Ben Dietz is the Founder & Chief Strategy Officer of Rangelife, a Superformat Design Group in Brooklyn. Previously, he spent 16 years at VICE, and was a co-founder of VIRTUE, it’s award-winning agency.
He sends out an amazing newsletter [SIC]: A Digest of Developments, and is the organizer of Breakfast Club BK an open breakfast on Wednesday mornings in Brooklyn that has spawned a growing network of breakfasts around the world.
FYI. I will be launching, with Mark DePace of The Friendly City Creative Club, Breakfast Club HUDSON at Kitty’s by the train station in November. Reach out.
I start all of my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She lives up here named Suzanne Snider. She teaches oral history. It's such a beautiful question. I use it all the time, but it's such a big question. I kind of over explain it the way that I'm doing now. Before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want. Now, with that lead up, the question is, where do you come from?
Well, I come from Syracuse, New York, which was the family seat for about 150 years. My family company relocated there in the 1840s from New York City. It was a lighting concern and made kerosene lanterns and that sort of thing to light the railroads and streets of a burgeoning America. I grew up in Syracuse. I was there until I was 18 when I moved to Philadelphia to go to college and then to New York. But Syracuse is a real touchstone for me for a variety of different reasons. So when people ask where I'm from, that's it.
What does it mean to be from Syracuse? How do you think about what it was like to grow up in Syracuse?
There are many places in the world, probably, but in America, certainly, where there's this joke, if you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes, it'll change. But Syracuse truly is like that. I grew up under overcast skies my entire childhood. Partly cloudy was our equivalent of a sunny day. Rain and snow constantly. And I never thought about it as a young person, but I realized as an adult that what it did was it made me adaptable. And it made me love improvisation, not in a UCB way. But living in the moment and trying to make extemporaneous decisions and looking for and relishing serendipity, because you never know what's going to happen in 15 minutes. So you have to be prepared for all of it and you have to relish the change
Is that lake effect weather?
It is. Lake effect is commonly attributed to snow in the winter. It's the accumulation of moisture in the clouds over the Great Lakes, which then gets dumped west of Lake Ontario in Syracuse's case. But the lake effect happens all year round. Syracuse is just far enough west, more so than Rochester, more so than Buffalo, that it really gets the brunt of that stuff.
What did young Ben in Syracuse want to be when he grew up?
I was always a talker. I used to be told when I was a kid that I should be a lawyer, which I always took as a compliment, because I thought lawyers are powerful and high earners and all that stuff. What I have come to realize over the course of time is that they really meant, you talk too much, you should shut up. But it was in my blood.
That's a cruel interpretation.
I'm a glass half full person in spite of myself. No matter what they intended, the way I took it was as part of the reinforcement. But yeah, I thought I'd be a lawyer. The family company, which had existed for 140 years by the time I became aware of it, was never an interest of mine. I always wanted to get out of Syracuse. I always wanted to experience other things. I always felt like I would move.
What was your relationship with that family business? What was it like to know that you were part of a traditional legacy like that?
It's important to note that the company was sold when I was 15. So I didn't have time to develop a full relationship to it. But it instilled in me the sense that things are going to be okay, things are durable, the world is ordered and predictable to a degree, so that you don't have to compensate for it, it will sort itself out. That's what informs my general glass half full mentality. But it was a pull, it was a keystone of the community. It was a pull in my life. It was an organizing factor in all of our family gatherings, and all that sort of stuff. It was obviously a point of pride and esteem.
Do you have a story about being a kid in the business? Was it a retail business?
No, it's a manufacturing business. The Dietz company, R.E. Dietz, made lighting. It began making literally handheld kerosene lanterns, the sort of things that you see nowadays on nostalgic campsites. But in the 20th century it moved into various other kinds of lighting. So it got into construction signals, barricade lights and road signs and that sort of stuff. When I was a kid, you'd frequently drive around and you'd see a Dietz sign on the construction barricade that you were driving past. That was always a fun, that was our version of an I spy kind of thing.
That's amazing. Largest manufacturer of lanterns. That's such a beautiful thing to be able to say.
Yeah, that moment long predated my life and probably my father's life. That was probably the early 1900s. But after electrification, less need for kerosene lanterns. But yeah, it was a cool thing. I mainly remember going to the factory where my father's corporate offices were. My father would go to his office sometimes on the weekends, my brother and I would just run around the empty factory floors, which smelled of grease and metal and were huge and mysterious and risky. That was a lot of fun.
I grew up in Rochester and I had a moment maybe 10 years ago now where I encountered somebody from Buffalo, a fellow Western New Yorker, and I was like, what is it? Every time I meet somebody from Western New York, I click with them in some way that's different than somebody from New England or whatever. And this person said very quickly, oh, well, that's because we're Midwesterners. And something in me clicked. I knew that I wasn't from New York City, even though I was from New York State. I knew that I wasn't from New England, because that was just different and too far east or something. I'm not from Massachusetts. But I didn't really know where I was from. And when that person said, you're from the Midwest, it made sense to me. Do you feel about that?
I don't identify with that at all. To me, and this is no disrespect to Midwesterners, but the Midwest is about a certain kind of conservatism and stuckism that relishes the traditions and expectations of the past. What I always felt, and I put it down to the weather, was that we're about the next thing. I don't know that that's a Syracuse thing so much as it's a me thing. But that Midwestern stuckism is very much the opposite of the way I feel about it.
And you felt like you were from somewhere in being from Syracuse.
Oh, yeah. Syracuse is a lifestyle, it's a mindset. It's funny, I'm a little surprised to hear somebody from Buffalo ascribe Midwesternism to themselves, because I have not spent a lot of time in Buffalo, but it seems like they would be closer. But my friend, William Strobeck, the video director who makes skateboard films and movies for Supreme, the brand, is funny. We grew up skateboarding together in Syracuse, and he is a real diehard believer in bringing the guys that he films skateboarding with to Syracuse, because he feels like there's something about the atmosphere there that requires them to approach their trade in a different way. So I don't know, maybe it's, I wouldn't have heard it described as a spiritual vortex a la Mesa, Arizona or whatever, but maybe there's that too. The salt, the great salt deposits under Onondaga Lake are attracting some kind of magnetism.
That's amazing. So tell me a little bit about where you are right now, and the kind of work that you're doing.
I'm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for the last 25 years. I say that to people, and they are generally kind of aghast, as if Greenpoint didn't exist 25 years ago. And it kind of didn't, it was really the end of the earth when we moved here by necessity. I act as a consultant and advisor to media companies, brands, and agencies in the advertising and marketing space.
It has a lot to do with trying to help them find what I call superformats, which are essentially concepts, intellectual property concepts that emanate from their brand values, and then can be turned into many different expressions at different consumer touchpoints.
So for instance, this conversation is a newsletter, right? It could also be released as a podcast, although you don't do it that way, as I understand. It could be a video, it could be a series of quotations, put into a book of aphorisms, it could be recorded in front of a live audience and could be ticketed, or it could be a membership benefit.
The smartest thing that you say today could be put on a t-shirt and turned into a piece of merchandise. It's about trying to figure out where companies have those deep and intrinsic levels of value, and then creating strategies to bring them to life and to reap some of that value.
Where did this idea of superformat come from? What was the inspiration for that?
Well, it's an interesting, the secret of it really is that it's not a new concept at all. It's Walt Disney's ecosystem drawing or whatever that thing is called from 1959. This is what we built in my many years at Vice, taking magazine stories and filming them and then attaching brands to them and that sort of stuff. So the inspiration is just in successful businesses in the past.
The thing though that has happened is that attitudes like COPE, C-O-P-E, create once, produce everywhere, which is a truism in media production, has obscured the fact that it is not enough simply to just version everything. You have to be strategic about the ways that you sequence, the way that you deploy, the way that you create. And so what superformat tries to do is just give a new tag to a tried and true practice so that people look at it differently and don't just apply the same playbook again, but rather think strategically about what they're doing.
And what do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?
To me, it's an endless exercise of, oh, wouldn't it be cool if... That was the thing that I always loved about... I began my career in the music business. I worked then at a company called Heavy doing digital, moving media content. And this is in the early aughts before broadband penetration.
And then at Vice, where it's this constant conversation with your friends and like-minded people of, whoa, that thing seen from a 15 degree different angle could be this thing. Wouldn't that be cool? And you start every conversation there. And then, of course, you assess and decide, well, yes, that really would be cool. Or no, actually, that would be not cool. Let's not do that one. But it's a constant process of discovery and creation, which just makes it incredibly fun.
When would you say you first sort of encountered this work and discovered it was something you could make a living doing?
Well, I think in a lot of respects, it starts very early in absorbing the business philosophies of skateboarding and fashion magazines, which I loved as a kid, where the ads are content and the contents are ads for all intents and purposes. You know what I mean? You're reading about a new release or a new pro skateboarder or whatever. And really what that press copy exists to do is to inform you about consumer choices that you're able to make. But it infused me with the sense that things can be more than one. They can have more than one kind of asset value. And that was, I think, the part of it.
I had a real aha moment at VICE in my first year there in 2004. The first thing I ever worked on was the 10-year anniversary party. And at that party, the brand 55DSL, which was the sort of action sports sub-label of Diesel, sponsored the party. And as a deliverable for that sponsorship, we had photographers, Ryan McGinley, Terry Richardson, Tim Barber, you know, all of whom were becoming giants in their field at the time and since went on to both fame and infamy. We had them taking photos of the party. And two weeks after the party, they exhibited their photos from the party at the 55DSL store on Union Square. And we had them come back and take more photos of that party. And then add that second set of photos to the first set. And then all of the photos went to the 55DSL store in London. And the process repeated. And the process repeated again.
And I just thought to myself, oh my God, this is an endlessly repeatable format. This is as scalable as you want it to be. The party can be gigantic. It can happen in your store, or it can happen as a magazine, or it can happen in whatever format you want. And from that point, it was just like, okay, how do we take this thing we're creating and make more out of it? Like create more surface area that consumers can attach to, that sponsors can attach to, that we can attach ourselves to and can learn from and build a business out of.
You talk about superformat as ownable, modular, and scalable. These are the qualities of a superformat.
Yeah, those are exact words that I use. I don't know if you've read me say that somewhere. Although I would say, Peter, if you were just coming up with those words on your own, it would also be proof of concept for the idea. So yes, ownable, modular, and scalable.
Coming out of what you just mentioned, it seems like coming up out of skateboard culture and music culture, you just had a totally different relationship with business, I imagine. What was it like coming into the world of business through those avenues?
Well, I think it has to do with being really passionate about something and then realizing, oh my God, I can, somebody, whether it's me or not, somebody can make a living at this. You can do this as a job. I like this too much for this to be work. How could it possibly be work? And then having that switch flipped, then going, wait a minute, if I can have this much fun doing work, why would I ever do work that I can't have fun at? So I think that was really the kind of macro lesson from it.
Your experience at VICE, I mean, I remember being in meetings with civic innovators and journalism people when you guys were exploding and sort of redefining what journalism was meant to be. What was it like being at Vice during that time? And how do you look back on that period?
It was incredibly fun because it was just, we felt like we were making up the rules as we went. And as much as in hindsight, that might seem like a naive thing to say, most of the rules that we made up were, I think, super positive, super additive and helped define an industry that had tremendous promise and still does.
But the main thing about it was that I worked with my friends. I worked with really smart people who all could have made more money anywhere else, but who really felt like we're doing a thing that is unique. And so it's worth us being here. And very few of them were trained to begin with. Most people learn on the fly, myself included. And that meant an atmosphere that was really open to possibility because nobody knew the rules and nobody said, well, we have to, we must do it this way because that's the way things are done. It was like, let's see what happens. That was informed by this kind of fearlessness that came from the editorial side of just getting into situations that you didn't know or understand terribly well and making yourself a fly on the wall and reporting on them.
I talked recently in my podcast, [SIC] Talks, to Jesse Pearson, who was the editor in chief of Vice Magazine for a long time. And they pioneered a strategy called immersionism, which I give Jesse credit for sort of inventing or at least coining. He demurs because he's conscious of the shoulders of giants that he's standing on. But in any case, that immersionism, I thought, was really powerful. And it became a way for us to explain, for me on the commercial side, a way to explain to our brand partners how they needed to interface with our audience. It was like, if you don't get in and speak the language of the people that you're talking to, in vernacular terms, you will never mean anything to them. And to steal your phrase, that business of meaning is the value.
That's beautiful. I had never heard that term, immersionism, and it seems so apt. You were also the co-founder of Virtue, right? How did that come about? And what was Virtue?
Virtue started in 2006, much earlier than the widely told narrative, because it was relaunched, or launched properly above the line in 2016. But it started in 2006 out of a totally extemporaneous conversation about a movie. We were approached by Crispin Porter Bogusky and Arnold, who were jointly the AORs for the Truth Campaign, the anti-smoking campaign. They wanted us to do, they liked some early, very early digital video content that Vice had made, and they wanted Vice to make a film about smoking in the States, about the contradictions, fundamental contradictions of the laws around smoking, or the laws in parallel. Like, why can't you buy a gun that is as deadly as a cigarette, when you can just buy cigarettes that are equally deadly?
Anyway, we didn't have an entity that could make that movie. And so I just said, why don't we just start an ad agency? We'll just create a separate LLC, and it'll be a services division. And, you know, the executives at Vice at the time were just like, okay, Dietz, whatever, go for it. And so, yeah, myself and a guy named Spencer Baim, who had just joined Vice at the time to help with strategy. Spencer and I kind of kicked it off. Eddy Moretti directed that film, and it became this agency capacity. And what it allowed us to do was to enter into conversations with brands that could never sit in Vice's editorial universe, or next to Vice's editorial universe. You know, people that were too conservative, or people that were just, you know, I'm not talking to Vice's demographic, but wanted to harness our insight about young people and our sort of creative ways of working.
And the fact that we were also incredibly cheap compared to the rest of the business, because we had no overhead and fixed costs that most agencies did, allowed us to create this really, really successful offshoot of the company, which towards the end was an equal contributor to its bottom line to advertising and the studio business and everything else.
How do you think about brand? And how do you talk about it? And how do you feel like it's changed in terms of how one builds a brand? Is this an annoying question?
I am such an intrinsic believer in the power of brand and in the idea that it is the starting point and the center of equity for every great company that I kind of don't know how to address the counterpoint. To me, it's like, if you don't have a brand, what do you have, you have a widget, and that widget is not interesting. Brand is interest, right? Brand makes interest, it makes attachment, it makes emotional connection. And these are the reasons that people participate in a conversation in an economy with commercial concerns.
I went to an event last night. It was a taping of On Strategy, the podcast. It was at Wieden in New York. Jonny Bauer, who is the co-founder of FundamentalCo. is a friend, and I was in the building for another event, and I saw Johnny's face on a poster, and so I went to the Wieden thing accidentally, or opportunistically. And there were a couple of panelists who said some very dumb things, like surprisingly dumb for people who are massive leaders in the advertising world. But Johnny said something that I thought was interesting.
My friend James Friedman happened to text me. He said, you know, Jonny said brand is a business idea that is far bigger than marketing, and so consequently - this is for agencies - a CMO will always undervalue brand and the strategies to build or grow it. And I thought that was really very much in line with the way I think about it. Like, the brand is the reason to believe, and so that's the ultimate driver of the business.
Can you unpack that quote? What are the implications of that?
Well, and I think this gets back to superformat a little bit. The way that we think of marketing in a lot of respects is communication of a specific message at a specific time to a specific audience with a specific intention or behavior, right? And what brand ought to do is create a world of possibility that allows you to go beyond all of those overlaps of that particular Venn diagram and create value that is more ephemeral, but also more durable, counterintuitively.
I explained this a lot by saying like, what you ought to do as a brand to communicate is think about how you're talking to your consumer, but also how you're talking to your employees, how you're talking to your competitive set, how you're talking to people who don't care particularly about what you're doing, but just are looking for value in the world to hang on to. And so that to me is like, if you're a marketer, and I think this is what Johnny was getting at, if you're a marketer, your KPIs are only based around the moment, the point of transaction, the particular buying audience, and you're missing the opportunity to create value for a much wider set of people and therefore create affinity with them at the point when they are ready to be a part of your consumer set. So that's I think what he's getting at. And look, public companies and quarterly reporting drive that focus on the near term and the very specific moment. I think that's deleterious and I think it's a factor to try to resist. I realize that it's not one that's going to go away, but I think being conscious of it is useful.
You mentioned that Superformat goes back a long way, that Disney articulated something similar. To what degree has the way that one builds a brand changed or not changed over time?
Well, to me, that's a question of tactic for the moment, right? For instance, there have been all of these stories recently about brands needing to be weird on TikTok and using Nutter Butter, the cookie brand, as an example of a brand that has leaned fully into almost surreal kinds of messaging. To me, that's just the 2024 version of the durable tactic, which is speaking to your audience in the language they speak to each other in, right? In harnessing vernacular. And so I don't know that it's changed all that much over time. At a high level, I think it's more that it's changed at a tactical level and that the tactics change so fast now because we have so many different points of interface that it seems like it's different when in fact it has been pretty consistent throughout.
What kind of methods do you use when you're engaged with a client? What is the role of research in your own process, your own work in either developing or working for a brand?
It's funny, partially because of the first question that you asked, or maybe the second one about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said, I talked a lot and I still do, but I really like to listen. And what I have come to understand is that listening is my love language in some respects, right? I want to be listened to and I want to listen. And so I try to listen a lot. I don't do a lot of extensive research. I don't really pursue a lot of counterfactuals. I don't really get deep into the library, so to speak. I try to listen to people in conversations and respond to the things that I hear them say or the present concerns.
Because my belief is that people are working out their points of view while they talk most of the time. And so it's easier to get them to reveal what is actually at issue by just letting them talk than by asking them to write it in brief or to state the case. And people resort to oversimplification in that case. So I try to listen a lot. And then I try to apply that to what I think the business problem that we're trying to solve is. I think a lot of times we are encouraged to, because of a reliance or over-reliance on brief, we're encouraged to think, what is the near-term solution that we can come up with to package and to sell as the product right this minute? What I'm much more interested in doing is going, how do we create long-term lasting value and then figure out how to package and sell that?
Who out there is doing this really well when you think about what's one of the best examples of brands embodying the quote that you mentioned from Johnny and also manifesting the potential of Superformats?
I go to IP-driven examples a lot. One of my favorites, and not just because I literally was listening to it before we got on and started having a chat. I think about the podcast How Long Gone. I don't know if you're familiar. So it's a podcast that's between two friends. It's been going since March of 2020. It was started at the very beginning of the pandemic, and it was sort of a joke about how long are we going to be gone from the world? And they have a three times weekly conversation every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it's now coming up on five years. But the thing that they do is they resist the notion that the podcast is a product that needs to be sold, and instead they look at it as a platform for their various pursuits.
They say, we are like a musical artist, and so we should have band merch, or we are like a speaker series tour, and so we should have public appearances, or we are like a focus group, and so we should have agency services. And they just sort of start these things up spontaneously throughout. And I think that's a really modern way of doing it, and I think it is indicative of how the creator economy is going to lead us into the entertainment world of the future. Brands are built organically out of a moment of creation. They find an audience. The audience says, hey, wouldn't it be cool if you did this? And the creator brand reacts to it, makes that thing, and then builds organically from that.
So I really like them a lot, and I see brands, particularly in the DTC space, who are creative and are sort of like creator-minded and peers, let's call it, of a lot of the digital creators doing the same thing. Vacation, for instance, is a good example of this. Those guys created an online radio station, and then they decided they were going to be a lifestyle brand based on 80s relaxation, and they said, what all goes into 80s relaxation? Well, it's suntan lotion, and it's events, and it's lip balm, and it's apps, and it's partnerships, and it's all of this sort of stuff. And they just build organically, and then they added the services division, which, from my experience at Virtue, I know is a really valuable way to both ensconce and to expand.
One of my first conversations was with Grant McCracken. Anyway, I'm a huge fanboy of Grant McCracken, and he talks about how he's been studying consumer culture and brands forever. And in the conversation, [Grant McCracken on Multiplicity & the Future of Culture] he talked about how the new rule is multiplicity, that in the old days, if you were a brand, the instinct was you needed to be very narrow and focused and repeat and kind of never really break the code ever. But now we live in a world where I think the same thing as you're describing is that there's almost a need to be many, many things all at once very differently, but all coming from some same place. How do you manage that?
I take issue to some degree with the word need, because I believe regarding it as a need is a path to misery. Regarding it as an opportunity is a path to pleasure and success. To be able to say, I am not limited to being a maker of, in Vacation's case, sunscreen. I can also be a maker of experience. I can also be a maker of merchandise. I can also be a maker of membership. It's incredibly liberating. If you said to somebody, if I said to you, Peter, THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING is now a brand and therefore you have to have a merch line and an experience division and a helicopter maintenance team, you'd go crazy. How am I supposed to build and execute to that? The answer is don't. But know that if you suddenly have proximity to an airfield and a helicopter mechanic, that you can get into helicopter maintenance. Why not?
Need was not the right word. I was thinking in part that it's just a tolerance. I was thinking more on the consumer side or the audience side that there's an openness to experiencing the multiple personalities of a brand. A brand doesn't need to be one thing all the time, whereas that was really the guiding logic, at least when I started. You just need it to be one thing all the time forever.
Yeah. And look, a lot of respects it comes from the ever deeper parasocial relationship we have with the icons of our lives, right? The entertainers or the politicians or our social graph. The sense that you can see the full breadth and depth of a person's life through their public facing expressions makes you realize that we are all greater than the sum of our parts. And so it is natural to wonder what are the other parts that create this fascinating sum or fascinating whole rather. And you pursue it. And you want that from brands. You want that from other people. You want it from colleagues and coworkers. And I think it's the real modern sort of tension is what, for instance, Chappel Roan is experiencing at the moment where she has become such an obsession and such an icon for people who want to know everything about her. And she's saying, hey, at a certain point, I want to be able to stop this. That to me is a parallel discussion to Superformat in a certain respect. It's about saying at the beginning of the process, what are we willing to do and what are we not willing to do? What are we good at and what are we not good at? And so how do we sequence the things that we want to go forward with as opposed to committing to being everything all the time and just burning ourselves out?
So what kind of guidance do you give to Chappel Roan navigating this? What's the lesson? You brought her up and I'm just wondering, what's the lesson or what do you think about when you think about the tension that she's experiencing?
I mean, look, I think I would counsel her to be a lot more gnomic, if I think I'm saying that word the right way. She should be more unknowable because I think vulnerability demands more vulnerability. I think in these parasocial relationships, her music makes her so knowable that to then have to ratchet that up in public and in public facing things, it seems unsustainable.
And so this is, I think, what we're seeing in her backlash at the moment is the rubber band snapping back the other way. I think there are lots of examples of artists over time who have made themselves mysterious and unknowable, and that makes them incredibly attractive. And I think she probably needs a little more of that and a little less of the open dialogue kind of thing. It's not going to be easy because she's already set a precedent, but it is probably important for her mental health and her continued success.
You used a word that I want to hear you talk more about, which is parasocial, which is not a word I think I really encounter. It's recent to me, parasocial. It's been five to 10 years, you know what I mean? But it seems like something that is very... Anyway, what does parasocial mean and what makes it an important concept to know?
Well, parasocial is the idea that we have a relationship with people or entities that we don't actually encounter person-to-person or face-to-face or firsthand. Like a podcaster that you listen to religiously whose voice you know and whose daily routines you have familiarity with, but you have never met and that you have never spoken to in person. That's someone you have a parasocial relationship with. And fans of artists have parasocial relationships with those artists. What social media has done over the last 15, close to 20 years now, is given us the opportunity to establish, expand, deepen those kinds of parasocial relationships with the creatives in the world that inspire us. And that then makes us know that we can have similar relationships with other entities and want them and want them to be deeper.
Because I think what you want out of any decision that you make, any choice, is that it is a good choice and that it is a valid choice. And so you want the other entity on the other side of that choice to communicate validation and to say, I agree with you or I agree with your action. Deepening these parasocial relationships makes you feel like, all right, I'm doing a thing that Chaperone thinks is cool. Because I've listened to Chaperone enough for her to say, this choice is one that I would make too. So it's a good one.
So we've just got a little bit of time left. What are the different Superformats of Ben Dietz?
Funny you should say that. A former colleague of mine, I was describing Rangelife, which is the Superformat studio that I operate. And I was describing it to a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago, a former colleague, a guy named Tom Punch. And Tom said, to really make this stick, you've got to demonstrate a successful Superformats yourself, of your own. Which was very apt advice, which I really appreciate. And the two that are most important to me are [SIC], which is a weekly newsletter that I send for free on Thursdays. It takes 100 or so, typically, sources that I've collected over the course of each week. And that I organize in a way that helps me pattern match what is happening in the world. I say euphemistically, it's like scraping the plaque off my brain. But what it also does is it gives me a jumping off point to then have conversations with other people who are similarly engaged in the world. So I can understand where the plaque on their brains is accumulating. That becomes an audio conversation. It becomes a video conversation. It becomes a series of whole quotes. At some point, it will become a standalone newsletter of its own. A [SIC] talk newsletter. And so SIC is a Superformat, this aggregation of inspirations and sources.
The other one is Breakfast Club. And Breakfast Club is an accidental community that I started in 2021 just by going to the same restaurant for breakfast every Wednesday and saying, hey, I'm going to be there. You're invited. Come hang out. You don't have to RSVP. You don't have to tell me you're coming. You don't have to buy a ticket. You don't have to show up with a set of opinions or there's no agenda. Just come and eat breakfast and let's hang out. And that has turned into not only this weekly breakfast in Williamsburg where I host, but now in 25 cities around the world, there are people who get together regularly in this open format breakfast kind of thing. And it's a way for them to just be among like minds, right?
And of course that leads to networking. It leads to collaborations. It has led to jobs. It's led to relationships. But really what it's meant to do is just kind of be a vibe and have people opt into it. And we can imagine that turning into a conference or turning into, I've been asked about doing merchandise for it. And I've been asked about doing it on behalf of companies and that sort of thing. So it's a Superformat unto itself as well.
Nice. The openness about the Breakfast Club seems sort of provocative in how open it is. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, well, sort of. I mean, the thing is, I find because I worked for such a long time on the commercial side of business and in, for all intents and purposes, sales, I'm very sensitive to people who can't not sell. And there are, as I call them, capitalized salespeople who can never turn it off. And what I wanted to make sure of was that if I was going to create a paradigm that anybody could participate in, that capitalized salespeople would show up, start their sales pitch that they can't help but doing, and they immediately feel like they were in the wrong place. And be forced instead to listen. And what happened, because salespeople, when they realize that they don't have an audience, they stop talking because there's nobody to sell.
And so what I wanted to do was make sure that if anybody like that ever turned up, that it would be a situation where they were immediately like, I am going to get no benefit from talking anymore. Maybe I should just listen. So yeah, it's sort of weird. I'd never thought about the fact that I designed it that way, but I guess I did. So yeah, that's the idea of the openness. And what it leads to ultimately is like a kid who has just graduated from college will end up sitting down next to a CEO. And neither of them has talked to their opposite in years, or maybe ever. The college kid has probably never talked to a CEO. CEO is not allowed to talk to young people or college kids because they're surrounded by their executive support. And so the two of them have a conversation that is always illuminatory. And so yeah, that's the goal.
It's very sweet. And it reminds me of, I think it's called Open Space Technology. I've been sort of curious about facilitating groups and how group dynamics and all that stuff work. Have you ever encountered the idea of open space technology?
I haven't. I'm interested.
I think you're kind of doing it. And I think it's a principle of organizing meetings. And there's some, it's all the principles are, it's like whoever shows up is who is meant to show up. You start and you finish when you finish. It's almost like a structure of no structure.
Lack of intention. Yeah. No, that's interesting. That is very much what we do. It was not under those auspices or with that name in mind, but yeah, that's very much what we do.
Cool. Ben, thank you so much. We're at the end of time. This has been a blast. I really appreciate you sharing your time with me.
Oh, of course, Peter. Listen, and I would just say that Breakfast Club format for what it's worth is open to anybody. So if you are reading this and you want to start one, you have my blessing, get in touch and I'll give you a few pointers.
Beautiful. All right. Thank you, sir.
My pleasure, Peter. Thank you.
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