Norms

Above, Jeff Leitner on norm design. Also, Tony Fadell on learning by doing. And, Marty Neumeier on Steve Jobs.

Creativity

Above, Martin Weigel on having an opinion. Also, Erich Joachimsthaler on AI marketing. And, Lauren Gepford on the Democrat brand.

Place

Above, Michael J. Crosbie on healing architecture. Also, Jessica Zouaoui on wellness. And, Brandan Presser on hotel blanding.

Plurality

Above, Stripe Partners on Arendt’s table. Also, Derek Thompson on male relationships. And, Nathan Schneider on the encyclical.

Conversation

Above, ReD Associates on conversational AI. Also, Sonia Clarke on conversations spaces. And, StoryCorps on great questions.

So I start all these conversations the same way. I’m not sure if you know this, but it’s a question I borrow from a friend of mine and a neighbor who helps people tell their story. And I learned this question from her and I haven’t really found a better way of getting into a strange conversation than this question, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now.

So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And it’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is, where do you come from?

It’s a deep question. The way you ask it sounds very deep. And if you forgive me, I will answer it in a superficial manner.

Or maybe you could almost say a deep manner. I was thinking about this question, it was coming. And the sincere answer is that I feel I don’t come from anywhere because there is a reason, because I moved a lot.

So if you’re a nomad, you ask the nomad, where’s your home? You might say, my suitcase, or my tent, or my rug. But in the short, officially, I was born in Lima, Peru.

All my four grandparents come from different cultures, different backgrounds, different nationalities. So alone, just genetically, very mixed. And when I was about four years old, I moved to East Africa, Tanzania, where I spent most of my childhood.

And from then on, there was a three-year rhythm, more or less, of moving, mainly across Europe, Switzerland, Spain, etc. But let’s say the formative educational years, let’s say high school, I spent in Germany. So probably Germany got the most of me.

And then, yeah, my professional career, I worked in Milan, I worked in London, I worked in Paris. Yeah, so, and currently, I live in New Jersey in a place called Montclair, which I find, by the way, very exotic. So yeah.

I love how you said Germany got the most of me. Yeah.

And I got the most of Germany. Yeah, well, the formative, that means the information, the software system, right? The poems, the literature, the culture, the love of the language, definitely the music.

And it started from the classics, like Beethoven, Mozart, the classic stuff, to the techno stuff, to the modern stuff. So I spent these formative years where I delved into music, dance culture, that was very much, very influenced by the German, let’s say, techno movement in the 90s. So I would say that that is still resonating inside of me, very much so, and also the German language, which I love.

Oh, wow. And do you have a recollection of being young in Germany, what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Well, the biggest recollection, probably the Tanzania, well, it depends on the age, right? But the childhood, let’s say before hitting puberty, was in East Africa. And I wanted, I think, to be between a spy and an archaeologist.

Oh, wow.

So I lived pretty much, this is really, I think this is really interesting, very isolated in the years in Tanzania and Dar es Salaam, no TV, no phone, hardly any neighbours, very, in deep isolation. So, yeah.

What explained all the travel?

Parents, jobs. So, yeah, my stepfather, my German stepfather, travelled a lot for his job. And later on, I really, I think, it was also already my constitution.

So it’s not just the way I was brought up, but I think it’s, I have a tendency to being a little bit restless. And FOMO is my favourite. It’s probably my state of being.

I want to be everywhere and I want to know everything. And I think I’m excessively curious. So, yeah.

Well, I identify with that a bunch. Often I describe myself as omnivorous, in a way, and I identify with your FOMO as a state of being. I want to go back to your, you were in Tanzania, you wanted to be a spy and an archaeologist or an archaeologist.

I think first, yeah. Well, let’s say archaeologist. I had a few books on ancient Egypt and there was not that much stimulation around me.

But so probably, I don’t know, I wonder, I wonder, this is pure interpretation, whether I thought that beneath the surface there was something to be discovered. I was fascinated by pirates and treasures that you had to dig out. So I often used to dig, dig around, make holes all over the place.

Oh, I lived also on a cliff upon the Indian Ocean. So there was a lot of beach, very lonely beach, no people. So that captured my infantile imagination.

Wow. Can you tell a story?

I’ve never thought about these questions. Yes. So it’s good to being asked. Thank you.

The image of being a child on an empty beach is quite powerful for some reason.

Yes. Yes. It was probably my main playground.

What I used to do, and actually, sometimes I share this, well, I used to collect shells. So that was something I loved doing. And luckily, my mother was very hands-off.

So I could do whatever I wanted. So I had a lot of freedom. And my room was, I had such a huge shell collection.

And one of my favorite activities was to sort them, organize them. So I would constantly reshuffle the order. So the pointy shells in one box, then I would classify them by their color.

And so I would keep moving the shells around by classifying by their characteristics. And I think I still do somehow with information the same.

And the spy part of the grown-up dream, what was the spy?

Well, I think I always found invisibility pretty amazing. I always wanted to be invisible because you find out more about what people are talking about, what they’re thinking. And I think that also goes hand in hand with my introverted character.

I’d rather listen in order to find out more. And I also believe this might be, I hope I’m not forcing here an interpretation, but because I moved so much and was constantly exposed to different environments and to different languages, I had to figure out how things work. So you stand on the side, imagine a playground, kids are playing in the playground and I probably would be at the periphery and figuring out how things function.

So that’s a way of looking at. So spy is not, I don’t mean in the dubious way of stealing information or lying, but much more the passive observer and recording everything that the awareness that information is valuable, that every information bit counts. I think maybe that has been, that was a, I wonder, I mean, I’m just maybe over-interpreting.

I appreciate how cautious you are of your own interpretation. You mentioned now that you’re, my usual question at this point is like, catch us up, where are you now? You mentioned Montclair, New Jersey, and you described it as exotic.

Well, first of all, I have my Manhattan studio where I’m talking right now. And so I commute, right? I go between Manhattan and Montclair, but Montclair, I mean, I did not grow up in the American suburbs.

I just knew the world of the suburbs through movies like American Beauty, example, or in the several chain of horror movies, right? And how should I explain this without being offensive? I find it very exotic because it’s, I never, I mean, if you consider that I grew up in Tanzania and that was my home, now imagine fast forward, like the contrast of a lonely beach and on a cliff to American suburbia.

What is the suburbs like for you?

It’s very interesting. I find in particular as a mother, right? The mother scene, very interesting. Luckily, many creatives picked up on the themes and wrote fantastic novels and wrote incredible horror movie scripts and a whole. I mean, it’s interesting. I think it’s interesting.

So, and for those who don’t know you, what do you do for work? Talk a little bit about what the work that you do and what keeps you busy?

Okay. So what keeps me busy is just recording everything I can get my hands to. I read a lot.

I read a lot that keeps me busy and it’s a full-time activity, right? Like taking an information. So there is no real work.

I mean, it’s not really work. It’s just basically the way I breathe and everything is my work is my life. I don’t see much distinction, but let’s say that if I had to nail it, I’ll say I do three things.

I advise clients on what’s coming next in culture, especially aesthetic and psychological trends or shifts. That’s one area. The another area I do is I teach people also how to spot patterns in society, if it’s zeitgeist or trends in particular areas.

I teach at the School of Visual Arts. I teach at the University of the Arts in Zurich, also in Poland and Warsaw, a place called School of Form. So internationally, I also give these workshops on how to sense the zeitgeist to companies.

So the teaching aspect. Then the third one is I really love theory, like theory or trend theory and building models and speculate on the nature of trends a lot. I have never published anything in that respect, but that’s my plan of working on a book.

Can you say more about that, about the theories and what you’re working on or what interests you about? I guess I’m not even sure what that means. What are the current theories about trends and patterns?

That’s a very big question. I would not know where to even start.

It’s too big. What’s the work that you’re doing that you’re comfortable sharing on theory?

One of the, let’s start with the most macro, like the clumpy part, aspect of what I do. Let’s look at the macro part because it gets really, it can get into a very, almost very molecular level of how observation works. But I started with art history, right?

That’s what I studied and noticed, which it’s no secret, that particular periods of time have particular styles, right? A Baroque, you just imagine, you can just get a sense of the Baroque style or the 50s or the 40s. This is, of course, artificial to set this time frame, right?

But just to get the concept. So I noticed that the style of a particular era permeates absolutely all areas of culture, right? So it will permeate, if you think about the 80s, you will feel and identify that there’s a particular style that manifests in the way people dress.

And that style is similar to the hairstyle, is similar to the music, is similar to the political movements, is similar to the dancing styles, is similar to the drug consumption, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a similarity, almost as if particular periods of time had a code, a stylistic code, a tuning fork, you could almost say, that defines multiple aspects in culture at once. I think that’s really interesting.

Because if you identify these codes, then you can translate them. And if you identify these codes really early on, before people take big consciousness of these codes, then you can, I would not say forecast, but you are a little bit ahead of the curve. So that’s in a very abstract manner.

That’s the very macro aspect. Now, let’s go more to the micro aspect, okay? Just imagine upside down pyramid, or triangle.

When in the trend world, we talk about signals, right? And signals of change signals. And if you take a signal, and you go really deep into the signal, you will see, imagine it was an entity, okay?

A molecule, or an entity. Just give it a corpus, yeah? In any form.

And you dive deep into it, you will see that this signal has many aspects. Yeah? We tend to say, oh, this signal.

Signal A, signal B, signal C. And that’s how we twitch through the information.

But if you take one signal, and you look deep into the signal, you will identify that there are many parts of the signal. It’s a bit like, you will see different qualities that you could, I mean, you can take the analogy of genetics and different traits. So the question is, it’s not about the signal itself.

Just imagine signal is a Trojan horse. What is inside the signal that might be the seed for the next? So that’s a very microscopic perspective. So I work with seeing things in the very big movements. What are the big shapes?

What are the big stylistic codes, you could say, that live in many types of bodies in culture? With types of bodies, I mean different categories, music, fashion, politics, architecture, etc, etc. To the very molecular, zoom into the signal itself that contains many traits.

And identify what the traits are. And now something that I find particularly interesting, and maybe differentiates me from maybe from most of my colleagues is that my colleagues and it’s a talk about the niche. Let’s all look at the little niche, right?

Are the things that are not mainstream. I do the opposite. I look, what I’m more fascinated with is the mainstream.

And which makes my work easier, right? Because the new always grows out of what’s already dominant. So it never appears from nowhere. And when I deconstruct it, I will look at all these aspects of the mainstream signal.

And then I try to identify what aspect in this mainstream signal is the freshest, the most alive aspect. So it’s not saying signal, aspect. And that’s normally where the next thing comes from.

That’s where the next sprouts out of that, that aspect. So it’s not rejecting the mainstream, it’s isolating a part of the mainstream that has momentum. So, yeah. I know it’s abstract.

No, I know exactly what you mean. And it’s, it just is abstract. So I wanted to ask a question that makes it concrete for people. Your work shows up in different forms, right? Curriculum and you work with clients when you, as an example, not that you need to share anything, but what do you deliver to a client? How does this work appear or, yeah, what do you deliver when people engage with you?

So there are, because I do three things, right? I advise what’s next in culture. And that’s traditional what I deliver.

I deliver then intel on, oh, I think this is next or bet on this, on A, don’t bet on B. I will give very complete feedback on what type of shapes I think are going to be on Vogue, what type of color. So that’s very concrete advice, right?

And often it goes hand in hand with identifying shifts, which normally, you’ve got certain terminology signals, shifts, hey, guys, you’re doing A, but culture is moving to B, right? And so that’s one part. I can say a little bit about that before I move then to the next part, which is a teaching aspect, right?

Yeah. It used to be, so I started out doing this, then it was transporting in the 90s. And that was before the internet was very, active with information, right?

So just having common knowledge, being good education, knowing how to look things up was a plus. Because Google images didn’t exist. So the what was really important to identify what is trending, right?

And then in the old days, I would be sent to beautiful places Tokyo to figure out what was happening in Tokyo, or what’s happening in the club culture, what’s happening in fashion. I used to work for an American futurist, and I was then in London, and I was checking, it was the what that was important, right?

Then it shifted to the why. Once, you had the internet, and it was so easy to get access. Suddenly, people in my field were much more concentrating on why is this happening?

We understand what is happening, why is it happening? So that has been, I think, the more traditional way of talking. But what I believe is happening next is the sensation and the feelings that these phenomena evoke, these new signals.

So how do you associate the culture, the changes in culture with the sensations, not only the rationale, not only the what, not only the why, but the feel, the vibe? That’s where things, I think, in our category are moving.

Can we spend time on that for a little bit? Because I can track the, because I was there, in the 90s, you know what I mean? You had to go and find the things, and that was a lot of the work was the what, as you said.

I haven’t heard it articulated the way that you did there, that when all the what is, everybody has access to the what, then you’re talking about the why, it’s about the why.

Yeah, the good people.

What’s that final shift from the what? What explains the shift to vibe from why?

Yeah. So definitely, I mean, OK, the what, the why, and now the emotion, the motion. It’s less about explaining culture, the why explains culture, but it’s more about sensing how it feels.

OK, and now why that is, right? You’re asking about why we’re moving there? I think there are many reasons.

First of all, let me share with you that when I used to talk about Zeitgeist before Covid, people would look at me and think I was crazy, like what? Maybe art historians or people in the arts or in fashion, but Zeitgeist feels so abracadabra, spirit of the times.

But then we spoke all about vibes, vibrations, vibes, what’s the vibe of this? What’s the vibe of that? And that is very interesting because it shows us a certain sophistication.

Yeah, when you perceive the vibe, it’s not just the flesh, the thing itself, but the vibe, the vibe is something subtle. And that subtlety is, again, you can talk about a vibration, a type of energy, you can call it the way you want, but it’s something that permeates everything. And that’s not something that we can analyze with our computing mind.

It’s something that we feel with our bodies. So vibes, it’s something that we feel. And we’ve talked, people talk vibes this, vibes that.

It’s not something that we really analyze. It’s something that we feel.

So that is one dimension. Another reason I think that the feeling is turning so important is because, I mean, this might sound a little bit obvious, I don’t know, but we had beautiful brains, right? And the beautiful brains created beautiful machines and our beautiful machines and large language model technologies and AI is magnificent in pattern recognition.

Many things that our cognitive faculties used to do, we are actually outsourcing maybe a certain degree of this thinking more and more. So I think as a result, the competitive edge is moving away from this pure rational processing and towards something much more human, which is the sensorial intelligence, emotional depth, or you could say almost an embodied understanding. So two elements, I think, are drivers.

The vibe, the sense of vibration, which I think has to do with us sitting on our computers in our bubbles, isolated, because it coincides also with our time when people started to talk about the vibe shift, the vibe, vibe, vibe. I mean, we had also that term in the 70s, not a coincidence, apparently. We talked about the vibes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please, what’s the resonance with the 70s, the 70s vibe? And you’re pointing at this coincidence of vibe being around in the 70s. What do you make of that? Are you just saying that it’s a word that we’ve just picked up?

I think that there is a similar sensitivity in the 70s, but it was completely, I believe, I’m not a classic historian, that it had to do with new age, right?

That you were tapping into alternate modes of interpreting the world, which were beyond the classic materialistic, fleshy way of looking at the world.

Yeah. I don’t want to interrupt, but I was going to ask a question. So I want to go back. When did you first discover that you could do this for a living? Where did this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was specifically in the 90s in Berlin. I was an art historian and I applied methods from art history, specifically speaking, iconological methods.

And then I started to see, and I was very immersed in the 16th century, and then I started to apply that way of looking at the world, this analyzing the world to my contemporary life. So the way I would look at and interpret a baroque painting, and the outfits of the queens or the monks, whomever, whatever I analyzed, I applied the same method onto my friends in the club. The sensations evoked through the consumption of particular drugs, etc.

And as I was living life to the fullest, and experiencing life, and observing life to the fullest, and trying out everything I could get my hands onto, and every book that crossed my path, with such a hunger, which by the way, not anymore. I don’t feel that. I realized, I thought, I don’t want to be in academia.

I don’t want to be in academia. I just want to do this for a living. I want to go to clubs for a living.

I want to read books for a living. I want to go to theater for a living, watch movies for a living, and talk to people, observe people for a living. Why can’t I do this?

And then I heard, oh, in the fashion industry, there are these people who are called trend analysts, and they spot trends, and they travel through the world and need to be really, really well informed. And I thought, oh gosh, fashion? And I looked down at it, right?

I looked down a little bit. I thought, this is superficial, right? Here was somebody who was into Baroque art.

And funnily enough, I thought, oh, okay, let’s go for it. And I realized that all this accumulated knowledge I had was actually useful for this type of activity, because you had a bigger box of references, right? And I must say that the fashion industry is probably, I’ve gone through many industries through my long life, and fashion industry is probably one of the least superficial industries you could think of.

And it’s very interesting, because fashion, it’s called not fashion for fashion’s sake, it’s cycles. So in the old days, the fact that you had to bring out four collections a year was very fast. I mean, now we can laugh about it.

But in the 90s, it was the fastest industry. Fashion industry was really fast. So with the prediction, it’s as if you had lots of mice or hamsters, the cycles are faster.

So therefore, the prediction work was just extremely gratifying, because you could see, oh, shit, sorry for the word, red did not go that well. We were expecting red to sell better, but actually, it’s blue. And the fact that you had sales numbers attached to it, it gives you real time feedback, but it gave you some feedback.

And you could then course correct your method. So that’s wonderful. That’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.

I’m struck by two things. One, it occurred to me that we now say fast fashion, which is sort of redundant. And we also have FedEx Express, I think, also. Things have gotten so fast, we’re sort of, we have redundancy built into the name.

Exactly. And that’s probably one of the main problems right now when people say, oh, there is so much uncertainty. There is so much uncertainty.

There’s hardly any presentation that doesn’t start with in these uncertain times. And it’s because things have always been uncertain. But the fact is, it’s, I don’t know how to explain this.

It’s the scale that has changed, the scale, we look at time. So it’s almost as if we had a rough scale in our minds. But the reality is so molecular more and more.

So we have an old way, or most of us have systems or apparati that are a little bit, I will not say plump, but plump, is that the right word? A little bit wide, big. And we’re dealing with a reality that is actually molecular. So that freaks us out.

Yes.

I don’t know how to express this very well. I’ve never expressed this actually. So I’m grateful that you asked these questions because you’re taking me to places that I never really thought about.

I never was forced to articulate. So yeah, the velocity of the world. Oh, this is interesting. The velocity of the world. You asked me before about why we were shifting from the what to the why to the feel, right?

Yes. Yep.

So I mentioned the vibe, the thing of the vibe, then I mentioned AI, right? That we are outsourcing rationality, so therefore the body has. But there is another element, if I may add this, a third one, which is, I mean, this is a strange analogy, OK?

But if you are in the rainforest, have you ever been in a dense environment? It’s 300, you’re 360 degrees enveloped by high information changing rate, rate, rate, rate, change, change, change, because there’s so much life around you. And when you are in these environments, you think less with your brain. Your body, your physicality, you’re more dependent on your physicality than on your brain.

And so are you, it’s, when you say that, it makes me think that modern life is dense, is stimulus dense like that.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

So it engages, we’re in a vigilant embodied state.

Well, we need to. The problem is that because we’re not very embodied and we live really operating system, computer systems on two legs.

And we can’t escape that metaphor no matter how hard we try, right? The computer, the machine, the thinking.

Yeah, yeah, that’s the problem. We have to be very careful because I think that there are lots of, I don’t want to say, I don’t want to sound dark, dark forces, but instincts pushing that, forces that are pushing us to equate ourselves to computing machines.

And that’s, and this is a moment really where we have to double down on the body. And because I travel a lot, right? And I perceive and spy and observe people who live in the Amazonas.

In what?

And how, in the Amazonas rainforest and the Amazon, Amazon you say? Amazon. There is a different, there is more body, more feel, more feel, more body.

Yeah. I wanted to go back to the moment you talked about fashion and you had an impression of fashion as being superficial. And then you changed and I had a recent experience, Leland Mashmire, does that name ring a bell?

He’s at Collins and he’s, I saw him talk and he said, I hadn’t heard anybody really say it so explicitly, but he just said fashion. He’s like, I pay attention to fashion because it’s where all the cultural production comes from. And it was just, I had never really heard anybody really just point at fashion.

I mean, I think I knew it theoretically, but I had my own biases against it, which I think you were also confessing. So what is, what is going, what are we doing in fashion? What makes fashion meaningful to somebody who doesn’t really care about the clothes? I guess is the thing. Or clothes is even a narrow read at all. Do you understand what I’m asking?

Yeah, but I’m curious about this person, Leland what?

Leland Maschmeyer. He was the head of, he was chief marketing officer at Chobani. He turned Chobani around and then he opened Collins, which is a design firm with Brian Collins.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

And I saw, I saw and I’m just referencing this moment because it’s stuck in my head. He just said very clearly, I pay attention to fashion because fashion is where all, is the origin of cultural production, I think is the way that he was paraphrasing. And it seems like you’re pointing at too, that you, at first your thought was nothing is produced in fashion. It’s all superficial, but you awaken to the fact that it is something. And I’m just curious, I want to hear you talk about what is it when you see it for what it is?

Well, it’s a primary form of self-expression, right? And you signal that self-expression every morning when you wake up and get dressed, you’re making an active choice. So you can see it from the expression perspective.

And I wonder whether Maschmeyer meant it that way. So it’s a wonderful way of reading what people feel and want is just by seeing how they dress, right?

That’s one aspect. The other aspect, so the expression, what people wear. And then the other aspect is the people who work in the fashion industry in the background and make choices.

Yes. It’s almost the industrial side is the part that I’m tempted to dismiss because it feels like, oh, it’s just fashion industry, blah, blah, blah. But I feel like what he was saying is that there’s meaning there too. I understand the self-expression thing. I get it that the choices we make express ourselves. We need to be attuned to it.\ But what is it about?

I think it has to do a lot. We can get molecular. And again, I love your questions.

The color, the colors, the shapes and the textures. We don’t think about it. But if I wanted to read, for example, an era, just by seeing, looking at the composition of the pieces that are being combined, the fabrics, the colors, the shapes, I can deduce out of that what the furniture is going to look like.

I do a lot of color forecasting and also for interior brands, paint brands, coating and paint. And one of the, Pantone, for example, we’ll have specialists that look at also at fashion, what’s been just on the runway. And so the expression part, but then apart from fashion, I look at art and it’s not a coincidence.

There are fine people, there are people who are specialized in developing their antennas. And artists, musicians, the fashion folks are certainly, I would consider them as the finest writers as well.

That perceive and translate. And if you really want to go energy and translating this vibe or energy in their metiers, in whatever the materials are that they work with, if it sounds, musicians, composers, fashion, artists, writers. We are all enveloped in this information soup that we all swim in vegetable peas in a soup, right?

We’re swimming in this brew, which is constantly changing. And some elements, some people are susceptible to understanding the flavor before others understand the flavor and modify and accommodate to the flavor. And the creators, the cultural creators are probably the finest antennas we have.

Yeah. Beautiful. I want to get to how you work and how you talk about your work. But first I’m curious about the joy. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?

Well, the joy, the freedom. Because in my work, first of all, it’s not real work. It’s just the way I breathe and take in the world.

There are particular states, psychological states that I need to be in in order to see things. And the main state that I try to be in, in order to see things, is to free myself from the entrapments of my own preconceptions and judgments. And that creates freedom.

And I want to go as far to say happiness. Happiness can be overrated, just in the way. Why does happy sound so superficial in English? In German, it sounds deeper.

How does it sound in German?

Yeah, in German, it’s glücklich. It’s just different than the flavor of happy. It’s a deep sense of freedom through the letting go of preconceptions.

If you have too many preconceptions and judgments, you don’t see things clearly, and seeing things clearly is the ultimate expression of freedom. And it’s wonderful to have the job I have because it forces me to try to see things clearly. So, and I would say that most people’s problems, most clients’ problems revolve around being entrapped in one’s own preconceptions.

We love preconceptions. We love labeling things, labeling ourselves, labeling others. And it has a good place.

It has a raison d’être. But excessive attachment to labels or preconceptions can distort the perception of reality and makes the reality hard to read.

So that is what really gives me joy in my work, is that I’ve been forced to, I know I’m doing good work when I feel free and vice versa, which means less sadness, less depression, etc.

And now, last time we talked, you taught, you have a very particular way of describing, well, we’ve ended up right here. You were talking about artists and these people, they’re more sensitive. They’re attuned to the soup, to use your metaphor.

So can you talk a little bit about how you, and it was the first thing you mentioned at the first question, what do you do? You’re documenting, you’re collecting, you’re observing all the time. How do you talk about the practice of noticing or collecting?

Yeah. This sounds a bit, maybe it sounds childish, but I like talking about it, different states of being that run parallel, that I equate to animals. So when I talk about this radical openness, the sense of trying to being as open as I can, I equate it with the jellyfish, which is an animal that basically has no brain.

It floats. It has no eyes. When it goes somewhere, you don’t know if it’s going intentionally or if it’s floating because it has no eyes.

You don’t know where it’s going. 360 degrees. And the neurons are distributed all over the body.

So there is no real brain. It’s just a being. And I like saying that that is the ideal state to identify things.

Kids are often in that place, and as we enter schools, it’s whipped out of our being, because it’s good to have opinions and classify the world. But we notice the fresh and the new and the peculiar and what some people would say weak signals by being very, very, very open. And if you have a judgment, you won’t see.

So that is the jellyfish part.

What’s an example of the application of the jellyfish? Can you tell a story? Do you choose to become jellyfish in moments?

I think that we’ve been always jellyfishes, when babies are, I think, jellyfishes. Children are often jellyfishes. And I would not equate it with innocence.

I would not go that far. But with a very, very, very, very, with a radical openness that enables you to see patterns easier.

I equate it sometimes also with an example when you go to a club and there is music playing and then the music transitions into the next tune. You will notice that some people, they go, they transfer faster than others from one tune to the other. You will see some people that are still stiff in the old melody when the next melody is playing.

So a good jellyfish is just imagine a dancer who feels the music. You’re in the space, and you float. As a change happens, you float, you go with the change because you perceive the change.

Beautiful.

It’s interesting, now that one gets older, one starts to understand also the stiffness of the body and the stiffness of the mind. I find that very interesting. Yeah, very aware of that process.

Octopus or jellyfish. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah. And then, well, then there is the classic state that we practice by analyzing, labeling, comparing, et cetera, which I call it the squirrel state. And I mean, it sounds childish, but ultimately it has shown that my students really get it when you make these differentiations.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t consider this, I mean, not that you need to hear me say this, it’s not childish at all. I think this stuff is the serious stuff. Honestly, metaphors and imagery like this, I feel like now you’re talking about something.

So AI is really, really an amazing squirrel. And our educational system has been very, very much a squirrel, the brain, the analysis, the labeling, the tagging information, the counting, counting, tagging and count, tag and count. The jellyfish part is different.

It’s interesting because I grew up in Tanzania and I grew up in Germany. I spent many years in different, very different places. And what’s peculiar, think about an intersection in Mumbai, a traffic intersection, which is deeply, deeply chaotic.

And there is no traffic light. That really works. If you put in a traffic light, there might be accidents.

Because you have to be 360 degrees aware if there are no traffic lights. Now imagine Switzerland, imagine a traffic intersection in Switzerland. If you pulled out the traffic light, you likely would have accidents. So that’s a very coarse way of describing the difference between both states.

We’ve had that. I think we have that experience here in the States with rotaries. And that conversation is happening where, I mean, if you put a rotary in an American town where there was an intersection before that was mediated by traffic lights, all of a sudden, you see American drivers thrown into the soup and they have no idea how to communicate.

They’re resentful that they have to pick up these signals of other people. Do you know what I mean? And the transition is very visible. And it’s completely, I’ve thought too much about this, but I agree with you on that.

That’s interesting.

And it happens all over the country. Rotaries are better, but they force us to be resonating or whatever language you want to use, you need to be communicating or responding to the signals from other drivers. And that’s a participatory way of being in the world that is new for most American drivers.

Yeah, that’s a good example.

Jellyfish, squirrel, are there other animals?

Well, yes. Well, if you come to the translation part. So, for example, imagine an artist working or a fashion designer, anybody, we all transform things, bring one thing into, bring things into being, right?

So, if you capture what is the fresh, the energy, the signals, the things that break the routine, in a jellyfish, and then you identify, you analyze them, you find the why, right? With a squirrel, you will have some sort of information in your hand. It can be a term, it can be a concept, but then comes the moment where you translate it.

And you can talk, then you can go then from a particular concept, a vibration, a vibe, a code, anything, and you can turn it into, you transform it into a product. That act of transformation, I call it, I mean this once again, the caterpillar-butterfly mode, where you transform something, you transform information into something through, if it’s through fabrics, paints, sounds, and bring it then, therefore, into being. You bring it, you turn it into a product, right?

Into an output.

Yeah. That’s great. I wanted to go back to something you differentiated yourself from colleagues, and you hear this a lot, that there’s the, you have to go to the fringe, you have to go to the subculture or the niche in order to discover where culture happens, but you describe your own process as being focused on the mainstream, and I think, I hope I’m not mischaracterizing that. Can you speak more about that difference?

Because I feel like it is, you run into it a lot, that you have to go to the fringe in order to find what’s happening, or what’s, but you’re saying that what’s happening is right in front of us, in the mainstream.

Well, it’s not yes and no.

I said it too strongly.

Yes, okay, think about the ecology, just dig into the mainstream, go deep into it.

Sometimes we look at signals as if they were little props, petals, but if you go deep into it, you go, imagine, you open it up. The real information, the deep, the real fuel is deep inside, just fossils, right, that turn into energy, petroleum, it’s deep inside the earth, and it’s the energy, it’s what gives the energy, it’s inside of it, it’s not the surface.

And the more people consume, by the way, I think that people are talking all out, talking about, oh, we are getting more into a mini, mini bubble, that’s true, but therefore the mainstream is going to be more important than ever.

I think for example, if you think about this movie, The Devil Wears Prada, it’s going to come out on May 1st, about every woman I meet wants to watch the movie.

There is also a desire for where are the commons? You still continue with your niche activities and interests, but the commons, I think, are going to be even more and more important. But yeah, so the new has to happen, it has to hatch out of a common understanding, otherwise it will not be a force in culture.

Right. I guess it’s a difference between, and maybe I’m over or under thinking this, where the mainstream is the point of consumption, it’s the penultimate act, and the origin is in the fringe. That’s one model, right?

No, the origin can also be inside, just on a deeper layer of the mainstream. So imagine the mainstream, again, it’s a phenomenon. I mean, imagine the signal, you can label the signal, but then you can analyze the signal, and when you go deeper into the analysis of the signal, you identify what, that there are elements in there that are fresh.

Now, I don’t only look at the mainstream, I also look at niche, but niche alone will never bring forth anything, unless it connects to an element that is inside the mainstream.

Therefore, I don’t get crazy by looking and freaking out of everything that is new, everything that is new, everything that is new. I follow or observe mainly the world of the arts and the world of music, what sounds are strange, different, what type of artists are out there that are doing interesting things that I’ve never heard of, and then I will notice, oh yeah, there is a connection between this particular technique or this particular artistic expression, and the depth of, I don’t know, the Devil Wears Prada, or a particular current event. I also look at current events. Yeah.

I mean, I hope this doesn’t sound too abstract. I wish I could, I normally think with pen and paper, which is easier.

No, it’s wonderful. I appreciate it very much, and yeah, we’ve come to the end of time. I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation, and I thank you so much.

And thank you so much for forcing me to articulate things that I’m normally not used to articulate. Thank you.

Social

Above, Henry Farrell on social technology. Also, Eli Pariser on prosocial AI. And, StoryCorps on great questions.

Niche

Above, Trevor Pan on the niche decade. Also, Mandi Astola & Eugen Popa on technological bullshit. And, Mo Diggs on Romanticism.

Drama

Above, Angelica Frey on power ballads. Also, Rose Florence & Notes by MERIT on pink. And, Robert King on the manosphere.

Culture

Above, Saeideh Bakhshi on depth at scale. Also, Lauren Oswald on context. And, Oliver Sweet on cultural intelligence.

Design

Above, Christopher Banks on the Ferrari Luce. Also, Kim Beil on the Hudson River School. And, Kate Wagner on 21st-century architecture.

Igor Kuvychko, PhD is a Principal Data Scientist at INFICON, where he builds ML and optimization systems for semiconductor manufacturing. He holds a PhD in Chemistry from Colorado State University, with over 2,000 academic citations. He was born in the Soviet Far East, grew up in Russia, and came to the US at 21.

I encountered him when he posted a piece, “Gregory Bateson & AI” on LinkedIn, connecting Bateson’s ideas about information, mind, and feedback to contemporary AI.

So as you may or may not know, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. And I really haven’t found a better way to get into a conversation than this question, but it’s really big.

So I over explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, 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?

And again, you are in absolute control.

Oh, this is such a fun question. Well, I’m gonna start from the very beginning. So I paint the picture, paint the story.

So I was born and grew up in Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union. So Vladivostok is a coastal city, very close to North Korea and Japan. So to picture it on a map.

And it’s very much on the periphery of the country, so pretty far away from the center. So that’s where I grew up. And I was a very curious kid.

So curiosity was one of the big themes. And when I was pretty little, I was into many things, including mathematics. And I got really quite into it.

And then I just by happenstance, I switched to chemistry. And I was probably around 10 years old or something like that. And it was summer and I was bored.

And I found that my older sister’s chemistry textbook, school textbook. And back then in Soviet Union, we had four years of high school, mid school and high school chemistry. So pretty decent problem.

And I started reading it and it just clicked with me. It was a fun subject because it was abstract and it was applied at the same time. And I was bored.

So I read the textbook and I solved all the homework problems. And I just had a ton of fun. And I kept doing it.

And then eventually went through all four years of high school chemistry before high school chemistry started. And the school teachers noticed me and then they gave me a little bit of extra attention and they connected me with a chemistry professor at a local university. And she took me under her wing and she gave me free tutoring, amazingly enough.

So every week I would go to this university, and I would hang out with her and other professors in the lab. And she would tutor me on organic chemistry and it was just a blast. So that is one of the themes.

But of course, a lot was going on societally, politically at the same time. So when I was 11, Soviet Union collapsed. And so it was a massive change.

There was something that was supposed to be enduring and permanent just ceased to exist. So from many perspectives, that was a very turbulent time. And I think that was one of the early injections of just turbulence and change.

So that was one of the themes. And then going further, when I was 15, my mom passed away from cancer. And that was, of course, a very one of those forming events in my life.

And that pretty very early made me very aware of finitude of life. And it made me ask some existential questions and questions of meaning, specifically, where does meaning come from? So that’s another thing.

And fast forward, I was, yeah, Soviet Union collapsed. But one of the lessons was the world ends, and then the sun rises, and life goes on. And we adapt.

We are very adaptable creatures. So there was still state funded programs. And back then in Russia, there were these competitions, high school competitions in science.

So high school kids were competing. And I was, I went into this program and got a chance to travel on basically on a government dime across the country, compete with other kids. Eventually, it led me to a very good university program in Moscow.

So when I was 17, I left Vladivostok, and it’s an eight hour plane flight to Moscow. So it’s pretty far away, and got my undergrad in chemistry. Then I realized pretty early on that I wanted to leave the country.

I had a pretty clear sense that the future of Russia was not the future I wanted to be a part of. So I went to the US and got my PhD in chemistry. And at that point, I was, so I was living in Colorado.

And my life was just, it was just a straight shot leading me to a career as a chemistry professor. Just everything was making sense, I was going to be a chemistry professor, I was going to work in academia. But the longer I stayed in academia, the less excited I was feeling about it.

So at some point, I realized that this is not a path I wanted to take. So I started taking some, I took some business classes. And then I made the decision to say goodbye to chemistry.

And that was another big change, because a lot of my identity was tied with being a great chem. But I walked away from that, joined Intel, and started working in the semiconductor factory at Fab. So making chip.

And then I had a number of roles at Intel. They did for almost a year. But I was moving closer and closer to software.

And since I was a kid, I loved applied mathematics. So I was doing more and more at the intersection of applied mathematics and software. And then, three years ago, at this point, I made the decision to switch to software full time.

And I joined Inficon, where I’m currently at. And so currently, I’m a principal data scientist at Inficon. And yeah, I just kept going in the direction of, it’s not really specifically about applied math or software.

It is about solving difficult problems at intersections of the main. So, and that’s something that I’m very interested in, especially when the problem is practical and messy. And there is some interesting math and science, that’s always fun.

But also the problem that I’m dealing with, there is a human element, there is the politics of change, and how people interact with your systems. So, and I feel that this is where Bateson comes right in.

Yeah, hold on, I want to stop there. And because we’re going to get into the Bateson thing, but I still want to spend a little time in your past, when you were a kid, before you discovered, I mean, you told the story very well, of course. But do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?

You have a vision of young Igor, what you wanted to be when you grew up? It seems like you found chemistry as a passion. And so maybe that was the answer. But I’m just curious, what did you hope to be when you were a child?

I had a very clear vision. So, since I was very little, I wanted to be a scientist.

I wanted to be a scientist.

Yes. And what did that look like?

It is interesting, because when I try to think about what was the vision, there was a word scientist. But what did it mean for me, for little me? And I don’t have a clear answer.

But it was more with this sense of curiosity and adventure. And I would say playfulness, too, that you’re just wrestling with these difficult problems. And you’re solving puzzles.

And it’s very exciting. So I think at that stage, that was really the vision. And I think it worked out quite well. Because although my job is, I’m not like an official scientist, but I feel that this is a lot of what I do.

Yeah, that’s wonderful. And I was also curious, too, you told the story of, you were 11, when the Soviet Union fell. And I was just curious, how did you notice it?

What, can you tell a story of what did you know? How did you know that it had gone away? You talked about it, this enduring thing is not there anymore. How did you know?

So of course, I knew that something big was happening, because my parents were freaked out about it. And that was just a topic of the conversations, right? And everybody was anxious and noticeably scared, right?

And kids are very attuned to the state of their, to the mental state of their parents, right? So we know when something isn’t right, right? So that was certainly one aspect, but there was a lot of just purely practical aspects, I remember when I was little, and back then, central heating is typical, was typical in Soviet Union, probably in Russia now.

But heating was never a problem. And then after Soviet Union collapsed, it was a problem. And I remember, even after I moved to the US, during winter time, I would make a mental note that I’m warm, because I remember when I was a kid, it’s just, whatever you are, at home, at school, at university, outside, it’s always cold during winter, just this always background of cold.

And it’s slowly grinds on you, like, that’s one of the things. Another thing was food insecurity. So, I remember the long queues, and the long queues waiting for US humanitarian aid.

And have to, because the aid was given per headcount. So, I had to wait in these queues with my grandpa, and we would get the box. And I still remember the canned mandarins, they were amazing.

Yeah, I remember, still, there was this one, like, my grandpa grabbed me, he’s like, okay, there is a humanitarian aid is being given, we need to wait. And we waited for three hours in this queue. And they ran out of canned mandarins.

I still remember that. So, it was interesting. It was definitely, there was a lot of crime, and a lot of organized crime going on.

There was, it was a very chaotic time, we had to, I’m still an expert in subsistence farming. I mean, I still remember how to grow potatoes, because we would grow enough potatoes to last us through the winter. So, there was this aspect that there is just things that were fine, are not fine, and you have to deal with them.

But despite all of this, of course, I was very young, but despite all of this, I remember this, there was this atmosphere of change and possibilities. That despite the fact that things were pretty rough, there was this sense that now it’s possible to do stuff that was not possible before. So, I remember, actually, a lot of people say that 90s was a horrible time in Russia, and it’s true, but I remember it as a very hopeful time, too.

Yeah, and I know that you mentioned this already in your story, so to catch us up, where are you living now? What’s the work you’re doing?

So, right now, I live close to Seattle. So, I live in Everett, so Washington State in the US, and I’m a principal data scientist. I work on optimization of semiconductor factories, so basically making semiconductor manufacturing facilities run better, whatever better may mean.

And just a disclosure, I’m here as a private citizen, I’m not in my official capacity for sure.

Oh, yes, of course. Yeah, and what do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in your work for you?

There are a few aspects of my job that I really enjoy. First is, I have, I’m leading a small team, so I’m working with a few people, and that I find very rewarding. Working with people, guiding them in their career path, and solving problems together, that is great.

But at the same time, I have my own projects. So, I feel that I’m a bit of an unusual case, because I’m a manager, and I’m an individual contributor, rolled in one package. And I’m grateful for this opportunity, because it’s, usually people do one or the other.

But I feel pretty strongly that this is, at least for me, this is a perfect intersection, because I maintain my technical skills actively, so I never become stale. I can see that I can become, I can be very productive if I switch to being 100% manager, but then my technical skills will atrophy, and my usefulness will decline. But also, I think I’m not gonna have as much fun.

So, that’s the bigger picture. And as far as the work itself, the story is really making semiconductor fabs, semiconductor factories run better. And factories, any factory is a very interesting organism, because there is a lot of technical complexity, of course.

There are a lot of constraints. So, there is just, oh, we can make it work so much better, but the reality gets in the way. And also, these are very human enterprises.

So, there is a large number of people of different walks of life that make a factory work. So, I find it a fascinating aspect, because it’s not just a technical problem. It’s a human problem as well, because you, for example, would build some software, but the software interacts with people.

And the better is predicated on the whole system working well.

Yes. And so, first, I noticed you, because you had written this beautiful piece, Gregory Bateson and AI, early in March, right? And it just showed up in my feed.

And so, I’m curious, where did that, what’s the origin story of that piece, both your relationship with Gregory Bateson, but then also, I guess, AI and what your experience of that is, and what inspired you to write a piece about it?

Yeah, I first read Gregory Bateson during my PhD years. So, quite a while back. And, it had nothing to do with my PhD subject matter.

So, it was absolutely orthogonal. And I think I stumbled on the recommendation, basically, the idea of looking at the Bateson, just on social media. I remember there were some accounts that I was following, and they recommended, they cited some Batesonian ideas, and I was like, oh, this is really cool, I need to look into it.

So, I read his book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. And it’s a brilliant book, and really quite unique. But many of these ideas, they stayed with me.

I think Bateson has the most beautiful definition of information, the differences that make a difference. I think it’s so insightful, right? Because information is not just a bunch of stuff, it’s not like notes somewhere.

It is really once somebody reads the notes, and they compel that individual to do something different. Or a system ingests the information, and there is a change in behavior. And that really struck me, because I think what Bateson does really well, he pulls us up to a higher level of discussion, right?

And the whole Batesonian trick, right, is to look at the whole system. To step back and take a look at the biggest system, and ask these biggest system questions. And I found that to be very insightful, and really beautiful, too.

So, that was my introduction to Gregory Bateson. And then, it was sort of low-level, simmering in my brain, and helping me along, because I think many, many problems become a lot clearer when you use this Batesonian lens to look at them. And I remember at Intel, my colleague, she used to say that my catchphrase is, what is the problem we’re trying to solve?

What is the real problem? Because usually people come to you, and it’s like, well, I want you to do this. And you’re like, well, okay, that’s great, but can you explain a little bit more?

Like, what do you actually want to achieve? Like, I want to achieve that. Okay, this is great, but why do you want to achieve it?

Like, what’s the biggest system where you’re embedded? What is the actual outcome that you desire to achieve, right? And that was a very fruitful line of questioning, because at the end, oftentimes it was like, oh, you know what?

Actually, we need to do something completely different. And with the origin story of the article on Batesonian AI, especially if you are in software, it is impossible to, the state of AI and LLMs. It is, I compare it actually, in terms of just the tectonic change, to how I felt during the collapse of the Soviet Union. You just realize that the, everything changed completely.

And there is also the sense of possibilities, of new possibilities that were not achievable before, but now they’re within reach. Of course, there is a downside to it, too. But me and my team and the company, we have been using AI and code, AI LLM-assisted coding for, very actively, I would say, for a year at this point.

So, we have been fairly early adopters. And it just struck me that the Bateson’s frame of mind and his ideas are so applicable to our age of AI. I mean, I think Bateson ideas are timeless, but they’re just so well suited to this new world that we’re living in.

And that gave rise to the paper. So, because I figured that probably not many people in the AI and software game are at Bateson. So, might as well try to introduce the thinker.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what was the response? I mean, you got on my radar through Simon Roberts at Stripe, he posted it and it was making the rounds in this anthropological thread. But what’s the experience been?

Oh, it’s been really interesting and wonderful, quite frankly, because I did not expect the anthropology folks to respond. And that was very heartening to me because anthropology is definitely not my field. I would say that I’m ignorant of the field.

I don’t know the latest debates and what drives the field and the conferences. Like, I’m completely unplugged from this slice of the universe. But I think it was Dawn and she’s the only anthropologist that I knew before I published the paper and we met at Intel.

And I think she posted the paper and complimented on it. And it was very encouraging to me because of course, when I publish anything, I’m like, well, I don’t know. Is it good enough?

Maybe I have maybe this is silly and but at the same time, I’m like if it’s silly, that’s OK. I can laugh at myself.

It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. Yeah. Well, what so maybe just what happens when you look at AI through Bateson? What does it do for you?

I think for me, I mean, the power of that, there are several concrete things as a Bateson helps me. First, I think is really coming up with better questions. So I think that’s really important.

And I think oftentimes asking good questions is the crux almost. And I think Bateson for me is very effective at making me think about the bigger system. All right.

The AI is, it can be, you can think about AI just a model and you send something to the model and you receive the answer. But the reality is more complex is that the model is embedded in some decision system and it is helping people make a decision, for example, or it’s making their life easier in some way. And I think the thinking about that in a very explicit way, I think for me, that’s very helpful.

So that’s one aspect. Then I think probably the most famous Batesonian construct is the double bind. I think probably the best known popular culture.

And the double bind, that concept, I think it’s useful in designing AI applications because you want to make sure that, because the model may give you a strange answer and you can blame, you may start to blame the model. But the reason may be because the model is caught in a double bind. It has conflicting instructions, especially conflicting instructions at different levels of meaning.

So, for example, you’re asking the model to do something, design, help me design something, a nuclear bomb. And then there are instructions, they say, don’t help anybody with this request. And so the model may struggle, right?

And because it has conflicting information that is fed to it. So I think that is a very practical design guidelines that a model needs to have an explicit escape route that basically model if the model can detect such a conflict and raise a red flag and say, look, I cannot do it because there are conflicting, I’m encountering conflicting instructions and I don’t know what to do. Because another ingredient in Batesonian double bind is that this escape from conflicting instructions is impossible.

So that’s the classic Batesonian double bind. So I think that that’s amazing, right, because Bateson came up with it in the 60s. And this is just so directly applicable to our AI world.

What more can you say about that first one? It's funny — it's laying right on top of an example I give all the time. Are you familiar with Ursula Le Guin, the writer?

Yes.

Yeah. She has an essay that she wrote, and it was about communication. And she makes an argument that the way that we think about communication is, it seems like it’s the same thing that Bateson is saying, which is that we think about communication as like, I’m a box of information, you’re a box of information, and we transmit bits of information through a tube and we take turns, sender, receiver.

But she says anybody that actually has been in a conversation knows that that’s total, that’s not how it works. A conversation is a totally different, more complicated, fluid intersubjective and reciprocal space. And so she says instead of the metaphor of two boxes communicating information, and in fact, it’s not even about information, it’s about relationship.

And so she describes the better metaphor for a conversation is amoeba sex, the sex that amoebas have. And maybe as a chemist, you know more about this than anybody I’ve ever spoken to, but something happens when amoebas have sex, the boundaries between them go away and they become one thing. And her point being that if you really look at a conversation, listening and telling are the same thing. It’s one act in a way.

And does that get to the complicating that Bateson does and brings to the way that we think about AI, that it’s not just these units bouncing around in very finite ways, but there’s all these layers around it that make it just much more complicated.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I think Bateson has a great phrase that I think fits really well, mind not limited by skin. And I think this is very apt here because the idea is that how we think and what we do is driven to the tools that we have and to our interactions and the relationships.

So, because certain types of thoughts are easier or harder depending on the tools that you have. And there is this, it’s a, you can call it the restatement of the old ideas that we create tools and then the tools that we create start to shape us. Right.

So, but tools is a very mechanistic term, but I think the same applies towards people, right? Because this is a cliched thing that you are the average of five people that you spend the most time with, right? And I think that’s very true.

And I think that’s, this is, I love this analogy of amoebas or, I don’t know, octopuses touching tentacles and it’s hard to, it’s difficult to draw a clear boundary, right? And I think this is more of a, it’s a feature, not a bug is that we have, we’re driven and defined by these complicated relationships. And I think there is, I mean, a lot of it is, I think science has been such a successful enterprise and the trick of science has been, you cut something into chunks and explain each chunk, right?

And then you build a puzzle out of explainable chunks. And this is a very powerful approach, right? But at some point, and I think we have already reached that point where we explain the chunks, but now we’re noticing that when you put a bunch of chunks together, the behavior is a lot more complex than we can infer from the structure of each individual chunk, right?

So we’re getting to the emergence phenomenon, right? When we have a complicated enough system, the behaviors that we’re seeing is really way more complex than we would expect based on constituent chunks. And I think this is immediately applicable to LLMs. These things are getting bigger and bigger and more and more capable. They’re amazingly capable right now. So, yes. Sorry, I’m blabbing on.

No, it’s wonderful. And I’m following you there. And I hadn’t, I appreciate how clear you were about that.

I hadn’t heard it explained that way. And I suppose my next question is really about, I’m curious how you imagine AI, like, because of the way that you think, the way that you’ve been educated and Bateson and chemistry and all this stuff. How do you think about AI in terms of what it is and how we interact with it?

Oh, it’s a difficult question because I think from, there is, there are several, I would say viewpoints that I have. One is more of a mechanistic point, what it is and how it works and the pieces. But then there is, and it’s interesting, of course, and in a way amazing that we can do it at the scale where behavior is interesting.

But there is another lens is, this is something that we grew in a Petri dish. Like we didn’t build it with intent. We build the system and then we trained it on basically all the human knowledge, a large chunk of it.

And then we created this artifact. And now we’re probing this artifact and we’re asking like, hey, can it do this? And it’s like, oh, wow, it can.

And can it do that? Like, wow, it can again. So I think there is, from my perspective, the more exciting piece is this discovery of what we can do now, because there is this mechanistic explanation of what it is.

And for me, this is less interesting. And right now I’m very excited about, oh, we’ll have this thing. And what can this thing help me do?

And already, in terms of doing research, studying something, digging into a new area. I mean, all of us basically gained a super intelligent, tireless assistant. I mean, it is an incredible capability.

I feel that many people haven’t, are not fully appreciating what it is and how powerful it is. But I do think that people, people are catching up for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. What’s your experience been with it? What do you enjoy about it most? How are you using it?

I think the succinct way to put it, for a long time I have a pretty diverse set of interests and there is a theme that unites them. But I felt that pre-AI, most of my ideas, they will blip in and out of existence, but I cannot act on them because in the old world, the overhead was too high, but now I actually can. And I have this wonderful feeling.

It’s what things that I really wanted to do and to learn and to try, now they’re actually achievable. I can do them and I can do them it’s feasible and I’m doing it. And I think that is very exciting to me.

Things that were just impossible before now become possible and I can try my ideas, test my ideas, dig into my ideas, dig into something complicated where I’m not an expert and get a good opinion. So that’s probably the most exciting piece for me is that it strikes me as a massive multiplier, a massive force multiplier. If you have an idea, it can really help you.

Of course, there is a danger there because it can amplify good and bad things. So every tool, every powerful tool can be misused. So there is the flip side too.

Yeah. I remember somebody, I don’t know where I heard it, but somebody said, well, two things are coming to me. The first is just I’ll share that.

Somebody said that the invention of the airplane was also the invention of the plane crash was the way that I had heard it. And then the second thing, I was just curious, when you say that you’ve, I completely identify, love the way that you said it, cause I’ve been experimenting on my own and that thing where these thoughts come where previously they would just come and then I wouldn’t be able to act on them. So they would evaporate away.

Now I have an opportunity to dig in them. There’s the, I had that same experience where the possibility to act on thoughts that previously I wouldn’t have been able to act on or to pursue is much easier now. And it’s quite something.

Are there any thoughts that you were, you’re willing, what’s an example of something that you’ve pursued or has been amplified by AI because AI is available to you?

There is of course the professional aspect, which I can’t get into details, but it is incredible in terms of what we can do, what we can try easily and cheaply. And before it was wouldn’t it be nice, but this is going to take a month and I don’t have the time. So can’t do it.

And now it’s okay, let’s spend half a day or day or whatever. So there is that aspect, but to make it more concrete, recently I published two papers on optimization and mathematics on my LinkedIn. And a lot of the research for the papers was done, I did it with the help of AI, right?

A lot of figures, for example, the figures are fully generated, right? I’m okay, I need this figure and everything quickly, quickly put it together. And this still took me, each paper took me days worth of work.

So it was not the case of make a paper for me. Okay. Post it.

No, this is, I value my voice and I really like the act of writing, right? So this is something very dear to me, but in the previous pre-AI, I would not be able to do it because it would have taken me probably a month or two of dedicated work to write these papers and all the support and information at the level of qualities that I find acceptable for sharing. And now in a matter of several weeks, or a month or whatever, working an hour here, an hour there, because I have a family and I like spending time with them too.

So now all of a sudden I can do it and I can explore these areas of mathematics that I didn’t have time to really dig into before, find interesting connections that I personally find beautiful. Maybe somebody else will, because I think for me also a good indicator, if it’s worth doing for me, I like using LinkedIn as a motivator to really push the idea and polish it and make sure that I give it justice. But I feel that I’m not doing it for LinkedIn or for engagement.

It’s more of an extra motivator. If LinkedIn didn’t exist, I would still do it.

Yeah. I love what you said about you value your voice and you like writing and that’s really important to you. And I’m curious, I know in my own experience, things get, maybe this is the whole question about, we’re talking about the boundaries that you can, where do I end?

Where does AI begin when it comes to the work and the creative stuff? How do you protect or what’s your workflow to protect your voice and to protect the writing and to use, how do you keep AI at a distance and away from that? Or is that a problem or a struggle at all that you need to do?

That is a really interesting question and I feel that it’s a moving target. At first I was, I would say very cautious in my use because I felt that I didn’t want to outsource too much of me and too much of my thinking. And as I use these tools more frequently and the tools are getting better, I feel that there is this it’s an interesting, I would say, blend almost.

And it is sometimes a little bit unsettling because it’s oh, is this too much or is it too little? And I feel that this is, again, always a moving target. But it’s a difficult question that I think all of us have to struggle with a little bit and find a good answer for ourselves.

And it’s also a moving target because models are constantly changing and they’re getting better. And I noticed something that half a year ago, I used to be explicit in my prompts and say don’t be sycophantic, tell it to me straight, all that stuff. And then I realized quite a while ago that I stopped doing it because the model got to a point where they push back, I would say, fairly effectively.

So, yeah, I don’t have an answer. I don’t have an answer because I think it is more of a process. But I do, and I think this is, for me, this is the definition that it is an active process and I need to maintain my judgment.

But also, I don’t want to be blind to the input because I do have these things that have every single book ever. And it would be, it probably wouldn’t be very smart to dismiss the feedback.

Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate the answer. And I know that in my own experience, I have the same challenges.

And I guess, is this what Bateson is talking about in a way that there’s, that things get blurry and complicated in ways that we don’t understand? Or am I misreading or over-reading Bateson into this part of the conversation?

Oh, I think that, for me, that’s very similar to how I think about it. I think things are, I think actual things, they’re not isolated. It is an ecology of things that interact.

And so trying to draw sharp boundaries, it is necessary and it is helpful because then, if you just well, everything is one, that’s not very useful or practical. You can’t really do anything with it. It’s okay, everything is one and then what?

Then it’s too complicated and you can’t really deal with the complexity. So, you have to cut and partition and think about things in isolation. But it has to be counteracted by this awareness that there is the ecology of things that interact.

And that’s very much how I think about my interactions with models because they’re definitely changing. I mean, they have changed the way I work. They have changed the way how my team works.

They have changed what is possible, what is worth doing versus what is not worth doing. I think that software is at the edge, at the leading edge of this change because the models are just so good in writing software right now. And of course, that creates, I see that many people have difficulty adjusting.

And they have a lot of empathy because there is the question of meaning, we do things, there is the practical aspect, we need a job to make a living and have shelter and food and all that stuff. But we also create meaning by what we do. So if your meaning was, well, I spent 20 years learning how to write awesome software and now this thing came along that can do it, frankly, better than I can and much faster and much cheaper.

What is my contribution to the universe? What is my meaning? What’s going on?

So, I have a lot of empathy because I changed careers, I said goodbye to chemistry and it was difficult. But sometimes, just this is the reality of it.

Yeah. I have two questions coming in at once, and maybe it’s really one. How are you feeling about all these changes?

I’ll give you the context. A guy invited me to write for his blog and asked, what would you say to a CMO? I do face-to-face qualitative research, ethnography — I’m a human being who goes and talks to other human beings on behalf of a company. And he said, why should a CMO pay for you when there’s synthetic data and AI all over the place?

It was an existential question for me. Because honestly, if I were a CMO, I don’t know that I would pay for a human to go out and talk to another human when AI can do so much of what it can do. It was a serious challenge to my sense of professional value.

So I’m wondering — did you have a moment like that? Where you asked yourself what AI does that you do? And more broadly, how are you feeling about all of it?

Yes. And so, full disclosure, right? I was very uneasy about these changes because I spent, I didn’t spend 20 years, but I spent years learning the craft of programming.

It was at least 10 years of dedicated study, and I enjoy it. And I pride myself at being good at it, right? And so, initially, I remember initially, I guess it was autumn, fall of 2025, the models were getting better.

And I was starting to experiment with those things like Copilot, and they were useful, but there was still these things that when I would try to push them even a little bit, hey, create this plot, Python, Matplotlib, whatever for me, give very detailed instructions, and it would fail. And basically, I was like, it’s faster for me to do it myself. So, I remember, I gave this talk, and it was October of 2025.

And I was pretty, sorry, October of 2024. So, October of 2024. Well, I was fairly skeptical because I’m like, yes, this is useful, but it’s very, I can see the limitations, and these are the limitations that I’m seeing.

And I didn’t believe that, I could see the limits. And I didn’t expect the models to just blow through these limits so quickly.

And so, when I definitely had that sensation of, oh, these things are getting better and better and better, but I think there is this mental protection that there is an uncomfortable reality, and you are explaining it away. And the models for instance are good also. So, it was easy to explain it away, to say, okay, yeah, this case is okay, but this case is not great.

And then, last year, I had this experience. It was in May of 2025. So, almost exactly a year ago.

And I had a very urgent project. And just ChatGPT basically sped me up by about a factor of two. And I was like, wow, this is legitimately amazing.

And then, a friend introduced me to QuoteCode and agentic coding. And I started on my personal time, I tried it. And I was like, wow, this is amazing.

And I remember, I’m usually not a command and control person in my management style. But I remember on Monday, I told my team, look, if your house is on fire, take out the fire, and then install it. And you can spend a week, just push your project, spend a week familiarizing yourself with the technology and start using it.

Because this is the future. I hate the phrase game changer, but I felt that not pushing my team on that would be a dereliction of duty. So, I guess my extended answer is that there was definitely a mental, some mental barrier to overcome.

Because it is, suddenly, a big part of your identity and your skill set became, the value that’s probably not the right word, but it’s not really where your value to the enterprise, to the economic system, I guess, this is not where your value is coming from, right? You need to figure something out. And I think this is a big, I see still, right now, and the models are staggeringly good now.

I still see a lot of discussions of people saying, well, but when I asked ChatGPT to count R and strawberries, it doesn’t do a good job. And I’m like, this is, to me, is more indicative of, this is more the window into psychology. Because, yes, it’s not perfect.

It’s not an oracle. But it’s an extremely powerful capability, right? And it’s, yes, it can’t count R and strawberries.

If you ask it to use Python to count R, it’s going to do a perfect job, by the way. But you need to, yes, there is this massive change, and it’s totally unexpected, and it’s very threatening. But what can we do?

We have to adapt. And we don’t choose the moment. We were born in this universe at this moment.

And this is a huge disruption, right? And we have to navigate it. And I think my experience is that it’s better to accept it and start figuring out a solution.

This is like dentistry. A toothache is not going to go away on its own. It’s only going to get worse.

I didn’t see a dentist analogy coming, but that’s perfect. The wonderful analogy. We’ve just got a few minutes left.

And I wanted to, because you’ve walked us right up to it, I wanted to bring it back to your piece about Bateson, in which you said you wanted to introduce Bateson to people who may not know Bateson. But also you wanted to introduce it into the conversation about AI because Bateson would, and you said it at the beginning of our conversation, it would lead to better questions. So, I guess I want to give you the chance.

What are the questions? What are the better questions that we should be asking or that you’re thinking about as it relates to AI?

I think it’s, yeah, the better questions to me is really there are some tactical, practical questions about, for example, double binds, schismogenesis. This is more around design and how we actually build these systems. But I think a bigger question is really thinking about the bigger system and the impacts that we want to have.

So, I think that’s a question that I find very compelling. And I think there is, of course, you can ask it on a very large level, right? Okay, this is a new technology, how it’s going to impact our lives.

And the answer is, I don’t know. I’m just a little guy doing some stuff. But there are things that I’m doing for our clients and I want to make sure that we’re successful as a company and that we’re making awesome software.

And so, I think asking these bigger questions, how people are going to interact with the software, how I can make their lives better, how I can make the whole operation more efficient. And, yeah, I think this is really the bigger question. And, of course, for me personally, it’s about having this awareness of, now there is this blend of model intelligence and my own intelligence, and it’s hard to separate, to draw a very sharp line.

And, it’s, I would say the adventure continues, it’s a very exciting time. And I didn’t expect the models to get as good so quickly. So, I don’t know where we’re going to be in a year from now, what capabilities we’re going to have available to us a year from now.

And this is very exciting and a little bit scary.

Yeah, for sure. Igor, thank you so much. I know that my invitation came from a, or you used the word earlier, orthogonal direction with regards to our professions. But I really just appreciate you accepting the invitation and sharing both the piece and just, and showing up and talking about it. So thank you so much.

Absolutely. It’s been a great pleasure. And Peter, thank you so much for reaching out. It’s been so much fun.

Celebrity

Above, Holly Grout on icons. Also, Elizabeth Goodspeed on taxonomic warfare. And, Nicole Rudick on modern art.

Strategy

Above, Indy Johar on ground truth. Also, Erich Joachimsthaler PhD on positioning. And, Sir John Hegarty on rational emotion.

Joy

Above, Elise Pepple on the existential beat. Also, Tanner Stening on sincerity. And, Allison P. Davis on clowning.

Civic

Above, Alondra Nelson on AI bill of rights. Also, Dr Sam Illingworth on Slow AI. And, Meredith Banasiak on liminal spaces.

Person

Above, Ian Rogers on AI personhood. Also, Jonathan Rowson on anarchism. And, William Jones on grace.

Nick Bodor is the founder and owner of Baker Falls, a live music venue and bar at 192 Allen Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He previously created some of the East Village’s most influential independent spots — alt.coffee, Library Bar, and Cake Shop, which booked early shows by MGMT, Vampire Weekend, and the Strokes. A first-generation Hungarian-American from rural Connecticut, he’s spent 30 years building communal spaces in downtown New York where emerging bands, downtown clowns, and anti-folk musicians find a home.

Nick is building the kinds of spaces we need. This piece makes the case we should be subsidizing this kind of social infrastructure: “Why ‘Cost Disease’ is The Secret Froce Behind America’s Toxic Solitude:’

There is a strong economic argument for subsidizing health care, education, and even child care. But should we also subsidize sit-down restaurants? Bowling alleys and the local dive bar? Coachella!

Of course, I’m joking about Coachella. (Kind of.) But my serious point is that if solitude has a social cost, it’s not crazy to think that local, state, and federal governments should be thinking about creative ways to make it cheaper to hang out. Some policy solutions would be familiar, such as local governments providing more public pools and community spaces. Others might sound a little odd, like making pro-social businesses, such as restaurants, qualify for tax-deductible donations, the same way that Puccini fans can write checks to their favorite opera house.

Cost disease is real, and it has a known cure. Today we’re seeing that one price of a successful economy is the rise of anti-social businesses. But if we want our rising living standards to include friendships and shared experiences—and not just a nation of couch potatoes scrolling on their phones for 10 hours a day—then we’ll need to choose our social future. And pay for it.

So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. I use it in all my conversations because I haven’t found a better way of getting into one of these conversations out of the blue. And it’s a big question. So I over explain it the way that I’m doing now.

So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

Yeah, it’s interesting because it is so open-ended. Where do I come from geographically? Where do I come from on my parents’ side that was somewhat formative? And full disclosure, it’s this funny thing that as...

I basically came to New York City in the early 90s and I’d been hanging out there since the 80s. And I opened this coffee shop on Avenue A in 1995 across from Tompkins. And everybody was like, hey, Nick, where are you from? What do you do? Well, it was such a what I call exploratory question for people you don’t know.

So with the backstory of I opened this coffee shop when I was 27, I think 27 years old. And it was just me and a business partner. We weren’t well funded. It was this very back in the day, we call it do it yourself, DIY coffee house that happened to have internet access. So we were very early internet cafe, but we wanted to be the cool internet cafe. I always called it an online coffee house, not a cyber cafe, which we were opening up at the time.

So when people asked me that question, I was very gun shy because I was very proud and I had worked since I was 13 years old, working in restaurants and having coked out chefs throw pots at me, but then bring me under their wing and mentor me. To answer the question where I’m from in that environment was I was like, I’m in New York. I’m a New Yorker. And that doesn’t fly.

To answer the question realistically, I think this will be me almost coming to terms with it is I’m from Connecticut. And when you say in 1990s East Village, Avenue A, gritty rock and roll and cool alternative culture, you’re from Connecticut. Everybody just thinks you’re from Westport or Greenwich and you’re a rich kid. Especially being a younger person that opened a coffee shop.

Everybody would just assume you’re a rich kid if you say you’re from Connecticut. So I always had this chip on my shoulder about answering that question. But ultimately, it formed me and it formed a lot of what I’m doing now in 2026, many decades later, 30 years later. Yeah, so the way I explain it is not being from Westport or Greenwich.

But from an area that’s much more rural. People don’t realize that Connecticut has rural populations like Easton and Georgetown. Where I’m from had literally an abandoned wire mill in the town, and my road was called Old Farm Road. So I grew up thinking everybody had a backyard with woods and an abandoned farmhouse that you could just walk across two neighbors’ yards and be in this giant field that was abandoned and fly kites and make model rockets that we would shoot off and just be young kids in the 70s and 80s. Your parents just said see you for dinner time and you just roamed around. And I thought everybody could kick in the door of an abandoned farm outbuilding and fall through the staircase with rusty nails and everything. Super lucky we didn’t get killed. But that formed a lot of an aesthetic of the woods and abandoned buildings and just exploring and just walking around.

And that transferred into New York City, which was a choice that I made to move because I was inspired by the East Village and Lower East Side when I was part of my growing up where I’m from.

I’m first generation. My father escaped in a revolution in Hungary in 1956 and came to Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is a factory town. And the Upper East Side had a Hungarian enclave. And the other one was in Youngstown, Ohio, which Jim Jarmusch made a movie about called Strangers in Paradise about Hungarians, New York, Hungary, downtown Hungarians going to a Hungarian enclave in Ohio. All of that formed a lot of what I’m doing these days.

And I started working in a restaurant when I was 13 called the Georgetown Saloon. That was where all the working folk, all the working people hung out. But it was also, there was some people that had some money. But it really was the place where people had Harleys and they cut the lawns for the rich people and had really successful landscaping businesses. But they drove Harleys and wore leather vests and stuff.

Honky tonk in the middle of everything. So that’s where I’m from. A lot of it, that restaurant, the Georgetown Saloon formed me because there was always one of the owners in the kitchen, one of the owners on the floor, one of the owners behind the bar.

And I worked for them for 10 years and they really brought me up. And when I was 18, I said, by the time I’m 28, I want to open a restaurant. I put myself long-term goal there that again is all where I’m from. And if I didn’t have that job at Georgetown Saloon, I probably wouldn’t have been inspired to do my own thing. I probably would have tried to get an office job or something that was the norm if you could make it happen. That really influenced where I’m from.

And put me in a position to open. I started getting really into coffee culture when I moved to New York and what I would call a coffee house versus cafe. I was romanticizing 1950s beatnik Greenwich Village coffee houses, but then I would travel to Montreal and I loved the coffee house scene there. And so when I moved to New York, 1992, I was 21 at the time and I got into the coffee business and I was like, oh, I don’t need to open a restaurant when I’m 28. I could open a coffee shop. And so I was able to put myself in a position there where we opened up Alt Coffee when I was 27. But I don’t know if that’s a long answer to that first question or if I should break to let you ask me a question.

No, I mean, the answers have their own, they come to their own end. I mean, it’s beautiful. But I do want to go back, because the next question I often ask is, as a kid, maybe before you got that job at the Georgetown Saloon, as a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Do you have a recollection of what young Nick wanted to be when he grew up?

Well, yeah, that again, it’s where are you from and what are the dates? And I was born the day they landed on the moon, is what I say. So this is also what I love about me being totally frank and honest, because I used to make up backstories for myself and that was such an interesting time.

Where you can just make shit up about your background and there wasn’t the internet to fact check, right? So I thought the Ramones were all brothers. You didn’t fact check it. So I’ve put bits and pieces of things out there, especially being in the cafe business and the bar business where I’m chatty, it’s hospitality. I love talking to various people. I’ve made some shit up. I’ve dropped some exaggerations.

So I always say I was born the day they landed on the moon, July 17th, 1969. But I have to be careful, because if people know, they actually landed on the moon on the 19th, and I was born when they were in space. Because people don’t always realize — other than now we’ve been back to the moon this year, which is coincidental — people know it takes multiple days. So I was technically born while they were on their way to the moon, but I always say I was born the day they landed on the moon. Apollo 11 landed on the moon. So I always wanted to be an astronaut. I’ve always been fascinated by space. I was a sci-fi kid. Star Wars, I was eight years old when Star Wars came out.

That was hugely influential. So yeah, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, for sure.

It’s amazing. I’m really connecting with, well what a choice to make that choice to say the day that they landed on the moon as opposed to being in the moon. Where does that come from, do you think, that instinct?

I think again, it’s exploratory questions or chit chatting with strangers. It’s just much easier to say you were born and it sounds cool to be honest. It sounds cooler. I was born the day they landed on the moon. Then, they were in flight. It took them three days to get to the moon. They actually landed on the 19th, but then when a friend would be like, you were born on July. I would say I was born on the day they landed on the moon. Let’s say 20 years ago, they’re like, you were born on July 19th. I’m no, I was actually born on July 17th.

So that was just so interesting being caught on it. It was really just easier and I felt more, again, it’s like, hey, it just sounds great. I was born in the day landing on the moon.

And how did you, I’m curious about that job at the Georgetown Saloon, because it sounds so formative. How did you get that job? What would that have must have been like as a first?

Yeah. So, literally 13, 14. My old man, again, very old world, very Eastern European, taught us a good work ethic. He literally escaped from the bottom of a truck in a revolution and hid and made his way to Germany. And he didn’t talk about it at that time, but he was really scrappy and very cheap, even though he worked hard and built up a good life.

So we didn’t really have an allowance or pocket money, and we did tons of chores around the house. He was the guy that would lay his own concrete, and we thought every kid had a concrete mixer at home and would help your dad mix up concrete. But we never got paid for it. So a buddy of mine had a job as a dishwasher and he was getting paid — probably two fifty, three dollars an hour maybe.

Before that, I had been raking leaves for neighbors and cutting grass. And the raking leaves, I remember it was so formative because I would literally be raking leaves for an hour, let’s say two hours, two fifty an hour, so for five bucks, and I would have blisters from raking leaves. And that was formative, but also God, this sucks to do this work for two dollars.

A dishwasher, five an hour — let’s do that. Because a friend of mine had been working there and it was literally in walking distance. It was rural, but this saloon was in walking distance. It was a long walk, but walking distance to my house. I could ride my bike down there.

And it was because my friend had the job. His dad was also, he was first generation, but his parents were actually South African and English. But he basically got me the job. And around that time in high school, a little later, more like 15, 16, other friends of mine had restaurant jobs. And it was a good way to have your own money and buy records and come into the city and go to CBGBs and everything. That was all because I had my own money.

As a young 14, 15, versus having to ask my parents for it.

Yeah. And what would you go into the city for? What was that scene you mentioned CBGBs? What stories can you tell?

Yep. Yeah. So I was a pretty good high school student.

And so I was allowed to just hop on a train, at that time it was probably five, six dollars. And an hour, an hour and a half later, you’re in Grand Central Station walking downtown. I used to always just walk down to Washington Square Park and see what was going on. And then I started getting a little bolder and heading over to Avenue A. And First Avenue was always the line back then. And as I got a little older, I’d get more, Avenue A and Avenue B.

And I would just walk around the city, sometimes with a friend, sometimes alone, and just walk 80 blocks — well, it was 40 blocks downtown, then east and west, south and north.

It was easy to get your bearings and just explore around. We would just walk around, hang out in the parks, do the stuff you do as a teenager. CBGB’s had all ages shows, and I never really had a fake ID, so it was all ages shows. Then when I got to be a little older, maybe you wouldn’t get carded back then as much. Around 17, 18, 19, I really started going out and going to coffee shops and going to bars if I could, or getting a drink if I could, or getting a 40 ounce from the bodega and going to the park, which was the thing to do. But yeah, it was a lot of wandering aimlessly. And then when you discovered cool spots, you would bring a friend there — you got to check this spot out. And for me, a lot of it was going to whatever shows were all ages and rock and roll, indie rock, alternative places where it all resonated with me.

And at record stores too, that was the other thing. I would go to a record store, that’s how I discovered, I mean, bands fall in and out of fashion, but I had a Beastie Boys seven inch before they had a record out because I would just be in a record store on Bleecker Street or something and the clerk would be playing and I’d be like, oh, who’s this? It’s Cookie Puss by Beastie Boys, a 12 inch remix. Yeah, that was a really cool part of it too.

So catch us up, where are you now and what is the work that you do? How do you describe what you do and what you’re up to?

Yeah, I mean, I had this long-term goal — I want to open a coffee house, I want to be part of coffee culture. And good coffee was just coming to New York at that time. Everything was bodega coffee, there was no Starbucks. There were the Italian espressos in Greenwich Village. And this guy Gene had a place called the Bean Bar that was an independent coffee shop.

And he was opening one on the Upper East Side. He’s like, I want you to come, I’ll teach you the business, and you can be the night manager on the Upper East Side. And I was living downtown — I had my first apartment, a railroad. I hate to be the back in the day guy, but I probably couldn’t have done what I’m doing now if I didn’t have a railroad apartment on East 13th Street with four other guys. The shared room was the kitchen, and people had to walk through my room to get to the exit. A typical railroad, but it was cheap and it allowed me to get into the coffee business and go to shows.

Basically, once I felt I had learned enough of the business, I found this abandoned dentist office that had been vacant for 14 years on Avenue A. I had staggered out of Doc Holliday’s, the honky tonk, and there was a handwritten for rent sign on the window of the space. I had never noticed it before because it looked like an apartment on street level, but it hadn’t been anything. And we wound up being able to just go to the lumber yard that used to be on 14th and buy wood and build a counter.

And so we opened in 1995 — Alt.coffee, an internet cafe with a T1 line when people had 28K dial up modems. But we were the funky one. We would just find couches on the street. There were no bed bugs in New York City at that time. Coffee, computers, and comfy chairs was our tagline, and the comfy chairs were wingback chairs we’d find from a dead 80-something in one of the tenements. We would just find all this cool old furniture, and we had fuzzy lamps with baubles hanging down. That was our shtick. And you could smoke in cafes. We didn’t even have a beer and wine license and we were open till 2, 3 a.m. just doing coffee and computers. It was really a very cool time. And I was a drunk.

So I was like, I should get in the bar business. And so in 1998, three years after Alt, I open Library Bar on Avenue A, which is a rock and roll dive bar that I loved. I loved places like Downtown Beirut and all these little spots — Z Bar and all these places that I used to go to in the East Village.

No Tell Motel. I mean, there’s so many. Brownies was very influential as a live music venue. There were just all these amazing rock and roll bars with jukeboxes. And I was like, someday I’ll have the best jukebox in New York City. And I would write down on a napkin oh, I got to put the Tom Waits in there. I never see Tom Waits in a jukebox, or all this stuff. Then we open the Library Bar in 98.

The next year when people actually read The Village Voice, we got voted best jukebox in New York City. I was like, that’s it, my career is over. That’s all I ever wanted to do. And then I always thought of myself as curating this 99 slot jukebox that, it’s funny about Tom Waits, because I was so excited to have him in there. And the first time he came on on a mellow, we were open noon to four, seven days a week, no food, just a watering hole.

First time Tom Waits came out on a Sunday afternoon, we’re all freaking out, this is so great. Then it comes on on a bumping, loud Friday night, high energy, just brought the whole room down. I was like, Tom Waits has to come off the jukebox. And it formulated this: what sounds good at 2 p.m. and what sounds good at 2 a.m.

And curating this 99 slot jukebox is something that I just took a lot of pleasure in and I know it brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of different types of people. And that was so exciting. That really fired me up and we did that for many years. And then in 2005, I was like, well, I’d love to open a venue. There’s all these great venues that I love that have great bands that I haven’t heard of. I’ll go to see three bands and discover two new ones. I might go for the headline and discover two bands I’ve never heard of that are amazing and that was the mid aughts which was a good time for new bands in New York City.

Basically, we opened Cake Shop as a record store, cafe, taking what we knew from the cafe business and the bar business at Library and opened a place that became a real communal hub because of the cafe and the record store upstairs and the music venue was downstairs. So if you wanted to pay the cover to go downstairs and see early shows by MGMT and Vampire Weekend, we booked their first shows, or you could hang out upstairs. It was accidental, but the social interaction and the community building was just so rewarding.

So amazing. We were there for 15 years. I didn’t think we had to close before COVID because our model didn’t work 15 years later where we needed cheap rent and either we raised our prices and everything was breaking down at the same time. The HVAC units are expensive. Insurance went up. Con Ed went up. So we decided we closed. To me, it seems two years ago, but it was actually quite a bit longer. So it was 2005 till 2019, so 14 years.

But I never thought I’d be able to do a venue again in Manhattan, which is my neighborhood. East Village is my neighborhood. It’s where I moved, it’s where I got the first railroad apartment. That’s home. Brooklyn didn’t feel home to me. Everyone’s open in Brooklyn, open in Brooklyn. I’m like, I don’t know. We wound up opening a short-lived place called Brewer Falls in Williamsburg that I had a bad partnership and it just soured me even further, but I was like, okay, I just never thought I’d be able to open again in the East Village.

And then after COVID hit, the Pyramid Club, which was a legendary club back in the day that hadn’t been very relevant, was available. And I was like, who owns this? And I did all this detective work. Who owns the Pyramid? Because it was a very mysterious thing. And I was able, long story short, to partner up with the Knitting Factory and get the space at 101 Avenue A.

And I thought, my god, this will be great. But the layout was so different from Cake Shop. I wanted to bring it back because it hadn’t really been relevant. It was just this place where you’d go dance to an 80s themed dance party in the 2000s, and that was it. It wasn’t where Nirvana’s first show on the East Coast was, which is what Pyramid was. And also RuPaul lived in the basement when she moved to New York because she was in a band called Wee Wee Hole, a punk band. The manager of Pyramid was like, “Hey, Rue, you don’t have to go back to Atlanta, Georgia with Wee Wee Hole. Come live in the basement.” And she was so inspired by that community there that she became RuPaul.

And that’s what I wanted was the rockers hanging out. When I was coming up, it was Don Hills and everybody in the Pyramid Club, everybody straight LGBTQ, whatever, everybody all hung out together with no judgments. And that’s what the coffee shop was. That’s what Cake Shop was.

I missed that. And Pyramid Club — I was too concerned with trying to preserve the history, that it didn’t really have its own identity as Baker Falls, which is what we had called it. And I had developed this idea of this decrepit manor house in the woods vibe in the downstairs lounge, the second bar downstairs that I called the Fever Dream. That really was the Baker Falls vibe — this decrepit manor house in the woods, part Grey Gardens, but also this weird town, part Twin Peaks. I wanted Baker Falls to be this whole thing, and that’s something I haven’t had the bandwidth to develop. But of course that was all Old Farm Road and growing up with these abandoned buildings — how fascinating that would be in a city environment.

So when we wound up parting ways with Knitting Factory and at the same time, the Rockwood Music Hall space became available. So I was able to immediately move Baker Falls into that space, which was much more conducive. I call it wood, glass, and iron. It has wood all over it, these iron. It’s got an iron mezzanine and it’s glass. And we could really trick it out with our decrepit town, weirdo oddball who lives in Baker Falls, who’s our kin, who’s a resident, who are nomads passing through Baker Falls. We could really execute that concept at Baker Falls.

So now we’re at 192 Allen Street right on, I call it the borderlands of the East Village, Lower East Side. But it’s a struggle because it’s a beast and we were underfunded. I just wanted to get open so bad and I really believed that it would all come together and instead what’s going on is we’re underfunded and struggling. But people love it, so we’ll keep it going.

Yeah, that’s beautiful. I had an experience there. That’s when we met. We met at the Breakfast Club in Brooklyn through Bendits and happened to be in the city and experienced, I think, is it the clown night?

Yeah, yeah, Idiot’s Hour. I’d seen this scene bubble up in back room, back rock bars — Cobra Club and these back venues — and I was seeing this avant-garde, modern clowning, but also traditional. Very smart but very silly. These are fucked up times, let’s laugh about it. And sometimes heavy. It was just such a great scene. I was like, okay, we’ve got to be the Manhattan home for the downtown — I just started calling it the downtown clown scene, but Matthew and Ryan, who are the hosts, they call it Idiot’s Hour.

But it was floating around in these back spaces of Bushwick. And I’m like, no, let’s make it the downtown clown home. So week one since we opened Baker Falls in January last year, 2024, every Wednesday we’ve been fostering and encouraging and exposing new people to this really amazing scene of avant clowning. And I’m so happy. I just feel I’m very proud that we identified it, was able to execute it and give it a home. So that’s been super rewarding.

And in general, Baker Falls is known as, I get emerging bands, Indie Rock Club, the way Cake Shop’s booking style with the addition of the Downtown Clowns. And we wanted to bring back the anti-folk scene, which had started in the East Village. It’s this sub-genre where Moldy Peaches came out of and Beck would, Jeffrey Lewis and all these people came out of this open mic where Beck would come to town and be influenced his whole sound. So we’re like, we’ve got to bring back anti-folk. So we do that every Monday as well.

We’ve done these residencies since day one on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. And the other one is we had this friend and artist that we really liked, Torture the Desert Spiders. She was actually one of my ticket people at Baker Falls at 101 Avenue A. She grew up — her mom was a long time door person and booker at Mercury Lounge — and she grew up in it the same way my 22 year old son grew up in it. And I wanted to bring back this idea of, man, the Strokes before anybody knew them would be at Mercury Lounge for a six week residency, and we’d be at the Library Bar like, oh, we should go see that band, the Strokes, next week — and we just never went that six weeks.

We tapped Torture to be our first resident because she’s so talented. She loved it so much, had so many great friends, that we’ve been doing that for 65 weeks now as well. And it’s this great thing where bands that can play at Bowery Ballroom and much bigger venues do stripped down sets with us every Tuesday. So that’s another thing. There was a while where I was like, can we keep open? And it’s very well publicized that we could close any day. But because of stuff like this — these residencies are important to people — it really makes us keep the fight going. And then we’ve got to maybe book some bigger shows on Friday, Saturday.

There’s always issues with startups — our air conditioning didn’t work last summer, so we never really could do any late night parties because it was hot in there. And so all of this is based on what we started being something very special, and we really need to keep it going.

It’s wonderful. There’s two things that I want to—there’s two big buckets that I want to get into, one because I’ve never lived in New York City. So I’m curious about and you’ve been in the East Village for so long and you described it as your home and it’s a neighborhood you’ve been working in for such a long time. So I’m really curious to hear you talk about the neighborhood. But before I ask you that question, what do you think that you do? What is it that you do? How do you think about what you do?

Yeah, I’m somewhat introspective, I know what I do. And I’ve always thought of myself as a social anthropologist, being fascinated by people, human interactions, no judgments. There’s nature, there’s nurture, there’s environment. People form for various reasons. Let’s have a discussion, whatever.

But so what I think I do very well is set up an environment where I want to hang out. And luckily, it’s very authentic and it’s very organic and all these terms that marketing people use, I know is what I do. I mean, my place resonates because my environments are not over designed. It’s not H&L architects coming in to design this retro bar in Greenwich Village. That’s the old world New York with dark wood. It’s just all that’s not what I do.

I just set up a place, design it. Maybe I have some collaborators. I mean, at Library Bar, it’s this rock and roll dive bar that has mine. I have Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedias I grew up with. It was always in our basement. We just put them behind the bar and all of this stuff. Tapping artists to do a mural, all of this stuff is what I think I do really well.

And I think I want multi-generation. I want the 22 year olds the way I was at Doc Holliday’s because I had no money and I drank—it’s funny because the owner of Doc’s says he never did this but what got me in there because I was not a country music guy was they had $2 mugs of Guinness and I felt it was so deluxe. So I’d be in this honky tonk drinking and talking to a guy missing a tooth who’s telling me amazing stories and a cute bartender who’s turning me on to why country music is storytelling and amazing.

I loved hanging out with the old timers when I was young and then it stopped with millennials only wanting to hang out with themselves and hang out and drink wine and smoke pot on the rooftop or whatever.

What my places have always, I think, appealed to is multi-generational people, and then we’re all hanging out together. So that’s what I think I do. I think I create environments where people feel comfortable and can meet a stranger or they can meet up with a friend. But what I don’t want is you bringing 40 friends for your 30th birthday party and hanging out. And I don’t really see that at a lot of my places. If you’re solo, you’re comfortable no matter what your orientation is, no matter what you identify as, you’re comfortable, we look after safe space, and you might meet your best friend and it happens.

I have so many people — if it comes up, oh, I own Library Bar — oh my god, I met my best friend there. Oh my god, my friend group is all from that bar. That happened at Cake Shop, that happened at Alt Coffee. That is something that I do, and I don’t always make the most money. I mean, as I’m getting older, I need to start thinking about retirement a little bit. I’m 55, I’m not making a lot of money, and so I have to calibrate: how do I do what I do and make some money on it so I don’t have to work till I’m 80? Although, full disclosure, my exit strategy is to be the 75 year old day bartender shuffling around some weird bar opening Budweisers. That’ll be okay for me too.

What’s it, yeah, talk to me, how is it different now than it was, whatever, 20 years ago, trying to create that space, to create the opportunities for, I this is something that we fixate on all the time, or at least I do, that how hard it is to connect or interact with people that you don’t know, what, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. What have been the biggest changes that you’ve noticed in terms of how hard it is to do that now?

Yeah, I mean, because things are so cyclical, it’s been interesting for me to be an observer over 30 years in New York City. There was a time where there weren’t any good rock bands and everything was electro clash or whatever. It just wasn’t. If it’s not your scene and you’re not feeling it, you can’t fake it. It’s interesting now with the Internet and social media.

There’s, retro’s always been there. I mean, for me, romanticizing the 1950s cafes in 1995, or bands or whatever, but now with social media, it’s very interesting to see how trends come out. So my son is in the East Village. He was born in a railroad, grew up in the East Village, and he’s 22 years old. And now him and I are working together. He’s a bartender. He got into the business on his own, which I was proud of because I didn’t really want him to be just a nepo baby thing. But he totally got into it on his own for many years, and then I brought him in to work with me. And he grew up in a household that had indie music. He could have gravitated to pop or hip hop or EDM or something, but he didn’t. So now we’re able to work together and connect on that and go to shows together. Now he’s over 21, we go to shows together. But more importantly, working together, we’re seeing how the kids — younger kids, when I say kids, 20-somethings — are fascinated by us old timers the way I was fascinated by the old timers at the honky tonk, Doc Holliday’s. And I didn’t see that for a while. You didn’t see a band with a 25 year old drummer and a 45 year old guitar player. And now you are. And the conversations are so enjoyable.

My whole thing is get people off the screens. That’s another part of what I do. I don’t have TVs. You walk into a bar in Midtown and everyone’s watching sports and you don’t have a sports conversation. What are you talking about? Right. That’s why music was always good for that for me — talking about the music, or a playlist, or so the young people now are asking us, my God, you own this place? How did that happen? And then they ask super fascinating questions.

If I was, let’s say I was 35, bartending at Cake Shop, and a 22 year old band from Montreal comes through — it was different. It was a little different. But now they’re so bold, I guess because they’re used to having their whole lives be televised on screens. Maybe 20 years ago it would have seemed a weird question to ask an old-timer. But now they’re just curious and they almost don’t have filters on it, which I find endearing, but also really amazing.

So when I first noticed this, it was me just being behind the bar. A young man, and they’re just so chatty, and a gal asked me, you own this place? Do you have any regrets? And I was like, whoa — this is the first, third sentence maybe that we spoke with each other. And she felt comfortable enough to ask me that question. Number one. Number two, I actually have a tattoo that says no regrets, but I have some. Sure. It just sparked this really great conversation with a 20-something when I was 50-something, and it was just learning from each other.

And all of this stuff is a very fascinating, exciting time, I think, to be social. They’re all figuring it out. I have this conversation all the time with my son’s age group. They’re like, yeah, we spent too much time on the screens. There was quarantine, which meant he didn’t make any friends. He was a teenager during COVID. So instead of doing stupid shit at Union Square that I did, or Washington Square Park or Tompkins, they were on a headset with their buddies from elementary school. Weren’t dating. Weren’t experimenting. Weren’t doing it. And so now they want to do that.

But they’re so curious. And I think a lot of parents my generation maybe — I have to say, I didn’t, I never really liked doing this, but I probably did it with the video games. But other parents would just give their kid a screen to keep them quiet in the restaurant or to keep them quiet. So parenting, I think, is shifting — like, shit, maybe we shouldn’t have that either. So that’s very interesting right now.

Yeah, I’m sure you’ve been an independent, you’ve been independent. I mean, what you’ve been doing is unbelievable that it began with the I love the T1 line before there was internet cafes, but you’ve been independent in that place in that neighborhood for so long. The success you had at the Cake Shop, and then what you’re doing now with the clowns. And I’m just wondering, do you think about culture? Do you have thoughts about what it means? How do you choose what to include or who to invite or what to... You have a sense of something that’s happening in East Village with each of the things that you do. What do you feel you’re either responding to or experiencing in the East Village when you create a space and invite clowns to come in or invite

Yeah. I mean, again, it’s funny, as this cis middle-aged white guy, not the most popular group of folks. But I’m an ally. I do good stuff, it just sort of, and it really is, I think Ben Dietz actually even made fun of me one time. This whole idea of gatekeeping or tastemaker, it’s unfashionable now, but I always did think of people with taste, that’s why curating a jukebox, who the fuck would think about curating a 99 CD jukebox?

But I gave it so much thought and so much testing and experimentation, when I’d swap things in and out, or I’d have a discussion. I love it when people don’t know I’m the owner. That’s ideal — if they just think I’m a bartender, or they just think I’m a guy sitting at the bar. The conversations are very different. Knowing it just became something over time.

I believe, and I’ve always said this — writing a business plan for what I do, there’s all these intangibles that I do really well that are very hard to put into a business plan. Vibe and decorating, whatever. So a lot of it is gut reaction. And during COVID, obviously I watched a ton of music documentaries, and it was always about these gut reactions of these A&R people, these label heads. Gut reactions. And sometimes people would tell them, this band will never do it. They’re like, no, this band’s special. I was like, I would have fucking killed it in that role.

And going out to see a million live shows, seeing a band you’ve never heard of, the hair in the back of your neck stands up — that’s so special to me. And I experience that all the time still because I go out a lot to small venues, and that’s what I love. But it’s this intangible.

And I do think for me, it’s what resonates with me that I may or may not have experimented with or explored or had loads of conversations with people at an airport bar in Tampa or whatever. I do that all the time. I love it. That, I think allows me to have a unique perspective. Plus the fact that I’m this indie DIY struggles, ups and downs, every year is different. Very fluid operator in that sense that, yeah, it just does that answer your question? I might have lost track a little bit there in that one.

What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?

Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s having a conversation with a stranger. It’s also that conversation leading into a new acquaintance or a new friend. But I also love — that’s the whole thing about airport bars. Having the greatest conversation with somebody that you’ll never, ever see again is always fun, too. And when I heard that airport bars started putting screens at every seat, I was like, no, that’s going to kill that. But now I heard they peeled that back, and it was just interesting culturally.

But the joy for me is 10 years later, somebody telling me that they met their partner there, or they fell in love there, or they wrote their screenplay — all of that. Or they saw the best band that they’d ever heard, or they discovered this band from fucking Milwaukee or whatever that they just loved and became a fan of. That’s the reward. And anytime I’m feeling like, oh my God, how am I going to keep this open? I’ll have that conversation. For me, it’s almost daily. And that really is why I keep doing it.

And I’ve tried to get out of it. I’ve tried to do other careers. When I moved to New York in ‘92, I wanted to be maybe a journalist working for Details magazine or something like that. I loved Paper magazine, the Village Voice. But I didn’t have any portfolio because I just never knew. Nobody said go get an internship at a magazine or an indie label. That’s probably something I should have done. It just wasn’t in my wheelhouse, or it just wasn’t an experience that anybody had directed me towards.

Having people — I know I’m doing really good work, in the sense of the way an artist does, but I’m not an artist. I’m the least creative guy. I’m a very good editor. I’m very good at taking things that work and putting them all together. But I tried to get out of the business, was my point, and then I’m like, shit, the Pyramid Club is for sale. Let’s go do that. And then I jump in, twin barrels burning, and next thing I know I’m back into it.

That also did come from, maybe I should work in an ad agency. I’ve always thought I would have been this organic marketer — then it’s becoming experiential marketing, experiential things, which is again a way I might be able to make a lot of money in the future. Because it is so hard now with a brick and mortar. Insurance is a big one — insurance in the past five years makes it cost prohibitive. And a lot of my models were based on cheap rent, building it up.

Making a fan who tells 10 people instead of making an enemy who tells 100 and you can’t do that now. You have to be a splash and you have to splash quickly because the overhead at least in New York and I think probably all over has changed so much. That’s why everybody leans on social media to get this splash and get people in the door. I mean that’s what’s frustrating about what’s changed over the decades is you can’t let it germinate. You can’t have this authentic place where you want to hang out and just hope everybody else comes. That’s the trick now.

What’s your sense of the difference between those two things?

Letting him germinate or squash.

Yeah, you’re painting a picture in which the economics mean you have to do this big splash, you’re describing an alternative form of growth.

Yeah, it’s basically like I wanted to be the way CBGB’s was around for decades. What happens is you open this cool restaurant and you spend a lot of money on somebody to your Instagram. And then I don’t think you’re going to be popular two years later, because I think there’s only certain people and they’re going to go check out the next one or the next neighborhood or the next whatever.

Versus being that institution that you can bring your kid to when they turn 21 or the coffee shop where you can meet your daughter who’s away at college come meet at the coffee shop and have a coffee.

Everything is shorter lived, I think, because of the splash of social media or the hipness or if you are able to even do it.

Well, I love you just use the word institution. Is it that you feel like you’ve been trying to build these little local institutions? It’s really beautiful.

I do, yeah, yeah, definitely. Is that cocky? Is that too cocky? But it’s so grimy because sometimes I’m worried I’m going to pay my rent. And I think that’s what keeps me humble too, to be honest. If I really opened a hugely successful rooftop bar or something that made a shitload of money, I don’t know, it’d be different, right?

No.

I think.

But what makes it worthwhile, all the struggle in the name of these local institutions? What makes it worthwhile?

Because I’m having somebody that told me they had a great time 20 years ago or yesterday. It really is that. I’m making an impact on somebody’s life, whether it’s for one day or for decades. That’s huge. That just makes me feel good.

I want to thank you so much for spending time with me and telling us a little bit about yourself. Do have any parting thoughts for people on Baker Falls or the village and introduce the neighborhood to them and your place?

Yeah. I would say get off the screens. I get there where it’s like, shit, I’m just going to stay home and watch Netflix, whatever. But then I go out and I’m like, my God, I’m so glad I did that. And I’m excited because I think people even a little older that maybe their kids are 12 or 13, they don’t need a babysitter, just go out and go out a little bit on your own and cut loose a little bit and have a good time and meet a new person. That is really my encouragement. And I think this is an interesting time where I’m starting to see it again. Lots of my friends or my peer group or my age group didn’t go out for decades. And now they’re coming back out and other people are coming back out.

I think we need that human connection. It’s something people are talking about a lot now, but it’s very real — finding your community, finding your tribe. I heard an artist get up and talk about Pyramid Club, being a gay person in Charleston, South Carolina, and discovering in the seventies Pyramid Club, where everybody was welcome and no judgment and it inspired you to do things and inspired you to be yourself. That’s happening right now.

And I don’t know if it took COVID for that to happen, but it’s really exciting. And support indie bands. I think there’s something to be said — we’re all small business owners trying to figure out what are we doing wrong and why are we struggling so hard. I think I’d like to encourage a level of patronage, whether it’s a GoFundMe or whether it’s a club you like where somebody’s sick or there’s something. I think people should be patrons a little bit more if you do have the money, because there are people that are struggling. Go pay the cover charge — that goes to the bands, it goes to the artists, it goes to the club. And if it says Venmo some more, then Venmo some more as a donation if you love the show or you love the artist.

So that’s something I’m trying to be a big proponent of, and it sounds weird because I am this guy who owns places. But everybody needs help sometimes, whether that’s coming in the doors or making a donation or buying a ticket. And in that respect, it sucks what’s going on with the big companies and these high ticket prices that don’t go to the artists. I hadn’t realized that merch is how a young band can make money now — selling merchandise. And I didn’t realize the big companies take a percentage of their merch. That should not be going on. But I want you to have a t-shirt of a great band you saw at Madison Square Garden — but maybe write a letter or express an opinion that this isn’t okay, to exploit artists, whether it’s Spotify, Madison Square Garden, whatever.

That’s what I leave people with. Keep it local, keep it small, support people that need support.

It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. I love that idea of intentionally becoming a patron, a social patron in some way. It reminds me, I just brought this article up. There’s a piece from Derek Thompson, he talks about how we’re at the end of a decade of anti-social business. And it’s just been the phenomenon. It’s just been overwhelming, which we all know. But the piece here that he shared was about, it’s called, Why Cost Disease Is the Secret Force Behind America’s Toxic Solitude? And so at the end of it, he makes the case for subsidizing social infrastructure. He’s making almost the same argument that you’re making from an economic

I like that. That’s great. These things that are hard, you can’t scale up cake shop, you can’t scale up Baker’s Falls. It’s an intimate, handmade, unbelievably constrained piece of wonderful stuff that needs to be supported and it’s been overwhelmed by the antisocial businesses of the last decade. So that’s just a beautiful thought to end on. I appreciate it so much. I will certainly stop by next time I’m down in the city.

Of course, everybody’s welcome. Thanks, Peter.

Evolution

Above, Brian Klaas on the Apollo speech for AI. Also, Henry Farrell & Cosma Rohilla Shalizi on AI as social. And, Cornelia C. Walther on the exposome.

Tribal

Above, Lura Forcum on tribalism. Also, Kirsten Bell on civil inattention. And, Daniel Stillman & Warren Berger on questions.

Flânerie

Above, Hye-Jin Ris Kim on flânerie. Also, Callie Hitchcock on the strip club. And, Zoe Kurland on roadside attractions.

Heartwood

Above, Zoe Scaman on what only you know. Also, Otto Scharmer on a second axial age. And, Erika Hall on beyond measure.

Sensemaking

Above, Jonathan Boymal on the conditions for understanding. Also, Eliza Yvette Esquivel on imagination. And, Elia Ayoub on solarpunk.

So, you may or may not know this, but I start every conversation, and I do this in my work too, with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s a neighbor, who you know, Suzanne Snyder, I imagine. And I use it because it’s a big, beautiful question.

I can’t imagine a better question for getting into a conversation out of nowhere. But because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it. So, before I ask, I want you to know that you are in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

My goodness. Out the gate with the existential big question. I, the first place I go to, because I’m a Brit living in the US, is I’m from England.

But that, in a sense, is its own problematic answer, because I think I’ve lived more years in the States now than I have in the UK. So, it’s a question I’m asking myself all the time. But I was born in England and came to the US for, when I was probably about one year old.

Lived here till I was eight, and then went back to the UK. My parents decided they wanted to put me back in English school. Finished my schooling there, and then did a gap year and all that, and then decided I wanted to come to the US for university.

Met a woman, and here I am living in the Hudson Valley next to you, Peter, living the dream. But you know, where do I come from? You know, I identify as English, 100%. My kids have American accents.

When I speak to English people, they think I’m American, because my accent’s all going all over the place. And every time they say that, it hurts a little bit. So, I’m going to claim the space here.

I’m English.

Are there moments when you feel particularly English?

When I talk about being English. I hear my accent go. But when I’m in England, I almost feel less English. But you know, I’d say when I invite my friends over for a Sunday dinner, and they don’t know the decorum of what a Sunday lunch is, that makes me feel very English. When I feel offended about something that other people should know, but why would they know, because it’s culturally different, but I get offended about it, I’m like, oh yeah, that’s an original point for me.

I think we’ve got to a very strong answer. What is the appropriate behavior for a Sunday dinner?

It could be a podcast in and of itself, to be honest with you. I’ll give you the top line.

If you accept the invite, you have to turn up unless something really bad happens. It’s not a casual invite. It’s not a potluck.

When you’re invited, you’re expected to come because someone’s been cooking for 48 hours. You bring a bottle of wine. You don’t bring a dish.

You are being fully hosted when you are invited to a Sunday lunch. Reciprocity and all that. Accept the gift and bring the bottle and play that role. That’s another good one.

Those two feel like those could be very common. That must happen all the time. Americans just trampling all over the Sunday dinner.

I’ve seen it all, Peter. I’ve been offended by it all.

The other one is a good Sunday lunch is about hanging out with people. It’s about having drinks and talking. It’s then about eating a big meal probably more than you should.

Then it’s about staying afterwards and sitting on the couch and kicking back. It’s something we don’t get to do that often. It’s not something that you come 45 minutes.

I think I could make that two o’clock other friend. No, no, no, no. You don’t want to hear about any other friends.

No, no new friends.

No new friends on a Sunday lunch.

I had an experience of something like that. It was a holiday feast at your place many years ago when both our kids were much smaller and you only had one, I think.

Yeah, back when I could do things like that. Well, you know, my wife’s a farmer, so she grows it, I cook it.

I’ve always enjoyed doing the cooking bit. The hosting piece, that’s a big Brit thing. We like to host people for meals, etc.

I want to know, when you were a kid, did you have an idea? Do you have a of young Johnny and what he wanted to be when he grew up?

I’m embarrassed about the answer. They did all these, you know, testing in England at school that would tell you sort of what career you could potentially be good for, which I always got really frustrated with later in life.

So I always thought I’d love to be a doctor, like a emergency room doctor. Maybe it’s because I’m just watching the pit too much. And I was told I wasn’t good at science.

And so as a young person, I really steered myself away from that. And I feel like I really did myself a disservice, saying, no, I can do that. I’ll just apply myself more and I could make it through.

It was like, because I was told I wasn’t good at science, being a doctor was never a thing I could do. And so I can’t remember what the tests told me. It’s probably something like you’d be good as a career counselor or something.

But I think the answer that I’m embarrassed by is I said I wanted to be a businessman. Ah. And what was a businessman? I don’t know what business it was.

I was naive at that time, but I’m almost like, am I that now? You know, I deal with for-profit businesses and digital marketing and I’m constantly talking to people about our services and selling what we do or talking about other people and their businesses and, you know, the problems they face and the solutions we could deploy. And maybe I am strangely become that businessman that I never thought I would be.

Johnny, I mean, that would mean that you’ve achieved your childhood dreams.

Oh, no. Another existential dilemma, Peter.

So catch us up. Where are you and what is the work that you do?

So I run a digital studio. Sometimes we call ourselves an agency, depending what day it is, in the Hudson Valley, New York. We’re based in Hudson, New York.

But we work nationally and internationally. We have some international clients as well. We’re defined by three main pillars of work.

We build brands, brand strategy and identity systems. We build websites, both sort of informational sites as well as full e-commerce sites. We’re in Shopify daily.

And then we do full 360 digital marketing for our clients. And our best projects are the ones that span all three of those pillars, because that means that we’re working with clients over several years. The relationship is very deep.

The results are very are productive and keep the client, you know, coming back and wanting to work with us. And we get to see growth. You know, that’s really if we worked across all three of those pillars, we’ve seen growth and some positive marketing market feedback.

How did you come to Hudson Valley, Hudson, New York? What do you love about it?

So I met a woman at the University of Virginia and we fell in love. And I went off to do a PhD and she went off to farm in New York in the Hudson Valley. She came here because of what’s called the craft program, which is this amazing young farmers program, especially in the Northeast, where if you want to farm and you don’t know how to get into it, you can join this program.

And that was her. And so she was doing this thing in the Hudson Valley. I remember visiting her when when when she was here thinking, where are we? She’s living in a box in the woods on this random farm up in Chatham.

But there was something beautiful about it reminded me of home, reminded me of England. And then things pretty good were getting serious with the woman. And then eventually she said, I want to farm.

I want a baby and I want it in the Hudson Valley. Are we doing this? And I took a moment to think about it and then said, yeah, all right. Sounds great.

Let’s go. And so fast forward. Here I am.

Yeah. And the PhD, I remember when we met. I mean, when did you arrive in Hudson?

I remember going to Baba Louie’s pizza in Hudson about 2010, I think was the first time. So I was writing the PhD when I was I was living in Kinderhook. Yeah. In Hudson, Kinderhook area at that time, post fieldwork.

Yeah. Would you want to tell the story of the fieldwork you did? You went, you were you’re an anthropologist.

Yeah. So I got into anthropology in undergrad. The gap year that I mentioned to was quite informative for me. I was 18.

I thought I knew everything about the world and myself. And I knew that I was living in England in a bubble and I was like, I’m going to get out of the West. So I lived in Nepal basically for a year with an organization called it’s now called Relentless Development, I think.

And they would put someone like me at 18 years old, paired up with a Nepali counterpart in a village in the south of Nepal. And very quickly, it was a shock. It was a shocking experience because I didn’t know everything.

I knew actually very little. And the West that I was trying to escape was actually in me. And then it started to pour out of me in these strange ways.

And I was like embarrassed about it, confused about it. It was a great experience. I loved living in that village and the people were so wonderful.

It was during the Maoist rebellion there. So there was a lot of violence going on at the time. But basically when I got to UVA, I was like, what did I just do? I mean, my brain was scrambled.

My identity was scrambled. And then I discovered in the, literally in back in that day, there was like the course book that they would print. And I was flicking through.

I was like, what courses am I going to take? Oh, this thing called anthropology. What’s that? I looked it up in the dictionary, literally. And I was like, that’s interesting.

That’s exactly what I want to do. Fast forward, went to Cambridge to do a PhD in social anthropology, which lent more towards medical anthropology. And then the field work was in Bhutan, studying the different types of healthcare that people use in Bhutan.

I spent a year doing the field work there, wrote it, published it as a book. Yeah. I love how you described the West of being in you and then coming out of you in all these uncomfortable ways.

I feel like I’ve identified with that a lot. And yeah, what else can you say about that experience, about being so far from home? What is, what’s the thing that no matter where you go, there you are, right?

Yeah. The first thing to say, I think about it is I problematize the whole thing in my head a lot now that I’m older. I mean, we went there to help and volunteer. So there are these gap year programs, you know, where you get to river raft one month and then you’re building a well in a village.

This was all about helping. And I really was on my high horse, you know, I was like, I want to volunteer and serve. But, you know, did anybody ask those villagers, you know, did they want this English white guy to come in? You know, the boundaries of consent there in the work and, and, um, it’s pretty, pretty blurred.

I did like the program though, because they, the teaming up with national volunteers was a big part of it. So we had language training. I had two Napoli counterparts actually, who we lived with and worked with.

So it was we were very embedded and the whole program was to get involved with the school, you know, create a student youth club, then ask the youth club to see if they wanted to, you know, what did they want to do? What did the community want to do? And then try to action that work. So as you know, well-building and, and Western, you know, top of the spear kind of international relief and development goes, it was pretty, it was soft, but still to this day, I’m like, whoa, well, what was I doing? What was I doing? And I, you know, I was 18. I didn’t, I didn’t know much.

You know, I wasn’t really that reflective of who I was and that’s what was coming out of me. I was like, oh, you know, getting frustrated at things or the slowness of things, things that I thought the way the work should go or what the youth team should do, or the community was not necessarily grateful for the work that I was doing confused me. Cause I thought that, oh, service is service.

Health is health. It’s not, you know, what did you love about, what drew you to anthropology or what was the, what was that like? I, when I came back from Nepal and I landed, I call it like landing in the full marching band, college marching band of university in the States. I mean, university of Virginia, big state university, all the things that you, you know, in love and like those old school nineties university movies was seemed to be happening there.

And I just felt so lost, you know, like, how do I make sense of these different world views that I had experienced in Nepal, in England and now in the States? I found it really confusing and anthropology it didn’t actually start to build the first thing it did. It started breaking everything down, you know, that postmodern breakdown where it’s like everything you ever thought was truth. We’re going to, we’re going to break it into component parts, start looking at the parts, break them even further down.

You know, it wasn’t till way later where I think I started to build back again. It was just four years of brutal destruction. I think anthropology gave the framework of how to do that without going crazy or down, down a certain rabbit hole.

It kept you quite honest and the whole, the whole exercise seemed to be very, self-critical in itself. So, you know, it’s, it helped me do that. And then when it start, when I started to understand the practice in itself and then started to go do field work and putting myself in that space through the PhD, you start to see a lot more of the value of the practice out in the world, you know, what the work that you’re doing, the people I was talking to, yeah, yeah.

So it did become a positive thing in the end. It wasn’t just destruction because I know a lot of anthropologists can feel that way, you know, like, what are we doing? We’re just talking in circles and circles. And whereas I work, you know, is it applied at all ever? Yeah. It’s challenging.

What was the role of the field work? And then I want to get to sort of where you’re at now, but I’m just, I’m sort of, and there’s a piece of me that’s also envious. I came to sort of, you know, the anthropological ideas really late.

So I sort of envy being a student and learning and then engaging it with it in that way. And at that age, but I’m just curious, the field work, what was that like for you and what was it like to pick up as a skill or as an ability or even just as an experience?

Yeah. I loved it. I feel very blessed and lucky that I got to do the field work. I went to Bhutan, a country that is, has been very closed off for a long time. And then when it did start to let folks in, whoever they were, Westerners, Indian, Chinese, or Indonesian Malaysians, a lot of people from there, you know, they did it in a very protected manner.

They were very controlled. You know, if you $250 a day, at least through the visas and the tour company there, they don’t let Johnny Tay. And when he was 18 years old, backpacking in Nepal, the neighbor, you know, they let me live off $3 a day.

So they’re very protective over what they have. And so the field work, you know, to get access is a story in of itself of how that happened. And essentially I was given a visa for a year, with a lot of freedom to move around the country.

I bought a car in there and I was just allowed to drive wherever, which is just all very, it’s a very, very rare thing. The field work itself was, you know, looking at the different types of healthcare that were available to patients in Bhutan. And then how they navigated between them.

It really became about healthcare seeking behavior, and trying to look, look at that in the context of Bhutan, which is very interesting, very quickly. They have a national healthcare service that’s biomedical. They have, so it’s paid for by the state.

If you get, say for example, cancer or you have a heart problem in the East of Bhutan, you’ll get referred from your national health clinic on the mountain side to the Mongar health clinic or hospital in the East of the country, which is the biggest, one of the biggest hospital in the East. If they can’t treat you there, you’ll get sent to Timpu, the capital. If you can’t get treated there, they’ll even pay for you and a family member to go to India.

So they’ve got this, you know, it’s a very active state controlled, all paid for health system in a country that is, you know, quite economically challenged. And so, you know, there aren’t that many doctors in, like in Bhutan. I’m sure it’s, I don’t know what the number is today, but it was really low before.

So in some ways, you know, speaking from the American point of view, amazing because I just seek the care that I need. But the question they have is, is the doctor actually there, the medication there that I need to get? That’s actually their problem. Then you have a national healthcare service that’s traditional medicine.

So I can walk, when I walk into a hospital in Mongar, the receptionist will ask me, would you like, but they call it modern, really modern healthcare, which is the biomedical, would you like traditional medicine, which is, it comes from, sort of Tibetan medicine history there. That region, all medicines grown, medicines come from plants and elements grown on the Himalayan mountain range in Bhutan, whole medicine collection thing that happens there. And it’s a very structured, well-known, systematized form of traditional medicine.

And then there’s a third category of alternative practice. So shamans, ritual healers, religious healing, folk remedies, a whole bunch of stuff, which the state is not involved in. And there’s a tango that happens between state practice and those other pieces.

So it was all about that when you’re sick as a patient there, people are referencing and using all of these things, oftentimes all at once or in competing intensity and timeframe. And so there’s a lot of complexity that arises there about how people seek care, what’s meaningful.

What do you feel like you learned? I guess being an anthropologist and somebody who’s done that kind of field work, what do you feel like you carry with you that somebody that doesn’t, hasn’t had that experience? I don’t know if I finished that question correctly.

No, I, I hear it. I think, I think it’s about how to talk to people. And I think you’re quite good at this Peter.

You want to start writing questions. Just asking questions, being able to walk into a room and sit down with anybody and be yourself, an open listening book, and ask the types of questions that get beyond just that surface level and start really diving deep into someone’s life, their, their context, physical context, their knowledge, context, all of that, and just go deep and deep and deep and not be too preoccupied with yourself and your agenda and what you’re thinking about. I think that’s what the training tries to get you to be, you know, and again, anthropology problematizes that, you know, we’re loaded as a, as a human being we’re loaded with culture.

And so we try to make ourselves, we’re trained to be as neutral as possible when going into situations, but you never truly are. But I think as anthropologists who’ve done that field work and enjoyed it and liked it, you probably come out with some pretty good listening skills. And so my tolerance to sit down with people from all walks of life, different political sides or, education side, any, wherever you come from.

I just love it. I love sitting down, speaking, talking to people, especially when they’re really out of my context. You know, if I meet someone who’s just really different from my everyday walk of life, that’s exciting for me.

Yeah. So how do you, what’s the story from social anthropology, Bhutan to Rhizome, your agency, your studio? How did you start this work?

It turns out, I don’t know if all your guests, your anthropologist guests are like this, maybe they, you’re speaking to the successful ones, but anthropology is just never paid. Reading books and doing field work.

I mean, there’s a whole story to have about how I funded my PhD. I mean, I felt like I ran it like a business. You know, I, I was never that good, Peter.

So I never got the big fellowships where Cambridge was like, yeah, we’ll just four years. We got you, Johnny. It wasn’t like that.

They actually let me in and said, we won’t pay for you. So, I had to self fund it and I did it through finding, lots of different scholarships. And you know, when, once you enter that world, there is opportunity, but it was very entrepreneurial.

Yeah. But you’re speaking as if the anthropologist in you isn’t a work or at work or alive in the work that you’re doing now, which yeah.

Well, they are aligned then they emerging every day more and more.

But you know, while I was running basically while I was at the university of Virginia learning anthropology and becoming a budding anthropologist, I was also spinning hard drives doing graphic work and eventually ended up running the digital media lab. It was called the UVA. And by the time I graduated, I was spinning four different hard drives across three different paid gigs for graphics, graphic design, motion graphics, everything.

I mean, I was basically teaching digital media by the time I left and my gosh, Peter, that worked paid. So throughout the PhD, I would take small projects here or there. And then it all, it all sort of came to a head when the PhD finished and we decided my wife and I decided to move to the Hudson Valley permanently and have that farm and that baby.

I looked around and I was like, well, what, what am I going to do? And so I just, I founded the agency then, and then started taking it really seriously and it just blossomed. I mean, it was like project to project, new client to new client. There was a lot of need for it.

Again, there’s listening skills, I think really helped because all of our clients had different challenges or problems that they’re trying to solve. And I’ve found that the work comes when you really understand the client and what challenge they face. You know, if you’re a specialist in Google ads, for example, you want your problem, your client’s problem to be a Google ads problem.

And it’s nice when it is, but it’s usually not. And so we, yeah, we flexed and changed and adapted a lot over the years to help our problems, clients solve, you know, very specific business problems. What do you love about the work that you’re doing at Rhizome? I have a question about the name too, Rhizome, but, what do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I really, I really like working with small to medium sized businesses where someone’s doing something really quite unique and special and you just help them get to where they want to go.

This is a lot, we spend a lot of our day talking to folks who are like, we’ve got this vision, but we just don’t quite know how to get there. And my team and I can come in and, do a little bit of work, put some systems in place, put some tech in place, put some education in place, and then you just watch something grow. And it’s thrilling, you know, when we get a client that calls us or we meet them and they’re like, look at this, look what happened.

And you’re like, we know it works. It feels like magic, you know? And it, and it does boil down to the anthropology thing. What, why is it working? It’s because we’re moving people, you know, our clients want some type of action to occur in the world.

They want people to do something. And when we see people doing that, it’s quite, it still blows my mind. It’s exciting.

Yeah. Is there a good story you can tell about the work that you’re doing, but you’re comfortable sharing? If not, that’s fine.

I love talking about work. We had a very interesting project, a year or two ago where we helped the city of battle Creek in Michigan, which is formerly known as serial city rebrand itself. They didn’t quite like serial city.

It felt, old the city in which Kellogg was founded as well as Ford. But in which serial is no longer made. And actually a lot of incredible stuff is happening in battle Creek.

Now, a lot of art going down a lot of new business, incredible education programs and things like that. And small businesses are being born every day in battle Creek. And so the city came forth with a project where they, they wanted a new identity.

They, you know, and it had to be born from a very community-based, process. This was not about big consultants coming in and telling them what you should be positioned here, because we’ve looked at the competitive sets of all of the cities around you. And we think there’s white space quote unquote here.

No, the opposite was true. It was about really understanding who battle Creek was, who they wanted to be, who they were in the past as well, because that was all, it was all sort of compressed into one layer and then asserting a type of identity, visual and words that would not only be reflective of who they were, but allow room to grow as well, because they, they were in a real, an upswing, like an inflection point of growth for them, culturally, economically size, you know, demographic as well. So that’s a, that’s a cool problem to solve when you come to like branding and identity, because you’ve got to build something that is hyper flexibility and applicability to the, to set community.

And it was real privilege to, you know, work with, with those people to come, come forth with a solution. And I think we did it. We had a cool design that was very flexible.

The end up, it was the, the visuals that the tagline was, battle Creek, our city, your home. And the visual was a very simple, a hand with a heart placed where battle Creek is because in Michigan, they often have the mitten shape of the state. So it’s a recognizable shape that especially Michigan folks know.

And then we put the heart right at battle Creek. And the whole idea was that the design could be rebuilt in any style that you wanted. So for example, the battle Creek zoo could do an animal pool and place a heart in the animal pool and make it their own, you know, a rock symbol, if you were a rock band from with the battle Creek, but there was, so there was, a connection to the identity and who they were, but then massive extendability to the brand design.

Very, very cool. Very cool. And I’m curious about process. What do you want to, when a question like that comes in front of you, how do you learn or what’s your approach to sort of orienting yourself to a project and thinking about how to, how to learn? And I guess for there’s, there’s always a selfish question or motivation behind my question. And it’s sort of like, what’s the role of research in the work that you do and how you think about it?

Every project is different in the bandwidth we have for research. So that is a good, the battle Creek projects, a great example where there was a, there was demand and a requirement for a ton of research and listening.

And there was the funding for it. It was a nonprofit in scope, the, but a lot of our clients are for-profit businesses and the appetite for a lot of research is not there, especially in the small to medium sized business. Sets people need results really quickly and they want to get right to it.

And so our approach really, again, is about listening to the client where they are in their journey and trying to tune a project, that fits their context perfectly. There’s a lot of layers of technical stuff, professional stuff, digital marketing stuff. You know, when you’re building a Shopify site, there’s a lot of rules, best practices that you have to follow.

Or if you’re doing digital marketing, if you’re going to run a Google ads campaign or, you know what you’re doing, there’s a lot, just expertise around that. But that’s just not enough. It needs to be the, the tactics of the digital marketing or website work needs to meet with the goals and the strategy of where the client is.

And that’s that magic point. So I spend my time really trying to think about before we even sign engagements, our proposal process takes a long time because we try to really line those things up so that we’re not just doing digital marketing tactics all day. And it’s not producing the end results.

That’s how projects fail. You know, where you’ve gone past, you’ve done 12 months of work and you look back and no one’s happy about it. Yeah.

Typically it’s not because the tactics were wrong. It’s not because the client didn’t have goals. It’s because they didn’t match up.

Yeah. What is your, it’s, what kinds of, I’m curious about how you listen to clients and how you engage with them in order to make sure that you’re learning and understanding, are there any tricks of the trades or ways that you think about, being in conversation with them or structuring that kind of conversation with them?

I find, maybe this is the anthropologist in me and the ethnographer, but you need to put your body in space and time with the client and you need a lot of time. I’ve tried to do it just over zoom, for example, or in a couple of meetings.

We never use things like surveys anymore. You know, it needs to be exploratory, discovery based conversation and that the more hours, the better really. And just when I think I know something about a client or their business and their problem, another conversation unveiled something new, and you’re always surprised.

So I try to go a little ethnographic with it, you know, ethnographer, just try to be in their place of business. We did a really lovely project in Pittsburgh, last year and continuing to work with the company called Elmhurst. Elmhurst group is formerly they’re a real estate developer in the Pittsburgh region.

And we spent a week there just, you know, literally meeting everybody that they work with going to events, that were only tangentially connected with real estate development, but it’s all input and interesting talking with every single employee from the company, talking to, all their vendors and suppliers and, partners in the business, investors, you know, the whole stack, everyone, the network, you know, and anyone connected to the network, let’s do active listening. So that’s what I mean, if we, if we’re doing it, right, we’ve got a body in place in time where the client is, beautiful.

And the name Rhizome, what’s the, why name it Rhizome?

This is a very existential question where I was worried you were going to ask me because Rhizome is going through its own rebranding process. It’s finally come the time where we haven’t spoken about the work that we’ve done really ever. We do, you know, a little on our website. And I’m quite excited about presenting us to the world in a more formal sense.

And the term Rhizome was deeply personal to me and very, influential in the way that I think about the world. It comes from Deleuze and Guattari, work, you know, a thousand plateaus, anti-Oedipus and the work with rhizomatic theory, versus arborescent tree-based structure. So it’s a whole, it’s a whole ontology about the world, which is like, Oh, do I really, am I, I, there are many other professional philosophers out there that should be talking about this, not me, but I’ve found myself as we start to rebrand, asking ourselves the question of like, who are we? Why, why do we do what we do? What’s the philosophy behind it? And the answer is yes.

Rhizomatic assemblage theory applied then to digital marketing in the way that we think about business and digital marketing. So. Yeah.

So, but unpack that stuff for me that what, what is rhizomatic assembly theory? What is the, what, what’s the significance, or is this something you know? Oh, I I’ll give it, I’ll give it. I just want to make sure I’m interpreting correctly. You were leaning into rhizome. You were owning and claiming rhizome.

I am. Yes, I am. Yeah. So I’ll give it my best shot. I think Deleuze and Guattari or Guattari, they were writing at, you know, late sixties, early seventies, and they were writing in response to Freud specifically, like anti Oedipus, one of their major first works was specifically critiquing Freud.

And so in the sixties, by the sixties, you had something happening where scientific thought, cultural thought knowledge was getting very, very narrow and trying to sort of put itself around a very specific way the world is and the way things are like that. And that’s the arborescent structure. So you’ve got a tree with a trunk.

It is the single source of truth. And then if you could just get that trunk of knowledge set and you really knew what the way it works, then it blooms into leaves and it has all this emergent quality to it of meaning. So if I’m sitting on the Freud’s couch and you’re like, I had this dream about riding my bike, you know, Freud will distill it through those from the tree back through the branches to this trunk of knowledge about, oh, it’s an Oedipus complex.

You know, you love your mother, whatever. Deleuze and Guattari would then really trying to problematize that. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no.

There isn’t this central structure of knowledge. The world doesn’t really work like that. It works more like a rhizome.

It works more like a network with nodes in it. So nodes being anything, physical knowledge, human beings, literally, it could be anything. But the, you start to think about the relationality between different things in a network, how they come together to create power.

Thank you, Foucault. And then how they emerge out into the world to create meaning, production, etc. And so when you do that as an anthropologist, it’s interesting because it allows you to really complexify meaning and complexify anything that you’re studying systems, for example, instead of strict structures.

And then you can break those systems apart, put them back together again. And so that’s a rhizome. It’s non-linear.

Like if you imagine that rhizome tuber under the earth, it grows in all different directions. It grows up, down, left, right. It can connect itself sometimes like branches of rhizomes come together and create single tubers that then go on and branch off again.

Very networked type of physical thing. Also, my wife grows ginger, which is so you know, I see those rhizomes a lot every day. So the name of this... Did that make any sense by the way? It did, it did.

What’s the application to a brand? In what ways is sort of, I’m assuming, brand or the work you do rhizomatic, if that’s the appropriate use of that term? Yeah, yeah. Or am I pushing too hard? Tell me the story.

This is really where like the rubber hits the road. Like what’s the point of talking about a digital studio’s philosophical thing if you can’t actually make meaning in the digital universe? You know, I think, and I actually really believe in this in the work that we do, which is there is one way to approach digital marketing, where there’s like, there is one brand truth, one way something has to be. And again, at that tactical level of digital marketing, this is the one way you do it. Like when you come to my digital agency, we’ll do this for you, this for you, this for you, and it’ll produce these results.

And these are the tools that we have. I think that what I have learned in my experience is that no one set of tactical digital marketing solutions fits every use case. And if there’s anything true with what’s happening with AI in the world now, and every marketing startup company, I mean, there are so many different platforms that could be used, so much time that could be spent on different types of marketing or tool sets in the work that we do.

That there is no one size fits all. There are always layers, connections and things that need to be connected or disconnected, reassembled into something else. And so when we think about marketing, we try to approach it that way.

We really open the network and say, what does this client need? What are they trying to solve objectively? And then what are all the different tools and methods that we could apply here? How can we layer them? When we layer them or connect them, do we see added growth? Interconnectivity, essentially, because the digital world is so interconnected in ways. And as you think about what’s about to happen, what is happening with SEO currently now, and LLMs, and LLMs now driving a large percentage of, or replacing a large percentage of search traffic and organic traffic, it’s a whole new expansion set. And no one really, I don’t think anybody really knows what’s going... The old days of SEO, it was like you use keywords and a meta title and a description, and that will move Google in the search results.

I think it’s getting more and more complex every day with what actually makes a difference out there in the digital space. Do you have an idea or an image of what that looks like? I mean, I hear people talk about share of model from an advertising thing, where you used to worry about share of voice, but now the LLM is its own thing that, of course, now needs to be dealt with and managed. I’m just, I mean, I’m not expecting anything, but I’m just... Do you even have a mental model of what’s going on or ways of talking about it? I think, if we think about it rhizomatically and non-linearly, I think there is a massive expansion happening right now, like laterally, like there’s a growth of pathways digitally happening.

Systems are being connected, new systems are growing and being connected further. And so it’s becoming a very dynamic, expanding network of digital presence. And in that sense, no one, I don’t think anybody really knows, because what’s driving it is also human beings, right? Like our behavior, our search behavior.

What app do you open? What do you search for? You know, what do you click on? And the digital universe now really knows that, you know, it grows on data and it will follow human beings. So there’s a lot of experimental expansion. And I think a lot of different folks are learning about where humans are actually engaging with those sort of different expansions.

Where it’s going to go? And I don’t know. I don’t know. I also think we’re always like moments away from big platform changes and introductions, especially with AI.

I think that if everybody was using Twitter as a growth engine five years ago, what’s going to be the growth engine of next year? I don’t know. Could it be chat, GBT? Which of the major LLMs will drive the majority of traffic to shop? I don’t know yet. We will know soon. So yeah, it’s a lot of unknowns. .

Last question. The newsletter that I, is that Business of Meaning? You’ve used the word meaning a handful of times, and I know you like big philosophical questions. What are we talking about when we talk about meaning? Are you glad you accepted this invitation, Jonny?

I’ll pull it to the human thing. I think meaning matters to a human being, at least I think in a lot of what we do.

I actually think that’s also problematic. I think meaning, there is meaning for protons and neutrons in the way that they connect. The way the universe is formed, I think the universe is really going to get heady with it.

The universe has a meaning that has nothing to do with human beings, which is also a crazy AI thought, because what if AI is the universe’s next way of knowing itself? Human knowledge and humans’ idea of meaning and what we think is important to me is about to be overrun. But I think right now, for me, we have two daughters, a wife and a life and a business that relies on human beings. Meaning is what humans make it to be, and where they put their time, bodies, and actions.

In the biggest sense, I think it’s that. What you do with that, then, in my work, we’re often trying to make people take an action. In marketing speak, the CTA, the call to action.

How do I get somebody to click that button? How do I get somebody to read something that we think is important? I know somebody’s out there that wants this thing. How do we connect it? We have a lovely client right now. They’re called Stonehouse Grain.

They make certified organic animal feed from grain that they grow in the Hudson Valley. Our current challenge right now is that we know there are people all over the Northeast that would love their product, that they’re looking to raise the healthiest possible animals they can, and they want the best quality feed, but they don’t know that this business exists. In this sense, our meaning is we’ve got folks who really love farming and raising animals.

We have someone who just loves growing the best quality grain, and we have to make them meet. There is a meaning production there when that meeting happens. That’s pretty exciting.

Was that an answer? I don’t know.

It was a perfect answer. It was great. We’re at time. I want to thank you very much. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. Yes, it’s been great. Thank you so much.

It’s been a pleasure. I invite you to Sunday lunch, Peter.

I will know how to behave now, or at least I know a couple of mistakes that I can avoid.

Sounds good.

Civic

Above, Nicholas Carr on the informed citizen. Also, Andrew McLuhan on gratitude. And, Sam Sklar & Andrew Rasiej on civic tech.

Culture

Above, Mariana Lenharo on testosterone therapy. Also, Miles Klee on subliminalmaxxing. And, Rina Raphael on near death experiences.

Research

Above, Simon Roberts on AI-ification. Also, ken anderson on anthropology. And, Adam Kucharski on evidence.

Rebellion

Above, Samuel Moyn on the gerontocracy. Also, Kyle Chayka in lo-fi rebellion. And, Pamela B Paresky on free speech.

Desire

Above, Hannah Pickard on addiction. Also, Giles Crouch on friction as status. And, Chris Danton on cringe.

John B. Dutton is Head of Creative Services at the National Film Board of Canada. He was previously Chief Creative Officer and Partner at Camden, a Montreal-based international advertising agency. He writes the Discomfort Zone newsletter and is the author of the novel 2084.

I’m not sure if you know this, but you may or may not know this, but I start every one of these conversations with the same question. It’s this big question that I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their story. And she’s got this question that is, there’s no better question that I found to start a conversation or get into a conversation.

But it’s such a big question, I over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

Yes, and I was aware that this was a question, because I’ve listened to many, I don’t know, several interviews that you give. So I was well aware of this question. And this is going to take up the entire hour, so just so you know.

We’ll both take a sip of water.

Yeah, get ready. Here it comes. Because I did think about, I knew that you were going to ask, and I was like, oh, this is actually funny. And I don’t want to be literally talking about myself for an hour. But in a way, and this is going to sound overly mysterious, but in a way, the answer is nowhere.

And there’s a reason for that, which is that the place I was born was in a county. You see, I have to use the past tense. It actually doesn’t, and this isn’t some story of a war-torn place.

Loads of people must have this story. Mine is a very super benign version of this story, right? But basically, I was born in a county where they moved the border for various administrative municipal reasons about four years, three or four years after I was born.

So in a way, it doesn’t exist anymore. But there is a bigger answer to why nowhere is the answer, which is that my parents moved from there when I was one year old to the south of England. I was born in the north of England, between Liverpool and Manchester, in a town called Warrington that back then was in Lancashire and is now in Cheshire.

And they moved to the south of England. And for an American, for a Canadian, England is a tiny place, right? But back then in the 1968 or 67 or whatever year it was, that was going to the other end of the earth.

So I grew up in the south of England, and that led to I was in the north just long enough to get an accent from the north so that I have literally had an accent my entire life. Because I went to school, so I would be teased at school for having an accent from the north because kids are kids, right? And then it became a bit of a mix, right, of accents if you’ve been in a place for long enough.

But that also means that it’s an accent of somewhere and sort of undefinable. Then I moved to Montreal when I was 21. Of course, I had an accent then, right?

And I don’t know what you think my accent sounds like now, but it’s probably mid-Atlantic-ish, right? And so the answer is nowhere because it’s a, I live, my parents moved a fair bit when I was young as well on top of that. So yeah, so I grew up living in a tiny town, the seaside, the country, a big town, and in London before I was finished being 18. Wow.

Do you have a feeling that you’re, you sound different? Are you aware of your accent?

Yeah, yes, and it comes and goes. And even in French, because I’m in Montreal, I work in French, minimum half the time. I have the French, the French I learned at school in England has a completely different accent from the French here.

So I have to switch my French accent if I go to France because I don’t have to, but I just do because that was the first French I learned. Right. Just if I’m speaking on the phone to my family in England, I’m going to start reverting back to that accent.

But even then, I don’t have the same accent as my sister, who’s not even, and even growing up, I didn’t. She’s not even two years younger than me, and we had different accents. Yeah.

Literally pronouncing words differently, bath and bath, which I have trouble saying. It’s an effort for me to say that.

Because that’s what she says, and that’s not what I say. So those vowels are carved in stone by the time you’re a one-year-old.

That’s amazing.

I don’t know if it’s amazing, but it’s the long-winded answer to your question.

I’m fascinated by it. The awareness of this, of the accent, the placeless accent is really, that seems like an interesting experience, a phenomenon in a way. Is that worth going at?

Yeah. There’s no way of not being aware of an accent in England, though, right? Because it’s still fairly class-based.

It’s better than it was when you would struggle to get certain jobs if you had what would be called a working class, lower class accent. Now, that’s not really the case. BBC has all kinds of ranges of accents.

When, 50 years ago, it was a thing that sounded like the Queen, a posh accent, basically, right? So at least in that respect, it’s a bit more democratized, but it’s still there.

Still, you’re very, very aware of somebody’s accent the second they open their mouth in Britain.

What do I sound like?

You sound American. Well, I know where you live, you live down the road from Montreal. You don’t sound that much different from the Canadians around here, right?

So you don’t sound that much different from me if I’m not paying much attention. The thing is that what I know, though, is that my accents, they come and go, just depending on context and without trying. Sometimes I would try, but obviously.

Yeah. But I said, if I’m on the phone to my sister or my dad when he was alive, pretty much instantly somebody would listen and be like, wow, he’s doing an accent. But I wasn’t doing an accent.

It was just that the context changed enough for me to click back into it.

That’s really cool.

I mean, but just the same way as you would click, if you did speak more than one language, you wouldn’t be thinking about it. You just change, right? The context would mean that you would just speak it that way.

So it’s not that weird. And it could be potentially pretentious. I do know people who are from Canada, went to school in England and yet somehow still have a bit of a British accent.

Right? It’s like, OK.

Yeah, I’ve had that experience. It immediately comes to mind as an American who played soccer. We had an American who went to play football in England. And he had a British accent. And it was just, yeah, come on, stop.

Well, coming back with it depends how long he was there.

Yeah, I know. I’m forgiving. This is a child in me responding to this guy coming.

Right, right. Exactly right. But that’s exactly what I was getting at about being made fun of for being teased for having an accent. But if he kept it for more than a couple of years, then that would be really, come on. Yeah. So you’re just trying to get the ladies probably, right?

Yeah, because that works. That accent works over here. We’ve strayed a little bit. What did you want to be as a kid when you’re young, John, in the south of England? Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yeah, not far off what I ended up doing, because the first in terms of a specifically a job, it was journalist and I’ve never been a journalist, but I’ve been a writer and I’ve worked in TV. Now I work for the National Film Board. So it’s pretty adjacent to that.

And the only reason I stopped having that ambition was because finally, once you become aware of what British, especially, what you would call the gutter press, the popular newspapers in Britain are renowned for being pretty. I don’t know what word to even use, just crappy. How far can the swear word me to go in this?

Yeah, we’re here all the way. Yeah, all the way.

OK, yeah. It’s crass at best. It’s fucking shitty.

The way they treat regular people, never mind celebrity. When I found out what it seemed like. Oh, that’s what journalists do.

That’s awful. Growing up in the eight, being a teenager in the 80s, I was like, oh, I don’t want to do that. That’s terrible. Right. Of course, there’s loads of amazing journalists in Britain. Right.

But that was what I would see on the tabloid front pages. And every day, right, is this absolute shit. And so I stopped wanting to do that. And yeah. So but writing was obviously a thing all along. So yeah.

And catch us up. Where are you now and what’s the work that you’re doing?

So I’m head of creative services at the National Film Board of Canada, which is a storied organization. It’s been around for over 85 years. We just one of our films just won an Oscar two weeks ago.

Congratulations.

Thank you. I can’t take credit for the film. It won best short animated film, and it’s called The Girl Who Cried Pearls. It’s a stop motion film by a pair of directors who were previously nominated for an Oscar at least 10 years ago. And painstaking, stop motion takes a long time. This was years and years and COVID happened in the middle of it.

So it was well over five years of work making this thing. And then the National Film Board, the NFB, has a lot of technical expertise to add to. They have a scene where it’s set in Montreal and Paris, this film.

There’s a winter time. There’s some light snow drifting down, which happens in Montreal. And that was CG, right?

That was computer animation, right? So there’s little touches that are added to this painstaking craftsmanship and all of the human element. They had real actors who performed the film that then they reproduce the actor’s movements with what are called puppets.

But puppet doesn’t do service to the amount of artistry in the creation of these characters. Just an insane amount of work. Anyway, that one won an Oscar.

And yeah, the NFB, the National Film Board is I believe the studio, if you want to call it that, although it’s not really that has won the most Oscars outside of Hollywood or been nominated for the most. I don’t want to I’ll be slapped on the wrist by somebody from communications if I’m not careful. But basically, yes, it’s a storied institution that is also a bit of a mystery, both at home and abroad, if you’re not careful, because it’s oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that.

And there’s an allure that almost goes along with the National Film Board. And anyway, I am head of creative services, which means that I’m responsible for a team that is almost like an in-house ad agency and content creation team. So, yes, we produce ads for the institution itself.

We help create advertising for some of the films. And we also create content on our social media channels, which anybody can go and find.

And what is the mission of the NFB? What is its role?

Yeah, that’s a good question. And so we’re part of the heritage ministry of the federal government. It’s actually not a separate. This is a strange thing for a lot of people to get their heads around. It’s because you’ll get public broadcasters in a lot of countries.

And Canada has a public broadcaster, CBC. But this institution is unique in the world because there are funding organizations for film in the world and there are in Canada, too. There’s many. But this organization was created in 1939 by a guy called John Grierson, who was a Scottish immigrant who was asked by the prime minister at the time, basically, to set up a film board to culturally unite a country which is just huge, but not very populated, at least back then. I mean, now Canada has, I don’t know, 40 or 50 million people. It’s not as many as the US, but it’s still a reasonable population, but it’s spread pretty thinly or at least it’s concentrated in cities mostly.

But if you think of back in 1939, it was really, how do people get news then? Yes. Newspapers. Radio was fairly established. But the idea was really to unite the cultural fabric somehow of a country which was still fairly young and growing.

And if you’re living in the Maritimes, if you live in Nova Scotia, if you live in New Brunswick, something like that, how do you know what life is like in Alberta or Manitoba or British Columbia? Because that’s 3000 miles away. It’s a long, long, long way away.

So that was the original goal. And then very quickly, what happened was the Second World War, because it was 1939.

And then a different purpose was found, which was making newsreels. And just as Hollywood was co-opted for the same purposes, to basically make films to promote the war effort. To say, look, we’re all in this together. We’re fighting for these values, that kind of thing. So that was the first five years or so, that was what the National Film Board was doing.

But then it really became focused back on its original mission of making documentary films. And then at one point, and I’m not the right person, I’m not the historian, we have a curator of our collection on my team who would be the person to interview about that. But you can go on our website, you can read the history.

But at one point, there was a filmmaker called Norman McLaren, who started this animation unit. And I think he was the first person to win an Oscar for the National Film Board. And he is a pioneer of animation in cinema, just a very, very innovative thinker and creator.

And he basically set up the second thread, as it were, to what we do in terms of weaving this cultural fabric. And then over the years, it’s expanded in different directions, contracted in different ways. But basically, we’re here to help Canadians, to help share Canadian stories to other Canadians and beyond our borders as well, whether it be through documentary, whether it be through animation, animated films, and also to promote Indigenous narrative sovereignty as well, because the Indigenous people of Canada were not even able to tell their own stories and their own history for the vast majority of the history of the country. And obviously, in the U.S., it’s a similar, if not maybe even worse situation. But who am I to judge?

A big part of our mandate is to give voice to Indigenous storytellers, whether it’s documentary again or animation. And we have some amazing, amazing Indigenous-led content that is just incredible to watch. And I’ve learned such a lot.

I mean, I’ve only been here 18 months. And even in these 18 months, I’ve learned such a lot. And working with these people is a privilege, whether they’re Indigenous filmmakers or not.

Amazing. I have so many questions. I mean, the first question, well, there’s one question that’s got two parts, I think. One is where did this begin for you, this work? When did you discover that you could do this kind of work? And then how does it feel to be doing this for the country, in a way, versus the commercial work?

You’ve been in agency, in creative direction, in the commercial space for a long time. But I’m wondering how it feels to be using those skills in this direction, and if there’s a way it feels different or operates differently. It feels great. I can tell you that.

There’s so much in that, in what way does it feel great?

Well, I mean, actually, so I think you were asking several questions or alluding to different questions. Yes. How is it, how did I, what exactly?

So a little bit there was, what I wanted to ask is, so where you are now is you’re head of creative services, but you’re running an agency basically for Canada as a sort of a, probably.

I mean, look, I don’t want to exaggerate. Yeah, I don’t want to overplay. I mean, yes, there’s the Canadian, the federal government of Canada has, and the provinces and the territories have their own communications that they do, and they may market different programs in different ways in terms of communicating them to the general public who are paying for them.

However, we do have a responsibility to share the stories of Canadians to other Canadians and beyond our borders. Is it great when somebody stands on a stage or two people stand on a stage with Oscars in their hands in Hollywood and say the word Canada? Yeah, it’s great.

And any country would say that. Every year you get somebody saying, I’m the first person to win from wherever or something. Yes, there’s definite value to that, but the main purpose is not that.

The main purpose isn’t bragging rights overseas. It’s cool and nice and fun. And this is a time politically when clearly there are countries that are, I don’t want to say, well, I do want to say stepping up.

I do want to say stepping up. I think Canada has stepped up and other countries that haven’t stepped up maybe as the world changes in terms of just making sure that the voices of their people are heard on a bigger stage. And is that what we are doing internationally?

No, we’re not. We’re not in politics. We’re not a broadcaster either. We’re not journalists. So I can’t.

What are you?

We create films that share Canadian stories to Canadians. That’s literally what we do. It’s films.

There’s long documentaries, short documentaries. We have a YouTube series coming out soon. There’s social media to reach younger people who maybe aren’t thinking of watching documentaries.

Back in the day, meaning when I immigrated to Canada, NFB films would play in the cinemas because you would go to the cinema and there would be a short playing before the main feature. And often those films were either a documentary short or an animated short. And also our films would play on TV, which they don’t so much anymore.

They do sometimes. But basically they fell off the radar a bit in terms of just the general cultural conversation, just because the media landscape changed. You don’t have that in cinemas anymore.

Cinema attendance, I should say, has dropped. I’m almost certain since 1987. And then when you go there, what happens before a film is just loads of trailers and ads.

Yeah.

Whereas in the past, you would get trailers and ads, but also a free short film. You didn’t think about it too much. You just played and you were happy to watch this film, whether it was by the NFB or whoever.

Pretty sure that wasn’t just in Canada. I think that was a thing.

Yeah, that’s right.

And that just stopped happening. But we have a streaming platform now and it’s for Canadians in the sense that I don’t think you can... Actually, it’s a good question.

I don’t know if you’re overseas what you see exactly, because I’m not. But it’s free for Canadians. This is...

That’s an NFB streaming platform? Or it’s a Canadian?

It’s a free streaming platform for our entire catalogue. So if you’re in Canada and you’re sick of paying for this platform, plus that, plus that, plus that, and all the prices go up every six months, well, guess what? The National Film Board is free.

I don’t believe a word you’re saying, John.

Incredible richness of content there. You are guaranteed to find something on there that you will find interesting if you’re Canadian. I can’t say that if you’re from Albania, maybe not.

What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you of all the different things that you do? Where’s the joy in it?

That’s a multi-dimensional answer, I’m sure. Because this is... I mean, you were asking in a way how I got here to do this right now. So the joy is part of that career path where I’m somebody who likes to channel my imagination because I also write.

I’ve written novels and screenplays. And so I think that I’m a creative person. I write nonfiction as well. Before working at the NFB, I was between jobs. I used to be a chief creative officer in a small international ad agency network.

And in between those two jobs, I decided to launch a Substack newsletter. And I think that’s how we actually first encountered each other online. And write a bunch of articles on Medium and just keep my hand in.

But not just for the sake of it, just because I really like it. I really like writing and creating. The cheesy term is content creation. But it is that.

So anyway, I really like being able to channel my skill. I mean, I do have a certain skill for writing, for coming up with ideas and concepts. And so being able to channel that either non-professionally into things that I’m interested in or professionally into whatever I’m being paid to do is wonderful.

Of course, I get a kick out of that. The interesting full circle thing is when I was at what would be the equivalent of the last, I don’t know necessarily the American terms for all these things, but in England, it’s just called college. So this would be the last two years of high school when you’re 17 and 18, I suppose.

And I did a course called Communication Studies because I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. Having all that I had done up till then was your regular academic, studying English, studying history, geography, whatever. Math and science and stuff.

And it was such a revelation, such an eye opener. And the very specific thing that got me interested in film was, and the teacher of that class was really good. I mean, I took this for two years.

That’s the way it works in Britain is you decide on a thing for two years. Several different subjects. It was a film called Don’t Look Now from, I guess, 1973 with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, speaking of Canadian legends, Donald Sutherland, who is from Quebec.

And the director of that film is called Nicholas Roeg. And in fact, Donald Sutherland named one of his sons. So not Kiefer.

He has a, Kiefer has a brother called Rogue Sutherland, who is named after that director, Nick Rogue, R-O-E-G. And he was a genius filmmaker. And once this film was screened for the class and the teacher explained the editing, the symbolism, the way the camera moved, all these different aspects of filmmaking, which I don’t know, I was just a kid who watched films.

It was, you just sat in front of the TV or sat in front of a cinema. And in fact, the town that I was living in, one of the towns I lived in between the ages of five and 11 didn’t even have a cinema. It was such a small town.

So it was just what I was on the telly. I had no particular interest in film. And then this was a real eye opening and mind expanding moment or class or something. I was like, oh my goodness, the possibilities here, just human communication with this medium are unbelievable.

So then I decided to do a degree in cinema. And that’s where it all finally came full circle because I became, when I moved here, I was a TV director and editor working in music television, which was, it was fun. Super fun. It was basically the Quebec equivalent of MTV.

Amazing thing to do when you’re in your 20s. Incredibly fun. Meeting famous bands and artists and directing interviews and performances and stuff like that. Wonderful. But at one point it was time to do something else.

But that one point was literally 10 years of doing that. And then I moved into writing and directing commercials for that TV station. And that’s how I got into advertising.

And then basically rose to become a creative director. And as I said, this chief creative officer for this small international network before working at the NFB. So the National Film Board is where it came full circle back to film, to cinema.

Oh, I see.

Finally, I got to be in a job interview where actually one of the requirements was my degree, which had almost, well, I wasn’t, I hadn’t been in many job interviews, to be honest with you, but it was my third, second one or something. But still, many, many years later, it was what goes around, comes around. It was like, oh, finally, it’s coming in handy, my degree.

I mean, that’s a silly way of putting it, because obviously it did come in handy in many, many ways. But yeah, so specifically, as far as this job is concerned, I love working with teams. As a writer, of course, you have to love working on your own. Otherwise, you couldn’t be a writer in any way. But I really love working with teams. I had worked with a team when I was a TV director.

Obviously, I spent a period working freelance after that, where I was occasionally working with teams, because when you’re a freelancer and you get hired by an agency, suddenly you’re parachuted in and you’re working with a bunch of people, which is fun. But then working in that agency network, again, you have a team, you have a team of copywriters, designers, art directors, whoever. I really, I love the interplay of creative minds, I guess, I would say.

And at the National Film Board, the filmmakers aren’t literally in-house. They’re not on staff. I mean, I think 70 years ago they were, but they propose a film and they may be, if they are, for example, animators, they may be here specifically in the head office in the building that I’m sitting in right now, because we have a lot of equipment to help create animation. There’s just, we have decades of history of all kinds, so many different kinds of animation.

Some super wacky kinds of animation, like pin screens. I don’t know if you know what a pin screen is, but stuff you wouldn’t even think of. Those things that you can buy, even in souvenir shops where you can put your hand in and it makes these pins stick out.

Well, imagine you could move those. So the impression of the hand that you left, you could move those pins, take a picture, move them a bit, take a picture. It’s absolutely insane.

But there’s entire movies of that that have been made here. So anyway, all that to say, even though the filmmakers themselves aren’t specifically part of the teams here, we do get to work with them because we create content with them. And it’s very interesting, but the people who are on staff here are just wonderful creative people who love films.

And even if they’re in the finance department or the legal department or whatever. There’s a wonderful sense of belonging to this organization and an understanding of the value of what we bring to the country, to the culture. That’s beautiful.

I wanna segue a little bit to talk about your writing and the novels. And there’s a little bit of a, yeah, I guess, yeah, tell me a little bit about your writing. You’ve got four novels that you’ve written. When did you start writing them?

Yeah, actually five. Well, six if you don’t count the one that was never saw the light of day. But which I still have a soft spot for. But yeah, I just, if I have an idea to write something, the medium is whatever I feel it should be.

So if I have an idea for a screenplay, none of my screenplays have ended up being made into movies. They’ve been optioned a couple of times. And this is par for the course if you’re a screenwriter. I think the vast majority of what screenwriters write doesn’t end up on screen.

But made a bit of money out of those at one point. But at one point I had an idea for the first novel that did see the light of day was back, I started writing that in 2002, when blogs were a thing, were beginning to become fairly popular. And I had this idea for a fictional blog, this character, this young woman who was working in a bar in Montreal, very closely based on my favorite bar, that’s still my favorite bar.

She meets this guy who says he has this extra sense, the book’s called The New Sense. And it’s a psychological mystery after that. But I wrote it, I gave myself this challenge of writing it in real time, of publishing, actually I set up a website actually, or a blog basically.

This was back when they were called weblogs. This was the name, that’s what they were. They were weblogs.

You had enough time to say the whole word.

If you were cool, you called them blogs. And so I gave myself the challenge of writing her blog because she’s trying to find, she has ended up getting pregnant with this mystery, mysterious guy.

She has this baby and he’s disappeared. And so she’s creating this blog to try to reach out to the world to say, hey, telling the story and saying, does anybody know where he is? Because he seems to have been captured by this nefarious organization.

He says he has these powers. Does he really? So that was the setup for that, where it forced me to write.

It’s that episodic writing. It’s if Dickens or whatever, whoever, if you knew you had to be published in the newspaper the next week, you had to churn out the stuff. So it’s a pretty good motivation, even though I wasn’t getting paid to do it.

I had set myself the motivational goal of doing this thing and I did it. And the really cool thing was there were some, there were people who would email who were actually concerned, right? This young woman couldn’t find this guy.

And of course, I did respond because there was an email. It was played for real, right? And I even faked a Photoshopped birth certificate. I basically forged it.

It’s War of the Worlds, right?

A little bit, I suppose. But I mean, obviously, if somebody wrote in and they were, I wrote back to them saying, thank you for your concern, this is fiction because I don’t want people to be actually perturbed in real life. But it was super interesting that, and at one point when self-publishing became a doable thing, I then published it as a- I had to rewrite a bunch of stuff to make it readable as a book. But I published it as a book called The New Sense, which I believe you can buy on Amazon.

It must still be there. I mean, it’s a print-on-demand thing, right? You can see my forged birth certificate, my forgery skills. I will dig around.

The other thing I want to mention is that when you and I met, we did meet, I think it was probably, it was Substack. It was your letter, right? Was it called The Discomfort Zone?

Yeah, exactly. The Discomfort Zone. It’s still there, but when I got this job, I had to, eventually I had to stop doing it because I was just, it wasn’t, I couldn’t do it justice, basically.

Yeah, it was a wonderful thing, but you invited me to contribute in a way. I don’t know why you did that.

Yeah, there was an interview. There was an interview segment.

Yeah, exactly. It was very nice. But if you remember, there was, you asked me this question about AI, and I think that you were in the middle of writing here because your most recent novel really is about AI, right?

And so it’s a bit of a thought experiment around AI. So this is what I want to hear your thoughts on, because you didn’t ask me quite point blank. What would you say to a CMO to make them choose qualitative research in the age of AI and synthetic data? This was probably a year and a half, two years ago, maybe.

Oh, this was more than that. Yeah, this was at least two years ago.

So it was early in that thing, and I hadn’t really, anyway, and you know this, but the short story of the version is that I really thought about it, and I really had an existential crisis around it, really confronting the degree to which, and this is a little bit of a provocation for you too, of how I’ve heard actually since people call about, call AI the fourth Copernican trauma. Have you heard that? Do you know what Copernican trauma is?

So I think this is a Freudian idea that humanity has been decentered over and over and over again, Galileo. Oh, I see. It was the first, and then Freud did it, Darwin did it, and then Freud did it.

And then we’ve been celebrating ourselves for being uniquely intelligent all this time. But now we have this crazy technology, which has grown, right? We don’t really understand how it works.

And it’s actually, it demonstrates that we were not alone in the ability to do this thing. That thing that we thought made us special doesn’t in fact make us special. And so now we’re caught to the degree that people are paying any attention at all in a trauma response around this thing.

Yeah, and so you invited me to ask that question. I really struggled with it. I think it made you wait weeks to try to write this piece.

And I came up with something which was pretty good, I think. But anyway, you’ve got this book and this novel, which is a thought experiment about AI. And I remember your response to my experience also being a little bit, come on, I think that you’re just taking all of this a little bit too seriously.

So where do you, so tell me about, tell us about the new novel and in what way it was a way of exploring AI. And do you think we’re all out of our minds?

Yeah, so I had mentioned that I’d written five novels. So there was a young adult trilogy in between, so I don’t need to go into that. Again, you can look it up online.

But then I started working on this novel. I started working on it in 2016, something like that. And it’s called 2084, which, I mean, I didn’t choose that year randomly, right?

1984 is the ultimate dystopia, right? So basically I’m imagining a utopian society 100 years after that fictional dystopia that is, there’s a whole political and economic background story to it of how we end up where we end up. That things don’t necessarily go well for the United States in the meantime.

And by the way, since I started, well, here’s the thing, right? So I start writing this thing. And this was, so I start writing this actually before AI was really on the radar.

It was 2015, 2016. I mean, AI existed, but it wasn’t the LLMs that we, the chat GPTs that we know now. But algorithms were a thing.

And corporatized life, let’s just say, is a thing. Capitalism is obviously a thing. And basically anybody who writes anything science fiction-esque or anything where you’re projecting into the future, let’s just say, right?

You’re gonna say that it’s a what if question, right? You’re using your imagination, what if? Okay, what is the end point of where we are right now?

And you let that play out. So I let something play out in terms of North American society where it gets to what an entity, I don’t want to call it a government actually. You’ll see why, because the ruling entity is called the, of where I live and where you live is called the United Corporations of Canada.

Oh boy. So yes, right. So the United States of America no longer exist.

There’s a country called a Mexico where a bunch of shit happened. And a bunch of American states decided to join the country to the North. But then that country morphed for various reasons into this entity called the United Corporations of Canada.

So this is, so everything is being run, basically all your needs are taken care of by what ultimately is AI. The thing is, after I started writing the book, then I got hired by this advertising agency to do a really important job. So I set it aside, then COVID happened and we all have more time on our hands.

And I went, oh crap, if I don’t get this thing finished, reality is gonna overtake my imagination. And I’ve not been proven wrong about this. I should have called it 2030.

No, I mean, I should, well, I don’t know. Anyway, let’s just say shit’s gone down. And I genuinely hope that this future, it’s speculative fiction, right?

So it’s speculative. I’m not predicting things, right? But just like Margaret Atwood with the Handmaid’s Tale, you can look at something and go, oh, there’s certain aspects of this that you can see becoming a bit more real than you had hoped.

So obviously it’s a, clearly, otherwise the book wouldn’t be interesting in any way. The utopian future ends up not being as utopian as it seems. So you have to read the book to figure out what’s going on there, but there’s a dark underbelly at minimum.

But I would contend that that dark underbelly is present in the world we live in anyway, in the West. I don’t want to say even necessarily capitalism, because I don’t want to make it a super political thing. But the world we live in is a world that’s basically run by corporations more and more, let’s put it that way.

And that seems to be accelerating. And AI is now a bigger part of that. And in fact, in the last six months, the world has changed.

Oh my God.

In how AI is being used in our lives, whether it’s in relatively benign ways, making silly videos, or what you would call slop. And interestingly, last week, OpenAI discontinued their video creation tool called Sora. One day to the next, we’re cancelling that.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what went down. But obviously, militarily speaking, there’s another story there. And how close corporations are to government has changed a lot in the last year to 18 months, two years as well.

So yeah, all of that is what my book’s about. And there are characters in it who are trying to navigate their way in this reality. And bad things look like they might happen at one point as they dig.

We’re near the end. Maybe there’s a question here that brings some of this stuff together. I mean, what is the impact of AI on creativity or on culture? Like what’s the overlap or the intersection between your AI and the work that you’re doing now? Or how do you feel about its impact on the work that you do?

There’s very little intersection with the work that I do either personally or professionally, or almost none. Because to be honest with you, the National Film Board has such a legacy. When I said that the filmmakers who just won an Oscar, they spent six years or whatever, it was hand crafting, making the stop motion film with insane amounts, not just them, the art direction, everything involved in that was so human, right?

It seems almost as far away from AI as you can get.

Yeah, it really is.

And there’s, and again, there is some CGI in certain aspects of that film, especially animating the mouths of some of the characters, because the film exists in English and French. So the mouths are animated differently for each language, which is, it’s an almost insane undertaking actually. And it came out, they did, my colleagues did such an amazing job.

But all that to say, we have such humanity behind the work that we do, that that is our superpower. There’s no way we should be trashing that. Like what would we have to gain from making AI, from using AI to create?

Now, AI can be a tool for certain research. It’s not like we don’t have our heads in the sand. We’ve always been extremely technologically innovative at the National Film Board.

So of course, anybody should be exploring the potential of any of this stuff. So anyway, the intersection is still pretty minimal, let’s just say, in reality. It doesn’t mean I don’t think about AI every day.

And in my personal life too, it’s pretty minimal in terms of output. In terms of my thoughts about it, and the question I was asking you, and that you’re in a way throwing back at me, it’s extremely interesting because I’ve had a lot more thoughts over the last two or three years about not just intelligence, because intelligence is actually, it’s pretty hard to define. And there’s different, the chat GPT that people think of as AI is super different from the AI that can play chess.

It’s a totally different thing, right? And it’s just the nature of conscious, what concerns me actually is discussions around AI being potentially conscious or aware or sentient. Like these are all words that are thrown around that don’t have an agreed upon definition.

And I wrote an essay recently that has not been published anywhere yet about consciousness and how it relates to our socialization. So this might be actually a conversation for another time because I know from your anthropological background, I’m sure you can have, I’d be interested to know what you think about all this. But basically that what philosophers would call qualia, which is the phenomenological experience of the world that we have, when we feel pain or we experience the color blue, or we experience the taste of something or far more complicated things than that, which are like the color of our lives, basically emotionally and perceptually, that the basic assumption is that those qualia are individually instantiated, let’s just say, like you have your experience of the color red, it may not be the same as mine, but it’s probably pretty similar because one of us could have some mutation of our eye, retina or something that would mean that we experienced it differently. But averaging it out, it’s basically a similar thing from one person to another. Now there’s a philosophical question about how do you really know that?

Well, okay, good question, fine. But if you’re just looking at purely the experience that would be called sentience, there’s my, sorry, a bit of a long-winded answer, but my current view of this is that the human experience of the world is actually unique compared to other creatures on the planet because it is based on our social interaction. I mean, no man is an island, right?

Is an obvious way of looking at that. That’s nothing new to look at reality, our reality that way, right? But in my mind, we have a genome and a phenome, right?

So the genome is your DNA, but then how it’s expressed and how you grow in the world is your phenome, how you turn out, right? That phenome is irrevocably social. We cannot escape that.

But what I’m getting at in this essay is that it’s at down to the level of experience, pure experience of the world. If I’m telling you you’re experiencing the color red and you cannot escape the cultural definition and social definition, however you want to put it, of the color red, you can’t escape it. Yes, you’re seeing wavelengths of light and so is some other animal that can perceive that same spectrum, but their experience, and I’m not saying animals aren’t conscious or not sentient, that’s the point, is yes, they are.

But we are in a qualitatively different way in the sense that flight, the evolution of flight for life forms was qualitatively different from what existed before flight evolved. The first animal that could fly properly, self-propelled flight, not just gliding, and obviously evolution happens over a long time and there’s in-betweeny, creatures and stuff like that, right? We have those flying squirrels and stuff, flying foxes or whatever today.

Once you get flight, that is then a qualitative difference of experience in the world that evolved among completely different branches of the biological tree of nature or whatever it’s called, right? So reptiles can do it, but insects can do it, right? And obviously birds can do it, right?

And humans can do it because we socially got together and built machines that could do it. We built technology, right? That you could not do as an individual, nothing.

We can’t do a single thing as an individual. And I contend that if you were literally raised by wolves, you basically wouldn’t be human. Your genome would be, but your phenome would not be at all, your phenotype, forget it, right?

You would see red, but you wouldn’t know what it was. You would have the experience, but it would be so basic, right? It would be just purely basic.

So getting back to AI, my concern is that people think that AI will be able to do that. And who am I to say whether it can or it can’t, but the concern is that we would rush to anthropomorphize. I mean, we already anthropomorphize anything.

That’s just a part of human nature apparently, right? Whether it’s clouds or your dog or something, right? But it’s so easy to do that.

LLM is a program to fool us into thinking that they are being human. And to a certain extent, they can have conversations, right? That’s, hey, dogs can’t.

So this must be more human than a dog. You could easily end up thinking. And of course it’s been fed with the entirety of human culture.

So to a certain extent, it has been socialized, right? But the it is still just a very, very specialized algorithm, right? And what really concerns me when I hear, I hear it all the time or I read it all the time of, oh no, we should be careful because if AI becomes conscious, it becomes sentient, then we’re going to have to treat it really nicely or we’re going to have to give it rights or something, right?

We’re going to have to, we can’t be cruel to it. And whenever I hear that, I think, oh my goodness. We kill so many sentient beings, billions every day.

You’re worried about this, this thing that is made of silicon. That’s your concern. My other concern, in terms of cruelty, it’s like, yeah, good God.

No, nobody’s more cruel than humans, right? Like it doesn’t come more cruel than a human being. And you can just benignly be munching on your burger or drinking your milk or whatever it is, right?

Worrying about being cruel to the AI.

And we’re worrying about being cruel to the AI. Oh my goodness. And I mean, forget about being cruel to people, right?

Look at the news, right? So that is not something people should be concerned about. What they should be being concerned about, and this is what brings it back a little bit full circle to corporations and what I deal with in my book is, corporations have what’s called, legally personhood, right?

So that was a probably understandable move at some point in history to in terms of liability, right? Like it enabled a lot of capitalism to create the world that we know today. And there are lots of advantages to that world, right?

In terms of human suffering, for sure, lots of benefits. But it’s a tricky, slippery slope. It becomes very wriggly and you can’t get hold of a corporation really, because it’s, what is it?

It just keeps on going, right? There is no, there’s no automatic lifespan to a corporation. And it just grows and grows.

And hence in my book, it’s the United Corporations have taken over a country for very benign reasons. Everything’s great. They all want the best for everybody.

But what concerns me, especially in terms of American law is, as soon as if AI had rights like a person and like a corporation, and maybe it is a corporation that is an AI, who knows? Then it would have, by definition, the right to bear arms in America. And that’s not, well, that film exists, right?

That’s called Terminator, right? I didn’t invent that future of the AI becoming sentient, obviously. So that is, what concerns me about AI is what the people let the computers do, let’s just say, because I’d rather just call it computers because it is just computation at the end of it.

Intelligence, whatever, is it intelligent? Yeah, it’s intelligent. Depends what you mean by intelligence.

So are bees, so ants. There’s plenty of examples of intelligence in the animal kingdom. But our intelligence is distributed intelligence in terms of we are fundamentally social and AI does that a bit.

And obviously the internet does that a bit. It’s distributed right now. So there’s never ending conversations can be had about that.

But what do we do about it? I just think there’s huge red flags that are perhaps being waved and maybe even in the wrong direction, these flags. It’s no, no, don’t worry about being cool to the AI.

I mean, so we’re right at the end of time, but I’m just to cross the T and dot the I. My view is that you’re not experiencing any insecurity about the humanity of the work that you do in the face of AI.

No, not at all. Because if you want to write an email and you’re not that good at writing, use AI, go for it. If you are, it’s beautiful.

If you’re from another country and you don’t speak English and you want to communicate what you have to share and convey your intelligence that you have, sure. It’s amazing. It’s in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the babble fish.

It’s the thing you can put in, it’s the universal communicator device, right? That is a dream. That’s the thing that we dreamed of when we were kids.

We dreamed of having a thing in our pocket that would give us the answers to all the questions. And AI is an extension to that. But when you push it far enough, it still averages out enough.

It can’t see into the future. It can’t imagine the future. And if we were going to have another conversation, I would start off talking about imagination because that is the key thing.

It doesn’t exist in time, right? It just is. You can turn it off and turn it on again. It has no awareness of time whatsoever. You can program in a clock, right? But it doesn’t mean anything.

Time doesn’t mean anything to a computer or AI. It means something to us. And we are able to project into the future, which is one of our superpowers is this imagination.

But even on a social level, because we hear something from somebody, we think about something that happened in history, we put it all together. And those are other people who are informing us as an individual. But even then, we’re going to tell, I’m telling you about it now.

There’s other people listening, right? Who knows what comes out of this conversation? Somebody else is going to hear. That is what humans do. And that is not what AI does. It’s just something qualitatively different.

But AI does a bunch of useful things, no question about it. But being replaced, yeah, if you’re doing coding, yeah, but that’s the same as saying that the motor car replaced the horse. Yeah, sure, some stuff will be replaced.

But that isn’t, it doesn’t replace the thing that humans do that makes us human. I think that’s the key thing to hang on to. And I have kids who are going to be entering the workforce in the not too distant future.

And we have conversations about this. You’ve got to be smart. You don’t want to be learning to drive the buggy in 1920, to have the horse and the whip and stuff.

That’s probably not a great career path. So be smart, but don’t, I wouldn’t freak out about that specifically. But we could, yeah, this is a never-ending conversation.

Yes, and I would love to do this again. Except it’s at the end.

We’ll take, what’s that?

It’s never-ending, but it is actually at the end.

It is the end. We’ll announce the never-ending nature of this right at the end. But thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It’s so much fun talking with you. And I really appreciate you accepting the invitation.

Oh, yeah, no, thank you. I really suspect I might have babbled on a bit too much. And I hope it’s interesting for somebody at some point.

No, it was wonderful. And I would love to do it again. Imagination and that essay, I think you shared with me actually about—

Oh, it’s true, I did.

So we can do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is my little pet project right now. Who knows where that will lead?

It’s beautiful. Cool. Thank you so much.

All right. Thank you, Peter. Talk soon.

I am playing around, exploring the new language for our new world of behaviors. These explorations have turned into what you might call essays about the new self that is being named: “The Sovereign Age” and “We Are All Authors Now.”

Strategy

Above, Johannes Suikkanen on applied social science. Also, Gideon Lichfield on discovery. And, eatbigfish on AI limits.

Death

Above, Jasmine Bina on death. Also, Roy Sorenson on a philosophy of shadows. And, Shira Chess on institutional gothic.

Invoke

Above, Craig Elimeliah on invocable brands. Also, Michael Crawlyer & Geoff Burns training styles. And, Matthew Frank on fandom.

Culture

Above, Matt Artz on AI anthropology. Also, Angelique Frey on sci-fi music. And, David Hoyt on animism.

Connection

Above, Perry Zurn & Dani S Bassett on curious minds. Also, Benjamin Ross Hoffman on Socrates. And, Vitaly Friedman on customer understanding.

Indi Young is a researcher, author, and consultant focused on understanding how people think. She developed the mental models method and is the author of Practical Empathy, Mental Models, and Time to Listen. Her work emphasizes listening, qualitative rigor, and designing systems that support different ways of thinking in practice. And, she has a great substack, Indi Young.

So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their story. And she has this question, which I just think is really beautiful, so I use it, but because it’s so big, I over-explain it before I ask. Because I want to make sure that you know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

I love that that question comes from your neighbor, too. I come from, well, my neighbor is actually a Buddhist meditation teacher, so neighbors are influential. Neighbors is a good word.

I would say that I come from the edges of things. I am not a typical anything, and this is true of my entire family. Well, not entire, you know, there’s always, maybe most of the family is black sheep, and there’s a few who aren’t, I don’t know.

But, yeah, I’ve never really been the person that anything was designed for. I remember sitting in math class in seventh grade, understanding what the teacher was talking about, but understanding also that the students weren’t understanding, but being way too shy to raise my hand and say, Miss Betsy, if you had just said this, then I think these guys wouldn’t be asking these questions. You know, it’s just I’m not smarter than anyone.

I just see things. I can see things, I guess. I don’t know.

Everybody can see things. But one of the things that’s interesting is I just visited my dad’s cousin, 87, last weekend, along with my cousin. And we were listening to family stories.

And my dad’s cousin is full of vigor and has had a very adventurous life that is not like any other life you would expect. She was a horse trainer and rider, specifically Arabian, specifically endurance trail riding, which is a reenactment of the Pony Express. The original one of those was called Tennis Cup.

And it runs from, it’s a hundred mile race that runs across the Sierras following the Pony Express mail trail that used to go across the Sierras. And she was instrumental. I mean, she rode that a bunch of times.

I remember as a kid, I would look at the pictures of her going over Cougar Rock, which is an iconic place to take a photo of a horse, jumping up over a rock. And I was just in love. And so, of course, I also followed that path for a little bit.

I am not rich enough to have horses on my own. But that was fabulous. She went on, I mean, she ended up working at a county jail for a while.

She had just all these different adventures. And one of the things that I keep getting reminded of when I’m visiting her is that the family on her side, on my dad’s side, came to California in 1849. The third year that the Carson Pass was open.

I think it was, I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t Carson Pass. It was a little bit north of that. But they came over at the exact same month as the Donner Party.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. And we have family stories about how typically awful the Donner Party was and how poorly they treated their Native American guides.

And stories of how we built, I don’t know, we were, the family was doing something to build. It’s called, it’s the Greenewalt Party.

That’s the name of the party that your family came to?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we’re, apparently, and we were the ones who, we went over, we built something so that we could go over it.

And the Donner Party wanted to just use our stuff and whatever.

Oh, wow.

It’s, yeah. And we’re like, no, we’re going to go over it first. And then you’re going to come right on our heels because there’s a big storm coming. And apparently they were miffed and didn’t and stayed.

And so you’re like, wow, OK. Few weeks later, we were part of the people coming back to help rescue them.

Oh, my gosh.

Right. So I think that, I mean, it’s a great little story because it talks about where we come from. I never, yeah, it’s not, we’re not a competitive minded family.

We are a let’s cooperate and collaborate and work with our neighbors and get things done so that we all can move forward kind of a family. And that has completely bled into everything I’ve done in my career. I’m trying to help.

Originally I grew up in Silicon Valley. It was not called that when I grew up, nor were there any of the tech bros there. There was no money there. There was Hewlett Packard. And I remember Apple being down the road from us in its very original form with a little rainbow Apple logo, although they didn’t.

I mean, you only saw the rainbow logo Apple in some brochure because I never saw the actual logo on a building. I don’t think they were big enough for that.

Where were you personally? What was the town you grew up in?

Oh, that was called Los Altos.

Yeah, I call it Los Altos now because there’s no way I can move back. Yeah, but it was like everybody that I knew, I got into computer science not because I wanted to, because it was something. So the story, once I got into it, let me tell that part of it.

Once I got into it, everybody was a deep thinker. Everybody thought things through. That was the flavor of the people who were getting into the early computing.

And it wasn’t something where I want to make money quick. That was not the goal. The goal was to figure out how these machines might be used for certain things and what that would look like and what the repercussions might be or how we could build on that.

It was always about building on things. And then it did start shifting and I can tell you stories about that. But my whole goal with my career is to try to teach Silicon Valley to think more broadly to think about the edges, because the edges are half your market, literally half your market.

And I have heard VPs and I don’t know, CTOs and stuff these days stand up and say, oh, we’re not interested in that market because that’s not enough income for us, not enough profit for us. It’s not worth it. Even though, you know, A, it should be worth it because they’re humans, too.

I have this good example with a Netflix subscription plan, but it’s worth it because they’re human, too. But it’s also worth it because it’s not going to cost you that much. It’s software.

It’s not going to cost you that much. So, yeah.

Yeah. I’m curious. I want to get into those stories, but I always enjoy hanging out in the origins. So you’re in Los Altos. What did you, did you have a, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yeah, I wanted to be a writer. I loved reading. Yeah, I think, you know, all through grade school, especially fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, I was the student where the teacher would say, speak up. We can’t hear you. But they would also come to me and say, hey, you might want to read this book. And so I read, you know, I read Tolkien. I read Dune. I read all of that before I was out of fifth grade. I just loved reading.

And of course, I go back and reread them. And then I go back. I have a list.

This list is in Excel spreadsheets. That’s a very core thing to me is spreadsheets. The list goes all the way back to the 70s of books that I’ve read. And then I go back and I reread them and I get a completely different message out of them. And then I’ll go back and I’ll reread them.

And this still happens. This happens with, I just reread the N.K. Jemisin Stone Sky series or whatever. It’s a series of three books.

And it’s speculative fiction. We don’t call it science fiction anymore because that was the old guy’s way, you know, science. It’s like, no, this is more about understanding how people interact and how people would interact and what society would look like and what government would look like in the future.

And in that series, it’s, you know, what, 40,000 years in the future of Earth? And we’re right back where we were during colonial times with respect to the government and the slaves and all of this. So interestingly, I read that for the first time, probably right before the pandemic, maybe a couple of years before the pandemic. And I just reread it last month.

And a whole new message comes out. I mean, I caught all, I’ll highlight these things. And then I caught a bunch, you know, I caught a bunch of stuff the first time through.

But then I’m like, oh, wait, there’s the lower message. And so next time I read it in another, you know, decade, I’ll find even more message. It would be really awesome.

So reading has always been my thing. I wanted to be a writer. I remember my dad, we were standing in the kitchen.

I think we were drying dishes or something. And my dad said, come here, I want you to watch this show. This show is called Nova.

And it was the very first iteration of Nova, which was, you know, a science show, an early version of a science show. And in their intro, they had some computer graphics, early computer graphics, showing the logo coming together. And he’s all, you know, they did that on a computer.

Would you be interested in computers maybe? Because I think you could earn a living on computers and then have writing as your hobby. Something to do on the side.

He is also the man who told me, get into something where you provide a service. And instead, well, I don’t know, I provide a service, but nobody wants my service right now with AI. Nobody wants to know about the humans.

Yes, yes. Well, now we’re talking. So how do you, let’s catch this up. So you tell us where you are now and the work that you’re doing. What is the work that you’re doing in your office?

Well, the work that I do, of course, has many levels at it. And so it’s hard to explain. But I was with my team, I’ve got this Tuesday team of folks who are mostly laid off or retired, who get together and we love thinking together. And we’re trying to think together about a better way to describe this that works in the world of AI. And basically, it is that most of the products that we’re creating are designed to be an average.

It is, here’s the product, most people can use it. I think there’s stories around why I think it derived that way. But most people don’t think the same way.

They think in wildly different ways, even though they’re approaching the same goal, the same purpose or intent. And that’s completely lost. And in a digital product, as opposed to a physical product, but even those can change.

And I’ve got stories about that, washing machine stories. In a digital product, it’s really easy to have multiple versions of it that match different thinking styles. So one of the key differences that I do is most teams look at what they’re doing from the point of view of the product, the solution, the service, the thing, the policy that we’re making.

And I’m building a policy and it’s all about policy. And they forget. And actually, Brian O’Neill has this newsletter that I just read the first paragraph and it exactly says this.

It’s like he does it for data dashboards and stuff. It’s like all the data is great, all the interface is great, but they forget. Way back in the beginning to ask the people what they were trying to get done.

They forget that perspective. And that’s what my whole career has been about. It’s like, let’s go figure out that perspective.

I don’t care what you’re building. When I come in to a client, they really want to show me what they’ve got. And I said, listen, let’s leave that for the later.

I don’t want to look at it now. I don’t care. What I want to do is talk to you about what you think people are trying to get done.

And let’s find those people so I can find out how they’re thinking about it.

Right. I’m interested in their cognition. The way that I teach how to listen involves layers. I use an analogy of a spherical candy that you might have eaten that has layers.

As a kid, you suck off the outer layer and it’s a different color underneath or a different flavor or something. And that’s basically when we’re interacting with each other conversationally, we tend not to go deep. We just stick with those outer layers.

And that’s how we think about communicating. Dave Gray had this book called Liminal Thinking a while ago. He has this cartoon and a little sketch he drew where basically two people are trying to communicate with each other, but they’re only communicating with that outer layer.

And so a lot gets missed. The foundational stuff gets missed. I work with teams who are sick to death of trying to fight with the other team to get things done.

A lot of strife and a lot of friction. And I teach them how to listen. And all of a sudden, they can see that even they are just throwing spears back at the other people.

They’re not attempting to get deep. Neither party is attempting to understand what actually is going through your mind and what actually might be emotional reactions you’re having, what actually might be personal rules that you’ve got under there. And once you get to that layer, all of a sudden, you’re like, oh, yeah, no, we’ve got the same personal rules in general.

Or, oh, no, we’ve got very different personal rules. So let’s have a discussion about that.

I’m sorry. There’s so many questions. When do people pick up the phone? I’m just so excited to talk to you about your work and about how you help people listen. I love the analogy of the lollipop, if that’s what it was, and that we stay at the surface and listening isn’t a skill or it’s not an instinct for a lot of organizations. I’m curious, what gets those organizations to the point that they ask for help? What do you find? When do you find people come to you?

That is exactly what my Tuesday team and I are exploring right now. Because all in the past, people have come to me because they are at the point that they understand this is missing already. They’re already converts in a certain respect.

They may have read something of mine. They may have seen a talk. I’ve given a lot of talks.

I would admit that a lot of my talks are at a level that demands that the audience understand some more deep concepts. I’m realizing I need to learn how to speak at a more outer layer to draw people in, which I need to learn how to do. But there’s always something.

So that’s how they would find out about me. Or it would be somebody telling somebody, oh, I was working with this new method. It increased our qualified leads in the worst winter month that we ever, normally we don’t get a lot of leads, but it increased it up and above the levels that we get in the summer by a third or two thirds.

And people are like, oh, interesting. How did you do that? And so that’s how it worked. I’ve never had to, I’m not a very good marketer.

Well, I have a lot of identification with that. I’m curious, because you talked about when you entered this world, that everybody was a deep thinker. People weren’t in it for money.

And you didn’t start out as a listener or a researcher. I’m just curious, is that right? I mean, I’m just curious, what’s the arc of your career been and how did you come to really cherish listening and make it a focus for you?

In the very beginning, as a young software engineer, you’re right, I was not doing that. I was on a team. This is spectacular. I wanted to move somewhere where I didn’t know the street names.

And so I accepted the job in Denver, which was actually, it turned out to be a job in, it was in the aerospace industry. And it ended up being a job in a tiny Air Force Base way the hell out on the planes. But I landed my first day with five other women engineers. And I’m like, hey, this is weird. We’re all saying this to each other. This is weird.

It was the guy who was, probably he was a feminist, probably, because we didn’t speak in those words, but probably he’s like, damn it, we need to hire people. These are fantastic thinkers. And so he’s like, I’m just going to do a glut on gender, gender and specific on women.

And so we show up looking at each other, like, wow, how did this happen? This is great. We worked together. It was a really fascinating job until I saw at this Air Force Base, a guy with his, he has pimples.

So he’s still, he’s not 20 yet. And he has this big automatic machine gun looped over his shoulder in the cafeteria. And I’m like, he swings around to get something.

We’ve got his tray in front of him. And I’m like, dude, you’ve got potato salad on your gun. OK, this is enough. I’m out of here.

What was the job there? What were you there to do?

We were writing software. We were writing software specifically, I think I can talk about this, to make a testbed for Star Wars.

And Star Wars was all these satellites that were supposed to shoot down missiles before they arrive on our soil. So it was, I mean, we had a five star general, of course, come because we’re five women in a giant cubicle. And they’re like, I got to see this, right?

So different in those days. But it was, I thought it was interesting work because I really hate war. And I thought, well, let’s make it a game. Let’s make it a game that the people who love war can play without killing our people, our young people who still have pimples on their face and don’t deserve to die.

But that’s not what it was. And I was done. And so the next thing that I did was basically join a company that was a spinoff from Cray.

So I had been using, we were programming with the Cray computer. It’s a supercomputer back in those days. And there was a spinoff that was like, okay, we’re going to do a supercomputer, but with an operating system and with an interface.

And so I was in charge of the interface. What would the visual interface look like? And that was super fun. And again, I mean, you get a chance to deeply think about things.

But at the same time, it was a really small group of us.

What was the state of the art for user interface? Was there any?

Oh, that’s actually worth talking about. Motif, I think was the name of the operating system. It was a visual operating system. So I don’t know if you know, Xerox Star was the first visual operating system before Apple. And we had, and in college, I went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and we had a bunch of Xerox Star machines that we got to, we were programming with them in the beginning.

And it was a windowed interface, which was fantastic. I also love the fact that it had a way to get at the keyboard and use different keyboards. So if you didn’t want the QWERTY keyboard, you could use a Dvorak keyboard, which was supposed to be more efficient in terms of the English language.

And the QWERTY is more mechanically efficient, meant for typewriter. And so you could just change it. I was a touch typist, so you don’t look at the keyboard.

And you could learn how to use a Dvorak keyboard by having the little icon of where the keys are laid out on the screen. It was beautiful. Xerox did some great work.

So anyway, we were building something. I think I ended up going with the operating system that I think was Sun Microsystems had pioneered. And it had the word tool in it.

And I can’t remember why. But it didn’t have color in it. And the other one I think was called Motif.

And it had color in it. And that one took off because it had color. But the one that Sun Microsystems did, and I think it was them.

I could be wrong. I loved it better because they had more thought behind it. For example, the scroll bar.

So right now, think of a scroll bar. You have to go find where it is. Move your mouse to it.

Grab it. Move it down. Move it up.

Figure out what speed it’s scrolling at. Use your little scroll bar thingy on your mouse, which I’ve never learned how to use, to affect that. And the Sun Microsystems one, it was not that.

It was an elevator. On a cord. And the elevator had, at the top, a little way to just go up little bit by little bit.

And at the bottom, another way to go down by a little bit, little bit. But you were keeping your mouse there. You didn’t have to move your mouse all over the place.

And then you could move it up and down the cord if you wanted to go farther and faster. It was just some little bits. That’s the one I can remember. This was a long time ago.

And so at what point did you, I mean, you develop mental models. At what point did you become a person that was really committed to listening?

It was pretty much around that time I started thinking, okay, we are designing for other software engineers or scientists even. It was called SSI, supercomputer. Shoot, I can’t remember. It was called SSI, whatever it was. But at that point, if they really wanted to double down on software, who else are we programming for? At that point, as a programmer, you were expected to go understand the standard operating procedure, the standard way people did a thing.

And so I would go and talk to all these people and try to figure out the standard way they would do a thing and then figure out a good interface for it. So that’s the point where I realized, okay, this is what it’s like to talk to people.

But just a little bit later, I was working as a consultant. So I switched off out of SSI and became a consultant using something called PenPoint as an operating system. It was the early tablet. And sorry, I keep pausing because I’m trying to remember what was the word for that?

We would bring the tablet around wherever we would go. We would go more places than I go now, out to a cafe or on a train or whatever. And people are like, what’s that? And it was a tablet that recognized handwriting.

So for example, doctors, there was a particular doctor that hired me to help him figure out how to do patient charts in a way that would work for him. And he would carry it around.

Recently, there was an Apple ad or something I saw that it felt like an alternate or parallel timeline that it seemed there was a real excitement about being able to turn handwriting into digital text around that time. And it just never took off. That was early 90s.

I think it didn’t take off because NEC was the one who was providing the hardware. And they bought the company that did the software and killed it. There’s always some blunt explanation.

There’s always something, yeah.

And anyway, now we’ve got voice.

So it was interesting because I was starting to work with the individuals who wanted to craft this thing in a way that matched the way they were thinking. There was one client who owned a bunch of satellites that would take pictures of the earth and they would sell them to the government and other corporations that would do things like mapping.

This is well before Google Maps. And it was somewhat expensive. It was a business, right? And they hired me because they wanted maybe to expand. This is actually one of the ways you asked me that question earlier. One of the ways that people will reach out to me is because we want to do something different. We think there’s an opportunity to do something different.

I’ve got a lot of stories around that. And this particular satellite company, they must have wanted to expand their market or something. They might have sensed that bigger things were coming. Who knows, right?

And so I’m there. I’m like, well, give me a bunch of your clients and let me go talk to them. And give me some people that you’re talking to to potentially become clients. And let me go talk to them too, half and half, because I don’t want to just talk to people who use this stuff.

But at that point in time, they were using that stuff to do something else. It wasn’t using the solution, the imagery. And we’re going to talk about getting the imagery. It was, what are you trying to do with the imagery? Right? And how do you think about it?

And after all of that, and I put the information together, I’m like, oh my God, there’s a huge mismatch. There’s some stuff that, and I did this vertically instead of horizontally, like the skyline. The first one was vertical. And it’s like, yeah, the vendor has this and the people are trying to do this. Only I had it, the people first.

The people are trying to do this. The vendor supports it. People are trying to do this. The vendor supports it. People are trying to do this. Crickets.

And I’m like, there’s your opportunity.

And the other guy who brought me on, the other consultant brought me on to do the research. I remember we were sitting in the taxi going back to the Pasadena airport. And he’s like, oh my God, you have to copyright that. That is amazing. And I’m like, I’m not going to copyright it. I want it to live and grow. If you copyright it and you try to control it, then it dies. So I’m not going to copyright it. It’s something that I’m going to expand into the world. Right?

So there’s just some, certain things about the way that I think are not because of my family. We’re not competitive that way. We are collaborative. We’re moving forward.

So that’s, yeah. How has the practice changed or how has the world changed? I mean, it’s been, you’ve been at this for quite a while and I’m just, I’m always curious to hear people talk about, I mean, I’m always interested in the role of listening, the role of qualitative. What’s your sense of how it’s changed in your career?

There’s a few changes that have happened. The early change was that people started to realize that qualitative is just as valuable as quant. In the early days, people thought there was one spectrum and the good stuff quant was at the good end and the bad stuff, the iffy, guessy stuff was the qual and it was at the bad end.

And they started realizing, no, they’re both their own spectrum. They both have an empirical end and they both have a subjective and we’re like, you’re guessing.

And there was a lot of qual out there where people would go and listen to one or two stories and they would say, hey, here’s our pattern. And I was like, no, that’s subjective qual.

And so I think one of the big changes was that there were a bunch of people who realized there was qualitative data that was actually verifiable and repeatable and therefore empirical. The whole reason for qualitative, the whole way that you can find out whether it’s verifiable is whether patterns come out of it, which is not something that people using quant could understand easily.

I’ve always been a words person. I wanted to be a writer. The SAT, I got 100% on the English side. Words are awesome. I think I’m losing a lot of them now. But yeah, so I think that was one of the changes is that, yay, people are getting it, that there is value in these words and that social sciences are still a science.

I want to linger here a little bit because this is where things get, I guess, significant in a way. I mean, you call yourself a qualitative data scientist, which seems very intentional. And I’m just wondering, what is the role or what is the value of qualitative for somebody who is mostly in the quantitative realm, to your point? I mean, I encounter lots of people. I love your analogy. It’s a spectrum. The qualitative is on the fuzzy, subjective side of things. But how do you help people see that they’re distinct? And what is the value that you articulate around qualitative? What does it do that nothing else does?

What qualitative does, and when I try to convince people it works and it doesn’t work, right? There are some people for whom they will never trust it. But what qualitative brings is an understanding that people are like little galaxies and they have a lot going on in their minds.

And what’s going on in their minds cannot be reduced to a Cartesian map. It changes. It’s what you think changes based on your inputs, your context, your mood. You don’t do the same thing twice, necessarily. There are guiding principles or personal roles, I call them, that underlay this.

And most of the time, people don’t mess around with their personal roles. They stick with them. When they are messing around with them, it’s when you feel like, the words like your hands start to sweat a little bit because I’m going against this thing that I always believe is the right thing to do.

So this might be a good time to talk about the pieces. So one of the things that I do when I’m convincing someone is I say, there’s a bunch of words that people say, which are just that outer layer. And that outer layer, as many surveys as you’d like, is going to produce a bunch of numbers that mean nothing because your survey is about those outer layers.

And you’re going to make a decision based on this survey that people, really like blah, blah, blah. But like is a preference. And the preference is going to change based on who they’re next to.

Right? You’re going to make a business decision based on it, and it’s not going to go down so well. And you’re going to forget that you made that decision because it was the result of a survey about preferences or a survey that maybe even there was a time when surveys were terrible because people always thought, I’ve got Survey Monkey. I can just write a bunch of questions.

So no, but they would try to write surveys about what’s going on in people’s minds. And you cannot capture it in multiple choice. Right?

Those days, I would say the only good survey is an essay. And people don’t want to fill in the blank because that’s a lot of writing. So the only good survey is to do listening sessions.

And the only good survey I say now is a survey where these are facts you would say about yourself. Right? Not personal rules, not preferences, not inner thinking, not emotional reactions, but facts like I am five foot four.

And why must we be so careful about the questions that we ask in that way?

Because I’m alluding to the idea that when people try to lay out someone’s inner world into a survey format, they’re never going to capture all the potentials.

So every time I look at a survey, let’s take... Okay. I also hate these universal personality types. There’s this intent or love of let’s have a model of how everybody thinks. Horoscopes, Myers-Briggs, whatever personality test you took at the last place you were employed so you’d get along with your fellow employees better. Right? There’s no universal. There’s no universal.

So Myers-Briggs, I keep, my cousins were really into it. So I try taking it and it’s like a hundred multiple choice questions. There are no answers for me.

There was maybe one in 10 questions. I’m like, oh yeah, that answer matches me. But the rest of it, it doesn’t match. Yeah. It’s just not there. Right? So you cannot collect that kind of information in survey format.

I don’t think it’s ethical to do it because you’re doing a disservice to the organization who’s trying to use it. Or you’re just building some sort of nice scammy universal model about personalities and selling it. So, okay, whatever.

Doing a listening session is the only way and doing it carefully and beautifully is the only way to get an understanding of a person’s inner world. So in a listening session, we bring no list of questions. We only bring a germinal question.

Germinal meaning a little seed and from which the conversation is going to grow. And that germinal question and every listening session is framed around a thing someone’s focused on addressing. I call it a purpose because I want to say something higher than a goal.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of jobs to be done as a methodology.

Yeah. They say it’s, somebody’s job and their jobs are always very discreet, very small.

In a listening session, I go with a little bit bigger jobs, right? So to speak, I don’t like to use the word job. They have it. I don’t like to use the word goal either because a lot of these things are things that you never are going to ever accomplish.

You’re just working at them as a part of your life. I did a listening, a study for a company making washing machines. And our study was about how do you take care of your clothing? And in fact, the other part of it, that germinal question is that we focus it on the past.

So how did you take care of your clothing over the past month or two?

Okay. Also, you’ll notice we didn’t ask about the solution, the washing machine.

We asked about what people were trying to get done. Okay. So there’s a bunch of stuff that goes into that thinking that goes into the way we form a germinal question.

And that also influences recruiting and who we want to hear from. There’s other things that the company is interested in, in terms of how they want to expand or how they want to innovate that goes into recruiting as well, but it doesn’t go into the germinal question.

Yeah.

I’m doing a study right now or helping a team form a study with doctors diagnosing stroke. They’ve done a ton of other kinds of studies. They want to do a study in this methodology because it’s maybe going to be the key to them understanding what’s going on.

Yeah, I’m curious. I’m so curious to know more about what you do in the listening session. You say that there’s no guide, there’s no list of questions, but how do you talk about your approach? What happens there and what’s your role as the interviewer, the researcher? How do you even think about what you’re doing there? Can you just say more about what’s happening in there and what you’re doing?

You are free in there. I have heard Sam Ladner and Steve Portigal in their podcast. They have this great podcast, something like Off the Path. In one of them, they’re like, God, I wish I could just be free.

But no, they’ve got these lists of questions and they’re both incredible researchers and they get a lot of stuff, but they are stuck within that list of questions. That’s mainly because their client wants to know about the solution and we haven’t framed it by what are people trying to get done. I think they do frame by what people are getting done, but it isn’t from a cognitive point of view or it isn’t from... I don’t know.

It’s interesting. They actually do a really good job within the constraints that they’re in. I don’t have an academic background in anthropology, so I didn’t know that you had to be constrained that way.

And so when I started out, that satellite company, the next time I did this, I think it was for a big investment company, I’m not going to ask you about your accounts. I’m going to ask you about what you’re trying to get done. So it’s got to be some specific thing.

And the org was well, we do all these things. We do all of them. We’re well, okay, we’ll do all those studies then.

What do you mean? We’ve got to frame it by the thing people are trying to get done. So within a listening session, let’s take that example of the washing machine one, taking care of your clothing. People will say, a lot of the time, maybe a third of the time, they’ll say, well, where do you want me to start? I’m what just went through your mind right now? But the beautiful thing is that usually I have had an intro session with them first.

And we do intro sessions, 15, 20 minutes to make sure that the person is comfortable with this kind of inner action. It is not a survey spoken out loud, right?

Yeah. I am not going to lead you through a list of questions.

And we will get a bunch of candidates. We will do intro sessions with them. And in that intro session, we’ll find out if they’re comfortable.

And we’ll also find out if they can speak about their inner thinking. And there was one candidate. This was for a study about, it was a company that makes small appliances.

And they just wanted to what else can we do? What are people doing in the kitchen, right? Well, you can’t just say, what are you doing in the kitchen? That’s not specific enough. You can’t say, what are you doing when you make dinner? Because a lot of people make dinner in a lot of different ways. So we decided on what went through your mind as you were cooking dinner in the mindset of feeling like a creative home chef. Okay. Very specific.

Is that the germinal question?

Yeah, that’s the germinal question.

It’s what went through your mind. It’s in the past. And it’s about this purpose that people have. Yeah. I use that word purpose. I know I teach this globally.

And there are countries this guy in South Africa. He’s all purpose means something totally different to us. I’m okay, good. Call it intent.

I really identify with all the language in the models around benefit, jobs to be done, motivations, mindsets. I feel I also have a pile of language in that space too. That’s I’m not really... So I’m just connecting with that. That’s it’s beautiful though. Keep going though. So you have a germinal question.

Yes, you have a germinal question. And generally people have thought about this germinal question since you had the intro session.

A few of them, maybe a third of them, maybe a quarter, I don’t know. We’ll say, well, where do you want me to start? Because they’ve thought about it so much. There’s a ton, right? You, you always start your listening sessions, which is what this is sort of.

There, there’s a reason why it isn’t exactly. With a question about where people come from.

Right. So it’s a way of, okay, let’s get started there. It does not matter where we start, because what’s going to happen is that the person’s going to bring up a story.

I’m going to try to get them to bring up a story. So within the clothing thing, there was someone who was a model. And taking care of clothing is important to that person.

And they told me, I don’t remember how we started, but one of the things was, when they get a job, they’re looking at what the requirements are of the job. And then they know exactly what they’re going to grab. They have organized their clothing in a way that is, in reaction to the types of job descriptions that they get for the modeling gigs.

Right. And that’s not true of this other person who was a widow, his wife had passed away.

He still wants to appear neat and pressed. He doesn’t want to give up, because there’s that big, deep black hole when your partner has died and he doesn’t want to fall his way of not falling into the big, deep black hole is with his clothing.

Right.

And so we’re getting all these stories. When we get these stories, what we’re interested in is two things. Well actually a lot of things, but one of them is let’s make sure that we’re building trust with this person because the person’s not going to just go out and tell you their inner thoughts if they’re not sure who they’re talking to.

Right. This is why a listening session has to be one-on-one. It can’t be multiple people because you guard yourself.

Maybe subconsciously, you’re just not going to talk about certain things. Right. And I don’t want people to talk about stuff that they would never tell anyone, but I do want them to talk about their inner thinking, their emotional reactions and their personal rules.

And I want us to sense. So this is the other thing we’re doing. When people are just explaining to us how they do them things, how the necklaces are organized on the racks going down her hallway, part of her clothing.

Right. But why? Right. I want to understand what’s underneath that. Well, they might get an opinion. They might tell me because this is better. But why? I don’t want to stick with just the opinion.

Where did that come from? When you first started doing it, do you remember what was going through your mind? And it was oh yeah, it was that day when I was at my friend’s apartment and she was trying to get ready to go out. We were going out and she couldn’t find the necklace that she wanted or, whatever. Right.

And I’m I never want to make anyone late, including myself. We were late to the concert. I never want to make any, so I have to organize this so that I don’t meet people late.

Right. So my personal rule then got formed. Well, maybe the personal rule was I don’t like being late, but that thinking of making my necklaces all organized as a part of that personal rule of I don’t want to ever be late.

Maybe it was related. Maybe it wasn’t. I’m making up this example because I’m not going to tell you people’s actual thinking.

The, the, the, what happens outside of this is important. After we look for patterns and this is important and I want to touch on this, maybe again later, but we’re not just looking at one person’s story and then surfacing that story, that story, meaning that inner thought, that trip back in memory. We were in the apartment.

My friend couldn’t find her necklace. We were going to be late. Right.

It gets rolled up with other people’s stories where they have the same focus of mental attention. So it might not be about necklaces.

Necklaces are nouns. It might not be about feeling in a rush, but it might be, or it might not be about a personal rule of not being late, but it might be. These little things are focuses of mental attention.

So when we analyze the data, what we’re doing is we’re using an affinity technique of what is the person focused on in that moment? What is the bigger thing? Yeah, they’re trying to find the necklace. What else were they focused on? They were focused on trying to get the concert before the gates shut or something, or maybe meeting friends in front of the Coliseum or wherever they’re going.

And letting that friend down or thinking about how the last time they went out with that friend and they were late, the friend said, okay, you get one more shot and then I’m not going to concerts with you again. They might’ve been thinking all of that, but we’re doing focus of mental attention.

And the focus of mental attention is what shows up as those towers in the skyline. Those towers contain the stories. The stories might be totally different.

I have a study that I’ve been doing for many years about what went through your mind as you experienced a near miss incident. And those incidents are all varied.

And what kind of, I’m curious, how do you, what kinds of questions you, I mean, you’ve written about listening and listening deeply. What have you learned? And what do you teach about how to help people tell these stories or uncover these stories?

So the things, and I teach, we’ve, I’ve got a course and I’ve got a book and I’ve been teaching at various levels throughout the career specifically began with just people who wanted to have a job and work with me. And so I teach one off and so I’ve just gotten better and better and better at it. And part of what I’m teaching is when you try to form trust with someone, you do it by those little words, like, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Yeah. Your tone of voice, you do it by understanding how they speak and trying to not speak yourself in a very opposite way.

So if the person’s very quick, very fast, then you will have very fast questions. You wouldn’t be going, oh yeah. And having a space. You would do it their way.

I teach people some of the ideas to let go of your judgment. Well, we’re certainly letting go of whatever the client wants. I don’t care about the client.

I don’t care about their product. I care about this person, what they’re trying to get done. So you try to keep the product and the client out of the conversation.

But more than that, you try to keep your judgment out of it. So you might hear someone saying something that they believe that you’re like, oh no, you’re a little fringe on that.

That’s a judgment. You let go of it. You’re like, oh, totally.

I can see how. So you’re thinking around that, just be there, be there for them. You are not lying.

You are being there for them. Have you ever heard of Harleen? I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Have you ever heard of Harlene Anderson? Does that name ring a bell?

No.

I’m going to send you these links, but she was a therapist and I have some footage of her talking about training therapists. And one of the things she talks about, everything you’re saying reminds me is resonating with interesting. Yeah. But she talks about how you ask questions not to get answers, but as a way of participating in the conversation.

Yes. Exactly. Well, that’s actually a good segue because the other part of this is like, well, what do I ask? You go into this with no questions. A lot of people are like, that’s like asking you to cross a tight rope between two cliffs with no net. I’m going to freeze up.

How did you come to this? How did you come to this way of doing it?

That’s a harder question to answer. Let me answer the first question.

Write that one down, bookmark it. So the idea is to calm people down to say, there’s no cliff. You’re just with this person.

You’re trying to understand this person. All you’re trying to do is sense what layer of this jawbreaker. That’s the candy that I talk about.

What layer are we at? Are we at sort of this description layer explanation scene setting? That’s all going to happen. Don’t try, you’re not going to ask them not to talk about this. You need it.

But then are we getting, oh, here’s a preference. Can I ask, are they going to explain their preference? And here’s an opinion. Oh yeah.

They’re explaining where the opinion came from. Good. Once they start hearing the kinds of questions that you’re asking, they start expanding themselves.

They get into it. They start expanding. They also will, even if you mess up and you let a little accidental way of your talking into their conversation and they’re like, okay, oops, that’s broken.

You can recover because of all the rest of the questions. They’re like, okay, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. You can recover it in most cases.

People are enthralled by the feeling of feeling heard, of being listened to. It’s like nothing else. And so they’re willing to allow you a couple mistakes.

They’re not willing to allow you outright judgment. That’s the end of it. Turn it off.

But when you’re in it, there are types of questions that I teach people. There are types of questions for getting behind the preference and the opinion. But a lot of the time, there’s going to be some part of inner thinking that’s got more to it.

And I’ll say, they’ll say, so my wife used to hang the clothing out to dry on the lines and I’m a little reluctant to do that. And I’m like, because we live in San Francisco where it’s foggy a lot of the time. I’m not sure things are going to dry out.

And I’m like, well, what went through your mind the last time you were thinking about this? So there’s two types of questions there. There’s a because, a continue question. You could say and. I don’t say the word why very often.

Because works a lot better. It doesn’t interrupt.

The second one was what went through your mind? Just the last time. That’s another kind of question. So I’m teaching people kinds of questions. In the book, you can actually see the chapters on the edges from the bleed over.

And the chapter on the types of questions is the biggest part of the book. So yeah, there’s a bunch of different ways.

And what you’re doing is just sensing as you’re going. You’re sensing when they’re talked out on this one topic. You’re sensing when there’s another topic that they drop onto the table.

And the way I think about this is it’s a jawbreaker. A jawbreaker, that candy with the layers, is a topic. They drop it onto the table.

They might drop two more. And you’re not going to dive into each one of them right then. Because they’re in the middle of this other jawbreaker that they’re talking about.

And every jawbreaker has these layers. They’ll speak at every layer or most layers. Or maybe only the outer layer.

Maybe only the interior layer. The interior layers where the inner thinking, the emotional reactions. And the personal rules are.

There might only be one of those, not all three. So for each topic, all you’re trying to do is circle around to see if we can get them the center of that jawbreaker. And sense whether they’re done with that jawbreaker.

Or follow them when they drop another topic. And they jump to it. Follow them and maybe come back to this other jawbreaker.

That’s beautiful. I tell people, you’re not allowed to write notes. You’re recording this.

You need to focus on this person. You need to stay on top of what they’re saying. If you write notes, you’re focused on your notes.

So all you’re allowed is to write down a topic, a jawbreaker. That they might have dropped and not gone to. That you can jump into later.

I feel like I could talk to you for hours about this. There’s more I want to ask you. We’re kind of near the end of time. So I want to end with a provocative question that stumped me. And it’s, so somebody had invited me to answer the question.

What would you say to a CMO or a senior leadership? Why invest in face-to-face qualitative when in this age of synthetic users and synthetic panels? What do you tell them? What makes it worthwhile?

The all the synthetic stuff is designed around the way people are using a product. It is designed. Sure. It’s getting qualitative, but it’s not designed to pick out cognition. It’s not designed to emphasize cognition.

It’s not designed to see that wild variety of the way people think. So the thing that comes out of this, there’s the skylines that I talked about with the towers and the stories inside. There’s also thinking styles.

And thinking styles are key to convincing the organization that it’s worthwhile to support thinking styles other than what they usually support. So normally an organization will say, oh, we’ve got personas. The personas are basically the roles people play. So we’ve got a product for this persona here.

This persona does such and such a role. And the role is actually the purpose. The role is the goal.

Within that goal, there’s going to be two, three, four thinking styles. And your solution is supporting either an ugly amalgamation of them, an average of them, or one specific kind that’s the kind that’s most prevalent at the way the people think in the organization that’s making the solution.

What’s an example of a thinking style?

Okay. So for the washing machine, there was a thinking style around appear well-dressed. Stains.

Oh, my God. Stains. Some people wanted, they had certain styles, different styles of clothing. Some buttoned down and everything.

Some of them really lovely, stretchy, slouchy things, but they were designed. They were very styly. Style doesn’t matter.

But keeping that style as good as it was when it was in the store, when you discovered it and fell in love with it, or as good as it was when you were a younger person wearing that same clothing, preserve the style, preservationist, that kind of a thing.

Okay. There’s another thinking style around it’ll be fine.

Clothing is going to cover me and I will be good. Maybe I’ll wear the color shirt that I need to wear for work. Just make sure there’s no stains.

Okay. Stains are a universal. There’s another one that’s a separationist. I don’t want cross-contamination.

This came from several different places. One person working at a hospital in the emergency room. Another person had a baby.

They got a whole separate tiny washing machine for them for baby’s clothes that goes in the tub. And another person had kids that played a lot of soccer and went and played outdoors. And she didn’t want that clothing in with the kitchen towels, drying the dishes. Separationist.

So now your washing machine. You’ve got your washing machine. It’s got the panel. Right now the washing machine is designed to surface how the mechanics work.

You want hot water or cold water? You want it to spin fast or slow? Has nothing to do with those thinking styles. So you could make it work for one of the thinking styles. But what? When you sell the thing in the beautiful ideal future, you sell the thing.

You walk in, whether you’re going to buy it in person or online, and you’re going to talk about how I like my clothing to be in my world. How do I take care of clothing? And then I’m going to select the washing machine that does that. Behind the scenes, it can be the same dang washing machine.

Just has a different software that runs on the panel that talks about what you’re trying to get out of it. And so if you sell that washing machine or sell that house and someone else comes in, they can press a button and pick out their thinking style. And the front end changes.

It’s beautiful. I mean, in my own relationship with my washing machine indicates that those washing machine companies need your help.

There’s a significant language barrier and thinking style barrier between myself and those manufacturers.

Again, I really appreciate you accepting my invitation and sharing your time with me.

I could talk to you for another hour about all the work that you’ve shared and the wisdom that you’ve shared with all of us. I just thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you, Peter. This was a lovely conversation.

Brand

Above, Bill Chidley on McKinsey and brand. Also, Erich Joachimsthaler on growth. And, Matt Arnold on shared meaning

Mirror

Above, Jonathan Boymal on digital selves. Also, Joel Anderson on digital twins. And, David Caswell on machine audiences.

Sovereign

Above, me on sovereignty. Also, Sally Augustin PhD on speaking and being. And, Eric Druckenmiller on taste.

Anti-Social

Above, Derek Thompson on meaning. Also, Megan Marz on the return to orality. And, Ingrid Enriquez-Donissaint on social intelligence.

Design

Above, Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on Socratic design. Also, Dolphia Arnstein on design’s craft crisis. And, Daniel Miller on flat design.

Annie Auerbach & Adam Chmielowski are co-founders of Starling Strategy, a cultural insight and futures consultancy now in its tenth year. They help brands step outside category conventions by mapping the cultural and historical forces that shape how people feel and why.

Annie is a trained historian, journalist, and author of several books including a forthcoming one on collaboration. Adam is a trained historian with a background in international qualitative research. Both previously worked at Flamingo, where they created the Cultural Intelligence unit before founding Starling in 2015.

Their pro bono project The Rift is amazing:

The Rift One: Understanding the growing divide between men and women.
The Rift Two: Living in a culture of futurelessness.

Mentioned in the conversation is
> Richard Huntington “The Mediocrity of Middle Distance in the Insight”
> Ella Saltmarshe on Sociological Stories

So, as you likely know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine, who is also a neighbor, who helps people tell their stories. And I use it because it’s a big question, but because it’s so big, I over explain it before I ask. And I’m going to ask each of you to answer this in turn. And then I’m curious to hear what Starling, your partnership, how that would answer the question too. But the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And Annie, I’ll start with you.

Annie: Okay, so there’s probably two ways to think about where I come from. The first one is family and heritage. And so my dad’s grandfather came over from Austria to London in about the 1900s, 1910s, and immediately set up shop in the East End of London, in Jewish community, and he was in the schmutter business or he made clothes.

And so my heritage comes on my dad’s side, from this immigrant background and making your way in the world. And big, strong communities, lots of family dinners and jokes. And this core of working hard and trying to better yourself.

And a slightly outsider’s perspective, I think, as well, which I think I have in common with Adam, and I think very much tries to inform our work. So that’s one side, which is this heritage point. And then the second one is academics and where I’ve come from educationally.

And it’s another thing that Adam and I have in common, but we both studied history. And so trained historians and thinking about the past and trajectories, and then I became a journalist, I became a writer. And so very much thinking about what moment are we in, it was a features journalist, I was always thinking about the moment we’re in the present.

And now, of course, Adam and I do cultural futures. So it’s this past, present, future vibe that’s gone with my education and career trajectory.

What was the business, the word that you said for your family?

Oh, the schmutter business.

Yeah, what is the schmutter business?

Clothes, can’t you tell?

I don’t, that’s not a, that’s a, what is that? That’s not a word I’ve heard before.

It’s Yiddish. And it just means in the clothes business. Yeah.

Beautiful. Adam.

Adam: Well, in echoes of what Annie just talked you through, I can’t pull all the strings or the threads together in such a neat way that says something about how we think and what we do. But maybe they’ll come out as I speak. The older I get, where I come from, gets further back in the past.

So most prosaically and more immediately, I come from a really boring, and when I say boring, I mean, the archetypically boring suburb, south of London in the county called Surrey. Nothing happens there. And it’s a place called Carshalton. I’m hoping I’m the only person from Carshalton that’s probably ever been on a podcast at all.

And it’s the sort of place that has a wool shop. It had a wool shop when I was there 40 odd years ago. It’s still got a wool shop there, amazingly.

And I’ve got no idea who buys the stuff from there. It’s probably surrounded by more chain coffee shops now. But it’s still pretty much the same.

And it has that eerie familiarity whenever I go back there. Anyway, that’s the boring British or English, very middle class suburbia is where I’m from, on one level. Further back, but not that further back.

So my parents were Polish. And they escaped Poland. Well, I say escaped, they were forced out of Poland during the war, the World War Two.

So my dad was, his story was, he was ushered out. Ushered is such a light, ushered, please, sir, could you please leave your dwelling and come to us to our gulag? But that’s effectively what happened.

So the Russians came to their door and told them to leave. They had an hour to leave their home, which I never saw again. So him and his two sisters, and their mother, their father, my great grandfather was, sorry, my grandfather was fighting in the war.

So they were taken to Siberia. And eventually, I won’t tell you the story because it will take the whole hour. They found their way via India to London in around 1947, I think, eventually got there.

And my mother, she was forced out by the Nazis. Same story, different enemy. She, through use of fake passports, got to the UK and also London, different part, to my dad, they met.

And then they lived the English middle-class suburban dream. And many immigrants, assimilated into that world seamlessly at the time. And yeah, a few decades later, which sounds a long time, but honestly, it boggles my mind that it’s only what, three decades after that I was born in that really, really boring place called Carshalton.

And actually, that’s where I’m from. And that whole story, I keep wishing to know it a bit more. Because as I say, the older I get, the more interested I am in it.

It’s probably something to do with wanting my kids to understand it more. And historically, we’re just in a time of forgetting that period. And that has its consequences.

So yeah, sorry, slightly long winded. I don’t have any connection to what we do. Maybe we’ll get there at the end of this.

I don’t know. But that’s, yeah. So we talk about being ancestors of immigrants quite a lot, actually, funnily enough. It might be part of our connection of what we’re doing and why we’re still doing it.

That’s so interesting. Yeah, well, then the next question, the third party in the conversation is Starling is your partnership. So where does your partnership come from?

Annie: So we met, funnily enough, we both studied history at the same time at the same place, but never met each other. But we met each other in an agency called Flamingo, which was an international qualitative research agency. And Adam and I found each other.

And we set up a wing of Flamingo, which was called Cultural Intelligence. So specifically around sociocultural trends and futures. And we did that together and we worked really well together.

And then I badgered Adam to leave and set up Starling and eventually he agreed. But yes, we chose the name Starling quite specifically, didn’t we?

Adam: Yeah, well, you said it’s because you were living in Brighton.

Annie: Yeah, so I used to live in Brighton and there’s beautiful murmurations that happen, Starling murmurations that happen over the pier at dusk. And when Adam and I were talking about culture, it just felt like a really good metaphor in the sense that obviously you have these very dynamic choreographed movements of birds all happening at once. It’s incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring.

So something about culture moving constantly, but also the more we learn about murmurations, the reason for the movement happens because of threats and opportunity of the birds at the edges. So they might see a predator or they might see a food source or a place to rest and they can create these critical transitions of movements to push the entire flock of birds towards or away from something.

We think that’s really interesting when you’re thinking about people and how change happens and how change often comes from the margins and how intersected it is. So that’s why we loved the metaphor.

That’s so powerful. I feel like I had just listening to you describe it, that what it must be like to be a Starling in one of those murmurations. You’re so attuned to all the Starlings around you and somehow turning into something really moving, something that big, so beautiful. So there’s one question that we, so what did you want to be when you were a kid? Do you remember as a child what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Adam: Oh my God. I really don’t, I genuinely don’t, but that just could be a result of a bad memory. Honestly, because I graduated from university and I still didn’t know and I had the luxury, frankly, and again, this paints a picture of a very different time.

This is what, late nineties, that I didn’t feel like I felt like I had time to work out what I wanted to do. And as a lot of people who do this sort of work, I think stumbled into doing research and strategy type work. And that was based a lot around traveling a lot.

And I also had a language, German, which got me into doing that. But honestly, I really didn’t think ahead. And it was a bit of a privilege and luxury because, you know, we’ve been doing some work around how young people look at the future now.

And I looked, I saw it as something that was just going to offer me some possibilities and opportunities, honestly. And partly that was through, you know, my education and that’s what is instilled or was instilled in you, you know, for better or worse. So honestly, no, I don’t have an answer for you what I want to speak when I grew up.

Annie: I wanted to be a vet.

Is that right?

Annie: Yes. I really loved animals. And I think that there was something quite, I don’t know, unadventurous or unimaginative that if you loved animals, you had to be a vet. You couldn’t just get a dog. But now I have two dogs and I’m not a vet. So it’s worked out really well.

Yes. And so tell us now, where are you and what’s the work that you guys do?

Adam: So where are the, where is the, where are you as an existential is your first question? Was that literally where I was?

Annie: In London.

Adam: In London. Yeah. So, okay. More tangibly. We are, so we’re 10 years in, specifically, we are, this is our 10th. We’re completing our 10th year as Starling in May, which is a real landmark.

Congratulations.

Adam: We think. And we haven’t fallen out and…

Annie: Not once.

Adam: Not once. And we’ve, you know, we’ve stayed Starling as the two of us. Everyone asks about growth or assumes growth comes from head count and all the usual metrics of what a growing business does. But I think we’ve managed to evolve and keep interested in each other and the way we think and work, but as much also in the work that we do for clients.

It’s always been cultural insight, futures, Annie talked about her background in journalism and she also writes books, I’m sure, and she can talk to you about that as well. But a big part of what we do is trying to articulate and write well in ways that move people. But back to the murmurations, I don’t claim that we are writing and our outputs quite have the same emotional effect as they do, but we’re really big believers in the idea that the ideas that we try and convey should make people feel something, not just cognitively, but genuinely feel excited and want to do something with them.

It’s harder as we do it through screens, right, I suppose. So that’s the work we do, and we can maybe talk about some examples, but yeah, it’s the, I don’t know if it’s grey areas, but I wouldn’t say we’re just one or the other, you know, Annie said we started in this, we created a unit called Culture Intelligence, which was essentially about in a qualitative group. And we were just interested, both of us, just in the forces that sit around people and between people that we don’t typically spend enough time thinking about.

And I mean that societally, as well as in the industry or brands. And we were just fascinated by that, really, of all the different ways in which culture operates.

How do you talk about what culture is? Sorry to interrupt you this, I’m getting excited about it. I always tell this story, poor Grant McCracken, he wrote that book, Chief Culture Officer, and I always reference him talking about that the chief culture officer for him meant you have to let the culture in, in order to breathe it out.

And he had this really beautiful idea. But he said that the whole corporate sort of world, just when they see the word culture, they think of themselves, they think of internal culture. There’s a narcissism inherent. And so how do you, number one, how do you define culture? And how do you get people to care about it?

Annie: Yeah, so there’s the culture in here, and then there’s the culture out there, right? So one of the most interesting ways that you’ve talked about it is around sociological stories, rather than psychological stories. I really like that.

Adam: Yeah, because you know, what I was thinking, I was trying to remember who it was, I came across that distinction. And typically, the media, or most stories that you’ll see out there are psychological stories, they have interviews with individuals, they’ll tell that story for connection and intimacy, and empathy, you know. But what that tends to miss out, and I always found this really interesting is the ability to tell a sociological story, which talks about all the power dynamics around people, or all the contexts and trends and influences that surround them.

And actually, it’s those stories, and I think they’ll talk about this in a environmental context, those stories are the ones that tend to affect social and cultural change. So they might be harder to tell, and there might be less frequent in terms of how we’re exposed to, but there is another way. And we just, we just seem to obviously, there’s enough people that are interested in us telling those stories.

Back to your original question about how we define culture, I reckon sometimes we don’t, we don’t define it too much, we don’t have a one liner, in all honesty, your Anadolu Grant, who is brilliant, I know Grant, and even if someone as clever and smart as Grant cannot, can have a go at it through a book, and it might not necessarily work with all people, it just shows you how hard it can be.

The space between people, I always come back to a very simple thing, which is thinking about the spaces between people, which can be filled with stories, literal, physical geography, and the spaces, structures, the material stuff, that to me is where we’re talking, typically, and filling in lots of gaps.

Annie: And I always think about it as the deeper why behind some of the things that we can observe. So in quality ethnography, you can get really close to understanding what people are doing, and how they’re talking about it. And sometimes you need that bird’s eye view, or that historical trajectory, to step back and understand those connections and systems that are swirling around people to understand why they feel the way they do, which is a bit of unlock sometimes with our clients as well. Because we can get to some deep attentions that then can help them understand how they can be helpful as brands and move things forward.

Adam: It makes me think of one thing, Ella Saltmarsh was the woman I was thinking about, sociological stories. Anyway, sorry, what you just said reminds me of one of the best things I read about insight. I bet you’re probably familiar with by Richard Huntington, the strategist in the UK.

And he talked about, he was talking about how too much insight lives in the middle distance, which is neither proximate and close and intimate and truly empathetic, either very up close stuff, which qual and other research methods are great at or good qual.

And then at the other end of the spectrum, I don’t know if you call it perspective, but I always remember the phrase, understanding the turns of culture, and just really understanding that landscape that people are embedded in and surrounded by. And I guess we operate at that end of things, often working with the proximity on a project or with the client clearly will be doing lots of good work on that end.

So yeah, I remember that piece. I will include a link to it as well. When did you first discover each of you that you could make a living doing this thing?

Annie: That’s a really good question. I was a journalist. And I ended up being the editor of a teenage girls website. And this is showing my age, but it was pre-Facebook. And this was a community of teenage girls who, and I’d only worked on magazines before. So there’d be a monthly postbag with 10 letters in it.

And with this teenage girls website, we were getting hundreds of emails every single day. And I was suddenly immersed very deeply in their problems and their hopes and their dreams. And I really wanted to, I was writing for them, but I wanted to write about them.

And that’s when I realized that research was a thing. Because it’s not like you grow up and go, hey, I want to be a market researcher when I’m older. Or maybe you do.

But so I realized research was a thing. And then more when Adam and I met each other and started talking about ideally what we were bored by and what we wanted to elevate to, I think we realized that there is a space for being able to bring a specific cultural and future lens to something, which at the time, there wasn’t much of was there? I don’t think anyone was really cultural intelligence. I know, it’s such an overused term. I don’t think anyone was really talking about it then. Not much. Which was how many years ago, probably 20, 15 years ago.

Adam: Yeah, that’s at least 15 years. So it’s five years, we’re running that unit within Flamingo. And there would be more, typically, you’d have a semiotic, there was a semiotic group, but we weren’t semioticians. Yeah, we’re interested in other aspects of how societies work, organise, change, other aspects that felt complementary to that.

Annie: Did we have a client who suddenly was like, yes, this is the thing. And I’m trying to think of them as that moment of definitely when we left and started Starling, we had a foundational client who was like, absolutely, we want this thinking. And we’re like, okay, I think this is going to work, touch wood.

And what do you love about the work for each of you? Where’s the joy in it of all the different pieces of the thing? Where’s the joy in it for each of you in the work that you do?

Adam: There’s loads of joys. I mean, honestly, mostly working with Annie. I’m not just saying that, because, through work, I mean, there’s loads of ambitions or goals you might have through work, finding your people is, for me, probably the biggest one, as long as everything else is equal, and you’re earning a living and all the rest of it.

The most important thing is that you’ve got someone who you can, not just, sorry, go on.

Annie: I was going to say riff with, get to a better place.

Adam: Yeah. And also just all the other things that, support each other and know that we’re in this together and feel supported and feel safe in voicing our ideas. Someone said to us the other day, it’s a vulnerable thing to do our job, any insight person, I think, but to pitch your ideas constantly to people, often through a screen.

And you’re putting yourself out there. There’s a bit of a myth, I think, about insight being some objective practice. I don’t, I’m not entirely sure I buy into that entirely, because you can say anything, and you’re effectively trying to marshal an argument and put it out there.

And it’s got a lot of you in it. So it’s never really quite that. It’s got a lot of us in it, I should say. And having Annie next to me to do that is everything, really. I think so. And so that’s the people side of it. Honestly, that’s the biggest answer to your question.

Annie: I like the alchemy of an idea coming together. So I find that super exciting when we’re throwing and by the way, by the way, I’m writing a book about collaboration. And I think I wouldn’t necessarily have written that book if I hadn’t had such a great collaboration with Adam for so many years.

But it’s the there’s something around sharing half formed ideas. And we’ll WhatsApp them to each other, we’ll talk about it when we’re walking from A to B, we’ll write something down, we’ll have this way of doing it, where we write 10 things down in the email, and then swap 10 things. And often, three of them will be pretty much the same.

And then the others will push our thinking. And there’s something about the growth of getting towards to a really hopefully great, creative, and interesting, and different, genuinely different, because we’ve seen so much of the same. So high standards, is this interesting?

Is this different? And I think there’s something very cool about that. And our clients have clustered us with some really interesting, high level, difficult questions, haven’t they?

Yeah, so we get, go ahead. No, I was going to ask what’s an example of the kinds of questions that come to you, I want to talk about Rift, but I’m curious to, and I know that came out of you guys, but I’m curious, what are the problems that clients come to you?

Adam: So there’s two answers to that. One is, the problems are everyday business and brand problems. So there’s a new positioning, and they want to make sure it’s really future facing and plugged into culture, or it might be a comms campaign that they want to ensure it feels like it’s going to be nourished, or feel of a piece with the broader cultural stories out there, not just category stories.

So whether it be positioning stuff, comms, innovation, thinking about how to re, how to think about how they could push a category, all those are the questions, or where it goes to. But what’s probably more interesting is the topics or the questions, and they’re often one worders, honestly, there’ll be a one word brief, which is around tell us about joy, tell us about the outdoors, because these are the outside in questions, if you like, that will help get away from the norms of the category, and just reframe it and just take it in a different direction, or brand, these might be brand equities that they’re trying to say something fresh in.

Can you say more about the need to escape the category conventions and the role that even just the framing of the exploration plays just to be really explicit about how important that is and what that does for a brand?

Adam: Yeah, I think some of it comes from a lot of the brands we work for are big businesses, big global brands who do a ton of research, and their competitors will do a ton of research. And these waters are potentially overfished. I know I mixed my metaphors now.

Because you ask enough people enough of the same questions, you’re going to get to the same answers and the same responses in terms of what the brands end up saying. And there needs to be a deliberate reframing of that or making the familiar feel a bit strange as the academic speak, which just helped people imagine what they can do differently. One of our favorite clients, one of our favorite quotes that they gave us, in terms of what they felt, and they allowed them to do was to imagine new possibilities.

So they didn’t say that gave us better insights or deeper truths, or understand culture, but all those things that people do say and they’re great. But it was this imagining new possibilities. And it’s this idea that you have to deliberately step out of the conventional way of seeing something to find new language for something to have an alternative references to say don’t compare yourself to other Chris brands or sneakers or whatever, but to other cultural products or movements or ideas.

And so that’s the thinking that we bring that people find valuable. What would you add to that?

Annie: Hey, so that’s the business answer. There’s another answer, which is, people sometimes have said the nicest thing to us, clients have sometimes said the nicest things to us, which is, this was the best thing in my day, or, this has inspired me to do. And I think there’s something about bringing fresh thinking and challenging ourselves very hard before we get to that moment where we share it with clients, that allows for a quite expansive meeting.

And even if it’s happening over zoom, and it’s electronic or whatever, you are bringing unusual references, you’re colliding, you’re deliberately colliding high and low culture together, you are looking in strange places. So for example, in my collaboration book, I’m looking at how people collaborate in the world of accident and emergency, in the world of polyamory, in the world of writers rooms in America, and how you develop, so looking in strange extreme places in order to bring different fresh thinking that hopefully opens up possibilities opens up minds, gives them something to talk about, not only within the business, but also is it something that they might go home and chat about? Maybe?

I don’t know. But this is the aspiration for us. And yeah, that’s what I would say.

Yeah. And what are your practices? Because it feels like you’re pointing at there’s some practices, there’s some layer of stress testing around the ideas that you have to make sure. And I’ve done a bunch of these interviews, and the best people I talked to, they have this final analysis of is this actually something? Is this something that the client’s ever known before? So I’m just curious, what is your practice for making sure the thing that you have is something that is actually going to have an impact? And what’s that process like for you guys?

Annie: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think the big, what we really love at the beginning is that they’re boringly called stakeholder interviews, but actually, what they are is conversations in order to understand where people’s heads are at. And I think the language that they use are clues to existing ways of thinking, existing models, existing familiar stuff to them. So if they overuse a phrase, or if they overuse particular words to describe something that’s really helpful to understand of where they’re at, and also understanding what they’re frustrated by and where they need to get to. So that bit at the beginning is this incredible map of what’s known and what’s not known and where there’s frustrations and appetites.

And then the whole thing is a stress test between us, Adam often says, he’ll say something. And if I’m shrug, then he’s okay, no to that. And the same goes, if there’s no electricity, if there’s no movement, if there’s no, that’s the thing.

And sometimes as well, I feel like Adam will say something, and it just is absolutely the thing. It’s that is the thing in all of this, that is the thing. And so there is that constant to and fro of what lands, what doesn’t, and what feels like it’s got some heat behind it.

Adam: Yeah, you were talking earlier about whether it has a pulse, which I quite like the language of. Does it make you feel something? Does it feel alive with something?

And these are all hard to describe, really, they’re a bit ineffable. But we’ve worked long enough together to have a bit of shorthand to feel that in different ways. And we’re equally humble enough to go, okay, I thought it was the best idea I’ve ever had. Right, we’ll move on now. The other thing is, we’re talking about the two of us, the clients we’re working with will give us a very strong steer in the sense of, so we’ll, the way we work in terms of practices, an awful lot of Google Docs. And so before we get to any formal situation and presentation, we’ll be riffing through Google Docs, improvising, maybe you might call it, as we go, and invite them in to participate in that.

And honestly, one of the most, for me, useful exercises is go, well, before we write the final thing, let’s just work out where we’ve engaged their minds. Because that’s going to be our best guide to work out, you could tell a million stories here, usually, with these big questions, what is joy? What is the outdoors?

I mean, where do you want to take that? But we’ve, you’ve got to be, it’s a collaborative exercise in the sense, I always talk about ideas emerge between people. And ideally, that’s, there’s a third part to the two of us, which is the client team or person.

And I was listening to Adam Morgan do his podcast series on interestingness, which we use the word interesting a lot, when I genuinely mean excitement, for most people, interesting sounds like a euphemism for boring. Genuinely, it’s most things are not interesting, right? So I liked his series.

And one of the things he said was, most interesting ideas are ones that people feel invited into, and that they can participate in. And I’m such a big believer in that in terms of effective work. Because, look, you can say, you can assert the most interesting story at someone, they’re not feeling it for whatever reason, or the timing is wrong.

Or they happen to be talking about something entirely different, and they quite like it. But there’s so many reasons why it won’t work.

So I love that word invitation to it’s such a, it’s so true, but it’s also so complicated, the idea of what makes something inviting, or what has what kinds of things have an invitation for some people. But I love that language described to describe it. So we I want to be respectful of time.

And there’s two, there’s one question I want to ask before, and I’m really excited to hear about the rift, this project that you’ve been doing. But I wanted to ask about the role of qualitative, I’m always interested in how people learn, and the role that qualitative plays and how it’s changed. So what, how, what is the proper role of qualitative? And how do you use it to find that thing that has a pulse that has invitation?

Adam: So one answer is, so we most most of and I’d say what 98% of our work doesn’t have a qualitative component in the sense of, I mean, you could call us work qualitative, in the broader sense. But typically, we don’t speak to in a commission primary work with consumers.

Having said that, we did on our recent Rift work around young people’s relationship, failing relationship with the future. And obviously, that brought to life those intimate bits of language that really helped land our story and get people engaged. Our work with clients will often be woven together with qualitative, and usually deliberately not qualitative.

So this is the hence the complicated answer to your simple question. But ultimately, they’re going to have to tell a story internally. And usually, I think, increasingly, now it has to be one story, people don’t have the appetite for time or budgets, potentially to do all those complicated things and leave leave it unwoven together.

So we work as hard as we can to understand what’s there on the table and how we tell a story that sits alongside it. But I mean, what else would you say about qualitative, Annie?

Annie: Well, just that we’re very, we’re interweaved with it. And we’re very adjacent to it. And yeah, I think it’s a really good complementary methodology for what we do.

We might put a story in a longer time trajectory, past, present, future, and qual might tell brilliantly the story of and make people feel deeply the story of the present, perhaps. And so I think that’s how I can work together at its best.

Adam: I mean, I think it’s actually probably quite rare. So Grant McCracken, he’s a great cultural thinker, he does a lot of deep ethnographic work. And he’s an anthropologist.

Doug Holt, similarly, he’s got loads of worlds that collide together that make his work brilliant. And but equally does a lot of deep interviewing. I think it’s actually quite rare for people to be doing cultural work, which, for loads of reasons doesn’t do that.

Because frankly, there’s enough to be exploring that sits around people and all the other, the history side of things. A lot of our work will have a story, part of the story, part of the argument, which is looking back in time to tell a historical arc of where have we been? Where are we now?

Where might we go to? And again, just to have the resources and time to reflect and do all that analysis. Yeah, it just means that’s where we spend our time.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but you're in the business of sociological stories — structural stories. Which is fantastic. So I'm curious: what does qualitative research actually bring to those stories? When does it show up, and what does it do when it gets there?

Annie: No, no, I think it’s this kind of, it can be an emotional gut punch. And so we can tell a story, which is this intersecting forces that surrounds this emotion at the beginning in the middle. And if somebody is looking into your eyes and telling you how you feel, and this is exactly what happened on the roof, to be honest, there was one very poignant quote, which was almost from a young guy in the UK, which almost got to the absolute heart of why we wanted to look at this particular topic.

And the way he phrased it, we told our story around it. But that was something I think that people will go home with and feel deeply, because, and what he said, by the way, was, we asked a question, how do you feel about the future? Because our topic of the rift this time around, we’ve done two, this is rift two, and it was the rift between young people and their futures.

And he said, when I was younger, he’s only 23. When I was younger, I grew up and I imagined this amazing utopian future of flying cars and diversity and everything at our fingertips. And now what I feel now, the word is dystopian.

And I’m just trying to live through that. And I think that way of phrasing things was okay, well, we need to work hard here, because this is just not good enough. To leave young people with that sentiment about how they feel about progress, ambition, the future, it’s not good enough, we need to help. So that’s what really spurred us to do this project.

Yeah, what was the origin of The Rift? You said, there’s two, there’s two phases. The first was on gender, right? And the futurelessness is the first time I encountered that word. And I’m not, it’s just so sad. So what’s the origin of the project? Where did it come from? And what did you discover?

Annie: So The Rift is a pro bono project that Adam and I do in collaboration with other agencies, including Tapestry, which is one agency. And we wanted to put some energy and time into the big questions and sociological stories that we felt were being neglected or untold. And we started doing The Rift One, which was the rift between young men and young women. And back in it would have been 2024.

And so we’d seen various signals around voting patterns, and young women and young women, young men voting very differently, young men towards the right, young women towards the left globally. And we wanted to understand what was happening ideologically and culturally to get to this situation, because we knew that this was an anomaly. And this wasn’t normally how young people behave politically.

And we did our work. And we launched the project in 2025, in February on Valentine’s Day. And a month or so later, Adolescence came out on Netflix.

And it felt suddenly there was a topic here that was something that we’d obviously researched quite deeply, but then it was propelled into mainstream media, and suddenly was a very big topic on the cultural conversation. And the same, I think, is true of the rift too.

So this time, the signals that we were picking up were a bit more existential, in the sense of, you used the word futurelessness, that’s how we described it, a culture of futurelessness that young people were living through, whether that be deep existential anxiety about the impact of AI, whether that be the job apocalypse, and the lack of faith in education to propel you into a career, whether that be a broken social contract, whereby the things that your parents’ generation could achieve are now out of reach for you. And we’ve always looked to young people as a counterculture, a sense of energy and innovation and critique, and rebellion and to move society onwards.

And if that is being drained away in terms of energy, power, resource and belief, it’s profoundly difficult, not only for them, but for all of us. And so that’s why we landed on that topic. We have a friend in common with you, Preeti Varma, and she conducted the rift interviews in the US and the UK.

And that’s where that amazing quote came from, that was super powerful, testament to her brilliant interviewing skills as well. So yeah, that’s the background to it all.

Adam: And all of that, I actually can’t remember whether we had a moment where we go, okay, this is all about the future, or futurelessness. There may have been that moment, one of us would have said it or... But to use them back to that murmuration image, I think it was all those things that Annie just described and more, just were swirling.

And through some form of whatever, created a pattern, all these things that pointed to, I think, the rift, thinking through this language of rifts and ruptures, is it with the future? And then the more we thought about that, and the word the future seemed to be discussed, not necessarily in the public consciousness or popular culture, but just places that you’d see online or the things we read and the things we’re into, just discussions of the future, what is the future? How do people think about the future?

How did they used to think about the future? And all these built together to go, yeah, that’s it. And let’s do it. And then Tapestry, as Annie mentioned, did a lovely piece of research into it, asked loads of different questions and ways in on getting people to talk about their future, as opposed to the future or the nation’s future and pulling that apart a bit in ways that fast forward to where we are now, I think people have found it is totally sad, and it is depressing.

But there’s been a resonance in what we’ve named with this idea of this concept of culture of futurelessness, which paints a picture again, back to what we do, of the reasons that people may be feeling in a certain thing, that it’s not because of some failing in them, or some anti aspiration or vibe that’s going on with young people these days. It’s a structural, systemic, historical, environmental, economic, technological, total system breakdown. And that’s a hard story to tell.

Annie: No one, it should be liberating for individuals, because they think it’s not my fault. It is liberating for Yeah.

What did you actually discover? And now that you have it — what can be done, and how is it being received? And I just want to say — it’s powerful that you’re applying these tools to social problems. I don’t know that it happens enough. We’re lucky to have people doing this work.

Annie: And so what we did with The Rift One around young men and young women is we identified why we felt this had arisen. And it was to do with the geographical and online spaces that they were occupying and the erosion of third spaces and the rise of pro-solitude culture and the echo chambers that exist online and that have segregated young people to live completely different worldviews.

Did you say pro-solitude? That’s beautiful.

Annie: Yeah, basically, I think a culture which has arisen, which has deified a very solo existence, whether that be routines and rituals and get ready with me and presenting the home as a retreat from a scary space out there. These are very good reasons we were living through COVID. And so a lot of this happened during that period, the rise of boundary culture, I don’t, I want to make sure I have strong boundaries.

And so my, I’m not being trauma dumped on by my friends, etc, etc. All of this stuff became common parlance, but that also allowed for silos to remain. And that was one thing that you graph, the geography of spaces, the mood music was important.

Adam: Yeah, the zero sum we talked about zero sum culture and philosophies that surround young people, or all of us really in the West, but young people have grown up with so it becomes part of their makeup in some ways, and culture again, reinforces it. And that thread has continued in the current work, the thinking about the future, where both the pro solitude or individualized existence, and then you add zero sum, compete your way through life and into the future. That’s been one of the biggest themes I think people have picked up on, what is the problem we have with how we think about the future, and what we leave people to do, which is effectively DIY their way to the future or compete their way competitively to get there.

And that is not a healthy place for a society to be in or individuals, because there’s winners and losers in that battle, most losers. And so the outcome of both of those was conversations and discussions about how do we create those communal spaces or intergenerational connections to help young people or bridge those divides? How do we, on the gender side, how do we get women and men, boys and girls, just sharing the same space for a start, because so much of it is separated back to historical parallels, just now in the digital world.

So there’s a very simple need to mingle casually more. And we discussed what that might mean and how the brands get involved. So that communal and collective thread, honestly, it recurs in a lot of work and in I do. Back to the, are we objective? Is that an ideology? I don’t know. Maybe it is.

What would the ideology be?

Adam: Well, the ideology is the world doesn’t rest on an individual’s shoulders and can only be understood as a solo battle through life where you just make some choices and life seems to progress. That’s the world we’re in. And typically in lots of dimensions, it doesn’t go that well.

So maybe whatever the third Rift is, here’s my prediction. But there will be a dimension to say, well, I think we’re not the zero sum context or what would you call it? Mindset. We’ve seen it rear its head twice through this rift. It’s such a pernicious force in society that I’d love to work on that a bit more.

And how do you really counter that? Because that’s a big effort. That’s a big society wide effort.

The rift — that word. How did you choose it? Because I have my own experience here in Hudson, watching what social media has done to us — the fracturing, all of it. We're only now waking up to what we've done to ourselves. And then AI — I always say we're just pouring gasoline on a dumpster fire. We just keep finding new ways to alienate ourselves from each other. So how did you land on that name — the rift?

Annie: How did we come to the name?

Adam: Well, it felt a natural way to describe the gender divide or the cultural divide, the political divides that we were seeing. The rift, again, that’s a language, relationships, rifts in relationships. We launched on Valentine’s Day. So it made sense in a specific way to relationships between men and women.

Annie: But also, I think that the rift was a bigger idea. And it feels so much of what’s difficult for people today is to do with polarization, to do with a lack of a common future or collective future that we’re working towards, the sense of loneliness and atomization. If Adam says there’s an ideology in how we work, it would be to think about collective solutions rather than individualized responsibility. And it lands with people. People have rifts in their own families politically. They have rifts in their neighborhoods.

I think exactly what you’re saying. I’d love to hear what you think about the rift in AI, because I think the next rift we have to do will be about AI and humanity. But it is pouring petrol on it. Tell me what you mean by that.

Social media promised connection and delivered disconnection. It created pro-solitude — I love that word, I hadn’t heard it before. Now there’s aspiration around not connecting. And that’s going to be cumulative. AI feels the same way to me. Equally seductive, equally charismatic — promising intelligence, but really just intervening in moments you might have had with another human being. Another way of choosing solitude over connection.

And my experience in the States is that every response to new technology is the same: skill up, adapt, you’ll be fine. But we’re completely outmatched. What’s required now is a collective capacity that we’ve let atrophy. While pro-solitude culture was rising, all the muscles we had for coming together just — wasted away. Nobody has any embodied memory of what it means to gather as a community.

The bowling alone stuff, the fellowship organizations — those are stories we’ve heard, not things we’ve lived. The social infrastructure isn’t there at exactly the moment we need it most. And we’re doing it to ourselves. We’re just letting the technology do whatever it wants. And it’s devastating.

And I think we’re just in the reckoning with social media here in the States. And I imagine, I think this is playing out everywhere. And the awareness on AI broadly is so shallow. And the implications are, I feel are going to come fast and furious. And it’s going to be hurtful. It’s going to hurt.

Annie: Yeah. I agree with you. And I think the bowling, bowling alone, scrolling alone, and the way that we collaborate with AI is usually alone. So you produce work and you iterate, you prompt, you get suggestions, all of that stuff that Adam and I described at the beginning, which was starting a question being having a vulnerable idea, the magic when it would have that that’s not happening.

Because you’re creating something solo and polished, which doesn’t have cracks in it, which doesn’t have vulnerabilities, which doesn’t have unfinishedness to it, which that invitational world word you picked up on Peter, it doesn’t, it’s not an invitation, particularly to get, tell me, how does that land with you? What does it mean to you?

How do you feel it? And I feel, again, to your word atrophy, we’re just surrendering the stuff, which is the joy of work, of ideas of humanity, and we are surrendering that so that we become more atomized. And I worry about it a lot. There you go.

What's the story about the artist that falls in love with his statue? So I've had this experience — I'm playing around with Claude Code, trying to figure out how it can work, and I'm alienating myself and having the benefit of playing with this tool, and it's real play, and it's really exciting. But my experience is that when I feel I've done something pretty awesome and I go share that with another person, they have their own experience creating something magical, and my magical thing is not interesting to them. It doesn't cross the border in a way. It's a private thing that has no context for anybody else, and when I try to share it, it doesn't seem to land in the way — with the value that it seems to have when I'm with it on my own. Does that make any sense?

Annie: Yeah, it does, but why?

Because they have their own relationship with something else — they don't know, they weren't there for it. It's just something that happened somewhere else. I'm not entirely sure.

I can just see this — oh, that’s, yeah. What feels magical to me is only magical because it was generated in isolation, I think, and if you’re not there for the process — it’s funny that AI really does threaten the thing that you guys said you have created and that you really treasure, the space between two people in a partnership.

It seems absolutely the thing that AI threatens the most. That’s what Dave and Helen talk about — the intimacy economy — it just invites us. This is the danger, right?

It is an invitation for us to give of ourselves to the machine as opposed to another human being.

Adam: Yeah, and I’ve only touched, I’ve only dipped my toe into their work, but I just love how they on one level just pull apart all the different roles you can think about to be with AI or AI is with you, just to give people more options about how does this fit in rather than how does this replace? And I loved what you said about embodied. That’s my favorite word currently, embodied.

And for obvious reasons, I think it’s not just come from anywhere. And we talk about AI in the context of intelligence and human intelligence, and immediately that’s a disembodied idea. We reduce people and ideas actually to cognitive tasks or skills or how quickly could you come up with some idea?

These aren’t the measures of what a good idea is, or they’re not the only ones, because the embodied aspect of them is a huge part, if not the dominant part. And if we take that away unthinkingly, what are we left? I don’t know what we’re left with.

Good enough ideas, coming back to the world of insights and producing, they’re probably good enough, but the collective outcome of that, we’ll have to wait and see to see what is produced from that, because it was still very early days. And yeah, how do you get people excited and feeling something through generating ideas with AI or delivering them through AI? Yeah, that’s a fascinating new frontier, put it that way.

Beautiful. Well, we’ve reached the end of time. I want to thank you both so much. I feel like you have been a part of my LinkedIn world for a very, very long time. I congratulate you on 10 years, and I really appreciate you showing up and making the time to talk with me.

Annie: Oh, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having us. Big admirer of everything that you do as well.

Adam: Yeah. Really enjoyed it. Great.

Place

Above, Danny Robb on the moon as place. Also, Saleah Blancaflor on liminal horror. And, Alex Mayassi on cost disease.

Belief

Above, Mark Koekelbergh on a new religion. Also, Michelle Lhooq on counterculture. And, Jacqueline Nesi, PhD on talking to strangers.

Drift

Above, Steven Shaw & Gideon Nave on thinking fast, slow, artificial. Also, Erika Hall on cognitive surrender. And, Carlo Iacono on forecasting.

Play

Above, Maria Konnikova on farting around. Also, Sarah Scholes on free will. And, Lisa Yin Zhang on DuChamps.

Brand

Above, Martin Weigel on brand infrastructure. Also, Antonio Relegado on framing. And, Jelena Veselinovic on brand building.

Nick Liddell is a brand strategist, author, and founder of Baron Sauvage, an independent consultancy based in London. Previously Director of Consulting at The Clearing, he has over 25 years of experience working with brands including Google, Prada, McLaren, and Samsung. His most recent books are You Are a Fish: The Truth About Brands and The Brand Architecture Book, which argues for understanding brands as coherent systems rather than singular entities.

So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine, who’s a neighbor also, who helps people tell their story. And it’s such a big question and a beautiful question is why I borrow it, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way I am doing right now. So before I ask it, 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? And again, you’re in total control.

And I think it’s really great that you asked this at the beginning of all of these conversations because I had some time to prepare for it, although I’m not sure you’re ever fully prepared. Yeah, I think as with a lot of people, it’s a complicated one to answer.

I was born in Paris. I only moved to the UK when I was three years old. And I initially lived in the north of England near a place called Carlisle.

And then I moved down to London when I was 10. So if I just want to give someone a short answer to it, particularly given that London is a pretty great place to work, if you’re working in branding, then I’ll just say London. But from a personal point of view, I’ll always feel I come from the north of England.

I don’t sound remotely like I do anymore. But yeah, I’m a northerner spiritually.

And what does that mean to be from the north of England? When do you feel most northern?

Well, I think professionally, it means that it’s super easy to get sucked into the belief that everywhere is London.

You grow up or you live in a bubble, particularly when you work in branding or marketing. And so it’s a really healthy way to remind myself that most of the world is not remotely like London or any major city for that matter. And also just personally, it means that the further north I go, the happier I tend to be.

And what was it like growing up? Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Well, certainly not a brand consultant. I had no idea a brand consultant was even a thing until I started looking for work. And then I saw in the list of things that aren’t being an accountant, a management consultant, a doctor or anything else that I wasn’t remotely qualified to do.

Brand consultant was one of the few things left. And so it sounded fun and I went for it. I think I wanted to be a different thing every week when I did it, including ballet dancer and professional footballer and spaceman and everything.

And where are you now? And what is the work that you do?

So now I am, to all intents and purposes, still London. I’m just outside London. And I still do pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last 26.

So helping organizations of all sorts of shape and size understand how they can better use their brands to improve their relationships with the people that they need to have good relationships with in a way that ultimately benefits them and helps them achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve as an organization.

Yeah. And when would you say you first discovered that you could make a living doing this thing?

Only really when I started doing it. I went to a careers fair and there were a couple of sad looking types in a corner.

No one was speaking to them. They had an easel with a couple of British Airways planes with some funky tail fins on the back of them. And I don’t think anyone was remotely interested in speaking to them because they didn’t have a really snazzy stance.

They weren’t handing out free things like the Unilever guys and the P&G guys were. So I went and talked to them and asked them what they did. And they told me that they worked at a brand consultancy called Interbrand.

And I asked them about the type of work that they did. And it sounded semi interesting. And so I applied for a job and got it.

And that was pretty much the extent to which I understood what I was doing, what on earth it involved. I learned it all when I started doing it.

Yeah. And what do you enjoy about it? What do you love about it, actually? Or where’s the joy in the work for you?

I love — well, personally, what I love about it is and the reason that I applied was I started working in brand valuation. So I studied philosophy and economics at university. So that’s a really nice mix of numbers and thoughts.

And so what I initially liked about branding was that very often you’re looking at large data sets and you’re looking for some story or idea that you can extract from those data sets. And then there’s the bit on top of that, which you don’t get from an economics and philosophy degree, which is then you can start working with people who actually do things like designers, writers, creatives of all sorts of shape and size to actually make this idea manifest in all sorts of delightful ways that you probably couldn’t have imagined when you started thinking about that idea. And that for me is just a really lovely process that you go through from you can literally look at an Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of ones and zeros as input.

And then output is just this really beautiful, compelling experience that’s been really thoughtfully designed that is going to make the right people really happy and get something and want to engage in it in a way that creates value for them and creates value for the people who are serving it up to them. And that’s still 26 years later, just a really fulfilling thing to do with my time.

Yeah, I feel like maybe we started around the same time. And I always say that I feel like when I came into the work world, brand was the new technology. Do you remember on one level? I’m curious, does that resonate with you? Do you feel like that’s valid? And then secondarily, what do you look at 26 years later? It’s a long time has passed. What’s changed and what hasn’t changed when it comes to brand?

I feel like I have to apologize before I respond to that. I think the funny thing for me is just how little that resonates. And I think probably the interesting thing about doing something for so long is you get into it and you forget. You forget some of the fundamentals after a while because you’re just used to the process of doing things. And so once in a while, I just find myself thinking, actually, why do these things exist? We’re so surrounded by brands in particular.

Right. You can get up probably on a daily basis. You interact without really knowing it with thousands of brands.

It’s in the tens within about five minutes of waking up. If you’ve brushed your teeth, picked up your phone, looked at the shower, stared out of the window. And so I think it was about 15 years ago.

I just started thinking, well, hang on. Yeah, why? Why do brands exist in the first place? When did they start existing? And maybe I can just learn a little bit about how it all started. And there was a really interesting academic research paper that I stumbled across that basically said, you go back to the earliest civilization in the Indus Valley, something like 4000 BC.

There is evidence of what they call proto branding. But effectively, it’s the same thing as what we’re dealing with today. And you’ve got merchants who are putting bulls and fertility gods like images of things onto their wares to signify where they come from.

But also there’s symbolic value to those things. And that’s what we’re still doing today. So I would have — I used to go along with the story when I was at Interbrand. We always said the same thing. Brand comes from this Norse term to brand something.

So that’s how old it is. It stretches back to Viking times and it’s all about asserting ownership. It’s complete nonsense.

Brands go back about as far back as civilization goes, as far as we know. Yeah.

And consequently, there’s just something innate about people when they get together and they produce all sorts of things like these artifacts of culture and brands happen to be one of those things.

Yeah, that’s beautiful. I’m happy to be corrected on that front. That’s beautiful. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Anthony Shore. He’s a namer.

But he pointed out there’s some science and research that talks about how names — they change the brain. We interact with names differently. And in a way that affirms what you’re saying, that the things that we’ve called things that we make and share or sell are fundamentally different than other things in our life.

So tell me, what kinds of projects do people come to you for? What are the kind of problems that you like to solve?

Well, part of the thing I love is how varied they tend to be.

So I think a lot of the time when people talk about branding, lots of the books and literature about branding focus on positioning. So how do we construct a belief system or create meaning around an organization and then use that meaning to help provide a sense of direction for people? And that’s some of the work. But then there’s a lot of stuff which is closer to what I call portfolio strategy, which is — so I’ve got a dog that I need to keep letting in.

And some of it’s portfolio strategy. So that’s just a question of, we’ve got all of these different moving parts. Most organizations don’t sell or create one thing for one audience in one place and sell it through one channel.

So how do we take all of these different moving parts of teams, divisions, products, services, solutions, families of products? How do we take all of that and make sense of it and help people navigate their way around it and make sure that it ladders up into that overarching meaning that we have set for ourselves?

And then there are architecture projects which are about how you create a system of visual and verbal signposts that make it easy for people to find their way around it.

And then there’s brand experience stuff, which is basically how do you take that idea in your — whatever you want to call it, positioning, proposition, promise, purpose, whatever word begins with P, vision, mission. How do you take that idea and how do you turn it into something people can experience, a service ethos that they can feel? Of course, there’s a manner of speaking, but really just how do you create something that you can envelop someone in where they will get it and benefit from it and want to continue that relationship?

And that’s the interesting bit because that’s where you’re working with designers and creators of all sorts of shape and size to just create, make something happen in a better way than it would have happened otherwise.

So most recently, your book on brand architecture popped up on my feed is what inspired me to reach out. But you’ve written a couple other books before them, all of which I recognized even not knowing, which is pretty cool. So Wild Thinking was the first one, right? Is that right?

Wild Thinking was the second book I wrote. Yeah, sorry, I have to remind myself because first book I wrote was called Business is Beautiful.

Oh, yeah. Nice. And what was the inspiration for that? Or how did you become a writer on top of being a brand consultant?

Well, when I worked at Interbrand, which is where I started working, it wasn’t really an option. I worked in brand valuation. It was one of the more prominent parts of the business in terms of how Interbrand markets itself.

Every year they produce this annual study of world’s most valuable brands or best global brands, as they call it. I used to manage that. And so I was very used to writing about brands and talking about brands and going on news programs and discussing brands that were in the public spotlight.

And when I moved job, I think there was an idea that I was just the numbers guy. And every — at that point, we’re talking probably about early noughties. Everybody wanted a league table because they felt that was a way to get attention and market your consultancy.

And I was really bored of them by that point. So I just said, well, why don’t we not do a league table? Because everyone’s doing a league table. Why don’t we write a book instead? And why don’t we write a book about the importance of intangibles in organizations and intangibles like creativity, for example? Why don’t we write a book about that? And why don’t we give it a really nice counter cultural title like Business is Beautiful, because certainly at the time businesses were getting bashed left, right and center.

And fortunately, because it was a French organization I was working for. And if you want to get French person interested in something, then just make it counter cultural. And then much more likely if you’re a bit contrarian, then that’s going to work a little bit better with them.

And so they said, yeah, great. Let’s not do a league table. Let’s do a book and let’s make it about all of these wonderful intangibles that organizations run on and thrive off and grow through.

But no one really ever talks about that. So it’s good fun.

Yeah. And I want to return to — you’ve connected us to the ancient roots of brand, I guess. So what do you feel has changed or has not changed when it comes to building a brand in twenty twenty five versus when you started?

I think surprisingly little has changed. I think the fundamentals of it are pretty similar just because whatever technology exists, whatever systems exist, you’ve still got a person in the middle of it or a group of people and all the messy ways that we interrelate with systems, we’re always the weak link there, the limiting factor. And so you can only really design a great system to the extent that you can really understand the messiness of humankind and our imperfections. And so whatever technology has sprung up, I’ve only been working 26 years in that time, we’ve had the dotcom boom and bust, we’ve had one and a half, maybe two financial crises. We’ve had a pandemic. We’ve had, of course, social media come up. We’ve had AI. And they’ve all had a cosmetic impact for brands. But the fundamentals — it’s a different channel.

That channel works a little bit differently. But at their core, there are a few basic things you need to get right. If you’re a brand and you need to get them right, no matter what time you’re in.

I just don’t see any technology particularly changing that unless that technology changes humans to the point where humans no longer interact with their world in the way that they’ve interacted with the world for millennia.

What are the things that you have to get right? What’s your working definition? I have a perverse attraction to foundational ideas, to the basics. When you talk about brand, what does it mean?

So I think when I talk about brand, probably like you, right, when you talk about brands, depending on who you’re talking to and what their level of interest is, then you’re going to talk about a different facet of it. Because you can talk about brands from a legal point of view. I don’t know much about trademark law, but I know enough to at least know what I need to speak to a trademark lawyer about a piece of work. There are all of these really lovely facets.

And I’ve only started, 26 years in, I’ve only really started wrapping my head around some of them. But I think one of the things that really piqued my curiosity about brands, and fundamentals of branding, extended from that idea of when did brand start? Oh, I can’t really tell when they started. So then why do brands exist? Why are they this almost, they’re not innate, but they just seem to be some chronic aspect of the human condition, or at least in the context of civilization.

And again, I found in another academic paper, this really interesting idea of anthropomorphism, and how, initially, it was identified as how interesting it is that when you travel around the world, people in different cultures recreate gods in their own image. And that’s a wider phenomenon. And we do it in all sorts of places, all sorts of times, we do it with our pets, and we do it with toys, when we’re younger, we do it with our cars, we do it with all sorts of inanimate objects.

And I think, fundamentally, brands exist, because humans have this tendency to anthropomorphize or humanize things that aren’t human. And there are specific situations in which we tend to do it. And those are the specific situations in which brands tend to flourish.

And so I have a theory that if you understand why people tend to humanize non-human things, then you probably also have some insight into branding, and what good looks like, and what not so good looks like as well.

Yeah.

What role, I came up as a researcher in a brand consultancy, so I identify very much as a researcher. And I’ve always been curious how people think about the role of qualitative, but just research, how do you learn for a client? Or how do you advise clients in terms of understanding the relationship you’re talking about between people and the objects that they’re trying to have a relationship with?

Yeah, and I love it, absolutely. I always feel like it’s an unfair thing that people pin on research. Certainly, there was a while when people used to roll their eyes a little bit at organizations that spend a lot of money on research, because particularly from a creative point of view, there was an idea that it’s some limitation factor, or it’s just indicative of just a lack of imagination on the part of an organization that they want to look into research all the time.

Actually, I think another way to look at it is that the firmer your evidence base, then the more confident you can feel in doing more creative things, just because you’ve got a solid platform on which to build. So if I possibly can, I like to build off a solid platform for the people that I work with, particularly if you’re going to ask someone to do something quite extreme for them. The more you want to take someone out of their comfort zone, I think the harder you have to work in terms of justifying why they should, and very often research is a way to do it. Qual, sometimes, quant, often, more often than not, some combination of the two, and ideally with Qual, I think, I’m really interested in where you come out with this stuff is the weirder, the better sometimes, as far as Qual is concerned.

I tend to be less interested in six or eight people sat in a room for two and a half hours being asked questions about a subject, but I’m always super interested in ways people get prodded without them necessarily knowing about something in other ways to reveal something that they would not otherwise have revealed, that they may not even be aware of themselves. That’s the stuff I really love about Qual.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have any examples, or can you tell a story? Anything, weird is a beautiful invitation.

Weird, yeah, I used, I really, for quite a lot of positioning work, I’ve really enjoyed stuff that builds on metaphor elicitation, and Jerry Zaltman and all his thinking, and you get people to collect images and tell stories about those images and use metaphors, and I do find you just go to some really, people take you to weird places, and will very often say they’re discussing things that they hadn’t necessarily thought about before, which I really like, and I really like the idea of if you want to test for one thing, you ask about another. So if you’re working on packaging, rather than show a couple of examples of packaging and ask people what they think of them, you put that thing in the packaging, and you ask them to taste it and tell you what they’re tasting, knowing yourself that that is the same thing in both packs, and so any difference they reveal is likely to be a difference that they perceive from the packaging, and I think it’s that sneaky, we’re going to tell you that we’re asking you one thing, but actually we’re testing for another thing that I think really attracts me to that aspect of Qual.

Yeah, absolutely, and I feel like that’s where I had a weird upbringing in that I was, I learned Qual at a brand consultancy, and so everything I learned was weird, it was all deep, projective, free association stuff, which I think is, well, of course, it’s unbelievably powerful, and I often say that what you learn, you can’t learn a ton, but what you learn has massive leverage because it’s so deeply true or connected to the emotional experience. Yeah, that’s beautiful, and I’ve got a sense of that, your work Wild Thinking was also, you’re advocating for just getting out, you seem to have a contrarian streak, is that fair when it comes to the discipline?

Well, I couldn’t have said all that stuff about the French, and admitted to having been born in Paris, and got quite a big French family, and not have a little bit of that rub off on me, I think, yeah, yeah, but weird’s another word I keep coming back to, as well, for a lot of the right type of client will respond well to a sentiment like, good positioning is sometimes just about finding out what makes you weird, and really embracing it, some organizations hate that sentiment, and just aren’t comfortable with it at all, but the right organization will take that as a prompt, and then go to an interesting place.

I want to talk about the brand architecture, what, why write a book about brand architecture? What’s the state of that? That’s not something that feels like an inside baseball, that’s a bad Americanism, perhaps, but an inside baseball topic. Why write a book on brand architecture?

The simple reason that it didn’t really exist yet, and I’d just, the book that I’d written before was called You Are a Fish, and that has all the stuff about anthropomorphization, and it’s really and anyone can pick it up and read it and understand a bit more about brands, even if they don’t feel particularly interested in them, that’s why that book was written, and I thought, after that, I should probably write a super technical book about this important but not particularly well covered subject about brand architecture and brand portfolio strategy, and it’s super geeky, I think you have to be really, really, really committed and interested in branding and brand strategy to really want to pick that book up and go through it. I know I’m not particularly selling it, but I also wouldn’t want to misrepresent it, and it always surprises me that there are people out there who do want to pick up a book like that and are interested in how you construct a portfolio strategy and once you get out of the trap of the house of brands or branded house, how you have a more nuanced way of talking about something like brand architecture that’s just a little bit more helpful for organizations.

Yeah, yeah, well, I guess I’m that guy. I don’t know that I’ll be spending the time to read all of it, but certainly the getting into the weeds about what brand architecture is and why it’s important is something I feel is thrilling in a way to me, which is strange. But it’s funny, I guess I hadn’t really acknowledged the degree to which there wasn’t a lot of literature about it, right? You’re saying it’s sort of there was house of brands.

What’s the state? What’s the general idea about? It seems like your book is what I’ve read about it. You’re reframing it from this hierarchy to a systems view, but what’s the state of thinking on brand architecture and what does the book bring?

Well, I think maybe it’s one of those things where David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler, 26 years ago now, I think it basically coincided with when I started working in branding. They wrote a book about brand leadership, and then that was followed up by David Aaker with a book about brand portfolio strategy.

And that’s where they introduced the idea of the brand relationship spectrum. And at one end, you’ve got a house of brands and the other got branded house. And there are seven steps in between them.

And they wrote that, they introduced the brand relationship structure and they created it. And they wrote the book that they wrote together with the idea that this is quite a nuanced area and it’s quite complex. And they wanted to create a helpful way for people to deal with that nuance.

Unfortunately, unwittingly, what they did was they invited people to collapse that spectrum into two opposites of branded house and house of brands. And I do still find whenever a client organization or marketer wants to talk about brand architecture, then they collapse it into that dichotomy. And so over the intervening years, not a lot, if anything, has been written about brand architecture that doesn’t just regurgitate that brand relationship spectrum.

And some people have house of brands, branded house, and in the middle, they’ve got an endorsed or something like that. But it’s not helpful if you’re a practicing brand consultant, because all of these things are really unique. And so but that’s not a helpful thing just to say to people, forget that model, just focus on something unique, because then you’re not really giving them anything helpful that they can use.

And so I thought I’d just write a book about the steps that I tend to go through when I think my way through a portfolio and architecture projects. And out of the end of it came this ludicrously large, but quite geeky book that is the brand architecture book.

And so what I would love, to the degree that you’re interested, I’d love to hear your approach to brand architecture. What’s the role that it plays for you? And what are the steps? What makes it valuable?

Well, I think at the heart of it is a distinction that I didn’t come up with. Someone I used to work with described this to me. I’m pretty sure it was someone called Ruth Ingram, who I think is now practicing in the United States.

So some of your listeners may be aware of her, but she described to me this difference between roles and relationships. So in any branded system, one job is just to work out, well, for each part of that system, what role does it play? What’s it there for? And that’s one challenge. And that’s what I now call the portfolio strategy bit is just what roles will be assigned to all of the different bits of your portfolio?

And then the second thing is, well, once you know the roles of these things, then you can start having a coherent conversation about what the relationships between them should be. If things play a similar role, maybe you group them and maybe they become a family. If different parts have contradictory roles, then maybe you actually want to create distance between them, and you can get into questions of, well, if you want to cross sell a lot between, or if there should be lots of cross talk between the different parts of your system based on their roles, then you actually want to make sure that visually and verbally everything feels similarly tight and coherent. On the other hand, if you’ve got lots of contradiction in there, or you want to speak to a really heterogeneous group of people and cover a really broad set of needs and requirements and markets and channels, well, actually, maybe you need to pull things apart a little bit more and have a system.

And so at the heart of the approach is really that distinction. First, let’s work through the roles, three things that I think of when I think about how you define roles, starting with the commercial side of things, working back from the positioning, because the role should refer in some way to your positioning, and then just making sure that in the context of what you want to achieve as an organization, and what your customers or audiences want to achieve, that you can then define a clear role in terms of how they win and how you win in each of those areas. And then once you’ve done that, and you’ve got a clear enough role defined for each part of the organization, that you could explain it to a five year old, then you start thinking about the relationships and how many levels or what the hierarchy is, how you create fixed assets, or what some people would call distinctive brand assets, but also what’s flexible, and then how you design an entire system around that, that you can future proof.

So it goes from the very, very commercial through to the very, very creative.

Yeah, and who does it really well, would you say, or who’s doing it badly?

I think the answer on badly is super easy, because most organizations get away without having a particularly great system.

And what’s the impetus to get one’s house in order?

Very often, it’s just people get a sense that everything is out of control. And they waste a lot of time doing things that don’t make sense. So when I think about the briefs that I got, I’m working with an automotive company right now.

And they’ve innovated really quickly. Generally, as a rule, I would say, the more innovative the company, the faster their pace of innovation, the more screwed up their architecture is likely to be because they get excited about something, they give it a name, it launches, it may succeed or fail, but they’ve already moved on to the next thing. They’re now excited about that.

They want that to have a name, but they want that name to stand out. So it’s going to be different from every other name they’ve got. Then you just see it happen over and over again.

And before you know it, they’ve got 500 things all with completely random names. Some of them seem to be working, some of them don’t, but everything looks different. It doesn’t look like it comes from the same place.

Every time they launch something, they have to reinvent the wheel. And at some point someone says, this is super inefficient. It’s crazy.

We’re so confused. Our salespeople can’t explain what we do. I can’t explain what we do. I run the company. Someone has to stop the madness. How do we stop the madness?

And that’s when you arrive.

But what that means is that generally the problem’s got to get really bad. Most organizations have pretty poor brand architecture systems. They muddle on. Okay. So it’s a fair challenge.

Once in a while, people say, well, if it’s so bad for most organizations and they can be valued in the billions or trillions, then how bad an issue is it? And I think there’s probably a threshold at which it just becomes unignorable.

And until you’re at that threshold, then I completely understand why organizations do ignore it because it’s really difficult to get a good architecture system. You need so many different bits of your organization to work together. Your product innovation people and your salespeople and your marketing people and your brand people, if you have them, and then your HR people, all of those teams need to agree on a single thing and then agree that they will sacrifice their autonomy for the greater good. And there’s loads of organizations in which that level of discipline doesn’t really exist.

I’m curious. The other context you mentioned before was there’s brand architecture, but then brand experience and developing brand experiences. How do you work with teams to do that? And how has that changed?

Generally, I would say that happens by increment. Once in a while, you get a really lovely brief or an opportunity to map out someone’s entire brand experience, and then work with them to identify the pain points, the pleasure points, which aspects of the experience are going to be most impactful from a user point of view, and then to work with them to design more thoughtfully around it. Sometimes you’ll already have a guideline in place before you do that. But that’s not in most cases.

In most cases, you’ve worked on a brand project, you’ve created a guideline, and then it’s a little bit like when you move into a house, right? And I remember the first house I moved into, and I remember thinking the walls are a disgrace, wallpapers peeling off the walls. And so we fixed the walls, but then I noticed how terrible the floor looked, because now that wasn’t up to scratch. And I think that’s how it happens in a lot of jobs is you develop a positioning, you work through some portfolio strategy, some architecture, you develop a set of guidelines, and then someone notices actually, our environments all look rubbish.

And so you get into a, okay, fine, we’ve designed a nice business card, but if our offices look terrible, then we need to fix our office experience. And then, okay, our offices look great, but actually the rest of our colleague experience sucks, because none of the rest of it is up to scratch at the office. And so you find in increments, you fix the thing next that needed to be fixed most after the last thing you fixed.

And then over time, everything becomes more coherent, it makes more sense for people, their impression of it improves, and only a few people know why, because it happens slowly, and without much fanfare.

So that’s wonderful. So I love the fact, the story of your name of your company, would you tell that story? And then I’m just curious how you work with clients to embrace the same spirit?

Yeah, well, I suppose, yeah, I’ve got to be really careful that this doesn’t sound like desperately amateurish. But I was just in a position where I needed to set a company up really quickly.

Yeah.

I’d worked on enough projects that involve company naming to know that if you go for an intelligent, if you go for an intelligent name that anyone in their right mind would want, then probably that name is already taken. By someone, because there are lots of intelligent people who make good decisions. So if you need a name in a hurry, you need to come up with a name that’s dumb that nobody would want, or maybe is brilliant, and no one thought about, but that’s 0.01% of names you’re likely to come up with.

So I just came up with a name that nobody would want. Baron Sauvage is the name of my business. And it was the name of, or the title of one of my ancestors, again, French ancestry. So there was a Napoleonic general in there called Pierre Sauvage.

He was a Baron. And I just thought, I’m going to call it Baron Sauvage because no one has it. No one has it.

The domain name costs 69p. And also if this thing fails spectacularly, no one’s really going to notice that.

And it turns out five and a half years later, it’s still going. And it’s caused lots of client mirth in the meantime, as well. This is another great thing about the difference between Northern and Southern, all my London based clients are extremely polite about it. My early clients was from the North, Accrington.

And they revealed after a little bit of working with me that behind my back, they call it Baron Sausage. And I just thought that was brilliant.

And so if I need to set up another business, it might be Baron Sausage.

Yeah, well, I was just curious, after all the time working with brands, what the experience was like, you caveated by saying you were worried it would appear amateurish in some way, but what was it like to try to brand yourself or to go through that process for your own identity and your own company?

I think it, well, I can’t say it revealed much to me. But what it did confirm is something that I’ve felt for a super long time, particularly all the time that I’ve worked, I’ve been so lucky that I’ve worked with some really great creative directors. And one thing I would observe is creativity is enormously undervalued in most organizations that I work with.

But the real missed opportunity there is that creativity, if exercised in the right way, can save you an incredible amount of money. If I had had more resources, I could have thought about a sensible name to call my company. And someone would already have had the domain name, I would have had to have bribed them to give me the domain name, I would have had to have probably challenged a bunch of people in terms of securing trademark rights, it would have cost me a lot of money.

I think if you don’t have money to spend on something, then you’re just going to have to get more creative with it. And I think we tend to do it out of necessity. It’s like the last resort.

But actually, more organizations, I think, would benefit from using creativity as a first resort for saving money, just doing things a little bit smarter. And working their way around problems in more imaginative ways that actually create solutions. A lot of the work really is ultimately about that.

Right? I’d be surprised if you didn’t have similar experiences.

Yeah. We’re coming near the end of time. And I was curious about, I wanted to shift into just your sense of the state of things now. There was something you said earlier about, you’re talking about how constant it all has been, that there’s a lot that hasn’t changed. And I think you said, unless some technology comes along, and it changes the way people relate with the world around them, I couldn’t help but think about AI and its most extreme manifestation, it’s pretty transformational. So I wonder, have you given it any thought as to what the implications are? And what do you say to somebody, a client who might ask about what’s coming, and what it might do to brand?

So I am always really honest with people that I am the least qualified person to ask about AI. If I had to, someone put a gun to my head and said, what’s AI gonna do to transform branding? My response would probably be less than you think.

Partly because most of the stuff I read about it, and I’m interested in AI, I read about AI, I read about how marketers and branding people and creative people use it. It’s not for lack of curiosity. It’s just that I genuinely don’t know.

And I’m really comfortable talking about brands and branding. I’m super uncomfortable pretending like I know about something that I don’t really know. But unless AI, so we go back to conditions in which we tend to humanize things, also being conditions in which brands tend to do really, really well.

And one of those is conditions of high uncertainty. So typically, if you can’t judge whether something’s good or not, or right or wrong, then you’re going to rely more on something like a brand to help you decide. Do I know much about life insurance providers? No. But it’s a really important thing for me to get right, because then if I die, my family’s entirely reliant on that provider.

So am I going to go for someone that I’ve never heard of, who started up yesterday? Or am I going to go for a company that’s 200 years old? Answerable to regulators? Well, I’m probably going to go for the 200 year old company that I’ve heard of, right. And so AI, if I have gleaned anything from what I’ve read about it, is heightening our degree of uncertainty. Certain individuals feel very certain about AI and what it does, but most of us I think don’t.

I think it probably makes us even less trusting of what’s going on. And throughout time, the more we have needed to trust stuff, and the less we’ve been able to objectively, the more we tend to rely on brands to fill the gaps. Now, I’m totally hedging my bets, because those brands might be AI brands.

I might be talking about Claude or Anthropic. I might not be talking about Apple, or pretty much anyone GE. But some brand at some point, if we continue to feel uncertain about all of this, it will be brands that probably help bridge that trust divide that we will hold responsible for things that go wrong as well as right.

And I don’t see that piece of technology fundamentally changing that dynamic.

Awesome. I want to thank you so much for accepting my invitation out of the blue and just being generous with your time and all your experience.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Instrument

Above, Zoe Scaman on the practitoner. Also, Ben Doepke on masks. And, Peter Totman on feeling the room.

Democracy

Above, Samuel Hammond on how think tanks defeated democracy. Also, Ilana Altman on civic joy. And, John Jost on social change.

Naming

Above, Nina Beckhardt on Microsoft’s 78 Copilots. Also, Pascal Soboll on design. And, Elizabeth Goodspeed on designers who write.

Forgetting

Above, Katie Dreke on the case for forgetting. Also, Debraj Ray on the last good moment. And, Steven Cave on sacrificing our lives for lasting fame.

Humor

Above, Grant McCracken on funny business. Also, Rachel Ossip on the Cattle Queen. And, Bridget Phetasy on not caring.

Matt Klein is Head of Global Foresight & Research Methods at Reddit and the creator of ZINE, a Webby Award-winning cultural intelligence newsletter with 26K+ subscribers across 150+ countries. He calls himself a “digital anthropologist, cultural theorist, strategist, and writer.” Douglas Rushkoff called him “a brilliant cultural analyst.” Someone else called him “the closest thing to Gen Z’s Marshall McLuhan.”

So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, which is significant, and she helps people tell their stories. And I haven’t really found a better question to start a conversation, but it’s a big question, so I over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

I knew this one was coming. Still don’t have an answer.

Where do I come from? I come from two loving parents in New Jersey. I grew up in the quintessential suburbs and went to high school in the very stereotypical movie high school with Friday Night Light football games and people shoving people into lockers type of deal. And didn’t love that experience. I was not shoved into any locker, for the record. But I did find a lot of relief. We had a mass media department. We had a full-on film set, TV studio in our high school. And I found a lot of both relief and just a respite catharsis in that space.

And it was also quite convenient to edit movies there rather than sit at the lunchroom table or alone. And very quickly I learned this is it. This is what I love doing.

I ended up going to a very small liberal arts school, Franklin and Marshall, where I did a double major in psychology and film and media studies. And I was either going to be a film director or a child therapist. It was a coin flip, one or the other.

But it wasn’t until I was taking these courses in strategic communications and the theory of technology that I realized that there was this overlap here, which was the psychology of media or the ways in which new technologies are changing the ways in which we communicate, express, create senses of self. I’m like, oh, that’s it. This idea that we can study media and culture and people through our devices or through media. And that’s what I was so interested in with film as well.

And that landed me in Adland. I had my first gig at RGA. It was perfect timing because all these brands were trying to figure out, what do we do with this thing called social media? How do we behave? What do we say? What is the purpose of these tools? And here I was explaining all of these platforms and the psychology of it and what that meant for culture and purchase decisions and creation of identity. And to be paid to do that was profound. That was wild.

And jumped from shop to shop, to market research, to creative, cutting my teeth on any and everything. And here we are. The passion is still the same, which is trying to make sense of culture. And what does our technology say about us and what do we say about our technology?

Yeah, that’s really wonderful. I’m so excited for this conversation. I wanna go back to the beginning. I was really struck by the suburban upbringing and your discovery of that studio. How did that begin? What’s the origin story of you finding that space to play in and explore?

I had already loved backyard movies. I was using our old massive camcorder. I don’t think it was even DV tapes. I think it was VHS tapes. We were recording on just nonsense in the backyard. And then for a birthday one year, I got a handheld. Lego also had their own movie studio product line. So I was loving that.

How did I discover it? I don’t even remember. It’s not like I chose the high school, but there was these intro to mass media courses where they taught you, here’s how to shoot. This is a pan. This is a zoom. And we were just editing. And the next year you take a course on deeper into editing styles or narrative fiction. And I mean, it was quite advanced for a high school and absolutely loved it. Was absolutely hooked because it was just filling an existing interest in the first place. And our school took it very, very seriously.

We had a full blown film festival at the end of the year where all the students submitted their films. There were screenings where students and teachers and parents came to watch them all in award ceremony. And I think it was so rare to have that experience where at a very early age in high school, you are given the opportunity to find something or for something to find you that stimulated you. And you can find something that was challenging. I mean, that wasn’t happening in US history for me. So to have all of those options of electives, essentially what they were, to find that in film was quite special.

Yeah. And do you have a recollection and maybe the answers in everything you’ve already said as a young, as a boy, what did you wanna be when you grew up?

What did I wanna be? I don’t know what the title was, but I knew that it was something creative in nature. I mean, I was always doodling. I was making those backyard movies. It was something creative in nature. And I mean, I went into college thinking maybe this is a film thing, but it was deeper than just the art itself. There was something beneath it. And I think I found that in, here we are, business. I’m not as much interested in the business part as much as everything else. Business is just the vehicle to explore that. I still don’t know. I still don’t know.

Yeah. And so catch us up. Where are you now? And what do you spend your time doing?

Doing a lot. I am currently at Reddit. That’s my nine to five on the Research and Insights team. The last four and a half, five years has been focused on helping brands understand what’s happening in culture through our data so they could show up in a more strategic way.

In a more strategic, creative, resonant manner. Last year or so, I’ve shifted a bit to focusing on applying those insights to Reddit itself and thinking about consumer growth, both in the US and internationally as well. That’s the nine to five.

And then outside of that is a lot of writing. I’ve been writing for quite some time, trying to make sense of the messiness of our current moment. I was writing for two people on the internet and was quite fine with that.

I was doing that on Medium and then Forbes and then a little thing called Substack came along before Substack was even Substack. And I thought, well, this is great. If two people subscribe, then at least I’m not fighting for attention.

Those are two people who are raising their hand to say, oh, I’ll read that. And that allowed me to focus more so on what I wanted to explore and think about rather than chase a view or cut through on attention. And that has grown into Zine.

And that has then brought in other speaking opportunities and advising opportunities. And that’s how I’m filling my time currently.

And when would you say you first discovered you could make a living doing this?

It’s an interesting question because we can interpret living in a few ways. There’s the financial aspect of it. And there’s the, oh, wow, I could fulfill myself and find that meaning in that.

That was very quickly. That was very, very, very quickly. Still today, I don’t view writing as something for other people.

I don’t say that selfishly. There’s of course value and people wanna pledge and fantastic, I’m so about that. But when I say it’s really for myself, it’s I have something that I’m trying to wrestle with.

I can’t make any sense of it. I’m trying to find my words to explain this to myself. The page is the canvas to do that. It’s really for me. Truly, it is for me. And sure, if less people read it, would I feel differently? Yeah, probably.

That said, anything that I’m writing is truly for myself. Truly, first and foremost, I’m trying to make sense of this thing. And if other people enjoy it, fantastic, I love that.

So when did I learn that you could make a living from that? I think very quickly because when I was writing these things even in college and soon thereafter, I was finding the words for things that I was trying to make sense of. And publishing that, whether that was read or not, was this practice of, oh, wow, I now better understand myself and I have a better understanding of the world around me.

How would you, to the degree that you have one, how would you describe your process? I’m always curious how people learn. I mean, you’re sitting in a position, I mean, you’re unbelievably well positioned to have access to so many different sources of data and different perspectives. But for you, how do you learn? And what’s your process for trying to understand what’s going on?

I try to wrap my arms around as much as possible, just collect, collect, collect, collect, and then try to find the patterns amongst all of that.

And the collection could be an observation on the street, a documentary, a dataset, whatever. The more diverse, the better. And oftentimes feels like the snake unhinging its jaw, trying to consume all of it.

And there’s total discomfort, like it’s not natural by any means. I have a running note in my notes app. And just thoughts, like true shower thoughts.

And when things start feeling connected, that then becomes a larger idea that graduates into maybe a piece or maybe a slide. But how I learn is just consume, consume, consume, consume, consume, like endless consumption.

What’s an example of a shower thought? This idea of, what kinds of things are worthy of you noting down?

Let’s open it up. We’ll do this in real time. It could be from a podcast. I’d be listening to a podcast and oh, let me open the notes app and jot that down.

I could be on the treadmill and oh, wait a second. Let me pause this, whether that be my own thought or someone else’s. 74% of food cooked in a restaurant is not eaten in a restaurant and it’s brought home.

That’s something like, oh, haven’t thought of that before. That’s interesting. What else does that connect to? Here’s another one.

This is funny, it’s like a diary. Do we need another made up phrase? Maybe not, but if language is the limits of a reality, creating a new language expands what that reality can be. Shower thought, just writing that down.

And I mean, those are pretty solid ones. What about trust cannot exist without fear? Perhaps fear, sometimes I read this and what does that even mean? I think that makes sense. Fear of perhaps the risk of a relationship or risk of identity or maybe ego.

Well, the value of trust is that without it, you can be hurt, right?

There’s that too, totally, totally. So they’re like unfinished lyrics. If you want to think of it like, an artist and you just piece these little things together, and maybe there’s a story and maybe it’s nonsense.

I mean, I’ll read through some of these. I’m like, what the fuck was I saying there? Okay, not an idea. Or I didn’t even know what I meant.

Didn’t hold, didn’t hold.

What would you say, you mentioned, I love the way you articulated the psychology of media. And I’m always curious about, what do you feel like you pay attention to that other people don’t? Based on your training, based on your own interests and inclinations, where do you find yourself fixating in ways that other people don’t?

I find it very reactive, where I’m reacting to the signal.

And what I mean by that is, what I’m interested or what I’m calibrated to pay attention to is the overlooked. So if everyone’s looking over there, I want to look in the other direction. What’s happening over there that we’re not giving as much attention to.

And the threshold or the barometer, the rubric, whatever you want to call it, is what’s having an influence on us with unproportional, or that is disproportionate to conversation volume. So in other words, okay, we could be talking about hype for hype’s sake, loud conversation, lots of volume of it, yet low impact. I want the opposite.

I want high impact, low conversation. And where do you find that? I don’t know. I’m still trying to look, that’s the job.

But I’m constantly reacting. That’s what I meant, which is all right, let me consume, consume, consume. This is what everyone’s thinking about, talking about.

That then sets me off in a different direction. The criteria I have in regards to what I write about is very much if it’s covered, then fantastic. I don’t feel compelled to have to add another voice to this given topic.

Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but I try not to. Because for me, I’m trying to go in the other direction to make sense of and to explain and articulate and selflessly try to provide the words for these other things that we don’t have the words for yet.

When you say react, what do you mean when you say react?

React in regards to just a response.

So react, maybe that’s not the right word. You go through the scroll or you’re going through the newsletter curations. Everyone’s talking about X, lots of headlines about X, more X, more X. Here’s someone else’s hot take about X, fantastic.

The reaction to me, what I mean by that is okay, X has been covered. We don’t need more noise about X. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not. I don’t feel compelled to have to say more about X. It’s not, judgelessly, not interested in more X. I’m interested in the Y. Interesting, I meant letter Y, but I also, W-H-Y as well.

Both, why is everyone talking about X, but also the letter Y over in this other direction. So I’m almost reacting to the, this sounds so clinical, the metadata of all the news itself. So rather than even reading some articles, it’s okay, this publication is talking about X. There’s a whole debate in the comments about X. That’s something to react to.

That’s okay, that’s some signal. Let me go over here. And I’m reacting to that existing noise or signal and heading in the opposite. I don’t think it’s the right word, but maybe it is.

There’s something really ambivalent in a few things that you’ve expressed. I know in the past, you’ve said trends have no meaning. You mean you’re critical of things that you’re participating in. And you hold both these positions at once, which is the definition of ambivalence, but you also said it in your, maybe it was your shower thought of do we need new language for this stuff? Oh, we actually, we do need this language for this stuff. Do you identify with that ambivalence?

100%. What we’re talking about is this nuance that it’s not all one way or all the other way. That what we’re talking about is incredibly complex because we are complex. So therefore you can need complex answers and approaches to all this material.

Sorry about ambivalence. We’re working within this, let’s call it corpo machine, which is oftentimes such nonsense and just so toxic, so anti-human. And it’s very easy to say, let me go unplug and write poetry in the Alps or whatever.

But I’m also of the camp that if you want to change something, you can’t always change it from the outside. Perhaps you’re more well positioned to change from the inside. So as critical as I am to the nonsense of advertising and trends and corpo capitalistic, not whatever, perhaps rather than throwing stones from the outside, you can find more momentum or traction in changing discourse and decision-making from the inside as well.

So I think all of these things can hold true. Is one more effective than the other? I don’t know. I’m not going to pretend anyone has the answer there, but I don’t think that’s a contradiction or insincere or disingenuous.

I think they can be true, that I find this work fascinating. I find it incredibly problematic, yet I also care so much about it and do find value in it in some instances. So all of this is just, it’s messy and we’re messy and it’s problematic if we don’t allow room for that messiness.

What do you love about the work? Thinking about all the different things that you do as part of it, where’s the joy in it for you?

It is not news that we are in a fucked up moment. Trust in government leaders, institutions across the board, all time lows. Yet when it comes to this idea of a brand or even marketing messages, there is no exaggeration, profound influence on the ways in which we see ourselves, others, the world.

It’s the party, it’s meaning. And you can’t have a sense, this sounds wild in a vacuum, but you can’t have a sense of self without some purchase. And to help organizations help other people, I find fascinating.

There’s something about that. And if you allow many of these organizations, which is just people to progress in group think or autopilot or hype, it’s a disservice to culture and individuals writ large. So I do find an opportunity and a valuable opportunity is how can you become a translator for these massive, massive, massive organizations that have an impact on the world anything else, arguably larger than government in some instances, because that bends towards the institution more often than not.

How can you become the translator, the decoder and the representative of people? And I don’t take that responsibility lightly. And that sounds more, it sounds bigger than it is, but I mean, that’s the work, that’s what we’re doing here. And I find that fascinating.

That is wild. And if not me, then who? So there’s this, I’ll go back to this word responsibility and no one granted this to me. I just found it myself and I find it interesting.

How can you help these organizations show up in a more human-centered manner? And I do think it’s possible. I do think it’s possible. Is it easy? No.

Is it frequent? No, but it is possible.

Yeah. Two questions trying to get out of me at the same time. I think the first, because you really centered on it, it sounded to me and maybe I’m over-interpreting, but you really, you’re holding up a brand as a responsibility, as an obligation and the significance of the role it plays in all of our lives in this culture. Can you just say more about what makes it so meaningful and what the role and responsibility is? Because sometimes I feel we skate all over the top of it without sitting with the significance of it.

This is a conversation in itself or five podcasts in itself. Brian Lang puts it from Future Commerce, transaction is identity exchange, which is to say a maker of a candle or a car is exchanging a part of their identity for this output. And you are exchanging your commerce, this transaction to help inform your identity. I’m a proud owner of this candle.

I’m a proud owner of this car. This transaction is more than money. This is labor. It is identity. It is affiliation. It is meaning. It’s really easy to hate on that. I’m well, do we need more luxury items? Or live a life without trying to buy something. You can’t, you cannot.

And whether the identity comes first or after, I think is moot. It’s all wrapped up. It’s one in the same.

So if transaction is integral to who we are and who we associate with and how we create status for both better or worse, more often worse, I mean, you can’t separate these things. So there’s ambivalence in that as well. I think oftentimes that’s not good.

That’s not healthy. We see the destructive path of that. But I think that’s for me a bit of reality.

I mean, we’re not gonna all wear burlap sacks and call it even. It’s not happening. We’re not doing that.

We’re not all gonna agree to buy the same car. And we’re not all going to agree to live in the same place. That’s not realistic.

It’s impossible. So what you’re left with is this forced decision of, well, what do I buy? Who do I associate with? What logos do I or not? And what’s wild about all of this is that the logo is not real. This thing is not real.

It’s not real in that Tony the Tiger doesn’t exist because it’s just a team of other humans. But Tony the Tiger, right? Brand is mythology. This is a spirit.

There’s nothing physical about this. So the fact that someone could look at one logo and feel a certain way and someone else can look at the same logo, the same colors and shapes and feel something else, that means it’s not real. This is perspective and interpretation.

With all that said, selfishly, that’s wild to me. That’s fascinating. And that you can make a living from trying to study that and play with that, insane, absolutely insane.

Now, to balance that or to counter that, if you’re gonna do that for a living, why not then root for Team Human and try to make these transactions and make these meanings as pro-human, as humanly possible? We’re in service of other people more so than that of the business. And it doesn’t have to be in favor of the... I mean, why should it be? This is all meant to serve us. Yeah.

You mentioned playing the role of translator and decoder for clients, helping them help people. What are the kinds of questions or where would you say clients or organizations generally, where do they struggle the most in trying to understand culture, understand what’s happening outside?

I think the biggest struggle is that, we’ve been hinting at it, that this is more complex and nuanced and subjective and ever evolving and dynamic than we realize. So we create these frameworks and trends and labels to try to code, quite literally code both in categories and names and zero and one binaries of what this is.

And we need to, to a certain extent because we can’t just throw up our hands. This is really messy stuff. And can we embrace that messiness and that gray area thinking? What I try to do is in that realm, which is can we deconstruct some of the presumptions that we come to the table with and think about this differently? The one that’s killing me right now is, we need to operate at the speed of culture.

Ridiculous.

In what way? Ridiculous. What’s ridiculous about that?

That we’re conflating culture with fast.

No, that’s one part of it. You’re talking about the boo-boo nonsense, machete garbage. That’s not culture.

Culture is also language, civil rights, religion, climate collapse. That stuff happens slowly. Is that not culture? Of course it’s culture.

So you’re talking about one super thin sliver of culture and it’s the least important part of it. So you don’t have to operate at that. Or another example, we need to predict the next thing before anyone else can.

So we have to create our trend forks, forecasting algorithmic newsroom to catch blank before anyone else. And the provocation there is, okay, and then what? What are you gonna do with it when you catch it? It’s the dog chasing the bus or car. What are you gonna do when you catch it? Not only do you not have the answer, you don’t even have the organizational capability to do something with it.

If you catch pickle girl summer, whatever it is before anyone else. Now what? So we’re just distracted by a lot of these things, which is fair because we’re living in a crazy moment where it’s very easy to be distracted by these things. And we have more data than ever.

We have more exposure to events around the world than ever. We have more access to people to research than ever. We have more opinions than ever.

Everyone and their mom has their substack. Fantastic, but can we develop a sense of taste or discernment around what do we pay attention to? What do we care about? And what’s going to help us? And then that part of what’s going to help us, let’s start there. What are we actually trying to stand for? Why are we in people’s lives? Back to identity exchange.

What do we want to be known for? How do we wanna help people? How do we provide value? How do we make this world better? Let’s start there and then worry about Pickle Girl Summer later on.

So many good things. So what do you call that top layer of culture that is being confused for culture?

Entertainment. Yeah. It’s fun, okay? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fun to talk about it and to pontificate and write these articles about it and to strategize around it and make tools to analyze it. It’s fun. And there’s not gonna totally denounce it.

There’s some value to it. It’s what people care about and are interested in. There’s value to that. But to mistake that as your business opportunity or business thread is completely myopic thinking.

How does one tell the difference between the two? And then I’m gonna little asterisk here because you reminded me. I’m just, I imagine you know Grant McCracken.

I’m always quoting Grant because I love him so much. But he talks about culture as dark matter for corporations. And I’m just recognizing that he’s very explicit about how mystifying culture is for the organization in the same way that you’re being very explicit about that it’s just, let’s just name this as something that the organizations just don’t know how to manage.

What’s the right question? How do we tell the difference between the messy culture that matters and the superficial entertainment bit? And how do you help clients see it for what it is or operate on it?

I’m not gonna pretend there’s a right answer or a hard-coded answer. I don’t think there is. Back to this messiness.

And that’s not to punt the question by any means. Because for me, I think it’s a good question. For me, the threshold or the criteria is does this scratch a human itch? If you wanna go back to hierarchy of needs, do humans fundamentally care about this thing? And does this have a more evergreen shelf life? If it’s, I don’t know, stonks or NFTs, back to the metaverse, what is this itching? Is this answering something for people? Maybe in a moment, sure.

But if you really, really go deep, what is this doing for people? I don’t know much. I don’t know what this is answering. Now, if you go back to La Boo Boo Entertainment, Dubai Chalk, sure, that’s fulfilling something that is scratching an itch, so that contradicts it.

But this is where it gets so fricking tricky. You almost need a cool-off period where, it’s funny, rec soccer, there’s this rule when we were kids. And the rec soccer rule was, if you’re a parent and you have an issue with one of the games, and the games are on Saturdays, you can’t call until Tuesday morning.

You can’t complain until Tuesday morning. We’ll hear you Tuesday morning. We’ll take your call, take your email, but you can’t send it until Tuesday morning.

So I think there’s something applicable here, which is if you just wait half a beat and see if this still persists, and it’s still scratching an itch, and it’s still saying something about our moment, fantastic, all aboard. Let’s talk more about La Boo Boo’s, or I don’t know, Mu Deng, the pygmy hippo, which everyone’s forgotten about at this point, poor Mu Deng. But if you just wait just half a second, you’ll realize, whoa, maybe this is not as important as we actually think it is in our current moment.

That’s not to say it wasn’t important in that moment, or there’s other signals that we could create constellations around. We just maybe need a cool off period for some reflection. Because we get caught up in the cycle of machine and the platform and the algorithm.

It wants us to work that fast, but it’s not natural. That’s not, we don’t operate at that level. So to think that we operate at that level because the news headlines operate that, that’s not it.

That’s not how it works. So to go back to the original question, what are brands asking, or how do we help these organizations? What are those provocations? It’s can we attune ourselves back to the human frequency, and realize that we are only human, and we’re trying to resonate with humans? So getting caught up in all this spin cycle, all this so-called nonsense isn’t helping anyone.

Yeah, that’s beautiful. And it’s, I mean, so resonate is a word I just keep, it feels everybody just wants to be resonating now. It’s the best expression of how we feel aligned with things, I think. I wanted to ask, I’m always selfishly interested in the role that qualitative research and ethnographic research plays in things.

If it doesn’t play a role, that’s fine too. But how do you think about research and the different modes and the methods and approaches in terms of helping organizations resonate?

I have no favorite, and oftentimes no preference, right? Pros and cons to all of it. I have a soft spot for the deeper, slower ethnographic research.

I, years ago, was on a crazy project trying to help understand why chronically ill insurance members were rejecting care. They were offered in-home care and it was a benefit to everyone if they accepted this care because they lived longer, insurance doesn’t have to pay out. Yet they couldn’t figure out, here was this free care for people to help, not just organize your life, but pick up prescriptions and clean and wash.

And why were people rejecting this? No survey, no dashboard, no semiotic, whatever. Nothing is helping you unless you go into those homes and spend three hours with these people. So I have a soft spot for that.

That being said, I don’t mean to punt again, it’s so dependent upon what’s our context. And maybe that’s the insight in itself, which is, I think we have a hammer, call it a dashboard for social listening, and we just view everything as the nail to hit that with. So I’m a bit more contextual of what are we doing or why are we doing it? I also look at a whole lot of data all day long, the largest human generated text corpus that’s ever existed.

So there’s a bias towards that as well. Incredible, incredible insight. The downside is you can’t ask a question to any of it.

No follow-up, can’t ask, what do you mean by that? Or why’d you use that word? Or what about in this context? It’s static. Not only is it static, but it’s five years old. And five years old is insight if you want to compare it to this year or next year.

Yeah, pros and cons to all of this.

Yeah. You talked about, I think in a recent study, you had a bunch of people choose the word of the moment. Is that right?

Yeah.

Here, I want to talk, I want to get your sense of the state of things right now. And I guess the words of the moments were anxiety and overwhelm. Is that right?

That’s right.

And then in my newsletter today, and I don’t ever plug this, but somebody wrote, do you know what whelm? I have a link about the word whelm. Maybe, I don’t think so.

But it’s whelm means overturn and it’s about boats. Whelm meant originally overturn or capsize. A thing that was whelmed was either a boat or other thing inverted with concavity down or someone or something covered by such a concavity. Anyway, so I thought that was a charming segue to talk about how we are all feeling now and what’s your, from where you sit, how are we all doing? What’s going on?

Not well. Not well. I go back and forth. I think about this a lot. You read Futurists from the 60s. I think of a future shock. And there’s these lines like, the pace of information and technology is greater than it’s ever been. We’re in complete overwhelm.

We cannot make sense of reality. This is so, so long ago. So either you’re incredibly prescient or this is just the human condition.

And it’s a 50-50 coin flip on how I feel every morning of is this particularly unique and this is truly, truly unprecedented or it’s just always been a mess, sometimes less of a mess than others. I flip-flop on that all the time. But I think by and large, it’s not good right now.

It’s not good. I’m optimistic, you have to be optimistic and not naively, but I’m optimistic because this goes back to the work that we do. These organizations, these institutions, these politicians, it’s all so malleable.

It’s so flexible. It’s so, it’s made up. None of it’s real. It’s arbitrary at times. So if that arbitrariness can get us to this point, that arbitrariness can also get us to other points as well. So the optimism comes from this idea of agency.

Now that’s easier said than done. I just think we’re missing a bit of, without diagnosing everyone or everything, that’s not the intent. I just think we’re a little, back to nautical themes, just a little lost at sea.

We’re treading, we’re swimming in a direction and we’re quite uncertain if that’s even the right direction or is that towards shore or not? And we’re just overwhelmed and exhausted with I’m tired of just treading. Where are we going and why? And who’s leading us there? And how much longer? And what’s gonna be there when we get there? We have no vision of what can be next. And I think that’s maybe the most acute part, which is we have no alternatives.

We have no tangible or visible alternatives. There’s a reason why a certain individual is in the position which he’s in, because he’s offered, this is what the future can look like. It looks autonomous cars and living on Mars.

At least that’s a vision. And you could understand why people are attracted to that because it is a vision, it is an alternative. It’s something other than this moment.

Now, there’s many, many, many other options, just harder to find them, to point to them, to hear them. And I think it’s scary for people to present them in our current moment, to deviate from or to stick their neck out. So chicken or egg, I don’t know, but a bit of a catch 22, the words I’ll use is lost or directionless, rudderless.

I thought I wanted to share, there are some of my shower thoughts, but I think they’re just observations that feel really true about what’s happening now. And I wanted to just run them by you. We’ll let my dog out for a second.

The first comes from, it was several years ago. I remember a couple of people in different contexts telling me the same story. One was this woman in wellness.

And she was saying that, you can’t really trust healthcare or doctors really to know what’s wrong with you. I’m the only one that really knows what’s good for me. And then a couple of weeks later, a guy at a bike shop was saying the same thing about the news.

He was, you can’t really trust any of the news. I’m the only one, I have to go out and do my own research. And I’ve come to call this, this is just the collapse of trust, right? Everywhere.

But I’ve come to call this sovereignty that we’re in this sort of sovereign age where everybody’s sort of assuming absolute control and responsibility for their domain because there’s no higher authority. It’s another way I’ve heard people describe it as trust went from vertical to horizontal. We’re all, we have to figure it out on our own.

And then I wanna throw into that. So that idea that things went from vertical to horizontal, the K-shaped economy, this idea that we’ve split in two and the well are doing really, really well and the poor are doing really poorly. And then third, and I think this is probably another hour’s worth of a conversation, but the notion of orality, this idea that media, we’ve just shifted out of, we’re in sort of post-literate, I’ve heard people talk about.

So we’re not reading anymore. And the implications of all three of these feels the maelstrom that we’re in. I think that’s a nautical term.

Yeah, what do you make of that? I feel if I were to draw a map, that would be the map. I would be trying to help people. That’s what I would describe as the environment we’re in.

I it. I co-sign. Yes.

Yes, across the board. For the trust and sovereignty bit, what comes to mind is, it’s almost larger than trust. It’s no one’s going to come help you.

So therefore you’re on your own. And that’s where I think you see something a sports betting mania, which is, fuck it, I’m on my own. Let’s gamble it.

Because my resources are much more limited or more precisely, my prospects or futures are more limited. So you have this maybe larger desperation, more willingness to bet because I’ve got less to lose. That then speaks to your K-shaped economy.

I think that’s always, maybe more so now, but people have always done very well and people have always done poorly. That’s more exacerbated and more extreme in our current moment, which then goes back because no one’s helping. In the same survey that I’d run about what’s the top word to define the moment, hold on, this is going to be, yeah.

In that same survey asking people what’s the top word, I’d also asked a question of what do you think is the most overlooked aspect of culture today? So my meta trend analysis was here’s what everyone’s talking about. But for those who study culture, what’s the one element you believe is having that outsized impact relative to discussion? Back to the question I think about a lot. And there’s a lot of answers around this idea of the successful, i.e. elites, celebrities, influencers, those are perhaps one aspect of the K-line are ignoring those on the bottom K-line.

That there’s not just a deviation, but a lack of acknowledgement of that. And I think that goes back to, oh, wow, I’m really on my own. There’s no, let’s go back to nautical themes, no dingy is gonna come and save me.

There’s no Coast Guard looking for me right now. And to maybe try to tie this all together, back to the post-literate bit, what comes to mind there is that, yes, we’re in a very visual culture. I think what’s driving that is that it’s a fast, just speedy, overwhelmed culture.

And we’re able to encode visual data faster than auditory or written. That a symbol or a sign is quicker. The video is quicker than hearing something.

So maybe we can tie these all together, if you stretch that in that overwhelmed, there’s this just fast breakneck desperation of I gotta go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, that utter panic, this frenetic energy of truly feeling alone and having to figure it out yourself because no one’s coming for you.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Have you encountered that orality argument before?

I have. I thought of it a lot when there was all those home devices, the Amazon Alexas and the Apple had one. And there was all this talk that, our future is gonna be screenless.

Well, there’s some term, spatial computing. We’re gonna live without screens. Never bought that, never bought that because no one wants to wait for the message to be finished read.

Right. I remember I had done a little, we’re near the end of time and I did a podcast project for a greeting card company. And I remember talking to young people about communications and greeting cards and greeting cards had become the equivalent of a marriage proposal. You know what I mean? The formality of a greeting card had become so, it’d become so weighted when you’re living in a world of text. But Matt, I wanna thank you so much for accepting the invitation and for showing up. I really appreciate it.

My pleasure. I appreciate the questions. This was a lot of fun.

Qual

Above, James Forr on the value of qualitative. Also, Simon Shaw on qual at scale. And, Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on collective listening.

Civic

Also, Andy Hall on political superintelligence. Also, Jazmin Pichardo & Beth Douthirt-Cohen on embodied conflict. And, Zeynep Aksehirli on Babylon Effect.

Strategy

Above, Leland Maschmeyer on Value Creation. Also, Alex Murrell on creative courage. And, Iain McGilchrist on left hemisphere laziness.

Design

Above, Matt Watkinson on digital luxury. Also, Jakob Voldum on AI and Design. And, Savannah Kunovsky on invisible design.

Friction

Above, Anat Perry-Sharon on social friction. Also, Emmet Ó Briain on AI and Sociality. And, Rebecca Solnit on the slow revolution.

Katarina Graffman is a cultural anthropologist and founder of Inculture, a cultural analysis consultancy. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and is a researcher at Uppsala University. Her clients include IKEA, Volvo, Bloomberg, Björn Borg, Skanska, Swedish Radio, and the BBC. She co-authored *We Are What We Buy* (2018) and *In Search of the Time to Come* (2020).

Her TED Talk “The focus on the rational mind will lead to climate collapse.”

All right, so I start all the conversations I do with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their stories. I don’t know, it’s just a beautiful question, so I stole it from her.

But it’s really big, so I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, 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? And again, you are in absolute control.

That’s an interesting question. I come from my mother’s womb. I was actually listening to a podcast this morning when I was out walking — a professor in nanotechnology here in Sweden, Maria Strömme. She’s from Norway, but she’s at Uppsala University. She has been in hard science her whole life, but now she’s started to dig deep into philosophy and the humanities, because she thinks she can build a mathematical formula to understand where people go after death. Where they go.

And I’ve never been someone who is afraid of death, even though I’m not religious. I think that in some way, we are around. So it was really interesting to hear this hard science woman arrive at the same conclusion through mathematics and physics. She will probably be a name in the future, I think.

So to answer your question — I come from my mother’s womb, but I think I come from all over the place, from many, many people from the past. That was a little bit maybe strange.

How does that feel? What’s that?

It feels good.

Nice. You used this phrase, I think, we are around. What did you mean when you said that?

I said that the spirit of us — or the something, whatever it is — something in us as humans is always around. The only way to explain it.

Do you have a recollection of growing up, as a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be someone working with elephants, but I ended up working with humans.

I don’t know what it says about me. What was the attraction to the elephants? I think I have always been fascinated by elephants because they are very wise. They have a really interesting way of living in groups, how they socialize with each other.

So I think maybe that’s also why I studied humans, because what’s interesting about anthropology is how people live in their groups, how we become herd members. We always talk about how humans are so individualistic and unique, especially in Western cultures. But the thing is that we are more dependent on the group than ever before in those individualistic cultures.

So that’s my area I’m studying today. Yeah. Did you have an experience with elephants as a child that inspired you, or where did that come from, do you think? I don’t know.

Not more than going to the zoo. And then later on, I went to Tanzania, but that was when I was 20-something, when I was starting my PhD. I went for half a year to Tanzania.

Of course, I saw elephants in the wild, but by then I had already started my anthropological career. Yeah. Tell us, where are you now and what do you do for work? Yeah, I’m an anthropologist and I took my PhD in Sweden, Uppsala University, in 2002.

And then I rather quickly decided to leave the university and academic life because I wanted to work outside. I think that as an anthropologist you can do a lot in society, in organizations, in different aspects of how to understand humans. I wrote my thesis about TV producers.

So that was a little bit different from many other anthropologists. My thesis was about how people in content creation produce content for people they don’t know. Especially in Sweden, we have public service and you are supposed to reach certain groups of people in our nation.

How can you do that if you don’t know them? So I wrote about that — how producers create fantasy viewers based on maybe one person they know in the countryside. And there was also an American anthropologist studying public service TV who talked about the same idea — that you create a viewer and then you start to make content with that fantasy in your head.

And I think that’s very interesting if you look at the marketing industries, because they often have very shallow knowledge of the people they are supposed to create products or advertisements for. So that’s where my interest started.

Yeah. I want to hear more about the field work on your thesis. That’s so fascinating. As somebody who’s worked within organizations and big corporations in the US, there’s all this talk about personas and empathy — all these shortcuts to help people develop products for people they don’t know. It’s a whole infrastructure, really. So what did you do and what did you really learn?

I started my field work with the idea that I was going to study how you make formats more locally adapted. For example, Who Wants to Become a Millionaire or Survivor or something — the format has a Bible, from the person who came up with the idea, and they say this is the way you should produce this format. But then you have to locally do something to make it popular in Sweden or popular in the UK or popular in Poland or wherever you are.

So I was interested in how you make this cultural adaptation of a format. But as an anthropologist, you can never know if what you’re interested in is going to happen during the time you’re there. So they didn’t do any formats. And when I was there — I was at a production company in Sweden, maybe they did 12 to 15 different productions — I started to become very interested in, OK, how do you know how to make this program? Because you don’t know your viewers, whether they’ll connect with it or not.

And then I talked to a guy who was in charge of the insights at this production company and he said, well, nobody in this industry comes and asks me anything about how to get to know people. It has happened twice. And I have put a sheet together with some statistics — that’s the only thing they want.

But I was so interested because I thought, wow, this is really something. So then I tried to understand how you as a creator actually make things when you don’t know for whom. That was my focus — to understand this process. And different producers use different strategies.

One guy, he said that when he’s out of creativity, he goes to a small town in Sweden and has some drinks at the bar. Then he goes home and writes new stuff. He’s met the ordinary Swedes.

So it was a lot of easy ways to get to know people without real knowledge. And maybe that’s why I talk a lot about insight washing in my work today. Because I think that what most companies do is insight washing. They have very, very shallow insights. You mentioned personas, generation descriptions, et cetera.

And that’s quite shallow because it’s mainly based on quantitative studies or broad categories. They don’t have this deep, qualitative knowledge of how people live their lives, what is meaningful for them, how people act in different groups — because you can never get that if you only ask people things. So insight washing is, I would say, the summary of everything I do.

Trying to make organizations understand what it is.

Yeah. What’s the definition of insight washing?

Well, I think it’s when you try to make very shallow insights look like real knowledge.

And I think that when you talk about it in that sense, people get two reactions. One is, wow, that’s true. But they also get a little bit offended — oh, so you don’t like quantitative studies? Well, it’s not about that, because you need both. You need different tools if you really want to understand. So what I say is that you should have qualitative studies as part of it.

It can be ethnography, it can be different conversations with people, it can be observation. You need to have the other view, not only what people say. Yeah.

You need to be able to see, okay, is this true? Are people really doing what they’re saying? No, they’re not. So that’s what I always say — you can’t trust what people say. You have to understand how they live.

So tell us about the work you do now. When do clients come to you, what kinds of problems do they bring, and how would you describe your approach?

I can take one project. One of my latest projects was for a big official organization that oversees building — different building projects. They set all the rules for construction. How do you explain that in English? A developer? Yeah, but they also decide all the rules for building. It’s more like a regulatory body.

So they have been working a lot with waste in the building industry. And in Sweden, they’ve estimated that around 25 percent is waste — materials, time, everything. It’s the most wasteful industry of all of them.

And they said, everybody in the business knows this, but why is nothing happening? Why isn’t the waste getting less year by year? So me and another anthropologist, we had the question: how can we work with this without sending another information folder? Everybody already knows. And that’s very typical when I work with companies — they want to change something. I work a lot with sustainability today.

People know, but they don’t change behavior. And the easiest response is to treat the human as a rational person. So let’s send some more information.

This time they will probably change — but of course, they will not. So I worked with them, me and Lotta Björklund Larsson, the other anthropologist. We thought, what can we do? Because building is very, very complex.

It’s a very complex process from when they start to buy land to the end, and also everything that happens after the building project is over. So we said, let’s look at the knowledge culture in this business. Why is it that everyone knows, but nothing is happening? Is there something wrong with how knowledge is transferred between different parts of the project, between different companies? So we focused on understanding the knowledge culture in the building industry.

And what we found was that many, many people have an enormous amount of knowledge, but they don’t have any system to transfer it the way they should. And they don’t systematically look at good and bad projects and use that knowledge going forward.

So that’s one way to work — finding ways to make change without using information as the lever. Especially when it comes to consumer culture. People know the world is on fire, but — I still want my fast fashion little dress. So I’ve been working a lot on that. How do you make people change without telling them to change? That’s maybe my main area today.

Yeah. Because it’s also a world that really needs change in many, many ways. So when did you first realize you could make a living doing this stuff? I think that I have had my own company now for 20 years, actually.

And I know I wrote something about that on LinkedIn, because when I told my former professor at Uppsala University that I wanted to start my own business and have my own company, she said to me, oh, that will be tough for you. Don’t say that you’re an anthropologist. So then I decided — yes, of course I will say that I’m an anthropologist.

Why make that choice? I think because she said that people in Sweden think anthropology is something weird. As I told you before we started to record, in Sweden, applied anthropology is not common. You can’t study it as a subject.

So an anthropologist in Sweden and Finland has been quite rare, compared to Denmark, for example. In some countries, anthropology has been much more established as a career path.

Your advisor told you to avoid the language, but you chose it for yourself. Why?

Because I thought that anthropology was the best subject in the world. I was supposed to study law first, then economics, and then I decided no.

Economics, because I thought that was quite a broad education and you can do almost anything. But it was really boring — I started with statistics, so I had to take a term off. And then I actually saw anthropology.

I didn’t know what it was when I was looking in the catalogue for the courses. And I started to read anthropology, and by my third course, the first term, I was just amazed. It was like a salvation for me.

It was really like, wow, this is fantastic. It made me see the world in totally new ways. So then I continued to read anthropology in different subjects and took my PhD.

So anthropology for me — it’s not a job. It’s a way of living and seeing the world, I would say. So that’s why when she said, you shouldn’t say that you’re an anthropologist —

I said, of course I have to do that.

I love that so much. How do you talk about what anthropology is, or what culture is, to people? I know you teach, and these ideas can feel slippery. How do you talk about what culture is? And as an anthropologist, what do you do that somebody who’s not an anthropologist can’t?

I would say — I know that it’s difficult. And also in Sweden, we have a particular difficulty with the word culture, because in Swedish, culture is called kultur, and that means both fine arts and culture. One word for both.

And that makes it even harder to explain what you do — it makes the whole thing blurry. So you have to find other ways to explain it.

When I talk to companies, I mostly talk about behavior — understanding people’s behavior, not only trusting what they say, and looking at group effects. If you’re more practical when you explain, it helps. Because in anthropology, there are around 200 definitions of what culture is. So of course, it’s really difficult.

And I think Grant McCracken has a good way, because he talks about it as a language. You learn the grammar when you are a baby and you start to talk, but you don’t know that. You just learn the language and start to speak it.

If you start to learn a language when you’re older, you need to learn the grammar. And that can be quite difficult, instead of just being in a culture and you just start to talk. And he says that culture is like that.

Culture is the blueprint of the society. It’s the grammar of the society. And it’s the system that decides how people interact and how they behave in different contexts.

So for many, it can feel like it’s quite blurry. But ethnography is the method of anthropology. It’s about putting a lot of time in different contexts, studying how people behave, and also talking to them without leading questions.

I can study a family and I can always ask them, why did you do that? Or can you explain that for me? But I never ask leading questions, because then you are pulling them towards different answers. And you’re not interested in that as an anthropologist.

You want to understand, how do these people live in everyday life? And who is affected by whom? Because that’s the essence of understanding culture.

How do you think about the questions you ask? You’ve said you don’t want to ask leading questions — so what kind of question do you find yourself asking?

Oh, it really depends on the project. I have one example. I was working with a fashion brand in Sweden and the marketing manager sent me three sheets with questions. Very tiny text.

And I was really — oh my God, she has really been thinking about this. She was a new marketing manager at this fashion brand and she wanted to do ethnography. She knew what anthropology is all about.

And she said, I have too many questions. So then I said to her, okay, interesting to read your questions, but let’s just leave them. The only thing I would go out and do is actually understand: what does this brand mean for people?

And then we studied how people use the brand. They had different stores. We did field work in the stores to understand the customers. We worked in different subgroups to understand how they used the brand — or how they didn’t use the brand.

And then we started to say, okay, this is what the brand is all about. And it answered almost all her questions, but we had this really broad approach. And the most interesting part was that this company thought they were so much hotter, in the trendier customer groups.

And it actually showed that no, they were very late majority. And that made a total difference for them — how they looked at the brand, what kind of marketing they were supposed to do. Everything changed because they realized they had been thinking totally wrong about who used the brand and why.

So I would say that most projects I do, I look at it very holistically, with a very broad question. And then you start to get knowledge and you get closer and closer to what is really interesting. And I call that the white spaces — and the white spaces are almost always something the company haven’t thought of at all, because you find it when you go in with this broad perspective.

What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?

I would say two things. I meet a lot of people that I never would meet, because we live in our bubbles.

And sometimes when you go out and do your field work — you have to go out in the evenings, and you feel, oh, I’m so tired, it’s tough going out tonight — but then it’s so fun to meet people you never meet otherwise. It can be in parts of Sweden I never go to. It can be different kinds of people that I normally don’t hang around with.

We always live in our bubbles — at work, doing our exercise, the family, the area we live in. So I love that part, that I meet so many different kinds of people.

And then also — it’s fantastic to do this often long study. It doesn’t have to be that long. When you write your PhD, you’re supposed to be one or two years in the field.

And that’s not possible if you work with company clients. But you put a lot of time in anyway. And then when you have all this data and you start to look at it and work with it and you realize, wow, look here — here is a real finding, here is a white space.

I think that’s the most gratifying part of being an anthropologist.

I’ve got two questions trying to come out at the same time. You’ve been at it a long time. How do you feel like it’s changed, or its role has changed, over that period?

I think that’s changed just in the last few years. When you do anthropology and ethnography in companies, you’re often looking eight to ten years out. What can we see today? What kind of trends, what kind of behavior can we see that will actually have an impact five, eight, ten years from now? Because you’re looking for those small signals when you do ethnography.

And my feeling is that companies are not interested in this long-term perspective anymore. It’s more like two years now. And that’s a little bit scary, especially because the world is changing so fast.

Instead of having this long perspective, they’re just looking at the fires right now. And I’ve been talking to other consultants from other fields and they say the same — the long-term perspective is gone.

And that’s scary, because you need it if you want to have a sustainable society. But what I’ve experienced in the last one or two years is something interesting, because I’ve met several highly educated engineers who say to me, we need the knowledge you have about understanding human beings. Engineers can be very focused on what they are doing right here, right now. And maybe they don’t see how the impact will be felt in other parts of society.

I’ve heard several engineers say that knowledge about how human beings behave will be even more important, because if we are going to scale up these technical solutions, it can be catastrophic if you don’t understand the impact and how people behave. And several really well-educated people, both in tech and other fields, say that understanding how human beings use technology will be so much more important when we have this technology all around us all the time.

So it’s hopeful, I think. Though it will take time before companies understand that, because right now they think they can do everything themselves. And the whole discussion about how everything will become very average, because they do all the creative work with AI — so of course, it will all be the same.

I think it will take time before companies realize that they really need to do something different. That they really need this understanding of how people live and what’s important for them.

Two things you said earlier — the insight washing, and the way anthropology is almost exclusively focused on very durable, enduring learnings. There’s a huge gap between what organizations like to digest and what anthropology actually creates. Do you feel that mismatch? And then — this is a big question — for somebody in a leadership position who wants real knowledge, not insight washing, what guidance do you give them about balancing different ways of learning about who they serve?

That was a very long, dense, tricky question, because I think that most organizations live in a system — they already have ways of doing stuff. And the way they’ve been doing it, it’s difficult to bend the system, because everything is connected to the same way of working, including how you look at insights.

So the main thing I would say is this: when I started — I’ve been working now for over 20 years — I had a lot of meetings in the beginning. And I would say that maybe two to three percent of people in CEO positions understood what I was talking about. And I quickly realized I couldn’t sit with people who didn’t even understand what I was talking about, because it would just drain my energy.

And today, I would say maybe 15 to 20 percent understand, after 20 years. Of course, I also have much more experience now, many more examples. So I can explain better.

Because you can’t sit and talk in anthropological terms — you have to find better ways to explain. But there is a difference. And the first thing I say is, look at what you’re measuring. Because we live in a measurement society — everything should be measured, all the time. How effective people are at work, how successful our product is, how much people love sustainability, blah, blah. You measure everything.

So the first thing I say is, can you look into everything you’re measuring? What are you measuring, and why? And what kind of answers do you think you’re getting? Because if they start there, they soon realize that maybe they don’t understand the right things. And one typical example — if you measure how loyal your customers are, or how satisfied your co-workers are, you have these measurement systems that you do every year. And I’ve worked with companies where I say, okay, you’ve done this with your co-workers for — what, 30 years? Have you changed the questions? We have a totally different world.

Oh no, we can’t change the questions, because then we can’t compare to what they said 10 years ago. And for me, that was really like — okay, society has totally changed. But you still ask the same questions. It’s amazing.

So very often I start by saying, what are you measuring? What kind of quantitative studies are you doing? Look into those things.

And maybe let someone with a qualitative eye look at what you’re doing. You might save some money, because some of these things aren’t telling you anything.

So I think that’s the first thing to keep in mind. And also to question this idea of information as a way to change people’s behavior and values.

Most people in companies know it doesn’t work, but they don’t have any other tools. People aren’t changing, they still eat bad things — okay, let’s do another information campaign. They know this isn’t working, but they don’t have alternatives.

So you give them some ideas. How could you do this differently? Maybe it could be nudging, or other approaches. Try to make small changes, and then they understand, wow, this is really good for us. And then they can start to make bigger changes.

I want to go back to that example — the client who wouldn’t change the questions because it would ruin their ability to track change over time. Can you be explicit about what makes that insane? What’s the assumption underneath that’s so problematic?

I would say — you have this saying that how you ask things, that’s the kind of answers you get.

And for example, it can be such easy things as using the wrong words. Maybe you’re using words that people in the 90s understood one way, but people in 2025 experience differently. I can give you an example. I was working with a big TV company in Sweden, and they were doing a lot of quantitative studies on how young people experienced different media and technology.

And they were using the phrase “new media” when they were talking about digital media. Because if you remember, 20 years ago, we talked about new media — that was the word. They didn’t know what to call YouTube, so it was new media.

And they were still using that phrase in their quantitative studies. And the young people we were studying, they said, what? What is new media? I know what old media is — that’s public service, that’s radio, that’s newspapers. I don’t know what new media is.

So they couldn’t even answer the questions because they didn’t know what was being asked. That’s a very simple example. And you also need to understand that media technology has so fundamentally changed the way we live and understand the world.

If you don’t have that included in your quantitative studies — if you want to understand customer loyalty or behavior — it’s really strange.

Have you ever heard of appreciative inquiry? We don’t need to get into it. But David Cooperrider — it’s an approach to transformation that’s not problem-solution. It’s about identifying where things are working, peak experiences, and trying to replicate the good as opposed to solving the bad. He had a quote: we live in the world that our questions create. And I feel like that’s the idea you were expressing.

Yes, yes, that’s very, very true. And I think that’s also connected to what I’ve been saying about white spaces — broadening the area of what you’re interested in. Because otherwise, managers have some ideas about what’s going wrong, or what they want to check.

And if your research doesn’t give them the answer they want, well, then they don’t use it. They’ve already decided what they want to confirm. The problem is that very rarely is that correct, because it’s often something else that’s wrong — something else in people’s everyday life that is affecting your brand or your product.

And managers sit, maybe they sit for quite a long time in the same company. And of course, they develop this framed view of things. That’s the way of being human. If you are in a certain context, you start to see only what’s inside the frame.

So it’s really hard to go outside your own frame of safety and start to understand what’s going on. And sometimes it’s even better to study people who don’t use your brand or don’t use your product. Because then you understand why they’re not using it. You can get more insights from that than from studying the people who are already using it.

So there are a lot of ways to get a much better understanding than the traditional way of doing research.

We’ve just got a little bit of time left. I’m always curious to hear people advocate for qualitative. You’ve talked about measurement, and I think we probably agree that there’s a kind of qualitative illiteracy in organizations — people don’t really understand what qualitative is, or that it’s actually data. How do you talk about what makes qualitative so important, and the role it should play in how people make decisions?

Well, I think I have mentioned it now. I use this quote: people don’t say what they think, they don’t know what they feel, and they for sure don’t do as they say.

And that’s my idea of being human. And that’s what I bring into the field when I start to do my study. We live with this idea of the rational person who understands information and can interpret the knowledge and then make a wise decision.

And we can’t. And humans are not living in a social and cultural vacuum. We are social beings. I would say that most things we do in life is because of other people.

I think, for example, Mark Earls has written Herd. It’s about the idea that you are part of a group — whether it’s the family, or your company, or your friends, or different groupings in social media. You want to do as other people do, because that’s the way of being human — being part of a group.

So in that sense, it’s so important to study how groups live and how they act and what’s important for the group.

Beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It’s been a blast talking to you.

Thank you.