THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Christoph Quarch on Aliveness & Cosmos

Christoph Quarch [https://christophquarch.de/en/autor/shop/] is a philosopher and author in Germany. He co-founded the New Platonic Academy, teaches ethics and business philosophy at universities including Danube Private University in Krems. He has written or edited more than 50 books. A handful are available in English, including Plato’s Metaphysics of Soul, The Donkey School for Leadership, and Awaken the Spirit of Europe; his German works include Lebenselixier Schönheit (”Beauty Will Save the World”) and Wahre Wirtschaft (on rethinking economics). We met in Athens, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. You may know this or you may not, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I imagine you’re going to enjoy. I borrowed it from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it’s big, I kind of 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 absolute 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 absolute control. This is an excellent question. So, where do I come from? This is a profound question, mostly for the philosopher, for philosophers for centuries posed this question. I would say I come from the universe. I am part of the universe, some kind of distillation of the universal spirit in an individual form, which will dwell on planet earth for a couple of years before probably my individual form will dissolve again, and I will become part of a greater whole again — without a personal identity, without subjectivity, but nevertheless being part of the cosmic consciousness. When do you feel like you discovered you were part of the universe, that you came from the universe? Well, to be honest, this is based on two columns. On the one column, it is philosophical reflection, mostly in conversation with ancient Greek philosophy, because this is a topic that I studied all my life. Mostly Plato, who inspired me very much indeed. But there’s also a kind of personal experience, which resonates with this philosophical reflection. This comes right from my childhood days, from a period when I was still adolescent. I remember very well the first spiritual experience, even though I don’t like these big concepts. As a young man, I was pretty much influenced and inspired by a kind of Christian congregation, which is called Taizé. It is a congregation located in Burgundy in France, and they practice a very contemplative kind of Christian faith. As a young man, at the age of 16 or 17, I went to their place very often. And I remember sitting on the ground floor of an old Romanesque church from the 12th century, contemplating, and suddenly it felt like my whole body opened up and a stream of warm energy — I would call it love — flowed straight through my body. This experience really had a huge impact on me. I could feel it for a decade at least, and it was my sincere intention to understand what happened to me in this moment and what it was all about. So first I studied theology, because I thought it must have something to do with Christian faith. But to be honest, I didn’t find answers in Christian theology, and therefore I proceeded to philosophy, which always attracted me, mostly ancient Greek philosophy. And there I found a concept and a mental explanation for this amazing experience of being fully alive. And when you were young, what did Christoph want to be when he grew up? Do you have a recollection, maybe before this experience — what was the imagination of Christoph of what he would be when he grew up? There was no very precise idea of what I was supposed to do in later days. It was about the same period when my spirit started to grow, to unfold itself, to evolve somehow. And in this period, I remember very well standing in front of the bookshelf of my father and finding a book called Plato’s Master Dialogues. I took that book and read a bit in it. I didn’t understand very much, to be honest, but there was something I did understand — namely that this had something to do with me. I became somehow attracted by this mind, this spirit that spoke to me through the lines I read in this book. And so it was the idea to do something that had to do with spirit, but also with beauty. I had the imagination that one day I could become a kind of poet and photographer who writes books, takes pictures, and through this makes a living. To be honest, this was very optimistic. I think in the 21st century, due to technological revolutions, this project would have failed anyway. So I became a philosopher. And when talking about this, there comes a line to my mind from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who once said that philosophy is a kind of asylum for those who felt attracted by poetry but didn’t dare to become a full-time poet. That’s quite beautiful. And that resonates with you and your experience. It does. And to be honest, sometimes it still feels to me that I should give up this philosophy, with these mental operations and dialectics and conversations, and return to poetry. As a young man I wrote a lot of poetry. Sometimes I think, in the time of AI, even philosophy seems to be substituted by automatically generated texts and books. But when it comes to poetry, there always remains something mysterious about it, something that I’m pretty convinced will never be substituted by artificial intelligence, even though it can pretend to write poetry. Real poetry, in my understanding, has to do with that early adolescent experience I was talking about. It has to do with the universal spirit, which sometimes grasps you, inspires you, fills you with inspiration and enthusiasm. And without that, I’m pretty convinced no real poetry will ever come into existence. So catch us up. What does it mean? Tell us a little bit about your work. What does it mean to be a philosopher? And what do you do? What’s the work that you do? I’m sitting here thinking all day long. No, I’m just kidding. It’s not that easy to explain, because when I decided to become a full-time philosopher, it was really a challenge. And if I had known at that time what it meant to do this, I’m not quite sure whether I would have decided to take that road. But anyway, what I’m actually doing is a kind of multi-task work. On the one hand — not that surprising for a philosopher — is teaching. I’m a lecturer at several universities, both in Germany and in Austria. But this is only part-time work. I’m not a professor at university; it’s freelance philosophy, and I’m invited to give some seminars. On the one hand, in a business school, in order to discuss with future entrepreneurs what it takes to reflect on what they are doing, what it takes to reflect on the spiritual dimension of economy, which actually exists. On the other hand, in Austria, I’m a lecturer at a medical school, and it’s about doing the same thing with future doctors. It’s quite inspiring for me to converse with young people and to understand how they look into the world, what kind of ideas they have for their future. Another thing is that I work a lot in collaboration with a German broadcasting corporation. I have a weekly format in which I reflect in a philosophical way on political topics that are important these days. Another thing is consulting work with corporations, mostly with leadership, when it comes to the question of corporate culture development — what needs to be reflected beyond figures and numbers and the hardcore economy stuff, but is important in order to have a good relationship with employees, all these things we call corporate culture in German. And the last thing — and this is the fun part of the whole thing — is the philosophical journeys I do in collaboration with a weekly German newspaper called Die Zeit, which is very widespread in Germany. These are philosophical journeys where we stay together with a group of interested, open-minded people to discuss week-long central issues. For instance, I go with them to Athens, where we met, to discuss the origin of democracy and political thought. Or last week, I just returned from Norway, where I had a seminar on the philosophy of nature. It’s really fun to go to places in which you can easily combine the experience of people with the topics that we are talking about. We met in Athens. I was there for the House of Beautiful Business. You were there, and you led a tour — the birthplace of democracy, of the Pnyx. And without question, it was the most powerful part of that journey for me. I was there in large part because I live in a very small town. I have concerns about the way that community conversations have struggled in the social media age, and democracy and all that good stuff. So I was excited to be in Athens, and that tour was really powerful. And I guess my question to you is this: it seems like your attraction from the beginning was to the ancient Greeks. So what do the ancient Greeks have to tell us now? And in particular, Athens and the Pnyx — the role that it plays — what do you think is significant about the Pnyx and the Athenians that we should be listening to? Well, they have so much that’s really important for us in our modern epoch. Let me try to put it like this. Ancient Greece is somehow the birthplace of Western civilization. That’s where our roots come from. Of course, there are other influences as well, from Jerusalem and Rome. But when we talk about politics and about democracy, it’s obviously Athens, or Greece, from which the whole story began. And what attracts me so much about these ancient Greeks is that they thought in a very inspiring way, differently than we do today. If you accept a metaphor from modern information technology, I would say the ancient Greeks operated with a different operating system, a different mental operating system than we do. And this is quite fascinating, because they were discussing similar topics to the ones we discuss nowadays, but they did it in a different manner. And this different manner is mostly influenced by their basic intuition, which is expressed in ancient Greek mythology and philosophy. What amazes me so much is that these people were very optimistic. They had a very positive attitude toward life. Their language expresses this inner mentality by the word cosmos. Cosmos is a word that we usually translate as universe, and the ancient Greek concept means much more. A literal translation would be beautiful order. So they thought they were living in a beautiful world, being part of a beautiful order. And the beauty of this order was the harmony. In ancient Greek philosophy and mythology, we always find people who are obsessed by the idea that they live in a harmonious universe, like a beautiful symphony, wonderful music, and that the responsibility of humans is to be in tune with this music, with this melody — to write, by one’s own life, a beautiful variation of the big symphony of life. And this is so different from the world we are living in, because from the 16th or 17th century onwards, Western civilization is somehow obsessed by the idea that the world, or nature, is something we need to dominate. René Descartes, a very important philosopher of the 17th century, said the dignity of humans consists in being capable of being maître et possesseur de la nature — master and owner of nature. This is completely different from the ancient Greek idea that human responsibility, or human dignity, consists in being part of this wonderful music, this wonderful harmonious universe they called cosmos. So there’s a completely different mindset. And in a world in which it sometimes seems to me that the mental operating system of modernity is becoming dysfunctional, it’s quite inspiring and also encouraging to understand that by no means is the way that we think nowadays the only way, that it is engraved in marble. No — there are different ways of thinking, and these different ways are not coming from another planet, but are to be found in the very basement floor of our own civilization, in ancient Greece. And as we were talking about democracy and the Pnyx, this is for me very important, in a period in which democracy seems to be under attack. Unfortunately, in one of the countries that for two centuries had been the lighthouse of democracy — I’m talking about your country, the United States of America — nowadays we as Europeans see with great sorrow and concern what is happening. And in a period like this — and to be honest, in Europe similar things are happening as well — it makes sense to me to reflect on the very origin of democracy and political thought in general. And that brings us back to essence, mostly to the place where we met, the Pnyx, which used to be the assembly field of the ancient Athenian general people’s assembly — the very center, the very heart of ancient Athenian democracy. When we reflect on ancient Greece, the amazing thing is that we can understand what has been the basic idea of democracy, and this is pretty different from the way we discuss democracy nowadays. Because the ancient Greeks didn’t understand democracy as a method of how to organize power. That’s the way we do it. We think democracy is a method to organize and operate with the power of the people. And a good democracy, in the modern mindset, is one in which the amount of power generated by the people is strong enough to become a powerful, wealthy, and prosperous country. The ancient Athenians thought differently. They asked themselves: how do we need to organize a society — they called it a polis, citizenship — how do we need to organize the citizenship in a way that suits the basic principles of life? A completely different approach. What do we need to do so that people will have the chance to live a good life as citizens of our polis? And to lead a good life, in the ancient understanding, meant to organize the city, the polis, as a kind of microcosmos. They had this image of the beautiful harmonious cosmos, and they asked themselves: how can we use this as a kind of measure within our own citizenship? How can we live together in a harmonious way? And a harmonious way means each citizen has the capacity, the ability, and the preconditions he or she needs in order to unfold their own individuality in a way that suits the whole polis, so that it can prosper. And the answer that a guy like Solon, one of the pioneers of Athenian democracy, gave was: let’s do it like this. Let’s take the citizens in charge, in responsibility for the polis. Through this it is pretty likely that the equilibrium, the balance of the whole citizenship, will be established and established again, even though the times are changing and we are in a constant flux of things. This is the original idea through which democracy was generated, on the basis of a different mental operating system. And to bring this to our minds and consciousness could be inspiring, in order to reactivate the core idea of democracy and to understand why democracy indeed is the way we need to organize ourselves — if it’s not merely about power, but about human aliveness. And this is the whole thing we are talking about. Philosophy, as I understand it, should always reflect on the question: how can we live a good life, allowing humans to unfold their potentials, to be fully alive? I just have so much appreciation — I love listening to you. And I said this when we met: it’s clear that you know that this is what you’re doing, breathing new life into these concepts and ideas. In my experience, my therapist was a little bit of a philosopher, and we would get into intellectual conversations, and he would always talk about how far we’ve fallen, in a way, away from some of these ideas. And in particular the way you talk about harmony, the cosmos — and then I feel like you also talked about virtue, and what virtue meant to the Athenian imagination. It awakened in me a whole new understanding, or appreciation, or maybe just aspiration, honestly, about what’s possible — that is really hard to come by. So where does virtue fit in? That was a word I remember you talking about and being inspired by. What’s the difference between how they imagined what virtue was and our sense of it now? Virtue now feels like a very shallow idea, a very Puritan idea. But you talked about it very differently. Another very profound question, which fits in very well in this part of our conversation. Because indeed, in the ancient Greek mental operating system, virtue was the central concept in the field of ethics or morality. And again, they thought in different ways than we do today, because our modern ethics is mostly shaped by the concept of value, and not that much by virtue. What makes the difference? In the Greek understanding, virtue is something to be understood when we understand the very essence of something. Let me give you an example, probably a strange one. I have a glass in my hand, and for an ancient Athenian it would not have sounded as weird as it does to our ears if I were to say: this is a virtuous glass. In our understanding, this is a bit weird, because we think virtue is a quality of human beings, but not of artifacts or things like a glass we can use. But in the ancient understanding, virtue is a quality of whatsoever, given that something is 100% what it might be, what it could be, and what it is meant to be. The meaning of the glass is something we can easily understand by using it. I can see what it is, and then I can drink without getting wet all over my shirt. So this is a definition of a glass, but it is something we need to understand by doing. It is not so much a kind of know-what, but a kind of know-how, which allows us to understand the virtue of something like a glass. The glass is a virtuous glass — it is a good glass — when it manifests, when it executes its significance, its meaning. In German we say seinen Sinn, when it is what it is meant to be. So you can apply the same strain of thought to the question of what might be the virtue of a human being. In order to understand the virtue of humans, we need to understand who we actually are. Therefore the major imperative of ancient Greek ethics is a word that was engraved on the temple walls at Delphi, the temple of Apollo, which says gnothi seauton — know who you are, realize who you are, understand what it takes to be human. This is not a psychological thing; it is about understanding the essence of humanness. Is it possible to say humanness in English? I think so. What is the very essence of a human being? Of course this question is far more profound than understanding the very essence of a glass, and it can’t easily be described by the utility of something. The essence of a human being is not to be understood through utility — no, it’s about something different. It is more about what we were talking about with the cosmos. It is about being in tune with oneself, being resonant with oneself, being in a harmonious state of existence — being in tune both with your inner self, your emotions, your feelings, your aspirations, and with your surroundings, your society, your family, probably your company, and also with nature. And this is the basic idea of human virtue. Human virtue is a kind of status — in the ancient Greek understanding, mostly in Plato, it is a kind of state in which you are in resonance, in harmony, in accordance with yourself, so that there’s a certain kind of inner integrity. This is not about values. It is not about some values being declared by either a god or a moral authority or a politician or whoever. A good life, in the ancient Greek understanding, is not a life which is in tune with values declared by a moral authority. A good life is measured by being itself, by the very essence of something. This is a very different approach, which again might be inspiring for modern times, because, as we all know, we live in a world in which you have several moral authorities. There are different moral authorities in China, in Iran, in Egypt, in Israel, in Russia, in Brussels, in Washington, in Rome. And who has the capacity to counterbalance these values? Who has the authority to say this value is true and the other one not? So when we talk about values, we always have a problem, because values are always based on authority, and authority is mostly based on power, and power is relative. We do not have any norms from which we can expect that they will be generally appreciated. It is different with the concept of virtue. It is at least theoretically possible that in a global dialogue we can agree on what it really means to be a full human being, what it takes to unfold the potentiality of humanity 100%. And given that this were possible, it could be an option that we could find some kind of norms through which we could be guided to come to terms with the incredible, unprecedented challenges of the 21st century. Of course, it is a theoretical idea, but it is also an invitation to converse with each other on this very old philosophical question through which the whole of Western philosophy was initiated: understand who you are. Gnothi seauton, know who you are. And I think what we really need in global society, and in any society, is to discuss these questions again and again. And one more aspect: I think the time has come, mostly because we as humans these days are strongly challenged by the generation of artificial intelligence, which claims to substitute humans or humanity in several ways, on several fields. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves who the f**k are we? What makes us different from AI? What are the essential features of real humanness which can’t be delegated to algorithms? So I think it is a very fertile period for profound philosophical conversations, as we are leading them right now. Yeah, absolutely, and that’s been my experience. This is a good segue into the AI conversation. I had the experience as a professional who talks to people — I research, I do interviews with people — and I guess what AI did for me as a professional person is that it made me ask that question of what is it. Can it do what I do? Can I be replaced by this intelligence? Is my intelligence, which I thought was unique, no longer really all that unique? And can I be replaced by this intelligence? And that was a real panic-attack moment, because in many, many cases, just from a professional point of view, the corporation is most likely going to say: yeah, absolutely. We’d much rather pay little money and have a machine do — forgive me — answers very cheaply, than pay you a lot of money and wait a little bit longer for something that a human did. They’ve made that calculation quite a bit. So there was this existential question that ends up being pretty bad. But alongside that question is a second one — they come together, these two questions. In what way is my intelligence not unique? And in what way am I unique? What is the thing that makes me who I am? It struck me — I guess I was a little surprised — that I really did have that kind of experience of, holy s**t, there are whole pieces of what I think is valuable about me that are just no longer unique to me. And, oh my God, there’s this whole chunk of what is unique about me that maybe I don’t even really know how to talk about. Do you know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean, because the same thoughts come to my mind as well. But let me nevertheless try to share the conclusion I came to when reflecting on these things, because it is a very profound, very philosophical question. As I mentioned before, I think it’s really time for philosophers to enter the stage and to talk about this, to bring another perspective into the dialogue, because, yes, we really need to see things differently. What happens, in my understanding, when we talk about AI these days, is a very subtle process of denaturalization. What do I mean by this? I think we are about to disconnect ourselves from our body, from our physical part of existence. And of course, this is one of the major projects of these guys who call themselves transhumanists, who say it is possible, in the age of spiritual machines — to use the words of Ray Kurzweil — to disconnect from this fragile substrate we call our body, and to transport the content of our brain, of our consciousness, to far more endurable substrates like silicon, on a computer chip, on hardware. I really wonder that humans are so attracted by the idea that they could leave their body, their flesh and blood, behind, even though we all know that being creatures of flesh and blood gives us an incredible amount of joy — of course of pain as well — but of aliveness, of this huge spectrum of emotions, of feelings, of experiences. As if life could be reduced to plain data, to plain information. This is a weird idea, in my understanding. And on the other hand, let me refer to what I was talking about at the very beginning of our conversation, when I shared my experience in the old Romanesque church in Taizé, when that spirit, that stream of love, ran straight through my whole existence. This is something no AI will ever be capable of understanding, because it derives from a different dimension of human existence. To stay for a second with the term dimension — it’s a bit difficult to explain without making a sketch — but in my understanding humans are multi-dimensional beings, at least four-dimensional beings. One dimension of our existence is our body, our physical substrate. When you compare it with a cube, it’s like the line you need to construct a cube. Then a second dimension, the surface of the cube. The surface is our ego. This is the way that we consider ourselves, our self-image. But our self-image is not identical with what we actually are, our profound self, what the ancients called soul. This, in my image, is a third dimension, the whole cube, which is far more complicated, far more complex than the plain surface of our ego, our self-image. And then there’s a fourth dimension, which — to refer again to the cube — is space and time in which the cube is located. Without space and time there would be no cube at all. This, in my language, referring to traditional philosophical speech, is the spirit. So we are spiritual beings, we are emotional, psychic beings, we are rational, ego beings, and we are corporal, physical beings. These are four dimensions of our existence. And to be fully alive means to be somehow at home in all four dimensions. AI, however, reduces us to the surface, to the user surface of our own individuality. It confuses the images we have of ourselves and of others with their profound depth, their soul — which of course is partly something we do not like to look at, which we try to remove from our self-image. But nevertheless it’s a part of us. I think being human is far more complex than what information technology suggests, because we are physical beings, we are fragile, we are mortal. And perhaps these are the features of human existence on which our dignity is based, and through which we are really unique and incomparable — what makes us unique and what can’t be replaced by artificial intelligence. I remember — it’s a quote I return to a bunch — I think I had gone to a brief talk, and it was by somebody who was an anthroposophist, you know, like Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf Schools. I paraphrase quite a bit, but what I heard that person say in talking about Steiner was this idea that Western man kind of wants to be a machine when it grows up. It was this way of expressing the aspiration that you’re talking about — that there’s something going on, that we’re really attracted to this technological dream, that it’s so deeply encoded that we just imagine ourselves as a machine when we grow up. It seems natural to embrace this, or at least some part of us does. And I’m wondering, how do you respond to that thought, and does that resonate with you? And then I wonder, what’s the alternative? What’s the human aspiration? If I wanted to be a human when I grew up, and to resist the aspiration to be a machine, what does that mean, and what does that look like? It’s quite fascinating, because this aspiration to become a machine, or to behave like a machine, is something that hasn’t fallen from the skies, but can be reconstructed in its genealogy, which leads us again to the 17th century, to the period that philosophers called rationalism. For instance, in the writings of René Descartes, and also in a very famous book by a French author and doctor called Julien Offray de La Mettrie, we find the idea that humans, in fact, are nothing but machines — that the body is a kind of mechanical apparatus, created in ways that are hardly comprehensible by a divine spirit. But basically, our body is a mechanism, and we can understand ourselves in a proper way by the imagery of a machine. And of course, those who try to convince us that humans are, in fact, nothing but biochemical algorithms, made to optimize their chances of good reproduction in future generations, are referring to that idea. It seems to be quite fascinating to humans, from a certain point of history onwards, to understand themselves in that way. Because what is a machine? A machine is something that multiplies human power. And in a period in which power seems to be a kind of substitute in the place where once a god or divinity used to be located, it is quite attractive to understand oneself as an optimizable machine, which can be perfected or optimized through artificial intelligence or other advanced technologies, in order to maximize power. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said that the major project of humans in the 20th and 21st century would be to accumulate, to maximize power — mostly because Nietzsche said God is dead. In former times, in the Western Christian world, people for centuries adored and worshipped a God who was defined by being almighty, all-powerful. When that God died — this is Nietzsche’s idea — humans started to replace the dead God by themselves, by becoming, as Yuval Noah Harari in his world bestseller puts it, homo deus, a transhuman being which somehow combines the qualities that once used to be the monopoly of the almighty God: all-mightiness, omnipresence, omniscience, and immortality. In former periods, however — in a world based on a different mental operating system, not so much on the belief in an almighty, all-powerful God, like the ancient Greek spirituality in which the gods are not defined by their power but by their intensity of aliveness — being a machine would never have been an ideal to humans. Those humans wanted to be god-like as well, but not almighty, all-powerful, omniscient, immortal — but fully alive. The idea of an ancient Greek god is to be 100% what you are. When you are 100% what you are, there is nothing you need to change, there is nothing you could want. You are completely satisfied with what you are, because your potential is 100% unfolded. You are who you are and nothing else. You are completely in tune with yourself. This is the ancient idea of perfection. It has nothing to do with power, but a lot to do with aliveness. It’s quite amazing that you can think in such different terms, and that’s why I always return to the Greeks again. They didn’t live in a worse way than we do today. They are the founders of Western civilization, and they created an unprecedented, incomparable thriving of human culture and civilization. So a bit more of the Greek mindset would do us well, I suppose. We’re coming near the end of our time, and I’ve got so many things that I’m curious to ask you about. Yeah, we can do a follow-up one day or another. Oh yeah, definitely. I would love to do this again. I’ve got two competing ideas in my head. One is, because we met at the Pnyx, I think there’s something in everything you’re talking about — about conversation, about this need to engage with each other — that is also under threat, as much as AI is exacerbating this difficulty we have in coming together and engaging each other in conversation and dialogue, and what philosophy does. I’m curious about that, just how you feel about the state of conversation and the importance of conversation. And maybe that’s what you’re saying — that’s why we have philosophy to begin with, to inspire that kind of conversation. And then I have a second curiosity, just about the word beauty. You’ve been talking about power, and I’m wondering what role beauty plays in the Athenian imagination, in that operating system, to use that analogy. So I’m just going to lay those in front of you and see what you might do with them. Perhaps let me start with the topic of beauty, because it’s a beautiful one. The last book I’ve published, unfortunately so far only in German, is called Beauty Will Save the World, which is a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky, the famous Russian novelist. I like it very much, because I actually think it is true. Why? Because beauty, again, in my understanding — I try to understand beauty on the basis of what I call the ancient Greek mental operating system, which, as for the topic of beauty, is quite different from the aesthetic approach to beauty that is common in modern Western philosophy. In the understanding of the Greeks, something is beautiful when it is harmonious, and again, to be harmonious means to be in tune with itself, to be completely what it is. This is true, for instance, for a piece of art like an ancient Greek temple. We stood in front of the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens, which is a ruin, but nevertheless you can still sense the incredible beauty of this masterpiece of ancient Greek architecture, because everything is proportional, everything is arranged in a way that it suits each other and creates an impression of wholeness, of completeness. This is the ancient idea of beauty — but with one aspect that was forgotten in later epochs, for instance in the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, philosophers talked about beauty, and they also talked about harmony. But the ancient Greek concept of harmony comprises one feature that is very important: namely that beauty is always created at the edge between order on the one hand and chaos on the other. It is always on that very edge, always in danger of falling either into a kind of fixation, of petrification, by order, or into complete chaos on the other side. So beauty is when you are walking on a very narrow rope. That’s what beauty is in the understanding of the ancients. Order was combined with the god Apollo, chaos with the god Dionysus, and the combination of the two of them is the very secret of what beauty is all about. Beauty is not sterile. And therefore the idea of a beautiful society, that the ancient Athenians tried to operationalize through democracy, always comprises the possibility of change, of transformation, sometimes even of what we call disruption. And this brings me to the second topic you were talking about, the importance of conversation. I think from the very beginning, from Socrates onwards, conversation and dialogue had always been the vehicle through which philosophy was executed, performed. And I think this is important, because profound conversation always has a capacity to change our opinions, to destroy patterns of thought which maybe once have been fertile and inspiring, but whose time has come. So the time has come to walk on different ways, to try other ways. And this is what Socrates did with his interlocutors when he talked in the marketplace in Athens. He asked, what do you think, what is the good life? And then they gave a conventional answer that most probably is not born on the soil of their own experience, but is a kind of food taken from someone else’s tree, repeated again and again without ever being reflected upon. So the beauty of philosophy — to refer to this term again — maybe is due to the fact that it has the capacity to destroy what has become an obstacle to becoming fully alive, in order to open new spaces, new perspectives, new horizons, which might help us to improve, to grow, to evolve our potentials, and through that to become fully alive. Christoph, I want to thank you so much. I would love to do this again with you sometime. It was a treat. The experience of the Pnyx in Athens was really moving and powerful, and I’m so glad you accepted the invitation here. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much. And thank you very much for your inspiring and sometimes challenging questions. In my understanding, what we actually did in these last 50 minutes was philosophy at its best. And therefore it was really a pleasure for me. Thank you so much for having invited me to that wonderful conversation. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Chris Danton on Building & Mattering

Chris Danton [https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-danton/] is Co-Founder and Chief of Ideas at IN GOOD CO [https://weareingoodco.com/], a B-Corp-certified, women-led brand strategy firm whose clients include Nike, Starbucks, Pinterest, Herman Miller, Uniqlo, Zappos, and Psycho Bunny. She is the writer behind GOOD THINKING [http://substack], a weekly newsletter on culture, trends, and marketing read by more than 17,000 brand executives, and co-host of the GOOD THINKING [https://ingoodco.substack.com/podcast] podcast. She lives in Italy. So I’m not sure if you know this or not, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine who’s a neighbor and she helps people tell their story. And once I heard this question, I just decided that it was the only way to really begin any conversation that’s coming out of nowhere. And it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why 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. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? Well, you did warn me and I did listen to some episodes. So I’ve thought a lot about it. It’s a really good question. So I admire you for the consistency. I love a good ritual. And I thought about it. And I think that the truth is, is I come from nowhere. And that’s maybe the whole story. I am a third culture kid. I’ve moved around my whole life. Probably every three years, I’ve had a major move of some variety, whether that’s different country, different continent, different state, and at least moving between states or even Long Beach to LA, I would say is a pretty significant cultural move, even if it’s within the same state. So I’ve moved a lot. And I think that the moving is really the foundation of where I come from, to the bigger meaning of your question. I feel like what drives who you are? And how you approach things. And I think that not having a place - people will be like, where’s home? And I’m like, I don’t know. I think it allows for the expansive thinking and the curiosity that drives a lot of what I do and what I write about and what I think about. And yeah, so in the end, I don’t really have a place, but I have consistency. I have my family, I have my very small family, as my child likes to say, she’s like, what’s our immediate family? And she means our dog and her two parents. But then there’s my family lives all over the world. And I’m anchored by that. But I’m anchored by my work and the people that I work with. But it’s, yeah, I don’t really have a place. I don’t have a place to come from. But I think that’s the genesis of me. Yeah. You use that phrase, third culture kid. And that’s, what does that mean to you? I’ve heard that before. And I know what it means. But it’s a funny phrase. When you say that you’re a third culture kid, what do you mean? Well, and I do this a lot, I hear things, I see things, and then I’m like, oh, appropriate that, that’s mine. I’ll use it how I wish. But the way I use it is to say, a lot of the people that I grew up with, I would identify them as third culture kids and people I’ve met throughout my life. But they’re people who have moved around so much, that they’ve never really been part of the cultures that they are visiting, are from. I’m from England, I’ve lived in a grand total of three years of my life, all at the very beginning phase of my life. But I’ve also, that’s the place that I went back to every year, Christmas, summer, for my whole life. So in some ways, it’s more constant for me than any other aspect of culture. But I am not English. And I don’t identify with English culture. And I can visit it. And I can cosplay in it sometimes. But it’s not mine. And I grew up in France for a while. I’m not French. But I identify in many ways as being somewhat French. But again, a visitor, a guest. I lived in Singapore. When I go back to Asia, I feel so at home in Asia. I can’t describe it to people. It’s very, I lived there when I was very young. And I think it’s very formative for me. But I’m obviously not Asian. And then I’ve lived in America. And everybody says, oh, you sound American. But then Americans say I don’t sound American. I’m not an East Coaster. I’m not a West Coaster. I’ve lived in Cincinnati. I lived in Zurich for a long time. And now I live in Italy. And I’m not Italian either. But I visit into all of these cultures. And I take pieces of them. And everybody will ask me, where do you like the best? And I always say, you should just like the place that you are, because it’s just not a helpful exercise to revisit something that you’re not in. And they always stay with you. And you revisit them, even when you’re not there. Yeah, those types of things. When you spoke about Singapore and Asia, it changed quite a bit. Can you say more about the feelings you have about that place? Yeah, I mean, I’ve gone back to Asia many times. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time trying to revisit that part of my life. But I moved to Asia when I was four years old, at a time when a little blonde girl in Asia, especially in Singapore, was weird at the time, or different anyway. And people would come over and try to touch my head, because I was lucky. It was very, it was a different time to what Singapore is like now, which is so vastly different. But yeah, that’s the four to six years old, four to seven years old was very formative time for me. And I lived barefoot running around with almost green hair, because I was in the pool so often. It was a fun place to grow up. And then I’ve gone back many, many times trying to find my essence, so to speak. Yeah. And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up as a girl? Like, what were you, or where were you at? As a people pleaser in recovery, I thought that I wanted to be a dentist for a really long time. Mainly because I had a lot of dental issues when I was little. None of my teeth fell out naturally, so I had to have them all removed. It was very strange. There’s probably some psychoanalysis of that. But I was like, oh, dentists are terrible. I would like to be a really nice dentist. And then I realized that none of the things about me, but everyone was like, yes, yes, be a dentist. That’s a great job. And then I realized nothing about my identity at all would align with dentistry as a practice. I’m not super into detail. I really like difference and change. I can’t handle anything that’s monotonous. And not to say that that’s what dentistry is, but that’s my impression. And then I quickly changed to architecture. And I stuck on that road, and I went to RISD for, well, ultimately I did interior architecture and then architecture, and I got my master’s in architecture. But along that way, I realized that I also don’t have the capability of being an architect. Speed is something that I, change, things happening at a pace is something that I really enjoy. And yeah, architecture doesn’t, that’s not really a part of that work. But it is a very good place to learn how to become what I became now, which is somebody who spends an enormous amount of time thinking about how people think, how people move, what people like, how they behave, what they’re attracted to. Because essentially architecture school is sales school. You just, you think about that. I always describe it as the law degree of the arts. You never build a building, ever, right? So you’re just selling your idea of the building, right? The whole time that you’re there, that’s all you’re doing. Telling your, and at RISD it’s very big thinking, right? So it’s like, this is the kind of person I’m building a building for. This is the kind of community I’m building a building for. This is what they believe in. This is what they have values in. This is what they need. I’ve identified what they need by thinking about all of these different things in their lives. And now I’m going to create this space or whatever it is that you’re doing, house, gigantic infrastructure, who knows, that is going to service these people, right? And help them somehow or provide something for them. And you just sell that. And you do that for years. And people come and critique your sales pitch and somewhat critique your building. But for the most part, they critique what you put forth, which is your idea, right? Of how the world is working and what you can do for it. And I essentially use those skills every single day. So. For me, there’s a parallel. So catch us up. Tell me, tell us, where are you now and what is the work that you do? Yeah, I mean, maybe it’s a little bit like the question at the beginning. It’s like, I don’t really know what I do. No. So I do two things. I run an agency called In Good Co. day to day. And we, for the most part, our bread and butter is repositioning brands. So or positioning brands. Sometimes they’re from scratch brands, but often they’re legacy brands who’ve lost their way in culture. And we’re trying to help them return to a place of success and growth. And then my other accidental day job is that I started writing a substack called Good Thinking, which has turned into having a small media company. We now have a podcast, we do events, we do lots of different things. And I write that about 10 different categories every week. And it’s really about the intersection of lots of different parts of culture and how I see them working together. Which, yeah, it’s been fun. Yeah. How long has it been, the substack? Two and a half years, about. Yeah. Yeah. It’s been crazy. Yeah. I mean, that’s how I discovered you. It’s amazing stuff. When you say it’s a small media company, what’s it been like growing it? Or yeah, what’s the experience been like? What inspired you to do it to begin with? To what degree are you surprised by what it’s become? Well, I’m 100% surprised all the time. I’m like, what? But I started it because I was reading a lot. I was reading an enormous number of substacks. And I joke that I had a consumption problem. I was just reading all the time. It’s what I like to do. And I do it for personal interests, but also when I’m thinking about client work. But it was getting out of control. The reading. I was obsessed with reading. And I talked to my therapist and I was like, I need to make this functional somehow. I need to, or I need to stop. And she was like, what do you want to do? I said, I should write the letter I want. She said, why don’t you do it? I said, I don’t know. Maybe I’m afraid of failing something probably to that degree. And then she said, nobody cares about you. And then the next day the letter was born. And it just went for a while. I just was writing. I wasn’t hearing too much. We started the podcast, which was again, Kirsten, my co-host and my business partner was very into the idea of doing that. And for me, that was a pretty big shift because I’m quite introverted generally. But then that started and got used to doing that. And then things just snowballed. I don’t really, there was no, I met somebody recently who has a very nice newsletter called Four Starters, which is all for entrepreneurs and small businesses and he definitely, Daniel set out with a path to this media company that he’s creating, right? Or this business that he’s creating. I fell in a hole. I’m like, wow, where am I? It was not a thought through business plan, but generally speaking, the life philosophy of the newsletter and the media side is if we’re having fun, we keep doing it. And if we’re not having fun, we don’t do it anymore. And that’s been the business plan. That’s beautiful. Can you tell a story about the kind of work that you do positioning or repositioning, to give people a sense of what you do? How are you there? Yeah. Let’s think, I mean, there’s a few different, so we work with a lot of different brands, different kinds of brands. We gather them into a group we call challenger brands, because for the most part, I think the commonality, much like the newsletter, we never niche down into a category. And I think that’s actually been an advantage. But one of the things that we talk a lot about is a lot of times when people are trying to reposition, they’re trying to return to a place of being a challenger, right? Want to stand out within the category again. And for the most part, we work with people who are not interested in just like, oh, we’re a gum brand. And what are the other gum brands doing? Let’s do what they’re doing, but we know we can’t be like the other gum brands, but we don’t know what we should be doing. So we’ve worked with brands like retail brands, Psycho Bunny, or sometimes we’re working on new brands. I don’t know if you know, the kids app brand ParkPark, various different kinds of levels of brands. ParkPark is a super well-funded, it’s the number one kids app on the App Store. But they realized that they had so they, we weren’t really repositioning them, but we were refocusing them. They were growing from we’re an app to we’re a platform and how do we do that? And how do we stay true to the things that they loved, but not pigeonhole them into we’re an app, which is essentially where they were living. With Psycho Bunny, they were a very beloved brand, but not very elevated brand. And we came in and worked on, we like to talk about repositioning as something that’s super active. So instead of saying, Hey, we’re going to work on repositioning for two years and then we’ll stew inside and we’ll bake this thing and then we’ll release it. We tend to work on projects where it’s like, Hey, okay, we’re going to start repositioning you project by project. So that ultimately in two years, you’ve been fully repositioned, but it’s not necessarily you’ve been baking inside for a long time. We’re working with big brands like MyFitnessPal. And then we also work a lot with other agencies. So other agencies hiring us to work on their things. So whether that’s for Google or Sacred or a lot of other brands that you might’ve heard of. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? Oh, that’s a great question. I mean, I love, this is probably why the letter became the letter is that I have an ability to get interested in just about anything. So you could tell me we’re going to work on a trucking company and I would be like, Oh, let me get obsessed with that. But usually where that comes in is I develop that obsession. And then I start to see how it connects to all other parts of culture. Right. And it’s Oh, this is the untapped opportunity within this particular thing. And I think that’s what I love the most is once I come in and I sort of immerse myself in your world, then your world starts to connect with all the other worlds that I have living in me. And then I can start to identify where the potential is, that is much more interesting than where things have been. Yeah. When did you first discover that this was something you could do for a living? I think my career has been super non-linear, everything that I’ve done. So when I came out of grad school, I worked for a while as a trends forecaster for a group called LPK out in Cincinnati who are amazing. And I think that began for me a realization that there’s just a lot more going on in the creative world that’s on the periphery of creative. So I did some trends forecasting. It was super fun, but very traditional trends forecasting, I would say. But with incredible people. And then I went back into experiential and marketing. And I trained in that more maybe the least traditional space for marketing at the time. Experiential was in its first wave. And again, I think one of the things that was very interesting for me is that the job that I had there was I was just pitching new clients. That’s all I did all day. My job was to come up with the thing that would be the idea. We would win the account and then I would barely ever get to touch it. It would just go to the creative group. So maybe then it’s an interesting, my career just evolved. And so I think I got a taste of all these different things. But the good thing was that again, for me, they’ve always laddered up to what I’m doing on a day to day basis now. And for a long time, I didn’t really know how to explain to people. And clearly I still don’t based on this conversation, but how they all connect. But they do, and I think that one of the things I’ve realized from writing the newsletter is that obviously I have a perspective that people really are intrigued by and find interesting and share. But it’s not something that much the newsletter, it was never something that I was like, oh, I’m going to package it up this way. It’s just this is how I think. Here you go. Here it is on a platter. What do you and apparently it works. Yeah, well, I’m struck by the degree to which you were echoing the architecture as the was instead of sales as a sales thing. I feel you were just that in some way, I guess it made me think that when you’re pitching brands or trends in that moment, you think about brands in an architectural way. Oh, not until this moment. But then, yeah, I mean, I think brand building, world building, whatever you want to call it, does have a lot of that. And I think one of the again, one of the things to think about architecture is that it’s never just the building, right? It’s this is what you feel when you walk in this room. This is the takeaway you want to have from this experience. This is what it makes you feel. This is what it makes you do. And that is all part and parcel of brand. I’ve actually met tons of architects who work in the brand space. And I think that perhaps the systems thinking not, you’re not just doing you’re never just dealing with one thing. But when you go to school for graphic design, maybe you always approach it from the perspective of the graphic quality of the or you if you’re a copywriter, then you might always approach from the first place of language, voice messaging, whereas I’m not trained in any of those things. But I do a lot of I apparently am a writer now. I do a lot of copywriting at work. But it’s not something that I’m formally I didn’t go to school for that. And I think that’s actually been hugely beneficial for me. I also work with amazing copywriters. So yeah, you never have to be an expert, you can just work with experts. So I want to maybe shift into a piece you wrote, which is really amazing, The Age of Authorship. And just about the patients about, the world that we live in now as being different from the world we lived in just before. And you described that you had this great line, you were playing with Claude Code, you had maybe a bit of an awakening, but you said, staring the devil in the eye. You described this moment, you had where you recognize that things were different. Now we were in a different world, and you call it the age of authorship. Can you tell a little bit more about that? Just that staring the devil in the eye? And what do you mean by it? About announcing this new world? Yeah. I definitely had an existential crisis about this. So I’ll try to take you through this experience without all the dread that happened for a few weeks. But ultimately, I came out on this. Include the dread. We’re here for the dread. Include the dread. Okay. So yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that was happening was obviously I write a lot about culture, write a lot about change, right? And obviously, everyone was talking about Claude Code, and you’re hearing it. And I was writing about it, but more from a theoretical standpoint, right? I could see where things are going. But I wasn’t really using it. And then I decided that I couldn’t continue to do that without having used it. So I decided to build an app. Kirsten, my business partner, takes peptides, as does everyone in California. And she’s always complaining to me about tracking her peptides. So I decided that I would just use this use case as nothing related to my work, nothing that would be too cerebral and that I would get in my own way. It’s this is very neat and tidy. Can I build her this tool? I built this tool in two days. And with no skills. A fully functioning app. I was impressed with myself, but I was okay, this is pretty crazy. But then I decided to build a website. I built a website in two days. Then I started building tools for myself. And at this point, I realized I was addicted. I was this is, I could spend all my time doing this. I kept coming back into my office, because this was before you could use it on your phone. Coming back into my office and tinkering and then leaving. And then my husband was what are you doing? And I’m just and he’s a, he’s a mathematician. And he was the one who got me into cloud code, and taught me, gave me the lay of the land. So he was oh my god, what have I created? And then it was around day five or six, where I’d made six or seven things that I could never have made before at a speed that was impossible to understand. At a quality that was pretty, these are functioning things. They’re not theoretically functioning, many of the things that we make sometimes as designers. These were functioning things. And I just, my brain started to implode. It was and so there was the first week of wow, it was whoa, this is amazing. And then the next two weeks were oh my god, what does this mean? What does this mean for the world that I’m working in, living in for my career, but for just the world. And the realization that I had, and talking to many clients and seeing how they’re working, and I was working with one particular client, big tech client. And I got into a conversation with them about something about positioning. And I was but we need to be doing this with the product. And they were you’re not a product person. You’re the marketing person. Leave the product to the product. And I was but why? Why? I can make this. I should be able to make this. And I made it. I went and asked Claude to make it, right? Some version of, was it perfect? No, but it was functioning. And it just blew everything apart for me, because at the end of the day, I think now every single person is a builder, in this future, anybody who wants to build anything, there’s no barrier to, and people are economics of the internet and yes, but the barrier to entry has never been lower. Never ever. It’s I equated in the essay to this is not the age of the internet coming on. This is electricity becoming available. Yes, right now, electricity, maybe we’re at 80% of people, 70% of people have access to it. But in a few years, every 100% of people will have very affordable electricity, right? It’s, and so it changes the game. That’s the the shortcut was I was oh, my gosh, anybody can build anything. So if you build anything, and you can keep building and building and building and building, and I can throw out ideas, I can build a company, I can compete with the big guys, I can do anything I want. How do you build things that matter? Does anything matter? So that was that was the crisis of does it can we ever build anything that matters again? It was really it was a tough phase. But ultimately, I came out on the other side of, of talking about it as realizing that there’s so many ways to build things that matter that, belonging, anything. But you, that is the new challenge. The challenge is not creating anything. The challenge is not building anything. It’s not having the idea. It’s creating something that matters to people. That is the challenge. Can you say more? I mean, it’s just how I roll a little bit. Can we just focus in on the dread? Yes, please. Let’s talk about dread. I’ve had similar. So I had a similar experience where I feel like I really encountered two things at once, this realization that things that I thought only I could do, all of a sudden were being done by this new intelligence, I’ve been calling it our strange companion. And I like that. And that really forced me. The two things happened at once. One was, Oh my God, if all of this stuff, which I thought was just unique to me is no longer unique to me, what is in fact unique to me? It led to the staring at a parallel question of where’s the real value, a real invitation to define something of real substance and real, unique, distinctive value. Is that similar to what you’re saying about mattering? We’re really forced to encounter the fact that you could produce a ton of slop. But now the challenge is making something that’s - I don’t even know if it’s slop. I think it’s so interesting. There’s a lot of slop, right? And so I’m not condoning slop. But one of the things that’s super interesting to me is the problem is not going to be the slop. The problem is not the slop. The slop is — we’re in a phase of slop. And there’s always been slop, a variety of things. Hello magazine has always existed in comparison to the New York Times. We’ve always had this. But it’s the quantity of it, right. But it’s also, we’re gonna make a lot of amazing things. And I can make amazing things very quickly. It’s not even the sloppy things that are the problem. I can make something very, very, very good, that people want very quickly and compete with some very big players. It’s almost easier for me to compete with them, because I have none of the tech debt that people claim to have, I have none of the business systems that are not made for this, I have none of the people concerns. When I’m just making, I can do away with all of these problems. So yeah, I think ultimately, we’re gonna be inundated with people creating things, building things for themselves, building — I think you could literally just go down a list of what top 100 companies, if I were in business school, or new graduate who was 16 years old, or coming out of high school, I would just go down a business list and put a dot next to something and build against it. Because it is easy to do that now. But how you defend against that, or how you make sure that you can do that, and the person behind you is going to be coming to do that, right? So it’s not even that you go do it. There’s going to be a whole army of people coming behind you. Is that you need to make something that people connect with, and that matters to people. And you need to have vision for where we’re going, you need to have an idea of where the world is going, right? And what is going to be important in the future. But you also need to be thinking much more than ever before, because it’s not about optimizing. The future is completely optimized. Everything is optimized, everybody — that’s no longer remote, optimization is not your friend. It is a given, it is water, you just need it. But it’s not going to differentiate you anymore. And I think we got away with that for 20 years of the internet, essentially. You were just optimizing better products. But the next age is about when anyone can build, what makes somebody stay with you? What makes somebody care about your business? And I think I look at Bobbie, right? I use them all the time as an example, because people understand that brand. But they made a formula brand, but they’re not a formula brand. They’re a brand that stands for motherhood, and how difficult motherhood is. And they matter to people. People recommend Bobbie who’ve never even used the product, who just what they stand for, and who they believe and stand up for. And I think it will be those types of businesses in all categories, categories that we have now and categories that, again, speaking to vision, categories that we don’t even have yet, right? The world is going to change. What we need today is not — three years from now is not going to be what we need now. And I think those will be the brands that are successful. Those will be how that’s how you defend. You call it the age of authorship. And I went down a rabbit hole myself [https://www.linkedin.com/posts/spearbrandlistening_why-authorship-now-activity-7455712224742133760-EIF1?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABuiRIgBdBPuWlRYxZgTfPAqzqR0I7cJ1AI] on that language. There’s all these words that are popping up in this moment right now, as we’re searching for ways to describe all these behaviors, which are really new, and one of them is sovereignty. And then the other one is authorship. And I’m borrowing, of course, from Dave and Helen Edwards at the Artificial Attitude, the way they talk of things. So how did you come to use the word authorship? I think part of it, to be honest, I was thinking a lot about when I’m thinking a lot about how businesses work right now. So because when I am in a business right now, helping them to reposition, a lot of these businesses are operating how businesses have operated for the last 20 years, right? You have your marketing division, there’s finance team, there’s the — within marketing, you might have, this is the — depends on how big you are. But these big companies, everything is siloed, and everybody is told to stay in their lane. And my job lately, entirely, is to point out that that culture will be the death of you. That is, if you’re doing anything today as a business owner, you need to be addressing that cultural issue, because the culture that you’re about to have is that everybody’s about to be an author, everybody’s about to be a builder, everybody wants to have, and should be essentially moving up and down and across within your business. Everybody will be coding, if you’re any kind of — everybody will be building something. Even in traditional businesses, where you don’t think you need to be building something, when you actually peel back the layers, and you look at it, there’s a lot of things to be building. And the expectations of having to do that are there. And I think a lot of businesses haven’t really realized that their employees are essentially there. They’re — most people that I meet on an individual level, granted, I’m working for high agency groups of people. But they’re experimenting, they’re doing this, they’re seeing what they have the capabilities of doing. And then you have entire teams, and then they’re just, yeah, no, you guys, no, you’re not allowed to touch this, or you’re not — I don’t need to know anything about finance, I can have a business degree in an afternoon. If I need to learn about it, I can upskill very quickly, or I can have an HBS trained agent doing it for me. It’s a very different world of thinking. And I use that word, because I think when I describe it to people as everyone wants to be writing, authoring, creating, they get it. It’s, oh, okay. And that’s a really big, that’s the culture shift. That’s the major thing that people haven’t really understood is that nobody, you can’t put people back in a box anymore. The lid is off. And the faster that companies and brands — it’s so much bigger than brands — the faster that we realize that that’s how we’re going to have to reorganize, I think the less painful this is going to be. Have you — what’s your experience been within your own company and your own partnership? Are there changes that you’ve been making? And again, I’m identifying myself, I’m doing a lot of tinkering and playing around, I wouldn’t call any of it disciplined. But I do recognize the degree that there is a need for a shift. What kinds of changes are you making within your own organization to respond? Are you operating differently or structuring yourself differently? That’s a great question. I think that, well, for example, I don’t think that we would have this media business that we have right now without the tools at my disposal to do it. There’s just no — the speed at which I can — I don’t use any of it for writing. I think it’s still completely useless at the act of writing. It’s still shocking to me how bad it is. But it’s incredibly good at being given a transcript from your podcast and finding the sections that you want and hyperlinking them and doing all of that. And the operations side of this business that, A, I don’t have an interest in, right? There’s not part of me that wants to be doing that. But I also can just be, hey, go off and do it. And now it’s trained to do it. And I’m training it now to do it proactively so that it doesn’t even need me to do it. So that then I’m just there to approve it. But that allows me more time. I could never write the — everyone’s, how do you have all this time? And I’m, I don’t have any more time than I had before. I just using my time differently. I use my time for reading, I use my time for writing, and I use my time for client work. And then, but I’m able to do so much more because of all the other things that I have, the tools that I have. And, but just today, I’ve been working on something that I was, I want to — when I go to these events, I need, there’s a need that I have to meet up with people, but I don’t know how to do it. So I’m asking Claude to help me figure out if there’s a way to make this better, right? And whether that’s a new app, or a piece of software, or service that I can put into my WhatsApp — I haven’t figured it out, but I’m doing that all the time. That’s how I solve problems now. When I needed to do something for the newsletter after Salone, I had 650 photos, it was absolutely overwhelming, such a small problem. And I turned to my husband, and I was, Oh my God, I don’t know how to deal with this. And he was, Have you asked Claude? And I was, okay, I asked Claude, it created me something in 30 minutes. And it literally went from this thing that I was, I don’t know how to deal with this to it’s done. It was already done and organized and made me this little tool that I could organize. It’s very small. But I think that this is the kind of thing that for small businesses, those big changes make me so much more efficient. But on a bigger scale, I think when marketing is looking at how things are rolling out, and they’re, Hey, there should be a product doing this. We think that there’s a consumer need for this. Why are you not letting them build it? Right. And test it and see. I can see and hear you talking about how unleashing the office within the organization — that sound a little too pat and I intended it to sound — but that one of the implications is that just that everybody can build. So let everybody build in ways that they can to serve the customer. But I’m wondering what, how would — what’s the impact on the relationship between the brand? What does it mean for brands, the brands themselves? Or that? How does it change the relationship or the way that we think about what that relationship is? I feel it. Yeah. I mean, it’s a really, I think it’s the issue of our time. I think it’s so interesting. Because I was listening to an episode that you had with Matt Klein, and he talked about the power of brand and how he believes that brands are really powerful and can have big cultural impact. And I believe the same thing. I’ve always felt that you have these enormous entities that can make huge difference in your life. And they change the way that we behave. These brands are, I think a lot of people pooh pooh brands, but they’re incredibly powerful. So it’s interesting, I think that we’re going to go through this phase where our expectations of brands are going to change. I use the example that when I go on to Zara, now when I’m, I don’t shop on Zara very often, but it’s an incredibly unpleasant and overwhelming experience for me. It’s not tailored to me, it doesn’t work for me. It should know what I like, it can have the capabilities to know what I like, I should be able to describe it, and it should basically be able to change itself for me. So what stays? What is the brand when I am asking it to change all the aspects of how, but it’s that’s not really your brand, or is it? And I think sometimes it might be no, we want, we’re not a brand like Zara, we’re a very bespoke brand, right? And we want to create the way that you engage with it. But if for a brand like Zara, it would make sense to allow me to see the depths of whatever thousands of pieces of clothing that they’re making more easily. I think it’s just going to change our expectations of brands, and our authorship over those brands, our expectations are going to change. So I think it comes down to what are you holding on to? What is what matters about you? What’s sacred? What can’t change? Why can’t it change? What are you really offering people at the end of the day? There’s a brand called Gani that’s not doing very well right now. And I was saying the other day, I think it broke its contract with people because the brand is experimental. But then over time, it’s just felt like an iteration of itself, right? It was completely iterative, and all of their stores are the same. And it just fell apart. They forgot what mattered. And I think, again, it’s just gonna, maybe being able to play with their website and be more experimental with what I do there would have enhanced that experience and made it better. And so I think for different brands, it’s going to mean lots of different things. But I think we’re going to see that everybody’s not going to create the same cookie cutter Shopify website they’ve created. And first of all, your website won’t matter anyway. So that’s not a good use of an example. But why would you even go to a website when you’re looking for things on AI search, so everything is changing. And you’re just going to have to really, brands are going to have to do some real internal soul searching about what they stand for. Beautiful. That’s a great opportunity to close. We’ve run out of time. I want to thank you so much for number one, just accepting the invitation and for thinking in public. I hope I made a fractional amount of sense. And thanks for having me on. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Nina Beckhardt on Systems & Words

Nina Beckhardt [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninabeckhardt/] is the founder of The Naming Group [https://thenaminggroup.com/], a brand naming consultancy she has run for 20 years. The agency works with large organizations on naming strategy, architecture, and systems. Clients include Chevrolet, Capital One, Reebok, Kohler, P&G, GM, Target, Puma, Gap, Sony, Nestlé, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. She co-founded The Business of Naming [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-business-of-naming-tickets-1986640382864] — the first professional conference for people who make a living making names — launched in 2025 and moving to Brooklyn in September 2026. Of course, as I think you know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine who’s also a neighbor who helps people tell their story. And when I heard her, when I learned that question, it felt I couldn’t really start any conversation without asking it. But it’s a big question. So I always 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. It’s the biggest lead up ever. And the question is very simply, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control. Well, I think how I want to answer that is from the more immediate frame of today, which is coming off of a very early morning and a really nice bike ride. Where do you ride? I ride in my neighborhood. I live in Mount Washington in Los Angeles. And it feels like Europe, it feels like a little bit like Italian countryside. So very hilly, really dense nature. And it’s the way that I want to start my brain off experiencing things in the morning. Yeah, how would you describe that ride? That’s a beautiful routine to have. I love getting on my bike. But what’s your morning bike ride? So I live on a really steep hill. So the first part is going down an incredibly steep hill, a hill that when people from the Northeast come to visit, they’re “What do you do in the winter?” And then they’re “Oh, wait, oh, wait, it’s LA.” And yeah, I just went my way around the neighborhood. And there’s this internal dialogue in my head of which way you’re gonna go, which way you’re gonna go. But then I always leave room for these last minute impulses, and following flowers or cars or certain directions that appeal. That’s beautiful. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up as a child? What did young Nina think she would be when she grew up? The first thing that comes to mind when I think of that question is, I recently found in my dad’s attic a report from, I had gone to Montessori school. And it was a report from the teachers on how I was doing and status updates. And it just had this sentence that says, Nina really enjoys being Nina. And I’ve tried to channel that henceforth. So I guess for a while, I just wanted to be Nina, which was great. And then yeah, the earliest thing I can remember really getting excited about was being a fashion designer, actually. For me, fashion is very much a creative practice and a means of self expression. I ended up studying art, minoring in psych. And yeah, so I never thought that I would be a namer or end up in the world of naming where I am now. I always envisioned it being a much more applied arts pathway. What do you mean? I think simply making things with my hands. It’s funny to think of myself as being behind a computer all day, every day, most days. Because my first loves, my first experience of flow state was with paint and pom poms and glue and mixing media and stuff. Yeah. I mean, first, it just has to be said that that note from your, did you say kindergarten? Yeah, Montessori school, kindergarten. I mean, that seems to be the note to end all notes from a teacher. I mean, I can’t imagine what a wonderful note to get. And then can you tell me a story about, I guess the art where the creativity, where that began? I think the biggest influence of that is probably my dad’s sister, my aunt, Karen is a, she’s retired now, but she was a professional artist. And I ended up spending a lot of time with her when she would come to visit. And we would often go on, I was an only child too. And the benefit of being an only child or one of them was being able to go on vacation a lot more than I think other kids that had a big family that they had to haul around. And my aunt and I would go on vacation with my parents. And when my parents would want to go off and do their own thing, Karen and I would sit and paint. And so that was just such an early thing that shaped me was from a really young age, just spending a lot of time being really still and observing a lot. And I think not just having that time and space to paint, but also having this mentor that was an expert. And I just remember her telling me things “okay, when you do the shading on that person’s neck, look really closely at the shadow because the shadows aren’t just black.” “There’s green in the shadows, there’s blue in the shadows.” And so I think she probably was one of the first people that really taught me to see things in such layers. Yeah. Yeah. Can you say, I mean, it sounds amazing. I really followed right into a moment where she was sort of teaching you how to look. Yes. And I think the way that art or creative practice has manifested in the last few years is through poetry, which as a namer, as somebody who has dealt with words and advising corporations on words for two decades, it feels funny that I’m just now in the last, I’d say four years really discovering how much I love poetry, but I think it’s a less messy, time-consuming creative practice that draws on the same way of seeing that Karen instilled. It’s seeing, you know, a vase or a coffee cup, but then seeing what it means, seeing all the layers, things like that, which is then reminding me and sort of bringing me to something that I can’t remember if I’ve said this to you before, but on your, on that business of meaning and a lot of your communiques, you have these images, they’re mostly of your hometown where you live, but it’ll be the light hitting a decrepit boat in somebody’s backyard. And I’m yes, it’s just, it’s so refreshing. And I just really relate to that part of your aesthetic and I really appreciate it. Oh, wow. That’s beautiful. Thank you so much. Yeah, that’s really, that’s really sweet. Yeah. And it feels that way too. It’s wonderful. So when you talk about the poetry, are you writing it or reading it or doing both? How would you describe your current relationship with it? It’s both more writing than reading, although I do read it. I think my favorite poet is Jane Kenyon, who is a master of making the mundane poignant. So yeah, just my friends and I have, I have two girlfriends and we have something called shitty writing club and it’s really to get us to keep writing, but to keep the stakes low. So we meet once a week and sometimes we write from a prompt. Other times we do sort of homework and bring it back there. But yeah, that’s where a lot of the poetry comes from. That’s great. It makes me, it made me think that every writing club is a shitty writing club, but the shitty is silent. I want to go back to the fashion designer. What did that mean? Do you have a recollection of what you were aspiring to or what it meant to be or what a fashion designer was or who? I’m going to think about that for a second. I think just that felt like one of the more exciting parts of life when I was younger. I remember in middle school, we had a magazine project where we had to basically build out a whole magazine over the course of, you know, a semester or something. And mine was a Vogue fashion magazine. It was called Faboo. And I just I remember this. Yes. My, maybe, maybe one of the first things I named. I’m glad things have improved since then. But yeah, I just, I think it goes back to that original thing I mentioned of fashion is a way to get to know people without speaking with them. And it’s just this immediate broadcast of choices that somebody has made. And so to me, it felt so interesting to build out pieces of a vocabulary that somebody could use and put on their body. I think I was always, my grandmother and my mom were both crafters. And so there was that sort of the piece I just mentioned about building the vocabulary, but then there was also just the gratification of the applied art of using a sewing machine and understanding how fabric works and color coming together. I think that’s another job as I got older that I was well, maybe I should be a color psychologist. So it was, it’s interesting. I don’t know if you feel this way, but just, I feel like I have landed in my work, but it didn’t, I didn’t seek it. It sort of found me and then I’ve nestled into it and found what I love about it. A hundred percent. I mean, I really, yeah, I really appreciate that observation. I think it’s totally true for me where it feels like I followed it into something that felt new and discovered also. Yeah, I was thinking as you were speaking that there, you mentioned that fashion was a way of understanding other people without having to talk about them. And it just, I feel like so much of this work is, or at least, you know, that we’re sensitive because we need to be for some reason, you know what I mean? This sensitivity or this awareness is a way of navigating the world, I guess. You know what I mean? And I remember my mentor who I really felt like was channeling all this stuff to me. I remember, you know, maybe we had a bad meeting with a client or something. And I remember looking at him in an airport line and saying, maybe we’re the ones who need the meeting. Nobody, they didn’t seem to give a s**t. You know what I mean? And I was why is this so, this is really important to me. You’re saying that you were the ones that needed, wait, say the piece of that once more. I thought we were, I was a young man in my first job and I thought we were, you know, bestowing expertise and wisdom on the client needed it. You know what I mean? And would acknowledge the value of it, but they just seemed to kind of be perfectly fine without it. And it occurred to me sort of in some moment where I was well, I really, I really get a lot out of this. Maybe this is really just about me. And this is for you and me, we love this. It really does. It doesn’t matter if it does anything for anybody else. Yeah. Yeah. Which feels like such a common sort of thread of a lot of creative practice. Rick Rubin talks about that in his book of yeah, sure. You can make art or do work for other people, but what often tends to resonate more deeply with a specific group of people is when you make art for yourself. And yeah, totally. Yeah. I’m grateful as I’ve gotten older that I can recognize more that it’s okay to just do more that I enjoy or or more for myself and not for the sake of something that I feel should be. So I relate to that. Yeah. And it really, I mean, I feel like I’m always sort of confess just the very, very slow awakening of a sort of a narcissistic young man. But let’s talk about you. How do you talk about your work? What do you, where are you now? What do you do? Yeah. So I am the principal and founder of a naming agency called the naming group. We specialize in naming systems. So what I mean when I say that is not just naming architecture and sort of supporting on brand architecture and what you might think of when you think of systems, but very much helping enterprise organizations set up naming systems within their orgs. So a lot of that ends up being working most closely with the person who has been tasked with running naming at a major brand and really knowledge sharing and helping them design systems that are specific to their company to make naming flow more efficiently. Of course we do pure name development as well. Sometimes the ask is just, Hey, we’re naming this credit card. Can you help us out? The other sort of third prong of what I mean when I say systems is we design decision-making systems around how to decide about names. Sometimes that’s on the more brand wide level, like flow charts and strategy charts and figuring out who should be involved when. But that is also something that we do even on individual naming projects where we just believe that the success of a naming project lives and dies by who is involved, how they’re involved when, and how we gather their feedback to make the final decision. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? Yeah. Very clear answer here. So I think a lot of people think that probably the most joyous part of naming is the creative piece, the let’s all get around a table, insert substance of choice, brainstorm names. I do enjoy that part. The part that I adore, the reason why I’m doing this almost 20 years later after I started is the human psychology piece. So it’s all that I just said about understanding people and how they make decisions, how teams collectively make decisions, understanding the individual personalities of people at different levels of the organization, just really honestly getting in people’s heads and being able to know when ego is showing up either on the client’s part or on my part, or my team’s part, being able to — in some ways I can’t directly compare myself to you, but listening for those little nuggets and establishing enough of a connection with the people we’re doing a project with, to not only do great work, but really build trust with them. That’s what I love. I love the people and bringing people together around a sense of — my colleague, John Elliott gave me this term and I love it. A sense of collective efficacy. There’s no better feeling than helping a team establish that. Yeah. Yeah. That’s beautiful. I mean, the only reason I talk about listening is that was my own. Maybe I didn’t even think that I would talk about this, but I feel like I’d labored for so long to figure out a way to talk about what I did that was different than moderating or quality. Listening seems to be one of those aspects completely invisible. You know what I mean? And it just needed to be named and to called out because it happens without anybody really recognizing that it’s something that you’re doing and it’s vital to everything that happens around it. So please compare away. So tell me a little bit about what do you mean, what do you listen for in a process for naming? What is the role that listening plays in your process and how you work? Yeah. So the way that we’ll start off any engagement, I like to call it the sponge stage where it’s just stakeholder interviews, kickoff conversations. And we’re just trying to really get steeped in, I’d say there’s two main arteries of information that we’re trying to tap into. There’s what the project is about. So really tapping into that institutional knowledge that these brand managers and people that have been laboring over this, whatever we are working on, they’ve been laboring over it for months. So really trying to get up to speed as quickly as possible. But then the other artery that we’re tapping into really is a sense of how the organization makes decisions. And as I mentioned, what are the personalities involved and listening for a lot of times, these little cues about how an organization thinks about naming. My work is interesting in that there’s a lot of assumptions around how naming should work around, how easy it should be. And over the time that I’ve been doing this, my ears are attuned for these keywords and phrases that tip me off to those types of assumptions that are being made. So the way that I describe it most simply is — this is very meta, but it’s unfortunate that naming is the word that is used. Because naming is also the word that you use when you’re naming your kid or your cat or when you’re putting a label on a file. Brand naming is more accurate, but it often just gets shorthanded to naming. And it’s just, because of that word being used and having such a broad meaning, people assume that naming a car and getting 12 executives to sign off on it and making sure that it passes trademark is akin to naming your cat. And it just — could it be more different? So that’s a really long winded answer, but. Oh my God. I’ve never, I don’t think I’ve told this story. It feels like it was a dream. I had a past client who was connected with people in the foundation world. This goes back a while ago. And it was I think I found myself, I don’t want to talk too much, but I was on a call with a bunch of people with open AI foundation. And it was, I think I was invited in to talk about a name because I had worked with this, I’ve been the brand guy in the not-for-profit space often. And so for that reason, I was on a call and I remember in the call, the head of the call who was on the open AI side said, okay, let’s do it as if we were going to do rename the entire organization. Right then they’re on the call. Wow. Amazing. I didn’t have enough client management instincts at all. I just said, you can’t, I just was, that’s crazy. What are you talking about? And then I never heard another word about it, but I want to, because this was part of where I wanted to get to just all the misconceptions around naming. And I wonder how do you, how do you confront them or approach them? You talked about listening for the clues. How do you approach them or what are the biggest misconceptions? If you could correct anybody’s wrong ideas or confused ideas about what names are or naming is, what would you want them to know? Yeah. Well, yeah. Okay. So I’ll start with what some of the more common misconceptions are, and then talk about the honed process of how to gently tackle those things. One, this is just top of mind. I was just posting about it the other day is that there is a lot of assumption that we can directly rely on our intuition when judging names that I’ll know it when I see it. It’s a gut feeling, it’s very feeling based, clients come in a lot of times with that language of well, I just need you to come up with some creative options and then I will be able to just feel it. And when you really break things down, if we relied only on feeling because we are mere mortals, evolution takes over. And what we are most attracted to naturally is what is most familiar to us. And so what is most familiar a lot of times is inversely related is opposite to what is most differentiated. And the essence of building a strong brand is carving out your own lane. And so a lot of times I bring up, I don’t know if you’ve read thinking fast and slow the book by Daniel Kahneman. I will admit that I have not read that book. It’s a clunker. It’s I have not finished it. I’m going to be honest with you also. But I’ve gotten enough to be able to talk about it on podcasts, which is there’s the system one thinking, which is your immediate reaction and system two is your slowed down more critical thought and naming requires system two, but the cultural narrative or understanding around naming is that it’s going to be a system one process. And so we’ve designed our entire process around basically really slowing down how you make the decision. And before we present any names to a client, we present what we call naming criteria. So it’s the three to five things that a name has to accomplish. So you’re really getting people to root their decision making in that agreed upon, objective first. And then all of the names are scored based on that by all the different people involved in the project. And so at every pass, we were just how do we short circuit the subjectivity, the emotion that comes into this? So yeah. Yeah. Can you tell a story? Can you illustrate how that works for with a story from your, from work you’ve done? I’m curious. I would love to hear people hear the kind of clients, the kind of names that you’ve worked on and projects you’ve worked on. And then also maybe just to give people an opportunity to hear what this looks like in practice. What kind of jobs does, what does a name do and what could a name do? What kinds of things do you make sure names do? Yeah, totally. I can definitely dive into that further. So just to give a general sense of clients and then I’ll dive into a story. Because naming is so delightfully narrow of an expertise, we get the joy of working with just such a breadth of clients. So that’s something that I really love about my work, which is that we have worked with outer space companies. So literal rocket science propulsion technology, but then we’ve also named chicken sandwiches and cars and just really gone across the spectrum there. But the through line, no matter what we’re naming is that naming criteria piece, which is that it’s basically so much of our philosophy is around naming is really a bit, you have to center it around business objectives. And so I want to answer your initial question and give you an example. We recently worked with a biotech startup and they were renaming, their original name was Vaxess, which was for vaccine access. There was a lot of trademark issues. They weren’t just focused on vaccines anymore. And so they needed to come up with a new name. And we basically in coming up with that naming criteria, we focused on a couple different areas. So there’s always the naming essence. So what is, because naming is a process of distillation through and through, how do we get the naming essence down to two or three words? I’m blanking actually on what it was for that, but I do remember for that in-space transportation company, that rocket propulsion company, it was the naming essence was powering the movement of humanity. So that becomes this central pivot point for a lot of different names. How do you get to the, there’s a whole process for getting to the essence as well. Oh yeah. It’s looking at the value proposition. It’s looking at questions that we’ve asked the client about, what truly makes you different. It’s basically the synthesis of that entire sponge stage that I mentioned. So actually maybe I’ll pivot to explaining what you asked about a specific story, but through that client, cause we took powering the movement of humanity. And one of the other naming criteria on that project was it cannot sound like a space brand, space at that time, which was maybe, I don’t know, nine years ago now had such an aesthetic, both visually and verbally, it was incredibly stars trek, add Astra, just extremely expected. And the tone of the name, which was one of the other criteria was that it had to feel optimistic, human and bold. So really putting into words, how unspacey we wanted this to feel. And the name that we ended up developing was momentous. So M O M E N T U S, which you could break apart as moment and us, our moment to move out into space, but it was also, momentum forward motion. So going back to naming essence, powering the movement of humanity, you’re getting basically all three of those, they’re powering movement humanity for us and things like that. It’s not every day that a name nails all parts of the naming essence. Sometimes it just really powerfully does one. And then we advise the client and the brand team to shape the messaging and the visual design around the other pieces of the essence to support it. But yeah, momentous was a cool example of hitting all those. Yeah. That’s amazing. To first go back into biography… When did you first discover that you could do this for work, make a living doing this, if it was a job? So my very first job out of college was I was an intern at Martha Stewart living magazine in the crafts department. So much more what I thought I would be doing. Shout out to Caitlin Barrett, who also worked at Martha Stewart living. Yeah. And so yeah, learned some incredible lessons about brand control, through working there. Anyways, so didn’t end up getting hired on full time. Base goal was to stay in New York city. That’s all I really wanted. And so back then, I think it was 2007. It was still very kosher to just hop on Craigslist and look for legit jobs, which I did. And I had only been looking at media art and design, which was one of the lanes in the job section. And this one day I pivoted over to business or something, I forget exactly what it was called. And it said that a naming agency was seeking an administrative genius. And I was like, oh, what’s a naming agency. And that agency was called name base. And they had named cars for Kia. They had named Fruitopia that Coca-Cola answered a Kool Aid. And anyways, I interviewed, got hired and that was it. So I always joke around that. My memoir is going to be, I found my couch and my career on Craigslist. Do you have any, I don’t know why these come together, but I think about, do you have any mentors or touchstones either people that really, really I mean, I had a mentor and absolutely I can trace so much of my thinking, just back to conversations with him. And then touchstones ideas that you return to, or you feel are bedrock or touchstones for your work. That’s a nice word. I hadn’t heard that before, but I really liked that. The mentor, I think one of the most powerful mentors for me was the founder of that first agency that I worked at. His name was Jim Singer and Holy s**t. He just really believed in me way more than I believed in myself. And I think there was a lot of who am I and what am I doing? I was fresh out of college, trying to make it in the big city and had all of this understanding of myself and forward motion towards art. And somebody was like, Oh no, you can do this. It doesn’t have to do with art, but come on board. And then, so not only just that initial sense of belief, but also there was a real, there was a defining moment that, I think we had Procter and Gamble as a client. We were naming a dishwashing detergent and I had written an email to the client. I was doing some project management at that time. And I walked over to his desk and I was like, what do you think? Can you give this a read? And he was like, no, just send it. And I will never forget that moment of just you have the answer or you don’t and you’ll figure it out. Which was very much not the way I was raised. I was raised more towards check your work, make sure it’s perfect. And so yeah, I still think back to that moment, even now when I feel like I turn around and look for this proverbial permission behind my shoulder. So yeah, Jim was huge, touchstones. I think the idea that gives me a lot of courage that I come back to a lot is that we all teach what we seek to learn. So at any moment when I feel like I’m pushing into a new space and my work that feels uncertain or imposter syndrome creeps in of who am I to be espousing this? Or it’s that idea gives me a lot of, it steels me for moving into new territory. Yeah. Can you say more about that? That’s, I feel like that’s, I’m having that experience of half understanding and being really interested in what you’re saying. It feels like it’s bending back upon itself and I want to know more. Okay. Yeah, I think I’ll answer it practically, which is yeah, the way that I think a lot of the naming industry is headed, is towards training different organizations, whether it’s brands or design agencies, on how to name and how to name well and how to set up efficient naming systems. And I think maybe you can relate to this, but it’s something I talk about with colleagues a lot that phenomenon that unless you are lucky enough to be in the Dunning Kruger camp, that the more knowledge you have, sometimes the less certain of yourself you can be because you’re just, you’re so deeply knowledgeable that you’re like, well, there has to be more that I could learn and there has to be more and there has to be more. It’s a moment when I actually feel envious of my younger self sometimes when I was 25 and just walking into meetings and just acting like I owned the place. So yeah, I think the humility and curiosity that’s built into that phrase of we all teach what we seek to learn is so, it buoys me in those moments where I’m like, well, who am I to be doing this work? But then I look around and there’s only a couple other people that are really starting to think like this about naming, Caitlin Barrett being one of them. The list is short. And so it’s, it’s exciting at the same time too. So powering ahead. It’s beautiful. Tell me what is the shift that’s happening? I guess. I mean, it is one of those things. How would you describe the way naming has changed, in your career and then maybe be, what do you see right now that makes you think the way that you’re thinking about what you want to teach them? Yeah. So I think the way that I describe it is, when I started this, back in 2007, if you told me that Ford motor company had a head of nomenclature or that CVS has a director of Brandon naming architecture, I would be like, well, that’s a nice idea. That’s not real. And now fast forward to today, those are real people. There are major brands that are creating positions and departments with the word naming in them. And that is happening because the pace of business is accelerating so massively. I can’t believe we have gotten this far in the interview and haven’t said AI, but that’s in no small part, thanks to AI. And just the expectation that business should move so much faster clients that we have that used to have two limited time offerings per year now have 11. And so, and all of those things need a name. Sometimes they need multiple names and then there’s the exponential mycelial impact of those names need to relate to the other names in the portfolio. And they need to be structurally sound and, not to mention on the individual naming project, every single time you need to get alignment across all levels of the organization, oftentimes all the way up to the CMO or the CEO. You need to make sure that those names are available for trademark. You need to make sure that they’re linguistically appropriate. And so I think that naming is, it’s getting to be a full-time job for people, especially at major organizations. And because it is still a relatively specialized skill set, the real opportunity that I see, and this is very much backed up by the types of asks and RFPs that we get is oh my gosh, please help us build out a naming practice. We need, we need help setting up a larger system and training people on this, very special set of skills. What do you make of that? I think I just feel so darn fortunate because it really dovetails so perfectly with that. It’s not like, honestly, going back to AI, AI is still not great at naming, but it’s really good at helping you explore different pathways and options and metaphors. And it’s a great sparring partner for naming, but the fact that so much of what is needed and where the real white space and business opportunity lies is in solving people problems and building people centered systems is just, I’m so stoked. That’s exactly where I would personally be going with my work. So I’m really pleased that that’s where the need is. Yeah. So I feel two things are coming together and maybe one is the right way to get into the other one, which is to pick up the poetry, right. And the words and the attention from the beginning of the conversation and maybe just put it next to AI. I mean, how are you interacting with it? What’s your experience been? I don’t want to ask, I don’t want to have a leading verb, working with AI or thinking with AI in your practice. What is it? What, how, what’s your practice now that we have this strange, strange companion? Yes. I love that strange companion. That’s perfect. There’s two thoughts that come to mind when answering that the first one is the more expected answer of how am I using AI in my work? And I’ll go there first, which is, it’s an incredible research tool. So so much of the work that we do, especially when we’re developing that criteria for clients and really looking at naming trends across the industry is, doing incredibly in depth competitive analysis, but through the lens of the name. And so we were naming an eye cream for this founder that was Turkish. And so they had told us stories about their childhood in Turkey. And basically I could go to AI then and enter some keywords from that story and explain to them, Hey, I’m looking for Turkish words that are meaningful in this space, or even more than that. On that particular project, it was can you come up with a list of all brands in the beauty and healthcare space that use Turkish words and what are they? So it’s those are ideas that I would have had five years ago and been, well, wouldn’t that be nice if I had the time or if I could sick a junior strategist on that. But it’s the fact that I can ask incredibly detailed questions and get an answer in a minute is incredible. So, to you as a namer, it makes you more what? It strengthens the thinking that goes into doing naming well. So as a namer, it bolsters me, it equips me better because again, the creative part isn’t the hard part. It’s building the naming criteria, I think in many ways is a legal case. It’s building the evidence against, not against, but for where a name should go. And so the fact that I have this B plus junior strategist at my ready to do those, to really look into those things and see those patterns is, it’s great. And then the other way to answer that question that you would initially ask about how AI is showing up is, we are really starting to think more about and put a white paper out about, how can we now be developing names that play well with AI? So the fact that most people now, the way that they are searching for brands, services, offerings, is through these, is through Claude, through chat, GPT. And so how can we engineer language so that it is more likely to show up there? How can we make sure that naming is consistent? That, you know, the messaging that supports the naming is consistent so that it’s parsed correctly. So, yeah, we’re not only thinking about how naming impacts the work that we do, but also our clients as well. Also occurs to me, tell me if you think that this is true, because this feels one of the things that, that smart people say to feel smart is that, you know, in this, this moment of massive transformation, you know what I mean? It seems hard to overstate the disruption that we’re in the middle of with AI should have arriving and showing up and making itself known in every domain. We are in, we are in a place where we have no language, you know what I mean? We need new language because there’s new, I mean, I remembering, I always think about maybe, oh, this is what comes to my mind. I always, when I talk about names, I always talk about, I talk about brands as verbs, right? And I’ll say Google, it’s a perfect example. Google becomes a verb and please correct me if I’m wrong. Google becomes a verb because it becomes associated with a, with a goal-oriented behavior that people have around this thing. And it was because the introduced a whole new behavior into our world. And so there’s this connection between behavior and the name. And so AI has arrived and we have a whole world of behaviors that are fundamentally new and we don’t know how to talk about them. And I wonder, is that something that you’ve also, I’m just thinking about the convergence of the challenges and the opportunities when you talk about companies recognizing that they need a system and an architecture for this to take it seriously, but also that we’re really at the beginning of a whole era of just a crazy, a crazy, is it Renaissance? That’s what’s coming to my mind, but this moment where we need names. Yeah. Yeah. And is it a Renaissance? Is it a bubble? I’m sorry. No, I mean, there are threads you’re laying down that I think are interesting. I think what it makes me think about is AI washing, that there are so many names, even of companies themselves, not just at the product level, but that have AI in them. And it’s such an interesting place to be because it’s everybody really, really, really feels they need to signal that. And that’s gonna make the deal, but it’s pretty short sighted. So we’re preparing for this deluge of inquiries in the next five or so years of how do we, how do we disentangle ourselves from these names that are all wedded to this term? So I think that’s a lot of what we’re doing now, which is I know that that feels such an important keyword and it is, but the name needs to be so much more evergreen than that. Yes. Yes. I mean, I get, certainly it didn’t occur to me that of course there’s an AI rush, right. Or a new tech rush that happens. I’m sure there was horrible conventions from, or the E, right. It was e-commerce, right. Everything had an E in front of it. I’m just remembering these horrible habits. Or the Apple, Apple washing. Yeah. Well, let’s talk about the, you’ve mentioned Caitlin a couple of times. Do you want to talk a little bit about the business of naming the community you’re building? Is it year two? It’s year two. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. So this is one of those things, origin story for that is it was an idea that I’ve had for over a decade to have a naming conference. And I said it out loud to so many people, always testing the waters. And when I said it out loud to Caitlin, they were, hell yes, let’s go. Let’s do this. So I think just so grateful for that partnership. So yeah. But for people that don’t know what I’ve just been talking about for a minute straight, it’s a, the first ever global naming conference. So our inaugural year last year was in Berkeley, California. This year it will be in Brooklyn, New York. And yeah, it’s just, I’m so amazed every time we do this, just the amount that people want this. People are hungry for knowledge and community around naming. So the business of naming is really built for that to amplify the voices in naming, but also the topics and questions. We’re going to be talking about naming research this year and how it’s done properly. There’s a whole panel devoted to in-house naming. So people that run naming at major orgs. Yeah, it’s going to be great. I’m stoked. Early bird tickets on sale until May 29th. Nice. I saw that it was in Brooklyn that I’m going to try to make it down there for it, at least to say hello, if not to attend. I would love that. We’re near the end of time. And the thought that just came to me, the question that came to me was this idea that, well, how to ask it. I feel like all of us, we have our little corners, our little expertise, our little specializations. As a namer, what do you think you see or are sensitive to that others aren’t? You know what I mean? What do you carry with you when you look at something or when you take something and what are you paying attention to that maybe somebody else in the group or the team or the organization isn’t really tuned into? I am actually going to quote you for my answer to this from your podcast with the deep dive podcast that you did, which is, you said, every word is a doorway, every word is a threshold. And I think that is this sensitivity that I’ve always had, but that has become just sharper and sharper and more attuned the longer I do this, which is every word somebody says or writes down could be a springboard to a brand name, which then becomes the flag to wave for an entire business, for a company of people. So, yeah, I’d say being incredibly attuned to the worlds that live within a single word. Has it always been that way? Were words always a place that you felt that way? I think so. Both of my parents were avid readers and I have early memories of us playing with language and talking about words. And we played this game called Mrs. Burns Dictionary, where it was a dictionary of incredibly obscure words that nobody’s ever heard of. And you write down the real definition, but then everybody else writes their own definition. It’s like Scattergories, if you’re familiar with that, and you vote on what you think the correct definition is. So from an incredibly young age, we were always playing with meaning and language in that way. So I think it probably got me really comfortable with the idea of using language to shape reality. Yeah. Beautiful. This has been so much fun. We’re at the end of time. Nina, thank you so much. Thank you, Peter. Thank you. This was fantastic. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Sem Devillart on Observation & Translation

Sem Devillart [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sem-devillart-70687ab/] is a cultural analyst at Harmony Labs in New York and co-founder of Popular Operations, her cultural trend practice. She is founding faculty at the School of Visual Arts [https://sva.edu/faculty/sem-devillart]’ MPS Branding program. She began her career with Li Edelkoort and later worked for Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve. Fluent in seven languages and trained in semiotics, design, and comparative religion, she has advised Christian Dior, Camper, PepsiCo, L’Oréal, Philips Design, and Deepak Chopra. 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, s**t, 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. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Igor Kuvychko PhD on Bateson & AI

Igor Kuvychko, PhD [https://www.linkedin.com/in/igor-kuvychko/] 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 [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gregory-bateson-ai-igor-kuvychko-phd-dztwc/] a piece, “Gregory Bateson & AI [https://zenodo.org/records/19870999]” 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. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]