THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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

Jasmine Bina is the CEO of Concept Bureau, a brand consultancy in Santa Monica, California. I first met Jasmine and her partner, Jean-Louis Rawlence, through LinkedIn, as you do. We had a great conversation and stayed in touch. (We hit it off so well, they invited me to kick of their Talks at Concept Bureau.)In the few years since that first meeting, it seems to me, they have really hit their stride, as a unique kind of consultancy that’s not afraid to be intellectual in public. And they to do it with style. Not only are they doing smart work for brands like Upwork, Skillshare and Feeld, they have launched their own community : Exposure Therapy - a “haven for the intellectually isolated” and “highly programmed educational community for strategic thinkers.”I was super excited to get into a conversation with Jasmine, to get to know her, and hear her talk about how they work with clients, and think about brand. I thank you so much for spending some time with me. This is a real experiment for me to invite people into a conversation and I'm excited to talk to you. When I do these things I always start my interviews with a question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who's an oral historian. She has people tell their story. I'm going to start with that question, but before I do, I want you to know that you are in absolute control. You can answer the question, or not answer the question, any way that you want to.That question has layers. I've been asking myself that question recently, actually, because when you have kids, it makes you question who your community is, what your tribe is, and what you're going to pass on to them. I've had to choose what holidays we celebrate from which of my cultures, going back and relearning what they meant, who is in our lives and the things that we value.Where I come from, the best thing I can say is that I was raised with a real love and appreciation for this country because my parents came from Iran. They basically fled, so I feel definitely American, but there's something about American history that I've always felt very deeply connected to.The things you learned about in high school, in the little yellow margins of your history books, about manifest destiny, the way West, and the mentality of this country - all the mythology, good or bad, right or wrong. I feel that I come from this country in that sense, that I love the ideals of the country.I am just as much of a cultural mashup as anybody else who's here. I would say that I come from it in the sense that I am always trying to get into the past of it. I love American history and I love finding out the truth about American history. It's great that in this country you can wrestle with the truth and confront it.That's the best way I can answer that question.It's beautiful. Where has that wrestling led you? What do you go when you try to, with your historical curiosity?I think it's led me to where you arrive at in your 40s anyways, which is acceptance.You just have to accept things the way that they are and be optimistic about the way things can change in the future. At this age, I feel like I've had to learn that about politics, demographics. I've had to learn that even as strategists, you're always in culture.I was just having a conversation about this at dinner recently with people, that you consume a lot of the achiness of culture in our work. I feel like we need a formal place to digest the trauma of it all. Learning to accept things as they are and not constantly be judging them or being hurt by them or traumatized by them or angry about them.It's a more fruitful place to be anyways.I love that. Did you have an idea when you were young of what you wanted to be when you grew up?I used to draw pictures of dresses all the time. I think I wanted to be a fashion designer. I wanted to create beautiful things with my hands.I used to paint a lot. I think I need to get back to it. Maybe I'm a lapsed painter, but I used to write a lot too, which is what I do now. I think I've always been a creative in some ways. What I love about this work is that it gives you bounds to your creativity. It still has to work within a market.It has to work within a culture. It makes it more interesting. I will say, I'm one of those people who doesn't remember their childhood too well, which I'm told is a sign of trauma.I'm right there with you. I can never answer the questions I ask.That's funny. I was going to say we got psychographic super fast here.I should have given you a heads up. How did you come into this work? When did you first encounter Brand and the idea that you could shape them or that they were meaningful?It's not the sexiest story, but I started doing PR in grad school.I had a friend who had a startup and could use some extra cash. So I offered to do his PR and learned how to do it. Then my agency started while I was in grad school. Most of our work was in tech and that was when it was the app economy. Apps could get super big before they even knew why they were big or how it happened.It was a really viral time. We would get these huge overnight successes that wanted to go to press, but they didn't even have stories. They had no identities, nothing. I started creating brands quick and dirty before I would even call them brands myself.Just to have something to - it felt like the pre-work before we could do the PR. Then that became a bigger part of our work. I met my partner, Jean Louis. We got more into the strategy side of things and we've just hacked it together as we've gone, but I never worked in an agency.I think that hindered me in the beginning, but I think it's really freed me in recent years. People always ask how did you create Concept Bureau to be what it is. It's different than other agencies. I think it's because I just never worked at an agency, so I didn't quite know the rules.Even when I hire people from agencies, I get nervous because I feel like they're going to come and be like, this isn't how it's supposed to be done.That's funny. I don't know. Start with that completely. When you say it hindered you in the beginning, in what way did you feel it hindered?Just a lot of self doubt, maybe mistakes I didn't need to make, figuring things out. It was all on the fly in the beginning. It was definitely a shaping experience those first few years.What do you love about it? Where's the joy in the work for you?I do love that now, Concept Bureau is focused a lot more on cultural futurism. It's a lot like future casting and trying to understand - it was always very behavioral. We've always done a lot of studies and trying to figure out where culture's going, behavior, belief systems, values, identities, things like that.I love it for the same reason I know every strategist loves their job - it's because you learn how the world works, but also you learn about who you are in the process. It's always changing you as a person. It's always evolving you. You're becoming more mature and objective and insightful and making connections between things. It makes the world feel like your playground.I feel it when I have conversations with friends. That's when my biggest aha moments come through, is when I'm talking to people and if you have a good partner in conversation, you start to just see the matrix a little bit while you're talking about this stuff. I think that's why it's like solving an eternal mystery.It's so beautiful. When did Concept Bureau start? It's been a long time.I don't really know the dates. I'm really bad with chronology. I think the PR agency started, I can't remember, when I was in grad school in 2010. Then maybe five or six years later, we pivoted to Concept Bureau.So I feel like 2016, 2017 is when we became this. When I say we became a brand strategy agency, I just mean in name. I didn't know what we were doing. That's when I started writing, because I had to figure out what am I even selling? So writing was my way of figuring out what's my philosophy about brand strategy, how do I approach it, what does it mean?How is it changing? That came through my writing, which was interesting. In the beginning, a lot of the way I developed my skill was through writing and not so much the work.What do you find people coming to you for? Why do people come to Concept Bureau? What do you find clients coming to you and asking?Traditionally, our engagements can be on the higher end. People who come to us have been reading our work for a while, usually a number of years. When you come to us after reading all of my writing or watching our content, you're really coming to us to be with like-minded curious people and do a massive thought experiment on what you can build in this world.Where can you take this brand? What new territory can you claim? How can you change your market? How can you change people's perceptions or beliefs? A lot of our work is very heavily research based. I tell people we're for brands that are looking to change a belief or a behavior in the market.They need to change a belief or a behavior in order to succeed, because that's where we start. That's what it's evolved to be, whatever that agency is called.That's beautiful. Can you unpack that a little bit? What does that mean? I love that, that's a very advanced place for most people to start a conversation. But what do you mean when you say change a belief, change a behavior, what are you actually talking about?Usually companies that are operating in a new category, they're trying to create a new category, or if the market is moving ahead of them. Sometimes it's as simple as having a new product or the culture around them is changing.The context where they used to own the market, but now they're not the ones dictating the rules anymore. If there's a bias or a fear or a habituated behavior that's keeping people from converting, or something deeper than just selling them on the benefits of your product.If there's something culturally encoded that is keeping people from helping your company grow, that's keeping you from your customers, that's where we try to play. That's where we try to help you untangle that so that you can access that market. It sounds abstract the way I'm saying it, but certain brands need to - let's say if you're creating a premium brand in a historically non-premium or non-luxury category, there's a belief that you just don't pay extra for that, or there's a belief that this is not something that can be luxury. You change that belief by creating stories around it, or finding a belief underneath that belief that you can tap into, or creating a different kind of demand. It's just, how do you change context, create context that makes people behave in a way that makes your products make sense to them?When I read your work, there's something I encounter there that's really special. I think you make the stakes very high. You connect brand to belief and identity. You make it a real thing in a way that feels meaningful. I think that's what I resonate with. I'm curious when you do sit down with a client, how do you talk, how do you define the role of brand and how do you make it clear to them? You've prepped them, like you said, they've come to you.They've been in our funnel. They've been in our orbit. I find oftentimes what we do explain to people to help level set in the beginning is that we very much believe brand first. Oftentimes brand is the product with the clients that we work with.People are paying the premium for the brand, but the brand informs everything else, including products, including user experience and journey, including your org chart, sales, everything, as well as the obvious stuff like marketing and the actual branding function. The brand is an organizing principle. I'm not the first person to say this, an organizing belief where if you saw the world through that lens then it spells out everything else about your company. That's what a brand does. It gives you this lens, this perspective through which to channel whatever the light of your company is, a specific point and it organizes all of your activities. People are usually relieved to hear that because brand usually feels separate or they feel like they're constantly making big decisions. But when you have a strong brand, you've made the only decision that counts, and everything gets filtered through that decision.Who are we? Or what are we meant to do in this world? When you filter everything through that decision, and it's already been made, and it's specific enough, and it's tied to culture, and it's tied to the future, everything you do is going to be on brand. It creates a real harmony in the company, a real simplicity.It doesn't mean you're not still going to have to make hard decisions and do hard things, but you're going to know - the indecisiveness, which plagues so many companies, or the uncertainty, or the unwillingness to take risk - it's still always going to be a risk. However, you've measured it so that now the risk is worth it, that you understand what the potential upside is.That's how I describe brands to people. Sometimes even our most well-read new clients, they need to hear that. They need to know that that's the way we approach brands. It means we are working with the C-suite and we have access to the whole company. We talk about product development and roadmap and stuff like that.Usually people are quite open to it.You mentioned the indecision and uncertainty and fear of taking risks maybe or something, risk aversion. I'm wondering, what's your diagnosis of the C-suite marketer? What is it like to be in that seat and try to make very big decisions about brand?I feel like we get such a small subset of people. They're already converted. They get it. But there are times where the risk aversion is a bit more endemic and I will say this, it's always top down.It's really always top down. If there is a problem within a company culturally, or just not so much culture, but their habit towards risk aversion or whatever, that's a C-suite problem that comes from leadership. It doesn't come from middle management or from the employees.So that's where if you need to fix it, that's where you start. I think if we're talking about CMOs, we're probably at a point in the business world for the most part, although I still see people who are not like this, but they don't usually become our clients, where I think people have a pretty sophisticated understanding of brands already and brand isn't underestimated.It's just that you really have to stress test - do people really say they want to have a revolutionary brand or they want to have a brand that changes everything or that they're very committed to renovating or redoing or updating the brand. If you don't address that question first, then you're going to have problems down the line.That's obvious. So we do our best to try to get that stuff out of the way upfront. We have a lot of questions that we ask initially, even when we do our initial calls with prospects. It's mostly us just asking questions. It works two ways. It helps us really understand if we can add value.But two, it helps them understand how we work. When they see the kinds of questions we ask and the kinds of uncomfortable discussions we force, and the places that we're snooping or trying to look into, the dark corners or whatever. Oftentimes people get excited by those questions because they've been wanting to talk about them forever and they haven't been able to.That's usually a good sign too.That's amazing. I want to talk about exposure therapy, this community that you've built, which is really pretty amazing. And so much fun, so much more fun than I thought I was going to be having. I was such a curmudgeon about it.There was a conversation today with Sylvia Baletsa, right? How do you say her name?Sylvia Baletsa. She's a professor from Columbia, marketing professor. I introduced her, what she was talking about, her work and her idea about status, because I want to hear it from you.She wrote an incredible paper. I can't remember the exact title, but I think it's like the distance theory of status or something like that. I mentioned this even on our call with her in exposure therapy. I've read a few different luxury books in my life, luxury branding books, and they don't really have much to say.Nothing new. You would think luxury hasn't changed in the last 50 years and really it's just a game for big players. She created a new model that kind of makes sense because things have been cropping up lately in culture that disprove a lot of our models for luxury. Quiet luxury, conspicuous non-consumption, athleisure, ugly luxury, a big one.These things don't make sense because in the typical luxury model, the idea is that luxury consumers want to create distinction, right? They create that distinction by buying expensive products or luxury products and when those things become more common or mainstream, they just go, they upgrade, right?They go upmarket or they buy something more expensive or something that's a higher luxury brand. So why is ugly luxury or ugly fashion a thing? Why are billionaires wearing athleisure? Why any of this stuff? She presents a new model and it's this, it's the distance theory. She says along six different dimensions, I'm trying to remember what the dimensions are now, but the idea is that luxury is not about moving up anymore.It's about moving away. It doesn't matter what direction, it's just moving away from the masses. Because luxury has become so diffused, because anybody can buy a Chanel bag now, because luxury brands have been so messy with their pricing and discounting and the internet has made information about all those secret rules about high society and culture and status democratized.How do you differentiate yourself in a world like that? She talks about these ideas of distance. In fact, I should actually pull up... Give me one second. I just want to pull up because I don't want to butcher what she was talking about. So there are different dimensions. There's time, pace of life, culture, aesthetics, conspicuousness, and quantity.So if the aesthetic of luxury has historically always been beautiful, and luxury consumers need to find new ways of distancing themselves and going up isn't an option anymore, of course ugly luxury, or ugly fashion is going to become a thing. Of course Balenciaga is going to make those like super expensive, the most expensive shoes of all time but they look like they're completely tattered.Or I think they're the ones that also made the duct tape bracelet recently. Or a lot of this peasant life cosplaying and stuff like that you see with celebrities. It's just about finding distance, same thing with time. Luxury has historically, only until very recently, been very much defined by newness, right?You have to buy the newest thing. This was very much true when we were younger. Whatever came out in the last three to six months, that was usually the timeline. This idea of vintage is actually quite new and vintage wasn't a known status signal. Vintage doesn't cost more money necessarily, but it costs in other ways.That's another thing about her model that was unique. It really addresses different kinds of costs that are also status signals that we didn't see in the past. Before it really was just about maybe time and money, but now there's all kinds of costs to pay to be in the know. I think one of the most interesting costs she talks about is misidentification costs.I could wear those tattered luxury sneakers, but the cost is that most people will think that I'm just being unfashionable. Very few people who are my peers will understand the signal that I'm giving. And that's a high cost. That's a cost a lot of people typically aren't willing to pay. But if you're in the upper realms of status and luxury and you're looking for ways to differentiate yourself, it's probably where you're going to go.Anyways, it's a fascinating model. What I love about it is that it really elegantly explains everything. I feel like now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it. It's everywhere. So yeah, that's what she talked to us about today.It's amazing, and I think I came in the middle, and that misidentification cost is fascinating to me.It's really a beautiful idea. Tell me a little bit about how has exposure therapy been going, and where did that come from? What was the inspiration?We're only two months in, but it's already exceeded all of my expectations. I talked about this recently. You can only ever really build half of anything.That's what I learned in this process. I could only build half of exposure therapy and it wasn't until people showed up that I knew what it was going to be. And I could see the entirety of this brand for the first time. Really, it was born from the fact that I knew we do strategy differently in our company.I knew we had a fan base that really wanted to spend time with us or somehow consume what we offer and the way that we do things. And I knew that strategists usually, I meet incredible strategists all the time and their curiosities are not being satisfied in their work and they're just not given access to the kinds of cultural intelligence and exposure and therapy that they need to be good strategists.And so we developed this community and it's basically - this is something I learned after my community showed up and people were telling me what exposure therapy is. The thing I heard it described as most is that it's like a haven for the intellectually isolated. So we have a different topic every month that we focus on.It's a highly programmed educational community for strategic thinkers. That's the log line for it. And every month we have a theme and sometimes they're quite strategic and brass tacks like positioning and storytelling we recently did, or this upcoming month is about how to build your strategic mind.We have a month coming up on personal branding. But other months are quite cultural and future focused. So this month we explored what we called modern riches, how we relate to wealth and status, hence why we had Professor Baletsa come and speak to us. Next month, our topic is on like I mentioned, how to build a strategic mind.And our goal is exposure and therapy. So on the exposure side, we drop original research into the group. That becomes the basis of our conversation for the month in Slack, but I'm trying to expose us to this topic from as many angles as possible. We haven't announced it yet, but next month's drop we're going to have the world's second, the number two female poker player in the world will come and talk to us about poker and strategy.We have one of the most well known mentalists who has given a TED Talk. He's going to come talk to us about mentalism, misdirection, holding people's focus, reversing their biases, stuff like that. We have one of the best conflict negotiators or conflict resolution experts coming to talk to us about conflict.It's just different ways of looking at strategy. And then we have some fun stuff planned too, and we have dinners. We just had one of our most recent dinners in LA, it was a remarkable night, and it was called Night of Abundance because we were still exploring the Modern Riches theme. We really played with that theme, it was a very playful, fun night, in a way that can only happen when you get strategists together, or strategists, we have founders and CMOs and leaders, and it's just anybody who has to think strategically for their work. It's really fun, but it's work.People have to stay, you have to work to stay up on the conversations because they're always going in different directions. I have had so many aha moments already in these last couple of months in this community, but it's a place where you can actually get your hands dirty and play in the clay of strategy.And I feel alive in it. I hope and think other people do as well.Absolutely. That's been my experience. The conversations are amazing. And I feel drawn to it even though I don't have time for it.You know what? I keep reminding myself, people make time for the things that are valuable to them.My job is to make it valuable enough that people make the time.That's right. I keep going. Something in what you were just talking about reminded me of, you talked about how you're about cultural futurism now. Is that a recent shift or how did you find that place? And what does that mean in how you work?It is and it isn't. We've always been doing our work like this, where it's always predictive. The whole idea of a brand strategy, the way we do it at least, is most people can create a good brand for today. Most people that come to work with us already have a good brand for today.But it's the whole Red Queen effect, right? Like things are always changing around you. You have to always be changing, even if it looks like there's nothing. And you can't build a strategy without having a prediction. We make a prediction about what the future is going to look like, and then we build a brand that sits in that future.And then your job as a brand is to make that future happen. When people look at your brand, they'll understand either they want to follow you into that future or they don't, but they can't stay apathetic. Because the biggest problem a lot of brands have is that they're nice, but they don't force a reaction, they don't force conversion.I say that you can work with love and hate, but indifference is what kills a brand. So the idea is to get away from that point of indifference. We've always been doing this. The reason I've started calling myself a cultural futurist is because I wrote a Fast Company article and they were asking for a brief bio and I was like, "You know what, I'm a cultural futurist."So I put it in there. But I think I've been circling and trying to figure out what it is that we do. What's something that people would understand and I think right now that's the best way of describing it.It's really powerful. I'm not, I've never heard of the Red Queen effect. What is that?Oh, it's actually going to be in our drop for next month for Exposure Therapy. That's why it's top of mind for me right now. But it's basically from Alice in Wonderland and I think the queen says something like you have to move very fast to stay in the same place.And it's the same thing. If you want to stay in your station in the market, you have to be innovating all the time. And that's the Red Queen effect. Things are constantly changing and you have to work very hard just to stay where you are.What the predictive, how do you, I guess I'm curious about research. I know that it's central to what you do, but tell me a little bit about the role that research plays in your work.It's a very big role. It's the first half of our engagements. I will say when we're not doing client stuff, we are always doing exercises and games and presentations internally just to keep us constantly predicting the future and comfortable with predicting the future.I read a book that kind of really opened my eyes to what research was about and how it's basically the precursor to creativity, at least for us. Jane McGonigal wrote a book called Imaginable that I reference all the time. I've probably bought like 50 copies for people over the years.I read that book and I would get so frustrated because it was just exercises about imagining a future. I was like, "Where does that, when am I going to, when is she going to start talking about how to do it?" It occurred to me that is how to do it. You must get comfortable with the discomfort of predicting it because we all think we can - if I told you, and this is an example she has in the book - describe, you wake up 10 years from now, describe where you are.That's hard. Unless you've been practicing, you can't name if you're in bed or not, what the lighting is like, who's with you, what's the building, you can't. That's hard and it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable because it takes a tremendous amount of imagination. Predicting the future takes huge amounts of imagination because usually the future is not what we think it's going to, or it's not what the obvious answer is.There are always disrupting things from out of left fields. People behave, you might think of the people, the way people are behaving, that's not the way they're going to behave in the future. Although the base nuances of who we are and what drives us probably remain the same, but we fail to interpret how they might change in the future.Jean Louis, my partner, loves to always give the example of we had, people used to be very creative about the future. Postcards about what the future would look like from the 1800s, but they never imagined that people would stop wearing hats. There are things that stay with us.There's so many things that you have to kind of popple in your mind to really be free to create an imagined future. It's an interplay, right? It's only the people who imagine the future that actually create it. So it's not like you're just guessing and hoping it's true. You're guessing so that you know what you need to do to make that guess a reality.And brands have the resources to do that. Brands are probably the only - I don't know that even our governments can do that anymore, but I can see brands doing it. So back to the role of research, which was your original question - it's very instrumental for us and we do three kinds of research: cultural research, psychographic research, and market research.Cultural is truly just trying to understand the narratives and culture that we think will be emerging that will affect people's perspectives and contexts in the next three to five years. Psychographic is - I hate to bring it back down to its very basic pieces, but it is quantum qual.Although we try really hard to make it informed quantum qual that I'm not asking about the product, the brand, I'm asking, I'm trying to understand how people are building their world views and the triggers that will get them to change. And then the market research, again, really isn't about the market.Of course, we need to know what's happening in the market, but I want to know how different players in the market are conditioning your users to expect different things in three to five years. Like in wellness, for example or medicine, yeah, science is going in a certain direction. Yes.Brands are doing certain things. But there are other factors including brands that are conditioning people to expect hyper personalization or conditioning people to expect emotional medical experiences. These conditioning experiences matter even if, especially if they don't come from your direct competitors.But that means they're coming to your doorstep with certain expectations and you have to predict what they're going to be. So that's the main research we do.I love that the question about research led you down a rabbit hole of imagination. I've heard you mention that book before. I'm pretty sure I have it because I remember her saying something amazing in the nineties about reality is broken and game design is going to fix it. She had this amazing quote.Oh yeah, she's great.But I want to tell me a little bit more about the role of imagination in the work. I'm, I think everybody's landing on this idea that we all need, nobody was talking about imagination a while ago, but now I feel like we all... we want to know. I know that I'm thinking about imagination a lot. So what does it mean?I feel like it's the hardest part of our job. And I think imagination for me, I can say personally, we're always trying different ways to engender more imagination in the company. I think imagination will be one of our topics next year for exposure therapy, for sure.But for me, I feel that there is probably unbounded imagination in everybody. It's not about cultivating it so much as it is about excavating and getting rid of everything that sits on top of it. All of your beliefs, all of your limiting narratives - I don't mean identity stuff like "I don't believe I can be that imaginative".I mean that we have so many conditions on what can happen and what's real and what people will accept that really make it hard to imagine something that's really outside of the box that we're living in now. It's like that whole paradigm shift. It's that famous quote, I don't even know if Einstein said it, but "the solution to a problem is never found in the same paradigm that the problem is in".So imagination is really - it sounds so tacky, but you can't like color outside of the lines easily. You really, it's hard to know the confines that you put yourself in mentally when you try to imagine a different future. I know I have a lot of them, but I know, you know when you meet somebody truly imaginative because they say stuff that you realize you could have thought of if you didn't have these weird rules in your head.And I think the innovative, like groundbreaking pieces when they break those rules. So I, it feels like an excavation to me.For some reason I was thinking about improv. Do you do improv?Oh my God. I'll die before I do that. And I probably should. I think somebody on my team does improv.I think Rebecca does it, which to me, she'll be a hero forever for doing that. I've heard improv is valuable for this kind of stuff. I don't know, maybe if I could drink before I got on stage, maybe. No, I'm like you. I'll drink everything before that.I'm like you, it's been suggested to me as something that people in this work do for all the reasons that we're talking about. And I have never done it because I'm terrified of all of that, but I guess I mean that's connected to everything you're talking about - my attachment to the boxes I'm in is strong.Improv is maybe fated on my journey as a strategist, but safer ways that I've been exploring have been reading history, because history really helps you see the patterns that we're doomed to repeat, so it helps you get outside of the box and look at it from the outside.Sci fi too and any kind of art, but sci fi is super interesting because those are like actual thought experiments that you see happening. I wrote about this recently, but for a long time, I wouldn't even let myself read fiction because I thought life is too short. I'm a business owner and I need to learn business and markets and how things work. I remember mentioning that to my team and I think it was Zach who said "you can't be a good strategist if you don't read fiction". And so I started reading fiction and it was just another one of those rules where I felt like fiction isn't the real work, imagination isn't the real work. And so it's just like I said, that's what strategy is - you're just always changing as a person.Do you feel like the idea of brand as a lens, that seems consistent and evergreen as a way of thinking about brand, but what changes for brands now to connect AI? I don't know if it was specifically AI, but just generally speaking.Can I go back to your first question? No, I'm kidding.I'll throw you under the AI bus.I don't think I have anything new to add to that conversation. I think my views are pretty vanilla. They're pretty loosely held. It probably will cut out the lower end of the brand strategy market, which would suck. I'm not concerned - we're not in that lower end. But I feel that another argument could be made, which is what I keep coming back to, that if AI and automation will completely democratize and remove any of the barriers around product tech development, entering a market, having channels - all that's really left is brand. That's basically all that's left. And brand can always be innovated upon. There is no right brand. And I think that's what makes it unique. You can have multiple brands that just grow a market. You can have one brand that stands for one thing, and another brand that stands for the opposite, and they will both work.And they will both grow the pie. That's what's interesting about it. It's not a zero sum game when it comes to brand. So I think in that case, in that regard, and I don't know, I don't know if I'm just being naively optimistic, but that's the natural conclusion I come to.Another conclusion too is that technology is fast, people are slow. My partner always loves to say that and I'm sure it's been said a million times. And I know somebody who's pretty deeply embedded in the AI world and things I'm hearing from people who are working at Fortune 500s - they're just so far behind. It's here and it's exciting, but most companies are extremely far behind in adopting it. We'll see, but I think we'll survive, it'll work out. I'm not having an existential crisis about it.Beautiful. I don't really have any more questions. I just really enjoyed talking to you. I really appreciate you sharing the time and I'm ever grateful for the invitation you extended to me to air my thinking. It was a really rewarding and satisfying experience and I appreciate it.Oh, people loved it. People loved it. It was a fantastic talk and I still use it as a model for all of our new speakers.So it was really, it was a gift to us.That's so kind. I mean it. Nice. So much. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.Of course. 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Ben Doepke is the Principal of IX Strategy. I was introduced by Ben my a mutual researcher friend. I remember hitting it off with him the first time we spoke. He’s a big thinker, who has a way of bringing the most compelling parts mythology and archetypes into this work. I was excited to speak him and learn more about how he got to where he is.In addition to the strategy work they do with clients, they also do pretty amazing Brand Behavior Training. I attended an event he organized in Cincinatti several years ago, and had a lot of fun, and met some amazing people. Coming up, I’ll be joining them in New York City. I think you know this, but I'd like to start all of my interviews, all my conversations with this question that I've borrowed from a friend of mine. Her name is Suzanne Snider, and she teaches the Oral History Summer School up here in Hudson. I stole it from her. I always use it all the time, and I love it, but I always over explain it. You can answer this question any way that you want. You're in absolute control. And the question is, where do you come from?Peter, I knew this one was coming. I haven't listened to previous interviews that you've done. I've learned that there seems to be an importance of acknowledging place and that people would answer that question in a geographical sense. So I guess the answer to that. In a geographical sense, Peter I come from Cincinnati. In fact, I am seventh generation Cincinnati. And with these kids now, it's eight generations of Cincinnati, you just can't get out. The cost of living is really low. The parents are so friendly, it's everywhere, it's a nice way of life.But I think the reality is I didn't grow up in Cincinnati. I grew up on a goat farm, about 20, 25 miles outside Cincinnati, which is interesting because my mom was a flutist in the symphony orchestra, my father, an urban designer, very cosmopolitan interests in profession, goat farmer. As I thought about your question, I knew it was coming.It's Cincinnati, but it's not really Cincinnati. And in point of fact, I come from the in between and you and I have talked about this in the past, I think you and I are both fascinated by these transitional moments, the threshold, the liminal and for better or worse, those are the only places that I feel comfortable.What, and so where would that be now? What's another example of where do you find that space?I'm continually finding that space. It's like you're asking me to describe my whole life, every wedge of my life. I'm currently speaking to you in a parking lot. This is endemic. This is built into my rhythm of life, my way of working. I don't know if you've been to my website. Most people who visit, I eventually just had to scrub the entire thing so it just said strategy and insight so that people would know this is what's happening here. And even still, what does strategy mean and what does insight mean? There is not a whole lot of agreement on what those things mean. So of course, that's where I set up shop is the space where people are it could be anything.What did as a young goat farmer, what did you want to be when you grew up?A musician. And so that came true.What kind of, tell me the music story. I don't know this about you Ben.I was a classical pianist and I was a damn good one until I was about 14 and then I quit having left tooth marks on the lid of the piano.I'm confused. I don't know what those teeth marks are about.Frustration, pain. When you're practicing a few hours a day, you're always left with the feeling that you're not as good as you would like to be and so you practice some more but you only exacerbate the situation. When you're 14, it's like dude. So lots of frustration. So I quit we've probably a good call. So where I wouldn't touch it, but then because I was socially awkward, I discovered that if I was going to make friends it would, I would need some sort of avenue.And so I found out that people in my social circles they like music. And so I joined a band, lots of band, and I stayed in bands, eventually toured for, I don't know, five, six, seven years, something like that. Full time. Into my mid toward my late 20s, 26, 27.Are you willing to share band names?Yeah. I got to make peace with it at some point. I was a psychology nerd. Always have been fixated on understanding what it means to be a human. And so getting into psychology, I discovered the somatosensory homunculus. And so the group of guys that I was playing with, they did not want to call the band somatosensory homunculus, but they were okay calling it just homunculus.So there you have it. Homunculus.What is a somatosensory homunculus?If your body parts were sized according to the amount of cortical region designated or the nerves that were how sensitive they are. That's what it, that's the somatosensory homunculus. They're like huge lips, huge fingers, huge feet tiny little legs and midsection, and no butt.Wow. Amazing. How old were you when you named that you're in that? 20.Wow. How long did homunculus survive? What was the peak homunculus experience?So I think the first show was in 96. We got it. I think we hung it up in '03.Nice. You had a good run.Yeah, it was a weird time to be in a band, because it was pre internet, dawn of internet, and then oh, like we don't even have to play live shows to be discovered. I came from, dude, we were the last of the handbill generation. You know what I'm talking about. You're an old. I'm an old. So we were out on the street corners passing out handbills.Painful. I'm with you. I'm with you. That's amazing. I love knowing this. You said that you 20, when did you discover that you were fascinated by what it means to be human? When did psychology become a thing that, that was in your world that you were interested in?Growing up on a farm, but going to school in the inner city every single day driving along the Ohio river. There was that in between period, which as a kid what are you doing? You're staring out the window, watching the river go by every single day. And we didn't have a TV. So when I would get into school, all the kids were talking about the different TV shows or whatever's going on, like cultural stuff.And I was like a freaking space alien who just landed in their frothy little world. In the in between, always in the in between. And so this thing of growing up on the farm, going to school in the inner city and just trying to figure out like, this is such a, I think a universal human response is why is everybody else so different? Why are they so different?  It doesn't dawn on you till probably early teens where you're like, why am I like, what's my problem? Why don't I go to mass? Why don't I, watch Parker Lewis can't lose. That was a TV show or whatever. Or what's happening, I think was a TV show. And kids would, we're talking about these shows and they were going to their religious ceremonies or what have you. And just, I was. Yeah. And I just, I also like in the midst of that, what is the word flummoxedness, flummoxation?Anyway, in the middle of that flummox, I was like, holy hell, I'm so taken by difference. I'm obsessed with difference. And that is a thought that I am still just really fixated on, if you're in a family setting and you look to your left and right, and maybe everybody in your family is speaking the same language, or maybe they all look the same, or there's all this sameness that you might find in your family, and still what is it that makes family life interesting? It's usually they will call out, Oh Peter is this, he's this way.Like he, that as humans, we lust for difference lost for it. And I think it's just, that's all tied into that drive to become who we are.When I started out West the guy that I worked for he would speak in like corporate koans. One of them that I always say was, “We consume what we are afraid we are losing.” What do you make of that? It came to me as you just described this attraction to difference or novelty or difference you were saying.The part it feels a bit careless is the afraid. I wouldn't paint fear as this predominantly defining feature of our existence. I think it's a big part of it. I use the word lust for difference and I think maybe there, these are two sides of the same coin. Maybe, I don't know. But I do believe that we were, we're always, let's say this, I think we're gathering pieces of ourselves through our interactions with each other, which is really a an expression of Vygotsky. So nothing new there.Tell me about Vygotsky.Lev Vygotsky. He, like most of his work I think was originally in Russian and the way it translates is pretty clunky, but I think a good summation of his work was we're always becoming ourselves through each other. He was a developmental psychologist and most of his work really focused on childhood, early childhood, but we just, we keep becoming older children.Yeah. And tell me a little bit, I want to hear about the work you do now. Tell me a little bit about what you do. What you're working on and you're thinking you, I've, we met a while ago and you're thinking is beautiful and the, what you bring to brand and the qualitative is so powerful. How do you talk? How do you start a conversation about the work you do when somebody asks, Hey Ben, what do you do?Thank you for speaking so kindly of the work, Peter. The way I would answer that question is contingent on who I think is asking it. And all the guesswork of trying to understand what it is they want to know.Let's say it's a parent at the swim that's in the bleachers. And the person at the swim meet asks you, ‘Hey what do you do?’So I'll either, if it's really loud and I'll just say I'm a consultant and then that's the end of that.The consultant exit.Yeah. That's fine. But no I say that I work with brands to help them understand who they are, to help them understand who they serve. And to understand what is possible, and then not just what's possible, but what is right. And I think all four of those things structure each other. I think it's just almost like a Buckminster Valerian, model that I hold in my head, like where everything is holding itself together.You know what I mean? I think too often, brands go right to, Oh we could make this, or we could say this, or we could run this particular activation or whatever the case may be. And sometimes you'll run into people who are saying, Oh yes, we can, we could do that, right? That is possible, but let's take a step back and ask Oh, what's going to resonate best with the people we serve.Very rarely do you back up further from that to say who are we and what do we have to offer anything to anyone, i. e. what is our most sacred remit.This isn't, this isn't just about brand purpose or brand promise or I think those statements are really important, by the way. This is really about the essence of the brand. And I think too often what we see is that in the rush to activate, in the rush to make ourselves visible as brands, we leave behind what matters. That's why you see so much cultural pollution coming from brands. Just the detritus of rushing and cleverness. God with the cleverness.What do you mean the cleverness? What's an example of what do you get? What are you talking about?You, in our fields, Peter, and I'm speaking broadly, like marketing, business, innovation. There are very talented, very gifted, brilliant people, truly brilliant, who are under commercial demands to perform, to deliver something, but without the latitude oftentimes to deliver something beautiful or to borrow the parlance of your initiative. Deliver something beautiful and meaningful.There it is. Deliver something meaningful. It sucks, man. Like, how many times have you been in that room and looked around and been like, this is an embarrassment of talent. What could we actually do here? If people understood what this brand was about. What could we do?Oh my God. So talk to me there. Like I just had a, you just painted a picture of that room that we've all been in, right? You've painted a picture that there's like another step all the way back is the sacred remit, right? How do you slip, how do you get, how do you get into a conversation about sacred remit?So again I'm still figuring that out because a lot of that is contingent on who's asking. Or more often, who's charging ahead and has paid for your help. That's not asking by the way.Wait, what do you mean? Same more about the brands are not asking.Brand leaders are not often asking, what are we about? What is our essence? What is sacred that should permeate everything that we are doing? They're not asking that they are asking, how do we hit timing under constraints of budget. How do we deliver quarter by quarter, everything is just this sort of keep the ball rolling down, downhill instead of what is the right thing.And so when I say they're not asking, they're charging ahead, they're charging ahead and they might reach out and say we need to know who our consumer is, or we need a commercial platform for 2025. We need to build out our pipeline, for the next three to five, maybe 10 years. If you're on a real fine one, but they're like, they're not at, to me they're not asking the most important questions that have to do with the sort of sacred origin, the sort of belief underneath the brand.I'm seeing your mind operate, and I think maybe you have a belief about what a brand means and what it is for people and the potential that it represents.   And there's a feeling that if only the client really understood it, the brand leaders understood what that was, then this embarrassment of talent could create just a flourish of beauty, basically. So that's what I feel like I heard. Please tell me if I'm wrong and then maybe I'm just projecting. And then the second part is how do you lead teams to an experience of what that is? How do you articulate that possibility? Is that, am I making sense?You are. The first thing you said is that I have a belief about what the brand is, about what brand essence brand is. It's not that I have a belief, it's that I know that they have a belief about what the brand is, and I don't know that belief has been properly served. If you ask a lot of decision makers that are working on brands, what is the origin story or the primal myth, the creation myth of this brand. They might look at you sideways give you that quizzical dog look.  As an alternate to that, they'll probably start reeling off the chronological history of the brand. That's not the way belief works. Belief tracks back to a creation myth or what bro, Barbara Sproul. S P R O U L. Barbara Sproul, she wrote a book on what did she call it? Primal myth.Low key banger. That book is fantastic. And I'm going to tell you, if you don't read the entire book, that's cool. But the intro come on. All right. Basically the creation myth, which is a dreamlike recollection and of the sacred origin of the brand. It holds the DNA. Like, when we enter into that non linear, into that imaginative space, images flood our minds.Those images carry instruction and it is our work then as we are faithfully delivering through that belief system to activate that essence to carry those instructions all the way through into the products that we are making and the messages that we are delivering and the services that we're offering and the experiences that we're hoping people will remember all of it, all of it should come from an intentional effort to carry that essence all the way.And the reality, Peter, sorry, and I'll wrap up this never ending thought. The reality is that those instructions, they're coming through anyway, but when they come through by accident, the results are usually painful. They are degenerative instead of generative, because when you are talking about this essence in its intentional form, in its deliberate form, it is generative and beautiful and gives the brand and a belief strength and traction, but in its sort of default, where it is not deliberate, where it is unin haphazard, then it shows up and it shows up destructively.  And when you're working with some of, I have so many near and dear friends who are working in these corporations that are characterized by this default way of working. It's just cranking it's just that, it's like somebody is asking you for something. Don't ask a whole bunch of whys just do it.Just get the thing done. And as I said, like I said earlier if you're immensely talented, you can draw from your talent. You can draw from your personal experience. You can be extra clever.But that doesn't change the fact that you've not stopped, paused, and asked what is the sacred content, the ineffable, the essential, that we can drive through here. Your cleverness, notwithstanding.Can you tell a story about helping a team. What's the process? How do you guys work? What I've heard is what I, what's interesting to me is you're collecting teams with their origin story, which is not something that I've ever really thought about like that before. So tell me a little bit more about how you guys work.As you would probably know is important given that you're doing similar type work, you got to meet people where they are like, I can't go streaming through the front door with my robes trailing behind me, my hair, all frizzed out. Come on, man.So when we set up stakeholder interviews, a big part of this is tell me about your time with the brand. What do you love about this brand? What makes you crazy about this brand? We have to start out in the sort of mundane, as it were, and probably even rage into the profane, which is a great setup for getting to the sacred.And usually that's what we'll do and say, All right. Now we built up some rapport. I have a really good picture of the chronology of the brand because everybody loves telling you about the chronology of the brand. And maybe there's an audit of all of its commercial activity going back 107 years.  Okay. That's great. And now I'll say, all right, we're just going to do something a little bit differently now. And we can think about it as creative inspiration. I'm going to ask you three questions. And there's there is actually a wrong answer and the wrong answer is when you start thinking too hard about what you're saying, I'm going to be able to tell, and I'm going to ask you to back up and think less and feel more.Is that an intervention that you'll do? That's how you are in an interview like that? You'll be like, I'm sorry, you were thinking too hard on that one.Yeah. That's fantastic. We have to, we got to hold the line, man, got to hold the line. Otherwise everybody continues to fall back into the default. I want to say something that's smart. I want to say something that's not going to get me fired. I want to say something that, yeah. I'll ask him three questions. It's I want you to imagine that this brand has never existed. Tell me about what comes to mind and tell me about the universe as you are picturing it where this brand never existed.  And oftentimes they will start telling you like, they're going to start playing back. Some historical element. And so I'll say, look, just as a reminder, I'm not interested in the history. I'm interested in the images that are flooding your mind. As you imagine the universe where this brand didn't exist.First reflexive images that are bubbling up. And then, so what I'm looking for in those answers are images, actions, and descriptions, and that's the order of priority image action and description. So there we go. The universe before the brand existed. Now, tell me about the brand. That's like in some moment, the universe went from no brand to now here's this brand again, images, actions, descriptions in that order is what I'm looking for. And then finally, we look at the universe as a comprehensive holistic system, and now there is this new presence that has been injected into it.Tell me about how you are observing the world shift. In response to this new present, how is it integrating or rejecting or whatever the case may be. How does the world adapt? And it's those three chapters that spell out these, what we would call core brand actions, that form the essence of the brand.And was it before, universe before it existed, and then when it arrived? And what are the three?Universe before the brand existed, now the brand exists, how has the universe responded? I don't even get. And based on those core brand actions, now we have psychographics that we can drop into the recruiting for understanding our design target.  We also have these syndicate instructions that can be deployed across the full spectrum of brand engagement, ranging from awareness all the way through to advocacy. It provides an action based line of continuity that, I don't think you often see in most brand strategy structure. You'll see a bullet point list of like first moments of truth, a bullet point list of second moments of truth, whatever the case may be, and what we are trying to say is the brand experience is itself a story that we as human beings have the opportunity to activate within our own lives. And there should be a line of continuity in there. There is a core brand action that we will sense through all touch points.And then other aspects of the brand from an action standpoint will come forward, will fall back. And all of that is baked into these instructions that live in the brand's origin or creation myth.Can you tell a story of a client story about how this plays out? Do you have a, a friendly case study that you are able to share? You express all this work in the story of a brand.Yeah. Without naming anybody we did a project about a year and a half ago that I think finally reached a very convincing point of success. Actually, you know what? Even better going, I think I can probably even share more specifics on this one because it was a while ago. There is a, our client from, I don't know, like five, six years ago called Money Lion. They're a financial tech company. At the time they were just I don't know, they were the startup, and they were at the very beginnings of trying to understand what are we and now they were at, they were not asking that question.They were asking who do we serve and how do we make sure that what we're offering is going to be relevant? So we do the stakeholder interviews. We meet with the entire C suite and we were asking these questions asking even at that time, I think we were even asking more biographical questions of them.What brought you into this, like something in your nature drew you into this brand. Can you tell me about what that might've been? And then we moved on to the questions that I mentioned to you before. And it was very cool. Like these are finance guys. These are like, hardcore, like financial dude.And so this was like pretty novel territory for them. But they ended up getting into it and we had a very we, some of them even called back two or three times and be like, I want to something else. And because narrative, narrative is addictive, when you're really in it, it's you just want to, you just want to keep pulling on that thread.But we did end up getting to some really concrete brand action, some core brand action. When we look at it that way, it's these are the things that you will do all the time. In everything. And so as we transitioned out of the stakeholder interviews, we got into the qualitative research where, as I said, like we injected the psychographics from those stakeholder interviews into the screener and we're going out and we are talking to people who are looking at.  In addition to their they're open to working with a financial app or all this category stuff. In addition to that, these are people who self identify a desire to liberate and be liberated. These were people who self identified as instigating or being instigated, right? Like jump starting.  Also people who were guarding and being guarded and these were just these prevailing action themes in their lives. And so you start to see, what is this configuration? You've got people jumpstarting chain, you've got people who are breaking free and people who are about guarding and safety and providing and all that business, right?And so the cool part is we go into their lives and we're, we are actively looking for how those four brand actions are coming to life already. How did those actions show up in their lives? And again, it's through images, it's through actions, and it's through description. And in the qualitative research, we discover all these insights, but I think some of the ones that were most stallion were the one that showed the relationship between these core brand actions, brought it all to a head to say the way that I take care of myself and my people often means that I need to break the status quo.It often means that I'm going to have to be the one who's turning over tables in the temple. And that whole energy transferred into the brand identity that the agency, We Believers fantastic agency, by the way, in New York We Believers took a lot of that material and codified it into the brand book.And so much of what in the brand today is it's now publicly traded company. It is lift and drop from those first couple phases of the work we did. Yes. Did we produce a comms platform and provide recommendations on what those services should be? Yes. But honestly, Peter, that stuff is a cakewalk compared to some of that chewier upfront stuff.How beautiful. I want to with the time we have left, I want to talk about archetypes. I know I've signed up for the thing in New York. Thank you. I'm so excited. What's the role of archetypes in the work that you do?We've almost stopped using the word archetype because of what you just said. I'm not interested in having this whole linguistic conversation about what is archetype, what does it mean, all this. The reality is most people who are talking about it haven't studied it. So let's not have that conversation.The conversation I am interested in having is the one that looks at the hypocrisy of brands who are willing to concede that they are all wrapped up in human nature. Nobody's going to argue if human nature isn't part of the way that you run a brand. No, one's going to fight you on that. And yet where is the line between human nature and nature, really? Are we just going to say that, Oh, like we're going to use this human nature line of discernment to separate brands from actual nature?Man, that's BS. And so what we try to do, we've backed out of the whole no disrespect to Carol Pearson, by the way, love Carol Pearson for people who are skeptical about archetypes. As you've learned about them through Carol's work, go deeper into Carol's work, because she she has made it very comfortable to linger in the lobby, as it were, but get a room, go deeper into the work.  She does follow it all the way through into its Jungian roots. I think we've gone into the, essentially, to borrow an archetypal reference, the belly of the whale. Where we are basically looking at these universal laws of nature and saying, how do they show up in human life? And then how did they show up consequently in brand life?And so that's it. We are looking at these nine, you could call them forces of nature. These nine different forces of nature. How are they shaping human life? How are they shaping brand decision making? And the, and what I was saying before is. If you work with those forces of nature, those archetypes as they were, if you work with those in a conscious way, in a deliberate, intentional way, then you have a chance at experiencing something generative, creative, harmonious, and of course, if you're working at it from a, from an unconscious standpoint, It's quite likely that you are incurring pain in your own life, as well as your team's lives.And God forbid, and this happens actually all the time you are scaling that oversight into the lives of millions of people. And this is where not to, as we run out of time, go all the way down the rabbit hole. But there is an ethic of brand decision making that I think a lot of people are not seeing, which is you are affecting people on psychological, social, cultural levels that you don't know about, that they don't know about, and it wouldn't take that much effort to stop and look at the essence of what you're doing and to activate it more intentionally.What should I expect in New York with you Brand Behavior Workshop?We are going to help you to embody these forces of nature in a social setting so that firstly you get these sensations in your body and we will then look for those sensations, externally as we go through the galleries at the Museum of Modern Art to say, Are there images, actions, and descriptions that are activating our bodies in a certain way?And we're going to go out and photocapture all of that. We'll bring it all back. We will look at each other's images together. We will discuss them. And we will certainly have a moment where we realize, Oh my God, like there were two or three of these that I couldn't find. And that's really typical.It doesn't mean that they're not in you. It just means that those rooms in your house are dark and we might need each other to help flip on the light. And now we're back to the Vygotsky again. We're always becoming ourselves through each other. It's beautiful.But thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. I appreciate you sharing your time and this was a lot of fun. So thank you so much. It's so great to hear more about your work.Peter, thank you so much. I appreciate you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Veronique Greenwood is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Pacific Standard, Aeon, Popular Science, Scientific American, and many others. I kept running into her work as I gathered pieces for my weekly newsletter, so created a Google alert for her. So, when I decided to have these conversations, I knew I wanted to get her take. One of the things I want to talk about is wonder - and this is something she knows well, and incorporates into her work. I hope you enjoy!A selection of my favorite of her pieces:How Trust Shapes Nations' Safety Rules in The Atlantic How does a country decide what risks are acceptable in everyday life? This is a must-read, and keep. The Vodka-Red-Bull Placebo Effect in The Atlantic People take more risks when downing caffeine-and-alcohol cocktails—but only if they know what they’re drinking. Beautiful proof of the power of brand. My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery in The Atlantic His career as an eminent physicist was derailed by an obsession. Was he a genius or a crackpot? A really beautiful story. . Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

When I think about naming, I think about Anthony Shore. He is the founder of Operative Words, and is responsible for more than 250 names. He is the guy people call when they talk about names. And, well, I wanted to talk about names. Here is the piece on the Neuroscience of Trademarks: Vance, Kristy and Sandra M Virtue. “Metaphoric advertisement comprehension: The role of the cerebral hemispheres.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 10 (2011): 41-50 Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Richard Wise is a brand anthropologist who is a Global Planning Director at VML. I had enjoyed his writing on brand and SXSW, and then I read his book, “Save Your Soul: Work in Advertising.” I can’t recommend the book, or his articles more highly. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe