THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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

AI Summary. In this interview, Peter Spear talks with Hugo Alves, co-founder of Synthetic Users, a pioneering company in AI-powered user research. Hugo shares his journey, the inspiration behind Synthetic Users, and the challenges of being at the forefront of a new category. He discusses the potential of synthetic user research to complement traditional methods and envisions Synthetic Users evolving into an end-to-end innovation engine. The interview explores the world of AI-powered user research and its potential impact on how companies innovate and develop products in the future.Hugo Alves is a Founder and the Chief Product Officer of Synthetic Users that offers AI generated persona’s for use in user research. He started out in clinical psychology, and got interested in building something - which led to his current company and role. I spoke with him when they launched almost a year ago, and created quite a splash. I had been asked recently for my thoughts on the impact of synthetic qualitative research on face-to-face qualitative research, so thought of Hugo. I really enjoyed getting to know him, and hearing the origin story of Synthetic Users.So this is a new thing for me. I have this newsletter and so I just take advantage of the opportunity to invite people into a conversation and I'm really enjoying it of course, but I start all of my interviews with the same question and I'll pose it to you. And before I ask the question, I always over explain it because it's a beautiful question, but it's a big question and the question so you can answer or not answer any way that you want to, you are in total control. And the question is, where do you come from?Got it. It's a big one. Particularly for me, I'm going to go maybe oversharing and a little bit too personal. But I'm adopted. So I was adopted at six months old. So quite young. The reality I knew until I was like five or six was just that family. I had no idea.  But then when I discovered that there was some weird dynamic in the family about someone that was visiting, that was my biological mother it brought me to that question, where do I come from? What is my background? Having said this it's not an existential question for me. I made peace with it a long time ago.If I had to describe where I come from, I think I come from essentially an event diagram with an intersection between technology and what's new, I'm a neophile, and what's possible with the amazing things that human beings can learn to change, and also with humanity. I studied psychology and for me who are we, how do we work, how do we reason about things, what makes us feel emotions, what are our biases and how they can be helpful, and at the same time, influence some decisions.That's essentially, I think, where I come from. It's from a mix of two worlds. From a really humanistic perspective in which I think that humans are core to everything we do. We're always about relationships. We're always about connections, while at the same time believing that humans can extend themselves beyond just themselves and have an impact on the world through technology.  And when I say technology, I use it in the broad sense. Kevin Kelly has a beautiful book called "The Technium" and he mentions that a pencil is technology. And we tend to forget that even those kind of steps that are really basic, like fire, like water, the wheel, those are technologies that humans created to act upon the world and to act upon other people. So I think that's where I come from.Did you have an idea as a kid what you wanted to be when you grew up?So first from my grandmother's recollection, I wanted to be a fisherman. That was the first thing I wanted to do. Then it seems that I drifted into more standard stuff where I grew up in the 80s, an astronaut.  Then I wanted to be a football soccer player which of course I would never be a good one because I'm quite clumsy. But when I then started to have more of a notion of who I am and what my aspirations were, I wanted to be a psychologist. I wanted to help people understand themselves, solve issues that they might have so help them regulate their relationships, which is probably one of the core challenges of human nature is how we relate to others.So I wanted to be a psychologist and a scientist. So there was a dichotomy in me. I applied to psychology, didn't get in. But I got in marine biology in the Azores but it was too far away for me. I didn't want to leave my small family quite far from continental Portugal.But what I think I always wanted to be was someone who tries to understand stuff, be it on the human side, be it on the scientific side, I always wanted to be someone that figures out and senses.And tell me a little bit about where you are now. Did you grow up in Portugal? Tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're doing.Last year was my, what I call my switch year. It was the first time that I spent more time in a different city than my hometown. Because I lived in my hometown for 21 years and last year it was the first time that I spent 22 years in Lisbon Portugal's capital. What I've been doing for those last 22 years was essentially studying.I have a master's in clinical psychology and then I worked at my university for some years in a psychology lab, helping researchers set up their studies, running experiments managing the participant pool of the university. And then I felt that I wanted to build something. So I left and I joined a web design and development agency, which is where I met my co-founder from Synthetic Users, to try to build a product that would help researchers collect data in a faster way. I wanted to build a Amazon Mechanical Turk, but with high quality participants. It didn't end up happening.And I ended up being a product manager for a lot of different companies. Five different companies, B2B, B2C small teams, like five people, larger corporations, like 200 employees. So this is my passage figuring out how can we deploy human capital, I hate this kind of word, human capital, it's a little bit too transactional but how can we use the skills of designers, developers, strategists to build something that solves someone's problem.When did you first discover that this idea of understanding people was something you could make a living doing? When did you first encounter, "Oh my gosh, this is what I want to do. This is what I can do."I'm honestly not sure because one of the things, psychology as an academic is an amazing thing. There's a lot of people doing amazing research, but what I wanted to be was a clinical psychologist, and it's not a job market that is fulfilling because there's a lot of psychologists.Most people can't afford, although they should have access to it, they can't afford mental health services. So we end up, particularly in Portugal, this weird situation where there's a lot of psychologists, there's a lot of people in mental health support, but then the people who need it don't have the money to pay.So a lot of psychologists end up in different careers. I think I understood that I could leverage my psychology and empathy skills in this new function of product management. Essentially what a product manager does, I normally make this joke with friends when they ask me what I do, I help people build products, but I'm the only one on the team who doesn't do anything.Because I don't code, I don't design, I don't use Figma. There's no real deliverable from a product manager. What product managers are supposed to do is understand if a particular group of people have a particular problem, if that problem is even worth solving for those people, because we have a lot of problems that are not even worth solving that we just go along with. And how to best leverage some capabilities, typically engineering, typically design, to build a solution for that problem. That is a solution that is feasible, viable, the Martin Kagan stuff and that they can build a business that can solve their problems and end up being able to improve their lives.So I think that was my realization that I can use my understanding of how humans work and how humans reason and how humans face challenges in my product management role.And tell me a little bit about how do you introduce people to Synthetic Users? How do you describe what it is?It depends on the moods. If I'm in a joking mood, I tell them that I build fake people. That's my joke to friends who are not familiar with either market research or user research or consumer research. And they're like, "You build people, but why would you do that?"When I'm talking to people who are more in the industry, what I focus on is the problem first. I help them remember that for anyone to build a valuable product, you need to understand if they tried to solve the problem in some way before, if they tried to solve it, why didn't the solution work? All of that. So user research and consumer research and market research are fundamental aspects of building great products that really provide value to the world. As much as this is a central process to that product creation flow, it's also a process that involves a lot of friction that sometimes it's almost impossible to believe.For example, if you want to study a hard to reach segment of the population, imagine someone who has a rare disease, it's really hard to find those people sometimes and to have a conversation with them to understand how they go about it. If you want to build a product for CEOs, you're not going to get them to sit down with you for one hour for a $50 Amazon voucher. People who are having an extremely busy time, it's not easy to do customer interviews with them.So what we're trying to solve is exactly that. Is to help people who need to do research in a fast and more effective way to have at least an early view of what the potential customers and potential users might say when confronted with particular situations or when asked particular questions and do that in a way that really reflects what those people would say out there in the real world.Of course, the overlap can't be 100%. I'm not even sure that it will ever be, but we believe that the overlap that we now get in between our synthetic users and the real research that teams would run and the difference between cost and speed is sufficiently valuable to help teams.And how does that work? Can you tell me a story, like in the example of the CEO, if I come to you and I say, listen, I'm developing something for CEOs. They're very hard to get. What do you do? How do you make fake people?So first of all typically "CEOs" is just too broad of a group to study as a homogenous group. So what we need, we are now re-implementing some of our interface exactly because of that. Because sometimes we get people that either because they're not as good at research or just because they don't know how to do it, still haven't understood the power of focusing on a particular segment.  They come to us and ask, "Hey, can you generate nurses?" And I'm like, "Yes, our system will generate nurses, but you're going to get nurses that work in so many different conditions that might not be exactly what you want."Right now, if you come to us and say, "Hey, please generate CEOs," our interface will ask you, "Okay, great. Let's study some CEOs. Is there any particular segmentation that you want to apply? Are they CEOs in Fortune 500 companies? Are they CEOs in small startups? Any particular geography you might be interested in?" So what I try to do now is clarify a little bit more the audience and the user group, because the more well-defined the audience is, the better results we get in terms of product building, because we need to be focused on particular segments and not just build products for everyone.Which is an error that I see first time entrepreneurs make, is that we want to build a product for everyone. That doesn't work that well, but assuming that you came to me and said CEOs, but I was able to ask some clarifying questions and we're now at "CEOs of consumer packaged goods companies in the US", which is already quite well defined. What we do after that is one thing that we know is no matter how well defined your segment is, there will still be some diversity within that group. Because within this group you defined, you still have some diversity in what kind of consumer packaged goods, the size of the company, all of that.So what we do is we generate what we call dynamic parameters. So for any audience that our customers ask us to generate, we generate a set of five parameters that we feel are likely relevant to segment and capture the full diversity of that audience. And then we generate the amount of synthetic users we need. Typically on our platform we can go up to 30. We normally generate, most people generate around six and each one of them will have a name, an age, a location, a profession, and then we'll vary within those five parameters that we generated specifically for that audience. We can then edit those parameters, add and remove, but in general terms, this is the third step of generating the synthetic profiles.From that point on, we recently introduced a new type of interview, which we call dynamic interviews, and it's essentially for each interview that we generate in our platform, we generate this interview. But we also generate the synthetic researcher that takes the research goal that our customers provide. For example, "I want to understand what are their challenges when trying to change pricing on their products." And it takes that research goal and dynamically asks follow up questions to try to achieve the research goal that you asked.When all the interviews are done, you generate a report that summarizes at the high level what was mentioned in those interviews, and then you can do follow up questions on the synthetic users. Now we can even chat with the report itself.And how has it been, how long - I feel like we talked maybe a year ago or a year and a half ago. How long has it been?I think we talked around one year ago, not long after we launched. We launched in March last year. It's been a wild ride, we were completely bootstrapped until October last year. It was mostly about trying to understand how people were using our platform, watching usage, and there was a lot of stuff that needed improvement in terms of the quality of the interviews themselves.Now I look back, I still look at it and I say, there's a lot to improve here, but now I look at the early ones and I'm like, "Oh my God, how could I put this out there in the world?" Because compared to the ones we have right now there was, it's just that they were shallow, there were repetitive things. But I think at the time, they were already better than not doing any research.A lot of people that came to us were a little bit in that mindset. We had early adopters, entrepreneurs, people just wanted to build a business and wanted to check if they had the right feel for it or not.And we iterated on the system. The level of complexity of our system today, compared to one year ago is probably 10x because there's, although audiences don't see it, there's a lot of stuff going on in the background that really makes the interviews a lot better.In terms of our team, when we launched last year we were three - myself, my co-founder Kwame, and Bart who was our developer at the time. So we were really constrained in terms of being able to iterate on the product quickly. Now we have four developers and still growing, so the team has a lot more leeway, has a lot more expertise. We're working on some cool new stuff like surveys and the ability to import existing data to enrich the synthetic users. So it was quite a big change.Also quite a big change in terms of market reception. One year ago, almost every post I saw on LinkedIn was kind of, "Oh, these guys are crazy, they should just stop what they're doing. It will never work." And now with people using the product, people sharing the outcomes that they get with their teams and with their colleagues, we now already see a lot of positive feedback, which was a welcome change. I think I'm a tough guy in terms of how I handle criticism, but there were some tough weeks getting roasted by big user research names on LinkedIn. It was quite tough to handle that criticism, but we used it to make the product better.And I think in the meantime, convince some people that there's value in what we do. And I also think there's some people that will never be convinced because it's more of a moral position regarding what we do than really an effectiveness and a pragmatic one.Can you tell me a little bit about what that's like to be in the middle of a storm like that? I can only imagine. I think there's so much about your name too. You're really creating this category, the way you're just showing up and bringing automation to this place that's got, everybody has so many feelings about, and it's so humanist. Can you tell me a little bit of what that was like to be in that kind of storm and to be carrying, to be representing generative AI in a humanist place?So one interesting thing about our product is that although right now a lot of people say, "Oh, your name is amazing. It really conveys everything", until two days before we launched, we had a different name. We were called "Synths" with a Z at the end. And then I think someone on the team said, "It's a mouthful, I need to explain to people how to spell it and all of that." And I was like, "Okay, I agree. But I'm not stopping the launch. We're going to launch in two days. Anyway, I'm not stopping the launch. It can be whatever name you want. It can be Synthetic Users. Let's go with whatever you want, but I'm not stopping the launch." We decided we're going to launch on Friday and we're going to launch on Friday. So we ended up with Synthetic Users almost by accident. It was a placeholder name. Eventually, if we need to rebrand, we will. That's how it started.But to be at the forefront, it's the first time in my life that I felt that I was doing a product that was genuinely something that I have never seen in the market. I was like, "Okay I'm at the forefront right now." That by itself doesn't mean anything, because you can be at the forefront of something that didn't exist or there's no market for it, but I felt that. And since then, as the category grew and established itself a little bit more, now there's different companies trying to do similar stuff to us. So I've been satisfied that we were really pioneers.But because of that, we were also the ones that were taking all of the criticism, because as you say, most people that go into user research, consumer research, are people who really care about feelings, are people who are deeply empathetic, who are wanting to make the world, sometimes even in an idealistic approach, a better place.And I think there's just fundamentally a moral discomfort that people see in a product like ours. Because they feel that we're taking away the essence of what's really meaningful. And Iget user researchers sending me messages saying, "No, my job is to talk to people and that's the best thing I do in my life." And I need to refrain myself from saying to them that, no, your job is helping whatever company or whatever product you're helping be better. It might require talking to people. It might not require talking to people. So don't identify with the task, identify with the goal. And there's a lot of this dilemma in a lot of people.I think it's okay to get the criticism. To be honest, I think the fact that we knew what we were going for, so when they came to us with posts saying "User research without users. Damn, that's stupid." So I knew, and I even told my co-founder that we should have kind of a page on the website with prebuilt tweets so people could say "This is really stupid. Just tweet saying that our product shouldn't exist. That is really stupid." So we knew and our communication saying "user research without users" was intentionally provocative because the fact that people were saying that this is something that shouldn't exist was something that was putting our name out there, so it ended up helping us a lot in our early growth.And it helped bring people that were essential to give us feedback about what was working and what was not in the product so we could improve it.You said a couple things I want to follow up on. You mentioned that you can be out in front of something, but you pointed out that you could also be out in front of nothing. At what point did you realize that you had traction, that you had something that people wanted? As I understand it, you've introduced a whole new behavior, a new behavior for organizations to learn. Is that true?The thing is, I knew one thing, which was the category would exist, even if we weren't successful. That was the first thing I understood, because this happens a lot, whoever is the company that starts a particular category ends up not being the one that dominates the category.But what I understood most from academic research, because half my day is reading papers, reading machine learning papers that I don't understand the math, but I understand what is now possible, so I can try to apply it on our side. And papers from sociology, psychology, human-computer interaction, in which a lot of academic researchers are comparing this idea of silicon samples, synthetic users, synthetic personas, and seeing how well these large language models really are at mimicking people in diverse situations, be it running morally violating situations, all of that.So I had that observation on the academic side that, hey, we're not crazy. There's people doing exactly the work that we also want to do, which is to compare the results and show where the overlap is. While at the same time, I was seeing that, of course, this is going to be a thing. Because models, they don't regress. The next model won't be worse than this one. And if we're at this stage with this one, it can always get better. So I saw that this is going to be an industry and a big one, I believe.I believe that when we get to that place where people are more comfortable, and we saw this with online research, in the beginning, when online research came out, there was a huge resistance from the industry saying "No, you need to talk to people face to face. Otherwise it's not real." And then for the efficiencies you get from online research, people adopted it. And I think it's going to be the same with synthetic research and synthetic users in particular, is that people just need to be more accustomed to the idea that comes with it and try it themselves.Most people that I've seen commenting on LinkedIn saying, "Oh, I saw these guys building synthetic users, this will never be possible," I always go there and I ask, "Are you saying this because you tried it and you feel the results are not good or are you saying this because it's more of an absolute perspective and there's nothing that can prove you wrong?" Because I think most people just are so skeptical because they haven't even tried it.What have you learned from your customers or your users in terms of how it changes how they learn? What does it do to face-to-face qualitative interviews? And what have you learned about the ideal use case for synthetic user research?So we have quite diverse usage in terms of how people and companies are adopting our platform. What I normally now recommend, in the beginning I was more forceful in how I pitched synthetic users, but I think I was making a mistake at that time, what I now recommend is that companies, for them to start feeling comfortable with what we do, that they use this as shadow research.What do I mean by shadow research is you already have set up a research project about a particular category of users that you're going to be investing in doing surveys and user interviews. Keep going, keep doing that, and use us to try to reproduce the research, not the results. Just try to use synthetic users as a platform to ask the same questions. And then you are the one who has all the data. You can see what synthetic users said, you can see what humans said, and you compare it with your own eyes. In the beginning, I was like, "No just trust us. Just go in and use us."So now I pitch more as synthetic users should be the first step, to use this as a stepping stone, feel comfortable with the overlap you get with our results. A lot of people use us to pre-test ideas before they validate it ultimately with humans, which I think for high risk decisions, that should be the case. Some people use us just to decide, they're planning on prioritizing three features, they're not sure which one to start with. They use synthetic users to help them make that decision.I know some people, this is not necessarily something that I recommend, there are now almost doing everything with synthetic users and only going to humans for really high stakes decisions. I'm not comfortable with this. I think there's a lot to improve in our product. I want to put some metrics, some evaluations out there, so people understand better where to use it. But the teams that have been doing this, mostly early stage startups, they're quite comfortable with it, which is quite pleasant to hear. But at the same time, I think that there's still, I think there always will be a role for humans in research. I don't think synthetic research will ever replace humans 100 percent. I don't think that should be the goal of any company. I think what we want to replace is some of the inefficiencies in the standardization process.What are other types of customers or use cases that you've been really surprised by?When we launched, we were really focused on a particular segment. That was like, this is going to be for early adopters, for entrepreneurs, for people who don't have a lot of experience doing research, who don't have access, who might not even have the money to do conventional user research and market research. And those are the ones we're going to be focusing on. We're going to be like Canva that allows you to design postcards and stuff like that. We're going to take away all the bells and whistles, going to really simplify and help those people.And when we launched that was our ideal customer profile. The idea was, let's go for kind of the lower end of the market, people who are not experts and really need some help doing this. The surprising thing was we suddenly, and I can't because of NDAs say names, but we started getting emails that I'm forwarding to my co-founder Kwame asking him, "Can you confirm that this is really coming from them?" Big financial institutions, big consumer packaged goods companies, some big research agencies reaching out to us and saying, "Hey, we think your proposition might have something to add to our company and to our process. Can you do a demo?"And suddenly I'm doing a demo for a company that almost any everyone in the world has bought a product from them. And I'm like, "Oh my God, maybe we focused on the wrong segment. We need to refocus." And that's a little bit of what we've been doing now. We felt that the cost was the most challenging part of research that we were solving. What we understood is that for big companies they have the money. They can pay for research. They've been paying for research for a long time. Some of them have their own panels. It's not lack of access to customers or to being able to do interviews. It's just the amount of time it takes that really slows down those companies.And those companies, almost by definition, because of their size are already quite slow companies because there's some organizational friction that comes with that, being a big consumer packaged goods or a big financial service company. If you join the organizational friction with the research friction, sometimes they're really slow to react to the market and to launch new products, because the iteration cycle between doing research, coming back to the core team, the team iterating, doing research and iterating, it really slows them down.They come to us exactly because of that, because sometimes what one of the insights managers on this told me was "I know that I don't need 100 percent certainty in all the decisions I make. Sometimes I'm okay with 60%. Sometimes I'm okay with 80%. Sometimes I'm okay just having a better notion of what the consumer might say when listening to this value proposition" and the trade-offs between the time that conventional research takes and what they can get with synthetic users is really what they want.So we've refocused a little bit more on the enterprise side. It was something really painful to me because I remember saying to Kwame when we launched and were going for the lower end of the market, it was like, "I don't want to do compliance. I don't want to do SOC 2, type 2 security checks. I don't want to do all those things because it's a pain." I know it's needed when you work with companies that size, but I didn't want to do that because it's one of those things, I'm a guy who likes to iterate fast. I don't want to spend time just implementing SSO and SAML and all of that. But truth is that here I am doing it because it's where the market is, so that's what the customers we're focusing on right now.You've used the word overlap. How do you compare the data you get from synthetic user research versus the data you get from what would you consider qualitative research?I do consider it qualitative research. I think that's one challenge when people think about products like ours is that they tend to think of an algorithm that is just math and say, "Oh no, it's someone that wrote an algorithm and that algorithm spits out words and those words mean nothing because it's just mathematics."What people tend to forget is that the training process of these large language models involves vast quantities of human data. Essentially, these models were trained with all the text that could be found on the internet. There's people who say not only text, but even transcripts from YouTube. There's now a question if OpenAI trained GPT-4 with transcripts from YouTube videos, which might be the case, might not be. I don't want to get in trouble by OpenAI for saying that.But the training data that was used for these models is human data. It's people, it's parents on parenting forums asking about their questions that they really struggle with. It's people talking on Reddit, on the subreddit, talking about their cars. It's people talking about their beliefs, their challenges, their fears, their aspirations. And that is what makes these models so good. It's not that the algorithm is some kind of magic math. It is, of course, beyond my comprehension, but the fact that it's trained on human data is what makes these models so good.Because then when you're running an interview with synthetic users, it's not the algorithm, what you're doing is you're going into the model and making it talk like the persons that you are interviewing talk online in different forums and in different aspects. So I do think it's qualitative research.Some people prefer calling it kind of desk research. They think it's the same thing as going to Reddit and searching for what people are discussing in forums. This practice already exists, a lot of smart user researchers already use Reddit as a source for research, because if you're studying a particular group, it's an amazing source and they go to forums and they read what people are discussing in forums. So this practice already exists, but even if that's the case, we make it so much easier.It's interesting that it's secondary research as opposed to primary, though it's dressed up a little bit like primary. It has a primary interface on a secondary methodology.Exactly. I think there's also some nuances. The reason why we lead with the user interviews, some people ask us, "Wouldn't it just be easier for you to generate the report that you give us at the end directly instead of doing the interviews first?" And we tried it. If we don't do the user interviews and if we don't include them as the base material for the report generation, the report is so shallow. It's extremely shallow. It doesn't involve any depth. It doesn't have any nuance. It's going to just spit out what a random person asked on the street about, "Hey, what are the challenges of truck drivers?" That's what you get with a report without the interviews.Because what the interviews allow these models to do is to explore what's called in the machine learning kind of groups "latent space". So we need these models, there's a space of connections and of correlations. And when you generate interviews that have different profiles and certainties on each one of the profiles, it goes into where it is that if you just generated the report, it wouldn't go there.It wouldn't involve the interviews as much as I would also like to take them away because they take time for us to generate. And if I could get the results with just doing the report, I would, but I can't because the interviews really play a role.And then there's another aspect of it, in the same way that with human interviews, sometimes it's just one sentence there that makes you think "There's something here that I might need to probe." And you can do that. It's the same thing with our interviews. Sometimes the interview, if you just summarize it, it's cool stuff, but then you look at one sentence and you're like, "Oh, because of the rush that I need to do every day to feed my kids." And you're like, "Wait, there's an adjacent problem here that is worth exploring." And you go and do a follow up question, "Can you tell me about that?" And suddenly, that's where the magic of the insight really is. It's when you can use synthetic users as you would do with humans, doing follow up questions and going deep on the conversation that was already taken and taking notes and investigating deeply. That's where you get the most value.As you were answering that question you used your hands. You really were describing the experience of the interview, the value of the interview, but you were describing it with your hands as being this really almost exploratory, that it goes places you don't know that it's going to go. So what's happening in that interview?It depends on the interviews we're talking about. If I focus on the ones I described earlier, the dynamic interviews in which it's an AI talking to an AI, essentially what's happening is you can think of it a bit as a problem space could be a map and you could decide on starting in this position and just going all the way here and you need to have some view of that problem space.But what happens when you generate several interviews around the same problem space is that one of the researchers decides to go this path and it's more severe, the other one goes here and the other one goes way in here and the other one goes on this side. And so in conjunction, they end up having a lot more visibility on that entire map or that entire problem space than any individual user. And if you don't use profiles and if you don't make the synthetic users diverse, what ends up happening is that all researchers would go in the same area. So you wouldn't have this diversity that you need to really capture everything that is happening on that space.What's your secret sauce that keeps you differentiated?On one side we use open data. We use data sets that are out there, public, either they were collected in academic settings. Some of them you might be aware of, like the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey, so we use data that is out there. And that allows us to have a better understanding of people, how people think about particular topics and all. But that's open data. Anyone, I don't know if anyone else is using that kind of data. Maybe I'm talking too much and I shouldn't have said this. But this is some of the data that we use.What we've been doing since maybe July last year, was we started also collecting our own data. So we collect data through surveys from several platforms. One of them is Prolific. Some of them is Amazon Mechanical Turk. There are lots of other micro task platforms that we collect data from. We have been collecting surveys. We have been collecting some qualitative interviews. Typically, the interviews we do are not even about problems and about concept testing, nothing like that. We have designed some interviews that are in our view essential to get a better understanding of how different aspects of people's lives are related and how they go along together. And this is really part of the core of the generation of the synthetic users and of the generation of the interviews themselves.We use a technique that is called retrieval augmented generation, RAG. So before any interview generation starts, we go and try to find relevant data in our data set to enrich the profile of that user. This is not visible to our end customer, but we enrich the profile of that user in terms of psychographics, aptitudes and then we generate data. So this is a little bit of the work we've been doing.And we're also now setting up a collaboration with some academic researchers in which we're going to be doing several studies comparing the results you get with synthetic users with the results you get with human interviews and human surveys.That's exciting.Yes, it is. It is. I'm really happy because it's something that we have on our wall in the office since day one, that is evaluation, which is the need to see how well the systems perform. It needs to be our number one priority, and we've been doing it, but informally and not sharing it with people out there, because we felt that just sharing numbers without sharing the full process wouldn't give the confidence to people that need it. Because they would just look at them and say, "Yes, these guys have something to sell, but they're hyping this just because they want to sell it."So I'm really happy doing this academic collaboration, because it's going to be a neutral group that is going to be running this. We're going to be paying for the participants and everything else, it's just about academia being neutral. And what I told the team that is doing this with us is, I want to see where we fall short. I want to see really concrete results of where do we perform best? Where do we fall short? What kind of topics we don't perform that well on?I can tell you one. I'm going to be really honest. We don't perform well on topics that touch sustainability. I'll explain why. Because the synthetic users tend to be a lot more worried about sustainability than conventional people. It has to do with the way they were trained. It has to do with some of the methodology that is used to fine tune these models, which is reinforcement learning and feedback. And they are a lot more concerned about the climate than most people are.And that is a topic that we have some measures in place to address it. But sometimes it happens that you go there and ask for feedback on some headphones and initially, not now, but they would always end up asking, "No, but I'm really worried about the process of building those headphones. Is it safe for the planet?" So they tend to be a little bit more worried about it than real people are, but we also know that real people tend to say that they are more worried about it than their actions then reflect.There seems to be lots of questions about bias in the data. How do you manage the bias in the data? You've given one example, what other ways do you manage it?Yes. So in terms of our data collection process, that's something that we started the data collection process also because of that, because we wanted to make sure that at least on our side we had really diverse data. We collect data about fishermen in Angola, which is not a group that I expect anyone to ever try to run interviews on synthetic users for. But we feel that having this data, that I'm using our data sets for having this kind of diversity, wouldn't reach any of the audiences that are generated through our platform. So we have this kind of problem.The thing is, there's a lot of the data sets that are used as training corpus for these models that is not real. Our corpus doesn't represent all human populations in the same way. English speaking populations are, of course, over represented. If you're thinking about the farmer in Botswana, it's quite improbable that he has an online footprint that is captured there. So there are populations in which we know are not represented in the data.In our particular case, since we are B2B, what we're doing is that the overlap between representation in online data and the overlap of the populations that companies want to study is quite good. I imagine that most companies are not, they don't want to interview fishermen in Angola or farmers in Botswana. I'm less worried about their lack of representation of those groups in the data that was used in training those models, because I also don't think people are coming to us to ask about those groups.Having said this, in our own data collection efforts, we're doing the best we can to really mitigate gender, race and all the kind of biases that we know are kind of part of the original corpus of training.As you look ahead, what are you most looking forward to, or how do you see this space, synthetic user research changing or evolving in five years?I think we're going to go beyond research. I think one of the things that I'm really looking forward to, we're starting to do that now with a feature that is coming in two weeks, is the idea of agents. The idea of going from just the discovery, understanding the market size and understanding the user needs, into also helping companies ideate, brainstorm, assess feasibility, assess market pull, test and validate with real people and even build the products itself.I think we will have agents in which a complex swarm of AI agents can build a product end to end in the sense that I can go to Synthetic Users and I can say, "I want to help single parents that live in Lisbon, Portugal and have an income less than X." And our system will put agents in those roles, they will simulate those personas, they will figure out what are the biggest pains they feel, they will figure out what are the market alternatives that are already in place, they will figure out what is a sufficiently differentiated new proposition that might solve those issues. They will figure out if there's business viability, if you can even make money building that product, it will assess the technical viability of building it. And then with the advances that we've been seeing, particularly on the software side, it might even build the product itself, might even write the copy, the marketing material for it.So in five years, I see this more as an end-to-end innovation engine than necessarily just a research piece, but we felt that beginning with the research piece was the right place to start. The Board of Innovation, a big agency, they like us a lot and we like them a lot. I think they came up for their summit last year, they came up with a really good name. They used, they called their summit "Autonomous Innovation", and I think it captures how I think about this space too.I'm curious, I want to return to the idea of being what I've heard described as "category generic". The name has captured the category. As somebody that works in branding and marketing, what's the upside, the benefit of that? And what's the downside?So the benefit is that we became the default name for people talking about the category, even when they're not aware that we exist as a company. So some people, because they saw some competitor start talking about synthetic users, then they go and Google and they discover that we exist. So there's that upside.There's a downside, which is, it's generic, so it's hard to then build as a brand with the artifacts that sometimes you need to have so it ends up capturing the category and not being necessarily specific enough to us, which at this stage where the category is still growing is a good thing.But I'm really happy that we made the decision to go with "Synthetic Users" because we almost don't need to explain it. We just say the name and most people have a sense of what you're discussing immediately without any explanation. And that's a really good thing when you're launching something as new as what we are.Listen, I want to really thank you so much for your time. You were generous a year ago by saying hello to me and especially today. So I really appreciate it.You're welcome. But it's always a pleasure to discuss these topics with you. You are a great conversationalist. So it's an amazing experience to have these kinds of conversations with someone who understands the industry, understands what we're trying to do, and gives us the best possibility of discussing.I wish you the best of luck and thank you again. Have a great weekend, Hugo.Thank you so much. Have a great weekend, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

AI Summary. In this engaging conversation from Peter Spear's series, brand strategist and educator Inaki Escudero discusses his journey from Spain to the U.S. and his unique perspective on mentor brands. Inaki and Peter explore how brands can guide and inspire customers by assuming a mentor role, emphasizing the importance of purpose and ethics in brand strategy. Through examples like REI and personal anecdotes, Inaki highlights the power of curiosity, meaningful brand-customer relationships, and the potential for building community through shared purpose.Inaki Escudero is an advisor and teacher who has his own firm, The Real Hero, that helps teams build Mentor brands. He is also a gifted teacher, at Hyper Island, teaching brand strategy, storytelling and ethics. We hit it off almost immediately, and it was a joy to talk to him about this work, and how he works with clients. I start all of these conversations with the same question and it's a question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who lives here in Hudson. She's an oral historian and helps people tell their stories. I always over explain it because it's such a powerful question. I want you to know you're in total control. You can answer or not answer the question any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from?That's a very relevant question because my family and I are just doing the DNA heritage thingy. It's a question that we've been trying to answer, and also the implications of where you really come from. It's funny because if you look at the lower percentages, my kids have 1 percent from Morocco, 1 percent from Nigeria, 1 percent from Mali, and it makes you think.We know we come from Africa, all of us, but that 1 percent is still in our DNA. There's 1 percent from China, which we all think is the famous Genghis Khan. It's really three quarters of the population of the world are related to Genghis Khan. So it might come from there. When you start looking at the higher percentages, there's 60 percent from Europe, maybe a little bit more and the rest comes from Latin America, because of my wife who is from Peru. When you get to Europe the higher percentage is Spanish, 20, 25%, there's Basque, 10, 15%, depending on who. There is a little bit of Scottish, a little bit of Irish, and a little bit of French.Where are you from? Where do you come from? Where do you feel you're from is not necessarily the same things because we all come from Africa and we have about 4 percent in our case of African ancestry, but I've never felt in my life that there was anything within me attached to Africa.I guess I can say I was born in Madrid, Spain from parents who were refugees in Mexico because of the Spanish Civil War. Because of that tradition of moving that my family had, I had to explore what was beyond my reality in Madrid. When I was 28 years old, I left, came to the U.S. and I've been here ever since.Do you have a memory of being a child? What you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be?Besides the obvious, I want to be a policeman, a firefighter, a doctor, I never had a calling. I studied psychology because I felt that was the most interesting of the non-traditional paths. I didn't want to be a lawyer, an economist, any of those. None of them called my attention.I thought understanding people was very interesting. Of course the first day in class, there were about 110 people in class. There were 102 women and four guys in my class. Back in 1982, psychology was perceived to be the type of career women took to become therapists, back in Spain.There were three guys, I was one of them, and the teacher says, "How many of you are here because you want to understand people better?" Almost everybody raised their hand and said "If that's the reason why you're here, you chose the wrong career." We were like okay, that's a very promising first day.But I think eventually I understood what the teacher said. Psychology is much more complex than just understanding people, even though it might be at the heart of it. There are other things that you can do with psychology besides understanding people, I guess more the application. But at the heart of it, it is about understanding ourselves and others, and how our experiences impact who we are.I was struck by how you said "I didn't have a calling." You were so clear about that. What do you mean when you say that?In Spain when you are about to go to college, you were supposed to put your preferences. I put psychology, politics, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Of course when you look at that, none of them are going to give you any money, except maybe politics. But I guess I wasn't looking at choosing a career that was going to give me money. I was looking for understanding, I was looking for what I'm passionate about. What is going to be the easiest way to spend five years learning about something where it doesn't become a burden. At that time, the career was five years. Five years is a long time to be committed to one single path of learning.I'm curious, I'm really again struck by the picture of you being one of three men in a room full of women, having put yourself in a position to understand people in what at the time was a feminine space. Where do you think that came from? How did it feel to be one of three?It felt weird because I never felt, I always felt, and I guess this tells you much more than you need to know about me, but I always felt that they were the ones that were in the wrong place. I never felt that I was in the wrong place.I'm trying to understand what this is all about and how this works. If you are here because you are hoping to use psychology to be a better mate, I think you are in the wrong place. I always felt that I belonged there.Eventually I think that if I can pick perhaps the biggest topic to chat with you about is the idea of psychology and how whoever is in charge of designing how we are going to break that down into topics and subject matters that you are supposed to know for you to work as a psychologist, I think that there was a disconnect between the excitement about what psychology means and the subjects that I had to study like logic. Logic was three years. I think, okay, that caught me by surprise. Why is logic and the application of logic to the way we think relevant to psychology? I wouldn't be surprised that if you were to look at the curriculum today that subject is completely gone. The same way that I grew up studying Latin and Greek back in Spain. The classic languages were mandatory even more than English back in the day.Wow. You still have that in you somewhere. Let's see. How did you, so you said you left, tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're up to now, your work and your life today.Psychology was a stepping stone, a good stepping stone because I feel that I've applied the basic mental models that I learned in college, I've been able to apply to basically every job I've done.I teach in a university in Sweden called Hyper Island. I teach about brand society and storytelling, and I also teach about the ethical implications of technology and the rapid progression of technology in our lives. The idea is to help students understand if we have the chance to look into the future, what decisions will be made today that will change your mind about what to create and what not to create. I think it's important. I think Facebook is a good example of what happens when you just grow without looking, without stopping for a second to think about what could be the worst possible unintended consequence of Facebook.When did you first encounter brand? When did you bump into the idea that you could make a living, that there was a thing out there called brand and that you could make a living?That's a good question. I was in Houston. I had studied film in New York. I moved to Texas and there wasn't any film industry or very small film industry happening in Texas at the time. A lot of production came to Texas, but the productions came from LA or New York, production being previews from Texas was very limited.Somebody told me with psychology and filmmaking as your background, maybe you should think about working in advertising. I said, "Really? Why?" They said, "You can write, so why don't you give it a try?" I interviewed with a Hispanic agency to be a copywriter and at the time they were desperate for people who could actually write in Spanish. I didn't have a book, I didn't have anything, but I was hired.I remember sitting in the office already, I showed up with my suit and they said no, in creativity, you don't wear a suit. I said, "Okay, that was good to know. You need to look the part and creatives are more loose, more creative." But I didn't know any of that. I was 30 years old. I was absorbing everything and learning how to be creative.That took me to understand at the service of what my creativity was doing and at the time I learned that it is to help brands be perceived in a way that people will want to buy them. I remember thinking about it in a very logical way. So I need to write messages for people to notice them so they could buy that brand. That's the exercise I did. That's the first time I thought of a brand as anything.How has your thinking about brand changed? You have a beautiful way of talking about it.Thank you. It has been transformed completely because after 20 years practicing, I learned that brands are very interesting because we have perceptions and feelings about brands. How do you regulate that? How do you create those feelings so people can have a more elevated relationship with a brand beyond the product or the service they offer you?The realization that the way I feel about Apple is different from just the mere, simple transaction of using your computer or putting on a watch, or the way I feel when I use my Nike app when I go for a run, that is not just keeping my time or the path on a map, but I feel differently when I use Under Armour than when I use Nike. I feel different when I use a Dell computer as when I use an Apple computer. That is the brand.If you get to work on building that brand, the architecture of emotions that you get to decide and bring to life so people create those perceptions and those feelings towards that brand, I think is a beautiful thing. It is a good job. It's a good job to have. It's a good challenge to solve. It's a good puzzle to look at. I guess the combination of psychology with filmmaking, with creativity, are good skills to have to operate in that business.What do you love about the work that you do? Where's the joy in it for you?What I love is right now with founders is that they are building something they believe in and they are looking at it through the very practical lens of this is a great product, this is a great service, this is a great company. When I start to talk to them about their brand, "How about your brand? How do you want people to feel?", they realize that they perhaps didn't think enough about that.I love that moment where I can inspire people to think about what they are doing in a different way, and to elevate that thinking. It's not just the product, the company you're building, but the people that are going to use it. How do you want them to feel when they are using it? The fact that they have the power to choose that, I love that moment when they realize, "How, so I get to choose? And you can help me figure that out?" Then the journey of understanding, solving that puzzle, I think it's fascinating. I love that. That brings me energy.Can you tell me a story about a moment like that you had?Perhaps the first real time I had is this woman from Sweden who grew up in Burkina Faso. You could imagine a blonde Swedish girl growing up in Burkina Faso 34 years ago. Her parents were missionaries and they were spending a lot of time there. Of course she was just playing with the other kids and she grew up in that environment.When she became an adult, she reflected on having this dual experience of growing up between Sweden and Burkina Faso, a developed country, one of the most developed in terms of society, most developed countries and one of the poorest countries in the world. She couldn't live with that reality. She couldn't make sense of how we can all be going about our lives, knowing that some kids, some communities in Burkina Faso are so poor that their issue is whether or not they are going to be alive tomorrow. This is the very first layer of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - I don't know if I'm going to survive tomorrow.She couldn't understand how can we go about our lives knowing that in this big community of our planet, there are people who live in that level of misery. So she decided to do something about it. She created a nonprofit called Yennenga Progress, and she wanted to help communities move out of poverty. It's not just poverty, the real term is absolute poverty. There is poverty, but there is absolute poverty.She decided to tackle that problem in a community that she knew. She went there with her best intentions and she realized something that perhaps not many people realize - the only way to get people out of poverty is by solving all the problems they have at the same time. It's not that we need to solve education and we need to solve water pollution, or we need to solve politics and government and infrastructure. When you are in absolute poverty, the only way to move on is to solve all of them at the same time.But she didn't know how to tell this story. The first time I asked her, "Tell me about what you do", she spent 45 minutes telling me all the things she was doing to solve the problem and the story wasn't even connected. She would tell me about an anShe would tell me about an anecdote of a little child and then another anecdote about a donor in Sweden.Because of the work we did together, I said, "Your story is fascinating, but you need to manage a way where you tell the story in 1 or 2 minutes that you can tell people this powerful story in a way that inspires action because you need people to donate to help you."The realization that she was mentoring donors, basically - remember when we spoke the first time, we spoke about how my perception of branding is that the brand is no longer the hero, the user, the customer is, and the brand then becomes the mentor. If she's mentoring somebody, who is she mentoring? Of course, most people will tell you the communities that she's helping move out of poverty, but they don't need a mentor, they need money.The person who needs the mentor, her hero, is the person in Sweden or in any other part of the world who wants to help, wants to do something about poverty, but doesn't know how. When she has this clarity that "my hero is the donor and I need to create the communications to show this donor, my hero, that they can help with 5, with 10, with 100, in many other ways", then your communications becomes very focused and with a very specific purpose.That is a great case study of how all the experiences that I've had narrowed down to helping a founder understand the clarity that she needs to do the job that she needs to do.It's a beautiful story. That shift is really, you can just feel it's so powerful. It's really wonderful. The mentor-hero, it's so powerful. Tell me more about what you mean when you say "mentor brand", and how you're applying or helping people assume that role. What does that ask of a founder to be a mentor? What happens in that shift for them?It's funny because if we think about storytelling, storytelling is everything. Everything is a story. Brands are a story. If you think of a brand as a story that is developing and unfolding over time every single day, who are the characters in that?Of course, many founders, especially founders, feel that they are the hero. They are going through their hero's journey. They are going against all obstacles, having to learn new things that they didn't know to create something. It's very easy for you to think that's the hero's journey and you are the hero of the story. You want to talk about what you do, how you do it, your incredible conviction that this product, this service that you're creating needs to see the light of day.But every service and every product we create, we do it for somebody to improve somebody's life some way or another. Otherwise, what we try to create is not going to find a market. You need to find a market, and that market is made of people with needs.Why are you laughing?It's just I'm just appreciating how elementary it is, but how necessary it is to be very clear. You just did a beautiful shift from, yes, we can talk about markets, but those markets are full of people. You've just humanized the whole process. I'm just appreciating it.So these people have needs. If you are creating something and you are aware of the needs of these people, then you create something that people need, but also improves their lives. When you look at marketing and brands that way, and you add the layer of storytelling, and you ask yourself again, what role, not only what role you play, but what role do you want to play?I think the brands that have inspired me the most are the brands that have been in my life for a long time. Nike - first pair of running shoes I bought in 1999 to train for the New York Marathon. 25 years later, they still are my mentor. The messages they put out for runners, the products, the services they put out for runners, they behave like a mentor. This is the way you do it, I'm going to mentor you into becoming a better runner at every stage. When I wasn't a runner, there's a step up. When I'm a runner that runs every day, there's always a step up. There's somebody to look up to.If you could choose what kind of brand you want to be, why not choose to be the mentor? The mentor is the person who is constantly by your side when you need them, offering you wisdom, solutions, when they need to give you an artifact for you to fight the dragon. They give you a pat on the back to encourage you - "Don't give up, I believe in you." They are there to tell you that. When they need to tell you you're being ridiculous, "Get over yourself, you need to stay focused", they do. They play that role too.If a brand could play a role, I would say that playing the mentor is fascinating because it also allows you to look at your customer, not as a transaction, but as a hero. If you see your customers as heroes, then the type of products, services and communications that you create are beautiful.How do you know when you've gotten the client to that place, like when is there a moment when you feel like, okay, they've gotten it, they understand, they're communicating in a way or they're thinking in a way that is - because that feels like a pretty powerful shift. I'm just curious, how do you know when the work is done, when somebody's assumed the mentor role?You know what, Peter, once I tell this story to people, everybody wants to be a mentor. I have found no resistance whatsoever from anybody saying "No, but Iñaki, hold on a second, I need to be the hero." Nobody has ever said that to me. I think mentor also means that there is a level of, there's something fascinating about the world needs your wisdom. The world needs you to be a mentor.I think it's a role we all want to play someday. People get it. It happens very early. From then on, it's telling people "Because you're a mentor, these are the type of messages you do. Because you're a mentor, this is where you need to be. You play the long game, you're here for them for the long term, and you're not just interested in a transaction. The transaction is a consequence of your behavior. Even if you don't get a transaction right now, if you get it six months down the line, that's still a win."It's all applying the storytelling, even today with the trilogies, it's not just one movie. In the case of my daughters, they were watching yesterday's Spider-Man. There are five different Spider-Man movies. When you play the long game, Marvel had to plan out 17 movies to tell one single story. To me, whoever at the studio approved that is a visionary, because you need to come with a long page that says, "Okay, we are going to produce this movie. But this movie is actually related to the seventh movie, which is eventually going to resolve the conflict in the 11th movie."What I love about the mentor, and I shared this with you, I can't resist sharing this story every time the word comes up, because when somebody told it to me, it blew my mind. The mentor is the character that Odysseus leaves his son with. So Mentor is his name in one of the oldest stories of time and that man was responsible for raising the son, I think Telemachus is his son.That struck me as so amazing because I had found mentors in my own professional life. I feel very lucky that I found men who taught me how to do what I do. I had one mentor professionally, I'm really grateful for.But it also speaks to that idea of brands as myths, which I geek out about. As a culture, I think Grant McCracken says the responsibility of culture is to raise an adult. We're supposed to help us grow up and assume responsibility for our life and our place in the world and all that stuff.What I love about mentor is that it, and maybe this is a thread that we share clearly, but through all of your work, brand isn't really only this sort of marketing thing, it is more significant than that. I'm just wondering, maybe if this is a bridge, it's a bridge, but maybe not, but you teach about, you teach ethics. So what is purpose and what is ethics? What is purpose driven? What is the responsibility of a brand, of a brand builder as you see it?I think I have to speak about myself for me to be able to put this in perspective. Helping others, when I started to speak on behalf of Hyper Island in front of 40, 50, 100 people talking about digital transformation, at one point, there's always a slide with your picture when you need to tell people who you are. You do that enough times, and I was doing it maybe once per month, so 12 times per year. There is a picture of yourself on a slide on the screen, I need to tell people who you are.I came to this tension - do I tell people what I do or do I tell people who I am? Because they are not the same thing. I felt that what I do was a combination of different things. I was a facilitator, I was a learning designer, I was a speaker, I was a strategist. It was very complex for me to say what I did or define myself as "this is what I do." I didn't necessarily like being defined by what I do because what we do doesn't really speak about the higher long-term building of our character.I decided that I wanted to speak about who I am and who I am could only be explained about my intention in life, not who I am, where I come from or to your first question, but who I am aspiring to become. I found after many iterations of it, and I wouldn't bore you with iterations, but because I was doing it very often, at one point I was doing it even twice per month, I was able to test which one of these versions felt better.I ended up using one that based on the feedback of people felt very true - Iñaki Escudero, my purpose is to inspire people to fall in love with learning again. It came from this conviction that as we grow up, we lose the passion for learning. Most people, not all of us, most people, and I think it's to the point of Sir Ken Robinson on education, the school takes that incredible imagination, incredible thirst for learning, that curiosity that all kids have - it's taken away from us. "Don't be curious. Don't ask why anymore. Just stay in your lane. Choose one thing to do and stay on that lane."I've always been very curious. It seemed to me like the purpose of inspiring people to fall in love with learning again was explaining who I was, like I want my curiosity to be contagious to other people and use that to learn anything you want because when we learn we can transform ourselves into anything.I was curious about film. I studied film even though I had studied psychology. My parents went, "Are you crazy? Are you going to change your career? You have, you barely started." "Yeah, but I'm very curious about it. It's your fault because you forced me to watch all those black and white movies growing up and you made me fall in love with them, so I blame them."What movies?All of them. My father was a huge film fan. From the Japanese Kurosawa movies to the Italian films to anything - the westerns from the U.S., the gangster movies with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, the classics.In New York I met many people studying film and we were talking in a party or a social event and they're like, "Yeah I have to go home because I have to write a paper about the role of film noir in American society." I was like, "Are you crazy? That's the most fascinating assignment I could think of. I need to give it a try. I don't want to be 50 and regret never having done this."I think the main thing to take away for me at that time was that when I express my purpose, I express not only what my intention is, but the clarity that I have when it comes to choosing what I want to do next. If I could inspire people to fall in love with learning through being a coach, I could teach a class, I could write a blog, I could do a podcast. I could bring that purpose to life in all the different ways that I wanted to do. It's not limited.Once I had that clarity, eventually I came to the realization that helping people with the same level of clarity - if you have a purpose, then you open the possibilities of what you can do. I wanted to help other people see that level of clarity, have that level of clarity about themselves and eventually turn that into a business if I could.How's that going?It's going great. I've had 12 times in the last 10 months, people from all over the world - Mexico, Argentina, the U.S. It's really rewarding because it seems to pay off pretty much everything we've been talking about with your very insightful question. It's a consequence of everything that I've learned how to do and all my passion. It's the intersection of everything I'm good at, and this is the Iñaki guide, everything I'm good at with everything I'm passionate about.Congratulations.Thank you. I'm 58 years old, so for people who are younger than me, be patient. For people who are older than me, just be intentional about that. It's not going to come to you. In my case, it was because I was forced to speak about who I was. That led me to that intersection of, is it what I do or is it who I am?It's so interesting that you just talked about it, that you had to do it in front of other people in a way that maybe this wouldn't have happened in isolation.It wouldn't have, because it's an easy question to say, "I'll do it tomorrow, I don't have to think about that right now. Let me watch Netflix."We have a few minutes left, and I want, I'm curious about the idea of ethics because I feel it's just been, how do I want to articulate this question? The idea of brand purpose captivated everybody, the idea that brands needed to have a social mission, and the social mission was the brand purpose, and I always felt like brands already had a purpose, and maybe social mission is an additional purpose, but they shouldn't be confused.I feel like we conflated them for a while. Now with AI coming, we're in this place where there's this whole other - I'm not doing a very good job with this question. What do you mean about, what does brand purpose mean today? You talk about ethics in brand building. What do you mean? Or what are you teaching when you teach ethics?Let's talk about ethics in the context of purpose because they are related. You can only be ethical if you know the boundaries you are willing or not willing to step beyond to remain true to your essence. Purpose is very much related to ethics.If we go back to purpose, there's this example I use in my classes, I use it with my clients, it's fascinating. I'm going to tell you a little story about REI, the store. They are an outdoors store. They compete with every other store that sells outdoor equipment from Big 5 Sporting Goods to Patagonia, Walmart and anybody. Academy here in Texas.If you are thinking "I need a tent to go camping this weekend with my family", all those options are an option for you. But if you are a little bit more conscious about what kind of company you want to buy from, then you do a little bit of research. If you come across REI and you dig a little bit on their website, you learn that REI was founded by a group of people who love climbing and they love climbing so much they wanted access to the best equipment, but the best equipment was in Europe. They didn't have money to buy the very expensive equipment from Europe, I'm talking about the 1950s.They had an idea - "What if we come together, pitch in, put all our money together, and we buy that equipment and then we take turns using that equipment." It's not a coincidence that REI is a co-op, it was born out of the idea that when we collaborate to do something, we achieve more than when we are by ourselves. That's why REI is a co-op and not Patagonia or Academy or any other store.Going back to the origins of the founders' story educates the purpose. The purpose of REI - no, the moral of the story of REI, which is more important, or the first step than the purpose, is because they were climbing so much and their idea of sharing resources allowed them to spend more time doing what they love. The moral of the story of REI is that we find our true selves when we are in the outdoors. That's the lesson they learned, is that we find our true selves when we are in the outdoors.If you're going to create a company, obviously your company is going to have to promote that lesson that you've learned to other people. Because you know this, but other people don't. And you want other people to know what you know. The purpose of REI, as declared by them on their website, is to inspire people to spend more time in the outdoors, because when you're in the outdoors, you find the best version of yourself.Again, I guess I completely picked on logic, but I keep using logic. The founders had that experience. They learned that lesson. They create a company so other people can learn that lesson. If the best version of ourselves is found in the outdoors, then ethically, I need to protect the outdoors because the outdoors represent the best version of humanity.To me, it's all related. Patagonia has found the same different moral, different purpose, different path of evolution as an outdoor company, because the founder is a different person and he had a different experience. But eventually they agree on the basics - we need to protect our planet. Patagonia believes this because we need to protect what's most precious. REI believes that we need to protect it because we find our best version of humanity in the outdoors. Similar lessons, similar principles, but different approach to it.Patagonia is helping other businesses because this problem can no longer be solved by individuals, it can only be solved by companies. That's their mission right now. REI continues to focus on if I can get one more person to enjoy the outdoors, and in the long term relationship of that because they might sell you a tent, but then they offer tours to escalate your experience of the outdoors to better, more professional. They take you like a true mentor, from the very beginning stages of enjoying the outdoors to the ultimate - go and climb the Himalaya if you want to.They are a true mentor brand. This is REI. Clear purpose.I feel like that, I mean, it's all, it fell into place listening to you. When I think of REI, they're the ones they did the Black Friday - "Go out, get outside". That's them. It makes sense. "Get outside." Just tell me if I'm wrong, but purpose comes first. When you have a good idea of purpose, then the ethics could flow out of purpose.Absolutely. Also, purpose - the mentor relationship, if they've assumed mentorship for the outdoor enthusiast, then it's obvious what to do on a Black Friday. When everybody else is shopping, what would you do for somebody, what would you do for somebody if you wanted them to have an experience of their best self? You would tell them to go outside.You're right, I find it, I like how you've bashed logic in the past, but the lessons come in a logical fashion. See this is how it works. They are a co-op, and belonging to the co-op costs you one dollar, and it's a lifetime membership. That's how much they want you to become, to fall in love with their outdoors.Beautiful. Listen, we're at the end of the hour, this has been, it's really easy to talk to you, a real joy. I thank you so much for your time, I'm so glad we were able to make it happen.The funny thing about this, Peter, is now it's your turn, so we need to coordinate our time so I can interview you because I had to beat my time not to ask you questions like 25 times.That's great. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

I am a true fan of Jeffrey Kripal’s work. I think his invitation to re-think the humanities by seriously engaging with the study of mystical and paranormal experiences is a beautiful thing. We talk about category creation in the marketing of products. Here, we are talking about the humanities, and the discipline we use to explore and understand the world, and our experiences of it. I was absolutely thrilled to get a chance to speak with him. I hope you enjoy.PeterAI Summary. Scholar Jeffrey Kripal discusses his efforts to "re-enchant" the humanities by taking seriously the extraordinary experiences that have shaped many great thinkers. He explores the distinctly American "spiritual but not religious" movement, its roots in the country's pluralistic approach to spirituality, and the challenges it poses in creating stable communities. Kripal also reflects on the mental health struggles of younger generations, who often feel depressed by the world they have inherited. He suggests that "The Superhumanities," by offering positive visions of human potential and the future, can provide hope in the face of these challenges. The conversation ultimately highlights the importance of integrating extraordinary human experiences into our understanding of ourselves and the world.Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he served as the Associate Dean of the School of Humanities (2019-2023), chaired the Department of Religion for eight years, and also helped create the GEM Program, a doctoral concentration in the study of Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism that is the largest program of its kind in the world. He presently helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he served as Chair of Board from 2015 to 2020. Rice is the home of the Archives of the Impossible.He specializes in the study of extreme religious states and the re-visioning of a New Comparativism, particularly as both involve putting “the impossible” back on the academic table again. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the history of religions and the sciences for The University of Chicago Press, collectively entitled The Super Story.Thank you for being here. I start all my conversations with the same question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She teaches oral history, and it's this beautiful question, so I always use it, but then I over-explain it, because I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? That's a loaded question. I can tell you where I come from organically or biologically. I'm not sure I can tell you where I come from metaphysically. I come from Nebraska. I grew up in the American Midwest, a little farming community, actually grew up in a hardware store. Oh, wow. Metaphysically, I'm not so sure. I don't know. I don't remember, I'll put it that way. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you were a kid, when you grew up? Yeah, I do. I wanted to be a comic book artist. That was my first dream and that didn't happen. Then I wanted to be an NFL quarterback. Then I wanted to be probably a Catholic missionary, and then I wanted to be a medical doctor, and then I became a professor of religion of all things. We fail at certain things, and we succeed at other things. What was your first comic book? What was your sort of entry into comics?I was born in '62. And I grew up, of course, in the late '60s, early '70s, and Marvel Comics was still inappropriate at that point, which meant it was good. Marvel Comics was a radical disjunction from what we call the DC universe - Superman and Batman. They were blocky figures in the '60s. They knew right from wrong, and they stood for the American way, and it was all this sort of impenetrable man kind of thing going on. With Marvel, the so-called heroes were always making fun of themselves and their villains, and the Hulk was always battling the U.S. Army. Dr. Strange was on God only knows what. We, as kids, didn't know anything about LSD or psychedelics, but the comics were wild and they were psychedelic in a creative or an inspirational sense. Those were really what inspired me early on as a kid, as a little kid. I couldn't explain why I found these bodies so attractive and so exciting but I did. I was what, 11 or 12 or whatever I was.So that was my initial fascination. It was actually comic books, and I know they make a lot of money now, and they're all over the screen and the television, but they weren't in the '60s and '70s. They were just basically a kind of junk literature for kids that was sold where your dad bought pornography. It was a drug store. So they were like drugs for 11-year-olds. Tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're working on. I think I'm at the same place. I think I'm stuck into superhumans and comics. I don't do psychedelics, but maybe sometimes I wish I did. I'm still really interested in people's extraordinary experiences. I think the human being is an extraordinary being and is far more than we imagined. So I think I'm still with the superhero comics of my youth. I just call them saints or mystics or something else now. I think it's the same kind of fascination. I resonated with your work. I really have read everything and just connected on so many levels throughout. I'm excited to talk to you about this stuff and I'm really amazed at what you're doing at Rice. You're formalizing this stuff in a pretty radical way. It seems to me anyway, like you're asking for things that never felt like they were taken seriously to be really considered. I just wonder what that's been like and when did that actually begin? When did you decide that this was what you wanted to be doing? First of all, I want to hear what you resonated with, because that to me is the real key here. I think with an academic or an intellectual, you either move or you create an environment around you that reflects something of what you're doing. I think I've done the latter. Rice University is a very friendly, very good place to be and to work, and it allows a kind of creativity that a lot of other schools don't allow. I know that because I've taught at other schools. I used to live on the East Coast and I lived in Pennsylvania and I interviewed at a lot of East Coast schools, including Ivy League schools, and they all wanted to tell me what to do. When I came to Rice, they were like, "You can do whatever you want. We'll follow you." I didn't believe them, Peter, because I had been told the opposite for many years, but I believe it now. I think it's essentially true, at least of this institution. So what I've done is I've created an ecosystem around myself and have tried to authorize and mainstream a lot of the interests I've always had and I've always written about, but didn't seem to have a home or a stable home. What I'm finding is that the academy and my colleagues are very friendly to these interests and that most people have these interests. They just don't admit it. So when I talk about these things or when I write about them or host conferences around them, people are like, "Yeah, we should be doing this." And I'm like, "Yeah, you should." Of course, I think the reason the humanities are being defunded and ignored is because we don't do this. We don't address the issues that really matter to a lot of people. I think we should. I also think all the critical theory and all the issues around race and gender and class are really important. But I think we also need to do this sort of vertical dimension. You wrote, "Why do we let the physicists go off and they tell these fabulous stories about string theory and yet we don't allow ourselves to talk about this stuff?" Can you tell me a little bit about what it is, for people who don't know your work, like what are you asking the humanities to do? I think I said that in "The Secret Body." It’s a memoir I wrote and what I was trying to talk about was that scientists and physicists can get away with the craziest s**t. They can say the most outrageous things, and because they're a physicist, everybody's like, "Oh yeah, that's possible." I'm like, "We've been saying that for thousands of years in the history of religions. Why are we crazy and they're not?" Of course, the answer is they're scientists and you're not. That doesn't really work for me. That's just a kind of invocation of authority. So what I do is I look at people's anomalous experiences that are not supposed to happen - things like out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, UFO encounters with entities, these sorts of things. I look at them and I realize that they do happen and that the people are actually telling the truth about what happens to them. They don't understand what happened to them. I don't think they're their own authorities. I don't think they understand or can interpret their own experiences. I don't think I can either, but I think we're being invited to try to do that. So that's what I do. I sit with and I think with people who have had these extraordinary or impossible experiences and I put them on the table with the table and the chairs and history and literature and everything else. I say, "Okay, let's think about all this together. Why do these things happen to people? And why do they happen to people in every culture at every time as far back as we can see?" If there's a universal in human experience, it's definitely the anomalous or the impossible. We've been having these experiences from way, way back. How did we get separated from these experiences?I would say by the 18th, 19th century, we start to separate from them, and certainly in the 20th century, we separate from them dramatically, at least in Western culture, Euro-American culture. I wrote an intellectual history of the word "paranormal" called "Authors of the Impossible." One of the takeaways of that little book is that all of the words we use today, like paranormal, psychical, parapsychological, all these terms were all originated or were coined by scientists and intellectuals, mostly in the 19th or early 20th century. During the 20th century, what happens is science and technology arise, and we turn to kind of computer mechanistic models of the mind, and suddenly the mind just becomes a kind of software of the wetware of the brain, and all of these things don't make any sense within that model. So people say they don't happen. They're hallucinations or people are crazy, or they're making this up, or they're looking for money or whatever the rhetoric is. But in fact, that's wrong. What I mean by the impossible is essentially these things that happen all the time, but aren't supposed to happen because of the parameters of our particular worldview. They're not actually possible within the parameters of what we consider to be real, but they happen anyway. So the big thought experiment for me is, "Okay, what must reality be like if these things happen?" Of course, there's no "if" - they do happen. Okay, so what must reality be? It's not what we're told it is. That's a part of the answer for sure. That can explain certainly my daily life, most of my daily life, but it actually can't explain these extraordinary moments. I'm basically making the wager that reality has to take in these extraordinary moments as well as these ordinary moments.Your most recent book is "The Superhumanities," which is a proposal to rethink the way comparative religion approaches this stuff. I don’t know enough about academia. What are you teaching today about how to approach these kinds of things? First of all, the academy is culture. You are a part of the academy and to the extent you're part of culture, of course you are. The academy is really just a bunch of people who are trained to think about culture and to think about the history of it and the contours of what a human being is and what reality is. So I think what academics or professors do is really a reflection of what society thinks. The argument of "The Superhumanities" is that if you look at the canon, if you will, or the people we read over and over again in the humanities, they all base their ideas on altered states. They had ecstatic experiences, they had precognitions, they had near-death experiences. They don't always write about those in the books, but they're behind the ideas that they write. Or they were taking psychedelics. William James is a good example. He's literally sucking nitrous oxide and eating peyote on the side and studying psychics, by the way. He spent his whole adult life studying mediums and psychics. So once you realize that the books we read and the ideas we teach are based on these extraordinary states, this modern notion that we can strip out all the extraordinary stuff, all the altered stuff, it's just crazy. Of course, the result is depression and a kind of boredom with what professors and universities do, and I get that. I share that. I think it's flatland, too, and so I want to add this sort of vertical dimension to things. The other joke I tell is last Halloween all these kids came up to our door looking for candy, and I'd say about two-thirds of them were dressed up as superhumans. No one was dressed up as a professor of religion, by the way. No one. No kid wanted to be an academic or a professor of anything. But about two-thirds of them wanted to be superhuman. So it's also a marketing issue, to be banal about it. It's a marketing crisis. We are not talking about higher education in a way that's attractive and that's actually faithful to the history of what higher education is. I think it's exciting. I think it's incredibly cool and I think we make it not cool or we make it too real or we only talk about the critical aspects which are again important but we don't talk about the positive or the affirmative aspects. It's beautiful. I really appreciate that, absolutely, that you corrected me by eliminating the division I put between the academy and culture immediately. I grew up in a hardware store, Peter. I grew up in the Midwest. My family are all farmers and small business people. They're people. I don't imagine for a moment standing outside of that or being somehow special. I think higher education has given me a lot of special ideas, but I think those special ideas again originated in these altered states and in these other people. So it's really human beings that I think are special, not academics. Academics just have the luxury and the benefit or the opportunity to write and to make film and to make art and to be creative in a way and not have to worry about our paycheck or our health insurance. That's extraordinary. And that's, by the way, historically unique as well. I don't take that for granted either. Do you remember, when did you realize that this is something you could make a living doing? I didn't. I never did. I was a weird kid, Peter. I was super religious, by the way. I was more religious than you probably would have liked. What is that? That's rather presumptuous. Yeah, it is a presumption, but it's a pretty fair presumption because I think I annoyed and offended lots of people with my piety. Why I'm saying that is I was fascinated. I got into religion. I wanted to be a monk, actually. I learned about the unconscious. I learned about Freud. I learned psychoanalysis. I was just a kid again from Nebraska. I didn't know any of this. Wow, that was mind-blowing. So I just pursued this. I guess this is what I'm trying to say. I just pursued these ideas. Then when the time came to get a job, magically, I got a job, but that didn't have to happen, Peter. A lot of my colleagues didn't get jobs and a lot of my students don't get jobs. Why did I get a job? I don't know. I know somebody made a mistake and hired me. But then when you back in, as I say, we all back into the academy, particularly the study of religion, you back into it. You don't grow up wanting to be it. You confront some problem or some issue with your community or your tradition or your culture that it cannot answer. It probably can't even ask that question, but you realize that these questions are asked all the time in the university. So you're like, "I can do this." That's why I say you back into the discipline or the field, not because you grew up wanting to be that, but because that was the only institution that will have you essentially, is what I'm trying to say. But that's important. That's really important. That's culture, by the way, again. So I think there's something remarkable about our culture that lifts up higher education, even though that same higher education is very challenging to the broader kind of social structures that lift it up. You define culture, I think, as "consciousness encoded." Is this phrase that I remember that you use. Can you talk more about - I'm, that just hit me like lightning when I read it. I hadn't encountered that idea exactly that way before. Yeah, I think the definition is - what is the definition? The humanities. The humanities are consciousness coded in culture. What I mean by that is you think, and I think - I'm saying you think, I don't know what you think, but I know I think what I think because of the society I live in. Even my sense of inwardness, even my sense of what's conscious and unconscious is really a function of this mad social imaginary that has raised me. I'm speaking English now, which is an entirely learned skill that I learned in this social imaginary. So this social world that we're in literally creates us, and it literally allows certain kinds of forms of consciousness and doesn't allow other forms of consciousness. When I describe society or the humanities as consciousness coded in culture, what I mean is that there's a particular form of awareness that's coded in things like language and ritual and law and politics and all these things that we just take for granted as the way the world really works, but it actually doesn't really work like that. Those are all local ways that we shape consciousness and that we create a person. You can think about this if you think about your dog or your cat. They have a very different personhood than you do because they've been shaped by different social practices. That's what I mean. I think we underestimate how deep our conditioned or constructed nature goes. I remember reading - do you know Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm? Yeah.So I fed, I'll confess, I fed some of your stuff into the AI and asked it to tell me questions to ask you. And one of it said, I'm going to quote this just for your entertainment: "Kripal's current focus is on renewing and revisioning the comparative method for the study of religion, aiming to re-enchant the field and make it magical and miraculous again." I just got that off of my bio. I just stole that off my bio. I don't think very much of AI, by the way. It's just stealing crap. That's all it's doing. So what about this idea of re-enchantment? Does this feel, does this connect with what you're doing or is it - do you want me to talk about Jason? Yes, I would love to hear that. Yes. He doesn't think we've ever been disenchanted and I think he's right. What he means by that is that the birth of the human sciences or what we now call the humanities and the social sciences, really have all of these moments in them that are literally magical. So people like Madame Curie are going to seances, for example, and seeing electricity around the heads of mediums. Somehow this is connected to her work on radioactivity and the birth of modern physics. Jason traces hundreds of these moments and shows that actually, if you look at the very individuals who say there was disenchantment, or who we say are responsible for disenchantment, they're actually enchanted. They're doing enchantment as they work. This is very much the argument of "The Superhumanities," which is that yeah, we can talk about a re-enchantment because we have disenchanted the fields to a great extent. But in fact, they've always had this enchantment inside them. This is what draws people to these books and these ideas.You also identify Esalen, or the Human Potential Movement - and please correct me if I'm wrong - as being a particularly American thing. Is that true? Does that feel fair? Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that if you talk to scholars of American religion, what they'll often say is what makes America, and by America the U.S., is its experimental, combinative nature. In other words, it's always combining stuff and experimenting with stuff that hasn't been done before. That's why I subtitled the book "America and the Religion of No Religion." It's this notion that all religions and all spiritual practices are attempts to realize this future human nature, but none of them are absolute or speak for all humankind. The religion of no religion - it's not atheism, it's not secularism. It's this idea that whatever we want to call God is just too big for any particular religious system or psychology or science or anything else. All of these are just attempts to approximate this greater whole. That's really what makes it American. I think at least in the U.S., legally, we have this separation of church and state, and we do not allow any religion to take over, as it were. We haven't so far. That is very Esalen-esque. That's very American. If you don't allow a religion to take over, it means all religions can prosper. It has this sort of paradoxical or ironic feature to it. If you allow one religion to take over, it's going to suppress all the others. If you only have two religions, they're going to kill each other, which is what you saw in Europe with the Protestants and the Catholics. But if you have thousands of religions, guess what? They can coexist in relative peace. That's the American experiment. It's an experiment, Peter. I want to emphasize that it's not a conclusion. It may be that human beings are just too intolerant and stupid and dumb to live together. I think that's entirely possible. But so far, we've managed to live with each other in a way that's not without fault and certainly has nasty histories, but it's also, I think, potentially promising.What I'm just thinking about - I feel like I read a lot or I see headlines around de-churching, and that the belief and religious practice and the behaviors around belief in America, in the U.S., and I think in the West generally, are really shifting and changing and morphing. I'm wondering what kind of observations do you have on how people are - the phrase that young people use now is "spiritual but not religious." Or they talk about the "nones" or the refusal to affiliate. My own sense of that - first of all, it's very American. Again, it's also very European. The Europeans are much more secular than the Americans. The Americans are nutty, by the way. They're spiritually nutty in a way that the Europeans are - I'm engaging in stereotypes here, but the Europeans are much more secular and scientific or secular about this. The Americans are like, "Oh, let's just put things together. Let's do yoga and let's meditate. Let's go to church and the synagogue and the temple and let's do it all." That's cool. But if you put a bunch of things together, what it means is you're not worshiping or honoring any one of those pieces. So there's this irony in that. To the extent we combine things, we also recognize that none of those things are absolute in themselves. This refusal to affiliate, it actually goes way back, certainly as far as American transcendentalism in the 19th century, which was essentially a very literary, very intellectual movement out of Boston that saw the soul as transcendental, and it's not connected, or not uniquely Christian or Jewish or anything else. It's just the soul. It's transcendent. When I taught at Harvard for a year, my office was two doors down from the chapel where Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a famous address to some graduating students. He said something like, "I call it consciousness, you call it Christianity." So it's this move. This is like 1835 or something. I don't know. I don't know what the date is. He was kicked out of Harvard for 50 years for saying that and for giving that sermon. But that then became, I think, the kind of core of what much later became the "spiritual but not religious" movement.The other thing I'll say is "spiritual but not religious" is a phrase that is also connected to AA, believe it or not. It's Alcoholics Anonymous that realized that you could be religious without being religious, that you could have some connection to some higher power or higher source without being, without going to a particular building on a particular day or being part of a particular community. They also realized that was really important, particularly if you happen to be an alcoholic. That's really what can save you or create a lifestyle that's not an alcoholic one. So there's a history, there's a long history here. When I hear young people say "I'm spiritual but not religious," what I hear, Peter, is a kind of moral protest. They don't like the local religious community condemning their friends or themselves for a particular set of desires or orientation. So they're like, "Screw it. I don't need that." But they do need, some human beings need some rootedness in some greater sense of reality or some cosmic scope. Saying "I'm spiritual but not religious" essentially means "I'm not intolerant of people's genders or sexualities or races, but I am rooted in a greater reality that goes well beyond me or my community." I think that's frankly very honest and quite healthy. The problem with it is it doesn't create community very well. One last question, which is a thread I feel like I heard in what you were - I guess just being a professor and having a relationship with all of these ideas, but also young people. You talked about sort of mental health and I just wonder, what do you - what have you learned about young people and their - how they are doing, do you know what I mean? How are the kids doing in this culture? Not well. If you're doing well in this culture, there's something wrong with you. I'll put it that way. If we want to define health and well-being as a kind of harmony with one's social environment, then how can you be healthy or happy when your social environment is systematically racist and killing the environment and threatening nuclear war and all kinds of things that are just insane, frankly? So the young people, at least I work with, they're often depressed, frankly, by their surroundings, by the world that their parents and their grandparents have created. It's not a good world. There are some people who succeed and flourish in that world and become rich, but they're few and far between. Most people do not succeed and suffer tremendously because of that world. So I don't want to paint too grim a picture, but I think it's pretty grim at points. I think a lot of young people are very concerned about the climate in particular. They see that in a way, they feel that in a way that their parents and grandparents do not. They know that they're growing up in that world. So there's more at stake in it than there are for older people. This seems a little trite, this question, but what does "The Superhumanities" have to offer or bring to that challenge? I think it can give people hope. One of the things I often say is, "Why, when you turn your streaming service on, is every movie about the future? Why is it always bad? Why are there only dystopias? Why are there no utopias? Why is the future never good?" There are lots of very, as I also say, there are a lot of good reasons to be dystopian, but thought tends to produce itself. In other words, if we think the world's bad, then the world is going to be bad. We're probably going to create a bad future. If, on the other hand, we think the world's good, then the chances are that we're going to act on those thoughts and that we're going to create a good future.So again, it goes back to this notion of authoring. I really think it's in some ways up to not you or me, but it's certainly up to us as a species about what kind of stories we tell. I think "The Superhumanities" have something to offer here because some of these stories are really quite positive about the future and they're not all negative. Certainly, the religions all have a kind of positive future woven right into them, rightfully or wrongfully, they do. I think that's what "The Superhumanities" can offer - a vision of the human that is future-oriented and not just bad and negative. That's what I would say. I want to thank you so much. I'm just a huge fan and super grateful that you shared your time. I just - yeah, it's been a real honor and a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much. I hope it was useful, Peter. I'm humbled by your enthusiasm. I always want to look around. I'm like, "Who is he talking to?" Maybe Iron Man. Maybe you're talking to him. But I, yeah, I hear that. I need to sit with that. I need to hear that more, I think. Yeah, that's wonderful. So I'm really - I feel, anyway, I know you got to go but thank you so much. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

AI summary. In this conversation, part of a series of conversations by Peter Spear, Ethan Decker shares his unique background and how it has shaped his approach to brand science. He introduces key concepts, such as the "banana curve" of buyer distribution and the importance of signaling theory in branding. Ethan emphasizes the limitations of synthetic research and the critical role of qualitative research in understanding consumer behavior. The conversation offers insights into Ethan's perspective on branding and marketing, influenced by his multidisciplinary experience.Ethan is the Founder and President of Applied Brand Science. He is a brand strategist and marketing expert who has spent 20 years doing award-winning brand strategy, advertising, and market research for some of the world’s biggest brands. Prior to launching his own company, he was Planning Director at 72andSunny and a Group Strategy Director at Crispin Porter Bogusky. Check out his TED Talk “We’re All in Marketing: What Evolution Tells us About Advertising”I start all these interviews with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian. She helps people tell their stories and it's a beautiful question. I always over explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want. And, the question is, where do you come from?Where do I come from? I come from two streams that merged. One being a waspy New England Protestant white community, and a Russian Jewish lineage that in many ways is still fleeing from the pogroms of their soul. Pogroms? I'm not sure how to pronounce that.And where did this, where did you grow up? Where did these streams cross?Philadelphia. I grew up downtown, Center City, Philadelphia, so being in big cities is my resonant frequency. I hum and vibrate in those spaces. And left Philly for Maine a little bit, that's where I fell in love with the outdoors. And then went to Ohio for college and New Mexico for grad school and now I'm in Boulder.Did you have an idea growing up in Philly, like what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah, and it hasn't happened that way.What was it? Will you share?I thought I would end up on Broadway. Really? Yeah. My mother is very talented and had a professional career and I inherited some of her talent, but then did not pursue it. And she did not push me into it either, which was interesting as well. So I did not become a Broadway person that could have been on stage or behind the stage. I did write musicals for a little while.And did you perform?I did. I performed as well.What was that like?Fun. I love it. I step on a stage and I feel at home. It's the opposite of the people who have massive crippling stage fright. For me getting on stage is, ah, all right, let's do this.I was looking at your LinkedIn, and you went from Oberlin studying sociology, to Santa Fe to study complexity and urban ecology. What's the thread?It's more of a web than a thread. I have a brain that happens to be pretty good at a lot of different things. Some of my friends used to be annoyed like, oh, God, of course, you're good at this, Ethan, and I have very many natural limits. So they were wrong in many ways. But it meant that I had a proclivity for science and I was okay at it. And then I had proclivity for creativity and writing and music. And I was okay at that too. So I ended up bouncing around. The undergraduate work in sociology was my attempt to understand culture and identity and how humans interact and how societies form. And then I hit a limit there of objectivity or pseudo subjectivity. I don't know really what to call it anymore. But, the postmodern analysis of things. Which is to say there's no one way to read a book, you can read it however you interpret it, and culture and context matter for how you read and interpret things, let's say. The postmodern analysis of biology left me wanting. And I said, I think there's an actual there there, I think there's something we can say for sure, DNA is DNA is DNA. And your interpretation of DNA is not as relevant. That there's an objective truth. And the place it really showed up the most was for things like gender. And I'm sure you can appreciate this being, I think, a fellow Gen Xer, gender, like the current craze about gender, they're standing on our shoulders. Of course, we were the ones to say, we have to bust gender norms. And Boy George, God bless ya, we did bust a lot of gender norms, but it also meant that there were some things that I was dissatisfied with when it came to understanding gender, because I think that there is biology, there is objective truth as well. And after having so many interpretations of identity and humanity and things like gender, I wanted to study something hard, hard science. Let's say, because actually the social sciences are indeed the hard sciences. They're the hardest sciences. Physics and chemistry. They're hard sciences. Sociology, psychology. They're the hardest sciences. So goddamn hard to do them. So getting to an exciting, but slightly frustrating point with understanding people and sociology and minds and identity. I said, let me go back to something more objective and concrete and hard science and environmental science was my other draw. So I got a PhD in ecology and I studied fractal ecosystems and complex systems theory, and I did quantitative modeling. So that was fun. And then I hit my limit on that. And I said, okay, I will only ever be restaurant conversational level of math. And I think to really excel in this world, I need to be fluent in math and probability theory. And I was never going to be fluent in probability theory or even coding, even though I wasn't a bad coder.And you were in New Mexico.That was New Mexico. I did grad school and the study of complex systems in New Mexico.And that must serve you well now, or not?It does. It actually does. It helps. In a couple of big ways, and I assume you mean the complex thing, not New Mexico. But New Mexico is helping.Sure, New Mexico was good for you too, but the complexity science.Yeah, the complexity science has helped because markets, marketing, advertising, these are inherently, technically speaking, complex systems. Which means there are feedback loops. There are deep interconnected webs. There's non linear responses to things. A small thing like having a trans kid get a customized beer can blow up to two billion dollars in lost revenue for the company, the country's largest beer maker. And then there are levels. There are different levels of understanding. The personal level, the group level, the cultural level, the societal level, and those are hallmarks of complex systems. So understanding that does help me understand a bit of how to approach it and how to analyze it in a way that a lot of classically trained marketers just won't see it the same way.When did you first bump into marketing as a way of work, like something to do with your time?I fell ass backwards into it. I left academia to become an editor of an outdoor magazine with an old buddy. I ran that for a couple years and I ran it right into the ground.What is the role of research to help a marketer in that shift towards developing a new intuition about how to grow?I start by saying data is data is data. And there's just comes in different flavors and qualities. And just because data is big and quantitative doesn't necessarily make it good or useful or insightful. And just because data is small or hard to quantify doesn't make it meaningless and unhelpful. So that's my first foray, usually, into the world of research and information, is trying to break down people's assumptions and biases when it comes to what kind of data they prioritize. Research, I think, is critical because it helps you understand the world you're operating in. You need to know the environment, you need to understand your market, you need to understand your shopper, and you don't get that without doing some kind of research.You used the word intuition in a very intentional way, it seemed to me. What do you mean when you say intuition and you're working with a client?Here's a good example. You've probably heard a client say, we need to educate our consumer about blah diddy blah diddy blah. And that always is the big flag for me. Ding! It's going up. That says, this person has a certain intuition about how people shop and buy and think about brands and how they relate to my brand. So I need to work on that intuition, that intuitive understanding, because you're not going to educate anybody. I hate to say, no one gets educated from outside. I've never been educated on how to use olive oil, or I've never been educated on low sodium anything, or on selvedge denim. No one's educated me, and therefore made me want to buy their stuff. And so the intuition is wrong about the relationship between the buyer and the brand.So if you look at the science of consumer psychology, the brand science, one of the fundamental laws is that we are mental misers. We think as little as possible about the least amount we can, because we've got more important s**t we got to think about. Our doctor's appointments, our kids doctor's appointments, our mom's medication, where the hell my car keys are, my next five meetings, the 200 emails I haven't done, planning for my next vacation, all of those things, that's taking up the space in our brains as it should. You know what's not? Whether my bleach is made in America. Or whether it has a ESG corporate social program. So my bleach isn't going to educate me on s**t. And so if a marketer mentions, we got to educate our consumer about the quality of our bleach or something. Then I realized their intuition is off about how to connect with shoppers.And then if they understand something like how much we are mental misers, and that means we're trying to think less about bleach. And when we have a hard question about bleach, like, is this eco friendly? Cause I thought all bleach was inherently not eco friendly. We substitute that with an easy question. Like what does Peter buy? Cause Peter's an eco nut. So I'll just do whatever Peter says. And that's how we think. So then that marketer with a retrained intuition, instead of saying we need to educate them on our eco friendliness of our bleach would say, huh, what are the shortcuts we can give them so that they know our bleach is eco friendly or feel our bleach is eco friendly? It's a really different approach.I feel like marketing science can have a behaviorist streak in it that says we're all creatures of habit, mental misers, as you say. And what this does is make brand kind of meaningless. Or makes it just an empty mnemonic device, or distinctive asset. So granting any significance to brand is irrelevant. Is that how you feel? That's one of the elements and that's one of the laws. If one of the laws is we're mental misers, we're trying to think less. And so brands function in a certain way, given that law, but there's another law that is extremely pertinent and relevant to brands, which seems to be a counterpoint or an opposite of that, which is that we are symbolic creatures. We signal to each other. So I studied evolutionary biology and organisms of all flavors and all stripes, whether they walk or quack or swim, organisms are constantly signaling to each other all kinds of information. The 1st type of signaling is, am I a threat? Will I kill you or eat you? Am I poisonous? Do I have spikes and thorns? That kind of stuff. And then critically, we also very much signal to each other about being a good mate or being a good community member. So the peacock feathers, the classic one, although I like the peacock spider better. Little tiny peacock spiders.For those that don't have video, Ethan did a wonderful impersonation of the peacock.Oh, you can watch it on my TED Talk. I do.Oh, it's a bit you do?Yeah. I do a peacock spider dance. Peacock spiders, they have these beautiful carapaces that are multicolored and iridescent. And when they're mating, the males flip up their back flap, and it looks like a peacock tail. And then out of their eight little legs, they flip up a couple of their legs, and they do a little dance. They dance back and forth. It's like they're shaking maracas to impress the females and those are all symbols to impress the female to mate with them.And as humans, we cue in on symbols all the time. Number one, people's hair. Oh my God. We are obsessed with hair, aren't we? But then clothes. And the kind of car you drive. And nowadays with Zoom, what's in your backdrop. We're very, very sensitive to all these symbols and signals. So technically it's called signaling theory. How do we signal certain things to each other to show that we're a member of the group or that we're cool or that we're trendy or whatever? Brands play a huge role in how we signal to each other. If you've ever seen a fad like Ugg boots or Hunter boots or of course Crocs are back now.What about the Stanley tumbler?Stanley tumblers. BAM! Great example. Those kind of trends and fads are some of the best examples of how we use brands to signal to each other. Stanley is no better or worse, I would say, than two or three other brands just like it that are built for tough. But you need to have the Stanley, and even better yet, you need to have one of the limited edition Stanley colors. To signal to your friends that you're cool and hip and that kind of stuff. So this seems opposite of what I just said about brands are shorthand and you think less. But in a way they connect because the Stanley cup, the Stanley brand, is shorthand for me signaling to my friends that I'm hip and that I have a certain level of status and I'm in the club.Yeah, that's I mean, I don't know that I've ever heard it articulated like that. So the tension between, because I hear the behaviorist thing and it feels like it really is just an erasure of the significance. So you've got signal theory on one side and then on the other side, it's just brands as a heuristic, a shortcut, a heuristic brand is a heuristic to make a choice easier and faster and simpler. I'm just going to buy the same olive oil I always buy. It's a safe bet. Whereas on the flip side, I have to very carefully choose the brand of jeans I wear because I wanted to symbolize and signal something particular to the people in my life. And what's the role of a marketer to make a brand a potent signal? How do you help them do that?Well, if you want to make the brand a potent symbol or effective signal, whatever a signal that grows, you need to play in the realm of signaling. And who cares more about signals and which people care about which signals. Obviously there are plenty of people who don't care or who choose very actively to signal other things. Like a great example is if you're the head of Morgan Stanley, this also comes from my TED Talk. This is not an ad for my TED Talk.I'll include a link to your TED Talk, Ethan. (Here it is)If you're the head of Goldman Sachs, what do you wear? A custom Armani suit with a beautiful Italian tie and you wear the most expensive Rolex you can buy. If you wore that onto the campus of the University of Iowa, into the biology department to talk about ant biology, you'd be laughed at because everyone would say you're superficial. And why are you flashing all this expensive bling and you clearly don't care about scholarship. So if you're the world's preeminent ant biologist, like E.O. Wilson was, you wear a suit from the 80s because it still fits. And you wear a tie that has a couple stains but nobody really notices because it still matches your suit well enough. And you wear a Swiss Army watch because it's very practical and all watches tell time equally well. So there's no point in spending more on a Rolex. And then you go into your lab and you are lauded, and you are respected because the vestments you're wearing signal that you care about scholarship more than you care about clothing. And so both of those people are wearing clothes that signal the right things in their environments. So, if you want to be successful and build a strong brand, you need to understand the signals that your brand gives off or supports in the environments where you want it to be bought.We're near the end of time, but I was invited to answer a couple of questions. The role of qualitative in the age of what is now, I think we're just agreeing is called synthetic research. Do you have any encounters or experiences with either synthetic research or thoughts about the impact of LLMs and generative AI on how your marketer develops an intuition?I think synthetic research is a crappy first step, let's call it. It's good at giving you a bland, basic summary of things, but I would never rely on synthetic research or LLMs to really understand the state of things, or the nuances, or importantly, the less common things that are bubbling up. And that's, I think, where a lot of qualitative is so vital. It's not getting the average what do people want out of jackets? They want them to be warm, to be waterproof sometimes, tolook good. Puffy jackets are popular. Like, no s**t. An LLM can tell you that. An LLM will tell you the middle. Yeah, and it will summarize it in a nice bland way. Beige. It'll give you beige. If you want to understand where things are going or the nuances or the potent meanings under there, you definitely have to go beyond LLMs.And the other critical reason is when we get back to the signaling stuff. And even the other stuff about some of the laws of mental misers and how we make decisions. A lot of the real reasons are not even available to us. We don't even know why we do what we do. You ask someone why they buy the clothes they do and they say, oh, because it makes me feel like an individual and it expresses myself and I like blah, blah, blah. When in fact, that's 180 degrees from the truth. It makes them feel like they fit in. Yeah. It's acceptable to their group. Or it's lauded by their group.  And that's why they choose the brand, not because it's unique or makes them feel individual. So you don't get that from LLMs. And I do think you probably don't even get that from quant surveys. Like there's not a single quant survey. I think if you had five years ago, polled people in general who drinks sparkling water and said, what are the aspects you look for in a sparkling water brand? And you'd, of course, you'd have to populate it with a refreshing, easy to buy, comes in different flavors, good price, available everywhere I want to go. You wouldn't have ever said also has a crazy death metal style brand and makes kooky marketing that makes me feel like a punk teenage boy. You never would have gotten that from a quant survey. You never would have gotten it from an LLM. And yet by going out and doing real qualitative listening and understanding an audience you would have realized there are a whole bunch of action sports dude bros who would never buy Evian or Fiji because they're sponsored by Monster. That's why you now have Liquid Death as an 800 million dollar brand of bubbly water.I hadn't heard that story. Is that the sort of the origin story of Liquid Death?You know what, yeah, I think even before the founder threw up a fake little website to gauge interest, he did that because his intuition from talking to humans. Yes. Hanging out at X Game type things. Hanging out at the skate park. Hanging out where people were shredding on snowboards on rails and skates and BMX and stuff. These were folks who were sponsored head to toe by energy drinks. And they had gotten to a point where they didn't want to poison their body with all that s**t. So they would take their Red Bull and Monster and fill it with water. They couldn't walk around with a Fiji because a) Fiji wasn't sponsoring anybody and b) it looked stupid if you're a dude bro. Yeah, I used the term affectionately. They wanted something fun and tough and whatever. And that's when the guy who created it said wow. There is no brand of water for the sports culture. Holy s**t. He didn't want to just go pure branding. It's the same product. He made sure it's real Austrian sparkling water. So great. But mostly 99 percent of the play was that dripping skull logo and a brand called Liquid Death in that old Germanic black letter.It's amazing.It's amazing. Doesn't come from quant, doesn't come from big data, doesn't come from LLMs. Amazing.All right. Listen, I want to thank you so much. I hope it was painless for you.You're welcome. There was that moment in the middle.I know. I felt that too.Where my ego got bruised a little bit.Oh, really?I'm joking. I'm just kidding. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Zoe Scaman is the CEO and Founder at Bodacious, a strategy studio delivering bold and audacious thinking. I have followed her for years, and have devoured her work. She is prolific and generous, having published in the past few years an amazing collection of work: The New Fandom Formula, Mad Men. Furious Women, Decoding Community, , The Multiplayer Brand, and Strategy in the Era of AI.All the interviews, I start the same way with this question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian and she helps people tell their stories. It's such a beautiful question. I always use it, but I also overexplain it because it is so powerful. So before I ask it, you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want. So with that, the biggest lead into a question ever, the question is, where do you come from? I think I come from a mashup of lots of different experiences, positives and negatives. I have always felt other. I've never really felt like I fitted in any of the stereotypes that were assigned to me. I think that when I was younger, that was seen as a flaw. Looking back on it now, I see it as a huge benefit that I've grown into over time.What, how would you articulate the benefits? What does it feel like to be on this side of that otherness?I think because you never really fit, it gives you an appetite for exploration of self and of possibility that you wouldn't necessarily have if you felt entirely comfortable in the situation that you'd started in. So I think it forces you to stretch yourself and to have more of a view on what else is out there and what kind of things you can pull together to make something your own, as opposed to just being happy with whatever it is that you're handed.Tell me a little bit about where you are now. Where are you situated right now? And what are you up to these days?I'm currently in the middle of the South Downs in a very leafy green West Sussex, which is lovely. I grew up round here and migrated back like a homing pigeon after COVID-19. Bought myself a 16th century cottage and did a big renovation on my own. Then met my partner and now almost giving birth to baby number two, which is very exciting. It's all moved very quickly. In terms of what I'm up to, it's a mixture of trying to keep up momentum with my own brain and the business, and also trying to find a way of slowing down into impending motherhood number two, which is always difficult for me. I know I need to slow down, but I seem impossibly incapable of doing it. And then also just wanting to enjoy my surroundings over the summer. That's what I'm really excited by. I think when you live in such a fast paced industry and world, we don't really stop and quite literally touch grass and smell the roses enough. So that's what I'm hoping to be able to do.I don't know the area. Can you help me understand where you are? Did you move there at COVID-19? Was it a rural exodus?Yes, it was. I grew up around here and obviously when you're 15, 16, 17, and you're living somewhere rural, you cannot wait to escape and get the hell out of there. You think it's the most boring place on earth. So I went on a bit of a 20 year road show around the world. I lived in Sydney in Australia for a while. Then I came back to London and then I moved to New York. Then I was in Ethiopia and then I was in Paris. And then back to London. When COVID hit, I was living on my own in London with no outdoor space. It was really lonely. I just thought, why am I here? Most of my clients are virtual. I've got the money, I've got the means. So I decided to move into this tiny little village in the middle of nowhere, which is about two hours outside of London. It's absolutely beautiful, but all of my neighbors are geriatric and everyone thought I was insane because I was in my mid-thirties and moving there alone, but it all worked out. It was almost like I needed to make the shift and then the universe would meet me where I was at, which is a lovely place to be.How far away are you now from where you grew up? How close?Probably about 10 minutes.What's that like?It's interesting because I think that it's a village that I had never set foot in because it's in the middle of a forest. You wouldn't even know it was there unless you've been there. So even though I grew up in the area, I had never been to this particular village. I feel like I've got the best of both worlds in terms of familiarity of wider place, but also the ability to discover my own place within it. Sometimes when you move back to your hometown, it feels like you've regressed and like you've changed, but the area hasn't. So I needed to try and find that happy medium.Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? As a girl in that area, did you know what you wanted to be or have an idea?I went through the whole stage of wanting to be Britney Spears, wanting to be famous and all that kind of stuff, but I never really knew, to be honest. I don't think I was particularly attracted to any one subject and I didn't go to university. I ended up dropping out of school when I was 18 because I just didn't know. The only options that were on the table that I was aware of at the time were things like business studies and economics. I just thought, do I really want to go and spend tens of thousands, which I'm going to spend my life paying off, on a course that I don't really know I want to do? I just want to get out there and work and see what comes my way. I think I've just been figuring it out ever since.When did you encounter the work you're doing now? When you think back, when did you first encounter brand or strategy? What was the first moment you realized you could do this kind of work?I've been doing this for over 20 years. I answered an ad in a local paper. That's how I got my first job in advertising because that was the way that you did it back then. It was just looking for a junior person for a startup agency. It was outside of London. It was in a county called Surrey. They paid me 11,000 pounds a year and I basically just made coffee. But I was in the right place at the right time because it was the era of pay-per-click advertising. So Google taking off and search engines. This company had created a piece of software that allowed you to close the gap between someone clicking on an ad on Google and landing on your website. At the time, that was groundbreaking. I got to go into London and wear a different hat, selling this kind of bit of software into all of these big ad agencies. It was the very first time that I had been exposed to that world. I'd never seen it before. It was really glamorous. It was the early 2000s.I remember walking into a place called Walker Media, which was famous in London for this woman called Christine Walker, who would sit surrounded by her bevy of other women and just chain smoke in the middle of the office. I remember walking past going, "God, that's so cool. I want to be like them when I grow up." That kind of opened my eyes to this world of brand and advertising. But I think it took me probably a good 10 years in the industry to really wrap my head around what it was and actually what we did.What's the origin story of Bodacious?  I think pretty much my entire career, I've been looking for a place that felt like home and that felt like I could do a number of different things under one roof. I haven't ever really found it. Probably the closest I came was when I was working at a place called Naked Communications when I was in Australia. It just felt like this crazy chaotic home for brilliant misfits. That's what we used to call ourselves. People that didn't really fit, who weren't the corporate type, who didn't necessarily have a background in advertising, who didn't always believe in brand but wanted to do things differently. It was just this incredible engine of wild thinking. I think some of the ideas that we put out into the world during that time were amazing.I got there probably the last two years of it being that kind of place. Then there were mergers and acquisitions and it all just went to s**t after that. I was really sad about the whole thing. I just job hopped after that. I then left Australia, I went to London. I worked in a couple of different agencies there and nothing felt right. Everything felt like it was narrow and pigeonholed. I was only able to explore one small facet of what interested me.So I jumped around a lot and I went into client side. I went into innovation. As I mentioned, I went to Ethiopia with Nike Foundation and thought I'll try that because I'd never done that kind of stuff before. I just never found something that really lit my brain on fire. I think all of that hopping around taught me that I was much more of a portfolio player, as opposed to one person who wanted to go on one trajectory.  So I've just got lots of bits that I wanted to hold together. The whole point of Bodacious was to give me the freedom to be able to explore all those different facets, because Bodacious is ultimately me. It's all about where I want to go and where I want to take my thinking.You mentioned in your experience at Naked that you were people that didn't believe in brand. What's the significance of that?I think there's a lot of agencies or pretty much predominantly the vast majority of agencies, advertising companies, et cetera, that have this kind of evangelical belief in certain brand frameworks or ways of thinking. They could worship Byron Sharp. They could worship John Steel. They could be all about a certain way of building performance over brand or whether they're entrenched in this idea of brand purpose. But wherever you go, there's always some sort of dominant belief system in terms of what they stand for and what they believe that brand and advertising is all about. I've never subscribed to any of it, to be honest. I'm much more of a fluid thinker in terms of, I'll have a look at what I think might work for any given project, for any given problem. There's no kind of dominating proprietary thing that I'm trying to sell.I really found that within Naked, they would basically say, we don't have a framework. We don't have a replicable formula. We don't have something that we constantly try and repeat and sell and repeat and sell because every problem is different. They come up with some crazy stuff. There was a pirate radio station in Australia that was shutting down and they were desperately trying to find a way to get funding to keep this pirate radio station going. There was nothing to do with brands. There was nothing to do with campaigns. We put out this kind of challenge to the people of Australia and said, we want you to do some crazy s**t to get funding. We're going to leave it in your hands and see what you come up with. There were no parameters to it.One guy got a boat as far as he could, and then dove into the sea and swam to Necker Island and filmed himself pleading on his knees with Richard Branson to try and give him some cash to keep the pirate radio station going. It's that just crazy, chaotic stuff that came out of Naked because there were no things that we were trying to box things into. I think that when you have that freedom to be anything and be a creative company on all different fronts, I think the work that comes out of that is just so much more interesting.You mentioned you used the phrase "lit your brain on fire". What do you love about the work that you do? Where's the joy in Bodacious for you?I think it's the variety. And then it's also the clients that kind of self select working with me. Because I very rarely work now on projects where the output is some form of advertising. Instead it's looking at new ways we could explore commercial models. It's looking at the future of gaming. It's looking at what is an athlete in 10 years time? And how do we start to prepare for that? It's what is the future of music? So it's these big kind of knotty questions that nobody really knows the answer to, including me and the ability for me to dive down different rabbit holes and get excited about research and see where it may lead me.Are there any touchstones for you, ideas or people that you keep returning to as you, when somebody comes at you with a new problem? I have mentors in my life. There are people I'll bring close if I'm, if I feel a little lost.I think I've got a quasi board of directors in my brain. They don't know I exist. But I have these people that I turn to.So I'm a huge fan of Brené Brown, for example, and Esther Perel. I love the idea of bringing more vulnerability and honesty to workplace relationships. I've been a huge fan of Brené since she first came out with her first book. I think Unlocking Us is probably my favorite podcast that exists ever. I just listened to the most recent one with Esther Perel, where she was talking about the other AI and she called it artificial intimacy. I just think that kind of thinking is groundbreaking. So I keep going back to thinkers like her.As I mentioned, Esther Perel as well. I love David Epstein's work on generalism. For me, that was the very first time that I had the language to articulate the journey that I had been on and the ability to look at my career in a positive light, as opposed to the way that I painted it, that I was unreliable or flighty, or I never saw the light or I got bored too easily.Michaela Coel is a brilliant screenwriter, actor and director…Our connection went out for a bit…..Oh, I was mentioning Michaela Coel. She is a writer, director, actor. She wrote a book called Misfits: A Personal Manifesto. She talked about her initial struggle to fit into the British broadcasting society and production, the way that film works. Then she talked about the fact that she really then embraced that and rejected everything that they stood for and built her own platform.  So I think I lean on different thinkers like that. None of them are in advertising. None of them are in brand. That doesn't really interest me that much. There's probably only one person who I think is doing really interesting work in that space who has moved herself along and that's Heidi Hackemer, who you may have come across. I've known Heidi for 15 years. I did some work with her when she had Wolf and Wilhelmina. Obviously she went to Chan Zuckerberg and then off to Oatly. Now she's doing her own thing again. I've just watched her journey and we've spoken a lot about it as well in terms of finding her passion and her place and what she really wants to do - lean on all the experience that she's had in advertising and brand and facilitation and really make a positive impact when it comes to indigenous communities within the U.S. Actually, how do we go back to basics and learn from their values and their rituals and their practices and bring that old world knowledge into the modern economy and modern world, which is breaking and broken. So I think she's probably one of the only ones that really inspires me in that world, because she has just unapologetically gone after what matters to her.What is the value of the outsider for the, what do you bring as the outsider?I think as the outsider, you're less afraid of fitting in, or not fitting in as the case may be. I think you're less afraid of asking challenging, difficult questions and of provoking people and being the provocateur in the room.  Not necessarily being the provocateur for the sake of it, but being the provocateur because you're trying to get to the right question in the first instance. I think if you're not adhering to quote unquote best practice or certain proprietary frameworks or certain methodologies of thinking, it just frees you up to be that kid at the back of the classroom going, "But why are we doing this? Why are we doing this way? Is there not a better way? Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Let me ask the stupid question."But that's always been me. I think that in agencies, not all agencies, but in agencies that I've been in, it's been like, "Shut up. You're supposed to be the smartest person in the room." And I was like, "I don't want to be the smartest person in the room because then who am I learning from?" That's not going to work for me. So I want to make sure that I'm always trying to expand and progress and connect to people who are three steps ahead of where I am in whatever field that they're in, and then I get to absorb from them, which is such a wonderful place to be, I think.So you reject the invitation to be the brightest person, the smartest person in the room, and you choose instead to become - what's the position you take in that room?It's the person who's asking all the damn questions. You assume they're dumb questions, but actually in many cases, they're not because there are other people in that room who don't know the answer and who would love to ask the question, but don't want to position themselves as being the one that doesn't know.  I've never felt like that. I've always felt very comfortable raising my hand and saying "Call me stupid, but" and then introducing a new aspect. Sometimes it is a stupid question, but sometimes it can open up brand new conversations, which everyone's like "Oh, actually we hadn't thought about it in that way."So I think that's always the position that I want to play is just thinking, how can I dig a little bit deeper? How can I go left of center? How can I be more abstract? If I can do all of those things, is that going to then open up something else or lead us in a different direction?It's the power of the stupid question is what you're talking about, right?  Yeah, I read about, I've completely forgotten his name, but there's a Harvard professor, I think he published a book in which this was a thing where he called, there's a brainstorming practice that he has called a question storm. I love it. I've practiced it a few times with clients and the idea is that you come into the room and you're only allowed to ask questions. You're not allowed to offer any solutions. You're not allowed to dig further into an initial question that you've asked. You just have to ask questions constantly for about 15 or 20 minutes. Once you think you've got the questions out of you, then you go back to the questions that you've written and if you can write them a different way.The whole premise of that is the best work, be it innovation, be it whatever direction you want to go in, comes from asking the best question. Often we skim over that completely and we jump into solutions because we find that easier, but then we don't know if we're providing solutions to the thing that we need to.So if you're spending 15 to 20 minutes with really smart people in a room, reframing the question a hundred times, then you might get to a better articulation that can again, open a door that you hadn't expected previously.What's your experience trying to open that space in the rooms that you're in, the teams, the clients? Is it difficult to do that?It can be. I think it's getting easier for me over time. I think when I very first started doing it, I was in agency land and I would sometimes get shut down. I would get told "Don't ask such a stupid question." Or again, as I said, "You're supposed to be the smart person in the room. Don't make yourself look like you're ignorant in any way." I was young, I was impressionable. That made me crawl back into my box and kind of shut myself down.I think as I've gotten more confident with my own practice, I will push it. So if a client says, "Oh, I don't think we need to go down that route," I'll go "No, actually I'd really like to spend 10 minutes just exploring this space." Or if they say "We've already answered that question," I'll say, "Okay, but I don't feel like I've got the answer to that. So if you could explain it to me again." Just finding ways to navigate first of all, the kind of dismissal that you get because it's not dismissal from a negative standpoint or from a mean-spirited standpoint. It's just that they want to fast track again towards a solution because that's a natural avenue for many of us to want to go.  But I think if we can just spend some time really working through those conversations in those areas, they may well lead nowhere, but I think it's worth the energy. So now I feel less pressure to conform in those situations. I feel much more comfortable kind of pushing that agenda because I also know that ultimately the buck stops with me in terms of whatever this output is going to be. So I should have more autonomy in navigating that process.Tell me a little bit about the thought leadership, the work you've been doing on fandom and multiplayer brand. It's just been amazing. It's unbelief, it's very prolific and smart. Was that a, how did it come to be that you would start doing this kind of thought leadership and what's that experience been like?I think it started a while ago. One of the very first pieces that I wrote, I think I was at Undercurrent actually in New York. Undercurrent doesn't exist anymore, but it was a quite experimental, non-hierarchical, organizational design company. It was all about teal organizations and what happens if you remove layers of hierarchy and you go into kind of slam teams and different ways of working.  I loved it to a certain degree, but I also felt that it was very sterile. It almost took human beings out of the process and over-engineered it to the point that I actually needed to have a glossary at the back of my notebook to know what the f**k anyone was talking about on a daily basis.It was a lot of super, super smart young people that they had hired from some of the top universities across the U.S., who had no emotional maturity, really, including myself. I think that we were going into these organizations - PepsiCo, American Express, Al Gore's Climate Reality Project - and we were like bulls in a China shop because we were not listening to people. We were not listening to the reality of an organization, which is made up of people. When you go into a company and you go to someone who's been working in a department for 20 years and you say "We're going to take away your team. We're going to take away your title and we're going to take away your remit, but don't worry. You get to work in a slam team now" - that's obviously going to piss them off because you are taking away all of the ways that they have defined their success in their progression. We just didn't get it.  I think that we were genuinely shocked when people would dig their heels in. So I started really, this is when I started reading into Brené Brown. This is probably about 10 years ago. I really started to get this idea of empathy and vulnerability and understanding individuals' ways of thinking. I wrote an article called "The Importance of Empathy within Organizational Design". I tried to get it published to Undercurrent, but they were not interested. They didn't think that it mattered at the time. So I self published it. I put it out onto LinkedIn and it did really well.  A lot of people came back and said, "Yes, this is what's missing. We're looking at these kind of progressive organizations that demolish hierarchy in favor of these new ways of thinking, but we're not thinking about the people. We're turning organizations into chess boards and it's not working." That's why it's not working. So that was the first one.Then when I was at Droga, I wrote a gigantic long piece on the importance of diversity. This was in 2016, and it was thoroughly researched, took me days and days to put together. I went to Droga, and I said, "Can I publish this under the banner of Droga?" Absolutely not. They didn't want Droga to take a point of view on diversity. They certainly didn't want it coming from me. So no, if I wanted to publish it, I could do it on my own, but they weren't going to help me get it to Campaign Magazine or anything like that. So I self-published it. Cindy Gallop got hold of it, pushed it far and wide. Then Brad Jakeman, who at the time was the CMO of PepsiCo got hold of it as well. He was like, "This is brilliant. Love this thinking."Then obviously Droga were like, "Oh, Brad Jakeman, the CMO of PepsiCo quite likes it. Zoe, can we take this and put it into Campaign Magazine under the banner of Droga?" And I said, "No, you can't." So again, I just learned this lesson that I needed to self-publish and I needed to have the freedom to be able to share my voice the way that I saw fit. Because every single time I tried to take my ideas to a company, I was pushing against a brick wall trying to get them to believe me or understand me or actually want to support my initial point of view, yet it was constantly being well received externally.  So I just kept on going after that. Obviously I wrote "Mad Men, Furious Women". I did a piece on "Breaking our addiction to non-fiction". So actually saying that creative people need to read more novels and fictional universes because everyone was getting obsessed with these brainy books that were actually killing our way of thinking. I said I would rather spend an evening reading Harry Potter than I would a book about strategy and planning. I don't think I've ever read a full book about strategy and planning. I thought that was important.Then it just progressed and then I started not necessarily writing just articles, but I started writing almost quasi-talks/presentations, which were a way of me communicating a new idea or something that I thought was evolving or shifting that was interesting. So I did "Fandom: The New Fandom Formula", "Decoding Community", "The Multiplayer Brand". I've just done "Strategy in the Era of AI". I've got two more in the works as well, which is exciting.I was politely invited to answer questions about the role of qualitative research in the age of AI, and I've gotten lost. What is the humanist argument for how we learn when AI is sitting there and it can be intuitive, generative and imaginative. Anything that you say about us, what we do with each other, I can find somebody who says this is possible with AI also. What do you think?I don't think it always is. I think that AI at the moment, if we're being generous about it, is a knowledge aggregation platform or knowledge aggregation system. So essentially it's drinking the entire internet and then regurgitating it in a way that uses predictive sentence structure to make it feel like it is human or conscious or helping us in that way.  I think that there is a huge amount of value to the ability for us to use knowledge aggregation engines in terms of moving us faster in certain instances, uncovering knowledge that we don't have, upskilling us in new categories, like all of that is great. But one of the big things that we have that I hope machines will never have is that ability to connect to one another and to have real complexity and nuance and challenge in the way that we are building relationships with each other and the way that we communicate and the way that we interact with the world and the way that we see it and move through it. AI doesn't have that ability yet.  We're still talking about AI potentially coming into having its own body. That's a conversation that is live at the moment. We're saying the only way for AI to evolve is for it to have a relationship with the real world in the way that we do. But even if that's the case, even if it can touch and it can feel, and it can hear and it can converse, that kind of myriad of complexity and emotion and messiness that makes us uniquely human - I just don't see that ever being translated into a machine.That's where the richness of qualitative research comes from - you have these in-depth conversations with individuals who have had fundamentally different life experiences, which have given them whatever it is that they are leaning into today. That's their own version of wisdom, that's their own version of life experience, and that makes them fundamentally unique in their opinions and their view of the world. If you're using AI to do that, you're going to miss out on all of that wonderful detail.What is the role of qualitative? What's your relationship with qualitative? Is it something that you use or what's your relationship with, how do you use research?I've actually just finished a massive research study, which is coming out next week, which was with children. It was with the Walton Family Foundation who obviously own Walmart, but they've got a huge foundation in the U.S. and they're one of the biggest spenders on educational philanthropy. They came to me about a year ago and said, "If you could study anything, what would it be?"I said, "I am fascinated by the changing landscape of how children are self-educating using games like Roblox and Minecraft. If you think about where gaming has been for the last two decades or so, gaming has been an escape. It's been a way for us to pick up a controller and put it on our television screens and to play a narrative, which takes us out of our everyday. But what's interesting about these new games and platforms that are coming up where the vast majority of under 13s are spending their time is within Roblox and Minecraft. You're not embodying a narrative necessarily that somebody else has built for you, you're actually creating as part of your play."So if these kids are creating, and that is the way that they are playing these different environments, what does that mean for the way that they're educating themselves and actually for the experiences and expectations they're going to have as they age up?We undertook this massive research study across the U.S., so about two and a half thousand children with a bunch of qualitative interviews as well with parents, children as young as five, as old as 13. We chatted to them about all of this stuff. The original hypothesis that I went in with, which is gaming is potentially helping with kids learning different subjects - where we got to was completely different.  What we found was that there is now proper evidence to suggest that children are being cognitively developed via these games. These games are character development playgrounds. They actually help them with perseverance, with resilience, with collaboration, with their creativity, 21st century lateral skills. So while they're not teaching them biology necessarily, or individual physics lessons, or adapting to the curriculum, they're teaching them much more expansive skill sets, which are going to be desperately needed for a work world that is completely uncertain. We have no idea what jobs are going to be around in 10 years, 20 years.  These kids are learning that level of kind of lateral thinking alongside the character development pieces within these games. Some of the interviews that we had with the parents and with the kids were just fascinating as a result of really delving into that and being flexible about where the conversation went.I think that's the biggest lesson for me with research, and I'm actually about to start another massive project into youth sports, which is looking at the same thing. We start with one hypothesis, but we're not fixed on that hypothesis. We're actually saying if there's something interesting that comes up in the research in the early stages and we want to pivot, let's pivot because that's the whole beauty of it - you have no idea where it's going to take you.  If you try and use research as a way of doing a kind of Q&A with your own thinking, you're not really letting go and really getting into the exploration side of things. I think that's where the richness is.It's beautiful. I was taught that people have experiences, not answers. Very often the research industry, we treat people like answer machines, and we're very willing and very good at providing the answers that we think people want. But it's much more interesting to just get lost in the experience and figure out what it's like.Exactly. I think AI can do the Q&A stuff. If you want to, you can turn to AI and synthetic users and you can say, "I want to do some quant research on kids who like to surf in Southern California." It will probably give you something that's 99% accurate if you're going to do quant.  But it won't give you the really rich insights and experiences that you were just mentioning. I think that's where we need to spend more energy if we can.I asked Claude for some questions to ask you. I fed some of your stuff and it's so, I'm going to try out a couple of those and we'll see how...I don't think I've been asked any interview questions by an AI before. This is the first.Let's see. There was a number of them. They were good. So with community becoming a bigger imperative for brands, how does this change the skill sets and capabilities needed within agencies? What new roles or departments might be required?I think it's a huge overhaul, to be honest. I think agencies have been teaching their staff for years and years how to be sausage factories. We get a brief, we go through the same formulaic process, we waterfall it down to creative and then production and then project managers. We produce a bunch of assets that people scroll past in two minutes. Then we repeat the whole process all over again, and we call that a successful business model.  I think that is short-term, disconnected campaign thinking. That's what we've been trained to do. When you're looking at the future of community for brands, that is long-term reciprocal relationship building which is much more embedded in the day-to-day activities of a brand. The skill sets are like night and day. We just simply do not have the ability to understand where to even begin on that front.So I think that it'll probably start as every other piece has started, whether it's search engine optimization or PPC or social media or whatever. There's going to be a bunch of shops that are set up outside of the norm to actually cater to this. Then over time, they're going to be sucked into the big holding companies. That's how it's always been.A second synthetic question. The research dives into various forms community can take - from subcultures to fandoms to collectibles and more. How can qualitative research be leveraged to map the community landscape around a brand and surface new opportunities?I think that's a fascinating area that not enough attention has actually been paid to, which is this idea of kind of community mapping. I did a bit of it for a project that I did year before last with Axe and Lynx, so the Unilever body spray. We looked at what are the adjacencies to the brand?  We thought hustle culture is one, comedy is another one, anime is another one, rap is another one. Then actually how do we look into each of these different adjacencies and say where are the different sub-communities and subcultures within these different areas? But again, you have to almost do the manual research. When we tried to go through a normal research company, which was much more quant focused, they came back and they were like, "Yeah, people who like basketball also like plants. You should look at plants." We were like, "What the f**k is this?" There was no real insight or intelligence driving it. It was just data for data's sake, but they hadn't analyzed it and they hadn't actually said, "Is this even worth saying in a meeting or even worth bringing up with a client? Because is it going to add to the conversation?" It didn't and it was a complete waste of time and energy.  So we went back to desk research and manual mining of information and connecting those different dots. That's what created the richness of the ecosystem that we made in the end.We've got just a few minutes. I guess maybe one big question just came to me and just thinking about the reports that you've put out - subcultures, right? Niches, the rise of niches and fandom and the multiplayer brand. There's a way that for me, it reminds me of, I had a boomer as a mentor and he would always talk about, he grew up in a binary world and then, and it's just like this, the fragmentation is this sort of natural process of the marketplace, it seems to me. It's what gives birth to brands or brand opportunity as a very, at least that's my elementary understanding, or idea of it.  To what degree do you think that's the case, that fragmentation is just how things work? Then, what does it mean to be a multiplayer brand? Is that what your, is that your diagnosis? Or, am I understanding you correctly, I guess is my question. Then, where does the multiplayer brand, what comes after the multiplayer brand, I guess is the question.I think we are in an era of just increasing fragmentation. I don't think it's new as you said, I think it's been happening since the advent of the internet and arguably even the printing press. What we're actually talking about is the proliferation of user-generated tools. That's what drives fragmentation.  When people got the printing press, suddenly you had more people able to publish their opinions and distribute those opinions with different groups of people who may or may not agree with them. Then we had radio and suddenly there was an explosion of different radio stations and again, different voices, different opinions, different genres of music. We had the television and so on. Obviously all the way through to the internet. It's just a constant push towards more niches, towards more subcultures, towards more varied voices, and towards more power being in the hands of just everyday people. You can spread those opinions and those ideas and find other people who belong in their tribe.  What I've been calling at the moment is the kind of third phase of internet-based UGC. We started out with when the internet first came around, we had forums. So we had people kind of writing blogs, for example, and we had people playing weird spin-off Dungeons and Dragons games on these obscure forums and Club Penguin, all those kinds of things.Then we moved into UGC phase two, which is where we've been for the last 15 years or so, maybe a bit longer. That was the advent of YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and that burst influencer culture and you had the kind of famous saying, I can't remember who said it, that YouTube would never take off because there was a certain amount of people who were still in the closet with a little bit of talent. Obviously that was completely bollocks and everything exploded from there.  Now we're moving into this new era of UGC, which is basically democratizing it even further by giving people access to incredibly powerful creation tools like Unreal Editor for Fortnite, Roblox Studio, and also the advent of AI, which means that actually that gap between idea and manifestation has closed to almost nothing because I don't need to know how to code now to build a website. I don't need to know how to produce a television show to create an animation. I don't need to know how to, I don't know, for example pull a bike apart and put it back together in a different way, I can just ask ChatGPT for instructions.  That ability to reduce that friction down to almost zero is then going to birth a brand new version of UGC and what people are calling it is UGGC, so user-guided generative content. That's just going to mean that we've got a proliferation of just stuff. A lot of that stuff's going to be s**t, but it's also potentially going to birth brand new genres and subcultures and fandoms and all that kind of stuff.  Think about the power of a fandom. For years, we've had fandoms creating fan fiction, spin-off characters, different ideas with particular characters. The very famous Trekkie one where Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock are secretly in love - that's been going for decades. But now imagine the ability for a fandom to train an AI. Suddenly you have the ability to generate brand new character tangents, different storylines that may or may not have existed previously. It's just turbocharging their creativity, which I think is amazing.  So I think that fragmentation is just going to continue. I think that the reason the multiplayer brand idea then came about was I was just thinking about the power in people's hands, the tools that they have at their disposal, but also their newfound expectations for how they want to interact with IP that they love, with brands that they love, with worlds that they love. They want to be a part of it and they want to be a part of it to the point of not just participation, but active navigation and contribution. They have the tools to do so.  Again, I'm looking at the Generation Alpha research that I've got coming out next week and these kids are tinkerers. They're coders, they're making toolkits. 25% of the kids that we interviewed who are under the age of 13 are actively selling their virtual creations on Roblox marketplace. It's crazy.You take all of that together and you look at this generation who have been trained on creation tools as their form of primary play, all of these other tools that are starting to close that gap between idea and manifestation by reducing all of the hurdles of friction. Suddenly you go, what relationship do they want to have with these brands? Are they going to be happy just to be given a sneaker that Nike has made? Or do they want the 3D files so they can create their own and 3D print them in their houses? Or do they want to create their own spin-off characters for LEGO? Or do they want to parachute themselves into a personalized story within the Pixar universe and actually decide where that navigation then goes in terms of narrative and storytelling and character arcs?  I think that's the answer. I'm not necessarily saying that every brand lends itself into multiplayer. There's a certain amount of multiplayer stuff that a toilet paper brand could do or toothbrushes, for example. But I think for the vast majority of brands who operate in entertainment, in sport, in apparel, anything like that, we're starting to see the need for them to open up to a certain degree, not everything, because I think if everything is open, you don't have a brand. You still need some control and parameters around it. But how do you really start to open up and allow people to come on in and mess around with your IP within certain guardrails, but giving them that permission to co-create.I think one of the biggest moves that I've seen recently which has got me really excited, is the newly announced partnership between Disney and Fortnite. Disney is building this absolutely massive map that covers every single one of their IPs within the world of Fortnite. Which not only makes their IP playable, but also if you start thinking about Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and the ability that Fortnite has given all of the players to create their own islands, characters, aesthetics. Then you overlay that onto Disney and the actual trailer for the partnership did talk about co-creation for the very first time. Disney will let people potentially play with their IP. That's a huge shift that we've never seen before.I want to thank you so much. You're so generous with the thinking that you put out there in the world. I really appreciate you sharing your time and your thoughts with me now.Of course. Thank you so much for having me. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe