need to get grounded in what the problem really is."I candidly agreed with them that this problem was present and growing, but there needed to be a little bit more meat on the bones before we could even begin to think about writing a discussion guide or a survey instrument or that sort of thing.It was just like, "It's not that research isn't what you need. It's just, you're not ready to do it. There's a whole bunch of legwork and groundwork that needs to be laid before we can start asking people questions."That is a step that often gets skipped by clients. "Let's just rush out and go talk to some customers," when we don't really know which customers or what we want to talk to them about. We're not sure about how we want to talk to them.Of late, I've had to argue with clients about the best way to ask about gender, for example, in surveys, where they're like, "We've always asked it this way. So just ask it this way." I'm like, "Except we see when we ask it this way, like one to 3 percent of our sample identifies as trans. So you're not going to know that. And it might matter for some of the services you want to offer. Why don't you just let me ask it this way? Also, I'm not making up this process. I've learned this from social scientists who've developed a better way of asking this question. We've done some research to make sure that we're asking it the right way."But these kinds of things are just like, if you don't know enough walking in, you're going to default to old habits, or you're going to focus on stuff that's not really all that important, or that you could get that information someplace else. We don't need to repeat research that is well covered by the academy. We could just read the white papers.What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?I think there are two places - no, there are three steps that I love.One is the part where we have that initial conversation, and the partnership starts to form. It's now a collaborative effort to identify what the real question is, and what the real decision to be made or problem to be solved actually is. Helping our clients clarify that question so that it is something really worth investigating and really worth doing something about.I love a puzzle. I love a mystery novel. I love a spy novel. Let's figure out what the real problem here is and get underneath. The question they come to me with is never really the question. There's always some deeper question. Let's figure out what the real question is. That's fun.The second part of it that I still derive a lot of joy out of is the generosity that people show in responding to my questions - the willingness that people have to share with me their experiences, good, bad, ugly, indifferent, and their opinions. I find it humanity-affirming. As much as I am a skeptic and don't think much of popular narratives about groups of people, I really love people telling me their stories.I love trying to engage in the perspective-taking that's required in order to actually hear their stories. Because one of the things that's very easy to do is listen to someone tell you a story and go, "That doesn't make any sense. You must be stupid." The actual truth is, people's stories make sense to them. So you have to try to put yourself in their shoes and figure out, "Why does this make sense to them? Does it make sense to me? Why does it make sense to them?" If you can start to understand that, then all sorts of other things open up.The other thing I like about those encounters is that on almost every project, there's something I'm wrong about. There's something that I didn't expect. A lot of times, to be honest, there are projects where - one of the things I like to do as we begin fieldwork is state my priors. What do I think is going to happen? What do I think is normal? What do I expect from this group of people or whatever? Then we see what actually happens.I like to do that both to keep myself honest and to make my clients keep themselves honest. But the thing that has happened many times is, I go into a conversation thinking, "This is how it happened for me or my family or someone close to me, but that's such a specific case. I shouldn't expect to hear anybody else tell this story." And then you encounter all these people who tell structurally the same story.It's like, "Oh, I'm like everybody else." Or, "My friends are like everybody else." Or, "This is a universal human experience." This is about how people interact with systems and structures, and the systems and structures are what they are. So there are only so many ways people can interact with them and have only so many outcomes. Once you encounter a system or a structure, infinite possibility is not before you. There are only so many possible outcomes.That's always very humbling. I get a kick out of it every time. "Aha, this is - everybody's doing the best they can and sometimes it's not good enough. But most of the time they're running up against impediments that they didn't see coming."If more people knew what everybody else was going through, they probably wouldn't feel so isolated. Also, they probably wouldn't feel so isolated or shamed by failing at a process, because everybody's failing at the process. The process is set up for them to fail.I was going to say a third thing, but I don't actually believe it. I do love telling these stories back to clients, but it's actually one of the least fulfilling parts of a project a lot of the time. It's very hard to incept your perspective-taking and empathy-building into somebody else who did not go along for the ride with you.I had a client in a startup years ago, who's a good friend now. At the time she told me, like, after the first dozen interviews, she listened to about her brand new baby product that it was nails on a chalkboard for her. She could not engage in the perspective shift required for her to be wholeheartedly listening to these people's feedback, and then going and pitching her business to investors. "I'm getting all this 'it's not great, it's not ready, it's not perfect' feedback over here. And I got to go tell these investors that it's great and it's only going to get better."So I have some empathy with them for why it's hard to hear these stories and switch their point of view.Do you feel like there's been a shift in terms of how clients understand research today? In particular, because I'm selfish, I'm curious about the role of qualitative research. How do you advocate for that? I wonder, because I did talk to Hugo, and I do think synthetic qualitative research is a thing that's arrived, that makes me wonder, what is the understanding that you get from qualitative research that you don't get from anything else that companies either understand or don't understand?I have a client right now that I work with who I'm a bit ride or die for. He's the CEO of the company. He is a believer in qualitative research. In particular, he likes ethnographic approaches. He is a rarity. He genuinely is.But he's trying to - as a CEO, he's responsible for so many different areas of responsibility. He's got to be accountable to his holding company. He's got to be accountable to shareholders and so on. He's got to deal with staff and employees. He's got to deal with customers. He's got to be responsible for the product as well at the end of the day.What's interesting is for him, that thick data is pound for pound more useful. It allows him to see people as they are in the world that they occupy and be creatively inspired. I think he has a kind of a service mindset. He thinks about how he can better serve these people, not how he can deconstruct the things they say.It's more, "Okay, if they're having a problem with this, how do I make that easier? If this is too expensive, how do I make it less expensive? If they need help here, how do I give them help here?"He has to balance it against the business interests, obviously. How much help is enough is sometimes a question. But I think that's actually a really important question. I think sometimes marketers can get really interventionist about things and people just need a little help a lot of the time, not everything done for them. There is an idea of useful friction after all. You don't want to - seamless is not necessarily the thing you're going for.But he has that orientation. For clients that don't, I think they exist on a little bit of a spectrum. There are the clients who just have very little experience with qualitative research.I had a new business call a couple months ago where they were like, "Oh, but in-person research is better than remote research, right?" I was like, "It depends, right? It depends on what you want to learn and how you want to learn it. It is not true, and probably never was, that one is better than the other. They're just different methods. Sometimes you want to do a mix of both." That's a kind of naivety problem that I think is relatively easy to solve.I think there's another side of it, and this is particularly prevalent in the U.S., is just an orientation towards a phrase I despise, which is, "The data will tell us what to do." What they love about this moment is the apparent ease of fielding large-scale surveys and also the availability of analytics. Those two things to them obviate the need to actually talk to people.That's - and it's faster and they feel like it's cheaper. I'm not convinced it is, but it's a trade-off. If your orientation towards pricing research is "what is the cost per interview," then sure, quant is cheaper. You might spend the same amount of money and not get substantively different answers than I'm going to get in a handful of interviews. The difference is you feel like you can cover your ass with a thousand-person survey in a way that you can't with a 15-person qualitative study.I think there's some of that - just a vestigial American business data orientation that does not countenance qualitative data as data, even though it is. This is the thing - I used to speak at Strata Conference, which is a data scientist conference. It was always like, "People are data too."The thing about surveys - and I've said this in many a public forum - is asking a thousand people their opinion does not transform those opinions into facts. Yet clients treat it like it does. But that's just a cognitive error. That is not what happens here. It's just, you asked a thousand people instead of asking 15. That's useful because it tells you how many people have a set of opinions, but it doesn't suddenly make those opinions the same as truth, whatever that might mean for you.So I think when clients embrace qualitative these days, it's for a few reasons. One is they don't start from an orientation that talking to individual people is a waste of time or money. They see the value of it. They want the data to be humanized. They want thicker data sets. They want to be able to improvise and explore as they go along, as opposed to having to preset a list of questions and hope that they're the right questions.We do a lot of mixed-methodology stuff where we do quant and qual, but we always do qual first. We never do quant first.I'm curious, even at the most elementary level, how would you articulate that? Why qual first, and what are clients risking? What gets lost, or what are you - what's the risk of being quant-only and denying the value of qualitative data?One of the things that I always say about why we do qual first is the survey instrument will be a better quality instrument if we use the language of the people we want to survey. In order to do that, we need to have a few conversations with the people we want to survey about the thing we want to survey them about, so that we understand how they talk about it.Sometimes it's literally how do they describe certain brand attributes or certain product characteristics. But also it might be, what is their mental model for buying in this category or behaving in this category? How do they understand their choices and know how to evaluate their options within a category?Unless - I don't know, unless you've been - I do believe in brand managers who have been in a category for a long time, are constantly interacting with customers, constantly looking for feedback, and they get to know those mental models really well. But there's also a lot of turnover in marketing organizations and insights teams at companies. They come from a consumer packaged goods category and now they're in a services category. They don't know what the mental models are there. They need to do that work first to orient themselves so that they can do the occasional fast-twitch survey or whatever of customers, and ask questions in a way that's relevant.If you don't do that - so I recently put in the field, against my own advice - it's not entirely true, I've had lots of conversations with people about this - but I put a little survey of my own in the field about the experience of IVF patients and fertility treatment patients, in part because we did this project last year about maternal health and it just felt like a thing that was lurking under the surface of those conversations. I was curious.What was helpful was, I wrote the survey - it's too long, but I'm a qualitative researcher, so of course it's too long - and I put it in the field and asked a few people first to take it. What was helpful there was those people felt they could tell me if questions were worded in a strange way, or if it felt like it was oriented too much towards couples and not towards single people trying to engage in family building. You didn't include this option, which a lot of people do.Even though I'd done a fair amount of pretty exhaustive lurking in Reddit forums and talking to people who've gone through it and talking to pregnant women and so on for other things, there was stuff I left out. This survey is too long. It could be twice as long. It could be three times as long. It's never going to be fully exhaustive.But there were some specific questions I had about it. If we'd done depth interviews first or some ethnography around it first, it would have been a shorter survey, probably. It also would have been a tighter one.Frequently I also talk to clients about a handful of interviews, like eight interviews, will enable us to write such a better survey that the survey will be higher value to you and it will help you make the decisions that you want to make. It's worth this incremental additional investment.We also have projects where my quant partners will literally tell clients, "I think you're better off just doing qual with this particular question, because it's so textured and layered that the complexity of the survey instrument would start getting to the point where I don't know that we could say we have valid results. It's easier to just have a conversation with people."Do you have any rules of thumb around when qual - what's a qual problem and what's a quant problem?The basics are like, if the answer to the question is yes/no, a number, or like a one-word answer, then quant's probably fine - just go do that.I say that and then it's - but are those really the right questions? I have done exercises with clients to help them sift through, like, "All right, let's just grab all the questions that you have and let's sort them into buckets. These ones are best suited towards qual. These ones are best suited towards quant. Or these ones probably exist in your analytics stack somewhere, and you could probably just go ask somebody in IT to pull it for you. Let's not ask questions we don't need to ask of people in an interview."That's usually the sort of starting point. The other question is, how much do you already know? How deep into this category and these consumers are you? Do you have a lot of experience here? Have you done a lot of research before? Then maybe we don't have to do as many interviews. Sometimes we don't have to do any interviews at all, because you already know so much about these people. You are so close to this audience that we don't need to repeat that work if you're in a hurry.Last question. You quoted Peter Drucker in one of your pieces. You made a very awesome case for research:"The purpose of a business is to create a customer. The toolkit that marketing, innovation, and research shares - if these are the essential functions of the enterprise, and why the hell are you depriving your organization of the tools it needs to perform those functions?"What do you say to a CMO - you've got this client who's totally ethnographically oriented. What do you say to a CMO or to somebody to inspire them to think about qual in a different way?I think the main thing is that qual is a really great way to start to sense change. It's much harder to sense change in surveys that are not longitudinal, that are not doing them in constant tracking flights.Even then, you'd have to include things in there that would enable you to sense change. Because people's opinions are pretty stable over time. Adam Mastroianni has written about this - we have pretty stable opinions about things.But when people start engaging in a new behavior, or feeling a new kind of way about a thing, or losing faith with a brand or a category or an institution or whatever, that comes up in conversation in a way that it just doesn't come up in a survey because you don't know to ask.As long as you keep having conversations with people, you can do more change-sensing than you can in quantitative. I think in the last several years we have gone through so much change and there's no end in sight for that.If you want to be able to adapt - my line right now is "adapting to change with integrity" - if you want to do that, then qualitative really is the answer, the best possible tool for you.It would be a whole other episode to talk about why I don't think synthetic users gets you there. But I think that's the reason to keep talking to people. It doesn't have to be ethnographic. It doesn't have to be focus groups. It doesn't have to be any particular methodology. But humans can tell you stories that will allow your sense-making abilities to say, "That's new. I wasn't expecting that. We haven't heard that before." That can then help you do everything else a lot more sensitively to change.Thank you so much. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It was a lot of fun. Thank you. I appreciate it.This was a pleasure. I hope you have nice weather where you are. 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Stephen Asma is the author of ten books, including Why We Need Religion, The Emotional Mind: Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition (with Dr. Rami Gabriel), The Evolution of Imagination, On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears and The Gods Drink Whiskey. He is the cofounder of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. He was a professional musician in Chicago for many years, playing with such legends as Bo Diddley and Buddy Guy. Check out his YouTube channel, Monsterology. His paper, “Adaptive Imagination: Toward a Mythopoetic Cognitive Science.” He makes the case for Imagination Studies in “Imaginology,” and for the primacy of imagery in thought in “Imagination is Ancient.” Find more of him here.AI Summary. In this installment of Peter Spear's series of conversations with fascinating people, he sits down with Stephen Asma, a professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago and the author of many thought-provoking books, including The Evolution of Imagination.Asma, who was mentored by Mark Johnson, the co-author of Metaphors We Live By, shares his journey from aspiring fine art painter to philosopher, discussing his blue-collar roots and his passion for exploring the middle ground between the sciences and the arts.Throughout the conversation, Asma delves into the importance of imagination as the core operating system of the human mind, discussing the historical neglect of imagination in cognitive science and the need for a more balanced approach that incorporates both the rational and the mythopoetic aspects of cognition.Asma also touches on his popular podcast, Chinwag, co-hosted with actor Paul Giamatti, where they explore a wide range of topics, from celebrity interviews to discussions on cryptids, UFOs, and the nature of historical narratives.I start all these interviews with a question that I borrowed from an oral historian friend of mine. She helps people tell their story and uses this one question. Before I ask, you're in total control and can answer any way or not answer. The question is: where do you come from?Oh, that's interesting. Where do I come from? I'm from a blue collar background originally. My father was a steel worker and my mother was a nurse. I grew up in that world of manual labor, which is how I decided I was going to get a Ph.D. because I really hated manual labor.More interestingly, I suppose I'm from this middle territory between the sciences and the arts. I respect the sciences - I studied a lot of biology and my PhD was in the philosophy of biology. But I've always been a visual artist and a musician. This middle territory gets a lot of lip service but doesn't really get a lot of institutional validation that I wish it would. That's where I'm coming from.Did you have an idea when you were a kid, a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up? You mentioned the PhD, but what did you want to be?I wanted to be a fine art painter. I knew that was not a good career move. I was one of these people who could draw at a really young age and people would say, "Oh, you can really draw." That created a feedback cycle where I would get the validation and then do it more, slowly getting better and better at it.I thought I could maybe be an illustrator because they can make a living. Turns out it's just very hard to make a living as an illustrator, even back then. It's even worse now. I was on my way to be an illustrator and then I took philosophy classes as an undergraduate and fell in love with it.I tried to read Kant's Critique of Reason and realized I would never understand this on my own. I needed a teacher. Therefore, to study this stuff, I'd need to switch my major. I thought I could keep drawing on my own, but I needed teachers to help me study philosophy. So I switched from the incredibly lucrative career of illustration to the even more lucrative career of philosophy. It was clear that I wasn't going to make any money, but that's how I shifted to philosophy.Once you get in the flow of philosophy, you realize you have to go all the way for the PhD if you're going to work in the field. So that's what I did.Where are you now and how do you - it seems like you've got so many different things going on. When people ask you what you do, what do you say?I guess I say I'm a professor first, because I'm a full professor at an art school in Chicago called Columbia College and have been there for a long time. I feel like that's my main focus, but then I've written ten books, so I could just as easily say I'm an author. Although I identify with the thing that pays the bills, which shows my working class background.So it's professor first, author, and now I'm saying podcaster because of this Chinwag podcast thing. (with Paul Giamatti)It's amazing. So much fun. When did you discover that you could make a living doing this, being a professor? When did that sort of click in?I was one of these people who played music to get through college. I was a pretty proficient guitar player. When I was at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, about an hour from Chicago, I had a blues band and we would go into Chicago and play the blues clubs.We built up a bit of a reputation because we were really young but playing all this classic stuff from the 50s and 60s. People were like, "Oh, it's the real thing." We got lucky one day waiting in line to see BB King play in DeKalb. The promoter, who knew who we were, came out and said BB King's bus broke down on the way and he needed like an hour to get here. He asked if we could go up and play a set of music. That was a pretty big moment for us.We played for about 3000 people, got to hang out with BB King and got to know him. Then we became the house band at Buddy Guy's Legends in Chicago. I used to play with Bo Diddley all the time and Buddy Guy. I was really lucky - it was like being in the right place at the right time. I played with all these great blues giants, most of whom are dead now.That was at the same time that I'd finished my PhD and was looking for jobs. Then I got a job as a professor in Chicago and had this terrible choice between continuing as a musician, which was super fun and really adrenaline-fueled, or continuing as a professor, because I couldn't do both due to the hours and travel. I chose being a professor.What do you love about the work that you're doing now? What's the joy in it for you?The professor job is super fun because the students always keep it fresh. Every couple of years, it feels like it's a very different kind of student with the development of being online all the time, with the changes from COVID. Really every five years or so, it feels like I'm teaching a totally different kind of person. That's exciting and fun, sometimes annoying.A lot of the books that I wrote were mostly these kind of didactic books, like "I'm going to teach you what Buddhism really means." I enjoyed that, but now I'm tired of doing these teaching books and didactic projects. Ever since before I met Paul Giamatti, who I do the podcast with, but certainly since Paul and I have started this partnership, I'm enjoying more play in my work and more creative work, where I'm not trying to teach something or correct somebody's bad logic. I do that in my day job, but what I'm really enjoying is this creative, playful stuff that I can do now.It just feels like walking the walk on imagination, doesn't it?I think in a way I was always walking the walk in the sense that I've always continued drawing and playing music, but it's now becoming instead of a hobby in the background, it's coming to the foreground and it's really the thing I try to focus on the most.My first experience of you, I think it was Monsterology. So on LinkedIn, is that possible that I would have run into Monsterology there?Yeah, because I made this YouTube channel during COVID when everybody was just trapped. I might've put it on LinkedIn or something. I'll include a link to this YouTube channel with these wonderful videos of you and your illustrations. It's just beautiful work. Where did that arise? How did the idea to bring the study of monsters to life connect with what you do?I had written a book about natural history museums early on called Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads. I was really interested in the way in which, compared to other sciences, biology is a very visual science. You think about anatomy and there's this wonderful, rich visual tradition in biology.I remember reading Darwin's autobiography and he said, "The only thing I regret is that I can't draw very well." I thought that sort of tells you something about the whole field.I got fascinated with natural history because it is both a visual and scientific tradition. I got really into these museums, and part of the museums have a lot to do with when quote-unquote "monsters" occur. These are just genetic or developmental deformations through teratogenic substances, like you have conjoined twins, you have kids born as cyclops. A lot of this stuff was exploited and eventually became what came to be - if you survived, you ended up in a freak show in the Barnum era.I was very interested in the places where biology and monster culture collided. That led me to write a book called On Monsters for Oxford, which was a continuation of this interest. I was just like, "What are cultures most afraid of?" The book examines the ancients, the medievals, the moderns, all the way up through Frankenstein, the werewolf, the Wolfman, viruses that are monstrous, robotics and AI. The book looks at all that stuff.It's amazing. I was watching "Giants and Titans" and you were drawing a Nimrod coming out of the Tower of Babel.Thanks for watching. Thanks for being one of the 10 people watching my channel. I appreciate it.You're very welcome. Imagination - when did that become something that you wanted to talk about? I guess there's a couple of ways. Just yesterday you published an article where you're inviting imagination to let its freak flag fly, as you said. But you you also have this very academic articulation of imagination. You tell the story in two cultures. You've got the academic articulation and now you're letting it fly free. I'm just curious, where did this begin and what are you doing with mythopoetic cognition?Part of my training is in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. As a philosopher, I'm very interested in how the mind works. In that area, the imagination has been ignored for about a hundred years. It used to be on the map - people would talk about the imagination. Aristotle talks about it, Immanuel Kant talks about it, even Jean-Paul Sartre talks about the imagination.But then you get the rise of kind of behaviorism in psychology, and eventually you get computational views of the mind, which is the mind as a computer. It's very hard to understand what the imagination is if that's the way you're studying the mind. So it was ignored for the last hundred years, I would say.Part of my work is to bring back focus on the imagination as a cognitive ability and how it evolved. But then I have this other way of actually doing imaginative work, like painting, drawing, making music. My work is trying to find a balance between these two things.Now there's actually work starting to happen on what the imagination is in the brain. It's super interesting and really important. But a lot of people who do that work, interestingly - I know a lot of them - they're not actually creative people. It's a rude way to put it. They're not engaging in an artistic practice in a sustained way. That's probably the better way to put it. So they get too far away from the activity of imagination.On the other hand, I know lots of musicians and artists who are very good practitioners. They play amazing music, they do poetry, they make art, but they don't know anything about this other side, which is what's the brain doing when they're being creative.I think the work I'm doing now is trying to find a balance. I'm just doing the brain stuff for a while, and then I'll just do this more weird creative stuff that doesn't have to answer to anybody. I feel like those two methods or interests of mind feed each other. They help to illuminate each other. So that's how I got into writing a book on the imagination.Daniel Kahneman is how most people that I bump into understand or think about - system one is a way of just thinking about the irrational or the unconscious. I always feel like anytime that we, as a culture, talk about this part of ourselves, it's always dismissive or pejorative - it's unconscious or irrational, it's always dismissive. It's very rarely affirmative. That's what's beautiful to me about what you're doing.I had an idea of a question: If a behavioral scientist and a mythopoetic scientist were walking down the street and they ran into each other, what happens? Do they get along? What do they say to each other?There's an explosion. It's an important point about the difference between the current cognitive scientist and this mythopoetic approach that I'm arguing for. Kahneman and others who work in this area recognize that there's two kinds of cognition - hot cognition, cold cognition, system one, system two.My view is that the popular mainstream cognitive science privileges system two, cold cognition, higher level thinking that is by and large propositional. It requires that there be some kind of knower and known, a subject and object. It has to have some kind of syntax that somebody like Chomsky would recognize. It has to have certain properties where it can apply to the world, but also have a kind of recursion so that it can keep going out and making more knowledge. All of that is true.The amazing thing about the human mind is it's very good at that kind of thinking. Now you'll see the dominant views, I think, in cognitive science. It used to be much more "We're going to do these neural network algorithms where we have target successful output, and we have this input, and then we have this black box of trained, conditioned connectionism." We put the input in, and the output is that we can see what kind of stuff you scroll on TikTok and we're going to give you more of the same.That's all true and it works really well with computational models. Now people are talking about that's how the human mind is - it's a predictive processor, it's always looking for what doesn't match, it tries to then find a way to make sense of it and adjust its prior beliefs. Again, all standard mainstream cognitive science.Those folks look at the imagination and even stuff like the emotions and they don't quite know what to do with that stuff. They're like, "That doesn't fit into the algorithmic view of the mind that we have."So here I come along as the mythopoetic cognitive scientist and I'm saying, "You guys have the wrong end of the stick. You are talking about something that evolved very recently in the human mind, which is this language-based propositional logical mind. But for literally hundreds of millions of years, the entire evolution of mammals, we've been building this other kind of problem-solving mind, which is much more closely connected to the emotions and is closely connected to visual perception and images generally."This is mythopoetic mind. If mammals have been evolving roughly for 200, maybe 300 million years - obviously after the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, that's our time to shine and we explode in ecology - that means that our hot cognition system, this old brain, what you might call a limbic brain, is so much older at problem solving and understanding the world than this new brain, which is arguably only as old as language, which might be only 100,000 to even maybe 1 million years old if you really want to push it. But that's quite recent.For me and the mythopoetic people, we think that stories are much earlier forms of thinking and organizing the world than logic is. When human beings evolved, we evolved telling stories, either through imagery on a cave wall or in the early days of language. I suspect it would have been a lot of storytelling in some way, using metaphors, images and myths. The world then is made up of good guys and bad guys, heroes and monsters. If you look at the earliest literature that we have, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's got heroes and monsters in it. These metaphors are foundational, I think, and that's because the imagination is the original operating system for human beings.It's still at work in our daily lives, reading information about the external world and also generating information and projecting that out into the external world. That system, again, is very old and it's much more a part of our regular experience than this kind of computational mind that most mainstream cognitive scientists want to talk about. That's a long-winded answer, but you get the idea.It's beautiful. What are the implications of this? You mentioned that there's been a rise - it's shocking to hear that the imagination falls off the map for a generation. Somehow that's what we do, right? We lose things and then rediscover them. But what are the implications of people now paying attention to imagination, that it's connected to emotion? We're realizing this is closer to how people move through the world.I think it's exciting because people are starting to realize they've left out things like the imagination and the affective systems or the emotional systems. You'll see cognitive science is trying to now put that into the work they're doing. But what's unfortunate is that their paradigm, which is this computational approach of algorithms and predictive processing, isn't allowing them access to a lot of this reality, like emotion.Here's an example: If you look, I go to lots of conferences and give talks and watch other people give talks. If you went 10 years ago, you would have seen nothing on emotional AI. Now, every other paper is about emotional AI. You go to the paper and get all excited, "Oh my God, they're going to talk about the emotions." No, that's not what they're talking about.What they mean is, "Okay, how can we train an AI system? A perceptual system, a robot, or like a large language model. How can we train it to spot emotional faces?" And what they mean  is you have to train the system so that when it sees a face that's angry, it recognizes that face needs to be marked as angry. It doesn't understand what angry is. How can it? It's just a computer. It doesn't feel the salient biological body feelings of being enraged.They're trying to train AI so that it would be smarter at finding, okay, just like there's voice detection AI, like in airports - this is a national security issue. And they're looking, trying to train AI so that it can spot when voices are being raised and maybe stress or tension is happening. And then maybe it can direct the security to that area. That's what they mean when they talk about finding room for the emotions in AI. They're looking for ways that the AI can just find a conditioned response to an angry or a happy face and then have an output response like "notify security."They're not actually trying to build a system that has feelings because no one has any idea how to do that without a nervous system, without a body. So it's an interesting sort of weird bridge that may not be able to be built between the algorithmic kind of intelligence and the feeling state kind of intelligence.Here's another example: I have my students read Plato's Republic. And then we talk about films that have the ideas in it. It's a fun class - you've got to do everything you can to get people to read philosophy. So we watched this great Martin Scorsese movie Goodfellas, and I was saying to the students, "Okay, how do we just apply Plato's theory of the breakdown of a character to this film, which is also about the breakdown of character, like how do you become a bad person? How do you become a tyrant? It happens slowly and it's a development."So I asked the students - when we read it, there's all this kind of fun stuff in Plato. He talks about a monster. He says, "Imagine you've got, you're made up of a monster. Like the lower part of you are all these crazy creatures and beasts." And it's almost like John Carpenter's The Thing. He describes snakes and fangs and everything. And he says, "That's your appetites. Those are your desires. Now imagine like a lion. And he says, that's your heart. And he says, imagine a little person, that's your mind, your reason. And this is all bundled together like a chimera or a hybrid creature. And that's what the human psyche is."Now that story really sticks with students because it's got all kinds of activating mythopoetic drama in it - crazy imagery, it's fun, it's exciting. So when I asked the students to make the connection to Goodfellas, they're able to do it very easily because that movie, if people aren't familiar with it, is about how somebody can let their desires and their cravings get totally out of control. And the next thing you know they're doing more and more cocaine, more and more women, more and more violence until eventually they're just in jail.I asked Chat GPT, "Okay compare, find the Platonic Republic ideas in Scorsese's Goodfellas." It's a pretty high-level test. And I got this response back, and the response was all about Plato's myth of the cave and trying to connect the myth of the cave to the movie. It was something, I mean it made sense. But what did the AI do?It simply scraped the entire internet to see what is the most talked about thing in the Republic. And it's in book seven, and it's called the myth of the cave. That's what everybody knows from Plato's Republic. So the AI is like, "Okay, look for the frequency of terms or tokens, and then just make something about the high frequency terms."But my assignment is about book nine of the Republic, which nobody reads. It's hardly on the internet at all. The AI can't see that because it's looking for something very different. What's salient to it is just frequency of appearances on the internet. Whereas what's salient to us, to my students, is our feelings. Did I feel curious? Was I afraid? Was I excited by this? That makes things important to us.So salience for biological animals is always connected to the nervous system, whereas salience for computational algorithms is just stuff like frequency, occurrence of tokens. It's totally different ideas of salience. That's a big problem.In one piece, you said "Calm down, there's no conscious AI." You make this point that without a feeling based motivational system, all information processing has no purpose. You talk about seeking and wanting and the drive being everything.Yeah, that's an idea that I learned from one of my later in life teachers who was really a mentor to me, Jaak Panksepp, who is considered the father of affective neuroscience. He created the field. Then others like Antonio Damasio, I think, were a lot more famous, but Damasio was hugely influenced by Panksepp's work. They have a similar vision.One of the things Damasio says is he had a patient who had damage to this sort of motivational system and the feeling system. In this particular case, it was the amygdala in the brain - everything's connected. One thing he was asking this patient, who was extremely smart and really good at information processing, he said, "What day do you want to come back for your next appointment?"I think I'm remembering this right. The patient was like, "Yeah, I could come back on Monday next week," and then proceeded to explain why that was a good idea. And then they were like, "But I could also come back on Tuesday." They went through every day of the week and just proceeded to give all the arguments for and against coming back at that time, but could not commit to anything. There was nothing tilting the patient towards one option rather than another.Damasio was like, "If you look at this, and there were empirical studies of this, people can't even make a decision about what cereal on the shelves they're going to pick without some kind of feelings about it - oh, I had that as a kid, or I had that and it was awful."Information doesn't actually motivate behavior. It's this other system, the motivational system, which is sometimes called the conative system, based on a word that somebody like Spinoza used called "conatus," which means striving.So if you don't have a motivational system, which is chemical, it's largely driven by spikes of dopamine, then the person or even the animal - we share this system with other mammals - it doesn't get up and forage. It doesn't go look for things. It's what we would call depressed. So that system is hugely important.I feel like - I didn't know that, "conatus," it was in that piece. I feel like I read somewhere else, isn't "motive" in the same family as "movement"? It's like the same linguistic family. When you're talking about motivation, you're talking about action.Yes, exactly. I think that this is something that certain philosophers forgot about too. They really start to think about the mind as just this passive thing - it receives information.Then philosophers like William James, the pragmatists like John Dewey, and also continental philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, they were like, "No, the mind is also about doing something. It's about moving through the world."Only occasionally and rarely do you sit reflectively and meditate on stuff. Mostly the mind is about getting through the world. I think that's also been a bit of a problem for the cognitive science folks now - they think of the mind largely like it's a chess-playing sort of process where you passively sit and work out logical options. But that is just a rarefied little slice of what the brain and the mind does.Most of the time you're working on the fly and you need that hot cognition stuff to be really important. So yeah, I think of the mind primarily as something that's about action. And only in very rare situations is it about this kind of purely theoretical abstract reasoning. I'm glad we have that system, don't get me wrong, but it's not what the mind is doing most of the time.What's your - do you have a preferred metaphor for the mind? I feel like in a lot of ways we are trapped in this computational culture. We talk about things and imagine things. Do you have a different way?That's a great question. It's unfortunate because I think the computationists have a better metaphor because it's so worked out and we understand computing and machines really well. But the mind is - I don't think the mind is a machine.The place to look for how the mind works is really, I think, to the animal world and to biology. But that's not really a metaphor. It's the thing itself. So I do think if I have to give a metaphor, I think the creative process, something like drawing or making music, is a great way to think about how the mind works overall.I think of improvisation as the key idea of the mind because in improvising, you've got that sort of hot cognition stuff - where if somebody just starts throwing rocks at me I know what to do, or I have some sort of basic moves I can make to get out of the way because my body has learned to improvise.But then there's the kind of great improvisation where you can almost build a second nature. If you study jazz music, it's a very complex and elaborate kind of understanding of harmony and rhythm and melody. But if you practice enough, you can get it into your body so that it's a kind of embodied form now. You don't have to think about "What am I going to do next on this chord? I've got to improvise the solo."That's a way in which human beings can take learned information, even stuff from the cold cognition system, and make it part of the hot cognition system. That applies in music, but also if you were to just ask a field surgeon who's working in a war zone - imagine somebody on in a war zone trying to patch up bodies, they don't have the best equipment, they've got to make do with what they've got.That kind of improvisation, if you take it up to Walt Disney or Hayao Miyazaki creating characters, all of that stuff from the highest sort of rarefied atmosphere of fine art, all the way to the field surgeon trying to save lives - that is all a kind of improvisation.I think that's a better way to think about the mind than as a chess player, somebody who's playing chess, or as a computer. Because computers are not good at improvising unless you give them very strict parameters. So I think maybe improv, maybe like the jazz player, is my metaphor for how the mind really works.I love it. When I came up in my world of market research, I was really taught that the mind thinks in images. It was very informally taught to me and I was pointed to Lakoff and embodied cognition. All that stuff was there.Oh, yeah, great. His co-author, Mark Johnson, was my dissertation advisor, one of my dissertation advisors. He was my teacher. That's why I connected on this.Oh, my God. So what was the influence of that?Exactly this. He wrote Metaphors We Live By with George Lakoff. Then he was my teacher in my Ph.D. program and I've stayed in contact with him ever since. His theory was speech and meaning doesn't have - it's not literal first and then it creates metaphors later like window dressing. The metaphors are first and the images are first and then the literal language comes later. Anyway, back to your point about marketing.Yeah, in my approach, which I learned, is that through free association, you get closer to the metaphor through language. By getting closer to the metaphor, interacting with the metaphor, you're then talking about motivation and emotion. So it's a more effective way of trying to understand what someone's experience feels like for them. Yes. Mark Johnson - oh, here it is. Look at this. You're going to love this. [I have a bookshelf above my computer. I reached up and pulled down the book.]Isn't that amazing?  The Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics and Human Understanding by Mark Johnson. I feel like the title of that book alone is perfect.He's awesome. He's really - and he had to carve this space almost by himself with George Lakoff and a couple other people. Now everybody understands this argument and there's a lot of people who have embraced it in their own way in the embodied cognition circles. He's awesome.When you're marketing stuff, that's right. You're thinking about "I need to form an association in this person's mind-body that will draw them to this service or this product or this thing." And that's probably not going to be a logical argument. That's going to be a feeling state.Yeah, that's exactly right. I was thinking about Lakoff. I think at one point - I usually use, I feel like he called it "imaginative reason.” That's why I was curious - why is it so important to recognize that we do think in images? You talk about thinking with images and thinking with the body. It seems shocking - I guess I'm just accustomed to it, but how radical an idea is that? How different is it for people to think about it that way?It's a very interesting point about the communities because the community you came up in knows damn well that the image is crucial. Because it so obviously works. But the community that I came up in, which is this philosophy of mind, cognitive science group, they got intoxicated by it - before the computational model came on and got very strong starting in like the 80s, I would say. Even before that, philosophy had been, for almost a hundred years, certainly since the Vienna Circle and the logical positivism of the 1920s, they had all been arguing that the only thing that's meaningful is going to be in language. It's going to be a proposition. Everything else is not meaningful. It's not knowledge.So there was a terrible bias in that community against images, which is just tragic and stupid and derailed philosophy, I think, for a hundred years. As a visual artist, as a practicing visual artist, I knew all along the power of images and I kept looking at my colleagues going, "You guys have no idea."I will say this, though - this is an interesting point: There is a neurodiversity element to all this, which is there is the phenomenon of aphantasia, when you do not think with images. Your mind does not think in general about the world by using images. It turns out, we're just now learning over the last five years even, that is - it's not a disability, it's just difference.There's a lot of people who have this kind of mind that does better with language and does better with math and logic. It turns out that they are way overrepresented statistically in the sciences and in places like analytic philosophy.So if you go to those folks and say, "Yeah, but images are everything and stories," they're gonna be like, "What are you talking about?" So it's not that one is correct and the other is wrong. It's just that they think differently.I talked to this guy, Craig Venter, who's very famous for cracking the genome code. He was the guy that devised the technology to be able to read the genome very quickly. He's a very decorated biologist at University of California, San Diego. I was talking to him and he has aphantasia. He was like, "Yeah, I don't think in images. I think in terms of like principles and logic."He and I could not - we talked for a while and we could not figure out how the other was thinking. It was really weird. I was like, "What do you think of when you think of your kitchen?" We were talking about this and he can't understand what the image-based mind is like, and I have a very hard time thinking without images. So there's that.I want to - there's a couple of things I want to - the overlap, a Venn diagram of our worlds, and in the middle is the placebo effect. I was just reading, you were just - I think, was it in today's thing about "get weird imagination," your essay - were you talking about the placebo effect?Yes, I do mention the placebo effect. I'm fascinated by it. The way I came at the placebo effect is from the point of view of biology and then how the mind works. Historically the placebo was used to demonstrate the failure of the mind to do as well as the actual medicinal compound that you're testing.It's true that the real compounds work better than a placebo, but what people started to notice only in the last really 10 years is that, oh my god, the placebo works way better than we thought it did. And in some areas it works like as well as some of the organic compounds or medicines or whatever you're giving.There's some really interesting work on this that shows that what really matters is not the sugar pill versus the actual medicinal pill. What matters is all of the contextual narrative framing that happens when you administer these two things.  So if you - this is like a kind of a crude example, but let's say you go in and you see a doctor and the doctor has a white coat and they sit you down and they talk about, "These are the effects and this is what you're experiencing and this is what you might experience." And then there's all the sort of rhetorical accoutrement - there's trays and test tubes and syringes and all of that stuff. It makes a huge difference on the effectiveness of the placebo. The way you frame it in context tells the mind, "Okay, this is gonna help me." That's what they're discovering.If you take away the context of the narrative, then the placebo doesn't perform as well. It really is just like a sugar pill.So they'll do these things with people where they'll do acupuncture - and acupuncture has been shown to actually help things like a bad back in certain situations. But they'll do fake acupuncture. They'll take people and they won't actually - the person can't see that they're not actually inserting the needles. And yet their back feels better for days.A lot of this stuff was dismissed as, "Oh, wishful thinking." But it turns out that if this theory of mine is right, which is the theory of Mark Johnson and Lakoff and Damasio, what's happening is your mind has learned words and terms and language because you have a simulation system. Like the brain is primarily a simulation system.We have these mirror neurons. So when I see you - if I hit my thumb with the hammer, then obviously I have pain. It turns out sort of two different areas of the brain light up. One is where the actual firings from my thumb all the way up are processing the brain. But the other is I just viewed it with my eyes and that's lighting up a certain - I think it's the anterior cingulate cortex, but don't quote me on that.But two areas of your brain are lighting up. And they discovered that if I just watch you smash your thumb with a hammer, I also get - not like the same, but one of the parts of my brain also lights up and I actually feel a little bit of your pain. In other words, there's a mirroring of the world, so I can mirror your experience a little bit.I don't just see that you're in pain and draw a logical inference - "I should help Peter. He's in pain." No, I actually have a quick, hot cognition mirror of your pain. It's not as severe as your pain, but it's there.So what happens is words and concepts are basically training our brains with feelings. When you hear "Pepsi" or "Adidas," or you see the logo, it's not just like you see that thing and then you draw a logical inference - "I once really enjoyed Adidas shoes." No, what's happening is the logo is triggering your emotional system directly. You're having an emotional response. And that's what I think is why it might be working really well in marketing of brands.We're right near the end of time. I wanted to have a chance to hear you talk about Chinwag, the podcast you're doing with Paul Giamatti.Chinwag is something that Paul Giamatti and I started about a year ago, when we started publishing the podcast. We've interviewed so many interesting people - there's people that you would recognize who are celebrities, like Tom Hanks and Stephen Colbert, but also wonderful experts like the expert on psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins, dream experts.We interviewed Peter Godfrey-Smith who does great work on octopuses. So it's a little bit of fun, ridiculous stuff on UFOs and Bigfoot, and also real experts in science, all mixed together. The idea is this is the kind of conversation you would have with your friends at the pub. Hopefully it has some facts in it but you're also just having fun.We're on tour and we're doing live shows. We just played at Harvard, which was really fun. Paul and I pick topics that are really out of our own imaginations or out of the cultural imagination. It could be something like cryptids, creatures that may or may not exist. It could be UFOs. It could be interesting stuff like how do we write history? Is it always biased by our contemporary times?We're having a lot of fun doing the podcast. I think people who are interested in the imagination might find it really intriguing.Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to include a bunch of links. I was listening to one on Bigfoot today.We're both obsessed with Bigfoot, I don't know why. Part of what I think we're interested in is not does Bigfoot actually exist? That's in the background, but why are these beliefs attractive? Why are we drawn to them? Why does the imagination settle around certain kinds of creatures and certain kinds of ideas? Why is the imagination drawn to them? That's really more of the interest.It also feels like there's this line where things get super uncomfortable, where you're supposed to not talk about these things or it's not safe to express them in a way. This is echoing my conversation with Jeffrey Kripal and his articulation of "super humanities" - that we leave things off the table. But why do we do that? And how does that shift?I totally agree. This is one of the things that Jeff Kripal's work and my own interests really dovetail. We just interviewed this guy at Harvard, Dr. Avi Loeb, who's the guy that's thinking maybe there's alien tech that may have come, or maybe there are things that we could analyze.There's that crazy comet that went through the solar system very fast. We only caught it as it was leaving - 'Oumuamua, I think it's a Hawaiian name. And he was like, "Why not at least consider the possibility?" This is how I think too - why take that off the table? You don't have to believe in it, but as scientists at least consider it.I think Kripal's work and my own work is also looking at - actually William James had a word for it. He called it "the unclassified residuum," which is the stuff that science doesn't want to look at. But really, this is a place where these anomalies are oftentimes where scientific revolutions occur. They start as an anomaly, but eventually they build. So I think we should be looking at everything with a scientific mindset.It's so interesting. Do you have a few more minutes or no? The blurb on your first book about natural history museums talks about categorization, which is essentially what we're talking about, right? That we get overly attached to the categories that we have about something that it becomes - it makes us blind to anything that doesn't fit. Is that -No, I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of evidence that it's intuitively clear too. You categorize the world in a certain way, and then it's very hard to break that category.I remember when somebody was explaining to me that a tomato is not a vegetable, it's a fruit. And I was a kid, I'm like, "No, it's a vegetable." And they're like, "No, it's a fruit." And it totally breaks your category. People for the longest time thought whales - they swim in the water, they must be fish. And of course they're mammals.So there are very strong attachments to the way you historically categorize the world, and they're hard to break through.What's next for you other than Chinwag and more teaching?I'm working on a graphic novel which is exciting to me. I don't know whether - it's very hard to break into this world, but I've got one chapter done and I'm really excited about it.I'm trying to do something that's very creative and again, not - but there's also a lot of stuff about religious viewpoints. It's about a guy who goes to the afterlife and he has to go through different levels of the afterlife, like the Judeo-Christian version, the Hindu version, the Buddhist version, the Muslim version, the occult version.So it's got a lot of actual learning in it, but it's really just a creative drama, it's an adventure story. So I'm working on that.Also, I'm working on a more serious book with some graduate student co-authors, and we're looking at trying to make a bigger argument for the importance of images in thinking. So how do we think with images? And we're trying to write a pretty academic book. So I'm keeping busy.Again, I'm so appreciative of your time and it's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much.Yeah, thank you, Peter. Appreciate it Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

AI Summary. In this interview, Peter Spear talks with Elise Pepple, director of Marfa Public Radio, about her unique background and passion for place-based storytelling and community engagement. They discuss the role of public radio in creating gathering spaces and fostering connection, especially in light of the isolation and disconnection prevalent in society. Pepple shares examples of how Marfa Public Radio has innovated to meet community needs, from providing critical information to hosting virtual events. The conversation also touches on the culture of public media and the importance of reinvention to stay relevant. Throughout, Pepple's dedication to public service and the power of storytelling shines through, offering a compelling vision for the future of public radio in fostering understanding and belonging in a fractured world.Elise Pepple is the Executive Director of Marfa Public Radio in Marfa, Texas. She is a wanderer with amazing stories to tell. I met Elise in Brooklyn in a small world moment. We discovered friends in common in Marfa and Hudson, and we bonded immediately on interviewing and listening. I was excited to get into a conversation with her about stories, public media and small town living. Elise began her career in public radio in 2008 when she brought StoryCorps to Alaska. In 2011, Elise produced and hosted a radio show celebrating sense of place in Sitka, Alaska for KCAW. At Marfa Public Radio, Elise uses old school and new school techniques to make the station a lifeline, a beacon for the stories of West Texas, and a center for media innovation.I have a particular kind of anxiety about asking this question because you know so much about it. You know Suzanne, who I borrowed it from…. I start all my conversations with this question and always caveat it because I want people to feel like they're in control. So you have all the control. You can answer or not answer the question any way that you want to. Where do you come from?Where do I come from? Yeah, we've talked about this question because I was like, "Oh, I don't know how I relate to that question." Rather than deconstructing it or having an anxiety attack, which is what it elicits in me, I would say that I come from a gigantic Catholic family. That's very chaotic. And that led me to know all kinds of people. I come from a family that's Catholic and magical realist at the same time, which maybe they're the same thing.Tell me about giant. Can you paint a picture of what it means to grow up in a giant family?Oh yeah. My mom's one of 12. And my grandparents had a mom and pop bakery. So they had 12 kids living in an apartment upstairs. Growing up, every kid had a bunch of kids. So 30 plus grandchildren, 30 plus great grandchildren, a meal would be like a hundred people.I grew up, I had one older brother who wanted nothing to do with me. What is it like to be in a giant family?Just like your life probably seemed normal to you. It just seemed normal to me that nobody fit around one table. We maybe fit in one house.In what way were your family magical realists?I guess being Catholic, I wouldn't think that Catholics are magical realists. They're different brands to me. But magical realist, so there's a lot of death when you have a lot of people in your family. So I grew up in funeral parlors. And the dead were always alive. My aunts who died young, my aunts who are alive, who are conventional in many senses of the word, talk to their dead sisters on the regular.Did you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up?It depends upon the age. When I was really little, I wanted to be an inventor.And what was an inventor?It was science based. That did not stick with me, but I wanted to be an inventor. I wanted to invent a flying machine. They already existed in airplanes. And then later, when I was in seventh grade, I wanted to save the planet and address human rights.Where was this? Where were you growing up?Baltimore.Tell me, where are you now? Tell me a little bit about what you're up to these days.I'm currently in Brooklyn, New York and also remotely Marfa, Texas. I run a public radio station.What do you love about running a public radio station? Where is the joy in running a public radio station? The joy is that it is a job that is about making meaning collectively. The other joy is that it's a way to tell stories.When did you first encounter this kind of work? What was your first moment of realization that collective meaning making is something that you could do?I'm slow so I was writing and making public art but I wasn't good at the material objects. I don't really care about them. I dropped out of art school. I was like, "This is dumb. Why do people do this?" I lived in a 300 person town in Alaska. I had moved there from Brooklyn, New York right after StoryCorps, which is an oral history project, was created and I would just talk to everyone. I was like, "Everybody has these amazing stories." So I called StoryCorps from this little town. And they said, "Oh, you should come up here." And they said, "Why don't you do it for us?" Great idea. That was the first time I did anything related to storytelling or public radio, I was 27 or 28. And then I was like, "Oh, stories. Oh, place based stories."You said that you had no interest in the material objects. I have so much identification with that. Can you tell me more about what that means to you?I think the thing that interests me is social space. When I was making art, the thing that interested me was not objects, like sculpture, painting, photography, it was the space where a person decides to come towards something. I was a bad artist. I didn't care and I would propose these things. I'd be like, "I want to harvest all the fruit in California that can't be picked by migrants because our government just stopped letting people cross the border." There were farmers who had the largest pear harvest on record and they were listening to the fruit fall off the trees and crying. I wanted to relieve them. I was like, "I want to relieve these farmers of hearing their fruit fall to the ground and not be harvested." And then I wanted to relocate. I wanted to pick up all these pears and relocate them to San Francisco so that we would encounter the thing that we couldn't see happening. I think my professor at the time was like, "What?"Doesn't sound like bad art to me. What do I know?Who knows? But yeah, so now what's so exciting is culture and that we should culture and that's not necessarily material, but it's more the social space, relational space.What did you learn at StoryCorps? What was that process like of you discovering this practice that fits? What did you learn from StoryCorps or that experience?From that experience I learned that most people don't think they have stories. I also learned that StoryCorps didn't teach me how to interact with people. Being my mom's daughter taught me how to interact with people. Never met a stranger. Just tell me everything! But maybe for the first time aligned the way that I am in the world with the work that I was doing in the world. And then what I would say is because I work for StoryCorps in Alaska and I moved to the Arctic to keep working for them, a lot of what I learned the hard way, but in a really necessary way, was about colonization, indigenous genocide. There's no separation between cultural and physical genocide. Yeah, so I had a crash course in being a white settler and being in communities that were thousands of years old.And what was the role of story there? What gets done? What do you do when you're inviting stories?It depends. When I'm in a cultural context that is where I'm from, it's all I do. I've done a lot of storytelling projects, all kinds like live storytelling events, oral histories, public art projects. But when I was in the Arctic what I learned is that stories, both in the Arctic and in Southeast Alaska, it's intellectual property. And so to show up to a place you're not a part of and say "Tell me your stories" is problematic. I remember there was an elder man when I first landed in Nome, Alaska, and I was like, "Oh I'm doing this thing StoryCorps." And he's like, "Yeah, National Geographic was here yesterday talking to me and the Smithsonian called me yesterday." That, which is not necessarily something people say all the time. There was a reluctance, really understandable reluctance to tell stories.How did you end up in Marfa?How did I end up in Marfa? I guess there's a period between StoryCorps, Alaska and Marfa, there's a five year window. Basically I hadn't trained in producing radio. I just learned alone in Alaska. So first it was leaving Alaska and going to train so I could tell stories in audio at a place called the Salt Institute for Documentary Study. And then I was doing two things at the same time. It was first person storytelling through live events and as a professor, and then this work around identity formation through those modes of storytelling. But I had three jobs. I was working at an art space, teaching, and then putting on events and I was like, "Oh, I want to do one thing and not hustle." So I visited Marfa and I'm not a good tourist. So I asked the station if they wanted to put on a live storytelling event, like The Moth. So I went there and then there's always multiple things happening. I also, one of my soulmates died that spring and I wanted to honor his memory and go camping in Big Bend National Park. So I ended up in Marfa and while I was there, I walked into the station and I was like, "What if radio stations were like community spaces, oral history archives, event spaces, like a think tank for new podcast content." And I had a thought, went home, and six months later was running the radio station. So I moved to Marfa to run Marfa Public Radio.How has it been? You've been there for how long now?Biblically or in real time?I don't know. I don't know anything about biblical time.It feels like I've been there for 50 years but I've only, this is my eighth year.You said earlier, you mentioned broadcast as a gathering space. I feel like that is what, has it been like to try to build a different kind of public radio station or to make that vision a reality? It's all different, right? That's a different idea. Sorry to interrupt you, but you came with a, is that a different way of thinking about public radio?I don't know if it's different. I think radio stations are very place based and very community. Because by that nature they are gatherings or they can be a gathering space. And then I guess I'll say something really practical, which is not like me. And then I'll say the other stuff. In a rural place like Marfa, the radio might be your only companion, might be similar to Alaska, might be your only thing. And so one of the ways it connects people like the road system there is that if there's an emergency and you have to imagine there's no internet or cell service, the radio is still the way to connect. If there's a fire, you turn on the radio. And it's really saying, "Hey, we're with you. Hey, this is happening. We're here. We're with you. This is what's happening right now." But then it's, for me, then it's what is the limit we can go to in being here for people? So it's not just saying maybe the news will be like, "There's this thing happening," but then it was like, "Okay, this is an evacuation, but it's not a mandatory evacuation. So what can we do as this thing that broadcasts to the whole area?" So we created a spreadsheet of shelter options for humans, pets, and horses. And so then the station was like, "If you need shelter, call the station. If you have shelter, call the station." Then there are firefighters coming from all over the country and they're fighting fire day and night. So then we're like, "Let's have dedication music shows to the firefighters." And then they can call in and make requests. And they would request, it was, I didn't know this, but firefighters would request heavy metal music. So it can just keep going. And then similarly, in the pandemic, another emergency, where "Here's the information that you need. We're in a place where there's two ventilators. The need for public health information is acute, but also everyone is terrified." So then throwing a dance party. March, beginning of the pandemic 2020. A "Dancing on your own dance party" where people could tune in, they could listen, or they could come to a zoom, get online and be together apart. That's a way to make a gathering space with a broadcast.And how did that go? The dance party, what was that?It was great. I had this idea. I think because part of my background is mental health. As a person who studied social work and mental health, I diagnosed systems. And as the director of a radio station, a more typical person might be like, "Oh, we must respond to this crisis. News reporting," which is important, but then I diagnose the, I do a biopsychosocial assessment of not just people, but systems. So I'm like, "Everybody's freaking out," I'm like, "So we need to do something for the whole person," and so I was like, "Okay, we're going to throw this dance party." And everyone's like, "What are you talking about?" And I'm like, "We're just going to do it." And then thousands of people participated.You mentioned the mission, what was, is that a general public radio mission or is that, was that a Marfa? You said "lift the spirit" was the second part. What was that about?That was the original mission of public radio written 54 years ago now, probably by Bill. That was the mission of public radio. And I think it was actually really creative, it was really creative 50 some years ago. The tools were limited or the framing was not. The paradigm shifts that have happened were not part of that conversation. But I guess the thing that is different about Marfa Public Radio is that we keep reinventing it or trying to lean into what that can sound like or look like, whereas most public radio stations sound the same all over the country. They sound like NPR, which is great. Or you have a public radio station in your area that sounds like community public radio from 1980.Yeah. And how do you feel about that mission now? Would you, how would you rewrite the mission of public radio?I love the mission. I'm like, "Great. There's so much to do there." There's so much to do there.Not everybody spends as much time in interview, in conversation with people, asking with the focus of getting them to tell a story. How do you feel about the fact that you spend all that time in the space asking, helping people tell a story? How has that changed you?It's my deepest joy. It is a great pleasure to talk to people about their lives. And I guess it's like on some level, let's make it count. Who a person is matters and what we're doing here matters. And I don't see the point in doing anything else.What have you learned about how to help people tell a story or how to make moments with people matter?I guess when people want a manual for how, I'm not saying this is you, but when people want a manual for "How do you ask people questions?" It’s clear you aren't a natural at it. Cause, How do I do that? For me, that is not the hard part. I think if you're listening to people and, I guess, 80 percent of communication is nonverbal, but if you're listening, I don't think it's hard to do.If you had to develop your own kind of public radio station or next kind of collective meaning making and gathering place, what would you do? Do you feel like you've executed the vision that you had when you showed up?Yeah, I do. I do at the radio station. In terms of what that would look like next, whether it might be a scale up or it would be a couple things. We're still dragging our asses through this. I think you made this metaphor. You told me about this article about the metaphor of "Long COVID" being what we're all inside of. And so I think there's no governing body or organization, this is an extreme statement, but I like hyperbole, that is meeting the moment of gathering, belonging, grief, joy. And so in some ways what I wish or what I would love is if there were an organization to say, "We need to orchestrate a million person funeral service. Every town in the country needs a three month long dance party where you can just be with others and move." So that would be a joy. And then I also think again, this is like overstating or over assuming a certain kind of importance in the world which is naive, but I'd say in the next seven months our country will face some pretty critical and wild political realities. And so I guess a thing I'm thinking a lot about is, "What are the stories we're going to need? What are the stories we're going to need then?" And how do we, is there a point of saying, "Timeout everybody. Why don't we take time nationally, timeout, regroup, let's come together and be like, 'Okay, what are we going to need?'"Yeah. The idea of the national moment of grieving basically, I love that idea. I feel like we've talked about this before. What is the role of place in all of this? It feels like that's where we're most fractured. I experience that in Hudson. It's difficult to find places where people gather.As part of it, again, if we diagnose systems and we just name it, now a lot of us live online at least 50 percent of our lives. So we're dislocated even from the places where we are. And I was talking to people in New York, which is one of the great things about the city is all the public, the ways people are public. I love things I love about New York, being in the city and the way people will have a fight with their person on the street, they're like, "Hey," and not you and "No," and it's we're all together, but that isn't happening. And so where do we go? It's like part of the reality.What has it been like for you to try to build what you want to build in public media? How would you describe the culture of public media today?There's never one culture. I feel like that's never a monolith.Is that true though? Is that true in culture, in public media though?Let me think about that for a sec. I think public media, it depends on your role within public media and within, say, a station. I am like, what attracts people to leadership roles in public radio? Because what I would say is in some ways it's very natural that I was inclined to public radio because I'm inclined to public service, both because my parents are and because that's how I function. I don't know if that's the best move from a business perspective or for your own life. I think I have this joke that's very snarky and untoward, but I'm like, "When I go to these meetings that are specifically for people who run radio stations, I'm like, 'Where are the good dressers?' I used to work in the arts. I'm like, 'I want some outfits, I want people to say things!'" And so the psychological profile, I'm always like, "What is the psychological profile of this radio station CEO or GM?" And then there's reporters, which is a very specific kind of psychology. And that's different. And so the culture of public radio, my concern right now is that it's ossified like the Catholic Church that I grew up in. And so it's wild to me. It feels like it's not operating in the times. And it feels like it doesn't reflect the times.I just interviewed this guy, Ethan Decker. He talked about how contemporary marketing and brand science, it's very clear that you don't educate. Education isn't something that gets done to people or that you do to people. This is something a lot of organizations do not understand. And so they don't communicate or create experiences that are effective or connect even at the beginning. Does that resonate with you? Yeah, totally. Whether it's social work or public radio, to assume that you're educating and whose definition of education, right? And what kind of education? Our ways of knowing, if we're lucky. And I think that's where the news, you and I were having this conversation about the news and I guess I was seeing through our conversation how one dimension the news is. And then what I think about, I'm like, "I love gossip." And a reinterpretation of gossip where it's, I could tell you this story that's from my life that's an example of what I would call "good gossip." And gossip is a renewable resource. And gossip for good is I think what we do as humans. And so in some ways it's, I wish we would take ourselves less seriously. Cause we're like, "We will educate and inform." And if you were to really pare it down, what radio is, is people being like, "Oh my gosh, this is what's happening. Oh my gosh, this is what's happening. Let me tell you what's happening. This is what's happening." And if we were to really go back and you and I were to put on our hippie, baby boomer parts of ourselves, we would be like, "The oldest thing is humans sitting around telling stories around a fire."I want to thank you so much. That story you told is really beautiful and hopeful, and I hope I didn't bring us down a little bit, but nice to see you. And thank you so much.This is fun. Love it. Love talking about all of this. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe